Vintage (2 page)

At the supermarket checkout Clare scribbled her name on the cheque, which had been filled in for the correct amount by the automatic machine, and returned it to the cashier together with her cheque card.

‘This supposed to be a D?’ the girl stabbed her biro at the particule that separated Clare from Cluzac.

‘Not a D, a de,’ Clare corrected her, ‘for the sake of which Marie-Antoinette, together with a great many of her compatriots, lost their heads.’

The girl was staring at her open-mouthed. Clare did not think it worth her while elaborating upon, or
explaining, the fact that under the ancien régime the noblesse was actually looked up to for its sense of tradition and its spiritual and moral values and that, unlike in England, in France you can enoble yourself only if you can prove letters patent from the king and descent through the male line.

Leaving it at that, she stuffed the last of her purchases into a carrier bag, rescuing a recalcitrant lime, and staggered out through the automatic doors into the King’s Road.

Had Clare not decided to buy a birthday present in Bond Street for her grandmother, Baronne Gertrude de Cluzac, she would not have run into Big Mick Bly and the course of her entire life might not have been changed. The Hermès scarf she had in mind was not going to endear her to her bank manager. Concerned about her personal overdraft, he had recently cautioned her about writing any more cheques, and had threatened the withdrawal of her credit card.

She was not exactly extravagant – she spent in fact very little on herself. Most of her clothes came from street markets, she wore very little in the way of underwear, and never darkened the doorstep of a hairdresser. When the ends of her hair began to straggle, she handed the kitchen scissors to Nicola. Any money she did spend – and it never stayed very long in her purse – was lavished upon others. She adored buying presents. It did not have to be a birthday. She could not pass a flower stall without buying a single rose or a bunch of violets and then thinking to whom she would give them. Her generosity extended to the human flotsam huddled listlessly in shop doorways whom she was unable to pass without making a not insubstantial contribution to their booze or drugs; it encompassed the Geranium Day for the Blind, Save the Children, and even the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. In a swift moment of empathy, as tins were rattled eloquently beneath her nose, she imagined a day without the use of her eyes, her
stick-limbed
self in an equatorial wasteland, or in oil-skinned peril on some uncompromising sea. Her profligacy was
an aberration which played havoc with her personal account only. In her business dealings, as far as the art gallery or her antiques stall was concerned, she was as hard as nails. The artists represented by Nicola could rest assured that their works were priced fairly and according to market forces, and that they would be promptly paid. Their contracts – drawn up by Clare – were honoured, the clients vetted for solvency, and the rent for the gallery never allowed to fall overdue. It was her business acumen, combined with Nicola’s flair – a felicitous partnership – that accounted for the popularity and success of the gallery.

It was not that she had any faith in the merchandise that was displayed, appropriately lit and labelled, on the gallery walls. Brought up among portraits of her ancestors painted by Steuben and Ingres, by-passing Cranachs and Gericaults each time she climbed the stairs to her bedroom – which looked out on to the vines – she was unable to tune into neo-conceptual icons made of match-boxes, bits of string and plumber’s felt, or to the tributaries of dense and multicoloured paint that looked as if they had been paddled in by the dog. It never failed to amaze her that reasonably sane people were willing to part with their money for what passed for ‘modern’ art.

On Private View days, the clients, clutching their glasses and narrowing their eyes, would crowd round a canvas which called itself Venice Lido (but which seemed to her to represent nothing so much as dirty washing-up water), as Nicola lectured them on how contemporary art should be approached. She would watch open-mouthed as they succeeded, where she had failed, in ‘looking into chasms and grottoes’, ‘building relationships with the image’ and responding to ‘the essence’ of place.

On Saturday mornings the boot was on the other foot. Behind the trestle table lugged out of Nicola’s hatchback and set out with cut-glass scent bottles, old metronomes, pewter teapots, backscratchers, tortoise-shell boxes, ivory button-hooks, Clarice Cliff toast-racks and the odd volume of Plutarch’s Lives, Clare was in her element. Her stock was bought at country sales where prices were routinely higher than London, and bidding often became feverish. Although private buyers with no knowledge of the market outnumbered dealers, this was balanced by the fact that in old homes that had been lived in by the same family for years, objects of character were more likely to turn up, there was a greater chance of ‘finds’ than in the London salerooms, and items were often less accurately catalogued than in the up-market auction houses.

