by Jess Kidd
‘I saw you with him,’ he says. ‘You’re in league with him, you sneaky bitch. You’re in league with all of them.’
I glance at him: his hands are shaking and there’s spittle on his lips and chin.
‘In league with who?’
‘That unctuous fat fucker.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘He’s charmed your knickers off. You’ve probably had him in your snatch.’ I feel his breath on my cheek, the threat in his low growl.
‘Then I’m easily charmed. He helped me take the rubbish out, just.’ I spit out the sweet and fold it in the wrapper.
‘He came to ask you to spy on me and you said yes.’ He puts on a sing-song voice. ‘Oh yes, I’ll spy on the old eejit for you, like the weasel you are. And he’ll be reporting back all the time to the other one.’
‘What other one? Biba?’
Mr Flood lets out a howl. ‘Don’t fucking pretend. You’re here to spy on me.’
I hold up my hand. ‘Stop it now, calm yourself and talk to me. It’s too early in the morning to be giving out. Jesus, all I’ve had for breakfast is a cough sweet.’
He shakes his head and my heart goes out to him because the old man is crying. And whichever way you cut it, it’s hard to see an old man cry. He looks away, wiping his eyes with his coat sleeve.
There’s a rustle by the bin bags and Larkin comes nosing to the back steps, tripping lightly, flicking his ears.
Mr Flood makes small soft noises through his sobs.
The fox moves forwards, almost touching Mr Flood’s outstretched hand with his sharp snout, ready to run but wanting to be near. I can see that in the lovely russet face he turns up to the old man.
‘I’m no spy,’ I say gently, ‘I’m just here to clear some of your stuff so you don’t get buried alive and to nag you to change your underpants.’
May God and all the saints forgive me for lying through my teeth.
Mr Flood exhales, and shuffles and struggles as if to get up. I offer him an arm. He stands, stringing his ramshackle bones together again. His feet turned out, legs thin like stilts, shoulders slumped as if with the weight of his great gnarled hands. The concave chest and the head set wobbling at the top with the big hinged jaw and glowering brow. When he’s steady he pats me on the shoulder and limps away towards the conservatory. Larkin bolts out from behind an upturned wheelbarrow to run ahead on dancing paws, his bright face curving back to Mr Flood.
The old man stops and turns. ‘And it’s Cathal to you.’ He frowns. ‘Are you coming then, you little gobshite?’
Beckett will have to wait a while longer for his freedom.
Cathal leads me into the conservatory through a heavy iron door, which he immediately locks behind us, slipping the key into the pocket of his coat. He crosses the room to a door on the far side of the conservatory and disappears through it, leaving me to explore the glass room alone.
Locked inside, like a spider in a jar.
The morning sunlight illuminates the room. There’s a marine cast thrown down from the panes above, which are glazed with algae. The lower windows cast a milkier light, having been painted with whitewash. The whole effect is like looking up from the bottom of the sea. Inside the conservatory there is a damp, mineral smell, tinged with linseed oil and turpentine.
The conservatory has a honed beauty, its grace intact despite years of decay. An octagon drawn in fine iron. I can still imagine it in its Victorian heyday, with palms and wicker chairs and trailing orchids. From the cupola an ornate lamp hangs with most of its glass globes intact, like little creamy moons.
I am surrounded by canvases, stacked twenty deep around the edges of the tiled floor, covered in cobwebs and blossoming with mildew. All of them are executed in bright colours, as if they record light strong enough to burn the shadows away. But the shadows haven’t gone; they are there, inside the subjects.
They give me a strange feeling, these paintings.
They are like sunlit happy scenes moments before a disaster. A fairground ride with a bolt loose, a day at the beach before the wave hit, a lazy row along the Thames before the splash, struggle and sweep of the undertow.
A fox roams through many of them with its honeyed eyes glinting. Its fur meticulously picked out in shades of brown madder and Indian red, coarse on top with a soft snowy front bib. Maybe it’s Larkin, or one of Larkin’s predecessors.
