Marrying Up (23 page)

Not wanting to face the dewy-eyed girls on the front desk, Alexa returned to the auction via the back entrance. As she staggered
past, obviously rumpled, the boys on Collections, a raffish lot in dark blue polo shirts embroidered with the auction house
logo, turned from manoeuvring a vast and ugly carved fireplace to give her an appreciative stare.

The enormous main marquee was fuller than before. Rows and rows of bidders and observers were arranged theatre audience style,
divided by an aisle in front of the elegant cream-painted rostrum on which stood the auctioneer. Large flat-screen televisions
by the rostrum and at the back of the tent illustrated the lot currently up for sale. At the moment it was a piece of furniture,
and the auctioneer had just made a crack about Her Grace’s drawers.

A small red-faced figure glided up to her.

‘Where the hell,’ Barney hissed, ‘have you been?’

‘Hello, pot, meet kettle,’ Alexa retaliated, but without conviction. ‘You were heading straight for the men’s loos when I
last saw you.’

Barney waved a dismissive hand. ‘False alarm. He wanted to
talk
, would you believe? So I spent most of the time lining up candidates for you.’

‘One stuffed mongoose,’ called the auctioneer, a pleasant patrician type with a grey mullet.

‘I had Sir Everard Bream good to go,’ Barney told her crossly. ‘Chatted him up for ages, not the easiest of things as he has
the most God-awful stammer. He’s not married, and he’s desperate for a little woman to bring his manor up to date and maybe
help convert some old stable block into a boutique hotel. He had your name all over him. All over him!’

Barney drove a frustrated red fist into a matching red palm. ‘But now he’s gone home with a collection of slightly chipped
Victorian milking pails.’

‘One hundred and fifty pounds I’m bid for this stuffed mongoose. Thank you sir, over there. Gentleman on the aisle. One hundred
and seventy pounds, the bid’s in the room. Oh, an online bid, one hundred and eighty. Any advance on one hundred and eighty
for this magnificent stuffed mongoose?’

Alexa hung her head, feeling not unlike a stuffed mongoose herself. She raised miserable eyes to Barney.

‘I saw you talking to Ralph de Vere Coningsby,’ Barney said accusingly. ‘He’s a notorious shagger. Comes to places like this
just to pick up women. I hope you . . .?’

As Alexa’s tragic gaze met his in affirmation, Barney slapped his pink forehead so hard his eyes watered. ‘God, no. Tell me
you didn’t.’

‘I didn’t realise. I thought he was available.’

‘Stuffed mongoose going for one hundred and eighty, then.

All done at one hundred and eighty.’ As the mallet clacked down, Alexa felt she was all done too.

‘Come on, Barney,’ she begged. ‘Can’t we find someone else? I’m here now.’

‘Yes, and look at you,’ he fulminated, his voice acid with anger and his blue eyes emitting electric sparks of fury. ‘Covered
in mud and your hair all over the place. Where did he shag you, the back of his filthy Land Rover?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

‘I can’t believe it. That old trick!’

There was nothing like sustained attack to revive Alexa’s
fighting spirit. ‘Well if he’s so notorious, why didn’t you warn me? I’d never heard of him.’

Barney’s lips were drawn back over his teeth. ‘I didn’t warn you,’ he growled, ‘because I never in a million years dreamt
I would need to. I thought it would be obvious what he was up to. I can’t imagine what you were thinking of.’

Alexa looked at him guiltily, knowing it would be pointless to say that even the most dedicated gold-digger occasionally had
needs that could not be ignored. That woman could not live by social ambition alone. It sounded ridiculous even to her. He
was right; what had she been thinking? Well she had better put it behind her now.

‘Oh lay off, Barney,’ she tried to josh him. ‘If I look a bit scuffed, that’s all to the good, surely. People are paying a
fortune for it all around us.’

A stuffed female deer was up under the hammer now. ‘Great deal of interest in this,’ the auctioneer reported excitedly. ‘Two
online bidders . . . ooh, we’re seeing some serious mouse-on-mouse violence here.’

The audience tittered.

‘Surely there’s someone else I can go for,’ Alexa wheedled, as Barney continued to glare at her.

‘No there bloody isn’t. Bream was our only chance. I can’t believe you took your eye off the ball like that.’

