by John Harvey
It had given them something to argue about, Katherine thought, her mum and dad, that’s what it had done. Ping-pong! They didn’t give a shit about ping-pong, who played and how often. Neither of them. That hadn’t been it at all.
A cheer went up as one of the players smashed home the final point and someone else stepped forward to take him on. She wondered if Chrissy might fancy a game later, after they’d finished? But then, Katherine thought, knowing Chrissy she was almost certain to say no. Me? You kidding, right? All those people watching? Chrissy, who took off her clothes regular as clockwork in front of a bunch of students with never, as far as she knew, a second thought about it.
She checked her phone: no new messages, no texts. There were plenty of art students coming out now, arty bags on their shoulders, pausing to fiddle with their phones, texting, lighting roll-ups, but still no sign of Chrissy. Katherine shoved her magazine back down into her bag and wandered over towards the doors. Which was when she bumped into him. Walking with his head turned, calling out to someone behind him, laughing.
‘Watch it!’ Katherine shouted, but by then he’d gone clattering into her, knocking the bag from her shoulder and spinning her round.
‘Oh, God!’ he said in that voice of his. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You should look where you’re going!’
‘I know, I know. Here, let me …’
‘No, it’s okay.’
He started to bend down towards the bag and the magazine that had gone shooting out across the floor, but Katherine scrambled after them and retrieved them both.
When she’d set them to rights he was still standing there and she got a proper look at him for the first time. Not tall, but not short either. Late forties, maybe? She’d never been very good with ages. Men’s ages. Bald. Completely. Not that that was any kind of sign nowadays. Wearing what looked like an expensive overcoat, cashmere; flecks of paint on his shoes.
‘You’ll accept my apologies?’
She nodded, mumbled something, and he turned swiftly away, striding off towards Granary Square. Then there was Chrissy, coming through the crowd.
‘What were you doing, talking to Anthony Winter?’
‘Who?’
‘Anthony Winter.’
‘Who’s he?’
6
Paddington to Penzance, five hours, twenty-seven minutes. A lot of time to think. Too much. Thoughts churning round and round. Whatever her intentions, Kate had come within – what? – an inch, an hour of taking her own life. And why? Because she was depressed? Because she’d been out of her head on booze and worse? Because of – what had she called it? – a thing? Because a thing with a man she’d become involved with, a relationship, had gone wrong.
Relationships end. You know that better than me. You and Mum.
He walked down to the buffet car and bought two minibar-sized bottles of whisky, drank one there, two swallows, the burning at the back of his throat, took the other to his seat. At first the Wi-Fi wasn’t working and then it was.
The Wikipedia page for Anthony Winter was nicely succinct. British artist, born March 1966, Salisbury, Wilts. Best known initially as a painter of urban landscapes and, latterly, portraits, his work often mixes figuration with symbolism, ultra-realism with elements of the surreal. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1984–87), briefly at Goldsmiths College (1987–88) and at the Royal College of Art (1988–90). After taking part in several group shows, including one in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1998), his first solo exhibition was at Abernathy Fine Art in 1999. Solo exhibitions since then include the National Gallery of Scotland (2004), the Museum Brandhorst in Munich (2009), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2011) and the Serpentine Gallery (2015).
His marriage to the painter Susannah Fielding (b. 1969, Beccles, Suffolk) ended in divorce. They have one son, Matthew (b. 1992) and a daughter, Melissa (b. 1994).
His photograph showed a strong face, a quite prominent, chiselled nose; the mouth set, the barest suggestion of a smile; blue eyes, dark blue, unfettered and clear. The head close-shaven and smooth. Nothing to suggest, as he stared back into the camera’s lens, anything less than absolute confidence, self-belief.
No big deal.
Elder could picture him, picture the scene.
No big deal, Kate, okay? And smiling. Even as he turned away. Job done. No big deal.
Not for him anyway. But it was for me.
Kate’s words became lost in the broken rhythm of the train. Bristol Temple Meads. Exeter St Davids. By the lock gates of a canal, a heron stared down into the water with perfect concentration. Glimpsed then gone.
Dad, it’s what happens.
Is it? Did it have to be? And was there nothing he could do?
He finished the second whisky, closed his eyes.
7
At the cottage there was a note tucked under the door. Just in case you don’t check your messages, we’ve a gig tonight. The Acorn. See you there? Vicki xxx. The last thing Elder fancied right then: music, noise, a crowd, the need to be sociable, respond. But by evening he’d changed his mind. A walk to the headland. Wind coursing around his head. Water driving against the rocks below. What was it someone had said? Loneliness is just solitude taken a step too far. Or was that the other way round?
The Acorn was two-thirds full, not a bad crowd, most of the tables taken, a few people standing at the back and along the sides, blokes mostly, pints in hand. The band had been augmented for the occasion by a couple more musicians, a trombonist down from London and a second saxophone; the sound fuller and, to Elder’s ears, more satisfying. Midway through an arrangement of Ellington’s ‘A Train’, he felt a finger pressing gently against the nape of his neck.
‘You made it then.’
