by Clare Boyd
When Gordon brought in Blue No. 3, her stomach lurched. She could see that half of the brown paper had been torn and was flapping open. There was no bubble wrap to protect it.
There was a sharp white scratch mark, roughly four inches long, across one corner.
She touched it, to verify what she saw, and then cried out, tearing away the rest of the paper. Two more marks had damaged the centre of the stormy oil painting. The deeper shades of blue, cut with black and sprayed with white, raged from the canvas as though it knew it had been defaced.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Elizabeth rasped. The air was high in her lungs as though there were arms around her, squeezing her breath up and out. Unable to contain her fear, she turned on Heather. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? It was you. You did this.’
Gordon stepped towards her, remonstrating, and Elizabeth turned away from Heather and flew at him. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to kill him or feel his strength in a comforting embrace, but both fists met his chest, striking his breastbone once, like it was a door she wanted to get through. He took her wrists and gently pushed them down by her sides. ‘We found it like that, Mrs Huxley,’ he said.
Tears ran down her cheeks. ‘He did it,’ she murmured.
‘Who? Do you know who damaged them?’ Heather asked, sounding near to tears herself.
Elizabeth drew back, gathering herself. ‘I don’t know. Why would I know?’ she said, hearing the sudden chill in her own voice. She wiped a finger under each eye to get rid of her tears.
‘But you said “He did it”, like you knew,’ Heather continued.
‘Jude did it. He painted this, and now it’s ruined.’ Elizabeth stared at Heather and Gordon, who were pillars side by side in front of her; pillars she hoped might disintegrate if she closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were still there.
‘You can go now. I’ll deal with this,’ she said, turning away from them, feeling their conspiratorial doubt ganging up on her as she walked away.
* * *
She called Jude straight away.
‘Are you free for a coffee today?’ she asked him.
‘You’re in London?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Everything okay?’
‘Can I meet you in your studio at one?’
‘Okay,’ he said with a question in his voice.
‘See you then,’ she replied, putting the phone down quickly.
There was a tug of love and fear in her belly. As a child, her happy place had been sitting on the sofa with him, shoulder to shoulder, eating Monster Munch, watching after-school television and deciding which of his pictures they should send into the BBC art competitions. Upsetting him frightened her. She had learnt as a girl that men disappeared when they were upset.
* * *
The large oak warehouse doors of Jude’s studio were solid and handsome, decorated with bottle-green stained glass in the panes along the top. Against the decrepit brickwork of the industrial courtyard, they were pieces of art in themselves.
‘This is a nice surprise,’ Jude said, heaving the doors closed and clicking the padlock shut.
‘Yes,’ she said, guessing it would not turn out to be nice at all.
‘Where shall we go?’
‘Are you sure you don’t want a cup of tea here?’ she asked, double-checking. Part of her would have preferred to deliver the bad news in private.
He groaned. ‘I need to get out. My latest piece is doing my head in.’
‘How about a bagel from that place you took me to last time?’
‘Perfect. We’ll find a park bench.’
They zigzagged through the strange mix of Victorian conversions and low-rise prefabricated apartment blocks of Shoreditch, crossing the scruffy, busy Kingsland Road and on through the five-storey red-brick tenements of Arnold Circus. The walk was familiar and comforting, reminding her that this city ran in her blood, and that she could leave her identity at Copper Lodge behind. Walking next to Jude, past the chained-up bikes and the graffiti, inhaling the bus fumes and shouting over ambulances, was like coming home.
She even enjoyed the occasional stare from strangers. They were an incongruous pair. Nobody would guess they were brother and sister, or even friends: a Home Counties housewife and an east London artist.
As children, everyone had assumed they’d had different fathers, a fact that their mother had neither confirmed nor denied. Back then, both of them had had long scrubby hair, which Virginia had never brushed and had allowed to grow right into their eyes. Jude had often been mistaken for a girl. As an adult, Elizabeth had tamed her own hair, but Jude had left his the same. His large blue eyes still blinked through the dark mop, until he shoved it back to see better, opening up his charming, boyish face.
