About this blog

'Naked Gardening for the Over-fifties' is my latest novel, which I will be serialising on this blog with a new chapter posted every day. If you like what you're reading, please consider heading over to FeedARead to buy the paperback. Thank you, and happy reading! (Click on 'read more' at the bottom of the page to see the chapters I have posted so far.)

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I woke late that morning to the sound of a radio discussion. The studio guests were doing the nudge-nudge, wink-wink thing about Naked Gardening Day. I had never heard of such a thing. Yesterday had been all sleet and snow flurries and I’d had to switch the heating back on. Naked Gardening? Good God. What a thought.

The bed was empty, meaning Bill had already left to pick up his new car. I wondered if lard was the answer. You could slather it all over yourself, like a cross-channel swimmer, to keep out the cold. I could ask Bill to do the lard slapping, but he would refuse without giving it a second thought, as his first consideration would be the car. He wouldn’t want a lardy wife inside his sparkly new car.

Bill was out of the question. So how does one find a good larder? This is the sort of thing I could have asked my mother if she’d still been alive, but she’d have said, ‘What, as in a pantry?’ I could just hear her now: irritated by the question, ready to snap at my stupid domesticity. Wishing I was more like my sister. I shook the thought out of my head.

The bedroom had been chilly, but the bathroom was red hot. I stood next to the radiator for ages before realising I was just standing doing nothing, mind a blank. For heaven’s sake, I was fifty-five years old—did I intend to spend the last few decades of my life standing vacantly in a warm bathroom? The prospect was scarily attractive. Back in the bedroom, I looked out of the window at the starlings that had lined up on the church roof. Thirty-five. I counted them all. It took a while as they wouldn’t keep still.

I got myself dressed eventually and nearly fell downstairs through sheer absentmindedness. There was a loaf of bread in the kitchen. I stood staring at it, saying ‘fuck-fuckety-fuck’ quietly, but meaning every syllable, as I tried to work up the energy to make breakfast. The loaf was soft and white, and the knife too sharp. I grew over-confident and clumsy, cut myself, and sucked my finger hard to stop the bleeding. My mind raced back through the last six months, all the silent accusations, all the fights that should have happened to clear the air, but didn’t, because I didn’t have the energy. I took the finger out of my mouth and examined the pale flap of skin. The blood was gathering beneath it, so I held the hand above my head, feeling foolish. Hand down, I assessed the damage. The fat blob of blood made me think of last night’s pork chops; the red oozing out of the bone, forming a bubble, turning purple, black. I needed sticking plaster, two strips, one to go one way, the other to go across and hold it down. Maybe another across that one at a diagonal. No. That would mean infinite strips, each holding the previous one in place. It would never end. I tested my fingertip on the table, tapping with care. Two uneven slices of bread lay next to me. I ought to wash the bread knife straight away. Couldn’t see any blood, but it would be there. Didn’t fancy toast anymore, so I threw the bread in the bin and ate a musty hard-boiled egg from the fridge instead.

Bill arrived back at ten o’clock. I dreaded having to show an interest in the car; dreaded him metaphorically patting me on the head if I did, when all I really wanted to do, I now realised, was go out into the garden, naked, one cold May morning and dig and be joyous—ecstatic, even. Was that too much to ask? When had I last been ecstatic? Various ghosts crowded my memories, ex-boyfriends, and others whom I’d longed for, one in particular who’d belonged to my sister, but the memory scared me. I’d settled for Bill, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember why, unless it was something to do with the dogs. He’d had a dachshund called Edna and I’d had a Labrador called Madge and they’d fallen for each other on first sight. Or smell. The first smell is the deepest.   

Bill had parked the new car in front of the house so that the neighbours would see and was standing so close it looked as if he was hiding an erection. Peter Thornley from opposite had come out and his dog was barking. It knew. I sniggered. Peter tugged on the lead and hurried away, dragging Izzy the Airedale behind him. Bill stopped polishing the car with his groin, gave the roof a little pat and came inside.

‘What do you think!’ he said.

‘It’s red.’

Bill seemed pleased to have had any kind of a response from me and proceeded to reel off the specifications. I didn’t listen. Once he’d run out of things to say about it, he stood there, exultant, waiting for me to speak. We conversed so rarely these days, but I didn’t want to talk to him, and certainly not about his bloody car.

‘I want you to rub lard all over me tomorrow for Naked Gardening Day,’ I said.

What Bill didn’t realise was that I had just asked him the most important question in the entire history of our marriage, and his answer would determine the course of our lives from now until the end of time.

I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me, but perhaps he was having problems processing the words.

‘It’s a nice car,’ I said after a bit, wondering if I’d said the naked gardening thing out loud or not.

After a pause that was too long, he reeled off some more half-hearted specifications, pulled his belly in and asked if I’d like a cup of tea.

The awful, awful thing was that I wanted a cup of tea with all my heart, I needed something hot and comforting and utterly desirable, and he’d offered me the one thing that was his to give and mine to receive, so I went across and hugged him and meant it, and he responded with such warmth I was at a loss to know what to say or do, but tomorrow I would dress in my warmest jumper, with woolly tights under my jeans, and I’d dig the garden for all of five minutes and then I’d come in and say it was far too cold, and could we go for a spin in the new car? And he’d be so happy, he’d have no idea that something was broken beyond repair.

Bill made the tea and gave me my cup, but he took his outside, presumably to share it with the car as he’d get more conversation out there. I stayed in the kitchen with the vague idea of preparing something for lunch. I started chopping red cabbage, far too quickly, the knife slipped—again! I’d taken a slice of skin off my fingertip, and this time I was insanely furious. I didn’t stop for a plaster, I kept chopping, harder, faster, harder, dammit! I stopped myself just in time, threw the knife down and stood back from it, terrified by a vision of myself hacking at that last finger joint, grabbing and twisting it, feeling the sharp pain—but then it would be off, and I’d look down, breathless and excited, and oh, the slow ache... the beautiful slow ache and the rush of blood on the chopping board, and I would never make red coleslaw again, he had never loved me anyway.

I wiped my hands carefully and threw the mangled cabbage in the bin. We could have a tin of soup for lunch. I didn’t need to chop up anything, but it was too early to be making lunch. I thought of getting my watercolours out but couldn’t raise much enthusiasm. Bill likes the fact that I do them. My “daubs” he calls them—very Brideshead. It’s what we ladies do, apparently, because it’s either that or something soul-destroying like decoupage or counted cross-stitch. I had accepted a generous redundancy package from the firm last year, so I was now a lady of endless, agonising leisure, but I wasn’t alone, thank God. My best friend Renée was also at a loose end now, and had taken up art for no good reason that I could see, until she admitted to an ulterior motive. She tried to blush but didn’t quite pull it off. Her smirk turned into a deep-throated chortle that gave her hiccups. Renée has class, she has style, but she’s also a complete fake. Apart from the broken heart—that’s real enough. A decade or so ago there was a man, very much her junior as far as I can make out. The relationship lasted six months which was a record for Renée, but at the end of it all she’d been more cut up than I’d ever known, and had gone running to a much older man, an old flame called John, about whom she never said much except that he’d been too embroiled with someone else, and—that’s Renée all over. Emotional crisis after emotional crisis. But now it was art, apparently; art was going to save her.

She’d been going to a class every Wednesday night in the village hall and was trying to get me to come along. They were doing trees next week with a special guest tutor, and would I like to give it a go? I did flowers, after all, so weren’t trees the next step? No, they weren’t, I said, but yes, why not, sounds like fun—which it didn’t, but Bill and I were going through one of our phases of ignoring each other, so I went along to the class, and oh God! Why did I do that? I think the trees were the catalyst for everything that followed. I often wonder what would have happened to us all if I’d never gone to that ruddy class.

The tutor was from Eastern Europe I think, judging by the accent, and I found him very hard to understand, but the words didn’t matter as his pencil skated across the paper. First, he drew a lollipop, which he coloured in, and I thought, ridiculous—this is primary school stuff. But then came another lollipop, less regular, with mottled shading, slower, done with more care. I shifted in my chair and clutched my pencil, attempting to draw a line, but my hand was shaking. The tutor drew the lollipop again, this time covering it in ovals, then branches, shading behind the shapes, the further ones dark. It swelled into life. He started another with rougher, wilder edges, depths and highlights—I watched his hand, its light touch on the pencil, the hairs on his arm, his fingers, then the life in the tree, the branches reaching out. My fingers tugged at my hair and I knew I would have to grow it long again. I tried to think about drawing trees, but all I could see was the way his neck grew out of the darkness of his shirt.

Renée thought it was all too funny, called me a little slapper, and told me I must come back next week—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d shocked myself with the revival of urges that reminded me of too many intensely difficult times in my teens, so I was determined not to go back until the tree project was over and they had a different tutor.

We settled back into our old routines. Bill kept himself busy making love to his new car, especially on a Sunday morning with a hosepipe and chamois leather, while I did whatever it was I did all day, which filled the time but left me dying for the night so that I could go to sleep and shut it all out. This was until Renée told me the class was back to its usual lady tutor, and they’d had some models in so that they could do life-drawing.  

‘What’s it like?’ I said.

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘You should see them. We get these enormous ladies and flaccid men,’

‘Renée!’

‘Yes, really, and it’s hilarious the first few times, but then you get into the drawing and the painting of great slabs of flesh and it’s hideous and mesmerising; you can’t stop. Moyra’s really into it, and I’m having a laugh.’

‘I’m tempted.’

When I told Bill I was thinking of joining Renée’s life drawing classes, he said, ‘What, nudes?’

‘Yes, that’s what “life drawing” means.’

‘No. You can’t, not on a Wednesday. We’re going round to Peter and Mandy for dinner next week, and I’m sure there’s something else the following week.’ He checked on his phone and managed to fabricate some more petty engagements. ‘Why would you want to draw people anyway?’ he said. It wasn’t hot, but there was a distinct sheen to his forehead. ‘You’re good at flowers. Stick with them.’

I couldn’t remember Bill ever taking so much of an interest in what I painted and was amazed he even knew it was flowers. And trees. No, don’t think about the trees. I could have argued back about the need to expand my skillset, but I didn’t have the will. He was back to tapping away at his computer anyway, so that was that.

Nakedness, you see. That was the crux of the matter. Bill and I didn’t do nakedness anymore. We had long ceased to conjoin our bodies in any meaningful way. I couldn’t remember the last time, and I didn’t want to try. What if it was, like, twenty years ago? Dear God! Come to think of it, I didn’t want to look at anyone else’s wobbly bits, far less study them in the minutest detail for drawing purposes.

I phoned Renée and said sorry, but we had too much on.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said, ‘but you could still do some life drawing. Ask Bill to pose.’

‘No!’

‘Or you could do it yourself.’

‘What, hold a paintbrush and look in a mirror and squint at myself in the nuddy?’

‘No, silly—you photograph yourself naked, but you work fully dressed. Unless you want to paint naked, naturally. There’s a group show in August. I could get you into that if you like.’

‘What sort of show?’

‘Naked Selfies: a celebration of the mature woman.’

‘Heavens! Are you doing it?’

‘We all are. The whole class. Even Moyra.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Frances?’ she said.

I waited for a clap of thunder. A sign, anything. I looked out of the window at the apple tree. A blackbird did a shit, a great white plop of stuff. The tree shivered, but that was probably the breeze. Naked gardening. I wasn’t going to get a sign.

‘Okay. I’m game.’ I had no idea why I’d said that other than the excruciating boredom that was hurting more than childbirth.

‘Excellent! I’ll pick you up for class next Wednesday. You can get some practice in before you try doing a selfie. Darling, it really is fun. Believe me.’

‘No, I can’t come to the class. But I will do the selfie. Promise.’

‘Good girl! Can’t wait to see it.’

‘Yeah… me too. I think.’

I stared at the phone and wondered what fresh hell I’d committed myself to, but something in me was stirring, some vague interest in the project.

I waited until Bill had to be away for a couple of nights for some sort of research for his writing, as I didn’t want to risk his head  unexpectedly popping round the door to ask me what in the name of all that was holy did I think I was doing. Once the coast was clear, I washed my not-nearly-long-enough-but-getting-there salt and pepper hair, and finger-dried it into natural waves. I didn’t brush it as I wanted to go for a wild, mad, witchy look. This couldn’t be a painting of the real me, but that wasn’t a problem as I was invisible these days, so any honesty could only result in a blank canvas.

I rummaged in the attic and found the quilt, a wedding present, satin, birds of paradise—we’d never dared use it, too exquisite, too sensuous. I set up the tripod and camera, disported myself upon the bed with the quilt as an exotic background, looked up and waited the endless twenty seconds for it to take the picture. 

But the result… oh God. I pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs, opened a decent merlot and drank a large glass very quickly. The kitchen was toasty warm, thanks to something slow and comforting in the oven, and the vinyl floor felt silky smooth under the soles of my feet. I went back upstairs, taking the bottle with me, poured myself another glass and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror to take stock. Ankles slightly swollen, as they always were, but I could easily sit on the bed in such a way that they didn’t show. Knees knobbly and wrinkly, true, but bending them would smooth them out. Thinnish legs, but too much obvious cellulite towards the top. Pubes ridiculous, thanks to not trimming in living memory. Belly wrinkled due to a long-ago pregnancy that felt like it belonged to a different life. Belly button looking oddly like a smiley face, but more resting bitch face than grin. I sniggered at that and took another slurp of wine. Tits okay, all things considered, but unimpressive nipples. Could do something about that with ice cubes, but bugger that, I was warm now and wanted to stay that way. I took another swig of wine and stuck my tongue out. It looked dark red and dangerous thanks to the merlot. I put my hand down to my pubes and straightened out a hair to see how long it really was. Snorted with laughter. Went back to the bedroom still giggling and took a photo of myself proudly demonstrating the extraordinary length of my hair. The picture was ridiculous. Aging drunken floozy doing something mildly distasteful. I sat on the edge of the bed and willed myself to cry, but nothing happened, because dammit, I was enjoying this too much. Needed to be sensible though, take this seriously for Renée’s sake.

There was an old violin in a dusty case on top of the wardrobe. I’d played it years ago, got to Grade Three before giving up. Bill had always found a reason to go out when I practised and had taken to staying out for longer and longer, though I’m not sure I could entirely blame the violin for that. I wouldn’t be able to play a note now, didn’t want to, but that didn’t matter. I got it down and had a look. The poor old thing was battered, and one shoulder had had a bad repair—couple of strings were broken and had kinks in them, reminding me of my rogue pubes. I would use the violin as a prop; a symbol of something old that was once beautiful, that could be done up if someone only knew how, that could play beautifully in the hands of an expert, with an appearance only enhanced by its ancient patina. The bathroom was deliciously warm—best room in the house, always, so that’s where we went, me and my poor, sad old violin. I stood in there, bum on the radiator, and daydreamed for a bit. Could have stayed there forever, but I had a picture to take, so I put the loo seat down, sat on it, held the violin on my lap and looked down at it with affection. The camera timer did its thing. The result didn’t make me feel the need to scream, so that was a distinct improvement.  

Once I’d got dressed, I uploaded the photo to my laptop and photoshopped out the corner of the toilet. An icy shiver trickled down my spine. I imagined Bill’s What the hell do you think you’re doing? Fuck you, Bill. Fuck you. I’m doing this for me, not you. This is who I really am. This matters.

I did nothing more with the picture until a week later. Bill was going for a run out to the coast in the new car, and did I want to come? He was too obviously pleased when I said no thanks, so I wondered who it was that lived at the coast. Could’ve been the woman from Seaham, but his current love interest lived in Aycliffe, surely, which was miles from the coast. Maybe he really did want to look at the sea and remind himself of our distant dysfunctional holidays in Brighton.

I knew I had hours, whoever he was seeing, so I set up my easel and the laptop and copied the photo faithfully to a linen canvas, putting all my years of experience into the act. This was why I had practised botanical illustration; this was why I had spent all that time drawing flowers with such painstaking accuracy; it was so that I would manage the ultimate flower, the most exquisite and perfect representation of fecundity and sexuality—me. I didn’t paint feverishly; I painted meticulously, I painted in a quiet Fuck you, Bill kind of a way, I painted the me he had never seen, and never would because I was damned if I was ever going to share this picture with him.

It needed another three sessions, so took a few weeks, but I finished it in the nick of time, and it was glorious. As I cleaned the brush for the last time, I was convinced I loved the painting more than I had ever loved Bill. I put the paints away and had a little cry and drank half a bottle of wine and poured the rest down the sink and then cried again, but the next day I was itching to start living again, and oh God, the relief.                                                                                                                                                                                                          

CHAPTER TWO

  

I didn’t have the nerve to hand the painting in at the same time as everyone else in the class. This amused Renée, but I think she understood.

‘Okay darling,’ she said. ‘No worries, we’ll have a girlie night out, just you, me and Moyra, and you can bring the painting along, give it to me, and I’ll take it in with my own.’

When I told her I didn’t really do “girlie”, she said, ‘Oh, but you’ve got to meet Moyra properly—you’ve hardly spoken to her.’

There was a good reason for that. I’d seen the woman at a distance on a couple of occasions, and found her most off-putting; awkward and ungainly, with a hard, unsmiling face. I had no idea why someone like her would be friends with Renée. When I’d asked Renée about this, she’d simply said, ‘Because of Toby’ which hadn’t meant much to me at the time, and Renée obviously hadn’t wanted to elaborate, but later I remembered that Toby had been the youth with whom she’d had that six-month fling. I’d seen a photo of him, and he’d been an Adonis who looked like Michelangelo’s “David”, so what that had to do with the oddly military and lopsided Moyra, I had no idea. The thought of doing anything “girlie” with Moyra gave me hives, so I put my foot down, and said I’d only hand the picture over to Renée, as I didn’t know Moyra well enough to be comfortable with her. Renée smiled and shook her head, but the arrangements were made, and we met for the hand-over at a lively Irish pub, where the music was loud and the conversation louder. We shouted at each other and almost communicated, but the place was too loud and so crowded I felt myself shrinking into non-existence. Any minute now I’d slip off my chair onto the floor and someone would stand on me and I’d be squidged out of existence and that would be that.

But it had to be done. I had bought a frame for the picture over the internet, as there was no way I could take a naked image of myself to my usual framers. They were used to seeing my botanical illustrations and knew me by name. I’d even had to avert my own eyes when fixing the picture into the off-the-shelf frame and had been relieved when I’d wound a roll of bubble wrap around it. I didn’t have a carrier bag large enough, so I spent a happy ten minutes on the floor with a pair of scissors and some duct tape, along with a length of tough plastic sheeting I’d found in the garage. It made a very passable bag that was waterproof and strong. Ample protection for the masterpiece. 

The intention when I arrived was to hand it over, have a quick social drink, and then go home. There couldn’t be any conversation in here, just shouting, and that was no fun. We would meet up again socially in a coffee shop next week. But it didn’t quite work out like that. I was drinking a pint of bitter and Renée was on something made with peaches and schnapps, possibly, though I wasn’t certain, and she shouted, ‘Let’s see it then,’ so I handed it over. She peered inside the bag, or rather she tried to, but I’d used so much tape she couldn’t get anywhere near it. She handed it back.

‘You’d better unwrap it,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t want to damage it.’

And I was about to say, ‘What, here? In the middle of a crowded pub?’ but that would have required her to answer, which I didn’t want, so I took a long draft of my beer, which was at that moment the most delicious thing I had ever tasted in my life. I pointed at it and shouted at her, ‘What’s this?’ because I could see the hand pumps and have more than a passing interest in craft beers. This was a pointless delaying tactic. She shook her head to indicate she had no idea, being a woman who drank Peach Schnapps, but she gestured at the picture, and dammit, I was going to have to do it. I took a large gulp of the nectar, and carefully opened up the bag, undid layers upon layers of bubble wrap, pulled out the picture, handed it across to her. She looked at it carefully, then grinned at me, and shouted, ‘You know, that’s really good. I’m so pleased.’

And so was I. Gods, I was pleased. But I was also pleased when she handed it back to me so that I could wrap it up again, which I did hurriedly and messily but at least it was done. By the time she had it back, fully wrapped, I was shaking and exhausted, and thinking, oh shit. Bill! What had I done to Bill? I shouldn’t have done this. But I drank the rest of my beer and thought, bugger Bill. He was big enough to cope.

We left the pub, and went our separate ways, me with the conviction that I had done the right thing, probably, and if I happened to wake up once or twice in the middle of the night in a panic, that was just silliness. I’d get over it.

Renée had persuaded me to come down to the exhibition opening. I felt I ought to tell Bill where I was going, so I did, but I didn’t ask him to accompany me, and I didn’t tell him, though I think he guessed, what sort of art was in the show. We’d reached an impasse where we had a sticky sort of agreement that we wouldn’t go anywhere together if we could possibly help it. That way we might survive this crisis, though what would be on the other side I had no idea. It’s not that we weren’t talking, but we were so utterly safe when we did speak, we might as well not have bothered. We avoided gardening because the word “naked” was still hanging in the air. We absolutely couldn’t talk about what I’d been painting for the same reason. I had no interest in his car, so he stopped mentioning it as he got no intelligent response. It didn’t leave much. Just, ‘What time are you likely to be in for dinner?’ and so on.

The big day came, and I dressed carefully and quietly in a charcoal jumper and newish jeans, so that I was smart enough but wouldn’t draw any attention to myself. I thought of a floaty scarf, but didn’t want to look self-consciously “arty”, and anyway it would make my neck itch and the end would go in my wine. I have a clumsy gene that guarantees that sort of thing. Renée would be there, so I’d have a friend to cling to. Moyra would be there too, most likely. I was feeling guilty about my reactions to her, which I knew were borne of jealousy. She was Renée’s friend, and I wanted Renée for myself. I’d never been one for close-knit groups of buddies, but if we were to invite a third party in, I didn’t want it to be Moyra. I wanted someone quiet and friendly. Moyra scared me, though I couldn’t work out exactly why.

The show was in a smallish upstairs gallery and was very discreetly advertised on the door outside. I arrived half an hour late, determined to avoid the embarrassment of standing around on my own peering at a load of garishly painted naked women. I had no illusions about the quality of the artwork that would be on offer. I’d seen people in the art class who had completely misinterpreted the tree tutor, and were still painting forests of arboreal lollipops, so what they would make of their own bodies, I dreaded to think.

Renée was already there when I arrived, but so was Moyra, as off-putting as ever, with her iron-grey hair like a helmet, and ill-fitting jeans with inappropriate embroidered flowers on them, something I might have worn in the seventies but certainly not now. On her they looked sad and wrong. I could hear her across the room. She had a deepish voice and an odd way of talking, somehow angular, and she moved in an angular way too, yet Renée always referred to her with such affection, exquisite, beautiful Renée—I just didn’t get it.    

The two were deep in conversation, so I turned away. I took the proffered cheap red wine and walked around, checking out the pictures. They were almost all excruciatingly bad, which was a relief. I would have hated for this show to be good and for it to go on tour, and for the whole of the country to see what I had produced, and what Bill had refused to see. There were exceptions though. A large pen and ink drawing drew the eye immediately—its detail was staggering. No face, but the whole torso, with every skin pore, every bit of flesh painfully alive. It was an incredibly powerful image. Renée came up as I was looking at it.

‘Like it?’

‘It’s amazing.’

‘Moyra’s.’

‘No! Really?’

‘Yes. Come and meet her. But be warned, she can be a little blunt.’

‘I know.’

Moyra was looking closely at a bit of wall that didn’t have any pictures on it, which struck me as perfectly sensible seeing as how bad most of the art was, but it was still unusual behaviour. She turned and looked at Renée but didn’t greet her. Then she looked at me, pointed at my cheek, and said: ‘What’s that?’

‘Oops…’ said Renée, quietly. ‘I did warn you,’ she whispered.

Blunt. Moyra Blunt, that’s what she should be called. Like those spies, Trilby, Morpheus and Blunt, or whatever their names had been.

‘Come on girls,’ said Renée, and she steered us both out of the crowd and down the stairs to the dimly lit shop below. ‘That’s better.’ she said. ‘Let’s introduce you two properly. Moyra, meet Frances. Frances, meet Moyra.’

I put out my hand, not knowing what else to do, and Moyra shook it, very deliberately and correctly. We stood there staring at each other, neither speaking. Renée was clearly holding back laughter.

‘So, what do we think of the exhibition?’ she said.

Neither me nor Moyra answered. She was still staring at the scar on my cheek, and I was still staring at her, wondering where she got the courage to say what everyone else was thinking.

‘Darlings! Be friends! For me!’

‘The exhibition’s a pile of shite,’ I said, ‘apart from Moyra’s drawing.’

‘And yours, yours is lovely,’ said Renée, ‘and so is mine,’ she lied: ‘Mine’s lovely, we’re all lovely.’

‘I’m not lovely,’ said Moyra, and Renée hooted with laughter. Moyra didn’t look at all put out, and at last I started to get an inkling of why Renée liked her.

‘But the rest! Oh, my dears. Tragic! Let’s smoke.’

‘I don’t.’

Moyra and I said it in unison.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Forgot.’

Renée stroked my arm and looked as if she was about to cry. It was all an act of course, but I still loved her for it.

‘Okay, in that case we’d best go back in. Sign autographs or scrawl rude messages on the wall or something.’

Moyra was still staring at my cheek. I wasn’t going to say anything. I needed to know her far better.

‘I haven’t actually seen your painting, Renée,’ I said.

‘Follow me. Gaze on my mighty works, and wonder, or whatever it is—I can never remember.’

‘Shenandoah?’ I said, the wine going to my head and my usual randomness appearing.

‘Ozymandias’, said Moyra. ‘Despair.’

‘Both!’ said Renée. ‘All three! Away you rollin’ river!’

We went back upstairs, and Renée led the way to her picture, which was a sorry thing, a dirty smudge of conté crayon that was an abstract trying to look vaguely human, but it was so badly done I didn’t know what to say.

‘Subterfuge, my dears,’ said Renée. ‘Disguise. I know I don’t look anything like that, but visitors to the gallery have no idea—they’ll look and say, oh, the poor deformed woman, how sad; how much is the painting? Oh, that’s not cheap, but we ought to buy it, we ought to encourage the poor thing.’

‘Naughty, Renée.’

‘I know! Only you and Moyra here have been honest.’

‘None of the others? Look, you can’t blame them for a lack of talent. That’s not fair. Doesn’t mean they haven’t been honest, just they don’t have the skill to show us what they wanted to say.’

‘Not so,’ she said, and she led us to one particularly nasty picture, all cerulean blue and alizarin crimson, as if the artist had read somewhere that that combination would make a rich velvety black, but had lost their nerve and kept the colours separate. This person didn’t need any great draftsman’s skills, but they needed courage. They needed to use those colours to say something, not just dot them around the canvas in a vaguely humanoid shape and hope the viewer would bring something exciting to the picture—compared to Moyra I was just a beginner at all of this, but even I knew it couldn’t happen without an honesty on the part of the artist, and this artist was scared.

‘There’s nothing of the person there other than nervousness,’ I said. ‘I feel sorry for her.’

‘Yes, the result isn’t exactly beguiling, is it. Whereas Moyra’s drawing holds nothing back at all, it’s brash, it’s honest, what you see is what you get.’

‘I don’t know any other way to do it,’ said Moyra.

‘Exactly. You are the apotheosis of honesty. Do I mean apotheosis? Nice word, I’ll use it anyway. And you, Frances, your picture is heart-breaking. So sad. I think I need to take you away on holiday. You need to get away from all of this.’

‘Don’t be silly. I can’t go on holiday.’

‘You can and you will. Moyra, you should come too, you’ll keep us sensible.’

