‘So your parents are both dead, Rose?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I told you.’
‘That doesn’t mean it’s true.’
‘So you’re saying I’m a liar.’ She ran ahead, away from him, tripping on a broken slab of pavement. He lunged forward, stopped her falling, retrieved her chocolate wrapper with its last two squares of wholenut, restored it to her carefully, as if she were a child.
‘People often have to lie. I respect that, actually.’
She bit, hard, into a hazelnut, crunched it in her teeth. ‘Why should I be lying?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve got this sort of gut feeling that your story isn’t true. It’s been nagging at me ever since you told me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but it is true. They died a month ago.’ She tossed her chocolate wrapper in the overflowing litter-bin, tried to throw her guilt away, as well – guilt not just about the lies, but about murdering her parents. It was tempting fate to say they’d died, might bring down retribution. She didn’t want them harmed; simply preferred to keep away from them, cut all ties, all contact. In that sense, they were dead – dead to her, at least.
The artist ground his cigarette out, after just a few brief puffs, as if he were trying to cut down, or perhaps control his irritation by stubbing it to shreds. ‘So what exactly did they die of?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I can’t explain.’ She traced a pattern on the pavement with her shoe. The silence felt oppressive, almost dangerous. ‘Okay,’ she mumbled finally. ‘You’re right. They’re still alive. It’s just – well – complicated.’
‘So are you.’ He met her eyes a moment, seemed to gaze right through them into the inside of her head, glimpse the muddle and confusion there. ‘Race you to that kiosk,’ he said suddenly.
She broke into a gallop, careering down the promenade, spurring herself on as she heard his steps pounding close behind her. She had to win this time, made a last wild effort, collapsed against the kiosk, gasping, out of breath.
‘I won, I won! There should have been a prize.’
‘There is.’ He drew out a small pebble from his inside jacket pocket. ‘A magic stone.’
‘Why magic?’
‘Perhaps you need some magic.’
She took the stone, which was smooth and cool and rounded like a tiny weighty egg, grey mottlings on its Bournville brown, one gnat-sized dent marring its perfection. She transferred it to her own pocket, kept her hand closed over it. ‘Hey! Look at all those people!’
They had walked into an excited mob jostling on the promenade, and gawping at a shattered row of houses. The roofs had all blown in, bare wood joists showing through like bones; their frail and spindly balconies no match for last night’s wind. The crowds were swarming round like sightseers, pointing and exclaiming, picking up souvenirs, even taking photographs. Some were in the gardens, trampling the bruised grass, spying on the obscene and private contents of an upturned rubbish bin – fishbones, dirty nappies, dented yogurt pots, a half-gnawed chunk of breadcrumbed cod, a man’s stained underpants. Two rival dogs were rooting in a Kentucky Fried Chicken box; several children playing on the creaking crippled remnants of a once-sturdy garden shed. Jane followed, almost mesmerised, touched the frame beneath a missing window, which felt jagged and uneven, like the socket of a badly extracted tooth, root fragments still embedded in the gum. Her hand groped to her own mouth, as if surprised to find it unscathed – not bleeding, not inflamed.
‘Rose! Come out of there.’
She could have been his dog, the high-handed way he called her – that mangy mongrel by the fence now sniffing at a pile of greasy rags. Yet she obeyed him none the less, trailing down the promenade a step or two behind him, back towards the car. He glanced across his shoulder at the still milling, jabbering throng. ‘Listen to those hypocrites! They’re all wailing, ‘‘Oh, how tragic,’’ yet secretly they’re thrilled.’
‘Thrilled? What for?’
‘Because they’re safe, of course – alive and whole and gloating while the other poor sods perished. They say nineteen people died last night, and hundreds more were injured. Yet even those who suffered see themselves as heroes. It’s rather like the war. There’s an excitement in destruction. Can’t you feel it?’
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I can’t. Maybe they’re relieved – that’s only natural, surely, but why should they be gloating?’
