Tonight as they came in, her father said, ‘Dinner in ten minutes,’ and she hurried upstairs to her room. The hall, stairs and landing were thick with his pictures, ‘Sparsholt’ or ‘JS’ all the way up, too many of them to look right; were they the treasures kept back or the ones no one wanted to buy? They were records of years of encounters in which she had played no part. The hang kept changing, and she noticed there were one or two new things staring out as she ran past; these looked like sketches for portraits, which were too good to throw away, and according to her father had more life in them sometimes than the finished article. Her own little room had a weird blue landscape over the bed, not by her father – it was a view she’d got used to, but with no warm feeling of knowing what or where it was. She carefully detached the picture of her mother from the grey glue binding of her sketch pad, and propped it up on the dressing table. The high bed with frilly pink pillow had the counterpane turned down but neither the comforting hump of a hot-water bottle nor the flex of an electric blanket was to be seen. Still, her row of books was on the mantelpiece, between two black elephants, there were frocks and a cardigan she’d half-forgotten in the wardrobe, and when she caught sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror she saw someone very nearly at home here. She went out to the bathroom (they didn’t have a separate lavatory), which was the opposite of the bathroom at home – throwaway razors, not thrown away, but heaped up on the dirty glass shelf, two kinds of shaving soap, a laundry-basket full of smelly grey boxer shorts and vests. There was a shower with a mildewed curtain that hung over the bath, and dark bottles of body-washes, and an odd rough glove for washing with. When she had a bath or anything here she did it as quickly as possible. The towels were heaped thick on the heated rail, and even her clean one had a remote male smell.
There was a knock at the door and a ‘Sorry!’ when the handle was tried; she hurried to wash her hands. It was Evert, looking perplexed. ‘I just awfully need to go,’ he said, with a distant look on his face, sliding past her as she left and not locking the door behind him. She went back along the landing, and sitting at the little pine desk with her pencils, she coloured in a bit more of her mother’s hair, in a much stronger yellow than the real colour, but it was all she had. The eyes too became a fiercely bright blue. In a minute there was another knock, and Evert looked round the door. ‘Ah! Hello,’ he said. ‘It’s you, um . . .’
‘Hello . . .’ she said, with the hint of reproach of any artist interrupted at work.
He came and stood over her. ‘Ah, yes, now . . . who’s this?’
‘Don’t you know?’ she said.
He sucked in his breath. ‘It’s someone I know.’
‘Yes!’
‘It’s . . . er . . . it’s not, no . . . oh god.’
‘Don’t you know?’ she said again, excited, and then sensing, when she looked up at him, a shallow breath of panic under his fixed smile. Maybe it wasn’t only names he couldn’t remember. ‘It’s . . . Francesca Skipton.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘She’s my mother, of course.’
‘Well, I know that, darling! I’ve known your mother since the day she was born.’ She held it up again and Evert craned forward, like the visitors in the gallery, and with his own private flinches, as an art expert too. ‘You’ve only got those colours, I expect,’ he said.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘It’s not a bad thing – you must make the most of what you have.’
‘Do you think it looks like her?’ said Lucy.
‘It’s hard to draw someone who’s not in front of you,’ he said. ‘We remember things differently, you see, when we can’t see them, especially faces, and so we make things up. You’ve made what I’d call a speculative portrait of your mother.’
‘Oh . . . yes,’ said Lucy. It was hard to tell if this increased or compromised its interest.
‘I’ll just sit quietly before dinner,’ said Evert, ‘if you don’t mind, I get so terribly tired,’ and moving the baby-sized doll from the little nursing chair where Lucy often sat to read, he lowered himself with a smile and a sharp grunt. She was surprised but didn’t object to a visitor who sat quietly; she got on with her drawing, which had now become problematic in ways she felt powerless to solve. So in a minute she started a question, glanced round and saw his eyes were closed – but yes, he was still breathing, and her fright turned into a kind of amusement. She didn’t want to look at him in case he opened his eyes and caught her. There were voices in the hall, Pat saying ‘Is he all right?’ in his competent way, footsteps on the stairs. There was a new tap at the door, and her father looked in, glanced from her to Evert in the armchair, chin down now in a snooze that looked thoughtful, the closed eyes of complete concentration – he pushed his chin forward a little as if grumpily accepting a point. Then he opened his eyes – stared at them both blankly for a second or two, and said, ‘Is everyone here?’
‘Yes, we’re all ready,’ said her father.
As they went downstairs she heard Clover saying to Pat, in the businesslike way of adults among themselves, ‘How old is she now?’ and Pat saying, ‘Oh, God, seven, would she be? I think she was two when we met.’ Lucy was small for her age, and aware of the mild concern this was causing her parents. All she minded was being treated as more of a child than she was.
‘I wonder what it will be,’ Evert said to her as they sat down. He peered at Pat, his aproned bulk obscuring the hob where pans simmered on the flames.
‘Mm, I wonder,’ said Lucy.
‘Do you eat creatures?’ Evert said.
Lucy admitted she did.
‘And so do I, I’m afraid. Which ones do you like eating best?’
Evert’s tone obliged her to be childish too. ‘I think lambs,’ she said.
‘Ah, yes!’ said Evert.
Her father made a horrible face.
‘Now here we are,’ said Pat, turning round with a frown.
A dinner this late was a Fulham thing, not tolerated in Belsize Grove, and she did her practical best to live up to it. It was a thick soup like green porridge to start and they all tried to guess what was in it: she was the one who identified courgettes. She found herself over-active with excitement and determination not to let herself down. Pat said, ‘Well done,’ and she smiled and kept on tasting, almost giving the impression she liked courgettes.
‘I’m sorry Ivan can’t join us,’ said Clover, in her usual tone of not minding very much.
‘I know,’ said Evert.
‘But he’s all right?’ said Pat. With Lucy, on the few times they’d met, Ivan had been very awkward; she’d really had to make the conversational going herself. He was an old friend of her mother’s, and he was one of the funny men who lived in the House of Horrors in Cranley Gardens.
‘Yes, he’s fine. He’s been an angel to me, you know, with this recent thing. But I can still get about by myself!’
‘Well, give him our love,’ said her father. ‘Clover, some more bread?’
‘No, thanks . . . Perhaps some wine . . . So do you have anyone sitting for you?’ she said, not taking her eye off the glass as it was filled.