I stood in the water, wasting time deliberating when I should shut the door, lock it, get through the window. Then I was certain, footsteps were coming towards me across the sitting room. I was out of the bath, grabbing a towel. I stood, the toilet brush in my hand raised, the only implement I could find with which to defend myself, a towel wrapped round me.
A shadow fell across the gap in the bathroom door.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Put the toilet brush down! I surrender.’
‘Finn!’
‘Oh my God, you thought I was an intruder?’
‘Of course I bloody well thought you were an intruder! What’re you doing walking in like this?’
I pressed the towel closer around me.
‘I came to see how it went.’
‘Christ! You could’ve given me some warning. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to put some clothes on.’
‘I’ll open a beer then.’
My eyes prickled with tears of relief, and something else. I’d gone all weak, as if someone had been holding me up, like a marionette, and had let go of the strings. My nerves were highly sensitised, twitchy, because of the man called Patrick, those phone calls. I’d thought Finn was him! How ridiculous when Patrick was stuck over sixty miles away in hospital.
Finn and I had spent hours in the past naked together but I couldn’t let him see me like this now we weren’t together any more, so when I’d thrown on some clothes I joined him in the sitting room where he was on the sofa, head bowed.
He looked awful close up, as if he hadn’t slept for days. But that was nothing new. Finn led the kind of life where he could forget to go to bed for weeks on end. Pepper had trotted straight over to him and jumped up onto his lap. Finn fondled his silky ears with his finger and thumb.
‘You brought your own beer?’
He shrugged.
Finn was on a permanent tight budget – his bringing beer was uncharacteristic.
‘Finn! I’ve got wine in the fridge, you know. You needn’t have worried.’
‘I can pay my way.’
I wished what I felt for him was a wash of love. Instead what I felt was pity.
‘I’m not suggesting . . . oh, never mind. Anyway, it gave me a shock, your walking in like that. Where did you get the key?’
‘I saw Chiara in the pub. With Liam. She said she was worried about you, so I said I’d come round, and she gave me her keys.’
‘You should have knocked! It’s not on to just walk in like that.’
‘I won’t do it again.’
‘Please don’t, Finn.’
There was a silence. I’d never spoken to Finn in this bossy way before. I softened.
‘What was Chiara worried about?’
‘She just thought you might avoid joining us. So I came to find you.’
‘I was going to come,’ I said. ‘I needed to unwind first.’
He looked up at me through his floppy fringe. ‘Sorry to snap,’ I said. ‘It was kind of you to come.’
‘Not really. Selfish motives. I’ve been missing you.’
I poured myself a glass of wine.
‘But next time – I do have a doorbell.’
‘It feels unnatural to ring the bell. I’ve never had to ring your bell before!’
He flicked his fringe aside and looked up at me with his earnest brown eyes. His elbows rested on his knees, he looked forlorn. I had to resist the urge to feel too much sympathy for him or I’d be tempted to crawl back to him.
‘Finn, things are different now. You can’t just walk into my flat any more, please accept that. It isn’t . . . easy for me, for either of us, after all this time, but we have to give it a go, for a bit longer.’
‘Do we? Chiara said she thought you were forcing yourself to do something counter-intuitive, she feels it’s a forced decision, not an instinctive one, to end it with me, and I think perhaps she’s right.’
‘Well she’s not. But anyway, how are you? How’re things? How was your weekend?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Not if you don’t tell me.’
‘It was a weekend.’
‘Finn, I’m sorry.’
He gave me a sceptical look. He knew I’d invited friends down to the cottage and excluded him.
‘It’s painful for me too, but I’ve got to try this. It’s the only way I’ll ever find out.’
‘Find out what?’
‘I’ve already told you.’
I had said that Finn belonged to a younger me. I was changing, but he didn’t seem to be.
‘So. How was the second home by the sea?’ he said.
‘As you know. It’s an old windswept clapboard house with mice.’
