by M. B. Shaw
‘Oh.’ Ariadne looked momentarily disappointed. ‘That might be a bit late for his retirement. Still, I suppose I could always give it to him afterwards. It doesn’t really matter, does it?’
‘It does also depend on how many sittings the subject can do,’ Iris clarified. ‘I imagine your husband’s very busy, especially with the TV special coming up.’
‘Oh, Dom’s never too busy to have an attractive woman focusing solely on him.’ Ariadne rolled her eyes indulgently. ‘He’ll adore the attention, believe me. Just as long as you don’t go all Lucian Freud and make him look ninety. I’m afraid my husband’s terribly vain.’
It must be tough being married to a man like that, thought Iris, and even tougher when the man was a ‘star’, accustomed to having his every whim indulged. Constantly having to subjugate one’s own ego. Then again, having witnessed Ariadne’s patience with both Lorcan and Billy, the woman seemed to positively thrive on abnegation and sacrifice.
‘Can I think about it?’ asked Iris, getting up to refill Ariadne’s tea and offering a delighted Lorcan another Jaffa cake, his fourth. ‘I’m very flattered by the offer, but I’m on a sort of hiatus at the moment. The timing might not be ideal, for either of us.’
‘Of course.’ Ariadne rose too, smoothing down her skirt and picking a tiny piece of lint off the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘No pressure at all. But I do hope you will think about it. Because, honestly, I think it might be fun. And it seems silly to have you living in the cottage and not take advantage of your amazing talents.’
My amazing talents, thought Iris, watching mother and son walk back up to the big house, arm in arm, sweetly devoted. She hadn’t thought about her art in those terms for a long while.
Maybe it was time to start another portrait. Dom Wetherby would certainly be a prestigious commission, not to mention a fascinating man to get to know. The author, his family and their idyllic house all intrigued Iris. And Ariadne Wetherby had said she could ‘name her price’.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Iris said aloud to herself.
But in her heart, she already knew her answer.
Somewhere above her, a cloud had started lifting.
Chapter Three
The first thing Ian McBride was aware of was the pain in his head. As if a miniature army of malicious dwarves were now bashing away from the inside with countless tiny pickaxes.
Then he sat up in bed, realised immediately that he was going to be sick, and staggered into the bathroom, only just making it to the loo in time.
Christ, he felt dreadful. Dreadful. He was too old for this.
Dropping two Alka-Seltzers into a toothmug and filling it up with water, he forced himself to drink the frothing liquid, only narrowly avoiding throwing up again. Then he shuffled along the corridor into the kitchen, leaning on the walls for support. He managed to put some coffee on to brew before slumping down at the table, still strewn with the detritus of last night’s epic drinking session, resting his throbbing head in his hands.
What had happened yesterday exactly?
His latest play, Dreamers, had been cancelled. Ian got the call from his agent, Mike Rogers, just before lunch.
‘I’m sorry, Ian, I really am. But the ticket sales were just so poor. Small theatres like Pickering barely break even in a good year. They can’t afford to take risks, however good the production.’
Poor Mike, Ian thought, remembering guiltily how he’d torn a strip off the agent on the phone. It wasn’t Mike’s fault that North Yorkshire’s theatre-going public had all the critical discernment of a heap of slurry, or that they’d only ever part with their money for bloody Alan Ayckbourn. Still, Ian had lashed out like a wounded animal, then proceeded to the bar at the Butcher’s Arms in Battersea, drinking solidly through the afternoon so that by the time Iris called – was it around six? – he’d been in a dark, belligerent mood.
Only fragments of their conversation came back to him this morning. Iris had told him excitedly about her commission to paint Dominic Wetherby. Coming on the back of his own cancelled play, his wife’s small success had felt like a well-timed kick in the ribs. Ian had been jealous, and his jealousy had made him angry and scathing: Dom Wetherby was a giftless bastard, on the pages of whose novels Ian would be reluctant to so much as wipe his arse. If Iris wanted to cheapen her own modest talent fawning over smug tossers like Wetherby, that was up to her. But she needn’t call Ian expecting a round of applause.
