This was as ugly as reading someone’s private diary. I put away the Greek picture quickly. Too quickly, as I knocked over another stack and the first two fell free of the sheet, face upwards. And I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach.
One was done from a distance. The setting was a rocky beach. A girl with long dark hair and an orange mini was sitting on one rock smiling at an improbably aquamarine sea. The second was a life-size head of the same girl, with her hair hanging forward and stunned eyes staring unseeing at the unseen artist. The girl had my face.
I heard a movement and looked round. George was watching from the doorway, his face the colour of the sheets.
I stood up very slowly. ‘George, I’m sorry. I’ve no excuse.’
Chapter Twelve
‘You don’t need one, Anne. I said, be my guest. I’d forgotten I’d just unlocked this door when I heard Mrs Potter below, as I was thinking of something else. It’s the only room I don’t let the tenants use, as I have to store this lot somewhere and they may as well stay here. Of course, if I sell, they’ll have to go into store with the furniture.’ He came in and picked up the beach scene. ‘The sea can’t really have been that colour.’
‘It was.’ I sat on the arm of the chair. ‘Why did you do them, George?’
His face went rigid, but his steady eyes met mine. ‘To paint you out. One can sometimes do that, just as writers can sometimes write something out. Get it on canvas or paper and it’s finished, dead. Didn’t come off too well in this case.’ He stacked away both pictures, dusted his hands. ‘Shall we go down? It’s chilly as well as filthy up here.’
I couldn’t then have moved had that house been on fire. ‘Just what exactly were you trying to paint out? Me ‒ personally ‒ or ‒ that whole time in Spain?’
‘Both.’
I looked at the sheet covering the Greek picture. ‘That figures.’
‘It does?’
‘Yes.’ As he still hadn’t told me of the air crash I was unsurprised by the doubt in his voice. I was very shaken Alistair should’ve made the mistake I had nearly made just now, but as he had a vivid imagination and liked me, wishful thinking had probably swayed the balance. ‘As you said on New Year’s Eve, it can be impossible to disassociate certain people from certain events. Only a rip-roaring masochist gets kicks from pain. I wouldn’t have said you were one.’
‘Nor’d, I, till recently,’ he retorted curtly.
I looked back at him, quickly. ‘I don’t get that.’
He flushed. ‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that. It’s not your fault.’
I tried to smile. ‘I used to blame fate, but I’m now not sure that’s fair. I didn’t have to go to Edinburgh at New Year, Dave and I didn’t have to go to Spain.’
‘Even less did I have to come to Martha’s ‒’
‘Oh yes, you did!’ I stood up. ‘Whatever doubts you may have about anything else, you shouldn’t have any about that and, if you do, just look at yourself in the nearest mirror and say ‒ Marlene Eccles.’
The colour drained from his face and he shook his head as if he couldn’t trust his hearing. ‘Do you wonder I bloody love you so much when you ‒ you ‒ after shuddering every time you’ve seen me roughly up to last Friday ‒ can still say that to my face?’
I sat down again, fast. ‘You ‒ love ‒ me?’
He just nodded.
I pointed unsteadily towards the covered pictures of myself. ‘That’s ‒ that’s why you wanted me out?’
‘Yes. Of course. I knew I was the last man on earth you’d want to see again ‒ and spent four years trying to kid myself I was over you ‒ but you don’t want to hear this ‒’
‘Go on, George, Please!’
He hesitated, ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea ‒’
‘Please!’
‘Right.’ His chin went up. ‘Then New Year’s Eve and there you were dancing with Alistair. You! When my main motive for being north that week-end was to avoid running into you in Martha’s New Year parties. Hit me like a kick from a mule ‒ and brought the whole bloody lot back, but worse as now you’re so much prettier, so much more desirable, and this air of illusive detachment you’ve acquired is ‒ er ‒ something I find disturbingly attractive whenever I’m near you. I’ve never known any other woman who can do to me what you can do across a dance floor, a canteen, the desk in Coronary Care. I wasn’t surprised I bashed up my knee on that damned drive. Keeping my mind off you sitting beside me hating every moment, reliving horrors every time you looked at me, had me so tensed I’d have asked you to take over the driving whilst we were in the borders, but for the weather I thought we’d meet and did.’ He gave me one of his clinical looks. ‘Why are you now looking as if you don’t believe a word I’m saying?’
