The Honey Queen (21 page)

Plenty of people in the art world had started from much humbler beginnings, but they’d been honest about it. Meredith had simply reinvented herself. Redstone didn’t exist as far as her new world was concerned. Yet the bedrock of Redstone was still inside her.

Leaving Charlie to charm the woman, she followed Pippa into the office section of the mezzanine. When buyers went upstairs, they could view paintings on a false wall behind which a glass cube of offices stood.

Meredith used to love the gallery but lately the enjoyment had gone out of it. It was hard to say why, exactly. The economy and worries about money had played their part, but it went deeper than that. The older she got, the more alone she felt. She was thirty-two; everyone her own vintage was already engaged or married. Even the younger ones seemed to have hooked up: Pippa, a mere child of twenty-four, had a boyfriend she spent weekends with in his mother’s horse yard. Even Mike the painter, who was a gifted man but a stranger to soap and toothpaste, had a partner. Only Meredith was still alone. Soon thirty-three would be knocking on the door and yet there was no sign of a man on the horizon.

She did her very best not to think about it, but sometimes the thought slipped sneakily into her head: this wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she left Redstone all those years ago.

Meredith had always had a passion for art. She’d been good enough to secure a place in a prestigious art college, but it hadn’t taken her long to realize that she wasn’t original enough to make money from her paintings. Laura, her best friend from college, was the opposite: a gifted painter but hopeless at business.

‘You’re good at that stuff,’ Laura said. ‘I can’t say nice things to galleries, I don’t want to. I just want to paint.’

So it came about that Meredith dragged Laura’s canvasses round the galleries, and then other people’s too, and suddenly, she became the go-to girl for anyone interested in investing in new and interesting art. Which led her to Sally-Anne and Keith, and eventually, the opening of their gallery: theirs, because they had the capital, but they’d made her a part of it too.

‘You know so much about art, you’re an asset to us,’ Sally-Anne had said to her six months ago. ‘We’ll call you partner, put your name on the gallery, and I’ll get my lawyer to sort it all out. Of course, we’d need some investment. Twenty thousand ought to do it.’

Meredith had borrowed the money using her apartment as collateral. Once she was made partner, Meredith got used to people phoning up and begging Sally-Anne to get them in on her deals.

Meredith hated to ask outright questions,
hated
it. People in the know never needed to ask which were the right clubs or the right hotels. If you had to ask, it was a dead giveaway that you were an interloper, an outsider. Meredith had made it her mission in life to look as though she was one of those people in the know
.

But eventually, curiosity got the better of her. She asked Sally-Anne outright what sort of property deals she did.

Sally-Anne, slim and tanned from always being in some hotspot or other, and dressed as usual in the season’s most expensive clothes, fixed her entirely unwrinkled eyes on Meredith, giving the matter some thought. And then Sally-Anne explained:

‘People invest money with me and I invest it for them. Usually short-term property deals with a twenty per cent profit margin. I deal with people I’ve known for years; mostly, people from school.’

She’d gone to a posh international school in Switzerland, the mention of which made Meredith feel entirely working class.

The deals, Sally-Anne explained, were in investment schemes quite apart from the gallery’s business. With so many of her rich friends involved in complex property and trading schemes that required only a few extra million to get them off the ground, it was the most natural thing in the world for Sally-Anne to introduce them to prospective investors eager to sink their money in short-term schemes that would yield a twenty per cent return on their capital.

‘Try getting that from a bank,’ she used to say happily.

She’d been running her schemes for years and people were clamouring to get in on the lucrative deals.

Which explained why Meredith was getting calls from people begging her for introductions to Keith and Sally-Anne.

‘I heard everyone involved in that London City thing made a quarter of a million profit,’ they’d wail. ‘Please tell Sally-Anne we’ve got money to invest and would love to get involved. Please.’

Eventually, Meredith borrowed another twenty thousand euros to invest herself. Six months later, twenty-eight thousand was deposited into her bank account.

And when Sally-Anne blithely mentioned another deal, Meredith had eagerly transferred her precious twenty-eight thousand into the Alexanders’ bank accounts.

With each deal, more and more money found its way into her account. And she began to steer other people to Sally-Anne’s investment fund; people like her friend Laura.