Elizabeth had never wanted her little brother’s face to show anything other than permanent happiness. Yet here they were.
They turned into Brick Lane and the bagel shop came into view. They joined the queue that had formed outside and along the pavement. Two pigeons pecked at the rubbish that had spilled out of a split bin bag. Elizabeth watched the birds and gathered sentences together in her head. When she finally started her confession, she spoke so loudly, the two pigeons flew off and the couple in front of them turned round.
‘You’re not going to like what I have to tell you,’ she said.
‘What am I not going to like?’
She continued in a whisper. ‘It’s quite bad news.’
His whole face stretched into a grimace of alarm. ‘What’s happened?’
Realising she had launched in too heavily, she backtracked and explained about the damage to the painting, talking in breathless bursts, feeling her heartbeat increasing.
When she had finished, he said, ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten those paintings even existed.’
Elizabeth knew this couldn’t be true. ‘You’re not angry?’
They shuffled forward, almost at the door. The smell of warm dough hit her.
‘Paintings get damaged all the time in storage or in transit,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘What do you want?’ he said, cupping his hands through the shop window to see the various tubs of fillings on offer.
He seemed unperturbed by her news, but she couldn’t relax. Maybe she didn’t trust in his nonchalance. When he was worried about her, he stopped sharing his true feelings. Was he worried about her now?
‘But aren’t you upset?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘Do you want me to be?’
‘No! But it’s ruined!’
‘I can fix it,’ he said.
She held her breath, suspending his offer in her mind like something precious held high. On an out breath, she said, ‘Is that really possible?’
‘I’d have to take a look at it, but by the sounds of it, I’d be able to patch it up, good as new.’
Then came the relief, rushing through her whole body. ‘Really, Jude?’
‘Yes.’ He indicated the woman behind the counter, who had asked them something. ‘What do you want?’ he said again.
Elizabeth ordered a plain bagel with cream cheese and Jude ordered a hot salt beef with mustard. She grinned at him. ‘You are the best, you know that?’ she said.
He grinned back. ‘Yeah. I know.’
With their warm paper bags in their hands, they walked to the church gardens and found a bench to sit on.
‘Do you want me to transport the canvas to your studio?’ she asked.
‘I’ll come down to Copper Lodge and have a look at it,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll get to see those two little mischiefs.’
The prospect of his visit – so rare these days – unlocked a rush of love and gratitude in her heart. ‘Thank you, Jude.’ She left the parcel of food on her lap and began to cry, releasing some of the recent pressures.
Jude put an arm around her.
‘Shh, shh, Elizabeth. It’s only a stupid bit of oil on canvas,’ he soothed.
‘Sorry, I’m okay, re
ally I am.’ She wiped her eyes with a paper napkin and looked up to the white, meaningless sky, trying to find something to focus on. There was a plastic bag high in a branch. She watched it billow and flap, and imagined a gust of wind dislodging it and sending it flitting across the sky to end its journey in a vast, stinking landfill. Her tears receded. Her self-pity was pathetic. ‘I’m so up and down these days. I’m probably perimenopausal. Some women do get it in their early forties,’ she waffled, knowing how high-pitched and silly she sounded.
They unwrapped their bagels in silence.
‘Are you still seeing that woman?’ he asked.
She screwed the napkin into a ball. ‘I don’t need to see someone every time I get a bit upset, Jude,’ she returned, irritated. Then she added, ‘Except maybe a beautician about these wrinkles.’ She squinted at him to accentuate her crow’s-feet lines, but he didn’t laugh.
So she bit into her soft, still-warm bagel and asked him to tell her all about the struggles he was having with his latest work. Anything to avoid talking about doctors.
* * *
Elizabeth was poised at her computer, ready to order the dull art deco invitations that Lucas had wanted. She fiddled with the edge of the credit card that he had given her. Her eyes were dried out from crying with Jude, but she felt significantly less burdened inside.
