At home, Vivian made coffee in a kitchen where nobody knew she had been swimming.
She stood at the counter in her robe and ate a piece of toast too hot to hold comfortably. The bread was good, bought from a man who opened late and refused telephone orders. Her kitchen door stood open to a garden still wet from the sprinklers. The small birds in the hedge were making an unreasonable amount of noise. She had chosen this house nine years ago, against Celeste's advice. Too little room to entertain, Celeste had said. Vivian had bought it anyway, imagining people close enough together to pour their own wine.
There were people who did. She ought to invite them more.
On the counter beside the coffee stood a framed photograph of her sister's two sons, solemnly wearing adult neckties over bare chests. The younger one had insisted on the photograph as evidence that they were ready for a wedding. Her sister had sent it without explanation. Vivian's family had become adept at living without her explanations too.
She called Frances while the toast was still in her hand.
“Thank God,” Frances said. “Are you coming or are you going to tell me you're coming?”
“Tomorrow morning, as promised.”
“Eight-thirty. If you say nine, we sit down at ten, and by eleven you're looking at your phone.”
“Eight-thirty.”
“And before you start, I am coming Sunday. Nicholas invited me himself. He wants me beside the museum man. As if I couldn't buy my own museum man.”
“I'll make sure you have the right chair.”
“Just one that doesn't tilt. Every dinner lately, I'm deciding whether my drink is sliding or I am.”
Vivian smiled. Frances could make people laugh while they were still deciding whether she was being difficult. It had been one of the first things Vivian liked about her.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
“Here. With these men.”
“Which men?”
“The ones measuring the wall. Hold on.”
There was a muffled instruction, then the sound of a door being closed. Vivian could picture Frances in the little office off her hall, surrounded by catalogs she never shelved because she was always using them. Her house had the peculiarity of being full of things the owner liked to look at. Nothing had been chosen for a photograph. Two of the best pictures hung in places where a stranger might have mistaken them for failures of arrangement.
“They're doing the preliminary plan,” Frances said. “For the exhibition. I told you.”
“You did.”
“They want The Red Room in the first room. I said it wasn't a collection of entrances, but apparently the first room matters.”
Vivian put the toast down.
“That's wonderful.”
“Is it? I thought so. Then Lena said I must be careful about transport, as if I'd borrowed it from an airport.”
“You want it here Monday.”
“I want it here when I said I wanted it here. Monday.”
The silence after that was a place Vivian had stood before. She had told herself six months ago that Nicholas would make an approach to Frances before Vivian had to answer another direct question. Then there had been a trip, a postponement, a suggestion from Nicholas that the owner might consider selling. Vivian knew Frances well enough to know how that suggestion would go, and had felt useful in not repeating it.
Now Celeste had named a sum. Separate money for Frances, a real lawyer for Vivian, a business disentangled instead of abandoned. It was the first arrangement that sounded large enough to contain what they'd done. She only had to keep the weekend intact until somebody could put it in front of Frances properly.
“The movement is being arranged,” she said. “I'll speak to you about it tomorrow.”
“Movement. It's a picture, Vivian. I don't want to join a movement.”
“Transport.”
“And it's all right?”
Vivian looked at the toast cooling beside her hand. She had already seen the invoice. She knew the original had gone abroad. The thing in the Wrens' drawing room was a copy, and none of the people measuring Frances's wall could make the original appear on Monday.
“It's being looked after,” she said.
“By you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Frances began telling her about the exhibition lunch, which she wanted to have outside although the curator thought it might be too hot. She was going to wear the green jacket that annoyed Lena. It had enormous lapels, and her daughter claimed it looked like the uniform of an airline that had gone out of business. Vivian said the jacket would be perfect. She meant it.
When the call ended she went out into the garden. She carried her cup without drinking from it. A gardener next door was listening to a radio; the song changed midway through a chorus. Vivian stood beside the tree she'd planted her first year in the house and remembered the afternoon Frances had lent the picture.
It had rained so hard they'd stayed at Frances's for lunch. Nicholas couldn't come; Celeste arrived late in a jacket she shook out over the front steps like an animal. Frances disliked the jacket and told her so. Celeste said she hadn't worn it to please a picture collector. Then they'd eaten oysters standing at the kitchen island because the dining room roof was leaking and Frances refused to shut a door on the sound.
