The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  She was also, as Carlo discovered over the first course, a brilliant mimic and a first-rate gossip who managed to avoid being bitchy or condescending. It was a revelation to Carlo that he could so thoroughly enjoy conversation with someone nearly four times as old as his current mistress.

  In the kitchen, Annie made the final touches to her main course – interlacing the finely sliced loins of veal with brightly coloured, perfectly round, glistening balls of white, green and red baby onions, peeled grapes and miniature beetroots. Then she took a few photographs of the platter on her telephone, knowing that within fifteen minutes it would return to the kitchen decimated. Food, she decided, was like performance rather than fine art: its power was in its transience and immediacy.

  As Jesu carried the steaming dish into the room, the diners broke out into spontaneous applause.

  ‘It is almost too good to eat,’ Melanie said, helping herself to one grape and a finger-sized piece of meat.

  ‘Much too good,’ Delores agreed, piling her plate high with veal and vegetables.

  ‘Who is the cook?’ Mrs Appledore asked Carlo while taking a second nibble of a perfectly cooked baby beetroot.

  ‘A woman I found – she is on loan to my wife.’

  ‘I must get her name and number.’

  Positioning herself just out of view, Annie peered through the serving hatch at the diners’ expressions as each tentatively put a first bite into their mouth. She noticed that the conversation stopped momentarily as taste and texture erupted onto palates. Septimus Ward-Thomas put down his knife and fork and lifted his eyes to the painting.

  ‘I am having a sensory assault,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘All I need is Beethoven to finish me right off.’

  Annie wanted to throw her arms around the gallery director to thank him for this unusual vote of confidence. Instead she turned her attention to poaching the quince and pear slices and hoped that the fruit would work as a balance to the rich first and second courses.

  Carlo, following a stern look from his father-in-law, turned reluctantly from Mrs Appledore to Delores Ryan.

  ‘This food is absolutely first class,’ Delores said, stabbing at the meat and stuffing two whole slices of veal into her mouth.

  ‘How’s your life? Written any books recently?’ Carlo asked, feigning politeness.

  ‘Weren’t you listening before? I have a new one out about Watteau’s women. Promise you’ll come to my little soirée?’ Delores said, pushing her leg firmly against his. Her thigh was so massive that it felt like a car reversing into his leg.

  ‘I’ve just finished The Sun King. I have high hopes for it,’ Carlo said, shifting towards Mrs Appledore.

  ‘How amusing,’ said Delores, sounding desperately bored. ‘Didn’t you also do one called The Sun Queen? Isn’t it a little repetitive?’

  ‘Do you ever ask why painters paint the same scenes over and over again?’ Carlo replied testily.

  ‘Painting is different.’

  ‘Damn your snobbery. Both disciplines are about capturing light and beauty,’ Carlo said, his voice rising.

  ‘A filmmaker is dependent on a crew, a camera and so much kit. A painter only needs his eyes, a brush and some paint.’

  Carlo’s temper quickened. ‘That is such bullshit.’ His voice soared above the other guests’. Rebecca looked nervously at her husband, fearing a row. ‘Look at your beloved Watteau – he rarely manages to get out of his entirely artificial sylvan glade. It’s the same old drab partygoers in different frocks over and over again. I can’t stand his work,’ Carlo shouted.

  ‘Darling, will you be very kind and see if I left my purse upstairs?’ Rebecca said firmly.

  Carlo got to his feet and went out of the room, vowing never to attend another one of these dinners. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was 9.40 p.m. – soon he could slip away and into Chiara’s bed. The telephone rang in the hall and without thinking he answered it.

  ‘Pronto.’

  There was no one on the other end. It was the third time someone had hung up on him in one day.

  ‘I hear the Evanses are selling up; lost a fortune in Spain when the euro went down. That means those lovely Blue Period Picassos will be on sale soon,’ said Johnny ‘Lips’.

  ‘I am so over the Blue Period,’ his wife called out. ‘Let’s buy a pink one.’

  At the other end of the table, Ward-Thomas was talking to Rebecca.

