Maestra
unironic velvet hairband and her arse looked like a giant tweedy mushroom. Once I had to steer her gently away from a truly disastrous turquoise taffeta ballgown on a sneaky dash to Peter Jones. I didn’t think her mother needed to worry about ordering the engraved invitations anytime soon, but I admired Frankie’s unapologetic style, her magnificent disdain for diets and her perennial optimism that she would some day meet ‘the One’. I really hoped she would – I could see her in a Georgian rectory, dishing out fish pie in front of the Aga to an adoring and wholesome family.
    Sometimes we had lunch together, and whilst I couldn’t get enough of her Pony Club childhood, she seemed to like hearing about the (strictly edited) escapades of my own upbringing, too. Frankie was definitely one of the things I liked about my job: the other was Dave, who worked as a porter in the warehouse. Dave was pretty much the only other person at the House whom I felt actually liked me. He had left a leg just inside the Iraqi border in the first Gulf war and got into art documentaries while he was convalescing. He had a fantastic natural eye and a quick mind; his passion was the eighteenth century. He’d told me once that after what he’d seen in the Gulf it was sometimes the only thing that kept him going, the chance to be close to great pictures. You could see the love in the tender way he handled them. I respected the sincerity of his interest, as well as his knowledge, and I’d certainly learned more about pictures from Dave than any of my superiors in the department.
    We flirted, of course, the nearest I ever got to water-cooler banter, but I also liked Dave because he was safe. Beneath his occasional saucy joke, he took a rather old-fashioned, paternal interest in me. He’d even sent me a congratulations card when I got promoted. But I knew he was happily married – his wife was always referred to as ‘my missus’ – and to put it bluntly it was relaxing to be around a guy who didn’t want to fuck me. Aside from rococo art, Dave’s other pleasure in life was garish ‘true crime’ paperbacks. Marital cannibalism was a popular trend, with many a disgruntled wife serving her husband as a pâté accompanied by a nicely chilled Chardonnay, and Dave, whose encounters with weaponry had been efficient and gun-shaped, delighted in the Shakespearean ingenuity of their fatal instruments. It was astonishing what you could do with a pair of curling tongs and a penknife if you put your mind to it. We had many a happy double-fag break in the dusty area of the warehouse, analysing the latest trends in gruesome murders, and I wondered sometimes how his interests connected, whether the prettified gods and goddesses who cavorted delicately through the canvases Dave loved were a solace for the violence he had witnessed, or an acknowledgement in their often erotic beauty that the classical world was as brutal and cruel as anything he had witnessed in the desert. If I was impressed by Dave’s self-taught expertise, he was sometimes embarrassingly respectful of my own specialist status.
    One morning after my latest evening with James, a Friday in early July, I had a few minutes before the department opened, so I ducked into the warehouse to find Dave. It had been a long night at the Gstaad and my retinas felt raw with smoke and sleeplessness. Dave clocked it when he saw I had my sunglasses on at 9 a.m.
    ‘Rough night, darlin’?’
    He produced a mug of sweet tea, two Nurofen and a Galaxy. Nothing like crap chocolate for a bad head. Dave kindly maintained the fancy that like many of the other girls who worked there I lived a dazzling social life amongst the reeling toffs of Chelsea. I didn’t enlighten him. Once I felt human enough to remove the shades, I got a pad and my tape from my case to start measuring a small series of Neapolitan landscapes for the upcoming ‘Grand Tour’ sale.
    ‘Shocking,’ Dave remarked, ‘putting that on at
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