The Red Room had been in the passage by the kitchen, Voss's strange shallow room with its slant of red wall and a white cup that seemed about to fall off the table. Vivian had first seen it from the corner of her eye while Frances was finding pepper. She'd gone to stand in front of it and lost the end of a sentence.
“You look like a person deciding to steal something,” Frances said.
“Don't lend it to me, then.”
Celeste came to stand beside her. “It's exactly wrong for my house.”
“Then you should have it for a while,” Frances said. “You've been getting very safe.”
It had been a loan between women who enjoyed being able to do things without a committee. There were proper papers afterward, transport arrangements and condition photographs, all of which Vivian handled. But first there had been Frances giving them the picture for the pleasure of watching it disturb a new room.
For years, when Vivian visited, Frances asked how it was behaving. Not what it was worth. How it looked in the winter light, whether Celeste still went in to see it at night. Vivian gave good answers because she had good things to say.
She took her coffee inside and poured it away.
In her office the sale material was where she'd left it, in a folder filed beneath the collection updates. She opened it now. The sum on Nicholas's invoice was not an explanation. It had become, through repeated looking, only a number. The foreign buyer's name and the dates gave no hint of a room in which Frances might see her painting again. Beside it, the replacement commission looked almost innocent: dimensions, surface instructions, delivery coordination. Somebody had done a specialized job and charged accordingly. It did not have to mean anything to them.
Vivian opened the message beneath it.
I'll deal with Frances. You've done enough worrying about our walls.
She could remember being relieved by the word enough. Nicholas knew she was uneasy; he would take it off her. Two days later he had approved the bonus, calling it recognition for a difficult year. She had accepted the description along with the money.
Her phone rang while the documents were still open. Celeste.
“You left early.”
“I left after midnight.”
“Without me.”
“It would have been an ambitious beginning.”
Celeste laughed quietly. “Did you sleep?”
“Some.”
“I didn't. He came up and told me I'd missed an entertaining story about Julia's contractor.”
“Did you?”
“Apparently there's a man who'll put in a kitchen for anyone except his wife.”
Vivian closed the folder on her screen. She turned her chair to face the garden, as though Celeste might see through the phone.
“I've spoken to Frances. Monday hasn't moved.”
“I know.”
“She wants the exhibition. She wants to stand beside that particular painting and have people ask her about it.”
“We'll need to give her a reason to wait.”
“Not a transport problem. I've used enough of those.”
“I didn't mean a transport problem.”
“What did you mean?”
Celeste paused. Vivian could hear a faint clink, probably a cup put down.
“A serious offer to make things right. Not an amount Nicholas mentions on the way out of a room. Something she can put in front of her own people.”
“Have you spoken to him about the money?”
“There are things I can arrange without asking him how he feels about me.”
Vivian rubbed a finger over a small scratch in the desk. “I'm seeing Lena for lunch.”
“How is she?”
“As usual, annoyed nobody's asked.”
“Poor Lena. Frances doesn't mean to make it so hard for her.”
“Sometimes she does.”
“Yes. Sometimes she does.”
Celeste said it with an affection that included the difficulty. Vivian's chest hurt unexpectedly. They had years of such exchanges: little judgments that depended on knowing the same people, seeing the same faults, keeping the same loyalties. Leaving would mean giving up that shorthand, or taking it into a new life with the person who'd made it possible.
“Come with me this afternoon,” Celeste said. “To look at The Swimmer before they pack it. We already have the appointment. I'd rather it wasn't the last thing we do together.”
“It doesn't have to be.”
“Then come.”
Afterward Vivian dressed in linen trousers and a dark shirt. She took off Celeste's bracelet, looked at the white impression it had left on her wrist, and put it back on. In the hall she picked up the keys to the apartment. She had not decided to offer Celeste anything more. She simply wanted to have them with her if the woman asked.
On the way out she stopped by the kitchen. The toast was still on the counter, a small hard square with the butter sunk into it. She put it in the trash and washed the plate, standing at the sink until it was clean.