‘Could you check?’
‘Sure. And if the charity woman wasn’t Marnie, well maybe she really was telling the truth and she did work for a charity, just not a very professional one.’
‘I suppose so.’
Ed grinned in a way that instantly made me feel better.
‘My darling, I think you are making connections where there aren’t any.’ He lifted my chin with his thumb so our eyes met. ‘Which is, after all, what artists like to do.’ He grinned. Ed knew exactly how to banish my fears. He always made the world seem pure again. ‘Maybe you should slow down a bit. You’ve been burning a lot of midnight oil lately. Spend some more time with the children. Make sure they don’t forget who you are!’
I didn’t rise. I knew Ed thought I neglected the children when I was in the force-field of art. Then again, so did he when duty called. The difference was somehow he could always slip back in with a hug and a joke as if he’d never been away, whereas Nell seemed to make it harder for me – even if it was only when I arrived home that she even noticed I’d been gone. Now he’d doused my fears, I wanted to move the conversation on.
‘And what about you? Arthur said you cried when you said goodnight the other day. Is everything OK with you?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I was just exhausted. It’s been pretty tough at work. We’re a bit short at the moment. Alison’s been ill, Pete’s been doing his exams, Karen’s on a course. Philippa’s still on holiday. We haven’t got enough bodies right now, so the rest of us are covering more than we should. On Wednesday a first-time mother had a placental abruption. We couldn’t save the baby. We had to operate. Poor thing. She was born to be a mum, that’s all she ever wanted, and now she never will be. And the husband, he was so upset, almost more than she was, completely inconsolable. When I told him he howled like a damaged animal. You could have heard it in Swansea. At times like that mine is the worst job in the world. I guess when I saw Arthur in bed it all came flooding back and I did start to cry, just thinking about how lucky we’ve been and how fragile life is. I thought I’d hidden it from him. Obviously not.’
I looked into Ed’s eyes. They were glistening. The things they had seen.
‘Old flappy ears doesn’t miss much.’
Ed kissed me on my cheek. I said,
‘Then there’s Araminta Lyall. What do you think? Burglary gone wrong? Crime of passion?’
‘Drug overdose more likely. She seemed to run with a pretty racy crowd.’
‘Then why are they calling it suspicious?’
‘Search me.’
He rolled the paper into a truncheon and scratched his nose.
Ed had a brief chat with the police one afternoon after his clinic but they didn’t give him any more details about what had happened or even whether they were still treating Araminta’s death as murder. I read everything I could about the case, online and off. I had never realized how the Internet throbs 24/7 on subjects that make the national news. Trolls, conspiracy theorists, single-issue maniacs, swivel-eyed obsessives, anyone with dodgy spelling and an iron-cast opinion, all have a new home. Daytime TV has lost its constituency. Quite soon I knew more about Araminta Lyall than her mother did. Her death dominated the tabloids, the broadsheets showed a prurient interest and when the police announced they were treating it as murder she even turned up on News at Ten. As for the Bristol Evening Post, it had never had it so good.
The reason was not hard to divine. Araminta was young, female, pretty, rich, well connected and very talented. Her tutors talked her up. Dealers in London talked her up. She had already sold a piece in New York. Though I wasn’t a sculptress, had no urge to be bleeding-edge and appreciated that a well-publicized death was a fail-safe enhancer of the value of any art, I couldn’t help a twinge of envy; not for her talent, which was shallower than the eulogies suggested, or her work, sub-Alexander Calder mobiles, but because she had come out of the blocks so quickly. Portraiture, by comparison, is a slow burn. Obviously she was helped by the milieu in which she moved. Her last boyfriend had been a yacht-racing Brazilian businessman more than twice her age and, it was hinted, she had once had an affair with a married TV presenter, a household name. Her father was chairman of a FTSE company. Her mother was an ex-model and a ‘deb’ who had ‘come out’ (isn’t that just the best colloquial change of meaning?) with the usual crop of horse-faced girls in the 1970s. Araminta’s life was exemplary of a certain type of upper-middle-class English life, set apart by the unmistakable twang of talent and her early death. As if all that wasn’t enough, the police found traces of cocaine in her flat. It was all too good to be true. The papers sucked it up and spat it out. And because there was no news, no lead, no arrest, the back-story was the front story, feeding on itself in an eternal loop.
