‘They are around our necks, speaking of collars, all these bureaucrats with their research assessment procedures,’ Roland said contemptuously. ‘What are we up to? they keep asking. Forgetting they have given us the nation’s youth, and that some of us are devoted to teaching, which is, after all, very time-consuming. Otherwise it’s, What do we need? What do we want? How can they make us happy? They should bloody well go away. People need to think life through for themselves or they don’t learn to care about it. The state is mothering everyone to death.’
‘I’ve taken on Roland as a mentor,’ said Lawrence with amiable disdain, clueing Hilary in, ‘and he defends me from the entire process of assessment.’
Roland giggled. He leaned towards Hilary and said, ‘Or maybe we should say, Lawrence has taken me on as his mother – in this post-feminist era. We’ve all been turned into women, really. Oxford dons, the government, whatever. The men, the fathers – their time is gone.’ He smiled and said to her with zest, ‘You’ve won.’
Hilary was taken aback. ‘Won what? I wasn’t fighting for anything.’ She felt strangely embarrassed by his pronouncement. She sat down at the table and Roland sat down opposite her.
‘I had a mentor,’ she said, as if admitting to a character flaw. ‘Edward Doro. He died, and I’ve been at sea ever since.’
‘That’s bad news,’ Roland said. ‘I mean – forgive me. What happened exactly?’
Lawrence knew all about it from Gwen, but he was intrigued now to hear it straight from Hilary. He drew a little closer to the table.
But for a moment Hilary didn’t say anything because she was wondering why it was that everyone she met in England assumed she was fighting for something, something of which she herself was unaware. Paul had seemed to think that she had an agenda of some kind. Were Americans more complacent than the English? Were they insufficiently political about day-today matters? Or is it me, she pondered, who has failed ever to become conscious of having any particular ambitions? Roland assumes I’m a feminist just because I’m a woman. Maybe I ought to be a feminist? But she and Gwen had agreed: it was out of the question for them, for a whole swathe of girls back in America, girls of their moment, of their type. Had she somehow misunderstood what it was, feminism? Had she received the benefits without signing up for the cause?
She looked up, sensing their expectation, wondering how to begin to answer Roland. ‘Edward Doro collected antiquities and so that’s what he taught me how to do.’ She lifted her palms in the air, apologetic, self-deprecating. ‘It was amazing – being with someone who always knew what he wanted. And who always got what he wanted – at least in the way of objects.’
She dropped her eyes, picked up a knife from the place setting in front of her, turned it end to end, idly, watching the gleam and flash of the blade, pacing herself. ‘I got so that I could tell, actually, when he was going to go after something. Even from photos. And so when he was old and he couldn’t really get out, he’d send me to look. And – it worked.’ She put the knife down, lined it up straight along the side of the blue straw table mat. ‘My eyes worked fine for him.’ She sighed.
Suddenly she fixed them directly on Roland’s, then away at Lawrence’s, and announced with matter-of-fact energy, ‘So, he left me to curate his collection, and I know exactly how to do it, but I’ve maybe wrecked my chance. Because I don’t know anything about life. There you go.’ Again she lifted her palms, the shrug of regret. ‘What book could I have read to find out how not to screw up when I’d been handed everything on a plate? It was like an inheritance for me – or like the candelabrum you were telling us about, Lawrence, given to me after a long apprenticeship.’ She wrapped a hand around the base of one of the pewter candlesticks. ‘How could I squander that?’
‘Maybe you don’t really want to look after the collection?’ Lawrence suggested mildly.
‘Oh, please, you’re just like Gwen, telling me I didn’t want to be engaged either.’
Roland flinched at this. ‘You were engaged to him?’
Hilary laughed her boisterous laugh, and she looked at Roland with friendliness for the first time. ‘God, no. That’s an entirely different saga. Though not unrelated, I can assure you.’
Roland’s heavy brows went up.
Before he could ask any more, Lawrence sat down with them, intervened. ‘Seriously though. Perhaps you don’t want to be a curator? It’s not the same as collecting. Conservation, fund-raising, exhibiting. A public, institutionalised profession. It’s about caring for something – as in the Latin – it’s not about the hunt.’
Hilary relented. ‘Sometimes the hunt came off Eddie like a smell –’ she tapped her fingertips together under his nose as if there was something on them, savoury, dripping; narrowed her eyes, spoke intensely – ‘this insistent – this urge to – get something. To possess it. The strange gratification. When he was like that, he couldn’t think about anything except how he was going to do it. Any scheme, no matter how complex. Money was not a problem. It was persuading people to part with things. Oh –and the agony he went through when he wanted an object that had no provenance! He wouldn’t let himself take a chance that something might be pulled out of the collection later if it turned out it had been stolen at some point or illegally exported.’
Roland and Lawrence were hanging on her every word. When she stopped talking there was a silence. To fill it, she said girlishly, with forced nonchalance, ‘It’s weird. Our whole partnership was about planning for death, but of course, you have no idea what that really means, dying, until the person’s done it – moved on to wherever. I knew his mind so well – for me it still exists, in my head, and in his things.
‘You’ve ruined the fish,’ wailed Gwen, rushing in down the stairs and across to the stove.
‘No, darling, I took it off. Don’t worry. It’s perfect.’ Lawrence stood up, pointed at the big white china platter on to which he had delicately transferred the salmon. ‘It’s under that foil. It’ll still be warm. I had to take the soufflé out; it was getting brown. But look – it hasn’t fallen.’
Gwen gave him a look of sweet relief, nodded thanks without smiling.
He took pity on her. ‘Poor you. I promised we’d rescue you after ten minutes. We got caught up in what Hilary was saying. But Hilary will say it again, won’t you, Hilary?’ He turned back to the other two at the table.
Gwen smiled, patted the air down with her palms, quietening him. ‘OK, OK, the goddess is appeased.’
She didn’t admit that she had lingered in Will’s room just because she felt content there. Why should she resent it if her party was going well without her? That was the whole point, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been able to hear their voices from upstairs, but she knew they were hard at it, finding out all about each other. And they had probably only found out things she herself already knew.
‘What about lighting the candles?’ she asked.
Lawrence stood up. ‘I couldn’t find any matches.’
‘The stove?’ Gwen suggested.
So he lit one candle from the gas and then held it against the other wick until they flamed up together.
Gwen switched off the lights. ‘Maybe everyone come serve yourselves?’
As they scraped back chairs, dished food, Lawrence announced in a non-committal tone, ‘I think Roland taught this Paul fellow with whom you’ve been – working. Quite a young chap, is he?’
Nobody