Twenty-Nine
NATASHA CAUGHT THE tube to Embankment. She walked along Millbank, saw Adam long before he saw her. It seemed only minutes ago that he’d kissed her, and at the same time it could have been weeks.
He was leaning on the railings, staring down at the Thames. Just as she had been the second time they’d met, in Oxford. It was hard to believe it was the same river. The water was the colour of steel, and the weak sunlight was making no impression on it. On the opposite bank, random electric lights emanated from a jungle of tower-block windows.
It was surprisingly warm for January though, as London sometimes was. People were strolling along the pavements as if it were spring.
Steven had told her, when she was little, how large cities created their own microclimates, so that if you travelled a few miles, just into the suburbs even, the weather would be quite different. It was one thing, accepting manmade streets and buildings, but the knowledge that once created they had the power to subvert nature made them seem sinister.
She’d better watch it. She’d brought The Pre-Raphaelite Dream to read on the train, intending to go through it more thoroughly and had obviously been getting too involved with Rossetti and Morris and their band, picking up their mistrust of the modern world, the way they saw cities, factories and machines as corrupting, evil entities and wanting to retreat into a world of Medieval chivalry and arcane mystical religions. But then she’d always been like that to some degree. You couldn’t study history, live your life with one foot always in the past, if a part of you didn’t yearn to go back.
So long as she could take her sports car, iMac, MP3 player and mobile phone with her of course.
She went to stand next to Adam, not quite touching. The water was a long way down, shifting and treacherous. There was one small boat, making slow progress up towards London Bridge. The putt-putt of its engine kept cutting out.
Adam turned to face her. He slipped his arm around her waist, kissed her. The shock she felt was like an electrical charge that left her a little dizzy and disoriented.
‘Am I late?’
He shook his head. ‘I was early. Didn’t want to keep you waiting.’
He looked at her with his direct gaze. It would be so easy to believe that she was the exclusive recipient, if she’d not seen evidence to the contrary, seen him behave exactly the same way at the studio, with Angie and Diana. He was one of those men who’d perfected the knack of making every woman feel the only one in the world. A useful skill for a photographer, perhaps. But exactly the type she could do without. Keep telling yourself that.
They walked back the way she’d come, towards the Tate.
‘You never explained,’ he said. ‘Why you don’t wear a watch.’
She was surprised he’d remembered that. ‘Something to do with too much static charge in my body.’
‘I can believe it. What happens?’
‘The time goes haywire.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s kind of freaky. Least, I thought it was when I was a kid.’
‘That’s when you don’t want to be different. When you’re older, different’s good.’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes not.’
Groups of young people were sitting on the steps of the gallery, knocking back cans of Coke, eating hot dogs they’d bought from a stand opposite.
Adam put his arm around Natasha’s shoulder, directed her down one of the long white corridors that spidered off to the galleries.
She’d a pretty good idea where they were heading. No doubt he’d thought she’d be interested, wanted her to see the paintings that had influenced his photographs. She was, but just now she wished they were somewhere else, anywhere.
She saw Ophelia immediately they entered the long, narrow gallery, hung at eye level on the right side of the room, halfway along the pale blue painted wall.
Beata Beatrix was hanging at the far end. Natasha walked across and stood before it.
There was a radiance about the picture, akin to the soft focus in Adam’s photographs, as if light was shining through it like a stained glass window. It made the edges of Lizzie’s red hair glow. Lizzie, or Beatrice, had her eyes closed, her face tilted upwards in an attitude of surrender, with her hands open in her lap to receive the white poppies. Natasha stared at the heavy lidded eyes, the pallor of her skin, and almost supine repose of her body, despite its erect position. You could imagine, all to easily, how he might have taken her dead body, sat her up and tilted her face, allowed her limp hands to rest just so.
‘They should be asphodels, not poppies,’ Adam whispered in her ear, making her jump.
‘Why’s that?’
