The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  Stella, as it turned out, knew both women – though not through her parents. An art college connection and another connection, leading from this pair of women to Stella: and now they greeted her warmly. ‘Ginny, darling,’ said the leggy, blonde woman, the eclipsed woman, ‘come and sit right beside me.’ She tapped the seat, as though Stella were a hound, to be brought to heel. ‘I want to hear all your news.’

  ‘No, no,’ Etienne said. ‘Stella’s seat is here,’ and he gestured at the empty space beside him. ‘Come and sit beside me, Stella.’ He was the host, after all. He could crack the whip when he really wanted a thing.

  ‘Goodness,’ Stella said, and she shrugged her shoulders and held aloft the palms of her hands in a theatrical gesture that John knew now, and loved, ‘how one is torn!’ But she settled herself beside Etienne, as instructed. Already she seemed to be having a good time, her terrors of boredom and a surfeit of bores and prisses and Uranians forgotten.

  John himself was having a good time, although his version of a good time differed from that of Stella. He was having a good time by wandering the elegant room and taking in the material on the walls. The paint itself was – well, it was clearly devastatingly expensive, was the first thing to be noticed and appreciated. You couldn’t get that chalky finish from any old paint. The red of the walls was rich and pure, and the paint added a depth that was marvellous, that set the blood racing a little faster in his veins. Some day, he thought, some day, I’ll have walls like this. Etienne knew his stuff.

  And what a collection hung on these red walls. He could see clustered there some of the most cutting-edge names in London – and he was not beyond feeling enormous satisfaction at seeing Tissue 1, and Tissue 2, and Tissue 3 hanging in pride of place. He tried, and succeeded, in taking a mental step back from the wall, in looking at his paintings with something approaching dispassion. But the force of these pieces was palpable: their naked power, the roar of the empty spaces that filled each canvas, the layers of white and grey paint that rose up from the surface in a mound of bones, whirling around the empty space. The subtle differences that marked each piece, the terror that each inspired – surely – when placed together.

  He remembered his colours, leaping like jewels from the linen cloth in his studio.

  He looked across the room to where Stella sat with Etienne. With her latest Uranian chum. She gesticulated largely, delivered the punchline, laughed. Etienne laughed with her, already in thrall. Longing, John assumed, for Stella to lash him across his bare buttocks until he screamed. John blinked. Would she not look across, would she not glance over to see what he was seeing, to take in the triptych in what now seemed its natural, its inevitable home, against these deep and dusty red walls?

  She would not. Already she had begun another story.

  He turned again to the wall.

  The two women rejected by Stella now sidled along the wall to meet him. ‘She’s a darling, Ginny, isn’t she?’ said the younger one, the most rejected one. ‘A treasure,’ she added.

  ‘She is,’ John said, and he noticed, as he always noticed, how a certain kind of person blinked and almost flinched at the sound of his accent assaulting their highly bred ears. She is: was all it took. She is: scored through with something alien and uncouth. Of course the flinch was wholly involuntary, and it was caught just a fragment of a second too late. Manners mattered in these circles: neither of these two would be rude just for the sake of it. But there it was, almost imperceptible, perfectly perceptible. ‘Although to me, she’s Stella.’

  ‘Stella,’ the younger woman exclaimed, and across the room Stella glanced and smiled. ‘Of course, she’s Stella now.’ She didn’t say it unpleasantly, or bitchily, or with any tincture of sourness. She sounded just a little nonplussed. ‘Why Stella, I wonder?’

  ‘She just liked the name, I suppose,’ he said lightly, and his Deptford vowels crashed from his mouth and onto the polished floorboards.

  22

  ‘I suppose she did,’ the blonde woman said. ‘Stella: a star. Well, it is a nice name.’

  ‘It is, rather,’ agreed her companion, gamely.

