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the works of the impressionists and their successors so often appear in. Hermione noticed my glance.
    “Bonnard,” she said.
    I nodded.
    “Of course that’s what you do, isn’t it?” said Peter. He looked at the painting. “I’ve always liked Bonnard. I bought that in New York. Sotheby’s, not your bunch.”
    “It’s lovely,” I said.
    “A woman in a bath,” Peter said. “It must have been difficult being married to Bonnard. Always wanting to paint you in the bath. No privacy at all.”
    “She might have been flattered,” said Hermione.
    Peter shrugged. “Maybe.” He turned to me. “And what’s the art market doing right now? Jittery, like everybody else?”
    I tried to remember what somebody had said over coffee the previous day. “It’s all right,” I said. “Contemporary art is doing rather well. Chinese too.”
    He smiled, and I wondered whether he had guessed that this was just the recitation of something I had heard from somebody who really knew what he was talking about. But I was not the cause of his smile; it was the fortunes of contemporary art. “Interesting,” he said. “I read the other day—it was in the FT , I think—there was a report about how one of these chaps, a big name in art today, didn’t sell when they put a whole stash of his work up for auction. Nobody wanted it. Because it was rubbish.”
    He waited for me to react. Presumably he thought that I approved of contemporary installation art.
    “I don’t like that sort of thing myself,” I said.
    He stared at me. “Koons and that crew?”
    “I don’t particularly like Koons’ work. I saw something of his that looked like an air conditioner.”
    He laughed; he was visibly relaxing. “Probably was. Five million dollars?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Created value,” he said. “The collectors keep the prices up. The stuff has only scrap value, but they can’t let people think that.”
    “Dutch tulips.” I had just read about that.
    He looked at me with heightened interest. “The best example there ever was. Although, frankly, I’m surprised the Dutch behaved that way. They were a sensible bunch—solid traders—and then they suddenly went wild over tulip bulbs.”
    He turned to Hermione. “Mrs. Thing has made dinner for us,” he said.
    She explained. “Mrs. Thing has got a name, Andrew. Mrs. Dallas. Daddy calls her Mrs. Thing.”
    He shrugged. “She doesn’t mind. I wouldn’t call her Mrs. Thing if she minded.”
    “She’s a really good cook,” Hermione continued.
    Peter moved towards a drinks trolley against the wall behind him. “Something to drink?” he asked. “Mrs. Thing wants us to eat in fifteen minutes or her soufflé willcollapse. She always threatens us with collapsed soufflés, but never makes them. It’s a peculiarity of hers.”
    He mixed us drinks and then, while we drank them, he quizzed me. At first the questions were of the sort that might be asked in any friendly conversation, but then they developed an edge. Did I think that my school education had prepared me adequately for university? Did I really think that university degrees needed to be as long as they were, or could they be compressed into two years, or even one? Were my professors there simply because they couldn’t do anything else?
    I could have been more forceful in their defence, and would have been—in different circumstances. “They’re good at their job,” I said quietly.
    He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe. But it all sounds a bit easy to me. What time do they start in the morning? When do they go home in the evening?”
    “I think they’re there all day.”
    He lifted his glass to his lips. “And you? Do you work a full day?”
    Hermione shot him a glance, but he ignored it.
    Now he answered his own question. “I’m sure you work very hard.” He paused. “Art history’s certainly interesting. You want to work in an auction house, I take it?”
    I told him that I had not made up my mind yet.
    “You