Consequences (32 page)

“
People
wipe things. In their heads, I mean.”

“That’s shrink stuff. I don’t go near those guys.”

“Nor me,” says Ruth. “I mean all the times that just vanish. Who remembers being four, or six, or even sixteen?”

“Sixteen is easy. First time with a girl. No one forgets that.”

“Well, yes. Dramatic survivals—equivalent of the Venetian doorway. But what about everything that goes down the plug?”

“Ruth, this is getting heavy. I thought I’d got you off this stuff?

Relax.”

She smiles. “You have. And I am. I’m enjoying myself, which isn’t what I expected to do on this trip. It’s not what I’m supposed to do.”

“Nor me,” says Al. “But you never do know what will turn up in the course of work.” And he gives her that large, quizzical, assessing grin.

They walk slowly back to the car. They pause to watch the long ribbons of light on the water of the harbor; they discuss whether that black ripple could possibly be a dolphin. “Probably not,” says Al. “They’re all but done for, the fishermen net them.”

“I insist that it is,” says Ruth—“another survival.”

“Then specially for you, ma’am,” says Al. “That is a dolphin. Something to tell your kids—they’ll want to know about this trip.”

“Some of it,” says Ruth.

“They miss you?”

“Hard to tell,” says Ruth. “They have their own agenda. And three days isn’t long.”

Except that it is, she thinks. These three days have had their own dimension—time out, time suspended, time confused.

They reach the car, get in. The coast road, once more. Not much is said. Al is humming the Greek song that had been played in the restaurant. Ruth glances sideways at him. This is a man who cruises through life with his hands in his pockets. How do you get like that?

Back at the hotel, he parks the car in the forecourt and they walk past the main building to the hinterland of bungalows. They are going to arrive first at Al’s, Ruth realizes. I knew this would happen, she thinks. I knew it.

He stops, and stands looking at her. “Well,” he says. “I guess we’re home.” And then he lays the back of his hand against her cheek for a moment. “So…How about it, Ruth?”

She cannot move. Or speak.

He takes her arm, guides her gently to the door, and then inside. He switches lights on, pulls down the blinds, and then, somehow, they are in the bedroom.

He sets about undressing her—kindly, efficiently, unzipping her skirt so that it slides down her legs, lifting her T-shirt (and she raises her arms obediently, like a child), undoing her bra.

“That’s the girl,” he says. Then he draws back for a moment, frowning. “So long as you’re sure you want this?”

She stands there, in her pants—helpless, hopeless. “I’m afraid I do,” she says.

“Who’s to be afraid? This’ll be good.”

And it is. She is astonished. She has never before had sex with a man she knows she will not see again. She is amazed at how easy it is, in the event, how—well, how unembarrassing, how inevitable. The process is familiar—oh dear me, yes—but is also radically different. His stranger’s body; her own unanticipated responses. At one point, she thinks fleetingly of Peter; it is like remembering some old home when you are in foreign territory. Al’s love-making is in tune with the rest of him—companionable, frank, purposeful. The idea is satisfaction all round, and that is achieved. But afterwards, lying there beside him, Ruth thinks: what’s missing? Something crucial, but it doesn’t have a name. Not love—that would be too obvious.

It is past one when she makes her way back to her own bungalow. “Stay,” Al had said, but she declined. She must leave for the airport at eight. “Okay—makes sense,” he says. At the door, he gives her a hug. “You’re a great girl, Ruth. Keep in touch. Take care.”

She opens her door, and sees at once the red light flashing on the phone. She picks it up. Please come to the hotel reception—there is an urgent fax for her.

She runs, her heart thumping. Something has happened. Something has happened to one of the children.

And, indeed, something has happened. But not to the children. It is Molly.

Part 8

JESS HAS HAD HER EARS PIERCED.
Without permission. She has taken herself off to Oxford Street, with her savings and two friends, and there the three of them have done the deed. She stands now in front of Ruth with pink ears, little gold studs, and an expression of distressed defiance: “You said I could when I’m fourteen. So what’s the difference?”

“Ten months’ difference,” says Ruth. “And you should have
asked.
”

Tom is looking at the ears with interest. “They’re all puffed up. Can I see the holes?”

Jess bursts into tears.

