What You Will

‘I can do the fish,’ said Lawrence. ‘And I’ll send Hilary to you in ten minutes if you haven’t reappeared. Don’t worry, darling.’

‘The spinach soufflé is in the oven. Keep an eye on it.’ Gwen had a foot on the bottom step.

‘G’night, Daddy,’ said Will, tipping a half-cupped palm in the air, a stilted wave, suddenly shy.

‘Night.’

The group in the kitchen, milling awkwardly around the table and the stove, turned back to the subject Roland had raised with Lawrence during their drive from Oxford to London – the question of whether Lawrence should be taking so much time from his big book on Greek and Roman slavery to be pursuing what Roland reckoned was a pretty tenuous connection between the Satyricon and Les Misérables.

Roland sidled up to Hilary, winking, conspiratorial. ‘I’ve been warning Lawrence off trying to be popular. He’s brewing up a scholarly piece on Les Mis. You must have seen Les Mis? Everyone has.’

‘Les Mis?’ she said, round-eyed. ‘The musical? I – well – I read the novel, years ago. But I don’t know any of the songs.’

‘You needn’t know the tunes,’ Lawrence assured her, tearing brown paper off a round, crusty loaf of bread. ‘Roland’s faking. You haven’t seen it, Roland. Own up.’

Roland’s chin shot out; his face reddened.

In the burning silence that ensued, Lawrence opened his case, with a kind of polite indifference, to put Hilary at her ease. ‘You remember the convict, Hilary? Jean Valjean? Tries to steal a loaf of bread – just like this,’ and he whacked the bread down on a wooden cutting board by the sink. ‘For this audacious, antisocial crime, he is sentenced to five years’ hard labour.’ Lawrence crumpled the paper showily with one hand and tossed it into the bin which stood lidless nearby. ‘He begins his sentence in tears with an iron collar riveted on around his neck. Might as well be a slave, you see? Just my sort of thing.’

Hilary was silent, eyes on the floor, conscious that Roland was watching her, and that she hadn’t responded to his opening gambit in the way he had evidently hoped she might. That she had failed even to recognise it as an opening gambit. She felt herself being caught up in somebody else’s argument, and she didn’t want to reveal sympathy for either side. Lawrence is only trying to be kind to me – that’s what she would have liked to say to Roland – he wouldn’t sideline his own friend on purpose.

Lawrence went on, gently but tenaciously, with his performance. It was irresistible to him to try to capture whatever youthful, feminine attention was in a room. ‘When he is eventually freed, the convict soon steals again.’ He reached for a bread knife, unsheathing it from the wooden knife block with a dangerous flourish, high in the air, eyes aglow. ‘But this time he steals from a bishop who has the power to free him physically and spiritually – by forgiving him. And as a sign of his forgiveness, the bishop gives the convict two silver candlesticks.’

Hilary looked up almost involuntarily and said, ‘I remember that.’

Lawrence cut into the bread with energy, the toothed blade scoring loudly through the crust and sinking into the doughy middle, rasping and biting all the way down to the powdery surface of the well-hacked board. He cut another slice, then stopped and looked about the room as if he had forgotten something. He spotted a pair of pewter candlesticks on the Welsh dresser, walked across and collected them with a package of long white tapers from a shelf above, and set them at the centre of the table among the place settings. ‘Perfect,’ he said, spreading his palms in the air over it all and smiling with satisfaction. ‘Maybe you’d put in the candles?’ he asked, handing them to Hilary.

‘You’re an atheist, Lawrence; surely Hugo was not,’ Roland grumbled. And he stalked off a few paces to sit down by himself on the sofa.

Lawrence ignored him, still smiling. He lifted the lid of the poaching pan ever so slightly with the corner of a spatula, looked at his watch. Then he began opening and shutting drawers, hunting. ‘Jean Valjean keeps the bishop’s candlesticks, despite the risk that they will eventually reveal his criminal past, just as Trimalchio – you know the Satyricon too, I suppose, Hilary? Being a classicist?’

Hilary looked guiltily towards Roland, then back towards Lawrence who was snatching and slamming at the drawers, rattling spoons, flaunting dish cloths, all the artillery of his domestic power. She fiddled with the package of candles, finding a way in through the cellophane, and nodded reluctantly, curious in spite of herself.

‘Well, I’m sure you recall that Trimalchio keeps by him the candelabrum which once belonged to his master, despite the fact that it marks him as a former slave. Just like Valjean’s candlesticks, you see?’

