“I should have spoken to you before, I know. I’m sorry. I’m speaking to you now, though.”
“Oh, that makes it all right, I suppose. So come on, then, what things are changing?”
“Well, the single most important thing is that the gallery business is struggling. You can see it happening all over. It’s all about art fairs now.”
“Really? Art fairs? You can’t be serious.”
“I’m serious all right, Lizzie. Did you know that Bill Hartley went into receivership last week? Fifty years in the business, and nothing to show for it. I had lunch with him before I went to New York, he told me his story, and it rang bells. The slow decline, you know. He advised me to act fast, to get our bookings into the international fairs, change our way of doing business before we end up like him.”
“Why should we end up like him?”
“Because the signs are there. Fewer sales, more borrowing, gallery costs rising year after year.”
Whatever Bert says, I find it hard to believe that art fairs are the way forward. We went to one in a London park a few years ago. It was big and brash, more to do with finance than art, I thought. Now others just like it have spawned around the world. They attract new money, big money, Russian and Chinese mostly; new money that doesn’t trust itself, but trails around in the wake of so-called experts who spout words like realism and abstraction and send out invoices that are works of artifice in themselves. God, the things people are talked into buying.
“That’s the way you want us to go, Bert? We might as well take our wares to flea markets.”
“Oh, come on, Lizzie, we will still be dealing in the art we like, and we saw some wonderful pieces in that London fair, didn’t we?”
“I don’t recall any wonderful pieces at that fair.”
“Yes, some great paintings, and remember that pure white canvas you fell in love with.”
“No.”
“Remember, you said it was quite wonderful, that it would look good in the gallery behind the white desk? You were so taken with it that I would have bought it for you if it hadn’t already sold. And we met some interesting people—it was exciting, wasn’t it?”
“One piece I liked out of thousands, Bert. The rest was just the ugly sister.”
I reminded him of the jumble sale piled high with “conceptual” bits of rag and recycled plastic that spread itself gracelessly in a bleak city of junk.
“Next you’ll be suggesting we show a Magritte alongside one of Henry’s mugs.”
“Fat chance we’d ever get our hands on a Magritte these days.”
“You know what I mean, Bert. I’m talking about quality.”
“I know that you don’t give art a chance,” he snapped. “It’s not all about names, you know. There’s real undiscovered talent out there, Lizzie, open your eyes.”
“And what if I disagree? Say no?”
“I’m sorry, but it’s too late for that. I’ve sold what’s left of the gallery lease to a jewelry designer. They’re a big chain. We have to be out in a couple of months.”
“You’ve what!”
I’m outraged at what’s been going on behind my back. “How dare you,” I stutter. “How dare you.”
I see his mouth moving, but there’s a thrashing sound in my head, and I can’t hear his words. Then my own words pour out of me, and I see the shock on his face.
“You bastard. You bloody bastard.”
I lash out at him with a fist, but he moves his head and my hand slaps the air. Will people never stop taking what is mine?
“Oh God, Lizzie, I’m sorry you are so upset,” he says, visibly shaken. “I should have talked it over with you, I can see that now. But I had to move quickly. I got the offer for the remaining lease as soon as the word got out, and I couldn’t turn it down. It really is for the best, you know.”
“I only have your say-so for that, Bert.”
“Look, I’ve just seen a great space in Vyner Street, one of those old warehouses in the East End. Mostly storage, but we could show there if need be. I was lucky to find it; they don’t come up that often, everyone seems to be looking for spaces there. I’m going to take it.”
“Oh, are you?” My voice is cold.
“I know how it must feel to you, everything moving so fast, but I see that as a good thing.” His voice is soft, wheedling, as though he is talking to a child who is in the middle of a meltdown. “Come and see it. And look at this year’s accounts, you’ll understand why I panicked.”
“No, Bert, I won’t understand. Panic is never the answer.”
