The Sparsholt Affair

4

Freddie’s funeral was held at Kensal Green, and Lucy was taken to it, at her own insistence. She was aware of the disagreements about whether she should go, her father’s wishes more or less clear from her mother’s response to them on the phone. When the day arrived she got up in a thoughtful variant of her dark school uniform and went into her mother and Una’s room to look in the big mirror; she was to travel to the crematorium with the Skipton family, but would come away from the ‘wake’ that followed with her father. In the evening she would go on with him, wearing something nicer, but still, she imagined, with a lingering gravity, to the Musson Gallery for the private view of Evert’s pictures. ‘It’s unfortunate,’ said her mother, ‘having the two things on the same day.’ But Lucy, adjusting her hat and looking for her in the mirror, disagreed. ‘After all the sadness,’ she said, ‘I think it will be a blessed relief.’

What she forgot, because it had no purchase on her yet, and she hoped never would, was the drink. Clover put on a party with waiters, back at the house, and it was just as noisy and successful as the party that Lucy had been to a year ago there, when Freddie was alive. Granny Iffy became, as she herself said, ‘Granny Squiffy’, Clover was ‘half-cut’ (according to Evert) before they started, and Evert himself got so sloshed he kissed one of the waiters. ‘It was what he wanted,’ said Clover, angling her glass for a refill: ‘he wanted to go out with a bang’; and to Lucy, standing at first by the door to the kitchen, the pop of champagne corks was the defining noise. Well, perhaps wakes were like this – it took a little getting used to, like the funeral itself, and she wasn’t going to show surprise. The solemn feeling that had silenced and upset her in the crematorium was not really to do with Freddie, whom she’d hardly known, and whose smile at her had always been a general one, of tolerance for all the confusing children of his friends’ children. The sight of the coffin, and the thought of him inside it, just a few feet away – this must have been what her mother wanted to protect her from, and what her father thought she was old enough now to see. She felt somehow both grateful and indignant.

She arrived at Clover’s with her mother and Una, and didn’t join up with her father and Pat again till later on, when the room was full, and ten or twelve people, in spite of the damp, grey weather, had gone into the garden. ‘There’s your father outside with Clover,’ said her mother: ‘run and talk to them.’ Lucy went through the French windows at the tactful pace which mixed eagerness to see one parent with reluctance to leave the other. A waiter had just come up to their little group.

‘Now I’ve asked them for things you can eat!’ said Clover, as her father shook his head at a tray of something wrapped in bacon. ‘I mentioned it specifically.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘you’ve got enough to think about.’

‘You’ve made something vegetarian, haven’t you,’ she said to the waiter, ‘specifically?’

‘I’ll certainly ask, madam,’ said the waiter.

‘They’ve taken over the kitchen,’ said Clover, ‘it’s out of my hands.’ She looked down and smiled dimly at Lucy. Her father, in an old striped suit, pulled her to him and kissed her, and Pat stooped too, eyes narrowed in concern.

‘Are you all right now, Lucy?’ he said.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Lucy, though his tenderness threatened to upset her again.

‘And have you got a drink?’ said Clover.

The waiter came back a minute later with a special plate of food for Lucy and condescending flourishes, smiled on by the adults: ‘There you are, young lady, you’ll enjoy that,’ patting her on the head as he went away. The vegetarians were going to have to wait rather longer.

Lucy had a sense of people being very nice to Clover, considering what they said about her normally, behind her back. She was suddenly a closer friend than she’d been before. This was partly because they were all being nice about Freddie – remarkable tributes were paid to him, now he was gone, and more than once Lucy heard someone say, ‘Well, he was a great man!’ and look away as if overcome with strong feeling.

‘Actually, you know, Clover, love,’ a tall drunk woman said, shaking her head in helpless frankness, ‘he was a bloody good writer!’

‘Well, he was, wasn’t he,’ said Clover mildly. ‘He understood people so well’ – this drew a thoughtful murmur from the others.