Hardly the
mot juste
, Alexa thought, remembering with a mixture of fury, regret and wonder what had sprung out of Ralph’s trousers.

‘Come here, where I can keep an eye on you.’ Barney grasped her arm hard and led her to a seat beneath the rostrum just as
the hammer came down on the deer. ‘Two thousand pounds, all done at two thousand pounds. A lot of doe, that,’ the auctioneer
quipped, to groans from the audience.

At a right angle from the end of the aisle where they sat stretched the platform on which the row of people from the auction
house were handling the telephone bids. Alexa’s eyes ran
avidly over them. Who was on the other end of their phones? Sheikhs? Oligarchs? Old money?

She suppressed the urge to pull a phone from one of their hands and yell ‘Marry me!’ into the receiver.

‘All done at two thousand pounds for the stuffed pike,’ beamed the patrician auctioneer, banging down his mallet to conclude
the sale of a large and mournful-looking fish. ‘The price has gone off the scale!’

She had tried to avoid him, but Jake made it impossible. He had been assigned his own area of the site by Neil, but was constantly
coming over to hers.

‘Go back to your own pit,’ Polly told him, her teeth gritted. ‘But I like yours,’ Jake replied easily, grinning up at her
from where he squatted at the edge of her trench, his eyes narrowed in the sun.

Polly pressed her lips tightly together. She had no intention of getting into conversation. After that first night in the
pub, where surprise and manners forced the exchanging of a few words, she had tried not to speak to him at all. The site was
big enough for the both of them, so long as Jake kept to his side. Which, so far, he wasn’t.

‘It wasn’t quite working out in France,’ was Jake’s breezy explanation of his sudden appearance in their midst. ‘Too many
cooks and all that. They’d slightly over-ordered on the expertise.’

‘What about Miranda?’ Polly had said coldly.

‘Still there, I believe,’ Jake said airily, poking idly at an uncharted corner of Polly’s trench. ‘Shagging the balls off
someone, most probably,’ he added casually.

Polly did not reply. That Miranda and Jake had split was not necessarily a surprise. What was was that he seemed to expect
them to pick up where they had left off. ‘Come on, Poll. I made
a mistake with Miranda, OK? It was just a fling, a moment of madness,’ he pleaded.

Polly continued working in her notebook, saying nothing.

‘The main reason I left the French dig was because I heard you were on this one,’ Jake added hopefully.

Bloody liar
, Polly thought. She knew this to be the case because Marcus, who along with Sam resented the way Jake had breezed in and
grabbed all Rose and Amber’s attention, had been making enquiries on the archaeology bush telegraph.

‘Well of course I have,’ he defended himself to Polly. ‘I’m an archaeologist. I delve.’

Marcus’s delvings revealed the real reason for Jake’s exodus from France. ‘Bit of a tomcat, basically,’ Polly learnt. ‘I mean,
obviously fieldwork means bed-hopping,’ he added, giving Polly a meaningful look. ‘But Jake was hopping like a frog with a
bomb up its arse. Bad for morale, in the end, because some beds are just not hoppable. Like the site director’s wife, say.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. And the wife of the director of the local museum.’

‘He was sleeping with
her
?’

‘I’m not sure how much sleeping they were doing.’ Marcus gave her a cryptic grin. ‘But the site director didn’t dig it anyway.
He sacked Jake and so he got posted here. Apparently he’s too brilliant to be wasted,’ Polly’s informant added with a derisive
toss of his dreadlocks.

Marcus and Ben, Polly could see, particularly resented the withering manner in which Jake treated those he considered less
gifted than himself. This category included just about everyone. Polly, used to it, was less affected; besides, as she knew,
Jake, academically at least, was every bit as good as he thought he was. His outward carelessness, even dilettantism, was
just a show. As Sam had discovered only yesterday.

Sam, who had a poor opinion of Jake’s capabilities, had made some derogatory remark. Jake, in reply, had lit a cigarette and
let fly a lengthy broadside about the newest wave of post-processual
theory and its implications for research. Sam had almost reeled backwards, and returned to his pit in silence.

While Polly felt that Jake had used a sledgehammer to crack a nut, she also, more worryingly, felt a sneaking admiration.
Jake’s looks had always attracted her, but in the heat of their affair, it had been his brains that had excited her the most.

