‘Piers, shut up,’ Ellie said very gently, as she levered herself out of the chair. ‘Just stop talking.’
She took hold of his elbows and gave him a tiny shake. Up close he had the sour smell of someone who’d stayed up all night awash in his own fear, and his elfin face was puffy and sallow. He was still gibbering about his grandfather and the very real possibility that he might get cut off from his trust fund if he couldn’t stay gainfully employed and prove he was a worthwhile member of society.
‘You need to go home …’
‘I can’t! It’s almost nine and I promised that I’d have all the customs declarations finished and on his desk this morning.’ Piers looked at her pleadingly. ‘I don’t suppose you could—’
‘If I were you I’d go home, have a shower and a shave and change your shirt,’ Ellie said quickly before Piers could completely take advantage of her good nature. ‘You’ll feel much better, and don’t worry about the customs declarations. The courier company aren’t coming to pick up that shipment until the end of the week. It’s only Tuesday. You can do them when you get back.’
Piers surreptitiously sniffed an armpit, then agreed to Ellie’s plan of action. After setting the alarm, she walked out with him as far as the nearest Leon for a triple skimmed latte and granola with strawberry compote.
By the time she got back to the gallery, Muffin and Inge were waiting for her. Neither of them was trusted to have her own keys, because they were just two more posh girls in a long line of posh girls that Ellie had seen come and go in the five years that she’d worked at the gallery. As far as she could remember Muffin and Inge were Posh Girl Ten and Posh Girl Eleven respectively, though after a while all the posh girls seemed to merge into one posh girl composite of shiny hair, expensive clothes and strident voice, who lived in Chelsea and was morbidly fascinated by the fact that Ellie lived in North London, had gone to a state school and didn’t know anybody called Bunny.
Still, most of the posh girls were perfectly nice and friendly, and both Muffin and especially Inge looked pleased to see Ellie as she rocked unsteadily over the cobbles because she hadn’t had time to swap her toning trainers for the Bloch ballet flats she had stashed in the bottom drawer of her desk.
‘Oh my, your natural look is looking very natural today,’ Muffin said by way of a greeting. Inge muttered something that might have been agreement or dissent but it was hard to tell with Inge because she never said much of anything, but sat behind the reception desk dreamily staring into space for most of the day. ‘It’s odd, you really do have quite a good complexion.’
It was a bit of a headspin for Muffin, who’d been raised in the country on food grown on the home farm and lots of untainted fresh air, that Ellie, born and bred in Camden, wasn’t riddled with rickets and tuberculosis.
‘It’s not a natural look, I just haven’t had time to put any make-up on,’ Ellie said and as she unlocked the door and they began to go through the morning ritual of turning off the alarm, switching on the water cooler and sorting through the post, she gave them a brief account of Piers’s latest mishap.
‘He’s such a silly boy,’ Muffin said, even though Piers, unlike Muffin, had never mistaken a very famous conceptual artist for the window cleaner. ‘I’d go and put your face on if I were you. Don’t worry, we can hold the fort.’
Ellie doubted that very much because Inge had already abandoned the onerous task of opening the post to assume her usual position behind the reception desk so she could gaze into the middle distance while Muffin was glued to her iPhone, fingers skating over the screen.
‘Let me know if we have any walk-ins,’ Ellie said, just as she did every morning, because every walk-in was a potential client and every potential client meant potential commission and she refused to mount even one stair until she got a verbal commitment from both girls. Then, and only then, was she able to head upstairs for the sanctuary of her office.
Camden, London, 1986
It wasn’t like Ari saw him everywhere she went after that, but she saw him often enough that it was more than a coincidence.
Billy Kay didn’t usually slum it in Camden. He was part of a louche Ladbroke Grove set of jaded rich kids with coke habits who all pretended to be living the hard times but looked down on anyone whose parents didn’t own half a county or a merchant bank, as Billy’s father did.
