by Julia Crouch
She tiptoed up the stairs to Anna’s bedroom. Gareth was still in there, huddled under the duvet. She held her breath for a few minutes to check he was still breathing. She was soon rewarded with a loud inhaled snore. After he had settled himself again, Rose took herself back down the stairs.
She went out to the Annexe to check on Polly. Tiptoeing up the steps, she knocked on the door.
‘Come in,’ Polly said in a small voice.
Rose took in the scent of the room. Polly had attempted to mask it with her perfume, but the same dark faecal taint surrounded her as it did Gareth. She lay in the bed, propped up by pillows, one long, thin hand resting on the top of the duvet, the other holding a book of Rimbaud’s Oeuvres Poétiques, as if she had arranged herself to look like Mimi in La Bohème, instead of an Englishwoman with diarrhoea.
The room was a mess.
‘How are you?’ Rose whispered.
‘On the mend,’ Polly smiled weakly.
‘You still up for Brighton tomorrow?’ Rose asked.
‘Try to stop me,’ Polly said, the smile vanishing from her face.
‘I’ll book a cab to get us to the station; I don’t want to disturb Gareth. Do you want a wake-up call?’ Rose said. ‘We’ll have to leave by seven.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Polly said.
‘Good, good. Anything I can get you?’
‘Just a glass of water, please.’
Rose went over to the kitchen area and turned on the tap. Standing there at that sink, she was reminded of a different era in her life, one that had been full of hope, when she, Gareth, Anna and Andy lived here and everything was looking up, before the roof went on the house, before she got pregnant, before Polly came to stay. She remembered doing the washing-up in this same spot, after a robust, roast-chicken supper that had felt well-earned after a day of hard graft.
Some part of Rose wished now that she could take a big demolition ball and knock The Lodge and everything it meant and contained down. She would erase it, and then move back into the Annexe to live the uncomplicated life of a hermit, or a nun.
She passed the water to Polly, who took a couple of sips then put it by her bedside.
‘I think I’ll try and get a little sleep now,’ Polly said. ‘So that I’m fresh for the morning.’
Fresh, thought Rose. Now, there’s a word.
She slipped down the stairs and skirted around the side of the house, just pausing to look up and check that Polly wasn’t watching her from the Annexe window. It wasn’t that she really cared about being discovered by Polly. It was one thing Gareth trying to stop her – he had the physical strength to do so; but Polly she could cast aside with one sweep of her arm if she so wanted. In fact, she thought as she headed over the back lawn, past the site of the fox murder, it was a wonder that she had managed to restrain herself so far. She could have just reached out and brought Polly down. Taken her out. Wasn’t that the expression?
Winding her fingers in the curlicues of the key, she slipped it into the studio keyhole. Before opening the door, she paused for a second. Did she really want to do this? If, as she suspected, she were to discover something she didn’t want to find, how would that change things? Perhaps it was better to go on not knowing. Perhaps it was better simply to work at ousting Polly so that their lives could, gradually, assume the perfect future they had once envisaged for themselves.
But she didn’t have the discipline for that, not at this point. Like a child with a carefully wrapped Christmas present, she wanted to see inside now. She thrust the door open and allowed her eyes to adjust to the gloomy, blind-drawn interior.
She snapped the lights on and the shrouded shapes gave up their secrets. If she were to be discovered down here, she could always say she had come to get the coffee cups for the dishwasher – she could count twelve dotted around the place. And then there were the wine glasses, quite a few of which had a familiar red shade of lipstick around the rim, and the empty bottles, which she could say she was fetching for the recycling.
Really. It wasn’t very careful of them.
But there was worse to come. Rose looked around. The place looked like a tip. This was normal. It was the one area of the house where Gareth could let his true nature express itself. Every surface was covered. Rose moved towards a long bench that ran down one side of the room, almost four metres of it. You really couldn’t see it through the drift of paper, drawings and pens that smothered it. For a horrible second, Rose thought there were some body parts in amongst it, but when she explored further with her fingers, she realised it was just dried up Sta-Wet palettes full of great nubs of nut-hard acrylic paint in all sorts of flesh tones.
She went over to the old plan-chest that she remembered helping Gareth salvage from the renovation of a couple of the art studios at Goldsmiths. On top was a six-inch pile of A1 sheets of Bristol board. Rose rifled through. Some fell to the ground, and she left them where they lay. The work, all pencil and charcoal, and ink, was of angular curves, of belly skin, stretched between hipbones, of tiny breasts with nipples like thumbs, a rack of ribs for a back.
He had inked some of the drawings. Rose looked hard at those. With their loose black stockings, their curls of pubic and underarm hair, their sad, sex eyes that gazed directly at the viewer, they brought Egon Schiele to mind. But there was something else there. A melancholy air of Christos.
This was extraordinary work for Gareth. Rose could see that. While the influences were plain, he had taken it way beyond. This was work that had Gareth’s own stamp on it. His agent, and his gallery, would be very pleased indeed. It was beautiful work – fresh, exploratory, yet commercial and very, very accomplished.