She approached the table, twisted the tapers into the sticks, straightened them.

‘The candlesticks and the candelabrum are mementos,’ he said, ‘– symbols, if you like – of the greatest moment in their lives: the moment of being freed.’ There was an easy comedy in his voice, as if he wasn’t insisting.

‘But Petronius writes nothing about this!’ Roland expostulated. Up he stood again. ‘You are importing modern psychology into a text of which only fragments survive in any case. Where is the documentary evidence for what you say? Or any evidence at all? Are you forgetting that Trimalchio is not a real person?’

Lawrence turned away from the oven door where he was crouching to peer through the glass at the soufflé, his hands cosied in the two halves of an oven mitt. He smiled at Hilary as she stood tangled between himself and Roland. ‘Petronius gives us extravagant detail! Trimalchio does nothing but celebrate his freedom. Hideous as he is, he becomes rich and he feasts – for ever, as it were – and in his own vulgar way. Feeding the appetites pent up in him as a slave.’

‘We have one of the collars,’ Hilary said. It burst out of her, as if it were proof of something. She lifted her eyebrows, surprised at herself. There was a little silence.

‘Collars?’ Roland bristled at her.

‘A slave collar. Made of bronze. It’s inscribed, so we know it’s late antiquity. Early Christian period, fourth century. Found in Italy. I’ll tell you what –’ She paused, turned from one to the other of them and then raised her hands towards her neck, resting her fingertips on her collarbone, squinting a little in dismay. ‘Sounds weird, but I put it on one time. It has a piece missing.’ She held out her right thumb and forefinger, about two and a half inches apart to show the size of the gap, then rested her fingers back on her collarbone.

‘I tried it with Eddie – Edward Doro.’ Her hands moved ever so slightly as she recalled the stiffness, pulling the collar open wider, whether she would snap it, how the ragged edges scraped her skin when the two of them nestled it into place. ‘It’s surprisingly delicate, actually – thin, like the leather strap you’d put around a dog’s neck; it’s not like you couldn’t get it off if you were determined. It would have been more – well, also a symbol. Even with the tiny rivets soldered into place. Which just shows how completely the slave was resigned to the whole system, his place in it. A kind of settled, polished arrangement. It’s almost unbearable to imagine –’

‘Imagine. Exactly.’ Roland pounced in triumph. ‘Why would any slave resist a master who could torture him, have him crucified? Or have his head put on a spike along the road? Where was a slave to run to even if he didn’t have a collar? The empire was monumental. You can’t go around imagining history.’

But Lawrence pounced back. ‘How the bloody else are we to understand it? It’s not as if it’s still here around us!’

Roland smiled, an artful, curling smile. He came towards the table, tut-tutting, reached for the white wine and poured himself another glass. ‘Yes, yes. All right. But judicious use of same. In any case, these collars are a very late phenomenon. And by the fourth century, a freed slave didn’t become a citizen of Rome, did he?’

‘We have two or three branding irons, too,’ said Hilary grimly.

‘Touché,’ said Lawrence. He was rinsing parsley at the sink, shaking water off it with a snap of his wrist. He reached across the counter and flung a few droplets on to the flame of the gas burner where they made a sizzling sound. ‘As it were.’

They all laughed.

‘Give it up, Roland,’ said Lawrence in a congenial tone. ‘We’ve scored a hit for the imagination. No history without it. No nothing, in fact.’

Hilary looked compassionately at Roland, and she said under her breath, uncertainly, ‘What I meant was, imagine if you had to wear the collar yourself. It’s degrading. And you feel that. Even though it is only a symbol of something else – real power, real servitude.’

Roland took a step towards her, holding his wine glass in front of his face, half obscuring it. ‘You have to forgive us. We go on at each other like this all the time. It’s part of our brief.’ He looked down at his shoes, sipped the wine.

Lawrence set the basket of sliced bread on the table. ‘Oh, yes, the brief. Nowadays we’ve got to fill out endless paperwork. What we plan to publish in the next five years – daunting to say the least. The whole department gets a grade. To ensure we’re on to something worthwhile with our work, contributing to the gross national product. And they set our colleagues on us: Haven’t we got something ready to go, something tucked away we could bring to print?’

