Could Mark really kick her off the project? She’d been agonising over it, telling herself she was too tired to think straight. Eddie wouldn’t leave me so exposed. Eddie, whose last years had been haunted by the future, by planning, eventualities. And then with a shuddering ache, Get real, Hilary. Eddie was never planning with you in mind. He wouldn’t leave his collection so exposed.
But it was hard to give up that fragile old-man voice in her ear, croaky, desiccated, the Bronx twang made fine by education and a certain natural delicacy: ‘How can you be so sure you want to give your life to this when I’m gone? And the lockstep with Mark? Maybe I should set you free from that? There’s always some other way, you know, with lawyers.’
How many times should Eddie have asked her? She had been so quick to reassure him, It’s decided. I’m all yours. As if she herself were a piece he wanted for the collection. Because she knew his appetite, and it gave her so much pleasure to satisfy it. And because in his growing frailty, he was facing something so big, drawing closer all the time, and she could shield him a little with this indulgence; she could take his mind off his fear. The legal stuff ’s fine. Mark’s good at that. Let him deal with it, she used to say.
I left myself exposed, she thought. I had – a sense of expectation; she had to admit it.
After the funeral, Hilary wondered how much she really cared for the treasures. All those years, had she been living off Eddie’s enthusiasm? Until it all came to life again with Paul. Paul loved the collection with that unhesitating lightness of heart, that spontaneous certainty that she had come to feel she would never encounter again. The touch of boyish disregard that carried it off.
That was real, she thought, that part of my friendship with Paul. It was the same as with Eddie – we shared some things perfectly, others not at all.
At last she began to sink into sleep, feeling justified in something. She let go of trying to make sense; let the pieces of her puzzle fall apart into their jigsaw fragments. She drifted among bodies, among beds. Gwen, Lawrence. Eddie lying alone under his grand red canopy, lost in the magnificence of its height and hangings. Slipping away. Eddie in his wheelchair in the big living room. In the sunlight beside her desk. Safely dead at last; the silent move he made, out of reach.
I only slept with Mark’s body, she thought without clarity. It felt like something she needed to explain. But not now, under the weight of the thin blanket, carrying her down. Don’t try.
Then she had a sensation of hurt. A jolt, as if the pillow had dropped underneath her, the whole bed. There was a shuddering black edge around her thoughts as she was thrown back from sleep for an instant.
I knew Eddie was selfish. I made it easy for him. She tried to push past this discomfort, her sense of error and responsibility, still reaching for sleep. I have to go forward from where I am now. With what I know now. I can get back in touch with Paul, on a new footing. He’ll help me. It’s OK here with Gwen until I get myself together.
She was sure of Gwen. At least there’s room for me here. With Lawrence and Gwen.
It seemed obvious to Gwen whom Hilary should meet. Roland was tall enough, smart enough, steady enough, good enough. Did it matter whether he was handsome? Walking along King Street the next morning after dropping Will at school, she decided that handsome wasn’t really the point. Up until now anyway, Gwen had never much judged people by how they looked. But he’s got a great face, she reflected. Solid, intriguing. A lot of texture to his skin, a real beard and a head of thick, dark hair, a kind of masculinity and force. Maybe she had never before considered Roland on the question of looks. Did she know him too well? When had she first looked at him? When had she ever looked at him? Six or eight years ago?
He had been introduced by Lawrence as an Ancient History colleague; one of the few colleagues who seemed to Gwen to be actually alive. So many of those Oxford types, Gwen thought, as she made her way towards a cash machine through the sparse, early scurry, existed only as their academic selves – a constellation of starred alphas, named memorial prizes, Oxford University Press publications, sherry-stained gowns, high-table ripostes. But she had liked Roland right away. At one of those wistful gatherings in a barnlike room, everyone standing because the chairs were so far apart, so stiff-backed and so sunken-seated, a hot little drink in the fist. He had made jokes and asked her direct, friendly questions about herself, real questions, that sought out what was inside her, not the windy senior-common-room cross-examinations that aimed to position you on an imaginary list and then dismiss you as falling below some necessary level of academic accomplishment on that list. What are you working on? they felt free to ask once they had established that she didn’t spend all her time looking after children, a house. Years ago, it had been her undergraduate degree in Greats. Then, when she gave up on that, she would answer, I paint. And it seemed to stump them. Hmm, they might reply, with a slight interrogative inflection, nodding vigorously, stretching the brows upward in a contortion of sympathy, optimism, goodwill. Some would venture on to a further question, What sort of things do you paint? Or even the informed probe, Figurative or abstract? But there the conversation would end. They couldn’t taxonomise this particular activity, landscape painting. It was easier to look upon her as a dropout.
But not for Roland. He was good for my self-esteem, Gwen reflected, and he’ll be good for Hilary’s. She fed her debit card into the machine, her PIN number circling through her brain like a glimmering fish until she hooked it, stabbed the digits into the hard little keys. Roland has the energy to take a genuine interest in anything, and he has the nerve, too. He knows that there is plenty of vitality and conviction outside the locus of clever, singular answers, outside the high-walled, ancient quadrangles. Those dons go head to head with each other so hard and so long that they forget everything else, the rest of the world, for instance, what it’s actually like. She bubbled with resentment, thinking about them. Their conversation, she thought, whatever the topic, is like a conversation about the weather, because they don’t actually want to make contact. Real contact. They might have to follow that up with some expenditure of emotion. They can’t afford to hear what you might have to say in case it doesn’t fit into their train of thought, in case it might disturb some theory they are pushing towards. Some simplification of life. How she had hated those gatherings in college, attended with universal joylessness, another fixed commitment during which it was possible to kill a little time away from books and pens, rest their mighty brains, while eating.
The cash wheedled out crisply as if it were newly printed expressly for her. Then there was the thump behind the screen, the personal vault slamming shut.
But they’re not all like that, she thought, folding the twenties into the pocket of her jeans, striding for home past the fountains playing over the smooth-paved piazza at her feet. Lawrence, Roland. Hilary will feel it right away. Roland’s curiosity and his warmth. Gwen smiled, picturing it. Hilary’s so tuned in. She’ll find out how widely read and how thoughtful Roland is. Older and wiser than Mark or Paul. Will Hilary think he’s too old? Lawrence’s age? Nearly fifty? A baby, compared to Doro.
She climbed the black-painted front steps, grabbing up the milk and pinning the bottle under one arm as she let herself into the colourless, empty stairwell, struggled with the keys to the stiff little door of the flat. As to why such a cultivated, lovable man wasn’t already involved with a worthwhile woman, Gwen glossed over it in her thoughts as she entered the ground-floor hallway, skipped down the basement steps to the kitchen. Or rather, she considered it rapidly as she flipped the fridge open and shut, and she decided, He hasn’t met a good one yet, a good enough one. The right one. In the back of her mind was the flattering certainty that Roland had always been quite