Playing Grace (21 page)

CHAPTER
17

Violet watched Gilbert and his lamb chop. He was pushing it towards the mound of mashed potato at the edge of the plate. He swirled it around in the gravy. Now the chop was let alone for a while as he speared some peas with the prongs of his fork. She didn’t like the look he gave them before he brought his teeth together around the fork and scraped the peas into his mouth.

The chop got another trip through the gravy.

‘You’re playing with your food,’ she said.

He did not reply, although she was certain he had heard her. Or perhaps he hadn’t – those mice were particularly verbal this evening, taunting her that the traps were still primed, still empty.

Gilbert put down his knife and fork on his plate and Violet said, ‘On the hour, Gilbert. Please!’

He gave her one of his looks but reached out and repositioned the fork so that it was no longer lying at about ten
to the knife’s twelve but right up hard against it. She didn’t care for the smile he gave her afterwards. It was the one he had given Mother when humouring her.

‘You didn’t like your chop?’ she asked.

‘Not today.’

‘But we always have a lamb chop on Tuesday.’

She thought that Gilbert was going to ignore her again. He was studying his plate.

‘Yes, we do, don’t we?’ he said, eventually. ‘Every. Single. Tuesday.’

Later he went out to the back garden to smoke and didn’t change out of his slippers. She watched him in the security light, making sure she stood back far enough so that he would not see her.

‘He’s in a funny mood,’ the mice said, and she had to agree with them. Restless. A bad evening. New people coming out of his mouth and into the house. Not just this Tate, but other names too.

Corinne. Jo. Someone called Baby? Bebbie? An infantile name.

Three women. Or was Joe a man? She couldn’t remember. Definitely two women. Young ones.

And there was a woman called Shawna – she was an artist. Still a woman, though.

She watched Gilbert smoking and even the way he was doing that seemed wrong, as if he couldn’t really be bothered.

She had been looking forward to cutting a swathe through Shanghai this evening, making headway with the Bund and Yuyuan Gardens, but how could she settle down to it now?

‘You were going to talk to Grace,’ the mice said. ‘Better get a move on, before it’s too late.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘not that it’s any of your business. Your business is to throw yourself on those traps.’

She waited until Gilbert had finished his smoke before she went to the back door.

‘Grace,’ she said, ‘it’s been a long time since I saw her. Would you like to invite her to tea? One day after she finishes work, perhaps?’ She saw him trying to work out what this invitation meant. She was ready for him. ‘You’re very dull company at the moment.’ She returned to the kitchen, then turned round again. ‘You don’t have to be here … when she visits. You could go out. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

Back inside the kitchen she watched Gilbert flick the end of his cigar thing over the back wall. She’d told him about that before.

CHAPTER
18

Grace knew that Tate’s first tour had been a success because he’d brought a large part of his group back with him and they were now out in reception talking about it. This was a slight improvement on the situation an hour earlier when they had been milling around her computer while Tate showed them some ‘really cool things happening in digital art’.

And a huge, huge improvement on when she’d come in that morning to a strong smell of paint, the source of which was her office, where the Chinese lady had been relegated to one corner and the wall with the windows in it painted scarlet. Various sized rocks and bits of wood were leaning against the wall, some of which were painted gold and formed small cairns. A large question mark, also in gold, was painted on the wall and Grace felt that it mirrored the one filling her own head … well, the space that wasn’t filled with the words
What a pile of rubbish
. As she was thinking that, one of the cairns collapsed, and as
she picked up the loose bits of rock and piled them back up, she got gold paint on her fingers.

When she went to the toilet to try to wash off the paint there was a rubber glove over the handle with chopsticks skewered through it. She wondered, if she took it off the handle and blew it up, would it stay inflated long enough to hit Tate around the head with it? She tried to go through Alistair’s office to retrieve her grout-cleaning toothbrush so she could scrub at the gold paint on her hands, but his office was locked.

‘Of course it sodding well is. Bastardy, bastard, bastard,’ she shouted, before remembering that she didn’t swear and she didn’t shout and she had a nailbrush in her own desk.

