Kat changed her clothes twice. Stopping before the mirror in the front hallway, she braided her hair in one long, loose plait, wrapping a bit of the ends around it to hold it fast. She liked having it out of her face. She should just cut it short, but it seemed somehow to be an admission of age.
Passing the arched window on the landing, she realized she was not alone. She wondered how long he had been there, body cloaked by lingering night, just beyond the garden doors. She had first seen the bright yellow eyes watching her the week that they moved into the house. She had seen the small red foxes on the paths in Holland Park in the early morning. In the springtime, reckless with desire, they came into the gardens behind the houses to mate, their sharp, keening cries waking her at night. Something both urgent and mournful about them. It surprised her to see such an untamed thing in the city. Somehow, just knowing that they were there gave her hope. As if she needed that wildness—even if she never did more than lock eyes with it. She needed to know that it was out there.
She had dismissed their driver early in the day. She seldom used him when Jonathan was out of town. Instead, she caught the number 9 bus to Mayfair. It was nearly full and she took a spot standing by the back door. She kept her long coat pulled tightly around her, hiding her dressy clothes. She very rarely bumped into anyone she knew on the bus in London. She felt that it was her own little secret world of public anonymity.
Two young women got on at Palace Gate, tottering on spindly heels, talking animatedly about a party. Kat wondered briefly what she was doing, thinking that Jorie must have talked her into it and reasoning that she was just curious about his work. And maybe he wouldn’t be there at all. Daniel had never liked openings.
An older woman in a bright red coat boarded at Exhibition Road and took a spot by the door, her long neck hidden under the folds of an expertly arranged Hermès scarf. Kat watched her as she swayed gracefully in sync with her fellow passengers as the bus stopped and started its way through traffic on Kensington Gore, her fluid movements elevating them to a corps de ballet.
Her mother had loved spending time with them in London, visiting so frequently over the years that Kat would tease her that she knew the city better than Kat did. On the mornings that Will was at school and Kat had something in the diary, her mother would set out alone to the museums. She had fallen on the last visit. Misjudging the distance from the bottom step of the bus to the pavement, she had fallen. Kat had gotten the phone call from the National Gallery and had raced over to find her resting on a couch in the staff break room, a cup of Earl Grey by her side. If she was shaken by the incident, she had not shown it, insisting on viewing the Vermeers that she had come to see, and then maintaining that it would be rude not to pay her respects to the Turners, as if they were old family friends. And so Kat had followed along beside her as she moved from Canaletto to Rubens to Ingres to Goya. Watching the changing shapes of joy in her face as the paintings passed her from one to the next. Looking like a schoolgirl with plasters on her knees.
Kat tightened her grip on the slick metal pole as the bus slid around Hyde Park corner, eliciting surprised giggles from the young women as it stacked them neatly against a stout man in a well-worn mac.
Walking the few blocks from Green Park, she arrived at the gallery, immediately identifiable by the news trucks parked outside. She was surprised by the amount of media there was. Someone was doing their job well. She paused briefly outside the gallery to check her phone. There was a message from Will. As sad as she was to have missed his call, she was glad to have the message, a little piece of him that he had left behind.
Making her way through the crowd on the pavement, she entered the handsome Georgian stone building and gave her name to the woman at the door, who found it on the list and waved her inside. There had been no hesitation, no resistance, when she had telephoned the gallery asking to be added to the guest list for tonight. She had used her married name.
She was well aware of the effect that Jonathan’s surname had begun to have on people in London. She had become inured to the immediate, subtle change in attitude that it engendered. A strange mixture of curiosity and resentment. When she married Jonathan, she had opted to keep her maiden name, a decision she had stuck with even after the success of the company had imbued his surname with new prestige. Jorie, who collected her husbands’ names and wore them about her neck like so many trinkets, continued to be puzzled by this decision.
Once inside, she declined to check her coat. The gallery was packed. She spotted Jorie waving to her from the less crowded side of the lobby and she made her way over, intercepting a flute of champagne on her way.
Jorie took her arm in the way that only European women can.
“Darling, it’s a madhouse. I swear that I just saw Richard Hawthorne.”