Through Sally-Anne, Meredith now owned shares in an American golf hotel, a Turkish apartment complex and a Russian shopping centre – as did Laura.

‘We are so lucky,’ Laura had said to her the last time Meredith had visited Laura’s studio in the wild and windy Kerry mountains. ‘We have a safety net, thanks to you.’

Laura was now married to Con, a bear of a Kerryman who sculpted giant figures out of reclaimed metals. They had a small daughter, Iona, who toddled happily between her parents’ studios, covering the walls with small painted fingerprints, which neither Con nor Laura appeared to notice. Their home nestled at the foot of a mountain and was full of strange hand-made wooden furniture, Con’s mad bronze pieces, and Laura’s vast canvasses filled with moody Kerry skies and swooping ocean waves. They had two rescue dogs, a pot-bellied pig who snoozed in the kitchen in front of the fire, and a clutch of guinea pigs for Iona. The latter lived in a pen in the dining room so that the dogs couldn’t stare hungrily at them and induce guinea-pig heart attacks. When you sat down in Laura and Con’s house, you invariably sat on a dog chew or a cushion covered with pet hair.

When Meredith had visited in the past, she’d always wondered how the heck Laura could live in such a remote spot without a coffee shop in sight and with no restaurants, theatres or galleries within miles. But on her last trip the previous Christmas, she had been shocked to find herself envying Laura’s life with little Iona and the bearded Con, who filled doorways when he stood in them.

Meredith was supposed to be the one who had it all, but as she sat at her friend’s crumb-covered kitchen table warming herself in front of the Swedish wood-burning stove with that damn pig snuffling round her feet, she realized how much she envied Laura.

What Meredith had were the things money could buy. Somehow she’d failed to capture the one thing it couldn’t. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her that money and prestige weren’t everything?

Con had persuaded her to stay over that night.

‘Why drive down the hill to find a hotel in this weather when we’ve a spare room here? We can open a decent bottle of wine and talk about how the world is going to hell in a handcart – what do you think?’ he said cheerfully, one big arm round her. ‘I’ve got local lamb in the fridge and Herself’s herb garden was doing well enough in the summer for us to make our own mint sauce. She freezes the herbs.’

‘Himself’s potato patch isn’t going too well because Himself hates going near it. He’s allergic to the spade,’ Laura teased, coming into the kitchen with Iona balanced on one hip. ‘They got eaten by blight, therefore the mashed potatoes will be locally grown but not from
our
garden.’

‘Go away with yourself, woman,’ growled Con in mock-hurt. ‘Vegetables are women’s work. Come here, lovey,’ he added, scooping Iona into his arms and nuzzling her cheek. ‘Protect me from your mother – she wants to work me to death.’

Iona, dressed in a red velour sleep-suit with a Santa motif, was quite happy to mind her daddy from all comers, even her beloved mummy.

‘Dada’s good, Mama,’ she said gravely. ‘No hitting.’

The three grownups all laughed.

‘See – proof that she beats me,’ said Con, with his sad face on. ‘I’m just a helpless artist stuck out here with this madwoman. You need to sell more of my pieces so I have my running-away fund.’

They ate the lamb, drank the good wine, and finished up with local cheese on oat cakes, talking till Iona fell asleep in her father’s arms.

‘I’ll put her down and you two can chat,’ whispered Con, carrying the child off to bed.

‘You’re very lucky, Laura,’ Meredith said quietly when they were alone with the dogs, the snoring pig and the flickering candles from the table.

‘You’d go nuts if you lived here,’ laughed Laura, leaning back in her chair and stretching. ‘Where’s the woman who once told me she’d die if she had to live in either the countryside or the suburbs?’

Meredith shuddered, both at the memory of such a ridiculous statement and the notion that the suburbs would kill her. Wasn’t that where she’d come from, after all?

‘Did I really say that?’

‘You always wanted different things: you wanted what the gallery has given you.’ Laura shrugged, helping herself to more cheese and giving a bit to the two dogs. ‘You’d hate this life.’

‘I think that what I wanted then and what I want now are two different things,’ Meredith said slowly, staring into the fire.

‘You’re not happy? Then leave.’

