Luck (29 page)

“Is this a joke?” Nora’s version of all that
You’re kidding
Sophie has already had to put up with?

“Not at all. It’d be like a tribute, sort of. A monument. Why, don’t you think Philip would approve?”

Sophie has, come to think of it, no idea. He might be affronted, enraged, he might be amused, he might, for all she knows, be honoured and touched. He grows less tangible. His image wavers. Sophie keeps a good grip on his hands, although even if they’re nothing like cheap department store sculptures of hands raised in prayer, cast in fake plaster or bronze, they’re banal enough compared with what Nora’s suggesting.

And there is Nora, yes, growing shiny with purpose, intention, drunkenness. How lucky she is, seeing no need, apparently, to be even a
nice
person, much less a good one. As if she’s entitled to these antagonistic, angry, frivolous, enthusiastic, freakish outbursts. Put her in a refugee camp and only the figures and shapes might appeal. The lumps and bumps of impromptu graveyards would form tapestries, and reaching arms would be slips of fabric, wonderfully embroidered. How chilly, eerie and enviable.

No wonder she gets into trouble.

“I can see you don’t approve, Sophie, but most people only have headstones. Don’t you think Philip would like the idea of a different sort of memorial? Something unique? I can’t think he’d appreciate sitting in a closet or up on a mantel, or for that matter being buried. He liked being the centre of attention.”

So he did. But Nora seems to think there is a good use for what remains of a human. Whereas there is not. There may have to be ends, but there are no good uses. Well, except for organ transplants, but that’s different.

Nora straightens, as best she can. “I guess it sounds strange, but everyone who cared is bereft in their own way, and this would be mine.” Sophie likes the sound of
bereft
, even from Nora, who may or may not know how deep and hard a word
it can be. It’s better than
bereaved
, anyway. That’s a sort of collective, a group:
The Bereaved.
Not personal, not individual.

“Have you made plans yet, Sophie? Have you thought what you might want to do?” If Beth hadn’t got a jump on events, this is how Nora might have approached her: easing into the subject while inexorably easing her out of the house. It’s more than a hint that Sophie had better get a move on. She has more life to pack up than Beth did, and even if she’d thought of it, wouldn’t have been able just to toss a couple of suitcases into the back of a car. Obviously time’s up, but Sophie wishes her head were clearer—Nora’s a hard one to keep up with, she’s just full of surprises.

“I don’t know. I’ll leave as fast as I can, but I haven’t had time to think where I’ll go. Can you give me a couple of days?”

Nora’s eyebrows go up, her mouth down. “Sophie! I didn’t mean you should leave, I was just wondering if you have anything in particular you want to do. Because if you don’t, I have a suggestion. There’s lots of reasons you might hate the idea, but let me pull a Beth and spring it on you anyway.”

Was Nora’s mind not the first to leap ahead of the others’ two mornings ago, when she woke up to find Philip dead beside her? Even drunk, and as she says
bereft
, she is light-footed as she vaults across chasms of dread and sorrow and loss. So Sophie imagines. “What idea?”

“That you’d stay on. If I’m going to do this, it seems to me I’ll have to stay where he always said he belonged in his bones. Which does not, let me say, cheer me up one little bit. But there it is. And I don’t want to be here on my own. So if you don’t have immediate plans, what would you think about staying, too?”

Sophie has two economics degrees. She used to have huge, world-saving ambitions, massive, hopeless desires. She is more
fit than she once was, thanks to Phil and, to be honest, Nora as well, but the question remains, fit for what?

She also thinks Nora sounds oddly pleading. Well, Sophie can see why she wouldn’t want to stay here alone. “If you’re sure. Maybe. For a while. You’re right, otherwise there’s a lot to think through all at once.” She remembers to add, “Thank you.” But how will they co-exist, even with plenty of extra room in this newly spacious house, when Sophie has only half her previous duties and an awful shortage of recognizable joys, while Nora’s busy playing about with Phil’s ashes?

Oh—is that how Sophie sees what Nora does? As
playing?
Frolicking with this outrageous notion and that one as if it’s a game, like rope-skipping or hopscotch?

“Good. Eventually I’ll be selling the house and we’ll both need to make plans, but meanwhile,” Nora takes a deep, obvious breath, “it feels right for the people who cared most for Philip to go on taking care of him.”

