The Muse

by Jessie Burton

  ‘Come on,’ said Lawrie quietly. ‘Let me take you out of the eighteenth century.’

  Except it wasn’t the eighteenth century, was it, Lawrie? It was late October, in 1967, in Baldock’s Ridge in Surrey, and you weren’t allowed to kiss me without comment. Or perhaps, more accurately, I was not allowed to be kissed.

  WHEN WE GOT TO THE house, the lights were on. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. I turned; Lawrie looked genuinely frightened.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought Gerry wouldn’t be here. We should go.’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ I said.

  ‘Odelle, Gerry isn’t – I don’t think he—­ I just want to warn you.’

  ‘Let me guess. I’m one of the natives.’

  ‘Oh, God, this is going to be a disaster. He’s – very old-­fashioned.’

  ‘We should get along perfectly, then.’

  ‘You won’t. You shouldn’t have to—­’

  ‘Lawrie. I don’t want you to protect me. Let me be the judge of Gerry. Just as no doubt he’ll be the judge of me.’

  •

  How to describe Gerry? Gerry the Bastard, Gerry the Merry. As soon as he clapped eyes on me, his face lit up. ‘I thought Lawrence was a queer!’ The tone with which he said it made me think that Gerry was possibly inclined that way himself. I have never met a man like him since; that particular strain of upper-­class English – so camp and Wodehousian, a madness at which no one bats an eye. Anything that was inappropriate to say, Gerry would say it. He was overweight, and handsome, but he looked like a man closing down on himself. I could smell the grief; six months down the line, you’d find him a puddle of skin on the floor.

  ‘I understand you work at an art gallery, Miss Baschin?’ he said, pouring yet another whisky.

  Lawrie winced at Gerry’s mispronouncing my name, and I could see he was about to correct his step-­father. ‘That’s right,’ I said quickly. ‘As a typist.’

  ‘Set up home here, then?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Nearly six years now.’

  ‘Odelle’s father was in the RAF,’ said Lawrie. I could hear the desperation in his voice, and it annoyed me. I knew what Lawrie was trying to do, of course – repackaging me in a context the man might understand. But I did not feel I needed my father’s military record as any introduction; I felt, in a strange way, that Gerry was accepting me regardless. By some weird alchemy – perhaps because I was inside his house – Gerry seemed to exempt me from the unconscious hierarchy of colour he also inadvertently revealed now and then. Perhaps he was whitewashing my skin? Perhaps he rather liked the thrill, his colonial days coming back to him? Or perhaps he just liked me. Whatever it was, I felt invited in.

  WE ATE A JUMPY DINNER – well, Lawrie was the jumpy one; me and Gerry fumbled our way through. At least he didn’t mention calypsos again – or bongos, or the miracle of my excellent English.

  ‘We went to the Caribbean once,’ Gerry said, as Lawrie cleared the plates. He drained his tumbler of whisky, and stared at it.

  ‘Did you like it?’ I asked.

  Gerry didn’t appear to hear me. ‘Worked in India after I left Oxford.’ I looked at Lawrie’s expression; thunderbolts at the tablecloth. ‘Was there for years. I think the travel bug was in my blood from then on – probably got bitten by something. Beautiful place, India. Difficult though. Incredibly hot.’

  ‘Which islands did you go to, in the Caribbean?’ I asked.

  ‘Feels like a lifetime ago now. I suppose it is.’

  ‘Gerry, Odelle asked you a question,’ said Lawrie.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘Jamaica,’ the man replied, with a sharp look at his son-­in-­law. ‘I’m not senile, Lawrence. I heard her.’

  ‘I’ve not been to Jamaica,’ I said.

  Gerry laughed. ‘How extraordinary. I thought you all just hopped between the islands?’

  ‘No, sir. I have been to Tobago, and Grenada, and Barbados. I do not know the other islands. I know London better than I know Jamaica.’

  Gerry reached for the whisky. ‘It wasn’t my choice to go there,’ he said. ‘But Sarah said everyone went to Jamaica. She loved heat, needed it. So off we went. I’m glad we did. The sand was so soft.’

