“Terrible day isn’t it?” he breezed taking her coat. Ignoring his vulnerability before her and the way her top clung to her body. “No need to get changed into that white robe-thing today, I just want to work on your face. Finishing touches.” She declined the offer of a drink and they went straight up to the loft room.
Martin stared at the almost finished painting, the fine details of the face were the last task. It had been a pleasure and a challenge he had wanted to savour and give a whole session over to. The light was completely different today due to the grey overcast sky, so he improvised with a daylight bulb from his desk lamp. He settled before the painting and conducted his ritual of looking between the subject and the canvas, but today, focussing so much time and attention on the face seemed like a torturous intimacy after his subconscious betrayal of her and himself. He didn’t know how to act as those eyes seemed to tear away at his composure. He didn’t know if he could cope with the session and was both relieved and pained that it would be their last session together. The painting would be finished and there would be no reason to see her again.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I am going to take a few photographs again just in case I need to come back to work on the likeness in your absence. The pictures of you from my 35mm camera came out distorted. It must have been the light or bad film, so I thought I would use a digital camera.” Without using the LCD view finder he framed her and took a series of shots, trying to ignore the memory of King as he did so. He turned the screen on intending a cursory check that the pictures had been stored but his attention was caught by the poor quality of the images. It was subtle, but there was some minor pixilation in places and a few areas of distorted focus. He shook his head dismissively.
“Sorry I think this is playing up now. I must be jinxed. Just one more try.” Martin switched to the LCD view finder and scanned it around the room. Despite the motion blur from his movement it didn’t suffer any other distortions. He levelled the camera in Ivory’s direction and the small screen pixelated into visible squares and then blurred and distorted with the rainbow of colours the screen used to provide the image. “Odd.” He caught himself saying aloud with a little embarrassment. A quick glance at Ivory showed she hadn’t reacted, nor had her head become a collection of little squares, an indefinite blur, or developed a rainbow aura. He trained the camera away from Ivory’s face and the screen’s crisp image returned, but flickered and broke up as he once more aimed it at Ivory. He went cold. Absently he switched the camera off and set it down, almost missing the easel shelf in his distraction.
King had explained the distortions on his photographs as bad lighting. Richard had complained that he had been unable to capture Ivory’s likeness. Martin had also experienced the same difficulties. He recalled overhearing one of his goth students state that the vampire myth and folk tales of Eastern Europe described how vampires did not have a reflection in mirrors, nor could their image be drawn or photographed. Vampires! He dismissed it. He had seen her reflection in the mirror on the landing AND most obviously vampires didn’t exist. He stifled a laugh at the ridiculous connection his mind had made but the uneasy strangeness of the situation refused to leave him.
After three hours and several layers of pain the face had gained accurate shades, texture and detail. He hesitated over her vacuous black eyes, his brush wetted with brilliant white oil poised over one of the twin black holes he had painted on the canvas. He stared intently into her real eyes and studied the play of light. He swallowed, uneasy with the intimate engagement with eyes that stripped him down to his base fears and needs. A few stabs of the brush into the blackness on his canvas and her eyes took on their obsidian sparkle.
Ivory was no vampire! Martin had captured her likeness.
He beamed to himself. He had succeeded where King and Richard had failed. The joy of success suddenly reduced everything into insignificance. The strangeness of Ivory, her thrall over him, the problems in his marriage all dissolved before the perfect image of her beauty captured like a butterfly in ice.
“It’s finished,” he announced.
Ivory kept her gaze on Martin as she crossed the room and walked around the easel until she stood face to face with herself. She angled her head and stared for what seemed like an age. She raised her hand and her gaze passed between the real and painted appendage. She stroked her face, as if exploring its shape and texture for the first time. She reached out to her painted self’s face.
“Don’t!” Martin blurted, then added more calmly, “It will be months before the paint is touch dry and even then it shouldn’t really be touched until it is sealed.” There was a feathery quiver in his throat and stomach as he wondered if she liked the portrait.
He had his sense of achievement at having captured her likeness and rediscovered his talent, but his interest in her had refused to lift. He had exorcised the urge to paint her from his mind yet he was no closer to understanding her appearance, the relationship she had with Ebony or why she sold herself. He wanted to know what she was like, what her life was like beyond the few things he knew about her, what she thought of what she did, what she thought of Ebony, of the world… of Martin. Although the question that troubled him the most was what did he want?
Martin heard the key grit against the lock and felt a draft from the front door as it opened. He acted as casually as he could at hearing Jenny return, but he felt like laughing at his ridiculous and irrational fears that she had left him. The whole time he had been preparing the apology meal he had been wondering if she might never return. He shuddered against a chill. She was still standing in the open door with the rain teeming down behind her.