‘I was wondering if we were going to have another instalment of the famous diary,’ said a man with a slightly anxious laugh.

Clover reflected. ‘I mean there’s masses there. He wrote every day of his life, almost to the last. I said something about it to Ivan Goyle, you know – I thought he might make another selection. Or even two.’

‘Oh, wonderful . . .’ said the drunk woman.

‘The absolute truth is the last one caused such a fuss I’m not sure I can take it.’

‘Well not yet anyway perhaps, love.’

‘Look, do you want to go inside?’ said Clover.

‘No, it’s fine, Clo,’ said her father. He looked round. ‘It’s hardly raining at all.’

Lucy took her cue from this, and turned her back to the drizzle as she chewed her sausage roll.

‘It is quite nice to be out, isn’t it,’ said Clover, a fine mist glistening on the stitch of her shawl.

‘Oh, it’s nothing much,’ said Pat, looking up reassuringly at the blurred grey sky above the rooftops. Clover stood, smiling dimly, miles away. And a minute later, as the rain turned unignorable, ‘You know, it is rather wet’ – and with a sudden collective coming to their senses everyone in the garden walked, almost ran, back into the house.

A little later Lucy went and stood near Grandpa George, who was in a corner of the crowded room with a tall white-haired man – she knew he hated people barging in when he was talking. After a minute, though, the older man nodded pleasantly at her and said, ‘And this must be your granddaughter, George?’

He looked down to check. ‘Yes . . . yes, it is’ – with a momentary smile at her, as if confirming he hadn’t lost his car keys.

‘And where is her beautiful mother?’

‘Oh, she’s about somewhere . . .’

‘It’ll be nice to see her again. They’re still in . . . Belsize Park?’

‘The last I heard, yes,’ said George, with quick facetiousness, since, as Lucy knew, the question meant was she still living with Una?

‘I thought I saw her friend earlier.’

‘I expect,’ said George.

‘I couldn’t remember her name.’

‘Oh, it’s Una.’

‘Una, that’s right. A nice name.’

‘Yes. Quite easy to remember.’

‘If you can remember anything . . .’ said the man, rather self-admiringly. ‘She does something, doesn’t she.’

Sir George smiled more pleasantly. ‘She sells completely useless items that she calls Essentials. Rather a clever idea – I believe she’s doing very well.’

Lucy slipped away.

She half remembered the house, with its hundreds, its thousands of books, but it was interesting in a new way to see where Freddie had lived and worked – until two weeks ago. Una said the move to Blenheim Crescent had been paid for by the film he wrote about the Cambridge Spies (Communists and homosexuals, whom Lucy imagined peering through binoculars from one college into the next). There were pictures of Freddie all over the house; in the large gloomy study, which she went into, hesitantly, after the lavatory, there was a photo of him getting married to someone who wasn’t Clover, long ago obviously, when he had dark hair and was a foot taller. Other photographs hung in the hall, and if you read the small twiddly writing you could find him in a school photo, which hung in the lavatory itself. Then there was the portrait her father had painted last year, which loomed over the drinks tray in the drawing room, and was smiled at today with respect and regret. Freddie had already been ill when it was done, very gaunt, she remembered her father talking about it, the problems of being truthful but kind. She took in this difficulty, it seemed to her an excellent picture, though not one she would want to have herself. Then she thought of Freddie, gaunter still, in the coffin, perhaps still in that striped jacket and red bow tie – she must remember he would just be ashes now, awful but a relief. (But then, what happened to the ashes? Where were they?)

She went through the hall, checked up on the visitors’ book, open on the table for the mourners to write their names: her own now two pages back, before her father’s, whose big S swung up and circled Pat’s B on the line above – Patrick Browning. She heard voices and went past the open door of the dining room . . . her father, but with Ivan, sitting with their backs to the door. ‘It’s been worked on recently, but it probably dates from 1967 or 8,’ Ivan was saying, ‘when your dad was in the news again. It may have been meant for the Memos, but I’m pretty sure he never read it there. A bit near the knuckle, perhaps.’

