The Sparsholt Affair

2

A bleak scene, lasting less than half an hour, was enacted some weeks later at the Mortlake Crematorium. Ivan went with Evert, who made a point of wearing a pink scarf with his black overcoat, and sat biting his cheek and pursing his lips so that Ivan couldn’t tell what he was feeling or thinking. Above all he seemed impatient. He had insisted, as an old friend, on sitting at the front; Ivan had to come out of the pew to let someone else get by, and stood looking frankly across the half-empty rows behind, nodding and giving rueful smiles to Brian Savory and Sally, and old Dorothy Denham; he was surprised to see Dorothy here, and when he sat down again jotted her name on the back of the order of service; he wasn’t sure if they had anything on her or not. He had been to a good few funerals, of Evert’s friends and of others he took an interest in, but it was his first time at Mortlake – sunlight through a cloud seemed to pick out the dormant first syllable of the name. They spoke of this room as a chapel, though Christian symbols had been carefully omitted from its design – and seemed none the less to lurk, for those who craved them, in the arrangement of the room, the coloured glass and the woodwork of the pews, with their narrow prayer-book ledge. Where the altar would have been was the automated bier, looking more than anything like a four-poster bed, with pillars and a canopy.

On the printed card there was a recent photo of Jill, in colour, caught at a party in a genial mood. Seeing it, Ivan heard her, telling him what to do or, more probably, what he should have done, with the dogged irony that was her disappointing means of engaging with all comers. Over the loudspeakers came, mildly distorted, a tune Ivan had heard before, the ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ by C. W. Gluck, a flute solo ushering onstage an incongruous new Jill, liberated, light-footed, welcomed into the next world, which she had perhaps thought of herself in pagan more than Christian terms. An unprompted silence fell over the congregation. ‘Ah, here’s the party,’ said Evert – they stood and half-turned to check as Jill was borne in. Her friends were too old for it, and she frightened the young, so the pall-bearers were the men from the undertakers’, one of them wall-eyed, another, put at the back, with a surgical boot. The V&A had sent a coldly artistic wreath of white lilies, which bobbed its way along at head height on top of the coffin towards its brief stay at the front.

And Jill had chosen hymns; she was a pagan but she wanted them to enjoy themselves, and singing was the only enjoyable part of a funeral, as a rule. She had sung herself, in one of the London choirs in the fifties, and referred just occasionally to Sir Adrian Boult as one might to a long-ago fling. It must be a woman from a choir now, a row or two behind them, an old but unembarrassed soprano with throbbing vibrato. Either the others were encouraged by her or they gave up altogether. Ivan glanced across the aisle at the military-looking man on the end of the row, looking forward, lips parted, an occasional drop of the jaw intended to convey the act of singing.

Afterwards Jill’s godson, a doctor from Taunton whom none of them knew, invited everyone back to Jill’s flat for sandwiches and a drink; the word went round that he was called Adrian. Had any of them been there before? Evert said once, thirty years ago, he’d got into the hall, but no further. The woman called Margaret, from the V&A, who had given the address, claimed to have had lunch there, but when pressed admitted it was ‘quite some while ago’. ‘Oh, what was it like?’ said Ivan. ‘Well, you’ll see,’ she said; ‘she had some nice things.’ ‘Oh, she was quite a collector,’ said Adrian, who it turned out was also her sole heir.

The flat was in a large Georgian house in Kew that had been subdivided; they went up to the second floor, Evert taking Ivan’s arm, in one of his cosy pretences of infirmity. The door stood open by the time they reached the landing, and they had a view in through the dark little lobby to a brighter room beyond. Curiosity about the flat seemed keener than grief among the mourners – as well as Brian and Sally, there were Freddie and Clover, Iffy, friends who only saw Jill at Cranley Gardens, and a woman called Arabella, who lived on the floor below, and had clearly being dying to get past the door for years. Evert stood in the hall looking up and down at three Piranesis hung one above the other – not familiar views but recondite studies of funerary fragments, broken tiles and inscriptions. ‘Fascinating,’ he said, which Ivan took for a joke.

