‘He would want me to be happy,’ I say.
She opens the bin and throws in the wet paper towel. The bin is full and she takes a moment to pull out the old bag and twist it shut. She places it by the back door and then she opens the drawer where the spare bags are kept – how capable she seems suddenly and how quickly she’s got to know my house – and unfolds another and slots it in. Her face is hidden behind her hair. When she flicks it back, her mouth is a thin line.
‘He wouldn’t want you to be happy,’ she says. ‘Not without him. You know that. You know what he’s like.’
Zach
May 2011
I am in Cornwall. Lizzie says she’ll join me on Friday. She said: ‘It will do you good to have some time alone.’ What does she mean? I can’t get her words out of my head. Why do I need time alone? Does she mean it will do her good to be away from me? I keep picking it apart, trying to make sense of it.
She’s always going on about Gulls being my place, how great it is I have somewhere on my own to work. How ironic. Finally I find a woman I don’t mind bringing down here, and she doesn’t want to come.
The weather is warm. A misty haze over the sea. I’ve been painting in the garage with the door bolted and the venetian blinds folded down. Strips of light trickled in at first, but I bought some masking tape in the village and closed up the cracks. Five small pictures completed. Abstracts. Phthalo Blue. Lamp Black. Zinc White. ‘It’s a series,’ as Lizzie said when I rang. ‘You’ll have to sell them together.’
Kulon introduced me to an old school friend, John Harvey, who runs a gallery in Bristol. He took my card. He is putting on a big exhibition in September – ‘Light on Water’ – and he came in to take a look at my work on his way out of the village. We shared a joint and he said if I ‘go a bit easier on the black tones, slap on a bit more colour’ he’d be seriously interested in what I had to show him. ‘More than seriously interested,’ he said, which is either sloppy language or a commitment.
I’ve been down in the Blue Lagoon most evenings. Kulon has been on holiday to Cambodia and has brought back a suitcase full of prescription drugs. ‘Chemists are like sweet shops over there.’ I won a few tabs of oxycodone off him, playing poker, which he traded for diazepam. He says he can buy Adderall from some American college kids he met in Newquay, which would be good. I can work all night on Adderall. He says I’m looking more relaxed than he’s seen me in a long time. ‘Married life suits you,’ he said.
A girl came in last night, a bit unsteady on her feet, and sat herself down at our table. She said, ‘I know you,’ and it took a moment to place her. Onnie, Victoria and Murphy’s daughter, the sad case from the beach. She’s changed a lot over the last year. Then it was spots and black sackcloth. Now it’s all flicked eyeliner, intense eyes, white girl’s dreadlocks. She looks twenty-five, though she can’t be much more than sixteen. I felt sorry for her. She told me she was kicked out of Bedales for cyber bullying and drinking, and Mummy and Daddy have banished her to Cornwall in disgrace. You have to love the hypocrisy. I could tell her a thing or two about Tarty Tory, as the yacht club boys used to call her, what happens to her after a glass or two of cava. Poor little cow. Up there in that isolated house, with just some Middle European au pair as jailor – no wonder she’s hitting the wine cellar big time.
She was in no state to walk so I drove her home. I was way over the limit myself, but I put down the soft top and gave myself up to the exhilaration of country lanes at speed. Drive it like an Italian, the dealer said. Throttle and clutch, pieces of hedgerow flying, nasty moment on a tight bend – all part of the fun. Onnie: a familiarisation of Aine, she tells me. Irish, pronounced ‘Onya’. The pagan goddess of wealth and summer. For fuck’s sake. ‘Aine’ is allowed back into school to sit her GCSEs, ‘which I’ll fail so it’s basically just a waste of time’.
When we pulled up outside, the au pair was tapping at a laptop in the window, oblivious to the predicament of her charge, drunk in the possession of a stranger. I leaned across her to open her door. ‘Aine’ didn’t budge, carried on sitting there, banging on about her exams with the tedious self-preoccupation of the young (‘I’m doing Double Science not Triple which is literally a joke’). The only subject she cared a toss about was art. I told her the harder she worked, the better she’d get. ‘That bilge about natural talent,’ I said, biting back my own bitterness, ‘it’s all bullshit.’
