Vaughn was really tall. She hadn’t realised that before, because when you were five feet three inches everyone was tall - but she could see wheat-coloured tufts of hair bobbing above the crowd and she made sure to keep him in her eyeline as she replaced her empty glass with a full one. He might claim to hate snobby art openings but Vaughn sure knew how to work a room: shaking hands, kissing cheeks, face all smiles as he clapped a short, sweaty man in glasses on the back.
Vaughn didn’t look like he needed rescuing; he looked like a man who’d executed a sneaky cut and run on her. During the third glass of wine, which was becoming more palatable the more that she drank, she saw him press a finger to the cleft in his chin. He did it so casually that at first Grace thought it was an involuntary gesture. But then he did it again, eyes scanning the room. Besides, the woman clinging to his arm didn’t look like she had much truck with personal space boundaries.
Grace took a step towards them. In her head she had a Russian accent all good to go, but as soon as she opened her mouth, she realised that it sounded more Mumbai than Moscow so she settled for giving Vaughn a sharp poke in the ribs with her clutch. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said plaintively. ‘You promised me dinner.’
Vaughn’s eyebrow winged all the way up to the ceiling as he slowly tried to raise the arm that the other woman was clamped to. Reluctantly she let go, so he could wrap it around Grace’s waist and pull her gently towards him. ‘There you are, darling,’ he said. ‘I’d almost given up on you.’
OK, she was halfway to hammered, which had to be why Grace leaned against Vaughn and brushed a proprietorial hand over his jacket lapel. The woman, another emaciated forty-something in an understated black dress with hair practically the same colour as Grace’s Marc Jacobs bag, smiled thinly. ‘I don’t think you’ve introduced me to your new girl.’
New girl? Did she think Grace was an office junior that Vaughn had taken on to help with the filing? Grace looked pointedly at Vaughn in the hope he’d correct the woman pretty damn sharpish. Instead he said, ‘Deirdre represents Ben Myers.’ Who the hell was Ben Myers? ‘Deirdre, this is Grace, she’s in fashion.’
Grace extended a hand and had it almost crushed between Deirdre’s skeletal fingers. ‘What do you think of Ben’s work?’
Deirdre asked, gesturing at one of the micro-sized portraits on the wall behind them.
The seconds passed with agonising slowness - only Vaughn’s thumb rhythmically stroking the indentation of her waist anchored Grace to the spot. ‘Well, they’re kinda small, aren’t they?’ she said finally.
‘That’s because they’re miniatures,’ Deirdre sniffed. ‘Ben’s reclaiming them as a vibrant twenty-first-century genre.’
What
ever
. Through the alcoholic haze, Grace dimly remembered an essay she’d written on
The Practical Uses of Painting Before the 20th Century
. ‘But, hey, weren’t miniatures meant to be carried about?’ she asked. ‘Like, they were the camera phones of the olden days, y’know?’
She was slurring her words, but Vaughn’s hand was still smoothing down the material of her dress so he couldn’t be that pissed off with her, even though Deirdre looked like her face had just been coated in hydrochloric acid.
‘And your point
is
?’ the woman asked.
‘Well, they’re just, like, really
small
.’ Grace tried to tap the tip of her nose and nearly poked her fingernail in her eye. ‘I had to get
that
close to work out what was going on, and—’
‘Look, Deirdre, if Ben started to work on a larger scale, I’d love to have another look,’ Vaughn added. ‘But Grace is right. Can you imagine any gallery letting the public get so close to the exhibits? And we both know that most private collectors prefer something a bit more showy.’
Deirdre gave Grace an all-encompassing once-over. ‘I’m giving you the opportunity to get in on the ground floor,’ she said, though her gimlet gaze was still locked on Grace, as she paused deliberately. ‘After all, you have a wonderful talent for . . . smoothing out the rough edges.’
Somewhere in there was a major diss aimed directly at Grace, as if Deirdre had X-ray vision and could see right through Grace’s borrowed finery to the tit-tape that was holding her dress together. Grace longed to shut her down, even opened her mouth - but the hand at her waist administered a warning pinch and when she looked up, Vaughn was smiling tightly.
‘That’s very sweet of you, Deirdre,’ he said with a careless shrug. ‘But I’m going to have to pass. I have my hands full at the moment.’
‘Well, you’re letting go of a wonderful opportunity,’ Deirdre hissed, before striding off with her nose in the air.
‘Was I rude?’ Grace asked Vaughn worriedly, but he was looking amused. ‘I was aiming for diplomatic but it sort of came out as rude.’
‘A little forthright, perhaps?’ he suggested. ‘But really, she’s so aggressive.’
‘I don’t know if you want to leave yet, but it wasn’t just a line. I’m starving and my stomach is making all sorts of gurgling noises . . .’
‘And you need food inside you to soak up some of the wine,’ Vaughn finished for her with an indulgent smile. ‘Shall we get out of here?’
Grace tried not to loll in a drunken sprawl on the back seat of the car as they drove further downtown. Apart from the demands of her gut, she felt like the whole world was in soft focus, the bright glitter outside the tinted windows muted to a delicate shimmer, the low murmur of Vaughn’s voice as he took a call, a soothing accompaniment to the hum of the air conditioning. She really had drunk quite a lot.
When the car stopped with a gentle lurch as a cab pulled out in front of them, it shocked her out of her stupor. Grace peered out on to Bank Street, eyes flickering in disbelief as the frontage of the Waverly Inn came into view. Owned by Graydon Carter, Editor of
Vanity Fair
, the Waverly Inn was so now, so hip, so on trend that even Kiki couldn’t get in. Or actually she’d been offered a table on the terrace and had turned it down because apparently the terrace was New York shorthand for social Siberia.
