The trick is to walk in and present yourself as if you belong, as if you are a step ahead of everyone else. As I enter the Courtenay’s showrooms on Bury Street, a stone’s throw away from Christie’s and St. James’s Park, I nod to Tabitha, Rob’s assistant, in the lobby. She is greeting guests and checking their names off the narrow list, flanked by a security guard and a photographer. I’m not on her list, but of course she knows me; she startles, then nods as I breeze past her. She’s checking in a couple—I recognize one of our top clients, who inherited a family fortune made in biscuits that crumble perfectly in your tea. On his arm is a young woman in an Audrey Hepburn black dress, so eager to be here that her face looks about to melt with excitement.
“Congratulations. What a coup.” The man accosts me as I brush past.
I ignore him. I’m not here for networking tonight. I’m trying hard to contain my anxiety, to fake it until I make it, as they say. Act like nothing’s wrong. You are in control, I repeat to myself, like a mantra. As I ascend to the showcase on the upper floor, I try to make my feet fall with authority. My steps echo hard against the marble, veined with gray like the skin of the dying.
How long before someone tells me I shouldn’t be here? Focus, Camille. The iPad case tucked under one arm surely would fool most into thinking that I’m here for work, as does the well-cut suit—navy, today, my reliable favorite. My hair was trimmed expensively this morning, its cut just above the shoulders designed to highlight a briskness in its swaying. I know people assume that its copper-redness is intentional, signifying some kind of power and coldheartedness that I let them think I possess. Maybe today my genetics are finally going to come in handy.
Camille Leray—French sculpture specialist, my badge says. Specialist. I’m bloody good at this, or I was; I can read it in most eyes as I emerge into the room, all taking a beat to appreciate that the expert has arrived. The one that found Night Swimming.
I haven’t found it. I’m not doing fine. I look great.
I have barely left the threshold when Rob blocks my way.
“Leray. I didn’t think you were coming.”
His lips are a tight bar of steel across his face disguised as a polite smile. I recognize it. We’ve worked together long enough that I should fear it.
Rob is ex-army, if you’d believe it. Well, he briefly “lost his way” (his words) in his early twenties; then military school helped “put his head back together.” He trained in business, then found himself in the art world where his true passion had always lain. Though it was thirty years ago, he still looks ready to fight: broad-shouldered, silver buzz cut, a towering six foot five to my five foot three. He also happens to be my boss, and he forbid me to come.
“I’m not one to miss free champagne,” I tell him, grabbing a flute from a passing waiter.
“I meant I didn’t think you were invited.”
He stares at me, and to my relief my hand doesn’t shake as I take a sip. He wants to say more, but he can’t. There are so few people here and the atmosphere is reverential. This is Courtenay’s most publicized sale, and our dear clients can’t catch a whiff that anything might not be first-rate. I shake my elbow out of Rob’s hand, smiling sweetly at him, and walk toward what I’m here to see.
The sculpture.
They’re all huddled around it. Biscuit Man is explaining something to his companion about Sorel’s signature style: how fluid her women are, always caught in such expressive movements that they seem about to fall, the materials to collapse. He describes Sorel as Boisseau’s muse, a “stunningly beautiful” woman, “too gifted for her own good—such a shame she gave up on art, that she couldn’t hack it in the end. Must have been hard for a woman then, I suppose.” His partner in the Hepburn dress stares at it through the glass case; I cast her a sideways look of solidarity, because he is so awful, but she is enthralled.
He’s wrong on many counts, but I have had to accept, in my line of work, that many of those who can afford to buy art are.
Man being wrong, reason one: Sorel was so much more than Boisseau’s muse.
Man being wrong, reason two: her signature style isn’t just the visuals of her sculptures. It’s the emotion she makes you feel. She draws you in, and there’s a rich, addictive world underneath her works. She speaks to you so directly, from her heart—her art is so personal. There is no other artist like her, and that’s why I’m so unprofessionally, personally, obsessed with her. We go back a long way, Constance and I. I’ve always felt we were tied by so much more than the world of fine art and sales.
Man being wrong, reason three: that sculpture, in the case—the one everybody is looking at—that’s not Night Swimming.
“Pretty, isn’t she?”
