‘No doubt,’ said Charlie brusquely, ‘and obviously I’m not here to talk about that.’
‘Well, you’ve picked the wrong house if your visit’s community-related. You won’t find much of a community round here. And, such as it is, I’m not part of it. I’m an outsider who drinks funny tea.’ Mary waved the green Twinings box at Charlie. ‘You should have seen their faces in the corner shop when I asked them to stock it. Anyone would have thought I was proposing to drink babies’ blood.’ She raised her cigarette to her thin lips. Her index and middle fingers were stained a dark yellow, almost brown.
‘No, it’s you I want,’ Charlie told her.
‘Then I know why.’ The response was smooth and instantaneous. ‘You’re here to ask me about a man I don’t know. A man called Aidan Seed. DC Christopher Gibbs came on Friday for the same reason, and DC Simon Waterhouse on Saturday. Unlike you, they didn’t pull bits off my tree.’
‘I didn’t . . . The tree’s dead,’ said Charlie.
‘Taking its pulse, were you? If dried flowers can be beautiful, why can’t dried trees? I like my garden. I like my dead tree, and its pot. Look at this.’ She led Charlie over to the wall that separated her house from the one next to it. There was something protruding from one of the cracks that looked like a green rose, but with petals that were oddly rubbery, almost cactus-like, pink-edged. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ said Mary. ‘It’s called a sempervivum. It’s not there by accident or neglect. Someone planted it so that it would grow out of the wall, but you could easily mistake it for a weed. I’m sure you did.’
‘Can I come in for a few minutes?’ Charlie asked, feeling as if she’d lost any potential advantage she might have had. She wished she was in her office, ‘helping’ Counsellor Geoff Vesey to draft his letter and questionnaire—writing them for him, in other words. Vesey was Chair of the Culver Valley Police Authority, an organisation that monitored, among other things, public confidence in the police. Charlie’s confidence in him was zero; the man couldn’t even come up with a list of questions on his own.
‘You can come in, but only because I’m not working,’ said Mary. ‘If I were busy, I’d ask you to leave. I’m a painter.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘But you know that already. I’m sure you know all about me.’ In spite of what she’d said, she was still blocking the entrance to the house with her narrow body.
‘You didn’t let Chris Gibbs in,’ said Charlie. ‘You nearly didn’t let Simon Waterhouse in.’
‘Because I was working on a painting, one I stayed up all night to finish. As soon as I’ve got rid of you, I’ll be going to bed. Anyway, that’s why the song was on so loud, if you care: I was celebrating. Do you have a favourite song?’
It was ridiculous not to want to answer. ‘ “Trespass” by Limited Sympathy.’
‘The song that was on before—that’s mine.’
Charlie wasn’t going to ask again what it was. If you care. She didn’t.
‘ “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child,’ said Mary in a brittle voice, like a pupil forced to hand over a treasured forbidden item to her teacher. As she spoke, the lines on her face rearranged themselves, criss-crossing around her mouth. Charlie had heard that excessively thin people aged more severely than plumper ones, but even so . . . ‘I could tell you what I love about it, but I don’t suppose you’re interested. I suppose you’re one of those people who only puts on a CD if you’ve got guests for dinner, with the volume down so low that nobody can hear it.’
‘I don’t do that, actually,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t rupture my neighbours’ eardrums, either.’
‘I told you: I was celebrating. Finishing a piece of work you’re happy with—it’s such a buzz. Like being able to fly. I wanted to reward myself, so I put on my favourite song and went round the corner to buy some smokes and peppermint tea. I put the volume up high so that I’d hear the song while I was in the shop.’ Mary smiled vaguely, a faraway look in her eyes, as if she was thinking back to something that had happened years ago.
Charlie’s skin prickled with apprehension. She thought of Ruth Bussey saying, ‘I’m frightened something’s going to happen. ’ ‘Could I see the painting?’ she asked. ‘The one you’ve just finished?’
‘No.’ A reflex response. Anger. ‘Why? You’re not interested in my work. The other two weren’t. You just want to check I’m who I say I am.’ Mary dropped her cigarette on the path, didn’t bother to extinguish it. It lay there, burning. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and dig out my passport and driver’s licence again. This time I won’t bother putting them back in the drawer, since one of you’s certain to turn up tomorrow.’
