by Pat Barker
Anything could’ve woken her, she thought. A dustbin lid clattering against a wall, a door banging, but then she saw it, a glow of light from inside the studio where no light should have been. A moving light, a torch or a small lamp. She saw the reflection on the hillside rather than the light itself, a tinge of purple on the heaving grass.
Police. She picked up the phone, unable at first to understand why there was silence rather than a steady purr, then realized the lines must be down. Checking, she switched on the bedside lamp. Dead. She went downstairs, trying lights on the staircase and landings, then found the torch she kept in a drawer of the hall table. Through into the living room, swinging the beam around her, she brought the light to a stop on Ben’s portrait. Oh, my dear, she thought, and touched his face.
If there’d been burglars in the house, she’d have locked the bedroom door and let them have the lot. But this was her work. She wouldn’t let that be stolen or destroyed.
In the kitchen she pulled on wellies, her bare feet jamming against the rubber, cold toes wiggling in space – too much space – she must’ve put on Ben’s boots, not her own. No time to change, she was out in the yard, switching the torch off as she left the house. She felt that carrying a light would make her conspicuous, though she switched it on again as she ventured out into the yard, briefly creating a wobbling sphere of light with slanting, silver lines of rain sweeping across it, then switched it off again, paused for a moment to get her eyes accustomed to the dark, and set off to the studio door. She opened it quietly, and stood in the lobby among the familiar daily smells, aware of somebody on the other side of that door. Deep breaths. Blood clamouring in her head and neck, destroying her ability to think. She put her eye to the crack in the door, wanting to know who and what she had to confront.
She couldn’t see anybody. The shadow of the huge Christ lay across the floor and climbed the wall, and a second smaller shadow flickered around it, like a grey flame. She pressed closer to the door, wondering if she dare push it open, trying to remember if it creaked, and then she heard the last sound she expected to hear – though it was the sound that filled the studio almost every day of her working life – the tapping of a mallet on a chisel. She pushed the door further open.
Peter Wingrave stood there, a torch propped up on one of the benches behind him, his shadow huge against the wall of the studio, but this was Peter as she’d never seen him before. Her mind grappled with the wrongness of the image, and then she realized he was wearing her clothes, even to the fur hat with earflaps that she sometimes wore when the studio was really cold. He looked ridiculous – and terrifying. Deranged. His bare arms protruded from the plaster-daubed fisherman’s smock. She was a tall woman, but on him the sleeves were barely past his elbow, and his legs stuck out of her tracksuit bottoms, bare legs, white and hairy in the torchlight, more clearly visible than the rest of him. Only her moon boots had defeated him. He was barefoot, his strong prehensile toes gripping and relaxing as his feet moved across the mess of white plaster dust, towards the figure, pause, strike, away. Decision, action, contemplation: the constant comparison of the shape in the mind with the shape that was emerging from the plaster. The shadow of the figure thrown on to the wall in front of him, one shadow threading in and out of the other, like a weaver’s bobbin.
He looked mad. He looked totally, utterly deranged, and he was destroying her Christ.
But then, a second later, something that had been tugging at the edges of her mind became clear. There was something wrong about the sound. She strained to listen. The scuff of his feet moving across the floor, a snap as a larger piece of plaster broke under his weight, then again the tap of mallet on chisel. There was no impact, no jar and squeak of the chisel biting into the plaster. He was miming. Pretending to be her. In his own mind, perhaps, he had become her.
The first rush of relief at knowing the figure wasn’t being damaged gave way immediately to a deeper fear. If he had been destroying her work, she must and would have confronted him, but this was so different from anything she’d expected to see that she stepped back into the darkness and stood there, thinking. He was stealing her power in an almost ritualistic way. She couldn’t confront him, because she couldn’t begin to understand what she was dealing with – she couldn’t foresee what his reaction would be.
Slowly, being careful to make no noise, she backed out of the lobby and ran across the yard into the house, where she locked and bolted the door behind her.
She began searching for her bag, but when she found her mobile she couldn’t get a signal. And in any case, she thought, putting it down, what could she say? There’s a man in my studio. Did he break in? No, I gave him the key. Is he doing any damage? No. Is he threatening you? No. Are you frightened? Yes. Terrified. Are you a neurotic, stupid bitch? Yes – probably.
They wouldn’t say that. All the same she didn’t particularly want to have the conversation. She put the mobile down and sat at the kitchen table, in darkness, torn between the desire to go back over there and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, and her fear that what he was doing made so little sense, even on his own terms, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be able to answer, and that the question might therefore topple him over into some state she couldn’t predict and wouldn’t be able to deal with. No, better left.
He was wearing her clothes.
She felt a spasm of revulsion, not from him but from herself, as if he had indeed succeeded in stealing her identity. It was easy to believe that what she’d seen in the studio, through the crack in the door, was a deranged double, a creature that in its insanity and incompetence revealed the truth about her.
Half an hour later, perhaps a little less, she heard the studio door close, footsteps walking along the side of the house and then the noise of his van driving away.
