‘Well, whoever they’re from I don’t want them,’ I said, grabbing them from the vase, marching them to the front door and flinging them out into the darkness.
‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much,’ said Nick inscrutably. He poured a glass of wine, pushed it across the coffee table toward me and turned up the volume on the news.
I woke early. Light was streaming through the blind and a single bird was chirruping loudly at intervals of exactly seven seconds. Once I had started to count them, I couldn’t stop. I crept out of bed, glancing over my shoulder to make sure I hadn’t disturbed Nick. He gave a great shuddering sigh before subsiding into sleep again. I pulled a sweatshirt on over my pyjamas and went downstairs.
The porch light was still on. Ethan’s boots, usually to be found lying haphazardly near the doormat, were conspicuous by their absence. The ‘missing’ jean jacket was nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t come home from the pub. My mind set off on its usual rat-run of worry. I imagined him lying in a field comatose from drugs; disfigured in a car wreck, sitting in Casualty waiting for a pint glass to be removed from his cranium. And then I remembered the ‘gagging for it’ text I had seen on the train, and the thought occurred that it might not, after all, have been addressed to the Australian girl, but to someone local. I tried to feel relieved.
I hadn’t gone far down the garden when I found the bouquet of flowers lying on the grass where I had thrown it last night, its cellophane wrapping spangled with dew. I was heading down the path to put it in the dustbin when my conscience pricked me. It seemed such a waste. The velvety cream petals of the lilies were still pristine, the rosebuds tightly furled. The flowers didn’t know or care who sent them and in the optimistic morning light they seemed to have lost their menace. There must be someone who would appreciate them, surely? I considered for a moment, then, peeling the envelope off the cellophane, I threw that alone in the bin and set off down the lane for Prospect Cottage.
I hesitated at the gate. Day had not yet penetrated the overgrown garden. Shrubs huddled like boulders in the crepuscular light and a faint breeze stirred the Leylandii. Steeling myself, I hurried up the crazy-paving path, pushed open the porch door and leaned my bouquet against an étagère crammed with ugly old-fashioned houseplants. A whiff of soil and rot and PVC caught in my throat. The outer door had swung to behind me and hearing a sound from inside the house, I scrambled to make good my escape, barging against the étagère in my haste and knocking a spider plant in a flimsy plastic pot upside down onto the floor. I panicked, knowing I should stop, clear up the mess, behave like a grown-up, but the dread of being caught in the act by Gordon was too much for me. I kicked the plant out of sight with my foot and yanked the door hard, but it juddered on its hinges and bounced back open, and I found myself running, heart pounding, down the path, as guilty and exhilarated and terrified as when I’d played Knock Down Ginger as a child.
Back on the lane I collected myself and tried to adopt the demeanour of a middle-aged woman returning from a well-meaning errand, but I felt like a criminal. Already the re-gifting of the bouquet seemed a terrible idea – cowardly, mean-spirited and strange. I should not be sneaking round at the crack of dawn, but calling at a decent hour, ideally bearing home-made scones, having brushed up my bedside manner. I would do better later, I promised myself, but for now the studio beckoned.
I had almost reached our house when the Gaineses’ two golden Labradors came bounding round the bend. I put a spurt on, reluctant to be buttonholed by whichever of their owners was on dog-walking duty, but my haste only seemed to excite the dogs and soon one was sniffing my hand while the other cocked its leg on our gatepost. I was manoeuvring my way between their furry haunches when I heard Douglas’s voice behind me.
‘Not the ideal calling card,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’
Like me, he was still in his pyjamas, though his were tucked into wellingtons and topped with a Barbour jacket. Unlike me he seemed to feel no compunction.
‘Bad girl, Frieda!’ he admonished the dog affectionately. ‘Lucky it wasn’t number twos. Although I’m equipped for that,’ he said cheerfully, pulling a small plastic bag out of his pocket and waving it at me.
He must have noticed my moue of distaste.
‘Ah yes, TMI, as the girls say. Apologies.’
