The Westerbridge Women

The last hour before a private view always felt longer than it was.

Faye Chamberlin stood at the reception desk of the Halston Gallery with a pencil behind her ear and the guest list under her palm, running through the same names she had already checked twice that afternoon. A late cancellation. Two additional guests from a collector in Chelsea. The florist’s van had arrived an hour later than promised, and the catalogues, which ought to have been waiting in neat stacks at nine o’clock, had come at noon with a corner bruised on the top copy.

None of it would show. That was the point of her.

North Audley Street had already gone dark. October did that without asking. Beyond the gallery windows, taxis moved through the rain towards Grosvenor Square. Inside, Marcus Venn’s paintings hung at careful intervals along the white walls.

Peter Halston came through from the office with his jacket on and his tie already perfect. At forty-five he still had the height to carry a room, black hair greying at the temples, grey eyes that missed very little. It was his name above the door, his reputation on the walls and his money at risk if the evening failed.

“Telephone?” he said.

“Mrs Langley’s secretary. She’ll be here. Mr Ashworth won’t. I’ve struck him and added the two from Chelsea.”

Peter nodded, already looking past her to the hanging. “Giles has the price list?”

“On the desk in the office. Spare copies under here.”

Giles Talbot appeared as if the mention had produced him, ginger head bent over a card, blue eyes flicking up. He had sold pictures in Mayfair long enough to know when to be charming and when to be quiet. Sales were his. Once a guest began to speak in numbers, Faye’s part was finished.

“Marcus is wearing a hole in the floorboards,” Giles said. “Tell him he looks expensive.”

“Tell him yourself,” Faye said. “I’m still finding Mrs Langley.”

She found Marcus instead, standing too still in front of his own work, blond hair slightly flattened where he had been putting his hands through it. He was thirty-four and trying not to look as though a great deal depended on the next two hours.

“Which one goes first?” he asked, without turning.

Faye followed his gaze. The large canvas nearest the street window had been Peter’s choice for the invitation card: a dining room in late light, a figure at a table, the silver painted with a skill that made people lean closer. It was the picture most likely to be mentioned in whatever notice the exhibition earned.

“That one,” she said.

Marcus made a small sound. “And which one should?”

Different question.

Faye pointed further in, to a quieter canvas hung where the gallery narrowed. A woman stood at a tall window with her back to the room. The room itself was ordinary: a chair, a strip of carpet, the suggestion of a door. But the light on the woman’s sleeve had been painted as if it might change if you looked away.

“That one.”

Marcus glanced at her. “You haven’t got a diploma, have you?”

“I’ve got a pencil.”

“You’re wasted on Peter’s telephone.”

“I like Peter’s telephone.” She meant it. She liked the work. She liked spending her days among pictures that were not hers and going home to Islington with them still in her head. She was not waiting to be discovered. “And I like this. Don’t start being tragic before anyone’s arrived.”

“Miss Chamberlin,” Peter said from the door, “if you and Mr Venn have quite finished rearranging my exhibition, the first car is on the kerb.”

The gallery filled slowly, and then all at once.

Faye remained at the desk. She took names, found them on the list, offered catalogues, smiled at people who barely saw her. At five feet three she lost the far end of the room almost immediately. Private views reduced the world to shoulders and the backs of heads, perfume and cigarette smoke, and the particular Mayfair laugh that meant nothing had yet been bought.

Then the crowd in front of her parted around a man.

He was tall enough that she tipped her face up before she had decided to. Not merely tall. Broad through the shoulders, solid in a way the dark suit did not disguise, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and the easy confidence of a man accustomed to taking up space.

“Stapleton,” he said.

She found the name. Miles Stapleton. It was there, written in her own hand from the week before, with no note beside it.

“Mr Stapleton.” She gave him a catalogue. “The exhibition begins on your left. Mr Venn is here, if you wished to meet him.”

He looked where she indicated. Marcus was already half swallowed by a knot of guests.

“Thank you.”

That was all. He walked into the gallery.

Faye watched him for a moment longer than the work required. At that height he was not difficult to follow. Then a couple arrived with rain on their coats, and she took their names.

She noticed him again all the same.

