The War Widow
Page 30
He didn’t return my smile. Either I’d misunderstood his comment or it wasn’t enough of an answer. After a little while I added rather dryly, “It was only later that I understood the truth about my role here. His models were an essential part of his art. But I wasn’t.”
Adam’s eyebrows lifted.
I explained, “Do you know what the most brutal discovery of all was for me? It was learning that through the years of my marriage my husband had found reason to form many derogatory judgements about me; and the overriding one was that I was actually rather silly.”
“Silly?” Adam queried the term.
“Silly,” I repeated firmly. “Silly for staying put when he plainly didn’t wish me to, silly for still caring for him when he was increasingly careless of me and definitely silly for believing I might ever have anything to contribute to a serious artistic endeavour beyond the ordinary housekeeping that anyone might do. The worst part was that he wasn’t doing it deliberately. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. This was just his genuine heartfelt response and to be quite frank I think it puzzled him that I grew to be such a disappointment. He knew he was making me sad and he was sorry for it.”
I took a breath. “He actually pitied me.”
I stopped. That last statement went ringing on and on in the room around us in a little pathetic shadow of that old loss of value. Now I really did feel a fool. I’d been speaking about my marriage quite easily and then suddenly up had crept this sneaking burst of true bitterness to the point that I felt like I was snatching for breath. I knew that this one old injury had underpinned all my reactions to the threats and accusations I had faced over the past few weeks. It had kept me going too. I couldn’t bear to revisit that old appreciation that I was judged worthy only of someone’s pity. But still I was terribly afraid that by coming here, all I had done was give these people the opportunity to teach me I was inferior all over again.
For a moment Adam was motionless. I had a horrible suspicion that he was about to launch into one of those excruciating declarations that I wasn’t an idiot really, with the earnestness one reserves for the truly fragile things of this world. But he didn’t. Instead, the photographs were reset upon their box. I watched him do it and then I said with a very odd sense of relief, “I do at least understand now that it’s not all my fault that I didn’t …” I searched for the word, “suit him.”
And it struck me then that I really did understand that. It was a new discovery.
“Absolutely,” Adam agreed easily with his attention already on the next thing. “But by that reckoning it’s not his fault he didn’t suit you either, and it’d be a shame to have to admit that.”
His dry retort sent ripples through my mind. He meant to observe that while I had been despising myself for trying and failing to be the sort of woman who could make Rhys happy, how much should I have been asking myself whether Rhys had ever really been capable of making me happy?
“No,” I agreed with the sort of hesitation that implied the thought was rolling about in my mouth and it was trying it on for size.
Then as soon as the growing warmth reached my lips it dawned on me with a little disorientating shock that I’d confided all this while the policeman had been looking at Christi’s pictures too, since he was tasked with supervising anything that caught our interest. Embarrassment descended like a cloud. I shot across the room to the door onto the landing at the head of the first flight of stairs. I stopped there, dithering and intensely conscious of the noise downstairs when Adam confided without so much as raising his voice, “Do you realise that I tried to tell you I knew who you were in almost every conversation we had, until that little piece of confusion by my car when we arrived back in Aberystwyth on that first day?”
Adam was bending over the box that I’d been meaning to search before I’d fled for the stairs instead. He waited for me to give a slight answering shake of my head. He continued, “I thought you’d remembered me when you made your farewell by that telephone box, it was so much a piece of the style of goodbyes that you and your set did at that event in this gallery. Only then I saw that you hadn’t and given that I thought I knew full well the sort of grief you were bearing and how naturally you might wish to avoid discussing it, I couldn’t very well force the truth upon you, could I? So then the secret became mine and grew into a falsehood that I was having to cultivate through no choice of my own and in a fit of exasperation I made the appalling decision to broadcast your name to the entire hotel. I don’t quite know what happened. I think,” he added sheepishly, “I must have had the bright idea of steering Mrs Alderton into asking the right question because you couldn’t reasonably avoid talking to me if it became public knowledge that we knew one another. For about a minute it made perfect sense. Then reality hit and I realised what I’d done.”
He spoke as if this was his fault. The old paint of the doorframe was brittle beneath my fingertips. A sizeable fragment flaked and joined its fellows on the floor. The carpet was an ugly threadbare red like the one in the rooms downstairs at the hotel. It made me realise with a jolt that Adam had been working to save me distress that first night in the lounge too. The night when Jim’s idea of conversation with Mary had been to go on and on about the waterfall. Adam hadn’t been shielding me from Mary’s little barbs at all. For a man so firmly fixed on honesty, he’d told a small mistruth about his actions that night. He’d known Mary wouldn’t bother me. Adam had been saving me from Jim’s continual descriptions of that drop because he knew what effect the policeman’s words would have on me and he’d done all that he could to stop it.
I opened my mouth to speak but I had no idea what I meant to say. There were no words powerful enough to break through the sheer dumbfounded appreciation of this man’s capacity for care.
Downstairs, speechlessness definitely wasn’t the problem. Jim was sharing a bold joke, Christi was laughing like a drain and then Gregory contributed something by way of a retort. I had to wonder if that policeman always had some broader aim in mind when he led a person into conversation.
