People We Love

by Jenny Harper

  ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered to Cameron after they’d downed some grey tea and chatted politely to strangers. She couldn’t see Patrick anywhere. He had probably made his escape already. She hadn’t had any contact with him since he’d come to tell her about Pavel’s death. If she lived to be a hundred she’d never understand that man.

  ‘Want me to drop you back at the cottage?’ Cameron asked.

  Lexie shook her head.

  ‘No. Fernhill please. I’ll go back to the cottage tomorrow. I want to clear some more stuff out of Jamie’s room.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. Need any help?’

  ‘No. Thanks. I’d rather be on my own.’

  He didn’t argue. For all his usual crassness, Cameron could sometimes show amazing sensitivity.

  ‘You know,’ he said as they approached Hailesbank, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Careful,’ Lexie said, on automatic. She was thinking about Patrick Mulgrew again, and puzzling about why he’d slipped away from the funeral without coming to talk to her.

  ‘No, seriously.’

  She glanced across at him. He was looking ahead, concentrating on the road, but there was none of the usual amusement in his expression.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, concerned.

  ‘Well, that guy. And Jamie. I mean, life’s short, isn’t it. You never know what’s round the corner.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ve ballsed everything up. You know. Messed my life up.’

  Lexie gazed at him, nonplussed by the direction the conversation had taken. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, we’re not getting any younger, are we?’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Wanker!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not you,’ Cameron grinned, ‘that guy in front, cut right in on me. Stupid bugger.’

  ‘Oh. I wasn’t looking at the road. You were saying?’

  ‘What was I saying? Oh yeah. Well, I mean, perhaps I’ve wasted too much time already. You know.’

  They pulled up outside Fernhill.

  ‘You’re sounding very serious.’

  ‘Yeah well. Death and all that. It kind of gets you, doesn’t it?’

  He didn’t phrase things elegantly, but in his own way Cameron had gone right to the heart of everything.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Death kind of gets you.’

  She waited for a few minutes, but he didn’t go on and she was not sure what he was getting at, so she said, ‘Well. I’d better go. Thanks for coming today. I do appreciate it.’

  ‘You’re all right.’ He started to chuckle. ‘It was worth it anyway. When that track blasted through the chapel – Bad Boys at their best. Wicked! Good on Pavel, eh?’

  It cheered Lexie up.

  ‘Yes. Good on Pavel.’

  Martha had gone out. Tom was at the Emporium. Lexie had Fernhill all to herself. She made a mug of tea and wandered round the house, clutching it. This was her home, and yet it wasn’t her home any longer. She had moved out for the second time, trying to re-establish her career. Yet the ties that bound her were still here, reaching out for her, sucking her in. She touched the oak banister, polished with age. She and Jamie used to slide down this, provoking Martha’s alarm.

  ‘You’ll fall! It’s so dangerous!’

  The house had seen so much. Edith’s secret had been walled up in the chimney bricks for more than half a century. Had there been other secrets? More shame? She reminded herself that there had been laughter, too, and love. When Jamie was alive, she’d worn luminous dresses and danced on the lawn at midnight. They’d had parties, wonderful, noisy parties. They’d grown up, made friends, fallen out with them, made up again.

  It was time to move on. Properly, this time. The cottage was just a start. She’d stay there until after the exhibition, then see how the finances went. Maybe she’d get an offer from another gallery. Perhaps she could apply for a grant, get by for a year on that. There were possibilities. Pavel would not want her to descend into depression.

  She drained her tea, rinsed the mug and placed it on the draining board by the sink. Even though she had moved out, she still had a duty towards her parents – that hadn’t changed. She worried about Gordon’s, she had to tackle Tom again about letting Neil take over. Martha showed signs of getting through the worst of the grief, and Lexie was sure that all the work she was doing (the scanning, the filing, the project management) was helping to restore her mother’s sense of self. There was still a lot to clear in Jamie’s room. She had neglected that in her selfish urge to paint. Today was the ideal opportunity to get stuck in, because she wouldn’t be able to settle in the cottage.

