Double Vision (7 page)

He got into the shower. The water was so hot he had to jump out again and readjust the settings. Already the small bathroom was full of steam. He got in a second time, more cautiously, and scrubbed every part of himself, washed his hair and rinsed it till it squeaked, then, deliberately, taking a deep breath, turned the shower to cold.

After the first yelp he took it in silence, letting the icy water plaster his hair flat against his skull until he was as mindless as animals seem to be in heavy rain, every sense subdued to the battering of the elements. Last, he raised his face and let the sheet of water, falling on his closed eyelids and into his open mouth, remove whatever he had left of feeling or thought.

He towelled himself dry in front of the fire, then hunted in his suitcase for clean socks and pants, before setting off, damp-haired and red-eyed but otherwise presentable, for his brother’s house.

Justine’s car had gone, he saw with a twinge of disappointment, but then remembered she’d said she was going home. He was faintly amused at himself, at how cheerful he suddenly felt. Nothing like lust to make you feel life’s still worth living, even if the particular attraction is one that you absolutely do not intend to pursue.

Six

When Kate finally decided her state of dream-filled, dry-mouthed semi-consciousness no longer qualified as sleep, she levered herself up on one elbow and looked at the clock. Five fifteen. This was ludicrous. If she went on like this, day and night would be reversed.

She dressed quickly, pulling on her oldest work clothes, and went down to the kitchen, where she made coffee and drank it wandering round the kitchen table. Her eyelids were prickling so much from tiredness that she was tempted to go back to bed, but there was Peter to consider now. The rhythms of her working life had to adjust to this other person.

Chafing against the new dependency, she drank the first cup of coffee too hot and scalded her tongue. Her neck felt terrible, her back ached. Every morning there was this interval of pain and stiffness, while her vertebrae got reacquainted and resigned themselves to working as a team. It got better. Warmth helped. Exercise helped.

Muffled against the cold, sheathed in her own breath, she stepped across the glittering yard, crunching across iced-covered puddles and ruts to the studio. The hens were just coming out of the barn, scuffling and pecking
at the mud, the cock strutting about with the sun’s rays caught in his jiggling comb, light streaming off his feathers, burning purple, oily green and gold. The farmhouse roof kindled, as she watched, frost glittered for a moment more fiercely, then began a slow retreat.

In the studio, red-faced, fingers and toes tingling, she made another pot of coffee and then walked round, staring at rolls of hessian, piles of newspaper, coils of chicken wire, buckets of sawdust, wood chippings, bags of plaster, bundles of straw, a tray of builders’ masks, mallets, pliers, chisels – all the materials and tools of her trade. She sighed, steam from the coffee rising into her eyes, and worked her arm round and round in its socket, wondering what, if anything, she could achieve before Peter arrived.

She hated having people in the studio while she worked, had never liked it, even back in art college, when it had been unavoidable. As a young woman she’d schemed and struggled to find her own place, initially a dank basement in Paddington, then, later, in Liverpool, a lock-up garage near a railway siding. Then she’d met Ben, who’d been on one of his retreats, times when he went off and photographed nothing but landscapes. Fenland, waterland, brown tarns in gorse-covered hills, snow light, water light – all with the same brooding darkness in them. They were supposed to be peaceful, these photographs, a break from the subjects he spent most of his life pursuing, but they weren’t. You always knew, looking at these empty fields, these miles of white sand with marram grass
waving in the wind, that somewhere, close at hand, but outside the frame, a murder had been committed.

Get on with it, she told herself. There must be something she could do. The solution to all the doubts was to get her hands on the wire, the pliers, above all the plaster, that first blessed gloop of white goo. She realized she was moving her hands, the way a starving bird will sometimes make pecking motions with its beak or snap the air at imaginary flies.

‘Bugger it,’ she said aloud, thinking she might as well swear while she still could.

A discreet cough. Turning to look behind her – she couldn’t move her head without swivelling her whole body – she saw that Peter had come in and was standing by the door, a tall, thin, dark figure starkly elongated against the white wall. she’d given him the combination of the lock so he wouldn’t be left waiting outside if she were late back from one of her physiotherapy sessions, but it meant he was always surprising her. She never heard him come in.

