I don’t know how long that awful silence lasted. All I know is, after a while, the horror-haze that had filled my head cleared. I remembered who Aidan was: the man I knew and loved. If he’d killed someone, it couldn’t have been murder. There had to be an acceptable explanation. I got up, put my arms round him, told him it didn’t matter-whatever he’d done, I still loved him. I would always love him. I hated myself for saying those words-‘it doesn’t matter’-about a woman’s life; I only said it to compensate for what I saw as my own treachery. How could I have felt hatred for him? How could I have believed him? Aidan wasn’t evil. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to think of him as a killer. He’s got it wrong, I thought. Even before I knew it wasn’t true, I didn’t believe it.
We made love for hours and hours, delaying the moment when words would once again become necessary. The morning sky was already breaking up the darkness by the time we finally fell asleep early the next morning. I woke up to the sound of Aidan saying my name. I opened my eyes. He wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s midday,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed half the day.’ His eyes were dull and hard. I’d never seen him look so out of reach before, and it scared me.
I said nothing as we got dressed. Aidan made it clear with his body language that he didn’t want to talk. He phoned reception and asked for a taxi to be ordered. I heard him say, ‘Straight away’ and ‘Alexandra Palace’.
‘We’re going back to the art fair?’ I said.
‘That’s why we came.’
‘We don’t have to go back,’ I told him. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted us to be alone, not in a hall full of people and noise. ‘We could go home. Let’s go home.’
‘We’re going to Alexandra Palace,’ he said tonelessly, as if a machine were speaking from inside him.
I knew then that something was badly wrong. I wanted to ask him what was the matter, but it would have sounded ridiculous. The night before, he’d confessed to a killing. That would be traumatic for anyone; today he had to live with the consequences. We both did. I wanted to ask who else knew about what he’d done. I’d only known him four months. He might have been in prison before I met him. Mainly I wanted to apologise for the way I’d frozen and shut him out when he’d first told me, but I was so afraid he wouldn’t forgive me that I didn’t dare.
When a receptionist phoned the room to say that our taxi was outside, I asked Aidan about the Gloria Stetbay picture-did he think it would be safe in the room? ‘No idea,’ he said, as if he couldn’t have cared less. He pretended not to notice that I started crying.
We arrived at the art fair and went through the motions, walking up and down the aisles. I looked at paintings without seeing them. Aidan didn’t even look. He kept his eyes straight ahead, glazed, and marched up and down as if he’d set himself a goal of a certain number of footsteps and was counting them off one by one.
Eventually I grabbed his arm and said, ‘I can’t stand this any more. Why are we like this? Why aren’t we talking?’
I saw him grit his teeth, as if he couldn’t bear my touch. Less than twelve hours ago we’d been having passionate sex. It made no sense. ‘I’ve already said too much,’ Aidan muttered, not looking at me. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry.’
‘Of course you should have told me.’ I made a mistake then. I said, ‘Was it an accident? Was it self-defence?’
He let out a harsh, contemptuous laugh. ‘Which would you prefer? Accident or self-defence?’
‘I… I didn’t mean…’
‘What if it was neither? What if I murdered someone in cold blood, a defenceless woman?’
I felt my face twist in pain. Defenceless. ‘You didn’t. You can’t have,’ I said faintly.
‘People change, Ruth. People become different people during the course of their lives. If you loved the person I am now, you’d forgive anything I’d done in the past, no matter how bad. I’d forgive you anything, anything at all. There’s no crime so terrible that I wouldn’t instantly forgive you for it. Obviously the feeling isn’t mutual.’
He was breathing hard and fast in my face, waiting for my response. I said nothing. He kept using words that paralysed me like shots from a stun-gun, words that had been repeated endlessly in court seven years ago: a defenceless woman. Parcel tape over my mouth…
By the time I recovered and realised I had said nothing, that I’d failed to respond, Aidan was walking away. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after him, but he’d turned a corner. I ran as fast as I could, trying to keep my eyes fixed on the point at which he’d disappeared from view, but by then I was hysterical, shaking, babbling nonsense to myself, convinced I’d driven him away for ever. There were too many corners, too many intersections between one row of stalls and another. Every junction looked the same as all the others. I looked down one aisle, then a second, then a third, but saw no sign of Aidan. In desperation, I asked some of the artists who were sitting in little white cubicles decorated with their own work. ‘Have you seen my boyfriend? He might have come down here a minute ago. He’s tall, wearing a black jacket with shiny patches on the shoulders.’ Nobody had seen him.
