Artistic Licence (20 page)

‘Yeah, well,’ she said now. ‘I’d better get downstairs or I’ll have to take a chisel to the flour and water paste.’

‘It’s good you’ve got the Harry Potter books. Veronica doesn’t read children’s books.’

‘No, well, I think it doesn’t matter whether a book is for adults or children; if it’s a good read, it’s a good read. Do you want the radio on, for company?’

‘Haven’t you got a television?’

‘Not in the bedroom, no. But I’ll put the radio on, it’ll
probably be news or something, but it may send you off to sleep. It always does me.’

At last Thea got herself away from Toby who, though sleepy, seemed reluctant to be left alone. If the kitchen hadn’t looked like the television set for a chimps tea party, she would have found jobs to do upstairs, but with Molly coming in the morning she wanted to get it straight. Besides, Petal would tell her off dreadfully if she found the detritus of deep pan pizza making stuck to the table.

Toby woke in the night, just as Thea was deeply asleep. She struggled upright to check he could find the loo all right. ‘OK?’ she murmured, with only one eye open.

‘I’m a bit cold.’

‘Oh.’ She thought about hot-water bottles and extra blankets, and balked. ‘Toby, I’m really, really sleepy. Would you mind awfully just getting into my bed? It’s a double and I can easily shift over.’ She shifted, waking up a bit more as she reached the cold bit.

‘Oh, OK.’ Toby padded over and got into the space Thea had made. ‘This is lovely and warm,’ he said, and fell asleep.

Thea, convinced that in the morning she would be convicted of child abuse, decided she would worry about it when it happened and joined Toby in slumber.

Molly arrived promptly at ten o’clock as arranged. Seeing Toby sitting at the kitchen table eating pancakes, she looked at Thea. ‘I hope you haven’t been spoiling him.’

‘Not at all. Toby and I like cooking, that’s all. And I think it’s important for men to learn the skills as well
as women.’

As Molly had got through life perfectly well without cooking anything which hadn’t come from Marks and Spencer’s she lost interest. ‘Well, can we go through to the sitting room? There’s something I want to say to you.’

Typical, thought Thea. Most people who came into her house had to be prised from the kitchen with a crowbar. Just for this moment, her kitchen was as clean and tidy as it ever was, and Molly wanted to go into the sitting room, which wasn’t.

Molly had already refused coffee, so Thea lead the way somewhat glumly.

‘Now Thea, sweetie, I know you’re not going to like this, but I’ve had an idea.’

Thea cringed into her favourite armchair, fearing what the idea might be.

‘I want to put money into the gallery. Just until you’re on your feet. Then, if you want to pay me back you can. Otherwise I can look on it as an investment.’

This was what Thea had been fearing and now didn’t know how to answer. She was genuinely fond of Molly, but did she really want to be beholden to her, financially, when they hadn’t even managed a week’s holiday together without getting snappy?

‘Derek said you wouldn’t want to do it, but he also said’ – Molly paused – ‘that I was to tell you, that you were to tell him if I was getting too bossy.’ She paused again. ‘I know I can be.’

Thea suddenly felt overcome with gratitude and warmth. She went across to Molly and sat beside her on the sofa. ‘Oh, Molly, it’s so sweet of you. I don’t know what to say.’

‘I partly want to do it’ – she cleared her throat – ‘because I’ve decided to stop going on Tiger Tours. That thing with Gerald, it was because I was bored, really. I realised that when you and Rory – I mean – you didn’t have an affair with Rory, did you? Because you knew that you needed a project. I really admired that. Because Rory was – is – gorgeous. To turn down someone like that because there was something more important – it taught me …’

‘Oh, Molly –’

‘It taught me that that was what I needed, a project I mean.’

‘But what about Derek?’

‘Derek said, “Go for it.” After all, you need the money and I’ve got it lying around in an account that’s not paying much interest. Then Derek said it would keep me out of mischief and I suddenly worried that he’d found out about Gerald.’