When he turned to face her, she kissed him close by the side of his mouth.
‘When are you on?’
Vicki’s smile broadened. ‘They’re saving me till the second half.’
‘Secret weapon?’
‘Something like that.’
She began with ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, no surprises there, just the double bass behind her at the beginning, that and her thumb and finger clicking on the beat, and then the drummer coming softly in on brushes when they reached the middle eight. Vicki singing, as she usually did, with her eyes closed much of the time, body swinging easy – a velvet dress in deepest blue, full at the hips, close at the waist and loose above – a woman, Elder thought, not for the first time, for whom cleavage could have been invented.
A blues next, then an up-tempo chase through ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’, and then …
‘This is a song I learned from a recording by Billie Holiday that she made way back in nineteen forty and which I first heard when I was eighteen or nineteen and I’ve been plucking up the courage to sing it ever since. So fingers crossed and here goes. Body and Soul.’
A few bars of sparse piano and then the lyric … My days have grown so lonely … nailing Elder from the first line, a threnody of helplessness, love and despair. Vicki’s voice by the final verse, the final chorus, beaten, defeated, little more than a whisper. Silence. And then the applause. Elder walked out into the night.
Walked down towards the harbour, lights on the water.
How long he’d been standing there before Vicki came and stood alongside him, he couldn’t say, save that his face and hands were cold and his mind was numb.
‘You didn’t like it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You never walked out on me before.’ Her hand slid into his. ‘Actually, that’s a lie.’
He put his arm around her waist.
After a few moments she said, ‘It doesn’t have to be true love, you know. Not at our age.’
He didn’t need to look to know she was smiling.
‘Shall we go in my car,’ she said, ‘or yours?’
When Elder woke it was still dark. Vicki lay curled towards him, her hand twitching involuntarily, the faint whis
tle of her breathing almost at one with the tide as it beat back along the shore. Careful not to wake her, he padded to the window and looked out: the longer he stood there the more clearly he could make out the contours of St Michael’s Mount, bulking up against the grey of the sky.
‘Come back to bed, Frank.’
She slipped one of her legs across his and rested her head on his chest. ‘What was it about the song?’
It was a while before he could formulate an answer.
‘The helplessness of it, I suppose. The if-I-can’t-have-you-my-life-isn’t-worth-living-ness of it. And the way you sing it, so bloody believable.’
‘It’s a song, Frank, just a song. And if I can’t make you believe in it for the time I’m singing it, then I’m doing it all wrong. But that’s not me. That’s not who I am.’
‘I know.’
She stroked his arm. ‘You’re thinking of Kate, aren’t you?’
He nodded, told her about the relationship with Winter, what little he knew.
‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she said.
He sat up, swinging his legs round from the bed. ‘I’ll make tea.’
‘And bring it back?’
‘And bring it back.’
Elder had had a girlfriend once, before he was married, who’d insisted, every morning, rain or shine, weekday or weekend, on making tea and toast and bringing them back to bed on a tray. It didn’t matter if they’d been out late the night before and not got back, exhausted, till two or three; didn’t matter if the alarm went off at some godforsaken early hour because she’d drawn first shift, there it was, where it had to be, tea and toast. Some mornings it was not unknown for the tray to capsize, crumbs to be found days later, deep down in the crevices of the sheets.
Just when he’d brought himself around to thinking it was really serious, true love perhaps, maybe they should get engaged – well, he was only twenty-three at most – she’d made it clear she had other ideas entirely, other fish to fry.
He’d scarcely thought of her in years.
At twenty-three that hadn’t seemed possible; hadn’t felt that way at all.
Sitting, the pair of them propped up against pillows, Vicki listened while he told her about Katherine and Anthony Winter, what little he knew, what little more he could surmise.
‘First serious relationship I had,’ Vicki said, ‘was with my teacher, music teacher. I was at college, seventeen. He was forty, forty-one. Married, of course. And for – what? – nine months, a little more, it took over my whole life. Being with him, thinking about him, thinking about being with him again. Then one day it was over. As quickly as it had begun. I was bereft, angry; cried myself to sleep, cried myself awake. Hung around outside his office, outside his house. Wrote letters to his wife that never got sent. God knows what would have happened in these days of instant emails, instant texts.’
She shook her head, exhaled slowly, sipped her tea.
‘And what did happen?’ Elder asked.
Vicki smiled. ‘I always think … There’s this story I read, short story, Hemingway, maybe? I think it’s Hemingway. Anyway, there’s this boy, Nick, he’s young, no more than fourteen or fifteen. And he learns that the girl he’s in love with has been seen with this other boy. When he goes to bed that night, he’s feeling so bad about it, so upset, he thinks his heart must be broken. But then, when he wakes up in the morning the first things he hears are the waves outside and the wind – they must live by a lake or the sea or something – and all he can think about is going fishing. It’s a long time before he remembers his heart is broken.’
‘And that’s what it was like? For you?’
‘Not overnight, not exactly. But that’s not the point.’
‘Then what is?’
‘The point is, he thinks his heart is broken because that’s what he’s been taught to think.’
‘Taught how?’
