WHAT YOU WILL

KATHERINE BUCKNELL

For Bob

Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Acknowledgements Also By Katherine Bucknell Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

‘How on earth could she fuck things up so badly?’ Lawrence asked.

‘I know.’ Gwen shrugged with her scant brown eyebrows. ‘She commits in a big way. It’s one of the great things about her. One of the things I love.’

He settled a pillow behind his head, slouching down into bed with his book, and put on his nearly invisible reading glasses; their delicate wings, spreading from the little gold clip on the bridge of his nose, made him look stern and scholarly yet somehow motherly, concerned. ‘Her engagement, her job, her flat in New York all scuppered in – what – twenty-four hours? Over an imaginary love affair with her assistant while she was working here in London this summer? Something of a minor masterpiece, don’t you think? She’s not – dumb? Your American slang dumb?’

‘No. She’s not dumb.’ Gwen studied the green paint underneath her fingernails, first with her grime-whorled palms upward, fingers curled towards her, then, flipping her hands over, with her fingers stretched out straight. ‘Not dumb – except maybe the way beasts are. Silent and unprotesting. She just takes what comes. She’s open-hearted, and she has the appetite for anything. She’s not – suspicious, you know, so she doesn’t try to protect herself from hurt.’

‘Sort of a hero to you,’ Lawrence observed, nonplussed, finding the page where he had left off. ‘Because she’s not afraid to suffer?’

‘But she doesn’t want to suffer.’ Gwen was sharp with him. ‘I mean – she says she has to fight it out for her job and finish what she was trying to do.’

‘How old is she getting to be?’ he asked vaguely, pulling his eyes up to his wife from the book. Behind his spectacles, the curves of flesh from lid to brow were broad and high, overlaying his grey-blue eyes with a permanent look of melancholy grandeur. His wax-white skin was ruddy around the nose, a little ruined by living. His once blond hair still grew thickly, to the verge of chaos.

‘Thirty-four. Same as me. Exactly.’

‘Funny, how she’s always seemed younger,’ Lawrence muttered. ‘Like a little sister somehow. Though I guess you were both in my class that year. I remember she used to work terribly hard. And sit in the back row. Silent, just as you say. So – she needs to grow up; there’ll surely be new vistas and new opportunities. She just doesn’t know yet what they are. Neither do we. And we won’t find out tonight.’ He yawned.

‘It’s this willingness she has,’ Gwen persisted. ‘Doing things for the sake of what other people want. Picking up on everyone else’s signals.’

‘She doesn’t appear to pick up on everyone else’s signals very well,’ Lawrence scoffed. ‘One feels she ought to stay away from men for a while.’

Gwen was silent.

Lawrence caught her eye, sensing her concern.

At last Gwen said, ‘She should be with someone, you know? It’s just so tough – thinking of her alone. And I feel like – well, I never did that.’

‘Weren’t you alone when I met you? It seemed so to me. Anyway, you’re not Hilary. Why do you want to put yourself in Hilary’s shoes?’

‘Would you like me in Hilary’s shoes?’ The tease was perverse.

Lawrence laughed. ‘Your feet wouldn’t fill them, would they? Your actual rather tiny feet. You’d have to grow yourself – quite a lot.’ And then in a tone of admonishment, a little impatient, ‘Why do you admire it, Gwen? Her blindness? Her inability to think clearly or to make sound judgements about other people?’

Gwen didn’t like being admonished, and she answered hotly: ‘I don’t admire it; I feel moved by it. By the way she exposes herself to things – to life.’

‘Yes, well, that you have done – taken your chances, huge ones. On me, for starters, and on living in England. You’ve shown plenty of nerve. It’s just that you’ve shown a surer instinct, don’t you think?’

‘A surer instinct for Englishmen?’ She was engaging him again, light-heartedly. They both laughed.

‘There does seem to be generous play on that theme,’ Lawrence said drily. ‘So perhaps she wants what you have and just doesn’t know how to get it? Perhaps it’s only natural? A little rivalry between the pair of you, being so close?’

‘An Englishman of her own? I don’t know that she likes you all that much, darling.’

‘I suppose not, or she might have made it up to see us at the cottage. She adores you, though. And we’ve been happy?’ The question trailed away, a wisp of interrogative, then he punctuated it flatly: ‘She’s well aware of that.’ His attention was wandering. He turned his eyes to his book.

Gwen nodded, pondering, tried to draw him back with a note of drama. ‘It’s major, Lawrence; she’s way out there now. Precarious. How does anybody deal with that?’

She hardly got more than a stock reply. ‘They turn to friends, my dear, just as she’s done. Lucky for her, she has you. And evidently plenty of aeroplane tickets.’

‘Maybe no more tickets, though; she has to be low on money, don’t you think? Which is another reason she really ought to stay here for at least a while. She needs us to take care of her.’ It was an explanation and also a plea.

‘She needs you to take care of her, my love.’ Lawrence gave a half-smile.

‘All of us,’ Gwen said emphatically.

‘I don’t see what I have to contribute apart from general fondness. I don’t mind at all, Gwen, if you feel you can persuade her. It’s nice for Will to spend time with his godmother. And nice for you. Especially when I’m in Oxford and staying at the cottage so much. I expect family life will wear thin with her quite quickly, and she’ll be off back to the States again no matter what you do for her or say to her.’ He paused; his eyes grew serious, his mouth settled in a forceful line. ‘But will you be ready for your exhibition, my love? That’s what you need to be sure of. She’s going to be hanging about, needing sympathy, endless conversation. It might prove to be like having two children. You’ve only just managed to settle Will at school and get shot of childminders. How will you paint? How long have you got?’

‘The show’s not till after Christmas. I’ve been thinking about it ever since she got here – Hilary sleeping up in the studio right now. I’m close enough. It’s about four months away, and there are plenty of canvases that are nearly ready. But the real point is that the work’s going well and I don’t want to stop. There are new things happening.’ She tested the very tips of each thumb against their first two fingers, rubbing lightly, then pincering open and closed like a crab, as if her hands tingled with energy and with excitement. Her eyes gleamed, her strange opaque green eyes. They had the look of cabochon emeralds, milky, as if she were threatened by cataracts, and they were shaped like drops turned sideways, spreading from the narrow tips inside the bridge of her nose. The deep brown lids were slow to blink, like the lids of a bird of prey.

Lawrence smiled and gave a little snort of pleasure. ‘There, you see – you grow all the time; nothing can stop you. Not even the safety of your happy marriage. You pull the sunlight to yourself, the nutrients, the H₂O. You don’t need to cast yourself out of the garden into a wilderness of error. Just keep painting. Can you? With Hilary up there?’

‘I can do – whatever I want. I’ve already told her I need to work. It’s not as if anyone has died – or – well … But she can deal with how we are. And she’s great with Will; she’ll help. She doesn’t have anything else to do.’

‘I’ve got to get the early bus to Oxford.’ Lawrence put down his book and reached for her, across her small back, around her smaller waist, a broad, familiar hand on her stomach, low down, the heel of his palm on her hip bone, his thumb edging into her belly button, pulling her towards him down into the depths of the mattress and the worn white sheets.

‘I’ve still got paint on my hands.’

‘I’ve been reading Petronius.’

Once again, they both laughed.

There was a knock at the bedroom door.

‘Will?’ they called together.

‘No. Sorry. Only Hilary.’ Her voice was husky. Husky with grief, but also because that was Hilary’s voice – big, rough, irresistible.

Gwen stood up and crossed noiselessly to the door, pulling her filmy white nightgown down around her knees.

‘I was thinking you might have a sleeping pill,’ came Hilary’s apology as the door swung open.

‘Poor Hil.’ Gwen reached up with her dirty, thin-fingered hand to the height of Hilary’s moon-white forehead, testing as if for a temperature. ‘I don’t know if we do, really. But let’s –’ She paused, feeling torn, stroked Hilary’s wobbly, near-black screws of hair back against her scalp and her ears, then, as the hair sprang free again, said, ‘C’mon. Lawrence has to get up early. Let’s go downstairs and look in the kitchen. Maybe we have some hippie tea. Or maybe – what about whiskey?’

The story of Hilary’s summer in London had rushed out chaotically at the big kitchen table in the basement when Hilary arrived from New York a few hours earlier. Now as Gwen turned on the lights at the bottom of the stairs and Hilary collapsed staring-eyed in a chair, it seemed to be still lying there in pieces which they could pick up and study. How did it all fit together? Did this piece interlock with that? Border or frame? Or endless, undifferentiated, disorienting sky?

The thing Hilary remembered most vividly from the last few months was eating lunch with Paul wherever they happened to be. It seemed as though they had eaten together every day that she had been in town. During the length of the mornings, working together, comparing this object with that one, discussing intrinsic qualities, history, whereabouts over the centuries and generations, the atmosphere between them would warm and thicken, a sense of anticipation would build up; they had to eat lunch, after all. It was unavoidable. He only suggested it once. After that, they repeated it by unspoken mutual agreement. They never made a reservation anywhere. Most of the cafés and sandwich shops they ate in were too simple for that, and making a reservation might have seemed to both of them to be too deliberate, like a date. It was as if, Hilary later reflected, they preferred to believe they ate together only because they had nothing better to do. And yet they seemed to go to lunch a little earlier each day, anxious to be sure there would be a table.

At the British Museum, for instance, they would desert the racks of antiquities and burst into the great, glass-ceilinged courtyard like travellers hurrying through a station for a train. Over their catalogues, over their notes, over their slides, they were reticent and businesslike; but in the bustle and clatter of that vast open space, they were relieved of self-consciousness and the excess of professional concentration that they practised in private. Among thick-shod tourists slung with umbrellas, cameras, guidebooks, parties of schoolchildren in windcheaters and knapsacks, squalling infants rolled along in their padded chair-worlds, they made a pair: experts from behind the scenes, carrying no luggage with them except what was inside their heads. The limestone facades, the wide, shallow stairs spiralling around the dome of Panizzi’s reading room, the summer sky dimmed by luminous clouds and marked out by steel struts in hundreds of triangular pieces like a pale grey parterre, offered a monumental stadium for their quiet focus upon one another.

Hilary afterwards thought that this particular setting, with its combination of neoclassical beauty and ultra-modern engineering – the worship of the old enshrined in the temple of the new – epitomised the kind of magic that bewitched her that summer. It seemed to sum up the whole effect on her of England: historical riches set off by soaring technical dazzle, a technical dazzle which she associated with America and which made her feel that she had been somehow misinformed. England – Europe – had gone on ahead into a future she didn’t recognise, couldn’t have predicted, and might not be able to keep up with. What rules were they playing by, she wondered, the members of this old culture, over which she had been taught, or had always assumed anyway, that the New World had some kind of natural, permanent, unbeatable advantage? How it all took her by surprise.

Hilary and Paul never spent much time studying a menu; it seemed to be of no interest to either what they ate. The first item listed would often be the one chosen by Paul, then Hilary might say, ‘I’ll have the same,’ handing the menu back unopened. Or, if it was a cafeteria, each might grab the first plate on the shelf. But after every lunch, they would sit over coffee upon coffee – cap-puccinos, double espressos, filters, cafetières, lattes – until they were shaking with it. Just to avoid leaving the table.

In the end it was all about being at the table, facing each other, with nothing in between them except what they might be about to eat or drink. In the Sotheby’s café in New Bond Street, where they lunched on the occasional days when Hilary borrowed a desk to go through the old sale archives and to be in touch with New York, she liked the last seat on the slippery, well-padded brown leather banquette, in the corner, the back of her head against the mirror; they could both see what was coming, Paul by looking right past her into the mirror. This arrangement, too, was like part of a journey, two travellers in a compartment on board a train and the world flashing by. This was the table, private but not solitary, at which she first began to tell Paul about her engagement.

There seemed no reason not to. She was only in London temporarily; it was a moment out of time, out of her real life, and Paul seemed to be the most understanding, the least judgemental of people. He didn’t know any of her New York friends. Who would he gossip to? It was a strangely exhilarating opportunity, something she couldn’t have planned or foreseen – spontaneous, like their friendship. She had scarcely realised how small her circle of New York friends had become, nor how narrow her life was, how regimented by her work. But here in London, virtually alone, she felt free. His probings were delicate but surprisingly searching; she understood his curiosity as a form of commitment to their friendship. He seemed to concern himself more with her each time they lunched. She kept back almost nothing.

‘Your fiancé was Edward Doro’s lawyer?’

‘He still is.’

‘Was that because of you?’

‘Because of me?’ She felt on the spot, pink under Paul’s gaze.

He dropped his eyes to his plate, cleared his throat, hesitated. ‘Well, I mean – did you introduce them to each other?’

Paul was so correct, Hilary thought, so cautious. But this question was not really personal, this was easy.

‘Oh, no,’ she said with a hint of relief, ‘the other way around. Mark, my fiancé, introduced me to Eddie. So I could help Eddie find the right person. It’s just – the right person turned out to be me.’ She laughed, tossed her head a little. Then she caught Paul’s blue eyes straight on; their glow was intensified by the lenses of his thin-framed, round spectacles and yet insulated by them, as if by fireproof safety glass.

‘So you – I mean, how did you – establish that?’ He had to work at saying it.

Hilary thought that he was about to burst out laughing. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she spurted.

‘You’re laughing,’ he replied, with a lift of his coppery eyebrows, sitting back in his chair so that his dark pinstriped jacket fell open and his waistcoat showed, with its looped gold watch chain.

He was so young to dress like that, she thought, and so thin. Yet it suited him, the fussiness of his dress. The intention was polite, and the execution winningly rumpled, though never actually dirty. Even on the hottest summer days, he smelled of lime blossom, never of sweat, never of hurry or of being too long in his clothes. And when he put his thumb into his watch pocket to haul out the watch and study the time, he seemed to her like a character in a play, or like an impersonation of an English gentleman she’d watched in some long-ago black-and-white film, only he was more graceful and more slender than anything she could recall, his shoulders stooping around his hand as he studied the watch, his long back flexing in a deep, easy curve, the other hand half in, half out of his hip pocket, elbow lightly cocked. He had a certain formality, and yet a certain knowingness that skipped all the formalities.

‘Forgive me,’ he went on, ‘it’s just that it seems impossibly convenient – or impossibly clever of you. To be engaged to such a man. A man who could introduce you to one of the great collectors.’

‘We weren’t engaged then.’ She said this as if it absolved her of guilt, though she didn’t know for what.

‘I see.’ Paul crossed his arms and nodded. His look dared her to go on, as if he knew what she would say next, as if nothing could surprise him.

‘He asked me to marry him the night before I left New York. Literally.’

Did this sound, Hilary wondered, like too short and too sudden an engagement to count? She rushed on with more details. ‘We’d already been living together for ages. We rented places with his old college room-mates, and there was a room-mate of mine for a while, then Mark’s law school people. Lately it’s been just the two of us. It’s sort of half his place, half mine. And I – actually, now it’s not really mine. He took it over so I wouldn’t have to pay rent while I was out of town and …’ She petered out, unsure, seeing his eyes flicker away, scan the room.

‘Very practical,’ Paul said as the waiter approached.

And she thought to herself, Oh God, Hilary. Don’t be so boring. Who cares about your domestic arrangements? For suddenly, her engagement didn’t seem to be much more than that – arrangements, a matter of practicality and administration – as though Mark had asked not for her hand in marriage but for a guarantee, a security deposit, key money, and she had agreed only because her looming departure had somehow raised the stakes and just then she couldn’t stand to lose one more thing.

‘Another coffee?’ Paul asked her, moving his fingers in the air like a trainer handling their waiter on an invisible leash.

She gulped a little, feeling reprieved. ‘OK. Why not?’

‘So the collection,’ resumed Paul, leaning towards her again. ‘Did you already know a lot about it before your fiancé introduced you to Mr Doro?’

‘I – no. What would anyone know? I’d heard of Eddie. I guess I – knew about things he’d acquired from time to time. But he’d been at it for years, as we all now realise. Who could have imagined how much there was?’

