‘I suppose because it had such a depressing sequel,’ he said, glad to be able to rely on the truth for once. At least some of the truth. ‘Peter found something in the ashram he’d never had before. He talked about peace and gentleness and a kind
of mystical fulfilment. I could understand the first because he’d had the sort of life with his father that I’d had with my mother, but not the last. I felt—’
Peace and gentleness, Toby thought, looking down at the mess of pheasant and gravy and red cabbage in front of him. What an irony!
He felt sicker than ever. His plate looked as though it was covered in blood and guts.
‘Left out?’ Henry had stopped sounding like a judge. ‘Betrayed even?’
Toby looked up and thought he could see sympathy in the usually critical face. He almost let go. Then a nightmare landscape of terror and recrimination and disgrace opened up in front of him, like the mountains of doom in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Cézanne. He could just see Henry as the huge, stalwart hero figure and himself the drooping pallid villain being dragged to hell.
‘So, what happened to your friend?’
‘He tried life in England again, and stuck it out until we graduated. But when his father started forcing him towards some kind of City job, he couldn’t bear it. So he went back to the ashram. At the beginning he used to write, but a few years ago the letters stopped.’
Toby saw the ghosts of sympathy in Henry’s eyes turn into mocking demons just like the ones at the edge of the Cézanne. Hoping to banish them again, he added: ‘I’ve missed him ever since.’
The demons did retreat, and a smile of extraordinary gentleness curled Henry’s lips. ‘That’s tough. In my experience one doesn’t get that kind of friendship more than once in a lifetime.’
Toby had to blink for real now, to clear his own eyes of a sudden embarrassing wetness. It was one thing to cry in front of Jo, even if it did make her sneer and tell him he needed to
see a shrink. It would be quite another to pour out tears here in this bastion of hideously confident old-style masculinity. He tried to distract himself by wondering who Henry’s friend had been and whether he still had him. Probably. Henry was lucky in everything else, so why not this too?
‘And it was this Peter, was it, who bought those drawings you identified as being by François Clouet?’ Henry went on, apparently quite unmoved by his own memories or emotions.
Coming without a warning like that, the accusation made Toby’s hand shake so much that he had to put down his claret glass. How was he going to get through the rest of this evening if he could neither eat nor drink without betraying himself?
‘Yes. But why do you want to know?’ He could hear his voice shaking, too.
Any minute now Henry was going to smash right into the truth and then everything would be over.
‘Someone was asking me about the Clouet drawings the other day,’ Henry went on cheerfully, ‘and I was ashamed to have to admit that I knew nothing more about your great coup than I’d read in the Sunday papers. I wish you’d tell me all about it now. It sounds brilliant.’
This couldn’t be coincidence. Was it Ben who’d been asking Henry about the Clouets? Or the dark woman? She’d brushed past the pair of them while they were talking after the sale. Had she snaked back after Ben had taken him away, to drip her poison into Henry’s ears?
He was saying something else now. Toby tried to forget the woman and listen properly. Henry was asking him whether there was anything he wanted to say, in the tones of a man asking his wife if she wanted to confess adultery. How much had he guessed? Or did he already know the whole story? Was this going to be another long-drawn-out torture?
Unable to speak safely, Toby shook his head, staring at the mess on his plate.
‘You do know,’ Henry went on, drilling like a dentist, ‘that you can always come to me if you’re worried about anything, don’t you? If you’re in some kind of trouble, Toby, I can almost certainly help. I do have a lot of resources.’
Toby risked looking up, hoping for another gentle smile, but all he could see was hard speculation and contempt. Whatever Henry said, he knew he was on his own, just as he always had been. Everyone he’d ever thought might love him had turned away. First Peter had betrayed him, and now Margaret had gone, too. If she ever found out it was his fault Mer had been hurt, she’d never come back. He had no one.
Helen lay in Jean-Pierre’s arms. For once he had not gone straight to sleep after they’d made love. He was nuzzling her hair and murmuring the most wonderful words to her. Her own French had got so much better now that she could understand nearly all of them and was mentally translating as he spoke.
