‘What isn’t true?’ said Flora.
‘About Jesus,’ said Nell.
‘Ah,’ said Flora. ‘Then we have a problem.’
‘So what if he isn’t real?’ Nell persisted. ‘What if it’s all a real lie?’
‘And equally,’ said Flora, ‘what if he is real, and it’s all true?’
‘Well, how can you tell,’ said Nell, ‘whether Jesus is really real, or not, then?’
‘You have to see for yourself,’ said Flora. ‘Each of us has to make up her own mind. Yes, Thomas, or his. That, as a matter of fact, is the whole point. One has to decide for oneself, as best one can.’
‘What do you think?’ said Nell.
‘I haven’t entirely decided,’ said Flora.
‘Then why do you go to church?’
‘To help me to decide.’
‘Do you have to decide?’ said Nell.
‘On the whole,’ Flora replied, ‘I do believe one does. One way or the other.’
‘Why?’ said Nell.
‘Because,’ said Flora, ‘there are two possible worlds, the one in which Jesus is real, and the one in which he is not, and it actually does matter which of these two worlds you believe you’re living in.’
‘Why?’ said Nell.
‘That is another of those questions you have to think about for yourself,’ said Flora. ‘If I gave you my own answer, it would be cheating.’
‘When do I have to decide?’ said Nell.
‘Whenever you can,’ said Flora. ‘But probably not until you’re a fair bit older, actually.’
‘That’s good,’ said Nell. ‘Can we go skating after lunch, Mum?’
‘We’ll see,’ said Flora. ‘We’ll see how your father feels.’
‘I’ll go and ask him,’ said Nell.
‘And you can tell him that lunch is almost ready,’ said Flora.
But Simon happened to come into the kitchen at this juncture, in quest of the gin. ‘Time for a quick pre-prandial?’ he asked Flora. Nell put her proposal before him. Of all the appalling ideas: the Queensway ice-rink. But then he remembered that Gillian was away this weekend. The idea was still fairly appalling nevertheless. He bit on the bullet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But no falling over and breaking any bones, okay? I just couldn’t stand the hassle.’
Janey came in, and learned what was afoot. ‘Can Amaryllis and Katie come too?’ she asked.
‘Oh, I suppose so,’ said Simon with mock weariness. She went away to telephone each of them and returned with the news that Amaryllis, but not Katie, would be of the party; when could she expect to be collected from her home in Holland Park? Simon gave Janey a time and she returned to the telephone. What an absolutely bloody brilliant father I am, thought Simon. And he meant it, every word.
73
‘Here I am.’
‘At last.’
‘I got here as soon as I could.’
‘Of course. Do you want anything?’
‘I might as well, since I’m here. Just a spritzer, I think.’
‘Coming up.’ Simon signalled a waiter, and gave the order.
‘I see you’re on the hard stuff,’ said Gillian.
Simon took another swallow. ‘Hard liquor,’ he said, ‘for a hard man.’
‘Golly,’ said Gillian. ‘You don’t say so.’
After they had finished their drinks and left the brasserie, and gone back to the house, and made love, he lay on his back and watched the columns of light sliding across the bedroom ceiling. I will never forget this, he thought. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked her.
‘Yes, everything’s just fine,’ she said. And he thought, it’s true, isn’t it? Everything is just fine. We understand each other. We know what we’re doing. It’s rare, that is: knowing what one’s doing. We’ve come through, he thought; we’ve made it. Equilibrium had been achieved. He glanced at the time: if he left now he might just catch Thomas. He stirred.
She came downstairs with him; as he passed the doorway to the sitting room he noticed Rupert’s orchid, still blooming. ‘Is that thing on steroids?’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Orchids do furnish a room,’ she said. And he suddenly apprehended—or believed he apprehended—how sparse, truly, her life was; how much, how utterly she needed him in it: because who else, truly, cared for her? Who else truly furnished her life? Rupert? Surely not. He was suddenly convinced that he was the only person really in her life, her only chance of an authentic connection.