‘Do you think I’ll pass then?’ she said. ‘My dad says I won’t.’
‘Course.’
She threw herself across me. Straddled, I think the word is. Nuzzled my neck.
I managed to extricate myself by volunteering to help with her portfolio – it was the only way I could think to get her out of the car.
I stayed up late finishing that sketch of Lizzie, rubbing her eyes out over and over, trying to get them right.
Lizzie rang. She asked if she could come on Saturday instead. Gives her time to babysit for Peggy and to visit her mother. Is that OK?
I left a silence, long enough for her to drown in. ‘Are you still there?’ she said.
These last few days, I’ve been waiting to see her, to touch her. I’ve been counting off the minutes until she’s in my arms. A delay makes me want to smash my fist against the wall.
‘I’d rather you came sooner,’ I managed to say.
‘Are you lonely?’ she said.
Lonely? With Kulon’s company and the Adderall, not to mention the hours with ‘Aine’. In-aine. It’s not loneliness that’s the problem, but this low dull feeling that I’m not enough. She’s poised to let me down, just like all the others. I thought she was different. I still hope.
I remembered her cycle in the nick of time. ‘But it’s day eleven,’ I said. ‘You’re at your most fertile. Let’s not miss ovulation.’
She sighed, and agreed to come on Friday. ‘We’re happy, aren’t we,’ she said. It was more of a question than a statement. I’ve told her I don’t want to muck about with doctors, endless tests, that what will be will be. She’s trying to accept it.
‘We don’t know how happy we could be,’ I said, ‘unless we try.’
Onnie spent the day here again, just turned up with her little box of paints and her sketchbook. Her project is on ‘Force’ so I gave her some ideas, told her to concentrate on images of physical strength, brute force, muscles, to make a collage to give an idea of texture. She gave me her mother’s phone number, told me she wanted me to ring, to discuss her progress, so I left her to it and took the phone into the garden.
Vic’s not happy, I can tell – doesn’t want her little darling mixing with the likes of yours truly. ‘I’ll pay for a couple of hours’ tuition,’ she said. ‘But that’s it. Please send her on her way when that’s finished. She has other work to be getting on with.’
Onnie wouldn’t leave when the two hours were up. I tried to get on with my work, but she kept wandering around the studio, picking things up. ‘Can’t we go in the house?’ she said. ‘Can’t you show me what it’s like inside?’
I told her I couldn’t. I was working on the seascape – horizontal line above horizontal line – when I felt her chin on my neck, her small damp lips in the crease, her breasts pressed against my back.
My phone was ringing in my pocket: Victoria checking up on her precious daughter. ‘Come on, now,’ I said, using my elbows to steer Onnie away. ‘I’m a happily married man.’
Unusual restraint. If I say so myself. Lizzie should realise what kind of sacrifices I make.
She missed her train. She was held up. Angus? Anyone else I should know about? It’s a joke. The thought of another man touching her sets up a rhythmic pain in my stomach.
She caught the later train. It arrived just before midnight. I paced until it got there. She ran towards me down the platform, dragging that mutt behind her, and threw her arms around me. I’m learning to conceal my emotions. I kept smiling and talking on the long drive from the station to Gulls. ‘Tired, darling?’ I sa
id. ‘Busy week?’ I wanted to put my hands around her neck. Think of Polly.
She fell asleep on the last hill, like a child late for bed. I sat for a long time, parked outside the bungalow, gazing at her. Bobbles on her tights on the insides of her knees. A faint down of hair above her upper lip. Her lashes dark below the blue of her lids.
Above us, a barn owl shrieked. From nowhere I remembered some random piece of poetry from school. Onnie’s ramblings must have prompted it. My English GCSE. Othello: ‘If it were now to die, ’Twere now to be most happy.’
Party up at the big house tomorrow night – ‘just drinks’, Victoria said, not like the parties she used to throw. Silly In-aine would be all over me. But I won’t let Lizzie go.
