Imogen

Imogen is thirty-one, she is invented by us, and tonight she is fourteenth from the left on the phone bank at an evening sale in St James’s. The day runs backwards from there.

Seven twenty. Twenty-odd people in a row with handsets, each of them talking a bidder through a lot in something between a whisper and a commentary. Hers is in Seoul and wants company between increments. She gives him the room in about nine words a bid, does not lean, does not put a hand up until the hand means something, and takes a picture past two million with the phone against her shoulder. Stillness at that end of the bank is legible from the rostrum, which is why the auctioneer’s eye keeps going to fourteen.

Four o’clock. The viewing, walking a collector from Zurich through six works on paper with the lights wrong and a school party coming through.

Half eleven. A condition report in the basement, cotton gloves, a raking light, and a sentence written carefully enough to survive a lawyer.

Eight. A van on King Street and a crate that everybody says is fine and is not fine.

Nine years back she was the one carrying the crate, hired for the summer at twenty-two, and she stayed because nobody in the building could work out where the department kept anything and she could.

She is not the first person anyone notices at a private view off Cork Street. She is reliably the last one they stop looking at, which is a rarer quality and a harder one to spend. In a trade whose entire economy is enthusiasm, a woman standing quite still with a glass she has not touched reads as the only solid object in the room. People come to her. She finds the effect funny and lets about a tenth of that show.

What she will not do is have the argument. No row, no cooling off, no explanation asked for and none offered. A person is simply no longer anywhere she is, and the first they know of it is a third unanswered Thursday.

The city she does this in, hour by hour, is in London after dark. What she is doing when she answers a loaded question with a short true sentence, and why it works, is halfway through our guide to etiquette.