“The sale begins at ten o’clock. Will you be with us?”
“I think not,” he said. “It wouldn’t give me any pleasure to see the faces of the stupid people who want to let such filth into their lives. This is just a means to an end. I’m only interested in the good works I will be able to do with the proceeds.”
“I understand.”
“Though, I am in London. I have taken a suite at Claridge’s, and I would appreciate it if you could come and see me to talk through the results when you have a moment.”
“Of course,” said Carrie. “I hope we’ll be able to crack open the champagne.”
“Not for me,” said Randon. “Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry.” Carrie berated herself for having forgotten, yet again, that the head of one of the world’s finest champagne houses was now a teetotaler. “Monsieur Randon, I was planning to call you first thing in the morning. I wanted to talk to you about one of the lots.”
“Yes,” said Randon. “Go on.”
“It’s the inro. The Japanese ivory box with the carvings of the man and woman on the lid. The one you said you couldn’t open.”
“Ah yes. The box I bought in 1973.”
“That’s it. Well, I’ve got some news for you. I was making a final inspection of the lots earlier this evening, and when I picked the inro up, I heard something rattle inside. Believe it or not, I actually managed to get it open. I wanted to be sure that it didn’t contain some rare jewel, and …”
“What did it contain?” Randon asked.
“Not much of interest. At least, not to me as an auctioneer. But perhaps for you … It contained some pieces of jewelry. Inexpensive stuff. The kind you can get on any high street. I’d say it was from the 1970s or 1980s. It also contained three locks of hair, which must have cushioned the jewelry. Hence we didn’t realize there was anything inside until now. I assumed that you wouldn’t want me to sell the inro with these items still in there, so I removed them. I’ve got them right here on my desk. Would you like them, or shall I dispose of them myself?”
There was a long pause.
“They’re really very cheap,” Carrie said to fill the silence, and immediately wished she hadn’t. Sentimental value, she knew, was often immeasurably great.
“I’d like you to send the items over to me at my hotel,” said Randon at last.
“Okay. I’ll do that at once.”
Carrie wanted to ask more. She wanted to ask if Randon had any idea whatsoever why the inro was stuffed with such crap. But he offered nothing, and she got no sense of whether he recalled having put those things in the box—as he must surely have done. Who else could have gained access to the collection?
“Is there anything more?” asked Randon.
“No,” said Carrie. “Everything else is ready for the sale. We’re very excited.”
“Good,” said Randon. “Make sure you send those other things over right away.”
Carrie promised she would.
Claridge’s was not far from the Ehrenpreis offices, so Carrie delivered the contents of the inro box to Randon’s hotel by hand, passing the bag to the concierge and insisting on staying until she received confirmation that it had been handed on to Randon himself.
What a strange thing. She couldn’t help thinking about those little mementoes as she sat in the back of her taxi home. Where had Randon come across them? Old girlfriends, Carrie decided. His first, second, and third loves, perhaps. Though the dates were slightly off. How old was Randon? He must be in his midfifties. In which case he would have had his first love affair way before 1985. Surely. Perhaps tomorrow, when she met Randon to discuss the results of the sale, he would throw some light on the matter. If he could.
In the privacy of his suite, Randon opened Carrie’s envelope.
Her news had confused him. Randon’s brain still failed him from time to time, and it took a while for him to remember the inro box. Why it should have had anything inside it that wasn’t from the period when the box was made was a total mystery to him. He hoped that seeing the items would jog his memory. He tipped them out onto the blotter on his desk, eager to know more.
Such a strange little collection. That tacky jewelry. Like nothing any woman he knew would have owned. And hair? Why hair? He picked up the heart-shaped locket and opened it, hoping for a further clue inside, but it was empty. Nothing but a little sliver of clear plastic that was supposed to protect a photograph. Had there ever been a photograph? He put the Claddagh ring on his pinkie finger and turned it this way and that. Had he seen it before? He didn’t recall it. The bracelet equally drew a blank.
