I nodded. We both saw our way out.
“I think perhaps you should stay in Scotland,” she said. “It would be awful if there were some problem with the flight home and you missed the exams, wouldn’t it?”
I agreed that it would. My relief, I think, was as evident as hers.
“There’ll be photographs,” she said. “You can imagine that you were there.”
“Yes. That’s right. Photographs.”
In the photographs they were both smiling with what seemed to me to be relief. Both of them had lost their first spouses, and both had obviously experienced what I understand is the strangeness of not having anybody about the house when one has been married for years. Something is missing; something is incomplete. Now they had found one another and their reaction was sheer relief. Normality had been restored.
With an inheritance from my father I had paid the deposit on a flat in Edinburgh. It had three bedrooms and I let these to fellow students, which paid half the mortgage. Alastair offered me help with the repayments, but I declined.
“There’s no shame in accepting money,” he said. “I did. I accepted a lot, actually.”
I wondered who had offered him money, and when this had happened. I looked at him in a new light. This was not a man who had built a golf course with his own resources; this was a man who had accepted a lot of money.
“I can get by,” I said. “I’ve got a part-time job in a coffee bar. I get the rent from the others.”
“So you’re a rentier,” he said, smiling at the jibe. “Just like the rest of us.”
I said nothing. He was watching me.
“You know something?” he said at last. “The best advice I can give you: marry money.”
I stared at him. “Why?”
“Because money makes money.” His tone was patient, as if he were explaining the facts of economic existence to one who knew nothing about them.
“What about love?”
He laughed. “Marriage and love have nothing to do with one another.” He seemed pleased with this observation, as if he had just minted a memorable aphorism.
I wanted to ask him: Do you love my mother? Or is the fact that you married her nothing to do with love?
He must have anticipated the objection, as he soon corrected himself. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say that. Perhaps not so firmly. There’s a sort of love that comes with being married to somebody, but it’s different, you know, to the love that makes your heart do a somersault. That’s infatuation, or whatever they call it. It’s not love.”
“So what is this love that comes with being married?”
He shrugged. “Being fond of somebody? Being nice? Wanting them not to go away?”
Wanting them not to go away … Alastair was far from poetic, but the line struck me with its poetic force. I didn’t want you to go away … It was certainly powerful, and perhaps it was as good a definition of love as any other. He, of course, did not agree with what I was doing at university. We discussed it only once, and then I changed the subject. You can do that by simply looking at people when they bring something up; you look at them and they know—or should know—that you don’t value their opinion on the matter. He saw that, and smiled; he smiled because he thought that he was right and that I knew it, and therefore the moral victory was his. He gave me a look that told me all of that, and more.
“I don’t know why you’re bothering to study—what is it you’re doing?” he said. “History of art? Where exactly does that lead?”
There was a sense in which he was right; studying accountancy or law, or medicine for that matter, leads to a career doing what you’ve spent time learning at university, but this is not the case with studying the history of art. In another sense, though, he was as wrong about that as he was about so much else. Learning about art led me everywhere, and had I wanted to argue with Alastair I could have told him. In my case it led me out of the narrow world of my life in a small Scottish town and into a world of light and intellectual passion. I suppose I was a bit naïve about it, but it seemed to me that in immersing myself in art history I was becoming a member of a world of connoisseurship and understanding. So while other students might concern themselves with economics or engineering, those of us who were studying art history were somehow above all that. We concerned ourselves with truth and beauty and myth and things of that nature. And if we talked about Giotto and Bernini and Titian, it was with the sense that these were the people with whom we belonged. We understood.
Of course we had no idea of how pretentious we were, and now, when I think back, even if only it’s a year or two ago, I shudder with embarrassment. But perhaps that’s not unusual. Perhaps it’s a healthy sign to feel that way on the contemplation of one’s earlier self; perhaps not to do so is a sign that one has not developed much self-awareness.
In the back of my mind, of course, was the understanding that it would be very unlikely that I would be able to find a job in the art world. I knew that the odds against doing so were discouraging, but somehow I managed to ignore this knowledge. Something would turn up.
And it did.
THEY HAD ALL BEEN LISTENING TO THE YOUNG man, but it was Kay who had been listening and watching. She had looked at his eyes, and noted their colour. She had wondered how she would describe them if she had been writing a diary, which was something she had been thinking of doing on this trip but had not got round to yet. Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifting across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.
She looked at his hands. She could not help it, but she had always looked at the hands of men and wondered how they had caressed the body of their lover. It was unhealthy, she knew, almost a form of voyeurism, but she could not stop herself. Those hands, she thought, were gentle. They were shy. They would move with hesitation, unsure of themselves.
