Keeping the World Away (40 page)

Paul had kept them. Locked up. Hidden from her.

*

Cameron took charge of selling the house. He assumed she would not want to show people around, or even be in the house when the estate agent did so, but he was wrong. She wanted to see who might be taking her place and said she would always be there whenever a prospective buyer was brought to look round. The estate agent, never mind her son, did not quite like this, but she was firm. All appointments were for the afternoon, except on Saturdays and Sundays when she agreed to almost any hour. The moment the house went on the estate agent’s books there were
many
applicants – six different lots of people came to look round on the very first day, and thereafter never fewer than two in an afternoon.

Ailsa enjoyed it. She didn’t feel in the least (as Cameron had warned her she would) ‘invaded’ by these people. On the contrary, she felt absolutely in control of them and took them round the house as though she herself were the agent (who pattered behind, occasionally pointing out things she’d missed). ‘What a lovely house,’ everyone said at some point, usually when she led them through to the conservatory and they saw the terrace and the garden. They all enquired how long she had lived here and when she told them almost twenty years they were impressed. They had been told, of course, that she was a widow, and so did not ask any upsetting questions – it was enough that she wanted somewhere smaller now that it was understood she was on her own. Offers were quickly made, so quickly that she was advised to hang on and she might very well get more than the asking price. (Property prices were buoyant in the 1980s.) Cameron thought she should wait for a cash buyer who could complete in the minimum time, without waiting to sell their own property, and at the end of the second week one appeared.

She was French, but spoke excellent and almost accentless English. She was married, with three young children, but she came on her own, in the evening. The estate agent brought her but, by mutual agreement, left her to be shown round by Ailsa, who by then had grown used to the inevitable questions about boilers and central heating, and felt she could cope. The woman, a Mme Verlon, Claudette Verlon, didn’t ask any of them. She smiled, but was virtually silent as she was taken from room to room. Ailsa saw her eyes darting about, though, and knew she was taking everything in. When the tour was over Ailsa ended up in the kitchen and, on impulse, asked Mme Verlon if she would like a glass of wine while she thought if she wanted to see anything again. The offer was accepted. Ailsa poured two glasses of white wine, and they sat at the table.

It was two weeks before Christmas and dark outside, and had
been
since soon after four. The kitchen was not cosy – it was much too big – but it was colourful, with a fine collection of plates on the pine dresser. Mme Verlon admired the plates, recognising several as being from Provence, and ventured the opinion that Ailsa was artistic. Ailsa shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have no feeling for art. It was my husband who collected most of the pictures and pottery. He had an eye, though it was untrained.’ ‘And was it he who bought the little painting in your bedroom, Madame?’ Ailsa stared at her in astonishment. They had only been in her bedroom a couple of minutes, with only one lamp switched on, and she had never drawn attention to the attic painting. She had instead mentioned only the large cupboard (because the estate agent was forever telling her to point out such ‘features’). Mme Verlon hadn’t mentioned the painting either, and she hadn’t had time to study it.

‘The little painting,’ she echoed, ‘on my bedroom wall, facing the bed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why ever does it interest you? How did you notice it?’

Mme Verlon shrugged, drank some wine. ‘I think I recognised it,’ she said. ‘It is quite valuable, no?’

‘Is it? I’ve no idea. I’ve never had it valued.’

‘Your husband bought it, perhaps?’

Ailsa hesitated, then said, avoiding Mme Verlon’s gaze, ‘No. It was a gift. To him.’

‘How fortunate he was. You have it insured?’

‘I don’t think so, not on its own, I mean, only as part of the house and contents insurance.’

‘You should treasure it, but perhaps you do, or it would not be on your bedroom wall. It means something, yes?’

Again, Ailsa hesitated. She felt herself blush, and said, hurriedly, ‘I don’t know. I’m never sure. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It seems sad, mostly.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, no. Though her life was maybe sad.’

‘Whose life?’

‘The artist’s.’