He touched one of the three locks of hair. Like Carrie, he found the very idea of it somewhat repellent. Why on earth would he have this? Who did it belong to? Randon toyed with the idea that perhaps it was his own hair. His mother was a sentimental woman who’d liked to save a curl from the heads of each of her children. As a child, Randon had had dark brown hair. His sisters too. But that didn’t explain how Randon would have ended up with their hair in a box.
He stared at the little collection on the blotter for quite some time, willing the memories to come back to him. The doctors had offered no hope for the recovery of some of his memory, but Randon was determined that one day he would be able to remember everything that had happened prior to the earthquake in San Francisco. To that end he filled notebooks with scribbled fragments and spent hours and hours poring over photographs in the hope that it would hurry the process along.
“Come back to me,” he muttered, staring until his eyes started to hurt. Then, without knowing why, he took up one of the locks of hair, held it to his nose, and inhaled deeply. Nothing. Nothing at all. But it must mean something. The action of smelling the hair had been so instinctual that it must have been something he’d done before. Randon was sure now that these things had once been precious to him, but why? He put them back into the envelope. Then Randon put the envelope under his pillow and tried to sleep.
When his dreams at last came, they were far from sweet.
“Let me go. I won’t tell anybody! I swear! I swear!” a woman’s voice called out across the years.
CHAPTER 53
Nat Wilde started the next day in a leisurely fashion. He was very pleased that he’d managed to wangle the afternoon slot for that day’s Randon auctions.
His suit for the sale was already laid out, along with a clean shirt and his lucky tie, frayed but ever faithful.
“Don’t let me down today,” he said as he tied the Hermès bunnies around his neck in a double Windsor.
This sale would go down in history, Nat knew. If not as one of the biggest, then definitely as one of the most amusing. He could hardly wait to get up there with his gavel and set the crowd roaring with laughter as he described the lots.
It was going to be great fun, he was sure.
And it was. Knowing that the occasion was more than likely to end up in the papers, the girls in the department had pulled out all the stops, individualizing in a variety of entertaining ways the formal black suit and white shirt combo they were supposed to wear on auction days.
Sarah Jane arrived at the office wearing an obscenely short skirt with no stockings and a gold ankle chain setting off her leopard-print shoes.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing flats?” Lizzy asked her.
“Why?” asked Sarah Jane. “What’s wrong with these shoes? They’re Louboutins.” She flashed a red sole.
Where to start, thought Lizzy.
“I’m only thinking of your poor back,” was what she said out loud.
Sarah Jane scowled, knowing that in putting on her leopard-print Louboutins, she had blown her chances of ever using backache caused by the Reynolds accident as an excuse for being bone idle again.
However, Lizzy was not to be outdone. Just before the sale was due to begin, Lizzy changed into a skirt that made Sarah Jane’s look positively modest. Lizzy’s skirt was a crotch grazer, as Harry Brown would say. Nat was delighted.
There was nothing he liked more than seeing the girls in the office competing with their hemlines. It made him feel like an old lion, surrounded by a pride full of strong young lionesses, all glossy coated and eminently strokeable. Even Olivia played up to Nat’s fantasy that day, swapping her A-line for something that was tight, if not short. And once they had their porters’ gloves on …
Oh God. Just the thought of those gloves gave Nat a raging hard-on. He’d found them impossibly erotic ever since his first week as a porter at Christie’s, when one of the older girls working there had taken him into the porters’ lift, stopped it between floors, and given him a hand job without taking her gloves off first. Those white gloves never failed to brighten his day, as Lizzy knew only too well.
Unlike Nat, Carrie was dreading her sale. There would be no embellishment in her descriptions.
