by Jo Riccioni
She climbed the scaffold beside him. He was mixing paint for the last view, which would fill the neat recess perpendicular to the north transept. They stood side by side, studying the completed centrepiece.
‘She was a very beautiful woman … your mother,’ Connie ventured.
Lucio shot her a look, but he didn’t contradict her and she knew that her instinct had been correct. She pointed to the saint’s mouth. ‘There … that’s Vittorio,’ she said, touching her own lips. ‘But here,’ she turned to face him and took hold of his wrist, bringing it to his forehead in the pose of his subject, ‘this is you.’ With her other hand she traced a line in the air, under his eyes. ‘And they are yours too. Did you know?’ She let her fingers rest on his cheekbone, where they felt charged, as if with the current of the stage lights. For a second they were very still, except for his focus inching across her face, her mouth, her hair, like he was reading something that had been written there. When it flickered away, back to the work he’d begun on the last view, she knew she had lost him.
She felt her stomach contract and her lungs empty of air. ‘So, what happened anyway? To your mother?’ she asked. Her voice was falsely flippant and not her own. He stopped mixing his paints and seemed to tense beside her. She knew she’d asked the question that might give him the most pain, but she wouldn’t admit to herself it was in retaliation for her own.
‘She died,’ was all he said, and she realised he saw straight through her.
‘I’m sorry.’ She meant it now. Her cheeks were burning and the threat of tears made her step away, distracting herself again with the mural.
In the left of the view, St Margaret’s nursemaid was feeding a newborn lamb from a bottle. She wore a burlap apron and her sleeves were rolled up. Unlike the saint, the woman was stocky: the arm holding the milk was brawny as any man’s. She might have single-handedly sheared, branded and butchered the entire flock, as easily as suckling a cade lamb. She didn’t appear to be modelled on anyone from the village, but the more Connie studied her, the more she began to sense a vulnerability about the nursemaid that was at odds with her build, a sense of foreboding in her expression. She sat in the foreground on a rock, gazing at the saint instead of the lamb, her lips parted, her cheeks raw and shining. Connie traced the solitary track of light that pooled under her ear as she tilted back her head, realising as she did that it was the path of a tear. Behind her was a tumble of discarded cloth, worn and grubby, and beneath the hem of her dress, one of her feet bore another trickle, this time of blood, snaking around her ankle and collecting between her coarse toes.
Connie searched the scene, looking for other odd, jarring details. She knew there would be more: there always were. She had often seen Lucio painting them in, only to arrive the following evening to discover them gone again, or something equally cryptic in their place. She found herself both entertained and saddened by these puzzles — they gave her the childish hope that the work might never end, and yet their significance disturbed her if she dwelled on them too much. She had given up asking Lucio what they meant. His responses were evasive; often he simply shrugged. They could certainly be overlooked among all the other intricate studies of nature that formed his backdrops: the robin with crooked head and liquid eye in the crystallised hedgerow, the ivy and elder that wound their leaves about the stonework, the hoarfrosted holly that immediately conjured the muted sound of the spinney after the winter’s first snowfall.
Still, those veiled tokens played on Connie, drawing her attention against her will and bothering her unaccountably. They made the paintings seem unbalanced, secretive, just as the old bricked-up window in the dining room of Leyton House often did, closed as an eye in the symmetrical facade. She examined the figure of the saint again, the sensuality of her, the intimate beauty that made Connie feel she was somehow trespassing. How on earth had he caught that expression, transferred that feeling in paint? She remembered the day she’d found Mrs Repton by the window in the library — that sense of intrusion on an unguarded thought. And then she saw it: the twist of black velvet looped around St Margaret’s forefinger, the ribbon’s tail half hidden in the folds of her skirt, like she had at that second pulled it from her hair and been caught in that vulnerable moment of imagining another life, another place.
