There was a flutter of applause.
‘I take it you’ve all got one of these?’ he waved an auction catalogue. ‘Now I know when it comes to good causes, you’ve got very deep pockets. Our last auction two years ago raised a cool nine and a half thousand pounds,’ (much whooping and foot stomping) ‘and we only had half the number of pledges we’ve got today, so I’m confident we’re going to beat our record very handsomely this afternoon. Because we’ve got so much lovely stuff on offer, however, we’re going to divide the proceedings into two sessions and take a refreshment break halfway through, so do please stick around because we’re saving the best till last and we’d hate you to miss out.’
Luca jabbed his elbow meaningfully into my thigh and looked up at me with a manic grin. Already I was regretting my slight over-familiarity with him at Min and Ray’s dinner party.
‘But now, without further ado, let me hand over to our esteemed auctioneer, everyone’s favourite landlord, your friend and mine, Kevin Lister from The Fleece. Kevin!’
‘Ladeez’n’genlemen, can I just say what a pleasure it is to welcome you to this episode of Homes Under the Hammer? Sorry, what… it’s not? Oh, I do beg your pardon…’
It was strange hearing the landlord do his shtick again – it took me back to the night of the pub quiz – a season and a lifetime ago. How wide-eyed and anxious and eager to please I had been. How keen to make a success of this strange unaccustomed new life; how daunted by my fellow team members – all of them here in this tent now – who weren’t really daunting at all. Not even Imogen, the hostess with the mostest, with her social graces, her superior art history knowledge and her glossy blonde hair. I watched her for a minute, glancing this way and that, checking on the caterers, acknowledging friends and acquaintances, and, when she thought no one was looking, casting covetous glances in Nick’s direction. She saw me watching her and, embarrassed to be caught in the act, gave me a cute little wave. I realized with a sort of curious detachment that I did not in fact want to kill her; that perhaps I even pitied her.
‘So ladies and gents, boys and girls, straight, gay, bi, trans, cis,’ the landlord fixed the audience with a satirically beady eye, as if challenging anyone to object to his newly acquired PC nomenclature, ‘that’s the one I can’t figure out,’ he confided, ‘cis.’ He mugged at the audience, who laughed uneasily and then with a well-timed comic shrug, he moved on. ‘A-n-yhoo… whoever you are, however you identify, if you’ve got money in your pocket and love in your heart, you are welcome, most welcome to the jamboree of charitable giving that is the third Walford House Auction of Promises. Let’s hear it for our hosts Douglas and Imogen Gaines, lovely, lovely people. Now without further ado…’
The first lots went in a flash. Twelve chocolate and vanilla cupcakes pledged by the two little Gaines girls rose quickly from ten pounds to twenty-five, to thirty, finally selling after a nail-biting face-off between two ardent cupcake fanciers, for forty-five pounds. A weekend’s dog-sitting went for a stingy twenty-three, and a tarot-reading offered by a garrulous local eccentric was won by a dismayed Min for only eight pounds.
‘The next lot is for all you nature lovers out there,’ the landlord said. ‘It’s a once in a lifetime experience. The kind of treat that only a landscape as fertile and abundant as this one can offer. No, I’m not talking about a roll in the hay with the missus…’ Groans from the floor. ‘It is, and I kid you not,’ he peered closely at the auction catalogue as if to verify the sheer magnanimity of the offer, ‘a mushroom foraging session, in our beautiful woods here, led by local lothario, fine art connoisseur and all-round fun gi, fun gi, ladeez’n’genlemen, did you see what I did there? Luca D’Agostino. I am reliably informed by the donor that no fewer than five varieties of delicious edible mushrooms can be found hereabouts if you know where to look and Luca D’Agostino, my friends, knows where to look. What am I bid for this gastronomic one-off? This unique chance to go foraging – yes foraging, ladies – at the crack of dawn with a handsome Italian?’
Luca shook his head in amused despair, cupped a hand to his mouth and called, ‘Hey, I’m a married man.’
‘Spoilsport!’ called Imogen Gaines and everyone laughed.
‘So, let’s start the bidding. Mushroom foraging for four at a time of your choosing. What am I bid?’
