Читать книгу What You Will - Katherine Bucknell - Страница 4

CHAPTER 1

‘How on earth could she fuck things up so badly?’ Lawrence asked.

‘I know.’ Gwen shrugged with her scant brown eyebrows. ‘She commits in a big way. It’s one of the great things about her. One of the things I love.’

He settled a pillow behind his head, slouching down into bed with his book, and put on his nearly invisible reading glasses; their delicate wings, spreading from the little gold clip on the bridge of his nose, made him look stern and scholarly yet somehow motherly, concerned. ‘Her engagement, her job, her flat in New York all scuppered in – what – twenty-four hours? Over an imaginary love affair with her assistant while she was working here in London this summer? Something of a minor masterpiece, don’t you think? She’s not – dumb? Your American slang dumb?’

‘No. She’s not dumb.’ Gwen studied the green paint underneath her fingernails, first with her grime-whorled palms upward, fingers curled towards her, then, flipping her hands over, with her fingers stretched out straight. ‘Not dumb – except maybe the way beasts are. Silent and unprotesting. She just takes what comes. She’s open-hearted, and she has the appetite for anything. She’s not – suspicious, you know, so she doesn’t try to protect herself from hurt.’

‘Sort of a hero to you,’ Lawrence observed, nonplussed, finding the page where he had left off. ‘Because she’s not afraid to suffer?’

‘But she doesn’t want to suffer.’ Gwen was sharp with him. ‘I mean – she says she has to fight it out for her job and finish what she was trying to do.’

‘How old is she getting to be?’ he asked vaguely, pulling his eyes up to his wife from the book. Behind his spectacles, the curves of flesh from lid to brow were broad and high, overlaying his grey-blue eyes with a permanent look of melancholy grandeur. His wax-white skin was ruddy around the nose, a little ruined by living. His once blond hair still grew thickly, to the verge of chaos.

‘Thirty-four. Same as me. Exactly.’

‘Funny, how she’s always seemed younger,’ Lawrence muttered. ‘Like a little sister somehow. Though I guess you were both in my class that year. I remember she used to work terribly hard. And sit in the back row. Silent, just as you say. So – she needs to grow up; there’ll surely be new vistas and new opportunities. She just doesn’t know yet what they are. Neither do we. And we won’t find out tonight.’ He yawned.

‘It’s this willingness she has,’ Gwen persisted. ‘Doing things for the sake of what other people want. Picking up on everyone else’s signals.’

‘She doesn’t appear to pick up on everyone else’s signals very well,’ Lawrence scoffed. ‘One feels she ought to stay away from men for a while.’

Gwen was silent.

Lawrence caught her eye, sensing her concern.

At last Gwen said, ‘She should be with someone, you know? It’s just so tough – thinking of her alone. And I feel like – well, I never did that.’

‘Weren’t you alone when I met you? It seemed so to me. Anyway, you’re not Hilary. Why do you want to put yourself in Hilary’s shoes?’

‘Would you like me in Hilary’s shoes?’ The tease was perverse.

Lawrence laughed. ‘Your feet wouldn’t fill them, would they? Your actual rather tiny feet. You’d have to grow yourself – quite a lot.’ And then in a tone of admonishment, a little impatient, ‘Why do you admire it, Gwen? Her blindness? Her inability to think clearly or to make sound judgements about other people?’

Gwen didn’t like being admonished, and she answered hotly: ‘I don’t admire it; I feel moved by it. By the way she exposes herself to things – to life.’

‘Yes, well, that you have done – taken your chances, huge ones. On me, for starters, and on living in England. You’ve shown plenty of nerve. It’s just that you’ve shown a surer instinct, don’t you think?’

‘A surer instinct for Englishmen?’ She was engaging him again, light-heartedly. They both laughed.

‘There does seem to be generous play on that theme,’ Lawrence said drily. ‘So perhaps she wants what you have and just doesn’t know how to get it? Perhaps it’s only natural? A little rivalry between the pair of you, being so close?’

‘An Englishman of her own? I don’t know that she likes you all that much, darling.’

‘I suppose not, or she might have made it up to see us at the cottage. She adores you, though. And we’ve been happy?’ The question trailed away, a wisp of interrogative, then he punctuated it flatly: ‘She’s well aware of that.’ His attention was wandering. He turned his eyes to his book.