Connie adjusted the stage light back in line with the others so that she could see the final portrait Lucio was working on. St Dorothea was still as Mr Swann had begun her — the ghost of a figure sketched into the alcove, tucked away to the side of the pulpit. Lucio had started on the backdrop first, with a maythorn hedge whose white blossoms settled so thickly upon the boughs that they cast an almost grey glow, like snow in the depths of winter. She thought of that first day he had shown her the nightingale in the hedgerow at Repton’s, how the maythorn had shed its petals as they parted the branches.
‘Why are you finishing with this one?’ she asked. ‘I always thought the view of St Margaret would be the last, being the most important.’
He put down his brushes, stepped back to consider his work. It was late and he seemed pale, drained, as he stretched out his neck. ‘It’s not important because it’s small?’
‘I didn’t say that —’
‘You see this?’ He described the alcove’s arch with his hand. ‘This frame, how it pulls your eye?’
‘Draws your eye.’ But she nodded.
‘It draws your eye,’ he corrected himself, ‘even when you don’t want it to.’
She imagined the alcove without the scaffolding. It was true. How many times had she sat through services to find her gaze resting there in daydreams? How many times had she settled herself under the arch as a child, rolling her marbles in its recess while Aunty Bea cleaned the church? It was a sanctuary within a sanctuary. And he had understood it straight away.
‘For that, it’s important,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about it a long time.’
He picked up his palette and brushes as she climbed down from the platform. She searched along the nearest pew, looking for his jacket. It had become his habit to leave it there for her, and she saw him glance down from the staging as she laid it over her shoulders. She breathed in his smell: the mineral fumes of paint, the tang of his collar where it rubbed his neck, the scent of the spinney in autumn that always seemed embedded in the cloth, regardless of the season. She watched the end of his brush twitch, the fractional incline of his head, his boots shifting on the platform. The buzzing stage lights became the hedgerow’s hum, twigs cracking underfoot, and in her dreams she heard the nightingale creaking out its alarm.
When she opened her eyes, she felt hours had passed. The light was different. She thought it might be morning and panicked, until she saw one of the spots casting its beam towards the roof, causing a gentle glow to fall about the pews. Lucio was sitting on the platform, his legs hanging over its edge, his head and arms propped on one of the bars, looking at her.
She sat up quickly. ‘God, how long have I been out? What time is it?’
‘Four o’clock.’
She stretched. ‘I was dreaming of the spinney … of birds singing.’ She stood and put a hand on her head. Her hair was still stiff from the salt air. ‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘It suits you.’
She laughed, thinking he was teasing, but he seemed serious.
‘The sun,’ he said. ‘The sun in your face.’ She felt the tight skin of her nose, a bit burned from the day at the coast, and looked away, as if he’d caught her out.
‘We … we went to the seaside,’ she said, like a confession. ‘You should have come. I wanted you to. You’d have loved it.’ She put a hand in her skirt pocket and felt the gritty sand at the bottom, the hard curve of the shell she’d found winking on the shore. Her fingers were comforted by its solid smoothness, something to hold on to.
‘You can’t hide away in here forever,’ she said. He got up and c
oncentrated again on the unfinished view. She stepped onto a rung of the scaffold, wanting to hold his attention. ‘You know, everyone says you’re so different, you and Vittorio, but …sometimes I think you’re as obsessive as he is, just as stubborn, only about different things.’ She climbed up next to him, by the dense flowers of the maythorn boughs. She felt chilled. ‘What are you going to do when it’s finished?’
He pushed back his hair with his wrist. ‘What are you going to do?’
She dug her hand deeper into her pocket until she felt a tiny crack of thread, of stitches breaking. She hadn’t expected this reply. It was as though he had realised she was asking the question not of him but of herself, and she became angry that he knew her so well but allowed her to understand so little of him.
‘Your brother wants me to marry him,’ she said. She heard the arrogance in her voice and regretted it. He nodded, as if he’d been waiting for her to say it, and she felt her stomach sink again.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
It was she who didn’t answer this time. She felt her throat constrict, her eyes stinging, and she swallowed and blinked it all back, not allowing herself to wonder whether it was from anger or despair.
