The Christmas Invitation

by Trisha Ashley

  In fact, if Al hadn’t sought me out in my studio space at college after Lex’s wife, Lisa, died, to tell me exactly what he thought of me, I wouldn’t have known the roles of both scapegoat and Delilah had been thrust upon me.

  I think what had hurt most was that Lex must have told Al everything that had happened … or what he remembered, anyway.

  Now, seeing Lex so unexpectedly had brought it all back, as raw as if it had happened yesterday, instead of – I did some rapid mental arithmetic – fourteen years ago.

  What were the odds of my running into him here, in the wilds of Lancashire? Infinitesimal, I would have thought. And he’d looked at me as if his worst nightmare had come back to haunt him, too, though perhaps that was partly because seeing me had suddenly brought back the pain of losing Lisa.

  He’d returned to college only once after her death, to collect some of his work, and when we’d come face to face in the corridor he’d turned on his heel and strode away before I could express my sadness at his loss – for Lisa had been a glowing, beautiful person, both inside and out. At the time I’d been puzzled and hurt, but later, when Al cornered me and in one furious, unstoppable outburst told me what he thought of me, I’d simply wanted never to see or even to think about either of them again.

  How young we’d been! I was just twenty-two and Lex and Lisa only a year or two older. But I was not the person Lex had thought me then, and I’d changed even more over the ensuing years. For a start, I now understood the tragedy of loss so much better …

  Whatever emotion my sudden appearance yesterday had conjured up in Lex, it had been powerful enough to make him turn round and leave without a word, like a ghastly reprise of our last meeting.

  And if I’d had an ounce of sense, that’s what I’d have done too: got back in the van and driven off, then sent some kind of apology to Clara later. Now, having missed my opportunity to make a fast escape, I was stuck here until after the Solstice on the 21st. Two weeks suddenly seemed like a very long time.

  If Clara and Henry could give me enough sittings, I was very sure I could finish the major part of both portraits by then, for once the initial drawing on to the canvas was completed, I used a bold, almost impressionistic technique with a palette knife to apply the paint. When the spirit was with me, I’d usually finish the face within two sittings and the rest in four or five … or at my leisure, back at my studio.

  I hadn’t actually agreed that I would stay for Christmas, so I could say that I’d realized how much I’d miss the Yule Feast at the Farm with all my surrogate family, which I would, however alluring the thought of a traditional family Christmas had been before I found out about Lex.

  Mind you, I already suspected that a lot of traditions at the Red House would turn out to be of the inhabitants’ own devising, though probably just as much fun.

  The image of Lex’s face at the moment he had turned and clocked just who had arrived at the Red House yesterday slid unbidden and unwanted back into my mind. It was hard to define. Shock? Anger? Even a touch of contempt?

  Still, now he knew I was here, he’d probably avoid the place until I’d gone, and if he did appear, I’d make myself scarce.

  I sighed. There was no point in lying there fruitlessly going over and over it all. The sooner I set up my painting gear and got going, the better!

  I showered, washing another layer of green out of my hair in the process, and dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a long, loose stripy knitted tunic with handy pockets. All were indelibly marked by oil paint, permanent souvenirs of portraits past – happier memories.

  I twisted up my hair into a high knot – it was just long enough and kept it out of the way when I was working – and then I was ready.

  Before I went downstairs I looked out of the window where, past the tops of a lot of majestically waving fir trees, I could see right down into the drowned valley. The dull, unpolished pewter surface of the water sullenly mirrored the surrounding hills and the dark pine trees that crowded up close to the shore, as if daring each other to take a dip in the icy water. They reminded me of the Forestry Commission woodland next to the Farm, which a few years previously had suddenly sprouted walking trails and a chalet café with a visitor centre.

  I felt quite guilty as I went downstairs, because it was so late. The house was quiet, except for the grandfather clock ticking heavily in the hall.

