“It will range from small individual portraits meant for the private home to large-scale group portraits of members of charitable institutions and civic guards.”
He stops pacing and eyes the basket suspiciously, feeling as though something inside is about to jump out at him.
“Yes, Simon, in the Sainsbury Wing. If there’s anything else you need to know, please do contact me here at the office.”
He hurries his colleague off the phone and hangs up. His hand pauses on the receiver, half tempted to call for security. The small basket seems alien and sweet in his musty office, like a newborn baby in a cradle left on the dirty steps of an orphanage. Underneath the wicker handle, the contents are covered by a checked cloth. He stands back and lifts it slowly, preparing to jump away at any moment.
A dozen or so muffins stare back at him.
His heart thumps, and he quickly looks around his box-sized office; he knows nobody is with him, but his discomfort at receiving this surprise gift adds an eerie presence. He searches the basket for a card. Taped to the other side is a small white envelope. With what he realizes now are shaking hands, he rips it rather clumsily from the basket and slides the card out. In the center of the card, in neat handwritten script, it simply says:
Thank you…
Chapter 28
JUSTIN POWER-WALKS THROUGH THE HALLS of the National Gallery, part of him obeying and the other part disobeying the no-running-in-the-halls rule as he jogs three steps then walks three steps, jogs three steps and slows to a walk again. Goody Two-shoes and the daredevil within him battling it out.
He spots Roberta tiptoeing through the hallway, making her way like a shadow to the private library where she has worked for the past five years.
“Roberta!” His daredevil is unleashed, disobeying the no-shouting-in-the-halls rule, and his voice echoes and rebounds off the walls and the high ceilings.
It’s enough for Roberta to freeze and turn slowly, her eyes wide and terrified like a deer caught in the headlights. She blushes as the half-dozen others in the hall turn to stare at her. Her gulp is visible from where he stands, and Justin’s immediately sorry for breaking her code, for pointing her out when she wants to be invisible. He stops his power-walking and tries to walk quietly along the floors, to glide as she does, in an attempt to retract the noise he has made. She stands, stiff as a board and as close to the wall as possible. Justin wonders if her behavior is a consequence of her career, or if being a librarian in the National Gallery seemed attractive to her because of her natural way. He thinks the latter.
“Yes,” she whispers, wide-eyed and frightened.
“Sorry for shouting your name,” he says as quietly as he can.
Her face softens, and her shoulders relax a little.
“Where did you get this basket?” He holds it out to her.
“At reception. I was returning from my break when Charlie asked me to give it to you. Is there something wrong?”
“Charlie.” He thinks hard. “He’s at the Sir Paul Getty entrance?”
She nods.
“Okay, thank you, Roberta. I apologize again for shouting.” He dashes off to the East Wing, his daredevil and good side clashing again in a remarkably confused half-run, half-walk combination, while the basket swings from his hand.
“Finished for the day, Little Red Riding Hood?” He hears a croaky chuckle as he nears his destination.
Justin, noticing he has been skipping along with the basket, stops abruptly and spins around to face Charlie, the gallery’s six-foot-tall security guard.
“My, Grandmother, what an ugly head you have.”
“What do you want?”
“I was wondering who gave you this basket?”
“A delivery guy from…” Charlie moves over to behind his small desk and riffles through some papers. He retrieves a clipboard. “Harrods. Zhang Wei,” he reads. “Why? Something wrong with the muffins?” He runs his tongue over his teeth and clears his throat.
Justin’s eyes narrow. “How did you know they were muffins?”
Charlie refuses to meet his stare. “Had to check, didn’t I? This is the National Gallery. You can’t expect me to accept a package without knowing what’s in it.”
Justin studies Charlie, whose face has pinked. He spies crumbs stuck to the corners of his mouth; there are slight traces down his uniform. He removes the checked cloth from his hamper and counts. Eleven muffins.
“Don’t you think it’s odd to send a person eleven muffins?”
