‘I’d love to,’ I told her, meaning it. ‘And we could have a bite to eat first.’
‘Good idea. I’ll get tickets. Oh, God – look at the time! And the piano tuner’s coming – I must fly.’
And seizing her keys she scurried off to her car, happier than I’d seen her look in a long time, I thought.
I watched from the window until her car had left my drive. Then I sat down and texted Eliza.
I will never see Ludo again. You have my word.
She came back within moments.
Thank you. I would be grateful if you didn’t tell him – or indeed anyone – about our conversation this afternoon. It will only make him hate me.
My heart lurched for her at this. I frantically texted back.
I will never breathe a word.
I knew now she wouldn’t be telling Ginnie. Wouldn’t want it spread any further. I sank back in my chair. Ladyboy was gazing at me from a pile of old newspapers on the kitchen table and Diblet’s dear old head was on my knee. My troops. My arch defenders. And I was still armed. Still dangerous. Even though my weapon lay limp in my hand. I regarded it a moment, then raised it. Texted another number.
Thank you for asking how I am, I will be fine. But I can’t see you ever again, Ludo. You cannot be my sticking plaster. I’m changing my number. Please don’t get in touch with me. I mean it.
And this time there was no kiss. I didn’t even find it hard to resist. And that way, he’d know I meant it.
I thought I’d feel cold and numb and miserable after that, but, strangely, I felt better. Almost energized. Control, I suppose. That elusive old chestnut. I got up and went outside, pausing only to plunge my feet into my boots. Odd socks again, I noticed. Then I whistled to the dogs and went out to feed my sheep. As I passed the water butt by the old barn I took my sim card from my phone and threw it in. I didn’t even stop to see if it sank to the bottom. Just walked on by.
Ottoline, of course, was already one step ahead of me on the animal front, her priorities being ever practical. I found her pouring meal into a long, galvanized trough at the far end of the field, the ewes, running up to push their noses into it hungrily, bleating balefully.
‘Thanks, Ottoline,’ I told her as she straightened up with the sack and turned at my approach. ‘You’ve been doing far too much for me lately.’
She smiled. ‘I enjoy it, you know I do. But nice to have you back.’ She looked at me properly. ‘You’ve been away a long time.’
How strange. It was the same line that Celia Johnson’s husband had delivered at the end of Brief Encounter, the film Ludo and I had seen so recently.
‘Well, I’m back now,’ I said shortly and indeed self-consciously. I was pretty sure it had been Celia’s response.
Ottoline gave her small, enigmatic smile. She didn’t ask me how my night away with my friend Rebecca had been. Ottoline had a sixth sense about so many things.
We left the ewes eating happily and walked in silence to the feed shed, where she deposited her sack, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. Then we delved into the bin to collect a scoop apiece of Layers Pellets to give to the chickens.
‘I see Sebastian’s gone,’ she said lightly as we made our way across the yard.
This stopped me in my tracks. ‘You mean he didn’t say goodbye?’
‘Oh, yes. In a manner of speaking. A week or so ago. He just didn’t say when exactly he was going.’
‘Ah.’ We walked on. It occurred to me that Ottoline would miss him almost as much as I would. She’d miss the children too, which I couldn’t bear to mention. But Ottoline wasn’t quite like other budgerigars.
‘I like my own company,’ she told me, second-guessing me. ‘It’s you I’m worried about.’
‘Me?’ I gave a tinny little laugh. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,’ I warbled, thinking: Don’t be nice, Ottoline. Not someone as bluff and straightforward as you. Don’t sympathize.
‘The ex-girlfriend is about, you know that, don’t you?’ she said, typically wrong-footing me. No flannel there, then.
‘Isobel?’
‘I don’t know her name. The blonde.’
‘Yes, Isobel.’
It hadn’t escaped me. Not that I’d seen her, but somehow I’d known. Had always been aware of Sebastian’s pulse. His heartbeat. And, on a less visceral, more tangible level, had been aware of comings and goings at the Granary recently, too.
‘I didn’t see them,’ she went on. ‘Someone just told me they’d seen them in town together.’
‘I know.’ Why was she telling me this? My heart began to clench in that horrid, familiar way.
‘But Isobel isn’t a threat, Ella.’
I stopped again and turned to look at her. ‘I know that, too. Sebastian’s deliberately gone for someone he won’t fall in love with, I know. I understand that man right down to his little finger, know him inside out, but we’ve separated, Ottoline. Christ, he’s moved out! We’re even more separated than usual, than we have been for years. What is it to me who he sees?’
