Restoring Grace (28 page)

Ellie ignored her. 'We've
decided you need the car.
What about the wedding presents?’

Grace nodded agreement. 'I've done without them
all this time and they're not from people I knew, really, or who cared about
me. Oh.'

‘What?'

‘One of them is a canteen of cutlery from
Allegra. I'd better not sell that.'

‘Let's get it down here then. I'm surprised she
didn't mention it last night. Your knives and forks are worthy of student
accommodation, Grace.'

‘
She gave us
a cheque and that's what we bought, and
although I did tell her, she's
probably forgotten. Which means we can sell it!' she added brightly.

Ellie, who liked things to match because it
saved so
much decision-making, sighed and
went back to the list.
'What else?’

should get a
job,' said Grace. 'What could I do? Manage a wine shop?'

‘
Have you got retail
experience? Ever worked in a
shop? A filling station? Anything?’

Grace shook her head. 'I
know about wine but not
about buying
and all that stuff. We'd better stick to wine
tastings
with food, and I'll get some more columns. I've had some quite good feedback
from the local paper. I
could always see if
other areas would like to run the arti
cles, and I can nag the wine
merchant about his friend on the glossy mag, see if he really wants me to write
for
it.' She frowned. 'But is any of this
going to earn us thirty
grand before the dry rot gets to the paintings?'

‘Oh, shit!' said Ellie. 'You don't think it
might already have got there, do you?’

As one, they rose from the table and dashed
along the corridor and across the hall to the dining room. 'Get the chair,'
said Ellie, 'I must look.'

‘No! Supposing you fall off! You'll lose the
baby.'

‘I won't fall off! I'm not drunk. I've been
climbing on chairs all my life and never fallen off any of them.’

Grace held the chair,
ready to catch Ellie. 'Can you see
anything?'

‘
The trouble
is, I don't really know what I'm looking
for.'

‘Come down and let me look.’

They swapped places. After
a while Grace said, 'I'm
not sure, but
I think there might be, just a bit. We could
go
upstairs and you could look and see if I'm right.’

Ellie shook her head.
'I'd rather not, if you don't mind.
Let's go back and work on our list.'
She felt that, in the scheme of things, having dry rot in the house was
probably not as serious as having dry rot in the paintings. After all, there
were lots of houses. The paintings were probably unique.

‘I was thinking,' said Grace, when they were
back in
the warmth of the kitchen, 'that I
could just sell the paint
ings. Would they fetch thirty grand, do you
think?’

Ellie squeaked. 'Grace,
they could be worth an absolute
fortune! If they were restored and
discovered to be by someone people have heard of, they'd be worth much,
much more than thirty grand. They've got to be
restored,
and then an expert must come in and value them. And
although it would be an awful shame to sell them,
at least
then you'd get a proper return for them.’

Grace sighed. 'But I need the money now!’

Ellie was desperate. 'We'll raise the thirty
grand
somehow, I promise you, but we must -
you
must not sell
them until they're back to their
full glory.'

‘And you're going to do that? Restore them?'

‘I'll have to if we can't afford to have them
done properly. That would probably cost about thirty grand, too!’

‘Oh, bugger.'

‘Grace! I didn't know you knew that word!'

‘I knew it all right, I just never use it much.
It's rather liberating. Perhaps I could say "fuck", too . . . No,'
she added a second later. 'It's too soon for the F word.'

‘I think it's sweet that you're so refined,'
said Ellie.

‘
It's
pathetic, but it's the way I am. The trouble with
me is I got married too young, but now I need a
career.
I 'can't spend the rest of my life being an ex-wife. We'll have
to sell the paintings. There's no other solution.'

‘But not in their present condition,' pleaded
Ellie.
'Imagine if you sold them and a
couple of years later
heard they were worth millions, not the few
thousands you'd sold them for.’

Grace was very unworldly,
but after a moment or two's
thought, even
she saw the point of this. 'And Allegra and
Nicholas
would never let me forget it. It would make the
house thing seem trivial. But we're back to money again.
Restoration
costs!'

‘Apply for a grant or something. Surely that's
what all this lottery money is for,' said Ellie, who was suddenly
wondering if it would be silly to make sandwiches
to take
with her.

‘
But if
anyone got to hear about the paintings, and they
were actually
valuable—'

‘They are,' said Ellie. 'Trust me on this.’

The grant
would have to go on insurance. I'd have to
have a burglar alarm, like Flynn.' She smiled at
the recol
lection of his late-night visit. 'He called round last night
after he'd driven Allegra to her hotel. Asked me
if I could
feed his cat for a bit.
Usually there's some builder or other
who
can do it, but there's no one there now. Presumably
because the house is
finished.'

‘
Hasn't he got any friends
he could ask?' said Demi.
'I am a friend,' said Grace.

‘
I think he just wants
to keep in touch,' said Ellie teas
ingly.

