Playing Grace (33 page)

‘Oh, Mum,’ was her only comment, but after a cup of tea, during which neither of them spoke, she did say, more forcefully, ‘I’m sorry about what happened, Mum, but I think you have to face facts: Jay’s gone, the money’s gone and if you’re not careful, your marriage is going to be gone too.’ She did not add that her dad, currently obsessed with the robbery, was giving every appearance of a man who had forgotten he had a wife.

Felicity took Grace’s speech more or less on the chin, but there was more sobbing and eye-wiping and falling on Grace’s neck before she headed home to ‘realign her emotions’.

Grace went back to her filing, knowing for certain that some kind of domino effect was sending all the certainties of her life falling one after the other. Felicity had always been an outrageous flirt, always too touchy-feely, but was this her first outing into really being unfaithful with her heart as well as her body? Or had it happened before, and her dad just put up with it because it was the oil that greased the wheels of their marriage?

She should try to look on it as a timely example of the things that happened when you let passion run away with you. Not that she really needed a new lesson on that.

She heard a noise behind her and turned.

‘Is Tate in yet?’

Seeing Esther in her office was like finding a jellyfish up a mountain. It just shouldn’t happen. Grace wasn’t even certain that Esther knew how to climb stairs.

‘I’m afraid he isn’t,’ she said.

‘When
will
he be in then?’ Esther was almost truculent; that mouth was getting a lot of pulling about.

‘Well, probably later, just to check on names and numbers for his tour.’

‘How much later?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ll wait then.’ The mouth was pouting; the bottom was on Tate’s chair.

‘You’ll wait? But doesn’t Bernice need you downstairs?’

‘Probably.’ Esther folded her arms.

For once the kettle came to Grace’s rescue and she used the need to fill it as an excuse to leave the room. In Alistair’s office, she phoned Bernice.

‘How does she look?’ Bernice said.

‘Dug in.’

‘I’ll be right up.’

Grace feared that there might be a bit of a scene when Bernice came to round up Esther, but Bernice did it very well, bustling up with a brochure, saying she couldn’t understand the surcharges and Esther had a better brain for these things than her.

Esther unpeeled herself from Tate’s chair, but as she left she reached into her pocket and got out a long white envelope. She put it on Grace’s desk.

‘Give this to Tate,’ she said.

Grace eyed the envelope with unease and then tried to ignore it. She should get back to worrying about Felicity. She didn’t look anywhere near to throwing herself on her husband’s mercy. What to do? She was sure if she opened up her emails there would be another battalion of crap from her sisters, one step behind as usual and some way off the shores of planet normal. She ought to tell them this latest development, but her hands did not go to her keyboard.

A month ago, perhaps, she would have worked out a sensible, objective solution. Now, her head seemed too full of everything else to cut a way through. She heard the main door open and close and sensed it was Tate before he appeared. Suddenly she didn’t know how to be with him, how to act or what to say.

‘Hi,’ she tried.

‘Yeah, hi,’ he said back. He went to his chair and pushed it towards her desk, but he didn’t bring it round and bump into her this time.

‘Bit of a night last night, huh?’ he said gently. ‘I’m really sorry, you know, for the whole calling-you-out thing.’ She wondered if he was going to put his hand on her arm or touch her in some way. She sensed he wanted to and she wondered what she would do if he did.

‘Forget it,’ she said.

He was pressing his lips together as if thinking about what to say next.

‘I … I rang Gilb just now.’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘Didn’t sound so good. You heard from him?’

‘Yes. Alistair’s doing his tour. I don’t think Gilbert told him it was a hangover, so you might not want to mention it if your paths cross at any point today.’

He didn’t answer. There was still a dark red mark on his top lip. She saw him rest his elbows on the desk, lower his head to his hands and then rub them up and down his face as if he was exhausted. Had he got any sleep before work at all?

He raised his head. ‘Al’s pretty hacked off, right? You get it in the neck?’

She wanted to lean across and gently touch the red mark
on his lip. What would it feel like? What would his lips feel like? She stopped looking at his lips and looked at his eyes instead.

