by Lorna Gray
I waited until the uniformed men had all shuffled in and then pulled a face as I dropped the latch. It was ever thus. It was the same game I had played with the first of Rhys’s models when I wasn’t supposed know, wasn’t supposed to let on that I knew.
The front door led into the main exhibition room and no one had moved to open the sturdy shutters. I flicked the light switch and found that Christi, Jim and two or three of the constables had disappeared upstairs. Presumably they were completing a survey of the building to ensure it was safely empty of Clarke and Reed. I joined the remainder in the centre of the floor. It was cold in here. It had that cold of the grates being left empty for some time. The walls were clean and white and adorned only by a few bright oil paintings and a cluster of someone else’s photographs. Presumably this was as far as Rhys had got with hanging that aborted exhibition on the theme of the Royal Wedding before everything had gone wrong. In the middle of the floor was the evidence of recent packing and it appeared that Christi, with all her style, personality and the distant Italian heritage that she seemed to turn on and off at will, was preparing to jump ship.
It was a moment before I realised that nearer by, Adam was staring intently at the bottom-right corner of one of the three paintings. It was a portrait, a vivid representation of a local grandee in modern blues and greens with a rare flash of crimson, and actually quite good. He spoke without turning his head. “K.W. Is this one of yours?”
“Shocking, isn’t it.” I moved a little nearer.
“Not really,” he said mildly, examining it again. “Why did I think you only ever painted landscapes in interesting shades of—?”
“Brown?” I supplied. The answer was easy. Figure work had been my husband’s niche and once my uncle retired and we began setting our own exhibitions it hadn’t seemed wise to turn the gallery into a specialist venue for studies of the human form. So my commercial work had always been landscapes and these portraits and others like them had been my sly secret, the equivalent of the smallest illicit affair of my own, painted whenever he went away.
It surprised me to see them hung like this. These three portraits were tenuously connected to the theme of the Royal Wedding so perhaps not out of place but as I’ve already said, Rhys had never liked my portrait work. The gallery had only ever exhibited my landscapes. Which had always been, as Adam rightly remarked, painted in rather drab colours.
“Adam?” I began tentatively.
“Mmmm?”
I didn’t get to ask the burning question because a figure moved into view from the office at the back and it was Gregory.
Rhys’s most reliable friend and patron was dressed in his customary pale trousers and blue blazer that bore the badge of his rowing club. He was a man whose legs seemed fractionally shorter than the length of his spine required but the imbalance was a discreet reminder that Gregory Scott had once been a famed rowing champion, still with the broad chest to match. Two years ago he’d used his presence and respectability in the sporting world to set the theme for Rhys’s first great project since his return from war. I’d never seen the final results of their collaboration but I’d witnessed their discussions in the project’s early stages. It had been destined to be a splendid celebration of human endeavour for an audience hungry for reassurance now that the war was really over.
Now Gregory’s greeting was warm. He looked well. Two years had passed in a blink of an eye for him. He moved swiftly across the room and embraced me in that easy way that we always had during my life here; the same way Adam had on that first drive back to Aberystwyth after a day at Devil’s Bridge. A swift pressure of his hand upon my arm and a touch of cheek to cheek. Then, because we were particularly old acquaintances, there was a brief touch of our other cheeks too.
I stepped back and found he was surveying me beneath lowered brows. I felt absurdly unmoved by our reunion and I think it was because I couldn’t quite remember how we had parted last; whether it had been amicable or if this greeting was inappropriately warm. I think I’ve mentioned the little complication of a sort of bubbling undertone of interest from him. He’d always teased that had our ages been more similar he’d have made his proposal before Rhys.
I’d always thought that age wouldn’t have made any difference.
Today he had clearly completely forgotten all that and those supple lips were simply saying warmly, “I didn’t think you’d come after our telephone call. You were very firm. I’m so glad you’ve changed your mind.”
That telephone conversation after Rhys’s death seemed a very long time ago. I remembered now. I’d hurt him then by being determined to stay away.
Now he was adding more soberly, “But what’s this? Why all the policemen? Is it Rhys? Surely, they haven’t found him? I mean … is he—?”
The poor man’s bewildered grief was etched upon his face.
I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed because these past few minutes I’d been reliving all that past unease and bracing myself to meet the subtle sense of always being at odds with his wishes. I hadn’t anticipated that his wish at this particular moment would simply be to inspire an expression of our shared sorrow in the passing of Rhys Williams.
I found myself stumbling into making apologetic negatives that made no sense and then had to pull myself together and finally clarified my answer by saying more calmly, “No, no. This is nothing to do with Rhys. That is, Detective Sergeant Fleece will have to explain what he wants, I’m afraid. What are you doing here?”
I hadn’t offended him. Gregory knew me. He laughed and told me plainly, “I came to harass poor Christi about those prints Rhys promised me. No one has been back before today.”
He said it louder for Christi’s benefit as she skipped down the stairs and sauntered back into the scene. She smiled at him. The difficulty for me was that she proved precisely why I was being so clumsy as I went through the awkward process of renewing my acquaintance with Gregory. It was the unpleasantness of realising just how well both these people knew me, when I’d imagined I would have the security of feeling like a stranger.
