The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban Page A

bring the total up to seventy thousand pounds for my art. Maybe with a capital A: my Art. A crash-dummy gorilla, OK. Having done the others, I found no reason to draw the line at this one. But what did he want from me besides his crash-dummy bonking menagerie? What was he expecting me to do with this time that his money was buying for me?
    Never mind, I said to myself, just make a good gorilla. I decided not to visit the Regent’s Park Zoo. When I last went there, some years ago, there was a female gorilla licking her urine off the floor. Was that her way, I wondered, of saying, ‘Is it I or is it not I?’ I had
National Geographics
, I had a video of David Attenborough whispering his narration while chewing vegetation and hanging out with a silverback and his troupe; and I had my own idea of gorilla-in-itself, a creature likely to be the dominant member in any relationship. I rigorously maintained my standards and eventually achieved a wooden gorilla with whom a wooden woman might crash any party of the appropriate scale with complete assurance.
    I thought of my gorilla woodenly dreaming of African mountains while doing what I’d been paid to make him do. I gave Jean-Louis a tape to take with him for thegorilla-and-partner soundtrack: : Bach’s
Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor
. I couldn’t find a recording by Marie-Claire Alain on that wonderful organ in Flensborg, Sweden that sounds as if it was made from the salt-encrusted timbers of Noah’s Ark so I went with Albert Schweitzer at the Parish Church in Gunsbach, Alsace. On reflection I was pleased with that choice; I thought Schweitzer and the gorilla would get on well together.

4
Sarah Varley
    You can do it either way, really: Monet defined his forms with light; Chardin with darkness. Monet’s figures, his flowers, his rocks, his boats and his sea all partake of the light; they mingle with it; one can’t say exactly where the light leaves off and they begin. Chardin’s people, his animals alive and dead, his still lifes all husband carefully the light allotted to them in the darkness that defines them. Chardin died in 1779, Monet in 1926. Certainly Monet’s is the more modern approach but I am a Chardin sort of person. At the exhibition at the Royal Academy I stood in front of his paintings caught by the lucent mystery of a glass of water, the quiet crucifixion of a hare. No, I am not modern.
    In my buying and selling I’m closer to the modern era; I’ve got Clarice Cliff and Susy Cooper china, Kosta and Orrefors glass. In costume jewellery I’ve got two Schiaparelli, three Trifari and one Kramer at present, a few things that go back to the twenties and earlier but mostly they’re from the forties and fifties: coloured glass, marcasite, paste. I like cheerful things that sparkle and I like to see women smiling as they put them on.
    Saturday went well at Chelsea Town Hall. I bought almostas much as I sold but they were things I expect to do all right with. I had the usual timewasters who blocked the stall without buying anything but nothing was stolen and there was a really nice Japanese woman who appreciated what I had on display and bought two of my most expensive necklaces. It isn’t just the money, it’s the recognition I crave — the little smile and nod and the look that says, ‘Ah yes, you know what’s good.’
    On Mondays I do Covent Garden, the Jubilee Market, so on Sunday I look at my stock and decide what to take; it’s the sort of thing that tends to fill the time available for it. I was luxuriating in indecision when the doorbell rang and I knew it would be Jehovah’s Witnesses. I hadn’t seen any for a long time and I’d begun to wonder whether they were an endangered species. These two looked diffident but daring, like animals returning to an old habitat but taking nothing for granted. One was a white man, slight and bespectacled, who looked like a stamp collector. He was wearing a suit and a tie. The other was a black woman, tall and