Canarino. Katherine Bucknell

her uniform and starts calling herself a babysitter? Or worse, leaves altogether? He pictured Gordon in his white summer shorts and little Hopie in her white linen dress, pleated and smocked across the chest; Elizabeth dressed them as if, any minute now, they would be playing croquet with the Queen. Did they possess any blue jeans? David had no idea.

      The drawing-room doors were ajar. Through the high, broad opening David caught sight of the gilded, cornflower-blue silk Louis Quinze sofa. He laughed—at himself and at his wife. A man can’t sit on that, he thought. Surely it was designed to prevent people wearing out whatever expensive fabric it was covered in? It’s like a very thin woman in a couture dress, fabulous to look at, fragile and hard to the touch. Why did she leave me that, of all things?

      He entered the room and walked around the sofa, clicking his heels on the newly carpetless parquet. It was a beautiful object, with its bowed legs gracefully pincering the floor, perfect and complete in itself. He sat down on it, gingerly. Its creaks and delicacy didn’t seem familiar. I’ve never even sat on this thing before, he thought, in how many years? Maybe she’d been told it wouldn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic, or the extremes of temperature in Virginia. He was sure Elizabeth loved the sofa; he could remember an imploring telephone call from a Sotheby’s showroom just as the auction was about to begin. He had agreed, as he generally did, that she could spend as much as she liked. Six or eight years ago by now? Was it before Gordon was born? Just afterwards?

      David put an elbow on one arm of the sofa and leaned against the back. It didn’t yield, nor did it break. I guess she didn’t want me getting too comfortable, he thought, stiffly perched. His eyes slowly swept the long room, huge, shadowy. The high white ceilings seemed to hover above the thickening glaze of evening light. There above the black-veined white marble mantelpiece was the portrait.

      Jesus, he muttered. She left that, too, my tenth anniversary present. All the company I’ll need for the summer. Maybe the paint hasn’t dried and it couldn’t be packed?

      Elizabeth, eight feet off the ground, looked down at him, her long, pale arms draped around the children on either side of her, all three of them dressed in white, their blonde heads shining like ridged gold as they lolled on the very same blue sofa where he himself was sitting now, the black Chinese pug at their feet. It was a romantic composition; David couldn’t remember which nineteenthcentury society painter it was that Elizabeth had chosen to model the portrait on, but he had teased her that the elaborate gilded frame looked naked without a little gold plaque, ‘Mrs David Judd and Her Children’. She hadn’t laughed at his joke; the plaque, somehow delayed, had been attached the very next morning. Then a day or two later, a man had come in to rub some of the gilding off the frame; Elizabeth had found it a little too bold.

      Despite the artful languor of Elizabeth’s pose, there was a quick energy in the picture, something startling and modern. In the weeks since the portrait had been hung, David had noticed it only half-consciously. He looked more carefully now, trying to see exactly what it was. Maybe Elizabeth was too skinny for a nineteenth-century society matron? You could see her wedding rings slipping toward her knuckle where her left hand hung down over Hopie’s back, as if her fingers, when not posing to be painted, were active, competent, washed dishes or drove a car. Her gauzy white skirt fell about her hidden legs in timeless folds, but there was a hint of edgy tailoring at her waist and neck, something a lady’s seamstress wouldn’t have produced, something that had stalked down a catwalk. Gordon was sitting demurely, tilted just slightly toward his mother, a twist of smile breaking out or just held back at the far side of his gap-toothed mouth, but Hopie was kneeling up on her hands, really, wasn’t she? She was turning sideways toward the painter, defiant, kittenish, ready to pounce. Were polite little girls allowed to sit like that before, say, the nineteen-sixties? Was Elizabeth actually holding Hopie down with one hand?

