‘Where are my pictures, then? Where are those three naïve things, lovely things, though she wasn’t so keen, where the fuck are they? And a couple more, now I think of it. And where’s that interior? The room, with the chairs and the rug and all… I can’t even remember who bloody owns it, probably priceless, the one she said she couldn’t bring back until the varnish was dry? Oh, Jesus Christ, she’s gone off with them all. Probably trading off a barrow in the fucking North, wherever it is she comes from, I don’t know. Taking all those goodies back home to daddy.’
Annie plunged her arm into her bag, a large satchel affair, which swung from her shoulder well below her waist, impeding walking and bumping against her knees, her fist grasping for a cigarette, the other hand holding a lighter, the pointed face grim with fury. Her legs were long and thin in their black leggings, a thinnie who, Francis suspected, ate and drank like a Trojan, smoked like an addict and made love with the power of a train. The satchel swung as Annie swung, unhinging a packet of fags with both hands at the same time as three jugs from the low shelf leapt to the floor. One smashed absently, another rolled, the third fell against the skirting board with an audible crack. Annie never took care with things she did not personally find precious.
‘Sorry,’ she said, grasping the bag into her waist, hitching up her elongated sweater as she did so, apologizing to the breakages as if they were alive, but only briefly, turning her back so the rest were still in danger from the next, dangerous swing.
‘Watch it,’ said Francis, stepping towards her, arms outstretched, wary of the satchel and the cigarette. She stood with her arms now folded across her chest, the lit cigarette at her lips, the satchel still. Annie was skinny, attractive, bursting with all the positive qualities Elisabeth had ever lacked, realism included. Not a person to say sorry even if she was, because saying sorry after the event was a waste of breath. She puffed, waved her hand, swung round again. Another jug crashed. Francis winced.
‘Didn’t know she had it in quite so big for all this bashed old china,’ said Annie. ‘Hope it isn’t art deco or anything. Doubt it, she was always a cheapskate. Nothing worthwhile here. Where are my fucking pictures?’ Her eyes had scanned the room, alive to the shape of her own, familiar canvases, found neither the colours nor shape of a hiding place.
‘Do you know what she is, this girl? My friend and yours?’
Annie’s bright red lips, which never seemed to lose their shine, drew on the cigarette, leaving a faint pink trace on the tip. Somewhere en route she had managed to renew the lipstick, and if this room inspired in Francis a sense of comical relief, it created high temper in his companion. Now she was standing by the open desk, the surface of which was covered with tidy piles of documents, letters, invoices, bills, separately bundled in elastic bands, as if there had been a systematic tidying long overdue. On the top of one bundle of letters, she read the words, ‘My darling Elisabeth’, and read no further. No wonder the police had found their cursory investigation so easy. Then there was a bundle of photographs, their subject matter, perhaps along with the letters, explaining why it was that both the officers of the law and the neighbour upstairs had been so quick to label Elisabeth Young a bit of a goodtime girl.
‘Oh,’ said Annie, ‘never knew she had it in her.’
Black-and-white shots, all showing Elisabeth half draped or naked. A demure Elisabeth, certainly, no las-civiousness in the pose, the eyes avoiding the camera, sculptured portraits somehow designed to show distinctive angles rather than the pouting poses demanded by pornography. There was something both anonymous and vacant about this nakedness, but all Francis registered at the time was the nakedness itself and the spreading of his previous anger, melting into his veins and making him warm in that cold room. Photographs, love letters, pathetic letters. He took another glance. ‘Lizzie, won’t you please come home …’ And read no further. He formed the vague but intense impression that she had abandoned everyone who aspired to passionate fondness.
‘A thief,’ Annie said, ‘that’s what she bloody is. And a slag.’
Anger cooled into a chill sweat. Francis would not share Annie’s condemnation, the same inner prompting which told him to control his temper in a courtroom telling him now he should know better. Elisabeth had never delivered any kind of promise to either of them: what did it matter what she was?
