‘So, when are we going to get a look at this exhibition of yours?’ he said.
Sam winced. ‘Not as soon as I would have liked. The organisation here is extraordinary.’
‘Or the lack of it.’
‘Precisely. There are artefacts scattered all over the Hall.’ Sam stretched her legs out along the sofa towards him. She had kicked off her shoes, and Max stole a glance at her bare feet, momentarily observing they had the same slender elegance as her hands. Anxious he might have been observed, he glanced back at her, but she was gazing into her wine. ‘I thought BS was meant to be this oracle who could track down anything,’ she continued, ‘but a lot of the time even he’s baffled. You heard about the inventory, I suppose?’
‘Noel told me.’
‘It’s all very peculiar. I simply don’t understand why it’s only just turned up.’ She looked over towards him, and he shrugged. As if he should know, or care, when he was sitting in Sam’s flat and her bare feet were inches away from his thigh. He was battling with an overwhelming desire to lift one of them tenderly on to his lap and begin to massage it. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s made things easier in some ways but a great deal more difficult in others. It’s thrown up a great list of things I didn’t know were in the collection. Even BS seems to have forgotten they were ever here, but they’re certainly on that inventory.’
‘They’re missing?’
‘Well, mislaid at least.’
‘By the way,’ Max said, sitting forward on the sofa to distract himself from his fixation with her feet, ‘I meant to tell you. You caused a bit of a stir up in the guides’ room this morning.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. Astonishingly, you’ve been put down on the guiding rota.’
‘Me?’ Sam pulled a face. She obviously found the notion as comical as did he.
‘I know. Extraordinary.’
‘But why?’
‘Apparently BS Moreton has put you down on a Monday instead of Maureen Hindle who waddled in today after a weekend away to find she had been dropped for the next couple of months. There was a terrific scene – keening, wailing, the tearing of pocket handkerchiefs. Noel and I made a pretty swift exit, I can tell you.’ Max chuckled and took a sip of beer before looking over towards Sam. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he said when he saw the seriousness of her expression.
‘Oh dear,’ Sam said. ‘I didn’t think he’d really do it.’
‘What?’
Sam didn’t reply straight away and Max sat listening to the clink of the charcoal in the grate and watching her face. He wished he could light a cigarette. Eventually she stirred, sighed and put her wine glass down on the side table next to her. She drew her legs up towards herself and hugged her arms around them, resting her chin on her raised knees. It made her look adorable. ‘How discreet can you be?’
‘Me? I’m the soul of discretion.’ This made Sam laugh. ‘What? I am.’
‘OK. I’ll believe you, because to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t mind running some of this through with a third party.’
‘I’m your man.’
Sam stood, picked up her glass of wine and made her way over to the fireplace. She put the glass on the mantelpiece and bent forward to throw two more logs on to the fire. Max caught his breath. She had stretched one leg forward to take her weight and her shirt had risen up at the back. He could make out the line of her underwear defining the curve of her buttock and he found the sight unbearably erotic. She straightened up, pulled her top back down over her trousers with a dainty tug and turned back to face Max. ‘Someone at the Hall is writing anonymous letters.’
‘No. Good grief!’ Her revelation was sufficiently spectacular to bring him back on track. ‘This place just gets better and better.’
‘Max, for God’s sake.’
‘It does. I love this place. It’s the oddest place on earth to work, I swear it is. Anonymous letters? Who’s writing them?’ Sam began to laugh again. ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he said, ‘you’re going to say you don’t know. They’re anonymous.’
‘Something like that, I suppose. But unfortunately, BS thinks he does know. He thinks it’s Maureen.’
‘Whoa! Maureen Hindle? She’s really having a bad week.’
‘He told me he was going to get rid of her. I do wish he hadn’t involved me in getting her booted out. I was dead against it.’
‘Why?’
‘Nothing but circumstantial evidence.’
‘I assume you’ve had some letters.’
‘Well, one.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘OK,’ Max got up and followed Sam over to the dining-room table where her laptop stood. She sat down in front of the computer and began to leaf through a pile of papers then drew out the envelope and handed it to Max. ‘Others have been sent to the CEO and to BS, but all of them are an attack on BS, criticising his working methods, and his personal life. The writer thinks he’s the Casanova of Duntisbourne Hall except that his tastes now are for rather maturer meat.’
Max looked up from the letter. ‘Marvellous.’
‘Seriously though, Max, we can have a good laugh about it, but it’s a shabby situation on a number of levels. Writing poison pen letters is a cowardly and subversive way to get your own back on someone; but squeezing someone out of their job without a shred of actual evidence is also a despicable way to behave.’
Max was having trouble ridding his mind of the image of BS Moreton sprawled on a chaise longue and surrounded by a group of skimpily-clad female guides in their sixties. ‘Can you really be a Lothario when you’re that old?’
‘I think you can,’ Sam said.
‘There’s always the good news.’ He folded the letter up again and put it into the envelope, glancing down at the postmark before tossing it on to the table. It floated a short distance across the polished surface and bumped the cordless mouse beside the computer which purred and the black screen irradiated into life. The screen was filled with archaic figures in black and white piled one upon the other in a tangle of buttocks, genitals, nuns’ wimples and birch canes. ‘Jesus!’ Max yelped. The whole evening was becoming an onslaught of lascivious thoughts and images.
