Consequences (33 page)

In the end, a girl from the dress shop was persuaded to mind the gallery while Ruth went to the hospital, located Max Gardner in A & E, found him conscious but too dazed to comment, collected the keys to the shop from his pocket and returned to lock up, thus retrieving the situation at least until the sister could get hold of a colleague of her brother’s who, it was thought, would hold the fort, rally round, pick up the pieces…and thank you
so
much, Mrs…er? Ruth was obliged to give her name and address.

And so it all came about. A couple of weeks later, Max Gardner arrived on the doorstep one evening, behind an enormous florist’s bouquet, bearing some rather nice wine. He was recovered—“A mere dent—I’ve got a tough nut”—but under doctor’s orders to take things a bit easier. “Pursed lips and insulting references to one’s age—you know these jumped-up boy consultants.” Ruth opened the wine, Max Gardner commented with enthusiasm on Matt’s work, touring the walls of the flat; he told the children their mother was a Good Samaritan, at which they looked baffled, and eventually stayed to supper. “Very kind—I won’t say no. I live over the shop, and it’s something from the deli in front of the TV, most nights.” He tucked into sausages and mash, and talked voraciously, shooting a question at Ruth from time to time. “I’m a dinosaur in my trade,” he told her. “They’re all thirty-somethings in designer jeans and Armani suits these days, into BritArt. That’s all right by me—I cater for the finer sensibility.” He produced scurrilous stories, threw artistic judgments around. She liked this man.

On the doorstep, leaving, he thanked her with some formality. “And one final thing. I have a proposition. Would you consider a part-time job in a prestigious Kensington gallery?”

Ruth said, “Well…I don’t know much about art.”

“You’d pick it up in a trice. An air of confident superiority is all that’s needed. I fear I must give in to the prissy boy in the hospital and put myself on a three-day week. Anyway, think about it.”

Ruth thought. She contemplated what she was doing now, and asked herself if she wanted to do that all the time, forevermore. A few days later, she rang Max Gardner.

Ruth worked two days a week at the gallery; the rest of the time, she continued with her usual commissions. She enjoyed this apposition of activities. The gallery rapidly became a known territory, and while Max’s airy dismissal of the need for experience seemed a touch optimistic, she found that by looking and learning she was soon reasonably proficient, at least in basic knowledge. And, if up against the wall, she could always put in a quick call to Max, who was usually in the flat leafing idly through saleroom catalogs or irritably getting on with what he called “the pernicious paperwork that takes the joy out of being a connoisseur.”

When Ruth’s father visited the gallery, he bought a Patrick Proktor lithograph.

“You really don’t have to feel you must buy something,” she told him.

“I don’t. I needed a birthday present for Claudia, and that solves the problem.” James Portland walked with a stick now; his thick dark hair had turned silver. He seemed amused at Ruth’s career move. “You’ve kept very quiet about this artistic expertise.”

“There isn’t any,” said Ruth. “As you well know. I bluff my way along.”

“Well, you look the part. Gallery ladies are always slim, beautiful, and dressed in black. You could perhaps be a bit more intimidating. The idea is usually to make anyone who comes in feel as awkward as possible.”

“I can’t do the hard sell. Fortunately that’s not Max’s line, either. This is a user-friendly outlet.”

“Evidently. You don’t often find a chair available.” James had sat himself down, wincing as he did so. He was in his mid-eighties, and though he did not look his age, there was a sense of diminishment, of ebbing vitality. Ruth found this hard to grasp; each time she saw him she expected still the vigorous figure of her childhood and adolescence. The stick, the stoop, the hair, seemed a mockery.

“At least he has some decent stuff.” James waved a hand at the gallery walls. “I’m too old for what’s come out of the art schools over the last ten years.”

“So am I, apparently,” said Ruth. “And it’s my generation.”

“All the best people feel out of tune with their times. You were always a bit maverick. Like your mother, but differently so.”

“Really?” Ruth was interested.

“She was defiant maverick. You were—are, presumably—introspective maverick, if there is such a thing.”

Ruth could not recall her father ever before offering such personal comments, and was startled. As if in response, he went on, “I’m so old I can say things like that. Probably should—before it’s too late. I miss her like anything, even though I hardly ever saw her. At least I knew she was out there.”