I want to keep her separate from all that. I won’t tell her about Onnie, and I won’t tell her about the party. I need to keep her to myself, or everything I’ve worked so hard for will be spoiled.
Chapter Fourteen
Lizzie
I make up the sofa bed in the study and then tell Onnie I’m tired and am going to have an early night. I sit on the edge of my bed and mend Conor’s blazer, poking the needle into the fabric and out again, trying to calm myself. I listen to her move around the house. She spends a long time in the bathroom. I hear the groaning of the pipes, the running of taps, the murmuring of her voice in the kitchen, talking to Howard. There are small creaks and rattles from the study, but finally she is quiet. I can tell from the darkening around my bedroom door that she’s switched off the light.
He wouldn’t want me to be happy – not without him. She’s right. I do know. I learned not to laugh on the phone if he was in earshot. If Peggy talked about our childhood, trips to the seaside or the fairground, he would become silent. I’d change the subject quickly, or divert it – away from the dark-haired boys who spun us on the waltzer to the dodgy hot dog we ate on the way home. Usually it was too late. He would interrogate me when we were alone. ‘So it came every year, the steam fair? Always the same boys? Did they fancy you? Did you let them kiss you?’ I’d try to joke it off, to soothe him. His own upbringing had been devoid of joy. He was insecure. It was my fault he was like this. I should have made him feel loved and safe. I was failing.
He’s not coming back to pick up where we left off. I’ve got to remember that. He’s not going to put what happened behind us. But I need to know what he is planning. I need the waiting to be over.
Out of the window, clouds race and gather.
My mobile phone rings twice in the night – ‘private number’ – but the caller hangs up when I answer.
It’s 8 a.m. when I look at the clock. I was awake until the early hours and then overslept despite myself. I throw back the covers. It’s quiet in the house. I wonder if Onnie has got up and slipped out without waking me, but the study is in darkness, and the sofa bed has a person on it. I cross the room to shake her, tripping over a pile of her clothes. She grunts, waves her arm ineffectually. ‘Go away,’ she says.
I pull open the blinds and a dull light creeps into the room. An empty mug is resting on the desk, and next to it Zach’s laptop is open.
I tap the keyboard. The screen brightens – Stepper Point and the request for a password. She hasn’t stirred again. She is turned towards me, but her eyes are shut. My fingers tap lightly, skating across the keys. I try two things in quick succession.
SAND MARTIN.
ONNIE.
INCORRECT PASSWORD.
Onnie moves, yawns. I snap the laptop shut.
‘Time to get up,’ I say, retrieving the mug.
‘I’m not going in,’ she says, half asleep. ‘You can’t make me.’
I laugh. ‘It’s not school. It’s Shelby Pink! Come on. Up you get.’
I leave her and get dressed. I haven’t time for breakfast, but I make a quick cup of tea and let the dog out while it’s brewing. He sways into the garden, cocks his leg against a pot by the door and comes back in. He bumps clumsily into the table before collapsing into his bed. His food is still uneaten.
I kneel down and stroke him. Poor old boy. I haven’t been paying attention. I’ve been too distracted. I lift his head and study his eyes. It’s the same symptoms as before – listlessness, a wobbly gait, loss of appetite. Last time, blood tests came up clear. I tell myself it’s nothing this time, too. As the vet says, dogs are the worst hypochondriacs. But still, I start making calculations. I’ll make an appointment as soon as I can.
Onnie walks into the kitchen in knickers and the same long-sleeved T-shirt as last night. Her hair is unbrushed, her face creased.
‘Not dressed?’ I say.
She lays her phone on the table. ‘I don’t think I’ll go in today,’ she says.
‘What? I thought you were loving it?’
‘It was all right.’
‘But you told me what an opportunity it was, that they’d turned down all those other people.’
‘It’s just, like, really awkward. No one even talks to me.’
‘I know.’ I stand up and smile with as much sympathy as I can muster. ‘I remember being new. You feel so self-conscious, don’t you? You don’t know where anything is and you have to ask about everything. You feel like everyone’s looking at you and you try and look busy even when you’re not. You start rearranging things on your desk.’