A canvas hung on the wall above the door catches my eye: a painting of a red-haired woman in a yellow dress. She walks holding a little boy’s hand, turning away from him to look down at the flower in her other hand, a sunny-eyed daisy with white petals. The boy’s face is suggested by a few rapid brushstrokes, a tangle of hair, a scowl. But the woman’s face is drawn in perfect luminous detail. Her face holds no tension; it is full of the peace and gladness of a long summer’s day, lulled and captivated by the weather and by nature all around her. Here is the same delicacy of touch as the portrait on the landing, but this is a very different woman. She is as light as that woman is dark.
And she is beautiful, with a calm, unwatched kind of beauty. There is the slightest blush of colour on the lips and cheeks, the nostrils and earlobes and on the pale long slants of her eyebrows. Her hair is swept up and back to tumble around her shoulders; a strand blows across her face. And it burns, her hair, backlit by the dying fire of the sun that sets in a molten strip in the field behind her. In the background there is a blue and cream caravan.
Only the child in the doorway is missing.
We pull an armchair from the corner of the conservatory and drape it with an old curtain, and Cathal positions an easel and a trestle table opposite.
He lays the table with a surgeon’s precision. Unpacking a box of glass bottles, labelled with pencilled writing on strips of masking tape. Soon there is a palette with tiny worms of colour squeezed out on it, a clean palette knife and brushes all in a line. Cathal disappears into the other room again and brings out a canvas, closing the door quickly behind him.
He motions for me to sit in the armchair.
‘Mary is very beautiful in that painting,’ I say. ‘That is Mary, isn’t it?’
He follows my eyes. ‘She wanted the boy in it. He fidgeted too much.’
‘That was painted from a photograph. Mary and Gabriel in Langton Cheney.’
He ignores me, fiddling with the nuts and bolts on the easel legs.
I realise I’m shaking. Full of adrenaline and ready to run, keen on the flight aspect more than anything. But the door is locked. I could smash through the glass, with my arm over my head like a stunt girl. Or I could take a run up and trapeze out of the open skylight. But no doubt I would need spandex and the natural bounce of an acrobat for that.
‘I found the photograph in the kitchen.’
Cathal glances up at me with an expression of bored confusion, as if I keep asking him questions in a language he can’t comprehend. ‘There are no photographs of Mary.’
‘There’s one.’
‘Where is it?’
On Renata Sparks’s coffee table in a plastic bag labelled Exhibit 2. ‘It was badly damaged.’
‘Oh yes,’ he says without interest.
‘Her face was burnt out of the picture.’
‘Was it?’ His tone is flat, unsurprised. ‘Well, Mary would do that.’ He picks up a stick of charcoal. ‘She didn’t like the way the camera captured her.’
‘Mary would burn her own face out of photographs?’
‘Lean back and put your head on your arm. Look up with your eyes – not your face, your eyes.’ He gestures at me from behind the easel. ‘Keep your mouth closed, and stop clenching your fecking jaw. Jesus, you’ve a jaw on you.’
I move in the chair, turning myself this way and that for him. I have two thoughts racing neck and neck: do I believe him? Do I not believe him?
I look at him, holding up his charcoal stick, squinting. Shuffling about in his slippers and raincoat with his hair on end, like some wild old Druid c
onducting some forgotten rite. Or a humbug wizard making up the magic as he goes along.
Without another thought I say it: ‘I found a photograph of two children too: Gabriel and a little girl standing next to the fountain. Her face was burnt away just like Mary’s.’
No answer.
‘Who is she?’
He frowns at the canvas. ‘No idea.’
‘So Mary defaced that picture too? Then crossed the little girl’s name out on the back?’
‘Keep still now.’ He holds up his charcoal. ‘As I said, she would do that, when the mood took her. Mary suffered with her nerves.’
‘In what way?’
‘She imagined things.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Would you close your fecking mouth until I draw you,’ he growls.
