“You know so much about it. Why aren’t you…”

He stopped but D’Arcy knew exactly what he’d been about to say. Why aren’t you a curator? Why waste an art history degree on being an art handler? It was what everyone asked her, mostly because so few people had ever heard of an art handler and had no real idea what she did. But he knew, and he still thought he had to ask the question.

She riffled through the box so she didn’t have to look at him and be disappointed that he held the same prejudices as everyone else. “There are too many people to answer to as a curator,” she said crisply. “Boards, the public, the media: being a curator sometimes seems much less about the art than it is about making everyone happy. And then there’s the pencil skirts. I prefer the freedom of being an art handler. And the wardrobe.”

He started to interrupt and she expected he would offer a platitude, say that he hadn’t meant to imply that curatorship was the only real job to which an art historian should aspire, but she didn’t give him the chance. “And the reason I know so much about it is because I once thought I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker,” she said. “That was my art. I studied media, as well as art history at uni. One of the documentaries I made was about what happened to women artists after the war. Women who’d been working as camouflage and propaganda artists, or war photographers, women who’d put their creative ambitions on hold to serve their country and who, once the war was over, were brushed aside as the men returned and took their jobs and reoccupied the artistic world. I’d read a piece in Art Monthly that resurrected Linda Nochlin’s 1970s essay. You know the one: ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ So I made a documentary arguing both that there had been great women artists and why they’d been overlooked and unremembered.”

D’Arcy drew in a breath. God, that was all such a long time ago. When she’d been a passionate art student and had thought she could be a filmmaker. Even writing her fellowship application hadn’t excited as much feeling in her as that speech just had. Regret squeezed her heart in its unfamiliar fist—how easily she’d cast her artistic aspirations aside like thousands of other female artists before her.

“You wanted to resurrect the documentary for the Jessica May Fellowship,” Josh said quietly.

Shit! She must have left the bloody email open on his computer.

“I wasn’t prying,” he said. “I closed it down as soon as I realized it was something of yours but it was impossible not to see some of it. They were right; it is a good idea for a documentary.”

“I felt it deserved more thought than my amateur abilities had lent it ten years ago,” she said. “But that’s not going to happen now. Another reason for me to continue as ‘just’ an art handler,” she finished sarcastically.