Domina

by L. S. Hilton

  The curved door of the booth swung shut and a light hummed and buzzed in the ceiling – some sort of X-ray scanner? I was released and the driver solemnly put my bags through the same process before carrying them to a lift in the opposite wall. The three of us rode up in silence, until the doors opened on a view that made me giggle with joy.

  We stood at the top of a shallow slope, with a gravelled sweep stretching down to Yermolov’s villa, framed in pine and poplar, with the sea beyond. The house was pale pink, nineteenth century, overblown and frivolous as a wedding gâteau, a house for a Colette courtesan, for jasmine-scented trysts and borrowed beds, the kind of house that would once have been staked on the turn of a card at the Monte Carlo casino. After the slightly sinister security proceedings below, its absurd prettiness wafted a delicate, exquisite scent of a vanished fin de siècle dream world. As we made our way to the pale lime double doors, set with a huge brass lion’s head, concealed spigots beneath the gravel began to play over the lawns on either side, so that we passed through a fountain of rainbows. I half expected to hear a waltz. Sometimes vulgarity can be so delightful.

  A suitably ponderous butler showed Miss Teerlinc to her room on the first floor. More double doors opened into a small octagonal antechamber lined with rosewood boiseries, a balcony on one side and the bedroom on the other. But I barely noticed the surroundings as a burst of heavy lily-scented air tumbled towards me and it was all I could do to mutter my thanks before I sank down on a bed which could have been in another room, long ago, a room where I had waited next to a swollen body suddenly vulnerable in death. Now I waited again for my blood to stop its whistling and churning in my ears.

  Maybe I’m shallow that way, but I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about the past. Contingency and reaction are what I understand. Yet that same thick reek had pervaded the room at the Hôtel du Cap where I had found James’s corpse; I had not thought of that place for so long, yet the huge arrangement of parchment-petalled calla lilies made me believe, for a moment, that I had never really left it. Was I really still mired there, trapped forever with my shaking hands in a dead man’s wallet?

  I noticed a familiar heavy cream envelope next to the vase on the nightstand. I opened it with my teeth and one hand, while the other began methodically breaking the flower heads from their stems, unfastening the chain to that moment with every snap. The stamens released orange dust clouds, which stained my cuffs as I read:

  Miss Teerlinc,

  I hope that your journey was pleasant and that you are comfortable. Please do not hesitate to ask should there be anything you require. You will be shown the collection when you are ready, and afterwards I look forward to your company at dinner. My thanks for your visit.

  Yours faithfully,

  P. Yermolov

  My eyes wandered over the page several times, before the last lily fell to the floor. That woke me up. My pretty silk Chloe blouse was irreparable. ‘Fuck, Judith,’ I said aloud. ‘Sort it out.’ But then I stopped myself. There was a mess on the rug, but this was my new world. Someone would take care of it. I was no longer the girl who had struggled for control in that airless room. I was rich, I was independent, I was free, and I was here. On my own terms, as a professional. Wasn’t I living proof that if you just believe in yourself and follow your dream you can be anything you want? The dead proofs it was perhaps best not to dwell on. I was all about the power of now, me. No use for history, and Proust and his aunt’s linden-blossom tea could screw themselves. I found the bathroom and ran cold water on my wrists, busied myself showering and changing, cleaned my face and pinned back my hair sternly. I had got this far, and it was going to take more than a remembered perfume to throw me off. Time to go to work.

  *

  By the time the grunt accompanied me through the villa’s grounds to the stark modern cube where Yermolov housed his art, I was feeling quite like myself. I had chosen a black Max Mara shift with stout Marni clogs – hideous, but, I thought, suitably artsy against the plain silk. I had a measuring tape and a record of dimensions in my briefcase, along with a flashlight and magnifying loupe – it’s surprising how many fakes have been passed off because experts neglect the basics. I also had an old-school Polaroid, since I didn’t imagine I would be allowed to use my phone to take pictures. I was handed over to a disapproving Frenchwoman in a skirt suit similar to those worn by Yermolov’s plane staff. This was Madame Poulhazan, the assistant with whom I had been dealing. Her tone was efficient and civil, but the long appraisal she gave both my legs and my briefcase made it plain that she hated having to admit me. Was I too young, or just insufficiently awed? Tinted glass doors slid open once she had gone through a complex procedure of iris recognition and security codes, then we stepped down into a crepuscular lobby smelling of ozone and varnish.