I rubbed my forehead. ‘It isn’t that. It’s just that you’ve muddled me ‒ I mean ‒ I don’t want to hurt you and I know it was a long time back but ‒ but ‒ didn’t you feel like this about the girl friend you lost in that air crash?’
He winced as if I had struck him. ‘Christ, girl! That poor little kid Caroline was only eleven! We’d collected her from boarding school and were taking her to her parents for Christmas ‒ but how the hell do you know about her? Or that crash? I’ve never wanted you told. You’ve been hurt too much ‒ parents ‒ husband ‒ without having your nightmares evoked by mine!’ He was blazing with anger. ‘Alistair, wasn’t it? No-one in Martha’s knows and all Ruth knows is that I won’t talk about it. If he was here now I’d bust his something neck and plead justifiable homicide!’
‘My dearest love, cool off!’ I grabbed his hands and levered myself to my feet since happiness had turned my legs to cotton wool. ‘You’re taking this one much too hard. Yes, it was Alistair, but obviously I got this part wrong, only it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter,’ I repeated, as he had apparently turned to stone.
‘What was that you called me?’
I repeated that, and for a few glorious moments we stood holding hands and looking at each other.
‘This why Friday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yesterday? Come on round?’
‘Yes.’ I smiled slightly. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I didn’t bloody dare.’ He let go of my hands, folded me in his arms and rested his face against mine. ‘I thought ‒ she’s stopped shuddering and starting to like me and if I go round now I’m too clapped out to keep my hands off her, and that could finish it.’ His thudding heart was making more noise than mine. ‘So I asked you here today and when you seemed so quiet, so out of reach, I thought ‒ she was just being kind for Marlene’s sake. I’ve never got through to her ‒ not getting through now. End of the road, Farler. On your way. Martha’s is her hospital and she’s happy there. David Davies is willing to pull this string for this northern pundit’s job, you’ll probably get it, and with it a lot more money than if you stay on as Roseburn suggests. Got it made ‒ so why worry? You’ll never stop loving her whilst you can see her, it gets worse every time you do, those four years hard were tough enough, why be a bloody glutton for punishment? Get. Sell the house. Tell her why you’re going ‒ but get!’ He raised his head to look at my face. ‘The tape, my beloved darling, began playing when we left Maidstone and was running through again when you opened the gates.’
I shivered with joy and told him about the cucumber sandwiches. ‘George, is this really happening?’
He looked at me with an expression I had never seen in his face before. ‘Takes time, Anne, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ I shivered more violently. ‘I’m scared. I’m so happy, I’m dead scared.’
‘I know, sweetheart, I know.’ I had never heard him use that voice either. ‘I wish ‒ God how I wish ‒ I could now promise you you’ll never have to be scared again and from now on nothing but sunshine and the birds singing, tra-la. You know I can’t. All I can say is ‒ whatever the turn-up, long as I live and you want me around ‒ I’ll be there.’
I couldn�
��t speak so I smiled and he kissed me more passionately and more wonderfully than I had ever been kissed. Very briefly, he uncovered my mouth to smile into my eyes. ‘Thanks,’ he said breathlessly.
In the fading light outside the sitting-room window the forsythia flowers looked more yellow and a line of black Canada geese flying across the empty sky reminded me of a Chinese painting on silk. I told him about Peking.
He said, ‘We must get there, one day. Want some more tea?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Good.’ He put down my cup and saucer with his free hand, lifted me back on to his lap, stretched out his legs along the sofa and listened dreamily to the birds singing the dusk chorus. ‘That blackbird in the sloe by the gates has the range of a nightingale.’
‘I thought it was one. Or do they only sing at night?’
‘No. Often at dusk, but not this early. I’ve never heard one before May.’
‘Does the phoenix sing?’
‘Don’t know.’ He tilted my face to his. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘The weight of that flying-fox. Too heavy for the chimney of this house?’
‘No.’ His eyes were luminous with happiness. ‘You’d like us to have it up?’
‘Yes. I think the kids will, too.’
He kissed me, tenderly. ‘Population explosion notwithstanding, how many do you want?’
‘Certainly two. Don’t you?’
‘With you? Very much. Very, very, much.’
