A Half Forgotten Song (3 page)

“It wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about you . . .” Ali’s eyes flashed angrily, and Zach saw the guilt there, too; saw that she’d struggled with the decision. Oddly, it made him feel no better that she had.

“How would you feel, Ali? How would you feel in my place?” he asked intently. For a horrifying second, he thought he might cry. But he didn’t. He held Ali’s gaze and made her see; and some emotion caused her cheeks to flush, her eyes to grow bright and desperate. What that emotion was, Zach could no longer read, and just at that moment Elise came rushing downstairs and flew into her mother’s arms.

As they left, Zach hugged Elise and tried to keep smiling, tried to reassure her that she didn’t need to feel guilty. But when Elise started to cry, he couldn’t keep it up—his smile became a grimace and tears blurred his last view of her, so in the end he stopped trying to pretend it was all right. Elise gulped and sobbed and scrubbed at her eyes with her knuckles, and Zach held her at arm’s length and wiped her face for her.

“I love you very much, Els. And I’ll see you very soon,” he said, giving the statements no ambiguity, no hint of a maybe. She nodded, taking huge, hitching breaths. “Come on. One last smile for your dad before you go.” She gave it a good try, her small, round mouth curling up at the corners even as sobs shook her chest. Zach kissed her and stood up.

“Go on,” he said to Ali brutally. “Go on now.” Ali reached down for Elise’s hand and towed her away along the pavement to where her car was parked. Elise turned and waved from the backseat. Waved until the car was out of sight down the hill and around the corner. And when it was, Zach felt something switch off inside him. He couldn’t tell what it was, but he knew it was vital. Numb, he sank down onto the front step of the gallery, and sat there for a long time.

F
or the next few days Zach went through the motions of his everyday life, opening the gallery, trying to fill his time with odd jobs, reading auction catalogs, closing the gallery again; all with this same numbness dogging his every step. There was an emptiness to everything he did. Without Elise there to wake him up, to need breakfast, to need entertaining and impressing and scolding, there seemed little point to any of the other things he did. For a while now he had thought that losing Ali was the worst thing that would happen to him. Now he knew that losing Elise was going to be much, much worse.

“You haven’t lost her. You’ll always be her dad,” said his friend Ian, over a curry the following week.

“An absentee father. Not the kind of father I wanted to be,” Zach replied morosely. Ian said nothing for a moment. He was obviously finding it hard to think of comforting things to say; he was finding Zach’s company hard. Zach felt bad about that, but he couldn’t help it. He had no bravado left; he felt neither brave, nor tough, nor resilient. When Ian tentatively suggested that the move to the States might prove liberating for Zach, might give him a fresh start, too, Zach looked up at him bleakly, and his friend fell into awkward silence. “Sorry, Ian. Crap company, aren’t I?” he apologized eventually.

“Terrible,” Ian agreed. “Thank God they do a good
karai
here, or I’d have left after the first ten minutes.”

“Sorry. I just . . . I miss her already.”

“I know. How’s business?”

“Going under.”

“Not seriously?”

“Quite possibly.” Zach smiled at the horrified expression on Ian’s face. Ian’s own company—organizing one-off adventures of a lifetime for people—was expanding all the time.

“You can’t let that happen, mate. There must be something you can do?”

“Like what? I can’t force people to buy art. They either want to buy it or they don’t.” In truth, there was more he should be doing. He should be dealing in smaller, more affordable pictures and increasing his stock that way. He should be getting up to London more; calling other dealers and past customers to remind them of his existence. Booking a stand at the London Art Fair. Anything to get the gallery some clients. It was what he’d done in the year before officially opening, and the year after that. Now the very thought tired him. It seemed to require more energy than he had left.

“What about those Charles Aubrey pictures? You must be able to sell them? Buy in some new stock instead, get things moving and shaking . . .” Ian suggested.

“I could . . . I could put two of them up for auction,” Zach conceded.
But not
Delphine, he thought. “But once they’re gone . . . that’s it. That’s the heart of the gallery gone. Who knows when—or if—I’d be able to afford to buy any more of his work? I’m meant to
specialize
in Aubrey. I’m an Aubrey expert, remember?”

