Keeping the World Away (41 page)

The first thing he did was rush to lower the blinds. Why hadn’t his mother done that? The light was unbearable with the sun blazing through the plate glass. But she didn’t seem to have done anything to the place. The room looked almost exactly as it had done the last time, the only time, he had seen it, when he and James moved her stuff. The word sterile sprang into his mind. It even struck him that it reminded him of his father’s secret flat. The very opposite of the home she had left. Well, this pared-down existence appeared to be what she wanted. It was her way, he supposed, of coping with his father’s death, however peculiar it seemed.

He sat for a moment on one of the cane chairs. It made him feel more depressed than ever to think of his mother coming back to this – it wasn’t what he had envisaged when he’d urged her to sell the house. He’d imagined her in another house, a neat little terraced house in Chelsea maybe, near James and Melissa (and perhaps, soon, grandchildren nearby to occupy her). But maybe she would not come back from this Italian jaunt of hers. Maybe she would meet someone – but that was absurdly unlikely. His mother had adored his father. No one would be able to take his place, she wouldn’t want any other man to attempt to.

He was going to leave the blinds down. Securing the cords either side, he turned and stood with his back to the windows for a moment, looking at the room. She’d hung one picture only on the opposite wall. It looked ridiculous, one tiny painting on a largish wall, dead centre, like a target. He peered at it. It wasn’t one he recognised. The wall cried out for his father’s colourful, dramatic paintings, the ones by someone who painted like Matisse, a series of three he’d bought years ago and cherished. But this picture his mother had selected was a pretty little nothing, almost colourless, quite unable to make an impression hanging where it did. He must ask her why she liked it, why she had chosen it, when she returned. Perhaps it was simply that it was an echo of herself.

*

It wasn’t like going to Scotland, to the island. She’d felt nervous enough then, travelling alone, but this was different, this was abroad, with no one to help her, no Paul to organise everything. Reaching Paris was adventure enough – she was exhausted. Managing the language made her head ache and after she’d forced herself out, to look at Notre Dame, she was glad to get back to her hotel. She ate in her room, not up to facing a restaurant, and despised her own cowardice. This would not do. She was meant to be savouring her freedom, rejoicing in her new-found independence, and yet here she was, scurrying about, enjoying nothing. She almost went home.

She tried hard, instead, to analyse what she was afraid of, what
made
her so uncertain and nervous when, alone on the island, she had felt so strong and sure of herself. It was, she decided, the presence of other people that did it, being one in a crowd – it was the crowd that unnerved her. If people were all around you, especially people speaking a different language from you, then the sense of isolation, of loneliness, intensified. Her mind was like a locked box, so much in it trying to get out, a great store of trivia jamming the works. Walking down a quiet street, or along an empty corridor in the hotel, her own footsteps scared her, emphasising her solitary state. She began to suspect that she was attracting odd looks, as though this inner turmoil was showing on her face and alarming people, and she took to walking with her head down.

Once, in the Luxembourg Gardens, as she wandered aimlessly among the statues and trees, watching an old woman feeding the sparrows, a man spoke to her. He came alongside her and said, in French, but she understood, that he was lost and did she know the way out of the gardens into the Boulevard Saint Michel. She said, in French, that no, she was sorry, she did not. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re English.’ He was American, he said, but his grandmother had been British, Welsh actually. He walked with her until they reached the Observatoire and he saw a sign pointing to the boulevard he wanted. He was young, about Cameron’s age, from Ohio. She listened politely to his account of why he was in Paris, and when he left her, with ‘Been nice talking to you,’ she realised she herself had hardly said a word. But the effect of this minimal human contact was extraordinary. She could feel herself more at ease, and she went to sit on a bench and exchanged pleasantries with a young woman holding a child on her knee, teaching it a song. The child, a girl of about four, leaned towards Ailsa and drew her into the song, and she joined in, her accent making both child and mother laugh. It could be done. She would not go home. She would learn how to function as a woman alone, among others.

*

She thought of Paul more than she had expected to, especially on train journeys, as she sat staring out of the windows, half in
a
trance as the countryside sped past. Had she loved him? Had she really known him? She’d lived with him all those years, in close proximity most of the time, and yet still there were mysterious glitches in his personality which had never been explained, things that did not fit her knowledge of him. Lucasta Jenkinson, her power over him. Sexual? Possibly. So, had she herself failed him in that respect? It irritated her intensely still to be going over and over this sore place, refusing to let it heal even while she was assuring herself that it had done so. She was fifty-four years old, Paul had been dead a year, yet here she was, travelling through Europe, torturing herself with questions which could never be answered. She must look forward, not back. But in struggling to look forward, there was no place in her vision of the future for another man. She did not want another lover or husband, emphatically not. She did not want ever to be taken over again, even if this would bring security and companionship. She had to stick to her resolution made so successfully on the island: to be herself, beholden to no one. It might amount to going against the grain of the woman she was, or the kind of woman that life with Paul had made her, but this was what she wanted.