It was all very straightforward to Laura. You did what you wanted. Doing just that had given her a career, Con and Iona.

‘It’s not that simple,’ Meredith protested.

‘Of course it is. People make it hard for themselves. You only get one chance at life, so why stay doing what you don’t want?’

‘But …’ Meredith was confused. ‘You were the one who got me into working in a gallery. You started me on this road by saying I was made for it.’

Laura shoved the greedy dogs away and gave Meredith her full attention.

‘That was years ago. You’re in charge of your own life, Meredith. You did want the money and the prestige, don’t deny it. You chose that. But if you want something different now, then leave the gallery and do something else.’

Meredith shook her head. Laura was being so childlike. Nothing was ever that simple. Meredith’s whole life was tied up with Alexander Byrne. Her work and her social life were all part of it. If she thought about it, she didn’t have one single friend who wasn’t linked to the gallery. Even Con was represented by them. And what about the money? She couldn’t give that up. Would Sally-Anne let her in on the schemes if they weren’t partners?

It appeared as if Laura had reached the same conclusion.

‘You’ve got investments with Sally-Anne – so have we, since you told us about them all. They’re our pension. But you don’t need to work any more, Meredith,’ she said, ‘so leave. Get a life.’

With that, Laura rose and began to tidy the table, murmuring that she had to get up early with Iona and she couldn’t handle late nights any more. ‘Half ten’s my limit for going to bed these days. Iona’s up at six every morning, come rain or shine.’

As she talked and tidied, Meredith sat there in silence, stunned by Laura’s comment:
Get a life.

She had a life, thank you very much.

With nothing more than a curt good night, she marched off to bed, wishing she hadn’t drunk any wine so she could drive off to a hotel. But she was stuck now, stuck with people who clearly thought she was a sad spinster with no life whatsoever.

In the sweet guest bedroom with the wooden bed and a wardrobe accessorized by the weirdest ever metal knobs, courtesy of Con, Meredith got ready for bed, muttering to herself all the while. How dare Laura say what she’d said. It was so rude now that she thought about it. Almost the sort of thing Molly, who lived next-door to her parents, might say. Molly had been behind the door when tact was being handed out and could put both feet in her mouth at the same time.

The last time Meredith had seen her, at her father’s awful sixtieth birthday party, she’d said something along the lines of: ‘Have you no man with you for us all to admire, Meredith? I was sure you’d have caught yourself a fine fella in Dublin, what with your fancy clothes and the new teeth and all.’

Suddenly, the memory of the tactless Molly faded as Meredith thought of that party and how badly she’d felt afterwards. She’d bought all that stupid champagne because she’d wanted the Byrne party to be cool, even though nobody else in the family cared in the least about being cool or what the waiters or the hotel management thought of them.

The Byrnes only cared that Ned enjoyed his birthday. Ned and Opal had tried to dissuade her. They didn’t care a hoot about champagne.

How stupid that
she’d
cared so much.

Meredith had lain on the bed without removing her make-up with her expensive cleanser and without putting her special moisturizer on. She wriggled out of her clothes, pulled the bedclothes over her and then sobbed herself to sleep.

Nobody else crossed the gallery’s doors that Saturday afternoon. The only thing of any importance that happened was that Keith phoned to say he’d be transferring money into the gallery’s account first thing Monday morning.

There was something very reassuring about Keith. The careful, thoughtful opposite to Sally-Anne’s butterfly ways, he even spoke slowly so that people trusted him implicitly.

‘Keith, I’m worried about money, full stop,’ Meredith told him, glad of the chance to speak to him instead of Sally-Anne. ‘I don’t know if Sally-Anne has told you, but a couple of cheques bounced and …’

Right, let me sort it out,’ Keith said and Meredith felt some of the weight lift. ‘Oh, and can you get that big Robinson painting shipped out this evening. I’ll give you an address.’

‘On a Saturday?’ said Meredith. ‘OK, I’ll do it. Email me the address. It’s the most expensive piece in the gallery, we’ll need insurance.’

‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Keith smoothly.

At six, they were all getting ready to leave when Pippa came up to Meredith, who was packing away papers into the leather tote she used as a briefcase.