‘I can’t see her as a thief,’ was all he responded, neutrally. ‘She might have taken away your paintings to work on them somewhere else. Do you think we have any right to touch any of these things?’ With the fading of his own anger, the mind of the lawyer returned, remembering some concepts of a justice in which he believed. Do not accuse with information unfairly obtained.
‘Let’s go, then,’ Annie said abruptly, sensing disapproval. Francis was relieved. Before they left, Annie darted into each of the other rooms, all empty in that quasi-tidiness which should have been familiar to him, but without life was strange. Clean, but not pristine, nothing quite in place, but nothing lost. Back outside in the street, where the cold stung, a different, whipping cold to the chilliness of that studio room, Francis took Annie’s arm. They were, in their slightly emotional, slightly ashamed state, back to being allies, unable to abandon each other.
‘Listen,’ said Francis, grasping her arm. ‘We don’t mind going into Elisabeth’s flat in search of possessions. Ironic, isn’t it? We barge in to look after the health of a few pictures … Shouldn’t we do just as much to try and find out how she is?’
‘She’s not my concern,’ said Annie, breaking step but only for a second.
‘Whose concern is she, then?’ asked Francis.
They had neglected to return the key: Annie forgot and Francis put it in his pocket. Watching them go down the street, Enid decided she did not mind. She had spare keys now: she was mistress of the whole house.
It vacillated, this anger of his, like a sickness, an ebbing and rising of mental temperature which left Francis exhausted through a dull meal in a weekday dull restaurant, where neither he nor Annie could find appetite. Except for that small, understated appetite for each other, not to be tested on an evening such as this. They retired to their own homes, her cheerful decor and the dozen messages on her answerphone enough to forestall a sensation of loneliness, his, calm, austere by comparison, streamlined apart from the still-crooked picture. A bachelor pad, Francis thought: to be kept thus indefinitely since women were never the gift they seemed. The empty bed was inviting, the automatically controlled heat of his rooms an incentive to sleep. In his own domain he re-exerted the control he relinquished outside in that world of anarchy which was his living, latterly mirroring the world of his emotions. I shall live alone, he thought, for a few years more, to avoid being deceived and to avoid hoping. Also to avoid the humiliation of discovering you have made love to a stranger. Strangers deserved indifference. As he fell asleep, wined and dined, Francis experienced the brief surge of contentment of a man reconciled to his life. He had not, in hindsight, been cruel to Elisabeth; she had been cruel to him. She deserved it, he told himself, this time without a hint of irony. She had a career, a family, a lover: she rode roughshod over them all.
At three, he woke with a feeling akin to electric shock, aware in the tingling of one enormous sound. A rending crash and his eyes open, simultaneous, but not synchronized, so that he did not know what the sound was, only that there had been sound, a violent sound to shock him into awareness. There was no cowardice in Francis: it was the impetuosity of him which was controlled: he had always waded into his juvenile fights at once without thinking who might be on the winning side, leapt up now without a second thought, ready to repel the threat, whatever it was. He did not think then of personal attack: Francis had never considered himself important enough for such a foul privilege, nor did he consider he could be held to ransom for his possessions. They did not yet rank high enough to risk his health, his skin or his conventional good looks.
Before he opened the door to his bedroom, he paused
for a second, fearless and aggressive, but trying wildly to analyse the sound he knew he had heard, the source of which he could not see nor as yet understand. An automatic prudence had forced his hand to reach for a dressing gown. Francis slept naked: slippers and pyjamas were not his uniform.
So he stepped into the hall of his small and perfect flat, reaching for the light, looking in the direction of his living room and the door, trying first to ascertain if there was a presence which might explain the sound which was still no more than his conviction, the tail end of it reverberating. He was potentially most violent when breathless or roused from sleep, an insult difficult to absorb. When shaken awake, Elisabeth sat bolt upright with staring eyes, clutching herself to herself. He remembered that as his foot passed over the glass and a searing pain roared into his brain. He staggered back into his room, aware that there was no intruder, no breathing presence outside, sat on the edge of his bed while his hand reached for the lamp by the side. He cradled his cut foot and plucked a shard of glass from the now dripping wound which arched in a line defined by droplets of startling red. The plucking out was painless, brought instant relief and the light illuminated the explanation.