‘I’ll always love you. You are the most perfect woman. I’ll never leave you. You have restored my faith in love. The world is worth saving because you are in it. I would do anything for you. I love you. I love you. I love you.’
She laid her face against his chest and told him she had thought she would never be loved like this, that she would do anything for him, too. Anything. Whatever it cost her.
Trish thought that if anyone touched her she might snap like an icicle. She couldn’t believe she would ever be warm again. The thirty little boys in front of her were rushing about in the mud of Clapham Common like worker ants, while the two hearty solicitors who coached them were running alongside, bellowing instructions and encouragement. Whistles bounced against their ample chests as they ran.
Trying to warm herself with the remains of her fury over Henry Buxford’s last sneering comment, Trish considered various ways of finding out enough to make him admit she’d been right all along.
One miserable, blue-kneed child tripped and fell face down in the icy sludge, reminding her that here, at least, she ought to forget Buxford and Toby Fullwell. Two other children flung themselves on top of the first. A woman in the small parental crowd moved forwards but was restrained by her husband. Trish overheard him mutter something about not making a wimp of the boy.
She was glad it hadn’t been David. He didn’t look happy, and his knees and shorts were as muddy as everyone else’s, but he hadn’t fallen and he was neither shivering nor snivelling. When he scored a try, she found herself cheering as loudly as any mother.
At the end of the match, she told him she was proud of him and was glad to see some pleasure in his face. But by then the cold was getting to him, in spite of all the exercise he’d just taken, and
making his teeth chatter against each other. His lips were grey. She handed him his fleece and walked him back to her car as briskly as possible, fighting the urge to do anything embarrassing like warm him up in her arms or put her own coat round him.
In the car, she turned up the heating as high as it would go and felt in the glove compartment for the bar of chocolate she kept for emergencies. She knew his mother had never allowed him to eat sweets and usually she tried to follow all the old rules, but the cold today had been savage. David must need something inside him, and she couldn’t bring herself to carry around a bag of peeled carrots, as though he was a horse.
‘That was a really good try,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t being too effusive. ‘I’m so glad I saw it. And that I haven’t infected you with that beastly cold I had last weekend.’
‘I never get colds,’ he assured her. The chocolate was making his voice sound squelchy. ‘I’m glad you’re better. You seemed really ill.’
‘Not ill; just stuffed up and uncomfortable. How was yesterday’s rehearsal?’
‘Not bad at all,’ he said, shooting a half-smile at her. He must have overheard her the other day suggesting that George might occasionally allow himself a rather more colourful compliment than that when she’d dressed up specially to please some of his clients.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said, enjoying the hint of cheekiness. ‘And how’s Mer doing in his part?’
Oh, stop it, Trish, she thought. You’re obsessed with the Fullwells. This is David’s time.
‘He’s got a broken arm.’ All the gleam and pleasure had gone from his voice. He turned his head away, too, to look out at the seedy-looking shops that lined this bit of the main road. Did he know she was trying to pump him? Or was this just the old reluctance to talk about Mer? ‘He says a man did it, but everyone knows it isn’t true. He’s stupid.’
‘A man? What man?’
‘He says it was a giant with red hair and yellow teeth, who put his arm across his knees and broke it. But it’s a lie. Mer’s a stupid, snivelling, little liar. Everyone knows that. And there aren’t any giants. I hate him.’
‘But why? Why aren’t you sorry for him? You’re usually much kinder than this, David.’
He still didn’t look round. Trish tried again:
‘You know I wouldn’t ever try to make you tell me anything you didn’t want to talk about, don’t you?’
‘I s’pose.’ He shrugged, still looking out of the window.
‘Good. Then I will just ask once what it is about Mer that makes you so uncomfortable.’
‘I told you.’ The dismal view might have been of paradise for the way he kept staring at it. ‘He’s stupid, and a liar.’ Trish took a hand off the steering wheel to lay it gently on his cold, dirty knee. He pulled away from her.