‘They are around our necks, speaking of collars, all these bureaucrats with their research assessment procedures,’ Roland said contemptuously. ‘What are we up to? they keep asking. Forgetting they have given us the nation’s youth, and that some of us are devoted to teaching, which is, after all, very time-consuming. Otherwise it’s, What do we need? What do we want? How can they make us happy? They should bloody well go away. People need to think life through for themselves or they don’t learn to care about it. The state is mothering everyone to death.’

‘I’ve taken on Roland as a mentor,’ said Lawrence with amiable disdain, clueing Hilary in, ‘and he defends me from the entire process of assessment.’

Roland giggled. He leaned towards Hilary and said, ‘Or maybe we should say, Lawrence has taken me on as his mother – in this post-feminist era. We’ve all been turned into women, really. Oxford dons, the government, whatever. The men, the fathers – their time is gone.’ He smiled and said to her with zest, ‘You’ve won.’

Hilary was taken aback. ‘Won what? I wasn’t fighting for anything.’ She felt strangely embarrassed by his pronouncement. She sat down at the table and Roland sat down opposite her.

‘I had a mentor,’ she said, as if admitting to a character flaw. ‘Edward Doro. He died, and I’ve been at sea ever since.’

‘That’s bad news,’ Roland said. ‘I mean – forgive me. What happened exactly?’

Lawrence knew all about it from Gwen, but he was intrigued now to hear it straight from Hilary. He drew a little closer to the table.

But for a moment Hilary didn’t say anything because she was wondering why it was that everyone she met in England assumed she was fighting for something, something of which she herself was unaware. Paul had seemed to think that she had an agenda of some kind. Were Americans more complacent than the English? Were they insufficiently political about day-today matters? Or is it me, she pondered, who has failed ever to become conscious of having any particular ambitions? Roland assumes I’m a feminist just because I’m a woman. Maybe I ought to be a feminist? But she and Gwen had agreed: it was out of the question for them, for a whole swathe of girls back in America, girls of their moment, of their type. Had she somehow misunderstood what it was, feminism? Had she received the benefits without signing up for the cause?

She looked up, sensing their expectation, wondering how to begin to answer Roland. ‘Edward Doro collected antiquities and so that’s what he taught me how to do.’ She lifted her palms in the air, apologetic, self-deprecating. ‘It was amazing – being with someone who always knew what he wanted. And who always got what he wanted – at least in the way of objects.’

She dropped her eyes, picked up a knife from the place setting in front of her, turned it end to end, idly, watching the gleam and flash of the blade, pacing herself. ‘I got so that I could tell, actually, when he was going to go after something. Even from photos. And so when he was old and he couldn’t really get out, he’d send me to look. And – it worked.’ She put the knife down, lined it up straight along the side of the blue straw table mat. ‘My eyes worked fine for him.’ She sighed.

Suddenly she fixed them directly on Roland’s, then away at Lawrence’s, and announced with matter-of-fact energy, ‘So, he left me to curate his collection, and I know exactly how to do it, but I’ve maybe wrecked my chance. Because I don’t know anything about life. There you go.’ Again she lifted her palms, the shrug of regret. ‘What book could I have read to find out how not to screw up when I’d been handed everything on a plate? It was like an inheritance for me – or like the candelabrum you were telling us about, Lawrence, given to me after a long apprenticeship.’ She wrapped a hand around the base of one of the pewter candlesticks. ‘How could I squander that?’

‘Maybe you don’t really want to look after the collection?’ Lawrence suggested mildly.

‘Oh, please, you’re just like Gwen, telling me I didn’t want to be engaged either.’

Roland flinched at this. ‘You were engaged to him?’

Hilary laughed her boisterous laugh, and she looked at Roland with friendliness for the first time. ‘God, no. That’s an entirely different saga. Though not unrelated, I can assure you.’

Roland’s heavy brows went up.

Before he could ask any more, Lawrence sat down with them, intervened. ‘Seriously though. Perhaps you don’t want to be a curator? It’s not the same as collecting. Conservation, fund-raising, exhibiting. A public, institutionalised profession. It’s about caring for something – as in the Latin – it’s not about the hunt.’

Hilary relented. ‘Sometimes the hunt came off Eddie like a smell –’ she tapped her fingertips together under his nose as if there was something on them, savoury, dripping; narrowed her eyes, spoke intensely – ‘this insistent – this urge to – get something. To possess it. The strange gratification. When he was like that, he couldn’t think about anything except how he was going to do it. Any scheme, no matter how complex. Money was not a problem. It was persuading people to part with things. Oh –and the agony he went through when he wanted an object that had no provenance! He wouldn’t let himself take a chance that something might be pulled out of the collection later if it turned out it had been stolen at some point or illegally exported.’

