Chapter 14
14
In a position of this sort […] it will be advisable not to stir forth, but rather to retreat.
THE ART OF WAR , SUN TZU
OPERATION PHOENIX RISING
Restore Chase’s reputation.
Make the gallery a roaring success.
Stop crying when I see CM.
Buy the next book in Delia’s series.
‘I cannot believe that you talked me into this,’ he grumbled.
‘Just shut up and smile,’ Bella commanded.
Chase pressed his lips together. He didn’t want Bella to see how much he enjoyed seeing her in boss mode. It was different to before. There was a determination to her that seemed to bypass her natural instinct to defer and pacify, which made Bella come to life in ways he’d just begun to imagine.
But that didn’t make him any more comfortable or happy with Bella’s idea to open the gallery to a local elementary school whose art funding had recently been cut. He’d stared at her, genuinely concerned how on the money both he and Tej had been with her plans to involve children in some kind of redemption scheme, but she had promised him that there would be no journalists and no press attention. This was just about imbedding the gallery into the local community in a way that aligned with his personal tenets.
He wasn’t 100 per cent convinced and had begun to suspect that the perfectly poised Bella might be hiding a devious mind. Which was alarmingly appealing enough to distract him from his suspicions. Which was also why he now found himself staring at nearly thirty children aged four and five, all staring back.
At him.
And some of them weren’t blinking.
The walls of the gallery were completely bare, Ye-Joon having worked hard over the last few days to take down and protect the artwork they’d put up while working on the layout of what would be the final placement for the pre-opening and opening.
Bella clapped her hands together, looking like a bright splash of colour in the sparse, white-walled setting of a weekday morning. She was wearing jeans, which surprised him. He hadn’t seen her in a pair of jeans before. The rich burgundy silk shirt made her grey eyes glow, but he doubted it would last five minutes against a child with grubby hands and a paint-loaded brush. He was trying his hardest to keep his eyes off the way the denim hugged the curves of her backside, and felt the wide-eyed watchful gaze of a five-year-old catching him out.
But what caught his attention the most, was that her hair was down. It was the first time he’d seen it loose and there was so much more of it than he’d imagined. Rich, golden waves hit a few inches below her shoulders, not as long as the middle of her back, but not far off it either. But he couldn’t quite understand why he was so taken by it, other than the fact that for the first time he thought he was seeing her . Not the socialite, not the perfect daughter or fiancée, not the comms director with something to prove. He saw her .
‘So, who has been to a gallery before?’ Bella asked brightly.
About half of the class put up their hands and Chase was slightly gutted by the sight. Every single one of them should have been to a gallery of some kind. But with the cost of entrance and travel to get there, with busy lives and cheap entertainment, it was harder and harder to get kids into spaces that were so heavily guarded against the noise that children would make, or the mess they could produce.
‘And who knows what happens at a gallery?’
The children blinked back at her. Until they all started talking at once.
‘Old people walk around a lot?’
‘Kids get shouted at for making a noise?’
‘People stare at pictures?’
‘Children, remember to put your hands in the air if you want to answer or ask a question,’ Mr Tawney chided, apparently remembering that he was there to supervise the children and not stare longingly in the direction Maurice had disappeared off to, having taken one look at a class of school children and run as far and as fast as he possibly could.
Chase coughed a laugh and caught Bella glaring at him.
‘Galleries are places we go to see paintings and sculptures and other kinds of art,’ Bella informed them with a smile, her voice pitched perfectly for the kids. She would have made a great teacher, he heard his mother say in his mind.
Chase swallowed.
‘And what does he do?’ a kid asked, pointing at Chase.
‘ He’s my boss,’ Bella replied.
‘Why aren’t you the boss?’ the little girl asked, with a similar tone to that of a person asking to speak to the manager.
‘Because she’s a girl,’ a boy replied with a snicker.
‘Girls can be bosses too,’ the future president replied, snippily, crossing her arms definitively over her chest in a ‘because I said so’ move that should have been enough to stop the conversation.
‘But she’s not a girl, she’s a lady ,’ the boy pointed out.
Battle lines were being drawn, teachers were beginning to look to each other with concern as the situation threatened to escalate. The children moved subtly within the group on the verge of taking sides.
