Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Read online

  McCarthy reckoned there was ‘a new melancholy in the chronic leisure’ of the renaissance nobility. Could a similar melancholy be detected among the leisured ladies of Marylebone High Street? Apparently not. Like everything else leisure had changed with the times, had sped up. So there was actually a kind of urgency about these wives of investment bankers and hedge fund managers negotiating the brief interval between lunch and picking up their kids from the lycée or the American School. They had learned the lesson of leisure, the importance of contriving things so that there wasn'ttime to be unhappy. Back in the Renaissance time mounted up without passing so that sudden storms are forever on the point of breaking. Hence the melancholy that ‘suffuses Giorgione's paintings, a breath of unrest that just fails to stir the foliage of the trees … It is the absolute fixity of his scenes that makes this strange impression.’

  Atman hadn't seen the painting in 1999 but it was one of the things he was most looking forward to this time around (if he had the time): seeingThe Tempest , gauging the painting – and the city – against what McCarthy had written about it.

  Stuffed with pastry, tense with coffee, he left Valerie's and browsed through the Oxfam bookshop, all part of the normal pattern of a walk along Marylebone High Street. What was completely out of the ordinary was to find himself looking in the window of an expensive-looking hairdresser's. He had never paid more than ten pounds (with tip), had not had his hair cut anywhere but a barber's for thirty years, not since the unisex craze of the mid-seventies, and, most importantly of all, he didn'tneed a haircut. But here he was, opening the door, entering, taking the first steps towards doing something he'd been thinking about for years: getting his hair dyed. For a long time he'd thought of grey hair as a symptom, a synonym of inner dreariness, and had accepted it, accordingly, as inevitable – but all that was about to change. He shut the door behind him. The hair-conditioned interior smelled nicely, of product and potion, and looked conservative – not the kind of place where getting your hair dyed anything other than orange or pillar-box red marked you down as a hopeless square. It had the atmosphere, almost, of a clinic or spa. A man with shapeless brown hair – was it a subtly suggestive ploy that hairdressers so often looked like they needed a haircut? – asked if he had an appointment.

  ‘No, I don't. But I wondered if you had a slot now.’

  He looked at the appointment book, heavy and much-amended, a kind of Domesday Book of the hair world.

  ‘Cut and wash?’

  ‘Yes. Actually, I was wondering …’ He felt as embarrassed as a character in a 1950s novel buying French letters. ‘Might it be possible to perhaps get my hair dyed?’ The guy, who had seemed only marginally interested, at this point became more focused.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dyeing is an art like everything else. We do it exceptionally well. We do it so it looks real.’

  ‘That's Sylvia Plath, right?’

  ‘Indeed.’ A hairdresser who quoted poetry. Well, this really was an upmarket place. Or perhaps this kind of thing came as standard in this part of London. Jeff would have liked to respond with some kind of counter-allusion but could dredge nothing up. He explained that he didn't want anything too radical, wanted it to be subtle.

  ‘Like this?’ the guy smiled.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like mine.’

  ‘Wow! Yes, exactly’ It was hard to believe his hair was dyed – it looked entirely natural and he still had a little grey at the temples. They moved into more detailed negotiations. It would cost a fortune but the great thing was that in ten minutes – he was lucky, the guy said, they'd just had a cancellation – Jeff was in the chair having his hair slightly cut and dyed … ‘Discreetly, very quietly,’ he thought to himself, but it was too late now to make use of this retaliatory bit of Plath: the man who'd welcomed him was evidently some kind of maitre d'; the actual dyeing was done by a young woman with multiple piercings (eyebrow, nose, a saliva-gleam of tongue stud), who preferred to work in silence. Fine by Atman. He was preoccupied, as he sat there, by the implications of coming out as a man who dyed his hair. It was the kind of thing you did if you emigrated to America, went to begin a new life in a place where no one knew your former grey-haired self – but he was reinventing himself on his home turf, in London, on Marylebone High Street. You grow older imperceptibly. Your knees begin to hurt perceptibly. They don't get better. Occasionally they get worse and then improve but they never get back to what they were before. You begin to accept that you have a bad knee. You adjust your walk to compensate and alleviate but, by doing so, you set the scene for lower-back pain. These things were complicated and sometimes impossible to fix. And now one of the symptoms of ageing – possibly not the worst, but certainly the most visible – was being dealt with, painlessly and quickly. It was as simple as that. All it took was money and a bit of time. Apart from that, you just sat under one of these Martian dryers, waiting, wondering if you should have opted for a lighter shade – or a darker one. Or just a trim.