“Yes, but . . . needs must, Zach. It’s business. Try not to make it so personal.”

Ian was right, but it was personal to Zach; probably far too personal. He’d known of Charles Aubrey for a very long time, since he was a small boy. On every strained, too-quiet visit to his grandparents, he would spend time standing next to his grandma, staring at the picture that hung in her dressing room. It would have hung in pride of place in the living room, his grandma told him, but Grandpa did not approve. When he asked why not, Zach was told,
I was one of Aubrey’s women
. The old woman always had a sparkle in her eye and a pleased smile pulling at her creased lips when she said these words. One time, Zach’s father heard her say it and put his head around the door to scowl at her.
Don’t go filling the boy’s head with that nonsense,
he muttered. When they went back downstairs, Zach’s father was staring at Grandpa, but the older man seemed unwilling to meet his gaze. One more of those tense, hung moments that Zach hadn’t understood at the time, that had made him half dread visiting his grandparents and half dread the black mood his father would be in for days afterwards.

The Aubrey print in his grandma’s dressing room was a scene of rocky cliffs and a churning silver sea, the cliff tops vibrant with long grass smoothed flat beneath the wind. A woman was walking along the cliff path with one hand clamped onto her hat and the other held slightly away from her, as if for balance. It was slightly impressionistic, the brushwork quick and impulsive, and yet the whole scene was alive. Looking at it, Zach expected to hear gulls and feel the touch of salt spray on his face. You could smell the wet rocks, hear the wind buffeting in your ears.
That’s me,
his grandma told him proudly, on more than one occasion. When she looked at the picture, it was clear she was looking into the past. Her eyes fell out of focus, drifted away to distant times and places. And yet Zach had always thought there was something slightly uneasy about the picture. It was the way the figure looked so vulnerable, on the cliff top. Walking all alone, and holding one hand out to steady herself, as if the wind wasn’t blowing in off the sea but off the land instead, and threatening to pull her over the edge into the choppy water below. If he looked at it for long enough, the picture sometimes gave Zach that spongy feeling in his knees that he got at the top of a ladder.

By the time his grandpa died, and his grandma, frail and frightened, agreed to move into an assisted living facility, the print had faded so badly that it went into the Dumpster, along with many more of their possessions that were too old, worn, and battered to be of use to anybody.
It’s too big to hang in that new flat of yours, anyway,
Zach’s father had said gruffly. His grandma had stared from the living room window, stared out at the Dumpster until the last possible moment before leaving. The original painting was in the Tate, and Zach went to see it whenever he was up in London. He felt nostalgic each time he looked at it. It took him back to his childhood, in the same way the smells of burned toast and Polo mints and cigarillo smoke did; and at the same time he could now see it through adult eyes, through an artist’s eyes. But perhaps it was time he stopped thinking of himself as an artist. It had been years since he’d finished a piece, even longer since he’d finished anything worth showing to anybody else. He really wanted the figure in the Aubrey painting to be his grandmother, and he often searched the figure for familiar characteristics. Tiny shoulders, comparatively large breasts. A diminutive figure with a smudge of light, tawny hair. It could have been her. The painting was dated 1939. That year, his grandma whispered to him as they stood in front of the print, she and his grandpa took a holiday in Dorset, near where Aubrey had his summer house; and they had met the artist while out walking.

Only later in life did the implications of all this begin to dawn on Zach. He never dared to ask his grandma outright about that summer, but he was willing to bet she would have given a little laugh and an evasive shrug if he had, and that there would have been that sparkle in her eye as she looked away, and a small smile lingering on her mouth. Her expression when she looked at the picture, Zach could see in hindsight, was that of an infatuated girl, still in the grip of young love over seventy years later. It got him thinking, but Zach’s father, maddeningly, bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to either Charles Aubrey or to Zach’s grandpa. But nobody in Zach’s family had ever picked up a paintbrush or a sketchbook until Zach did. None of his official forebears had any kind of artistic bent whatsoever. When he was ten, he presented his grandpa with his best-ever drawing of his BMX bike. It was good; he knew it was good. He thought his grandpa would be pleased, impressed; but the old man had frowned at the picture instead of smiling, and had handed it back to Zach with a dismissive remark.
Not bad, son
.