Ten minutes later, emotional order has been restored. Jess is texting an outer circle of friends to report on her rite of passage; Tom, bored with the fuss, has withdrawn to engage with his Game Boy; Ruth has conceded tacitly that there is not much point in trying to counter the tide of peer pressure. She reminds Jess that they have company for supper, shortly. Sam is in town for some poetic commitment, and she has invited Simon and Tim to join them.

“Be thankful it wasn’t her belly button,” says Simon. The children have gone to watch television; the four adults sit around Ruth’s kitchen table. Throughout the evening, as always now, there has been a void in their midst, that keen abiding absence; they are broken-backed, but carry on. This, now, is the family.

“Or a tattoo,” suggests Tim.

Ruth sighs, then laughs. “To think this is just the
start
of adolescence. Was I like that?”

“Of course,” Simon tells her. “I recall door slamming and funereal silences.”

Ruth looks at Sam.

“By the time I came along you were a mellow seventeen. Entirely reasonable. Or nearly so.”

Sam today, in this new age, is himself, yet at the same time he is someone different, as though loss had stripped him of some aspect of personality. He is more silent, more withdrawn; he is thinner, he has honed an interest in bird-watching, and goes on long solitary forays to uncomfortable places.

“The thing now,” says Simon, “is that teenage is a status. It’s a social category, and they are well aware of that. In my day—or Tim’s—it was seen as an apprenticeship. We knew our place.”

Tim recalls that his parents imposed an eight o’clock curfew, which rose to ten when you were eighteen.

“Interesting idea,” says Ruth. “I can’t see it catching on these days. Oh well—the next few years are going to be challenging, that’s clear.” She turns to Sam. “That envelope you forwarded…”

“Ah,” says Sam. “‘For Molly Faraday or other connection of artist Matt Faraday.’ I hoped it wasn’t some belated creditor.”

“No way.” Ruth gets up and goes to the dresser. “Look.” She lays on the table some photographs and a letter.

Sam inspects the photographs. “It’s…they’re wood blocks, aren’t they? For engraving?”

“Right.”

Simon is reading the letter. “This chap thinks they are Matt’s. And he lives in that cottage.”

“He does and they are,” says Ruth. “I asked Max and he said definitely. But I knew anyway. This Brian Clyde found them in a box in a shed. And there’s some sort of maquette, apparently.”

“However did he trace you? Or Moll, rather.” asks Simon.

“He sent the photos to the Society of Wood Engravers, and they got someone to identify them. And then he seems to have done some clever detective work. He’s suggesting I visit, so he can hand over the blocks and the other thing.”

“You must.”

“Oh, I shall. Though goodness knows when I’ll fit it in.”

“Business brisk in retail art?”

“Business is never
brisk
in a gallery. We’re more genteel than that. One transaction a day is thought quite good going. I have suggested a summer sale, but Max considers this vulgar.”

“Quite right too,” says Simon. “Someone has to maintain standards. We independent bookshops try to do our bit. No three for twos, no promotions, and no doubt we shall all go to the wall in due course. You should have diversified into merchant banking, Ruth, or share trading—whatever it’s called. Not some fossilized area of commerce.”

“I doubt if that was ever an option, given my credentials.”

“We must rest our hopes in Jess and Tom. Mind you keep them well away from any sort of creative activity.”

Sam grins. “Make sure they learn a trade. Plumbing’s the thing, I’d say.”

“Tom might do well there. He’s been digging up what passes for our garden to make a fish pond. With fountain. Anyone like more coffee?”

Simon and Tim leave. Sam, who is staying the night, helps Ruth to clear up. The children have gone to bed.

“I’ve forgotten why you’re here,” says Ruth. “Apart from to see us.”

“A reading on the South Bank.” Sam pulls a face. “Time I hung up my clogs, where that sort of thing is concerned.”

“Nonsense. You’d fester. Nothing but cars and birds.”

“Festering has its appeal.”

“Mum would say…” Ruth begins.

“Oh, I know what she would say. She says it frequently. And I say—I hear you, my love. And sometimes I obey and sometimes I don’t.”

Ruth smiles and nods. “Me too.” And they both listen to her voice, see her face, as they stand there in Ruth’s kitchen amid the debris of the meal.

Sam shakes his head, and picks up the butter. “This go in the fridge?”

The present flat was somewhat larger than the old one, and had this garden of brickbats and cat shit on which Tom had designs. Peter, his wife, Marta, and their two-year-old daughter had moved to a house in a neighboring postcode, which involved some shunting to and fro, though the children now spent rather less time with their father.

