Maestra

by L. S. Hilton

  “Wait, there was something else, a bit of paper, I’ll get it.”

  I dumped the contents of the tiny Fendi bag on the duvet. Fags, lighter, lip gloss, comb, mints, one pair of black silk chiffon knickers, and the crumpled sheet of paper I had hastily stuffed in the cigarette packet.

  “This. Here.”

  Steve scanned it slowly, and as he did the tension was ironed out of his face.

  “Lauren, you are a fucking genius. Where did you get this?”

  “It was on the floor by the desk. I didn’t think he’d miss it—the maid could have picked it up easily. What is it?”

  Of course, I’d already read it. A name, a date two days from now, and a question mark, scribbled in Biro.

  “Rivoli. Hotel group. He’s bidding for it. I really do need to make some calls now. Thanks, doll.” Steve wandered out, yelling for Tris.

  All that cloak-and-dagger nonsense for a bit of insider share dealing. If I hadn’t read up on the penalties for that kind of thing, I wouldn’t have been able to see what Steve was so excited about. But if he wasn’t going to prison, he stood to make some serious money, and while I supposed I could ask him for a cut, there was something else that he could do for me now. And it was useful to know that even the financial masters of the universe were so unsophisticated when it came to dirty little secrets.

  • • •

  SOMETHING ELSE I discovered while the Mandarin was off Ponza was James’s obituary notice. It was in the Times online, no photograph, presumably out of respect for the family, but it mentioned James’s wife, Veronica. Rhodes, like Cecil. I’d never registered his surname. JR, like me. I could have read that as a sign. It mentioned various charities he had contributed to, the bank he worked for, the fact that he’d once played for Harrow at Lord’s, which I couldn’t really picture, that he left one daughter, Flora, that a memorial service was to be held in a month. He was sixty-three, not a bad innings, considering. The piece only mentioned that he’d died of a heart attack while traveling on business, but it still made me antsy. I locked myself in the bathroom and took out the seamed Loro Piana carrier where I kept my personal stuff. My money was crammed into a paper sandwich bag. There was still about eight thousand euro of James’s cash left, plus what I’d creamed off from my shopping trips, a good few thousand. I’d made a few withdrawals from my own English account, small sums, just to keep up the idea that I was on holiday, but it wasn’t as though I could stay on the boat forever. Steve was obviously getting a bit over the whole idea of leisure pursuits, dying to get back to moving some serious money. I could keep the bank off my back for a few months, until I had some work, but the cash wouldn’t stretch much further, not in London. I also had to consider that it might not be so easy to find a job in the art world, given that I’d called one of London’s major experts a “bent cunt.”

  The immediate issue was where to put the money. I didn’t want to deposit that amount of cash in my English account; it felt dubious. Of course I could just hold on to it, but that didn’t feel right either. Maybe it was stupid, but I wanted that money to mean something. I’d always thought that people who believed in horoscopes should be denied the vote, but equally, when the universe tries to tell you something, it’s dumb not to listen. And I couldn’t quite bear the thought of going back to the flat, to textbooks and toast crumbs and tights drying over the shower rail.

  Trailing back to London with a stash of pocket money that would dribble away in rent and bills felt too much like defeat. It was one step closer to basic cable and the pub on Friday night, to the slow ooze of sugar bloat, and the wind at the bus stop on College Road, to pebbledash and Tesco and the vomit in the doorway of the Social, to the bottles stashed in the microwave and the unanswered doorbell, to the smell of cold fat and cheap cigarettes and lurid curry that was my own little bouquet of despair. All the things I knew it was indecent to despise, because they were just the fabric of most people’s lives, yet my contempt for which kept me flinty clean inside.

