Domina

by L. S. Hilton

  If he was displeased he didn’t show it, except perhaps that the quavering hands knotted themselves together and were still.

  ‘You consider yourself . . . unqualified? But why? Your gallery seems successful.’

  As I began to answer him my eyes were suddenly distracted by a movement on the cliff path below. A flash of blonde hair caught in the candlelight, the sheen of a woman’s bare shoulder. Yermolov did not turn his head, but spoke sharply in Russian from the side of his mouth and I couldn’t help jumping as a bodyguard ghosted from behind one of the summerhouse columns and began to descend the steps. I’d had no idea that he was there and I didn’t know if that made me frightened or relieved.

  ‘Forgive me. We are sometimes troubled by trespassers here.’

  ‘It’s such an irresistible spot.’

  I didn’t believe him. The place had better security than 10 Downing Street. What trespasser could have got so close?

  ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Of course. You are very kind, but I would hardly describe the gallery as especially successful – yet.’ I paused, fiddled with my spoon, fudged. ‘Quite simply, I only . . . took over . . . at Gentileschi about a year ago. And we deal mostly in contemporary work.’

  ‘I had understood you were also knowledgeable about Old Masters.’ He caught my eye inquisitively.

  What did he mean? Nothing. Stop being paranoid.

  ‘I’m trained, but by no means an authority. The breadth and value of your pieces is exceptional, as you know. I wouldn’t feel confident in attributing an accurate market value to them.’

  ‘But you would consider doing so nonetheless?’

  I did consider. Now I knew what was there, I could go back through the sales reports for the past few years, consult Artprice, compare projections for similar works, the kind of thing I had done all the time back at the House. Daunting, but not impossible.

  ‘If you are troubled about authentication, the provenances are all impeccable. It is only the valuation that I require.’

  ‘I would –’

  There were voices nearby, speaking Russian, a woman and the bodyguard. I heard her hiss, ‘I want to speak to him,’ and then the man’s deeper voice, the tone soothing, something I didn’t understand and then the word ‘impossible’.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Teerlinc.’

  Yermolov rose unhurriedly and disappeared into the purple night. He didn’t raise his voice, but I heard him speak clearly.

  ‘Get rid of her. I’ll deal with it in the morning.’

  He didn’t know I could speak a little Russian, but then again he hadn’t asked. I wondered if the night-time stroller even realised how dangerous her walk could have been, and not because of the gradient of the cliff. The fact that I hadn’t yet seen a Kalashnikov didn’t mean they weren’t there, and after seeing the gallery I could understand why they might need to be. There was something in the icy calmness of Yermolov’s voice that suggested he wouldn’t hesitate to use one personally.

  ‘Again, forgive me.’ The hands picked up his napkin, hovered, placed it back down.

  I realised that what made Yermolov scary was his sheer lack of scariness. He didn’t need to be intimidating. The calm was not a disguise for ruthlessness, simply a confirmation of it. I was annoyed at how sexy that suddenly made him.

  ‘Where were we?’ he asked.

  I was sure that, given time, I could do a fair job. Yet something about the quality of the pictures made me resist. They deserved the best, and loath as I was to admit it to myself, the best was not me, not yet.

  ‘Mr Yermolov, may I ask why you chose me for the valuation?’

  ‘Dr Kazbich suggested you. He buys for me.’ He had become impatient at the slightest hint that I was wasting his time.

  ‘Mr Yermolov, you can be assured of my discretion. And I am honoured to have seen your works. But I simply don’t believe I am the right person for the job. It would need a team of experts, assistants . . .’ I trailed off. In just a few words, I had bored him. As I expected, he made a few more desultory remarks, then excused himself, explaining he had calls to take. I was of no use, therefore of no further interest.

  The next morning Yermolov did not even trouble to say goodbye. I never imagined I would see him again, nor did I have any idea how much I would come to wish that had been the case.

  4

  Like most of the stupider things I have done, Ibiza was my own decision. I hadn’t paid much attention to Tage Stahl at the view in August, but he’d persisted in calling and messaging. It turned out he was Danish, something to do with ships. Then he threw a house party on his private island off Ibiza’s north coast; I asked him for the hell of it if he would send the plane, and he said of course, so then accepting felt like a point of style.