‘I thought that was the point of the Memos,’ her father said. He laughed oddly, and laid his hand on a stack of paper on the table. ‘Do I have to read it?’ He lifted the top sheet, up to head height – it was a printout, the pages a long concertina, the strip of punch-holes down the side so pleasing to tear off; then he let it drop, with a momentary rippling noise. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what it says?’

‘No, I think you should read it yourself. Of course, I don’t know how accurate it is, I haven’t seen the diary for that period, and we all know Freddie could enhance things a certain amount, but . . . it’s good,’ said Ivan. ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’

Her father sighed. ‘Has Evert seen it?’

‘I thought it best not to upset him.’

‘What about me?’

Ivan put a hand on his shoulder, then took it away. ‘I don’t think you will find it upsetting.’

‘It’s just more stuff about Dad . . .’

‘Well . . . yes,’ said Ivan, ‘it’s about an affair, you know – another one . . . I must say it came as a surprise to me.’

‘Daddy,’ said Lucy.

‘Oh, hello!’ said Ivan. Both the men glanced round, alarmed for a second – then not alarmed at all. ‘Well, I’ll leave it with you’ – Ivan stood up and smiling remotely at Lucy, patting his pockets as if remembering what was next on his list, he went past her and into the hall. She came forward. Her father’s right hand, alien and familiar, large, big-knuckled, scrubbed up for the occasion, lay on the document. With his left he pulled her in.

‘Are Mummy and Una still here?’

She said they were. She stood and read the beginning, ‘The evening when we first heard’, and later bits, between his fingers . . . ‘Evert Dax’ . . . ‘secretary’; her father watched her for a moment, then read too, shifting his hand to cover the rest of the page – but she was faster than he was. ‘Is it about you, Daddy?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, no; it’s something Freddie wrote about your grandpa.’

‘Grandpa David,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’ He picked it up, rolled it as best he could, tried to push it into his jacket pocket; it was quite thick. She’d become aware, mainly from something Timothy’s mother had said, of some sort of problem about this particular grandfather, and his getting divorced from Granny Connie.

‘Is it nice?’

‘I’m sure it is – it’s about when they were at Oxford, you know, in the War.’

‘Freddie and Grandpa were?’

‘Yup.’

‘Oh,’ said Lucy, ‘I didn’t know that’ – the War again, the great dreary fog that old people conjured up and disappeared into whenever they had a chance.

Her father frowned at her. ‘Do you want to go?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘You’re supposed to say yes, then I’ll have to take you.’

‘Oh, well, yes, then,’ she said, ‘of course.’

About the evening, and the sale of Evert’s pictures, she felt she knew more than most. Her mother had had the whole story from Ivan, and explained it to her crossly: ‘He needs the money, Lucy, and that’s that.’ Her father was more sympathetic: ‘It’s all very sad really – it’s that great big house, it’ll fall down if he can’t find some extra cash.’

‘The House of Horrors?’

He allowed the name, but he didn’t much like it. ‘You’ve never been there, have you?’

‘Mummy said when I was very small.’

‘I mean not to remember.’

She agreed she hadn’t; though in her mind she had visited it, and in a taxi once she was told they’d just gone past it – she’d twisted and stared back, at the tall bleak terrace of identical houses, grey brick, white porches, with numbers on the pillars, she didn’t know which number it was. Now that real grey house had to coexist, rather feebly, with the more enduring one she’d imagined before.

‘Well, we’ll go and see, shall we?’

‘Before it falls down?’ She looked narrowly at him.