*

Ailsa had taken the letters with her. They lay at the bottom of her bag and every now and again she took them out, wondering if she was ready to read them (that is, if ever she decided she was going to). Each time, she got only as far as fingering the envelopes and then put them down. She was not ready, not ready in Paris, not ready in Venice, not ready anywhere until she reached Florence. She stayed in a
pensione
she’d been told about, near Fiesole, and there was something so cheerful about the little villa, the attic room she was given there, that she felt a surge of optimism and thought it might be time to lay this ghost to rest.

Sitting on the terrace, among great tubs of brilliant scarlet flowers, she drank her coffee in the morning and took out the letters. Whatever she decided, they were not going back into her bag. She was going to destroy them, read or unread. What was it Paul had said? About love, about how hard it was? She was
shocked
to find she could no longer exactly remember. It had been something to do with the little painting. He had wanted her to look at it, to understand. She had looked, and not understood.

She opened the first letter and read it, and then left the other unread. It had not hurt her or even angered her, reading Lucasta Jenkinson’s words to her now dead husband. The words were nothing. Paul’s might have meant more, but those of his mistress did not, at this distance of time, affect her. So far as Ailsa could make out, Lucasta Jenkinson was trying to persuade Paul that they had never really loved each other but had been in the grip of a physical passion which was now spent. He loved his wife, she wrote, couldn’t he see that? Apparently, he couldn’t, or there would not have been at least one more letter. How sad, Ailsa thought, that Paul must have gone on pleading and Lucasta Jenkinson continued to reject him. If only she had known she was wrong: that Paul had really loved
her
and not his wife.

Well, she, his wife, his widow, did not now care. She put the letters in the stove which even in this weather seemed always to be lit. ‘Just paper,’ she said to the kitchen girl. Just paper. But she would keep the picture, for ever. Some day, she might understand its significance.

ALL GILLIAN KNEW
was that the quarrel, with its consequences, had been to do with money, or the lack of it. Nobody in the Mortimer family would go into the details of the split between her father Cameron and his brother James, either claiming not to know or to have forgotten. But what she suspected they had not forgotten was the shock, after Ailsa Mortimer was killed, of discovering that she had left more than half of everything she possessed to a bewildering list of Scottish charities involved with protecting the environment. Why she should have done this nobody could work out – it was not in character, and not what Paul Mortimer, whose money and property it all had been, would have wanted. There were suspicions that Ailsa’s will must have been made under duress, but exhaustive investigation revealed no such influence. She had been of sound mind, and her will had been drawn up and properly witnessed before she left London for Italy, some six months before she was killed when a car skidded onto a pavement she was walking along in Florence.

Gillian, brought up on this tale, had often wondered about her grandmother. What was she doing in Florence? Nobody seemed to know. ‘She went a bit funny after her husband died,’ Gillian’s mother, Beth, told her (but Beth had never met Ailsa, coming into Cameron’s life after the death of his mother). There were photographs, of course, so Gillian was able to see that her grandmother had been strikingly beautiful. When anyone remarked that she had ‘a look’ of her grandmother, she was pleased and flattered. Her father, however, said she didn’t resemble his mother in the least, but this was because, even after all these years, he still felt angry and could hardly bear her name to be mentioned. What puzzled Gillian, trying to understand what had happened, was
why
her father cared so much, and why he and his brother James had not spoken to each other since their mother’s death. She knew her father had not been poor when his mother left him much less than he might have expected. He earned a lot of money himself, as a financial analyst, so that when his mother was killed he was already well set up. But apparently his anger had nothing to do with money. His distress was to do with the insult. It had felt, according to his wife, like ‘a slap in the face’. It had carried a message that he had not been loved, not been valued, not been worthy. Gillian had had to accept this, though her father himself had never confided in her.

But the split with her uncle James was harder to understand. James, after all, had also not benefited from his mother’s will and might have been expected to share his brother’s feelings. Maybe he did, but since she was not allowed to have anything to do with her uncle or his family, Gillian had no means of finding out. Her mother was vague when pressed.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it was something to do with a picture.’

This seemed so unlikely – her father wasn’t the least bit interested in art – that Gillian couldn’t credit it. ‘A picture?’ she echoed. ‘Dad? He doesn’t care about pictures.’

Her mother shrugged, said that was what she had been told. There had been a fight, and it was to do with a picture, she was sure.

‘A physical fight?’ Gillian asked, astonished.

Another shrug. Her mother didn’t know. All she knew was that James had wanted the picture and Cameron hadn’t wanted him to have it.

