What You Will

‘I am very comfortable with Mark,’ she admitted, feeling a strange lowering inside, greyness, a lack of savour. ‘And Eddie was comfortable with Mark, too. The plans have been perfectly clear for a long time. I mean – whether I actually go on to build and run the museum remains to be seen. Under the terms of the will, the appointment has to be confirmed by the trustees after the size of the project is finalised. But Mark chairs the trustees anyway. First the auction, is the thing. Maximise the cash. So – we better get back to the provenances, don’t you think?’

She stood up, adjusting her limp, blue cotton skirt, studying the round scuffed toes of her flat, navy blue shoes. She didn’t feel the least bit beautiful, and yet when Paul leaped from his chair and placed his hand for just an instant against the small of her back, gesturing gracefully with his free hand as if she needed to be shown the way and then propelling her gently through the doorway of the café and out into the main hall, she thought, He’s incredibly attentive. He must like me. It’s just that he’s – so shy. It’s this English thing, being nervous around girls. Boys sent away to boarding school too young, never seeing girls at all. I must ask him about that, she thought, as they walked to the stairs.

Despite her sense that each lunchtime with Paul was a kind of journey, he never actually agreed to travel with her around the other European museums and dealers. She was surprised, because this seemed to her one of the best things about the job she had hired him to do – trips abroad, nice hotels, introductions to other experts in the field. Paul always seemed to be committed to a bank holiday weekend in the countryside, amateur theatricals, an evening of singing, visiting some aged former teacher. And he told her, in a confessional, apologetic tone, that his German was too embarrassing, even his vaunted Italian.

So Hilary flew off alone to Paris, Basel, Rome, Athens, lugging her notes and her photographs. While she was away, she worked like crazy, drilling through thick boxes of file cards, pinpointing every site of origin, every change of hands, dragging her eyes from object to object, her feet through gallery upon gallery, assessing, comparing, confirming; interviewing dozens of curators and dealers, picking their brains and at the same time building up their appetites for the auction. It renewed her confidence in herself: that she knew exactly what she was doing, solo. Still, wherever she went, she mentioned Paul by name, knowing as she did so that it made her feel important to say she had an assistant, and justifying such a weakness by telling herself that the connection might help him or her at some future unforeseen moment; in any case, she liked him and liked describing the two of them as a team.

On her return, she would spill her discoveries, her best anecdotes to Paul, and she would feel thicker than ever with him. If she withheld any details – out of shyness, half-conscious loyalty to Doro – she also flirtatiously hinted to Paul that he might make his own discoveries and his own connections if he perhaps came along on the next trip.

When the time came to go back to New York at the end of September, Hilary was beside herself. She spent her last morning rearranging papers that she might just as easily have thrown away or abandoned. She had already assembled by herself, without Paul’s knowledge, a draft for the sale catalogue, checked every caption, checked and double-checked every estimate; she had provisionally numbered every lot; there was nothing more to describe. She had packed the night before, returned the keys to the service flat, and brought her suitcases to Sotheby’s with her. There she sat at the borrowed desk in the warren of low-ceilinged back offices surrounded by computer screens, telephones, and glamorous-haired, multilingual women she still didn’t know, waiting for lunch. Her concentration was ratty, her hands were trembly; she worried that she hadn’t been thorough enough, but at the same time, she knew that she could have left yesterday, the day before; her mind flopped to and fro; words blurred on the page. She had meant to spend half a day around the corner at the Royal Academy before she left town, for her own pleasure, and she had meant to go shopping for Mark, a cashmere sweater or something, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the building and to venture down the street alone; she was afraid she would miss something, although she would have been reluctant to say what.

Paul arrived late. He breezed in at eleven thirty. She was in agony, pretending not to care, telling herself, Of course he’s taking it easy, there’s nothing left to do. She wondered if she should have invited him ahead of time to go along with her to the Royal Academy. But at their table in the café, Paul insisted on cham pagne. They both ordered lobster sandwiches despite the expense, and she allowed herself to be reassured that he shared her enthusiasm for this last precious lunch.

‘A toast to our work,’ he said buoyantly, lifting his glass.

‘Our work,’ she replied, lifting her glass to touch his.

‘Shall we lay a bet on the outcome?’ he asked, his glass still resting against hers.