And so it was that two months ago, on a cold Sunday morning, they had taken a huge walk up the Fulham Road, turning into Cranley Gardens at last about eleven o’clock. She saw now which house it was, though several were shabby and neglected, with dead brown plants on the balconies and weeds round the area railings; Evert’s house had a piece of tarpaulin suspended above the top-floor windows. ‘It’s just to catch anything if it drops off,’ her father said. They darted in under the porch. There was a muddle of doorbells, several not working, new ones fixed with makeshift wiring. He let her work it out: DAX / GOYLE: she pressed it, smiling forbearingly. As they waited he explained: Mrs Lenska, the Polish widow, had the ground floor (‘Please, Press Hard, Twice!’) and Parfitt, a banker no one ever saw, the first floor. The basement was empty, because of the damp. The smart new entryphone, more permanent-looking than the rest, had the label DRURY.

‘Hello, it’s Lucy!’ she said, and after a moment’s uncertainty they were in.

On the table in the hall she noticed many unopened letters. They climbed the stairs, Lucy just behind her father, peering at the antiquated lift that ran up the centre in a cage. ‘Evert’s father had that put in,’ he said. ‘You know, having only one leg.’

It was just the sort of thing she’d been expecting. ‘Oh, dear!’ she said.

‘I’m afraid it hasn’t worked for years.’ She assumed he meant the lift.

There was a tall window on each turn of the stair, throwing dirty light across the carpet, which was worn through to the floorboards in places. As they climbed they passed large dim oblongs, huge hooks, black drapery of cobwebs where pictures must have hung for a very long time. When they reached the landing they saw them stacked against the wall, in their heavy gilt frames, trying to stay dignified while peering nervously over each other’s shoulders. The pictures left hanging, perhaps not worth selling, looked hopeless without them. Lucy was intrigued to be walking upstairs in someone else’s house and looking at things. On the second-floor landing there was a nasty sweet reek that went to the back of the nose – she wasn’t sure what it was, though she’d smelt it once or twice at home, when friends of Una’s had been round. A lock snapped, a door opened and two men came out, in jeans and T-shirts, no shoes – it was rather odd because it was a lavatory. She said nothing but as they went into the room in front they must have heard her, and her father. ‘Oh, my god!’ said one of them, and the other turned too and said, ‘Ooh, hello . . . !’ They were young men, in their twenties, and the first one had extraordinary big eyes swimming in his face. She didn’t think they could be workmen.

Her father put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Is Evert around?’ he said.

They both laughed. ‘Which one’s he?’

‘Is he the old guy?’

‘You’re in his house,’ her father said.

‘Oh, are we!’ The one with huge eyes giggled and gripped the other round the arm. ‘We’re just friends of Denis’s,’ he said. They went into the big room beyond, still laughing, their arms round each other. The sense that something wasn’t right made Lucy stick close by her father – she followed him into what seemed to be a pleasant drawing room, but the curtains were still closed, and with only a couple of lamps on it was hard to tell. In the odd daytime gloom she made out Denis Drury, lying on the sofa, looking away from them.

‘Put some more music on,’ he said. There was a stereo on the far side of the room, and a heap of records out of their sleeves. Her father seemed angry, but it wasn’t his house – he waved his hand as if to clear the smell and said,

‘Hello, Denis, I’ve come to see Evert.’

Denis tensed, then turned his head slowly, and smiled at them. His cheeks in the lamplight were red, and his flat shiny hair stood up in spikes here and there; his black eyes were bulging too. ‘Mister Sparsholt!’ he said, and half sitting up – ‘and Miss Sparsholt, my goodness me . . .’

Lucy didn’t correct him, there were bigger things to worry about.

‘Have you got anything a bit more, like, modern?’ said the man by the record player, giving up on the pile of discs and looking round. The large-eyed one had sat on the floor and was making a giant cigarette by pulling apart several other cigarettes and heaping up the contents. Denis looked very carefully at his watch and said,

‘Have you come for lunch? I’m afraid you’re rather early if so.’

‘I told Evert we’d come this morning and help him with the pictures. Musson’s coming at twelve.’