  The moment arrived, the moment of untruth. The silver foil was taken off. Jeff was tilted back over the basin. His hair was washed with almond-scented shampoo, rinsed. Flipped back into upright mode he was confronted, in the mirror, with his new hair. Wet, it lookedThunderbirds-black. Having it dried was like watching a Polaroid in reverse. The black gradually faded to a convincing shade of rejuvenation. It had worked! His hair was dark without looking dyed. He looked ten years younger! He was so pleased by the result that he could have spent ages gazing at himself adoringly in the mirror. It was him but not him: dark-haired him, plausibly youthful him. All in all it was the best eighty quid he'd ever spent in his life. (The only thing that could have made him happier was to have found a way to claim it back on expenses as necessary preparation and research for the Biennale.) And tomorrow he'd be on his way to Venice. Life was sweet, a lot sweeter than it had been three hours previously when he'd left the house as a way of putting off writing a stupid article – which still had to be written. If it hadn't been for that, if he didn't have to get back and write his stupid article, he'd have been tempted to drop in at the newsagent's again, to buy anotherTopic and see if that young Indian girl was still there.

  Back home, back at his desk, the perennial question kept cropping up: how much longer could he keep doing this stuff for? For about two minutes at a time, it turned out, but eventually these two minute increments – punctuated by emails pinging in and out – mounted up. God, what a miserable way to earn a living. Back in the days when his hair was naturally this colour – or darker – it had been a thrill writing stuff like this, or at least seeing it in print was thrilling. The fact that his dyed hair had sort of rolled back the years brought home how little progress he'd made in the intervening decade and a half. Here he was, doing the same shit he'd been doing fifteen years ago. Not that that made doing it any easier; it just made it more depressing. As always he struggled to get anywhere near the required word length and then, after padding and expanding, ended up with too many words and had to expend still more energy cutting it back to the required length (which always turned out to be more than was actually published). Still, by eleven o'clock he'd finished, cracked it, done it. He celebrated with camomile tea – there were days of heavy drinking ahead – and the remains ofNewsnight , amazed at howgrey Paxman's hair had become.

  Tomorrow he'd be on his way to Venice …More immediately, less sweetly, he was on his way toStansted. With all the potential for cancellations and manifold failure – signals, points, engine – he'd allowed ample time for delays but, on this occasion, there were none; everything went smoothly and he got to the airport with time to spare. In this way the country's injury-prone transport system contrived to waste your time even when nothing went wrong. Ahead of him in the check-in queue was Philip Spender, a director at the Gagosian gallery, wearing his cream suit – his trademark cream suit – and expensive sunglasses perched atop his expensive haircut.

  ‘Junket Jeff! What a non-surprise, meeting you
here.’

  ‘You too, Phil.’ He was staring at Jeff's hair. ‘You're looking good.’