I kept my hand on the gate, determined to at least convey the impression of forward motion.
‘By the way, Karen, as long as we’re chatting…’
‘Yes?’
‘… Imogen’d have my guts for garters if I didn’t mention the Auction of Promises.’
‘In the diary,’ I said, cheerfully. ‘We’ll be there.’ Both dogs had by now pushed past me and were sniffing around our front garden.
‘Ah yes, very good,’ Douglas said, ‘but I’m also on the scrounge for lots.’
‘Lots of what?’
‘Oh, haha. Yes, very funny. Lots. To auction. It’s in aid of two very good causes, the chur—’
‘Oh yes, I know, Imogen told me.’
I cast a despairing glance over my shoulder, wondering, in light of Douglas’s supremely relaxed attitude, if I would ever make good my escape.
‘Splendid. So… I just wondered, with your being a local craftswoman and so forth…’
‘Oh, you want a pot? Ah, that’s not… I’m not really…’
‘Now, now, no need to be modest. Doesn’t have to be a Ming vase,’ he said. ‘Can be as humble as an eggcup. You’d be surprised what people’ll bid for a one-off. Year before last I paid a silly amount of cash for a personalised bedside lamp for Honour’s birthday. Little toadstool house with a resident pixie. Cost me a small fortune, because of course once Grace caught sight of it, I had to commission another for her. Local woman – you might know her actually. Thriving little business…’
I looked up at him, booming away at top volume, pyjamas rippling around his thighs in the breeze and I couldn’t help smiling.
‘… And the beauty of it is, you can fit it in as and when. It’s a promise, but it’s up to you how long you take to make good on it. People are very patient, very trusting, because of course it’s not really about the lots at all, it’s about the cause.’
‘Well, I suppose if the timescale’s fairly generous…’ I conceded, thinking that at this rate I would waste more time talking to him than it might take to throw a pot for his wretched auction.
‘Marvellous!’ he said, flashing me a grateful smile. ‘I’ll pop you on the list. Frieda! Diego! Leave poor Karen alone, she doesn’t want your piss all over her lavender.’
I watched him trudge off down the lane with the dogs and wondered whether life was as uncomplicated for him as it seemed. Plenty of money, a smart and pretty wife, a Grade Two-listed home and a sense of entitlement the size of the county. Perhaps he’d have liked a son and heir; then again, he was probably an equal opportunities Nob. His daughters would no doubt end up doing Masters degrees in earth science or running environmentally friendly energy companies and good luck to them. But did he wake in the early hours of the morning tormented with existential fears? Did congenital defects lurk in the gene pool that made him dread grandparenthood? Did he secretly feel unworthy of the luminous Imogen, and track her movements on his mobile phone? I was projecting now, my psych would have said, and she’d have been right. That was what therapy was for – to give you the insight to recognize your triggers – to stand at one remove and say to yourself, ‘Ah yes!’ The unhealthy impulse to put a tracking device on one’s partner, whilst perhaps occasioned by a breach of trust, might actually stem from deep-rooted insecurities going all the way back to childhood…
‘So, you’re a ceramicist?’ my psych had asked.
‘A potter,’ I’d replied, sulkily.
She’d uncrossed her legs, clicked the end of her biro and written something down.
‘But clay is your medium. You feel comfortable around it?’
I shrugged and she’d produced from a drawer a little wooden boar
d, a slab of pale hobby clay and a few wooden tools – no serrated edges, I noticed.
‘Suppose I were to say,’ she said, blinking at me earnestly from behind her stylish tortoiseshell spectacles, ‘show me, in clay, why you think you’re here…’
I sat for a moment, arms folded, not sure if she was joking.
Then, glancing up at her carefully managed expression – curiosity disguised as professional detachment – I thought I might amuse myself. I took half the clay and made it into an oval, then rolled it between my palms until it became first a fat sausage, then a long thin snake, its head and tail whipping back and forth in time with my hand movements. She sat up attentively and reached for her notepad, ready, no doubt, to jot down the words ‘phallic’ and ‘repressed memory?’.
