Christopher looked at his watch. “We’d better get back to the château. It’s four o’clock. There’s a lecture at five. I think we should be there.”
Everybody would be there-every one of the eight connoisseurs invited by their host and all twelve experts. They would listen, ask a few questions, then break up until drinks before dinner. It was hardly demanding.
Justine drained her glass. At home she would never have drunk wine at four in the afternoon, but this was France and it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. She felt… almost happy. When Christopher had suggested that she come on this trip, she had at first been reluctant. She had not been away with him before, and she was not sure whether she wanted to. He was her boss, and although they had crossed the line on several occasions, he was married-and she knew Rosemary. She would never have initiated something like this herself; he had done it, he had pushed her into it at a vulnerable moment and she had acceded. What else could she do?
But inviting her to come on this trip seemed to be upping the stakes, flaunting their affair. Well, if he was ready for that, then perhaps she was too. She had nobody else in her life at the moment. Of course he had girlfriends-everybody knew that, including Rosemary, or so people said.
She thought back to their conversation about this trip…
“You’ve heard of Carl Porter?” he’d asked. “The Porter Foundation?”
“Yes,” she’d said. Though she hadn’t, not until she’d googled him.
“Sometimes people forget that there are real people behind these foundations. Carl lives in France and has for years. The money comes from cosmetics-lipstick or something like that. Cheap stuff. Anyway, Carl and his wife got bored with Palm Beach and decided to move to France. He was a big collector. And he knew what he was doing. It’s a great collection now and he likes to share it.”
It started to make sense to her. “Share it? You mean he might give us-the museum-something?”
Christopher shook his head. “No. Carl is tight. He’s looking for ways of taking it with him.”
“So, this invitation?”
He explained it to her. “Carl’s idea of sharing is to invite people to come and tell him what great paintings he has. He has what he calls conferences. They last five days or so, sometimes a whole week. He invites other collectors and a bunch of people he calls experts from the museums and galleries. That’s us.”
“And we sing for our supper?”
Christopher smiled. “Exactly. You won’t have to do anything. It’s just that the invitation is for two people from the museum. Of course, if you’d rather I took someone else…”
“I’ll come.”
Justine came back to the moment, staring at Christopher Thomas, his angular face, the permanent sneer on his lips.
Christopher seemed pleased. For her part, she was under no illusions as to why he had asked her. He would need entertainment. He had actually used that word before when he referred to what was between them. She was entertainment. She could have been angered, but rather to her surprise she found that she was not. In a way she was even flattered that he-the great Christopher Thomas-should find her entertaining. And what else did she have? She had long ago had the insight-which sometimes people did not get until much later on-that this was no dress rehearsal. You had one chance at life and you had to grab what was offered you. She had worked her way up from circumstances few if any in the rarefied world of art even knew about, and she had no intention of going back. She’d kept her job because of him; certain invitations came her way because he felt fit to pass them on; she was in France because Christopher Thomas liked her enough to ask her. If that meant that they shared a room, then that was not too much of a price to pay. She was a willing participant, something she had been telling herself for several weeks.
Christopher drove back to the château in the rented Peugeot. It was not a long drive as the château was barely five miles from the village. It was good land: the wide landscape of Charente stretched under the high Poitou-Charentes sky, here and there a major town, but for the most part a place of small villages surrounded by sunflower and wheat fields, vineyards, stretches of forest. The château had been virtually derelict before Carl acquired it from its last owner, an almost blind French colonel, the last vestige of a distinguished family that had lived there for five centuries. He had left much of the furniture simply because he could not bear to sell it and had wept as he had shown Carl and his wife, Terry, round each room.
Christopher had been there before on several occasions after Carl had moved the collection from the secure warehouse near Philadelphia where it had spent the previous eighteen months. Carl had wanted his advice, not only on the paintings he had but on works he intended to acquire. Christopher was happy to give his opinions and had even persuaded Carl to sell several paintings of doubtful merit or questionable provenance. This advice had been rewarded with a fee-a remarkably generous one in view of Carl’s reputation for meanness-or occasionally with a gift of a small painting. Christopher had a Vuillard pastel-admittedly an undistinguished one-that Carl had given him in gratitude for brokering the acquisition of something that Carl had long been looking for.
Christopher had held on to the Vuillard for a year before discreetly selling it to a dealer in Paris who assured him that it would be sold to a private client and not appear in the auction rooms. He knew that Carl looked at all the catalogs-Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips-and if the Vuillard came onto the open market, he would see it and would not be pleased.
Christopher and Justine had arrived the day before, taking the high-speed train down from Charles de Gaulle and picking up the rental car at Angoulême. Justine had been fascinated by the château and somewhat relieved she had her own room. But that night, after dinner, Christopher had knocked on her door and she had let him in.
“It’s a very old house,” he had whispered. “And I get so lonely.”
The main conference started the next day with a discussion of two of Carl’s latest acquisitions-a Dürer and an early Hopper. The Dürer was introduced by a woman from Berlin, who talked at great length. “Look at the face, the way it leaps out of the background, caught by the light. Everything else is in shadow; only the face is illuminated.”
Christopher nudged Justine. “He was using a camera obscura. You read Hockney on that?”
A man sitting nearby looked disapprovingly in his direction; Christopher acknowledged the look with a nod. Justine suppressed a smile. She remembered a friend saying to her, “Look, Justine, that man is using you. It’s so obvious.” And she knew that her friend was right but said, “But he’s so amusing. He makes it fun. Don’t you understand that?”
The Hopper was more exciting. It was not well-known and had languished in an obscure private collection for thirty years before Carl had the chance to buy it for a mere $4 million. A hotel room at night with a curtain moved by the wind: classic Hopper territory, with its air of something about to happen. Carl gave the talk himself-his main performance of the week-and his audience listened with all the attentiveness of those who were being paid to listen or, if not actually being paid, were the recipients of a week of hospitality from a man who had $4 million to spend on a painting of an empty room in which something indefinable was going to take place.
Christopher’s attention wandered, and he found himself looking at the back of the neck of the German woman who had talked to them about Dürer. German. Precise. A bit superior. Scholarly. She’d be fussy and out of place in San Francisco; too stiff. Yet women like that were a challenge, attainable but not available, which made her all the more interesting. This German woman, who now, for no reason, turned her head slightly and met his glance, crossed her legs this way then that-shapely legs-and smiled at him.