Artistic Licence (22 page)

‘Oh. That’s a bit of a blow.’

‘Why? So you could show your work to your aunties? You should have asked me, I could have got you another set done.’

‘How long would that take?’

Thea shrugged. ‘Hard to say. How long will you be in London?’

‘I was planning on staying a month.’

‘A month? That’s not that much less than you gave me to set up my gallery from scratch. It’s too long for a holiday, Rory. You can stay a fortnight, at the most, or’ – she scooped up a sleeping bundle of black and white fluff – ‘the puppy gets it.’

He laughed. ‘You’re a hard woman, Thea. Did I ever tell you that?’

Lara lay in front of the Rayburn, taking up almost the entire width of the kitchen. She stared resignedly under the sink, her puppies sucking away happily. The little one was still far smaller than the others, but he sucked strongly now and seemed to move about just as much as the others did.

Thea felt so tired she could have lain down on the kitchen floor next to Lara and gone to sleep. She decided that the puppies were doing well enough with their mother for now. If they needed solid food, they could wait until the morning. Lara had a bucket of water by her and was now lying on an old duvet instead of just the stone flags, and seemed content, although her master had abandoned her. She was like a child who had got used to being dumped in strange places. She just settled down and got on with things,
rather as Toby had done.

Thea turned at the kitchen door and decided she’d better write a note for the lodgers, otherwise they might have funny turns when they saw Lara and the pups. And they’d definitely make enough noise to wake them up. Having done this, she toiled back up the stairs, thinking about Ben. Now if he had been making extravagant promises in exchange for a night in her arms, how would she have reacted? It was a little lowering to reflect that he wouldn’t have to offer her anything, apart from the night in his arms. And she didn’t know him as well as she knew Rory.

Just before she went to sleep, Thea realised that Rory had gone and not left her an address in London. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she murmured into her pillow. ‘He’s probably just visiting his aunties.’

Thea got up very early the following morning. The puppies all bumbled around while Thea showed Lara the tiny garden which was up a flight of rather narrow stone steps. Lara negotiated them easily, squatted and then made Thea send Rory messages of rage. How could he have left her with Lara and the pups when the dog did turds which wouldn’t have shamed an elephant? She lived in a town, for goodness’ sake! Pursing her lips and trying not to breathe through her nose, Thea rummaged in the garden shed and found a shovel. By the time she had dealt with Lara’s offering she was seriously considering ringing the RSPCA. Lara and her pups would look lovely on
Pet Rescue
. When she’d washed her hands and gone back into the kitchen to give Lara her breakfast, she’d changed her mind. The pups moved slowly about like those giant
blow-up puppets of sumo wrestlers, only in miniature.

The pet shop opened early. She bought a book and realised she’d have to look after the pups herself, even if she had to take them backwards and forwards to the gallery with her in the car.

The book told her that pups of three weeks should be started on solid food. Well, it was already too late for that. They should be fed in separate bowls to make sure they all got equal shares and they would need at least three meals a day. They would also have to be helped to eat. Thea saw herself spoon-feeding each pup, saying ‘one for mummy’ and playing aeroplanes. It would take hours out of her already completely full days. She put a jug of milk in the microwave, having not bought a proprietary puppy milk, hoping it wouldn’t give them the threatened diarrhoea.

‘If I’d wanted to become a dog breeder,’ she growled to the absent Rory, when she’d finally got the cornflakes (all the cereal she had in the cupboard) to the right temperature, ‘I wouldn’t have chosen to do it while I was opening an art gallery. I’d have done it when I had absolutely nothing to do with my life except lie on my stomach and dabble my fingers in warm breakfast cereal.’

This sarcasm followed the many other curses she had sent to him over the ether. She cursed as she bought boxes of Weetabix and tins of puppy food, a proper water bowl and a set of new cereal bowls. Only at the last minute did she relent and let the lodgers have the new bowls, and use the old ones for the pups.

The lodgers were mostly delighted with Lara and the pups, even though it was only Thea who would clear up after her in the garden. Molly was very
ambivalent. When Thea explained that she would have to take Lara and the pups to the gallery, if there was no one at home to give Lara her huge meals and the pups their little ones, she bit her lip. ‘It’s not that I don’t love Lara’ – she patted the huge head with some distaste – ‘but an art gallery is no place for animals.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Thea snapped, and then smiled to neutralise her irritation. ‘But what can I do? Besides, if I did ever feel like sleeping over at the gallery, Lara would be company.’

Molly didn’t approve of the notion of Thea sleeping at the gallery and so far the lure of hot water had always prevented Thea from doing it. But she could see that the drive home after a long day would seem like a dreadful slog, particularly in Thea’s little car.

‘I suppose so. And the pups are rather sweet.’ One of them was chewing ineffectually at the toe of Molly’s shoe.

Would she think they were sweet when those little baby teeth were big enough to do any damage to the Charles Jourdans? Thea wondered. ‘The lodgers are very good at taking Lara round the park,’ she said. ‘Pete in particular. Although of course I can’t persuade them to clean up after her, so I have to walk her first.’

‘Clean up after … ? Oh, my God!’

‘I shall leave them at home tomorrow, because I want to sand the floor and the noise will be dreadful, and Pete will be in to feed them.’

Molly, who had felt uncomfortably out of control when the talk had been of puppies and dog poo, swung into managerial mode: ‘Thea, you cannot do that yourself. You must get someone to do it for you. It’ll take you ages. I absolutely insist!’

‘But I’ve booked the sander, now.’ Thea actually hadn’t been looking forward to being dragged about behind a large and noisy machine, but she was intent on doing everything the very cheapest way possible, which meant doing everything herself.

‘Then leave it to me. I’ll get someone to do it.’