As with many of the names Jorie dropped, Kat recognized it in a vague way, feeling that perhaps she had read it somewhere recently.
It was sometimes difficult to tell predator from prey in the art world, but this crowd was all predator. Dressed to the nines in the type of vintage clothing whose value was detectable only to the trained eye—watches that cost more than most cars, handbags with two-year waiting lists. Nostrils flared, heads thrown back the better to look down their noses, they prowled the openings, sniffing out the latest prize. Daniel was nowhere to be seen.
Observing the crowd as it funneled in through the door into the room on the right, Jorie guided Kat purposefully to the left. “It’s less crowded this way. Why follow the herd?”
The canvases in the first room they entered were massive. Much larger than anything she had known him to paint. They certainly would not have fit into the rue Garancière studio. The first one confronted her immediately—a milk-white hand seen from above. Long, slender fingers clutching a fistful of cloth, tendons taut and straining, knuckles showing white through pale skin. The painting itself had to be eight feet tall—allowing even the detail of the thin, fair hairs and tiny creases between the thumb and forefinger to be seen clearly.
It took her a moment to identify the next one. Her eye was drawn immediately to a sharp pink shape punctuating the lower edge of the expanse of pale canvas. Only when she recognized it as the corner of a mouth, barely open, did she see the rest of the canvas as cheek. The discoveries of the first two made the rest of the paintings in the room easier to decipher. Looking around, she saw that the room also contained a throat, stretched out in a way that suggested a head flung back just out of view; and a shoulder streaked by several loose strands of hair and the unmistakable curve of a female waist pushed back against a tangle of wrinkled fabric. There were others that she could not see, as they were obscured by the crowds.
“Like pieces of a broken statue,” Jorie whispered, squeezing her arm.
Kat nodded. Jorie was right. Taken alone, the individual pieces were like fragments of an unseen whole, strangely unsatisfying for all their detail. But together they had a distinctive narrative quality, coalescing into an undeniable portrait of a woman in the throes of passion. The individual paintings seemed to be glimpses of what a lover might see in the moments when he opened his eyes. The size of the paintings tested the limits of the space, filling it with what amounted to a fractured, flickering confession.
And yet there remained a persistent sense of something that was absolutely broken. There was a strong incongruity between the heat of the subject and the cold, almost bloodless approach to it. Given the intimate nature of the subject, she found the scale and detail disturbing. She rubbed her fingertips up and down the cold glass in her hand, tracing paths in the condensation.
Spotting a face she recognized at the far end of the room, Jorie gave Kat’s arm a quick squeeze before she dropped it with a murmured apology and pushed through the crowds, leaving Kat to navigate the gallery alone.
Coming to the end of the room too quickly, Kat stopped to examine the canvas by the door. The long curving edge of a female form clung to one side of it, barely distinguishable from the pale sheet that occupied the rest of the canvas. The last glimpse of the figure before she moved off the canvas and out of view. Its vertical shape seemed to serve as punctuation at the end of the room.
In an attempt to escape the current of the crowd around her, Kat stepped closer to it. From a few feet away she could clearly see the thin layers of paint, pulled taut across the canvas. As she followed the shape up the side of the canvas, a sharp jolt of cold made her aware that she had involuntarily brought her fingers, chilled from the glass, up to her neck. Suddenly alert, on the banks of the moving crowd, she became aware of distinct voices within the crowd directly behind her.
“This is the one.” The male speaker was authoritative, demanding.
After a moment, the same voice again, louder and more insistent. “Did you hear me, Martin? I want your word on it.”
Before any reply could be made, a woman’s voice broke in, seemingly unaffected by her companion’s bluster. “How did you find him?”
After a moment, a second male voice—Martin, she presumed—responded to the woman in a soothing, indulgent tone. “He has been in the stable for years. Found him in Paris and then took him to New York with me. Had great success doing commissions—portraits of the glitterati. Women mostly.… Very technically adept, but missing that elusive something that separates the good from the great—that essential spark. Then about a year ago he calls and tells me he has something to show me. Tells me to meet him at this warehouse—in the middle of nowhere. Hands me a key to one of those awful rented storerooms.”
