The Catalyst

by Angela Jardine

  ‘No … I don’t think so. I’m not a very good sailor.’

  Again she was lying to him and she felt sure he knew it. The truth was she was very interested in the coves and was an excellent sailor but she felt she would rather have had all her teeth pulled than admit that to the overconfident Adonis in rig boots blocking the sunlight in her doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry, Matthew but I really need to get on now … I was just getting ready to go out.’ She smiled to soften this latest rejection of him but she needed a breathing space from the intensity of his interest in her. A little of Matty Tregoning was already too much.

  ‘Sure …’ he said, nodding amiably and moving off, ‘but if you need any help with anything, anytime … you only have to ask.’

  His eye contact implied much more than his parting remark seemed to mean on the surface and Sunny watched him go uncertain of what was going on.

  Surely he wasn’t seriously pursuing her? She was hardly naïve. She had been openly propositioned a few times in her life and had ignored many more discreet advances but she could hardly believe this young man might be interested in her. She frowned. It had been such a long time since she had played this game and she had convinced herself she did not want to be bothered with it anymore with anyone, however handsome.

  Besides which she thoroughly distrusted her own instinct, surely she was too old for this sort of thing, too old to look for … she stopped herself, balking at the word ‘love’.

  Because the Matty Tregonings of this world were not about love, were they? They were about curiosity and conquest and being thought of as a ‘rum lad’, a stud. Would he really dare to try it on with someone her age? She shook her head, puzzled by what seemed to be happening.

  Only now, despite the somewhat ludicrous and opportunistic nature of Matty’s possible pursuit of her, Sunny had to admit a seed had been sown in her mind. So far she had never thought about ever looking for love again in her life and the possibility that such an occasion might ever arise had simply never occurred to her.

  She was a widow, end of story, end of ... her? Suddenly, and all because of Matty, it occurred to her that maybe she did not want to live out the rest of her days alone. Her body had all too obviously reached this conclusion before her mind had, clearly indicating to her its need for the physical comfort of another person.

  Now, belatedly, her mind too had woken up to the possibility of finding someone to share her life, someone who could laugh with her and lie beside her, although she seriously doubted whether that person was Matty Tregoning.

  But then he would find that out in his own good time.

  Chapter 3

  It had been a bad day so far for Jimmy Fisher. Jenny had slammed out of the door early this morning, yelling at him to fuck off. He hadn’t really minded about being sworn at and it didn’t matter how loudly anyone cursed or argued up here on the cliff-top, there were no neighbours to overhear. Their old farmhouse was totally on its own and even a full-on Italian opera would have been lost to the hedges and heavens out here.

  In fact, that’s just what most of our rows are like… Italian opera, he thought, ruefully rubbing the stubble on his chin and suppressing a grin. He really did not think he should grin today, he didn’t want to smile, he just wanted to glower and sulk and enjoy his moodiness, to plumb the depths of his misery and its subsequent disruption.

  It was just dumb bad luck Jenny had got to their computer first today and had found the suggestive e-mail Rosie had sent. She’s an evil little bitch, that Rosie. He almost caught himself laughing at her audacity before remembering it was her who had caused all this morning's chaos.

  Domestics were really not his scene, they used up too much of his valuable energy and he had been relieved when Jenny had gone. Now he was completely uninterested in where she had gone or when she would be back, or even if she would be back. No, he didn’t mean that, not really, and anyway of course she’d be back, she always came back when she cooled down. Right now he had much more important things to think about.

  The painting was not going well. He had got up at dawn hoping the light would soon be just what he wanted for this one and intent on catching it. It had been, fleetingly, but now the sunlight had gone and a grey drizzle had clamped down. Perhaps this was just as well as he found he had difficulty in mixing the colour he could see in his head. It simply would not work and eventually he had thrown his paints against the studio wall in a rage.