“Yes,” said Ruth, nervous now. This might be going a mite too far.

“She was the love of my life. I won’t say she broke my heart—it was probably too weathered for that—but she made anything else seem second fiddle.”

Ruth thought fleetingly of her stepmother, with something akin to sympathy.

“Well, there it is. No doubt she was right—we weren’t entirely compatible.” James got up, grimacing again. “Bloody knee, now.” He stood looking at her. “At least there’s you.”

“A sort of memento?” she said, with a wry smile.

He patted her arm. “I’d put it rather more strongly than that.”

Every conception is fortuitous, every birth. That said, Ruth always saw her own existence as perhaps peculiarly accidental, spun from the odd conjunction of two people whose meeting was an unlikely chance. But the same could be said of her grandparents: a park bench…Isn’t it always like that? Well, no; she and Peter had been cogs in the same machine, almost bound to mesh at some point. Molly and Sam inhabited the same world; they might well have missed one another, but the odds were in their favor. When she was young, Ruth had never questioned her circumstances; she moved from Molly to her father, from disheveled flat or house to the French château or the Belgravia mansion, merely accepting this polarization as the way things were, and how could they be otherwise? Only now, in mid-life—for that was where she was, after all—did she see this background, and her very presence, as a distinctly precarious event. This put you in your place, somehow.

Mid-life, she found, was not a bad time. She felt more positive than ever she had in youth, more deliberate, as though she had found a more satisfactory personality and settled into it. Sometimes she felt infused with Molly’s drive, a hidden legacy. She had had to manage children, work, the flat, a regular cash flow, and it had all been possible. Life might be accidental, but she could feel that she had met its challenges. She was without a partner, and that was flying in the face of social expectation, and maybe of nature, but she was coming to accept this. So be it. One or two skirmishes had come to nothing; nowadays, she seldom eyed a man for his potential. Outside of work, she was immersed in the children’s dizzying development, the way in which they mutated month by month, year by year, became new versions of themselves—taller, smarter, saying and doing different things, bewildering, challenging. She felt as though the flat were filled with the ghostly sloughed skins of last year’s Jess, the Tom of two years ago—gone, extinguished, surviving only in her mind’s eye. In her dreams, they were babies again, and then she woke to the pierced ears, the muddy football strip.

She found herself valuing more and more those who underpinned her life, those who had always been there—her father, Simon, Sam. When you are short on relatives, those that you have become essential tethers. Her friends had brothers and sisters, cousins, a full com plement of parents. She had just this trio, who had no connection with one another. Somewhere, there must be people from the same genetic pond—her grandparents had had siblings, after all—but they were of no interest to her. A relation is a person whose face and traits you have always known, someone alongside whom you have grown, and while Sam did not quite fit, he was close enough and he was Molly’s, and anyway she loved him. She spoke to him frequently, and to Simon.

But when sometimes Ruth thought about her descent—eyeing the children in some unfocused moment—it did seem meager that this should be all that was left from those mythic figures, her grandparents. Matt and Lorna. When you have never known your grandparents, when they are just a young face in a snapshot, they hang differently in the mind.

“Listen,” Ruth says to Sam. “Are you around next week? At home?”

“I’m always around.”

“Peter’s taking the children to Disneyland, and I’ve told Max I’d like some time off. I thought I’d come down—and on the way I could call in and see this guy who’s got Matt’s blocks, at that cottage.”

“Good idea. Excellent. I, too, will take sick leave. As it is, fiddling around inside cars is slightly losing its appeal.”

“You should retire,” says Ruth sternly.

“The village would grind to a halt without me. And the dosh is rather welcome. Anyway, unrelieved think-work gets me down.”

“Maybe that’s why I find the gallery a relief. Not that my think-work compares at all with your think-work.”

“Self-abasement will get you nowhere,” says Sam. “Pack your boots. I shall take you for a good long walk on the moor.”

“I remember route marches with you and Mum when I was at college. I thought it was an infringement of human rights.”

“You’re a grown woman now. You’ll love it.”

“Simon?”

“Ruth. Could you hang on one moment—I’m up a ladder. There. Firm ground. How are things?”

