The Last Day

by Claire Dyer

‘Oh, this and that. There were a few barren years, you know, like we all go through.’ He laughs and takes a dainty sip of his drink. His fingernails, I notice, are painted with sky-blue nail polish. ‘But then I got my shit together. Thanks mostly to Marmaduke,’ he waves a hand at the crowd, ‘who’s here somewhere, and now the pictures are back. Mostly Cornish skies as that’s where we’re based now. I paint as Rock Johnson now. You may have heard of me?’

  His eyes widen, kind of like a dog’s might when he’s doing something clever like sitting and staying or coming when called. I’ve heard of Rock Johnson. There was a piece about him in one of the Sunday supplements not so long back. I hadn’t recognised the photo of him then either. And his work? Now I come to think of it, his use of perspectives was still good, but his colour palette seemed to have gone awry, although, I think charitably, maybe that was just the print quality in the magazine. I obviously hadn’t read the article that closely, otherwise I might have noticed the connection to our college and our inauspicious beginnings in the studio.

  ‘Of course,’ I say hurriedly, fearing that his eyes may actually explode. ‘There was an article I read about you recently.’

  ‘Oh that old thing,’ he says, blushing. ‘What a lot of fuss!’

  But I can tell he’s delighted really.

  ‘And so,’ he says, taking yet another sip of his drink, ‘what’s new with you?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely nothing,’ I reply. ‘Same old, same old.’

  I absolutely don’t want to tell him about the pet portraits.

  ‘But surely,’ he presses on, ‘you must be doing something. An artist never really puts down their brush, do they?’

  ‘I live a quiet life. I get by.’

  ‘And what about that handsome brute you went off with? He still on the scene?’

  There’s an odd, stabby feeling inside my chest as though I’ve suddenly developed indigestion.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s not.’

  Three small words: not nearly large enough to describe the pain I’d once felt.

  At that moment, Colin appears. Thank God for Colin, I think.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Colin asks. He’s not holding a glass and looks unruffled and cool in the heat of the room. I am grateful to him for all these things.

  I introduce him to Barney and say, ‘I’m good, thank you. But we should be getting going I guess.’

  I should ask Barney the requisite questions about where he’s staying tonight, what his plans are after the preview, when he’s going back to Cornwall, but can’t be bothered. Right now, I wish to be in my house in Albert Terrace, with its muddle and its memories; I want to be at home. I don’t let myself consider whether Colin should be there too or whether I will spend the night listening for small movements and whispered conversations in the room across the stairs.

  ‘Keep in touch,’ Barney says as I put my now-empty glass on a passing waiter’s tray.

  ‘Will do,’ I promise, but I know I won’t.

  I haven’t even really studied the art on the walls. There’s always been a press of people near the paintings and I’m not in the mood to battle my way through them. A glimpse here and there has been enough.

  It’s nice to leave the gallery and step out into the street. Perversely, despite the traffic noise, it seems quieter out here than in the room behind us. My neck under my plait is prickly with sweat. Colin doesn’t try to take my hand but still he seems to steer me towards the Tube. He doesn’t say much, just the occasional comment. He asks me no questions. Again I am grateful. He is such easy company.

  The journey home is uneventful; the train we catch is one of those mid-evening ones after the commuter rush and before the late-night ones where the sleepy or the drunk journey home, swaying between the seats before they find somewhere to sit, the trains where the overriding smell is of burger and chips.

  ‘We’ll walk back I presume,’ Colin says as we rumble into Farnham station.

  It’s completely dark now and still warm and as we get off, Colin holds out an arm to steady me.

  We walk in companionable silence and then Colin says, ‘I liked the art tonight. It was robust.’

  Robust is just the right word. Robustness is what my work has been lacking of late. I seem to have lost whatever vigour I once had, the ability to take chances, the time to. I’d once thought there was an infinite amount of time ahead of me, but whatever there was has sped by at an alarming rate and now I look back more than forward and this angers me; I should have more to show for my life than I do.

  ‘It was,’ I say, as we turn into Albert Terrace. Some of the houses still have their curtains open and I glance into front room windows, see the buttery yellow lights on inside, the flicker of a TV screen.

