Continuation of story from chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The plan for the next morning was for it to pretty much follow the previous day’s pattern. John and Vicky were going to take Moyra, this time with photos of her incredible murals from yesterday, to see one last gallery owner. This one was important, and John was confident, but the whole atmosphere had changed. He had become serious and distant. Vicky looked as if she hadn’t slept well, and Moyra was in the last stages of exhaustion. I took her to one side and asked if she was taking her epilepsy tablets. The question was stupid, because I was sure she would be, but I couldn’t think of any other way of getting her to talk about how she was feeling and what was going wrong. She assured me she was taking her tablets, and I said, ‘It’s just that you look so tired this morning. I wondered if you were all right. Are you?

            ‘No.’

            ‘Is there anything I can do? Or Renée? Any of us?’

            ‘No.’

            She hesitated for a bit and then she put an arm round my shoulder and pulled so tight it hurt. I think it was a hug. This worried me more than anything that had happened so far. I left her sipping her coffee and went to see Renée.

            ‘We have to help Moyra,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know how to do it. This is becoming urgent. I don’t mean the stuff with galleries and so on. I’m sure John and Vicky have that in hand.’

            ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ said Renée. ‘The person we need is Dylan, but possibly not even the real Dylan—it might be her idea of Dylan who would be most useful, but we can’t just magic him out of the air the way she does Alfred. Sometimes I wonder if Dylan even exists. I’ve never met him, and I’ve known Moyra since before the fateful incident with the boil.’

            ‘Of course he’s real! She wouldn’t have all of that up. You saw how upset it made her. He’s all too real, and he’s left her.’

            ‘I suppose so. But what about Alfred?’

            ‘He’s a teddy bear without a head.’

            ‘Okay, if you say so.’

            Renée seemed distracted, her thoughts elsewhere. Was I the only person who could see how badly Moyra was hurting?

            ‘All those murals she drew last night,’ I said. ‘We should have stopped her.’

            ‘I know. We all should have done something, but once she’d drawn John, our natural selfishness took over and we all had to have our portraits drawn by marvellous Moyra. We all felt the potential fame. Even you weren’t immune.’

            She looked up at me, and whilst the “even you” riled a bit, I knew she was right. ‘But it’s done now,’ she said. ‘Damage limitation time.’

            ‘Are you going to stop her going out with John and Vicky this morning?’

            ‘I don’t think that would be possible, and I don’t think I should anyway.’ She mentioned the name of the gallery John was going to take her to—it meant nothing to me. ‘It’s the big one,’ she said. ‘John has saved the best to last.’

            ‘Right. Supposing they take her on. What then? She works furiously at some paintings, making herself more ill than ever? We need to stop this.’

            ‘Stop Moyra creating art? Stop the tide? The phases of the moon?’

            ‘No, but we need to calm it all down somehow. Give her some breathing space.’

            ‘Suggest she does little portraits of birds and flowers? Might work for you, but not Moyra.’

            ‘Dammit Renée, it doesn’t work for me and it never has.’

            ‘I know. That was rather my point. We either effectively lobotomise Moyra and heaven knows how we would do that, and keep her safe that way, or we let her follow where John is taking her.’

            ‘Renée—if this weren’t John. If it were someone else entirely, someone you didn’t know, who was doing this to Moyra—what then?’

            ‘That’s an impossible question.’

            ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

            ‘No, I am. I don’t know how to help Moyra without hurting John. That’s my dilemma.’

            ‘Impasse then.’

            ‘No, not really—because you’re here. You’re independent. You’ve known Moyra only a short time, and you might have known John once, but that was back in the dark ages—you didn’t even recognise him at first. Therefore, you are truly independent and can be the voice of reason. You’re the sensible one because you’re not in love with him’

            No, I wasn’t in love with him and never had been unless you count a violent, agonising, heartrending teenage crush that had come close to destroying me and was still having repercussions all these years later. I was remembering more and more of what it had been like back then. I remembered the day I first saw Susan with him, and the agonies of jealousy I went through because he was so beautiful, this dark boy, he was quicksilver, he was anger, he was magic, he was everything the dull stolid boys in my class at school were not. But he had shown a cruel side and he had hurt her, hurt me—he had tried to kiss me. What if I’d let him? And why had he done it in the first place? I’d never known. I couldn’t possibly have asked him back then. Could do now, but I wouldn’t. I shivered at the potential embarrassment of the question. He might not even remember doing it—I mean, how many girls would he have tried to kiss? Hundreds. If I was remembered at all, it would only be because I’d refused. No, I wasn’t in love. I was in something, but it wasn’t love, it was unpleasant, and I hated it; I couldn’t cope, and I wanted out. Teenage crushes are wonderful at fourteen, but they’re sheer hell at fifty-five. But we were talking about Moyra, not John, forget John.

            ‘I’ve asked her if she’s all right,’ I said, ‘and she’s told me she isn’t.’

            ‘Damn. In that case—oh, it’s so hard to know what to do. I think we’ll have to let her go out with John and Vicky this morning as planned, but then we’ll take her to a funfair or to the opera or anything, find something that’s full of colour and life and stimulation.’

            ‘That’s not going to work, is it.’

            ‘No. But it’s something to hold onto.’

I shook my head, but I had no answers, so the two of us went out as before, and I suppose Paris was still there the same as ever, but we barely saw it. There was a drizzly rain and greyness—we could have been anywhere. I was about ready to sit down in the gutter and cry, but Renée couldn’t stay glum indefinitely. Eventually our salvation came along in the form of a man, an archetypal cartoon Frenchman, who was cycling towards us. No string of onions, but you could almost imagine them, and Renée was delighted.

She clapped her hands. ‘It’s him! It’s le facteur de Bétharram!’

‘The what?’

‘Look. Look at his square face with its piggy black eyes, three chins, the Gitane that droops from his pursed lips and lines up perfectly with his bicycle’s front forks.’

‘No it doesn’t!’

‘Ha! Stick with me. His beret has faded but the horizontal stripes on his jumper remain strong. Gaston has pedalled these streets for fifty years. They say he should retire, but he’s squat and severe and no one dares mention the possibility. There’s a wheeze and a squeak and he’s gone, trailing ash. The new man walks with purpose. They think his name is Pierre, but no one likes to ask. He doesn’t smoke, but his eyes speak of absinthe and doom.’

‘I preferred Gaston. Don’t think I like Pierre very much.’

‘No, me neither. Poor Gaston. Later, he trundles his bicycle into the light through grains of silence, past two men walking the ploughed fields in search of windmills.’

‘Shades of Don Quixote.’

‘That’s the idea. At home, his face wears a frown, and the piping along the edge of his dressing gown flirts with moths. His wife left him yesterday or maybe last year or even some previous decade, with flowers and hair blowing this way and that, and the streams run into the ground beneath the grey pterodactyls—or that’s what he thinks he sees through his cataracts. “Get them done,” she used to say but he never did as he was told. That’s why his front forks are buckled. He won’t be able to cycle again. We need Moyra to bring him to life for us. Wonder how they’re getting on.’

‘Oh Renée, they’d better be all right.’

‘They will be. We won’t think about it. We’ll sort Moyra out this afternoon.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Only a couple more hours to kill.’ She was stepping off the pavement as she said this, just as an ambulance and police car rushed through and narrowly missed her. I pulled her back, and she was fine, but the experience had been a wake-up call. We had to start living in reality, not this fantasy land of windmills and onions. 

‘We need tea,’ she said. ‘I know this is Paris, and tea is pretty much an anachronism, but sometimes it’s the only thing. Come on.’

An old lady a few yards further along the road had also nearly been run over by the ambulance. A group of people had gathered round her, and were being most solicitous, checking both she and her ridiculous little dog were all right.

‘Good heavens! Aunt Didith,’ said Renée.

‘Who?’

‘The real Aunt Didith, God rest her soul, was one of John’s terrible old aunts, who incidentally, really did exist even if nothing else was true. That old woman looked just like her. Aunt Didith… Aunt Didith: tight curls, sprigged blouse, baleful glances. Pearl earrings pulling at floppy lobes, loose skin, bulbous knuckles. She sticks out a quivering nose, sniffs—Aunt Didith, stark against red bricks. Out she goes, trailing a rat on a string.’

            ‘That’s cruel.’

            ‘No, it isn’t. You saw it. Manky little animal. Didith, with her long unlit cigarette tight between dried lips. She frowns forward and the rat-dog trails behind, pitter-patter-pitter-patter, Didith-didith-didith… her stockinged legs shine in the sun, her court shoes bulge with bunions, she’s fast, the rat scurries along behind her as Didith strides past vandalised stairs, patches of black that creep along concrete. A car races past, a man shouts, “Look out! Look out!” Didith flies into a funfair world of flashing lights, rollercoasters, blinds to keep out the blistering sun, camellias, grandfather’s pipe, rosehip syrup. The rat sits back on its haunches and howls, a piteous sound. Dammit, I really do need that cup of tea.’

She was on a mission. It only took us three bars before we found one that looked likely, though the tea pots were strange clear things, like spherical cafetieres, and the tray included a set of hourglasses so that you could brew your tea for a precise length of time.

We settled down, poured a brew. ‘Tell me about Simon,’ I said. ‘He of the smashed porcelain and the upsetting portrait. What’s he like?’

‘Simon Tovey? He’s a genuinely sweet man. I’ve only met him a few times, on both occasions with John, and he makes a perfect foil. They’re opposites in so many ways. Simon is pale where John is dark, open where John is secretive. His passion is that porcelain. He has a huge and valuable collection of it, apparently. He and Vicky were totally mismatched, according to John. The way he tells it, he saved them both from each other by “taking over”.’

‘That’s not how Moyra saw it.’

‘No, that was interesting wasn’t it. What she saw was the way Vicky had crushed poor Simon and broke her own heart by doing so. I wonder if that’s what really happened. If so, it’s yet another tragedy to lay at John’s door. Yes, a very nice man, that Mr Tovey, and that’s something you’d never say about John.’

‘Did you ever—you know—with Simon?’

‘No. Not my type. Too pristine. Too reserved. I like my boys to know exactly what they want and to go out and get it. You’d probably like him, though he’s nothing like your Bill. I don’t understand Bill. He seems to be in love with his car and not able to see you at all, which is very odd. I suppose that’s why Moyra sketched you as not much more than an outline.’

‘No. That’s not why she drew me like that. She was protecting me, showing that I keep things hidden.’

‘Well yes, I suppose that’s another interpretation.’

‘But herself—that dot.’ I shivered, just as I’d done when she’d drawn it.

‘I’ve been trying not to think about that,’ said Renée. ‘The last self-portrait I saw her do was the nude for our exhibition, and that was all her, it was complete, it was detailed, it was very beautiful. Something’s clearly gone wrong since then.’

‘Dylan has walked further and further away into the cloud landscape, and she’s been left behind. He’s gone through a gate somewhere, and closed it behind him, and now she doesn’t know where he is. Or where she is, either. She’s lost.’

‘I’m impressed. You really do get her, don’t you.’

‘Yes. And that’s why I’m frightened.’ I looked at my watch. ‘We need to get back.’

‘Okay.’

We walked through a park and the sun came out, there was a little dog in a frenzy over some bedding plants, it was jumping back and forth, snapping at bees and pram wheels and yap-yap-yapping at everyone, but in such a delightful friendly way that the old men on the benches were grinning with remembrance, as if they’d all had such little dogs in their younger days, and old women were tut-tut-tutting, but you could see them melting a little. Paris was beautiful, and I loved it, and I should have been so happy here. Perhaps I would be one day—but first there was this ugly tangle of Moyra and John and Vicky and Renée to sort out, quite apart from Bill, and Dylan, and maybe even Simon Tovey. I didn’t know how the hell I was supposed to do it all by myself, or even why I thought I should, but Renée had said I was the sensible one, so I didn’t feel as if she’d given me any choice.

We arrived back to an empty apartment and wondered why the others were taking so long. They should have been here by now. John’s image stared down at us from the wall, violent and furious—Vicky stamped on the delicate china and hurt it again and again—Renée looked kind and statuesque, and sad, and I was barely there at all. We hadn’t put the lights on, so we couldn’t see Moyra. It was as if she had never been a real person at all, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. I picked up a book and settled on the sofa to read. Renée skimmed through a magazine. We waited and waited, and then at last we heard the door. John and Vicky came in without speaking. Vicky had obviously been crying. John’s face was entirely without expression.

            ‘My dears—what’s happened,’ said Renée. ‘Where’s Moyra?’

            ‘In hospital,’ said John.

            ‘What? Where? Did she have a seizure?’

            I shook my head. That wouldn’t have been it. She’d been taking her tablets. But no one was looking at me. Vicky and Renée were both staring at John, waiting for him to explain, to put it all right. And he wasn’t going to, I could see it, I could see the little orphan boy on the beach, struggling to survive, just wanting to get away; I could see the young man fighting his way through delinquency against the odds; I could see far too much for my own good.

            ‘You explain,’ he said to Vicky. ‘I’m going out.’

            He picked up his jacket and slammed the door behind him. Vicky and Renée were left staring at each other. The younger woman started to sob, the elder looked horrified but also deeply sympathetic. She reached out to Vicky and took her in her arms, gave her a hug. So that left me. Someone had to go after John. Me! Christ. Right Moyra. I don’t know what’s happened to you, but… oh hell. But what?

            I needed to be quick. John had long legs. I scampered out of the apartment and vaulted down the stairs. My dumpy days were long past, and I was reasonably fit, so by trotting along the pavement and dodging in and out of people I managed to catch up with him just as he turned into a bar. I tugged on his sleeve, and he turned, furious, but then his face softened.

            ‘Frannie,’ he said. ‘Thank God.’

            He put his arm round me and pulled me close, and I thought of Moyra doing exactly the same thing earlier. I extricated myself gently.

            ‘Brandy?’ he said.

            ‘Please.’

            We took our drinks—doubles—to a table and sat down.

            ‘Tell me,’ I said.

            ‘I knew she wasn’t well,’ he said. ‘She had that wild and damaged look to her, so I set out knowing we’d have to keep a close eye on her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so unhappy. We managed the gallery fine, and the photos of the murals—well, they spoke for themselves. She didn’t say anything, but we were speaking French, so that didn’t seem odd. Then afterwards, when we were walking across the bridge, she went to the side, calmly and deliberately, climbed over and jumped. No warning. Nothing—or a massive, bloody obvious warning in the pictures themselves, in the way she’d been, in every bloody thing I’ve ever seen her do in the short time I’ve known her, in that manic, non-stop drawing, all those lines, all that hurt. That poor woman.’

            I remembered the ambulance and police car that had gone past us this morning, nearly knocking down Renée.

            ‘Is she going to be okay?’

            ‘No, she isn’t going to be remotely okay. She hit her head on the way down, and there was a boat, they dragged her out pretty quickly, but she’s on a life support machine. They’re trying to find Dylan.’

            ‘Oh God!’

            ‘She had an address written down in a notebook. That’s all they have. It’s not her own, so it must be someone who means something to her. The police are onto it. They know it’s urgent.’

            I drank the rest of my brandy.

            ‘It won’t be Dylan’s address,’ I said. ‘She told me she didn’t know where he was.’

            He stretched out and covered my hand with his. ‘Damn. God sake, Frannie, you tried to warn us. You saw what was happening. We wouldn’t listen. I’m never going to forgive myself for this.’

            I couldn’t speak and neither could I pull my hand away. This was the only way we were going to be able to give each other any sort of comfort.

            ‘How’s Vicky taking it?’

            ‘Victoria?’ He snorted in disgust. ‘She decided to attack me; to physically lay into me and shout and scream and become generally hysterical, which is always her way in times of crisis, but it wasn’t exactly helpful.’

            ‘That’s cruel.’

            ‘I know, but what do you expect? I’m not very nice. Remember? You of all people should know that.’

            ‘You didn’t mean to hurt me.’

            ‘Yes I did.’

            I pulled my hand away.

            ‘You bastard.’ I said it very quietly, but he heard me.

            ‘Thank you. I needed that.’

            He got up and went to the bar to get us more brandy. I was going to be very drunk very soon, but it wouldn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more. He was the utter bastard I’d always known he was, and Moyra was not going to make it. Never mind me, never mind John, this was about Moyra, who had hugged me this morning and who must have known exactly what she was going to do later on, and that’s why she had done it; Moyra who had produced her finest, most stunning artwork only hours before she knew she was going to die, or at least attempt to die. Moyra.

            John came back with the drinks and sat down. He stared at his glass. I might not have been there at all. I wasn’t. I was a faintly sketched line on a wall. Moyra was a dot, like those old-fashioned televisions—you switch them off and a dot of light remains for minutes, but then it finally fades out and dies and it’s gone.

            ‘Let me tell you about your sister,’ said John. ‘Susan was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, so of course I was going to have her, but I was all swagger—she terrified me. I didn’t deserve to have a girlfriend who looked like that, and if I did manage to go out with her, it couldn’t last, because nice things never lasted with me; girlfriends were for a few weeks, sometimes even just days, and that was it. My own mother threw me out and left me in the care of strangers. Whenever I felt that one of those strangers, one of those foster mothers might perhaps be kind after all—I think Allison might have been nice, given the chance—they kicked me out anyway.’

            ‘I thought Allison was murdered by Jonah?’

            ‘Hardly, though I think he often felt murderous towards her. He gave her one of those ultimatums: choose God—ie, him—or choose this difficult child, and she naturally stuck with him, so I had to go. She pushed me away like all the others, so if I tell a story where Jonah punishes her for this on my behalf, it’s only fair. And…’

            ‘And what?’

            ‘She was my aunt. Didith’s sister. Not a formal fostering at all.’

            ‘What about Jonah?’

            He shook his head.

            ‘Good God. Do you ever stop lying?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘Okay.’

            I sipped the brandy. I had drunk more brandy since I’d been in Paris than I had in the rest of my life in its entirety.

            ‘I knew Susan would push me away eventually. After going out with her for a week or two, I hoped it would be sooner rather than later, because I discovered I didn’t even like her, and it certainly didn’t help that she had a kid sister who was so much more obviously my type.’

            ‘Oh, come off it.’

            ‘Frannie, you were clever, serious, sensible, articulate when someone could get you to speak—and you couldn’t stand me. You saw though my act in a way your mother and sister never could and never would. I started fantasising about you, wanting you to grow up quickly so that I could ditch your sister and take up with you. I was convinced you would change your mind about me given time. Maybe you were already secretly in love with me, which is why I was happy to go through the motions with Susan for the time being. Everyone thought we were the golden couple.’

