Cars did not count. They had no intrinsic worth. The one in the next street, round the corner (three derelict houses and two more for sale, the avenue reeking with indifference), was very old indeed, suffering rust gallantly. Thomas stopped to check the number, reluctant to do what he must towards something so innocuous. All cars were ugly. Everyone asleep, the old car conveniently far from the nearest sleeper. She must have parked here deliberately next to a lamp post, as if the thing needed light in order to survive. How soft she was really, soft as butter under the knife.
He reversed carefully, with all the deliberation of a man who drove his adapted car less than once a month (and then only at night or on Sundays), until the heavy Mercedes was facing the flank of the rusty little Fiat. Then he drove forward, slowly but definitely, his own engine whirring in protest, but the sound of impact surprisingly small. He reversed again and hit again, enjoying the sensation a little more this time but not increasing the speed, doubting the need to beware of the neighbours: they all believed in each for his own, the most popular of all beliefs, he had found. The solid front of the Mercedes ground into the fragile body of the Fiat. The Fiat groaned and stirred: he withdrew at that point because he did not want a wreck, merely a dramatic disability, revved once more, felt through the vibrating body the offside wing buckle against the force. The twisted metal resembled a smile when he got out to examine, a leer of final protest, the smile of subjection. Only a metal machine. To be sure of his vandalism, first looking up and down the deserted road, he took the jack from the Fiat’s open boot and flung it against the back window. There was a crunching sound as the window crazed into an opaque design, like frost on glass. Risky, that. Then he crept into his own driving seat and purred away with scarcely a mark on his car and none on his soul, which had undergone a kind of cleansing.
Swinging from the mirror of his car was a small picture tied to a brilliant blue St Christopher medal by a cheap, pink ribbon. A present from Maria, a crude good luck emblem presented on a birthday, ugly in his eyes as she was superbly ugly, so manifestly imperfect she did not count, although he knew she had her own version of beauty which included this picture and its attendant piece of glitter. Showing a saint who was made into a legend, purely by such effigies as these. Christopher, the Canaanite, a huge and ugly man who had served the devil first and then dedicated his prodigious strength to God, carried Christ across the water and now brought luck to travellers.
Thomas slewed the car, tore down the medal with violence and hurled it from the window. Then felt guilty. His sister’s gift. A sort of bribery which verged on love, he supposed. He wondered what she was doing, angry for having to wonder, turned his ludicrous car past Elisabeth’s house, where no lights showed.
Downstairs in the same house, the cat whose owners had gone away finally recognized the futility of howling distress, a method of gaining attention which Elisabeth could have told it was bound to fail. Aiming to exact prompt obedience to its needs in the future, the cat coughed and deposited her anguished disgust on the fringed rug in the hall.
Maria clambered into bed in her basement flat which seemed to consist of no space at all. Not enough to swing a cat or for her to turn without knocking something over, which was one reason why there was so little to knock. There was a tiny kitchenette, screened from her bedsitting room by a piece of floral curtain which Thomas had thrown out long since, another room for lavatory and basin. In her bedsit room was a comfortable bed, also his once, a chair from the same source, but all the pictures were her own. Down to Westminster Cathedral once or twice a week for replenishments, and she knew all about art, reckoning her knowledge was far superior to his, although the passion shared made her tolerate him better than she might. There was the Virgin Mother, Madonna with Child, St Bernadette surrounded by an aura of unearthly light, with a blue robe and roses at her feet, each holy picture replaced when the touch of her fingertips dirtied the surface. Art was wonderful: it was her religion, and for that reason alone she understood Thomas. Maria would have liked other people to see. Thomas visited rarely, never lingered: he might learn a thing or two about what made paintings inspirational, but the need was not urgent. These were hers and this was her only home, stamped thus as her own although it depended completely on him. She did not mind her relative poverty and, not usually, her ugliness. There were no mirrors, no reminders in this home, a womb lined with holy colours, no luxuries. She whistled and wheezed to the tune of a hymn, rubbed her body with cold water, never looking down at it, making her ablutions deliberately rough. The proper treatment for a body was mortification, but the soul needed art.
