‘Jonno Ritchie.’
She made a face. ‘Yes?’
‘Do you know his assistant?’
‘Lizzie. Nice girl.’
‘Do you think you could give her a call?’
Under my direction, Imogen called Lizzie, but she was having a day off, so Imogen spoke to a temporary assistant, Sian, who spoke to Jonno’s colleague Petra’s assistant Anita. With Anita on the phone, I explained the situation and, luckily, she understood perfectly. It turned out Jonno was in a viewing and was unlikely to have seen the email yet. We all agreed that it was in everyone’s interests if he never did. Anita went into Jonno’s office, logged on to his computer and deleted the message from his inbox and trash, erasing all evidence of Petroc’s indiscretion. Petroc cried with relief, and tearfully took himself off to the Fat Shelf to root out a slice of carrot cake, which he gorged on to restore his blood sugar levels. Then, at my behest, he contacted Bloom & Wild and arranged to send Anita a nice bunch of flowers to say thank you. Assistants are the lifeblood of the TV industry, of any industry. They know everything, everyone. They’re the power behind the throne, and you need them on side.
Back in my office, I spotted a rogue almond on the floor under my desk. I crawled under, picked it up and ate it. That’s what producers do; we clear up the mess. Sometimes we even enjoy it. Now Art Andra is my mess, and I’m going to wipe the floor with him.
25
When Danny drops me off at the house on Cheltenham Avenue, Susie’s outside looking like thunder, but I’ve got precisely fifteen minutes to get ready for my visitor and don’t really have time for explanations. As she unlocks the door and starts messing about with a devilishly complicated alarm system, she throws questions over her shoulder at me while I stand on the steps, drinking in the imposing façade. It’s gigantic, with Juliet balconies and a carefully shaped magnolia tree in the elegant front garden. Thinking of my own front garden, full of withered pot plants and flourishing weeds, I wish I could achieve this level of pruned perfection. But that would require professional help; maybe a whole team of dedicated gardeners and landscapers. If only I had staff – people to pick up my dry-cleaning, power hose the patio, renew our TV licence, make my hair curly every day. I would be so much more productive if there was a team of people taking up the slack, being productive for me.
‘What’s going on? Why are you so weird? What on earth have you done to your hair? Is that some sort of creature in your bag? Where did you get that dress?’
I deal with the most important thing first, putting down Bigwig and my bag to give her a twirl.
‘It’s got pockets!’ I jam my hands in them to demonstrate their capaciousness.
She gives me a grudging nod. ‘That’s really nice, how much did it set you back?’
‘McMany Pounds, but I got a discount thanks to some hard-nosed haggling.’
‘See, that’s what I mean.’ Susie beckons me onwards and, carrying Bigwig, I follow her across the hallway and up the stairs, already goggling. ‘The Clover I know doesn’t haggle.’
‘Over the next hour or so, you’re going to get to know another Clover. Just go with it.’ I gaze around the room she’s just led me to, at the back of the house. ‘Bloody hell, this is . . . unbelievable.’
‘This is the old ballroom.’
We’re in a vast space lined with long Georgian windows. The ceiling is covered in intricate cornicing, picked out in brilliant white against a beige background, and punctuated by three huge chandeliers that glint in the afternoon sunlight. The floor is smooth polished oak; I can imagine Regency couples bowing to each other and circling, while dowagers look on disapprovingly. But now, instead of dancers, the room is populated with sculptures – a huge marble head emerging from rough-hewn rock; a series of metal spikes set in a concrete base; a big looping resin blob with a hole in it; an enormous shiny balloon animal; and an elongated bronze figure of a man who appears to be leaning against the wind. This is the second rich person’s house I’ve been in today and once again I can’t imagine what they do with the space – what is the point of a sculpture room? Do they come and stand here of an evening, finger to chin, mulling on the curves of the blob?
