‘Lucky I didn’t leave it any longer…’ said Nick when we were alone.
‘Don’t be daft,’ I said lightly, ‘he was just being nice.’
‘Yeah, looked like he was gearing up to be a whole lot nicer…’
I tilted my head admonishingly, but couldn’t prevent my cheeks from reddening.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘so much for getting some work done.’
‘There’s your “admirer”, anyway…’
‘You think…?’
‘Oh, sure. He’s got it bad. You can see it in his puppy dog eyes.’
‘Nick!’
I eyed him warily as he strolled around the room, thwacking the supporting beam with his palm, stroking the work surface, casting a critical and ultimately approving eye over the quality of the workmanship he had commissioned. He walked over to the kiln and stood in front of it, arms folded.
‘My second batch of pots got wrecked,’ I told him ruefully.
He pulled me close and stroked my hair and for a moment, I surrendered, breathing the scent of him through his T-shirt. I wanted him then, and he wanted me, I could tell, and even though I suspected his amorousness was piqued more by Luca’s interest in me than my own intrinsic charms, when he nuzzled my neck I was tempted to succumb. We hadn’t yet ‘christened’ the studio. But then I remembered my clay – the striations and splits that would, if I didn’t get some moisture on them fast, soon render the whole batch unworkable and with a great effort of will, I took him by the wrists and with a chaste kiss to his cheek, gently eased myself out of his embrace.
‘Sorry but I really ought to…’
I gestured towards the bench and he looked surprised and not a little put out.
‘Oh, OK then,’ he said, a little brusquely, ‘I’ll let you get on.’
I made three more good pots that morning. I was beginning to get a feel for it so that I knew instinctively how to make each one the same, but different. Sensing the thickness of the clay, the moment to flare it out and the moment to draw it back in again. The finishing too had become a sort of ritual – the growing on of the neck, the slicing of the rim with the clay wire and the sponging of the rim into a lip. The smoothing of the surface, so that no crack or bump or infinitesimal graininess remained.
Moving the latest pot across to the shelves to join its companions, I saw that my idea was good. In just those nine pots I could see continuity but also variation. At a glance they looked more or less identical, but closer inspection revealed subtle differences, which, once extrapolated over sixty pots, let alone the hundred or more I planned to throw, might very well, depending how I arranged them, replicate the undulations of a landscape. I went over to the window and stood on tiptoe, trying to catch a glimpse of the distant hills, for comparison. But as elevated as my studio was and as lovely the view, it was too small a slice of valley for my purposes. I needed panorama. I needed to get up high.
‘Anyone fancy a walk?’ I breezed into the kitchen, buzzing with energy, barely registering that Ethan was back, or that he and Nick were sitting companionably at the kitchen table munching bacon sandwiches.
‘A walk?’ Nick gave a puzzled laugh. ‘I thought you were working, Kaz. I’m not being funny, but don’t you think you ought to stay focused? We can always go for a stroll this evening.’
‘This is work,’ I said. ‘And I don’t mean a stroll. I mean a climb.’
I waved my phone at him.
‘Can I print photos from this on your printer?’
Nick shook his head as if befuddled.
‘Yes. I think so, but what’s that got to do with…?’
‘I’m going to take some reference shots. I’ll print them out and stick them up on the wall – make a sort of montage. So I can see the bigger picture, literally, while I’m throwing the pots.’
‘Sounds great,’ said Nick doubtfully. ‘But I can’t come with you. I’m pitching for a job at half past three.’
‘How about you, Ethan?’ I said. ‘Walk off your hangover, maybe?’
Ethan wrinkled his nose apologetically.
‘Did your jacket turn up by the way?’ I added.
‘My jacket…?’ He looked momentarily nonplussed.
‘You thought you’d left your denim…’
‘Oh, right, yeah, no. No one had handed it in.’
He didn’t meet my eye.
‘Right, well, I’ll just grab a bit of toast and I’ll be off,’ I said.