‘You say sfumayto, I say sfumarto.’
The following Friday it was half-term and I took Arthur to London as a treat for winning a cartoon competition at school, or not annoying his sister for a whole minute, or both. The plan was to look at ten paintings in the National Gallery, one from each century, then have a hamburger and go to Hamleys. The hams were the real prize.
The Virgin of the Rocks was his favourite painting, admittedly after I had pointed out the virtuosity of the master’s technique, the distance between Leonardo and his contemporaries. Arthur is competitive, drawn to winners. He also liked the Turners, the collision of the old warship and new industrial age in The Fighting Temeraire, the tale of the artist being lashed to a mast in order to paint his storms at sea. Children love stories. They love the suspense, the narrative arc. That’s why we read to them at night. I filled Arthur with hokum as we meandered through the galleries, taking in unscheduled detours via Holbein and Joseph Wright of Derby. I pointed out connections, explaining how each artist conducted a dialogue with the past. In front of a Titian he said,
‘Mummy, what is art?’
I took a deep breath – where to begin? – but before I could start talking of artifice and transformation he gave a cheese-slicer grin and said,
‘It’s short for Arthur!’
We ended at Cézanne’s Hillside in Provence, the artist flattening the landscape, blocking out space, opening the door to Cubism. We were both tired so we headed into Soho, Arthur’s eyes swivelling at the painted mannequins, and checked into an upmarket burger joint with a pink neon sign sandwiched between a red-lacquered bassoon shop and an Itsu. I had chosen it because it was opposite the site of Qube, the gallery where I’d had my first-ever solo exhibition.
At Arthur’s request we sat on stools at the zinc bar. The man next to us wore a bootlace tie and ten-gallon hat, which made him look like he’d blown in from Dodge City.
‘Mummy, why don’t you pronounce “union” like “onion” and “onion” like “on-yon”?’
Wyatt Earp caught my eye. I returned his smile and let my mind drift back in time. Qube had become a coffee shop, but it didn’t matter because my memories of that first exhibition were crystal clear. It had been a minor triumph, partly because it was the only show by a new young artist who – radically – painted in oil. Everyone else was sailing under the flag of fashion, which meant drawing a dotted line through the word ‘ART’ or producing an hour-long video of a Japanese woman repeating the word ‘yes’ (or maybe ‘no’). There may be nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come, but the same is true of its opposite.
The reason my memories are crystal clear is because at tea time on the day of the private view I’d rung my older brother Matt to see if he was coming as he hadn’t replied. My sister Bridgey, the middle of the three of us, had predictably replied by return with regrets. I could imagine the invitation propped up on the mantelpiece of her spinsterish hive on Hampstead Hill, every surface stacked with books and magazines, scented candles. Matt was living in Oxford. He’d returned under some vague pretext he was going to finish his degree eight years after he dropped out. I rang Bridgey to see if she knew anything. She was flustered by my call, fumbling around for her
own excuse and only relaxed when she realized I was calling about Matt. She hadn’t spoken to him for a year. When I finally got through to him he said he didn’t know the private view was happening, even though I’d sent an invitation and left about thirty messages on his answerphone.
It wasn’t his answer that bugged me but his voice, which sounded as if there was a kidnapper pointing a gun at his head. I suddenly understood that what I’d taken for evasiveness was helplessness, or hopelessness, the sound of a man falling apart.
So I rang Anthea – such a 70s name – who owned the gallery and said I had to go to Oxford immediately and therefore would miss the private view. She went nuts, saying, ‘What fucking difference will one day make?’ But I had to do whatever I could. No one else would. So I didn’t show up at my own first night, which is not a great career move, and I’ve had to live with a reputation for being difficult ever since. But I’ve no regrets. If my art is not about humanity then it’s not about anything at all.