Here the voice wavered and the speaker paused to collect himself before going on. When he began speaking again, his voice was lower. Kat took a step back toward the group.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. There were paintings everywhere—leaning against the walls, stacked on crates. I knew the moment I saw them that this was something special. That he had found his passion. I knew instantly that this was going to be the first line of my obituary.”
The woman’s voice again, as soft as it had been, but with a hint of edge in it that had not been there before. “And his obituary.”
There was a brief pause before the man replied. “Of course.” After a moment he went on. “I actually bought a painting from this series when he first came to see me about twenty years ago. One of the earliest ones he had done. The Blue Bath—the one I pointed out in the last room. It was the first one he sold to me. It was the piece that first made me take notice of him.”
His voice grew quieter, and Kat took another step backward, straining to hear him. “I kept it, which is rather unusual for me. I had absolutely no idea there were more like it. At the time, he needed money, so I set him up to do a commissioned portrait. An ambassador’s daughter. Not very lucrative, I grant, but good money and a good entrée into that world, as the portrait would be seen by the right people. The art world is all about exposure to the right people. Began representing him shortly thereafter, but never saw any more like that first one until that day at the warehouse.”
There was a pause, as the speaker and his audience considered his story, before the woman spoke again.
“She is beautiful.”
There was another pause before Martin responded, his voice slightly cold.
“Perhaps. But the paintings are more beautiful.”
The first voice again, impatient and a bit too loud. “How much did you pay for it? The blue one.”
The second man chuckled softly, as if he felt the situation required it.
“Now, Nicholas, do you think me cruel enough to tell you that? Suffice it to say that he was unknown at the time and as I said, he needed the money. But that painting was what got my attention, which is what ultimately led us to this.” Kat imagined the speaker gesturing to the crowd around him in a proprietary way as he continued. “So I would say it all worked out in the end.”
Succumbing to her curiosity, Kat glanced furtively over her shoulder at the threesome. A tall man stood with his back to her and the painting, while a well-groomed brunette woman stood opposite him, squinting at it. Between them another man stood facing her, short and preemptively bald. In addition to setting him apart from the crowd, the particular shade of his dark green suit served to underscore the fact that he was shaped remarkably like an avocado.
The tall man spoke again, still impatient. “How much is it worth? What’s its value today?”
Kat watched the pale face atop the green suit and saw its features relax as its small eyes swept across the expansive canvas behind her.
“Did you know, in painting, the term ‘value’ refers to the lightness or darkness of a color or a canvas? I have always thought that to be a marvelous way to regard the concept of value—the inherent darkness or lightness of a thing.” Kat thought that his voice sounded suddenly tired.
“Are you interested in selling?” the tall man persisted.
Kat saw the curve of his lips return as he replied. “You know me, Nicholas. For the right price…”
Before she could look away, the small man caught her eye, shooting her a quick, sharp glance before turning back to the group.
Scanning the crowd, Kat spied Jorie on the far side of the room, hand on hip, head tossed back in laughter, standing only slightly too close to someone else’s husband. The crowd was pushing Kat backward and she had to keep moving to avoid being forced back the way she came. So she left the room, the conversation dying behind her.
* * *
THE NEXT ROOM was populated with smaller canvases. At first she could see only bits of the paintings among the heads of the crowd. As she focused on the first one she could see whole, on the wall to her right, green eyes stared back at her from a pale face, appearing at once far away and very close. At once, her stomach lurched and the sounds of the room receded, replaced by a low buzzing in her head.
She blinked, opening her eyes to find that the face before her remained. It looked different in the bright light of the gallery, over the bobbing heads of the crowd, but she recognized it immediately. It had lain on its side against the wall under the windows for months after he had finished it, looking up at the stained ceiling. Against the smooth expanse of immaculate white wall it seemed larger. More bold. Less warm. But she was certain it was the same one. The figure on the canvas looked sleepy and sensual, completely at ease lying across the unmade bed.
