Gold Digger (7 page)

Thomas put his arms round her and stroked her hair. It had grown long and thick in her year’s residence.

‘Was it me? Was it me who spoiled it?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t you.’

They did not come back. The rest of the day fell into darkness and disappointment. Thomas tried, but could not help his own, utter despondency. The turquoise tent disappeared, the floors were cleared; the room returned to the grand room still full of the magic of the paintings, the light in them, the music they brought. She left him to write. He wrote to Saul.

You are quite right. When I die, they will descend like locusts. There will be no collection left. They will spread everything to the winds. They will kill everything I love. The collection will die.

Saul emailed back.
You must make sure it doesn’t. You owe the world more than you owe your children.

A
fter dark, she crept up behind him. His hands were quiet. She could see his face mirrored inexactly in the screen of his computer, next to her own, blurred, brown complexion. She could feel the vibrations of his sadness from a mile away, it was if it was in her own blood, and she could not bear it. His hands and feet were icy cold, and the skin on his neck was hot and she wrapped her arms around he. Soft and brittle, she was, featherdown and steel. And he, old polished leather with a layer of salt and bright, bright, blue eyes, holding on to her so hard, he almost hurt.

Thomas in his gallery room, having an attack of sheer panic, déjà vu, fear, so acute it paralysed the hands that wrote something every day. She read the words on the screen.

Tell her about the alterations made to the basement. Explain what happened.

Di leant over him and typed with one hand.

I know.

His hands began to move again. The shaking stopped. She
waited, holding his shoulders with her strong hands and this time she did not let him go.

T
he next morning, they walked on the beach in a different way, still holding each other. An invisible jet plane flew above them, leaving a fussy white plume behind itself as far as the eye could see, scarring the sky with a line of ragged lace, making them stop and stare, shielding their eyes. They stood and stared like imbeciles, wondered out loud where that jet would go after leaving its mark, and not wanting to be anywhere else. It was the perfect, abstract picture with the blinding colour no one would believe.

I’d like to collect the clouds
, Di said.
And flints.

Will you marry me?
Thomas said.

She laughed, and held on to his arm.

‘Some pictures are best unframed,’ she said.

R
aymond Forrest, the lawyer, called in the late summer. There was a sign on the door.
Gone swimming.

W
ell
, Monica said. ‘Well, well, well. I must say, they give a fine party. And it was nice of him to ask my nieces, even if he did it through you. They liked it. Been telling each other stories ever since, which was more than they did before. And Di’s good with kids, I’ll say that for her, but then she is one, isn’t she?’

Jones sat in Monica’s barber’s chair, heavy-hearted. He thought of watching from the pier with his binoculars fixed on the front door, seeing the daughters of Thomas Porteous stuffing their wailing children into two cars and driving away as if the hounds of hell were after them and that shifty fucker, Edward, running down the front steps last. That was a month ago.

‘Something went wrong, though,’ he said.

‘Something was always wrong,’ Monica said, ‘with those girls of his. Maybe their mother.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Because I know a woman who worked for old Douglas,
that lawyer Thomas used for the divorce. Retired now, but she was the typist and she comes in here. Remembers every bloody thing she ever typed.’

‘Go on,’ Jones said.

‘Thomas really wanted custody of his girls, and because Christina was the deserting one, and not very stable, he might have got it, and that’s when she started saying he wasn’t natural towards them, touched them wrong, he was a pervert. Like his father was. Faintest hint of that and Thomas couldn’t win, and he didn’t.’

‘That simple?’

‘Look, think about it. If a man is put down as a monster by his own wife, you gotta believe it. Only later, when Thomas gets rich, she needs to change her tune. She wants to take it all back and parade her kids and then
their
kids to get back in favour and have at the money, ’cos by this time she’s alone and they’re all broke. Simple? Not quite.’

There was the
snip, snip, snip
of her sharp scissors, a sound Jones liked, although it reminded him of something sinister.

