Playing Grace (42 page)

She didn’t know what he was doing talking about fish – it was casserole tonight. He was always trying to change the nights they had things. She left him putting the arm cap straight while she made a pot of tea. When she came back he was still looking sad, so she told him about Tate’s visit.

‘He said he was very pleased that you love me and I love you, Gilbert.’ She would have liked to laugh then, because Gilbert gave her one of the looks he used when he thought she hadn’t been able to undo the top on her pill bottle. ‘And he said love comes in all different shapes and sizes.
I think he might have been drinking before he popped round.’

Gilbert nodded and frowned while he drank his tea and then he was burbling on about love too. ‘It does, it does,’ he said, ‘comes in all different shapes and sizes. And it stretches.’

She had to ask him to repeat that last bit because she felt they’d veered into talking about elastic bands.

‘It means,’ Gilbert had said, playing with that blessed arm cap again, ‘that you can love one person and then if another one comes along who you want to love, that’s all right, because there’s enough love to go around. It stretches, doesn’t have to be rationed out.’

She wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about now, and didn’t know why he had to peer at her like that as if she had something on her face. She went and checked in the mirror and when she came back he was still peering at her.

‘Do you want to tell me something, Gilbert?’ she had asked, but he said he didn’t; he just wanted her to try and remember what he’d said about love stretching and not having to be rationed.

She said she would and got a piece of paper off the bookshelf and wrote it down. That seemed to really cheer him up and they had a good old evening after that. Cluedo. Twice.

CHAPTER
34

Grace watched the gay man in traditional tweeds and the heterosexual man in a dress playing chess and doubted whether her next place of work would be as interesting. A few more days and Picture London would be mothballed.

Alistair was flying out to see Emma in Italy; there had been hours of phone conversations and the signs were, if not good, then promising. But they needed time to talk, away from the pressures of the business.

Gilbert was fulfilling the last of their tours because Alistair said it was important to maintain the goodwill attached to the Picture London name, for when it reopened. He hadn’t pressed Grace to help Gilbert out and she’d been grateful for that. From next week she was finished with art – she was moving forward to history (if that was chronologically possible) thanks to Gilbert. He’d alerted her to a management job at Capital H for History, a company that had a baffling love of puns but a full programme of tours
and thus a constant need for someone with Grace’s organisational skills. It was full-time and meant a proper wage and an office of her own.

Grace picked up her mobile and checked it again as she’d been obsessively checking it since Tate had left her. Nothing from him, and anything else she was ignoring. Except she had read the short text Emma had sent which suggested that, in their relationship at least, she had been forgiven for holding on to a secret. All the same, she knew it would be some time before Emma’s life resumed any of its old habits, including pizza with friends. As Emma had so succinctly signed off:
other wman = hsbnd
.

She saw that Stacey was trying to get her attention without Gilbert noticing. Her look clearly said
help
because there was a pile of her black knights, bishops and rooks by Gilbert’s elbow.

‘Queen to e 4,’ she mouthed and Gilbert said, ‘Stop it, Grace, and …’ He tapped Stacey’s hand as she went to move the queen: ‘Stop it, Stacey.’

It was a friendly tap because Gilbert got on better with Stacey than he ever had with Alistair. Gilbert said there was much less of that
Monarch of the Glen
posturing from Stacey, plus she had better taste in shoes.

Grace carried on putting files into storage boxes and shredding anything that didn’t need to be kept. When, or
if, Picture London ever got going again, it would be somewhere else. Alistair was giving up the lease, cutting more ties with the past.

Gilbert finished trouncing Stacey and came to help Grace with some files. ‘Nice that we’ll still be seeing each other,’ he said, ‘even though I suspect I’ll have to keep touching my forelock when we meet. Do you get an armband showing your title?’

‘I will make one myself.’

‘You probably would. But they’re not a bad bunch there, although maybe not as colourful as here.’ He arched an eyebrow and they both looked across at Stacey, who was tidying away the chess pieces.

‘I’m looking forward to the change,’ she said. She welcomed the certainty of history with its secure dates and unchangeable facts and she need never look at another painting again. Slightly ironic that she was happy to look at other people’s history and not her own.

When she had gone for the interview she had not expected to get the job. When she got it, she thought she would panic at the prospect of all that extra responsibility and turn it down, but in a moment of rare clarity she realised that she was being asked to do much less than at Picture London for a fair bit more money. There even appeared to be a personal assistant called Heather, who cheerfully said
she did all the ‘odds and sods’ nobody else wanted to do.

Gilbert was looking at her. ‘He hasn’t gone yet, you know,’ he whispered. ‘There is still time.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just.’

‘We’re trashing that file,’ she replied, trying to take a green lever arch one out of his hand.

Gilbert wasn’t giving up the file. ‘Grace, stop being so stubborn and go and talk to him.’ They had a tussle over a piece of office stationery because it was more socially acceptable to fight over that than for Gilbert to put her in an arm lock to make her see sense and for her to slap him so that he would leave her alone.

‘Oh, keep it then,’ she said, letting go. ‘And don’t nag, I’ve stabilised.’

‘If stabilised means you appear to be eating and drinking fresh air and Stacey has a slightly better grip on grooming and make-up than you do—’

‘I’m cleaning out the office, Gilbert. I’m dressing down. Don’t make me out to be—’

‘Functioning on the surface, but underneath falling apart?’ Gilbert said archly, pursing his lips. ‘Well, I think stability is highly overrated, particularly in this case – standing firm is just plain wrong, Grace. Tate believed your innocence about all that wardrobe stuff so I can’t see what else is stopping you two getting together.’