Panicked, she cast her eyes over the surrounding crowd, and struggled to control her breathing. As her eyes panned around the room, she recognized another painting—a smaller study of the bath. An almost irresistible urge to run filled her, mitigated only by an equally strong impulse to move closer to it. A previous occupant of the studio had painted the inside of the bathtub a deep shade of blue. Although meant to be permanent, the paint still imparted a slight blue tint to the water when the tub was filled. For all its intimacy, the painting was quite discreet, as the water obscured most of her body. From where she was standing, she could see a finger smudge on the upper left side of the unframed canvas. Often, when finishing a detail, Daniel would grasp the upper left corner of the canvas, leaving smudged fingerprints on its edge, which he never bothered to remove.
She met her own eyes—wide and wet—in the next canvas. She looked as if she had just finished laughing. And the next one—a close-up of her sleeping, the corner of the sheet brushing her cheek. And the next one—her eyes downcast as she sat curled in the fading pink sunshine of late afternoon, bent over a book, her hair held up by both of her hands, stray strands seeping out between her fingers.
The painting in front of her was so close that she could reach out and touch it. Trace the lines of the body. There was something about it that seemed so real. Much more real than the crowded gallery that surrounded her now. It seemed that if she stood and looked long enough, the girl’s hand would move through the length of her hair, fingers disappearing among the soft strands. That the hint of smile in her eyes would spread slowly, inevitably, to the rest of her face. Kat felt a tightening in her chest. An ache.
Backing away from the paintings, into the center of the room, she realized she was surrounded. She scanned the paintings that ringed the room. Her face. Her body. Made young again and laid bare around her. She wondered briefly if it was voyeurism if you were looking at yourself.
Each of the paintings triggered a barrage of memories. They crashed into her, immediately more real to her than the crush of people brushing past her. She remembered the circumstances of each painting. The tepid water of the bath and the strange sensation of disconnection with her body while it was submerged unseen in the murky water. The warmth of the morning sun on her face, and the feel of the smooth cover of the book in her hands. She remembered how she felt when he was painting her. So safe. So understood. It was almost an abdication of herself. As if he held her and she was free to wander. Although she had not strayed far from the studio that summer.
She remembered the smell of the paint and the slight damp of the studio in the mornings. The feel of the cool wooden floorboards under her bare feet. Being woken by the sunlight coming through the thin glass panes in the windows.
She remembered Daniel stretching the blank canvases, mixing the colors and then washing them off his brushes. Their traces on the edges of the drain—mingling briefly to become something other than what they had been separately and then fading, faded, into the worn porcelain basin. She remembered the clumps of paint, like dried leaves, on the rough wooden palette and all the colors that she had not known were in her—black, green, burnt and raw umber, ocher, white, and then more green or blue for shading.
She remembered the strange silence of the studio. The paintings seemed out of place in this loud, crowded, windowless room. A man pushed by her roughly, mumbling a perfunctory apology through thick lips as he passed by, reminding Kat of where she was in the center of the room, her feet anchoring her to the floor as the crowd moved around her.
She kept her head down, pulling nervously on the end of her long plait, taking small breaths. The air in the room felt too warm, heated to a viscous syrup by the movement of the crowd. Looking around, she realized that most of the people had their backs to the paintings, talking among themselves, while her face looked on from different vantage points on the walls. The current of people swelled against her, urging her back the way she had come. She had obviously come the wrong way, viewing the exhibit backward.
There was something else in the air at the gallery. A different kind of excitement. Brash, eager, slightly tarnished, she recognized it in the excited laughter and conversation of the crowd. Money. The paintings had passed beyond what they had been in the studio on the rue Garancière, beyond even what the early critics had recognized in them, and were being regarded with a new kind of lust. They had become commodities. Looking more closely at the crowd, she was surprised to see so many familiar faces. These were the men and women who bought and sold things in London. Companies, property, buildings, art. He was in her world now.
A thought gripped her. Just how close was the resemblance between her and the girl in the paintings? How easy would it be to link her face to the face in the portraits?
Hearing a heavy sigh, she turned to find a tall brunette woman standing beside her. Kat recognized her as one-third of the trio she had overheard in the other room. The woman smiled at Kat and scanned the crowd distractedly as it moved past them. Turning her gaze back to the painting in front of her, she sighed again. Kat froze. Was it too late? Had she been recognized?