Rob is back at my side. He likes being crass about artworks, talking them down to provoke me. I always thought, in the ten years we worked together, that he didn’t mean it, but today there’s doubt. Things have started to feel cartoonish lately, as if I’ve been losing my grasp on reality. Perhaps Rob doesn’t really value art. Perhaps none of them truly appreciate it and I have been deluded all along.
I nod. “Oh, yes.”
“So, what is she telling you today? Hopefully that she can’t wait to be admired by the whole wide world.”
He pretends he is joking but there’s an edge of threat to his voice. Don’t do anything you might regret, Camille.
The biggest argument we had about the sculpture was just before the press release. I can still picture the scene; my frustration is still very much alive. Rob was sat very still at his desk, and I stood in front of him, increasingly tense at his refusal to listen to me. “Fuck me, Leray,” he said. “The provenance is perfect. You found the photo of it in Boisseau’s workshop, you found the note, by his own hand. Women swimming at night, C. Sorel, on loan. At the back of a soap order, in his archives—bloody hell, that was a masterstroke, and I wouldn’t have expected less from you.” He stopped, lowered his voice. “I’m about to press send, and our careers are about to go through the roof. And now you’re telling me it’s not right? Because of your hunch? You need to stop pissing about and accept that we’re both bloody geniuses about to roll in gold.”
I slammed my hands flat on the surface of his desk, mahogany polished to such a shine that I could see the reflection of my face in it. I hadn’t slept for days; shadows had been creeping under my eyes, dulling the gray of their irises. I didn’t like my body betraying my interiority, when I had made it my life’s work to cover it up. Reliable, professional, of sharp mind and even temper, read every single one of my references. But the statue was wrong, it was dangerous, and nobody was listening. I looked up at Rob, pressing down hard on the desk so my fingers wouldn’t tremble. “Something’s not right. I’m the leading expert in her work. We’ve worked together for a long time, Rob. You of all people should believe me.” That was an understatement, but I couldn’t tell him what had really happened when I tried to access the sculpture the first time. That I had been avoiding it and the toll it had taken, resisting its broken, cursed, and dangerous call ever since.
Rob looked at me with concern rather than anger, and that’s when I knew he had stopped taking me seriously. To be fair to him, all the evidence I had found in days and nights of frantic research had, in fact, pointed the attribution to Sorel. “You don’t know it, Leray, because it is Night Swimming. And that is the end of your ‘doubts,’ you hear me?” He banged his desk with every word he emphasized, like a military drum. As I left, he reached for a cloth to wipe off our fingerprints.
But I couldn’t let it go. I had worked with Constance’s art for years and it had never felt like that. This couldn’t possibly be Night Swimming, I couldn’t bear to see it displayed as such for everyone to see; if I didn’t do something, I was allowing them to betray her. For weeks, while things ran their course and the showcase and sale were being organized, my doubts made me spiral slowly into hell. I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping, I barely left the office, going over the facts again and again, trapped.
It all came to a head three days ago: when I came into the office, trying to plead with Rob once more to take the sculpture off the sale.
“I know you don’t believe me, but it’s—dangerous, Rob. We can’t have that out there. And she wouldn’t make anything like that.” To my shame, I started sobbing. I didn’t even know what day it was, when I last slept. All I could think of was what had happened that first time I tried to tap into the sculpture. Rob took one look at my crumpled shirt, my hair sticking out in all sorts of places, my clammy skin. He handled me calmly, almost kindly, which was worse. He said I had been working too hard and told me he was signing me off for a month on “gardening leave.” That he didn’t expect me to come to the showcase today. He meant that he forbid me to come. Like some of those terrible, awkward fakes we sometimes are asked to look at, I was best locked up inside a shameful cupboard.
“What’s the name of your friend again?” I flinched at his (accurate) use of friend, singular. “The baker?”
“Lowen.”
“Is it Cornwall that he lives in now? Why don’t you go and spend a few days with him, you know, get some sea air, blow the cobwebs away.”
I nodded, too stunned to really listen to him.
“And, Leray?” His voice caught me again as I slipped out of his office, feeling like I’d just been punched in the gut so hard that there soon would be nothing left of me for the internal bleeding. “You are good at this. Maybe a bit too good. Sometimes we can get cocky, and our hunches start to betray us.”
Rob doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he mentions my “hunch.” None of them have ever known what I can do, and why I appear to be so good at my job.
