Border Crossing (13 page)

He sat looking down at his hands, unwilling or unable to say more.

Tom broke the silence. ‘How long before Lizzie’s death was this?’

Danny looked up with an expression of mild surprise. ‘Do you know I never realized? It was the day before.’

FIFTEEN

Lauren rang to ask when it would be convenient for her to come and collect her pictures and some pieces of furniture. ‘Never,’ he wanted to say, but stopped himself in time.

‘Which pieces?’ he asked, grudging and suspicious. He didn’t want or mean to sound like that, but the idea of a van drawing up outside and men carrying away part of his home was unpleasant, to say the least. And, when he first heard her voice, there’d been a second of hope. He’d thought she just might say, ‘Look, let’s not do anything in a hurry. Let’s give it a few more months.’ Instead, there was this crisp, cool, businesslike request for a date and time.

‘The hall table. The sofas in the living room, the balloon-backed chair, the chest of drawers in the bedroom.’

All hers. All entirely reasonable.

When he remained silent, she said, ‘The hall table was a present from my father. I hadn’t even met you.’

‘No, no, of course it’s yours. And the rest.’ Take the lot, he wanted to add, take everything. At the same time he had an uncomfortably clear picture of himself grappling with the removal men on the steps. He’d lived with those things for years. They were part of him.

‘So when would it be convenient?’

Never. ‘Thursday.’ And that word: ‘convenient’, he thought. He hated it. It was a non-word. Like going on talking about ‘discomfort’ when the patient’s screaming with pain. ‘About ten o’clock? Or is that too early?’

‘More like one o’clock. I’m driving up.’

That raised the prospect of food. Drink. He didn’t know whether she wanted that or not. Well, he could offer. She could say no. He didn’t want to give her the opportunity of saying no. ‘All right.’

He wanted to say something else, but then he heard a man’s voice in the background, and her voice answering, muffled, because she’d put her hand over the receiver. ‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ she said, in a breathless rush. ‘One o’clock, Thursday. Okay?’

No. ‘Yes, all right. See you then.’

After she rang off he spent some time trying to convince himself that the voice’ in the background had belonged to his father-in-law, then wandered round the house, dreading the coming invasion. He looked at her paintings. Three of them in the living room, all attempts to capture that peculiar quality of the light on the river in early morning and evening, especially when the tide was out. The most successful was almost abstract: a blend of brown and silver-grey, with the ribs of the submerged boat showing above the water as the tide turned.

His favourite among these paintings was the sunset scene, for no better reason than that he’d been there when she painted it. Late one afternoon they’d taken a picnic and gone out to the estuary, and as the sun sank she set up her easel and started work.

Black bars of cloud across the horizon, but the water was calm, luminous, reflecting the last light of the sky. He settled down with a book, ostensibly reading, but in fact watching Lauren. She became a different person when she painted, opening a can of beer, laughing when the foam squirted into her face, barefoot, an old pair of his jeans tightly belted round her waist. Lauren was beautiful, and elegant, but she was not, except when painting, graceful. She was too self-conscious; none of her movements was exactly the right movement. Except at times like this, stepping back from the canvas, moving forward, dabbing, stepping back, dabbing again… Speeded up, she’d have looked like a hummingbird. It needs something in the foreground,’ she said. ‘You’ll do.’ So, carrying the book, he went and stood where she indicated. ‘Put the book down, for God’s sake. You look like Wordsworth.’ She held his shoulders, manipulating him into the right position. He smelt Chanel 19, which he didn’t find sexy, and turpentine, which he did — very. ‘There.’ A satisfied nod, and she went back to the easel. Looking out of the corner of his eye, he could just see her eyes above the canvas, contemplating him as a problem in light and shade, and beneath it, her bare feet doing their never-ending dance in the dirt.

Almost the worst thing about the last week had been the way in which the snag in his present life ran back into the past and unravelled it. Because they were splitting up, it was easy to believe they’d never really been happy. When he tried to visualize Lauren painting the estuary, the image was changed by the fact that she had left him. The slim figure in the baggy jeans became doubly insubstantial, as if her recording of that sunset over the river had been no more than the first stage of her saying goodbye. Holiday snaps: the need to record a place that you already know will live on only in your memory. In his memory she shifted from one foot to another, raised a can of beer to her lips, streaked paint through her hair, smelt of turps, but she was already dwindling. What this painting gave him, when he looked at it again, was reassurance. She’d painted the river because she loved it, and, grasping the reality of that love, not vaguely, not as a general proposition, but precisely, in the particular strokes of her brush, he was able to go on believing that she had also, once, loved him.