They didn’t speak for a while. She thought that if she opened her mouth, things might come tumbling out, things that she could not take back. She glanced towards the south door and knew that beyond it were the fields, the squat houses and their grey hearths, the burnished letters of Mrs Cleat’s window, all brooding in the dark, like hens biding their time until the first light, when they would rattle out their dull declaration of Monday morning.
He broke the silence. ‘It’s alright,’ he said softly. ‘I understand.’ His expression had no accusation in it, as if he had simply watched the images that passed through her mind; had seen how she was trapped, and why she could force herself to do something against her own nature. She thought perhaps he really did understand, but she didn’t want him to: she wanted him to rail against it, to confront her, tell her she was making a mistake. But he only picked up his brushes and continued his work.
‘Lucio?’ she said, but her voice was lost under the vaulting, his name a shush once more, and she climbed down the scaffold.
Before she left, she folded up his jacket and put it back on the pew, slipping the shell under its collar. Outside, the lychgate was a triangular silhouette against the nacre of the pre-dawn sky. She dug her fingers into her pocket and through the hole that was left there.
When she got home from St Margaret’s the birds were stirring in the gardens of Grimthorpe Lane. She slipped off her sandals and climbed through the kitchen window, as she always did. There was an art to manoeuvring around the sink, lowering herself onto the lino, reaching for her shoes from the sill, all without making a sound.
‘Very lady-like, I’m sure,’ came a low voice. Connie started. Aunty Bea was sitting in the dim kitchen, her hands spread on the table, catching the light that had begun to slant through the panes. Connie thought of Reverend Stanton palming the lectern before a sermon.
‘So, barefoot and through the window, is it now?’ Aunty Bea’s voice was flat, detached. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t think you was a didicoy and take the coal shovel to you.’ She sniffed and pulled a handkerchief from the cuff of her bedjacket. Her hair was tucked in its night-time pins, and the lines of disappointment about her mouth seemed chiselled in the kitchen’s shadows.
‘You’re up early,’ Connie said. She meant to provoke her, to get the inevitable row over with, but the sarcasm in her voice faltered.
‘Seems like none of us has been to bed tonight.’
Connie went to the switch and flicked on the light. Its beam was invasive, but less disconcerting than seeing her aunt sitting there in the dark.
‘We need to talk,’ Aunty Bea said.
‘Talk?’ Connie gave a cool laugh. ‘That’s novel. I can’t remember the last time we actually talked.’
‘And that would be my fault, I suppose? Being as I’m the one who’s always at the Roxy or the flicks or God-knows-where, coming home through the window at four in the morning?’ Her aunt slipped into the usual recriminations, but the words seemed listless in her mouth, lacking their typical vigour.
‘Oh, here we go,’ Connie said anyway. She crossed her arms and waited, but Aunty Bea was silent, unmoving. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk, that’s all.’ She took her aunt’s sullenness to be a sign of the great storm about to break. ‘If the talk is over, I’d like to get ready for work.’
‘No, it is not over,’ Aunty Bea said. She got up and moved to the sink, her breath laboured. Her eyes glittered at Connie as she turned, but their focus seemed strangely elsewhere. ‘I won’t be doing at the Big House tomorrow. I want you to drop in to the kitchen and tell Mrs Cartwright on your way to Cleat’s.’
‘What? Why can’t you work?’ But her aunt’s expression, the tone of her request, seemed too weary to have any other agenda. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She was genuinely concerned now.
‘One thing, I’m asking,’ Aunty Bea said, with some of her old spark. ‘Just this one thing, after all I’ve done for you. Can you manage it, or not?’
Connie nodded, half expecting a renewal of hostilities, but her aunt only reached for a dishcloth and ran it about the sink. She watched her hang the cloth over the faucet, pull the latch on the window, check the knobs on the stove — all the small, obsessive habits of her domesticity. And she frowned as her aunt slipped through the door and shuffled up the stairs, as though Connie had not been there at all.
