Maestra by L. S. Hilton Read Free Book Online Page A

watched the numbers begin to stack up.
    It was clear from the start what James wanted, but his arrogance was overlaid with an air of diffidence, as though he didn’t quite know where to begin. Like most men, his favourite topic of conversation was himself, so it was easy to draw him out. He had a wife, Veronica, and a teenage daughter, who lived in Kensington, near Holland Park. He claimed to like reading philosophy in his spare time, though his idea of serious thought was more ‘Jesus CEO’ than Kantian aesthetics. Still, we got quite a lot of mileage out of that. I asked him to recommend a few titles and Googled the reviews so it seemed as though I had read them. Veronica managed the house and sat on various charity committees. I wondered about her, a little, about whether she knew, or cared, where her husband spent his evenings. I doubted she did. Did they fuck? I couldn’t imagine James being capable of it – even if the oestrogen produced by all that flab hadn’t eaten his cock he could barely get up the stairs of the club without risking a coronary. But as our evenings together unfolded, he was keen to convince me that he’d been quite the dog in his day. Oh, he’d had a gay old time, had James. The older married woman in St Moritz, the sisters on Cap Ferrat. He was old enough to claim to have been a debs’ delight, and I came in for a lot of anecdotes about ‘gels’ who gave in in shooting brakes and London squares, madly hilarious house parties and Soho nightclubs. Apparently, what was left of London Society in the Seventies had been an erotic paradise for the morbidly obese.
    *
    ‘Biccie, Judith?’ asked Frankie, the department secretary, pulling my mind back to the meeting as she pushed a plate of chocolate digestives over the conference table. Laura frowned. We were having what Rupert called a High Priority Consultation – me, Frankie, Rupert, Laura and Oliver the portraiture expert, who was slightly thinner and less pomegranate-coloured than our boss.
    ‘No, thanks,’ I whispered back.
    Laura frowned at us and ruched up her pashmina further over the ravages of her Barbados tan. I changed my mind and took a biscuit. At least Frankie offered some gentle female solidarity, unlike Laura, who mostly treated me like an unsatisfactory housemaid.
    ‘Here they are,’ said a girl’s voice. A tall blonde with artfully ratted hair was breathlessly setting down a pile of new catalogues.
    ‘This is Angelica,’ said Laura. ‘Angelica is joining us on work experience for a month. She’s just finished at the Burghley in Florence.’
    If Dave had been there I would have rolled my eyes. The Burghley offered history of art courses for rich thickies too monumentally idle to get into even a pretend university. They got a year in Renaissance Disneyland on the assumption they might absorb a bit of culture by osmosis between spliffs, and a nice little certificate.
    ‘Welcome to the department, Angelica,’ said Rupert pleasantly.
    ‘It’s so good of you to have me here,’ she replied.
    ‘Angelica is my god-daughter,’ added Laura, winching her Botox into a beam. That explained that then. I sat up a bit straighter.
    ‘Now,’ said Rupert, ‘big event today, boys and girls. We’ve got a Stubbs in.’ He passed round the catalogues. They looked like programmes for an eighteenth-century opera. George Stubbs , announced the cover, The Duke and Duchess of Richmond Watching the Gallops .
    ‘Oooh,’ squealed Frankie, like the good sport she was, ‘A Stubbs!’
    I could see why she was excited. George Stubbs was a hugely profitable artist, known for fetching prices over twenty million. I had a bit of a soft spot for him myself – he was from Liverpool, like me, and despite having actually bothered to study anatomy, meaning that his paintings of horses were some of the finest the eighteenth century had produced, he was still dismissed by the Royal Academy in his own day as a ‘sporting painter’ and denied full