I ran and ran, up and down the aisles in both halls. Aidan wouldn’t have left without me. He couldn’t have. He would never abandon me like that. Completely by accident, I found myself at Jane Fielder’s stall, number 171. I didn’t ask the woman standing next to it if she was Jane Fielder, or tell her how much I liked her painting that I’d bought from the Spilling Gallery-finding Aidan was the only thing in my head. Anything, I thought. I’d forgive him anything. ‘Have you seen a man with dark hair, tall, wearing a black jacket with shiny patches here?’ I tapped my shoulders. The woman shook her head.
‘I saw him,’ a voice called out from across the aisle. ‘He walked past a minute ago. Like a sort of donkey jacket, is it?’
I turned, saw a young woman. Hair dyed yellow, with black roots showing, a red patterned scarf wrapped round her head. Skinny legs, cerise fishnet tights over black sheer ones, heavy black boots to halfway up her calves. She was minding the stall opposite, sitting beside a large free-standing sign that said, ‘TiqTaq Gallery, London’.
I ran over to her, nearly colliding with her chair and knocking her to the ground. I managed to stop myself just in time. ‘Which way did he-?’ I broke off as something caught my eye. I blinked, breathed. No. No. I backed away. This was some sort of hideous practical joke; it had to be.
‘Which way did he go?’ the young woman asked on my behalf, seeing I was having trouble getting the question out. ‘That way-towards the exit there. Are you okay?’
I wasn’t. I had to get away, but felt too weak to move. I leaned against the partition that separated Jane Fielder’s stall from the one beside it, and stared at the TiqTaq Gallery’s space from across the aisle, rubbing my forehead with my left hand, pressing my fingers hard against my skin.
‘Careful, you’re leaning on a picture,’ said a voice behind me. I couldn’t speak, or shift my weight elsewhere. I couldn’t do anything except stare past the woman with the dyed blonde hair at the painting in a green-stained wood frame that was hanging behind her. It stood out from all the others. It would have even if I’d never seen it before; it was in a different league from everything else TiqTaq had to offer.
Abberton. Framed, signed, dated 2007. I forced myself to close my eyes, then open them and look again, to make sure it was real. I walked towards the picture, seeing nothing else; it might have been the only thing in an otherwise empty room. Now I understood why the name of the woman Aidan said he’d killed had sounded familiar, even though she’d never introduced herself to me. I’d done plenty of paperwork for Saul; I’d probably sent her a bill or a receipt, or seen her name on one of the ‘Work Pending’ lists Saul used to pin up everywhere.
That same name was painted in neat black letters in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in front of me: Mary Trelease.
It took me about four seconds to realise that if Mary Trelease had painted Abberton
in 2007, Aidan could not have killed her years ago. He’d made a mistake. I felt myself swell with relief. Of course he wasn’t a killer. I’d known that all along. All I needed now was to find him so that he could see the picture for himself, but the woman from the TiqTaq Gallery had said she’d seen him heading for an exit. What if he was in a taxi on his way to King’s Cross?
I was unwilling to move from TiqTaq’s stall. I knew I couldn’t let Abberton out of my sight. It was my evidence-indisputable proof that Aidan hadn’t done what he thought he’d done. It occurred to me that there might be more than one Mary Trelease, but I quickly dismissed the idea. Even if there were dozens or hundreds of women with that name, the artist who had assaulted me in Saul’s gallery had to be the one Aidan thought he’d killed. She was a painter; he framed pictures. They both lived in Spilling. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Perhaps they’d had a fight. She might have attacked him-a hypothesis that seemed entirely consistent with what I knew of her character-and he’d defended himself… My mind raced ahead, going through the possibilities, but I couldn’t focus on anything for long. Shock was still slamming through me and I couldn’t think coherently.
