Playing Grace (34 page)

‘Put the camera away, Flora,’ Tate said, ‘this isn’t part of the tour.’

Grace threw her head back and laughed like a hyena at that, unconcerned at the way she was the focus of everyone’s attention. She didn’t even care that the sound of feet
moving quickly from outside the room suggested attendants were on their way.

‘Priceless, priceless,’ she crowed, ‘they think it’s art! That just about bloody sums up what you’ve taught them. What they’ve seen. Why not take them down the park so they can watch dogs sniffing round each other’s—’

‘OK, that’s enough,’ Tate said, catching hold of one of her arms. ‘Show over, guys. Full refunds later. Just have a stroll round by yourselves while my colleague and I have a word.’

An attendant came up to them. ‘You’ll have to go outside,’ and Tate said, ‘Great idea,’ and he was behind Grace, pushing her forward with his body, still holding on to her arm as they headed for the sliding doors to the courtyard.

She tried to struggle free, saying, ‘I’m not going out there,’ but one moment they were on the gallery side of the doors, the next on the courtyard side.

‘Just calm down,’ Tate said, letting go of her and sliding the door shut behind him. ‘You’re gonna get us banned from every gallery in London.’

‘
I’m
going to get us banned? You’ve got a nerve. Everything was all right till you came here. Everything was fine.’

‘You sure about that, Gracie?’

‘Shut up!’ She appeared to have moved on to screeching now. ‘Shut up. You’re always digging and prying and trying
to work out an angle on me. This isn’t about me. What did you tell Esther?’

She saw him straighten up and lower his chin. He stared her straight in the eye. ‘I said I was sorry she believed I liked her more than a friend would like a friend. I apologised that I’d given her the wrong idea … that it wasn’t her fault, that I had a bad habit of getting people all fired up.’ He paused. ‘I told her she was a nice woman but there couldn’t be anything between us because I really, really liked someone else.’

‘Not listening. Not listening,’ she said putting her hands over her ears.

‘Then I’ll have to shout.’ He was coming towards her and she could hear him clearly. ‘I told her it was more than liking; I’d fallen hard, out of the blue, hit by a truck.’

Grace skittered backwards, took her hands from her ears. ‘Shut up,’ she screamed.

‘Nope.’ He was still coming forward. ‘Didn’t say your name, though. Esther must have worked it out.’ His smile slowly returned. ‘Everyone could work it out, Gracie. And honey, it was you who told me to leave no room for her to hope, so I told her we’d been lovers for a while.’

He must have heard her sharp intake of breath. He stopped walking and the look he was giving her reached right down inside her and shook her apart. ‘Oh, come on,
Gracie. All I did was jump the gun, fast forward to what I wanted to happen. Jeez, you must know that and you’re driving me mad ’cos I sense you want it too. You want it but you’re too scared to say it.’ He tilted his head. ‘So, you gonna look me in the face and say I’m wrong?’

‘You’re wrong,’ she wailed at him but she couldn’t look him in the face to say it and he laughed.

‘Told you,’ he said and then she did look at him and he had a determined expression on his face. She started to move again, and so did he. ‘Stay away from me. You’re horrible!’ she shouted. ‘Cocky, obnoxious, a show-off, a charmer, lazy, untrustworthy—’

‘Get it all out, Gracie,’ he said, not looking the least bit bothered, ‘’Cos I don’t think you’re talking about me there? Sure that’s not some other guy?’

She glanced down because her feet felt wet and for a second she feared she was on the beach, but it was too cold for that.

‘No, not another guy. You. Wreaking havoc and walking away from it.’

He was in front of her, had his hands on her arms again, trying to pull her towards him. ‘Nope, that’s not me. Feels like you’re making me pick up the bill for what some other guy’s done to you.’

She jerked free of him, her anger gone now and in its
place a sickly panic. ‘You said “bill”.’ She was flapping her hands about and couldn’t seem to make them behave. ‘Why did you say “bill”? “Picking up the bill”? Americans don’t say “bill” – they say “check”.’

‘Come here, stop it … look, I have no idea what … hey, come back … whoa there! Gracie, stop. Don’t …’

In her rush to get away from him, she had forgotten about the slowly turning unicorn and she stepped back into it and felt a great smack on the back of her head that reverberated down her neck and into her shoulders. She saw Tate reach for her and she was down on the ground.

