‘I am very comfortable with Mark,’ she admitted, feeling a strange lowering inside, greyness, a lack of savour. ‘And Eddie was comfortable with Mark, too. The plans have been perfectly clear for a long time. I mean – whether I actually go on to build and run the museum remains to be seen. Under the terms of the will, the appointment has to be confirmed by the trustees after the size of the project is finalised. But Mark chairs the trustees anyway. First the auction, is the thing. Maximise the cash. So – we better get back to the provenances, don’t you think?’
She stood up, adjusting her limp, blue cotton skirt, studying the round scuffed toes of her flat, navy blue shoes. She didn’t feel the least bit beautiful, and yet when Paul leaped from his chair and placed his hand for just an instant against the small of her back, gesturing gracefully with his free hand as if she needed to be shown the way and then propelling her gently through the doorway of the café and out into the main hall, she thought, He’s incredibly attentive. He must like me. It’s just that he’s – so shy. It’s this English thing, being nervous around girls. Boys sent away to boarding school too young, never seeing girls at all. I must ask him about that, she thought, as they walked to the stairs.
Despite her sense that each lunchtime with Paul was a kind of journey, he never actually agreed to travel with her around the other European museums and dealers. She was surprised, because this seemed to her one of the best things about the job she had hired him to do – trips abroad, nice hotels, introductions to other experts in the field. Paul always seemed to be committed to a bank holiday weekend in the countryside, amateur theatricals, an evening of singing, visiting some aged former teacher. And he told her, in a confessional, apologetic tone, that his German was too embarrassing, even his vaunted Italian.
So Hilary flew off alone to Paris, Basel, Rome, Athens, lugging her notes and her photographs. While she was away, she worked like crazy, drilling through thick boxes of file cards, pinpointing every site of origin, every change of hands, dragging her eyes from object to object, her feet through gallery upon gallery, assessing, comparing, confirming; interviewing dozens of curators and dealers, picking their brains and at the same time building up their appetites for the auction. It renewed her confidence in herself: that she knew exactly what she was doing, solo. Still, wherever she went, she mentioned Paul by name, knowing as she did so that it made her feel important to say she had an assistant, and justifying such a weakness by telling herself that the connection might help him or her at some future unforeseen moment; in any case, she liked him and liked describing the two of them as a team.
On her return, she would spill her discoveries, her best anecdotes to Paul, and she would feel thicker than ever with him. If she withheld any details – out of shyness, half-conscious loyalty to Doro – she also flirtatiously hinted to Paul that he might make his own discoveries and his own connections if he perhaps came along on the next trip.
When the time came to go back to New York at the end of September, Hilary was beside herself. She spent her last morning rearranging papers that she might just as easily have thrown away or abandoned. She had already assembled by herself, without Paul’s knowledge, a draft for the sale catalogue, checked every caption, checked and double-checked every estimate; she had provisionally numbered every lot; there was nothing more to describe. She had packed the night before, returned the keys to the service flat, and brought her suitcases to Sotheby’s with her. There she sat at the borrowed desk in the warren of low-ceilinged back offices surrounded by computer screens, telephones, and glamorous-haired, multilingual women she still didn’t know, waiting for lunch. Her concentration was ratty, her hands were trembly; she worried that she hadn’t been thorough enough, but at the same time, she knew that she could have left yesterday, the day before; her mind flopped to and fro; words blurred on the page. She had meant to spend half a day around the corner at the Royal Academy before she left town, for her own pleasure, and she had meant to go shopping for Mark, a cashmere sweater or something, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the building and to venture down the street alone; she was afraid she would miss something, although she would have been reluctant to say what.
Paul arrived late. He breezed in at eleven thirty. She was in agony, pretending not to care, telling herself, Of course he’s taking it easy, there’s nothing left to do. She wondered if she should have invited him ahead of time to go along with her to the Royal Academy. But at their table in the café, Paul insisted on cham pagne. They both ordered lobster sandwiches despite the expense, and she allowed herself to be reassured that he shared her enthusiasm for this last precious lunch.
‘A toast to our work,’ he said buoyantly, lifting his glass.
‘Our work,’ she replied, lifting her glass to touch his.
‘Shall we lay a bet on the outcome?’ he asked, his glass still resting against hers.
She felt a little thrill of excitement, her throat parching with the sense that something was going to knock her off her feet. ‘The outcome?’
‘I’ll lay you a round-trip ticket to New York that your sale breaks thirty million.’
The part of his wager that stood out for her was the round-trip ticket to New York; her heart leaped at it, a mixture of longing and fear. What was in Paul’s mind – a trip to New York? Or even – if she won – a trip back to London for her? She struggled to say something rational. ‘Dollars or pounds?’ was what she came out with.
Paul laughed. ‘Quite right to ask, you clever puss.’
She felt barriers collapsing, her chest expanding, the tiny room spinning away around them. She smiled and stared deep into his eyes, happy, letting herself go.
‘I bag dollars,’ she cried, the English idiom tripping off her tongue in a cascade of delight.
He pursed his lips, rueful, sulky. ‘I haven’t got a prayer of winning now, have I?’
‘Poor baby,’ she crooned at him, then snapped her glass to her lips and took a long triumphant draught of the silky bubbles.
They agreed they would stay in touch, and in the slosh of playful talk, exchanged addresses, schedules, plans. But there was a sense of an ending hanging over them which was explicit and somehow final. Hilary kept expecting something more to happen; the atmosphere of possibility seemed so rich, so ripe. They decided to extend to dessert before coffee; he recommended Eton Mess, which she had never heard of before, but which sounded like a sentimental journey they might yet take together into a charmed English world. It proved to be a familiar indulgence, grainy meringue smothered in sweet whipped cream, oozing with blood-red summer berries.
In the end, it was the usual thing, the waiter with the bill. Bewildered at the thought of Heathrow, the long, lonely taxi ride, Hilary insisted on paying.
‘But I ordered the champagne,’ Paul objected.
‘You can pay next time –’ she began.
‘Next time?’ He put one hand on her hand with her credit card in it, pushing her card away, and slipped his other hand inside his jacket, feeling for his wallet.
Hilary was liquid with warmth, ‘Well, sometime … ?’ She dropped the credit card on to the little tray just as the waiter snatched it from somewhere above them.
Paul helped her out to the pavement with her bags. ‘It’s been grand, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve adored getting to know you.’
‘Yes.’