I sit in silence, listening to the slap of Cathal’s slippers as he wanders backwards and forwards in a one-sided dance with the easel.
Outside this strange marine-lit world, life is happening. Buses and cars are driving up and down, people are going to the shops. A thousand million miles away. The Devil’s Triangle has been transplanted from just south of Bermuda; it’s here in West London. At Bridlemere navigational instruments are dashed and logic fails. Watches stop and phones don’t work and inanimate objects are possessed. Even a saint won’t step over the threshold.
And here I sit, locked in a glass room with a cantankerous old giant who might be a murderer, or worse even, but then again he might not be. If he is a killer he might beat me to death with the easel or cut my throat with the palette knife.
Now why did I wait until I was locked in a fish bowl to ask him questions?
Perhaps because it shows that I trust him not to slaughter me?
He glances up, a quick sharp look under his shaggy brows.
I could believe Renata: that this man finished off his wife and, most likely, a Dorset schoolgirl. I could believe Sam: that I’m the victim of some kind of prank and I should steer clear. I could believe Gabriel: that he doesn’t remember posing for a wintertime photo with a little girl with the same fierce red hair as him.
I could believe Cathal: that Mary suffered with her nerves and defaced photographs.
I could try.
If not for letters traced in dust in an empty bedroom and the slamming doors and the sound of singing. If not for the feeling that skewers my stomach whenever I think about Mary Flood and Maggie Dunne.
‘Did Mary get treatment for her nerves?’
Cathal makes a swipe at the canvas and stands back. ‘She did, thank you. Now will you hold yourself still?’
He can’t object to me moving my eyes, so I examine the painting above the door. I think of the child missing from the painted scene. The caravan door is shut tight. And then I see it, the meaning in the picture.
‘What kind of flower is that, the one that Mary is holding?’
He glances at the painting. ‘No idea.’
‘Isn’t it a marguerite?’
‘If you say so.’
Would it be anything else? ‘Does it have a special meaning? It’s a girl’s name, isn’t it?’
He looks at me, his face empty. ‘It has no meaning. It’s just a flower.’
It is a strange sensation, being painted by Cathal Flood. Of being measured with an unconscious kind of scrutiny. He peers often through one narrowed eye, frequently grimaces and sometimes looks amused, his eyebrows shooting up his forehead. But this play of emotions is pre-thought, I’m sure of it. Devoid of consciousness, like the expressions on the face of a sleeping baby.
I wonder how he sees me. ‘What do I look like, in your drawing?’
‘A dark-eyed terrier; keep your mouth shut.’
‘That doesn’t sound very complimentary.’
He smiles. ‘You’ve a look of something that would dig up fence posts if you had a mind to.’
We continue in silence. The shadow of a cloud passes by, dimming the light overhead.
‘What about a story?’ I ask. ‘You could tell me a story while you draw me. To pass the time.’
‘I could.’
‘You could tell me a story about Mary.’
I steel myself for the fallout, for the roaring and pointing. His expression is one of chronic indigestion, but to my surprise it passes quickly.
‘The demands from it. No hounding; I tell what I tell.’
‘No hounding.’
I wait, listening to the sound of his brush moving with a faint rasp, catching the raised texture of the canvas. He seems to be focusing on the line from my shoulder to my wrist.
‘The first time I noticed Mary was at her husband’s wake,’ he says.
‘Really?’
He nods. ‘She was a wealthy widow of seventeen who was just after burying a man five times her age. Rumour had it that the old fool had killed himself on top of her.’ Cathal smiles grimly. ‘On account of his exertions.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘They’d been married less than a year and the whole of his estate went to her. She’d been his housemaid. Of course his children were disgusted; they said she’d put a spell on the old fool.’ He looks across at me. ‘It was her tits that bewitched him.’
‘None of that.’