  We pause outside Colin’s house. ‘You can come in if you like,’ he says.

  Again, the lack of a direct question is a comfort.

  ‘I think I’ll head home. Got an early start.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’ll see you soon.’ This time he does reach out a hand and takes one of mine in it. He presses his thumb against the soft flesh of my palm and I feel a faint buzz inside my stomach but it’s not strong enough to make me change my mind. His face is calm and unlined, his eyes reflect the glow from the streetlights. I like his mouth, his plump lips, his tidy stubble, the way he speaks.

  ‘Thanks for coming with me this evening.’ I begin to pull my hand away from his.

  ‘It was a pleasure, as always,’ he replies.

  I’m starting to turn away from him, my heartbeats steadying, when he says, ‘Vita?’

  I look back at him. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course I am. Why?’

  ‘I just hope it’s working out all right, you know with Boyd and everything.’

  ‘By everything, do you mean Honey?’ I ask, my heartbeats inexplicably quickening again.

  ‘Well, yes and Boyd. I mean it must be odd having them there.’

  I think. Is it odd? I’d thought it would be but actually it isn’t. There’s something right about it, easy almost. It’s good to have Boyd there; strangely, his presence provides a kind of comfort. And Honey? It’s almost as though she fills a gap, albeit a gap that shouldn’t be there and that she shouldn’t be filling. Sometimes I hate having them there, but other times? Other times, it seems as natural as breathing.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. Then realise I’ve said this snappily so I tilt my head to one side and continue, ‘Really I am. There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing is changing and it’s only temporary. They’ll be gone before I know it.’

  ‘As long as you’re OK.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am.’

  But as I close the front door behind me and Colin closes his, I stop in the darkness of the lounge. The curtains are drawn to and all is quiet upstairs and suddenly I’m filled with a fury that’s as unwelcome as it is unexpected. My heart somersaults in my chest and I stomp into the kitchen to get a glass of water and then I stomp upstairs, not caring if I disturb them, they shouldn’t bloody well be here anyway. Everything was perfectly settled the way it was before. It has been six years and never once have I questioned what happened between Boyd and me. It was the natural culmination of what led up to it; there’d been no other choice.

  I get into my pyjamas, take off my glasses and unplait my hair and then I use the bathroom. I don’t stop midway along the landing to listen out for movement in Boyd and Honey’s room but I imagine him turning over in his sleep, his long legs stretching out, his paw of a hand resting on her hip and my heart bangs uncomfortably inside my ribs again as I climb into bed and turn off the light.

  I also don’t think of Colin in the room on the other side of the wall, or the fact that on the few occasions we’ve actually fallen asleep together, when he sleeps, he sleeps tidily and noiselessly, doesn’t crowd me and keeps to his side of the bed, how he doesn’t rest his hand on my hip. No, I don’t think about any of this at all.

  * * *
<
br />   The next morning I’m making a cup of tea when I hear the unmistakeable sound of Boyd’s footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Tea?’ I ask.

  ‘Please.’ He’s standing before me running his fingers through his hair.

  ‘How did yesterday go?’

  ‘Yesterday?’ He’s walking through to the lounge to draw back the curtains.

  ‘Honey’s birthday surprise,’ I reply as he comes back through to the kitchen and I’m pouring boiling water into the teapot. I’d obviously known about her birthday but hadn’t felt it my place to acknowledge it in any way. We weren’t on those sorts of terms.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it was great, thanks. I booked for her to go and see a medium. You know how she is about her superstitions? Well, I wanted to give her some kind of certainty and thought it would be a good idea.’

  He pauses, then continues, ‘She got told just what she wanted to hear. Lots of good news, future all rosy that kind of thing. The lady even said …’

  He stops mid-sentence and I have a sneaky suspicion I know what he was going to say. I am relieved when he doesn’t but instead mutters, ‘… Never mind. It’s not important. How was your evening by the way? Good preview?’

  ‘It was OK,’ I say as I stir sugar into his tea. ‘Met up with Barney Makepeace. Not sure if you remember him from the old days?’

