Mariette was unfazed by my reaction. She was a few years younger than me, shorter and with a slight plumpness which might one day spoil her looks. But not for a long time. At twenty-two or twenty-three she was merely voluptuous. She was quite stunning in every way, with big brown eyes and that curly hair so black you could hardly believe the colour was natural, although somehow you knew it was. Her skin was pale and creamy, and her lips full and pink. Like me, she wore very little make-up, but I suspected that our reasons were rather different. She didn’t need make-up and jolly well knew it. I just didn’t have a clue how to go about putting on anything beyond a dash of mascara, a smear of foundation and a smudge of lipstick.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I’ve not had it since New Year’s Eve.’
I nearly choked on my cappuccino. ‘Oh,’ I remarked lamely.
‘Yeah,’ Mariette continued conversationally. ‘Went to a party with my Micky and all he did was get fruity with this tart from Truro. So I pulled her bloke – not that he was up to much. But then my Micky has the cheek to get all sanctimonious and chuck me up.’
The French waiter reappeared, to ask smilingly if there was anything else we would like.
‘Tell you later, darling,’ said Mariette shamelessly. The waiter’s smile widened. When he eventually carried our empty coffee cups back to the kitchen Mariette’s eyes followed his retreating bum. ‘What I couldn’t do with that,’ she murmured.
I was staggered. But I found myself giggling along with her. For me even such inconsequential events were an adventure, and I could not wait to get home and tell Carl about my new friend – although I did leave out our conversations concerning the merits of the waiter’s bum and the state of Mariette’s sex life.
As coffee breaks with Mariette became a weekly occurrence I began to relax and even join in the cheeky chat. Our gossipy sessions were a great novelty to me because Carl and I were always so totally immersed in each other that we had never felt the need to mix much with anyone from outside. In any case, we only felt really safe with each other. I even wondered if my new friendship with Mariette might cause him any anxiety, but he gave no indication that it did.
I was however finding myself drawn towards a lifestyle very different from anything I had ever experienced. Mariette’s independence seemed so appealing to me. Exciting even!
Although I had never handled money and was daunted by the vague prospect of ever doing so – Carl had always dealt with all of that, as had somebody throughout my life – I began to fantasise about earning some money of my own. I wondered if I might be able to get a job in the town, perhaps just part time. Anything that would allow me to stand on my own two feet at last, albeit just a little. And one day I mentioned it to Mariette in the library.
‘Good idea, I’ll ask around and see what’s going,’ she replied easily.
She had, of course, no idea what a monumental step it would be for me.
I was thoughtful when I left the library and began to walk up the steep cobbled streets towards our little cottage. One way and another, the idea of a job was becoming more and more appealing. It was early July and the sun was warm on my back. As I walked, dodging the holidaymakers, I could see the glow of the bay through gaps between the higgledy-piggledy mish-mash of buildings. The sight never failed to lift me, and I had at last begun to feel so strong and well, and unusually untroubled, that I decided to talk over my job idea with Carl.
Over our usual snack lunch of bits and pieces grabbed from the fridge, I mentioned as casually as I could manage that perhaps I might like to find a job one of these days, to have some kind of commitment outside our home.
Carl was eating an orange and struggling not to let the juice run down his chin. He was one of those people who always seemed to have a problem eating without dribbling or dropping something. I used to think it must be to do with the shape of his mouth and it always made me want to laugh, particularly watching him try to be so careful. Eventually he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and then rubbed both his hands down the sides of the paint-spattered blue cotton smock he always wore when he was working. He stared at me thoughtfully before he spoke. ‘It’s not so easy, you know, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘You’ve never worked; I think you would find it very stressful.’
I supposed that he was right and didn’t push the point.
I slept soundly and nightmare free yet again that night and woke soon after dawn to another quite glorious summer morning. Through the bedroom window I could see the sun rising over the bay. It was the kind of morning which defied you to be anything other than happy and optimistic. One of these days, I thought, I will build a life of my own, like Mariette, I really will.