‘I’m sure he couldn’t have done. There wasn’t much to find out, was there?’

‘No, but I could have made the most God-awful fool of myself.’ Molly shook her head slightly. ‘I won’t interfere, I promise.’

Thea didn’t ask how, if Molly wasn’t going to interfere, it was going to keep her out of mischief, because Molly not interfering was like anyone else doing without oxygen, just not possible. But she still didn’t know what to say, or what to think. In some ways it was the answer to her problems. She could move into the gallery immediately and start getting it ready. But Molly? Not an ideal business partner for someone, let alone for anyone who was so bad at saying no.

‘Let me have a few moments to think about it, Molly.’

‘You could have longer than that. You don’t have to tell me in a hurry.’

‘Yes, I do, if I’m going to get this gallery open. Just give me a couple of sees. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

By the time the kettle had boiled, Thea had had a short conversation with Toby about how to cook pancakes without getting them thick as planks and had made coffee, she had made up her mind.

She brought a tray back into the sitting room and, having moved a pile of NMEs, found space for it on a small table. ‘I accept your very kind offer, Molly. It’s really sweet of you and I’m very grateful.’

‘But? I know there’s a but, so you might as well tell me what it is.’

‘I am going to be firm with you. I’m going to practise being businesslike. After all, it was because I was too naïve and trusting that I’ – Thea paused – ‘that I decided that photojournalism wasn’t for me. This time I’m going to tell it like it is and say no if I think you’re wrong.’

‘Well, of course.’ Molly was pink. ‘I never thought you’d accept. I thought I was just too domineering for you. Derek says I should go on a de-assertiveness course.’

Thea handed her friend a cup of coffee, getting a sudden insight into her marriage; Derek probably let Molly do more or less what she wanted, but it was him to whom she turned when she needed help.

‘I was thinking of going on a course in “how to say no”, but I don’t think we’re either of us going to have time.’

‘You mean you’ll let me help?’

‘Of course! I need you to help, Molly, just as long as you do what I want you to. It’ll be my turn to be bossy.’ Thea sipped her coffee to hide her amusement at this notion. She could no more boss Molly than Molly could go to bed without flossing her teeth or applying expensive cream, with light, upward strokes, into her neck.

They were a good team. Thea signed papers and Molly signed cheques, and between them they put the fear of God into all the official bodies they had to deal with before Thea was given two sets of keys to what would be the gallery. She gave one to Molly as they drank a celebratory cup of coffee and Thea ate a celebratory cream cake. ‘You’ll need these. I’m planning to organise the lodgers to come in and help me clean and decorate. I’ll have to pay them, of course. I’m not sure if Petal will do it, though. Unlike the others, she doesn’t need the money.’

‘Get her to organise the others. The way to deal with bossy people,’ said Molly, looking directly at Thea, but not changing her expression, ‘is to channel their bossiness. Derek told me that.’

Thea had never really got to know Derek. She tended to do things with Molly on her own. Now, she liked Derek better the more she learned about him and mentally filed him away as a source of advice.

Later, she rang Rory and told him the good news. He was worryingly ambivalent. ‘Rory, you’re not going to let me do all this gallery thing, borrow hundreds – no, thousands – of pounds from Molly, and then just send your stuff to the States anyway?’

‘Now, would I do a thing like that?’

His charm was less potent down the phone, but still evident. ‘I do hope not, Rory, or I might have to firebomb your studio or something,’ said Thea mildly. ‘No one cares about your work as much as I do, except perhaps Ben. I’m busting all my guts, everything, to give you a completely fabulous space to show it in. I can’t have you backing out now.’

‘Now don’t you go getting your knickers in a twist.’ Thea winced at her least favourite expression. ‘I’ll let you have the first showing of my work, provided you’ve got space for it all.’

A finger of anxiety touched Thea for a moment, but she dismissed it. When Rory saw the gallery he wouldn’t want his work shown anywhere else.