She felt a little thrill of excitement, her throat parching with the sense that something was going to knock her off her feet. ‘The outcome?’

‘I’ll lay you a round-trip ticket to New York that your sale breaks thirty million.’

The part of his wager that stood out for her was the round-trip ticket to New York; her heart leaped at it, a mixture of longing and fear. What was in Paul’s mind – a trip to New York? Or even – if she won – a trip back to London for her? She struggled to say something rational. ‘Dollars or pounds?’ was what she came out with.

Paul laughed. ‘Quite right to ask, you clever puss.’

She felt barriers collapsing, her chest expanding, the tiny room spinning away around them. She smiled and stared deep into his eyes, happy, letting herself go.

‘I bag dollars,’ she cried, the English idiom tripping off her tongue in a cascade of delight.

He pursed his lips, rueful, sulky. ‘I haven’t got a prayer of winning now, have I?’

‘Poor baby,’ she crooned at him, then snapped her glass to her lips and took a long triumphant draught of the silky bubbles.

They agreed they would stay in touch, and in the slosh of playful talk, exchanged addresses, schedules, plans. But there was a sense of an ending hanging over them which was explicit and somehow final. Hilary kept expecting something more to happen; the atmosphere of possibility seemed so rich, so ripe. They decided to extend to dessert before coffee; he recommended Eton Mess, which she had never heard of before, but which sounded like a sentimental journey they might yet take together into a charmed English world. It proved to be a familiar indulgence, grainy meringue smothered in sweet whipped cream, oozing with blood-red summer berries.

In the end, it was the usual thing, the waiter with the bill. Bewildered at the thought of Heathrow, the long, lonely taxi ride, Hilary insisted on paying.

‘But I ordered the champagne,’ Paul objected.

‘You can pay next time –’ she began.

‘Next time?’ He put one hand on her hand with her credit card in it, pushing her card away, and slipped his other hand inside his jacket, feeling for his wallet.

Hilary was liquid with warmth, ‘Well, sometime … ?’ She dropped the credit card on to the little tray just as the waiter snatched it from somewhere above them.

Paul helped her out to the pavement with her bags. ‘It’s been grand, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve adored getting to know you.’

‘Yes.’ Even the single syllable of American sounded yokelish, she thought. She wouldn’t risk more. But her feelings were in spate, a running torrent. He might easily have carried her off if he had tried. He merely kissed her on one cheek, holding her arm just above the elbow as he leaned down to her, a whisper of flesh, soft and dry, halfway between her mouth and her ear.

Still, it heated her to nearly a sizzle and she added, ‘I’ve adored –’ stumbled, blushed ‘– you.’

Then she found herself in tears. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t help it. I’m going to miss you. I have to say it.’

‘I shall – miss you, too –’ Paul stood up straight, took a half-step backwards, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Naturally.’

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’

‘Well, don’t be. I mean – poor you. I had – no idea.’

‘It’s my fault. I should have said something. I wish we’d gone out, maybe, or –’

‘How sweet you are,’ Paul said. ‘I’m terribly flattered.’ With a glance up and down New Bond Street, he took his hands from his pockets and awkwardly wrapped his long arms around her, rattled her sportily in his embrace, then released her, stooped a little, peered into her face, stroked her unruly hair. ‘But you’ve got to make that plane, haven’t you? Come on, you can do it.’ His voice was tender and encouraging. Now he pulled her against him with his left arm around her shoulders, raising his right in the air to hail a black cab.

Hilary let herself be held, melted against his willowy frame. It felt like heaven to her, this instant of contact, a brief crisis of bliss, as the taxi squealed to a stop, purred at them.

‘Heathrow,’ Paul barked at the driver, bullish, familiar. He lifted Hilary’s two big black suitcases inside with his long right arm, letting go of her shoulders, taking her hand and holding it in his left as he reached through the yawning black door and she stood on the pavement beside him.

The driver poked at his computer, waiting. Hilary’s mind went blank; time seemed suspended; she was in Paul’s care; she felt she had admitted everything to him, everything that mattered.

‘There,’ Paul announced as he swung back towards her. ‘You’re all set. This chappie’s been there a thousand times.’

And she nodded, accepting it. She felt entirely passive, a sleepwalker, partly because of the champagne.