“Odd?” Eyes wander, shoulders fidget. “Dunno, mate. Never sent muffins to anyone in my life.”
“Wouldn’t it seem more obvious to send a dozen muffins?”
Shoulders shrug. Fingers fidget. Charlie’s eyes now turn to study everybody that enters the gallery, far more intently than usual. His body language tells Justin that he’s finished with the conversation.
Justin whips out his cell phone as he exits to Trafalgar Square.
“Hello?”
“Bea, it’s Dad.”
“I’m not talking to you.”
“Why not?”
“Peter told me what you said to him at the ballet last night,” she snaps.
“What did I do?”
“You interrogated him about his intentions all night.”
“I’m your father, that’s my job.”
“No, what you did is the job of the Gestapo,” she fumes. “I swear, I’m not speaking to you until you apologize to him.”
“Apologize?” He laughs. “What for? I merely made a few inquiries into his past, in order to ascertain his agenda.”
“Agenda? He doesn’t have an agenda!”
“So I asked him a few questions, so what? Bea, he’s not good enough for you.”
“No, he’s not good enough for you. Anyway, I don’t care what you think of him, it’s me that’s supposed to be happy.”
“He picks strawberries for a living.”
“He is an IT consultant!”
“Then who picks strawberries?” Somebody picks strawberries. “Well, honey, you know how I feel about consultants. If they are so amazing at something, why don’t they do it themselves, instead of just making money telling people how to do it?”
“You’re a lecturer, curator, reviewer, whatever. If you know so much, why don’t you just build a building or paint a damn picture yourself?” she shouts. “Instead of just bragging to everybody about how much you know about them!”
Hmm.
“Sweetheart, let’s not get out of control now.”
“No, you are the one out of control. You will apologize to Peter, and if you don’t, I will not answer your phone calls, and you can deal with your little dramas all by yourself.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Just one question.”
“Dad, I—”
“Did-you-send-me-a-hamper-of-a-dozen-cinnamon-muffins?” he rushes out.
“What? No!”
“No?”
“No muffins! No conversations, no nothing—”
“Now, now, sweetheart, there’s no need for double negatives.”
“I’ll have no more contact with you until you apologize,” she finishes.
“Okay.” He sighs. “Sorry.”
“Not to me. To Peter.”
“Okay, but does that mean you won’t be collecting my dry cleaning on your way over tomorrow? You know where it is, it’s the one beside the tube station—”
The phone clicks. He stares at it in confusion. My own daughter hung up on me? I knew this Peter was trouble.
He thinks again about the muffins and dials another number. He clears his throat.
“Hello.”
“Jennifer, it’s Justin.”
“Hello, Justin.” Her voice is cold.
Used to be warm. Like honey. No, like hot caramel. It used to bounce from octave to octave when she said his name, just like the piano music he’d wake early on Sunday mornings to hear her play from the conservatory. But now?
He liste
ns to the silence on the other end. Ice.
“I’m just calling to see whether you’d sent me a basket of muffins.” As soon as he’s said it, he realizes how ridiculous this call is. Of course she didn’t send him anything. Why would she?
“I beg your pardon?”
“I received a basket of muffins at my office today along with a thank-you note, but the note failed to reveal the sender’s identity. I was wondering if it was you.”
Her voice is amused now. No, not amused, mocking. “What would I have to thank you for, Justin?”
It’s a simple question, but because he knows her as he does, it has implications far beyond the words, and of course Justin jumps up and snaps at the bait. The hook cuts through his lip, and bitter Justin is back, the voice he grew so accustomed to during the demise of their…well, during their demise. She has reeled him right in.