  I needed to think, so I wandered up to the deck. We were anchored a few miles along the coast from the main port; the only other craft in sight was a fabulous 1930s teak racing yacht, whose owners probably referred to the likes of the Mandarin, disparagingly, as “Tupperware.” It was very quiet, just the lulling creak of the hull in the waves and the thrum of crickets from the low hills backing up from the shore. Carlotta was taking a siesta with Hermann, being disgusted. Steve was hunched over his screens as usual, intent as an alchemist. The water was peacock-colored, gold and turquoise and green, so clear that I could see shoals of tiny silver fish fanning below the surface. I pulled off my Heidi Klein caftan, then my white Eres bikini, and hopped over the bow rail, the afternoon heat throbbing on my bare skin. It suddenly looked like a long way down. It would have been easy to jump, let myself fall into that delicious blue, but even though there was no one watching, I couldn’t let myself be sloppy. Arms stretched until my sternum opened, flex the calves, abs held tight, tuck in the head, a perfect swallow dive, the salt streaming across my eyeballs as I opened them after the report of my body in the water, crystals at my fingertips as I arched to the surface. I pushed my hair back and trod water. The sea cradled my body, a dazzle of tiny salt crystals blurred my vision into a smooth panorama of blue and gold and white. Above me, the Mandarin cut a neat geometric shadow over the soft waves, a reassuring island of money. This was where I belonged, I thought. I just had to work out a way to stay here.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, we trooped to Billionaire. Never mind that the Chinese had bought it, we were going to paaaarty like Briatore. As we walked to a VIP table, I could feel the girls watching us, in their hooker shoes and spaghetti straps, pretending to dance. When did nightclubs start to look like strip clubs? They were on the banquettes, on the tables, practically swinging from the chandeliers. There was enough booty shaking going on to cause an earthquake. Carlotta scowled as a rogue buttock nearly knocked Hermann’s Oliver Peoples off. Steve was bored, fiddling on his BlackBerry, not even looking up when the waiter brought the champagne. Tris looked nervy; any minute now it would be back to school. He touched Steve’s shoulder, indicated two gorgeous black girls with impossibly tiny waists and arses just beneath their shoulder blades who were writhing nearby. Steve shook his head irritably. It was impossible to talk over the music, so I leaned forward and bawled in Steve’s ear, “Darling, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got the worst headache. Will you take me back?”

  Steve didn’t do gent stuff, but it was clear to me that he had no interest in staying, so when he got up I caught a look of gratitude from Tris. He took my hand and held it in his own smooth, dry palm all the way to the car, and I couldn’t help a little flip of triumph as I carried off my prey.

  I made him a Tanqueray and tonic, carefully, wiping a lemon slice around the rim of the glass, and carried it through to where he was idly flicking over the news channels on the vast plasma screen.

  “How’s your head?”

  “Fine, really. It was just too much, that place.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  We looked at CNN for a bit. There was no way to open this conversation subtly, but then subtlety wasn’t his thing.

  “Steve?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking. You’ve been so amazing to me, the trip, the shopping, everything. I want to thank you.” I really meant it too.

  He looked suddenly nervous. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Not like that. I think—we’re friends, aren’t we? Kind of?”

  “Sure.”

  “So I had this idea . . .”

  I’d learned enough from the endless capital gains racket back in London to be able to talk a good game. I wanted to open my own gallery, I explained, dealing privately. I had some money saved, but it was cash, awkward. Could Steve help me get started? If I made a profit, I could buy for him. W
e’d talked enough about his collection for him to believe I shared what he thought was his taste, I had a good eye, and I knew how to make it convenient for him, tax-wise. If there’s one thing that really gets rich people razzled it’s the prospect of saving entirely negligible amounts of tax.

  “Where do you want to put it?”

  I hesitated. “Well, it’s chump change, really. About ten grand. I thought—maybe Geneva?”

  Ten grand happened to be the minimum deposit required at a small and not particularly successful private bank called Osprey. I’d checked it out on my laptop at a café in the port.

  “I have an apartment in Geneva.”

  “Nice. Shall we go?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just like that, okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll get Tris to see to it in the morning. I’m getting fucked off with all this, anyway.”

  I straddled his lap and nuzzled his face. “Steve, I love you. It’s going to be great, I promise!”

  He held my shoulders at arm’s length and looked into my eyes.

  “Sure you do, Lauren.”