‘How come they’re broke?’

Monica did not like being asked a question she couldn’t answer, but she was happy to guess.

‘’Cos they ain’t bought up to work, like their mother wasn’t? Posh schools and no training? ’Cos they got through life maintained by Daddy and think it’s going to last for ever? ’Cos someone’s told them they’re going to be rich some day? ’Cos they were brought up lazy? Maybe ’cos they were brought up thinking of themselves as victims. I don’t know. Someone owes them. I haven’t got the end of the story, only the beginning. Porteous got another lawyer.’

So much Jones already knew.

Snip, snip, snip.

‘You’re all done,’ Monica said.

She brushed the stray hair from his neck with a soft brush and took off the black nylon gown that made him look almost judicial. He looked sad enough to kiss. No doubt about it, he missed the job.

‘So you reckon no one ever believed Thomas tried to touch up his own kids?’

‘I never said that,’ Monica said. ‘No smoke without fire, old Douglas said.’

‘No wonder Thomas fucking went to someone else, then,’ Jones said. ‘Hope it’s a good one he’s got now, because he’s going to need it. He’s only wanting to get married.’

Monica gasped. ‘Di?’

‘Who else? The fucking Queen of Sheba?’

‘She wouldn’t,’ Monica said. ‘She wouldn’t. Oh my word.’

She paused, scissors in the air, half smiling. Jones turned away, not liking that smile, not liking it at all, because he thought he knew what Monica might be thinking. It might just be crossing her mind that if Thomas P married Di Q, it might just bring her father back.

‘She wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have the nerve. She wouldn’t do that to him. Look at the size of her. Makes everything they said about him look true.’

‘She isn’t a child,’ Jones said.

S
he wouldn’t. Di wouldn’t. She told Thomas, again and again,
some things are best left unframed. You can’t marry the burglar. And don’t you see what it would do? It could bring in all the demons.

No it won’t; it’ll keep them at bay. Come on, Di; make an honest man of me.

You are an honest man.

No, not entirely.

And then, she did. It took another year.

T
he figure of the man moved towards the young woman. She smiled him at him.

‘I like you in white,’ he said. ‘Can you wear that?’

She shook her head.

‘I think I’ll go as I am.’

She stood up and stripped off the white garment, to show a small, naked, body that had grown from that of a girl to a woman. Thomas sat down on the spindly dressing-table chair she had vacated, clutching his chest, mimicking a heart attack and fanning himself.

‘Oh my, I’m too old for this. The stress, the stress. You’ve got to wear clothes otherwise you’ll get a chill and I shall be incoherent. Am I too old for this?’

‘Think of Picasso,’ she said. ‘And you’re much better looking than him.’

Thomas wasn’t remotely old to her. He simply was what he was and she adored him. She was struggling into a tight
dress, and stood with one arm in it, one arm out, striking a comical pose, yanking it down over her knees, getting stuck in the thing, peeking at him through a sleeve, looking at his velvet jacket.

‘I wonder what’s it like to be elegant?’ she asked him.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said.

Thomas was remarkably inept with his own clothes today. Vintage velvet jacket and unmatched trousers, a lovely clashing ensemble which had virtue in her eyes, simply because it was what he wanted to wear and it showed off the fine colour of his skin and the whiteness of his hair. She came and sat next to him.

‘Will they turn up?’ she asked. ‘Please, let them turn up and see you so handsome.’

‘
If
my daughters turn up,’ he said. ‘They may behave badly. Announce just cause and impediment.’

She seized his hand and kissed it.

‘But it was right to ask them,’ she insisted.

‘Even after they threatened to put me in the madhouse?’

It was a ragged red dress she had on, but sublimely comfortable. At the end of her third summer, her skin really was the colour of sand.

‘Thomas, my dearest and only love, I want to know. I want to know that you aren’t doing this to spite them, because if you are, it isn’t a good enough reason. I don’t
need
a ring.’

