Julia just shrugged and said, “We have loads of this kind of stuff.”
He lifted the veil on a small Rembrandt every time he passed it on the staircase. No one would miss it, he thought. Did such careless people even deserve such treasure? If he took the Rembrandt his life would be quite different. He would be a thief, for one thing. A different narrative.
There were a couple of Rubenses, a Van Dyke, a Bernini in the hall, all kinds of Italian Renaissance treasures. But it was the little Rembrandt that stole his heart. He could have robbed the entire house. There was a key beneath an urn at the front door. When he chided Julia for the lack of security she laughed and said, “Yes, but it’s a very heavy urn.” (It was.)
“You can have it as far as I’m concerned, darling,” Julia said when she caught him looking at the Rembrandt. “It’s a murky old thing.”
“Thank you, but no.” What a pillar of moral rectitude. In later life, he wished he had appropriated the painting. No one would have believed it was a genuine Rembrandt, it would have existed entirely for his own guilty pleasure, hanging on a suburban wall. He should have done. The London house was hit by a V-2, the Rembrandt lost for ever.
“You can keep your art as far as I’m concerned,” Julia said. “I’m very shallow, I’m afraid.” In Teddy’s experience people who claimed to be one thing were generally the opposite, although in Julia’s case it was true. She was magnificently philistine.
They didn’t go to Petty France. Instead they spent their romantic interlude in the London house or, on one memorable night in which sleep played no part, at a suite in the Savoy that seemed to be permanently available to her. There were “gallons” of champagne in the cellar of the London house and they spent the week drinking it and making love on top of a variety of priceless antiques. It struck Teddy that it was possible that Julia lived her life like this all the time.
She had a perfect body, the Grecian-goddess type. He could imagine her as a goddess, cool and indifferent, quite happy to condemn some poor Actaeon to be torn to death by hounds. Nancy could never inhabit the cruel world of Olympus, she was more of a merry pagan sprite.
“Who is Nancy?”
“My fiancée.”
“Oh, darling, how sweet.”
He was rather put out by her response. The piquancy of a little jealousy would have added to the whole experience. That’s what it was, an experience, his heart was never truly engaged. He was playing at romance. This was after Hamburg, after Beethoven, after Keith died, not long before Nuremberg, when he didn’t care too much about anything, particularly beautiful shallow blondes. But he appreciated the gift of having unfettered, lusty sex (“Filthy,” as Julia put it), so that in later years when he returned to the more common-or-garden type he at least knew what it was to fuck with abandon. He wasn’t fond of the word but it was the only one that would do for Julia really.
On the last day of his leave he turned up at the London house and shifted the heavy urn to find no key, only a piece of paper bearing a scribbled message: “Darling, it was lovely, see you around, Jxx.” He rather resented being locked out of the house, he had begun to feel quite at home there.
Not long afterwards Julia was posted to an Army ordnance base and was one of seventeen people who were killed when a bomb dump accidentally exploded. Teddy was already in the POW camp by then and didn’t find out about this incident until years later when he read about her father’s death in his own newspaper (“Peer in sex scandal falls to death”).
He imagined Julia’s perfect white limbs broken and scattered like ancient statuary. It was old news, too old for him really to care—Nancy had just embarked on her illness. He hadn’t known about the London house either until he read it in the same newspaper article (“Many priceless works of art lost during the war”). He mourned the little Rembrandt more than he did Julia, who he hadn’t thought of for a long time.
But that was in the future. Now he was returning from Jackdaws with Keith and finding Fox Corner’s drawing room alive with guests. Sylvie had invited people for lunch, people Teddy had never met and in whom he had little interest.
There was a pontificating local councillor and his wife, a solicitor (a self-styled “old-fashioned bachelor”) who seemed to be lining himself up as a prospective suitor for Sylvie. There was also a widow, rather elderly, who complained a good deal, particularly about how hard the war had made her life, and finally a “man of the cloth,” as Sylvie referred to him. Not just an ordinary cleric but a bishop—a superior kind of devil-dodger. He was rather unctuous, as Teddy expected a bishop to be.
They were drinking dainty glasses of sherry—the men too—and Sylvie said to Keith and Teddy, “I expect you would prefer beer.”