  Even then his painter’s eye thought how beautiful they looked, splashed and dashed against the stark whiteness of the wall. He had even found himself kneeling down to check the colour he wanted hadn’t somehow magically mixed itself by being thrown but it still eluded him.

  Stamping out of his studio he crossed the derelict farmyard and threw himself down on the rickety bench against the wall of the old milking parlour, fighting the urge to have an impossibly early whisky. He briefly considered smoking some of his precious marijuana stash before realising that would definitely interfere with resuming work later on.

  So he took out his tobacco tin and made himself an ordinary rollup cigarette instead, oblivious of the fine rain that beaded his hair and paint-spattered sweater with diamonds. His hands shook but he put it down to the aftershock of the anger and frustration at his inability to capture the colour he wanted. The scene his paintings represented was spread damply before him and he felt so close to portraying its true wildness that any time lost ramped up his frustration to almost unbearable levels.

  The land between the farmstead and the sea had always fascinated him and he painted it constantly, in all lights, all seasons, and from every angle. At other times an idea would idle in his mind as he walked along the cliff path, before crystallising into a fully fledged picture in his imagination. Instantly this would trigger the now-familiar heat inside his chest and he would feel a sort of expansion, a suppressed excitement. Then he knew he had to somehow show his mental picture to the world. He had to put it on canvas so that he could share it with others.

  The need to share his vision of how the world looked was an urgent and evangelical force for Jimmy and he had recognised this in himself long ago. He knew with absolute conviction he could achieve this, that he did have the skill to make others see the world as he saw it. Only when he had successfully translated the picture in his mind onto canvas did he feel better, but the feeling of relief never lasted long enough.

  To feel complete he needed proof that other people saw what he saw, felt what he felt about his work. He had to know they understood him. When all went well and their comments showed they too saw things the way he saw them, that they felt as he did, did he relax, fulfilled for the time being.

  It was different when he felt they did not understand his work. Then he was caustic and scathing and full of loathing for them. He burned to make people understand how the land felt, wanting to show it as a living thing and he tried constantly to imbue his paintings with emotion. He was sure his work was important, that his paintings could move people. It was simply a case of perfecting his technique and he knew it was close, so close, just at the end of his fingertips.

  Even so, when he had captured this emotion on canvas, he still needed to connect to the right people, the people who felt as he did and for that he needed Jenny. Jenny did all his marketing, handling all the business that meant nothing to him. She had wanted him to marry her for a long time now but to Jimmy it had never seemed important. It was just another chore he hadn’t yet got round to, on a par with mending the door on the wood shed as far as he was concerned. On reflection, he felt the woodshed door was probably the more important job.

  Why she should want to marry him he really could not fathom. They had lived together for such a long time and so far she had put up with his ‘screwing around’ as she called it. Maybe she thought marriage would reform him. He snorted at the thought, that was doubtful to say the least. He didn’t set out to be deliberately unfaithful, it just sort of happened. Anyway, it isn’t as if I
’m in love with her or anything, he thought now.

  He was almost sure he had never been in love with her but she was comfortable to live with. Apart from the rows every now and then Jenny made life comfortable. Comfortable but boring, and by his own admission Jimmy didn’t do ‘boring’, hence the subversive nature of his affairs. The more risky they were, the more exciting they were to him.

  As the morning wore on however, his air of determined indifference started to waver and worrying thoughts began to creep into his mind. Thoughts like, how would he manage if Jenny finally said she had had enough of him and left for good? Perhaps Rosie could take her place? But he knew that Rosie would drink all night and stay in bed all day and try to persuade him to do the same.

  Remembering the warm, musky smell of her and her constant readiness for sex he knew he would be tempted, although he was astute enough to realise that would soon pall. Not because he would not be able to match her demands for sex (at least he hoped he could) but because she would never be able to understand his need to work. She would not be the support that Jenny is … was … is. He corrected his thoughts, loathe to somehow tempt Fate with a past tense.

