The entrance to the meeting was through a side door of the dilapidated health and well-being centre. Built in the 1970s, the concrete pebbledash façade had worn away and the paintwork was now a rain-stained grey. Taped to the door was a piece of paper with “AA meeting” written by hand and underneath it an arrow pointing upwards, apparently to heaven. Straightening her coat and patting her hair lightly, Evie checked herself in the grimy window. Her appearance was important. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was an alcoholic; she was just someone who needed a little support on occasion.
“Are you here for the meeting?” asked a young woman wearing pink trousers, a tight black jumper and a nose piercing, as she pushed past Evie and opened the door to the centre. She waited for Evie to follow her. “It’s just at the end of this corridor. I’m Lottie.”
Evie wondered how she had guessed.
“Your first time?” Lottie asked. “Don’t be scared. We all start somewhere.” She walked quickly down the linoleum-lined passage and, turning left at the end, opened another door into a large room.
“Hi, Lottie,” a large middle-aged woman in a cardigan and slacks called out.
“Hello, Danni,” said Lottie, giving her a big hug. “What did the doctor say last week?”
“He changed my meds—I’m now on a different kind.”
“How are they working?”
“Feel a bit off, really,” said Danni. She turned to Evie. “Welcome. Is this your first meeting?”
Evie nodded, forcing out a smile. She wanted to turn around and leave. She knew that she didn’t belong with these people. Damn Annie for making her promise to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
“Cup of tea?” Danni asked.
Evie nodded.
Evie took her tea and chose a chair on the outer edge of the room. Over the next half-hour about fifteen people arrived, all known to each other. The mix of age and background surprised Evie; there was a dapper black man in his seventies, wearing a well-cut suit and carrying a cane; an elderly trim woman, Patricia, dressed immaculately in pearls and a twinset. A grubby teenager arrived with a sixty-year-old in a tracksuit, and a heavily tattooed man with a snub-nosed mongrel. Bella, who introduced herself to Evie, must have been a model—the vestige of great beauty clung to her ageing face.
“Just listen to the similarities rather than the differences,” Bella advised.
“Keep coming back; it works if you work it,” Danni added.
Patricia got up and went to sit at the front of the room behind a Formica table.
“My name is Patricia and I am an alcoholic,” she told the room. Evie had to admit that her story was extraordinary but it had nothing whatsoever to do with her own problems. After Patricia had finished speaking, others took turns to talk about their own stories. Some identified with Patricia, others talked about struggles in their daily lives. Their language was peppered with slogans, “One day at a time” or “it works if you work it.” Psychobabble, Evie thought crossly. At the end, five minutes was set aside for newcomers. Everyone looked expectantly at Evie who looked at her feet. Eventually, unable to endure the deafening silence, Evie spoke. “I’m Evie and I am not like any of you.” She expected a mass rejection but was surprised when the whole group smiled benignly and encouragingly at her and said in unison, “Welcome, keep coming back. It works if you work it.” Evie arranged her mouth in a lukewarm smile. Bloody loonies, she thought.
Nevertheless, she stayed for a cup of tea afterwards. The people were very kind and gave her leaflets and electric-pink-coloured biscuits. Evie took the newcomer’s welcome pack back to the flat and left it on the table for Annie to see. Privately she knew that AA was not for her; what she needed was the love of a good man and some money. Evie only drank because she was lonely and broke.
In the good old days, Melanie Appledore thought as she handed her ticket to the man at the door, the chairman of the governors and the director would have met her at the entrance to the Royal Opera House. She still gave $100,000 a year to the institution, but these days, $100,000 didn’t buy much respect, just a priority booking number and a small window of time to reserve seats for popular performances. Once upon a time she walked into the lobby and every head turned to look at her and her husband. People knew exactly who she was and the importance of her diamond (the Shimla, 30 carats), the designer of her gown and the value of her sable coat. They would whisper her name and speculate on her husband’s net worth. Mrs. Appledore knew that they wondered about her humble beginnings and a former life. Many assumed she was a Jewish refugee, sent to America on Kindertransport before the war. “You know it is too painful for her to talk about,” one society friend told another. Melanie did not put them right or wrong; she didn’t mind being a Jew to the Jews or a goy to the rest. She knew that she was the object of fascination and occasionally of satire, but it was better to be talked about than never mentioned. Tonight it was like old times; the audience stared and whispered but Mrs. Appledore knew no-one recognised or even cared about her. Instead their attention was aimed at Barty, who had come dressed as the opera’s hero Rodolfo, a struggling eighteenth-century writer.