Adam must have puzzling over the same. I found that my mind was blindly fixing upon my job and my gaze was already running up the next flight of stairs but Adam’s voice called me back.
He asked, “Did Rhys mean to marry Christi do you think?”
I hesitated there, my hand upon the banister rail. “Yes,” I replied. “Yes, I believe Rhys did love her.”
“And did she love him?”
I tipped my head towards the office downstairs. “Don’t be misled by her mirth. She’s as capable of playing a part as Jim is. And anyway, how are we to know what she should be feeling after only a few weeks?” Then it hit me what I’d said. Of course he would know precisely how it felt. “Oh, dear,” I said. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
I was truly embarrassed now and trying to both stay and bolt upstairs, but there was also something about finding that it really was perfectly possible to talk about such things, so I asked, “Would you have worked through all the months do you think?”
For a moment Adam was lost in the grim pattern of his own thoughts. He looked completely blank. Then realisation dawned in a faintly amused little lift of one corner of his mouth. “Oh, I see. You mean May and June. Perhaps.”
All of a sudden I was calm. I knew after a morning when all I’d done was endlessly draw support from him that I had to give something back. “Adam,” I began, “thank you for coming today. I couldn’t bear this place without you. I’d have still done it; but I’d have hated it.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“And I couldn’t talk about it either, without you. This is going to sound silly but I’m going to say it anyway while I’ve got the chance: I like talking to you. You really are a beautiful man.”
His surprise came with me as a little talisman as I climbed the stairs into Rhys’s darkroom.
Chapter 29
The stairs rose in an ‘L’ shape with the short leg at the top. The first thing I noti
ced when I reached the attic floor was that the policeman had stayed with Adam rather than following me. The second thing I noticed was that here at last was the explanation why no ghosts from my past life waited for me in this place. There was nothing left for me up here at all. Like the rest of the house, everything here had been stripped, even Rhys’s cumbersome film processing equipment and the chemical baths. Only the infrared light remained, which cast the room into hellish streaks when I depressed the switch.
I think Adam would have loved it up here, given his predilection for dark holes and lost tunnels. The darkroom consumed the entire length of the attic, from one steep gable to the other. There would have been an impressively historic window at the street end if it hadn’t been shielded by heavy wooden shutters that had never been opened in all the time I’d lived here.
This was Rhys’s sanctuary. His bolthole, as well as a functional part of his artistic processes. It was odd to see it stripped bare and it occurred to me that unless Christi had abruptly sold the lot after Rhys’s death – which surely must have raised a comment from Jim given his statement that the place had remained materially unchanged since his last visit – they must have already moved his equipment to a new studio. Which meant that she’d lied about the smallest little detail of not yet having moved to a new home.
I descended the stairs in about three seconds.
Adam and PC Downe were standing over that box; one tall and one boyishly chubby despite his years. I came to a halt in the centre of the room and began, absurdly, by saying in a rush, “I know why the place suddenly smells of damp. It’s always been masked by the vinegar stench of his chemicals before.”
Then I gave a shake of my head as if to drive out the clutter of intruding thoughts and asked Adam urgently, “All those questions about Christi’s feelings for Rhys … What is it you suspect her of?”
It was the policeman who answered me with another question. It felt like the continuation of a conversation that had been going on only moments before while I had been out of the room. PC Downe asked me, “Can you tell me what Christi is short for?”
“It’s short for Christine, I should think. She didn’t tell you when you took her statement before?”
“She gave us Christi Bollini.” The policeman meant it as a question.
I tilted my head at him. “But she isn’t really Italian, no matter what she tries to imply. Christi Bollini is her professional name.”
Keeping his voice low in case the people in the office downstairs should suddenly take to listening rather than laughing, PC Downe abruptly proved why Jim might have entrusted us to his care. He leaned in. “Will you say that again?”
I told him, “Christi Bollini is an assumed name. Legally acquired I think, but it really is barely more than a pen name. I don’t know her real surname – before she married Rhys I mean and became the next Mrs Williams. She never used it. I’ve always imagined it was something painfully ordinary, like Smith or something.”
PC Downe was nodding in a vague sort of away and proceeded to flick through his notes. He suggested in a voice that made it seem like he was a long way away, “What about Christel?”
I stared. He and Adam really had been talking while I’d been upstairs. This bore the signature workings of the author’s mind rather than the policeman’s.
Adam proved it in the next moment by adding on a wondering note of realisation, “Christi would be a contraction of her surname, would it?”
In the next moment he and I were alone while the policeman scuttled down the stairs and brought the mirth to an abrupt halt. We all heard as he discreetly asked his superior for a private word. He managed to do it in such a way as to imply that I had been mildly troublesome.
I returned to staring at Adam. I was questioning if he had deliberately waited until I was out of the room just now before sharing his suspicions. Adam raised an eyebrow. Then he said, “Who’s guessing Jim’s already worked out that she was this prize witness at Devil’s Bridge and this whole event is a sideshow to another scheme? You don’t think he’s going to want you to go to London next, do you? To search their new home?”