“Lot number thirty-six. Carved ornamental phallus. Alabaster. Eleven inches. Believed to be from Egypt, 300 B.C. Who will start the bidding at thirty thousand pounds …”
But it was hard to retain any semblance of dignity when the dealers were shouting things like, “You’re holding that cock all wrong, love,” from the back of the room. Sometimes they were no better than the crowd you got at a secondhand car sale, thought Carrie, as she brought down her gavel like a judge to bring order to the room. When the auction was over, she retreated to her office and collapsed into her chair. It had been the toughest auction of her life.
Nat, meanwhile, had a ball. He presented his half of Randon’s collection like a magician performing a well-rehearsed show, relishing every opportunity to make a joke, drawing attention to his lovely assistants as they trotted and twirled across the stage with the smaller lots. Sarah Jane wiggled and pouted so much that Nat was prompted to say, “Hold still, Sarah Jane. The quicker I get this lithograph sold, the sooner you can go to the bathroom.” He made the crowd roar when he informed them that they would have to negotiate James’s and Marcus’s services separately, as the hapless young lads carried on a pair of enormous ceremonial dildos carved out of rosewood.
Lizzy watched from the wings. This was Nat at his very best. He made the whole process a pleasure. If anyone in the room had a spare tenner, Nat would have it added to their bid in no time, and yet everyone went home happy, feeling that they had paid a fair price, or at least enjoyed a colorful performance if they lost out.
As Nat sold, Lizzy annotated the lots in her copy of the catalog, keeping a running total on the calculator on her phone. She knew exactly what Ehrenpreis had managed to raise that morning. It was an impressive number to have to beat. By the halfway point, Lizzy was starting to be cautiously confident that victory would be theirs.
The very last item was the original Marquis de Sade manuscript. Half the room wanted to bid for that scrappy collection of papers. Nat brought the hammer down at one and a half million pounds.
“Wa-hey!” Knowing that they had busted the Ehrenpreis figure, Sarah Jane jumped up in the air with glee. She landed a little awkwardly, twisting her ankle badly enough to bring tears to her eyes.
“You should stick to flats,” said Lizzy, but inside she was jumping too.
The news that the Ludbrook’s sale had earned so much more than her own was with Carrie seconds after it reached Nat. Jessica had been at the back of the Ludbrook’s auction room, keeping her own running total.
“Shit.”
Carrie stared at the numbers. “He got how much for that?”
Jessica tried to be positive. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that Randon will let Ludbrook’s have the rest of his collection. I’m sure that when you meet with him you’ll be able to explain the difference between the sales. There’s no way he can believe that he assigned the two houses goods of exactly equal value.”
Carrie shrugged.
“If I were you, I would tell him that he’s acting like a jerk. I mean, splitting the collection and putting us into direct competition with Ludbrook’s was a jerkish move in the first place. We’re professionals. This is not an episode of The Apprentice!”
“I know. It’s stupid. But you can bet that if we had won, I would absolutely be holding Randon to his word. As Nat Wilde will. I took the challenge. We have to stick to the rules.”
“It’s so unfair!” Jessica cried out.
It was unfair. Not least because, in the end, Carrie had not had exactly half of Randon’s collection to sell. At the very last minute, his assistant had called and informed Carrie that Randon no longer wished to sell the Japanese inro. It was to be withdrawn from the sale and returned to him at the hotel. Carrie had to do as she was instructed. It was deeply frustrating. She had talked to several buyers that week who’d been interested in purchasing the piece. Had the two heaviest hitters gone head to head over the inro in the auction room, who knows what it might have fetched. Enough to put her way ahead of Nat Wilde, she was sure. Carrie hoped that Randon would take that into consideration when looking at the results.
But it got worse. In the press reports of the sales, Carrie found herself described as a “dominatrix.” She was not happy about that at all.
When she passed Nat in the lobby at Claridge’s, he congratulated her on the photograph that had already hit the Evening Standard website.
“Great shoes. You could always find work in a Mayfair dungeon,” he suggested.
“Shut it, Wilde.”