Charlie followed her into a tiny brown kitchen that contained a free-standing electric cooker with a grime-encrusted top, a stained metal sink and a row of cabinets with uncloseable doors that hung askew. Mottled brown linoleum covered the floor, studded with cigarette burns. No one has touched this place for at least thirty years, thought Charlie, and then: it looks even worse than my house, and that’s saying something. ‘I don’t want to see any ID,’ she said. ‘My colleagues are satisfied that you’re who you say you are, and that’s good enough for me.’
Mary undid the buttons of her duffle-coat and let it slide off her arms. When it hit the floor, she kicked it to one side. It lay in a heap by the kitchen door. ‘It doubles as a draught excluder,’ she told Charlie. Her refined voice sounded so out of place in the drab, cramped room that Charlie wondered if she was a Trustafarian—playing at slumming it, rubbing shoulders with bona fide poor people in an attempt to make her art more authentic, knowing she could escape to Daddy’s mansion in Berkshire whenever it suited her.
Mary pulled off her hat, releasing a huge silver-black frizz that tumbled down her back. ‘Aidan Seed’s a picture-framer,’ said Charlie matter-of-factly. ‘Did Chris Gibbs or Simon Waterhouse tell you that?’
‘Yes. I see the connection: I’m a painter, he’s a framer. Doesn’t mean I know him.’
‘You haven’t heard the name? Perhaps from other artists, even if you don’t know him personally? I’d have thought, with Spilling being the size it is . . .’
‘I don’t know any artists,’ said Mary. ‘Don’t think that because I’m a painter I’m in any way part of the art world. I hate all that nonsense. You join some group and next thing you know you’re on a committee, organising quizzes and raffles. That’s what the local art scene would be like in a town like this, and as for the London scene—all that Charles Saatchi garbage has got nothing to do with art. It’s marketing—it markets its own brand of marketing and nothing else. It’s about creating appetites, artificially—there’s no real hunger in it. There’s nothing real about it.’
‘Do you know Ruth Bussey?’ Charlie asked.
Mary’s surprise was unmistakeable. ‘Yes. Well . . .’ She frowned. ‘I don’t exactly know her. I’ve met her twice. I’m hoping to persuade her to sit for me. Why?’
‘How did you meet her?’
‘Why’s Ruth of interest to the police?’
‘If you could answer my—’
‘This is someone who’s been inside my home.’ Mary’s voice was shrill. Frightened, thought Charlie. ‘Why are you asking about her? Has she got some connection to this Aidan Seed person?’
‘How about we do a swap?’ Charlie suggested. ‘You show me some of your work, I answer your question. I am interested, although I know sod-all about art, except that all the best stuff seems to be by dead people.’
Mary’s face went rigid. She stared at Charlie. ‘Are you playing games with me?’
‘No.’ Of all the pissing stupid things to say. All over her body, Charlie’s skin felt cold. ‘I meant, you know, Picasso, Rembrandt . . . I meant that nowadays art seems to mean slices of dead cow and balls of elephant dung.’
‘I’m not dead,’ said Mary very carefully, as if she wanted Charlie to pay attention.
Charlie thought that people who believed in ghosts deserved to have their brains confiscated
indefinitely. She couldn’t understand why it should freak her out so much to be standing in the kitchen of a shabby ex-council house listening to a straight-faced woman insist that she wasn’t dead.
‘I’m alive and my work is excellent,’ said Mary less vociferously. ‘Sorry to jump down your throat, but it’s depressing to hear what Joe Public thinks: that anyone with talent is famous already, basically. And dead, of course—all geniuses are dead. If they died young and tragically and in poverty, then all the better. ’
Charlie exhaled slowly. Simon hadn’t told Mary what Aidan Seed had said about her. Neither, he’d told Charlie, had Gibbs. What did it mean? What did any of it mean?
‘Do you think you need to suffer—I mean suffer deeply—in order to be a true artist?’ Mary asked, screwing up her eyes, pushing her wild hair behind her ears with both hands. Was it scorn in her voice, or something else?
