by Ruth Hartley
Lara, in fact, reacted in an instant. She reinserted the beeswax and rough gems into the inner frame, shoved back the black gum that locked the gems into their hiding place, covered the separated surfaces with wood glue and pushed the frame back into shape, jamming her tool box against its side to hold it until it set. Only then did she reach behind her for a chair to sit on, her hand holding her thudding heart in place behind her breastbone. Only then did she see Bernie standing watching her silent as a cat. This time Lara did stumble and almost fall. This time her gasp of fear was audible as she collapsed onto the seat.
“You didn’t know? You didn’t know?”
Lara kept shaking her head. Her body was also shaking.
“You mustn’t say a word! You mustn’t tell a soul! Nobody must ever know!”
Bernie, normally so suave and well-spoken, sounded strident and East-European. Lara grasped in the midst of her extreme fear that Bernie too was terrified. No one must ever know that Bernie had accidentally allowed Lara to find out Oscar’s secret. Bernie had made the mistake of believing that Lara already knew about the gemstones. Bernie was at risk as much as she, Lara, was in danger. They both had to keep this secret or die. Lara knew at that moment that if Oscar found out that she knew she was in real trouble. Oscar might kill her, or blackmail her, or simply shop her to the police as the guilty party in the illegal export of gemstones while he made an easy escape.
She had been used.
Chapter Eight
The Plane Crash
Oscar was dead.
There were questions about exactly how and when it had happened but there seemed to be no doubt about the fact. Tim was given a detailed account by Enoch Junior who was one of the first to hear what was assumed to have taken place. Tim and Enoch Junior remained good friends and often phoned each other. Lara made Tim tell her word for word what he knew. Oscar must have died within a year or so of the failed coup against President Chona but nothing was known about it for around six years. He had taken off in his plane one day with Natan beside him. No flight plan had been registered. The plane and its two occupants simply disappeared.
It was a second plane crash that led to the discovery of Oscar’s plane and the two bodies in it. A couple of wild life conservationists, co-pilots of a small plane, were making a study of game movement in the north of the National Park when they had engine trouble about one hundred kilometres north of the Tin Heart Gold Mine. They managed to send out a mayday call before they crashed into the hills. They were found alive and very thirsty, the following day, one with a broken collar bone, the other just badly battered and bruised. However the search and rescue team sent out to find them had first spotted the remains of a second small plane. It hung rusty and broken, suspended on a shattered tree against a steep rocky cliff where the northern escarpment dropped into a river valley. The registration on its fuselage identified it as Kilo Golf Tango 132, the Cessna 172 that had belonged to Oscar Mynhardt. To their relief it was obvious that this more deadly accident had happened a long time before and was not anything to do with the aircraft for which they were hunting. When the searchers circled above it they could not see bodies or movement but neither did they expect to given the state of the plane. As their first task was to arrange the rescue of their injured colleagues, they flew on until they located them. They dropped water, food and first aid supplies, then radioed-in the vehicles sent to pick them up. Though they reported the sighting of Oscar’s plane it was some months before anyone felt motivated enough to make an expedition to the crash site and then only in response to a rumour that there might be diamonds or emeralds stashed in the Cessna’s hold.
The same two rescuers set off again. They first reconnoitred by plane, then having located the crash, they landed at a rough airfield used by the flying doctor service, rented a battered truck from the local chief and drove through the bush to the top of the escarpment from where they climbed down to the crash site. The plane was balanced precariously on a large tree growing at an angle out of the hillside. This had kept it out of reach of scavengers like hyena and explained why they found the two skeletal remains relatively intact. One body was jammed in the cockpit and quite clearly had been shot. A round bullet hole was apparent in the right temple and a large jagged hole behind the left ear. The men who had climbed down to the wreck took photos and searched the plane and the dead man’s clothes for any proof of identity. There was none and the photos taken on an instamatic family camera were not of good quality. They reckoned that this man, seated as he was, was too tall to be Oscar. The second person had either been flung from the plane or had managed to climb out. The body lay face down stretched out on a sturdy branch a little lower down. The men could not be sure if its leg was broken or if it had just adopted a strange angle with the passage of time. Identification was complicated because the skull had become detached and fallen further down the hill.
“Poor bugger!” the adventurers said to each other. “I hope it didn’t take him too long to die.”
Tim did not tell Lara this part of the story but she understood its likelihood and asked him about it anyway. Tim could only shrug.
The two men reckoned that the plane must have been close to the limit of its fuel. There was a metal jerry can in the back of the plane that amazingly still had some fuel in it but it was jammed into the twisted body of the plane so they did not try and lift it out. A passport was buttoned in the second corpse’s shirt pocket. The name in it was Oscar Mynhardt.
“Where’s the pilot’s passport gone?” one of the men asked. The other shook his head and frowned.
“Do you think there were only two people on board?”
