The First Cut

by Knight, Ali

  ‘Got mine,’ said Adam.

  Nicky’s eyes wandered over the many empty shelves, the wealth of this semi-cellar presumably quickly disappearing down the thirsty throats of Adam and his mates. The thought made her sad, somehow. It took years to build something, and but a few raucous nights to end it. She followed him up the creaky steps, wondering if this was an allegory for her marriage. He picked two glasses off a shelf and they began walking round the drawing room, pausing to look at the dark oil paintings of stern-looking men and women, or men with dogs, which were hanging on chains from the picture rail.

  ‘I’ve never seen a picture rail actually used like that.’

  ‘It’s a way of never being able to get rid of the ancestors. Aunt Connie said that they used to give her nightmares when she was young.’

  Nicky walked further along the wall, examining the paintings. ‘They’re all holding guns. What is it about the upper classes and their guns?’

  Adam laughed. ‘They’re still here. There’s a cabinet.’

  ‘No way!’ She followed Adam out to the hallway and by the billiard room there was a locker with a long glass front and two guns stacked against the supports inside. Nicky pulled at the door. ‘It’s shut.’

  ‘There’s a key somewhere.’ Adam felt along the top of the case and a moment later found the key. He opened the door and pulled out a shotgun, aiming it at Nicky’s chest. ‘Stick ’em up!’

  It was more unpleasant having a gun pointed at her than she had imagined; its power and connotations were impossible to ignore. ‘Tell me that’s not loaded.’

  Adam shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Please put it back.’ Adam didn’t move. His grin grew wider. He lifted the gun towards her face, looking down the barrel at her. ‘Stop it!’ He didn’t, and a long moment passed. ‘Put that fucking thing away!’

  A spell had been broken. Adam held up his hands in mock defeat. ‘Relax, it’s OK. I’m kidding.’ The gun rested on his shoulder, pointing up to the ceiling.

  She was suddenly angry. ‘You never mess about with guns.’ She tried to grab it from his hand, preparing for a battle, but he limply let her have it. It was colder and heavier than she had expected, the wood smooth in her palm. She bundled it back into the cabinet and locked the door, putting the key back where Adam had retrieved it from. When she turned back he was staring at her, looking hurt. ‘I’m sorry. It’s the total surrender it demands. The – I don’t know – bowing before the great power of the fucking gun. These things kill, Adam!’

  ‘It was just a joke,’ he said quietly, and walked off into the drawing room.

  Nicky felt bad, but she didn’t feel in the wrong. He shouldn’t point guns in people’s faces. She picked up the key from the top of the cabinet and stuck it behind a photo on a bureau in the hall. She didn’t want a repeat of what had just happened. It might be his house and she was a guest, but she was unnerved. Hiding the key was a way to keep things light between them. She looked at the picture in the frame and paused. It was Adam’s mother, she was sure. Their eyes were the same shape, with the same intense stare, but hers were blue. She was looking up at the photographer, her hands clasping her elbows in a defensive gesture. She was wearing a frilly blouse that made her look a bit prim; her blonde hair was iron straight and long. She was beautiful and young and it brought home to Nicky the enormity of Adam’s loss: a child without a mother. I don’t have a single picture of my mother, thought Nicky suddenly. Not even one.

  She looked round at the grand old house, steeped in generations of family history, ancestors on the walls, photos in frames, stories, anecdotes, a lineage recorded in Debrett’s. It really brought home to Nicky, for the first time, that she was without history; she had been stripped of her own story. If you don’t know who you are, can you know where you’re going? She was affected by this and retreated to the toilet, shaken.

