Katherine Bucknell - What You Will

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.’