A Half Forgotten Song (31 page)

“The one staying at the pub. The tourist woman with the fiancé she barely looks at . . . the one who has to touch herself each time she sees you . . . Don’t pretend you don’t know!”

“But . . . I hardly know the woman! I’ve met her only twice! You’re imagining things, Celeste—”

“I am not! And I tell you now, Charles Aubrey, either we go to Morocco and away from this damp and dreary place, or I will go alone with the girls and you will see us no more!”

There was a long, uneasy silence, and Dimity didn’t dare to breathe.

“All right,” Charles said at last, and Dimity went cold. “We’ll all go,” he said.

“What? No . . .” Celeste protested. “Just
us,
Charles. We need some time alone . . .”

“Well, that’s not possible. So we’ll all go.” Dimity couldn’t hold herself still any longer. She crossed the rest of the hallway in steps as loud as she could make them without spilling the tea, to announce her arrival, and smiled frantically as she stepped out into the light.

“Here, Celeste. I fetched your tea,” she said, fighting to keep her voice from shaking.

“Mitzy! How about it—a trip to Morocco! All five of us. Celeste can visit her family, and I can paint you as a harem girl, or perhaps a Berber princess . . . It’ll be like nowhere you’ve ever seen, trust me. You’ll love it. What do you say?” Charles stood with his hands on his hips, squinting at her with a kind of desperate fixation, as if he could feel Celeste’s baleful eyes upon him and didn’t dare to look.

“You . . . want me to go to Morocco with you? Truly?” Dimity breathed, glancing from him to Celeste and back. “I . . . I should love to go . . .” she said. “You’ll take me with you? You promise?”

“Of course. You’d be a great help to us on the journey, I’m sure. You can help look after the girls, and give Celeste and me some time to rest and be together.” Charles set his smile bravely, and finally found the courage to look across at Celeste. She was watching him, her mouth open in shock, but she did not speak.

“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” said Dimity, scarcely able to believe it was true. Her smile stretched from ear to ear, her face ached from it. They would go, but this time she would stay with them, with him. She would leave Blacknowle, and travel farther than she had ever thought it possible to travel. She did not care if Celeste did not want her there. She cared only that Charles did; and in that moment, she loved him completely.

“There now,” Charles said awkwardly. “Go on inside and tell the girls. And is there any tea for me in the pot?”

“I’ll fetch you some.” Dimity stepped back into the strawberry-scented house, and just before she moved out of earshot, she heard Celeste say, in a voice made frigid with rage:

“Charles. How could you?”

T
here was straw prickling Zach’s back and the sharp smell of sheep shit in his nostrils, filtering through the thick mass of Hannah’s hair. Her head was resting in the crook where his neck met his shoulder, and for a while he shut his eyes and enjoyed the discomfort of her nose and chin digging into him. Her breath was warm and growing steadily slower, returning to normal. From behind the bale of straw on which he was leaning came the sudden deep, loud bleat of a sheep; Hannah’s head came up in an instant, her eyes fighting into focus.

“Is she all right?” said Zach. Hannah sat up straighter to look and Zach felt their bodies disconnect, the sudden touch of cool air on damp and delicate skin.

“Yes, I think so. Just getting a bit uncomfortable now, poor girl. I should check on her, though.” She climbed off Zach and got to her feet, wrestling her trousers back over her hips and zipping them up. There was sheep shit on one of her knees. She went around the bale and crouched by the laboring ewe, whose quick breathing was flaring her nostrils and making her whole body rock. Hannah peered beneath her tail, put gentle fingers there to feel the shape of what was beginning to protrude. “I can feel feet and nostrils.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes, that’s good. Nostrils means a straightforward, headfirst birth. Breech is trickier.”

“Oh, good. Well . . . I’ve never done that before. Had sex in a barn full of sheep, I mean,” Zach said, dressing and brushing the sharp bits of chaff from his skin. Hannah looked up with a brief smile.

“It certainly helps liven up the long hours of a lambing vigil. Chuck me that rag, would you?” She caught it deftly and wiped the muck from her hands as she sat back down on the bale beside him. Zach took her hand and meshed their fingers, pressing the pads of their thumbs together and feeling the hard scar running across hers.