Grace tried to play it cool, aware of Vaughn’s eyes on her, as they were waved past the bouncer, ushered through the bar and into the tiny inner sanctum of New York’s power players. The dining room wasn’t much bigger than Grace’s bedsit and decorated with what looked like a pile of tatty old junk; battered books, old baseball photos and some really tacky paintings. Grace knew she’d just been admitted into the Holy of Holies and she wanted to stop and drink it all in but she forced herself to keep moving. Vaughn’s hand was at the small of her back, and she was sure he could tell that she was trembling as if a whole colony of butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach as she and Vaughn were led right to the back of the room while all eyes rested upon them.
Grace slid on to the empty banquette and tried not to bounce in excitement as Vaughn sat down opposite her. ‘Graydon lets me have his table when he’s out of town,’ he told her, not bothering to explain who Graydon was and Grace was grateful that she knew and didn’t need to ask for subtitles. There was a conveniently placed mirror next to her so she could see the entire room and didn’t have to shamelessly rubberneck the other guests to see if she could spot a stray Scarlett or Gwyneth. She’d even have been happy with a Sienna.
‘This is amazing,’ she breathed when the ability to speak finally came back to her. She wanted to wince at how starstruck she sounded but Vaughn didn’t seem to mind. He simply smiled and then raised his hand at someone a couple of tables across who was sitting with a woman who looked a hell of a lot like Jennifer Aniston.
‘The food’s good,’ Vaughn said. ‘I hope you’re not a picky eater.’
He made ‘picky eater’ sound like code for ‘kiddy fiddler’, and Grace was pleased she could shake her head. ‘I’ll eat anything. Well, apart from artichokes.’ Now she could smell the surprisingly homely scent of food and remembered how hungry she was; her stomach gave another warning rumble. As a waiter had come over with the sole intention of serving them alcohol, Grace could feel herself start to relax ever so slightly.
Dissecting and discussing the menu kept the conversation grooving along and by the time Grace had gulped down a glass of water and they were sharing a starter of crab cakes, she was beginning to enjoy herself.
Normally Grace treated conversations as awkward silences punctuated by whatever she could think of to fill the pauses. But Vaughn chatted with a practised ease and when Grace realised that they’d lapsed into quiet, he was ready with an anecdote about a Texan oil baron who’d spent millions on a Picasso and then put his elbow through it while he was showing it off at his birthday party.
By the time Grace’s forty-five-dollar macaroni and cheese with fresh truffle shavings was just a few smears on her plate, they were on to the subject of twentieth-century art.
‘Your favourite painter’s Paul Klee?’ she clarified, remembering to pronounce his surname ‘clay’ so she didn’t come across as a total philistine. ‘That’s such a boy thing to say.’
‘Well, who do you like?’ Vaughn laughed and he needed to do that more often because it transformed the angular lines of his face into something almost friendly. ‘Georgia O’Keeffe? What a girl thing to say.’
‘Erté,’ Grace said immediately. ‘Mostly his fashion illustrations for
Harper’s
- that girly enough for you, Mr Vaughn?’
‘Just Vaughn will do,’ he said mildly, refilling her glass from the second bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. ‘You know a lot about art.’
‘I did Art and History of Art for A-levels and I must have been dragged round every gallery in the country before I was ten.’ Grace reached for the bottle of San Pellegrino as her teeth were going numb, which was a warning sign that she was well on the road to ruin.
‘Your parents are art lovers?’
‘Grandparents,’ she corrected, carefully pouring water into her glass with a hand that barely shook. ‘And not really art lovers, they just wanted to find a way to occupy me that didn’t involve video games or watching too much TV.’
Vaughn’s ever-changing face had changed again; eyes narrowed in contemplation. ‘And what do your parents do?’
‘My father does something in an office in Worthing. Sells insurance, I think,’ Grace conceded, looking hopefully around for their server. There was still enough room for dessert and if she was chowing down on something chocolate-based then she didn’t have to answer any more questions. ‘My mother lives in Australia.’
‘So you were brought up by your father then?’
Grace put down her glass with enough force that water slopped over the rim. ‘I don’t like talking about my family.’
Vaughn gave a careless shrug. ‘Evidently.’ He smiled with just the tiniest hint of cruelty. ‘Why did your mother leave?’
He was un-fucking-believable and blind if he couldn’t see that Grace was scowling ferociously. But judging from the way Vaughn hadn’t taken his eyes off her, he’d noticed but simply didn’t care. ‘My personal life isn’t a free gift that comes with the purchase of dinner,’ she told him crisply. ‘My parents married young, they divorced young. I went to live with my grandparents. Satisfied?’
Vaughn calmly rearranged his napkin as if the brief recap of Grace’s toxic formative years had barely registered. ‘I was only asking. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘I’m not upset! FYI, I had a happy childhood. I baked cakes. I learned to knit. There were books everywhere. The worst thing was they only had a black and white TV and it was embarrassing when I had friends over.’ Grace made a concerted effort to lower her volume knob. ‘My grandparents are amazing. They put their life on hold for me.’ She tried to smile. ‘OK, they were kinda strict sometimes and there was a lot of ‘when I was your age there was a war going on’ but I’d have been much worse off if my parents had stayed together.’
‘And what do your grandparents do? Are they retired?’
Grace couldn’t help but smile now. ‘Grandy plays golf and my grandmother’s a pensioners’ rights activist - she writes angry letters to the
Daily Mail
when they’re mean about Marks and Spencer.’ She paused for thought. ‘And they go on a hell of a lot of walking holidays.’
She smiled again, expecting Vaughn to smile back but he was studying her so intently that Grace was tempted to cover her face with her napkin. ‘I’m getting used to your huge repertoire of filthy looks,’ he remarked idly. ‘But like I said before, when you smile, you’re really quite beautiful.’