by Karen Swan
There followed an aghast silence.
‘But darling, we were having figs!’ her father protested as soon as he’d recovered, agog that it could even be considered that they might be eaten without the Maury’s accompanying top notes of pomegranate molasses.
‘You know what I’m saying,’ her mother replied, turning back to them both but pinning her husband with an expression of reproach. He tried to catch her for a kiss as she pulled the olive bread from the Aga, her slim arms swamped in the oven gloves. ‘The Pouilly-Fumé was perfectly sufficient.’ She handed him the tray of rosemary-sprinkled bread in lieu of the kiss. ‘Put that on the table for me, please.’
Flora giggled as her father – sporting a particularly colourful ensemble of cherry-pink shorts and a grass-green polo shirt – shuffled away, disconsolate at his wife’s insistence on worrying about the state of his liver. Between his speeding, his wine consumption and the state of the kitchen floor, he was well and truly in the doghouse. ‘Poor Daddy.’
Her mother was heaping the warm, shelled langoustines onto the club salad, and Flora, spotting her chance, stole a slice of avocado. Her mother automatically went to reprimand her with a slap on the wrist, then thought better of it and handed Flora another slice herself. ‘You need feeding up. Now call your brother, will you, please?’ she said, lifting the laden serving plate. ‘Then bring through those napkins and the flowers.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Flora saluted, clicking her heels in the sink and grinning as her mother walked away with a sigh and a shake of her head.
‘Honestly.’
Flora jumped down from the worktop and went and stood at the bottom of the stairs in the hall. ‘Hey! Ratfink!’ she hollered as loudly as she could. ‘Lunch in the garden now or I’m sending in the army!’
‘If I’d wanted to let the neighbours know we were eating, I’d have invited them over,’ her mother said wryly as Flora trotted out into the garden a moment later and set down the oyster-pink linen napkins and a milk jug filled with freshly cut white sweet peas.
‘Bet he’s up now though,’ Flora grinned, sidling into the chair beside her father and tearing off a chunk of the still-warm bread.
Her father reluctantly poured the lime soda which his wife was trying to sell to him as an equally refreshing alternative to a champagne spritzer and she took a sip and closed her eyes, feeling the condensation running down the chilled glass onto her hand, the drowsy throb of the midday sun like a pulse on her skin. She didn’t need to open them again to know her brother was finally crossing the grass. Yes, she’d heard the creak on the bottom stair, heard the French door knock against the wall, but she’d always been able to detect when he was nearby – hence his nickname for her, Bat Ears, which had morphed over the years into Batty. There were just under two years between them but they had been inseparable from the moment her mother had brought her home from the hospital, with Freddie climbing into her cot each night and sharing his favourite toy. He’d looked out for her in the school playground on her first day and helped her on her paper-round on Sundays (at her father’s insistence they earn their own money) when the supplements meant the papers were too heavy for her to carry; he’d promised not to tell their mum when the butterfly tattoo she got on her hip became infected; he’d threatened to beat up any of his friends who tried to hit on her and had vetted those boys she did date, more fiercely than their father had.
‘In your own time, Ratty,’ she grinned, lazily opening her eyes and pinning him with a grin. ‘We’ll just starve to death out here while you—holy shit!’
‘Flossie! Language!’ her mother scolded.
But Flora couldn’t take her eyes off her brother – her lanky, rangy, sandy, mop-haired brother still covered in the boyish freckles they’d once tried to count by joining them up with permanent marker. But the lopsided smile that had got him off numerous detentions had clearly slid off him somewhere along the M4, along with eight kilos.
He pointed a finger straight at her as she literally jumped to attention. ‘Don’t start! You look minging,’ he said. ‘Seriously, sis, lay off the pies.’
She wanted to laugh. It was his usual joke, normally received with great hilarity, but she noticed that no one was laughing today. ‘What the hell’s happened to you?’ she asked, her eyes trying to persuade him to seriousness.
