‘Police stop the ambulance just round the corner and find the icon in it … not a real ambulance or real paramedics; not even a real heart attack. Take everyone in for questioning and they cough up a load more names. So, couple of hours later, they round up the guy who fitted the cabinets, a couple of the Shillingsworth’s security guards, and three guards and an attendant from the Paddwick Gallery. Oh, and a Hong Kong businessman living in Windsor who was running the whole thing. Funny really, you and Tate were at the police station when it was all going on.’
‘Yes, really, really hilarious, Dad. So tell me, Hercule Poirot, Tate has just been released. I’m assuming it’s without charge?’
‘Ah, yes. Not involved at all … now, don’t make that noise. I was wrong about him, I’ll admit it.’ A pause. ‘Oh, and those icons in his wardrobe—’
‘Don’t say it, Dad, I don’t want to hear it.’ She stopped and sniffed. ‘I can’t hear it.’
‘But—’
‘Dad!’
‘All right, all right. But, I was wrong about Norman too: he had nothing to do with it … Attendant called Lilly. You know her?’
Grace put the phone under the sofa while her father was still talking.
*
Later, when she was lying on her side, she debated whether she should retrieve her phone and call Mark. Trouble was, she didn’t know what she needed to tell him, except that sleeping with him wasn’t going to work for her ever again.
She knew now why Tate had that paint under his nails, but if she didn’t hear anyone say it out loud, she wouldn’t think of him standing there, lovingly …
She closed her eyes tightly and clung on to the tin, trying to empty her mind of everything, and suddenly Gilbert and Alistair were standing over her. She sat up and tried to make sense of the time on her watch.
‘Sorry … I was really tired. You’ve been gone a long time.’
She could not stop herself listening for biker boots on the stairs, even though she knew from their expressions that Tate would not be coming.
‘Gilbert, can you handle this?’ Alistair seemed uncomfortable. ‘There’s something I want to do in my office.’ He swung his arm half-heartedly, more golf than baseball now, and trudged into his room.
Gilbert rolled his eyes. ‘Like a wet weekend. What on earth is wrong with him today?’
‘How’s Tate?’ She hadn’t been able to hold it in any longer.
Gilbert sat down by her side. ‘He’s very tired, very shaken up by the whole thing. He’d been allowed his one phone call and had used it to talk to his mother. She was extremely distressed.’
Grace felt as if this was personally her fault. She imagined Tate’s mother out in America still holding the phone long after the call was over.
‘Poor man has no idea why he’s been released, except an officer mentioned that there had been new developments. We bought him a couple of beers and Alistair asked him about the big flat … and the Russian, and he held up his hands in that way he has …’ Gilbert said fondly, ‘and announced he had a few things to explain – not things he’d lied about, but omissions he’d made. Grace, what’s wrong?’
Grace realised she must have been squinting at him, her head was throbbing again.
‘Head and neck hurting. Falling asleep on this sofa hasn’t helped.’
‘Paracetamol?’
‘Finished them. Look, never mind. Go on.’
Gilbert pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger as if it would remind him where he had got to. ‘Turns out he’s not really “into” modern art – installations, happenings, all that. He paints with oils, mainly portraits but other figurative work as well. This Sergei, the one who owns the flat, saw Tate’s final show in Chicago, bought some of it, and when he heard he wanted to have a bit of time in Europe, struck a deal – he’d let Tate use his flat rent-free in London and, if Tate could show he was prepared to work to pay all his other expenses, well, then Sergei would know he was serious about travelling and learning. He’s going to fund him to have six months in France – there’s a very good portrait painter Tate wants to study with in Paris and someone else in Marseilles, can’t remember what his speciality is.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Indeed. All that enthusiasm for modern art was something of an act. I mean, he says he likes it, but it’s not his first love. He just overheard Alistair in a pub saying he was looking for someone to do modern art tours and knew he could wing it. On top of the tours he’s been doing cleaning, late shifts, early shifts.’
Grace understood now why Tate had spent so much time asleep on the sofa. She wished he was here now.
Gilbert sighed. ‘As we said on the way back, we made an awful lot of judgements about Tate based on how he dressed.’
It was fitting that Alistair chose that moment to come out of his office. He was wearing the blouse and skirt ensemble again but this time he had shoes on with it, strappy and quite high. Totally inappropriate for work.
Gilbert stared, slid his gaze from Alistair to Grace, and there was the slightest widening of his eyes.
‘This is Stacey,’ Grace said, indicating Alistair with her hand. Gilbert was still looking and not talking. There was a certain slackness to his jaw, as if it had dropped open but by keeping his mouth shut he was hoping to disguise it.
‘Any question you like, Gilbert,’ Alistair said in his deep voice.
Gilbert slowly shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Alistair lowered himself into one of the leather chairs and Gilbert kept checking on him as though he needed to establish that what he was seeing was real.