‘Tell me!’ Ailsa felt suddenly excited, and leaned across the table to touch the other woman’s hand. ‘I’ve always wanted to know who painted it, and why. I don’t think my husband knew either, or the person who gave it to him.’

‘She was English, but lived in Paris. I’ve seen some of her work. Your painting is like one of her other paintings, almost a copy of it, but I don’t think it is a copy. I would have to look at it carefully.’

Ailsa went to fetch the painting.

*

Mme Verlon held the little painting in her hands and studied it closely. ‘May I?’ she asked, turning it over, poised to take off the frame. Ailsa nodded. The canvas came out of it easily. Mme Verlon turned it over and scrutinised the back of the canvas. ‘I believe she rarely signed her work,’ she said. ‘It is not significant that this bears no signature. But I think it is genuine. I think it is by Gwen John.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘No, no. Dead long ago, I don’t know exactly when, but before the last war, I think.’

‘Did she live in a room like this?’

‘I think so. She was poor. Her brother, you know him, Augustus John, was more famous, and much richer.’

‘And she was his sister? How odd. Was she married?’

‘No.’

‘Children?’

‘No.’

‘So she was lonely, it
is
a sad painting.’

‘I don’t know. Someone will be able to tell you. But if I am right, it is precious. You must take care of it. I would love to have it, but I cannot afford to buy it, at the moment, if I am to buy your house, which I would like to do, please.’

The sale went through very quickly, without a hitch, and Ailsa had only a month to find somewhere else and to dispose of the furniture and contents. Cameron, delighted at the amount of money the house had raised, thought his mother should come and stay
with
him, or else rent somewhere, while she looked ‘properly’ for her future home, but Ailsa had already made her mind up. She was going to travel, and needed only a base until she’d satisfied her wanderlust, so she bought a tiny flat through the estate agency which had handled her house sale – one room, with kitchen and bathroom, in a new block by the river. Her sons couldn’t understand her choice, but were bound to admit it was sensible, for a woman her age. There was a lift, and a porter, and it was new so maintenance would be easy. It would do, for the time being, and be easy to sell when their mother was ready to settle down.

They moved her things for her. It was not an arduous job, since she was keeping hardly anything from the family house. Most of what went into her
pied-à-terre
was new – a new (smaller) bed, because her existing one would have filled the room; a new small pine table; two rather uncomfortable cane chairs – and that was it. ‘Pretty comfortless, Mum,’ James said, ‘and what about a fitted carpet?’ No, she didn’t want the white-tiled floor covered. She would buy a rug, eventually. In spite of its size, the room fortunately had plenty of storage space, cleverly hidden behind a false wall, and all Ailsa’s clothes and boxes went into this long, narrow compartment. The kitchen, though there was hardly room to turn round in it (literally) was well and cunningly equipped. So was the bathroom. She had everything, she announced, that she needed.

The walls were white, a brilliant white. Everything in the place was white – kitchen appliances, kitchen floor, bath, bathroom floor. She’d deliberately put a white woven cotton bedspread over her new bed and made white cushions for the chairs. The effect, not surprisingly, was stark and hurt her eyes, she had to admit. There was so much light, with two big windows, both large, double-glazed panes of glass, flooding the room with sun whenever the weather was good and illuminating it strongly when it was not. There were white slatted blinds in place, but she had rolled them up and never intended to use them – no one, except passing seagulls, could see in and she liked the panorama before her. But something would have to be done eventually about the
whiteness
, to tone it down. She thought she might buy a grey rug, and maybe one comfortable chair, covered in grey linen. She would also have some sort of curtains, even if she would rarely draw them – there was enough space either side of the windows for them to hang and tone down the whiteness of the other walls.

‘You need some pictures,’ James said. ‘Haven’t you brought some nice pictures? What’s happening to all Dad’s pictures?’

‘I’ve brought one,’ Ailsa said.