He put his arms around her. ‘Friday?’ he said.
‘I may be held up,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we meet in the brasserie again—can you do that? Six-thirty-ish?’
‘I’ll be there,’ he said.
74
‘Everything okay?’
‘Yes, everything’s okay. Ish.’
‘Perhaps you’d better be precise.’
‘Wasn’t I?’
‘Insufficiently so.’
Flora shrugged. ‘What more would you like to know?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Simon, ‘the difference between okay, and okayish, would do to be going on with.’
‘I would have thought,’ Flora replied, ‘that it was fairly obvious that getting home in time to see Thomas is okay, and not doing so is ish: okay?’
‘Ish,’ said Simon.
Flora stopped stitching and looked up at him. ‘Perhaps you’d better be precise,’ she said.
Simon sighed. ‘Oh, God,’ he said.
Flora started stitching again. ‘Oh God our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come,’ she sang; ‘Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home.’ She couldn’t remember the words of the next verse, so she simply hummed, continuing to stitch the while. Simon stared at her, half irritated and half bemused, and sensing at last his irritation if not his bemusement she let the tune trail away and looked up again. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you haven’t forgotten about Friday, have you?’
‘Friday?’
‘Yes, that thing of Lydia’s, the private view.’
‘The what?’
‘You know, I told you—the invitation’s up there, somewhere. One of her mother’s painters is having his first London show. Some gallery in Mayfair—I’ve forgotten which; it’s up there anyway. You said we might go along—surely you remember?’
‘You don’t want to go to a thing like that!’
‘But I do. It would be fun.’
‘Honestly, Flora, what on earth’s got into you? A lot of lousy modern paintings, unspeakable people and undrinkable Chablis— you’ve got to be kidding.’ Flora said nothing, her face averted over her work. ‘Aren’t you?’ said Simon.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought it might be fun. It would be a change. We never go anywhere like that.’
‘Too right we don’t.
It’s not even as if we like modern paintings.’ ‘It’s not just the paintings,’ said Flora. ‘And anyway, Lydia could use a bit of moral support. After all, she’s more or less obliged to be there, but she won’t know anyone, except this painter chap, whom she’s only just met, if that much.’
Simon sighed. ‘Bloody Lydia,’ he said, but without force. Flora gave him a look but said nothing. ‘Well look,’ he went on, ‘why don’t you go along without me, then?’
‘Oh!’ cried Flora, ‘but that wouldn’t be nearly the same.’
Simon sighed again. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ he said; as if he meant it. And he all but did. ‘I really can’t manage it—not Friday. Not as it looks from here. What time’s the off? Six to eight sort of thing, eh? It’s impossible. You go along without me.’
‘I’ll see,’ said Flora in a small voice. ‘I’ll see if Louisa’s going, or Claire.’
‘There you are,’ said Simon. ‘One of them’s bound to be, if not both. You girls get stuck in there. You’ll enjoy it much more without me.’
‘I won’t,’ said Flora.
75
Simon was sitting with his back to the door when Lydia, with half a
n hour to kill in between visiting her Bayswater photographer and going on to the private view, came into the brasserie.
And Lydia, having taken so long earlier in the afternoon to dress for the occasion, apprehensive about it in any case, sitting down in the nearest available place—at a table near the door— wasn’t tempted, alone and self-conscious as she felt, to look around her, and might not have recognised Simon’s rear view if she had, but ordered a filter coffee (she didn’t want to mix her drinks) and lit a cigarette, and then stared out of the window at the passing crowd. This is the place I saw Simon and that blonde woman coming into that night, she thought.
And this was the moment, precisely, when she saw the woman herself entering the brasserie once again. For as Lydia herself had often quite carelessly observed (never quite believing it, in all its depth and import) London is a karmic sort of place. She watched, frozen, as the woman crossed the room; she saw, horrified, that the man who rose to greet her was Simon.