‘I seem to have completely forgotten my thread,’ he said, giving Alistair’s legs another hasty check. ‘Had I got to the bit about Tate being followed? No? Right … well, in one way, he was pleased to find out that the people who had been hanging about were friends of your father. You see, with Sergei being Russian and rich, he worried they might be some Russian mafia types. Said he spent a lot of time trying to shake them off.’ Gilbert laughed. ‘He’d got to the point where he was thinking of going to the police, which is pretty ironic …’
Gilbert was building up to something unpleasant, Grace could sense it, and in an effort to stave it off she told them both about the phone call from her father.
‘That explains a lot,’ Gilbert said. ‘Lilly, eh? Hard to credit it, although I could never warm to her. And no Russian connection at all?’ He glanced across at Alistair and Grace could see the effort he was making to act as if he were completely unfazed. ‘This is good news for the business, though, isn’t it Al — um, Stacey?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Alistair said without much enthusiasm. ‘Bit of a nerve the galleries barring us when it was their own staff on the take. Could probably screw them for some compensation for loss of earnings.’
The old Alistair would probably have been on his feet and rushing for a phone, but this one continued to sit with his ‘wet weekend’ face on. Gilbert turned back towards Grace and mouthed, ‘God save us,’ before a more serious expression settled over his features.
‘My dear, Grace,’ he said, giving Alistair another guarded look, ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but having been on the receiving end of a lot of it in my time, I know that getting it straight is better than a big tour round the houses while everybody tries to avoid eye contact. So, Tate seems to think you set him up, that you distracted him long enough for your father to get into his flat. He was a gentleman and didn’t supply details, but he looks crushed.’
Grace pictured those green eyes with the light gone out of them and retrieved a tissue from her sleeve. She held it to her nose and waited, and then lowered it again.
‘Is there more?’
‘Yes. About the icons found in his flat.’
‘Please, please don’t mention them,’ she said, because she knew what they were, had known it ever since she’d heard the original icons had been found by the police.
Gilbert’s hand was o
n her knee.
‘He painted them for you, Grace,’ he said, gently, ‘you must know that. He couldn’t bear to see how sad you were when the real ones got stolen. He thought it was a way to show how he felt about you. He still wants you to have them, you know, when the police let them go.’
Grace didn’t bother with the tissue this time and it wouldn’t have lasted long anyway because she was heaving up great sobs and tears that coursed down her face and plopped on to the leather of the sofa. She was allowing herself to imagine Tate copying the icons to make her happy, the paint she’d seen under his nails evidence of his love for her.
She remembered the times she’d never even given him a chance because he reminded her so much of Bill, and yet he wasn’t anything like Bill. All that work Tate had been doing, while Bill had sneered at getting out of bed before lunch.
She cried on, with Gilbert now and again patting her knee and saying, ‘That’s it. Cry it out’ and Stacey saying, ‘Yes, you have a good cry, Grace. Bottling things up never does you any good, believe me.’
She did take the lid off the biscuit tin then. Why not?
How much further could she slide? She, Gilbert and Stacey shared the whisky and Grace and Stacey the joints, even though any potency the dope had once possessed seemed to have dried to nothing. It must have done, because Grace didn’t even find it funny when Gilbert put on the cheese-cloth shirt or Stacey stowed the cigarettes away down the front of her blouse ‘for later’.
All she could think about was how life had been skewed and twisted: the copied icons were a token of something genuine from Tate, whereas what she’d given him on that bed must now, to him, seem just tawdry and fake.
CHAPTER 32
There had been no response to the messages she had left on his voicemail or the trip round to his address to ring on the bell and look up at the blank windows of his flat. Following a nasty, raw showdown with her father, she had persuaded him to write to Tate to explain that she’d had absolutely no idea that his plans had included invading Tate’s wardrobe. It felt like getting one of your parents to write a letter excusing you from PE. Still no response. She was left explaining, to a void, what elements of her behaviour had been an act and what most certainly had not.
Increasingly desperate for some king of contact with Tate, she hunted out Joe, Corinne and Bebbie in the White Hart, but they hadn’t seen Tate for days. Bebbie gave her a look that said, Now you know how it feels.
Standing in the pub, she’d wanted to gravitate to the bar to drown her despair, but after the whisky and the joints she’d been heartily sick and couldn’t face even the smell of alcohol. Perhaps nine years of sobriety had made her allergic to any kind of drug? Was she stuck being a goody two-shoes forever? Back in the office, she put the biscuit tin on the floor and stamped down on the lid with the heel of one of those goody two-shoes until the whole thing was a buckled mess.
Putting it in the bin, she knew it was a symbolic act, but of what she wasn’t certain.
She wasn’t certain what she was meant to be doing at work either, really. Even though they were no longer blacklisted, Picture London was still not functioning properly – Gilbert was the only one doing any tours. Grace still had a tendency to burst into tears whenever she passed any kind of painting, particularly portraits, and Stacey had long periods of time when she just stared at the carpet. Emma had been in touch to report that she was going to Italy with her parents for a week or two to think things through. Stacey would have been more optimistic if Emma had mentioned coming back afterwards.