They finished the rest of the drive home in silence. Trish asked herself savagely what she thought she’d been doing. She was usually far better at cross-examination.
‘George should be here by now,’ she said as she pulled up outside her building. That made the boy turn back at last. She saw that he’d been crying. ‘Oh, David.’ She was about to apologize, but he got the words out first, hiccuping a little.
‘Trish, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you angry.’
Now she did risk putting an arm round him. His body was rigid. She kissed the top of his head. ‘You haven’t made me angry. You don’t have to tell me anything. And I won’t ask any more questions about Mer. I promise.’
He didn’t relax, so she knew she’d have to let him go uncomforted. She hoped being back in the flat would help him feel safe again. Later, while he was having his post-match bath, she went to find George and confess her latest idiocy.
‘Don’t worry so much,’ he said at once. ‘He’s more robust than
you think. All he needs is a bit of ordinary insensitivity to make him see that he needn’t be on his best behaviour all the time, not all this pussy-footing and apologizing.’ He kissed her head, in much the same way she’d kissed David’s and, she thought, for much the same reason. ‘Open the wine, will you?’
After lunch, George drove David to a friend’s house, while Trish did the washing up. She was still at the sink when he came back to hug her properly. His body was warm and very comforting. She dried her hands and turned in the circle of his arms.
Ten minutes later they were still there. The edge of the sink was pressing into her back and her hands were sliding up inside his shirt while he pushed down the straps of her bra.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said, barely able to speak.
‘Wait, Trish, wait,’ he murmured as he bent to kiss her breast. But she couldn’t wait. She wanted him with an urgency she hadn’t felt for years and arched up towards him.
Later, when they had made it up the spiral staircase to bed and she felt him building the once-familiar dizzying excitement in her, she forgot Toby and Henry Buxford and her career and even her brother. Later still, with George lying spent in her arms, she knew that nothing and no one mattered as much as he did.
For once she slept, and it was he who woke her. She smiled up at him, back where she belonged.
‘You look glorious,’ he said, straightening her tousled hair. ‘Absolutely glorious. And I
love
you.’
‘Me too.’
On Sunday George decided he had to work, so Trish stayed in Southwark instead of spending the day at his house in Fulham. David and Nicky had had an expedition planned for weeks and left early. Trish took her time finishing breakfast, then phoned her mother and left another message for her father. With no other obligations to fulfil, she booted up her laptop and clicked on to Outlook Express to read her accumulated emails.
Her fingers slipped off the keys as she saw the name Ivan Gregory at the top of the list.
My dear Miss Maguire,
Henry Buxford sent me a note last week, asking me to write to you about my father’s collection of paintings. I am afraid that I am not going to be able to give you what Henry believes you need. You see, there has never been any kind of inventory of the paintings. At least, I have never seen one.
To understand my ignorance, you would have to understand my mother. She was a remarkable woman. I, of course, knew her only as she was once the great adventure – and tragedy – of her life was over. But its effects never left her, and she devoted the rest of her life to the shell-shocked survivors of her war. She had seen their life in the trenches in close up, you see, and could never forget what it had done to them.
She and I lived together in the house my father had bought her, on the very edge of the City, where the gallery now is. When I was young we had lodgers too. I do not know when my father bought it, although I imagine the deeds must include a date. I can’t remember ever having looked at them myself.
She used to tell me about his paintings when I was a small boy, and how she was keeping them safe for him, for when he returned to her. Even when it became clear that he would not return, she could not bring herself to touch them, let alone unpack them to make any kind of list.
As you must know, he never did return. We think he was probably killed some time before 1918, but obviously after her pregnancy forced her to confess her secret marriage and leave the army nursing service.
She never met any of his family while she was serving in France, and it may be that he had no opportunity to tell them about her before he was killed, which may also
be why no one ever informed her of his death. But I do not know.
She tried to find them, just as she tried to find him, writing to everyone she could think of who might have been able to tell her. After the Second World War was over, she even went over to France to search for clues, but found nothing.
