Black Valley (29 page)

What would happen now? she wondered. Now that Isobel had lost Blake? Would the anger between the twins finally erupt? Evidently the relationship was already showing signs of strain.

Jess sighed. She sometimes found the Kleinian view of the world a little too grim for her liking. She walked over to the corner of the room, and put the book back on the shelf, promising herself
that she’d return to it later.

The phone rang. The answerphone came on.

‘Jess.’ It was Dresler on the end of the line.

Jess walked over to the desk, and waited beside it.

‘Just wanted to tell you. There’s been an extraordinary new development.’

She picked up the phone. ‘Sorry, I’m here. What’s happened?’

‘Well, it’s about Morris.’

Jess felt a thrill of excitement. ‘You mean, I was right? About Isobel?’

‘What d’you mean, Isobel?’

Jess was irritated. And hurt. Not only had he discounted her theory that Isobel was painting as Morris, he’d completely forgotten it.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Oh that.’ He caught her slightly frosty tone of voice. ‘No, no. This is something quite amazing. Morris has asked me to be his agent.’

‘Really? You mean, you met him?’

‘Not yet, no, but I’m sure I shall. He’s written to me, telling me that he’s broken with the Powell Gallery. He didn’t have any faith in Isobel. She’s not at
her best at the moment, by all accounts.’ There was a pause. ‘Anyway, he’s come to me. I’m going to be looking after him.’

‘Oh.’ Jess wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘We’re calling a press conference—’

‘We?’

‘Well, I am. Under Hefin’s instructions.’

Jess noticed that Morris had now become ‘Hefin’. ‘Is he going to be there?’

‘It’s possible.’ Dresler paused. ‘Anyway, he’s decided to hold it up at Ferndale.’

Jess knew of Ferndale, but she’d never been there. It was a small town in the Rhondda, one of many blighted by post-industrial decline.

‘It was where the first coal mine was sunk in the nineteenth century, apparently. Hefin wants to draw attention to what’s happened to the place since.’

‘Well, I hope you’re going to be able to get people to go up there. It’s not exactly a cultural hub, you know.’

‘That’s the whole point, Jess. This isn’t a smug gallery opening. It’s an intervention.’

‘Right.’ Might as well call it a happening, Jess thought, rather sourly, but she didn’t voice her opinion.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter if we don’t get a good turnout,’ Dresler went on. ‘It’ll be reported in the papers just because it’s something different. I
think it’s a brilliant idea.’

He paused, waiting for her to agree. When she didn’t, he continued, ‘We’ve called it for next Tuesday evening, seven o’clock. At the town hall. We haven’t got long
to plan it. We’re organizing transport from London. I’ll be coming down in a charabanc’ – he laughed – ‘with a bunch of critics, buyers and the like. Will you be
able to drive up from Cardiff?’

‘Let’s see. Tuesday.’ Jess thought for a moment. Her last session on a Tuesday was at five. ‘Should be all right.’ She paused. ‘Can I help in any way? Bring
anything?’

‘No, just yourself.’

‘OK.’ Jess adopted a bright, breezy tone. ‘I’ll see you up there. Don’t worry if I’m a bit late, the traffic can be bad getting out of Cardiff at that time of
day.’

‘Fine. Oh, by the way, can you stay overnight? I’ve booked a load of us into a hotel nearby.’

‘I don’t know. Depends on what I can arrange for Rose. Can I let you know?’

‘Of course.’

There was a short silence.

‘Bye then, darling.’

Jess found she couldn’t respond in kind.

‘Bye, Jacob. And good luck.’

The evening she drove up to Ferndale, Jess was running late. She’d had a stressful day, particularly in her last session with her long-standing client Maria, who was
suffering from depression, and whose children had now been sent to stay with a relative. She’d let the session go over length, and had had to stop for petrol on the way. While she was filling
up, she’d noticed that one of the tyres on the car was down, so she’d faffed about in the rain with the garage pressure pump, smearing grease over her dress in the process. It was a
linen shift, worn with a short, unlined jacket, and as she grappled with the air hose she realized it was the wrong outfit for the weather: it had turned wet and cold, and she’d have done
better to wear a winter coat. By the time she started the car and pulled out of the garage, she felt thoroughly irritable.