“So,” said Christi, standing in the doorway to the back room as the physical embodiment of Rhys’s creative genius. There was the tramp of many feet after her down the stairs. Jim drifted into view in the office behind her. I waited for the policeman to exert some kind of authority over the scene – and my part in it. It felt like I’d waited long enough. But he didn’t. He occupied himself with the task of dispatching several of his team into the little enclosed courtyard that stood beyond the office. And then I noticed that Christi was watching Adam with a lazy kind of curiosity. His presence here seemed to fascinate her. It made me restless. I’d thought he would be by my side but he wasn’t. He had resumed his examination of my pictures almost as soon as Jim had reappeared.
Christi cemented my sense of being stranded by abruptly remarking quite forcefully, “How nice to see you again, Mr Hitchen. You were at our little soiree for Rhys’s comeback exhibition in October last year.”
I couldn’t help staring at Adam too then. I saw him tilt his head at her in silent acknowledgement before he turned away to the photographic prints on the far wall. They were not to Rhys’s standard.
“What are you doing here, Detective Sergeant Fleece?” From her doorway, Christi cast the policeman a mildly challenging glance over her shoulder. He was by the desk now. I could just see one cluttered corner. “Well?” she demanded, striking a dramatic pose with one hand on a hip. “Still hunting for your greasy friend?”
“Detective Constable Philip Black is still missing,” Jim confirmed amiably. “Have you thought of anything else that might help me find him?”
She gave a tinkling laugh as though he’d made a private joke. It was as she turned to give him the full dramatic impact of her looks that I noticed that something else about her was geared for impact too.
Christi was wearing impossibly elegant slacks with a waist to rival Mrs Alderton’s but, unlike that lady’s fearsome denial of comfor
t, Christi’s idea of grace was given carelessly so that she was utterly, intimidatingly feminine. She didn’t need age to give her character; she’d been born confident. Now she lifted her hand to brush a stray mass of thick curling hair back from her face. It glittered a little in the glare of the overhead light.
In fact, it shone gold.
Now I understood the fragment of news that Sue, my mother-in-law, had been able to only hint at; the undisclosed secret that might well lead me into a fit of rage where the only revenge strong enough was to evict the great artist from his home. Sue hadn’t known this though.
By contrast, Christi knew precisely what she was doing. She followed my gaze and affected surprise as she realised what I was looking at. “Oh,” she said, examining the ring as if she were seeing it for the first time herself. “I’m sorry, did no one tell you?”
I was thinking that the inspector in Aberystwyth had, in his way, when he’d imagined that my identity shared the grave status of a war widow, then realised his mistake and blamed me for the falsehood. It still remained though that someone should probably have seen fit to explain the whole story to her new mother-in-law.
Christi stared at the band of gold, turning it on her finger before suddenly rejecting it as nothing and impatiently thrusting the hand into a trouser pocket. “Yes,” she confided. “It’s been about three months now. We’re in the throes of seeking a new studio in London. Or at least we were. It would have been heaven. And yes,” this was tart, for Jim, “we would have informed the police of its address when we finally moved.”
It struck me with a little shock that these boxes and piles were not the signs of a sudden house move after all. This wasn’t the flight of a bereaved woman after Rhys’s death. This had been planned long before. They hadn’t intended to stay long enough to leave room for me to indulge in a little petty revenge when the news got out. Which proved just how much importance they gave to their situation that they thought I should even wish to try.
It was at that moment, equally abruptly, that it dawned on me that Gregory was still beside me and lending me his company. It had an awful ring of familiarity about it; the symmetry of Christi scoring a point on Rhys’s name, the sense of being undervalued in this place and the idea that at least one man here might wish to reassure me that things could be weighted the other way. In this case I don’t believe Gregory was actually doing anything except standing where there was space for him but still it sent me though the crowded doorway into the office like a bullet from a gun.---
The office was very light because the back wall was nearly all glass. There was also a door that opened into the shared courtyard behind our gallery. Two of the three uniformed policemen who’d previously trudged upstairs with Jim were now out there, as ever making a very serious business out of glowering fiercely at the various entrances belonging to us, the watchmakers and the houses behind.
Christi was watching me. The force of her resentment turned my head to look back at her. Her jaw had hardened. She didn’t mean to reveal the bitterness beneath the flare, I think, but the feeling was genuine. This was hard for her and I found myself doing my usual thing of working myself into a tangle worrying about the feelings of this person that I didn’t like before stumbling through some apologies for this invasion that the bereaved widow didn’t want and certainly didn’t hear. She showed it by saying idly, “Did you know he only married you for this gallery?”
I remarked dryly, “His timing was uncanny.” It wasn’t actually. Other galleries had been available. This gallery had simply been the convenience that had kept him here later, after his experiment with a gentler kind of infatuation had proved unfulfilling. But I was hardly going to give her the satisfaction of arguing the point.