Moyra looked shocked. ‘I don’t do holidays anymore. Dylan left me when we were on holiday. I don’t want to go on a holiday.’

‘We won’t leave you, will we Frances.’

‘Well no, but Renée—’

‘So that’s settled. Next week. Paris.’

‘Renée, don’t be absurd!’

‘Has to be next week because I have use of an apartment and we can all stay there for nothing. Here darlings, have some more wine. I don’t want to go on my own, not to Paris! Please?’

I drank up, dutifully. Moyra had been downing glasses of this weak red stuff all evening, and it didn’t appear to be having any effect on her, but I was feeling light-headed. Paris. Without Bill. Dear God! I couldn’t. Paris. With Renée and Moyra. The Golden Girls meet Sex in the City. Oh, please, no. Too pathetic.

Moyra was staring at me again and I realised I was touching the scar on my cheek.

‘It’s a cigarette burn,’ I said. ‘Someone deliberately pushed a lit cigarette onto my cheek.’

‘That wasn’t very nice of them.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

But I was thinking that Moyra was the first person who had ever asked me about this honestly and without pretence of any kind, and I wanted to tell her all about it, but Renée was getting nervous about the turn the conversation was taking.

‘Moyra, I’m sure she’ll tell you the story when she’s good and ready. And you can tell her about that last walk you had with Dylan, and we can all cry into our absinthe and be gloomy and artistic and it will be absolutely wonderful. You see, my dears; this is why we have to go.’

I took one more look round the exhibition. The paintings were awful. Now that I was slightly tiddly, I could see what Renée meant about their dishonesty. It had nothing to do with the technique. It was all about artists putting on a front and producing what they thought was safe to show. You couldn’t be an artist if you were safe. You either had to go wild and play with expectations and pull faces and laugh like Renée, all the time showing a dark underbelly of erotic possibilities, or you had to be Moyra, a pure artist, who drew precisely what she saw with terrifying honesty. I wondered what I was. At that moment, I badly wanted to show Bill my picture, but I couldn’t. I’d blown it. Should’ve read the Haynes Manual for his car so that I could’ve talked to him properly about it. If such things still existed. Probably disappeared decades ago. Buggerit. Paris, though. What could I say? What possible excuse? I’d worry about that in the morning.

‘Penny, darling?’ said Renée.

‘For my thoughts? No.’

‘Bill, I take it.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Is it so very bad?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, luvvy, we’ll have to get that sorted out, won’t we.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We won’t.’

‘Sorry. I’m not going to push. But you will come to Paris, won’t you?’

‘Hell, why not. Did I tell you Bill has a new car?’

‘No, you didn’t. Have you christened it yet?’

‘As in, have we made love on the back seat? No. We’re in our fifties. We have hips. Knees.’

Moyra looked puzzled. ‘So do people in their forties. Twenties. Tens.’

Renée roared with laughter again and hugged Moyra, who went stiff as a board and looked surprised.

We walked back together to the bus stop, but Renée said no, don’t be silly, we’ll get a taxi, her treat, and so we did. We settled in the back, and she said, ‘Tell us about Bill. How did you two meet?’

‘Do you know, I’m not even sure. Not the first time. The critical time was when we were much older, when we had dogs.’

‘Dogs?’

‘Our dogs met and fell in love. But Bill… no, I’d known him sort of for ages, because once we’d moved up north, in my teens, he was often around, larger than life, while I was always so much smaller—metaphorically speaking, that is. I was fat.’

‘I can’t imagine that, darling!’

‘Not as a small child, but by puberty I was gross. I remember being at someone’s house one time, can’t even remember who’s now—a friend of my sister’s most likely. Anyway, Bill was there with some of his mates, and I’d been skimming through a magazine and I’d come upon a photograph of a man flexing his arm. Bill saw what I was looking at and copied the pose for fun. He had freckles on his shoulders among the sprouting hairs, and oh God—how I wanted to stroke the curves of his arm, slip my fingers inside his tee-shirt, find out if he had a hairy back.’

‘Heavens! Not one of those I hope!’ said Renée.

‘No, but I didn’t find that out until much later. I did nothing. I was a mouse, I crept into corners, I didn’t reach out and grab. I scuttled away, whiskers twitching, to write it all down with a scritchy-scratch pen in a dreadful little journal.’

‘Still got it?’

‘No. Destroyed. I couldn’t bear it.’

‘Know the feeling.’

‘I’d look at Bill and think, are you a cat? Will you pounce one day? Completely wrong. Nothing catlike about Bill. I was completely baffled by him—or rather by my reaction to him. I soon forgot all about it, but there was another occasion, a few weeks after the Charles Atlas pose. We were in the kitchen and he was munching on his sandwich with the others. I was making the tea. Everyone was talking and laughing. He was the centre of everyone’s world, not just mine. He said something profound, and there was a girl there, can’t remember her name, but she was one of those unlikely blondes that one instinctively sees as a threat—and she did that thing some women do; she pushed a lock of hair behind one ear and stared at him intently, head tilted just so. I was careful not to split any of the tea bags, there being nothing worse than a mouthful of tea leaves when you don’t expect it. This was all about food and sex and desire—it was about love—but nobody could see it except for me. I remember there was a hole in the wainscoting, and I heard a scratching sound behind it. I didn’t know why I was crying, but I was thinking mice and traps, and a hawk swooped down outside. Something screamed.’

‘I feel your pain,’ said Renée, but she said it in such an arch and over-the-top way, I couldn’t help laughing, which was just what she had intended.

‘And then I genuinely forgot all about him. For years. We didn’t see him after he’d married the mermaid.’

‘Mermaid?’

‘That’s what everyone called her. I’ll tell you some day. But not now.’

The taxi had reached my house. I didn’t want to leave its warmth and go indoors, but I had to, so I said a hurried goodbye, not sure if I wanted Bill to be in the house or not.

He was lying on a chair in the living room, snoring, and there was some rubbish on the TV. I looked at him and thought about christening the car and knew it was not going to happen, which was sad in a way, and it wasn’t because of the hips and knees at all. I felt a lump in my throat. I was crying too much these days. I went upstairs and got into a hot bath, but was suddenly terrified by the water’s hot rush, the way it filled the bath and I imagined it overflowing onto the chequerboard floor, making it slick-wet, and I’d fall, I’d crack my head on the cistern, my feet would lose their grip on the splish-splashy floor, and hell wasn’t a fiery pit, it was this, it was a hot slip-sloshing bath and a patterned floor. It was this.

I got out of the bath half an hour later, faint with the heat, pulled on some pyjamas which stuck to my skin as I hadn’t dried myself properly, but I’d needed to get out of the bathroom, away from the horror of the water, the fear of drowning. I curled up on my side of the bed and waited for Bill to come up. He wasn’t long. I pretended to be asleep. He snuffled and grunted, got into his side, and was snoring within minutes.

Hours passed. I lay awake and tried to think about Paris. In theory I’d once gone there with Bill. In practice, I couldn’t remember much about it, most likely because nothing memorable had happened. I touched my cheek and thought about how Moyra had stared at the scar and asked me what it was, and I knew I wanted to tell her because she was someone I could trust—but I couldn’t remember exactly how it had happened, but that, I was sure, was because the memory hurt so much I’d buried it for my own safety. Memories. Bastards. Maybe I’d remember in those quiet moments in the morning before I was properly awake, when the dreams were quietly gliding away to wherever they wait, ready for the next night. Sleep can be terrifying. I tried to stay awake but didn’t manage.

   

CHAPTER THREE

 

Bill was suffering his usual summer rugby withdrawal symptoms so was consoling himself by watching a DVD of a classic match from the previous season—Toulon, I think, though I have no idea who they were playing. But France, yes, this could be my opening. I could talk about the match—or if not about the match, as I didn’t understand the game, I could talk about Toulon—not that I’d ever been there. Dammit, this was hard. But if I found a way in somehow, it should be easy enough to turn to the conversation to how long it had been since we were last in France, and oh, happy coincidence! Couple of my friends were going to Paris this weekend and they’d invited me.

I stared at the screen. Men were running about, throwing a ball, always turning and passing it sideways, slightly behind them, whereas in netball we’d thrown it ahead, but not always, and I was damned if I could remember the rules of who could throw what where and why, and who was allowed in which part of the court. I could never get my head round that, though in rugby it looked as if anyone was allowed anywhere, and why was the ball that shape anyway, how had that happened? Balls are round unless they’re shuttlecocks, which aren’t balls at all. I watched a bit more and found I could almost follow what was going on. It was like a story unfolding, but the rules were beyond me, and I wasn’t sure why some of those men were like mountains where others were small, but then you got that in snooker too, didn’t you. Though whether you could call snooker a sport was another matter. Darts too. Oh God. Anything to stop me talking about what I needed to say.

Procrastinate, procrastinate. I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. I was stroking my cheek again. A nervous habit I thought I’d cured, but it had reappeared recently. Early on in our marriage, Bill had told me the scar didn’t matter. He’d said it kindly, to put me at my ease and take away my self-consciousness—but in doing so he’d inadvertently hurt me because I’d needed to tell him and hoped so much he would ask. He never did, and then the moment was gone, and it became impossible to bring the subject up again. It was a nothing anyway, not a major traumatic experience. Nobody had died. There had been a boy, that was all. I couldn’t remember much about him, and anyway, he’d been with my sister, not me. I could remember him smoking. That was the one certain image in my mind; this skinny dark boy who was always smoking, the way he sucked his cheeks in as he drew on the cigarette. I must have got too close, and I had no idea if he’d done it deliberately—unlikely—or if it had been a genuine accident; people jostling each other, everyone drunk—except they couldn’t have been, could they? I was only fourteen. But Susan was older than me, and it had mostly been her friends. I’d been angry about what had happened and had chosen to believe it was deliberate because it marked me, made me a victim, and I was so sorry for myself back in those days, I had relished this mark of victimhood. I lived my pain, I told myself stories of why the boy had done it. I started to believe them and was happy with my protective and most likely inaccurate layer of belief until that moment when Moyra had said, ‘What’s that?’ and I’d realised I could no longer keep telling the victim narrative because it wasn’t true and it never had been, but I had this great big, blank, angry thing in the way, blocking the real memory. 

Never mind. Forget it. Bill was watching the rugby, and I had no way of putting all of that into words and offering it to him alongside a chocolate digestive. Best not to say anything.

I took his tea in, without any biscuits because he was watching rugby and didn’t deserve any. I handed him his mug and he grunted. I was tempted to grunt back. We could regress. Apes. I resisted the temptation.

‘I’ll be going away next week,’ I said. ‘A short break in Paris, with Renée and Moyra.’

Grunt.

‘Just five days or so.’

Grunt. Slurp of tea. ‘Who’s Moyra?’

Heavens to Betsy. It lives. It attends. ‘She’s a friend of Renée’s from the art class. She’s nice. Unusual.’ And I wanted to tell him all about Moyra, but he suddenly leapt up, spilled some tea. A stubby little man on the telly had dived at a muddy bit of grass and everyone was cheering, then groaning, Bill included. I watched his animation, his joy, the agony, the way it was directed solely at the TV screen.

‘I might stay longer,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’

‘Where did you say?’

‘Paris.’

‘Why are you going?’

‘I need a break. To get away.’ From you. This.

Grunt. ‘Go on, my son!’

A very muddy man was running at top speed in zigzags down the muddy field. Bill was half out of his chair again. I moved his tea to a safe distance and went back into the kitchen where I’d left my own mug. I drank the tea slowly and looked out of the window at the washing on the line. A pair of Bill’s boxers that he’d taken to wearing as pyjamas were flapping gently in the breeze. They were washed out and baggy and revolting, but he liked them and hadn’t wanted me to replace them, so I hadn’t. No reason why I should buy his clothes anyway. No reason to do anything for him. I could stay in Paris and maybe it would rain like in that Nancy Mitford novel and I would be discovered sitting on my suitcase, soggy and miserable, by a mysterious Frenchman, an aristocrat—no, an art dealer. That would be more useful. No, not that, because Moyra was the real artist, not me. What then? An international rugby star? That would piss Bill off, but it wouldn’t work, as he’d be too young. Manager then? No, not quite the same glamour.

Why not young though? What’s wrong with that? Renée’s Toby, her beautiful boy, the Adonis, had been painfully young. She didn’t talk about him much, because it had all ended desperately sadly as far as I could tell, and that was unusual for Renée, who was usually so much in control. She was alone now, as far as I could tell, as was Moyra. Husband Dylan was no longer around, having apparently abandoned her on a mountain top. I couldn’t imagine how she’d come to be married in the first place. That must have been one hell of a peculiar courtship. I’d have to ask her about it. She’d probably tell me too, without a quibble. That was the glory of Moyra.

Bill came into the kitchen with his mug. The DVD must have finished.

‘France?’ he said. ‘With Renée? The tart with the heart?’

‘She’s my friend.’

‘Mine too.’

‘Hardly!’

He put his mug down on the counter, narrowed his eyes as he squinted out into the garden, and for a moment looked about forty-five and ridiculously attractive. Then the sun went behind a cloud and he looked nearer sixty again. Bill and Renée? Had they ever? Years ago? Oh, hell. Quite possibly. But I mustn’t think about that. She was my friend. He couldn’t have her. He’d never asked me about the scar.

Bill donned his wellies and trudged down the garden. I didn’t want to follow. Ours was a typical English garden, reeking of dead bodies interred beneath lichened stones, and yes, the dead bodies were probably just birds or rats or something, but they still gave me the creeps. You never see dead rats, so they must get buried somewhere, and why not in a garden beneath the roses, which sit there smugly in their beds sucking from the suppurating wounds of what the gardener calls “blood, fish and bones”. I’d seen the mouldering box of fertiliser in the shed, I’d seen the vastness and emptiness of the garden in midwinter; I’d known it when I’d felt I was walking on corpses that had leached in from the graveyard across the way.

I was in a foul mood. It was a pretty garden, but I’d become wary of it recently, and tried my best not to kill insects for fear they might come back and haunt me. Don’t know what was wrong with me, but when I was in the infants, a bullying boy had told me once that I should always shit between the delphiniums because that was the only way I would stay safe; I had to crap on those beneath me, all the buried people. I even did it once, and thank God nobody saw me, but I never did it again because all I could think of was worms, and those bugs in jackets that make gardeners pour poisons into the soil.

Renée was right about the need for a holiday.

She had insisted on first class, at least down the East Coast mainline to Kings Cross, and as she was paying for the upgrade, Moyra and I raised no objections.

Moyra stowed the luggage with enviable efficiency and we settled into our seats. I looked forward to people watching, knowing from experience how good Renée was in such situations, how she made up entertaining stories about everyone.

A businessman across the aisle from us had his phone out and his fat fingers were floundering about on it as he keyed in what Renée assured us, sotto voce, were dirty messages to his girlfriend. These texts would read as if he were a stud instead of a great sweating bulk who wheezed with the exertion of moving one finger across a tiny screen. I looked across at him, trying not to be too obvious. He had bags under his too-small eyes and great fat jowls, which wobbled, but not in a loose kind of way, more heavy and thick, and all I could think was, yuck. His poor girlfriend.

‘How could she sleep with that?’ I said. ‘There’s a mouth hidden somewhere in that vast face and she must have kissed it. How she could bear it?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Moyra.

‘It’s power and wealth, darlings,’ said Renée. ‘Plus, the fourteen-inch cock.’

‘Renée!’ I needed to change the subject as Moyra was now staring at the poor man’s crotch and frowning as if wondering how it could all fit in there. We were artists, we should talk about art. There had been a greyhound on the platform at Darlington which had reminded me of one of my favourite paintings, Diana of the Uplands. Renée had never seen the picture but Moyra knew it—I was soon to discover Moyra knew virtually every work of art ever created by anyone. Renée faded out of the conversation as I tried in my inarticulate way to explain to Moyra what was so exciting, so wonderful about that painting. Renée closed her eyes, but I’m sure she wasn’t asleep, she was just letting me and Moyra get to know each other.

This being first class, we had been drinking the complimentary white wine, and, as at the exhibition preview, Moyra didn’t seem remotely affected, but I was drunk. It doesn’t take much. My conversation veered off in all directions, freewheeling in a way I never could with my art, but this was all bound up with the whole “letting go” thing. You should paint drunk. Not literally, but you should be in the zone, whatever that means. I rarely am. The naked selfie had been the only occasion I could recall. Give me a bit of alcohol and my shyness disappears, the words flow. I was talking about the view beyond the forest, about the Diana of the picture. She was me! She had to be, because of the greyhound, and I’d had a Labrador and had looked after a Bedlington Terrier for someone once, but that greyhound!

Moyra looked puzzled. I tried to explain how the Diana of the painting was the me I should have been, the me I was in my heart, the eternal me rather than the tired woman in the crumpled jeans sitting across the table from her. I wanted to be, young, excited, the dog straining at the leash, a strong wind blowing—that was how I saw myself, always had. Moyra frowned. I was becoming increasingly incoherent, but I knew exactly what I meant.

The view from the window changed and became more industrial.

‘What if she were with us now,’ I said, slurring my words slightly, ‘staring through these blood-spattered windows at that endless construction, those rampant cranes?’

I expected Moyra to question the blood spattering, but she took that in her stride and queried the rampantness of the cranes instead.

‘Not quite the right word,’ I said. I’d forgotten the need for precision with Moyra. ‘But okay. What if instead of first class, instead of nets and antimacassars, what if we were travelling cattle class.’

‘They don’t take cows on these trains. And there are no nets.’

‘But there are antimacassars.’

Renée’s lips twitched. She definitely wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t going to interrupt.

‘No, I mean the basic sort of train carriages,’ I said. ‘The old ones, with wooden slatted benches to sit on, the sort that make you wish your backside was more padded, that leave you feeling like your bum must have black and blue stripes, so you can’t sit comfortably, but Diana...’ I tried to remember where I was going with this. ‘Yes, Diana, when the snow crowds the bark on the northern side of remembered trees...’

I’d lost my thread after all, but Moyra took over. She was somehow on my wavelength after all, and I have no idea how, but I was beginning to see she had an extraordinary quality of empathy along with the logical thought processes.

‘I see. There is a birch on the edge of the woods? North facing?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and no one can see the weeping resin anymore, the holes, the scars....’

I fiddled with my gloves. Didn’t know why I’d brought gloves. Late May. It would be warm in Paris. What was it with the stupid bloody gloves?

Renée opened one eye. ‘You don’t have to tell us, you know,’ she said.

‘There’s nothing to tell anyway. It’s all lies. Everything.’

The glove was damp and sticky.

Moyra was frowning. ‘I can’t remember who painted it.’

‘What?’ said Renée.

‘The birch on the edge of the woods.’

‘Not to worry. Maybe you imagined the picture.’

‘I don’t imagine pictures. I can’t remember it. I should be able to remember it. I shouldn’t be forgetting.’ She looked distraught.

‘My dear,’ said Renée, ‘you’re allowed to forget who painted a picture once in a while.’

‘No. I mustn’t forget the pictures. They’re all I have left.’

‘Okay. We need more wine. We’re getting maudlin.’

She beckoned to the helpful young man who had realised we would need our glasses refilled regularly.

The train creaked and groaned its way into Doncaster where the far ends of the platform were peopled with the familiar spotters with their notebooks, and dear God, even the train spotters were getting younger. The main mass of humanity in the middle of the platform comprised a mix of youths standing wide-legged and arrogant, and exhausted women with bags full of things they likely didn’t need. There was an old man with wrinkles like one of those dogs, enormous great flaps of skin, and I wondered how he could see let alone breathe, then I realised it was a dog after all, and I felt like an idiot. And there was a woman in a headscarf who had too many fingers, and oh, a greyhound puppy, and a gentle whistling sound, someone snoring... Bill....

I woke with a start at Kings Cross. Moyra was handing the cases down to Renée. I had a sickly-sweet taste in my mouth, but my head was clearer than it had any right to be. I wanted a mug of tea; a huge great steaming mug of tea, with plenty of milk. Bill would have to make his own this week—unless he found someone else to make it for him. Bill never had any problem finding tea-ladies.

We had a few hours to wait for our connection to Paris, but not enough to make it worth our while doing anything other than sit in the sunshine in Granary Square and eat delicious wraps full of the sort of flavours that have yet to make their way into the north with any sort of conviction. Renée was on top form, holding forth with scurrilous comments about passers-by, leaving Moyra nonplussed and me aching with laughter, possibly helped by the fact that I was still tiddly. The sun blazed down, and I was laughing, and nothing could possibly ever be bad again. The slight pull on my cheek from the scar when I grinned had become a familiar and friendly thing, a part of who I was, not an alarming thing at all. That poor boy who I’d blamed all these years had probably felt awful when he realised what he’d done. I hoped he’d forgotten all about it. I looked round the square, to see if he was here, if one of those young men hurrying past—but no. He’d be in his fifties or even sixties by now. Heavens! He’d be older than me. Or young like Renée pretended to be, or of an entirely indeterminate age like Moyra. He certainly wouldn’t be one of these earnest young students swarming in and out of Central St Martins with their portfolios, or popping across to Waitrose, then running back because they’d forgotten their ID, and they only looked twelve, so that hoping to pick up a few cans of beer was a forlorn hope. There were geese and ducks on the canal, and brightly painted narrow boats, some with solar panels nestling among the pots of geraniums. This was how life should be: three women, no men, and the prospect of Paris. I would have hugged Renée if I were the sort of person who hugs people, but I’m not if I can help it, so I didn’t. No husbands! Wonderful to go away without husbands. Renée had never had one. I asked her why.

‘I didn’t dare.’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Toast.’

‘Toast?’

‘I have this trick; I know about toast, how to burn it.’

‘Anyone can burn toast.’

‘Not the way I can. Stay with me darlings. Imagine this. I’ve been tricked into marriage. He’s coming downstairs now, with his fat-heavy feet. I throw two eggs at the pan. They split and spatter. The morning is misty, the sun a little tired. I watch it in desperation. This is how I distract myself from the slop and grind of his jaws across the table. I think about the stink of the sea, about my marriage, speeding downhill on a bicycle when the front forks are bent, and you know you’re going to crash. I can’t remember why we’re together at all, when all I ever wanted has been left beneath an apple tree back home.’

‘An apple tree?’ said Moyra.

‘Where we first made love. The last time it was truly love.’

‘Oh.’

‘We should have honeymooned in Beirut and been bombed out of existence. Instead, me and this poor bloke have unloosed decay relentlessly upon each other for thirty years and now we’re crashing.’

‘And the toast?’ I said.

‘I scrape his toast till it bleeds.’

‘Yikes. Good thing you never married this mysterious gentleman then.’

‘He was no gentleman, and nobody says “yikes” anymore,’ said Renée, amused.

‘Yes, they do,’ said Moyra, with perfect logic. Then she reminded us we needed to check-in in good time, so we cleared our little picnic away and set off for St Pancras, Paris, and the mysterious nobleman who was going to sweep me off my feet. He’d better, because if he didn’t, I’d have to return to Bill. When I’d left for the station that morning, he’d said, ‘Bye’. That was it. He hadn’t even offered to walk there with me to carry my case. He’d looked restless, as if he was just waiting for me to be out of the door so that he could go too, maybe to Seaham or Aycliffe or wherever his latest girlfriend might be. He’d be looking forward to having a great time with someone who hung on his every word, who probably enthused about his bloody car. So I’d have to have a better one. Paris was going to have to be amazing. It would be.

Paris, you have no choice in the matter. Be incredible. Just do it. 

CHAPTER FOUR

I was starting to regret my dowdy clothes. Fine in Darlington, but here I felt a total scruff. I’d forgotten how much smarter everyone looks in London. A few young men were sporting the latest incarnation of the hipster look, something I had rarely seen up north, but here there was an abundance of carefully shaped artisanal beards and faux lumberjack shirts. I was confident Paris would be free of such strange creatures, but I feared that once there I would look dowdier than ever. The apartment had better not be too grand or intimidating. A nice little backstreet garret would be fine, but Renée had said it belonged to a friend, and her friends tended to be smart. I was forgetting I numbered among them and was not remotely smart—and what about Moyra? But I needed to know, so I asked, and soon wished I hadn’t. She became bright and bubbly and unbearably false.

‘My dears, you will not believe the glory of what you are to witness. The apartment is exquisite! Which is all down to John, naturally, as the man has impeccable taste in most things. Most. But I’m afraid the paintings—oh lordy. They’re horrendous unless you’re into that sort of overblown erotica. They’re done by his wife, so I suppose he thought he had to hang them to keep her sweet. The rest of the furnishings, thank God, are all his choices. Utterly ravishing.’

‘Who are these people, again?’

‘Oh darling, you must have heard of them. He’s John Stephenson, used to be a highly successful antiques dealer, now better known for promoting his wife’s nasty paintings. Such a waste, darlings. He was so, so good at what he did, that delicious Serpentine furniture that writhed around his showrooms, but I’m afraid little Vicky got her claws into him and now he’s realised how much he can make out of her, so there’s no going back.’

My jaw didn’t really drop to the ground. Nobody’s does, outside cartoons.

‘What, the Vicky Stephenson? Bloody hell! We’re staying in John and Vicky Stephenson’s apartment? As featured in the posh and gossipy glossies?’

‘Frances, darling, they’re just people. Vicky does enormous scary paintings and John has an enormous scary personality, but you needn’t worry as neither of them will be there. You’re quite safe.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

‘About them not being there? No, really, they won’t be.’

‘I meant about it being their apartment.’

Moyra butted in at this point. ‘She’s not joking. It’s not a joke. It’s not funny.’

Renée chortled, and then became serious. ‘No, darlings, it’s not a joke. John and I are old, old friends, from way back, long before Vicky was a foetus. I did tell you, didn’t I? I must have mentioned John dozens of times.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but only as “John”, and that’s a common enough name. And you said we were staying in an “old friend’s” apartment. I had no idea it was a mega-celebrity old friend’s luxury penthouse suite. Shit!’

‘Darling, stop worrying so much. We’ve kept in touch over the years the way old friends do, and he lets me use the apartment whenever I’m in Paris if he’s not using it himself. That’s all there is to it.’

‘So, you’re very good old friends, are you?’ I hoped Moyra wouldn’t ask me to define precisely what I meant by “very good”.

‘The best, in every possible way. Now then—what would you like to do once we get there? Galleries and suchlike, or shopping? Touristy, or go all arty-farty and frequent disreputable bars, sipping absinthe and smoking Gitanes?’

‘I don’t smoke.’ This was becoming an in-joke. If we kept saying it in tandem even Moyra might find it funny, but then I had a feeling she would keep repeating it for the sake of it and we’d have to stop her.

‘I’d like to see the real Paris, and I don’t even know what I mean by that,’ I said, ‘but certainly not the place I saw with Bill on our honeymoon.’

‘I thought you honeymooned on Skye?’

‘That was honeymoon part one. It didn’t work out. Part two was Paris, but it was no better.’

‘Do tell! I love honeymoons that don’t quite work out, especially two-parters. Come on Frances, we’ve got the best part of an hour.’

‘All right, though it’s a sorry little tale.’

‘More sordid than sorry I hope.’

‘Not really. Gods, this was such a long time ago. Let me think. Honeymoon number one. Started off okay, the drive up to the Highlands, the ferry to Skye. The hotel was fine. Second day, pretty much everything was going to plan, but then we met two brothers in the pub—Angus and Euan. I don’t know how to describe them other than to say they were deep in the soil. Not literally, but you know what I mean’

Moyra looked up and I had no idea how she was going to take my words. If she asked me if they lived down a hole or a mineshaft, I feared I would start giggling like a maniac, the wine still being in my system, so I moved on quickly.