Gwen nodded, pondering, tried to draw him back with a note of drama. ‘It’s major, Lawrence; she’s way out there now. Precarious. How does anybody deal with that?’

She hardly got more than a stock reply. ‘They turn to friends, my dear, just as she’s done. Lucky for her, she has you. And evidently plenty of aeroplane tickets.’

‘Maybe no more tickets, though; she has to be low on money, don’t you think? Which is another reason she really ought to stay here for at least a while. She needs us to take care of her.’ It was an explanation and also a plea.

‘She needs you to take care of her, my love.’ Lawrence gave a half-smile.

‘All of us,’ Gwen said emphatically.

‘I don’t see what I have to contribute apart from general fondness. I don’t mind at all, Gwen, if you feel you can persuade her. It’s nice for Will to spend time with his godmother. And nice for you. Especially when I’m in Oxford and staying at the cottage so much. I expect family life will wear thin with her quite quickly, and she’ll be off back to the States again no matter what you do for her or say to her.’ He paused; his eyes grew serious, his mouth settled in a forceful line. ‘But will you be ready for your exhibition, my love? That’s what you need to be sure of. She’s going to be hanging about, needing sympathy, endless conversation. It might prove to be like having two children. You’ve only just managed to settle Will at school and get shot of childminders. How will you paint? How long have you got?’

‘The show’s not till after Christmas. I’ve been thinking about it ever since she got here – Hilary sleeping up in the studio right now. I’m close enough. It’s about four months away, and there are plenty of canvases that are nearly ready. But the real point is that the work’s going well and I don’t want to stop. There are new things happening.’ She tested the very tips of each thumb against their first two fingers, rubbing lightly, then pincering open and closed like a crab, as if her hands tingled with energy and with excitement. Her eyes gleamed, her strange opaque green eyes. They had the look of cabochon emeralds, milky, as if she were threatened by cataracts, and they were shaped like drops turned sideways, spreading from the narrow tips inside the bridge of her nose. The deep brown lids were slow to blink, like the lids of a bird of prey.

Lawrence smiled and gave a little snort of pleasure. ‘There, you see – you grow all the time; nothing can stop you. Not even the safety of your happy marriage. You pull the sunlight to yourself, the nutrients, the H₂O. You don’t need to cast yourself out of the garden into a wilderness of error. Just keep painting. Can you? With Hilary up there?’

‘I can do – whatever I want. I’ve already told her I need to work. It’s not as if anyone has died – or – well … But she can deal with how we are. And she’s great with Will; she’ll help. She doesn’t have anything else to do.’

‘I’ve got to get the early bus to Oxford.’ Lawrence put down his book and reached for her, across her small back, around her smaller waist, a broad, familiar hand on her stomach, low down, the heel of his palm on her hip bone, his thumb edging into her belly button, pulling her towards him down into the depths of the mattress and the worn white sheets.

‘I’ve still got paint on my hands.’

‘I’ve been reading Petronius.’

Once again, they both laughed.

There was a knock at the bedroom door.

‘Will?’ they called together.

‘No. Sorry. Only Hilary.’ Her voice was husky. Husky with grief, but also because that was Hilary’s voice – big, rough, irresistible.

Gwen stood up and crossed noiselessly to the door, pulling her filmy white nightgown down around her knees.

‘I was thinking you might have a sleeping pill,’ came Hilary’s apology as the door swung open.

‘Poor Hil.’ Gwen reached up with her dirty, thin-fingered hand to the height of Hilary’s moon-white forehead, testing as if for a temperature. ‘I don’t know if we do, really. But let’s –’ She paused, feeling torn, stroked Hilary’s wobbly, near-black screws of hair back against her scalp and her ears, then, as the hair sprang free again, said, ‘C’mon. Lawrence has to get up early. Let’s go downstairs and look in the kitchen. Maybe we have some hippie tea. Or maybe – what about whiskey?’

The story of Hilary’s summer in London had rushed out chaotically at the big kitchen table in the basement when Hilary arrived from New York a few hours earlier. Now as Gwen turned on the lights at the bottom of the stairs and Hilary collapsed staring-eyed in a chair, it seemed to be still lying there in pieces which they could pick up and study. How did it all fit together? Did this piece interlock with that? Border or frame? Or endless, undifferentiated, disorienting sky?

