‘Ditto clients.’
With a new mackerel strip she casts again, with no great vigour, but releasing her index finger from the line with precise timing, so the weight is propelled in an almost horizontal trajectory in front of her before dropping onto the millpond surface. Next she checks that the line is not snagged on the reel, or the tip of the rod, before reeling in a few turns so that the bale arm flicks over. Luke watches in the hope his own cast will be equally precise. He brings his rod forward, eyes fixed on the sand eel, checking it remains on the hook. Bait and float drop obediently ahead of him. He too reels in a couple of turns before looking over to Eva who seems to be gazing towards the horizon, rather than at her float. He imagines her as child with her aunt by a lake in County Clare, absorbing the mysteries of fly fishing. Eva had later, with great patience, passed on these mysteries to him. The sea fishing skills he in return had shared with her seemed slight in comparison.
A flash of silver arches out of the sea about twelve metres from their floats. Luke turns his head to Eva whose brief nod indicates she also has seen it. For a minute they wait, hoping that the bass’s incessant hunt for food is moving in their direction.
‘Yes,’ shouts Eva as her float disappears. Her rod tip bends. She begins reeling in.
Luke reels in to avoid a crossed line if the hooked fish weaves back and forth. Having waded to the beach, he lays down his rod, collects the landing net and walks towards Eva. He stands to one side of her as she reels the fish towards her. The line zig-zags as the fish fights. It remains out of view. Now it becomes more compliant and Eva reels in with less resistance, until the fish flashes out of the water a few metres away and disappears. In a moment of unguarded delight Eva allows the rod tip to point downwards. Exploiting the sudden slackness of the line, the bass veers to the right. As Eva regains the tension she reels in some more. The fish, exhausted now, gives no more than a token fight until, fully visible at last, it glides towards her.
Luke offers her the landing net.
‘No, you,’ she says.
On his second attempt Luke manoeuvers the net beneath the bass and lifts it from the water. They wade back to the beach where Eva removes the hook and dispatches the fish as if she had landed a trout.
‘Almost two pounds,’ she says, weighing it in her hands. ‘More than enough for supper.’
‘Shall we make it a brace?’ says Luke.
They return to their rods and the tide continues its advance, forcing them back. They cast and cast again, change bait, but fail to find another bass. Eva looks towards Luke. His casting is perfunctory. Even at this distance his body language speaks of distraction. Is it tiredness? she asks. Unless there is another cause. A hundred metres away a seal’s head emerges from the water. As it stares towards her she feels a pang of unease, and is glad when she and Luke are back on the beach where she watches him clean the fish at the water’s edge, eyed by waiting gulls.
Walking to the van, parked in a lane on the far side of the dunes, Eva says, ‘Remember the night we camped here and fished on the early morning tide?’
‘Did we catch anything?’
‘How can you forget? We caught three.’
‘We must camp here again this summer,’ he says.
Eva detects a lack of conviction in his voice.
It is almost 9.00pm when they arrive back at Eva’s cottage. The old privet hedges which flank the path to the back door exude a bitter sweetness reminiscent of his childhood home. Near the door he pauses to look at a bed of dark purple daylilies interspersed with a few outrageous yellows, fluorescent in the evening light.
‘Annie’s suggestion,’ says Eva. ‘An idea filched from the irises in Monet’s garden. ‘Let yourself in and I’ll lift some spuds.’
Luke unlocks the door with his own key.
While Eva goes to her vegetable garden, Luke switches on the oven and places the fish on foil in a baking tray. On her return, Eva throws on some herbs and Luke wraps the fish.
‘Bubbly to celebrate, I think,’ she says, producing two tinted champagne flutes. She puts on some Scott Joplin while Luke goes to the fridge for a bottle of cava. They finish it before the bass is placed in the oven and have started a second bottle before the stubborn potatoes have softened. At last, with the bass lying between them like a trophy, they drink to a successful expedition. Through the cobalt-tinted base of his glass Luke sees the eye of the fish turn blue, the one disconcerting moment in an otherwise perfect evening.
