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He rose from his chair, as did Charles, and the two men once again shook hands. ‘How wonderful to have seen you again, Amy.’ He raised her hand and gave it a gallant kiss. They smiled at each other and he walked away.

‘Nice man,’ commented Charles.

‘Yes, he always was a good person.’

Amy and Charles left their table shortly after Peter Smith had returned to his family. They smiled as they passed the Smith clan: four handsome young men and two beautiful young women who beamed back at them. Amy glanced briefly at Peter Smith. Seeing him somehow warmed her heart.

Chapter 2

There were many things that Charles found charming about Amy Ross, not the least of which was that she never took herself as seriously as other people did. That was part of her power, and yes, Amy did have a great deal of power. She wielded it in their personal relationship, just as she did in her professional relationships, more subtly than any woman he had ever met.

She did it by standing back out of the limelight and appearing like magic: a puff of smoke, abracadabra, and
voilà
! There she was, at the right moment, for the right reasons, doing the right thing. Amy Ross, in the spotlight, to shine like the star that she was for a rare appearance, afterwards to recede once more into the shadows. That was her style, the way she liked to live.

She was a woman who knew how to retreat in order to advance, in order to win. She was therefore admired, respected, and very much sought after. She had an inner life that shined through her looks, the way she moved, the way she lived and worked.

In his heart Charles knew that he would never win her back to his bed nor to the altar unless some fundamental change took place in her. Most of the time he tried to ignore that fact and just went on living the
best way he could under the circumstances. But today, walking with her from Claridge’s up Brook Street to Bond Street and Sotheby’s where they were going to view a painting, a Rothko he wanted to bid for, he somehow couldn’t go on, very nearly said something to her about it, but stopped when she broke into his thoughts.

‘How very strange seeing Peter Smith. I had thought it would have been someone else.’

‘I don’t quite get that. Have I missed something?’

She slipped her arm through his and drew closer to him, neither of them breaking step. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Only just a few days ago I had a dream about someone from my past.’

‘A man?’

‘Yes.’

‘The near past or the very past past?’

‘A long, long time ago.’

‘A lover?’

Amy stopped. She seemed to cling even closer to Charles and gazed into his eyes. He saw something in them he had never seen before. Was it pain, sorrow? Instinctively, he reached out and caressed her cheek, and whatever he had seen vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

‘It wasn’t a very nice dream. Nasty, in fact. It was about a man from what seems like another lifetime who returned to claim me. The dream unnerved me and I put it out of my mind. Now, having seen Peter, it’s come back. I hadn’t thought of it as a premonition of some
sort, hadn’t thought it was a warning that I would really meet someone from my past.’

‘The man in your dream … it wasn’t Peter Smith, was it?’

They had resumed walking and Amy was very quick to tell him, ‘Oh, no. Peter Smith was a very nice and happy interlude.’

They were just walking through the door into Sotheby’s. Charles gripped her arm very tightly and Amy stopped short and looked at him. ‘And me, Amy? Am I more than Peter Smith? More than a very nice and happy interlude?’ he asked her in a voice lowered to just above a whisper.

‘What’s wrong, Charles?’

‘Let’s forget the Rothko. Come back to Claridge’s with me, to bed. I don’t want to be a mere interlude.’

There were people on both side of the glass doors trying to get in and out of the auction house and being held up. Amy and Charles looked embarrassed when they realised they were causing a traffic jam. He pushed the door open and they walked through it into the reception area. Amy took him by the hand and led him to one side.

‘You always have been, always will be much more to me than an interlude, and you know that, Charles.’

The relief he felt was enormous. He sighed and all anxiety left his face. He felt suddenly foolish with not the least idea what had caused him momentarily to feel he had lost Amy to her past. He felt enormously sexy, full of lust, but his mind took over and he controlled
himself. He would not lose her by forcing the issue of sex. She had made it abundantly clear to him that if and when it was to happen for them again, it would be she who would approach him. He was about to attempt to cover his
faux pas
but was saved when one of the Sotheby’s directors approached them.

