In so far as anything could please me, I was pleased to see a market square with a church at one end, and, at the other, a music shop selling sheet music and instruments, a cheese shop and a gift shop called ‘Surprises and Secrets’. The church was a beautiful building and, as long as I didn’t have to set foot inside it, I was prepared to live near it and admire its contribution to the landscape. Even so, I couldn’t help wondering how many of the people who attended its services did so by choice.
I walked into the first pub I came to, the Brown Cow, because there was a board outside it advertising rooms to let. The landlord seemed happy to rent one to me. He asked me how many nights I wanted it for. I opened my mouth, then found I had no answer ready. I didn’t have a plan. ‘Two weeks?’ I suggested tentatively, prepared to be rebuffed.
His eyes lit up. ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘And if you want to stay longer, you’ll be more than welcome.’
Tears pricked my eyes and I had to look away. He was being too nice to me. Not knowing me, he wasn’t aware that I deserved none of his kindness. Maybe I’ll stay here until all my money runs out, I thought, and then go and jump in a river. All the books I’d read over the past four years—since Him and Her—had failed to convince me that this wouldn’t be in many ways the best course of action. I’d made a decent profit from the sale of my house in Lincoln; it would take me a year, maybe two, to give it all away to the storage company in Lincoln and the landlord of the Brown Cow. It would be an interesting experiment, I thought: see how much I wanted to survive. If I ran out of money and wanted to live, I would be forced to do something about it. Or else I could not live. Five or six years after the event, no one would be able to say I hadn’t let a decent interval elapse. I’d have had more than half a decade, by then, to reflect on what I’d done.
My first eleven days in Spilling were unremarkable. I slept a lot, went out for little walks round town. Every day I went to the independent bookshop, ‘Word on the Street’. Never, I thought after my first visit, has a shop had a less appropriate name. Far from being hip and contemporary, Word on the Street—or Word, as everyone in Spilling seemed to call it—looked exactly like my idea of the perfect second-hand bookshop, except with new instead of used stock: low ceilings; creaking floors; several storeys, each a completely different shape from the others; not-quite-straight passageways leading from children’s books to poetry, from the fiction wall to military history.
Within a week I’d bought Word’s entire ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ section, and the manager had promised to replenish his supplies. I nearly bought a book called Shame, the memoir of a woman who had escaped the arranged marriage her parents had tried to force upon her. I took it off the shelf, then happened to glance up and see a label that said ‘Biography’ at the top of the free-standing bookcase. The word made me think of my father, and I had to put the book back, even though I wanted to read it.
On my eleventh morning as a Spilling resident, I went into the cheese shop, Spilling Cheeses—at least half of the local shops were called Spilling this or that—and its owner, instead of asking if she could help me, launched into a monologue. ‘I’ve seen you wandering up and down the high street,’ she said. ‘You do a lot of walking, don’t you? You look at all the shops, but more often that not you don’t go in. I’ve been wondering when you’d come in here.’
This was nearly enough to drive me out, and it certainly put me off buying any cheese, but I didn’t want to appear rude. People who have made no serious mistakes in their lives might not understand this, but once you’ve done something wrong and suffered as a result, good behaviour takes on the utmost importance. I’d resolved never to behave badly again, in my eyes or in the world’s. I knew there were people who were never condemned by anybody, not for a single word or deed: uncontroversial people, ordinary people. That was the sort of person I needed to be.
‘If you like a good walk, you’re crazy to march up and down the pavement, with all the car fumes and the noise,’ said Spilling Cheeses’ owner. ‘There’s lovely countryside less than five minutes away by car—nice and peaceful. Middle of nowhere, really. You won’t meet another soul. I can direct you if you want.’
I smiled, told her ‘No, thank you,’ and left in a hurry, my heart pounding. I didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere, or even near it. I wanted other souls, plenty of them. I didn’t want to speak to them or strike up friendships, but I wanted them to be there in case one day I needed them. Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong place, I thought. Maybe I should go to Birmingham or Manchester or London. I walked quickly up the street, careful not to look back at the cheese shop. Then I started to feel dizzy, as if I was going to fall. I stopped and leaned my head against the nearest window, hoping the glass would be cold.
It was. I pressed my burning forehead against it and imagined the coolness moving in waves from outside my head to inside. After a few seconds I felt stronger, and peeled myself off the window, embarrassed, hoping no one had seen me. There was an opaque patch on the glass in front of me where my breath had misted it, and behind that, a painting. The frame was black, but the picture itself was long and red. At first I thought red was the only colour, but then I saw small, uneven gold lines behind the red blotches. Standing back, I saw that they weren’t blotches at all, but textured circles and ovals, almost like oversized fingerprints. Each one was a slightly different shade and shape—some were more orange, some seemed to have a blue undertone.
There were dozens of colours in the picture, not one. When I looked carefully, I saw that every colour was in it. And, depending on how far away from it I stood, the intriguing shapes’ relationships to one another changed. From close up, a smeared-looking orange sphere appeared to leap forward, but when I stood back, some of the longer, oval-shaped forms seemed more prominent.