‘Alistair’s permanently hacked off these days. Don’t worry. I’ll … I’ll just run off a list of the clients on your tour this afternoon.’ She was operating on autopilot now, a last desperate attempt to put normality and order between the two of them.

He nodded, said ‘thanks’ and rubbed his face one more time before removing his elbows from her desk and sitting back. Was he letting her take her time? Come to him?

They both watched the sheet of names chug out of the printer and when it had stopped, he gave her one of his megawatt smiles and said, ‘Safe pair of hands, Gracie.’

She sat quietly, not knowing what to do with those hands, while he sat and studied the names on the paper, and then slowly he leaned forward. She knew this time he was going to take her hand and something about his mouth told her he was going to put it to his lips. He was going to go for it this time and if she hadn’t seen that flash of silver on his thumb just as he started to move, she would have lost it then, thrown everything up in the air and waited for lightening to strike again. But once she’d seen it, something in her brain hit reverse and she remembered the envelope on the desk.

‘This is for you,’ she said, picking it up and holding it out so that his hand collided with it.

‘Love letter?’ he said with a shy smile and took it from her.

‘It’s from Esther.’ It was as if she’d thrown a cup of cold water in his face.

‘Esther,’ he repeated. He turned the envelope over and over before ripping it open. Grace tried not to watch, but her curiosity won out.

‘Jeez, Esther,’ he said, pulling out a paper wallet. He scrunched the torn envelope up with one hand and dropped it on the desk, opening the wallet as if it might explode. He extracted what was obviously a plane ticket and made a groaning noise. The ticket went on the desk and his head went in his hands again, his fingers covering his eyes. ‘Esther, Esther, Esther,’ he was saying softly.

Grace picked up the ticket.
London Heathrow to Jorge Chávez International Airport, Lima
.

‘Oh God. She must have gone to a different travel agent’s to organise this for you.’ She put the ticket back in the wallet. It was another sign of chaos. ‘You need to talk to her. Bernice says she’s … well, she forms attachments. She’s done it before.’ He dropped his hands from his eyes and stared at her as if that were the worst news she could have given him.

‘You always known that?’ he asked.

‘Only found out yesterday.’

‘The day I told you to stop clucking over everyone like a mother hen?’ He seemed angry with himself.

‘Well, yes …’

His response was a wry, sour noise. ‘Me and my big mouth.’ When Esther had cornered him before, he had seemed younger, more vulnerable. Now he looked ancient.

‘Gotta learn to keep it shut. But hell, I don’t get it. I mean, I never did anything to make her think … I was just being friendly, waking her up a bit.’ He stared sadly at the ticket. ‘How much has she spent on this?’

He seemed to have retreated inside himself and Grace did not know what she wanted to say to him or do for him, so she stood up and hoped that just keeping busy would kick-start her brain. She finished her filing, gave reception a tidy up and then came back and put on her coat. Tate got up slowly.

‘Not gonna say “I told you so”?’

‘I’ll walk down with you. I need to lock up.’ A thousand tiny movements to stop herself putting her arms around him.

At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped. ‘I read this all wrong, loused up again. Need your help here, Gracie. You got any advice?’ He was looking towards the door of Far & Away as if it were an undertaker’s.

She wanted to put her hand on his back and say it would be all right.

‘I’d suggest asking to talk to her out here,’ she said gently. ‘That way you won’t embarrass her in front of Bernice, but Bernice will be close if you need her. Esther is bound to be upset.’ His eyes widened at that. ‘But you have to be honest, Tate. Not brutally honest, but honest enough that you don’t leave her any room to think there’s hope. Be kind, but honest.’

He nodded and before she knew it she had placed her palm on his face. ‘Be brave,’ she said and didn’t wait to see his expression. She walked very quickly away and didn’t look back.

*

After two hours at the Wallace Collection, talking about Marie Antoinette and the world of French painting but thinking about her mum and dad, about Gilbert and Esther, and most resolutely trying not to think about how Tate’s skin had felt under her hand, Grace grabbed some lunch and then went to the Shillingsworth. She glanced out into the courtyard at the strange bent-over unicorn–man figure before going to get her fill of the icon. She wished they’d put an attendant permanently in the room. Surely they could see it needed protecting?

