Marnie had panicked. ‘No, Pete, he’ll be angry . . . he doesn’t want to have a woman designer.’
‘What are you talking about?’ He had stared at her, his eyes huge behind his glasses. ‘He’s in a fury because we’re about to lose the Phoenix Airline job because Lewis left. If you can do it instead, it means you’ll save the day. I don’t think your sex comes into it.’
Pete Piper had gone right into George’s office there and then and told him the whole story. It was as simple as that. All those weeks, months, that Lewis had procrastinated had been so unnecessary. By the end of the day Marnie Regan had a new role as designer.
What Pete had done made Marnie fall for him. He had been her champion; had seen who she really was. He didn’t just love Marnie for being a pretty woman; he loved her talent. And Marnie couldn’t help being seduced by his admiration. She had known she could no longer deceive him. The next evening, over a celebratory dinner, she had told him she was pregnant. He hadn’t batted an eye.
‘Lewis might have abandoned you, Marnie,’ he’d said. ‘But I never will. I’ve loved you from the first day I met you, and I will never stop loving you.’
He had proposed to her there and then.
Pete had been true to his word. He and Marnie had been married seven years this August, the happiest years of her life. She had fallen in love slowly, unravelling like thread that had been wound tight around her heart, and Pete was the most devoted father to Cait. They had hoped for more children, but Pete had never expressed the need to father his own. ‘Cait fills my heart,’ he’d told Marnie. He adored her – which was why Marnie didn’t understand what he’d done, though she guessed it was all to do with Pete’s belief in the value of honesty. To never sweep anything under the carpet.
Last night, as she and Pete had been sitting outside in their tiny garden in Putney, sipping on chilled white wine and relaxing after a tough day at Studio M, her husband had handed her a slip of paper.
‘I know where Lewis is,’ he had said, for once awkward. ‘That’s his address.’
‘Lewis Bell?’
It had been years since they had mentioned him to each other, although Cait was a living, breathing reminder.
‘My friends, Dylan and Rachel, ran into him when they were on holiday in Arizona.’
‘Lewis lives in Arizona?’ Marnie had asked Pete in shock. The American west was the last kind of place she’d expected Lewis to live. She’d assumed that if he’d gone to America, it would be to a city, like New York or Chicago.
‘He works in an art gallery. Dylan just mentioned this English guy called Lewis who helped them pick a picture. They talked about design, and he said that he’d worked as a graphic designer in London in the late sixties. It piqued my curiosity so I did some research and found out that there is a Lewis Bell living in Scottsdale, Arizona and working at the Langely Gallery.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Pete? I don’t ever want to see him again.’
‘I would hope not.’ Pete had leaned forward and given Marnie a gentle kiss on the cheek. ‘He’s married, you know. His wife is called Samantha.’
‘Bully for him,’ Marnie had said, knocking back her wine. ‘But I really don’t care about Lewis Bell any more.’
She’d stood up, for once annoyed with her husband. Why did he have to rake up the past?
‘Marnie,’ he’d said softly, reaching out for her. Reluctantly she had let herself be pulled onto his lap. ‘Darling, I’m not giving you this address for you but for Cait. One day she might want to know who her real father is, and where he is.’
‘No,’ Marnie had said, ‘you’re her dad. I don’t ever want her to know the truth.’
‘Are you sure?’ he’d asked her. ‘Remember what you always tell me – the truth eventually comes out.’
‘Not this time,’ Marnie had said with certainty. ‘Only you, Eva and I know the truth, and none of us are going to tell Cait – ever.’
Marnie had started to scrunch up the piece of paper, but Pete had put his hand on hers to stop her.
‘Just put it in your address book. You never know.’
Strandhill, County Sligo, Easter Monday,27 March 1989
Lewis woke in the early hours. His T-shirt was drenched with sweat, his mouth so dry he was almost choking. Where the hell was he?