She sat down at the kitchen table, the house about her feeling somehow skewed, diminished, like it was Aunty Bea’s anger, her strictures, that kept firm its joists. Without it there was suddenly less for Connie to throw herself against, no bars she could rattle to justify her frustrations. How could her aunt be sick? Aunty Bea didn’t believe in illness any more than crying; she always said she never had time for such indulgences. But there had been those visits by Doctor Bland of late. Connie had seen him getting into his car as she cycled up the lane after work. Her aunt had flapped her hand when she’d asked about it, mumbling about women’s affairs, as if Connie herself did not belong to that sex.
She heard the dry bark of Uncle Jack’s morning cough and switched off the kitchen light. When she went into the narrow hall, she realised the sound was coming from the front room. She creaked the door ajar and put her head around it. Aunty Bea had meant it when she said no one had had any sleep that night: she guessed her aunt would have tossed and turned sufficiently to keep Uncle Jack up too.
He was sitting in his chair, his head propped against the wing. There was no light on, and she was surprised to find one or two embers glowing in the grate despite the summer night. A book had slipped from his lap, and she went in and kneeled before him on the hearthrug, reaching for it. He was awake: she smiled at him and set the book on the side table. He straightened his head, coughing again.
‘You need to get off the Woodys,’ she said.
He cricked the corner of his mouth at her. ‘Too much fresh air and me lungs’d pack up from shock.’
She had the sudden desire to curl herself onto his lap and lean into his chest like she had as a child. He used to read to her then, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, while she brushed ash off the pages to see the pictures. Instead she settled on the floor, her head against the arm of the chair, and felt his hand on her hair. A bedroom door closed above them.
‘You shouldn’t mind her so much, Lizzie,’ he said.
She lifted her chin and looked up at him. ‘I don’t. But she minds me, doesn’t she? I wonder sometimes whether she even likes me very much.’
His breath whistled and his hand became heavy on her head. ‘You’re wrong there. I think she likes you a lot more than she likes herself. She sees in you what she might’ve wanted to be.’ His vo
ice was so quiet that he could have been talking to himself.
‘What? She’d like to have been a shop assistant?’ Connie couldn’t help it, despite the rare confidence Uncle Jack was granting.
‘Maybe.’
She thought about it. As someone who’d spent her whole life doing other people’s cleaning, Aunty Bea might see a certain glamour in working behind the counter at Cleat’s. Still, it wasn’t what Connie wanted to hear, and she leaned away from him to put the grate across the fire.
‘I think it’s more she looks at you and she sees someone open to things …’ He paused and ran his hand across his mouth. ‘Someone willing to take a risk, like. Passionate, even.’
It was a lot of words for Uncle Jack, surprising words that she wasn’t used to hearing from him. They made her uncomfortable, and she fobbed them off by joking. ‘Steady on now, Mr Farrington! What kind of a girl do you take me for?’ She cocked her head, expecting to see his smile, but there was only an edge of disappointment at his mouth.
‘Can you not see it in yourself, Connie?’ he said gently.
She shrugged, taken aback at the sound of her name, the seriousness of it coming from him.
‘Them Eye-talians you’re so keen spending time on, you suppose they only see the Hayworth hair and them skinny white spokes of legs?’
She’d wondered at this herself — what it was they did see in her, especially Vittorio, who could have had any girl he wanted. She could believe Lucio knew her: he always seemed to peel away the skin of everything with those eyes. But it didn’t count for much: the night had proved that to her.
‘I don’t know what they see,’ she said sharply, uneasy with the conversation.
‘I do,’ he persisted.
‘Well, you’re biased.’ And she tried to laugh him off again.
He reached for the book she’d set on the table and took out a card he’d been using as a bookmark. When he handed it to her, she saw it was a photograph. She held the image up to the glow of the coals in the grate. She could make out a pier at the seaside. A youthful Uncle Jack, barely her age, was leaning against the railing, his hair thick under the cap he’d pushed back on his head. He was looking at a girl sitting on a wrought-iron bench before him. One of her hands was blurred at her neck and her face was animated with laughter, her hair loose and windswept about her shoulders. Had it not been for Uncle Jack behind this figure, she might not have recognised Aunty Bea. In the foreground another man seemed to have just completed a cartwheel: his legs and arms were out of focus, but the fringe of his hair fanned across his face.