  ‘Alors, mademoiselle. This is a non-disclosure agreement. You will sign here, and here, and here, please.’

  The document was three pages, in English, so detailed that I had to sign away not only my right to discuss or communicate in any form whatsoever the contents of the collection, but practically promise to erase them from my memory. Still, I scribbled Elisabeth’s signature. Madame then scanned me all over with an illuminated device that looked like a luxury vibrator, poked dubiously among my papers and triumphantly ejected the Polaroid.

  ‘This is not permitted.’

  ‘I’ll need it for the assessment.’

  ‘You don’t trust your eyes?’ she sneered.

  I could have said it was Yermolov’s I had no faith in, but that wouldn’t have helped, so I suggested politely that she telephone to the house for permission, and had the pleasure of her disgust when it was granted. Yet another pause while she entered a lengthy code for the final lock, and we were in.

  The floor was malachite, but the sound of my clumpy heels on its glassy surface couldn’t have given me more pleasure had it been beaten emerald. If I had been disarmed by the clutch of anxiety evoked by the scent of lilies in my bedroom, now I recalled the miles I had trudged down the endless corridors of the House, the months of tedious errands, crossing and re-crossing London’s pavements, a tapestried path that led back to the first time I had really seen a painting, in the National Gallery, and which had carried me here, professional, independent, respected even. It’s rare to know, in a given moment, that you have exactly what you wanted, and for a few seconds I felt weightless, lifted on a coil of time, effortlessly present in my own accomplishment. Not bad, Judith. Not bad at all. I opened my eyes to see Madame staring at me enquiringly. I wouldn’t give her the pleasure of seeing that I was impressed, but though I had seen quite a few extraordinary spaces, I had never seen anything like Yermolov’s.

  The room was long and high, as softly lit as though by candles. Two Breuer sofas in toothpaste-white suede stood back to back in the centre, with a few other seats – harp-back Regency chairs in glowing beech, a Louis XIV bergère in grey silks grouped about them – a conversation piece waiting for characters. Without taking another step, I recognised the Pollock and the Matisse – the Maison à Tahiti which had caused a sensation in New York when an anonymous buyer had apparently walked in off the street and bid nearly forty million dollars for it five years previously – three Picassos, a Rembrandt, two Breughels, a Cézanne, a Titian – fuck, a Titian; who actually owns a Titian? – Pontormo’s Young Gentleman in a Red Cap. It was dizzying. I had to repress the urge to run between the pictures placing my hands above their luminous surfaces to absorb the thrill of them. The left wall was Russian artists, a swirling Vrubel dragon, a Grigoriev, a Repin, merging into a Poussin, then a series of Klimt landscapes.

  ‘And here, the drawings.’ Madame was pointing a remote at a panel below the Klimts. A hatch slid open with the gentlest whirr, and a steel container like a giant old-fashioned CD rack emerged. As she manipulated the controls, they flipped past, a Ferris wheel of charcoals and aquaforte, every one of them a major piece in its own right.

  My elation turned as b
itter as a caviar martini. I’d expected the responsibility to be daunting, even been excited by the challenge of it, but this was impossible. There was just too much, and the too much was too good. I needed a team of assistants, ladders, gloves, Christ knew what equipment. I hardly dared to touch these things, let alone attempt to value them. What was Yermolov playing at? Why would a man who owned a collection like this even consider using a solitary, unknown gallerist to value works whose beauty abruptly felt like a taunt?

  Madame had seated herself primly on one of the sofas, her lipsticked mouth twisted in a tight, expectant little smile. Show no fear.

  ‘I understood that there were some Renaissance works?’ was the best defiance I could manage.

  ‘Naturally. This way.’