3
On Monday morning Luke enters the shop to hear the volume of the radio turned higher than usual. Russ hums in time with La Fille Mal Gardée.
‘So what are you celebrating?’ asks Luke over their first coffee of the day.
‘I’ve been invited to Michael’s seventieth. Eurostar and lunch in Paris.’
‘Good for you, Russ. When is it?’
‘October, but of course I shan’t be going. I could never face the Tunnel. Worse than flying. But it’s so nice to be invited. You and Eva have a good weekend?’
‘We caught a bass on Saturday night. I helped weed her garden on Sunday. Today’s she’s away at a conference in Cambridge.’
‘What’s it this time – Mr. Jung again?’
‘New Directions in Cognitive Therapy.’
‘I wouldn’t know what the old ones were.’
‘Helping people to move away from negative thoughts about themselves.’
‘Like Bing Crosby.’
‘What?’
‘You know the one. It's all about opting for positivity. Now, how does it go?’ Russ breaks into a mocking parlando.
‘I’ll tell Eva to give up the talking cure and play old songs to her clients instead.’
‘Got to be more fun than sobbing into a box of Kleenex. More coffee?’
While Russ sees to the refills in the kitchen, Luke recalls his own experiences of counselling after the break-up of a short-lived marriage. He cannot remember sobbing, only falling in love with Eva.
Russ brings in the mugs and sits on a decorated Sheraton chair.
‘How’s the overmantel progressing?’ Luke asks.
‘So far so good, but the last person who restored it slapped finger-thick gunge all over the damaged areas. Took me ages to get down to the original. Anyhow, I got it off an . . .’
It was sometime during the sixth session, Luke remembers, that he decided he didn’t need counselling. He had fallen in love.
‘. . . I thought the horses were missing from the chariot but it seems like they were never there. So next I thought they were being pulled by what looked like a pair of cherubs. But an hour later I discovered under all that ghastly goo they were really dolphins with tiny ropes attached . . .’
Two days earlier there had been that glimpse of her in a café in Blenheim Street. She hadn’t seen him, but during that sixth session he had mentioned it.
‘. . . which means that the figure in the chariot which had all but disappeared must have been, as you can guess . . .’
‘Neptune. Can you restore him?’
‘I’ve got a mould I’ve used before, and the trident can be made from brass wire. But there’s an object in the background I can’t quite figure out. Some sort of sea monster . . .’
Being told she had been spotted outside the counselling environment had caught her by surprise and had elicited her natural and not her professional smile. It was a sort of victory. A first step.
‘. . . or it may be another dolphin.’
‘We’ll have to look in the reference books.’ Luke half rises from his chair with the idea of helping Russ research the mirror, but, changing his mind, sits down again. ‘I’m sure you’ll find similar examples.’
With a shrug Russ walks to the bookcase behind Luke’s chair. For ten minutes Luke stares down the length of the shop into the market place, barely hearing the sounds from behind him of books moved and pages turned. Books had been a lifeline between sessions. He remembers how he noted whatever book he saw protruding from Eva’s bag in
her Hammersmith counselling room, reading with a dealer’s eyes the title on the front or spine. It became a weekly task to read whatever she was reading: when you love someone but are not yet able to act upon it, he had reasoned, what better way to feel close to her than to share a book, even at a distance?
‘Found it,’ calls Russ. ‘I’ve a picture of an identical one sold in 1964. And what’s missing is not another dolphin but a seahorse.’ He brings the book to Luke and lays it on the desk.
Luke reads, ‘Formerly at a house in King’s Road, Brighton, an invoice of 1806 describes an identical pair ordered from Thomas Fentham of The Strand.’ He struggles to sound as excited as the glowing Russ. ‘Brilliant – a probable maker. This will make it worth more.’
‘What else have we tucked away?’ Russ enthuses.
‘Enough to keep us going for a year or two.’ Luke thinks of the four hundred unrestored mirrors in one of his barns on the edge of town, suspecting that most will still be there when Russ retires. When that day comes they can be sold off and the barn converted to houses. ‘Mirrors have been good to us,’ he says as Russ returns to his workshop relishing the problem of making Neptune and a seahorse. Luke hears the volume of the radio reduced to its normal level and there is no more humming from Russ, apart from a brief lapse during Widow Simone’s clog dance.