CHAPTER THREE
‘People shouldn’t complain of being poor, Annie said, apropos of nothing. ‘Being poor means having nothing to steal, which is nothing to envy. Someone whipped some of my stock yesterday. Three gilt frames. Bastards.’
‘Nothing much, I hope.’
‘No. You’ve done this beautifully, Liz. Sorry, Elisabeth. Beautiful. Wouldn’t know it was the same canvas.’ Elisabeth detested that shortening of her name. Call her Liz and she glared; call her Lizzie and she practically spat. No, not spat: that was far too violent a reaction for Liz. I wish I knew you better, Annie was thinking. But then again, perhaps not.
‘Yes, I have. Done it beautifully, I mean.’
‘I don’t know how you manage. You can’t even see where the tear was. No bump, even.’
‘Bandage,’ said Elisabeth with a hint of pride. ‘Patch it with gauze instead of canvas. I get it from medical suppliers, pull together all the threads in the tear, face the back with bandage. Then it never shows through.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Annie repeated. ‘Medical suppliers, you do shop in strange places. Is there anything you can’t mend? I mean, that picture looked as if it had been kicked for a hundred years.’
‘Fire,’ Elisabeth murmured. ‘You can’t make them recover from fire. If you want to kill oil paint, burn it, acid or flame, similar effect.’
‘Fancy that.’ Annie’s mind already running on to the selling of the picture, the profit after Elisabeth’s bill: she had become so used to this constant calculation, the mechanics of trade, that she almost forgot to look at the pictures themselves. She was bored with the complexities and sometimes wished she was selling handkerchiefs. Not like Elisabeth: hers was not merely a living but an ongoing love affair more consistent than anything Annie had ever encountered. Until death do us part, me and my paint box, Annie thought wryly, uncomfortable with such intensity. She didn’t much care for people who lived for art and they certainly weren’t the best customers. Annie was preparing to haggle, the exercise of second nature. A graceful haggle since she was fond of Elisabeth, equally fond of her friend’s habit of undercharging from modesty, but still a haggle with the merest undertone of guilt.
‘I shan’t get much for this, you know. It might be good, but it isn’t signed. Why do so many good artists forget to sign? Anyway, it’s Mrs Ballantyre’s and she’s only paying three hundred.’
‘Uh-oh …’
‘Don’t knock her, Liz – Elisabeth. She’s a good customer.’
‘More money than sense. Comes in here with her Gucci bag and says, Hmm, I’ll have that and that and ye-e-es, I think so, like someone in church, all whispers and reverence, as if she was buying icons. Taps her little trotters, snaps her little jaws and signs her little cheques. No smiles, no joy. People with her money should be singing and dancing, wild with excitement, but she never buys anything just because she likes it. She’d kill herself rather than buy anything anonymous, always knows the artist, always for investment, like buying by numbers.’
‘Now, now,’ Annie remonstrated, surprised at such vehemence. ‘Don’t like to see you standing in judgement. Have a coffee. Envy makes your eyes crossed.’
‘I am envious. I’m riddled with it.’
‘Listen, if you owned half the things you mend, it wouldn’t make any difference.’
‘Yes it would. I’d be able to work
on pictures I like. I’d be able to buy what I wanted to save. I’d be able to afford light, a better studio.’
‘Oh, I thought you meant you could buy a swimming pool. All you want is work. You must be mad. All right then, I’ll get us some coffee. Watch the shop.’
