Maestra (7 page)

‘I’ll see you tonight, then, Angelica,’ he said on his way out.

Angelica didn’t even bother looking up from her urgent texting. ‘Yuh, sure, Rupes.’

I was wondering what ‘tonight’ was when Rupert paused at my desk, fumbling in his briefcase.

‘Er, Judith. Thought you might like to come to this,’ he said, handing me a stiff envelope. ‘Angelica’s coming along. Bit of socialising. Look smart!’

‘I’ll do my best, Rupert.’

‘I’m sure you will. You always look, er, very nice. See you later then!’

I left the envelope where he’d dropped it for a bit, in case Angelica thought I didn’t know what I’d been asked to, but when I opened it I had a hard time keeping the grin off my face. Rupert had given me an invite to the Tentis party at the Serpentine Gallery. Tentis & Tentis were a huge architecture firm who had just finished a conversion in the City which contained some of the most expensive flats in London. The sleb magazines at the Gstaad Club had been full of it. Rupert had managed to flog them a job lot of uncollected sale remnants dating back to the Eighties to adorn the billionaires’ walls. It had taken me a week to cobble together the provenances. The party was to celebrate a forthcoming collaboration with the Frieze Masters art fair. Rupert had actually asked me. There would be photographers – the girls at the club might see it. Maybe even the slags I’d been at school with would see it.

The dress code at the base of the thick, classic cream board said ‘Black Tie’. I didn’t have a long dress, but this was no time for economy. I clock-watched until exactly 5 p.m., ran up to the bank on Piccadilly, then hailed a cab. By six, I was back at my flat, via Harvey Nicks, with a cotton dress bag containing a plain Ralph Lauren black silk column which fastened over one shoulder with an almost invisible gold chain. It had been stupidly expensive, but I wouldn’t think about that. I could make it good at the club. I wasn’t terribly interested in Rupert’s opinion of my fashion sense, but this was the first real opportunity I’d had to network with serious people. I wanted to look perfect.

But I dithered over jewellery. The dim little diamond studs my mother had given me for my twenty-first had been pawned in Hatton Garden ages ago, so I took the view that no jewels would always be more stylish than bad jewels and went without. The dress didn’t need a thing underneath it, just simple heels. I begged Pai’s black Gucci clutch to finish it. Hardly any make-up, just mascara and a berry stain on my lips. I ordered a taxi so as not to arrive feeling ruffled. The expression on the cabbie’s face as I got in told me everything I needed to know.

A crowd of paps waited at the end of the red carpet which stretched out from the glass pavilion in Hyde Park, glowing pink and mauve like a retro spacecraft. A couple of them clicked off a few obliging frames, just being polite, I supposed, but it made me feel good. The hum of the party throbbed towards me, unified, organic, like the murmurings of some massive beast. I handed my invite to an attendant, who waved me through, and closed my eyes for one delicious anticipatory second, preparing to take it all in.

How would Cinderella have felt if, when she finally did make it to the ball, she found herself at an estate agents’ office party? The huge pots of Jo Malone candles couldn’t disguise the smell of one massive, acrid champagne belch. Hundreds of pasty men in bad suits were crowded round the free bar with the excitement of Mormons let loose in Atlantic City. Wherever Tentis & Tentis had found their rentacrowd was obviously a Moët-free zone. I spied the tiny head of a superannuated supermodel poking out of the scrum like a stick of bewildered celery, but apart from her it could have been Friday night in All Bar One Hammersmith. I had a horrible pang of regret over the Harvey Nicks receipt on my bureau. The only other person who hadn’t ignored the dress code was Rupert, whose gut had created his own mini-VIP section around him. He was talking to someone I vaguely knew, a gallerist named Cameron Fitzpatrick. I caught Rupert’s eye, and he came barrelling towards me. Few men fail to be improved by black tie, and Rupert was one of the few, but for once I was glad to see him. ‘Rupert,’ I called sociably, waving the clutch at him. ‘Hi!’

He looked momentarily confused.

‘Oh, er, Judith. Righto. I was just going, actually. Got a dinner.’

‘I don’t want to keep you, but I did a bit of extra work on the provenance of the Stubbs?’

‘What?’

‘At the departmental meeting today? That Stubbs?’

‘Judith, must dash, we’ll talk tomorrow,’ he threw over his shoulder as he bolted.