I found Matt in a mildew-stained, one-room basement in Jericho below a pagan shop having a January sale of crystal balls, which were piled high in the window like tapioca. His hair was long and greasy and his T-shirt hung off him like a paper bag. I’d never seen anyone so lonely or exhausted. I almost burst into tears on his doorstep.
We went for a coffee. I forced him. On the way to the café, Matt just looked around as if it was strange to be above ground. It was awful. I bought him a cappuccino and a ham roll with mayo and English mustard, which he hadn’t asked for but which he looked as though he needed and had always been his favourite on Dartmoor picnics when we were children. He didn’t touch the coffee or eat the roll.
We talked a little, his monosyllables punctuating Pinteresque pauses. I suggested he come away for a few days and stay with me in London, but he shook his head. I offered to stay in Oxford. He declined. When I mentioned Highlands he winced perceptibly and looked stricken. He was purple-eyed, breathing through his nose, hard to hear above the hiss of the coffee machine.
‘Thank you for coming, Bunny. You shouldn’t have.’
‘I had to.’
‘There’s nothing for you here.’
‘You’re here.’
‘You must go now.’
‘Not without you.’
‘You can’t stay.’
‘You must come too.’
‘Your exhibition …’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s only a few paintings.’
We sat in silence. In the end he left. There was nothing to stay for. I watched him go, stooped in his long coat, heading out into the street like Captain Oates and with about as much chance of success. He was as thin as a leaf, a feather in a stream, and had been almost hollow in my farewell embrace. It had been years since we sat in the field behind the house and he read me the poems he loved.
Anthea never forgave me, even though the exhibition sales exceeded both our expectations, and I never forgave her. Not after I found out she’d told the Londoner’s Diary gigolo I hadn’t been at my own private view because I was helping my ‘sick’ brother. You didn’t need a degree in pharmacology to work out what could be making him sick. She was unrepentant. ‘If you’re not going to sell yourself, then I’m going to have to do it for you. People love the tortured artist, the fucked-up family. Smell the coffee, darling: no hook, no story, no’ – she made a gesture as if she was setting a dove free from cupped hands – ‘air. This is business.’
I glanced at Arthur. He’d eaten his burger and was licking his fingers, engrossed in his magazine. Batman was being acrobatic with a long chain in an abandoned building on a moonlit night. Wyatt Earp was paying his bill and getting ready to saddle up.
I reached for the paper. I didn’t want to think about Matt any more. People reach an age where they have to live their own lives. Too often beautiful boys make unhappy men. I flicked through the news pages. There was an article about Araminta Lyall with the ‘Dering Street’ picture in colour: royal blue choker, pencil skirt, siren smile. I read the article, which sprinkled generic reportage with rent-a-quotes from unnamed friends and tutors. ‘Minta was a brilliant artist with a bright future in front of her.’ She was ‘always the last to leave parties’, ‘seriously intelligent, intelligently serious’, ‘happiest really just playing with wire and coloured plastic’. On it went, her friends conjuring images of a magical girl who probably wouldn’t have recognized herself in print.
And then it hit me. Right between the eyes in a word so large I wondered how I had missed it before.
How could I have been so blind? I glanced at Arthur to see if he had registered any physical manifestation of my shock. Of course not. He was totally absorbed in his comic and caramel milkshake. I looked away and counted to three. Then I looked at the paper again, even though I knew nothing would have changed. I’d already read the word, it was right there on the page in front of me, one word that changed my life and explained everything I didn’t understand about the last couple of weeks, the word that I could never unread.
Minta.
‘Minta was a brilliant artist.’
Minta. Minta Lyall. She was known to her friends as Minta Lyall, not Araminta Lyall. Minta Lyall was ML. ML was not Marnie Latham or Mima Langton. Marnie Latham was off in the north, telling anyone who would listen she was still my friend, and Mima Langton never existed. She was always Jemima Langton and always would be.