Most of the men who came to these evenings hunted faces first and pictures afterwards. Mr Stapleton did the opposite. He stood before the canvases as though he had come to see them. He did not give each one the polite thirty seconds. He gave them time.

It was some while before Faye left the desk. A waiter had set a tray of glasses too close to a still life; she moved it, spoke to the girl from the caterers, and found herself in the wider part of the gallery where the invitation picture hung.

He was standing in front of it.

He seemed to know she was there before she spoke. He turned his head.

“What do you think?”

The gallery answer came first because it always did.

“It’s one of the strongest pieces in the exhibition. The handling of the light on the silver is particularly—”

“I didn’t ask the gallery,” he said.

It was not unkind. It was precise.

He looked down at her, and she became properly aware of how far down. Mahogany brown eyes. A face that had been handsome for a long time and showed no sign of giving it up.

Faye hesitated. She was there to help Peter sell Marcus’s work, not to tell a man with money in his voice that he was standing in front of the wrong painting.

He saw the hesitation. Something almost like amusement moved across his face.

“I don’t think it’s his best,” she said.

“Which is?”

She took him across the floor.

Standing beside him was different from watching him through a crowd. She had to tilt her head to meet his eyes. When a man in a pale suit tried to pass behind them, Miles shifted and put one hand briefly at the small of her back so that she was not knocked towards the canvas.

His hand was large and warm through the wool of her dress. Then it was gone.

“You think the window is sentimental,” he said.

“I think the window is the point. The dining room is a performance. This isn’t performing.”

“She’s alone.”

“She’s in a room. That isn’t the same thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not if the painter knows the difference.”

He looked at the canvas again, properly, and Faye had the unusual sensation of being listened to without waiting for the inevitable interruption.

“Miles Stapleton,” he said after a moment, as if the name at the desk had been only a formality.

“Faye Chamberlin.”

He repeated it.

“Faye Chamberlin.”

She rather liked her own name in his voice. That was inconvenient.

“You studied,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“Art history? No.”

“Art at all?”

“No.”

“University?”

“No.”

He turned from the painting to look at her fully, which required her to tip her head back again. She was conscious of the years between them, although she had not yet counted them. He was simply older. Considerably.

It ought to have settled the matter.

It did not.

“Then how do you know all this?”

“I read,” Faye said. “There are quite a lot of books on the subject.”

The smile arrived then. Small, but unmistakable.

Marcus found them before she could retreat behind the desk.

“Faye—oh.” He stopped. His expression changed when he saw Miles. Recognition, quickly hidden. “Mr Stapleton. I didn’t realise—”

“Marcus Venn,” Miles said. “I saw the earlier interiors. The one with the green shutter.”

Marcus flushed, pleased and unsettled in equal measure. “That was three years ago.”

“It has improved.” Miles glanced at Faye. “Miss Chamberlin has been explaining your windows to me.”

“Has she?” Marcus looked at her. “She looks. Most people don’t.”

“So I gather.”

They spoke about the exhibition. Whenever Faye tried to step back, Marcus drew her into the conversation again, and Miles seemed perfectly content for her to remain. He asked the questions of someone who actually lived with the pictures he bought. Faye had suspected he was a collector. Now she was certain.

Someone claimed Marcus, a woman in pearls with an opinion about varnish, and Faye made to go.

“Miss Chamberlin.”

She stopped.

“I want that one,” Miles said.

Her painting. The woman at the window. Untitled in the catalogue, because Marcus had not wanted to pin a name on it and Peter had not fought him.

“I’ll fetch Mr Talbot.”

“Why?”

“He’s the sales manager. I don’t handle sales.”

Miles looked genuinely entertained.

“You’ve just sold me a painting.”

“I’ve done almost exactly the opposite. I told you not to buy the one you were looking at.”

“Yes,” he said. “That rather proves the point.”

She fetched Giles anyway.

Giles knew him. Faye saw it in the immediate smile and the easy “Mr Stapleton”. Miles knew him too. They had done business before.

Giles began as Giles always began. The price, which Faye already knew. Delivery. Insurance. The gallery would arrange hanging if that would be helpful. Paperwork in the office, if Mr Stapleton had a moment.

“Miss Chamberlin is dealing with me,” Miles said.

