The Catalyst

by Angela Jardine

  She left a message saying she would be a little late getting back to him that evening and, as it had by now occurred to her he might not be too pleased about the reason, she had simply said she needed to organise the stock at the shop for the next day and would then shop for groceries on her way home.

  She knew she had lied to keep the peace and it made her uncomfortable. Why could she just not be honest, be true to who she was? She wondered why she should instinctively feel the need to lie and had to admit to herself she knew honesty came at a cost. It could demand a difficult reckoning and take its toll on her serenity and she felt she was not yet strong enough for that.

  Edward was waiting for her when she got back to Porthcarn. He had made an effort to shave and comb his hair but his face still looked drawn, his eyes tired; or was there something more than tiredness there? She seemed to sense a sadness in him too and prayed it was not her fault, hoping it was just his usual withdrawn manner combined with a hangover.

  He too, hoped he gave nothing away. He had spent the day lolling listlessly on the couch, dozing or trying to distract any unwanted thought processes with television, hoping to numb the mental anguish he felt was far worse than any of his self-induced, physical pains. All day long his mood had swung between self-pity and attempts to be vindictive. He even went as far as considering firing Sunny but he knew he couldn’t, it wouldn’t be right.

  Be sensible, he berated himself, you can’t fire her just because she is behaving in a way you disapprove of, a way that just happens to hurt your pathetic feelings. Sensible! Yes, that’s me, sensible should be my middle name, he had thought bitterly, and where has being sensible got me? Absolutely bloody nowhere.

  Finally he had talked himself into some sort of acceptance of the situation, deciding he would maintain as dignified a front as he could muster in the face of Sunny’s affair with the loathsome Jimmy Fisher. He would be here for her if ... no, make that a ‘when’ he thought ... she needed him. Otherwise he would simply be her employer, respecting her right to a private life. He was grateful to her for looking after the shop today and was now somewhat embarrassed by his lack of control the night before.

  When she arrived with groceries to cook an evening meal for him he thanked her saying he did not feel hungry just at the moment but would cook something for himself a little later. Suspecting, correctly, that she might be wishing herself back with Jimmy, he steeled himself to look her in the eye and, trying to summon up a relaxed and pleasant expression, insisted she do what she had intended to do before promising to cook for him.

  Sunny, however, met his eyes and knew without a doubt she had caused some sort of emotional hiatus within him and that he was struggling with it. They stared at each other for what seemed an endless minute, her knowing she had unwittingly hurt him and him knowing that she knew.

  In that moment they knew too that neither one of them would refer to the fact. She left him saying she would be in to work promptly in the morning and feeling guilty about her relief at being let off from her obligation to him. It was a relief he was acutely aware of and it hurt him deeply.

  ‘See you in the morning then,’ he called after her with an unconvincing lightness of tone, knowing better now than to offer to take her into work the next day. He closed the door behind her and stood leaning against it.

  Well, you poor sod, how the hell are you going to deal with this, he wondered. Ten minutes later, as he was struggling to make himself eat something, he saw her leave her cottage and get into her car with what appeared to be an overnight bag.

  ‘Treat her well, Fisher, you womanising bastard, or else,’ he said out loud as he watched her drive away from him and towards Jimmy Fisher.

  Chapter 15

  Jimmy did not come to meet her as she pulled into the farmyard and she felt a fleeting quiver of apprehension before telling herself not to be so pathetic. Then, as if summoned by her thoughts, he appeared through the doorway of the old barn on the other side of the yard and loped over to her.

  ‘Hullo, my lover,’ he said, looking down at her with his wolfish grin. She chuckled at the appropriateness of his affectionate colloquialism, reassured that things were all right between them and she hadn’t dreamt the closeness of the night before. He still felt the same way about her.

  ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ she said, wanting to call him ‘darling’ and stroke his face but even after their excesses of the night before it still didn’t seem the right thing to do just yet. To her it seemed somehow presumptuous, hinting at possessiveness but it was exactly the sort of gesture Jimmy would have loved her to make. To him it would have been an open signal of their belonging to one another.

  ‘Come and see this,’ he said now, linking his fingers with hers and leading her towards the doorway from which he had just emerged.

  As she entered the barn she realised this was his studio. An enormous pointed window that seemed to have been reclaimed from a chapel took up almost the whole of the end wall overlooking the sea and she could see the lights of the small boats on the water as they made for home in the last of the evening light.

  Above her large roof-lights showed the first stars as they started to appear in the dusk and everything, the walls, the ceiling, even the open roof beams, were all painted a stark white. All around her his work, strong, savage, teetering on the edge of the abstract, hung or leant against the rough stones of the walls in bright and exuberant chaos.

  He didn’t speak but let her explore his soul in her own way, for everything he was had been laid bare in this room. No other person had been allowed in here, save for Jenny on rare occasions and then never at his invitation. He had not encouraged her to enter his studio, actively disliking her being in it, staying quiet only to keep the studio’s special aura of serenity intact.

  Sunny took it all in silently, instantly drawn to his work, intuitively knowing how he felt about its subject, the wild landscape beyond the window. She caught his eye and read a waiting vulnerability, a nervous need for her approval so strangely at odds with the brashness of his everyday self.

