*
Cameron and James had both been left with keys to her flat, though they were not required to do anything. But all the same, eager not just to be dutiful but to see what his mother might have done to the flat between moving in and leaving it to go travelling, Cameron visited it the first weekend after she had gone. He hadn’t a great deal to do on Sundays since he and Elspeth, his partner of five years, had split up and he missed the routine. He still slept late, went out for newspapers, bought croissants, took them home and ate and read, but after that there was a dismal gap. He thought he might take up some sport, tennis probably, but had done nothing about it. He could have visited James, but he couldn’t stand Melissa who would be sure to offer her interpretation of why he was on his own again: he couldn’t, according to his sister-in-law, ‘commit’.
He was living in his father’s flat, though whether he would stay there he hadn’t yet decided. The existence of this flat in the mews off Devonshire Street had been a surprise to all of them. The moment he and James were told of it by the solicitor, they had worried about their mother. Would she guess? Would she be forced to realise what they had suspected for so long, that their father had had other women and that this was where he took them? But she hadn’t appeared to be in any way disturbed. She’d simply seemed to think the flat was another of Paul’s clever investments, and there had been no need to protect her. Protection was what their mother had always needed – she seemed to them frail, dependent on their father’s strength, and sometimes they imagined that this irked him. ‘For heaven’s sake, Ailsa,’ they had heard him say often enough, ‘have a mind of your own.’
Going there with the keys for the first time, Cameron had wondered how long it had been empty. He knew, from what the solicitor had told him, that it had been let for several years, during his father’s illness, but the place had an air of such abandonment it did not feel as if it had been lived in for a very long time. It did not feel, either, as though it could ever have been anything as vulgar as a love-nest. Everything about it had a clinical precision – the way the furniture was arranged, the austere shades of the fabrics, the extreme tidiness. Who on earth had his father brought here to satisfy his lust? What a sad business it must have been, going into that bare bedroom with its grey-covered bed, the bedspread stretched tight across it. No hint of warmth or colour anywhere, nothing on the walls, no mirror, only smooth-fitting drawers and cupboards along one grey painted wall.
Cameron changed it dramatically, made it colourful and comfortable, hung London Transport posters on the walls, and yet still he could not banish the previous atmosphere, not quite. He was glad his mother had never been there before he had managed to transform it as much as he could – it would have upset her, she would have sensed something. Surely. Going up in the lift, on Sunday afternoon, to his mother’s new home, Cameron thought how odd she had become. She hadn’t always been odd. She’d been quite conventional in behaviour. He’d always been rather proud of her – she was the best-looking mother of all his friends’ mothers, and he’d been glad she’d never had a career. She was always there when he and James were at home from school, a comforting presence. Had they taken her for granted? He supposed so, but she’d seemed happy enough about it. There’d been no problems with his mother, ever. It was with his father there had been difficulties, with his father there were arguments and fights. His mother was the peacemaker, though she hadn’t always succeeded. His father had been powerful, dominant, determined to win whatever struggle he was engaged in. He’d quite often hated his father.
The first thing he did was rush to lower the blinds. Why hadn’t his mother done that? The light was unbearable with the sun blazing through the plate glass. But she didn’t seem to have done anything to the place. The room looked almost exactly as it had done the last time, the only time, he had seen it, when he and James moved her stuff. The word sterile sprang into his mind. It even struck him that it reminded him of his father’s secret flat. The very opposite of the home she had left. Well, this pared-down existence appeared to be what she wanted. It was her way, he supposed, of coping with his father’s death, however peculiar it seemed.
He sat for a moment on one of the cane chairs. It made him feel more depressed than ever to think of his mother coming back to this – it wasn’t what he had envisaged when he’d urged her to sell the house. He’d imagined her in another house, a neat little terraced house in Chelsea maybe, near James and Melissa (and perhaps, soon, grandchildren nearby to occupy her). But maybe she would not come back from this Italian jaunt of hers. Maybe she would meet someone – but that was absurdly unlikely. His mother had adored his father. No one would be able to take his place, she wouldn’t want any other man to attempt to.
