Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘I could mend this,’ she murmured.

  Maria shook her head violently and stamped her foot in an agony of fearful impatience. Didn’t she know, didn’t she know? More gently, but insistently, she took the painting from Elisabeth, holding it by one corner and quickly stuffed it back into its place beyond the stack of reeking canvases. She held it with finger and thumb, so light was a stretched canvas without a frame, the solidity of the paint surface so cunningly deceptive, but Elisabeth winced. A painting should be held by the sides, always. Was she so obsessive she could think of that, even now? The premonition of danger, suspended by the familiar colours, returned. Maria was hurrying, rearranging the dressing room to hide every trace of their presence, shutting the door firmly and brushing her hands down her overall. The smell lingered over them both. When Maria turned back to Elisabeth, her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Poor, poor, poor,’ she said. The words of sympathy were crooned, urgently. It was imperative but impossible to explain, but she knew she must try, throwing her whole ugly body into the attempt, spittle flying with the gestures. Survival depended on it.

  ‘He cleans,’ she spat, rubbing the air with an imaginary cloth. ‘Make clean, perfect … And after, when it is Perfect …’ She stopped, and began to drag an uncomprehending Elisabeth back down the corridor to the cloak cupboard by the front door. Inside, Maria rummaged and spat, attacking the box of sticks. Cupboard upon cupboard, this place so full of tidied-away secrets, doors upon doors. Maria abruptly produced one black umbrella, then a second, then a third, finally a stick tipped with silver, which she flourished before she looked at it again and shrugged.

  ‘Not this one,’ she spat. ‘But like this, he does this … She held the cane like a fencer, thrust with it in the direction of the kitchen, making small, lunging movements accompanied by aggressive grunts, ‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’ There was a rumble and a crash as Butler’s growls increased and he hurled himself against the door. ‘Bastard!’ Maria yelled lunging harder and breaking into a peal of laughter. She dropped the stick and crept closer to the door. ‘Big bastard, and your master, your mother was a cat!’ The effect was more comic than tragic: Elisabeth laughed, too, until they whooped with crazy giggles even as Elisabeth was thinking of stranger sounds, her eyes mesmerized by the silver top of the stick as it lay on the ground. Now that she understood more than the half, she found the rest intolerable knowledge and her fingers became nerveless with fear. Step step click, one two click, the footsteps in the mind, like the dance before the sacrifice. She did not know how long they had been in the dressing room by Thomas’s bed, how long standing here while Maria let rip her hidden talents and played the fool, but her mind was filled with the sound of footsteps, the flash of silver which had threatened so in the deserted railway station where she had first seen it, the steps in the street, one two click, one two click, haunting for weeks, encouraging, even manufacturing her escape into this confinement. He had lured her here through her fear of the outside. Slowly and by common accord, the two of them stopped laughing. Elisabeth, copying Maria’s action with the painting, took the fallen stick and replaced it exactly where it had been found and closed the door. Then, as they stood looking at each other, wondering how they might broach the monster in the kitchen and the monster beyond, they heard a sound at the front door. Butler became silent. Elisabeth and Maria, the latter with a finger over her lips and a head frantically shaking, fled to the studio room. Elisabeth picked up a rag and a bottle of white spirit: Maria stood behind in a pose of uneasy nonchalance.

  ‘Thomas?’ Elisabeth gaily called as the front door opened and Butler began to bark again. ‘Thomas, is that you?’

  He did not answer. Elisabeth began to rub at the third picture, already clean, the actions of her fingers automatic, keeping her back to the door. The light had already faded: she had not turned on the tungsten light for the earth colours of which this picture was composed, panicked. Too dark to work: he would know she could not work at this hour without light, but she stood still, hoping against desperate hope that the half light and her shaking would not betray her. His footsteps were very slow, guessed at rather than heard over that sound-muffling carpet, teased by Maria’s vacuum cleaning into thicker pile and greater silence. It was his breath she heeded before the sound of his steps on the wooden floor of the studio, his presence, directly behind her, looking at Maria’s immobile face, then at Elisabeth’s back in its pretended concentration.

