Looking Down (17 page)

‘On less intimate knowledge of them, I agree. But there’s an
absence of any other theories. And this peculiar lack of identification – no shoes, no bag, as if everything had been removed from her. Maybe a fight before she went over; maybe a deliberate depersonalising, as if it was important that no one should ever know who she was.’

He paused again, feeling her rapt attention spurring him on.

‘It’s that which haunts me, you see. Everyone has something that says who they are. I can’t bear her to be buried without a name. She sort of brought
me
to life, poor girl. And I
know
there must have been something. And I have this feeling that Richard knows, or he saw something he may have forgotten.’

She was silent, horribly moved, against her will. So much for the peaceful life.

‘Was she injured before she fell?’

‘Difficult to say. She was, how shall I put it?, rather broken up, but there might have been a pre-mortem wound to the abdomen. Not enough to kill her. I’ve seen mortuary photos. They couldn’t do them at the scene.’

He rubbed his hands over his eyes.

‘That’s the puzzle and pity of it; nothing to identify her. Thus no one to avenge her, no one to mourn her or tell her father. I found myself carrying a copy of Richard’s sketch of the body, and I found him again, haunting the same spot, because I wanted to ask him what more he had seen. And, of course, I wondered why he came back. And I wanted to protect him, because the ice chip melts, you know, and he was shocked and someone had hit him. He had told me he was going to make a painting of the sketch, that’s the way he works. He was the one who studied her. Maybe there was a necklace, maybe there was something. Something he saw. She moved me because she was like my daughter with her bleach-blonde hair.’

Their arms were touching. Sarah had become very still.

‘Stay where you are. I want to show you something. No, come with me. We need the right kind of light.’

She lit the painting as she had before, in the east-facing, always shaded living room of her flat. There was a shortage of natural light in all the apartments except for the one at the top. She had noticed how the painting faded into garish insignificance in such ordinary light, and then transformed itself into something entirely different and horribly decipherable when strong light was played upon it from above.

‘Is this familiar?’ Sarah asked. ‘Is he looking
down
at her?’

‘Yes, obviously. I wish he didn’t use so much paint,’ John said.

‘Do you? I like all that paint, I’ve decided. Although I want to pick it off, and see what’s underneath. See what he intended, supposing he knew.’

John walked backwards away from the thing, then towards it, suddenly excited.

‘That’s her, all right. I can see the sketch, but it’s not like the sketch. Look, he’s looking down, but out of it. And the body’s not in proportion, like he’s magnifying what mesmerises. The head’s too big; she has no eyes. Tiny feet and huge, ripped-up torso. And there’s something round her neck . . . yes!’

‘So there is. Yellow, or is it white? And did he imagine the black bra and knickers? A slight, pornographic touch?’

‘Oh no, they were there, and why is there always something suggestive about black underwear? Because men like it best?’

‘What’s this?’

She was pointing to the right of the bloody corpse, to where almost backing out of the painting bottom right there was a large, roughly elongated, circular blob of sheer black with a spume of red emerging from it.

‘That’s his chough,’ John said. ‘He swore blind he’d seen a chough.’

‘The black bird with the red beak?’

‘Yes. Spelt C.H.O.U.G.H.’

‘Could he have seen such a thing?’

‘No, but he was sure he did.’

‘And the other black bits?’

There was so much black and red, the more she looked the more they were submerged. Into a ghastly, eyeless turmoil. She leant forward, still holding the light. In what she took to be sky above the corpse there were black, winged creatures, obscured by the bits of lint from the towel that stuck to the raised surface. The paint was pointed here, even thicker than elsewhere, blunted by mistreatment.

‘The texture’s like cake icing,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’m surprised you do.’

They were making light of it.

‘I don’t, but my mother did. What are the black things?’

He did his backward, forward routine, almost dancing. Nimble on his feet, she noticed. A fine man, hardly in touch with his own intelligence. Discovering spontaneity. The phone rang. She left him holding the spotlight to go out into the hallway to answer it.

‘We can ask Richard,’ John was saying. ‘All we have to do is ask Richard. Where did that thing round her neck
go?
’

Then he stopped, hand on mouth, moving closer, looking again.

