Muddy Waters (29 page)

Willow had taken to singing. Her voice, unexpectedly loud for someone so generally fey and whimsical in expression, could be heard over the entire island. She began her songs the moment she woke up in Bernard's sagging bed and went out onto the balcony to water the trough of tomato plants she'd wheelbarrowed along from her own garden. She specialized in old Simon and Garfunkel numbers, trilling ‘Scarboro Fair' and ‘Bright Eyes' across the river, the sound water-amplified to the far bank and then back across the rest of the island. Ellen MacIver, with unusual sarcasm, put in a request for ‘The Sound of Silence'. She was driving Peggy crazy on her barge. Ted, who had now more or less stopped going home except with bags full of laundry, found it fascinating, a real live piece of the eccentricity the island was famous for. Enzo thought her showing off was despicably un-Italian – the worst kind of English trait. He sneered at her whenever he met her on the path, intending to convey that Italians were so accustomed to permanent sexual fulfilment that they didn't need to go around singing and looking ecstatically smug about it. Willow's cats, too, were neglected and running wild, savaging two of Giuliana's poor hens and frightening a broody one away from her snug nest beneath a rusty Ford Capri bonnet. Willow spent more and more time at Bernard's studio, moving a lot more than the tomatoes onto the premises. Over a week, she'd staggered along the path with most of the contents of her own workspace, all the pots she wanted to exhibit for the Arts Fair, along with the finished plaster of six residents' bottoms and three more moulds (including Adrian's, which he had agreed to for its potential as research for his own work) ready for casting. It was almost as if she was weighing Bernard's premises down with her possessions, anchoring him and his home as hard as she could so that he'd find it impossible to shift her out again. ‘Is your friend, oh, I can't remember her name . . .' Willow twittered excitedly to Stella as they both crossed over on the ferry one morning, ‘is she coming back for the Art Fair?'

‘Abigail?' Stella reminded her coolly, knowing full well that Willow wasn't likely to have forgotten that particular name. ‘Well, she said she was, and bringing her children too, just for a night or so.'

Willow looked gleeful, ‘Oh, I am glad, I'm sure she'll enjoy it.'

‘You're
glad
? Not so long ago you said she was dangerous and destructive and shouldn't be allowed on the island at all. Don't you mind about “devil spirits” any more?' Stella asked. They reached the main bank and Willow sprang off, agile as a schoolgirl.

‘No. No, I don't. After all, they have their uses,' she declared mysteriously, skipping off towards Marks and Spencer, a selection of plastic shopping bags fluttering from her hands, the picture of domestic organization.

Stella felt furious with her. Ruth had pleaded with them all never, ever, to mention the humiliation of being abandoned on Willow's table covered with drying plaster, in the belief that the whole world, bar no one, would be creased up with laughter about it, and she'd die, absolutely die of humiliation. But it was terribly tempting to make her own feelings known. Willow, in her new-found bliss, was oblivious to innuendo and implication and supremely unaware that to Stella, Toby, Adrian and Ruth she was the object of angry hostility. What Stella wanted to face Willow with, mother-protective and still carrying the memory of Ruth's distraught sobbing, was something along the lines of ‘How dare you go off and abandon my child, naked on your table covered in plaster and ordered not to move?' She'd practised the words in the car, going over them in differing orders to get them to sound right, but had come to the conclusion that actually stated out loud, in spite of Ruth's trauma at the time, the situation became just too funny to keep a straight face about. That, of course, made Stella even crosser – she hated to feel so powerless.

‘Painting all finished then?' Melissa asked Ruth as she watched her in the college common room, twisting the final strands of silver wire round the last pair of earrings for her exhibition.

‘What do you mean?' Ruth looked up and glared at her.

Melissa's hand flew up defensively, ‘Hey, what's the aggression for? I only asked . . . It's just that you haven't missed any time here this week to go along and pose for that old bloke – and usually you do. That's all.' Melissa slumped down on the bench next to her and fumbled in her bag for cigarettes. ‘Smoke?' she offered, hoping to buy an explanation and a better mood.