‘Can ladies be bosses?’ the girl asked, swinging her attention back to Bella whose smile hadn’t changed a bit, despite the way they’d dramatically veered off topic in barely three seconds.
‘Ladies can be bosses. Everyone can be a boss if they want… they just have to work hard enough.’ Which managed to successfully unite every single child in the room with a single disappointed groan as if they’d heard the sentiment many times before.
Teachers breathed a sigh of relief. A united front was better than fighting or out-right civil war. It took a little time to wrangle the kids into the seats at the tables they’d brought in for the visit, but eventually each child was settled down at the table they’d formed into a U shape and all that could be heard was the sound of pen on paper which was strangely soothing.
Bella knelt by a little boy, helping him choose some colours. Maurice passed through the gallery an unnecessary number of times to check on some spurious thing and tried not to fall over his own feet checking out Mr Tawney.
Chase could see that working, he thought with a smile.
He felt a tug at his pant leg and looked down to find a young boy staring up at him with large solemn eyes.
‘Yes?’ he said.
The kid tugged again.
Chase bent down and offered the kid his ear.
‘I don’t know what to draw,’ the kid whispered, a confession that seemed pulled from Chase’s own psyche.
He turned to look at the kid. ‘You don’t?’
The kid shook his head.
‘What about an animal?’
The kid shook his head again.
‘A flower?’
The kid scrunched his nose up and Chase hid his smile.
‘A house?’
When he went preternaturally still, Chase clenched his jaw. Eventually the kid shook his head. He caught Mr Tawney’s concern from the corner of his eye, but waved him off.
‘What’s your name?’ Chase asked.
‘Joseph,’ the kid replied with a nod that shook almost his entire little body.
‘Do you know what I liked to draw when I was a kid, Joseph?’
The kid looked at him as if trying to work out how Chase had once been a kid. Sometimes he wondered himself, but he pushed that thought aside and took the very small-sized child’s seat at the table. Joseph laughed as Chase’s knees rose above the table, but he came to stand next to him, until Chase kicked out the empty chair beside him for Joseph to sit on. Chase picked a piece of paper and his hand hovered for a second over a pen, before choosing one at random.
‘Nothing,’ Chase whispered to the kid as he started colouring in the page, finally answering the question he’d asked before. ‘I didn’t want to draw cats, or clouds, or airplanes,’ he said, the pen moving the pen across the paper, while still looking at the little boy.
‘What did you want to draw?’ he asked.
‘I,’ he confided at a whisper, ‘wanted to draw feelings.’
Joseph looked back at him. Wide, brown eyes full of wonder. ‘Can you do that?’
Chase nodded. ‘My mother said I could,’ he confided. ‘She said that I could draw anything I wanted to. Anything. And so can you. With this pen, nothing is right or wrong. And no one can take what you do with it from you,’ he told Joseph, who ate up his words like they were the God’s honest truth. And that, Chase realised, they were.
He looked down at the piece of paper beneath his pen and stared at the first piece of artwork he’d created since he’d caught Annalise and Darren in his bed.
‘What do feelings look like?’ the kid asked.
Chase pushed his piece of paper towards the kid. ‘Mine look like that today.’
‘Today?’
Chase nodded again as Joseph peered over at the colours, hovering over a forest green colour that merged into a deep grey, with slashes of red.
‘Tomorrow they might look different.’
The kid nodded sagely as if he understood. For all Chase knew, he did. For all Chase knew, Joseph probably had it more together than he did.
They sat beside each other for the next half an hour, as Joseph filled pages with colour, getting more and more confident and happy as he did until Mr Tawney announced they were all going to the park for their packed lunches.
He caught the nod of thanks Mr Tawney threw his way for taking time with Joseph, but shrugged it off. As Bella and one of the teachers gathered up the pictures the children had drawn, he thumbed the edge of the page he’d filled with felt-tip pen scribbles, slid it from the table and slipped it into the bin before heading back up to the office. He felt Bella’s eyes on him the whole way.
* * *
Bella, Maurice, Ali, Ye-Joon and one of the parent helpers spent the lunch time putting the drawings into frames and hanging them on the walls of the gallery, in between grabbing bites of sandwiches that she’d ordered in from a deli across the street.
