Helena was asleep in the crook of Mike’s arm. It did not last long but for a time it was real sleep, and that was worth a lot to her. She longed to feel safe with him, not just with her conscious, willed mind but with all the uncontrollable, only half-understood parts of her subconscious. If she could have done it by wanting and trying, it would already have happened. When she knew that she was not going to sleep again, she got up, collected the novel she was reading and went to bed again alone in the spare room.
She was up and dressed, sipping coffee and reading the arts section of her Sunday paper by the time Mike emerged, looking enticingly rumpled. He wandered into the kitchen in his bare feet, rubbing his big hands over his face.
‘Sleep all right?’ he asked, blinking at her and smiling sleepily.
‘Yes,’ she said, not wanting to bore him with her oddities. ‘Coffee?’
‘Mm. That would be nice.’
‘And what to eat? I can’t offer you kidneys and bacon or anything like that, but there’s toast, muesli, eggs, fruit. That’s about it, I think. Oh, no, there are some sausages in the freezer, if you’d like.’
He laughed. ‘No thanks. Toast would be great, especially if you’ve got any butter for once.’
‘As it happens, I have,’ she said. ‘In an access of sentimentality, I bought you some in case you should happen to be here for breakfast ever. It’ll be a bit cold, but it’s there.’
He blew her a kiss. ‘Greater love hath no woman.’
‘What? Than to buy her lover food she knows is bad for him?’
‘That’s it. But in any case you don’t “know” it’s bad. You only think it is because of what you’ve read other people writing, and they don’t know either. They’re just spoilsports. I listen to my body and know that butter is good for me.’
‘You are a shocker, you know. And a wheedler, which is probably worse.’
He kissed the top of her head and then pulled her into his arms and hugged her.
‘I never thought I could be grateful for that hellish weekend we spent with Harriet and George,’ he said. ‘And yet it’s led to this.’
‘Who’d have thought it?’ agreed Helena. She tried to look up at him, but she could see little more than his broad chest and bristly chin. ‘You look quite bizarre from this angle.’ She stepped back and saw his friendly duck-like smile. ‘That’s better. Now what am I supposed to be doing? Oh, yes, your toast. Sit down and I’ll bring it. D’you want some of the paper? Help yourself.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, leafing about among the innumerable sections that were spread all over the kitchen table. ‘What would you like to do today?’
‘I hadn’t thought much beyond breakfast and the newspaper,’ she said, looking at him over her shoulder. ‘Why? Have you got plans?’
‘There’s an auction at Beamie’s next week and the stuff’s available for viewing today. I did wonder whether you’d like to come with me.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Helena. ‘I like Beamie’s, although most of their things are way beyond my price range. But I’m surprised you know about the sale. You’re not a collector, are you?’
‘Only in a very small way, but I happen to have a bit of spare cash at the moment and what with the index being so toppy and interest rates so pathetic, I thought I might put a bit into some really good furniture.’
‘Antiques hardly ever represent a good investment in purely financial terms, you know,’ Helena warned him, surprised that he had never mentioned any interest in old furniture before. ‘Particularly in the short term.’
‘No, I am aware of that,’ he said, looking even more amused than usual. She wondered if he were about to tell her not to teach her grandmother to suck eggs. ‘But it gives you nice things to use and look at in the meantime, and who knows? There may be another boom in eighteenth-century English furniture, and then I can flog it all and make a decent return. Quite as good as I’d get putting it in equities before the market crashes again. I must do something with it. One can’t leave money hanging about doing nothing, you know.’
‘No, I suppose one can’t,’ she said, trying not to laugh. She herself never had much more than was necessary to service the mortgage, pay the bills, and buy herself the odd treat, so she had never had to worry about investments.
‘Will you come? I don’t want to exploit your expertise, but I’d like to persuade you to have a quick look at a chair that sounds rather good in the catalogue. I’ll pay you a fee, if you like.’
‘Certainly not,’ she said in genuine outrage. ‘I’d love to look at it for you, but I’d be appalled if you paid me.’
‘Why? I’d be using your professional knowledge.’
‘Yes. But it would be the greatest possible pleasure for me to be able to give it to you,’ she said with a formality that she hoped would persuade him that she meant what she said.
‘Good. It’s a deal then. We’ll have a real London Sunday jaunt.’
‘We always used to go to the zoo when I was a child,’ said Helena irrelevantly. The coffee rose into the top half of the espresso pot and she poured him a cupful. ‘Or one of the parks. At least, Irene and I did. Fin was usually working. Once or twice she even took me to Battersea funfair. That was the best.’