Life at Annie’s stall in the basement of the Antiques Centre was one long nibble, especially when business was bad; coffee, tea, Coke in summer, pastries, chocolate, cigarettes in between, no deference to health. This floor was empty of customers, floodlit but unprofitable early in the day. The coffee shop was on the third floor: Annie’s high heels clicked away into the distance on the uneven floorboards, her cigarette smoke floating back, her eyes looking ahead, ignoring the stalls as she went. Seen it all before. So had Elisabeth, but in ten years’ watching, never learned the indifference of the woman who was at least the equivalent of a friend. As much as anyone was. Unfailingly, Elisabeth found the Antiques Centre a church to her spirit, the way a born housewife might find a supermarket, taking half an hour for each aisle, which was why Annie was so quick to volunteer for the coffee. Our Lizzie looked at everything en route, looked and touched in the same way Annie herself could not get across the room at a party because she knew so many people and always stopped for each. Elisabeth would stand transfixed by the colours of a Paisley shawl, mesmerized apparently by the sheen of mahogany or walnut on a veneered music box, smiling at the vivid blues of Venetian glass. Delivering back to Annie a picture she had restored was only an excuse. Going for coffee was only an excuse to renew acquaintance with old friends, spotlit, the presence of paintings, tapestries, bronze, brass, vases, silks, china, pottery and porcelain, cloaks, scarves and shawls, violins and fans, the only panacea she needed. Objects, shapes, sizes and colours brought all the sensations of peace. As long as such things existed and were treasured, life was not mad and all was more or less tolerable with her world. There was no such stability in people.
He saw her from the other end of the aisle in the basement of an uncomfortable warehouse, far from the subdued galleries of the West End; watched her and knew exactly why she was there. She had come for the work and the colour, so distracted she might simply forget to tell the other woman about anything new or distressing in her life, supposing she had noticed: her secretive habits such that the troubling of anyone else with her own woes would be anathema. Even in extremis, she was not a person who knew how to scream for help; a useful attribute, that. Instead, she removed herself from whatever it was tormented her, stood as she was now, examining the three new pictures Annie was giving her to restore. Thomas marvelled at her from where he stood, but he did not speak. Naïve paintings, he noticed: American, once fresh portraits of wide open faces painted in poor materials and now vividly aged by cracking, with no shadows beyond those solemn heads. Shadows are multicoloured; naïve paintings have no shadows: the naïve artist does not understand shadows, paints, like a child, a vision of what he thinks he sees, not what is there. Elisabeth had cleansed the shadows out of her life, deleted them for ever. Not this shadow: never this one. Look at me, he wanted to say. Look at me, damn you, but he did not want her to look. If she did, she would only turn away and dismiss him. In that piercing light, created from dozens of spotlights illuminating stalls where one or two owners were polishing their silver the better to reflect the curves, Elisabeth knew no fear. Despite the footsteps so close to her ears, a sound diffused by murmuring voices, approaching, then receding, her broad back impervious as long as she clutched the painting, examined and held like a shield. A three-cornered step, one two click, one two click, like a man with a stick who did not need a stick but carried it for affectation, an Edwardian gentleman who placed little weight on his prop. Edwardian, the era for decorative painting, ladies in fine frocks. Concentrate. One two click, fainter now: she still could not turn towards that sound, heard here for the first time, as familiar as dusk or dawn: one two click, sounding on the pavement beyond her house, in the station two days before, inside and outside of everything she did. Fainter and fainter, another sound superimposed. Annie’s high heels clattering back, progress announced with loud greetings to left and right, such an audible perambulation as the other faded away. You shouldn’t live alone, Annie told her, she who liked a crowded life. Too much space: space means shadows.
‘You naffed off a buyer, then?’ Annie said. ‘You look sick.’ Elisabeth took a cup of scalding liquid, beigey brown coffee slopping and scalding her fingers. Pink, pudgy fingers, swollen: the dermatitis caused by chemicals was back for a while. Never mind. A little dribbled on the olive green of the cardigan she wore, edged with violet ribbon: the belt matched, olive and violet striped, the whole effect a neat patchwork. She drank, burning her mouth. The footsteps became part of a compendium of memory, dreaded and resisted, ignored and absorbed in unequal proportion. It was the first time she had heard them here: fear made her unnaturally calm and objective. There was no point telling Annie because Annie would not listen. No one did.
‘I don’t know what I can do with these,’ Elisabeth said, pointing at the naïve paintings. ‘I can’t get them back to what they were.’ The faces reminded her of an undertaker’s work, another kind of artistry not so different from her own, turning dead flesh into serenity with the help of scientific maquillage. She was trembling.
‘Never mind,’ said Annie, comfortably. ‘You’ll think of something. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter. Paint them over, if you like. Who’d know? Not the buyer.’
