Drowning Rose (9 page)

She blew her nose and tucked the tissue up the sleeve of her wine-red jersey. ‘I’m sorry. I came here to talk about your problems not whinge about my own.’

‘I don’t have any problems,’ I said. ‘And I am just pleased you wanted to talk about yours with me. It seems I owe you.’ I didn’t add that I liked hearing about other people’s troubles – as long as those people were ones I didn’t particularly like. It perked me up. Until I remembered that wasn’t very nice at all and then I got depressed again.

‘No, really. I have not the slightest evidence against my poor boy. I’m being silly, aren’t I?’ She looked up at me as if she were expecting a reply.

‘More tea?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘But thank you. I should be on my way. I just wanted to make sure you were all right. As I said, Olivia was worried.’

I fetched her coat and walked her to the front door. There she turned round and looked at me with a peculiar little smile. ‘I don’t know what I would do if it was happening again. And do you know, the worst of it is that I can feel people looking at me and then looking at him and thinking, “What else could she expect?” If they see me at all. Being large doesn’t stop you from being invisible, you know.’

I felt suddenly defensive of her. ‘You’re worth ten of him,’ I said.

Ruth frowned. ‘Why do you say that? Most people think Robert’s quite a catch. Maybe not compared with your Gabriel but then I don’t set my standards quite that high.’

I put my hand out and touched her arm. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dismiss Robert. I simply wanted you to see that you have no reason to feel grateful or inferior.’

Ruth clasped her shoulder bag to her side with her elbow and opened the front door. ‘Well, don’t be a stranger,’ she said. ‘Although now I know what you really think of Robert . . .’

I closed the door behind her, my head feeling like a snow-globe that had been given a good shake. I tried to get back to my work but when after several attempts the Wolf’s sheepish grin still looked more like the smirk of a psychopath, I gave up and put my things away. Then Uncle Ian called.

He hoped he wasn’t interrupting my supper and I told him not at all; the timing was perfect.

‘Good,’ he said. He went on to say that he had spoken to my mother, who agreed completely.

‘I can’t see how she could,’ I said. ‘She always gets the timing wrong when she calls.’

There was a pause. ‘What are you talking about?’ Uncle Ian asked.

‘Timing. What were you talking about?’

I heard the impatient sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘The house.’

It was like listening to the radio with only intermittent sound. I must have missed something.

I decided that asking, ‘what house?’ would irritate him even further so instead I tried an, ‘Aha, the
house
.’ Hoping this would lead him to reveal more.

‘As I told your mother, people are apt to make their wills with the excitement of buying Christmas presents, forgetting they won’t actually be there to witness the unwrapping.’

I paused, still confused as to where exactly this was all heading. ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ I said finally.

‘You’re not an American.’

‘Ain’t . . . No, no, I’m not.’

‘So what do you say?’

‘Good-oh?’

‘So you agree. Excellent.’ The ‘excellent’ came out like the sound of a starting gun. ‘I’ll call your mother and tell her the good news. She’ll be thrilled.’

‘Uncle Ian.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

There was silence. I crossed and uncrossed my ankles. I did good toes and naughty toes. Eventually he spoke. His voice was a model of enforced patience. ‘Olivia told me your rental agreement on your current place runs out on the second of April. If we start looking now you might just get somewhere in time.’

‘Ah, I see. And thank you . . . for caring, but I’m not worried. I’m on to it. I’ve got plenty of time to find another flat.’

‘We think a house.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of a house.’ This was not strictly true. I was often
thinking
of a house, a house like the one that Gabriel and I had lived in when we were married or some house in the abstract, a house just for me with a workshop and a garden where I could grow bluebells beneath a small pink magnolia. But in the sense of actually living in one I was not thinking about it. I wanted to stay in the area and the rental on even a tiny flat like this one was on the edge of what I could afford.

‘With a flat you’re always in the hands of other people, even when you own the lease. You have very little control over matters such as when maintenance and repairs are carried out, or by whom, or over the cost. No, your mother agrees, a house is a better idea.’

I reminded myself that age had had its way even with Uncle Ian and that he was now a very different man from the one I had once known. ‘I can see a house might be better but then you’re still in the hands of the landlord and the rental prizes around here are astronomical.’

‘I remember you being much quicker, Eliza. Are you getting old? The whole idea is that we buy you your own place rather than wait for the money to come to you when I’m dead. It could still take a while, you know.’ He laughed happily.

‘No,’ I realised that I had raised my voice. ‘Sorry, I mean I don’t know what Olivia said to you for you to make such an incredibly generous offer but really, no.’

‘I have to go now; it’s time for my pills but if you would be kind enough to think over my offer and maybe also have a word with your mother. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’ My voice was a squeak and I stood holding the receiver long after Uncle Ian had put the phone down, right through the beeping and the schoolmarm voice telling me to please hang up and try again later.

Ten

The day was cold and brilliant with sun. It was the kind of day that lured pensioners outside to tumble and break, and children in mittens and hats to run across treacherous ice. The kind of day when fog or a slippery patch lay in wait on the road. The kind of day most commonly described as beautiful.

But I was safely inside the museum making my way through the opulent exhibition halls and up the dingy back stairs to the ceramics studio with its peeling walls and boiler-room decor.

Beatrice was at her workbench, dismantling the previous restoration on a Minton jardinière. She looked up with a smile and a wave of her free hand. Then she frowned. ‘You look odd. Is everything all right?’

‘Fine, thanks. It’s just, well, you know, winter.’

‘I do know. And it was winter last week but then you didn’t look like you’d just come face to face with the Loch Ness Monster.’