Nat mimed a zip across his lips.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t stay here and torment you. Got some celebrating to do with my team. Do drop in and join us if you like.”
“Fuck you,” Carrie mouthed.
When she was finally admitted to his suite, Randon shook Carrie by the hand. “You did a wonderful job, and I am very grateful. I hope I didn’t cause you too much inconvenience by withdrawing the inro at the last moment.”
“Of course not,” Carrie lied. What else could she say? Her eyes traveled to the other side of the room. She had noticed the inro sitting on the desk the moment she’d walked into the room. Randon followed her eyes toward it.
“I’m afraid I weakened,” he said. “That inro doesn’t just represent the beginning of my erotic collection. It’s the first piece I bought to celebrate my success in business. The sentimental reasons for keeping it are myriad.”
Carrie nodded. Was he going to explain the items inside the box now?
He didn’t. Instead he made it clear that the audience was drawing to a close.
Carrie took a taxi home and ordered takeout.
With Carrie gone, Randon went to his desk. He had emails to read from his lawyers and the real estate agent who had found him several suitable properties to consider for his retreat. Randon looked at the details with the same care he would once have applied to a search for a new bachelor pad, but the criteria were different now. He needed privacy. Remoteness. He no longer needed to be within ten minutes of Le Club 55 in Saint-Tropez, or even within half an hour of an airport. In fact, he decided, the harder it was to get to his new retreat, the better. A difficult journey to his utopia would help the supplicants arriving there truly appreciate what they were there to learn. The road to his retreat should be like Christ’s road to Calvary, beset with difficulties but with glory at the end of it.
It was to be an early night. At seven o’clock exactly, Randon turned out the light. In the darkness, his fingers played with the rosary, counting off beads and prayers.
It wasn’t long before the woman was back. This time more clearly than ever. He could see that she was younger than he had thought. Only just out of her teens. And she was wearing clothes from the eighties. She was walking across a field, toward the river. She looked back toward him several times, beckoning him to follow. Getting closer at last, he saw the heart on the chain around her neck.
CHAPTER 54
Over at Ludbrook’s, the atmosphere was altogether more exuberant. Spirits were always high after a good sale, but that afternoon had been incredible. Nat had played the crowd like a violin. Not a lot lef
t unsold, and every single one had gone for more than the high estimate. Seconds after the last patron left, the champagne corks and self-congratulation started flying.
Lizzy still had work to do. A small dispute was taking place at the front desk between two dealers who both claimed they had made the highest bid on a small bronze penis. It would be easy enough to resolve. Lizzy sat down with the video recording of that day’s auction and reeled through the items until she found the sequence of Nat selling the disputed item. The two dealers watched the film with her and the louder of the two had to admit that he’d been mistaken. His rival got “the dick,” as he called it.
Lizzy waved them away and happily turned off her laptop for the night. Now she could join the party. Her team was in one of the boardrooms upstairs, toasting their own success. Nat had returned from his post-sale meeting with Randon, and so the party could begin in earnest. Lizzy bounded up the grand central stairway two at a time, eager to be with them. She couldn’t bear to wait for the passenger lift, which was notoriously erratic. Earlier that week it had been out of action for two whole days, after an episode in which a dowager duchess had been treated to a yo-yo ride, ricocheting between the ground and fifth floors seven times before someone noticed what was happening and pressed the stop button. Lizzy definitely didn’t want to be stuck in the lift that night. She wanted to be with her all-conquering hero. Her Nat.
“Where’s Nat Wilde?”
James Ludbrook, the great-great-grandson of Ludbrook’s founder, and father of its current managing director, John, was eager to pay his respects to his star auctioneer so that he could leave the party and get home to bed. James was almost eighty-seven, after all.
It suddenly struck the assembled guests that none of them had seen Nat for a while.
“Maybe he went home,” suggested Olivia.
“What?” said Harry Brown. “After tonight’s performance? No way. He never misses an opportunity to hear praises sung to him.”
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