He took a swig of water from the glass by his bed, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out an unfamiliar wardrobe and row upon row of stuffed bookshelves opposite the bed. The evening came back to him. He put his hand to his heart as he remembered he was in Marnie’s house. He was shocked that he was here. That in the room across the hall was a young woman who was his daughter. His life as he knew it was over. The secret dream of Marnie that he had clung to for years was gone.
He lay in bed, trying to still his frantic heart. Apart from the sound of the sea in the distance, all was quiet. Moonlight spilled through the curtains, illuminating the end of the bed and plunging the rest of the room into deeper shadows.
He hadn’t found Marnie in time. Lewis closed his eyes, his chest tight with regret. What would Marnie have looked like now? He knew she would have aged well; she would still be beautiful.
Last night he had been unable to sleep, reading Marnie’s diary for hours. In it Marnie had written that she had wanted him to marry her. Yet he had run away, and his flight had lasted the rest of Marnie’s life.
He turned on the beside lamp, picked up her journal and read her words yet again:
I want him to ask me to marry him but not because I’m pregnant, not because he should feel sorry for me, but because he recognises what we have. Eva says I should tell him straight out that I’m having his baby. She says I have to make him marry me. I know she’s only concerned for my welfare, but I don’t want Lewis to be forced. I will not be pitied. Eva tells me that love is a serious business. She says that unplanned pregnancies are a consequence of the gravity of love. A sobering slap in the face of passion. Yet when she uses that word – gravity – I think of it as a power, a force that you cannot deny. I want to trust in nature, or science. If we are meant to be together then the gravity of our love will bring us together.
I wish we were back in Ireland. It was so magical that time together. No wonder we made a child. If only he can see what we are, what we could be. It breaks my heart. That’s why I want him to tell George about me. If he can put me before him then I’ll know he loves me.
The diary fell out of his hands as grief tore through Lewis’s body. He shuddered, and a tear slipped down his cheek. Marnie was dead. And he had lost Joy. It was the same cruel cycle to his life.
Just as he should have gone to Marnie’s flat from the hospital and into the comfort of her love, he should have stayed in Ballycastle and confronted Joy’s husband. He should have fought for her.
Yet if he had stayed, Lewis would never have come to Strandhill and found his daughter.
He considered the peculiar symmetry that he and Joy were part of. Him and his lost daughter. Her and her lost mother. It didn’t feel like it was over yet.
London, 14 April 1967, 11.21 a.m.
Lewis thrashed his MG down the morning streets like a maniac. He was on fire. His London had turned into hell. It had always been his and Lizzie’s city. When they had come to London they had a found a home of their own. No more begging at the table of some relative of their father’s in the middle of nowhere. In London they had been free, because they were no longer children. They could do as they pleased. But his sister had gone too far – so far it had killed her.
He screeched to a halt at traffic lights on Bayswater Road. He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror and was shocked by his own reflection. Without his easy smile he looked quite different. Not so handsome, yet more significant. His face was white with fury, and his brown eyes were almost black, the pupils swallowing the irises. He tasted metal in his mouth.
He found the street where Jim lived no problem, his fury guiding him there. He abandoned th
e car at the end of the road and set off on foot. Everybody was on their way to work for the day, surging forward, like the incoming tide – like he was walking against the whole world. No one was going his way.
The house stood before him: monolithic portico with white pillars, black iron railings and large sash windows. The curtains were still drawn, and the full milk bottles had not been retrieved from outside the door. He picked up a gold top, pierced the foil with his finger and swallowed down a mouthful of milk and cream. He was a warrior drinking blood before battle. Lewis had never been a fighter, had never understood that part of being a man. He was one of the new generation of young men who believed that if there ever was another war, it would be beyond men fighting men; it would be over in a couple of minutes. The whole of London wiped out by an atomic bomb. Lizzie had talked about that often.
Lizzie.
That big white house was where he had left her. It was the place where she had spoken to him last. He clenched his fists, tightened his jaw and banged on the door.
