The man nearest me upends a binbag of leaflets onto the floor and I try to catch them as they spill onto the redpainted parquet at my feet. ‘And the paint . . .’ he shouts to one of the others. The man he shouted to hurls a can of paint across the top of the pile of paper like petrol on a bonfire. It seeps across the floor like blood. Splashes of scarlet splatter up the front of his black jeans as if flames are licking his legs.
Araminta grabs the paintbrush from the hand of the man painting onto the glass. He is halfway through his second ‘MURDER’ and the straight line of the ‘D’ trails away like a gash across the glass as she pulls the brush away.
The men nearest me snatch their backpacks from the edge of the room, hook their arms through the straps. For a moment I think they are going to swing them into the vast wall of glass, but they turn towards the doorway instead. ‘Come on,’ shouts the tallest to the man by Araminta. He has paint on the elbows of his black jumper, smears across the back of his balaclava.
I spin round to watch them go. At my feet, pictures of dogs in cages, bears with anguished eyes – the paper pasted scarlet – stare up at me from the swirl of red. Nothing is untouched.
I hear Araminta cry out behind me. I turn and see the man wrestle his paintbrush back out of her hand. She reaches up towards it and he bowls against her with his shoulder. She shouts as she falls, her legs sliding from under her in the paste of paint and paper.
There is a single sickening snap as her arm hits the ground before she does and then a moment of absolute silence.
In the slow seconds that follow, paint seeps down every vertical surface, the smell booms and boils to fill the whole room. The animals stare – impotent and frozen – and Araminta lies very still, red and frail and helpless.
All four men bolt for the exit.
And, as they leave, I catch the eyes of the one nearest me. His balaclava slips up from his forehead.
I know those dark narrow eyes. I recognise those heavy eyebrows.
I know that if I pulled the black wool up from his throat I would see a smudged blue tattoo.
Chapter Sixteen
After the chaos of the attack, everything seems to happen quietly and calmly. The ambulance arrives but not before all the visitors have left, terrified. A nurse from the local A&E department happened to be in the library with her family: she came running when she heard the rumble of news that someone had been attacked.
The WI ladies gather as if by instinct and do their best to shuffle people out past Gallery One without them looking in too much, but the smell of paint, the red tell-tale footsteps that march all around the corridors, blushing our parquet flooring with pink prints, gives it all away.
Something horrible has happened here. And two hundred visitors have seen its aftermath.
Araminta regains consciousness almost immediately, but the unnatural angle of her arm speaks volumes. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says in a voice that doesn’t quite belong to her. ‘We can go by car – I don’t need an ambulance.’
‘You do, I’m afraid.’ The nurse sits beside her on the floor, sticky with paint. ‘You were definitely unconscious for a few moments. That makes you a risk.’
I try to smile at Araminta. For a moment, I think about stroking her good arm but I don’t dare touch her. We both know without saying it that I am, essentially, responsible for this.
Behind us, the volunteers clean down the man and the pushchair as best they can but, in the end, all they can do is take his name and address and say we’ll be in touch about replacing the pram and his clothes.
*
‘I knew this was going to go wrong.’ Araminta closes her eyes. ‘I should never have allowed it. I’ve let everyone down.’
My hands flutter around her; I don’t know which piece of her to touch without it hurting. ‘This is my fault. All my fault.’
Leo has arrived in the gallery. ‘Bastards.’ He slaps his hands on his thighs. He is spitting with anger, flecks of saliva land on the floor in front of him, a drop in the ocean of red. ‘Bastards.’
He kneels down in the paint beside Araminta.
I think about his best jeans, ruined. His priorities are so different to a few months ago. When we lived in London he would have been terrified by this situation – by this mess – rather than angry. Did I miss him growing, or is this how parenting works?
‘Curtis and me will get them, Mrs Minta. We will tell them, tell the police.’
