“Marion,” said Aphra to me the morning after I slammed out of my own gallery, which is not the way anyone should treat his own property, leaving my staff to discuss love seats with Leslie Beck the egregious, Leslie Beck the creep. “Marion, I’m sorry.”
“In future,” I said, “call me Miss Loos,” but I knew she wouldn’t. She humored me, in the way the young these days humor those who are more settled in the world than they, who like to have furniture polished and a steady disposable income and their clothes taken to the cleaners. “What are you sorry about?” I asked, curiosity overcoming dignity.
The opening of the group show was to open its doors at five thirty. A couple of the artists had phoned to say they would be dropping in to see how their works were hung. Barbara was already rehanging these to advantage to save argument. Sometimes we stood firm, but today no one seemed to have the energy to do so. Let them have their own way. The painters who worried most were the ones who needed to worry; the others were sitting in the Italian sun or snoozing in their penthouse garrets—a couple of paintings in a group show wouldn’t affect their income or their reputation one way or another. A couple of leading newspapers were sending critics; this did not please me particularly. Why hadn’t they turned up at the MacIntyre? And, of course, thanks to the Life Force, Anita Beck’s painting had pride of place, and was the most expensive in the show by twenty percent, and made me extremely nervous. But I didn’t have the heart to move it. And it wasn’t any worse than Halliday’s comical goose or clumsier than Beldock’s boring fish-on-slab: let it be where Leslie thought it ought to be.
“We went to the Japanese with Leslie Beck,” said Aphra, “and he discovered he’d left his wallet at home. So I came back and took seventy quid from the petty cash. Barbara said it would be all right.”
Oh, did she?
“It must have been a good dinner,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Just bits of slimy pieces, as usual,” said Aphra, “but hardly any calories, and he was okay company.”
“I thought you said he was a creep.”
“Okay for a oldie,” she said. “And I didn’t know all that stuff about how you began in the world. I’d like to have my own gallery one day.”
“I bet you would,” I said. “So, when is he going to replace the seventy pounds? Or did he say I could take it out of the sale of the painting?”
Aphra laughed. “I was right the first time,” she said. “He is a creep. That’s exactly what he said.”
The wine for the opening turned up. I don’t try to save money on it. I see good wine as an investment. The more you spend on frills, the richer people think you are; the richer they think you are, the more likely they are to give you their money. When I lived in Leslie Beck’s basement on nothing but dribs, drabs, and handouts, cleaning up the mess of other people’s lives, I put up with second best and received second best. I was tired of it. It was like Eric and Ida switching forever to the game shows on TV, the unfunny comics, the Sunday hymn program, while the wisdom of ages flickered through on other channels. They felt at home with the shoddy. I never did.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m hard, without feeling. But I feel for Monet and Manet: I cried when Monet got ulcers over her eyes and had pads put on them by the vet and was blind for a whole ten days. It’s not that I’m incapable of emotional pain; it’s just that I prefer not to seek it out. I like to have money in the bank. I never, ever want to be in the state I was when I got pregnant by Leslie Beck.
A delivery boy carried in a couple of cases of Australian Chardonnay. I asked him to carry them downstairs to the basement, where it’s so cold you don’t have to use the fridge, and he didn’t look too pleased, but that’s what he’s paid for. While he was downstairs, his van was ticketed.
“I hope you’re pleased,” he said.
I said I wasn’t pleased at all; with any luck, at least a couple of chauffeurs would be dropping rich clients off in front of the gallery that evening, and I didn’t want some boring ticketed van cramping their style. Chauffeurs have as much right to display their skills as anyone.
“I take your point,” he said, though I was sure he did not.
He was an attractive lad—dark, fleshy, and quite witty—but I had no time for any of that today. I handed the whole problem over to Barbara.
And then Leslie Beck stood in the door.
“I’m very busy, Leslie,” I said. He handed me a wedge of ten-pound notes. They were crisp and pleasant to feel, and still slightly warm from the cash machine.
“Seven of them,” he said. “You’d better count them, you’re so full of doubt.”
What did he mean? I was full of doubt? I remembered that was Leslie’s stock-in-trade. He would make a remark about your essential nature, and in the moment when your mind stood still, wondering what he meant, feeling grateful that somebody cared, somebody noticed, in he would come for the kill. The transition from the grateful to the physical is easily made.
If I had bothered to make the delivery boy grateful (rung up his boss, said it wasn’t his fault he was ticketed, offered to pay), then pleaded some sad female necessity of my own (a sink to unblock, a lonely evening), he would have been over at my place in a trice, if only to get back at the difficult, beautiful bitch and then dump her, and talk about it; but who wants such adventures? Sometimes I do; not often. It’s just good to know you can have them if you want.
Leslie Beck was staring at me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You could if you wanted, but you don’t. You were always like that. The things you’ve missed in life.”
I had the strong impression he was here to make trouble, to stir things up, and I was almost afraid.
“You should have come out to dinner with us,” he said.
“I was tired.”
“Barbara didn’t get home till three,” he said. “And she seems okay. She came back to Rothwell Gardens to look at Anita’s paintings. Has she talked to you about them?”
“She hasn’t had time,” I said. “Leslie, I have to get on,” and I walked off into the stockroom before he could read any more of my thoughts, which were, as he well knew, in the language of the cheap novels Ida used to read very occasionally, in turmoil.