They went into a small room at the side, with a single bed, where they heaped up their coats. The unvisited feel of any spare bedroom was redoubled in this unvisited flat. Behind them Brian shuffled in with his stick and Sally set about tugging his coat off, pulling it down one arm, then the other, while he examined the books in the bookcase as if nothing was happening. ‘Well, well, I hadn’t got old Jill down as a Wodehouse reader,’ he said. ‘Nor Tolkien, come to that.’

‘Well, she knew him at Oxford, of course,’ said Ivan.

‘Though none of them read very recently, by the look of it,’ said Brian, stooping to get Summer Lightning, which slid out like a slice of cake with its own thick layer of dust on top.

The unused room and its neglected clues to the dead woman’s past appealed to Ivan. Above the bookcase was a framed poster for a Picasso exhibition in New York which again was unlikely, faded over thirty-five summers into palest beiges and blues. Ivan wedged his briefcase in a small armchair with a tear in the cane backing – the welcome to overnight guests (the godson perhaps on occasion) seemed made with all the rejected goods from the rest of the owner’s life.

‘Oh, lord . . .’ said Sally, tucking Brian’s scarf into his coat sleeve, and staring at the chest of drawers between the bed and the window.

‘Sally, darling,’ said Clover, coming in behind them, and unpinning her black hat. Sally was belittled by her friends, and famous (among half a dozen people) for getting the wrong end of the stick, and the attention they gave her now was both delayed and momentary. She shook her head.

‘No . . . I just thought. Oh, never mind.’ But she kept a canny eye on the chest, and the odd group of items on top of it, for a moment longer, while the others trailed out of the room.

The proceedings got under way, with the desire to have a normal chat curbed for the first few minutes at least by the propriety of the occasion – the spirit of where they had come from still lingered in dark suits and a quiet postponing manner, until, with a glass of wine down, people turned away in sudden conversation towards the window or the sofa and the unselfconscious life of the party, which after all was life itself, began. Ivan watched as a small wavy-haired man in his sixties, with large glasses and a boyish smile, approached the majestic Margaret. ‘Margaret, it’s Gordon!’ he said.

‘How are you?’ said Margaret, smiling down at him in untroubled vagueness before moving to the table for a refill. Gordon filled his glass too. A minute later he went up to the old man on the far side of Evert.

‘It’s Gordon!’ he said. He seemed to hope to identify himself not just as Gordon, but as that especial Gordon who had brightened their lives long ago.

‘Who is that man?’ said Evert.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ivan; ‘he says his name’s Gordon.’ Ivan noticed that no one greeted Gordon, and quick individual decisions that they needn’t bother with him took the semblance, in ten minutes, of a general intention to ignore him. Still, he came round, small and bright-eyed as he looked up at them. ‘It’s Gordon!’ he said.

‘I know who it is,’ said Clover sharply, as if his main purpose had been not eager friendship but reproach.

Ivan heard candid questions asked by people who were as close as friends ever were to Jill. ‘I wish I’d known her better. She was very private, wasn’t she.’

‘Of course sometimes, with the very private ones, you go to the funeral and find the most astonishing people – they’d just compartmentalized their lives, and you had no idea. Here, though, I have the feeling I’ve known everyone for years.’

‘Did she ever read anything to the Memo Club?’

‘Well, yes, years ago . . . perhaps you weren’t there? A rather surprising thing about her sister, who was killed when she was a child. And the alcoholic mother. Tragic, really. I remember it was very short, and she looked as if she wished she hadn’t written it – or hadn’t read it out, anyway.’

‘Really she just liked seeing other people exposing themselves.’

‘And correcting them afterwards.’ They laughed. ‘Poor Jill.’