  ‘You too.’ Spender was still looking at his hair. Jeff could see the question ‘Have you dyed your hair?’ bubbling away in his head unaskably at this pre-drunken hour of the day. But hewould ask it at some point, probably at whichever time ensured maximum public embarrassment. They'd seen each other a couple of nights earlier, at Grayson Perry's opening at Victoria Miro, so the contrast between before (grey) and after (discreetly non-grey) must, in Phil's eyes, have been at its most marked and least discreet. They established where they were staying (quite near each other); parties they were going to (a lot of overlap, but Phil was going to some others as well, including an unscheduled, semi-clandestine Kraftwerk gig that Jeff had not even heard of, had no desire to go to, but which now preyed on his mind). This was it, the start of the Biennale proper: the onset of party-anxiety and invite-envy, the fear that there were better parties you'd not been invited to, a higher tier of pleasure that was forbidden to you. Once you got to Venice, this became still more acute. You could be at a tremendous party, full of fun people, surrounded by beautiful women, booze flowing, totally happy – but part of you would be in a state of torment because there was another party to which you'd not been invited. There was nothing to be done about it. Jeff was not really a player in the art world. He had a certain usefulness in terms of gaining publicity for galleries and artists but had no real value in his own right. He was the kind of person who could be bought relatively cheaply – a few glasses of prosecco, an Asian-inflected canapé – happy to be someone else's Plus One if that would get him into a party to which he would not otherwise have gained admittance. He was way down the totem pole but plenty of people were not evenon the totem pole – and not everyone queuing up to check in was Biennale-bound. There were also families on the brink of riot, backpackers and a group of ruddy-faced Irish who looked like they'd booked tickets solely to get stuck into the duty-free.

  ‘You know,’ Phil said, as if reading his mind, ‘flying has never been the same since Concorde was grounded.’

  ‘Quite.’ Where had that ‘quite’ come from? He'd never said it before. Must have been from reading a John le Carré novel a couple of weeks earlier. The Circus. Scalphunters. Babysitters. Quite. Perhaps Phil was a spy, working at Gagosian but secretly in the employ of White Cube. Actually, now that the idea of duplicity had entered Jeff's mind, it occurred to him that Gagosian was almost certainly having a party to which he had not been invited. What a shit Spender was, standing here chatting, all the time knowing that his gallery was having a party to which Jeff had been conspicuously uninvited. For the second time in as many minutes, Phil seemed to have read his mind.

  ‘You're coming to our party, I hope?’

  ‘When's that? I don't think I got an invite.’

  ‘On Friday. You should have had one. I put your name on the list myself.’ Typical: there he was thinking everyone was a total shit – an enemy agent – and it turns out they're considerate, thoughtful. The only shit was Atman himself, for being so suspicious, so ready to think the worst of everyone.

  Phil clicked open his black, espionage-leather briefcase. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing over an invite. ‘Take this one.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jeff studied the invitation, noting the sponsor's logo – Moët, nice – and the time. Shit, it clashed exactly with the Australia party which, in turn, overlapped with a dinner he'd cancelled as soon as the Australia invite turned up. That was also part of the Biennale experience: not getting invited to things was a source of torment; getting invited to them added to the logistical difficulties of wanting to go to far more things than you had any desire to go to.

  Another sign that the Venice experience had started here, at Stansted: he and Spender were both glancing over each other's shoulders, seeing who else was around. Jeff recognized several people in the various check-in queues that were in danger of merging into a single queue. Talking on her phone, rummaging in her handbag, Mary Bishop from Tate Modern spilled cigarette lighter and passport. The man next to her – Nigel Stein – bent down and picked up everything for her. Jeff waved to both of them. In fact, as he looked around, there were lots of people he knew, all looking around and waving at all the other people they knew.

  In spite of its size, the queue was fast-moving. Jeff could now see, with some surprise, that the airline logo above the check-in read: ‘Air Meteor: We Couldn't Give a Flying Fuck!’ It was in exactly the same font, against the same yellow background, as the rest of the airline's graphics but none of the other counters boasted this interesting amendment. Moving closer he saw that this slogan had been stuck over the existing one, but so subtly and cleverly it was difficult to notice. Given how quickly it must have been done – airports, these days, were not the easiest places for guerrilla subversion or art pranks – it was extremely impressive. Maybe it had even been done by Banksy. Or perhaps, in the spirit of artistic collaboration and ironic brand-awareness enhancement, the airline had co-operated, let it go. Whatever the case, it was certainly fair comment. Airlines like Ryanair or EasyJet tried to dress up their no-frills status; Meteor basked in theirs. What you saw was what you got. More accurately, what youdidn't get. This was budget flying taken to its limit. They had stripped away everything that made flying slightly more agreeable and what you were left with was the basically disagreeable experience of getting from A to B, even though B turned out not to be in B at all, but in the neighbouring city C, or even country D.