‘“My regret follows you to the grave.”’ Natasha looked at him. ‘The Language of Flowers. Bethany was into all that.’
She turned back to the picture, seeing only the bouquet in Highgate. Fresh poppies.
Then, suddenly, she remembered the bouquet Adam said was in the jam jar beside the diary the morning Bethany went away. ‘Which flowers did she leave you?’ She tried to sound casual.
‘They were purple, surrounded by lots of grasses and leaves, pretty. Then that was her job.’
‘But what were the flowers, do you know?’
‘I’m not very good at that kind of thing. African Violets maybe.’ He looked at her.
‘Just asking.’
He nodded towards the painting. ‘There’s something really disturbing about it, have you noticed? She’s supposed to be praying, or contemplating heaven, and there’s that phallic symbol pointing at her face.’
Natasha hadn’t spotted it before, but she did now. The sundial in the background was incredibly suggestive.
She moved down the room to stand beside a little family who were admiring Ophelia.
‘She had to lie in a bath of water whilst the artist painted her,’ the mother was saying quietly, as if she was telling a bedtime story. ‘There were candles underneath to keep the water warm, but the picture took so long to paint that they all went out, and the water grew so cold poor Lizzie caught pneumonia. Her father was terribly upset and sued the artist.’
‘How much did he get?’ The little boy asked, with a glee that made Natasha smile.
‘I’m not sure. It wouldn’t have been as much as your pocket money. It was a long time ago.’
‘Why didn’t she say she was freezing?’ the girl asked.
‘She didn’t want to ruin the picture.’
It had never struck Natasha before that paintings could be much more lifelike than photographs.
She glanced at Adam, watching her from a bench in the middle of the room and she realised then how brilliantly he had replicated it all in his photograph. Bethany’s dress could easily have been the one Lizzie had worn, and Adam had managed to recreate the setting perfectly, down to the reeds protruding from the water and the branch of the tree that overhung it. You could almost imagine he’d come to sit on the same bank just a few minutes after John Everett Millais had left.
And Bethany must have stood exactly where they did now, studying the picture, staring into Lizzie’s eyes. She must be a talented actress. For in Adam’s photographs she had caught the expression exactly, the wildness and despairing sorrow.
Unless of course, there had been no need for her to pretend.
The caption beside the painting listed the abundance of plants and flowers, explaining how Millais had taken pains to be accurate and true to nature, explaining also the symbolism of them.
The willow, forsaken love; the nettle growing amongst its branches, pain; the daisies near Ophelia’s right hand, innocence; the pansies floating on the dress, love in vain.
The chain of violets around her neck, death of the young.
Violets, not African Violets. But maybe in December the African ones were all that were available.
Bethany and Adam had come here together. Natasha almost sensed her now, sitting in the space between them. If she turned she almost believed she’d see her.
Lizzie. Elizabeth. Beth. Bethany.
Why hadn’t she spotted that before? Bethany probably wasn’t her real name either.
‘You can see why they’ve put those two pictures together.’ Adam gave a short nod towards the picture that hung above Ophelia.
It was of a fragile boy stretched out on a narrow rumpled couch in a garret, his head and arm lolling off the edge. He was dressed in a white frilled shirt and beautiful blue silk breeches that lent a sickly, lurid blue-grey hue to the painting. His red hair curled around his wan face.
Natasha recognised it from the book she had at home, but went to read the description anyway.
Chatterton, by Henry Wallis.
Thomas Chatterton was a poet whose spurious medieval histories copied out in a fake hand on old parchment, his melancholy life and youthful suicide, fascinated artists and writers of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth called him the ‘sleepless soul that perished in his pride’.
If Bethany had stood here then she too had read it, been bombarded with those two haunting, beautiful images of suicide …
‘You can see the fascination with dying young,’ Adam said quietly. ‘Rossetti was obsessed with the idea of earthly love cut short by early death, having a lover to worship in heaven. Like Dante and Beatrice.’ What was he saying? That the idea appealed to him too? ‘The fantasy came true for Rossetti. I’ve often wondered if it lived up to expectations.’
