The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

own jet? They’ve probably all got them now. Anyway, Martha’s privileged background had nothing to do with her not getting the job at Trinity. Aidan was a better painter than she was a writer, and she knew it.’

The room closes in on me. ‘Aidan was a painter?’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’

‘You never saw him painting? Never saw any of his work?’

‘He didn’t… he doesn’t paint.’ I am listening to a story about a stranger, trying to match the details to someone I thought I knew. ‘I’d know if he did. He…’ I shouldn’t want to tell her, but I do. There’s no reason not to. ‘When I met him, he was living in one room behind his workshop. There were empty frames all over the walls, frames he’d made-they’re still there, but there’s nothing in them.’

‘So he stopped,’ Mary says softly, rocking back and forth. ‘Good.’

‘Why would he do that? Why would he frame nothing?’ Why didn’t he tell me he knew about Gemma and Stephen? How did he know?

‘How many empty frames?’

‘I… I don’t know. I’ve never counted them.’

‘More than ten?’

‘Yes.’

‘As many as a hundred?’

‘No, nowhere near that. I don’t know, maybe fifteen, twenty.’

‘I know how many. Count them when you next get the chance-you’ll see I’m right.’

Everyone but me knows things they can’t possibly know. I don’t know even the things I could so easily have known. Should have known. Was Aidan’s family poor? Was he common, to use Mary’s word? I try to collect together in my mind everything he’s told me about his childhood: he loved animals, would have liked a cat as a pet but wasn’t allowed one. He never had his own bedroom, and wanted that more than anything: privacy. His brother and sister were much older than him, as remote as strangers.

‘There are eighteen,’ says Mary. ‘Eighteen empty frames.’

The Times, 23 December 1999

FUTURE FAMOUS FIVE

You might not know these names yet, but you soon will. From novelists and painters to actors, from singers to comedians, Senga McAllister talks fame and fortune with the young British talent heading your way.

Today I’m at Hoxton Street Studios to meet five unbelievably talented people. They’re doing a photo-shoot for a double-page spread in Vogue as part of its New Talent, New Style promotion, but they kindly spared a few minutes each, in between having their hair sprayed and their eyebrows plucked, to chat to me about how it feels to scale the dizzy heights of success.

Aidan Seed, 32, painter. Aidan is a precocious talent. Artist in residence at London’s National Portrait Gallery, before that he spent two years enjoying the enviable title of Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Aidan tells me this post was open to writers, artists and composers, so it wasn’t only other painters he had to beat off in order to get it. He laughs. ‘There was no beating involved. I doubt I was the most talented artist who applied that year-I got lucky, that’s all. Someone liked my stuff.’ Self-deprecation aside, the art world is buzzing with hype about Aidan’s immense talent. Next February he has his first one-man show at London’s prestigious TiqTaq Gallery. Owner and art dealer Jan Garner describes him as ‘astonishingly gifted’. I ask him what being a Fellow Commoner involved. Aidan tells me, ‘Trinity’s got its strongest reputation as a sciences college, and the post I held is its way of supporting the arts. Literally, being a patron of the arts in the old- fashioned sense. They didn’t expect me to do anything apart from paint, and they paid me a salary. It was a dream job.’ So why ‘Commoner’? ‘It means I’m not a scholar,’ says Aidan. ‘They didn’t give me the post because of any academic achievements.’ He smiles. ‘It doesn’t mean they thought I was common, though I am.’

Aidan is proud of his working-class background. His mother, Pauline, who died when he was twelve, was a cleaner, and he grew up on a council estate in the Culver Valley. ‘I didn’t have a toothbrush until I was eleven,’ he tells me. ‘As soon as I had one, I used it to mix paint.’ Pauline, a single parent, was too poor to buy him paints or canvas; he was forced to steal what materials he could from school. ‘I knew stealing was wrong, but painting was a compulsion for me-I had to do it, no matter what.’ His family would have discouraged any artistic interests, so Aidan stashed all his early work at his friend Jim’s house. ‘Jim’s parents were from a different world to mine,’ Aidan tells me. ‘They always encouraged me to paint.’ As a child and young adult, Aidan painted on any surface he could find: cardboard boxes, cigarette packets. When he left school at sixteen, he got a job in a meat-packing factory where he worked for long enough to save the money he needed to fund his art degree. ‘The years at the factory were hard,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad I did it. I had a brilliant art teacher at college who said to me, “Aidan, if you want to be a painter, you have to have a life.” I think that’s really true.’

Although obviously gifted, the most extraordinary thing about Aidan is that he has never sold a painting, despite many offers from eager prospective buyers. He paints over canvases he isn’t entirely satisfied with, of which there have been many throughout the years. He works slowly and laboriously, and won’t part with work until he thinks it’s perfect. I have the impression that he’s a hard man to please when it comes to his own output. ‘I’m working on a number of paintings concurrently. They’re all ones that have been evolving for some time now, the only ones I’ve ever done that I think are truly worthwhile, fit for presentation to the public.’ These pictures are the ones that will make up his show at TiqTaq in February. They’re dark, brooding, atmospheric and unfashionably figurative. ‘I don’t give a toss about fashion,’ says Aidan with unmistakeable pride. ‘You can use traditional techniques and still produce modern work. I don’t understand artists who want to chuck out centuries of painterly knowledge and expertise as if they never happened. My aim is to build on what’s gone before, historically, not start from scratch. To me, that’d feel like arrogance.’

I ask him if the pictures at TiqTaq will be for sale, if he will finally allow people to buy his work. He laughs. ‘I don’t think I’ll have much choice,’ he says, adding on a more practical note, ‘I think that’s kind of the point of the exhibition. Jan [Garner] would have a word or two to say if I refused to sell anything.’ Eager art collectors had better secure their places in the queue. I’ve got a hunch Aidan Seed is an artist people will be talking about for decades to come.

Doohan Champion, 24, actor. Doohan has the sort of chiselled beauty to make young girls swoon. He first came to the great British public’s attention as Toby, the troubled teenage hero of Wayfaring Stranger. The critics raved about him, and he’s been rising meteorically ever since. ‘I no longer have to look for work,’ he says. ‘I can pick and choose. It’s a great position to be in.’ A quick glance at Doohan’s early career and it’s obvious fame and fortune have always been waiting in the wings. Encouraged by his mother, a dentist’s receptionist, Doohan went from playing the lead roles at school in Leeds to the Eldwick Youth Theatre, widely regarded as a rival to the National, where he stayed for four years. ‘It was a good way to dodge homework,’ laughs Doohan. ‘But I soon came to feel passionately about acting.’ His passion was rewarded-he won the Gold Medal for his year. ‘I could tell I was on the right lines when more and more girls started to ask me out,’ jokes Doohan. ‘There was no way I was giving up!’

More than 30 agents wanted to sign him when he graduated. Doohan is sitting back and waiting for the acclaim to flood in when his film Serpent Shine opens next year. He plays Isaac, a young schizophrenic who is threatened with the loss of his family home after his alcoholic father dies. ‘It’s a moving piece, very strong indeed,’ says Doohan. I ask him if the fame game is as sexy as it seems to those of us on the outside. ‘You know what?’ he says. ‘It’s even better. I’m in demand, I’m making a mint. It’s bloody great.’ Then he looks downcast, suddenly. ‘Although I wouldn’t like to get too famous. I like being able to go for a few drinks at my local without being hassled.’ Sorry, Doohan-I fear this won’t be possible for much longer!