Gold has no smell. All the other materials Helena used in her work had their own comfortingly familiar scents, from the throat-catching pungency of the chemicals and varnishes to the warm mustiness of sawdust and the freshness of the water-based fillers and paints. Only gold left no evidence of itself in the air.
She bent forward to touch the dampened parchment size she had applied over the repair to her client’s eighteenth-century girandole. It was a lovely piece, with holders for a trio of candles in front of an oval mirror in a delicately carved and gilded rococo frame. Having checked that the size was properly tacky against her fingertips, she took a sheet of twenty-four-carat gold leaf from its cardboard envelope and laid it lightly on the size.
There was a long buzz from the front door bell. Helena paid no attention, not even raising her eyes to the screen over her workbench. The sheets of gold leaf were so fragile that it always took all her concentration to apply one without tearing it or leaving any wrinkles. It was far too expensive to waste.
When she was at last satisfied with the smooth perfection of the patch, she did look up at the screen and smiled at the sight of the man patiently waiting under the wisteria that hung around her door. The grey and white image was sharp enough for her to identify her half-brother but not much more than that. It smudged his features and made him look much squatter than he was, almost ordinary; and if there was one thing Ivo was not, it was ordinary.
Reaching across to the intercom, Helena pressed a switch and said: ‘Ivo? What a treat! Sorry about the wait. I’m in the shed, gilding. I’ll buzz you in.’
He looked up towards the discreet camera over the door and nodded. ‘Great, thanks,’ he said into the grille beside the bell.
Having stripped off the old-fashioned cream linen carpenter’s apron she wore over her loose khaki shorts and black T-shirt, Helena brushed some of the dust from her espadrilles and removed a blob of size that was stuck in her hair.
By the time she reached the door of the shed, Ivo was already opening the french windows. He waited at the top of the iron steps, standing in full sunlight between cascades of frothy-looking white and pink Clematis montana, which grew entwined with climbing roses. He was an inch or two under six foot, but he had had the luck to inherit the best features of both his parents. With his mother’s thick dark hair, expressive black eyes and almost golden skin, he also had his father’s infinitely more delicate bones and slim, straight figure. He was dressed, as usual, in faded jeans and an old cotton shirt that had been washed and worn to a silky softness that was much more important to him than its fraying collar and cuffs.
Helena was different from him in everything but their shared disdain for expensive clothes. She took after her mother, and was slight and fair, with the kind of thin skin that freckles easily and large greenish-grey eyes. Her slithery blond hair was casually bunched out of the way on top of her head in a rubber band the postman had left around a bundle of letters that morning. There was no makeup on her face to disguise the freckles, and the old army-surplus shorts she was wearing had been chosen for their comfort and the ease of movement they gave her as she worked. Her slender legs were bare and she had black canvas espadrilles on her narrow feet. She wore no jewellery of any kind and her nails were cut very short.
‘Are you very busy,’ Ivo asked, sounding almost wistful, ‘or might you have time to knock off for a bit?’
Helena locked the door of the shed without bothering to answer. They both knew that he had not needed to ask; she had always given him everything he wanted and would have dropped the most urgent piece of work in order to spend time with him.
‘Let’s go indoors,’ she said, pocketing the key. ‘It’s too hot and bright to sit out here; at least it is for me. And you must be boiled if you’ve come all the way from Oxford. What are you up here for?’
‘Helena,’ he said, mock severity banishing all the softness from his voice. ‘Come off it. You know perfectly well I’m going to this dinner the parents are giving for Geoffrey Duxford. I thought you were, too.’
‘I suppose I am,’ she said, sighing. ‘I’d managed to forget it for a blessed few minutes. Silly of me. Never mind. You must be thirsty. What would you like to drink? There’s plenty of beer in the fridge or fizzy water, orange juice, elderflower cordial – but perhaps that’s too girly for you.’
‘Not at all. It sounds great. You know, I think you really had forgotten the dinner. What a very good thing I dropped round in time to remind you!’
Helena laughed and brushed past him on the way into her narrow kitchen. The fridge provided a welcome blast of cold air as she opened its door, and she stood gratefully in the coolness for an extravagant minute before reaching to the back of the bottom shelf for the bottles she needed.
‘I hadn’t really forgotten. But I have been trying not to think about it – or the rows it must have been generating.’
Ivo casually stroked her thin back as she poured their drinks. She wished she was not so sweaty and hoped her T-shirt did not feel damp under his hand. If it did, Ivo showed no signs of revulsion, and his voice was as lightly friendly as usual when he said: ‘You take the parental fratching far too seriously. You’re as bad as Jane. Be like me and ignore it.’
Helena turned with the two cool tumblers in her hands.
‘But how can you? Don’t they try to suck you in when they start savaging each other?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Ivo with all the confident tolerance she envied so much. He took one of the glasses from her. ‘I just don’t let them.’
Helena drank some of the prickling, sweet elderflower cordial and then said: ‘I wish I knew how you managed that.’