If that’s Nora’s idea of taking care of him.

But how long has she known? Right from the start, or has she just worked it out?

Nora uncoils from the sofa and for an instant Sophie presses back in her chair. How stupid—Nora’s not about to attack her, she is saying, “I’m absolutely starving all of a sudden. Are you?”

They fry eggs, they make toast, they’re having breakfast, evidently, at nightfall. Nora looks at her watch. “Max and Beth will be nearly back by now. I wonder where she’ll go? I hope she’s okay.” Easy to be benevolent, even pitying, from a distance.

“Maybe she has relatives.”

“I’m not sure. All the time I spent with her, and I only know she wasn’t in touch with anyone. I didn’t actually get the impression she had any family, but if I ever asked, she
wouldn’t talk about anything except all those damned beauty pageants. Nothing about actual relatives. Or friends, for that matter.” Even so, it really is bad not to know. Because the truth is, Nora wasn’t much interested, beyond Beth’s various postures and uses—what a good thing there’s no particular connection between an artist’s virtues and her work’s values.

Just as there’s not necessarily a connection between visions, hopes and desires, and what actually comes of them. This is the best time, when pictures are still so unformed they’re also still perfect. The moment work begins, when it starts taking on real shape and shading and purpose, that’s the moment it will begin losing perfection.

For the time being it’s companionable to be sitting at the kitchen table, eating a night-time breakfast with Sophie.

The more the merrier?

“Bear with me,” Nora says. “Honestly, I don’t have bad intentions.”

Do Nora and Sophie sleep on this third night? Oh yes; not like the dead, but near enough. And do they dream? Yes again, but tonight’s dreams are not sweet or bad or useful or even especially sad. Neither of them dreams of Philip Lawrence, three nights dead now. Sophie dreams of adding by hand reams of household sums for no identified purpose; Nora of cleaning paintbrushes over and over, an infinity of the things, an endless task. These are tedious ways to spend the night, but easy ones.
The harder part
must pick up in the morning, and the morning, again, after that. There is no way to absorb fatal information, and no denying it either, which is precisely the shocking dilemma of grief: that things happen—bang!—out of any day and out of the night, and there’s nothing to be done about it, and that’s almost all there is to it.

F
or all the density of black in this large, high-ceilinged room, the atmosphere is the reverse of funereal. There’s not a syllable of muted reverence in the swell of soaring, multiple voices, nor is the style of so much blackness remotely sombre. Nora, for instance, is tanned to the visible navel in a slim-lined, one-shouldered, short black number slit to the thighs. Very glamorous, very fit for her coming-out party, a deliberate, bold, fleshy statement:
I’m back.

Although not back as she once was. Adapt or perish, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—that’s the sort of difference being spoken by her spare body, scant dress.

Sophie, by contrast, is even larger than she used to be, and is also one of the few who’ve opted for flamboyance, with a gloriously red, massively ballooning-out dress. In colour and size she takes up more than her fair share of space, like a deep, old-fashioned sofa in a room otherwise occupied by the expensively spindly. She’s here partly for a change-of-pace treat, partly as an effort of loyalty; loyalty having taken several turns in the past year or so.

Nora and Sophie have both learned, it seems, what Beth
used to know: that style and colour have their own language, they have something to say, truth or lies.

Speaking of Beth, what on earth is she doing here, what was Max thinking? There she is, just coming through the door and already taking up more space than she’s due as well; not because she’s bigger than she used to be, although she is, or because she’s excessively colourful, which she isn’t in a knee-length straight black dress that leaves her arms bare but is high-collared in a fashion that would not be out of place on a nun, but because of her unwieldy accessory: the wheelchair in which she’s rolling a not-awfully-old man.

Sugar daddy? Nora and Sophie catch each other’s eyes through the crowd, and raise eyebrows.

Despite Max’s cranked-high air conditioning, it’s growing uncomfortably warm with too much humanity on a hot city night. Look at these sleek people sipping their wine, listen to the cumulative roar and mosquito-whine of their social voices. See also a few of them exchanging lowered words, deliberating, frowning, nodding—it’s the discreet who need watching, they’re the thumbs-up, thumbs-down people, the ones doing business. It’s not quite ten o’clock, too early to know for sure, but the room feels promising, there’s a good, high hum to it.