  Now, he was not having an interesting time. Sometimes he did, at these events (though this was a cut above; this was the poshest house he had ever been in; he knew that Etienne worked at ITV, and there must be money in that, but surely there must be – think of the house – family money there, too; and granted, seeing his own paintings hanging on the expensively dusty walls certainly was a help), sometimes he found himself laughing his head off, against his better judgement; sometimes, he told stories of Old Deptford, capitalised, which made them all listen and exclaim, though none of them had ever been in Deptford in their lives, needless to say, and never would go there, not if you paid them. Deptford equalled, yes, Bedlam: that was clear, and he exploited the fact. They adored the authenticity of his stories: the smells and the sounds and the sights, the lazy slap of the Thames on its shingle and mud banks, the market traders and the strange churches. They delighted in hearing about all that: it bolstered their sense of superiority, of having been blessed in the lottery of life. But it was important that he didn’t go on about it all too much – which was fine; he had good judgement on that score.

  Tonight, though, was different. Etienne seemed quite relaxed: almost too relaxed, almost as if he didn’t care all that much if people were having a good time or not; he was laughing a lot himself and drinking a little too steadily (and still no sign of dinner), but he wasn’t tending to the conversation as a good host should; John watched him over the rim of his wine glass. And the other men seemed mere functionaries, though the television personality had a thing or two to say, mainly about himself. And the women were no better, no more interesting. A woman leading the Conservative Party, they said: wasn’t it amazing? Though, that voice of hers: wasn’t it awful? She’d need to do something about her voice, or she could forget about winning a general election. It was all just a little boring: but it wasn’t, of course, the boredom that was bothering him. Stella was too alive, too brightly lit, too vibrant.

  Dinner, at last: a bright green soup. The blonde woman seated beside him, with Stella on the other side of the table. Heavy silver cutlery, scrupulously polished, and heavy, green-tinted glassware from Czechoslovakia, complete with air bubbles caught and held in the element. A tablecloth in a shade of oatmeal, linen – ‘Irish linen,’ the blonde woman sighed, and passed her hand over the cloth, ‘lovely’ – and candles in tall antique French silver holders.

  Yes, he would like, some future day, for such things to be his, too.

  Later, as promised, beef-and-mango casserole, held in a silver tureen, and complete with a jaunty silver serving spoon. Etienne dispensed the casserole, Stella passed the potatoes, the candles shone in their silver holders. The blonde woman looked at the tureen and pursed her lips.

  ‘Didn’t we have this last time too, dearest?’ – and Etienne blushed a little.

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. I remember I liked it a lot: but you know what some people do, they keep their menus, you know, in a menu book, and cross-reference them, so they don’t make these mistakes. You should try that yourself, dearest.’

  ‘Now, everyone,’ Stella said and she commanded the table, surveyed the room, ‘I think we should all look at Etienne for a moment – just a moment, just long enough to allow him to reflect on this faux pas. Come on now: reflect – beginning,’ and she glanced at her slender wristwatch, ‘now.’

  Etienne laughed and his flush faded. They all laughed, and the blonde woman sat back in her chair.

  ‘It’s lovely, darling,’ Stella said now to Etienne, meaning the casserole. ‘Delicious. You are clever. A star.’

  ‘Star anise, don’t you mean?’

  ‘Do I?’ Stella said and nibbled another little bite, the tiniest bite of casserole. ‘Gosh yes, I taste it now. Where did you get such a thing? Even more clever, darling. A hunter, too.’

  She was kind, Stella. Sensitiv
e to the feelings, the needs of others. Nothing of the bitch about her. John had always seen this – beginning that very first evening in the gassy bedsit on Camberwell Grove. The oilcloth was attended to, the eggs praised, the gassy smell ignored. And tonight, she was being kind, being sensitive to a fairy. There was nothing here to dislike. Even the woman who had flung herself back in her seat: even she was smiling again. Stella was a good egg.

  Perhaps it was the patter of this evening, the patter of all these evenings. Darling, and dearest and gosh, yes, and I see, how clever you are – it all ran in the air like water in the pipes. Like sewage in the drains, John thought sometimes, in his dark moments: filling and spouting and seemingly never-ending, the language of a certain English class effortlessly pleased with itself, self-perpetuating, hatchet-ruthless at asserting itself, at getting its own way. Open to newness – to the likes of John himself – so long as this novelty could be corralled, and managed, and controlled.

