by Helen Peters
He looked at her kindly, but he said, “I really need to speak to your mother or father.”
Hannah hadn’t planned for this. She had to distract him. “When is your next auction?”
He put down his notebook and picked up the mug. “Our next sporting sale – that’s where we would sell a Gunn – is in four weeks. But it’s too late to get your painting into that sale, unfortunately. The catalogue’s about to go to print.”
“So when’s the one after that?”
“November.”
“But that’s too late!” cried Hannah.
He frowned. “Too late for what?”
“For …” What could she say? If she answered that question, she would have to tell him everything.
“What is it?” he asked.
And he sounded so concerned.
So she told him everything.
The whole story.
Well, nearly.
And he sat on the torn Victorian sofa and sipped his tea and listened.
“The next rent is due on Midsummer’s Day,” she finished. “And if Dad can’t pay it on time they’re going to throw us off the farm. So November’s too late.”
The back door rattled open. Hannah went rigid.
“Hannah!” called Dad.
Mr Milsom stood up. “Ah, good, is this your father?”
“No!” hissed Hannah. “He doesn’t know.”
Mr Milsom’s eyes widened into circles.
“You can’t let him know,” whispered Hannah. “He won’t let me sell it.”
Mr Milsom took a deep breath and put his hand on the desk to steady himself. He looked hard at Hannah.
“Miss Roberts, you cannot sell this painting without your father’s permission. That, I am afraid, is against the law. If we are going to sell it, then I shall have to speak to him.”
“But he’ll kill me!”
Mr Milsom put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Miss Roberts, if your father is one-tenth as impressed as I am by the story you’ve just told me, I would imagine that killing you will be the last thing on his mind.”
Who would have believed it?
It had helped that Dad took to Sebastian Milsom right from the start. Dad was a man of instant likes and dislikes. If he disliked you, everything you said was nonsense and everything you did was laughable. But if he took to you … well, you could do pretty much anything. You could probably strip naked and start worshipping the goddess Diana in the pig field and he would think you were thoroughly sensible.
So when Mr Milsom told Dad that he had a rather good Ben Gunn painting hanging in his sitting room, and that selling it might be a rather good idea, and that maybe, just maybe, as an incredibly special favour to Hannah, he could rush through the paperwork and squeeze their painting into the Sporting Art Sale in four weeks’ time … well, Dad took notice.
And so on Thursday 6 May Hannah found herself, as in a dream, walking through the front door of Sotheby’s on New Bond Street.
The first thing that struck her was how extraordinarily quiet it was. It was nothing like she had expected. Sotheby’s was more like a church than an auction house. Even though there were a lot of people milling around, everybody spoke in hushed voices and seemed to float across the carpeted floors.
And it was so clean! All the walls were painted white and cream, and there wasn’t so much as a smudge on any of them. Cream-coloured roses in glass vases stood on the gleaming surfaces. In a pristine café off the reception area, people in immaculate suits drank frothy coffee from white china cups and murmured into mobile phones. The men all looked like Sebastian Milsom. The women had perfect hair and elegant hands.
Thank goodness Dad had made an effort. He was wearing his wedding suit and a clean white shirt, and he’d combed his hair and shaved.
They walked upstairs on thick cream carpet to the auction room. It was smaller and less fancy than Hannah had imagined. There were plenty of empty seats but Dad, as he did everywhere, plonked himself down in the back row.
“Can’t we sit nearer the front?” said Hannah.
“No, these will do.”
A smart-suited man and a woman with long, shiny auburn hair walked down the aisle to the front row. The man sat down and crossed his legs. The woman tossed her auburn hair and…
Wait a minute.
No. Don’t be silly.
“Do you want a look at this?” Dad pulled out a glossy catalogue from the battered leather document case he had brought with him and handed it to Hannah.
Well, at least she might find out something this way. Dad had been as vague as usual when she had asked him how much the painting might sell for.
Hannah flicked through the thick shiny pages. There were hunting scenes, shooting scenes, racing scenes …
And here it was. Almost at the end of the catalogue. It was labelled “Lot 37”. Hannah looked at the writing on the facing page. She skimmed the dates and the section called “Provenance”.
She looked at the figures at the bottom of the text.
£30,000–£40,000.
She stared at the numbers.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Does that mean,” Hannah whispered, “that our painting is worth thirty to forty thousand pounds?”
Dad cleared his throat. “Well, that’s what Mr Milsom thinks. We’ll see. It all depends on somebody wanting it.”
“Thirty to forty thousand pounds!”
“All thanks to you,” he said.
Hannah stared at him, amazed. Was he praising her?
He avoided her gaze, but he carried on. “You didn’t run away from the problem. You faced up to it and you tried to solve it.” He paused and then, in a quieter tone, he said, “Your mother would have done the same.”
Hannah couldn’t bear him being nice to her. She shook her head. “No. I nearly destroyed everything. The theatre and the farm. If the painting doesn’t sell, it will all be destroyed. And it will be my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
Hannah twisted her fingers together. “I invited Jack to our dress rehearsal. It was supposed to be a secret but I invited him. And that’s why he and Danny burned the barn down – because they got bored and went off and lit a fire instead. And that’s how Danny knew where the theatre was to come and vandalise it.”