The small cappuccino-colored ewes were dotted around all over the barn, some with tiny lambs curled sleepily beside them, others prostrate and panting like the one Hannah had just checked, others eating hay as though none of it was anything to do with them. It was three o’clock in the morning and an immaculate full moon had risen outside, casting silvery shadows over everything. Zach peered out through the door, up the hill to where the low shape of The Watch crouched against the horizon. There was a single light on in the kitchen downstairs, and he wondered if Dimity was still up, or had forgotten to turn it off.

“Don’t you need to put a blob of that green paint on them? Or number them or something, so you know whose is whose?” He gestured to the sheep that already had lambs. All the ewes had large blobs of emerald green paint on their rumps.

“I’m sure the sheep know. And they’ll all get their ear tags, soon enough. That green paint is tenacious stuff—you can’t get it off you, once it’s on. Not ideal for organic fleeces. It goes on the ram’s chest, so we can see who he’s covered.”

“Is lambing always this easy?” he asked. Hannah shrugged.

“This is my first season with this flock, remember. Hopefully they’ll all keep popping out easy-peasy, because I can’t afford to call the vet right now.”

Zach thought about this for a moment. “What about . . . what about your pictures? I mean, no offense, but you hardly get a lot of foot traffic in that shop of yours. Couldn’t you find some local gallery or gift shop to stock them? They’d sell really well, I’m sure they would.”

“I could, I suppose. I just . . . I don’t know. The idea doesn’t appeal to me.”

“What idea? The idea of being a talented artist and making some extra income through the sale of your work? What’s not to like?”

“I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be an organic shepherd.”

“The one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other, does it?”

“Sort of. If the pictures sell really well I’ll only have to do more of them . . . it’s a slippery slope. Soon I’ll be painting daisies on watering cans and running a gift shop rather than farming.” She shuddered, and Zach laughed softly.

“But you draw already. The pictures are there; I’m sure no harm would come of putting them somewhere they’re more likely to sell. I could look into it, if you like?” he said. Hannah gave him a steady look.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll think about it,” she said. “What about you? I bet you wanted to be an artist, right? What made you open a gallery?”

“The fact that nobody bought my art and I had a wife and child to feed. Actually, Ali fed herself, and me and Elise. She’s a lawyer, a very good one.”

“Bet that did wonders for your ego.”

“It was my own stupid fault—the fact that I didn’t make it. I had my chance and I blew it.” Zach smiled ruefully and shook his head at the memory. He’d been so full of himself at the time, so bloody cocksure.

I
t was the year he graduated from Goldsmiths, and his final show was being showered with praise from staff and classmates alike, and from a journalist who wrote in a piece in her magazine about young artists to keep an eye on.
Zach Gilchrist,
the article said,
combines a classical eye with a challenging, almost surrealist approach to subject and meaning.
It was rumored that Simon d’Angelico, one of the most influential collectors of British contemporary art, might be coming to the exhibition to look at his pieces. A real, genuine rumor, not one that Zach had cooked up himself. All that promise, all that potential. Zach entirely lost sight of the fact that it was all just possibility and suggestion, nothing more concrete than that. That he was still just a new graduate, unproven—a maybe, that was all. He felt like he had made it already, so that when a woman called Lauren Holt, who ran a small gallery near Vyner Street in the City and was building up a stable of new artists, came and spoke to him and asked about hanging his final piece and two others, he barely listened to her. He’d never heard of her or her gallery, and that told him everything he thought he needed to know. She had bright scarlet hair, even though she looked over fifty, and it clashed with her green eye shadow. Zach supposed she thought it made her look avant-garde; he wrote her off as an eccentric amateur. Her gallery had been open for only six months, and for all he knew it was the kind of place that sold postcards of the art in a rotating wire rack. So he turned her down flat and thought no more about it, safe in the knowledge that big things were coming his way.

Nine months later, Lauren Holt hosted a private viewing at her gallery that caused a buzz of excitement in the press and in the art-world circles that Zach was trying desperately to gain access to. Simon d’Angelico never did come to his final show; there were no more articles mentioning Zach in any magazines or newspaper reviews. Zach paid Lauren’s gallery a visit, and walked around in increasing dismay as he absorbed the quality of the pieces on display, the perfect lighting, the buzz of conversation. Startling pieces by people he
had
heard of, being discussed by people who mattered. Lauren Holt came in through a back door in the white wall, dressed all in black with her red hair shining. Zach tried to hide behind a piece of wire sculpture, but she caught his eye and gave him a lopsided little smile, more wistful than gloating. Zach slunk away, too ashamed to ask her if she might still be interested in him. And that had been the closest he had ever come to having his work picked up by an influential gallery. In terms of his career as an artist, it was all downhill from there.