He stroked her head. ‘But I do,’ he said. ‘I want to do this for the future. To keep us safe. To acknowledge you for being what you are. To make us partners in name. Let no man cast us asunder. And above all, because I’m so … ’ he struggled for words ‘… so very
proud
of you.’

‘Shush,’ she said, always embarrassed by compliments.

‘And because, do you know what, I have always wanted to be a
happily
married man.’

She took his face between her hands and kissed him. Then she pulled him upright, straightened his clothes and regarded him with frank admiration. So handsome in his crazy garb; she curtsied to him.

‘You can run away afterwards,’ he said, solemnly, tucking her arm into his. ‘When I turn into a Frog.’

‘My Prince,’ she said. ‘Shall we walk, or shall we take the pumpkin?’

She was thinking,
if you knew how much I love you, you might be the one to run away.

‘N
ot a good day’s work,’ Jones said later to another onlooker of his acquaintance, both of them waiting outside the Town Hall that morning. The onlooker spat on the ground.

Jones looked anxiously at the gathering crowd. News like this got about: there were curious faces, predictable remarks, such as,
I can see what’s in it for her, what’s in it for him?
But there was distraction. It was early afternoon and warm, a group of drunks newly released from the pub reeling into the space, guests from another wedding earlier in the day, a warring family spoiling for a fight, just there by accident. Jones’s attention was distracted by a figure on the other side of the street and he moved quickly.

Thomas and Diana emerged into the light, blinking at the unexpected gathering. The man Jones saw had one arm outstretched towards her as if begging, as she moved into sunlight. She was blinded by the light, squinting, looking heavenwards to focus, confused by the presence of people. Jones stopped the man with a punch: he stumbled down the step into the drunken group and from then on, the fight
started from nowhere and swayed across the street, as if someone had ignited the blue touch paper and failed to retire.

The witnesses to the marriage, someone remembered, namely that foppish man, and the other, earnest creature who looked as if he was sent from central casting to be a lawyer, flanked the wedded couple and shepherded them away. No one could say if the pair looked happy or doomed: the focus was on the fight.

‘My, my,’ Beatrice said. ‘Cinderella goes to the brawl.’

Gayle and Patrick stood to the side, too late to attend the wedding, because by some odd mistake, Raymond Forrest had given them the wrong time.

‘No matter we couldn’t stop it,’ Gayle said in her calm voice. ‘Nothing as tawdry as this could ever last. Come away.’

King Frog has got married to the witch
, Patrick said to himself.
Good.

‘W
ell, that went well,’ Saul Blythe said to Raymond Forrest as they travelled back together on the train later in the day.

‘As well as can be expected,’ Raymond Forrest said, stiffly.

The two men were not mutually sympathetic. It was the first time they had met and even in the enforced intimacy of a shared table on an empty, London-bound train, they could not quite be frank with each other. One was a creative collector with a dubious morality, the other a solid man of duty. While Raymond was concerned to protect his client’s assets and scarcely noticed his client’s environment, it was that environment and all the paintings in it which was Saul’s sole concern. The landscape passed by in a journey already familiar to the couple whose strange marriage they had witnessed. Di loved the train, she had told Raymond Forrest, but then it seemed to him she loved everything without much
discrimination at all, and would inevitably love the spending of his client’s money, a prospect he regarded with grave suspicion. He was wondering if Diana Porteous knew the extent of her husband’s assets, and decided she probably didn’t – yet – whereas this man on the other side of the table most certainly did.

Saul could almost see Raymond’s mind whirring with polite queries and a certain, sterile curiosity.

‘One would hope,’ Raymond said, ‘that people would leave them alone for a while.’

‘I fear they will,’ Saul said. ‘Can’t see local society rushing to embrace them. But tell me,’ he said, leaning forward over the table so far and so confidentially that Raymond recoiled, ‘how did the girls take the news of the nuptials? I gather you were deputed to give them the happy tidings and invite them to the wedding.’