“This is going to sound dreadful but I was grateful for it.”
“It’s not dreadful. I don’t think men ever stop being boys. The things they loved as kids stay with them, and usually they are not shared by their wives later on. My dad loves flying radio controlled aeroplanes. He’s always in a field somewhere at the weekends with his friends.”
“Well, family pressures don’t always allow for such indulgences, and at some point the spark went out of my work.”
“It was just before I switched classes. I remember you struggling a little then.”
Martin absently broke off a piece of his almond croissant and pushed it around the plate, mopping up the flakes of pastry. “I thought you had switched because of it.”
“No.” Richard shook his head solemnly.
“Well. I have been teaching my students how to paint and express themselves in oils and acrylics, and the truth is I can’t do it myself anymore. Yet I have found a subject that I am dying to paint because I am sure she could help me reignite my artistic fire.” He sat back and tossed the piece of pastry back on to the plate. “She is so beautiful. Ever since I have seen her I have wanted to paint her, to somehow capture her. I’m an artist: I have seen beautiful things before. Painted them. Recreated them perfectly. It’s just that there’s something alluring and mysterious in her beauty – something that I haven’t been able to capture in my paints.”
Richard studied Martin with a peculiar wariness, seemingly waiting for him to come to rest. When he did Richard appeared hesitant to speak and when he did speak his words were slow and measured. “What’s her name?” As though he knew, or was fearful that he knew, how Martin would answer.
Martin swallowed and stared at Richard, unsure whether he could trust him. If Candy had gone to the police and implicated Ivory then Martin could be incriminating himself by mentioning her name. However, if Candy had gone to the police then she would have mentioned the car accident and they would have gained his details from that. He could be screwed anyway. “Ivory. She’s called Ivory.”
Richard fumbled with his mug, almost spilling it before he could replace it on the table. He slumped back in his chair and stared out at the red, amber and white lights of the traffic on the busy dark evening road. “I know her,” he managed after some time. “I’ve seen her walk to and from Arven. That’s when I first saw her.”
Martin leaned forward trying to bridge the gap created by Richard’s withdrawal. Every cell in his body called for information, wanting every word at once, a download of information straight into his brain. With caution fallen like a ruin and forgotten his words fell over themselves with excitement. “Tell me.”
“I saw her around. She was so unusual looking. Like you say she has a beauty about her that is almost disturbing. I might be gay, but I could always appreciate what was attractive in a woman. Sexuality doesn’t affect your recognition of whether things are beautiful or not. Ivory was different. I had feelings for her that I couldn’t escape. They haunted me. I had wrestled with issues about my sexuality in my early teens, before even then. Yet she made me question things. Things that made me wonder about what my Dad had said about phases and confusion. But, deep down I knew it was her that created the confusion. It was just about her. Her alone.
“I moved my hustling plot nearer to her route. I followed her around, to and from her home. She started coming out in my art but whatever I created just did not live up to her likeness.” Richard turned his attention from the road and back to Martin, his dark eyes soulful and lost.
“I don’t remember ever seeing them,” Martin demonstrated incredulously.
“I kept them to myself. I was ashamed of what it said about me. How it made my overt confidence about my sexuality somehow hypocritical. Made me a sham.” Richard reached into his fitted jeans and drew out a packet of cigarettes. “Step out? I need a fag.”
Martin nodded somewhat reluctantly, and they moved to the tables and chairs outside, leaving their consumables behind them. It was bitterly cold and the four lane road was busy and noisy with rush-hour traffic.
“Did you ever… talk to her or…” A knot of dread tightened his stomach, at the possibility of Richard having any kind of relationship with Ivory.
Richard’s fingers trembled as he fingered the cigarette packet open. “No. I was always terrified of what would happen if I actually spoke to her. I thought that I would be lost if I did that. I would have no escape then.” His lips pursed around and a cigarette and he lit it and took a deep draw.
“What happened?”