Helena could remember the experience with astonishing clarity, almost able to feel the wholly exciting and half-frightening swooping sensation as the various machines swirled her about and turned her upside down. Lost in memories of the probably tawdry, but to a child thrilling, pleasures of the funfair, she did not notice Mike taking the cup from her.
‘Thanks,’ he said, stroking her hand and making her jump.
‘For what?’
‘The coffee.’
‘You’re laughing at me again,’ she said, returning to the present.
‘Yes, I am. You don’t mind, though, do you?’
‘To tell you the truth, I love it. But why this time?’
‘I was just amused to think that on all the occasions I’ve sat wondering how to make you happy, I’d never realized that the easiest way would be to take you to a funfair. For some weird reason it hadn’t even struck me as a possibility. I can’t think why not.’
By then she was laughing too and pretended to aim a punch at his head.
‘I don’t suppose I’d like it these days,’ she said. ‘It’s probably like candyfloss and thumb-sucking.’
‘Have you been trying those recently?’ asked Mike in deep amusement.
‘Idiot. No, of course I haven’t, but I can well remember the miserable disillusion of finding that they had lost their appeal.’
‘On your last birthday, you mean?’
‘Just a trifle earlier than that,’ Helena said. ‘You do me good, Mike. I haven’t laughed as much as this in years and years. Oh, lord! The toast.’
The acrid smell of burning made her run to the toaster, which seemed to have jammed. She could not think why neither of them had noticed it before or seen the smoke that was billowing along the worktop under the cupboards. She unlocked the window and flung it open to clear the air.
They took their time over breakfast and a shared bath, and it was nearly twelve by the time they were both dressed.
‘We’ll miss Beamie’s if we hang about any longer,’ Helena said lightly as she buttoned up her loose turquoise dress, revelling in the warmth that seemed to be going to last for ever. The endless rainy summers of her past seemed almost impossible to believe in as day succeeded day with hardly a cloud to be seen. She pulled a wide straw hat off a peg on the back of the door and picked up her dark glasses. ‘We’d better get going.’
Mike nodded, zipped up his trousers and pulled on his socks. It amused him that Helena was not going to dress up for Beamie’s. True it was a Sunday and most people dressed informally for Sunday viewings, but even so her bare legs and scooped-neck dress seemed remarkably casual for St James’s.
When they walked into the sale rooms in Bury Street half an hour later, Helena was immediately hailed by a young man dressed in the sort of cream-coloured trousers and blazer that a young farmer might wear when tidied up for Sunday lunch. He nodded to Mike and then kissed Helena. Mike stood aside and watched them talk until Helena remembered him and introduced the young man as Jonathan Beamie, the director in charge of furniture at the auction rooms.
‘And this is Michael Alfrick,’ she said, urging him forward.
‘How do you do?’ said young Mr Beamie, shaking hands and looking at Mike properly for the first time. ‘But we’ve met before, haven’t we?’
‘Once or twice,’ he said shortly. Then he caught sight of Helena’s look of surprise and added in a more relaxed voice: ‘I’ve been in here several times. You were the auctioneer one evening last year when I bought a breakfast table – oval on a single shaft with four particularly elegant splayed legs.’
‘That must be it. I remember that table well. Rather gorgeous, wasn’t it? Although the condition could have been better. Regency; satinwood with kingwood stringing?’
‘That’s the one.’
Helena was looking at Mike and wondering why she had never noticed him at any of the sales she had attended, and whether he had seen her.
‘Have you still got it?’ Jonathan Beamie was asking.
‘Sure. I eat off it. Had I known Helena in those days I’d have got her to restore it rather than the firm I did get, who did an immensely expensive and rather obtrusive job on it.’
As Mike was talking, Helena suddenly realized why he might have hidden his interest in antiques from her. If he had been so afraid of exploiting her knowledge that he had offered to pay her to look at the chair he was thinking of buying that day, he might well have thought that she would interpret any earlier questions as attempts to get free professional advice out of her and resent them. She almost blushed as she thought of how her wariness could have been misconstrued.
‘Oh, Helena’s undoubtedly one of the best in London these days,’ Jonathan Beamie was saying, ‘but very hard to get. Which reminds me, Helena, my father was saying only the other day that he would like you to have a go at a set of Chippendale chairs he’s found. Would you consider it?’
‘Really Chippendale?’ she asked, remembering the unpleasant telephone call and hoping that this was not another attempt to get her to increase the saleability of the same ‘naughty’chairs.
