Wearing a dark-grey suit, he moved about the large room looking for Myra. He was hungry, and one whisky put him at last into a good mood. Lady Ritmeester was involved with a group of men whose faces he half knew, and she took his arm as he tried to get by. ‘Here’s Handley. Let’s ask him!’
‘What?’ he smiled. ‘Are you inviting me to become a social being?’
Her piled hair was phosphorescent, clamped into place by a blue and gilded fish. ‘Good Lord, no!’
‘You haven’t even kissed me, and we can never be friends until we’re over that little obstacle.’
‘Now look, Albert, Kenneth here says that those who take no interest in political matters fit very well into a declining society.’
‘I don’t take an interest myself,’ Kenneth said with a fat chuckle, ‘so I’m not prejudiced.’
Not you, thought Albert. ‘An interest in politics is only valuable in a declining society. Then you might get enough blood and brains out of it to make a revolution. If you see what I mean.’
Lady Ritmeester yelped joyously as if someone had stepped on her tail. ‘I thought painters weren’t very revolutionary people?’
‘Some are, some aren’t,’ Kenneth put in. ‘Don’t you think so, Raymond?’
‘More or less,’ said Raymond, who didn’t know what they were talking about.
‘I didn’t think you were,’ Lady Ritmeester said to Handley, as if a look from her beautiful eyes would bring him back onto the true path.
‘I wouldn’t stand you up against a wall, Lady Ritmeester, and that’s a fact.’
John looked at Malcolm, as if wondering whether they should throw this boor out before the American cultural attaché arrived.
‘I’m a revolutionary by faith,’ he said, ‘though perhaps not by conviction, living in England, if you know what I mean, which lacks the imagination or energy to be revolutionary.’
This seemed more of an insult than his last remark to Lady Ritmeester. Mark and John linked arms and walked off, while only Kenneth was goodnatured about it: ‘You mustn’t mention the word energy at a party.’
‘Energy’s a relative thing,’ Handley said, mocking himself with his own pomposity. ‘I once knew a man who worked double-shifts in a factory, sixteen hours every single day, for three months. Then he took a week off to go to the Isle of Wight. On the station platform he dropped a box of matches and when he bent down he never got up again. That particular movement had never been in his job. All the chaps remembered the way he died, and from then on he was the man who never even had the energy to pick up a box of matches.’
‘I’m so glad you’re telling us how spineless the workers are, Albert.’
‘Imagine bending down to pick up your lap-dog,’ Handley said to her, ‘and pegging out that way.’
‘This conversation’s too morbid for me,’ Lady Ritmeester said, turning to another group and hoping to cut the ground from everyone’s feet except her own.
He moved towards the wall, where huge blown-up pictures of George Bassingfield, Myra’s late and never-lamented husband looked down from beyond the grave at this strange company drinking homage to his book. Broad forehead, dark smouldering eyes, and bushy moustache gave him the slightly old-fashioned appearance of a works foreman who had volunteered for the First World War and perished on the Somme — probably because the enlargement had been blown up from a snapshot. It was a very English face, of a man who saw and felt everything but had been unable to express anything, except that such a malaise had driven him to write what was by all accounts a quite marvellous book. Copies were stacked on a card-table by the door, and Handley flipped through one while Myra was talking to her dead husband’s publisher. A year ago she’d met Frank Dawley at Handley’s first show. They’d decided to go away together, she leaving her husband whose photograph now looked down so mournfully and proud. On the evening she was to leave him for good George got in his high-powered car intending to run into them and kill both on their way to the bus-stop. By some split-second mishap in his desperate and foolhardy brain he had killed himself, injured Frank, and missed Myra altogether.
The publisher, Larry, was regretting George’s untimely death. ‘On the showing of this book he had a lot to give the world. He was a poet, really, who’d have knocked Rachel Carson right out of the picture on this line of writing.’
She looked far from easy, for the party called all the life-changing events of the last year before her. Yet self-control increased her confidence, and set up in her a beauty that Albert had never seen before. Like many men of unstable temperament he tended to fall in love only with unhappy women, but Myra’s misfortunes had inspired her beyond such a state, for which transition he had a respect and tenderness he tried never to let her see.
The publisher was a tall dark middle-aged man wearing sweat-shirt, jeans and sneakers, who tried to inveigle authors into his net by looking young, being with it and getting rich. When Myra introduced him to Handley he gave a radiantly shy smile and asked if they could publish his autobiography.
‘I haven’t written it yet,’ Handley said, still holding Myra’s hand, which she’d given him by way of greeting. ‘My life’s so dull nobody’d be interested. Artists lead dull lives, otherwise how would they feed their imagination?’
Larry gave a great laugh. ‘There, you see? He says something like that, and wants us to believe he’d write a dull book. We’d give five hundred pounds on signature.’
‘If you gave me that much money I’d never write the book,’ Handley said. ‘I’m a painter, not a thief. Everyone I meet tries to get me to give up painting. Maybe I’m good, after all.’ Larry asked if he had any more of those long thin cigars he was smoking, on the principle that if you want to charm someone get them to do you a favour. Albert opened his tin. ‘You offer me five hundred pounds one minute and beg a cigar off me the next. I don’t know what the publishing world is coming to. I suppose you’ll have a knighthood soon.’
‘I’ll tell you what, then,’ said Larry, ‘why don’t you do a series of book-jackets for us?’ Relishing the cigar, he mentioned an artist who’d also done some, whom he considered to be Handley’s superior because all the critics applauded him, but whom Handley thought was the lowest kind of paint-smearer — obscene, bloody and perverse. When he said so, Larry gave up and moved away, so that Handley received his first silent compliment of the evening.
He released Myra’s hand. ‘It’s over two months since I saw you. Thanks for getting them to send an invitation.’
‘They were delighted, as you saw.’
‘I didn’t much like leaving you alone in your cold house when I drove you back from the ship.’
‘Everything’s all right. The baby’s fine. He’s with my sister in Hampstead.’
‘Everything?’ he said. She smiled, and it delighted him to see that life had for once ennobled someone. To say there was a bond between them would be too accurate for it to be helpful.