Eighteen
The storm blew itself out over the next few hours. Kate made no attempt to sleep again, but sat at the kitchen table, tense and watchful, eyes prickling with tiredness, mouth and stomach sour with too much caffeine.
After a while, as the light coming through the window panes strengthened, she crept out of the house into the opening eye of day, and in that watery yellow light made her way across the yard, which was strewn with twigs and small branches torn off the trees, to the studio.
The huge figure towered over her. It had changed, and yet there were no fresh chips of plaster on the floor, and no chisel marks she couldn’t remember making herself. If it looked different, it must be because her way of seeing it had changed. The belly was scored in three, no, four different places. She put her hands into the cracks. Chest and neck gouged – it looked like a skin disease, bubonic plague, a savagely plucked bird. Pockmarks everywhere. Slowly, she raised her eyes and looked at the head. Cheekbones like cliffs, a thin, dour mouth, lines graven deep on either side, bruised, cut, swollen. Beaten up. Somebody with a talent for such things had given him a right going over. This was the Jesus of history. And we know what happens in history: the strong take what they can, the weak endure what they must, and the dead emphatically do not rise.
She’d made this, not Peter, and yet it seemed to her, remembering last night, that everything she found most disturbing in this figure corresponded with his mimed movements.
Putting the problem aside as too complex to solve now, she looked round the studio, thinking he might have left things behind, and sure enough, there was his jacket on the bench. Putting scruples aside, she felt inside the pockets and found loose change, three five-pound notes and a credit card. She’d have to find a way of returning these: she didn’t want him coming here to collect them. Perhaps she could drop them off at the vicarage. He could pick them up there.
She went out, locked the door and changed the combination on the alarm. It took her a long time to remember what she had to do to achieve this, and while she was doing it the rain started again, though only a few scattered drops, just enough to freshen her burning face.
Back in the house, she forc
ed herself to wash, dress, comb her hair, though her efforts only seemed to make the shadows under her eyes more apparent. She looked dreadful, ancient. Felt it too. And yet the improvement in her shoulder was even more remarkable this morning. They’d told her that if it worked at all, the effects would be dramatic, but she hadn’t dared hope for anything as good as this.
The lights came on at ten o’clock. Various pieces of electronic equipment clicked and whirred, the freezer light glowed red but quickly turned to green. A hum in the distance resolved itself into the sound of a car’s engine. Peter? She immediately wished she’d phoned Angela and asked her to come round, but it was too late now. The car stopped by the side of the house, and with relief she saw Stephen Sharkey walk past the kitchen window.
He was making for the studio, taking it for granted that at this time of the morning she’d be there.
‘Hello,’ she said, opening the kitchen door.
‘Hello. Rough night?’
She must look even worse than she thought. ‘Yes, it was a bit.’ She stood to one side. ‘Come in.’
He stepped over the threshold. ‘Did your lights go off?’
‘Yes, they came back on half an hour ago. And yours?’
‘The same. I expect we’re on the same bit of the grid. Did you manage to sleep through it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Do you know,’ he said, taking off his coat, ‘I saw an owl sitting on the fence back there, in broad daylight. I think I could have walked up to it.’
‘Perhaps it’s lost its tree, poor thing. There’ll be a good few of them down.’
She was remembering he’d arranged to come this morning to look through Ben’s prints. It had completely slipped her mind. ‘Would you like some coffee before you start?’
She put the kettle on, but had peppermint tea herself. Her mind buzzed and fizzed with caffeine, but not in any way that produced useful thought. Stephen watched her sip the greenish-brown liquid. She looked shaken, he thought.
‘Don’t you like thunder?’
‘No, it wasn’t that. I was woken up by I think it was a dustbin lid blowing around – but then I saw a light in the studio. So I went across…’
She told it, or attempted to tell it, as an amusing incident, unaware of the expression of fear and distress that had spread across her face and deepened as she spoke.
‘Anyway, there he was with my clothes on.’
‘Your clothes?’
‘Yes, you know, work clothes. He wasn’t prancing about in high heels and a bra.’ A spasm of irritation born of exhaustion. She controlled herself. ‘He was pretending to carve the plaster.’
‘Pretending?’
‘Oh, yes, he didn’t touch it.’
‘Imitating you.’
Imitating domesticated it, she thought. It had been a lot more than that.
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing very heroic, I’m afraid. I just came back here and locked the door.’
‘Did you phone the police?’
She shook her head. ‘The lines were down.’
‘Have you tried this morning?’
‘No, I don’t see the point.’
‘Was there any damage?’
Good question. ‘No, not really.’ She couldn’t explain that the damage was to her belief in herself and in the project. There was nothing the police could do about that.
Stephen was silent for a moment, holding the steaming mug in his clasped hands. ‘Did you know he’d been in prison? Did Alec tell you?’
‘No. How do you know?’
‘Justine told me. It’s about five years ago, so he’s been out for a while.’
