We showed her the cardboard box and she noted the remaining contents. She winced but wrote. She even picked up some things we’d missed. One gold fish mask, acetate. Have I seen it all. Eliza affirmed. What happens now. I’ll write a report and a valuation. Nothing in principle prohibits them appearing in the same document so to make your part as lucid and as uncomplicated as possible I’ll combine and send you a copy that’ll be yours, to use that is. Take it with you to the buyers and beware.
The next manoeuvre had been planned. Would she be interested in any of it, all of it.
Certainly not. That would be a flagrant conflict of interest. I hope that. She straightened an arm. Do you know what you’re doing.
I suppose we couldn’t offer any of it to your husband then either.
Correct. Ted wouldn’t touch it, be people just waiting to trip him up. He’s one of the best, unique, but he has to rise above a lot. With all he cops from those goddamned nanny goats and worse, above and below, he’s a consummate professional, a great communicator. Phah. Vendetta of the flesh. Anyway I thought you wanted to sell the stuff straight off. I’ll send you a list of places you could try. There’s some value here, among the store-bought furniture, but let me tell you, this is a long way from a sure business; whatever you got for that bookcase, I wouldn’t spend it yet.
Mrs. Sullaman wound on her film then dropped her things back in the bag. Would she like a cup of tea or coffee before she left. No thank you. And I suggest you give all that tableware a proper clean before you try pushing it on anyone. Relatively small things like that can make a difference.
Yes ma’am.
After she had gone Eliza suggested we draw lots for the washing up this time but I told her not to bother. She hooked her finger in the elastic tabs of her boots and pulled them off, then she stretched out on the sofa with a slip of junk mail raised to the fading light. The valuer had been over longer than I’d realised. I put the gloves on as they were and dumped the silver back in the sink. It shivered the unaccumulated quiet of the flat, waking me up to the lull between peak hour and the various night traffic, when you can hear the leaves if there are any, and the birds, closer than that long, silent migration that darkens over the city at twilight, when voices on the street break so clearly they reach the kitchen window without the words that carried them. Eliza was shuffling through her reading matter. I poured a handful of baking soda into the sink.
7
I may as well say in faith to the arbitrariness by which I apparently got here that I began when I came across a photograph of a scale model escalator on fire in a volume bound, I believe, in the colour of the baseball team named for keeping out of the way of the new trolley cars in Brooklyn, and containing a report from a seminar on Fire Dynamics and the Organisation of Safety at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, augury into the accident in the shaft serving the deep Piccadilly line at St. Pancras. An intestine catastrophe as they nicely call it. How did it happen. Probably a match, the ban ignored, dropped alight by some careless traveller at the right side of the wooden stairs and falling in a grease track pregnant with paper fragments from discarded tickets, sweet wrappers, fluff, rat and human hair, never cleaned. An eastbound train arriving and a westbound train departing. The wind in the wings. No one believed the first computer simulation, that it burns obliquely: the model proved it. Remain calm, fire does not burn downwards, gh devoured. Anisot, well, you remember the bits, the solvent in the ceiling turning the smoke oily black, and so on the vidimus, less the wax of course in such mounting heat. At least it’s true I’ve always had a soft spot for pictures. It might have been different.