‘Why do you say that?’
‘There’d been some kind of contretemps when they got together to have their photo taken. I don’t think I ever knew all the details, but it was something to do with one or more of them calling Aidan pretentious. Which he wasn’t,’ said Jan defensively. ‘He could be too intense and earnest at times, but there wasn’t a grain of pretence about him.’
‘So Martha Wyers might have been there, at Aidan’s private view?’
Jan shrugged.
‘Could Mary Trelease have been there too?’
‘I suppose she might have been. It was a bit of a blur that night—private views always are. I was madly busy and the place was packed. I don’t remember individuals, only a big crowd of people, almost too big to squeeze in.’
‘Did anything happen that struck you as out of the ordinary? ’ Charlie asked. ‘Anything at all?’
‘I don’t think so. Two punters had a fairly predictable row about whether to buy a picture or not. A mother and daughter, I think. That’s right, yes. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have dared tell my mother how to spend her money, God rest her soul. It’s amazing how tactless people can be—tussling in front of the artist like that. “It’s not worth two thousand quid!” “Well, I think it is!” Usually I keep schtum, but on that occasion I butted in and told the daughter she was crazy.’
It didn’t sound crazy to Charlie. Two thousand quid? Was there any reason for art to be so expensive?
‘I don’t mind if people genuinely can’t afford it,’ said Jan. ‘But in this case, it wasn’t about money. The daughter said the paintings were cold and unforgiving, that they had a “rotten soul”—I’ve never forgotten that. She was talking nonsense, and her mother looked upset by it, so I gave her a piece of my mind. Thank goodness Aidan didn’t hear her.’
‘Did Aidan talk to you about his personal life?’ Charlie asked.
‘Not really. Apart from jokingly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He once told me he had a stalker. When we were hanging his exhibition.’
Charlie tried not to look too eager.
‘Oh, he wasn’t worried about it or anything like that. He sounded almost flattered. He wasn’t being entirely serious, I don’t think.’
‘Do you remember anything else he said?’
Jan’s face creased in concentration. ‘Something about having to let her have her way with him because she wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was very tongue in cheek, though. I said something like, “It’s a hard life when you’re in demand,” and he laughed. He referred to fate, too—fate kept throwing them together, something like that.’
Not many people would accept a stalker as part of destiny’s grand plan, Charlie thought. Odd. ‘Can you remember his exact words?’ she asked.
Jan looked impatient, then tried to soften her expression to one of mock exasperation. ‘It was eight years ago. Of course I can’t.’
‘And he didn’t give his stalker a name?’
‘Nope. Sorry.’
‘You didn’t take any photos or anything, did you? Of the private view? You said you kept a record of all your exhibitions.’
‘That’s an idea. I always take pictures. Want me to dig out the file?’
‘Please.’ It wasn’t impossible that Mary Trelease or Martha Wyers or both of them might be in one or more of the photographs. And if they were? More evidence of a connection between the key players, but still nothing to indicate what they were players in, or how their individual stories fitted together. Had Martha and Mary been more than contemporaries at Villiers? Had they been friends?
Charlie recalled Mary’s expression when she’d said, ‘Not me.’ Had Aidan Seed killed Martha Wyers? Hanged her? You murder one woman, then, years later, pretend you’ve strangled her friend. No—too bizarre. And why choose hanging as a way of killing someone? Automatically, Charlie’s mind supplied an answer: to make it look like suicide.
‘Could Martha Wyers have been Aidan’s stalker?’ she asked, not expecting Jan to know the answer.
‘I’ve no idea. I suppose she could have been. Why?’ Jan had pulled a manila folder out of one of her desk drawers.
‘Martha published a novel before she died, Ice on the Sun. It’s about a woman who falls for a man she meets at a job interview and pursues—’
‘Oh, lordy.’ Jan’s mouth gaped open. ‘Aidan told me he first met his stalker-woman at a job interview. It only came back to me when I heard you say it. He definitely did. I remember asking if he thought she’d fixated on him because he had the job she wanted.’
