Aunt Margaret's Lover Read online

  'What do you think?' she asked, eyes bright, fingers playing with buttons that turned her hither and thither until I felt she must surely be sick.

  'Very dashing,' I said. 'And potentially lethal.'

  'I could probably take you for a short ride if you sat on my lap,' she said cheerfully. 'Care to try?'

  'No,' I said, though a little part of me thought how wonderful it would be to ride down the length of these polished boards. By this time the art world had got very fusty and pompous and the old days of iconoclastic happenings and events had long gone. We were well and truly into gilt-edged, blue-chip, safe investment - the Picasso exhibition being a part of that.

  'I'll get you a drink,' I said, 'while you look at these.'

  'Oh no,' she said. 'I'll get you one. Watch.' And off she went.

  I did watch. So did the owner of the gallery. So did his wife and his pinstriped helpmate. So did his assistants, customers, poseurs. We all watched. And the expression on the face of the white-jacketed barman as she did her Ironside towards him was worthy of a snapshot by Diane Arbus. She made it to the drinks table, collected two glasses, and with the touch of a button began the slightly slower journey back to me. The barman never took his eyes off her. Neither did anybody else. I doubt if Pablo would have appreciated in his dotage (as he would have in his youth) the way his works on the walls were forgotten for the more immediate interest of one old lady clutching two glasses of wine and steering herself past those hallowed exhibits like something out of Fellini.

  'I think,' I said quietly, 'that we should just go slowly along looking at the work or there's likely to be a rebellion. Can you put that thing on manual and I'll push?'

  'I don't want to,' she said. 'And there will not be a rebellion because they know I shall be buying.'

  'Will you? You haven't even looked at them yet.'

  'They are Picasso,' she said. 'And etchings. New ones. I can afford them.'

  'Maybe,' I said. 'But have you looked? I don't think they are very good.'

  'You seem in a very dismal mood this evening, Margaret,' she said with an uncharacteristic sniff.

  'AH geniuses have to fail sometimes,' I said. ' "If you have genius, industry will improve it," says Reynolds. Well, I don't think in this instance he was industrious enough.'

  'Reynolds was a pompous portraitist,' she said grandly. 'And I shall judge for myself.'

  And off, in her chariot, she went.

  It was not particularly good and there were a lot of them, a portfolio publication containing about twenty prints to a set, each print signed and numbered out of quite a large edition. A set hung on the walls, framed exquisitely (not by me, alas) in the thinnest polished brass and looking extremely important - as indeed they were given that their creator was not long for this world and, as it turned out, they were among the last things his hand gave life to. But they were self-indulgent things - the old theme of aged bull-men with thrusting pizzles and a bevy of lustful virgins (their blooming sexes so minutely detailed, so enlarged by the artist's horny stylo, that they were only good for cavorting; they could certainly never have walked anywhere with such endowments). I thought the pictures were private works - like a poet laureate's dirty doggerels - and rather bathetic. But Mrs Mortimer decided differently.

  It was the wheelchair that did it. It gave her a wild lack of judgement on that initial night. She signed her cheque with a flourish and spent a considerable amount of time once this was done in manoeuvring herself about like a child - into tight corners and out of them again - her pleasure apparent by the pinkening of her cheeks and the flash of wild blue in her eyes. And I didn't mind that. Not at all. Why shouldn't she do exactly what she liked? I quite enjoyed the idea of them all being shaken up with their 'Oh, it's Picasso, then we must go to it' attitude and their principles of accountancy, the flavour of the times. I actually heard someone say of the portfolio, 'Yes, but will it make a first-class investment?' and someone, else suggest they would keep theirs in the bank 'for safety'. I should like to think that Picasso, in his hey-day, would have walked through the show on hearing such things and torn everything up. A smart operator he may have been, but not so much that he would wish his pictures to sit, unseen, in the vaults of Messrs Coutts.

  'How would you frame them?' Mrs Mortimer asked as, later, we waited in Cork Street for her car to come.

  'Rather like they have,' I said, but without enthusiasm.

  'You think I have made a mistake, don't you? You don't think I should have bought them? Well, they will be an excellent investment.' She gave me a very wide-eyed stare, as if to defy any further comment. And I was silent. And oddly sad. For Mrs Mortimer had never before spoken of investment in her collection. Of course she bought good stuff, but that was always secondary to the first consideration - love, desire, inspiration. Her pictures were like her lovers, really, and I felt in this case she had been a careless and fickle amourette.

  'Well, Margaret?'

  'Brass,' I said flatly.

  'And do you think I have made a mistake?' 'I am sure they will go up and up in value.' 'That is not what I asked.'

  'Brass,' I said again, this time more lightly. 'Definitely brass. . .'

  She blinked. 'Well, I shall have a think about it before deciding. I quite like the brass, but perhaps . . . ah . . . here is the car. Goodbye, my dear ...

  And off she went, up the ramps, whirr, whirr, and with a small wave once ensconced in the back. We never talked of

  the etchings again and they never came to me for framing. I assumed that, piqued, she had gone elsewhere with them and that they perhaps hung in a part of the house to which I was not privy.

