Artistic Licence (29 page)

Thea looked down at her feet and examined Petal’s trainers. ‘I thought I had a friend like that, too.’

‘But you haven’t now?’

Although Thea had deliberately made it impossible for Magenta to see her expression, she must have betrayed something in her voice. ‘Well, I expect I’ve still got him as a friend. In fact, he’s been great. Really helpful.’

‘But you’d like something more than friendship, right?’

‘Mm.’

‘Tell me about him. We’ve got a while before we arrive at number 506. It’s out near the Dome.’

‘It won’t take long. He thinks I’m a complete idiot.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

Aware that she’d had no one to talk to about Ben, Thea relaxed into it. ‘In my kitchen. I was standing in a dustbin at the time. I think it set the whole tone of our relationship.’

‘So, when did you fall in love with him?’

‘Well, I didn’t know it at the time, but it must have been when I saw him deliver a litter of puppies.’

‘Thea! I’ll never leave you to your own devices again! What in hell have you been up to?’

‘Not as much as I would have liked.’

‘I hate to say this,’ Thea eased off her shoes and eased her hot feet on the cold marble. ‘But I think I’m galleried out. How many have we seen?’

‘Only half a dozen and I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you to do the last couple on your own. I’ve got a hair appointment.’

‘Lucky you. Can’t I come with you? I’ve seen so much art, so many galleries and not a sniff of Rory.’ Thea was very tired and on the verge of becoming deeply depressed. ‘It might be best just to forget about him and carry on with the degree show.’

‘You can’t give up now! I’m really into this guy now you’ve told me so much about him. And even though I only had time to glance at his slides, they seemed great.’

‘Mm. Imagine them twenty times the size, or whatever. But I’m shattered.’

‘I know. We’ll pop into the Wallace Collection for a bit of therapy.’

After so much contemporary work–some of which Thea found intensely stimulating and exciting and some about which she just wondered what the point was – the Wallace Collection was a haven. Time seemed to have stood still there for centuries and Thea was quite happy to stand still with it. ‘I’d forgotten there were so many old masters here,’ she whispered to Magenta.

‘I know, and while the National and the Tate have them too, they’re not so easy just to step into and wander.’

Thea stood in front of each painting for ages, staring at fur you could almost run your fingers through, at velvet so soft and dense you wanted to drape yourself in it, and pearls more real than anything she had ever actually worn in her own life. ‘Can people still paint like that?’ she murmured to Magenta. ‘Nothing we’ve seen today implies that they can. Perhaps it’s a skill that’s been lost.’

‘I got the impression from the slides that your Rory could.’

Thea turned to her friend. ‘You’re right. I thought it was just the subject matter, landscapes so bright and vivid they’re like winter sunshine after months of fog and rain. But it must have been the quality of the painting that made them like that.’

She cast her mind back to when she first dragged his paintings out on to the Irish hillside and saw them properly. The same prickles of excitement she had then stirred the hairs at the back of her neck. No, it had to be she who brought his work to the eyes of the world. She’d earned the privilege.

‘Let’s go and find him.’

Chapter Seventeen

Thea was quite relieved that Magenta had left for her hair appointment. She wanted to slip into the last gallery for the day on her own and just be an ordinary punter looking at art. She could ask questions later.

She found it quite easily, down a side street at the back of Harrods. From the outside she thought it looked far too small for Rory’s work, but Magenta had said that the curator was a big name and a good contact.

Once inside, the space was much larger than it had appeared, and wonderfully cool after the heat and dust outside. The weather had been getting hotter and more humid; thunder seemed inevitable. Thea decided she must make sure she was in a cab and on her way home before the storm broke and everyone wanted one.

She heard voices and, glad to slip in unnoticed, followed the sign to the exhibition upstairs. She could investigate the ground floor and find the owner later.

It was, she realised, the first gallery of the many they had seen that she actually envied. She had very little confidence in her abilities as a gallery owner, but she knew that none of the other spaces, or the way they had arranged the work, inspired her like this one. In some ways it was a relief. She had been beginning to
think that she was too jealous of other galleries to judge them fairly. In this, she knew she was looking at true class.

It helped that she really liked the work. It was an eclectic mix of paintings, ceramics and three-dimensional work. She didn’t like all of it by any means, but she did respect it and felt that if art had been required always to please the eye it would never have progressed beyond tasteful paintings of children playing with puppies. She wondered, briefly, how her own puppies were getting on.

Some of the work she loved. There were wonderful paintings composed of the purest pigments, red so intense that from some angles it looked black, scored with a slash of a palette knife so the paper beneath was revealed. Others were blue-black, the night sky distilled and intensified into a three-foot square.

As she wandered around she realised that this was the standard she was aiming for and that she didn’t want anything less good in her gallery.

The voices still murmured on but she decided to go downstairs anyway. Her curiosity about what might be there lured her on.

She couldn’t see the speakers because they were through in another section, where the gallery obviously extended into the building next door. At first, she ignored them and just gazed at a very complicated textile hanging piece, but then she heard a familiar laugh and knew she’d found her quarry. All day, she and Magenta had hunted him, asking questions, picking up snippets and bits of information accidentally let fall; now here he was, in person.

If this was the gallery Rory had found there was
some sort of comfort in the fact that he had chosen such a wonderful one to abandon hers for. If he’d just gone for a good address, with no substance behind it, she’d have been incredibly hurt. While she was still hurt, not to mention bloody furious, at least she’d been left for a class act.

She had to think carefully how to approach him. After all, what could she say? Stamping her foot and telling the gallery owner that it wasn’t fair, Rory had promised to show in her space first, wouldn’t cut any ice. Especially when he asked what or where her gallery was. He was probably like Magenta and despised ‘the provinces’.

