The Things We Do to Our Friends(12)

I had expected them to be closed off or awkward. It was clear they all had varying amounts and sources of money, which I’d come to understand in time; none of them had part-time jobs as far as I could tell. Sitting in that grand flat in one of the priciest parts of the city, there was no shame or apology to the discussion.

Tabitha took the lead and the rest followed. She bemoaned how expensive running the place was. At this, she gave Imogen a winning smile. Oh, how Imogen glowered. I learned that instead of being rented like most student flats, the place belonged to Tabitha’s father, which now seemed obvious given all the antiques. He’d bought it for her to live in with friends while she studied and she charged Imogen and Ava a very steep rent.

Later, we ate fudge, with coffee served formally in cups with saucers, and whisky afterward, sloshing in our cups, so the liquor mixed with the coffee grinds and became bitter and lukewarm. Tabitha pointed out some of her favorite pieces and how much they were worth. The old chair Ava had been sitting on had cost so much that, when she told me, I choked on my whisky, and then hid it with a cough.

“Not that I’d sell it at the moment, Clare!” Tabitha exclaimed, wide-eyed. “But don’t spill anything on it.”

I put my cup down, making a mental note to use a coaster next time.

The chair was assessed by the group with a bland detachment. They cared very little for the actual object. Ava declared the designer at some point and Tabitha just scrunched her nose and started to talk about how Lebanese wine was a shrewd investment.

One of the things I had looked at and assumed to be expensive—an oil painting of a colonel, his face wrinkled and the effect heightened by the age-induced cracks of the paint—turned out to be basically worthless, or at least to them, because they weren’t sentimental about possessions in the slightest.

“Charity shop find from home.” Samuel winked. “The chap had the thing propped up by the side of the road one day, and I asked if I could buy it. Cost about a tenner or something, nabbed it for Tabs’ eighteenth.”

Now so many years later, I notice people of my age often drift into the monotony of discussing property prices. I don’t think I quite appreciated at the time how rare it was to sit around at eighteen or nineteen and discuss such matters with keen interest, but they included me in it, so it didn’t feel as strange. They drew me in without any kind of test, and I listened quietly as they chattered away.

“When I’m older, I hope I’ll have a cool mil to spend on somewhere decent. Maybe here, or some ramshackle old castle up in the Highlands,” said Samuel.

“Oh, of course you will, darling,” Tabitha exclaimed. “You just get so much for your money up north.” She finished with a smooth purr.

I didn’t ask what “north” meant, as I’d quickly learned from our lectures together that anything above London was “the north.”

Maybe I should have felt uncomfortable at how the conversation developed, but it hummed along, and I didn’t interject much. I just listened as it floated around me like the comfort of a warm bath. It didn’t niggle, being on the outside. It was pretentious, but not irritating. Right from that first night, I never thought that they considered me poor, or not like them, and that was before I knew more detail about their individual circumstances.

Later, Ava produced a ladder, and we climbed through a hatch up to the top of the building so we could look out and see the familiar landmarks from the rooftop, all lit up. Samuel pulled out a joint and we smoked it. It could have been the weed but by the end of that night I was happy in a way that had such an unexpected lightness to it. It was the simple delight of spending time with people I felt such a strong pull toward, of learning more about them and watching the way they spoke to each other—I inhaled the details. Those wrenching waves deep inside my gut that had been there for a while had gone.

It was like we were pretending to be grown-ups with clip-on earrings. Playing at holding a dinner party and talking about money like it was a game of Monopoly.

Then, at the end of the night, Tabitha led me out of the drawing room and into the corridor, where there was a large print in a cheap-looking plastic frame that I hadn’t noticed when I’d come in.

“My favorite,” she said, when she saw I’d seen it.

“Klimt,” I said, recognizing the style immediately. Rudimentary art history. The woman with her long body framed in scratchy fragments of gold. So decorative; an almost armored dress that slipped to the sides and showed a lengthy, moon-colored stretch of flesh from blurred clavicle to belly button. A rosy breast.

Not The Kiss—the picture that so many students our age had as a print on their walls. A different painting.

“Klimt, yes, of course,” she said. “His picture of Judith—do you know the story?”

“No.”

She spoke with adoration. “The story’s been done a million times in art, but this is Klimt’s version. My favorite version. Judith, a strong, quite frankly vicious widow, enters the tent of Holofernes,” she said, then sighed. “And what a woman she was—look at her! He finds her intoxicating, beautiful; it’s easy for her to get into his tent, exactly where she wants him. They fuck. He’s wasted; he passes out and she…”

Tabitha drew a finger across her lovely throat.

And it was only then that I looked away from the gaze of the formidable Judith and to the side of the artwork. It was partially cut off, so you hardly noticed until you looked properly. I realized Tabitha’s gesture had been quite literal. In the painting, the decapitated head of a man. Cast in shadows under Judith’s arm. Her hand on top of the man’s head gripping at his hair, her face triumphant but relaxed.