Of course, there was the question of who the model was.
Rose looked at the tumbled, unmade sofa bed that stood over against the far wall. On the floor, just by it, was a pair of black stockings that she recognised from the work. She walked over and picked them up, letting the fine stuff fall through her fingers. Underneath was a little pair of black knickers. Silk. She picked them up and sniffed them, like she did if she found Anna’s underwear lying around, to see if it needed washing. This pair certainly needed to go in the machine. But their scent was heavy and musked, a million miles away from Anna’s pissy little girl tang. A white residue stained the gusset, as if these had been forced up inside the wearer in a heated moment . . .
Rose knelt on the floor and sniffed the bed, where she found long dark hairs. And my God, she thought, this bed needs stripping and washing. She had to fight every bone in her body to stop herself pulling the sheets away and bundling them up.
She stood up and tried to picture the scene: Polly lying on her back, Gareth doing to her what he had done to Rose only a couple of weeks before. Her bones against his strong chest. Him burying his face down there underneath her concave belly.
The spring that had been drawing back inside Rose was finally released. She grabbed a pillow from the bed and slammed it down again and again, until it burst and its tiny feathers fluttered down, like she had imagined, like the aftermath of a ruck of angels. She ripped the sheets from the bed and emptied tube after tube of expensive paint over them. She dragged the paint-smeared sheets around the room, like naked girls in a 1960s action painting. The feathers joined in with her, swirling and falling, embedding themselves in the paint.
She stopped for a minute, panting, and surveyed her work. Then she went for the drawers where Gareth kept all his equipment. She rummaged around until she found a Stanley knife. She went first to the stinking, stained knickers and shredded them. Then she took herself to the pile of Bristol Boards, to the best work Gareth had ever done, and she slashed each one of the drawings until she was surrounded by a pile of ribbons. Finally, she went to the large, impressive oil and acrylic paintings of Polly that Gareth had propped up around the two empty walls of the studio, the work Rose had failed to notice until now, and gouged each set of staring soulful eyes out, leaving dark holes where there had once been his work, his look
ing, his taking. It seemed appropriate: payback time exerted by Rose on behalf of his poor birth mother for what he did to her with BloodLine.
Then, brushing her hands free of the shards of canvas and paint that covered them, she switched off the light, locked the door and threw the key into the pond. Those ancient keys didn’t come with copies. Even if Gareth did get up before they left for Brighton, that should buy her a bit of time to stage her getaway.
Forty-Two
Rose had a quick shower, then spent what remained of the afternoon packing for Brighton. She started the task by making a list, on which, amongst the baby wipes, nappies, changes of clothes for herself, Flossie and Anna, she included: suit of armour, bazooka, landmines (two).
By leaving out the ordnance, she managed to boil everything down to one large rucksack and a wheeled suitcase. It wasn’t exactly travelling light, but it nevertheless felt liberating to know that she and her daughters had everything they needed for survival in just two bags. She then packed two smaller, wheeled suitcases for the boys. She supposed she would be the only one to think about that, and it wasn’t fair on them to be bloody-minded about such things.
She rang Simon to check on the children, and to warn him that they wouldn’t be staying to watch a movie, because an early night was called for. In all honesty, this was more for her own benefit than theirs. Her duvet was calling her. She just wanted to hide there until the morning, and then leave.
Instead, though, she had the rest of the afternoon to deal with. She got some chicken stock out of the freezer and heated it up with some thread egg noodles in it to serve to the invalids. To add belt and braces to her plan, she ground another four of the green herbal pills in her pestle and mortar and stirred the powder into Gareth’s bowl.
‘That should keep him quiet,’ she said to the kitten, who was crying up at her, unfed. ‘I’m not going to humour you, you know,’ Rose said, ignoring its pitiful mewing. ‘You’re the devil’s work, you are.’
She found a tray and spread one of her lovely Irish linen, lace-edged napkins on it. They were among the few things she had taken from her parents’ house when they had kicked her out. She had rarely used them.
She smoothed out the ironed-in creases. They had kicked her out. She thought about it. In their view, she had shamed them, so they had actually kicked her, their only child, out of their home. Left her alone, in trouble, with only Polly to rely on, only Polly to sort her out.
How could they do that? And was it any wonder she didn’t want to go back to Brighton? But it was too late now. And anyway, she had plans, now.
She poured Gareth’s soup into one of her favourite vintage Biot bowls and placed it on top of the napkin. By the side, she positioned a heavy tumbler of water, a small vase with a little bunch of honeysuckle from the garden in it, and a weighty silver soup spoon from the ancestral canteen she and Gareth had received from Pam and John for a wedding present-cum-attempted peace-offering. If he was feeling well enough, he would be pleased with this arrangement. Pleased enough, hopefully, to drink the whole bowlful no matter how bitter it tasted.
She tiptoed up the stairs and knocked softly on Anna’s door.
She heard Gareth mumble something, so she pushed the door open and went inside. He was ashen, but awake, with dark rings under his eyes. What a baby, Rose thought. What a milksop.
