Page 201

“You’re a bossy asshole sometimes, you know that?”

“So I’m told.”

“You don’t understand what he said to me, Jack,” she tries again. “You don’t know him.”

“I understand perfectly. He scared you into submission, and now you’re going to prove his point by doing sweet fuck all about it. Or that’s how it’s looking to me.”

The words land.

Alice turns on her heel, calls me an arrogant bastard under her breath and disappears off into the bedroom.

The door slams.

Nice.

Progress.

I take my laptop to the island.

Alice can prepare the paintings. I’ll prepare myself for the auction room they need to conquer.

It’s a project I started yesterday, as soon as I got Bryce’s buy in. A whole load of work to get through at lightning speed with the timer running.

I haven’t felt the thrill of pressure like this in years.

Camilla’s previous catalogues give me names. Auction records give me prices. Photographs and video clips give me habits.

Collectors. Advisers. Gallery owners. Dealers. People who call themselves art enthusiasts because rich person needing validation sounds so pathetic in its realism.

I don’t only want to know who attends the Hammersmith auction. I want to know what they buy, when they enter the bidding, and who they hate losing against.

The art world pretends to be more sophisticated than gambling, but the same instincts are everywhere.

Ego.

Risk.

The thrill of taking home something another person wanted.

It’s my usual habitat with a different kind of overlay, and I have to say… I like it.

It’s a fresh kind of flavour.

So far, I’ve identified a collector who favours aggressive red-and-black abstracts. Another who claims to support emerging women but always waits for an established buyer to move first. A private investor who has recently begun collecting triptychs, supposedly because his new house has suitably large walls. What he means is he’s just moved into one of those modern looking glass mansions filled with boring white expanses of nothing.

These are all healthy potentials.

I note those who chase fashionable names, those who tend to wimp out just before the hammer drops, and those who only raise a paddle when the whole room is watching.

Then I turn to the artists.

The Gilded Table can’t be interested in Alice alone. It needs a decent looking profile. A healthy dose of fake authenticity.

I need to be into bold contemporary work. Mixed materials. Emerging artists.

Bryce and I made a shortlist yesterday. I called on his knowledge.

We shortlisted a reclaimed-metal sculptor whose work resembles an elegant car crash. Hardly up my street. I’d rather go to the scrapyard. A portrait artist who obscures faces with gold leaf. A good running theme that had Bryce genuinely open mouthed at the beauty. A young abstract painter who burns through the surfaces of his canvases to expose the layers underneath. I actually do like that one.