W
hy didn’t you ask her there and then if she’d still have you? The gallery was still quite new . . . if you’d groveled she might have been flattered enough to agree, even if it was just one piece—that final-year piece you did that she liked,” said Hannah as they trod through the straw to another ewe who had the front legs of her lamb protruding from her back end, sheathed in a gray and shiny membrane.

“I couldn’t. It was too humiliating . . .”

“You mean you were still too proud, even at that point?”

“I guess so.”

“Men!” Hannah rolled her eyes. “You never will stop to ask for directions.”

“I was still hoping for a miracle from elsewhere, I suppose. But that was it. My big chance, and I blew it.”

“Come on, I don’t buy that.” She wrapped her hands around the lamb’s slippery legs and when she saw the ewe heave, pulled steadily until its whole body slithered free with a rush of fluid and a grunt from the ewe. “Yes! Good sheep,” she said as she cleared the mucus from the lamb’s mouth and nose, then swung it gently a few times until it sneezed and snuffled and shook its head weakly. She laid it in the straw beside its astonished mother and wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans. Zach grimaced. Lambing was gorier than he’d imagined it would be.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s for you won’t go by you, as my old granddad used to say. Talent will out. If you were meant to make it as a professional artist, you would have made it,” she said. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Hmm. I’m not sure if that’s a better or worse thought, actually. Don’t we make our own luck, our own opportunities in life?”

“So, what are you telling me—that you just haven’t been trying all these years? That that’s why you aren’t a famous artist, and your gallery’s about to close, and now you can’t finish your book?”

“No, I suppose not. It’s certainly . . . felt like I’ve been trying. Makes me tired just thinking about it, actually.”

“Well, there you are, then. Don’t beat yourself up about one missed chance of an exhibition.”

“So you’re saying I was doomed to failure from the start?”

“Exactly. There now—doesn’t that make you feel better?” She grinned at him, punching him lightly on the shoulder.

“Oh yes. Much,” he said with a smile. Hannah sighed slightly and stepped forwards, grabbed him by his shirt and tipped up her chin to kiss him.

“Cheer up. I still fancy you, in spite of you being such a towering loser,” she said.

Z
ach slept until lunchtime the day after his long night in the lambing barns, and woke up ravenous. At two in the afternoon, he sat down to a plate of ham, eggs, and chips amid the drinkers and dog walkers sheltering from a steady, drenching downpour outside. Zach turned to stare out of the window at the rain, and saw Hannah. She was waiting at the bus stop, wearing her outsize checked shirt but nothing waterproof; jeans stuffed into her wellies, an old waxed hat pulled down low over her hair. Zach sat up and reached out to knock on the glass to get her attention, but he realized that she was too far away and wouldn’t hear him over the rain. He leaned back and started to wonder why on earth she would wait at a bus stop in the rain, when she could drive wherever she wanted to go. And if her jeep was out of action for some reason, he was sure she’d feel no compunction about asking him for a lift. So he frowned, and rested his chin on the back of the seat to watch her. She had her hands thrust deeply into her pockets, and her back fearfully straight. Her shoulders were high and set, and the more Zach studied her the more he realized that she looked extremely tense, even uneasy. Before long, the bus pulled up, wipers flailing, and two elderly ladies got out, wrapped up in clear plastic macintoshes. Hannah did not get in.

About two minutes later Hannah glanced at her watch, but even as she did so, a filthy white Toyota pickup swung to a halt in front of the bus stop, splashing muddy water from the gutter over Hannah’s boots. She stepped forwards and leaned down at the open window. Zach stared. There were two men inside the car, but he couldn’t make them out. They spoke for no more than ten seconds, then Hannah reached into her back pocket and handed over a crumpled, letter-size envelope. Through the windscreen, Zach could see the white of the envelope as the man in the passenger seat opened it and rummaged inside with his fingertips.
Money,
thought Zach. It had to be. Hannah gave a nod and stepped back, and the pickup pulled away. With her hands back in her pockets, she watched it go, and as it pulled around the corner near the pub, Zach saw the sleeve of the man in the passenger seat, resting against the window. A scruffy lilac sweatshirt sleeve. He saw the huge bulk of the man, and a rough, bearded neck. James Horne. Hannah stood for a moment longer, looking down at her feet with the tension still rigid in her frame. Then she walked across the road towards the pub.