He waited, banging again, but no one answered. Then a curtain flickered. Someone was inside, watching him, hoping he would go away. He walked back down the path onto the pavement and stared up at the house. Again he could see movement behind the curtain of the window on the first floor, but the door didn’t open.
The house was on a corner so he walked round it, his hand trailing the rough red-brick wall running the length of the street. He stood on his tiptoes and peered over the wall. He could see an overgrown garden and the back of the house. He looked both ways to check no one was coming and slipped over the wall.
A cat was slinking through the tall grass, its black fur glossy against the emerald green. It followed him as he pushed aside an overgrown blackberry bush, not caring about the pinpricks of blood on his bare hands. Then it jumped onto the lid of a bin and eyeballed him, as if it knew what Lewis was up to. He climbed some broken stone steps up to the back door and tried the handle. It opened.
He walked into a back kitchen. There was a smell of fried onions lingering in the air, and the sink was full of unwashed dishes. The tiny Formica table was littered with half-drunk cups of tea, a random crust of toast, an overflowing ashtray and a heap of broken eggshells. For such a grand house, the kitchen was a dump.
He went into the hall. A slice of daylight from a window on top of the front door lit the way for him, and he paused at the bottom of the staircase, his hand gripping the banister before he crossed the hall and carefully pushed a door open. The curtains were shut, and the room was almost dark. The embers of a fire still glowed in the grate, and the room was hot and stuffy. It smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke and cannabis.
He peered into the gloom. There could be someone in here, crashed out on the floor, but as his eyes adjusted he could see that the room was empty of people. He flicked the light switch, which shed an unflattering light across the messy room. It looked like a drug den. Cigarette papers were scattered on the coffee table, along with loose tobacco. There was an exotic hookah pipe placed in the middle of the table, its pipe curled around the base. There was no such thing as a couch in this sitting room, for the floor was covered with cushions, of various sizes and colours. There were incense sticks stuck in holders, a large Persian rug and heavy mahogany furniture. A large wooden bowl sat on a side table by the fireplace, next to an antique silver cigarette box.
The owner of this house had more money than taste, for everything about this room was offensive to Lewis’s modernist sensibility. Worse than anything was the painting now hanging in front of him. He cried out; he couldn’t help it. It was horrific to see his sister in this pose, naked, smiling at him.
He ran across the room, slipping and sliding on the cushions, reached up and took the picture down. Then he punched his hand through the canvas, right through Lizzie’s stomach and ripped it down the length of the picture, through her exposed thighs, right down to her toes.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’
Lewis spun round, ready to fight, but behind him was the girl he’d met yesterday – Sammy. He hadn’t even heard her coming into the room. She was practically naked, apart from a tiny white T-shirt, which just about covered her backside. Her hair was all over the place, and her eyes were hazy and slightly unfocused.
‘Do I know you?’ she asked him in her soft American accent, seemingly unperturbed by Lewis’s demented destruction of the painting.
‘I’m Lizzie’s brother, Lewis.’ He pushed his fist through the canvas again – tearing through Lizzie’s torso this time.
‘You mean Elizabeth?’ the girl asked.
‘We met yesterday. You’re probably too stoned to remember.’
‘I remember.’ The girl stepped forward, and stood right next to him.
‘Do you want me to put the pieces you’ve ripped into the fire?’ she asked.
He stopped what he was doing for a moment. Sammy was smiling at him. He could tell she was completely out of it, yet he was glad of her solidarity.
‘Sure,’ he said.
Sammy knelt down by the fire and started feeding pieces of Lizzie’s painting into it. At first it smouldered, but then it suddenly flared up.
He had reached his sister’s face, but now he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t rip it up. Without the naked body attached to it, her expression looked joyous. He tore around Lizzie’s head, carefully, in a circle. Then he folded the piece of canvas up and shoved it in his pocket.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
A voice boomed out behind him. Lewis turned round. Fear and fury conflicted within him as he faced Jim, the man who had bought his sister’s painting – and given her those drugs. He was the person Lewis had chosen to blame for her death.