  He wondered guiltily if he would get away with it again this time. Bloody Rosie! She hadn’t needed to use the business email address to send her pornographic message, he had given her his own password-protected email address. He was shrewd enough to see the game, her game. It was the ‘piss Jenny off enough with Jimmy and she’ll leave and I’ll move in’ game. Well, it wasn’t going to work, he would phone her today and tell her it was well and truly over. She might be amazing in bed but that was only a part of his life and, he suddenly realised, it was not the most important part.

  Now, thunderstruck, it occurred to him that the only thing that was truly important to him was his work. His work was, and always had been, his drug of choice. He only felt truly alive, only felt his life mattered when he worked. It was the only time when he was really at peace with himself.

  He sighed and took a last drag on his cigarette before blowing the smoke up into the still, wet air. Flicking the final ember of his rollup away onto the broken concrete of the yard he stood up, aware his body was stiff and that his joints were beginning to ache. Of course he would have to end it with Rosie. At twenty-three she was much too young for him. It had just been a bit of fun, a fling, but he was nearly twenty years older than her for Pete’s sake!

  He did not like to think there would come a time when she, or any woman come to think of it, would look at his body with disgust but he knew he already looked older than his years. Vanity would make him self-protective like nothing else could.

  If only he wasn’t so easily tempted by women. It was not as if he had ever loved any of them. Well, he didn’t think he had anyway but that was not the point. The point was knowing he still seemed to be able to have any woman he wanted. It was all their fault, they usually made the first move. He thought back rapidly and found that this was more or less true, but even he could see that did not mean he had needed to respond to their advances.

  At the back of his mind he knew it was probably time he settled down to living the life of a neutered tomcat and he was more than a little relieved to find the thought automatically filled him with dismay. For Jimmy this meant he had all the right drives still intact.

  The post van screeched to an instant halt in the yard just as he stepped back into the kitchen. He knew Pete Jose, the postman, would stay awhile with him as his was the last delivery on his post round, so he filled the kettle for tea, hoping it would take away his own worrying need for whisky. He wondered if Pete had seen Jenny on his rounds.

  Pete’s flip-flops slapped on the bare flagstones of the kitchen floor as Jimmy picked out a couple of mugs from the sink full of crockery and washed them. He heard a thump as his post was slapped down on the table and knew Pete would be standing there, half in the summer uniform of the Royal Mail, navy shorts and light-blue shirt, and half in his own eclectic style of friendship bracelets, electric blue mirror shades and sun-bleached dreadlocks, salt-stiff from surfing at every available opportunity.

  Jimmy smiled to himself now at the thought, knowing the postmaster had long since given up trying to make Pete toe the official clothing line of the Royal Mail.

  ‘Yo, painter dude,’ Pete said with a very white grin.

  ‘Yo, Pete,’ Jimmy answered, wearily entering into the spirit of Pete’s Californian surfer talk.

  ‘Sorry man, looks like a loada bills…’ Pete said, nodding his head regretfully as he turned down the corners of his mouth in an air of commiseration that hinted that no one should have to be bothered with such constraints on living life to the full.

  ‘No problemo,’ Jimmy shrugged, allowing himself to be seduced by Pete’s laconic style and just enough aware to be touched by Pete’s identifying with the starving artist scenario. He wasn’t exactly starving but life would be a real struggle without Jenny’s little job in a local surf shop.

  Jimmy despised lavish living. He had no time for conspicuous consumption. Besides his womanising his only other vices, cheap whisky, rollups and basic marijuana were not outrageously expensive if you knew where to look. The few times he realised his clothes were shabby to the point of indecency his complete lack of vanity in this area meant he could usually find what he wanted in charity shops.

  Still, he hoped to sell more paintings than he did at present. Occasionally he even allowed himself the luxury of daydreaming of the time when everyone would want a Jimmy Fisher on their wall.

  ‘Seen Jenny this morning, Pete? She … went to the shops … early on.’ He hoped he seemed casual.