He came further into the room, chafing his hands together. His nose was red with cold.

‘Have a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Get warm.’

They stood over the wood stove together, and she had a second cup, and he stared around him. He was obviously fascinated by the plaster figures that lined the walls. No, don’t look, she wanted to say, they’re not finished. They were part of a sequence she’d started after 9/11, not based on Ben’s photographs, or anybody else’s for that matter, because nobody had been there
to photograph what chiefly compelled her imagination: the young men at the controls who’d seized aeroplanes full of people and flown them into the sides of buildings. There they were, lean, predatory, equally ready to kill or die. She thought they might be rather good in the end. They certainly frightened her.

Peter started on the wire, cutting and shaping under her direction. She went back to her drawings, rolled them out and pinned the curling edges down with chisels and mallets. Because her hands were not touching the material, she felt doubtful about ideas that had once seemed persuasive. She knew she was being uncharacteristically tentative. The grave cloths were a problem. All her instincts had been for a nude figure – There’s no logical reason why the Risen Christ should go on wearing the dress of a first-century Palestinian Jew for the rest of eternity, and even less reason for him to have got stuck in the robes of a medieval English king, and yet she knew that a naked Christ would cause uproar. A lively faith in the Incarnation often goes with a marked disinclination to have the anatomical consequences staring one in the face. She’d compromised by having him tearing off grave cloths vigorously, but not so vigorously as to uncover those parts that would occasion letters to
The Times
if they were to be revealed. She was becoming middle aged. Once she might have fought for the purity of her original conception. These days she just didn’t think cocks were worth the bother.

If only she had been able to do the work herself,
she’d have known immediately which ideas worked and which didn’t. She felt frustrated, and was trying desperately hard not to show it, because, in all fairness, Peter couldn’t have been any more tactful. He had such a talent for blending into the background that once or twice she’d actually managed to forget he was there.

Twelve weeks to go, and here she was still cutting wire. She fought the panic down and reached for the next bale.

Eight days later she had a complete figure. She wasn’t sure about the torso, and she knew she was going to have to rethink the head, but the legs were all right. Everything depended on the legs. Once, in a television interview, dazzled by the lights, her face weighed down by more make-up than she’d ever worn in her life – she felt like a geisha – she’d heard herself say, ‘You see, the thing is, you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t fall over.’

She’d buried her head in her hands and groaned aloud when she watched the video. Profound, or what? Oh, well, yes, thank you, Ms Frobisher, that’s really got the direction of twentieth-century sculpture sorted out. But yes, she thought, looking up at the chicken-wire figure, actually that
is
the thing. It mustn’t fall over.

This was stable enough, though the proportions were all wrong. Cautiously, she craned her head back, trying, despite the pain in her neck, to decide what changes needed to be made. ‘There’s a spotlight over there. Would you mind putting it on?’

She walked round the floodlit figure. The head was
the problem. People would be looking up – well, obviously – from the foot of the plinth, and that meant the head had to be considerably larger than was anatomically accurate. She reckoned about a third larger. But the plinth itself stood on a small hill to the right of the path that led to the west door, and it was from this vantage point that the majority of people would see it – still looking upwards, but at a greater distance and from a much less acute angle. The problem was simple: the distortion that worked from the foot of the plinth might well look grotesque from the path. Simple to formulate. By no means simple to solve.

‘It’s a wonderful site, isn’t it?’ the dean had enthused, white hair blowing in the wind, when he took her outside to see it. Meaning, she supposed, that it was prominent. It was that all right. She’d stared at him in complete astonishment.
Wonderful?
she’d wanted to say.
It’s a bloody nightmare
. It wasn’t just the technical problems of the position, it was the fact that the statue was going to stand next to one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe. A wonderful site if you didn’t mind making a total prat of yourself.

‘Peter, would you mind standing there?’

He’d been hovering behind her, silent as always, waiting for her to tell him what to do next. He went and stood where she indicated, beside the figure.