  Of course, he had heard it all before. He would never know, for sure, if any woman ever meant those words. I held his gaze. There might have been a little moment when we both felt human.

  “Ooops, sorry, you two!”

  Carlotta.

  “No worries.” I sensed Steve wasn’t sorry for her to misunderstand. I left him watching the second half of The Matrix and went to have a good bitch about the quality of the sluts at Billionaire.

  • • •

  FLYING BUSINESS CLASS from Sardinia to Switzerland was the first time I’d ever turned left on a plane. It was practically the first time I’d been on a plane—my European travels had mostly been conducted by train. Steve was going on to the States while Tris took the boat back up the coast to Genoa. If he was annoyed with me for cutting short his free cruise he had the sense not to show it; besides, he’d have a few days of pretending the Mandarin was his. I left a handwritten thank-you note and three hundred euro for the crew, crammed all my swag into bags, and said good-bye to Carlotta and Hermann, who made polite noises about seeing me at their wedding. I’d asked for my return ticket to be to Rome; it seemed a shame not to see it again when I had the chance.

  We didn’t talk much on the flight. Conversation was an effort for Steve if he wasn’t discussing things he owned; I assumed that was why he kept buying them. I appreciated the space and the leather seats and the extra-voltage smiles of the Alitalia hostesses with their gleaming chignons. Steve didn’t, but then his own plane was picking him up the next day. If it was anything like his flat, I couldn’t envy him. All I could think of when we got to the apartment was that God never resists a chance to show His contempt for money. Now I knew where Ian Schrager went to die.

  “Got this place last year. Used to have a house on the lake, but I thought an apartment was more me. Alberto Pinto did it.”

  I wondered if there had been much marble left in Carrara by the time Alberto had finished. I wandered about a bit, looking admiringly. Everything that wasn’t black or white or golden marble was lacquered shagreen: the bathroom looked like Oscar Wilde’s cigarette case.

  “It’s very impressive,” I managed, seriously, wondering why new money always has such appalling taste. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time—this century’s gruesome opulence is the next’s priceless baroque.

  “Most of the art is in the study,” said Steve, pressing a button that opened a dividing door disguised as a mother-of-pearl screen. The room was larger than the whole of my old flat in London, with one entirely glass wall looking over the rather lugubrious sights of Geneva. You could tell it was the study because of the books, at least three of them retro French novels from the sixties laid out on a nineteenth-century washstand, the only pretty thing in the place. How much had Alberto charged for one of his assistants to break the spines? Emin, Hirst, check, check; a huge Pollock, check; Schnabel, check. Entirely predictable.

  “What do you think of this?”

  A concrete cast of a gravestone, like a Bronze Age stelae, engraved with a thug-necked young man in a flashy suit, Rolex prominently displayed, an Uzi dangling from his right hand as casually as a young man-about-town might have held a riding crop in an earlier century.

  “It’s clever. The definition of a swagger portrait. Whose?”

  “It’s real, a real tombstone. The guy’s family sold it to the artist. Leni Kravchenko?”

  Not that clever, then, just sad and sneering and cheap.

  “You have some nice things. This”—I indicated the boy gangster’s memorial—“this is the kind of stuff I can see you getting into. I’m thinking Eastern Bloc, maybe China. Not so certain as an investment, but more interesting for that. Witty, ambitious.” Just like you, Steve.

  His eyes were already wandering toward the screens in the sitting room. So much for art, gotta get to work.

  “Sure, that would be great, when you get your thing going,” he answered vaguely.

  I said that I was sure he had a lot to do, and why didn’t I come back for him after lunch? I’d love to see the city. He was already sinking gratefully into his desk chair, tapping open the veins of the world’s money, but he didn’t forget to release a lump of it for me from the silver clip in his back pocket. So I tripped prettily off and found a taxi to take me on a tour where I could ask a few questions, followed by a little light shopping and a croque monsieur in a café overlooking the lake, surrounded by muffled Middle Eastern women and their beer-bellied offspring and men on their phones, tapping, tapping, in the green shadow of the sublime Alps.