  Clara had told me breakfast and lunch were help-yourself affairs in the kitchen, so I went down the dark passage and opened the door at the end on to light, cosiness and the mouth-watering fragrance of warm bread.

  ‘There you are, darling,’ said Clara, a slab of bread and jam poised halfway to her lips. ‘And very workmanlike you look, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so late,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all, you were tired and needed your rest,’ she assured me. ‘Den and Tottie have taken Teddy to school and then they’re going to do a little shopping. Tottie always gets the siege mentality at this time of year, afraid we’ll get snowed or iced in, so she stuffs the larder and freezer until they bulge at the seams.’

  ‘Do you often get snowed in?’ I asked anxiously, for if they did, that might make my getaway difficult. Come to that, River might not be able to get here.

  ‘Fairly often, but the road to Thorstane is generally cleared after a few days. Once we were snowed in for a week at Easter, though, and Tottie has never forgotten it!’

  ‘I don’t think I would have done, either,’ I said, thinking that my tall, narrow camper van was certainly not built for difficult driving conditions.

  ‘They’ll be back shortly, I’m sure, and then Den can give you a hand bringing in your painting gear.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. Nothing’s heavy and I’m used to carting it about.’

  ‘Well, have something to eat, first. The coffee is hot on the stove and the bread is fresh from the oven. We have one of those bread-making machines, and Henry and Den have lots of fun experimenting with different types of dough. If men have to have a hobby, then producing something delicious is a good one. This loaf was so tasty it seemed a shame to toast it.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll just have it as it is too,’ I agreed, and spread mine with butter and some of Tottie’s own honey.

  I suddenly remembered Clara saying that Tottie was an enthusiastic bottler, jammer and pickler, and I thought my hamper of curds and chutney upstairs would seem to be a bit redundant. I bet they hadn’t already got any chilli chutney capable of blowing their socks off, though.

  ‘Henry likes to work early, but now he’s in the morning room, doing his t’ai chi,’ she said. ‘Lass is watching him. She thinks it must be some kind of game, but she doesn’t know how to join in.’

  I took a bite of bread and honey and chewed thoughtfully. This was not like any household I’d ever stayed in before whilst painting a commission, though it wasn’t any odder than being brought up in a commune full of eccentrics. In fact, I already felt quite at home … or I would have done but for the Lex-sized fly in the ointment.

  Clara soon retired to her study, in order, she said, to dictate the next chapter of her current crime novel, which she estimated would take approximately one hour, after which she’d show me the rest of the downstairs rooms and we could discuss when the first sitting would be and where I wanted to paint her.

  She also added that she had work to do later, so I wasn’t sure what she called the novel writing! Perhaps it was a hobby?

  I took my second cup of coffee through to the studio and found there was quite a good light in there, especially considering it was December. Through the skylight I could see an expanse of icy blue, with ragged clouds scurrying across it, but the wind had stopped howling and instead just emitted the occasional disgruntled and perfunctory moan.

  It still looked bitterly cold out there, though, so I put on my down anorak before going to search for the van, which I discovered parked round the back of the house in a gravelled sweep sheltered by the double garage and stable block and a
stand of slightly battered conifers.

  I ferried in my painting gear using the back door to the garden hall, resisting the lure of the conservatory that led off it, with its mass of greenery crowding up to press long, palm-shaped fingers against the steamy glass.

  I expect that was Tottie’s pigeon too, like the garden, and I’d be interested to see what she was growing in it.

  I wasn’t sure yet where I’d set up my easel, but meanwhile the ancient studio one was there, ready, and after carefully relocating the original owner’s painting gear to one of the empty bookshelves, I set out my own.

  There was something soothing to the soul about laying out the materials of my trade: the soft black pencils and putty rubber, a huge wooden box of oil paints, a palette and the mahl stick – a cane with loads of masking tape wrapped round the end to form a ball, which I used to keep my arm and hand off the wet surface of the canvas while I worked.

