‘No, I meant – agh, forget it.’ He gave up, knowing perfectly well she was being obtuse. She knocked back the coffee shot and took a moment to enjoy the hit before walking over to him. ‘Okay, so where are we at?’
‘Well, I think you’ll be pleased.’ Bart took a folder from the top of his paperwork pile and slid it along the bench to her. ‘Which is not the same thing as saying the client’s management will be. Apparently he’s just signed as the lead in some Viking epic, and hair – preferably long hair – was taken as a given.’
‘Why? Were there never any bald Vikings?’ she grinned. ‘Relax. It’ll have grown back in a couple of months. When are they beginning shooting?’
‘Next month.’
‘Huh. Well, he should have said, then.’ She opened up the file and stared into the eyes that had been locked onto hers only a few hours previously in her spare room. Echoes of the connection that had tugged between them through the lens yesterday vibrated through her again now. The electricity crackled on the page; it was what gave the images their vibrancy, magnetism. But though she could read it, she no longer felt it. Like the diminishing toots of a stream train puffing out of sight, the feeling was distant already. He had been precisely what she had needed – but she had only needed it for a few hours.
‘Mmm . . . The lighting’s a bit sharp in this sequence,’ she murmured, putting on her eye loupe and scoring out three whole rows of images with a red cross. ‘And I don’t like the angle in these here, do you?’
It was a rhetorical question. Bart knew Lee never doubted her instincts on her own work. She could ruthlessly edit herself without any need for input from anyone else, and had many times thrown out entire shoots, refusing to hand over the images to the client if she wasn’t absolutely happy with them. It made her a nightmare to work with but it was also what made her desirable; no one had higher expectations of her than she did of herself and her very perfectionism and uncompromising vision was the reason the bookings kept coming.
She went through the contact sheets with brisk efficiency, eliminating scores of images (mainly the early ones) on account of an awkward pose, a forced look, a ‘too perfect’ symmetry, so that by the time she’d finished, they had perhaps a dozen left from an initial count of one hundred and eighty.
‘Yes.’ She stepped back, looking at the survivors with a critical hawk-eye. She famously never retouched her images and it was in her contract that her clients were forbidden to alter her work in any way. ‘Give them those. I reckon there’s a good three cover options there if they want them. That I’d choose, anyway.’
‘Yep.’ Bart nodded in agreement. It wasn’t unknown for the publications to go out with multiple covers in limited-edition runs when she’d spoilt them for choice like this. He shuffled the edit into a new pile and took them back to his desk.
She sank onto her high stool, flicked quickly through the post and checked her emails. It was the usual depressing mix of marketing spam and domestic miscellanea – her studio insurance was coming up for renewal, her Life magazine subscription was about to expire, a dispatch note for the new inner tubes she’d bought for her bike.
‘So are you going to call him, then?’ Bart asked from across the space, his eyes on his screen.
She clicked on an email for dinner arrangements at her place with Noah, Liam and Mila tomorrow night. ‘Who?’
‘Matteo!’ He swivelled around on his chair, pointing a finger at her. ‘And don’t even try to deny it! It was pretty damn obvious there was something between you. I can always tell with you.’
She gave a groan. ‘He’s an actor, Bart. Easy on the eye, perhaps, but—’
‘He’s never going to save the world?’ he finished for her, knowing her too well. ‘But does he need to? You don’t need to marry him, you know. You could still go on a date with the guy, just have a few drinks.’
‘I have a five-year-old. I don’t have time for dating. I barely have time to sleep,’ she muttered.
‘Lunch then. You’ve gotta eat.’
She peered over her glasses as him. ‘Bart, it’s sweet of you to worry about the abysmal state of my love life but I’m honestly more concerned about who’s going to win The X Factor.’
‘You don’t watch The X Factor.’
‘Precisely. You know, sometimes I think you forget Happily Ever After only exists in fairy tales.’ She flashed him a sarcastic smile.
‘So cynical. So sad,’ he tutted dramatically, just as the phone rang. ‘Oh, and before I forget, Dita called. She’s getting on a plane now,’ he said as he picked it up, ‘but-says-she’s-going-to-be-in-town-next-week, most-likely-Wednesday-but-could-be-sooner, and-are-you-free-for-brunch? Hello, Fitch Studios,’ he said all in one breath.
Dita?
Lee felt her laissez-faire mood seep away like water into sand, the past dragging down her spine like a sharp red fingernail. Her former boss was a hard woman to pin down these days and hearing from her was like getting a call from the White House. She’d been like Lee and Cunningham and Schneider and all the others once too. It had taken being ambushed by Tamil Tigers to make her step back from working in the field; her daughter had been three at the time. But unlike Lee, she hadn’t turned her back on that world altogether and, as the Reuters bureau chief in London, her voice down the line – too often heard when Lee had been dialling in from some godforsaken, drought-addled war zone – had represented safety. Civilization. The land of bubble baths and coffee machines. More than once she had talked Lee down from rising panic as mortars had been shelled over her head. More than once she’d arranged a pickup to get Lee out of a ‘sticky situation’, as she’d called extracting her from Tahrir Square in 2011 when the protests quickly became riots and no woman was safe; and rescuing her when Lee found herself in the maze of Gaza tunnels as Israel began its aerial bombardment of the West Bank in the summer of 2014. Dita had a reputation amongst the men they worked with for being an uncompromising and unscrupulous hard-ass, but to Lee, she was a gravel-voiced, dirty-laughing surrogate mother.
Lee dialled her number but it went to voicemail. ‘Dita, I got your message. Text me where you’re staying when you get here. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure I see you.’
They never bothered with pleasantries. Their phone calls had always had to be punchy and to the point when a line could be cut at any moment. Still, Lee wondered what she was doing over here. Dita usually transferred flights through Paris. Why was she going to be in Amsterdam?
‘That was Julia from the gallery,’ Bart said, intruding on her thoughts. ‘The painting is all done. They’re ready when you are.’
‘Great. Did you collect the prints?’
‘Of course,’ Bart said, leading her over to the workbench and whisking away a long sheet that had been draped over the top. ‘Ta-da!’
‘Oooh!’ She stepped back, taking in the large five-foot images that were now mounted and framed to her exact specifications. He had set them out along the table in a double line and she looked at them in pairs, front and then back, working her way along the row as Bart watched on, nervously biting his nails. ‘Yes,’ she hissed under her breath with a feeling of satisfaction – and relief. ‘They look great, better than I’d even hoped,’ she murmured, peering at one of the images more closely – a thin, dark-haired woman with her hair twisted up in a chignon, pearls at her throat. She had her back to the camera and was wearing a pale-grey taffeta Dior evening gown, her face turned in profile. ‘God, you really wouldn’t know, would you?’