Her phone told her a text had been delivered and she snatched it up, merely to find another of Zin’s poems. Lines that were meant to be uplifting had been arriving every day. This latest effort was particularly enamel-rotting:
The soul that has never loved has never lived, and heat once given forever lives on lips
.
Grace texted back:
Never mind heat forever living on lips, what about fathers forever living in flats? Got a poem to help me with that???
Grace had company at night in the office – Stacey, still on the floor. Grace believed that it was some form of self-inflicted penance. She had a perfectly good bed at home, albeit without Emma in it.
Grace studied her now, sitting in the easy chair and working through more paperwork about refunds, and wondered how she walked in those shoes. The dress was good, suited her, and she’d had a shave and put on some enthusiastic make-up. Strangely, it wasn’t the lipstick and eye shadow Grace found most disturbing; it was the wig. It was blond.
Stacey still looked like Alistair, though, even when Grace squinted at him, and she wondered whether it was important to him to feel he could pass as a woman. She decided now was not a good time to ask that question, but did offer to help Stacey with her make-up next time.
The more she saw Alistair dressed as Stacey, the less of a jolt it caused. Perhaps one day she would even be able to think about what she had on under that dress. She looked again … no, that day hadn’t yet arrived.
She watched Stacey chewing the end of her pen. It certainly took enormous courage to sit there looking exactly
how she wanted to look. She had the biggest balls Grace had ever seen in a dress.
When Stacey had finished the calculations, she passed Grace the paperwork and tottered back to her office. When Grace looked up next time, Alistair was standing there.
‘I’m going for lunch,’ he said, fiddling to do up the buttons on his shirt collar.
‘Not ready to go out as Stacey yet?’
He shook his head and said, ‘One day,’ which made her feel incredibly sad and stirred up all kinds of thoughts about people not being who they really were and trying to cram their real selves back into a box … or a locked cabinet … or even a biscuit tin.
Grace scanned the work she’d been given, correcting a lot of it, but all the figures began to blur and she put her head down on it, not caring if she smudged everything and ended up with ink all over her face. What was the point in carrying on with this controlled version of herself when Tate had reminded her there was so much more to life?
‘Neck so bad you can’t even keep your head upright any more?’ a voice asked right by her desk and she detached herself from the soggy paper and slowly sat up, even though she felt as if everything that used to be muscle might now be made of jelly. She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand and took a good look at him.
He had on his greatcoat, with the collar up, and he might just have ridden in from the range, his hair all mussed up and especially blond against the blue of the material. She remembered how his hair had brushed against her chin when he kissed her neck and it caused a laugh to try and fight its way up inside her, a kind of glad-to-be-alive, glad-to-know-him laugh. She met his gaze and the laugh turned tail and went back down her throat.
‘Got your messages,’ he said and crossed the room to sit in his chair. He wrapped the coat more tightly around himself, his hands in his pockets, and stretched out his legs. ‘I got your dad’s message too. Gonna get any from Fliss? Your sisters?’
Before he would have delivered those lines with a laugh or a grin. Now they were coming out straight. It didn’t feel like a good sign.
‘I know I’ve really hurt you,’ she said softly. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’
He nodded, a kind of thinking nod, but didn’t say anything, leaving her a big gap in which to jump and repeat all the things she’d tried to get into her messages.
‘I really, really had no idea how far Dad’s theories about you had got, Tate, please believe me. And, in no way is this an excuse, but being hit on the head, well, it didn’t improve my ability to think logically. I should have just told him
to leave you alone, but some of what he was saying seemed to make a weird kind of sense. Not the wardrobe thing. That would never have seemed anything other than mad.’
Tate had his chin down as he twisted the seat of the chair to the left and then to the right. She didn’t know if it indicated irritation.
‘And, please believe me, I had no idea that he was going to be at your flat … if I had, do you honestly think I would have let you take me there? It would have been the last place I’d go.’ She lowered her head to try to see into his eyes. ‘When you kissed me in the street, it was scary and wonderful and I didn’t want it to stop. Everything from there on was real. Me.’