  That these unresolved feelings about her unknown family should appear so strongly here, of all places, was a shock to Nicky, and she would have spent longer thinking it through but she was soon distracted by her admiration of the trompe l’oeil wallpaper in the toilet, some of which was peeling at the sides with the damp. Guns, dogs and horses – the motifs of the upper classes. A representation of her upbringing would have been a drinks trolley, a chicken brick and those British bird coasters. She weed on the curly blue lettering in the toilet bowl that advertised the workshop that had fashioned the ceramic. ‘Pissing on the workers, are we, Nics?’ That’s what Maria would say when she told her. But Maria, despite her fashionable flirtations with revolutionary politics in her youth, would be rapt. This set-up was every girl’s dream, however much they pretended otherwise. She’d seen Maria steal Country Life from the Art Desk, just as she had done. She was hanging out with a handsome, passionate young man with a crumbling estate and a tragic past. In many ways Adam and Greg were similar – no wonder she was attracted to him. She was dealing with high emotion and chaos and it was a heady combination.

  She came back into the billiard room and looked at the huge painting hanging on the back wall.

  ‘My mum painted this.’

  ‘Oh bless.’

  ‘It’s awful, really awful.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

  It was a view of the estate seen from the side, where a huge willow tree dominated a section of lawn. It was a timid and literal representation of the view. It was sludgy and sad, but not in an arresting way. Nicky tried to find something positive to say. She admired anyone who had a go and thought sniping at someone’s ambition, however poorly executed, was mean, but she couldn’t help thinking of the striking, modern prints in Lawrence’s London flat – so much better than these.

  ‘Let’s get Connie’s stuff,’ Adam said and they wandered up the broad turning staircase to the bedrooms on the first floor, passing more paintings by Adam’s mother of the lake and other views of the estate, some seen through a first-floor window.

  They were on the top landing now, sun cascading through the floor-to-ceiling windows, where a much better, larger oil painting, of a cavalier knight, hung on the landing wall. He was staring sternly out of the canvas, his hand on the hilt of a huge sword. ‘Oh we have to do something funny,’ Adam said. ‘Close your eyes. Go on, close them.’ Nicky gave a nervous half giggle. ‘Go on, it’s an old family game. Everyone plays it when they come here, it’s a Thornton ritual. Just stand here on the landing and close your eyes.’

  ‘I’m in.’ Nicky liked silly games. She put her hands over her eyes, listening. She heard nothing. ‘Can I open them yet?’ There was no answer. ‘Adam?’ She waited a few more moments and then took her hands away and looked around. The sun was still shining, the dust dancing lightly on the rising summer air. She looked down both corridors that led away from the landing but Adam wasn’t there. She leaned over the banister but he didn’t seem to be downstairs. A plane began its low drone over the house, the noise reaching its crescendo a short while later. The silence crept back. She sensed Adam was near but she couldn’t work out where. She heard a faint noise by the picture of the cavalier and took a step towards it. Where was he? She stared at the picture and gasped. Its eyes were moving! She burst out laughing as Adam rolled his eyes theatrically in the cavalier’s head. ‘That is brilliant!’

  Adam opened a hidden door in the painting, made to follow the outline of the knight’s armour, and Nicky joined him in the secret room. It was larger than expected and the only light came from the two holes in the eyes. She looked out at the corridor and the top of the stairs. ‘When I came to stay we had such a laugh scaring people,’ Adam said. ‘Look, here are the eyes you put back.’ He held up a piece of wood with the eyeballs painted on it and pointed at the little shelf that it sat on.

  ‘Who painted this, then?’

  Adam sniggered. ‘Certainly not my mother!’

  14

  Greg woke in his bed with a start, clawing his way to consciousness. He lay panting in the wet sheets, his heart hammering.
He had been falling, twisted and contorted . . . He wondered if he had been screaming, and if anyone in the hotel had heard. He reached out for the ringing phone and dragged himself to sit upright on the side of the bed.

  It was Liz, her voice crisp and accusing. ‘I’ve got some news.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘She picked up a young man this morning in the car.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘How should I know! She met him on Portobello Road.’ Greg frowned. He opened the Evian bottle on the bedside table. ‘Then they drove off.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  Liz paused. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean you lost them?’

  ‘Yes, Greg! This isn’t an action film! I’m not exactly trained to do this! He was driving. He suddenly took off.’

  ‘He was driving my car?’ The silence hung heavy in the air. ‘He was driving my fucking car?’

  ‘They swapped when she met him.’