Distorted abdomen, slashed. Black blobs of paint, oh no.

‘We must ask Richard,’ he repeated as she came back.

‘He wants to speak to you. I said you’d phone back, in a minute.’

She sat, very firmly, on her sofa, looking small in it, and lost. His eyes were dizzied with the savage colours of the painting. She was another mix of colours altogether, passionately calm.

‘You cannot ask Richard. You absolutely must not ask Richard. And I’ll tell you why.’

‘Don’t be silly, Sarah. I must.’

‘Yes, you must, but not yet. You cannot ask Richard, because my brother stole this painting from him the night before last, with the connivance of Richard’s wife. And he can’t be told that, can he?’

She told him not why, but how, and odd though it sounded, he believed every word of it. After all, there was no other logical explanation for this painting to be in this flat. It all made sense, once he got to grips with the fact that everything in this alternative world was screwed. Nothing was going to shock him ever again. It made sense to him, because nothing made sense; it made sense because loyalty to a brother was second nature, and it made most sense of all because he could entirely see why a wife would do anything at all to get this painting out of her house. The story ended.

‘That’s it, as far as I know,’ Sarah finished.

‘Hmmm. See what you mean. Better put it away then. Until we find some way of getting it back. Put it out of sight. What does Richard want, anyway?’

‘He wants to know if his cunning plan to get us together and sort your head out worked. Which I think it did, if you don’t mind my saying so, do you agree?’

He nodded. She grinned. He grinned back. ‘It’s been great,’ he said. ‘It’s great to be trusted, you know.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s free. And a pleasure. You could call it an unrest cure. You’ve entered the world of amoral eccentrics. Oh, and by the way, Richard says he’s sick of female company already and wants the male kind. He’s anxious to spirit you off somewhere. I think you’d better go.’

‘Can I come back?’

‘Oh yes. We’ve unfinished business. As long as you don’t tell Richard you know where his painting is.’

‘Yes, I can see why I can’t do that. But I think I need it, this painting.’

‘Take it, then. Not now, later. I’ll wrap it and leave it behind the porter’s desk. You can collect it. Better with you than with me. I’ve got your number and you’ve got mine, so come back soon, friend, I like you. Richard’s flat is one flight up, number fourteen. Keep your face straight when you see the wife.’

The flat was empty and still clean. Sarah showered and went back to look at the painting. She chose her clothes carefully, and went back to look at the painting. Retreated, brushed her teeth again, and went back to look at the painting, falling prey to an old habit of counting on her fingers. Then she made the third cup of coffee and sat with it in front of the painting. Finally, she found it moved her to tears, so she got up, fetched a handkerchief, told herself to be sensible and then sat, staring at it again. Then picked it up and carefully removed the traces of lint that still adhered to the surface. It was not
zing;
it was pity. Admiration for the sheer effort of it, which moved her. The hours it had taken, the use of all that paint. The uncertainty of it: the artist not sure what to include or omit, altering and maybe ruining it as he went along, risking the advantages and disadvantages of rich oil paint. The things he had included out of his imagination, because they could not possibly have been there. The red beak of the bird in the corner, as if it had risen beyond what else he could see, level with his eye. The disproportion of the body, as if he had tried to bring parts of that dreadful anatomy closer. Did he remember details he could only have seen through binoculars? Details he could never have seen from this distance? The necklace, a line of yellowish white . . . could that hold the clue to identity? And finally, the corpse itself and the overwhelming pity of its isolation. The reminder of dying in terror and misery, never to be acknowledged or mourned, no time to think of someone, somewhere, waiting for this child to come home.

Who would look for me? Sarah asked herself. All the lovers? I don’t think so. I sidle in and out of other lives. I don’t belong. Nor did she. I owe her something. I have a trivial, lucky, feckless life. John cannot be the only one who owes her something.

She looked one more time at the blacks and reds and wondered who the girl was. A younger alter ego, dying in terror. An awful memory of the twice in her own life when she had known that terror, and lived. Then she wrapped the painting in brown paper, attached a label with the doctor’s name.

Don’t want to get involved. Don’t want anyone else’s pain. Want a quiet life.