She sat and looked at it for a while but found it hard to
meet the eyes of the mother or the baby. Hadn’t Grace promised that it would never happen again? Yet here she was poised to throw all her self-control away again. She moved nearer to the icon, hoping to draw some strength from it. If she concentrated hard enough, would she have the willpower to turn her back on Tate?

As she walked towards the entrance to meet her group, she told herself she felt more resolute, but there was a tinny, hollow sound to it.

Her group today was small – a husband and wife from Lancashire and two ladies from Scotland. They set off round the eclectic mix of paintings, Grace trying to bring some cohesion to ‘Big Ideas in Twentieth-Century Art’ but finding it hard, like wading through thick mud. Images of her mother crying and the paint on the stair carpet kept tumbling into her brain, along with pictures of Esther patting her mouth and Tate sitting quietly, listening to Violet and calling her ‘ma’am’. She jolted back to her group – at least
they
were still paying attention.

‘So, in this painting,’ she said ‘would anyone like to show us how Nash achieved such a strong sense of claustrophobia?’

‘By lying. By pretending, pretending, pretending. Walking around like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth … but look at you, look at you!’

That didn’t seem any kind of answer to Grace until she recognised the voice. Esther. Esther standing, hands balled into fists, eyes wide. ‘How … how could you, Grace? Right under my nose? He told me. You and him. Sleeping together.’

The couple from Lancashire looked at the women from Scotland and, as if in some unspoken agreement, they all moved away from Esther. Grace, on the other hand, felt as if she were frozen.
You and him. Sleeping together?

‘We were going to go to South America,’ Esther cried out and Grace came back to life and tried to go to her, talk softly to her, but she got batted away.

‘Esther, please,’ she tried, ‘come on, I know you’re upset. Let’s go and find Bernice, let’s take you outside.’

‘Go to hell, you whore!’ Esther shouted and charged out of the room.

The group watched Esther go and then turned back to Grace. She felt they expected her to say something. She wasn’t sure she could: her legs were trembling and she didn’t know if it was just adrenalin, worry about where Esther might be headed or anger, complete skull-crushing anger, about what Tate had said in his letting-Esther-down-gently-but-firmly speech. The idiot. He was an idiot – how could she have been tempted to think anything else? When she saw him next she was going to …

She stopped thinking because she could hear him. Oh God, she had his voice in her head.

‘Um,’ the man from Lancashire said, ‘do you think we could get on—’

‘Shh,’ Grace held up her finger. It was definitely Tate’s voice getting closer.

‘Now, look,’ the Lancashire accent had become more strident, but it didn’t matter; her tour group didn’t matter, because there was Tate coming into the room, his group following behind him. Of course he was. Why wouldn’t he be? This was on one of his routes. Maybe he’d even gone out of his way to come here because he knew she’d be here. To get under her skin a bit more.

He looked delighted to see her and his expression got down into her chest, but it didn’t change a thing – she was still going to kill him.

‘You complete and utter fuckwit!’ she screamed the length of the room, and she knew it was too late. However hard she tried to fight him, it didn’t matter anyway. He’d pushed her down the slide and now nothing could stop her descent. Everything was falling away from her, as she hurtled downwards without a brake.

Tate stopped smiling and his tour group stopped moving.

‘Gracie, what’s wrong?’ he said, frowning. ‘What did I do this time?’

‘Where would you like me to start?’ She was still screaming. ‘Did you think it was funny? Were you trying to create some kind of “happening”? What the hell did you tell Esther?’

‘Esther?’ he said, looking around, worried. ‘You’ve seen her? What did she say?’

‘All kinds of things,’ the man from Lancashire confirmed, tutting.

‘You all right?’ Tate said coming towards her, ‘She didn’t upset you? Hell, I better get on the phone to Bernice.’ He was hunting in the pocket of his stupid coat. ‘I thought Esther was cool about it. She seemed to take it OK.’

She got right up close to him so quickly he stopped hunting around in his pocket and seemed a bit taken aback.

‘She did not take it OK,’ Grace said, baring her teeth at him. ‘She seemed to think that you and I were sleeping together.’ Tate went a bit pink and that annoyed her even more, so she poked him hard with a finger and one of his group took a photograph of her.