We stare at the chaos: the scarlet papier mâché of leaflets already gluing itself to the floor, the red smears tattooing themselves to the glass.
‘At least it’s emulsion. It’ll scrub off,’ says one of the volunteers. ‘But you have to start on these leaflets now or they’ll be impossible.’
I drop my voice, whisper. ‘This was Curtis.’
‘How could it possibly be Curtis? This is not the moment for petty grudges.’ Araminta’s voice is quiet, as frail and ghostly as her face.
‘I saw him.’ I hiss it through my teeth. A snake, on the floor to my left, stares at me with solidarity, glassy eyes approving through his red filter.
‘Cate . . .’ Her voice is cracking with pain and with emotion. She is broken in more ways than just her arm. ‘You don’t always know as much about people as you think you do.’ She tries to get up but the nurse stops her, strokes her arm. ‘He’s a good boy – good for the museum.’ She brushes the nurse away, tries to sit up. ‘And this, what we did today, was not.’
‘I’m going to get buckets. Do something practical. You’ve had a shock, Araminta.’ How can she be returning to the old her, after all this?
‘I knew this would happen,’ she says and sinks back down beside the nurse who kneels in front of her. ‘I have let Colonel Hugo down, broken my promise.’ She starts to cry. ‘This is what the Board have been waiting for. Oh, Cate . . .’
‘This wasn’t me!’ I lose my temper. ‘I didn’t do this.’ I wave my arms at the visceral paint seeping down the glass, at the congealed mess on Leo’s jeans, at what looks like blood on my hands. I bellow at Araminta. ‘I didn’t do this!’
She turns and stares at me for a second. Her face is saying, Oh, yes, you did.
*
Araminta doesn’t want anyone to go with her in the ambulance: she is adamant. I make her promise to call me to collect her or to bring clothes if she has to stay in.
The police have said we can start cleaning up and the paint does come off reasonably easily, although it will sit in the tiny gaps between the glass and the dioramas’ wooden frames for a long time to come.
Some of the leaflets need scraping off with a paint scraper to remove them. The noise is as brittle as the atmosphere in the gallery.
‘Curtis isn’t texting me back, Mummy.’ Leo long since gave up washing the paint with me. He went back up to the flat saying that he was too tired to help. ‘I want him to come online.’
I don’t know what to say. It’s all too awful.
It is late when we finish. The atmosphere in the house is as thick – and as sickening – as the smell of the paint.
I pour a glass of wine from the bottle in the fridge. My hands leave a rose mist around its cold edges and I wipe them on my trousers to try and clean them. It is no good. I run the tap into the big butler’s sink and wash my hands, the soapy water foaming blood against the enamel.
I take my wine into the library. I need some open space around me but I’m still a little afraid to go outside.
The library is quiet. The paint must have rubbed off people’s shoes by the time they got here and I am the only thing in the room to remind anyone of what happened. Above me the black spangled sky blinks and twinkles.
‘What the fuck?’ I ask the books but they stay silent, their backs turned towards me. ‘How is this all my fault?’ I am asking about the whole of the last four years – not just tonight. I am tired to my soul – I was tired before Richard died. I am asking about my whole life.
All these books, all these secrets, all these
betrayals. The house says nothing.
I watch my face reflected in the brass light fittings at the back of the desk. I am so tired and vulnerable that it feels as if the house is pointing my own image back at me in order to accuse me. And maybe I’m guilty.
Maybe I’ll be found guilty of contingency, of being contingent. The last years have been a backfire of action and reaction. I have not made a decision of my own – for me – in decades. I bend around the plans that life makes for me – with no chance to wonder whether they are the right ones. Despite the horrors of today, despite being forced into yet another corner – there is one thing I am deciding, am doing just for myself: Patch. Patch is part of the new me, the antithesis of being blown about by fate and chance. Patch is something, someone, that I am choosing.
And I’m not the only person that choosing Patch affects.