  ‘Maria, what are you doing here? You mustn’t disturb Elisabeth, I told you. Elisabeth, your shopping. And I bought you something – well, a present…’

  She turned with what she hoped was a grateful smile. Beneath the glasses his nostrils were dilated: he carried neither stick nor umbrella, and she thought for one wild moment she might be wrong, she and Maria, about every thing. The nostrils continued to twitch. His sense of smell, Elisabeth had noticed, was peculiarly refined: she had watched him sniff food as if its odour were the most essential element. In guilty response, she raised her own hands to her nose as if to brush away dirt. Her fingers reeked of onions, fires, kitchen smells, including must and mice, the scents which had impregnated the old and battered canvases in front of those which were newly restored but disfigured. Oil takes up smells, she remembered: an oil painting will smell for ever of where it has been, the fumes of the air, heat, cooking, coal, all drunk into the medium. You could tell how an ancient kitchen smelt, she remembered, by the painting from above the fire; paintings lived to tell tales, and so did the present state of her hands, her smock, Maria’s overall, all stinking with the odour of other generations.

  ‘Go to the kitchen, Maria. Now.’

  Maria tried to appear surprised. ‘Go,’ he said. She remembered Butler in the kitchen, cringed, put her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Tea,’ said Elisabeth brightly. ‘Tea. I’ll go.’ Thomas smiled and shook his head in a wide, lazy sideways movement, like a horse disturbing flies in summer. With one hand on her shoulder, he propelled Maria out of the room. Elisabeth stood still, unsure of what to do. The front door was unlocked now: she had imagined Thomas escorting Maria towards it, as he did most evenings, telling her what time to come back tomorrow, guarding his secret of the lock’s combination. All she had to do was run behind them both and, when the door was open, run some more, past the two and down the stairs. The paralysis melted: she felt in the pocket for her house keys, remembering even then, she had no house, merely a roof, but something, anything where she was not captive, a park bench, was better than this. She recalled the sensation of Thomas’s hand on her arm, shuddered, prepared to move. The timing was crucial: with the good arm Thomas could stop a train.

  Then she heard the kitchen door open and slam shut and realized what he had done. The air, still air in this flat on top of the world, was rent with screams of terror. Thomas stood outside the door of the kitchen, looking at it in puzzlement, smiling his silly smile, as if it were not he who had slammed it shut on Maria and that dog.

  The last stop of the day was the garage and the rain had begun again. A fool’s errand, Annie thought halfway. Elisabeth’s car was dead, so why would Elisabeth have come here at all, although her invoices showed she had been here twice in the last year? She could not have been contemplating buying another car before her own was stolen, or could she? Annie was damp, sick of the sight of buses and trains and the weight of the umbrella. It was not meant to be held aloft, too much metal even if the metal were silver. Annie found the garage desolate. A fat, middle-aged man sat in the kiosk on the forecourt, his shelter so small there was no room inside for anyone else, so Annie stood outside. The man was distracted, staring into the distance away from her, so she tapped on the window, awkwardly, with the umbrella. Rain shone on the silver tip. The man turned, saw Annie and shrank back into the swivel chair he occupied. The cheap upholstery of the chair was torn, and foam stuffing poked obscenely through.

  ‘Elisabeth Young?’ Annie began, brightly enough, but her smile was wearing thin. H
e shouted at her to go away, but she stayed while he put his head in his hands, muttered, wept. She persisted.

  There was this car, her car, he said. Which she had brought in and which his son had taken and never said anything about it. Never, until this man came in, with that umbrella, and took him to one side. ‘Why couldn’t the boy have told me first?’ the father said. ‘I could have covered up for him. But that other bloke, he was frightening and in the end the boy told us both. Frightening, asking about the car, said he was Miss Young’s uncle, but he was not, she could never have an uncle like that, I said. She was too nice, I said, but the boy, well he was terrified, he told him things he’d never tell me. But when I found out from listening what he’d done, my boy, with that girl’s car, I beat him good and proper. “It was broken, dad,” he said, “it was already good for nothing, that car; stoppit, stoppit.” But I didn’t stop, I was angry, wasn’t I?’

  It didn’t make sense to Annie, any of it. Only about the uncle having the umbrella she now carried, which he had stuck in the kiosk seat to make his point. An uncle tying up the loose ends of Lizzie’s life, seeking to pay her bills. Someone who had been through Elisabeth’s correspondence and all her records as carefully as she. Annie understood only about the boy running off, taking another car, driving the way he tended to drive when he, too, was hurt and angry. And not coming home again, making his father cry with guilt. Absent, like all those similarly haunted by a man with a blade concealed in his innocence.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Francis had heard worse stories, even in his relatively few years of practice. Many worse, of burnt babies and abused children, brutalized beyond hope of a moral code, no possible salvation in a society which was meaningless to their lives. All of these histories he had absorbed with professional disinterest, reproduced where necessary in mitigation or quoted to friends, sometimes with less respect than others, but more often with incredulity. Compassion was dulled by ignorance and distance: he could not afford to let pity swell his senses and make him forgot his lines.