She wasn’t aware of pain, just that her back felt wet, and her first humiliating thought was that she had wee’d herself. But as she struggled to sit up and put her hand on her head, that was wet too. She held up her hand. Red water.

‘Oh God, not again,’ she said, ‘not again. You see, you see … this is what happens. I get carried away, let passion take over and people get hurt. Look at that figure. Look, it’s me, bent over in that bathroom …’

‘Shush, shush.’ Tate was down on his knees, unwinding the scarf from around his neck, pulling her into his shoulder. She felt him pressing on the back of her head. ‘It’s OK, OK, you get a lot of blood with head wounds. Always look worse than they are. Shush, it’s going be fine.’

His face didn’t look like he was one hundred per cent sure of what he was saying and then she felt him jump as something clunked against the glass of the door, making it tremble. ‘What the … ?’ Tate started and she turned and saw people putting their hands to their mouths, stumbling about, and attendants running. She recognised the man from Lancashire pulling open the sliding door, his eyes streaming. An alarm started to wail, bouncing off the walls of the courtyard.

‘It’s happening again, isn’t it?’ Grace said, struggling to get up. ‘I need to get her out of there.’ She wasn’t moving. Tate was holding on to her jacket.

‘Gracie, you can’t go in there,’ he said, ‘it’s full of tear gas and whoever’s doing this isn’t gonna think twice about swatting you. Out here’s the safest place. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’

Grace looked at him with a great clump of her jacket in his fist and that green, penetrating gaze skewering its way through her heart and knew he had, indeed, got her.

CHAPTER
28

It seemed to Grace that all she’d done since the second robbery was sit on a variety of chairs.

First there had been the chairs in A & E where she and Tate had sat side by side and he’d held her hand tightly. Her head hurt and so did her neck, but neither of them pained her as deeply as the realisation that another icon had gone and now she had no one left who really understood. There were scores of other icons in London, but none like those two. She’d bonded with them and now they were lost.

Tate asked her now and again if her vision was all right? Was she feeling sick? Could he get her anything? But mostly he kept quiet; uncharacteristically quiet, as if today had been too much even for him. They didn’t talk about what he’d said to her in the courtyard or what she’d said back to him, and now, with the way her head and neck were hurting and the shock of the icon being ripped away from her, she wasn’t completely sure any of those words had been spoken out loud.

Tate got up at one point and said he’d better ring Alistair. He came back, screwed up his face and said, ‘Not a happy man,’ and was silent again. The only time he seemed himself was when the nurse asked her how the accident had happened and she said she’d been hit by a unicorn.

‘That’s gonna really make them think you’ve got concussion,’ he said. ‘Better say it was half-unicorn, half-man.’

She didn’t have to have stitches or stay in overnight, but they did say someone needed to keep an eye on her for the next twenty-four hours. She got her mobile out sharpish after that and rang her father to come and collect her. Tate waited with her till he arrived, called her dad ‘sir’ and then went. She watched him go. He wasn’t walking like he normally walked. It was as if his boots had become too heavy for him.

After that, she sat on another chair in her flat while her father subtly tried to ask her questions about the robbery without appearing to. ‘So, those attendants in the gallery, Grace, tough day for them. You know any of them?’ and ‘Any blinds you noticed?’

When she started to feel sick, she knew it wasn’t the bang on the head – it was his constant badgering and the lingering paint and white spirit fumes.

Only threatening to get her mother to come over made him back off, and she was left to lie on the sofa and field
a variety of telephone calls from people who’d just heard the news. In the end she turned her mobile off, put the duvet over her head and thought about the icon. When she had exhausted herself, she slept. Whether her father did check on her during the night or it was just luck she was alive in the morning, she would never know.

The next day she sat on a chair in the police station while she made a witness statement. The police would have come to the house, but Grace felt that if they saw any of her father’s extensive diagrams and notes about the earlier robbery at the Paddwick Gallery, they would both be arrested on the spot. And if they’d looked under her bed …

The young police officer who talked to Grace was extremely interested in the fact that she and Tate had been present at the previous robbery and had been observed arguing before that one too. He was careful what he said, but she could sense his agitation – as if he felt he was on to something important. She asked him if he’d already interviewed Tate, but he said he couldn’t discuss that.

‘I did get injured,’ she pointed out.

‘We have no witnesses to how that happened, other than Mr Jefferson,’ he replied.