  ‘The other day I took a Ukrainian round the gallery and the chap kept offering money for the paintings. It’s a national museum, I told him – they don’t belong to me; they belong to the people of Great Britain and are definitely not for sale. So he doubled his offer – those chaps think the whole world is up for grabs,’ he said.

  ‘I thought everything had a price,’ said Carlo, re-entering the room.

  ‘Darling, will you swap places with Septimus? He is longing to talk to Delores about a rare attribution.’ She patted the seat next to her.

  Like a scolded child, Carlo sat down next to his wife.

  Annie looked at the clock – it was already 10 p.m. – the last hour and a half had disappeared. The noise from the dining room had risen with each bottle opened. Through the open door she saw that Rebecca’s alabaster-white skin had a faint pink glow and overheard Karen Duffy telling Mrs Appledore that riding would be very good for her pelvic floor.

  Annie put the last touches on her pudding – it looked beautiful – almost translucent glistening pieces of quince and pear flecked with pomegranate seeds as red and rich as tiny rubies.

  When Jesu and Primrose carried out the fruit platter, the guests claimed they could not eat another morsel. Half an hour later, all the plates and dishes were returned to the kitchen scraped clean.

  Delores asked for seconds but was shouted down. Mrs Appledore insisted that the chef come into the dining room for a round of applause; Carlo jumped to his feet and clapped loudly.

  Looking around the room, Annie got her first glimpse of Memling Winkleman: there was something transfixing and unsettling about the man’s intense watery blue-eyed stare. Annie made a mental note to avoid him at all costs.

  As the guests left the dining room, Annie heard Mrs Appledore tell Memling, ‘I might have to buy that gory picture just to remind me of this extraordinary dinner.’

  Chapter 8

  The last guest left at midnight, but it was after 1 a.m. when Annie slipped out of the staff entrance of the Winklemans’ house and into the mews behind Curzon Street. The night was cold and clear. Still wide awake, Annie decided to walk a little before catching a night bus home. The evening had been a huge success. Delores Ryan and Mrs Appledore had both asked for her telephone number. Earl Beachendon promised to recommend her services to the board of Monachorum. Even Rebecca, famously undemonstrative and silent, had offered a clipped but sincere thank you.

  Annie walked down Piccadilly and turned left into Old Bond Street, looking idly into the art gallery windows. A few weeks earlier she would have walked straight past but now she peered at each and every display with newfound interest. In one shop front she studied a painting titled Moses with the Golden Calf by Ludovico Carracci. Racking her brains, she tried to remember the story. Had God provided a cow as well as manna to eat or did the calf represent idolatry? To her, Moses looked racked with despair as the tablets lay in pieces around his feet and his followers shivered in the background. Annie wondered if her inability to decode the painting mattered or if it were acceptable just to like something without truly understanding its hidden messages. In the next gallery, there was an installation – four large mattresses suspended from a ceiling around a broken kettle, a dildo and a hairbrush entitled ‘Mama never told me there’d be days like this’. To Annie, this composition was bewildering. Art, she thought, is a different language and one that she did not particularly want to learn. Overhearing the conversation at dinner, talk of skulduggery and exorbitant prices as well as the internecine rules and mores of the super-rich, had only reinforced A
nnie’s love of cooking. For just a few pounds, she could transform humble ingredients into an extraordinary experience that didn’t need prior knowledge or insight or investment. Eating was an essential, sensual and communal activity requiring nothing more than taste buds and an open mind.

  ‘Money for a cup of tea, love?’ A disembodied voice emanated from a doorway. Annie jumped when a hand, followed by a face, appeared from a cardboard box. She had not noticed anyone or anything in the muddle of darkness. ‘Just a few quid.’

  Annie fished around in her pocket for some loose change and then in the bottom of her bag.

  ‘I’m so sorry – I only have my Oyster card and a lipstick,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘I don’t have much use for either,’ the voice said.

  ‘Goodnight,’ Annie said. She made a mental note to return one evening with money.

  Walking on, she noticed another lumpy shape curled up in a doorway; this one was boxless but surrounded by plastic bags overspilling with possessions – Annie made out the shape of a kettle, a brush and a cup. A large fox with a long scrubby tail trotted up the road, its head low, and its gait purposeful. It passed Annie without a second glance before disappearing down the steps into the service entrance of a grand hotel.