Roland and Lawrence were hanging on her every word. When she stopped talking there was a silence. To fill it, she said girlishly, with forced nonchalance, ‘It’s weird. Our whole partnership was about planning for death, but of course, you have no idea what that really means, dying, until the person’s done it – moved on to wherever. I knew his mind so well – for me it still exists, in my head, and in his things.

‘You’ve ruined the fish,’ wailed Gwen, rushing in down the stairs and across to the stove.

‘No, darling, I took it off. Don’t worry. It’s perfect.’ Lawrence stood up, pointed at the big white china platter on to which he had delicately transferred the salmon. ‘It’s under that foil. It’ll still be warm. I had to take the soufflé out; it was getting brown. But look – it hasn’t fallen.’

Gwen gave him a look of sweet relief, nodded thanks without smiling.

He took pity on her. ‘Poor you. I promised we’d rescue you after ten minutes. We got caught up in what Hilary was saying. But Hilary will say it again, won’t you, Hilary?’ He turned back to the other two at the table.

Gwen smiled, patted the air down with her palms, quietening him. ‘OK, OK, the goddess is appeased.’

She didn’t admit that she had lingered in Will’s room just because she felt content there. Why should she resent it if her party was going well without her? That was the whole point, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been able to hear their voices from upstairs, but she knew they were hard at it, finding out all about each other. And they had probably only found out things she herself already knew.

‘What about lighting the candles?’ she asked.

Lawrence stood up. ‘I couldn’t find any matches.’

‘The stove?’ Gwen suggested.

So he lit one candle from the gas and then held it against the other wick until they flamed up together.

Gwen switched off the lights. ‘Maybe everyone come serve yourselves?’

As they scraped back chairs, dished food, Lawrence announced in a non-committal tone, ‘I think Roland taught this Paul fellow with whom you’ve been – working. Quite a young chap, is he?’

Nobody spoke. Gwen uncovered the potatoes and dropped the saucepan lid on the stove with a stupendous crash.

‘You mean Paul Mercy?’ Hilary said loudly, as if it should be obvious to them all. She put two potatoes beside her fish, and they rolled clumsily until they hit the soft mound of spinach. She levelled the plate in both hands, sat down. ‘You’re the one who taught him, Roland?’

‘The one? To be sure, others will have taught him as well.’ Roland cut off a large piece of salmon. ‘Did you never teach him, Lawrence?’

‘Never even met him,’ Lawrence replied. ‘Know nothing at all about him apart from what I –’ he slowed ‘– hear.’

‘Isn’t he – I mean, Lawrence, was this to do with the post you were asking around about in the Easter vac, or maybe Trinity term. Last spring? And I suggested Paul, and I believe it was Clare Pryce, and I don’t recall who else? Old students of mine, to be sure. All of them.’

The conversation was suspended, everyone waiting for someone to say something, to acknowledge some mysterious chain of connections by which they all were linked and of which they none were entirely aware.

‘Gosh,’ Lawrence muttered. ‘I suppose I –’

There was another silence. Was anyone to blame? Had someone committed a crime? Were they all still on the same side?

‘I gave you his name, didn’t I?’ Lawrence said contritely, looking sorrowfully at Hilary. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I had no idea he would prove to be –’

‘So irresistible?’ Hilary demanded. ‘Come on, it’s not your fault. The guy knows his antiquities.’ Her voice was raw, defensive and aggressive at once.

‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ Lawrence said sympathetically. ‘But after all, a reference from friends. We ought to have been able to vouch for him personally, somehow. We ought to have –’

‘I interviewed him,’ said Hilary, bold, sarcastic. ‘It was never a requirement that he subscribe to any particular code of conduct. That he be straight, marriageable, a match made in heaven –’

‘Still, it’s hardly professional –’ Lawrence was grasping for some way to ease her pain, to let her off the hook.

‘On the contrary. He behaved perfectly correctly. I was the one who lost my cool, wasn’t I?’ She seemed to be challenging him with her toughness and her hurry, insisting on keeping control of her own story, rather than be its pitiable victim.