‘They told us their family had worked the same croft for centuries, and it was ancient work, timeless, so Bill was interested in them, bought them some drinks and got into conversation. He listened closely as they told us about their lives and themselves, in slow voices, rich with music, and this is going to sound silly, but I realised I was falling in love with the younger brother—Euan—with his curls, and his gentle voice, but I was there with my husband; we were on honeymoon. Can that really happen? Just one evening listening to someone talk and you know you love them and always will?’

I looked helplessly at Renée. She smiled and shook her head. She knew exactly what I meant. Moyra would take it all literally, but in this instance, she’d be right to do so.

‘The brothers left us to have a game of darts. Bill asked me if I was tired, and I wasn’t, I was the opposite of tired, I wanted to run out of the pub and up a mountain in the moonlight, but I said it had been a long day, and perhaps we should turn in. We went upstairs, and Bill talked enthusiastically about sheep and maggots. I was repulsed. I don’t know what it was—when Euan and Angus spoke about such things, I’d hung on their every word, but Bill? It was all wrong, and I was terrified because this was my honeymoon, and I couldn’t bear the sight of the man I had married. I said I wanted a bath, and I lay in the water for ages so that by the time I climbed into bed he was snoring.’

Moyra nodded at this, and I started wondering about her own marriage. I couldn’t see her in a sexual context at all, but I wasn’t going to ask her about that now. 

‘The next day we were out walking when we saw the sheep heading down the mountainside. The men were whistling the dogs, and the sheep were running, single file, perfectly controlled. Angus waved to us. Bill waved back, but instead of going over and talking to the brothers, he told me he wanted a drink, a cup of tea. It was early and we’d hardly been out any time, but he pointed to the clouds, said it was going to be a filthy morning, and for all their talk about grandfathers and heritage, this land really belonged to nobody. He was being surly and bad-tempered. Having slept on it he must have had a change of heart about these sons of the soil who last night had been his heroes. Now he was seeing them as a threat, though how he could have known what had happened inside my head, I have no idea. We hadn’t spoken much at breakfast, but had he guessed what I’d been thinking? You know—that thing where you’re thinking so much about someone you say or do the wrong thing, and you never know you’ve done it? He was looking at me expectantly, needing me to agree with what he’d just said, to say something about how we’re all guardians of land, nobody can really own it, but I was thinking about Euan’s hands and the way he narrowed his eyes when he threw a dart, the way it flew absolutely true, his grin, the one hundred and eighty.’

‘Naughty girl,’ said Renée.

‘Naughty? No. Is love ever naughty?’

‘Well...’ she was trying so hard not to laugh, I almost giggled myself despite the mundane tragedy of the tale I was telling.

‘Behave yourself, Renée. This is serious stuff. We returned to the pub and ordered sandwiches even though it was only eleven thirty. Bill had a pint, not tea after all. I didn’t want to drink. I watched him lunge at his sandwich. You’ve seen him, Renée, the way he eats and eats. That’s why he’s so big. Even back then he was stocky and strong. Don’t suppose he’s ever been skinny. Loves his food too much. I don’t think the mermaid fed him very well. I suspect she was one of those women who always tries to get their husband to lose weight. He’d had a very dull first honeymoon in Cornwall, or so he told me, and this time he’d wanted something far more exotic. He’d tried to persuade me to consider the Caribbean, but I’d said no: Skye, please let’s go to Skye! and he’d laughed, said I was cheap to run. I hadn’t much liked the way he’d said that.’

I looked down at my dowdy jeans. Had I been the same back then? As a teen, Levis and Wranglers had been out of my reach, so I’d settled for badly fitting efforts from C&A, jingly-jangly flares with bells sewn on. Ridiculous things. I still hadn’t managed to make jeans work properly for me, despite living in the blasted things, but I kept trying. One day I’d find the perfect pair.

‘Sandwiches,’ said Renée. ‘You were in the bar, having an early sandwich. What happened next?’

‘I told him I was tired, and I wanted to lie down. Bill said he felt like motoring round the island, and did I want to come? No, I really, really didn’t. I needed to be alone, to think.’

‘He’ll have been disappointed,’ said Renée. ‘Sounds like he was trying to fix the problem.’

‘You think? Perhaps. That didn’t even occur to me, probably because my head was so full of Euan, I had no room for Bill and his bloody car. He’s always loved his cars too much. After he’d gone, I put on warm clothes and waterproofs and went out. There was no sign of the sheep or the crofters. I walked along the seashore, climbing over the rocks. There were tiny flowers in every nook and cranny, the grass was cropped short and I met a herd of shaggy cattle. It was all so bloody beautiful. I thought perhaps this could work after all, and I could be happy. Bill would come back and I’d tell him about it, he’d listen, and he’d want to go to the places where I’d been. The path took me above the meadows, and once I’d climbed a few hundred feet I could see the distant Cuillin, and I yearned for them; they took my breath away. That was why I’d wanted to come here on honeymoon in the first place. I’d wanted to stand here with Bill and for him to see the same things, but he’d taken a glance at the distant mountains that first afternoon and said they were among the most dangerous climbs in the UK. He’d looked at them as if he wanted to fight them rather than climb them. Jealous of mountains? Madness.’

But Moyra was nodding. ‘There have been more deaths on the Cuillin than any other UK mountains.’

I carried on before she could give us the figures.

‘I walked inland, determined to climb something. I had this need to climb, to get into the clouds, to lose myself up there. Can’t really explain it.’

Moyra was staring at me. I think for once I was saying something she could understand properly.

‘I set myself a target, and I don’t even know what the mountain was called—and nor was it much of a mountain, more of a hillock, but I was soon in the clouds and the wind got up, gusty, all I could hear was the mad flapping of my cagoule—I felt like I was chasing a storm, and not in some romantic way of following distant thunderheads that could create a deluge worthy of measuring out cubits of wood to make an ark or anything like that—no, this storm was of my own making, a maelstrom of love and hate, death and transfiguration, sturm und drang; that whole bollocky rubbish of need; that excruciating realisation that someone else matters infinitely more than you do, that a whisper, a  touch, a glance will mean the deadly lightning strike that follows will come as a blessed release. It was such nonsense, this whole love thing. I knew I should turn back, and not just from the mountainside and the risk of dying of exposure—but from my increasing obsession with Euan. It was raining hard by now and I was cold, I was crying, and I knew Euan would never love me or even notice me; I would never feel the weight of his arm across my shoulder, the warmth of his body. Then the lightning struck the cairn on the next summit and I realised this was dangerous, this “poor me” self-indulgence. I needed to get down. If Bill had been with me, I would have prayed for him to twist his ankle between two rocks, get struck by lightning and go up like a torch, screaming, and at the last moment, to think of me and be sorry. But he wasn’t with me, he was tootling around in a warm car, and now my blasted foot was stuck in a bog because I hadn’t been looking where I was going. I could easily have pulled it out, and it would have come with a squelch, but I didn’t. It had to stay there as a punishment.

‘But I was cold, and I knew there would be a cup of tea for me back at the hotel. So much for love and hate. Trumped by the mere thought of a cuppa, I pulled my foot out and plodged back down to the village. The rain eased off and it became almost pleasant. And then I saw something very odd—a sort of portent. There was a decrepit old woman walking along with something in her hand. At first, I thought it was a scarf with a stone sewn into a corner, but as I got closer, could see it was a dead chicken with its neck hanging down. She walked strangely. Her left hip hunched up, and when she moved it protruded—she shuffled, wavered a little, shuffled a bit further and I was counting her steps, one-two-three-four-five—she stepped on some wilted flowers and crushed them, shuffled until they were brown and slimy. She looked at the ground, picked up a stick, and I suddenly had a vision of her pushing it up her nostril, but thank God she didn’t. She shuffled on, and the chicken’s head was going flip-flop, flip-flop, and I felt dizzy. It was so bloody weird, I can tell you. And I thought, that’s my future if I don’t pull myself together. I couldn’t get that awful dead chicken and the lopsided woman out of my mind.’

‘Horrid,’ said Renée. ‘Poor you.’

‘Bill returned later that afternoon with a pair of very expensive binoculars he’d bought. It was the one thing we’d forgotten to bring. He was pleased with himself and showed me what the binoculars could do. I didn’t tell him yes; I know full well what binoculars can do. They bring things closer. That’s the theory. But I knew these wouldn’t work in that way. We sat down to dinner and he had his usual hearty appetite. He ordered wine, and this time I joined him. Afterwards, we went into the bar and the brothers were there again. Bill was ready for them this time. He seemed to grow, he was loud, and he was everyone’s best friend. Euan was small and slight, almost ephemeral in contrast. I didn’t think he’d even noticed me, but Angus had—he was grinning and nudging his brother. I had to look away. Bill was talking to everyone, so the brothers were inevitably brought into our group which meant Bill had them where he could see them and control them. Euan told us about the swallows in the barn, the way they surged out into the blue. I could picture them, and I wanted to hear more, but Bill changed the subject, injecting testosterone into the conversation, and soon the men were talking about war. Angus was telling Bill how you could use sheep dip to kill a man. Bill bought them all drinks, round after round. Euan held his pint quietly, and I sipped my wine. I decided to get very drunk, but in such a way that only I would know it.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Renée. ‘Did you manage?’

‘Probably not. Angus was talking about the hard places, the darkest months, and it seemed he had done various tours of duty in the army, but he’d been wounded and wasn’t going back. The other men were respectful. Bill grew even taller, expanding his chest. I wanted him to explode with the effort. I tried not to giggle, and I absolutely refused to catch Euan’s eye. Eventually the evening came to an end, and I could escape to my bath, hot and full of that foam that smells of roses—then I took Bill to bed and I was warm and yes, I was very drunk, and all I was thinking about was Euan. I don’t know if Bill could tell.’

‘Oh, the poor man,’ said Renée.

‘You think? He cut the honeymoon short, so I never did get to go to the Cuillin, I never stood there with him, hand in hand, staring out across the bracken as the sun went down and everything turned to gold; he never gave me a chance to heal whatever wound it was that had opened between us. We left the next day. He invented an excuse, something to do with a phone call, an unexpected deadline. He’s good at that sort of thing. That blasted phone. We drove away from Skye and the further we went the smaller he shrank until by the time we crossed the border into England he was back to his normal size, still solid, but no longer having to be so absurdly expansive. He cheered up and suggested we go to Paris the following weekend to make up for leaving Skye so soon, but you know, it was a silly idea, and I knew it couldn’t possibly heal the rift. It must have been months before he felt even slightly certain of me again.’

‘And Paris? How did that go?’ asked Renée.

‘Search me. I think we did the Louvre. Must have looked at the Eiffel Tower. It was probably quite nice.’

‘Quite nice? That’s so sad.’

‘Bollocks to that. I don’t care that I don’t remember. I’m glad. It means I can see the city now with fresh eyes. I don’t even remember how we got there. Ferry I suppose. I don’t think we flew. It was a honeymoon, so we must have made love, but the abiding image I have of my early married life is Euan’s face, not Bill’s.’

‘Forever young, eh?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Still missing your farmer boy?’

‘I still think about him, yes. Rough hands, haystacks, sheep dip... diesel fumes from the tractor.’

‘Tup and ewe, bull and heifer?’

‘Renée!’

‘But you still dream about him.’

‘Oh yes. And how. I can see his face even now; those wide-set grey eyes, and I bet his father and grandfather before him, going back generations had those wonderful eyes.’

‘But you hardly met him,’ said Moyra. ‘I don’t understand how someone’s face is so important. Although –’

‘Yes?’

‘Dylan’s boil. That mattered.’

I could see Renée struggling to keep a straight face, but luckily at that moment the announcement came for us to check-in. While Moyra busied herself with organising the luggage—she was good at that—Renée leaned into me and whispered, ‘You know, you are going to have to ask her about Dylan’s boil. It’s a good story. Could well see us all the way to Paris.’

CHAPTER FIVE

There was more queuing and standing around but finally we were through passport control and could board the train. We sat around a table and I had my instructions to ask about Dylan’s boil, but didn’t know how to begin. Renée solved the problem. I’d forgotten how direct you could be with Moyra.

‘Moyra, tell Frances about Dylan’s boil. I know the story, but she hasn’t heard it.’

‘I know,’ said Moyra, logically enough, and I thought that might be it; that she’d need another nudge from Renée, but though Moyra’s social skills might be odd, they were still there. She might have been on the spectrum, but she was highly intelligent, and could function perfectly well in this sort of conversation. Her occasional wry comments were humour, not confusion.

‘I wanted Dylan to be like Alfred,’ she said.

‘Alfred?’ said Renée. ‘You’ve never mentioned him before?’

‘He lives in my head.’

‘Aha! Okay, save Alfred for later. Let’s hear about Dylan. He’s real.’

‘Alfred is real.’

‘Yes, my dear, but Frances wants to hear about Dylan. Don’t you, Frances.’

She kicked me under the table.

‘Yes! Tell me about Dylan.’

‘All right. This happened two years ago. Dylan and I were staying at a hotel in Capel Curig, and on the day in question had planned to complete the eastern peaks of the Glyderau—Tryfan, Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach.’

‘Less geography please, darling,’ said Renée.

Moyra ignored her.

‘We parked close to Ogwen Cottage. The weather was good, and we set out, with me walking behind Dylan, matching his steps pace for pace, but it was difficult. He had his hat on back-to-front and I couldn’t bear it. He had said it didn’t matter, but it did. When I explained the problem for a second time, he smiled at me and carried on walking without adjusting the hat. He often smiled when I was unhappy, and I don’t know why. The wrongness of the hat was upsetting me and affecting my walking. My limp is worse when I’m stressed. I was trying to correct by leaning my left foot in with each step, pushing as far as I could without producing a counter-productive sprain. The terrain was not easy, but I was managing.’

I remembered my anecdote about the limping old woman on Skye and regretted it deeply.

‘We stopped for coffee at eleven o’clock and found two rocks to sit on. There was a distance between us as there were no appropriate boulders in a position that would have allowed for a more intimate configuration.’

‘I do love an intimate configuration,’ murmured Renée. I kicked her under the table. Moyra may have noticed, but she made no comment. She was concentrating on her narrative as if it were a ritual she had to go through.

‘I poured,’ she said. ‘Flask top for me, yellow beaker for Dylan. I took his across and returned to my rock. He took his hat off and scratched his head. I held my breath. He had a massive boil on the top of his head. We had made an appointment for it to be lanced the following week because the wrongness of it was incalculable. I wish it could have been dealt with before we went away, but the doctor’s receptionist had said it wasn’t an emergency. She was wrong. It was an emergency, for me. I was terrified Dylan would scratch it too hard. He did, and I couldn’t stop him because our rocks were too far apart for me to bat his hand away in time. His fingernail punctured the boil. He stared at his wet finger and sniffed it. I waited for him to lick it and taste it and the thought horrified me beyond anything I had ever known, so I gripped my cup of coffee tightly and concentrated on the hot plastic smell, taking a sip every few seconds. The coffee scalded my mouth and I examined the pain. My tongue would later ulcerate, but that was a small price to pay.

Dylan replaced his hat, the right way round this time. I don’t know why he couldn’t have worn it that way all along. Now even the rightness felt wrong. He wiped his fingers on his trousers and rummaged in his pocket, bringing out a crumpled bag of toffees, something he always carried as “emergency rations”. He proceeded to pull out a clump of conjoined toffees, but he was holding them with the hand that had punctured the growth and I gagged at the thought of the whitish sticky fluid on the toffees; I remembered the last time we’d had sex, more than a year previously.’

Renée returned my kick under the table at this point and our eyes met. Poor Dylan. He’d probably had no idea what he’d done, but my sympathy was still with Moyra as I wouldn’t have fancied one of those toffees either. Mind you, a man who carried a bag of toffees with him all the time had to be nice. I held onto that and tried to warm to him.

‘He peeled one of the toffees off and put it in his mouth and moved it around with his tongue. I could see it pressed against one cheek and then the other, and each time it looked as if he had another huge boil that moved from cheek to cheek. I had to look away. I felt ill.’

Renée and I exchanged a look and a wince.

‘The previous day, I’d seen a yellow thistle growing out of a cliff. This had unsettled me. In my experience, thistles have purple flowers, not yellow. I looked the plant up and it shouldn’t have existed this far north. I’d asked Dylan what he thought, and he’d said, “What, dear? A thistle?” and smiled at me. Always that smile. “Yellow,” I said, in case he hadn’t heard, and he frowned as if he didn’t understand, but then he smiled again and patted my arm. I drew away as I didn’t like him touching me. I don’t know why I mentioned the thistle. It has nothing to do with the boil. I think the colour. Yes, that was it. Yellow. That’s what made the connection.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Renée. ‘Keep going. You were on that walk up the mountains with the unpronounceable names, remember? Elevenses?’

‘The names are easy to pronounce. I just showed you how to do it.’

‘Yes, so you did. What happened next?’

‘We were three thousand feet up by this point and could look out across the mountains to the sea, where the clouds were rolling in, making their own landscape. It was beautiful but also terrifying because they were never the same. I felt compelled to work out the best routes up the cloud mountains, but it was impossible. They couldn’t remain motionless and still retain their essential integrity. Each time I worked out a route, they changed, and I failed yet again.’

I was astonished to see tears in Moyra’s eyes as she described the clouds.

‘But Dylan was smiling at the view as if it were quite ordinary. There was a kind of cognitive dissonance going on between the act of smiling and the reason for the smiling on his part, and the receipt of the smile and confusion of expectations on mine. It hurt.’

‘Tricksy things, smiles,’ said Renée.

‘Even for you?’

‘Yes. Even me. Even with just one other person. And in a crowd? They can mean so many different things. Dinner parties. Oh, my dears, the things I could tell you about dinner parties.’

I hoped she wouldn’t. I wanted to know how the story of Dylan and the boil would end.

‘I knew what it would be like that evening in the hotel,’ said Moyra. ‘It would be the same as all the other evenings. They followed a pattern. Dylan would chat to the other hotel guests, saying nothing of interest or importance. Someone would notice I wasn’t speaking and would try to draw me into the conversation. It wouldn’t work. But at least I could sit with Dylan. We could be a couple. Dylan didn’t talk to me much when there was no one else around. He had understood my need for quiet times from early in our relationship. Other things he hadn’t understood. The sex had been awful. Each time I hoped it would be the last, but up in the mountains, so close to the sky, I could almost imagine wanting it. There was one more peak to conquer before we could return to the car. As we climbed the final stretch, I forgot to turn my left foot inwards; I got into a rhythm, I hummed a tune, I followed Dylan’s stocky legs, the tramp of his boots, left, right, left, right. Half an hour later we had reached the top and the clouds had formed new peaks, and I needed them so much I came close to collapse; I wanted to die in this air that smelled so sweet it made a roaring in my head and I thought my skull might explode.’

            ‘Had you forgotten to take your epilepsy pills? That’s not like you,’ said Renée.

‘I was on a new prescription and the dosage wasn’t quite right, though I didn’t realise this at the time. Hence the small seizure. Dylan was used to seeing me pass out. He knew what to do. I regained consciousness lying on the heather in the recovery position. He was sitting next to me, stroking the bilberry bushes, popping a berry in his mouth ever so often. The smile I hated so much had gone, and he was looking sad. I was glad to be reminded of the way his mouth could look in this mood, purple-stained with berries, and his eyes, clear blue. But he looked up and was all jollity again.’

‘Just trying to cheer you up, I expect,’ said Renée.

‘I didn’t need cheering up. But he still said, “Feeling okay, pet?” I didn’t answer. This had happened before enough times for him to know I would be dizzy and suffering from a headache. I lay still until I felt well enough to get up and put on my rucksack. He offered to carry it. He shouldn’t have done that. He should have known I didn’t want him to take it from me. Isn’t that what marriage is supposed to be about? That sort of intimate telepathy? I don’t know how it works, but it has to exist, or there is nothing. Something in my face must have said this because he stepped back and didn’t take the rucksack after all. There was a long drop and I wanted to jump. Only the blue of his eyes stopped me and made me want to push him gently over the edge instead, with kindness and a handful of bog myrtle leaves. On our wedding day there had been flowers and the smell had been the sweetness of lilies and the blue of his eyes. It had made me think it really would be all right, being married, but then there had been the wedding night and while I understood he had to do what he did to me, I hated the smell and the noises. Straight afterwards, I was scrubbing myself clean of his smell in the shower, and he came and joined me. There wasn’t much room and it was inconvenient. He held me so tight I couldn’t move.

‘But we carried on. We were a couple, though I don’t think we were a proper happy couple. Dylan grew fat and I couldn’t understand how that great belly could be part of him when it hadn’t been there before. By the time we reached the top of the mountain he was so big I couldn’t have pushed him gently over the edge after all. I would have had to give him an almighty shove. The thought amused me, so I grinned. I expected him to smile back properly, but he looked at me in a way I didn’t understand, and for once he didn’t smile. He put out a hand towards me. I have no idea why. I stared at the hand. It looked warmish and dry, and it was his left hand, so it hadn’t touched the lump on his head or the conjoined toffees. I thought about taking that hand and giving it a sudden yank to over-balance him so that he would tumble down the jagged mountainside, his head getting smashed, all remnants of the boil destroyed. I was still looking at his hand when he spoke. “I’m so sorry, love,” he said. I don’t know why he said that, but he withdrew his hand and turned away and set off down the slope faster than I’d ever seen him move. I stayed on the mountain, looking at the clouds. It was half past twelve and time for lunch. I got out a packet of mixed nuts and raisins and chewed my way through those. The flask coffee was still hot. There was a block of Cheddar cheese, some fruit cake, two cherry tomatoes, a hard-boiled egg and a mini pork pie. I think I’d loved Dylan the most on the occasions when he’d looked sad, and once I’d tried to tell him that, but he hadn’t understood—he’d simply smiled. Now he was gone, and I missed him. I shouldn’t have had to eat lunch on my own. I bit into the pork pie. It was a good one; peppery, with well-flavoured aspic. I enjoyed that.’

‘Good old Melton Mowbray. Drives the fastest pork pies in the West,’ said Renée under her breath. Moyra ignored her.

‘Once I’d finished my lunch, I packed everything away, and thought about the first time I met Dylan, alongside the River Tees, half a mile upstream from Low Force. He’d been walking along the footpath ahead of me, and I’d got into a rhythm, matching his steps. He stopped at a gate, and the catch was stiff, so I caught up. I looked at his eyes because they were so blue, and I hadn’t seen such blue eyes before. We discussed the difficulty of the gate. Because we passed through together, we walked on together. It was pleasant. He pointed out plants and birds and told me the names, which was useful, as much of the flora of Teesdale is unique, and some of it was new to me. I remember all the names. I have a very good memory. It’s the best thing I have. At eleven o’clock. I told him we must stop for coffee and he didn’t say it was too early or too late or inconvenient the way so many other people did in the rambling club.

‘We took to walking together often. We didn’t always talk, but we were pleasant with each other. When he asked me to marry him, I agreed because it meant we would keep walking together for the rest of our lives, and I needn’t be afraid of anything changing—and he had the bluest eyes of anyone I had ever met. But on the top of the mountain, I was afraid again. He had moved on. He had left me twelve minutes after I’d had a seizure and I wouldn’t be able to catch up. There was no gate with a stiff catch on the mountain. But irrespective of any health considerations, I was in the situation I would have been in if the catch on the original gate had not stuck, if he’d walked on and I’d never caught up with him. If I’d never married him. If we’d never walked up mountains together. I looked down the slope and there he was, a tiny figure far, far below, striding out along the path. It was nearly one o’clock, and he hadn’t even stopped for his lunch.

‘The clouds swirled and re-formed and made new paths. I watched them and tried to work out a route through them, but they kept shifting, and I cried, not knowing what else to do. I had been part of a couple, and I had been normal, or as close to normal as I ever could be. People had looked at me and they hadn’t seen a peculiar woman on her own, they’d seen a wife, Dylan’s wife. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be now. I would have to return to the hotel. The receptionist wouldn’t know who I was on my own, so I would have to tell her. She would be disgusted at the sight of this part person, torn away from the fat man with the boil on his head. But the boil was gone. He had burst it. People would be happy to see Dylan without his boil, but not me. Not me without Dylan. 

‘The next day I went and sat by Llyn Bochlwyd. It’s where we had intended to go. I kept expecting to see him clambering down from Bwlch Tryfan, and I worried in case he was still going too fast, tripping and falling, as the terrain there is very rough, but I didn’t see him, and my eyes were sore. I remembered the roughness of his tweed jacket, his thick socks, the way he tied his walking boots. And a cat he had picked up one day on a walk; the way it had closed its eyes and rumbled with satisfaction when he held it close. There were no cats here, just sheep and close-cropped grass. I checked out of the hotel the next day, though Dylan had paid for us to stay the whole week. He’d packed his belongings and left while I’d been on the mountain. Someone must have given him a lift, as the car was still parked at Ogwen Cottage when I got down. I don’t know who that was. I don’t know who drove him away.’

I thought Renée was going to say something unforgivable in reply but thankfully she didn’t.

‘We’re not divorced,’ said Moyra. ‘I still have a husband, but I don’t know where he is. I stopped walking after that and started drawing instead. First it was clouds, because I knew them and I thought they were safe, but they weren’t. I drew clouds and I drew the pathways and routes through them, but I could never find Dylan. Then one day I saw a face in the clouds, and it was Alfred, so I tried to draw him, and that hurt too. Each time I draw it hurts, more and more, but I draw now, I can’t do anything else but draw. I don’t understand the things I used to know, like the way Dylan’s mouth used to look bruised when he crammed in too many blackberries. The paint on the house is peeling and I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t know how to sweep the floor anymore. Dylan’s not in the window seat, looking out. Alfred’s gone.’

CHAPTER SIX

‘Why “Alfred” specifically?’ said Renée. ‘Why that name?’

            Moyra frowned and I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Eventually she said, ‘I had a teddy bear called Alfred when I was very small.’

            ‘Oh, wonderful!’ said Renée. ‘I so love that you had a teddy bear. Tell us all about him.’

‘Can we have a drink first?’ I said.

‘Shush, no. I want to hear about Alfred.’

‘This is a story about my father,’ said Moyra, who I supposed was still in a place where she needed to say all these things. My drink would have to wait, but I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. Moyra was perspiring, and it wasn’t hot. Could just have been her age, but I thought it more likely she was getting over-stressed with reliving these traumatic events.

‘We were at sea,’ she said.

‘Literally?’ said Renée.

‘Yes. There was a storm. The ship was foundering, women were talking about small things, the men were telling each other that somebody had called the coastguard, we’d live, we’d be fine, we could forget about ships, how they sink. Nobody mentioned the broken spars.’

‘This sounds more like a tea clipper,’ said Renée. ‘Or a Spanish galleon. How exciting!’

Moyra ignored her, wisely, but I could understand Renée’s point, and I wondered what weird recesses of Moyra’s imagination were being mined. I wasn’t sure we should let her talk like this. She seemed to have lost touch with the reality of what had happened. I wondered if she’d even been at sea.

‘I’m writing all of this down, sorry Dad,’ said Moyra, talking to someone who wasn’t there. ‘You always called me a nincompoop, so I’m allowed. Alfred should be lying beside me, filled up with sleep and want, and love—no, not you, Dad. This is for Alfred alone. Shut up, Daddy. Go stare at the waves, ignore the falling masts, the slap of the sails. Alfred is dreaming of sea serpents wrapping themselves round the hull, squeezing the shattered timbers. The water foams through the porthole like old shampoo.’

And then it occurred to me that with her confessed recent obsession with drawing, she might be describing an artwork, or a series of paintings. I relaxed and listened. My own drawings were boring; perhaps I could learn something from Moyra’s imagination.