*

There was no one else in the block as yet, though the other flats had all been sold, and unlike being in the croft on the island, Ailsa found the atmosphere eerie. All that emptiness below her made her feel curiously vulnerable, though in fact the porter was there, in residence, and she was quite secure. Going into her flat she felt startled each and every time – she found herself catching her breath at the sight of this unknown space. No memories at all. No reminders of any previous life. All that connected her with the past was the little painting, said to be by a well-respected artist, Gwendoline Mary John. The focus of attention, it now looked lost on the white wall. The eye was drawn to it, in the strong light, and stayed, reluctant to leave the only interruption in all that bright white.

She had not, as Mme Verlon advised, taken the painting to an expert. She was content to accept the Frenchwoman’s opinion and had found out from her all that she wanted to know. She hadn’t insured it separately either – she didn’t want anyone to look at it. The first thing she would have to do when she returned from Italy was to have the wall upon which the picture hung repainted, a beige colour, she thought. It pleased her to think she had this to come back to, the simplicity of it, contrasting so strongly with the complexity of the family house. She wouldn’t get overwhelmed ever again – this room was her life now down to the core. She didn’t even want her sons to come into it, or not as they once had done. She was quite free of entanglements, at last. The picture, when she locked the door upon it, reassured her that this was true.

*

Cameron and James had both been left with keys to her flat, though they were not required to do anything. But all the same, eager not just to be dutiful but to see what his mother might have done to the flat between moving in and leaving it to go travelling, Cameron visited it the first weekend after she had gone. He hadn’t a great deal to do on Sundays since he and Elspeth, his partner of five years, had split up and he missed the routine. He still slept late, went out for newspapers, bought croissants, took them home and ate and read, but after that there was a dismal gap. He thought he might take up some sport, tennis probably, but had done nothing about it. He could have visited James, but he couldn’t stand Melissa who would be sure to offer her interpretation of why he was on his own again: he couldn’t, according to his sister-in-law, ‘commit’.

He was living in his father’s flat, though whether he would stay there he hadn’t yet decided. The existence of this flat in the mews off Devonshire Street had been a surprise to all of them. The moment he and James were told of it by the solicitor, they had worried about their mother. Would she guess? Would she be forced to realise what they had suspected for so long, that their father had had other women and that this was where he took them? But she hadn’t appeared to be in any way disturbed. She’d simply seemed to think the flat was another of Paul’s clever investments, and there had been no need to protect her. Protection was what their mother had always needed – she seemed to them frail, dependent on their father’s strength, and sometimes they imagined that this irked him. ‘For heaven’s sake, Ailsa,’ they had heard him say often enough, ‘have a mind of your own.’

Going there with the keys for the first time, Cameron had wondered how long it had been empty. He knew, from what the solicitor had told him, that it had been let for several years, during his father’s illness, but the place had an air of such abandonment it did not feel as if it had been lived in for a very long time. It did not feel, either, as though it could ever have been anything as vulgar as a love-nest. Everything about it had a clinical precision –
the
way the furniture was arranged, the austere shades of the fabrics, the extreme tidiness. Who on earth had his father brought here to satisfy his lust? What a sad business it must have been, going into that bare bedroom with its grey-covered bed, the bedspread stretched tight across it. No hint of warmth or colour anywhere, nothing on the walls, no mirror, only smooth-fitting drawers and cupboards along one grey painted wall.

Cameron changed it dramatically, made it colourful and comfortable, hung London Transport posters on the walls, and yet still he could not banish the previous atmosphere, not quite. He was glad his mother had never been there before he had managed to transform it as much as he could – it would have upset her, she would have sensed something. Surely. Going up in the lift, on Sunday afternoon, to his mother’s new home, Cameron thought how odd she had become. She hadn’t always been odd. She’d been quite conventional in behaviour. He’d always been rather proud of her – she was the best-looking mother of all his friends’ mothers, and he’d been glad she’d never had a career. She was always there when he and James were at home from school, a comforting presence. Had they taken her for granted? He supposed so, but she’d seemed happy enough about it. There’d been no problems with his mother, ever. It was with his father there had been difficulties, with his father there were arguments and fights. His mother was the peacemaker, though she hadn’t always succeeded. His father had been powerful, dominant, determined to win whatever struggle he was engaged in. He’d quite often hated his father.