‘Ah, yes.’ Ivan had never got on with Lucy, for reasons he smoothly avoided thinking about. ‘You couldn’t bring her?’
‘She was quite keen, actually, she’s been longing to go to somebody’s funeral, but her mother was against it.’
‘Ah well, she’ll have plenty more chances. How are you?’
‘Fine!’ said Johnny, coming in now, and kissing him quickly as he peered past into the room. ‘How did it go?’
Ivan smiled at him and shrugged. ‘Oh, you know. About twenty people, I suppose.’
‘Poor old Jill.’
‘Actually, the V&A woman gave a good address.’
‘Oh, OK.’
Ivan thought Johnny had made some fractional effort – he was wearing an old pinstripe jacket over his roll-neck jersey, and a pair of black boots like a policeman’s.
‘How’s Pat?’
‘He’s very well, thank you,’ said Johnny, with a straight-faced stare at him, even after twenty years – not that Ivan supposed Johnny fancied him any longer, it was something more subtle, the feeling a pretence should be made of still very distantly minding that things hadn’t worked out between them. ‘He was sorry you couldn’t come a few weeks back . . . you know.’ They were both looking in through the door of the sitting room. ‘How is Evert?’
‘Well, there he is,’ said Ivan. There was a small rather animated group at the window now, some with tea cups, others holding the Chelsea figures and turning them over, like experts in a shop. ‘Go and say hello.’ He was aware of a slight tendency among their friends to avoid Evert since his stroke, odd instinctual counterpart to the genuine desire to help.
‘I will,’ said Johnny.
When he came back from the loo, Ivan smiled at the others but he had the stupid feeling of having missed something – they were already adjusting to what had happened, the formulas of surprise passed round, repeated but diminishing, half-phrases. He looked from one to another, as if the joke might yet be on him. ‘What is it . . . ?’ Evert was holding the Chelsea figure Ivan had been looking at earlier, Dorothy Denham clutched a small silver box, Freddie himself held up the fancy cup and saucer:
‘You must remember,’ he said, ‘I had a whole set from my mother.’
Evert didn’t seem sure; he said, ‘I remember this all right.’
‘What is it?’ said Ivan again.
‘Well, it’s too extraordinary,’ said Arabella.
Sally came in behind them, holding aloft, like something everyone had been looking for, a painted china girl, in apron and bonnet, on a round white base. ‘This is what I mean,’ she said, ‘do you remember, Brian?’; and when she’d shown it him she placed it, after a brief hesitation, in Adrian’s hands.
‘Well, I don’t know!’ said Adrian, turning it over, reasonable but defensive.
Margaret didn’t speak at first. Then she said, ‘This is actually rather serious, you know.’ On the table beside her, among wine glasses and discarded paper napkins, were ten small objects, typical of the impersonal clutter of the room. ‘We’re going to have to have a long hard think about this.’
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ said Gordon, who didn’t seem to be holding anything.
‘It was actually reported missing,’ Margaret said, ‘well, of course it was, it’s a very rare object. Jill was interviewed by the police about it herself.’ And she cleared a space round a bowl on the table – it looked Chinese, and even to Ivan had the dull gleam of importance and no doubt value.
‘Well, she’s dead now,’ said Clover, perhaps too straightforwardly.
But Sally in her worry saw the really delicate problem. ‘Oh, Adrian, I’m so sorry,’ she said.
When they left they all agreed their things should remain in the flat, until Margaret had spoken to her colleagues at the museum, and a plan was worked out. It seemed Jill had even had the nerve to nick something from Arabella downstairs, on one of her unreturned visits. ‘Well, it all makes sense,’ Arabella said – though in the minicab going home Ivan didn’t know quite what it meant. Evert was sleepy with the drink, and seemed already to have forgotten about it. ‘No, extraordinary,’ he agreed, when Ivan brought the subject up.
Evert’s stroke had had two main consequences – his short-term memory was impaired, leaving him sometimes at sea in the midst of a conversation started with a clear sense of purpose and subject. He said he saw soft white squares, where facts in the form of images, or images of words, should be, pale blanks that floated on his mind’s eye like the shape of a bright window. The other effect, somehow doubly surprising, was release from worry – not only the worry that pervaded decisions and plans, but the worry that was caused by not being able to remember. This felt like a blessing, but was also, Ivan felt, a bit worrying in itself.
There was a rather oppressive need to keep him focused – on day-to-day matters, and on the looming plans for the house. Victor was tidied up now, really for good. And all the things that had been put off until he was tidied up loomed much larger. The advance for the biography was £10,000, a much smaller figure when the book was delivered than it had been when the contract was signed. The work on the house might cost ten times as much. Besides which, Evert needed a new project. A proper memoir was the obvious idea; but it could be another art book, portraits of artists he had known over fifty years. Otherwise he was going to spend every day forgetting what he’d gone out for and picking up strangers in Marks and Spencer’s.
Ivan had forced him to make an inventory of all the pictures, which had been like getting a child to do his homework; he wriggled out of it, or else, going through the contents of a print chest on the top landing, fell under the spell of forgotten images and their suddenly woken associations. There were also the various items on loan, to museums and so forth. A certain ruthlessness was called for here, if the sale was to realize the best figure. Ivan felt everything should be looked at, and the threat of ending the loans, if it seemed worth it, put into play.
A few months ago Evert had been invited to a Feast at his old College, and Ivan had gone with him. He wanted to see the portrait of Victor by George Lambert which Evert was sure he’d given them, but which Ivan discovered on a look through some old files was merely on loan. At the drinks before, in a room that was virtually panelled in old portraits, Ivan brought up the question with one of the dons, who it turned out had never heard of the sitter, let alone the portrait. But he introduced him to a Dr Fraser, who ran the College art collection, and Ivan said again he thought they had it. ‘Indeed we do . . . !’ said Dr Fraser: ‘I’ll ask Mr Tarlow to show it to you after dinner.’ ‘It’s not in here, then,’ said Ivan. ‘We don’t keep it in here,’ said Dr Fraser, with no further explanation, but conveying a sense that wherever it was was the best place for it. He himself had promptly forgotten his promise, but Ivan pressed him again later on, and after dessert he and Evert were taken out by Mr Tarlow across the quad, through an archway and into another quad, then into a staircase next to the kitchens, into a range of old buildings lately adapted for graduate accommodation, where up two flights of stairs were two guest rooms for overnight visitors. They unlocked the first and looked in, but it wasn’t there, so they tried the second, Mr Tarlow emitting a hearty ‘Aha!’ as he stood back and let them have a look. The room contained almost nothing – a single bed, a completely empty bookcase, and a refrigerator. And on the wall above the refrigerator hung Arnold Victor Dax (1880–1954) by George Lambert (1873–1930), in a heavily ornate gilt frame missing a cusp at one corner. It was further described, on the small label on the frame, as on ‘permanent loan’ from Evert Dax, 1939 – the year, of course, of his matriculation. Ivan found himself wondering what on earth the guests made of it, with its wary gleam and villainous moustache. ‘We like to keep as much of the collection on view as we can,’ said Mr Tarlow warmly, stumbling on the tail of his gown as he stepped back across the squawking floorboards. ‘Well, no one could say it brightened up the room,’ said Evert, which left Mr Tarlow a little at a loss as they all trooped out again.