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‘Consultation on a Soutine someone in Switzerland wants to sell privately. Bags of discretion. If it does come available you would do well to have a look at it. I think it’s very much one you’d be thrilled to have in your collection. I can’t say more right now.’

With that Amy blew them a kiss and roared off down the drive. It would take her another twenty minutes to get home, and she did so want to get there.

Once she closed her front door behind her, she leaned against it and gave an enormous sigh of relief. That dream simply would not go away! Why did it still haunt her? The past didn’t. Yet she was frightened by that dream. ‘Shit!’ she called out in the dark, silent house and switched on the lights.

Her whole world sprang into light. A stranger who had not known her had once been brought to her house. The stranger went away and sent a note: ‘Your house is an uplifting experience. Thank you.’ She looked through the glass screen and saw it in its entirety in one glance, and it was true. It was an uplifting experience and her mood was raised above the darkness of a dream.

Suddenly the energy that had drained out of her at the close of lunch with her girlfriends rushed back. She would no longer sustain unhappiness or anxiety. She had learned how to let it go. Once she had been a woman who never expected upheavals of any kind in her life and could be devastated by them. Now she was a woman who could expect them, could take them in her stride and deal with them, and then immediately let them go. There was a great deal to be said for the mature years of one’s life.

Amy looked at her watch, she was running late, and went directly to the library. All the research work on the Soutine – its provenance, her analysis of the painting, letters corroborating her own analysis from a French art historian, and from Edward Silberzog as one of the curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – was laid out on her library table.

Amy examined the documents one more time. She looked yet again at the excellent coloured photograph of the painting, a prime example of Chaim Soutine’s work. She placed the photograph on the library table again and sat back and closed her eyes, remembering the real painting and the collection in Geneva. She had gone twice to see it. The first time at her client’s request, the second of her own volition. She had had to confirm several things about it. Both she and her client were thrilled by what she had so far discovered. The painting was an extremely rare Soutine, probably the only one of its kind that he had ever painted.

Chaim Soutine had been a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated to Paris in 1913. Amy’s client’s father met him a year after he arrived at the time Soutine was being influenced by Expressionism. The client’s father, a doctor, was at the time collecting the then new Expressionist painters. He attended several of the poor Montparnasse artists who respected him as a physician but even more as a friend who never sent a bill. When he was called in to attend Chaim Soutine, the doctor had been appalled at the poverty and filth the man lived and painted in, and had befriended him. Not an easy task. Soutine was a difficult and suspicious man who had been twisted by gruelling poverty, near starvation, a darkness of the heart and soul. The painter finally achieved recognition in the 1920s despite his reluctance to exhibit his work. Amy’s client’s father was rewarded by him when, one day arriving at Soutine’s studio, he found the painter in acute distress with an American
dealer and his client pressing him for a large canvas Soutine did not want to sell.

The arrival of the doctor settled the problem. Soutine sold it to his friend for the equivalent of fifty dollars in French francs, a pittance compared to the dealer’s offer but a fortune in the 1920s to the artist and the doctor. There were accounts in diaries and letters to verify the story.

Amy had studied the life of Chaim Soutine and could almost visualise it: the tortured, unhappy soul, the squalor of his life, the Paris art world of the 1920s. The painting itself? A masterpiece. Amy was thinking about that scene. How humiliating for him to have to bargain for his life’s blood, for that indeed was what he painted with. What price could one put on such an elemental struggle, and the great painting which was its result? She conjured up a vision of the artist working on this glorious canvas. Chaim Soutine painted with his guts and his soul, and with thickly applied paint, intense colour, distorted, writhing forms. He was, with Chagall, the leading representative of French Expressionism. Amy remained lost in that painting and thoughts of the artist, the agony and ecstasy of art. She was snapped back to reality by the ringing of the telephone. The interference annoyed her. She was quite happy lost in the Paris art world of the 1920s. The telephone was incessant, ringing several more times before she finally answered.

‘Hello.’

‘You sound grumpy. I hope I didn’t wake you?’ It was Pete Smith.

