We crept back up to the flat in the early daylight, hung-over and greedy for tea and toast. There was no movement from Jenna or Grant and we sat in the kitchen with mugs of tea so strong that it was almost soup as the toaster popped regular slices at us.
We hadn’t really spoken much since the conversation in the night. I still got little heart-thumps when I thought about the way Max had said, ‘I really like you,’ but reasoned that posh champagne was probably no bar to the drunken ‘I bloody love you’ syndrome. He’d been affectionately drunk, that was all. Nothing to it. He’d hardly known what he was saying. But none of my best rational thinking could quite drive away the feeling those words had given me, and I was hugging them close to me as I downed another mug of best Yorkshire tea and an unflattering amount of chunky toast. I had no idea what bread it had been made from, but I had the awful feeling that the word ‘artisan’ would be in the description somewhere.
Gradually the liquid and carbohydrate intake did their work and we straightened up a bit and opened our eyes properly. Max let out a little sigh. ‘How much did we drink last night?’
‘I have no idea. You were in charge of the bottles. Where did it all come from?’
‘Dad had quite a stash. He only drank champagne, apparently, and I think we may have seen off most of his collection.’ He sighed again. ‘Oh, well. His daughter just got engaged, I think he would have approved.’
‘I’m not sure he would have approved of his son and heir crashing out on the antiques, though,’ I said. ‘With a woman of the Lower Orders. That’s the sort of thing that used to get sons disinherited faster than you can say Georgette Heyer, you know.’ I refilled my mug.
Max looked at me. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I said I’d got something to show you and now might be the time, before anyone else wakes up.’ He stood up and wielded his mug. ‘Bring your tea.’
I followed him out of the flat and down the main staircase this time. We walked past a young woman in an overall who was vacuuming an acre of carpet with a Henry Hoover, who looked up as we passed. ‘Morning, Max.’
‘Hi, Daisy.’
I could feel Daisy’s curious eyes following me along the corridor and even the Henry had turned to look my way as I trailed behind Max to the end of the passage, where he threw open a double door and bowed. ‘This is what I want you to see.’
I stepped past him and into a room that ran the entire width of the house. Black-shrouded windows made up one whole wall because the room had obviously been built to make the most of natural light, although now it was only illuminated by some subtle wall-lighting. Polished wooden flooring smelled of beeswax beneath me and I had a sudden schoolgirl urge to take off my shoes and slide as far as I could in my socks. Then I looked up. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘This is the Painted Room,’ Max said. ‘Or, as we know it in the family, the Boobie Room. It’s eight-times Great Grandad’s equivalent of a mucky photo album.’
The walls and ceiling were covered in paintings of naked women. There were occasional naked cherubs in there too, presumably to detract slightly from the numbers of boobs, but they didn’t dilute them much. I had never seen so much naked flesh on display, and that was including the showers after hockey. ‘It’s…’ I had to take a mouthful of tea to find the words. ‘Er. Quite striking.’
‘The legend goes that Eighth Great Grandad had all his lovers painted here.’ Max pointed to one. ‘This is Lady Elizabeth Weir, whose family owned the estate next door. This is Carlotta of Venice. We think this one may be the Duchess of Devonshire, but we aren’t entirely sure.’
Despite the fact that most of the ladies had been painted in provocative poses, there was something entirely unerotic about so much nakedness. A bit like a naturists’ convention, I thought, trying to comprehend the vast swathes of flesh. ‘I wonder if the artist ran out of pink?’ I mused, staring at the large painted sky, which extended down two walls. ‘He must have enjoyed doing the clouds, for a rest.’
Max walked into the centre of the room and put his tea down on the floor. ‘But do you get my point?’ He looked around at the walls. ‘Alice?’
‘No,’ I muttered into my mug, trying to ignore the fact that there were about fourteen breasts immediately above my head and the number of cavorting thighs didn’t bear thinking about.
‘You said last night that you didn’t think I could like you because you were big and plain.’
‘I was hoping you were too drunk to remember that,’ I said, somewhat waspishly. ‘Or too much of a gentleman to mention it ever again.’
‘Well, I wasn’t and I’m not. Just look.’ He waved a hand at the billowing mass of fuchsia, watermelon, salmon and coral, interspersed with darker shades of both skin and hair. ‘This is what Eighth Great Grandad found sexy. These girls were the pin-ups of their time. Just because nowadays it’s fashionable to weigh the same as a large carp, not every man finds that attractive, and in Great Grandad’s day they would have been seen as starving waifs living in poverty.’
‘So you’re trying to tell me that I’m a great beauty, four hundred years out of my time?’ I stayed near the door. There was altogether too much ‘female’ in the room already.
‘Alice, I’m telling you that not every man finds the same thing attractive. Not every man values a woman for how tiny her waist is or the fact that she can get into clothes made for a ten-year-old. Some men, lots of men, want a woman they can talk to, who’s kind and interesting and clever and doesn’t want them to be ripped gym-fanatic billionaires.’ He gestured at the ceiling. ‘If all men liked the same kind of women, then there would be one very smug supermodel in the world and the human race would die out in two generations.’
I kept my eyes on the floor. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? He couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. Not a man who fitted the ‘tall, dark and handsome’ mould as though it had been constructed around him. Not a man who owned all this. Not, basically, Max. How could he like someone like me, without being intrinsically flawed?
‘Nobody’s perfect, Alice,’ he said gently, as though he was reading my mind. ‘Nobody. We all have our baggage and our hang-ups, mine are in my head, that’s all.’
He came in a little bit closer. Not too close, maybe he didn’t want to risk getting my tea thrown over him. ‘But…’ I was floundering. ‘How can you? I mean… I’m me.’
‘Well, Beyonce was busy and Christina Hendricks is spoken for.’ Max flashed me a grin. ‘You were third on the list.’
‘But…’ I said again and stared down at myself.
‘Looks all right from where I’m standing.’ He was definitely smiling now. ‘Plus you’ve got a brain and you’re not afraid to use it, and that’s the number one fascination for me.’ He came in closer still. ‘There’s no rush. Just, please, believe me.’
Max reached out a hand and touched my hair. His eyes were very dark, I noticed, meeting them properly for the first time. So dark that I could feel myself pulled in, watching his pupils expand and feeling his hand touch the side of my neck. My skin reacted, as though all my nerve endings were pushed into that tiny part of me that was under his fingers, and I could feel nothing else but the sensation of his fingertips under my jaw.
The door burst open. ‘Oh, thank God!’ Jenna erupted into the room. ‘Daisy said you were in here. Hi, Alice. The police are on the phone, Max. They say they need to talk to you, urgently. They’ve found a body under the Fortune House.’