Giles glanced at Faye.

“Faye doesn’t handle sales.”

“Can she?”

Giles hesitated.

Then he smiled.

“Of course.”

And Faye, who had come to work that morning to check a guest list, found herself selling her first painting.

She knew the procedures. She had typed enough invoices and filed enough delivery notes to manage without embarrassing herself. Miles stood at the side of the desk and watched her write. He did not hurry her. He did not help.

“You do realise I’m the receptionist,” she said, not quite under her breath.

“Yes.”

“Mr Talbot actually does this for a living.”

“I know.”

“And you’re still buying it from me.”

The small smile again.

“I thought we’d established that.”

Across the room Giles watched with his glass and did not interfere.

Peter Halston appeared once the red mark was on the wall.

He knew Miles too. Peter was delighted in the particular way of a dealer whose young painter had just been taken seriously. A Venn in a good collection would help Marcus. It would help the gallery too.

“Congratulations,” he said to Faye when Miles had been drawn away by a man who wanted to speak about insurance. “Your first sale.”

“Giles’s sale. I only filled in the form.”

Peter’s grey eyes were amused. “Not according to the buyer. The commission is yours.”

She stared at him.

“That’s not how it works.”

“It is this evening.”

The sum was not a fortune. She lived with Shirley in a house without a mortgage, and her father had left them comfortable. But several hundred pounds, unexpected on a Thursday in October, was enough to matter. She had come to work expecting to tick names off a list.

She looked for Miles.

He was standing with a glass near the dining-room canvas he had not bought, listening to someone with the same attention he had given the pictures. He caught her looking and lifted the glass slightly.

He knew Peter had told her.

Faye went to him.

“You knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I’d get the commission.”

“You made the sale,” Miles said. “You should receive the commission.”

“I didn’t make the sale.”

“We disagree.”

The evening began to thin.

Miles did not monopolise her. He spoke to Peter, Giles, Marcus, a woman who had bought a smaller study and wanted to tell him so. Faye did her work. She found coats. She found Mrs Langley’s driver. She rescued another glass from the vicinity of a canvas. Now and then she found herself talking to Miles again.

At last the door opened on the wet street and stayed open a little longer between departures.

“Have you eaten?” Miles asked.

“Not properly.”

“Then have dinner with me.”

She hesitated.

She was attracted to him. There was no honest way around that. He was also, quite obviously, much too old for her. Fifty, she thought, looking at the silver in his hair. She was twenty-seven. The arithmetic was not complicated.

He waited.

Faye glanced towards the woman at the window and the little red mark beneath her.

“Was the commission a bribe?”

Miles considered the question seriously enough to make it funny.

“Would it have worked?”

“No.”

“Then fortunately it wasn’t.”

She laughed.

“Not tonight. There’s still all this. I’m not leaving them with the glasses.”

“Another evening, then.”

“Yes.”

He asked for her telephone number. She wrote the Islington number on the back of a catalogue slip. It felt unexpectedly intimate. No office. No secretary. If he wanted her, he would have to ring a house in which her mother might answer and ask who was calling.

“Thank you, Miss Chamberlin.”

“Faye.”

“Faye,” he said.

Then he left.

The gallery was quiet at last.

Glasses went back onto trays. Peter stood in the middle of the floor and allowed himself, for the first time all evening, to look pleased. Giles went through the sales with a pencil. Marcus sat on the office chair that was not meant for sitting, exhausted, relieved and a little drunk.

Faye passed the painting she had loved since it came out of the crate.

SOLD.

Marcus saw her looking.

“You sold that one?”

“To Miles Stapleton.”

Marcus’s mouth opened and closed. “Stapleton bought it?”

That flicker again. Recognition, quickly mastered.

She did not think much of it. Wealthy men knew one another. Collectors knew painters. It was a small world if you stood in Mayfair long enough.

She looked at the woman in the window, who still had not turned her head.

Then she thought about Miles.

Now that he was not standing beside her, she let herself think about the size of him. The top of her head would hardly have reached his shoulder. She remembered tipping her face up to those brown eyes and the brief warmth of his hand at her back.

Twenty-three years.

Far too old for her, really.

She was very much looking forward to seeing him again.