‘What made you think of the Loch Ness Monster? I hardly ever think about it.’

‘Neither do I. Maybe it was your tartan scarf.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I took off my coat and the scarf and went off to hang them on a peg in the small back office. As I returned I said, ‘My godfather seems to want to buy me a house.’

Beatrice looked up. ‘Really. How wonderful.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As long as one isn’t bothered by considerations like earning one’s own keep and living within one’s means and not profiting from one’s sins, those kinds of details.’

‘If he gives you the money, buying the house
is
within your means,’ Beatrice said. ‘The rest I wouldn’t know about.’

I was working on a piece of Daisy Makeig-Jones Fairyland Lustre, retouching. The previous day I had applied the first coat over the untinted filler. The paint was not completely dry yet so I brought over the warm air fan, placing it at a safe distance from the bowl. The point was not to blast the fairies and birds from the blue-bowl-sky or the branches of the witchity-wood trees but simply to speed the healing with a warm caress. Lustre used to be the most problematic of finishes to replicate but with the arrival of some new fluid iridescent paints it was less of a challenge. Of course seamless perfection was not what we were looking for these days anyway. For us the emphasis was on conservation. Conserve, according to
The Oxford English Dictionary
: ‘to keep from harm or damage, to preserve . . .’

Restoration was different. Restore: ‘to bring back or attempt to bring back to the original state by rebuilding, repairing, repainting etc. . . .’ A lot of people muddled up the two. But as I always told students, there were some basic rules to follow with both approaches.

The prime ones were:

Not to inflict further damage by misuse of tools or materials or by careless handling.

To make sure that each stage is reversible.

To carry out honest repairs without the intention to deceive.

Fairyland Lustre did not appeal to everyone. In fact it seemed not to appeal to quite a lot of people, including Beatrice. I could see why, but for myself I adored Daisy (we were on first name terms – my decision, had to be, she was dead), adored her ebullience, her revelling in colour, her fearless championing of fairies and elves and sprites and rainbows all in the face of received good taste. Looking at one of her pieces made me happy.

Beatrice brought me some coffee. ‘How was your weekend?’ I asked her.

‘No one offered me a house but otherwise it was fine. My parents were over. They drove me insane while they were there and then I felt bad and missed them once they’d gone. So the usual.’

‘My stepsister popped round. She drives me insane when she’s there and I
don’t
miss her when she’s gone.’

I mixed burnt umber and Mars red pigment with some MSA varnish to get the dark bronze finish I wanted for the trunk of the tree, then I sat back, waiting and watching for the exciting coat of paint to dry. Contrary to common belief, it could be quite an interesting pastime. With some paints and pigments it was as if a veil were being slowly drawn across their surface, whereas others darkened and deepened during the process and others still simply got on with it, with no changes of tone or shade.

‘Ruth suspects her husband’s having an affair. I feel terribly sorry for her but he’s always having affairs and I can’t help feeling she should leave him. He’s a jerk.’

‘Maybe she loves him?’

I thought about it. ‘Perhaps. Though I think it’s more that she’s allowed herself to be completely defined by him and by their relationship. She’s so used to the role of bullied betrayed wife that she wouldn’t know how to be if that all came to an end. She’s always talking about all the wonderful things she would have done had it not been for Robert’s work, or him making her move, or him playing around. Maybe in a perverse kind of way that works for her? Having an excuse on tap every time she feels her life isn’t working out as she had hoped.’

‘So true,’ Beatrice said. ‘People do that sometimes, don’t they? Use something in their lives, a tragedy perhaps, as an excuse not to live fully.’

‘That’s so well put. It’s exactly what . . . Hang on a minute. You weren’t just talking about Ruth, were you?’

Beatrice looked back at me with the kind of smile that was halfway between approval and exasperation, the kind of smile a teacher might give a particularly dim pupil who’d finally worked it out. But all she said was, ‘So are you going to accept your godfather’s offer?’

I frowned at my brushes. ‘He says it would make him happy. If that’s true, if that’s how he really feels, well, then I should accept because in comparison my feelings aren’t what’s important here.’

Beatrice’s smiled widened. For the class dunce I was doing well.

‘Then again maybe he actually resents me as much as I think he ought to. Maybe the whole idea is some kind of elaborate punishment.’

Beatrice pursed her lips. ‘You’re quite perverse when you wish to be. I mean no one normal would have even thought of that.’

‘What’s normal?’ I said. Not an original question but it was the only thing I could think of as a reply.

‘Well, that wasn’t,’ Beatrice said. ‘And if being given a house were a punishment then please can I be punished too, me and another few thousand recession-hit individuals.’

‘That’s unfair,’ I said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Because I believe that if you were in my shoes you’d rather stay where you were.’

Beatrice sighed. ‘Perhaps.’

‘And I know I’m about to lose the flat but there are plenty of rentals around. Anyway, I’d say I was doing averagely well in life these days but average isn’t enough, it seems. If my godfather could acquisition Gabriel and arrange a re-merger he would be thrilled. And of course I should have a few children too. And because I was tolerably good at art when I was at school I was supposed to have gone on to become a great artist, so me doing what I’m doing, something I think is immensely worthwhile, he feels is somehow second best. And to be quite honest that pisses me off. And I’m not allowed to be pissed off with him because he’s the good guy here. And why is he? Should I believe Rose told him to? And all that “closure” talk. Really, it makes no sense.’

‘Oh Eliza, have you never heard of forgiveness?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Well, there you have it. He’s forgiven you. Would you like another cup of coffee?’