Richard exhaled a steady stream of ghostly blue smoke. “I spoilt several relationships because of my doubts about myself and I lost some good friends clumsily trying to reaffirm my sexuality and prove something to myself. I thought I was losing it. So I made the decision to be free of her. I adapted my routine so it wouldn’t clash with hers. Avoided places where I had seen her. Found a new patch further away. Some days I didn’t leave the flat. Weeks if I am being honest.
“Beyond a counsellor you’re the first real person I have told about this. I was worried I would sound melodramatic, but I can see the same look in your eyes that haunted mine back then. So I am glad I have told you. Maybe it will spare you the same anguish.”
“Where are your pictures?”
“I destroyed them. Burnt the lot. It was the only way to cast her out of my life. I couldn’t trust myself to paint. That is why I changed to sculpture.” A little anger reinforced his voice as he finally explained the true reasons for his change of art, maybe bitterness for Martin’s rejection of him. “I did it to escape the subtlety of paint, I was afraid that the chance of creating beauty would posses my hand back to trying to recreate her on canvas. She destroyed my art.
“Whatever your interest in Ivory, I would suggest leaving it. Maybe it was just me she had this affect on. Maybe not. I saw the way other people looked at her. People would stop dead in the street to look at her. I think I was lucky to escape myself and my obsession. I am not going to lecture you, but you have a wife and kids. Don’t let this take over. Don’t let it destroy you.”
Chapter Eight
Ordinarily Martin would have considered Richard’s warning to be dramatic, but taken in context with recent events it unnerved him. So much so that he had felt the need to divert his thoughts from Ivory and ground himself in normality by re-engaging with his life. When he had returned home from having coffee with Richard he replied to one of the many texts Donnie had been pestering him with, and accepted Donnie and Bea’s invite to their dinner party. He arranged for their usual babysitter and made Jenny’s month when he told her that he had arranged for them to go out for the evening that Saturday.
Martin grabbed Jenny’s arm and steadied her as she stumbled through the door.
“Oops. How much wine did I have?”
Martin put a hand to his forehead. “I have had so much myself I don’t think I can count.”
“You do the standing and I will do the Maths.” Jenny propped herself up on the newel post and balustrade and groaned.
The babysitter, Sally Jenkins the eldest daughter of a family down the road, emerged from the family room. Her abnormal height threw him in his drunken state, then he remembered her bulky boots and the six inch platform soles. Having been paid at the beginning of the evening she had her black patent floor length coat on already and was ready to leave. She tucked her bangs of starkly died black hair behind her ears and her heavily blacked up eyes sheepishly shifted from Martin and Jenny and the floor, explained that the boys had gone to bed without any problems. She appeared to find it awkward being around their drunkenness and made a hasty exit. Martin closed the door behind the pale goth and struggled to get the key in the lock in a pin the tail on the donkey style.
“I’m sure the last time she babysat she was blonde and pink and fluffy.” Martin slurred.
“Shows how often we go out.” Jenny clapped her hands to her face. “We have turned into hermits.”
&
nbsp; “Should we check that she hasn’t summoned a Demon in the family room?”
“Or sacrificed the children.”
“I think the boys could handle her. They would just kick her platform boots from under her. The fall would kill her.”
Jenny did a twirl and brandished her sequin and diamante shoulder wrap in the air like a scarf at a football match, scattering spots of reflected light over the gloomy hallway. She looked nice all made-up and dressed in something other than her slouch clothes, the transformation had been something of a surprise it had been such a long-time since he had seen her like that. She hadn’t taken much pride in her appearance since Finn had been born.
“Did I out glam Donnie’s beard?”
Martin reached around Jenny and deposited his keys on the newel post. He spoke into her neck, could smell the Kenzo Flower perfume he had bought her for tonight. She smelt good. “That’s impossible.” He kissed her behind the ear and pulled away. Bea’s vast frame had been draped in a voluminous dress of aqua blue sequins. “She was a veritable glitter ball this evening. There must be a shortage of sequins in the world after making that dress.”