  Jamie’s room felt odd now. He inhabited it less than he had done. All his clothes had gone and most of his personal items. There were some big objects – his exercise bike, for example. That could go to a charity shop, along with the bags that had already been sorted. What was left? Just the books. It shouldn’t take long – and Martha, in her organised way, had collected half a dozen empty cardboard boxes at the supermarket to make their removal easier.

  She started top left. Jamie had missed out on Martha’s passion for order – there was no apparent logic to the arrangement of the books on the shelves. John Grisham sat alongside Dickens, but she spotted more titles by those authors further along, next to Larsson and Tolkien. A childhood set of the Narnia books sat beside War and Peace and Kane and Abel.

  She came across The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and smiled. She loved Jamie’s eclectic taste. The book fell open at a page marked by an envelope. The passage didn’t seem to be particularly exciting. Scanning the page idly, she drew the card out of its envelope and looked at it. It was a Valentine’s card, the image was a little girl holding a string. High above her floated a vast red heart balloon. The words ‘Guess Who?’ were printed inside. There was no signature, just an odd squiggle. Lexie looked at it, puzzled. It was like a question mark, but upside down. Why write it upside down?

  She gave up speculating (after all, who knew about Jamie and his many loves?), shoved the card back into the envelope, stuck it into her pocket and straightened up.

  There, nothing left to be done. Just the books and bags to deliver to the charity shops, and Cameron would help her with that.

  Lexie stuck to her work routine. It was all she could do, until she heard something about Cobbles. There was no other option but to carry on. Her work was good, the concept was original and honest and moving, and she had something to prove. Besides, she wanted to do it for Pavel. Pavel had wanted this.

  The light was beginning to change. She no longer wakened with the dawn at five thirty. She couldn’t paint until eleven at night, because it was getting dark before nine. It was pointless working in artificial light, so the time available became more and more squeezed. She made the most of it. She got up as the first streak of daylight appeared through the trees, made coffee, and started painting. She worked (ignoring all complaints from Cameron) until she couldn’t trust her eyes any longer. Then, and only then, would she consider putting her brushes aside and turning her attention to him. If he was playing darts, or had an early start, or was shattered, she moved from her easel to her computer, to complete more orders for books.

  The shoes kept coming. Every other day Martha arrived with more boxes. Once a week, a pair of shoes arrived that really stood out for her and she put them aside for consideration for the exhibition. There was a single bridal shoe, for example, that reduced her to tears. The donor was a man called Bob Hutchison, who lived in Hailesbank. ‘We were due to get married in the August,’ he wrote, ‘but in the May, Susie was walking home from work when she was knocked down by a car. She was on the pavement, it was broad daylight, and the weather was fine. The car didn’t stop. Susie nearly died, and they were forced to amputate her right leg. She was determined to walk down the aisle – and four months later, she did just that.’

  It’s about the stories.

  She put the shoe with the pile for th
e exhibition and Martha photographed it, made notes, and scanned the letter onto the computer.

  There had been no sign of Patrick since the funeral. She’d heard nothing about Cobbles and didn’t even know who to ask.

  ‘Tell Lexie to take the sherry glasses,’ he’d said. Pavel’s last words, he’d said. But there was no sign of the glasses. Presumably they were still locked in the shop, and she no longer had a key. Not that she would think of going in there anyway.

  Lexie sat on her stool, paintbrush in hand, lost in memories. There’d be no more excited phone calls. (‘I’ve got the most sublime handbag in, Alexa darling, you must drop by’.) No more little chats over tea or sherry. No more wondering what colourful outfit he’d picked today. No more todays.

  Grief erupted again. It was so bloody final.