Carl, almost always an early riser, was already up and about, and I could smell that he had made fresh coffee. I tripped down the stairs, my head buzzing with all my ideas.
‘You look like you’re in a good mood,’ he remarked with a grin.
‘I am,’ I said, and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
‘Right then,’ he responded. ‘It’s a glorious day. Shall we drive out of town a bit and take a walk along the coastal path? It’s still very early, shouldn’t be too many grockles about yet.’
I nodded enthusiastically, gulped down a cup of coffee, nibbled at a slice of bread and honey, then followed Carl out of the door.
His old red van was parked just around the corner on the brow of the hill. It was pretty battered but, even so, as we approached it we noticed that there were fresh scratches right down the side nearest to us.
‘Goddamn it,’ exclaimed Carl, reaching out to touch the damage. ‘I thought they only did this to Mercs and Beamers.’
I smiled. I was still in a good mood. Neither Carl nor I were exactly car proud. We couldn’t afford anything much to be proud of, for a start.
Then Carl stood back and studied the scratches more carefully.
‘It’s some kind of graffiti, isn’t it?’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘Some kind of writing, I think, but very difficult to read.’
He narrowed his eyes and half squinted at the marks.
‘“Know, Know, Know . . . something.” I’m not sure. What do you make of it, Suzanne?’
‘“Know the truth”,’ I read aloud, suddenly seeing most of the badly formed letters on the van quite clearly.
I glanced at Carl.
He was frowning by then. Concentrating hard.
‘“I know the truth”,’ he said quietly.
Then he turned to look at me. We stared at each other for a few seconds. It felt like a very long time.
‘Kids,’ he said eventually. ‘Damned stupid kids.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘Must be kids. What else?’
We climbed into the van, drove out a few miles on the road heading south towards Land’s End, parked in a lay-by just outside Zennor and found our way on to a part of the famous coastal path which runs all the way from Minehead on the north coast of Devon, right down around the bottom end of Cornwall and up the south coast to Portland Bill in Dorset.
The sun was still shining brightly. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sea was that kind of aquamarine blue that is so rarely seen off the British Isles.
And yet somehow the day was not quite as glorious for Carl and I as it had been such a short time ago.
We only walked for an hour of so. Our hearts were not in it. As soon as we returned to the cottage Carl went into his studio – then just a makeshift lean-to in the backyard but with plenty of good natural light – and began to paint. Not one of the wonderful abstracts which were his pride and joy, but a cosy seaside scene of the kind that were our bread and butter.
I sat quietly on a stool and watched him as I so often did, even though my mind kept wandering. I had somehow lost the desire to go off job-hunting.
Carl could paint the chocolate box pictures, as we called them, blindfold. Sometimes he used pastels and watercolour, but more often he worked in oils because oil paintings fetched the best prices. Car
l was a highly accomplished oil painter, very skilled in all the technicalities of producing just the right colour and texture, but that morning his progress was slow. His brush did not sweep across the canvas with anything like its usual assured flourish.
The light was almost too bright. The studio, which had a glass roof, caught rather too much morning sun on a day like this, and it could be blinding for an artist. I knew that Carl preferred the pure light of a more wintry day. He was sweating, too. Every possible window was open but it was hot in the small conservatory-like building. In the winter it was extremely cold, of course, but Carl never seemed to notice.
He worked on a tall easel and stood with one leg bent and balanced on a footstool so that he could lean his palette on his knee. His big wooden paintbox was on the table to one side, every tube and jar meticulously laid out. Carl was a very ordered painter. The studio was never untidy, not at all the way I had always imagined an artist’s studio would be. Carl said he couldn’t work in a mess. Occasionally he took a break from layering on the paint to step back and study the all too familiar scene taking form on his canvas – a fishing smack in the foreground of St Ives bay, a vividly setting sun behind.
The painting was as technically excellent as ever, but I knew how much the subject bored him.
‘Do you know how many sunsets over St Ives I’ve painted since we came to live here, Suzanne?’ he asked, as he paused to drink a mug of coffee I had made for him.
I shook my head.