            Which was exactly what the gossip columns now called him and Vicky. 

            ‘I showed off,’ he said. ‘I used the toughness I’d learnt in care, all that sparring with Steve, which was the only real love I’d known.’

He’d clearly forgotten he’d just pretty much admitted to me that the stories of fostering were all lies, but I let that pass.

‘It didn’t make for an easy time with Susan, especially as at around that time I happened to meet a boy called Simon Tovey who was quiet and gentle and at first I thought him a total wimp, but then I started to see qualities in him that I craved for myself, and I became jealous. I thought if I bided my time with Susan while surreptitiously turning myself into Simon, I’d be in with a chance with you. But I became impatient. The rows with Susan were getting worse. I knew we didn’t have long before the relationship ceased to be viable in any way, but once I split up with her, I wouldn’t have access to you, so that’s why I speeded things up, and why I decided to kiss you. It was supposed to be a promise of what you had to look forward to.’

            He shook his head and smiled. ‘Have I ever told you what an idiot I am at times?’

            ‘No, but you’ve shown it.’

            ‘That was the most momentous kiss of my life that never happened. I can’t tell you how shocked I was when you pulled away. I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to kiss me back, so I went back to Susan in a foul mood, and she was happy enough to oblige, but only if we were in a crowd and it made her look good. When it was just the two of us, she pulled away exactly as you were doing. I decided it was your fault.’

            ‘Why?’

            ‘Because I needed someone other than myself to blame. My theory was that you’d told her about the attempted kiss in order to poison the relationship. You were working flat out against me.’

            ‘I never told her. I told Mum. She didn’t believe me. After that, there was no point trying to tell anyone else.’

            ‘I knew you didn’t really tell Susan, but I needed a fight and you were a good excuse. I boiled over, I was cruel to your sister and then I did that unforgivable thing to you.’

            He reached out and touched my cheek. I imagined taking hold of his hand and kissing his fingers. I didn’t do it.

            ‘But not long after that I met Renée and she did the impossible and turned me around. She’s a year or two older than I am, and even back then she was far more experienced than she should have been. When we made love, she was fully engaged in the act, and I’d never known that was even possible before.’

            ‘Of course not! You were only seventeen, for Christ’s sake.’

            ‘Kids in care grow up very quickly.’

            ‘I’m sure they do, but you weren’t really in care, you just stayed with a couple of mad aunts for a bit, as far as I can tell.’

            He ignored that.

            ‘It didn’t last with Renée. I moved away from her, but it was a gentle parting, it was kind, it showed me that there were other ways of doing things. She had a level of sophistication that I craved, even though all of it was fake.’

            ‘No, I can’t believe that. She’s a brilliant actress, but a lot of it’s got to be real.’

            ‘No, not at all. She came from a council estate background with petty thefts, shoplifting, truancy—ask her. She won’t lie to you. She was doing all the things I was doing, but she was cleverer; she had managed to re-invent herself as something ladylike and gentle. If she could move on from her past and re-invent herself so thoroughly, I thought maybe I could too. And heaven knows I tried. I’d already been hanging around with some intellectuals, now I spent more time with Simon and picked up his love of beautiful things, and I started dating much nicer girls. They still always chucked me as a matter of course, because some anger in me would still emerge, however hard I tried to conceal it.’

            ‘The fury that Moyra drew.’

            ‘Exactly. It was still there and always will be. But years later, in my forties, I fell in love, properly and deeply. She was called Emma; and she was much younger than me, she’d just finished at university and was artistic, intelligent, articulate—I decided she was “the one”, whether she wanted to be the one or not. But this time I didn’t grab her and attempt to kiss her. I held back, I got to know her, and she seemed to like me. We spent more and more time together, and I was confident this time at last I had found someone who wouldn’t leave me—but then she was mesmerised by a pretty boy, purely because of his looks. I took him for a fool. He had a very odd, direct way of communicating. I’d never come across anything like it before. Didn’t realise at the time was on the autistic spectrum.’

            ‘Like Moyra.’

            ‘Yes. And here’s the thing. While Emma was busy pursuing him, it turns out he was doting on Renée.’

            ‘Ah! She was still in your circle?’

            ‘Yes, we’d never been very far apart. But then whether from ulterior motives or not, Renée came to my rescue. She comforted me in my distress.’

            I’ll bet she did, I was thinking.

            ‘She made me see that if I wanted Emma, then I could have her. She set to work and prised Toby and Emma apart, took Toby for herself—and that was extraordinary. The one time I’ve ever seen Renée look truly uncomfortable was the day she met Toby’s mother for the first time, and it turned out the women were exactly the same age.’

            ‘Ouch.’

            ‘But after a few wobbly moments, she pulled it off magnificently.’

            ‘I can believe that.’

            ‘But the moment Emma was mine, I started to see that although she was clever in an academic sense, she had a kind of, not stupidity exactly, but a lack of understanding, of me especially. We married, because we had to marry. By which I don’t mean she was pregnant, but after all we’d been through there was a real emotional commitment. We both needed some stability. We thought we could make it work. It didn’t. My old friend Simon, in the meantime, was going out with a young artist called Victoria.... They were a total disaster together, but Simon was besotted. I met Victoria, and she took against me immediately, and not just a gut instinct dislike, but she was also Emma’s closest friend, and I hate to think what Emma had said to her about me. It was one of those godawful messes again, but I didn’t have Renée to sort me out this time—she was in Argentina with a rancher who had temporarily swept her off her feet. By the time she returned, Emma and I were divorced, and I’d done all I could to break Simon and Victoria up.’

            ‘You bastard.’

            ‘Yes, I deserve that, many times over, but this was not one-sided. You’ve seen Victoria’s paintings of me in the flat. Even while she still hated me, even while she was sleeping with Simon, she was doing paintings like that. And they were all about me.’

            ‘And now?’

            ‘And now, she has started to leave me. They all leave me.’

            ‘Except for Renée.’

            ‘Yes. But I think... I think I may have lost even Renée.’

            ‘Because of Moyra.’

            ‘Exactly. These last few days have been possibly the cruellest of my life. I have taken an extraordinarily talented woman, and I have effectively thrown her off that bridge myself. I didn’t see the woman herself—she was, let’s face it, not beautiful. I am too dismissive of ugly women.’

            No, you’re not, I was thinking, because I had been acne-ridden and fat when we’d first met, but you’d been young; not yet afflicted with this curse of needing to have beautiful things around you all the time.

            ‘I de-humanised her,’ he said. ‘She was a means to an end, I would manage her career, I could see an even larger apartment in Paris—and I think even Victoria was thinking in similar terms. Only you and Renée could see the person, and I think Renée was still thinking of Toby—Moyra was not a substitute, exactly, but a memory of a way of being, with that honesty and straightforwardness she possessed. Moyra enabled Renée to remember a happier time and she took solace from the reminders. So that leaves you, doesn’t it. The one person who genuinely saw Moyra as a human being. The one person who could see the destruction that was going on.’

            ‘That had started long before Paris.’

            ‘I wish that were true.’

            ‘It is. There was Dylan. I don’t know much about him, but they were married, and it was clear from what she said that she was unable to show him the love she felt. And she did feel it, very strongly, but she couldn’t get it across to him, and he left, permanently. With him gone, she had to fall back on something to keep her going, and she just about managed with the art until it started taking over and became a nightmarish obsession. If only she’d been a terrible artist. If only she could have just done little paintings at home, the way I do.’

            ‘You paint?’

            ‘Always have. Silly little things. Flowers mostly. Only one good painting ever.’

            ‘What was that? A bunch of wolfbane?’

            ‘No, of course not. It was something Renée got me to do. A naked self-portrait.’

            John smiled. He looked delighted for once. ‘Good old Renée. She brings out the best in us all.’

            ‘For all the good it did me. Bill’s not even seen it.’

            ‘Who’s Bill?’

            I think my jaw dropped at that point. I had been having a heart-to-heart with a man I barely knew, chatting to him in an open way I had rarely if ever managed with Bill, and this man didn’t even know I had a husband, far less his name.

            ‘I would say my husband, but I don’t know if he will be for much longer. Susan informs me he’s playing away very openly in my absence.’

            ‘I’m sorry.’

            In my imagination John now asked me to marry him and I turned him down, very gracefully. Of course, he did nothing of the sort. He drank up his brandy and said we should be getting back to see if Victoria had killed Renée or vice versa by now.

            ‘I suspect we’ll find they’re the best of friends,’ I said.

            ‘You’re probably right.’

            ‘You need Renée.’

            ‘I know—do you think I don’t? But we’re no good together long term.’

            ‘Yes, you are. How long have you known her? And you’re still together.’

            ‘No, we’re not. Come on, drink up.’

            He stood up, but I stayed sitting. ‘I gave her the idea.’

            ‘Who? What?’

            ‘Moyra. I told her about the hag. About Mal.’

            ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

            ‘The Cliffs of Moher. I talked to her about jumping off cliffs.’

            He sat down again. ‘Frannie, you didn’t give her the idea. None of us did. We are all guilty and none of us are guilty. Come on. Let’s get back.’

            I wanted to, but I couldn’t because suddenly I was crying too much and I wasn’t going anywhere, but John stayed with me and held my hand and then put his arm round me and was kind and gentle until at last I felt I could move.

            ‘Damselflies,’ I said.

            ‘Damselflies?’

            ‘They live for a day to mate, and then they die.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When we arrived back at the apartment, Vicky had gone to bed. Renée was sitting at a small table, holding a piece of paper covered with tiny writing.

            ‘We found this in Moyra’s room,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to give it to the police as evidence as to the state of her mind or whatever they call it here, but I think we all need to read it first.’

            She handed the sheet to me and I sat down and read it through carefully. The writing was cramped and barely legible, and it looked as if Moyra had written it as she did her drawings, at breakneck speed, but with less confidence as there were parts scratched out and re-done.

They’ve invented a new fish, it’s some kind of minnow, a silver-finned slippery thing, and I’m supposed to love it, to feed it, to care even though I can’t swim. I’m not allowed to scream. Care for your fish, your minnow, they say, but that’s no minnow, I know what minnows are like. I thought I did. Now I’ve forgotten. I mustn’t forget. I don’t know how to know if I’ve forgotten or not. While I am trying to remember, the fish explodes, stinking, its skeleton shatters, tiny spines fly out cactus-like and stick into my cheek, pinpricks, tiny, tiny. A clockwork mouse scuttles away to hide, every second a hundred-billion neutrinos pass through my heart.

What will it be like? It will be like this. I He Dylan Alfred will fall off the edge of a cliff or a hill or a bridge or somebody, everybody, pushes him or he jumps, but by then it will be too late to matter. The point is the amount of time Alfred has left during the falling and how he will use that time. The consternation on his face which is not a face because his father has torn it away, should indicate that he realises this, but he doesn’t, it is merely the result of surprise that this has come upon him so suddenly before he is ready. He never wanted to come here, but Renée insisted. His fists are clenched, his eyes are wide open, his mouth is tight shut. That is what he says through his mouth which is not a mouth because it is missing. He is frightened by this. He cannot remember things anymore. He has given away his oil paints because he no longer knows how to mix the colours, so now he only works in black marker pen, sometimes just pencil because he cannot remember what to do with colour. So his paintings are black. There are drawings beneath, but the lines have grown thicker and denser until only the cruelty of the black remains. He is over fifty now and gaining years by the minute. He didn’t think fifty was old until it happened to him. He is bitter. He is falling. He is fifty-one now. Fifty-two. Fifty-three. The words mean nothing. He hides behind their meaninglessness and lets others discuss their implications. He has forgotten how to use words. What they mean. HE HAS FORGOTTEN. They say the sleep of reason produces monsters. He says it produces something rather less; owls and bats, toads and frogs, togs and froads FROGS AND TOADS. He paints what they say he must. Alfred, Moyra, Dylan MOYRA looks up. She’s caught Dylan by the rucksack and drags him off the cliff to join the chaos of the fall. They cascade down the mountainside, bumping off rocks, and she tries to remember what she knows about physics—one thousand neutrinos—how soon a falling body reaches terminal velocity, what happens then. BUT SHE HAS FORGOTTEN SHE HAS FORGOTTEN SHE HAS FORGOTTEN. She wonders how deep this cliff face is. She’s afraid as she doesn’t have any concept of what may be lying in wait at the base, if there even is a base. She doesn’t have years, she is falling off a cliff, off a mountain, off a cloud—the pity of it all. She had looked forward to a lifetime of music, of art, of painting, of walking—of Dylan, climbing into the clouds, higher and higher, but if that lifetime is just to be a few seconds, then that is so very sad.

A sniggering monk called John, full of fury and rolled up in a ball, shoots past, his laughter soon disappears as he bounces off the mountainside. There’s a crunch of bones. This is dangerous, this headlong descent. Many will die. Moyra doesn’t understood what is happening, never has. It’s too late to learn anything new now, to paint any pictures, to learn about love. Dylan is so close to her now, and she’s sure he is trying to say something to her, to offer her a toffee from his pocket, to tell her something important, but there’s nothing he can do as they’re falling at different speeds. He stretches out his hand. She reaches for his ankle, but the distance is too great.

She hears Dylan on the wind. The fall cannot go on for ever. She is ninety-eight years old now. It cannot go on forever.

You did this to yourself, Moyra, it’s your fault the world is flat. Clouds give the illusion of mountains. They lie.

Death is beautiful slowed down. When I go blind, I will feel the sunset, the great blue herons will shimmer beside the river, the beach will vibrate with heat, telling its tale in a grain of quartz.

I cannot remember light.

Once I was wide open spaces, now I’m shuttered, I don’t know whether to scream or sigh, so I’ll leave my words behind, tramping through the sun, wind, summer grass, dust rising, barley fields, bonfires, frost, begging, begging, begging, that someone will oil the hinges, that someone will conceal my death in a dot on an unmarked page of my sketch book.

           

I put the sheet of paper down and moved away from the table. John took my place and read Moyra’s—I didn’t know what to call it. Suicide note? Confession? More like a poem, a word-painting, a tragedy. I didn’t know what to say, so I went and sat close to Renée.

            ‘What a day,’ she said quietly.

            ‘Aye.’

            ‘There will have to be an inquest, or whatever it is they do.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. The hospital rang. And nobody could find Dylan in time, they still can’t. It’s all so desperately sad. I’ll have to stay here and deal with things this end, but I think you should go home.’

            ‘I don’t have a home.’

            ‘You do, and you have a husband, and you need to get back and do something about that situation. Urgently. And I think—’

            She paused. ‘I think you need to take Vicky with you. Get her out of here. She and John are going to implode unless they both have some breathing space. I’ll look after him—and no, I don’t mean like that. I’m not going to persuade him Vicky’s wrong for him, or anything like that, because, after today, I don’t think she is. We talked a lot this evening, and she’s perfect, she’s the one person I’ve ever met who I believe can make him happy. But she needs space right now, and she needs someone to keep an eye on her, and I think that someone should be you.’

            ‘I barely know her.’

            ‘You barely knew Moyra, but you saw so much more in her than the rest of us. If you can’t do this, nobody can.’

            ‘I’m not up to it.’

‘You are. Now go to bed. It’s not going to look any better in the morning, I won’t pretend it is, but at least we can get nearer to some sort of a resolution.’

            ‘No, I can’t go to bed yet. There’s something I still have to do.’

Vicky came in at that moment, looking terrible—mottled and blotchy with tears. She slumped onto a chair.

‘Vicky?’ I said.

            She looked up, bleary eyed. ‘Yes?’

            ‘Can I have one of your black marker pens please?’

            ‘I’ll get you one.’

            She disappeared off, seemingly glad to have something asked of her that she was able to do without having to think too much.

            ‘What are you up to?’ said Renée. ‘You can’t touch the drawings on the wall. You know you can’t. That would be borderline sacrilegious.’

            ‘With one exception. Moyra never finished the drawing of me. She left me incomplete. That was deliberate. She wanted and expected me to finish the picture, when I was ready.’

            ‘Are you sure?’

            ‘Yes. I’ve never been more sure of anything.’

            ‘You may be a little drunk.’

            ‘More than a little, but the cognac has nothing to do with it.’

            Vicky came back and handed me the pen. I took the cap off, pushed it onto the end, sniffed it from force of habit—who doesn’t sniff marker pens?—and went and stood in front of Moyra’s outline of me. She’d done all the planning out of the drawing. The proportions were spot on. All I needed to do was fill in the detail; to show who I really was—or more, to discover who I really was. This was her gift to me. Her thank you note for what I had tried to do for her. John was still reading Moyra’s note, but now he put it down and watched me. I met his eyes. If he was going to stop me, this was his chance. He nodded. I had permission.

I had never done anything like this before—except that I had, all those weeks ago, shortly after the failed Naked Gardening Day, when I’d stripped myself bare and drawn myself alive, sexual and real, so there was a precedent. This one would not be naked in that way, but it would be honest. I closed my eyes for a moment, thought of what Moyra would have wanted me to do, and then I was ready.

            I didn’t have Moyra’s lightning speed or experience. My skillset was entirely different, so it was a good hour before I had done what she would have completed in five minutes, but I put everything I knew into that drawing, my whole life—my parents, my sister, my daughter; John, Euan, the man with the Times Crossword, the fat Greek, Bill—most of all Bill—but they were the supporting cast. I was centre stage. Even Renée had been reduced to a mere member of the audience. I was in what they call “the zone”; a sort of trance state that had little to do with the alcohol, and everything to do with the fact that Moyra had felt so utterly alone, and in such despair over the loss of her once brilliant memory, and the crumbling of her intellect, that she had seen no other choice than to remove herself from existence before her sense of self slipped away entirely. I may have been drawing myself, but it was a memorial to her, and it was a promise that I would never do the same thing as she had done. I had been fading out of existence as depression increasingly took hold of me—and she had recognised that in me—but from now on, I refused to follow that path. I would do whatever it took to exist, fully. 