Often she had to bid for a ‘lot’ – comprising a box of assorted kitchenalia (saucepans, pyrex dishes, storage jars and jelly moulds), two dolls, a wooden bed-head and an assortment of child’s wellington boots – in order to secure a copper coal scuttle (much sought after as
pot-plant
containers), which was what she was really after. Tracking down teacups and toast-racks among the battered fridges and electric cookers, strapping rickety tables to Nicola’s roof-rack, standing ankle deep in mud with her catalogue in a Suffolk marquee, she was as happy as a sandboy.

Back in London, persuading American tourists that life without a chipped majolica inkstand or a cloisonné vase which had lost its mate was not worth living was right up her street. Seeing them coming, in their matching Burberry raincoats or Oxford University sweaters, as they darted from stall to stall fingering
willow-patterned
plates, peering at makers’ marks, and prodding moth-eaten teddy bears, she would cast her line
and, with the dexterity of an angler, rearranging the lustre and the cream ware before her, haul them in.

Sometimes she fabricated stories: the early Worcester mustard pot, only slightly cracked, which had belonged to George III; the pinchbeck mantel clock, property of a titled lady. As far as the price was concerned and the customers’ determination to get the better of her, they need not have bothered. She was not deceived by the shabbiness of their clothes (as often as not they were dealers) or the persistence of their bargaining – she saw them before they saw her and adjusted her price accordingly. This time it was Nicola, flapping her arms with cold in winter, lifting her face to the rays of the sun in summer, and keeping a weather eye open for an available man in all seasons, who, trying to keep the smile from her face at Clare’s fairytales of provenance, or her testimony that the price offered was less than that which she had paid, took the money and wrapped the goods in old newspaper before stuffing them into used plastic bags. She was unable to credit how anybody in their right mind, with even the minimum of street cred, could be beguiled by Clare’s blarney, be persuaded to part with their dosh.

Narrowly avoiding being annihilated by an oncoming taxi, Clare, who had an hour to kill before her meeting with Michael Millington in Albemarle Street, got off the bus at John Lewis and nipped across Oxford Street in search of her grandmother’s scarf. It was the morning after the dinner party and, as far as she could remember, they had all got roaring drunk; the evening had gone rather well.

Nicola’s friend Hannah, owner of If You’ve Got It Flaunt It, a trendy clothes emporium in the King’s Road, and Seth, the artistic director of a fringe theatre currently organising a programme of South American
mime, her current boyfriend; Zoffany, a compliance officer in a City bank recently made redundant (with whom Clare had been at school), and Jonathan, a barrister specialising in company law, her new partner; Francesca Foglia the TV cook – Alfresco with Francesca – and Sebastian Boyd (with whom Jamie had qualified), a Senior Registrar in radiology at the Middlesex Hospital, with whom they hoped to set her up; Oleg, a sad-eyed Russian photographer, unable to find work in his own field, who had a picture-lighting workshop in Camden Lock, with whom Nicola was besotted but whose Eastern European despondency she was unable to penetrate; Tony and Clive, who ran a high-profile florist’s (catering for society weddings and extravaganzas and specialising in outlandish table decorations comprising driftwood and bits of old rope as well as flowers) in the New King’s Road, and who lived upstairs, and Jamie who had been delayed by a spinal canal stenosis – at which he had to chip away slowly to relieve the pressure on the nerves – and had shown up only when they were on to Francesca’s working woman’s summer pudding, which owed its success to the addition of a Chivers blackcurrant jelly.

Clare had set the table with the Compagnie des Indes china, Venetian glasses and worn, silver-gilt cutlery given to her by her grandmother and stored, for want of space, beneath her bed. The once-blue, drawn-thread tablecloth, from the same source, overlapped the table round which they had to squeeze, and had to be doubled up in the middle. Arranging it in a pleat with the complaining Nicola – who said Clare was off her trolley and that she had absolutely no intention of ironing it – brought back to Clare the linen-room at Cluzac at the top of the François-er tower a hundred feet above the moat, a great, dark, oval room lined with shelves and linen presses, no longer in use, reached by a spiral staircase.

The wheels of the conversation were lubricated by a welcoming vodka from the freezer (a crafty bid by Nicola to make Oleg feel at home); the bottle of Rioja Francesca had brought with Clare’s soup; Château de Cluzac 1991 with Nicola’s poulet à l’orange (a can of frozen orange juice chucked over the appropriate number of chicken thighs and put in a hot oven); and a Beaumes de Venise courtesy of Tony and Clive, who had also brought a cache-marie composed of brussels sprouts and lavender for the centre of the table, with the summer pudding. As the evening wore on, the talk had turned from the horrors of reaching the age of thirty, an analysis (male) of sexual desire, women’s tussles with the glass ceiling, the newly opened Channel Tunnel, the stinginess of the Arts Council, an exposé of ultrasound which used sound waves to image organs in real time, the mentality of serial killers and the possibility of the Duke of Clarence having been Jack the Ripper.