Fine art is more than the sum of its parts. It’s more than catalogues raisonnés, dates that fit the story, gallery archives, sales records, materials and pigments, even skills. Art comes to life in those flashes of human connection; it is a mini-portal from the viewer’s soul into an artist’s world. To connect with art, to allow it to speak to you deeply, is a spiritual, if not supernatural, experience.
And for me, it is even more so.
Since I was little, I have been able to enter the world of art. As if by magic. When I tap into a piece, I’m able to visit the world of the artist’s mind when they created it. For a little while, I can walk into their internal, to me very physical, landscape, made of the memories and feelings they poured into that specific piece. Their experiences play out for me on a loop, their emotions imbue everything I walk through. It is something I have come to realize only I can do. A glitch, a wonderful gift once bestowed upon an emotionally starved child.
My gift, and my way of working it, took me years to refine. The first time it happened was with a classmate’s drawing in preschool. We had all spent the afternoon drawing clumsy lines barely identifiable as objects from the real world. I wanted the girl next to me, Hannah, to be my friend. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how to get her to notice me—I yearned for her and her friendship so much that, one afternoon, when everybody else was playing, I crept up to the desk and stared at her drawing. I think I intended to steal it, but as I stared at it, something else happened. It was like my own feelings, my straining to connect with her through what she had made, opened a door that sucked me in. It was mild then, unrefined, but I saw it in my mind’s eye: her mother’s golden hair and the warmth of her hand on Hannah’s head, her doting father, who had just repaired her Barbie, and her ginger cat, Tiffin. I saw that Hannah had intended to draw them as they ate the vanilla-strawberry birthday cake with sprinkles that her mother had made for her. This was so different from my own home life. I would have happily stayed in that loop all afternoon, but our teacher gently nudged me out of it. Go and play with the others, Camille; it’s no good staying by yourself all the time. Everybody needs friends. I blinked, then approached Hannah and told her how I loved ginger cats and strawberry cakes. We were friends for a whole week after that.
At the beginning I used my gift to do precisely this: try to connect with people, but also enrich my own life with their feelings. The humble, everyday drawings and paintings and bits of arts and crafts became a way for me to escape the drabness of my own family life, its loneliness. It brought color to my existence, taught me feelings my parents weren’t sharing: joy, compassion, love.
Until, age nine, I found fine art. Paintings and sculptures that artists had made, whose only function was to be beautiful, to sublimize an aspect of the human experience. That changed everything, opened up a new world whose sensations went much deeper than the love a grandma poured into some cinnamon biscuits in her grandchild’s lunch box. The hit was extraordinary—like nothing I had ever experienced. From that point on, I sought the company of the finest works of art. I strained to refine the use of my gift to explore the depths and vivid, detailed worlds of real artists, geniuses whose every breath spurred them to create. Whose raison d’être was to pick up a brush or dig their fingertips into clay, make their vivid internal worlds come to life. Those worlds were limitless, dizzying, addictive.
And it was all thanks to Maxime Foucault, who introduced me to it.
Now, in my midthirties, I have refined my gift, learned to be selective of what I use it for. I’ve been lucky to carve my way into a career in fine art, and my gift informs my work. My process is controlled, and I work through the steps methodically, like you would put on gloves, open a toolbox, and take the sharp implements out one by one.
First, I must attune to the sculpture. I prefer to be alone; I work best intensely, with no distractions. I start by spending time with the work, observing it, measuring it, starting from the outside until I know it well enough to pierce the surface, and everything else melts away.
As I attune to it, water rises and my real surroundings fade as well as the work itself. I find I’m standing at the edge of a pond at night, full of voices and echoes. When I dive in, I must swim to follow the light at the bottom, emerging into the artist’s reality, a symbolic upside-down land of the artist’s mind when they made it. It can be a beach, it can be a house, a field, or a dreamlike checkerboard. Over the years, I have managed to attune so precisely that I can conjure the artist, just the way you can will things to life in a lucid dream. Sometimes they say and do things that make part of their memories, the fabric of the piece, but I can’t respond. Everything in the landscape is feeling, meaning, and I inhabit it completely, as a witness. I absorb it, understand the piece and its significance to the artist’s life.