Barty wore a pair of torn breeches with a raggedy frock coat on top. His handkerchief was made from the pages of an unpublished play (written out in best boarding-school writing by Emeline that afternoon), his shoes were mismatched, and on his head Barty wore a bright-pink silk bonnet in deference to Mimi, the opera’s heroine. Lucky, Mrs. Appledore thought, they were in a box or many would complain about the hat obscuring views. As it wasn’t an opening night, there were no photographers to capture his quite brilliant take on La Bohème, but Barty would never let sartorial standards drop. Besides, he had met his latest love, a young fashion student, one night leaving the ballet. Juan de Carlos had asked for his autograph and soon became Barty’s screensaver.
Even if no one else understood who Mrs. Appledore was, Barty made a huge fuss of her. Having walked ladies to the ballet and opera for half a century, he knew every back passage, every loo and most of the attendants. Mrs. Appledore would get to her box without being jostled or pushed. They would get the best table in the Crush bar and an ice-cold bottle of champagne would be delivered to the box at the end of each act. Waiting for them in the box were Mrs. Appledore’s other guests, the Duke and Duchess of Swindon. Windy Swindon (the nickname came from his ancestral home’s position on top of the Marlborough Downs) and his wife Stinky (her real name was Glendora and she never smelled) were, in Barty’s opinion, the dullest members of the aristocracy and that was saying something.
“What are you wearing, Barty?” Stinky asked.
“The references aren’t that difficult,” Barty said, pointing to the bonnet and the manuscript. “I am Rodolfo mourning Mimi.”
“Who the fuck are they when they are at home?” Windy asked.
“You are about to find out,” Barty said.
“Are they joining us too?” Stinky looked around.
“Rodolfo and Mimi are the hero and heroine of La Bohème,” Mrs. Appledore said, giving Barty a warning glance.
“It’s the opera you are about to see,” Barty said incredulously. He often wondered how the aristocracy had survived so much longer than their brain cells.
The bell sounded and in Box 60 the party of four took their seats. Barty chose the high stool at the back, a position he liked. Although it gave an impaired view of the stage, it offered the best view of the audience. Taking his opera glasses out of his pocket, he scanned the boxes opposite and stalls for familiar faces. It was rather a poor night. Lord Beachendon was there with his tired-looking wife in an exhausted dress. She looks, Barty thought, like someone from a 1970s BBC documentary on rural gentility, one of those (probably only fifty-looking seventy-year-old) wives who had been retired to the country in a Laura Ashley smock with a couple of Labradors. Her hair, salt-and-pepper blonde, was pulled back into a velvet band and round her neck she wore the last family heirloom, three strings of good pearls. Earl Beachendon, Barty thought, looked emaciated. His old smoking jacket hung like velvet weeds from narrow, stooped shoulders. His hair, or the very little left of it, needed a trim. Both the Earl and Countess reminded Barty of party balloons left to deflate in a cupboard.
In complete contrast, the next-door box was full of over-pumped hedge-fund types who probably bought the tickets at a City auction, thinking that Bohème was related to Beyoncé. Dame Fiona Goldfarb was in the Royal Box (which, as Queen of the Jews and the major patron of the Opera House, she deserved); Tayassa, the eldest daughter of the Emir and Sheikha of Alwabbi, was there (probably deciding whether to build an opera house to go with their new museum) but apart from that, it was all rather déclassé, Barty thought sadly. Once you came to the opera to be seen; now one comes to escape.
The conductor took to the stand and the audience erupted into applause.
“Honestly,” Barty whispered to Mrs. Appledore, “it’s not like he just landed a holiday plane in the Costa del Sol—let the man prove himself.”
The conductor turned to his crowd and bowed.
“Oh do get on with it,” Barty said a little too loudly. Then the huge red velvet curtain swept open and the audience was transported on a wave of violins, piccolos, flutes and cellos into Rodolfo’s garret, where the writer sat next to an unlit stove, with his friend, the painter Marcello, complaining about being cold and, of course, about love.
In Box 60, four pairs of eyes were fixed on the stage, but four minds were elsewhere. Barty lamented the drop in standards and how sad it was that few bothered to dress for the opera. Mrs. Appledore decided to blow the rest of her husband’s foundation on one major donation, a real showstopper. Windy Swindon wondered if he should sell the grouse moor in Scotland. It wasn’t worth much these days—the grouse had long since gone—but it might buy a new roof for the west wing of Swindon Hall. Stinky worried about her box-hedge blight that threatened the whole structure of the garden. What could she do to preserve the neat knot garden without box? Someone suggested yew but that took ages to grow; she had not been so worried about anything since Windy took a mistress (she was still around and turned out to be quite convenient really—Stinky was let off conjugal duties, a blessed relief).