Jim stood before him, dressed in a crimson bathrobe. He wasn’t tall, but he was well built, stocky, with a battered face. He looked nearly twice as old as Lewis.
‘This is Elizabeth’s brother,’ Sammy piped up from the fireplace.
‘I don’t care who the fuck you are, what are you doing in my house, destroying my property?’
‘It’s my sister.’ Lewis’s voice erupted out of his mouth. ‘And you can’t have her.’
He picked up the frame of the now destroyed picture and smashed it on the ground.
‘I paid for that,’ Jim yelled back. ‘That cost me money, man. You can’t just come into someone’s home and destroy something that belongs to them.’
Lewis walked up to the American so that they were eye to eye. ‘Why not?’ he challenged. ‘You destroyed my sister.’
‘Hey, I done nothing, man. Your sister’s a junkie slut. I didn’t make her that way.’
‘Take that back!’ Lewis screamed, his spit spraying the man’s sneering face.
‘No. She was always begging me to give her stuff. She’d fuck me just to get more dope. I even paid for some of that picture with drugs.’
Lewis couldn’t hold back any longer. He grabbed Jim’s bathrobe with both hands and tried to shake him. But the man was an immovable block in front of him.
‘You killed her!’ Lewis yelled at him. ‘Lizzie died this morning, and you killed my sister.’
‘Fuck you, man.’ Jim swung forward and punched Lewis in the face. He went flying backward, an arc of blood from his nose spraying the room as he landed on his back. He knew he couldn’t win this fight. The American was tougher and stronger than him, yet he scrambled to his feet and launched himself at the other man as if he was entering a rugby scrum. He grabbed Jim by the waist and tried to pull him down, but the American just thumped his shoulders and Lewis crumpled beneath the impact.
He tried to get up again, but Jim kicked him down. ‘Fucking pussy.’
He could hear Jim laughing at him and Lewis felt a crack in one of his ribs as Jim kicked him again and again. Pain seared through him, but it was good to feel this pain. He was doing something for Lizzie.
Curled up on the floor now with Jim beating the life out of him, he closed his eyes and
waited for Lizzie to come to him – always together the two of them, on every new threshold. Yet she didn’t come. Instead he heard a scream followed by a loud crash, and the kicking stopped.
He opened his eyes to see Jim swaying above him, blood trickling down his face, and then he fell with a thump onto the floor next to him. And there was Sammy, a heavy wooden bowl in her raised hands. Tears were streaming down her stoned face. She was saying something, but it was hard to make out the words.
Lewis unwound his broken body, got onto his knees and then stumbled to his feet. He looked down at Jim. He was out cold, but alive. Lewis could see his chest rising up and down.
‘You could have killed him.’ His voice came out in a hoarse whisper.
She was still standing, arms aloft, holding that heavy bowl and teetering on her feet. Lewis took the bowl out of her hands and put it on the table, and she stared at him, uncomprehending, tears still streaming down her face.
‘Elizabeth,’ she whispered in a cracked voice.
Then she began to shake. He put his arms around her shoulders and led her out of the room. In the dark hall, she clung to him, clawing at his shirt. Her face was so close to his he could feel her tears wet on his neck.
‘It’ll be okay,’ he said, but he wasn’t so sure. The anger that had fed him all morning had dissipated. If Sammy hadn’t stopped him, Jim might have kicked him to death.
Sammy tucked her hands into his trouser pockets and leaned into his body.
She pressed her mouth to his chest, but he could still hear her muffled words. ‘Jim killed Elizabeth.’
‘He didn’t actually kill her.’
She pulled her head back. ‘He gave her the speed. She said she wasn’t allowed to take it because of her medication, but he made her.’ Sammy tugged at Lewis’s sleeve. ‘I told him not to, but he laughed at me.’
Lewis tried to disentangle himself, but the American girl was stuck to him like honey. As he looked down at her straggly blonde hair, her tanned face now pale from fear and her big dark eyes, he imagined she was Lizzie, beseeching him one last time.
The Gravity of Love Page 30