‘It’s not exactly hard. You just have to remember that they choose to carry on like that. When something happens to make them want to stop, they will. You didn’t make them start …’
Didn’t I? thought Helena, but she did not say it aloud. ‘… and nothing you could possibly say or do would make them stop. You’d do much better to keep out of it all. They don’t really want you involved – whatever they say – and it wouldn’t get to you so much if you left them to it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Helena, envying him his detachment almost more than any of his multifarious talents.
Everything seemed to come easily to him. He had been born with brains as well as confidence, and he had learned to make the most of them. Helena had watched his smooth progress through life with amused admiration, not in the least surprised when he had come top in every exam he had ever sat or when the dons had positively begged him to stay up at university to take a second degree after his stunning success as an undergraduate.
Like almost everyone else, she loved him. She had done so from the moment she first saw him, when she was a skinny, anxious seven-year-old, admitted to her stepmother’s room only a few hours after his birth.
‘They did tell you the dinner was to be black tie, didn’t they?’ she said in a ludicrous attempt to assert her seniority.
Ivo’s glinting smile told her that he knew exactly what she was doing and did not mind it in the least. She slid back in her chair and smiled with him.
‘Yes, dear,’ he said as though to a fragile, elderly relation, ‘and I washed behind my ears this morning.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
‘That’s better. You really do need to lighten up, old girl. What are you going to wear tonight?’
‘A rather glamorous long skirt,’ she said, obediently trying to relax. ‘I think it’s going to look pretty good.’
‘I’m sure it is. In the charming phrase of a well-known crime writer whose novel I was reading the other day, you always do scrub up well. What’s the skirt like?’
‘Sort of triangular, made from some spectacularly over-the-top ancient Florentine damask – black and grey. I bought it at a textile auction when I was in Amsterdam, meaning it for some chairs I was doing up.’ She laughed again. ‘It turned out to be much too flamboyant for them, but I thought it would do for me. I’m planning to wear it with a black scoop-neck body and that gold locket Geoffrey gave me for my christening. I hope it’ll all go down all right.’
‘Don’t be such a wimp. Why shouldn’t it? And anyway, why should you care? I never have understood why you mind so much about what other people think of you.’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘No. You need to remember that you’re an independent woman with your own thoroughly successful business and, I may say, a surprisingly high reputation among people who matter.’
‘What on earth do you know about my reputation?’ she asked, sitting up straighter.
‘Aha!’ he said. His black eyes looked thoroughly mischievous. ‘Quite a lot actually. There are some important antique dealers who think you’re positively brilliant at what you do and, in their words, “bizarrely honest” about it. I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds pretty good.’
‘Well, maybe. But how did you hear it?’
‘I’ve been spying on you for weeks,’ he said casually.
‘What?’
‘Don’t look so horrified. It was what we frivolous chaps call a joke, Helena. You know, one of those things that’s supposed to make people laugh.’
‘Ah.’ She manufactured a smile, feeling uncomfortable. Ivo’s jokes were usually much funnier than that. ‘But where did you come across these gossiping antique dealers?’
‘At an auction I was at last month.’
‘You?’
‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ he said. ‘I know chemists are supposed to be boringly wedded to their labs, but it’s not an essential qualification.’
‘No, I suppose not. All the same …’
Her voice dwindled, but it did not matter. Ivo was already starting to say, ‘In fact it was having seen how peculiar some of my colleagues had got that made me realize I must get away from the test tubes sometimes. Those who don’t seem to end up like stale specimens themselves: deeply unattractive, rather smelly, and not much use to anyone.’
Helena laughed, feeling better.
‘I can’t stand sport,’ Ivo went on cheerfully, ‘and I can’t sing a note, so it was going to have to be either acting or art of some kind. I thought I’d try the latter first and get my eye in by doing all the available exhibitions and auctions.’
‘Well, good for you, Ivo. I had no idea.’
‘No? Well, I’ve been to quite a few sales now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not all that keen on pictures or silver, but I think I might seriously enjoy collecting old furniture.’
Helena raised her fair eyebrows. Successful and charming Ivo might be, but it was going to be some years before he was rich enough to start buying antiques.
‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘that’s what’s made me come up so early this afternoon. I was wondering if I couldn’t commission you to do something for me.’
‘Of course I will,’ she said at once. ‘I’d happily bid for anything you want, but, Ivo, anything good is going to be frightfully expensive.’
‘I know that,’ he said, looking amused. ‘And I’m not asking you to bid for anything. I’m quite capable of doing that myself, thanks. Anyway, I’ve already acquired my heart’s desire. But it does need some restoration. I hoped you’d help.’
‘Acquired it? What?’
‘A desk. I think it’s rather a find, but it’s pretty tired and needs a fair amount of work. Will you come out and have look at it and see what you think?’
‘You mean you’ve got it with you?’ said Helena, feeling as though her mind were working much more slowly than usual.
‘Yes. I borrowed a van from a mate at Oxford. It’s parked out there. Come on.’