Paul bundled her into the cab, one arm under her elbow, the other around her shoulder. ‘Don’t forget your seat belt; you have to, you know.’

She nodded, the tears welling as she slid back on the seat.

‘You mustn’t go all to pieces,’ he clucked at her, leaning in one last time. ‘There’s so much traffic, is the thing. Better get going.’ And he stretched his face towards her, creaking with effort, planted another, longer kiss on her cheek.

‘Come to the airport with me?’ Hilary was surprised at her own boldness. And she could tell that Paul was more than surprised. Shocked almost.

‘I – I don’t think I can. I mean – I don’t think I should,’ he sputtered. And then after a ponderous silence, a horn sounding behind them, he said with evident discomfort, ‘After all, you’re engaged to be married. I believe you must have mentioned it every day. So – hadn’t we better leave it here? Mutual adoration and no bruises?’

It was a blow, but he said it so definitely that Hilary couldn’t demur. And she felt she had no right to, since the impediment was on her side.

When she tried to speak, her lips shook; she was forced to wipe at her nose with a bare knuckle. Engaged to be married. She felt a surge of shame at her behaviour. So undignified, she reprimanded herself. What was she doing? Who was she, in fact? She sat up very straight, dry-eyed, suddenly self-possessed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said solemnly. ‘Please forgive me. Please.’

Paul was silent, opened his face to her. At least that was how Hilary thought of it afterwards, and that’s what she was trying to explain now to Gwen.

CHAPTER 2

‘There he was putting me into the cab, practically strapping me to the seat to stop me throwing myself at him, while I was blubbing my eyes out and trying to apologise, and the expression on his face was so – well, I don’t know what it was. It was like he opened his face, made it – whatever I needed it to be. Made it an acceptance, or a forgiveness. A non-judgement. Without any sign that I could really make sense of.’

‘You mean – blank?’ Gwen asked. She had switched on the kettle, stood rummaging in the cupboards for mugs, tea bags.

‘Maybe that’s all it was. Just a blank. A make-of-me-what-you-will. And so I – I said goodbye, and the taxi pulled away and it seemed that anything was possible. That he had handed the situation over to me. That he would wait to see what I did next.’

‘And what you did next was break off your engagement.’

Hilary pressed her lips together hard, looked feisty. ‘God, you make it sound so cut and dried. Where the hell is that whiskey?’ she demanded.

Gwen laughed and chucked the boxes of tea back into the cupboard just as the kettle began to spout steam into the air. She moved off towards the Welsh dresser by the floppy green sofa in the window alcove, bent to the screeching doors, the clinking bottles, and brandished a bottle aloft as she recrossed the room. She sloshed whiskey into the pair of mugs. Then she sat down at the kitchen table opposite Hilary.

The first sip made Hilary’s voice deeper, huskier. ‘Oh God, the lustre was off Mark completely. I so did not want to see him – like a kind of sudden revulsion. It blows my mind how fast everything came clear. I just wanted the plane to turn around and fly the other way. I got this terrible headache, and I kept thinking that if I ordered more champagne, I’d get rid of the headache and I could lie back and daydream about Paul. There were bubbles inside me, you know, this sensation of something fizzing, exhilarating – how I felt about Paul and that now he knew it. But I couldn’t let the bubbles rise.

‘It was weird when we landed. The wheels hit with that hard bounce, and it was like – the knock of reality. There was that smell you get of burning, the reek of the brakes in your nose, really hurting. Utter destruction. All those years with Mark, some kind of lie I’d told to both of us. I was stale and sweaty and gross, but I was glad about it, because it proved how hard I’d been working – an alibi. I was the sexless professional again, the same work jock I’d been when I left town. And I was thinking how free it felt, and how I should just do what I wanted to do, and how being alone was fine. Strong. Kind of thrilling, in fact.’

Gwen basked in it, Hilary alone.

‘I was completely businesslike with Mark. Starting with, From three thousand miles away, I realised I didn’t really want to be married … But I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. Somehow you think the person’s going to hit you or something. I mean, you feel you need to be ready to run. What is that? Some primitive thing. Your gut tells you that, basically, breaking up is a fight.’

‘But you did say he was angry?’