He knew he was being a dick. Even at the time, he knew it. It was like that proverb they used to trot out at AA meetings about resentment: ‘It’s like swallowing poison and then wondering why the other person doesn’t die.’ But how were you supposed to stop? How could you not feel resentment when everything you’d worked for, everything you deserved, was crumbling around you like the bloody Parthenon?
After that, the conversation was a bit of a blur. The commission meant Iris would have to stay on at the Mill through Christmas and possibly New Year too, working. She’d asked Ian if he wanted to join her at the cottage for Christmas, an offer he’d dismissed instantly and unkindly, and then been hurt by the relief he detected in her voice after he said no.
He’d hung up on her then and, to his intense shame now, had gone home to their Clapham flat, rushed straight into Iris’s home office, emptied her precious drawers full of doll’s-house furniture onto the floor, all the stuff she’d left behind, and stamped on the miniature chairs and tables and beds in a jealous rage, listening to the satisfying crack as they shattered beyond repair under his feet, like the bones of tiny mice.
What the hell is wrong with me?
The whistling coffee pot interrupted his miserable retrospective, slicing into his throbbing skull like a Gamma Knife. Grimly Ian shuffled back to the stove, poured himself a strong and bitter mug of Colombia’s finest, and headed into the sitting room.
Sinking into his favourite armchair, Ian looked around the room. The small but light-filled space was the nicest room in the flat by far and was dominated by Iris’s portraits, which hung from every wall, a constant reminder of her absence. The only spot not taken up by Iris’s work was directly over the fireplace, where a heavy gilt mirror had been hung, to make the room look bigger. Ian caught his reflection in it now and grimaced. He’d been a handsome man once, for a long time in fact, but in the last few miserable years, age had caught up with him, swiftly and brutally. His once-thick head of dark hair was now distinctly wispy and grey, and his grey eyes, though still soulful and intense, were now ringed with an ugly latticework of lines and grooves, liked the cracked bed of a dried-out river. His jowls drooped; his shoulders sagged. He looked like a once-proud sailing ship, now sodden and cracked from the relentless pounding of the waves. Waves of disappointment and humiliation, of unfulfilled promise.
Iris’s portrait of him, a miniature she’d painted in the early years of their marriage, hung just to the left of the mirror, and was almost unbearable to look at now. Where had that person gone? Not just the good looks but the hope, the confidence, the joy? It took all of Ian’s remaining self-restraint not to destroy that too.
Things hadn’t always been like they were now. When Ian first met Iris at Oxford, the attraction had been instant and profound, on both sides. Ian had been Iris’s tutor, sixteen years her senior and on the brink of his first major professional success. His play Broken was about to be given a West End run. He’d been full of joy back then, full of confidence and creative energy, proud of his own work but also generous about the work of others, including Iris’s.
‘Her writing’s good,’ Ian used to tell people, ‘but you should see her paint. She’s incredible.’
Ian didn’t think Iris was incredible anymore. There had been too many fights for that, too much water under the bridge. Unable to live up to his own early promise as a playwright, Ian’s confidence and creativity had been replaced by anger and bitterness to the point where he no longer made any attempt to hide his naked loathing of any writer more successful th
an he was. Increasingly, he began taking his frustration and disappointment out on his wife.
Not that he’d ever hurt Iris physically. She wouldn’t have stood for that. But in other, more subtle ways, he had worn away at her over the years, just as her artistic success had worn away at him. Iris had run through a list of his marital misdemeanours in one of their last, most vicious rows: his barbed ‘jokes’ about everything from her appearance, especially her clothes, which for some reason had begun to embarrass him lately, to her taste in music, to her friends. He’d come to particularly dislike Iris’s friend Annie Proctor and her boyfriend, Joe. Annie taught yoga and reiki healing. Iris had met her on one of the alternative fertility treatment courses she dabbled in, and the two women connected at once. Joe owned the Love Organic health-food café on Clapham High Road.
‘I mean, what on earth is there to resent about Annie and Joe?’ Iris challenged him. ‘Their kindness?’
