When she had recovered her composure, she glanced at her father and said, with a certain note of reproach in her voice, ‘I didn’t realise that you got Mummy from a catalogue.’
Rufus found this amusing. ‘A catalogue? No, it was hardly like that. After I saw her picture in the magazine I got somebody who lived near her father to get me invited to a do they had. That’s how I met her. Of course there were lots of other men all about her and I had to join the queue, so to speak.’
‘Daddy!’ This was unbearable. That her mother should have entertained advances from anybody but her father was inconceivable. How could she? It was almost as if she had discovered that her mother had a history as a courtesan: talked about by men; the subject of heaven knows what dark ambitions and fantasies.
That was where the discussion stopped. Caroline had discovered enough about the expectations that might be raised by the publication of her picture - which had already been taken - and she decided to contact Tim Something and get him to withdraw the photograph. She did not want a husband - at least not yet - and she certainly did not want people to think that she had agreed to have her photograph featured in this way purely for that reason.
She telephoned Tim Something. ‘That photograph,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to use it.’
‘But it’s great. They liked it a lot. That picture of you standing next to the monkey-puzzle tree in your old man’s garden. Fantastic. Have you ever thought of modelling? I know a guy in London who’s always on the look-out for likely vict—subjects. I could do a few portfolio shots. You know the sort of thing. You looking into the middle distance. You smiling. You’ve got a great smile, btw.’
She began to shout, but then calmed down and spoke more evenly. ‘You’re not listening to me,’ she said, adding, ‘btw. I said that I’m withdrawing my consent. You know what that means? No. Nyet. Nein.’
It was a moment or two before he replied. ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What do you mean too late?’
‘I mean that they’ve made up the magazine. It’ll be ready for printing.’
Caroline drew in her breath. ‘Then they’ll just have to stop,’ she said. ‘I’m withdrawing my consent.’
‘Too late,’ he said. ‘Really. It’s just too late.’ He paused. ‘Of course you could get them to over-print it with a sign saying Sold. That’s what they do with houses that are off the market by the time the magazine goes to press.’
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ she hissed.
‘No,’ said Tim Something. ‘Just helpful.’
7. Proustian-Jungian Soup
Caroline thought: It’s odd, sitting here, letting one’s mind wander, and who should come into it but Tim Something, of all people. Strange.
She had not seen him for two years; her photograph had appeared in Rural Living during her last year at Oxford Brookes and then there had been the gap year in New Zealand looking after the children of a family who lived in Auckland (whose fifteen-year-old son had made a pass at her; fifteen!). Now here she was doing her Master’s in Fine Art, sitting in a lecture on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and a photographer whom she barely knew - and rather disliked - suddenly came into her mind. It was odd, but that was how the human mind was: a Proustian-Jungian soup of random memories and associations.
Proustian-Jungian; she rather liked the term, and might use it in one of her essays. She was overdue with one of them - a discussion of influences in Veneto-Cretan painting - and she was finding the going rather difficult. There was a literature on the subject but a lot of it was in German, and Caroline’s German was almost non-existent. She could ask the way to the station, perhaps, in that language, and had indeed once done so in Frankfurt, only to be answered in perfect, almost non-accented English. But when it came to influences in Italian art, it was a different matter.
The Proustian-Jungian line would certainly help. She had been looking at a photograph of a small Veneto-Cretan treatment of the birth of the Virgin Mary, a popular theme in the art of the time. In this painting, the Virgin Mary’s mother was lying in a large four-poster bed, across which a rich, brocaded green cover had been draped. The mother was composed, and was being served a tray by a serving girl, next to whom was standing a saint, his halo providing a measure of illumination for the eating of the meal on the tray. In the foreground a group of angels stood around the newborn babe, who was, curiously enough, already standing, at the tender age of a couple of hours, although admittedly lightly supported by another serving girl, or early au pair perhaps.