She hesitated over the stationer’s order form, blinking at the screen. The notion of writing to Mary Billingshurst to commission the expensive gold strawberry invitations was a temptation she was trying to resist.
Sabotaging thoughts like this one had multiplied in her mind throughout the afternoon. There had been various decisions to make and yet she had been deliberating about all of them, leaving emails unanswered: flute or coupe glasses? Cream or white tablecloths? Tomato salad or cucumber and strawberry? These frivolous details were important to Lucas, but the options were piling up inside her, cramming her brain, ready to spill out and shatter into pieces with no party to show for it.
She had to break the impasse by ordering the invitations. It was essential she send them out six weeks before 4 July.
Still she prevaricated. She thought about Isla’s tantrum yesterday. She had wanted to drop Lucas in it and say ‘Daddy does actually think you’re stupid. Join the club!’ But she hadn’t. She had swallowed Isla’s blame and withstood her small pummelling fists.
After seeing Jude this morning, she felt buoyed up, and a little rebellious.
The cursor flashed in the address box of the stationer’s website. The little line ticked patiently, waiting for her to fill in the blanks. It would do anything she asked of it, just as she would for Lucas.
There had been a time, many moons ago, when her mother had accused her of being spirited and wilful. Virginia had laid down rules and Elizabeth had broken them. That bolshie child was still inside her somewhere.
But she knew the hand-painted invitations were an unnecessary expense and that the Sloane Street stationer was the safe, conventional bet. To afford this party, Lucas had been loading up his credit cards, consolidating loans and managing their money meticulously, eking out its value to ensure they could hire or buy the highest possible quality for the lowest possible price.
Mindful of the tight budget, she began to type in her details.
Then the white scratch on Jude’s painting flared across her eyelids, like lightning across the painted sea, and she stabbed at the delete button. Lucas had been responsible for the damage to her paintings, and she felt a surge of anger towards him.
She clicked out of the website and opened up her emails.
As though the cursor had come to life and taken charge, the letters of Mary Billingshurst’s name appeared, forming a blue, underscored destination for her email. She clicked into the main body of the message and carefully worded her order.
Before sending it, she double-checked the finished email, and then triple-checked it. Her heart rose into her throat as she tapped send to confirm the order of one hundred and fifty gold strawberry themed invitations.
Shortly afterwards, she received an email from Mary asking her to call with her credit card details. With the full knowledge that there would no longer be enough left on this particular credit card to pay the deposit on the marquee, she read out the long number on the front.
* * *
She was shocked by what she had done, but not shocked enough to change her mind over the coming days before the invitations arrived.
* * *
Lucas’s voice on the phone cut out repeatedly.
‘Stop rustling those packets, you two!’ Elizabeth cried out, trying to decipher Lucas’s broken-up instructions through their crisp-eating in the back of the car.
She gleaned he needed her in London by 8 p.m. She was to meet him at the Berkeley private members’ club, where Sam and Poppy Stone would join them for dinner.
Elizabeth had never met Sam and Poppy Stone before, but she remembered writing their address, One Hyde Park, SW1X, underneath their names on one of the small white envelopes. Their gold strawberry invitation would have landed on the doormat of their exclusive home in the heart of Knightsbridge, where the apartments cost twenty million pounds, give or take a few hundred thousand.
Meeting a billionaire like Sam Stone might have interested Elizabeth years ago, when she and Lucas had first met. She might have wanted to know how he had earned his money, how he spent it, where he holidayed, whether his skin had the glow of wealth or his eyes shone with the secret to an easier life. She might have convinced herself that he was more interesting than the average person, like meeting a celebrity, an exotic creature, someone her mother would have scoffed at.
