The Catalyst (23 page)

‘The current was too strong, Matty ... just too strong for me.’

Her voice was merely a whisper and she knew she could never explain that epiphanal moment when the sea had taken hold of her and she had suddenly seen David’s sad face in front of her eyes. Only then had she known she did not have the right to throw away her life and the freedom he had given her at such a high price, no matter how overwhelmed by shame she felt.

In that instant she had realised she had to honour his gift of life and had tried to fight against the deadly current that had her in its grip.

Epilogue

The woman balanced delicately on one leg, her hands raised above her head, palms together, the foot of the raised leg resting at right angles against the knee of the supporting leg. There was no sound in the room beyond her own soft rhythmic breathing as she stood steadily on the polished wooden floor.

Beyond the French windows opening onto the balcony in front of her, the waters of the bay lay serene and innocent in the summer beauty of the late afternoon sun. The light reflected up from the placid surface of the sea outside to ripple on the ceiling above her and long curtains of white gauze bellied gently in the slight salt breeze that wafted into the room, but the woman saw none of this.

Her gaze was turned in on herself, intent on feeling the stretch in her muscles and only vaguely aware of the tang of the sea as she breathed. She was however much more aware of a new lightness of spirit. It had been nine months since Matthew Tregoning had foiled her halfhearted suicide attempt and now she simply felt thankful for her life ... and the two remarkable men in it.

Only now, as she finished her yoga session and picked up her towel, did she permit herself to dwell briefly on how far she had come since that time, seeing the past now as if through darkened glass, shadowy and not quite real.

She made a ritual, and by now habitual, obeisance towards the sleeping power of the sea outside the open window before flipping the towel over her shoulder and running downstairs to uncork a bottle of wine to go with the evening meal.

Jenny Lawrence had, with the help of her loyal friend Jasper Carne, but very much against his wishes, calmly turned herself in to the police. It was irrelevant to her that neither Sunny nor Jimmy had ever pressed any charges against her. She had simply pressed charges against herself having a deep conviction she needed to pay the price of her obsession.

Jasper had wanted to spirit her abroad and hide with her in a country where no one could find her, offering to give up everything to keep her safe and out of prison. It was true she had been tempted for a moment but she knew it was too much of a price for him to pay, even for a friendship as strange and deep as theirs.

Her decision had not surprised Jasper even though he could not understand it. The strange thing was that surrendering her freedom had not seemed like any sort of burden to her and it was with the same sense of natural justice having been served that she seemed to have calmly accepted her loss of sight.

There seemed to be no reason for her persistent blindness. All the tests proved there was nothing physically wrong with her eyes and their connection to the brain. The doctors believed it to be a psychosomatic disorder, some sort of self-imposed penance, the mechanism of which they still did not fully understand. The specialist’s diagnosis of ‘hysterical blindness’ however had still not been enough to keep her from jail.

The villagers of Porthcarn, of course, had their own views and were divided between scepticism and pity, with many of them uncharitably convinced she was ‘putting it on’ to shorten her jail sentence. Only Sunny, who knew what Jenny had seen and could guess at what she had endured, knew she had paid the price for her actions long before she had been sentenced to jail.

So Jasper continued to build his salvage empire in between the times he spent visiting Jenny, constantly seeking new treatments for her self-imposed blindness and appealing for a reduced sentence. And if he sometimes looked sadly into her blank eyes and wished her better he also lived with the hope that when she was released she would feel she had paid the appropriate price and allow herself to see again.

Jimmy too had realised that keeping out of Jenny’s life from now on would be in her best interests as well as his own and so she remained strangely at peace with herself.

Sunny had plucked up enough courage to say goodbye to Jimmy face to face. She knew it was the only way to sever the ties properly so she had visited him on his release from hospital. It had been a brief but emotionally draining meeting and she had fled from his farm in tears with Jimmy’s curses following her out of the door.

He had been unable to understand why she was leaving him now, after all they had been through and his anger at being unable to persuade her to change her mind had made her frightened for his sanity. He could still see nothing wrong with his treatment of Jenny and that fact alone had convinced Sunny she was doing the right thing in leaving him.

Even so, she had faced him with the unwelcome knowledge that seeing him again had brought back everything she felt for him. Now she knew more clearly than ever that she still loved him, it had not just been lust, it had not just been infatuation. The only difference now was that their relationship was tainted with blood and what seemed like a sort of madness.

It had been defiled beyond redemption by his deceit and her naivety and, for her, there was no going back. She had decided she would just have to learn to live alone with her shame but if she thought that was a simple decision she had been wrong. As the days passed after leaving Jimmy her mental agonies had increased until they became insupportable.

The sea had appeared to offer her a way out but Sunny's private attempt at penance by drowning seemed to have been rejected by Fate. What was more, it had redeemed her. At the moment of drowning, realising not just that she wanted to survive but that she desired life with a desperate intensity, she had tried to fight for it.

In that instant of recognition of her truest, purest feelings all the memories of her previous misery had crystallised and shattered and only the timely intervention of Matty Tregoning had saved her from an eternity of regret.

The baptism of the sea had given her a gift, a new way of being. It had given her another chance to deal with her guilt with courage and prove herself. Now, finally, she felt strong enough to stop running away from life and its complexities and take a stand.

Edward Hervey slammed the door shut with his foot, dropping books all over the Victorian tiles in the hallway.

‘Oh bugger! That’ll do the covers in,’ he said with a rueful chuckle, looking up at Sunny as she walked towards him, still in her yoga gear. She handed him a glass of red wine with a smile.

