Poppy had never seen a transformation like it. The effect Will Smyth had had on Claudia was mesmerizing. She looked prettier; she was happier; she couldn’t stop singing. It went to show, thought Poppy, mystified. There really was no accounting for taste.
‘You’re home,’ Claudia cried when she arrived back from work on Wednesday afternoon. ‘Perfect, we can eat right away. I’ve made a chili.’
‘Made?’ Poppy was startled. ‘You mean poked holes in the cellophane and put in the microwave?’
‘No, made made.’ Claudia tried to look Nigella Lawson-ish, as if preparing meals from scratch was something that came perfectly naturally to her. ‘Really made. And there’s no need to stare at me like that,’ she went on defensively. ‘It’s only chili.’
‘Oh, I get it. Will’s coming round to dinner and you want him to see what a perfect wife you’ll make.’
‘Wrong’—Claudia looked smug—‘so there. I’m meeting him at Johnnie’s Bar for a drink.’ She beamed. She couldn’t stop beaming. ‘He’s going to introduce me to his friends.’
And later, when he brought her home, she would casually ask if he was hungry and they would open the fridge in search of something to eat. Then she would say, even more casually, ‘There’s some leftover chili here; we could heat that up. Or I could do cheese and biscuits.’
It was Claudia’s subtle approach and she was proud of it. Anyone, after all, could knock themselves out producing a ravishingly formal dinner. Well, she was going to go one better. She was going to really impress Will by being the girl with the ravishing leftovers.
‘You keep looking at your watch,’ said Poppy, mopping up the last smear of sauce from her plate. She popped the bread into her mouth. ‘That was brilliant. Should he have phoned by now?’
‘No, no,’ Claudia lied brightly.
‘Only you seem nervous.’
‘Me, nervous? Why would I be nervous? Oh—!’
The phone rang. Claudia leapt on it, her skin prickling all over with relief.
Seconds later she passed it across to Poppy.
‘For you.’
Poppy winced. If Will made Claudia happy, she wanted him to phone. If Will made Claudia make stupendous chili she wanted him to phone almost as much as Claudia did.
‘Hi-ya!’
Five minutes later Poppy replaced the receiver.
‘That was Dina.’
‘I know it was Dina.’ Twitchy with nerves, Claudia couldn’t help sounding irate. ‘I spoke to her first, didn’t I?’
‘She asked if she could come and stay with us again this weekend.’
‘And you said yes. Again.’
‘I couldn’t really say no.’ Poppy shrugged. ‘She’s hell-bent on coming up here. I think she’s going through a bad patch at home. Anyway, Caspar doesn’t mind.’
Claudia was still fretful. She didn’t even dare glance at the phone now. Maybe it was like a watched kettle never boiling… if she looked at it, it wouldn’t ring.
‘Well if you ask me, it’s taking advantage. Why can’t she book into an hotel?’
Poppy couldn’t resist the dig.
‘Maybe for the same reason Will didn’t book into one the other night. Because it was more convenient to stay here.’
Poppy was lying semi-submerged in the bath an hour later when she heard the phone trill again downstairs. Before long Claudia was hammering joyfully on the bathroom door.
‘That was Will, ringing to say he’s finished work. Just to let you know I’m off out now to meet him.’
Phew, that was a relief. Poppy turned the hot tap on again in celebration, and added another dollop of Body Shop grapefruit shampoo because she’d run out of bubble bath.
‘Okay, have a good time.’
‘I will, I will!’
‘Oh, and I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier,’ Poppy added just for fun. ‘The Dina thing. Maybe you’re right. I’ll tell her to find a B and B somewhere instead.’
Claudia hesitated for less than a second. Will had phoned and all was right with the world.
‘Don’t be daft, I was only joking,’ she cried through the closed door. ‘Of course Dina can stay.’
To while away a slow morning, Poppy and Marlene had been giving men marks out of ten for their bums.
‘This is sexist,’ Jake complained. No matter how hard he concentrated on his accounts, he couldn’t help but overhear their outrageous remarks.
‘You’re jealous because Marlene only gave you a seven,’ Poppy told him.
‘Marlene doesn’t recognize quality when she sees it,’ said Jake. ‘And it’s still sexist.’