Would she describe him in her diary as beautiful? Yes, she thought; she would. And how would he describe her? She did not like to think of that. There were twenty years between them, and so she imagined he would not bother to describe her at all. Or was that doing him an injustice? His conversation had been revealing. He had told her about himself and his feelings about his stepfather. He had opened up. Twenty years was nothing.
She waited until he had finished what he was saying. Then she asked: “What turned up?”
IT WAS AN INTERNSHIP, HE SAID. THEY DID NOT advertise it, but sent out a letter to the head of the department of art history at a number of universities, including Edinburgh. It was for three months, this letter said, and the internship could be held over the summer so as to suit undergraduates who had to get back to their courses in September. The duties were not specified, although the auction house was at pains to point out that interns were given every opportunity to participate in the work of the firm and would not be used as cheap labour.
“You should apply,” said one of my lecturers, who, for some reason, liked me. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had read one of his books and had told him I found it interesting. That was true: I had enjoyed it and I think he appreciated that.
I remarked that I thought it unlikely I would be chosen. There would be hundreds of applications and presumably they would take only one or two people. “Everybody wants to work there. Everybody.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be defeatist.”
“I’m not. I’m being realistic.”
He pressed me for my reasons, and I told him. “These firms are exclusive. They take people who are a bit …”
“A bit what?”
“Well-connected. They know people. I don’t know anybody.”
He stared at me. “Is that what you th
ink the world is like these days? Is that really what you think?”
I nodded. “I’m from Oban. That’s nowhere. People down there won’t even know how to pronounce it.”
He looked incredulous. “Does that matter? Does it matter if somebody comes from somewhere unpronounceable? And it isn’t really unpronounceable.”
“Plenty of people put the emphasis in the wrong place,” I said. “It happens all the time. They emphasise the second syllable; but it should be the first.”
He looked serious now. “What a ridiculous conversation, Andrew. Apply, and, if you don’t mind, may I give you a bit of advice? Don’t go through life giving up before you’ve even begun.”
I did as he suggested and sent in an application. To my surprise, I was invited for an interview.
“I told you so,” said my lecturer.
“I’m still surprised.”
There was a hint of a smile. “Well, I know somebody there.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but it was one of those situations where you think one thing and another thing comes out.
“It’s just an interview,” I pointed out.
KAY SMILED. “HE KNEW SOMEBODY?”
“Yes,” said Andrew. “Exactly.”
She shrugged. “That’s the way things are, don’t you think? It’s human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that.”
“But there he was saying the world didn’t work that way. That’s what he said.”
Kay smiled again. “Of course he had to say that. That’s the official position. People don’t admit to doing things in any other way—not these days—but when you scratch the surface, we haven’t really changed very much. Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know. Watch people do it. I’m from such and such a place. Oh yes? So you know So-and-So? Yes! And So-and-So? No, I don’t know her, but of course there’s So-and-So. That’s how it works.”
“I suppose so. But why?”
“Because we don’t like impersonality. Maybe …”
David joined in. “Because we had to.”
She asked him: “Had to what?”
“Because we had to co-operate. That’s deep in the genes. We had to co-operate with one another and so we needed to know whether the stranger was a threat. Survival—that’s what it is. Survival.”
I sound like a socio-biologist, he thought, with one of their reductive explanations that made all of life about hunting or mating—scientific ancestor worship, as one of his friends had put it.
She thought about what he had said. Had to co-operate? Not any more? She glanced at Andrew. “And then?”
I’M NOT SURE HOW MANY PEOPLE APPLIED, BUT it was quite a few. In the end, they took three people that summer. Apart from me, there were two girls, one from the University of Sussex and the other from Oxford. The one from Oxford was called Hermione, and she lived in London. She was tall and very striking-looking. She had that look about her that gave you the impression that she had just had her hair done, and her skin, and her clothes—everything, in fact. She wore jeans that first day, although the letter they had sent us had been very clear on the point. We were not to wear jeans to work.
She noticed that I was looking at her legs and she leaned over and whispered. “They’re not jeans. Not really.”
“What are they then?”
“They’re moleskin. Not from real moles, of course. It’s a sort of cotton. Jeans are denim, aren’t they?”
I felt somehow privileged that this person seemed to be recruiting me as an ally. “Of course,” I said. “I didn’t think they were jeans. Well, I did, actually.”
“But now you know they’re moleskin.”
“Yes.”
She smiled at me. “They can be a bit stuffy. Even Tommy.”
“Who’s Tommy?”
She seemed surprised at the question. “Our new boss.”
“You call him Tommy?”
She shrugged. “He’s my godfather. He’s a sweetie.”