‘Why you? How did he – what made him choose you?’

‘I think it was just – he trusted me. It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I knew a lot, enough to start on. And the fact that I was young meant I was – available. Plus – we got along incredibly well. He saw that I had a mind of my own, but he could tell that I wanted to find out what was in his mind; I was – well, I made myself – available in that way, too.’

‘So,’ Paul drained his cup, ‘the perfect relationship.’

Hilary sighed. ‘I guess – yes, in a lot of ways, it was perfect.’ She felt odd assessing it; she didn’t think about it as a relationship.

Paul was perching forward, quizzical, as if there was more to explain, so she said, ‘The thing is, he decided the minute he met me that I was the one. He was like that. It was how he collected, too. Just with his eye – his instinct. He wanted what he thought was beautiful, what he loved. And that’s why he wanted his pieces to stay together: because they represented a series of observations and decisions. A sort of work of art in its own right, you know? His contribution.’

‘But,’ Paul opened his eyes wide, lifted his thumbs, ‘so much of it will be dispersed in this sale you’re planning.’

‘Yes. But Eddie’s the one who’s decided what to sell. And what to keep.’ She looked at Paul with conviction, her round, pewter-coloured eyes steady, confident that she was hitting home.

‘Of course.’ Paul nodded, smiling. Then after a pause, he asked lightly, ‘And how did you meet your fiancé?’

‘Ages ago. College.’ She struggled with it. ‘Honestly? I guess it was Roman Law, which he thought, you know, that he should take. Not that he was interested in the Roman part – but the economics of it, the politics –’

What was it, Hilary wondered, that made these facts seem dull? Was it her voice? Her flat, inelegant American drawl? Paul, with his precise lips, his tongue knocking the backs of his teeth when he spoke, his almost sly poise and porcelain enunciation, seemed to supply every word he spoke with a special stylishness, an air of cultivation, broad knowledge, hauteur even, so that although they were speaking the same language, he seemed so much more in command of it than she felt she was. His way of speaking, Hilary thought, makes me feel that my life up until now has been entirely ordinary and that I hardly know what I’m talking about. Silently, she bolstered her nerve, dismissed such worries: Ridiculous. But even as she told herself this, she heard the very word, Ridiculous, metamorphosing inside her head as if it were being pronounced by a dandified English gentleman and with stinging disdain; it went on changing, so that she heard a shimmering stream of English alternatives for what she was trying to tell herself. After Ridiculous came Rubbish, Daft, Poppycock, Mad, Utterly Absurd. Words she herself would never say at all.

‘You must be very comfortable with each other?’ Paul smoothed his bumpy yellow curls around behind his ears. His cheeks were ruddy, unevenly blotched with schoolboy rose, and pricked towards the bottom with a gorse of brown-blond beard that from day to day came and went in no evident pattern at all, as if he just sometimes remembered that shaving was something he might do to his face of a morning.

Was comfort something to be desired? Sought after? Hilary wondered. Or was Paul making fun of such an unexciting arrangement? Was comfort missing from his own life? He never talked of it. This thought didn’t wring any pity from her; she sensed a confidence in Paul, deep down, that he would get what he wanted in time. In fact, she sensed that he had some kind of plan, some long-term intention. Certainly he seemed to attribute far more long-term intention to her than she had ever consciously had, and far more ambition.

His view of her made Hilary begin to realise that everything which had happened to her in her life so far had happened by chance or through people she already knew. She had worked hard every single day for a decade since drifting away from graduate school, but she had never called any shots. She had simply accepted what life had offered in the way of work, in the way of friends. And she had been content. But now that Eddie Doro was dead, now that he had left her to sell off two-thirds of his collection of antiquities and build his museum, she was beginning to wonder if she needed to have something more like a vision, or at least an agenda. She had been relying on Eddie’s. Would that be enough to complete the assignment? Such was Paul’s effect on her – to make her feel as if he, Paul, could see her life much more clearly than she could see it herself, as if he could do the job she was intending to do better than she could do it.

‘I am very comfortable with Mark,’ she admitted, feeling a strange lowering inside, greyness, a lack of savour. ‘And Eddie was comfortable with Mark, too. The plans have been perfectly clear for a long time. I mean – whether I actually go on to build and run the museum remains to be seen. Under the terms of the will, the appointment has to be confirmed by the trustees after the size of the project is finalised. But Mark chairs the trustees anyway. First the auction, is the thing. Maximise the cash. So – we better get back to the provenances, don’t you think?’

She stood up, adjusting her limp, blue cotton skirt, studying the round scuffed toes of her flat, navy blue shoes. She didn’t feel the least bit beautiful, and yet when Paul leaped from his chair and placed his hand for just an instant against the small of her back, gesturing gracefully with his free hand as if she needed to be shown the way and then propelling her gently through the doorway of the café and out into the main hall, she thought, He’s incredibly attentive. He must like me. It’s just that he’s – so shy. It’s this English thing, being nervous around girls. Boys sent away to boarding school too young, never seeing girls at all. I must ask him about that, she thought, as they walked to the stairs.

Despite her sense that each lunchtime with Paul was a kind of journey, he never actually agreed to travel with her around the other European museums and dealers. She was surprised, because this seemed to her one of the best things about the job she had hired him to do – trips abroad, nice hotels, introductions to other experts in the field. Paul always seemed to be committed to a bank holiday weekend in the countryside, amateur theatricals, an evening of singing, visiting some aged former teacher. And he told her, in a confessional, apologetic tone, that his German was too embarrassing, even his vaunted Italian.

So Hilary flew off alone to Paris, Basel, Rome, Athens, lugging her notes and her photographs. While she was away, she worked like crazy, drilling through thick boxes of file cards, pinpointing every site of origin, every change of hands, dragging her eyes from object to object, her feet through gallery upon gallery, assessing, comparing, confirming; interviewing dozens of curators and dealers, picking their brains and at the same time building up their appetites for the auction. It renewed her confidence in herself: that she knew exactly what she was doing, solo. Still, wherever she went, she mentioned Paul by name, knowing as she did so that it made her feel important to say she had an assistant, and justifying such a weakness by telling herself that the connection might help him or her at some future unforeseen moment; in any case, she liked him and liked describing the two of them as a team.

On her return, she would spill her discoveries, her best anecdotes to Paul, and she would feel thicker than ever with him. If she withheld any details – out of shyness, half-conscious loyalty to Doro – she also flirtatiously hinted to Paul that he might make his own discoveries and his own connections if he perhaps came along on the next trip.

When the time came to go back to New York at the end of September, Hilary was beside herself. She spent her last morning rearranging papers that she might just as easily have thrown away or abandoned. She had already assembled by herself, without Paul’s knowledge, a draft for the sale catalogue, checked every caption, checked and double-checked every estimate; she had provisionally numbered every lot; there was nothing more to describe. She had packed the night before, returned the keys to the service flat, and brought her suitcases to Sotheby’s with her. There she sat at the borrowed desk in the warren of low-ceilinged back offices surrounded by computer screens, telephones, and glamorous-haired, multilingual women she still didn’t know, waiting for lunch. Her concentration was ratty, her hands were trembly; she worried that she hadn’t been thorough enough, but at the same time, she knew that she could have left yesterday, the day before; her mind flopped to and fro; words blurred on the page. She had meant to spend half a day around the corner at the Royal Academy before she left town, for her own pleasure, and she had meant to go shopping for Mark, a cashmere sweater or something, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the building and to venture down the street alone; she was afraid she would miss something, although she would have been reluctant to say what.

Paul arrived late. He breezed in at eleven thirty. She was in agony, pretending not to care, telling herself, Of course he’s taking it easy, there’s nothing left to do. She wondered if she should have invited him ahead of time to go along with her to the Royal Academy. But at their table in the café, Paul insisted on cham pagne. They both ordered lobster sandwiches despite the expense, and she allowed herself to be reassured that he shared her enthusiasm for this last precious lunch.

‘A toast to our work,’ he said buoyantly, lifting his glass.

‘Our work,’ she replied, lifting her glass to touch his.

‘Shall we lay a bet on the outcome?’ he asked, his glass still resting against hers.

She felt a little thrill of excitement, her throat parching with the sense that something was going to knock her off her feet. ‘The outcome?’

‘I’ll lay you a round-trip ticket to New York that your sale breaks thirty million.’

The part of his wager that stood out for her was the round-trip ticket to New York; her heart leaped at it, a mixture of longing and fear. What was in Paul’s mind – a trip to New York? Or even – if she won – a trip back to London for her? She struggled to say something rational. ‘Dollars or pounds?’ was what she came out with.

Paul laughed. ‘Quite right to ask, you clever puss.’

She felt barriers collapsing, her chest expanding, the tiny room spinning away around them. She smiled and stared deep into his eyes, happy, letting herself go.

‘I bag dollars,’ she cried, the English idiom tripping off her tongue in a cascade of delight.

He pursed his lips, rueful, sulky. ‘I haven’t got a prayer of winning now, have I?’

‘Poor baby,’ she crooned at him, then snapped her glass to her lips and took a long triumphant draught of the silky bubbles.

They agreed they would stay in touch, and in the slosh of playful talk, exchanged addresses, schedules, plans. But there was a sense of an ending hanging over them which was explicit and somehow final. Hilary kept expecting something more to happen; the atmosphere of possibility seemed so rich, so ripe. They decided to extend to dessert before coffee; he recommended Eton Mess, which she had never heard of before, but which sounded like a sentimental journey they might yet take together into a charmed English world. It proved to be a familiar indulgence, grainy meringue smothered in sweet whipped cream, oozing with blood-red summer berries.

In the end, it was the usual thing, the waiter with the bill. Bewildered at the thought of Heathrow, the long, lonely taxi ride, Hilary insisted on paying.

‘But I ordered the champagne,’ Paul objected.

‘You can pay next time –’ she began.

‘Next time?’ He put one hand on her hand with her credit card in it, pushing her card away, and slipped his other hand inside his jacket, feeling for his wallet.

Hilary was liquid with warmth, ‘Well, sometime … ?’ She dropped the credit card on to the little tray just as the waiter snatched it from somewhere above them.

Paul helped her out to the pavement with her bags. ‘It’s been grand, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve adored getting to know you.’

‘Yes.’ Even the single syllable of American sounded yokelish, she thought. She wouldn’t risk more. But her feelings were in spate, a running torrent. He might easily have carried her off if he had tried. He merely kissed her on one cheek, holding her arm just above the elbow as he leaned down to her, a whisper of flesh, soft and dry, halfway between her mouth and her ear.

Still, it heated her to nearly a sizzle and she added, ‘I’ve adored –’ stumbled, blushed ‘– you.’

Then she found herself in tears. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t help it. I’m going to miss you. I have to say it.’

‘I shall – miss you, too –’ Paul stood up straight, took a half-step backwards, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Naturally.’

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’

‘Well, don’t be. I mean – poor you. I had – no idea.’

‘It’s my fault. I should have said something. I wish we’d gone out, maybe, or –’

‘How sweet you are,’ Paul said. ‘I’m terribly flattered.’ With a glance up and down New Bond Street, he took his hands from his pockets and awkwardly wrapped his long arms around her, rattled her sportily in his embrace, then released her, stooped a little, peered into her face, stroked her unruly hair. ‘But you’ve got to make that plane, haven’t you? Come on, you can do it.’ His voice was tender and encouraging. Now he pulled her against him with his left arm around her shoulders, raising his right in the air to hail a black cab.

Hilary let herself be held, melted against his willowy frame. It felt like heaven to her, this instant of contact, a brief crisis of bliss, as the taxi squealed to a stop, purred at them.

‘Heathrow,’ Paul barked at the driver, bullish, familiar. He lifted Hilary’s two big black suitcases inside with his long right arm, letting go of her shoulders, taking her hand and holding it in his left as he reached through the yawning black door and she stood on the pavement beside him.

The driver poked at his computer, waiting. Hilary’s mind went blank; time seemed suspended; she was in Paul’s care; she felt she had admitted everything to him, everything that mattered.

‘There,’ Paul announced as he swung back towards her. ‘You’re all set. This chappie’s been there a thousand times.’

And she nodded, accepting it. She felt entirely passive, a sleepwalker, partly because of the champagne.

Paul bundled her into the cab, one arm under her elbow, the other around her shoulder. ‘Don’t forget your seat belt; you have to, you know.’

She nodded, the tears welling as she slid back on the seat.

‘You mustn’t go all to pieces,’ he clucked at her, leaning in one last time. ‘There’s so much traffic, is the thing. Better get going.’ And he stretched his face towards her, creaking with effort, planted another, longer kiss on her cheek.

‘Come to the airport with me?’ Hilary was surprised at her own boldness. And she could tell that Paul was more than surprised. Shocked almost.

‘I – I don’t think I can. I mean – I don’t think I should,’ he sputtered. And then after a ponderous silence, a horn sounding behind them, he said with evident discomfort, ‘After all, you’re engaged to be married. I believe you must have mentioned it every day. So – hadn’t we better leave it here? Mutual adoration and no bruises?’

It was a blow, but he said it so definitely that Hilary couldn’t demur. And she felt she had no right to, since the impediment was on her side.

When she tried to speak, her lips shook; she was forced to wipe at her nose with a bare knuckle. Engaged to be married. She felt a surge of shame at her behaviour. So undignified, she reprimanded herself. What was she doing? Who was she, in fact? She sat up very straight, dry-eyed, suddenly self-possessed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said solemnly. ‘Please forgive me. Please.’

Paul was silent, opened his face to her. At least that was how Hilary thought of it afterwards, and that’s what she was trying to explain now to Gwen.

CHAPTER 2

‘There he was putting me into the cab, practically strapping me to the seat to stop me throwing myself at him, while I was blubbing my eyes out and trying to apologise, and the expression on his face was so – well, I don’t know what it was. It was like he opened his face, made it – whatever I needed it to be. Made it an acceptance, or a forgiveness. A non-judgement. Without any sign that I could really make sense of.’

‘You mean – blank?’ Gwen asked. She had switched on the kettle, stood rummaging in the cupboards for mugs, tea bags.

‘Maybe that’s all it was. Just a blank. A make-of-me-what-you-will. And so I – I said goodbye, and the taxi pulled away and it seemed that anything was possible. That he had handed the situation over to me. That he would wait to see what I did next.’

‘And what you did next was break off your engagement.’

Hilary pressed her lips together hard, looked feisty. ‘God, you make it sound so cut and dried. Where the hell is that whiskey?’ she demanded.

Gwen laughed and chucked the boxes of tea back into the cupboard just as the kettle began to spout steam into the air. She moved off towards the Welsh dresser by the floppy green sofa in the window alcove, bent to the screeching doors, the clinking bottles, and brandished a bottle aloft as she recrossed the room. She sloshed whiskey into the pair of mugs. Then she sat down at the kitchen table opposite Hilary.

The first sip made Hilary’s voice deeper, huskier. ‘Oh God, the lustre was off Mark completely. I so did not want to see him – like a kind of sudden revulsion. It blows my mind how fast everything came clear. I just wanted the plane to turn around and fly the other way. I got this terrible headache, and I kept thinking that if I ordered more champagne, I’d get rid of the headache and I could lie back and daydream about Paul. There were bubbles inside me, you know, this sensation of something fizzing, exhilarating – how I felt about Paul and that now he knew it. But I couldn’t let the bubbles rise.

‘It was weird when we landed. The wheels hit with that hard bounce, and it was like – the knock of reality. There was that smell you get of burning, the reek of the brakes in your nose, really hurting. Utter destruction. All those years with Mark, some kind of lie I’d told to both of us. I was stale and sweaty and gross, but I was glad about it, because it proved how hard I’d been working – an alibi. I was the sexless professional again, the same work jock I’d been when I left town. And I was thinking how free it felt, and how I should just do what I wanted to do, and how being alone was fine. Strong. Kind of thrilling, in fact.’

Gwen basked in it, Hilary alone.