I felt something move inside me, pushing away the layers of fear, guilt, shame and anger that had piled up in my heart and stifled all my memories of past happiness and, along with them, any hope of future happiness, since if you can’t remember ever having felt a certain way then you can’t believe you ever did or will again. It wasn’t only that the painting was beautiful, or that when I looked at it, I felt that a bit of that beauty belonged to me; I felt as if someone was trying to communicate with me. It was a connection, a positive connection with another person, the artist—someone entirely non-threatening because I had never met them, nor was I likely to.
I had to have that picture. I pushed open the door to the Spilling Gallery and told the man I found inside—Saul Hansard—that I wanted the painting in the window and I would pay any price for it. ‘Really?’ He chuckled. ‘What if I said seventy-five thousand pounds?’
‘I haven’t got seventy-five thousand pounds. How much is it?’
‘You’re in luck, then. It’s two hundred and fifty pounds.’
I grinned. In luck. It felt true, for the first time in four years. ‘Who painted it? What is it? Do you know anything about it?’
‘Artist by the name of Jane Fielder. She lives in Yorkshire. It’s the only one of hers I’ve got, or I’d be trying to flog you some more. Something Wicked, this one’s called.’ He was taking it out of the window as he spoke. ‘See the faint gold writing behind the red thumbprints?’
‘Thumbprints,’ I murmured. So I’d been right, almost.
‘Well, not really, but that’s what they’re supposed to represent. The gold writing goes all the way down, see? Two lines, repeated: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes.” Agatha Christie, via William Shakespeare.’ Saul Hansard smiled at me and introduced himself. I didn’t mind telling him my name because he was so obviously harmless. He was short, in his mid-sixties, I guessed, with flyaway sandy hair, bifocal glasses and trousers that were held up by red braces. I didn’t know then that he wore the braces every day. He was thin and had one of those straight-up-and-down bodies, almost like a boy’s—like a ten-year-old, tall for his age.
I took Something Wicked back to my room
at the Brown Cow and leaned it against the wall. Looking at it became my main daily activity. I also, from then on, went to the Spilling Gallery every day. At first Saul kept explaining to me apologetically that he wasn’t going to get new work in for a while. I didn’t care. I was happy to look at the paintings he had on the walls, however many times I’d seen them before and even though I’d decided I didn’t want to buy them. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. Most of them were good, I thought, but they didn’t make me feel the way Something Wicked did.
When I found out Saul framed as well as sold pictures, I started to spend afternoons with him in his workshop at the back of the gallery because it was a way of seeing more art. He was always behind with his workload, and while he got on with float-mounting and bevelling to a constant soundtrack of Classic FM, I would sift through piles of pictures waiting to be framed, looking for something that might mean as much to me as Something Wicked did.
After about a month, Saul said to me, ‘Forgive me if I’m being nosey, Ruth, but . . . you evidently don’t have a job.’
I told him I didn’t. Looking at art was my job as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t care if no one paid me for it.
‘You wouldn’t by any chance like to work here, would you?’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’m losing customers all the time, with it being just me—people come in and they can’t find anyone because I’m here in the back, and so they turn tail and leave. I’ve been thinking that what I could really do with is a friendly face to welcome—’
‘Yes,’ I interrupted him. ‘I’d love to.’
Saul beamed. ‘What a stroke of luck,’ he said. He uses the word luck a lot; it was one of the things I liked about him. ‘You’re here anyway, so you might as well be paid for it. And you can be the first to see any new work that comes in.’
My life changed very quickly after that. I knew I couldn’t stay at the Brown Cow; I would need somewhere bigger, somewhere that could accommodate all the art I was going to buy. I rented Blantyre Lodge, got my things out of storage, raided Word on the Street’s art section and read as much as I could about famous artists and their work.
I took occasional days off to go to Silsford, where there was another gallery that sold contemporary art, and found the second picture I fell in love with there: Tree of Life by an artist called Lynda Thomas. It was a stylised image of a tree with black branches that twisted upwards like thick curls of hair. If you fixed your eye on it and moved around the room, you saw little metallic glimmers of red, gold and silver peeping out from between the leaves. The background was midnight blue, and the tree, though dark, shone against it, full of a hidden mysterious force, but nothing dangerous, nothing threatening. The painting wasn’t sentimental, though it might easily have been were the artist less talented.
I said all of this to Saul, not in the least embarrassed. I had known nothing about art for most of my life, but my sudden passion for it had given me confidence. I knew I was right because I felt it; I didn’t care about critics or experts, and whether they’d agree with me.
Gradually, I built up a collection. I branched out from paintings to sculptures. I relaxed my rule a bit and allowed myself to buy work that I didn’t love quite as much as Something Wicked and Tree of Life. In an art collection, I decided, one didn’t necessarily need or want to respond to every piece with the same intensity. Besides, I discovered, some pictures grew on you. I told Saul about my change of policy, explaining that, as well as soulmates, a person needs friends and acquaintances. He agreed. ‘Have you got any friends, Ruth?’ he asked me, looking concerned. In general he avoided asking me personal questions; I could hardly begrudge him this one.
‘I’ve got you,’ I said, eyes fixed on the art magazine I was reading.