‘I wouldn’t say the one follows from the other,’ said Charlie. ‘You could suffer the torments of the damned and still not be able to draw or paint for toffee.’
Mary seemed to like that answer. ‘True,’ she said. ‘Nothing great is so easily reducible. I asked DC Waterhouse the same question. He said he didn’t know.’
Another thing Simon hadn’t mentioned. He’d certainly have had an opinion, thought Charlie. Clearly he hadn’t wanted to share it with this peculiar woman.
‘I’ve changed my my mind,’ said Mary. ‘I will show you my work. I want you to see it. There’s one condition, though. We agree now that nothing I’m going to show you is for sale. Even if you see a picture you think would be perfect for—’
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Charlie told her. ‘I haven’t got the money to buy original art. How much do you normally sell your paintings for? Does it vary depending on size, or . . .?’
‘I don’t.’ Mary’s face turned blank. As if she’d been expecting trouble and now it had arrived. ‘I never sell my work. Ever.’
‘But . . . so . . .?’
‘You mean why. That’s what you want to ask me: why? If that’s what you want to ask, ask.’
‘I was actually thinking more . . . are all your pictures here, then? In this house?’
There was a long pause before Mary said, ‘Pretty much.’
‘Wow. How long have you been painting?’
‘I started in 2000.’
‘Professionally, you mean? What about as a child?’
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘I never painted or drew as a child. Apart from when I had to, at school.’
Of course not professionally; painters who sold none of their work couldn’t be called professional. I should be asking different questions, thought Charlie. I should be asking about Aidan Seed and Ruth Bussey, and then I should be going to work. Why aren’t I?
She knew the answer, but it was a few seconds before she was willing to admit it to herself: because now she too was . . . scared would have been putting it too strongly, but something about 15 Megson Crescent and its occupant unsettled her. Perhaps it was nothing more than a bad atmosphere in the house, the result of years of neglect. Whatever it was, Charlie couldn’t allow herself to give in to the urge to get the hell out as quickly as possible.
‘I said you could see my paintings, not grill me about them,’ said Mary. ‘If you’re not careful I’ll change my mind. I don’t normally show my work to anybody.’
‘Why me, then?’
Mary nodded. ‘It’s a good question.’ She smiled, as if she knew the answer but wasn’t about to divulge it. ‘Come on. Most of the pictures are upstairs.’
Charlie followed her into a narrow hall which was as unattractive as the kitchen. The carpet had rotted away from the walls on both sides, and was patterned with red and brown swirls, apart from near the front door where it was black. The wallpaper had half peeled off the walls. It was dark beige with a few lighter streaks and patches; it might have been magnolia at one time. A small, low radiator had lost most of its dirty-grey chipped paint. Charlie stopped to look at the painting above it of a fat man, a woman and a boy of about fourteen or fifteen sitting round a small table. Only the boy was fully dressed; the other two were in dressing-gowns. The woman was small and slender with sharp, close-set features. She was shielding her eyes with her hands and looking down. Her posture suggested a headache. No, a hangover—there were empty bottles all over the table. A morning-after-a-heavy-night scene, Charlie guessed.
At the foot of the stairs was another picture of the same man and woman, this time without the boy. The woman was combing her hair in front of a mirror, wearing a strappy white nightie. Behind her, the fat man lay on a bed reading a tabloid newspaper.
Charlie was impressed. The paintings were too seedy to be conventionally appealing, but they had life in them, and seemed to create more energy in the hall than the shadeless bulb Mary had turned on as she passed. The colours were extraordinary—vivid without being in any way buoyant or heartening. The effect was one of grim cheerlessness exposed in the glare of a searchlight. ‘Are these yours?’ Charlie asked, guessing they must be.
Mary was halfway up the stairs. She made a noise that was hard to interpret. ‘I didn’t steal them, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘No, I meant . . .’
‘No. They’re not mine.’
So she hadn’t misunderstood. She’d been playing for time.