“I wonder how many little Indian boys went blind sewing them on.”
“Three at the least.”
Jenny fingered her wrap absently and leaned against Martin as they headed towards the kitchen. “Did you have a nice time?”
It had been a good evening. Donnie and Bea had invited two couples that were regulars at their parties Clive and Gillian and Toby and Shirley. Such a combination always guaranteed intelligent witty conversation and bawdy and mischievous drunkenness. “It was good. Apart from the Americans.”
Jenny stopped in the doorway to the kitchen and patted Martin on the arm as she scolded him. “They were nice.”
“Janice, who you spent much of the evening talking with, was nice. She’s a card-carrying member of the NRA and has more guns than you have handbags. I heard you asking her about guns for the majority of the evening.” Martin attempted to tap Jenny playfully on the nose, but the drink caused him to miss and he poked her in the eye.
“Ow!” She blinked against the sting. “She’s the first fellow female gun fan I have ever spoken to.”
“Thankfully there were no guns present when I was stuck with her husband. George was an arrogant bore.” Martin headed into the kitchen and started to crash about making a cup of tea for them both. George was in his fifties, but attempted to obscure it with Grecian 2000, and by being ‘fashionable’ through every item of clothing or accessory being branded with a designer label. He could have sought sponsorship going out like that. George had chipped into every conversation or talked over it until he held court at the dining table talking about his success as a business entrepreneur and boasting grossly about his wealth. Donnie and Bea had met their match in the talking department, and Martin had noticed that the hosts were throwing as much alcohol in his direction as they could in the hope it might sedate him a little.
It had only served to loosen his tongue and lower his inhibitions, most noticeably when Donnie mentioned his two daughters, and George had responded with dramatic incredulity; “You have children?”
If the first brick wall your assumptions ran into when you were getting to know Donnie was that he was married to a woman, the second was that he had fathered children. Bea wasn’t just a trophy wife. It usually evoked a hesitation as the brain reappraised, but George’s reaction had been embarrassing for everyone, although Donnie and Bea only demonstrated the smallest flinch.
“Yes, we do that over here too,” Martin had leapt in to defend his friend.
“And for quite a while longer too.” Donnie added before swigging back the rest of his wine. A little more than he had seen Donnie knock back in one go.
“Where are they now?” Janice had asked, trying to cover for her husband.
“They have flown the coup,” Bea announced with a theatrical flutter of her hand in the air. Her other hand squeezed Donnie’s wrist as if it was a subject she knew Donnie would need comforting over. “It was a wrench to have them leave, but it’s lovely to see them happy. Jen-Jen is married and Janey is living in Edinburgh. She’s frantically making her designs into clothes for a show that she has coming up.”
“I guess we have that to come, honey.” George had nodded to Janice, wrenching the spotlight from Bea and turning it back on himself. Quite a feat in itself. “Did you see our darling?”
“You have seen the American prodigal already, Martin,” Donnie poured more wine into Martin’s glass at this point, so that as he explained Martin would be the only one able to see him arch an eyebrow. “George and Janice’s daughter played the lead in my recent production.”
The girl with the acute nose. “Her performance stood out from all the others.” Martin raised his glass in a toast. “To Donnie, for he has a nose for talent.”
Bea and Donnie had raised their glasses conspiratorially within their shared joke at George’s daughters’ expense. Jenny had stifled a smirk and kicked him under the table but she needn’t have worried as George was so ignorant he wouldn’t have been able to recognise a flaw in his perfect world if Martin had just said, “Oh yes, the girl with the memorable nose.”
“Talented she is, but her choice to take her studies in Europe was difficult for me when I had managed to secure her a place at Yale.”
In Martin’s line of sight Donnie had rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. George had bought his daughter a place.
“…but I figure if I pump enough money into this university of yours I can make it fit for my princess.”
Bea had raised both her drawn on eyebrows at this, exaggerating her usual appearance of sustained surprise, and had begun to clear the table. Her signal to Donnie that she had had enough of George.
