The only small problem was that I had to cancel, abruptly, my lunch with Simon. I had to stand up my boss. And all week long, I think, Simon, who notices things, had been noticing my nervousness, my not quite sparkling form. Everything okay, Paula?
Every month or so Simon likes to have a one-to-one lunch with one of his directors, and this was my turn. All part, as he sees it, of his caring and counselling and not merely boss-like role. He nearly always begins, after the first sip of wine, with a: “Now — tell me all your troubles.” A wry joke by now, since I never seem to have any to tell him. Though I have a hunch that nothing would do more for Simon’s sense of his own worth than if I were to grasp his wrist across the table and pour out some tale of woe, even show signs of wanting to cry on his shoulder. And perhaps this week he’d been scenting the possibility.
A complicated soul, my boss. The soul of sweetness, charm and urbanity, but a discontented soul who, since he has no envy or spite and no obvious cause for them (“unhappily married art dealer with a house in Holland Park” doesn’t quite get the sympathy vote), rumbles not with anger but with a strange thwarted charity.
And a world expert on Piazetta. And in more than thirty years of buying and selling, he hasn’t lost the love which is my love too. No disrespect meant to your father. It’s not a case of one thing or the other, and it’s not confessing to anything treacherous to say that when I was starting at Walker’s, in the years after I’d married your dad, before you were born, it was Simon who really brought out in me the second passion of my life. No disrespect, either, to you.
Art’s not for the very young? For you it’s just “stuff.” You have to have grown up and had a taste of loss. I’ll explain that later. Art’s just compensation? I’m not saying that either. And I’m definitely not saying I could imagine an alternative life for myself with — God forbid — Simon Fitch. But two people who in most other respects may be entirely mismatched can still thrill together to a third thing, a passion shared. The light falling round people in a painting which is like the light falling round real people too, except it can’t go out. What do you care for such things? The light which fell today (yesterday, I mean), just sunny June light shafting into the narrow streets between Jermyn Street and Pall Mall. What was so special about it?
But “better at art than life,” that’s what I think Simon would confess of himself, if you ever dared to press his rawest nerve, to prod his art dealer’s solar plexus. He’d like some compensation the other way round. At sixty-one, the light, in that respect, is starting to look a little thin.
I know he’s fond of me. More than that, possibly. It’s he, perhaps, who at one of our lunches should grasp my wrist and unburden his breast, but it hasn’t happened in over twenty years and I think my job is safe.
I think Simon thinks — if we set aside the “Walker and Fitch wouldn’t be Walker and Fitch without you” and other such tripe he talks — that what’s lying here now, under this roof, may be a sort of perfection, as good as it gets. Art and life. If only he’d found the same recipe. And I can’t disillusion him. I love my husband. I love you, my precious ones, I love this home. And Simon’s been here, of course, and seen it and you, and you’ve seen him. You treated him, the first time at least — paraded in your jimjams before bedtime — like some visiting crown prince. You almost bowed and curtsied (but I won’t remind you). Simon Fitch and his stately wife, Veronica, for dinner.
But he was enchanted by you, always asks after you. And to cap it all, I think he’s always been enchanted by what we’ll call the “Living World Story”—by how his indispensable junior colleague became in time and in turn rather out-shone, professionally speaking, by her once obscurely occupied and poorly paid husband. He once proclaimed, like some minister who’d personally blessed our union, that your dad and I were “Science and Art.” Now look at that splendid pairing.
If I were to tell Simon the little truth behind that splendour — that even you don’t know about yet — I don’t think he’d adjust his appraisal. I don’t think he’d suck thoughtfully at his half-rims, step back and (as he can do) declare the picture not to be genuine after all. I think he’d just relish the entrusting and the opportunity to protect.
But the thought that I might have spilled out to Simon at lunch today, over a plate of crab linguini, the full facts of this imminent weekend is — unthinkable. Poor Simon. But unthinkable.
And anyway now I’d had, abruptly, to cancel and, in the secret circumstances, to be blunt about my reasons. Though I was a little mean and sly.
“Another lunch date, Paula? Who is this special client?”
“It’s Mike.”
“Ah. Well — far be it from me…”
The sunshine fell too into Simon’s office, onto his crisp striped (Jermyn Street) shirt.
It wasn’t lost on Simon, of course, that it was very odd that Michael Hook, head of Living World and a busy man, should want or feel it proper to phone his wife in her busy office at ten-thirty on a Friday to press her to lunch.
“Well, of course. Of course, Paula.” He looked suddenly solicitous — and intrigued. “You must have — something important, I dare say, to discuss.”
“Yes,” I said, being tactful.
But not discuss actually. Just mark, just observe what day it was, which Simon couldn’t possibly have guessed. And it was a fine one in June and your dad had a simple plan. Not even a restaurant. A restaurant seemed ceremonious and conspicuous. Mark, not celebrate. And this was lunch, not quite yet that actual terminal supper, which we’d already agreed had to be simply at home, and absolutely without any attempt at ceremony, with you.
I can say now that that would have been a tricky undertaking, I’m not sure how we’d have managed it, and I should thank you for getting us out of it. Since what, in the event, did we find? You were both out celebrating, your recent release from exams. There were separate, dutiful phone messages from each of you to say you had your separate Friday-evening plans, hastily fixed up, it seemed, like our lunch. The days have long gone for asking permission: “Fine. Have fun. Home by midnight.” This was hardly a night anyway for taking you to task.
And in fact you were both home before eleven. They can’t have been such riotous celebrations. Neither of you seemed especially worse for wear, and neither of you had been aware till you came in that you’d both been doing similar things. Of course, you were immediately and automatically uninterested in that fact. These days you don’t like anything that smacks of synchronicity. Your lack of enquiry after each other meant that your dad and I couldn’t do much enquiring either. It turned out, this last day, to be one of those not so uncommon days which pass with our exchanging barely a handful of words with you. How different tomorrow will be.
After some fridge-raiding, you both seemed ready to go to bed, or at least to your rooms. They’re tired, we said condoningly, clearing up after you, those exams have caught up with them. Ordinary parental concession. Soon afterwards we came up too.
I hope you had fun anyway. If you think they were not particularly memorable evenings, you may find that you’ll always remember them nonetheless. You weren’t to know there was something else — to mark. Conceivably, on this of all nights, I might still be waiting up for you, listening out for you, in this rain. By now, I’d be seriously worried. But you’re safely tucked up and I’m telling you this story.
I left my office a little after twelve-thirty and walked towards Lower Regent Street. Your dad left his office in a cab. I met him at the top of the Duke of York’s Steps. I’d called in, on my way, at the sandwich bar in Crown Passage. We walked down the steps and across the Mall to the park.