It helped, it soothed him, but on Thursday the paintings would go.

SIXTEEN

Four days after that conversation with Lauren, Tom found himself standing in a small railway station on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, watching his departing train dwindle to a doubtful wink of light in the far distance. After it had gone there was silence, except for the click of the railway lines contracting after the day’s hot sun, and somewhere, in the far distance, a peewit crying.

On the phone, Angus had sounded brisk and efficient, his Scottish accent less pronounced than Danny’s mimicry had led Tom to expect. No point driving, he said. The Scarsdale Writers’ Centre was at the end of a mile-long track so potholed that only a Land Rover could manage it. And anyway it would be no trouble to meet him at the station.

Trouble or not, there was nobody here. Tom put his overnight bag down, arid sat on a bench beneath a poster advertising the delights of Whitby, and another proclaiming the 24-hour availability of the Samaritans.He was beginning to wonder how he should set about calling a taxi when he heard the click of high heels, and looked up to see a woman with long orange hair, trailing clouds of diaphanous fabric behind her.

‘Are you Tom Seymour?’

He admitted that he was.

‘Rowena Moody.’ She announced her name as people do who expect it to be known, though it meant nothing to him. T-m one of the tutors on this week’s course,’ she added, the drawl of dissolute grandeur drying to a schoolmistressy snap, as she realized the ‘Oh’ of recognition would not be forthcoming. ‘There’s a bit of a flap on at the moment. This is the night we have an outside reader, and Angus was hoping to have…’ Her voice sank reverentially over a name that even Tom, who read no literary fiction, knew to be famous. ‘I told him it wouldn’t happen. He’s not going to trail up here. As far as he’s concerned, there’s only a hole in the ground between London and Edinburgh.’

They were walking briskly towards the Land Rover. Ail those flying draperies were making Tom think of Isadora Duncan, but Rowena got herself safely behind the wheel and tucked the yards of silk chiffon around her.

They lurched forward across the car park and out of the station yard. It rapidly became clear that Rowena had no business behind the wheel of a Land Rover or any other vehicle. She was lethal. ‘Oops,’she said at one point, jamming on the brakes and placing her left hand in Tom’s groin to reinforce the operation of his seat belt. ‘I didn’t see him at all, did you?’

It was a relief to be out on the moors, where there were comparatively few cars, and the sheep saw her coming, and fled.

‘So how do you know Angus?’ she asked, in what passed for a quiet moment.

‘I don’t really. It’s a sort of a friend-of-a-friend thing.’ He should have come with a story prepared, since there could be no question of mentioning Danny.

‘So you’re not an aspiring writer?’

‘No, I’m a psychologist. I do write, but nothing creative.’ The sooner they got off this line of questioning the better. ‘Do you often tutor for this course?’

It was her third time. She was happy to chat about the arrangement: fifteen aspiring writers cooped up for a week with two professional writers: an apprenticeship system.

‘It becomes quite an emotional pressure-cooker – you’d be surprised. Some groups more than others, of course.’

‘How’s this one?’

‘We haven’t found the weirdo yet.’

‘Does there have to be one?’

‘If you’re lucky. Two or three, if you’re not.’

Perhaps Angus liked intense, enclosed communities. At any rate he seemed to have found himself another one, or a succession of them. ‘Does Angus teach?’

‘He’s teaching on this one, but no, not usually. He and Jeremy run the place. Jeremy’s his partner.’

There was a questioning note to her voice. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his sexual availability was being explored. ‘I haven’t met Jeremy either.’

‘No, well, he’s not here this week. I’m afraid it’s a case of when the cat’s away…’ She wrinkled her nose with fastidious malice. 1 wouldn’t care to claim the path to the tutors’ cottage has remained entirely untrodden.’

Without signalling or slowing down, she turned left on to a potholed lane bordered on either side by drystone walls. A steep descent, taken at speed, brought them to a low farmhouse that seemed to have burrowed into the side of the hill to escape the winds that had deformed every tree. Even now, on a peaceful autumn evening, a gust snatched at him as he got out of the Land Rover. On a stormy night you must feel you were out at sea.