The explosion of sound and the implosion of pain were all the result of an old, heavily framed etching in the hall falling from its hook. When he hobbled back to the door, Francis found the carpet sparkling with shards of glitter, the old, brown picture cord frayed into decay, the frame askew against a radiator and his passage in and out treacherous with shattered glass. He had no shoes in his room, nothing but his nakedness. The picture (a print he no longer liked, hence the relegation to the hall) should have been checked to see if the cord was frayed, and then replaced with wire. Everything in glass should be hung with wire, Elisabeth said: everything decays. Don’t you know that?
He hovered, finally threw his dressing gown over the glass and skipped beyond, in search of a drink. Then removed his vacuum cleaner from a cupboard and encouraged it to drink up the glass. Remnants still glimmered, stuck among the threads of the carpet. His right foot throbbed; his mind throbbed. You never own them, she had said, they will do what they will. These depictions of things have a life of their own, didn’t you know? I don’t know about love, she had also said. I might know but I don’t really know, I wish I did. Pictures are almost as unreliable as people, but not quite. It takes them years to fall.
This one, thought Francis, has me trapped either in or out of the place where I sleep, because of the glass. Something has Elisabeth trapped where she sleeps. Tramp, harlot, sometime photographic model, born in a place of which he had never heard, recipient of love letters, chameleon, peacock, efficient person, keeper of jugs, colour in her fingertips, no relatives, unable to trust, confide, confront, but equipped with skills which gave paintings life. A borrowed life, thought Francis in his bathroom, not my concern: I am a barrister and nothing is really my concern, but getting this poison out of my foot and getting to court tomorrow.
He relished the peace which followed, the whole relief of not having to fight a living intruder, with nothing to do but dab dilute disinfectant on his wound and go back to bed, leaving the mess until tomorrow. Another battleground survived relatively easily. Life went on tomorrow.
Tomorrow, then, he would check the cords of every picture to avoid a repetition. For now he drifted towards sleep again, making himself think in his precise way of how he would make people laugh when he told of this scare in the small hours, the problem of ridding the carpet of clinging glass. Unbidden, came a scene from Elisabeth’s flat: the bedroom with similar, neutral carpet, older than his own but as seen in that last, inquisitive foray, the worn patches covered with a wine-coloured rug. The one from the hall, the tripping-up rug with the treacherous fringe, absent from its place on the Saturday night when he had seen her last. Dry-cleaning, she said: he remembered that, too: the cat had been sick.
The rug. In the wrong place. Some time during this week she had been back. Or some poltergeist. Someone else in there. Bringing back that rug which had always caught his heels. Someone else, but then there had always been someone else. Francis was uneasily awake and then feel asleep again, dreaming of nothing.
There had been no post, either. Something had happened.
It isn’t my concern. I don’t still love her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Darkness fell earlier and earlier in the afternoons. Darkness increased the desire not to move. Somehow, she had got used to it all, become absorbed in the ménage until she was part of the walls. She wrote letters, of course, renewing an old habit in herself which had almost died from lack of practice. She wrote to Annie, and nicely to Enid, telling both of them where she was, and once to Francis, a few cheerful pain-free words like a postcard from holiday. The letters, given to Maria for posting, provided a chink in the armour of the environment and gave her at the same time every excuse to do what she wanted to do, which was to stay still. Once embedded in the hostage mentality, once the decision was made to sway with this pleasant regime rather than question, Elisabeth found it was all too easy. Besides, fourteen whole days of trouble-free existence in the sheer exercise of skill, paid at a rate so generous as to be absurd, had the same effect on her as manna from heaven. She had had quite enough experience of the opposite to be easily seduced by this quiet, addictive and intense excitement. I lied, I lied, Elisabeth said to herself, if ever I thought this was not enough to content me. And I did not want to treat the Gainsboroughs, for the rich and famous who would always find their experts; I wanted to rescue the lesser known, as I am doing now. But even so, amongst all this enthusiasm and comfort, she was suspending from her intellect that crowd of suspicions which buzzed around her head like midges in summer. She made them settle, for the moment, around the neck of the blue-robed portrait.