  Lawrie snatched the whisky bottle. ‘Let’s go and listen to that record we bought,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Sarah?’ I asked.

  Gerry looked at me through bloodshot eyes. ‘Lawrence didn’t even tell you her name?’

  ‘Whose name?’

  ‘His mother,’ Gerry said, sighing when Lawrie turned away. ‘My beautiful wife.’

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  XV

  Lawrie lunged up the stairs, three at a time.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said. ‘He just misses her. He wants to talk about her.’

  Lawrie stopped on the landing and whirled round at me. ‘Don’t think he’s some sort of saint,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t, Lawrie.’

  Lawrie seemed to be battling with a particular thought. He looked half fearful, half furious. ‘When my dad died,’ I went on, trying to sound soothing, ‘my mum used to hear his voice in the radio. Saw his face in every man she met. You’ve got to be patient.’

  ‘She was my mother.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was the one who found her. In that room down there.’

  ‘Oh, Lawrie. You didn’t say.’

  I turned to the darkness where he was pointing, and felt a preternatural repulsion, an overwhelming desire to walk in the opposite direction. But I didn’t move; I didn’t want him to see me scared. ‘Gerry’s held together with whisky and sticking plasters,’ I said. ‘You should be kind to him.’

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘I’ll be kind to you, Lawrie,’ I replied, taking his hand.

  WE LAY SIDE BY SIDE on Lawrie’s eiderdown, hearing Gerry shuffling beneath us, until a door closed and the house fell silent. ‘You shouldn’t live here,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ He turned on his side to face me, propping himself on his elbow. ‘But it’s all I have. This place, Gerry and a painting.’

  ‘And me,’ I said. ‘You’ve got me.’

  Gently, he ran his hand down the side of my face. The window was still open, and I heard a blackbird, so musical and effortless, singing in a tree like it was dawn. ‘Come on, Writer. What’s your favourite word?’ he asked.

  I could see he wanted to change the subject, so I obliged. ‘You’re asking me to pick? All right. Lodgings.’

  He laughed. ‘You had it ready – I knew you would. That’s so stodgy, Odelle.’

  ‘Is not. It’s cosy. “My lodgings were clean and comfortable.” You?’

  ‘Cloud.’

  ‘Such a cliché,’ I said, inching towards him and giving him a squeeze.

  We talked on – for now, mothers and step-­fathers and paintings forgotten, or pushed away at least, banishing them to the outer edges of our memories as much as we could. We talked about how beautiful the English language could be, in the right hands – how varied and nuanced and illogical. Hamper and hamper, and words like turn, that seemed boring at first but were deceptive in their depths. We discussed our favourite onomatopoeia: frizz and sludge and glide and bumblebee. I’d never been so happy alone with another person.

  Because of the blackbird singing in the tree, we ended up drifting into a game of bird-­tennis, our intertwined hands the raised-­up net, and a kiss for each bird that we exchanged. Plover to lapwing, honey-­creep, lark. Coquette and falcon, manakin, hawk. His hands upon my skin, curlew, oriole, and mine upon his. Jacamar, wren. Then the birds flew away, their names turned to kisses and a silence that spelled a new world.

 
•

  The next morning, I woke very early. Lawrie was in a deep sleep, his expression peaceful. I considered the astonishing moment he’d pushed inside me, how that was never going to happen for the first time again. I put on his shirt and woolly jumper, slid out of the bed and tiptoed along the corridor to the bathroom. Had Gerry known I’d stayed? How mortifying it would be to cross him now.

  I went to the toilet and felt between my legs; a little dried blood, but the more obvious symptom was the stomach pain I could feel, slight, low-­seated, a dull ache, a sense of having been opened up and bruised. I had never even been naked with a man, had never been touched like that before; it was strange that one might feel pain over something that had been so pleasurable.

  We had broken through a frontier, and I had told him, very quietly, that I loved him, and Lawrie had pressed his ear to my mouth, saying, You might have to repeat that one, Odelle, because I’m getting on and these days I don’t hear so well. And so I said it again, slightly louder, and he kissed me in return.