Donnie kept Martin and George connected as the party broke away from the table and the couples moved to lounge on the sofas and chairs, freeing the others to talk more independently and take much needed breaks from George. “Martin has two lovely children, much younger than ours but just as talented. His oldest is following in his father’s footsteps.”
Martin had spent all day with the children. He had taken them to a midday showing of the latest Pixar animated movie at the Renoir Cinema at the hideously modernist Brunswick, then worked with them on drawings and paintings in his loft studio, teaching them and encouraging them and having fun with them. Throwing himself into family life for the first time in months. Being the dad his father had never been. Being the dad Martin had always promised himself that he would be. Oscar did have a burgeoning talent.
Cornered with George he had received a text on his mobile phone and had been surprised to see it was from Donnie across the room with Jenny. “HE LIKES YOUR PAINTING. THAT’S WHY I ARRANGED THIS HORROR SHOW OF A DINNER PARTY. HE’S GOING TO OFFER YOU £2000 FOR YOUR WORK. CHARGE HIM £2,500 AND MAKE THIS NIGHT WORTH-BLOODY-WHILE.”
“Yes, and he did give you the £2,500,” Jenny reminded him in George’s defence.
“He did.” Martin finished making the tea. “I thought writing the cheque in front of everyone was a nice touch. I felt like a tradesman.”
“You are an artist, and George paid you the compliment of demonstrating that your work is appreciated and how much your talent is worth.”
Martin rolled his eyes and rummaged through the breadbin. It actually did feel good to sell a piece of work. He really should think about putting a collection back into a gallery and regain some of the recognition he used to have. He had some work in the studio, if he could do a couple more pieces that bridged his individual works it could be done. “So what will the money do for us? Replacement car, the new kitchen we have been talking about for the past five years, or repair that leak in the roof to replace the bucket that has been sitting in the loft for eighteen months?” There were no cakes behind the bread. He opened the tea-towel drawer and peered into the back. No cakes there either.
“Car. No question.”
Martin nodded in agreement.
“You won’t find them. With the three of you sniffing out cakes and sweets all day I have to get inventive from time-to-time. But you deserve a treat. Try the washing machine. One of the few places no one in this house but me goes to.”
Martin threw her a lopsided smile then opened the glass door. At seeing that there was indeed a Tupperware container stored in the washing machine he shook his head in disbelief. He pried the tub open to find cupcakes piled high with pink butter-cream icing. “Not just any cupcakes… Marks and Spencer’s cupcakes.”
“Only the best for you. I live to please my husband-the-artist.”
Martin took a hearty bite and groaned with pleasure at the rich sweetness that poured itself over his tongue. “That’s so good.”
Jenny sashayed over to him, a sparkle in her eye. She fingered icing off the cake, touched it to his lips, then to her own and slipped it into her mouth and sucked at it seductively. He kissed her lips, could taste the sweetness. She pressed herself against him and their kiss turned from a lip kiss to a deep mouth kiss.
“I can feel something… Is that because of the cake or me?”
“Both. The cake and because you bought it for me.”
“You got the cake, now what do I get?”
He dropped the cake on the work top and pawed at her dress, pulled it down over her shoulders, exposing her bra and chest as he kissed her neck roughly. “Thank you Marks and Spencer.” She whispered breathlessly into his ear.
He hitched her dress up to her waist, clutched at handfuls of her upper thigh and buttocks then lifted her up onto the worktop. She fumbled with his belt and the button of his trousers, his trousers fell to the floor and she pulled his boxers down and took him in her hand. She worked her firm grip on his hardness until he could take it no more. He pulled her underwear to one-side and entered her. Within a few minutes they were into ardent throws and both were grunting, groaning and biting their lips. She ignored knocking the remnants of his cupcake on the floor and he ignored stepping on it. In moments it was over and they were both sitting opposite each other against the kitchen units on the cold tile floor, the clothes pulled back up to cover themselves in case the children should be drawn down by their noise and commotion.
Ivory Page 8