“Does great art inspire you or just depress you? I mean, there is no way I could ever create anything like this. Frankly, it would be embarrassing for me to even try. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the aspirational aspect of it, but I think that if we’re honest, part of it’s also about teaching us our limitations. After all, if everyone could create something like that, would we value it the way we do?”
“Maybe not,” Kat managed, but doubted that she had been heard over the noise. The woman’s gaze remained on the painting in front of them. She frowned, addressing her words directly to it.
“Although, I don’t suppose the alternative is any better. Even if you have the talent, by turning what you love into something that pays the rent, you destroy it in a thousand daily cuts. Familiarity, complacency, compromise … Although, at least you have your arms around it as you do it. At least it dies by your own hand. I don’t know—maybe there’s some solace in that.”
The brunette cocked her head at Kat, smiling widely. “I just think having something like that in my drawing room would suck the life right out of me.”
Kat felt a tidal swell in the crowd. The woman nodded toward the far side of the gallery. “Here comes the talent now.”
Kat turned in the direction she indicated. And there he was. A head above the crowd, looking too big and too volatile for the spare, white room. The same craggy face—more lived-in and more weathered than she remembered. Hair slicked back from his forehead. Clean-shaven. More solid. Older. She had anticipated these possibilities. What surprised her was not all that had changed, but all that had not changed. Somehow she hadn’t expected him to still be Daniel.
Staying very still as the crowd moved around her, she studied him in the brief glimpses through the changing kaleidoscope of bobbing heads, watching as, outnumbered, he met his admirers, greeting and kissing and shaking hands.
In that one moment, watching him across the room, she saw the arc of his potential condensed, realized. She saw him as he had been and she saw him as he appeared now through the eyes of the crowd. The artist. As if in that moment he became all that he could have been so many years ago. It was like witnessing a birth.
It took her a minute to see the girl. She was beautiful. Delicate and small against him, she seemed more at home in this place than he was, although she was clearly here for him. He clutched her tightly, his arm wrapped around her waist, hand resting on her hip.
Her reflection was all too brief. Interrupted, as she clung to the wall on the far side of the room, when his eyes met hers. There was no double take. No lag between him seeing her and recognizing her. Apart from a brief flicker, his expression did not change. Excusing himself from his conversation and unwrapping himself from the girl, he began to make his way toward her through the crowd—eyes locked on her—pinning her to her spot like a moth. She could not read his expression, but she felt a familiar intensity in it.
But the gallery was too crowded with pilgrims, paying homage, seeking his attention in return for theirs. As he momentarily lost eye contact with her, she pulled away from his gaze and made for the door. Reaching it, she turned back, but he was gone, obscured by his admirers. Sliding between the bodies entering the gallery, she felt the rough pavement beneath her shoes and the cold wind on her face.
Kat made her way quickly down the street, her breath escaping back toward the gallery. When she was a safe distance away, she moved to the edge of the pavement and waited for the traffic to clear so she could cross the street. Hearing voices behind her, she turned. Was she being followed? Had someone in the gallery noticed the resemblance between her and the girl in the paintings? Holding her breath, she turned to find two men standing beside a black cab idling at the curb.
“And the schedule? He can complete it on time?” It was the older gentleman whom Jorie had pointed out at Daniel’s show. Kat tried to remember his name, but she had not glanced down at it after it had been dropped.
“Of course.” The answer came even before the question had been completed. The voice sounded immediately familiar and she recognized the short man in the green suit from the gallery. Martin. “I’ve been looking after Daniel for years. I know what he is going to do even before he does.”
The other man considered him gravely for a long moment, allowing him to squirm like a fat worm on a hook.
“Because, you know, we hear things. Addictions, perhaps…” He shook his head sadly. “There are, after all, visible scars.”
“We all have our addictions, Richard.” It was spoken in a low tone, with real menace in it. “Some are more productive than others. Without them, I doubt we would be having this conversation today.”
Crossing the street, Kat did not hear the reply, if there was one.
