A Perfect Pair

There’s something missing in this romantic short story by Val Melhop.

I had to find a way to get my hands on that beautiful sculpture!

NINE hundred and fifty pounds,” the auctioneer called. I could tell by the crowd’s gasps that no-one had expected the marble sculpture to reach such a high price.

My legs began to shake and my heart was hammering against my ribs. I wanted this sculpture so much.

Besides, only I knew its secret.

This was it. My last break-the-bank bid, my final chance.

I raised the paddle.

“One thousand pounds!” the auctioneer shouted. “Any advances on one thousand pounds?”

He raised the hammer, looking through the gathered crowd at the other bidder.

There was a pause. I held my breath.

Please, please let one thousand pounds be his limit, I thought.

But he signalled again. “One thousand and fifty pounds to the bidder at the back,” the auctioneer called.

The audience exchanged looks of disbelief.

The auctioneer’s gaze swivelled to me now.

I shook my head, making horizontal movements with my hands. I was out.

The hammer came down with a final blow.

Disappointment flooded into my mind.

“Sold!”

My intense longing for the life-sized marble sculpture had shaken me.

Naturally, I had coveted other things during my life, but never had I felt anything as powerful as this connection with the goddess on the marble pool.

I looked around urgently for the man who had bought the sculpture.

The auctioneer’s hammer had dictated the outcome, but I couldn’t help giving it one last try.

Would it be possible to convince the successful bidder to sell it to me later if it didn’t suit his purpose?

He’d paid an outrageous sum for the piece.

He would probably make his way to the payment counter to settle up.

Hovering by the Accounts and Payments office, I recognised him immediately as he was flipping paddle 36 back and forth as he waited in the queue.

He matched his voice. He was tall, confident and broad-shouldered, with a mop of curly brown hair. He was probably in his early thirties.

Approaching him, I tapped his arm, thinking maybe there might be a chance before he paid for his purchase to buy it myself.

Perhaps his enthusiasm for the object had diminished since the excitement of the bidding.

Wishful thinking, of course.

“Excuse me. I’m Laura MacKenzie, the other bidder for the goddess on the pool.”

“Hello, Laura. Well, I can see why you were so keen. You look just like her,” he said, indicating the goddess on the pool with a tilt of his head.

“You certainly bumped the price up. If I’d been purchasing it for myself I would never have paid such an extravagant sum.” He held out his hand. “Roland Pearce, landscape designer.”

“This is my phone number in case the sculpture is not right for the position you intended for it,” I said.

“Or your wife doesn’t like it or something,” I added.

“I don’t have a wife. I’ve been commissioned by

Sir Henry De Lyle to design and landscape his new property, and I purchased the goddess and pool sculpture on his behalf.

“It’s to be the focal point for a garden room I’m working on.

“But I’ll take your number just in case,” he said with a mischievous grin. “It’s not often I’m offered the phone number of a goddess lookalike.”

“I saw no resemblance,” I responded. “It’s just that I have the perfect position for her, and – and she

captured my heart.”

Roland Pearce looked at me with a gentle smile.

He took my business card.

“You’re an artist, too, I see.”

“Not of gardens. I’m an interior decorator.”

Roland handed over his own business card.

“Here’s my number. Give me a ring if you’d like to visit the goddess in her new location.”

The queue had moved along and he’d reached the cashier.

He turned back.

“I’ll let you know if

Sir Henry objects to the romantic figure on the pool.” He flashed me a devastating smile.

In other circumstances I might well have fallen for his charms, but there were far more disturbing things on my mind.

I should have confessed to Roland Pearce the secret I’d discovered about the statue – a discovery that made my failure to purchase the sculpture in the auction even more disastrous than the simple loss of a coveted artwork.

Now I was consumed with guilt and feeling like a miserable human being.

Two days before the auction, I had made the discovery.

Unable to keep away from the lovely marble figure, I had returned to the auction display rooms to sit and gaze at the goddess on the pool and to experience the wonder that something utterly beautiful can impart.

The goddess had drawn me under her spell. She belonged in my garden under the perfumed wisteria.

I circled the lovely figure, imagined the pool filled with water, stroked her cool, smooth marble shoulders, then sat on a low stone bench to study her across the empty pool.

At that height, my eyes were in direct line with the goddess’s gaze.

Weirdly, I felt the figure was trying to communicate with me.

Focusing all my attention on the expressive face, her graceful lines, her pose, one hand extended, I wondered why was she looking so intently and lovingly across the pool at me?

Her gaze, I suddenly realised, was focused not on me, but on something that wasn’t there.

Then the message became clear.

The marble figure had been carved to look longingly across the pool at another object.

She had been doing that for a century or more – long before I’d sat in her line of vision.

I leaned forward and ran my hand around the curved ledge of the pool and encountered a section of roughness along the rim, so out of character compared with the silky smoothness of the surrounding marble.

My heart beat faster. Some other figure had been sitting there.

What had it been – a lover, a nymph, a child?

If the object of the goddess’s gaze were here in the auction rooms, I would find it.

Jumping up, I began searching through the displays, not sure what I was looking for, but knowing I’d recognise it when I saw it.

Twice I did a circuit of the three public rooms.

In a seedy-looking back room were miscellaneous articles: more stone benches, pottery urns, a pair of brass lions’ heads with water spouts attached to their mouths.

This was a room where items were not so much displayed as deposited.

A flash of white marble caught my eye.

High up in a set of wall cabinets, it looked like the flank of a small animal.

The marble matched the sculpture perfectly, the same white marble with its pale grey-veined markings.

On the shelf, a little fawn sat all alone, his legs folded under him, a trusting expression on his face.

His head was turned to the left, and I knew exactly where his gaze was meant to be directed.