Self-conscious but determined, she lay down on the floor at his feet and looked up at him.

‘No, don’t look at me. Look straight ahead.’

When he looked down, his eyes almost vanished.
Even staring straight ahead they were difficult to see.

‘Can you take your specs off?’

He did as she asked, reaching behind him to put them on the table. His eyes still made no impact, and yet they were larger than most. The eyes on the Christ were going to have to be enormous, and she’d underestimated how big the head had to be. She looked from Peter’s head to the ball of wire on top of the figure, memorizing the changes that would have to be made before she could start on the plaster. She felt Peter tense up under her gaze.

‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ she said, laughing a little with embarrassment as she tried to stand up. ‘It’s not turning into a portrait.’

He didn’t help her to her feet, though she struggled on her knees for several seconds because her back had gone into spasm. He never touched her. When he handed tools up to her, his fingertips never brushed hers. Once or twice she’d seen him reach out a hand as if to steady her on the scaffolding, but he never actually did. He was elaborately formal, impersonal.

‘Ouch,’ she said, pressing one hand into the small of her back, laughing.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine. I just needed to get the size of the head right.’

‘Does it need to come off?’

‘Yeah, but it’s a bit late now. We’ll start on it tomorrow.’

She was smiling as she took off her gloves and put the pliers down. But trying not to sound disconsolate
was one of the burdens of the situation. Her moods, the ebb and flow of hope and conviction, were supposed to be private. Her work, what she chose to show, became public at the moment when somebody pulled off the sheet and not one second before.

After Peter had gone, she walked round the figure again, comparing its shape with the figure in her head, mentally altering the proportions, itching to get up there, to feel the wire, but even looking up for any length of time produced pain. She had to admit defeat.

As she turned to go, she noticed that Peter had left his specs behind on the table, and she picked them up. Greasy fingerprints all over them. Impossible to keep glasses clean in a studio. She went over to the sink, dampened a sheet of kitchen paper and worked at the lenses till they were clean, holding them up against the light to check she’d removed every mark. She hoped he was all right to drive without them. Experimentally, she put them on, looking round the studio at the complex patterns of light and shade cast by the figure on the plinth.

Suddenly, she realized what she was
not
experiencing: the wave of nausea you feel when you put on somebody else’s spectacles. And she could still see perfectly well, although somebody else’s prescription lenses ought to have blurred the scene. Thinking she must be mistaken, she took them off and put them on again, but no, there was no doubt. The ‘lenses’ were clear glass.

Lots of people wear clear specs, she told herself. She put them to one side and started clearing up. But then
she thought: who wears them? Rising young executives wanting to look older and more authoritative. But not gardeners. In any outdoor job glasses are a nuisance. Oh, well, not my business, she told herself firmly, and got back to work.

When she’d finished, she wrapped the specs in kitchen paper and put them by the sink, then, dragging herself reluctantly away from the warm fug of the studio, let herself out into the icy winter air.

Seven

Stephen woke before dawn. Nothing like this darkness in the city, ever. Deep black, like some of those nights in Africa. He located his body purely by the sense of touch: skin on sheets. His hands and feet were far-flung colonies. He daren’t switch the light on, because in this state he found light more frightening than darkness. All the while the details of the dream went on invading his waking mind. Being buried alive. No source of light in this dream – only the smell, gasping breaths, other people’s blood soaking him to the skin, the knowledge that if he moved or cried or stirred, the people up there, the people he never saw, were waiting with knives and guns and machetes to finish the job.

Exerting every scrap of willpower, he turned over, and stared into the darkness until beyond the swirls of orange and purple he managed to distinguish shapes: a chair, a wardrobe, the door to the landing. When he was sure he knew the way, he got out of bed – there was no point lying there, he would never get back to sleep, he was too afraid the dream would return – and naked, sweating, a pink, peeled prawn of a man – that’s how he saw himself – he edged his way downstairs, feet overlapping the sixteenth-century treads at every step. He entered the stone-flagged kitchen, where he
drew back the curtains and put the kettle on for coffee.