  ‘Yeah man, I seen her … she was just goin’ into Sacha’s … with some dude. Saw them just as I was leaving town to come out here,’ Pete answered, concentrating on dunking his teabag in the mug in front of him.

  Jimmy watched him, suddenly struck by a flush of jealousy. Jenny, going into some upmarket coffee house … with some dude? What the hell did ‘some dude’ mean anyway? Jenny didn’t do ‘some dude’, Jenny did ‘I love you, Jimmy.’

  ‘Know who he was?’ Confused, he put his own used teabag down on the draining board, vaguely aware that Jenny would moan at him for not putting it straight in the bin. Pete shook his dreads and Jimmy, his mind in turmoil, absently watched them writhe.

  ‘Nah ... jes’ some white guy ... in a suit.’

  Some white guy … in a suit. A suit! Jimmy stared down at the unsuspecting teabag with a frown as he visualised the man in the suit. Nobody did suits down here, everyone here did laid back, tee-shirts, tattoos, flip-flops, the ultimate anarchist’s dress code, the reactionary symbol of this place.

  Even the rat-race escapees, who had moved here to retire or live the bohemian dream, hid upcountry wealth behind old number plates and gardening clothes in an attempt to fit in with the genuinely breadline locals.

  Only one type of person did suits this far away from the big city. Solicitors! Well, two types ... solicitors and developers. Property developers roamed this land like a walking rash and Jimmy hated them to the soles of his beat-up trainers, but Jenny had no time for developers either. So maybe the guy was a solicitor? Solicitors did suits, they did suits everywhere. Could Jenny have been talking to a solicitor?

  If she was there could only be one reason because he knew there was just no one out there who was going to leave her an inheritance. She was thinking of leaving him, she had had enough of him at last. His mind scattered in several directions at once. She must be trying to find out if she was entitled to anything from him after living as his partner for the last whatever-the-hell-it-was years.

  His mental processes slipped into panic mode. How would he manage? Who would look after him while he worked, who would arrange his exhibitions, check his paperwork, do that fucking awful tax return? Who would feed him when he had forgotten about food? He grew clammy at the thought of it all.

  ‘Pete, just remembered … gotta go into town … close the door when you go
…’

  He scooped up the keys to his old pickup truck and hurried out of the door. Pete nodded with all the sagacity his twenty-six years could muster, sipping his hot tea carefully and knowing you didn’t ask questions of painter dudes ... artistic temperament and all that man, they jes’ di’n’t do laid back.

  Jimmy lurched the dodgy gearbox of the pickup through the narrow, winding lanes towards Dehwelyans, cursing the tourists that rubbernecked at the scenery and cautiously crept their expensive, too-large cars between the high hedges. The three mile journey seemed interminable. He needed to find Jenny, he needed to put things right, he just … needed.

  It was a cold, hard fact he hated facing. Plump little dark-haired Jenny, stoic, loving, capable, fiery. She was hardly beautiful … or was she? Perhaps he had just got used to seeing her. He imagined her now, trying to analyse her looks, was there was something about her? Any pretensions Jenny might have to beauty eluded him.

  Fuck, why was she talking to a suit? She must just have had enough of him. He wondered if she could take him to the cleaners if she left. That would be a challenge for them, he thought grimly. How can you have half of sod all? Even the farmhouse was rented.

  The search for Jenny proved fruitless even though Millie in Sacha’s coffee house remembered seeing her there. She had been talking to a very expensive looking man, handsome too, she added, eager to gossip and watching closely to see what effect the news had on Jimmy as he tried to hide the unaccustomed anxiety rising ever higher inside him.

  He hurried off down the busy street peering in shops, even trying the surf shop where she usually worked though he knew it was unlikely she would have gone there on her day off. Finally he gave up, suddenly realising he knew few of her friends in the town. After all these years, he still knew very little about the woman he slept beside.