  When I brought in the two large canvases intended for Henry and Clara’s portraits, the breeze tried to carry me away, using them as sails.

  The last load included a couple of good lights on tripods, the sort photographers use, which I’d found invaluable in the past. I tried moving the chair on the dais about and angling the lamps at it, but I still wasn’t sure if I would paint Clara there, or Henry, or in their respective studies, which presumably would be full of items of meaning to them and imprinted with their equally strong, but very different personalities.

  In daylight, the studio was rather nice, the walls painted a soft dove grey and furnished with a couple of battered but comfortable easy chairs, as well as the velvet-seated carved one on the dais. The dais itself was partly draped in a rug of faded splendour, which was surely too valuable to be thrown so carelessly about in an artist’s studio.

  The lino floor had a smell of its own, pleasing but indescribable, and evoked a recollection of making linocuts at art college during the foundation year, when we tried our hands at all kinds of art forms, from etching to pottery, before deciding what we wanted to specialize in.

  In my case, I’d already decided: I wanted to study Fine Art, particularly portraits.

  There was a knock on the door and Den appeared with a mug of coffee and two wrapped Italian biscotti, which he set down on one of the smaller painting tables.

  ‘There you are, and the missus says she’s nearly finished murdering some pore innocent and yer to go along to ’er study in ten minutes.’

  That sounded a bit headmistressy, but although I did have something on my conscience, it was going to stay there.

  9

  Treasured Possessions

  Clara’s study was large and light, despite being lined with crammed bookshelves and several tall, glass-fronted cabinets containing what looked like bits of pottery, clay tablets, stone and wood.

  There was a big U-shaped desk in the centre of the room, with various computers and screens on it.

  Clara was seated before a small monitor, talking into one of those old-fashioned ball-on-a-stick microphones.

  ‘The blood ran richly red over the incised letters of the broken tablet and congealed slowly through the night, so that by morning the message appeared to have been filled with dark crimson sealing wax,’ she intoned deeply into the microphone and then stopped, clicked it off and turned with a smile that exposed her large and healthy teeth.

  ‘There we are: one chapter a day and it all comes together in no time. This one is called Written in Blood.’

  From the bit I’d heard, that seemed very appropriate.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your crime novels yet,’ I confessed.

  ‘Why should you? I only started writing them for fun and I certainly don’t expect everyone to want to read them. But if you do fancy trying one, they’re all over there on the shelf, so help yourself.’

  She gestured to a long row of books nearby, which alternated between large hardbacks and shorter paperbacks, like a strange fossil spine … a spine of spines, in fact.

  ‘Stone Dead was my first. Bit dated, but then, so am I.’

  ‘I think I’d like to start with that one,’ I said, finding the paperback and feeling strangely guilty about the hole it left on the shelf, though it was hardly akin to removing the keystone of the universe and watching the sky fall in.

  Going by the array of computer monitors and equipment on the U-shaped desk, I wouldn’t have said Clara was old-fashioned in any way.

  ‘Can you get the internet OK here?’ I enquired. ‘I haven’t tried yet.’ In fact, I didn’t think I’d turned on either my phone or iPad since my arrival, but then, I had had other things on my mind.

  ‘Oh, yes, broadband. You have to be very unlucky these days to be beyond its reach. Just as well we have it, too, because I’m constantly emailing colleagues. And I’ve just got a new version of a very clever program to play with,’ she added enthusiastically, propelling her sturdy wheeled office chair over to the middle monitor without rising from it and quickly bringing up a screen that showed several small fragments of incised clay tablets.

  ‘Cuneiform, Hittite,’ she explained. ‘The pieces appear to be from the same clay tablet, but the images have been obtained from several different sources. Finds in the past were so often divided up and sold on to collectors and museums, not always with their provenance. But luckily I have a photographic memory for where I’ve spotted finds that might be part of the same inscription and with this program, you can bring them together to see if they really do fit.’

