William Boyd - Stars and bars

“Take as long as you like, my dear boy, as long as you like. What about the Dutch paintings?”

“Very average, as you thought. There is one curiosity.” He described Gage’s dirty picture. “I can’t place the myth. I thought Pruitt might know.”

“I’ll ask him. Enjoy yourself.”

Henderson put the phone down. Shanda came back with a cup of coffee. Her love-bite had faded to a brown smudge. Her distended breasts swung unrestrained, it seemed to Henderson, beneath a bright floral-patterned maternity dress. They sat and chatted as best they could for a few minutes. He thought she asked him if he and ‘Bryant’s mommy’ were going to get married in a church. He told her no, and sketched out the arguments in favour of a registry office wedding.

“I’m sorry?”

“Registry office.”

“Red just offed his what? His wife?”

Did they have registry offices in America? “No. A registry office.”

“Air defence officer? Who? Red?”

“Fiss. Fiss. Aw-fiss.”

Shanda lit a cigarette and smiled worriedly at him.

“You know, it’s still not working,” she said. “Sometimes it’s fine an’ I hear you OK. But other times it just goes. I’m lost.”

Ten minutes later, Henderson stepped exhausted from the trailer. He walked around the side of the house, belching quietly to himself in an attempt to dislodge the ball of warm air trapped behind his rib cage. He wandered down the cool overgrown alleyways of the back garden feeling slightly more at ease. Apart from his clogged and costive body, his life was beginning to pick up again. He was finally getting on with his job and was reconciled with Irene. The last few days had been an absurd and regrettable hiccough. It was as if in driving south he’d passed into some anarchic and frustrating time zone — like Alice falling down the rabbit hole — but now things were returning to normal.

He pushed through a screen of laurels to find himself on the banks of a large brackish stream. On the far bank was a dense pine wood. Over to his right was a stone bench, upon which sat Cora.

“Mr Dores,” she called. “Come and admire the view.”

He joined her on the bench. She wore black cotton trousers and a white blouse, and with her short hair looked obscurely Chinese.

“The view?”

“My mother planned to construct a ‘vista’ here. But it never got made.”

“I see. Shame.” They sat and looked at the pine trees some thirty or forty feet away across the stream.

“I suppose you think,” she said, “that it’s a rather pretentious idea. A Southern lady playing at being a landscape gardener.”

“Not at all,” he said defensively. He changed the subject. “I was very impressed by your father’s collection.”

She turned her sunglasses on him. “Is he going to let you sell them?”

“I hope so.”

“Do you like ‘Demeter and lambe’?”

“That’s the one where…”

“The girl is holding up her dress. Yes.”

“What did you call it?”

“‘Demeter and lambe’. It’s written on the back of the canvas. I don’t know who the hell they are, though.”

“I can fill you in on Demeter, I think. Goddess of the harvest. Her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, one day while she was gathering flowers. Demeter goes wild with grief, permits no harvest for a year. Mankind about to perish, Zeus persuades Hades to release Persephone. Harvests restored. I don’t know where lambe fits in. One of the rarer Greek myths, I suppose.”

“I suppoase sowe ,” she imitated his accent. Henderson smiled. He could take a joke.

“Are you married, Mr Dores?”

He explained — roughly — the position in regard to Melissa.

“You divorced her and now you want to remarry? Why?”

“Well…I think because I now realize that the only time I was truly happy was when I was married to her and, well, I think I can be happy again.” He was a little astounded at his honesty. Having uttered the sentiment he reassessed it in the light of his recent phone call to Irene. Was it true? Yes, he told himself and remarked again on the boundless capacity for self-deception that resides in every human being.

“So I take it Miss Dubrovnik isn’t your intended.”

“Who? Oh no. Why would…what would make you think that she might have been?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that when I told you she’d phoned you looked so pleased.”

“She’s a colleague. She, ah, had some important news for me about the paintings. Actually I’m meeting her in Atlanta on Friday. Some problems of dating, provenance, that sort of thing. Seventeenth-century Dutch is not really my area.”

“What is?”

“Late nineteenth. I’m what’s known as ‘an Impressionist man’.”

“The Impressionist man,” she said grandly.

“Yes.” He couldn’t tell why he felt uneasy.

“I see.”

“May I ask you something?” he said, emboldened by the friendly turn the conversation had taken.

“You may.”

“Why do you wear your sunglasses all the time?”

She looked at him. “Because I’m an Impressionist man as well, yo’u might say. An Impressionist woman.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Because everything looks nicer. The country, the weather, the people. They all look more as they should.”

Henderson wasn’t quite sure if she were being serious. “You mean as you somehow imagined they would? Ideally speaking.”

“Let’s say, as I think they should . Without my glasses the world doesn’t look as bright or as richly coloured. The people look nastier too.” She puffed at her cigarette, sending small clouds up into the branches of the tree that overhung the bench.

“Stands to reason,” Henderson said without much conviction.

“Do you want me to take them off?”

“Well, I…I mean only if—”

She took her sunglasses off and turned her face towards him. It seemed an almost profane and indecent gesture, as if she’d suddenly exposed her breasts or, like the girl in the painting, raised her dress. Her eyes seemed small and were brown like beer. English bitter, he thought, how apt. Her face seemed bland and empty. It was impossible to assess — with the removal of such a dominant feature — whether she was pretty or plain. It was like a good friend shaving off a beard he’s worn for ten years. Someone entirely different — unknown — is exposed beneath.

Henderson felt uncomfortable. A fly buzzed round her face and she flapped it away. The removal of her sunglasses seemed to imply an intimacy between them, as if she were doing something specially for him. He hadn’t asked her to oblige, he reminded himself.

“I think,” he said with insincere gallantry, “you look much nicer with them off.”

“Remember I’m seeing you differently, too,” she said, scrutinizing him. “I’ve torn away a veil.”

He smiled edgily. The fly buzzed back, around his head this time. Just then the distant sound of rock music came from the house.

“You’re not quite so hostile to us Brits, today,” he said.

She laughed. “Life can get a little boring around here. Don’t blame me if I try to liven it up a little. Create some tension. I like to draw people out, you know. Force them to be themselves.”

“Well, your blindness was very convincing. Your contempt for the English, too.”

“What about your contempt for us Americans, then?”

“What contempt? We don’t have any contempt for you. I don’t, certainly.”

She looked hard at him. “Well, we don’t care, anyway. We know it’s all brought on by envy.”

He decided not to be drawn out any further.

“Why are you living here, if you don’t mind my asking? I heard you dropped out of medical school.”