Rowena led him into the house. Red-tiled floors, a huge vase of hemlock casting shadows across a whitewashed wall, a bowl of pebbles on a wooden chest. She swept into the kitchen and he followed. A tall, fair-haired young man was standing at one of the work surfaces, squeezing meat out of sausage skins into a bowl.

He looked up and raised his eyebrows. ‘Couldn’t get sausage meat, would you believe?’

‘Don’t let Angus see you,’ Rowena murmured. ‘I don’t think I could cope with a cardiac arrest. Where is he, by the way?’

‘In the office. Trying to find a replacement.’

‘Oh, not still.’

Angus was on the phone. He raised his thumb in the air when he heard Rowena’s voice, saying into the phone, ‘No, absolutely not. Of course I’ll come and get you, and you’ll stay over, won’t you? There’s no point going back tonight.’ He listened, said: ‘Forty minutes? All right, then,’ put the phone down, and punched the air with his clenched fist.

‘Success?’ Rowena asked.

‘Lucy says she’ll do it.’

‘Oh, thank God. Perks things up a bit, you know, midweek,’ she said, turning to Tom. ‘Getting somebody else in. They’re sick of us by then. Though I must say I think they’ll find poor Lucy something of an anti-climax.’

‘Well, sod their luck,’ Angus said, sibilant, but stagily so. ‘And you must be Tom.’ A warm, dry, firm handclasp, and a hard stare. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to dash off, but we’ll see each other later. As I expect you’ve gathered, it’s been quite a day.’ He was taking the Land Rover keys from Rowena as he spoke. ‘Could you be a darling and tell them in the kitchen she’s a vegetarian? Tell them not to make a fuss – just make sure there’s plenty of salad.’

After he’d gone, Rowena pulled a face. ‘It’s always like this. He sweet-talks people into making the commitment, but then they don’t bloody well show up.’

The dining room had blackened beams, white walls and an ancient fireplace. Three tall windows overlooked the valley, which was now brimming with blue light, though the sun still shone on the distant hills. Tom sat next to Rowena. Angus and Lucy, a small, brown woman with a shy and sour expression, arrived late and sat opposite. The food was good and washed down with large quantities of wine.

‘There’s a kitty,’ Rowena explained, ‘but some of us bring our own as well.’

She spent the meal pointing out the course participants to him. There were two elderly ladies, sisters apparently, both widowed – one of them, after her husband’s death, had moved three hundred miles to be closer to the other – and until this week they’d been inseparable. Now they sat at opposite ends of the table, each looking, since there was a striking resemblance between them, like the other’s mirror image. Neither of them spoke to the people on either side.

‘That’s Angus, for you,’ Rowena said. ‘He always sees them individually, and he pokes and probes away till he finds out what makes them angry. Calls it the grit in the oyster. You find the anger, you find the voice. Well, what makes Nancy angry is that her father used to get pissed and beat her mother up, and her mother was an absolute saint who brought eight kids up on next to nothing. And what makes Poppy angry is anybody saying anything against her father, who was a marvellous man, never once the worse for drink in his entire life, despite being driven up the wall by a nagging wife. There’s only two years between them – and they seem to have grown up on different planets. Angus persuaded Nancy to write about the father’s drinking, and she read it aloud to the group. And Poppy got up and walked out. And they haven’t spoken since.’

‘Do you think it’s just a tiff?’

‘No, I don’t. I think it’ll take years. And you’ve got to ask yourself: what’s the point? Really, what is the point? I mean, okay, it was quite a nice little piece, but frankly we are not dealing with the Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
de nos jours.’

‘Would it be all right if you were?’

She looked sharply at him. ‘Good question. Dennis Potter said all writers have blood on their teeth.’

‘Who’s the man sitting next to Nancy?’

‘That’s our recovering alcoholic. Wants to learn to write so he can warn others against the demon drink. Don’t let him get you on your own. He’ll tell you all about the times he was incontinent. Next to him’ – Rowena lowered her voice still further, he could feel her breath on his cheek – ‘we have the groupies: Esme, Leah and – can’t remember. Carrie. They’re out of sorts – they were looking forward to this evening. A male literary lion. They’re all right – a bit histrionic’ Rowena clearly didn’t think this was a word that could ever be applied to her. ‘Next one along’s a lay preacher. God knows what he makes of it. And coming round this way you see four extremely good-looking young men, and they’re all gay, which is nice for Angus, but rather tough on the groupies. Oh, and that very beautiful girl’s called Anya. She’s wasted on that lot.’