  The thrill of the electric wheelchair abated and, though energized by the freedom the extra power gave to her, much needed as she grew older and frailer, she never re-created in my presence that funny fairground night in Cork Street. Nor did she ever, to my knowledge, put investment potential above her critical eye again. The next things she bought, some months later, were two portrait drawings, with mysterious, unnerving, fish-eyed heads by the prolific and rather wild John Bellany. That made me feel a great deal better, for they were good and not at all the sort of thing the Coutts cognoscenti could get their pea-brains round, no matter how many catalogue introductions they pored over. I framed those in richly carved and gilded wood, for they had an ancient quality about them, and I knew I had done well when she hung them in the drawing-room, removing a good Dubuffet to make space. 1 was glad it was the Dubuffct and not the small Matisse head and told her so. She smiled as we viewed the two new additions. 'Oh no,' she said. 'I would never move that. It is my favourite.'

  'And mine,' I said firmly.

  I felt we had put the incident of the Picasso portfolio behind us. It was only at the will reading after the funeral that I found we had not.

  Chapter Five

  Coincidence is the fusion of two apparently unconnected happenings which result in a synthesis. Mrs Mortimer died a few days before Saskia was due to depart these shores. The two events seemed to balance out the sadness of each other: both feared, both inevitable, both here. Even the funeral was on the same day as the farewell party. Sassy suggested we change it, but I decided not. To be surrounded by large numbers of young people, with just a sprinkling of wrinklies such as myself, struck me as a good way to confront mortality and a graveside farewell, and providing I did not get maudlin (which meant modest dips into the champagne only) I was sure it would be an unshadowed success.

  The only dimmer was that Jill could not come. She and David had flu. I decided with relief that this accounted for her low spirits on the phone. She had been going down with something. When she rang to apologize, she was still in low spirits, though largely because Amanda was there looking after them. 'Do you know,' whispered Jill down the phone, 'that she thinks Canada would be a wonderful place to live. Can you imagine?' Amanda was serene and pretty, just like her mother, but unlike her mother she had been spared a romantic streak. She was absolutely David in
that. At her age Jill would have been dreaming of the ochre and blue of the Adriatic, of the scent of jasmine in the velvety night air.

  David, of the new-found rotundity, was now chairman of some sort of Anglo-Japanese financial group based in Newcastle. Their house was impressively Georgian. Made homely despite its size and lordliness, it looked out over the Cheviot Hills. He was another Julius, really - one day he was travelling the magic bus, the next he wore a suit. Jill, who fitted somewhere in between, had submitted to reality, kissed the dreams of fond mortals goodbye, had two children, raised them, and now ran a little market garden. Much more fun than the hard, uncertain graft of my framing business. 'You should have married someone rich like me,' she used to say. She had stopped saying it now.

  I had especially wanted her around that night, not only because the party was a landmark in my and Sassy's life, but because 1 wanted her to stay up with me and talk into the small hours. Funerals and farewells make for restless feelings and she might have had some ideas - until I came back to the shores of routine peacefulness again. She would probably suggest a man, some idealized swain. She usually did. Besides, I had been invited to Mrs Mortimer's will reading, an event on which I wanted to conjecture with someone who would not think me callous. This was to take place - another curiosity - on the same day that the ship sailed and I was grateful. It would certainly give me something else to think about.

  That there was to be a will reading, and that I should be asked to attend it, was no surprise. I expected Mrs Mortimer to leave me some token of our friendship, for she had said as much, but what it was I had no idea. Of course I fantasized, but the only thing I fantasized about was far too valuable to be left to anyone outside of the family.

  Saskia and I went to the Pomme d'Amour on her last night. Just the two of us. We laughed at the inappropriate choice, though she said, 'Well, we are a bit like parting lovers, aren't we?' I thought, Are we? It didn't sound right to me.

  She looked, and sounded, extremely grown up. 'I wonder what he will be like. And I wonder if I shall like his paintings. Apparently his studio is very big and I can have a corner of it if I want to. Of course I shall travel about quite a bit too, but he'll be my base, so that's sort of a relief.' She laughed. I tried to but it hurt - I couldn't pretend otherwise to myself.

  'That's providing we get on,' she said.

  I had no doubt they would. For what father could resist the arrival in his life of a fully grown, beautiful, talented daughter who had nothing to ask but acceptance?' It was a hard notion to acknowledge but there was no point in being sour. Stopping this reunion would have been like trying to stop the sunrise. It was inevitable.

  At the end of our meal, I asked, carefully, quietly, my heart constricting, 'What do you feel about him?'

  'I feel,' she said, 'a blank page about him. Just that. After all, it's been seventeen years. People change. I wish he had not gone away, I suppose.'

  I checked myself from saying that it was the only thing I had to thank him for.

  She looked at mc strangely. 'And the rest of it is like a Grimm fairy-talc. Horrible but distant. Remote. In the past. I don't suppose he still drinks and drives wild cars. Do you?'

  I rubbed my fingertip over her knuckles. 'I hope not,' I said. And I had a sudden foolish premonition. 'Be careful.'

