One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [69]
He was watching television in the sitting room, softly lit, but still too bright. I snapped off a lamp as I came in and groped towards him in the gloom.
‘So how was it?’ I asked, sinking down beside him on the sofa. David Attenborough was lying prone in the undergrowth before us, whispering excitedly about a female gorilla behind a tree. Poor girl. I have many problems, but wearing my sexual organs on the outside is not one of them.
‘Oh, averagely ghastly,’ Ivan groaned. He put his arm around me and I snuggled up, tucking my knees beneath me in a youthful manner. One of them clicked. ‘The usual merry-go-round of rip-off merchants and tat, with the occasional lucky find. Our friend Monsieur Renard had the best, as usual, but he wasn’t prepared to part with it for peanuts. I ended up paying well over the odds for a pair of château shutters, but they’re excellent. You’d have fought me for them.’
I smiled. The first time I’d met Ivan we’d both been after the same piece in Boulogne. I’d seen it first: a plaster bust of the goddess Daphne, slightly wounded, it has to be said, but nevertheless, she’d sit beautifully in the landing window of a house Maggie and I were doing in Putney. But the fellow was asking a lot. I’d haggled and got him down a bit, but he wouldn’t budge any more. Also he wanted cash.
‘Save it for me,’ I told him as I went grudgingly off to the bank to accommodate him. When I got back, Ivan had just bought it.
‘That’s my Daphne!’ I said, as the Frenchman handed it over.
Monsieur Renard raised shoulders and dismissive eyebrows. ‘He pay more. What can I do?’
I turned, furious, to my competitor: a tall blond chap in a leather jacket.
‘I’d reserved that bust. You could at least have waited to see if I was prepared to outbid you!’
He’d widened cool grey eyes. ‘Oh, is that how it works? A sort of gentlemanly entente cordiale. And there was I thinking antique dealing was every man for himself. Had no idea there were conduct rules.’
Monsieur Renard sniggered as he pocketed his euros.
‘Well, you’re obviously new to the game,’ I snapped. Maggie and I knew most dealers’ faces, particularly the English ones in the markets, and this was a new one on me. ‘As a rule we don’t tread on each other’s toes and we do try to maintain some sort of decorum.’ This was quite untrue. We’d snatch an object from each other’s jaws if necessary.
‘Is that so? So the little episode last week in Montauroux, when two girls were seen physically assaulting an elderly gentleman before whisking a campaign bed away in the back of a lorry, was totally uncharacteristic?’
This, a reference to an unseemly little tussle with Billy the Bastard, as he was known in trading circles, who’d tried to buy a bed Maggie had in fact already secured, and was just waiting for me to bring the van around to collect. Naturally we’d dealt with him in a robust manner, since any other manner would be lost on Billy, but I wasn’t prepared to go into that with my blond rival right now. I just wanted my Daphne back. But he was already making off with it.
‘Where d’you think you’re going?’ I squealed.
‘I was going to pop it in the back of your lorry for you – it’s quite heavy. You can line up the café au laits in the bar.’
‘Oh.’ I stared after him.
Over coffee, I’d tried to pay him for the bust, but he wouldn’t accept it.
‘It’s a present.’
‘For me?’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t be silly, you can’t buy it for me.’ I was embarrassed now. ‘I’ll only sell it on at a profit.’
He’d shrugged. ‘OK.’ His eyes held mine over the rim of his coffee cup. Smouldered, might even be the word. ‘Your choice.’
I hadn’t, of course, sold Daphne. She was still with me today, on a console