‘It’s two in the morning, there should be bright moonlight, a flight of dolphins. Next door, an old man sits with his drowned wife. I stretch my arms out to gather herrings. Fish know where to love, when to whisper Goodnight. You used to tell me bedtime stories, but there’s a difference; the three bears are tunny fish, clouds of cod are nibbling the mermaid’s toes; squid, cuttlefish and children are drifting, kicking their tiny feet, chasing the sweetness of ink. Nobody scrambles over the side to rescue them. I’m lost in a sea-fog, you’ve fallen into a trench, I’ll follow shortly, but for now, I’ll stay alone in this trough of water. You tore Alfred’s head off when I was so small.’

‘No!’ said Renée. ‘Poor Alfred!’

‘There’s a harbour somewhere, with safe mooring. I watched as you went on dying, lasting too long. I practised hate. I hated the lobsters, the mermaids, the sirens, hated the kittiwakes, great auk, krill, the wandering barnacles, clams. Listen—rescue is coming, the door clicks open. Alfred drops down the chimney.’

She stopped speaking. We waited, but nothing happened.

‘Coffee?’ said Renée.

‘I’ve never drawn coffee,’ said Moyra, and she flashed one of her rare smiles, but I was thinking about endings, about the awful sadness of such things, and I didn’t even want a drink any more, but neither did I want to get lost in Moyra’s kind of madness. She seemed to be living with a massive weight of fear. I couldn’t begin to comprehend it.

‘The other day,’ I said, ‘I was hanging out the washing, and it wasn’t as dry as it should have been, I don’t know, blocked filter or something—but everything was wringing wet. It was windy, so should have been good for drying, but I was stretching up for the line and the wind kept whipping it away. I nearly lost one of Bill’s shirts, and I was squinting up in frustration. The sun was too bright, so I started swearing at it, then a great white sheet thwacked me across the face, and it was damp as buggery. I grabbed a corner, and suddenly I was miles away from the chores, the endless laundering for an ungrateful slob. I stood there like a gumby for I don’t know how long, but then I dropped a handful of pegs on the ground and couldn’t bend down to pick them up or I’d have lost the line which would have meant starting again from the end, or trying to hook it back with the pole Bill made all those years ago with his hands—and something broke.’

‘The pole?’

‘No, not the pole. Me. I was sobbing at the memory of his hands and how he used to stroke my belly when I was pregnant—but the wind cut through my thoughts, and I wanted to hammer a nail through his blasted hands and watch the blood erupt out of them.’

‘Frances!’ said Renée.

‘Sorry, but I did. The line flapped back and caught my hair; it tugged me back to reality and I felt old and crooked and hag-like. Bill would never touch me again the way he once did. Love disappears, just as you think you’ve caught it. And then it’s too late.’

Moyra nodded. She might not have known precisely what I was saying, but she could exhibit a high level of empathy.

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Renée, and she reached across and touched my hand. ‘But you’ve had good times too? I remember you went to Ireland not so long ago. You said the place was beautiful.’

‘The place, yes.’

‘Cliffs of somewhere or other, wasn’t it?’

‘Moher. Yes, last ditch attempt to go somewhere nice and make something work. I followed Bill all the way to the Hags Head. I was the hag, he was the—I don’t know what, but not the romantic hero I wanted him to be.’

‘You’re not remotely hag-like, darling.’ Renée patted my hand.

‘Thank you. But I have a certain haggishness at times, I’m afraid. Oh, Renée, you should see the place. So unutterably lovely. The rock formations are supposed to resemble a woman’s head looking out to sea. I’d brought my watercolours, but the weather was vile, so the paints were back at the cottage. Bill had wanted to go alone, to write. He was blocked at home, hence the trip—or so he said. He hadn’t wanted me along, but I’d insisted. The entity that was Bill and Frances was in crisis yet again, and he was slipping away. I’d told myself that this was a last-ditch attempt for us not to kill each other, but Bill had no idea of any of this. He kept himself amused looking at maps and spending hours emailing people from his laptop, though he claimed he was researching the area. Unlike him, I really had. I’d read up on how Mal, the old hag, had fallen for Cú Chulainn and chased him all the way across Ireland. He stayed ahead by hopping across the sea stacks like stepping-stones. She lost her footing and was dashed to her death against the rocks below. I’d already peered over the edge. It was wild as buggery down there. She wouldn’t have had a hope of surviving, but she wouldn’t have wanted to either. Not without him.’

I picked up my gloves and played with them.

‘I used to have this theory that if someone is in love with you, it can last forever so long as you keep still enough and stay the same—but you can’t stay the same.’

‘What about “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds”?’ said Renée.

‘That’s all very well, but do you really believe it?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘I wish I could, but it doesn’t fit with my experience. Bill never wrote me into his stories because I never meant enough to him. Maybe if I’d kept still—it’s like the way you can’t paint someone if they’re fidgeting all the time, they have to keep absolutely still so you can understand them perfectly.’

‘Not so sure about that,’ said Renée. ‘What about the dynamism? The personality? You don’t get that if someone’s completely still all the time.’

Moyra nodded in agreement.

‘Anyway, Bill had said he needed to go to Ireland because he had an idea for a series of interlocked stories. He hadn’t wanted me with him because he didn’t want me in his stories.’

‘Did he say so?’

‘No, but it was obvious. He said I’d be bored, but I insisted on coming, so I was there, and I was going to be shattered into a thousand bloody pieces at the base of the cliffs while he looked the other way, too busy thinking about the next story. That’s when I started having imaginary conversations with him.’

‘Like me and Alfred,’ said Moyra, nodding slowly.

‘Maybe. I liked talking to an idealised Bill, one who really got me. One who looked at me and saw me.’

‘One who lived in a romantic novel?’ said Renée. ‘Who would put his arms round you and pull you close, with the two of you staring out to sea, all grey and blustery and beautiful?’

‘Yeah, except in reality, he would be pushing his hands into his pockets and stomping away.’

‘While you looked out to sea and watched the clouds rolling in from the West, heavy with grief?’

‘Renée! Stop taking the Mickey. I’m serious here. This hurt.’

‘I know. Sorry.’

‘But there were, indeed, clouds, and they were heavy. We were getting soaked. One time when we were out and I was feeling windswept and romantic, Bill muttered something about idiocy and fucking awful weather and walked back to the car, head bent, one splodging foot after the other. He was no Cú Chulainn vaulting between rock stacks. I stayed out with Mal the Hag. She was still crashing about in the waves beneath my feet, being shattered time and time again on the jagged rocks. It was too cold to stand still for long. I saw a seagull lose its footing and tumble off the cliff. It recovered, but I knew I wouldn’t if I tried the same thing. I wasn’t brave enough. I would get back to the cottage unharmed and we would drive back to Dublin and get the ferry to Holyhead. We wouldn’t speak. This had been our last chance and we’d blown it, wordlessly.

‘That’s where the imaginary Bill butted in and said, Not necessarily. There were two versions of Bill: the Bill in my head, who I dreamed about, who I talked to all the time, and oh God, I did love that version—and the real Bill, stomping back to the car, cold and bedraggled and annoyed. I needed to reconcile the two, but the imaginary Bill told me not to try, and I agreed there was little point. He said that wasn’t what he’d meant, and we had a long conversation and—I don’t remember it, but I know it was comforting, even if it made me cry. I have these discussions in my head, and I get lost in them, but they give me something to hold onto, something to live for.

‘I waved goodbye to Mal the Hag. History is always biased towards the Cú Chulainns of the world, but the Mals could have had much more fun if only they’d been allowed. What’s that sport called where you scramble round the base of cliffs, half in and half out of the sea? That’s what she’d been doing for centuries, when all Cú Chulainn did was hop from one stepping-stone to the next like a good little boy, careful not to get his toes wet.

            ‘That evening, we ate in the pub. Bill had a huge steak and Guinness pie, and I had colcannon, because this was Ireland, so I was going to eat colcannon even though I didn’t know what it was. We shared a bottle of Merlot, which didn’t go too well with either meal. Bill chewed with his usual enthusiasm, and I knew I still loved him, but it was such a waste of love. Something got stuck between his teeth and he picked at it with a fingernail. He could have had a log stuck between his front teeth and he wouldn’t have been bothered. I was off in a daydream seeing how large an object he could have stuck between his teeth before he noticed, when he spoke, the real Bill, not the made up one. “God’s sake, Frances,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? Isn’t that any good?” He asked me if I’d wanted the pie after all, and when I said no, he said, “You sure? You can have some. Plenty here. That colicky mush looks disgusting.” to which I replied it was very nice, and he said, “Suit yourself,” so I had to go on eating the disgusting mush for appearances’ sake. Bill finished and wiped his mouth roughly with the napkin—I could hear it rubbing against his bristles. He hadn’t shaved that evening. I still wanted to kiss him, even with the risk of bristle burns. He looked round for the dessert menu. I knew he’d choose something huge and slurp it down as if it were a personal challenge. Everything he did was so much larger than life, but so petty at the same time. It was a pudding! It didn’t matter!’

‘Oh, these things, they do, they do,’ said Renée, laughing.

‘Apparently so. He put in his order and didn’t even ask me if I wanted anything. And I was just preparing to cry, when he did ask me after all. I was so cross—I was always building up these ideas of him, only for him to subvert them. I asked for crème brulée, despite knowing I’d get all worked up, anticipating that moment when I cracked the caramel with my spoon—but would they know how to make it properly here? We drank the rest of the Merlot and the dregs were bitter and gritty. Bill ordered another bottle, Chilean Pinot Noir this time, and it was horrible; it tasted of tar and eucalyptus and was paralyzingly strong. The desserts arrived. His was a massive steaming turd of a sticky toffee pudding. Mine was small and I couldn’t believe how promising it looked. I was close to crying again, this time at the anticipation of the crackle and crack of the back of my spoon on the top. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was like a statue, poised.’

Moyra was scribbling away furiously in her sketch book. I wondered if she was doing a lightning portrait of me poised to crack my pudding, or maybe it was me jumping off the cliffs in despair. I hoped it was the former, but I suspected the latter after what she’d said about pushing Dylan off the mountaintop. I was beginning to see there was something apocalyptic about Moyra.

‘Bill didn’t say anything, so I addressed him in my head, complained about how he was wolfing down his pudding, asked him if nobody ever fed him any puddings when he was a little kid, and he said, no, they didn’t, so I told him, No pulling at the heart strings, puhlease, and he just laughed, delighted, and told me to try my pudding—so I did. I gave it a thwack with the back of my spoon and the crust shattered, gloriously, and I looked up at him and the real Bill grinned back. And because of that, and only because of that, we somehow survived the Irish trip. The real and the imagined Bill had become one, but it only lasted a few seconds. That’s all I’ve had to live on ever since. We came back home, and the real Bill found someone new to write into his stories. There have been many new people—women—for him to write into his stories.’

‘Oh darling. No. Really?’ said Renée.

‘Yes. But I can hardly blame him, can I, not after Euan.’

‘From what you say, nothing happened with Euan.’

‘Nothing physical, true, and we hardly spoke to each other, but Bill saw how I looked at him. It set a precedent. After a while, inevitably, he started looking at other women, especially after Jessie was born and I went psychotic with the baby blues. Eventually it was more than just a look. He didn’t try to hide what he was doing. Mostly I was okay with it as it didn’t seem to make any difference to our marriage, but there was one—Josie—who I’d known at mother and toddler group. Only she’d been a toddler, not a mum. Now she was grown up. He didn’t realise it was the same kid who used to have sleepovers with our Jessie. I was completely invisible by then as far as he was concerned.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ said Renée.

I ignored her. ‘You know what I wanted to do? I wanted to return to Aillte an Mhothair, I wanted to stay in that cottage again. I have this dream that I ask Mal if she’s still being dashed to smithereens on those rocks below, and whether I can join her. Great swathes of clouds roll in, the sea roars beneath my feet, gulls scream overhead. I turn round and see a man striding across the promontory, maybe doing a little hop now and then as if jumping from one stepping-stone to another. He stretches out his arms to me. But then he’s not there. I want to go back to the car, to find Bill sitting there, but the car’s empty. I say bye-bye to Mal, tell her I won’t be joining her after all unless some great gust of wind lifts me up and lobs me into the sea just for the hell of it. In real life, lovelorn hags can’t escape their lot by being swept away into the sea. That’s the realm of Victorian melodrama. The reality is far bleaker. Oh God! We really did talk to each other, right at the beginning, on that gorgeous beach up at Bamburgh where our dogs fell in love. But that was a long time ago, and now the reality is that Bill’s been having affair after affair with leggy, clever-looking girls, with their ways of doing secretive smiles at people. Men look at them all the time, waiting for that little action to light up their day. Now look at me. Compare and contrast. Hag, remember? Scruffy. Short of stature, but if I wear heels I fall of and sprain my ankles. Oh God, what does it matter.’

‘Frances!’ said Renée. ‘Stop this! You’re lovely.’

‘I’m not, but you’re kind. Thank you.’

And then, somehow, we had reached Paris—Moyra leapt straight into baggage-handler mode and got us organised in no time, which was useful because I was in a world of my own and was of no use to anybody.

PART TWO

CHAPTER SEVEN

We arrived at John Stephenson’s apartment by taxi even though it was only a short walk from the station. Renée was in full diva mode by now, and as Parisian as was humanly possible—I hadn’t noticed her touching up her makeup, but she must have done it somewhere, presumably in the loo on the train. Moyra didn’t comment on how Renée was looking or acting, but Moyra finds everyone’s behaviour a mystery, so for her nothing essential had changed. I didn’t know what I was doing with them. I wanted to go home. Paris was horrible, I was going to be bored, it would be like the second honeymoon all over again—but without Bill this time.

The front of the building was elegant with period stonework, the lobby like an exclusive hotel, all deep carpets and understated elegance. I was acutely aware of my shoes which laced all the way down to my toes for added comfort. Thank God they weren’t done up with comfortable flaps of velcro but give me another five years and they might be. Renée must have been in those heels all day, but in London I hadn’t noticed them. Here, they came into their own, and it wasn’t the shoes themselves, but the way she walked in them with her trademark Monroe wiggle. I shouldn’t knock it; she looked fabulous, and genuinely happy, as if this were her spiritual home. We entered the incredibly grand-looking building and went up in a walnut-panelled lift, emerging on a floor which apparently belonged in its entirety to the Stephensons. Renée unlocked the door, opened it with a flourish, and led us in.

And that’s when Vicky Stephenson knocked us straight back out again—not literally, as she wasn’t there in person, but an immediate battle was being waged between the chic perfection of Renée’s Parisian persona, and the wild fury of Vicky’s paintings—monstrous great erotic canvases that shouldn’t have worked at all in that elegant space, but dear God, they did, and they made me realise what a pretender I was when it came to art. I could never dream of being able to paint like this. Everything about the paintings was huge. I didn’t have the words for it. Vicky’s personality must have been even more extraordinary and far scarier than I’d been led to believe from the photographs and articles I’d seen in magazines and on the internet, where she gave the impression of being slightly distant and mad and with a touch of the Goth about her. Here she was something else, something ferocious and sexually voracious. I hoped never to meet her. I would be subsumed.

Renée stood there in all her glory, willing the paintings to bow down to her, but they never would. Moyra on the other hand was taking it all in her stride. She had walked over to the first picture and was examining a portion of it in minute detail. She stepped back a few paces and nodded.

‘These are good.’

‘No, this is good,’ said Renée, as she opened the shutters onto a magnificent view of the Paris skyline. The sun was low, and she was side-lit. She looked amazing, and I’m sure she knew it. I wondered how often she had stood there, and whether she had been with John Stephenson at the time. I couldn’t imagine she would pose like that for Vicky.

‘Tell me about Mr Stephenson,’ I said. I couldn’t bring myself to call him “John”. ‘How did you two meet?’

‘Oh that? Ancient history. Dinosaurs roamed the earth, a comet struck, we met, we fell into bed. As one does.’

No, one doesn’t, but I didn’t stop her.

‘We moved on, we had affairs, he veered into marriages, so we necessarily drifted apart for long periods of time. Didn’t see each other for ages after he’d left Emma.’

‘Emma?’

‘His first wife. A dear girl. I adored her. She was so hurt by the things that little bitch Vicky said to her, she ran straight into the arms of a motor mechanic, would you believe. After John Stephenson! The poor darling. The two of them moved to the seaside to make babies and patch up clapped out old exhaust pipes. Such a waste. I hope it worked out for her, but after John, and given that she had such dysfunctional parents, I don’t know.’

‘Dysfunctional?’

‘Yes. Long story. I won’t bore you, but reading between the lines, I’m sure there was some bullying going on there.’

 ‘So, you think—with John?’

 ‘Lordy no. I’m sure Emma didn’t do a history repeating itself thing and abuse him in anyway, or vice versa, but she’d had a difficult upbringing, very few boyfriends, always shy and awkward around men, and that was why it was so utterly tragic that when finally she had a man who was perfect for her, who loved her to distraction, that a few sour words from Vicky would destroy it all. Emma and Vicky knew each other, you see. They’d been students together, and Emma trusted her completely. I don’t know exactly how it happened, as Emma didn’t want to say and there was no way Vicky would have told me, but Emma ran off with a motor mechanic to a little coastal village in Northumberland to pop out baby after baby after baby. Such a waste. She was so good for John and he was perfect for her.’   

‘She may well be very happy for all you know.’

‘I refuse to acknowledge the possibility,’ said Renée, with a chuckle.

‘But what about you and John?’

‘We had a quite delicious early history, my dears, but then we drifted apart until I bumped into him years later, quite randomly, in the garden at Chatsworth. After we’d done the cheery “Gosh, fancy seeing you here,” thing, it was clear to us both that the years didn’t matter, only the pain, only the waste. The conversation stumbled to a halt, and that never happens with me.’

‘True.’

‘Then he dropped a bombshell. Told me there had been an occasion, years and years ago, when I’d said, “Yes, I’ll stay.” I don’t remember ever saying that, but he said he panicked and ran. Chatsworth is so beautiful, but after his confession, I couldn’t start talking about roses or anything, that would have been absurd. The only sound was the wood pigeons. Funny how their call is so like cuckoos. These things we say, we throw them away as if they don’t matter. “I’ll stay.” Why did I ever say that? I’ve never stayed with anybody. We walked on, slowly, both lost in thought. When we were younger, life was about hurrying; but not anymore. Now we could potter round this half-warm garden in June and find a pocket of sunshine, but the warmth was dangerous and full of memories. He smiled at me, and I remembered that smile, I remembered kissing it over and over. It was all too sad, my dears. This growing old, these memories, these beautiful people that we want to stay the way they always were. I was sure the sun would go behind a cloud any minute, there would be a chill in the air and we’d say something about how funny it was to meet up again after all these years, and we’d be awkward and then we’d say we had to go, we were with people, needed to catch up, and neither of us would say “Stay in touch” because we’d both dread the idea of doing any such thing. I used to have a little subterfuge, a little game I used to play that I called “the pausing kiss”. A terrible thing my dears, really awful, but I would stand with my head tilted back, waiting, timing it to perfection. But then one day I had to wait a second too long, and that was the day I feared my little tricks and games had succeeded in manipulating me out of his love completely. I didn’t want to waste these few precious moments I had left with him; I didn’t dare say anything that would take us back to the old arguments, and my dears, we did used to argue. Then we came upon a mechanical tree, a lovely thing, with water pouring out of its branches like the last of love escaping.’

‘I know that tree,’ I said. ‘It’s exquisite.’

‘Isn’t it? Heartbreakingly lovely workmanship. Imagine a man making something like that for you. Just imagine.’

Moyra frowned. I wondered what was going through her head. She would be attempting to follow the instruction. Moyra was always trying so hard to do what people wanted her to do.

‘There was a rumbling beneath our feet,’ said Renée. ‘I asked if it was thunder, and I looked to him because thunder frightens me, and he knows it does—there had been a day once, and a storm and him holding me, but now he was so much older, and I had lived so long knowing he would never hold me again, so I couldn’t bear the possibility. Half a dozen sparrows were chirping and fluttering around. Something startled them and they flew off. There was a pebble on the ground, some sort of pink granite, it looked out of place. My magpie eyes were darting around, desperate for distractions. I could smell the storm in the air. The water in the fountain—it must have worked by gravity—was this limestone country? I didn’t know. John would have known. He was always interested in what things were made of, whether his beloved antiques or the land itself. That was always his area, I didn’t take an interest. I lived my own life, and darlings, you know what that’s like.’

She smirked, and it was funny how she was suddenly the Renée we knew—during her reminiscences she’d seemed to be someone else entirely. But then she was back in her memories.

‘There was a flicker of light and the thunder rumbled again, closer. I hadn’t brought an umbrella. It had looked so nice that morning. I shivered, but there was a gap between us of at least two feet—’

I thought of Moyra and Dylan sitting on their separate boulders on a mountaintop.

‘—and I didn’t know how to cross it to get to him. A fox barked in the distance. I thought it was unusual to hear them at this time of day and I said something of the sort, some rubbish. It was probably a dog not a fox at all. What does a fox bark sound like anyway? I don’t know. But the thunder had startled it. A flock of birds rose up from the distant trees, and we discussed them, saying how they were jackdaws most likely, but they could have been starlings, so hard to tell at that distance, and I thought, what are we doing? Neither of us has any interest in birds. But then the sparrows were back, and they were so very young—fluffy—soft little things, so fragile. They broke my heart, and I thought, they’d better bloody survive. I was going to invest my entire being in making sure they survived. He said we’d best be getting back. Downpour on its way. He was being kind, but the distance between us was increasing. I took one last look at the sparrows and whispered “Goodbye”. I felt sick. There was a crack of thunder almost overhead and I grabbed his arm. He turned quickly and his other arm came round me, held me very, very tight.’

She smiled at the memory.

‘And that, my dears, was that. We re-kindled our old friendship, and it didn’t take long before I had the keys to this place, though of course I tend only to use it when he’s away.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ I said, doubting that very much. ‘And Vicky?’

‘Horrible bloody cow. I’ve met her on a number of times and have had to be bitingly polite, though I don’t think she’s appreciated the effort. She’s so tied up in these bloody great things.’

Renée’s elegant arm swept past the huge paintings in what I could only describe as a magnificent sneer.

‘I like them,’ said Moyra. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

‘Moyra, my love,’ said Renée, ‘you’re priceless. Tell you what; let’s go and eat and drink and live and absorb this wonderful city and we’d best watch Frances as she is going to get very drunk very quickly.’

‘I am not!’

‘We’ll see.’  

We spent all of five minutes doing a rudimentary unpacking, and then we were out, determined to enjoy ourselves. We stopped at the nearest bar and of course Renée managed to get us served immediately with her impeccable French. Moyra sat stiff and upright, clearly uneasy.

            ‘Alfred came to Paris once,’ she said under her breath, as if to assert that the language that made her comfortable was English, but she wouldn’t expect anyone to respond. I had to think for a moment. Was I supposed to know Alfred? Oh yes. Her imaginary friend, an avatar of a long-ago headless teddy bear, now transmogrified into some sort of a version of her husband. I suppose the missing head meant it couldn’t have a boil where Dylan’s had been. 

            ‘Do tell!’ said Renée. ‘I’ve been dying to hear more about the delectable Alfred.’

            ‘The Café-hotel Au Bon Coin lies between the Rue Arthur Rozier and the end of the world,’ said Moyra, and her accent was impeccable as she said the names.

I vowed never to attempt to say anything in French as long as we were on foreign soil.

‘Alfred was here once,’ said Moyra. ‘The fur hat he wore to keep his thoughts warm and steady, was weighing him down. His head was too hot. He was trying to remember.’

Our drinks arrived and we each took a sip. Okay, so the bear, Alfred, still had a head at this point. I couldn’t make out if he, or it, was like my alternate Bill, an unrealistic version of Dylan, or if he was something else entirely. I’d thought I’d more or less got to grips with how Moyra’s mind worked, but this Alfred stuff was confusing, and it felt unhealthy.

‘There was a telephone number in the window,’ said Moyra, ‘but he had no need of Coca Cola and didn’t know what else they could provide.’

‘Champagne?’ said Renée. ‘I really do think the dear old fellow could have phoned for some champagne if he was in Gay Paree.’

Moyra looked at her and frowned.

‘No,’ she said.

‘What happened?’ I said, despite myself. ‘Go on, Moyra. Don’t mind Renée.’

‘All he could see was the reflected monotones from the gutter. I’ve painted this.’

‘Aha!’ said Renée. ‘Alfred is your muse. These are your paintings. Excellent.’

‘I don’t know about that. I don’t understand muses in the modern sense of the word. I painted him because he lay in the gutter once.’

‘And saw stars?’

‘Renée do stop interrupting,’ I said, but it didn’t seem that Moyra minded. She was lost in her memory of the paintings or the person or even the teddy bear which may or may not have had its head ripped off by her father.

‘He picked up his bags and shuffled on, and because he was no longer looking at the plate glass, he couldn’t see his reflection, so didn’t know how the moonlight picked out the white hairs that sprouted from his ears. Dylan had white hairs sprouting out of his ears.’

‘How lovely,’ said Renée. ‘Frances, you’ve finished your drink, and that will never do. We must keep you topped up.’

I put my hand over my glass, but she pushed it away with a smile and filled the glass again with not too much that I would raise an objection, but more than I could finish in just a few sips.

Moyra noticed her drink for the first time. She stared at the glass, picked it up and wiped some of the condensation off the outside of the glass by drawing a double helix with her fingertips, and I have no idea how she did that, but I instinctively knew she’d be the sort of person who could stand in front of a blackboard and draw a perfect circle.

She put her glass down and Renée filled it to the brim. Moyra frowned at it, hesitated, then rummaged in her bag for her sketch book and a pencil. Within moments a shape was there, a person, but I couldn’t quite make him out.

‘Is that Alfred?’ I said.

‘No. It’s Goya’s grandmother.’ Moyra was deadly serious.

‘Of course it is,’ said Renée under her breath.

‘She bends and shakes her hair,’ said Moyra, narrating her picture as she drew more lines. ‘A white owl flops in front of her face; behind her, a serpent’s tail writhes and coils down her back until it slips inside her black dress. Her cat grins and bats at stars with one fractured paw while the other rakes and harrows the soil till the earth’s scars break open and bleed.’

‘Heavens,’ said Renée. ‘I really think Goya’s grandmother needs to wait for another day. Tell us another Alfred story. I think I could grow quite fond of the old fellow.’

I felt differently. I didn’t think talking about “Alfred” was doing Moyra any good. Normally she was so logical and straightforward, but Alfred, or the wine, or something, was taking her into a dark place where perhaps she shouldn’t have been going.

‘He hasn’t seen the sky for twenty years,’ said Moyra, ‘not since they took him away. They said, “But look out of the window!” He looked, but it wasn’t sky, it was stars and nebulae. He longed for grey and blue and salmon pink and cumulo-nimbus, alto-stratus. Clouds. They gave him a cup of tea, but it came from a replicator, and wasn’t tea any more than the cosmos was sky. Alfred said he was sorry, but would they please slip something toxic into his supper. He missed the sky and the clouds so very much.’

            Moyra took a huge swig of her wine. Renée made a move to top her glass up again, but I stopped her. I wondered if I should stop Moyra talking as well as drinking, however entertaining Renée might be finding it all, but stopping her might have been impossible. She was speaking very quietly now, and we had to strain to hear her.

‘Chaos erupted on the northernmost reaches of the planet, its core shook and quivered with pulses of magma. Pumice flew from the surface, pluming up beyond the seven circling moons, beyond the crown nebula, beyond the wind-whipped reaches of Sol, beyond comprehension, but I couldn’t reach Dylan.’