‘All right. Let me get rid of these first.’ She took both glasses back to the kitchen and then followed him out of the house. A shabby white van was parked behind her much neater, smaller, red one.
Ivo unlocked the dented back doors and leaped nimbly up into the van. Helena followed him hardly less agilely and squatted down in front of the desk, which was swathed in coarse grey blankets and strapped to the struts that ran along the side of the vehicle. She peeled away the blankets and caught her breath at the sight of Ivo’s heart’s desire.
It was a simply shaped walnut kneehole desk in the style of those made during the reign of Queen Anne. Helena could not believe that it could possibly be genuine, although she noticed at once that the veneer had the right soft and silky look with appropriately faded markings. The proportions gave it a kind of unshowy elegance, and, as she ran her fingers over the beading and pulled out one of the drawers, she saw that it was exceedingly well made.
She made a quick visual check of the usual danger points. The veneers were thickish, nearly an eighth of an inch, and correctly quartered on the top. There were three drawers beneath the top and three on either side of the kneehole.
‘Well?’ Ivo said, sounding as though he thought she had had quite enough time to come to a conclusion and was bored with her silence. ‘What d’you think of it?’
‘Superficially it looks good, but real ones are frighteningly rare and I’d hate to give you any false hopes. I don’t quite …’ She looked up at him over her right shoulder, frowning and worried. ‘Ivo, I don’t understand. Even fakes of this quality cost a fortune. How are you going to pay for it?’
He laughed, leaning against the side of the van with his hands in his pockets. ‘You sound terribly worried. Are you mixing me up with my spendthrift, debt-ridden sister?’
‘No,’ said Helena, twisting right round so that she could see his face properly. ‘You couldn’t be as irresponsible as Jane if you tried. But I don’t understand where you’re going to get the money to buy something like this.’
‘Unlike poor old Jane,’ he said, ‘I ‘m lucky enough to have an understanding bank manager.’
‘But what collateral could you possibly offer him? You didn’t pretend that Father would … ?’
‘Helena, don’t be silly. I’m not completely mad. I went to my bank with a business proposition and they thought about it and eventually accepted. The desk is its own security. They could see that it was worth a great deal more than I paid.’
She was still frowning.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘a rather philistine friend of mine with a juicy job in the City inherited it from some batty spinster aunt and had it delivered to his flat. As soon as he got it there, he realized it looked absolutely ghastly with all his modern Italian stuff and so he decided to flog it. When he told me what he was thinking of asking for it, I knew I couldn’t pass up the chance. Between the two of us and my bank manager, we came to an arrangement.’
Helena was silent for a moment, thinking that the purchase of the desk was yet another piece of the astonishing luck that had always been visited on Ivo. She had been trawling antique and junk shops for years, attending many of the big auctions and looking in at antique markets all around the country, and she had never seen anything so good that was not priced at its full value – or more.
‘If it’s what I think it is, you’ve done well. You’ve obviously got a good eye, Ivo. But I’m still puzzled about the bank manager. For someone not yet earning, it’s …’
‘Now, stop it, Helena. You are not responsible for my finances and you don’t have to worry about them. You’ve got plenty of other things to worry about, God knows. If you must know, I’ve been doing some tutoring since the autumn and accumulated just about enough for the bank man to think I’m a fair risk.’
‘Oh, I see.’ She reminded herself that even though Ivo was her younger brother his financial affairs were no business of hers. If he got himself into debt, he was probably quite capable of getting out again. ‘And did he just accept your view of what it was worth?’
‘Of course he didn’t. He’s not a fool. I got a valuation from an Oxford dealer.’ Ivo looked at her with a smile of indescribable affection. ‘I thought it would be better not to involve you at that stage. I can just imagine the state you’d get in if you thought you might’ve been leading me astray.’
‘You know me too well,’ she said, reaching out to touch his arm. ‘That was generous.’
‘So you will patch it up for me then?’
‘I’d love to. I won’t be able to get to it straight away, I’m afraid. I’ve got quite a few things stacked up and I don’t want to antagonize faithful clients, even for you. Shall you mind waiting?’
‘Not at all. But have you got room to hang on to it until you can do it? I don’t want to lug it all the way to Oxford, only to bring it back again.’
‘Sure. Let’s take it in now.’
When the desk was safely stowed at the back of the carefully damp-proofed workshed, once again wrapped in its blankets, Ivo looked at his watch.
‘I suppose I’d better get going; and you ought to start the scrubbing-up. It looks as though it may take some time.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather change here and stay the night?’ Helena said, ignoring his insult. ‘Mike won’t be here and there’s plenty of room.’
‘Sweet of you,’ said Ivo, blowing her a kiss. He was already halfway out of the door of the shed. ‘But I’d better not. I told my mother I’d be with her as soon after seven as I could manage and with rush-hour traffic I’ll be pushed to make it before half past. See you later.’
He had gone, moving as gracefully as ever and leaving as big a gap. Helena reluctantly went upstairs to wash her sticky, dusty hair.