‘Hmph. Any roof in Southwold is worth millions. Even those beach huts are hundreds of thousands. You know you’ve landed yourself a pile. But anyway, what about the Private View. How did it go?’
‘It went well, Finn.’
‘I don’t suppose you only got the freeloaders I get, draining the wine you’ve had to take out a bank loan to provide, eating the crisps, leaving you to clear up the mess, and wondering what you’re going to do with all the bloody crap you’ve made and have nowhere to store.’
‘It was in a good cause. People buy when a percentage goes to charity, so I sold a few. It doesn’t make me a Turner contender.’
‘Chiara said there was someone interested in giving you a commission, in New York?’
Finn and I had shared a studio at art college, we’d collaborated on several big projects. We had even developed our own secret ‘language’ when we were first in love, sending each other hidden messages in our paintings, words embedded in the collages we made, that we knew (though no one else would) to piece together to make sentences. He had told me he loved me for the first time like this. And I had told him the oddities about him I found irresistible. ‘Your fringe,’ I had stuck onto one painting. ‘The way you pull your ear.’ He saw the fact I was developing my own style as another kind of rejection of him. My moving away from the conceptual pieces he loved was something he found difficult, interpreting it as another sort of insult to everything that made him himself, Finn.
He sat hunched up, his baggy jumper swamping his emaciated body. His black hair hanging over his pale, earnest face.
‘You’re making this hard for me. For both of us.’
‘I don’t mean to. Sorry, Els.’
I looked at him as he stared into his beer. The trouble is, when you’ve been with someone for as long as we’d been together – could it possibly be five years? – you’re so used to touching each other, not to feels like a strain. Unnatural. I longed to put my hand out as I would once have done, to squeeze his thigh. But I mustn’t mislead him.
Then he glanced up.
‘Look, when you’re ready,’ he said, ‘if you like, I’ll come and do some more work down there for you. No one will know we’re . . . connected. I’ll be the odd jobs man. I’ve collected some oilcans I found down on the river, on the tideline, I could customise them. You need some garden furniture, don’t you?’
‘Finn, if we’re going to do this, it’s best we just don’t see each other at all – for a bit at least.’
‘Will the Southwold gentry disapprove?’
‘Stop it!’
‘That’s what it is though, isn’t it? You don’t want a penniless acolyte following you about!’
‘Finn, please.’
‘You’re going up in the world, Ellie. A long way up. Out of my reach.’
‘No. That’s not true.’
‘A fucking New York commission!’
I didn’t want to hurt him, yet it was unavoidable and the more I tried to skirt round the truth, that I couldn’t spend my life with someone I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure about, someone who wanted to hold me back, preserve me as the anxious, obsessive compulsive student I’d been when I first met him – the more I avoided telling him these things, the deeper I was digging myself into a
different hole, making it look as though I’d become blinkered by commercial success.
We were silent for a bit. My exhibition seemed to hang between us, obliterating the chance of any proper communication.
‘It wasn’t such a great weekend after all,’ I said. ‘You didn’t miss much. I spent a lot of it fixing things at the house.’
‘Ah! That’s the reality, you see,’ Finn said. ‘The reality of ownership. The more you have, the more you have to work to maintain it. You should follow my example and never own anything of any worth whatsoever. That way you are free of all ties. The only thing I’m responsible for is Tommy.’
Tommy was the stray cat that had taken residence on Finn’s windowsill, in his room in a shared ex-local authority flat in Bow.
‘How is Tommy?’
‘He’s bored. He’s fed up with being homeless and wants to move in with Princess, the feline up the road in the big house. He’s got tired of the vagrant life. It’s lost its appeal. He wants to settle down.’
‘Aah. Like The Aristocats.’
‘I love that film. I used to watch it when I was little, when I was off school.’
‘Me too.’
‘You coming to the pub?’
‘No. I think it’s best not to.’