Emma was another person who wasn’t returning Grace’s calls. Grace was trying to ignore a few herself – mainly from her sisters. They were now fully up to speed with Felicity’s escapade, but this had taken second billing to Grace’s ‘return to the world of the heart’ as Serafina had dubbed it. There was delight that Grace was still capable of such a monumentally wild and rash act and, even better, was laid low by love. They revelled in it and seemed particularly happy to tell her that if she had followed her emotions (female) instead of her brain (male) right from the start, she would once again be in the arms of an artist – inspiring, loving and nurturing him.
Grace found that really helpful.
Felicity had finally got the message that this latest drama might not be about her and her throbbing aura and seized the chance to play a major supporting role with gusto, appearing at odd times to dispense unasked-for advice and offers of ‘emotional counselling’. This had driven Grace, the night before, to sleep in the office, reasoning that one sofa was very much like another. Besides, she felt closer to Tate there than anywhere else. Seeing his chair made her feel that at any minute he might walk in and sit on it. That happy image only stayed in her head a few moments before it was replaced by the one of him nodding at the vast bed in his flat and saying, That’s what this was, Gracie, keeping me busy?
Her phone told her a text had been delivered and she snatched it up, merely to find another of Zin’s poems. Lines that were meant to be uplifting had been arriving every day. This latest effort was particularly enamel-rotting: The soul that has never loved has never lived, and heat once given forever lives on lips.
Grace texted back: Never mind heat forever living on lips, what about fathers forever living in flats? Got a poem to help me with that???
Grace had company at night in the office – Stacey, still on the floor. Grace believed that it was some form of self-inflicted penance. She had a perfectly good bed at home, albeit without Emma in it.
Grace studied her now, sitting in the easy chair and working through more paperwork about refunds, and wondered how she walked in those shoes. The dress was good, suited her, and she’d had a shave and put on some enthusiastic make-up. Strangely, it wasn’t the lipstick and eye shadow Grace found most disturbing; it was the wig. It was blond.
Stacey still looked like Alistair, though, even when Grace squinted at him, and she wondered whether it was important to him to feel he could pass as a woman. She decided now was not a good time to ask that question, but did offer to help Stacey with her make-up next time.
The more she saw Alistair dressed as Stacey, the less of a jolt it caused. Perhaps one day she would even be able to think about what she had on under that dress. She looked again … no, that day hadn’t yet arrived.
She watched Stacey chewing the end of her pen. It certainly took enormous courage to sit there looking exactly how she wanted to look. She had the biggest balls Grace had ever seen in a dress.
When Stacey had finished the calculations, she passed Grace the paperwork and tottered back to her office. When Grace looked up next time, Alistair was standing there.
‘I’m going for lunch,’ he said, fiddling to do up the buttons on his shirt collar.
‘Not ready to go out as Stacey yet?’
He shook his head and said, ‘One day,’ which made her feel incredibly sad and stirred up all kinds of thoughts about people not being who they really were and trying to cram their real selves back into a box … or a locked cabinet … or even a biscuit tin.
Grace scanned the work she’d been given, correcting a lot of it, but all the figures began to blur and she put her head down on it, not caring if she smudged everything and ended up with ink all over her face. What was the point in carrying on with this controlled version of herself when Tate had reminded her there was so much more to life?
‘Neck so bad you can’t even keep your head upright any more?’ a voice asked right by her desk and she detached herself from the soggy paper and slowly sat up, even though she felt as if everything that used to be muscle might now be made of jelly. She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand and took a good look at him.
He had on his greatcoat, with the collar up, and he might just have ridden in from the range, his hair all mussed up and especially blond against the blue of the material. She remembered how his hair had brushed against her chin when he kissed her neck and it caused a laugh to try and fight its way up inside her, a kind
of glad-to-be-alive, glad-to-know-him laugh. She met his gaze and the laugh turned tail and went back down her throat.
‘Got your messages,’ he said and crossed the room to sit in his chair. He wrapped the coat more tightly around himself, his hands in his pockets, and stretched out his legs. ‘I got your dad’s message too. Gonna get any from Fliss? Your sisters?’
Before he would have delivered those lines with a laugh or a grin. Now they were coming out straight. It didn’t feel like a good sign.
‘I know I’ve really hurt you,’ she said softly. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’
He nodded, a kind of thinking nod, but didn’t say anything, leaving her a big gap in which to jump and repeat all the things she’d tried to get into her messages.
‘I really, really had no idea how far Dad’s theories about you had got, Tate, please believe me. And, in no way is this an excuse, but being hit on the head, well, it didn’t improve my ability to think logically. I should have just told him to leave you alone, but some of what he was saying seemed to make a weird kind of sense. Not the wardrobe thing. That would never have seemed anything other than mad.’
Tate had his chin down as he twisted the seat of the chair to the left and then to the right. She didn’t know if it indicated irritation.
‘And, please believe me, I had no idea that he was going to be at your flat … if I had, do you honestly think I would have let you take me there? It would have been the last place I’d go.’ She lowered her head to try to see into his eyes. ‘When you kissed me in the street, it was scary and wonderful and I didn’t want it to stop. Everything from there on was real. Me.’
He lifted his chin, but his expression was still watchful and she knew she was beginning to sound as if she was pleading. She needed to see a spark of light in those green eyes.
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