‘I was completely businesslike with Mark. Starting with, From three thousand miles away, I realised I didn’t really want to be married … But I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. Somehow you think the person’s going to hit you or something. I mean, you feel you need to be ready to run. What is that? Some primitive thing. Your gut tells you that, basically, breaking up is a fight.’

‘But you did say he was angry?’

‘Not at first. I mean – well, I don’t remember his face. Or – I didn’t look at it. At first he just didn’t believe me. And then when he started to take it in, he thought it was just a re-entry thing. That I’d gone skittish or gotten self-conscious. He was saying things like, Do you want to maybe take a shower.’

‘You mean because you didn’t really kiss him when you first came in?’

Hilary went red. ‘Oh, but Christ, I couldn’t kiss him, Gwen!’ Then she laughed. ‘My clothes stank, though. God, you think that’s what he meant? And I was thinking how I must seem like – such a bitch. Cold – and – but it’s true. I was.’

‘And the champagne?’

‘That was so terrible. A bottle of Dom Pérignon. The whole fiancé thing. And you know that he’s not really like that, Gwen. He’s much more beer and Chinese noodles. There were roses, too, in this tippy glass vase on the coffee table. Those dark red kind, like rolled-up bundles of velvet, on long, long stems. They looked completely ghastly. They were studded with thorns. And they had no scent; those waxy petals, nothing at all on your nose when you try to smell them. I guess he even bought the vase. Things he’d never done, never thought of. The apartment was bare, as if he’d stuffed all the mess into closets or had cleaners come in. All so contrived. Then he opened the champagne while I was in the bathroom.’

Gwen grimaced. ‘So you had to drink it.’

‘Of course I had to. And it made me think how easy it could have been to slip back into my old life, if I had been polite at first, or pretended a little. If I had let it start to happen between us as if nothing had changed, then – I don’t know.’

‘Nah, come on. You’d just have gotten here tomorrow instead of today.’ Gwen wrapped her fingers around Hilary’s wrist, lifted it gently, dropped it on the scarred top of the oak table, lifted it and dropped it again, feeling the weight of Hilary’s arm where it swelled towards the elbow, studying the flicker of the tendons where they disappeared inside Hilary’s pushed-up sleeve. Then she let go, looked up at Hilary again. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I was scared there was going to be a ring. I kept looking for one of those little boxes, a bulge in a pocket. And I saw myself trapped there with only him for company, starved of something else I wanted. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I couldn’t spend one night there, couldn’t sleep with him even to comfort him. And he was saying that I couldn’t expect him to swear off me all of a sudden like that, after he’d been waiting all summer and looking forward to seeing me. In a way, that was the worst. Basically, he was begging for sex. I think he even had his hands like this.’ She put her palms together as if she were praying. ‘He never asked anything about my summer, about what had happened, or what I felt. So how could sex fit? Where could it come from, in a situation like that?’

Gwen tapped the whiskey bottle, raising her eyebrows at Hilary, but Hilary shook her head.

‘We drank too much, Mark and I, last night. That was part of the problem – the crying and the screaming.’

‘But, hey, you got through a lot of misery in one awful night.’

‘I feel bad for him, Gwen. It was like I’d inflicted this terrible injury. That’s how I keep picturing it – an open wound, bleeding and twitching.’

‘Worse for Mark if you hadn’t found out in time, hon.’ Gwen was casual, like someone who’d seen it all before, lots of times. Then she stooped close across the table and spoke caressingly. ‘It’s bitter to betray someone – anyone – a lover, a friend. But don’t you think when it comes to love and marriage – the lifelong deal, I mean – for that, don’t you have to pay any price? You can’t fake that. And if you want to have children? You did the right thing.’

Hilary was white-faced, dipping her finger in the dregs of her whiskey.

Gwen insisted. ‘You have to leave this with ragged edges, Hil. If he blames you or thinks you’re a shit, then that’s what he needs to do to survive. You have to let him deal with this – without you. Because if you’re dumping Mark, you’re dumping him. The thing is broken. That’s life. It’s painful.’

‘Yeah. Painful.’ Hilary’s voice creaked. Guilt pooled in her eyes. And then she seemed to shoulder it, like a burden. ‘Listen. I know there were big things wrong with me and Mark. We were always part of some gang. Endless room-mates. Then with Eddie, a gang of three. We only ever existed as part of a clique. Never a couple. It was more like being under a spell. I was still in graduate school when the whole thing with Eddie started, and because of him, I never even finished my degree. Mark and I had been around each other for so long that it just seemed like time for something else to happen. The truth is, Paul saved me.’

She paused for a long time, leaned back in her chair. And then at last, she let it out: ‘But man, I could never have pictured Mark’s anger. His eyes turned red – flaming. In all our years together, I had never seen – this – creature in him who didn’t get what he expected. Who couldn’t make me do what he wanted. That was totally scary.’

‘Stay away from him for a while, don’t you think? Till he calms down?’

Hilary sat up. ‘God, I’m stealing you from your bed, and Will’ll be up early needing you.’

Gwen was easy with it. ‘It’s fine. Let’s do the tea, huh?’

Hilary didn’t fight her. ‘Camomile or peppermint or something?’

Gwen switched the kettle back on, took clean mugs from the cupboard, talked with her back to Hilary, flipping labels loose from tea bags, extending their little strings. ‘So what about all your stuff? How are you going to get it out of Mark’s place?’ She launched the soggy tea bags into the sink where they splatted.

‘I don’t have that much. Anyway, where would I put it? I have to get my own place first. You can always buy new stuff. I just need my books from Eddie’s apartment. I miss those.’

Gwen rapped down the two smoking mugs, sat opposite again.

Hilary cupped her hands around one mug and shook her head. ‘Mark didn’t know about Paul, so he blamed Eddie, you know? The stuff he said – aggressive, disgusting stuff. How weird I was to have a thing for an old man. Did I get off on Eddie’s obsession, or was it the power I had over his money? Then shouting at me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going to go now? You can’t get into his apartment if I don’t give you the key. What are you going to do? Sleep in the warehouse so you can fondle his pots and his lamps and his statues? That’s what you’d really like to do, isn’t it? Sleep with him – with his fucking collection.”’ Hilary’s lips curled back from her teeth, trembled ever so slightly.

‘You think he felt jealous when Eddie was alive?’

‘Maybe there was some power thing with them. Basically Mark never understood what all the excitement was about. Eddie and I just thought he did. He couldn’t see what we saw – about the past. Turns out it made him mad. Made him into a kind of brute – a bully.’

Gwen lifted her mug to her lips, put it down again without drinking from it; there was something in Hilary’s voice, disillusionment, a tone of fuck all. ‘But you don’t think he’d try to derail Eddie’s plans?’

‘He was kind of nuts with his threats, Gwen: “I can stop the whole fucking project. Doro’s dead; he’s buried in a hole in the ground. All that stuff in his apartment and all that stuff in the warehouse is dust and bones. It’s dug up out of graves, stolen from tombs. It belonged to people who died thousands of years ago. What is this with you – dead people, the past? It’s necrophilia, that’s what it’s called. You give me the creeps with your sarcophaguses and your burial monuments and your funeral urns.”’

Gwen squeaked with outrage. ‘But a lawyer – a trusts and estates lawyer – that’s all about people dying, and about them trying to reach into the future with what they want – to exercise their will! I mean the word, “will” – it’s all about enacting what you want from beyond the grave. That’s Mark’s job, it’s what he chose. What’s going on over there in America?’

‘I know! And I said to him, “It’s sarcophagi, by the way”; but, God, I wish I hadn’t! It just infuriated him.’ At last she sipped her tea.

‘Ginger and lemon,’ murmured Gwen, watching her.

‘I like it.’ Hilary took another, longer sip. ‘Up until I said that – “It’s sarcophagi, by the way” – I think there was maybe a chance I could have persuaded Mark to give me back the key to Eddie’s apartment. But somehow that one pedantic little remark changed everything. It seems trivial, but just as I was saying it, I realised that was the point: we weren’t speaking the same language any more. I needed to be with someone who understood what I was doing – so I could remember who I was. All I really wanted was to go to Eddie’s and sit there quietly and collect myself – Well, the thing is I couldn’t ask Mark, could I, because communing with Eddie –?’ Hilary stopped, raised her hands in mock horror.

‘He would have thought you were trying to hold a seance –’ Gwen said.

‘It crossed my mind that I could get the doorman to let me in. There’s one I’m friendly with. But there are all these procedures for access now because of the value of the stuff, and then Mark could accuse me of breaking the rules, and he’d have just what he needed to get me dumped for ever from the project. Imagine thinking that way, about a guy you were going to marry! And by then it was three or four in the morning and I wanted –’

The neglected undercurrent of Paul stirred between them. Gwen acknowledged it by lifting one corner of her mouth, not a smile, but sliding her lips around to the side of her face, making a squeegee sound inside her cheek. ‘Right – you wanted to be with someone who understood why you cared so much about all those antiquities.’

‘I got down into the street with my suitcases, and hailed a cab, and the whole thing just ran away with me. Arriving, departing. What was the name of any hotel, anyway? I felt all beaten up, and yet there was energy bubbling somewhere inside me. It was like I was right in the middle of a sentence with Paul, and I thought, Now I can talk straight to him because I’m free. So I told the cab driver to take me back to the airport.’

‘I still can’t believe you didn’t phone him!’

‘It was crazy. I thought – I imagined – that somehow he knew I was coming – or … I don’t know. Paul and I never used the phone; we always just walked in and saw each other first thing every morning. It felt like such a sure thing. I had his address and I – I was so excited – so impatient – like I was running to his arms. I wanted to amaze him. I thought it would make up for torturing him all summer talking about Mark. I kept remembering that expression on his face, when he put me in the taxi – open to whatever I decided. And this would be my answer, my fabulous, dramatic answer. I thought I was in love, Gwen, that’s the thing.’ Hilary swallowed a sob. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said loudly, defying it. ‘I’m so fucking tired.’

Gwen got up from her chair, slipped around the table, kneeled down beside Hilary, put her arms around her. ‘It’s fine. You have to give it time, Hil.’

‘I pounded on his door for ever!’ Hilary groaned. ‘What was I thinking?!’

‘You weren’t thinking, you were feeling.’

‘What was I feeling? None of it was real.’

‘So maybe that’s a problem people have about love. That they want it to feel passionate and impulsive. Maybe you did all this to make it feel like love when it wasn’t. To throw yourself, to jump blind. Maybe you needed the end of the world as you knew it.’

‘Christ, how does anyone ever know?’ Hilary turned her chair with a raw scrape and laid her cheek on Gwen’s hair; tears darkened the fine brown strands and swelled like beads on the flecks of green oil paint stuck to a few. ‘Any normal person would have given up and gone away, realised he wasn’t going to answer, assumed he wasn’t home.’

‘Shhh,’ said Gwen, rocking her gently. ‘It’s just as well he was there so it’s over already. One day you’ll laugh about it.’

‘When he finally opened the door, he was glowing. Hair tousled, no glasses, out of breath a little, giggling – and I still thought it was all for me. That he’d been waiting and hoping. He didn’t have on a shirt, his trousers were only half done up. It’s so embarrassing. I swear. I launched myself across the threshold, into the air, arms outstretched, before I even noticed the other man right behind him. This huge, hairy guy, half naked, twice Paul’s age.’

Gwen shook with laughter. ‘I’m sorry. I know how much it’s hurting you, but you tell it so perfectly, and I see this – tableau.’

Hilary pushed Gwen’s shoulders away, slapped at them, belligerent, half joking. ‘Bitch.’

‘Who talked first?’

‘Paul. Handled it easily. As if he were in white tie and tails and presenting me to a duchess, but with this kind of blandness, like he was – under hypnosis.’ She mimicked his English accent exaggeratedly: ‘“Ah – Hilary, what a surprise. Can I introduce you to my friend Orlando?” – or whatever the guy was called. But I didn’t meet him; he must have been as surprised as I was; made tracks. And then Paul said, “We were just having a bit of a rest, actually.”’ In her broadest American accent Hilary added, ‘Well, duh –’

‘And how’d you make your getaway?’

‘Badly. Really badly –’ Hilary started to laugh, too. ‘Some garbled junk about airplanes and how I had no idea what time it was and I was sorry and I’d call in the morning. To his credit, Paul did ask, “Is everything all right? Quite all right?”’

Hilary rolled her eyes. ‘Perfect. It’s all perfect. Can’t you see? My life is completely perfect. What does he care?’

Lawrence lifted his head a little as Gwen slid under the covers.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she whispered.

‘How is she now?’ he muttered. ‘OK?’ He laid a hand on Gwen’s thigh, squeezing it softly, then giving it a gentle shove, the cadence of goodnight.

‘I’ve got to find her someone to marry.’

Lawrence snorted into his pillow. ‘Wouldn’t it be enough to find her a place to live? Or maybe a job?’ He turned his head away, closing his eyes. ‘Why does she need to marry anyone?’

‘She still wants her old job. But we need to keep her away from Mark for a while. He’s so angry, it’s as if he’s lost his mind. She definitely doesn’t know how to pick men.’

His head came up again. ‘Do you know?’ Then dropped.

Gwen bent down and pressed her face into the nape of Lawrence’s neck, rubbing against his bristling hair where it was cut close at the back, metallic with grey. ‘OK,’ she admitted, ‘it was you who picked me. But by now, I can recognise the goods. Hilary feels so much, and she just throws herself at whatever – next it could be a passing car. I have to help her.’

Lawrence didn’t answer; he was asleep.

Upstairs in the studio, on her thin spare pillow, Hilary was thinking about Lawrence and Gwen lying side by side in their wide bed with its massive, blackened oak headboard. So much presence, that bed. An institution in itself, she thought. The thick modern mattress supported by the Jacobean frame, five hundred years or more of ageing wood hewn by hand with an axe – an oak tree reshaped as beams, posts, creaking pegs neatly filling invisible holes in the tight corners, and the broad exposed planks boldly, impressively carved.

Generations were born and died in that bed, Hilary thought. She saw them in pairs, producing a life, producing a death. In her mind’s eye, she only approximated the bodies, generic, strangely innocent, dressed in white like Gwen in her nightgown; what did Hilary know of their intimacy, in fact? She revered the idea of it. She pictured Lawrence and Gwen together throughout time, their hands folded on their breasts, not touching at all. Like figures carved in stone on a funeral monument. You could sleep for ever in that bed, she thought.

She had slept there herself during half of July and most of August when Gwen took Will to the cottage for the summer air and offered Hilary a vacation from the service flat. There had been a string of mornings so bright that Hilary had relished being called to them early by the birds. Relished dozing and dreaming in the half-light before dawn, under the pleasing shroud of Gwen’s stiffly laundered cotton sheets, slightly abrasive with London lime on the naked skin. How lucky, how certain, how easy I felt in that bed. Before all this mess.

Hilary longed for sleep now, for oblivion. But her mind raced on. I could get to hate Gwen, she thought. Both of them. It might seem easy to tell myself I don’t want what they have. But for whose benefit, that lie? The spinster’s bitter defiance, life at arm’s length. It’s a marriage I admire, and it’s their marriage. No way I can stay here more than a day or two. I have to tell her. Tomorrow – right away. Ask her to lend me money for one more ticket. Save what’s left of the credit cards.

Trouble with goddamned fucking New York is everybody’s apartments are so small. In London people have things like extra beds. She ran over in her mind the friends who might have room for her to stay, thinking how they were really Mark’s friends more than hers, how they might have an opinion, either hate her guts or try to talk her around, and how she wouldn’t be able to bear the interference. One or two from graduate school she could maybe impose on, her old PhD supervisor, for instance, who still treated her as though the world needed the thesis she had never finished writing. She pictured herself telling the whole sorry tale again on the phone to New York, and her stomach toiled with embarrassment.

Could Mark really kick her off the project? She’d been agonising over it, telling herself she was too tired to think straight. Eddie wouldn’t leave me so exposed. Eddie, whose last years had been haunted by the future, by planning, eventualities. And then with a shuddering ache, Get real, Hilary. Eddie was never planning with you in mind. He wouldn’t leave his collection so exposed.