*

Ivan talked for a while to Freddie, asked a few straight questions about his health, and then turned, he hoped reassuringly, to other things, such as travels, and what he was writing, which all tended to curve magnetically to the fact he was avoiding, that Freddie wasn’t going to be writing or travelling much longer. After the operation and the chemo, he was shockingly bald and gaunt. The slight improbable pot he had got in his late sixties had gone, and the eccentric mixture of clashing clothes that had long been his trademark hung large on him as if he had dressed himself from a charity shop on the way here. There had been something almost sexy about him, in Ivan’s eyes, when they’d first met, more than twenty years ago – the sexiness of cleverness, of labyrinthine knowledge and the charm that focused on you like a seduction. It was an appeal that Freddie’s appearance made all the more confusing and authentic.

As always a small group formed round him, with a shared understanding now that they wouldn’t often do so again. ‘Was there ever anyone?’ said Margaret.

‘An affair, you mean?’ said Sally.

‘Someone in the War she once mentioned?’

Clover peered at Freddie in an archly ingenuous fashion, a raised eyebrow, a pert smile. Freddie took a moment to say, ‘Oh, they don’t want to hear about all that,’ with a look he had when quickly calculating whether and how to hold court.

‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ said Clover, in the friendly but uncertain silence that had fallen.

‘It seems unlikely now, somehow.’

‘What’s that?’ said Sally.

‘Evert could explain it very well,’ Freddie said more loudly, his voice hoarse, looking quite pleased with himself, in his emaciated way.

‘What’s that?’ said Evert, turning from talking to Brian.

‘We’re going back to Oxford days,’ said Clover.

‘Let me tell it, darling,’ said Freddie, holding his wine glass in both hands, rather like a microphone. ‘It seems proper to record,’ he said drolly, ‘that Jill Darrow in her youth cut quite a figure.’

‘Oh, gosh,’ said Sally.

‘You know, she was actually quite magnificent,’ said Freddie. ‘The truth is I adored her – she was so big and so virginal, and beautiful in her way. She was really my first love.’ He grinned at them, self-mocking, self-entranced.

‘Goodness, Freddie!’ – no one could say what they thought as they looked at him now.

‘So you had a romance . . .’ said Margaret, with rather dry enthusiasm.

Freddie looked at her. ‘Romance was never exactly Jill’s thing,’ he said. ‘But I pursued her for over a year. I don’t think I was ever asked into her rooms. It was just like later on, I suppose. None of us ever came here.’

‘Well, Freddie, you dark horse,’ said Gordon, in the flirty tone of a nurse to a childish old man; though Freddie didn’t disown the compliment. And there was a sense, as he took another swig from his glass, lurched slightly and caught Clover’s arm, that the matter should now be dropped.

After this unexpected testimony from a sick man to a dead woman scant further light was shed on the intervening half-century. She went – unrevealed – into a space like the hall of her flat, no windows, fragments of epitaphs on the wall, a door open still on to the sitting room behind her, and the door beyond now open too, on to the common parts, and the shadowy downward stairs. The godson seemed unprepared for the curiosity of her friends and colleagues, who he surely supposed knew her better than he did. He explained what he could, that his parents had met Jill in Berlin after the War; that she’d been a proper postal-order sort of godmother, with a pipe of port when he was twenty-one, and meetings once a year or so since then. He went along with them a certain way, looking from face to face, but drew back at the hints of comedy, something unseemly. She was preserved for him in tender and unquestioned sentiment they seemed not to share. Besides, she had left him everything she had, a flat which Ivan supposed was worth quarter of a million, and her large miscellaneous collection of porcelain, silver and pictures. Ivan, by himself for a moment at the window, was looking at a row of china figures on the sill. He thought, because of Evert having some, that they were Chelsea, but he didn’t know (what he knew you had to know) the marks. The figure he picked up and turned over had a small golden anchor, but his feeling that this was a good sign coexisted with a sense of half-forgotten warnings about rivals and imitations. The fact was he didn’t care – about the things themselves; though as objects of Evert’s interest, or of Jill’s, they were worth knowing just enough about.