‘Hello, you ... dinner's in the oven and I’ll be changed in two ticks. Oh and Matty will be here shortly too, I invited him over for to eat with us. Can you listen out for him at the door?’

She picked up the books he had dropped and piled them on the old wooden settle in the hall as he sank down and sat beside them. He watched her slight figure run upstairs to change, his heart as usual, well and truly fixed on his sleeve.

So what if it wasn’t a marriage, or even a romance, he thought as he sipped his wine, it was still good to be sharing a home with her. The nightmare of the morning he had found Matty Tregoning standing on the steps of his cottage with a dripping Sunny in his arms had now well and truly begun to recede into the past.

Of course he would have liked more from her. Alone in his bed at night he knew what he hoped for but for now it really was enough that she was living here with him in a beautiful house overlooking the sea. He was content for their relationship to be what it was, he knew his emotions were safe in her keeping. He had at last learned to trust a woman again and besides which one never knew what the future might bring.

It had been a struggle for Jimmy to accept Sunny's decision to leave him, and an even bigger struggle not to give in to the temptation to seek her out and 'accidentally' bump into her in the town. Eventually he felt he could no longer bear the thought he might meet her in the street and she would pass him by as though he was merely a stranger. He had never quite been able to forget his dream of her looking coldly at him and had no wish to see it become a reality.

So he had left the farm on the cliff top, left the place he had loved above all others for so long and gone to live abroad. His home was now a low, white-walled villa on a Mediterranean island where, having lost one of the passions of his life, he continued to lose himself in the other. He could admit quite openly to himself that he used his obsession with his work as the only effective antidote to his anguish.

The irony that this new life had been funded by the sale of ‘Dancer’ had not been lost on him. He had found he could no longer look at the painting without almost unendurable memories of Sunny surfacing so, in one of his moments of resentful anger, he had put it in a gallery in London and it had sold before he had had time to change his mind.

He decided he was glad to have it gone, out of his life, and he resolutely gave no thought to who might have bought it. So when the payment cheque came with the name of the purchaser at the bottom of the paperwork, he had thrown it onto the kitchen table with all the other pieces of paper that were collecting there. It was just another annoying piece of paper to add to the pile.

The accompanying cheque however was substantial and he had swiftly deposited it in the bank knowing it would help to keep him afloat for a while, but he could not allow himself the luxury of feeling the pleasure that selling a painting usually gave him. So he simply tried to forget about it, to forget about his once-special painting, the best work he had ever done in his life.

Each day, just after dawn, he had continued to throw on his paint-spattered work clothes and, with a mug of coffee in one hand and his habitual roll-up in the other, had drifted off to his studio to work until mid-afternoon, stopping only when the pangs of hunger became too insistent to ignore. The finished paintings had stacked up against the studio walls until he could hardly walk between them. Or at least they did until the arrival of the purchaser of ‘Dancer’ who was about to become an avid, and influential, collector of his work.

It was a face Sunny had never expected to see on the television. The unexpectedness of it gave her heart an unexpected spasm and she was thankful Edward was not there to see her reaction. He’s thinner, she thought, too thin, but the wolfish grin was just the same as he answered the questions the female interviewer asked him.

The eye patch suited him, it gave him an air of menace, of mystery, with nobody in the art world knowing whether it was an affectation or not. The interviewer was noticeably wary of him. As the latest ‘enfant terrible’ of the art world Jimmy Fisher was known to have a reputation for being sharp and unpredictable and not easy to interview.

His left eye gleamed with a secret, cynical mischief as he looked towards the glossy young woman who was asking him about his work and Sunny was relieved to see that although he was thinner he looked well and seemingly at ease with his new lifestyle.

In truth, it was something more than ease and she could see he was genuinely enjoying the attention in his usual, mocking way. Watching him as he led the girl into making increasingly confused and pretentious comments, she wondered if he really was the same old Jimmy. Could he have changed? She had no way of knowing for sure. Could he still, with one of his cruel and satirical comments, utterly crush the ego of the breathless young woman opposite him?

She found herself willing him not to be unkind to the girl, not to walk out of the interview on some artistic caprice or to make some obscure point. Kneeling in front of the television and putting her fingers against the screen, she absorbed every contour of his face, only gradually becoming aware he was talking about the painting of her, talking about ‘Dancer’.

‘Yes, Hermione, that is true … it did all start with ‘Dancer’. Having that piece achieve the sort of recognition it did, did kick-start my career. Twenty-five years of blood, sweat and tears and I become an overnight success.’

Hermione smiled politely, not quite catching the joke and waiting for him to say more. Suddenly he was serious, letting his smile fade, deliberately allowing the mask of flippancy to slip and his vulnerability to show.

‘When I painted ‘Dancer’ I, like many painters of beautiful women, was in love with my subject. Perhaps that was what showed, perhaps that’s what made it special.’

‘So, will we ever know who the subject of ‘Dancer’ is?’ the girl asked with a coy smile.

‘No, no one will ever know who she is. She would not want that.’ His answer was blunt, uncompromising. ‘It is enough for me to know she exists somewhere in the world ... and I would hope she knows I still love her ... ’

His words were spoken straight to camera, straight to Sunny, as if he knew she was watching him, as if they were the only two people in the world. The interviewer smiled with relief, knowing further questions were unnecessary, he had given her the perfect sound bite on which to end the interview.

Sunny watched as Jimmy’s face faded from view, smiling at his final audacity as the closing credits raced up the screen. She had loved him, did still love him, but she knew now he had never really been a suitable man for the sort of love that lasts a lifetime. Now, at last, she knew herself to finally be at peace.

She rose and went to find Edward, suddenly eager for his company.