It was too late. She had seen what she had seen, heard what she had heard, and it was too late to back away, although she tried. Brush hair. Go out. Find noise, find people, get these images into proportion. Down in the foyer, Fritz sat at his desk. She had the impression he was waiting for something and she hoped it was not her, since she was not in the mood for mournful Fritz, who looked as if he, too, might have been crying. But he waved, and once she was reluctantly within earshot of his whisper, she could see that the guess was right.

‘Hi, Fritz, how are you?’

‘Oh, Sarah, what are we to do? What are we to do?’ She immediately thought he was going to say he knew all about Steven, braced herself.

‘What are we to do, Sarah? Minty’s back.’

‘Minty?’

‘Either Minty’s back, Sarah, or they’ve got another one locked in there.’ Shit, shit,
shit.
She handed to Fritz the picture of a dead girl, which could have been her, could have been Minty. And knew that a long and happy spell of not
quite
getting involved in other people’s lives had finally gone down the pan.

‘So tell me about it,’ she said, ‘before I remember I don’t want to know.’

She felt profound relief. If Minty was back, then Minty could not be the girl in the painting, led to her death by a lecherous artist.

When Dr John Armstrong got back to his house late in the evening, he was tired in the pleasant way of being tired, which meant pleased to feel that way. Still buzzing with images, novel interiors and beautiful women, and still full of food from the afternoon meal with Richard. John had eaten ravenously, perhaps, he thought wryly, because the evening before with Sarah had not featured much by way of food. The late luncheon had been fish and chips and John took it as a return to the health of optimism that he should suddenly think about food at all; he had got out of the way of that. Depression suppressed appetite; uncertainty suppressed everything else. For God’s sake, eat, man, and all else follows was a mantra he often repeated to patients. He was humming to himself a ditty he had repeated to Richard who, ready to laugh, had done so.

Always eat when you are hungry/Always drink when you are dry/Always scratch when you are itchy/Don’t stop breathing or you’ll die.

An adequate philosophy. What a day, what a two-day wonder. Alive, all over again. He had made friends and made love.

John even quite liked the sight of his own house, a nice contrast to the grandeur of the Beaumont abode. He could not live in that size flat, with that great, long corridor, even with the Beaumont wife he had met so briefly and found sulky. In fact, it would not do to live in any flat, or even a city, or at least not all the time. And Sarah, oh Sarah: he was tingling.

The thirty hours away added perspective to the view of his small and over-cosy dwelling, with neutral walls and excessive tidiness. Plain colours, hardly a pattern in sight, as neutral as a surgery. Now whose idea had that been? He had never really thought about his own house before. The decisions had always been someone else’s, wherever and however he had lived since memory began. There were no paintings on the walls. The place was only distinguished by its garden. A bland house, the symptom of the marriage he had mourned because he could not make her happy. He felt as if he had entered a decompression chamber in the last few days and now he was free. He had even learned deceit.

The only tricky bit of the day had been not mentioning
painting
to Richard, either as subject or object, but that, in retrospect, had been avoided because Richard had avoided it, too. He had been anxious to shuffle him out of the place where his pictures were. Then, in a way that reminded John of two boys let out of school, they had gone down to the river as sightseers, hopped on the London Eye, with Richard pointing out the sights, yelling
Isn’t it bloody marvellous?
and John agreeing. Yes, he tingled, but he was glad to be home. The second tricky bit was saying goodbye to Richard, who was going on somewhere else, and then, guiltily, going back himself to the block where Richard and Sarah lived in their disparate styles, picking up the brown-paper parcel which contained the painting from the gloomy man at the desk, who handed it to him as if it was contagion. Which it was, in its way. John postponed thinking about it, having carried it back as
precious cargo. Then he thought of Sarah Fortune with downright affection and looked forward to seeing her again. For the moment he strolled around his own house as if he had been away for weeks, noticing how blasted ordinary it was, preserved as his wife had made it. Whisky in hand (this was getting to be an excellent habit), he looked at beige walls and imagined them in reds and blues with hot paintings, emerald-green blinds and useless ornaments. A dour but faultless leather three-piece suite glared at him sullenly. He wanted clutter and colour. He was already starting to imagine it that way. He would make it something uncompromising, vivid, make a virtue of living alone and throw open the doors.