  As Annie turned down a side road and into Berkeley Square, some people spilled out of a nightclub. Three men were dressed in black tie; two young women wore tiny dresses and another man, incongruously dressed as a punk rocker, followed behind.

  ‘Hurry up, Barty, I’m bloody freezing!’ one girl shouted as her friend waved her arms to stop a taxi. Two young men cupped their hands around a match, while the third tried drunkenly to get his cigarette to light.

  ‘You can’t smoke in a taxi these days, Roddy!’ shrieked Miss Pink Dress.

  The punk rocker banged into Annie.

  ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’ His voice was slightly querulous with age and drink.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Annie replied, trying to navigate her way through his friends.

  Miss Tiny Golden Dress tottered up to them. ‘Barty, stop picking up strangers.’ Smiling insincerely at Annie, she pulled him away and towards the cab.

  Annie walked on into Mount Street and looked longingly at a row of cabs parked outside the Connaught Hotel. If only she had the money to take one home and laughing friends to fill it up. She jumped as a couple of youth ran past, letting off a firework that whooshed and exploded above the roofline. The doorman of the hotel shouted at them half-heartedly.

  One hundred feet above the pavement in the royal suite, the firework woke Vlad with a start. Since his expulsion from Russia, every bang, every sharp noise scared him. He reassured himself that he had made the necessary payments; it must be someone else getting it tonight.

  Looking across the bed, Vlad saw the three other bodies, all naked, all female, all blonde, all young and all new to him. The concierge had effected their introduction, promising Vlad that they came from a reputable ‘house’ where there was no riff-raff. He said they could organise ‘Oxbridge’ too; Vlad wasn’t sure what that meant but had said no: he just wanted ‘young, slim, blonde and clean’.

  After an energetic couple of hours, the girls had fallen asleep. Vlad, unused to having anyone else in his bed, lay there with a restless spirit, too tired to move yet too unsettled to sleep. One girl snored like a truck driver; he couldn’t imagine how something so slight and pretty could make such an extraordinary noise. Her friends slept through it regardless. The sex had been good; no, better than good – the girls had known exactly what to do and fulfilled their tasks with grace and apparent enthusiasm. Unlike most of the prostitutes that Vlad had hired, their orgasms and moans of satisfaction seemed authentic. Yet for all this company, Vlad felt empty and alone. Perhaps next time he should order more girls but he knew that quenching loneliness wasn’t a numbers game. Perhaps he needed a girlfriend, someone with whom he could develop a relationship. The thought made him feel even more desperate – who could possibly understand where he had come from, what this life was like? The price paid for physical freedom was emotional exile.

  In an earlier life Vlad had assumed money would provide more than physical protection; it was the longed-for enabler and padding, a springboard and soft landing, a passage and lubricant. He remembered lying in his truckle bed in Smlinsk planning future comforts. Even in his wildest dreams he would never have imagined how rich he would become. The irony was that now he could not work out what to spend his billions on, let alone how to make himself happy. For all the cars, girls, boats, planes, holidays, suits, horses, he was still unable to shake off a feeling of unease and dissatisfaction. Now he saw these great gains as a large mountain with him perched alone on the top. The simplicity of his earlier anxieties, of being hungry and cold, had been replaced with more abstract terrors – of being inadequate and unlovable.

  There was nothing to miss about life in Smlinsk and yet Vlad couldn’t help but remember that time with nostalgia. There was a comforting simplicity: he got up, went to work, got tired, came home and went to sleep, day in and day out. He found a satisfying rhythm to the endless monotony and something else too: the knowledge that every other person in Smlinsk was in the same situation. They were all hungry, trapped and dreaming of a life elsewhere or a different future. Most would only earn enough money to buy a flagon of vodka to temporarily lift them out of the incessant daily routine, a Saturday-night reprieve.

  Vlad felt one of the girls start to wake up. She opened a large blue eye and looked at him, wondering, no doubt, if she would be required to perform some sexual act. She smiled sweetly at him.

  ‘Just going to freshen up,’ she said and slithered out of the bed.