I smiled to myself, took a smaller piece of clay, fashioned it into a flat base and coiled the clay snake upwards around its edge until I’d made a rudimentary vessel.
She looked at me for a long moment.
‘And what does that mean to you?’
‘It’s a pot,’ I said, innocently.
I thought I’d won, but it seemed this answer was as useful to her as any other. She wrote a lot of things down, at any rate. I got tired of second-guessing her in the end.
It turned out to have been a good instinct of hers, the clay. The miniature board and cheap, air-dryable modelling material returned me to the mind-set of a nursery child – a free and unselfconscious state. I ended up quite enjoying myself. I spent one whole session dividing the ball of clay into a collection of smaller balls, each of which I halved and re-rolled until by the end of the session, I had a couple of hundred tiny balls, about the size of the sugar pearls used to decorate cakes. She wrote a lot of stuff down about that. Another time I amused myself making a doll-sized rocking cradle, about as big as my thumb and she asked me where the baby was.
I shrugged.
‘Are you the baby? Is that why it’s missing?’
I pulled a sceptical face.
She checked her notes.
‘You were an only child, weren’t you?’
I nodded, warily.
‘So no siblings?’ she said, as if I might have inadvertently forgotten one.
The silence stretched on.
‘Was there an absent baby in your family?’ she said gently. ‘A twin that didn’t survive? A stillbirth?’
When I spoke, it was with a break in my voice that I hadn’t anticipated.
‘My dad had a kid with someone else.’
Scribble, scribble, scribble.
‘A brother or a sister?’
‘Sister.’
Scribble.
‘And when did you find this out?’
I shook my head.
‘You don’t know? Or it’s painful to remember?’
‘I must have been ten or so.’
‘And did you meet her… this half-sister?’
‘One time, by accident in the playground. My dad said she was my cousin but I heard her call him Daddy.’
She stopped, pen poised and looked into my face, clicking the pen on and off, on and off.
Douglas had disappeared from view now. Only one of the dogs, Diego or Frida, I wasn’t sure which, could still be seen, sniffing in the nettles by the side of the road, as though it had caught the scent of a fox.
15
As I rolled back the studio door, I told myself the nervous flutter in my stomach was one of anticipation for the potting I planned to do, rather than one of dread that some new voodoo tribute might await me. The hapless bird had, after all, been trapped and slow-cooked thanks to my oversight, not to some phantom stalker’s malevolence. I had worked hard to overlay my recollection of the event with Nick’s more plausible one, and had, for the most part succeeded, except when a sudden vivid flashback brought to mind the gape of the bird’s hollow eye socket or the rake of its inch-long talon against my skin. Then I would find my pulse racing all over again.
The first thing I did – to freshen things up rather than to release any bad bird juju – was to open all the windows, although it was disconcerting when a sprightly breeze sprang up, rattling the polythene around my clay and riffling the pages of my notebook until it skittered off the workbench onto the floor.
I’d expected my precious pots to be in pieces when I opened the kiln, but I hadn’t bargained for the hundreds of splintered shards I discovered, nor for the layer of clay dust that their shattering had left on its every plane and crevice. I could have cried, especially as it could only have been my mistake; it must have been. What random stalker would know how to adjust the temperature and switch off the override? They wouldn’t. And even though I’d been working this same kiln for over a decade, could have programmed it in my sleep, I couldn’t deny that my concentration lately had been on the patchy side.
It felt cathartic, sweeping the detritus out of the kiln, chipping away at the hardened splashes of glaze, poking into every hard-to-reach corner with my cloth. It reminded me of spring-cleaning Trenchard Street when the boys were young. I’d known I couldn’t compete with Nick’s ex in looks and charisma, so I’d put myself at his service instead – and not just in the bedroom. Naïve of me really to think that keeping on top of the housework would be any substitute for whatever dirty tricks she’d had in her repertoire, but for a while I’d given it a go – letting home-made cassoulet catch on the hob while I vac-ed round and plumped up cushions and lit scented candles in time for his homecoming.