Again they took photos and returned to their camp-site for the night. They were up early to the smell of smoke from a bush fire. The fact that they had explored the crash site the day before had led other creatures to do the same. Perhaps a leopard tracking their scent had disturbed the plane. It had shifted, rocked and fallen further down the rock face taking both bodies with it. Some spilt fuel, broken glass the heat of the rising sun – who knows? The angry flames around the jumble of metal and bones were a transparent red. The quick smoke curled upwards black and choking. It was the end of a very dry season. The two adventurers had to turn their truck around and drive away from the bush fire as it roared up the rock face out of the valley towards their camp site. They never went back. Instead they took their photos, their story and Oscar’s passport to the Chief of Police who informed Junior Enoch about it. They hadn’t found any gemstones, which they thought was disappointing – and odd.
It took Oscar’s lawyers two more slow years before they decided they were sufficiently empowered to carry out his will and settle up his estate. It was then that Lara received the two fat brown envelopes informing her that she was one of Oscar’s legatees. The other legatee was Inonge. Inonge became the sole owner of the Tin Heart Gold mine and the Kasenga Safari Camp site. Half the proceeds of the sale of Oscar’s ranch house went to Lara, half to Inonge. The Otto Dix paintings and the Käthe Kollwitz prints now belonged to Lara and were in a London bank vault.
“Worth a lot of money.” The lawyer said. “Real gold!”
“How did you feel about Oscar’s death?” Brendan asks Lara.
“After so long? Relieved and indifferent I think.” Lara says hesitating at first, then with a half-smile at the way Brendan phrased his question. Her feelings, complicated and so changeable for so long seem to have settled. Maybe into an emotional sludge. Does she want to have them stirred up?
“I knew he must be dead. If he wasn’t, I think he would have let me know in some way. I mean he could have blackmailed me into seeing him again if he had wanted to – he could have said that I was an accomplice of his. Could I have proved otherwise?” Lara watched Brendan’s reaction to her words then carried on. “I couldn’t understand how he could be capable of loving me and using me. I couldn’t understand how he c
ould be both -” Lara searches for the right words. “ – a crook – and – and such a good and loyal friend to Enoch and also to me – and then do what he did to us both – betray us – and then? How could he use my paintings to smuggle out diamonds? It incriminates me! I don’t know what happened to the paintings.” Lara glances up at Brendan and manages a grin. “The idea that my paintings have been junked makes me absolutely furious even if I am safer for it!” She stops smiling abruptly. “He didn’t appear so – damaged or so exploitative but I guess I knew he couldn’t change and he wouldn’t stop doing what he had always done in Chambeshi.”
“What was that? What was it he always would do?” Brendan persists.
“Oh I don’t know really.” Lara says crossly. “Be an opportunist always – looking to survive – like a wild animal on the hunt always.”
“When did you begin to realise that?” Brendan asks.
Lara shakes her head slowly and soberly.
“I don’t know exactly – the knowledge gradually seeped into me somehow. I began to see that he was not quite in control of himself – he was driven always to take chances – like someone canoeing down rapids in a deep, steep-sided gorge – there was no way out for him and he didn’t know whether he would be drowned going over a waterfall or finally reach the sea.
Part Ten
London 1997
Chapter One
Gillian
When Adam goes back to school the week after Tim’s departure, Gillian and Anne help Lara move the contents of her studio from the flat into her new, much larger, and very much colder space at the Victoria Park Art Factory Studios.
The abandoned living room is a dismal mess now that it is empty.
“Mum, you haven’t cleaned your studio ever, have you? Wow!”
Adam is so impressed by this idea that Lara has to laugh. She had been thinking gloomily of the time and money she would have to spend to get the room into a usable condition. It’s time, rather than money, that she is most reluctant to give to the task but as she doesn’t want to touch Oscar’s money, time is what the task will need.
“It’s certainly got the dirtiest spider webs and biggest dust-balls in the East End of London, hasn’t it?” Lara says. “Bedrooms aren’t the same as artist’s studios though. You still have to clean yours and I still do always keep the kitchen clean. How about you give me a hand with this room, Adam? Maybe the spiders will defeat me and I’ll end up wrapped up in spider web cocoon like a dead fly.”
Adam hesitates a moment in case he is being tricked into housework, but racing around this newly discovered space with a broom and batting at webs with a duster proves too tempting. Lara has to call an end to their game when the air fills with dust and makes them both cough.
“This is great, Mum. Can you leave it like this for a bit?” Adam asks.
Why not? Lara thinks, happy and breathless from their shared exercise.
“Okay, until I get the curtains down and cleaned and start to paint it.”
Adam brings down any of his toys that still have wheels and sets up competitions to see which of them would crash most spectacularly into the opposite skirting board after travelling the furthest distance.
Lara is pleased to put off cleaning and decorating the living room and instead concentrate on settling into her Victoria Park Studio. She is paying for a half-share of a large space but as the other half is still unoccupied she lets herself spread out a little. It is lovely to be undisturbed as she works and she has almost three clear days a week to concentrate on her own work.
Lara paints steadily, using the twilight greens of the soft shadowless English countryside and blurring colour through mist.
