‘If you like,’ Lexie says, and hangs up the phone.
In the event, Geraldine Roffe is tied up. She is sorry but she cannot get out of whatever church activity she’s committed to. It’s something to do with the altar cloths and their need to be laundered – the precise details are unclear to Lexie. She has, then, no option but to take Theo with her. It is early February. England is shrouded in misty sleet; dirty snow is piled up at the sides of the pavements. She takes a train to Swansea and then catches the night ferry to Cork. She clings to the rails as the boat rides the steel-grey waves of the Irish Sea. She pulls Theo’s knitted hat far down over his ears, tucking a blanket around him. The boat docks in a blue, drizzling dawn at Cork. Lexie changes a nappy on the floor of a toilet in the port. Theo screams and kicks out at this indignity and several women come to stand and watch. She catches a train towards the ragged dog-legged coastline. Theo presses his face to the window, letting out a stream of surprised nouns: horse, gate, tractor, tree. They arrive on the Dingle peninsula around lunchtime and Theo’s vocabulary runs dry. Sea, Lexie tells him, beach, sand.
When the train slows and she sees a green sign with SKIBBERLOUGH flash past, she jumps to her feet, puts Theo in his carrier, hauls it to her shoulders and pulls her suitcase down from the rack. SKIBBERLOUGH – SKIBBERLOUGH – SKIBBERLOUGH, the window tells her, SKIBB—She swings open the door and has to step back: below her there is no platform, just a large drop to a muddy path beside the train tracks. Lexie peers out of the door, looks up and down. The station, if you can call it that, is deserted. There is a small wooden shelter, the green sign, the single set of rails – and nothing else.
She hurls the suitcase to the ground with a thud and climbs down after it. The train begins to clank and groan as it gathers itself into movement. Theo chatters and exclaims at the sight, the noise of it. Lexie hauls her suitcase up out of the mud and, as she reaches the wooden shelter, a man appears from around it.
‘Excuse me,’ Lexie says. ‘I wonder if you can help me—’
‘Miss Sinclair, I assume, of the Daily Courier,’ the man says, in a clipped English accent. Not Fitzgerald, then. He is unsmiling, slightly dishevelled, his collar crooked, his jacket undone. He takes her in with an expression of naked shock – her muddy shoes, the child on her back, her disarrayed hair – but refrains from comment. Wisely, Lexie feels. ‘This way.’ He reaches out for her suitcase, closes his fingers around the handle.
Lexie doesn’t let go. ‘I can manage,’ she says, ‘thank you.’
The man shrugs and relinquishes the handle.
Beside the road there is an open-backed truck that, beneath the filth and rust, would once have been red. The man climbs into the driver’s seat and fires the engine while Lexie tries to find a place for her suitcase in the back, which is mainly occupied with dog baskets and rolls of chicken wire.
When she has sat herself in the passenger seat, with Theo on her knee, when they have swung out on to the road, Lexie turns to examine her driver. She clocks the glasses, folded and stuck into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, the stain of blue ink on the index finger of his right hand; she clocks the book pushed between the car seats, the week-old copy of an English newspaper – not hers, the Courier’s direct competitor – beside it, the hair pushed back off the brow, greying a little at the temples.
‘So,’ she begins, ‘you work with Fitzgerald?’
The man frowns, just as she had known he would. ‘No.’
They continue along a narrow road for some minutes in silence.
‘Brrm, brrm,’ Theo comments.
Lexie smiles at him, then turns to look at a church as it flashes past, the woman coming out of its wooden doors. ‘You’re a friend of his?’
He doesn’t frown this time. Just says, ‘No,’ out of the corner of his mouth.
‘A neighbour?’
‘No.’
‘A relative?’
‘No.’
‘His valet?’
‘No.’
‘His dealer? His doctor? His priest?’
‘None of the above.’
‘Do you always answer questions with one-word answers?’
The man glances in the rear-view mirror, removes a hand from the wheel to scratch his chin. The road rolls past. Twisted, blackened branches of thorn trees, a donkey tethered to a stake. ‘Technically,’ he says, ‘they were not questions.’
‘They were.’
‘No.’ The man shakes his head. ‘They were statements. You said, “You work with Fitzgerald. You are a relative.” I merely refuted what you said.’
Lexie turns to look at this trespasser on her field of expertise. ‘Questions can be formed from statements.’
‘They can’t.’
‘Grammatically speaking, they can.’
‘No, they can’t. It wouldn’t be allowed in a court of law.’
‘We’re not in a court of law,’ Lexie points out. ‘We are, I believe, in your truck.’
‘Truck!’ Theo shouts.
‘Not my truck,’ says the man. ‘Fitzgerald’s truck. One of.’
‘So is that what you are? A lawyer?’
The man seems to consider this for a moment. Then he says, ‘No.’
‘A barrister?’ she suggests.
He shakes his head.
‘A judge?’
‘Wrong again.’
‘A spy? A secret agent?’
He laughs for the first time and it is a surprisingly nice laugh – deep, resonant. Hearing it, Theo breaks into laughter too.
