AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘You could still find time to write occasionally, and not only to Sophie…’
‘What with having to work in the gallery and studying and constantly working towards my next exhibition—not to mention all Ross’s social obligations—I don’t have any spare time,’ was the plaintive reply.
‘What kind of painting do you do?’ asked Veronica politely.
Ashley gave her a patronising look. ‘I’m not a painter. I don’t restrict myself to revisiting dead conventions; I’m an environmental constructionist—I conceptualise space and remodel it with mixed-media and sculptural forms.’
‘Ashley is an installation artist,’ translated Luc, taking pity on Veronica’s look of confusion. ‘You know the kind of thing—covering objects in bubble-wrap, running hours of looped video in a room with the furniture glued to the ceiling…’
‘Oh, sorry, Ashley, I really don’t know much about modern art,’ Veronica said humbly, thinking it sounded quite ghastly. ‘I did enjoy the Picasso Museum in Paris, though.’
Her attempt to find common ground went down like a lead balloon. ‘Oh, Picasso—he’s accessible to pretty well everyone these days.’ Ashley shrugged.
‘Ashley prides herself on her inaccessibility,’ said Luc, his voice so exquisitely deadpan that Veronica glanced sideways at him, and almost made the mistake of laughing.
Ashley’s pretty face tensed, her blue eyes narrowing in fleeting doubt under the funky fringe of her bleached blonde hair before she decided to take the comment at its face value. ‘The struggle to be understood is part of the challenge of being on the cutting edge of art,’ she declared loftily.
‘Installation art is a hot-button for sponsorship in the Melbourne cultural scene at the moment,’ contributed Ross, pouring himself another glass of wine and reaching for the olives. ‘If you can get yourself noticed you can virtually write your own cheques. If I get posted to London, Ryder, perhaps you might be able to use some of your financial connections to help get sponsorship for an exhibition of Ash’s work,’ he said to Lucien, with an ingratiating smile that suggested he was well aware of the potential value of such contacts to himself.
‘Perhaps.’ Lucien’s voice was pleasant but noncommittal and Veronica, acutely attuned to every nuance of his tone, sensed his instinctive disli
ke of the other man.
Ashley flushed.
‘Luc’s got billions, he could afford to sponsor me himself, if he wasn’t such a philistine,’ she said, with a careless toss of her head.
‘No, he hasn’t, he’s only a millionaire,’ piped up Sophie. ‘I looked it up on the web. A billion is a thousand million and Luc only has—’
‘Sophie!’ her mother said sharply. ‘It’s rude to talk how much money people have right in front of them.’
‘That’s right, you should be like everyone else and do it sneakily, behind my back,’ grinned Lucien, giving Sophie a wink and making Melanie pinken.
‘Ashley said it first,’ the little girl was emboldened to say, ‘and she made a mistake, so I had to say something. Anyway, that’s what Luc does…he talks to people all the time about how much money they have and how much of his money they need to make their things work. That’s not rude, that’s just business.’
‘She means I’m a venture capitalist,’ said Lucien, catching the flicker of Veronica’s dark lashes. ‘I invest in other people’s ideas.’
He made it sound as simple as putting money in the bank, but Veronica knew that if he was making millions he was either incredibly astute or fantastically lucky…or a combination of both.
‘That’s a very high-risk field, isn’t it?’ she felt compelled to ask, wondering if a controversial investment gone wrong was the reason he was ducking the press.
He shrugged. ‘No risk, no gain—surely you subscribe to that philosophy yourself…’It was a statement, not a question, the sensuality sheathed in his slow smile hinting of things that had nothing to do with finance.
Veronica chose to ignore the sly suggestions. ‘What kind of ideas do you invest in?’
‘Whatever happens to interest me at the time. I’m a maverick.’ His shoulder brushed her arm as he stretched across the table to snag the bottle that Ross had left at his elbow and offer to top up her almost-empty glass.
‘Oh, I don’t know that I should—’ she said weakly, denying the temptation offered by the deliciously chilled nectar. She hadn’t been drunk last night, but she had certainly been uninhibited. She didn’t dare risk the reappearance of the wild, wanton woman she thought that she had left in Paris.
‘Go on, say yes, you know you want it,’ Lucien said silkily, tilting the bottle and emptying it into her glass. ‘Don’t deny yourself pleasure just because you think it might be bad for you. Sometimes bad is very, very good.’
His words shivered over her, something warm and heavy coiling and uncoiling in her stomach. She was beginning to realise that she had made a silly mistake in not instantly acknowledging she’d spent the evening in his company, and laughing it off to the Reeds as just one of those crazy things. That would have been the mature, sophisticated thing to do. Instead, by hiding it, she had made it into something more important than it was, an intimate secret between the two of them, compounding her embarrassment if it ever came out—and handing Luc a licence to torment her for his own amusement.
‘Yes, you’d better have something to wash down the you-know-what,’ Sophie reminded her. ‘Didn’t you say you had something for Veronica, Gran?’ she urged.
‘Ah, yes, the Mas de Bonnard rite of passage,’ intoned Miles, lifting a little covered pottery dish painted in the bright colours of Provence and passing it along the table to his mother-in-law.
‘Fred and I used to come here on holiday every winter for years,’ said Zoe reminiscently as she cradled the dish. ‘We loved it so much we were even talking about buying Mas de Bonnard and retiring here to run a B&B—we ran a motel, you see, and Fred was a cook. He died just before his sixty-fifth birthday, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to stop coming, so I’ve been making it a kind of pilgrimage ever since. We have lots of friends here amongst the locals over the years, which is why we know where to go for the best of everything and dear Fred did love his marinated snails…’
