They’d gone through the preliminaries together, earlier in the year – the strange formality of registering with the clinic and the comedic evenings spent poring over the catalogue of potential donors – but then Alice had got cold feet, hadn’t even wanted to talk about it anymore, and between Henry’s decline and the build-up to the Morris Prize the subject had faded from view. But not from Lou’s mind. In the end, almost on the spur of the moment, she’d gone back to the clinic alone. As her father lay dying, the idea of bringing new life into the world had possessed her: no, that wasn’t quite true. Nor was it true that her cool legal mind had reckoned up the pros and cons, the chances of success on the first attempt, the likelihood that Alice would see things differently once the deed was done. Lou was by no means sure of that now. It was as if the unquestioning correspondence between the two of them had been unsettled; as if more had changed in Lou herself than that clump of cells deep in her belly.
Hauling herself up at last, Lou stood for a few moments in front of the sink, scrutinising herself in the mirror. She looked pale, her dark hair hanging flat against her face. Not much like a guest of honour at a glamorous reception, she thought, not that she gave a fig about that. There were plenty of people out there to glitter and twitter, glancing over their shoulders to see who was watching, who was listening. Even from her corner, she’d heard the Art Today article about the shortlist quoted several times, along with opinions about this being the year for peace not violence, for a return to conventional modes of representation, for work that reflected the global financial crisis. She attempted a smile in the mirror, and heard an echo of her father’s voice. Hang in there, it said. Too bad you can’t smoke at these things anymore.
Lou made her way back towards the gallery more steadily than she had left it. It seemed vital now to find Alice while the need to confide was still urgent and before nausea overtook her again. As she pushed open the door, the noise of chatter and laughter burst out at her: across the room, she heard a shrill exclamation, and some trick of the mind shaped the words into the sound of her father’s name. Lou stopped. So many people, she thought. But as she searched the crowd, there, miraculously, mysteriously, was Alice, coming towards her. Alice unusually elegant in her green silk trousers and long jacket, but still her Alice, solid and comforting, more familiar these days than Lou’s own reflection.
For a few seconds Lou’s sense of relief was so strong that she didn’t register Alice’s expression, nor wonder at the coincidence of her approach. She swayed slightly, grasping at the wall again to counter a moment of giddiness, and lifted her eyes to meet Alice’s gaze. But before she could speak, before they were close enough to touch, Alice began talking instead.
‘My darling,’ she said. ‘I need to show you something. I should have told you about it, but I didn’t. I’m sorry; I was very wrong.’
*
Someone had found Kitty a chair and a glass of water, while news of her reaction to the Bacchus statue spread in murmured ripples around her. As the first shock receded, Kitty felt several different things at once: embarrassment about the scene she’d made, and grief, and anger too, of course – but it wasn’t entirely clear to her who she was angry with, or what about. A feeling that was hard to explain, but which was strangely familiar to Kitty.
She’d thought the Morris Prize show would be a pleasant diversion; that art and sophisticated company and free champagne were just what she needed. The last thing she’d expected was to have her father thrust forcibly back into view, and in a way that managed to capture both his less admirable side – the bit Kitty was trying hard to forget – and his pathetic vulnerability at the end. Surely she should be angry with Alice, then, for doing this without telling them – certainly without telling Kitty?
Alice had talked a lot, for her, about this collection. It had been a welcome distraction during those awful weekends before Henry died, when they’d all drifted around Orchards like ghosts. Henry had been intrigued by Alice’s sketches and the photos of sculptures in progress – a special concession, that, because Alice was usually so reticent about her work. They’d all been grateful for the pleasure it had given him.
Kitty had thought she knew what to expect this evening, anyway. The collection was called Neomythia. Alice called the pieces exposés of myth, by which she meant exposés of what happened to women in myth. Greek and Roman artists, she said, presented the victims of rape without regard for their suffering. She showed them photographs: Leda resting an arm on the sinuous body of the swan while lifting her cloak compliantly; Danae reclining on a couch with breasts casually bared, gazing up at Zeus’s shower of golden confetti; Europa kneeling provocatively on the back of the bull. What message did that send to male aggressors down the centuries, she’d demanded? Henry, frail and shrunken by now, had smiled in a way that conveyed both admiration for Alice’s protest and a pang of regret for the passing of his own days as a red-blooded male.