I call this world “Avalon,” no matter what form it takes, the name of the mythical island where King Arthur was taken to rest between life and death. That’s the name I chose when trying to make sense of my gift as a young teenager, when I realized this wasn’t normal. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that nobody else seemed to have the same experience. All I could find was Stendhal syndrome, which has never been medically proven, but is rumored to come on when people are overly affected by artwork, leading to fainting, confusion, even hallucinations. It wasn’t the same for me, I knew. My experience was too real.
To return to my reality I must swim back, and I regain awareness with a new understanding of the art. Time works differently in Avalon; whereas I feel that I spent hours there, and I come back exhausted and buzzing, on a high nothing else can come close to. To an external observer, it looks like I’ve had a small seizure, some kind of absence lasting only a few seconds. I know this because Lowen is the only one I have ever allowed to see the process. I still don’t know if he believed me, even though he said he did.
So I hide my gift, using it secretly for the art I’m in charge of selling: my ambling in Avalon feeds the story I present to buyers, allowing me to make the piece come alive with meaning, with emotional relevance. I make sure the art I sell is personal. I see myself as a conduit, in charge of telling people the truth about a piece, why it mattered so much to the artist and why it should matter to anyone who buys it. I’m no different from any other outstanding auctioneer who works with integrity and cares deeply about the human experience. Except I always know the truth for sure. Well, until recently.
If anybody in the art world found out about my gift, they would think I’m mad, some kind of hippiesque charlatan, and I would lose all credibility as an expert, no matter how good my knowledge actually is and how many hours of actual research and labor I’ve put into building my career. Over the years, to compensate and hide my insider knowledge, I’ve made sure to work twice as hard as anybody else to earn my reputation and their respect. At Courtenay, I’m the one everyone jokes about keeping a sleeping bag and hair straighteners in the office. My life is art, appraising and selling. My whole life.
I never thought it would be taken away from me, until this wrong Night Swimming landed on my desk. Now I can’t look at it without fear, but I can’t let it be sold as Constance Sorel’s; that sculpture feels like nothing she’s ever made, and the night I tried to tap into it left me scarred and terrified. I know I need to try once more to tell them the truth. Even if it has to be desperate and public.
So here I am today, forcing my way to the presale showcase, looking professional on the outside and, on the inside, in a state of disarray. I care about her so much, and what will be labeled as hers. And also…I need them to believe me—the buyers, the experts, the journalists, Rob. I need to know they respect my judgment enough to listen. I clutch my hands into fists to stifle their shaking. I know I must resist the pull of the sculpture, keep my head on straight and speak clearly, but I can’t stop looking at it.
“Leray. Go home. Remember what we talked about yesterday.”
I don’t turn to Rob, who is still at my elbow like a bouncer ready to whisk me out of the room any minute.
“This is wrong.” I only intended to speak to him, but the words come out of my mouth loud enough that conversations around us quieten.
“Camille.” The warning hisses through his tense jaw.
“What is going on?” Biscuit Man asks behind me, addressing Rob. The man in charge. Rob’s hand grips my upper arm.
Murmurs rise behind me, but much harder to ignore, the sculpture is trying to pull me in and I’m fighting to resist it. Sorel’s works have always been my comfort zone. Since I found her, I’ve always felt I understood her. That our lives were connected across time and space. But this—this is something else, so deep and full of destruction, like a black hole trying to suck me in. Normally I can choose when to go, I can control it, but the water is here, risen to my ankles, heavy and wet and empty all at once. I don’t want to go in again. I can’t—
“That’s not right. There’s something wrong with it.” I aim for a strong, calm professional statement but it comes out as a desperate plea. Rob is escorting me out now and I can only use all the fight in me to stay in this reality, to shut out the dark pond taking shape around me, crawling all over the parquet—rising, rising…
“Wait. Leray, are you OK?” Rob stops. Among the spreading night, a glimpse of his furious yet concerned eyes reach me.
“Please help, I don’t want to go in,” I whisper to him, trying to cling on to him, but, as if someone has pulled a giant plug or exploded a dam, the water engulfs me.
Oh, God. I’m back in.