‘I thought this was about Alfred?’ said Renée.

I shushed her.

‘All I could do was sit there, crackle-glazed like a rack of roast lamb, tucked into a crater when everyone else had left but that was okay, that was how I liked it. “The loneliness of the long-distance cosmonaut”.’

She looked at her glass, picked it up, put it down slightly to the left, picked it up again, put it down slightly to the right, repeat, repeat, repeat.

We sat very still for a long time. Then Renée laughed, but it was a warm laugh. ‘Honestly Moyra, you should be writing short stories as well as painting. Get out of your spaceship and into Paris.’

‘No. Alfred’s stuck out there and it’s such a long way home.’

Moyra grinned unnervingly, presumably having made some sort of a joke that we didn’t get. She got up from the table and marched away—we panicked for a moment, but she was just going to the toilet.

‘Phew!’ said Renée.

‘Phew indeed.’

‘But you can see why I like her.’

‘She’s fascinating. Has she painted all those pictures? Of Alfred, or Dylan, or whoever it really is?’

‘Do you know, I have no idea, but if she hasn’t, she should. I’ll have to have a word with John. Who knows what he could do for her.’

Moyra came back to the table and we stopped talking about her. She was silent now, but she didn’t appear to have regretted speaking as she had. We had asked her about Alfred, and she had told us, and perhaps it had been good for her. I wondered about Dylan, and whether he would ever come back to her, and what Moyra would do if he didn’t—how she would make her life work. It sounded as if Renée had plans to turn her into a successful artist, which may have been the real reason for our trip to Paris. Was John Stephenson really away for weeks as she’d claimed? I sincerely hoped so. If he was due back and this was a setup to get him and Moyra to meet, then I was playing gooseberry and I’d sooner be anywhere else. I absolutely did not want to meet him. I missed Bill. We could have gone off somewhere and… I didn’t know. We never went off and did anything. But I wanted my Bill, I wanted to sit with him on the sofa and have a cuddle, I needed him so much all of a sudden, I’d be wailing if I didn’t watch out. Must watch my alcohol consumption—I was turning into a mad old bat staring at an empty absinthe bottle, fated never to be painted by Manet or anyone else. Fucking invisible. Shit. I needed the loo. Felt awful. Frances, stop drinking so much. You can’t take it. Paris, stop being fucking Paris. City of love. Fuck off.

When I got back from ladies’, having splashed my face with cold water and forced myself to be reasonably sober, the other two were standing up ready to go. Renée said it looked like rain, so we’d best be heading back. She put her hand on my arm, and I wasn’t sure why until she said I’d been doing my leaning tower of Pisa impression and she was afraid I might break something or someone. She was laughing at me, and I was cross, but she was justified. She steered me towards the door and out into the street, and yes, it was going to rain, there was that distinctive smell in the air.

             She led us back by a strange route, the “real” Paris she said, off the tourist track. It was dirty and wound through alleyways that in my sozzled state seemed to contain all the lost pieces of my life—I’m sure I saw a slot machine rocking horse, barrels of beer, square planters with dying shrubs. I shook my head and it sloshed about alarmingly. Above me, the unholy clouds were threatening and in the weird light it looked like a river of urine was trickling past my feet—but that could well have been real. A man staggered past, oblivious of us, and he smelled of stale fish, smoke, and sewage, his shoes didn’t have any laces, and I didn’t know how anyone could live like that, but maybe when his organs finally failed he would smell of acacia blossom. The thought sustained me. I wrinkled my nose and followed Renée and Moyra under an arch, past the graffiti—a spray-painted cow, a toad, and there was a splot of paint on the pavement that looked like an insect, wearing a bishop’s mitre; then we walked beneath a poster of naked people embracing each other in the rain, and God, it was pouring by now, we were getting soaked and Renée’s heels were going tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, faster and faster, but Moyra’s feet in her heavy brogues didn’t make a sound, didn’t even splash, it was as if she wasn’t quite solid, she was a ghost. I looked up and shivered—we were surrounded by grotesques, monsters, hideous gargoyles. A blue man cycled past with a swish in the water creating a trail of bubbles that opened for just one moment like the Red Sea parting then closed again. I thought I was going to vomit on the cobbles. Somehow stopped myself. No more booze! Must stop drinking!

CHAPTER EIGHT

Renée was a most excellent hostess. We spent the next couple of days learning about the Paris she loved, and she really did love it, she was passionate. She found all the best places, some touristy, some quiet and intimate, and all very, very French. This Paris of hers bore no relation to the one I’d seen with Bill all those years ago. I vaguely remembered the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and the queues, and Bill trying too hard to make up for his boorishness on Skye. We had gone through the honeymoon motions, each playing our part, each trying to fix what had gone wrong but was permanently unfixable. After Paris, we’d stopped making the effort, though just sometimes I’d see the hurt in his eyes and I’d go to him and love him and we almost managed to recapture whatever it was that had made us want to be together in the first place.

            Paris with Renée was all about freshness and light, darkness and love; it was magnificent and tragic and eternal, and it made London feel tasteless and unsophisticated. Moyra was doing the proper arty thing and sketching whenever we kept still enough for her to do so, and the drawings, fleeting impressions, showed a level of skill that alternately depressed and inspired me. I was too self-conscious to have a go myself, and that was the story of my life. I never did anything that might make people notice me or that might be deemed exceptional or exciting. This travelling to Paris, which to Renée was the same as popping next door for a cup of tea, was for me a most incredible adventure and had taken a level of bravery she could never imagine.

            I had left Bill, and this was not just in the sense that he was at home while I was here, but I was starting to realise I really had left him, at long last, and it was startling and freeing and awful and I didn’t know what to do with myself or how to cope with it. No wonder I had spent the last few days getting drunk. Now, however, I was determined to stop seeing everything through an alcoholic haze, so instead, I watched Moyra’s incredible skill at drawing, and Renée’s incredible skill at being Renée, and went with the flow. And Paris—Paris! I didn’t have the words to describe it, so I listened to Renée; and I didn’t have the skills to draw it, so I watched Moyra and wondered how she could capture it all with such incredible insight but so few marks on the page. And at night we went back to John’s apartment and I looked at Vicky’s paintings which had scared me witless at first, but now, with more familiarity, I started to see what she was doing, and I wasn’t surprised Renée hated her, because there must have been layers upon layers of jealousy going on there. I didn’t ever want to meet Vicky. Whoever had painted these furiously beautiful pictures would be so much larger than life I would never be able to speak to her. If ever we were in the same room I would sit in a corner and be very quiet, hoping she didn’t notice me. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’d had plenty of practice at invisibility.

            On about the fourth day we were walking through a park and Renée stopped us, whispered, ‘Le fin du jour,’ and pointed out a couple on a bench. ‘Roland and Marie,’ she said. 

‘Friends of yours?’

‘No, never met them, but don’t they look just like a Roland and Marie?’

Moyra, inevitably had her sketchbook out and had already virtually captured the scene, while Renée did a cinematic-style voice-over.

‘Roland and Marie are making their final pilgrimage to the Parc de Sceaux’

‘This isn’t Sceaux,’ said Moyra, nose in her sketchbook. ‘That’s ten kilometres away.’

Renée ignored her.

‘They sit on the stone bench and gaze at the cedars clipped into pyramids that have witnessed their lives, each visit, each kiss, each trembling finger that touched another. The sun is setting.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Moyra. She pointed at the sun, high in the sky.

‘Marie shifts slightly,’ said Renée, trying to keep a straight face. ‘The bones of her backside are no longer well-covered with padding to save her from cold white marble. Roland cracks a knuckle or two in the silence, blinks his tired eyes behind dark-rimmed spectacles, watches a bee buzzing back and forth with all the time in the world.’

‘That’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘They are beautiful. Look at them. So old, yet still so in love.’

There was a tear in the corner of Renée’s eye, and she looked like a silent film star, playing a part to perfection, not a dry eye in the house. She grinned suddenly. ‘Let’s have a look at your sketch, Moyra. Woah! That’s good. That’s very good. I think we need more pyramids.’

She gathered us up as if we were children and strode along the path to where there was a small kiosk selling magazines and cigarettes.

‘Here’s your next picture, Moyra. Now then. We need a character... there! That girl with the stripy tights and the big hat, she can be saying, “I think you have many such pyramids in Paris,” but in French, of course, and a man is following her, he’s thinking he can’t deny the statement, though this one—this has something new. She walks up to the kiosk.’

‘I can’t see her. Where is she?’ said Moyra.

‘That’s just the point. She isn’t here anymore, even though the man has been following her. He can be that tall fellow there. See him?’

‘Yes.’ Moyra put her head down and sketched him in with just a few strokes. I had no idea how she did it.

‘He’s been stalking her all morning, but now she’s vanished and all he can see is the elderly woman dressed in that blue spotty thing. Is she the same woman? Can’t be. And yet... She’s far too short to see across the counter. Her eyes are on a level with Marie-Claire. Oh God, look at her stockings! I didn’t think those still existed. Wonder how many centuries she’s been wearing and darning them, and how many of those lines are darnings and how many are varicose veins.’

‘Renée!’ I said. ‘They’re just patterned tights.’

‘If you say so—and then suddenly there’s a movement between them, a cat sweeps by, mimicking shadows, then it’s gone and all the man has left is a memory of pyramids, splashed with graffiti. I hope you’re getting all this down, Moyra.’

‘No. I’m drawing what I see. Not what you see.’

‘Ah. That’s profound, probably. Look! You must draw him.’

She pointed out a young man in improbably tight jeans. ‘See him? I think he’s what in the nineteen-twenties they used to call “the young idea,” but updated for today.’ She peered over Moyra’s shoulder to see how she was doing and gave me a thumbs up. ‘It’s a Monday, drainpipe, downpipe, guttering sort of a day… but his face is in shadow, his profile so, so young—Moyra, that’s clever. How have you made him blue without using a blue pencil? No idea how you did that. His shadow stretches to the top—I can’t see the end of the shadow’

            ‘There is no end to shadows,’ said Moyra, and she turned over to the next page.

‘Roland and Marie part two?’ I said, spotting another elderly couple, but even as I said it, I knew they weren’t. There was something uncomfortable about them. They were obviously together, but there was too wide a gap between them.

‘Over to you,’ I said to Renée.

She looked at them for a long time before she spoke. ‘Sandor and his wife Giulietta are sitting in the park, as far apart as they can manage while still being together. Giulietta is hunched over her book, her shoulders are soft and round, her forearms rest on comfortable thighs clad in generous beige slacks. She moves her lips as she reads, and the lipstick creeps up the lines on her long upper lip. Sandor crosses his legs—he pulls on his trousers to ease the movement; his right hand grips the fabric and lifts the leg across. He doesn’t watch what he’s doing. His eyes are on the young woman sitting a foot or two away. She’s asleep. Her legs are crossed. He hasn’t realised he’s echoing her pose. Her arms are bare, her dress is cotton, low cut. She’s put her cardigan over the back of the bench to soften the wooden slats against her head. Her breathing is slow. Sandor watches her chest rising and falling. The sun moves round.’

Moyra looked up. I hoped she wasn’t going to say, ‘No it doesn’t.’ Luckily, she desisted, merely shaking her head. She turned the page over and started a new drawing.

‘Giulietta glowers at the sun and wrinkles her nose,’ said Renée. ‘It’s hard to read when the light gets too bright. She sees Sandor, sees the girl, puts her book back in her bag and stands up with a clicking of hips. “Well?” she says to Sandor. “Well what?” “Had enough?” Now there’s a question. Has he had enough sun, enough sitting down, enough gazing at the girl with her chest rising and falling, rising and falling—has he had enough of his wife, who refuses to sit next to him on a park bench, because he will keep crossing his legs and fidgeting when she wants to read—and why shouldn’t he fidget? Why does she have to come with him in the first place? She could stay at home. Has he had enough? Yes, he’s had enough. “What do you want for tea?” says Giulietta, and Sandor remembers that his wife is an excellent cook and he can never have too much of her food, of melting braised beef, light fluffy gnocchi drenched in butter—but is that enough? A leaf floats down from the tree and lands in the girl’s cleavage. She shudders awake, bats at her chest, gets the leaf out, laughs at it, puts it down carefully on the bench beside her, closes her eyes again. Sandor looks at the leaf. Looks at Giulietta. She looks at him, purses her lips, looks at the leaf. Neither of them move or speak. He wonders if he dare pick it up. Giulietta’s eyes bore into him. The girl yawns, picks up her cardigan and walks away. The leaf flutters to the ground. Sandor knows he should get up now, quickly, go home with Giulietta, eat warm, fat, comfortable food. He doesn’t have much time to decide. Giulietta’s “Well?” is still ringing in the air between them. He looks up at her. She’s chewing her teeth. He imagines the plate in her mouth, the slick slap of it as she moves it about. He bends down and picks up the leaf.’

Renée had a tear in her eye by the end, and it might even have been genuine. I had a lump in the throat myself. Renée had a way of getting to the heart of things, a way of observing—and I think I could have done that too, but I would never have been able to put it all into words the way she did. Beside me, Moyra had produced another brilliant sketch. It occurred to me that they should write a book together, call it “Sketches of Paris” or something, and Renée could do the text to go with the wonderful drawings Moyra was producing.

‘You should write a book about love,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it would be too, too sad. It would be about people whose hearts turn to iron. It would be tears. Loss. That’s what always happens when I write about love. I can’t do it any other way.’

‘But that’s exactly why you should write it all down,’ I said.

‘No, my dear. I couldn’t do it. I’d be destroyed.’

Moyra looked at her and gave a swift nod. You never knew when Moyra would suddenly “get” something, but this was one of those occasions when she did, and her understanding was striking and somehow tragic.

We needed to cheer up. It was easy enough—this was Paris! Renée kept finding places, people, she had a great eye for it all, and Moyra’s sketchbook would come out and she would make magic with her pen, and I would tag along wondering why I was there at all, but taking in all the sights and sounds anyway. In retrospect, I think Renée knew exactly what she was doing, and not just as regards Moyra. She was fixing us. That’s what she does, she fixes people. She was taking two unhappy women and giving them something to live for. Moyra would be a great artist, she would take Paris by storm. But me? I wondered what she had in store for me. I liked that she was showing me Paris and helping to take my mind off Bill and what I had done to him, but I was sure there was going to be more to it than that.

‘Oh, those Audrey Hepburn sunglasses!’ said Renée, seeing another amazingly elegant woman. ‘Want, want, want!’ She changed her walk slightly and turned herself into Hepburn. ‘We should all get drunk now and again,’ she said in a sweet but cut-glass accent, ‘especially here, where the climate is impeccable.’

‘It’s no such thing,’ I said.

‘Maybe not,’ she said, back as the familiar Renée again, ‘but I have momentarily mislaid my muse, and am therefore inclined towards a certain delicious depravity.’

Moyra looked at her, confused, then put her head back down, absorbed once again in one of her drawings.

‘Put that away, darling. I need a drink, even if Frances has temporarily decided to take the pledge.’

We were soon settled at a café table, and Moyra had hardly noticed, she’d been scribbling away and had to be guided to her seat and gently pushed down into it.

‘Bill’s never been remotely faithful to you, has he,’ said Renée, catching me completely off balance.

‘Okay, so he’s had his “away-days”.’

‘Is that what you call them? And what about the nights?’

‘I should never have looked at Euan.’

‘My dear! We’ve been through this. Don’t be absurd. That’s all you did, you looked. You saw a beautiful thing and you looked. You probably never did it again, but he did it, dozens of times. He felt justified. Men are like that, I’m afraid.’

I didn’t reply.

‘Wait. You did do it again, didn’t you? Come on. Tell Auntie Renée.’

‘January. Two years ago.’

‘What happened?’

‘I’d been away for a few days on a course. Bill had been away too, though I’ve no idea where. I got back first, Bill later, but I looked at him that evening and it was as if he was a complete stranger. The thought going through my head was: “I have forgotten how to love you.” I didn’t say it out loud, but this great lump of a man was sitting in an armchair in front of the fire, reading his paper, and for a moment I couldn’t understand who he was or what the hell he was doing in my life. I’d met someone at the hotel. That sounds ridiculous now that I say it out loud. It’s absurd that such an innocuous phrase as “met someone” should have such weight. I met someone. I might have met a policeman and asked him the time; I might have met a petrol pump attendant and asked them to “fill her up”. Such things date me terribly. I wonder when a policeman was last asked the time, or if it ever happened. Do you sense I’m avoiding the issue?’

‘Yes, but no matter. We’ve got all the time in the world. Moyra’s got half a sketchbook to finish yet.’

‘Okay. I met someone while I was away. I’ll call him “Adam”. Not his real name. Because, and I know this sounds awful, I can’t remember what his real name was, although it was only two years ago. We sat together at breakfast on the last morning, purely by chance, and he was puzzling over a clue in the Times crossword. He had an answer which fitted, but was uncertain why it was right, so he asked me to take a look, and in no time we were discussing everything under the sun: music, mathematics, phonetics, art, nature—all with a realisation that this was our last morning, and why hadn’t we sat together before? We needed a lifetime, but we didn’t have a lifetime, we had breakfast, and that was it. We were each going home within the hour, he to Henley, me back to Darlington.’

‘All sounds a bit Brief Encounter to me.’

‘I hope not. And anyway, it was just the one breakfast.’

‘I think there must have been more to it than that. What happened when you got home?’

‘I arrived back mid-afternoon. I knew Bill would be back by the evening, and I would be perfectly nice to him, as always. The house would be warm. I imagined the scenario. He would come in and ask me about my time away, half listening to the answer, but with no real interest. I would have an urge to break his heart but wouldn’t know how to achieve this. I would tell him I did the Times Crossword with a lovely man at breakfast, and he would be delighted for me—always so bloody happy to my face, never meaning a thing by it. I would want to disappoint him, wake him up, hurt him; make him wonder if the crossword is all we did. And I would turn the situation round and say: “Did you meet someone while I was away?” because I would be sure he had. Lipstick on his collar.’

‘A bit old hat, darling.’

‘I know. But all the time I would be thinking: can this be the end of us? Please? Not that any of this happened, in actual fact. The reality was that I drank some tea and did the ironing until I heard his car pull into the drive over the heave and crunch of the snow. There had only been a few inches when I’d got back, but it had snowed heavily since, so I knew he wouldn’t be able to get into the house easily. The gate to the back would be frozen shut. I wondered what he would do. After a bit I heard soft thuds, looked out of the window and saw him with the shovel working hard, rhythmically, shifting the snow, shovelful by shovelful, lit up by the porchlight in the blizzard. There was something heroic in the way he was digging his way back into my life, but also something so sad in him doing this all by himself. This need I’ve always had to be needed; it’s a quiet bomb, almost benign. It was exploding then, so gently, as he dug through the snow, sending snowflakes onto his head that he hadn’t even noticed, but they would melt, and there would be a trickle of cold water down the back of his neck. I could see him sensing a mild irritation. Is that all I was worth? At least he was shivering. He came inside at last and settled himself in front of the fire, picked up the paper. I was sitting at the table, doing a sudoku puzzle. I looked up, possibly even smiled, I don’t remember. I finished the puzzle, and then I put my pen down and it was over.’

‘Oh, my dear...’

‘And as for “Adam”, I have no doubt he went back home to his wife and never gave me a single thought, and if I thought about him at all it was simply to despise him for having someone to go home to; someone he loved. I closed my book of puzzles and sat very still. Bill noticed me at last. Something must have been showing because he asked me what was wrong. I shook my head and said nothing. I didn’t trust my voice. He poured some wine and brought me a glass. I took a sip. It was warming and spicy. He went across to the telly, and I knew if there was a drama on about lies and deception something in me would break—but what if there wasn’t? What if it was his favourite team playing, and I saw the simple joy on his face? And what if I remembered that the man at breakfast, whose name I’m sure wasn’t anything as honest as “Adam” had had a mono-brow and smelled of Old Spice and fried eggs, and what if I remembered that people who do the Times crossword at breakfast in hotels are dreadful posers? What if I remembered how to love Bill?’

Renée looked at me with her best sorrowful look, a classic. I had to admire the way she could do that.

‘Finished,’ said Moyra. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Moyra, my love,’ said Renée, ‘you have the knack of saying precisely the right thing or the wrong thing at precisely the right or wrong time, and it’s impossible to know the difference—but luckily I know just the right place.’

 

CHAPTER NINE

The right place turned out to be a glorious bar, pure art deco, the sort of interior where you expect to see Toulouse Lautrec and his crowd—genuinely arty people rather than tourists. Moyra and I stuck out dreadfully, but Renée covered for us, as ever. The food was perfect, and despite the abject misery which had descended on me like a pile of dust from an over-full vacuum cleaner, I managed to enjoy it. For once Renée didn’t insist I drink until I was paralytic. I think she was wary of me collapsing into a sobbing wreck. She chattered brightly and non-stop, and I thought, as I often did, what a wonderful person she was, so completely life-affirming. I think I was a little bit in love with her.

‘There was the Greek as well,’ I said, still in confessional mode.

‘The what? Who?’ said Renée.

‘Not just Mr Times Crossword. Not just Euan. I’d forgotten about the fat Greek.’

‘Frances, you are amazing. A fat Greek. How delicious. Do tell.’

‘Okay, but this really is ridiculous.’

‘Good.’

‘We were on holiday in Greece one summer. Blisteringly hot—I wasn’t enjoying it. But one day we were on the beach and twenty yards along from us a couple were having a blazing row. You’d have loved them, Renée, you could’ve made up a brilliant story. This isn’t brilliant, I’m afraid, but it’s true. They were sitting on yellow plastic chairs and must have been on them for some time because the tide was coming in and they were going to be underwater if they didn’t move soon. The man had his back to the sea and the woman was facing him, and from the body language it looked as if she was winning whatever the argument was about, but he was leaning back, smug as anything, refusing to answer her. His chair legs were already half-submerged. She was leaning forwards and her front chair legs had sunk by around eight inches. Funny how well I remember these details, but the sun was so bright, everything was in such sharp focus, it lasered itself onto my memory. The woman had one eye shut because of the brightness, and it made her face look monstrously lopsided. She had fat mottled legs, which she was tensing and flexing, bringing out the full horror of her cellulite. I glanced down at my own and was relieved not to be so bad. She had one hand on the ground to stop herself toppling forwards and was gesticulating violently with the other. I decided to dislike her. Quite unfair I know, but that ultra-blonde hair and bronze cleavage were colours that couldn’t exist in nature.’

‘Bit like mine?’ said Renée patting her beautifully dyed hair.

‘Nothing like yours.’

‘And what about the man? Your big fat Greek?’

‘Not mine. But he was big, very big. He was wearing a dark red vest—I guessed he worked outside because he had an incredibly deep tan all over, bald head included. If he’d leaned much further back he’d have toppled, and if she’d leaned much further forward, she’d have fallen between his legs, which I’m sure was not her intention. Bill told me not to stare, but he’d been watching them as well. I handed him the sun block and he squeezed out a great white blob and slapped it all over his shiny body. I wanted to flick sand at him, but I resisted. He wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it. Hadn’t been in any sort of a receptive mood for weeks, probably because he’d sooner have been away with someone else.’

‘Oh, Frances.’

‘I know, I know. But it’s been like that for years. I’m used to it.’

‘And the Greeks?’

‘She was screaming at him, and he’d changed position and was leaning forward now, they were eyeball to eyeball, the whole beach pretending very hard not to see—except for the lifeguard who had his binoculars trained on them. And then it happened, that freak wave that always comes along just as you think you’ve understood the pace of the incoming tide. It slapped the man hard on the back and his chair lurched to one side. He fell out, face down into the water which was deep enough to drown him if his reflexes didn’t kick in straight away. I thought they would, and he would come up spluttering, but the wave pulled back and he didn’t. The woman screeched and tried to get out of her chair but her huge backside was wedged in it, and the chair legs had been completely sucked into the sand.’

Renée hooted with laughter.

‘The lifeguard leapt down from his seat, and that went wrong too—he landed very awkwardly and hurt his ankle, not just a sprain but maybe even a fracture. Bill was watching, mouth open, eyes with pinprick pupils leaping back and forth between the protagonists, trying to focus through the blistering sunlight. “Do something!” he yelled at anyone and everyone, but nobody moved, so he sprang into action, dropping the sun block into the sand, and vaulted along the beach. He tried to leap past the woman in the chair, but she was gesticulating wildly and inadvertently tripped him up. He toppled into the water, but managed to scramble to his feet quickly enough, reached out to grab the Greek, and tugged at him to pull him up the beach. He was far too heavy for Bill to move on his own, but another bloke arrived and together they dragged him onto the dry sand, then they looked at each other. Someone needed to give him the kiss of life, and the seconds ticking away mattered. There they were, staring at each other, doing nothing, and I thought: fuck’s sake. So I scrambled up from my towel and ran across the baking hot sand. I’d last done CPR on a plastic dummy about ten years earlier, but I could remember the drill. I tipped the big bloke’s head back, pinched his nose and took a deep breath. Then I blanked out everything and got on with it. I couldn’t think straight for several minutes—if you’ve never done it, you don’t know how exhausting CPR is, how much your brain gets starved of oxygen; how mad ideas come to you that are best forgotten. At some point I was vaguely aware of sirens, and then someone pulled me off him and took over. Bystanders must have dug the woman’s chair out of the sand, because she was further up the beach crying and being comforted by everyone who could get there in time to feel themselves part of great events. I staggered to my feet and walked away slowly. Bill grabbed me and hugged me hard. I was still partially starved of oxygen, and for a moment, as he crushed my body, I had absolutely no idea why we were having any marital problems at all, but gradually my brain woke up and I pushed him away.’

‘Shame,’ said Renée, quietly.

‘The Greek meanwhile was being stretchered into an ambulance. I saw his arm twitch, so I assumed he’d be all right. The woman and her entourage were following, and she was screeching again. Her default setting appeared to be “screech” where mine was “quiet and understanding”. I wondered what their row had been about, and I wondered when me and Bill had last had a fully-fledged hammer and tongs barney about anything at all, and if this failure to argue was part of our problem. We went back to the hotel and he had a long shower, and then, by mutual unspoken consent, we made love like the very best of friends and a bit more of me died. In the bar later, we were heroes. They wanted to buy us champagne but were pleased when I asked for Retsina. I drank and drank and thought about cedar wood, pines, olives, and my mouth on the big Greek’s mouth. I can taste him still; fragrant and earthy.’

‘What a sad, funny, lovely tale,’ said Renée.

Moyra hadn’t been drawing for a change, which was a shame as I’d have liked to see what she made of my Greek, but perhaps she’d been wondering about me and Bill, how our relationship worked, if it worked at all.

‘I suppose I knew something like that was going to happen. Earlier in the week, we’d been going round the ruins in Delphi, in the backstreets.’

‘Oh, I love Delphi,’ said Renée. ‘The way those old shops facades whisper of ancient sex.’

‘Not exactly how I saw it, but I know what you mean. Our guide had one of those black umbrellas in the burning heat; and he was getting further and further ahead, looking like a deranged toadstool picking its way through the ruins. Everything was watery with mirages, and we were dawdling, too hot to catch up. I could smell thyme and I saw a pair of egrets—I wanted this to be so romantic, but I had a vision of myself abandoning Bill in the Temple of Athena Pronoia. He was standing looking out across to the distant hills and for a moment I thought of the Cuillins. I resisted my premonition, told myself it would be all right and this would be the turning point, but then a memory intruded of an old man we’d seen that morning, sitting mending his fishing nets. I’d nearly passed out with the need to leave before the place seduced me entirely.’

