‘Sheraton,’ says Hamish proudly. ‘An inlaid, cross-banded, mahogany, bow-fronted Sheraton sideboard. I got it for a song. Eight hundred.’
‘In the style of Sheraton,’ corrects Victor. ‘And four hundred would be too much. The legs are wrong, too.’
Hamish flinches, as if from a physical blow. Thus, so far, in his boastful peregrination of the house and its contents, he has flinched already some eight or nine times. The two men stand in what Gemma grandly refers to as the morning room, an elegant room of Georgian proportions, painted in modest white, picked out with gold and green, where the flicker-fire is lit every morning and where Gemma – if only such were her temperament – would go after breakfast to deal with her correspondence on the mahogany writing table with the U stretchers, circa 1800.
‘At least,’ remarks Victor kindly, ‘you’ve managed two pieces of approximately the same date and style in the same room.’
‘It’s Gemma’s fault,’ grits Hamish through his teeth with unaccustomed passion. ‘If I like something, she doesn’t like it and if I want it in a certain place she doesn’t rest until she’s got it somewhere else.’
‘That’s marriage,’ says Victor, insouciant.
The two men move up the wide, shallow staircase to stand under the tall windows, with their panels of coloured Art Nouveau glass.
‘The panes are moulded, not cut, I’m afraid,’ says Victor. ‘I hope you got them cheap.’
But, of course, Hamish hadn’t.
‘People take me for a fool,’ says Hamish mournfully. ‘Money isn’t what it was. No one respects you for making it, not any more. If anything, they despise you for it.’
Victor raises his eyebrows. Only the rich talk thus, his look indicates. He is discovering in himself a certain animosity towards Hamish.
‘Even your lass Elsa is unimpressed,’ complains Hamish. ‘She doesn’t want me for my money. She pities me.’
‘Um,’ says Victor, who would rather not consider the detail of Elsa’s forthcoming intimacy with this forlorn buyer of dud antiques. Victor has a facility for ignoring matters which might cause him mental distress. His parents were of an altogether different temperament, and thought long and hard about disagreeable matters, and on many occasions the small Victor would be turned out of his bedroom to make way for some distraught refugee, fresh from an SS inquisition or a concentration camp. Victor, as if to right the balance, to supply the family with a quality which it otherwise might lack, developed a degree of frivolity, a capacity for looking the other way whenever trouble loomed, which finally altogether estranged his parents from him. ‘Victor is not serious,’ they each separately concluded, and presently confided in one another, earnestly grieving their son. ‘Where did we go wrong?’
That was on the occasion when Victor, offered a gramophone record for his nineteenth birthday present, had specified ‘Bach for Swingers’. They could not bring themselves to buy such a travesty of a decent aesthetic experience, and bought him a record token instead, and were pained by the look of disappointment that passed across his face. He was a hefty, hearty boy by then, making two of his father. A changeling. Both parents had died since: his father, painfully of lung cancer: his mother, shortly afterwards, of sorrow – in the form of a heart attack. Their loss, and their distress, washed over Victor lightly, and drained quickly away. Janice had cried enough for both of them, sobbing and sniffing at the funeral. It wasn’t that Victor lacked feeling; he merely did not like to waste it where it would do no good: on the dead, the dying, or the destroyed. His parents had taught him that, however inadvertently, and would have to put up with the consequences. They had, in any case, or so it seemed to Victor, used up in their lives their full quota of mourning: there was none left over to shroud their departing. He walked briefly about the graveyard, organising.
When the good die they are regretted, but not much grieved. It is the imperfect we miss so badly, once they are gone. Apart from Janice, most of the mourners were dry-eyed.
Once Victor’s good parents were dead, Victor lived. Ah, how he lived! What Elsa most loved about him was his cheerfulness, his positiveness. He woke in the morning so full of energy, joy and life; while she, poor thing, had to ease herself, moaning, groaning and yawning, into the waking world.