Grace laughed at the notion; it was about as
funny as the thought of the virtually empty Luckenham House having a security
system similar to the one which Flynn had explained to her in such detail.

‘
But going
back to the grant thing, even if I didn't
have to install burglar alarms
and things like that; it's
just sod's law
that someone would say they can't be
taken
out of the place where they were painted and I'll
be left with a million-pound
insurance bill and still have dry rot.’

Ellie had decided against
making sandwiches. It would
make her look a
bit unsophisticated, as if she were a child
taking her lunch box to school. 'Well, let me get some tips
and wrinkles from this picture restorer and I'll see what
I can do. But it's a huge responsibility, Grace. Those paint
ings are
probably a National Treasure or something.'

‘
Oh come on!
They're just the eighteenth-century equiv
alent of that girl in tennis
gear scratching her bum that was so popular in the eighties,' said Demi.

Shocked, both the other two looked at her. 'How
on earth do you know about that?' asked Ellie.

‘Media Studies,' said Demi, unbearably smug.
'It's the only bit of it I can remember.’

It was after
that they had realised if they didn't leave the house immediately, they'd all
be late.

*

The fact
that Ellie managed to find a parking space rela
tively nearby was a good omen, and the fact that
Randolph Frazier
had remembered to expect her was another.

But as he ushered her down into a cellar which
had
obviously never been used for anything
more artistic than
storing bottles
of chemicals and a few bits of timber, she
realised that extracting the
'tips and wrinkles' might be harder than she had anticipated. She'd have to get
him talking in her coffee break, if he let her have one.

Hard physical work in very unpleasant
surroundings took the edge off Ellie's shyness.

‘You're getting a lot of work out of me for
nothing,
Randolph,' she said a couple of
hours later, when she was
filthy and
tired, but the cellar was clear apart from about
twenty black sacks of
rubbish.

‘Call me Ran,' he said.

‘Ellie was tempted to call him something much
less
polite, but she needed him more than
he needed her. She
also needed lunch.

‘Ran, then. I mean, I'm supposed to be getting
work
experience - in picture restoration,'
she added hurriedly,
before he could
say that she
was
getting work
experience.
'But I could go out for sandwiches first, if
you like.'

‘
Oh, yes,
that would be a good idea. There's a little
shop at the bottom of the
hill. I'll have egg mayonnaise. Here's some money. I don't expect you to pay
for your own lunch,' he added.

Grateful for small
mercies, Ellie took the note he handed
her,
wondering if pregnant women were allowed egg
mayonnaise.
Probably not. Being pregnant made you give
up most of the pleasures of
life: soft cheese, soft-boiled eggs, strong drink.

When she got back a
little later she found him upstairs
in the studio.
There was a picture of a battle scene - men
wearing
antiquated military uniforms - on an easel and as she came in he licked the end
of what looked like a kebab skewer and dipped it into a roll of cotton wool.
Then he took up a wisp and rolled it round, producing what looked like a
doll's-house-sized stick of candyfloss.

‘
Home-made
cotton bud,' he explained. Then he licked
it again. 'Spit is always the
first thing you try. It's got enzymes in it.’

He rubbed at a tiny corner of the painting,
about one
centimetre square, changing the
cotton wool several
times, inspecting what was on the cotton wool
intently.
'We start on the weakest chemical
we can get away with.'

‘
Couldn't
you just reproduce the enzymes and save yourself all that spitting?’

He shook his head. 'I was working at a major
picture gallery, years ago, when an American came over. He
thought the same as you. Got a chemist to work
out what
was in spit, had it reproduced, and put a tiny bit in the
corner of the painting. Before he went home he checked that it was working. In
the morning, what was fixing the paint to the painting had completely
disappeared.'

‘My God!'

‘
Which is why
I like spit and not a fake version of it. Do you want to put the kettle on?
We'll eat lunch over
by the kitchen.'

‘
I do
realise it would be dreadful to eat or drink
anything in the studio.’

He frowned at her. 'No. It's just that the
view's better
from the kitchen.' Then he
relented. 'But you're right, you
shouldn't really bring food or drinks
into a studio.’

Ellie sighed as she filled the kettle. Picture
restoration
was obviously an extremely
painstaking, time-consuming
business. She could probably work with this
man for several years and still not have a clue what to do about the panels.
She'd have to ask leading questions.

‘So,' she said when they were both sitting on
stools at a counter, their food and mugs well away from the work in progress.
'When do I get some hands-on experience?’

‘
You don't.
It's all highly technical, you can't let
amateurs do it.'

‘So why did you take me on, if you're not
prepared to let me have some real work experience?' She bit into her ham and
salad baguette and a bit of tomato dropped on the floor.

He shrugged. 'You saw how badly the cellar
needed clearing out. I'm going to turn it into a dark room.’