            I stepped back and looked at the drawing critically. It was me all right. And it was quite likely the last time I would ever do anything of the sort, because I was shaking with exhaustion. How the hell had Moyra managed? I put the cap back on the pen and left the room. I had no doubt my artwork would be discussed and ripped apart in my absence, shredded, over-analysed by John, Vicky and Renée but I didn’t want to hear what they had to say. Once upon a time I would have needed to, because once upon a time I only existed through other people. That was one of the reasons I had been fading. Now I was going to go to bed, and tomorrow I was going to make sure Renée and John were organised and knew what they were doing, and then I would take Vicky back to England and sort her out.

            That was the plan. But best laid, etc. I’d had a shower, was in my pyjamas and all set to retire for a no doubt restless night when I heard shouting—screaming—from the other room. It was Vicky and she was swearing at John, and then there was a crash, and Renée’s voice was telling him to stop it, and—oh Christ. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep while all that was going on. I picked up a hairbrush—don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it, throw it at someone?—and left my bedroom.

            Vicky was raging. She was Moyra’s drawing of her come to life, crying her eyes out, and she was grappling with John, but he had her by the wrists and was far stronger. Renée looked genuinely scared. She was pleading to John to let Vicky go, and Vicky was calling him every name under the sun, blaming him and him alone for everything. He shoved her away from him and she fell hard against a table, cracked her head, but got straight back up and attacked him again. Renée turned to me.

            ‘Frances! Do something!’

            She was in tears.

            Do something? Do what? I waited until John had virtually thrown Vicky across the room and managed to get myself between them as she was picking herself up to go for him again. I took his hands and held them, looked into his face, and said ‘Stop,’ very quietly. His breathing was coming in gasps. He was in agony and I’m sure he wanted to stop but didn’t know how to do it. The situation hung in the balance. I willed Vicky to take control of herself. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Renée move—she went up to Vicky and put her arm round her, drew her away.

            ‘It’s okay,’ I said to John. ‘It’s okay.’

            ‘Is it? Is anything ever going to be okay again?’

            I let go of his hands, put my arms round him and held him, the way a mother would hug an errant but much-loved child. He didn’t exactly relax, but something got through to him. He understood what I was doing; he wanted me to do it, to change the atmosphere in the room somehow, to enable all of us to continue living as reasonable, rational human beings.

Renée had taken Vicky into the bathroom. She had cuts on her face from bashing into goodness knows what, and she would be covered in bruises tomorrow. John hadn’t hit her directly. It occurred to me that he had most likely never hit anyone directly—other than the time he had deliberately burnt me—but the women around him had still ended up battered; some physically, all emotionally. Renée’s whole life had revolved around him, and it had prevented her ever having a successful relationship with anyone else. Emma appeared to have escaped. She was the exception. Susan had tried to get away, but then had spent a lifetime pursuing one abusive husband after another. And Vicky? She was phenomenally tough and gave as good as she got, but for that very reason Renée was right that I had to get her away from John, at least temporarily. I had no doubt they would get back together to fight again at some point, but that was their problem. For now, they needed a break from each other.

            I let go of John. ‘Now listen,’ I said. ‘I need to get some sleep, so please can you be a bit quieter in here? Please?’

            He smiled, and he was all kindness and charm. ‘Of course. And thank you Frannie.’ He kissed me on the forehead.

            ‘You look tired,’ I said. ‘You should go to bed too.’

            ‘Is that an invitation?’

            ‘No, you bastard.’ I left quickly before he had a chance to see the tears.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I woke early the next morning with a slight headache from all the brandy, but apart from that and a flutter of nerves over my behaviour the previous night, I felt ready to take on the world, and that included John Stephenson. I got dressed and spent some time looking at the murals while nursing a comforting mug of instant coffee. John and Vicky were a perfect match in some ways, but also far too alike, which meant they were repellent, as in the flipside of opposites attracting. John came in as I was studying the pictures.

            ‘What’s he like?’ I said. ‘Simon Tovey.’ I was looking at the crushed porcelain beneath Vicky’s feet. I had already asked Renée this question, so was interested to hear how John, who knew him far better, would respond.

            ‘He’s my best friend, and I think he’s what Victoria needs right now. I would like you to deliver her to him.’

            ‘Oh, would you.’

            ‘Yes. Coffee?’

            ‘Already got some.’

            ‘No, I mean coffee. I’ll put some on.’

            He went into the kitchen and busied himself with whatever alchemy was required to produce something that bore scant relation to the homely brown stuff I was drinking. He came back as it was brewing or percolating or whatever it was it did.

            ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘She needs someone quiet and calm. She needs to fall in love with him all over again, to be besotted for a while, and then remember why she rejected him. Once she’s done that, and ideally trampled some more porcelain underfoot, she’ll be back, and by then Renée will have sorted me out and everything will be fine.’

            ‘You wish. And does Mr Tovey have any say in this?’

            ‘No.’ He grinned and went back into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a tray with exquisite—unbroken—coffee cups and pot. ‘Simon’s my best friend,’ he said, again, ‘and he’ll do as he’s told, then look a little bit embarrassed and apologise to me. He’s a bit like you. Sensible, but with a heart of gold.’

            ‘Hearts can get broken.’ I was looking at Vicky’s heels grinding the shattered pieces into the carpet in Moyra’s picture.

            ‘Simon needs shaking up every so often. It’ll be good for him.’

            ‘That’s cruel.’

            ‘Perhaps. But I need Victoria and nothing else matters. Simon’s a very understanding person. You know, you’re really very good.’ He was looking at the picture I had finished last night. ‘Ever thought of doing this professionally?’

            ‘Fuck off.’

            ‘You sound just like Victoria. Actually, Susan too. I think those were the last tender words she hurled in my direction all those years ago. Here, have a coffee.’

            He handed me a tiny cup. The liquor inside it was strong, rich, almost too much for me, but I drank it anyway.

            ‘All that stuff about the foster homes, the island, Steve who went to prison. The farm. Jacob. That terrifying incident when you were five, or was it seven? Was any of it true? Any of it at all?’

            ‘Very little.’

            ‘Thought so. Do you ever tell the full truth?’

            ‘Yes. But you realise that is an impossible question to answer in such a way as to ensure the person poses the question receives an accurate reply.’

            ‘I know. But it needed asking, and I think I believe your answer.’

            ‘Thank you. That’s appreciated.’

            Renée came in at that point, looking as if she had taken an extraordinary amount of care over her appearance this morning, and I loved her for it. She was going to look after John and mother him and probably also sleep with him, but I wasn’t going to think about that. She would do whatever was needed. Whether he deserved any of this care was another matter entirely, but, ultimately, he was a human being, and he was hurting even if he was covering it up well, so anyone offering healing was doing a good thing. Me and Renée—we were too nice for our own good. Vicky had the better idea. She threw things.

            I put the tiny coffee cup back down with extreme care. This thing was so very fragile. We were all stepping carefully around broken pieces this morning, and I didn’t want to be in the room when Vicky came in.

            ‘I need to start packing,’ I said, and I made my escape just as I heard stirring from the tiny spare room where she’d apparently spent the night. I shut my own door and lay down on the bed. I would pack in a bit. First, I needed to lie still and listen and check that nothing was going to get thrown or broken this morning. I hoped they’d all behave. Five minutes later it was still quiet, just a gentle murmuring of voices, so I got off the bed, pulled the case out from under it and started folding clothes. I wondered if anyone had thought to arrange tickets. You can’t just step onto Eurostar the way you can any other train. Or can you? I went online to check. Yes, you pretty much could if there were still seats available, which there were, but it would cost you. I had enough money, just, and I assumed Vicky would have plenty. I was almost disappointed. I was cutting short a holiday in Paris, which was a mad thing to do. I’d get home and Bill would say, ‘Got bored, did you?’ and I wouldn’t know how to answer. Except that the conversation couldn’t happen, because according to Susan, Bill wouldn’t be at home. He’d be in Aycliffe with that woman. Or in Seaham, with a different one. Or anywhere. But he wouldn’t be where I needed him to be as he had no reason to be in an empty house, and even when I returned, he would still consider it empty. 

            There was a tentative knock at my door, and Vicky came in.

            ‘Are you okay with all of this? You and me going to England? Now? This morning?’ she said. ‘It all seems to be arranged.’

She picked up my hairbrush, turned it over, frowned at it for no reason I could see, and put it down again.

            ‘Yes, of course, it’s okay.’

            She sat down on the bed. Picked up a pair of my knickers. They were the awful pink flowery ones. At least they were clean. I snatched them away and put them in the case.

‘John’s sorted out the tickets.’

            ‘Oh—I’ll have to give him some money.’

            ‘No, he’s paying, he insists, he said to tell you that. I don’t know why he’s sending me away. He shouldn’t send me away. I haven’t done anything wrong.’

            I looked at the grey circles under her eyes and the dark red areas that would be blue-grey bruises shortly; then they would have to turn all the colours of the rainbow before finally fading.

            ‘No, you haven’t, but you need to heal. We all do.’

            ‘Yes, but England? I haven’t been in England apart from short breaks for five years. I wouldn’t know where to go.’

            ‘You can stay with me while you find your feet.’

            ‘Can I? Thank you. That’s kind. Just for a day or two perhaps, if I may.’

            ‘Of course.’

            We were being oddly polite, but she didn’t look as if she could take a serious discussion of what John had in mind for her at the moment, and I couldn’t very well say, oh, by the way, he wants you to have a fling with your ex, Simon. He thinks it would be good for you and set you up very nicely for a return to him—and don’t worry about Simon. He’s used to you hurting him. Just look at Moyra’s picture for evidence.

The more I thought about it, the more dangerous this plan seemed. I had a strong feeling this “You’re the sensible one” that everyone kept telling me was simply their way of abnegating responsibility for their own problems. What about me? When was someone going to take me in hand and sort out my problems? I hated this. I hated them all. I remembered Renée, all bright and breezy, telling me and Moyra we all needed a holiday in Paris. Dear God, what had she been thinking! No, not fair. She couldn’t have known.

            Vicky got up off the bed. ‘Best go and pack then.’

            ‘Yes. See you in a bit.’

            Once she was gone, I had an urge to draw—irises in blues and purples, with orange throats, sweet with pollen. I sat still for a while thinking about a potential painting, and I was filled with an odd sort of stillness, but it didn’t feel quite right. I found a ballpoint pen at the bottom of my handbag, and a scrap of paper, and tried to draw a flower, but I ended up drawing Bill’s face. I didn’t mean to do it, I swear, but God, I was tired, I was like one of Euan’s sheep trudging home through the fog, following the sheep in front, not knowing where I was going, just trudge, trudge, trudge into oblivion. I couldn’t draw an elegant flower to save my life, not today, but Bill’s face—I loved drawing his face. It was something I very rarely did, only tiny doodles, scribbled out almost as soon as I’d done them. There was an unwritten rule about such things, something I’d made up for what I considered to be my own protection. It stated: no more than one of these treats a month. I’d made the rule to keep myself safe, and in recent months I’d been well within the bounds. I did want to draw an iris, I really did, but Bill wasn’t an iris, nothing like. Couldn’t draw one anyway. Wrong time of year, so there wasn’t an elegant vase of them just crying out to be painted; I wasn’t going to borrow a canvas and paints from Vicky and produce a Van Gogh. There were some silk flowers in a vase, and they were lovely, but they were dead, they had never been alive in the first place. I prayed nobody would come in and see what I was doing. I thought how I could hide the pen and paper quickly under the bed covers. Eyes, though... Bill’s eyes. Pupil and iris and eyelid and lashes and eyebrows and lips, his chin and that cleft and the way it was echoed above in his nose, and between his nose and above his chin, his lips. I drew the picture. And when I’d finished, I looked in the mirror, and somehow a smudge of black ink had appeared around my mouth. My fingers were covered with ink. The pen had been leaking and I’d bruised my face with ink. I looked like Vicky. I screwed up the paper, but I didn’t put it in the bin for someone to find. Instead, I hid it away in my case inside a pair of socks. With any luck I would forget it was there and throw it in the washing machine when I got home.

But then I unrolled the sock and extricated the piece of paper. I flattened it out carefully. There was plenty of space on it still and I remembered a day on Seaham beach, not so long ago, a wild, stormy day that had made me feel as if I were inside an oil painting. Light, like white gold had splurged out from behind a molten cloud, while further away, the sky had darkened to indigo, the clouds to Payne’s grey with a smoky heaviness. The sea had been a liquid that wasn’t water, but somewhere between mercury and lead. The beach had mimicked tarmac in the strange light.

I started scribbling the memory down on the paper: a breakwater stretching out, black vertebrae into the waves. Bill had taken my hand that day, but I had felt cold, so cold, I had wanted to pull away and put my hand in my pocket to warm it up, but I couldn’t, Bill was gripping it too tightly. I put the pen down and allowed myself back into the memory. Time had rippled past us and the clouds had blown away on bright gusts of wind, contrails appeared in the sky, streaks of silver, but the sand was still a flat kind of colour. I didn’t know what to call it; that sad colour somewhere between grey and beige. Braige. That would do. The horizon hinted at another distant sea where anything might happen, and I so longed to go there—just like Moyra and her cloud mountains—but here, the waves lapped the beach, quietly angry at having been woken up by the sunshine. Bill’s hand was a block of marble. Palm to palm, why couldn’t we generate some warmth? A flock of birds swarmed in silhouette across the wet sands, dipping and drawing up sandworms, as if their beaks were straws. Were they oystercatchers? Bill always knew the names of such things, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. They drifted back and forth across the wet sand that was suddenly blindingly bright, directly in the line of the sun. I blinked back tears. Bill had finally let me go. I turned inland towards the sea wall. I wanted to follow the dips in the sand, the footprints that led back to I don’t know what; I was imagining a cottage, warmth, a blackened grate, breakfast, kippers, porridge, all the things that speak of love. Bill was watching a couple of seagulls squabbling over some unidentified object. He’d no idea I’d left him.

I put the pen down and stared at the piece of paper. I was not, not, not going to do what Moyra had done; I was not going to sublimate my depression into frantic drawings. I hadn’t realised before how depressed I’d become, but now it was obvious. I’d spent too long assuming the numb misery I’d been feeling was just that—a quiet dissatisfaction with life. But it was more, and I was scared. I was not Moyra. Not. I had to keep telling myself that. Dylan had left her alone on a mountain top and walked away into the clouds. Bill had never done anything remotely like that to me. If he had left me, and I think effectively he had done so, many years ago, he had done it in such a way that I would still be able to carry on and cope. Sensible Frances. Everyone knows she can deal with anything if she must, if she’s backed into a corner. She’s too clever to despair.

But cleverness didn’t come into it. Moyra was no fool. I could feel the tears again. I’d been crying a lot recently. Always justified, so I’d thought no more of it, but people shouldn’t cry that much, it wasn’t normal. Depression’s a bastard. Creeps up on you. Thank God I now had Vicky to look after. John had given me Vicky; he’d been concerned, and he’d cared about us both. All of us. He just had a bloody ridiculous way of showing it. You only knew John Bloody Stephenson cared about you when he threw you across a room or kicked you out of his apartment and sent you home with a broken heart. 

I felt better at that and managed to finish my packing, swearing under my breath as I put each item in the bag. You can fuck off, I said to a pair of knickers. And you. And you. You can fuck off too.

            Sometime later, I felt strong enough to face the others. They were sitting round the table together, waiting for me, not talking. I joined them. We must have looked as if we were about to conduct a séance. If anyone suggested that, I’d pick up the table and lob it through a window. This was ridiculous. We couldn’t all sit here like this not speaking. But we did and it went on, and I was twitchy. Renée rescued us all at last.

            ‘Come on my dears. We need to say our goodbyes.’

She got up from her chair and went to position herself near the door. After a few moments, John smiled and went to join her. It looked absurdly like a wedding line-up. Vicky got down from the table and went up to Renée and gave her a hug.

            ‘Look after him for me,’ she said.

            ‘Yes, my dear. Don’t you worry.’

            Vicky moved on to John.

            ‘At this moment, I rather think I despise you,’ she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Then she clung on to him, and I couldn’t bear to look.

            I went and gave Renée a hug.

            ‘You will be okay, won’t you?’ said Renée, clearly concerned.

            ‘Yes, don’t worry. I know what I must do, pretty much. Just not how I’m going to do it yet. I’ll play it by ear.’

            She nodded, and I moved on to John.

            ‘Goodbye, you bastard,’ I said, cheerily, and he smacked my backside. I responded by slapping him hard across the face. We nodded to each other in perfect mutual understanding. I picked up my case, and we were off.

            At the door, I stopped.

            ‘Oh. Tickets. Have we got the tickets?’

            ‘Yes, I’ve got them,’ said Vicky. ‘Good thing one of us is sensible.’

            And on that note, we left.

PART THREE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We took a taxi to Gard du Nord, and arrived just in time to check in, but then there was the usual sitting about before we could board.

            ‘Are you able to tell me how you first met John?’ said Vicky. ‘I mean, not if you don’t want to. I know it’s a long time ago and maybe it’s painful. Stuff with John often is. But I’m dying to know. When was it? What was it like?’

            I had no way of knowing how much she knew about our history, so I answered the question in as straightforward a manner as I could. No point in having any secrets. I’d done with them.

            ‘June ’72. Streatham ice-rink.’

            ‘You were a skater?’

            ‘Good God, no. I was only fourteen: someone who walked round the edges, very slowly, clinging on for dear life. I haven’t been to an ice rink since, so I don’t know what it’s like nowadays, but back then it was a bit like going to a bowling alley. You arrived at a reception area, paid your money and told them your shoe size and they handed over some crappy old skates, and well, I can’t really remember much about it except I’d watched the figure skating from the Olympics and was expecting something similar. Mum had insisted I took the knitted socks I wore when we went hill walking, and that was embarrassing because nobody else was wearing anything of the sort. I was so bloody out of place, as always. This turned out to be more of a discotheque than a sporting arena anyway; it was all coloured lights and loud music and everyone being loud and confident and me feeling bloody stupid. I was there with my older sister, Susan. She was sixteen at the time, very glam, heavy make-up. I told her she looked like a spider, all pinched lips and eyelashes like spider-legs. She didn’t take kindly to that. I, on the other hand, was a blob in a washed-out misshapen tracksuit which I usually only wore when I was in goal for hockey at school. I hated hockey.’

            ‘Oh dear. Not glamorous then.’