But it was hard to give up that fragile old-man voice in her ear, croaky, desiccated, the Bronx twang made fine by education and a certain natural delicacy: ‘How can you be so sure you want to give your life to this when I’m gone? And the lockstep with Mark? Maybe I should set you free from that? There’s always some other way, you know, with lawyers.’

How many times should Eddie have asked her? She had been so quick to reassure him, It’s decided. I’m all yours. As if she herself were a piece he wanted for the collection. Because she knew his appetite, and it gave her so much pleasure to satisfy it. And because in his growing frailty, he was facing something so big, drawing closer all the time, and she could shield him a little with this indulgence; she could take his mind off his fear. The legal stuff ’s fine. Mark’s good at that. Let him deal with it, she used to say.

I left myself exposed, she thought. I had – a sense of expectation; she had to admit it.

After the funeral, Hilary wondered how much she really cared for the treasures. All those years, had she been living off Eddie’s enthusiasm? Until it all came to life again with Paul. Paul loved the collection with that unhesitating lightness of heart, that spontaneous certainty that she had come to feel she would never encounter again. The touch of boyish disregard that carried it off.

That was real, she thought, that part of my friendship with Paul. It was the same as with Eddie – we shared some things perfectly, others not at all.

At last she began to sink into sleep, feeling justified in something. She let go of trying to make sense; let the pieces of her puzzle fall apart into their jigsaw fragments. She drifted among bodies, among beds. Gwen, Lawrence. Eddie lying alone under his grand red canopy, lost in the magnificence of its height and hangings. Slipping away. Eddie in his wheelchair in the big living room. In the sunlight beside her desk. Safely dead at last; the silent move he made, out of reach.

I only slept with Mark’s body, she thought without clarity. It felt like something she needed to explain. But not now, under the weight of the thin blanket, carrying her down. Don’t try.

Then she had a sensation of hurt. A jolt, as if the pillow had dropped underneath her, the whole bed. There was a shuddering black edge around her thoughts as she was thrown back from sleep for an instant.

I knew Eddie was selfish. I made it easy for him. She tried to push past this discomfort, her sense of error and responsibility, still reaching for sleep. I have to go forward from where I am now. With what I know now. I can get back in touch with Paul, on a new footing. He’ll help me. It’s OK here with Gwen until I get myself together.

She was sure of Gwen. At least there’s room for me here. With Lawrence and Gwen.

CHAPTER 3

It seemed obvious to Gwen whom Hilary should meet. Roland was tall enough, smart enough, steady enough, good enough. Did it matter whether he was handsome? Walking along King Street the next morning after dropping Will at school, she decided that handsome wasn’t really the point. Up until now anyway, Gwen had never much judged people by how they looked. But he’s got a great face, she reflected. Solid, intriguing. A lot of texture to his skin, a real beard and a head of thick, dark hair, a kind of masculinity and force. Maybe she had never before considered Roland on the question of looks. Did she know him too well? When had she first looked at him? When had she ever looked at him? Six or eight years ago?

He had been introduced by Lawrence as an Ancient History colleague; one of the few colleagues who seemed to Gwen to be actually alive. So many of those Oxford types, Gwen thought, as she made her way towards a cash machine through the sparse, early scurry, existed only as their academic selves – a constellation of starred alphas, named memorial prizes, Oxford University Press publications, sherry-stained gowns, high-table ripostes. But she had liked Roland right away. At one of those wistful gatherings in a barnlike room, everyone standing because the chairs were so far apart, so stiff-backed and so sunken-seated, a hot little drink in the fist. He had made jokes and asked her direct, friendly questions about herself, real questions, that sought out what was inside her, not the windy senior-common-room cross-examinations that aimed to position you on an imaginary list and then dismiss you as falling below some necessary level of academic accomplishment on that list. What are you working on? they felt free to ask once they had established that she didn’t spend all her time looking after children, a house. Years ago, it had been her undergraduate degree in Greats. Then, when she gave up on that, she would answer, I paint. And it seemed to stump them. Hmm, they might reply, with a slight interrogative inflection, nodding vigorously, stretching the brows upward in a contortion of sympathy, optimism, goodwill. Some would venture on to a further question, What sort of things do you paint? Or even the informed probe, Figurative or abstract? But there the conversation would end. They couldn’t taxonomise this particular activity, landscape painting. It was easier to look upon her as a dropout.

But not for Roland. He was good for my self-esteem, Gwen reflected, and he’ll be good for Hilary’s. She fed her debit card into the machine, her PIN number circling through her brain like a glimmering fish until she hooked it, stabbed the digits into the hard little keys. Roland has the energy to take a genuine interest in anything, and he has the nerve, too. He knows that there is plenty of vitality and conviction outside the locus of clever, singular answers, outside the high-walled, ancient quadrangles. Those dons go head to head with each other so hard and so long that they forget everything else, the rest of the world, for instance, what it’s actually like. She bubbled with resentment, thinking about them. Their conversation, she thought, whatever the topic, is like a conversation about the weather, because they don’t actually want to make contact. Real contact. They might have to follow that up with some expenditure of emotion. They can’t afford to hear what you might have to say in case it doesn’t fit into their train of thought, in case it might disturb some theory they are pushing towards. Some simplification of life. How she had hated those gatherings in college, attended with universal joylessness, another fixed commitment during which it was possible to kill a little time away from books and pens, rest their mighty brains, while eating.

The cash wheedled out crisply as if it were newly printed expressly for her. Then there was the thump behind the screen, the personal vault slamming shut.

But they’re not all like that, she thought, folding the twenties into the pocket of her jeans, striding for home past the fountains playing over the smooth-paved piazza at her feet. Lawrence, Roland. Hilary will feel it right away. Roland’s curiosity and his warmth. Gwen smiled, picturing it. Hilary’s so tuned in. She’ll find out how widely read and how thoughtful Roland is. Older and wiser than Mark or Paul. Will Hilary think he’s too old? Lawrence’s age? Nearly fifty? A baby, compared to Doro.

She climbed the black-painted front steps, grabbing up the milk and pinning the bottle under one arm as she let herself into the colourless, empty stairwell, struggled with the keys to the stiff little door of the flat. As to why such a cultivated, lovable man wasn’t already involved with a worthwhile woman, Gwen glossed over it in her thoughts as she entered the ground-floor hallway, skipped down the basement steps to the kitchen. Or rather, she considered it rapidly as she flipped the fridge open and shut, and she decided, He hasn’t met a good one yet, a good enough one. The right one. In the back of her mind was the flattering certainty that Roland had always been quite attentive to her. From this, she concluded that he liked American women and that he ought to meet more of them. She looked upon his chivalry towards herself as a promise, even a guarantee, that he would like Hilary, indeed, that Hilary was exactly whom he was waiting to meet.

She put Will’s breakfast things in the dishwasher, walked around to the clammy back room, and started dragging towels and sheets out of the dryer, heaping them on the ironing board in crackling electric mounds so she could transfer the wet things in from the washing machine. She stopped to find Roland’s number in the kitchen drawer, dialled it, and kept the phone clutched against her ear as she went back again to the laundry room.

‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’ She felt unexpectedly shy – bent double, arse up, at the mouths of her machines, struggling one-handed to weed out little cotton items to dry on the rack, her knickers, a bra, falling on the dirty floor as they came untangled from the wet lump in the bouncing, perforated drum.

But Roland welcomed it. ‘I’ll drive down with Lawrence,’ he said. ‘Any day this week apart from tomorrow. It’s only the freshers arriving now.’

‘Lawrence thought he might be staying up for a couple of nights.’

‘I’ll give him a ring, shall I? And we’ll fix it.’

That was it. She chucked more laundry into the washing machine and turned it on with the dryer, leaving the folding for later, everything churning.

Mentioning the arrangement to Hilary, Gwen was casual. ‘There’s a friend coming to supper. It’s just the four of us.’

Hilary was horrified. She had woken up late and swayed down into the kitchen in her pale blue-and-grey-striped men’s pyjamas with a black V-neck sweater over them. Her dark tendrils of hair were pulled into a bright red scrunchie at the back of her head so that her whole face was revealed in the morning light, flushed, puffy around the eyes, but smooth with deep, long sleep.

She came on with a spoiling chill. ‘I don’t want to meet anyone, Gwen. I’m a wreck. I need to recover. I need time to – figure out what’s going to happen.’ In her alarm, she pulled her hair loose from the scrunchie, scowled as she plucked at its ends.

Gwen just looked at her for a few seconds, trying to tell from Hilary’s half-veiled face why she seemed to be receiving the effort as an insult. But she couldn’t see Hilary’s eyes. An insult to grief? Gwen considered. Or to the seriousness of what’s happened to her? How much time would Hilary need to mourn the end of her engagement? Gwen lifted her eyebrows and, at the same time, she blinked, indicating doubt, an attempt to be patient. She didn’t speak.

‘Don’t get mad, Gwen.’ Hilary dropped into the same chair where she had sat last night, reached for the box of Weetabix sitting on the table, studied the package.

‘I’m not mad.’ Gwen was trying to suppress her sense of investment in sorting Hilary out. She was thinking, It’s a problem to be solved, let’s get the ball rolling. Why dawdle and agonise? But she said, as casually as she could muster, ‘Do you want me to postpone it?’

‘I guess. I don’t know.’ Hilary looked a little dazed. ‘Do you think I’ll like this cereal? I never tried it all the time I was staying here. It looks so weird.’ Hilary thought she was off the hook.

‘It needs milk. Lawrence eats it,’ Gwen said with sympathetic diffidence. Then adopting a perky, administrative tone, ‘I can call him back and say next week instead of this? Is a week enough?’

Hilary put the cereal box down on the table and looked at Gwen. ‘Is it really important? I mean, do we have to set a particular date now?’

‘No. I mean – yes, it’s important. It’s harder for him to find the time once term starts.’

‘So he can’t come after I’m gone? I won’t be here long.’

‘He’s wonderful. You should meet him.’

‘Well, I don’t want to waste that, do I? A wonderful man? But I’m really not in the mood to meet a man right now, Gwen. It’s about the last thing I need. Don’t you think?’

Where does mood come into it? Gwen wondered. Either he’s the right man or he’s not. And knowing she was grooming things ever so slightly, pushing her luck, she said, ‘It’s not a date or anything. He’s an old friend of Lawrence’s – of both of ours.’

‘So you told him you want us to meet?’ Despite her fanfared emotional helplessness and her sleepy look, Hilary was nobody’s fool.

‘He comes here to supper – all the time. You happen to be staying with us.’ Gwen lifted her hands, absolving herself of setting anything up. ‘I haven’t told him a lot about you.’

‘What – that I’m roadkill? That someone needs to drag me to the shoulder before I get run over again and my guts squish out? Gwen, you said he’s wonderful, and you said that it’s important. So shouldn’t I be – well, at least shouldn’t I be looking my best? Maybe a few more days of real sleep, some exercise. I have to be ready to make an effort. Right now, I can’t really think or talk about anything apart from – from everything that’s happened to me since Eddie died.’

‘Maybe you should try. You need to get your mind off what’s happened. Just do something else. Distract yourself for a while, and let some time pass.’

‘Can’t I do that with you and Will and Lawrence? You guys are enough. And frankly, you’re all I can cope with right now. Christ, you’re bossy. And you must be at least two cups of coffee ahead of me.’ Hilary gave Gwen a camp smile. She stood up and looked around the counters until she spotted the coffee machine that during the weeks she had stayed in the flat she had never used because she had hurried out each morning as if to meet her destiny. The clear glass jug was dark with coffee at the bottom and the little red light was on.

Without a word, Gwen opened a cupboard, handed Hilary a mug, went to the fridge for the milk, hangdog, slack-footed. She was suddenly remorseful. ‘Hil. I’m sorry. Roland’s not a lot more than just us. That’s how well we know him. It’s just one evening.’

‘Do whatever you’d do if I weren’t here,’ Hilary said as she slurped. ‘But I reserve the right to hide in my room – or leave before he shows up.’

Gwen saw she might get her way; she decided to drop it for a while. ‘I got you some money,’ she said. ‘Don’t know if you need it or not.’ She pulled it from her pocket, held it out.

Hilary was surprised and embarrassed. Of course I need it, she thought. But despite herself she said, ‘I can’t take that, Gwen. God.’ What she was thinking was, Why does it feel like she’s forcing it on me? Is it just because she didn’t give me time to ask before she offered? And how the hell will I ask for it now?

‘Just in case you maybe don’t have pounds?’ Gwen put the money on the counter, and there it lay, burning a hole in the slate. ‘Do you want to go for a run with me now you’re up?’ Gwen asked. ‘We could do a little circuit down across Hammersmith Bridge and along the south side of the river to Putney?’

Hilary’s eyes focused hard at her; the glassy, washed-away blue brightened, sparked with enthusiasm. ‘So forget cereal. Give me five minutes.’

Outside, the first morning of October glowed at them; summer grown brittle, a little shabby, along the car-lined street. Gwen set off in front because the pavement was narrow and uneven, blistered by tree roots, and because she knew the way.

‘These poor trees,’ Hilary said, looking up and around. ‘They made me sad in the summer with their branches lopped off, trying to squeeze a leaf out of those knobs they have left. It looks even worse now that the green is turning.’

‘It’s what cities do, yeah? Cramping us all, making us into grotesques. The council prunes the trees like that because the roots are getting at everyone’s foundations. Lifting them and breaking the walls.’

‘All about insurance probably.’ Hilary puffed out the words in even bursts. ‘Just like the States.’

‘Getting like that here. How people think they can be insured against nature, against what grows, I don’t know. There are just so many of us on the planet now. Everything, everyone, has to give way. In the country, you know, those trees would have room to achieve their true shape. It’s why I can’t paint here, except to finish things. I have to have the countryside. The city doesn’t feel big enough. Or even – convincing. All hemmed in and restricted.’

Hilary called out to her as Gwen trotted ahead: ‘I don’t go fast any more, Gwen.’

‘Neither do I. Don’t worry.’ Gwen tempered her pace ever so slightly, her feet making almost no sound as she loped along. ‘Your legs are so much longer than mine, I thought you’d be tripping over me.’

‘Why’d you move from the cottage, then? I thought you guys liked the city?’

‘We like it. We need it anyway. Maybe people need a lot of things, not just one thing. It seemed like a question of survival for me – to grow. Some kind of abrasion. I was alone too much. And the company out there wasn’t any you’d really choose on purpose. But now that we’re here in town, I actually spend a lot of time trying to avoid people because there are just too many around. Especially if you have a child. All the school stuff. And if you really want to get any work done.’ Gwen’s voice grew expressionless with conserving breath.

For a little while, Hilary followed her in silence, feeling her brain sigh and expand with physical relief, feeling muscles let go that she hadn’t realised were tense. Her back was stiff, her ankles were swollen, but these were local irritations, aeroplane-wear; underneath them, she felt strong, a flow of energy starting as her skin grew warm and damp.

At the Great West Road, by Hammersmith roundabout, they had to wait for the lights to get across the rush of traffic. They stamped around, hands on hips, elbows flapping, then crossed underneath the thumping flyover and the cool, stony shadow of the church, its great, gold-rimmed clock almost on noon. The wide world and the bright air opened all around them as they bounded on to the pale green arch of the bridge; the long slings of cable swooped up over their heads, the silver-brown river slid long and slow through the broad, exposed mudflats beneath, their shaking footsteps were lost in the size and glory of it all. Cars and buses roared by, and the acrid exhaust mingled in their noses with the salt stench of the ebb tide.

Down they plunged on the far bank, through the translucent, yellow foliage and the dank air hovering under the bridge, then settled their pace side by side on the pebbly path. Seagulls wheeled and called over the lonely, squint-making shine of the river, foraging the urban bend as if it were the ocean’s edge. A pair of clean white swans nestled and waddled in the algae-streaked pools.

Hilary and Gwen grew easy with one another, slimy with sweat, breathing the layer of air that runners breathe, a chin length higher as the head tilts up and back ever so slightly. And in the depths of the mind, they were beginning to swim the channel of blue thought which grooves deeper, more vivid, with heartily coursing blood.