When Luke returns from lunch he is surprised to find on his desk the needlework, now stretched on a board and resplendent in a pearwood frame. And by some miracle the damage has vanished. In addition, from the gentle ripples and striations in the glazing, it is clear that Russ has cut an early piece of glass to fit the frame. He turns it over and finds Russ has used old pine for the back board, even old nails to secure it. Needlework and frame seem to have lived together for centuries. He goes to the workshop.
‘Russ, I didn’t know you did textile repairs. We shall have to diversify.’
‘It was only a few areas of cross stitch.’
‘I can’t even see where the damage was.’
‘Nothing to it really. I don’t know why those conservation ladies in their white gloves make such a to-do about five minutes’ darning.’
‘It certainly looks worth the money.’
‘I said it was cheap.’
Luke goes to the workbench to inspect Neptune. ‘Mirror’s looking good too.’
‘I found out over the weekend that, as we guessed, Rhona Mills is married to Alden in our drama group.’
Luke feels his face redden and stares down at the gesso sea where Russ has been adding new crests to the waves. He runs a finger along the dolphins’ harness, his thoughts returning to yesterday’s successful fishing trip. ‘When did she say she would collect it?’
‘Sometime next week.’ There is a hint of ‘as if you didn’t know’ in Russ’s voice.
Luke says, ‘I wonder if you say “Gee up” or “Swim on” to a dolphin.’
‘I think I would say, “Don’t dive”,’ says Russ in an admonitory tone, ‘but then I can’t swim.’
Luke returns to the showroom, removes a small églomisé mirror from the wall to the left of his desk and replaces it with the needlework. Standing back to admire it, he is overcome by an unaccountable restlessness and asks Russ to look after the shop for the remaining afternoon. He is in need of refuge.
Leaving the market place he walks towards the edge of town through the 1970s estate of houses and bungalows which occupy the site of the demolished Cantisham Hall, its large walled garden, now allotments, the last survivor of Victorian grandeur.
‘Early in the day to see you,’ growls an old man at the allotment gate.
‘I need to tie up my sweet peas, Alf.’
‘I remember last year seeing them in your shop window.’
‘Russ says they’re the best flowers to go in front of a mirror.’
Inside the walled garden Alf inspects two rows of Luke’s onions. ‘They look half decent,’ he says.
Gratified to have the approval of the high priest of vegetables, Luke says, ‘I might lift some today.’
In the Victorian hot houses where allotment holders grow tomatoes, cucumbers and optimistic lemons, Luke goes to the obsolete boiler room and finds his boots, scissors, raffia and a hoe. For half an hour he forgets about mirrors and needlework. He picks flowers from his cordon-grown sweet peas, secures new growth to the canes, cuts off laterals and tendrils, and weeds by hand, enjoying the dark soil on his fingers. Next, he hoes between rows of vegetables, pausing every few minutes to look around with pleasure at a safe world surrounded by brick walls eighteen feet high, within whose confines time obeys different rules and where the temperature is always higher than outside. As he works, his hoe releases into the air a loaminess which combines with the aroma of the low box hedge surrounding his plot. He breathes in deeply, becoming part of a place which knows nothing of emails and VAT returns. The weeding done, he lifts a few onions and leaves them on the ground to dry.
‘Cup of tea?’ calls Alf from a brick lean-to, once the head gardener’s office.
Selecting an onion, Luke walks over to him, smelling the reek of paraffin from Alf’s primus stove before he reaches the hut door. Inside, a battered kettle is attempting to whistle, as if, like its owner, it has lost a front tooth.
‘Sit down, old partner,’ Alf tells him.
Luke settles himself on a rickety chair cushioned with a folded corn sack and watches Alf warm a heavy brown teapot with water from the kettle, throw the water out of the door and spoon in tea leaves from an old mustard tin.
‘So let’s have a look,’ says Alf.
Luke holds out the onion. Alf weighs it in his hand, rubs it and smells his fingers. ‘Not bad,’ he says. ‘Probably better left in the ground a week or two longer.’