‘Greece can do that to you, even without a Shirley Valentine scenario,’ said Renée.

‘Doesn’t it just. I mumbled something like “No good, no good,” because I was frightened, and Bill said, “What’s the matter, Fran?” I didn’t answer. I lurched away from him, thinking how hot the beaches were here, and how different from other, colder, windswept and infinitely dearer beaches far away on Skye. Two tourists walked past in loud shirts, talking about selling England by the pound, and they were idiots, but they didn’t deserve the scowl Bill gave them, and I wanted to run up and hug them in their blind stupidity.’

‘Meanwhile, in the temple?’

‘Oh yes. We’d caught up with the others. The translation of the temple’s name was Foresight. That’s when I knew I would hurt him.’

‘My dear, I rather think it was he who had been hurting you, not the other way round.’

I shook my head. ‘It takes two.’

‘At least you had holidays in some lovely places,’ said Renée.

‘You reckon? Most years it was Brighton.’

‘Brighton’s not so bad.’

‘Yes, it is. I remember a Thursday in April, seafront café, Bill with a bad knee, me only there to take the blame for making him walk over those boulder-sized pebbles. He was rubbing his other knee—my fault as well, I expect. The weather was Brighton grey. My fault again. The waitress brought us tea in a stainless-steel pot that dribbled; and milk in one of those jugs that defies good sense. How do they ever get designed like that? I refused to be “mother”. I told him to pour it himself. We waited, condemning the world and everyone in it through the tears of condensation that were pouring down the window. There was a man outside with a spotty dog wearing what looked like a coat made of a carpet—we watched him in silence. If we’d been talking to each other properly, we could have laughed at the dog and its ridiculous coat, but we were both so cold and tired. Outside was creeping in. It would soon be dark. We put our tea things back on the tray, left a tip. There was nothing to say.’

‘Oh dear!’ said Renée. ‘Come on my lovelies, we’d best be getting back before we all decide to slit our wrists and jump into the Seine.’

I wondered what Moyra had made of my sorry little tales. She’d been listening but hadn’t offered any comment. We might have been speaking a different language as far as she’d been concerned—or possibly she’d understood every word and was relating it to herself and Dylan.

On the way back, Renée said, ‘But you have your daughter. That’s something neither Moyra nor I ever managed; the whole giving birth scenario.’

‘You want all the grisly details?’

‘A bit of blood and gore? Why not. Get it out of your system.’

‘It’s not like it is on the telly, I’m afraid,’ I said.

‘I never imagined it would be.’

‘Okay. Six in the morning, weather grey.’

‘Brighton again?’

‘No, Darlington. Riding the hours, the minutes, the seconds between contractions. I remember the most mundane things from that time. There was a window, and I could see a plastic bag from my bed, snagged on a tree. I willed the bag to escape and kept repeating a silent mantra in time with my pains. Branches whipped against the sky, clawing at the bag. The thing with babies, with giving birth, is it doesn’t make love any stronger; it just moves its focus. I got on and did the whole push, pant, breathe thing, and no, I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account, because if you haven’t done it, the details don’t mean anything. But some time later, there was my daughter, perfection, so any future failure would be down to me and Bill. It was six in the evening by the time I was settled back in bed, but little Jessie was outside time. They’d taken her away because there’d been no crying yet and for some reason, they wanted her to cry, poor little mite. Nurses came and went in a blur. A small plastic box was eventually wheeled back in, with a tiny person inside it. While Bill had been away—which had been for several hours—the carrier bag had ruptured, and its innards spilled forth. I decided he’d fucked the barmaid and burnt down the house.’

            ‘No, he hadn’t,’ said Renée.

            ‘Okay. Just one of the two. We still had the house. And then, about six hours later, I went mad. The baby blues they call it. What they fail to tell you is that it can be a major psychotic episode. Bill tried to help. I’ll give him that. For weeks he made sure Jessie was fed, bathed, zipped up and lullabied. But if he leaned down to kiss her, I watched, ready to pounce, to kill him if he did anything wrong. There were often marks on his cheek, cuts on his nose, his skin under my fingernails. I would only unclench my fists if he walked away, and he did, he walked and walked, to other houses, other women. But sometimes he talked to me and laughed and held me and the fear left me bit by bit until I was able to nuzzle into him and find some comfort. He was being so sad and brave about it all, and I think that’s what had made me fall in love with him all over again. But now we had a tiny baby and I’d gone mad.’

Renée hugged me. 

‘Do you have any photos of the little one? I’ve seen her now she’s grown up, of course, but never when she was tiny.’

‘Just the one. I keep it on me because it makes me laugh. Look.’

The photo showed Jessie with her grandparents, who had been determined to have a grandson. Bill’s mum had dressed Jessie specially in a sailor suit, and with her long trousers and hat at a rakish angle she looked about forty years old rather than eighteen months. I loved the way she was frowning, uncertain of whether she liked being held against grandma’s vast bosom.

‘I don’t normally like little kiddy pictures,’ said Renée, ‘but that is delightful. Too funny. Look, Moyra.’

Moyra dutifully looked, then handed the photo back without comment.  

We had reached the apartment and entered the elegant panelled lift once more. Moyra had already got out her sketch book but I didn’t believe even she could do a lightning study of the lift in the few seconds we had left. I just wanted to lie down. All that confessional stuff had left me exhausted.

Renée opened the door to the apartment and seemed to grow in some way—not taller exactly, or even more curvaceous, but there was something mysterious going on. It was as if she were cloaking herself in a glamour; a kind of breathless beauty. I’d seen Renée the actress on so many occasions, I knew something was up, and once we were inside it was clear what it was, and that she’d known exactly what was going to happen. There was a thin blue fug of smoke rising from a chair that had its back to us. A man’s voice said, ‘Renée, what have you been up to now?’

‘Darling, you home already? I thought you were away for another week.’

‘Like hell you did.’

A tall dark man got out of the chair and came towards us, but he only had eyes for Renée, so didn’t appear to notice me doing my rabbit-in-the-headlights impression, or Moyra’s decision to become a statue. He took Renée in his arms and kissed her full on the lips and I didn’t know where to look.

            She eventually disentangled herself and was the epitome of smug satisfaction; I expected her to start crowing any minute, but she didn’t, she simply said, ‘John, these are my friends, Frances and Moyra. Girls, say hello to John.’

            Predictably enough, Moyra said ‘Hello John,’ and I didn’t say anything.

            John didn’t greet us. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Your friends? Your excuses, you mean.’

            ‘Vicky not with you then?’

            He didn’t bother to answer, but as he pulled on his cigarette, I looked at him properly for the first time, put my hand to my cheek, and looked down at the floor quickly. I felt sick. I mumbled something and disappeared out of the room, drawing too much attention to myself I’m sure, but I couldn’t have stayed in there. It wasn’t him. Of course, it wasn’t. It’s just that there was something in the movement of the hand, the pull on the cigarette, the hollowed cheeks as he inhaled—all so horrifyingly familiar. But not him. I lay down on the bed and hugged myself. I had no idea what I was doing here with this terrifying man and with Moyra, who was so bloody peculiar and scaring me more and more and I couldn’t work out why, and with Renée who I’d thought was my friend but who was only here because she wanted to sleep with John, who was married to Vicky who was a far better artist than I would ever be, as was Moyra, and everybody else, and probably even poor sodding Dylan, and oh, what was the point of me! The only person who’d ever given any point to my existence was Bill, but I’d mucked that up for good the minute I’d listened to Renée and painted that naked picture, or long, long, before that, and I’d almost forgotten about him, but there had been Ferenc, the tutor who’d shown us how to draw trees at art class, and then Mr Times crossword puzzle, then the big fat Greek, and the two crofter brothers on Skye, and even before that, there had been the cataclysmic moment when I had said ‘yes’ to Bill and ruined both our lives as a consequence. And now I was fifty-five years old and very, very lonely, on holiday in a place where I wasn’t wanted.

I got off the bed and started packing my case. It was too late to be doing this, but I might be able to get on a train as far as London. There were hotels close to St Pancras and I had a credit card. I could get the East Coast train back to Darlington in the morning, be home by midday. Twenty-four hours’ time, I could be making a cup of tea, and Bill would be saying, ‘You’re home early,’ and he’d be watching the match on the TV, he wouldn’t even look up, but it wouldn’t matter.

            There was a quiet knock at the door. Renée came in.

            ‘Darling, whatever is the matter?’

            ‘I need to get home.’

            ‘You need to do no such thing. I’m sorry John was rude to you, but that’s John for you—don’t give it another thought. Tell you what though, he’s completely besotted with Moyra. It’s a joy to see.’

            ‘He’s what?’

            ‘I know! Ridiculous isn’t it. It’s her drawings, I left the two of them completely hugger-mugger, poring over every page in her sketchbook. He’s bowled over, utterly in love—with her art at least. I’m not sure poor Moyra has it in her to attract him in a physical sense. He might like you though.’

            ‘For goodness sake Renée; I don’t like him, and I want to go home. I’m in the way and should never have come.’

            ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said quietly. ‘Please stay. I rather think I need a friend.’

            ‘You’ve got John.’

            ‘No. I haven’t got John. Vicky’s got John.’

            ‘That’s not what it looked like when we came in.’

            ‘Oh that? Just a little kiss, darling. We always say hello like that. Have done for years.’

            She sat down on the bed and deflated somehow, as if all the beauty and glamour had been too much effort.

            ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can keep doing this,’ she said.

            ‘Feeling your age?’

            ‘Meow.’ She leaned back against the bolster. ‘It used to be so easy. We would meet up, usually because he had a problem and needed emotional support—and I would give it to him, time and again I gave him everything he could possibly desire, and it worked, I healed him every single time. I loved it. I had never been close like that to anyone. But now? It’s not a question of the distance between us, more that he doesn’t need me, and even if he did, I’m not sure I have the reserves left to support him anymore. I know I’ve grown older, but so has he. The problem is that Vicky is so unreasonably young. She has energy, and she has art in a way I never did. I had my body, but her art will last forever. My body? Huh. But you’ve seen her paintings; her terrifying, beautiful-ugly art. How am I supposed to compete with that?’

            ‘By introducing him to Moyra?’

            ‘Yes.’ She smiled, and it was a wicked smile.

            ‘Renée, you’re not using Moyra to break John and Vicky up are you?’

            ‘No, that could never work, not directly. She’d have to look less like a truck driver. Definitely not his type. But her art is extraordinary. More cerebral than Vicky’s. He’s looking at it right now and he’s drinking it all in. This is turning out far better than I could have hoped. He’s seeing there’s more to art and life than just the incredible bitch that is Victoria Stephenson. It was about time he was reminded of that.’

            ‘So you are.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Using Moyra to break them up.’

            ‘Frances, you’re too darned clever at times. Probably what I need. Someone who sees straight through me. Now then, unpack these things. I’m not letting you fly away like this. We’re going to have our week in Paris, come what may, and if John’s rude to you again—but he wasn’t really, was he? I mean, I know he was a bit dismissive and didn’t exactly say hello, but you didn’t give him a chance; you dashed off. Something else was wrong, wasn’t there.’

            ‘He was smoking,’ I said, and I touched my cheek.

            ‘Dear God, it wasn’t him, was it?’

            ‘No, of course not. I told you, that was ages ago and I don’t remember it anyway. But just for a moment, there was something about the way he held that cigarette. That’s why I hate being round smokers, it keeps happening. And once I’d had the thought, I couldn’t get rid of it, and I had to take myself away. I don’t want to see him again, but I suppose I’ll have to—it’s his apartment, so I can’t just slope out. Or can I? You’d cover for me, wouldn’t you?’

            ‘I’m not letting you go. Seriously, Frances, I need you. I can’t do this on my own.’

            ‘Do what though? What exactly is it you’re trying to do?’

            ‘I’m trying my very best not to get my heart broken again. I’ve lost track of the number of times he’s done it.’

            ‘But what can I do?’

            ‘Be here? That’s all I need. Please?’

            I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want to have to look at that tall dark man one more time, to have all the old nightmares revived, all the trauma reactivated—but Renée was being genuine. She wasn’t acting for once, and I was supposed to be her friend.

            ‘Oh, buggeration. Okay. I’ll stay.’

            She gave me a quick hug, and when she released me, I was astonished to see tears in her eyes, real ones. This dreadful man must mean so much to her. I didn’t know what I could do other than be the proverbial shoulder to cry on, but I dutifully unpacked my things, my plain little knickers, my tee-shirts that doubled up as vests or tops or anything, my dull little collection of clothes that just about summed me up. Perhaps something of Renée’s glamour would rub off on me if I stuck around her for long enough.

            ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Be brave. We’ll go for a walk later, shake that man out of our hair.’

‘Wash.’

‘What? Oh yes. Wash him out. Looks like it’s going to rain again, so that’ll probably happen anyway. But whatever we decide, you really can’t hide away in here.’

            I looked around at the pretty little room with its beautiful antique furniture. I would have been perfectly happy to hide in here indefinitely if it had been in anyone else’s apartment. Renée led me out of the door and back into the elegant sitting room where John was looking nonplussed as Moyra drew at lightning speed and told him what she was drawing as she went. I was all for leaving then and there, but Renée held me back; she wanted to listen.

            ‘This is Alfred,’ said Moyra. ‘He’s the Little Man, running down Skiddaw’s flank. His eyes are fixed on Ullock Pike.’

A quick pencil line, and there it was, Ullock Pike. I’d have had to study a photograph for hours and then grid it up or trace it to get it that accurate.

‘No one stops him. He is bound to silence. His oath prevents him from talking about the standing stones but that doesn’t affect me, because I’ve sketched there sixty-seven times and I know the shapes. He cries as he nears the Pike, thinking he’s safe; a few more small bumps, then Bassenthwaite, sheltered from the One.’

‘The one what?’

‘The one who surveyed the silhouettes of the surrounding fells in order to mark their measure on the stone circle and capture their shapes. If he –’

‘Who, the one?’

‘No.’ Moyra looked at John as if he was an idiot schoolchild rather than a tall, imposing and terrifying man. ‘Alfred. If Alfred drops down low enough, he thinks he can avoid being forced to echo the profile of a stone, but he’s wrong. He never reaches Ullock Pike. Look.’ She added a few pencil strokes. ‘He’s frozen below the summit where nobody notices him unless they have been walking there for years and have good powers of observation.’

She finished the picture with a small neat signature and date in the corner.

‘The last time I was at Castlerigg, I witnessed an Aztec fire ceremony,’ said John, apparently perfectly seriously.

‘I would have liked to have seen that,’ said Moyra, and she turned a page and although she hadn’t been there, she could bloody well do it, and not only that, it took her no more than two minutes. John was mesmerised, and I thought, okay, he isn’t so bad. He’s being nice to Moyra. He likes her art. But then he looked up and saw us, and yet again ignored me.

‘More schemes, more plans, more tricks?’ he said to Renée with a downright evil smile on his lips.

She rose to the occasion. ‘Oh, wouldn’t you like to know! Yes-yes-yes! Come on Frances, let’s let loose the hounds of the apocalypse!’

I shook my head and followed her out. ‘Horses of the apocalypse, or dogs of war. Or maybe the Hound of heaven.’

‘Or a mix of all three? Let’s go down to the river and padlock ourselves to the bridge, or whatever people do in this city when their hearts are being broken.’

‘I’m game.’

I’d have done anything to get out, and this time she looked as if she was entirely on my wavelength.

We walked and walked and saw so much of the city, we utterly exhausted ourselves, but it was what we both needed. It started to rain, it always rains on me—this used to be a joke between me and Bill, but Renée had warned me it was going to rain, so maybe this once I wouldn’t have to blame Bill, and he couldn’t blame me; we were entirely innocent and weather was just weather—isobars and related squiggly lines and symbols on a map.

Renée was on fine form, manic in her enthusiasms. I knew she’d crash soon, but for now she was exhilarating company, and I was loving it. On Alexander’s Bridge we peered through the brilliant muddle of red taillights, exhaust fumes, golden cherubs and art deco lamps that collided with horses embalmed in rococo wings, all splattered in the rain. Oh, it was wonderful—the lions, the flurries of angels, nymphs, hard-hammered in copper, and all the rain in the world pouring into the Seine so that I could have picked up handfuls of water like snow, and thrown it up high in the air. The river churned beneath us, a monstrous thing, full of threats and promises. I couldn’t bear to watch it, I felt it was trying to tell me something, some dreadful warning. And still more of the storm rode in from the Champs-Élysées on skittering gallops of water, while a pair of lovers ran along, clutching each other’s arms.

‘That’s me when I was younger!’ said Renée, and she laughed and started running despite her heels—Christ knows how she did that without tripping and falling, because it was all I could do to keep up with her in my sensible flat pumps.

We were both drunk, on rain, on Paris, on love. We raced through an art deco entrance and down a steep flight of steps onto the Métro, feeling the whoosh of hot air, and the metallic twang of burning dust that is the stink of the underground everywhere. It was not like the London tube at all, which has now been nicely cleaned up and sanitised so that it is completely nostalgia-free apart from a few tucked away disused old stations. No, this was genuine Parisian filth, and it was glorious, and full of stories. Renée pointed out a woman who looked so sad, with a man, and I took an instant dislike to him. Renée could see it, she could describe it perfectly, the way his left arm lay heavily around her shoulder, the woman’s body leaning in, but her head tilted away. The tips of his fingers were stroking the side of her neck, pressing on her pulse. Her expression said nothing. He was talking too quickly for either of us to follow the conversation, but we could see it was threatening. The woman’s hands were in her lap and she was scratching the side of her thumb with a finger. The movement of the train brought them closer each time it juddered across the points. Her eyeliner was smudged. The train slowed, braked and screeched, people rocked and swayed, she leaned to grab the carrier bag at her feet. A packet of coffee fell out. She stared at it, aghast. The man picked it up, put it back in the bag, held her more firmly, but at least his fingers no longer pressed on her neck. She looked as if she were breathing more easily. It was their stop. They moved off the train and I thought about coffee, its bitterness.

            The train trundled on. Renée nudged me, pointed out a man across the aisle who was jutting out his beard and trying very hard not to watch the young couple opposite him, who were laughing and sitting closer to each other than the laws of physics should have allowed. The bearded man was gripping his bag with white knuckles.

‘What do you suppose is in the bag?’ I said.

‘Red slippers for his wife,’ said Renée. ‘She has told him which size, which colour, where to go. She’s housebound, can’t shop. But that slim girl opposite—her smile makes him ache. Look, he’s sticking his chin ever higher, trying not to think about kissing that smile. The boy’s too young, his head’s too full of hair, that’s what’s upsetting the man; and the way the train is grunting through tunnels, and the distorted reflections in the window. See how the boy looks as if there’s a steel pole entering his ear and emerging through his cheek?’

‘Ouch. Yes.’ I touched my own cheek.

‘The old man is thinking, this is too fast! We’ll crash! He’s sweating, can barely breathe. Ah! Slowing down at last. The girl’s still smiling the boy has his tongue in her ear. The bearded man’s clutching the red slippers as tightly as he can.’

‘I bet it’s nothing of the sort in that bag.’

‘No, it’s a sporran from his cousin in Edinburgh.’

‘It’s a stuffed rat.’

‘It’s our stop. Come on.’

I had no idea where we were, but Renée was never lost in Paris. We spent hours swarming among the crowds and the cries of the city and the smog and the rooftops, the domes and turrets, the spires and the smoke and the delicate traceries that were almost hidden from view, just occasionally glimpsed, lit by beams of sunlight between heavy showers, then back to the towers and gargoyles, the aerials, minarets, tower blocks and cranes which made me think of Moyra, and still we ran, away from the rumbling traffic, from colour, from the opera house, the Ferris wheel, the tenements, and into the filthy-fresh twilight that lurked in the corners of Paris, our Paris.

            We arrived back at the apartment a couple of hours later, soaked to the skin and filthy but both having exorcised whatever it was that had been stopping us absorbing the sheer vibrancy of the city before. We were now ready to face the next few days if not exactly transfigured, at least spiritually invigorated. Moyra and John were still looking at Moyra’s sketches as if nothing had happened. We might have only been out for ten minutes. They didn’t so much as glance up when we came in. I was used to that on my behalf, but I did wish John could have looked up at least once and seen Renée. Soaking wet and bedraggled, but utterly honest for once, and so full of love for him it hurt me to be a witness. But he didn’t, and perhaps that was because he knew, and he... well. There was Vicky, who’d painted those obscenely powerful paintings that were all around us, so that must have been it. She was holding him back, preventing him from finding happiness. In that moment I think I hated Vicky almost as much as Renée did.

            And he still hadn’t looked at me.

CHAPTER TEN

John cooked for us that night. Renée joined him in the kitchen, and I could hear laughter. I was so glad for her, though I dreaded the moment when she would inevitably try to draw me into the general conversation. Despite this afternoon, I still had a yearning to pack my bags and leave them all and let them sort out their problems by themselves. They had sod-all to do with me, or rather, I refused to let them have anything to do with me.  

            Renée came back into the living room, making her usual grand entrance. ‘My dears: prepare to be delighted. John and I have created a masterpiece.’ She lowered her voice so that John wouldn’t hear. ‘You have my permission to forget these ghastly wall hangings and just enjoy the food—and the company, of course.’

            John came in with two bottles of wine, red and white, and told us what they were but it meant nothing to me.

            ‘Renée—red I presume?’

            ‘Please, darling.’

            He poured for her and handed her the glass and they smiled at each other and it was a magical, happy moment. This was going to be all right after all.

            ‘Moyra?’

            ‘Water please.’

            I thought he’d argue, but he didn’t, he disappeared into the kitchen and came back with exactly what she’d asked for, and he hadn’t made the error of adding a slice of lemon or even ice. If Moyra wanted water, then that was what she would get. Of course, he’d spent all afternoon with her, so he must have been accustomed to her directness by now.

            I sat very still. Up to this point he had not addressed me. I wasn’t sure if he’d even remembered my name from when Renée had introduced us, and I doubted very much if they’d talked about me in the kitchen.

            ‘Frannie?’

            Renée laughed. ‘Her name is Frances! Nobody calls her Frannie, you great lummox.’

            I managed to whisper, ‘White please’.

            Nobody calls me Frannie apart from my sister Susan, and even she hasn’t since we were teenagers. Renée wouldn’t have known that as she’d never met her. I’d been carefully avoiding thinking about Susan, but it had been hard as I’d had an email from her only last week in which she bewailed the fact that her thoroughly abusive third husband was being thoroughly abusive—surprise, surprise. I’d only just managed to resist emailing back to tell her to stop marrying such bell-ends, it was her own fault, she needed to stop being such a victim and pick a nice bloke for a change, like my Bill—but he wasn’t my bloke anymore, so I hadn’t said anything other than some vague message of sympathy. She was my sister and I loved her, and it was horrible the way she fell into the same trap time and time again. The current husband didn’t physically assault her, and that was something, but he bullied her; I’d witnessed it and I hated it. Nobody should talk to my sister like that. I would have to go and sort him out when I got back from Paris. God knows how I’d do that. I didn’t have a great record at sorting out Susan’s problems, and Bill wouldn’t be around to consult—and even if he were, it would be too awkward.  

John yanked me out of my reverie by handing me the glass of wine and I managed to take it somehow, but I put it down quickly so as not to spill it or break the stem. That would be all I needed. Splinters of glass in my hand, blood on the carpet, everyone being solicitous, me waiting for someone to smack me because I’d broken such a beautiful piece of lead crystal and ruined the set as a result.

But they were talking about the food and the moment passed, I could disappear back into my head for a while. I didn’t much like what I found there. I’d enjoyed my great block of amnesia for such a long time, but I could feel it slipping away. Darlington had been my home for so many years I’d successfully managed to wipe my mind clean of everything from my childhood and teens. We hadn’t always lived in the north. My early years had been spent in South London—Streatham. It hadn’t been a bad place. School was fine, people were friendly, Mum liked the shops, Dad had an easy commute into the City.

Susan had had a boyfriend back then, a skinny lad who smoked too much, but who moved like a dancer. I’d said that to her one time and she’d laughed, said no, he moved like a boxer, not a dancer, so next time Dad was watching the boxing on the telly I watched it too, and I thought, yes, she’s right, he does. I was all puppy fat and acne in those days, and I thought I was gross. Susan was two years older, sixteen, and beautiful. She and the boxer boy looked good together—I hated the way they looked so good, it wasn’t fair—but one morning I was up very early and I saw her going into the bathroom before anyone else was around, which meant she didn’t have her usual make-up on, and there was a bruise on her cheek. I asked her about it, I said, “What’s that?” just as Moyra had asked me about the scar on my cheek. And she said “Nothing.” I said, “It’s not nothing,” but she shut the bathroom door in my face and was a very long time in there. When she came out, she was fully made up and you would never have known. I thought about the boy who moved like a boxer, the skinny boy, and I decided to look at his hands next time I saw him and check out whether his knuckles were bruised. They weren’t, but I was suspicious of him, and I sensed he was a bully, or if not exactly a bully, he was manipulating my sister and I didn’t like it. He could get her to do anything. My tough, sassy sister was turning into a shadow, a beautiful non-person, completely in thrall to this whippet of a boy who should have been worshipping her beauty, not treating her like a plaything. I took to scowling at him whenever he was around. He noticed it and it amused him. One day when we were alone for a few moments, he called me a little tease and pulled me into his arms and tried to kiss me. I was horrified and very scared. I pushed him away and ran into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I stayed there for a very long time until I heard him leaving with Susan.

After that, I took care not to scowl at him again, and I took even more care to make sure we were never alone together as I was terrified he would do more than just kiss me if he had the chance. I was fourteen and agonisingly shy; I’d never even held hands with a boy, but I’d been very attentive during biology lessons at school and I wasn’t stupid. I wondered about telling Susan what he’d done, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I told Mum instead and got a right bollocking for making up such ridiculous stories about Susan’s lovely boyfriend. I never told anyone else. Then it was Susan’s birthday party, and I didn’t think she’d want me there, but she did, she insisted, said I could bring a friend to keep me company, and I knew she was hoping I’d produce a boy from somewhere but that was utterly beyond me. How could I ask a boy out when I was incapable of even speaking to one? I’d become increasingly nervous of them, even the geeky ones, since the attempted kiss. In the end I said I’d asked a boy but he’d caught a heavy cold so he was very sorry, but he couldn’t come.

The party... even now, with the memories flooding back, I found it hard to focus on what had really happened. It was held in a hall or a scout hut or something. I couldn’t remember exactly where. But I do remember how hot it was, and the piles of cider bottles and Bacardi and beer out of a poly-pin, everyone dancing, the music very loud. Jean Genie, that always seemed to be playing in those Streatham days and nights. Susan and her friends—the ones with boyfriends—were all over each other, snogging away, which made me hot and cold and excited and embarrassed all at the same time. As the evening went on, people were getting upset, there were tears, a few fights, and the thin, whippy lad, cool and supercilious as ever, always with a cigarette in his fingers, was laughing at them all—and then there was the row. I don’t know what Susan said or what he said, or what set it off, but they were fighting, and she was pummelling him on the chest with her fists, and he was batting her arms away, he was strong, far too quick for her, and one time, I’m sure he didn’t mean to hit her, but his arm, her head—she went down, and that was it. I was furious—you do NOT do that to my sister! I launched myself into him, I became an unstoppable force, an insanely ridiculous fat spotty blob of a bull charging, and he swung round, and his cigarette—God, it hurt. It hurt so much. I screamed; me, who never spoke—I screamed, and everyone looked, and I screamed and wailed and ran away, and I remember him shouting after me, “Frannie! Frannie! Come back!” He started after me, but there were people in the way and I was so scared, I thought he’s going to kill me, so I dodged between them and I got out, and I ran—I don’t know where, but somehow I got back home and I charged up the stairs and into my room and flung myself onto my bed. Mum came in, and I was sobbing, and she said, “What’s wrong? What’s happened? Why aren’t you at Susan’s party?” and I wouldn’t tell her, but she saw the burn, and she said: “What have you been doing! Have you been smoking? I can smell it on your clothes!” so she slapped me. She’d not slapped me since I was a toddler, but she slapped me, and I thought she’d never stop.

