“Indeed,” Jamie replied, when Grace echoed the words back to her. “I find that is sometimes the best course of action.” She gave Grace a smile. She had never had to fake it, per se, because faking it implied that one didn’t have the skills required to reach their goal, but she understood that an attention to detail, and appearances, went an incredibly long way to shaping one’s image. And there was no harm in offering rather pedestrian advice to someone who, for all her apparent similarities to Jamie, was likely rather pedestrian herself.
Jamie laughed at the question. “Oh, I’m giving you this advice free of charge,” she said, playing along with the joke in an uncharacteristically light-hearted way. She had warmed to Grace remarkably quickly, and was enjoying her company. The other woman might not have been her intellectual equal, but they seemed to have a fair few things in common, and that was enough to tolerate her company with much more ease than Jamie might have with anyone else. And, she had to admit to herself, that the bar had been set incredibly low in Echo Springs. It was a place seemingly populated with hicks and fools, and the occasional deeply unpleasant character.
So, she was rather pleasantly surprised when Grace asked if she had experience with ‘all of this’. It wasn’t a wildly impressive conclusion to draw – it was, in fact, quite an easy assumption to make, given the advice Jamie had offered her thus far – but it was still enough to illicit some surprise. And, for an odd moment, Jamie felt a sense which she could only describe as a lacking, as if she should have been able to answer Grace’s comments with more examples than those which came to mind. Her tweed-wearing, stuffed-shirt, male colleagues at the museum came instantly to mind, and the British carbon copies she had worked with in England also, but she felt as if she should have more experience with men to draw from. Much more. This feeling of absence seemed to be drawn from the same source as the strange lack of danger she had felt around Kaz Brekker, despite the fact he’d been an armed man, and she had been a lone woman at night. It was so surreal that it took Jamie a moment to mentally right herself, and focus on this discussion at hand.
Luckily, a lifetime of hiding her dimly-felt emotions, and wearing a mask in company, allowed her to hide this brief, odd, turmoil. The only sign that it had been there at all was the pause between Grace’s question, and Jamie’s given answer. “Yes, I do have some experience,” she said. “My field – heritage work – attracts a particular subspecies of man. Balding, socially inept, gentlemen who seem to think that museums are no places for women. Or, indeed, if we are graced with permission to work with them, we are always seen as women in a man’s world.” She was speaking in a pleasant tone, even smiling conspiratorially, but there was a cold undercurrent to her voice that made her true feelings quite clear. “The world of history, conservation, and restoration, belongs to men, I’m afraid. It isn’t enough that they own the present. They feel the need to keep a firm grip on the past as well.”
She watched Grace for a moment, still smiling, and added, “It is the same the world over, unfortunately. But, one carries on. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, Ms Le Domas.”
From the other woman’s description it was very apparent that Jamie had definitely gotten some experience dealing with annoying male egos in the workplace, at least that made sense why her advice had been so good. “That sounds like pretty much everyone on the board of my company” She grimaces, her nose scrunched up in distaste as her mind can’t help but conjure up the image of all the old white men that sat around the board table and looked on her with disdain. She was pretty sure her face had reflected that right back at them. Grace was about as thrilled to have been thrown into the role in place of a man as they were to have a young woman with no experience as their boss. She could fake it until she made it all she wanted, but until the stuffy men at the table got over their butthurt Grace knew it would just go on as it was now.
Grace taps the ash away from her cigarette before raising it to her lips for another drag. “I’m afraid I don’t have the fancy education that my hus- my uh, in laws had” She smiles to hide the slip up, she didn’t like referring to Alex as her husband anymore but those that knew him and regarded her as his widow expected it of her which was a hard line to balance “what you said sounded good, but it means nothing to me and my public school education.”
As Grace blows out another puff of smoke something occurs to her, the never ending list of jobs in her mind suddenly grabbing her attention. “So you work in restoration? Like, old art?” The golden antique cigarette case she carried around with her may paint a different picture but Grace cared little about fancy paintings or their price tags, that was very much their in-laws thing. She could appreciate them sure, and Grace had gone on a few dates to the museum happily, but that was where her interest firmly ended. But since she had inherited everything that included an extensive art collection that she was yet to decide what to do with, something she now hoped Jamie could help her with. “If I said I had a lot of paintings lying around that I could do with having valued, is that something you could do?”