“Oh, I don’t know, twenty years of marriage, perhaps. A daughter. A good living. A roof over your head.” He knows it’s a stupid statement. That before him, after him, and even without him, she had and always would have a roof, of all things, over her head. But it’s spurting out of him now, and he can’t stop and won’t stop, for he is right and she is wrong and anger is spurring on every word, like a jockey whipping his horse as they near the finish line. “Travel all over the world.” Whip-crack-away! “Clothes, clothes, and more clothes.” Whip-crack-away! “A new kitchen when we didn’t need one, a conservatory, for Christ’s sake…” And he goes on, like a man from the nineteenth century who’d been keeping his wife accustomed to a good life she would otherwise have been without, ignoring the fact that she had made a good living herself playing in an orchestra that traveled the world.
At the beginning of their married life they had no choice but to live with Justin’s mother. They were young and had a baby to rear, the reason for their hasty marriage, and as Justin was still attending college by day, bartending at night, and working at an art museum on the weekends, Jennifer had made money playing the piano at an upmarket restaurant in Chicago. She would return home in the early hours of the morning, her back sore and tendonitis in her middle finger, but the memory of this flies out of his mind at this moment. Finally running out of things to list from the last twenty years, and out of steam, he stops.
Jennifer is silent, refusing to spar with him this time.
“Jennifer?”
“Yes, Justin.” Icy again.
Justin sighs with exhaustion. “So, was it you?”
“It must have been one of your other women, because it most certainly wasn’t me.”
Click, and she’s gone.
Rage bubbles inside him. Other women. Other women! One affair when he was twenty years old, a fumble in the dark with Mary-Beth Dursoa at college, before he and Jennifer were even married, and she carries on as though he were Don Juan. In their bedroom, he’d even put a print of A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph by Piero di Cosimo, which Jennifer had always loathed but which he had always hoped would send her subliminal messages. In the painting there is a young girl, semiclothed, who on first glance seems asleep, but on further viewing has blood seeping from her throat. A satyr is mourning her. Justin’s interpretation of the painting is that the woman, mistrusting her husband’s fidelity, followed him into the woods. He was hunting, not going astray as she thought, and shot her by accident. Sometimes during his and Jennifer’s toughest arguments, their eyes stinging with tears, their hearts breaking from the pain, their heads pounding from the analysis, Justin would study the painting and envy the satyr.
Fuming, he charges down the North Terrace steps, sits down by one of the fountains, places the basket by his feet, and bites into a muffin, wolfing it down so quickly he barely has time to taste it. Crumbs fall at his feet, attracting a flock of pigeons with intent in their beady black eyes. He goes to reach for another muffin, but he is swarmed by even more overenthusiastic pigeons pecking at the contents of his basket. Peck, peck, peck—he watches dozens more flock toward him, coming in to land like fighter jets. Afraid of falling missiles from those that circle his head, he picks up his basket and shoos them away with all the butchness of an eleven-year-old.
A few minutes later he breezes in the front door of his home, not even taking the time to close it, and is immediately greeted by Doris, with a paint palette in her hand.
“Okay, so I’ve narrowed it down,” she begins, thrusting dozens of colors in his face.
Her long leopard-print nails are each decorated with a diamanté jewel. She wears an all-in-one snakeskin jumpsuit, and her feet wobble dangerously in patent lace-up ankle stilettos. Her hair is its usual shock of red; her eyes are catlike, with inky eyeliner sweeping up from the corners of her eyes; and with her painted lips matching her hair, she reminds him of Ronald McDonald.
Not sensing his mood, she begins, “Gooseberry Fool, Celtic Forest, English Mist, and Woodland Pearl, all calm tones, would look so good in this room, or even Wild Mushroom, Nomadic Glow, and Sultana Spice. Cappuccino Candy is one of my faves, but I don’t think it’ll work next to that curtain, do you?”
She waves a fabric in front of his face, and it tickles his nose, which tingles with such intensity it senses the fight that is about to brew. He doesn’t respond, but takes deep breaths and counts to ten in his mind. And when that doesn’t stop her from listing more paint colors, he keeps on going to twenty.
“Hello? Justin?” She snaps her fingers in his face. “Hel-lo?”
“Maybe you should give Justin a break, Doris. He looks tired.” Al looks nervously at his brother.