‘I can’t believe I never did this all summer,’ Hilary said, happy. ‘When was the last time we ran together?’

‘Before Will?’

‘But it reminds me of college. Along the Charles. When we used to train for crew.’

‘And see – a boat appears before your very eyes as if you had summoned it.’ Gwen stuck her jaw towards it. ‘Maybe boys from St Paul’s? There are boathouses back there, and more further along. Lots of crews working out here all the time.’

They were getting inside each other’s heads now, inside the same flash of memory, locked in step as the boat slid towards them among the trees. They both heard the sucking slap as the pale blades cut the water, both delighted at the sudden, mighty thrust of speed as eight lean backs curled hard and round and the prow shot towards them, blades kicking free of the water again, flattening in the air with the deep, unison thunk against the oarlocks. Then again. And again. The boat wobbled a little between strokes, the boys’ long, knobby bodies awkward, uncertain, as they came up their slides, arms and legs pretzeling crazily around their neat, clinging hands, the cox shouting, restless, his elbow flexed rigid up behind him in the stern.

‘The cox is overruddering,’ Gwen grunted. ‘Throwing off their balance between strokes.’

She spun around and jogged backwards a few steps in the scatter of fallen leaves, looking on as the boat receded upriver, and she saw the fresh, devoted faces, tousle-haired, of the stroke, the seven, suffused with the blood of effort, eyes down, determined, bearing it. Then Hilary’s face came between her and the boys as Hilary ran along towards her, so that she remembered how Hilary used to dive and pull, dive and pull, facing her in the stroke seat, her every movement perfectly matched to Gwen’s commands. And behind Hilary, seven more gigantic, muscled Venuses, bulging, nearly cracking, with conviction as their thighs and stomachs doubled up then exploded, doubled up then exploded, lungs raging for air, nausea scorching chests and throats, arms and backs racked out to the edge of violence, and the hard pads of their calluses rubbed and eaten at by the slippery, fat, unquenchable wood of the blade handles.

Hilary used to be taciturn then, Gwen thought, pudgy and enslaveable. But that beastlike willingness pointed out to Lawrence, like the plunging salaams, had given way to something more sceptical, more self-regarding. And she was thinner now, Gwen noticed, lithe with maturity.

‘You could still do it, couldn’t you, Gwen? Cox that boat. You’re light as a twig. Look at you, scuttling all around me like a spider. And your voice – big as ever.’

‘I could cox a boat,’ Gwen agreed, turning back to run alongside her.

It was exactly what Gwen had said the day they had met. ‘I could cox a boat.’ There had been no maybe, no hesitation.

‘Remember when I came up to you in our Greek class, that first time?’

‘On your quest for short people?’

‘Was it just because you were short?’

Hilary had noticed her up in the front row and brought her along to practise the same afternoon, like a prize. Around this time of year, a few weeks earlier. Indian summer, humid, bright. The delirium of starting college still on them. Everything new. Everything desirable.

The others had treated them like a pair: here was Hilary’s friend she was introducing. Which had made them intensely aware of each other.

In the shadowy quiet of the boathouse, a dozen or so big girls leaning up against the long, smooth-hulled shells overturned on their racks, a few more sitting on the concrete floor, bare legs crossed or negligently splayed, the coach droning on about trials. In their innocence. Most of them were there because it was offered. None of them had a clue. They were all nervous, eyes on the floor, faking cool, glancing up now and again to check the postures, the expressions, the chemistry of the group, furtively hunting for anything that could be pegged, judged.

We played along with it, Hilary thought, side by side through all the sizing up. And she could remember the anxiety, as the impatient seconds ticked by, filled with talking rather than the doing craved by every physique in the room. What did we know about each other? Only a hunch. And we both kept silent, poker-faced, made the same bet. That’s how it started. Over the gruelling months that followed, unimaginable sweat and exhaustion, they privately crept towards the commitment they publicly seemed to have made already.

Those girls knew how to do what they were told; Gwen quickly learned how to tell them. In no time at all, she vaulted upwards a level in the team hierarchy, practically a coach herself. But she did the same training as the others. She was knitted into the boat by it, felt the challenge. And Hilary, at stroke, remained her inward captain. Setting the beat, silently communicating to Gwen what was physically possible – how quick, how long, how many – and Hilary had to make it happen, bring the other seven with her, pull their oars in time with Gwen’s commands. Gradually, Hilary and Gwen took complete possession of one another; it had to work between them or the whole boat failed. The adrenalin of the training, the races and victories, worked on them like a drug. They flew on it, face to face in the back of the boat.

‘Don’t you ever feel sorry about leaving early?’ Hilary asked. ‘Missing our last year?’

‘Never.’

‘I remember it as if you had been there, you know? That other girl who coxed after you, senior year. She was fine. But it wasn’t the same. She never mattered.’

Gwen felt hit by this. But she fought it. ‘Maybe I was there enough, if we both have such good memories. Maybe another year would have been less intense.’

‘I just mean I can’t picture her face, that girl. I can only picture yours, shouting abuse.’ Hilary laughed. ‘You were unbelievable, Gwen. If we could have harnessed your willpower –’

‘If you could have harnessed my willpower, maybe I wouldn’t have left!’

‘You had us all completely under your control, Gwen. Your face was all I could ever see out on the river – my whole world was inside the boat. You could see all of us and the race, all the other boats alongside, out in front.’

‘Other boats were never out in front for long, babe; you guys saw them all, too, once we passed them!’ Gwen barked out, ‘Power ten,’ and sprinted away in front of Hilary along the path, playful. But then she slowed down sheepishly and waited.

‘It was a pretty big surprise,’ Hilary said, catching up with her, ‘you going off with Lawrence. Actually leaving the country. Like the boat, in a way – because to me, it felt as though I had my head down over work, over the school slog, and it turned out that you were looking around and seeing so much more. Seeing all the possibilities.’

‘I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, Hil. If you ask Lawrence, he’ll tell you. I wasn’t as sophisticated as you might think – trying to pick up some visiting professor.’

‘You went to his office hours. I would never have had the nerve.’

Gwen laughed out loud, broke stride. ‘Well, that’s what they’re for – office hours! I refuse to be embarrassed by that.’ And she laughed again. ‘You were no shrinking violet, Hil, shacked up with Mark by the end of freshman year as I recall. Maybe otherwise you would have had more nerve. Give me a break! I had questions for Lawrence. Who else was I going to ask? I hated what I was doing, and he guessed – I’ve told you that? Wrote it on one of my papers: “You seem to hate Pliny. Why are you doing this?”’

‘Probably you could sue for that now,’ Hilary chuckled.

‘Yeah. And how could suing be better than falling in love, dropping out, running away together?’

‘It seemed so womanly and grown-up – or no – old-fashioned. That’s what surprised me. Because we were all such tomboys, you know? The romance between you and Lawrence was something someone would do who wore skirts to class, or who wasn’t in college at all. Like something out of the 1950s, or even the nineteenth century.’

Gwen was a little stunned, irritated even. ‘Why? Because he was English? I’m still a tomboy. Look what I’m wearing.’ It was true; she had on men’s track shorts made from heavy, dark blue cotton, probably ten years old, a once white T-shirt turned grey with washing, holes under the arms and along the edge of the neck band where the material had disintegrated with use and with sweat. It was all far too big for her. ‘Not exactly a gym bunny’s exercise outfit. Not a stitch of Lycra. I’m out here to sweat, not to vamp anyone.’ She turned her head and looked Hilary up and down as they passed the Barn Elms boathouse.

Hilary was wearing a shirt she had borrowed from Mark and never returned; she looked at it now, smarting with dismay. And she had on skintight black stretch leggings, cropped at the knee, about which she self-consciously observed, ‘I think the high-tech stuff is OK if you actually exercise in it. I know people go around in sports stuff as a fashion thing, at least in New York they do, and it looks like a state of undress. Running around town in pyjamas. But if you sweat in them and ache in them, you get to love them, like anything.’ Next she said, ‘Maybe I just never got the difference between a tomboy and an actual boy.’

‘I found out the difference when I had Will – what a shock – that made me realise I was a girl. Man, I fought it – needing help. Needing anything at all. Maybe you’ll be better prepared than I was. But sometimes I think our whole generation is confused about it. Did we think we were boys? I swear. Do you remember how, when all the schools in the States were going co-ed, it felt like we could go to college anywhere we wanted? And the real girls went to the women’s colleges where they could be girls together, but the ones of us who went to the men’s colleges – we went as boys. Hiding our femininity. Why did we do that?’

‘Because the women’s libbers were so goddamned embarrassing.’ Hilary coughed up a laugh. ‘So political, so filled with vengeance, so covered with hair. And because the only company they were ever going to have was each other’s.’

‘But if we wanted to pull men, why didn’t we just become cheerleaders?’

‘Didn’t you have to be from the Deep South to do that? Surely it never crossed your mind? Anyway, pulling men – on purpose?’

‘You’re right. Never.’

‘So you see what I mean about you and Lawrence … ? It looked like the real man-woman deal. Like something in a French movie. Adult. Or I guess it would have to be an English movie – one of the Michaels, Caine or York, or Charles Dance – with the wounded, pale-eyed glamour and the Shakespearean voice.’

‘Lawrence has been telling me you have a thing for Englishmen.’ Gwen smiled, thinking of Roland, dark as he was, his shambling brilliance.

‘You and Lawrence started a whole mythology. We were awestruck. I was anyway.’

There was a little pause, their outbreaths whinnying, their shoes skiffing more lightly over the paved road as they passed the long row of boathouses at Putney: Vesta, Westminster Boys’ School, Dulwich College. There were flags fluttering, powerboats and dinghies on wooden trailers outside open doors, boats moored along the waterfront, a jaunty, maritime air.

‘But we were adults then, on the verge of it,’ Gwen said at last.

And Hilary asked, ‘Do you think we’re getting too old to be tomboys?’

‘Jeez. I haven’t got any other self-image handy. Can’t start primping now. I don’t have time.’ Gwen’s tone was arch. After another pause, she said, ‘Besides, Hil, the sort of guy we were interested in wasn’t attracted to a woman already spit-shined and curled on a tray, fully cooked. Maybe we were embarrassed. Maybe we were being defiant. Or maybe we were saving the potent thing – like for a rainy day. For a man we really wanted. The gem in the rough – do you really want it cut, faceted? Cool was wearing the most disgusting clothes you could find because you knew you could dress up if you ever wanted to.’

‘If you ever met a man you really wanted,’ Hilary said sardonically. ‘But, yeah. Maidenliness – it’s girl macho, isn’t it? Too easy if you use sex to get a guy. Any girl can use sex. Maybe even love is too easy. I got stuck there for ever with Mark – good friends who have sex on the side. The best I can say about it now is that it was completely reliable.’

This observation produced a brooding hiatus. They became a little separated as they threaded their way among the passers-by on the narrow pavement leading up on to Putney Bridge. The traffic swelled and crashed remorselessly; then they ran down on the other side among the faded roses at the edge of the grounds of Fulham Palace.

Gwen started in again with something bland and positive. ‘You look better anyway than you looked then. I guess you know that. Your hair looks better, too.’

‘We didn’t have haircuts in those days, did we?’

Gwen laughed. ‘I still don’t have a haircut.’ It was loose brown strands around her shoulders, some straight, some wavy, no obvious parting, fairly tangled, not even tied back to go running, wind-whipped, dark with sweat underneath.

‘Mine doesn’t cut anyway, even when the hairdresser uses scissors.’

‘But among ourselves, we were comrades, hey, Hilary? That was a good thing about those days. How we were friends?’

‘Not a lot of girls around, really. You had to be comrades.’

‘And no rivalry.’

‘Competition,’ Hilary objected.

‘It’s not the same. Remember the girls who came from wherever on the weekends? They had haircuts. Hairdos, even. How they were desperate for dates – to get engaged before they graduated. And only the pretty ones had a prayer. That was rivalry. Completely poisonous.’

‘It’s funny, though, how when you left –’ Hilary paused.

‘When I left?’ Gwen was waiting for a revelation, which she thought might be something funny; maybe Hilary and their classmates had all begun to pay great attention to their hair or to their dress during senior year. But what she got was more of a spear thrust.

‘It – felt like the ultimate move. That’s all. Finished us off.’

Just then, under the long canopy made by the old London plane trees lining Bishop’s Park and spreading without restraint over the paved embankment towards the river, they came up behind a woman walking with a baby in a pushchair. The baby was five or six months old, bright-eyed, alert, sitting up facing the woman with a little white blanket tucked up to its chest, its arms free and waving about sturdily with the joy of its ride and the excitement of the dappled golden light moving before its eyes. The pushchair bounced and lunged, its wheels catching against the blocks of the pavement, which were lifted at harsh angles here and there. The baby lurched forward then back, laughing and gurgling, as the woman strode steadily, wearily on along the green-railinged river.

‘Hello,’ said Hilary, stepping around the pushchair.

‘Hey,’ breathed Gwen.

But the woman said nothing as they turned and glanced at her. She stared ahead, into her baby’s eyes, vague-faced under fair, bedraggled hair, blue circles under her own eyes, half smiling, bearing it.

When they were out of earshot, Gwen said, ‘She needs a good night’s sleep. I can remember being exactly like that with Will.’

‘What – a zombie? You have to tell me more about Will.’

‘My ultimate move?’ Gwen let the sarcasm sink in, but then she softened. ‘It was just like that, you know. He was my cox. That woman back there, me, any mother – we’re all galley slaves. You force the pushchair over the ruined paving, over whatever. Anything at all to keep the boat moving. The baby gives all the commands, shouts, shits, steers – whatever. Nothing else seems to matter. You can’t hear the world, don’t notice your husband. I guess from the baby’s point of view it must be like trying to control a giant: the monster mother. Scary. Uncertain. Which is maybe why the baby is so ruthless in its demands. And you submit to it. Willingly. You throw yourself down, betray the man you love, whatever it takes – to please the child. It’s a big deal. It’s crazy.’ She looked sideways at Hilary, half smiled with the slack corners of her heaving mouth. ‘I’m ranting, aren’t I?’

Hilary said, ‘We’ve been out a while. It can happen – with the exercise.’

‘Now. We have to go around this,’ said Gwen, gesturing up to high white walls and fences marked Fulham Football Club.

On they ran into the silent neighbourhood, between the staring front windows of empty, midday houses, a deserted newsagent’s, then weaved back once or twice to the north bank of the river, past outdoor lunches on pub terraces and gleaming café tables, laundry hanging out to dry, phlox spilling its clash of fuchsia over dark brick balconies above their heads, then at last back into the traffic, in rhythmic delirium, tired, surviving.

CHAPTER 4

The growing feeling of comfort between Hilary and Gwen made it seem easy, in the end, to sit down for dinner with Lawrence and Roland a few days later. Gwen didn’t have to insist.

Will was still orbiting around his mother in the kitchen as she turned on the pair of gas burners underneath the shiny, submarine-shaped poaching pan, unwrapped the salmon, poked at the little potatoes rolling about in their cauldron. He managed to make himself the centre of everyone’s attention for a good half-hour after Roland arrived with Lawrence, so that the jittery business of greeting, introducing, pouring drinks, was made even more chaotic than usual.

Will had a stacking top: five individual tops which could be made to spin as one if they were wound up and dropped in precisely the right way – accurately, quickly – before any of them stopped spinning. One by one, hosts and guests got down on the floor, giggling, absorbed. Nobody could get beyond three tops piled up and spinning at once – until they started helping each other out. Gwen was fastest at winding the tops, but Will had the surest touch for stacking them. The little group fell silent when mother and son got four of the tops going together. Then Will, his heavily lashed green eyes hooded and still, dropped the last tiny top on the whirling stack. The sharp point of the big, fat top at the bottom buzzed loudly like a little drill against the polished wood as the stack leaned ever so slightly and began to inscribe a slow hard arc across the floor, moving faster, becoming more and more unstable, alarmingly angled. At last it shot under the kitchen table, struck one of the legs and blew apart.