  She demonstrated, moving the fragments about and turning them round. It was quite fascinating, like a jigsaw puzzle without the box, so you weren’t sure that all the pieces belonged together, or quite how it would turn out.

  ‘Of course, it’s not as good as actually playing with a tray of pieces,’ she said regretfully. ‘You just don’t have that same feel for what should go where, even if they are too broken to fit neatly any more.’

  ‘I didn’t even know you could do that on a computer,’ I said. ‘But then, I just can’t seem to get interested much in the internet, or phones, or anything else my friends seem to find so riveting. Perhaps being brought up in the commune, with only a landline phone and the radio had something to do with it. I can’t even get that interested in the TV most of the time, unless it’s documentaries. I prefer to read my fiction and see the pictures in my head.’

  ‘I understand what you mean. In my opinion, the internet is a good tool, but a poor master. And sadly, it does seem to have mastered and enslaved an entire generation – when they aren’t binge-watching whole inane TV series.’

  She had that spot-on, I thought.

  ‘Don’t you feel the need to tweet about the day-to-day minutiae of your life every five minutes?’ she asked with a smile. ‘My niece, Zelda, does that.’

  ‘No, I’d rather just live my life rather than record it. And the same for photos. I want to look at things directly, not through a lens. I do take pictures of my sitters on my iPad, though, to help me with the portraits: to get the pose right each time, and to jog my memory for small details if I’m completing them in the studio.’

  ‘You’re a very unusual young woman,’ she remarked, and I thought, but didn’t say, that she was an extremely unusual old one. Not that old seemed the right term for someone so radiantly vital, and her mind certainly wasn’t.

  The light from the screen illuminated the interestingly strong bones of her face and I found myself looking at her now with the eye of a painter. She’d picked up a chunk of engraved stone that had been weighing down a heap of papers and was absently turning it over in her hands, the carnelian seal ring glowing dully as they moved. She was dressed today in a cherry-red jumper, black cord trousers and silver earrings in the form of ankhs. A long string of Egyptian turquoise paste beads hung round her neck, which contrasted wonderfully with the jumper.

  Behind her was the bright patchwork of book spines on the shelves and, I now noticed, a tall wooden post carved with the brightly painted
grimacing heads of various creatures. A bird squatted on top, reminding me of the fierce eagle on the stair post.

  ‘Is that a totem pole?’ I asked.

  ‘A small-scale replica of one. I commissioned it when I visited Canada a few years ago and had it shipped over. The Customs people X-rayed it for drugs before they let me collect it, because they didn’t believe that anyone would pay that much shipping for a carved post.’

  ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘And I want to paint you just the way you are now … that is, if you wouldn’t mind my invading your space?’

  ‘Not at all – invade away,’ she said amiably. ‘When I’m working, I soon forget anyone’s in the room anyway.’

  I fished the iPad out of the depths of my tapestry shoulder bag, switched it on, then snapped her. She looked faintly startled.

  ‘I want to get that exact pose again,’ I explained.

  ‘You can set your easel up right where you are now and leave it there as long as you need to,’ she suggested.

  ‘Great, but you’ll have to tell me when I can start and how long you’ll sit for each session.’

  ‘You’ll need good light, so I could give you an hour or two in the mornings, say from ten? Will that do? Not today, obviously – it’s too late – and I want to show you round and let you settle in first.’

  ‘That would be perfect, and perhaps when you’re not using the room I could come in and work on the background a little, too.’

  ‘There we are, then, all settled,’ she said, turning off the computers and getting up. ‘Come along – time for the sixpenny tour.’

  By daylight the drawing room looked even bigger than it had the previous evening, and now the mustard velvet drapes were flung back from a square bay window recess, which had padded seats up each side, to reveal an impressive view.

  ‘You can just see Underhill to the right. It’s that squat, rambling house there, below the Starstone hill.’