She hesitated for a few seconds before she answered him. Her voice softened. ‘No, you didn’t wake me. Did I really sound grumpy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose I was. I was lost in my work and the ringing of the telephone yanked me back to the here and now.’

‘I’m disturbing you. I’ll call back another time.’

‘No, don’t hang up. I’m really pleased you’re calling.’

‘You are?’

‘Why are you so surprised?’

He changed the subject rather than answer her question. ‘The children want a steam boat like yours.’

That amused Amy. She felt a surge of tenderness towards him. ‘
Arcadia
was built in 1901.’ They were skirting around the real reason for his call and they both knew it.

‘How are you? I think about you often,’ he told her.

‘I’m glad about that.’

‘That’s encouraging.’

‘It was meant to be.’

‘That last sight of you driving away into the night all alone – I hated that.’

‘Pete, I left with a great deal to think about.’

‘You called me Pete, and you hate nicknames!’

‘They don’t bother me as much as they used to, and you always preferred it. I can live with that.’

‘It isn’t much but it’s a beginning.’

‘I guess it is.’

‘I’ll call you tomorrow night.’

‘I may be in Geneva.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded hurt, disappointed.

She quickly added, ‘For my work.’

‘I’ll try you, and if you’re not there I’ll try another time. Is that all right?’

‘Of course it is, you silly old thing. Seeing you again has made me really happy.’

‘Long may it last.’

‘Goodbye, Pete.’

‘Goodbye, Amy.’

He’d called and that felt good. But why didn’t it feel better? She wanted it to. Amy had hoped that when she did hear from him she would feel that surge of excitement for a man that she wanted to feel again in her life. Not obsessive love; she had had that, been there, and it had been terrific but destructive. High on the life of another as well as oneself, there’s a great deal to be said for that, but not when it blinds you to all else in life.

It didn’t have to be instant love and passion, overwhelming sexual desire. She had had that too, many times. She could wait for it to evolve. Maybe this time round that was what Pete was doing as well. Possibly, had she not been distracted with the Soutine and the call to Geneva, she might have felt a greater surge of sexual excitement at the sound of his voice. But Pete had had a great deal to compete with at the moment when he’d called: the art world and her work, the singular life she had created for herself.

Bad timing, she told herself. She would come round. And then, for a fleeting moment, wondered what it would take. She thought on that and deduced there must be
something to her and Pete because he had stirred sexual feeling in her, the desire to be outrageously sexual with a man again, which had not happened for a very long time. That in itself was exciting, something to ponder on. Especially since she had truly believed she was through with sex and love.

She was still immersed in thought when the telephone rang again. She answered it and pushed thoughts of Pete from her mind. The sale of the Soutine was uppermost now. She had suddenly made her decision as to the three people she would approach on behalf of her client, and that was her preoccupation when she heard Edward Silberzog’s assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York explaining she was calling on his behalf. He was flying in to London for a day and then on to Paris. Could he possibly meet her at her place on Monday afternoon, briefly? He would be bringing a friend along for her to meet.

Amy was only barely listening to the young woman. Her mind was on the Soutine and the coup of dealing with this great find of a painting. She said absently, ‘Yes, thank you, goodbye,’ and jotted the date down in her diary.

‘Then that is a confirmed appointment, Miss Ross?’

‘Yes, I did say that, Penelope.’

‘Please, did you write it down, Miss Ross? He asked me to ask you that. It’s very important to him, you see. He’s only stopping off briefly in London to meet you.’

‘Yes, it’s down in my book. Look, I don’t mean to be rude but I do have to go, Penelope.’ And Amy put down the
telephone and again, almost immediately, picked up the receiver and punched in the Geneva telephone number.

The following day, when Tillie was putting together thin sandwiches of brown bread, sparingly buttered and thick with smoked salmon topped with several screws of freshly ground black pepper, for the small basket Amy used to picnic with on air travel, and she was checking her briefcase for the fourth time to make certain she had forgotten nothing, the ship’s bell outside the front door was loudly rung.

