Errors of Judgment(13)

Sarah closed her eyes. She shouldn’t be feeling like this. She should be blissfully happy. She was engaged to a charming, decent, good-looking man, who was a much nicer person than she would ever be and thereby made up for all her personal deficiencies, who was in a fabulously well-paying job, and could keep her in the luxury to which she would quite happily become accustomed. And, of course, she loved him. Toby was very loveable. Was she in love with him? No – but Sarah had long ago decided that being in love was a deluded state, and not necessarily the basis for a successful relationship. Marrying Toby was a rational act. She certainly didn’t want to stay single all her life, she was pretty much fed up with the exhausting pleasures of dating, and of short-term relationships, and Toby was quite a catch. She didn’t believe in a soulmate, or The Perfect Man. Life was all about compromise. And while Toby might not set her world on fire, the future with him looked secure, prosperous. She had already decided to give up her job when they were married. Being a broker didn’t exactly float her boat, and they wouldn’t miss the money. Toby earned enough for both of them. She would spend her time decorating whatever house they bought and then in a year or two, when she got bored with that, she might have a baby. Some of her girlfriends were already mothers, and it seemed like quite an amusing club to belong to. From babies her mind drifted to sex. She had to admit that, tender and affectionate though he was, Toby was ponderously unexciting in bed. But then, weren’t most British men? She sipped her tea, totting up the exceptions in her head. It was a short list. She considered Anthony Cross, whom she’d run into the other day. Would she put him on it? Probably, for enthusiasm as much as anything else. And a willingness to learn. But top of the list, head and shoulders above the rest, came Leo. With Leo, sex had been a game, a guilt-free pleasure ride of unbridled physicality and shameless gratification. She hadn’t seen him in four years, but she felt her stomach go into free fall just thinking about him. Perhaps there was such a thing as the perfect man after all. Of all the men she’d ever known, Leo’s outlook and personality were closest to her own. On top of which, he had money, taste, intelligence and wit. An ideal partner – only Leo wasn’t the marrying kind. Theirs hadn’t been a friendship exactly, more an enjoyable mutual antagonism, with recreational sex thrown in. Not the stuff of lasting relationships. So why did she always feel, with a confidence that bordered on certainty, that she would see him again, some time, some place?

She dragged her mind away reluctantly from Leo. It wouldn’t do. She was marrying Toby, whom she loved, and who would make a satisfactory husband in every possible way. She took another sip of her tea, but found it had gone cold. She had been thinking about Leo for longer than she’d realised.

That same evening, Anthony and his brother Barry were meeting their father, Chay, for Sunday supper in a gastropub in Hackney. Chay Cross was a successful postmodern artist who spent most of every year flitting between his homes in Madrid and New York, soaking up the admiration and hospitality of well-heeled investors and socialites who, with more money than sense, were prepared to cough up tens and thousands for his works. This October he was on one of his regular visits to London to see his sons and check up on the progress of his pet project, ShoMoMa, a new museum of modern art housed in a former Shoreditch brewery which, with surprising foresight, Chay had purchased a few years earlier.

Their father’s artistic success remained a deep mystery to Anthony and Barry. Throughout their childhood he had been a shifting, insubstantial presence, an itinerant hippy moving from one squat to another, smoking an inordinate amount of dope, and dabbling unsuccessfully in a variety of creative mediums. He only came to visit their mother Judith when he was in need of a handout, though he had occasionally taken the boys on outings and camping weekends. His surprising rise to fame had come about when Anthony, an impecunious student barrister, had sold some of Chay’s paintings to a gallery in an attempt to pay off a debt. The gallery had found buyers for the paintings, critics had paid attention, and within a few months Chay Cross was being hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as ‘a wuthering expressionist of plangent, emotional rawness’ (Modern Painters), ‘an artist with a thrillingly gestative response to the world’ (Apollo Magazine), and ‘a craftsman bringing meaning, mythology and dream alive within veiled abstraction’ (Frieze). Since which time Anthony, whenever he was forced to consider one of his father’s vast monochrome daubs, had the uneasy feeling he might have been responsible for launching one of the greatest public frauds in the history of art. Still, he seemed to sit in good company alongside Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.