‘I need to buy a painting,’ I said to the woman with the dyed hair. ‘That one there.’
She shrugged. If I wanted to forget about the man I’d been looking for and boost her profits instead, that was all right by her. ‘Great,’ she said, though her tone and manner conveyed little enthusiasm. She hadn’t looked to see which picture I’d pointed at. ‘Let me dig out the relevant forms.’ Languidly, like someone with all the time in the world, she bent to open a desk drawer.
‘Can you put the “Sold” sticker on first?’ I asked, trying not to sound as impatient as I felt. ‘I don’t want anyone else to see it and think it’s still for sale.’
She laughed. ‘You might not have noticed, but people aren’t exactly queuing up. I’ve barely had anyone glance in my direction since yesterday morning.’ Pulling the lid off a pen with her teeth, she said, ‘Right, I’ll fill in my bits, then I’ll hand it over to you to do yours. You know you pay the total upfront? It’s a fair, so there’s no deposit system.’
I nodded.
‘We take cash, cheques, all major credit cards. Which picture is it you want?’
‘Abberton,’ I said. It was a lie. I didn’t want it; it was the last thing I wanted. Neither did Mary Trelease want me to have it. She had made that clear enough. I couldn’t put a picture on my wall knowing the artist didn’t want it there. As soon as I’d found Aidan and shown him Abberton, I would give it away-to Malcolm, I decided. He often made admiring remarks about my art collection.
Please let Aidan still be in London, I thought. I didn’t want to have to take Abberton back to Spilling. The idea of having it in my home was unthinkable. Already I felt oppressed by it in a funny sort of way, even though I hadn’t touched it yet and didn’t own it. I had always known it was an object that possessed a certain power-that was what had drawn me to it in the first place-but now that its maker had traumatised and humiliated me, the force of the picture seemed wholly negative. It was ridiculous, I knew, but I was afraid of it.
‘Abberton,’ the woman repeated slowly, writing it on her form. ‘Artist’s name?’
‘Mary Trelease.’ I was surprised to have to tell her. Saul Hansard wouldn’t have needed to ask. How could she represent her artists properly if she wasn’t familiar with the titles of their work? Everything about her demeanour suggested indifference. I wondered how much commission TiqTaq took. Aidan had told me most galleries take fifty per cent, even the ones that make no effort to promote an artist’s work.
‘Mary Trelease?’ The woman looked up at me, seeming suddenly nervous. For a moment, I was terrified she was about to tell me something I knew to be impossible. You must be mistaken. Mary Trelease died years ago. She was murdered.
The young woman walked over to Abberton and tapped its surface with the biro she was holding. ‘This is the picture you want?’ The disbelief and annoyance in her voice let me know that I was making life difficult for her.
‘Yes.’ I took my credit card out of my wallet to show her I wasn’t going to back down, waited for her to say I couldn’t have Abberton-Mary Trelease had told her to sell the painting to anybody but me. But I hadn’t told this woman my name; how could she know who I was?
‘Sorry, my mistake,’ she said, a rueful smile appearing on her face. ‘It’s already sold.’
‘What? But… it can’t be. There’s no red dot on the label.’ I noticed for the first time that there was also no price, nothing written beneath the title and Mary Trelease’s name. All the other pictures on TiqTaq’s stall had prices apart from one or two that were labelled ‘NFS’-not for sale-and their labels were printed. Why was Abberton’s handwritten? Had it been added at the last minute?
‘I told you-I made a mistake. Someone bought this picture yesterday.’ The smile was still there but it was straining to stay in place. ‘I meant to put a “Sold” sticker on, but I never got round to it. I was rushed off my feet.’
‘You told me it had been quiet since you got here,’ I blurted out. ‘I don’t believe the picture’s sold. Why won’t you sell it to me?’ I had to be allowed to take Abberton away with me. I had to. Aidan needed to see it; it would make everything all right between us again, as if his confession last night and his anger today had never happened.
The young woman screwed her eyes up, the better to inspect me: this crazy specimen that had put itself in front of her. ‘Do you think I don’t want to make money? I’d gladly sell it to you if it was for sale.’