After the landlord’s hype, the silence and shuffling that followed was painful to endure. Luca sat up high on his haunches next to me, his knee held in the crook of his arm, his other hand tapping an anxious rhythm on the seat of my chair. The silence stretched on. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him glance up at me hopefully, but I stared straight ahead, determined not to further embolden a married man with whom I already regretted having flirted, and who had taken so little encouragement to send me flowers. There was a nervous cough, someone tittered, Luca raked his hand once more through his hair and my resolve cracked.
‘Ten pounds,’ I called, raising my hand. Luca looked up at me in adoration and already I was kicking myself. From across the table, Nick gave me a weary eye roll.
‘Fifteen,’ came a voice, plummy and amused, from somewhere near the front. It was Imogen.
‘OK, ladies,’ the landlord rubbed his hands together, ‘looks like we’ve got a fight on our hands.’
Luca looked unbearably smug now, but it was too late for regrets, I had been assigned my role in the drama and not to up my offer would be to show my opening bid for the empty gesture it was.
‘Fifteen pounds fifty?’ I called feebly and the audience groaned.
‘Twenty pounds,’ called Imogen Gaines and the audience cheered. There seemed no way back now. We were locked in combat, Imogen and I, and as much as I did not want to go mushroom foraging with Luca and Melissa, nor did the spoilt child in me want to lose out to Imogen Gaines.
‘Twenty-five,’ I called.
‘Thirty!’
‘Thirty-five!’ I dared not look at Nick.
‘Fifty pounds!’
‘Sixty!’
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luca bunching his fists like a football fan watching an attack on goal. I was steeling myself to up the ante, when a man’s voice called out, ‘One hundred pounds!’
A little frisson of amusement and perplexity rippled around the room. Heads turned, but not mine. I knew who it was – it was Nick.
I couldn’t see Imogen from where I was sitting, but I could hear the smirk, the challenge in her voice when she said, ‘One hundred and fifty pounds.’
The marquee was quiet. A rope creaked and outside the caterers could be heard chatting amongst themselves.
‘So, for one hundred and fifty pounds, going once, going twice…’
‘Two hundred pounds!’ Nick called.
The landlord looked enquiringly towards Imogen, but must have received a shake of the head.
‘Sold to the gentleman at the back for two hundred pounds sterling, thank you for your generosity, sir!’
There was a collective sigh of relief. People started chatting and drinking again.
‘Congratulations,’ I said to Luca. ‘That’s a lot of money you’ve raised.’
‘Yes, it’s very good,’ he replied. ‘I hope you will come on the trip also…?’ He looked up at me with bloodhound eyes.
Lots came and lots went. Some raised even more than Luca’s mushroom hunt. A spa break bought for one of the Boden ladies by her stockbroker husband made three hundred pounds, a weekend at Min and Ray’s B&B a very respectable two hundred and seventy. Hengist Debonair’s circus skills proved more popular than Marjory Baverstock’s healing crystals. Cath’s window boxes went for seventy quid apiece.
By the time the landlord announced that he’d faint if he didn’t get a cucumber sandwich, it was already five forty-five and the total raised had exceeded the proceeds of the previous auction by five hundred pounds.
We poured out of the marquee onto the lawn as intoxicated with our generosity as if we had paid off the national debt of a small developing
country. Douglas’s voice crackled over the PA system informing us that the auction would resume in half an hour’s time and that meanwhile we should top up our glasses and fill our boots as it looked like being a late one. A boogie-woogie number came tootling through the loudspeaker and people started to relax, mingle, eat and drink.
I felt light-headed and a little bit sick, a fact I chose to put down to the three glasses of Pimm’s I’d drunk on an empty stomach, rather than to Min’s casual mention of Ethan, which had flustered and perplexed me in ways I didn’t really want to confront. I suppose I should have welcomed news of him. If he had gone to the pub, he must have had the price of a pint. The fact that he had exchanged pleasantries with Ray suggested at least a vestige of social responsibility and if he had a local ‘lady friend’, his plans to emigrate must at the very least be on hold. More importantly, it suggested that he probably wasn’t shooting up smack in a bus shelter somewhere, an unacknowledged dread that had been nagging at me ever since his shopping ‘spree’ in London had left at least a hundred pounds of his father’s largesse unaccounted for. Somehow, though, the thought that our son should be living in our community completely estranged from us – that our neighbours should be more au fait with his movements than we, his parents – seemed not just humiliating, but a badge of failure.