Amy ignored it. She was switched off from everything but the project in hand: getting to her client in Geneva. Her mind was filled with the Soutine painting of two nude reclining women, and the fact that the world believed that he had only painted one nude, prudish and flurried. It had always been assumed the reason had been a discreet and unpublicised romantic life. This new discovery would change history. The sale of the painting, and the book she had decided she would write on the history of it, were all running wildly through her mind. She would try and tie its publication in with the exhibiting of the painting if it was sold to the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, two of the three buyers she had in mind. This was just the sort of thing that Amy enjoyed: to deliver a coup to the art world, make a client happy, earn enough money from her work to live well for the next two years,
and
be able to stay in the background of it all. She was thrilled to be going to Geneva, and that said a great deal. She didn’t much like Geneva.

Tillie answered the door. The clear cellophane box of flowers was enormous and tied with a white satin bow. The end of the box had been removed and from it protruded the stems of three dozen white roses. They had come by courier from Constance Spry’s shop in London. She took them to the library at once.

Amy was just closing her briefcase. Delight at the sight of the flowers shone in her eyes; she could always find time for flowers. She assumed that they had been sent by Charles but then remembered that his florist was Moyses Stevens. Anthony Kramer never sent flowers. A bauble from Tiffany’s from New York, something from Hermès in London or Loewe in Madrid was more his style.

A new admirer? How flattering. What fun. ‘The Lalique vase, Tillie, they should look magnificent in it.’

‘These are the longest stemmed roses I have ever seen. Someone is smitten, Miss Ross,’ teased Tillie, and hurried off to fetch the antique piece that seemed to have been made for white roses – or so Miss Ross thought because she never put any other flowers in it.

Amy pulled on the ribbon and the bow disintegrated in her hands. She removed the box’s lid and the small white envelope lying across the stems. The signature made her sit down and look once more at the roses lying in the box. She leaned over them and gathered them into her hands, pushing her face down among them. The scent was sweet. Amy was surprised and delighted at the extravagant gesture. She plucked a single rose from
the box and sat back in her chair to contemplate its beauty. Then she read the card:

Geneva was a great success. This was the second sale that Amy would be handling for Annette and Pierre de Boulet. It had not been an easy decision for them to sell the Soutine but needs must. The proceeds would ensure that the rest of their art collection would remain intact and could be housed in the small private museum they intended to create on the ground floor of their Geneva house. It would still boast eleven Chaim Soutines. The doctor’s love of art and his access to the painters in Paris at a time just before the Great War had laid the foundations for a now large private collection. After the decision to sell the Soutine came another. The de Boulets asked Amy to compile the catalogue and to write a book on their collection in the distant future.

These were the things occupying Amy’s mind now as she sat in a first-class seat on the plane from Geneva to London. Her meeting with the de Boulets could not have gone better. They appreciated her discretion in handling the sale. They were not ostentatious art collectors; even their museum would be by appointment only, and requests for admittance judiciously considered. Amy would not let them down.

Her mind was racing. She tried to think of other things to slow it down. The staggering beauty of those three
dozen white roses in the Lalique vase on her library table came to mind. And slowly she calmed down. This was the first time in days that she’d allowed herself the luxury of setting aside the Soutine business and the art world; she could afford to now, having accomplished all that she had set out to do in Geneva.

Pete had indeed surprised her. The call the night before they arrived had been nice, but the flowers, and the card with them, had nothing to do with
nice
, they were most decidedly romantic. And she liked him even more for that gesture. It was what she needed, and he had instinctively known that and had done something about it. To be fair she had been touched very deeply by his words, ‘
all the flowers in the world are for you, Amy
.’ But at the same time a shiver of apprehension had gone through her, and the hand holding the card had trembled. It had been as if someone had walked over her grave and she had known it was not Pete Smith, it had been Jarret Sparrow, because immediately on reading those words she remembered something quite contrary that Jarret had once said to her. She heard his words as clearly as if he had been standing before her uttering them. ‘All the flowers in the world are for
me
.’ And amazingly she had loved him so much, she had agreed with him, and would have laid every living flower on earth at his feet if it had been in her power to do so.