Charlie cautioned herself against getting her hopes up. Yet another connection; more unanswered questions. ‘In Martha’s novel, the man the heroine falls in love with is called Adam Sands—same initials as Aidan Seed.’
Jan was flicking through the file. ‘Nothing here, I’m afraid. Look.’ She handed Charlie several photographs. Seeing Aidan again in this context was almost shocking, though Charlie couldn’t have said why. In the pictures, he was wearing a suit and was slimmer than he’d been when Charlie had met him. He was smiling for the camera, but there was a strain to the smile, as if he wasn’t sure he could support its weight for much longer.
‘Would you say he was a happy person?’
‘Hard to tell,’ said Jan. ‘Sometimes he was jolly and chatty, life and soul of the party, but he could also be reserved, verging on morose. I had the impression life had been a struggle for him.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I was afraid you were going to ask me that.’ Jan smiled ruefully. ‘I don’t know. Let me think about it.’ She was silent for so long, Charlie started to wonder if she was waiting to be granted permission to think. ‘It was the way he spoke,’ she said finally. ‘He expressed his opinions and pursued his ambitions so . . . assertively. As if he thought it was the only way to be heard. I used to wonder about his family. I know his siblings are much older than he is. None of them came to the private view, which I thought was rather odd; not one single relative of his came anywhere near the exhibition in the month it was on. That’s almost unheard of.’
There was nothing remarkable about the photographs of Aidan Seed’s private view. His paintings, from what Charlie could make out, were of interiors containing people, usually more than one. Charlie found herself staring for longer than she needed to at a painting of a staircase, with a middle-aged woman turning, halfway up, to look down at a younger man—almost a boy—who was looking away from her.
‘Can you see how he uses almost stiflingly traditional painting techniques to create scenes that are aggressively contemporary? ’ Jan asked.
The picture was meticulously realistic; it could have been a photograph. Charlie was impressed, but she wouldn’t have wanted it on her wall. It would make her tense. The couple depicted—if they were a couple—had evidently had a row, or were in the middle of one. It wasn’t a peaceful painting. ‘What’s it called?’ she asked, wondering if the title would offer any clues. If she’d painted it, she’d have called it ‘These people are pissed off with each other because . . .’ and then the reason. What was the point of a picture that told a story if no one could work out what the story was?
Jan had pulled a glossy card booklet out of the file. ‘Here’s the catalogue.’ She handed it to Charlie. In the photograph, the stairs painting was labelled ‘12’. Number 12 in the catalogue was called Supply and Demand. Charlie was none the wiser. The picture had been reproduced in the catalogue, along with one other, of a fat man in a bath, his torso like a mountain.
‘His titles are all . . .’ The rest of the sentence withered and died in Charlie’s mouth as she stared at the catalogue. Her hands shook. She’d been about to say that all Aidan’s titles were evasive. They said nothing about what was happening in the picture.
Apart from one.
Painting number 18 was called The Murder of Mary Trelease .
17
Wednesday 5 March 2008
‘
Did you fall in love with Aidan the instant you saw him?’ Mary asks abruptly.
‘Yes.’
‘So did Martha. Funny how that’s used as a gauge of love’s worth, isn’t it? The more groundless it is, the more based on nothing, the more impressive it sounds. “I fell in love at first sight.” We all want to say that—prove how passionate we are. And Martha was the worst kind of fool—a clever one. She was good with words and ideas, could make them serve her purpose, whatever it was. Within seconds she’d spun her reaction to Aidan, which was probably nothing more than sexual, into an irresistible narrative of love and enforced separation: the formalities of the occasion dictated that she had to walk into the interview room and he had to walk out of it while the chair of the appointment committee held the door open. Time for their eyes to meet, but nothing more. And their souls, according to Martha. She was an idiot,’ Mary adds vehemently, as if afraid I might miss the point of the story.