  I LOOKED AT MY WRISTWATCH; five-­thirty. Below me, I could hear Gerry’s snores. What a place to be, I thought; urinating in a clapped-­out Victorian toilet in deepest Surrey over a man called Gerry’s head. I would not have predicted it; and I was glad of the lack of forewarning. Had I known such things were going to be promised me, I would have been too intimidated by their weirdness and they probably wouldn’t have happened.

  I finished, washed my hands and face and used a little soap on my upper thighs. I felt the sudden desire to tell Pamela that this had happened, to give her the gift of my gossip, to make her birthday present worth it after all.

  I came out of the bathroom and was about to head back to Lawrie’s room, when I hesitated. I turned to my right, looking down the long corridor to where, last night, Lawrie had pointed out the room in which he had found his mother. There would be no other time, I knew; with Lawrie awake it was unlikely he would lead an expedition down here. And for me, the curiosity was too great.

  The door was slightly ajar. It was her bedroom, Sarah’s bedroom; you could tell. There were still lipsticks on the dressing table, a silver powder compact in the shape of a shell; paperback novels and old magazines. Along the sill were china and glass ornaments, vases of flowers, now dried out. The curtains were open, but the sun was not yet up. The silhouettes of naked trees were crooked against a lavender sky.

  I looked at the bed. Had it happened here? There was no sense of the scene, for which I was grateful. I felt deeply sorry for both these men, clearly lost without her – or confused, at least. Gerry was right – Lawrie had been so evasive about his mother. Gerry, far from being a heartless bastard, appeared to want to discuss her. It was Lawrie who wouldn’t. Only now, being in the house with him and his step-­father together, could I see how deeply Lawrie had been affected by Sarah, by this second marriage, by the manner of her death.

  In the corner of the room was a large wardrobe. I opened it, and a cloud of camphor hit the back of my throat. Hanging inside was a solitary pair of delicate red trousers, and I pulled them out and held them against my body. If these were Sarah’s, and I assumed they were, she had been tiny. They barely cut the middle of my shins. They were made of scarlet wool, which in many places had been attacked by moth, most unfortunately at the groin. Yet you could tell that these trousers had been particularly stylish. They made me think of Quick. She’d have liked these, holey groin or not.

  ‘They won’t fit, you know,’ said a voice. ‘But I couldn’t bear to throw them away.’

  I jumped. At the door was Gerry; scant, sandy hair on end, large body wrapped in a deep blue dressing gown, his hairy legs and bare feet sticking out at the bottom. Embarrassed, I stammered something incomprehensible as I moved to put the trousers back. I felt terrible for thinking that Gerry had just cleared away his wife without a second thought. This place was like his little shrine. He probably visited it every morning, and I was an intruder. I was beyond mortified. I’d stayed over; I was just wearing a man’s shirt and jumper. I’d had sex under his roof. Thank God Lawrie was much taller than me, in terms of my modesty, but I might as well have had the word SEX emblazoned on my forehead, I felt it was so obvious.

  But Gerry seemed uninterested in the morals of his step-­son and girlfriend. Perhaps he was more modern than I gave him credit for. That, or he was too mired or hungover in his grief to care. He waved his hand as he padded in. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, sitting heavily on the end of the bed. I was still holding the trousers. ‘You can have a look around. She was a mystery to me too, in many ways.’

  With his glum expression and rotund stomach, Gerry reminded me of the morose Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass. And in this house, I felt like Alice – too small one minute, too large the next, being riddled and challenged in every direction I turned.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t be in here.’

  ‘Don’t be. Lawrie really doesn’t talk about her, does he?’

  ‘Not much. Mr Scott, can I ask—­’

  ‘I’m not Scott,’ said Gerry. ‘That was Sarah’s maiden name.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Lawrence chose to keep her name rather than mine,’ Gerry said, shaking his head. ‘Still, he was sixteen by then, and you can’t tell a sixteen year-­old what to do. Never really understood him.’

  ‘He didn’t take his father’s name?’