A combination of confusion and desperation had emboldened me, and I spoke to a complete stranger as I never would have dared to if there had been less at stake. ‘Show me the sales form,’ I said. ‘Show me your copy, the yellow copy.’ I indicated the form she’d been filling in for me. All the artists and galleries at the fair had the same ones, with three layers: white, yellow and green. Aidan and I had watched Gloria Stetbay’s assistant fill one in yesterday and keep the yellow copy for herself.
‘This is ridiculous.’ Dyed-hair woman tried to laugh, but it wasn’t convincing.
I walked towards her. She moved to stand in front of Abberton, as if she feared I might snatch it off the wall. ‘You represent Mary Trelease, is that right? If her painting’s up on your stall, that means you must represent her.’ Aidan had taught me the basics about how the art world worked. ‘If this picture is sold, I’d like to buy something else by her. Does she have other work that’s available?’
‘I wouldn’t know that sort of thing. You’d have to pop into our gallery on Charlotte Street and-’
‘Is someone there now, one of your colleagues?’ I wasn’t going to let it drop. She was lying to me, and I would force her to admit it. ‘You could ring and ask them. Tell them you’re with someone who’s keen to buy any painting you’ve got by Mary Trelease, as long as it’s signed, dated and recent.’
‘There’s no one there who’d… Look, I’m not…’ She was getting flustered. She spread both her hands and lowered them slowly in a calming gesture. ‘To be honest, I don’t think we’ve got any other stuff by her, okay?’
‘Do you represent her or don’t you?’
‘I’m not going to discuss details of the gallery’s relationship with a particular artist…’
‘An artist who refuses to sell any of her work,’ I snapped. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? Mary Trelease sells her paintings to nobody. Why not?’ I was certain my hunch was correct. Mary often used to bring in pictures for Saul to frame, ignoring me as she walked past me time after time, yet he never put her work up in the gallery. Saul always exhibited paintings by the artists he framed for; he used to tell me all the time that it was the best way to advertise his own work as well as theirs. So why not Mary’s?
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the woman. ‘All I know is, we’ve sold one picture for her. This one.’ She jabbed her thumb at Abberton. ‘T
here’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t un-sell it. I’d be happy to sell you any of the other stuff you can see here. Everything else is available.’
I shook my head. ‘If Abberton’s sold then whoever bought it will be back here to collect it, won’t they? Did they say when?’ An art fair wasn’t like a gallery exhibition, Aidan had told me the day before. You didn’t have to wait until it finished to collect your purchases-you could pick them up any time before the end of the last day.
I got no answer, so I kept pushing. ‘Are they coming to collect it? Or did they pay extra to have it delivered to their home? Can you check that for me, on the yellow form?’
‘No, I can’t. Even if I knew, I couldn’t… Look, I really don’t see how I can help you any more. I hope I’m not going to have to call security.’
This shocked me, the idea that someone could feel threatened by me. ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Just… could you do me one favour?’
She eyed me suspiciously, waiting for the worst.
‘Could you make sure the picture stays where it is until I come back? I don’t care about buying it-I don’t want it. But I need to show it to my boyfriend and… I don’t know where he is.’
‘The tall bloke in the donkey jacket you were looking for?’
I nodded.
She sighed, and seemed to soften. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said, ‘but if the buyer comes to pick it up, there’s not an awful lot I can do.’
I left without saying thank you or goodbye. I’d wasted enough time already. She was right. Assuming Abberton really was sold and she wasn’t lying, the person who had bought it could arrive to collect it at any moment. I ran outside and stuck out my arm to stop a taxi, then realised there weren’t any, only several people who looked as if they were waiting. One glanced at his watch, sighed and walked off down the road.
‘Come on,’ I breathed through gritted teeth. A taxi had to come. I had to get back to the hotel-that’s where Aidan would be. He’d have gone back there to check out, to pick up our bag and the Gloria Stetbay. A taxi appeared, and a woman in a grey trouser suit with a mobile phone pressed to her ear moved forward to greet it. She opened the back door. I ran at her with my wallet already open and offered her twenty pounds if she’d let me take it instead. It was an emergency, I told her. She looked unconvinced, but took the money and stepped back, relinquishing the cab.
The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down Page 18