Hours later, I went into the bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror, tied my long greasy hair back and pressed the fringe down flat on my forehead. It reached over my eyes. I picked up the scissors. First, I thinned the fringe, just a little. There wasn’t much hair as I was suffering from stress-related alopecia. That’s what the nurse had called it. Treatment was, “Here, have some pills.” I cut along in a wobbly line, more or less level with the underside of my eyebrows. I was sure Susan’s boyfriend didn’t know the colour of my eyes. I’d heard him playing that game with Susan once: what would you sooner lose, a leg or an arm? Your hearing or your sight? And Susan had said, go on—tell me the colour of my eyes. She’d shut them tight, laughing, expecting the right answer, expecting a kiss. He’d got it wrong and didn’t even try to kiss her. He hadn’t looked like he cared and had probably got it wrong on purpose. He was cruel like that. I kept snipping at the hairs in my fringe and they dropped into the sink, which would be blocked by the time I’d finished and give Mum yet another reason to scream at me. I looked at my face in the mirror. There they were; my eyes, my beautiful hazel eyes, the only part of me that I didn’t absolutely despise. The fringe wasn’t straight. I levelled it, brushed it out. Still wasn’t straight. Snip-snip-snip. Still. Not. Straight. Snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip. Susan had dyed hers. Bleached it. She’d gone blonde. Her boyfriend had told her he preferred redheads. I stuck the point of the scissors into my scalp, watched the blob of blood. Watched... watched... The red blob settled, then worked its way along a few hairs, gluing them together, turning them darker. I preferred the brighter red. I wanted to slip the scissors under my skin. Snip. Snip-snip. Raw and pink underneath.  Snip. Snip. I didn’t do it, but I slashed at my hair, all my hair, and cut and cut until it was reduced to tufts across my head, and I wanted to hack at my scalp to get rid of the tufts, but I couldn’t see clearly to do it, I was crying, and I held the scissors and I wanted to stop my eyes from crying. Couldn’t do it.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ said Renée and I lurched back into the present, into John’s elegant Parisian apartment where we were about to have a delicious meal. I drank all the wine in my glass. He had called me “Frannie.” Nobody called me Frannie. Even Susan called me Frances these days.

The food was as perfect as I had been expecting, and I even managed to enjoy it. Renée was delighted with everything and everyone and didn’t seem to notice I was not joining in the conversation. She sparkled, but she was burning far too brightly. I thought of Roman Candles. Beautiful, but they burn out, and that’s it, and everyone then looks to the skies for the big finale, the massive rockets and their explosive brilliance. Vicky’s paintings surrounded us, mocking Renée’s attempts to outshine them. I had the impression John was very much aware of what Renée was doing and was happy to go along with it for tonight, but ultimately the paintings were going to win. I had no idea what Moyra thought of the situation, or even if she was thinking about it at all. We left the dining room and retired to the other room with glasses of cognac, and Renée actually snuggled up to John on the sofa; she slipped off her shoes and pulled up her feet and I expected to hear her purring at any moment. He wasn’t smoking. I wondered why not. I remember thinking, Renée, you are about to get very badly hurt. This is what happens with John.

The sweet, quiet moment lasted just a little longer. Moyra was staring into her brandy, and from the way her finger moved round the glass, I guessed she was studying the patterns the alcohol made as it rose up the sides. Renée was melting into John. I was sitting quietly, gathering my strength, because Renée was going to need it.

And then it was all over. We heard the key in the lock. The door to the apartment opened.

‘Who’s that?’ said Renée, suddenly sitting up.

‘That,’ said John, with a deeply satisfied smile, ‘is my wife.’

A dark, petite woman came into the room and all the pictures roared into life. John got up and embraced Vicky and I thought he was never going to let her go, but he did and then she was grinning at all of us, saying, ‘People! Lovely!’ and I thought, oh bugger, she’s nice. I had been so determined not to like her. Renée did that thing where she grows two inches taller. She looked outrageously glamorous. Little Vicky in comparison was being entirely natural and was obviously delighted to see us all. She was winning easily.

‘Renée!’ she said, and she went across and gave her a peck on the cheek. I thought she wasn’t going to be tall enough to do it, but it turned out Renée’s height had been an illusion after all.

‘And this is Moyra, who is a phenomenally talented artist,’ said John, and I waited for Vicky to be jealous as hell, but she wasn’t, she was clearly delighted.

‘Moyra,’ she said, and she instinctively put her hand out to shake Moyra’s, which was exactly the right thing to do. Moyra returned the handshake, looking satisfied and confident.

I wondered how he’d introduce me. How honest he was going to be in front of Vicky?

‘And this is Frannie,’ he said. ‘We go back a long, long way.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Vicky.

Oh God. He’d done it. Vicky came up to me and gave me a hug, and I was so grateful because a hug was exactly what I needed at that point, and if I couldn’t have one from Bill, I would happily accept it from this sweet, kind girl.

Renée was staring at me. What must she be thinking? She mouthed the words, ‘A long way?’ at me. I knew she’d want explanations later. I couldn’t give her any. There weren’t any. This wasn’t happening.

‘I need coffee,’ said Vicky.

‘Onto it,’ said John, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

‘John makes the best coffee,’ said Vicky. She followed him.

Once she was gone, Renée looked at me as if I were a complete stranger and said, ‘How long?’

‘So long that I’d completely forgotten. Honestly, Renée. All I remember is that he went out with my sister for a bit when we were in our teens, back in the Streatham days. It took me a while to recognise him. I only ever knew him as ‘John’ back then, and that’s a common enough name. Didn’t know the ‘Stephenson’ or I might have clicked sooner. I wasn’t even sure it was actually him until he called me “Frannie” just now.’

‘You sure he didn’t go out with you?’

‘Heavens no. Absolutely not. Just my sister.’

‘Not even one snog?’

‘Categorically not. I wouldn’t have let him near me.’

‘Okay, okay, I believe you. I need a smoke. Do you mind?’

Moyra said ‘Yes,’ but I didn’t reply. Renée ignored Moyra, got out an elegant long skinny black cigarette and lit it with practised care. Then she sat back in her chair and drew deeply. She looked old, tired, but still somehow exquisite. She must have been thinking she had just had her last dinner with the man she loved, and now it was all over—or maybe that was my overactive imagination and she was taking all this in her stride and girding her loins ready for the next attack.

John and Vicky came back in with a tray containing an incredibly beautiful coffee set. I wasn’t sure I dared pick up one of those tiny cups. Vicky saw me looking at them. ‘Sèvres,’ she said, with great affection. ‘Wedding present from Simon, John’s best friend.’

‘And the love of your life,’ said John, ‘before I stole you away from him.’

She kissed him on the cheek with such affection I thought surely even Renée should be able to take pleasure in the way these two were so obviously one of those rare, golden couples, but she had changed guises again, and now was playing the part of tragic heroine, and refusing to take pleasure in anything at all. She walked over to the ostentatious grand piano and opened the lid, languidly played a few notes. It was impressive, a beautiful and sad melody. Bach, perhaps? I didn’t know she played. Perhaps she didn’t. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have learnt a small sequence of notes for just such an occasion. She put the lid back down and went into what sounded like a prepared speech.

‘Isn’t it strange, the way our young lives are so changed by music, even while our small fingers struggle to find the notes.’

‘That piano actually turned up on a building site in Paris last year,’ said John. ‘Broken strings. I think it was drunk and had crashed.’

‘It’s strings were hammered?’ said Vicky with a giggle.

‘When I am weary,’ said Renée, determined to continue with her script despite the others, ‘I find—what’s the word? Solace, yes that’s it: I find solace in Haydn sonatas.’

‘I didn’t know you played’ I said. I didn’t think she was going to get much encouragement from Vicky or John, and I was supposed to be her friend. Plus, this felt safe, and God knows I needed a safe topic of conversation.

‘Oh yes. I had lessons from a master.’

I’m willing to bet all of us except possibly Moyra immediately imagined she had slept with this “master”. Poor Renée. She was trying so hard.

‘The piano is not an instrument you can teach yourself,’ she said, ‘or you end up frantic, you yearn to rip out the keys at every wrong note, folding your anger between the pages of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata.’

I thought she was overdoing it now. I didn’t know how to respond, but John pitched it just right.

‘Two dark tractors pass in a field,’ he said. ‘One is driven by a man called Chopin, the other by Rachmaninov. The chances of this happening are ridiculous.’

Vicky snorted with laughter. ‘I’ll say.’ Then she put her hand to her brow, and honestly, it was a piss-take of Renée, real silent movie star stuff, though I don’t think she realised she was doing it—but she put on a husky voice and said, ‘A pale light reflects off brass pedals, burnished by years of use. There is sawdust beneath the piano. If you listen closely, you can hear the woodworm boring away, finding their resonant frequency.’

Then it was John’s turn. It became a duet between the two of them.

‘On top of the piano,’ he said,’ is a lovely piece of slate fashioned into an ashtray, but nobody’s allowed to smoke any more. It rattles when Topper plays the Maple Leaf Rag. He calls it the Maple Teeth. We don’t correct him—he has a temper.’

Vicky thought for a bit, then said, ‘There’s a young girl standing twenty yards from the piano on Paddington station, yearning for Schumann, for woodland scenes. She’ll never move any closer. The Prophet Bird sings out, late into the soft October night. We leave the performance early as we don’t want to hear the Scriabin. We are not strong enough.’

‘You might not be,’ muttered Renée.

John ignored her. ‘There’s a distant tapping on the road, the men are working, they have their sign up. We remember how we used to joke about umbrellas. The old piano had brackets for candles. Middle C is opposite the keyhole, but I have mislaid the key.’

Vicky went up to him and held both his hands, looked up into his face. ‘An avenue, dark and nameless, curtains drawn. Someone’s playing scales, C sharp minor, badly. Their playing is uneven, the hands do not match, they should stop and do something else—climb a mountain and pray to the gods of high places that they don’t pick one where someone has left a piano.’

John: ‘We dare not go near the piano floor in Harrods. That place means death. It is peopled by ghosts. It no longer exists. The entrance is blocked by brambles.’

Vicky: ‘Late in the summer the strange horses came, black-plumed, but instead of a coffin, Mozart’s piano, dressed in black crepe.’

‘I remember my father,’ said John, ‘how he played me to sleep with Schubert and Brahms, and now this is something I wish you to do for me.’

 At this point Vicky gave him a big hug, quite rightly. Then she continued.

‘When the water runs into the bath, if you listen carefully, you can hear pianos running through the pipes.’

Renée rolled her eyes. I knew what she was thinking. Pianos running through pipes? Ridiculous.

‘You could build bridges or be a brain surgeon or play Beethoven,’ said John. ‘All are skilled jobs. There’s only one you can still do when you’re ninety-four.’

Vicky smiled. ‘Reading music by candlelight makes it sound sweeter.’

‘And if a man should build a piano out of a quarter ton of Lego, and if the strings should be wound of fishing line, ay, what then?’

Vicky laughed at that one.

‘The sound of cars passing in the wet, the swish-swish of their tyres, the soaking wet street piano, the boys laughing, trying to play Metallica.’

I tried to imagine the wet piano sound doing metal. Couldn’t quite get there.

It was John’s turn. ‘In the not too distant future, I will play in seven flats and the sonorities will be glorious, and you will fall in love with me.’

‘This is a stupid way to die, crushed by a piano falling out of a Glasgow tenement window in a comedy short.’

Laurel and Hardy—that was it! I used to love that film where they’re trying to move a piano—just an upright, but still hard enough—up flights of stairs. Those films, my childhood. Long time ago. So sad.

‘The piano is under an awning now,’ said John. ‘The people are talking about rain. The piano is sulking.’

Vicky: ‘Someone puts a vase of peonies on the piano in memory of a suicide.’

John again: ‘I sit down to play Chopin, the Opus 25 Etudes. By the time I finish we are married and have ten children.’

‘We bloody do not!’ said Vicky. She moved away and sat down.

‘Ladies,’ said John, addressing me and Renée. ‘Tomorrow I am going to steal Moyra away from you while Victoria and I take her to see some gallery people. I have no doubt you’ll be able to amuse yourselves.’

‘Are you sure this is what she wants?’ said Renée.

‘It will be,’ said John, followed closely by Moyra’s ‘Yes.’

Renée went into full Gloria Swanson mode and it was all I could do not to laugh. John caught my eye, ever so briefly, and I thought, he shouted at me that night because he knew he had hurt me and I was running away and he was worried for me, I might have run into a road or anything. I might have been killed. He might have caused an awful tragedy, instead of the minor one he actually caused, of me having a tiny scar and being nervous of boys for the next couple of years. He was probably still worrying about it now, and that was why he hadn’t spoken to me since we’d been here. He didn’t know what to say. He would be all right tomorrow, because he would have been able to talk it through with Vicky, and she would have told him he was being silly, and all he had to do is say sorry and everything would be fine.

No. He wasn’t thinking about me at all. He never had. He vaguely knew me as Susan’s little sister, the fat spotty one. He had never liked me, hadn’t had much to say to me back then and he had even less to say to me now. It was a clever trick to remember my name, I’ll grant him that, but I was dull. I had no purpose. I didn’t have Renée’s ability to sleep with him when he was feeling the itch, or Moyra’s ability to engage his interest with her art. I had nothing, and I might as well not exist.

I drank the bitter dregs of my coffee from the tiny cup and longed for Bill to come in at this point with a great steaming mug of tea, but he couldn’t, because he was back in Darlington, and instinct told me by now he’d have got fed up of being on his own even after just a few days, and would have buggered off to see Elaine down the road, or even Audrey over in Aycliffe Village. Or Josie. No, she wouldn’t have lasted. Too young. I was sure—or rather, I hoped, that that infatuation was over by now. But he had his comforts dotted about all over the place. Some I knew about, not all. I was good at ironing his shirts. That was the only thing that was keeping him with me—but I was away now, so I wasn’t ironing them. He’d be gone once I got back, off to find a docile shirt-ironer who was more enthusiastic in other areas than me, and I would have to start all over again. There would be the divorce to sort out, and I knew from Susan’s divorces how long and painful that could be, but at least Jessie was grown up so there wasn’t any question of fighting over access. Bill had been through it all before, so he’d know what to do. I didn’t, but I guessed it was a case of sorting the money, the house, my redundancy package, his salary, the pensions. Oh, dear God, I’d need a solicitor. I couldn’t do this. Why was I in France drinking coffee out of Sèvres porcelain anyway? Bloody stupid. 

Except that the coffee was delicious, and if only I’d let John kiss me that time, this might have all been mine—except it couldn’t have been, don’t be stupid. There was the question of the artwork. I could never have produced anything like these heartrending, glorious paintings that surrounded us on every side. I couldn’t draw my agony the way Moyra did or paint my ecstasy like Vicky. The only honest painting I had ever done was the nude selfie, and that was hidden away on top of the wardrobe in a cold empty house in Darlington, and nobody was ever going to see it again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We’d finished our coffee. Vicky was sitting cross-legged on the sofa next to John, with no artifice at all, looking young and lovely and a complete contrast to the way Renée had been melting into him earlier. We’d moved from soft focus black and white into vibrant colour. Renée herself had withdrawn into an elegant rococo chair which gave her a queenly aspect—I think she was trying to channel Liz Taylor as Cleopatra. Moyra was drawing some complicated tale that no doubt was another in the “Alfred” series, but luckily nobody had asked her to explain it, and she now had her head down and would be unlikely to respond to any enquiry. Vicky had just asked me how long I’d known John, and I wasn’t sure how to answer, but while I pondered what should have been an easy question, John said, ‘Frannie and I were friends even before I joined the ranks of the priesthood.’

            ‘Before you did what?’ said Renée, her poise deserting her. ‘You were never a priest. Don’t be ridiculous.’

            John made the sign of the cross in a very convincing manner.

            ‘You can’t have been,’ said Renée. ‘Impossible.’

            ‘That’s what they said at the seminary.’

            ‘John, don’t be so naughty,’ said Vicky, laughing. ‘Tell the truth.’

            ‘Okay. Not a priest then. But very nearly. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Prepare yourselves for the pitiful tale of a poor little orphan boy.’

            ‘You weren’t an orphan,’ said Renée.

            ‘As good as,’ said John, more seriously. ‘Shall we just say I was something of a delinquent as a small child and was taken into care at an age when I should have been clinging to my mother’s skirts. Come to think of it, my poor dead mother should have been clinging onto her own skirts rather tighter some nine months before my first appearance in this world.’

            ‘John!’ Vicky gave him a playful wallop.

            ‘The rot set in with the aunts. I was handed over to them at a tender age and they attempted to bring me up in a distant land where the vertical sun kills each shadow.’

‘That would be Croydon, then,’ said Renée under her breath. 

‘I tried to be good, but the light was hurtful and failed to flood me with love. The aunts spent much of their time in church, preparing for hardship. They were there week after week, reporting my sins. I was sent to Sunday School, but it didn’t take in the way they wanted. Yes, I had a great desire to see angels, they fascinated me, but I wanted to take them to bed and bury my face in their stiff leathery wings.’

‘Like hell you did,’ said Renée.

‘I was young, I didn’t understand what was happening, particularly one day when the aunts were filling in crossword puzzles, as was their wont, and armed police surrounded the house of the butcher next door who had run out of organs.’

‘He’d what?’ said Vicky.

‘His lights, his lungs, his multiple hearts, his sausages, had all been on display in the heat, and this had been unwise. Even the aunts didn’t think it was a good idea. I’d been laughing at the events that morning and I suspect happiness was not allowed. The aunts were more into sadness, as well as having a boundless lust for huge red-faced men, butchers particularly, with sweat glands and issues of trust. I wanted to help, to offer my awkward lisping words. I knew I was hardly fluent. But they didn’t want to listen to me—they were off riding their horses, their skirts flying, which made it obvious they weren’t wearing any knickers, but that was because the butcher had told them you shouldn’t when mounted, and they had believed.’

            ‘John, you are so full of shit,’ said Renée. ‘I met those aunts. They were nothing like that.’

            ‘So you did. We went and stayed there that one time, didn’t we. Separate rooms, of course. We lay either side of the wall, under crocheted blankets, our bed stands well supplied with water and cobwebs and polite magazines, the doors disguised with sagging wallpaper.’

‘And there were those awful yellow patches of rotting felt on the floor. My dears, it was disgusting,’ said Renée.

‘Wasn’t it just. And while we lay in bed, pretty much under curfew, the aunts were outside in the dark, picking up pieces of snow and placing them in buckets. Remember that yowling from the living room?’

‘That sounded like two cats in agonised humping?’

‘Yes, that was what they wanted us to think.’ He nodded. ‘The aunts ran back inside and threw their snow on the coals.’

And I was thinking, now, you can’t know that, not if you were in bed. You’re making all of this up. You’re a liar. A nasty one. A vicious one.

‘Outside,’ he said, ‘the trees were advancing, the snow flumped, and the holes left behind by the aunts would soon be buried, like us, on either side of the wall. Later, if we weren’t careful, we would be flung in the back of a bin van and trundled across the ice-frozen lake. We were convinced this would happen. The night finally normalised around two a.m. when the cats fell asleep. We crept into each other’s arms, knowing this should not be rushed, this creaking of pines, this soughing of aunts.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Vicky, cheerfully. ‘Enough of the knickerless aunts. I want to know how you nearly became a priest. Tell the truth this time.’

            ‘Okay. I’ll behave. The epiphany came one summer. I’d just turned twelve, and social services had placed me with the redoubtable Allison and her husband Jonah. They were evangelical, practically missionaries, and I had decided to detest them: fat Allison with her home-knitted nylon cardigans, and Jonah with his Amish-style beard.’

‘And hat to match?’ said Vicky.

‘Naturally. I’d only been with them a few weeks and was already sick of all the praying when they took it into their heads to take me on holiday. I was a pale and sickly child, skinny as a runner bean.’

I doubted the pale and sickly bit, but skinny was true. I listened more attentively.

‘They took me to the seaside—Tenby as I recall. They had a theory about candy floss being healthy and helpful. The sea and sand were fine, but Jonah made me wear long trousers and long-sleeved button-up tee-shirts, his reasoning being that modesty was as becoming in a young boy as a girl, which I wasn’t sure about, but at least I wouldn’t get sunburnt. I answered back all the time, and thought I was getting away with it, but they had saved up all their disappointment in me until we were back in the bungalow, where they forced me to kneel. They held me down and prayed and then made me lie flat on the floor and prayed and prayed and prayed. Then we “broke bread” and they rejoiced, so at least I got fed, but that praying thing had been excruciating and pointless. At least they didn’t paw at me or try to hug me, as some of the other foster parents had done, so that was a relief, but I had to sing their boring songs, and go to their boring meetings where they cried a lot and praised Jesus because I was such a blessing. They even started introducing me to people as “The Blessing”.’

            Vicky giggled. ‘I’ll have to try that.’

            ‘Don’t you dare. So we were on holiday and I was being good, most of the time, and thought maybe I’d be able to stick this one out for the sake of the candy floss if nothing else, when I bumped into Steve. We’d been best mates at the Home the year before. He couldn’t believe what had happened to me, all the “holy” crap, so he behaved in typical Steve manner: he flung himself onto the sand and ground it into his face, and went “Aargghh!” and leapt up and ran miles down the beach and then back again and threw sand at me until I started laughing and throwing it back, and then he leapt on me and punched me in the eye so I walloped him and I thought, this is happiness, this is how it should be, not those happy-clappy songs in a room smelling of over-boiled cabbage. That was when he told me about the island. He said you could get a boat trip out to see it, that there were killer rabbits on one half, and gannets that speared you with their beaks on the other. He said it was a laugh, and I should get Allison and Jonah to take me there, because that would give them something to pray about.

‘I liked the idea. I was going to do it. Steve’s minders caught up with him at that moment and tried to drag him away, so he threw a fit and they had to restrain him. It was vicious. Allison and Jonah hadn’t seen anything because they’d been sitting on the beach facing each other, reading Bible verses and getting visibly turned on by the act.’

‘Yuck,’ said Vicky.

‘Jonah was wearing his big wooden cross and Allison’s face was shiny with factor 60, and I lost it—I actually said a prayer, or made a promise, or something. We were going to go to that island, and we were going to go there for Steve because of the way that minder had sat on him and cracked his arm back to lock it. I returned to where Allison and Jonah were praying behind the windbreak—their attempt at modesty. I picked up the Bible, opened it at random, and the first verse I saw was: Oh Lord God; to whom vengeance belongeth; Oh God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself. I didn’t read it out loud, but I thought: that’s one thing Allison and Jonah have got right. Open the Book randomly, and it really does speak to you. I looked up and told them I would like to visit the retreat. Jonah asked me which retreat, and he leaned forward so that his huge wooden cross swayed towards me and nearly hit me in the face. And then I put on an act worthy of Renée. You’d have been proud of me, darling. I donned my best cherubic look and said, “The island. A boy on the beach—or perhaps he was an angel—told me about it. Behold!” I stood up, shaded my eyes, and pointed to the island which you could just see on the horizon. I breathed deeply and shuddered, thinking of saints and martyrs. “Tis an island, dark and low, but I go to seek the light.”

‘Allison clapped her hands. “Oh joy! Oh blessings!” And that was that. We packed up our things, got in the car and tootled down to the harbour, which was very crowded, so we were stuck in a queue going round and round the car park. Jonah was rapidly losing his enthusiasm. “Or we could go to Cardiff?” he said. “Big prayer meeting this afternoon.” Allison snarled like a cat when you’ve stamped on its tail. “The Blessing!” She spat the words out. God, I hated the pair of them so much, but I sat in the back being determinedly angelic. Vengeance! A car moved out of a parking spot and they were all “Praise the Lord!” and I was all “Amen! Amen!” and they were like “Hallelujah!” I touched my cheek bone where Steve had hit me, but it felt more as if he had kissed me because it was proper affection, it was how love should be, not the way Allison and Jonah did it, grinning all the time, shining with factor 500 or whatever it was’

I touched my own cheek at this point. Couldn’t help it. Didn’t think anyone noticed, but I looked up and John was staring at me. Then he turned away and went on with his ridiculous story. I didn’t believe a word of it, but everyone else was lapping it up. I remembered the skinny lad who had convinced my mother that black was white. I’d thought he’d moved beautifully. Like a dancer. A boxer. I’d wanted him. Needed him. But my mum had slapped some sense into me.

‘It was three in the afternoon by now, and I didn’t know if any boats would still be going out, but Jonah went to the kiosk and got us tickets while Allison opened her Bible and read out: “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence,” and I was thinking, oh no he won’t, not if I have anything to do with it, but I kept quiet. Jonah came back with the tickets and we went down to the quayside. Our boat had just docked, and it was full of people who to my eyes looked at least a hundred years old. They were taking forever to disembark. Jonah and Allison did their Christian bit and helped them up the ramp and I joined in to confirm my status as beloved angel, blessed boy, gift of God, etc. We finally got them all up onto a safe bit of the harbour, only to see the boat sailing off without us, which I thought was hilarious, but Jonah went bright red and Allison looked as if she was going to cry. They went back to the kiosk and talked in very stern and serious voices to the poor lady there until she had no choice but to ring around and try to find another boat for us. Took ages, but she managed at last, and a surly-looking bloke with a little putter-putter boat turned up. We got into this boat and Jonah stood up in the middle of it and gave an uplifting sermon about the waves and his namesake and big fishes and what have you until the waves were so big, he had to sit down again. We reached the island and the bloke tied up the boat and told us to get off, but he looked at me and said quietly, “Are you sure?” and I said, “Oh, yes. They’re completely mad, but I’ll see they’re okay.” We stepped onto the island and he untied his boat and puttered away. Wine anyone?’

Vicky held out her glass, and John opened another  bottles, topped her up, and continued.

‘The island stank. There was one little path. The gannets were on the right and they were furious, they spat and squawked and pecked at our ankles. The rabbit warrens were on the left. I didn’t see any killer rabbits, but the holes were like those cheeses that are more holes than cheese. You couldn’t have walked across there, or you’d have been swallowed up. Maybe the killer rabbits lurked beneath, waiting for you to fall in and break your leg. Jonah and Allison were still smiling and praying, but that’s their default position, they can’t do anything else. I shivered as I was only wearing my tee-shirt and thin trousers and it was several degrees cooler out here than on the mainland. Allison started singing in her thin wavery voice and that set the gannets off again. At four o’clock she said she wondered when the boat would be coming back to pick us up, and Jonah gave her such a look. Then he started singing, and his deep rumbly voice must have upset the sea and the sky, because the wind got up and it clouded over in no time; darker and darker. I thought I saw a rabbit pop up out of a hole and bare its teeth before going back down again. I wished Jonah would stop singing his rain song, but he sang louder and deeper and there was a flash and then a rumble of thunder. No rain yet, but we knew it was coming, we could see it in the distance. The horizon disappeared and there was this sort of yellowy-orange hole in the sky while all around was rolling black clouds, and the sea turned to ink. It was actually pretty good. I was enjoying myself—I was twelve years old, stuck on an island inhabited by mad killer rabbits, furious gannets, and a couple of insane missionaries. I thought life couldn’t get much better, but then the rain reached us, and it stopped being so much fun. Massive great splots of water fell as if God were emptying buckets over us. Allison giggled and held out her arms and Jonah slapped her hand away and said she had no right, so she giggled even more and stretched out her arms wide as if she were nailed to the cross, waiting for her palms to be struck by lightning. Jonah grabbed one of her arms and yanked it down hard. “Blasphemer!” he shouted, and I stepped back carefully to avoid the killer rabbit holes. Allison lifted her arms again and Jonah roared and lunged for her: she screamed, the gannets screamed, the thunder clapped directly overhead, and the lightning must’ve hit some part of the island because I felt the shock through my feet. Then they were down on the ground amongst the rabbit holes and I saw Jonah lift his great big fist and bring it smashing down onto Allison’s face. She didn’t scream anymore.’