The thing Hilary remembered most vividly from the last few months was eating lunch with Paul wherever they happened to be. It seemed as though they had eaten together every day that she had been in town. During the length of the mornings, working together, comparing this object with that one, discussing intrinsic qualities, history, whereabouts over the centuries and generations, the atmosphere between them would warm and thicken, a sense of anticipation would build up; they had to eat lunch, after all. It was unavoidable. He only suggested it once. After that, they repeated it by unspoken mutual agreement. They never made a reservation anywhere. Most of the cafés and sandwich shops they ate in were too simple for that, and making a reservation might have seemed to both of them to be too deliberate, like a date. It was as if, Hilary later reflected, they preferred to believe they ate together only because they had nothing better to do. And yet they seemed to go to lunch a little earlier each day, anxious to be sure there would be a table.

At the British Museum, for instance, they would desert the racks of antiquities and burst into the great, glass-ceilinged courtyard like travellers hurrying through a station for a train. Over their catalogues, over their notes, over their slides, they were reticent and businesslike; but in the bustle and clatter of that vast open space, they were relieved of self-consciousness and the excess of professional concentration that they practised in private. Among thick-shod tourists slung with umbrellas, cameras, guidebooks, parties of schoolchildren in windcheaters and knapsacks, squalling infants rolled along in their padded chair-worlds, they made a pair: experts from behind the scenes, carrying no luggage with them except what was inside their heads. The limestone facades, the wide, shallow stairs spiralling around the dome of Panizzi’s reading room, the summer sky dimmed by luminous clouds and marked out by steel struts in hundreds of triangular pieces like a pale grey parterre, offered a monumental stadium for their quiet focus upon one another.

Hilary afterwards thought that this particular setting, with its combination of neoclassical beauty and ultra-modern engineering – the worship of the old enshrined in the temple of the new – epitomised the kind of magic that bewitched her that summer. It seemed to sum up the whole effect on her of England: historical riches set off by soaring technical dazzle, a technical dazzle which she associated with America and which made her feel that she had been somehow misinformed. England – Europe – had gone on ahead into a future she didn’t recognise, couldn’t have predicted, and might not be able to keep up with. What rules were they playing by, she wondered, the members of this old culture, over which she had been taught, or had always assumed anyway, that the New World had some kind of natural, permanent, unbeatable advantage? How it all took her by surprise.

Hilary and Paul never spent much time studying a menu; it seemed to be of no interest to either what they ate. The first item listed would often be the one chosen by Paul, then Hilary might say, ‘I’ll have the same,’ handing the menu back unopened. Or, if it was a cafeteria, each might grab the first plate on the shelf. But after every lunch, they would sit over coffee upon coffee – cap-puccinos, double espressos, filters, cafetières, lattes – until they were shaking with it. Just to avoid leaving the table.

In the end it was all about being at the table, facing each other, with nothing in between them except what they might be about to eat or drink. In the Sotheby’s café in New Bond Street, where they lunched on the occasional days when Hilary borrowed a desk to go through the old sale archives and to be in touch with New York, she liked the last seat on the slippery, well-padded brown leather banquette, in the corner, the back of her head against the mirror; they could both see what was coming, Paul by looking right past her into the mirror. This arrangement, too, was like part of a journey, two travellers in a compartment on board a train and the world flashing by. This was the table, private but not solitary, at which she first began to tell Paul about her engagement.

There seemed no reason not to. She was only in London temporarily; it was a moment out of time, out of her real life, and Paul seemed to be the most understanding, the least judgemental of people. He didn’t know any of her New York friends. Who would he gossip to? It was a strangely exhilarating opportunity, something she couldn’t have planned or foreseen – spontaneous, like their friendship. She had scarcely realised how small her circle of New York friends had become, nor how narrow her life was, how regimented by her work. But here in London, virtually alone, she felt free. His probings were delicate but surprisingly searching; she understood his curiosity as a form of commitment to their friendship. He seemed to concern himself more with her each time they lunched. She kept back almost nothing.

‘Your fiancé was Edward Doro’s lawyer?’