Ari’s parents might be the dry-cleaning moguls of North London but they’d started out in Hackney and dragged themselves out by their bootstraps. They weren’t too happy that their youngest daughter pulled pints and worked on a secondhand clothes stall to fund the amazing thirty minutes when she was on stage, but Ari didn’t much care what Sadie and Morry Cohen thought.
She got it. Nice Jewish girls weren’t in bands, but maybe that was what intrigued Billy Kay – that besides him, she was the only other cool Jewish person in London. Yeah, there might be a whole coterie of artsy, liberal Jewish types in Hampstead all descended from Sigmund Freud, but they couldn’t tell one end of a guitar from the other so they didn’t count as far as Ari was concerned. That had to be why Billy stared at her when she was ordering a drink in a grimy Camden pub or flicking through the racks in the record shops on Hanway Street. He pretended to ignore her, but when she pretended to ignore him right back, Tabitha would hiss, ‘He’s staring at you.’
Or he could have been staring because every other girl in a band or in a club or in a record shop in 1986 wore fifties summer dresses, white ankle socks and lace-up brogues, and they all bobbed their hair and carried their stuff in leather satchels and tried to look gamine and coy. Ari hated coy.
She dyed her hair black and backcombed it into a gravity-defying bouffant, applied lashings of thick black liquid eyeliner and red lipstick and wore her dresses leopard print and skin tight. Sure it was hard to work a fuzz pedal in a five-inch-high winklepicker but it wasn’t impossible.
And when you were married to a girl called the Honourable Olivia Chivers, whose parents owned a fucking stately home and had probably got down one of their shotguns when you knocked up their daughter, a not-so-nice Jewish girl had to be the last word in exotica.
Chapter Three
Ellie loved her office. Not just because she was twenty-six and already had her own office – it was the only place in her world that was exactly how she wanted it.
It was airy and light. It was minimalist. She had a big desk, which was actually a Le Corbusier dining table, with nothing on it but her telephone, laptop, a white Roberts radio, and a small white Eames elephant, which she’d found heavily reduced in a little shop in Margate that was going out of business.
There was one splash of colour from a reproduction art-deco rug in soft shades of blue. Her books and reference guides and box files were neatly arranged on her modular shelving and everything else was hidden from view in the cupboard below.
Ellie strived to achieve the same clean minimalism at home but it was hard with two flatmates who liked to traipse into her bedroom to borrow clothes, books and make-up, and to spill drinks or, worse, nail varnish, on her floor and even her bedclothes as they hung out in her room to escape the noise of bouzouki music and plate smashing from Theo’s restaurant when he did special ladies’ nights on alternate Wednesday and Thursday evenings.
It was little wonder then that her pristine work environment was so pleasing. Calmness and order reigned, and every time Ellie walked into her office she felt like the best version of her that there was. It was a feeling that she could never get used to. Like this morning, as she sat down on her Arne Jacobsen swivel chair, her bum nestled lovingly on over two thousand pounds’ worth of white lacquered, laminated sliced veneer, which had been languishing in her boss’s storage facility in King’s Cross until Ellie had liberated it, and sipped her latte as she read the morning’s emails. It was at moments like this that Ellie felt like a proper grown-up, though most proper grownups probably didn’t have to remind themselves they were proper grown-ups.
She worked steadily f
or half an hour but was replying to an email from her grandmother who wanted her to go to John Lewis in Oxford Street and buy vacuum cleaner bags because the Brent Cross branch were out of stock when her office door, which had been ajar, opened.
‘Cohen, where’s Piers?’
She didn’t pause.
… and I can pop them in the post or bring them when I come round for Friday night dinner in a couple of weeks, if you can wait that long.
Lots and lots and lots of love
Ellie xoxo
Then she looked up at Vaughn, her boss, who was waiting with a querulous expression on his face. To be fair, he spent ninety per cent of the time looking querulous. It was just the way his face was.
‘He had some errands to run,’ Ellie lied, trying to sound harried and glancing down at her laptop as if she was busy with important gallery business.
‘What kind of errands were more pressing than the customs declarations that I needed on my desk first thing?’ Vaughn wanted to know.
