Lucian grimaced and Miranda smiled wryly, drawing in the smoke of the cigarette, then blowing it out very slowly.
‘There was no raw flesh, no blood and guts. I just slowly disappeared inside him. You see, we didn’t just do things together. What we did were things that he wanted to do. I didn’t argue.’
Lucian agreed that it didn’t sound like love.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t complain,’ she considered. ‘It was the one time when I was wonderfully nothing. I did not exist. I was merely a part of him, doing what he wanted to do. I hate myself for it now, but at the time it was like being asleep, perhaps like being dead. But it wasn’t the same when we actually made love. That was something different. Though there were times during sex when I wanted to sink my teeth into his shoulder, to burrow my head into him.’
‘You’ve drunk too much.’
‘You can be so boring sometimes,’ she declared with unexpected hate. ‘Isn’t there anything interesting about you? Last night you went upstairs and your little Elizabeth gave herself to you. She probably only did that to try and get you to stay with her. But you’re going anyway. And I suppose it was all so lovely, and now you know all about love and sex?’
‘That sounds like jealousy.’
‘Of course it’s jealousy! But there’s more to life than . . .’ Miranda stopped.
‘Yes?’ he asked. ‘Go on.’
‘Yes, I’ll go on, because it’s not a contradiction to say that easy and happy existence isn’t what we should strive after.’ She thought; ‘Experiences . . .’
‘You’re talking rubbish,’ Lucian laughed, surprising himself as much as her. ‘And you’re contradicting yourself. You said that you felt great when you were unaware of anything, when you didn’t exist.’
‘It’s a vice like cocaine, I love it, but I feel so bad about it.’
Suddenly she retched again and put one hand to her mouth, dropping the cigarette as the other hand clutched her stomach. She ran out and Lucian picked up the cigarette and put it in the ashtray before following her into the kitchen. She was spitting vomit into the stainless steel sink.
‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked, but again she waved him away. He stood, useless, in the middle of the room. She was properly sick now, her body convulsing and the liquid splashing around the sink. When she had finished she seemed to relax a little, then turned on the taps to wash away the mess and then cleanse her hands. Calmer now, she poured herself a glass of water that she then sipped and spat out, staring after it into the sink. Lucian stood quietly, waiting, and watched her look in a cupboard for cleaning fluid and then pour it liberally around the sink before rinsing it away. Again she washed her hands and only then did she turn and see him. She reacted as though she had not known he was there.
‘Give a woman a bit of privacy,’ she demanded, and then ripped off some kitchen roll and wiped her mouth. He backed out into the hall and wandered, unthinking, up to the front door. He tried to look out but all that he could see was his darkened reflection in the glass, and the distorted mirror-image of the hall.
Without turning he was able to see her leave the kitchen and walk away through to the conservatory. Although he didn’t think he should follow her, he was not convinced that they had finished their conversation. He certainly didn’t want her to have had the last word, although being sick had given her the upper hand.
Lucian found her in Gerald’s studio, standing before the canvas he was working on. She was still and looked pale:
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all of those things,’ she apologised.
Lucian decided that he would not appear to forgive her immediately.
Other canvases lay around, though only this one was well lit. The painting was a study of a nude woman half laying on her back with her hair out behind her on the floor. Life-size, there was something magnificent about the model for all that the painting was not finished. The skin was milk-white but with a hesitant suggestion of colour. The red hair was a little too bright, a little too unreal.
It would have been hard for Lucian to recognise the model if he had not known that she was standing before her image. As Gerald so often did, he had painted her so that her face was turned away.
‘It’s going to be an amazing painting,’ Lucian nodded towards the canvas.
‘Well, it’s yours now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You won everything at cards.’
‘He’s going to look pretty silly when I have to give it all back to him.’
‘He won’t be coming back,’ she mused. ‘Remember, it’s all yours.’
‘Where’s he gone at this time of night?’
‘Who knows? He’s probably half way to London by now, or France,’ she laughed. ‘And quoting Baudelaire to himself, I expect.’
Lucian and Elizabeth had not been shown that particular picture on the previous evening and again he found it hard to explain what it was about it that he disliked. He could not understand why Gerald painted with such cold colours. Beyond the canvas, on the far wall, was a large mirror and he could see Miranda in it. He compared the colour of her skin with Gerald’s grey representation of it.
‘You’re wrong to call it pornography,’ he said, but Miranda did not reply. ‘It’s not designed to titillate.’
By making her turn her head away Gerald was denying her any personality, he considered. Perhaps by being dismissive of his subject he was being dismissive of her, but that did not seem to Lucian to be the point. He obviously had a genius for painting a woman’s body; in the picture before them he had posed his model in an awkward attitude and he was giving himself a greater challenge in capturing her image on canvas successfully. He had painted her from the side, and from only slightly above, and he had accentuated the thinness of her arms at the expense of the torso. For no apparent reason he had made her breasts very small. Somehow it was all distorted, although only slightly so.