‘I brought you a little chicken soup.’
‘Oy vey,’ he tried to smile.
‘If you eat something, it’ll make you stronger.’ She put the tray down in front of him.
‘Very pretty,’ he said, taking the spoon in his hand.
She hoped he didn’t think she was trying to say sorry for her outburst with this tray of food. But it was a risk she had to take in order to keep him quiet. She watched with satisfaction as he took first one then another spoonful of the soup.
‘I’ll take a bowl up to Polly,’ Rose said, turning to go.
‘How is she?’
‘On the mend. Bit better than you, in fact. She still wants to go to Brighton tomorrow, in any case.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You must go. Don’t worry about me.’
As if, Rose thought.
Polly was asleep when Rose took another, less well-adorned tray up to the Annexe, so she left it on the floor by the bed. With any luck, she would tip it over when she got up and get cold soup over her nightdress.
Back at The Lodge, Rose was just slipping on her Barbour for the walk over to Simon’s house to pick up the children, when she heard Anna’s bedroom door swing open and Gareth rush across the landing to the family bathroom. He was in such a hurry, he didn’t have a chance to shut the door, and Rose listened with satisfaction to his involuntary exertions. Before she went, she lit a Jo Malone candle on the kitchen table, to mask the stink.
It took a while to get the children to sleep. They were so excited about the impending trip that they begged Rose for details, for snippets of history, for tips as to the best rides on the pier. She put up her hands and refused to say a word.
‘You’ll find out all about it at the weekend,’ she promised. Instead, she read the chapter from Winnie the Pooh where he takes a balloon and floats up into a tree.
She put them all to bed, then sat at the kitchen table and drank an entire bottle of Gareth’s special champagne. She felt the day called for a celebration. The champagne tasted quite disgusting served warm, but it seemed more fitting that way.
Forty-Three
When Rose went downstairs the following morning, she nearly fell over in shock. Polly was already up, sitting in the kitchen armchair, dressed like a punk Celia Howard in Brief Encounter. She balanced a little handbag on her knee; a small suitcase that Rose had never seen before was perched on the floor beside her.
‘Good morning!’ Polly said, her face bright. ‘I fed the cat. He was starving, poor kitty.’
Hungover, still unwashed and in her nightclothes, Rose didn’t feel anywhere near as perky. She grunted and put Flossie in her high chair. Then the house erupted, as the herd that was Nico, Yannis and Anna thundered down the stairs.
‘Are we going to be late?’ they asked.
‘Will the taxi be here on time?’
Nico and Yannis directed all their questions at Rose. They seemed to fail to notice that their mother, whose health they had feared for so much the day before, was now alive and well and sitting in the kitchen.
‘Hush now, we don’t want to wake Gareth,’ Rose said. ‘It’s only just gone six.’
When they were all washed, breakfasted and dressed, they took their suitcases up the steps towards the lane to wait for the people-carrier that the local shopkeeper’s husband drove and which served for the village taxi. Rose didn’t want him to pull up in the driveway and sound his horn like he normally did. She had left a brief, functional note for Gareth, reminding him to feed the kitten. She had also taken the precaution of not letting him know where they were staying and removing Polly’s mobile phone from her handbag while she was in the bathroom. She turned it off, ran it under the tap for good measure, then hid it at the back of the dresser.
It was a misty morning – so misty that you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. Rose hoped it was only a local problem – they did live in a slight dip – or they might actually miss the train, and then what would she do?
They stood on a nub of grass at the lane entrance to The Lodge and waited. The older children pulled up long grasses and, holding them like cigarettes, pretended to smoke them, blowing out clouds of breath into the damp air. Flossie was quiet, cocooned in her allterrain buggy like a sleeping Buddha. Out there in the cold country morning, all done up in her forties gear, Polly looked a little gormless, Rose thought. She was clearly bamboozled by the early hour, the chill, and the fact that she really wasn’t wearing enough clothes for someone with no inbuilt insulation.
‘Look!’ Anna said, pointing at a chandelier of cobwebs, jewelled with diamanté beads of dew. Nico drew back his grass cigarette and swiped at them
, bringing the elaborate construction twinkling down with a silent clatter. Anna laughed and clapped her hands. A couple of months ago she would have been distraught. Rose wondered what had shifted to harden her daughter so, and whether it was a good or bad thing.
Thankfully, the taxi turned up on time and Rose’s fears about the mist were unfounded. Once they got onto the main road it was plain sailing, and they arrived at the station with five minutes to spare. Even boarding the train was simple, despite all the bags and the children, thanks to an absurdly cheery, red-faced couple of older male station guards who insisted on doing everything ‘while you ladies find a nice seat for yourselves and the kiddies’. There was even a trolley service on the train, run by an apple-cheeked young Polish girl. As soon as they sat down on their reserved seats, she wheeled up towards them and offered them tea, coffee and hot chocolate along with fresh sugared doughnuts for the children. Rose paid.