‘She’s not going to change her mind at the last minute?’ Hamish persists. ‘I would find that very undignified, like being outbid at an auction.’
‘Hamish,’ says Victor unkindly, ‘auctions are no places to exercise the ego. Buying in a sale room is the surest way to acquire rubbish at ten times the price you meant to pay. Leave a sensible bid with the porter the day before and don’t go near the place until it’s all over. Then you won’t be tempted. I take it you bought the stuff in the billiard room at an auction?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes. Local.’
‘Rigged, you mean. I imagine the trade was there in force, a ring was operating, the auctioneer was in cahoots, and you paid through the nose, poor muggins.’
‘I paid a fair price. I wasn’t after a bargain.’
‘Poor old Hamish. Through the nose again. Well, I’ll take it off your hands for a couple of thousand.’
‘You said two and a half,’ protests Hamish.
‘I’ve had another look at it.’
‘And I’ve had another look at Elsa.’
Victor looks both shocked and pained.
‘We’re not bartering Elsa.’
‘Then what else are we doing?’ Hamish demands.
‘You are doing me a favour: I’m not doing you one, believe me. You are relieving me of the indignity, because indignity it is, of being in thrall to a buxom teenage body and a luminous eye. It makes me nervous. Other men look at her. Young men. I’m too old for her. She’ll be off presently. I can’t stand the strain. I never had it with Janice. I want to get it over with, and she can’t wait. She broke a famille rose palette plate, Chinese, eighteenth century, authenticated, the other day. Knocked it off the wall with a feather duster. That was a sign of a portent, believe me.’
‘Um,’ says Hamish. ‘She didn’t seem all that full of portent to me. She’s not perfect, either. Her legs aren’t right.’ He shakes silently at his own joke. It is the nearest he gets to laughter.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They’re too thin for her body.’
Victor does not deign to answer.
‘Two and a half thousand and the library ladder thrown in,’ is all he says, insouciant as can be.
Hamish’s eyes narrow. He looks now as if he had never laughed in his life.
‘That library ladder belonged to my mother. I’m not selling.’
‘Hamish, you didn’t have a mother.’
‘We all had mothers,’ says Hamish. ‘Pretty young mothers. Mine was a typist, I believe, before she went to the bad. Or so I was told. But perhaps she wasn’t all that pretty: she produced a fairly dreadful daughter, my poor sister Joanna, late lamented. Unless she took after her father. I like to think so. I’ve always fancied typists, for some reason. I like to see them sitting, typing away, heads bobbing, fingers flying. That’s how I met Gemma.’
He is overwhelmed by gloom. He takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes, and peers out between the purple globes of a glass bunch of grapes, as the noise of a passing motorbike swells on the other side of the pallisade wall, and then, instead of passing on, turns into the gateway, and stops and splutters, and the plastic gates open at once, as if the visitor was expected, and the heavy machine skids through the gravel and is brought to a stop at the bottom of the steps, and allowed to drop, as if it was a toy discarded by a wilful child, unlike the owner, leather-suited, swaggering, curly-haired beneath the yellow helmet, who leaps up the steps to bang heavily at the front door.
‘Dear God,’ says Hamish, the light through the glass grapes casting plague spots over his face, ‘it’s her.’
‘Who?’
‘Some dyke friend of Gemma’s. An alleged physiotherapist. Alice Hemsley. Gemma claims to have known her as a child.’
‘Can’t you put a stop to it?’
‘To what? How can you put a stop to something you don’t even know about? How can a man decently stand between a crippled wife and a physiotherapist.’
Hamish is agitated.
‘What was it we agreed?’ Victor asks cunningly. ‘Two thousand and the library ladder?’
‘I will talk about it tomorrow,’ says Hamish, speaking for once like a man of decision. ‘And ask Elsa to check the light-bulbs in her bedroom. Gemma keeps putting in forty watts. It’s impossible to type properly with anything less than a hundred. I tell her so but she takes not the slightest notice.’