Tom nodded to his left. ‘And these three?’

Distaste and incredulity mingled. 1 think they just want to write.’

By the end of the meal a good deal of wine had been drunk, and a row had broken out in the kitchen between two of the extremely good-looking young men. Lucy, clearly dreading the reading, had turned an alarming shade of grey.

‘I hope somebody’s thought of the likely side effects of all that wine and beans,’ Rowena murmured, as she flowed through into the sitting room, glass in hand.

She sat in a rocking chair, a little way apart from the others, with an ashtray at her feet. Tom sat at one end of a sofa, next to another rocking chair that was clearly intended for Lucy. Esme, Leah and Carrie sat on the red sofa, facing the fireplace. The lay preacher, arms clamped tight against his sides, shared the beige sofa with three of the gay young men. The fourth, whom Tom had met in the kitchen, separated himself from his friends, and sat with dilated pupils, blowing smoke from his nostrils. The two elderly sisters, one conspicuously raw-eyed, the other glittering with defiance, also sat as far away from each other as possible. Angus took a chair by the fireplace, and set a bottle of wine down at his feet. The recovering alcoholic sat opposite him, pointing his nose at the bottle with the single-minded concentration of a gun dog. Lucy sat in the rocking chair, and swallowed twice. Angus poured her a glass of wine, though water would have been more to the point.

Angus looked around with a glint of amusement, and began to introduce the reader. Lucy blushed at the eulogistic praise delivered in a voice so ostentatiously well modulated that anything it said would have sounded insincere. Expecting a literary lion (male), obliged to make do with one small tabby cat (female), the groupies sank deeper into the sofa, a single, disgruntled heap.

Then Lucy began to read. She might have been a wonderful writer: short of snatching the book away from her and reading it yourself, it was impossible to tell. She read in a quick, anxious monotone, no eye contact, not even at the end of the first chapter. Within fifteen minutes the groupies were asleep, heads thrown back against the sofa cushions, mouths open, limbs sprawled in every direction, blowzy goddesses awaiting the judgement of a pathologically indecisive Paris.

Tom sat well forward on the sofa, looked interested, stifled a burp, tried not to laugh, dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands, became aware of the heaving sides of the lady next to him, glanced up and saw the same battle between good manners, boredom, flatulence and mass hysteria played out all around him, and hastily looked down again. By now the noise of tummy rumbles, burps and outright farts had left the realms of chamber music and reached symphonic heights, and the quick, monotonous voice ran on and on. Lucy hadn’t glanced up once, though she must have been aware of suppressed giggles spreading round the room. Why didn’t she bring it to a graceful close? Why had she selected such a long reading? He glanced sideways at the page, saw another chapter looming, and realized she was reading on because she was afraid to stop. A whickering snore from one of the sleeping beauties woke the others, who stared round them with expressions of lively interest. Tom followed the reading till the end of the chapter, and started to applaud. Everybody, relieved at the possibility of making some socially acceptable noise at last, clapped till their hands were sore. Lucy looked up, timidly, relieved to see it had all gone so much better than she had feared.

‘Thank you,’ said Angus. ‘That was memorable.’

Questions followed. Surprisingly intense this session. Did Lucy have an agent? Did she use a computer? Write every day? Plan the book before she started?No questions about her book, but then, to be fair, they hadn’t heard much of it. And then, thank God, it was over, and everybody was free to drink, especially Lucy, who’d sipped water during dinner, but now got spectacularly drunk in record time.

‘You think we’re all mad, don’t you?’ Angus said, coming up to Tom with glass and bottle in his hands.

‘Do you think we could talk now?’

Angus glanced round, and noticed the recovering alcoholic bearing down upon him. ‘Definitely.’

He pushed open the patio doors, and they stepped out on to the lawn. They walked down towards the fence, their feet leaving scuff marks in the dew.

‘He will keep telling people about crapping himself,’ Angus said. ‘There’s something repulsively self-righteous about it all. St Sebastian and the arrows. St Catherine and the wheel. St Terence and the shitty pants.’

‘I suppose he thinks the more he humiliates himself the less likely he is to drink again.’

‘I’d drink to forget I’d done it.’

Despite what he said, Angus was less drunk than Tom had supposed. Either he’d been pacing himself rather more carefully than the ubiquitous bottle suggested, or his capacity was formidable.