  He ate his beef-and-mango casserole.

  She hardly needed him, of course. Was that it? She had her own place: that little house at World’s End (‘bought by Daddy,’ she said dismissively, before the estrangement, before the severing of ties) and a little money had been settled on her when she turned eighteen. Not much, but enough to get by, which was now just as well: she was not quite, then, an epitome of high-minded and courageous independence. Not that he judged her for that: a little money, a little stash in the bank, was what every artist ought to have. It set them free – from their families, not least. Good for her.

  But yes: it meant that Stella hardly needed him. Not at all on a material level. And her attitude, and her quest for a specific kind of love, and her focus and her libations, poured out into the soil of Daddy’s apple orchard long ago – taken together provided her with another kind of independence, the sort that frightened him, chilled and froze him.

  In his darkest moments, he told himself that he was inadequate to her needs. At night, lying awake – sometimes she was lying beside him, in her house; sometimes he was breathing in the gas alone, in his little room in Camberwell – this thought would come to him, infrequently at first, and then more and more often. Their trajectories were different – but no, because paths and journeys can be replotted, can be rethought. Inadequacy is different again, and sometimes there is nothing to be done about it.

  He took up his heavy, bubbled Czechoslovak glass. If he flung it, right now, at Etienne’s dusty red walls, if the glass shattered and its shards flew into the tureen of beef-and-mango casserole, and into the potatoes, and into the linen tablecloth—

  Well, it would cause a sensation, for certain: but it wouldn’t make him feel any better. He sipped, and set the glass down on the linen.

  The blonde woman, who seemed designated tonight as his bad fairy companion, said, ‘Delicious, isn’t it? Star anise, as Ginny says, and the mango is delightful. A treat, altogether.’ Then she added, ‘How did you meet?’

  He gave her a version.

  ‘Lovely. To find someone. You’re so lucky,’ she added, almost visibly comparing his Deptford tones to Stella’s Berkshire ones, her carriage and tilted chin to his, and his, her past and her present and her future to his, and his, and his. ‘So lucky.’ She sighed. ‘I’m divorced, myself. Already divorced, at my age. Imagine! I can hardly believe it.’

  No. It wasn’t that Stella didn’t need him.

  It was that she couldn’t have him.

  It was that there was a part of him that he couldn’t give to anyone, Stella included. It was that she understood this, now, or had been in the process of understanding it, that day by the lake, under the heron’s unblinking eye. It was that she was seeing the end of the road.

  And his colour, and his distempered cloth: they wouldn’t be enough to hold her to him.

  The room swam before his eyes.

  23

  ‘Mildred’s?’ She didn’t in the least want to go to Mildred’s. It was too late, she had eaten too much, and she had drunk too much of Etienne’s good wine (she had given their own cheap, green Portuguese the very widest of berths; her head would be bad in the morning as it was, without driving a Portuguese axe through it), and she had breathed in a little too much cigar smoke.

  No, she wanted to go home.

  But. Etienne had never been to Mildred’s.

  ‘Haven’t you? Never? Well, we’ll remedy that tonight.’

  She heard John’s voice, his deep voice, his carrying tones. His decisiveness. That was that.

  She needed, really, to go home. Alone, preferably: to lie in her small bed in her small house, on her own, and think through the evening. There had been a stickily damp orange cake, dense with almonds, to follow the beef-and-mango casserole, and it was then that this fellow had made his move. She had been aware of Paddy York’s voice the entire evening, through the bright green soup and the beef-and-mango casserole: impossible, indeed, to be unaware of his voice, for he appeared not to need to take a breath, he spoke in great dense blocks of text, not even sentences, on and on and on. Not opinionated, not, apparently, needing to talk over anyone, as such, but rather talking as water might foam over a waterfall. Unceasing, unceasing.

  The good Lord preserve her from the likes of him.

  He was a personality: she knew that. In front of the camera, but also behind the camera, a good sound business head with a Cambridge education and a little black book growing, so they said, by an inch a day. Paddy York, Patrick York, with his own programme, his own programmes, his fingers in a thousand pies.