She stood up.
He grabbed her hand then, aggressive, his fingers tightening on her wrist. ‘There’s something I wanted to tell you.’
‘Let go of me. You’re hurting.’
He released her. She went to sit down on a bench, shaken, keeping a distance, her eyes fixed ahead.
It was then that she noticed the small watercolour that hung to the left of Ophelia.
It was Turner’s painting of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.
Jake Romilly had taken a picture of Bethany beneath the bridge with the same name in Oxford. This must have been where he had the idea. They’d probably all come here then. Bethany, Adam, Jake Romilly.
Adam must have followed the direction of her gaze. ‘They called Waterloo Bridge the Bridge of Sighs for a while, because there were so many sucides there.’
She stared at him. Then she remembered the conversation they’d just been having. Adam was only explaining a probable reason for the picture’s presence beside the other two, why a pretty watercolour of a bridge should hang beside two paintings of people who’d killed themselves.
But she couldn’t rid herself of the thought: He knows about the note. He’s known all along.
This was all a trap, some kind of trick. He was toying with her, in some horrible, cruel way she couldn’t begin to understand.
Adam’s voice reached her. ‘When I came here with Bethany she said something to me. We were talking about how the Pre-Raphaelites believed that evil was female in origin, that beautiful women corrupted and destroyed the men who loved them. And Bethany said to me, “That’s what I’ll do to you. I can’t help it. I have a bad heart.”’
Thirty
‘LET’S GET OUT of here.’ Natasha led the way back through the gallery, following the signs to the café and restaurant, under the rotunda, down the stairs to the basement. She chose the café, judging the service would be more prompt. She and Adam ordered two bottles of beer that were plonked on the counter immediately.
Adam lit up. ‘What do you think she meant?’
She looked at him. ‘I’ve no idea.’ But she was thinking: Bethany’s secrecy, her sudden departure. What did she have to hide?… All along it was Adam she’d been suspicious of, when perhaps, if there was some crime or mystery behind Bethany’s disappearance, he was not the one responsible? Unless of course, he was being very clever, this was just one more lie, another dimension to whatever game he was playing. ‘Are you quite sure she didn’t mean it as a joke?’
He was easing the corner of the damp label off the beer bottle, the way you took a price tag off a present, so it left no trace. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ he said. ‘I just thought you should know, that’s all.’
‘I wish you’d told me before.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘Is there anything else while you’re at it?’
‘No.’
Despite her better judgement, she’d cut back her distrust and suspicions of him to a seed of doubt. But it was like a weed, with roots too tenacious to be completely eradicated.
Her bag was on the table, the spine of the book poking out. Adam read out the title ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Dream. Do you always immerse yourself so deeply in your research?’
‘I was interested in the Pre-Raphaelites when I was a teenager.’
‘This job is close to your heart then.’
He was still looking into her eyes. Marcus’s had been so dark, like Steven’s. Natasha wasn’t normally attracted to blue eyes, the colour of cold and of ice. But there was nothing cold about Adam’s eyes now. They were as changeble as water that took its colour from the sky; blue, grey, green, or black as night.
She’d drunk the beer too quickly, could feel it working round her system, going to her head. She looked away from Adam. The fatal attraction of danger. She’d thought she was too sensible to fall for that.
‘There’s something else,’ he said. He reached inside his jacket, produced a folded brown envelope. ‘This arrived for her at the flat this morning.’
The frank bore the Family Records Centre logo.
Inside was a death certificate. For a man named Harold Leyburn, from Dorchester in Dorset, who died in January 1921 aged thirty-five.
After everything else Natasha couldn’t take this in, make any sense of it at all.
The obvious conclusion: Bethany had started to research her family history herself and this Harold Leyburn was one of her ancestors. He could be a great-grandparent. Just three generations back.
