‘Oh and you’re an expert are you?’ Ruby shot back. ‘And if anything I’d say that assessment and mine are anything but mutually exclusive. My prediction stands. She’s gonna have to get some from somewhere.’
‘Quite a way with words! You should think about becoming a poet.’
‘And you should stick to photography,’ Ruby retorted. She was enjoying herself.
They sat down on a pair of lawn chairs, facing out onto the grounds. The sky was turning indigo, but the soft lights around the pool illuminated the outline of trees framing the far end of the lawn.
Johan winked at her, handing her the cigarette he’d been rolling. They smoked in silence for a few minutes. Ruby relished the stillness of the air, how differently it sat in her lungs compared to the exhaust fumes of South London.
‘So how did Gareth find you then?’
Ruby exhaled. ‘He came to the open mic night I was at.’ She shrugged. ‘How about you?’
‘I’ve had a couple of shows at Toad recently.’
‘Oh so you’re like a proper artist then.’ Ruby hoped she sounded teasing, but her words came out with a bitter edge. ‘You probably don’t even need the 75k.’
‘You think that because a few of my photos have been in an exhibition I’m sorted? I need that money as much as anyone.’
Ruby was taken aback by the forcefulness of his tone.
‘OK, OK, I get it, we’re all broke.’ Ruby held her hands up.
‘Yeah, exactly.’
They went back to silence. Wordlessly, they each rolled and smoked again. Ruby wasn’t entirely sure how the vibe had soured so suddenly.
She stubbed out her butt in the gravel. ‘I’m going to bed.’ Johan just nodded and she headed back inside.
She walked up the stairs and down the corridor. As she approached her door, she heard footsteps catching her up. She turned to see Johan trotting up behind her. Before she had time to process what was happening, he took her face in his hands and backed her up against the wall.
In the dim light, she could still make out the heat in his eyes. Her breathing deepened, and they gazed at each other for an unfathomable amount of time. She could feel him getting hard against her hip bone but she resolved that she was not going to be the first to lean in. He was daring her to succumb, and Ruby didn’t like to be conquered.
Finally, he lowered his head and pressed his lips against her throat. She threw back her head and, despite herself, she let out a tiny moan. His hands glided down to her waist, and he pulled her against him. Her fingers wound into his hair. And then he stopped, pulled back and watched her pant. He smiled, thinking he had won the game. But then she smiled, tucked a blonde strand behind his ear and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Night, Jojo,’ she said casually as she extricated herself from her cornered position; his expression turned to confusion. She turned her back on him and opened her bedroom door. ‘Sleep tight,’ she called, closing the door behind her without looking back.
Chapter 16
Noah couldn’t get to sleep. Part of the reason was because the mattress was too soft. At home his mother insisted that for a healthy back, you needed a plank of wood covering the bed slats and only a thin foam mattress over the top. He’d grown used to it. Here, though, in Opal Fairfax’s guest bedroom, he felt as though he was floating in just not salty enough water, and his limbs were sinking away from the rest of his body.
The other reason he couldn’t sleep? The thrill. He’d done it; one of his harebrained schemes had actually worked out. Not only that but once he’d arrived he had felt as though this was exactly where he was meant to be. Seeing Gareth standing in the kitchen had startled him. He hadn’t game-planned for that. Gareth was only supposed to be the fixer. Noah hadn’t banked on him popping up at the retreat itself.
But it had only taken the shortest of walks from the front door for Opal to fall under his spell. He chuckled to himself now in the dark. A spell that made him sound like a sorcerer, a nefarious one, but really he was just making the most of the one God-given skill set he had to get ahead, as most people did. He could only have dreamed how responsive Opal would be to his latest concoction. He’d dabbed it behind his ears andin the crooks of his elbows as he sat in the rattling train toilet he’d holed up in to avoid paying the train fare.
And Gareth was already so drunk that Opal had taken his protestations about ‘having no idea who this man was’ as some sort of perverse joke. ‘So you mean to say this complete stranger has made up knowing you and your gallery and then risked a journey from Birmingham to turn up at my door and take part in an artists’ retreat that’s never been publicised?’ Gareth shrugged and replied, ‘Well it seems you refuse to take my word for it, so I’ll stop wasting my breath.’ That was a stroke of luck. Especially considering how close Opal unwittingly was to the truth.
What both she and Gareth were wrong about, though, was that Noah had never met Gareth before. In fact Noah had been to Toad on almost every visit he had made to London over the past year. Gareth was usually there, although more often than not he was sharing a glass of champagne with a prospective buyer rather than paying attention to the scruffy riff-raff coming in to ‘just have a look around’. Noah obviously fell into the latter category. In his fraying stonewash jeans paired with those pastel polo tops his mother still insisted on buying him, he did not scream ‘looking to expand my private collection’. And so to Gareth he was essentially invisible.
Maybe that wasn’t quite fair, though, because there was another type of person that Gareth noticed, and that was artists. Or ratherhisartists. It had been just another stroke of luck on that particular Saturday afternoon that Johan had come in to discuss his next exhibition at Toad, at the same time as Noah was hanging around.
He hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, but he’d always been anosy person, and there was something about the hushing of their voices that drew him in, instinctively.
He’d heard Gareth make the proposition: six weeks, Fairfax Manor, an artists’ retreat run by his dear friend Opal and the chance to win 75k at the end of it. ‘By invite only’. It was all Noah needed. On the train back home he’d written that letter and sent it first class the next morning.
This is exactly why he had to come to London. His parents didn’t understand. ‘Birmingham,’ they said. ‘It’s the second city. There’s nothing you can get in London that you can’t get here.’ But that afternoon, standing within earshot of that particularly important conversation in Toad, Noah felt vindicated. London was where the opportunity was, where the money was. Where being an artist meant something.
He hadn’t had the heart to tell his mum that he’d wangled this chance through illegitimate means. As far as she knew, her son’s exceptional talents had been so glaring that a single conversation with the right person had culminated in this offer of a lifetime. She’d been proud of him, even more than usual. His father had needed more convincing. They had given him the money for the train all the way down but he’d used all of it to buy himself a silk shirt in Camden Market on the stopover. He needed to look the part, to get away with the final stage of his plan.