Denis thought, and said quietly, ‘Oh, she’s not, is she?’ He clearly wasn’t himself, the change itself was alarming, and yet there was something nicer about him than usual – he gave them an almost friendly look. ‘This is Kevin and Gogo,’ he said. ‘Jonathan and Lucy.’

‘Hello, Lucy,’ said Kevin.

‘George,’ said Gogo, grinning at her over the tobacco. It was spread on a record box – she construed the word ‘Resurrection’, and when he lifted the giant cigarette to lick the paper she saw a picture of an old man in glasses smoking a pipe.

‘Is this Evert your boyfriend then?’ said Kevin.

‘Oh, no . . .’ said Lucy, then looked anxiously around.

Denis lay there with a strange smile. ‘Years and years ago,’ he said, ‘I was his amanuensis.’

‘Ooh, what’s that?’ said Gogo, and watched Denis raising his hand and wiggling his fingers as if pulling on a rubber glove.

‘I’m going to find Ivan,’ her father said, and they went back out on to the landing, just as Ivan came downstairs. His sleeves were rolled up and he was wearing an apron.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘hello,’ going past them, really too busy to talk. They drifted back after him into the room. ‘Can we have this room clear, please?’ he said.

‘Oh, my god, it’s the housemaid!’ said Denis, falling back on the sofa. ‘Boys, meet Ivy.’ Lucy’s mother and Una sometimes spoke of him as Ivy, but she held her breath to hear him called it to his face. He stood, small and plump, in front of the fireplace, with his hands on his hips.

‘We’ve got Hughie Musson coming round any minute.’

‘Is he cute?’ said Gogo.

‘You wouldn’t say cute, would you, Ivy?’ said Denis. ‘Or perhaps you would . . .’

‘Hugh Musson is a very important man. So I need you all out of here, please.’ Denis rolled his head moodily. ‘You can all go and play in Denis’s room.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Gogo.

‘I’m too exhausted to move,’ said Denis. ‘How long were we in that club? Eight hours? In that hell-hole of debauchery?’

But Ivan crossed the room and tugged back the curtains, and the cold lunchtime light seemed enough to push them upstairs, blinking and lazily protesting.

Lucy helped, and in ten minutes the room was straight, the carpet hoovered, and the records put hastily into sleeves – she knew some of them were in the wrong ones. The window was left open to clear the air, and it got quite chilly. Probably it had been a lovely room once, but it was all a bit shabby and sagging now, the walls covered with pictures like a junk shop. In Grandpa George’s drawing room there were just three pictures, each worth fifty thousand pounds. In Evert’s there were (she nodded as she turned from wall to wall) thirty-seven – how much they were worth remained to be seen. They went into the kitchen, and Ivan took off his apron.

‘Where’s Herta, when you need her?’ said her father.

‘Who’s Herta, Daddy?’ Lucy said.

Ivan set about making coffee with a paper cone and a glass jug. ‘Poor Herta,’ he said. ‘We went to see her last week.’

‘She was Evert’s housekeeper for years and years,’ her father said.

‘She was his father’s housekeeper,’ said Ivan.

‘You mean the man with one leg?’ said Lucy.

‘A. V. Dax,’ said Ivan, ‘the novelist.’

Evert came in, looked at them, waved a kiss at them with his fingers. ‘Is Denis about?’ he said.

‘He’s gone upstairs,’ said Ivan, ‘he’s got some young friends round.’

‘I thought I heard something,’ said Evert.

When the coffee was made, and Lucy given the Pepsi Ivan said she would prefer, they went off for a preliminary look at the pictures. ‘Let’s go to Johnny’s room,’ Evert said. They entered a small bedroom, opposite the lavatory, where perhaps a dozen paintings stood propped against the chest of drawers.

‘Why do you call it Johnny’s room?’ said Lucy.

‘It’s so sweet of you,’ said her father.

‘Your dear papa lived in this room, darling, long ago,’ said Evert. ‘Twenty years ago?’