  Death kind of gets you. She jabbed angrily at the painting, a pair of Indian wedding shoes, so gloriously colourful she couldn’t resist choosing them, but the golds and purples sucked her in and soon she was at peace again, absorbed by her work. Her work was her salvation. This was what she’d been missing this last year. At least she was getting one thing back under control.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Catalogue number 3: Rugby boots. Tough leather studded boots, worn by Jamie Gordon, lock for The Hailesbank Hawks. Donor, the Gordon family, Hailesbank. Jamie Gordon was a man like many other young men. He loved to play sport, see his friends, work hard, enjoy life to the full. He played a pivotal role in the rugby team he was passionate about, just as he was pivotal in so many people’s lives. Sadly, Jamie lost his life in a car accident, aged 28. The boots embody his energy, spirit and talent.

  Patrick was sitting in Business Class on a flight from Edinburgh to New York. Beside him sat a very excited Victoria Hunter-Darling. He’d been tempted to put Victoria into Economy, but felt this was being mean. Now he was regretting it, because she was like an excited child, bobbing up and down every few minutes to look at the views, fiddling with the entertainment system to see if there was anything better than the channel she was currently watching, squealing with pleasure when complementary skin care products appeared, or free drinks, or a good meal.

  He closed down his laptop, switched the entertainment system to a music channel, stuck on the headset and settled back, eyes closed. Victoria subsided.

  The visit to New York was going to be short – just three days. There’d be little time for sightseeing, but he’d managed to get tickets for La Bohème at the Met.. Victoria was beside herself at this. Not that she was an opera lover (she had never been to the opera, she told him), but because she would have a chance to dress up. Maybe he’d give her some free time, it would be a shame not to see anything of the great metropolis on a first visit, but he had an agenda. There would be a day with a realtor, trying to pin down possible premises for his gallery. The cost made him shudder, but he remembered the calculations he’d made on the profit side and was confident the risk would pay off. The venture was exciting. He’d be interviewing for a local gallery director (there were some very interesting résumés) and he was going to meet with two artists whose work he hoped to showcase in the first few months.

  In particular, he was looking forward to meeting Domenica Martinez again. He’d first met this distinguished Mexican-born artist when he’d been in his twenties. She’d been in her forties then, and the guest artist at the gallery where he’d been working in London. He remembered her vividly: tall and upright, her stance proud and confident, thick dark hair that flowed in unruly waves down to her waist, and eyes of the most astonishing blue. He’d always admired her work, which had matured over the years. The colour and intense vividness he’d been so struck by was still there, but the imagery had become more subtle, more abstract and, in his opinion, even more powerful. She was very sought after now. If he could persuade her to open his new gallery…

  Patrick drifted into sleep. What seemed like moments later, the cabin crew woke him with the news that the plane would shortly be landing at Newark. He glanced at Victoria. She looked as if she had been too excited to sleep. She’d suffer for that later.

  Patrick adored New York. He loved the vibrancy of the city, the ‘can-do’ attitude of its citizens, the sense of confidence about the place. He’d first come here, as Victoria was doing now, as part of his on-the-job training with Armando Ardizzone, the gallery director in London who’d showed such faith in him twenty years ago. They’d stayed at the Waldorf, and he had stayed there ever since. The cost was worth it because of the feeling of success it gave him. He loved the sumptuousness of the place, its rich Art Deco magnificence, the respect people showed him when he told them where he was staying, and the convenience of its location, slap bang in the middle of Park Avenue.

  ‘Wow!’ Victoria said, for the third time, when they walked into the third empty shell of a showroom. She was showing no signs of suffering (yet) from jet lag. It would come.

  He liked this space. It was a good shape. There were three large rooms, offering potential for one, two or three exhibitions concurrently – or the opportunity of installing a coffee corner, an idea he still liked.

  When Victoria finally flagged, he sent her back to the Waldorf and spent the evening in a piano bar on Seventh. This was less to listen to the music than to sit in a space where he might avoid thinking about Lexie. He should not be thinking about Lexie. One of the reasons he had come to New York was to get her out of his mind. Work, he told himself, was the answer. It had been work that had saved him after Niamh had left, so surely it could achieve the same miracle now?