As Clare served her soup from the Spode tureen with Baronne Gertrude’s English silver ladle, they had each been required by Nicola to say what reaching the age of thirty meant to them, while Clare – not yet twenty-nine – made mental notes.

‘Relief that the twenties are over’ Zoffany tasted the soup. ‘Delicious. Félicitations a la cuisinière!’

‘Coming to terms with the fact that I shall never be a size ten.’ Hannah helped herself to a large chunk of bread, which she spread liberally with butter.

‘No problem, darling, the superwaif is dead!’ Francesca raised her glass. ‘Long live the “real” woman.’

‘Maturity,’ Jonathan said ponderously, although Clare doubted if he had ever been anything but mature.

‘Courage to pull the plug on a relationship,’ Nicola said. ‘When I think of all the wankers I have put up with
just because I was too immature to extricate myself…’ She disappeared into the kitchen to attend to the chicken. ‘In one’s twenties,’ her voice drifted through the door, ‘what one is looking for is thrills. Now I can’t imagine anything more exciting than to spend the rest of my life’ – her tone was wistful – ‘with one absolutely divine man.’

Oleg, at whom the remark was directed and who had put his soup spoon down on the drawn-thread tablecloth, did not react.

‘Reaching my sexual peak.’ Francesca eye-balled Sebastian.

‘Women don’t peak until forty,’ Clare objected, sitting down. ‘By which time men are definitely going off the boil.’ She looked up in time to see Zoffany and Jonathan exchange the swiftest of glances and realised that the conversation had touched a nerve. Her isolated childhood had led her to be tuned into adult distress signals and she knew instinctively that if you really wanted to know what was going on you had to watch people’s faces in repose.

Take Hannah, the life and soul of any party, with her apparent lack of self-consciousness and aptitude for making others laugh. When Hannah was caught off guard, when she thought no one was looking, the sparkle would fade from her eyes, her face would crumple into deep creases and her plump mouth, which she was constantly feeding, would droop at the corners. Or take Seth, who controlled the conversation as he controlled his actors, by virtue of the fact that his voice rarely rose above a whisper – you had to strain sometimes to catch what he was saying – whose face (if you paid close attention) became suffused with repressed anger if he was interrupted or crossed. Francesca was at apparent ease before the TV camera, but was betrayed by her
expression of chronic anxiety when her public persona was switched off, and the supercilious Jonathan by the way he looked round the table for approval each time he spoke. Although Sebastian’s diagnostic skills were unquestioned, his emotional immaturity was revealed by his often puerile jokes. Tony’s mouth beneath his sophisticated moustache lapsed into a thin line of petulance and jealousy whenever Clive, a macho
six-footer
, paid too much attention to somebody else, while Zoffany’s true self was exposed by her bitten fingernails which, when she thought no one was looking, she surreptitiously chewed. Only Oleg was a closed book except for the unmistakably sexual signals which were directed not towards Nicola but, to her great discomfort, towards Clare herself.

These were her friends and she loved them. There had been none when she was growing up.

When Jamie finally arrived, he was greeted with inebriated hugs and kisses both from Clare and her girlfriends, with whom he was extremely popular. Upending the Rioja, he proceeded to make up for lost time.

It was two o’clock in the morning before everyone had gone home, and already getting light by the time Clare had finally got to sleep. The delay was due to the fact that, having carried out the traditional post-mortem on the evening, which had turned out to be a noisy but unqualified success, Jamie had asked her to marry him.

‘How would you feel about spending the rest of your life with me?’

‘Sorry?’ Clare, who was knackered, was almost asleep.

‘How would you feel about spending the rest of your life with me?’

‘Can’t think of anything nicer. ’Night.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘Honestly, Jamie, I can’t keep awake.’

Ten minutes later, Clare sat bolt upright.

‘Was that a proposal?’

‘You could say that. What on earth are you crying for?’

‘It’s the nicest proposal I’ve ever heard.’

The following two hours had been spent planning the wedding. Clare, egged on by her grandmother, had always had a romantic picture of herself as a bride drifting, in a cloud of ivory tulle, down the aisle of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street, and Jamie, who had something much more laid back in mind, had
suggested
a simple little church in the heart of Soho followed by a few drinks in a wine-bar with their friends.