“We really must get on,” said Irene, pushing Bertie through the door. “You must excuse us, Domenica. We have to walk to
Bertie’s appointment.” She paused, before adding pointedly: “We don’t use our car in town, you see.”
“I think our car’s been lost,” said Bertie. “Daddy parked it somewhere when he was drunk and forgot where he put it.”
“Bertie!” said Irene, reaching out to seize his arm. “You must not say things like that! You naughty, naughty boy!” She turned to face Domenica. “I’m sorry. He’s confabulating. I don’t know what’s got into him. Stuart would never drive under the influence.
Bertie’s imagining things.”
“Well, where is it then?” asked Bertie. “Where’s our car, Mummy? You tell me where it is.”
Domenica looked at Irene politely, as if waiting for an answer.
“Our car is parked,” said Irene. “It is parked in a safe place somewhere. We do not need to use it very much as we happen to have a sense of responsibility towards the environment. Some people . . . some people may choose to act otherwise, but we do not. That’s all there is to it.”
“Of course if you have lost it,” said Domenica, “it’ll probably be down in the car pound. That’s where they take irresponsible cars.”
“Our car is not irresponsible,” said Irene. “It is a small car.”
“Easy to lose, I suppose,” said Domenica.
“It is not lost!” said Irene, chiselling out each word. “Now come, Bertie, we mustn’t keep Dr Fairbairn waiting.”
“I don’t care,” said Bertie, as he was hustled past Domenica, but still within her hearing. “You’re the one who wants to see him, Mummy. You’re the one who likes to sit and talk to him. I can tell. You really like him, don’t you? You like him more than Daddy. Is that right, Mummy? Is that what you think?”
Matthew called the taxi while Pat wrote out a notice saying that the gallery would be closed for an hour.
224
“It won’t take us much longer than that,” said Matthew. “We’ll nip up to Morningside Road, buy the painting back, and be back down here in no time.”
“Buy it?” asked Pat. “Isn’t it still ours?”
Matthew gazed up at the ceiling. “It may be ours technically.
But it may be simpler just to pay whatever they’re asking. It can’t be very much.”
Pat was doubtful. It might not be as simple as Matthew imagined. She had heard that charity shops were more astute than one might think, and the days when one might find a bargain, an misidentified antique or a rare first edition, were over. “Sometimes these places send anything interesting off for valuation,”
she pointed out. “They do that with books, for example. Anything that looks as if it might be worth something is looked at – just in case. First editions, you see. Some of these first editions can be pretty valuable, and these charity shop people know it.”
Matthew smiled. “Not these Morningside ladies,” he said.
“That place will be staffed by Morningside ladies. You’ll see.
They won’t know the first thing about art.”
Like you, thought Pat, but did not say it. And she was not so sure about Morningside ladies, who tended, in her experience, to be rather sharper than people might give them credit for. Peploe was exactly the sort of painter of whom such ladies might be expected to have heard – Peploe and Cadell. These ladies might not like Hockney – “He paints some
“Such lovely hats they wore then! Just look at those feathers!”
Faced with a Peploe? it was perfectly possible that they might have set the painting aside for valuation, and if they had done that it would be impossible to get it back from them. They would have to contact a lawyer, perhaps, and take the matter to court. That would take a long time and she wondered whether Matthew would have the stomach for it. Even if he did, then at the end of the day if the painting turned out not to be a Peploe, they would have wasted a lot of time and money on something quite valueless. Not that Matthew had much to do with his time, of course. His day,
as far as she could make out, consisted of drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, and doing one or two tiny little tasks that could easily be fitted into ten minutes if he really exerted himself.
What was it like to be Matthew? This rather interested Pat, who often wondered what it would be like to be somebody else, even if she was not entirely sure what it was like to be herself.
That, of course, is something that one is not sure about at twenty, largely because one is not yet sure who one is. Being Matthew must be, well, it must be rather dull. He did not appear to believe in anything with any degree of passion; he did not appear to have any real ambitions; there was no sense of disappointment or loss – it was all rather
Matthew did not seem to have a particular girlfriend either.
His evenings, as far as she could ascertain, were spent with a group of friends that she once glimpsed in the Cumberland Bar.