  I reflected that I didn’t really know all that much about contemporary art, but I didn’t see that being a reason to hold me back. First, because there wasn’t much to know, and second, no one buying it knows anything either. The expertise is in spying out the trends, working out what will be hot when your client comes to sell. The idea of a patron buying for aesthetic reasons went out with the Grand Tour, and I’d been unbelievably lucky so far in convincing Steve that I knew how to buy, though his tastes weren’t exactly a hard sell. After all my serious work for Rupert in my three years at the House, it seemed a bit cheap, but I’d got over worse things. Like, my entire life so far. And maybe, if I could do it, if I could really do it, then I’d have a crack at being someone, being the person I’d always known I was meant to be.

  Back at the flat I changed into one of my new purchases, a beige Stella McCartney shirt dress with an Hermès foulard, a pattern of pink and orange clocks. I’d bought a plain tan leather clutch to hold the cash; I didn’t want to be rootling it out of a paper bag. Steve was in his usual jeans, polo, and Nikes. He held my hand in the cab to the bank, although the other was busy spidering away on his BlackBerry.

  I’d once been sent to Hoare’s, up on Fleet Street, to cash a check for Rupert, and I suppose I had expected something like that—imposing pillars, old oil paintings, white-gloved doormen. But Osprey looked like any other office, not a grand hotel. Just a lobby and a lift and a discreet plaque by the bell, a sofa and a water cooler and an ancient fax machine. Steve explained briefly in his surprisingly good French that he needed to open a personal account for a new employee. As soon as he gave his name, I could see the manager drooling. We were shown to an even smaller room, just a cubicle with a table and three chairs hastily squashed in. I flashed my passport and they brought the paperwork.

  “Just sign here, Mademoiselle Rashleigh, and here, and here.” I pushed over the tan clutch and the manager took it with a pained smile, as though I’d handed him a dirty nappy. Actual cash was obviously not the thing to display in Geneva, though dodgy money was what the place was built on. He pressed a button under the table and a slim girl in a black trouser suit appeared to take it away, using her hand as though it were silver tongs. I saw her looking at Steve and allowed my hand to rest for a m
oment on his wrist. A few minutes passed, during which the manager ventured a remark about how I liked Geneva, then the girl came back with the now flaccid purse and a passbook with my name miraculously printed on the front.

  “And where would mademoiselle like the correspondence to be sent?”

  Fuck. I hadn’t thought of that. I could hardly have Swiss bank statements turning up on the Koreans’ breakfast table.

  “I’m, um, looking for premises at the moment,” I managed lamely.

  “Of course, mademoiselle. But you will be passing through Geneva?” He was helping me, with his eye on Steve’s potential.

  “Yes, naturally. Art Basel and, um, so on.”

  “So we have an arrangement here at Osprey. A numbered box, a key for yourself, only. Just for correspondence, you understand. Our clients find it helpful while they are . . . traveling.”

  I liked that. “Traveling,” like Holly Golightly.

  “That would be very suitable, thank you.”

  “Just one more form, then, mademoiselle.” Black suit reappeared; I signed. Steve had barely registered anything; he was still tapping.

  • • •

  I GOT TO turn left again on the flight to Rome early that evening. I declined a glass of champagne with the weary air of the seasoned business-class traveler, which obviously I really enjoyed. My good-bye to Steve had been awkward, though I doubted he had felt it. Even though he didn’t know quite what he had done for me, he had been extraordinarily kind, and had it been any other man I would at least have given him an assiduous farewell going-over on Alberto’s carefully selected Pratesi sheets, but I had the sense not to suggest it. Still, saying “thank you” didn’t seem to be enough, and there was nothing else I could give him, at least nothing I could explain and expect him to understand. To know that someone sees you is a gift, even love, of a kind, but if there was a part of Steve that remembered what it felt to be a fearful geek, it had long ago been veneered beyond recognition. To tell him that I saw what he wasn’t and liked him anyway would merely have puzzled him momentarily. So I settled for a hug and a promise, which he took as lightly as all the hugs and promises I imagine he encountered these days, and left him to the dancing enchantments of the markets.