If. The list of ifs gathers in number as George walks with Tess, the woman who owns the gallery, round the large space that will house the exhibition. As she often does, because she is very good at what the times now call public relations, she talks to the newspapers so that notices will appear in the press and people will know that the exhibition is soon to open and will know all about it when it does. And because he is the art critic for the paper, the largest in the city, she is speaking to him. They have met and spoken frequently in his time as critic and every time he meets her it is impossible not to notice that she is from and was obviously born into a world of money, sophistication and social ease. A woman the like of whom George has never met before. She doesn’t parade wealth and all the things that the money she was born into have given her. She doesn’t need to. It is unmistakably there. No jewels, no expensive clothes, just this — and it is the only way George can describe it — this … unassailable self. And the ease of manner. The aura that nothing can touch her because, George imagines, nothing ever has. The very rich, the wise mid-western voice of Mr Fitzgerald is telling him, are different from you and me (the same Mr Fitzgerald who Tess would dearly love to correct if he were still alive). And although she has the gift of speaking to him as if he were a kind of friend or just the likeable type that she would want to talk to anyway, George knows perfectly well that she is only spending her time with him because he is the critic.
And there is a large part of George that wishes this were not so. In an ideological age, an age that has long insisted on the necessity of taking sides (and the moral superiority of those who do), George is not particularly ideological. This does not mean that he doesn’t understand the prevailing ideological stand-off nor care about it. He does, but he is distant, detached, about ideology in the same way that he one day hopes to be distant and detached about the whole country. If his university education has taught him anything, it has taught him that he is one of those who are now adrift. His father is a shopkeeper, his mother a mother. He is what the ideology of the day regards as that most slippery of customers, the petit-bourgeois man. Neither working class nor middle class. Fleeing one and aspiring to the other. A deserter to one and an upstart to the other. Not to be trusted.
In fact, he is not aspiring to any of that: class, wealth or status. He is, as far as he is concerned, quite simply adrift. And happily so. Free. Distant, and happily distant. If he aspires to anything at this particular moment it is to the kind of woman he is now speaking to. To Tess. No, he doesn’t want class, wealth or status. He just wants her (which, he silently concedes, could be just another way of having all the rest). To the likes of his father she is one of those who are out of reach, and a good thing too. To the likes of his father there is happiness and there is contentment. Contentment is preferable because it is more lasting. And contentment is found with one’s kind. Not with the kind of woman that George is currently in the company of. Only tears are to be found there. Stick to your kind, George, a voice like his father’s tells him. But George isn’t listening. George is adrift; unaligned and unencumbered. And this is why part of George wishes that it wasn’t simply because he is the critic for the newspaper that Tess is talking to him. But he knows full well that that is the long and the short and the tall of it. And that is also why when he tells himself that if he aspires to anything at all it is to the kind of woman he is with, it is a playful telling. A little story, something to be toyed with; a toy to be taken from the toy box of fanciful living and to be put back when play is over. A sort of daydream. And because he is the one making up the story he knows better than to believe it.
As she takes him around the space, an old warehouse that has been vacant for many years (and which she picked up for a song), the list of ifs is gathering in number. Because there will be so many paintings in this exhibition (for it is a survey of all that the city’s painters and sculptors produced during the war), more than the usual gallery space is needed. And there are paintings on the walls already, as well as sculptures and small artifacts on the floor and on tables. The gallery area is being filled with images and objects and colour. Bright, luminous colour that seems to light up the warehouse. And it is an odd collection of images: grotesque, sleazy, bizarre, absurd, violent and sadly triumphant — for the years that produced them were all of that and more. Already there is an air of excitement about the place, a sense of moment. And as much as George is contemplating all of this, the list of ‘ifs’ is gathering. If he was not leaving the city as soon as he could. If he had the knack of saying the right thing at the right time, which he doesn’t and it’s part of the reason he became a writer. If her poised self were not so unassailable and his not so adrift. If, indeed, she was not married with a daughter who is a mirror image of her, and if she was not happily married, for he has seen her with her husband, a banker, and concluded that there is happiness in the union. If it was not for all this and so much more, George just might fall in love with this woman. But for all the reasons he has gone over and over again as they have walked around the gallery space, he wouldn’t stand a chance. And with this thought the voice of his father rings with truth. But he is adrift, so what can he do but ignore the ringing? It is a call he will not take for the time being. Or possibly ever. And so, as she guides him round, he is playfully compiling a list of ifs.
As she remarks upon this and that exhibit, he becomes aware of her favourites, not so much because of what she says but because of the enthusiasm with which she speaks of some more than others. And he is conscious of being led in a certain direction, towards certain artists more than others, so that when he comes to write about the exhibition he will mention these artists more than others. Of course, she would never say which are her favourites; they are all her children. But she does hint.
At the end of the tour she adds that the exhibition is not complete. That she is still waiting for some artists, and it is here that she offers a number of names. And although the name of Sam is in the middle of the list, it is the way it is dropped into the middle — a little too casually — that catches his attention. Although George has a naturally playful turn of mind, indeed, an aspect of the eternal child, he also has the child’s capacity to recognise instantly and see through such things as calculated, casual remarks. Whether he is right or wrong, he is suddenly contemplating the possibility that not all young men like himself simply play with the idea of falling in love with a woman like this. That this poised and worldly self of hers might not be so unassailable after all. That the very rich, as Mr Hemingway informed his mid-western friend, were different only insofar as they were very rich. And that sometimes this woman just might fall in love with her favourites (and he has heard small-town rumours to this effect), the favourites whose names she is apt to drop casually into the middle of a list of names so as not to single them out.
But his list of ‘ifs’ is still the same, and his speculations remain playful. At the door of the warehouse that sense of moment he felt walking around the gallery comes upon him again as he stares back at the images inside, the grotesque, the absurd, the violent and the sadly triumphant. And he can’t help but think, yet again, that when they all finally leave this place that they can’t wait to be shot of they just might find that they have left their best behind them, and that pressure cooker of a city at war the best thing that ever happened to them.