      And their blue eyes, six intensely blue eyes, had to have been rendered by some modern technique of painting. They glowed with the watery, aquamarine light that the ocean reflects from a cloudless blue sky on a hot, still summer day somewhere off the coast of New England; those were American, sunstruck, beachgoing eyes. That was it, thought David. And even though they had sat for the painting during the winter, Gordon and Hopie were far too brown, weren’t they? They didn’t match Elizabeth’s stately pallor. In fact, they looked like wild children or tamed hippie kids beside her. The more he looked, the more David felt that his rather beautiful, playful children with their freckled, unformed faces seemed a little out of place in the ambitious formality of their mother’s fantasy.

      He laughed to himself again, benevolently—as he had laughed at the sofa, and as he had laughed when first presented with what he still couldn’t help thinking was an absurd gift. Benevolence felt right. It felt—optimistic. All along, he had assumed that Elizabeth, too, found the portrait just a little bit comical; but she had said nothing to confirm whether she saw any pretentiousness in it. Was it an overt bid to join generations of arriving bourgeoisie opulently displaying their wealth and beauty? He couldn’t ask her; what if it was—in earnest?

      Her face in the portrait was creamy, expressionless, weirdly still. The majestic bone structure was all there; it showed just as well in paint, David thought, as it did in glossy photographs. She seemed unaware of the giggling fidgets barely repressed in the body language of her children, or at least she seemed undisturbed by them. Her calm was deep, otherworldly. And yet there was something long-suffering, even beseeching, in the shallow curve of her pale pink lips. Her long brown-gold hair snaked and looped around her face, over her shoulders, into matching loose coils on her chest. Below her fearsome, stylishly plucked brown eyebrows, her famous iridescent eyes were perhaps not exactly the same as the children’s eyes, David thought. They glittered a whiter aquamarine, almost like fabulous slivers of blue ice.

      David got up from the sofa, walked to the leftmost pair of French doors, unshot the gleaming brass bolt, threw the doors open, and stepped out on the balcony. He could feel the grit of the city abrading the soles of his shoes; the black wrought-iron railings as he leaned on them with both hands were rough with soot. He liked it. He looked across at the heavy, suspiring trees in the square; for all their green, he thought, they’ll never clear this air. It’s a losing battle.

      A car passed just underneath him, kissing and sucking the pavement softly with its rubber-bound weight, moving the twilight. He imagined he could feel particles rising on its wake, entering his nose, his lungs; he breathed in like an addicted smoker. The hot city evening thrilled him; it reminded him of New York, which had been hotter, dirtier, and which, in twelve years in London, he had never really ceased to long for.

      The air seemed to rush and swoop in the distance, like voices swelling, shouting, dying. A siren blared to the east, then another, faster one; both faded. He could hear birds, tuneful ones, in the garden, though he couldn’t see them. The pale, narrow band of sky visible between the trees and the houses seemed to soar up into a wide dome spreading over immeasurable life and variety—neon, hopping, embattled, unpredictable.

      It still excites me, David thought, the fighting, vulgarity, noise, surging threat and promise of it all. Nobody even knows I’m in town, apart from one or two people at the office. It’s like freedom all over again, being small in it, anonymous. He slapped the railings with the palms of his hands; they didn’t wobble, didn’t even vibrate. So solid, this house, this success.

      Here I am, David Judd, a very rich man, in my mansion in Belgravia, about to retire from investment banking and go home. Whatever that is. Somebody said home is a place you can freely go both in and out of. Why does America make me think of my grave? I’m only forty-seven. He slapped the railings again, hard, so that his hands stung and the little bones at the top of his palms ached with the smack.

      There on the balcony, David felt like he was on the edge of a precipice. It was a moment of freedom, and a moment of uncertainty. The moment lasted a long time. He looked out at the gathering dusk, feeling the dull continual energy of the city, listening to its throbs of activity, sometimes remote, sometimes nearby. How could anyone engage with it all? A single life was narrow, short. The city was only an idea, he told himself, an endless seduction that nonetheless ended—ended in just a handful of recognized achievements, familiar relationships, habitual activities, done deals, inescapable commitments. He dusted