‘No. Given up,' Ruth said sulkily. She put the earrings away in her bag and sat hunched over with her arms folded across her body, staring ahead in the general direction of the food counter. Melissa, who was studying psychology A-level, took this as hostile and uncommunicative body language and knew that Ruth would almost literally have to be unwound before she'd tell her anything.

She tried flattery: ‘You've made some great stuff. I expect you'll sell it all, no problem, and then you'll be rich. Do you want me to come over and help you on the day?'

‘If you want.'

‘Did your dad let you have his summerhouse?'

‘Yep.' Ruth unthreaded one of her arms, but only to push her hair out of her eyes.

Melissa persisted, ‘And will we all get to see the great portrait?'

‘Which one?' Melissa let out an exaggerated sigh and raised her eyes dramatically heavenwards. Ruth still glowered.

‘Of you,
stoopid
,' Melissa said bravely, ‘the one this great and famous artist has done.'

‘Dunno.' Ruth at last unfolded her arms and uncrossed her legs and stood up. ‘You know, Melissa, I think you're confusing me with someone who gives a flying fuck about what Bernard does with his stuff once he's finished it.' She picked up her bag and strode off towards the door, body language telling Melissa once again that she wasn't in the mood to be accompanied.

Ruth couldn't believe she'd been so abruptly discarded by Bernard. I suppose he makes every one of us think we're going to be the special one, she thought as she walked slowly along the road, reluctant to be heading back home. ‘The painting is finished. I'm really pleased with it – an exciting departure in style,' he'd told her on the phone when she'd gathered the courage to call and ask when she should come again. She'd heard all about him and Willow. That was where the cow had gone off to, leaving her plastered and helpless on that bloody table. In bed late at night, with grumbling pigeons roosting on her skylight above her and sleep impossible, she'd wondered if Bernard had actually managed immediate sex with Willow that morning, only about an hour after he'd done it with
her.
Probably not, she'd concluded. Perhaps he and Willow had a relationship on entirely another plane, something mystic and spiritual – that would be why Willow was looking so superior. She couldn't believe that the clapped out old hippy had actually achieved
moving in.
But then he hadn't suggested she, Ruth, should come back at all – in fact, as they'd been talking he'd sounded slightly distracted as if there was someone there with him, someone who he'd like to get back to, quickly – Willow – she now realized painfully, forced to accept the truth. Willow was now never
not
there.

‘
What
style departure?' she'd asked him, having thought the painting of her looked exactly like all the other ones she'd seen of girls like her, but giving him the chance to invite her round to explain.

‘Oh, bigger scale, bolder colour, that sort of thing,' he'd said vaguely, obviously not in the mood for deeper discussion. Now, miserable and bereft, she interpreted this as him implying that it was actually
her
that was a bigger scale, bolder colour, and felt doubly humiliated.

‘I even feel a bit sorry for that awful Abigail now,' she confided to Toby out in the garden on the swing seat that evening.

‘Christ, don't bother wasting sympathy on her. She doesn't even halfway deserve it.'

‘Well, at least I know how she feels, someone she'd cared about just going off and leaving her for someone else.' She couldn't quite bring herself to say ‘loved'. Even she, immersed in the drama of a severed relationship, wouldn't have claimed that she'd
loved
Bernard. The idea, all along, had been that he should love, adore, idolize,
her
. Surely at his age, he should have been grateful to have had the chance.

‘Well, I suppose Martin was – is – Abigail's husband. It's got to be a
bit
different,' Toby said, unforgivably in Ruth's opinion. ‘Anyway, she's a complete bitch, I think she was only pretending to be so miserable. She seemed to make a pretty good recovery while she was here.'

‘Yeah, chasing after Bernard and eying you up. I saw her, all those little pattings at you whenever she wanted you to listen to her. I even wondered if you and she might, well, you know . . .' Ruth sneaked a grin at him but he wasn't smiling.

‘Chasing
everyone
,' he interrupted her. ‘She's one of those women, the ones who can't bear to see anyone else happy. She has to go and wreck things.'

Ruth assumed he was talking about her and agreed, ‘Well, I'm not happy now, so when she comes back perhaps she'll be a bit nicer to me. She'll probably even think I'm her very best friend,' she laughed.