‘Possibly, although there are no C scrolls.’
Helena sighed in relief. They might still be the same chairs, but at least the brief was going to be different and she would not be asked to fake anything. That could make it possible to accept the work, and she would if she could. The Beamies were a good source of clients and she did not want to antagonize them if she could possibly avoid it.
‘The date’s about right, though,’ Jonathan went on, ‘which comes to much the same thing in the end. Shall I get my father to ring you?’
‘Thanks, Jonathan. He’s got my number and if I’m out or working the machine will be on.’
‘Great stuff.’ Jonathan Beamie waved at someone over her head, thanked her again, and left them.
Mike took her arm and they strolled upstairs to the main auction rooms.
‘You do hide your light under a bushel, don’t you?’ he said as they paused before a games table, most beautifully made and inlaid with several different exotic woods. ‘I hadn’t realized quite how distinguished you were. Old Mr Beamie …’ He stopped talking when he saw that Helena was not listening. She had bent down to look under the surface of the table.
‘Well?’ he said when she re-emerged, red in the face from stooping.
‘Naughty,’ she said. ‘What were you saying?’
‘Nothing. My chair’s over there. Will you give it the once-over for me?’
‘Of course I will. I told you I would.’
They went off to inspect it and after a minute search, during which she took a lens out of her capacious pocket to examine a particular joint, she pronounced herself satisfied. The upper estimate was, she told him, a little high, but it was worth putting in a lowball and seeing how the bidding went.
Amused by her carefully limited enthusiasm, he left her to wander around the rest of the lots while he went to arrange a commission bid with one of the receptionists. Helena was stopped by Jonathan Beamie again when she had returned to look sadly at the games table.
‘Don’t you approve?’ he said. She looked round and shook her head, smiling politely.
‘You know as well as I do that it’s been made up. They were never built like that. This has one table’s legs with a quite different table’s folding top bunged on them. The hinges are all wrong, and so’s the stringing down the legs.’
‘Nicely done, though, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, quite. The inlay is certainly pretty clean. But I think your cataloguing’s on the optimistic side to say the least. There’s no way that this is a nineteenth-century games table, even if its legs might have been made before 1900.’
‘And many of the other parts I imagine, although, not being responsible for the valuations or the catalogue descriptions, I haven’t examined it closely myself. There’s no need to look like that. As you know perfectly well, we’re merely agents for the seller here. We carry no liability. Caveat emptor.’
‘Doesn’t it worry you that the ignorant might think this table really was made just as it is in the nineteenth century?’
‘Why should it? After all, everyone knows the basis on which we work and it’s printed in all our catalogues. We’d never knowingly authenticate a fake. God forbid! But if our valuer’s view of something is different from someone else’s …’
‘Who put it together?’ she asked suddenly, looking up at him again. ‘You’re right. It is good work.’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he said coldly. ‘Why?’
‘I just thought that it’s been remarkably well done, and I was trying to think which of the really good cabinet makers could have done it. But perhaps it isn’t English work. Who brought it in?’
‘I don’t know and you’re beginning to sound like a policewoman. You want to watch that. What’s your friend up to?’
‘He’s leaving a commission bid on that nice little elbow chair over there. He obviously doesn’t trust me to bid for him.’
‘You passed the chair then, did you?’ Jonathan was obviously trying to sound pleasant, but Helena knew that he was seriously annoyed about her strictures on the games table. As he led her back to re-examine the elbow chair, she wondered whether he was staying beside her to ensure that she did not repeat her observations on the table to any possible buyer.
‘Yes, I did pass it,’ she said, looking at it again. ‘It’s been mended more than once and obviously re-upholstered, but in a perfectly respectable way.’
‘You’d much prefer the Chinese system, wouldn’t you?’ Jonathan was still smiling, but it was clear that he was not remotely amused.
‘Yes, I would. It’s so much more honest to keep all repairs deliberately visible. You know exactly where you are, and you’d know that no-one you were working for could be using your work to mislead other people.’
‘But it’s not so pretty. I hope your friend gets the chair. He probably will; he’s bought several things for quite good prices over the past six months or so.’
Helena stood up straight and looked at Beamie in surprise. ‘But I thought you only just managed to recognize him after I’d introduced you.’
Jonathan Beamie looked faintly embarrassed. He coughed and ran his stubby fingers through his short, sleek, dark hair.
‘I thought he was familiar when I spotted the pair of you coming in,’ he said, not meeting her eyes, ‘but I couldn’t remember his name and didn’t want to seem rude by getting it wrong since he’s becoming a good customer. It seemed politic to wait for you to introduce us.’
