by Lorna Gray
“Up,” he ordered none too pleasantly. “Wait for me up there. I’ll be just a minute.”
I went. I reached the head of the first flight of stairs just as he was making a great deal of fuss about clearing a chair of debris for poor Mrs Williams. I was stepping for the first time in two years into the wide room that had once been my bedroom and I barely noticed. The policeman who had been left up here was drifting forwards through the gloom to meet me, then there was a movement behind on the stairs and the creak of footsteps on bare floorboards as Adam rose into view.
For a moment I thought he had the look where he was about to start lecturing me again only it wasn’t quite. And then Jim was behind him and leaning in to whisper, “Bravo indeed, Kate.”
He was very nearly laughing. I was standing there on the bare wooden boards, reeling with a sort of impotent emotion that might have been upset and might just as easily have been rage. Christi’s voice followed him. She was making the most of her disgust and I heard the murmur as Gregory tried to mediate. I stood there in the hollow disarray of a bedroom that had lately been sorted into boxes, glaring at them all in turn and breathing hard as it dawned on me that yet again I had a very strong man dictating that I couldn’t just walk out through the door.
Jim’s voice was strong too. Beaming broadly, he said very clearly, “Forgive me, Madam, but I had to get you away before the two of you came to blows.” If we could hear Christi’s complaints up here, I had no doubt she could hear everything Jim said to me. His manner was immensely condescending as he added, “I think it would be better for you stay out of the way up here while she and I have a little chat, don’t you? Since you can’t manage to restrain yourself before Rhys Williams’ new wife. My dear lady, you just threatened a widow.”
That stopped me. I might not have come remotely close to dealing in blows, but I had at the least lost my temper with a woman who had just lost her husband. What precisely did that say about me?
Only Jim seemed to be finding it funny. There was an expectant little silence while he grinned at me. Then beside me Adam gave a sigh. “Jim,” he remarked very quietly indeed, “Kate hasn’t guessed that the scene down there was part of a greater ploy.”
I looked from the one to the other.
Adam added, “You might also like to explain precisely why you gave me the high sign over that woman’s shoulder to leave Kate stranded just now.”
“Oh, very nice,” I hissed. “Was it wise do you think, given everything that was said in Adam’s kitchen earlier about my general wellbeing and the precarious state of my mind, to deliberately set about reducing my dignity to the level of a naughty child before these people?” Trying not to give way to a general apoplexy, I demanded in a fierce whisper, “What on earth were you hoping to achieve?”
Jim was unrepentant. In fact his hushed reply was aggressive. He growled, “This.” He tipped his head towards the room. “That woman has made it pretty clear she doesn’t want you up here. Now in one fell swoop Christi Williams has convinced herself that your status here is negligible, she’s gifted me the perfect premise for banishing you upstairs and also given me the excuse for letting you search without allowing her to scrutinise every step. Is that clear enough for you? You’ve done it again, Kate. You’ve achieved in five minutes what would have taken me weeks to arrange.”
In the dingy light of the bedroom, Jim’s whole body was blazing with a fierce kind of triumph. His expression made me say incredulously, “You can’t suspect Christi?”
“Why not?”
I had to pause for a moment. I hadn’t actually thought why not. “Because, for one thing, it’s too convenient. The other woman? It’d suit me down to the ground, wouldn’t it, if I managed to find the piece of evidence that would prove Rhys’s new ladylove was a thief all along. Christi wasn’t here during the war, Jim, to loot these houses. And neither was Rhys.”
“I’ve got my job,” Jim replied arrogantly, turning away. “And you’ve got yours. So do it.” Then he added as a conciliatory afterthought, “Please?”
I stopped him with my hand. “Detective … Sergeant … Jim – whatever we call you now – can I just confirm that you aren’t imagining there are secret niches in the gallery walls concealing coded messages that only I could find; hatches in the floorboards; that sort of thing, are you? Because if you are, you’re set to be disappointed.”