‘Things, Gilbert. Things.’ She waved away what might have been another attempt to interrupt. ‘I have a new career to look forward to, and please, I don’t harangue you about … people at the National Gallery who I think might—’

Gilbert had his hand up now. With the other one he gave her the file. He looked a bit heated. ‘All right, all right. But the two things are not the same. I’ve been burned once
and
there’s Violet.’

She didn’t want to talk about burning. She just had to get through today, then Tate would be gone and things would return to how they were. Whenever she thought about being brave and telling Tate everything, she felt sick, clenched in on herself. Then guilt and shame surfaced and she realised it was hopeless. She would never forgive herself so how could he be expected to forgive her? She couldn’t stand to have him look at her with disgust. It was a simple choice in the end – she could lose him when he went to France, or right now by coming clean. On balance, letting him go was better.

‘Here,’ Gilbert said, giving her a handkerchief.

She tried to concentrate on the positives. She already had her flat back – breaking down at regular intervals had shifted her father where logical argument had failed. Whether he was talking to her mother, or she to him, she didn’t know. She was having a rest from family for a while,
particularly the dramatic, crime-obsessed ones and those inclined towards poetry.

At lunchtime she went out into London, a drizzly, sky-bearing-down-on-the-tops-of-buildings place today, and walked to Green Park. Most of the trees were bare and the leaves on the ground were like litter – too many feet had kicked through them, too much damp and grime seeped into them. She did a rough circle of the park and thought of Tate. Always thinking about him and sometimes thinking about Mark and wondering if she had been wrong – perhaps she could go back to what they had? Mark didn’t want all of her like Tate did. She could live with him all her life and he wouldn’t ask her those difficult questions.

She dropped in to see Bernice on the way back. Sol was just putting on his coat; it was one of his days for helping now Esther was taking it easy.

‘Cheese and chutney?’ he said to Bernice who was on the phone and she gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Anything for you, Grace?’ he called over his shoulder on the way out.

She waited for Bernice to finish talking and because she couldn’t bear to look at the brochure for the USA lying on the desk, covered it up with one for the Caribbean.

With Bernice off the phone they talked about Alistair, Bernice fishing for the reason why he was taking a break
and Grace evading the nets and hooks without giving anything away. No change there then.

‘I’ve seen you looking better,’ Bernice said when Alistair had been exhausted as a topic of conversation. ‘Sure you did the right thing?’

Under an earlier interrogation, almost as probing as the ones Grace had endured from her father, she had admitted to Bernice that she and Tate had had a fling, but that she had decided not to take it any further. This was true in a way.

‘I’m not sure of anything,’ she said truthfully, ‘except that the kind of life Tate will be leading doesn’t work for me. I need more stability, a settled routine. With someone like Tate I’d start off drifting and end up falling. You’re really lucky, Bernice; I look at you and Sol and think what a good team you make … both pulling in the same direction, wanting the same things. You’re working so hard together to build something solid – the business, your house, your marriage. Lovely to have found someone dependable who’s completely on your wavelength.’

Bernice had been holding a magazine in her hands, idly flicking through it as Grace talked and suddenly, in one swift movement, she hurled it towards the wall, where it fell in a swirl of spine and pages.

‘You think?’ she said in a dull, dead voice.

Grace stared at the magazine, not really sure what was happening here.

‘You think?’ Bernice said again, almost aggressively. ‘How about I tell you then that I have no idea what I’m going to do when the garden is finished. That’ll be everything exhausted. House done, garden done, nothing else to hide behind.’ Bernice’s eyes were black, shiny. She flung her hands up. ‘I suppose I’ll have to move again then, won’t I? My whole life I’ll be doing up houses and moving on. Till. I. Die.’

‘I thought …’ Grace didn’t know what she thought and was frantically trying to read Bernice. ‘Doing up the house,’ she tried again, ‘I always thought it was a labour of love. And that, you know, next thing, maybe would be …’

Grace was building up to saying
a family
when Bernice snapped, ‘That bloody house is the only thing we’ve got in common.’ She put one of her elbows on the desk and the hand of that arm was balled in a fist. She was tapping her mouth with it, which reminded Grace of Esther. It was as though she was trying to stop anything else escaping. It didn’t work.

‘He’s lovely, Sol, don’t get me wrong, Grace, but God, I should have lived with him longer before I got married. You get swept along, don’t you? People asking you when you’re going to set a date, all that. And then it’s like the whole of my family is marrying into the whole of his
– know what I mean? One big happy family. Before you can blink it’s all signed and sealed. Organising the wedding, doing the house up gave us plenty to talk about, which was good, otherwise there would have been a great big yawning silence. Curtain poles, hand-blocked wallpaper, hard landscaping – I tell you, Grace, I’ve been clinging on to them for dear life.’

Grace felt punch-drunk, as if there was too much information that she had to revisit and re-evaluate in the light of what Bernice was saying. Just as she’d had to revisit Alistair’s behaviour.

‘But … but …’ she said, aware she was sounding like a faulty motor scooter.

Bernice sat back, shook her head. ‘Know what makes it harder, Grace? He has no inkling of how I feel. Worships me, loves what we’ve got. So what do I do to put this right, when he’s done nothing wrong?’

‘Bernice, I had no idea. I’m really sorry.’ Grace would have tried to pat Bernice’s hand or even put an arm around her but she looked volatile, like she might swat her away as Esther had done.

Bernice got up and retrieved the magazine, before chucking it again, this time on to Esther’s desk. ‘He’ll be back soon,’ she said, ‘I better get on.’ Just for a second she caught Grace’s eye and Grace saw despair.

Bernice sat back down and hung her head but when Grace tentatively touched her on the shoulder, she said, ‘No, don’t. Don’t be kind. Just keep an eye on the door.’