And now here they were, Alice’s portrayals of female bodies deformed and degraded by assault: women cowering beneath giant wings, strangled by snakes and stoned by meteorites. Beside the video screens and fussy assemblages of the other finalists, they looked majestic and magnificent. Kitty had wandered from one to the other with a pleasing sense of understanding and of association. She was Alice’s sister-in-law, a woman signed up to the fight against oppression. Surely Alice would win, and they would all have something to celebrate at last after the long months of illness and death.
Then she’d come upon Alice’s final piece. Audacious, the people around her were saying, to include it. A male figure, withered and alone, rendered with the same sensitivity as the tyrannised women. A defeated Bacchus, his breast ravaged by a pestilence that no intoxication, no wild hope nor creative force could cure. Kitty shuddered, remembering the moment of recognition, the sudden shaft of understanding. A dying roué with the face and hair and thickset torso of her father.
The gaggle of well-wishers around her was drifting away now to other encounters and conversations. Fragments of laughter rose like spray from the sea of chatter, darting briefly towards the high ceiling before falling back to be lost amid the babble. She was all alone, Kitty thought suddenly. Where was Lou? Where was Flora? She looked towards the door, towards the table stacked with bottles and glasses, towards Bacchus on his plinth. And then, as someone shifted in the crowd, she saw Alice leading Lou towards him.
‘Oh dear,’ she said aloud, although there was no one to hear her. ‘I don’t think Lou knows. I don’t think Alice has told her.’
*
Lou saw her sister’s face an instant before her father’s. Kitty looked almost as white as the Carrara marble Alice liked best to work with, but Lou had only a fleeting impression of her sister’s expression before the statue snatched her attention away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said – or at least, Lou assumed that was what she was saying. For a few moments, as she stared at the statue, she could hear nothing but the clang of recognition.
‘It’s a good likeness,’ she said eventually. Other words revolved in her mind, lots of different words, but none of them reached her tongue. She looked from the sculpture to Alice, then to Kitty.
‘A bit of a shock,’ Kitty said. ‘Hadn’t you seen it?’
Lou shook her head. She wondered how – when – Alice had worked on the piece. Had she studied Henry’s features during those weekend visits before he died? Or found some photographs, perhaps?
‘Have you seen Flora?’ Kitty asked now.
‘No.’
Lou put a hand on Kitty’s shoulder. She could feel her sister trembling: both of them, she thought, ridiculously undone by the old devil’s death – or by his unexpected reappearance. She wondered whether Kitty was thinking, as she was, of that other portrait of Henry, Nicholas Comyn’s sketch of him as a young man, which hung in the hall at Orchards. It was partly the resemblance to that which was so disconcerting. The resemblance and the difference – and the uncharacteristic callousnes
s of what Alice had done. Although it was more complicated than that. The tenderness of the portrait hurt almost as much as the criticism implied by representing her father as the libertine Bacchus.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said again, and it was clear that she was: even sorrier than she needed to be, Lou thought. Henry would have been delighted. He’d have taken the whole thing in his stride in the name of art. He’d always been strangely immune to suffering. But Kitty wasn’t; Kitty looked shattered.
As she cast about for something to say, Lou’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Kitty reached for hers at the same moment.
‘Mum.’ Kitty stared at the screen. ‘She’s not coming. She’s staying in France.’
Lou felt something echoing down the years: a particular, guarded kind of disappointment. ‘With the cousin?’ she asked.
‘No – Calais, it says. She must have started for home then changed her mind.’
Lou’s eyes rested for a moment on her sister. Kitty was dressed tonight in garishly mismatched layers, her long glass earrings catching the light as she moved. They looked nothing like each other, Kitty’s pre-Raphaelite prettiness and peach-skin complexion a stark contrast to Lou’s neat features and Italianate colouring – and they were separated, too, by nine years and a whole spectrum of choices and characteristics. But just now, it was the connection between them that struck Lou. Flesh and blood, she thought; and then she thought of the creature inside her, the chain link of generation to generation, and love and grief and distress welled up inside her.