I turned aside to leaf through some old press cuttings on top of the cabinet in the corner by the door. The office was in a far worse state than the exhibition room. The shelves were empty and half-filled boxes stood about containing a disordered mess of old volumes of my painstakingly recorded accounts. Books logging historic client orders cluttered the desk alongside various dog-eared exhibition catalogues and alone in a locked cabinet was that familiar Leica camera. I turned the key and drew it out. My fingers automatically found the roughened surface where I had paid to have it engraved with his name. “Is this broken?”
Christi was watching me, one shoulder propped against the doorframe and her fine eyebrows faintly curious. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“No reason.” I put it down again. Then I picked up one of the ancient accounts books from the box against the wall. Line upon line of sums and notes in neat little columns written in those years when I had been alone here. I had liked this place then. In fact I had loved it. It had been my home. I returned the accounts book to its place and moved towards the stairs.
“Do you have to go sniffing about?” Christi was sweeping her hair aside again, this time with less precision than before. “I know this is your house, but it’s also my home. It was his home and now there are policemen all over it. They’re outside, they’re in the gallery and whatever your tame police sergeant thinks, I have happened to noticed that one slyly stayed up there while we trooped back downstairs just now.”
I stopped and stared at her. The raw honesty in her voice floored me. From her I was used to distain, pity, coldness; never sadness. “I—”
She cut across me. “You could at least tell me what you want before you start nosing about the place. You’ve been gone for two years, it can’t be right that you just walk in like this? Without so much as a pause to ask how I am?” Then Christi was adding quite brutally, “I’ve loved him for longer than you, you know.”
There was a crowd in the doorway behind her. Adam was standing to one side, listening but with his gaze fixed on something he was juggling in his hands. A screwdriver that he’d picked up off the floor. A pair of idle policemen stood beyond him and on the other side of the open doorway were the watchful eyes of Gregory. The ageing athlete looked alert. I think for a moment he’d been deeply surprised – he hadn’t known of Rhys’s marriage either. Now I think he was concerned, perhaps rightly, for the welfare of his friend’s widow. Who now most definitely wasn’t me.
Jim was swift to answer for all of us. “Of course, Mrs Williams, you must have known him for a long time. You met him when his posting with the troops took him to Italy. Kate only had him for the few years before the war. Barely any time at all. And you were very courageous in your enclave above Naples during the occupation. It is nothing short of tragic that sorrow has found you here like this. We’re very sorry for your loss. Where have you been staying for these past few weeks if it hasn’t been here?”
“With friends,” she said curtly. The weakness switched off. She’d wanted to earn my sympathy, not his.
It made me ask, “Why did you come back today?”
Christi didn’t care to answer my questions. She wanted to control me, or at least my feelings. Her reply was terse. “Because life moves on. Look, what do you want here?”
Jim interceded again. “Mrs Williams, let me be frank with you.” To my utter amazement, he went on to tell her the truth of his missing policeman’s search for the connection between the gallery, a thief and a dead middleman; and his own decision to return today to find it once and for all. He made no mention of my letter or my rendezvous with Clarke and Reed or indeed my part in this search at all. In fact he implied I was only here at all because my presence did away with the need for a warrant to search the place. The idea that I could just bring who I liked into her home sounded rather uncertain legal ground to me. I glanced at Adam and caught Gregory’s gaze instead. The space between us narrowed, particularly when this old friend stepped into the room as if he’d intercepted my silent plea to Adam to end my isolation in this place and thought I wished him to lend me his support. The mistake drove me backwards a pace and I found my hands firmly upon a banister rail.
Christi wasn’t remotely interested in Jim’s theory about the
form his crucial clue took. She suddenly snapped out, “It must hurt to hear him call me Mrs Williams.”
Her voice checked me on the first step. This wasn’t a calculated effort to draw a certain response. This was pure, desperate, impulsive venom.
Adam was in the room too now. He’d stepped in to lay his screwdriver down on a shelf where it couldn’t fall and trip anyone. He was almost as close to me as Gregory was but he wasn’t watching me. His eyes had flicked unsmilingly back to Christi.
Some devil within me, driven by the hatefully incessant tug and draw of this place, made me answer her sweetly, “Not at all. Mrs Williams is far easier on the ears than any of the other names I have for you.”
No one spoke. No one moved and the heavy silence in this room was punctuated only by the irregular chatter of a customer in the shop next door and the distant murmur of traffic on the marketplace. Then Gregory made an appalled reproof out of my name. I think he was used to pitying me. I think the alternative came as a bit of a shock.
At the same time Christi stepped forwards and reached out a hand with a view, I think, of ejecting me from the building. She said, suddenly very Mediterranean indeed:
“Bravo, Kate. Perhaps if you’d been a little more like that and a little less like an insipid lackey you might not have lost him to me, no?”
Chapter 28
For a moment there was absolute silence. Then suddenly everyone was talking at once and Jim was shouting warnings and throwing himself between us. Someone thrust us or, to be precise, thrust me roughly backwards. Above it all, Gregory was talking in a loud clear voice and recollecting an important meeting elsewhere and Jim was instructing him to stay, please, and taking me by the arm and propelling me none too gently up the stairs.