There was a fresh gleam of a grin. He was quite frightening when he was happy like this. It was like meeting the real man, and the real man was enjoying the hunt. He told me, “No. We’ve searched the fabric of this place twice now. We know the connection is within the gallery’s business affairs. And you’re the woman to find it. You have to be. Because the thief wanted you here too.”
He stepped back. Then he added severely in a ringing tone that echoed down the stairs, “This is PC Downe. He’s going to keep an eye on everything, and I mean everything you touch. So tread carefully, Mrs Williams.”
He descended the stairs. I heard him begin again in that bold carrying voice, “Mrs Williams!” And this time he wasn’t talking to me.
We all stood there for a moment, listening as Gregory grew impatient and demanded to know whether a mere sergeant had the authority to ruin a person’s day like this. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask such a thing but Jim calmly explained that his senior, an inspector by the name of Woods, was delayed by another case but would be here before the morning was out. He didn’t add it, but he meant before this supposed two o’clock deadline set by Clarke and Reed. I turned abruptly towards the shrouded window and put a hand to the heavy curtains.
“Is this allowed?” I asked. PC Downe only smiled. He was a small mildly portly man of about my age with an amiable face. The wooden rings shrieked along the rails.
I heard Adam say quietly, “Kate …”
I turned back to the room and found I was suddenly angry with him. Or angry with myself for minding quite so much, or something. And ashamed of myself for feeling it. It was this place. I’d expected a ghostly mausoleum to an old and dusty tragedy and found living conflict instead. I’d also given myself a different kind of humiliation. It was humiliating that after all these years of maintaining a reasonably dignified silence before all the petty insults embodied by these other women, I had at last been reduced to the level of jealous rival in the face of Christi’s taunts. I didn’t know whether anyone had noticed that the key that had finally done it had not been her claim on Rhys…
---
This room that had been my bedroom smelled a little of damp. It was bare – bare of every little piece of furniture that had made this place my own. In my day this room had been a mixture of library, bedroom and my studio. Now it was just an empty shell with a collection of about four overflowing boxes, a line of bookcases fixed to the wall, a pair of men’s shoes and somebody else’s expansive bed.
Even that was bare too. It was just a mattress on a heavy wooden frame. Through the doorway opposite, beyond the spot where the smudged rectangle of sunlight from the grimy windows reached its limit and Adam stood quietly to one side, I knew the narrow landing bore two other doors. The nearest was a kitchen with its narrow walls bearing cupboards, drawers and a very dubious oven, and beyond that a bathroom was tucked in the damp corner beneath the rising stairs.
Downstairs, Jim was calmly listening to Gregory’s politely expressed frustration that he wasn’t allowed to leave. The man had an appointment with his doctor. He hadn’t intended to spend his day mediating between the police and sparring wives. I presumed I should probably examine the contents of the boxes. I dropped my coat on the bed and tugged the first box towards me and sat down.
The box contained reams of old contact prints, those direct copies of negatives laid out as miniature black and white images on stiff photographic paper, and wallets containing the negatives themselves. It was then that it struck me that this was a truly infuriating way to search. I had absolutely no idea what form this missing connection took and all the w
hile I had to wrestle with the crippling suspicion that Jim had set me up as a miracle-worker. I was doomed to fail. From his stillness, I knew Adam thought the same. I’d braced myself to tackle a swift march through the home I had known, where any little alteration would stand out like a sore thumb. This slow drift through untidily boxed possessions was nothing more than an invasion into a barren unfamiliar world while the man who had promised to make me feel secure stood there helplessly adding to the eyes that watched me. My memories were no more use in this hunt than his were.
I couldn’t help asking Adam then: “Is that how you know me? Because of her?”
I thought I’d managed to conceal my feelings perfectly. But I can’t have because when I dared to glance up his mouth was compressed into one of those smiles that made a line. “No, Kate,” he said.