  Yet he was filled with a sense of despondency which he couldn’t shake off. He remembered Lexie in a hundred different poses. He couldn’t rid himself of the memory of the first time he’d made love to her – a scorching hot and utterly inappropriate grapple in her room in the modest flat she’d shared with two other artists in Broughton Street in Edinburgh. The flat had been above a wine bar and the chatter of late-night drinkers had floated up on a wave of cigarette smoke through the open window. That particular mixture of sound and smell always reminded him of that moment.

  ‘I don’t make a habit of screwing my new protégées,’ he’d whispered, ‘but you, Alexa Gordon, are ravishing.’

  And, my God, she had been. It hadn’t just been her slender limbs that had attracted him, nor the graceful sweep of her neck from her shoulders to the crazy red hair. It had been the marriage of these physical attributes with the fearless way she’d challenged established beliefs – and dug her heels in thereafter. The tattoo on her thumb said it all: ‘Artbollocks.’ He’d smiled wryly the first time he’d seen it, recognising an artbollocks tendency of his own. Now he thought of it every time he teetered on the edge of pomposity about the work he showed, and chose his words more carefully.

  This was the extent of her influence on him. It reached far beyond sexual attraction, beyond his heart, even. She engaged his brain. The combination, in his experience, was unique and powerful.

  When he was so tired that he thought he might fall asleep in the cab back to the hotel, he paid his bill and left. He believed in adjusting at once to local time (especially when the visit was so short), but he had reached his limit.

  Victoria wasn’t involved in the interviewing, since the appointment of a senior member of staff could not involve a junior. He spent a useful morning vetting applicants, and by the time his young assistant rejoined him for a meeting with the upcoming installation artist, Matte Ruutu, his mood had become expansive – and he still felt upbeat later, as he dressed for the opera.

  ‘You look stunning,’ he told Victoria, who had donned her best dress, an ankle-length, clinging creation in pastel chiffon.

  She looked thrilled at the compliment.

  ‘I’m so excited,’ she said, over and over again as the taxi sped to the Lincoln Center.

  Afterwards – after Victoria had oohed and aahed and sighed and wept through La Bohème – they visited The View for cocktails and the buffet. Despite himself, P
atrick couldn’t help showing New York off. He enjoyed Victoria’s delight at everything. It so exactly mirrored his own all those years ago that it refreshed his pleasure. Back at the Waldorf, he realised – too late – that she had misread him.

  ‘Thank you for bringing me, Patrick,’ she smiled as he paused at her door. Before he saw it coming, she had pushed herself into his arms and was kissing him with every appearance of passion.

  He disengaged himself as firmly and as quickly as he could.

  ‘I’m flattered,’ he said gently, ‘at your interest. But this isn’t what I had in mind.’

  She blushed a vivid scarlet and took a step back.

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry! I thought—’

  In an effort to lessen her embarrassment, he added, ‘You’re extraordinarily pretty, Victoria, and a good worker. It’s just that I’m not available.’

  ‘You don’t need to explain.’

  She was biting her lip and her face was still pink.

  ‘I don’t want you to think you’re unattractive, because—’

  ‘You don’t need to explain,’ she repeated. ‘Really. Listen, can we just forget this?’

  ‘It’s forgotten. I’ll see you in the morning. Actually,’ he seized on a thought, ‘why don’t you have a lie in, then take a look round town? Go shopping.’

  ‘Is that OK?’ she said doubtfully. ‘What about the meeting with Domenica Martinez?’

  ‘I’d like to see her on my own. Do you mind? She’s an old friend.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  He could see she was torn between her duties and shopping.

  ‘Listen, Bloomingdale’s is just up the road, Saks isn’t far away. And Tiffany’s. Go do a Holly Golightly. Just don’t blame me if you wreck your credit card.’

  ‘Well, okay then. If you’re sure. Thanks. I’ll see you at lunchtime.’

  ‘We’ll finish by looking at the last two properties before we head for the airport. OK?’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  He didn’t really know why he was sending her off shopping. After all, what was the point in bringing her all this way just to do what she could do back home? But he didn’t want to feel he had to watch every word or worry about awkwardness. In any case, he would need to put all his charm into the meeting with Domenica if he was to secure her agreement to show at his new gallery.