A deflationary ‘Oh …’ seeped from them all, the air going out of their game.

Then Hilary cried out, ‘Look, they’re still going!’

‘Cool!’ squeaked Will. Because three of the tops had landed upright and went on spinning separately, moving freely over the floor.

‘Centripetal force,’ Roland observed in his deep, imperturbable voice.

‘Dead cool,’ Gwen said, smiling, rising to her feet. ‘We can do it all again tomorrow. Time for bed.’

She made no move to enforce this, but walked away to the stove, stuck a fork into the potatoes to see if they were cooked, then hefted them from the burner to the sink and poured the boiling water away.

Will grabbed up his tops, which were wobbling now as they spun themselves out, and took them to his father. ‘Daddy, will you wind them up one more time? Pu-leeeze?’

And so Lawrence did, and the game began again, but with more tension now that bedtime was looming; everyone’s hands were stiff and unsuccessful with it. The tops racketed crazily around the room, under the chairs, under the table, and Will fired the smaller ones carelessly at the bigger ones like bombs, laughing hilariously until he collapsed on the floor. His five-year-old stomach and its irresistible plughole of a belly button bulged unguarded where his striped pyjamas separated at the waist, and he was made the victim of a tough tickle from his father’s big, relentless fingers, until he was overcome, and screamed, ‘Stop, stop.’ His legs kicked ferociously as he lay on his back; his arms flailed and swatted.

Lawrence stopped.

Then Will screamed, ‘Do it again! Do it again!’ tears showing along the corners of his grin.

Gwen slipped the fish into the simmering pan and replaced the long lid. ‘C’mon, you guys. Bed.’

As Gwen moved with Will towards the door, Hilary said, ‘I could read Will a story?’

‘Do you want to?’ Gwen turned, grateful.

‘While you do the fish?’

‘The fish is OK, actually,’ said Gwen. ‘It has to cook for a few minutes.’

Will said, ‘I want Mummy to read me the story.’ He took hold of Gwen’s hand.

‘It’s going to be a short one, Will, since we’re having dinner.’

‘Two short ones?’ he said engagingly.

‘I can do the fish,’ said Lawrence. ‘And I’ll send Hilary to you in ten minutes if you haven’t reappeared. Don’t worry, darling.’

‘The spinach soufflé is in the oven. Keep an eye on it.’ Gwen had a foot on the bottom step.

‘G’night, Daddy,’ said Will, tipping a half-cupped palm in the air, a stilted wave, suddenly shy.

‘Night.’

The group in the kitchen, milling awkwardly around the table and the stove, turned back to the subject Roland had raised with Lawrence during their drive from Oxford to London – the question of whether Lawrence should be taking so much time from his big book on Greek and Roman slavery to be pursuing what Roland reckoned was a pretty tenuous connection between the Satyricon and Les Misérables.

Roland sidled up to Hilary, winking, conspiratorial. ‘I’ve been warning Lawrence off trying to be popular. He’s brewing up a scholarly piece on Les Mis. You must have seen Les Mis? Everyone has.’

‘Les Mis?’ she said, round-eyed. ‘The musical? I – well – I read the novel, years ago. But I don’t know any of the songs.’

‘You needn’t know the tunes,’ Lawrence assured her, tearing brown paper off a round, crusty loaf of bread. ‘Roland’s faking. You haven’t seen it, Roland. Own up.’

Roland’s chin shot out; his face reddened.

In the burning silence that ensued, Lawrence opened his case, with a kind of polite indifference, to put Hilary at her ease. ‘You remember the convict, Hilary? Jean Valjean? Tries to steal a loaf of bread – just like this,’ and he whacked the bread down on a wooden cutting board by the sink. ‘For this audacious, antisocial crime, he is sentenced to five years’ hard labour.’ Lawrence crumpled the paper showily with one hand and tossed it into the bin which stood lidless nearby. ‘He begins his sentence in tears with an iron collar riveted on around his neck. Might as well be a slave, you see? Just my sort of thing.’

Hilary was silent, eyes on the floor, conscious that Roland was watching her, and that she hadn’t responded to his opening gambit in the way he had evidently hoped she might. That she had failed even to recognise it as an opening gambit. She felt herself being caught up in somebody else’s argument, and she didn’t want to reveal sympathy for either side. Lawrence is only trying to be kind to me – that’s what she would have liked to say to Roland – he wouldn’t sideline his own friend on purpose.

Lawrence went on, gently but tenaciously, with his performance. It was irresistible to him to try to capture whatever youthful, feminine attention was in a room. ‘When he is eventually freed, the convict soon steals again.’ He reached for a bread knife, unsheathing it from the wooden knife block with a dangerous flourish, high in the air, eyes aglow. ‘But this time he steals from a bishop who has the power to free him physically and spiritually – by forgiving him. And as a sign of his forgiveness, the bishop gives the convict two silver candlesticks.’

Hilary looked up almost involuntarily and said, ‘I remember that.’

Lawrence cut into the bread with energy, the toothed blade scoring loudly through the crust and sinking into the doughy middle, rasping and biting all the way down to the powdery surface of the well-hacked board. He cut another slice, then stopped and looked about the room as if he had forgotten something. He spotted a pair of pewter candlesticks on the Welsh dresser, walked across and collected them with a package of long white tapers from a shelf above, and set them at the centre of the table among the place settings. ‘Perfect,’ he said, spreading his palms in the air over it all and smiling with satisfaction. ‘Maybe you’d put in the candles?’ he asked, handing them to Hilary.

‘You’re an atheist, Lawrence; surely Hugo was not,’ Roland grumbled. And he stalked off a few paces to sit down by himself on the sofa.

Lawrence ignored him, still smiling. He lifted the lid of the poaching pan ever so slightly with the corner of a spatula, looked at his watch. Then he began opening and shutting drawers, hunting. ‘Jean Valjean keeps the bishop’s candlesticks, despite the risk that they will eventually reveal his criminal past, just as Trimalchio – you know the Satyricon too, I suppose, Hilary? Being a classicist?’

Hilary looked guiltily towards Roland, then back towards Lawrence who was snatching and slamming at the drawers, rattling spoons, flaunting dish cloths, all the artillery of his domestic power. She fiddled with the package of candles, finding a way in through the cellophane, and nodded reluctantly, curious in spite of herself.

‘Well, I’m sure you recall that Trimalchio keeps by him the candelabrum which once belonged to his master, despite the fact that it marks him as a former slave. Just like Valjean’s candlesticks, you see?’

She approached the table, twisted the tapers into the sticks, straightened them.

‘The candlesticks and the candelabrum are mementos,’ he said, ‘– symbols, if you like – of the greatest moment in their lives: the moment of being freed.’ There was an easy comedy in his voice, as if he wasn’t insisting.

‘But Petronius writes nothing about this!’ Roland expostulated. Up he stood again. ‘You are importing modern psychology into a text of which only fragments survive in any case. Where is the documentary evidence for what you say? Or any evidence at all? Are you forgetting that Trimalchio is not a real person?’

Lawrence turned away from the oven door where he was crouching to peer through the glass at the soufflé, his hands cosied in the two halves of an oven mitt. He smiled at Hilary as she stood tangled between himself and Roland. ‘Petronius gives us extravagant detail! Trimalchio does nothing but celebrate his freedom. Hideous as he is, he becomes rich and he feasts – for ever, as it were – and in his own vulgar way. Feeding the appetites pent up in him as a slave.’

‘We have one of the collars,’ Hilary said. It burst out of her, as if it were proof of something. She lifted her eyebrows, surprised at herself. There was a little silence.

‘Collars?’ Roland bristled at her.

‘A slave collar. Made of bronze. It’s inscribed, so we know it’s late antiquity. Early Christian period, fourth century. Found in Italy. I’ll tell you what –’ She paused, turned from one to the other of them and then raised her hands towards her neck, resting her fingertips on her collarbone, squinting a little in dismay. ‘Sounds weird, but I put it on one time. It has a piece missing.’ She held out her right thumb and forefinger, about two and a half inches apart to show the size of the gap, then rested her fingers back on her collarbone.

‘I tried it with Eddie – Edward Doro.’ Her hands moved ever so slightly as she recalled the stiffness, pulling the collar open wider, whether she would snap it, how the ragged edges scraped her skin when the two of them nestled it into place. ‘It’s surprisingly delicate, actually – thin, like the leather strap you’d put around a dog’s neck; it’s not like you couldn’t get it off if you were determined. It would have been more – well, also a symbol. Even with the tiny rivets soldered into place. Which just shows how completely the slave was resigned to the whole system, his place in it. A kind of settled, polished arrangement. It’s almost unbearable to imagine –’

‘Imagine. Exactly.’ Roland pounced in triumph. ‘Why would any slave resist a master who could torture him, have him crucified? Or have his head put on a spike along the road? Where was a slave to run to even if he didn’t have a collar? The empire was monumental. You can’t go around imagining history.’

But Lawrence pounced back. ‘How the bloody else are we to understand it? It’s not as if it’s still here around us!’

Roland smiled, an artful, curling smile. He came towards the table, tut-tutting, reached for the white wine and poured himself another glass. ‘Yes, yes. All right. But judicious use of same. In any case, these collars are a very late phenomenon. And by the fourth century, a freed slave didn’t become a citizen of Rome, did he?’

‘We have two or three branding irons, too,’ said Hilary grimly.

‘Touché,’ said Lawrence. He was rinsing parsley at the sink, shaking water off it with a snap of his wrist. He reached across the counter and flung a few droplets on to the flame of the gas burner where they made a sizzling sound. ‘As it were.’

They all laughed.

‘Give it up, Roland,’ said Lawrence in a congenial tone. ‘We’ve scored a hit for the imagination. No history without it. No nothing, in fact.’

Hilary looked compassionately at Roland, and she said under her breath, uncertainly, ‘What I meant was, imagine if you had to wear the collar yourself. It’s degrading. And you feel that. Even though it is only a symbol of something else – real power, real servitude.’

Roland took a step towards her, holding his wine glass in front of his face, half obscuring it. ‘You have to forgive us. We go on at each other like this all the time. It’s part of our brief.’ He looked down at his shoes, sipped the wine.

Lawrence set the basket of sliced bread on the table. ‘Oh, yes, the brief. Nowadays we’ve got to fill out endless paperwork. What we plan to publish in the next five years – daunting to say the least. The whole department gets a grade. To ensure we’re on to something worthwhile with our work, contributing to the gross national product. And they set our colleagues on us: Haven’t we got something ready to go, something tucked away we could bring to print?’

‘They are around our necks, speaking of collars, all these bureaucrats with their research assessment procedures,’ Roland said contemptuously. ‘What are we up to? they keep asking. Forgetting they have given us the nation’s youth, and that some of us are devoted to teaching, which is, after all, very time-consuming. Otherwise it’s, What do we need? What do we want? How can they make us happy? They should bloody well go away. People need to think life through for themselves or they don’t learn to care about it. The state is mothering everyone to death.’

‘I’ve taken on Roland as a mentor,’ said Lawrence with amiable disdain, clueing Hilary in, ‘and he defends me from the entire process of assessment.’

Roland giggled. He leaned towards Hilary and said, ‘Or maybe we should say, Lawrence has taken me on as his mother – in this post-feminist era. We’ve all been turned into women, really. Oxford dons, the government, whatever. The men, the fathers – their time is gone.’ He smiled and said to her with zest, ‘You’ve won.’

Hilary was taken aback. ‘Won what? I wasn’t fighting for anything.’ She felt strangely embarrassed by his pronouncement. She sat down at the table and Roland sat down opposite her.

‘I had a mentor,’ she said, as if admitting to a character flaw. ‘Edward Doro. He died, and I’ve been at sea ever since.’

‘That’s bad news,’ Roland said. ‘I mean – forgive me. What happened exactly?’

Lawrence knew all about it from Gwen, but he was intrigued now to hear it straight from Hilary. He drew a little closer to the table.

But for a moment Hilary didn’t say anything because she was wondering why it was that everyone she met in England assumed she was fighting for something, something of which she herself was unaware. Paul had seemed to think that she had an agenda of some kind. Were Americans more complacent than the English? Were they insufficiently political about day-today matters? Or is it me, she pondered, who has failed ever to become conscious of having any particular ambitions? Roland assumes I’m a feminist just because I’m a woman. Maybe I ought to be a feminist? But she and Gwen had agreed: it was out of the question for them, for a whole swathe of girls back in America, girls of their moment, of their type. Had she somehow misunderstood what it was, feminism? Had she received the benefits without signing up for the cause?

She looked up, sensing their expectation, wondering how to begin to answer Roland. ‘Edward Doro collected antiquities and so that’s what he taught me how to do.’ She lifted her palms in the air, apologetic, self-deprecating. ‘It was amazing – being with someone who always knew what he wanted. And who always got what he wanted – at least in the way of objects.’

She dropped her eyes, picked up a knife from the place setting in front of her, turned it end to end, idly, watching the gleam and flash of the blade, pacing herself. ‘I got so that I could tell, actually, when he was going to go after something. Even from photos. And so when he was old and he couldn’t really get out, he’d send me to look. And – it worked.’ She put the knife down, lined it up straight along the side of the blue straw table mat. ‘My eyes worked fine for him.’ She sighed.

Suddenly she fixed them directly on Roland’s, then away at Lawrence’s, and announced with matter-of-fact energy, ‘So, he left me to curate his collection, and I know exactly how to do it, but I’ve maybe wrecked my chance. Because I don’t know anything about life. There you go.’ Again she lifted her palms, the shrug of regret. ‘What book could I have read to find out how not to screw up when I’d been handed everything on a plate? It was like an inheritance for me – or like the candelabrum you were telling us about, Lawrence, given to me after a long apprenticeship.’ She wrapped a hand around the base of one of the pewter candlesticks. ‘How could I squander that?’

‘Maybe you don’t really want to look after the collection?’ Lawrence suggested mildly.

‘Oh, please, you’re just like Gwen, telling me I didn’t want to be engaged either.’

Roland flinched at this. ‘You were engaged to him?’

Hilary laughed her boisterous laugh, and she looked at Roland with friendliness for the first time. ‘God, no. That’s an entirely different saga. Though not unrelated, I can assure you.’

Roland’s heavy brows went up.

Before he could ask any more, Lawrence sat down with them, intervened. ‘Seriously though. Perhaps you don’t want to be a curator? It’s not the same as collecting. Conservation, fund-raising, exhibiting. A public, institutionalised profession. It’s about caring for something – as in the Latin – it’s not about the hunt.’

Hilary relented. ‘Sometimes the hunt came off Eddie like a smell –’ she tapped her fingertips together under his nose as if there was something on them, savoury, dripping; narrowed her eyes, spoke intensely – ‘this insistent – this urge to – get something. To possess it. The strange gratification. When he was like that, he couldn’t think about anything except how he was going to do it. Any scheme, no matter how complex. Money was not a problem. It was persuading people to part with things. Oh –and the agony he went through when he wanted an object that had no provenance! He wouldn’t let himself take a chance that something might be pulled out of the collection later if it turned out it had been stolen at some point or illegally exported.’

Roland and Lawrence were hanging on her every word. When she stopped talking there was a silence. To fill it, she said girlishly, with forced nonchalance, ‘It’s weird. Our whole partnership was about planning for death, but of course, you have no idea what that really means, dying, until the person’s done it – moved on to wherever. I knew his mind so well – for me it still exists, in my head, and in his things.

‘You’ve ruined the fish,’ wailed Gwen, rushing in down the stairs and across to the stove.

‘No, darling, I took it off. Don’t worry. It’s perfect.’ Lawrence stood up, pointed at the big white china platter on to which he had delicately transferred the salmon. ‘It’s under that foil. It’ll still be warm. I had to take the soufflé out; it was getting brown. But look – it hasn’t fallen.’

Gwen gave him a look of sweet relief, nodded thanks without smiling.