A little later, he said, ‘I shall enjoy the day my wife turns into a sister. Will I have to cut my hair shorter to live up to you?’
‘We’ll have to have silver streaks put in mine to live up to having a pundit for a husband when your new contract with Martha’s ends?’
He laughed. ‘Kiss me again just to make sure I’m awake.’ Later still, he asked, ‘What exactly did Alistair tell you?’
And when I finished, ‘He recognized you from New Year’s Eve.’
‘He did ‒ so that’s why!’ I explained Alistair’s immediate reaction to me, then, ‘When did he tell you?’
‘When he flew over to Edinburgh on my sick leave. He told me he’d seen those portraits, but not that he’d told you about the crash. I wasn’t then too sure of his motives,’ he said slowly, ‘but I can now see he was trying from the start to do for us what I ‒ and then both of us were trying for Ruth and him.’
‘So he was! God bless him! I thought he was sweet, but he’s sweeter than I thought.’ I saw his expression. ‘You weren’t ever jealous of him?’
‘Yes. Sorry. But with you I’d have been jealous of my own brother, and we aren’t brothers. Just cousins. It was because he realized that that he told me all he did. He’s always had more insight than most, except where Ruth’s concerned, and he does now seem to be catching up there. He accepted our temp lowering act at instant face value as he saw I wasn’t acting. So did Ruth. What neither realized was that you’d only agreed to come along for the ride because you felt you owed me too much to refuse.’
‘It wasn’t only that ‒’
‘My darling, I know you genuinely wanted to help them, but for choice with any man but me. Don’t look so upset ‒ I know one look at me’s raised so many ghosts for you that in William and Mary there were times when you even wanted to beat it from Richard. It made sense ‒ even when I had a post-anaesthetic hangover.’
‘You remember that evening? I thought you hadn’t.’
‘Not very clearly. I just remember your appalled expression as you stood beside me. After, as you clearly wanted to forget it, I played along. I knew if you hadn’t, you’d have come to see me.’
‘Oh, George, Dear George. Did you expect me?’
He smiled. ‘No. Hoped, perhaps.’
‘I feel so guilty ‒’ I had to kiss him. ‘And then I was ultra-bitchy to you about Clive B. Renner.’
‘I wouldn’t have said I came out of that too well. First making you cry, then leaving you to it.’ He had to kiss me. ‘I was bloody glad you did weigh into me. For the first time ever you saw me without the hair shirt ‒ and proved I was sweating unnecessarily about your being swept off by Renner.’
‘You weren’t jealous of him too? Oh, no!’
He nodded ruefully. ‘Jealous as hell. Mind?’
I shook my head, smiling. ‘The other way round, I’d probably have been the same.’
‘Then?’
I explained the effect the fire had on me. ‘I didn’t expect, or for a time even want this to happen. It just has.’
‘I’ve been saying that to myself ever since I met you. Then, as I’ve told you, tried to kid myself it was bloody nonsense. I’m more my old man’s son than I ever realized in his lifetime.’ He stroked my hair. ‘You know he never re-married after my mother’s death. It wasn’t till I got to Cambridge that that struck me as unusual, as it was only then I began to see him as a human being and not just a parent. Once I asked him why not. He had some good reasons. He said he had known with my mother the greatest happiness any man has any right to expect with a woman, had an excellent memory, never had cared for second-bests, and when he eventually met another woman whom he had loved as much as my mother, she happened to be another man’s wife, and that, he said, was that. I asked why there hadn’t been a divorce. This was all when I was about ten and knew nothing of it at the time. He said because she was a good mother, loved her children; as the law then stood she would have lost them and that any man who asked a woman to abandon her children loved himself more than he loved her and, personally, in that context, he didn’t think “love” came into the situation. They agreed to stop seeing each other and never met again. He told me he had long got over the emotional hump, but I don’t think he ever wholly forgot her. That time we talked about her ‒ he looked young. I’ve never forgotten. Poor old dad.’ His eyes were suddenly guarded. ‘He sounds an intractable, rather priggish don, but he wasn’t. He was a very amusing man and very good company. We had a good relationship.’
I told him I had seen that gardening picture and ran a finger over his jaw and lips. ‘You’ve got his chin and mouth. And the same humour in your faces. I’m sure he was kind as you are so kind. Did you know that?’ He blushed like a boy. ‘You’re incredibly kind. That’s why you keep getting lumbered. Your father did a great job of raising you, my love. I wish I’d known him. I’d love to thank him.’