‘Not at first. I mean – well, I don’t remember his face. Or – I didn’t look at it. At first he just didn’t believe me. And then when he started to take it in, he thought it was just a re-entry thing. That I’d gone skittish or gotten self-conscious. He was saying things like, Do you want to maybe take a shower.’

‘You mean because you didn’t really kiss him when you first came in?’

Hilary went red. ‘Oh, but Christ, I couldn’t kiss him, Gwen!’ Then she laughed. ‘My clothes stank, though. God, you think that’s what he meant? And I was thinking how I must seem like – such a bitch. Cold – and – but it’s true. I was.’

‘And the champagne?’

‘That was so terrible. A bottle of Dom Pérignon. The whole fiancé thing. And you know that he’s not really like that, Gwen. He’s much more beer and Chinese noodles. There were roses, too, in this tippy glass vase on the coffee table. Those dark red kind, like rolled-up bundles of velvet, on long, long stems. They looked completely ghastly. They were studded with thorns. And they had no scent; those waxy petals, nothing at all on your nose when you try to smell them. I guess he even bought the vase. Things he’d never done, never thought of. The apartment was bare, as if he’d stuffed all the mess into closets or had cleaners come in. All so contrived. Then he opened the champagne while I was in the bathroom.’

Gwen grimaced. ‘So you had to drink it.’

‘Of course I had to. And it made me think how easy it could have been to slip back into my old life, if I had been polite at first, or pretended a little. If I had let it start to happen between us as if nothing had changed, then – I don’t know.’

‘Nah, come on. You’d just have gotten here tomorrow instead of today.’ Gwen wrapped her fingers around Hilary’s wrist, lifted it gently, dropped it on the scarred top of the oak table, lifted it and dropped it again, feeling the weight of Hilary’s arm where it swelled towards the elbow, studying the flicker of the tendons where they disappeared inside Hilary’s pushed-up sleeve. Then she let go, looked up at Hilary again. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I was scared there was going to be a ring. I kept looking for one of those little boxes, a bulge in a pocket. And I saw myself trapped there with only him for company, starved of something else I wanted. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I couldn’t spend one night there, couldn’t sleep with him even to comfort him. And he was saying that I couldn’t expect him to swear off me all of a sudden like that, after he’d been waiting all summer and looking forward to seeing me. In a way, that was the worst. Basically, he was begging for sex. I think he even had his hands like this.’ She put her palms together as if she were praying. ‘He never asked anything about my summer, about what had happened, or what I felt. So how could sex fit? Where could it come from, in a situation like that?’

Gwen tapped the whiskey bottle, raising her eyebrows at Hilary, but Hilary shook her head.

‘We drank too much, Mark and I, last night. That was part of the problem – the crying and the screaming.’

‘But, hey, you got through a lot of misery in one awful night.’

‘I feel bad for him, Gwen. It was like I’d inflicted this terrible injury. That’s how I keep picturing it – an open wound, bleeding and twitching.’

‘Worse for Mark if you hadn’t found out in time, hon.’ Gwen was casual, like someone who’d seen it all before, lots of times. Then she stooped close across the table and spoke caressingly. ‘It’s bitter to betray someone – anyone – a lover, a friend. But don’t you think when it comes to love and marriage – the lifelong deal, I mean – for that, don’t you have to pay any price? You can’t fake that. And if you want to have children? You did the right thing.’

Hilary was white-faced, dipping her finger in the dregs of her whiskey.

Gwen insisted. ‘You have to leave this with ragged edges, Hil. If he blames you or thinks you’re a shit, then that’s what he needs to do to survive. You have to let him deal with this – without you. Because if you’re dumping Mark, you’re dumping him. The thing is broken. That’s life. It’s painful.’

‘Yeah. Painful.’ Hilary’s voice creaked. Guilt pooled in her eyes. And then she seemed to shoulder it, like a burden. ‘Listen. I know there were big things wrong with me and Mark. We were always part of some gang. Endless room-mates. Then with Eddie, a gang of three. We only ever existed as part of a clique. Never a couple. It was more like being under a spell. I was still in graduate school when the whole thing with Eddie started, and because of him, I never even finished my degree. Mark and I had been around each other for so long that it just seemed like time for something else to happen. The truth is, Paul saved me.’