“Why are you up a ladder, and do you always have the phone in your pocket?”

“To measure the wall, and yes, otherwise I forget where it is. We are considering buying an eighteenth-century French tapestry. Great excitement. We can’t really afford it and fear that this is
folie de grandeur,
but we can’t resist.”

“Goodness—it was that arts and crafts chair last year. You never used to have this lust for fine furnishings.”

“I know. I think it’s a delayed reaction to growing up in the Fulham Road house. Cracked lino and chairs with wonky legs, and that sofa with the springs sticking out.”

“At least there was Matt on the walls.”

“True. And books everywhere. High thinking and low living really—a perfectly respectable tradition. But it seems to have spawned this hankering for the occasional delicacy. Tim is just as bad, and in his home they had inherited mahogany and an ancestral mirror.”

“So indulge yourselves,” says Ruth. “Actually, walls is what I wanted to ask about. Can you remember Mum ever talking about frescos on the walls of that cottage in Somerset?”

“Frankly, no. But she was—what? five?—when she left it. Would she remember?”

“Probably not. I’ve just looked at that man’s letter again, and he talks about frescos. I’m going to call in on him next week, on the way down to see Sam.”

“Give him my love. Sam, I mean, not the man. While you’re at it, you might take in a few Devon antique shops, and see if you spot any nice Lowestoft pieces. We’re starting a collection.”

“Simon,” says Ruth. “I wouldn’t know a nice Lowestoft piece if I saw one. And Sam doesn’t do antique shops. It’s going to be long tramps on the moor.”

“You poor dear. You’ll be back here in a flash.”

She had Brian Clyde’s letter, and the map that he has sent in response to her phone call: “This place is quite impossible to find.” She had some wine for Sam. And her walking boots—all right, Sam. The children were already gone; she shut up the flat with a certain sense of release.

The M4. The M5. Comfort stops at teeming motorway service stations through which flowed the August crowds. The nation was on the move, and the west country was the place to which it moved. Ranks of cars without, and a horde of people within. Lines shuffling forward for a fix of burgers, pasties, coke, coffee. Ruth had some lunch. Later, she had tea and ten minutes with the paper. And then, following her instructions, she was flung off the motorway into Somerset. First, a main road through a town and some villages. Brown signs displaying the area’s wares: a ruined abbey, a cider farm, a castle, a beach, Butlins—something for everyone. This was holiday time, and the place was in full swing, everyone bolstering the local economy. There was a scenic railway, apparently doing good business; as she went through one village, she saw it at the station, in its cream and brown livery, with faces at every window.

The fields were stubble—stripped, spent, dotted with giant straw cotton reels, and black plastic drums. From time to time the river of traffic slowed to a crawl behind a tractor with its trailer. Cars fidgeted impatiently behind such obstacles, edging out to overtake. At one point, an oncoming car, skipping past a tractor, sent a stone spurting up from the road; a little star of shattered glass appeared in the windscreen in front of her. An older economy was still in operation here; the land itself was busy, spewing forth corn as it ever did, and a few more fancy latter-day crops that Ruth could not put a name to. What was the curious black stuff on that hillside?

And now the directions sent her off sharply into the hinterland. You burrowed into this landscape, she saw. The motorways rushed through it, and the A this and the B that, but as soon as you abandoned those dictatorial highways you had slipped off into another sphere. You were in the lanes, you were in narrow tunnels between high hedge banks, routes that also knew quite well what they were about and where they were going but that was their own immemorial business, and you were now in their domain. You went where they went, and that was that.

Ruth thought this was the right way. According to the map it should be. She had turned off the A39—thank goodness—and was proceeding cautiously, aware of the frequency of bends, of the fact that two vehicles could not pass one another. She did meet one car, which shot obligingly backward—rather too fast for comfort, a local presumably—into a nearby gateway. She continued, up a hill, round another bend, with here and there a glimpse through a gate of blue and green distances, like the jewelled vistas in medieval painting. Trees arched suddenly over the lane, so that she was in the center of a leafy sphere, through which sunlight splashed down onto the road ahead. The trees ended; the hedges rose again. A straight bit. Another bend, uphill again, and now at the crest of the hill the lane was blocked. There was a challenge.