Next to the easel, on the floor, were several canvases covered with a cloth. Lucian knealt down and gingerly removed the covering. They were the pictures they had been shown the night before, and he ranged them about the easel. They were a third the size of the new portrait, but all were of Miranda in various poses. Each had a different coloured background, shadowed so as to imply a curtain, but obviously not representational. He had to admire the way that brush strokes, apparently so effortlessly made, could hint at such a subtlety of skin tones and shapes. But while it seemed such a waste that they were so grey and lifeless, they were nonetheless fascinating. He stared at them for some time, considering whether the fascination came from the pictures or the subject.
‘You don’t like them?’ she asked.
He realized that he had been looking at them proprietorially and put them back and re-covered them with the cloth.
‘No, you don’t,’ she decided.
‘They’re very good, but they don’t seem quite, I don’t know. . . They don’t capture their subject.’ No, they were still not quite Miranda, they were not quite correct. These, with the larger picture, were what Gerald had talked of for a new exhibition.
‘His very early work would probably be more your style,’ Miranda suggested. ‘More Russell Flint.’
Lucian didn’t understand the reference.
‘Do you have any of those here?’ he asked.
‘There’s one upstairs.’
He followed her quietly through the house and up to her bedroom. The low wattage bulb revealed a mess; clothes hung over the wardrobe door, over the chair, over the end of the bed. They were suspended from the curtain-rail by wire hangers, which would darken the room by day, and there were more clothes piled on the floor in shapeless heaps. The dressing table was cluttered with make-up and bottles, and the bookcase overflowed with paperbacks and magazines. There were boxes and bags, often filled with further boxes and bags, and there was no surface that was not covered, whether it was with ornaments, curios or costume jewellery.
It was a dusty ro
om, but not dirty. The bed had various blankets thrown over it and was unmade.
On the wall in a corner was a tiny painting of a nude. Lucian did not immediately recognize it as Miranda. She was much younger, very pretty and quite plump.
‘It’s lovely,’ he said as he moved closer to it.
‘I was quite young then. Nobody’s features are properly formed at that age.
‘It’s not like the ones downstairs,’ he admitted, squinting at it.
Lucian sensed movement behind him and glanced round. Miranda was removing her wet dress, so he turned back to the picture, having seen nothing untoward, and determined that he shouldn’t. He could hear her open a wardrobe, close it, and then walk out of the room. He could hear that she had gone into the bathroom, and he studied the painting closer. He stared at her breasts in the picture, with their big pink nipples, and he felt aroused.
When she returned he started to pick his way through the debris on the floor to get to the door. She sat down on the bed, in an oversized shirt from which her long legs stretched. ‘I suppose that picture’s yours as well.’
‘I ought to let you go to bed,’ he said, not answering her question.
‘Don’t worry about me. I feel quite awake now. I’m happy to talk. You can go to bed if you want to.’
‘No, perhaps not immediately.’
He did not want to admit that the door to his room was barred. Her bedside clock said it was just after three o’clock.
After a pause she said:
‘I really need to clear all the junk out of my life, and Gerald is a good way to start.’ She looked amongst the old papers on the bedside table and produced one last cigarette from a packet which she then threw towards the door. Then she hunted for something to light it with.
‘I’m going to have a great big bonfire with all of Gerald’s stuff.’
‘Won’t he be annoyed?’
‘He won’t be back.’
‘Why not just box it all up and throw it in a shed?’
‘There’s too much. In fact, it’ll take me weeks to burn all his stuff. You’ve never come across such a hoarder.’
‘I don’t know . . . my mother . . .’
‘No, I promise you, you’ve never come across anyone like him. He’s so full of his own self-importance. He kept everything. And anything that wasn’t of immediate use was boxed up and labelled and filed. And why? Because he expected it to be of interest to other people some day. He kept a diary since he was eight because he thought future scholars would want to pour over them to work out his motivation long after he had gone. But it’s rubbish; he only had a mediocre talent. When he moved in here he brought all his shit with him.’
She finally found a box of matches down the side of the bed and lit her cigarette. She drew in a very appreciative lungful of smoke and patted the blanket beside her for Lucian to sit down.
‘I suppose we all keep too much stuff . . .’ he tried to explain.
‘You really don’t understand. It wasn’t unreasonable that he might keep his old sketchbooks and canvases, but his old clothes? His old shoes? Magazines, and other rubbish? You wouldn’t believe how much utter shit we accumulate in our lifetime. Most people throw stuff away eventually, but not Gerald. And he made collections of all kinds of things throughout his life that made it worse.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like birds eggs, butterflies, stamps, matchbox tops, cigarette packets, but never long enough to put together anything of value.
She dropped the cigarette into an old cup by the bed and then lay back and looked up at the ceiling: ‘The day he moved in here I expected him to bring a suitcase, but he brought a whole bloody removal lorry. And it’s all going to be burnt.’
Miranda stopped and put her hands over her face. Lucian wondered if she was tired, or had a headache, but then realised she was sobbing.
‘Hey,’ he put a hand on her arm. ‘It’s okay.’
He manoeuvred himself to her side and she put her head on his chest and one arm over him, seeking reassurance. She wiped her eyes, annoyed, but stayed in the position in which they found themselves.