He was very touched and didn’t hide it. ‘If he were alive, we wouldn’t have met for you to thank him.’
‘No?’
‘No. I wouldn’t have concentrated on work the way I did to get over you if I hadn’t met you, so I wouldn’t have got the degrees I have, had that good job up north, or been asked to come to Martha’s. So we wouldn’t have met there. We wouldn’t have met in Spain. In the old days I spent my two weeks in the winter skiing, and if I managed two in the summer generally met my father somewhere in Europe but always in cities. He loved Spain, taught there for years and taught me to be bi-lingual in English and Spanish before I was in prep school, but nothing would’ve persuaded him to spend two weeks in an off-the-map fishing village without so much as a decent library.’
‘Why did you choose that village?’
He didn’t answer and instantly I wished I hadn’t asked that. His face turned more rigid than I had ever seen him and the same rigidity was in his arms. ‘George, darling, let it go. It doesn’t matter. It’s just something else that doesn’t matter now.’
‘It does, Anne. It matters now with you ‒ with us. It matters more than you know ‒ so I think you should ‒ no ‒’ he corrected himself abruptly ‒ ‘not should ‒ I’d like you to know. Just you.’
I sat higher to put an arm round his shoulders and as I waited watched a great grey heron rise languidly from the field opposite and then fly towards the marsh with one leg trailing and slow flaps of its rounded wings. The dusk chorus was dying down, but the blackbird was still singing like a nightingale.
George said, ‘For the last half-hour in th
e plane we knew something was wrong. They’d asked us to stop smoking, put on our safety belts, re-read the alarm drill. There was no panic at all. The passengers were very quiet, hardly anyone talked, I think some people were praying. In the quiet, the engines sounded wrong. The crew ‒ stewards ‒ hostesses ‒ were up and down, up and down, smiling with all their teeth. We were in a row of three right back in the rear portion. Caroline had the window. Kids like to see out. Dad next and I was on the aisle. Caroline was asleep ‒’
‘Thank God.’
‘Yes. Yes. She slept throughout. Dad and I ‒’ his eyes darkened visibly as he stared at me and saw only the memory ‒ ‘we didn’t talk. Always, we’d understood each other’s silences. I ‒ I think we did then. I could tell he knew something was very wrong with the engines. Hell, he knew about planes. He’d flown them in the war. Just before we went down, the lights went crazy. Then we dropped. Anne, we dropped like a bloody stone. Dad said quickly ‒’ his voice shook ‒ “Get your head down, boy ‒ God be with you”, and he shoved my head over my knees by the back of my neck as if I were a kid ‒ a kid like Caroline ‒ and flung himself over her.’ He closed his eyes and had to stop. I drew his head against me and held him cradled and after a while in my arms he went on.
‘When I came round I knew at once what had happened, only I thought they had been mistaken and we’d come down in the sea as it was all so cold and wet. It was the snow. At first, I couldn’t move. Just shock. I hadn’t fractured anything ‒ a few scratches ‒ bruises ‒ that’s all. Somehow, I’d fallen with my seat through a hole in the floor ‒ I think ‒ and landed in a drift under a bit of wing. It was very dark, very cold, though I didn’t feel it then. Later they told me it must’ve been around 3 a.m. I’d matches and a lighter, but daren’t use either. Even with that wind ‒ that bloody awful wind ‒ the smell of kerosene was revolting. Then I remembered I might have an old throat torch on me. I generally have one in some pocket. I’d one in my inside breast pocket and it hadn’t smashed.’ His face twisted. ‘The backroom boys who sort the pieces had themselves a real kick out of that torch. Strange things give ’em kicks, but as I wouldn’t do their job for a fortune and someone has to ‒ why should I kick ’em for it? That torch wasn’t much light or much help ‒ just better than the dark.’ He took a long breath. ‘Anne, till then, I never knew what the silence of death meant. Death in a hospital is totally different. There’s so much life around. There ‒ only the wind screaming. I started searching and found what seemed part of the tail. That’s all it was. The rest had fallen on the other side after she broke up. I don’t know how long it took me ‒ but I found them.’
Silent Song Page 21