At the top of the stairs there was another picture, and a further two on the landing: the woman and the boy sitting at opposite ends of a lumpy yellow sofa with a torn cover, not looking at each other; the man standing next to a closed door, his hand raised to knock, his mouth open. The third painting featured two different people: a young man and woman, both dark with heavy eyebrows and square foreheads, both overweight, playing cards at the same table that was in the picture downstairs.
Mary pushed open one of the three doors on the landing, stood back and gestured for Charlie to go in ahead of her. The front bedroom. Aidan Seed had told Simon he’d killed Mary in here, left her body in the centre of the bed. Charlie’s throat felt tight as she walked in. I’m being ridiculous, she told herself. Would Mary be opening the door if there were a corpse behind it?
The room was full of pictures, so full that after a few steps Charlie had to stop. Many of them were obscured from view, either by other paintings, or because they were turned the wrong way. Charlie tried to take in as much as she could. There was a picture of a large stone building with a square tower, a lot of head-and-shoulders portraits, mainly of women, all of whom looked weary, defeated by life. Leaning against one wall were four or five big pinky-brown abstracts that looked like close-ups of scarred human flesh, with lots of intersecting lines and funny ridges. Like the paintings downstairs and on the landing, none of these was conventionally beautiful, but their power was undeniable. Charlie found herself needing to stare at them.
Like the paintings downstairs . . . Something else was undeniable, and yet Mary had denied it. ‘If you painted all these, then you painted the others as well,’ said Charlie, gesturing towards the door. ‘Even I can tell they’re all by the same artist.’
Mary looked put out. After a few seconds she said, ‘I painted them, yes. All of them.’
Charlie would have felt pedantic asking her why, in that case, she’d pretended she hadn’t. Was she embarrassed to have her own pictures up on the walls? She didn’t seem the sort of person who would give a toss about seeming vain. In this room, all the paintings were framed; the ones Charlie had seen on the walls had been hung unframed. Somehow, it seemed the wrong way round.
‘Who are they all?’ Charlie asked.
‘The people in the pictures? Neighbours, mostly, or people who used to live round here. The Winstanley estate collection.’ Mary’s smile was like a sneer, directed at herself. She nodded at the portraits stacked against the opposite wall. ‘I couldn’t tell you most of those people’s names now—I paid them, they sat for me, that was it.’
Charlie looked again at the faces,
to see if she recognised anyone she’d ever arrested.
‘You’re wondering why I’d choose to paint strangers who mean nothing to me,’ said Mary, though Charlie hadn’t been. ‘Painting people you care about is like offering yourself an emotional breakdown. I avoid it if I can, though it’s not always possible. Sometimes a compulsion takes hold and you have to suffer the consequences.’
Charlie saw the tension in her posture as she spoke, the way she hunched herself together so that her body became more compact.
‘If you had to paint a portrait, who would you choose? Your fiancé?’ Mary was looking at Charlie’s hand. ‘I saw the ring.’
‘I really don’t know.’ Charlie felt her skin heat up. No way could she paint Simon; it would be too intimate, too close. He’d never let her. He’d ended up staying the night on Saturday, after the party; he and Charlie had slept side by side, but they hadn’t kissed or touched. The hug he’d given her downstairs—that had been it in terms of physical contact. Still, Charlie was pleased. She’d never been able to persuade him to stay the night before. It was progress.
‘Definitely not your fiancé,’ said Mary. ‘So either you don’t care enough about him to bother, in which case I’d call off the engagement, or you know what I’m talking about: like offering yourself a breakdown.’
‘You said pretty much all your pictures were here,’ Charlie changed the subject. ‘Where are the rest, if you never sell your work?’
‘Ruth Bussey’s got one. I gave it to her as a present.’ A smile played around Mary’s lips. ‘Remember the sempervivum I showed you outside?’
Charlie didn’t. Then she realised Mary was talking about the rubbery green rose sticking out of the wall.
‘Ruth told me it was called that. I didn’t know. I don’t know any plant names. My experience of gardening is limited. I completely ruined a garden once and decided to leave it at that. After I gave Ruth the painting—I hadn’t given anybody a present in a long time and it felt strange—but I thought to myself, she’s given me a present too. That name: sempervivum. Live for ever, live always—that’s what it means.’
The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 11