‘What about breakfast?’ Nick seemed quite crestfallen. ‘I was just going to bring you a bacon sarnie…’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, helping myself off his plate, ‘I’ll have yours!’
I took a cheeky bite, flicking a stray bit of ketchup into my mouth with my little finger.
‘I’m not sure you should be going on your own,’ Nick fretted, ‘after what happened last time…’
‘What happened last time was you freaked out for no good reason,’ I pointed out, through a mouthful of bacon, relieved that he had not been there to witness my spectacular meltdown on top of the hill.
‘I’ll be fine, Nick. I’ll stick to the path, I’ll be less than an hour; I’ll take my phone.’
‘You won’t get a signal.’
‘OK, OK,’ I said, laughing, ‘well if you’re that keen for me to be chaperoned…’ I raised my eyebrows and Nick looked apprehensive, ‘… I’ll call for Cath. She knows the lie of the land.’
Touché, I thought to myself.
16
I hurried down the lane with a spring in my step, but slowed as I passed Prospect Cottage, remembering my bungled flower delivery earlier that morning. Glancing up towards the bedroom window, I thought I saw the top of my bouquet, just visible between the half-drawn curtains. I felt a flush of relief – that my second-hand tribute had at least been taken in; that Gordon had bothered to put the flowers in a vase – but I felt foolish, too, for having fled so fearfully. I really did need to grow up, I told myself, resolving to knock at the door on my way back and ask after the patient. Maybe Gordon would invite me in and I could satisfy myself that he was no Bluebeard; just an old curmudgeon who’d fallen out with his daughter. Such things happened, I reminded myself. Families were complicated – of that I was well aware – and thinking of the uneasy détente between Nick and Ethan, it was probably best not to rush to judgement – there but for the grace of God… I took a deep breath and strode on. Here was progress. Here was perspective. My psych would be proud of me. The clouds were beginning to part…
I galloped two at a time up the steps to Cath’s place and rapped smartly on the door. Despite its being after one, the house still seemed deep in slumber. Cath’s ginger tom, winding itself round my legs in expectation of food, seemed more confident of a response than I was. I had knocked and hallooed a few times and was on the point of giving up when a startled-looking face finally appeared at the downstairs window. She looked a wreck, her spiky white hair whorled into crop circles; her eyes like two gashes in a side of ham. It was obvious she had spent the night boozing or crying or both. I smiled, gestured, shrugged – unsure quite what message I was trying to convey, but when her face disappeared I took it for dismissal and had got halfway down the steps again before I heard the door open and her voice call hoarsely, ‘You’ll not bugger off now you’ve woke me!’
‘I was just heading off for a walk and I wondered if you wanted to…?’
She ordered me inside with a jerk of her head.
The place smelled like a shebeen. Sagging cushions and a rumpled blanket suggested she had spent the night on the sofa. Next to it on the coffee table stood an empty wine bottle, a large cut-glass ashtray brimming with fag ends and a wallet of colour photographs, a number of which were scattered across the floor. Making to follow her to the kitchen, I almost stepped on one and, picking it up, glimpsed a younger, slimmer, rather more handsome Cath standing with her arm around a smiley young woman in a red beanie, whose face, it took me a moment to realize, owed its indistinct babyishness
to an absence of eyebrows and lashes. Even without those features Cath’s companion was lovely; dark eyes full of humour, chin tilted defiantly as if daring the camera to pity her. Cath’s demeanour, too, was staunchly cheerful; poignantly so, given what must have lain ahead for both of them. If love were enough to face down death, you would have given them good odds, seeing this photograph; but knowing that it had not been enough, knowing even a little of what followed, made my witnessing it feel all the more intrusive. I stuffed it guiltily back into the wallet and followed Cath through to the kitchen.
I found her scattering coffee grounds over the work surface as she attempted, with trembling hands and through a tobacco haze, to spoon it into the cafetière. The kitchen was in an even worse state of disarray than the living room had been. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes, empty bottles crowded the base of an erupting flip-top bin and a dish of rancid cat food was attracting a host of flies.