Her heart was still thumping as she sat in the taxi which was taking her to the private view; she still all but trembled with the shock. Their heads together, their hands clasped—there could be no doubt now that they were lovers: she, Lydia, had witnessed this thing.
There had been the woman’s apparent awareness of her furtive glances—which had consequently ceased; and at last there had been the worst thing of all, when, as she was leaving—casting one last almost involuntary glance in their direction—she had caught, very briefly, Simon’s eye in the mirror opposite which he was sitting.
She had looked away instantly, pretending utter obliviousness— acting the complete and disinterested stranger—and, having paid her bill, had sailed out of the brasserie, her back as straight as a rod, her head held high, sublimely, apparently, unaware; but trembling with shock, and even fright, her heart thumping, her mind in a daze. God, oh God, she was saying to herself; oh, God. She was still saying this, dazedly looking through the window, as her taxi bore her down Park Lane, the Friday night traffic loud and frantic all around her, the park a lake of black silence in the distance beyond.
76
‘And who, exactly, is Lydia Faraday?’
Simon was still quite pale with dismay. To have been seen— bad; but to have seen himself being seen—vile. An eventuality so dreadful that its import must be denied.
‘She’s no one, absolutely no one.’
‘Come now.’
‘No, truly. She’s just a person Flora—just someone Flora knew at Cambridge. She’s no one.’
‘All the same.’
He took her hand again. ‘All the same, nothing. I mean, she won’t say anything, or—anything.’
‘Are you quite sure about that?’
The thing was, Gillian seemed quite calm now. She leaned back and lit a cigarette; she was looking at him quite coolly; he could even have said that she did not entirely (or at all) believe him; that she was interrogating him. ‘Of course I am,’ he said impatiently. ‘I tell you, she’s no one. In any case, what did she see? Nothing.’
‘She saw us.’
‘What of it?’
‘Don’t you wonder what we looked like to her, sitting here?’
Simon was silent. His head was still swimming; he couldn’t think straight.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Gillian, very slowly, ‘that we’ve had it, my dear.’
It was too dreadful to be credible. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Simon.
‘You really don’t quite understand, do you?’
‘Understand what?’
‘What this really means. To have been seen, like this.’
‘As I keep saying, she saw nothing. I’ll fix her. Of course it’s an awful drag, but I’ll fix her.’
‘You mean you’ll tell her some plausible story.’
‘Nothing to it.’
‘You really don’t see, do you?’
‘See what?’
‘That having to tell some plausible story is as bad as bad can get. You know, never apologise, never explain—once you start doing either, it’s all up. I’m sorry. But it really is.’
And now at last he saw, hidden behind her apparent calm, beyond her relentless questions, the shock from which she too was suffering. He was appalled. ‘Let’s for God’s sake get out of here,’ he muttered; and they went back to her house, both silent and terrified of the pass they had reached. Here it finally is, Simon thought, as they walked down the early-evening lamplit street: here is the abyss. ‘Cold tonight, isn’t it?’ he said pointlessly. Inside the house they clung to each other and made love passionately, but it was no good; it really was no good; they both knew this, but it had become unthinkable that either should say so. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll fix old Lydia.’
‘Yes,’ Gillian said wearily. ‘No.’
77
Dazed, trembling, still—here now she was. Quickly, out on the pavement—pay the cabbie—go inside: never mind anything—grab a drink. Not the inferior Chablis foreseen by Simon, but a reliable South Australian Riesling. Well, naturally.
Here were all the usual liggers, all merrily talking their heads off, God bless them. She heard her mother’s voice in her ear, six years old, felt the maternal hand on her back: ‘You’re on, darling’; she felt the heat of the sudden bright lights after the nervous darkness of the wings. She was on, another bit-player, with all the self-consciousness of a star. She drank another mouthful of wine. The shock was subsiding and a light-headed febrility was beginning to take its place.