He was going to leave the blinds down. Securing the cords either side, he turned and stood with his back to the windows for a moment, looking at the room. She’d hung one picture only on the opposite wall. It looked ridiculous, one tiny painting on a largish wall, dead centre, like a target. He peered at it. It wasn’t one he recognised. The wall cried out for his father’s colourful, dramatic paintings, the ones by someone who painted like Matisse, a series of three he’d bought years ago and cherished. But this picture his mother had selected was a pretty little nothing, almost colourless, quite unable to make an impression hanging where it did. He must ask her why she liked it, why she had chosen it, when she returned. Perhaps it was simply that it was an echo of herself.
*
It wasn’t like going to Scotland, to the island. She’d felt nervous enough then, travelling alone, but this was different, this was abroad, with no one to help her, no Paul to organise everything. Reaching Paris was adventure enough – she was exhausted. Managing the language made her head ache and after she’d forced herself out, to look at Notre Dame, she was glad to get back to her hotel. She ate in her room, not up to facing a restaurant, and despised her own cowardice. This would not do. She was meant to be savouring her freedom, rejoicing in her new-found independence, and yet here she was, scurrying about, enjoying nothing. She almost went home.
She tried hard, instead, to analyse what she was afraid of, what made her so uncertain and nervous when, alone on the island, she had felt so strong and sure of herself. It was, she decided, the presence of other people that did it, being one in a crowd – it was the crowd that unnerved her. If people were all around you, especially people speaking a different language from you, then the sense of isolation, of loneliness, intensified. Her mind was like a locked box, so much in it trying to get out, a great store of trivia jamming the works. Walking down a quiet street, or along an empty corridor in the hotel, her own footsteps scared her, emphasising her solitary state. She began to suspect that she was attracting odd looks, as though this inner turmoil was showing on her face and alarming people, and she took to walking with her head down.
Once, in the Luxembourg Gardens, as she wandered aimlessly among the statues and trees, watching an old woman feeding the sparrows, a man spoke to her. He came alongside her and said, in French, but she understood, that he was lost and did she know the way out of the gardens into the Boulevard Saint Michel. She said, in French, that no, she was sorry, she did not. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re English.’ He was American, he said, but his grandmother had been British, Welsh actually. He walked with her until they reached the Observatoire and he saw a sign pointing to the boulevard he wanted. He was young, about Cameron’s age, from Ohio. She listened politely to his account of why he was in Paris, and when he left her, with ‘Been nice talking to you,’ she realised she herself had hardly said a word. But the effect of this minimal human contact was extraordinary. She could feel herself more at ease, and she went to sit on a bench and exchanged pleasantries with a young woman holding a child on her knee, teaching it a song. The child, a girl of about four, leaned towards Ailsa and drew her into the song, and she joined in, her accent making both child and mother laugh. It could be done. She would not go home. She would learn how to function as
a woman alone, among others.
*
She thought of Paul more than she had expected to, especially on train journeys, as she sat staring out of the windows, half in a trance as the countryside sped past. Had she loved him? Had she really known him? She’d lived with him all those years, in close proximity most of the time, and yet still there were mysterious glitches in his personality which had never been explained, things that did not fit her knowledge of him. Lucasta Jenkinson, her power over him. Sexual? Possibly. So, had she herself failed him in that respect? It irritated her intensely still to be going over and over this sore place, refusing to let it heal even while she was assuring herself that it had done so. She was fifty-four years old, Paul had been dead a year, yet here she was, travelling through Europe, torturing herself with questions which could never be answered. She must look forward, not back. But in struggling to look forward, there was no place in her vision of the future for another man. She did not want another lover or husband, emphatically not. She did not want ever to be taken over again, even if this would bring security and companionship. She had to stick to her resolution made so successfully on the island: to be herself, beholden to no one. It might amount to going against the grain of the woman she was, or the kind of woman that life with Paul had made her, but this was what she wanted.
