Free Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Page B

place artists came to live.
    Once or twice he had seen Francis Bacon, whose favourite model Henrietta Moraes lived around the corner, waiting by the bus stop outside the Follett house, hair oxblooded with boot-polish, carrier bag in hand. It was the same bus stop that, according to the biographies, T. S. Eliot used to use when he was a resident of Carlyle Mansions to travel to his job as poetry editor at Faber and Faber.
    One afternoon, bringing the dog back from the park, he had come across Peter Sellers and his new wife Britt Ekland appraising the Follett house (although this was several years before it was known as that), craning their necks, admiring a conservatory, speculating (he imagined)on what it must be like to be sitting in it, drink in hand, sunk into the rattan armchairs covered in the green bamboo-pattern fabric that the then-owners had, held in suspension between misty Whistlerian river and the vast expanse of gunmetal sky, floating in a diorama of changing light. (When, after Sellers’ death, Britt Ekland took up with a member of the American retro rockabilly band Stray Cats and he would sometimes spot them together looking dishevelled and hungover in the rougher pubs and cafés of the World’s End – looking like vintage pictures of an off-the-rails Amy Winehouse and her drug-addled husband that ran like a flicker-frame through the whole of that summer – he would recall that other Britt who was an intimate of Princes Margaret’s, one of Peter Sellers’ best friends, and that other time before the Follett house was the Follett house.)
    Summer 2007 was the moment of Russia and China and the new super-rich Asian countries. Under the influence of globalisation, the nature of financial markets had changed. Art, for example, had become ‘monetised’. Art had become an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate. Finance, he read without understanding what he was reading, was now an end in itself. It no longer needed a real economy to function because it had gone off into hyperspace, operating in a virtual world.
    It was a changed, and still vertiginously changing, world. The rewards for those who knew and understood how to manipulate money were unprecedentedly massive. And Mr Studzinski, the new owner of the handsomehouse at Battersea Reach, was apparently a part of that world.
    He had dogs. Three, and then four big dogs, giant Leonburgers which bayed and, when out for walks, loped slowly, like a pack. An elaborate system of security was installed, and a man in a uniform sent round every night to check. A trip-light was set up over the garage to interrogate every face passing in the street. Spiked fences were erected. Security cameras boxed in with metal grilles. Mature trees were swung in over the rooftops and their big rootballs buried in a line along the back of the house so that, even clinging precariously to the chimney and peering over, his view of the garden was now screened off, blocked by the new wall of trees.
    The front of the house with the sweeping view of the river was in a red zone. There was no stopping. And so all exchange between outside and inside took place at the side, through the garages. Standing by the bus stop – the same stop where Francis Bacon and, before him, T. S. Eliot (a lifelong anglophile, like Mr Studzinski) once waited – it was impossible to be unaware of the day-long comings and goings of florists and dry-cleaning people, of his driver, his butler, the first-and second-gardener, the Filipino domestics and the husband of one of them, the odd-job man, the men who walked his dogs. But never the man himself.
    There were rumours. He read about him in the papers: about the Picasso collection, the Man Rays, the salons reflecting his polymath interests, ‘mixing artists,authors and musicians with clergy, politicians, royalty and captains of industry … the Duchess of Kent and Sting; Lord Browne of BP and members of the Gucci family’. There had been a £5 million