‘Neither do I.’ He grinned. ‘If I counted them I think I really would go mad.’
He gave me a peck on the cheek and went back to work. About an hour or so later, as he squeezed some crimson paint on to his palette the tube split open and dollops of the bright-red goo spurted on to the canvas.
Carl rarely swore. ‘Bugger it!’ he said, dabbing at the canvas with an oily cloth. Then he put down his palette, stepped away from his easel and turned to face me. ‘This is silly,’ he said, ‘I can’t concentrate. Come on, we’re going out.’
He led me into the town, stopping in Fore Street at Warren’s pasty shop for what we reckoned were the best oggies in town and then at an off-licence for a bottle of wine, before marching me up the hill. I knew where he was taking me. We both loved the Barbara Hepworth museum, set in the white-painted cottage in the little narrow street leading up from the harbour, which had been the famous sculptor’s home. It wasn’t like the Tate Gallery down the road, all antiseptic and don’t touch and blaring out that awful ever-so-British establishment message that most of us aren’t really good enough to appreciate art.
In Barbara Hepworth’s place you can sit on a bench eating your lunch while children crawl through the convoluted holes of her huge garden sculptures and her workshop remains exactly as it was the very last time she had used it, even down to the discarded smock and the half-finished carvings.
The garden was bathed in warm sunshine that morning. It’s not a big garden, but mature trees and shrubs give plenty of shade and variety, and provide a wonderful backdrop for the Hepworth sculptures. We sat on our favourite south-facing bench in its sheltered spot backing on to the garden wall alongside the white-painted hut where Barbara used to sleep sometimes on balmy summer nights. Her bed is still there.
The wine was a chilled bottle of Sancerre – a real extravagance by our standards. Usually we only drank wine on our rare nights out at a local restaurant. Carl opened the bottle carefully, keeping it in its brown paper bag and turning his back to the garden. Drinking in public places, apart from licensed premises, is not allowed in St Ives any more, a legacy of too many afternoon boozers, particularly during the holiday season, spilling out on to the streets outside pubs like the Sloop and causing drunken mayhem. However, with a little discretion quiet drinkers like Carl and me could still wash down a summer picnic with something more interesting than lemonade.
Carl poured generous measures into two paper cups and raised his in a familiar toast. ‘To us,’ he said. ‘And most of all to you, my Lady of the Harbour.’
He often called me that. It had a special significance for us. He leaned very close and whispered in my ear. The birds were singing. There was a child playing contentedly just a yard or two from our feet, intent on climbing through every possible shape in Barbara’s largest work, which is the centrepiece of the Hepworth garden, dominating the small central lawn. The towering green bronze Four-square, fifteen feet high, has a magnetic attraction for small children and I had already learned enough about the artist to know that she would have liked nothing better than to have watched this one at play amidst her work.
A couple of tourists, clutching guidebooks and talking in loud American accents, wandered by. Yet I was barely aware of anything except the closeness of the man I loved. It was always like that. Carl and I had no children, of course, and had agreed that we should have none, the way things were. Naturally I hoped that one day it would be possible to have Carl’s child, but I was still very young and we already had so much together. He made me happy and he made me laugh.
He took a bite of his pasty and several chunks of meat and potato fell into his lap. I really had never understood how so meticulous a man could have such a job getting food into his mouth without dropping it and in spite of the tension we both felt that day I found myself giggling.
He brushed the bits of food off his trousers, sat up very straight and pretended to drop the entire pasty. I giggled all the more.
‘God, I wish I was Little Miss Perfect like you,’ he said.
I kissed his cheek. Somehow or other he had managed to get flakes of pastry on it.
He grinned at me and spoke with his mouth full: ‘Nothing is going to hurt us, Suzanne. Nothing. We’re going to stay just as happy as we are now, always . . .’
I let his words wash over me.
