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.
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 lo
oked 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 . . .’
‘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 m
ean,’ 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.
The Sparsholt Affair Page 32