She talks like no one I’ve ever known. I want to ask again about the eighteen empty frames, but she’s already ignored the question three times. I know she’ll continue to ignore it until she’s ready, so I let her talk.
‘The stupid cow made a virtue of it. If they’d exchanged even one word, she went round telling everyone, the perfection of that moment would have been ruined. There’s no reasoning with someone like Martha. When the college phoned her to tell her she hadn’t got the job, she claimed she’d known he’d got it before they told her. She was happier for him than she would have been for herself, she said. And she knew where she’d be able to find him, as of the first of October 1993: Trinity College, Cambridge. She didn’t bother with the subtle approach—she wrote to him and told him she was in love with him. Any half-decent man would have read that letter and known straight away how vulnerable she was, but Aidan didn’t care. He wrote back and told her he’d noticed her too. Noticed! She offers him unconditional love, and in return he tells her he’s registered her existence! That was when I knew how dangerous he was for someone like Martha.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘He didn’t say, “I feel the same way”, he didn’t say, “I’m sorry, I’m not interested”. From his letter it was obvious he was one of those men who likes to reel women in, offering the illusion of intimacy with no substance behind it.’ Mary is picking up speed, barely aware of my presence. ‘He invited Martha to Trinity. She was so worried about being late, she got an earlier train and arrived in Cambridge an hour before she was supposed to. He’d told her where to find his rooms. When he opened his door and saw her there, he said, “You’re early,” and shook her hand. He didn’t even kiss her on the cheek. She apologised and asked if he was busy. He said, “I’m painting.” You know what he did then? Sat down at his easel and carried on. “I can talk at the same time,” he said, not even looking at her. Martha had gone all the way to Cambridge to see him, and he made her wait while he finished filling in the red background of his painting with a tiny brush. She said it was like being tortured. ’
Mary grabs a strand of her hair and puts it in her mouth, chewing it as if it’s a curl of liquorice. ‘When he’d finished painting, he took her for lunch. In college, surrounded by other people. He told her he was flattered, thought she was amazing, but didn’t want to get involved with anyone—said he’d find it too stressful. He could have told her that when he wrote to her, saved her the trip, instead of leaving her to wonder if something about her in the flesh hadn’t lived up to his memory of her. After lunch he sent her away. She wrote to him every day for a long time—her feelings hadn’t changed—but he hardly ever wrote back. When he did, his letters were chatty, anodyne—as short as he could get away with. I also wrote to him once or twice: hate mail.’
Mary tries to smile. ‘You know what I’m like when I get angry. I couldn’t bear what he was doing to her. In the end she stopped writing to him and started writing a novel instead. All about him, and her obsession with him. It wasn’t so much a book as a self-indulgent splurge, but apparently I was the only person who thought that. It got published. When it came out, she sent him a copy. She got his reply two days later—a card, thanking her for sending it, and quoting Gore Vidal. I suppose you know the famous quote?’
It’s a few seconds before I realise she wants a response from me. Not giving her what she wants doesn’t occur to me. ‘No.’
‘ “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.” ’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘Plenty of things are horrible,’ she says impatiently. ‘If they’re true, it doesn’t matter, but that’s not true, not of me, anyway. I’d only want someone to fail if I disliked them. Wouldn’t you?’ She doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘Anyone else would have torn up Aidan’s card and written him off as the arsehole that he is, but not Martha. Do you know what her take on it was?’ When Mary laughs, it sounds as if she’s choking, fighting for breath. She looks limp, like a doll that’s had the stuffing pulled out of it. ‘At least he thought of her as a friend.’
‘What?’
‘ “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.” Martha decided to minimise the hurt to herself by taking it as a declaration of friendship, something she’d not had from him before.’
I flinch. This is too personal a detail. I feel as if I’m invading Martha Wyers’ privacy, ransacking the mind and heart of an unhappy dead woman. I ought to tell Mary to stop. I don’t.