  She smiled and looked, for a moment, a great deal older than me. Til wear a seat-belt,' she said. 'Literally and metaphorically.'

  I changed the subject. We sipped sweet dessert wine while she spoke with wild enthusiasm about the thousand and one things she wanted to do over there, and as I watched her I thought how much a combination of her parentage she was. In her face was held the image of one I loved, and one I despised, and I wondered if it was that very duality which made it seem acceptable and right that she should go.

  Next to us a pair of lovers, not in the first flush of youth, paid their bill with words of regret that the evening was ended. While they waited for their change, he ran his fingers through her stylish grey hair and watched her with great tenderness while she quickly checked her lips in a pocket mirror. She smoothed her hair, smiling into the reflection like a Leonardo, and said, 'He wouldn't want to see me with it all mussed up. We must be careful . ..' Then they picked up their briefcases and, hand in hand, went out into the night. Sassy giggled. 'Honestly,' she said. 'At their age.'

  I felt a little affronted on their behalf. 'They're not exactly over the hill,' I said crisply. 'And neither, for that matter, am I . ..'

  She looked at me and blinked. 'Oh,' she said in a mixture of astonishment and embarrassment. 'Oh.' And then I could see her rearrange her thoughts. 'But you've got Roger.'

  'Yes,' I said, signalling for the bill. 'I suppose I have.' I thought about them, sauntering out into the night holding hands, and was chilled by a definite streak of envy.

  Ten minutes later, walking home, also hand in hand, we passed a large red car parked beside Holland Park Underground, and I recognized the stylish grey hair of its occupant. She was sitting, alone, hands on the steering-wheel, staring into the entrance of the station with an expression of deep misery on her face. The chill of envy crept away, suitably ashamed. Who on earth would want that?

  Saskia said, 'What are you doing tomorrow? After you've seen me off? You should do something.1

  'Celebrate, do you mean?'

  She laughed. 'Certainly not. Not celebrate my actual going - more celebrate the successful outcome of a job well done.' I looked at her. She was serious.

  'Sassy,' I said, 'I don't feel I'm signing off and joining the surrogate mothers' dole queue. This thing will, as they say, run and run.'

  'I know that,' she said, 'but the responsibility is over. Now it's just the relationship left. It's different.'

  'Really?' I said, thinking that youth is infuriatingly black and white.

  'Yes, really. You said that ages ago.' She was obliviously positive.

  'As a matter of fact,' I said. 'I am doing something tomorrow.' 'Oh? What?'

  'Well, first of all I'm going to the shop to open up ...' 'Boring.'

  'And then I am going to Mrs Mortimer's will reading. She's left me something and I don't know what.'

  That stopped her precocity in its tracks. 'Ah,' she said. 'It could be anything. How exciting.'

  'It'll be something small, I expect. Just a token.'

  'It might not be,' she said. 'It might be something huge and valuable. She might have left you her entire collection. Or the house . ..'

  'And dumped Julius?'

  'I forgot him.' She was wistful.

  'You may have done, but his mother won't. Nor her grandchildren. No. It will be a keepsake, which is all I expect and is perfectly fitting.'

  'You can be really pompous sometimes, Aunt M. Why don't you just say how much you would like her to have left you something really smashing and desirable?'

  'Because,' I said, and put my fingers to my lips, then to hers. I remembered how she had looked as a child and how a genius had once captured its spirit on paper.

  Chapter Six

  And Greasy Joan doth stir the pot, I thought.

  In she came. There was that lank fair hair a swathe of which hung like a curtain over one eye ready for le flick — le flick being the occasional sweeping back of its fall so that –voila! - the face revealed two eyes after all, but only for a moment before it flopped down making her a Cyclops once more. Yet in that time of deliverance, in that short time of both eyes being out and about, the viewer, me, felt such relief, such joy, that its loss, so soon, was depressing.

  Details, I was in no mood for such details. The early morning quayside chill had entered what I was thinking of, disloyally, as my old bones. I waited. I was polishing glass ready to be slipped into a frame and fixed down. Polishing has a waiting quality about it. Rhythmic, slow, silent. I said, 'Hi, Joan.'

  She said flatly, 'Hi. Sassy get off OK?'

  'Yes,' I said, doing soft circles now.

  'Good,' she said.

&nbs
p; I took the irremedial step. There was nothing else for it. 'How's things, then, Joan?' I waited.

  While I waited, knowing the tone if not the content of what was about to be revealed, I was thinking that she must wash that bloody hair sometimes - but when? Did she rush home on a Friday night, dunk her head in a basin, spend the whole weekend looking fresh and shining and sweet, only to arrive back here on Monday looking stale, dingy and with the smell of mouse about her? She had worked for me since leaving school, which was over ten years now, and in all that time I could not recall once - I rubbed the glass harder - a shine or the smell of shampoo in her locks. Then there was Reg who did most of the workshop stuff nowadays. He had a wall eye. Was I destined to be surrounded by the unbeautiful? Was I destined to hear their confessions, sigh and shake my head, caught between the rankness of her hair and the insecurity of not knowing exactly where Reg was looking as he spoke? The answer, resoundingly empty, seemed to be yes.