‘I’m so stupid, ignore me.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he tried to reassure her. She was silent once more, thinking, and he stared down at her red hair. He stroked it and she did not object. He played with a lock of it that fell about her ear. There were little blue flowers embroidered on the shirt that was wide open around her neck. When she had moved he could see and marvel at her skin, taught over her collar-bone. He could not begin to understand why Gerald, when he painted her, would not give it the deep, warm tones that I could see and which appeared to him to be so beautiful.
Lucian don’t think that Miranda had even noticed that he was stroking her hair, or staring at her, but she moved once more, rolling over and looking away from him. Lucian was almost overwhelmed by tiredness and without thinking he lay down by her.
‘Gerald wrote a diary every day from eight years old until his death,’ she was almost inaudible, perhaps talking to herself. ‘He wrote it for posterity. He left them for people to read, including me. He knew I’d read them . . . he left them lying around. And he was very cruel.’
She rolled back over to face Lucian.
‘I don’t know you, but you seem like a decent person.’
He was flattered. She put her arm over him to squeeze his hand and he squeezed it back. He was thinking about what she said, thinking of how to reply, when he saw that she was asleep. The house still creaked as they lay there, finally settling for the night. Lucian lay next to her, their noses almost touching. She seemed young now, like a little girl, her mouth half open, her eyes closed. He was considering getting up, to turn off the light and to find himself somewhere to sleep, but he was so tired and so comfortable that he did not want to move just at that time. His lids were heavy and itchy, and although he was enjoying looking at Miranda he must have closed them for a moment and have fallen asleep.
Part 2
Lucian awoke on Sunday morning with a great presentiment of doom. Starlings seemed to be squabbling under the eaves and rain was being dashed against the window in uneven bursts by the wind. He could tell it was late and his head hurt abominably. He was alone in Miranda’s very dishevelled bed, and was still dressed from the night before. He was too hot with the sheets pulled right up to his head.
He got up immediately and looked out through the curtains. He could almost see the wind coming at the house across the miles, gaining speed and force until it met it on the hillside, the first object in its path. It came up the valley from the English Channel, following the tidal river that gave the town below its name. The wind caused the rain to come almost horizontal so that it was obviously penetrating the walls deep, forcing its way in between joints and frames. It came in around the edges of the loose panes of glass, and dribbled out quietly beneath the window sill. He closed the curtain against the too-bright light.
Once out on the landing Lucian could smell bacon cooking. He looked warily through the open door of the room that he was meant to have shared with Elizabeth, but both she and her bag had gone. Before going downstairs he had to visit the bathroom and was glad to find headache pills and health salts. He locked the door and felt safe for a moment from whoever might be left in the house. It was only a temporary refuge and he wondered just who he would have to face downstairs, and who he would have to apologise to for the night before. He told myself that nothing was entirely his fault, that he was the victim of events as much as anyone else, but he was unsure how far he could reasonably argue this. Not feeling any better, and not daring to look in the mirror, he walked back onto the landing.
His room really was completely devoid of Elizabeth’s presence. She might possibly be downstairs, waiting to leave, but it was unlikely. There was a chance that she would have simply got up and left, and would not have tried looking for him, but it seemed unlikley. As long as she had not looked in Miranda’s room, he thought. If she had, he hoped th
at she would have at least seen that he was fully dressed.
Lucian descended the stairs uncertainly, and glimpsed the debris in the living room from the night before. Someone was moving about in the kitchen, but who it might be, and whether they were alone he could not tell. Perhaps Adrian was up? The hall clock said that it was half past one.
He took a deep breath and walked into the room. He tried a cheery ‘Morning’ without immediately registering who was there.
Only Miranda was in the kitchen. She was wearing a large dressing gown.
‘A bacon sandwich?’ she asked, not turning around.
‘No thanks.’
‘You should, it’ll make you feel better.’
He agreed and she passed him a plate, presumably her own and she turned back to making another.
‘Things haven’t exactly turned out well after last night,’ she said slowly.
‘Somehow I guessed they wouldn’t have.’ He sat at the table gloomily.
‘Adrian left a note in his room to say that he was so embarrassed by me and Gerald that he’s going up to London to stay with his father. Well, that’s fine by me, though as his guest you have every right to be pretty well pissed-off with him. And it means that his father will phone me up later and give me all kinds of grief based on Adrian’s stories. That’s not a problem either; I’m used to it. The little bastard emptied my purse before he went. For his train fare, I assume. And Gerald’s has left as well, or, rather, I threw him out last night. I’m sure he won’t be returning,’ she stopped making the sandwich and appeared to be looking out of the window. ‘That’s good, I know it is.’
‘Are you sure?’ Lucian asked.
‘Yes. Intellectually and emotionally, I’m sure. But I’ve relied on the bastard for the last ten years and it feels pretty strange. It leaves all kinds of complications.’
‘And Elizabeth?’
‘I was saving that news until last.’
She finished making her sandwich but she didn’t turn around.
Bloody Baudelaire Page 3