THE GIRL FROM SUSSEX WAS INTERESTED IN MODERN art and moved off to work in the department that dealt with that. That left Hermione and me in Old Masters and British Nineteenth Century Art, which was exactly where both of us wanted to be. From her point of view the attraction was the nineteenth century, on which she was writing her second-year dissertation at Oxford; from mine it was partly the period—I was very interested in the seventeenth century at that stage—and partly the fact that I would be working there with Hermione. I had fallen in love, you see. I had fallen in love the moment I saw her; the instant she looked at me; as soon as she had leaned forward and told me that moleskin was different from denim. There’s a song somewhere—I forget who sang it—which asks whether you believe in love at first sight and then gives the answer that yes, it happens all the time. Of course it does. In fact, has it ever occurred to people that love at first sight might be the rule rather than the exception? How many people fall in love gradually rather than on the first occasion they meet the other person?
THIS QUESTION, POSED ALMOST RHETORICALLY, had a noticeable effect on each of them. Kay frowned, and looked intensely at the young man, as if to coax an answer out of him. But he said nothing, and his question hung in the air. The other young man, Hugh, looked down at the table that separated the seats on one side from those on the other. There was a magazine on this, and he moved it slightly, lining it up against the edge of the table. David allowed his gaze to move out of the window. He caught sight of a boy standing on a river bank; but it was very fleeting, as the train was moving faster and the world outside had speeded up correspondingly.
I REMEMBER EXACTLY WHERE I WAS WHEN I admitted to myself that I was in love with Hermione. It was not when I first saw her, even if that was the point at which I fell in love; there is a difference, I think, between falling in love and knowing it. You know it when you surrender to the feeling; you put your hands up and say, “That’s it,” or something like that. I suppose it must be the same with any of the admissions that one makes. There comes a time when people say, “All right, I’m a crook” or “I admit it, I’m a drunk.” Not all of them say that, of course, but some do. And not everyone says to themselves, “I’m in love,” but I did.
It was at the end of my second day at the auction house. Although Hermione and I were working in the same department, I saw little of her in that first day or two, as she had immediately been assigned the task of doing research on a painting that somebody had brought in for valuation. Most of the paintings that came in the door unannounced were of no interest, and there was one member of staff who did the initial screening of these. He was the most tactful person in the building, or so everyone said, and he could turn people away with such skill that most of them went off feeling better than they had when they came in. They still had their painting, of course, and knew that it was not going to be accepted for auction, but somehow they managed to be pleased with this result. Nobody ever worked out exactly how he did it; somebody suggested that it was through a subtle form of hypnotism; others said it was simple charm.
But even if most of those who came in from the street were turned away, nobody was ever discouraged from bringing things in. Stories were told of how a few years earlier a Rembrandt drawing had been brought in by a woman who was carrying it in a plastic shopping bag, along with some sausages bought in the supermarket. And then there was the Turner watercolour that somebody else had been keeping in a biscuit tin. The tin was not quite large enough, and so the owner had folded the edge of the Turner. “I had to,” she said. “You have to keep these things in a tin, you know. The light damages them.”
The painting that Hermione had to investigate had been consigned by a dealer who had a good idea of what it was, but confirmation was needed. The artist was known, but the auction house did not have any of the literature. That was in the library of the Courtauld Instit
ute, where there were some articles on his work in an obscure German art history review. Hermione read German, and was asked to go and look through these to see if there was anything that might help the senior members of the department to make a firm attribution. They wanted to promote the painting from “attributed to” status. This was where the auction house said that the painting was probably by the artist to whom they attributed it, but they were not saying that it definitely was. “Attributed to” was not a bad status to have, and was better than “Circle of” or “Follower of,” but it made a big difference to the price if they could commit firmly to a particular painter.
Hermione told me about her assignment. I felt envious. “Proper work,” I said.
She smiled at me. “You’ll get some too,” she said.
I shrugged. I had been given the task of proof-reading a catalogue, checking the spelling of artists’ names and their dates. She smiled again when I told her about it, and how boring it was, and then she said, “We could go for a drink after work, if you like. I’m going to meet some friends. You could come along too.”
I accepted, and for the next couple of hours I analysed every word of her invitation. If you like … Was that because she was worried that I might think that she was asking me out, and because she did not want me to form that impression? Was she inviting me along because she felt sorry for me; she was off to the Courtauld to do some real research and I was stuck checking the dates of Dutch Golden Age painters—going to the pub would at least give me something to look forward to. And as for the friends she mentioned, were they male or female, or both? And if they were male, or at least some of them, then might one of them be her boyfriend?
She came back from the Courtauld half an hour before we were due to stop work.
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
She showed me a sheaf of photocopied pages. “Screeds of stuff,” she said. “And it’s all good news.”
I felt envious. I had found one minor mistake in the catalogue: an artist who had been born in Haarlem was described as having been born in Delft. I had circled the error in red ink and then I had sat and gazed at it. The red circle, I realised, was the sum total of my achievement that day. Hermione, by contrast, had found information that might add thirty thousand pounds to the price of a painting.
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