Tate seemed to think no explanation was needed for the artwork when he arrived, and since then Grace had been on barista duty again, her pleasant demeanour never wavering, even when a Goth girl and an austere Belgian couple requested decaf. Alistair had appeared and seemed delighted with the fact that the office had been invaded, presumably because it made him feel ‘hip with the happening’ or whatever mangled reading he was putting on it. Although Grace could see he wasn’t so overwhelmed with the wall and the rocks. He spent a few minutes weaving among the group to shake hands and ask them where they
had come from as if he were suddenly a member of the royal family. Everything was again ‘Marvellous, marvellous,’ and while not exactly slapping Tate on the back, Alistair touched his arm in a gesture that suggested he was congratulating him. It was at that point that Grace discovered how hard it was to smile when your lips wanted to curl downwards. She found it even harder when soon afterwards Alistair disappeared into his office, only to emerge again clutching his briefcase and saying he was off to a meeting. He gabbled something about a London tourism committee, which was news to Grace. When she passed through his office to fill the kettle, she saw he had cleared a space for the secure cabinet.

With the sound of more people arriving, Grace returned to reception to see Corinne, Joe and Bebbie. They laid claim to the sofa and the pastry and croissant eating session was repeated. Joe, still largely monosyllabic, went out for extra supplies for the people from the art tour. Music was put on again. Someone had a guitar, not electric thankfully, and started to play, trying to keep time with the music playing on the laptop.

Grace made more coffee and returned to Alistair’s office, trying to block out the discussions about the ‘death of figurative art’ and who in the art world had or had not ‘sold out’. Unwilling to overhear which artists they might
mention, she went to the kitchen and cleaned the grout between the tiles with her nailbrush and the toothbrush. In a small act of rebellion she also turned the cut-out of the Chinese lady upside down so she stood on her head, or where it would have been had she had one, and wrote on a Post-it note,
Some people have no idea which way is up
.

Part of her bad mood, she knew, was down to jealousy. Her tour of ‘The Nation’s Best-Loved Paintings’ in the National Gallery that morning had not been as successful as Tate’s. Even before it started she had felt uneasy: Mr and Mrs Baldridge would again be part of her group and, so it appeared, would Monsieur Laurent. Tate must have booked him in. Memories of the currents of tension that had run between the Americans and the laconic Monsieur the first time had resurfaced as Grace walked along St Martin’s Lane towards her 10 a.m. start, but for the first hour and a half of the tour, history had not repeated itself. The other members of the group were a very quiet couple from Scotland and a Russian man who spoke excellent English. Mr Laurent was listening in his usual laid-back way and the Baldridges weren’t complaining about anything. There was even a bit of bonding between the two men over the shared reminiscence of that ‘goddam awful blond kook from the last tour’.

This all changed when they gathered in front of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Mr Laurent sighed in a way that suggested he found the subject of Waterloo and Wellington’s victory over Napoleon deeply, deeply boring. At which point Mr Baldridge, with an overfamiliar nudge to his arm, had said, ‘Yup, that guy sure gave you a whipping.’

Grace had hurried everyone along to the next painting, talking all the while, but Mr Laurent’s body language suggested he was seething.

Grace thought of the paintings ahead, trying to anticipate any other potential flashpoints: Constable’s
The Haywain
and Stubbs’s
Whistlejacket
. Surely no one could get into a fight over a pastoral scene and a horse? And the painting after that? Oh no. Turner’s
The Fighting Temeraire
. Could she miss it out? Unlikely: it was on the publicity leaflet and they would walk right by it. She decided she’d simply elaborate on how Turner’s masterful brushwork in sky and sea invoked a sense of impending loss as the old ship was towed away. She would forget entirely about the battles it had fought.

‘Painted when Turner was in his sixties,’ she began, feeling a chill skim up her neck as Mr Baldridge opened his mouth.

‘Hey,’ he said, delivering another nudge to Monsieur
Laurent, ‘I know this one … this is the ship that helped whop your ass at Trafalgar.’

‘If we could just return to the painting,’ Grace said, seeing Mr Laurent squaring up to Mr Baldridge. ‘The feeling here is of an age that is passing—’

‘I ’ave ’ad enough of you, you odious fat man.’ Monsieur Laurent’s verdict was accompanied by a pointing finger that seemed to stir Mrs Baldridge into life.