‘Flora, lang—’ her mother said again, but from the corner of her eye, Flora saw her father’s hand shoot forward and quieten her.
He shrugged. ‘Nothing. Chill.’
‘But you’re so thin!’ she cried, almost laughing at the irony that he was trying to pretend everything was fine.
‘Pot. Kettle. Black,’ he replied, flopping artfully into the spare chair and taking a glug of lime soda. He pulled a face and scowled at the glass, then cast a sceptical look at his father who could only shrug in reply.
‘Mum, tell him,’ Flora ordered.
‘I have, darling, and I told you too,’ she replied, heaping an extra-large helping of salad onto his plate. ‘Why do you think I ordered an extra kilo of langoustines?’
Freddie seemed to pale at the sight of it, his fork inert in his hand.
‘You look properly shocking,’ Flora said, putting her elbows on the table and staring him right in the eye, refusing to let it drop. She knew her brother better than anyone. ‘For real. What’s going on?’
He opened his mouth to respond, but unlike the food that he couldn’t seem to put in it, the words by contrast couldn’t seem to get out. He just shrugged.
A long silence opened up into which concern rushed. They were all definitely worried now. Freddie might not be able to eat but he could always, always talk. Flora watched him, her mind racing. Had he heard that Aggie was dating again? Had it knocked him more than they had anticipated?
But there was no time even to ask. The sudden scraping of his chair on the flagstones made them all jump.
‘I can’t do this,’ he mumbled.
‘Freddie?’ their father enquired, concern stripping his voice of its usual humour, as Freddie strode back towards the house, his arms swinging too high, too wildly.
The rest of the family stared at one another – shocked, alarmed, shaken.
‘You two are close. Has he said anything to you?’ her mother asked in a low voice, her elbows on the table. ‘Anything at all that could explain this?’
Flora shook her head, still looking into the space he had just travelled through, as though he’d torn through the fabric of the air and left it hanging in rags behind him.
‘I’m going after him,’ her father said, throwing down his napkin on the table, but Flora put her hand on his forearm and stopped him.
‘No, let me,’ she insisted.
She stood and ran into the shaded house, the old floorboards creaking beneath her weight, branches of the jasmine trailing in through the open windows, honeysuckle blossoms nodding behind the glass, her fingers sliding over the bumpy walls as she took the stairs two at a time. She put her head in at his bedroom door but she already knew she wouldn’t find him in there, and instead continued up the staircase to the attic room at the top. It was decorated in a turquoise Toile de Jouy paper, heavy gingham curtains hanging at the small windows and a broken clock tossed on the bed, forgotten. It had once been the au pair’s room but the two of them had been undeterred by that, forever sneaking past whichever sleeping German or Swedish girl was there at the time, en route to their secret hiding place.
She stopped by the wall and opened the small hatch built halfway up it, which they had been strictly forbidden from ever opening when they were young. She crawled through, emerging moments later onto the flat section of roof, a hidden valley obscured from sight of the garden by the slopes of all the gable ends. Freddie didn’t look surprised to see her as she scooted over to him, keeping low out of habit.
They used to sunbathe up here, and sneakily learned to smoke too, although Freddie had drawn the line at them drinking up here – alcohol and heights weren’t a good idea.<
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‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she said quietly, sitting against him. Usually they leaned back, pressing themselves against the roof tiles either to feel the sun on their faces or to watch the moon, but today he was hunched forward like a curled-up beetle, his elbows on his knees, his head dropped low.
‘Can’t.’ He shook his head.
She clasped his arm as his words confirmed her worst fear that she wasn’t imagining this, it wasn’t her mother’s overblown anxiety that something was wrong. It really, truly was. ‘Whatever it is, I’m on your side. You know I am.’
He shook his head, staring at her sidelong. ‘You won’t be. Not this time.’
‘Freddie, there is literally nothing that you could say that would ever make me doubt you. You’re my big brother. I adore you.’
He dropped his head down, squeezing his hands together so tightly, his knuckles blanched white. She winced on his behalf.