He lifted his chin, but his expression was still watchful and she knew she was beginning to sound as if she was pleading. She needed to see a spark of light in those green eyes.
‘I don’t know what else I can do to make you believe me,’ she said bleakly. ‘I just want to hold you and kiss you and say I am so, so sorry for all that time I wasted being defensive and snotty.’
She felt she was losing him.
‘Please Tate, talk to me. How can I convince you it was the real me in that taxi, in that bed?’
‘Easy.’ His stare was direct and challenging. ‘You can tell
me about Bill because I sure as hell wanna slug him, but I don’t know what for.’
The word ‘Bill’ felt like another thump to her head. ‘Bill?’ she squawked and then tried in a flurry to think this through. He knew about Bill. But what did he know?
‘Yeah, Bill,’ Tate said more forcefully. ‘Bill Jackson, the painter. Is there another Bill you lived with?’
Ah, so he knew that
.
‘How … how did you find out about Bill?’
‘Had a visit from your mum and dad ’bout an hour ago and boy, have to say all bets are off about which one of them is more nuts than the other. Your dad told you his theory about Jack the Ripper? Man!’
She heard only snatches of what he was saying. Why, why had her parents suddenly decided to be interested in anyone but themselves?
Tate must have guessed she wasn’t listening because he said, ‘You in there?’
‘They told you?’
‘Yup. Your dad said he knew he’d loused things up, wanted to put it right. Fliss said you came back from Spain with a broken heart, hadn’t been the same since. Kept playing it safe – work, life. Men.’
The one time she’d have liked them to display their usual self-absorption and they’d gone and—
‘Grace.’
The hard edges of that ‘Grace’ made her panic. How should she play this? He was going to ask her to tell him everything.
‘Thing is, it was those damn signs again,’ he was saying, ‘you were sending them out, I wasn’t reading them. You looking queasy in front of Bill Jackson’s painting; all that jabbering about checks and bills before you clonked your head.’ He stopped. ‘So, you gonna tell me now or am I gonna have to tip you upside down and shake you to get it all out?’
The expression on his face showed he probably would.
‘I … this is hard …’
‘Come on, I’ve gotta hear it from you.’
‘All right, all right,’ she said, struggling to think how to get everything in a believable order. ‘Look, I met Bill when I was eighteen, just before my A-levels. I was on a school trip to a gallery. He was mooching about in there looking like a tramp, a beautiful tramp with a great shock of blond hair, these tatty blue overalls, fingers covered in silver rings.’
She saw Tate glance at the ring on his thumb and frown. It made her feel hesitant about going on, but on she went.
‘One look and it was all the clichés – like being struck by lightning, the whole world falling away, you name it.’
She glanced at him to see if he was still frowning. ‘I mean, with a mum like mine and older sisters who were already passion junkies, it was bound to happen. I was ripe for the
coup de foudre
. Ripe for starring in my own heartbreaking love story. He was the call of my wild. So … I left the gallery with him, left school, left home. Rang Mum to tell her and you’d have thought I’d just got into the best university.’
‘Great parenting.’
She loved him more for saying that and tried to put it all in a smile. He did a kind of grimacy thing back but his frown had, at least, gone.
‘Yes, some of Felicity’s finest mothering skills came into play. Practically whooped with delight when I told her we were off to Spain. I was eighteen, Bill was forty.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, we went to Spain, Bill had rented a big, slightly dilapidated villa in San Sebastián. He loved the resort: great food, great location and respectable enough for him to have something to rebel against.’ She knew Tate understood that.
She shrugged. ‘It was wonderful for about a year and a half. We’d get up late in the afternoon and I’d swim and lie in the sun while he painted. We’d smoke a bit, drink a lot, he’d paint some more, we’d go out till early morning. We got in with a good crowd – lively. They were all
nationalities – other artists, writers, musicians, a few Australians doing the Europe tour. Bill’s son lived in a flat in the town too for a couple of months. Just passing through. He was a sculptor, though not a very good one. Anyway, what more can I say? It seemed like a fairy tale – I was Bill’s lover, his muse, he couldn’t get enough of me.’