She held her breath.
“So?” said Dad.
Hannah looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“So you invited people to your play. You didn’t invite them to burn down the barn or vandalise your theatre, did you?”
“No.”
“Well then, it’s not your fault, is it? Gracious, girl, the nonsense you do talk.”
He shook his head, took the catalogue from Hannah and started to read it.
It was just what Vanessa had said, only in slightly different words.
When Vanessa had said it, she hadn’t quite believed her.
But she believed Dad.
Hannah’s shoulders dropped about ten centimetres. It felt like an enormous weight had been lifted from them. A weight that had been there for such a long time that, until it was taken away, she hadn’t even realised how heavy it was.
The auburn-haired woman in the front row turned her head to scan the room.
But it wasn’t a woman.
It was Miranda Hathaway.
Unbelievable.
Miranda Hathaway, at the same auction!
Miranda saw Hannah and her jaw dropped. She blinked a few times, as if she was trying to clear an obstruction from her eye.
Hannah stopped herself from laughing just in time and smiled instead.
“It was that rent rise that caused all the problems, anyway,” said Dad.
Hannah looked at him, wide-eyed. He didn’t seem to be talking to anybody. He was looking straight ahead.
Was he confiding in her?
“If we’d sold the thresher, it would only have covered the rent for a few more months, and then the cows would h
ave had to go the next time,” he said.
Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah could see Miranda. She had stopped blinking. Now she craned her head forward and mouthed, “What are you doing here?”
Hannah was tempted to say, “Waiting for the disco to start,” but that would just confuse Miranda. “Selling a painting,” she mouthed back.
Miranda treated Hannah to one of her sweeping up-and-down looks, as if to say, Don’t be ridiculous; somebody as badly dressed as you can’t possibly have a painting to sell. She frowned, turned away and took her father’s catalogue off his lap.
Hannah turned back to Dad. “So what are you going to do? I mean, even if we sell the painting, it won’t pay the rent forever, will it?”
“No,” he said. “With any luck, it’ll buy us some time. But we’re going to have to make a lot of changes to the place.”
Something in his voice made Hannah look curiously at her father. He had mentioned making changes as though he actually relished the idea. She couldn’t remember when she had last heard him sound enthusiastic about anything.
Miranda turned round again. “Which lot?” she mouthed.
Hannah had never been so pleased to answer a question. “Lot thirty-seven.”
Miranda started leafing through her catalogue. Hannah sat back to await the reaction.
A tall, slim man in glasses entered the room and stepped on to a platform at the front. He must be the auctioneer.
And then in walked Sebastian Milsom. He stood next to the auctioneer and opened up a laptop on a little table. He glanced round the room and when he saw Hannah he beamed at her. Hannah beamed back. She started to enjoy it all. She looked around at the other people in their smart suits and jewellery. She wanted to say, “Look at lot thirty-seven! That’s ours! We’re selling that!”
Miranda turned round again. She had a disbelieving sort of frown on her face. She held up the catalogue with the page open at Lot 37. “Really?” she mouthed.
Hannah nodded, straight-faced. Inside her head, she was jumping up and down with glee.
Miranda stared at the page, and back at Hannah. “How come?”
And Hannah just shrugged nonchalantly, as if they had dozens of paintings worth thousands of pounds hanging on the farmhouse walls.
Miranda tossed her head and turned back to face the auctioneer.
The first picture was lifted on to an easel at the front by two immaculate assistants in white gloves. And the auction started.
The bidding was very discreet. You had to hold up a sign called a paddle with your number on it if you wanted to bid, but half the time Hannah couldn’t see anybody raising their paddles at all. What secret signs were these people using? She kept her hands in her lap and didn’t dare catch the auctioneer’s eye in case she accidentally bought a work of art.
Much of the bidding seemed to be done over the phone. There was a row of telephones on a counter along the right-hand walls, and Sotheby’s assistants perched on stools talking to the distant bidders.
Lots came and went very quickly. In no time at all, the hammer went down for Lot 36. The two assistants brought Dad and Mum’s Ben Gunn painting into the room and placed it on the easel. Goose pimples prickled up all over Hannah’s body.
“We have here,” said the auctioneer, “a fine Ben Gunn.”
Sebastian Milsom glanced up from his laptop for a second and smiled at Hannah. Hannah smiled back at him.
Miranda caught the exchange of glances. She looked curiously from Mr Milsom to Hannah and back again, as if trying to work out the connection.
Dad sat very straight, clasped his hands in his lap and kept his eyes fixed on the auctioneer.
“May I start the bidding at twenty-eight thousand pounds?” said the auctioneer. “Thank you, madam.”
The bidder was a woman in a pale-pink dress.
“Do I see thirty thousand pounds?”
A small man in a navy suit, a striped shirt and a spotty tie raised his paddle a few centimetres and nodded.
“Thirty-two?”
This time it was a telephone bidder.
“Thirty-four?”
The man with the spotty tie again.
“Thirty-six?”