‘Is it why you wanted us all to be here this weekend?’ She had had to move heaven and earth to bring her diary into alignment with his unusual request that they all gather here.
‘I thought I could do it. I thought I could tell you all. I thought it was the right thing to do . . .’
‘You can,’ she whispered. ‘It is.’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I was watching you all down there and you’re the same as you’ve always been. You so perfect and sarcastic and sweet, Dad so bluff, Mum making everything beautiful and worrying about nothing.’ He paused. ‘Only now she really has got something to worry about. I’ve ruined it.’
‘Ruined what?’
‘Us – our family. And I can’t bear to see the looks in your eyes when I tell you.’
It was her turn to fall quiet, her eyes scouring his face as he pulled away again, his emotions pleating inwards as though hiding from her gaze. ‘What have you done, Freddie? You have to tell me.’ Her grip tightened on his arm. ‘You know we’re not getting down from here until you do.’
He took a juddering breath. ‘It’s not true. You have to believe me.’
‘And I will, I promise. I already do.’
‘You don’t know what it is yet.’
‘No. But I know you. I support you. I love you.’
He nodded and dropped his head down, letting the tears come first. And then, finally, the words.
Chapter Two
London, one week later
The auction room was packed, with every seat taken and people standing in a crowd at the back. Everyone was talking and laughing loudly, catalogues in hand and eyes skippy as they evaluated who was here – and more importantly who wasn’t – and the deep banks of Sotheby’s staff manning the phone and internet bids.
Flora shifted position in her seat, the bidding paddle obscured in her lap by the soft folds of her pink silk skirt. She made a point of never getting involved with this pre-sale gossip and conjecture. It might be good for networking but she didn’t like to bring attention to herself when she wanted to clinch a sale; there was something to be said for understatement, a light touch. And besides, in her opinion, networking was always far more effective with a good dress and a cocktail in one’s hand.
She waited patiently while the Peter Doig oil painting was wheeled out by gloved porters and the room regrouped. The Warhol Marilyn (Reversal), and the reason she was here, was up next but that wasn’t why her boss Angus was texting her every third minute. She ignored his latest update through the traffic as it buzzed in her bag. If he was so anxious to see what happened with the Bacon triptych, then he should learn not to fly in for the London Evening Sale on a New York flight that only landed forty minutes before the auction started. She exhaled her irritation quietly. She didn’t understand his constant need for chaos and action. Her boss thrived on adrenalin rushes and perpetual near-misses, as though a result was only validated by a dramatic narrative around it.
A man with florid cheeks and a red tie imprinted with monkeys balancing on teacups – Hermès, then – caught her eye, wordlessly communicating his question down the aisle with hitched-up eyebrows and a glance at the empty seat – the only one in the room – beside her. She shook her head sympathetically but firmly and, tapping at her watchless wrist, rolled her eyes. The man got the point, his mouth settling into an irritated line, and returned to the back of the room.
Flora brushed her blonde hair off her shoulders and fanned herself lightly with the paddle. It was a close night, the sky already blooming into a bruise as she had hopped out of the cab earlier, and thunder was forecast. She hoped she could get home before that happened. She hadn’t had time to collect her jacket from the office in her haste to get here from an overrun appointment and she didn’t fancy being caught in a downpour in this white silk shirt and her strappy red suede heels.
The door behind the auctioneer opened and the tension in the room tightened again, like cloth being pulled across a loom, as the Warhol screen print was wheeled out. Flora remained impassive, even though she felt the same quickening that made others gasp, murmur, smile. Unlike the bright rainbow colours of the better-known Marilyn screen prints which had been owned by stars almost as famous as the subject, this reversal was dark and brooding, a subversion of the disco-happy original: smoky black with smudges of neon pink, the negative of a film photograph, it was perfect for her clients, a young Russian couple who had swapped Moscow for Mayfair. She had worked carefully with them for the past eighteen months, building their bent for bold colour into a fledgling contemporary art collection that was already worth more than £11 million. She had taken them to the Fine Art Fairs in Maastricht and Palm Beach, closed on private deals for them at Chatsworth and in Dubai, and successfully bid in auctions in New York, Zurich and Los Angeles. Tonight, if she got it for the right price, the Warhol would fill the remaining blank wall above the bed in the master suite. The client’s wife had already instructed her decorators to repaint the room in gold leaf in anticipation of its arrival.