Sam didn’t seem flustered. She looked at the screen and then at Max’s expression and smiled. ‘Just research,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ he agreed, regaining his self-composure.
‘Another mystery, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘These are engravings from a later version of a novella by the Marquis de Sade, Les Infortunes de la Vertu.’
‘The Misfortunes of Justine?’
‘Yes.’ Sam raised an eyebrow.
‘They’re familiar. Can’t think why. Perhaps they formed the bread and butter of our burgeoning sexuality at school.’
‘According to the inventory the ninth earl bought a number of these engravings and they’re valuable.’
‘Are they? They’re pretty comical.’
‘Yes. I suppose they are to the modern eye, but there’s an interesting history behind them.’
‘Do tell,’ and Max drew a chair alongside Sam’s and stared at the writhing bodies on the screen. Sam shut the lid and turned to face him.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘when the extended version of the original novella was printed in Holland in around 1797, engravings of these types of illustrations were printed off the original plates and sold individually. Napoleon thought the book was – ’ here Sam flicked through her notes and read – ‘‘the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination”, although in fairness to Sade, his original novella was fairly tame compared to his later writing. It was these subsequent and graphic revisions that pushed the book into rank obscenity, but that didn’t stop Napoleon arresting and imprisoning Sade for thirteen years for being the anonymous author. The Cour Royal de Paris ordered the destruction of the books in 1815. Anyway, I wanted to use images like these as huge backdrops behind the cabinets in the exhibition.’
�
��But you can’t find them.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Get them off the internet.’
‘Can’t do that.’
‘I don’t mean download them for free. I mean contact the copyright owners.’
‘Copyright isn’t the issue – these prints are over two hundred years old. The problem is that I don’t know which ones were in the collection. I have the part numbers and a visual description, but I can’t be sure which belonged to Duntisbourne.’
‘Does it matter?’
Sam sighed. ‘Yes, it does. It matters to me and, as I keep trying to explain to Noel, unless they’re genuine someone, some day, will spot the error, and I don’t want my name on an exhibition unless I’m a hundred per cent certain all the elements are authentic.’
‘OK,’ said Max, feeling chastened.
‘I don’t mean to sound pompous.’
‘But it’s important to you.’
‘Exactly. Another beer?’
He should have said no.
Max let himself into his house with a heavy heart. Monty sensed his mood and tailored his welcome to suit it, trotting along the corridor behind his master as he went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. Max lit a cigarette, filled the cafetierre and stared at the grounds as they rose and fell in the blackening water. Monty put his paws on to his shin and stretched up towards him.
‘Ballsed it up, Monty,’ Max said. ‘But I was defenceless against her charming little feet.’ He poured his coffee and went through to his office. He didn’t expect to get much sleep again tonight – he might as well fiddle around on the computer.
He’d taken a gamble and it hadn’t worked. He had moved in for a kiss towards the end of the evening and been rebuffed. In fact the kiss had signalled the end of the evening, and without his attempt, he would probably still be at Sam’s flat, chatting merrily in front of the fire, watching her bend to put another log on the fire, making her laugh with tales of eccentric work colleagues. And the reason she had rebuffed him was awful – a deal-breaker. She didn’t want to kiss a smoker. That’s what she had said. He had scrabbled for his mints, but she said no, it wouldn’t help, it was coming from his lungs.
‘My lungs?’ he had said, recoiling in horror as she must have done from his gamey breath. It was humiliating.
He lit another cigarette before he noticed that his earlier one was still smouldering in the ashtray. He had smoked for England ever since he was a teenager – there couldn’t be a more passionate smoker in the world. He was a two-pack-a-day man, sometimes three packs at times of high stress such as when he was squabbling with his ex-wife. He would have smoked his finger if necessary. The anti-smoking lobby appalled him – they summed up disapproving Middle England, the nanny state, everything he hated, and his beloved Sam was one of them.
‘What to do, Monty?’ he said. The dog stirred from underneath the desk and thrust his head up between Max’s knees. He rubbed his fur and looked into the dog’s eyes. ‘Your breath smells. Does that put me off you?’ Monty tipped his head from side to side, listening. ‘Well, a bit, I must admit.’ Monty dropped down on to the floor and Max stretched back in his chair. Could he give up smoking? It had defined him for so many years, he couldn’t think of life without cigarettes. Even his recent health scare hadn’t been enough of an incentive – he felt it was part of being in the twilight of his days and ill health was inevitable. Perhaps it wasn’t. Could he really start taking care of himself this late in the day? If he could see a future with Sam, he certainly wanted many more years to enjoy it.
But hang on a minute – Sam hadn’t said in so many words that if he was a non-smoker he’d be in with a chance. Perhaps she wasn’t that keen anyway, and she thought the smoking thing was a good way out. But surely that was wrong. He couldn’t have misread the signs so completely. She obviously enjoyed his company – after all, she had made the move and invited him up to her flat. She wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t in with a chance. God, he thought, so many things get easier with age, but not this. He felt every bit as insecure as he had at sixteen.