There was a small regrouping of the party, and Sally came across and stood by him, looking at the room over her glass. ‘I find it all so sad.’

‘I know . . .’ Ivan found it gloomy, intriguing, but as it happened not sad.

‘Are you doing her?’

‘We’ve got someone, yes,’ he said. ‘We didn’t have her ready.’

‘Oh, I’d have thought . . . but perhaps she wasn’t quite . . . I don’t know.’

‘No, no, definitely something,’ he assured her.

‘Not very long, I suppose?’

‘Shortish, I think,’ said Ivan, with a businesslike smile. He made an absolute point of not saying who wrote the obituaries. For Jill he’d asked Evert to do it, since he’d known her for more than fifty years, but it was a joint effort, Ivan splicing in details he’d been gathering himself for nearly half that time. Like most of the members of the now vestigial gang, she had a pocket of her own in his concertina files.

Sally laughed nervously, and said, ‘I don’t want to make a fuss, but I’ve just found something rather odd.’

‘Oh . . . ?’ said Ivan, and felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Cup of tea?’ said Adrian.

‘Oh . . .’ – Ivan looked around, at the already dishevelled and surprisingly noisy little group. Evert had had two or three glasses of Adrian’s red wine, and seemed to be enjoying himself more than he should have been. ‘Probably a good idea . . . Do you want a hand?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Sally.

Ivan went with Adrian into the small old-fashioned kitchen – blue cupboards, old cooker with eye-level grill, net curtain on a string halfway up the window, which looked on to the car park and the road. Oval plates of sandwiches, ham or egg, still waited under clingfilm, enough for a much larger or hungrier party. Adrian started taking down cups and saucers from a cupboard. ‘How many are we?’ he said. A tray was quickly covered with a much-laundered cloth, the best teapot warmed from the boiling kettle. Then Freddie came in, he had to take his pills, and wanted a glass of water. He knocked them back, burped, and leant against the sink, and his eyes settled on the tray, the six smart tea cups augmented by others stacked for a moment in tilting pairs, relics of tea sets long gone, or just things Jill had picked up, and his lips, thin and dry, spread into what seemed, on his gaunt head, a smile of sickly tenderness.

‘How funny. She told me fifty years ago that I didn’t understand her. Naturally I thought she was wrong, but now I’m not so sure.’

Ivan smiled uncertainly. ‘It seems you knew her quite well, Freddie.’

‘I wonder if you’d do me a favour,’ Freddie said to Adrian, and when he raised his eyebrows: ‘When the tea’s made will you give that cup there to Evert Dax?’

‘This fancy one . . .’

‘The Meissen one,’ said Freddie. ‘I want to see what he says.’

Ivan doubted he’d say very much. He picked it up himself, wondering if there was something obviously funny about it – he thought it was just the sort of thing, with its rippling gilt rim and tiny pictures of pink shepherds on blue hills, that any old lady might have.

He went to find the loo, which was locked, and as he waited in the hallway there was a knock at the open front door and Johnny looked in. ‘You’re a bit late, my dear,’ Ivan said.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Johnny, ‘I’ve had Lucy . . .’

‘Ah, yes.’ Ivan had never got on with Lucy, for reasons he smoothly avoided thinking about. ‘You couldn’t bring her?’

‘She was quite keen, actually, she’s been longing to go to somebody’s funeral, but her mother was against it.’

‘Ah well, she’ll have plenty more chances. How are you?’

‘Fine!’ said Johnny, coming in now, and kissing him quickly as he peered past into the room. ‘How did it go?’

Ivan smiled at him and shrugged. ‘Oh, you know. About twenty people, I suppose.’

‘Poor old Jill.’

‘Actually, the V&A woman gave a good address.’