  I followed her along the gallery, my head drooping now she couldn’t see it. The end wall was blank, which somehow only emphasised the treasures leading up to it. Madame set her palm against another concealed panel and a tiny door slid open, as though we were stepping into a medieval monk’s cell. Inside, I didn’t bother to conceal my astonishment. The tiny room was a copy of the famous studiolo of the Duke of Urbino, entirely panelled in intricate wood intarsia, the trompe l’oeil images interspersed with the classical philosophers the Renaissance revered. My eyes bounced over its swirl and gleam. And then, so close I could have reached them both with a single stretch of my arms, two medallion settings, two luminous enamelled faces, two touchably moulded chins beneath inquiring grey eyes, two blond heads veiled in gauze so delicate it seemed to float towards my astonished face. The Annunciation and the Madonna and Child. They were here. The paintings I had studied but never seen, that hardly anyone living had ever seen. The Jameson Botticellis. Now I began to see the point of Yermolov’s paperwork.

  ‘Are those the Jameson Botticellis? The real ones?’ I couldn’t keep the awe from my voice.

  ‘Quite so,’ Madame responded. She was warming up a bit; perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered with the blasé routine. Only a fool could fail to be dumbstruck. It was as much as I could do to remain standing. The third picture, facing us, was covered with a heavy green velvet curtain. Gingerly I tugged it aside.

  ‘Oh.’

  I had named my gallery for Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter I had fallen in love with when I was in my teens. Artemisia had painted her way over prejudice and poverty, even over rape, had chosen boldness, had refused to submit to a world which had defiled and dismissed her. In 1598, when Artemisia Gentileschi was still a little girl, her father and teacher Orazio spent many wild nights in the company of his friend, a northern Italian painter named Michelangelo Caravaggio. They were good times for bad boys in Rome. Caravaggio and his friends peacocked about like rackety rock stars, picking fights, running whores, swaggering sword-side through the taverns of the Roman underworld high on wine and white lead. Caravaggio, named for the armed archangel, made a picture that year of remorseless virtuosity, shattering pagan luminosity. It was a gift from his patron, Cardinal del Monte, to Ferdinando de’ Medici of Florence, a self-portrait as the Gorgon Medusa. The painting is a convex poplar-wood shield, a rendering of the bronze weapon Perseus used to reflect the Gorgon’s petrifying glare while he killed her. To look directly into the enchantress’s eyes would have turned Ovid’s hero to stone. Caravaggio gave the monster his own face, Medusa’s last agonised awakening as her sleeping head was struck from her body by Perseus’s sword. But Caravaggio intuited somehow that space curves as sinuously as the mink bristles of a paintbrush, it cannot stand still, and that time speeds or slows according to its position within gravity. On the Medusa shield, the concave shadows of the writhing, snake-crowned head belie the convexity of the surface. This is where the two planes intersect, where, momentarily, time falters. At the coincidence of our eyes with the Medusa’s, Caravaggio freezes the universe to capture the moment of death, screaming his defiance of the laws of art. We are safe; we can look away and look again at this work which transcends a painter’s depiction to become, in a superlatively arrogant display of bravura, the thing which is painted. This is the Lombard nobody in his tattered cast-off finery proving he could play God on a piece of wood. Hold this, painter tells patron, and you stop time.

  ‘Oh.’

  Even the copy was breathtaking. If I hadn’t seen the real thing in the Uffizi, I would have believed I was looking at the genuine Caravaggio. Could Yermolov . . . ? No, surely –

  ‘It is a copy of course,’ Madame added helpfully, before I fell any further down the rabbit hole. ‘Mr Yermolov wanted a third piece for the room.’

  ‘It’s still wonderful.’

  ‘For the present.’

  I covered the picture, opened the curtain again, Medusa’s face snatched at my heart. I turned slowly and looked back into the gallery. The little room was the core of a flame. Beyond it, the colours of the paintings danced and shone.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said sincerely. ‘Thank you for showing me this.’

  *

  It was hard to wrench myself away from those pictures, yet I was more curious than ever to meet Yermolov. What kind of will did it take to acquire such a collection? To own the Jameson Botticellis and keep them hidden? Moreover, why had he really asked me here? When I had met Dr Kazbich we’d both known the private valuation wasn’t kosher. It happens in the art world all the time – even places like the House produce dubious valuations, often for insurance or tax, but as far as Yermolov knew I had no such background. I presumed Kazbich had been led to my gallery by the Belgrade connection – his business was there, as were the Xaoc Collective. Perhaps Yermolov had demanded someone in a hurry and I’d just been lucky. The hope of seeing the Botticellis – not to mention the money – had been enough to persuade me, even if I hadn’t been selected for the most respectable reasons. Yet, after seeing the quality of his collection, that felt much less plausible. Somehow I believed that a person who loved art the way Yermolov clearly did would go to the finest in the business, as his pictures merited.