“Close the door, it’s cold.” Jenny obeyed but still stood at the end of the hall. Face passive. Martin offered a weak smile from the kitchen door and dried his hands on a tea-towel. “Kids with friends? Why don’t you run upstairs and get changed and we can sit down and eat together. I am going to make us spaghetti bolognese and I have a bottle of wine ready to go.”
Jenny smiled weakly but there was clearly no feeling behind it. “Sounds nice. But I’m not really feeling up to eating or drinking.” Her hair was plastered to her head and the sides of her face, the fringe sharpened into thorns by the rain. The water dripped audibly onto the floor. She held her position until Martin lost his smile and set down the tea-towel to one side.
Martin sagged and he couldn’t look her in the eye. “It’s about last night isn’t it? I’m so sorry. I was asleep when I started what I did, and I had a nightmare. When I woke up I was startled…”
“Disorientated. Yes, I know, you said already.” Jenny walked down the hallway and Martin found himself retreat into the middle of the kitchen. “I’m not sure I believe you, but I accept your apology.”
He experienced a mix of panic and indignation. “You don’t believe me?”
“I think when you looked at me and recoiled last night you did so because you thought I was someone else.”
“Who?” He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of incredulity.
Jenny clenched her eyes and pressed the thumb and forefinger of one hand against them. “It doesn’t matter. You have explained yourself, and I can’t really argue any differently.” She opened her eyes again and there was a hardness in them. She spoke as if she had rehearsed the moment. “I said to you last week that I wondered how long it would take for you to neglect me and Oscar and Finn again, and we didn’t have to wait long did we? You have spent so much time with your student, that girl. I called Bea and asked after her, I described the girl to her and she said she didn’t know of any such student, nor did Donnie. I was so embarrassed.”
“It’s a big university.”
“And the guilt that you have on your face now?” Jenny shrugged. “I have seen flashes of it when she arrives and leaves, and you do your damnedest not to talk about her. I don’t know what that means, whether you’re having an affair…” He objected but she closed her eyes against him and talked over his bluster. �
��or this is an affair in the making, or this is all in my head, it doesn’t matter because it’s not just about this. We aren’t a married couple, we aren’t a family. You can only be those things if everyone plays their part.”
“I play my part,” he was surprised by his anger when he knew she was right.
“Yes, you do. Poor choice of words on my part but an accurate description for you to use; you ‘play your part’. To be married and to make a family you need to give yourself over to it, and you only give a 110 percent to your work – your art.”
He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”
“I know. I genuinely believe you are, but it’s too late. I have been holding the marriage and the family together myself and I am fed up with it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I haven’t been at work today and the children aren’t at friends. I ran them down to Surrey to my parents. I came back to tell you that I don’t want to do this anymore.”
He was starting to give over to panic. “No, don’t do this to me. We can do this. I will give up my private work, just focus on university work. I can change my ways.”
Jenny clapped her hands to her face and ran them down under her chin until she held her own throat. “You aren’t listening to me. Even if you could change, I don’t want to do this.”
Martin was crushed. He had feared this happening but not really expected it. It was all so unreal. “Do the kids know?”
Jenny’s hands dropped away from her neck and she picked at her nails. Now she couldn’t look him in the eye. “I’m going to tell them tomorrow. I didn’t want a scene.”
“How can you do this to them.” He meant ‘me’.
“Yes, there will be tears. But there have been tears already because of the arguments and your absence. The irony is I think they have become used to you only being in the background already.”
A sensation ran through him but he didn’t know how to feel it. “They need to be here, they have school on Monday.” All he could do was offer practicalities that might cause her to rethink the decision.
“I will let the school know what’s going on. I will get some work from them, mum can get back into teacher mode at the drop of a hat so she can keep them ticking over until we sort something out.”
“You don’t mean it.” He grabbed desperately.
“I do Martin. It’s over. Done. Finished.”
Suddenly Martin was frightened, his fate seemed sealed, as though the moral vows of his marriage had been all that stood between him and the danger that Richard had warned him about, between the side of him that his father and King had recognised. He found himself collapse and he struggled to catch his breath around sobs that wracked his body and caused his eyes and nose to stream. He reached out for her and begged. “Please. Stay!”
Jenny pulled away, her eyes running, but her face passive as she shook her head. She turned away from him then froze. He knew what she had seen and only in that moment realised how insensitive and reckless he had been. Jenny strode into the lounge and pointed at the completed portrait of Ivory that he had hung on the chimney breast in place of the family portrait.
“What’s this?”
“No, no, no. It’s not how it looks. I had just finished it, I was so pleased with it I hung it there so I could see it in a better light.”
Jenny planted her hands on her hips, bowed her head and shook it to herself.
“It’s not how it looks.” His hands pulled desperately at his hair and he trembled with his wracking tears. “I LOVE YOU!” he roared. The outburst startled Jenny, and she seemed shocked at his disintegration, but she still shook her head in denial. “I do, I do, I do,” he chanted continually, swaying on legs buckling under him.
