As always a small group formed round him, with a shared understanding now that they wouldn’t often do so again. ‘Was there ever anyone?’ said Margaret.
‘An affair, you mean?’ said Sally.
‘Someone in the War she once mentioned?’
Clover peered at Freddie in an archly ingenuous fashion, a raised eyebrow, a pert smile. Freddie took a moment to say, ‘Oh, they don’t want to hear about all that,’ with a look he had when quickly calculating whether and how to hold court.
‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ said Clover, in the friendly but uncertain silence that had fallen.
‘It seems unlikely now, somehow.’
‘What’s that?’ said Sally.
‘Evert could explain it very well,’ Freddie said more loudly, his voice hoarse, looking quite pleased with himself, in his emaciated way.
‘What’s that?’ said Evert, turning from talking to Brian.
‘We’re going back to Oxford days,’ said Clover.
‘Let me tell it, darling,’ said Freddie, holding his wine glass in both hands, rather like a microphone. ‘It seems proper to record,’ he said drolly, ‘that Jill Darrow in her youth cut quite a figure.’
‘Oh, gosh,’ said Sally.
‘You know, she was actually quite magnificent,’ said Freddie. ‘The truth is I adored her – she was so big and so virginal, and beautiful in her way. She was really my first love.’ He grinned at them, self-mocking, self-entranced.
‘Goodness, Freddie!’ – no one could say what they thought as they looked at him now.
‘So you had a romance . . .’ said Margaret, with rather dry enthusiasm.
Freddie looked at her. ‘Romance was never exactly Jill’s thing,’ he said. ‘But I pursued her for over a year. I don’t think I was ever asked into her rooms. It was just like later on, I suppose. None of us ever came here.’
‘Well, Freddie, you dark horse,’ said Gordon, in the flirty tone of a nurse to a childish old man; though Freddie didn’t disown the compliment. And there was a sense, as he took another swig from his glass, lurched slightly and caught Clover’s arm, that the matter should now be dropped.
After this unexpected testimony from a sick man to a dead woman scant further light was shed on the intervening half-century. She went – unrevealed – into a space like the hall of her flat, no windows, fragments of epitaphs on the wall, a door open still on to the sitting room behind her, and the door beyond now open too, on to the common parts, and the shadowy downward stairs. The godson seemed unprepared for the curiosity of her friends and colleagues, who he surely supposed knew her better than he did. He explained what he could, that his parents had met Jill in Berlin after the War; that she’d been a proper postal-order sort of godmother, with a pipe of port when he was twenty-one, and meetings once a year or so since then. He went along with them a certain way, looking from face to face, but drew back at the hints of comedy, something unseemly. She was preserved for him in tender and unquestioned sentiment they seemed not to share. Besides, she had left him everything she had, a flat which Ivan supposed was worth quarter of a million, and her large miscellaneous collection of porcelain, silver and pictures. Ivan, by himself for a moment at the window, was looking at a row of china figures on the sill. He thought, because of Evert having some, that they were Chelsea, but he didn’t know (what he knew you had to know) the marks. The figure he picked up and turned over had a small golden anchor, but his feeling that this was a good sign coexisted with a sense of half-forgotten warnings about rivals and imitations. The fact was he didn’t care – about the things themselves; though as objects of Evert’s interest, or of Jill’s, they were worth knowing just enough about.
There was a small regrouping of the party, and Sally came across and stood by him, looking at the room over her glass. ‘I find it all so sad.’
‘I know . . .’ Ivan found it gloomy, intriguing, but as it happened not sad.
‘Are you doing her?’
‘We’ve got someone, yes,’ he said. ‘We didn’t have her ready.’
‘Oh, I’d have thought . . . but perhaps she wasn’t quite . . . I don’t know.’
‘No, no, definitely something,’ he assured her.
‘Not very long, I suppose?’
‘Shortish, I think,’ said Ivan, with a businesslike smile. He made an absolute point of not saying who wrote the obituaries. For Jill he’d asked Evert to do it, since he’d known her for more than fifty years, but it was a joint effort, Ivan splicing in details he’d been gathering himself for nearly half that time. Like most of the members of the now vestigial gang, she had a pocket of her own in his concertina files.
Sally laughed nervously, and said, ‘I don’t want to make a fuss, but I’ve just found something rather odd.’
‘Oh . . . ?’ said Ivan, and felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘Cup of tea?’ said Adrian.
‘Oh . . .’ – Ivan looked around, at the already dishevelled and surprisingly noisy little group. Evert had had two or three glasses of Adrian’s red wine, and seemed to be enjoying himself more than he should have been. ‘Probably a good idea . . . Do you want a hand?’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Sally.
Ivan went with Adrian into the small old-fashioned kitchen – blue cupboards, old cooker with eye-level grill, net curtain on a string halfway up the window, which looked on to the car park and the road. Oval plates of sandwiches, ham or egg, still waited under clingfilm, enough for a much larger or hungrier party. Adrian started taking down cups and saucers from a cupboard. ‘How many are we?’ he said. A tray was quickly covered with a much-laundered cloth, the best teapot warmed from the boiling kettle. Then Freddie came in, he had to take his pills, and wanted a glass of water. He knocked them back, burped, and leant against the sink, and his eyes settled on the tray, the six smart tea cups augmented by others stacked for a moment in tilting pairs, relics of tea sets long gone, or just things Jill had picked up, and his lips, thin and dry, spread into what seemed, on his gaunt head, a smile of sickly tenderness.
‘How funny. She told me fifty years ago that I didn’t understand her. Naturally I thought she was wrong, but now I’m not so sure.’
Ivan smiled uncertainly. ‘It seems you knew her quite well, Freddie.’
‘I wonder if you’d do me a favour,’ Freddie said to Adrian, and when he raised his eyebrows: ‘When the tea’s made will you give that cup there to Evert Dax?’
‘This fancy one . . .’
‘The Meissen one,’ said Freddie. ‘I want to see what he says.’
Ivan doubted he’d say very much. He picked it up himself, wondering if there was something obviously funny about it – he thought it was just the sort of thing, with its rippling gilt rim and tiny pictures of pink shepherds on blue hills, that any old lady might have.
He went to find the loo, which was locked, and as he waited in the hallway there was a knock at the open front door and Johnny looked in. ‘You’re a bit late, my dear,’ Ivan said.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Johnny, ‘I’ve had Lucy . . .’