‘Yes, but . . . apart from me. Have you got anyone else that you . . . see?’
‘I see you,’ I replied determinedly, starting to feel uneasy. ‘Why? You’re not planning on ditching me, are you? Closing the gallery and running off somewhere without telling me?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Saul. ‘With any luck, I’ll be around for a long time.’ It struck me that this was an odd way for him to put it. I looked up to catch his expression, but his face gave nothing away. I’d been working for him for two years by that point. Was he worried about what would happen to me after he died? Surely not. I didn’t know exactly how old he was, but he was certainly on the right side of seventy. I didn’t like to think about Saul dying, so I changed the subject back to art. It was the only thing I was interested in talking about, and Saul seemed happy to indulge me.
As it turned out, I was the one who deserted him, though it was the last thing I wanted to do; he was the only companion I had and I’d grown to love him.
On 18 June 2007—several dates are etched for ever on my brain, and this is one of them—I was sitting behind the counter, reading an art book called Still Life with a Bridle by Zbigniew Herbert, when a woman walked into the gallery. I recognised her, having seen her once or twice before, but didn’t know her name. She belonged to the category of Saul’s regulars that he and I called ‘the Rudies’—the people who, if they found me in the gallery, would ignore me and walk straight through to the back to find Saul.
I tried to smile, as I always did when a Rudie walked in, but got no response. The woman, dressed in a tasselled gypsy skirt and white trainers, and with a mass of curly silver-threaded black hair, was carrying a picture under her arm. I saw only the back of it as she strode past me without saying hello.
I shook my head at her rudeness and turned back to my book. A few seconds later she was back, the painting still under her arm. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got a picture I want him to frame—today, ideally.’
‘Isn’t he there?’
‘Not unless he’s invisible.’
‘Um . . . I don’t know. He must have nipped out.’
‘Did you see him go out?’ she asked impatiently.
‘No, but—’
‘How long’s he likely to be?’
‘Not long.’ I smiled. ‘He’s probably popped out the back and across to the post office. Can I help you at all?’
She looked down at me as if I were a piece of rubbish, contaminating her space. ‘You haven’t so far,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait five minutes. If Saul’s not back by then I’ll have to leave. I’m not wasting my whole day hanging round here—I’ve got work to do.’ She leaned the canvas board she’d been carrying against my desk and started to circle the gallery, looking at the pictures Saul and I had hung a few days earlier. ‘Lame,’ she said loudly about the first one she came to. Then she marched quickly past the others, offering a one-word comment on each of them: ‘Dismal. Lame. Pretentious. Vacuous. Hideous. I see nothing’s changed around here.’
The picture she’d brought in was tall, and she’d propped it up against the part of the desk I was sitting behind—perhaps deliberately to annoy me by obscuring my view of the room. On the back of the board someone had scrawled, in capital letters, the word ‘ABBERTON’. I wondered if it was her surname.
Her outright condemnation of every painting she saw made me curious to see the one she wanted Saul to frame. Whether she’d painted it or someone else had, she clearly deemed it worth spending money on. No one frames art they don’t value. I stood up and walked round the desk to look at the picture. She must have sensed me move because she whirled round, the bottom of her tasselled skirt whooshing out in a circle. It had a hole in it, I noticed. Her face was a mask of suspicion. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. Did she imagine I was glued to my chair? Why shouldn’t I move freely around the gallery, as she was? I worked there, after all.
When I looked at the painting, I had the same feeling I’d had when I first saw Something Wicked, except stronger. It was like instant hypnosis, a magnetic attraction. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The background—painted in dark greens, browns, purples and greys so that you could only just make it out, so that it looked as if it was in the shadows—w
as a residential street with houses all along it, a loop at one end, the shape of which had been massively exaggerated; it looked almost like a noose, with the rest of the road being the rope. The street was a cul-de-sac: Megson Crescent, though I didn’t know that at the time.
The rude woman must have noticed my reaction because she said, ‘You don’t need to tell me it’s good. I know it’s good.’
I was too startled by the picture’s power to say anything. At its centre, standing in the scene, was the outline of a person. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman. Apart from its shape, there was nothing human about the figure; inside the thin black line that separated it from the rest of the picture was a mass of what looked like hard feathers, scraps of material—gauze, perhaps—some white, some with colour painted on. A churned-up angel: that’s what it made me think of. It should have been grotesque, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. ‘Did you do it?’ I asked.
She told me she did.
‘It’s amazing.’
Flattery usually worked, even with the rudest of the Rudies, but it didn’t on her. Every few seconds she frowned at the door, as if willing Saul to walk through it. I held out my hand. ‘I’m Ruth Bussey,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced, even though I’ve seen you before.’
‘We haven’t,’ she agreed.
‘Is your name Abberton? I noticed—’
‘No. Abberton is the person in the picture.’ She didn’t tell me her name. When I kept looking at her, she raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Do you want to make something of it?’
I turned back to the painting. ‘Is it . . .?’
‘No. It’s not for sale.’
‘Oh.’ I was horribly disappointed, and couldn’t think what to do. I could hardly challenge her—it was her painting, after all—but I knew I had to have it, had to be able to take it home with me.
The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 13