The Red Hat by John Bayley

Author:John Bayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

PART TWO

People like pictures, if they do, for all sorts of different reasons. I personally find something rather sympathetic in Nancy Deverell’s attitude to them, as revealed in the account of her adventures despatched, no doubt with some malice aforethought, to Cloe Winterbotham. Cloe is quite a good friend of mine, as well as a very old friend, having regard to our respective ages; and it appears she is in the same sense an old friend of Nancy Deverell, or at least the latter appears to have thought of her as such. I wouldn’t know, never having met this Nancy, but I am beginning to hope that I may presently do so.

Cloe is eight or nine years younger than me: a different generation in a sense, although women marry men ten years older than themselves all the time, even in this day and age. I don’t exactly think I ever wanted to marry Cloe; I would, all the same, dearly have loved to have an affair with her. That, alas, did not happen, despite my best efforts. ‘You’re so oldfashioned, Roland,’ she used to say. ‘Even your name is oldfashioned, though that’s one of the things I like about it, and about you.’ But she didn’t like it, or me presumably, enough to respond in the way I was hoping. I sometimes wonder who she does like to go to bed with.

Perhaps she’s too fond of herself to fancy either men or women? But it looks as if she may favour gay men who have decided by an exercise of the will to go straight for a while, or even to settle down in a nice comfortable double life. Charles Martin for example. Even as I write she is on the verge of marriage with Charles, and I have been asked to the wedding. I trust my old friend status will remain unimpaired. I rather fancy it will be. Cloe is very dependent on her friends, because she knows how to make use of them.

She is certainly making use of me, and I love it. It would be hard to say just why – just why she is making use of me I mean. I love it for my own reasons.

Charles? Well I have mixed feelings about him. Perhaps that’s only to be expected. Undoubtedly he is a very able fellow, although he is the opposite of the sort of clean-cut image that phrase suggests. As Nancy Deverell accepts, or at least seems to take for granted, he really is good on pictures, although Vermeer is not his special study: I rather fancy it may be Tiepolo. He is Professor of Fine Art at London; an OK job I should imagine as regards the money, and I believe he has plenty of his own. That may be one of the reasons Cloe is marrying him. She never has much; and, oddly enough for such an attractive and apparently competent girl, she never seems to hold down a decent job. She’s

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