  ‘I find your work very ... moving,’ she said at last. ‘There is something ... emotional, about it ... but I have to admit that I really know nothing at all about art, Jimmy. I only know how it makes me feel.’

  ‘And how does this make you feel?’ He said as he drew her towards a covered canvas on an easel and even before he removed the old sheet from the canvas she knew she was about to see herself as he had seen her the night before. He tugged at the sheet and it slid gently to the floor exposing his vision of her and, even though she knew the pose, the painting still caught her unawares and her eyes filled with tears.

  With the simplest of soft grey lines he had somehow blended her pose of the previous night into an image that portrayed the strength of the dancer with her own fragile frame, showing a fluid outline as though she was about to dance. There was a flexibility about the wrist and arm, a graceful vulnerability about the neck and a suppleness to the curving waist that spoke of imminent movement.

  The only colour in it was a vague pinkish wash that zigzagged haphazardly across one shoulder and Sunny fell in love with it instantly, able now to dissociate it from herself and seeing only the emotion suggested, the need of the dancer who must dance to be fully alive. She smiled up at him with wet eyes.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Like you...’ He smiled down at her, his arm curling around her waist. ‘I’m going to call it ‘Dancer’ ... just ‘Dancer’. I know it’s obvious but I just felt it was honest too. I didn’t want to call it something pretentious … not when it’s so important to me.You don’t think it’s too obvious, do you?’ He looked anxiously at her for approval.

  ‘I think it's the perfect name.’

  She knew he was happy with the painting but as she glanced around his studio it seemed so different from anything else he had painted.

  ‘I love it,’ he said now as he stared at the painting, in reality he was seeing only Sunny in hi
s mind. He was wondering if he should tell her he loved her too. He decided he did not dare but felt she must surely be able to tell how he felt without him having to say the words he had only ever used before with total cynicism.

  Now the words ‘I love you’ felt debased and pointless to him and he didn’t quite know how to tell this woman how much she meant to him, how different she was to all the others. It was not a problem he had ever envisaged having before.

  ‘Do you think it will sell?’ She wondered how she would feel when he sold it.

  ‘Oh, I don't think I could ever sell it … well, only for lots and lots of money ... after all I will still have the real thing so I can always paint another for myself.’ He laughed, only half joking. ‘And of course, I shall never sell it if you leave me.’

  His throat tightened at the thought and he could say nothing more. Instead he held her tightly to feel her against him, trying to imprint the memory of her on his body, trying to shrug away the thought of her leaving him but it still lurked at the back of his mind as he kissed her. Jenny never entered his thoughts at all.

  The days passed all too quickly as the autumn developed into a full-blown Indian summer. Blue sky became a permanent feature of the daytime and the sea observed its obligations with the tide but other than that felt hardly able to raise a wave. The fields and hedges took on the tired, dusty look of an overdue autumn as grasses parched and leaves hung listlessly waiting for the winter gales to help them shed.

  The dried seedpods of dead foxgloves had long since flung away their tiny black seeds and now the withered stems were bent, waiting patiently for the winter rain to soften them so they could rot back into the earth. The cultivated side of the countryside was all in order, all crop fields harvested, all meadowland grass collected for winter feed, leaving the land waiting for the cycle to start again. Everything waited with bated breath for the onset of the next season.

  For Jimmy and Sunny it was a brief idyll. It was difficult being apart during the day when Sunny went to work so Jimmy worked feverishly to blot out the gap left by her absence and make the hours pass quicker. He found it was becoming harder to make himself work now he had Sunny in his life. For once his work was no longer his major motive for living.

  Now his overwhelming passion was no longer for paint and canvas but for flesh and blood, for Sunny. The thought of losing her cut his mind with a cold fear and brought an actual, physical pain to his core.

  Conversely, the strange inner turmoil of his emotions seemed to interpret well in what work he did do and both he and Sunny were aware of a new depth to his paintings. He had started to joke about it, calling it his ‘Sunny period’ before hiding his fear that everything might end by flouncing about parodying his fellow artists and their pretensions.

  Jimmy had little time for any of their self-indulgent musings in newspapers and exhibition catalogues about the importance of their work and his mockery was both perceptive and cruelly funny. Even so, Sunny felt guilty as she laughed at his mimicry.

  On the days when she was not at work they swam naked off the rocks at Pendew Point or picnicked in the tiny, long-ago-abandoned flower fields hugging the cliff-sides. They made love almost every night, only missing when they were too exhausted and sleep claimed them quicker than desire could. The mornings when she did not go to work were spent lying together in bed after lovemaking, talking about their lives, making plans for their future. It never occurred to either of them they might not have a future.

  For Sunny her life was filled with moments of sudden exhilaration that bubbled up out of nowhere; moments when she experienced the same feelings of wild joy she had once felt as a child.

  Now these feelings of a feral, youthful playfulness were becoming more frequent and she felt something within her was at last starting to come alive. The damping down of herself she had experienced with marriage and David’s death was slowly beginning to lift and beneath the repressed emotions of the years she was discovering her true nature again.