He sounded properly annoyed now. Ellie decided to give him her full attention.
‘He had to take an invoice to the printers because they forgot to sign it, then he had to go to the post office.’ She frowned. ‘Something to do with the customs declaration. He did say, but I wasn’t paying much attention.’
‘You’re lying, Cohen,’ Vaughn said. He always called her ‘Cohen’ because he said her first name was too insipid to be said out loud. Ellie didn’t take offence. He also refused to call Muffin anything other than Alexandra, which was the name she’d been christened with. ‘You always give everything your full attention so you must be covering for him.’ He sighed and almost cracked a smile, so he was obviously in a good mood. ‘Dare I even ask what he’s done now? Has he put his foot through something again?’
For the briefest moment, Ellie considered telling Vaughn about the penis epidemic, but his moods were mercurial and she didn’t want to talk about penises with her boss. She liked to maintain some professional distance. ‘Nothing like that,’ she murmured noncommittally. ‘Just errands.’
Vaughn wasn’t convinced but Ellie managed to distract him by giving him an update on the Emerging Scandinavian Artists exhibition she was curating and soon he was leaving her office with an uncharacteristic: ‘Looks like you have everything under control. By the way, Grace says that Copenhagen is the new Berlin, but then she’s always saying something is the new something.’
Grace, Vaughn’s much younger wife, was fashion editor on Skirt magazine. In the two years since he’d got married, Vaughn was much easier to deal with, apart from when he and Grace rowed (which they did frequently), when he was much worse. Luckily, Piers was tight with Grace and Lola knew her socially, so Ellie got the nod when Vaughn and Grace had been fighting and could stay out of his way.
Besides, Vaughn could never be as scary as he’d been the first time that Ellie had met him. His name had been mentioned in awestruck whispers all the way through her degree course in Criticism, Communication and Curation. There had been a huge furore in her second year at Central St Martins when he’d mounted a successful coup to have the creative director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts fired. That same year he’d swept into one of the studios before the Fine Art undergraduates’ final show, bought every single piece from a German student called Frans and made him sign away the rights to everything he produced for the next ten years.
Then came that awful fateful day in her final year when Ellie had been tasked with curating the Conceptual Arts undergraduate degree show. Theoretically she was meant to be assisting but it had been a very weak crop of undergraduates that year and when the actual salaried curator had seen the badly executed, poorly conceptualised fruits of their labours, she’d washed her hands of them. It was left to Ellie to write the exhibition brochure, drum up what publicity she could, contact dealers, agents and museum muckety-mucks and beg them to attend.
It had been an absolute, bloody disaster, which had counted as thirty per cent of Ellie’s final mark. On opening night, the art critic of the Evening Standard had even refused to enter the gallery. ‘Far kinder that I say nothing at all,’ he’d told Ellie when she pleaded with him to stay for a glass of really indifferent Chardonnay.
Ellie had then spent the next two days being shouted at by Conceptual Artists and Conceptual Artists’ parents and significant others, who blamed her for the lack of interest. She’d been feeling pretty despondent on a Thursday afternoon, three days into the exhibition, and was standing in the gallery wondering if it might help in the slightest if she repositioned some of the pieces when Vaughn had walked in. He looked just like his photo on artpedia.org: tall, grim and utterly formidable.
Ellie had simply stood there, face aflame, as Vaughn had slowly walked round the space. Finally he’d walked up to her and she’d tried to smile but gave up when he said, ‘This is the worst undergraduate show I have ever seen. Every single one of these artists, though I hesitate to use that word, should be shot for crimes against aestheticism. You should be ashamed for having any part of this.’
Then he’d gone. Ellie had made sure that he was really gone and wasn’t coming back to say even more mean things, then she’d burst into tears.
It wasn’t until she’d scrubbed her eyes with a piece of toilet tissue, and phoned her mum and her grandma and her grandpa and her mum’s friends, who all assured her that it wasn’t her fault and she’d done the best she could in the circumstances, that Ellie had the best idea of her life. Ever.