The auctioneer paused while an assistant murmured down the phone. She looked up and shook her head. He looked out into the room again.
“Thirty-eight?”
The woman in the pink dress raised her paddle.
“Forty?”
The man in the spotty tie.
“Forty-two thousand?”
It was just the two of them bidding now.
“Forty-four thousand?”
Time slowed down.
“Forty-six thousand?”
There was a pause, before the woman in the pink dress slowly raised her paddle.
“Forty-eight thousand?”
The man in the spotty tie raised his paddle.
Hannah felt dizzy.
“Fifty thousand?”
The woman shook her head and put her paddle in her lap.
“Do I see fifty thousand pounds anywhere?”
The room was as silent and still as a gallery of statues.
The auctioneer tapped his hammer on the lectern. “Sold, for forty-eight thousand pounds. Lot thirty-eight…”
Time went on, presumably. Their painting was taken off the easel by the white-gloved assistants, another painting was put in its place and the bidding continued. But for Hannah, time had stopped. Dazed and dizzy, she turned to her father.
“We can pay the rent now,” she whispered.
Slowly he turned to her and focused his blue eyes on her green ones. A grin spread across his face.
“Yes,” he said. “Nearly two years’ rent.”
“And then?”
“And then there are going to have to be changes.”
Hannah took a deep breath. “Actually,” she whispered, “I’ve had an idea about that too.”
When the auction finished, Miranda and her father walked out down the aisle as Hannah and Dad were still gathering up their things. Miranda stared at Hannah. She looked completely confused. I had you nicely tucked away out of sight in a box labelled “Farm Girl”, she seemed to be thinking. Now you’ve messed everything up and I don’t know how to treat you any more.
Hannah smiled at Miranda. Good luck figuring that one out, she thought, because there is so much of the world that you don’t understand, Miranda Hathaway.
“Get that animal’s filthy stinking paws off my new shoes!” screeched Martha.
Jo clutched the silky cocker spaniel puppy to her chest. “Don’t be so mean. She smells a lot better than you do. Budge up, Sam.”
“Right, you lot, let’s get a move on,” said Dad, yanking open the driver’s door.
Hannah disengaged Sam’s hands from his new John Deere baler long enough to fasten his seatbelt, and ran around to the passenger door.
She heaved out a bag of pig nuts and dumped it at the side of the yard.
“Hi, Hannah,” called Emily. She was wheeling a barrow full of horse manure from the stables to the dung heap. Her cheeks were bright red and her hair looked like a bird’s nest, but Hannah had never seen her look so happy. “Hey, my friend Rosie from the other stables is thinking about renting one of your stables. Can she come up and have a look around tomorrow afternoon?”
“Sure, great,” said Hannah. “I’ll be here. See you!”
She brushed some of the straw off the passenger seat and jumped in.
“Where are we going anyway?” asked Martha.
“Got a couple of things to do,” said Dad, starting up the engine.
They bumped slowly up the track, the windows open to inhale the scent of new-mown grass. Adam had mown North Meadow yesterday for the first cut of hay. Swallows darted, weaved and dived through the grazing sheep in South Meadow. They passed the ancient oak tree that stood alone in the middle of the pasture. New life had sprung out of its hollow shell, and a choir of birds sung from the shelter of its
branches. And over the farm arched the huge sky, pale at the edges of the valley, shading to a deep bright blue in the centre.
Dad pulled up at the postbox opposite Lottie’s house. He handed Hannah a small brown envelope. “Shove that in the post, will you?”
Hannah looked at the address. “The rent cheque?”
“Yep.” He grinned. “It’s not even due for another week. That should give old what’s-his-name a bit of a shock when it lands on his desk.”
“Did you pay the whole year’s rent?” asked Hannah.
Dad grunted. “Not on your life. They can wait until it’s due. Besides,” he said, glancing at Hannah, “there’s a couple of other things we need to buy. Some new curtains for the sitting room, for example.”
Hannah turned rigid.
He’d noticed? But why hadn’t he said anything?
He chuckled. “Don’t worry. Your mother would have been delighted to see her curtains in a theatre.”
Well.
What else had he noticed that he’d never said a word about?
Hannah hopped out and posted the rent cheque.
“Hey, Han!”
Lottie was leaning out of her bedroom window. “How long will you be out for? Can I come up later? We could start building the set.”
“Dad said we’ll be an hour,” said Hannah. “So better make it two. Meet you in the theatre. I’ll bring the script. It’s all finished.”
“Great, see you soon,” said Lottie. “Have fun!”
Dad drove out of the village and took a route Hannah didn’t know, along narrow winding lanes shaded with beech and chestnut trees. The verges, covered with cow parsley, were a froth of white lace.
Dad turned into a gateway and stopped the car in a neat and tidy farmyard.
“What are we going to do here, Daddy?” asked Sam.
Dad got out and opened the back door. He ruffled Sam’s hair. “We’re going to start farming again, boy.”
Hannah watched her father as he leaned over the railings, stroking the beautiful chocolate-brown calves. His eyes were bright. He looked younger than he had for years.
“So you’re not going back into dairy then?” asked Mrs Thompson, the farmer.