Kitty’s eyes were on her too, her expression uncertain. She glanced again at the sculpture. ‘I don’t . . .’ she began – but she was interrupted by an exclamation behind her. A familiar voice, followed almost at once by a familiar face.
‘Good Lord,’ it said. ‘It really is him, isn’t it?’
‘Landon!’
Kitty’s face filled with surprise and pleasure. And relief, Lou thought, feeling, herself, a twist of something more complicated. The present and the absent, she thought. Making do with what you had: that had always been a feature of their lives, hadn’t it?
‘Hello, dear ladies,’ Landon said. His eyes rested on each of them in turn, judging his response. He knew them well enough, Lou thought, to understand that there wasn’t to be a scene.
‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘Where’s your mother?’
‘In France still,’ said Kitty. ‘She’s decided to stay a bit longer. I didn’t know you were coming, Landon. Do you know Alice?’
Lou turned, her eyes meeting Alice’s briefly. They’d met at Henry’s funeral, but . . .
‘Alice Zellner,’ she said, ‘Landon Peverell. Landon is – was – Henry’s oldest friend. He’s –’
‘I know who Landon is,’ Alice said. She looked straight at him in the way she did with new people; the way Lou found, at different times, admirable or endearing or a little embarrassing. Not unlike the way a blind person might trace a stranger’s features with their fingers, storing them away for future reference. ‘I heard you sing at the Proms once,’ she said. ‘The Mozart Requiem.’
‘And of course I can return the compliment.’ Landon smiled. ‘Congratulations: it’s an impressive collection. Very powerful, the Bacchus. The – tumour.’
‘Breast cancer,’ said Lou. Her voice shook a little, perhaps not enough for anyone else to hear it. ‘You know that, of course. Henry died of breast cancer.’
November 1977
Flora stands on the landing, looking down into the hall. She feels nothing like a junior doctor tonight, an aspiring surgeon whom her colleagues are fast learning not to underestimate. She feels like Scarlett O’Hara, like Elizabeth Bennet, like Juliet Capulet. She has always been told she is pretty, even beautiful, and for the first time she’s glad of it. She’s wearing a new dress and has dried her short hair carefully, so that it looks sleeker and more stylish than usual. When she hears the doorbell she takes a step backward, counting to three before she starts down the stairs.
Henry looks rumpled, as he did the last time she saw him. As he always does, she will soon learn. His clothes are well cut, but casually worn and rarely pressed.
‘Hello,’ he says, with a smile that seems to convey a multitude of other things – to acknowledge what cannot be said in her parents’ house. ‘Are you ready?’
Another thing Flora hasn’t quite understood yet, but which undoubtedly contributes to her electric state of anticipation: her defences have never been challenged, as far as men are concerned. The men she deals with day by day at the hospital treat her with care, like an unfamiliar and possibly dangerous animal. It’s clear to Flora that a certain vigilance is required on both sides to keep at bay the prejudice and fear lurking below the surface of professional courtesy, but she is quite happy with this state of affairs. The men whom her mother invites to parties to tempt her with are a different species, requiring no vigilance of any kind.
Her mother doesn’t so much disapprove of Flora’s career as ignore it: she treats it as a phase Flora will grow out of. She gets on, undaunted, with finding her a suitable husband, and Flora pays as little attention as she can. But the irony – one of many ironies in their relationship, as she will realise in due course – is that Flora met Henry as a result of her mother’s implacable social engineering. Henry was brought to one of Diana Macintyre’s famous parties by Landon Peverell. Diana has always regarded Landon – the son of her oldest friend – as a diverting addition to her soirées, and if he isn’t quite the pinnacle of her aspirations for her daughter, the fact that they have known each other since babyhood means there’s little risk that he’ll distract Flora from the reliable young men from Lloyd’s and Cazenove and Hoare Govett. Men like Derek Nicolson, whose engagement to her sister Jean – two years younger than Flora, and suitably equipped with a nannying qualification – has just been announced in The Telegraph.