‘That’s right, 1975, wasn’t it, my early London period . . .’

‘A good year or more, I should think,’ Evert said.

‘Just about,’ said her father.

‘About ten months,’ said Ivan.

Evert hoisted up a medium-sized brown painting. Lucy imagined her father then, with his awful long hair, coming into this room each day, sleeping on this hard bed, which now had a big folder of drawings lying on it. She’d never thought of him not having a house of his own.

‘These are Victor’s pictures, then?’ he said.

‘That’s right. I think I’ll probably sell most of them.’

‘I’ve not seen this before, I don’t think’ – her father peered forward at it.

‘It’s Witsen, Rotterdam Harbour. It’s a bit dirty, but it’s meant to be more or less that colour.’

Ivan made a deeply unimpressed face. ‘We’re aiming for a much sparer hang, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Get rid of a lot of junk.’

‘Oh, I like it,’ said her father. ‘But yes, I guess . . .’

‘I remember it very well when I was a boy,’ said Evert. ‘It used to hang in the dining room downstairs. My father knew Willem Witsen, I think he bought it off him; it may even have been given to him, since Witsen was rich, and very generous. Do you know about him?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Not really,’ said her father.

‘Oh, a fascinating figure – also a very good photographer, wealthy, but extremely bohemian. I always wanted to put on a little show somewhere, you know, at a small gallery, but—’

‘We just can’t keep getting into all these reminiscences all the time,’ said Ivan, ‘darling – or we’ll never get anywhere.’

‘Well . . .’ said Evert.

‘OK . . .’ said Lucy’s father, with an embarrassed laugh.

‘In or out?’ said Ivan.

Evert looked at him, obediently, but with a last hint of resistance. ‘Do you mean in or out of the house, or in or out of the sale?’

Ivan smiled tightly. ‘Out of the house,’ he said.

‘In that case . . . out, I suppose.’

Lucy thought she’d never seen anyone look so sad.

*

First of all Hughie Musson looked at the pictures on the landing. ‘Your father thought big, didn’t he.’

‘Oh, always,’ said Evert.

Hughie glanced down the cavernous stairwell. ‘He had a lot of walls to cover, of course, I can see that . . .’ He himself was big, he’d wheezed his way up to the second floor with several pauses to peer at the unworking lift. ‘Quite a period piece,’ he said.

‘It was the same in his own work,’ Evert went on, ‘he felt space was there to be used.’

‘It’s awful,’ said Hughie with a grin, ‘I’ve hardly read him.’

‘He had no time for what he called minchers,’ Evert said.

‘Ah, yes . . . ! Well, no . . .’ said Musson; and businesslike after all, ‘Well, I don’t think any of these, I’m afraid, for our show.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Evert, and smiled. ‘We’d better look at the things in the drawing room.’

‘I want to see the Sutherland,’ said Hughie. ‘Modern British art: after you . . .’ and as they went through: ‘I’ve got an idea about who could write something – you know, for the catalogue.’

‘Oh, have you . . .’ said Evert.

‘This is marvellous,’ said Hughie, surveying the mad jumble. ‘I’d forgotten just how good it was.’

Evert turned round, and nodded slowly, as though seeing it all again for the first time – and also, Lucy thought but didn’t say, for the last. If she didn’t like much of it herself, she was impressed that Hughie did. He was in his element. He took things down, reaching higher than Ivan, who was helping him; she was entrusted with a small picture herself, which she carried across the room and propped on the sofa for them all to stare at. ‘You’re thinking of an exhibition, of course,’ her father said. ‘I’m trying to remember the space.’ It was the exercise of a skill that couldn’t be explained.

‘The big Ben Nicholson, obviously,’ said Hughie.

‘Ah . . . yes,’ said Evert.

‘The two little Nicholsons,’ said Ivan.

‘Well, they’re marvellous. One I think not in good nick.’ This turned out to be Lucy’s picture.