I suppose if I’d known then that he hadn’t really chosen me – that when he’d left his wife in my seventh month of pregnancy, he hadn’t jumped, but had been pushed – I might not have bothered. But I was still pursuing the dream at that point. Nick might not any longer have the swanky house in Fulham or the glitzy social calendar but he had the love nest in Hackney, and it was my job to keep it cosy and beautiful and open for business. In Nick’s version he had woken up one morning to the blinding revelation that I was his one true love and he was destined to be with me. He would always stand by his precious firstborn Gabe, would see right by both his children if he had to work two jobs to do it, but he couldn’t live a lie any longer and he was damned if he’d sacrifice his own happiness to a loveless sham of a marriage. Had I really believed him or had I just wanted to?
Well, if nothing else, I had honed my skills as a cleaner, and whereas with domestic cleaning, you had nothing to show for it as it all began again the next day, here I was cleaning to a purpose. I needed a clean kiln in which to fire my pots; not just a handful or even a series, but battalions – pots enough to face down the scorn of a hundred critics. Pots enough to march forward into posterity. Pots enough to cease being pots and become topography.
I don’t know how much time had passed before I had three new pieces hardening off on the shelf, all I knew was that I was enjoying myself. The wind had died down, the sun was creeping up over the treetops and if I didn’t get a move on, the heat of the work surface would cook the next batch of clay before I could get it to the wheel. I was pounding it back to a throwing consistency, wiping the sweat off my temples with the inside of my elbow, when a figure appeared in the doorway.
It occurred to me, fleetingly, that I shouldn’t have left my door open to all-comers in light of recent events, but by the time I had turned to acknowledge him, he was already in the room, standing foursquare between me and my only route of escape. When I saw that it was only Luca I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I remembered the flowers.
‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ he joined his palms in a prayer of supplication, ‘I wouldn’t have disturb you but your husband say I’m OK.’
‘Then I’m sure you must be.’
He blinked at me perplexedly. I suppose I must have looked a sight – flushed with exertion and wild-eyed, still in my pyjamas and up to my elbows in slip. He picked up my notebook off the floor.
‘Oh yes, thank you…’ I said, holding my hand out.
‘Always so interesting to see the artist�
�s process…’ He returned it to me reluctantly.
‘Right…’
‘Which is why I’m here, in fact.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Oh, not to intrude in that way. I wouldn’t dream to be so impertinent… no. To ask whether you might be prepared to participate…?’
‘Participate?’ I said, frowning a little impatiently. First Douglas with his eggcups and now this.
I saw the consternation on his face and felt a pang of guilt.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m just a bit busy… go on. Participate in what?’
‘So, I don’t know if you are aware that every year Melissa and I organize an art trail for the commune…’
‘The commune?’
‘The area. The locale.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, you mentioned it the other night, but I think I said then…’
‘It’s very popular and it brings many visitors to the area. We produce a little catalogue with photographs of our artists’ work and their biographies, and their studio location on a map and…’
‘The thing is, Luca,’ I said, the moment I could get a word in, ‘it’s too soon for me. This is literally only the second time I’ve managed to get in the studio and as you can see…’
I flung my arm in the direction of the almost empty shelves and a large gobbet of slip flew off my wet fingers and landed on Luca’s navy polka dot scarf. I gasped in dismay and had taken a step towards him to examine the stain before I realized this might not be the brightest of moves, in view of his possible crush on me. He glanced down, and then at me, and took both my hands in his.
‘Can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?’ came a voice from the doorway.
I stepped back from Luca in guilty haste and Luca turned to Nick, with the round eyes of a toddler caught raiding the biscuit tin.
‘I just got slip on Luca’s scarf,’ I said.
‘I’m sure Luca will forgive you,’ said Nick drily. I blushed and Luca withdrew to a safe distance and somehow we all danced around each other in a very awkward, very civilised way until Luca managed to invent a place he urgently needed to be and left, giving Nick an ill-judged pat on the shoulder and me a mortified glance on his way out.
The Move Page 13