Another day in the gallery passed with barely any customers. An elderly lady spent twenty minutes turning the wire rack of postcards around and around before deciding not to buy any. How he hated that revolving wire rack. Postcards of art—last chance saloon for any serious gallery—and he couldn’t even sell them, thought Zach. He noticed that there was dust on the white wires of the rack. Tiny little banks of it on each and every horizontal. He wiped at a few with his cuff, but soon gave up and thought instead about Ian’s last question to him over their recent meal:
So, what are you going to do?

Something like panic gripped him then, and gave his gut a nasty little jolt; because he really had no idea. The future stretched out shapelessly in front of him, and in it he couldn’t find one thing to aim for, one thing that would clearly be a good idea, or that he could afford to do. And looking back was no help either. His one best thing, his greatest achievement, was now thousands of miles away in Massachusetts, probably developing an American accent and forgetting him already. And when he looked behind him, everything he thought he had been building turned out to have been transient, and had crumbled into nothing when he wasn’t watching. His career as an artist, his marriage, his gallery. He genuinely wasn’t sure how it had happened—if there had been signs he’d missed, or some fundamental flaw in his approach to life. He thought he’d done all the right things; he thought he’d worked hard. But now he was divorced, just like his parents. Just like his grandparents had longed to be, held together only by the conventions of their generation. Having witnessed the bloody battleground of his parents’ separation, Zach had vowed that it would never happen to him. He had been sure, before he wed, that he would do right whatever it was that they had not. Staring into space, he followed the thread of his life back, right back, searching for all the times and places he’d gone wrong.

The sun sank below the rooftops outside, and shadows stretched long and deep across the gallery floor. Earlier every day, these shadows descended. Pooling in the narrow streets where pale Bath stone façades stretched up on either side like canyon walls. In the heat of summer they were a blissful escape from the glaring sun, from the heat and the sticky press of crowding people. Now they seemed oppressive, foreboding. Zach went back to his desk and sank into the chair, suddenly cold, and tired. He would give every last scant thing he possessed in an instant, he decided, to the first person who could tell him clearly and precisely what he should do next. He didn’t think he could stand even one more day trapped in the silence of the gallery, smothered by the sound of an absent daughter, a long-gone wife, and no clients, no customers. He had just decided to get horribly, pointlessly drunk when two things happened within the space of five minutes. First he found a new drawing by Charles Aubrey for sale by auction in the Christie’s catalog, and then he got a phone call.

He was staring at the description of the drawing as he picked up the phone, distractedly, not really interested in the call.

“Gilchrist Gallery?” he said.

“Zach? It’s David.” Clipped words in a smooth, unfathomable voice.

“Oh, hello, David,” Zach replied, dragging his eyes from the catalog and trying to place the name, the voice. He had a sudden nagging feeling that he should pay attention. There was a nonplussed grunt at the end of the line.

“David Fellows, at Haverley?”

“Yes, of course. How are you, David?” Zach said, too quickly. Guilt made his fingertips tingle, just like they had at school when the question about his missing homework was asked.

“I’m very well, thank you. Look, it’s been a while since I’ve heard from you. In truth, it’s been over eighteen months. I know you said you needed more time to get the manuscript to me, and we did agree to that, but there does come a point when a publisher starts to wonder if a book is ever going to appear . . .”

“Yes, look, I am sorry for the delay . . . I’ve been . . . well . . .”

“Zach, you’re a scholar. Books take as long as they take, I am well aware. The reason I’m calling today is to let you know that somebody else has come to us with an outline for a work on Charles Aubrey . . .”

“Who?”

“Perhaps it might be more politic if I didn’t say. But it’s a strong proposal; he’s shown us half the manuscript and hopes to finish in four to five months. It would coincide very nicely with next year’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery . . . Anyway, I’ve been told by the powers that be to chase you up, not to put too fine a point on it. We want to go ahead with a major new work on the artist, and we want to publish next summer. That means we would need a manuscript from you by January or February at the latest. How does that sound?”