If only she hadn’t caught Simon’s eye—if only that. But if only she hadn’t, she wouldn’t, as she now did, know. And what she knew was too dreadful to contain. Here she was, nonetheless, containing it—so she supposed. Simon’s guilty glance: Simon’s found-out glance. Oh, Simon. Not simply wicked (if you wanted to be old-fashioned) but careless. Another mouthful, before she did her stuff here, and—oh, God. There was Flora.
‘Flora!’
‘We were afraid you weren’t coming!’
‘And Janey too! How nice.’
‘Simon couldn’t come, so I thought—’ ‘Yes, what a good idea. Have you looked at the paintings yet? What do you think, Janey? Are they any good?’
‘You can’t see them properly, there are too many people in the way.’
‘How true. Oh, there’s Claire. See over there, talking to Will Feather.’
‘Yes, we know—she ditched us for Mr Feather.’
‘Well, Claire has her row to hoe. That reminds me, I should hoe my own, I must pay my respects to the artist. I wonder which he is.’ Lydia looked around at all the English faces; it was hopeless.
‘I think that’s him over there,’ said Janey. Lydia looked: Janey was probably right.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ she said. It was indeed he: as she came closer she heard the quacking of antipodean vowels. She waited for a break and introduced herself. ‘How nice to meet you at last,’ she said. She was two glasses of wine down; was she overdoing it?
‘Gidday,’ said the antipodean amiably, ‘likewise.’
‘Well—’ said Lydia, ‘they’ve certainly got a crowd in tonight. Everyone’s here.’
‘Yeah, it’s beaut!’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance yet to see the paintings properly—so many people in the way.’
‘No worries; they’ll be up for two more weeks.’
‘Yes, I must come back during the day.’
‘You do that.’
‘Yes. Anyway, I do hope you’re enjoying London—but then I dare say you’ve been here before.’
‘Oh yeah, I have; it’s bonzer.’
‘Oh good.’
‘Yeah, I’ve been havin’ a beaut time.’
‘Oh, beaut. Oh, sorry—I mean—’ ‘No worries!’
‘Oh good. Anyway—where are you staying exactly?’
‘Oh, I’ve got a loan of a triffic flat in Notting Hill.’
‘Oh yes, Notting Hill.’
‘Yeah that’s right—beaut pl
ace.’
‘So you know lots of people here, do you?’
‘Oh, well, I know a few. I’ve met some more here. They’re bonzer people.’
‘Oh, are they?’
‘Yeah, right; triffic!’
‘Well, some friends of mine are here tonight who’d love to meet you—Claire Maclise, just over there—you see—’
‘Oh yeah, I’ve met her already; she’s beaut.’
‘Yes, I’m sure she’d adore to know you’d said that, I must tell her—’
‘You beauty.’
‘And then there’s darling Flora, just over there, Flora Beaufort—see, with the jeune fille en fleur, well, almost—’
‘Oh yeah I noticed her. Bonzer, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she is; as a matter of fact she’s rather clever, too, you know; she’s at St Paul’s.’
‘Oh yeah? That’s triffic.’
‘Yes, it is actually. Anyway, come and meet her, and Flora too.’
‘Righty-oh; that’ll be beaut!’
78
‘Where were you?’
‘Honestly, Simon. At that private view, remember?’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘Did you pay the babysitter?’
‘Yes of course I did.’
‘Good. Well, let’s have some stew. Could you light the gas under it, Janey? Not too high. You haven’t eaten yet have you, Simon?’
‘No, I was waiting for you.’
‘How sweet.’
‘Well, did you enjoy yourselves?’
‘Yes, it was beaut. ’
Flora and Janey both started to laugh. Simon looked from one to the other. They tried to explain the joke but he didn’t seem to appreciate it. ‘Honestly,’ said Flora, ‘he was just so funny. It was ages before we cottoned on that he was putting it all on. Well, quite a lot. Playing the Australian card. Really funny. What a shame you couldn’t come. It really was bonzer.’ Flora put the casserole of stew on the table, and they sat down to eat. ‘He thinks Janey’s beaut, too,’ she went on. ‘He said, that’s a real beaut little girl you’ve got there, Flora.’
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