The Gallery's Crossing

Jody is fifty-four years old, and she has promised herself that this crossing is going to be a holiday in the truest sense, meaning no phone calls, no artists crying in her office, and most importantly no people from her old life, which is why the sight of the bar entrance makes her stomach drop in a way that feels almost comical. She had chosen the MV Solent Star specifically because nobody takes an overnight ferry to Bilbao anymore, not when cheap flights exist, and a thirty-hour crossing through the Bay of Biscay seemed like the perfect place to disappear into a paperback and a series of small glasses of wine. She owns a small gallery in Brighton, has owned it for eleven years now, and she left her last job under circumstances she still rehearses arguments about in the shower, which is not a healthy habit and she knows it.

The man she is dreading is named George Pemberton, and he was her director for six years at a commercial gallery in London, a man who once told her, at a Christmas party, in front of two artists she represented, that her taste was "commercially charming but aesthetically timid," a sentence she has never forgiven and probably never will. She is on her first glass of Rioja in the ship's lounge, a modern room with floor-to-ceiling windows showing nothing but grey water and greyer sky, when the doors slide open and George walks in wearing a camel coat, of course a camel coat, because the universe has a sense of humour and it is a cruel one.

Jody does the arithmetic in about two seconds, which is all the time she has. There is one route out of this and it is narrow. She is sitting at a small table beside a man she has never seen before in her life, a man in his late forties reading a paperback with a cracked spine, a soft-looking sort with grey coming into his dark hair and a corduroy jacket that suggests antique shops and long lunches. She puts her hand on his arm and says, "Darling, there you are."

The man looks up from his book with an expression of pure, unadulterated confusion, and then, and this is the part Jody will remember for the rest of her life, he looks at George, seems to do his own arithmetic, and turns back to her with a warm smile and says nothing at all.

"Pemberton," she calls across the lounge, because cowardice at this stage would ruin everything. "George Pemberton, goodness, small world."

George comes over with the particular smile of a man who is delighted to see someone doing worse than he is, and Jody watches him take in the table, the two glasses, the stranger's hand still resting familiarly on her forearm. "Jody Fairhurst," he says. "I thought that was you. And you're?"

"Callum," says the stranger, extending a hand, giving nothing else, which is so perfect that Jody could kiss him.

"Partner," she supplies, and watches something flicker behind George's eyes, something that might be disappointment or might just be indigestion from the ferry food. "Callum and I have been together, oh, what is it now, darling, three years?"

"Four in the spring," says Callum, calm as a millpond, and George says all the right things in the wrong tone, asks after the gallery, mentions he is travelling for an auction house now, does not apologise for anything because men like George never do, and then excuses himself toward the bar with a promise to catch up later that Jody sincerely hopes the Bay of Biscay will prevent.

She waits until George is safely out of earshot, and then she turns to Callum and lets out a breath she feels she has been holding since the doors slid open. "Oh my god," she says. "I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. I just need you to know that I have never done anything like that in my life, and also that you were incredible, three years, four in the spring, where did that even come from?"

Callum closes his book, keeping his thumb in the page, and considers her for a moment. "You looked like a woman about to do something drastic," he says. "I figured I could either help or watch it go badly, and helping seemed kinder."

"I owe you a drink," she says, "or possibly a house," and she flags down the passing bar staff and orders another Rioja for herself and asks him what he is having, and he says a pint if they have anything decent, and they do not, and he takes it anyway with a gracious little shrug that makes her laugh for the first time in what feels like months.

"So," she says, once the drinks arrive and she has stopped wanting to hide under the table. "Callum. Who are you, besides my fictitious long-term partner?"

"Antique dealer," he says. "Mostly Georgian glass and the odd bit of porcelain. I'm heading to San Sebastian for a fair, which is my entire personality for the next two weeks. And you're a gallery owner, apparently, unless that was also invented."

"Oh no, that part's real, worse luck!" She tells him about the gallery in Brighton, eleven years of it, the artists who have stayed and the ones who have flounced off in dramatic style, and he actually listens, which she notices, because listening is rarer than it should be. Then he asks her a question that stops her mid-sentence.

"Did you ever deal with the Hensley estate? There was a tracing paper sketch, mid-fifties, that came through a small gallery on the south coast and I've always wondered whose eye spotted it."

Jody puts her glass down very slowly. "That was me," she says. "That was my gallery. I bought it off a bloke in a pub in Worthing for four hundred quid and sold it six months later for eleven thousand, and it is still the best thing I have ever done."

"The Worthing pub," Callum says, and he is grinning now, an easy crooked grin that rearranges his whole face. "That's legendary in certain very small circles. People still say it. There's a man in Lewes who tells that story like a parable."

She cannot believe this. "You know my work? You actually know my work, and you sat there reading a paperback about shipwrecks instead of introducing yourself like a normal person?"

"I was on holiday," he says, "or I thought I was. Also you looked very busy being left alone, and that seemed sacred." He turns his pint glass a slow quarter turn on the table. "I was married at twenty-five, divorced by thirty-one, and I've got very good at leaving people to their peace."

"Fifty-four," she offers, because it seems fair to trade. "Never married at all, one gallery, one fling with a fellow curator about eighteen years ago that ended so politely it was practically a tax settlement, and a former boss I would cheerfully pay to never see again, which brings us to the awkward part."

"George," Callum says.

"George. Whom I have now told we have been together for four years, and whom you played along with like a professional, and I need to ask you something and I want you to feel completely free to say no." She takes a breath. "He's on this ferry for the whole crossing. Thirty hours to Bilbao. And if he sees either of us alone at any point, the whole thing collapses, and I will spend the voyage being pitied, which is worse than being insulted, honestly, pity is the worst one. So. Would you have dinner with me tonight, publicly, as my partner, and possibly breakfast tomorrow? Just a favor between strangers, nothing owed on either side, and you can walk away from it whenever you like."

Callum looks at her over the rim of his glass, and there is something in his face that is not just amusement, though there is plenty of that. "Four in the spring," he says. "We should probably agree on how we met before dinner. He'll ask."

"You met at a gallery," Jody says immediately. "Obviously. You came in to value a vase and stayed for the wine."

"And what did you sell me?"

"Something you couldn't afford," she says, "and bought anyway," and Callum laughs, a proper laugh, and she thinks, with a small and slightly alarming lurch, that this charade is going to be the easiest lie she has ever told, and possibly the most enjoyable.

Outside the windows the water is darkening toward evening, and somewhere behind them George is buying a camel-coat round of drinks for people he thinks matter, and Jody refills both their glasses and starts inventing their first date, and Callum, she notices, keeps finding excuses to let his hand rest near hers on the table.

George comes back into the lounge after the starters have arrived, which Jody decides later is the single most George thing that has ever happened, because the man cannot bear a room he is not the center of for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

He drifts over in the camel coat with a glass of something amber in his hand, smiling the smile he used to deploy across open-plan offices, and Jody feels her spine go rigid and then deliberately, consciously, soften.

"Jody Fairhurst," he says. "I thought that was you. How are the south coast trade, still charming and commercial?"

"Thriving," she says, and reaches over without letting herself think about it and takes Callum's hand on the tabletop. "George, this is Callum, my partner. Callum, George Pemberton, who used to be my director about a hundred years ago."