  Unexpectedly, she had also added a new emotion to her range, lust, but it was very much tempered by love and now she knew herself very much in love with the complex human being that was Jimmy Fisher. She had long ago forgotten her ability to fascinate, to flex her beauty to bind a man to her but now, without any artifice or effort on her part, this innate skill had surfaced again.

  Only now she was aware she wanted to be loved on her own terms and her terms were the freedom to be herself and own her own life but with the choice of returning any time she wanted to the man she loved. Understanding of this was what she expected from Jimmy. It was also what she offered him in exchange.

  Jimmy too, had added a new emotion to his experience but already being a master in lust, Jimmy’s new emotion was love. Love with all its intricacies, awkwardness and frustration. He now knew beyond any doubt that he had never felt it before. It made it difficult for him to let Sunny go anywhere without him, even to work, although he was just perceptive enough to realise he should not try to control her.

  He also knew she was not as autonomous as she liked to think she was, and neither was he, not any more. They simply belonged, each to the other. These days he sang as he worked.

  At the back of his mind however he could never forget that Sunny worked with Edward Hervey and although he felt almost sure he could trust her, and Edward could hardly be classed as a rival anyway, it still made him uneasy. He felt he needed to protect his interests, he needed to make sure Sunny would stay with him forever.

  This much had become obvious to him as he lay with his head in her lap one afternoon in the cliff top field they had christened the Honeysuckle Meadow. Long ago this tiny, south-facing field just above the sea had produced early spring flowers for the London markets but Nature had reclaimed it from Man and all had grown peaceful again.

  Now, in the early autumn sunshine, the honeysuckle flowers had all gone and the vine drooped instead under the weight of translucent, red berries, although its flamboyant neighbour, the bindweed, still flaunted a last few white paper trumpets in brazen contempt of the coming winter.

  Sunny lay back amongst the dry grasses trying to read a novel and studiously trying to ignore what Jimmy’s proximity was doing to her. Jimmy had been remembering their early morning sex session so vividly that he wondered if he had the energy to try a few exploratory moves in that direction now. It had been with a real sense of amazement that he had found their lovemaking increasingly exciting.

  The bond between them had grown progressively stronger and their subtle, unspoken understanding of each other’s needs and desires made it easier for both of them to lose themselves in their own physical pleasure. He could admit to himself now that he had usually lost interest fairly soon after achieving conquest and had had to plot his way out of the liaison but this relationship was something different and he wanted to hold onto it at all costs.

  He even began to think of marriage as a means of binding her closer to him. The more he thought about the idea, the more he found he liked it. He felt only one small prickle of doubt but shrugged it away. No, he was being foolish, of course she would want to marry him, they were so much in tune with one another, both physically and mentally.

  He knew too that she understood his work. He could see it in the way she responded to his paintings, sometimes becoming so absorbed in them that when he spoke to her she had to drag herself back from wherever they had taken her mind. Of course she must marry him, it was the perfect solution. He simply could not afford to lose this woman. Wasn’t marriage what Jenny had always wanted from him? Bloody hell, Jenny!

  He lay stunned, wondering how he had managed to forget about her so completely. Well, it wasn’t that he had forgotten about her so much as not allowed himself to think about her on the few occasions she had managed briefly to intrude on his thoughts. He had hoped she had decided to leave him for good and it would seem he had half-persuaded himself that she had done just that. But what if she hadn’t? What if she was going to come back?<
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  Fuck! What the hell do I do about that, he wondered, as she began to loom as a rather large obstacle in his dream life. He began to get hot with anger as he realised she could come between him and something he now knew he desperately wanted.

  Unwilling to alert Sunny to his growing anxiety he forced himself to remain looking relaxed as his mind spun round and round in a loop of tangled thoughts, aware that Jenny could walk in on his idyll with Sunny at any moment and smash it to pieces with one hysterical scene.

  Thoughts of her now flooded his mind, filling it with questions. Where was she? Suddenly, belatedly, this mattered to him. When would she return? How would she be when she came back? Would she be spoiling for a fight as usual? What would she say ... do ... when she found out about Sunny? Would he be able to deal with whatever fallout there was?

  He knew he could not let her find out about Sunny, he would have to head her off somehow. His mind skimmed over all sorts of scenarios of increasing unpleasantness and he now found he had no taste at all for the usual dramas of his relationship with Jenny. His spirits, volatile at the best of times, and these thoughts represented far from the best of times, sank. He lay so still in his despondency that Sunny became aware of it.

  Putting her book down, she smoothed the tangle of black curls back from his forehead and asked him what was wrong. Looking up at the grave, beautiful face above him he wanted so much to tell her about Jenny, to be honest with her and ask for her help.

  Even as the thoughts formed he knew he could never tell her about Jenny, he knew he would lose her if he did. She would leave him. She would give him up in some sort of misguided sense of honour, sisterhood and all that bollocks. She might even turn from him in revulsion at his dishonesty, at his betrayal of Jenny, the wronged woman. Which she was, he had the grace to admit now with a squirm of discomfort.