Now she was in a taxi from Waterloo station to Berkeley Square, passing one of the four-storey houses in Mayfair that Lucas had once promised he would buy her. She remembered him saying it after she had admired its Georgian windows, and how she had exhaled with a sense of relief. She had been in love with Lucas, and had begun to view her mother’s disdain for the wealthy as a perverse inverse snobbery, a prejudice even. There were different ways of living, she had thought, and she had decided on one that she thought would suit her better. By choosing Lucas, a lifetime of money worries would be over. Little had she known that Lucas would worry about money just as much as her mother had, albeit in a different way. The hardships weren’t there, but the focus on finding money was as all-consuming. Appearing wealthier than they were took skill and dedication. Borrowing off the back of his assets and juggling debts had become a twenty-four-hour preoccupation. And Elizabeth had begun to learn from him. For instance, to solve the problem of the shortfall on the credit card for the marquee deposit, she had tricked him into giving her more housekeeping money this month.
Smoke and mirrors, darling, smoke and mirrors.
At the Berkeley Club reception – Lucas had negotiated a discount on their membership in exchange for recruiting five new members a year – they knew her by name.
Lucas was sitting in the corner of the bar, on a circular green velvet banquette. There was a martini waiting for her on the table. She was relieved that Sam and Poppy had not yet arrived. When he saw her, he stopped circling the cocktail stick in his own drink. ‘Wow,’ he said, looking her up and down and whistling. She was wearing a silk wrap dress in midnight blue that she knew he liked. His approval gave her a thrill.
She slipped in next to him, relishing the smells of good food and the sound of ice on cut-glass tumblers. The low lighting made everyone look beautiful. The shadows across the glass of the ornate antique mirrors, heavy and overbearing around the room, reflected infinite muted versions of the huge chandeliers; of prosperity and luxury. Everything he had promised her.
The first sip of her martini went straight to her head.
Lucas stroked her leg through the slit of her dress, high up her thigh. She wished they could find somewhere to have an illicit kiss. No more. Just a kiss, like teenagers.
‘Sam’s running late. But it gives us some time.’ He po
pped the gin-soaked olive into his mouth.
‘What’s he like as a person?’ she asked. ‘Sam, I mean.’
‘He’s a bit of a prat, if I’m honest. He pretends he’s self-made, but all the investments he’s made have been off the back of Poppy’s dad.’
She tried not to drink her martini too fast and said, ‘I’d always imagined that only Russian oligarchs and Saudi oil-men lived at One Hyde Park.’
‘His business partner is a Russian oligarch.’
She laughed. ‘And Poppy? Do you think we’ll get on?’
‘I haven’t met her. Are they coming on the fourth of July?’
‘They haven’t RSVP’d yet.’ Elizabeth thought again of the invitations that Lucas had not sanctioned.
‘How many are we up to?’
‘Twenty yeses and two noes.’
‘Who are the noes from?’
‘The Arnolds – they’re going to be in Perugia – and your sister can’t make it. But Benjamin Healing is confirmed.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘An artist.’
‘Do we have anything by him?’
‘No.’
‘He was on your brother’s list?’
‘Yes. Jude’s driving him down. They’re good friends. He’s pretty hot right now.’
‘Should we own one of his pieces?’
‘You didn’t like his work when we saw it at the Wigram a few years back. Too many lines, you said.’
‘I remember now.’ He stopped a waiter and asked for more olives. ‘Make sure you tell Poppy your brother will be there. She’s impressed by that crap and I really want them to come.’
‘Poppy and Bo are friends, aren’t they?’
‘That’s why we’re here.’ Lucas dropped his voice, ‘There they are.’ He stood up to wave them over.
Sam Stone looked much younger than Elizabeth had imagined him to be. He was small, with a squashed face, as though a spade had flattened his nose to the side and forced his eyes further apart. He was underdressed, wearing trainers and a short-sleeved black sweatshirt. Poppy was a few inches taller than him and far too thin, in an elegant cream chiffon blouse. The severe points of her nose and cheekbones contrasted almost comically with Sam’s boneless features. Her name conjured a smiley, fun girl. On first sight, Elizabeth gleaned that Poppy was neither.