‘So the old fool’s family were all there at the wake with these long faces on them having lost their inheritance to the little widoween who was planning on having them packed and out of the house by the end of the day. For hadn’t she seen the way the old man’s children had fleeced him for money?’ He pulls a mock-sad face. ‘Oh, and hadn’t that hurt her? For she had loved the old devil in her own way. Wasn’t that clear to everyone at the wake? With her eyes raw from crying?’
‘So what happened?’
‘I danced with the little widow, she copped a feel of a brave young man and we were married. Me without a pot to my name, for all my wealth had been lost by my father.’ He reminisces. ‘The big house was sold and we moved to London where we cut quite a dash.’ He bows. ‘I was a catch then, can you believe?’
I smile.
‘We were the handsome Floods. She was a queen, with her grave penitent beauty. The upstart daughter of a drunken blacksmith.’
‘And you were her king?’
‘No. I was a gallery of a man.’ He smiles back at me bitterly. ‘She had this face you’d never forget. These green eyes; there was great piety in those eyes looking up.’
He puts down his brush, shuffles to the corner of the room and searches through canvases. He pulls one out, brings it back and props it near my chair.
In the painting Mary is very young; she wears a high-necked, short-sleeved blue dress with her searing red hair coiled over one shoulder. Her eyes are averted, gazing up to the heavens, like those of a saint. A fox cub sleeps curled in the crook of her arm, a froth of fur and snout. Behind them, perched by an open window, is an owl with a heart-shaped face and dappled feathers.
‘The fox and the owl,’ I murmur. ‘Have you ever heard of a girl called Maggie Dunne?’
He goes back to the easel and picks up his brush. ‘I haven’t.’
‘She went missing from a village called Langton Cheney in August 1985. She was fifteen. You took your caravan there a few years previously.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘Are you sure, Cathal?’ I ask softly.
He leans over the canvas. ‘We’re done,’ he says. ‘Get out, go home.’
His eyes are terrible, lupine, a sudden searing blue. For a moment I fear he’ll vault his easel and have my throat out. Instead he looks away, fumbles the key from his coat pocket and stalks over to the door of the conservatory.
‘You want me to leave?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘But your meal—’
‘Get out, I said.’ His face is white, as closed and hard as a fist.
I don’t argue. I’m relieved to step out into the garden and hear the lock turn behind me.
I walk round to the kitchen
door; it’s latched still.
There’s nothing left to do but go home. I look up at the house. There’s a balcony outside what could be the white bedroom, if I could just find a ladder—
A shadow passes across one of the newspapered windows and an eye draws nearer to a peephole.
Or that could just be my imagination.
St Monica (disappointing children, victims of adultery) is waiting for me outside the gate. She nods curtly and falls in beside me as I walk to the bus stop. We exchange no words for she appears to be deep in thought. She’s a pensive, abstracted kind of saint, given to drifting and staring into the distance. She has shadow-ringed eyes that look inwards and a thin, pained line of a mouth, lips pressed together as if to stop flies getting in. St Monica would be a little dreary if it weren’t for her robes: they are cream, with a nice pale glow to them.
I form sentences in my head about missing schoolgirls and wives that have fallen to suspicious deaths but find I can’t speak any of them. St Monica seems to understand, because now and again she glances up at me with a sour smile.
At the bus stop she arranges her robes around her feet with peevish delicacy and surveys the traffic.
‘I don’t know what to do.’
St Monica rolls her eyes.
‘Is Maggie Dunne dead?’
St Monica frowns.
‘If you could just let me know one way or the other? You don’t have to say it out loud if it’s against the rules. You could just cough once for yes, twice for no.’
St Monica folds her arms and looks disenchanted.
We wait in silence and I listen, just in case she decides to cough anyway.
After a while I say, ‘Have you any practical advice for me? On finding Maggie and saving the cat?’
St Monica is staring out past the bus shelter. A muscle twitches in her jaw and the ghost of a grimace crosses her face as if some deep memory has suddenly snagged.
‘I could do with backup in there,’ I say. ‘It’s not likely though, is it?’