‘It’s awful,’ said Hughie with a grin, ‘I’ve hardly read him.’
‘He had no time for what he called minchers,’ Evert said.
‘Ah, yes . . . ! Well, no . . .’ said Musson; and businesslike after all, ‘Well, I don’t think any of these, I’m afraid, for our show.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Evert, and smiled. ‘We’d better look at the things in the drawing room.’
‘I want to see the Sutherland,’ said Hughie. ‘Modern British art: after you . . .’ and as they went through: ‘I’ve got an idea about who could write something – you know, for the catalogue.’
‘Oh, have you . . .’ said Evert.
‘This is marvellous,’ said Hughie, surveying the mad jumble. ‘I’d forgotten just how good it was.’
Evert turned round, and nodded slowly, as though seeing it all again for the first time – and also, Lucy thought but didn’t say, for the last. If she didn’t like much of it herself, she was impressed that Hughie did. He was in his element. He took things down, reaching higher than Ivan, who was helping him; she was entrusted with a small picture herself, which she carried across the room and propped on the sofa for them all to stare at. ‘You’re thinking of an exhibition, of course,’ her father said. ‘I’m trying to remember the space.’ It was the exercise of a skill that couldn’t be explained.
‘The big Ben Nicholson, obviously,’ said Hughie.
‘Ah . . . yes,’ said Evert.
‘The two little Nicholsons,’ said Ivan.
‘Well, they’re marvellous. One I think not in good nick.’ This turned out to be Lucy’s picture.
‘Really?’
‘Well, have a look at it,’ said Hughie. Lucy peered at it, propped on the cushions, and thought it looked very rough indeed, the paint in a thick brown corner actually chipped off.
‘Oh, and what about the Chagall?’ Ivan said.
Hughie was charming but brisk. ‘I think just paintings, don’t you? I mean, it would probably sell, but it wouldn’t fit.’
‘Which one’s that?’ Lucy asked her father. He showed her – a lovely, rather funny, picture of a red man, a green woman and a blue cow flying overhead. She read in the corner, ‘À mon ami Dax’.
‘It’s just a print, you see, Lucy.’
‘Oh . . . yes, I see,’ she said. He’d explained prints before.
‘There’s a lot of prints,’ said Ivan, with a frown at this unexpected objection. She sensed it was something he was going to come back to.
‘Now there are half a dozen Goyles,’ said Evert.
‘That may be too many,’ said Hughie.
Lucy peered at Ivan: was he a painter? Her impression was that Ivan didn’t like art, was bothered by it somehow, as he was by children.
‘I remember that one,’ her father said, as a little painting, green, white and black, was unhooked from above the bureau.
‘Of course, beside the Nicholsons . . .’ Hughie said, with a sharp breath. ‘I know he’s a favourite of yours, Evert!’
‘I do think he was good,’ Evert said mildly.
‘What do you think, I wonder, Jonathan,’ said Hughie, ‘as a painter?’
‘Oh . . .’ – as if he’d never thought about it. ‘No, he’s got something, hasn’t he . . .’
‘I mean he’s far from contemptible,’ Hughie said, ‘obviously’ – though contempt, now he’d mentioned it, seemed to steal into the room, like the draught from the window. He grinned. ‘There’s something rather brilliant, in a way, about the total lack of intellectual interest.’
‘Oh, dear!’ said Ivan. ‘Poor old Uncle Stanley!’
The other thing Hughie said he very much hoped they would have was the sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. The others looked down on it on its table in front of the mirror, while Lucy had it at eye level, the back of it reflected, smooth as a bowl, when she moved her head to right or left. It was hollowed out, the rim polished, the rougher inside painted white. Or it had been white once; now she peered into a tilted cup that was yellowish at the top and at the bottom almost grey, as if water had stood in it. The painted surface had fine cracks over it, and she noticed that one of the strings across the gap had been replaced – it had a bigger knot underneath the rim, which only she perhaps could see. ‘Simply stunning,’ said Hughie. ‘Nineteen-fifty or so, I imagine.’
‘I expect you’re right. I bought it after my father died, which was 1952. Ivan will correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve always loved it.’
‘I’d have thought, what . . . thirty thousand?’ said Hughie.
Lucy gave it a stern look, as if haggling the price down. She thought it was nice, as a little thing to have, but £30,000 made her want to laugh in protest.
‘Well . . .’ said Evert, who seemed rather thrown by the price himself, ‘I’m glad you like it’ – he turned away suddenly to look for something in the bureau.
To see the Sutherland they had to go to a bedroom along a short passage also lined with pictures. Lucy glanced at them in a carefully expressionless way; they seemed to be drawings and photographs mainly. But her father stopped and, a little shortsighted now, looked at one of them, a red drawing of a naked man, obviously, but with no head and cut off above the knee; there was a funny squiggle where his tool, as Thomas called it, should have been. ‘You’re keeping this, I hope?’ he said.
‘What?’ Evert turned back. ‘You’ve always had a soft spot for that one, haven’t you. I think I’ll have to leave it you when I die.’
‘Ah! Thank you,’ said her father, and touched Evert’s sleeve: ‘Though I can wait! It’s by . . . remind me . . . ?’
‘It’s by Peter Coyle,’ said Evert, ‘you know . . .’
‘Oh, that’s a Coyle,’ her father said. ‘Coyle not Goyle!’
‘Oh, very much not Goyle,’ Evert agreed. They stood pondering it for a moment, it must have been some body-builder, a bit grotesque, frankly. Ivan said,
‘What would that be worth, I wonder?’
Hughie came back. He made a humorous show of giving it his consideration. ‘Coyle?’ he said. ‘His time has yet to come. Who can say, he may enjoy a revival.’
‘I knew him, of course,’ said Evert. ‘You know he went into camouflage in the War – painting whole ships. It satisfied his sense of scale.’
‘He thought big, like your father,’ said Hughie.
‘Well, there you are,’ said Evert.
‘He was killed, I believe, in 1942,’ said Ivan.
‘Alas,’ said Evert.
‘A certain problem of scale here, too, I think, don’t you?’ said Hughie with a laugh. ‘Or do you imagine the model really looked like that?’
‘Hah – I wonder,’ said Evert; he smiled for a moment at Lucy, then leaning on her father’s arm he led them into the bedroom.
Therefore, when she arrived at Hughie’s gallery for the Private View Lucy knew most of the pictures, and the main interest lay in seeing them uprooted, divorced, regrouped, and sometimes repaired; her little Ben Nicholson had been very cleverly patched up – even in the bright spotlight you could only tell if you already knew. It struck her it all became a Collection, with a beautiful book about it, just at the moment it was being dispersed. She felt the pictures were like . . . not friends really, but acquaintances – like those adults in the room who had met you before but now boomed at each other over your head. She stood for a while by the desk at the front, reading the backwards writing on the window: ‘Modern British Art The Evert Dax Collection’. Even after she’d worked it out it remained to be solved. Evert was standing in the middle of it all, red in the face, with Ivan helping him, and Hughie saying, ‘Evert, you remember Georgia Screamer,’ (or something like that) as people came up. She went back through the room. She was the only child there, glimpsed, greeted, disregarded, and the onset of boredom was mixed with a larger disappointment, a sadness she felt hanging, lurking in the heat and noise of the party. No one paid much attention to the pictures, and soon the gallery was so crowded you couldn’t have looked at them properly even if you’d wanted to. For the guests it was really a private view of each other.