When Mimi and Rodolfo declared their love, the music was so rousing and the sight of the diminutive tenor’s arms trying to encircle the rotund soprano’s girth was so alarming that everyone in Box 60 turned their attention to the stage. Mrs. Appledore began to cry; she remembered the other Bohèmes she and her husband had seen, at the Met, La Scala, Teatro La Fenice and the happy times they had spent before he died nearly twenty-two years previously, thus consigning her to a life of pampered peripatetic loneliness, moving between her houses in London, New York, Aspen, Paris, St. Barts, Buenos Aires, Cap Ferrat, St. Moritz and, of course, their yacht. The ever-attentive Barty noticed the three tiny tears meander down Mrs. Appledore’s entirely smooth cheek and he passed her a scented handkerchief. Barty understood loneliness and, taking her tiny wizened hand, he held it for the rest of Act Two as gently as a baby swallow.
On stage the young people did what young people did: kissed and drank, fell in love and argued. The audience, most in their dotage, had to trawl the depths of their memories to remember what all that was like.
On the other side of the auditorium Earl Beachendon was not thinking about love or sex; he was worrying about money and a visit he had paid that afternoon to the world’s highest-selling contemporary artist, a man formerly known as Gary Mitchell, who now went by the name of Blob. As he was over six feet tall and as etiolated as a peeled cucumber, no one understood why Gary had chosen such an unlikely sobriquet. Gary didn’t explain or elaborate; as Lord Beachendon found out that morning, Gary or Blob kept words to a minimum. After two hours spent in his company, all Blob had conceded was “yes,” “no” and “maybe,” and on the whole only “maybe.” Maybe he would consent to a selling sale/exhibition at the auction house. Maybe it would happen this year. Maybe he would split the profits 60/40 with the auction house. Maybe he would leave his dealers.
Lord Beachendon had entered Blob’s house with a sense of hope and left in a state of confusion. Blob lived in an exquisite double-fronted Huguenot mansion in Spitalfields (bought for £8 million earlier that year); the Earl had been met by an astonishingly pretty assistant (an MIT graduate) and shown into a waiting area decorated with a Rembrandt (£18 million, sold by the Earl two years earlier). The interiors had been tastefully decorated (at least £250,000 per room) and the carpet was by Aubusson (mint condition, £2 million). Minutes later, Blob’s PA, a knock-out in skin-tight black Lycra (double first from Cambridge), greeted him coolly but politely and apologised that Blob was running slightly late. She could offer a glass of Cristal (£290 per bottle) or a Lafite Rothschild 1961 (£450). What depressed Beachendon most was not the amount of money that Blob must have made from his art but that the artist and his set-up brought out Beachendon’s basest instincts and most jealous inclinations. Like many of the clients he so despised, the Earl realised that he had become just another person who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. He had not bothered to look at the Rembrandt or the carpet, he would not be able to taste the claret or admire the woman’s brain—all he could think about was what they had cost.
Those mysterious market forces had decided that Blob was “it”: the new wunderkind, the commander of great prices. His paintings, phantasmagorical, highly detailed visions of heaven and hell, sold for millions of pounds and the waiting lists were comprised of several hundred collectors. He was the first painter since Hieronymus Bosch to capture the essence of human depravity and virtuosity. Critics, in a rare case of unanimity, agreed that Blob’s work reflected everything that was good and bad about contemporary society, and what was more, he was, unlike so many of his peers, a beautiful draftsman and astonishingly accomplished painter. What Lord Beachendon knew was that Blob was sitting on thousands of priceless drawings and preparatory oil sketches. If the artist could be persuaded to bring these to auction, all of Earl Beachendon’s troubles would evaporate. The sale of Blob’s work would cause a financial and critical sensation. All Blob had to say was yes; all Blob said was maybe.
At exactly the time that Mimi uttered her last breath at Covent Garden, Agatha sent Annie a text with an update on the picture.
“Annie. Discoloured varnish thinned: extraordinary transformation. White cloud is actually a clown! All very Watteauesque. Further investigation and research needed. Septimus W-T wants pic out of gall. Please pick up ASAP. Best wishes, Agatha.”
When the message came through, Annie was still at work waiting for an “oeuf en gelée” to set. She had placed the egg in a mould with nasturtium petals, sprigs of dill and mustard seeds but even after six attempts the result looked messy. She gave Agatha’s text a cursory glance, her attention still on the recalcitrant starter: could she create an omelette, roll it up with salmon caviar and chopped steamed spinach to create three layers of colour and set that in aspic? Glancing at the clock she saw it was 10:30 p.m.—it would take an hour to get home on the bus or forty-five minutes to bicycle against a headwind.
The painting, she thought, is too much trouble. She decided to collect it, hang it in her flat and stop this pointless wild goose chase. Miraculous things like discovering lost masterpieces did not happen to women like her. Texting Agatha back, she wrote, “Thanks v much. Will come in ASAP. Best, Annie.”