Behind her, last year’s unfinished canvasses of hard dark edged grey, robotic city forms are stacked facing the studio wall.
On her work-table, the sketch books are still in piles, but now their pages are jammed open with any convenient or appropriate object and Lara constantly refers to them. Boxes of pencils, crayons, stones, feathers and leaves collected from the bush sit uneasily on their awkward upended lids ready to give up information or to provide memory markers.
Hidden for the last ten years, a huge blood-red canvas still wearing a skirt of bubble-wrap glows in the late light of the window right where Lara can see it if she dares to confront it. Lara is determined to find a new direction and a new meaning for her art. The red painting was from a previous life. Maybe she will strip it off its stretchers, tear it into shreds and put it out with the rubbish.
Tim has been gone several weeks now. She can redefine herself. Lara decides that she needs to find a new way of rooting her art in the place where she lives. She will start with English paintings and perhaps make them more abstract and less descriptive. The idea frightens her. She begins to feel as if she is floating rootless above her own life. Will she be able to find meaning for herself in isolation in England? Tim phones her regularly and always speaks to Adam but their conversations are all surface chat. They always seem to cover the same territory.
“I’m fine. You’re fine? Yes me too. No life’s fine. Adam’s good. Aren’t you Adam? Yes work’s okay. I’ll tell you about it? I’ll write and I’ll fax you. Is your fax private? Adam wants to fax some drawings to you. Okay?”
They exchange letters by fax machine and Lara always includes something that Adam has written or drawn or occasionally dictated if time was short.
Lara knows she needs other artists. It had been a good move to reconnect with Gillian and get back into a different, more avant-garde, perhaps a more extreme art coterie. It was proving interesting but would it was also disruptive and maybe it increases her sense of displacement and uncertainty about herself and her work.
She has to give it a try but her feelings of detachment are accompanied by a growing sense of desolation. Then the dreams start again and turn into nightmares.
Chapter Two
Rape
Lara had encountered her old art school friend Gillian by chance at an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. At first they were wary of each other but to their mutual surprise found their old art school friendship was built on a the depth of passion each felt for their own work together with a readiness to laugh at their mistakes. Gillian is more relaxed than Lara remembers and her appearance is more ordinary. She still has a stud in her nose and another in her eyebrow but she wears no make-up and her hair, though very short simply looks fashionable. Her tattoos have faded slightly but are now mostly covered by her T-shirt. Gillian has a new partner, Anne, a red-haired woman with a friendly open face who dresses like a school-teacher and, in fact, is one. Lara immediately feels comfortable with her unchallenging manner. She meets Gillian and Anne at their small Stratford East house which is pleasant, comfortable and well-maintained with a tiny but pretty garden.
“Anne never minded being gay.” Gillian says. “It was just how she was and what she wanted to be. I had problems about being a lesbian – you’ll remember. I felt I had to go on a journey to become what in fact I already was. I had to join a club, choose to belong, change myself and show I was different by my appearance. Mad really. I wasn’t the only one who felt that of course.”
They are on the bus heading for Gillian’s studio near Victoria Park. Gillian had invited Lara to come and see what she was working on.
The studio was in an old factory with large spaces, wide stone stairs and iron frame windows. Heating was obviously a problem. There were boiler suits and thick sweaters hanging behind the doors of the studios.
“Horrid aren’t they? At least – I hope you think they are.” Gillian says.
Gillian and Lara stand together in front of six enormous black and white photo-montages.
“My God yes – they are awful. It’s you isn’t it? What made you do them? I mean I know what they’re about, but why did you do them? What happened? They are about you, aren’t
they?”
“I was raped.” Gillian says matter-of-factly. “It happened a long time ago when I was living with Poppy after art school. You know how we looked – we were both so into punk then. There was a pub we used to go to near where we lived. We used to chat to some blokes who hung out there. They seemed okay with us, I thought. They seemed to accept that we were weird and they used to rag us about being punks and being gay but they didn’t seem aggressive or anything – I thought they liked us and we were almost friends. Anyhow I was there one night on my own and after I left the pub they followed me. Seems they had decided to educate me into being a heterosexual so they pulled me into a side road and all had a go at showing me what I was missing. I fought like hell which was probably a mistake – I lost my front teeth.” Gillian clacks her fingernail on the bridgework in her mouth.
Lara is aghast. She stares at Gillian open-mouthed. How does she manage to be so calm about it?
“How awful!” Lara repeats in shock. “What did you do? Did you go to the police? What happened?”
“Oh I did. The case went to court. On my lawyer’s advice I even dressed in ordinary clothes for the court appearance but of course the ‘boys’ got off. A punk unemployed artist in a gay relationship is asking for it apparently. With my lifestyle what could I expect but to be raped?”
Lara looks around for a chair to sit on.
“Hey” Gillian says, “I’m okay now you know – but you don’t look so good.”
She pulls out a high stool for Lara and makes instant coffee in stained and chipped mugs that smell faintly of white spirit. Lara stares at the photo-montages.