‘Really?’

‘Well, have a look at it,’ said Hughie. Lucy peered at it, propped on the cushions, and thought it looked very rough indeed, the paint in a thick brown corner actually chipped off.

‘Oh, and what about the Chagall?’ Ivan said.

Hughie was charming but brisk. ‘I think just paintings, don’t you? I mean, it would probably sell, but it wouldn’t fit.’

‘Which one’s that?’ Lucy asked her father. He showed her – a lovely, rather funny, picture of a red man, a green woman and a blue cow flying overhead. She read in the corner, ‘À mon ami Dax’.

‘It’s just a print, you see, Lucy.’

‘Oh . . . yes, I see,’ she said. He’d explained prints before.

‘There’s a lot of prints,’ said Ivan, with a frown at this unexpected objection. She sensed it was something he was going to come back to.

‘Now there are half a dozen Goyles,’ said Evert.

‘That may be too many,’ said Hughie.

Lucy peered at Ivan: was he a painter? Her impression was that Ivan didn’t like art, was bothered by it somehow, as he was by children.

‘I remember that one,’ her father said, as a little painting, green, white and black, was unhooked from above the bureau.

‘Of course, beside the Nicholsons . . .’ Hughie said, with a sharp breath. ‘I know he’s a favourite of yours, Evert!’

‘I do think he was good,’ Evert said mildly.

‘What do you think, I wonder, Jonathan,’ said Hughie, ‘as a painter?’

‘Oh . . .’ – as if he’d never thought about it. ‘No, he’s got something, hasn’t he . . .’

‘I mean he’s far from contemptible,’ Hughie said, ‘obviously’ – though contempt, now he’d mentioned it, seemed to steal into the room, like the draught from the window. He grinned. ‘There’s something rather brilliant, in a way, about the total lack of intellectual interest.’

‘Oh, dear!’ said Ivan. ‘Poor old Uncle Stanley!’

The other thing Hughie said he very much hoped they would have was the sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. The others looked down on it on its table in front of the mirror, while Lucy had it at eye level, the back of it reflected, smooth as a bowl, when she moved her head to right or left. It was hollowed out, the rim polished, the rougher inside painted white. Or it had been white once; now she peered into a tilted cup that was yellowish at the top and at the bottom almost grey, as if water had stood in it. The painted surface had fine cracks over it, and she noticed that one of the strings across the gap had been replaced – it had a bigger knot underneath the rim, which only she perhaps could see. ‘Simply stunning,’ said Hughie. ‘Nineteen-fifty or so, I imagine.’

‘I expect you’re right. I bought it after my father died, which was 1952. Ivan will correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve always loved it.’

‘I’d have thought, what . . . thirty thousand?’ said Hughie.

Lucy gave it a stern look, as if haggling the price down. She thought it was nice, as a little thing to have, but £30,000 made her want to laugh in protest.

‘Well . . .’ said Evert, who seemed rather thrown by the price himself, ‘I’m glad you like it’ – he turned away suddenly to look for something in the bureau.

To see the Sutherland they had to go to a bedroom along a short passage also lined with pictures. Lucy glanced at them in a carefully expressionless way; they seemed to be drawings and photographs mainly. But her father stopped and, a little shortsighted now, looked at one of them, a red drawing of a naked man, obviously, but with no head and cut off above the knee; there was a funny squiggle where his tool, as Thomas called it, should have been. ‘You’re keeping this, I hope?’ he said.

‘What?’ Evert turned back. ‘You’ve always had a soft spot for that one, haven’t you. I think I’ll have to leave it you when I die.’

‘Ah! Thank you,’ said her father, and touched Evert’s sleeve: ‘Though I can wait! It’s by . . . remind me . . . ?’

‘It’s by Peter Coyle,’ said Evert, ‘you know . . .’

‘Oh, that’s a Coyle,’ her father said. ‘Coyle not Goyle!’