‘Why not? We’re all two-faced at heart. I mean, even with our friends we sometimes feel a curious sort of pleasure when one of them’s in trouble – a certain secret relish that it’s them instead of us; or maybe worse than that – maybe just a basic satisfaction at someone else’s crisis.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Speak for yourself. Not everyone’s so callous.’ She knew it sounded rude, but she had to contradict him, insist that he was wrong.
‘More than you imagine. You’ve only got to listen to the news – all that wild adrenalin pumping out on almost every channel – excited breathless voices like the ones they use for Cup Finals, a new high each time the body-count goes up.’
‘It’s not like that. It’s …’ Jane tried to quash the voices she was hearing in her head; those explosive hyped-up voices they had switched on in the car, trumpeting disaster.
‘Why deny it? Except everybody tries to, as if we can’t face our real nature. And yet we’re all turned on by tidal waves or earthquakes, or great storms like last night’s, because those so-called acts of God express a violence we’re familiar with, a violence in ourselves.’
‘Are you excited by it, then?’
He frowned, considering. ‘Any force as huge as that has got to be exhilarating – the force of nature, the force of art. And of course it has its plus side. I mean, think of the Romantics. Man’s response to the sublime has left some bloody marvellous landmarks – Turner’s violent storms at sea, Wordsworth’s lowering mountains, crashing cataracts. And even a disaster can be salutary, if it shakes us up, out of our complacency, our fixed and timid view of things. But basically, it comes down to deliverance. We preen because we’re spared, still alive to tell the tale.’
‘That’s … somehow not enough.’
‘It has to be. It’s all there is.’
‘I don’t want it to be all.’
He laughed. ‘Nor do most, I reckon. You’re in good company. Why else should human beings invent all their different gods, their other worlds and afterlives, except to kid themselves the world is safe and cosy, and that they’re never going to die, or if they do, they’ll wake up somewhere else – somewhere everlasting and pretty damned near perfect?’
‘I don’t believe all that.’
‘I bet you wish you did, though. Religion’s very useful. It must help a lot to have rituals to enact, or to turn the sun and wind into gods you can disarm, or lay on harvest festivals to propitiate Mother Nature and prevent her blighting all your crops next year. The only problem is it doesn’t take account of chaos, which is a new science in itself these days. I expect you’ve heard of the ‘‘butterfly effect’’.’ He skirted a pile of roof-tiles, lying raw and splintered on the ground.
‘No.’ She shook her head.
‘Well, they say the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can change the world’s whole weather – and I’m not exaggerating – just one tiny puny butterfly, maybe several thousand miles away. What happens is some minuscule disturbance swells and amplifies until it’s large enough to set off a great hurricane or avalanche. And why that’s so significant is that it means we can’t be in control. Even where we understand the so-called laws of nature, things can still be unpredictable – maybe always and for ever, and necessarily.’
‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘I know.’ She could hear a chain-saw whining from a garden, sounding like the screaming wind of yesterday. She tried to block it out, erase the whole last month; said nothing more u
ntil they reached the car. Christopher unlocked the door, removed a paper carton from the bonnet. ‘Shall I drop you back at your place?’
She didn’t answer, could see a tiny butterfly flapping its jewelled wings above her cottage, an avalanche of shingle suddenly rearing up and interring the whole beach.
‘Or doesn’t it exist – a fiction like your parents’ death? Oh, come on, Rose, don’t scowl – that was meant to be a joke. The problem is I must get down to work. It’s half past twelve already, and with this new commission looming, I’m beginning to realise what a lot there is to finish before I can clear the decks.’
‘Well, don’t add me to your burden then. I’ll just stay here, in town. I … I’ve got some things to do.’
‘I doubt if you can do much with everything kaput.’ He snapped his fingers, as if dismissing the whole town. ‘Look, kid, you said you needed a job. Why not come and work for me?’
‘You?’
‘Don’t look so horrified. I’m not an ogre, am I?’
‘No, but …’
‘You seemed pretty keen on Adrian’s job. What’s the difference?’