By the time they were standing in front of the Rothko painting they had been joined by several people and were being observed by Sotheby’s staff and art dealers. That was the sort of attention Amy Ross commanded when she appeared at exhibitions in galleries or sale rooms. Her stamp of approval or disapproval, any comment, was closely attended to. Like many an art historian she was used not only as the voice of authority but as a barometer. Her mere appearance, as now, gave weight to a sale.

Her presence at a viewing was always exciting, creating tension, expectation; the mere fact that she had come out to look at the paintings piqued people’s interest. Even more so because she rarely said much, and almost never stated an opinion publicly. People tried to get an inkling from her manner or the change of expression on her face, from who she was with or by listening to any interchange between her and the entourage that usually formed to follow her round the gallery.

Amy knew the Rothko. Seeing it once again, she was reminded of the first time Mark Rothko had shown it to her. Her heart took a leap for the sheer majesty and beauty of the work. ‘What audacity,’ she had told him. He had asked her, ‘Why audacious, Amy?’ And she had answered, ‘Because it’s more godly than God, anybody’s
god.’ And then they had both fallen silent and lingered for some length of time contemplating the ethereal peace and tranquillity of the work. It was one of his paintings that peeled away the surface of things and shot straight to the centre of being. It was a painting of pure heart and exquisite soul, a painting that was more alive than life itself. It was life eternal.

How glorious it was to see it again. Of all the works of art she had ever seen, this painting was one of her favourites. It had vanished into a private collection for many years and though the collector who owned it would happily have allowed her a viewing any time she liked, she had never taken advantage of her position and asked to see it. Amy had written an essay on the painting and the painter, which had appeared in one of her books on Abstract Expressionism. It was often quoted from and used in other writers’ publications. That too had been a long time ago. Now, standing once more in front of the painting, she remembered those words she had written. They too had stood the test of time. If she had any intention of writing about the painting or the painter again, which she did not, there was not a single word she would change.

She and Charles were still engrossed in the painting. Several Sotheby’s staff were still very much in attendance, hovering expectantly. They were well trained to know a serious buyer when they saw one. Amy quite suddenly felt stifled, not by the painting but the whole process of art for sale. That often happened to her and was one of the reasons she only rarely emerged
from her reclusive life to step into the art world.

A profound sadness for Mark Rothko, that he was dead and gone, came over her. Had he known what a magnificent legacy he was leaving behind? She believed he did and, in some strange way, that it was what had killed him. Those years in the late fifties and early sixties had been so exciting, the best and the worst of her life. She didn’t often think about them but the Rothko and the reappearance of Peter Smith, together with that horrid dream of Jarret’s return, seemed to be drawing the past back into the present. So what? We all live with the ghosts of our past, she told herself, and the sadness vanished as quickly as it had appeared. She smiled, and felt quite happy to be seeing the Rothko again – happy and privileged. She placed her hands together, their fingertips touching, and brought them up to her lips. One more glance and with a beatific smile on her face she turned away to slip her arm through Charles’s.

‘Shall we go?’ she asked.

They were ushered through the reception area, to the door. Finally outside on the pavement she turned to Charles. ‘Well?’ she asked.

‘It’s everything you said it was, and more. What a privilege to own that painting.’

‘I knew you would see it for what it is, one of his finest. What will you do?’

‘Bid for it. But I don’t know that I can afford it. We’ll have to see. Who do you think I will be bidding against?’

‘Difficult to say, surely a museum or two, but they aren’t the ones to worry about. It’s the private collectors
who will spend more money on it.’

‘The sale will be in New York. Will you come with me?’

‘I don’t think so. Not my scene any more, you know that.’

‘Nor mine.’

‘You could always handle it from this end, bid by telephone.’

‘More than a million dollars?’

‘I think you must be prepared for very nearly two million.’

Walking down Brook Street from Bond Street, Charles saw Amy’s car being driven up to the entrance of Claridge’s. The timing was too perfect for his liking. She would want to get away at once. Had they had to wait for her car, he would have suggested tea, preferably in his suite. Amy and Charles had little routines they lived by and rarely deviated from these days. Both were careful, each for their own reasons, trying to keep their relationship on an even keel: Amy because she didn’t want it to change, and Charles because he did and was fearful of losing her altogether.