‘Don’t you raa-ise your voice to myyyy husband. And he is
not
fat. He is manly.’

‘The ship was being towed—’

‘I will raise my voice to whom I like,’ Monsieur Laurent snapped. ‘Your ’usband is deliberately trying to provoke me. Because. I. Am. French.’

‘Yeah, well, the truth hurts,’ Mr Baldridge said.

‘… was being towed to scrapyards at—’

‘Truth?’ Mr Laurent cocked his head.

‘Trafalgar, Waterloo. Ten years between ’em but yah got yer ass kicked both times.’ He smirked towards his wife. ‘Nothing changes, huh? Last time you had to get us to come bail you out—’

‘Mr Baldridge, I cannot talk at the same time as you,’ Grace said in her sharpest voice, ‘which is a great, great pity as the rest of the group would like to hear about this painting. And, Monsieur Laurent, can I just ask you to please
move to the other side of the group where you might be more comfortable.’ Grace stood her ground, knowing as she did that either Mr Baldridge or Monsieur Laurent might protest. When they both did, she repeated her request and suggested that if they didn’t wish to comply, they should leave now; this was, after all, the last painting on the tour.

Nobody left, but a nasty, clotted atmosphere hung over the group as Grace battled on with Turner, and when she wound up the tour, those who had behaved seemed eager to get away and those who hadn’t engineered showy, huffy departures. Grace felt a sense of failure churn through her stomach. How had she let this happen? Things were starting to slide, she could feel it.

Even a visit to see Samuel stationed in ‘Dutch Painting 1660–1800’ didn’t cheer her much. She had hoped to drop Gilbert into the conversation to see if she was right about how Samuel felt towards him, but the poor guy had been surrounded by a group of schoolchildren, his grey uniform disappearing among a blur of bright clothes, and Grace only got a raised hand in greeting before his attention was grabbed away again.

Grace decided to stop thinking back over her tour, rinsed off the nailbrush and the toothbrush in the kitchen sink and returned to her office through the people and the mess in reception. Tate was helping the Goth girl balance
on Joe’s shoulders and someone else was taking photos. She laughed long enough to get through the door and to her chair, stepping over some more rocks that had dislodged themselves from a cairn.

She logged into her email account. No further correspondence from her sisters, which suggested that Felicity had not yet told them about her business plans or Jay Houghton. Typical Felicity – she was leaving it to Grace to broach the subject, which meant it was Grace who would suffer the flak if she didn’t get the wording just right. She tried to think how she’d phrase that particular email but was finding it impossible not to get distracted by the noise coming from reception and the knowledge that it would now have descended even further into a quagmire of crumbs, empty paper bags and dirty cups. And she would most definitely not take any notice of Tate who kept calling out to her to ‘come and kick back and join in’.

Here he was again, but this time heading for the kettle, Bebbie following. As he spooned more coffee into his cup and flicked on the kettle, Bebbie wrapped her arms around him, resting her head against his back. Grace imagined how uncomfortable that must be – today Tate had on jeans and a T-shirt plus a black leather jacket, scuffed as badly as his boots and with a pattern of tiny studs across the shoulders. There had been a number of these hugs from
Bebbie and a range of other signs of intimacy – a hand on Tate’s arm; reaching out and running her fingers down his thigh. At first Grace had taken them as lavish signals from Bebbie that Tate was her man and she was his woman, but now she wasn’t so sure. There was something needy about Bebbie’s movements and a touch of indifference in the way Tate reacted to them. The kettle hadn’t even boiled when Grace heard Tate say, ‘Bebbie, honey, I need to get that,’ and flex his shoulders as if he wanted to underline his desire to be free of her.

Bebbie released Tate and moved to his side. Her hand reached out for the milk, presumably to add to his coffee.

‘I got it,’ he said, picking up the carton himself. ‘You wanna check and see if anyone else needs a refill?’

Grace made sure she did not look up as Bebbie walked by her desk, but she could almost smell the frustration and confusion coming off her.

‘Sure you don’t want a coffee?’ Tate asked, holding out his cup to Grace.