He made me grin suddenly, and shake my head over the bundle in my hands. It brought sudden easing of tension. A sudden appreciation of my own ridiculousness. The policeman moved. It was just a simple shift of his weight from one leg to the other but it made me conscious of the negatives in my hands. Examination identified them as a mixture of Rhys’s dry record shots – the equivalent of an artist’s preparatory sketch – and Christi’s own efforts taken at a large gallery event. It wasn’t the recent launch party that had been attended by Jim’s missing policeman. It was probably the launch of Rhys’s comeback exhibition because – the only detail discernible at that miniscule scale – one of the gallery walls bore a vast portrait of a football team. There were even a few photographs of older events that were mine where familiar faces seemed to loom from every angle. They were rubbish. They were probably packed like this to make them easier to throw away.
Beside me, the policeman had his notebook out and was making a list of everything I touched. I showed him what was in my hands and then I put them back.
Then I heard Adam defy our audience – he was far braver than I – to explain, “I met Rhys during the summer that saw the release of my first novel when the publisher demanded a formal photograph; something suitably meaningful of the author surrounded by his favourite books. Rhys Williams was local so I commissioned him and it was, in the event, really quite brilliant. Although he did make it embarrassingly clear that I didn’t quite rank highly enough on the social scale at that stage to deserve anything more than a slightly bored courtesy as he took my money …”
Adam cast me a wry glance. He had drifted towards the vacant bookshelves that lined the wall. His hand began to leaf through a small pile of papers that had been left there and I saw him jump as the constable moved to peer over his shoulder. There was a rustle as Adam hastily set down the sheets of paper. One slipped and fell and he caught it.
As he set it back on its pile, he told me, “You and I were introduced shortly afterwards at an exhibition launch; the last one you did before we were all sent our call-up papers, I believe. I wouldn’t have gone to the thing at all but for the fact that it was about five months after June had died and I felt it was high time I did some talking to grown-ups.”
That brought my pulse up. “Dear Lord,” I said with feeling. “I’m not sure I would have picked one of our launch parties for that. Was I friendly?”
“Of course.” He’d turned his back to the bookcase. “You were very polite and asked me how I was, and we talked about the town and the park, and then you offered me a glass of champagne. I already had one in my hand.” He smiled.
I was leafing through a fresh bundle of something without even looking at it. I turned my head and found the collection was a tattered cluster of small prints of Christi. I hastily put them back. I said ruefully, “I was probably worrying about the discussion I’d just had with Lord Whatsit and Sir Someone Else and whether I had said something utterly clichéd that set Rhys’s talent alongside the artistic greats of our time only to get the details blatantly wrong. Such as talking about Picasso as if he were old and dead, for example. It’s been done, believe me.”
In truth, Rhys and I must have inevitably had one of our rows, or rather he would have been having a creative crisis and I would have been quietly pacifying only for his charm to turn on like a switch when the first guest arrived. I, on the other hand, would have been left a wreck. I said sheepishly, “And then you bumped into me years later on a deserted hilltop and I was rude to you all over again. I’m so sorry. You won’t believe me, but I did think your voice was familiar. And you didn’t tell me about your wife – June, I mean – at Devil’s Bridge, did you? I remembered it from meeting you here all those years ago. I suppose you recognised me immediately?”
Adam had drifted nearer to me and my little collection of rubbish. His coat dropped onto the bare mattress beside mine. “Not immediately,” he said, “no. But I was sure when I saw you sitting there at breakfast. To be honest, when we met at the party all those years ago …” His voice slowed as he was distracted by a bundle lying on top of the next crate but then he recollected himself and turned back to me. “I didn’t think you were rude. I thought you were astoundingly normal in a sea of pretension.”