He took pity on her. ‘Poor you. I promised we’d rescue you after ten minutes. We got caught up in what Hilary was saying. But Hilary will say it again, won’t you, Hilary?’ He turned back to the other two at the table.

Gwen smiled, patted the air down with her palms, quietening him. ‘OK, OK, the goddess is appeased.’

She didn’t admit that she had lingered in Will’s room just because she felt content there. Why should she resent it if her party was going well without her? That was the whole point, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been able to hear their voices from upstairs, but she knew they were hard at it, finding out all about each other. And they had probably only found out things she herself already knew.

‘What about lighting the candles?’ she asked.

Lawrence stood up. ‘I couldn’t find any matches.’

‘The stove?’ Gwen suggested.

So he lit one candle from the gas and then held it against the other wick until they flamed up together.

Gwen switched off the lights. ‘Maybe everyone come serve yourselves?’

As they scraped back chairs, dished food, Lawrence announced in a non-committal tone, ‘I think Roland taught this Paul fellow with whom you’ve been – working. Quite a young chap, is he?’

Nobody spoke. Gwen uncovered the potatoes and dropped the saucepan lid on the stove with a stupendous crash.

‘You mean Paul Mercy?’ Hilary said loudly, as if it should be obvious to them all. She put two potatoes beside her fish, and they rolled clumsily until they hit the soft mound of spinach. She levelled the plate in both hands, sat down. ‘You’re the one who taught him, Roland?’

‘The one? To be sure, others will have taught him as well.’ Roland cut off a large piece of salmon. ‘Did you never teach him, Lawrence?’

‘Never even met him,’ Lawrence replied. ‘Know nothing at all about him apart from what I –’ he slowed ‘– hear.’

‘Isn’t he – I mean, Lawrence, was this to do with the post you were asking around about in the Easter vac, or maybe Trinity term. Last spring? And I suggested Paul, and I believe it was Clare Pryce, and I don’t recall who else? Old students of mine, to be sure. All of them.’

The conversation was suspended, everyone waiting for someone to say something, to acknowledge some mysterious chain of connections by which they all were linked and of which they none were entirely aware.

‘Gosh,’ Lawrence muttered. ‘I suppose I –’

There was another silence. Was anyone to blame? Had someone committed a crime? Were they all still on the same side?

‘I gave you his name, didn’t I?’ Lawrence said contritely, looking sorrowfully at Hilary. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I had no idea he would prove to be –’

‘So irresistible?’ Hilary demanded. ‘Come on, it’s not your fault. The guy knows his antiquities.’ Her voice was raw, defensive and aggressive at once.

‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ Lawrence said sympathetically. ‘But after all, a reference from friends. We ought to have been able to vouch for him personally, somehow. We ought to have –’

‘I interviewed him,’ said Hilary, bold, sarcastic. ‘It was never a requirement that he subscribe to any particular code of conduct. That he be straight, marriageable, a match made in heaven –’

‘Still, it’s hardly professional –’ Lawrence was grasping for some way to ease her pain, to let her off the hook.

‘On the contrary. He behaved perfectly correctly. I was the one who lost my cool, wasn’t I?’ She seemed to be challenging him with her toughness and her hurry, insisting on keeping control of her own story, rather than be its pitiable victim.

‘But the way you tell it, or Gwen tells it, he sounds rather – slimy. There’s some level there of false ingratiation. And – something –’

He looked at Gwen, but Gwen was just as bewildered as he was. She only nodded. ‘He’s doesn’t sound like a nice guy,’ she observed lamely. ‘Not – forthright. I think – pretending to make friends – what is that? Leading you on. He knew. I’m sure he knew. After all, women are always getting blamed for that kind of behaviour – using their looks, their feminine wiles, to get what they want.’

Hilary nodded, suddenly speechless, self-conscious.

And Roland leaped in, in a schoolmasterish voice, summarising the merits and demerits of Paul. ‘He’s clever, of course. Very good company. But lazy, really – unless he’s outgrown that. Quite a high opinion of himself – presumed he’d go far, I reckon. And he could do. Impressive grasp of detail, very strong sense of style. Gifted with languages. Even as an undergraduate, he had several ancient and modern ones.’

‘Gifted with languages,’ Hilary echoed, dry-mouthed.

Gwen knew just what Hilary was thinking – that Paul had lied about being lousy at Italian.

‘Hardly a historian, and certainly not a philosopher,’ Roland went on, unstoppable. ‘Not that I ever taught him philosophy. Could have done anything he set his mind to, really, but he used to tell me that he hated talking about definitions and logic. Called them puzzles. Disdained Aristotle, Plato, metaphysics, ethics – plain old good and evil. What happens happens is what he would say. Capable of memorising anything he read, but didn’t want to think too hard. Not joined-up thinking. Text-based history suited him fine, but he wasn’t much with analysing a problem. Useless with an economic model; he’d tell you what every pottery shard looked like, who made it, where it came from, based on certain visual qualities, but never get on to caring or understanding how the pottery trade might have worked in a pre-capitalist economy. Equally, the coins to him were lovely bright objects to collect and admire. He has the mind of a connoisseur really, an aesthete. And for ever stuck in the one-damn-thing-after-another school of thought. What, honestly, is the point of that? Life as a series of accidents? I take it, Hilary, that has somehow included you? Some – accident?’

‘An accident,’ Hilary breathed. She gave a tight chuckle, feeling that Roland was scolding her, taking her to task for having failed to see what she was dealing with in Paul. ‘You seem to have the nub of it.’

Gwen thought, I’ve never seen Roland being so pompous, so cold, so unbelievably condescending.

Lawrence was diligently working his way through his plateful, head down, shovelling it in. ‘Maybe he was quite happy to achieve some hold on Hilary,’ he said with his mouth full, chewing. ‘Maybe he did do it all deliberately. C’mon, Hilary, stick up for yourself. You mustn’t let Roland be hard on you. Maybe Paul was after your – inheritance. Your candelabrum.’

Once again, Roland went red, realising he’d crossed some line. ‘Do forgive me. I have no intention of being hard on anyone. And I don’t think you should let Paul Mercy get the better of you. He shouldn’t be allowed to – hurt your feelings. Or anyone’s feelings for that matter.’

Gwen caught Lawrence’s eye across the table as she poured sparkling water and he poured more wine. She was thinking that Roland, in some ghastly, awkward way, was trying to cheer Hilary up. She felt certain that Lawrence was thinking the same. She gazed at Lawrence, half smiling, considering that wine on top of fourteen years of marriage dissolved any barriers between their minds, that he knew even now what she was thinking as she thought it: that all this bluster was Roland’s idea of gallantry, cutting Paul off at the knees, reducing him to a slip of an undergraduate figure, a schoolboy even, truant, with a lost homework assignment.

What is it with these dons? She wondered if Roland’s efforts would succeed, looking at Hilary, looking at Roland. Surely Lawrence would never stoop so low, belittling a rival? Or were all men like that?

And now she heard Hilary starting in on how ridiculous she must have seemed, throwing herself at Paul.

‘Here,’ Hilary cried out, flushed with wine. ‘Have my heart.’ And she made a gesture, like throwing something down on the floor. ‘Stomp on it for me.’

Oh, don’t tell these stories against yourself, Gwen thought. She felt, suddenly, that the evening was destroying Hilary’s morale. It’s the tone of voice – abject, self-abasing. Come on, Hil, Gwen was thinking. You are not such a loser as all that. And why, why, tell Roland so much about the broken engagement. I mean not with such gusto. It’s my fault, Gwen considered. She warned me, Not yet.

‘Maybe Paul was somehow intrigued by you – authentically,’ Lawrence proposed. ‘Maybe he felt comfortable knowing nothing need happen between you. There are plenty of men like that, gay and straight.’

‘And are there plenty of women like that?’ asked Hilary, open-eyed.

‘Plenty of women?’ Lawrence echoed. ‘For whom nothing need happen?’ He felt strangely pinned down by her, targeted, and he found himself stuttering, ‘No,’ then, ‘I don’t know,’ as it came over him that he had always presumed that women were not comfortable unless something did happen. Not a wise presumption, he advised himself. Yet he felt certain that it was true for this woman: something would need to happen for Hilary to feel comfortable. Lawrence felt it distinctly.

Roland turned away just then from Hilary. Gwen felt his attention shift with a snap, like the mainsail of a boat going about in a stiff breeze. The weight of the evening fell towards her heavily, life jackets, picnic bags sliding down across the cockpit. He began to ask her about her upcoming exhibition.

‘I’ve banned my dealer from my studio,’ she announced. ‘It’s not until after Christmas, and he’s already sold a piece. Had it shipped to Aspen to some movie producer. That was sort of – withering.’ She hunched her shoulders up around her neck like a vulture, curled her fingers together in front of her face, miming avarice. ‘He arrives from New York with this big black portfolio, peers at all the canvases, scavenges little scraps of drawings lying around. There’s a lot of money on offer. The figures are going way up, which starts getting inside my head, right inside my imagination. Once I’m done with the paintings, OK, I’ll want them all out – instantly –’ She waved her hand imperiously. ‘But I work back and forth from one to another and I need them all together until they’re finished. You don’t want someone buying your flat, really, if you’re still living in it. Even though you might need the money. You want to find your new place first, where you’re going to live next.’

‘Same with books,’ Roland murmured as if to himself, chewing, ruminating, so that Gwen had to sit up close to hear him. He swallowed, bent his head towards her, spoke more clearly, his lips near the curve of her cheek. ‘I never tell a colleague, or even a student, something that I’m writing about; it’s only natural for them to try to use it before I can publish it. Anything we say aloud – it’s up for grabs, isn’t it? Anything at all. But on the other hand, we writers don’t really have to part with our books. Not like paintings. Everyone can have a copy of a book. More that the publisher worries nobody will want one.’

Gwen laughed at this. ‘My dealer’s pretty commercial,’ she confided. ‘American. You’d think I’d want big exhibitions and the high prices. But I feel a little pushed. A little packaged. Who are these clamouring millionaires? I need to paint without worrying about what sells; otherwise, I get on this roll that isn’t my own. I hit one thing that someone really goes for, and I know I could do it again, and there’s a lot of adrenalin there, and maybe even a temptation – a kind of challenge to please some supposed audience. But then, what would I really be doing? Are they hot for just whatever it is I’m producing? Or am I producing something they’re hot for?’

She whirled her fork through the air. ‘Sometimes I think I might have to run away from it, back to the country. So I don’t become part of something dreamed up by other people. But right now, the work’s OK. There’s a lot happening fast. More coming. I can’t stop. You’d have to pry my brushes out of my hands.’ She gripped the fork hard, making a fist.

Now Roland laughed, a murmur in his chest, pleasure, interest, leaning down towards her. ‘Part of art?’ he asked, as if she knew what he meant. And when she looked bemused, he went on, ‘To please the audience, to give them pleasure? Nowadays all parts of our culture are infected by a kind of marketing mentality. Even Lawrence. What do the people want? That question shapes everything – politics, education, health, transport. But can one ever be right in thinking one knows what the people want? And do the people want the right things in any case?’

Gwen poked at a nearly invisible fish bone on her plate, pushed it to the very edge, and without looking up said dreamily, almost as if she were thinking aloud, ‘When I’m out in the landscape, looking, or even just being there, I don’t think of any of that. It’s something else – something that carries you right out of yourself, out of normal experience. Like some loophole you can get through in time, where it’s slower or deeper – and actually real –’

‘That’s quite a palatable form of religion – nature worship. But quite primitive, eh? Pantheism, Wordsworth, the Druids. A sense of awe before the natural world? What about mankind, Gwen? What about civilisation? Or God, for that matter. Far more complex and intriguing.’

‘What about God? What are you saying?’ she demanded, sitting right up into the flow of his talk. ‘I’ve copped out? Picked the easiest subject matter?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Roland said, smiling a smooth, almost syrupy smile, as if he were stroking her mind to quiet it. ‘You’re a painter after all.’

This was worse. ‘So it’s painting that’s not good enough for you? What is wrong with this country, that painting isn’t anything? And you’ve had so few great painters!’

He fell silent, looking confused. Then he said, ‘Your paintings please me enormously. And I think art should please; it should be beautiful. Marketing, after all, is a lowbrow commercial name for something that has always been going on – and going on for perfectly good reasons. I like to see you think hard, that’s all. You could do anything you wanted to. You might be more thoughtfu—’ he corrected himself, ‘more analytical – if you were pushed to it.’

‘Watch your step, Henry Higgins!’ Though she joked, Gwen was hurt. I reveal something personal, she thought, and he comes at me with that arrogance. Why does everything have to be an argument or a theory supported by evidence, a proof of something true or untrue? Who the fuck does he think he is?

Roland looked at her, down at his plate, at her again. Gwen sensed that he wanted in some way to apologise. She glanced at Hilary, wondering how the evening seemed to her, safely chatting with Lawrence.

‘Of course I have my own favourites,’ Hilary was saying, eyes on the hem of her napkin which she was folding and unfolding on the tabletop. Then she leaned a little towards Lawrence’s reply.

‘You won’t ever be content if you let someone else get their hands on those. Will you?’

‘I don’t talk about it. It’s not really appropriate to have my own opinion about the collection.’ Hilary was demure and self-contained.

‘But that’s ridiculous!’ Lawrence offered friendly outrage. ‘You must have your own opinion! How can you ever have been a student of mine and not have an opinion? You must summon some nerve and tell me what it is! I’m longing to hear it!’

Hilary’s cheeks darkened with his enthusiasm.

That’s more like a conversation, Gwen thought. And it dawned on her that Roland was hardly coping with life away from Oxford. He was stuck after all in the tone of voice, in the useless style of put-downs and sparring. Roland only wants to please, she thought. Wants to be noticed and admired. But he doesn’t know how to give ground. He doesn’t believe as much as he pretends to believe in anyone else’s vitality. He just knows how to question.

Tonight he had a chance – in theory, he had a chance for love. And he blew it. Before he even got into the room. He’s the one who recommended the heartless Paul to be Hilary’s assistant. So he’s taking revenge on me as well as on Hilary. He won’t even risk considering whether or not he likes Hilary, or how he ought to talk to her; he’s just leaving her to Lawrence. He must have failed at this a hundred times, agonisingly, and he’s trying to prove to us that he doesn’t care – about women, about romance. Which shows that he’s terrified. Gwen saw it all so suddenly and so clearly.

Oh, she thought with pain, he doesn’t set out to hurt. He only needs someone to encourage him. To straighten his hair and spruce him up a little. Then he could shine. It occurred to her that, until tonight, she herself had been able to bring out what was generous and alive in Roland because she wasn’t a chance for love. She was already taken; with her, he was safe from failure, and so with her, he succeeded.

As she thought of this, she looked up at Roland with such warmth, such forgiveness, that he blushed brick red, almost purple, like a bruise, and the blush made a bond between them, a certain understanding. She could easily be the one if she cared to; he’d admitted it. It made the insides of her nostrils burn with surprise; she felt a flush of energy in her chest. She looked over at Hilary again, thinking, this should be you, Hil. And yet she felt a furtive pleasure that Hilary was still deep in conversation with Lawrence.

Gwen smiled a long easy smile at Roland. She felt gratified. She liked knowing she could be the one with him. She liked considering him as if she were single like Hilary. It was a long time since she had looked at a man with unmarried eyes.

When they talked about it, getting up the next morning, Gwen thought the party had been something of a success.

‘Of course it was,’ Lawrence announced. ‘Everyone there was completely remarkable. What a privilege to be in the room with such people. And oh, the pudding!’ He kissed his fingertips and tossed them in the air, then went back to scouring his teeth, toothpaste foaming from his jaws.

Gwen laughed, squeezing in at the sink. He had devoted himself to the store-bought chocolate cake.

Hyperbole often characterised Lawrence’s most serious statements. It was like a superstition with him, making fun. He feared to value anything too much in case he lost it.

‘But what do you mean by success? You want Roland to ask her out by himself?’ He shook his head.

‘You don’t think he will?’ Gwen whined a little, feeling mocked.