‘Oh, very much not Goyle,’ Evert agreed. They stood pondering it for a moment, it must have been some body-builder, a bit grotesque, frankly. Ivan said,

‘What would that be worth, I wonder?’

Hughie came back. He made a humorous show of giving it his consideration. ‘Coyle?’ he said. ‘His time has yet to come. Who can say, he may enjoy a revival.’

‘I knew him, of course,’ said Evert. ‘You know he went into camouflage in the War – painting whole ships. It satisfied his sense of scale.’

‘He thought big, like your father,’ said Hughie.

‘Well, there you are,’ said Evert.

‘He was killed, I believe, in 1942,’ said Ivan.

‘Alas,’ said Evert.

‘A certain problem of scale here, too, I think, don’t you?’ said Hughie with a laugh. ‘Or do you imagine the model really looked like that?’

‘Hah – I wonder,’ said Evert; he smiled for a moment at Lucy, then leaning on her father’s arm he led them into the bedroom.

Therefore, when she arrived at Hughie’s gallery for the Private View Lucy knew most of the pictures, and the main interest lay in seeing them uprooted, divorced, regrouped, and sometimes repaired; her little Ben Nicholson had been very cleverly patched up – even in the bright spotlight you could only tell if you already knew. It struck her it all became a Collection, with a beautiful book about it, just at the moment it was being dispersed. She felt the pictures were like . . . not friends really, but acquaintances – like those adults in the room who had met you before but now boomed at each other over your head. She stood for a while by the desk at the front, reading the backwards writing on the window: ‘Modern British Art The Evert Dax Collection’. Even after she’d worked it out it remained to be solved. Evert was standing in the middle of it all, red in the face, with Ivan helping him, and Hughie saying, ‘Evert, you remember Georgia Screamer,’ (or something like that) as people came up. She went back through the room. She was the only child there, glimpsed, greeted, disregarded, and the onset of boredom was mixed with a larger disappointment, a sadness she felt hanging, lurking in the heat and noise of the party. No one paid much attention to the pictures, and soon the gallery was so crowded you couldn’t have looked at them properly even if you’d wanted to. For the guests it was really a private view of each other.

She went to her father, who was on the edge of a group of people who’d been at the funeral earlier and had the unstuck look that came with drinking all day.

‘I know . . . I found myself thinking, what did it all add up to, really?’ a tall red-faced man said.

‘Well, it wasn’t a bad life, was it?’ – this was the woman called Sally.

‘No, no, I wouldn’t say bad. Funerals always throw me.’

‘If it wasn’t exactly a good life, it was one that Freddie himself thoroughly enjoyed,’ said a small amusing man.

‘He enjoyed being Freddie, I suppose. I don’t think I’d have liked it, but it quite suited him.’

Lucy looked up and her father took her hand. All the reverence of earlier seemed to have vanished, the tributes she’d heard spoken over the coffin, and in the garden afterwards; she felt for the first time that she’d been quite fond of Freddie.

‘A shame he never had children,’ said Sally.

‘Probably a good thing,’ said the tall man, and after a second gave a crinkly smile at Lucy.

‘I sometimes wondered,’ said the short man, ‘if he wasn’t really queer, you know, deep down.’

‘Oh . . .’ – Sally gave a worried laugh, and also a quick glance at Lucy, and then her father. ‘I think you’d have to ask Clover that!’

‘Mm, perhaps later,’ the man said, and they laughed and turned with their glasses out in barely concealed rivalry as the pretty girl with the bottle of champagne came alongside.

Lucy tugged her father’s hand, and they went round together, sidling, pushing, rubbing backs with these fickle drinkers. There was the Barbara Hepworth, put on a special plinth. She jumped protectively as a large man, making way for the waitress, backed into it, it jolted but didn’t fall. ‘Oops . . . must be more careful,’ he said, glanced down at Lucy, the witness, with a moment’s rough calculation, then turned and went on shouting at the woman beyond him.