  Spender checked in successfully. Turning back from the counter, he said he'd see Jeff on the other side, as if they were about to cross the river Styx. Jeff stepped forward, handed over his passport, answered the questions about security, said he had no bags to check in. The check-in woman asked to see his hand baggage. He held up the smaller of the two bags he was carrying and she went ahead and checked him in. Taking care to keep his other bag hidden from her, he turned away and headed towards passport control and security. With no larger aim in view, his life was made up entirely of little triumphs and successes like this. He had avoided checking in his bags, thereby saving an incalculable amount of time at the other end.

  Boarding was a barely polite scramble, but such was the demand for a place near the front of the plane that Jeff succeeded in getting the ultimate prize: an exit-row seat. He stowed his bags, one of which was almost too large to get into the overhead bin, smiled at his neighbour and belted himself in for what promised to be an uncomfortable but festive couple of hours. The plane was filled with people who already knew each other, all on their way to the Biennale. It was like being on a school trip, organized by the art teacher and part-funded by a range of sympathetic breweries.

  At the Biennale one entered a realm of magical excess. Champagne flowed like spring water. There were rumours that, at the Ukraine party, there would be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of caviar. Not like that here on the plane, of course. The cost-cutting was amazing, extravagant, even. No expense had not been spared. Getting rid of free meals and drinks was just the beginning of it. They'd skimped on the flight attendants' uniforms, on the design and graphics of the check-in counter, on the number of characters on the boarding pass, on the amount of foam and cushion on the seats. It was hard to imagine they had not skimped on safety features as well – why bother with a life raft when everyone knew that if the plane ditched in the sea you were fucked anyway? It seemed they had even budgeted on the looks of the flight attendants. The one doing the safety demonstration appeared to be suffering from an aerial equivalent of the bends. No amount of make-up – and there was a lot of it, caked on like the first stage in the preparation of a death mask – could disguise the toll taken by years of jetlag and cabin pressure.

  As far as this particular flight was concerned, though, all went according to plan. The plane accelerated, succeeded in taking off, levelled out at the budget cruising altitude and, unless something catastrophic occurred, would land in
Venice (or thereabouts) in less than two hours. Even a frequent flyer, hardened complainer and upgrade-seeker like Atman had to concede that, for a mere two hours, conditions on board were tolerable. He bought a Coke and a small tube of Pringles – ‘Could I have a receipt, please?’ – and began reading the press material biked over yesterday about Julia Berman, Steven Morison and their daughter, Niki.

  Pretty standard stuff, really. They'd had an affair, she became pregnant, raised the kid on her own. Morison had pitched in with some money but continued his life as a globally successful artist, painting his pictures and porking whichever model or studio assistant took his fancy, the most recent of whom was only a couple of years older than his daughter, who was twenty-two and had her first record coming out (with cover art by her famous dad). Niki had already been interviewed byVogue but a ‘rare’ interview with the ‘reclusive’ mum and a never-before-seen picture constituted some kind of scoop. All of this had to be arranged in person, by Jeff, because, rather quaintly, Julia Berman didn't do email. (As Max Grayson, his editor atKulchur , had said, ‘You're there anyway and it's such a simple assignment even you can't fuck it up.’) She was in her mid-fifties now; there were rumours – and had been for years – of a forthcoming, unghosted memoir. Jeff was to find out about that as well, if possible.