She paused for a long time, leaned back in her chair. And then at last, she let it out: ‘But man, I could never have pictured Mark’s anger. His eyes turned red – flaming. In all our years together, I had never seen – this – creature in him who didn’t get what he expected. Who couldn’t make me do what he wanted. That was totally scary.’

‘Stay away from him for a while, don’t you think? Till he calms down?’

Hilary sat up. ‘God, I’m stealing you from your bed, and Will’ll be up early needing you.’

Gwen was easy with it. ‘It’s fine. Let’s do the tea, huh?’

Hilary didn’t fight her. ‘Camomile or peppermint or something?’

Gwen switched the kettle back on, took clean mugs from the cupboard, talked with her back to Hilary, flipping labels loose from tea bags, extending their little strings. ‘So what about all your stuff? How are you going to get it out of Mark’s place?’ She launched the soggy tea bags into the sink where they splatted.

‘I don’t have that much. Anyway, where would I put it? I have to get my own place first. You can always buy new stuff. I just need my books from Eddie’s apartment. I miss those.’

Gwen rapped down the two smoking mugs, sat opposite again.

Hilary cupped her hands around one mug and shook her head. ‘Mark didn’t know about Paul, so he blamed Eddie, you know? The stuff he said – aggressive, disgusting stuff. How weird I was to have a thing for an old man. Did I get off on Eddie’s obsession, or was it the power I had over his money? Then shouting at me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going to go now? You can’t get into his apartment if I don’t give you the key. What are you going to do? Sleep in the warehouse so you can fondle his pots and his lamps and his statues? That’s what you’d really like to do, isn’t it? Sleep with him – with his fucking collection.”’ Hilary’s lips curled back from her teeth, trembled ever so slightly.

‘You think he felt jealous when Eddie was alive?’

‘Maybe there was some power thing with them. Basically Mark never understood what all the excitement was about. Eddie and I just thought he did. He couldn’t see what we saw – about the past. Turns out it made him mad. Made him into a kind of brute – a bully.’

Gwen lifted her mug to her lips, put it down again without drinking from it; there was something in Hilary’s voice, disillusionment, a tone of fuck all. ‘But you don’t think he’d try to derail Eddie’s plans?’

‘He was kind of nuts with his threats, Gwen: “I can stop the whole fucking project. Doro’s dead; he’s buried in a hole in the ground. All that stuff in his apartment and all that stuff in the warehouse is dust and bones. It’s dug up out of graves, stolen from tombs. It belonged to people who died thousands of years ago. What is this with you – dead people, the past? It’s necrophilia, that’s what it’s called. You give me the creeps with your sarcophaguses and your burial monuments and your funeral urns.”’

Gwen squeaked with outrage. ‘But a lawyer – a trusts and estates lawyer – that’s all about people dying, and about them trying to reach into the future with what they want – to exercise their will! I mean the word, “will” – it’s all about enacting what you want from beyond the grave. That’s Mark’s job, it’s what he chose. What’s going on over there in America?’

‘I know! And I said to him, “It’s sarcophagi, by the way”; but, God, I wish I hadn’t! It just infuriated him.’ At last she sipped her tea.

‘Ginger and lemon,’ murmured Gwen, watching her.

‘I like it.’ Hilary took another, longer sip. ‘Up until I said that – “It’s sarcophagi, by the way” – I think there was maybe a chance I could have persuaded Mark to give me back the key to Eddie’s apartment. But somehow that one pedantic little remark changed everything. It seems trivial, but just as I was saying it, I realised that was the point: we weren’t speaking the same language any more. I needed to be with someone who understood what I was doing – so I could remember who I was. All I really wanted was to go to Eddie’s and sit there quietly and collect myself – Well, the thing is I couldn’t ask Mark, could I, because communing with Eddie –?’ Hilary stopped, raised her hands in mock horror.

‘He would have thought you were trying to hold a seance –’ Gwen said.

‘It crossed my mind that I could get the doorman to let me in. There’s one I’m friendly with. But there are all these procedures for access now because of the value of the stuff, and then Mark could accuse me of breaking the rules, and he’d have just what he needed to get me dumped for ever from the project. Imagine thinking that way, about a guy you were going to marry! And by then it was three or four in the morning and I wanted –’