Helena was about to ask what else Mike had bought when she saw him returning from the front desk and so she said nothing.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ Jonathan whispered in her ear. ‘Chaps as rich as he must be are used to keeping their assets hidden. Have a look round next time you go to his place and see what you can see. I’d have said he’s a pretty good catch. You’ll be doing quite well for yourself if you manage to nab him on a permanent basis.’
‘Are you all right?’ asked Mike as he reached her side. Jonathan had already gone, but Helena could feel the heat in her cheeks and hoped that they were not as red as she thought they might be.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But the atmosphere in here always gets a bit stuffy. D’you want to see any more? Would you mind if I go and sit on the steps outside and wait for you there?’
‘No. I’ve seen all I need. I’ll come with you. We could sit in Green Park for a bit if that would help.’
‘I like St James’s better,’ she said, reminding herself that it was she who had always refused to go to Mike’s house and insisted that he come to hers. There was no need to suspect a conspiracy just because he had never talked about the antiques he owned or told her that he had attended many of the same sales as she had done. She still wondered whether he had noticed her at any of them and did not like the idea that he might have been watching her and said nothing about it. She told herself sharply to stop being so silly; if she had not seen him, there was no reason in the world why he should have noticed her. ‘Let’s go.’
They sat in the grass like office workers in their lunch break, soaking up the sun and watching the waterbirds on the lake until the ground began to seem much too hard. Mike shifted position for the fourth time in as many minutes and asked her what she would like to do next and whether he could take her out for lunch.
‘Could we go to your house? I’d love to see it. I realize I’ve never been.’
She was surprised when he looked pleased and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Of course. Come back to the car and we’ll go straight away. I hope you won’t be disappointed. It’s not actually a house – just a flat. I’d love you to see it. You’ve always turned up your nose at the prospect before.’
Driving towards Regent’s Park, Mike laughed. When Helena asked what was so amusing, he said: ‘It’s the breakfast table, isn’t it? The one I bought from Beamie’s. You want to know what it looks like. Collector’s curiosity, eh?’
‘No, no, no! Nothing like that. I just suddenly realized that there’s an enormous amount I don’t know about you, even though we know each other as well as we possibly could in some ways. I thought it might help if I were to see where you live. D’you mind?’
‘I have to say that I’m delighted. But there’s nothing there to feed you on and you haven’t had any lunch yet. It’s no wonder you came over a bit faint.’
‘I don’t need any food. It was just the stuffiness.’
Mike pulled up outside a large white house on the edge of Regent’s Park.
‘It looks a bit pompous from the outside, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘but the room’s are such good sizes and I like the view.’
He let her in and escorted her into a tall, gloomy hall with an unyielding floor of black and white stone. Helena was relieved to discover much more light and space upstairs, even though it was all very grand. The main room was huge, much more elaborately decorated than anything in her house. She stood in the doorway, taking it all in and trying to connect what she could see with the man she had learned to know in her own much simpler surroundings.
There were shelves on either side of the fireplace, stretching from floor to ceiling and full of books that he had obviously bought to read, rather than for their bindings or because they were valuable first editions. More books were stored in a glass-fronted secretaire-bookcase between the two long windows that looked out over the park.
A large, absolutely plain looking-glass filled the space above the chimneypiece on which stood a low rectangular black vase stuffed with terracotta-coloured roses cut very short. Matching sofas covered in terracotta linen piped in black were arranged on either side of the fire with a low table between them. From where she was standing the table seemed to be made of a slab of polished, fossil-filled beige stone resting on a single pedestal. There was a heap of books at one end and a small bronze bust in the far corner.
The curtains were heavy cream linen naively printed in gold, terracotta and black, the floor was ebonized wood, and there were several old and probably valuable rugs. The breakfast table from Beamie’s gleamed with its newly restored polish, and a variety of beautiful, but not matching, chairs stood around it. A card table, which looked much more authentic than the one Jonathan Beamie had tried to defend, was folded against the wall.
‘Is something the matter?’ Mike said from behind her. Helena turned.
‘You live on such a grand scale,’ she said, opening her eyes very wide. ‘You must have felt you were slumming it in Clerkenwell. I had no idea you were so …’ There was no tactful way of putting it, and so she finished frankly: ‘So rich.’
He laughed and put his arms round her. ‘I love Clerkenwell. And it isn’t slumming anyway. But I do earn quite a lot, you know, bonuses, profit-shares and all that, and there’s no point working hard if you don’t ever do anything with the money.’