‘But the way you tell it, or Gwen tells it, he sounds rather – slimy. There’s some level there of false ingratiation. And – something –’

He looked at Gwen, but Gwen was just as bewildered as he was. She only nodded. ‘He’s doesn’t sound like a nice guy,’ she observed lamely. ‘Not – forthright. I think – pretending to make friends – what is that? Leading you on. He knew. I’m sure he knew. After all, women are always getting blamed for that kind of behaviour – using their looks, their feminine wiles, to get what they want.’

Hilary nodded, suddenly speechless, self-conscious.

And Roland leaped in, in a schoolmasterish voice, summarising the merits and demerits of Paul. ‘He’s clever, of course. Very good company. But lazy, really – unless he’s outgrown that. Quite a high opinion of himself – presumed he’d go far, I reckon. And he could do. Impressive grasp of detail, very strong sense of style. Gifted with languages. Even as an undergraduate, he had several ancient and modern ones.’

‘Gifted with languages,’ Hilary echoed, dry-mouthed.

Gwen knew just what Hilary was thinking – that Paul had lied about being lousy at Italian.

‘Hardly a historian, and certainly not a philosopher,’ Roland went on, unstoppable. ‘Not that I ever taught him philosophy. Could have done anything he set his mind to, really, but he used to tell me that he hated talking about definitions and logic. Called them puzzles. Disdained Aristotle, Plato, metaphysics, ethics – plain old good and evil. What happens happens is what he would say. Capable of memorising anything he read, but didn’t want to think too hard. Not joined-up thinking. Text-based history suited him fine, but he wasn’t much with analysing a problem. Useless with an economic model; he’d tell you what every pottery shard looked like, who made it, where it came from, based on certain visual qualities, but never get on to caring or understanding how the pottery trade might have worked in a pre-capitalist economy. Equally, the coins to him were lovely bright objects to collect and admire. He has the mind of a connoisseur really, an aesthete. And for ever stuck in the one-damn-thing-after-another school of thought. What, honestly, is the point of that? Life as a series of accidents? I take it, Hilary, that has somehow included you? Some – accident?’

‘An accident,’ Hilary breathed. She gave a tight chuckle, feeling that Roland was scolding her, taking her to task for having failed to see what she was dealing with in Paul. ‘You seem to have the nub of it.’

Gwen thought, I’ve never seen Roland being so pompous, so cold, so unbelievably condescending.

Lawrence was diligently working his way through his plateful, head down, shovelling it in. ‘Maybe he was quite happy to achieve some hold on Hilary,’ he said with his mouth full, chewing. ‘Maybe he did do it all deliberately. C’mon, Hilary, stick up for yourself. You mustn’t let Roland be hard on you. Maybe Paul was after your – inheritance. Your candelabrum.’

Once again, Roland went red, realising he’d crossed some line. ‘Do forgive me. I have no intention of being hard on anyone. And I don’t think you should let Paul Mercy get the better of you. He shouldn’t be allowed to – hurt your feelings. Or anyone’s feelings for that matter.’

Gwen caught Lawrence’s eye across the table as she poured sparkling water and he poured more wine. She was thinking that Roland, in some ghastly, awkward way, was trying to cheer Hilary up. She felt certain that Lawrence was thinking the same. She gazed at Lawrence, half smiling, considering that wine on top of fourteen years of marriage dissolved any barriers between their minds, that he knew even now what she was thinking as she thought it: that all this bluster was Roland’s idea of gallantry, cutting Paul off at the knees, reducing him to a slip of an undergraduate figure, a schoolboy even, truant, with a lost homework assignment.

What is it with these dons? She wondered if Roland’s efforts would succeed, looking at Hilary, looking at Roland. Surely Lawrence would never stoop so low, belittling a rival? Or were all men like that?

And now she heard Hilary starting in on how ridiculous she must have seemed, throwing herself at Paul.

‘Here,’ Hilary cried out, flushed with wine. ‘Have my heart.’ And she made a gesture, like throwing something down on the floor. ‘Stomp on it for me.’

Oh, don’t tell these stories against yourself, Gwen thought. She felt, suddenly, that the evening was destroying Hilary’s morale. It’s the tone of voice – abject, self-abasing. Come on, Hil, Gwen was thinking. You are not such a loser as all that. And why, why, tell Roland so much about the broken engagement. I mean not with such gusto. It’s my fault, Gwen considered. She warned me, Not yet.