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.Above all, the status of the pictures matters to the Japanese.At the moment, they have an equation in their tidy, systematic minds: it says that if the Monet is real and precious, then the “El Grecos” must be, too, because the famous Fatman does not make mistakes.You’ve heard of guilt by association? This is worth by association.The Hulliborn enjoys some of that worth, even though the paintings have been stolen.This is a museum distinguished enough for their exhibition.But, if the triptych goes back on the wall, and half a dozen El Greco experts fly for a gaze and pronounce Quentin Youde a fool for buying them, then all of us at the Hulliborn – every department, including Asian Antiquities – partake of that foolishness.We’ve failed the pay-your-way test, and this is the only one that counts these days.’TenThrough the massed blades of plastic straw, Kate Avis commanded in his ear with lovely warmth, ‘Give it to me now, Modern-Man.Give it me now, now, now, Now-Man.’‘Is it what you needed?’ Lepage grunted solicitously.‘What I needed? What I need, for God’s sake.Present tense.Future, too.’‘I mean, a total therapy.’‘Everything.You’re bringing me back from limbo to the living.But not too quick, George, OK? Twentieth-century pace is frantic, but, please.Please.’Quite a few times tonight he had thought of Julia, though admittedly not at this moment.Obviously, it wasn’t wholly right to be here on the floor of the Hulliborn’s medieval breakfast tableau room with Kate Avis, he naked except for socks, passably comfortable, thanks to the mock straw, and stirred to the marrow, while Julia, in her Bray Square kiosk, struggled to convince half the piss-artists and ragtag boulevardiers of the city that their revelry fell quaintly short if they didn’t buy a scooped-out potato stuffed with Zappy-Tang sauces.Kate seemed to get this crude word from him by telepathy: ‘Yes, stuff me, stuff me until there’s no room for pain or dread or poisoned recollections,’ she told him.‘I love the things you say, Kate, but can you do it quieter, darling?’ he whispered.‘Additional security since the break-in.’ They had given Keith Jervis and others some extra night duties to go with their part-time portering.This was not the first occasion in his museum career that Lepage had noticed the way the words ‘stuff’, ‘stuffed’ could take on very opposed meanings: one so bristling with life and extremely coarse vigour; the other to do only with death and sad imitation.Hadn’t Julia used this distinction the other day when talking about the platypus? Julia could be very harsh, and if Lepage carefully listed all the matters for which she might refuse to show tolerance, having it off with Kate Avis in front of old wax peasants and their brood might come out near the top.She would be unable to accept that what was happening here amounted to no more than essential, philanthropic repairs to Kate’s psyche: just a kind of in situ cure.Wouldn’t it have been monstrously cruel and untypically callous of Lepage to reject Kate’s tacit appeal for comforting? He thought so.But Julia would never see it like this, whatever the mysteries of her own private life.She was unlikely to be impressed by the argument that, as Director, he always had an unavoidable, if occasionally tiresome, responsibility to compensate for deep offence given by the museum, and in the most simple, suitable and effective method to hand.Sometimes, Lepage thought he spent too much time wondering how other people might view a situation – for instance, what would Julia think; what would Flounce do? It was weak.It was pitiable.Didn’t he have a self?‘Do you feel it, too?’ she said.‘Yes.What, exactly?’‘Just how wonderful it is to have the patriarch watching us, a kind of blessing, a union of past and present.’ For a second she glanced up at the glossy-cheeked, ever empty-eyed father of the model family; all his face craters and lumps smoothed out now, after that rough treatment in the Birds cupboard.‘This assertion of living love in a dead place, or a place where love was mocked, abused.’After a while, Kate’s movements under him became exceptionally strong and telling, and she flung out her arms on each side, fingers clutching and unclutching, mangling some of the indestructible straw, which Lepage had commandeered from the tableau’s cottage floor.Her body squirmed appreciatively.He felt proud to have helped in her recovery.She was making a noise, but only a small, blissful, gentle, fairly safe mixture of humming and speaking in which gibberish words featured now and then, utterly unintelligible, but almost definitely to do with fulfilment, not angst or any of those other dark matters she’d mentioned.Yes, Lepage could assure himself that something worthwhile was being achieved here: nothing less than restoration of a lovely woman’s faith in one of life’s core celebrations.In a few months there might be changes and this room filled with the primordial Japanese equipment, and this was fine by Lepage.He would certainly never disparage the splendid, thrilling distinction of the exhibition, even though he might seem to think and speak lightly of it now and then.One could recognize its qualities and still enjoy the sound of Kate Avis’s buttocks bouncing sweetly and regularly on the Hulliborn boards and mock straw, and to feel her thrusting tirelessly back at him, in glorious proof of brave progress towards a complete mental rehabilitation.Scholarship and heritage were not everything.Neither Time, nor the two of them here now, could stay still.No, he certainly could not.Kate’s eyes were closed and her head turned to one side, as she softly half sang and mumbled and savouringly gasped, so she did not seem to notice when a third figure joined them on the floor.Her feet, thrashing out as an adjunct of her joy, must have caught the patriarch, causing him to tumble sideways and finish up alongside them, the sound of his fall muted by the straw.His face lay near Kate’s, and one of his legs rested on Lepage’s right.The patriarch’s arm, which was stretched out in the tableau to point invitingly at the excellent, full old-English breakfast, now reached across Lepage’s shoulders, in a sort of comradely embrace, as with bonding soccer players.Although Lepage recognized at once what had happened, he decided to ignore it.In fact, he was quite swiftly, so swiftly – he was quite swiftly approaching a point when ignoring almost everything would become easy
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