My only other hope of a spot of small talk, Fitzpatrick, had by now vanished in the crowd. I pushed my way to the bar through a gaggle of micro-dressed girls with shoes that Coleen Rooney probably wanted back. I couldn’t even enjoy the looks they were giving me. They’d obviously heard about bootylicious being powerful, but that was as far as they’d taken that particular thought. Channelling your inner goddess by shovelling your arse into a skirt that practically announced your last visit to the waxer was not perhaps the best route to female emancipation. I guessed their evening would end in a half-hearted lap dance at 3 a.m. in the Vingt Quatre for a crowd of mayonnaise-covered sub-Sloanes. Not like me, oh no. Not like Judith the successful art dealer-slash-hostess. I didn’t really want a drink, but I took two glasses to give me something to do. I re-crossed the room slowly, pretending I was taking it to someone, but my heart wasn’t in it.

Angelica hadn’t bothered to show. She might know nothing about paintings, but her life’s training had clearly included a masterclass on which parties to avoid. Obviously another secret code I hadn’t cracked. How could I have been so pathetically excited? What had I seriously thought was going to happen? Gracious conversation with a glittering crowd, sharing a joke with Jay Jopling before being swept off to dinner at Lucien Freud’s old table at the Wolseley?

That would never happen to me, because I was just a grunt, wasn’t I? A jumped-up tea lady. I felt humiliated. Even the paps outside had gone on to better things. The ancient supermodel had vanished, too, presumably stowing the fat cheque for turning up under the chicken fillets in her bra, on her way to where the smart people were actually hanging out. God, I was pathetic. I thought I should punish myself by doing the walk home but I was too depressed. What was another twenty on a cab? At least I could tell Dave I’d been somewhere fancy; he liked that sort of thing. But was it always like this? Was London a series of ever-tinier enclosures, like Russian dolls, so that when you thought you had got inside there was just another smooth painted casket, screwed down to keep you out? I was already clawing the stupid dress off me as I paid the driver. The delicate chain snapped and I was so furious I grabbed the split in the leg and tore the fucking thing in half, much to the surprise of an elderly couple who were passing, clutching programmes from the Albert Hall.

The flat was lying in wait for me, humming with white rage. After I’d scrambled through the hideous maze of cycles and pumps and helmets that permanently blocked the hallway, I saw a box on the kitchen table with a note to ‘Judy’ taped to it. The box contained a fat pink ceramic mug with bunny ears. The note said, ‘Really sorry. I borrowed your cup and accidentally broke it. I got you this instead!’ My roommate had drawn a smiley face, the silly cunt. I looked in the bin. There were the pieces of my cup and saucer, a perfect Villeroy 1929 glaze in absinthe green that I’d gone all the way to Camden Passage to agonise over for two weeks. It had only cost forty quid, but that was not the point. It was just not the point. I thought there might be some Superglue in the drawer of the horrible fake-Victorian buffet, but the handle stuck and I kicked the leg of the fucking thing so hard it just flew off, and the cabinet lurched to one side so that all the shitty china smashed, and then there were a regrettable few minutes which took quite a long time to clean up, after I’d calmed down.

7

I woke at five with my head fizzing. I lay naked on my bed, staring at the usual aching ceiling. I’d let the club addle my brain. The camaraderie with the girls and the easy money had put me off my game. I was going to do this right, and that meant getting to the bottom of the Stubbs acquisition. A bad party was nothing. I just had to focus.

I was at the office early, dying to see Dave, but Laura cornered me and made me spend an impatient morning going through minimum sale prices for Stanley Spencers in order to help some hedge funder fiddle his capital gains tax. CGT was about the only area in which the department was remotely businesslike. I went down to the warehouse at lunch, but Dave was out. I called his mobile and offered to buy him a drink after work, then went across to N. Peal and bought a beautiful pale blue cashmere crew neck that cost almost as much as I had spunked in Harvey Nicks. Somehow spending more money made me feel better about the Tentis debacle. I planned to change for the club in the ladies at the London Library in St James’s Square to give me time to meet Dave in the Bunch of Grapes on Duke Street. When he limped in – he was too proud to use a cane – I got him a pint of London Pride and a tonic water for myself.