  Greg began to squeeze the small plastic bottle in his hand. A cold pebble of hatred and jealousy formed in his throat as he thought of Nicky. He was stuck here, working seventeen-hour days, seven days a week, while back home his wife was letting her toy boy smear his hands over the gearstick of his beloved motor. She knew how much he cared for his car, and he didn’t apologize or feel embarrassed about that – it was what men of his class and age did: care, covet and show off. Why else did men buy Kevlar bicycles and flat-screen, sixty-inch, high-resolution TVs with surround sound? He squeezed so hard on the tiny Evian bottle water splashed onto his fist.

  ‘They were driving west when he suddenly ran a red light, turned right across two lanes of oncoming traffic and sped off. He nearly hit a pedestrian. It came out of the blue. She looked as surprised as I was.’

  Too much saliva was draining into Greg’s mouth. Surprises in his life had never been good; unexpected news was, to Greg, simply tragedy by another name. After what had happened to Grace it was no wonder. The anger was being chased by fear, the claustrophobia of not knowing, of having to imagine. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He’s got dark hair, kind of tall, really young.’

  ‘How young?’

  ‘Mid-twenties, I’d guess.’ Greg thought back to his Skype call with Nicky after she nearly drowned in the Thames and was rescued by some young buck. It was the same jumped-up little fucker, he was sure of it. ‘She didn’t take a bag with her. She wasn’t planning on going for long.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Greg put his mobile down as the hotel phone rang.

  ‘Mr Peterson, your car is waiting for you, sir,’ Sheri’s or Diane’s or Trudi’s sing-song voice trilled from reception.

  ‘Thanks.’ He turned back to the call from London.

  ‘Maybe it’s nothing, Greg. He was probably just showing off.’

  Greg’s feeling of impotence was redoubled by being thousands of miles away. He picked his trousers off a chair and put them on. His plan had made a twisted sense at the time: keep far away from Nicky and the bad karma that surrounded him couldn’t contaminate her. He had thought their love could survive the distance. After all, he had survived things that would have broken other men; as a consequence he believed he was not like other men. He veered wildly between amazement that he was still here and fear at what tomorrow might bring. But now he felt that in trying to protect her he had simply lost her. All that effort and pain was for nothing! A surge of hatred for this young man flowed through him. Jealousy had a power and a logic all its own. He knew he shouldn’t be asking Liz to keep tabs on Nicky, but he had been separated for ever from normal by Grace’s murder and by what had gone before. He wiped his sweating brow. Was it so wrong that he was trying to buy a little insurance? Why me, Greg thought. For the millionth time the unanswerable question came back to him . . . He had lost Grace, and now, because of how the past was shaping him, he was in danger of losing Nicky too . . . The anger he tried so hard to control swamped him.

  ‘Greg?’ His half growl, half grunt and the sound of breaking glass was clearly audible down the phone.

  ‘I’m still here.’ Greg stared at the shards of the vase that had stood on the mantelpiece above the instant fake-log gas fire before he’d hurled the doll-sized Evian bottle at it. Against all the odds, he was still here, he was still clinging on; on the surface he was a success, a man with a wife and a future that was his to control, if only he could forget his past . . .

  ‘I’m not sure I can do much more, I have to work tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, thanks, Liz.’

  ‘Greg? I’m sorry.’

  Greg looked out of the window at the weak sun struggling to shine through the pollution layer. La la land. Helio was downstairs waiting to drive him to the shoot, where he’d have breakfast at the catering van. The public would watch from behind the lines set up to keep them at bay. He’d shoot images today that would remain cast for ever in cinema history. A smooth, slick, fantasy representation that bore no relation to the effort required to make it. He needed to remember that. He rang off and phoned reception. ‘Can you tell the cleaner to watch out? I accidentally broke a vase this morning. I don’t want her to get hurt.’

  15

  Upstairs they walked past a series of bedrooms, some of them habitable, others filled with broken chairs and old trunks. A large damp patch stained part of the corridor. ‘I guess all Connie’s stuff would have been kept in here,’ Adam said, opening the door to a bedroom that overlooked the lake. The room had a single brass iron bedstead with a blue satiny cover, a faded Indian rug on the floorboards and a wardrobe.