  After my trip to meet Yermolov, La Serenissima was frankly not feeling all that serene. I didn’t regret my decision – indeed my choice not to value the collection felt like a form of loyalty to my true self, whoever she was. I’d kept my faith with the paintings by refusing to become involved in whatever Yermolov was planning. But the way I’d handled it rankled. I hadn’t felt so awkward and wrong-footed since my days at the House. A smart party was just what Elisabeth Teerlinc needed to restore her plumage. Besides, I was irritated with my flat. Usually just being there among my beautiful things calmed me, but I seemed to be misplacing stuff – cups and glasses cluttered up my customarily immaculate kitchen and I’d apparently bought a bar of chocolate by mistake. I found it in the cupboard next to the spices. Ninety-eight per cent cocoa, with almond flakes. Weird. I hated almonds even more than I hated dark chocolate.

  *

  I arrived on Ibiza mid-afternoon. A nippy dark van zoomed me across the tarmac to the concourse; from the state of the crowd in the airport it didn’t seem to be the happiest time of day. Homeless huddles of sleeping revellers twitched beside shrink-wrapped wheelie cases, a group of girls whose flowered face paint had smudged to bruises quarrelled feebly at the easyJet counter, two implacable cleaners in hairnets and turquoise overalls pushed wide mops through a spreading pool of apricot-coloured vomit. David Guetta, a malevolently Ray-Banned dictator, stared down from everywhere. I found Stahl’s driver, who loaded me into an open black Jeep which wheezed and rumbled through exhaust fumes and chirruping cicadas, past the turn-off for the white citadel above the port, past pizzerias and yoga studios and hoarding after hoarding promising DJ Nirvana, until the motorway narrowed and we began to climb through soft green hills with low white fincas on their brims. It was my first time on the famous island, and I could see that it really must have been lovely, once.

  I began to get the point of Ibiza even more when we finally stopped at a sign for a beach named Agua Blanca, pulling up in a dusty car park full of more Jeeps and mopeds. The driver carried my bag down a steep track which opened on to a milky bay, where naked children played in the long shallows between tall columns of reddish rock. I slipped off my flats and felt that little surge of pleasurable freedom that always comes with sand between the toes. Further along the shore, a group of dreadlocked jugglers, also naked, were spinning batons, while sunbathers caked in drying white clay roasted above the surf line. I picked my way through them to a jetty, where the driver was untying a grey dinghy, and we set off, bouncing a little as we hit the current, towards the smaller island, its two green and white cliffs opening like a butterfly’s wings, which broke the horizon.

  Stahl’s spanking new villa may have been done out like a tiki bar, but that view over the strait to the Agua Blanca beach was surely the best that money could buy, which presumably was why Stahl had bought it. Stacked over the hillside in cubes of steel and limed glass, every room of the villa seemed open to the sea. There were no other guests in evidence when I disembarked, apart from an emaciated woman in a Norma Kamali caftan poking dispiritedly at what had to be an egg-white omelette at one end of the huge curved terrace. A maid showed me to my room and began unpacking for me while I rootled awkwardly around
her busy hands for a bikini and a pair of cut-offs. On the terrace, the caftan had abandoned her eggs and I took an apricot from the debris on her tray, sliding my teeth through its chalky juice while I watched the pale shore a kilometre away. A wooden staircase carved with grimacing Polynesian heads descended to the deserted pool, a huge oval basin of pale grey marble. The water looked deliciously smooth, but before I had a chance to try it, Stahl appeared fresh from the tennis court, and something about his tanned height, the hardness of his torso and his lapis lazuli eyes reminded me of a happy Scandinavian afternoon two summers ago. I had been living very quietly indeed in Venice after all, so that deal was sealed in his vast Balinese bed with enthusiasm, if not much skill on his part, by the time everyone else had finished their early-afternoon breakfast. The world seemed calmer after that. Altogether, I was quite set for a jolly weekend.