‘So who got it?’ Gillian asked. ‘Where is it?’

‘Neither of them got it,’ her mother said. ‘It was sold.’

‘Who bought it?’ Gillian asked, but her mother had no idea. She’d tried picking good moments to bring the subject up with her father, when he was in a particularly mellow mood, but he nearly always side-stepped her questions. But nevertheless, over the years, in bits and pieces, she had managed to get out of him that his brother had had no right to anything in his mother’s flat
and
that when he, Cameron, had caught James in the act of ‘stealing’ a picture he had been furious and had demanded the picture back. James had said he wanted the painting as a memento, and had seen no harm in removing it. Cameron had reported what he termed ‘the attempted theft’ to his mother’s lawyer and things had ‘turned rather nasty’. The picture, together with all his mother’s personal effects, had been sold. When she had asked to whom, he said a Mme Verl–something had bought it, the same woman who had earlier bought the family house. To Gillian, it all seemed a bit unlikely: two brothers parted over a picture neither of them actually cared about?

It also seemed sad. Gillian was an only child, with a longing to be part of a larger family. She knew she had four Mortimer cousins, two of each sex, living not so far away, in Surrey, and had visions of meeting them and becoming part of what she was sure must be one big, noisy, happy group. She fantasised about having holidays with them, sleeping in the same room as the two girls, whispering secrets to each other and having midnight feasts. That was when she was small, seven or eight, and at her loneliest. She boasted, then, about her boy cousins, of how tall and strong they were, capable of defending her against all comers. The fact that she knew only their names, but not even their exact ages, did not put her off. Later, when she had stopped this kind of fantasising she thought more seriously about trying to contact them. Where would the harm be? In her father’s disapproval, maybe distress, that’s where. And he would undoubtedly find out.

But, though she thought about it, she made no move. Instead, by the time she was applying to an art foundation course, her interest had switched to the famous (or infamous) picture which had caused all the trouble. She longed to know what it was. Her father, still powerful in her life, for financial as well as other reasons, need never know. There was no danger, as there would have been had she contacted her uncle’s family, of his discovering she had set out to trace the picture which had caused so much trouble. She didn’t tell her mother what she was going to try to
do
, but then there were a great many things by that stage which she did not tell her mother.

It was easy enough to begin the investigation. Her father had always been proud of his father Paul Mortimer, and would talk about him freely. Easy, once she had prompted him to do so, to ask her father where he himself had lived as a child. ‘Chelsea,’ he said. ‘But exactly where?’ And the answer came readily. She went to the square he mentioned and stood in front of what had been her grandfather’s house through the 1960s and 1970s. It was rather grand, impressive. Worth, in 2005 terms, a couple of million, she guessed. She had already checked in the telephone directory and knew that a Mr and Mrs Verlon still lived there, some twenty years after buying it from Ailsa Mortimer, but this did not, of course, mean that they still owned the picture. Mrs Verlon had perhaps bought it only to sell, and by now it could be anywhere in the world. But this only added to the mystery and did not put Gillian Mortimer off in the least.

All that concerned her was how she should present herself when she rang the bell of No. 26, as she was about to do.

*

Claudette Verlon was not expecting anyone on that Monday afternoon and very nearly ignored the persistent ringing of the doorbell. There were so many annoying callers these days, people wanting sponsorship, people representing charities (or so they said) selling useless articles, and, lately, beggars, refugees, asking quite openly for money. She had had an intercom fitted and a chain put on the door, and practised extreme caution.

She had never felt like this in Paris. Her husband vowed that the situation in Paris was exactly the same, that there were no areas in any major European city which could be guaranteed absolutely safe, but Claudette did not believe him. He only told her this to persuade her that there was no point in moving back to Paris, which she had wanted to do for a long time. Her children were all living there now, and she wanted to be near them. But Jacques was adamant: next year, he would retire and then she could live wherever she wanted in Paris. He did not fail to remind
her
, either, that she was the one who had chosen this Chelsea house when he had been moved to London. He himself would have preferred Regent’s Park, and had said so.

The house had charmed her then, as had its very beautiful owner, the tragic widow Mortimer. Claudette had convinced herself that the atmosphere in the place was congenial and that it ‘spoke’ to her. In spite of the comparatively recent death of Mr Mortimer, the house had seemed a happy place, bright and warm and full of evidence of a surely contented family life. She had been won over, and enthusiastic enough about the purchase to rush her husband into it. And for the last twenty years the house had proved comfortable and they had been happy there. As an investment, it could not have been bettered, and so, from being annoyed with her, Jacques had become proud of his wife’s acumen and boasted about it to his friends and colleagues. It was he who was now reluctant to sell, when the time came, and move back to Paris, but Claudette was determined. They were going to make a huge profit and she intended to take advantage of the money which would be theirs to buy some exquisite apartment in, possibly, the Ile St Louis area. She did not want another house. With the children gone, she and Jacques needed only a few rooms, elegant and spacious rooms of course, but only, say, four or five of them, preferably conveniently arranged on one floor. They had started married life in two rooms in Montparnasse, and Claudette found herself these days remembering them with more and more affection, though at the time she had yearned for more space.