She decided it was best, from then on, to be more circumspect about what she said. When she emerged from the
room, her father was outside chatting to some of the officers he knew and she hoped to God he wasn’t sharing his theories about signalling via gallery blinds.

After that it was back to the sofa. At some point her mother
did
arrive and, for a large part of the visit, Grace pretended to be asleep.

Now it was Monday morning, and although Alistair had said she didn’t have to come into work, she wanted to. It hadn’t taken long for her to wish she’d stayed at home. She was sitting on a chair in Alistair’s office and Gilbert had been summoned to sit on another one, and the fact that Alistair had changed his tactics and was not huffing and puffing while planted in the middle of her office floor told her that this was going to be extremely unpleasant. The way he had his arms folded, his head bowed and was rocking back and forth in his chair was also a bit of a giveaway.

Gilbert mouthed, ‘He’s lost it,’ at her and Alistair jerked upright, said, ‘I heard that, Gilbert,’ and then they were off. Gilbert got it in the neck first and had to admit under some heavy questioning that he’d been too hungover to fulfil his tour obligations. Alistair rounded that conversation off by telling Gilbert he wasn’t indispensable and if he got himself a reputation for being unreliable, he’d soon find the work drying up. Grace could feel the outrage
coming off Gilbert, but he clamped his lips shut and didn’t express it. It was her turn next and Gilbert tried to be a gentleman and leave, but Alistair was on a roll.

He wanted to know just what her problem was? Why she imagined it was acceptable to fight with another guide, abandon her clients mid-tour (all of whom had complained and demanded a refund, by the way) and bring the company into disrepute with the galleries and all the other organisations who recommended them to visitors? He’d spent a lot of time trying to mend bridges, call in favours and field calls from the odd smart alec hotel concierge asking if it was true that each Picture London tour came with a free fight, a tear-gassing and a robbery? What did Grace think of that?

Before she could start telling him what she thought, he said, more softly, ‘And don’t think I’m just picking on you. I rang Tate over the weekend to tear a strip off him. I know you got hurt, Grace, and it was good of you to come back today, but really I did expect so much more from you.’

Grace gulped at that, wondering if the tears she’d been waiting for were going to come now, but the gulp was all she got, so she said the right things, promised it would never happen again; reasoned, placated, calmed. It was all an act: she knew that someone had taken the tray on which
she had laid out all the neat, interlocking pieces of her life and kicked it high up into the air. Kicked it with great big biker boots and she couldn’t promise anything.

When Alistair released them, Gilbert took her into her office and gave her a hug. It felt slightly strange, as if he were uncomfortable but determined.

‘How’s the head?’ he asked when he let her go.

‘Fine, more or less. To be honest, I was glad to come back today. Mum came round in a flurry yesterday upset I hadn’t rung her right away. So, while Dad stayed in the kitchen being huffy, I had her sitting by the sofa doing Reiki massage on me and sobbing.’

‘It’s nice she was so upset about you.’

‘It wasn’t me she was upset about, it was … someone else … oh, never mind, Gilbert. Enough of Parenting for the Self-Indulgent and enough about my head. How’s yours?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Head is better, Grace – it’s had a while to recover. But conscience still bothering me. I wasn’t particularly pleasant to you before Tate and I went out.’

‘I dropped you in it with Bernice.’

He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips as if weighing something up. ‘You did, and she explained the whole of China to me, but you did it only after I had provoked you with my truculence. Your actions were understandable; mine were not. I turned on you, Grace. Showing off in
front of Tate.’ He went and stood by the window. ‘I’m sorry. I’m an old fool.’

‘You like him, don’t you, Gilbert?’ she said gently. ‘Tate?’

He nodded. ‘But not in
that
way, Grace. Not perhaps in the way you think. It’s just he reminds me of Tony – all that life. He doesn’t worry about saying the right thing, nor about standing on anyone’s toes. When we were out with his friends it was refreshing – they don’t shut up; they’re like a load of birds. They argued, they got overwrought, they hugged, they made up. Do you know, we spray-painted a wall at some point during the evening? Can’t remember exactly when. We had a limbo-dancing competition, which I am very afraid I might have won. We mooned a CCTV camera. It makes going home and having a lamb chop every Tuesday seem … well …’ He laughed and Grace sensed it was at himself. ‘Then you catch sight of yourself in the mirror behind the bar and realise you’re old enough to be any one of their fathers. Grandfather even.’