‘Don't count on it,' Toby warned.

In the secretive safety of the downstairs loo Adrian flicked through
Get This!
to the problem page and was surprised at how disappointed he was that the letter he'd written hadn't made it to the ‘Go Ask Alice' column. It was a stupid, puerile thing to have done anyway, he decided, following up on a whim after Giuliana's flippant suggestion and writing to his own wife, pretending he was sixteen. Perhaps she hadn't read it yet. Probably this universal, ordinary, common-place quandary, the brief and guilty knocking-off of the girlfriend's best mate, appeared in one guise or another in Stella's column every couple of weeks. After all, he thought, in teenagehood the best pal's always around, talking about the boyfriend, talking about the friend, there's bound to be more than a bit of sneaky juvenile curiosity on both sides. A boy of that sort of age couldn't really be expected to resist – he'd be so sure that every fold and freckle of his dick had been discussed and analyzed by the terrifying posse of two, it was hardly a major step to let the girl check out what her best friend was so enthralled by. Only he and Abigail, this time, were a long way from the excuse of being juvenile, he reminded himself. He had no excuses at all. If Stella, when she got round to dealing with it, only knew who'd sent the letter, and who it was about . . . He probably wouldn't have bothered if he hadn't just finished the book and was feeling loose-endish. Appalled to realize he'd started making notes for a new book that was based on that tumultuous forty minutes with Abigail, he'd consigned the words to the computer's waste-bin and instead written a ‘Dear Alice . . .' signing it ‘Pulp fan, Richmond'. It would probably turn up with the next bagload. Interested, he took a look at the problems and identified the one from ‘Alex' that she'd shown him. ‘Sensitive response,' he murmured to himself approvingly, glad that if anyone in the family
had
chanced to see him, Stella wouldn't thank them for rushing up and telling her. He flushed the loo, shoved the magazine up his sweatshirt and went to put it back in the kitchen.

‘When did Abigail say she was coming back?' Adrian asked Stella as they started clearing out the summerhouse to accommodate Ruth's jewellery. He bent to clear up scattered papers from under the desk and added, in hope, fingers crossed, ‘Or has she changed her mind now she's got the children with her, after all it would be a bit of a hassle, wouldn't it, dragging them over here.' I don't even mind if we keep her cat for bloody ever, he thought to himself, silently offering a comprehensive service of pampering, vet-bill-paying, flea-spraying, worm-treating cat-care to the gods in exchange for their indulgence.

‘Friday,' Stella told him, making his heart plummet, ‘
Tomorrow
that is, I suppose. Which reminds me, I'll have to ask Toby to move out of his room for her children. Perhaps he can go off and stay with Nick for a night or two.' She flicked a duster over the newly cleared window ledge and asked him, ‘Why isn't Ruth out here doing this? How is it we're fixing up the room for her?'

‘She's suddenly, mysteriously, got an essay to write,' Adrian told her. ‘She also had this idea that it would be better if you and I did it all so that I'd know just where everything had been put away so I could find it again on Monday. Devious, huh?'

‘Wonder where she gets that from,' Stella commented, causing Adrian's blood pressure to rise to a danger level. Abigail had been ringing up daily to report that Martin hadn't been phoning at all. Adrian thought he'd been clever, avoiding answering the phone round about six o'clock drinks time, but then perhaps that had been unwise, for whatever else had she been saying to Stella?

‘Do you ever think you'd like a bit more space?' Stella suddenly asked, flinging the duster down on the desk and flopping into Adrian's big cream chair. She looked really small in it, he thought, really vulnerable like a child pretending to drive a car. He'd hate to hurt her, but, since Abigail, had been scared to touch her.

‘What sort of space?' he asked warily. She might mean ‘space' as in time away from each other, separate rooms, homes, miles put between them. She gave him a perplexed sort of look, as if wondering why he suddenly didn't understand plain English.

‘You know, just
space,
more garden, more room in the house. A bigger house, I suppose. Somewhere with room for a proper study each, so you wouldn't have to trail down the garden in all weather.' She was smiling at him, quite tenderly really as if prepared to be patient with his lack of understanding of simple words.