  The house party were reviving themselves with rosé and joints around the pool when my host and I reappeared, and Stahl introduced me to the usual combination of greying men and hungry women, a mixture I was familiar with from my first jaunt around the Mediterranean. I declined both weed and wine, but plunged willingly enough into the talk of where everyone had been and where they were going next, until I was interrupted in a discussion of the relative merits of Pantelleria over Patmos by a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Hi, darling. I’m Alvin.’

  It wasn’t the ubiquitous ‘darling’ that bothered me. More the fact that, unlike the other men, Alvin was close to my own age, maybe younger even, and that there was something sly and insinuating beneath the friendliness of his American accent that sent a feather-brush of ice across my skin.

  ‘Elisabeth Teerlinc. Hi – I don’t think we’ve met?’

  ‘Not in person.’

  ‘How intriguing.’

  ‘We’re friends on Facebook.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  Judith Rashleigh didn’t exist online, but Elisabeth Teerlinc, successful gallerist, kept up a dutiful connection with social media. Dissidence would have been too conspicuous, so every few days I spent a reluctant half-hour accepting and posting, anodyne stuff mostly, no personal pictures, and always related to Gentileschi. I wasn’t too vigilant about accepting friends – refusals would be more conspicuous. Alvin was gangly and red-haired, with an unattractively soggy mouth; I didn’t recognise him, but then I could see why he mightn’t use a personal picture for his profile. He had the slightly mangy look of the wealthy stoner.

  ‘You have a space in Venice, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’ I smiled cautiously.

  ‘I just finished a year at the Courtauld. My dad works with Tage.’

  ‘Lucky you. The Courtauld Institute, I mean. Though I’m sure your dad’s delightful.’

  When he returned my smile I saw that his teeth were discordantly unpatriotic, snaggled and thickly furred with plaque around the gums.

  ‘Yeah, it’s cool, but I’m not really into that museum stuff, you know?’ I had an ominous feeling that he was about to start telling me about the about the app he was working on, so I excused myself for a refill of iced tea, but somehow the shadow of that lupine grin stayed with me all through the length of the hot afternoon.

  Tage’s ‘party boat’, a bronze-hulled Razan 47, ferried us back to the mainland that evening, where we were to join another house party at a villa for dinner. After the flattening, creamy heat of Venice, the Ibiza air felt clear, and though the cicadas’ humming was drowned by the thump of a Garrix track as the Jeeps climbed into the hills, the music couldn’t swallow the pine resin of the maquis or the honeysuckle breeze from the low white walls of the house. The wedge-heeled women leaned delightedly on the men’s arms as we crossed a gravel courtyard filled with more Jeeps, a huge open-topped Bentley and a red Ferrari.

  I was irritated to note that there was a part of me that remained surprised and excited to find myself within such a tableau, or at least without a tray in my hands. But old habits die hard; if you’re not entitled, be prepared. Just as I had done back at college, I’d looked up the right things to know about Ibiza, so when I recognised the remodelled farmhouse as the style of Blakstad, an architect who was imitated in the most expensive builds on the island, I could compliment our host on his taste as Tage introduced me.

  ‘This is Elisabeth. She sold me the Xaoc pieces I have in Copenhagen.’

  ‘You are a dealer?’

  ‘Only modestly.’ I smiled. ‘Very much a beginner.’

  ‘She has a fantastic eye!’ enthused Tage, squeezing my hand.

  Our host was another Dane, ponderous and balding, with a signet ring and an American wife at least twenty years his junior. ‘You guys are just adorable together!’ she squeaked at Tage, who didn’t look displeased by the misunderstanding, ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘Oh, a little while ago. In Venice,’ I offered.

  ‘I love Venice – oh my God how romantic. We always stay at the Danieli – you know the Danieli? I love Italy so much. We went to Sardinia last year – where did we stay on Sardinia, Sveyn?’

  ‘On Tage’s boat.’

  ‘Oh, sure we did. No, I was thinking of Tuscany – where did we stay in Tuscany?’

  It seemed we might remain in that conversational loop until we got to the Austrian border, so I drew her gently away and admired the flowers, braided arrangements of orange blossom looped around black figs stretched across the centre of the long table.