‘Oh, OK.’

Ivan thought Johnny had made some fractional effort – he was wearing an old pinstripe jacket over his roll-neck jersey, and a pair of black boots like a policeman’s.

‘How’s Pat?’

‘He’s very well, thank you,’ said Johnny, with a straight-faced stare at him, even after twenty years – not that Ivan supposed Johnny fancied him any longer, it was something more subtle, the feeling a pretence should be made of still very distantly minding that things hadn’t worked out between them. ‘He was sorry you couldn’t come a few weeks back . . . you know.’ They were both looking in through the door of the sitting room. ‘How is Evert?’

‘Well, there he is,’ said Ivan. There was a small rather animated group at the window now, some with tea cups, others holding the Chelsea figures and turning them over, like experts in a shop. ‘Go and say hello.’ He was aware of a slight tendency among their friends to avoid Evert since his stroke, odd instinctual counterpart to the genuine desire to help.

‘I will,’ said Johnny.

When he came back from the loo, Ivan smiled at the others but he had the stupid feeling of having missed something – they were already adjusting to what had happened, the formulas of surprise passed round, repeated but diminishing, half-phrases. He looked from one to another, as if the joke might yet be on him. ‘What is it . . . ?’ Evert was holding the Chelsea figure Ivan had been looking at earlier, Dorothy Denham clutched a small silver box, Freddie himself held up the fancy cup and saucer:

‘You must remember,’ he said, ‘I had a whole set from my mother.’

Evert didn’t seem sure; he said, ‘I remember this all right.’

‘What is it?’ said Ivan again.

‘Well, it’s too extraordinary,’ said Arabella.

Sally came in behind them, holding aloft, like something everyone had been looking for, a painted china girl, in apron and bonnet, on a round white base. ‘This is what I mean,’ she said, ‘do you remember, Brian?’; and when she’d shown it him she placed it, after a brief hesitation, in Adrian’s hands.

‘Well, I don’t know!’ said Adrian, turning it over, reasonable but defensive.

Margaret didn’t speak at first. Then she said, ‘This is actually rather serious, you know.’ On the table beside her, among wine glasses and discarded paper napkins, were ten small objects, typical of the impersonal clutter of the room. ‘We’re going to have to have a long hard think about this.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?’ said Gordon, who didn’t seem to be holding anything.

‘It was actually reported missing,’ Margaret said, ‘well, of course it was, it’s a very rare object. Jill was interviewed by the police about it herself.’ And she cleared a space round a bowl on the table – it looked Chinese, and even to Ivan had the dull gleam of importance and no doubt value.

‘Well, she’s dead now,’ said Clover, perhaps too straightforwardly.

But Sally in her worry saw the really delicate problem. ‘Oh, Adrian, I’m so sorry,’ she said.

When they left they all agreed their things should remain in the flat, until Margaret had spoken to her colleagues at the museum, and a plan was worked out. It seemed Jill had even had the nerve to nick something from Arabella downstairs, on one of her unreturned visits. ‘Well, it all makes sense,’ Arabella said – though in the minicab going home Ivan didn’t know quite what it meant. Evert was sleepy with the drink, and seemed already to have forgotten about it. ‘No, extraordinary,’ he agreed, when Ivan brought the subject up.

Evert’s stroke had had two main consequences – his short-term memory was impaired, leaving him sometimes at sea in the midst of a conversation started with a clear sense of purpose and subject. He said he saw soft white squares, where facts in the form of images, or images of words, should be, pale blanks that floated on his mind’s eye like the shape of a bright window. The other effect, somehow doubly surprising, was release from worry – not only the worry that pervaded decisions and plans, but the worry that was caused by not being able to remember. This felt like a blessing, but was also, Ivan felt, a bit worrying in itself.