‘You can hurry this bit along,’ Tate said gruffly.
‘Even in winter it was beautiful: the beach deserted and the skies stormy and us wrapped in layers of clothes and blankets in the villa. And then suddenly it wasn’t so good. Flipped from feeling like bliss to being like barbed wire.’
She remembered the month they went from Bill reaching out while he was painting to make sure she was still there to finding a woman asleep on the sofa in his studio wearing only his coat.
Tate sat forward in his chair. ‘Stop thinking about it and get it out, Grace. Come on, the quicker you say it the easier it will be.’
She thought how young he was. How lovely to be so certain, so glib.
‘Bill started bringing other women to the villa; some I knew, and others I didn’t. If I got upset, he said I was being small-minded, bourgeois. He said I was still the one … just not the one and only.’
‘Dickhead,’ Tate said with feeling.
‘No, he was just being Bill – passionate to the point of making you feel like you were burning and then leaving you charred and broken to go off and find someone else to incinerate. I loved him
so
much; this wasn’t how my love affair was meant to go.’
She was surprised to hear herself laugh. ‘He had me wound round his little finger. Makes me sick now how grateful I used to be when he came back to me still smelling of someone else. My heart was his and he knew it.’
‘I’m not warming to Bill. How long did he dick around?’
‘Long enough to make me sick with myself, him, everything.’ She stopped talking as she tried to think how to finish her story about her and Bill because she couldn’t go on to the place their relationship had really died. If she did, he’d be up and out of his chair and gone. He wouldn’t look at her in the same way as he’d looked at her on that bed.
‘What happened in the end?’ he said.
‘I had enough,’ she said slowly. ‘We called it a day. I came home. I went to college, resumed my A-levels, got a place at Edinburgh to do History of Art, got the job with Picture London.’ She wished she’d paced that last bit better – it sounded as if she were reading from a list. Tate obviously thought so too.
‘Just like that,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘So, when did he burn the paintings?’
‘What?’
He shook his head; she could tell he was losing patience. ‘Did a bit of googling when your mum and dad had gone. Bill Jackson was in Spain for two years, and the woman in the gallery said he burned his paintings when he was in Spain. The explanation by that painting said he did it during a particularly turbulent period in his life. So I’m guessing you were either there or he did it because of you.’
‘We had an argument, he got really drunk, that’s how it happened.’
He leaned back again and studied her, and under the pressure of having those green eyes on her, all those mannerisms that showed she was lying leaked out.
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Grace,’ he said. ‘This story you’re giving me, it’s not the full one, is it? Lots of bits missing. Know how I know? ’Cos it’s nine years down the line and you’re still carrying this love affair around. See, Fliss might think that having your heart broken is enough to explain all this …’ he waved his hand at her, at the desk, at the office. ‘But I don’t buy that. This is more than a broken heart. This is something that’s left you so guarded it’s making you wall yourself up. Isn’t that the phrase? You’re hemming yourself in, brick by brick. You’re even
going around acting like an unpaid slave in a business you could run twenty times better than Al. Why is that, unless your self-confidence has taken such a kicking you can’t see how fucking brilliant you are? Or you’ve got so badly broken, you think the slightest bit of pressure’s gonna bust you apart again?’
At that moment Grace felt the two conflicting emotions of gratitude that he understood her so completely and horror that her deepest fears had been uncovered.
‘I like my job,’ she said pathetically.
He snorted. ‘Yeah? Well, that’s great. Another big lie, but hey, I’m pleased for you.’ His tone grew harsher. ‘See, if I keep getting these lies, if you won’t tell me what happened, my mind’s starting to think all kinds of things. Not just about what might have happened, but how you feel about me.’
‘Tate—’
‘You’ve already proved you didn’t trust me with your dad’s wardrobe act, but hey, I can’t blame you for jumping to conclusions. You know hardly anything about me and, well, if I didn’t exactly lie, I didn’t tell people everything – about Sergei, the flat, what I painted. But not trusting me with something from your past is different. What do you think I’m gonna do, sell it? Or are you holding yourself back ’cos you think I might be like Bill?’