Would I ever have been fair enough – generous enough – to let Simon go if Patch hadn’t come into my life?
I sit at one of the desks to write the email I have to write. I run my fingers over the worn wood. So many love letters must have been written here: so many ‘sorrys’; ‘congratulations’; and ‘I’m so sad to inform you.’ The house has seen it all before.
From: Cate Morris
To: Simon Henderson
Subject: I need to tell you something
Mail: I haven’t been entirely honest with you: or with myself. Something we both know I’m good at. And I don’t know how to find the words for this, I only know that I need to tell you.
I’ve met someone. It’s been swift – an absolute avalanche. I’m so sorr y. I didn’t expect this to happen and I cer tainly didn’t mean it to. I don’t know what will come of it – if anything – I’m surprised to find him in my life, cer tainly surprised that I could feel the way I do. I feel less lonely and, potentially, as though I have something to look for ward to and someone to share that with. I didn’t think I would feel like that again in my lifetime and that’s why I’ve never prepared myself – or you – for the possibility of me meeting someone else.
I love you, Simon. I have done since I was eighteen years old. I love you for who you were to Richard, who you are to Leo, and – most of all – for everything you have been to me.
I can’t simply switch off the way I feel about you, you mean too much. But it’s not a relationship that was ever meant to be. In another place and time, if I hadn’t been Richard’s wife – and now, if Patch hadn’t turned up – I know we would have been a lifelong love story. There was always a little part of me that believed you would come back and we would start again: that the fairytale would come true. And I think, in no small way, that myth helped me to deal with losing Richard.
But that isn’t what’s happened and I’m not able to belong to you. It breaks my heart but, once again, we have slipped past each other and out of reach.
You’ll always be my best friend. You’ll always be Leo’s godfather. Most of all, I will always love you but, for now, we can’t see each other: it would be too painful.
Cxxx
When I am done with crying, at least for now, I go back to the kitchen to finish clearing up. It is late, beyond midnight, and properly dark.
I search the drawers for some kind of cloth that I can use to scrub the last of the paint from the sink. I can’t use a tea towel – whatever I get this off with will have to be thrown away immediately. One of the drawers in the dresser is full of things that look suitable, I rifle through for the oldest, the most disposable. At the bottom of the drawer, there is a book.
The book is thin, the cover faded. In pale blue letters it says Crouch-on-Sea, a History with a picture of Hatters, pretty much as it looks today, from the outside. I take the book out of the drawer and open it. On the first page it gives the author’s details – no one I recognise – and the year: 1967.
I take the book with me to the kitchen table, under the central lamp, so that I can see it better. The writer has put together a pretty decent potted history of the house: I skim it. I know most of it. What is new to me is the collection of black-and-white photos. As I read on, I realise that the photographs are greyscale copies of colour pictures and that the pictures are relatively modern, presumably taken by the author specifically for the book.
Most of the galleries are reproduced – with some degree of talent. The scale of the animal collection almost makes its way onto the page although it would need a human in the picture for perspective to properly grasp the scale. It brings me back to what it looked like today.
And then, towards the end of the section, a group shot outside the front door. Underneath it says, ‘The residents of Hatters, the Lyons-Morris family.’
In the line-up is a small boy. I don’t need to be told who it is, it could be Leo. The dark hair, the sturdy legs, that half-frown. This is a picture of Richard – he must be six or seven. And beside him, unmistakable, and barely changed, is Araminta.
I rush through the text, trying to find out an exact year. This picture must have been taken more than fifty years ago. I open the magnifier on my phone and hold it over the photograph: the details come into view. It is definitely Richard, and it is definitely Araminta. She is wearing the same short skirt she wears now, the same light round-necked jumper. Her hair is the exact same shape and set but possibly, if I squint, a shade or two darker than it is now.