“It could be fun, you know, traveling, being part of a new scene. A chance to start again, and not only for the business.”
He is talking about us, of course, but I don’t want to hear it.
“You had no right to go ahead without me.”
“Right is debatable, Lizzie. You haven’t been interested for a while now, and it’s my business, after all. I am entitled to do what’s best for it.”
“I thought it was half mine, Bert.”
“Not half, you own forty percent. That gives me the final say.”
“I’d get half in a divorce.” I want it to sound like a threat.
Bert sighs. He has a stubborn set to his lips. “Shall we go and look at Alice’s house?” he says. “Talk about it out of the wind.”
I turn away from him, leave him to find his own way back. I am angry and don’t want to be in his company.
Fingering the key in my pocket, I head to Alice’s house. My house, soon, like it or not. At least I can be alone there. It is only a few minutes from Pipits, in a grim little close, sitting alongside six other houses just like it. They are built low and square, and look out of place in our ancient village, similar to the council houses that squat at the bottom of the road that takes you out of Cold-Upton. Why things have to be built without beauty is beyond me. It would hardly add much to the cost to lengthen a window, widen a front door.
I let myself in. The hall is cold, the air a little fusty. I haven’t put a foot inside the place since Alice’s party all those years ago, the one where I met Henry. Gloria was meant to be there, but she was on her way back from Eurorailing with her university friends after finishing at York, and didn’t make it on time. I can see now that my hopes for Henry back then were futile; her absence made no difference to the outcome, which was, if Henry is to be believed, set in his and Gloria’s stars. Alice’s dad was alive then, the house’s interior pure seventies, an homage to brown.
Things have changed since then. Alice’s love of color has transformed the place. Expecting a drab symphony of umber, I’m startled at her turquoise sofa, the soft terra-cotta pattern of the kilims. The space is Lilliputian, but there are books everywhere, shelves of them in the hall and in the sitting room, a neat pile on the floor next to an armchair. Alice has always been a reader; no surprise she chose to be a librarian.
I check the books out: a lot of classics, romantic novels of the literary kind, some self-help tomes, and a few biographies. One of Henry’s failed pots works as a bookend for her collection of Virago titles, a long green line of them, Keane and Holtby and Taylor and the like. None of them first editions, none of them worth more than a few pence secondhand.
Everything is neat and tidy. Alice has finalized her affairs, left no mess to be cleared up after she is gone. She will leave no scandal, no problems, no trouble to remember her by.
I put the kettle on, drop a tea bag from a glass pot at the kettle’s side into a blue and white mug, and settle myself at the small kitchen table.
I wonder if I could be happy here in this minor house. It might be made better simply by ripping out the nasty yellow pine of the kitchen cupboards, changing the cheap light fittings, and replacing the department store pictures of box-framed flower heads and passé seafront prints with actual paintings. One could hang curtains that sweep the floor rather than finish at the sill, replace the awful patterned carpet on the stairs. But, no, there is nothing to be
done about the low ceilings, the meanness of the rooms; nothing to be done about the gait of the place. And prettying up this plain thing would feel like betrayal. I would be lonely here, lonely without Pipits.
By the time I get back, Alice is in the drawing room listening to music with Henry and Gloria. Not wanting it to look as though I have been checking out Alice’s house, I don’t tell them I have been there. They tell me that Bert has left.
“He seemed upset,” Henry says. “Thinks he did something he shouldn’t have.”
“Good,” I say. “He did.”
There’s a note on my bed. He is sorry I’m upset about the gallery, but the deed is done, he is going ahead with his plans. He wonders if I really care anymore. In any case, he is leaving it up to me to think about it and get in touch.
It doesn’t sound like much of an apology to me.
8
ALICE DIED IN THE early hours of the morning, three days after Christmas. I had looked in on her on my way to bed the night before she went, just to say good night and to please Gloria, who had reminded me to do it, as she did every evening.
“No telling if she’ll be awake half the night,” she said. “It’ll break up the boredom for her.”
