‘I was just about to sit down and have a sneaky read of Grazia,’ said Lauren, more light-heartedly.
‘Stephen wants it asap.’
‘Okay, okay. Pop up later and I’ll see what I can dig out for you.’
‘Check him out,’ said Lauren, opening a copy of Three Centuries of Exploration by Peter May, the bible of expedition documentation. She thunked the volume on to her desk and pointed at a handsome man in a parka. ‘Is it wrong to fancy a dead person?’
‘He was very good-looking,’ said Abby, scanning the text.
‘If he was around today, he’d have his own show and a range of sleeping bags,’ said Lauren. ‘How much do you know about him? It’s a really sad story.’
Dominic Blake was standing in a formal shot on a mountainside, piles of equipment in the background, rope looped around his shoulders. It was stiff, posed, but he certainly stood out, his gaze coming straight down the lens as if to say ‘Yes? And you are?’ There was just the hint of a smile, too.
‘Where’s he off to in this one?’ asked Abby.
‘The Karakoram Pass,’ said Lauren, reading the caption.
‘He got around.’
‘You have no idea. I called my mother. You know she was a bit of a mover and shaker in the sixties. According to her, he shagged half of high society. Why the sudden interest?’
‘I’m thinking of using a picture of him in the exhibition.’
‘I’d better tell my mum. Might get you one more punter through the door.’
‘What about the wife? We’ll have to do some notes to accompany the images.’
‘I haven’t been able to find out about that. Dominic’s got a Wiki page, but it doesn’t say much. Went to Cambridge, edited a long-defunct magazine called Capital, wrote a few books, travelled the world. Seems he wasn’t married.’
‘Well he looks pretty much in love here,’ said Abby, showing Lauren the photo she had brought with her.
Lauren sighed as she looked at it.
‘Wow. What wouldn’t you give to have a man look at you like that? Lucky lady.’
Abby silently agreed with her.
‘There were a few more photos in the set,’ she said. ‘You can see the woman’s face better in this one.’
‘Well let’s see if we can track her down that way,’ said Lauren, clicking on Google Images and tapping in the words ‘Dominic Blake’, ‘Capital magazine’ and ‘girlfriend’.
Some random images appeared on the screen. A few of them were even of the right Dominic Blake.
‘We’ve got a stash of old society magazines over there. Have a look through while I try the online Spectator archives.’
Abby wandered through the shelves of the library. It was an impressive place, stacked floor to ceiling with books about everything that might interest the Institute’s members, from geology to the birds of the northern tundra.
She heaved one of the leather tomes on to a reading table: Bystander magazine, 1958–62, all carefully bound together. She smiled: to many of the well-born RCI members, the people featured inside this society journal were probably friends and relatives. She flipped to January 1961 and found the party pages: lots of photographs of toffs having fun. Apart from the fashions and the grainy photography, they could have come from the social pages of Tatler today. The same bright faces, the same cocktails, the same swish houses just glimpsed in the background. She turned to the February issue, then March, April, May, June and July. And there, nestled among the coverage of the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix, was the handsome face she was looking for. It was unmistakably Dominic Blake, sitting holding a cigarette, his arm draped along the back of a sofa. Next to him was a woman, laughing. Abby stopped. It was her. She glanced down at the caption: Adventurer Dominic Blake and Rosamund Bailey. May 14th, 1961.
She took the book over to Lauren.
‘She’s called Rosamund Bailey.’
‘I’ve heard of that name,’ said her friend, typing it into a search engine.
Abby’s eyes opened in surprise as thousands of entries came up.
‘She’s more famous than Dominic,’ muttered Lauren as they read her Wiki page.