  ‘Guy who always wore black t-shirts and unfeasibly tight jeans?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ I hand him his tea. ‘He looks a bit different now though.’

  ‘Guess we all do. It’s been a while.’

  ‘I suppose it has.’ I take a mouthful of my drink, it’s so hot it scalds my tongue. ‘Shall we see if we can finish off yesterday’s crossword then?’ I ask.

  We settle down on the sofa and he is within touching distance.

  ‘Right,’ he says, ‘which ones have we still got to do?’

  ‘There’s twelve down: “Alarming disclosure of beauty”. It’s nine letters.’

  Boyd shifts in his seat. ‘Do we have any of them yet?’

  ‘Sixth letter is H.’

  ‘That’s not much to go on.’

  I am struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu, that not only have we sat here like this a thousand times before but that we’ve had this clue before. I look at Boyd. He’s frowning and drumming his fingers on his leg and before I know what I’m doing I say, ‘You haven’t changed. Not like Barney, I mean.’

  I think, shit, where am I going with this?

  He turns and smiles, ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  There is a heavy pause. I rustle the paper. I am acutely aware of Honey upstairs, of the fact that Boyd has changed; he is older, wiser, his heart belongs to someone else.

  ‘Did you mean it as one?’

  ‘One what?’ I snap. I am staring hard at the clues. Thirteen across is ‘Two girls on one knee’ and it’s seven letters. If we get it, it’ll help us with twelve down. My mind has suddenly gone blank.

  ‘A compliment,’ Boyd says.

  ‘I guess so. At least you still have your hair!’

  ‘And you haven’t changed either, Vita. You’re still …’

  ‘Still what?’ I am losing patience with this conversation, am fearful one of us will say something that will put the delicate balance we’ve achieved at risk.

  ‘Still stubborn, generous, opinionated, intelligent,’ he says. ‘And you still have that energy, that sense of beauty that I so loved about you …’

  The word ‘loved’ crashes into me and sounds huge in the quiet of the kitchen. Two things about it are inescapable: firstly, he said the word ‘love’ and secondly, he used the past tense. I leap up as if stung; the mug of tea I’ve balanced on the arm of the sofa topples and smashes to the floor. Broken china and tea go everywhere. ‘Fuck,’ I say. ‘Look what you made me do.’

  ‘I made you? What do you mean?’

  I can’t explain to him what I mean. My head is whirling; I didn’t need to hear what he said, I don’t need to know it, I don’t want to admit what both things about the word may mean. It’s a bombshell I can do without.

  ‘Bombshell!’ I almost shout it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Alarming disclosure of beauty” is Bombshell!’

  ‘You’re right, it is. Well done you. That gives us an L for thirteen across. Knee, knee … The answer’s almost within reach.’

  Too bloody right, I think, but don’t really know where the thought comes from. By now, I’m on my knees, cleaning up the broken mug and wiping up the spilt tea. Knee, knee … and then the word comes to me: ‘Patella,’ I say, looking up at Boyd. ‘Pat and Ella are two girls’ names and patella is kneecap.’

  ‘You’re on fire this morning, Vita,’ he says and thankfully it seems as though he’s forgotten what made me leap up and knock over my drink. ‘You’re way ahead of me.’

  But I’m not, I think. I’m actually way behind you. I haven’t been able to give my heart to anyone else and still don’t really know to whom it rightly belongs. Of course I say nothing though, it wouldn’t do either of us any good if I did.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘guess I’d better be getting on.’

  ‘Me too,’ he replies. ‘And Vita …?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He stands, still holding the newspaper, and he looks at me. ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he says. ‘It’ll keep.’

  And then he’s gone, back up the stairs, back to Honey, and I’m left with two clues completed and no appetite for my toast and marmalade, just pieces of broken china in my hand and a tea stain on the carpet.

  Boyd

  From the photographs Boyd’s seen, his mother had been beautiful when young: dark hair, full lips, wasp-thin waist. He remembers looking through her albums when he was a boy, the pictures held in by cardboard corners. She hadn’t annotated them with dates or places but he’d seen a succession of shots of her as a teenager: her leaning against railings on a pier or standing next to a shining car, her tiny gloved hand resting on the bonnet; or her seated at a table, cocktail glass in hand. She’d been a radiant person back then.