All she ever had were her memories and the paintings themselves. Perhaps in the end it was her sadness that made her leave them untouched, as though they were but a poor substitute for the man she had so greatly loved.
It has been on my conscience that I took my attitude from hers and did not even think to look at the paintings. After I had my stroke, I began to see that we had betrayed his legacy by leaving it in the dark. During my recovery I became obsessed by the need to put that right, although in my almost speechless and semi-paralysed state there was very little I could do.
Young Henry Buxford saved me and took on the burden of my father’s legacy. He even found this place for me to live, where the women who care for us are kind.
He has allowed me to make some kind of peace with my father’s ghost, if that is not too sentimental a way of putting it. Of course, it will only be when the last painting has been unpacked and restored that I will feel completely at ease, but this is the kind of thing that is slow work when it is done properly, as our director Toby Fullwell is doing it.
I am afraid there is nothing more that I can tell you about the paintings or about my father’s intentions for them. All I have ever known is what my mother told me about her magnificent Frenchman, who appeared one day at the dressing station behind the front line, where she was working.
As always, it was appallingly short of every kind of staff, from doctors right down to orderlies. He rolled up his
sleeves and joined in with whatever needed doing. He had no medical training, but he carried stretchers and soil buckets, stoked incinerators, held wounded limbs while the doctors worked on them, which, my mother said, was something most orderlies couldn’t stomach and left to barely trained VADs. Everyone loved him, she used to say, and he did much to restore the reputation of his countrymen in the eyes of the men he served.
There was a great prejudice amongst our forces against the local peasants, you see. There they were, my mother used to tell me, only a mile or two from the hell on earth that was the front line, living their comfortable prosperous little lives and rapaciously overcharging the suffering soldiery for the small comforts they could provide.
But Jean-Pierre Gregoire was not of their kidney. He was heroic in the quiet, unflamboyant way that my mother loved. And, although he was well over fighting age, he was waging the dirty secret war no one could speak of. She said he must have been in his early forties when she first knew him in 1916, and so when she went in search of him in 1949, he would have been seventy-four or five, only ten years younger than I am now. But as I say, she found no trace. Not of him, nor of his family.
I am becoming repetitive. Please forgive me, my dear Miss Maguire, and do let me know if there is any further help that I can give you.
Yours sincerely,
Ivan Gregory
No wonder Henry likes him so much, Trish thought, and is so determined to protect him.
The old man’s mention of the deeds of the house interested her. There must have been a marriage certificate, too, if his mother had inherited his father’s house and paintings, and
another certificate to show that he had been officially presumed dead. Henry ought to know where they were. In fact, Trish thought, it was odd that he hadn’t included any such documents in his original, wholly inadequate, bundle. Just as so many other things about Jean-Pierre’s life and collection were beginning to look extremely odd.
She had no difficulty believing that the body of a man killed in the First World War might never have been found, but she was less convinced that his widow would have been unable to find any trace of his family if she had really tried. Or that his family would not have made any efforts to trace his collection. Or that his widow would never have looked at it, however sacred a charge it might have seemed.
‘You’re getting side-tracked,’ Trish muttered to herself.
Jean-Pierre Gregoire was not her problem, and his son was clearly safe in the place Henry had found for him. Only Toby was in any kind of danger now. And Trish was still sure the danger was a great deal worse than Henry was letting himself believe.
The threat had obviously been very close at the Goode & Floore’s sale, so it seemed only sensible to start there. As Trish had told Henry in the beginning, she knew very little about the world of old master dealing, and she needed a guide.
She thought of the man she’d sat beside at a dinner of Antony Shelley’s. If only she could track him down, he might be able to help. As far as she could remember, he had been intelligent and reasonably open about the eccentricities of some of his colleagues.
He had certainly had a lot to say about the behaviour of some of the more aggressive dealers he knew. He’d talked of one in particular who would give absurdly exaggerated attributions in order to secure the sale of a big painting for his gallery. ‘Like a greedy estate agent,’ Trish had said and watched the expert’s eyes warm up with laughter.