*
Ailsa had taken the letters with her. They lay at the bottom of her bag and every now and again she took them out, wondering if she was ready to read them (that is, if ever she decided she was going to). Each time, she got only as far as fingering the envelopes and then put them down. She was not ready, not ready in Paris, not ready in Venice, not ready anywhere until she reached Florence. She stayed in a pensione she’d been told about, near Fiesole, and there was something so cheerful about the little villa, the attic room she was given there, that she felt a surge of optimism and thought it might be time to lay this ghost to rest.
Sitting on the terrace, among great tubs of brilliant scarlet flowers, she drank her coffee in the morning and took out the letters. Whatever she decided, they were not going back into her bag. She was going to destroy them, read or unread. What was it Paul had said? About love, about how hard it was? She was shocked to find she could no longer exactly remember. It had been something to do with the little painting. He had wanted her to look at it, to understand. She had looked, and not understood.
She opened the first letter and read it, and then left the other unread. It had not hurt her or even angered her, reading Lucasta Jenkinson’s words to her now dead husband. The words were nothing. Paul’s might have meant more, but those of his mistress did not, at this distance of time, affect her. So far as Ailsa could make out, Lucasta Jenkinson was trying to persuade Paul that they had never really loved each other but had been in the grip of a physical passion which was now spent. He loved his wife, she wrote, couldn’t he see that? Apparently, he couldn’t, or there would not have been at least one more letter. How sad, Ailsa thought, that Paul must have gone on pleading and Lucasta Jenkinson continued to reject him. If only she had known she was wrong: that Paul had really loved her and not his wife.
Well, she, his wife, his widow, did not now care. She put the letters in the stove which even in this weather seemed always to be lit. ‘Just paper,’ she said to the kitchen girl. Just paper. But she would keep the picture, for ever. Some day, she might understand its significance.
GILLIAN
ALL GILLIAN KNEW was that the quarrel, with its consequences, had been to do with money, or the lack of it. Nobody in the Mortimer family would go into the details of the split between her father Cameron and his brother James, either claiming not to know or to have forgotten. But what she suspected they had not forgotten was the shock, after Ailsa Mortimer was killed, of discovering that she had left more than half of everything she possessed to a bewildering list of Scottish charities involved with protecting the environment. Why she should have done this nobody could work out – it was not in character, and not what Paul Mortimer, whose money and property it all had been, would have wanted. There were suspicions that Ailsa’s will must have been made under duress, but exhaustive investigation revealed no such influence. She had been of sound mind, and her will had been drawn up and properly witnessed before she left London for Italy, some six months before she was killed when a car skidded onto a pavement she was walking along in Florence.
Gillian, brought up on this tale, had often wondered about her grandmother. What was she doing in Florence? Nobody seemed to know. ‘She went a bit funny after her husband died,’ Gillian’s mother, Beth, told her (but Beth had never met Ailsa, coming into Cameron’s life after the death of his mother). There were photographs, of course, so Gillian was able to see that her grandmother had been strikingly beautiful. When anyone remarked that she had ‘a look’ of her grandmother, she was pleased and flattered. Her father, however, said she didn’t resemble his mother in the least, but this was because, even after all these years, he still felt angry and could hardly bear her name to be mentioned. What puzzled Gillian, trying to understand what had happened, was why her father cared so much, and why he and his brother James had not spoken to each other since their mother’s death. She knew her father had not been poor when his mother left him much less than he might have expected. He earned a lot of money himself, as a financial analyst, so that when his mother was killed he was already well set up. But apparently his anger had nothing to do with money. His distress was to do with the insult. It had felt, according to his wife, like ‘a slap in the face’. It had carried a message that he had not been loved, not been valued, not been worthy. Gillian had had to accept this, though her father himself had never confided in her.