Colonel Hugo is in the middle, the tallest person in the picture and definitely at its centre. To one side of him is a woman I assume is Harriet – the only other pictures I’ve seen of her are in her wedding veil, but it must be her. Richard is in front of Hugo and his two hands rest on his grandson’s shoulders in a gesture of pride.
Richard looks sweet. He is wearing school uniform, long grey shorts that cast shadows over his knees, a V-necked jumper with a band of colour running round the ‘V’, a white shirt with its pointy collars sticking over the jumper, and a school tie. He is untroubled and easy, his face – despite its natural frown – radiant and engaged. And again, no sign of his parents. I kiss my fingers, then place them gently on his little face.
Does this house let me into its shadows whenever it wants to? Does it offer up these reminders as a comfort to me – or as a reminder to know my place? Is it trying to remind me that my son might belong here, but I don’t.
*
I get into bed a little after 1 a.m., lonely and sad. There is a reply on my phone from Simon.
From: Simon Henderson
To: Cate Morris
Subject: Thank you
Mail: Thank you, as ever, for your startling honesty. I’m so pleased that this has worked out for you, and for Leo.
I ran away when Richard died – however kindly we dress it up. I should have stayed and taken care of you and Leo and I didn’t. I took my guilt and my shame and I got as far away from what we did as I could. I know now that I was wrong – just as I know (and my mum actually wrote this in a letter to me when I left) that you take yourself with you wherever you go. I have taken you and Leo with me too – along with Richard, the best friend a man could ever have – the three of you will always be beside me.
I hope you will still let me visit when I come back. I would love to see Leo. And I will have to ‘screw my courage to the sticking place’ to see you and your new chap: maybe if I’d done that in the first place, everyone’s lives would have gone differently.
Whoever has the fortune to be loved by you – and I count myself among that lucky number – is a privileged man.
Simon
When you’re sad and wrong, someone being noble and kind brings its own searing pain. I cry myself back to sleep.
Chapter Seventeen
Fire overwhelms every sense the human body has but, for me, the last thing that goes is my sense of smell. It is smell that wakes me: smell that makes me dream – in the moments before that – of bonfires, winter nights, of curling up on a sofa with Richard in our old house.
I have read that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory, to
our primal selves: that heroin-users smell the sweet staleness of their mother’s milk before they are overcome by the whoosh of the drug.
I am awake, fully awake, and everything I rely on has gone.
The bedroom is never this dark. The moon has vanished from my window and everything is a deep yellowed grey. The starling chicks are screaming beneath the eaves, a ghostly screech of chaos as they panic and flap. The panic itself is contagious and I throw myself towards my bedroom door.
Leo. Where is Leo? I scream his name but no sound comes. It is swallowed by the noise and stench of the smoke. I stagger across the room, toward what I believe is the door. I walk straight into what can only be a chest of drawers. Even in this tiny space, I have gone the wrong way.
I have no sight; and no hearing left outside of the screaming screaming birds. My nose is clogged and choked with smoke, it coats my tongue and my searing throat. Adrenalin and fear paste white sweat across my skin.
Leo.
I drop to the floor where there is less smoke. I push my face into the ancient carpet and try to inhale through its weave of dust and worn fibres. My hands are bony spiders that crawl towards the bottom of the door. Flex and drag, stretch and pull. Every weft and weave of the carpet scores into my cheeks as I inch forward.
I wrench the door open and it is a full second before I realise my skin has stuck to the brass doorknob. I scream and scream his name.
The birds are silent.
My bath towel hangs on the back of this door. I pat blindly with my wrong hand until my palm hits the fabric. I bunch the towel up in both hands and try to turn the knob. It slips and resists and stays, stubbornly, shut. I push myself upright, my face pressed against the heat of the door, the hot paint sticking to my skin. I hit the doorknob with the towel, over and over. I am completely ineffective.
I try to shout, but there is nothing in my throat but smoke. I must wake Leo. I must get to his bedroom. Leo sleeps like a log, he will sleep right through this until . . .
Where We Belong Page 16
