Peggy shuffled down the room, glancing over the etchings of naked boys, indolent and faintly eroticised. Other faces, less attractive, of all types. The lines wobbled away from a harsh realism towards a cartoonlike facileness. All these faces looked bemused. Their expressions seemed to Peggy to sum up her own feelings at the moment, and it cheered her up. These people, these friends of the artist, she thought; you can tell they’re living complicated lives. In the pictures where they’re together, you can tell it isn’t all a picnic. A pursed-mouth bemusement seemed like the only rational response to them.
She turned to see that Iris had sat down in a high-backed chair next to a potted plant. She plucked a handful of ostrich feathers from a nearby vase and fanned herself lazily. Looking up, she saw Peggy standing over her. “The Valkyries decided, Peggy. Don’t you see? They determined which warriors would fall in battle, or who would get to Valhalla. Isn’t that where we are? Aren’t we in a battlefield? Aren’t all those in our family warriors?”
“I don’t think we’re as important as that,” Peggy said sadly. “I don’t think it makes much odds to them at all what we think. The younger lot will press on with whatever they fancy doing, regardless.”
“But we can still put spanners in the works.” Iris was starting to look crumpled up again. Peggy felt a twinge of dismay. “We can still talk sense to them.”
“We’re old.” Peggy shrugged. “They can see better than us, I think, what’s for the best.”
“When I write a novel again,” said Iris, rallying once more, “and I shall, I’ll call it Swanning About.” She cast a glance back to the painting of the boy jumping into the pool. “Because that’s what we’ve all being doing, isn’t it? We’re all dead selfish with each other. But our best moments together, when we love each other most, is when we show off for each other. When we are as fabulous as our friends think we ought to be.”
“I think so,” Peggy said; guilty again that Iris had embarrassed her.
“All we want is for the world to value those we love as much as we do. Not to inflict itself too hard on them. To be kinder. And my book will do that. I want it to show us all at our best and at our worst. It’ll be about the warriors I know now. And since I’m a Valkyrie, at least when I’m writing, and since when I’m writing, I can rig all the rules, I’ll make surer we all get to Valhalla.”
Impulsively Peggy bent to hug her. For a moment Iris seemed terribly frail in her arms, thinner than ever beneath her many layers. Peggy felt she was embracing a heap of cushions. “It’ll have to be Valhalla,” she sniffed. “I don’t reckon any of us will make it to heaven. Not the heaven my husband used to rant about, anyway. That was just for legitimate family.”
Iris cackled again. “The Valhalla I’m going to rig up is one for family members of the most illegitimate kind. Old dykes, tattooed faggots, divorcees, co-opted coppers, the lot. Blood doesn’t count for much, I don’t think. The messy stuff’s best avoided.”
Passers-by were staring now at the two old ladies making a scene in the middle of the gallery. The ostrich feathers were spread out, dropped at their feet. Peggy was beyond embarrassment now. When she felt as touched as this, she usually felt sick with love. Her heart seemed somewhere at the back of her throat. For Peggy, the timelessness of lovers meant the minutes she couldn’t swallow her saliva. It welled up in tenderness until she swallowed and tears slipped out.
“I love the idea of us being warriors for each other,” she said. “It makes us seem on more or less the same side.”
“I think, in the end, we are.”
“But some of us have to bear the brunt of it,” Peggy said. “I think Mark’s going under. I’ve not seen him like this before.”
RICHARD FOUND HIM IN THE SMALLER GALLERY UPSTAIRS, GAZING AT the bright, abstract shapes of Hockney’s ‘Very New Paintings’. One in particular had caught his attention. Richard stood by him and politely looked at the purple, orange and yellow curves and folds, the speckled, swirling contours, graphs on an Apple Mac swollen and distorted.
“Fucking hell,” Mark said. “I came out of the bogs and walked into twenty-four original Hockneys.”
Richard grinned. The room was like a tunnel, with barred windows running opposite the paintings. He waited until a group of nice ladies left the gallery, discussing cake decorating, as far as he could tell, and asked Mark, “So how’re you doing?”
Mark pointed to the painting directly before him. “This is amazing,” he said. “But that’s almost what I’ve got all up my back.”
“YOU’VE STOPPED TALKING,” BOB SAID, AND LOOKED AT HER.
She had been dozing off to the radio. Now that Sally was asleep in the back, something had relaxed in Sam and with the loss of her vigilance, her need to stay awake had gone too.
“This takes me back—” Bob grinned—”to my earliest memories. My mam was never quiet. She still isn’t. You’ll meet her soon. You’ll get on like a house on fire, but, God, she can talk! When I was little, the only time I remember her being quiet was when we were out in the car.”
“What was that?” Sam was only half-listening. She suspected Bob was talking for the sake of it. He needed to talk to dispel the claustrophobia. Outside, the snow was falling heavier than ever and they weren’t much further on in their journey. The pace was slacker and there were hardly any other cars about.
“Even before I can remember, they used to drive the car out at night. In the middle of nights, when I couldn’t sleep.