Somehow fawn and goddess had become detached and separated. The fawn had been allocated a separate number, Lot 12.

On its own, it was an attractive little piece, but fixed back on the rim of the pool where he belonged, this small deer would complete a stunningly beautiful tableau.

Lot 12 was one of the first to be auctioned on Friday.

Right on ten o’clock, when the doors opened, I was waiting.

Not many people were interested in this miscellaneous section and I bid almost unchallenged for the marble fawn, which I got for £30.

Clearly no-one else had made the connection.

I paid for the fawn and carried it out to my car, nestled it in blankets in a box on the back seat, then returned to the auction rooms for the more soughtafter items.

I returned, as fate would have it, to my bitter defeat in the dramatic battle for the treasured goddess sculpture.

Back home, I placed the fawn on the path leading to the paved area where the goddess should have been.

The poor little fellow reflected my own loneliness and loss.

For days my feelings alternated between resentment that someone had outbid me for something that was just a job for him, and a sense of personal grief.

The fawn became a reminder of the whole botched incident.

I began to lose sleep over it. My conscience wouldn’t let me rest or concentrate.

More damning still was the knowledge that I was deceiving Roland Pearce.

Finally, with a heavy heart, I resolved to confess and give up the little fawn to its rightful place for the sake of the sculpture.

The best solution would be to buy a replacement feature for my own garden – a fountain, perhaps – then contact the landscape designer and hand over the missing piece.

At the auction rooms the following week, I wandered through the new collection of estate pieces that had come in.

There was a fountain. It looked as if it could be attached to a piped water system.

Splashing water in the summer would be nice, but the fountain was far too

Clearly no-one else had made the connection

cumbersome for my small garden.

“Now, don’t tell me you’re getting all dewyeyed over this piece, too, Laura.”

The twinkling tawny eyes of Roland Pearce regarded me.

“You’re welcome to it. It’s too big for my garden. I’m looking for a replacement for the goddess sculpture.”

“Well, the lovely goddess is currently just camping in Sir Henry’s garden room. She looks good to me, but Sir Henry has some reservations.

“To be honest, I fell for her, too,” he admitted. “I even sit with her in my lunch breaks. She has a secret, that nymph. A secret she’s not telling me.

“I try to communicate with her, but the marble maiden offers only a cold shoulder and the silent treatment.”

He was a bit of a romantic, too.

I laughed, liking his sense of humour, and was reassured to know he was astute enough to perceive something was not quite as it should be.

“Well, I discovered her secret,” I told him.

“Did you?” He waited for the revelation.

“I’d rather you saw for yourself,” I replied, taking a deep breath. “Would you like to come for coffee at my place on Saturday morning? I’ll hand

over the key to the mystery.”

“It sounds very cloak-anddagger.” He shivered theatrically. “How could I refuse?

“Would you like to have a picnic afterwards on

Sir Henry’s estate? I’ll bring the champagne and a quiche.”

“Champagne?” I asked. This felt more like a final farewell or a hostage hand-over.

On Saturday morning, I served hot coffee and buttery cheese rolls on the terrace.

The cheese rolls were a hit, and Roland admired my style of décor and the renovated cottage.

We chatted about my interior decorating business, and Roland entertained me with stories about his work with

Sir Henry De Lyle.

Mimicking Sir Henry, he said with a sweeping gesture, “Roland, this marble woman on the pool is a pretty piece, but you know we do things on the grand scale here. We want magnificence! Get something grander.”

I smiled.

“Well, now I’ll show you what the goddess was trying to tell us.”

He followed me down the stone steps to the garden.

I had grown semi-formal low box hedges on each side of a rock-paved path leading to a larger, roughly circular paved area.

Here, at the place where the eye was drawn from the living area of the house, with a backdrop of a pergola covered with glorious lavender-blue flowering wisteria, was an empty space.

Picking up the marble fawn from the edge of the path, I handed it to Roland.

“This is the object of the goddess’s desire.”

“What a beauty. So he’s the missing clue. Hang on. Eric’s arrived.”

A truck had pulled up in the driveway and a man jumped out.

Roland went out to meet him.

“This is Eric,” he said. “He’s delivering something for you. Eric, this is Laura.”

“Blimey, she’s the image of the marble woman on the pool,” Eric said, looking at me.

“Same face, same figure, even the same squiggly bits of hair falling out of the hairdo. Spooky, I call it.”

“Romeo, move over.

Eric’s here,” Roland mocked.

I knew just by the size of the boxed-up item what it was.

“Oh!” I gasped. “Why are you bringing it here?”

“This is where it belongs,” Roland said softly.

He handed back the fawn for me to hold.

Roland and Eric wheeled the box down the ramp on a trolley and around the house to the secluded area in front of the wisteria.

Eric carefully unhinged the battens with the claw of a hammer, took off the boxing, and they lifted the statue gently to the ground.

It was exquisite.

The proportions of the sculpture for the location were perfect, and the luminous quality of the white marble cast light among the dappled shadows under the wisteria.

Roland took the fawn back from me.

The brush of his hands as I passed it to him gave me a sense of having already had a glass and a half of champagne.

Holding the creature against his chest as if it were alive, Roland placed the fawn on the wide ledge surrounding the pool.

From where it now sat, its gaze was perfectly aligned with the goddess’s on the other side.

“I have some marble adhesive. I can fix him in place for you,” Roland said, casting an appreciative eye over the completed sculpture.

“That feels right now,” he added a few moments later, stepping back.

Seeing the goddess and her fawn united at last, the sense of belonging was so achingly beautiful, I found I could not hold back the tears.

“Oh, Laura,” Roland said, wrapping his arms around me and holding me close.

Breathing a sigh, I relaxed against him.

Nestled in his embrace, I was struck by that same sense of belonging.

“That definitely feels right now,” he said.

The End.