He came closer and took that cluster of tired prints out of my hands. I must have absently picked them up again to restart the process of examining them all over again. He glanced at them and then added, “You see, last autumn when I received a condescendingly generic invitation to Rhys’s comeback exhibition I accepted, I believe, for pretty much the same reason as before. And then I got Christi instead of you and was treated to a tour of the room like a new trophy, and received some quite extraordinary proof that I must have risen after all in the years since that first awkward photographic commission. Now I was a noteworthy personage who must be added to the collection. And you know how much I enjoy that sort of thing. To be quite frank it was almost a relief that you didn’t recognise me over breakfast.” A hesitation. “Almost.”
He caught my eye. I flushed and hid it by turning my head back to the box before me. Then I observed, “No wonder Christi felt she had to claim you as her own earlier. The idea that I’d pipped her to the post would have piqued terribly.” And had to bite my lip at the implication that I too thought of him in terms of ownership.
“You think she was suffering from jealousy? Is that what it was?”
I looked up at him in surprise. It hadn’t struck him to resent my words at all. Or perhaps even consider them. This was different. This wasn’t about me; this was about her. I asked quickly in a strangely tight voice, “You don’t think so?”
“Perhaps. Yes, of course it was. Exactly.”
There was something in his tone. Something repressive. I remarked dryly, “And that was a very enigmatic reply.”
“Was it? Sorry.” He didn’t care to explain. Instead he moved on so swiftly that he almost left me floundering to understand his meaning. He said, “Was this how you met Rhys too?”
I stared at him blankly, then Adam turned a photograph round to face me. His expression was so carefully arranged into polite interest that it made me laugh. It was one of Rhys’s set-up shots. It was a rough, untidy record of a scene so that the model’s pose could be re-enacted in the future. It must have been a work from his last completed exhibition where great paintings were parodied in modern form; the one that had been recorded on Christi’s camera only to plunge with him into the void at that waterfall.
The piece recorded in this particular photograph used a scantily clad Christi. Angular and dramatic, she was striking the pose of an Olympia or an Odalisque across a bed. She was accompanied by what looked like an ARP warden where classical paintings would place a slave girl. It seemed to me rather unusually vulgar of him to reference our nation’s recent war in this way; a cheap trick playing on our emotions so soon into peacetime. Or perhaps that had been his point.
Adam wasn’t worrying about any of that. He was asking whether I too had been Rhys’s model. I had not. I had never been called on to drape myself artfully across a scene for him. When we’d met I had been a fellow artist, albeit an inferior one. I’d
been a student who had stumbled into his world through the kindness and invitation of my talented, generous, gruffly spoken old uncle. I was the woman who thought she understood the scope of Rhys’s concepts; I was never the muse that inspired them. Which was not, now I came to think of it, remotely flattering since every other woman he met had been.
I told Adam this without rancour and reached to pull the next box closer. I wasn’t really meaning anything by it. I was already leafing through images of yet more launch events. Some of them seemed to be enlargements of the negatives in the other box. I could make out that there was traffic on the road outside the gallery window meaning that they dated from the time before the fuel ration had been withdrawn.
“Kate,” said Adam sharply to catch my attention.
I looked up. “What?”
“Come off it,” he said simply.
Oh.
Flushing, finally I told him what he wanted to know.
“Sometimes I wonder,” I remarked lightly, flicking blindly through yet more photographs, “how it might have worked out if a trivial little disagreement about sharing desk-space in the office hadn’t driven me into a fit of self-awareness. I honestly don’t know if Rhys would have ever mustered the energy to tell me the truth about his feelings for … well, for me as his wife and for these other women, and then more specifically, Christi. I think he might have let us all go on together, driving each other insane, but too lazy to make the change. It never really struck me how absurd it was. At the time I think we felt that although Rhys was the artist, we all had a part to play and we were all contributing to something truly great. Something greater than ourselves. The sacrifice we made in our daily lives – we women that is – was a natural requirement of his art, not a part of him. It was just something that had happened all through history with the wives and muses of great artists and was happening again to us.”
“You actually believed that?”
“At the time,” I repeated with a smile.
