Two hours and four glasses of rosé later, I helped Mirabella into a taxi and went back inside to face Henrietta. Any other boss would no doubt have been thrilled by the sales I’d made—two countryside scenes, one custom painting from Andrea Edmunds, and the awful pineapple thing—but I knew Henrietta wouldn’t see it that way. We got a bonus for each painting sold, and her client had left without buying a thing.
“Bethany, a word?”
“Let me just clear these wine glasses away.”
Anything to put off the inevitable. What would she make me do this time? Rearrange the packaging supplies? Reply to comments on the gallery’s Facebook page? Dust the back office? In the five months I’d worked there, Henrietta had proven herself to be a master at dreaming up trivial tasks to keep me busy, thereby minimising the possibility that I might beat her in the sales stakes. And I couldn’t say a thing. Complaining would make me look like a troublemaker, and I needed to keep this job for a little longer. The only thing that would look worse on my CV than no experience at all was leaving a position after such a short period of time.
“No, no, leave that. Gemma can do it. Hugo’s asked you to run an errand.”
Translation: Hugo had asked Henrietta to run an errand, and she’d seen it as the perfect opportunity to get rid of me.
“What kind of errand?”
Oh, that sly smile… She tried to hide it, but just for a moment, it popped onto her face unbidden.
“He wants you to deliver a painting to a client.”
“Which client?”
Henrietta passed me a piece of paper, and I recognised Hugo Pemberton’s elegant cursive.
“Here—Hugo wrote down the address so you wouldn’t forget.”
So she wouldn’t forget, more like. The week after I started, she’d delivered a painting to Christie’s instead of Sotheby’s and blamed it on Gemma’s poor instructions. But I’d been standing next to Gemma when she jotted down the notes from Hugo to give to Henrietta, and she’d clearly written Sotheby’s. When Hugo asked if I knew anything, I couldn’t lie, and that was another reason Henrietta went out of her way to make my life difficult.
Except that today, I got the last laugh. Hugo’s note gave the address of a hotel in Richmond, with an instruction to meet AJ Lonsdale in the bar at four o’clock. It may have been less than ten miles away, but in London traffic, it would take me over two hours to get there and back, by which time the gallery would be closing. Since there was obviously no point in me going back to work, I could carry on driving west to Ascot and visit Chaucer. Between the distance to the stables, the cost of petrol, and the overtime at work, I only got to see him three days a week now if I was lucky, so today’s trip would be an extra treat. Still, I tried to look cheesed off in case Henrietta changed her mind.
“I’ll be sure to memorise the address. Where’s the painting?”
“In Hugo’s studio. You need to leave soon or you’ll be late.”
Really? But it was only half past twelve, and I didn’t need to arrive until four. Then the old-fashioned brass bell above the front door jangled, and I realised Henrietta just wanted to get rid of the competition.
“Ooh, I’d better go and speak to this couple,” she said.
See?
Hugo was seated at his easel, his face hidden behind a jeweller’s visor as he retouched an old oil portrait. The rather stern-looking lady was the ancestor of a client’s wife, and he’d decided to have the painting restored as a Christmas surprise. If the wife was anything like my mother—and I suspected she was since they played tennis together—she’d rather have some diamonds or a trip to the Caribbean, but since the husband was paying Hugo a lot of money, I wasn’t about to mention that.
“Henrietta said you wanted me to deliver a painting?”
Hugo tutted quietly under his breath. “I asked her to go while you looked after the customers.”
As I suspected. I saw my precious hour with Chaucer slipping away. “I could ask her to swap? But some people just came in, and she’s talking with them.” I leaned in closer to study the painting. The last time I’d seen it, there had been a two-inch tear in one corner, but now the damage was all but invisible. “Did you patch it?”
“I considered that, but there were flaky areas of paint on the subject’s dress, and also the face, so in the end, I re-lined it instead.”
Sometimes, when a painting had been neglected over the years and was almost beyond saving, the best option was to bond the whole thing—the damaged canvas and what was left of the paint—onto a new canvas behind using a heat-sensitive glue.
The number-one rule of art restoration was that any changes to the painting needed to be reversible. After re-lining, the whole thing would be coated in a synthetic, non-yellowing varnish that could be removed later with solvent if necessary. Only then would the delicate process of retouching begin. A restorer was a master in his own right—he had to be every bit as skilled as the original artist as well as schooled in chemistry, materials, and the history of art. Hugo Pemberton was one of the best.
Once, I’d hoped to follow in his footsteps. The way a seemingly lost cause could be transformed into its former glory by a process that at times seemed like magic had fascinated me for years, ever since my father had my family’s own art collection restored when I was a child. But a lack of courage and marriage to the wrong man had put paid to those dreams, and now I was the errand girl.
“It looks great. About that delivery—I really don’t mind making the trip. Best not to interrupt Henrietta when she’s with potential customers.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right. As long as you’re sure you don’t mind.” Hugo’s lips pinched in concentration as he selected a tiny sable brush, a double-zero size, then changed his mind and swapped it for an even smaller triple-zero. “The painting’s right over there in the corner.”
He waved his other hand at a small wooden crate, roughly thirty inches by fifteen. From those dimensions, I knew the painting would be about two feet by one foot in size as we tended to allow three inches for packing materials, perhaps a little more if it needed to survive a plane trip. Inside, the painting would be wrapped in buffered, acid-free tissue paper and a layer of bubble wrap, with the remaining space filled by styrofoam peanuts.
“Is it the Stanley Spencer landscape?”
“No, I’m still working on that one. This is a Heath Robert, a birthday surprise for a friend in California. His assistant’s in town today, and he’s going to take it back with him.”
Heath Robert—pronounced “Roe-bear,” never “Roh-bert”—was a well-established artist fond of painting sailing boats. The last work of his we’d sold went for eleven thousand pounds, so it was a generous gift. But Hugo always had been generous. On my birthday, he’d given me a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, then taken me, Henrietta, and Gemma out for dinner at the fancy restaurant around the corner. Even Henrietta had been cheerful that night.
“Lovely—I’ll take good care of it. Don’t work too late, will you?”
“No, no, of course not.”
Hugo would ignore me, just as he always did. It wasn’t unusual for me to unlock the gallery in the morning and find him fast asleep on the old leather sofa in the corner of his studio, snoring quietly. Hugo got so engrossed in his work that he forgot about the time.