A disgraced former MP, Teddy Chesterton, is dying. He wants to put things right with
his ex-wife, Laura, the only woman he has ever loved, but who left him after
believing he deceived her. Teddy finds out that Laura has recently been widowed
and invites her to come with him to Venice. To his surprise, she accepts.
They first meet at a gallery where Teddy’s university friend, Paul Merrick works, and
Laura is offered the chance to work in London to help stage an exhibition of
paintings by Tiepolo. Paul asks Laura to do him a favour and authenticate a sketch
by the younger Tiepolo. She is told subsequently that what she believed to be a genuine Tiepolo was a fake, and her reputation in the art world is ruined.
She blames Teddy for his part in getting her involved with Paul. They divorce, and
Teddy goes to prison for money laundering.
Upon his release, he visits Paul, who explains that he had nothing to do with the sketch being a fake and that it was copied by a forger to whom he had unwittingly sold the original.
In Venice, Teddy gives Laura a pile of papers that prove Paul did not set out to
deceive her about the sketch he asked her to authenticate. Teddy knows that he
has done what he set out to do, even if everything is just too late.
Apart from three years studying History of Art and Philosophy at University College
London, I have lived my entire life in the North West – born in Warrington, lived and worked in Manchester, and fourteen years ago moved to north Cumbria.
After several years of freelance arts journalism, I ran a NW-based public relations agency called Lawson Leah in the 1990s, then worked for various organisations in the construction industry, as CEO of Construction for Merseyside Ltd and then Director of the Civil Engineering Contractors’ Association. I have been a guest lecturer on urban regeneration and chaired a housing association for three years, and now work part-time as a consultant.
I have had articles on a range of topics, including the arts, construction,
engineering, housing and economic development published in numerous
magazines, as well as poetry and a guidebook to waterway walks in the NW.
My approach to writing tends to involve identifying a problematic situation and then finding a means of resolving it. I derive particular pleasure from finding the right words to achieve that. I was first inspired to write, as a teenager, after reading The Catcher in the Rye, and latterly find inspiration in the daunting novels of Bellow, Nabokov and Pynchon.
My thoughts: Teddy invites his ex-wife Laura to join him on a short trip to Venice, she is the only woman he’s ever loved and he doesn’t blame her for divorcing him when she did.
The story of their relationship is told in turns by them, the story of how a Jewish New Yorker art historian met a Home Counties Tory MP (as he became). It’s bittersweet as you know from the beginning that they aren’t together any more and that Laura moved on. It’s also the story of an art fraud that they were implicated in, one that could have ended very badly.
Teddy is dying, something he keeps from Laura even as they relive their previous trips to Venice and their life together. He leaves her with the proof that the art fraud that destroyed their marriage was not done with malice towards them, that it was in fact the buyer of the piece that perpetrated it and they were merely caught up in. While we’re not given Laura’s reaction, after everything else we as readers know, it would be a shock.
Once you get into the narrative flow, and the way it passes back and forth between Teddy and Laura, between the past and the present, it’s a well written and quite engaging story, Teddy is a bit of a rogue and Laura slightly naive and unworldly, but somehow it worked and they have two adult children together, keeping them always just in each other’s lives long after their marriage ended. A fascinating and thoughtful read.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 