‘You know we don’t have to do this,’ I said, with a doubtful smile. ‘You can go back to bed and I’ll call in on my way ba—’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she interrupted fiercely, ‘you’ll have a coffee with me and then we’re going on that walk, if it bloody well kills me.’
At Cath’s suggestion, we took the westerly route up to the hill to avoid the dog-walkers whose cars tended to clog up the lane at weekends. Turning left at the track that ran beside the Gaineses’ walled garden, we negotiated a dilapidated stile and then began an arduous twenty-minute climb through the woods. For a while the only noises were our puffing and panting, the crunch of our feet over last year’s hazel shells and an occasional bout of phlegmy coughing from Cath. Despite the imminence of autumn, the canopy was still dense. Now and then, a shaft of light filtered through, highlighting an eruption of gorgeous purple fungus or a curiously shaped tree stump, and I remarked on them just to make conversation. As the woods became denser, however, such picturesque distractions were fewer, and the narrowing path and subfusc light seemed to confer an intimacy for which neither of us was quite prepared; our silence, broken only by the occasional snap of a twig underfoot, began to weigh heavy. Several times I opened my mouth to speak and then thought better of it.
‘She died four years ago yesterday,’ Cath said at last.
‘I’m so sorry.’
We trudged on for a bit.
‘I don’t suppose you want…? If it helps, you could tell me about her…’
So she did. They’d met on a walking holiday in Andalucía, to which Cath had forced herself to sign up after the break-up of a long-standing and destructive relationship.
‘It was either that or sit in my wee flat in London and drink myself to death,’ she said. I raised a meaningful eyebrow and she gave me a wry smile and continued. She’d been drawn to Annie straight away, she told me – her sunny disposition, her inventively foul mouth – but she had not looked on her ‘like that’, both because Cath was too bruised from her recent heartbreak and because Annie was coupled up. However, long-story-short, by the end of the holiday, the cracks in Annie’s relationship were beginning to show, Cath was utterly smitten and although not much more went on in Spain than meaningful looks, within a few months of returning, Annie’s ex was, well, Annie’s ex and she and Cath had moved in together.
‘When you know, you know,’ she said and I could only agree.
We walked on for a while in silence, our footfall prompting urgent rustlings in the undergrowth as various unseen creatures dived for cover.
‘So you knew, did you, with Nick…?’ Cath said.
I nodded ruefully.
‘It was like an illness,’ I said, ‘I didn’t recognize myself.’
I told her how we’d met, the cheesy chat-up, the cocktail, the kiss.
‘He rang every alarm bell going,’ I remembered with a grin.
‘And you ran towards the burning building,’ smiled Cath.
‘Yup.’
‘Worth it though…?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, emphatically, ‘we had Ethan for one thing…’
‘Of course, of course,’ Cath acknowledged, ‘and a lovely young man he seems too.’
Silence fell again, except for the crunch of our boots on the forest floor.
When we started speaking again, it was both of us at once.
‘It must have been awful for…’
‘Is he right for you, do you…?’
Nervous laughter.
‘Nick? Right for me?’ I pursed my lips and considered. ‘I don’t know that I ever really looked at it like that. I was too busy asking myself if I was right for him.’
Cath gave me a puzzled look.
‘Oh, come on. You only have to look at us,’ I chastised her. ‘Anyone can see I’m punching above my weight with Nick; when we first met, even more so. God, he was handsome. Still is, of course. But then! I mean, phwoar!’
‘So it’s physical?’ Cath said and I had to smile at her directness.
‘Not just physical, no,’ I replied. ‘I suppose…’
It made me squirm a little, trying to identify what it was.
‘It’s like… I don’t know… like, there’s a hole in me that only he can fill… oh God, that sounds rude…’ Cath gave a little frown of frustration. I was stalling and she knew it.