‘I can’t see any other reason for your secrecy. Go on, you can tell me. I won’t breathe a word to anyone.’
He swings the car round a hairpin bend. ‘You expect me to believe that, coming from a journalist?’ They hit a pothole and the car jounces violently, the three of them jolting in their seats. Theo finds this very funny too. ‘I don’t want to tell you the truth now,’ he admits, ‘because it would seem so dull. I feel honour bound to protract the fantasy life you’ve constructed for me.’
‘Go on. Put me out of my misery.’
‘I’m a biographer.’
Lexie considers this. She glances again at the inked finger, the folded glasses. Then she smiles. ‘I see,’ she says.
‘What do you see?’
She shrugs, looking out of the windscreen. ‘I see everything now.’
‘What, precisely?’
‘You. Why you’re being quite so . . . prickly. You don’t want me here. You’re busy beavering away on a biography of Fitzgerald and the last thing you need is a bit of competition turning up.’
‘Competition?’ The car ascends a steep bit of hill and suddenly they are out of the trees and pulling up next to a large, crumbling house built on the bluff. ‘My dear woman, if you think your interview, or whatever you’re doing with Fitzgerald, poses any kind of threat to my work, I have to tell you that you’re labouring under a grave delusion.’
Lexie pushes open her door, settling Theo on her hip, and reaches for her suitcase. ‘Tell me, do you write the way you talk?’ she says.
He heaves himself out of the truck and regards her over the roof. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I just wondered whether it was a general principle of yours to use twenty words where ten might do.’
He laughs again and strides across the gravel towards the door of the house. When he reaches it, he half turns. ‘At least I know the difference between a question and a statement.’
Lexie slams the car door and follows him into the house.
There is no sign of Fitzgerald anywhere. And by the time she and Theo have climbed the steps, the man has disappeared. Lexie stands in the hallway. Several threadbare rugs cover the stone-flagged floor. A large, wide staircase sweeps up to the floor above. On the walls, spotted old hunting scenes are mixed with charcoal sketches of abstract shapes. There’s a coat-stand heaped with moth-eaten jackets and several umbrellas without fabric. A striped cat sleeps half in and half out of an upturned stra
w hat. A heap of dirty dishes lies abandoned on a wicker chair. The ceiling above them is domed and Theo, tipping his head back, shouts, ‘Echo! Echo!’ The ceiling sends back his voice, smaller, distorted, and he and Lexie laugh.
A woman in an apron appears out of a door, frowning at the noise. She leads Lexie and Theo through another door, muttering to herself about how no one does any work around here except herself, along a dark passageway and up some narrow steps at the back of the house. She bangs open the door of a whitewashed room with sloping ceilings and an unnaturally high bed, and gestures Lexie to go in. Lexie asks her the name of the man who drove the car and receives the reply: ‘Mr Lowe.’
Lexie thinks for a moment. ‘Robert Lowe?’
The housekeeper shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
Lexie asks how long he’s been here and the housekeeper rolls her eyes and says, ‘Too long.’ Lexie lets out a laugh. The housekeeper is suddenly content to play with Theo as Lexie unpacks. Robert Lowe works all day, she tells Lexie, clapping her hands at Theo, who claps back. His room is a mess of notes and papers and books. An impossible mess. He doesn’t say much to anyone, but his wife sends him a telegram every week. The woman seems shocked by the expense of this. Mr Lowe writes to her every day. He walks into the village to post the letter. The wife is an invalid. The woman whispers this last word. In a wheelchair, God love her. I see, Lexie says. And does Mr Lowe spend much time with Mr Fitzgerald? The woman grins and shakes her head. No. Himself, as she refers to Fitzgerald, is working on something, something big, and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Every day Mr Lowe goes knocking on the studio door and every day Himself is telling him, no, not today.
When the housekeeper leaves, Theo falls asleep almost instantly. Lexie lays out her notebooks and pens on the dressing-table. She changes into a warmer sweater, peers out of the tiny square window, set deep into the thick stone walls. She can see a small patio below, gilded with moss, an abandoned wooden table, chairs leaning against it. A long-legged black dog wanders across the patio, stops to sniff at the ground, then skitters off in the opposite direction.
Lexie is, she realises, famished. Carefully, carefully, so that he doesn’t wake, she eases Theo into his carrier and hefts his sleeping weight to her back. The narrow landing along which she’d walked is empty, lined with vacant chairs. She opens a door off it at random and finds a library filled with the smell of mould; she opens another into a bathroom, the paint peeling off the walls, the tub stained green by a dripping tap. She goes down the back stairs and finds the kitchen and, after hesitating a few moments, opens a cupboard. It’s filled with plates and cups and fishing tackle, stacked haphazardly together. She falls then upon an earthenware pot with a lid and finds a half-loaf of bread. She tears off a piece and pushes it into her mouth.