‘I just don’t want you to use it as an excuse, that’s all. To throw up your hands and say, “Oh, well, he’s with Isobel again, what can I do?” There’s a lot you can do.’
My heart began to hammer fast in my chest. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Ella, why d’you think Sebastian has gone?’
‘Well, to – to give us both some space. Some finality. Closure, I believe the Americans would call it.’
‘And to work,’ she said softly.
‘Yes,’ I agreed tautly, trying to keep my voice steady.
‘Which he can’t do here, with you.’
I swallowed. Did she know? No one knew. She gave me a flinty look.
‘Ella, I know what happened. Why it all fell apart.’
I had to hold out a hand to steady myself. The flat of it found the rough brick texture of the barn wall. After a moment, eyelids lowered against her in defence, I made myself look at her.
‘He told you?’ I said, aghast.
‘Yes. He did. Years ago, when you first came here.’
‘Right.’ Years ago. Christ.
‘And I didn’t say he’d gone to Oxford to paint,’ she went on quietly. ‘I said he’d gone to work. To inspire. To teach. Something he can do without you around.’
I averted my gaze to the feeding ewes in the distance. Couldn’t look at her. Unsteadily I removed my hand from the wall and carried on walking. She fell in beside me as I stared resolutely down at the two pairs of boots on this damp, October day, concentrating hard on the way they splashed through the mud, the puddles in the yard.
‘The new chickens have settled in well,’ I said conversationally, keeping my voice steady. ‘I thought they’d fight at first, but they haven’t.’
‘Bugger the chickens.’
I stopped. Touched my forehead with my fingertips. It was damp.
‘We’re over, Ottoline,’ I said quietly. ‘Sebastian and me. Well and truly. You know that.’ I gave a hollow laugh, raising my face incredulously to the heavens. ‘He doesn’t even love me, for one thing.’
She seized my arm and swung me round to face her. She looked furious. ‘How can you say that? How dare you?’
I gazed, astonished, into her blazing eyes. Ottoline didn’t do emotion. ‘Well, he doesn’t. He hates me.’
‘Oh, hate, sure, which is precariously close to love, isn’t it? A very fine line. Like the one between passion and art. Which – and I know it wasn’t your fault, Ella, wasn’t ever how you wanted it to be – he was forced to choose between.’
My mouth was so dry I had to work my tongue hard to produce saliva.
‘I didn’t ask him to choose between me and art, Ottoline. Christ – we wanted both!’
‘Yes, but he couldn’t have both, could he? Couldn’t finish a picture. It didn’t mean he stopped loving you; he just hated what he’d become. A has-been. A failure. Yesterday’s man. In some ways I wish you’d carried on paintin
g, Ella. Buggered off to France or somewhere inspirational. Done your own thing.’
And with that she stomped off, bucket swinging from her hand, gripping it tightly: a short, stumpy figure in faded denim, disappearing into the distance. I gazed after her.
‘Instead of doing his thing,’ I finished for her softly, and to her departing back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The first time it happened it had been a joke. A laugh. Stumbling up the five flights of stairs to the attic flat in Cadogan Terrace shortly before we were married, fresh from a party in a restaurant, San Lorenzo’s, I think – roaring with laughter at some joke: some fellow painter who’d slid clean under the table he was so drunk – clutching each other as we remembered. Sebastian was in his huge brown overcoat, me in some arty flowing number, something I’d seen on another girl on the tube and copied. Engaged, happy, pregnant. Sebastian had probably been a bit worse for drink, but I wasn’t because of the baby. Just high on life. We’d had to shoulder-barge into the flat, as usual – the door always stuck – making ‘Don’t wake the neighbours!’ faces at each other and then, once our hilarity had died down, Sebastian, as always, had gone to his easel to wind down whilst I’d disappeared into the galley kitchen to make some tea. His current canvas was a landscape, almost finished, but not quite. I knew what he was going to do with it, though.
‘What?’ he asked, amused, rising to the bait, eyebrows cocked as I returned, handing him a mug of tea.
‘Oh, the yellowish-brown, ploughed field at the bottom will turn dramatically to a brilliant wash of yellow ochre in the left-hand corner, as bright as the sun but with just a hint of green. Then a characteristic touch of red will appear in the distance. Probably on the handle of the plough, to draw the eye.’