Susie continues. ‘On this floor, there’s also a library and a drawing room. Six bedrooms on the second, third and fourth floors, including a huge suite. Downstairs is the kitchen, dining room, cinema room, and then below that is the basement where he keeps all his cars.’
‘Huh. Some collector.’ I run my hand over the marble face – even on this warm day, it feels cold to the touch. ‘This is the real deal, right? I mean, worth a few quid?’
She grimaces. ‘He loves telling people. I’ve been going through a lot of the stuff for our catalogue. His car collection is worth about a million, and the art is worth more. There’s a Gainsborough in the drawing room, and in the library, he’s got a cigar case that belonged to Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He tried to buy the Banksy that got shredded, but he got outbid.’
‘Why does he live here?’ I’m not knocking the West Country, but couldn’t this guy lord it in London or LA? I’m sure everyone has a sculpture room in La La Land, along with a gym and a chakra-realigning pod.
‘He’s Bristol born and bred. Divides his time between here and the UAE. I’m starting to think he might be an arms dealer. Which is why I’m really not happy about you being here.’
‘I’m just your assistant, here to help you with your cataloguing. You said the kitchen was downstairs?’
I take a quick peek in the drawing room – perfect for my purposes – then jog back down the sweeping staircase. The kitchen is underneath the ballroom and is almost as big, industrial-shiny, with all sorts of anterooms for storing wine and doing laundry and stuffing swans. While Susie follows me round exclaiming and complaining, I do what I need to do, and when the doorbell rings just after five, I’m ready.
‘Could you get that please?’
‘Who the hell is it? We’ve got visitors now? Jesus Christ!’
‘It’s an artist called Art Andra, and it’s only for half an hour, and then we’ll be out of your lair.’
She takes me by the shoulders and looks into my eyes. ‘What are you up to? Just tell me.’
For a second I meet her gaze. ‘Not yet. But I will. You’ve just got to trust me. I know what I’m doing.’
She stares at me searchingly, before releasing my shoulders. ‘OK. But you owe me, big time.’
‘OK.’ I watch her walk away, my best friend, who knows everything – not quite everything – and will do this mad thing for me, on my say-so, on my day-of-days, and I think: yes, I do owe her. More than a basement of supercars or a ballroom of sculptures. And I’ll pay her back, another day, just like I did for Petroc. I catch sight of myself in the gilt mirror above the fireplace and zhuzh my crazy hair. My eyes have a light in them; it’s the martial light of Lucas Andra, my visitor’s demonic son. I’m going to need it.
26
The Clover Susie knows doesn’t haggle. She doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t push, doesn’t quibble. She pays full price, tips poor service, accepts her lower-than-market-value salary meekly, is grateful. Sometimes I hate her. She’s so darn spineless, she makes my blood boil.
I keep thinking back to moments when I let my natural cowardice get the better of me, allowing myself to be ignored, slighted, overlooked, rebuked. My innate fear of rocking the boat condemned me to a life spent tiptoeing around, polite smile plastered on, apologizing and throwing my cloak on the floor for everyone. Mostly my mother, admittedly, but it’s a habit that bled out and infected every part of my existence, until I’d effectively erased myself.
‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ Rose always said, when, as a little girl, I scraped my knee, or was scared of the dark, or got lost in Woolworths and the staff had to do an announcement. Her vision of the perfect child was one who was neither seen nor heard, blending into the soft furnishings until we were as accommodating and forgiving as one of her many plump velvet cushions. It became ingrained, that urge to please, to acquiesce, to make everyone else comfortable, even if I was being sat on. Maz dealt with it in a different way, tuning her, and then most of the world, out, but I slogged away, keeping the plates spinning, doing my best to stay serene, a good girl. A husband, two kids, a career, nice house, an (almost) size ten body that functions, shiny hair.
And I’m so fucking tired of it.