Each child had at least one piece on the wall and once finished, they all stood back and oohed and aahhhed over the adorable pictures. But as Bella looked at the walls, there was something niggling at the back of her mind and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
‘What is it?’ Maurice asked, noticing her distraction.
She wasn’t sure. The walls were filled and the bright pops of felt-tip pen looked perfect against the stark white back drop. Innocence and an energy that pulsed from the room but…
She looked to where Chase stood watching her with a knowing smile.
‘You know what’s wrong with it,’ she accused.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it.’ Ali rushed to their defence, while the others looked around the gallery trying to see what she wasn’t quite seeing yet.
He nodded, but didn’t tell her.
‘This has to be perfect,’ Bella nearly whined, genuinely wanting the kids to like it, to love seeing their own work on the walls, completely forgetting that this had anything to do with his reputation or the article.
She’d seen how much effort the children had put into something so simple, just because they could. Because they’d been encouraged to play and be silly. Not to be means tested or assessed, but to put a little bit of themselves on a piece of paper and for it to go up on the… up on the…
‘ Oh ,’ she exclaimed, finally getting what was bothering her. ‘We’ve done it all wrong. They all have to come off.’
Ali and Maurice went to stop her, but when she looked back to Chase, he smiled, more with his eyes than mouth, and gestured for her to do what he’d known was needed all along.
The others were confused until she took the nearest picture from off the hook she’d hung it on and lowered it by almost two feet. All of the pieces had been hung at adult eye level and would have left the kids peering up to see their work. It was something that had taken her a while to realise, but Chase had known nearly immediately, his awareness of how people accessed art so much stronger than others.
They all scrambled to rehang the pictures before the kids got back from the park and their parents arrived. Maurice had procured some red velvet curtains that were absolutely perfect, and draped them across the small entrance to the gallery so that the class and their parents could gather for the ‘grand unveiling’ that Mr Tawney had advertised.
Bella welcomed them all back and Mr Tawney picked the girl who had decided that ladies could be bosses as well as girls, to cut the gold ribbon they’d tied across the velvet curtain and the children poured into the gallery with their parents.
And she had never seen anything more lovely. The look of delight across the children’s faces as they saw their pictures hanging on the wall. Bella didn’t know if they’d noticed the way that the pictures were hung at the perfect height for them, and then realised that was the point. They shouldn’t have to notice.
Children held the hands of parents, of each other, of teachers, moving around the room in beautiful chaos, so unlike the way that adults moved progressively painting by painting around a quiet gallery.
Today, Nayak was full of gasps of delight and conversation that wasn’t hushed, it was full of colour and brightness and noise and everything Bella wanted to see in a gallery again already.
She smiled as she looked around the room, until she noticed the little boy that Chase had been working with earlier standing alone looking unsure. She was about to cross the room when the boy looked up, a look of happiness passing over his features and he ran smack-bang into Chase’s legs.
‘Look,’ the boy said, his face angled up at Chase.
‘I did,’ Chase said, smiling, understanding the little boy immediately.
But the child still grabbed Chase’s hand and drew him half way across the gallery, almost as if he were dragging a stuffed toy behind him. Bella watched half fascinated as the boy pointed at his drawing. Chase and the boy came to stand opposite the small frame that encased his drawing, both wearing almost identical expressions of seriousness on their faces as they ‘looked’.
‘If I had ovaries, I think they’d have just exploded,’ Mr Tawney said, suddenly appearing at her side.
She let out a huff of surprised laughter, but knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘I’m afraid that you might not be his type,’ she offered regretfully.
‘Oh, he’s not mine either,’ Mr Tawney confided, casting a longing glance over Bella’s shoulder to where Maurice was studiously ignoring them. ‘I was thinking for you.’
‘Me?’ Bella spluttered. ‘Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.’ She dropped the denial about them like confetti.
‘Mm hmm,’ Mr Tawney replied wryly.
‘No, seriously,’ Bella replied, half panicked.
‘Me thinks she protesteth too much,’ he stated with a wicked grin and left her standing in the middle of the gallery reeling at what he’d just said.