arrogant. When I was asked why I’d given away the Van Gogh, I simply replied that I didn’t want it. The audience seemed to like the interview. Jennifer was more loquacious, explaining the importance of the missing painting, then paying a very nice tribute to my generosity. The audience applauded me. The whole thing was quite painless, and all over within twenty minutes. We were shown back to the hospitality room where we were offered warm white wine and stale sandwiches. There was no sign of Hans.
“He had to catch a flight to Geneva,” Jennifer explained. She looked very excited, perhaps because she had enjoyed the interview more than she had expected. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?”
“Of course it was! Don’t be so boring. I think I’d like to be on telly more often.”
“You were very good,” I said loyally.
“Then we shall celebrate my success by having dinner.”
She was suddenly bouncing with happiness, and my own happiness was increasing because of it. We went to a restaurant where we could eat outside and, in the lantern-light, she told me about her childhood, and about the American university where she’d majored in Fine Arts, then about her apprenticeship at a London auction house and her first proper gallery job in Florence. I tried to put a time-span on various jobs, and decided she must be twenty- seven.
“And you,” she asked, “what about you?”
“I thought you’d done all that research on me?”
“Maybe it was wrong.” She caught my eye, and we said nothing for a moment, and I wondered if all the former hostility between us had been merely a disguise for what we had both been feeling. I think I already knew that this was a girl worth staying ashore for, and if that was an exciting thought, it was also somewhat frightening. Maybe she felt the same fear for she suddenly looked away and posed a brutal question. “Tell me about your brother. Why did he kill himself?”
“He couldn’t cope.”
“With what?”
“The problems of Stowey. Mother. Life. Debts. Disappointment.”
Jennifer frowned. “Disappointment?”
I lit a pipe, taking my time over the job. “It was very important to Michael that he was going to be an earl. He thought it would make him important. He couldn’t wait for Father to die. He wanted to see the forelocks twitching when he walked by, and he wanted to wear the ermine, and he fancied hobnobbing in the House of Lords, and when he finally inherited he suddenly discovered that it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. He was still just the same indecisive idiot that he’d always been. Mother kept pushing him to do things to the estate, which he didn’t have the guts to try, and she also wanted him to marry some monstrous creature from the Fens, which he couldn’t face, so in the end he just bunged a double-barrel into his mouth and put his big toe on the trigger.”
For a few seconds she didn’t speak, then she frowned. “You can be very flippant at times.”
“Can I?”
She didn’t reply, instead she just stared at me as though this was the very first time she had really taken notice of me. And I, suddenly, was frightened, because I knew I was being judged, and I wanted that judgment to be favourable.
“Listen,” I said. “Life can be very shitty, it can be tough, it can be the pits. So there’s only one rule, and that’s never to give in. Bad luck comes to all of us, so what must you do? You fight it, you claw at it, you kick the shit out of it, but you never, ever, ever give in. You only go through this vale of tears once, so for God’s sake make it a good voyage. So if I’m flippant, that’s only because it’s better to make light of a disaster than to cry over it.”
I had spoken with more vehemence than I had intended. Jennifer had looked away from me to stare down at the table, so I could not see what she had made of my words. “What do you think about when you’re out there?” she asked after a while, “on your own, at sea?”
“Survival.”
“Is that all?”
“It isn’t all,” I started, though I couldn’t explain the rest of it, so shrugged instead. “You have to be there to know.”
I knew my words had been inadequate. I looked round the small courtyard where diners sat at a dozen tables. They looked content, wealthy, attractive, happy. They also looked plump, self-important, and trapped. “Once,” I said awkwardly, “I watched a meteor fall past the Southern Cross. It was a big one, a great blazon of light across the darkness, and I can’t explain why that’s important, or what I felt, except that to see it even once, in all its glory, is worth an awful lot.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t want to share it with anyone?”
“Oh, yes.”
She smiled at that answer, but kept silent.
“So tomorrow” – I took the plunge for happiness — “why don’t you come to Devon with me and we’ll have a day at sea?”
“To watch the stars fall?”
“Maybe.”
She raised her glass, waited for me to do the same, then touched her rim against mine. “OK,” she said simply.
And I was in heaven.
We stayed that night at Sir Leon’s house in Mayfair. I was given a guest room, and didn’t ask for more. We were up long before dawn and, while I made coffee and toast, Jennifer raided the freezers and kitchen cupboards for our lunch. We were much too early for a radio weather forecast, so I phoned the commercial service and listened to their tape recording. “What do they say?” Jennifer asked me when I put the phone down.
“Sounds good,” I said absent-mindedly, “a real skirt-lifter.”
“A real what?” She turned on me with mock fierceness.
“Force six, gusting seven,” I said contritely, then carried the bags down to the garage where she opened the door of a battered Ford Escort. “Yours?” I asked.
She heard the surprise in my voice. “What did you expect? A Lamborghini?”
“A Porsche at least.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.” She dangled the keys above the car roof. “Do you want to drive?”
“No.”
“That’s good. I like driving.”
She raced the car through empty dark streets. Neither of us spoke much at first, it was too early in the morning, yet there was a distinct feeling of excitement. Just days before we had been snapping at each other like strange dogs; now, suddenly, we had the comfortable intimacy of friendship. There was also the anticipation of something more than friendship. It was that anticipation which touched our commonplace with excitement. We both felt it and we were both happy.
She drove like Charlie; fast, competently, and with a blithe confidence that the police would ignore her. They did.
We sped past Heathrow and Windsor, and only then did she break our silence. She talked about the books she was reading, and scorned me with laughter when I told her I thought four books sufficient for life. She described the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, calling it her stepfather’s fantasy and obsession. “That’s why he pursued money so ruthlessly,” she went on, “just so he could build his fantasy.”
“And he’s very rich,” I commented sourly.
“Very.” She ignored the jealousy in my voice. “It was the property world that started him off. It still pays well, I think, but he keeps Mummy and me a long way away from the seamier side of his activities.”
“Seamy?” I asked.
“A bit, I think.” She didn’t elaborate. The sun rose behind us, casting long shadows and promising a fine day, though I doubted, looking at the bare sky, whether the forecast of a skirt-lifting force six would prove correct. Not that it mattered, for this day was not really about sailing, but about exploring a friendship.
And we had plenty of time for that exploration, for we were in Dartmouth long before breakfast time. I hadn’t