‘Thanks for the drink, Judith, but my missus will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

I explained that my notes on the picture seemed to have been lost, and that the Stubbs had been acquired not direct from the couple in Warminster but through a mystery buyer. It did sound a bit lame, but I was so sure there was something wrong. I couldn’t have explained it to Dave, but after my total failure the previous evening it seemed even more important to prove that I was right about the Stubbs.

‘I want to have a look at it, Dave. It’s in, right? You’ve got a better eye than me. I don’t believe this overpainting stuff.’

Dave lowered his voice.

‘You don’t really mean Rupert would be flogging a fake?’

‘Of course I don’t. I think he might have made a mistake and I don’t want anyone to look bad, that’s all. If helping them not look bad makes me look good, then that suits me fine. But it wouldn’t be the first time someone made an attribution error, would it? You know that. Please? Ten minutes and you can tell me I’m an idiot and I’ll never mention it again.’

‘Judith, there’s the experts for this. I’d need, I dunno, tools.’

‘Dave. You care about the real thing, right? You think what we sell should be the real thing? Regimental honour and all that?’

‘We should really get permission.’

‘I work there, you work there. We have passes – I could just be looking at the “works”, like bloody Laura is always saying.’

‘Ten minutes?’

‘Max. Come on.’ I made my voice softer. ‘We’re mates, yes?’

‘Oh, go on then.’

Most of the staff had left, so Dave took us in using his code for the back entrance. We had to use torches in the storage room, which was kept dim to protect the artworks. Dave went straight to the correct crate and lifted the picture out. I pointed out where I had remembered the Newmarket sign being placed, and where I thought the signature had been moved.

‘Judith, I can’t say. It really looks alright to me.’

‘But there was a sign, just here. How new is that varnish?’

Our heads were close together as we peered at the canvas, both our fingertips hovering over the emptied space.

‘If it was cleaned,’ Dave said, engaged now, ‘there might be a trace on the underpainting. We need to get it under the right light.’

‘Well, can we move it?’

‘Where did you say the signature was?’

‘Yes, where was it?’ Rupert. They say that fat people can often move with surprising stealth. I laughed stupidly.

‘Rupert. Hi, sorry, we were just –’

‘Please explain what you are doing. You are a junior, you have no permission to be here.’ Actually it wasn’t that big a deal. I’d popped down after hours many times. Usually because Rupert had asked me to. He turned to Dave, his voice softer.

‘What are you two up to, eh? Isn’t it time you were getting home, Dave?’

Dave looked mortified and mumbled a good evening. I hated the way he called Rupert ‘sir’. Rupert stayed affable, politely undramatic until he limped off up the stairs, then considered me for a long moment. In the bluish light he looked like a strangely bloated El Greco. I knew he wasn’t going to make a scene. Power is so much more effective when it’s quiet.

‘Judith, I’ve been meaning to speak to you for a while. I don’t really think you fit in here, do you? I wanted to give you a chance, but I’ve had several complaints in the department about your attitude. Your comments at the Stubbs meeting were inappropriate and frankly impertinent.’

‘I just thought – that is, I was trying – I wasn’t sure –. ’ I was babbling like a guilty schoolgirl, furious with myself but unable to stop.

‘I think it would be better if you get your things and leave now, don’t you?’ he added calmly.

‘You’re – firing me?’

‘If you want to put it like that, yes. I am.’

I was bewildered. Instead of protesting, instead of defending myself, I just started to cry. Absurd. All the frustrated tears I had kept down chose that moment to bubble up like a geyser, reducing me despite myself to the role of pleading woman. Even as I felt those hot, furious tears massing in my eyes, I knew that Rupert was hiding something. Even that the stupid party invitation had been meant as a sop to keep me quiet. Yet this wasn’t how it was meant to be, was it? I was trying to do the right thing, the good thing.

‘Rupert, please. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. If I could just explain?’

‘I have no interest in your explanations.’

He ignored me as we made our way back to the department. I walked in front of him through the narrow corridors, feeling like a prisoner. He stood with his arms folded as I gathered the bits and pieces from my desk and scooped them into my briefcase. My dress and heels for the club were stuffed at the bottom. I couldn’t bear to see them.

‘Are you ready?’

I nodded dumbly.

‘I need your pass, please. I don’t think there’s any need to ask Security to see you out.’

I handed it over, mute.