            ‘Not remotely. And I was heavy back then with what they used to call puppy fat. I had the lot: lank greasy hair, acne—and I hated myself. I hated Susan, naturally, because she was beautiful. She may have had one blackhead at some point during her teens, but if she, did she will have known how to cover it up. Most people had that sort of skill and it seemed innate, so I hated them all because I didn’t know how to do whatever it was they were doing. But David Bowie was playing really loud—and I always loved Bowie, and there were lights, and some of the people there could skate impressively and most of them were drinking lager and cider and God knows what else, and I started longing to be part of it; I wanted to be older, I wanted that kind of sophistication. As for Susan, she hated having to babysit me. She skated around, looking mean and dangerous as a black widow spider, and some boys tried to get off with her, but she refused. But then this skinny dark lad appeared.’

‘John.’

‘Yes. He was different to the other lads, even back then. In my eyes, he looked like a dancer, and on those skates, he flew, he was amazing. I couldn’t stop looking at him. He probably wasn’t even that good, not really, but he had charisma, a way of moving, of being the best-looking person there even if others might have been technically better skaters.’

‘Yep. That’s John all right. Even back then, eh?’

‘And how. So I slid about on the side-lines, wondering how to attract his attention, until I remembered I was a spotty blob in a baggy tracksuit and if he did accidentally catch sight of me he would be revolted, so I’d be better off remaining invisible. He was looking our way by then, but he wasn’t seeing me, thank God, it was Susan who’d attracted his attention despite her scary black make-up, or perhaps because of it, and now the music was hurting me, it was too loud, my tracky bottoms were too baggy, I was too short and fat and ugly, and I hated it. So I thought, okay Susan, today he might be yours, but tomorrow, I promise-promise-promise, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, I’ll come back and my eyes will be pooling like black absinthe saucers, and my hair will be streaked green, and then he’ll be mine.’

‘Excellent.’

‘It didn’t happen, of course, and not just because absinthe is not black, though I didn’t know that at the time. We didn’t go skating again, because by then he and Susan had exchanged details, so she didn’t need to. At one point, when I was making my slow progress round the rink and they were on the other side, I looked across and they were having a snog, a proper one of the kind I could only dream about.’

            ‘Cripes. Poor you.’

            ‘Yeah. It all feels such a long time ago. Probably because it was.’

            ‘I wasn’t even born.’

            ‘Ouch.’

            ‘Sorry.’

            ‘Not your fault.’

            ‘That means you must have known him before he’d even met Simon or had those long philosophical discussions with Evan that led to him meeting Renée. You’ve known him longer than any of us, when he was still fresh and young and unsullied.’

            ‘Ha! That’s one way of putting it.’

            ‘I can’t imagine him as a teenager, snogging another teen to the strains of Bowie. Another lifetime. Another planet even.’

‘Very much so.’

‘And I certainly can’t see you as podgy and spotty.’

‘No. Neither can I at this distance, not the gross physicality of my state back then, but that awful lack of confidence still comes back at regular intervals. I don’t think you ever quite recover from that.’

‘Some things are hard to heal.’

She was right, but that was precisely what John and Renée had sent us away to do—heal our wounds, and basically “get over it”. I still didn’t know how the hell we were supposed to do that.

The announcement came that our train was ready to board. We fumbled with our cases, one fell over but luckily didn’t fall open, and God, I missed Moyra. That’s a facile thing to say, but she had been so slick and organised with the luggage. Renée and I had just followed in her wake. Vicky and I were a mess in comparison, but we were doing our best. People kept staring because the bruises were starting to darken and kicking suitcases round the concourse wasn’t helping. She could have covered her bruises with make-up, the way Susan had done, but Vicky was no Susan and I instinctively knew that hiding her injuries was the last thing she would do.

We found our seats on the train and managed to load our cases without them falling on our heads or anyone pulling a shoulder out of joint. No table this time, but I think we both appreciated the privacy of not having a complete stranger staring across at us. I picked up the conversation where we’d left off.

            ‘How about you?’ I said. ‘When did you first meet John?’

            ‘May 2008.’

            ‘That’s very precise.’

            ‘That’s the thing about John. You remember.’

            ‘You certainly do.’

            ‘And also, that was the year the Serpentine Gallery had the Maria Lassnig exhibition. Did you see it?’

            ‘No. Good, was it?’

            ‘Fabulous. First picture you saw as you went in was huge, the size of one of my paintings in John’s apartment, and it was one of her self-portraits, nude, looking straight at the viewer, sitting there with her legs splayed wide, breasts sagging, and there she was, pointing a gun straight at you. Made me laugh, because there were all these families coming in with little kids because it’s free to get into the Serpentine, and that’s what they saw before they had a chance to turn around and go straight back out again, and then they had to field the little darlings’ questions. Wicked sense of humour on the curator’s part, I was thinking, and I applauded whoever it was. I’d been painting pot-boilers up to that point, trying to make a living, but seeing Lassnig’s brilliantly confrontational paintings made me realise I needed to be more honest in my work, though that didn’t happen properly until John and I started sparring. He’d just reached the end of a perfectly rancid marriage to Emma, who’d been my best mate at uni in Durham. She was in a right old state, so I was determined to hate him, and it was easy at first—but it was complicated by the fact that I was dating Simon, and he insisted John was actually jolly nice, and Emma must be mistaken.’

            ‘“Jolly nice?” Blimey.’

            ‘That’s how Simon talks, I’m afraid, and the thing is, when he’s with Simon, John really is “jolly nice”. They’re absolute sweeties together. Simon’s niceness rubs off on him, and John’s viciousness never impinges on Simon. Maybe they should have got married. Perfect chalk and cheese couple. Whereas me and John—we’re a bomb site, with much of it still unexploded. Emma was different, but she couldn’t stand up to him, and he couldn’t maintain the level of gentleness she needed, so she ended up turning nasty as a sort of escape mechanism. It was only temporary. She found a lovely bloke in Bamburgh who fixed her car, and she’s been having babies ever since. Must have dozens of the things by now.’

            ‘I hope not, for her sake.’

            ‘Well, I’ve lost count. I think I’m a sort of a pagan godmother to some of them, but I can’t even remember their names, let alone birthdays and things.’

            ‘You should go and see her while you’re up north. Not too far from Darlo to Bamburgh.’

            ‘I could, but I’m not sure I should. Maybe. I’d like to, but I nicked her fellah, didn’t I, and although she’s said over and over that she’s forgiven me, once you’ve been with John, I don’t think you ever quite get over it.’

            She looked at me, and I think she must have been wondering how close me and John had been back then. I wasn’t sure I knew the answer to that myself, so I stayed quiet.

            ‘Tell me about Bill,’ she said.

            ‘Bill is an oaf and a dolt and a thug, who loves his car. And he loves a woman in Aycliffe, and another in Seaham, and a childhood friend of my daughter’s and probably dozens of others I know nothing about. But I think the car’s the real love of his life.’

            ‘Fuck that. Sounds like the man’s an eejit. Why are you still married to him if he’s like that?’

            ‘Fuck knows.’

            ‘Ha! You’re starting to sound like me. If you hang around me much longer, you’ll be dying your hair purple and shopping for vintage clothes in Greenwich.’

            I looked down at my comfortable jeans and non-descript jumper. ‘Nice thought, but no. Nothing and nobody will prise me out of my jeans.’

            I wished I hadn’t said that. Too many connotations. But Vicky let it go.

            ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘We’ll be out of France soon. One last pain au chocolat?’

            ‘Good thinking.’

            ‘I’ll get them.’

            She went along the train in pursuit of food, and I was glad not to have to say any more about Bill—at least not for the time being. Susan had been positive he’d moved out. I’d have to check what he’d taken with him in the way of clothes to know whether the move was a temporary or permanent. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to enjoy this last journey before I had to face what I’d lost without even realising I was losing it. He was not an oaf, dolt or thug; that was a lie. He was warm-hearted and kind, but he had always tended to spread that warm heart around too much.

            Vicky returned with the refreshments and we savoured the last of France as the countryside flattened out into dull arable fields punctuated by miles of wind turbines. Then it was into the tunnel, out the other side though you barely noticed as the route to London comprised many more tunnels of varying lengths. We talked a little more, but neither of us was inclined to say much. We both had too much to think about and the last twenty minutes or so were passed in silence.

            We had nearly an hour to spare once we arrived at St Pancras, so went and sat outside Kings Cross Station on the very same curving bench that me, Moyra and Renée had been sitting on just a few days earlier. I didn’t say anything about it, but I was pleased when Vicky livened up, and started telling me what the area used to be like—she’d had a flat, ten minutes’ walk away down York Way before the area had poshed up, before Waitrose and the new high-rise blocks had been built, in the days when you couldn’t get a pizza delivery because they wouldn’t stop in Gifford Street—too rough, apparently, though she’d never had any problems. She’d been living there when she’d taken up with and then broken up with Simon, and she was telling me about it and bewailing the fact that the Cross Kings pub had changed its name and the American carwash with its distinctive beckoning automaton had gone, when her phone buzzed with a text from Simon himself. I thought this was too much of a coincidence and decided she must have texted him when she’d gone to get the refreshments on the train, and that’s why I hadn’t spotted her doing it. She replied, and I don’t know what she said, but a few moments later she got a message back.

            ‘We’ve arranged to meet up at the Botanics tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Midday, for lunch.’

            ‘Durham?’

            ‘Yes. But you’ll have to come.’

            ‘No, I don’t need to.’

            She shook her head. ‘You do, because I’ve told Simon I’ll have a chaperone, and he approves. I knew he wouldn’t want to meet me on his own. Or maybe he would, but this way the pixie can’t make any objections.’

            ‘The pixie?’

            ‘Some homunculus he’s dating or married to or something.’

            ‘I take it you don’t like her.’

            ‘She’s lovely, terribly sweet, but she’s unbearably petite and beautiful. Makes me feel huge.’

‘You? Huge?’

‘Exactly. So naturally I hate her.’

            ‘Is she going to be there as well?’

            ‘No, thank God.’

            ‘In that case I’m going to be in the way.’

            ‘No, you’ll be there making sure I don’t make a total fool of myself. You’ll be there to protect Simon from falling for my fatal charms once again. Maybe he’ll fall for you instead. Ha! Yes. Then the pixie would be well and truly shafted. That’s what we should do.’

            ‘Vicky!’

            ‘Joking.’

            ‘Why the Botanic Gardens?’

            ‘Because that’s where I’ve had all the defining moments in my life; it’s where I was particularly horrible to Simon one time which led to the bust-up that signalled the beginning of the end for us, and it’s where John and I went later to lay the ghosts.’

            ‘Sounds like the last place you should be going.’

            ‘Does rather, doesn’t it, but I like facing these things head on.’

She looked around.

‘I used to know how to win at Kings Cross,’ she said.

‘Win? What do you mean?’

‘The Underground. Do you remember how it always used to be impossibly difficult not to feel you’d walked so far through tunnels you might as well not have used the tube at all?’

‘I never used it much round here. I was South London, Streatham.’

‘Yes, of course. But then they built that entrance,’ she pointed at the Granary Square one, ‘and life became a lot simpler for those of us down York Way, though when you’re coming out it’s not signposted properly; you have to follow the signs to Regents Canal that feel like they’re going in the wrong direction, back to St Pancras, when they’re not, and then you take a sharp right down an invisible turning that glows with coloured light.’

‘Really? Are you making this up?’

‘No, it’s surprisingly lovely—you walk the coloured tunnel and it bends round, ribbed and somehow kindly. Do you know, there’s no part of me that doesn’t hurt at the moment? And I’m not just talking about the bruises.’

I didn’t know how to reply.

‘I love the rumble of the tunnels,’ she said. ‘Listen. Can you hear?’

I couldn’t but I didn’t think she was talking to me anymore. She was thinking aloud, and I let her; the crowds went by in a blur and she spoke quietly and intensely.

‘I’m feeling old. That’s why I hurt.’

‘No, you hurt because...’ and I couldn’t finish it.

She patted my hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s pretend ignorance. Let’s reinvent all of this, all that’s happened the last few days as performance art. That’s why I love Marina Abramovic. She knows how to deal with stuff like this.’

She was getting beyond me now. I was an ignoramus when it came to what I would call “real” art, the sort of thing that got proper artists like Vicky so excited. I could paint something that looked like something, but that wasn’t art, that was a clever trick with line and tone and colour. Nothing I did with my silly little “daubs” had ever come close to what Vicky was able to do. She lived her art. I didn’t. And that was that. But Moyra had lived it too, albeit reluctantly. It had drawn her in, and she had been unable to escape.

‘The trick is to enter at Granary Square,’ said Vicky, still lost in her memories. ‘You have to sense where to turn left and right, which signs to ignore; you have to know which part used to be the old Northern ticket hall.’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Just remember to look backwards, remember signs and emotions.’

‘You okay?’

She was suddenly looking like she was going to cry.

‘The thing is, I have to try not to hate him too much,’ she said.

Her voice was cracking. She blew her nose. ‘Turn left, then right, and keep looking back, and on your return don’t follow the “way out” signs to the right, turn left! That’s how you win. That’s how I always wanted him to hold me—he didn’t even have to like me, just to hold me.’

‘Vicky, he does far more than just “like” you.’

She blew her nose again. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘No more deaths since Moyra, none expected. And no sexual contact allowed. I’ve won, even though I ache like Salcedo’s crack in the floor of the Tate and all Bourgeois’ mothers have scuttled away. Including your sister. I love your spidery sister.’

Then she grinned and was straight back in the present as if she hadn’t just poured her heart out, or whatever it was she’d been doing.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s catch a train. Dirty old East Coast Mainline, and a load of drunks will get on at Donny, and it’ll be like coming home.’

            ‘It is coming home.’

            ‘For you, yes. But not for me. I’m not sure where my home is any more.’

            ‘Wherever John is?’

            ‘Christ, no. I’m an artist, not some sort of feeble acolyte, swooning over her Svengali. I’m itching to paint, though. London does that to me, and Durham even more so.’

            ‘And John?’

            ‘He noticed a long time ago that everything I painted, however abstract, was a portrait of him—but I don’t need him to be around to be doing that. Whenever we’re going through comfortable periods in our relationship, I don’t produce anything of any quality, whereas now, I’m confident the next set of paintings will be my best ever. John knows this too. Why else do you think he sent me away? He wants to make money out of me, and he’ll do that most effectively if I’m beside myself with misery, if I tear my heart out and use it to apply my agony to the canvas. Look at my face. He knows what I look like right now, he knows I am going to have to paint these bruises out of my system; he knows that as they fade away from my skin, they will re-appear, magnified, on every canvas.’

‘Dear God.’

‘Well, it’s true isn’t it.’

I couldn’t deny it.

‘But I’m not going to let myself paint yet,’ she said. ‘I’m too experienced for that. I’m going to hold it in, let it fester until it explodes. You won’t want to be near me when that happens. I have studio space in Paris, so I’ll wait until I get back there. In the meantime, I’ll be growing those paintings in my head and nothing’s going to stop them.’

            ‘And in the meantime, I might get my watercolours out and do a delicate picture of a buttercup.’

            ‘Don’t knock it. The subject matter doesn’t dictate the amount of passion that goes into an artwork. You could paint a tulip to break someone’s heart.’

            ‘Or a liverwort to damage their spleen.’

            ‘Some guy called Van Gogh was quite handy at sunflowers.’

            ‘True.’

            Our train was announced, and we headed off down the platform and boarded it for the final leg of our journey. The carriage was full of Geordie lasses who had been celebrating in London—a fortieth birthday party, as far as we could gather. The trip had been “Disney Princess” themed. Vicky and I sat back and listened in amazement to their conversation, which revolved entirely around Disney Princesses all the way from Kings Cross to York, where they finally shut up, all too sozzled on the Prosecco they’d brought along to do anything than snooze for the last part of their journey. But by this point we had learnt everything there was to know about the subject, including vital tips on the need to use the US eBay sites to obtain certain merchandise, and to time your purchase for when the re-releases happened so that you could afford the prices, and I’m sure we were both thinking, hang on a minute, these are women in their thirties and forties. It became clear from the conversation that they had all dressed up in their favourite princess outfits for the party, about which they talked with boundless enthusiasm. They even had a quiz. They stopped drinking for fifteen minutes after Peterborough and settled down to do this quiz about all things Disney Princess related. I only knew one answer and Vicky knew two, but these lasses knew everything, all forty questions, and afterwards there was a deep discussion about, oh, I can’t remember now because it was all so utterly alien. To them, it mattered deeply, and I thought about other worlds, and how sometimes they impinge, but they might as well have been talking about neurosurgery or robotics or hedge funds. It meant nothing at all to me, though their enthusiasm and sheer joy in the subject was wonderful. But then some random blokes walked by and I caught the words ‘new season’ and ‘Falcons’ and Vicky said something about birdwatchers, and I said no, not that sort of falcons. Newcastle Falcons. And she said what are they, and I said, they’re a rugby team, and I wondered how she could not know that, and I missed Bill horribly. I think my face must have showed something, because she left it at that and didn’t push me for details.

            Later on, I’m not quite sure where, somewhere near the Vale of York perhaps, we saw one of those white horses that’s carved into a hillside in the distance, and I didn’t notice at what I was doing at first, but I was humming a favourite old song, and Vicky said, ‘What’s that?’

            I had to stop and think for a bit.

            ‘White Horses. The theme tune. You won’t remember it. Something I used to watch as a child.’

            ‘Ah. John would know it then. Sometimes I feel stupidly young. All these references; you and Renée and John, you have all these things in common, lovely things, and I don’t have them.’

            ‘They’re not all so lovely, you know. Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion.’

            ‘He sounds fun. What was wrong with Clarence?’

            ‘He was cross-eyed. All right. Bad example. But radios with valves that took forever to warm up, so you’d miss the start of whatever you wanted to listen to. Meccano, all those tiny nuts and bolts.’

‘I had Meccano.’

‘Plasticine on the lino then.’

‘Play-doh on the vinyl.’

‘Not the same thing at all. Did Play-doh get under your fingernails, and not come out again for weeks? Did it all turn to that dark reddish colour, however bright and vibrant it had been at the start? Was it hard as buggery on cold days so you had to knead it and press it for ages before you could make anything?’

‘Okay, plasticine wins. And I know you had ice patterns on the windows. Everyone talks about that.’ She yawned.

‘They were beautiful. Worth being freezing just to see them.’

‘Beauty and pain, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hey. You okay? Look sort of sad.’

‘You’ve never even heard of Christopher Trace, have you,’ I said.

‘No. Should I have?’