‘It’s like… if I’m with him, then I must be OK. He’s got all the credentials. You know, he’s smart and funny, he always knows what to do and what to say. And I never do. He’s a good dad…’
My voice trailed off as I wondered to myself if this last claim were true. He had certainly been a good dad to Gabe, but judged on the last few months, his relationship with Ethan had not, I supposed, been an unmitigated success; then again, nor had his relationship with me.
‘Well, I’m happy you’re happy…’ Cath nodded slowly and deliberately, ‘… except…’
‘What?’
She gave me a searching look.
‘You don’t seem that happy.’
I felt my face crumple.
‘Sorry,’ she said, before I could speak, ‘sorry… I shouldn’t have said that. Blame it on the skinful I had last night. Blame it on Annie.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, trying to mask my distress with briskness, ‘you’re right. I’m not. Wasn’t anyway. We’ve had our troubles, Nick and I. He let me down… had an affair. Such a cliché.’
She raised her eyebrows inquisitively and I was about to go further when it occurred to me that this would be disloyal. ‘But he paid the price. Still is, really…’
‘How so?’
‘Oh well, all this…’ I waved my hand vaguely towards the trees, ‘… isn’t Nick. He’s no country bumpkin, but I think he thought it’d be good for me – the peace and quiet and the space and so forth. So he found us the cottage and made it all lovely and built me my studio, which I absolutely adore and he’s busting a gut to make me happy and you know, it does, it does make me happy, but it’s early days and I still have my moments…’
‘And what moments are those?’ Cath said gently. Suddenly I couldn’t speak.
I stopped and bit my lip. Tears filmed my eyes.
‘I have… gaps,’ I said, ‘absences. Times when I just zone out, or get muddled. You know, like the other night at Min and Ray’s…?’
‘Call that zoning out?’ Cath shook her head humorously. ‘You’re talking to the woman who just lost two days of her life to a bottle of Scotch!’
I smiled and looked a bit sheepish.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to trivialize what you went through… God, Annie used to hate me doing that. Why don’t you tell me? Tell me how it started. Tell me all about it.’
I shrugged, then began, haltingly at first.
‘I don’t know. I can barely remember the first time now. It was so… not me. But it was prompted by the…’ I tailed off, not wanting to sound histrionic, ‘… well, the trauma, I suppose you’d have to call it. When I found out Nick had been seeing… When things came to a head between
us, it was all very sudden… I didn’t handle it well. I had a meltdown – went wild, got very destructive and then, well, it was kind of a blank after that…’
Cath nodded ruefully. I had never really been this honest with myself before, let alone with anyone else. Not even with the psych. I had felt too ashamed.
‘I suppose…’ I added haltingly, wondering if it were true even as I said it, ‘I suppose maybe I knew deep down that something would go wrong between us. The next thing I was in hospital, feeling as though I’d lost everything. They wouldn’t let Nick visit at first…’
Again, the beady look from Cath.
‘… Just because, you know, they needed to stabilize me, plus someone had to be at home for Ethan… poor kid didn’t know what was going on.’
Cath raised a sceptical eyebrow.
‘And of course Nick didn’t want to bring him until I was more recognizably his mother, because if he’d seen me how I was at first, well… it wasn’t good. But then because nobody came, I sort of got the wrong end of the stick and thought I was being punished and I just kind of checked out. Just sat and rocked and didn’t eat anything. And I didn’t even know I was doing it. That’s what I mean by blanking out. I mean… pathetic. So then they put me on these horse tranquilizers – you know, really heavy-duty antidepressants, and it was like being at the bottom of a fish tank. The days just blurred together and the food tasted of nothing and I was in la-la land. It was quite nice in a way because nothing felt real or connected, but I knew, I think, a little bit of me knew deep down that I had to be careful or I might not come back, which I didn’t care about for my sake, but I was worried about…
‘… Ethan,’ Cath murmured, ‘of course. Of course you were, hen.’
She bit her lip, as if such territory might not be unfamiliar to her and I felt a pang of shame that on this most painful of anniversaries, I was hogging the limelight.
The Move Page 14