Whatever happened, all thought must be postponed until she decided what to do about the madonna’s neck. Elisabeth knew now that some of it had been painted over, not an in-filling of paint to hide damage, but an over-painting skilful and deceptive to the untutored eye until the canvas was held at an angle to show the unevenness of surface. Not only overpainting, perhaps: she had stood back, looked, stood back, looked again, worked on the other painting, and now she knew she was right. One part of the covering paint was newer than the old, more malleable, but still tough, done with an eye to permanence. When Elisabeth painted over damage or filled in a missing piece of lost paint, she did so minimally, using soft restorer’s colours for easier removal in a lighter shade than the original to make it less obvious, because to do otherwise was selfish and arrogant. Removing another person’s improvements was always a risk. Like any restorer, she was not a soothsayer and never quite knew what might lurk beneath; there were times when the decisions gave her nights of sleeplessness.
But the necklace (at least) on this vulnerable woman was a discordant piece of decoration for such a patrician face, flashy sapphires in a setting of glittery gold, at odds with tiny silver earrings and the colours of the face. Today, Elisabeth had risen early from her comfortable bed, begun to remove these stubborn jewels, piece by piece, watching the pigment on her cotton wool as she worked with a bud, rolling in carefully minute circles, never scraping. A stronger solution of acetone for the new, tough, paint, the smell of it in her eyes and her heart in her mouth.
Beneath all that crusty sparkle, there was skin, and more than that, a slender silver chain, simple in the extreme and used as the vehicle for a single, unset pearl. Perfect for the ultramarine silk which bunched and twisted in the chair below the turned body, a modest choice for a modest woman. The skin on the neck, she could see now, was darkened, but not beyond the powers of her own, cautious retouching. The beauty had been deliberately re-dressed with unnatural finery. Elisabeth simmered with the kind of rage she might have reserved for someone who maliciously persuaded a friend to wear some piece of clothing which would make her look a fool.
‘Thomas!’ Elisabeth yelled.
There were times, only br
ief times, when isolation had drawbacks, when shouting was the only thing to do. Times, she realized, when the sharing of something was the only way to define it. In the same spurt of understanding as fizzy as a soda fountain, she thought, I lied too, about not being my mother’s daughter. I love cleaning: I have done it all my adult life. Not for the first time she had an enormous longing to show the mother she never mentioned what she had done, to attempt, once more, those failed explanations of achievement, to make good the losses of the years.
‘Thomas, come and look!’ she yelled again. Shouted words fell like cotton wisps into the carpet of the hall where she stood, and, again, she was perturbed by the inability of sound to carry far in this place.
Nobody heard at first, except Maria, who materialized from the kitchen as she so often did, bearing gifts. Coffee, tea, biscuits, which, Elisabeth realized with a momentary pang of guilt, she often ignored. Maria standing there, looking at the picture with its now damaged throat, her own larynx forcing small sounds of distress from her mouth, pointing in horror. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Elisabeth found herself pushed back into the room used as a studio, her arm held, with surprising determination, Maria’s imploring face close to her own, the eyes full of tears. In the same moment of surprise she recognized the reason for the distress. Maria’s madonnalike picture, the one she often came to admire, now looked far worse, as if vandalized. The plaintive but aristocratic face looked as if someone had scratched the neck below: there was a painful residue of cleanser.
‘It’s all right,’ Elisabeth said. ‘Really, all right. Better, see?’ She seized the sable brush Thomas had provided, bought from the place she had so exactly instructed, moistened it with saliva, brushed it emptily back and forth across the scraped throat of the picture. The colours emerged in the wet.
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