But the split with her uncle James was harder to understand. James, after all, had also not benefited from his mother’s will and might have been expected to share his brother’s feelings. Maybe he did, but since she was not allowed to have anything to do with her uncle or his family, Gillian had no means of finding out. Her mother was vague when pressed.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it was something to do with a picture.’
This seemed so unlikely – her father wasn’t the least bit interested in art – that Gillian couldn’t credit it. ‘A picture?’ she echoed. ‘Dad? He doesn’t care about pictures.’
Her mother shrugged, said that was what she had been told. There had been a fight, and it was to do with a picture, she was sure.
‘A physical fight?’ Gillian asked, astonished.
Another shrug. Her mother didn’t know. All she knew was that James had wanted the picture and Cameron hadn’t wanted him to have it.
‘So who got it?’ Gillian asked. ‘Where is it?’
‘Neither of them got it,’ her mother said. ‘It was sold.’
‘Who bought it?’ Gillian asked, but her mother had no idea. She’d tried picking good moments to bring the subject up with her father, when he was in a particularly mellow mood, but he nearly always side-stepped her questions. But nevertheless, over the years, in bits and pieces, she had managed to get out of him that his brother had had no right to anything in his mother’s flat and that when he, Cameron, had caught James in the act of ‘stealing’ a picture he had been furious and had demanded the picture back. James had said he wanted the painting as a memento, and had seen no harm in removing it. Cameron had reported what he termed ‘the attempted theft’ to his mother’s lawyer and things had ‘turned rather nasty’. The picture, together with all his mother’s personal effects, had been sold. When she had asked to whom, he said a Mme Verl–something had bought it, the same woman who had earlier bought the family house. To Gillian, it all seemed a bit unlikely: two brothers parted over a picture neither of them actually cared about?
It also seemed sad. Gillian was an only child, with a longing to be part of a larger family. She knew she had four Mortimer cousins, two of each sex, living not so far away, in Surrey, and had visions of meeting them and becoming part of what she was sure must be one big, n
oisy, happy group. She fantasised about having holidays with them, sleeping in the same room as the two girls, whispering secrets to each other and having midnight feasts. That was when she was small, seven or eight, and at her loneliest. She boasted, then, about her boy cousins, of how tall and strong they were, capable of defending her against all comers. The fact that she knew only their names, but not even their exact ages, did not put her off. Later, when she had stopped this kind of fantasising she thought more seriously about trying to contact them. Where would the harm be? In her father’s disapproval, maybe distress, that’s where. And he would undoubtedly find out.
But, though she thought about it, she made no move. Instead, by the time she was applying to an art foundation course, her interest had switched to the famous (or infamous) picture which had caused all the trouble. She longed to know what it was. Her father, still powerful in her life, for financial as well as other reasons, need never know. There was no danger, as there would have been had she contacted her uncle’s family, of his discovering she had set out to trace the picture which had caused so much trouble. She didn’t tell her mother what she was going to try to do, but then there were a great many things by that stage which she did not tell her mother.
It was easy enough to begin the investigation. Her father had always been proud of his father Paul Mortimer, and would talk about him freely. Easy, once she had prompted him to do so, to ask her father where he himself had lived as a child. ‘Chelsea,’ he said. ‘But exactly where?’ And the answer came readily. She went to the square he mentioned and stood in front of what had been her grandfather’s house through the 1960s and 1970s. It was rather grand, impressive. Worth, in 2005 terms, a couple of million, she guessed. She had already checked in the telephone directory and knew that a Mr and Mrs Verlon still lived there, some twenty years after buying it from Ailsa Mortimer, but this did not, of course, mean that they still owned the picture. Mrs Verlon had perhaps bought it only to sell, and by now it could be anywhere in the world. But this only added to the mystery and did not put Gillian Mortimer off in the least.
Keeping the World Away Page 33