  It was different, though, when that life about whom a tale was told had touched his own. ‘Is it yours, then?’ the taxi man had jeered. Is she pregnant, will you marry her, is she in trouble? As if that were the only kind of trouble.

  Francis had not once thought of marrying Elisabeth. The love which preceded marriage was surely quite different from the emotion he had so signally failed to nurture towards her. A marriageable love would be a question of compatibility, similarity, not at all like the initial crush of amazing intensity which had blazed his trail to Elisabeth with her softly accented voice and all those artisan but artistic qualities. No she was not suitable, with varnish in her fingernails, her abrupt common sense, her frequent lack of the charm he possessed himself in such abundance; was instead a person stuck in limbo, the professional from working-class stock, neither fish nor fowl, seeming so ready to face the world, so immune to public opinion, seeming indeed, like someone who could protect herself with all that sublime independence which had been half of the attraction but fifty per cent of the irritation. No promises of any kind had ever entered his transactions with Elisabeth, but somehow the thought of her being pregnant was not unpleasant and he almost wished it were true.

  The country seemed to flower into colour as his train drew out of the dismal, unmanned station which was a shaming contrast to the new concrete richness of Clayfields’ nearest town. Culture here was carried in polythene bags, Francis thought, and chided himself for his snobbery. Night fell as the train roared south. He dozed with nightmarish visions before his eyes, visions which defied logic but included an image of the Velasquez Venus. Elisabeth had led him to it in the National Gallery, pointing out the very faintest of lines which showed where it had been restored, then shown him later a picture in a book of the same Venus, hacked by the knife of a maddened suffragette. The Venus had a dazzling body, lay on her side with the long curve of her perfect back facing out, head resting on a hand as she gazed at her own reflection in the mirror held by Cupid. Such flesh that Francis and a million others wanted to touch the hollow of her waist and run hands down her thighs. The suffragette had sliced into that tactile flesh with a blade, ripping through the buttocks and the spine with systematic strokes, but Venus had not wept or died: she had lived to enchant, hung there now, with those infinitesimal marks on her back, restored because she was priceless and beautiful and the blade had been so sharp, her shadowed face still smirking into her mirror.

  To the rhythm of the train, the erotic body of the painting became Elisabeth’s with none of her anonymity: the bile of the image choked the back of his throat as if he had swallowed lava. Elisabeth, lying thus, cut across her curves with knives, red blood welling on olive-skinned flesh from wounds a foot long. Elisabeth, led silent round her dying village with paint obscenely smeared on her breasts, covering her scars for ever. Francis had heard worse stories, could not recall a worse dream.

  Annie had been crying, sitting in her flat snuffling. For the people who loved Elisabeth, for the boy in the garage and his howling father, crying out of a nameless fear and an equally indefinable guilt which belonged with the letters inside the pig. It seemed to her that Elisabeth was dangerous to all she knew, but Annie was growing to love her with the love she preserved first for the victims of bullies, and second for all those men who might never love her back. Annie listened to Francis, who told the saga of his day, omitting the manic laughter and the last remarks of the taxi man. Annie told the details of her day, omitting anything which did not give her credit, such as the silly crying and the resentment with which she had begun in the morning. Then she showed him the letters.

  ‘Great family,’ she said, spreading out the letters on the floor, her collection from the intestine of the rosewood pig. ‘Really lovely. Just like yours and mine, I guess. Sweethearts, every one. Load of bastards.’

  The letters, various colours and ages, were now scattered. Annie liked the thought of watching Francis pick them up, but was denied the privilege. Her phone rang in the other room and she went to answer.

  Francis bent down from the chair and scooped a few sheets into a fist with less elegance than he might have used if Annie had been watching. For all their common purpose, they were still making each other reluctant to take it seriously: here in the warmth, it became more of a game they could play and they were as aware of one another as mating cats. The frozen North, which had slid away from him in the train, the shower and the taxi came back with the bitterness of the wine and the crinkle of cheap paper. Pink.