Max’s gallery, expanded since Nora’s first visit, now has four sizeable rooms. The smallest, which after the loss of Lily contains a single big cherrywood desk rather than two, always has one or two favoured works hanging, but it’s mainly an office. Tonight it will be opened only for business purposes, the private discussion of prices, and with luck the writing of cheques. “My first errand of the day after an opening,” Max likes to say, “is the bank. We do not approve of sober second thoughts.” His little joke, but he is also serious when he pats
his belly and says, “If I worked only for love, I could never have this. With love only, no one eats.”

Max is among those in black. He is shrinking, and his belly is not what it was. Several months ago he had a few tiny strokes, cerebral accidents as they’re called, that have slowed and altered his judgment in ways he is still discovering. He has sold his beloved yellow Fiat. “I take taxis,” he shrugs. “This is life.” One of these days he’ll be gone, too. Tonight it’s possible to locate his progress by watching people shifting and swaying, making way for a happy elderly man moving through the crowd like a child through a cornfield.

Almost no one has left yet, and some, like Beth, are still arriving. They show their invitations to the hired doorman and once inside are offered white wine or red by more hired staff. This front gallery is the largest, but people are also spilling into a smaller one, where there’s food. The two servers there are busy trying to keep the tables along two of the walls from chaos. How hungry, or greedy, people show themselves to be in their table-side jostlings, even though they are not exactly among the deprived of the earth, and the food, from tiny hot quiches and samosas to chocolate-dipped fruits, isn’t especially interesting. “We feed them,” says Max, “but not well.”

The third, most intimate gallery is closed and locked.

In his invitations and advertisements, Max has named the show “Philip etc.” in fat, black, eye-catching, romantically cursive script. All the work does involve Philip, it’s true, although not always in obvious ways. He appears here in a fierce orangey blotch reflecting fury and flames, there in a glued cufflink—
PL
—on a muscled forearm, the tracing of a hand, carefully callused, holding the chopped-off remains of a red-patterned silk tie. There is the upholstery-fabric blue-grey of his eyes and of grief in one work; in
another the shape of his mouth attached to a brilliantly yellow background, in the form of two close-set rows of out-sized, clownish, shiny red buttons.

That he was closed-mouthed in an open-mouthed way: not uncommon to camouflage secrets behind bold appearance, but who, besides Nora and Sophie, will see Philip in this? The piece is already sold, the buyer, according to Max, a woman who likes the notion of a swoop of unusually wrought, vibrant red lips over one of her sofas.

There are in these pieces not codes exactly, but distillations and private commentaries, but they’ll be hard for outsiders to decipher. No one here will know, for instance, that the big, curiously old-fashioned, particularly joyous-looking portrayal of round and merry, colourfully snowsuited children setting off down a tobogganing hill is not joyous at all. That the subtly angled tree at the bottom will prove fatal.

Max may have named the show “Philip etc.,” but Philip cannot possibly be himself, a separate figure, a man on his own from his own point of view. It’s Nora’s memory and eye that see not only those cheery youngsters headed for doom but the tendons and veins of Philip’s calves, and how they became especially prominent at his ankles; it’s her perspective that views the way the flesh of his thigh shaped itself as it hung from the bone when he was lying in bed with one leg propped up; it’s her senses, not his, that know the precise warmth of the flesh of his shoulder, the little dip where it encountered his neck, the rippling up and down of his spine. Oh, the attention she has paid to the details of Philip—far more in his absence, as a sad matter of fact, than when he was present.

That’s too bad. Still, a person can stagger back from rude shock all she wants, but she does finally have to stagger forward
again, the only choice the manner of staggering. This is Nora’s way, all this tonight on these walls.

What do other people do with sorrow and loss, with anger and error, with recollected delight for that matter, if they have no gift for transforming? Nora has come to see Philip through many different materials and manifestations in the past year. She has also come in several not-quite-identifiable ways to love him, she thinks, sufficiently, and somewhat differently. That’s here, too. She misses his presence moment to moment (including this moment when he ought to be at her shoulder), that loose loyalty of his backing her up, but in the face of impossibility she has done what she could, and if the two of them can no longer be connected in lying-down, getting-up ways, they are at least strung and beaded, glued, painted and stitched together on these walls, in these pictures.