Lucy’s father looked at Evert as he said, ‘I’ve just started on old George Chalmers, in fact.’
‘Oh, you’re doing him, are you?’ said Evert.
‘Well, thanks to your recommendation.’
‘I’m glad it came off,’ said Evert quietly; he looked at Clover, ‘I don’t expect you know George Chalmers. He used to hang around in Oxford when I was there, though he was still a schoolboy. He was a famous beauty, though rather hard to deal with.’
‘No, I’ve met him, I think,’ said Clover.
‘Why was he?’ said Lucy.
‘Why was he what, darling?’
‘Hard to deal with.’
Evert sighed as he looked for the answer, as though he’d gone into the junk room and didn’t know what to bring out. ‘I suppose really he was just terribly vain, you know . . .’
‘No change there, then,’ Lucy’s father said.
‘Ah, I’m sure . . . Does he come to you?’
‘He does now. We started off down in Wiltshire – you know, I went for the weekend.’
‘Was he all over you, I suppose?’
‘Never came near me’ – he grinned at Lucy, as if to sweep over the matter. ‘A bit old for him, I think,’ he said quietly.
‘Well, you know of course my friend Peter Coyle and George . . .’ said Evert.
‘I don’t think there’s much Johnny doesn’t know about George Chalmers’s private life by now,’ said Pat, who tended to get left out of these art talks; ‘if you can even call it private.’ He laughed, and kept smiling at Lucy too, with a hint of solidarity, as he stood to clear the soup bowls. Lucy smiled cautiously back, at this friend of her father with his unshaven face pink from cooking and drinking wine, and the soft dark eyes.
‘Now how are you liking your lasagne?’ Pat said to her five minutes later.
‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Lucy, with an almost reluctant awareness that she was quite enjoying it; there was something in it remarkably like mince. She thought she had better not mention it, in case Pat had made a terrible mistake, and they would have to go upstairs and make themselves sick, which had happened more than once, apparently, when they were in hotels abroad.
‘Is it Quorn?’ said Clover. ‘I’ve read about it.’
‘What do you think?’ said Pat.
Lucy glanced at her father, who had his deaf-to-all-arguments vegetarian face on.
‘Awfully good!’ said Clover, picking out a tiny forkful, and so behind the others that she was bound, as usual, to leave almost everything on her plate. And yet she was enormous, bigger than Una, so perhaps like her a snacker. She lifted her empty glass – ‘Could I?’
‘Ah, yes’ – Pat leant over to fill it with red wine, and she said,
‘But what about your work, Pat?’
Did he sense, as Lucy did, the hint of helpless courtesy in the question? ‘My work,’ he said, ‘is notoriously boring.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that.’
Pat shook his head happily at her. ‘I don’t mean I find it boring, not in the least, I love it, but it bores the socks off anyone I talk to about it.’
This was a challenge, and Clover, pushing her food about with her fork, said, ‘I know it’s organs.’
‘Aha!’ said Pat.
‘Historical, though,’ said Lucy’s father.
‘Restoration,’ said Pat.
‘Yes, of course, you restore organs.’
‘No, Restoration organs.’
‘Ah . . .’
‘Organs built in the 1660s.’
‘Oh, I see. So you do Restoration organ restoration!’
‘I do,’ Pat smiled politely.
‘Goodness!’ said Clover, and took a big swig of wine. ‘I think that could be awfully interesting.’
‘Well . . . So what are your plans, Evert?’ said Pat.
‘Well,’ said Evert.
‘You’ve got this trip, haven’t you, Evert,’ said Lucy’s father.
‘That’s it, darling,’ said Evert tactfully, as if unsure how many shared the secret.
‘And where are you going to?’ said Clover, almost teasing the poor man, Lucy thought.
‘Well . . . !’ – Evert sat back and smiled over their heads.
‘Of course, you’re going to Antwerp,’ said Pat. ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘That’s it,’ said Evert again, with a nod. Now it was out, and they could talk about it. Still, he seemed a little uneasy. He turned to Lucy. ‘Do you know where Antwerp is, darling?’
‘It’s in Belgium,’ said Lucy.
‘Very good,’ said Clover.
‘It’s a port.’
‘Mm, that’s right,’ said Clover.
Evert had the whole thing now. ‘I’m going to an Alternative Book Fair,’ he said. ‘They’ve invited me, to talk about A. V. – you know, he’s coming out in Dutch.’
‘You mean you’re coming out in Dutch,’ said Lucy’s father.
‘Yes – well, he’s in Dutch already, he always has been,’ said Evert. ‘You know, I get a cheque every year for sixty guilders or something, and it’s the royalties.’
‘It’ll be more now,’ said Pat.
‘Will it?’
‘With your book!’
‘Oh, well, let’s hope.’
They sat for a long time over their plates, forgetting Lucy. Pudding was still to come, but to her it was almost too late. Her appetite itself was falling asleep. Her father caught her eye now and then, in an irksome way. But the talk by this stage had moved into a baffling square dance of first names, combining and recombining, Evert and Pat themselves at cross-purposes, and the Olivia, whom she followed hopefully at first, urging her on with smiles of recognition, turned out to be a quite different Olivia from the one who was a friend of her mother’s. Well, she’d known it would happen, the obvious truth of the night was that the adults had their own endless things to talk about, and the wine they were knocking back made them all speak more freely and with less and less thought for her. She was aware of the light burden it put on any adult seated next to her, to keep one ear on the real conversation while they turned to make small talk with her. Now her father was mentioning his mother, who’d been in hospital, but of course was not a celebrity patient like Freddie.
‘Do you know my granny,’ Lucy asked Evert, ‘Granny Connie, I mean?’
‘Well,’ Evert stared at the table, ‘I knew her, let me see, it’s 1994, fifty-four years ago.’
‘It’s not,’ said Lucy, ‘it’s 1995.’
‘Ah, well, in that case even longer. It was when she was engaged to your grandpa, during the War.’
‘Did you know Grandpa David then?’
‘David . . . oh, yes, I knew him awfully well,’ said Evert. ‘We used to do things together . . . sometimes, you know . . .’
These two sentences sounded a little inconsistent. Lucy saw he was being polite, or perhaps couldn’t really remember. She smiled understandingly, but it was too long ago to be interesting now, and a stronger wave of sleep swept through her, she yawned before she could help it. In a minute she was standing and waving them goodnight, pulled in by Clover for an approximate kiss, and then, at a nod from her father, she went off upstairs.
2
A bleak scene, lasting less than half an hour, was enacted some weeks later at the Mortlake Crematorium. Ivan went with Evert, who made a point of wearing a pink scarf with his black overcoat, and sat biting his cheek and pursing his lips so that Ivan couldn’t tell what he was feeling or thinking. Above all he seemed impatient. He had insisted, as an old friend, on sitting at the front; Ivan had to come out of the pew to let someone else get by, and stood looking frankly across the half-empty rows behind, nodding and giving rueful smiles to Brian Savory and Sally, and old Dorothy Denham; he was surprised to see Dorothy here, and when he sat down again jotted her name on the back of the order of service; he wasn’t sure if they had anything on her or not. He had been to a good few funerals, of Evert’s friends and of others he took an interest in, but it was his first time at Mortlake – sunlight through a cloud seemed to pick out the dormant first syllable of the name. They spoke of this room as a chapel, though Christian symbols had been carefully omitted from its design – and seemed none the less to lurk, for those who craved them, in the arrangement of the room, the coloured glass and the woodwork of the pews, with their narrow prayer-book ledge. Where the altar would have been was the automated bier, looking more than anything like a four-poster bed, with pillars and a canopy.