Even so, there was
no
possibility that she was getting back together with him. He could come to her pit and gaze up into her eyes all he liked.
It would make no difference. Max might yet come back. And even if he didn’t, Jake’s own past conduct was warning enough. She
would remain oblivious to the charms now turned up to full wattage and trained with all their power on her.

‘Come out to supper with me, Poll?’ Jake wheedled now. He didn’t give up easily, she had to give him that. No doubt he just
wanted to override her resistance. Women never refused him normally; she was a challenge.

She could see, glancing over, the rest of the dig looking in their direction. Sam and Marcus were making thumbs-down signs.

‘No thanks,’ Polly said to Jake, gathering her tools together. She felt sticky and hot; the thought of a long, cool shower
at home was tempting. Afterwards she would write up her notes. It would be dull, but safe. Being with her charismatic, treacherous
former boyfriend, on the other hand, seemed increasingly dangerous.

She noticed now that, for practically the first time since he had come over to her trench, Jake’s attention was on something
other than her. He had been working absently on a corner as he spoke and was prodding excitedly.

‘What is it?’ Polly crouched down beside him; carefully, they dug the object out. It was both longer and wider than she had
anticipated; a piece of concrete, a fragment of wall?

‘Decorated on the underside, with any luck,’ Jake said. ‘Then we’d have a palace on our hands.’

Such a discovery would, of course, be completely typical of Jake, Polly remembered. As well as being clever, he was lucky.
Whatever pit he dug always yielded the best artefacts; he seemed able to charm them to the surface, as he charmed everyone
else.

They were both on their knees now, working rapidly. They looked up simultaneously; Polly, staring into handsome eyes full
of excitement and suggestion, finally felt her suppressed desire for him break through. Jake saw it, and grinned. ‘Like old
times,’ he murmured, brushing the tip of his nose against hers.

The large piece of concrete was now almost completely out. Would it have a fresco on the hidden side? Heart thundering, Polly
helped Jake clear away the last few centimetres of earth. They eased it out, she felt it give and they lifted it into the
air.

Avidly they inspected it, brushing the dust carefully off each side. ‘No fresco,’ Polly said, disappointed.

‘No, but what’s this?’ Jake’s long fingers were tracing what looked like scratches on the other side.

Polly peered. ‘Is it writing?’

‘Looks like it. Done with a knife. Latin.’

They crouched over it, heads together, puzzling it out. ‘
Marcus hic
. . .’ Jake began.

‘Marcus was here,’ Polly gasped out the translation.

‘No I wasn’t,’ came the indignant riposte from a few feet away. ‘I stick to my own pit, thanks. Unlike
some
people.’

‘I’ve got it!’ Jake squeezed Polly’s hand. ‘
Marcus cacavit bene
. Marcus had a good shit here.’

‘I bloody well did not, you bastard.’

But Polly was not listening. She was laughing into Jake’s excited face. ‘It’s graffiti!’ she exclaimed. ‘Graffiti from the
loo!’

Max twisted his neck within his stiff collar and looked down at his white starched shirt front. Across it stretched a pale
blue ribbon supporting the elaborate gold and enamel device of the Ancient Order of Swedish Fish Picklers. His father had
honoured him with it at breakfast; the intention was to flatter the countess from Bergen who was coming this morning.

Pinned just below the top button was the glittering pendant of the Star of Sedona, a courtesy title given to all crown princes
on their twentieth birthday. What seemed to Max an entire constellation of other, smaller stars were attached elsewhere across
his torso, positioned according to some mental decorations map that the elderly Lord Chamberlain, who had officiated in the
robing room, seemed to carry in his head. Elsewhere were rows of gold buttons, pearl shirt studs and a row of medals almost
a foot across. Max felt like a Christmas tree in a tailcoat. He also felt ridiculous – and very bad-tempered.

The valet came running in with a large white portable telephone, the sort, Max always thought, you never saw anywhere apart
from sixties films and the chateau of Sedona.

‘Max, my friend. Do you have five minutes?’ It was Etienne. ‘I need your help.’

‘I’m a bit busy,’ Max said shortly, thinking without affection of Etienne’s pink and silver palace of canine pampering. No
doubt one of the spa assistants was sick and Etienne needed
someone to bath a tortoise or paint a guinea pig’s toenails.

‘Please, my friend. It is an emergency.’ Etienne’s usually relaxed and assured tones were almost unrecognisably strained.