The traffic slowed to a crawl as she came out of Cardiff, but cleared as she hit the road up to the valleys. It wasn’t a particularly scenic journey at the best of times, she reflected, as
she left the city behind: residential sprawl gave way to industrial estates, then to a landscape that bore silent witness to the ravages created by two centuries of coalmining – the
‘heritage’ of the Rhondda, as it was now called. Rusting iron wheels and ruined red-brick chimneys rose up from abandoned pit heads; quarried mountains and grassed-over slagheaps,
dotted with spindly shrubs, created an unnatural horizon; and crouching in their shadow, long, neat rows of terraced houses jutted out into the hillside and came to an abrupt, arbitrary stop, as
if, when they reached the middle of nowhere, they’d given up hope.

As Jess drove along, she began to relax. A calm came over her as the city, the consulting rooms, and her thronging clients with their neuroses, grew further and further away. She wondered
whether Isobel and Elinor would be at the launch; probably not, she concluded, since Morris had taken the opportunity of Blake’s death to break with the Powell Gallery, and asked Dresler to
be his agent.

The deeper Jess penetrated the Rhondda, the more compelling she found it. Along the old road, the towns were like a corridor, running into each other, perched alongside the wide, shallow
valleys. The squat Victorian chapels and stone terraces weren’t beautiful, but with the ruined mountains behind them, there was a mystery to the place. This was a world where the aftermath of
an epic struggle between humanity and nature was on show for all to see. She could see why Morris had decided to call his press conference – intervention, whatever it was – up here in
the Rhondda. It was one of the most depressed areas in the country, yet the ravaged landscape had a kind of sombre dignity about it, and the people who still remained here a tenacious way of
adjusting to hardship that really did add up to a ‘heritage’, one that the average mollycoddled city visitor couldn’t help but find sobering.

Towns succeeded towns, one after the other, huddled on the hillsides, until eventually she came to Ferndale. The venue was not hard to find. The centre of Ferndale consisted of only a few
streets, and she soon found a space. She parked the car, and walked the short distance to the venue, a community arts centre that had once been a municipal building of some kind. When she got
there, the meeting was already in progress, so she slipped in at the back.

Contrary to her expectation, there were quite a few people in attendance, including a small film crew. Most of them were Londoners from the art world, soberly dressed but sporting the odd,
carefully chosen quirky item to demonstrate their membership of the tribe. To her surprise, she noticed Mia, Blake’s former business partner – dressed from head to toe in black, and
still wearing the bicycle chain – standing next to Dresler; given the animosity between Dresler and Blake, and her questionable part as Blake’s alibi in the police investigation of
Ursula’s death, she would have thought Mia would have stayed away.

As she’d predicted, Elinor and Isobel were nowhere to be seen. She wondered for a moment if Elinor was all right; since their last session, when she’d been dithering about whether to
come back into therapy or not, she hadn’t been in touch.

Dresler was running over more or less the same speech about Morris that he’d given at the museum when Jess had first met him. He delivered it with confidence, his eyes shining with
enthusiasm, and once again – although she’d heard most of what he had to say before – she was impressed. He was dressed casually, in a cord jacket with a Nehru collar, a chambray
shirt and jeans, but he looked distinguished, and she couldn’t help feeling proud of him. There was a future to this relationship, she thought, as he talked on; whatever minor problems they
had at present would be ironed out in time. She was looking forward to introducing him to the girls; they’d like him, she thought. Nella would find his world interesting, and she could
imagine that he would be sensitive and kind to Rose. She wondered what his son, Seth, was like, and whether he’d get on with her daughters; they might find him rather glamorous, as a London
boy. He might even, in time, become something of a brother to them . . .

She brought her mind back to the present, realizing that she’d wandered off into a bit of a daydream. She looked around her. The staff working at the centre were standing by the tea urn
they’d set up at the back of the hall. They were listening attentively, some of them with a perplexed look on their faces, others evidently trying to fight off boredom. She turned her
attention back to Dresler, and found herself feeling a little uncomfortable. Ostensibly, he was singing the praises of the mining communities of the Welsh valleys; yet in reality, there was a
subtle air of entitlement about him that contrasted strikingly with the deferential demeanour of the staff. For Dresler and his crew, Jess realized, as he talked on, the actual people of Ferndale
were entirely invisible.

