‘He still is.’
‘Was that because of you?’
‘Because of me?’ She felt on the spot, pink under Paul’s gaze.
He dropped his eyes to his plate, cleared his throat, hesitated. ‘Well, I mean – did you introduce them to each other?’
Paul was so correct, Hilary thought, so cautious. But this question was not really personal, this was easy.
‘Oh, no,’ she said with a hint of relief, ‘the other way around. Mark, my fiancé, introduced me to Eddie. So I could help Eddie find the right person. It’s just – the right person turned out to be me.’ She laughed, tossed her head a little. Then she caught Paul’s blue eyes straight on; their glow was intensified by the lenses of his thin-framed, round spectacles and yet insulated by them, as if by fireproof safety glass.
‘So you – I mean, how did you – establish that?’ He had to work at saying it.
Hilary thought that he was about to burst out laughing. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she spurted.
‘You’re laughing,’ he replied, with a lift of his coppery eyebrows, sitting back in his chair so that his dark pinstriped jacket fell open and his waistcoat showed, with its looped gold watch chain.
He was so young to dress like that, she thought, and so thin. Yet it suited him, the fussiness of his dress. The intention was polite, and the execution winningly rumpled, though never actually dirty. Even on the hottest summer days, he smelled of lime blossom, never of sweat, never of hurry or of being too long in his clothes. And when he put his thumb into his watch pocket to haul out the watch and study the time, he seemed to her like a character in a play, or like an impersonation of an English gentleman she’d watched in some long-ago black-and-white film, only he was more graceful and more slender than anything she could recall, his shoulders stooping around his hand as he studied the watch, his long back flexing in a deep, easy curve, the other hand half in, half out of his hip pocket, elbow lightly cocked. He had a certain formality, and yet a certain knowingness that skipped all the formalities.
‘Forgive me,’ he went on, ‘it’s just that it seems impossibly convenient – or impossibly clever of you. To be engaged to such a man. A man who could introduce you to one of the great collectors.’
‘We weren’t engaged then.’ She said this as if it absolved her of guilt, though she didn’t know for what.
‘I see.’ Paul crossed his arms and nodded. His look dared her to go on, as if he knew what she would say next, as if nothing could surprise him.
‘He asked me to marry him the night before I left New York. Literally.’
Did this sound, Hilary wondered, like too short and too sudden an engagement to count? She rushed on with more details. ‘We’d already been living together for ages. We rented places with his old college room-mates, and there was a room-mate of mine for a while, then Mark’s law school people. Lately it’s been just the two of us. It’s sort of half his place, half mine. And I – actually, now it’s not really mine. He took it over so I wouldn’t have to pay rent while I was out of town and …’ She petered out, unsure, seeing his eyes flicker away, scan the room.
‘Very practical,’ Paul said as the waiter approached.
And she thought to herself, Oh God, Hilary. Don’t be so boring. Who cares about your domestic arrangements? For suddenly, her engagement didn’t seem to be much more than that – arrangements, a matter of practicality and administration – as though Mark had asked not for her hand in marriage but for a guarantee, a security deposit, key money, and she had agreed only because her looming departure had somehow raised the stakes and just then she couldn’t stand to lose one more thing.
‘Another coffee?’ Paul asked her, moving his fingers in the air like a trainer handling their waiter on an invisible leash.
She gulped a little, feeling reprieved. ‘OK. Why not?’
‘So the collection,’ resumed Paul, leaning towards her again. ‘Did you already know a lot about it before your fiancé introduced you to Mr Doro?’
‘I – no. What would anyone know? I’d heard of Eddie. I guess I – knew about things he’d acquired from time to time. But he’d been at it for years, as we all now realise. Who could have imagined how much there was?’
‘Why you? How did he – what made him choose you?’
‘I think it was just – he trusted me. It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I knew a lot, enough to start on. And the fact that I was young meant I was – available. Plus – we got along incredibly well. He saw that I had a mind of my own, but he could tell that I wanted to find out what was in his mind; I was – well, I made myself – available in that way, too.’
‘So,’ Paul drained his cup, ‘the perfect relationship.’
Hilary sighed. ‘I guess – yes, in a lot of ways, it was perfect.’ She felt odd assessing it; she didn’t think about it as a relationship.
Paul was perching forward, quizzical, as if there was more to explain, so she said, ‘The thing is, he decided the minute he met me that I was the one. He was like that. It was how he collected, too. Just with his eye – his instinct. He wanted what he thought was beautiful, what he loved. And that’s why he wanted his pieces to stay together: because they represented a series of observations and decisions. A sort of work of art in its own right, you know? His contribution.’
‘But,’ Paul opened his eyes wide, lifted his thumbs, ‘so much of it will be dispersed in this sale you’re planning.’
‘Yes. But Eddie’s the one who’s decided what to sell. And what to keep.’ She looked at Paul with conviction, her round, pewter-coloured eyes steady, confident that she was hitting home.
‘Of course.’ Paul nodded, smiling. Then after a pause, he asked lightly, ‘And how did you meet your fiancé?’
‘Ages ago. College.’ She struggled with it. ‘Honestly? I guess it was Roman Law, which he thought, you know, that he should take. Not that he was interested in the Roman part – but the economics of it, the politics –’
What was it, Hilary wondered, that made these facts seem dull? Was it her voice? Her flat, inelegant American drawl? Paul, with his precise lips, his tongue knocking the backs of his teeth when he spoke, his almost sly poise and porcelain enunciation, seemed to supply every word he spoke with a special stylishness, an air of cultivation, broad knowledge, hauteur even, so that although they were speaking the same language, he seemed so much more in command of it than she felt she was. His way of speaking, Hilary thought, makes me feel that my life up until now has been entirely ordinary and that I hardly know what I’m talking about. Silently, she bolstered her nerve, dismissed such worries: Ridiculous. But even as she told herself this, she heard the very word, Ridiculous, metamorphosing inside her head as if it were being pronounced by a dandified English gentleman and with stinging disdain; it went on changing, so that she heard a shimmering stream of English alternatives for what she was trying to tell herself. After Ridiculous came Rubbish, Daft, Poppycock, Mad, Utterly Absurd. Words she herself would never say at all.
‘You must be very comfortable with each other?’ Paul smoothed his bumpy yellow curls around behind his ears. His cheeks were ruddy, unevenly blotched with schoolboy rose, and pricked towards the bottom with a gorse of brown-blond beard that from day to day came and went in no evident pattern at all, as if he just sometimes remembered that shaving was something he might do to his face of a morning.
Was comfort something to be desired? Sought after? Hilary wondered. Or was Paul making fun of such an unexciting arrangement? Was comfort missing from his own life? He never talked of it. This thought didn’t wring any pity from her; she sensed a confidence in Paul, deep down, that he would get what he wanted in time. In fact, she sensed that he had some kind of plan, some long-term intention. Certainly he seemed to attribute far more long-term intention to her than she had ever consciously