There was a rather oppressive need to keep him focused – on day-to-day matters, and on the looming plans for the house. Victor was tidied up now, really for good. And all the things that had been put off until he was tidied up loomed much larger. The advance for the biography was £10,000, a much smaller figure when the book was delivered than it had been when the contract was signed. The work on the house might cost ten times as much. Besides which, Evert needed a new project. A proper memoir was the obvious idea; but it could be another art book, portraits of artists he had known over fifty years. Otherwise he was going to spend every day forgetting what he’d gone out for and picking up strangers in Marks and Spencer’s.

Ivan had forced him to make an inventory of all the pictures, which had been like getting a child to do his homework; he wriggled out of it, or else, going through the contents of a print chest on the top landing, fell under the spell of forgotten images and their suddenly woken associations. There were also the various items on loan, to museums and so forth. A certain ruthlessness was called for here, if the sale was to realize the best figure. Ivan felt everything should be looked at, and the threat of ending the loans, if it seemed worth it, put into play.

A few months ago Evert had been invited to a Feast at his old College, and Ivan had gone with him. He wanted to see the portrait of Victor by George Lambert which Evert was sure he’d given them, but which Ivan discovered on a look through some old files was merely on loan. At the drinks before, in a room that was virtually panelled in old portraits, Ivan brought up the question with one of the dons, who it turned out had never heard of the sitter, let alone the portrait. But he introduced him to a Dr Fraser, who ran the College art collection, and Ivan said again he thought they had it. ‘Indeed we do . . . !’ said Dr Fraser: ‘I’ll ask Mr Tarlow to show it to you after dinner.’ ‘It’s not in here, then,’ said Ivan. ‘We don’t keep it in here,’ said Dr Fraser, with no further explanation, but conveying a sense that wherever it was was the best place for it. He himself had promptly forgotten his promise, but Ivan pressed him again later on, and after dessert he and Evert were taken out by Mr Tarlow across the quad, through an archway and into another quad, then into a staircase next to the kitchens, into a range of old buildings lately adapted for graduate accommodation, where up two flights of stairs were two guest rooms for overnight visitors. They unlocked the first and looked in, but it wasn’t there, so they tried the second, Mr Tarlow emitting a hearty ‘Aha!’ as he stood back and let them have a look. The room contained almost nothing – a single bed, a completely empty bookcase, and a refrigerator. And on the wall above the refrigerator hung Arnold Victor Dax (1880–1954) by George Lambert (1873–1930), in a heavily ornate gilt frame missing a cusp at one corner. It was further described, on the small label on the frame, as on ‘permanent loan’ from Evert Dax, 1939 – the year, of course, of his matriculation. Ivan found himself wondering what on earth the guests made of it, with its wary gleam and villainous moustache. ‘We like to keep as much of the collection on view as we can,’ said Mr Tarlow warmly, stumbling on the tail of his gown as he stepped back across the squawking floorboards. ‘Well, no one could say it brightened up the room,’ said Evert, which left Mr Tarlow a little at a loss as they all trooped out again.

When they got home Evert went to lie down, and Ivan dealt with the mail that had come that morning. The main item was from the Dean of Humanities at Lichfield University, at first glance just a brochure about their development programme, but with a covering letter that concealed towards the end a rather delicate piece of news. The enhanced facilities, the expanded library, the new Gottfried Wenk International Business School, were described in Utopian detail, or lack of it. It was all going to be marvellous, and the one possibly regrettable consequence of the works was the demolition of the old 1960s Arts Building, whose much-loved but now sadly outdated amenities included of course the A. V. Dax Theatre. ‘It is hoped’, the Dean wrote, ‘that the memory of your father will be preserved in some other way in the department. I believe Professor Bishop will be in touch with you soon about the digitisation of the A. V. Dax Archive.’ This sounded like a good thing, though Ivan couldn’t help wondering if the actual manuscripts, once digitally preserved, would still be thought necessary. He saw a van arriving at Cranley Gardens with the forty boxes which Evert had so cleverly got rid of twenty-five years earlier.