‘One of the first Blue Peter presenters. Left under a cloud. Great shame. I liked him.’

‘There was a “first”? I always thought that programme had gone on forever, that it stretched back indefinitely.’

‘No, there was a first. Those were the endless days, full of teapots with those rubber bits on their spouts to stop the drips, and old aunts, except they were so old they must have been great aunts. I’m sure Auntie Joan knitted a trombone one time.’

‘That’s a clever trick.’

‘Can’t be right, can it. But I know my aunts were a lot more comforting than Aunt Didith and her sister.’

‘Who?’

‘John’s possibly apocryphal aunts. Except Renée said she’d met them. You haven’t?’

‘No, I think John realised I wouldn’t behave myself in their company, so it never happened, and then they were dead, so that was that.’

‘Mine are long gone too, but I remember them with a sort of surreal affection. Uncle Jim sitting with his pipe on a folded-up hippopotamus with armrests; Lettuce and Pru, in Kodachrome blue. Gladys with a hat like a strawberry.’

‘I think I like your aunts. Can I borrow them?’

‘Be my guest. We could use them now. They’d sort us out, they’d be all kindly and smelling of lavender, but not real lavender, more that slightly powdery version that all old ladies used to smell of.’

‘They don’t anymore, do they,’ said Vicky. ‘Wonder where that all went.’

‘We’re getting sad again. Come on. Think of something cheerful.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Blimey, Northallerton already. We need to get organised.’

We pulled our cases down off the luggage rack and wobbled our way down to the rattly end of the carriage where conversation was nigh on impossible. The automatic door opened and closed at random intervals and the train rocked and clunked its way into Darlington.

The platform was as bitingly cold as ever, but this was home, freezing or not, and I was relieved beyond all reason. Paris was a long way away now, and Moyra—but I didn’t want to think about Moyra, or Renée, or John. This was Darlo, I had my new pal Vicky with me, and tomorrow we would be going to Durham Botanic gardens, a favourite haunt of mine because, well, flowers. I was starting to think that a class in botanic illustration might be just the thing for me. What Vicky had said was true. You could pour your heart into a flower just as much as you could into one of those huge abstract things she produced.

            ‘Taxi?’ she said.

            ‘No, we walk. It’s not far.’

            And then, ten minutes later, we were home, and Bill’s car was not in the drive or in the garage, and the house was cold and unlived in. He had taken plenty of clothes, a number of books and his laptop. He really had gone.

                

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We turned in early, both exhausted by the day’s journey. My bed was cold and clammy, and I hated sleeping on my own, though goodness knows it had happened often enough. Bill had absented himself on various occasions throughout our marriage. The first few times it happened, although I had been deeply upset and absolutely furious with him, I had still revelled in having the whole bed to myself, and the unaccustomed luxury of being able to move around freely and not worry about pulling the duvet off him. Latterly, things had changed, and when I was alone in bed, I didn’t move at all. I stuck to my side, wishing he was on the other, snoring away and being like a storage heater, exuding a warmth that I desperately missed.

            The next morning Vicky and I both slept in. She came down at about ten o’clock while I was boiling the kettle. Her face was a dramatic patchwork of dark blue and purple patches.

            ‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen myself in the mirror. I will get “looks” all day, but it won’t stop me going to Durham. You still okay with that? I can’t go on my own, but I do really need to go.’

            ‘Yes, no problem. I’ll come with you.’

            ‘Thanks. Who’s that?’

She looked round. There was a sound at the door—a key—it couldn’t be Bill because his car wasn’t there. I looked out of the window to check. A branch had blown down in front of the garage door—I’d noticed it when we arrived yesterday—and it was still in the same position, so the garage door hadn’t been opened, and the car wasn’t on the drive or the pavement outside. Nobody else had a key. Or had they? Might he have given a key to one of his girlfriends? If he had, that was unforgivable. My mind raced through a whole load of increasingly panicky possibilities in the time it took Bill to open the door and come into the kitchen.

            ‘Hello, you’re back soon,’ he said. ‘Paris not much to write home about then, was it?’

            I had no way of answering that question, but I had to answer. This was the five second rule: if I dawdled his words would turn toxic. I couldn’t leave them lying there on the floor any more than you can leave a piece of toast you’ve dropped. You pick it up quickly and eat it before a million ants crowd in and snaffle it away from you. 

Dammit! Say something!

            But in the end, I didn’t have to. He noticed Vicky’s face. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

            ‘And hello to you too. Bill, I presume.’ She held out her hand, amused, and perfectly poised. ‘I’m Vicky.’

            ‘Pleased to meet you, Vic. What happened to your face?’

            I looked away. It was such a perfect echo of what Moyra had said to me.

            ‘Oh, that? A bloke threw me across a room,’ said Vicky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

            ‘That wasn’t very nice of him,’ said Bill.

            I was staring out of the window, and found the words at last, the ones that really mattered. ‘Bill,’ I said. ‘Where’s the car?’

            ‘She wrote it off.’

            ‘She what? No! Never! Your beautiful car?’

            I remembered the hours he’d spent polishing it, the love he’d lavished on it.

            ‘She fucking drove it into a fucking wall.’

            ‘Christ!’ said Vicky. ‘Is she okay?’

            ‘Audrey? Yes, fine. Bit of whiplash. Nothing. But the car’s a write-off. We had a row, one of those “You-care-more-about-your-car-than-you-do-me” articles. She seemed to find it unreasonable that I was more concerned with my car being reduced to a wreck of mangled metal than I was with her slightly sore neck. She told me not to fuss, I’d get the insurance. And yes, I will, because I had the foresight to add her as a named driver, thank God, but my premiums will rocket thanks to her. But the car... Fran, the car!’

            He shook his head so of course I went over and gave him a hug. I held him for a long time. I could feel his agony, but I was also delighted that Audrey had not understood. Eventually I let him go.

            ‘I need a shower,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get one at Aud’s this morning. She was still stottin’.’

            He tramped up the stairs with his bags of stuff—two holdalls and a large rucksack, so he must have comprehensively moved out of her place.

            ‘So that’s your Bill,’ said Vicky.

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘I like him.’

            I laughed at that. ‘Yeah. Everyone likes him. Straightforward, honest old Bill. Says what he thinks, never mind anyone else.’

            ‘I liked watching you hug him, and I think he very much liked that you did it.’

            ‘I don’t know.’

            ‘Well he’s back now.’

            ‘Yes, but for how long? I can’t keep doing this, Vicky. I can’t be the loving wife who stays at home, ever loyal, while he gallivants off whenever he feels like it.’

            ‘You could always do your own gallivanting.’

            ‘No, I can’t. It’s been tempting a few times, and I’ve fantasised plenty, but I’d never actually do it, not the way he does.’

            ‘Maybe this business with the car will put him off for a bit.’

            ‘You reckon? Maybe it will. His first wife was killed in a car crash. This will have shaken him up more than he’s letting on.’

            ‘Cripes! Poor bloke.’

            We busied ourselves with breakfast, then did the washing up, and were generally domestic. Vicky was far easier to be with than I’d expected—I’d seen the wild-eyed passionate artist when she was with John but hadn’t known about this quieter side that seemed so normal. She had a pleasant and calming ordinariness to her this morning, despite the black and blue face—which I was only noticing now and again. Soon I’d be so used to it I’d wonder why other people were staring. She certainly seemed to have forgotten about it.

            Bill came back down after a bit, refreshed, with his short-cropped hair standing straight up as he’d roughly towel-dried it and then left it, giving him a startled appearance. He smelled of his familiar shower gel and I tried my hardest not to feel any overpowering waves of love for him, but it was difficult.

            He grunted a greeting and sat down at the table, rifled through the papers without really seeing them. After a bit he slammed his fist into the table. We both jumped.

            ‘Bill? You okay?’ I said.

            ‘Me, women and cars,’ he replied. ‘Vicky, would you like to hear a story about a man, his wife, their car and a dachshund?’

            ‘What’s the dachshund called?’

            ‘Edna.’

            ‘Yes, in that case I would. Are you okay with this, Frances?’

            ‘Yes, don’t mind me. I’ll do the crossword. I know the story.’

            I did. The man was Bill, and the wife was my predecessor, Rachel. If he felt the need to regale Vicky with the whole story, then that was fine with me. It might help him, and it would certainly help her to understand why the car incident was upsetting him so much.

            ‘It started with the paperweights,’ he said. ‘One sunny morning.’

He paused for a while, taking himself back to that day when his whole life changed.

‘I was cradling one of them in my hand,’ he said, ‘studying the swirls in the glass, considering lobbing it at my darling soon-to-be-ex-wife’s head. A beam of sunlight was lighting up the fuzz on her upper lip which stopped abruptly where it met her lip gloss. I thought of sticky fly papers, ultra-violet fly-killers, the zzzzz phtttt! when a fly is incinerated. The pendulum in the grandfather clock was swaying. Poor old bugger looked exhausted. I sympathised. Time slipped down the clock face and flumped to the floor. “Let us count down the minutes,” I said. “Nay, seconds.” And fuck you. Fuck you every second, every minute, every hour of the day I have to spend with your puckered arms, your fat-rounded shoulders, your flabby face turned powdery flesh-coloured by God knows what alchemy.’

Vicky looked at me wide-eyed.

I shook my head and smiled to show it was all right. She should just listen. He needed to say this, but Bill had noticed. He turned to her.

‘You see Vic,’ he said, ‘it was like this.’ He took off his glasses, breathed on them and rubbed them with the corner of his shirt. ‘We were in the process of getting divorced, becoming hysterical when reading barristers’ hourly rates, laughing like loons when expected to pay to reply to questions which we’d already answered in triplicate. Our wits were just about up to the task of behaving like civilised chimps. Where was I?’

He put his glasses back on.

‘Ah yes. That morning. I picked up a magnifying glass and focused the sunrays to a pinprick on the wall. Rachel picked up the other paperweight—the Matterhorn, sharp and glinting. Can you imagine it, Vic? We were all set for the battle of the paperweights. Smash, crash, you’re dead.’

            ‘Oh, hell yes,’ said Vicky. ‘Been there, done that.’

            Bill nodded. ‘Thought you might.’ He was looking at her face. ‘Rachel dropped the Matterhorn on the desk. She’d cut her hand. I reached across and held her fingers, studied the drops of blood through the magnifying glass. She wasn’t amused. She pulled away and ordered me to get into her car. We’d reached this situation because I was being very lax about signing various documents and she was having to drive me to my solicitor’s to make sure I got on with it. Unorthodox, but by this time I was in a state of not giving a flying fuck, so it was the only way forward for her. The setting sun was burning the room blood-red, filling the corners with sparks and embers, like those Victorian paintings of the Industrial Revolution.’

‘I love them,’ said Vicky. ‘Have you been to the Laing? There’s a cracker there.’

‘Yes? Must go one of these days. Arty stuff’s more Fran’s area, but I don’t mind looking. But back then, I was sick of conflagrations and burn-outs, and most of all I was sick of Rachel. I tried to remember desire, the strength of her swimmer’s shoulders, the taut ripple of the muscles across her belly—but that had been the past. We’d met when we were, what, fifteen?’

Vicky turned to me. ‘About the same age as you and John?’

‘More or less.’

‘Who’s John?’ said Bill. Another impossible to answer question in one simple sentence, so I shook my head and looked at Vicky. Bill took the hint and carried on. 

‘Yes, barely fifteen when my best mate Tom said I had to meet his new step-sister, because she had class, medals for swimming and everything. I was impressed, so over the next few weeks I constructed my idea of the amazing Rachel, champion swimmer and mermaid. My idea gestated, matured, was born fully-formed, so that when I finally met her I assumed a knowledge of her and forced everything she did or said to fit vision, stupid fucking idiot that I was back then. Still am in many ways.’

He looked at me. I didn’t say anything.

‘But now we were marching to the scaffold to the strains of the Dies Irae, with a small detour to sign some papers. We would sort out the house, be civilised, break up nicely. One did things nicely with Rachel. She had class. Something was snuffling round my feet—Edna, Rachel’s dachshund.’

‘Oh good,’ said Vicky. ‘I want to hear about Edna.’

‘I said her name and the daft little dog raised her head and gazed at me with her big brown eyes. I crouched down and asked if she ever yearned to go out and commune with the sunset, searching for meaning. She wagged her tail, so I told her she and I could have been friends, if only I’d known. What a fucking waste it all had been. Rachel was listening, quietly seething, especially when I shook Edna’s paw, but I told her Edna and I had important matters to discuss, such as whether dogs feel the call of the sea. Seals are dog-mermaids after all. Merdogs. Rachel snarled at me about needing to go now. I pushed poor Edna into the kitchen, and she whimpered and scratched the closed door. There was something about that whimpering. It got to me.’

‘Poor little mutt,’ said Vicky.

‘What, me or the dog?’ He grinned.

‘Twerp.’

‘Anyway, I was a good boy and followed Rachel out to her car, longing for the mermaid she’d once been before she swapped the sea for ceramics, flower arranging, and Russian literature. She’d became a stolid and sensible tin of tuna in vegetable oil, not even brine. Nothing of the sea left in her at all.’

Neither me nor Vicky spoke. We didn’t have to leave for Durham for at least half an hour, and I wasn’t going to interrupt Bill at this point. This mattered to him; he’d always had to get this story out of his system at crisis times in his life, because this was the first crisis, the important one, after which anything else had seemed of little consequence.

‘We arrived at Boring, Twat and Christalmighty’s offices, and I went through the motions, signed where I was told to sign, even clapped Boring on the back as we left, telling him a darts club joke designed to piss of Rachel. The drive home was a silent affair until Rachel failed to notice the changing lights. She sped across the junction into a fat clunk of fate, a grinding and hideous screeching, too quick to remember or take in, the scrape, the roar and groan of buckled metal. Then there was a gentle hiss, subsiding. For a long time, I blanked all this out, but it started coming back in nightmarish chunks. I remember blinking, dazed. I thought I was okay—my side of the car was still intact. The previous day in Morrisons, the guy on the fish counter had been filleting fresh herrings, the fat roes slipping out, the brown bloody gunk in the middle. Damn. That was a lot of blood. Swimming in it. Mermaids. A mermaid’s tail smashed to bits by a bloody sledgehammer. Someone was screaming. Couldn’t have been Rachel. Had to be me.’

I got up and put the kettle on. Bill took two sugars. I wasn’t sure about Vicky. I put a bowl of sugar on the tray just in case.

‘Rachel’s hand was on my leg, palm up. The tiny scratch from the Matterhorn paperweight was oozing blood—one, two, three, four drops. Then nothing. I kept hold of her hand until the paramedics arrived and I had to get out. I took some persuading, as I needed to talk to Rachel, to tell her I was so sorry I’d laughed at her ceramics, sorry I wasn’t able to discuss Dostoyevsky. Sorry I hadn’t smashed her skull in with the paperweight earlier, because at least that would have been honest and I would have been punished, which was precisely what she’d tried to talk to me about when she was doing Crime and Punishment in her Russian literature class. I was sorry I’d never loved her. I was sorry I was still lying about that.

‘They checked me out at hospital. I had a choice. I could stop overnight on a trolley in a corridor, but nobody seemed keen, so I assured them I wasn’t seeing double, didn’t have a headache, didn’t feel sick. They were pragmatic and overcrowded and chose to believe me, so they let me go. A police officer took notes and arranged for me to be driven home. Was there anyone they could call? Family? Friends? No, I’d be fine, I had Edna for company. One of the police officers smirked when I said “Edna” and I wanted to smash the fat pig’s face in, but I was too tired. Someone would call round in the morning, they said.’

‘Oh Bill. What a dreadful, dreadful thing,’ said Vicky.

I put the teapot on the table and poured. I didn’t say anything.

‘I got up the next day feeling dizzy; keeled back onto the bed, stood up again, slowly. The wardrobe was leaning to one side, swollen and pulsating and the crystal chandelier was strobing. I walked across the room, pleased the furniture was solid mahogany and couldn’t topple. I opened a drawer, found my socks by feel. Slid back into bed, pulled them on carefully, slowly. Dressing took twenty-three minutes. I timed it, I wanted to impose order. The order didn’t last long at first because I had to rush to the bathroom to throw up. I sat on the loo, timing myself again and kept my balance by gripping the washbasin. I inched my way back to the bedroom and finished dressing somehow. Going downstairs was problematic until it occurred to me to go down sitting on each step at a time like a toddler. Edna was in the kitchen and she greeted me, ecstatic.’

‘Good old Edna,’ said Vicky.

‘She asked to be let out and I obliged, feeling sick at the rush of petrol-scented air that wafted in. I felt in my pocket, but it was empty—there hadn’t been a packet of ciggies in there since before I’d been married. Half an hour later I was able to sip a mug of instant coffee, black. I’d used up the last of the milk and would have to drive to the supermarket to buy milk and dog food. Two hours later, I was ready to make the attempt. Edna hopped into the back of the car, overjoyed. I drove to the shop with extreme care, sweating profusely. Once I was inside, I thought I would be okay as I could grip the trolley hard and keep my balance that way, but then I passed the fish counter and the sight of the herrings brought on an attack of vertigo. The other shoppers swelled and pulsated with their fat veins—I could hear the tsunami of their blood flowing and the thunderous booming of their hearts. I was damned if I knew how I was going to reach the checkout. It was a quarter past by this time. Right, I said to myself. Stay calm. There were plenty of empty checkouts. I would be back at the car by twenty past if I managed to stay in control. I inched down an aisle. Four minutes left. Three. Nearly there. Reached the checkout. Only two items, through quickly. Two minutes. Stuck in the entrance. Had to make it across the car park. One minute. Stuck. No, Edna was in the car, and she needed me. Five minutes up. Move now. MOVE!’

‘Cripes... you poor bloke.’

‘My world contracted, Vic. I rarely left the house, and when I did it was armed with a spreadsheet with timings worked out. The minimum value was five minutes. That allowed plenty of time to get into the car, even if I fumbled with the lock. Once in the car park, fifteen minutes was enough to reach the shop, allowing for stopping every few cars, leaning on them and finding my bearings. I only bought milk, coffee, dog food, whisky and sandwiches. At home, I worked, I researched articles and stories, wrote them up, emailed them off. My editor never said I was writing bollocks, so I must have been managing. Maybe I was even amazing. When I wasn’t writing, I stared into the Caithness Crystal paperweight, saw mermaids caught in a whirlpool. I tried to work out a strategy for releasing them, wondered if throwing it against a brick wall and smashing it would let them out, or if they’d be cut to pieces and would bleed through my dreams. There had been too much blood. Even those tiny drops. One, two, three... even them. Sometimes I picked up the Matterhorn instead, found the sharp edge, wanting to score my palm, but something always stopped me. It was usually Edna, whimpering for food, scratching on the door, reminding me, and looking at me with her big brown seal’s eyes, like a merdog.