I get that I’m lucky to have it all, and know that others have it so much worse. And it’s not that I don’t want those things any more. It’s just that to get them, keep them, maintain them, was and is so much effort. Sometimes I feel like I could give up work and just spend every second of every day dealing with the humdrum minutiae of life – pruning plants and sorting Tupperware cupboards and recycling pens and filling in forms and ordering compost bags on Amazon and buying birthday presents and changing duvet covers and de-ticking the cat and fixing the loose tile in the bathroom and touching up my roots and queueing at the pharmacy and making sure Ethan does his homework and going for a run and prepping dinner and throwing away the rotting vegetables in the fridge and remembering to put wine in for later and dammit I forgot to charge my toothbrush.
And that’s just the ‘fun’ stuff. Then there’s smear tests, and checking your boobs for tumours, and pulling hair from the plughole of the shower, and rinsing the fat-clogged filter in the dishwasher and hosing shit off a child’s welly, and listening to a friend tell you about her mum who has Alzheimer’s and worrying about when that might be your turn, and smiling when the man tells you to smile and hating yourself, and reading about how your children will perish on a fiery earth, and knowing that when you sit down to dinner there are wars raging and people who can’t afford food, parents who can’t feed their kids, and you’re so lucky, you should just sit for a while to think about how goddamned lucky you are, but you just don’t have time, because the washing cycle finished and there’s another load to do.
There’s just too much going on. Keeping everything ticking over without breaking down is a full-time job. And I have a full-time job. ‘A woman’s work is never done!’ my mother twinkles inanely, but that doesn’t begin to cover it. Makes it sound like you’re ticking off a list, one by one, and things keep getting added to the list. But the reality is more than that. It’s more like the vault in Harry Potter where he’s looking for the goblet, but everything he touches multiplies, until they’re all suffocated. More like that. I’m suffocating in cursed goblets, trying to rise above it with a smile. I guess I need to stop touching stuff, stop smiling.
And I will. But first I want to burn the whole thing down.
27
Susie leads Art Andra into the drawing room, where I’m sitting on a chaise longue with my knees together like the Duchess of Cambridge. As he approaches, rolling his shoulders, I can tell he’s already slightly intimidated, working hard to hide it. Shock and awe, that’s what I was going for. I get to my feet more gracefully than is natural to me, and shake his hand.
‘Mr Andra, so good of you to come. This is Suzanne, my assistant. Please, take a seat.’
While I was setting everything up, I practised my accent under my breath, and really think I’ve got it down now. Hearing it, though, causes Susie’s eyes to widen, only to narrow again as she’s introduced.
‘Champagne?’ I gesture towards the bottle set on the table between us, along with two glasses. I’m doing a David Lyon-James. Susie was apoplectic when she saw me nick it from the owner’s wine fridge, but there were loads in there, and he’ll never notice, particularly as it’s only Moët, the arms dealer’s equivalent of tap water. Pouring us both a glass, I check out Art Andra. I couldn’t see him properly on the floor of the gallery, but it turns out he’s a fairly unprepossessing figure anyway – quite short in stature, with close-cropped dark hair revealing his pierced ears. He’s wearing rolled-up black trousers, a neck chain like Connell in Normal People, and one of those ampersand T-shirts. His says ‘Claude & Camille & Alfred & Auguste & Edgar’. What a wag.
As we lean forwards to clink, we’re briefly interrupted by Bigwig lazily hopping across the Persian rug between us. I had to let him out my bag as I wanted him to have a run-around, but Suzanne my assistant is on hand with wipes.
I gently caress his back as he lollops past. ‘My emotional support animal,’ I explain. ‘Essential to my wellbeing in these times of turmoil.’
Art dips his head sagely. I feel we’re already bonding. ‘Can I start by saying I’m a huge admirer of yours.’ I raise my glass to him. ‘Six Weeks is a miraculous piece.’ That’s the title of the big posseting baby figure, which was the only thing I really liked in the exhibition.
He looks disgruntled. ‘That’s one of my earliest works,’ he says. ‘I’ve been experimenting with form since then.’
