The Witch Elm

Luckily I didn’t live in the kind of place where I swapped cheery waves with my neighbors on our way out to work every morning, and if I missed a day someone would call round with cookies to make sure I was OK. My apartment was on the ground floor of a slabby, redbrick 1970s block, jammed eye-jarringly between beautiful Victorian mansions in an extremely nice part of Dublin. The street was broad and airy, lined with enormous old trees whose roots rucked up big patches of the pavement, and the architect had at least had enough sensitivity to respond to that; my living room had great floor-to-ceiling windows and glass doors on two sides, so that in summer the whole room was a glorious, disorientating tumble of sunshine and leaf-shadows. Apart from that one stroke of inspiration, though, he had done a pretty lousy job: the outside was sourly utilitarian and the corridors had the hallucinatory, liminal vibe of an airport hotel, long line of brown carpet stretching off into the distance, long line of textured beige wallpaper and cheap wooden doors on either side, dirty cut-glass wall sconces giving off a curdled yellowish glow. I never, ever saw the neighbors. I heard the occasional muffled thump when someone dropped something on the floor above me, and one time I had held the door for an accountant-looking guy with acne and a lot of Marks & Spencer shopping bags, but apart from that I might have had the whole block to myself. No one was about to notice, or care, that instead of going to work I was at home blowing up emplacements and inventing cute gallery stories to tell Melissa on the phone that evening.

I did do a certain amount of panicking, off and on. Tiernan wasn’t answering his phone, even when I rang from my unlisted landline, so I had no way of knowing how thoroughly he had ratted me out, although the lack of contact didn’t feel like a good sign. I told myself that if Richard had been planning to fire me he would have done it straight out, the same way he had to Tiernan; most of the time this made total, comforting sense, but every now and then there was a moment (middle of the night, mostly, eyes snapping open to the slant of pale light sweeping ominously across my bedroom ceiling as a car passed near-silently outside) when the full potential of the thing thumped down on top of me. If I lost my job, how would I hide it from people—my friends, my parents, oh God Melissa—until I could get a new one? In fact, what if I couldn’t get a new one? All the big firms I had been carefully cultivating would notice my sudden departure from the gallery, notice how the star of the big hyped summer show had abruptly dematerialized at the exact same time, and that would be it: if I wanted a new job I would have to leave the country, and even that might not do me much good. And on the subject of leaving the country: could Tiernan and I be arrested for fraud? We hadn’t sold any of Gouger’s paintings, thank God, and it wasn’t like we had been claiming they were by Picasso, but we had taken funding under false pretenses, that had to be some kind of crime . . .

Like I said, I wasn’t used to worrying, and the intensity of those moments took me aback. In facile hindsight it’s tempting to see them as a premonition gone awry, a wild danger signal propelled to me by the force of its own urgency and then scrambled, ever so slightly but fatally, by the limitations of my mind. At the time I just saw them as a nuisance, one that I had no intention of allowing to freak me out. After a few minutes of spiraling panic I would get up, shock my mind out of its loop with thirty seconds under a freezing shower, shake like a dog and then go back to whatever I had been doing.

On Friday morning I was a little jumpy, enough that it took me several tries to find an outfit that felt like it sent the right message (sober, repentant, ready to get back to work)—eventually I settled on my dark gray tweed suit, with a plain white shirt and no tie. All the same, when I knocked on Richard’s door I was feeling fairly confident. Even his curt “Come” didn’t put me on edge.

“Me,” I said, putting my head diffidently around the door.

“I know. Sit down.”

Richard’s office was a riotous nest of carved antelopes, sand dollars, Matisse prints, things he’d picked up on his travels, all precariously balanced on shelves and stacks of books and each other. He was sifting aimlessly through a large pile of papers. I pulled up a chair to his desk, at an angle, like we were going to be looking through brochure proofs together.

He said, when he had waited for me to settle, “I don’t need to tell you what this is about.”

Playing innocent would have been a bad mistake. “Gouger,” I said.

“Gouger,” Richard said. “Yes.” He picked up a sheet from his pile, gazed at it blankly for a second and let it drop. “When did you find out?”

Crossing my fingers that Tiernan had kept his mouth shut: “A few weeks ago. Two. Maybe three.” It had been a lot longer than that.

Richard looked up at me then. “And you didn’t tell me.”

Cold undertow in his voice. He was furious, really furious, still; it hadn’t worn off at all. I dialed up the intensity a few notches. “I almost did. But by that time, by the time I found out, it had just gone too far, you know? Gouger’s stuff was out there, on the website, it was on the invitation—I know for a fact he was the reason the Sunday Times said yes, and the ambassador—” I was talking too fast, gabbling, it made me sound guilty. I slowed down. “All I could think was how suspicious it would look if he vanished so close to the show. It could have cast doubt on the whole thing. The whole gallery.” Richard’s eyes closed for a second against that. “And I didn’t want to throw the responsibility onto you. So I just—”

“It’s on me now. And you’re right, it’s going to look incredibly suspicious.”

“We can fix it. Honestly. I’ve spent the last three days working it all out. We can have it sorted by the end of today.” We, we: we’re still a team. “I’ll get onto all the guests and the critics, explain that we’ve had a slight change in the lineup and we thought they might want to know. I’ll tell them Gouger got cold feet—he thinks his enemies might be sniffing around, he needs to keep a low profile for a while. I’ll say we’re very optimistic that he’ll sort out his personal problems soon and bring his work back to us—we need to keep them hopeful, let them down gradually. I’ll explain that this is a risk you take when you work with people from that kind of background, and while we’re obviously sorry it’s gone wrong, we don’t regret giving him a chance. It would take a monster to have a problem with that.”

“You’re very good at this,” Richard said wearily. He took off his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb.

“I need to be. I need to make it up to you.” He didn’t react. “We’ll lose a few of the critics, and maybe a couple of guests, but not enough to matter. I’m pretty sure we’re in time to stop the program going to press; we can redo the cover, put Chantelle’s sofa assemblage on it—”

“All of that would have been much easier to do three weeks ago.”

“I know. I know. But it’s not too late. I’ll talk to the media, make sure they keep it low-key, explain we don’t want to scare him off for good—”

“Or,” Richard said. He put his glasses back on. “We could send out a press release explaining that we discovered Gouger was an impostor.”

He looked up at me, mild blue eyes magnified and unblinking.

“Well,” I said carefully. I was heartened by the “we,” but this was a really awful idea and I needed to make sure he got that. “We could. But it would almost definitely mean canceling the whole show. I mean, I suppose I could try to find a way to angle it, maybe highlight the fact that we pulled his work as soon as we knew, but it’s still going to make us look gullible, and that’s going to raise questions about the rest of the—”

“All right,” Richard said, turning his face away and raising a hand to stop me. “I know all that. We’re not going to do it. God knows I’d love to, but we’re not. Go do the other thing, all the stuff you talked about. Get it done fast.”

“Richard,” I said, from the heart. Looking at him, the sudden tide of fatigue dragging at his body, I felt terrible. Richard had always been good to me, he had taken a chance on grass-green me when the other woman at the final interview had had years of experience; if I’d had any idea it would hit him this hard I would never have let things go this far, never—“I’m so sorry.”

“Are you?”

“God, yes, I am. It was an awful thing to do. I just . . . the pictures are so good, you know? I wanted people to see them. I wanted us to show them. I got carried away. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

“All right. That’s good.” He still wasn’t looking at me. “Go make your phone calls.”

“I’ll sort it out. I swear.”

“I’m sure you will,” Richard said flatly, “now go,” and he went back to rearranging his pieces of paper.