I said, “What do you—?”
Adam cut me off short. He said, “Ready for this?” Jim’s voice was already calling our names up the stairs. Then, while I gave him a puzzled nod and said impatiently, “Adam, what is it? You keep not telling me things!” he made it all so much more confusing by repeating that old gesture of briefly touching his hand to my cheek.
After such a morning in such a house, this was bewilderingly unexpected. I’d been thinking that contact between us had been left on the threshold to the gallery from the street outside and set aside for a quieter discussion at some other time. This sudden claim on my heart made my mind still. There was a breathless moment of doubt when it felt like he was reminding me of my fragility. Like he was telling me that I wouldn’t really have been fit to share in his discussions with the policeman. Only he wasn’t. He didn’t mean to humble me. And he wouldn’t question my energy like this. Not here, in this place, snatched in a pause between all these people who waited to discover just how cruel the past weeks had been only to use the knowledge to achieve their ends.
It was when his hand dropped that I identified the real feeling behind the gesture and it was far more unnerving. The act seemed designed to communicate, not pity as I had always known it, but something more equal and profoundly more powerful. It meant to communicate compassion.
I think I knew now what for. I meant to follow closely on his heels but some sense of completing my search held me back. Perhaps I was simply finding a convenient excuse for prolonging the moment before I had to speak to her again, and it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I’m convinced I knew then what Adam suspected and had been so unwilling to voice.
Below I heard the brief scrape of a chair and then a quick murmur of familiar voices. There was a short reply to some sarcastic comment from Christi followed by a more generous mention of my name from Gregory but instead of answering either person’s faint query, I drifted a little farther along the narrow passage at the top of the stairs.
The kitchen was worn out and rather dirty. The cupboards were bare. Probing deeper into the gloom behind the stairs, I found the door of the bathroom ajar and the room within lit by the dingy light of a small and crusted window. The bath was partially obscured by the open door. It was in the same shabby state as the kitchen. The mirror above the equally ancient sink on the far wall reflected the corner behind the door with its ranks of yellow tiles and these, in a rare contradiction of the changes that had been wrought upon the rest of the house, were just as ugly as they had always been. And here, at long last, was the ghost I had been fearing.
Just like the last visitation in Aberystwyth, he seemed pale and distant and unnatural. I hadn’t been confronted by this particular delusion for days and I had to brace myself for that old nauseating twist of my heart as reality righted itself. It never came. There was no sign either of the shameful outburst that usually wrenched itself from me in the moments after a surprise. I was utterly mute. In the mirror I saw the reflected green of his eyes. Then the eyes blinked.
For a moment I thought it had been my blink. It should have been mine. And by rights, when my eyes opened again, the apparition should have vanished like every time before. But this time I was transfixed and I didn’t even move when it spoke.
“So good of you to concede that Christi might actually care.” His voice was his own; curt and derisive, and exactly how I remembered.
Then there was a bang behind as Adam reappeared at the top of the first flight of stairs in a rush.
“Hello,” I heard Adam say and felt the floorboard shift as he stepped forwards to join me in the doorway. He came closer. He eased himself sideways into the gap between me and the wall. Touching mine without really any thought for it, his body was alive with that energy of tension while his voice was extraordinarily measured as he surveyed the vision behind the door.
Chapter 30
All things being equal, being discovered hiding in a bathtub when you’d supposedly committed suicide should have been enough to dent anybody’s confidence, but of course it hadn’t. Rhys was lounging in his office chair with as much grace as if he were giving a press interview. Jim had fractionally tipped the balance of power in his own favour by selecting the throne-like desk chair. Rhys had naturally claimed the better seat usually reserved for his clients, Christi had the other and Gregory was propped against the far wall on a stool usually employed as a plant stand. Only Adam was standing. He was leaning against the wooden doorframe before a mass of black uniforms peering through from the main gallery room behind. Adam’s gaze was roving idly across the papers stacked on top of the cabinet near his side. He wouldn’t look at me.
I was perching awkwardly on a hastily collected stack of crates near the foot of the stairs. I was shivering a little and trying very hard to hide it. I would get it under control but then Rhys would pivot in his seat, forcing me to risk a glance that might make contact with him and then it would start again.
He wasn’t looking at me anyway. No one was. Perhaps it was just shock that did that; made me feel isolated again – or perhaps the expectation that somehow these people would ensure it. But I wasn’t really feeling like that. Adam was just there across the room from me; with me as always, and yet deliberately not diminishing me by standing over me as my guardian.
The rest of this group weren’t remotely sharing my unease. They were practically performing caricatures of themselves ─ the policeman, the art collector, the new wife and the artist back from the dead. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be being presented in real, honest colour was the room itself. But even this wasn’t authentic. Christi’s system of packing had left a stack of blue books on the desk as if they were in daily use but they were merely old logs of orders and client contacts; and the box beneath me was labelled very clearly Archive Accounts 1935–1940. The books had all been old before I’d even left this place.