She’d cobbled together a press release, then emailed the Evening Standard critic, the critics at The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times and every art blogger she knew with the scoop that she, according to the most feared and influential art dealer in London, was curating the worst ever undergraduate show to take up gallery space. She’d quoted Vaughn verbatim, then added a few flourishes about the hard lot in life Conceptual Arts graduates had and how the industry had to support them or there’d be no art industry left.
Somehow it had worked. The gallery was packed with critics, dealers and scenesters eager to see what all the fuss was about. Ellie had given countless interviews, coined the phrase ‘The New Ugly’ (she was still particularly proud of that), and sold every single vile piece and installation.
When the Dean of Undergraduate Studies asked to see Ellie, she knew no fear. The students curating the Fine Arts undergraduate degree show had done a pretty poor job and props were due but when she was shown into the Dean’s office, Vaughn was sitting behind his desk.
Ellie had looked imploringly at the Dean but he’d pushed her onto a chair and headed for the door. ‘I’ll let you two sort this out,’ he’d blustered, and left her with Vaughn, who wielded enough power to get some big kahuna from the ICA fired, so ruining her nascent career wasn’t going to tax him unduly.
They’d sat there in silence for an agonising while. Ellie knew what Vaughn was thinking: she was a nice Home Counties girl who’d crack under pressure. That was what most people at Central St Martins thought of her because she’d never cultivated a mockney accent or tried to disguise a privileged upbringing by dressing as if she’d just done a trolley dash in Oxfam. If that was what Vaughn thought too, then he was in for a nasty surprise, because she’d been brought up on a rough Camden council estate and had regularly stepped over the slumbering bodies of itinerant musicians who were kipping on the living-room floor as she got ready for school. Hell, she’d once been taken to the park by the late Ruby X, so if Vaughn thought he could start shouting at her and that she’d just sit there and take it, then … well, she’d probably cry but on the inside she’d be giving him the finger.
‘I did a little digging on you,’ was what he’d eventually said in a calm voice. ‘I know exactly who you are. I used to know your mother … and your father.’
It hadn’t exactly been a shock, though Ellie felt herself pitching forward. When she’d mentioned her predicament to her mother, who knew absolutely everyone, she??
?d shaken her head. ‘Jimmy Vaughn,’ she’d mused. ‘Always thought he’d end up in prison or, well, dead.’
But to hear Vaughn mention her father, who was never, ever mentioned, wasn’t what Ellie had been expecting and the shock threw her for a second. But only for a second, until she’d forced herself to raise her head and look Vaughn directly in the eye. ‘Yeah, Mum says hi, by the way.’
Then she’d waited for him to start with the shouting and the threatening and the ‘I’m going to ruin yous’, but he’d offered her a job instead.
‘As my general assistant, then we’ll see how things progress once you’re house-trained,’ he’d said. ‘I do like to have someone poor and hungry on staff. They tend to have more of a work ethic than the children of the aristocracy.’
Ellie had lasted six months as Vaughn’s general assistant. He’d shouted at her every day; threatened to fire her without references every day; sent her scuttling to the loo every day so she could cry angry tears in private, but she’d learned more in six months than she had in her three years as an undergraduate.
When she’d picked a degree course it had been a compromise between her mother’s desire for Ellie ‘to do something really creative and rock ’n’ roll with your life’ and her grandparents’ belief in a solid recession-proof career. Ellie knew all about the major art movements, could differentiate between good and bad brushstrokes and could understand why investing in art was a safer bet than hedge funds or stock options, but she didn’t really ‘get’ art. It turned out that not getting art wasn’t a huge obstacle to success if you worked for an art dealer and she did have great interpersonal skills.
So when a Premier League footballer had arrived to buy some art for his new Epping Forest mansion, Ellie was entrusted with the care of his wife, a nice girl called Carlie, who she’d taken up to Vaughn’s office so they could talk about handbags and shoes and all the other things Vaughn had told her to talk to Carlie about.