‘She wrote him a few more letters, to which he didn’t reply,’ she resumes her toneless cataloguing of the facts. As she sees them. I wonder what Aidan would say if he could hear her telling the story. Would his version of it be different? ‘Everyone told her to forget him, which was disastrous for someone like Martha—the very worst thing to say.’
‘It supported her idea of them as doomed lovers, with the world against them,’ I say. When Mary smiles at me, I feel something that’s not easy to distinguish from pride, and it scares me. My desire to please others isn’t safe. I wanted so badly to please Aidan. And Stephen Elton. For a while, I thought I had, did, both of them.
‘What is it?’ Mary asks.
I don’t want to tell her what I’m thinking. I’ve surrendered too much of myself already.
‘Don’t you believe me?’
I nod.
‘You don’t, not entirely. You’re not sure. It doesn’t sound like the Aidan you know. That Aidan’s kind and loving. On the other hand, you can’t explain his recent behaviour, and you hope I can. You need me to be able to, so part of you wants me to be telling the truth. That part believes me.’
She’s right. ‘You make me sound schizophrenic,’ I say, to hide my discomfort.
‘There are divisions within every person. Especially those who are forced to bear unbearable pain. That’s what trauma does—it divides you against yourself: the need to survive versus the desire for oblivion.’
One half dies. The other half lives.
I think I’m starting to understand. ‘Did Martha hang herself because of Aidan?’ I ask. ‘Because he rejected her?’
‘Yes. But that was much later, after they’d had sex,’ Mary says. It seems not to occur to her that this might be hard for me to listen to. ‘They met again in 1999. Someone decided to round up young, promising artists and writers and the like, and parade them in the press like performing monkeys. Martha and Aidan were both chosen. You can imagine what she made of that.’
‘She thought fate had brought them together again.’
‘She was right. Martha was Aidan’s doom, and he was hers. Why do people assume fate has their best interests at heart?’
‘I don’t,’ I tell her.
‘You’ve got more sense than Martha, then. She tried to turn herself into the person she thought Aidan wanted her to be. She lost weight, changed the way she dressed . . .’
‘Had he said he didn’t like her appearance?’
‘He’d said nothing! She made it up, the lot. All those years she’d been denied access to the real Aidan, she’d g
rown an alternative version in her mind, complete with all the preferences and attitudes she thought he ought to have. That was the man she was trying to please. And if he said things that didn’t tally with what she wanted to believe about him, instead of letting them crush the fantasy, she denied her own feelings, brought them into line with his. Like when they were interviewed for The Times and asked which was more important to them, personal happiness or work. Aidan said—in front of Martha, knowing how she felt about him—that nothing could ever matter to him as much as his work. Martha said the same thing, to win his approval, even though she’d gladly have renounced not only her work but also her family, friends, everything, if she could have had Aidan.’
So would I, if I could have him how he used to be. Before London. I try to keep an even expression on my face so that Mary can’t see what I’m thinking, but she’s wrapped up in her own thoughts, not even looking at me.
‘That was Martha’s fatal mistake,’ she says. ‘If she hadn’t told that one stupid lie, she’d be alive today.’
18
5/3/08
Charlie backed away, not wanting Jan Garner to see what she’d read. No wonder the name Mary Trelease had sounded familiar to Jan. ‘I’m going to need to take this with me,’ Charlie said.
Jan frowned. ‘I haven’t got a spare. I could have it photocopied if you want, let you have a copy.’
‘I’ll guard it with my life and bring it back as soon as I can.’ Charlie wouldn’t have been able to explain why a copy wasn’t good enough. It wouldn’t be the same as the catalogue, with its stiff, shiny pages. She had to show this to Simon. Dunning and Milward ought to see it too.
Aware that Jan hadn’t yet agreed to let her take it, seeing the gallery owner’s discomfort, Charlie held up her left hand. ‘I’ll leave you my engagement ring as security,’ she said. ‘You can keep it until I return the catalogue.’
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