‘You mean, it’s a job like his – cleaning, tidying up?’
‘More or less.’
She kicked out at the kerb. How dare he tell her a charring job would demean her, waste her talents, then offer one himself, and one with fewer perks – no swimming pool or chapel, no young and lively colleagues? And the way he’d called her ‘kid’ – so condescending, arrogant, as if she were a grubby brat in kindergarten. ‘Skivvying,’ she muttered, repeating his own word.
‘What?’
She shook her head, avoided his stern eye.
He was leaning on the car now, playing with his car-keys, jingling them from hand to hand. ‘There are scores of things you could do around the studio. It would really help me out.’
I bet it would, she thought. Adrian had told her how hard it was to get domestic help, since he was off the beaten track. Christopher must find it even harder. His barn was in the wilds, miles from any transport. He was probably pretty desperate for a cleaner, had stopped her taking Adrian’s job so he could employ her as a char himself, then churned out all that stuff about her talents. She would hardly utilise her talents scrubbing floors for him any more than scrubbing them for Adrian.
‘In fact, you could probably even help me with the glass. I’m going to be so busy I could do with an assistant.’
‘But I know absolutely nothing about glass.’
‘You’ll learn. I imagine you could pick things up extremely fast and easily.’
Flattery again, she thought, jabbing her scuffed trainer up and down the kerb. How could someone totally untrained in art work as his assistant? He’d lure her there with far-fetched hopes, then keep her washing coffee cups. Okay, she needed work, but not that sort of work, slaving for one arrogant man, with no other scope or company. And anyway, it wouldn’t solve her problem of finding somewhere she could live.
‘I’m sorry, but I need a live-in job.’
‘No problem. The studio has a mezzanine floor you probably didn’t notice. There’s a bed up there and storage space for clothes, and you’ve already seen my kitchen and …’
She stared at him aghast. Surely he couldn’t be suggesting that she move in and share his pad? It was totally impossible – to shack up with a stranger much older than her father.
He dropped his keys, retrieved them, hooked the key-ring on one finger. ‘I get in at eight most mornings – sometimes even earlier the days my wife’s away. But if you want to have a lie-in, that’s okay with me. I won’t prise you out of bed. We could fix office hours from nine to four or five.’
‘But I thought you …’ She backed away, bewildered. She’d assumed his studio was home, that he lived there, on his own; didn’t treat it like an office, didn’t have a wife.
Suddenly, he opened the door, plumped into the driver’s seat, leaned across to unlock the other side. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘You coming?’
She shook her head, still needled by the words ‘my wife’ – two tiny harmless casual words, which had somehow stirred up sediment from the bottom of her mind, set up angry ripples, like a stone flung in a pond.
‘But I can’t leave you here alone, if you’ve nowhere else to go.’
‘I’m … I’m all right.’
‘Okay. Please yourself.’ He jerked the car away, waved briefly from the window as he punished the accelerator, revved from nought to burn.
‘Goodbye,’ she called, though he couldn’t hear, had already turned the corner, left only his exhaust behind, a blast of dirty smoke. She stood rigid where she was, still breathing in his fumes. Why shouldn’t he be married? What was it to her? True, he’d seemed an obvious bachelor, prowling on his own in the middle of the night; never saying ‘we’, like married people tended to; keeping toiletries and toothbrush in the studio, not to mention ‘meals-for-one’. But why should it affect her? She didn’t want his job, need never see him in her life again. What she had to do now was hike back to her cottage, assess the damage, and decide on her next move, try to build a future.