It was her passion for Rory’s work and the memory of her first sight of it that gave her the courage to pursue the matter. That and the fact that she’d committed herself so far, and potentially made such a fool of herself anyway, a little embarrassment in a gallery she would never visit again was neither here nor there. But what argument could she possibly offer Rory to make him change his mind?

She was about to go and confront him, hoping something halfway sensible would come to her, when another woman came in. She walked straight past Thea to where Rory and the owner were talking. Damn! Pratfalls were all very well, but Thea would have preferred to take hers without extra spectators.

The woman obviously knew Rory. Thea could hear the air kisses from where she was. Rory laughed again. It was, she had to acknowledge, a very sexy laugh and, judging by the laugh the woman gave in return, she thought so too.

Thea moved closer. She was well within sight, so it
wasn’t really eavesdropping. She was invisible in any case, because she wasn’t anything except a slightly dishevelled woman in her thirties, looking at works of art she obviously couldn’t afford.

‘So, Rory, when are you going to let Edward have the paintings? He can’t plan a show properly without them. Can you?’ the woman said.

The man murmured something and everyone laughed again.

Thea wished she’d got a better look at the woman, or could see her now. But at least she knew that this was indeed the gallery in question, and it gave her some satisfaction that the pictures they wanted were in hers. Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law. In theory, anyway.

‘I did explain.’ Rory sounded apologetic. ‘It is a little difficult. I promised this woman I’d show with her first.’

‘You really don’t need to worry about that,’ the woman was soothing yet adamant. ‘After all, she isn’t anybody. No one would expect you to keep your word made in those circumstances. I mean, she may have got you to show your work to her, but that doesn’t give her any rights to it whatsoever.’

‘Well–’

‘She didn’t buy any of it, did she?’ This time the voice was edged with irritation.

‘She did pay to have the drawings and sketches framed.’

Well, thank you, Rory, for remembering
, thought Thea.

‘Then all you need to do is pay her back for the framing. A cheque will do it. You don’t have to hide your work away as well.’ Her voice became cooing and
Thea was willing to bet she was now holding on to Rory in some way.

Thea began to shift about uncomfortably. She was definitely eavesdropping now. Rory didn’t know she was there and he was talking about her. If she didn’t reveal herself soon, it would get to the stage when she couldn’t.

Just as she was plucking up the courage to say something ingenuous like ‘Oh, hello, Rory, I didn’t know you were here’, to her enormous surprise she saw Toby and a young woman approach the door of the gallery. This was somehow a greater shock than coming across Rory. In the nick of time she stepped behind an elevated circulating fridge and avoided being seen. What the hell was Toby doing here? Surely not just looking at art with his nanny.

Toby moved to the woman and said in a polite but strangely unenthusiastic voice, ‘Hello, Veronica.’

Thea’s heart started jumping in her chest. She felt blood rush up through her body and sweat broke out at her hairline. Suddenly she seemed like the victim of some horrible plot.
Don’t panic
, she ordered herself.
Veronica could be anyone; she doesn’t have to be his mother. It’s quite a common name – probably.

But ‘Veronica’ put out her arm and pulled Toby to her. ‘Hello darling. I see you’re wearing that new shirt I bought you. It might look better tucked in.’ There was no doubt. Only a mother or a teacher would tell a boy to tuck his shirt in.

This was the moment. She moved from behind the suspended fridge and cleared her throat. ‘Hello,’ she said, wishing she could think of something less banal.

‘Thea!’ said Toby and Rory at the same time.

It was Toby’s presence that kept Thea calm. She couldn’t shout and scream and throw things with him there. It wouldn’t be fair.

‘I’m sorry? Do I know you?’ asked Veronica icily.

‘This is Thea, the woman who made me get my work out of the shed,’ said Rory. He seemed extremely put out to her and was shuffling about like a schoolboy caught investigating his sister’s underwear.

Thea glanced at Toby. After his initial delighted greeting, he now seemed reluctant to look at her. Thea began to feel more and more certain that something very untoward was going on.

‘Oh!’ said Veronica. ‘So you’re the one.’ She came forward, hand outstretched. ‘I’ve heard such a lot about you.’

Thea took the hand, which was cool and hard, and at the same time took a good look at its owner. She was aggressively thin, attractive, though not pretty, and had that high-maintenance gloss which made it hard to tell her age. She had probably looked as she did now when she was eighteen and would go on looking like it when she was fifty.

‘Sorry,’ said Thea, ‘I don’t know your name.’
Even if I do know, perfectly well, who you are.

‘Veronica de Claudio. I discovered Rory.’ Veronica smiled. She smelt strongly of some sophisticated perfume and her clothes were the sort Thea wouldn’t know how to wear, even if she could fit into them; layers of silk, trousers, a floor-length waistcoat and a sort of embroidered panel across her concave stomach which showed her hips were no more than six inches from point to point.

‘Oh, really?’ Thea inclined her head graciously. ‘I
thought I did that.’

Veronica’s eyes narrowed with pleasure. She gave Thea the sort of smile people give when delivering bad news that actually delights them. ‘Oh, I was way ahead of you. I saw Rory’s graduate show and his subsequent exhibition. In Cork Street.’

‘Oh?’ The implications of this announcement were many and Thea’s stomach was beginning to churn alarmingly, but just now, she wanted Veronica’s take on Rory’s fatal exhibition.

‘It was stunning, absolutely stunning.’

Rory had turned away and was trying to engage Toby in conversation about one of the sculptures. Whether he was embarrassed to hear his work described as stunning or felt bad about what happened afterwards Thea could only guess. Knowing Rory, the former seemed rather unlikely.