Gloria was huffing and puffing her way around the kitchen loading the dishwasher, clearing up from dinner. Her belly is big now, tight as a drum, she says.
“Refresh her water, would you, Betty? I’ll be up soon.”
My sister read to Alice every night, books of Alice’s choosing, mostly novels, but lately those cringing celebrity “dish the dirt” scrawls.
“She’s in the mood for something frivolous,” Gloria says.
I often heard them laughing together, Gloria’s girlish giggle, Alice’s soft breathless roll. One wondered what these women, one with death in front of her, the other with birth, found to laugh about.
I knocked and entered without hearing an answer. I suppose Alice made the effort, but there was little volume left in her voice. I asked her how she was feeling and set about refreshing her water, closing her curtains, putting her slippers tidily under the bed. Gloria was in and out of Alice’s room all day, yet the untidiness didn’t impinge, or if it did, not enough for her to do anything about it.
“I feel sleepy,” Alice replied. “But I can’t seem to sleep.”
She looked as she usually did, which is to say waxy and shrunken. She was propped on the pillow, her pink pashmina draped over her shoulders. I could see the little hills of her bones through it, bumping along her shoulder line. She was making an effort for Gloria, waiting with her hand resting on a book beside her on the bed. Waiting for the one she really wanted to see.
She patted the side of the bed for me to sit. I took the bedside chair instead. Her hands looked like those of an old woman’s, bloodless, the veins raised, the nails faintly blue.
“You know, Betty, it makes me so happy that you will have my little house,” she said breathlessly, as though continuing a conversation she’d been having in her head. “It’s cozy, easy to run, and near to Gloria and Henry, lovely for all of you to be close but not on top of each other. Just perfect for weekends for you and Bert.”
She didn’t need to hammer the message home. I knew well enough why I had been given the house.
But really! Happy in her little house! You might as well say to someone who has just lost her alpha-male husband, “Look, here is a poorer, less interesting, less good-looking man, an inflictor of tedium, have him instead.”
“Yes, you’re right, it would make a good weekend place,” I said eventually. “It was so kind of you, Alice.”
“I guess you’ll be going home to London soon,” she persisted with that mulish streak so common in the meek.
I nodded but couldn’t bring myself to answer right away. If Alice hadn’t been ill, I would have told her that where I lived was none of her business.
Out of kindness I let it go. I surprise myself, sometimes.
* * *
GLORIA THINKS ALICE MUST have left us at around two in the morning. She had fallen asleep next to her on the bed and was woken by what she took to be a little cough.
“Her death rattle, I suppose,” Henry whispers.
“Oh don’t,” Gloria cries.
The clock read a minute past two. Alice was not to be roused.
“At least she was not alone,” Gloria says. “That comforts a little.”
“We’ve lost our Alice,” Henry says. “We’ll miss that sweet girl.”
The doctor has called; the undertaker is on his way to claim Alice. Pipits is good business for him. I wonder who will be next.
Alice has specified a quiet send-off, a short service, and then her burial in the churchyard alongside her mother and father. Of course, Gloria will invite the mourners back to Pipits for a funeral tea. She will revel in the rituals of death, accept the kisses and the sympathy, as though it is her loss alone. She will be thought the sweetest hostess ever. I can’t wait for the sickly business of it to be over.
Gloria says she will be lonely without Alice.
“You have me,” Henry says, and gathers her to him. “And soon you’ll have our little Mango.”
The apple has been promoted to a mango now. Gloria has burgeoned into something that looks like the human version of a mango herself; her skin is tinged olive with the ongoing sickness that lasted well beyond the first trimester; her breasts and stomach are swollen into one bloated mass.
It would be too humiliating to remind them that I am here, too.
“Oh, Alice,” Gloria moans, and the tears, big opals of them, tremble on her eyelids, tip over, and stream down her cheeks.