He opened up the packet of cigarettes. It was a full pack bar four. He would make a decision in the morning.
- 21 -
‘Good morning,’ Sam said. The hammering stopped and the carpenter looked down at her, brandished his hammer and smiled around a mouthful of nails. ‘Carry on. I’m just checking progress.’ The ceiling was plastered, the cables for the lights were hanging out of the holes above and the floor was back down again although covered with polythene to protect it. She lifted up one edge to check that the cabling had been brought under the floor for the power points beneath each display cabinet. Satisfied, she bade the electrician and carpenter good day and made her way back to her flat. The sun was shining, but the wind was from the east so she lit the fire early because she intended working throughout the morning where she wouldn’t get constant interruptions. The conclusion of her evening with Max had left her mildly troubled and she knew that once she immersed herself in her task these concerns would be pushed to one side. Often, when she revisited worries after a certain amount of time, she had a clearer perspective.
Over the past few weeks, with Noel’s help, she had been systematically opening each box in the music room, listing the items and repacking them in preparation for their return upstairs, and today she faced the monumental task of comparing her list with the inventory which Maureen had given to her. She had been forced to rethink her plan of using enlarged images from the prints in the collection as a backdrop to the cabinets because she was running out of time to have the panels manufactured and however many times she impressed on BS the urgency of the situation, he invariably had some reason for failing to unearth them. His initial delay was plausible – he did seem to be overstretched by his workload to the point that he had been taken ill – but Sam was beginning to wonder if something more sinister lay behind it. His handling of the anonymous letters had revealed a side to his personality that worried her. She couldn’t understand his response, his secrecy and shame, unless there was some truth in their content, and his solution to the problem frankly appalled her. She wondered now if his inefficiency with the collection was in fact obfuscation and she was getting an uneasy feeling that a great deal more was missing than a few prints.
Sam continued to work through until lunchtime, fixed herself a sandwich and worked on until the light began to fail in her room and she stood up to turn on a few of the lamps. Her task today had been made doubly difficult because the inventory was more like the minutes of meetings and had been compiled chronologically, with descriptions of the items followed by handwritten notes and anecdotes which, if another item was not procured for a number of month, ran to pages. She had started by making headings, but it soon became clear that this was too cumbersome a way to list them, and instead she created a spreadsheet which enabled her to jump from box to box as she came across another item amidst the slanting handwriting of many different people.
Sam stretched and yawned, then went over to the window and looked out into the darkness. She wondered how Max was. She knew she had wounded him, but she hadn’t meant to. She had been aware throughout the evening that he was following her with his eyes, and she was not displeased by his attention, but she still didn’t have that knot of excitement in her stomach that she had when she was deeply attracted to a man. It was as if she needed that crazy feeling to override any characteristics that didn’t fit the blueprint which branded itself on to her mind the moment she was captivated by someone. For months, sometimes for as long as a year, she could minimise a man’s faults and glorify his qualities, but eventually the crazy feeling waned, and she was left with the bald truth that this was no dream man but someone who hung their jacket up on the hook in their car, who liked to watch world wrestling or who held his knife like a pencil, and one of these minor irritations would bring the whole edifice of delusion tumbling down. She didn’t know how to operate romantically without that feeling. Her rej
ection of Max wasn’t really about his breath. Heavens above, she had had excellent sex with someone for nearly six months who had tonsil trouble and the most awful halitosis and as long as she was nuts about him, she learnt to mouth-breathe. She just wasn’t nuts about Max, and wasn’t able to disregard any minor flaws.
She drew the curtains shut with a sudden violence, irritated with herself, and realised she was ravenously hungry. Seeing that it was well past seven, she went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine and pulled out a packet of streaky bacon, a tray of eggs and some fresh pasta. A plate of carbonara was exactly what she felt like.
She stirred the onions and bacon around in the pan and watched them popping and jumping in the oil. The pasta bubbled and sent clouds of steam up into the kitchen. She gazed at them as they rose, her hand stirring the food but her mind was tripping away down a line of connections which were easier to unpick than her feelings about Max, easier to dwell on. Too much stuff was missing from the collection for it to have been mislaid – she had sensed that days ago, and her painstaking exercise today revealed the true extent of the problem. She had been unable to track down any of the fifteen engravings from Justine, and had not managed to unearth a single one of the twenty-five volumes of books that were discussed in the inventory. There was no John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; no Charles Sedley or George Etherege; a first edition of An Essay on Woman, the obscene parody of the writings of Alexander Pope, along with collections of bawdy country songs and flagellation eclogues such as The Flogging Block were nowhere to be found. The most frustrating loss was a small portrait of the ninth earl in his youth painted in the style of William Hogarth’s portrait of Sir Francis Dashwood as a Franciscan monk. From the description in the inventory, it would have been the perfect illustration of the growth of religious nonconformity and the rise of toleration which, in Sam’s opinion, represented the turning point in western cultural attitudes to sexual behaviour.
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