EIGHT

Swan persuaded himself that Meridor would have wanted him to accept Cardale’s offer on the grounds that it meant he could keep a close eye on his Picassos. Not literally, of course, since Cardale promptly deposited them in the bomb-proof vault of his Piccadilly bank. There had not actually been any bombing yet, but the National Gallery had evacuated its collections long since – to north Wales, so rumour had it – and as Cardale said: ‘We must take good care of your employer’s property for him, mustn’t we?’

Unsurprisingly in the circumstances, Cardale’s gallery in Ryder Street was thinly stocked. It was made clear to Swan that his commitments there would be far from onerous. ‘The show must go on, old man, but don’t expect any full houses.’ Nor was he required to discharge any of those commitments until the following week. ‘You’ll need a few days to find your feet.’

The use, free of charge, of a comfortably furnished flat in St James’s greatly eased the process of feet-finding, as did the large cheque Swan obtained from Mr Levi Burg of Hatton Garden in exchange for his diamonds. Burg confessed himself envious when he heard of his friend’s departure for the United States. ‘New York will soon be the only place where our business can flourish, Mr Swan. I would go there myself if I could obtain a visa. Isaac must know more influential people than I do. But why am I surprised? He’s always been gifted in that department.’

Swan opened an account at Cardale’s bank with the money and judged he could afford to live as well as wartime conditions allowed for some time to come. The London he had returned to was not, of course, the London he remembered. Eros had left Piccadilly Circus. Barrage balloons floated in the sky. Many statues were boarded up, many buildings sandbagged. The guards at Buckingham Palace were in battledress. Policemen wore tin hats. There was hardly a taxi or a private car to be seen on the streets, rendering Cardale’s ability to fill the tank of his thirsty V12 all the more mysterious. And the blackout seemed to plunge the city back in time, as Cardale warned him. ‘It’s more like 1740 than 1940 once night falls, old man. Beware pickpockets and footpads.’

During the week or so likely to elapse before any cable from Meridor arrived, Swan proposed to enjoy himself as best he could. Good food and fine wine were still to be had in the restaurants of the West End and a mood of desperate gaiety prevailed in Soho. He found diversion easily enough. The air-raid precautions seemed excessive to him. The war remained, in his own mind, just a rumour. He decided to test the mood of middle England and do his filial duty by visiting his parents over his first weekend back in Blighty. He fired off a letter telling them of his plan and travelled up to Leamington on Saturday.

He regretted going even before he arrived. The train was impossibly crowded, which his fellow travellers assured him was quite normal. Where taxis in London were scarce, in Leamington they were non-existent, obliging him to walk to his parents’ house. He had never been there before and covered twice the actual distance thanks to a series of wrong turnings. Nor was meat rationing the only reason for the absence of a fatted calf when he reached the oversized mock-Tudor dwelling, set in half an acre of heavily treed garden, to which his father had retired after more than forty years in Africa. The move had evidently done nothing to improve his temperament. Always irascible, he had become in old age splutteringly choleric. The sight of his eldest son was as a red rag to a bull.

‘I didn’t fix you up with a job in Antwerp so that you could use it as an excuse to dodge the column, Eldritch. Your brother’s in the Army, which is where you should be, goddammit, doing your bit for King and country. What the hell do you mean by still being in civvies? There’s a war on. Hadn’t you noticed?’

The storm eventually died, thanks to Swan’s mother, a well-practised domestic appeaser. Swan himself was far from sure he wanted to do any appeasing. Verhoest’s attempt to blackmail Meridor had led to revelations about Swan senior’s activities while working for the East African Railways and Harbours Administration that sat ill with his self-righteous outpourings. A few judicious hints on the subject when the two were eventually left alone together ensured no further broadsides came Swan’s way. A sullen truce prevailed, during which his father contented himself with complaints about Chamberlain’s war leadership and the scandalous difficulty of hiring decent domestic staff in England compared with Tanganyika. When Swan left the following morning, his mother waved tearfully to him from the front gate, while his father scowled at him from the driveway behind her. If he had known he would never see either of them again, he might have gone back and crafted a tenderer farewell. But he did not know. How could he?