I stopped a teenage boy in a bow tie, carrying a tin tray of egg and cress sandwiches and took a fistful in a shroud of napkin.
‘Sandwich, anyone?’ I said, through a mouthful, but no one else seemed hungry. I was wondering what to do with the surplus when Imogen Gaines descended on me, one hand raised in the air. Realising in the nick of time that she intended not a recriminatory slap, but a celebratory high-five, I jettisoned my sandwiches and met her halfway.
‘Yay to foraging!’ she said. ‘That was so fun. Wasn’t that fun?’
‘Yes… great,’ I said, rubbing my smarting palm.
‘And your super husband has invited me and Douglas to be your guests!’
‘Terrific.’
‘It’s crazy really to have a whole living larder out there and not take advantage of it, isn’t it?’
‘Mad,’ I said.
There was an awkward silence.
‘I love your…’ she gestured towards my jumpsuit with the back of her hand.
‘Thanks.’
I suppose it might have looked a bit rude, my turning my back on her, but Ray looked like leaving the group and I needed to catch up with him.
‘You’re a dark horse!’ I said, a little breathlessly, following him up the steps to the terrace. ‘Great band you’ve got there. I had no idea.’
‘Oh, yeah, thanks,’ he said. He seemed wary of me, and who could blame him. ‘Having fun?’ he added.
‘Fun might be a bit strong…’ I had rolled my eyes, before I realized how mean-spirited my attitude must seem.
‘Well… I was just going to top up my…’ He jerked his head towards the beer tent and started edging away from me and I saw that I had blown any chance of friendship with him. I was the uptight snobbish Londoner, the helicopter parent, the crazy lady. Come back, I wanted to say. Never mind Ethan. Tell me about you, your marriage – how you and Min, with love to burn, can be childless, whilst Nick and I, with two strapping boys between us, have…
But he had gone and I was left stranded on the terrace. Below me on the lawn I could see Nick giving Gabe a matey slap on the shoulder, Imogen and Melissa enjoying a joke, Cath and Min helping themselves to scones. The sky was turning periwinkle blue. Cardigans and cigarettes were coming out. Gestures were becoming more expansive, laughter more raucous, strappy sandals lay abandoned on the grass.
‘Karen!’
‘Yoo hoo!’
‘We’re going back in!’
I snapped out of my reverie and looked down to see Min, Cath and Melissa on the lawn below me waving their arms like sirens.
23
My pot was the second to last item in the catalogue, sandwiched between a weekend course in Discovering Ayurveda and a pre-owned dressage saddle. It would have been nice to have got it out of the way earlier so I could relax, but I could see what Douglas’s thinking had been. Get everyone drunk, then load the back end of the auction with a combination of big-ticket items and white elephants. I wasn’t sure into which of these two categories my donation fell, but as long as somebody bid for it I no longer cared. Even now, a dusty-looking bottle of red wine was going up in increments of fifty pounds and had just surpassed the amount I’d paid for my 2009 Renault Clio.
‘Serious money’s stuck around, anyway…’ Nick whispered, nodding towards a table of scruffy-looking eccentrics who were braying ever more loudly as the evening went on.
‘Just as well,’ I murmured back, ‘I can’t see normal people affording this stuff.’
‘Going once, going twice, sold to the gentleman in the fetching red braces, thank you, sir, and don’t drink it all at once.’
The atmosphere inside the marquee had changed since the refreshment break. Very young children had been taken home to bed, and some of the older folk too had wearied of the proceedings. A younger crowd had dropped in, some on a whim, having picked up the spare catalogues that were lying around in The Fleece; others, I suspected, who just wanted to see how the other half lived. The noise level was higher, the landlord’s patter more liberally scattered with double entendres, the vibe generally more lairy.
For me, the drink was starting to wear off. I was beginning to feel remarkably clear-eyed; detached almost. Between lots, I watched Cath chatting with Ray and Min, her accent growing stronger, her conversation more meandering with every slug of wine she took. I watched Gabe and Nick compete instinctively and unwittingly for the attention of Melissa, who, sitting between them, turned her face sunflower-like toward whoever shone the brightest. And every so often, when Luca’s forlorn stares became too much for me, I stared back at him, and he affected a sudden fascination with the roof of the tent, or the auction catalogue, or his fingernails.