  Adam began rummaging through a series of trunks, unearthing clothing and cloche hats and papers and dust.

  ‘Was she an organized kind of woman?’ Nicky asked, having a sneezing fit.

  ‘No. She thought of herself as too bohemian to bother about order or anything. The room at Dad’s is a comedy of junk and stuff she won’t throw away. It drives Bridget mad because it spoils her modern, clean-line aesthetic. There are to be no wonky standard lamps in Bridget’s eye line!’ He shook his head. ‘It’s pathetic what little is left at the end, in the end.’

  ‘I completely disagree. My whole job is about showing how much there is to celebrate and to remember.’

  Adam opened a large box of photographs and started rifling through them.

  ‘Maybe. We’ll take this box outside on the terrace, but first let’s see what else there is.’

  Nicky pulled a suitcase out from under the bed. Inside were about ten faded red notebooks. She picked one out at random, opened it and began scanning the first page. It was a description of repairs to the estate wall by the airport and of the trouble the builders had getting some machinery across the parkland. The passage was dated June 1988. She opened a page in the middle of the book and skim-read about a dinner party at the house. A date had been added here too. ‘It looks like she kept a diary.’

  Adam leaned over her shoulder to look. ‘That’s not Connie’s writing.’ Nicky turned to the front of the notebook but it was blank. She flipped through to the last page, finding it empty. Nicky picked up another notebook and looked at the first page and the last, but again they were unmarked.

  ‘My God, my mum . . .’

  Nicky turned to Adam, who was holding one of the notebooks. On the inside back cover she saw the marks of a fountain pen. In scratchy lettering was Catherine Thornton’s name.

  ‘These are hers? You never knew they were here?’

  ‘No. I had no idea.’ He knelt by the suitcase and put the notebook back in.

  ‘Are you going to read them?’

  Adam sat back on his heels. ‘Not now, maybe not at all.’ He looked at Nicky and gave a nervous half laugh. ‘It feels weird.’

  ‘A bit like an intrusion into something private from long ago.’

  ‘I guess.’ He gave a little shudder and closed the suitcase lid, then pushed it back under the bed. ‘Come on, let’s go outside.’

  They lugged the box out into the afternoon
shade and pored over the photos from the Tramps doorway, and others from parties here at the house. They ploughed through another bottle of wine as they laughed at letters of thanks from cabinet ministers, written on headed paper, handwritten notes that meant nothing to them from people they didn’t know. At one point Adam pulled out a photo and turned to Nicky. ‘Look at this.’

  The photo summed up the late seventies: it was full colour, Connie was wearing a blood-red jumpsuit and large hoop earrings and her lips were glossy. She was pictured in a doorway, presumably of the club, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Half out of shot was a top Hollywood actor of the day, sunglasses, sideburns and all. The picture was taken at an angle and was full of movement and life.

  ‘This is great. It’s a good basis for a piece if I can talk to a few more people who knew her.’

  Adam looked sad for a moment. ‘I can’t believe that’s her. Not a trace of her old self remains . . .’

  Nicky felt it best not to comment, but she didn’t agree. Connie no longer had youthful, even features – the stroke made it hard to see any physical resemblance at all – but the eyes were the same. The hard, unyielding stare had remained until the very end: it was the stare she had given Nicky at the flat. ‘She’s had a good life, that’s all you can hope for.’ He looked away and said nothing.

  They ate a picnic of bread and cheese and pickles as the shadows of the trees lengthened across the grass. She had enjoyed the day, but her thoughts started turning with increasing regularity to going home. Adam was stretched out on a sofa they’d dragged out from the drawing room behind them. She didn’t want to go, but the longer they remained the more problems it would create. ‘We need to be leaving soon.’

  Adam looked up. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m staying here.’

  She was surprised. ‘You’re not coming back to London?’

  ‘Not today, no. There’re some things I need to do here so I’m going to hang around for a few days.’

  ‘Oh.’