Next day was his first in the gallery. Little more was required of him than to mind the shop during Cardale’s frequent absences. The knowledge of the art world he had picked up from Meridor would have been an advantage if there had been many customers to impress with it, but they were few and far between. He looked the part, according to Cardale: that was all that really mattered.

The direness of the current trading climate drove them to an early lunch at L’Escargot in Soho, where it was possible to imagine for a pleasant couple of hours that there was no war under way in the world. Cardale disclosed he was a widower who had also lost a daughter, though he had a young grandson to remember her by. ‘I rattle round a too-big-by-bloody-half house in Richmond with the nipper, his nanny and a grumpy cook. It’s not exactly how I imagined it would turn out.’ The daughter, it emerged, had died in childbirth. The father of her child went unmentioned. He was evidently not on the scene. Swan felt genuinely sorry for Cardale, though he was aware that the second bottle of Pomerol might have contributed to the sentiment.

He also became aware, late in the proceedings, that Cardale was gently pumping him for information about Meridor’s Picassos. When were they bought? Which dealer were they bought from? How much had they cost? Swan could not help. The pictures had all been acquired before his appointment as Meridor’s secretary. It was Cardale’s turn to be vague when Swan asked what Meridor had bought from him. ‘Second-division Impressionists, as I recall, old man. He probably sold them all on at a healthy profit. Shrewd fellow, your boss.’

Cardale had plans for the afternoon that did not involve returning to the gallery. Swan volunteered to open up for a couple of hours solo. It promised to be an undemanding stint.

And so it was, until the arrival of a customer whose manner and appearance were not those of the average St James’s gallery browser. He was a lean, sleek-haired, sallow-skinned fellow in a pale suit and two-toned shoes, with a heavy five o’clock shadow. Swan liked the look of him not at all.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

The man broke off from ogling a bathtime-in-the-harem piece of Victorian kitsch and treated Swan to a hostile glare. ‘Where’s Cardale?’ he growled.

‘Out at present, sir.’

‘I’ll bet. Well, give him a message when he crawls back, will you? Tell him patience is on ration like everything else and he’s had as much from us as he’s going to get.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard. Tell him.’ The man levelled a stubby forefinger at Swan. ‘Got that?’

‘Very well. Who shall I say the message is from?’

The man smirked. ‘He’ll know.’

Swan felt strangely unsurprised by this turn of events. No one, in his experience, was ever as wealthy or as honourable as they cared to imply. Meridor; Cardale; his own father: they all had feet of clay. But maybe his father was right about one thing. Maybe he should follow his brother’s example and join the Army. War service was an escape route of sorts.

He assumed it would be the following day before he had the chance to pass on the message to Cardale and gauge his reaction to it. As it was, however, he saw Cardale much sooner than that.

He had locked up and was en route to Piccadilly, with the half-formed intention of kicking off his evening with a cocktail at the Ritz, when he saw Cardale bearing down on him along St James’s Street, clutching a newspaper in his hand.

‘There you are, Swan.’ He was breathless and clearly agitated about something. He looked, indeed, like a man who had just received a great shock. ‘I … I was on my way to see you.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought you said you weren’t coming back this afternoon.’

‘I wasn’t intending to. But—’ He broke off and grasped Swan’s elbow. ‘You obviously haven’t heard.’ He flapped the newspaper. It was that day’s Evening Standard, folded open at an inside page. ‘Awful. Perfectly bloody awful.’

‘What is?’

‘This, man. Here.’ Cardale stabbed at a side-column headline. ‘See?’ And Swan saw.

Belgian liner Uitlander torpedoed in mid-Atlantic
– no survivors