It was the reading of the painting that was all-important, and only the naive would see this painting as being simply about the birth of the Virgin Mary. There was far, far more to be gained from looking at it closely, but . . . what exactly? That was the difficulty.
Her thoughts, however, were interrupted by the voice of their lecturer, who had pressed the button to bring a fresh slide to the screen. Thoughts of the Veneto-Cretan were replaced by thoughts of the Dutch Golden Age and the significance of light.
‘These paintings,’ said the lecturer, a small man in a velvet jacket, ‘are really about water, because whenever a Dutch artist paints land, he is really painting land as seen through the water that suffused the very air about him. It is this omnipresence of water that gives to the light of that period its particular quality. As we see here in this landscape by Pieter de Hooch. See. Here and here. And here.’
Caroline felt herself becoming drowsy. It was warm in the lecture theatre, and she had woken up rather early that morning. The Dutch light, she felt, was soporific; it had perhaps had that effect on de Hooch as he sat at his easel all those years ago.
She felt a gentle dig in her ribs. ‘Don’t go to sleep,’ her neighbour whispered. ‘Poor Dr Edwards will be very offended if he sees you. But he is boring, isn’t he?’
She half turned to the young man sitting beside her. He had started taking notes at the beginning of the lecture but now appeared to have stopped. James was a special friend of hers; they often sat next to one another in lectures, lent each other notes, and went off for coffee together. He was easy company, amusing and undemanding and, most importantly, quite unthreatening to women.
‘I can’t help it,’ she whispered back. ‘His voice . . .’
James patted her forearm. ‘Quite. But listen, I need to talk to you. Have you got a moment after this?’
‘Of course.’ She hesitated. ‘A problem?’
He put a finger to his lips. Dr Edwards was looking in their direction. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Afterwards.’
At the end of the lecture they left the lecture room together, abandoning a small knot of members of the course who wanted to take up with Dr Edwards some point about the Dutch Golden Age. Coming out of Bedford Square, they went into the coffee bar off Tottenham Court Road where, at any hour of the day, they knew they could always find a table.
‘So,’ said Caroline. ‘What’s up? Have you got an interview? Or even an offer?’ James was applying for jobs at various galleries and had been passing on to her the woes of his fruitless quest.
He shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. Actually, this is a personal issue. I don’t want to burden you . . .’
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Who’s your best friend on this course? Me. And what are best friends for? To be burdened. So . . .’
He looked at her gratefully. ‘I couldn’t talk to anybody else about this,’ he said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing . . . well, it’s not the sort of thing I’ve found very easy to talk about. Ever.’
She nodded. ‘I can imagine . . . Not that I know what it is, of course, but if I did, then I’m sure I’d see what you mean.’
James toyed with the spoon that the barista had placed beside his caffe latte. ‘It’s not easy.’
‘No.’
‘Well, you see, it’s about me. About who I am. About what I feel.’
Caroline looked at him encouragingly. ‘For most of us, that’s quite an important issue. Yes?
’
He looked at her. ‘Caroline, you do know that I’m . . . well, you know that I’m . . . you know . . .’
She laughed; this was hardly a disclosure. James, after all, had admired the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke - more than once. ‘But of course. And so what? Surely that’s not an issue.’
‘No, it isn’t. Except that . . . well, except that I think I’m not . . . you know.’
Caroline frowned. ‘You’ve just discovered that you like . . . girls?’
James sighed. ‘Yes. I think I may be straight. Here I am at twenty-two, committed to art history, and discovering that I may be straight. How bad is that?’
‘Now, that is a problem,’ agreed Caroline.
8. The Merits of Italian Wine (or some of it)
While Caroline sat in the coffee bar with James, listening to his unexpected and unsettling disclosure, William was busy taking delivery of a large consignment of Brunello di Montalcino, eighteen cases in all, of which seven were already promised to clients and three were semi-promised. A semi-promise was where the client said that he would take something and the merchant said that he would set it aside, both knowing that neither meant it. Failure to take up a semi-promise had no consequences for the client but he could nonetheless treat such a failure as cause for minor umbrage - mild disappointment, perhaps, that something he might have wanted had been sold. But there were limits to this umbrage and if the merchant thought these limits had been surpassed, he could come back with a remark about making firm orders in future. Clients who traded in semi-promises did not like firm orders and would usually let the matter drop at that point.