‘And now I come to why we’re gathered here today.’ Dresler put down his notes and addressed the assembled company directly. ‘I’ve received a communication from
Hefin to say that he cannot be with us this evening.’

There were cries of dismay. Angry voices were raised, and people began to complain to each other.

Dresler held up his hands in an effort to mollify them, pausing to let the fuss die down, then continued, raising his voice slightly. ‘My sincere apologies. However, what I can tell you is
that he is planning a number of new large-scale works. These will be site-specific, and will be shown at different locations in the valleys. The first of them is to be unveiled in a few
weeks’ time, not far from where we’re standing today.’

The crowd were not impressed, but Dresler hid his embarrassment and soldiered on, discussing the virtues of these ‘site-specific’ works, until he brought the speech to a close. There
was a feeble round of applause, and some booing. At the back, the urns started to hiss in readiness for the refreshments to be served. Then people got up from their chairs and began to move around
the hall.

Dresler stowed away his notes, came over, and gave Jess a kiss on the cheek.

‘God, what a fiasco,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

‘He just didn’t show.’ Dresler gave a sigh of frustration. ‘Still, we’ll have to try and make the best of it.’

He took Jess over to his party and introduced her. There was Mia, the gallery owner, a young man named Jake who worked for her, a journalist called Giles, and Akiko, the Japanese woman
she’d seen at the computer in the magazine office below his London flat. Mia was friendly, but evidently completely obsessed with her work; she talked animatedly about Morris and a number of
her other artists, all of them ‘politically engaged’, as she called it, without ever asking Jess a single question about her. Giles, Jake and Akiko were less intense, but no less
immersed in their own worlds; they, too, talked shop, and took little interest in their surroundings.

The community workers served up the refreshments, along with a selection of biscuits ranging from bourbon to rich tea. One of them, Rhys, a dreadlocked outreach worker with boundless enthusiasm,
came up and chatted to Jess. He was excited about the project, and had been hoping to meet Morris so that he could get local people to visit the site-specific work, and perhaps get them involved.
She took him over to talk to Dresler, but he was preoccupied with the film crew, who were about to leave. They stood around waiting for a while, but then the staff began to clear up, and Rhys had
to go off and supervise the washing-up.

‘Right. Let’s go.’ Dresler gathered together his things. ‘I’ve booked us all into a hotel just off the M4. It’s on a golf course, I believe.’

Jess knew the one. It was where all the football teams stayed when they came to Cardiff. Not Dresler’s cup of tea at all, she’d have thought.

‘We should be able to get a decent meal there, anyway,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘There’s nowhere else around here.’

They made arrangements to leave. Jess would drive over to the hotel, since she knew the way, and Dresler would follow with the others in his car. Mia didn’t offer to accompany Jess, and
neither did any of the others. Jess couldn’t help feeling slightly miffed, but at the same time she was somewhat relieved. The thought of talking to Mia about her newest artist’s
coruscating work with Palestinian refugees as they drove down the country lanes to a four-star hotel for a slap-up dinner wearied her more than a little.

They set off, Jess leading the way, the others behind. She drove slowly, so that they wouldn’t lose her. On the way, she put on Radio 3, hoping it would calm her growing impatience with
Dresler and his crowd. She liked practically everything that the station played, apart from a certain type of modern orchestral music featuring flurries of woodwind, stabbing horns and rolling
timpani. What came on was exactly that, so she switched off again, and drove on in silence.

By the time they got to the hotel, it was beginning to get dark, but it was ablaze with lights. Coaches were lined up outside it, and the place was full of handsome young men in tight-fitting
shirts and jeans, brandishing mobile phones. Beside the entrance was a huge gym, lit up to display rows and rows of enormous weights. Jess was immediately cheered by the sight: after the squat,
dark chapels and terraces of the Rhondda, this shining pink palace told another story. Here was where the young lions of the valleys, the footballers and rugby players and rock singers, celebrated
their victories; where people came for a taste of luxury, of glamour; where they got married, played golf, sat about in dressing gowns, ordered themselves massages, champagne breakfasts and
‘sumptuous banquets’. As she got out of the car, Jess was excited: she had no responsibilities for the evening, except to have fun. Nella was over at Gareth’s place for the night;
Rose was with Bob at his flat in the Bay, and happy to be there. When the wine began to flow over dinner, the Londoners would warm up, and they’d all have a good time.