  *

  The butler told me that Mr Yermolov was expecting me for drinks on the terrace at eight, but I changed hastily and was down by a quarter to, hoping to catch him selling a nuclear submarine perhaps. In fact, my host was doing nothing more thrilling than reading The Economist. Yermolov was tall, narrow-shouldered but strong-looking, with fair hair and colourless northern eyes. He was dressed in that nondescript manner that only very rich men can afford to affect: plain shirt and navy chinos, a cheap digital watch. Yermolov rose to greet me with an odd look – questioning, slightly amused, as though we were already familiar. While he pulled out my chair and offered me a glass of champagne, I noticed that there was something sedate and controlled about his movements; a graceful calm which might have been charming, were it not for his hands. Long and delicate, they spidered around the stem of his glass, picked at the seams of his linen napkin, twitched the little dishes of olives and cornichons into spiral formations. Combined with the military echo of his blond buzz cut, the hands unnerved me; they conjured airless interrogation rooms, yellowed files twitched from battered cabinets, pencils poised to strike out a life in Siberia between sips of tepid bitter coffee. Their restless energy belied his physical poise, something greedy in their endless clutching.

  ‘Welcome, Miss Teerlinc. I’m so glad you could take some time away from the cut and thrust of the art world.’ He smiled at his own attempt to be funny. I gave my best version of a silvery laugh.

  ‘I’m delighted to be here.’

  Yermolov seemed to be appraising me quietly as we drank the aperitif, making small talk about my journey and the view. Later we moved to a summerhouse overlooking the water for dinner. The servants came and went with ceviche of sea bass, then langouste baked in filo pastry, while the waves fluttered politely against the shore three hundred feet below. Candles flickered along the path towards the terrace, over Yermolov’s right shoulder I could follow their glow to the shore, down a staircase carved out of the sheer face of the rock. Yermolov smok
ed, which was jolly, his conversation was effortfully courteous and the Chassagne-Montrachet was excellent, but I felt somehow uneasy. I couldn’t square that feeling with my knowledge that here was the man who had acquired that wunderkammer of beauty, humming in its pale box just down the hill.

  I stuck to form for the first courses, business only once the plates are cleared, so we discussed the best seasons to visit Venice and the Caribbean, the renovation of the French house, which he had owned for five years, the new architecture of Moscow, on which I’d read an article before I flew down. Groups of citizen vigilantes were now patrolling the city centre at night, hoping to catch arsonists who were destroying old buildings to make way for developments. And then we talked of Lermontov, since as he was from the Caucasus he loved Lermontov, and he quoted a long passage from The Demon, in that disarming way that Russians can, and I began to rather like him. The hands twirled and played as we were served a pudding course of tiny violet crèmes brûlées, which neither of us touched, and I stayed silent then, waiting for his questions.

  ‘So – I believe you spent time in New York before moving to Venice. Or was it Paris?’

  I froze. Elisabeth Teerlinc had never set foot in Paris.

  ‘I’m from Switzerland actually.’

  ‘Forgive me. My mistake.’

  I was suddenly conscious of how isolated we were, far from the house, far from anything. I hadn’t told anybody where I was because – well, there wasn’t anyone to tell. Nothing to be anxious about, he’s a busy man. You’re basically staff. Why shouldn’t he make a mistake? I lifted my wine glass.

  ‘Do you feel you have had some time to begin considering my collection?’

  ‘It was a privilege to see it, yes.’

  ‘And you think you can evaluate it?’

  I put down my own glass.

  ‘Mr Yermolov, I should be honest. I’m extremely flattered that you have asked me to come here, and I’m very grateful for your hospitality, but a collection like yours – I wouldn’t really trust myself to value it. I think it would be better if you were to commission one of the major houses in London or New York.’