Jenny charged over to the teak roll-top bureau in the nearest alcove, probed through the mess of papers within and pulled something out, she returned to the painting. “You might care Martin, you just might. But it needs to be demonstrated from time to time. You just don’t show it. You have let our relationship, our family slide in priority.” She held a paper knife to Ivory’s painted face as if she was holding her hostage. “Choose then. Choose me, your kids or this girl, and your art. Give us everything that you try and channel into them!”
“What?” Martin asked, shocked out of his breakdown. “Get away from that painting.” Martin’s voice was calm but edged with a menace that frightened him in its conception. “That is unfair! It has taken every ounce of my being to create that! I have finally got my art back.”
“An interest and passion you should have been using on me and the kids, and at what cost?” Jenny kept the blade level with Ivory’s face. “CHOOSE.”
Martin trembled, he needed Jenny, he needed the painting, he was confused and suddenly unsure which choice would lead to saving the painting. Jenny needed to be away from the canvas. With the work out of danger he could think things through more clearly and then he could decide. Martin stepped towards the painting to get between the blade and the canvas, but he suddenly realised she had read his action as a move to save the portrait. Jenny drew her arm with the blade back, ready to slash at Ivory’s face. He had seconds to save his work.
Jenny flew to one side before he realised he had actually knocked her in that direction with the back of his hand. There was pain in his upper thigh and he pressed his hand against it. The paperknife had caught him as her arms had flailed out to save herself. He pulled his hand away briefly and found his palm smeared with blood. Jenny was seated on the floor between the sofa and the bureau with her back against the wall. She sat, stunned for a few moments, before she clambered awkwardly to her feet. Speckles of blood marked the crest of her cheek bone from where his strike had broken her skin.
“I’m so sorry. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do.”
Jenny snatched at her hand and threw something at him. Her wedding band hit him hard in the face under his eye and clacked off the coffee table onto the floor. She shoved Martin aside and disturbed his wound, the fresh shock of pain buckled his leg and he stumbled, his calf muscle hit the sharp corner of the coffee table and he fell backwards. For a fleeting second the images of his leg wound and the glass coffee table competed in dominating his mind. King’s injury. King’s fate. Martin fell backward clutching desperately at the air in terror.
Martin landed heavily on the carpet. The coffee table beside him. Winded from the impact he lay there, unable to move and listened to Jenny slam the front door closed behind her as she left him. His eyes fixated on the portrait of Ivory that towered above him like a deity in judgement. He wanted to hate Ivory, but the only hate he had was for himself.
He needed to be free of her. Destroying the picture was out of the question. It had resurrected his talent. It was finished though, and there was no excuse to see her again. They had hardly developed a relationship during their time together. Not enough validation to ingratiate himself in her life any further, or her in his. Ivory was gone and out of his life, as he surely knew she would be, yet he had allowed his time with her to come between his marriage and his family.
He wondered if looking at the portrait of Ivory be a substitute for Ivory herself, or whether he could bring himself to buy Ivory’s time as a companion. Considering all the things she would have had to have done in her past, companionship would be innocent. She may even grow to like the time with him, appreciate the money and not having to degrade herself. What would he do with that hour? Sixty minutes of time, three thousand, six hundred seconds of gaping emptiness and an unrelenting call he still wanted to deny.
Without Jenny and the kids he had a sense of freedom that terrified him, like a caged thing released into the great outdoors. Had he been freed to become his father? To become King? No. He had to stay away from Ivory. He had let his obsession end his marriage, his family. He would stay away from her. Get a counsellor. Pursue Jenny again. Be a husband. Be a lover. Be a father.
The phone rang and startled him, scattering his strengthening resolve. He strug
gled up from the floor and slumped onto the sofa and snatched the phone up from the side-table. A familiar but unexpected male voice greeted him. Martin’s hope that it would be Jenny plummeted. It was Richard. There was stress in his voice.
“Ivory is in trouble.”
Chapter Thirteen
Martin relaxed into the driver’s seat of the Focus and surveyed the boarded houses of Arven Road and the grey rusting railway bridge that crossed it. The few streetlights that actually worked burned with a brilliant futility against the night that draped the front’s of the houses and swamped the overgrown gardens. The orange light that puddled beneath the lamps illuminated those small areas but made the surrounding shadows thicker and impenetrable. Occasionally a girl or a lone man would cross the islands of light or could be picked out of the dirty orange gloom by a movement in an alley or doorway. King’s flat, blackened with soot that stretched up from broken windows, was a husk filled with destruction that stared back at him accusingly. Martin knew King was dead but Martin had an unnerving sense that the danger and vice lurked beneath the paving slabs and in the cracked facades of the buildings as a malevolent presence.
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