‘How about the fact that they’re a pair of grubby, ignorant hippies without a brain cell between them?’ Ian shot back. ‘I always expect to find a dirty toenail clipping in my lentil soup at Love Organic, and that Annie should be ashamed of herself, peddling false hope to desperate childless women at eighty quid an hour. She’s a charlatan.’
His relentless negativity rankled. Although perhaps worst of all was his constant criticism of Iris’s paintings, dressed up as praise: ‘Thank God Iris produces such commercial stuff. If it weren’t for her paint-to-order portraits, we’d have starved long ago. I don’t know how she does it.’
Ian knew there was truth to some of Iris’s accusations, but he’d reached a point where any criticism, justified or not, was unbearable. So instead he’d hit back, turning the tables on Iris about the IVF, round after failed round, the endless rollercoaster of hope and despair, longing and loss that had taken its toll on both of them, emotionally and financially. Was it any wonder he’d grown fed up with a wife who cried all the time? Whose hormonal depressions meant that she frequently struggled to get out of bed, never mind put dinner on the table?
‘Jesus, Iris,’ Ian had finally snapped. ‘I never even wanted kids! You knew that when we met. I’ve wasted a hundred grand on this shit, five fucking cycles, and now you want to do another one? When’s it going to end? Listen to the doctors! Get it through your head. YOU. CAN’T. HAVE. CHILDREN.’
Weirdly, it was the ‘I’ve wasted a hundred grand’ that seemed to rankle with Iris the most. Scathingly, she’d reminded him that it was her paintings that had produced the money for their fertility treatments, her ‘commercial paint-to-order’ portraits that had paid for IVF, just as they paid for everything else, from the mortgage to Ian’s beloved bespoke Savile Row suits. ‘My wardrobe may make me “look like a clown”, as you so sweetly put it, but at least they don’t cost us the bloody earth!’
Again, in his more rational moments, Ian was intelligent enough to recognise the truth of his wife’s arguments. But his deep shame made it impossible for him to admit his own failure, as a provider as well as a writer. Iris had waited in vain for days for an apology, or even a kind word from him, but none was forthcoming. A few days later she’d answered the ad in the Sunday Times and buggered off to Hampshire. The rest, as they say, was history.
Flicking on the TV, Ian let the self-justification begin. He reminded himself that he wasn’t the only one to blame for the breakdown in his and Iris’s marriage, or for last night’s row. Iris had long ago stopped supporting him, stopped believing in his writing, stopped caring about anything at all except her longed-for baby, an imaginary infant that Ian had grown to hate over the years. How ironic that a person who had never even existed should have robbed him, robbed both of them, of so much.
And then of course it was Iris who’d left, buggering off to Hampshire and abandoning him. Although they both knew that, emotionally, she’d jumped ship long before she ever rented Mill Cottage.
He’d been wrong to break her doll’s-house things last night, he admitted to himself, sipping the bitter coffee as he channel-surfed, looking for something distracting to watch on television. It was spiteful and childish and he regretted it.
But then hadn’t Iris done the same thing to his heart? Stamped on it till it cracked, till it was as broken and ruined as the rest of him? And wasn’t that worse, in the end?
If Iris cared more about painting the portrait of some two-bit fiction writer than she did about coming home and repairing their marriage, she could go to hell.
* * *
A few miles across London in Wandsworth, four-year-old Lottie Wetherby twirled proudly round her kitchen.
‘Look, Daddy! Look how sparkly I am! Do you think I’ll be the sparkliest out of all the snowflakes?’
Marcus Wetherby looked up from the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. ‘The sparkliest? Oh, no question. Definitely.’
Marcus grinned at his wife, Jenna, who was busy wiping porridge out of their son’s hair with one hand and trying to clear away the breakfast things with the other. Poor Jenna had been up till midnight painstakingly gluing pieces of glitter-covered polystyrene together and sewing them into specially made ‘pouches’ on Lottie’s leotard for her school Christmas concert. And it wasn’t even December yet! Miss Quinley, Lottie’s sadist of a teacher, had decided that all the reception girls were to be snowflakes this year and that parents were responsible for costume-making.
‘Parents!’ Jenna had scoffed when the letter came home. ‘Mothers, you mean. Why not call a spade a spade? I don’t think any of the dads will be rushing home and racing for their sewing boxes, do you? It’s bad enough that she sends Lottie home singing that dreadful song twenty-four seven.’
