On the printed card there was a recent photo of Jill, in colour, caught at a party in a genial mood. Seeing it, Ivan heard her, telling him what to do or, more probably, what he should have done, with the dogged irony that was her disappointing means of engaging with all comers. Over the loudspeakers came, mildly distorted, a tune Ivan had heard before, the ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ by C. W. Gluck, a flute solo ushering onstage an incongruous new Jill, liberated, light-footed, welcomed into the next world, which she had perhaps thought of herself in pagan more than Christian terms. An unprompted silence fell over the congregation. ‘Ah, here’s the party,’ said Evert – they stood and half-turned to check as Jill was borne in. Her friends were too old for it, and she frightened the young, so the pall-bearers were the men from the undertakers’, one of them wall-eyed, another, put at the back, with a surgical boot. The V&A had sent a coldly artistic wreath of white lilies, which bobbed its way along at head height on top of the coffin towards its brief stay at the front.
And Jill had chosen hymns; she was a pagan but she wanted them to enjoy themselves, and singing was the only enjoyable part of a funeral, as a rule. She had sung herself, in one of the London choirs in the fifties, and referred just occasionally to Sir Adrian Boult as one might to a long-ago fling. It must be a woman from a choir now, a row or two behind them, an old but unembarrassed soprano with throbbing vibrato. Either the others were encouraged by her or they gave up altogether. Ivan glanced across the aisle at the military-looking man on the end of the row, looking forward, lips parted, an occasional drop of the jaw intended to convey the act of singing.
Afterwards Jill’s godson, a doctor from Taunton whom none of them knew, invited everyone back to Jill’s flat for sandwiches and a drink; the word went round that he was called Adrian. Had any of them been there before? Evert said once, thirty years ago, he’d got into the hall, but no further. The woman called Margaret, from the V&A, who had given the address, claimed to have had lunch there, but when pressed admitted it was ‘quite some while ago’. ‘Oh, what was it like?’ said Ivan. ‘Well, you’ll see,’ she said; ‘she had some nice things.’ ‘Oh, she was quite a collector,’ said Adrian, who it turned out was also her sole heir.
The flat was in a large Georgian house in Kew that had been subdivided; they went up to the second floor, Evert taking Ivan’s arm, in one of his cosy pretences of infirmity. The door stood open by the time they reached the landing, and they had a view in through the dark little lobby to a brighter room beyond. Curiosity about the flat seemed keener than grief among the mourners – as well as Brian and Sally, there were Freddie and Clover, Iffy, friends who only saw Jill at Cranley Gardens, and a woman called Arabella, who lived on the floor below, and had clearly being dying to get past the door for years. Evert stood in the hall looking up and down at three Piranesis hung one above the other – not familiar views but recondite studies of funerary fragments, broken tiles and inscriptions. ‘Fascinating,’ he said, which Ivan took for a joke.
They went into a small room at the side, with a single bed, where they heaped up their coats. The unvisited feel of any spare bedroom was redoubled in this unvisited flat. Behind them Brian shuffled in with his stick and Sally set about tugging his coat off, pulling it down one arm, then the other, while he examined the books in the bookcase as if nothing was happening. ‘Well, well, I hadn’t got old Jill down as a Wodehouse reader,’ he said. ‘Nor Tolkien, come to that.’
‘Well, she knew him at Oxford, of course,’ said Ivan.
‘Though none of them read very recently, by the look of it,’ said Brian, stooping to get Summer Lightning, which slid out like a slice of cake with its own thick layer of dust on top.
The unused room and its neglected clues to the dead woman’s past appealed to Ivan. Above the bookcase was a framed poster for a Picasso exhibition in New York which again was unlikely, faded over thirty-five summers into palest beiges and blues. Ivan wedged his briefcase in a small armchair with a tear in the cane backing – the welcome to overnight guests (the godson perhaps on occasion) seemed made with all the rejected goods from the rest of the owner’s life.
‘Oh, lord . . .’ said Sally, tucking Brian’s scarf into his coat sleeve, and staring at the chest of drawers between the bed and the window.
‘Sally, darling,’ said Clover, coming in behind them, and unpinning her black hat. Sally was belittled by her friends, and famous (among half a dozen people) for getting the wrong end of the stick, and the attention they gave her now was both delayed and momentary. She shook her head.
‘No . . . I just thought. Oh, never mind.’ But she kept a canny eye on the chest, and the odd group of items on top of it, for a moment longer, while the others trailed out of the room.
The proceedings got under way, with the desire to have a normal chat curbed for the first few minutes at least by the propriety of the occasion – the spirit of where they had come from still lingered in dark suits and a quiet postponing manner, until, with a glass of wine down, people turned away in sudden conversation towards the window or the sofa and the unselfconscious life of the party, which after all was life itself, began. Ivan watched as a small wavy-haired man in his sixties, with large glasses and a boyish smile, approached the majestic Margaret. ‘Margaret, it’s Gordon!’ he said.
‘How are you?’ said Margaret, smiling down at him in untroubled vagueness before moving to the table for a refill. Gordon filled his glass too. A minute later he went up to the old man on the far side of Evert.
‘It’s Gordon!’ he said. He seemed to hope to identify himself not just as Gordon, but as that especial Gordon who had brightened their lives long ago.
‘Who is that man?’ said Evert.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ivan; ‘he says his name’s Gordon.’ Ivan noticed that no one greeted Gordon, and quick individual decisions that they needn’t bother with him took the semblance, in ten minutes, of a general intention to ignore him. Still, he came round, small and bright-eyed as he looked up at them. ‘It’s Gordon!’ he said.
‘I know who it is,’ said Clover sharply, as if his main purpose had been not eager friendship but reproach.
Ivan heard candid questions asked by people who were as close as friends ever were to Jill. ‘I wish I’d known her better. She was very private, wasn’t she.’
‘Of course sometimes, with the very private ones, you go to the funeral and find the most astonishing people – they’d just compartmentalized their lives, and you had no idea. Here, though, I have the feeling I’ve known everyone for years.’
‘Did she ever read anything to the Memo Club?’
‘Well, yes, years ago . . . perhaps you weren’t there? A rather surprising thing about her sister, who was killed when she was a child. And the alcoholic mother. Tragic, really. I remember it was very short, and she looked as if she wished she hadn’t written it – or hadn’t read it out, anyway.’
‘Really she just liked seeing other people exposing themselves.’
‘And correcting them afterwards.’ They laughed. ‘Poor Jill.’
*
Ivan talked for a while to Freddie, asked a few straight questions about his health, and then turned, he hoped reassuringly, to other things, such as travels, and what he was writing, which all tended to curve magnetically to the fact he was avoiding, that Freddie wasn’t going to be writing or travelling much longer. After the operation and the chemo, he was shockingly bald and gaunt. The slight improbable pot he had got in his late sixties had gone, and the eccentric mixture of clashing clothes that had long been his trademark hung large on him as if he had dressed himself from a charity shop on the way here. There had been something almost sexy about him, in Ivan’s eyes, when they’d first met, more than twenty years ago – the sexiness of cleverness, of labyrinthine knowledge and the charm that focused on you like a seduction. It was an appeal that Freddie’s appearance made all the more confusing and authentic.