  A house just around the corner too, newly purchased, and a housekeeper installed in the basement, tempestuous but a treasure, so they said. Of course all this was neither here nor there. There was more to life than tempestuous housekeepers and all the rest of it, as she well knew.

  And she had to keep an eye on John, who seemed a little tense, a little downcast. He had been fine earlier, as they had taken their bus from Camberwell to Victoria, and their tube from Victoria to South Kensington, and their legs from South Kensington to this candlelit haven, this palace with its dusted walls. But – perhaps it was being placed beside what-was-her-name that did the mischief, perhaps she had bored him into a state of desperation, she was a sweet girl, they said, but not at all bright, and even her husband had given up in the end – he had seemed low all through dinner. Even the sight of the paintings, his own paintings, on Etienne’s walls had provided only the briefest of fillips.

  And glass after glass of wine.

  She had been watching him throughout the meal, and she was feeling the strain. Her own sense of honour called upon her to laugh with Etienne, who was a sweet man, and listen to him, and joke, and spread some good conversation around the table, and she had done all of these things, while simultaneously keeping her eye, her third eye, on John.

  How many eyes was a girl supposed to have? It was a strain: she wasn’t a professional juggler.

  With the sticky orange cake came a change in energy: chairs pushed back, for Etienne liked his guests to shift around the table and to bring their fine china plate, their orange cake, with them. Etienne himself moved off to the end of the long table, to fraternise with the industrialists who had established a bridgehead there. And then, as if the evening were not already as dense as the cake, Patrick York appeared beside her, just appeared as out of thin air, and the whole cycle began again.

  There should be more to life than duty, and obligation, and good manners.

  Weren’t these just several of the many forces from which she was fleeing, or attempting to flee? She gazed at her elegantly thin wedge of orange cake, she took up her small, glitteringly polished dessert fork. She wasn’t making a job of this fleeing, was she?

  ‘May I?’

  She had heard this voice coming out of televisions and radios with, of late, ever increasing frequency. His own programme on the BBC, a slew of them, in fact, after a quiet start on ITV; also, a radio show, and another radio show somewhere else. And eye-catching charity w
ork, on the side – and now, wasn’t he doing something in America, too? His own production company. A young Turk, out and out, and criss-crossing the Atlantic. And she had heard him only the previous Sunday on Desert Island Discs: choosing classical, and some religious, Edith Piaf, and a Beatles number for the youth vote; Betjeman, and English ale. She couldn’t fault his public side.

  A voice that grabbed you, slightly too much pomade in his black, quiffed hair, sharply suited, tall enough but not too tall.

  Yes, a faultless public side.

  She nodded politely, patted the seat – the still-warm seat – that Etienne had just vacated. ‘Please.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He sat. ‘It can be hard to catch all the names sometimes. I’m Patrick York.’ He extended a soft, yielding hand.

  ‘Stella Wakeham.’

  ‘How do you do.’

  ‘I know who you are, of course,’ Stella said. To please him. He must be expecting it. ‘The talk of the town, you are.’

  To her enormous surprise, he flushed a little: then, as he caught her startled expression, his flush deepened, spread along his neck.

  ‘People who don’t even know me,’ he said.

  She glanced – a reflex action – across the table. John hadn’t moved, in spite of Etienne’s efforts to get him to shift three seats along: but the older woman, what was her name? – had slid into the seat beside him. She was less of a bore, so they said, and certainly John looked less cross. And the orange cake was very good. She turned back to her companion.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t even know you: not the real you. So you can count me among this throng. You’d better tell me about yourself.’

  But again to her surprise, he shook his head. ‘It might be better if we told each other about ourselves. Beginning with you. I daresay you could hear me,’ he added, ‘all through dinner. I’m trying to do a deal with that chap, he has money I need’ – and he nodded along the table to the industrialist with whom Etienne was now engaged in earnest conversation. Was the industrialist perhaps a Uranian too? Goodness, they were everywhere. ‘So that was the public moi you heard. I’d much rather listen to you – I mean, if that’s not thoroughly disagreeable.’