The auctioneer, Giles, whom Flora knew from a (very) brief fling at university – dubious taste in pants, predilection for spanking – shuffled his papers and raised his head. The room fell into a hush again and Flora set to work.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we come now to lot twelve: one pink-and-black Marilyn print from the Reversal series, by Andy Warhol. Executed 1979 to 1986, the year before his untimely death. This is an acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas.’ As he intoned venerably, his voice ringing crisp as a bell through the suspended crowd, Flora tried not to recall the sobbing messages he’d left on her phone when she’d finished with him. ‘Unframed . . .’
Flora listened like a teacher’s pet, even though she already knew what was coming next. She had fully examined the provenance and condition reports and was unperturbed by the hairline craquelure at the pull margins.
She was so absorbed that it took her a moment to realize Angus had taken his seat beside her, his tight strawberry blonde curls damp with sweat, round cheeks rosy, panting slightly as though he’d actually sprinted here from the airport. He had barely made it in time and she could see he was stressed, his favourite thing to be.
‘How’s it going?’ he stage-whispered, loosening his tie slightly as the bidding started up.
‘Fine.’ She kept her eyes on the auctioneer, her back straight as she kept track – without moving her head – of who was throwing their hat in the ring, clocking who was sitting with whom, representing whom, who was staying silent and still, who had turned down the corners of their catalogues to this lot, circled it with fountain-pen ink . . . It was no coincidence that she was an exceptional high-stakes poker player.
‘I thought—’
‘Don’t talk,’ she murmured, her eyes sticking on a man in a grey suit in the opposite corner, sitting angled in his chair, one arm slung across the back of it. He had placed an early bid but then fallen quiet; she could tell from his body language, though, that he wasn’t out of the game yet.
She didn
’t recognize him. He wasn’t a dealer, trader or collector that she was aware of and the fine-art world was a small one. Since graduating from St Andrews with her degree in history of fine art six years earlier, Flora had worked in various roles at Phillips, Christie’s and the Saatchi Gallery before joining Angus’s eponymous agency, Beaumont’s Fine Art Agents, last year as a junior partner; as such, she was exceptionally well connected. She could put a name to nearly every face in this room and had sipped Manhattans at one time or another with most of them.
‘Sorry. Sorry, you do your thing,’ Angus whispered, sitting back and raking his fingers through his curls, as though loosening them.
The phones were busy too. Flora watched the Sotheby’s staff, looking for who was talking most to their clients. Anyone who needed ‘talking up’ would be out early; it was the quiet ones she was interested in. She calculated there were two serious buyers there.
The guy in the grey suit was still sitting in his almost louche position but the sinews in his neck kept twitching and she could see the tension in his hands as he tried to keep from raising them, to get back in the game.
Flora looked again at the phone bank. They were down to one there, the paddles in the air growing fewer as the numbers increased and the painting steadily slipped out of reach of the majority, like a yacht that had loosed her moorings and was heading for the horizon.
The auctioneer was looking round the room, the phone bidder now alone in the ring.
Flora looked at the grey-suited guy just as he nodded his head. Back in the game.
Satisfied by her accurate prediction, she let the two of them play for a bit. The estimate had been set between £1.2 and £1.8 million but they were at £1.92 million now and the pace of the sale had slowed down, with longer pauses between the bids. The bidder in the room was nearing his limit; Flora could tell from the way he spread his shoulders wide and forward, trying to release the tension in his neck. He was looking round the room more, too, checking no one else was coming in. He hadn’t spotted her – or if he had, he hadn’t considered her a threat.