‘I’d know.’
‘You purist. Don’t complain about being poor, then.’
‘All right,’ said Elisabeth. ‘I won’t.’
‘Got a lot of work coming in? As well as mine? Only I could do with these in a hurry.’
‘I might have an awful lot.’ She hesitated, as if about to confess. ‘A dealer, at least I think a dealer, phoned about a contract to restore the paintings in his flat. In fact,’ she rushed on with a level of concern in her voice which Annie chose to ignore, ‘he’s phoned several times, keeps leaving messages, impressive address. Should I go?’
‘What do you mean, should you go? For Christ’s sake, beats me how you stay in business at all. Too honest, Elisabeth, too honest. A man, you said. What do you think he’s going to do, rape you?’ Annie’s cursory glance at Elisabeth’s vivid colours and generous size spoke loud her own opinion that Liz was the last person a modern rapist might consider. Annie herself was built like a stick.
‘I was wondering if you’d come with me. To look it over, I mean?’ She did not add, I am frightened of footsteps: I would go almost anywhere for a safe haven, but I do not want to go into strange territory alone.
‘Is he selling anything, this dealer?’
‘No, he says not, the paintings are his own.’
‘Sorry then, no. Why don’t you ask your friend Francis? How’s that going, by the way?’
‘Goes fine, I suppose. He’s too busy, I don’t like to ask …’
‘Well, so am I busy,’ said Annie sharply, stung by the notion that her time was less precious.
‘All right, all right, I’m sure it’s genuine.’
‘Course it is. If it’s work you want, you get along there, double quick.’
It was a lie, about Annie being busy, and Elisabeth knew it was a lie. Enough of a lie to hurt and she no more knew a way of bouncing back from a hurt than she knew how to make demands. Suddenly, the quiet house of a stranger seemed preferable to what she knew.
‘Business is business,’ said Annie. Elisabeth fell silent. The footsteps were coming back, purely imaginary, echoing. He had come so close, but never touched.
‘How about a hundred on account?’ Annie said lightly. ‘For the work, I mean. I know I owe you more, but trade’s not good. You know that.’
‘What? Oh, yes, I suppose so.’
The pain of the lies, the casual insolence towards a skilled friend, continued silently, like a toothache. Annie the bargainer was picking up cake crumbs from her desk with the ball of one
finger decorated with shredded nail varnish, this shrewd Annie, not meeting her eyes, replacing the friendly Annie with the ease of a chameleon changing colour, a natural instinct for survival where money was concerned.
‘And, of course, I want you to do these three, like I said.’ Cunning: the offer of work was always seductive; money promised better than nothing. ‘That OK, then?’
‘What? Oh yes, of course.’
Elisabeth’s hallmark, Annie recognized with irritation, this bloody humility. Always let you get away with it; always took money on account; too humble by half, couldn’t bargain her way out of a paper bag. Why hadn’t she learned, like everyone else, how to confront the world? But she wasn’t even going to try, simply accepted a bum deal. Liz could never bargain for her own price. Thank God you aren’t a tart, Annie thought with a tiny hint of malice: you’d be dead by now. Annie breathed on the end of her cigarette, which acted as a digestif for her cake, watched the tip glow under her breath. Business was business.
‘Can’t say I like these naïve paintings much,’ said Elisabeth mildly, preparing to move.
‘Other people do. I suppose you’d like to restore a bloody Gainsborough?’
‘No, I don’t want anything priceless. I want something brilliant but unrecognized.’
‘Well, maybe your posh contact with the posh address has got one waiting for you. Not damaged by fire. Get back to your answerphone. See you.’
Annie watched Elisabeth depart, kicked a frame into a corner. Small flakes of gold leaf showered from where her foot had landed. Annie scooped them up, muttering, looked at the glittering dust in her hands and wiped them on her skirt. Costly stuff, temper. Elisabeth’s fault for her incessant, calm goodwill, an attribute Annie did not share. Annie was uncomfortably aware that although she and Elisabeth acted as friends, she had, in one mean sense, cheated the other for at least three years.
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