Henry strokes her hair, hugs her tighter.
“It will be all right,” he assures her. “We will never forget her. And you were the most wonderful friend to her.”
Over Gloria’s shoulder Henry catches my eye and gives me that pinched-up look that says Poor darling, Gloria. We, the stronger ones, must look after her.
I make sympathetic noises, but I know that Gloria will have forgotten Alice all too soon. She professes to miss Mother, but her shallow ditch of a memory rarely calls Mother to mind. Mother hardly gets a mention in this house these days, unless it is to complain about her so-called hoarding.
This from Gloria during the pre-Christmas cleanup.
“Believe it or not, I found a carton of cigarettes at the back of the cloakroom cupboard, and Mother gave up smoking a decade ago. Ten-year-old cigarettes. Just imagine!” She laughed.
Of course, Henry had to join in the conversation. “What with that and the moths eating every theater program and ticket for everything she ever saw, something has to be done.”
“Honestly, this whole place needs a good clear-out.” Gloria sighed.
Does it indeed, little sister. We’ll see about that.
You have to wonder about death. Father, Mother, and now Alice gone, and the world rolling on, not giving a damn. I find myself thinking well of Alice, though. Her passage through Pipits has been calm, dignified. She will leave little of note, a trace of her energy perhaps, faint enough at the end to be absorbed without changing anything.
* * *
A LETTER HAS COME from Bert. The old-fashioned kind, through the post, on heavy white linen paper, his bold hand in black fountain-pen ink. He wants a divorce.
The missive is full of clichés. He has tried to make it work, but we haven’t been on the same page for a long time now; we want different things, in business and in life; he cannot give me what I need, I deserve better than him. It hurts him to admit it, he writes, but he thinks our parting is for the best.
I rip his letter into four pieces, then Scotch-tape it back together. I am only momentarily angry, and not surprised, of course. I have sensed the break coming for some time, initiated it, really. I could have kept Bert if I had wanted to, but the truth is, I’m relieved. If it weren’t for the Helen thing, I would be celebrating now. She set out to seduce Bert, swooped in to take what’s mine.
The very thought of the woman burns; she’s nothing but a common thief.
I would like to have been the one to make the first move, to have allowed her my leftovers. I don’t want to hold on to Bert, but I don’t like being dictated to. And I won’t stand for Helen having a say in how things progress from here. I must make sure that I get my fair share. And if it’s about fairness, then I should get more than Bert. Without me, Walker and Stash would not have been a success.
I put more sweat into the gallery than Bert ever did. Truth is, he was always swanning off to lunch, wasting time with people who had no intention of buying art. And, of course, as well as the gallery, there is our apartment, with its fine furniture and paintings, no small thing. So, as long as the settlement is on my terms, as long as I don’t lose out, my husband can have his divorce.
When the time comes, with Mother’s money, and my share of Walker and Stash, not to mention the proceeds from our sale of the apartment, and Alice’s house when it is sold, I could live in Pipits without a care.
I must get myself a good divorce lawyer. I will sort that out, go to London and see Bert, gauge whether things can be achieved with good manners and a cool eye. I won’t be bullied, though, and I certainly won’t allow Bert to make off with the bulk of the spoils from our marriage. I find myself excited at the thought of change.
Henry and Gloria claim to be concerned for me. But is it truly concern for me or concern for themselves? Concern that I might make my life in Cold-Upton now, concern that they will lose their lovely Bert.
“Thank goodness you have Alice’s house,” Henry says. “Bless her.”
“Yes, bless her,” I repeat, infusing my voice with kindness.
“But Bert is so lovely,” Gloria says. “Are you sure that your marriage can’t be repaired, Betty? I don’t think divorce is what Bert really wants.”
“It’s for the best,” I say. “At least now I won’t have to mash his food or change his soiled sheets when he’s eighty.” I put a lilt in my voice to make them believe that I am kidding.
The Beloveds Page 9