Friends of Landon’s are usually welcome at Diana’s parties, but Flora could tell at once that her mother disapproved of Henry. He seemed to Flora very much like the rest – his clothes and his manner and his accent indistinguishable from those of the favoured candidates for her hand – but some antenna of her mother’s was piqued, and it was this (another irony) that made Flora look twice at him.
‘This is Henry Jones,’ Landon said, ‘we were at university together,’ and Flora smiled in a way she rarely smiled, especially at men.
‘Enchanté,’ said Henry, perfectly poised between sincerity and self-parody. ‘I’ve heard all about you, of course.’
For the next few hours Flora played along with his flirtation, embroiling herself in a game of tease whose complexity she underestimated. When he said goodbye at the end of the evening she felt a revelation come over her like a physical change. Lying in bed that night, she traced the outline of his face in her mind’s eye, straining her memory for his tone of voice and the twist of his smile. The next day at the hospital she wasn’t just distracted, but well-nigh oblivious to the patients in front of her, the bodies laid bare on the operating table. She’d had no practice; built up no immunity. She was like a Pacific island encountering measles for the first time.
‘Henry Jones telephoned,’ her mother said, when she got home the next evening.
Flora nodded, revealing nothing. Glancing at the hall table, she could see there was no phone number beside Henry’s name on the message pad, but she knew he would call again.
*
‘I thought we’d go to Rules,’ Henry says, when they are in the taxi.
‘Lovely,’ says Flora. She has no idea what Rules is, but the name conjures something grown up and expensive. She’s conscious of the lingering scent of surgical scrub on her hands, despite the overlay of bath salts. Forever afterwards, anticipation will smell to her of iodine and lavender.
Rules is grown up and expensive, but it’s also splendidly old-fashioned, with a menu full of game and potted shrimps. They sit in a corner, beneath a row of hunting prints. Henry orders champagne and oy
sters, their flesh and serum texture steeped in sexual allusion and giddyingly redolent, too, of the body cavities Flora is familiar with.
‘Here’s to us,’ Henry says, as she lifts the first oyster to her lips, and she smiles at him and swallows, a woman who can handle anything.
3
The sun was sinking as the ferry chuntered south again across the Channel. The clouds sprawled like rumpled bedclothes across the horizon were marbled now with pink and gold: a backdrop, Flora thought, for a scene of high romance. But even as her heart swelled with the exhilaration of escape, misgivings were starting to gather in her mind. The temperature was falling, and she shivered as she stared out at the same stretch of sea she’d crossed once already today.
What had she done? Half an hour ago it had seemed audacious, even admirable, to seize the moment with this grand gesture of liberation. But now, with the light fading and no idea where she was going, it felt more like the wild, futile protest of a child, slipping through the garden gate to run away from home.
In a crowded gallery in London, Lou and Kitty would soon be asking each other where she was. Why hadn’t she texted them from Dover? Had she thought, somehow, that her impulsive wish wouldn’t come true, and that she’d find herself, after all, heading towards London on the M20? The last of the momentum that had swept her back onto the ferry slid away now with the same disorientating lurch as the boat’s swaying movement. In its place there was a glimmer of something cold and unfamiliar that felt uncannily like remorse.
*
The hotel room was large but plain: white walls, floral curtains in subdued colours, bedspread to match. There was a chest of drawers and a little desk and chair, all made from the same dark, sober wood, and an expanse of polished wooden floor. She’d been lucky to find it, Flora thought. A Google search on her iPhone had spared her the cheerless welcome of the Formule Un or the Ibis. Even so, she felt stranded: cast on her own resources in a way she hadn’t faced, quite this starkly, in the weeks since Henry’s death. The man on the desk had expressed neither surprise nor pleasure at her late arrival, and she hadn’t spoken to anyone else since the ferry docked at Calais. It occurred to her that no one in the world expected anything of her anymore.
The Things You Do for Love Page 3