This nostalgia was part of the reason why all those years ago she had bought what she hoped was a Gwen John painting. Not the most important reason, not by any means, but part of it. The excitement of a true ‘find’, if the painting were to be authentic, and therefore extremely valuable, justified her buying it, but the sentimental element was there too. She had a strong suspicion that she had paid far less for it than it was worth. A quick call to Christie’s and Sotheby’s art departments told her that no oil by Gwen John had come on the market in the last fifteen years and that it would be difficult to estimate how much such a picture might fetch. It
was
not signed, and its provenance was unconvincing, but she was sure that the so-called ‘expert’ called in by the Mortimer family’s solicitor had not known what he was looking at. His verdict had been ‘could be … is in the style of … matches an existing painting of the same interior’, but he hesitated to confirm it as a Gwen John. He had wanted to call in other experts – Cecily Langdale had been mentioned – but the family was impatient, and very satisfied with Mme Verlon’s cash offer. The deal was done, and she carried home the little picture and hung it back on the wall of the room where she had first seen it. It looked far better than it had done against Mrs Mortimer’s décor. Claudette had stripped the walls of their wallpaper and had them painted a distressed pale yellow, the colour of the primroses. She had the carpet lifted and a blond wooden floor laid down, and the furniture in the room was all old pine – good quality, nothing glossy, and all of it almost bleached in colour. No drapes, but a lace curtain in front of the window. No wickerwork chairs, but a comfortable button-backed easy chair upholstered in pink – again, picking up the touch of pink in the flowers in the painting.

Nobody else used the room. It was Claudette’s ‘boudoir’, but she was rarely in it for long, and she liked to think of it quiet and empty, graced by the picture. She walked through it from her bedroom, on the way to the landing, and imagined she felt a soothing breeze as she did so, though there was no window. Jacques used the other door of their bedroom, never trespassing on what he knew was her territory. If she wanted to give a whole room to one tiny painting, then let her: there were enough other rooms in the house for this not to be outrageous. Sometimes, he would find his wife standing looking at the painting, an odd smile on her face, and he would wonder at the power it had over her. Occasionally, when they were quarrelling (which was not often) he would shout at her to calm down and go and worship her wretched painting. She went. The effect was magical.

When the door-bell rang that Monday afternoon, Claudette was on the top floor of the house, looking for a certificate her daughter had asked her to find and send to her. So, when the noise continued
and
became irritating, it was easy for her to open the window and peer down to see who was standing on the doorstep, without their being aware of being spied upon. All she could see was the top of a head, but it was clearly a woman’s head. Claudette waited. She guessed that this caller would eventually descend two or three of the stone steps – there were eight of them – when she gave up ringing the bell, and she would get a better view. The woman, a young woman, neatly dressed, definitely not a refugee, slowly backed away from the front door and then hesitated halfway down the steps. She was wearing a rather chic jacket, of a subtle shade of green, and she had a matching green ribbon tying back her long, black hair. This decided Claudette.

‘Hello?’ she called out. ‘Hello?’

The woman looked up and smiled. ‘Hello!’ she shouted back. ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but my family used to live here and I wondered if I might possibly come in for a moment and ask you something. My name is Gillian Mortimer. Are you Mrs, er, Verlon?’

‘Wait,’ Claudette shouted back, and closed the window. All the way down the many stairs, she was thinking about the widow who had sold the house to her. This young woman looked like her – she had had no need to give her name. It was safe to let her in.

*

The house was quite different from how Gillian had imagined it. Her father had described it as ‘a spacious family house’ but it seemed grander than that. The staircase alone was impressive, so wide that surely four people could walk abreast up the stairs. She decided immediately that she would not have liked to live here. Mme Verlon was not the sort of woman she had envisaged either. She did not look French in the least, if to be a Frenchwoman of a certain age was to be chic and elegant, impeccably groomed and dressed – Gillian had seen her in her mind’s eye, small and slight, wearing a Chanel suit and expensive pearls. But the woman who opened the door was rather stout and a little masculine in appearance. She had short, cropped grey hair, wore no make-up,
and
was dressed in black, baggy trousers and a loose cream sweater. She was not unattractive but seemed more powerful than sophisticated. Her gaze was very direct, even haughty, and she spoke English with only a trace of accent. She made Gillian nervous.