‘I didn’t attend the inquest. Rachel’s brother Tom called round in a terrible state a couple of days after the accident, but he took one look at me and offered to make all the arrangements himself. I didn’t argue. Was I managing? I was fine, thank you. Edna came up and jumped on my lap and I put my hand on her head, felt its warmth, stroked the length of her tight little body, her silken fur. Tom took in the homely scene, felt reassured, and let himself out. I didn’t get up. I had become good at sitting still. Standing up and moving around wasn’t so great, but I made myself let Edna out to do her business and run round the garden. The grass was long, and she was often lost to sight, but now and again she jumped up and snapped at a fly, a porpoise leaping out of the waves. Any more tea in that pot, love?’

I poured him another cup. Stirred in the sugar.

‘It took six months, but one autumn day I bundled an excited Edna into the car and drove to the coast. I picked the location carefully—didn’t want to have to brave even the relatively small crowds at Bamburgh, so I went a couple of miles south to a lonely part of the beach, well away from any of the caravans. Edna soared along the sands, her back rippling like a mirage. I walked slowly along after her, wobbling slightly and keeping close to dunes. I thought how nice it would have been to approach the sea; to let go. I touched my watch for reassurance. The temptation to look at it and judge the timing was overwhelming, and I succumbed. Ten past two. No, that couldn’t be right. That was the time we had left the house. It should have been half past three by now. Watches stop. Batteries run out. It’s no big deal. Look at Edna. Imagine porpoises, mermaids. No, don’t imagine anything. Feel the sea breeze. Take off your shoes. Walk in the sand.

‘I sat on a rock and unlaced my shoes, embarrassed, hoping nobody could see me. Shoes off, socks off. Long bony white feet, unaccountably hairy toes. I looked like a yeti. Would never capture a mermaid looking like that. I rolled up my trousers. Pale legs, blue veins. I stuffed the socks into the shoes and stood up. I’d forgotten what sand felt like, sweet and gritty and nostalgic. As I walked towards the sea, Edna exploded in a paroxysm of joy—she bounded round my legs, leapt up, barked, twisted and swirled. I loved that little dog so much. We made it to the water’s edge, and she dashed in and straight out and in again. I stood in half an inch of water marvelling at the intensity of the cold. I’d have cramp in a minute. I’d feel something. I glanced at the non-working watch and allowed myself the standard five minutes, but it took barely ten seconds before I had to step back, wincing. A school of porpoises was leaping through the waves like mermaids waving, but I wasn’t remotely tempted to swim out and join them. Edna’s tail was wagging furiously. She launched herself across the beach. In the distance I could see a woman striding along with a Labrador.’

He reached across the table and took my hand.

‘Paddy,’ I said. ‘That was Paddy. I loved that dog.’

‘So you did.’

Vicky mumbled something about washing up and disappeared into the kitchen. Me and Bill stayed there holding hands. We were still like that when she came back in.

‘Shall I get the train then?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘To Durham. You’ll want to stay here.’

‘No, I said I’d take you and I will. Bill, we’re going to meet a friend of Vicky’s at the Botanics. Would you like to come?’

‘Certainly. I love flowers.’

‘Fibber.’

  

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Renée’s text arrived just as we were about to leave. Dylan found was all it said. I told Vicky.

‘Thank God for that,’ she said. ‘But too late. Damn. Poor Dylan.’

            ‘Who’s Dylan?’ said Bill, reasonably enough. ‘Someone you lost?’

            ‘No. We lost Moyra.’ I texted the word How? back to Renée, and she replied, Through the Ramblers Assoc. Of course. He’d been a keen walker—that’s how they’d met. It had been a sensible place to look.

            ‘How did you lose Moyra?’ said Bill cheerfully, but he saw Vicky looking as if she was about to cry so he took me by the elbow and steered me into the kitchen and closed the door. ‘What’s happened? What went on in France? I thought it was just you, Renée and Vicky who went—who’s Moyra?’

            ‘No, it was me, Renée and Moyra who went, and Moyra was having horrible problems, we never realised, and she jumped from a bridge into the Seine, and she never revived, and we’ve been trying to locate Dylan, he’s her husband, he walked out on her when they were on the top of a mountain and she’d just had a seizure, and,’ I snuffled a bit, ‘and Vicky and John were with her when she jumped, but they couldn’t stop her, because you don’t expect it, do you, you don’t expect when you’re out having a nice time with someone in Paris, when you’re taking them to see galleries and dealers because your art is so brilliant, you don’t expect that person will just get on a parapet and jump off. You don’t. How can you know?’

‘God’s sake, Fran. I don’t know what the hell you just said, but it sounds horrible. Who’s John? And come to that, who’s Vicky? I know I’ve been chatting to her for the last half hour, but what’s her connection with you and Renée, and what’s she doing in our house?’

‘We were staying in John’s apartment—he and Renée used to be a couple. Still are in a way. Then he turned up.’

‘Who turned up?’

‘John.’

‘Right.’

‘He wasn’t supposed to, or maybe he was. I don’t know. Maybe Renée had planned it all along. I think she probably had, but then Vicky arrived, because she’s John’s wife, and I don’t think that was part of Renée’s plan at all, and Moyra drew these incredible pictures all over the walls of the apartment.’

            ‘What, like a toddler with a marker pen?’ said Bill.

            ‘Marker pen, yes. But these drawings... oh Bill.’ I blew my nose again.

            ‘Let me get this right. We’re talking about Renée from your art class. Yes?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘And Moyra was at the class too?’

            ‘Yes. But I’d only met her a couple of times before we went. Didn’t really know her at all. Not at first.’

            ‘Okay. And Vicky?’

            ‘I first met Vicky when she turned up at the apartment. Christ! That was only a few days ago. Feels like so much longer.’

            Bill frowned. ‘So she’s another person you hardly know at all?’

            ‘I suppose so.’

            ‘And John? I suppose he’s another virtual stranger whose life has suddenly impinged on yours, with devastating consequences?’

            ‘No. That happened years ago. I was fourteen. He hurt me.’

That stopped Bill’s cheerful interrogation in its tracks.               

‘And now he’s done it again?’ he said quietly and carefully. He put his arms round me.

            ‘No,’ I said, into his shoulder. ‘John and I have made our peace. I called him a bastard and slapped him. Hard.’

            ‘Silly girl.’

            ‘Yeah. Doesn’t solve anything, does it. Didn’t make me feel any better, not really, but I suppose it was part of a process and I had to go through with it. That’s over now. I won’t ever have to do it again.’

            ‘Okay.’ He let me go, apparently satisfied. ‘And now we’re going to Durham Botanics, no doubt to meet someone else who will irrevocably change your life?’

            ‘Possibly. His name is Simon Tovey.’

‘And?’

‘Yeah, okay, I’ve never met him, but Vicky used to go out with him. John and Renée both seem to think she needs to see him again. He’s married to a pixie.’

            ‘If you say so.’

            ‘I’m sorry Bill, this must all sound utterly ridiculous.’

            ‘It does, but I’m in mourning for my car so any distraction is helpful.’

            ‘It’s always about your bloody car, isn’t it.’

            ‘Yes.’

            He hugged me again, tighter this time, and kissed my forehead. I looked up at his dear face and saw how much older it had become, but still the same, still the man who I’d met six months after his wife had died, the man with a dachshund called Edna. We needed to get another dog. It had been years.

            We gathered Vicky up and went out to my pathetic excuse for a car, an aging Suzuki Alto that rattled like an old washing machine on a spin cycle and didn’t go very fast unless it was downhill. Vicky sat in the front at Bill’s insistence, and he squeezed into the back. By sitting sideways, he was fine. I drove carefully, as ever. Bill had always teased me for never going above thirty in built up areas, but this car liked thirty; and if you rested your foot gently on the accelerator it settled into about twenty-nine and would happily stay there all day. Pushing it any higher seemed to take an inordinate amount of effort on both the driver’s and the car’s part.

            Bill was rude about the car, and Vicky cheered up, I cheered up, because what else was there to do? We were going to the gardens, and I hadn’t been there in ages. I loved flowers. We were meeting Simon Tovey for lunch. The pixie wasn’t going to be there as she was in London, but Simon had been in Newcastle for some kind of conference and was going to get the train down to meet us. I’d been assured by Vicky that he was so incredibly nice we’d all end up being completely charming to each other—but I also knew they’d had some sort of cataclysmic row at the gardens in the past, so I wondered at the wisdom of the Botanics as a meeting place.

            The seaside might have been better—but not Seaham. We’d have potentially bumped into whichever one it was who lived in Seaham, and that would have been the last thing I needed. But I was remembering a trip to the seaside last year, to Alnmouth. Bill had gone for a swim, which you’re not supposed to do because of the estuary and the currents, but he’d gone anyway because he’s like that, and the water must have been bracing because it’s never properly warm in the sea anywhere on the Northumberland coast. He’d had his swim, and then run up the beach and plonked himself down beside me, wide grin, wet hair, just as he must have done decades ago on holiday with his mum at Margate. Unfortunately, a seagull chose that moment to crash beak first onto his head. Some moron with an air gun, I suppose, because seagulls do not fall out of the sky; it wasn’t as if he was holding an ice cream or something and the seagull had missed. Maybe it had just seen its reflection in his shiny bald patch. I don’t know. “And hast thou killed the albatross? Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” I said, delighted by what had just happened, but he wasn’t beaming. There was blood. Maybe I should have screamed, but I laughed instead. He was furious. I tried to remember that vision I’d had only moments earlier of the nine-year-old boy, so full of joy—but all I could see was this fat grumpy bloke I’d married.

The gull stank of fish and what might have been seagull vomit, and I was thinking what a cruel month August is, full of rotten seaweed and sewage outlets, itchy sunburn, and coarse sand working its way into the cracked skin between your toes. I was ready to cry, the day ruined, but Bill took hold of the gull’s wing and lobbed the unfortunate bird down the beach—a couple of dogs charged after it, their owners screamed at them and I snorted. Bill told me to shut the fuck up or he’d do the same to me. I called him a crosspatch, he told me to fuck off, and we were okay, it was a blissful moment and we were back to normal. I got out a tissue and gently wiped the blood away, just as his mother must have done all those years ago when he tripped and fell at Margate.

We’d had many such moments. It was the times between the moments that were killing us; the times when he went off and was with someone else and I couldn’t bear it. This, though—this was one of the good moments—this was going out in my daft little car with my husband and my new friend Vicky, going to the gardens, going out for lunch to meet Vicky’s charming ex-boyfriend Simon. Happy, despite everything.

            Bill had gone quiet. I looked in the mirror. His eyes were closing and his head was lolling. He’d be snoring next. I used to hate that snoring. Sometimes, at night, I would look at the snoring lump of lard next to me and tell myself I had to do some hard thinking, because this was intolerable, this was torture. Back in those early days, Bill had been great in bed when he was awake, but asleep he was awful. Outside the bedroom was okay. He was allowed to sleep in front of the telly, and snore as much as he wanted, so long as I was in the kitchen with the radio on loud, but that was my limit. And even at the start, I found he could be argumentative and pig-headed. It wasn’t long before he became unfaithful. Jessie couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old. I was only just emerging from that agonising post-natal psychosis and I needed him, but he wasn’t there for me, he’d had enough by then and was coping no more than I was.

But sometimes we’d be in bed and I’d be looking at him, furious because I’d been woken up yet again and I was so bloody tired, and he’d stop snoring, and I’d think, dead? Dear God! And then he’d start up again with a jerk that would nearly throw me off the mattress. I’d be beside myself with fury. I’d get out of bed as noisily as I could, go into the bathroom, leave the door open, flush the toilet twice and use the electric toothbrush. I’d come back in and open drawers noisily looking for fresh undies, slamming the drawer shut. He’d snuffle, go silent, then set up again, slack-jawed, lying half on his side, head back. I’d decide I’d married a pig, a grunting, slobbery pig. But despite myself, I’d feel a wave of tenderness for him, and would shake my head and get dressed. He’d open his eyes, and the conversation would by typically: “Wha time’s it?” “Six-thirty.” “Wha? Come back t’bed, silly cow.” He would reach out to me and I would strip off the panties I’d only just put on and get straight back in.

            That had been the way for a long time, but to say it was not an entirely satisfactory way was an understatement. We needed to get this sorted. We were fine today, might well be good tomorrow—but after that? The insurance money would come through for his car, he’d buy a replacement and be on top form for a while but then something would happen, and he’d slip through my fingers again.

            And if that happened, I would have the nightmare again. It had first come to me many years ago. I hadn’t realised I was asleep, but I must have been because I was smoking, and I don’t smoke, never have, but in the dream, I drew on my cigarette, deep, long and slow. The toxins sought out the folds and crevices of my lungs, and I held the poison there awhile to absorb the pleasure, before exhaling. Bill slept on, quietly for once, turned over and back again. I tapped the end of the cigarette and watched the ash drop into his open mouth. Grey flecks fell round his lips, and I wondered… what if? What if I ground the end of the cigarette into his cheek, could I burn right through? Would his lies seep out and sink into the pillow? Whether this was premonition, memory or wishful thinking, I had no idea. In the dream, I shook my head and went back to sleep.

Each time I awoke up from the dream, I was horrified and tried to put it all out of my head, but it hung around for a long time. Now, driving past the flats where the old Cock o’ the North pub used to be, I realised it hadn’t been Bill in the dream at all, it had been John all along, a nightmarish version of John which thank God was entirely different to the reality I’d met only a few days ago.

I didn’t want to hurt John, and the relief was enormous. We really had found closure.

Bill was another matter.

I took a deep breath.

‘You okay?’ said Vicky.

‘Yeah, fine, just sorting out memories and things.’

‘Bummer.’

‘Quite.’

‘I’ve got some stinkers regarding Simon,’ she said.

‘Probably best not to think about them when you’re about to meet him again.’

‘True.’ She didn’t say anything for a bit, but then, ‘I was remembering when I was on a train one night, late, coming home—in the days when “home” meant Simon, and porcelain and being terribly polite. The train was clacking through the night and the other passengers were dozing, but he’d just texted me and I was reading it. He’d said he liked the latest paintings. He thought they were good. That was his word. “Good”.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Exactly. And I was thinking, no, they’re not “good”. I have torn my guts out and hammered them onto the canvas, I have opened my heart up with blunt instruments, I have screamed my pain. They are the best of me. They are so beyond “good”! And they are not intended to be “liked”. They are not Facebook statuses. I took a sip from one of those horrible cardboard cups of coffee and it had gone cold, but I tried to be generous; I thought, perhaps Simon had been frightened by them and had backed off, squinted, tried to see rabbits and squirrels or something. He must have decided it was best to say “good”, to be positive, and leave it at that. I’d be home soon, and I knew we’d have to talk about it, but I didn’t want to talk, I didn’t know how the hell I was going to explain to him what I’d been doing, so I closed my eyes and sat perfectly still. I decided he could put on the percolator. He was “good” at that.’

‘Bill’s good at putting the kettle on.’

‘Good to know they’re useful for something.’

I looked in the mirror and caught Bill’s eye. Hadn’t realised he’d woken up. I wondered how long he’d been listening.

I turned into the car park. There were plenty of spaces, so I didn’t have to attempt any clever parking manoeuvres, and that was a relief because I didn’t want to catch Bill’s pained expression as I did a fifteen-point turn. We walked down the path into the low building that housed the café and a gift shop. Simon had arrived before us. He stood up as we entered, and my first impression was of a tall, fair man in a beautifully tailored Harris Tweed jacket and light-coloured smart trousers. He came across to greet us, Vicky first, kissing her formally on both cheeks. She grinned up at him and introduced us all. I also got the double cheek kiss, so this was clearly something he did as a matter of course. It was jolly nice, I decided, already getting on Simon’s wavelength having only met him a few seconds earlier. Too few people did this, and I was going to take it up in future—although it could backfire if people weren’t expecting it. While I was wondering about double or single air kisses, Simon was shaking hands with Bill and the two men were sizing each other up the way men do. Simon was a good four inches taller, but Bill had weight and a pugnacious chin on his side. Then we were looking at the menu and talking about sandwiches and coffee and nobody was going to fight anybody. Vicky and Simon were soon chatting away about people and places and we were a perfectly normal group of people having a pleasant lunch together. I thought this was going to be a nice morning, but a complete waste of time—though maybe we needed to waste time like this to lick our wounds. But then Simon broached the subject.

‘Vicky, are you okay?’

‘Aside from having witnessed a suicide a few days ago and having had a furious row with John, yes, absolutely fine. Why, what did you think these bruises were? Self-inflicted?’

She said it pleasantly as if she were asking if his sandwich was nice.

Simon blushed. You don’t often see grown men blush. I wanted to give him a lollipop and tell him he was being a brave little soldier under the circumstances, and it was going to be fine.

‘No, I didn’t think that at all. Vicky, do we have to do this now?’

‘Yes.’

He looked at me and Bill, and we studiously examined our sandwiches, but I knew I’d have to smooth the way. This was what I’d been engaged to do in the first place. I put my sandwich down, looked Simon in the eye and said, ‘Vicky does need to talk about what happened,’ I said. ‘And I know it’s awkward, but John wanted her to talk to you, so…’

‘Okay. But Vicky, if you are going to tell me John hit you, you know I won’t believe you. He’s not a violent man.’

This was the cue for me to take a bite out of my sandwich and for it to go down the wrong way so I was coughing and spluttering all over the place and Bill was thumping me on the back, too hard, so I swung round and nearly punched him on the nose, something I would never do—I didn’t know what had come over me.

‘Oh, I see, so just because he didn’t actually land a punch on my jaw and dislocate it, that excuses him?’ said Vicky, ‘I was there, John was there, we were having a furious row and I ended up looking like this. Threw myself at the wall and the table and the bookshelves, did I? Frances was there—ask her!’

Her voice was raised, and other people were looking, and I was thinking, what the hell are we doing? We must be insane. Whose idea was this anyway? Damn you, Renée.