‘I’ll have a contact try to track down any living descendants,’ Natasha said, mechanically. It would all take time. Why the hell hadn’t this come earlier?
She realised Adam hadn’t passed any comment. She forced her eyes away from the certificate to look at him. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should just let her go.’
‘No. We can’t give up looking now.’
Adam was toying with a paper flower that was stuck in a stainless steel vase in front of them. A red rose. ‘The only symbol in the language of flowers that everyone understands,’ he said. ‘But does it mean love or the Labour party to most people now?’
‘What a depressing thought.’
There were no roses in the bouquet Bethany left Adam, and she’d have access to anything she wanted surely, working in a florists?
A lot of people bring flowers, the Highgate guide had said. Where did they get them?
Thirty-One
NATASHA MET STEVEN in a dark, spit and sawdust tavern off Chancery Lane. He was with a trio of the team he was taking back to Italy and they’d been downing pints for the best part of the afternoon judging by the collection of empty glasses ranged around them, and the general decibel level.
Steven rose, looking steady as a rock, to kiss her. He introduced her to his colleagues, most of whom Natasha had met briefly before, in similar locations.
‘V and T?’ Steven said, grabbing an extra stool. ‘My round.’
He came back with a double. ‘You’ve some catching up to do.’
There was no point trying to pace yourself with this lot. ‘You got your funding, I take it?’ Natasha shouted above the din.
Steven raised his glass, sank half of it. ‘Just a few quid short of what we wanted. It’ll do for now though.’
‘When do you go back?’
‘Soon as possible, hey, mate?’ Freddie, one of the gang, winked.
‘Something you’re not telling me?’ Natasha said.
‘Someone more like.’
‘Thank you, Freddie,’ said Steven.
/> ‘Say no more.’ Natasha winked back at Freddie, to make sure he didn’t for one second think he’d got one over on her. Children weren’t supposed to like hearing of their parents’ sexual exploits but Natasha was well used to it, unable to summon any indignation. Which worried her sometimes. Where were her scruples? But she knew none of Steven’s dalliances were serious. He was like a sailor, a girl in every ruin.
‘What are you doing later tonight?’ Natasha asked him.
‘Open to offers. Depends who’s asking.’
‘Me. I need a bed for the night if there’s one spare.’
‘We’re staying at a cheap hotel in Piccadilly. I’m sure there’ll be a chair,’ Steven said.
‘How gallant,’ Freddie commented.
‘For me, you idiot,’ Steven said.
The hotel room was small and dingy, neon lights outside that made certain you knew you were on the outskirts of Soho. The single bed was fairly comfortable, with crisply laundered white sheets that were tucked in so tight you felt as if you were in a straightjacket.
‘Are you all right?’ Steven asked her.
‘Fine thanks.’ Which wasn’t quite true.
* * *
It was still dark and the meter was already up to seventeen pounds. A scented pine tree dangled from the roof of the taxi and the smell, combined with her raging hangover, was beginning to make Natasha feel sick. She’d bought a Danish pastry but couldn’t face it. The journey to Highgate seemed to be taking ages. They’d started at a crawl through Piccadilly, been swept along with the morning influx of traffic and picked up just a little speed round Regent’s Park and on into Camden. Hampstead, with the Heath flanking either side of the road, had been quieter, almost desolate in comparison.
Eighteen pounds now. But at least they were moving. When Natasha had first come down to London, she’d been amazed that you were charged by time as much as distance, and could be stationary in traffic, watching the pounds clocking up.
She’d had an issue with that in her own work, since she’d set up as an independent researcher. At the College of Arms, projects had been sub-contracted out to her, with the Heralds taking a commission, handling all the client liaison, dealing with the invoicing. A similar system had operated at Generations. Natasha had worked out her own free structure, and she hated charging people if she didn’t feel she’d done a good job.
Pale as the Dead Page 17