He roared with laughter, right up to the rafters, not a bit offended. Asked what else. I told him – adopting a camp tone peculiar to one particularly obsequious art critic, one Simon Monk, employing his ridiculous use of random emphasis. I said that in all probability it would veer seamlessly, and in an intensely Faustian direction, towards the obscure, thus achieving, in its final execution, a perceptive perspective on the human condition, despite the overwhelming pastoral content. Simon wasn’t hard to ape and I was a good actress. I squirmed and contorted my face, wringing my hands like Uriah Heep on drugs. Sebastian doubled up.
‘You’ve got him in one!’ he yelped.
‘And, of course, it’ll all be executed with the intrinsic Sebastian Montclair brushstrokes, which have become such a keynote of his contemporary repertoire.’
‘Oh, will it?’ said Sebastian with a grin. He handed me a brush. ‘Go on, then, show me.’
He ignored the tea and opened a bottle of wine instead. Handed me a glass. I did allow myself one now and then but it always went straight to my head. Giggling, I waved the brush about, eyeing up Sebastian’s canvas and pretending to dab at it, imitating his stance at the easel. The way he rested on his back foot as he surveyed the painting, his other leg slightly at an angle. The way he raised one eyebrow just before adding a brushstroke, then looked almost in pain as he dabbed, eyes half shut. As I said, I’m a good mimic, and Sebastian hooted as he flopped back down on the sofa.
‘Oh, I think you should go all the way, Ella!’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘Go on, live a little. Have a go.’
‘What, on this?’ I turned, grinning.
‘Why not?’
‘But you like this one!’
‘I don’t, actually.’ He made a sour face. ‘Was going to ditch it tomorrow. I’ve fallen out of love with the hay bales in the corner; they’re a bit too regimented and anal for my liking. I’m throwing them over for the sumptuous, rolling flesh of my nude tomorrow.’ He sipped his wine.
Sebastian always had more than one picture on the go. More than a few, in fact, and the nude behind us was one of many works in progress.
‘I’m not sure Mrs Archibald would like to hear herself described as rolling flesh,’ I told him sternly. But, rising to the challenge, I picked up his palette. Then I switched the brush he’d given me to something a bit thicker and started to mix white with cobalt blue. The palette was very much his colour scheme, not mine: strong and forceful and quite dark, but I knew how he’d use it. Still imitating his stance to make him laugh – he quite often put his hand in his back pocket – I added a few strokes to the canvas. Sebastian settled back on the sofa behind me, shifting a cushion behind his head, putting his feet up, fuelled with his wine.
‘Go on!’ He laughed.
And so I did. And it was fun. Fun not to be me, to be painting in someone else’s style, which came easily, because I didn’t have to think. I knew, you see. Didn’t have to invent. Or use my brain. I just became another person. Emboldened by grunts of admiring laughter behind me, I played to the gallery and added some trademark strokes which he’d employ only very occasionally, like punctuation marks, and which were greeted with howls of delight. The picture was almost there, anyway – seven-eighths finished – so it wouldn’t take long, I reckoned, an hour or so, to cover the blank canvas at the bottom and add some finishing touches.
In the event, though, it was completed much later than either of us imagined, any sort of creative process being like that. Hours pass very quickly. When I turned round, he was fast asleep, the best part of a bottle of wine gone too. I woke him up to show him and, bleary-eyed, he staggered to his feet. He almost gagged with laughter as he prowled round it, roaring with glee, at which point we decided it was time for bed. Arms round each other we stumbled drunkenly away.
The next morning we were still highly delighted and I could tell Sebastian was impressed.
‘You’d never know it wasn’t me,’ he said, standing back and viewing it from all angles, smiling critically.
‘Oh, you would,’ I said, thinking: Well, no. You wouldn’t, actually.
So that was that. And nothing like that happened again for a while. But then, just before we got married, for a laugh, it did. We’d giggled at the still life of flowers and fruit which he hated but had spent ages on, and which I’d finished in an evening just to get rid of it. He laughingly suggested we give to Javier, his agent, for the next collection.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ I said, tossing it in the corner.
Around the time of our wedding, though, it happened more often. Sebastian had a one-man show in Cork Street – exhausting. Masses of paintings were required and he was under huge pressure to deliver. A deadline of three weeks hence loomed, and, whilst he had quite a lot of finished pictures, there were an awful lot of unfinished articles too: an awful lot of pictures on the go. Maybe I’d just complete one or two, we thought? We discussed it together over a bottle of wine. Neither of us needed persuading. Indeed, after another bottle, we both thought it a hoot. And an arresting idea, too. It rather cocked a snook at the art world, we felt; the pretension behind all those snooty critics who were so quick to pour scorn, but hadn’t an ounce of talent in their little fingers themselves. And, after all, I did it so well. Sebastian marvelled when he came across to my easel.
