‘But –’
‘Be a good girl and don’t mention this to your mother.’
‘I –’
‘Goodnight, darling.’
‘Goodnight.’
EIGHT
Five miles west of the village of Allnorthover, the countryside briefly altered its expression and became beautiful. Hedgerows marshalled impressively and the pattern of the fields suggested history rather than expedience. There were single oaks, inky copses, and enough of a rise and fall for shadow to animate the landscape. In the middle of this fine view, an avenue of cedars led to a honey-coloured, intricate, magical, crumbling house. It had been bought by Stefan Brucke seven years earlier, when he had fallen in love with Clara Clough’s painted skies, and had found and married her.
With the birth of her third child, Clara had begun to work more intently. The harder it was to do so, the more ambitious she became, believing that only something that insisted upon absolute concentration could wrench her beyond the guilt of not listening out for or thinking about her children. So the small-scale studies of land and sky for which she had become known, as far as she was known, had grown into what one critic had described as ‘monumental abstractions of shifting light’. She worked in the old library, matching the scale of her canvases to its high ceiling, and the harshness of her palette to its northern light. The East End gallery that had offered her a joint show only had room for two works. One morning she received a letter saying that they had both been bought by the Arts Council for its own collection.
Stefan was concerned. ‘It’s a bit corporate, don’t you think?’
‘It’s money, validation. Anyway, you’re corporate.’
He worked for his family’s bank and spent half of each week in Geneva.
‘They’ll just stick them in an office somewhere.’ Stefan was removing marmalade from his daughter Mabel’s hair while she tried to pick his nose. Her twin, Sidney, was cutting his toast into tiny triangles, each of which he chewed for a long time.
‘If they can fit those works into an office, it’s going to have to be a big one, somewhere important. It can’t hurt. Anyway, the Chief Executive, Barbara Dart, has asked me to lunch.’
‘In town?’
‘Well, she’s hardly going to trek out here, is she? And I could visit Mary, lend a hand with Bella.’ She halved an apple and gave one piece to Mabel, then peeled the other half and cut it into triangles for Sidney.
‘Who’s Barbara Dart?’
‘Comes from the City side of things, arts sponsorship.’
‘Any relation to Juliet’s Dart?’
‘His ex, I think.’
Clara could always find a reason to go to London and now she had several: lunch with Barbara Dart, visiting Mary, and trying to sort things out between Juliet and Fred, who were having some kind of argument.
She drove down the avenue of cedars and along the green lanes. It was a hot, close afternoon in late May. The fields were burgeoning and toxic, and the air sagged. Clara breathed more easily once she was on the train.
Barbara had suggested a new Spanish restaurant, flattering Clara by assuming she knew where it was. She found it eventually and was led towards a woman who rose delightedly to shake her hand. They were the same height and made of the same stuff, and sat down in unison.
Barbara ordered two glasses of white manzanilla – a toast to the fact that they liked one another immediately. She told Clara that she had first seen her paintings ten years earlier at a student show, and how much she had liked them; that she had followed her career since and had been delighted to acquire those two works for the Arts Council collection. She spoke of Clara’s work with such attention to detail that what she said did not sound like flattery but the most connoisseurial expression of respect.
Clara found that she had ordered wind-dried sausage and pebbly beans, a slick of tomatoes and a heap of fiery potatoes. It all tasted rough and delicious, and the sherry was followed by a pale green wine that sang on her tongue. She talked and Barbara led her.
‘Have you ever thought about getting a studio in town?’
‘I have one at home.’
‘That must make it hard.’
‘Hard?’ Everyone else said how beautiful the old library was, how lucky she was.
‘To concentrate.’
Clara found herself telling this stranger exactly how hard it was, and not only that but ‘…I didn’t know before what it felt like when someone died, how it leaves everything so clean, I mean the details fall away.’
‘Yes,’ said Barbara, ‘I understand.’
‘So now things are more clear. I have to work … properly. I mean, do you know what my life is like?’
‘I can imagine.’
‘From the minute I wake up there are breakfasts, school bags, lunches, Stefan’s shirts, suitcases, dentists, doctors, meals and noise, and when everyone’s gone there are all those crumbling walls and rotting windows and leaking roofs and outside the door acres of stuff that keeps on dying and growing, and I swim up through it all and if I’m lucky I get to break the surface and take a breath. I work in snatches. I get it done but I don’t get better. I don’t have time to learn.’
Barbara echoed, underlined and agreed, and then held out her gift: ‘A space has come up in the Quondam Building. I’m on the board and wondered –’
‘The Quondam Building?’ The first purpose-built artists’ studios in London, sixty years old and famous for their light.
They drank tiny cups of coffee and agreed that it was perfectly plausible for Clara to spend a few days each week in London. It would be good for her. The children were alluded to only vaguely, which Clara told herself was out of delicacy as Barbara had none.
That evening Clara arrived at Khyber Road feeling bilious and tense. What had she been offered? What had she agreed to?
Fred opened the door. ‘You never call,’ he said. ‘You just turn up.’
‘Is that a complaint?’ Clara asked, feeling the tightness with which he hugged her and knowing that it was not.