I would have an early night after all. It was a teaching day tomorrow. He looked at me. His dark eyes full of warmth, full of that twinkle I was so drawn to at first. For a few seconds I wondered if I was, after all, making a mistake. I was afraid I might weaken. I had always loved his determination to reject the consumer world. I’d always loved him because he was so true.
‘Come back to mine tonight. I want to wine and dine you,’ he whispered into my ear. ‘I’ve got baked beans. And a bottle of Blue Nun.’
And, of course, because he made me laugh.
‘Ellie,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t want to ask it but it won’t leave me alone until I do. Is there somebody else?’
Now he was making me impatient.
‘Of course not! Please go.’
And he left.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Finn had gone I tried to focus on making a salad, the way Chiara did, with olive oil and salt to bring the juices out of the tomatoes. I’d have to get used to cooking for myself once she’d moved. So I’d better practise. I was sprinkling on the salt when the phone rang. I picked it up, spilling half of the salt on the counter.
‘I wondered if you’d like to come down this weekend, Ellie.’
It was my mother.
‘Miriam’s away and I could do with some company.’
‘Aren’t you working?’
‘I’ve just finished a novel so I’ve got a bit of time to play with. Thought I could take you to the ADC on Friday night. There’s a production of Othello we could see.’
‘That would be lovely!’ I rarely got to see my mother alone these days, since she’d moved in with her lover, Miriam. And she had probably picked up on the fact that although we could get by together, Miriam and I regarded each other warily. Miriam knew I couldn’t help blaming her for my parents not getting back together, though my mother hadn’t met her until several years after my parents split. It was unfair of me, but I still regarded her as an imposter in our family. We hadn’t quite worked out who had the most rights to my mother’s attention. I couldn’t relax when Miriam was there, and usually cut my visits short.
I agreed to stay with Mum on Friday night, and continue on down to May’s on Saturday to pick up my unsold paintings from the gallery and do a bit more sorting of her things.
I nibbled at my salad, which tasted nothing like what Chiara would have made – the tomatoes were hard and tasteless – then gave up and threw the spilt salt over my shoulder into the eye of the devil. I was a fool, believing in these things. I didn’t really believe in them. But I didn’t want to risk it. This was the problem with relying on talismans to feel safe in the world. When you ignored them, the free-floating feeling it left you with meant other superstitions popped up in their place. I was covering the bases. Taking precautions. The way I supposed some non-religious people prayed, just in case.
The phone went again as I swept up the scattered salt. My mother made a habit of changing her plans and not being able to see me and I prepared myself to feel let down.
‘Ellie, it’s me.’
‘Who?’
‘Patrick.’
For a few seconds I considered slamming the phone down.
He spoke into my silence.
‘Why didn’t you ring back?’
‘I—’
‘I’m still me! Or that’s what they’re telling me. Still the old Patrick.’
What was I supposed to say?
He spoke though, before I could decide.
‘When are you coming back to see me?’
I opened my mouth but nothing came out.
‘I may be in here for days. But you’re the only one who bothered to come – do you realise that?’
I tried to formulate an explanation in my head.
Instead I asked, ‘Was I really your only visitor?’
‘Absolutely.’
I felt a wave of responsibility, mixed with compassion for him.
‘And they haven’t found the bastard who did this to me. They thought they knew, but their suspects had a watertight alibi.’
‘But I thought . . .’
‘It wasn’t who they suspected. They’re looking for someone else, maybe someone unconnected. They think from forensic evidence it was a car, not a van.’
An uncomfortable surge in my belly. Doubt raising its head again. If it wasn’t the people they thought, it still might have been me!
‘There’s a massive investigation going on, but it isn’t going to give me my walking back, is it? It isn’t going to undo what’s done.’
‘What? What do you mean, give you your walking back?’
‘Didn’t they say. . . didn’t they tell you I may never walk again?’
I couldn’t speak. His words reverberated round my head.
Never walk again. Never walk again.