‘I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be doing.’ She puts her hands out. ‘I had to, like, ring all these suppliers to find a lace swatch to match some Pantone reference. For a paillette or something. I didn’t even know what I was asking for. I had to write it down and just read it out.’
I laugh.
‘Plus I’m not being paid.’
‘It’s experience.’ I start putting on my coat, then check my bag for my wallet and keys. ‘Work can be boring, unless you’re lucky and happen to do what you love, and even then you’re answerable to other people.’
‘Unless you’re self-employed like Zach. He wasn’t answerable to anyone. He was free.’
‘Yes, but he also didn’t earn any money.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘It does if you want to live in the real world. He had all these big ideas about being self-sufficient. But it’s one thing to talk about it, another to put it into practice. All I am saying is, if you have the opportunity, the privilege, of getting experience, then you shouldn’t let it pass you by.’
She rubs the back of one hand with the tips of her fingers, concentrating as if it were important, ignoring me.
‘Anyway,’ I say, half out of the room, ‘I’ve got to go to work now, or I’ll be late.’ I run upstairs for Conor’s mended blazer, and then back down. She hasn’t moved from the kitchen. I want her to leave the house at the same time as me, but that doesn’t seem likely. ‘Could you lock the front door when you go and stick the key through the letter box? And Onnie?’
She looks up from her hand.
‘Please ring me when you’ve spoken to Xenia.’
‘OK.’
I am halfway along the passage when I hear her say: ‘I might just walk out of here, disappear and never come back. No one will notice.’
I hesitate. Irritation runs through me. I’m tempted to call, ‘Go on then, Onnie, I dare you.’ But I don’t. I lay my bag and Conor’s blazer down in a heap in the hall and walk back into the room. Her head is bowed. She is kicking the legs of the table rhythmically with her feet – a toddler in teenage form. I crouch down and put my arms around her from the side. ‘Don’t be silly. Think how upset your parents would be, and all your friends, if they didn’t know where you’d gone.’
‘I haven’t got any friends.’ She tries to pull away from me. ‘They wouldn’t even notice. I told you, no one at home cares what I do.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ I say, as kindly as I can manage. ‘I’m sure they worry about you.’
She laughs bitterly. ‘Has anyone rung me while I’ve been here?’ She picks up her phone and then throws it down again. ‘They don’t care about me.’
She turns her face towards me, her eyes small, her mouth twisted with misery. ‘All they worry about is that I might embarrass them during a photo opportunity. That’s the only time my dad ever wants anything to do with me, when the press are around.’
I say, ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘How do you know? You don’t know anything about me. You don’t even want me here, and why should you? I don’t blame you for hating me.’
‘I don’t hate you. Why on earth would I hate you? You’re being silly now. Come on.’ I rub her shoulder and smooth her hair, picking a small feather out of it. ‘There we go.’
‘Why are you being nice to me?’
‘I’m not. I’m just . . . I think—’ I bend so I can see her face ‘—that you should pull yourself together and go to Shelby Pink. You’ll feel better today, more confident.’
‘I can’t.’ She rubs her eyes. ‘I’ve got myself too upset now.’
I feel a seeping boredom. ‘Go home then, watch TV, see a friend.’
The dog in his basket gives a small shudder. I reach back and stroke his nose. It feels dry. ‘You’re not feeling great either,’ I say under my breath. I stand up. ‘Onnie, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late. I’ve got a lot to do today and I’ll have to take the dog to the vet at lunchtime so . . .’ I make a cheerful face. ‘So, I’ll see you.’
‘I know!’ she says.
I’m at the door. ‘What?’
‘I’ll look after Howard today. I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll take him to the vet for you, if you like.’
‘No, honestly. It’s fine.’
Howard is lying in a strange position, head down, his sides moving fast. I look from him to Onnie. She’s stopped crying. ‘Go on. Let me,’ she says eagerly. ‘I’ll go to Shelby Pink once he’s better. But let me look after him.’
‘He’s only eaten something dodgy,’ I say. ‘That’s all it is.’
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