‘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 had, and far more ambition.

His view of her made Hilary begin to realise that everything which had happened to her in her life so far had happened by chance or through people she already knew. She had worked hard every single day for a decade since drifting away from graduate school, but she had never called any shots. She had simply accepted what life had offered in the way of work, in the way of friends. And she had been content. But now that Eddie Doro was dead, now that he had left her to sell off two-thirds of his collection of antiquities and build his museum, she was beginning to wonder if she needed to have something more like a vision, or at least an agenda. She had been relying on Eddie’s. Would that be enough to complete the assignment? Such was Paul’s effect on her – to make her feel as if he, Paul, could see her life much more clearly than she could see it herself, as if he could do the job she was intending to do better than she could do it.

‘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.’ Even the single syllable of American sounded yokelish, she thought. She wouldn’t risk more. But her feelings were in spate, a running torrent. He might easily have carried her off if he had tried. He merely kissed her on one cheek, holding her arm just above the elbow as he leaned down to her, a whisper of flesh, soft and dry, halfway between her mouth and her ear.

Still, it heated her to nearly a sizzle and she added, ‘I’ve adored –’ stumbled, blushed ‘– you.’

Then she found herself in tears. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t help it. I’m going to miss you. I have to say it.’

‘I shall – miss you, too –’ Paul stood up straight, took a half-step backwards, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Naturally.’

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’

‘Well, don’t be. I mean – poor you. I had – no idea.’

‘It’s my fault. I should have said something. I wish we’d gone out, maybe, or –’

‘How sweet you are,’ Paul said. ‘I’m terribly flattered.’ With a glance up and down New Bond Street, he took his hands from his pockets and awkwardly wrapped his long arms around her, rattled her sportily in his embrace, then released her, stooped a little, peered into her face, stroked her unruly hair. ‘But you’ve got to make that plane, haven’t you? Come on, you can do it.’ His voice was tender and encouraging. Now he pulled her against him with his left arm around her shoulders, raising his right in the air to hail a black cab.

Hilary let herself be held, melted against his willowy frame. It felt like heaven to her, this instant of contact, a brief crisis of bliss, as the taxi squealed to a stop, purred at them.

‘Heathrow,’ Paul barked at the driver, bullish, familiar. He lifted Hilary’s two big black suitcases inside with his long right arm, letting go of her shoulders, taking her hand and holding it in his left as he reached through the yawning black door and she stood on the pavement beside him.

The driver poked at his computer, waiting. Hilary’s mind went blank; time seemed suspended; she was in Paul’s care; she felt she had admitted everything to him, everything that mattered.

‘There,’ Paul announced as he swung back towards her. ‘You’re all set. This chappie’s been there a thousand times.’

And she nodded, accepting it. She felt entirely passive, a sleepwalker, partly because of the champagne.

Paul bundled her into the cab, one arm under her elbow, the other around her shoulder. ‘Don’t forget your seat belt; you have to, you know.’

She nodded, the tears welling as she slid back on the seat.

‘You mustn’t go all to pieces,’ he clucked at her, leaning in one last time. ‘There’s so much traffic, is the thing. Better get going.’ And he stretched his face towards her, creaking with effort, planted another, longer kiss on her cheek.

‘Come to the airport with me?’ Hilary was surprised at her own boldness. And she could tell that Paul was more than surprised. Shocked almost.

‘I – I don’t think I can. I mean – I don’t think I should,’ he sputtered. And then after a ponderous silence, a horn sounding behind them, he said with evident discomfort, ‘After all, you’re engaged to be married. I believe you must have mentioned it every day. So – hadn’t we better leave it here? Mutual adoration and no bruises?’

It was a blow, but he said it so definitely that Hilary couldn’t demur. And she felt she had no right to, since the impediment was on her side.

When she tried to speak, her lips shook; she was forced to wipe at her nose with a bare knuckle. Engaged to be married. She felt a surge of shame at her behaviour. So undignified, she reprimanded herself. What was she doing? Who was she, in fact? She sat up very straight, dry-eyed, suddenly self-possessed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said solemnly. ‘Please forgive me. Please.’

Paul was silent, opened his face to her. At least that was how Hilary thought of it afterwards, and that’s what she was trying to explain now to Gwen.