‘But Molly, we’ll have to pay them. I’ll do it for nothing.’

‘Thea, I’ve told you, I’m happy to finance the gallery. Derek’s happy. We’ve allocated an amount and you haven’t even spent a third of it yet. Save your energy and your talent for things that only you can do. I’ve chased the shippers, by the way. The paintings should arrive the day after tomorrow. You can think about where to store them.’

Thea heaved a larger sigh than usual. Sometimes it was nice to be bullied. ‘Most of them should fit in the little bedroom at the gallery and the rest can go in the passage.’

‘Good,’ said Molly. ‘Then you can’t sleep there.’

Chapter Thirteen

The floor had been sanded and the pictures had arrived (after at least a dozen enquiries as to their whereabouts) but the floor still had to be varnished and Thea wouldn’t allow anyone else to do it. She had not been pleased with the quality of the sanding done by Molly’s ‘little man’ and what she’d said to Molly was, ‘I’m damned if I’ll pay anyone else to do the job badly when I can do it badly myself for nothing.’

She’d tracked down some quick-drying water-based varnish, which wouldn’t poison her with fumes, and she planned to spend all evening and on into the night if necessary, putting on coat after coat until the floor would shrug off a diamond cutter, let alone the scuffing of hundreds of pairs of feet.

She had brought Lara and the pups with her, as there was no one at home to look after them. It was the first time, because until now someone had always been able to feed them and change the newspapers.

Thea had also brought a sleeping bag and pillow to the gallery, in case she felt too tired to drive back. With Lara and the puppies for protection, a radio for company and a little stash of goodies for comfort, she felt equipped for a marathon of varnishing.

Molly had offered to do it with her, declaring that she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. But as Thea
knew this wasn’t true and that the offer was made out of duty rather than a desire to get a repetitive-stress injury, she refused. Molly was proving a boon. Her bullying nature – or ‘managerial qualities’ as Thea now referred to them for diplomatic reasons – had come in very useful when it came to persuading magazines to accept their advertisements after their deadline, for wheedling important names and addresses out of people who couldn’t usually be wheedled, and for giving the electrician hell when Thea was too nice to him. She was brazen about contacting people for publicity and persuaded several large local companies to sponsor the brochure in exchange for a very insignificant entry on the back page. So far, she and Thea hadn’t fallen out and it was Molly who asked Thea what she intended to do or show ‘after Rory’.

Up to now, Thea hadn’t thought about ‘after Rory’. Getting the gallery ready and his work into it was all she’d focused on. But Molly was quite right. Rory was only the beginning and she still had uncomfortable feelings about his commitment to the gallery. He’d rung her late one night, from a pub, and given her half an address, but he didn’t sound like he was planning to come back any time soon.

‘You need a theme, darling,’ Molly had said, tentatively stroking Lara who had come upstairs into Thea’s sitting room for some time away from her children. ‘"Seascapes and Sunsets", something like that.’

Thea mentally reached for her sick bucket, but took the point.

‘Then you put in a call for work and people send you slides. The girl at the magazine was awfully helpful
when I explained I – er – we were opening a new gallery. Students are always desperate for somewhere to show their work, she said, but we must be careful about quality and make sure we don’t have anything too weird or it won’t sell. I think we want some nice watercolours. People always like those.’

Thea picked a spot of white paint off her trousers. This was crunch time. This was when she had to explain to Molly that her vision of what the gallery should do was quite different from what Molly obviously had in mind. ‘Actually, Molly, I do want to show weird stuff, even if it doesn’t sell.’

‘But Thea! How on earth will we make any money if we can’t sell the work?’

‘We’ll charge a fee for showing. Then we can show what we like – what I like. Otherwise we’ll be just another art gallery selling Cotswold views. I don’t want that.’

‘But Thea …!’

‘Molly, you very kindly lent me the money to open. I’m hoping that Rory’s stuff will sell so well and so expensively that we’ll get a huge amount in commission. If we do, I’ll pay as much back to you as possible. If not, when I can arrange a mortgage’ – she should have said, ‘when I can persuade someone to give me a mortgage’ – ‘I’ll pay you back. You’ve been wonderful, Molly. I’ve really enjoyed working with you. But if we want different things for the gallery we’ll have to part.’

Molly absorbed this. She too had really enjoyed being involved. Before her marriage she had worked as a secretary to quite an important businessman when she really ought to have been in business herself. She
left her job when she got married and since then her organisational skills had been confined to her husband and her committees. And her desire for adventure had been confined by the limits of Tiger Tours. Since she’d been involved in getting the gallery open, she had really felt fulfilled for the first time in her life. Her problem was going to be the awful rubbish that Thea might consider ‘Art’.

‘Very well,’ she said at last. ‘It’s your gallery, after all. You can put what you want into it, but only if the people who exhibit pay a proper amount
and
we charge commission. Otherwise you’ll never make more than enough just to cover your overheads. I’ve done some costings.’

Thea laughed. ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you, Molly. I’d be hopeless on my own.’ She had learnt a little about manipulation recently.

She had taken a glass of water upstairs and drank it, examining the task before her. It was impossibly hot. The first week in June had decided to live up to it’s name and be ‘flaming’, purloin all the summer’s heat for itself and discharge it that late afternoon when Thea was planning to work. She had opened the louvred windows in the one pane of glass which had in it anything you could open and she cursed herself for not getting the ventilators working. She had to be content with propping the street door open. At least the varnish was non-toxic.

When she’d given the pups and Lara a meal, and taken Lara to some waste ground for a sniff around, she stripped down to her bra, pants and old painting shirt, which just about covered her pants, and set
to work with the roller.

She put Van Morrison on loudly and was well into the rhythm of both the music and her work when she straightened up to ease her back and noticed a section of ceiling which hadn’t been painted.