The doorman tipped his hat to them, and Charles was surprised and delighted when Amy said, ‘Mr Craven, can I ask you to keep the car for another half hour? I would like to have tea with Sir Charles.’

He was even further surprised when she agreed to have tea in his rooms. Not the grandest of Claridge’s suites, it was nevertheless one of their most charming with a small entrance hall, large sitting-room, pantry,
two bedrooms and baths. The sitting-room was elegant in shades of cream and white silk damask with eighteenth-century furniture, books piled on every surface and fresh flowers in every vase. Oriental carpets on the floors and contemporary paintings on the walls: Picassos and Renoirs shared the space with Soutines and Monets, Schwitters collages, a Motherwell, a Pollock, and in the bedroom, hanging over his bed, an Ingres of sumptuous naked odalisques. Charles had come from a long line of collectors of beautiful works of art. Silver-framed family photographs stood everywhere, the white concert grand lid a veritable gallery of them.

Charles had taken the suite over from his father who had had it decorated in the 1930s by Syrie Maugham, first and only wife of Somerset, who had made the white drawing-room fashionable. The suite had been passed on like that, father to son, since the hotel opened in 1898, always a much-loved base for Charles’s family when they were in London. In Paris they kept a similar suite at the Ritz, their place in France. The family house had for centuries been and still remained a stately hundred-room palace on twenty thousand acres in Derbyshire. That was home life; otherwise it was travel and hotel residences everywhere else. The Grenfells had always known how to live well.

From the first time Charles had taken Amy to the suite she had liked it, found it utterly charming. Nothing had changed. Charles went directly to the fireplace and put a match to the already laid fire. It caught at once, flared up, and he turned from the leaping flames to face
Amy. This was what he wanted: Amy, here in his life. He smiled at her, went to her and removed the shawl from round her shoulders and dropped it on a chair. He took her in his arms and kissed her, stroked her hair. She was responsive. She slid her arms under his open jacket and round him, caressed his back. His hands felt so good on her breasts. She kissed him back and leaned into his body. She sighed with contentment, then stepped ever so gently away from him. She placed a hand on his cheek. He took it in his own and kissed it. Amy moved away to warm herself in front of the fire. A kiss, a caress … that they still allowed themselves in this now platonic love she insisted upon.

Charles rarely made an issue of their sexual estrangement; he had in the past and they had almost lost each other over it. He had learned to deal with his sexual ardour for Amy. He excused himself for a moment and went to the bedroom. Closing the door, he went directly to the telephone.

When he returned Amy was sitting at the piano, tinkling the keys. He sat down next to her. They were both high on the Rothko. They had had a grand day.

‘Thank you,’ she told him.

‘No. Thank you.’

And they kissed once more, this time the kiss of two friends who loved each other. Two people who knew they were thanking each other for more than a good lunch and viewing a great painting. She was thanking him for not forcing the sexual issue, he her for loving him the best way she could. They spoke about the Rothko until
tea arrived and the Lapsang Souchong was poured and cakes served.

Over tea they talked of other paintings and painters. The excitement kept mounting for them both. Great art can do that: awaken you, transport you into realms other than your own.

Even the telephone’s intrusion could not bring them down from their high. Life seemed suddenly more rich and valid. Charles answered the telephone, still with his mouth full of cake.

He chewed and swallowed and tried to talk all at the same time. Amy rushed to his side with his cup of tea. He took a swallow and they both smiled for his greediness.

‘Yes, Mother, I am eating,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve caught me out.’

Lady Mary spoke for some time. Charles sipped tea and smiled, sometimes interrupting her with a burst of laughter.

He held his hand over the receiver and whispered across the room to Amy, ‘She’s being very amusing about her dotty sister.

‘You will take a co-pilot?’ he asked his mother.

Lady Mary asked about the Rothko painting. Amy enjoyed his enthusiasm in telling her about it. When he asked if he might call her back because he had Amy there for tea, he was obliged to pass the telephone over.

Lady Mary and Amy were very fond of each other, more so since they were in agreement that Amy should never marry Charles. They spoke for a short time and
then Amy put the phone down.