  Gerry looked at me shrewdly. ‘Not a very good idea to call yourself Schloss in the school playground in the forties.’

  I stood, frozen to the spot, the red trousers hanging limply in my grasp. I shook my head, unable to believe what Gerry was saying. ‘Schloss?’ I repeated. ‘Lawrie’s father was Schloss?’

  Gerry looked up at me, interested by the energy in my voice. ‘Well, strictly speaking, yes. Sarah gave him the surname Scott from the moment he was born, but in terms of his father, it’s Schloss. Her first husband was an Austrian of all things, just before the Great War.’

  ‘Austrian?’

  Gerry looked amused. ‘You seem a little perturbed by all this. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I said, trying to look as casual as I could, in Lawrie’s oversized woollen jumper, clutching his dead mother’s trousers, as if this news about Lawrie’s father meant nothing to me at all.

  ‘When she came back to England and had Lawrie, she thought it prudent to give him her own name. Nobody trusted a German name in those days.’

  ‘What was her husband’s first name?’

  ‘Harold. Poor bastard. God, when I think what happened. Sarah never talked about it, but I think perhaps she should have, now I look at Lawrence. The man is so pathological when it comes to his parents.’

  I tried to recall how Lawrie had behaved, on the occasions that Reede had mentioned the name Harold Schloss. I didn’t remember any particular show of emotion, or moment of recognition. But he had asked if Reede knew what had happened to him – I did remember that.

  ‘What happened to his father?’ I asked.

  Gerry bared his teeth in a grim smile, revealing long incisors. ‘He doesn’t tell you much, does he? Well, it’s a sensitive subject.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Perhaps you two don’t have time spare for talking. I was the same, once.’

  I tried to turn my blush into a weak smile, half wanting to flee, half wanting to find out from this man more than Lawrie would ever tell me. ‘He has a point, not talking about it,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s useless for a man to rake over things he can’t even remember. Lawrie never even met the fellow.’ He ran his hand over his head and fixed me with a look. ‘Hitler happened to Harold Schloss, that’s what, Miss Baschin. Like he happened to us all.’

  I went to speak, but Gerry rose to his feet, yellow-­nailed against the dark wood floorboards. ‘It’s very early to be talking about all this,’ he said. ‘I’m going
for a walk to clear my head. I suggest that you go back to bed.’

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  XVI

  I returned to Lawrie’s room. He stirred and opened his eyes with a smile, throwing his arms up to let me into the warm, crumpled sheets. I stood at the side of the bed. ‘What is it?’ he said, the smile fading. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You’re Lawrie Schloss,’ I said. ‘Your father sold Rufina and the Lion. That’s how you have the painting.’

  I admit, there might have been a better way to approach the situation – your father this and your father that – talking of a dead man Lawrie had never met, at six fifteen in the morning. I think it was because I had always thought of Lawrie as fundamentally honest; had even defended him to Quick when she was raising her doubts. And I realized now, that time and again, Lawrie had evaded the question not just of his mother, but of how she might have come into possessing such an artwork.

  Lawrie lowered his arms and surveyed me. ‘I’m Lawrie Scott,’ he said. He closed his eyes. ‘You’ve been talking to Gerry.’

  ‘You lied,’ I said.

  He opened his eyes again, and propped himself on an elbow. ‘I didn’t bloody lie. I just never told you the whole truth.’

  ‘But why? What does it matter who your father was?’ He said nothing. ‘Lawrie, have you really sold your car?’

  He rubbed his eyes, frowning as if trying to slot his thoughts into place. ‘Yes, I have really sold my car. Gerry’s definitely planning to sell this house. And then what will I do?’

  ‘He’ll never sell it. There’s a room along this corridor devoted to your mother. It’s even got her clothes and make-­up still inside.’

  There was confusion in his eyes. ‘How d’you know about that?’

  I sat down slowly on the side of the bed. ‘It’s where I just bumped into Gerry.’

  ‘You were snooping?’

  I looked away, embarrassed. ‘He told me about your mother giving you her maiden name when the war was on. When Reede mentioned Harold Schloss – why didn’t you just say something?’