‘That sounds more likely,’ said Simon with a smile. ‘So he didn’t hit you directly, then.’

            ‘No.’

            She looked like a sulky child, but she was only telling the truth. I took a careful sip of coffee, trying not to cough again.

            Simon looked at me and Bill. ‘I’m sorry about this—me and Vicky can get a little volatile. But we understand each other, and I’ve known John for years, far longer than she has.’

            ‘Yes,’ said Vicky triumphantly, ‘but Frances has known him even longer.’

            ‘Really?’ Simon looked interested.

            ‘I was brought up in South London, haven’t always lived up here. When I was in my teens, John went out with my older sister for a while. Back in the seventies.’

            ‘Gosh, you really have known him a long time.’

            And I hoped and hoped he wouldn’t ask me to adjudicate, to take his side and claim John didn’t have a violent bone in his body, because I couldn’t do that as I knew for a fact he did, but Simon genuinely was a calming influence. He was clearly so nice, I didn’t want to say anything horrible to him about John, and apart from that one short outburst, he’d even managed to placate Vicky.

            ‘That story he tells about the killer rabbits,’ I said. ‘Is it true? Any of it?’

            ‘Not remotely,’ said Simon. ‘He always used to make up things like that to make himself seem exotic. He had a real chip on his shoulder about being from a comfortable and wealthy background. Lovely parents, nice detached house in Lower Norwood. But he was painfully shy, so he re-invented himself as an abused kid who had excuses to be withdrawn because he was so damaged. He had a vivid imagination, so once he’d got the idea, he impressed everyone with his outlandish tales. He tried the stories on me for a bit, but when he found we had a lot in common, a shared aesthetic sensibility when it came to antiques, artworks and so on—he stopped pretending. Having stopped pretending with me, he gradually eased up with everyone else. If anything, he went too far the other way. Once his antiques business was established, he tried to become ultra-sophisticated and ended up turning into a tiresome snob who believed his own rhetoric. He was at his worst, I believe, when he was pursuing Emma, but Renée soon cured him of that. She had a genuine council estate background and showed him how ridiculous all his posturing had been compared to the real thing.’

            ‘Sounds a right wazzock,’ said Bill.

            Vicky snorted. ‘Don’t think he’s ever been called that before. Let’s go and look at some flowers.’

            We started off going round the gardens as a foursome, but it didn’t take long before we’d naturally split off into two couples.

            ‘That Simon’s a nice bloke isn’t he,’ said Bill, and I was surprised because Bill doesn’t usually have much time for men in obviously incredibly expensive clothing. ‘Whereas your John sounds like an arsehole.’

            ‘He’s not my John, he’s Vicky’s, and Renée’s, but you know what, that just about sums him up.’

            ‘So why is everyone besotted with him? Sounds like you’ve all had problems, but none of you has a bad word to say for him. Even Vicky hasn’t directly accused him, despite what he’s obviously done to her. I mean, look at her face.’ He shook his head. ‘However, much you try to weasel out of it, that is not self-inflicted. So why is she still defending him? You are. Simon is, even though Simon’s admitted the bastard lied through his teeth to him when they first knew each other—and not only that, he broke up Simon and Vicky’s relationship. What the hell is really going on?’

            ‘That’s a good question, but I’m damned if I know the answer.’

            That was a lie, as I did, in a way, but I wasn’t saying. I didn’t know how to explain to Bill that the answer was love. We all loved him one way or another, and we all saw how damaged he was in so many ways, we all thought we could make it better—no, I couldn’t say any of that to him. I couldn’t say that I loved Bill himself in a very similar way, I couldn’t tell him that it’s common enough; we see the little boy in the man, the frightened, stubborn child, trying so hard, and we long to help him to achieve his potential and often we’ll do anything to that end—and often it goes spectacularly wrong. This was impossible to explain in just a few sentences, especially now when I wasn’t sure of us as a couple because he’d only come back to me because his blasted car had been written off, and what sort of a basis was that for a relationship? All those other women. God, that hurt so much. He had no idea. No, I wasn’t going to attempt to talk to him about love. Not now.

We went into the hothouses and they had tanks of horrible things like giant cockroaches, centipedes and tarantulas, and they were just what I needed. Bill liked them too, and he knew all about them. He might have looked like a thug, but Bill was highly educated and infinitely curious about everything. Also, he knew about thugs. He understood them, saw straight through them. I realised I might have to re-think John Stephenson, but the idea was heart-breaking. Streatham, all those years ago; a skinny boy who could skate, who took my sister in his arms and kissed her—and the jealousy was all over me again, I staggered and nearly fell. Bill didn’t see it. He was examining a tiny luminescent frog in a tank, and the frog appeared to be staring back at him. Bill grinned, and the frog winked, but it can’t have really.

            Thank God I had Bill. I needed to hang on to him, whatever happened. And thank God I didn’t have John. Susan had been stuck with him, one way or another ever since—all those men she’d had, all of them abusive. And Renée—she’d managed to avoid the abuse trap, but she was still drawn back to John, time and again. She’d never had much of a relationship with anyone else. Six months here, six months there, at most. And then there was Moyra, who had thrown herself off a bridge to avoid his clutches. No, that was grossly unfair. I wondered what Dylan was like. What sort of a man left his sick wife on a mountaintop and marched off, never returning?

            But, and this was important, Simon, who seemed like a thoroughly decent bloke, was fond of John and had been for years. I went across and looked at all the goldfish in the ornamental pond. They swam towards me en masse, mouths gaping and gasping, wanting, wanting, wanting. ‘Oh, you poor stupid things,’ I said. There were some pots of fish food behind me. I put a few coins in the honesty box and gave the fish the food they craved so desperately. They struggled and fought to get to the scraps, even though there was plenty more, but it was as if that one pot of food was all they could possibly desire and they were going to fight each other to the death if necessary to get it for themselves. Well yeah, I’d fight anyone for Bill—so why hadn’t I? Why had I let that blasted woman in Aycliffe write off my beloved Bill’s beloved car? Why was I always standing by and letting him get away with it, letting him—and me—get hurt time and time again? That wasn’t very loving, was it?

            And why was I aiding and abetting Renée and John in their dastardly attempt to get Vicky back to Paris? Christ knows.

            Bill had ambled off into the rainforest section of the glasshouses. I followed. He pressed the button that makes it rain in there and grinned like a nine-year-old. I went and joined him by the banana tree, or whatever it was. ‘Can we come and live here?’ I said.

            ‘Yeah. Why not.’ He turned and nuzzled my hair, kissed me lightly.

            ‘What am I going to do about Vicky?’ I said.

            ‘Do you have to do anything?’

            ‘I don’t know. I sort of think everyone is relying on me to organise her and get her love life back on track. Firstly, I had to fix up this meet with Simon, and then—God knows. They see me as the sensible one.’

            Bill shook his head. ‘No, they see you as the one who will do their dirty work for them. Come on.’

            He led me out of the hothouse and into the prehistoric garden beyond, all ferns and horsetails and a new gingko biloba sapling along with a great fossilised log. Bill knew about the relative ages of these things and helped me to get it all into perspective. We moved on to the Alpine garden, but that looked like a building site today, so we didn’t linger, but headed on down towards the woodland areas.

            ‘I do want to see that picture, you know,’ said Bill.

            ‘What picture?’

            ‘Your naked self-portrait. You told me you’d done it and I was so gobsmacked I failed to react appropriately. I should have been leaping about and breaking open the Prosecco. Instead I went into a state of shock and changed the subject as far as I recall.’

            ‘You probably talked about your car.’

            ‘Most likely. Safest subject. Show me when we get back?’

            ‘Not when Vicky’s around.’

            ‘All right. When she’s gone.’

            We walked on a bit further and reached the field with the Manx sheep with the huge horns.

‘Is it any good?’ he said, and I knew he’d been thinking about the picture, and that made me happy and hot and cold at the same time.

            ‘I think so. We all did one—me, Renée, Moyra. Moyra’s was brilliant. I wonder what will happen to it now—whether John will manage to get his hands on it, or perhaps Dylan will claim it. Renée’s was a piss-take. Abstract nonsense, deliberately crudely done, and that surprised us all, because Renée is so upfront about everything. Mine’s less extreme than Moyra’s, but more serious than Renée’s. They all thought it was very good, and I don’t think they were just being kind.’

            ‘I don’t care if it was good art or not.’

            ‘You should a bit.’

            ‘Okay. You’re a genius artist, and I want to flog it to the highest bidder.’

            I thumped him on the shoulder.

            We’d nearly caught up with Simon and Vicky, who were walking ahead of us, not quite touching, deep in conversation. They stopped and turned to face each other. Simon opened his arms and Vicky went to him and they held each other for a long time. When Simon let her go, I could see Vicky had been crying. He got out a hanky and gave it to her. She held onto it, and I knew he was never going to get it back. He caught sight of us and walked across.

            ‘I have to get back to Newcastle. So nice to have met you.’

            He shook Bill’s hand and I got the double air kiss again. ‘Look after Vicky,’ he said. ‘She needs to stay away from John for a while yet, but I think they’ll be all right.’

            Then he strode away and within moments was out of sight.

            Vicky walked back to us. ‘I love that man so much,’ she said.

            ‘Which one,’ said Bill, and I could have kicked him, but turned out it was the right thing to say, because Vicky gave a throaty laugh and told him not to be so damned clever. Then she was all sad and serious again. She walked on ahead of us back to the car.       

            When we caught up, she was busy on her phone, texting.

            ‘I’m going to go and stay with Emma,’ she said.

            ‘You don’t have to you know—you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like.’

            ‘I know, you’ve been very kind, but Simon thinks I should, and he’s right. I’ve known Emma for years. She and I are experts at crying on each other’s shoulders. Plus, she lives at Bamburgh, and there’s nowhere better for blowing cobwebs out of your hair and making you see sense. I’ll get the train up to Alnmouth this afternoon.’

            Bill nodded. ‘Long walks along that beach have cured many an ill,’ he said.

            ‘Oh, of course. I’d forgotten,’ said Vicky. ‘That’s where you and Frances…  So Bamburgh it is. Simon reckons I should stay away from Paris till after Moyra’s funeral—that will be somewhere round here, I presume. I don’t know. Do you suppose Dylan will sort that out?’

            ‘I’ve absolutely no idea. Renée might know more.’

            ‘Yeah. Renée. She knows everything. Too much. I suppose John’s safe with her?’

            ‘Moyra thought so.’

            ‘She did, didn’t she. But she pictured me crushing Simon, and that wasn’t entirely accurate. You’ve just seen him. Did he strike you as crushed? No, didn’t think so. She pictured you as incomplete, but look at you—anyone more complete would be hard to imagine. She pictured John as a mass of fury and violence, but if Simon had drawn him rather than Moyra, we would have seen a gentle, thoughtful and intelligent man. Shy even. She drew herself as a nothing, and that was absolutely, categorically wrong. We’ve been pussyfooting around this, haven’t we; so overawed by her talent, we’ve been thinking she must have been right about everything. But she killed herself. Was that the right thing to do? And that note she wrote. We were blown away by that, absolutely in awe of the things she was saying, but didn’t it actually show total confusion? A fear of the way things really were? I think that piece of writing was Moyra showing us what the world looked like to her, and failing because she was a far better artist than writer. But she tried, so that we could see in no uncertain terms that she starting to suffer from some kind of dementia, and that falling from that bridge was the logical culmination of her desperation to understand what the hell was going on and happening to her, and to end all the confusion once and for all.’

            I stood there, unable to speak.

            ‘Do you want me to drive?’ said Bill.

            ‘Please.’

            I handed him the car keys and he took us home. We didn’t even have a cup of tea. Vicky needed to get to Emma, so Bill walked her to the station. I sat at home, exhausted. I was supposed to be the one with insight, but it was Vicky who had nailed the situation.

            When Bill came back, I told him I wanted to kill Dylan. He made me a cup of tea, and I felt better. Nobody makes a cup of tea quite like Bill. Then he disappeared off to his computer to write an article, and I went out into the garden. Autumn would be here in a matter of weeks, scratching a path through the trees and winding its way into corners, in a spiderish way, scuttling here and there, allowing a few bright patches of sunlight to cheer you up for a while, but all the time the cobwebs of the season were encroaching. It would soon be too cold for any naked gardening. The brightness, the last light of summer, was winking out. But this wasn’t the tragedy I had thought it might be. The richness of the mulch assailed my nostrils like a heavy anaesthetic. The roses were still blooming, poor mad things, though soon their petals would be turning mushroom brown with the first frosts.

            I came inside. This was no good. I had to get myself out of this mood, or else use it to do something positive. I rummaged around my old paintings until I found one I particularly hated. It was ripe for destruction. I got out my oils and went for it. Time flew by. Bill came in later, looked at it, and clearly didn’t know what to say about the swirling mass of colours. I told him I’d painted the Carnival in Venice; I’d squeezed streamers of oil onto canvas over a previous painting—it had originally been a dull Scottish landscape copied faithfully from a faded postcard. Ben Nevis was no more. Upland heather cropped tight by small sheep had been replaced by Vivaldi gone mad. Il Preto Rosso was dancing with birds of paradise, masked men were reading poetry to paramours; women were men were women were God knows what. I didn’t care. This was Carnival. Bonny Scotland, where chickens were presumably still chickens, lurked beneath, but my vast oil slick of a painting pleased me far more. Degenerate Venice had the edge over Ben Nevis today. It was quite unlike anything I’d ever done before, and more like a very early Vicky Stephenson in the days when she trying to find her own voice—but it was also absolutely mine.

Bill grinned. ‘That’s bloody brilliant,’ he said. ‘We’ll get it framed. Hang it over the mantelpiece.’

             

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Bill was dragging his heels replacing the beloved motor. He browsed the internet for hours, looking at overseas dealerships, searching out something special—he wasn’t going to buy new this time. He wanted something “pre-loved” as they say when talking about second-hand clothes to make them sound a step up from charity shop wear. He even consulted me, which had never happened before. We talked about colour, style, comfort. He didn’t bother asking me about any specification or engine type and size as it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. As he was without a car, he took to driving mine, and persuaded it that maybe it was a nippy little hot hatchback rather than the dawdling town car I’d always considered it to be. For a while it sounded like a high-powered motorbike, to my ears, but what did I know. I was informed by Bill that meant the exhaust needed fixing. He had it done, and then it purred. In the meantime, he was coming closer and closer to finding the perfect car. He told me he wasn’t going to rush things. He was being careful. Very, very careful. He stayed at home, never slept away anywhere. Nothing was ever said, but the longer it went on, the more secure I felt.

I had been keeping in occasional touch with Renée by email but hadn’t heard anything from Vicky for several weeks. Nobody had, as far as I could tell. Renée was ambivalent about her staying so long with Emma—I think she worried they would be talking late into the night about John, and that made her uncomfortable. She was very fond of Emma, and didn’t want her “corrupted” by Vicky. 

And then, finally, in the middle of September, I received a brief email from John to say that the French authorities had finally released Moyra’s body and Dylan was arranging the funeral, which would take place in a fortnight’s time. He had taken the liberty of giving Dylan my contact details.

            Well thank you very much, John.

I didn’t want to meet Dylan, who by now had assumed monstrous proportions in my imagination, but it couldn’t be helped. The formal invitation to the funeral duly arrived, with both myself and “partner” invited.

            ‘You have got to be bloody joking,’ said Bill. ‘I never even met the woman. Why should I go to her funeral?’

            ‘Because I might need some support.’

            ‘Why? You’ll have Renée there, won’t you? And Vicky?’

            ‘And John.’

            ‘What, and you think he’ll start throwing punches?’        Bill chuckled, but it wasn’t funny.

            ‘Please Bill.’

            ‘Really?’

            ‘Yes. I need you to protect me from the monsters and the ghouls and whatever else my imagination has conjured up—specifically Dylan. The very idea of him is giving me the collywobbles. Also, there’s the tangled web that is John and Vicky and Renée. This will be the first time all three have been in the same place at the same time since Paris. You have to be there to protect me from the fallout. What if they start blaming me for everything? I was supposed to sort their lives out, and what have I done? Damn all. I don’t know what Vicky’s been up to, and I don’t know whether Renée and John are now so much a “thing” that they’ll never part, and Vicky will blame me, and—’

‘And you need me to be there. Okay.’

‘Oh, love, thank you. Afterwards we’ll come back here, and I really will bring that picture out. Or had you forgotten you wanted to see it?’

            ‘No, I haven’t forgotten. I was waiting for you to be ready. When we came back from the Botanic Gardens that day, I didn’t think you were. That’s why I said nothing. Okay, I’ll come, and we’ll go in my new car.’ He checked the date on the invitation. ‘I’m picking it up that very morning.’

            ‘Is it very flash?’

            ‘No, it’s not flash at all. It is a thing of refinement and beauty. And it’s very powerful.’

            ‘You’re coming because you want to show off your new car?’

            ‘Something like that.’

            ‘And you’re confident your car is bigger than John’s.’

            ‘Oh yes.’

            ‘That’s the real reason you’re coming, isn’t it.’

            He grinned and went outside into the garden, picked up a rake from the shed, and disappeared off beyond the apple trees.

            I went upstairs and looked in my wardrobe for black garments, found a depressing number of the wretched things, all of which fitted perfectly because I never changed shape. So that was that. Black tailored trousers, a soft knit jumper. Long woollen jacket. Hat. Boots. Not exactly haute couture, but anonymous enough.

The day arrived too soon, and I had butterflies, which was stupid as all I had to do was go and sit in a cramped crematorium for twenty minutes and then go to a hotel and eat finger food for half an hour, and then we could come home and that would be that, end of story. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see John and Vicky and Renée. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Simon again, but he was nothing to do with Moyra, so he wouldn’t be there.

            Bill left at half past seven in the morning to collect the car. A few hours later there was a subterranean rumble, and the car drew up outside the house. It was a refined shade of deep green, quite unlike the bright red of the previous two or three, and yes, it was a thing of beauty, far too big for me to drive, which was a relief. I wouldn’t call it “second-hand” in Bill’s presence—I would find out what the correct term for a fully restored whatever-it-was might be. But it was beautiful, and Peter Thornley from next door had come out to look at it. Izzie the Airedale was sniffing around, wagging her tail, and Bill and Peter were talking excitedly. I wondered what it had cost, and whether the insurance money from the last one had paid for it; what the premiums on this one would be, and whether we could afford it. Whatever the costs were, I would do everything in my power to make sure we could afford them, because this mattered, and how had I ever not realised how much things like this mattered before?