‘You must have been working exceedingly hard,’ she said, looking again at the secretaire, which was one of the most desirable pieces she had seen in a long time.
‘Yes. But I’ve had some luck, too. You need it in venture capital,’ he said seriously. ‘You can find really good people with seriously good ideas and adequate know-how, give them the money they need, ensure that there are plenty of safeguards, and yet the whole thing still goes belly up. Luckily that hasn’t happened to me for a while, hence the bonuses. Now, would you like a drink, or tea, or something to eat if I can find anything?’
‘A cup of tea would be lovely.’
‘Good. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be long.’
While he disappeared into the kitchen, she walked around the big room, wondering how she could have had so little curiosity about a man she liked so much and with whom she was prepared to make love. Looking along the rows of his bookshelves, she realized that he was a serious reader of much more than newspapers. Many of the novels and biographies were ones she recognized from her own reading or from book reviews, but there were plenty of others that were completely strange to her. There were even some in French and Italian. Picking one out, she turned the pages and saw his name written on the flyleaf in a strange hand above a message in Italian and a date two years old. Not wanting to pry into his past, she quickly replaced the book and went to look more closely at the breakfast table.
It looked right and was beautifully proportioned, but she could not help running her fingers over the joins between the inlay and the crossbanding. Sadly she felt the smoothness and knew that Mike had paid for a table that was a great deal more modern than he thought. If it had been made during the Regency, the timbers would have shrunk and forced the inlay up, higher than the rest.
As she ran her fingers once more over the smoothness where there should have been a ridge, she wished it was as easy to tell whether people were real or fake.
Hearing Mike returning from the kitchen, she moved away from the table and went to look at the pictures. She was not sure she shared his eclectic taste in paintings; there was a Schiele, which she definitely did not like, and a pair of rather dull watercolours, which she was fairly sure were by Peter de Wint, over the games table on the wall opposite the fireplace. On the other hand, a drawing of ruins that looked remarkably like one of Ben Nicholson’s was very much to her taste, if surprising in a room as sombrely rich as Mike’s.
Helena remembered his suggestion that he would sell the elbow chair if the price of English furniture ever rose steeply again and wondered whether he had bought the pictures purely for their investment value. The idea was not pleasant.
‘You look worried,’ he said. She turned and saw that he was putting a tray down on the fossil table. ‘Don’t you like Schiele?’
‘Not a lot, but I was really just remembering that business of the over-restored painting that was auctioned in London.’
Mike frowned and then nodded. ‘I remember. There was a court case, wasn’t there? And the auctioneers had to repay everything. I think this one’s all right, though. I’m particularly proud of it because it came from a lucky bet that I should never have made.’
‘I didn’t know you gambled,’ said Helena, trying not to sound censorious. It was not the idea of his betting that she minded so much as the thought that he had never told her he did it, just as he had never told her that he collected antiques. She wondered unhappily how much more there was to discover and was surprised to see that he was laughing at her.
‘Darling heart, it’s what I do all the time. It’s what venture capitalism is all about.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. Silly of me. Sorry. You mean you backed a winner in one of your clients?’
‘Yup. I had a hunch about one young man my colleagues insisted on turning down a few years back. Since I couldn’t persuade my then boss to go for the project, I put most of what I’d accumulated myself into the client’s business and reaped very handsome rewards. In retrospect I can hardly believe I did anything so risky. I sometimes wake in the night sweating about it, but it came out all right.’
Helena admired the courage that could let anyone take such a risk.
‘Did I mention that I was off to New York again tomorrow?’ said Mike before she could tell him so. She nodded. He stroked her hair away from her face with both hands, looking down into her eyes much more seriously than usual.
‘I fly out tomorrow, but I’ll be back on Friday evening. May I come straight to Clerkenwell? For the weekend, I mean?’
She smiled as she shook her head. ‘I’ve got to go down to Worcestershire to see a client first thing on Saturday morning. I can’t postpone it. It’s too important.’
‘Couldn’t I come too? I could give you a lift. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in my car than that rattly old van of yours?’
‘Much. But even so I can’t take you with me. The client’s elderly and hates changes to arrangements or having to worry about new people. I’ve promised to drive down in the morning and have lunch with her. I can’t take another person, honestly. I’m sorry, Mike.’
‘All right,’ he said, looking less kind. ‘Then what about Sunday? You’ll be back by then, won’t you?’
‘Yes, probably. But I’m not quite sure exactly when I’ll get home. Why don’t I ring you then? Would that be all right?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ he asked coolly.