‘No, I love it. Someone still just knocks on the door, and they come all the way from the suburbs to do it.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘You’ve been boozing.’
‘I had lunch, a business lunch; and I do not live in the suburbs.’
‘You will soon.’
She pushed past him and went into the kitchen. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Federico?’
‘Oh!’ he said like an amazed guest. ‘That would be lovely.’
They sat at the kitchen table and eventually Clara said, ‘You’re upset.’
He spoke to the table. ‘We all are, aren’t we?’
‘That’s Dad’s line. You know what I mean.’
Fred flung up his hands and sighed, ‘She’s really going.’
‘Caroline? Going where?’
‘Not Caroline, Jules. After everything that’s happened, she’s still going to America.’
‘Yes I am,’ said Juliet coming in crossly. She was wearing a shirt which Clara recognised as having once belonged to Tobias. ‘May I stay to discuss myself?’
‘Shouldn’t you be at work still?’
‘I had to go and see someone about my visa.’
Fred gave an indignant snort and the three lapsed into silence. Clara was thinking how like Tobias Juliet was – Tobias as a child.
She wanted to be encouraging. ‘Littlefield College is a very good place.’
Fred rolled his eyes. ‘I know. Juliet keeps telling me, but what I don’t understand is the point of going there to do something you can do here. And it’s not just about you, Jules. It will upset everything.’
‘For me, alright? It will be a good place for me!’ Juliet shouted wearily.
This argument had clearly been going on for days.
Fred continued: ‘And what about me?’
‘Stay here, or go anywhere you like. We’re grown-ups now, we can do what we like.’
‘No,’ said Fred. ‘It’s because we’re gro
wn-ups that we can’t.’
Clara intervened. ‘Why do you think Juliet ought not go?’
Fred looked round the room and then, as if he had lit on something, ‘Bella.’ He could just as easily have said Door or Dishcloth.
‘I’m not Bella’s mother,’ said Juliet.
‘No, you’re her aunt and her father, your brother, is dead. Mary needs our help.’
‘So you help her.’
‘I will,’ Fred sniffed, ‘I do.’
‘When did you last babysit?’
‘I thought we decided not to, to encourage her to get someone proper …’
‘You mean you didn’t want to be pinned down.’
‘The babysitting is a separate issue, a practical one,’ said Clara. ‘The point is we’re not going to make each other feel better but we can give each other less to worry about by taking care of ourselves.’
‘But you don’t take care of yourself. You have Stefan and Mrs Clark and all those little men …’ said Fred.
‘It will be good for you, Juliet. It’ll do you good to get away.’
‘From me, you mean?’ Fred’s voice was exhausting.
‘No, from –’ Clara stopped herself.
Juliet understood and an idea arose, provoked by childhood and sisterhood – a complication of wanting to surpass, to subsume and to be. ‘Jacob,’ she said, enjoying his name, ‘might be coming with me.’
Clara left the next day. She had tickets for a matinee performance of Salome and Mary was going with her. It was the first time they had done something without children for years. Clara caught a train to Waterloo. In the city, she tended not to let the crowd impinge on her vision, and so did not notice anything unusual about the people gathering in the station, what they were carrying or how they were dressed.
‘Clara!’ Mary was struggling to reach her. ‘We can’t go to the theatre, not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s the rally. I completely forgot.’
‘Oh, right. I remember hearing something about it.’
‘We have to go.’
‘Really? Can’t we just go later? We spent years marching and shouting. Can’t we have this one day off?’
Mary hesitated. It was true that they had marched a lot, and was tax really a matter of life and death like apartheid or neo-nazism or the Bomb?
The play ticked by. Clara concentrated on Salome’s anger – punishing a man for his resistance, punishing herself for her desire. She was trapped by it, just as others were trapped by their reaction to her body, even him.
Mary could not stand the way these actors spoke and moved. To her, it did not suggest tension at all, just going through the motions while hanging on to your dignity. Desire was not like that. She grew bored, and became aware of noises outside, a surge of running and … horses? As the play continued stiffly on, she listened harder – whistles, clatter and roars. She was sure they would leave the theatre that sunny afternoon to find the city ablaze and under martial law, and could not understand how the rest of the audience could remain so absorbed by this preposterous drama. Nor could she persuade herself to act. She wanted to say something, to Clara at least, but stayed quietly in her seat.
The actors hurried through their curtain calls and a man in evening dress appeared onstage: ‘Ladies and Gentleman, I regret to inform you that due to a civil disturbance, Charing Cross Road has been closed off by the police. Please would you all follow me through to the exit at the rear of the theatre.’
Clara was amused as they picked their way through the backstage clutter and out into a rubble-filled lot. ‘It’s as if we’re the Romanovs, being led off to be shot.’
‘We deserve to be,’ said Mary. ‘We should have been out there.’
‘Now we are.’ Clara found an alley which led through to Charing Cross Road. ‘Come on!’ They could not resist.
The police had forced the protesters back down to Cambridge Circus, where Mary and Clara found themselves looking over the heads of the crowd at two grey police horses – massive and empty-eyed – which suddenly galloped towards them, forcing people to fall over one another in their hurry to get out of the way. Who knew what such creatures were capable of?