            I went out and said ‘Wow!’ and meant it. Bill looked as if he were on the verge of tears with joy. Shame our first trip out in it would be to a funeral, but that couldn’t be helped. I managed to prise Bill away from his pride and joy and brought him indoors to get suited up. He emerged from the bathroom twenty minutes later looking serious and sober in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie, hair brushed neatly, chin clean-shaven. I barely recognised him, but I knew he’d look good in the car like that.

            We set off for the crematorium, and the car smelled of leather and polish and all good things—it was alive, it rumbled, it purred. We arrived, got out, and the doors closed with a clunk that made my heart beat a little faster. I held onto that moment, because my imagination had gone into overdrive and I was over-thinking in ridiculous terms—there would be a bomb in the crematorium, like in the soap operas, or Moyra would rise up out of the coffin as a zombie, or, I don’t know, John and Dylan would have a punch-up for no reason. A huge man was greeting people, immensely tall and bulky with it, Old Father Time, or a Tolkienesque dwarf grown into a giant. He was frankly terrifying, but he turned out to be Dylan, who was so unlike what I’d expected, I couldn’t think of anything to say at all, so I just nodded and scurried inside. Bill shook hands with him and murmured, ‘Sorry for your loss’ or something and followed me in.

            ‘Fucking hell!’ said Bill as he sat down next to me. ‘What was that?’

            ‘That was my friend’s widowed husband.’

            ‘Man mountain! Bigfoot!’

            ‘Shush.’

I sat there trying hard not to bite my nails. A couple of other people from the art class came in, which was a relief, so I nodded at them. There were a few other people I didn’t know, presumably walkers. No sign of the key people yet, but then Vicky came in with a face like thunder, wearing an outrageous outfit in black and purple with peacock feathers, but why not. She looked magnificent. She saw us and gave a furious smile that made even Bill wince.

‘Might be me needs protection,’ he whispered in my ear, so I stuck my elbow in his ribs.

‘Shut up,’ I said, under my breath. Vicky came up to us.

            ‘Shove up,’ she said. ‘I need to sit with friends.’

            We moved along to let her in.

            ‘How was Bamburgh?’ I said.

            ‘Good. Lots of sand, sea, castle, gulls. You know.’

            She sounded distracted.

            ‘And Emma?’

            ‘Ha! Emma was her usual self. Told me to get the hell out of John’s life. Gave herself as an example of how glorious it could be if one finally escaped his clutches. There were hundreds of children running in and out of the house. It was a bad example, but I didn’t tell her. The kids mostly liked my bruised face, so I’ll give them that, but then it healed up and they lost interest. Is he here yet?’

            ‘Haven’t seen him.’

            ‘Maybe he won’t come.’

            ‘He’ll come.’

            ‘Maybe Dylan’s blocked the door and isn’t letting him in,’ said Bill, not very helpfully.

            But then there was a hush and we all turned the way you do at a wedding when the bride comes in on her father’s arm, only it was Renée, looking utterly gorgeous, on John’s arm, and he looked... Gods. This was bad. He looked so desirable I had to close my eyes tight and think about something else entirely.

            ‘Shit,’ I said under my breath. ‘How does he do that?’

            ‘I know,’ said Vicky. ‘Bastard, eh?’

            ‘Yep.’

            They sat at the front with Dylan as if they were the chief mourners, which felt wrong, but then I thought, maybe Renée really was her only proper friend, and John had been one of the last people to see her alive, and would have been her agent, and Dylan had been her husband, so who else should be there?

            The funeral itself was short and dignified. John stood up and spoke briefly about Moyra’s stupendous talent as an artist, and what a terrible loss to the art world her premature death had been. Dylan, choking back tears, talked about the girl he’d met on a walk one day and fallen in love with. And that was about it. If there was music, I don’t remember it. Nothing exploded. No armed police rushed in. Nobody stood up and claimed an impediment, though I suppose you don’t get those at cremations. I nearly relaxed, though I knew we had the reception or wake or whatever it was at the hotel to get through yet. I didn’t imagine many of the art class people would stay for that, but there were some others who seemed to be attached to Dylan, and they looked all right, and possibly they’d be able to prevent the cat fight between Renée and Vicky that surely was going to happen. That was the bomb. Had to be.

            At last it was over, and we trooped out. Vicky asked us for a lift to the hotel. I was surprised she hadn’t gone with John. As far as I was aware, she hadn’t even said hello to him yet. She gave us a couple of anecdotes about Emma’s kids, who were all absolute horrors the way she told it, and then we were there, and I couldn’t put it off any longer, I would have to go and say hello to Renée, I would have to introduce Bill and John to each other, and this afternoon would end eventually. And then we’d go home, and it would all be over, and Bill would make me a cup of tea. Was there any way to concertina time? I could use that cuppa right now.

            Man Mountain was coming across, and he was going to talk to me. I would stay calm. He greeted me by name and told me how he understood Moyra had been very fond of me, and I wasn’t sure how true that was, but she hadn’t disliked me, so I mumbled something. He said how sorry he was about everything, and I thought he was going to cry again. I don’t know what you do with these huge men. You can’t take them onto your lap and comfort them or you’d be flattened. And he had that massive beard—I kept thinking about the Edward Lear limerick about the old man with the beard. I so wanted two owls and a hen to suddenly appear, but they didn’t, and we got past the moment somehow. He’d done his duty and I’d presumably said something right because he smiled and thanked me again and moved on.

            Next was Renée. She gave me a ‘Darling!’ and swept me up in her arms, and she was joyful and sad and wonderful and on absolutely Oscar-winning form—but I loved her for it, and I felt comfortable again and maybe this wasn’t going to be such a trial after all. She and Bill had met before a few times, but I introduced them as if they hadn’t and she was completely charming and won him over in a moment, but then when nobody else was in earshot she said to me, ‘Bamburgh? What did you do that for! Christ knows how much Vicky managed to upset Emma. I’ll have to go up there and sort it out. Poor Emma!’

            ‘That wasn’t me at all—that was Simon. His idea.’

            ‘What? But why? So destructive. Emma’s sensitive.’

            ‘Emma’s a mother of about five hundred kids as far as I can tell. I think Simon had exactly the right idea. He made Vicky see precisely what “life without John” can look like. Isn’t that what you wanted? Might not have been the method, but my mission, should I choose to accept it—and I did—was to help get them over a sticky patch, wasn’t it? With Simon’s help?’

            ‘I don’t know. The theory was fine, but...’

            She stopped and we both looked across the room. John and Vicky were standing yards apart, staring at each other. He looked infinitely sad. I couldn’t read her at all. Renée started to move, but I grabbed her and held her back. She bit her lip and said to me: ‘One summer. That’s all I had. Most I’ve ever had in one go, so I should be grateful, I suppose.’

            ‘Oh, Renée.’

            I put my arm round her shoulders.

            ‘When he’s sad, when he’s lost someone, when he’s desperate, that’s when he turns to me, and I nurse him back, and then—then he leaves me again. The awful thing is it’s worth it.’

            ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Bill. I’d forgotten he was there. ‘Have you any idea what you sound like?’

            He marched across the room towards John and I thought, this is it, this is where they fight. But no. Bill put his hand out. ‘Hello, you must be John. I’m Bill.’

            And John snapped out of whatever it was and shook Bill’s hand, clearly having forgotten the name so with no idea who he might be, but I took a mental snapshot; solid stocky Bill, absolutely determined to stop us behaving like overwrought fools, and tall, slender John, whose face was now breaking into a look of amusement.

‘Bill,’ he said, ‘I could use a drink. Join me?’

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

            And that was it. They disappeared off to the bar, leaving Vicky, resplendent in peacock feathers in the centre of the room, a work of art in herself.

            ‘Renée,’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to be the kind one. Remember?’

            ‘Oh, bugger it,’ she said. ‘Okay. I’ll be good. But I’ll need moral support. Come on.’

            We walked across to Vicky and Renée gave her a hug. ‘My dear, you look stunning—and it is so good to see you again. How was Emma and all her darling little children?’

            ‘The little darlings were huge and gross and very, very smelly, but Emma was fine. We painted. Talked. Had a good time. John looks well—you must have taken good care of him.’

            ‘My dear—the very best.’

            Vicky smirked. ‘Yeah. I could claw your eyes out for that, but actually I’m going to say thank you, and I’m going to mean it. Thank you, Renée. For a while, I wasn’t sure if Moyra had got any of us right, but now I’m thinking she had. Still can’t help wishing she’d drawn you on your council estate, surrounded by winos.’

            ‘Darling, it wasn’t exactly like that.’

            ‘How was it then,’ I said, intrigued because I’d always wondered about this aspect of Renée.

            ‘We ate margarine on Nimble bread because Mum was always slimming. Spam and Branston sandwiches, Vesta Chow Mein for special occasions, Instant Whip for afters, Mick McManus on the telly in the afternoon, Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence, pink bubblegum. You can see why I had to leave. There was a boy, Alan, he was at the same school, and we went out when we were fifteen or so. He was skinny, played a lot of football. A sweet boy, but I’d seen his older brother. I knew what would happen a few years down the line. Eight pints of Trophy Bitter after the match. He would become fat with all the beer, though he’d keep playing football so some of the fat would turn muscle, and maybe the sex would be in technicolour, because it certainly had terrific potential. My mates thought I was amazing, the way I always had those panda eyes from exhaustion. They knew the reason. But if I’d stayed, we’d have got married straight from school, he’d have gone to work in a factory, got made redundant five years later. I’d have kept us going by working in the Spar shop. His dole money would have all gone on his beer.’

‘Kids?’ said Vicky.

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘You might have won the lottery.’

‘The pools in those days, but okay. Say I won the jackpot. He’d buy a stupid car, and I’d have the house decorated in Laura Ashley, which my Mum would think was beautiful, the epitome of sophistication. I would cook lamb Dalesteaks and we would have Viennetta for dessert. My dears, I couldn’t bear it. The thought! I got away while I could.’

‘And Alan?’ I said.

‘No idea. I never saw him again. But I did bump into another old school friend a while back, and it turned out she was busy embezzling from John’s antique business. I decided I didn’t like my old friends. Alan’s probably had a coronary by now anyway.’

            ‘Ah yes, the embezzler! I’ve heard about her,’ said Vicky. ‘Tell me more.’

I left them to it. I drank the remains of my glass of white wine and went to find Bill and John to see if they’d killed each other yet. They weren’t in the bar area, but I had a brainwave and went out to the car park. Bill was showing off. More than showing off—Vicky might have been wearing the feathers, but Bill was the peacock. John was looking sardonic, amused—and fully recovered. Renée had done a brilliant job on him. I went over to join them.

            ‘Frannie,’ said John, and he leaned forward and kissed me. Just the one cheek. ‘Good to see you again.’

            He looked kindly and sort of avuncular. Quite ridiculous. I wanted him to be angry. Unhappy. Needy. Damn you, Renée.

            And then, just when I thought we were all being lovely—nauseatingly so—Bill said to John: ‘You did this, didn’t you,’ and he indicated my cheek.

            John didn’t answer, but his eyes narrowed, and he was sizing Bill up. Bill handed me his glass, and I thought, oh come off it, you two. You’re not really going to. Are you?

            ‘That is between Frannie and myself,’ said John, ‘and I have already apologised.’

            They stared at each other for Christ knows how long. The film score would be by Ennio Morricone. The Good the Bad and the Ugly. I was trying to work out which of us was which when John turned to me and gave me a look that was so full of meaning it would take me forever to work it all out. Then he turned back to Bill and said, ‘I am going to give Frannie a hug, because when I was seventeen years old that was all I wanted to do and I knew I could be happy forever if only she’d let me—but she didn’t let me. And I still want that hug. After we’ve done that, you may punch me if you like, but I don’t think you will, because I am going to leave and go to Vicky and I am going to take Vicky in my arms and hold her for a very, very long time.’

            He did it. He gave me a hug, and of course he had actually done this before—not that Bill knew. We were all play-acting. He’d just spent all summer with Renée, he knew precisely how to play these games—but I enjoyed the hug, and I hugged back as my fourteen-year-old self had longed to do all those years ago, and then it was over. He walked away.

            Bill picked up his drink and finished it. ‘That’s enough for me,’ he said. ‘Shall we go?’

            ‘God, yes! Shall I drive?’

            ‘No!’

We were home in ten minutes, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. John would have gone back in and swept Vicky off her feet, and Renée, if I knew her at all, would have sidled up to Man Mountain and offered comfort the way only Renée could. I went upstairs and brought the naked selfie painting down, unwrapped it carefully and handed it to Bill. He looked at it closely and gave it a ‘Wow!’ much as I’d given his car earlier.

            ‘This is absolutely beautiful,’ he said. He leaned across and kissed me, then looked back at the picture in his hands and grinned.

            I remembered something. ‘So, are we going to do the naked gardening now?’

            ‘Oh yes. Definitely. Too cold to do it outside, though.’ He studied a particular part of the picture and said, ‘Looks like you’ve got a bush needs trimming.’

           

Later, we were lying together on the bed, entwined and warm and comfortable, and Bill said, ‘I think we could use a holiday.’

‘Oh God no, not Paris. Please not Paris.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it. I was thinking of Skye.’

‘Shit. Really? You sure?’

He hugged me harder, kissed me.

‘I owe you a proper honeymoon. Rather ballsed up the first one, didn’t I, and the second was eminently forgettable.’

‘Yes, but...’

I didn’t know what to say. Euan and Angus—they wouldn’t be those young lads any more, they’d be our age; Euan would no longer be the curly-headed boy of my dreams, he’d be a weatherworn crofter who was most likely married with half a dozen kids all of whom would be ridiculously beautiful—or scruffy as hell—and they might have done up the croft and be letting it out as a holiday cottage, or Christ knows what. I couldn’t get my head round it. Back to Skye? Couldn’t do it. Ridiculous suggestion. Bonkers.

‘Thing is,’ said Bill, ‘I behaved like an arsehole. We’ve never talked about this, have we.’

‘No.’

‘I got this idea into my head that you were more interested in those farmer boys than me, and I thought, this is going to be Rachel all over again—I marry someone, and they turn out to be entirely different to the person I’ve built up in my imagination. I was scared and I turned into a pig, no other word for it.’

He stroked my hair, and I ran through all possible scenarios in my head: what would happen if I told him his suspicions had been spot on, I had, indeed fallen for the farmer boy, and he had, indeed, been a pig, and I’d hated him at that moment and regretted getting married and wondered what the hell I had done with my life. That could well be the end of us. Marriage over, full stop. At least it would be an honest ending. But if I kept quiet, or if I denied it all, wouldn’t that actually be worse? Carrying on lying for the sake of a quiet life? That wasn’t life. That was the opposite. Wasn’t even death. It was purgatory. 

‘Euan,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘His name was Euan.’

‘Ah.’

He didn’t say anything else for a long time, but neither did he push me away. I tried to picture Euan’s face. Couldn’t do it. Thought of the Cuillin. They’d be bathed in orange light this time of year, the bracken would be glorious. I wanted—dear God, I needed to be there, I needed it more than anything.

‘Bracken,’ I said, and I was close to sobbing.

‘Who’s that? Who’s Bracken? I thought the other brother was Angus or Hamish or something?’

I laughed, borderline hysterical. ‘No, you twerp, not a person. Bracken. The plant.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m saying I would love to go to Skye with you, there is nothing I want more, and when we get there I want you to gaze at the mountains with me because they will be covered in bracken and they will be the most beautiful thing you have ever seen, and I want you to see what I see, see though my eyes, and not be afraid that I’m going to turn into Rachel, I’d never do that to you, and I want us to trust each other and then we’ll grow worthy of that trust and I don’t know why it has taken me decades to say that out loud. What’s wrong with me for goodness sake! How can it be so hard?’

‘And if those crofter boys are still around?’

‘They won’t remember us, and they probably won’t be there anyway, but if they are, you can deal with them. You dealt with John.’

‘Yeah, in a way, but still wish I’d punched him in the face. Dunno how the hell he stopped me.’

‘He’s clever like that.’

‘Are you in love with him?’

‘Have been, off and on all my life.’

‘Thought so.’

‘Are you okay with that?’

‘No.’

‘Quite right. You shouldn’t be.’

‘Any more than you should be okay with Audrey and Josie and’

‘Shhh...’

We lay there, each lost in our own thoughts, but neither of us let go of the other.

I received an email from Vicky a few days later.

Where did you two get off to? No, I can guess. I was watching the first part. We all were. I really thought Bill was going to flatten John, and then John hugged you and I thought, no, Bill won’t flatten him, he’ll disembowel him—but somehow it didn’t happen, and John was inordinately cheerful when he came back inside. He came across to me and asked me why I hadn’t bothered to dress up for the occasion, then he put his hand round my waist and didn’t let go for at least an hour until he had to because I needed the loo, but when I came back he took hold of me again and he hasn’t really let go since. I don’t know what magic Renée worked, but it was highly effective.

You’ll be relieved to hear I have not fallen against any walls or walked into shelving units recently, and don’t intend to, either. My complexion is clear. We’re back in Paris now. John got some very clever restorer bloke to come round and peel the plasterwork off the walls, keeping Moyra’s artworks—and yours—intact. There’s going to be an exhibition. You’ll be famous! Renée’s going to come. Seems she and Dylan are already an item, though knowing Renée that will be a very temporary arrangement. I can’t see her and that beard co-existing very long, but she claims any bloke who keeps a bag of toffees in his pocket is a catch. That sounds like a very un-Renée thing to say, but what do I know. Maybe she’s accidentally fallen in love with him, despite herself. At least it means my paintings can go back up, and they need to, because they’re where I say ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’ to John in no uncertain terms, and he needs to know that and see it every single day.

Frances, you and Bill were so kind to me. I’ll never forget that. I had a note from Simon the other day, asking if everything had worked out, and I was so pleased I could write back and say yes. He and the pixie have some sort of anniversary coming up and me and John are invited. It’ll be fun. John will turn into Simon for the evening, and be utterly charming, and I’ll be sweet as fuck, just like the pixie. Then we’ll come home and get paralytically drunk and throw each other round the apartment and smash some porcelain, and the world will be back to how it should be.

Give Bill a kiss from me.

Love,

Vicky xxx”