  He watched her naked back as she stumbled towards the bathroom and felt a twitch of desire. So what if all this was a mercenary transaction, devoid of love and tenderness? So what if he was the necessary conduit for her to buy or enjoy the life she wanted? So what if she simulated pleasure and he gave her little? Wasn’t the whole of life one kind of transaction or another? Vlad drove the earlier feelings of vulnerability out and felt his heart harden. All human relationships were based on some form of contract, some kind of exchange. Love was just an index-linked commodity, as volatile and tradable as any stock on the open market.

  The girl came back. ‘Do you want to fool around?’ she asked.

  ‘No, talk.’

  ‘I love a chat,’ she said, slipping under the covers next to him. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

  ‘What your name?’

  ‘Trish.’

  ‘Vlad.’

  ‘Nice to meet you Vlad.’ Trish held out a small hand. ‘We didn’t really get a chance to introduce ourselves earlier.’

  ‘Lonely, get you?’ Vlad asked.

  ‘Do I ever get lonely?’ Trish asked. ‘Not really, I live at home with my mum and my two sisters, a corgi, a Weimaraner and a poodle, so there’s never really any time to get lonely.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Epping. Where are you from?’

  ‘Smlinsk. Siberia.’

  ‘Sounds cold.’ Trish snuggled with a theatrical shiver into the crook of Vlad’s arm and rested her face against his chest. ‘Tell me about your hometown.’

  ‘Small town, big mine. Mine nearly empty now. No jobs.’ Vlad knew a man who murdered his grandmother so there would be more food on the table for his children.

  ‘Sounds like Epping. They closed the Iceland factory last week. Do you have a girlfriend back home?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no one special,’ Vlad lied. He had only had one girlfriend, Svetlana. She would be nearly thirty now.

  ‘There is someone, isn’t there?’ Trish said, poking him slightly. ‘I’m psycho, you see; I can tell what people are thinking. Come on, tell me about her.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Vlad asked.

  ‘Twenty-two. Getting on. My mum was married at nineteen. What was you doing when you was twenty-two?’


  Vlad wondered whether to tell her that at her age he had already spent seven years in a mine and had murdered his first man.

  ‘Would you kill?’ he asked.

  Trish thought for a minute. ‘I’d kill for a Burberry trench or a Mulberry handbag in pink crocodile skin.’

  Vlad thought about his split-second decision to kill his brother, push him down the deep shaft of the mine. Leonard had snatched first the top job and then Svetlana from Vlad in the same week. For three years Vlad watched him take home a better salary and flaunt his superior position, and his beautiful girlfriend. Sometimes he had a flashback of Leonard’s startled, appalled face as he fell backwards, realising the consequences of Vlad’s hefty shove. Vlad heard the thud of the body hitting the sides of the shaft and the final thunk as it crashed to the floor sixty feet below. He never once regretted killing his brother. Leonard deserved it.

  ‘I would also love a pair of Kurt Geiger shoes,’ Trish continued, ‘but I probably wouldn’t kill for them.’ She looked at Vlad. ‘You’re not even listening, are you?’ She gave him a gentle shove. ‘What would you kill for?’

  ‘I would kill when important.’

  ‘Would you really?’ she said nervously.

  Vlad didn’t reply. Once he had killed Leonard and found it so easy and useful, he had done it again: the wealthier he got, the further he could stay from the scene of the crime and the less chance of detection.

  Looking across his suite, at the etiolated beige furniture, chosen to reflect the tastes of everyone and no one, Vlad’s thoughts turned to Barty. This strange man had promised him ‘a life’ full of colour, interests and fun. Vlad decided to retain his services; he had nothing to lose except money.

  ‘I think you are a big softy really,’ said Trish, letting her fingers trail down Vlad’s chest and over his stomach. ‘I know what will make you happy,’ and, getting on to her knees, she flicked her tongue over his nipples.

  Two miles away, Annie walked along the edge of Hyde Park and looking through the railings, she saw tiny spring crocuses and snowdrops peeking through the grass by the trees, bathed in the glow of street lamps. In Devon, she thought, it would be a few more weeks before any flowers appeared; London was ahead of the times in all ways.