She slumped down on the kerb. She wouldn’t mind a wife herself, someone supportive and devoted who could share that shadowy future; help to build and shape it. Everyone was married, or in cosy twos like Noah’s Ark, safe from the great Flood – all her friends from school now coupled up with boyfriends, or using that smug ‘we’. She’d never had a special friend, not of either sex. There was probably something wrong with her – one of those strange animals cast out by the tribe. She peered down at the puddle in the gutter, tried to see herself reflected. She looked blurred and insubstantial, her features trembling slightly in the water, as if scared, or very cold. She was cold, cold all over, and also starving hungry. All she’d eaten since six o’clock last night was half a fig, a mouthful of smoked salmon, and one small bar of chocolate. She pressed her hands against her stomach, surprised it wasn’t rumbling. She would starve in grim reality if she didn’t get a job. Wasn’t she being inconsistent, cutting off her nose to spite her face? She had wanted Adrian’s charring job, so why not Christopher’s? She couldn’t work it out, was too obsessed with food still – pizzas oozing melted cheese, hamburgers so huge they stopped your mouth.
She closed her eyes, saw the artist striding from his studio, setting down a loaded tray on the table in the garden – not for her, but for his wife. The wife kept changing – first blonde, then dark and sultry, then auburn with green eyes – but always wildly beautiful. She heard his deep impatient voice rapping out a name.
‘Rose!’
That couldn’t be his wife’s name. She probably had a long name – something elegant, exotic – Clarissa, Ariadne.
‘Rose, I want my gloves.’
She jumped, looked up, saw the artist’s classy car snorting there in front of her, the nearside door flung open, as he leant across the empty seat, reached out an impatient arm.
‘You haven’t lost them, have you? They’re a very special pair.’
She glanced down at her hands – bare and freezing hands, blue-tinged around the fingernails.
‘I saw you take them off. Which probably means you’ve dropped them on the promenade. We’ll never find them now, with all those trippers out in force.’
She stumbled to her feet, rummaged in her pocket, drew out the grey suede gloves, coldly limp and squashed now.
‘Thanks,’ he said, stretching right across to take them, then gesturing to the passenger-seat. ‘Get in.’
Chapter Five
Jane switched on the light, stared straight into the private parts of a gigantic fallen oak, its roots lifted like a woman’s skirt, shamefully exposing a writhe of tangled tubes, a dark hole at its base. She felt like a voyeur as her eyes tracked down the hole, recoiling from its texture, the ooze of sticky sap seeping from the middle, like dark half-clotted blood. There were more trees all around her – blighted trees, blasted trees – as if the storm had come inside. I
t had been difficult to sleep with them surrounding her – scores of lowering canvases stacked against the wall, or hung, unframed, on three sides of the mezzanine. They were all signed CHS – aggressive black initials in the bottom right-hand corner. Christopher Harville-Shaw. She had seen his name written on the fly-leaf of a book; hadn’t realised that he painted, as well as made stained glass. She skewed her head and shoulders round, so she could see the two large paintings hung above the bed. They had haunted her all night – trees like human figures, but horribly dismembered, one split from neck to knee. He must have used the last two great storms, turned horror into art; feasted on it, drawn from it, dipped his brush in carnage. She nestled back beneath the duvet. It frightened her to look at things uprooted.
She hugged her arms around her chest, surprised to feel it silky-smooth, and not bulked out with jerseys. Christopher had lent her a pair of his pyjamas, a real silk pair in midnight blue which he had dug out of a drawer and tossed across as casually as if they’d been a painting-rag, although the label looked exotic and was printed in Italian. Strange, the feel of silk – the way it lapped your body, clung to every curve. She tried to imagine Christopher’s body beneath that same blue silk; could see his chest and shoulders – narrow, probably hairy, judging by his hands; his stomach hard and flat. Then her mind went blank. There was a gap between his belly and his knees, a disturbing gap, a judder of uneasiness.
She turned over on her back, turfed him out of bed, but he still threatened from the wall, compelling her attention in a scorched and cratered landscape, one lone bird flapping from the stubble, a charred and maimed survivor. She couldn’t get away from him. Although he’d left yesterday, at tea-time, driven home, said goodbye till Monday, told her he was going to stay in Oxfordshire, he was still warped and woofed in the very stuff and fabric of the studio – his scarlet birds below her on the glass-screens, his work on every wall, his smell still in her nostrils, his voice reverberating, and now his blue-silk tentacles clinging round her body.
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