Alf pours two cups of dark tea, hands one to Luke and sits on a stool by the door. Luke sips, surprised that such a strong brew is acceptable here but not in the outside world, a confirmation of his belief that the allotments are a parallel universe.
Alf points through the doorway to an unkempt rectangle among the patchwork of neat husbandry. ‘Old Maud’s moved to Tudfield and it’s too far for her to get here on that bike of hers. She’s looking for someone to take over her plot. I could have found ten people myself by now, but it’s her choice. She won’t listen to advice from me. Allotment rules are rules.’
‘True,’ says Luke but only half agreeing as he remembers the friendships it was necessary to strike up with elderly allotment holders until, after six years, at last one of them passed on to him a plot. Alf opens a packet of ginger biscuits. At the sound of rustling paper, a grey shape camouflaged on an old blanket stirs at the end of the shed, and Alf’s lurcher unfolds itself.
‘I sometimes think a waiting list would be fairer,’ says Luke.
‘You can’t control people on a waiting list.’ Alf offers Luke a biscuit. ‘This way we each get a chance to choose a successor.’
Without arguing Luke drinks his tea, remembering how nine years ago he initiated a change of rules to ban weedkillers and pesticides; it is too early for another revolution. The lurcher pleads for a biscuit. Alf gives him half of his own. Expecting a similar favour, the dog moves to Luke.
‘Maurice, you old scrounger,’ says Alf. ‘Don’t give him any.’
Luke obeys, smiling at the thought that Alf’s adherence to allotment rules falls short of observing the ban on dogs.
‘You got much more to do?’ asks Alf.
‘I might give everything a good watering.’
‘You’d be wasting your time. It’ll rain tonight.’
‘You sound very certain.’
‘You wait. I’m umpiring the limited over match this evening, and if we don’t finish by eight, rain will finish it for us.’
Maurice salivates, a foot from Luke’s uneaten biscuit.
‘I’ll wander up and watch you one night,’ says Luke.
‘Pity you don’t play. We need a few more.’
‘I never played much at school. We
had a choice in the summer term: cricket, shooting or swimming. I chose shooting.’
‘You ought to come and shoot some of the rabbits on the cricket ground. Maurice is too old now to catch them.’
‘I’ve only ever shot targets on ranges, not animals or birds.’
‘Don’t let Maurice beg your biscuit. He’s as fat as a seal.’
Maurice already has a tongue on Luke’s biscuit. Luke gives it to him while Alf refills the pot. After a second cup Luke changes out of his boots, goes home to collect four lamb chops and walks to Eva’s. When she returns from Cambridge she can sit down with a glass of wine and watch him cook dinner, complete with his own onions. But as he sits with a drink in her garden, listening out for the sound of her VW, and admiring the nodding heads of globe thistles at the back of her border, he feels a ripple of guilt that there is someone else he is more excited about seeing again. And he is annoyed with himself: how absurd to be thinking like this about a woman he cannot claim to know and with whom he has exchanged no more than a few words.
4
On Wednesday morning Luke is in the shop by 9.00am, armed with a good excuse to give Russ for his early arrival. ‘The Elmans are descending later – they phoned last night. We must sort out the store room.’
‘OK,’ says Russ, with a look which adds, that’s a new shirt you’re wearing – I don’t have to ask why.
In the storeroom at the rear of the shop Russ removes frames hung in neat order from wooden arms extending from the walls, and hands them to Luke who props them at random in small groups around the room. A few he leaves on the floor. After ten minutes a tidy store has been transformed into a chaos of gilded wood and glass.
Luke looks at the empty arms. ‘Shall I go to the barn for some more?’
‘No need,’ says Russ, and he hangs an old easel from one arm and drapes a dust sheet over two more. Next he goes to the workshop and returns with a waste bin of rags and paper which he tips onto the floor and spreads around with a foot. ‘Now what do they need to discover?’
‘That, I think,’ says Luke, pointing to a large Regency mirror. ‘They’ll love the leopard heads.’
The Mirrror Shop Page 3