Nonetheless, the damage had been done, somewhere deep inside. Hand in hand we walked home in the mid-afternoon. We paused by the Market House, now the town hall, outside which John Payne was hanged in 1549, the place of his execution marked by a bronze and marble tablet. The sight always made me shiver. The story went that the St Ives Mayor had been entertaining the provost marshal, whose job was to pacify the rebellious county of Cornwall, in the George and Dragon inn, when he was asked to have gallows erected by the time the meal was over. He did so without question and afterwards obediently escorted the provost marshal to the scaffold.
The provost then asked if the construction was strong enough and, upon being assured that it certainly was, turned to John Payne: ‘Well, then get up speedily for they are prepared for you.’
‘I hope,’ answered the mayor, ‘you mean not as you speak.’
‘In faith,’ said the provost, ‘there is no remedy for you have been a busy rebel.’
I heard my own voice recite those words verbatim from the book about the Prayer Book Rebellion that I had borrowed from the library. And I was aware of Carl staring at me.
‘A cheerful little tale,’ he said.
I smiled wanly. ‘Have we built our own gallows, Carl?’ I asked.
‘Suzanne, stop it,’ he said and for once he was very serious, without a trace of teasing banter in his voice. ‘Everything is going to be absolutely fine. I wish you wouldn’t be so morbid.’
The ghosts of St Ives felt very close that day. Just across Market Place was the little old-fashioned gentlemen’s outfitters where successive proprietors had reported seeing a ghost in the form of a pair of disembodied legs wearing wide blue trousers.
Funny things, ghost stories: one day they’ll make you laugh and another your flesh will crawl. This was one of the flesh-crawling days.
‘The ghosts of our own pasts are always with us, like the poor,’ I said.
Carl managed a dry laugh.
‘Where do you get these sayings, Suzanne?’
I shrugged. ‘I think I made that one up,’ I said.
Carl flung an arm round my shoulders and pulled me close to him. ‘C’mon, let’s go home,’
he said, the usual gentle teasing note back in his voice. ‘Ghosts aren’t allowed in Rose Cottage. I’ve banned them.’
We both knew that could never be quite true. Carl had been as disturbed as me by the curious damage to our van. I was well aware of that in spite of his gallant attempts to conceal his unease. As we carried on walking up the hill the sun continued to blaze, casting deep, dark shadows in the narrow streets. In one of those places where I knew there was a convenient gap between the buildings I turned to look back over the rooftops to the sea. A figure disappeared abruptly into a doorway. For a moment I wondered if someone was following us. I gave myself a silent dressing down for being paranoid. The water in St Ives bay still shimmered silver and gold, but my heart was no longer singing. All the old fears had invaded me again. I tried desperately to snap out of it, but I couldn’t quite.
‘Right, I’ll cook supper,’ said Carl when we arrived home. ‘Now tell me what would be madame’s fancy, then get out of my kitchen.’
As a rule I loved him cooking for me. He was a good cook and had the knack of turning our meals together into an event, but that night I somehow didn’t want him to.
‘I’ll cook,’ I said. ‘It will give me something to do . . .’
He didn’t press the point. He knew what I meant. I was hoping that being busy would stop me from dwelling on matters I preferred to forget. We had somehow not got around to buying any fresh food so I made spaghetti bolognaise with tins of minced meat and tomatoes. We always had plenty of garlic and onions. Too late I realised that there was no fresh parmesan in the fridge. Neither of us liked the dried-up powdered stuff you can buy in drums, so we had none of that to use as an emergency stand-in either. One way and another it was not the best spag-bog I had ever made, but if Carl noticed he gave no sign.
‘Right, I’ll wash up, then how about an early night?’ he suggested after we had finished eating.
I knew he wanted to make love to me, and I had no intention of rejecting him, even though I did not think it would work – not for me, at any rate. And it didn’t. I couldn’t concentrate. I derived some comfort from his closeness, I could never fail to do that, and from the familiar intimacy when he took me into the bathroom, as he always did afterwards, and we washed together beneath the shower. But later I was afraid to sleep. Carl was as gentle and understanding as ever. Yet, for hours after he had gone to sleep, I lay wide awake, trying not to toss and turn so much that I disturbed him.
A Deep Deceit Page 3