  ‘These are so clever!’ I trilled. ‘You must be exhausted.’

  As a rule, I found the richer the husband, the more exhausted the wife. It was a safe gambit.

  ‘Oh God, you know, I’ve been doing this dinner for, like, a week. I told Sveyn, I told him, I am doing absolutely nothing after this, you know? Nothing. It’s been crazy.’

  I looked past her along the table, set perpendicular to the pool, which dropped off the cliff between two huge driftwood sculptures, white-painted. Four servers in dark jackets were setting out ice boats of sushi; another was lighting bronze fire bowls at the rim of the deck. Two more were pouring champagne and rosé, another was handing round tiny rolls of Ibérico ham and pickled ginger. She must have been knackered.

  ‘I mean, I like to keep things simple, you know?’ She was giggling now. ‘I mean, this is Ibiza, everyone is really chilled, but still –’

  ‘It’s a lot of work, making things beautiful for other people,’ I finished sincerely.

  ‘My God, you just get it, don’t you, Elsie? Total girl crush!’ she squealed at Tage, who had kindly come to rescue me.

  *

  There was no placement at dinner, because of it being so chilled; Tage sat next to me, with a woman in a pompommed Vita Kin sundress on my other side. She talked across me to Tage for some time without introducing herself, asking detailed questions about the Ibiza Polo Club, lots of mentions of patrons and whom she had seen at Cowdray. We were kindred spirits, in style if not execution. It was only when Tage fed me a piece of ahi tuna with white truffle while nuzzling my neck that she got the point, and in fairness didn’t miss a beat, shoved her henna-tattooed hand into mine, took a game slug of rosé and told me that her house had just had all its cisterns refitted with golden water.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Well, you know the swirls on a snail’s shell? They represent the golden mean – it’s found everywhere in nature. That’s how water’s meant to be, not still and static like it is in the tap. So there’s this machine that scientifically re-arranges the molecules in your water according to the golden mean –’

  ‘Like the, um, Hadron Collider?’

  ‘Exactly. And it makes the water so much more hydrating. You can really taste when fruits and vegetables have been grown with it – you know, you can taste their happiness. It’s really mathematical, but also spiritual.’

  ‘Holistic,’ I just about managed, biting the insides of my cheeks.

  ‘Yah. You can get one for your bathroom, anywhere. They’re waiting for FDA approval, but you know, t
here’s like so much red tape and bureaucracy. Hang on, I’ve got a card.’ She began fishing in her snakeskin Gucci tote. ‘I mean, it’s changed my life.’

  ‘Thanks so much. I’ll, er, definitely look into it.’

  ‘My pleasure, honey.’

  As the guests drifted away from the table, the servers were lighting tiny coloured Moroccan lanterns in the trees. Dried lavender had been thrown in the fire bowls, sending billows of scent into the soft, salty air.

  ‘Taking a risk with the old vigile, aren’t you, Sveyn?’ an English guy with a single button fastened on his blue linen Vilebrequin shirt was asking the host, who laughed drily.

  ‘Yah, they fine you ten thousand euro if anyone reports a naked flame. Half the hillside at San Juan went up last year. I find it easier,’ Sveyn confided, ‘just to give them the 10K in advance.’ Both men laughed conspiratorially.

  Tage led me to a teak sofa draped with delicate ikat shawls, an arm draped possessively around my shoulder, and introduced me to a Swedish architect who had the commission for next year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion and his wife who had an impressive-sounding job in medical research in Stockholm. I doubted she had much call for golden water. They were clever and charming, and more than politely interested in my plans for Gentileschi. As I sat there with Tage, the ice cubes melting tiny flowers into my rosé, I could look across at the gleaming walls of the house and the dark promise of the garden and rejoice again in Judith Rashleigh’s banishment. Spirituality aside, this was where I had wanted to be, wasn’t it? And the best thing was, I was answerable to no one. I caught sight of Alvin, lolling in a hammock with two girls, and raised my glass in acknowledgement. Despite my disappointment over the Yermolov valuation, I felt optimistic, even – maybe – happy.

  Afterwards, I saw that was the last time I could pretend that things were going to end well.