“But—”
“Get your sultana spice behind over here,” he teases, and she whoops.
“Okay, but just one more thing. Bea will love her room done in Ivory Lace. And Petey too. Imagine how romantic this will be for—”
“Enough!” Justin screams at the top of his lungs, not wanting his daughter’s name and the word romantic to share the same sentence.
Doris jumps and immediately stops talking. Her hand flies to her chest. Al stops mid-gulp, his bottle freezing just below his lips, his heavy breathing above the rim making strange pipe music. Other than that, there’s absolute silence.
“Doris”—Justin takes a deep breath and tries to speak as calmly as possible—“enough of this, please. Enough of this Cappuccino Nights—”
“Candy,” she interrupts, and quickly falls silent again.
“Whatever. This is a Victorian house, from the nineteenth century, not some painted lady from an episode of Changing Rooms.” He tries to restrain his emotions, his feelings on behalf of the building. “If you had mentioned Cappuccino Chocolate—”
“Candy,” she whispers.
“Whatever! To anyone during that time, you would have been instantly burned at the stake.”
She squeaks, insulted.
“It needs sophistication, it needs to be researched, it needs furniture of the period, colors of the period. It can’t have a room that sounds like Al’s dinner menu.”
“Hey!” Al speaks up.
“I think it needs—” Justin takes another deep breath and says gently, “somebody else for the job. Maybe it’s just bigger than you thought it was going to be, but I appreciate your help, really I do. Please tell me you understand.”
She nods slowly, and he breathes a sigh of relief.
Suddenly the paint palettes go flying across the room as Doris lets rip, “You pretentious little bastaaaaard!”
“Doris!” Al leaps up out of his armchair, or at least makes a great attempt to.
Justin immediately takes three steps back as she walks aggressively toward him, pointing a sparkly animal-print nail at him like a weapon.
“Listen here, you silly little man. I have spent the last two weeks researching this dump of a basement in the kinds of libraries and places you wouldn’t even think exist. I’ve been to dark, dingy dungeons where people smell of old…things.” Her nostrils flare, and her voice deepens threateningly. “I purchased every historic period pa
int brochure that I could get my hands on and applied the colors in accordance with the color rules at the end of the nineteenth century. I’ve shaken hands with people and seen parts of London you don’t even wanna know about. I’ve looked through books so old, the dust mites were big enough to hand them to me from the shelves. I’ve been to secondhand, thirdhand, even antique stores and have sat in chairs so rickety I could smell the black death that killed the last person who died sitting on them. I have sanded down so much pine, I have splinters in places you don’t wanna see. So.” She prods him in the chest with her dagger nail as she emphasizes each word, finally backing him up against the wall. “Don’t. Tell. Me. That this is too big for me.”
She clears her throat and stands up straight. The anger in her voice is replaced with a vulnerable “poor me” tremble. “But despite what you said, I will finish this project. I will go on undeterred. I will do it in spite of you, and I will do it for your brother, who might be dead next month, not that you even care.”
“Dead?” Justin’s eyes widen.
With that, she turns on her heel and storms off into her bedroom.
She sticks her head back in the doorway. “By the way, just so you know, I would have banged the door behind me very loudly to show just how angry I am, but it’s currently out in the backyard ready for sanding and priming before I paint it”—and this she spits out rebelliously—“Ivory Lace.”
Then she disappears again, without a bang.
I shift from foot to foot nervously outside Justin’s front door, which is oddly wide open. Should I ring the bell? Simply call his name? Will he call the police and have me arrested for trespassing? Oh, this was such a bad idea. Frankie and Kate have persuaded me to come here to present myself to him. They pumped me up to such a point I hopped in the first taxi that came my way and took it to Trafalgar Square, to try to catch him at the National Gallery before he left. I ended up trailing him on the street while he was on the phone, hearing him question someone about the basket. I’d felt oddly comfortable just watching him, without his knowing, reveling in the secret thrill of being able to actually see him for who he is instead of just viewing his memories.