He kept it till they were going to bed, and the two or three minutes when Evert, in his pyjama bottoms, sat on a stool in the bedroom while Ivan, standing behind him, worked Deep Heat into his stiff neck and left shoulder. It was a moment when he had him captive, and with his gently kneading thumbs and fingers could coax and comfort and half-hypnotize him. He smiled at him in the mirror: ‘You had a funny letter today from the man at Lichfield.’

‘Oh!’ said Evert, fluttering his eyelashes at the appearance of something so remote from his present thoughts. ‘I’d forgotten about them.’

‘Just as well, perhaps,’ said Ivan. Evert’s skin was warm now and soft, the springy little grey hairs on his shoulders were smoothed flat by the ointment; then curled up again. The fumes of menthol and eucalyptus, the trace of turpentine, offered their old-fashioned reassurance. Ivan told him about the Theatre. He didn’t present it as something bad, and had little idea, after all these years, how Evert would take it.

‘Oh, lord,’ he said.

‘It’s a shame, isn’t it,’ Ivan said.

‘You’ve never seen it, have you,’ said Evert. ‘It wasn’t a very nice theatre.’

‘No, you said.’

‘I mean it wasn’t a theatre, it was a lecture room.’

‘And at least it’s going to be demolished,’ said Ivan. ‘They’re not renaming it after someone else.’

‘Someone with more money usually.’

‘That would be an insult. Still, it’s rather awful,’ said Ivan, slipping his arms round Evert’s neck and resting his chin on the crown of his head. They examined themselves in the mirror.

‘Yes, it’s awful,’ said Evert, looking down as if he might be about to cry, or was just possibly stifling a laugh. Ivan had a sense he minded it more than Evert did. If the memorial itself was destroyed, then what remained? ‘Thanks,’ Evert said, and rolled his shoulders as he stood up. ‘Mm, that’s much better.’ He put on his pyjama jacket and buttoned it as he went off to clean his teeth.

Ivan got undressed too. He had a responsible feeling of surviving, tonight, of carrying on in the world when a friend had left it for ever. He imagined Jill’s godson Adrian, a kindly hard-working man of about his own age, clearing up after the strangers had gone and turning out the lights on the prospects of a small, entirely unforeseen scandal. Margaret would do her best to control it, but all organizations were leaky, the V&A literally so, crumbling and underfunded, with staff laid off – Ivan knew about it, and saw he must press for the obituary to appear before the story broke.

They usually read for ten minutes or so in bed, but tonight Ivan, halfway through Chips Channon’s Diaries, felt tired and switched off his light after a page or so. Evert had been livelier in bed since his stroke, which was nice, but made Ivan himself a bit cautious, out of worry he might have another stroke from the exertion. They now had their once-a-monthers about three times a week. Ivan heard him coming back from the bathroom, his quiet, random, spaced-out remarks. Evert, who’d been half of a couple for the past forty years, now talked to himself like someone who lived alone. He had always spoken in his sleep, odd phrases that turned over as if in bed themselves and settled some unheard argument (‘which of course was why . . .’ ‘so you see he couldn’t . . .’); now he talked in his sleep when he was awake, made passing observations, wistful or sly, and often surely sexual, wandering in a field of reminiscence peopled by men other and earlier than Ivan. He smiled contentedly as he came into the room, set down his glass of water, and slipped into bed. ‘Good night,’ said Ivan with a vocal sort of yawn, pulling up the covers.

Evert pushed up beside him. ‘Because he was always passive, you know, in bed,’ he said, cosily but conclusively.

Ivan’s voice was toneless, a last dim formality before sleep as he turned away from Evert and shrugged into the pillow. ‘Who was that, Evert?’

‘Mm, never you mind,’ said Evert, raising a knee and breathing a kiss on to his neck; and it soon became clear Ivan wasn’t going to get off that lightly.