Caught up in the drama of a bidding war for a sourdough starter kit, I don’t think any of us noticed the latest group of newcomers shoulder their way into the back of the tent. I heard one of the Gaineses’ Labradors snarl and the other one bark, but Douglas shushed them and it was on to lot number forty-three, a bespoke hat donated by Anastasia Baines-Cass, whose creations, the landlord would have us know, had graced the cover of Vogue. One of the newcomers gave a satirical wolf-whistle and turning round half amused, half indignant, to see who was responsible, I caught my breath. There were five or six of them – louts, you would have to say. Not because of the way they looked – they were no scruffier than many of the other youths in attendance – a knitted beanie here, a lobe-stretcher there. No, it was their swagger, the deliberate air of menace they projected. As if they had come to take stock, to see what gave, to decide on a whim whether to let the event pass off without incident, or if they’d a mind to stir things up a bit. Two of them in particular were familiar to me and of these I didn’t know whose presence dismayed me most. One looked a little different from the way he had the last time I’d seen him. His head, then fully shaven, now had a Travis Bickle-style Mohawk stripe down the middle. He was not wearing the aviator sunglasses he had worn when he had driven his van at us, but even if I hadn’t recognized his air of jittery grievance, I should have known him by his neck tattoo. The other one was my son.
‘What…?’ Nick said, noticing the look on my face as I turned back to face the front of the room but there was no time to explain because suddenly all eyes were on me.
‘There she is, give us a wave Karen,’ the landlord was saying and I realized that he had been introducing my lot.
‘And it can be anything they like, can it? A fruit bowl, a nice vase?’
I was trembling. My mouth seemed to slice sideways as I spoke, as if I’d been injected with Novocaine.
‘Yes,’ I stammered, ‘whatever anybody wants.’
‘There you go, ladies and gents, what
ever you want, from our local ceramic artiste. Who wants to start the bidding?’
‘A blow job,’ shouted one of the newcomers.
Nick started out of his seat, but I tugged him back down.
‘All right, that’ll do,’ the landlord said, his tone betraying just enough anxiety to undermine any authority he’d hoped to assert. ‘This is a charity function. If you want to bid on this lady’s pot, by all means do, otherwise you’d better make yourselves scarce.’
‘We’re after something a bit stronger than pot, mate.’
This witticism was met with sniggers from the newcomers, sucked teeth and partially turned heads among the wider room. Women gathered cardis and bags towards them; men sat up straighter in their chairs and tightened their fists round their glasses.
‘Fifty pounds!’ Cath’s voice rang out, deep and Glaswegian and fearless.
For a moment there was silence, and then another voice – Luca’s – called, ‘Seventy.’
The landlord resumed his habitual pose, like a conductor on a podium and the room was wrested back to something like normality.
‘One hundred pounds,’ called Douglas Gaines.
‘A hundred and twenty!’
‘One fifty!’
‘A hundred and seventy-five!’
All over the room, different voices pitched in. Barely any of them, I was sure, really wanting a bespoke fruit bowl, all of them keen to play their part in this symbolic reassertion of civilization over mob rule. The asking price had reached a ludicrous eight hundred and seventy pounds, before people gradually came to their senses and dropped out of the bidding, leaving the floor to the two genuine enthusiasts.
‘Nine ’undred pound,’ Luca said recklessly.
‘Nine fifty!’ said Cath.
‘Nine ’undred seventy-five’
‘A thousand pounds!’ Cath banged the table decisively. For a moment there was silence. Luca seemed to have lost his nerve. He darted a doubtful glance at Melissa, who shrugged in reply but as he opened his mouth to raise the bid, a volley of ear-splitting barks drowned him out. The dog must have been with them all along – kept on a tight leash, I suppose, and trained to respond to the flicker of its master’s eyebrow, in the way such creatures are by men who think it’s clever to assert their power by the abuse of a dumb animal. It was off the leash now, all right, and launching itself toward the front of the marquee with a skitter of claws and a low-pitched snarling. A volley of ear-piercing barks briefly drowned out the cries of startled observers, who stood up and surged forward so we at the back could no longer see.
The Move Page 20