Ruth also made postcode transits, but hers had a wider significance, when she moved twice a week from the upland suburbia of north London to the city thicket of South Kensington. It always seemed to her that she moved not only through space but through time, as she left Edwardian brick and arrived amid Georgian stucco with its sparkling white terraces and squares, while the traffic and the glossy shops reminded you that a city mutates, puts on new clothes, changes shape, adapts—year by year, decade by decade.

The gallery was in a street of boutiques and restaurants. Ruth had come upon it after a visit to a friend in the big hospital nearby. Feeling in need of a coffee, she wandered along the street, in search of a likely place, and stopped for a moment to look into an art shop, spotting from the door a wall of what seemed to be wood engravings. She went in, glanced around—lithographs, watercolors, assemblies of prints, and this display on one wall at which she looked more closely, and there, dead center, was one of Matt’s.

The churchyard one, with tilted gravestones and a yew tree. She knew it well—Molly had a print, which was still with Sam, though he had pressed her to take it, along with others. There it was, with the little pencil mark below: 8/25. Where are the other twenty-three, she wondered. She moved along the wall, to examine its neighbors. Here was a Clare Leighton, and a Guy Malet, and a Rachel Reckitt. Heavens, though—look at the prices! She returned to Matt, and stood rapt, enjoying this sense of intimacy, as though a hand waved to you from a crowd of strangers.

There was someone alongside. The gallery proprietor, presumably, who had glanced up from behind a desk as she came in. An elderly man in a cord jacket; shock of white hair and spotted tie.

“Matt Faraday, that is,” he said. “Artist of the thirties. Died in the war.”

“I know. I’ve got some of his work.”

“Hang onto it, then. Hard to come by.”

After a moment, Ruth said, “He was my grandfather.”

“Well, well. Any talent in that direction yourself?”

“None whatsoever.”

“It’s a dying art, anyway. An endangered species, engravers. Fifty years’ time, nobody’ll be doing it. Collectors’ items, all this early twentieth-century stuff. Which Faradays have you got?”

Ruth cited the engravings that hung on her walls. “I had a
Cleeve Abbey
last year,” said the man. “Or was it
Mushrooms
? Hang on—I’ll just check the catalog.”

She did not see exactly what happened. He turned and headed for the door that led to an office at the back of the gallery. She heard a crash, ran across, and he was lying on the floor, face down, out cold. Later, she realized that he must have tripped on the edge of a rug.

The ambulance arrived within five minutes, to her relief. The stretcher, the red blanket, the two burly matter-of-fact paramedics. “What’s his name, love?” She had to say that she had no idea. Then—“Wait…” She rushed to the office, fumbled through a pile of letters, and deduced that he must be Max Gardner. “Thanks, love. We’ll get going. Head injury. Clipped it on the corner of that desk, by the look of it.” And they were gone.

You cannot, as a responsible person, walk out of a place full of valuable artwork, leaving it open and unattended, when its owner has involuntarily departed for an indefinite period. Ruth hunted for keys, to no avail. She went out and visited the bistro on one side and the smart dress shop on the other, where nobody could tell her anything about Max Gardner, and there was a distinct reluctance to become involved. She found the number of the local police station, and was advised to contact a friend or relative of Mr. Gardner’s. “Look,” she said, “I just walked in off the street, I have no idea…” The police station became tetchy, and seemed to suggest that she was being importunate; Ruth understood that in a London of gun crime and potential terrorism the police could not be expected to take an immediate interest in an unmanned art gallery. A person came in, spent some time inspecting prints in the racks, and asked if she ever had any Hockneys. Ruth said, “I don’t actually work here, I’m afraid,” and received a look of exasperation. The customer departed. The phone rang: someone wanted to know if their lithograph had come back from the framers yet. “I’m afraid I don’t actually…” said Ruth. A courier arrived with a package, which she signed for, in desperation.

The phone rang again. “Max?” said a female voice, puzzled. Ruth explained. Consternation. Max Gardner’s sister, in Salisbury, poured down the line a muddle of anxiety and suggestions: which hospital? what sort of head injury? keys, keys? keys almost certainly in his jacket pocket…oh dear, I’d better come up to town…train times…if you could
possibly
…