The flowers were from Minta Lyall.
ML xxx
I couldn’t believe Ed would double-deal. It’s just not his style. Plus, I know he loves me and he adores Nell and Arthur far too much to risk losing them, and they adore him. He’s wedded – welded – to the family unit and he knows, because I once told him, that if he ever left me for another woman he could wave goodbye to the children. It might not be the best thing for them and probably wouldn’t be for me, but I couldn’t bear the injustice of another woman bringing them up, even if it was only every other weekend. Whether I had to move to London or Los Angeles or Lahore to ensure he never saw them, I would. I really would.
I had called Jemima Langton to thank her for the flowers and she apologetically confessed that they hadn’t sent any. So they were almost certainly from (Ara)minta Lyall, meaning something must have happened between her and Ed. That made it more likely she was the mysterious charity girl on the phone who didn’t know the things a medical charity worker would have done. Why would she have rung? For Ed? Not at nine o’clock in the morning. Know the competition. Every mistress wants to check out the wife, like a python measuring itself against whatever it plans to eat. It would also explain why Ed had changed his mobile password for the first time ever, why Neil had seen him on Stokes Croft and why – I’m suddenly remembering – he went down to the basement to make a phone call he could easily have made in the kitchen.
Jesus. How could I have been so blind?
Because I trusted him.
Yet the evidence, if circumstantial, suggested there were questions to answer. I had gone to the study and combed through the drawers in his desk. There was nothing incriminating or even suspicious, simply piles of bills and tax returns that would have bored the most ardent PI. Ed had never been secretive. It was one of the reasons I loved him. I checked his laptop. The password hadn’t been changed. Nothing. I looked at the ribbon of blue silk lying on the desk. I had found it in his suit pocket.
Outside, a tomcat glided along the stone wall in the garden. It was sure-footed, ginger and furry, self-confident, prowling far from home.
How do you ask your faithful husband of fifteen years whether he has slept with another woman, even more so when that woman has subsequently died? Simply asking the question exposes the loss of trust. Do you come straight out with it, a blurted question loaded with tears and ultimatums? Or do you approach it obliquely, crabwise, like a yachtsman navigating heavy seas? The latter is the obvious strategy, but it’s not your call. In the cauldron of the moment, raw instinct is bound to take over.
Ed arriv
ed back at eight fifty. The children had gone upstairs, Nell to settle down to two hours’ hard texting on her bed, Arthur to kill various aliens who had invaded our television at his request. For once I didn’t care. I was sitting alone at the kitchen table, a Caravaggio monograph the size and weight of a medieval tombstone positioned squarely in front of me. It was open at the painting of The Incredulity of Thomas, the sceptic’s finger pushed into Christ’s wound where the soldier’s spear had broken his skin. Caravaggio was a rackety genius who redefined the possibility of art.
Only I wasn’t thinking about the possibility of art as I sat there, but I was thinking about scepticism and trust. I was thinking there must be a simple explanation that would put my mind at ease. There had to be, because I wasn’t sure what I would do if there wasn’t. Whenever I had doubts about anything – usually my work, sometimes my mother – Ed always lifted me. From our earliest days together he had been able to stop me worrying or taking things (usually myself) too seriously, generally by poking fun at my fears until I realized it was me that was the problem, not someone else, and if I understood that I could solve it (or me).
He kissed me on the top of the head, a kiss saying rather more about hunger than love, and took off his jacket, brushing a speck of imaginary lint off a sleeve as he hung it over a chair. His shirt was cornflower blue, the sleeves rolled neatly above the elbow, lumberjack forearms, delicate hands, slender fingers – the obstetrician’s toolkit. Many men who left the house at 7.30 a.m. and didn’t get back until almost 9 p.m. would have fixed themselves a drink, but Ed never did. He didn’t offer me one either, though sometimes he does. I invariably decline. The only thing sadder than a man drinking alone is a woman drinking alone.
What Alice Knew Page 5