After a few blocks she slowed down and walked for a while through Mayfair, drinking in the cold air. Above the constellations of Christmas lights on Oxford Street, the sky was leaden and still. The streets were slick. It must have rained earlier. The reflected light off the pavement seemed somehow brighter than the streetlamps themselves. She was flooded with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and regret for a delicate and vanished time. For the brief, fragile peace of simply being seen.
She recalled her astonishment standing in front of the first completed painting of herself in Paris. It was evening and the studio was wrapped in blue darkness. After a moment, she had turned to Daniel.
“Is that who you see when you look at me?”
He had looked around the room briefly, searching for something. Then, laying his hands on her shoulders, he had steered her to the window and indicated her reflection in the glass pane.
“That is not what you look like. At least not to others. We are not what we see in the mirror—our images are, in fact, reversed. We are not what we appear to be, even to ourselves.”
It was true. While immediately familiar, the face in the painting was not quite the same face she saw in the mirror or in photographs. Nor somehow did she believe that it was the face that others saw. Yet the feeling of recognition was overwhelming. The only way she could think to describe it was that girl he captured on canvas looked the way that she felt. And that sense of shared truth was more seductive than being admired or even being loved. And unlike love, which often engendered a broader affinity for others, its sharp edge severed all other connections, leaving only the two of them.
He had painted her whenever the urge struck him. She would suddenly hear the pages on the sketch pad being flipped over or the crisp sighs of the charcoal on paper. Sometimes she wouldn’t notice at all, discovering it only when she moved and heard his urgent whisper for her to stay where she was. Half prayer, half command. He often drew her while she was sleeping.
And slowly, she had begun to become more aware of herself. Of the pleasing shape her neck made as she bent forward over a book. Of the way the shadows fell beside her as she sat or reclined on the bed, and the varying effects of sunlight in her hair at different times of the day. She became conscious of the way different textures of clothing or blankets looked against her bare skin and she began to pay more attention when buying books at the markets, selecting the ones with the most interesting covers, soft, mottled linens and rich, distressed leathers.
Daniel would sometimes begin to sketch her in the early morning, drawing her outline swiftly, without taking his eyes off her. Often turned away, she could not see him, but she could feel his eyes just beyond her view, moving over her, holding her to her spot. And when he had enough, when she was free to go, she would feel him release her. Daniel hardly acknowledged her departure when she left. When she returned to the studio in the early evening she would find herself taking form on the canvas. It was as if time obeyed different rules in the little room under the eaves of the ancient building on the rue Garancière. He didn’t need her to be physically present to paint her. When he was painting her, she remained with him.
As she made her way past the shuttered shops, Kat thought about Daniel at the gallery in his immaculate dark gray suit, its carefully cut lines betraying it as bespoke, a perfect complement to the confident smiles and brief greetings, the earnest eye contact, the seemingly effortless charm. Playing the artist. And he was good at it.
She supposed it wasn’t really surprising. After all, she had gotten better at it, too. She could sit through the endless dinners and cocktail parties. She could make conversation with the nervous first wives and the defensive trophies. She could smile and nod and not have to excuse herself from the table too often to sneak out the back door to the dark garden and fill herself full of night air, enough to get her through the rest of the evening.
It might all have seemed real if she weren’t watching so closely and if she hadn’t known what had come before. She noticed the telltale way he shifted his weight and how stillness seemed to elude him. He was acting. Pretending. And although he was better at it now than he used to be, there remained a lingering suggestion of volatility about him. He seemed to be actively restraining himself.
She was embarrassed for leaving the gallery the way that she had. Seeing him in a crowd like that had been so unfamiliar. In all her memories of him, it was always just the two of them. As if there hadn’t been anyone else in Paris.
And the paintings. She remembered living with them while they were drying. How they had surrounded them. And she realized at once just how rare that intimacy was. How it was almost impossible to achieve, in a museum or even in the smallest of galleries. How even the most hallowed of spaces were haunted by the footsteps and whispered incantations of others.
She caught a cab on Park Lane. As it cut through Hyde Park, her mobile rang. Jonathan.
“Darling—where are you?” His voice was muffled.
“Hello. Just in Mayfair.”