Marcus agreed, on both counts. He was the first to admit that his wife did everything with the children. Jenna was a devoted mother, just like his own mum, Ariadne, had been with him and his brothers. As for Lottie’s singing of ‘I’m a little snowflake, white and soft’ to the tune of ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ tunelessly and incessantly for the last three weeks straight, this was more than even Marcus’s highly developed doting-father gene could tolerate.
Putting down the paper, Marcus took the dirty plates from his wife and kissed her.
‘The costume’s a triumph.’
Jenna kissed him back. ‘A very fragile triumph. See if you can persuade her to take it off before something snaps,’ she said, thinking how handsome and English Marcus looked, with his tortoiseshell glasses and polished brogues. An American herself, from Kansas City, Jenna Franklin had met Marcus Wetherby when she was an exchange student in London, the year before she qualified as a child psychologist. The attraction was instant, on both sides. Jenna was a classically beautiful girl, tall and blonde and athletic. And Marcus was so gloriously different to all the boys she knew from back home, bookish and funny and intensely charming. A less selfish version of his father, in fact, as Jenna would later learn.
While Marcus dutifully scooped Lottie up and carried her upstairs to extricate her from her costume, Jenna distracted their three-year-old, Oscar, with a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD and was about to start loading the dishwasher when the phone rang.
‘Oh, good morning, Jenna darling. Is Marcus about?’
Ariadne’s voice drifted gently over the line like thistledown on a soft breeze. Jenna felt herself tensing. It wasn’t that she disliked her mother-in-law. Ariadne had never been anything other than kind towards her. But Jenna did resent the degree to which Ariadne relied on Marcus, ringing him up constantly and asking his advice on everything from financial decisions to what dress Marcus thought she should wear to Dom’s latest book launch. Now, with Christmas and the all-important cocktail party fast approaching, she was being more intrusive than ever.
Christmas was a big deal in the Wetherby family. And it always ‘officially’ began with Dom and Ariadne’s Christmas Eve cocktails at the Mill, an event so star-studded and fabulous that it always made the pages of Tatler and Vogue. This lavish and very public Yuletide celebration was followed by an
equally perfect but strictly private family Christmas Day, the order of which was always the same: stockings, breakfast, church, family quiz, late lunch and present opening around the tree, followed by a long walk with the dog along Hazelford Meadows. Ariadne’s elderly father, Clive, was always invited, getting deafer and more demanding by the year, but even his waspish asides were indulged and appreciated as ‘part of the fun’. Nothing about Christmas at the Mill could be anything less than wonderful.
Except that of course none of it was really wonderful. To Jenna’s eyes, the entire holiday felt like a performance. Like one long, rigidly scripted play, designed to conceal all the resentments and enmities and jealousies bubbling beneath the Wetherby family’s glamorous surface. There was a pervasive dishonesty to Christmas at the Mill that bothered Jenna more with each passing year. The fact that Marcus either couldn’t or wouldn’t see it only made matters worse.
Right now it was the Christmas Eve party that was consuming Ariadne the most. Just last night she’d kept Marcus on the phone for well over an hour, rabbiting on about Billy, Marcus’s black sheep of a brother, how hard things were with him at home, and how worried she was that he might be going to spoil the event or embarrass Dom in front of their famous friends, not to mention everyone in the village.
Once she’d finally exhausted the subject of the party, she switched into a monologue about some artist they had staying in Mill Cottage who might be going to paint Dom’s portrait, Iris somebody or other. And of course Marcus had listened, patiently, as he always did, while the supper Jenna had prepared for him grew cold. Marcus was incapable of saying no to his mother, whom he seemed to regard as some sort of paragon. It was bad enough that they had to go to the Mill for Christmas every single year, but the daily calls about canapé menus and guest lists and God knows what else, starting in November? That, in Jenna’s view, was too much.
‘He’s busy just now, Ariadne,’ she said, quietly but firmly, cupping her hand over the receiver so that Marcus wouldn’t hear it was his mother and demand the phone. ‘Can I help?’