  Too young for soldiers, she’d waited until she was nineteen, until the start of the fifties, to spread her wings. It was then, Boyd reckoned by looking at the fashions, that she was photographed leaning on the arms of a succession of handsome boys, her expression guileless and happy.

  He must have studied these pictures when they lived in their first home. He remembers his mother stopping on her way to the kitchen, sitting next to him on the mustard-yellow sofa they’d had in those days and saying, ‘My goodness, Boyd, how times change, eh?’ She’d taken a drag on her cigarette and said, ‘But we’re fine, aren’t we? Just the two of us. You must promise me …’

  ‘Promise you what?’ he’d asked.

  She’d paused before she’d said, ‘That you’ll never try to find your father. Some things are best left. OK?’ and she’d let out a mouthful of smoke and through the smoke her face had looked fierce, fierce and like a stranger’s.

  And, of course he’d promised her. When the smoke had cleared, he’d looked up and seen how her face powder had settled into the creases around her eyes and how there’d been a faint dusting of it on the outrageously wide collar of her patterned dress. He’d promised her because he’d had no other choice. She’d moved away then, the ash hanging perilously from the end of her cigarette.

  This was in the mid-seventies when they’d lived in a flat above a chemist’s shop in West London and before she’d married for the second time.

  Her story had not been a simple one and it had taken him a long time to put the pieces of it together, not helped by the absence of any grandparents to provide corroborating evidence. He often mourned the fact that he’d never been part of a family, part of something bigger than himself and his mother.

  She’d been born to an upper middle class family from Bristol. Her father had, he came to learn, been the Company Secretary of a prestigious manufacturing firm – one that made a
certain type of valve ­– and he and his wife lived a life of respectability and calm that came with his close association to the local captains of industry. That was until Boyd’s mother discovered men, or one man in particular.

  She’d been christened Muriel but had always hated the name so renamed herself ‘Belle’, and all was going well until – as she was to tell him one afternoon when, again, they were sitting on the mustard-yellow sofa and Boyd was turning the pages in the album and saw a picture of her holding a bouquet of white flowers, standing next to a man on a set of steps – she met Malcolm.

  Malcolm had blown into town with the travelling fair. He’d worked the dodgems and Boyd could imagine what had happened; it’s a common enough story. Malcolm must have flattered Belle, smiled at her as he hung on to the waltzer’s poles, as he hopped panther-like from one to the other in his hip-hugging trousers, a cigarette hanging from his lips, as he made her believe she was the only one.

  Belle had got pregnant, had been disowned by her respectable parents, had married Malcolm only to lose the baby and for him to go back to the fair, leaving her a wife with no husband, a mother with no baby, a daughter with no parents.

  That afternoon on the sofa, when Boyd had been around eight and they were looking at the photograph of her wedding day, she’d said, ‘He was the most beautiful and most dangerous man I’ve ever known. I loved him with all my heart.’

  Boyd had not really understood then of course.

  There were other men after Malcolm; plenty of them, as the album testified. There were pictures of Belle with men wearing hats, men smoking pipes, men in thick woollen cardigans, one man with a dog at his heels. But no one stayed. She worked, paid the rent, made her own clothes, smoked too many cigarettes, drank too much, didn’t eat properly and still her parents didn’t, couldn’t, forgive her. Boyd had often wondered if they came to regret their decision, but he’d never know for sure as they’d died long ago. His mother had told him the bare facts in her more tipsy moments over the years but never whether she tried to effect a reconciliation. He doubts she did. Like him, she was, and is, a proud person.

  Then, in 1969, she fell pregnant again, with him. His father was, so Boyd came to believe, the husband of one of Belle’s friends: a married man with a family of his own who’d never wanted anything to do with either Boyd or Belle. This is what his mother had told him anyway and Boyd had long since been unable to grasp whether it was the men she picked who were flawed or whether it was her; whether there was something inherently unkeepable and unwantable about her.