‘With the wound of Paul that he and I inflicted on her? It’s too much to expect him to make that up to her. Anyway, darling, you’re the one he wants. He doesn’t want her!’

She made an astonished face. ‘Come off it, Lawrence. He wants a woman who will make sacrifices for him. You remember he told us that once? I don’t make sacrifices for anyone!’

‘You make sacrifices for Will every thirty seconds.’ His voice trailed away as he went through the hall into the bedroom.

She scoffed at the mirror, spat into the sink. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

Lawrence reappeared, buttoning his shirt, grinning devilishly. He watched her reflection over her shoulder and she watched, too – watched him, watched herself. Then she blushed, more from shyness than anxiety. They both knew he had a point, but it did them no harm at all, this tiny gratification she had enjoyed, Roland’s attention. They laughed a little. It wasn’t serious. It was like being caught eating ice cream straight out of the carton with the freezer door open; she felt slightly embarrassed. Why not sit down, have a bowlful? But a chair and a bowl would formally acknowledge the appetite; a chair and a bowl would make it impossible to pretend that the ice cream wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even really being eaten. As good as being caught; so who was kidding who? It was a delicate torture, to remind them both how intimately Lawrence knew her appetites and her sensibility.

As for Roland’s admiration, Lawrence found it appropriate. It was further celebration of Gwen. Roland wasn’t anything Gwen really wanted; Lawrence was sure of that. It enchanted Lawrence to surprise his wife as she tasted something she didn’t really want; he loved the pathos of her inability to resist, and he felt a surge of strength in knowing she was his. ‘Poor Roland’ was what Lawrence really thought, but he didn’t say it aloud.

He leaned down and around to Gwen’s cheek, kissed her fondly. ‘I’m not suggesting that you should sacrifice anything for Roland.’

‘Hilary would make sacrifices, though,’ Gwen burbled. ‘That’s what she’s good at.’

But then she wondered uncomfortably, What kind of sacrifices? What kind of pleasure would Hilary have to forgo? Some deeply personal and necessary joy? Gwen remembered the sting Roland had administered with his comments about her private religion. What about mankind? she wondered. How could anybody drag her mind back from where it preferred to go? From its habitual satisfactions? In order to consider mankind? She felt angry at Roland, and she pushed the thought away.

‘Maybe Roland thinks he wants a woman who would make sacrifices. But frankly, my dear, that’s so last century.’ Lawrence paused to savour the absurd trendiness of his witticism. Then he affected a more earnest voice, ‘Don’t you think he’d lose interest in someone like that? Walk all over her, use her up, throw her out? He ought to have a wife who could challenge him, amaze him. Do we know anyone that good? That tough?’

Gwen squirmed a little, knowing whom Lawrence had in mind. He reached for her chin, tugging at it in his cupped fingers, pulling her into his control. It was possessive, somehow tender, as if he wanted only to remind her of something.

‘So, OK,’ she conceded. ‘Matchmaking’s at least as hard as painting. For me, maybe harder, since I don’t know yet how to do it.’

‘I should think,’ Lawrence agreed. He nodded, brooding, then added, ‘It’s a case of getting it exactly right once and once only. With painting, the more ways you can find, the more interest. And anyway, the paint lets you do it. But the people?’

CHAPTER 5

Gwen’s studio was at the top of the house near the light. Already the autumn days seemed remorselessly short. Even if she didn’t stop for lunch at all, the light didn’t last as long as her appetite for work. She had ways of addressing this. She had systems, artifices, and she was always devising new ones.

Lately, she had one big, square canvas set on an easel directly underneath the vast skylight in the middle of the room, and another two wide, rectangular canvases facing the long window running across the back. Around the middle of the day, she usually worked on the square canvas underneath the skylight. Since it was October, the sun’s zenith barely achieved the top of sky, and, even at noon, the light slanted in at an angle. But for a little over an hour, the quality of the light remained almost steady, so that the colours, as she worked them, held their value, ever so briefly, ever so precariously, and allowed her to see what she was making: a vista of dropping emerald meadow at midsummer in broad day.

Of course the light from her city skylight was nothing like the gradual passage of limpid sun at the cottage in June. But it didn’t need to be. The meadow was a memory, a vision lodged in her mind long since. Gwen worked from what was in her mind. Catching what she could excited her for the hour or so that she tried. And she relished the time pressure because it reminded her of the transience of the scene at the moment that she had beheld it, of the urgency then of seeing it.

It wasn’t a picture of a summer day anyway. It was an experience of moisture – clumps of grass that harassed her ankles or were dazzled by the wind as separated blades, trees caressed by mild English clouds along a tamed horizon, a festival of birdsong. In full summer, the English countryside always looked to Gwen pleasant, accommodating, long in use. Like a well-pillowed drawing room in nature, it was inviting, cultivated, but without any roof. She meant the picture to convey this, and yet while she painted, her mind dipped from time to time into something wilder and more crude that she half remembered from the brilliance and unbearable energies of her childhood in America. And when her mind dipped, deep, backwards, she would think, England is not like that, England is like this, making an implicit comparison; it was as if the scene she was painting held down some other scene and covered it.

On the pair of canvases by the back window, Gwen was doing something else, equally temperate, more mysterious: a pond in the woods, cloaked in mist, at dawn. And beside it, the same pond later in the day as the mist burned off so that the pond shone among the close-growing trees like phosphorescence. She liked to work on the first of these canvases very early in the morning, when the light from the window still reached long and low into its dank grey-green washes.

She would fetch the big wooden palette which she left tilted against the wall overnight to keep dust from clinging to the wet paint, and she would prod the little turds of colour with a small brush, with a knife, and with another, bigger, once white-haired brush, feeling how the colours had ever so slightly begun to seal themselves over in their sleep, like chrysalises around caterpillars. They would spread their wings, flatten out on to the palette as she waked them. She would snatch a brush into her mouth, clamp it there with wiry lips, tasting the white spirits she had cleaned it with, select another brush and another, until several bristled from her left fist as she narrowed her eyes again at where she had left off. She had hundreds of brushes in the studio, almost as many knives, stuffed upright into jars, flowerpots, pitchers, tin cans, all sizes, all shapes, each brush looking bleached and waterlogged as if it had rolled around the bottom of the sea, been abraded by sand, by surf, drifted ashore in harsh sun.

The sable hairs of her smallest brush would nip and sway at the soft mounds of Davy’s grey, Payne’s grey, burnt umber, terre verte, cadmium green, indigo, yellow ochre, probing the caches of colour. She would poke at the palette as if at a baby’s meal, mix and blend the tiny portions in dabs, deliver them with the delicate fingertips and the anxious poise of a mother’s hand towards an upturned mouth, then wait to see the effect before she offered more. On a clear day, the shafts of light reached closer and closer to the canvas as the morning wore on, and until Gwen herself moved on to the second canvas, where the mist was rising to reveal glimpses of brown and even purple reflected in the surface of the pond and ballasting the trees, bright yellow at their tops where the mist thinned to mere wisps, lifted in threads. The pond itself looked eerily on the move, as if through time, as if emerging from the past.

While she worked on these bucolic scenes, Gwen was mesmerised by their completeness, and she would think only from time to time of Will or of Lawrence – an instantaneous drift of face before her mind’s eye, amounting to a serene recognition: They, too, exist, separately, safely. But lately, more and more continually, she thought of Hilary. Hilary didn’t seem to be a discrete, settled fact; she not only existed but also suffered. Hilary was in turmoil, in trajectory, in a state of need. She was not constant; she was changing. Gwen saw Hilary clearly – wrinkles of fretfulness striking harsh verticals through the thick, pale flesh at the top of Hilary’s long nose, between her forthright blue eyes.

One lunchtime not long after the dinner party, Gwen put down her brushes, flexed her shoulders, filled the kettle with water for coffee. The light was already hardening into the yellow-grey scowl of a smoggy London afternoon. She stared into the stained enamel sink, iridescent with wear like an old tooth, blue-black around the paint-clogged drain. She would fight it, she resolved, the premature onset of twilight. Will had piano after school and Hilary had offered to pick him up. Still time for the meadow. And what else?

She leaned back against the chipped edge of the Formica counter, the kettle roaring and spitting behind her. Around the sides of the room stood canvas upon canvas, a few with their pale wood stretchers and blank backs showing titles scrawled in black across them, others facing forward, one or two in trial frames, offering glimpses of a season, a time of day, a mood of nature. Her sketchbooks, warped and fattened with changes of atmosphere – raindrops, sun, the baking edge of the Aga at the cottage – lay here and there on the spattered workbench, the fridge, the disused cooker; one or two were propped open like tents so she could glance at them as they stood up with their wire bindings across the top. They served to remind her of what she had wanted to capture about a particular time in a particular place, like a diary of her intentions towards the paint.

A rickety panelled screen zigzagged halfway along the bed. On the floor one of Hilary’s big black suitcases lay open, her linen skirt limp over one edge, her Lycra running tights over another. Abandoned like that, the clothes seemed to Gwen poignant, vulnerable. They had pressed so near Hilary’s skin that they might have been part of Hilary herself, her chosen outline, not her assigned one. But she isn’t fully conscious of making an outline, Gwen thought. Not of how she looks or chooses to make herself look. And here they lay, her garments, with white flecks of Hilary’s sloughed-off skin invisibly clinging to them, her odour and her sweat swelling each thread of the fabric ever so slightly, making it more airy, lighter than if the clothes had been newly laundered, dried, pressed. From all the way across the room, Gwen could see how intimately the fabric portrayed Hilary’s person. Hilary who was always so unconcerned about such things. If her knickers, her bra, had lain on top of the pile of her clothes, even in a locker room, a public changing booth, she wouldn’t have noticed, wouldn’t have paused to fold them inside and conceal them, wouldn’t even have turned them right side out if they were wrong side out. Was this really a woman? How like a boy, thought Gwen, a young boy. She noticed that among the pungent smells of the studio – white spirits, oil paint, linseed, sawdust – she couldn’t, in fact, smell Hilary.

Next to the suitcase, Hilary’s black nylon briefcase leaned against the bed, the pockets all unzipped, a laptop half in, half out. Plastic sleeves holding typed sheets and photographs spilled from one side. Doro’s collection, Gwen thought, crossing the room, bending down to flip through the files, slithery in her hands.

Amphorae, kraters, statues, friezes, the likes of which she herself had once pored over with painful concentration. It gave her a start, their familiarity and their strangeness. How we both loved all this, she thought. Hilary still does; this is where she really lives, where she is at home. Is this something she should have to sacrifice? Slow-footed processionals and naked ceremonials, wars and games and crafts, kissing, killing, dancing, marrying, offering, giving thanks. There were human figures, animals, ritual fires, wreaths, gods, heroes, centaurs, satyrs, once known by name to Gwen, all poised in their long-ago occupations and obligations. Ideal bodies idealised – orderly, savage, in draperies, in helmets, in wings, in chariots, their white-ringed eyes sightless. The statues stood free and trance-like in their three dimensions, inky bronze, white marble, battered grey stone; the painted figures were silhouetted against red backgrounds, like the earth they came and went from, or, on the later vases, against black backgrounds, like the eternity of night into which, as they told, time carries everything.

Try something like this under electric light, thought Gwen. It can’t change, so the light won’t matter. It’s not as if I ever experienced any of it as a natural world to begin with.

She decided on a tall, slender, two-handled black vase with red-gold figures, and she laid the sleeve with its typed notes on the counter while she measured coffee grounds into her little cafetière, poured in the boiling water, stirred it. Then, leaving the coffee to draw on the ridged steel draining board next to the sink, she slipped the photograph from the sleeve to see the figures on the vase more closely: a wedding procession, mostly women, their hair bound with leaves, with linen, their golden earrings dangling, their gowns crisply pleated, their maidenly eyes downcast, their noses and their backs long and straight as they trod, following a man and leading a bullock, towards the longed-for state of marriage. How chaste a scene, Gwen thought, remote, inviolable.

One woman, the most maidenly, the most downcast, was carrying a vase exactly like this vase on which she was portrayed.

‘Loutrophoros,’ Gwen muttered to herself.

For there was the name of the vase shape typed across the top of Hilary’s notes. Carrier of washing water. A vase as awkwardly tall and thin as a leggy girl – easy to sweep off its foot, narrow-necked, but with a wide, inviting mouth which was shaped almost flat like a plate to catch and funnel precious liquid so that none might be spilled. Did they mean it to seem like the way into a womb? Gwen wondered. This was the vase in which they kept the sacred water to purify you for marriage, or for your funeral if you died without marrying. Undamaged, like the virginal belly it suggested. Maybe it had been unearthed from a grave, buried with a maiden still unmarried at her death, and that’s why we have it whole.

So what does that tell us about marriage for them? Gwen wondered. Right up there with death? They stayed at home with their children, they kept house, cooked and sewed. Submissive, hemmed in. Didn’t get out much to chat to Alcibiades over a kylix of wine and water, or to throw javelins at the Olympic Games. What choices did they have? Gwen wondered. She simply couldn’t imagine having no choices. They must have had ideas, sensations, plans. What did they sacrifice? They left nothing behind in words. On the other hand, neither did Socrates. We have only what the others recorded. And he was the Master of them all.

She put the photograph back into its sleeve, poured out coffee, thinking of Hilary, wondering whether this part of Doro’s collection was to be kept or sold, wondering how much Hilary minded. I might catch something before it’s dispersed, preserve it. Hilary might like that. She remembered eighteenth-century engravings by Piranesi. Earlier ones by Dürer, Goltzius. And handcoloured things in books. The self-styled Baron d’Hancarville’s illustrations of William Hamilton’s collection of antiquities. Tischbein’s. There was John Flaxman, the sculptor. Fascinated by Herculaneum, Pompeii, she thought. Lots of people were. Or much later, Beazley, the Balliol scholar, sketching vase after vase, making tracings, developing his method.

She merely fussed over the meadow, distracted by Hilary’s face, by the vase, and by the little offering she had in mind to make from it. It wasn’t long before she leaned her palette up against the wall, stuck her brushes in a jar of spirits in the sink, and began to sort through the bottom drawer of the mammoth brown chest that stood against the radiator.

She found a newish sketchbook; it was a good size, eleven by fourteen, with porous paper. She struggled with the drawer for a while, kneeling, lifting, pushing against its swollen groans. The weight was all on one side – clinking hammers, small saws, chisels, tacks. Needs rearranging, she thought, abandoned it gaping, and laid the sketch pad down flat on the workbench. Her hinged green tin box of watercolours was on top of the chest. She sharpened a pencil and stood over the photograph, calculating proportions. Then she sketched the geometry of the vase with swift strokes, thinking, To copy on to the shape of the vase a scene which contains the shape of the vase is called mise en abyme. First the potter, then the vase painter, now me. She felt the giddying pull of it, the palimpsest reaching right back through time, as if it were something she could dive into. I can lose myself in this, she thought.

She pulled up a tall stool and sat against the edge of it. As she outlined their forms and their faces, Gwen no longer wondered at all about the women on the vase. It didn’t seem to her as if the women had ever been real. She could remember that when she had been a student, her professors liked to discuss what could be found out about life in, say, fifth century BC Athens, by looking at what was depicted on a vase. Social history on the side of a ceramic object. She didn’t believe such a scene could be real. It came from inside someone’s head. The very place where people part ways with so-called reality.

What she believed was that the clay was real and that whoever had made the clay into a vase was real and that whoever had painted the decoration on the vase was also real. Otherwise it was more like decoration on an Easter egg: it was what the maker had thought of on the day – a pattern, a momentary conclusion, at best a recollection. This might look nice, the painter had thought. Pleasing his eye, pleasing his patron, pleasing his master if he was a slave. But whenever Gwen had tried to discuss this with her professors they had always explained in a remedial tone, Ah, but the Greeks weren’t like that. They weren’t interested in self-expression. They were craftsmen. And she had always wanted to insist, No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about self-expression. It’s just a practical fact about making something. It’s how it happens, if you concentrate at all. You have to abandon what you really

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