‘I don’t suppose he did anything dreadful. Possession of a Category A drug?’
‘I think it was a bit more than that.’
‘Doesn’t Justine know?’
‘No, he never told her.’
‘Alec would know.’
‘Oh, yes, he’d know.’
‘I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.’
‘No, well, I agree. I think you had the right to know what you were taking on.’
‘Yes.’ She was starting to feel angry. A simpler and much more enjoyable response than the mixture of disgust and self-doubt she’d experienced till now.
After Stephen finished his coffee, she took him off to Ben’s studio, tapped in the combination and unlocked the door. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘why don’t I write this down for you? Then you can come and go as you want.’ He gave her his notebook and a pen, and she leant against the wall to write the numbers down. ‘I hope you have a good morning,’ she said, handing the pad back to him.
She went back into the house, but a few minutes later she came out, got in her car and drove away.
Parking outside the churchyard gate, Kate realized she could see the headstone of Ben’s grave, backed by bleached blond grass. She’d wanted him to be there, on the edge of the cemetery, with the rolling moors shrugging their bare shoulders behind him, rather than close to the village with its dense, secretive life, its rivalries, feuds and gossip.
As she walked up the path to the front door of the vicarage, she saw pale gashes in the trees that had been damaged overnight. Twigs and small branches were scattered over the lawn as they were over her yard, but, more worrying for Alec, there were broken slates mixed in as well.
She rang the bell twice, resigning herself to a long wait and possible disappointment, but after a few minutes she heard footsteps – too light to be Alec’s – and turned to the door, expecting to see Justine.
But it was Angela who stood there. They stared at each other. The buttons on Angela’s blouse had been done up in the wrong order, obviously fastened in a hurry. Kate blushed, Angela didn’t. Trying to keep her eyes off the button, Kate asked, ‘Is Alec in?’
‘Yes,’ said Angela, not moving aside.
Somewhere in the depths of the house Kate heard the slapping of bare feet on lino. ‘Could I have a word with him, please?’
She had never spoken to Angela in that chilly, formal way before, but it had an effect. Angela stood aside and let her in. Kate followed her along the corridor and down a flight of steps to the basement kitchen. A dreadfully old-fashioned place. The gas cooker had clawed feet. Kate sat at the table. Angela filled a whistling kettle at a tap that juddered with the effort of producing water, and put it on the cooker to boil.
The window looked out over the churchyard. It said a lot for the kitchen that one appreciated the comparative cheerfulness of the view. Kate said, ‘I’m not surprised Victoria ran away.’
Angela shrugged. ‘She’d only herself to blame. The bishop offered them a modern house, but she wouldn’t have it because it was on a housing estate. She was quite county, you know, Victoria.’
‘Was she? I never really got to know her.’ A pause. ‘Where’s Justine?’
‘With Stephen, I suppose.’
‘With Stephen?’
‘Oh, yes. That’s been going on quite a while.’
Alec had come in on slippered feet and was standing just inside the door. ‘Hello, Kate. What can I do for you?’
She didn’t want to say anything in front of Angela, but it was difficult to make that clear without appearing to snub her. She looked so pink and pleased with herself, presiding over the teapot in this desolate kitchen with its smells of congealed fat and mice. Poor Justine.
‘I’d like to talk about Peter, but there’s no hurry. Have your tea, first.’
Alec beamed as he accepted a cup. He looked so happy, so nice, so rubicund and smiling, so engagingly and endearingly well fucked above his clerical collar, that it was difficult to go on being angry.
But Kate made the effort, and, sensing her mood, Alec suggested they should take their tea into his study.
Kate followed him down the corridor, wondering what the smell was. Some powerful floor cleaner that failed to live up to its promise and simply pushed the grime around from place to place. Though perhaps there was no gr
ime. Perhaps it was just that the lino had reached a stage of wear when all the colours run into each other and become shades of grey. It reminded her of high teas with her great-aunts when she was a little girl. That graveyard smell of boiled beetroot leaking red on to wilted lettuce leaves.
Alec’s study was overshadowed by trees. He closed the door behind them and stood at an angle to the window, facing her. ‘I dream about them sometimes. The trees. I dream the branches come in at the window.’
Kate realized, with some surprise, that in over five years of so-called friendship this was the most intimate thing she’d ever heard him say. ‘You should cut them down.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’
‘They’re too close, Alec. Anything that’s been blocking the light for 200 years needs to come down.’
He sat down with a creak and protest of ancient wood. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Something rather strange happened last night.’
In telling the story again, she rediscovered her anger. She was flushed by the time she finished. ‘It’s thrown me completely. I was really frightened.’
Alec steepled his fingers, as if she had posed some abstract question in moral theology. ‘I wonder what made him do that? He does have problems with boundaries between people.’
Kate was getting angrier by the minute. She could have accepted any amount of Christian preaching – he was paid to do it, after all – but this was just psychobabble. And he hadn’t acknowledged the salient fact, which was that she was the injured party.
