“You are. So get off your arse and pitch.”
“Pitch?” I squeaked. “Pitch what?”
“Something a teenager with access to Google couldn’t write. Something only you could. That’s what Mara’s looking for.” George’s free hand made a gesture that could have meant anything from “problem solved” to “I’m bored of your insecurities” and was probably a little bit of both. “Now, are you going to try this caviar? It’s getting warm.”
The shiny fish eggs looked no more appealing than they had five minutes ago. “Why would I want to?”
“Arden.” Her expression grew quite severe suddenly. “Whywouldn’tyou? Very few adventures begin with a no.”
She was right, of course. And what was the worst that could happen? I would have to swallow a mouthful of salty goo. Been there, done that.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
“Close your eyes.”
I subjected her to my best put-upon look before obeying.
“You’re cute,” she drawled, “when you’re doing what you’re told.”
I opened my mouth to protest, on principle, that I was cute all the damn time, but then I felt the nudge of the spoon against my lips, and the next thing I knew, I had a gob full of fish eggs.
It wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d feared. Far less salty and far less, well,eggy. If anything, it was like popping candy without the candy: little bursts of flavour that crackled on my tongue and vanished, leaving behind the memory of the sea. I mean, I wouldn’t be reaching for a tin of caviar the next time I got the munchies, but at the very least I’d increased my fancy party eligibility.
“Well?” asked George.
I shrugged. “S’okay.”
“Eat your damn Pot Noodle.” But she was laughing as she said it.
Chapter 7
In the end, we shared both the Pot Noodle and the caviar. Of course, they didn’t go at all, but that was part of the fun. And afterwards, she took my hand and led me upstairs again. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about George’s bedroom, except maybe that it was slightly nicer than average (if by average, you meant “mine,” which was mainly socks and my futon mattress), but I’d forgotten how intimate someone else’s living spaces could be. Caspian’s apartments—including his own—had always been about display: wealth, power, beauty, and all that blah blah blah. But George’s home was just…George. Right down to the pile of velvet jackets flung over a chair back.
Her bed had a touch of the fairy tale about it—all silver leaf and swan-neck posts, with pale grey sheets and dusty purple covers. I’d always imagined that—at the point of being able to afford something nice to sleep in—I’d want one of those ornately carved jobbies, so I could be tied to it in a variety of interesting ways. But honestly, this was super romantic. It looked like the sort of bed Louis XIV’s gay brother would get sucked off in.
George went to lounge, and me being me, I made a beeline for the bookcase. Apparently, my post-Caspian fascination for people who had personal belongings wasn’t going away anytime soon. But also, you could learn so much about someone from their bookshelves, and I’m nosy as fuck. In my experience there were two kinds of people in the world: people who kept books for show and people who kept them for love, and George was definitely in the second category. There wasn’t much order to her books, but they all looked read, and read often.
She seemed to like mysteries, especially classic English ones about dead aristocrats in country houses. But I also recognised the names of a bunch of philosopher-type people I’d diligently avoided while at Oxford, like Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag. Then came lots of scary art books, which all had titles along the lines ofThe Principles of Art History,Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, andBody, Memory and Architecture. And after those, biographies and autobiographies of photographers, a scant handful of which I’d vaguely heard of. Well. It was official: I was a cultureless lout.
“If you move the biography of Diane Arbus to a forty-five-degree angle,” drawled George, “you’ll open the secret passage to my satanic ritual chamber.”
I spun round, blushing. “Sorry, I was just looking.”
“See anything you like?”
“I don’t”—I scuffed sheepishly—“actually know much about art.”
“There’s someone you might recognise on the top shelf.”
I had to go up on my tiptoes. But then I gasped. “Oh, they’re your books. Can I look?”
“Certainly not. My retiring disposition could never allow it.”
Laughing, I reached up and tugged one down. George was best known for her fashion photography and the occasional Royal Wedding, but she also did these portrait collections. Photographs of a single subject that…well, I only knew what Tabs had told me, which was that the exhibitions were always one-night-only, and what I’d discovered for myself after hours of Googling, which was that the books were nearly impossible to get.
Right now I was holdingSylvia: She was a wisp of a woman and eighty if she was a day. Though mostly she was covered in bees. Or surrounded by them, anyway, and looking way happier about it than I would have expected from someone covered in bees. It was kind of amazing, actually—the way the images captured both her stillness and the ceaseless motion around her. I put my fingers to one of the pages, half expecting to feel the stickiness of honey. The hesitant warmth of an English spring. Maybe if I closed my eyes, I’d smell meadow flowers.
“You are wonderful,” I whispered.