‘By what you were talking about before. Partly that, anyway. Songs. Stuff he’s heard on the radio. Films. TV. Things he’s seen. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s upset, feeling wretched, anyone would be. But, like it says, his heart isn’t really broken.’
‘And you’re saying that’s what it’s like for Kate? She’s just overreacting?’
‘I don’t mean what she’s feeling isn’t real, of course it is. She was hurt, angry, upset, she had every right to be. I just mean, given a little time, it may not be quite as serious as she thought it was. She’ll get over it, that’s what I’m saying. And maybe’ – squeezing Elder’s hand – ‘maybe by dwelling on it, drawing attention to it, asking too many questions, you’re preventing that from happening.’
‘So I should shut up, say nothing, mind my own business?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What then?’
‘Back off a little.’
‘And if I can’t stop thinking about it? Worrying?’
‘Then that’s your problem. Don’t make it hers.’
Elder felt as if he’d been stung, slapped; his body tensed, his breathing changed. ‘I’d better be getting ready,’ he said.
She came up behind him as he was tucking his shirt down into his trousers and rested her hand on his shoulder. ‘The trouble is, you’re a man. And not just a man – for most of your adult life you’ve been a policeman. You feel the need to do something, get things sorted, solve the problem. And I think this is something she’s got to do on her own. You can help, of course. Be supportive. But other than that …’
She stepped away and he turned towards her. ‘That relationship you were talking about, with the teacher, didn’t you think he was using you?’
‘Frank, I knew what I was doing, knew he was married; I think we were both using each other.’
He thought about it later, what Vicki had said, and yes, it made sense, a skewed sort of sense perhaps, but sense nonetheless, and he knew that what he was doing could be construed as interfering, making things worse instead of better. He understood, with the clarity of hindsight and common sense, that he should leave well enough alone. Let time do its thing, allow wounds to heal. But Winter was a significantly older, presumably experienced and sophisticated man, and Katherine, in his eyes, was still little more than a child.
His child.
And that made all the difference in the world. Whatever Vicki and Ernest fucking Hemingway might say.
8
They were at this club. Shoreditch. All four of them. Abike’s birthday. They’d had a meal first, some new burger place; patties in brioche for God’s sake, hot sauce, sweet-potato fries. Then the pub. And then this. Cosmopolitans. Screwdrivers. Vodka Martinis. Abike, who didn’t drink, sticking to Shirley Temples, virgin pina coladas. The DJ heading off on some kind of mild retro kick. Missy Elliott, Jamiroquai, Jack ’N’ Chill. ‘Fuck off!’ Chrissy yelled at the umpteenth bloke to start hitting on them. ‘Fuck off and take your sorry dick with you!’
At two in the morning the streets were cold and Stelina’s Uber app kept refusing to recognise her location. Linking arms, they half-danced, half-hobbled as far as the high street, Chrissy and Katherine with their heels in their hands, and hailed a black cab.
Back at the flat, Katherine came close to crashing out, but Stelina brought her round with peppermint tea and the promise of chocolate digestives. Chrissy presented Abike with two Weetabix in warm milk topped with a pink cake candle and announced she was off to bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said over loud protests, ‘but I have to be looking my best for a roomful of final-year students in the morning and I need all the beauty sleep I can get.’
Half an hour or so later, when Katherine went into the room they shared, single beds a few metres apart, Chrissy’s eyes blinked open.
‘I don’t know how you can,’ Katherine said.
‘Can what?’
‘In front of all those people. Naked.’
‘It’s not naked, it’s nude. There’s a difference. And besides, it’s like sex. Most sex. After the first few times you barel
y give it a second thought.’
With that, she turned over and, within minutes, she was fast asleep.
‘What did you mean?’ Katherine said. ‘What you said last night?’
They were in the kitchen, oddly early, Abike and Stelina still dead to the world. Chrissy measuring out the coffee.
‘I probably said a lot of things.’
‘No, I mean last thing. About posing.’
‘Posing?’
‘Not naked but nude.’
‘I said that?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Chrissy laughed. ‘I probably read it somewhere. Some magazine.’
‘But is it true?’
‘Yes, I think so. More or less, anyway.’
‘So explain.’
Chrissy screwed the lid down on the stovetop pot and set it on the gas.
‘Naked, it’s like ordinary, everyday. In the bathroom, the shower. Or, you know, when you’re with someone. But nude, it’s … well, it’s professional, for one thing. The way it’s set up, everything. Posing for a group especially. When it’s for someone on their own, just the one person, I suppose that’s a bit different, or it can be, but with a class you’re the model and they’re the artists, well, trying to be, and what they’re doing – they might be sketching or painting, whatever – what they’re concentrating on, it’s not really you, not you at all – you could be a bunch of flowers or some old vase or something – what they’re concentrating on is getting it right, getting it down properly. They don’t even see you, most of the time. Just bits of you. A knee or an arm …’
‘A breast?’
‘Yes, but not …’ She paused to turn up the flame. ‘The way they look at you, it’s not … If they were looking at you as if you were naked, you’d know, believe me.’