Mary was rooted to the spot, the horses coming straight towards her, when Clara grabbed her hand: ‘Run!’ They ran. A sidestreet brought them to Long Acre where the world was ordinary again until they passed a burst window, its jagged glass holding the metal bin that had been hurled at it. A couple came round the corner with a child in a push-chair, still shopping, followed by half a dozen riot police moving at a calm trot. Mary and Clara took a number of shortcuts westwards but every time met a police line and were turned back.
Mary thought of Bella, somewhere on the other side of that line, and felt sick. ‘I have to get home. Now!’
Clara took charge. ‘We need to head south, cross the river and then we can come back over later.’
They did this, walking the other way until the police line petered out and they could cross at Southwark and make their way west along the south bank of the river.
‘Are you alright?’ Clara asked. She felt protective of Mary, as always.
‘I thought this didn’t happen any more. We had so much of it and then everyone seemed to just give up and stay at home.’
‘That bloody woman wore us down.’
‘Or we wore ourselves out.’
‘Doing what? We never did that much – just the odd rally or march.’
Mary frowned. ‘Maybe there’s less to us than we think.’
‘Mary George, you are never less clear than when you are being serious.’
They walked on and their journey became one of those unexpected crossings of the city in which it falls open and you marvel at how quickly you get from one place to another, how remarkable it all is, and how remarkable you feel. By the time Clara and Mary reached Victoria Station, they had worked their way down to something of their teenage selves. Each had recovered a sense of authenticity and wakefulness which had not been felt for so long that they had forgotten it never lasted.
NINE
Fred had given the matter of Juliet’s surprise leaving party a great deal of thought. Her friends, for instance. Who were her friends? The only ones he was sure of were her college gang and they all scared him to death. Sara was an Ethiopian princess who had just qualified as an architect, Ritsu already lectured at the Institute where they had studied and Hannelore had taken a second masters degree in philosophy. They were all striking, and Sara was beautiful. Why couldn’t Juliet have ordinary friends, girls like those in Allnorthover? She had refused to have anything to do with them and spent years alone (although there might have been a boy at some point, Fred couldn’t be sure) before this international trio of goddesses had come along. Sara and Hannelore were tall but Fred rather liked that, the way they towered over him and smiled down. Caroline was taller than him, too.
He rang Ritsu at the Institute and asked her who else to invite, adding glumly that he supposed he ought to ask the Dart.
‘The what?’ asked Ritsu.
‘The who. You know, Jacob. Jacob Dart.’
‘Jacob?’
‘Juliet’s … you know …’
‘Her what?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘Evidently not. Jacob Dart? Any relation to Barbara Dart at the Arts Council?’
‘I don’t know. Who’s she? Do you think I ought to invite her as well?’
Carlo arrived first with Mary and Bella, who was put into Fred’s bed. It was seven o’clock on an August evening. Bella lay down, closed her eyes for a few minutes and then sat up. Mary took a dark blanket from Juliet’s room and hung it over the window. ‘It’s called Black Out,’ she explained. ‘Same as Lights Out only more so.’ She laid her daughter back down, hoping that this new kind of darkness would interest Bella sufficiently to let it have its effect.
The plan was that Tania would take Juliet for a farewell drink and then offer to d
rive her home at eight. She was flying out to America the next day. Mary had brought along Tobias’s pliers, screwdrivers and soldering iron, and set about getting Juliet’s stereo to work. It was a system that the Clough children had inherited from an uncle who liked to be up-to-the-minute and who had died young – waist-high speakers and monolithic slabs of dusty black plastic covered in knobs and dials, and connected by a tangle of fat cracked cables.
That afternoon Fred had remembered that there ought to be food and dashed into a deli to buy a ham, a cheese and a large jar of small silver onions which he’d liked the look of. The goddesses arrived with champagne and travel-size, elaborately wrapped presents. Allie, who was out of hospital, had donated a large bag of his homegrown grass and was sociably rolling joints at the kitchen table.
Just before eight, a car was heard approaching.
‘That’ll be Tania and Juliet! Come on everybody, hide!’ Fred ushered them into the kitchen and then crept up to the front door and crouched behind it, waiting for the knock. There were footsteps, and then more footsteps, too many footsteps and someone, a man, saying: ‘We really ought to have beaten you to it!’
Juliet’s voice: ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Pritt,’ the man said. ‘Graham Pritt. We came to dinner back in the spring.’
‘Hello!’ A woman’s voice. Fred leaned hard back against the wall. It wasn’t Graham’s wife Jane, but Caroline! He had issued only a casual invitation and had never thought that they, let alone she, would come.
Before he could recover himself, Juliet had opened the door and was letting them in while saying something about packing and an early start and ‘Fred? What the hell are you doing behind the door? There are people here to see you. And I need to get on.’
‘Fred! How lovely to see you,’ said Tania. She stepped aside and waited for further instructions.
Juliet went straight to the stairs, turning only to say, ‘Yes, well, thanks for the lift Tania, the drink and all that. I’ll, um, be in touch … And nice to see you again, and you …’
An Irresponsible Age Page 9