I clutched the kitchen doorjamb, feeling the grey carpet sway beneath me, the room recede and then swing back into focus. I wished I’d gone to the pub with the others after all. Where I could have hidden my head in the sand – or deep in a glass of wine.
‘They just keep telling me to take it one day at a time. My leg was completely fucked as you must know. They say it could take weeks to learn to walk again. Fuck ’em. I’m gonna prove them wrong. At least I’m recovering from the bop on the head.’
I waited a few seconds, or maybe minutes. The silence on the other end of the line blossomed around me, filled up my room, the growl of traffic outside faded beneath the beating of my heart. I must put a stop to this. I should put the phone down, walk away.
Chiara had said it couldn’t have had anything to do with me. But I hadn’t checked! And now, when I shut my eyes, limb-like forms lying in the shadows came back to me. Bits I’d tried to convince myself were just storm-blasted sticks and debris from the trees but that now took on human shapes, scattered belongings in my mind.
I had ignored the compulsion to go back – now this.
‘I need to see you, Ellie.’
This man believed he knew me! I owed him something, some explanation, some support.
‘I’m not sure if I can come. It’s difficult . . .’
‘I’m going crazy! It’s bad enough being stuck in bed unable to run or sail. There’s nothing to do! No one to talk to. I thought you, of all people, would be here for me.’
I could see his body in the bed. The strength in him, crushed under car wheels. I couldn’t just ignore his plea. I had become inextricably involved, by visiting him, whether I’d hit him in my car or not. I realised this now. If no one else had visited him then I had to. He shouldn’t be allowed to suffer alone in this way. I tried to visualise this man called Patrick. Dark hair against the pillow. Muscular arms on the white sheets.
A leg propped up. The beep of his monitors. The damage I was no longer sure I hadn’t caused.
‘Please, Ellie. Please.’
I took a deep breath. I owed him this.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. I’ll come.’
‘When? I need you soon.’ His voice was soft now. Vulnerable.
‘I’ll come tomorrow evening,’ I said.
‘That seems a long time to wait, time goes so slowly in here.’
‘I can’t come before, I’ve got work . . .’
‘Promise me then.’
‘I promise.’
I put the phone down.
And I shivered all over.
The kids’ bright little faces trooping into class were a welcome distraction the next morning,
I had the Year Ones, five- and six-year-olds, an age group I enjoyed. Young enough to still be innocent but old enough – most of them – to tie their own laces and wipe their own noses.
Billy nudged me, waving a photo cut out from the Sunday paper under my nose.
‘What’s this, Billy?’
‘Charles and Camilla,’ he said. ‘On a Royal Tour.’
I smiled up at Joyce, my TA. Billy had a passion for the royal couple. He brought in photos he’d cut out of the tabloids almost every day. He had even named his guinea pigs after them.
I got through the day, too busy to give my encroaching visit to Patrick any more conscious thought, though a persistent knot in my stomach accompanied me. In the afternoon I got out some air-drying clay and let the kids make as much mess as they wanted – I’d get them to finish early and spend half an hour clearing up so the cleaner wouldn’t have a fit when she came in after school. Then I’d read them a story to keep them quiet for the last fifteen minutes before I could let them go.
I opened the classroom door at three thirty and the children streamed out. Apart from Timothy. He always hung around when the others had bolted for the door, eyes fixed on the computer screen.
‘C’n I do the pooters?’
‘OK, Timothy. How’s your weekend been? Did you do nice things?’
He shrugged.
It wasn’t strictly within Health and Safety guidelines, allowing kids to turn the computers off. But Timothy loved switches, putting things on, turning them off, plugging them in. He loved watching screens fizzle on, and snap off. And I knew, better than anyone, how when objects held this kind of power over you, it made you miserable if you were prevented from carrying out your compulsion. It was Timothy’s way of feeling he had some control over something, when he had so little in his life at home.
A Trick of the Mind Page 7