She wanders around the patio, the gardens, the lawns choked with dock and clover. Theo sleeps on and on, his head a warm pressure on her neck. She finds a swimming-pool, filled only with leaves and a puddle of dirty water. She walks out on to the diving-board and stands there, a woman and a child suspended in space, for a moment. She circles an outhouse or barn with high, yellow-lit windows and the sounds of scraping and clattering coming from within. It must be Fitzgerald’s studio. She circles it again but can’t see anything other than the barn ceiling, studded with lights. She returns to her room, lays Theo carefully on the bed and lies next to him. Within about five seconds she is asleep.
A loud crashing sound wakes her. She sits up, shocked, still in the depths of a dream about Innes, about the Elsewhere office. The room is dark and shadowed, icy cold. Theo lies beside her, feet in the air, thumb in mouth, humming to himself.
‘Mama,’ he says, seizing her around the windpipe, ‘Mama sleeping.’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘But I’m awake now.’
She scrambles from the bed. The sound comes again and this time she realises what it is. A gong. It must be dinner-time. She flicks on the light, ransacks her clothes to find a cardigan and yanks it on over her sweater; she pulls a brush through her hair; she applies a swift slick of lipstick, then lifts Theo off the bed and they make their way downstairs.
The dining room is deserted. Three places are laid at the table, with three steaming bowls of soup. But there is no one to eat them. Feeling like Goldilocks in the wrong house, Lexie sits in front of one and eats it, feeding every second spoonful to Theo, who stands at her side.
‘Where is everyone?’ she says to him, and he looks at her face, straining to understand.
‘Everyone,’ he says back.
She drinks a glass of wine. She is tempted to start on a second bowl of soup, but restrains herself. She breaks a roll into pieces and eats those. Theo finds a basket of pine cones and begins taking them out, one by one, and putting them back, one by one. The housekeeper stumps in with a dish of roast potatoes and cold cuts of meat, which she thumps down on the table with bad grace, muttering about the empty chairs. Lexie helps herself. She eats, looking around the room, feeding some to Theo when he can be distracted from the pine cones.
She leaves the table and wanders to the fireplace – which is enormous and piled with blazing logs – warming her back and watching Theo, who is balancing pine cones along the hearth. She is chewing a piece of bread from the basket on the table. Empty sofas and chairs are arranged around her, as if she is a hostess expecting a large party of people. Around the walls are numerous framed pictures. Lexie moves over to look. A sketch of Fitzgerald’s, a watercolour, a pencil study of a naked woman; she moves on, shifting from one foot to the next. She pushes the last crust between her teeth as she studies an Yves Klein.
‘That’s not his,’ a voice behind her says.
Lexie doesn’t turn round. ‘I know that,’ she says. She hears him sit heavily in one of the chairs at the dining-table. She hears him spooning potatoes on to his plate. She moves on to the next picture – a sketch by Dalí.
‘Hello,’ Theo shouts, sprinting towards him over the carpet, evidently delighted by the appearance of someone else.
Lexie hears him murmur, ‘Hello,’ back, and then: ‘What have you got there?’
‘Hello!’ Theo shouts again.
‘I’ve read one of your books,’ Lexie says.
‘Oh, really.’ He’s trying to sound casual but she’s not convinced. ‘Which one?’
‘The Picasso.’
‘Ah.’
‘I thought it was good.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Although you were rather hard on Dora Maar.’
‘Do you think?’
Lexie turns to look at him. He has changed his clothes. A white shirt, open-necked, a different jacket. ‘Yes. You depicted her as a groupie, a hanger-on. But she was a talented artist in her own right.’
Robert Lowe raises an eyebrow. ‘Have you seen any of her work?’
‘No,’ Lexie says. ‘I’m basing my opinion on no knowledge whatsoever. ’ She comes and sits opposite him at the table. Theo climbs into her lap, a pine cone clutched in each fist.
‘Careful,’ he says to Robert. ‘Soup hot.’
Robert smiles at him. ‘Thank you. I’ll be very careful, I promise.’
‘Where is Fitzgerald, anyway?’ Lexie says.
‘Careful, careful,’ Theo warns again.
Robert shrugs, opens his hands, then closes them again. ‘Where indeed?’
‘Is that his studio in the barn out there?’
Robert nods. ‘He could be in there or he could be out hunting for pheasant. Or he could well be in the pub in the village, on the prowl for young girls. He might be out tracking foxes. Or he could have driven to Dublin. No one knows. Fitzgerald keeps to his own schedule.’
‘Hot,’ Theo exclaims, and Robert nods, makes a show of blowing on the surface of his soup.
Lexie folds her napkin. ‘Well, maybe I should just go and knock on the door and tell him—’
‘He won’t answer. Even if he’s there.’
Lexie looks at him. It’s impos
sible to know if he’s telling the truth. ‘But he might not know that it’s dinner-time.’
‘Believe me, he’ll know. He’ll just have chosen not to come. We’re at his mercy. We have to wait for him to come to us.’
‘Really?’ She reaches for an apple from the fruit bowl. ‘How very . . . nineteenth century.’
‘Nineteenth century?’
‘Yes. As if we’re young maidens, meekly awaiting our suitor.’
Robert harrumphs into his soup. ‘I don’t feel like a young maiden.’
The Hand That First Held Mine Page 27