Molly was quite right about Petal. Once she was convinced that it was the right and cool thing to do (helped in her decision by her new boyfriend who, unusually for Petal, was hard up) she galvanised the troops wonderfully, making those without Saturday jobs give up their free day to Thea.

Molly, who had yet to shrug off entirely her previous existence as a ‘woman who lunched’, was just going to drop an estate load, which amounted to four students, at the gallery. Thea’s car was packed with an enormous sound system which Petal insisted was essential if any work was to be done, as many of her old clothes as she thought would cover the workers, mugs, coffee, a huge chocolate cake she had made in the night when she couldn’t sleep and a case of beers she planned to keep hidden until after the work was done. She also took her vacuum cleaner and Petal.

‘You get them into painting gear while I make friends with the builders’ merchants round the corner, and get paint and ladders and stuff. I’ve opened an account there, so that’ll mean I don’t have to go every time and pay. We’re going to be rigid about coffee breaks and only have them when we’ve seen real progress.’

Petal gave her a ‘get a life’ look, rolling her eyes, her expression saying ‘Iike any of that’s ever going to happen’. Thea frowned, wondering if she
could
fit in an assertiveness course, after all. Having dumped Petal and the contents of her car on to the pavement, she watched her organise a chain gang through her rear-view mirror.

It took ages to buy the industrial-size tubs of paint, sugar soap, soft brooms, stiff brooms, rubber gloves and all the other myriad items she and the man who served her thought she’d need. All the while more items were added to the list, or she took another docket to another window so she could pay, she consoled herself with the thought that Petal would have been making them get on. They couldn’t do a lot, she realised, but they could start pulling up the carpet. Derek had put his tool kit into Molly’s car.

She had forgotten that they were mostly art students. First, they had had enormous fun dressing up in Thea’s old clothes. Then they had put the music on loud enough to threaten the glass in the windows and pranced about, exclaiming over the wondrousness of the space. They had also found the chocolate cake, though not, thank goodness, the beer.

Thea turned off the music, realising that either Petal had let her down, or that she didn’t have quite enough
of Molly’s genes. ‘Right, you lot!’ she shouted assertively. ‘I’ll start paying you from the time you start work. We need to get this carpet up. And if this room isn’t clear of carpet, walls and floor washed by five o’clock, no one gets paid and no one gets a lift back to town. Petal?’

She hoped no one heard the note of pleading, which to her was only too clear.

Chapter Twelve

At half past four Molly arrived, elegant as usual, to see if there was anything she could do.

Thea would have fallen on her neck in gratitude if she hadn’t been so filthy. ‘Take this lot away,’ she pleaded quietly, so ‘this lot’ wouldn’t hear. ‘They’ve been wonderful, but they can’t agree what music to play, and there’s nothing more they can do apart from painting and I don’t want them doing that – they’re art students.’

Molly’s estate managed to fit in Petal and the sound system, as well as the four who had come in it originally. Thea watched them drive past the window, waving madly, with a sigh of relief. They were nice kids. Two of them lived with her, one of them was Petal’s boyfriend and one, a girl, was attached to another of her lodgers, but Thea had had enough young company. She wanted to have the place to herself, some calm, to give herself a rough idea how long it would take to get it into some sort of order. She couldn’t do that with drum’n’bass beating in her ears at full volume. She only liked drum’n’bass through a couple of closed doors. Then it was fine.

The carpet was gone. The floor beneath washed, but otherwise in a bad way. She would have to hire a sander to get through the layers of dirt and stain. Then
it would need lots and lots of coats of varnish. She’d have to find something that was fairly quick-drying.

Downstairs, in the basement room, they discovered the carpet was glued down. Thea had stopped them pulling it up until she found out if the glue would come off easily. She didn’t want people sticking to the floor, after all. The corner where they tried this indicated that only laborious scrubbing with a paint scraper would remove it, and with the prospect of varnishing the floor upstairs for days on end ahead of her, she decided to think of a plan B for the basement floor.