  Annie’s face, when he raised his head to her footstep, was equally pale, two nodules of crimson blusher standing out on her cheeks.

  ‘That was a shopkeeper,’ she said shortly. ‘One of those where I went today, following my little trail of devotion. Do you know we could get half of London looking for Lime Lizzie if we wanted? Anyway, someone came in on an errand.’

  Francis jumped. A vivid but guilty hope enlivened his face.

  ‘No, no, not her. Just someone who came in for a special kind of gauze, the kind Elisabeth uses. They don’t get much call for it and there aren’t many art restorers that go into medical-supply shops, are there? That’s what Yvonne said, a friend of Lizzie’s. They all call themselves friends of hers.’

  ‘Don’t call her Lizzie,’ Francis said automatically.

  ‘Suit yourself. They didn’t have what he wanted, so she offered to send it to him if he paid in advance. He said he’d collect. But he was a funny little man, Yvonne said. A bit sinister, she said, told her he was a restorer, but he can’t have been, she said, because he looked blind, had a funny stick and dark glasses.’

  ‘And? So? Maybe every art restorer uses the same things, I don’t know …’

  She sat down abruptly. ‘Oh my God. Oh my Christ.’

  ‘What?’ said Francis.

  ‘I forgot the glasses. I always forget glasses. I know who he is. There’s this man, bought a picture from me, just the once, ages ago, ask
ed me about restorers, I told him about Lizzie. Only I’ve lost the paperwork, the way I do. He gave me a picture for restoration … I passed it on for Lizzie to do … it’s the one that disappeared from her place and I couldn’t remember whose it was. Drove me mad. You know the one I mean. Don’t you remember I asked you about it? She had it for ages. Two chairs, a wooden floor …’

  ‘Yes, I know the one, I know. I wanted it, picture of a room. But why, what?’

  Annie flourished from behind her back the silver-tipped, beautiful, lethal umbrella.

  ‘He had a stick with silver on, a bit like this. A funny, fussy, not very memorable man to look at, that’s why I didn’t remember him, far too unmemorable. Apart from the stick. And the glasses.’

  ‘Where did you find that?’ asked Francis, gesturing to the umbrella.

  ‘In her bloody flat,’ said Annie. ‘And it wasn’t there last time, was it?’

  He took the umbrella, examined it like a judge with an exhibit. He pulled off the ferrule, carelessly. The blade beneath scored the palm of his hand and together they watched the forming of a thin line of blood.

  Thomas had left the flat with Maria, taken her away. He said he would be back soon. The door clunked shut behind him. Elisabeth squirmed with shame. Tossed her head and arched her body with the agony of it; shame, guilt incarnate in her own sweating flesh. Neither the lights over the picture nor the heat of a tropical sun could have made her perspire so much with this guilt, this shame, shame, shame. To have listened to those screams and remained still, struck with the paralysis of violence, doing as she was told thereafter, the cowardly mopper of blood. She thought, I cannoned into Thomas as he stood outside the kitchen door. I may have shouted at him, but not for that long; I did nothing to persuade him to move until he was ready to move and open the door, and there she was crouched with her ugly mouth, whimpering now, not screaming, for which I dared be grateful. The dog, licking its foul lips, as if he had not liked the texture of her hairy skin, experimenting with the aftertaste. Maria’s stumpy legs were bleeding, a little mashed around the ankle, small puncture wounds which did not penetrate to muscle, nips rather than bites, but still wounds which would turn black, blue, throb for days. There was also an ugly scrape on one shin which might have hurt worst of all, but looked less significant, the skin red raw from the tom edge of the plastic rubbish bin behind which she had hidden to shield herself from the worst. With passable success, but not enough to dismiss the terror from her face, make her voice more audible than a kitten’s mewing, or the mouth more human than a slack and dribbling line. Thomas had laughed. Behind that soft exterior of consistent civility, the madness and sadness showed like the wounds on his servant. He laughed as if it were a joke, the comforting but forced laughter of an adult in front of a child in order to pretend that falling down was not really serious, that the child was not really hurt and should not make a fuss. Laughter to surprise someone into smiling and forgetting, carrying the promise of a treat if they complied. He had put his arms round Maria’s shoulders. And then, most obscene of all, worse than her screams and her bleeding legs, was her response. She placed her arms around his neck, her face against the barrel of his chest, and let him hold her, sobbing.