‘We’ll never see eye to eye,’ Handley said. ‘I enjoy coming to see you because it makes me feel so civilised. I mean, it amazes me how cultured people like you can live so far down in the mud.’
Teddy laughed. ‘Let’s not go into that.’
‘Or we’ll never get off it,’ Handley said, pushing his face close, ‘will we?’
‘I mean,’ Teddy said, ‘wouldn’t it be better for you to live in Majorca, or some place where the sun is warm, and living cheap?’
He grinned. ‘You want to get rid of me?’
‘I want you to be happy.’
‘I thought so. You want me to stop painting.’
Greensleaves flushed, as if caught in a secret criminal thought, which deepened when he realised there was no basis for it.
‘Don’t take me seriously,’ Handley said, ‘or I’ll cry. I’m the only one who knows how I can live.’
‘You’re painting well?’ Teddy said, pouring two brandies. He had the look of a man who had his vices under control, but who also knew exactly what they were — which was something.
Handley sat in a leather chair, his feet on the long mahogany desk. ‘Never better, in my humble opinion. You can put another show on as soon as you like.’
‘It’s only three months since the last. We don’t want them to think you’re too prolific.’
‘Afraid they’ll stop buying?’ Handley jibed.
‘They may want them cheaper. We can’t afford that.’
‘Why not? It’ll hurt you but it won’t hurt me. I’m working as if I’m on piece work. Bull week, every week. Grab, grab, grab. Call it inspiration if you like.’
Teddy pushed the brandy over. ‘Leave the tactics to me.’
‘Cheers! I suppose you might get thin if you didn’t make so much money.’
He sipped and laughed. ‘I don’t think you realise it, Albert, but I like being fat.’
‘There’d be nothing left of you if you weren’t.’
‘It’s good to be fat in this business. A thin art dealer isn’t trusted. A thin partner, yes, but not someone like me.’
He’s trying to reassure me, Handley thought, that he’ll never run away with my money. He’s devious and corpulent. His eyes are shifty and incompetent. I’m sure he’s robbing me. But he’s good-natured, and I like him. ‘Have you always been fat?’
‘Generally, yes. People make way for a fat man. They respect him.’
Handley lit a cigar. ‘Unless there’s a war on.’
‘No danger of that.’
‘Civil war, I mean.’
Teddy laughed. ‘When I go into a restaurant the waiters smile. I’m always served first, whether they know me or not. I get bigger helpings, what’s more.’
Greensleaves’ office made him uneasy because three of his paintings hung on the well-lit walls. They seemed out of place, set there for dealers and customers who saw them only as so many square yards of investment. Handley knew, however, that his attitude was a bad one, indicating a lack of detachment and even backbone. He was, after all, happy enough when Teddy took out his cheque book and passed a chit for three thousand pounds.
He put it in his wallet. ‘That’ll get me through the weekend! I don’t need the other for the moment.’
They were disturbed by the buzzer, and when the door opened Handley recognised Lady Daphne Maria Fitzgerald Ritmeester (names he’d seen in an up-to-date Who’s Who which he’d bought to get basic facts on people he bumped into now that his paintings sold at the proper prices).
‘You’ve already met, I believe,’ Greensleaves said.
‘Twice,’ Handley stood up, ‘and both times I asked her to kiss me, but she didn’t.’
‘On the first occasion you were drunk,’ she said, with half a smile. Her charming and grating voice was the sort that would make you feel unsure of yourself if you thought there was a chance of going to bed with her. She was a thin middle-aged woman with dark hair piled over a splendidly intelligent face. Her grey eyes seemed over-exposed due to skilful make-up and care, and her faintly spread nostrils created a subtlety for her lips that they might not otherwise have had. Handley sensed that men would have to be a hundred times more gentle before such women would come to like them.
She turned to Greensleaves. ‘I just popped in to give you this,’ taking an envelope from her Florentine leather bag.
Teddy blushed at money instead of sex. There has to be something that embarrasses him to the marrow, Handley thought. Lady Ritmeester had bought some of his work, including the Lincolnshire Poacher, that star piece of his one-man show at which they’d first met.
‘How long are you in town?’
‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Till tomorrow, perhaps.’
She lit a cigarette and sat down. ‘How’s the country?’
‘Restful, as long as I can get away.’
‘I hear you run some sort of community?’
‘An extended family, really. A five-star doss-house.’
‘I thought the revolutionary thing nowadays was to eliminate the family.’
He laughed. ‘That sort of theory’s for young people who haven’t got families. I have seven kids, so who could get rid of that lot? There would have been another but my wife lost it after our house caught fire in Lincolnshire. I’m afraid to make up a manifesto against the family in case she gets pregnant again. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. The only thing is to make it bigger. It drives me up the zigzags.’
‘You could simply walk away,’ she teased, much to Teddy’s enjoyment as he opened her envelope, and put the cheque in his drawer.
‘If a man’s up to his neck in a bog how can he get up and crawl off? He needs a tractor to pull him free, and then it might yank both his arms out and he’d bleed to death. Still, there is some good in the family. The State’s helpless against it — or one like mine. Any system that screams against the family only wants to abolish it for its own ends — good or bad. It wants such power for itself. Who wouldn’t? Will you have lunch with me?’
Launched in the same tone as his speculations on the family, the request took her by surprise: ‘What a strange idea!’
‘It would be if we went to a fish ’n’ chip shop for a piece of grotty cod washed down with a bottle of high-powered sauce,’ he said. ‘But I mean real lunch at the Royal Bean up the street.’
She was an expensive production with the palest of porcelain skin as if, should you start to take her clothes off, she’d come to pieces in your hands. ‘You fascinate me.’
‘You’re like a woman,’ she answered. ‘Full of tease. A real man, I believe it’s called.’
No response was good enough, at least not while he expected it. ‘I’d be delighted if you’d have lunch with me.’
If he thought about it he couldn’t imagine anything more grisly, but it was too late to back out now. ‘As an experiment, then,’ she said, still with that damaged but maddening smile.
Teddy wondered if they’d need to use his desk to make love on — they were getting along so well — and had an impulse to begin clearing it, so as to inch himself back into their talk. They had forgotten him, and only such rude and crude behaviour could make them pay for it.
CHAPTER TWO
Handley suggested a taxi, but she preferred to walk the two hundred yards. They had the luck of a table near the curtained window. He offered a cigarette from his packet. ‘Do you eat out much?’
‘Reasonably often.’
‘I usually get stomach poisoning, though this place looks all right.’ He snapped his finger, but no one heard it.
‘That’s the disadvantage of a restaurant,’ she said. ‘Not good for one’s self-confidence.’
She was enjoying herself, and what man could want more than that? He knew he was not very strong on courtship, and Daphne Ritmeester sensed it, too, and was trying to make him pay for it. But time was on his side, and they were no longer close to the prying ears of Teddy Greensleaves, which made them somewhat easier on each other.