As the day for issuing the tender documents drew nearer, Charlie spent more and more of his time with the merchant banker. Meanwhile Tom Arnold took overall control of the running of the shops, as well as overseeing the building program with the exception of Number 1, which still remained my domain.
I had decided several months before the final announcement that I wanted to mount a major sale at the auction house just before Charlie's declaration of going public, and I was confident that the Italian collection to which I had been devoting a great deal of my time would prove to be the ideal opportunity to place Number 1 Chelsea Terrace on the map.
It had taken my chief researcher Francis Lawson nearly two years to gather some fifty-nine canvases together, all painted between 1519 and 1768. Our biggest coup was a Canaletto—The Basilica of St. Mark's—a painting that had been left to Daphne by an old aunt of hers from Cumberland. "It isn't," she characteristically told us, "as good as the two Percy already has in Lanarkshire. However, I still expect the painting to fetch a fair price, my darling. Failure will only result in offering any future custom to Sotheby's," she added with a smile.
We placed a reserve on the painting of thirty thousand pounds. I had suggested to Daphne that this was a sensible figure, remembering that the record for a Canaletto was thirty-eight thousand pounds, bid at Christie's the previous year.
While I was in the final throes of preparation for the sale Charlie and Tim Newman spent most of their time visiting institutions, banks, finance companies and major investors, to brief them on why they should take a stake in the "biggest barrow in the world."
Tim was optimistic about the outcome and felt that when the stock applications came to be counted we would be heavily oversubscribed. Even so, he thought that he and Charlie should travel to New York and drum up some interest among American investors. Charlie timed his trip to the States so that he would be back in London a couple of days before my auction was to take place and a clear three weeks before our tender document was to be offered to the public.
It was a cold Monday morning in May, and I may not have been at my brightest but I could have sworn I recognized the customer who was in deep conversation with one of our new counter assistants. It worried me that I couldn't quite place the middle-aged lady who was wearing a coat that would have been fashionable in the thirties and looked as if she had fallen on hard times and might be having to sell off one of the family heirlooms.
Once she had left the building I walked over to the desk and asked Cathy, our most recent recruit, who she was.
"A Mrs. Bennett," said the young girl behind the counter. The name meant nothing to me so I asked what she had wanted.
Cathy handed me a small oil painting of the Virgin Mary and Child. "The lady asked if this could still be considered for the Italian sale. She knew nothing of its provenance, and looking at her I have to say I wondered if it might have been stolen. I was about to have a word with Mr. Lawson."
I stared at the little oil and immediately realized it had been Charlie's youngest sister who had brought the painting in.
"Leave this one to me."
"Certainly, Lady Trumper."
I took the lift to the top floor and walked straight past Jessica Allen and on into Charlie's office. I handed over the picture for him to study and quickly explained how it had come into our possession.
He pushed the paperwork on his desk to one side and stared at the painting for some time without saying a word.
"Well, one thing's for certain," Charlie eventually offered, "Kitty is never going to tell us how or where she got hold of it, otherwise she would have come to me direct."
"So what shall we do?"
"Put it in the sale as she instructed, because you can be sure that no one is going to bid more for the picture than I will."
"But if all she's after is some cash, why not make her a fair offer for the picture?"
"If all Kitty is after was some cash, she would be standing in this office now. No, she would like nothing better than to see me crawling to her for a change."
"But if she stole the painting?"
"From whom? And even if she did there's nothing to stop us stating the original provenance in our catalogue. After all, the police must still have all the details of the theft on their files."
"But what if Guy gave it to her?"
"Guy," Charlie reminded me, "is dead."
I was delighted by the amount of interest the press and public were beginning to take in the sale. Another good omen was that several of the leading art critics and collectors were spotted during the preview week studying the pictures on display in the main gallery.
Articles about Charlie and me began to appear, first in the financial sections, then spreading over to the feature pages. I didn't care much for the sound of "The Triumphant Trumpers," as one paper had dubbed us, but Tim Newman explained to us the importance of public relations when trying to raise large sums of money. As feature after feature appeared in newspapers and magazines, our new young director became daily more confident that the flotation was going to be a success.
Francis Lawson and his new assistant Cathy Ross worked on the auction catalogue for several weeks, painstakingly going over the history of each painting, its previous owners and the galleries and exhibitions in which each had been exhibited before they were offered to Trumper's for auction. To our surprise, what went down particularly well with the public was not the paintings themselves but our catalogue, the first with every plate in color. It cost a fortune to produce, but as we had to order two reprints before the day of the sale and we sold every catalogue at five shillings a time, it wasn't long before we recovered our costs. I was able to inform the board at our monthly meeting that following two more reprints we had actually ended up making a small profit. "Perhaps you should close the art gallery and open a publishing house," was Charlie's helpful comment.
The new auction room at Number 1 held two hundred and twenty comfortably. We had never managed to fill every seat in the past, but now, as applications for tickets kept arriving by every post, we quickly had to sort out the genuine bidders from the hangers-on.
Despite cutting, pruning, being offhand and even downright rude to one or two persistent individuals, we still ended up with nearly three hundred people who expected to be found seats. Several journalists were among them, but our biggest coup came when the arts editor of the "Third Programme" phoned to inquire if they could cover the auction on radio.
Charlie arrived back from America two days before the sale and told me in the brief moments we had together that the trip had proved most satisfactory whatever that meant. He added that Daphne would be accompanying him to the auction—"Got to keep the major clients happy." I didn't mention the fact that I had quite forgotten to allocate him a seat, but Simon Matthews, who had recently been appointed as my deputy, squeezed a couple of extra chairs on the end of the seventh row and prayed that no one from the fire department would be among the bidders.
We decided to hold the sale at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, after Tim Newman advised us that timing was all important if we were to ensure the maximum coverage in the national papers the following day.
Simon and I were up all night before the auction with the saleroom staff, removing the pictures from the walls and placing them in the correct order ready for sale. Next we checked the lighting of the easel which would display each painting and finally placed the chairs in the auction room as close together as possible. By pulling the stand from which Simon would conduct the auction back by a few feet we were even able to add another row. It may have left less room for the spotters—who always stand by the side of the auctioneer during a sale searching for the bidders—but it certainly solved fourteen other problems.