“Right—the Cancer Foundation ball, it’s tonight?”
“No—not yet. Just a gallery opening. With Jorie.”
“Ah, Ms. Thibaud-Paxton-Bowles…” Jonathan always included all of Jorie’s surnames. “Any eligible bachelors there then?”
Kat winced. “Not for long.… How are you? How’s everything?”
“Moving forward. Omega starts diligence tomorrow.”
Her confusion lasted for just a beat. “Oh. Are we at the code-name stage?”
“We are. Especially on phones.”
“I hadn’t realized.”
“You haven’t said anything to Jorie, have you?” His voice rose suddenly in panic.
“Jonathan. Of course not.”
She knew better and he knew that she did. She knew how information moved in their circles, functioning as currency, as entertainment, as proof of status. Even more literally in this case, as any information about the impending sale was insider information. There could be no confidences.
“Sorry. It’s just that the press is all over this. I’m pretty sure that someone has been following me since I got here.”
“Really?” She could not help the incredulous tone in her voice and immediately regretted it.
“Yes. Really.”
She heard the thin thread of his voice pull taut across the miles and she spoke quickly. “Don’t be cross with me. I know this is serious. It just seems so absurd.”
“Do you remember that bastard, Warre, the one who wrote that hatchet piece in the Mail? Apparently, he has started calling our analysts and some major shareholders, inquiring as to their opinions on the impending sale of the company to a foreign firm.”
The article, which had appeared more than a year ago, prompted by a photograph of Jonathan having dinner with executives from the Chinese company, had been a vitriolic nationalistic tirade. Citing the usual long list of venerable British institutions that had been recently sold off to foreign interests—the Savoy Hotel, Fortnum & Mason, Harrods, Cadbury—the reporter had cast Jonathan as the latest in a long line of money-hungry CEOs, cashing out after bleeding Britain dry of talent and resources. The piece had served as a nasty surprise to Jonathan, who was accustomed to a rather different sort of coverage.
A photo of the columnist, Alistair Warre, had appeared beside the article. A small black-and-white rendering of a hirsute, slack-jawed man peering through large horn-rimmed glasses. Since then, Kat had seen him at events occasionally and even on the street once or twice. He had a distinctive, scurrying gait that suited a person much younger. A kind of eager, halting pace that gave the impression he was about to break into a run. Come to think of it, she might have seen him just a few days ago on Holland Park Avenue.
There was silence on the line.
“So, I met with Sir Charles…” she began brightly.
“I don’t know why. If this deal goes through, we may never even live in the house.”
She stopped short, holding the phone to her ear in the darkness of the cab. “What? Why?”
“Turns out they want me to stay on as CEO.”
“Right. In London. The company is in London.”
“But management would be in Hong Kong.”
She was silent.
“I assumed you knew this was a possibility…”
“You never said anything about moving to China.”
“Look, this gives me a chance to take care of our people. Make sure they’re integrated into the new organization. They’ve been loyal to us. They helped build the company. It’s the right thing to do.”
* * *
AFTER THE CALL, she sat stunned in the back of the cab. Hong Kong? Had that possibility been lost in the shuffle that had been their lives over the past several months? Mistakenly packed away? Mislabeled? Or had she simply not been paying attention? What other possibilities had been misplaced or overlooked?
For years, they had lived an unsettled life. And she had learned to enjoy it. She had come to find that uncertainty had a certain charm. But since buying the house, she had believed that had changed. The size of the house, the financial commitment, the scope of the renovation—all of these things had led her to allow herself to believe that they were putting down roots. After all, wasn’t this what they had worked toward? Wasn’t this the dream?
She became aware of the regular thump of the speed bumps as they moved onto the residential streets off the High Street. She switched on the overhead light to find her house keys in her bag. In the dim glare she caught sight of her reflection in the smooth black window of the cab. The deepening wrinkles around the edges of her eyes and mouth, the softening jawline. A far different face from the one that had looked back at her from the walls of the gallery. Kat let out a sudden laugh, startling the cabdriver, who turned round to look at her. Perhaps she needn’t have worried that anyone would recognize her.