He paused, remembering—or maybe thinking which way he could take this ridiculous story. None of us said a word.

‘The clouds drifted away. The gannets quietened down after a bit. Allison lay on the ground, very still. Jonah kept kissing her face. I’d never seen him kiss her before. He didn’t stop. He kept kissing and kissing and crying. I had a lump in my throat. I hated Allison, but I’d never wanted this to happen. I wanted the boat to come back. Why hadn’t it come back? I wanted to ask Jonah, but I decided he must have gone crazy, so I thought it best not to draw his attention to myself. I worked out what must have happened: the proper boat was the one with all the old people on it, but that one hadn’t brought us out, so it didn’t know it had to come and pick us up. The bloke in the putter-putter wasn’t going to go out of his way to help, I was sure of that. The only person left was the lady in the kiosk. She knew we were out here, but Allison and Jonah had been horrible to her, so she might not care. And then I did something very odd for me. I got down on my knees among the gannets, and they didn’t peck me, they seemed to accept me as one of their own. I thought of St Francis and St Cuthbert and Steve with his arm twisted backwards, and poor Allison with her face smashed in, and I suppose me thinking of them turned into a kind of a prayer; a real one. It must’ve been, because it was answered. A little later on, when it was almost dark, there was a boat—and the bloke in the boat came onto the island with a torch and found me curled up among the gannets and Jonah lying on top of Allison, and he called for the coastguard and got it all sorted out somehow. I was sent back to the Home straight away that night, and Steve was so bloody happy to see me he gave me two black eyes and had to be punished but he didn’t care. Nobody told me what became of Jonah, but that was fine. I didn’t want to know. I tried to forget, but for a long time, on dark and stormy nights, Jonah and Allison would return and haunt me.

‘Twenty years later, I decided I needed to lay their ghosts to rest, so I took a group of my parishioners on a day trip to the island. We didn’t get off the boat—it was a nature reserve by then, and you weren’t allowed—but we sailed around and I told them about a miracle, an unlikely conversion that happened here one stormy afternoon on a narrow path between the gannets and the killer rabbits.’

We were quiet for a while, then, ‘You did nothing of the sort,’ said Renée.

‘Perhaps not. But it makes a fitting end to the tale, don’t you think?’

‘Did you ever see Steve again?’ said Vicky.

‘Yes. He was in and out of prison, but in one place they taught him a trade—joinery—and he surprised himself by being good at it. So good that the next time he was out he took a professional qualification and learnt to restore antique furniture. That was how I met up with him again. He used to work on pieces from my showroom. Nicked a few of course.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Vicky, giggling.

‘Not many,’ said John, and he kissed her on the forehead. She laid her head on his shoulder. I wondered how much of the story had been pure fabrication. Most of it, no doubt, but there had been some truth in there too. I remembered the whippy lad that Susan had been dating. Could easily have been a borstal boy. My parents certainly thought so. They hadn’t approved of him at all at first, though they were still dazzled by his good looks, and he could turn on the charm, even back then.

‘But that wasn’t the only trauma of my childhood,’ he said, and I waited, wondering whether this time he would tell us the truth. He closed his eyes as if trying his hardest to remember.

‘I was five years old, at school. There had been a lot of screaming and running about, but now we were sitting silently in our classroom. A masked man came in, told us to get up. He led us into the yard, lined us up along one wall and some of us wet ourselves, I was one. I remember that too clearly, the hot trickle turning icy cold, the chafing. We stood there for hours. My knees kept locking. We heard explosions, saw clouds of yellow and purple rising up, dirty and stinking, and I thought back to earlier that day, getting ready for school. I hadn’t wanted to go. I’d thought of pretending I had a tummy ache in order to stay at home, because I wanted to make sure Ruth—my then foster mother—wasn’t going to kill herself. She looked so sad when she thought I wasn’t watching her. She burnt the toast, and I told her it didn’t matter. I forced myself to eat it, to not mind the scrape of rancid butter, the memory of marmalade.

‘Then the shouting, and closer, a barrage of shooting, and me, just seven years old—’

Gotcha! I thought. He’d said he was five. Get it right, John.

‘—a line of us up against the wall, the masked men waiting, and Steve went berserk. He lunged forward out of the line, and one of the men cracked his skull with his rifle butt. He crumpled. I thought of the story he’d read out the previous week about his sister’s hamster, how funny it had been, and I thought of how his shirt tails always came out of his trousers, how he managed to get ink on his knees. Now he just lay in the school yard, broken.’

I didn’t want to hear any more. John told these stories too well, he was too convincing, even when the facts were obviously wrong. He’d persuade anyone of anything. Renée came to the rescue.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you really are full of shit, aren’t you.’

John grinned at her.

‘You’ve never had a friend called Steve,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been a poor little waif and stray—when I first met you, your best friend was a psychologist called Evan, and you used to meet up with him in that café in Bacchus Wynd every week to discuss philosophy—no, don’t try to deny it, I was there, remember?’

John laughed.

‘So you were. But Renée, my love, the tales I could tell about you!’

‘I know you could, but the difference is, they’d be true.’

I was tired. I wanted to make my excuses and slip off to my bedroom, but I knew if I tried to sleep I wouldn’t be able to help listening to the low voices next door—mostly John’s—and it would be agonising not to be able to hear clearly what everyone was saying, so I stayed. John was now talking about courage, about a time when he had, allegedly, been fourteen years old, living on a farm with lots of younger kids, also fostered. 

‘One day a man arrived in a big car with dark windows,’ he was saying. ‘We all ran and hid, except for our foster dad, Jacob, who stood there in his loose corduroy trousers, the piglets running and squealing around his feet. The man got out of the car. He was wearing a dark suit and shades. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could see well enough what was going on. The man pushed Jacob’s shoulder, and he staggered back. I willed him to stand up to the man, but his hands were at his sides, he wasn’t going to defend himself. A chicken flapped down from the window ledge, and the cockerel strutted round the yard, proud and strong, taking the piss, but Jacob lowered his head, meekly. I didn’t want to watch. I gathered the little ones together, took them out along the lane which was claggy and stinking with cow’s piss. I told them Jacob was doing this deliberately; play-acting to buy us time. Once we were gone, Jacob would kill the man. That’s what I told them. They liked that. They’d seen Jacob cutting a squealer’s throat, they’d seen him castrating the bullocks, they believed him capable of doing what I said. I led them down to the mill race, into danger. I knew they’d follow me anywhere, but this was just water, full of noise. Pick it up, and it slips through your fingers.’

This story scared me, and I thought there might well be more truth in it than any of the others, but I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to think about it.

Then Moyra’s booming voice said goodnight. I wondered what she’d made of it all. She’d sat there drawing, and if she’d been illustrating what she’d been hearing she’d have made something extraordinary, but her drawing was obsessive, and I wondered if she ever would be able to stop. She needed a break, but probably only Dylan could have done anything about it, and he was long gone.

And Bill? Oh Bill... I closed my eyes tight shut and hoped I’d dream about him tonight, because if I didn’t then I would dream about John and I couldn’t bear to do that, not again, not after all these years.

            ‘I wonder what would have become of you if you’d really become a priest,’ said Renée.

            John thought for a moment, with his hands in that steeple position that weirdly transformed him into an elderly priest without doing anything else at all.

            And at this point I got up and said goodnight and went to bed. I’d had enough. I’d leave Vicky and Renée to fight over John’s soul. I didn’t know who would win, and I didn’t care. He was infuriating. Always had been. Vicky and Renée were each as idiotic as the other and needed their heads knocking together. I was well out of it. 

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

I woke up early the next morning and made myself coffee—not fragrant and exquisite and served in a delicate vessel, but plain and instant and I even managed to find a smallish mug to drink it from. Moyra was next up. She looked haggard. She told me she’d been drawing—Vicky had given her some materials. This incessant artwork was so obviously bad for her, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Direct approach? Might as well try.

            ‘Looks to me like all this sketching is wearing you out.’

            ‘Yes. It is.’

            ‘Why don’t you stop?’

            ‘I can’t. Not without Dylan.’

            ‘Where is he now?’

            ‘I don’t know.’

            ‘Don’t you have his mobile number?’

            ‘No.’

            ‘Friends? Family? Someone might know?’

            ‘Yes, someone might know, and they might tell me, and then I would know, but I wouldn’t know what to do with that information. So I draw, because it’s what I have to do, and it’s all I can do now.’

            ‘But it’s wearing you out.’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘Does John realise what it’s doing to you?’

            ‘I don’t know what John realises.’

            ‘Have you told him?’

            ‘No.’

            ‘He probably doesn’t realise then.’

            ‘No, probably not.’

            ‘Vicky?’

            ‘What about her?’

            ‘Does she... oh, don’t worry. We’ll find some way out of this mess.’

            ‘It’s not a mess. I draw pictures. John and Vicky are going to take me to see some gallery people today with my drawings. The gallery people might want to exhibit my work. They might sell it. If they sell it, I will get some money. I will be able to buy more art materials and draw more pictures.’

            ‘And will that make you happy?’

            ‘I don’t know if what I feel when I do my drawings is happiness. My artwork is outside happiness and sadness. It is otherness.’

            ‘Would you sooner be doing more art, or have Dylan back?’

            ‘I don’t know.’

I was getting nowhere with this. I decided to try another tack.

            ‘What does Alfred say?’

            ‘He can’t say anything,’ said Moyra, and she laughed at me, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. ‘He’s a bear. My father pulled his head off.’

            ‘Oh.’

            I was relieved when Renée came in.

            ‘Darlings! How are we all this morning? Moyra? Raring to take the Paris art world by storm? Frances? Shall we go and set off fireworks in the Louvre? Bungee jump off the Eiffel Tower? String John Bloody Stephenson up by the you know whats?’

            ‘Renée! But yes, and why not.’ I was relieved at the way she was this morning; back to full strength and clearly not about to take any nonsense from anyone. We were in for a fun day. Moyra was still looking miserable, but Renée wasn’t stupid, she could see there was a problem.

            ‘Listen girls, let me tell you about older husbands—and I know Dylan and Bill aren’t exactly doddering old fools, not yet, but from what I’ve heard, neither of them has shown a lot of common sense; neither knows when they’re well off. You know what happens if you don’t get rid of them? If they cling onto you, and you grow old together? Really old? You end up screaming at windows. That’s what happens, and you don’t want that, believe me.’

            ‘I don’t think I would ever scream at a window,’ said Moyra.

            ‘Me neither,’ I said.

            ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Renée. ‘Have you ever been in one of those sad old pubs, peopled by lonely old married men with their turkey-necks—you know, ancient decrepit blokes nursing pints in the snug, quiet, but in their minds they’re battering at barred windows and screaming? They’re not happy either. At home, they have wives who’ve been reading articles telling them their boobs wouldn’t have sagged if they hadn’t worn bras all those years, and they cackle at the articles, they tear them up, they throw the pieces of paper up in the air and watch them flutter down to the carpet. They go upstairs. They try it: they take off their bras and they see wrinkly sagging sacks that are somehow still part of their bodies, and they’re still like that when their husbands come home and find them, sitting like statues at their dressing tables, watching their yellowing crepe paper skin from all three angles, blotchy and brown where the silvering at the back of the mirror has started to lose its integrity. The men turn away, astonished, wondering what these terrifying old crones are doing in their homes. They go downstairs, shaking their heads, turn on the television and watch twelve-year-old politicians, six-year-old comedians, newly born presenters, yet to be conceived pop stars. They close their eyes, and their wives come down, determined to find love, somehow, but the men are asleep, grunting, with drool seeping down the sides of their mouths and snot bubbling from their noses.’

            Oh God. That was Bill all right.

‘At which point, the women make a nice cup of tea,’ I said, ‘and end up screaming at the barred kitchen windows.’

            ‘Quite so. My dears, I think it’s clear you are both better off without them. Moyra my love, I realise you’re seriously driven with this art business, I realise it’s causing you pain, but John really is the best. If he is going to manage your career, it will happen, and you will be successful, and you never know where that success will lead you. Sometimes the unknowing is the scary bit.’

            ‘Yes,’ said Moyra. ‘I don’t like not knowing.’

            She got out a sketchpad and scribbled so fast I could barely see the pencil moving. A face emerged, then disappeared. Her breathing was quick and shallow. Then thirty seconds later she stopped, and there was a ghost of a beautiful face left on the page that was practically covered with graphite. It was a tiny picture, and I could imagine it sensitively framed, a large plain mount, simple ash frame. I could imagine it selling for a lot of money, and I was jealous; I wanted her talent. I wanted to be John’s protégée.

            I filled the kettle again. John’s apartment must have been unique in Paris in having both electric kettle and toaster. Homely things. I wondered if that was down to Vicky. I wondered when John and I were going to talk properly, because it had to happen sometime. We had acknowledged each other, but we hadn’t said anything. I couldn’t discuss this with Renée, and obviously not with Vicky. Moyra would listen, but I was worried that she was too dangerously empathetic for her own good, and I would only be adding to her woes.

            It was still hard to associate this sophisticated and seductively charming man with the difficult and violent youth who’d set my sister on her lifelong course of seeking out abusive men. I’d avoided the trap. Bill had a mouth on him at times, but he was kind. He’d never hurt me, not really. Yet here I was, thinking about a man who decades earlier had scarred me, and I wasn’t just thinking about him—there were snippets of my dream still in my head, and I didn’t like to pursue them. I knew what I’d been doing, and I certainly hadn’t been doing it with Bill or Euan or the man with the Times Crossword Puzzle in the hotel, or even the fat Greek. But there was a skinny raggedy boy, passed from one care home to another, even if they had never really existed, and from one inappropriate foster family to another; a boy who had survived somehow, grown into a youth that my sister had been crazy about, who had charmed my mother so that she thought he could do no wrong, who had earned some grudging respect from my father, even though he disapproved strongly. For me, it had been the way he moved, the way he held that blasted cigarette. He had been like a dancer, a boxer, and although he’d lost some of that now, as he must have turned sixty, and his career had been in antiques, some of that grace remained, and he was still unmistakably the same person. He’d moved from furniture into fine arts. He was rich, respected, still charming. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, any more than I’d been able to all those years ago.

            ‘Frances, you haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying.’

            ‘Sorry, Renée. What was that?’

            ‘Never mind. I can hear John and Vicky getting up. We need to present a flawless front of invincibility.’

            ‘Aye, that we do.’

            ‘Darling, how quaintly northern of you. Been thinking about Euan, have we?’

            ‘You know, I can’t even remember what he looks like. Curly hair. Big hands. Lovely soft voice. That’s it.’

            ‘That’s plenty. You should draw him.’

            ‘I’m not Moyra. I don’t have the skills.’

            ‘You’re more subtle. You take your time. I suspect you are very much better than you think you are, but we can’t prove that one way or another as I doubt if you’re going to take up a sketch pad and draw something in a “Look at me!” kind of a way.’

            ‘Absolutely not.’

            ‘Sooner die?’

            ‘Something like that.’

            ‘Why?’ said Moyra.

            ‘Because –’ and John and Vicky walked in at that point, both of them looking tousled and bedroomy. I took my mug of coffee and went into the living room. Moyra and Renée stayed in the kitchen, and Renée was in fine form, dominating the conversation, seemingly delighted with everyone and everything. I would need all my strength later on to support her, I was sure of it. What a strange group we were; four women, all of us profoundly affected by the one man. I wanted Bill to turn up unexpectedly and punch John on the nose. That would even the score a bit.

            I looked round the room—tall, elegant, rococo, with those startling enormous paintings Vicky had created—they were all about John, no question, and the more I looked at them the more unsettling I found them. I would be glad to get out of here. Renée and I could have a pleasant touristy day, do the sights and not worry about what hellish place Moyra was sinking into with this incessant drawing. Much as I’d grown to like the woman, her intensity was hard to take for hours on end. Without her, Renée and I could be frivolous and have fun. 

            And that’s exactly what we did. We shopped, we stopped for coffee countless times, we people-watched, we viewed the Seine from every bridge, we marvelled at what had happened to Notre Dame, we pretended we were wealthy enough to go into some incredibly exclusive places, and everyone was utterly charming to us because Renée was magnificent; she spread love everywhere, and everyone loved her back. I was an acolyte, but that was all right. I had no wish to compete with her on any level, and was happy to be her shadow, her lady-in-waiting—but also her protector, her knight errant, just in case anyone dared to insult her. Nobody did, so I don’t know why I was thinking of myself in those terms. She was impregnable that day. We arrived back at the apartment late in the afternoon. John, Vicky and Moyra had just got in, and Vicky was full of what they’d been up to; she reeled off the names of galleries and how impressed they had been with Moyra, though of course the fact that she had been escorted by M’sieur and Madame Stephenson can’t have done her any harm.

            John was sitting back in his elegant chair, smoking as usual, his arm draped over the back, long fingers, the cigarette placed just so, and I was almost tempted to draw him—but that’s not what I do, so I didn’t. I felt such a fraud. These arty people. What was I even doing here? Moyra now, she was the real thing. She was sitting on the floor next to the coffee table, which had a large sheet of paper on it, and she was drawing, furiously, it was a Paris street scene, but it looked as if it was about explode. I realised John was watching her, being careful not to interrupt. Vicky had less subtlety.

            ‘That’s fucking brilliant Moyra, but too small. John, what can we do? Moyra needs to be working on a much larger scale.’ She looked around at her own enormous paintings. ‘Tell you what. Take one of those down. Let her draw on the wall behind it. That’s a huge great space.’

            ‘That’s a mad idea,’ he said, ‘but I’d be interested to see what she makes of it.’

            They were talking as if she wasn’t even there, and in a way, she wasn’t, because she was so into her drawing, she was breathing heavily, sweating, and I hoped she’d been taking her epilepsy tablets because if she suddenly had a seizure I’m not sure any of us would have known what to do. I looked at Renée, but Renée was too busy being elegant and sexually alluring to have any energy left to communicate with me.

            ‘Come on John,’ said Vicky, and she supervised as he unscrewed the picture from the wall. She was too small to be of any practical use, but her energy seemed to transfer to John and his usual languid stance became positively animated. Once the picture was down and safely propped up in a bedroom, he resumed his pose on the chair. My God, I thought—he’s as bad as Renée. They’re trying to out-sophisticate each other. Does Vicky not see this? Perhaps she did, but was so used to John and the way he behaved around Renée that she didn’t mind, or perhaps this excitement about Moyra’s artwork on her part was absolutely genuine, and she really wanted to see what Moyra could do on the larger “canvas”. She scurried off and returned with half a dozen fat marker pens.

            ‘Really?’ said John.

            ‘You can re-decorate. But I don’t think you’ll want to.’

            Moyra, who had seemed oblivious to what was going on had clearly been listening and had taken it all in. She stood up and took a black pen from Vicky.

            ‘What are you going to draw?’ said John, quietly.

            Moyra stared at him for an uncomfortably long time, then said, ‘You.’

            ‘Oh, bravo!’ said Vicky.

            We all settled ourselves down to watch as if this were a theatrical performance or a musical recital. I had never seen Moyra draw a direct portrait from life before and looked forward to seeing how she would deal with the angles and long limbs and the fact that he never kept absolutely still—but what I was hoping most to see was something of the grace, the dancer. She took the top off the pen, and we all held our collective breaths. Then she was off. It was the usual high-speed Moyra. Her staring at John had been the equivalent of taking a photograph. Now she simply had to draw what she had seen—or so I thought. What she actually drew was nothing like John’s real pose. She didn’t draw the dancer, the languid sophisticate. She drew a thug. She drew a man with clenched fists and a look of blind fury in his eyes. She knocked a good twenty years off his age—maybe more. All the grey hair was gone, and he was dark, dark, dark—and I remembered him shouting at Susan that night, and the furious row, and then the excruciating pain, and the running. I could barely look at the picture, but then she’d finished—it had only taken her ten minutes—how could she work so quickly? And there it was. Life-size and terrifying. I looked at John to see how he was taking it, and was surprised to see a smile, though a somewhat rueful one.

            Renée stood up and walked closer to the picture. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Moyra, this... it isn’t fair.’ She turned round and there were tears in her eyes, which I could see she was determined to hide. She gulped and sat back down again, all her poise gone—she looked old and desperately sad.

            ‘That’s fucking awesome,’ said Vicky. ‘Right. John? Get this next picture down. I want Moyra to do one of me. This is like going to a fortune teller. Terrific!’

            I wasn’t convinced it really was terrific, but I had to admit to being very keen indeed to see what Moyra would make of Vicky, if only to take my mind—and my eyes—away from John. I glanced back at the picture again. All that anger. Dear God, I hadn’t realised. I thought back to his probably apocryphal story about the island, and his friend, and his need for vengeance. I didn’t know how Moyra had managed to capture all of that, but she had.

            John took the next picture down, stowed it away, came back, sat down, and we all waited. Again, Moyra worked incredibly quickly. Her drawing of Vicky showed a woman jumping up and down on something, and I wondered what it would be, but then was astonished to see it was the exquisite Sèvres coffee set we’d used after dinner. She was smashing it up, and pieces were flying everywhere, tiny, beautiful shards of porcelain being utterly destroyed. Her face wasn’t furious like in John’s picture—it was misery. Pure sorrow, heart-breaking sorrow as the beautiful thing was destroyed forever.

            I looked at Vicky to see how she was taking it, and her face was mirroring what Moyra was drawing. She looked as if she were about to crumple onto the floor. John was staring at the picture, and he looked angry. There had to be more to this than simply the destruction of a coffee set. There was a significance I was missing. Vicky turned away and put her face in her hands. Renée looked puzzled—clearly she was not privy to whatever this was about, but John knew and Vicky knew and I had no idea how Moyra knew, but they had been together all day and she had a way of picking up on things. I could always ask her later.

            She was drawing on like a person possessed, which I suppose she was, because that’s what was happening more and more with her art. I wondered if I ought to pull her away gently, say, that’s enough for now, Moyra, as if she were a five-year-old who was playing too long at something and was bound to get tired and fractious. But I couldn’t—I had no presence here, no authority. I just hoped Moyra had enough control to get through this.

            The picture was finished. ‘I think you need to do Renée now,’ said Vicky, with such venom in her voice that I was startled—I’d never heard her speak like that to anyone. I wondered what Renée’s reaction would be.

‘I would adore to have my picture in John’s apartment. What a lovely, generous suggestion, Vicky.’

            Oh, nice riposte, Renée. Catty and perfect. But what about Moyra? Aren’t any of you seeing what this is doing to her?

            John, meanwhile, was taking all of Vicky’s remaining paintings down. He was going to replace Vicky, at least temporarily, with a startling array of original artwork depicting this gathering of mismatched people on a sunny late afternoon in Paris, though the pictures were anything but sunny.

            Moyra had already moved onto drawing Renée, and I could hardly bear to watch. She’d known Renée for a long time now, and I dreaded to think what awful secrets from her past were about to appear—but I was wrong. The Renée she drew wasn’t the one most people saw at all; it was someone who was made of kindness, no cattiness, not a hint of the brittle sophistication and general bitchiness which most people would assume made up a large proportion of her persona. She looked graceful, a little sad, but very generous, very beautiful—and utterly authentic. And she was staring straight out from the wall so that wherever you were in the room, I had a feeling her eyes would follow you. I wondered what John—and even more so, Vicky—would feel about that.

            Moyra looked exhausted and I wanted her to stop, but I don’t think I could have stopped her now.

            ‘Frannie next?’ said John.

            ‘Yes,’ said Moyra, barely audible, and within twenty seconds she had drawn a few lines that were barely there, barely there at all, but it was me. I was shocked. Was I really such an ephemeral being? Did I really hardly exist?

            ‘Draw Dylan,’ said Renée.

            ‘No!’ I said. This had to stop. I was too late. She’d started. And she drew clouds, mountains of clouds, fabulous landscapes, paths winding through them, a scene of heartrending beauty. She took far longer over this one, and she looked ready to drop by the time she had finished.

            ‘Room for just one more,’ said John. ‘A self-portrait, to complete the collection.’

            She moved to the remaining wall. Stared at it for a long time. Then took the pen and did a dot. One tiny, lonely, dot. She put the top back on the pen and walked out of the room.

            ‘Cripes!’ said Vicky. ‘I need a drink!’ We all did. It had been late afternoon when we’d come home, but now it was almost dark outside. Moyra had been drawing for far longer than we’d realised. I hated to think what it had done to her, but she’d gone for a lie down presumably, and that would be the best thing. I looked at the drawings again, one by one, and it hurt. How John was going to live with these I had no idea, but he could always put Vicky’s pictures up again to cover them. Trouble is, they’d still be there. Even if he painted over them, they’d still be there. Those were permanent marker pens that Moyra had been using. Only way to get rid of the marks would be to chip the plaster away and re-do it from scratch. I was sure John knew this, and maybe even now he was working out how much value Moyra had added to his apartment, because if he could make her famous, this private art collection of his would be worth—God knows.

            He handed me a large glass of white wine and I took it without thanking him. I had no desire whatsoever to thank him for what had just happened.

            ‘So, what’s the story behind the smashed porcelain?’ asked Renée, and I looked at Vicky. Vicky looked at John. John drank his wine.

            ‘That,’ he said, eventually, ‘is Simon Tovey. My best friend. Vicky’s former lover.’

            ‘Ohhh,’ said Renée. ‘Poor man. Wonder what he did to deserve that.’

            ‘What he did or didn’t do has fuck-all to do with you,’ said Vicky, furious. She stood up and threw her wine glass into the fireplace, then stormed out.

            ‘Oops,’ said Renée.

            ‘Renée, you are incorrigible,’ said John, and he laughed—genuinely, with real affection. I stood up, mumbled something about putting the kettle on, and escaped to the kitchen. I closed the door, made myself a mug of instant, and sat there sipping it, willing Bill to phone me, but of course he wouldn’t. I had taken a phone call earlier, but it had been from Susan to say she thought I ought to come back early because Bill was now openly going around with that woman from Aycliffe, and if I wanted him back, I’d better do something about it. I told her I didn’t want him back, that we had nothing in common, and that I was having a lovely time in Paris. All the artwork! I told her I’d bumped into an old friend of hers, and when I said the name she’d stopped for a moment, then said, ‘Christ, Frances, you spoke to the bastard? After what he did to you?’ I didn’t dare tell her I’d not only spoken to him; I was speaking from his apartment. I wanted to talk about him, but she changed the subject quickly, was back onto Bill, and how he was a good man and I ought to sort myself out. Oh, so it was my fault now was it? Apparently yes. And soon we were back on familiar ground, blaming each other for our dysfunctional relationships. I finished the phone call feeling nothing but affection for my sister, missing her like crazy. She was so gloriously normal, whereas here I was staying with a bunch of overwrought maniacs.

That bloody woman from Aycliffe, though. It wasn’t fair. She was probably nice and normal too. Bill always went for nice normal people.