William’s assistant, Paul, a young man of nineteen, was late that morning and came in to find William stacking the last of the cases of Brunello. William looked pointedly at his watch and then at Paul, who was dressed in the outfit that he wore every day - denim jeans and a T-shirt of a colour somewhere between grey and white. He wondered whether it was always the same pair of jeans and the same T-shirt, but it was difficult to tell. Paul seemed clean enough to him and was never, as William put it when commenting on the unwashed who appeared to circulate in London, ‘slightly off’. Indeed, Paul wore something, some cologne or aftershave, that had a pleasant, slightly sandalwood tang to it. William had once discovered a bottle of white wine from the Veneto which seemed to have exactly the same nose to it as Paul’s cologne. He had called out to Paul, ‘My goodness, Paul, this Italian white smells exactly like—’ And had stopped himself before he said you. One man - even a new man, which William would claim to be - did not comment to another man on how he smelled; there were taboos about this, and the most that any man could do of another was to wrinkle his nose slightly, or perhaps waft the air in front of his nose with a hand - a gesture into which all sorts of alternative and innocent meanings could be read.
But now there was the issue of time-keeping, rather than smell, and William looked again at his watch and then glanced at Paul.
‘Not my fault,’ said Paul. ‘Somebody on the District Line. Everything stopped.’
William rolled his eyes. He suspected that Paul’s excuses for being late were not always true; indeed he thought that Paul, for all his merits - and he was a willing worker - had little idea of the difference between lies and the truth. This suspicion had been aroused on a number of occasions, most recently when, in the course of a desultory conversation during a slack period in the wine shop, William had commented on a newspaper report about a government minister found to have been lying.
‘Can’t blame him,’ said Paul. ‘Poor geezer. All those journalists after him like that. Can’t blame him.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said William. ‘He is a minister of the Government. He should not tell lies.’
‘A few porkies,’ said Paul. ‘Everybody tells porkies now and then. Specially if somebody’s trying to get you.’
William found himself almost speechless. ‘Porkies!’
‘Yeah, porkies. What difference does it make if he says that he didn’t do it? Nobody’s been hurt, have they?’
William was silent for a few moments. ‘You don’t mind being lied to? You don’t mind? When you trusted somebody and then he goes and lies to you when you’re paying him your taxes . . .’
‘Don’t pay all that much tax,’ Paul had said, looking reproachfully at William. ‘If I earned more, then I’d pay more tax and maybe I’d feel a bit different. But as it is . . .’
Now, glaring at his assistant, William resorted to sarcasm. ‘You seem to live in a highly suicide-prone area, Paul. How many this year? Four? Amazing. Other people don’t seem to suffer from quite as many person-on-track delays as you do. Extraordinary.’
Paul shrugged. ‘Awful, isn’t it? You’d think that they might choose a time when people didn’t need to get to work. Why jump in front of a train when people need to get to work?’
William found himself being drawn into the exchange. He had started off talking about punctuality, but the conversation was entering deeper waters. ‘People don’t think about these things,’ he said. ‘They’re usually very upset. But let’s not dwell on that. There but for the grace of God go I.’
Paul looked at him in astonishment. ‘What?’
‘Never mind. It’s an expression that means, it could happen to anybody. They don’t teach you people anything these days, do they?’
‘I wouldn’t choose the District Line,’ said Paul.
William opened one of the cases of wine and held a bottle up to the light. ‘Look at this lovely stuff. You do know that they gave this to the Queen when she visited Italy last, don’t you? They had a state banquet and served Her Majesty Brunello di Montalcino.’
Paul stared at the bottle. ‘They could hardly give her Lambrusco.’
‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Paul,’ said William. ‘Lambrusco has its place. Not the sort of stuff that we get in this country, but the real thing. They make it around Reggio Emilia and Parma. And I’ve tasted some very fine examples of it in the past. Out there it’s much drier.’
‘It tastes like sherbet here,’ said Paul.
‘Perhaps. But that’s because it’s the sweet version. The locals drink it dry, and eat some fresh Parmesan cheese with it. It’s delicious.’
William replaced the bottle of Brunello in its case. At this point the telephone rang and Paul, being closer, answered. He smiled as he spoke, and William began to wonder whether it was to be one of those long personal calls that irritated him so much. But then Paul mumbled something and handed the receiver to his employer.
It was Marcia.
‘I’m coming round at lunchtime,’ she said, ‘with some very interesting news.’
‘What is it?’
‘You just wait.’
9. Marcia’s Idea
Although Marcia had a habit of parking her van half-way over the pavement, she had never been given a parking ticket.
‘The wardens are sweeties,’ she once said to William. ‘Or at least the male wardens are - in my experience. If you talk to them reasonably, they understand that you don’t mean any harm. It’s the female ones who are the problem. They’re ruthless. Fortunately, I’ve never had any dealings with them, but my goodness, they’re a bunch of frumps. Amazons. And they take out all their sexual frustrations on drivers - all because they can’t get a man. Not one of them, I believe, has a man. Can you credit it?’
William had smiled. He was used to Marcia sounding off about all sorts of matters, and used to discounting most of what she said. She was full of prejudices, but in spite of that he found her entertaining. Nothing she said was really nasty; untrue, perhaps, and extreme, but not downright nasty.
That afternoon, she parked her car immediately in front of the wine shop, in a spot where the council might once have considered establishing a paid parking place but in the end decided not to. It was just right, Marcia thought; it was a car-shaped space that needed a car, or, as in this case, a modest-sized van, and she was doing no harm in lea
ving the van protruding just slightly over the pavement.
‘There you are,’ she said, as she walked into William’s office at the back of the shop. ‘Was that the coffee you were putting on?’
‘No, not exactly. But I can if you wish.’
She lowered herself into the chair on the other side of William’s desk. ‘There’s a dear. Thank you. As I said on the phone—’
‘You have some important news to impart to me.’
‘Yes, I do.’
William busied himself with the coffee as Marcia began to talk. ‘Eddie,’ she said.
William stiffened slightly. ‘Eddie?’
‘Yes, Eddie.’ She paused, and looked at him across the room. ‘You were telling me that you were keen to get Eddie into his own place.’
William unscrewed the top of the coffee canister and sniffed at the contents. Smells. He was very sensitive to smell, and coffee grounds were one of his olfactory favourites.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Eddie is twenty-four now and I have been thinking about helping him to move on. There was that place in Kentish Town . . .’
‘You told me about that,’ said Marcia. ‘The one that had no kitchen and a front door at a forty-five-degree angle.’
‘Yes. Not the best of places. But he could have made something of it.’
‘But didn’t.’
William sighed. ‘No. He didn’t.’ He turned and met Marcia’s stare. ‘Look, Marcia, Eddie may have his little failings but he is my flesh and blood, you know . . .’
She held up a hand. ‘Of course he is. Of course. And as his father you love him dearly. I know that.’
William turned back to the coffee. Did he love Eddie dearly? Would it be possible for anybody to love Eddie dearly? William’s late wife had done so, but that was because she was his mother. Every mother loves her son dearly - or should. Even after the son has done something egregiously terrible - tried to shoot the Pope, or something equally awful - the mother would still love him. There had been that man, of course, who had shot the Pope; what must his mother have thought? Perhaps it would depend on whether the mother was Catholic or not, thought William. A Catholic mother might find her maternal affection stretched if her son did something like that. But then again, she would have remained his mother and might have argued, ‘Well, dear, you must have had your reasons . . .’
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