‘It’s downright depressing if you ask me.’ Marlene pulled a face like Harpo Marx. ‘I mean it’s hardly Bondi Beach around here, is it? Hardly Baywatch.’ She helped herself to another lemon sherbet, sucking noisily and twiddling the cellophane wrapper around her fat fingers. ‘I mean, most of the blokes in here today have been bloody antiques.’
Glancing up, Jake spotted Caspar coming in through the double doors.
‘How about this one? Is he more your type?’
‘Average-looking,’ said Poppy, sounding bored. She grinned as Marlene’s jaw dropped open. ‘A five, maybe a six. Not bad.’
‘Not bad? Are you kidding?’ squealed Marlene. ‘Look at him, he’s gorgeous! Talk about… Oh wow, he’s winking at me.’
‘Actually,’ said Poppy, ‘he’s winking at me.’
It was very quiet on the ground floor. Caspar, whose hearing was excellent, said, ‘If you must know, I was winking at Jake.’
‘My lucky day,’ Jake observed mildly. He gave up on the accounts, which were in a hideous state, and closed the book with a thud. Then he began cleaning the dusty lenses of his spectacles with the sleeve of his plaid shirt.
‘It is,’ said Caspar. He had come straight from Gillingham’s, the prestigious firm of auctioneers in South Kensington whose name was right up there along with Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Poppy looked confused. ‘Is what?’
Jake, who wasn’t so slow, said, ‘Really? You mean that little picture’s worth a few bob after all? That’s great.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ said Caspar, ‘hands up anyone here who knows the name Wilhelm von Kantz.’
Poppy looked blank. Jake looked blank. Marlene, hoping to impress the most heavenly body she’d seen in a long long time, screwed up her eyes and nodded slowly as if the name did mean something to her, she just wasn’t sure what.
‘Well?’ Caspar turned his attention to her.
‘Um… was he the Red Baron?’
He looked appalled by their stupidity.
‘Hopeless, the lot of you. Okay, let me run through this. Von Kantz died two years ago at the age of ninety-three. He was a second-generation American of German-Dutch descent. He was a painter, a womanizer, a serious drinker, and he made a bit of a prat of himself publicly rubbishing the traditionalists and maintaining that his was the only form of art worth the canvas it was painted on.’
‘Blimey.’ Poppy shook her head in wonder. ‘You mean the chap who did “Dead Hamster on a Patio” said that? Some people have a nerve.’
‘What?’ said Marlene, mystified.
‘Go on,’ said Jake.
‘He came over to England just before the Second World War. He was married—well, married-ish—but he wrote in his diaries about an affair he had here with a woman called Dorrie.’
‘Dorothea,’ Poppy exclaimed. ‘Oh, I love it when things match up! He had an affair with Dorothea de Lacey and he gave her a painting of a dead hamster to remember him by. How romantic can you get?’
‘Who did you show it to?’ Jake frowned. ‘How much does he think it’s actually worth?’
‘I took it to Gillingham’s on Monday. We had to wait until this morning for a couple of their experts to fly back from Boston. I’ve been with them all morning. They’ve verified the painting’s authenticity. They asked if they could handle the sale.’
Poppy’s eyes were by this time like saucers.
‘You mean it’s worth more than a couple of hundred?’
‘Put it this way,’ said Caspar. ‘When he died, Wilhelm von Kantz was regarded as one of the greatest painters in the world.’
People were staring. The entire antiques market had gone silent. Poppy began to giggle. She punched Caspar on the arm.
‘Okay, it’s a wind-up,’ she told Jake. ‘We’ve been Punk’d. Any minute now, the ghost of this loopy artist is going to burst in here and demand his picture back. Wilhelm von Kantz is probably an anagram of gullible nit wits. Watch out for hidden cameras everyone, and grumpy council officials with beards—’
‘You really are a bunch of peasants,’ said Caspar. ‘How can you not have heard of von Kantz? You’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard of de Kooning.’
More blank faces. Edward de Kooning, for decades one of Wilhelm’s friends and rivals, was possibly the greatest living exponent of this form of art, and nobody here even recognized the name.
‘Picasso?’ said Caspar. ‘Ring any bells?’
‘How much is this painting likely to fetch?’ Jake asked quietly.
Caspar rapped Poppy across the knuckles to regain her attention.
‘Will you stop looking for hidden cameras? This isn’t a joke.’ Then he turned to look at Jake. ‘Three quarters of a million pounds.’