Goodbye Again by Joseph Hone

gazing at it, without eating it. ‘Sometimes I’d like to be just a very ordinary person, comfortably kept afloat by all sorts of lies and nonsense. If I’d been just an ordinary chap, with a spot of humility, I’d have gotten on better with people, been a bit more serene – though that usually means just suiting the other person. Instead I took to old cord suits, bright red scarves and wide black hats and became a bloody painter. Though I’ve more or less lost the knack.’
    ‘Why? What happened?’  
    I wasn’t going to tell her about Katie. ‘Things sometimes just die on you.’  
    ‘I’m sorry.’ She was genuinely sympathetic. ‘So what do you want to do with your life now?’  
    ‘Oh, just a few simple things really. Get a bit of money together and my old Bentley and take off down the Rhône Valley – Dijon, Burgundy, High Provence. Never seen any of those places. There are many very ordinary things I’d like to do now. And be.’  
    She had relaxed as she listened to all this, dropping her shoulders, the drawn, wary look in her face disappearing, as if some burden had been lifted from her. Shading her eyes against the sun, she looked at me carefully.  
    ‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Your honesty addiction … mine as well.’ Now she didn’t mind talking about the personal, she wanted to. ‘I can be outspoken and tyrannical sometimes. Most of all, like you, I can’t stick the hypocrites, the people who lie to themselves and to me, and then make out they’re in step, and you’re not … the ones who won’t risk admitting mistakes. They can’t afford to be wrong, their sanity depends on it.’  
    I frowned. In what she’d just said, Elsa might have been describing Katie’s characteristics and how she had promoted these with me.  
    ‘I’ve had just that happen with several people in my life,’ I said. ‘It’s an old trick. People have to damn your own fairly honest character, so they can survive with their own pretty dishonest one. Then they can throw you overboard without a qualm and stay secure on their comfy, cagey raft of lies. I’ve sometimes felt I should have joined them there for an easier life.’  
    ‘No. You can’t do that. It’s no use trying to be an apple tree when you’re a mulberry bush.’  
    There was silence, with the swell rocking the boat gently and the anchor chain grating softly against the stern.
    ‘Listen.’ She spoke up. ‘You said you wanted to explore the Rhône Valley, and maybe on to Italy? I’m going down that way for this book on olives and oil. I was going anyway, before my father started sinking. We could go together?’  
    I considered the matter, unconcerned, as if she’d suggested we take a trip to the local supermarket.  
    ‘What would I do?’  
    ‘The Modigliani nude,’ she said at once. ‘You said it might be at the heart of the whole business, the connection between my father and yours.’  
    ‘Yes, I did. I do.’  
    ‘So maybe we could find out about it together? Who it belonged to originally, how it got to be hidden in your father’s attic, and so on.’  
    She smiled. And so on, I thought. That was likely to be the real problem, but I wasn’t going to turn down her suggestion on that account. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps find out who the woman in the painting was. Though I don’t know quite where one would start.’  
    ‘The archives in the Louvre? – or the Musée d’Orsay?’  
    That provocative smile again. Like Katie’s, when she wanted me to do something with her. Paris, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay – that had been the first trip Katie and I had made abroad together, five years before, in early summer. And here was almost her double, beckoning me along the same path. Up the garden path? To a dead end? That’s how it had ended with Katie.  
    Well, damn it, Katie was dead and Elsa was alive and I would go to Paris with her. So I said, ‘Yes, start in Paris. I’ve an old friend there, an