It is dark, like it always is, but somehow burning. I have to swim, I know I need to find the bottom, but there is no light—this water is thick like tar, filling my eyes, my lungs. Screams ambush me, distorted sonars through the substance. Useless. Never good enough. Better off if you died; hands wrestling me in place while others slap me, hard. It’s like sleep apnea, like drowning. It is relentless: the anguish, the violence, the terror, the deepest, darkest kind of primal fear. I am small, and terrified, and vulnerable; I am ten years old, cowering, too scared even to sob. I resist swimming deeper with all my might. She stole you. She took you away. I miss you. You drowned him. Stay here with me, at the bottom. Let us die together. Keys locking me in, irons on my ankles, my wrists. My reality smashed into smithereens, the hammer cracking my skull. They’re holding me down. I’m going to die, to suffocate, and people want me to—
And suddenly I see her, floating across from me, and her face is terrified, screaming for help. The woman in the Hepburn dress.
Jesus. How is she here? How—her eyes are bulging, she is gasping for air, her hand trying to clutch mine, but she is too far—No, oh my God, no… This kicks some life into me, and I fight with everything I have to get close enough to grab her, and my mind wins, in the nick of time; the water recedes, the parquet rises hard to meet my body. I’m prone, feeling like I’ve landed from a great height, my body burning with the absence of oxygen. Rob is splashing cold water in my face. It gets into my nose—the idiot used sparkling water—I gasp, pushing him away, scrambling on my hands and knees to find enough air.
What happened? It was like the first time I went in, except—except I tried to resist it and couldn’t. Did I really pull that woman in with me? That’s impossible. I’ve tried before to show Lowen but it never worked. My ears are buzzing, blood leaving my brain and extremities. Am I going to faint again? Or throw up? I still feel the sludge of darkness on my skin, inside my ears and nose. I feel sticky, heavy, like a bird caught in an oil slick. I look for the woman. I need to ask her…
“Someone fainted!” The shrill call of an emergency helps to bring me back. Rob and I turn at once. The first thing I see are her silver stilettos. She is lying on the floor, motionless, while her useless companion attempts to revive her.
“Camille, what the fuck?” Rob hisses, letting me go as we both rush to her.
“Could this be Stendhal syndrome?” Biscuit Man asks the onlookers, while the security guard props her legs up on someone’s bag. I crouch on the floor next to her. Is he right, or have I…done this to her? How did she follow me? I take her hand, patting it gently, praying she just had a funny turn.
“That’s fucking made up, mate.” I know Rob is beyond crisis mode because he’s never sworn in front of a client before.
Finally, she resurfaces. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, but her first words are not words. She screams. It ripples across the small crowd, scrambling like an army of spiders under our skins. Then she looks straight at me, snatches her hand out of mine. “Get away from me!” I’m sure her eyes aren’t the same as they were before. They’re bigger, swallowed somehow. She points to the sculpture. The room is silent, the worst kind of silence, as she starts sobbing.
“Get me out of here,” she tells her companion, who helps her up. Her legs are jelly and he has to prop her up. “Away from that thing. And away from her!”
Nobody else moves as he walks her out. I turn to Rob, then to the potential buyers. They’re all looking at the sculpture, and I swear I see in them a glimpse of that terror, making them back away, slowly, toward the exit. Then Rob shakes his head and springs back to life. “I need to deal with this. Leray, get out. Now.”
This time, I do. My head is buzzing, nausea rolling through me. I need air. I need—as I exit the room, I turn around, trying one last time to make sense of what happened. It’s like the aftermath of a disaster; people seeking each other’s support, tending to their unease. Did I do this? Did I bring it all out somehow, whatever wrongness is inside that sculpture?
And that’s when I notice him. He’s standing at the back but, unlike everyone else, isn’t cowering away, or gulping champagne as if to build up courage. He is looking straight at me, and I can’t believe I didn’t notice him before. When did he arrive? How could I have missed him?
Maxime Foucault.
I can’t help it; for a second, despite the urgency of getting out of that room, I turn to him like a sunflower drawn to his features, to the warmth of his utter charisma and the desperate way I have missed him. He’s not smiling at me. His eyes are probing, clever, calm.
I don’t see him in fifteen years, and he finally turns up to see me crash our biggest sale?
Shame breaks the spell and I stumble down the stairs. I hurry away as if I am leaving a burning building, the walls melting around me, threatening to close me in. I run to try and escape the mental image of the woman floating in the dark pond, her mouth opened in a silent scream.
My power has never been dangerous before. To me, or to others.
But now, it might be.