‘Only because you’ve done three-quarters of the work. The quality work,’ I’d say, slightly uncomfortable. He’d look a bit unconvinced.
Javier, however, was delighted.
‘Finally you get a beet of a wiggle on!’ he declared in his outrageous French accent when he came round one day to flush Sebastian out of his studio, demanding to know how he was getting on. He hustled the paintings down to his van to take them to the framers, which, left to his own devices, Sebastian would take ages to organize. ‘Finally,’ he called up the stairs, ‘I can get them ’anging on the gallery walls!’ The door slammed shut behind him.
To show Sebastian, though, I brought home a friend’s picture from art school. An unfinished one. One that had been abandoned.
‘You see? I have no talent,’ I said, finishing Tobias’s picture one afternoon in the same way, but in a nineteen-twenties, cubist style quite unlike Sebastian’s. ‘Can’t do a
nything myself, but give me something to copy and I’m away.’
‘Yes, but you’re not copying,’ he said, as he inspected it, his eyes narrowed, head cocked as he scrutinized. ‘You’re imitating. That’s much better.’
I made a dismissive face. ‘It’s still pretty uninspired.’ I played it down. Right down. Knew I had to.
And, anyway, it wasn’t a problem. We hugged the secret to ourselves. It was our special bond. And when the cameras flashed at his one-man exhibition in Cork Street and the champagne flowed and the red stickers flew to the bottom right-hand corners, we just toasted one another quietly, from one end of the crowded, brightly lit room to the other. He’d been under far too much pressure with the scale and size of this exhibition, that was all. Expectation had been immense. And Javier had been too greedy. We’d be wiser next time. Wouldn’t agree to so many pictures. Then it wouldn’t happen.
This, by now, was unspoken between us. We didn’t talk about it. And, yes, I helped out now and again, but not often. And, actually, creatively, who didn’t? We had a friend, a writer, whose wife edited his manuscripts before they were sent to the publisher. It wasn’t unusual. And it wasn’t necessarily wrong. Look at T. S. Eliot, I told myself, with Ezra Pound. What was that, if not an artistic collaboration? And you’re not telling me Michelangelo didn’t have other artists up there on the Sistine Chapel with him? Lying on platforms, filling in the rather boring bits of sky? And what about Damien Hirst, with a team of artists, mass-producing dots in a factory, for heaven’s sake?
But then Sebastian had a bit of a block when Tabitha was born. Artistically. A bit of a barren period. It lasted on and off for a few years. Well, five. It didn’t really matter, though; his reputation went before him, and it happens to a lot of painters, everyone knows that. By now, however, we had the house in Flood Street and huge bills to pay, not to mention school fees. We’d overstretched ourselves. Over a drunken lunch with a gallery owner in Le Caprice, Sebastian agreed to do another large one-man show, this time in Pont Street. When he told me I went quiet. I knew we needed the money, but I also knew he didn’t need that sort of pressure. He needed to work quietly, at his own pace, and then, a few years down the line, put on a show when he was ready. In retrospect, we should have moved house. Gone to Clapham, somewhere cheaper. We didn’t. Instead, Sebastian worked day and night on the Pont Street exhibition whilst I tried to keep the children quiet. He’d emerge from his studio white and exhausted: the worse for drink often, too. He’d look scared. We both knew what was happening. He was losing his confidence. He’d start one picture, declare it was bollocks, and then frantically start another. And whereas a few years ago it would literally be a few finishing touches that were missing, almost as if he were savouring the moment of finally adding them, going, ‘Ta-da!’ – and which, that very first time in the attic studio, I’d felt he’d almost given me as a gift, an act of love – now it was more. Now a quarter would be missing. A half. Sometimes more. Sometimes, if I were to finish a canvas, which I did one night, it would be three-quarters empty. Sebastian had been desperate that time. He’d woken me at four in the morning, sober for a change, but ashen-faced. His shoulders had sagged and he’d howled. The one and only time I’d ever seen him cry. I’d knelt up on the bed and cradled his head, appalled. Not at the crying, but at what was happening to him: to my beloved man. My Sebastian. He’d begged me just to get him going again, even though we’d tacitly agreed I couldn’t: that it couldn’t go on. He was like a junkie begging for a fix. Just a few strokes, then hand the brush to him. He was sure he’d be fine. We tried it. Me in my dressing gown; him, dishevelled and unshaven, in what he’d been wearing for the past four days; the children asleep. It worked. I passed him the brush after half an hour and – almost in a trance – he took over.
My Husband Next Door Page 37