No. It couldn’t be.
It was. Bobble hat or no bobble hat, it was him. With a black Labrador, for Christ’s sake? Now Charlie knew two things Ruth didn’t know she knew.
‘He’s probably just a nosey bastard,’ she said. If Ruth noticed that her tone or manner had changed, she showed no sign of it. Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d trusted anyone less than she trusted this strange woman who was staring at her wide-eyed, apparently waiting for help of some sort. ‘Why did you seek Mary out?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Pardon?’ Ruth paused the tape.
‘You said she attacked you. You left the gallery and never went back. Sounds pretty upsetting. Yet subsequently you went to her house. Why?’
I’m going to stick my fingers into every hole in your story, bitch, and I’m going to pull and pull until the whole thing snaps and I get to watch you fall apart.
‘For the painting,’ said Ruth. ‘For Aidan. Aidan wanted it. But that was later, much later.’
‘All right, so what happened next? After the incident with Mary in the gallery last June, and you leaving your job? That was six months before Aidan told you he’d killed her, right?’
‘I can’t tell you everything you want to know.’ Charlie heard panic in Ruth’s voice. ‘I can tell you everything
I
know, everything that happened, but not why, or what it means.’
‘I’ll settle for anything that isn’t a lie.’
‘No more lies,’ Ruth promised. ‘What happened next was that Aidan and I went to an art fair in London.’
7
Monday 3 March 2008
The
Access 2
Art fair at Alexandra Palace in London was the first one I’d ever been to. I didn’t know such things existed until Aidan told me. One of the artists he frames for was going to have a stall there, and sent Aidan two free tickets. Aidan tore open the envelope at work one day—it must have been October or November last year. It’s strange, that’s the one detail I don’t remember. Everything else about the art fair is fixed in my mind as clearly as if someone had filmed what happened from start to finish and implanted the footage in my brain.
I saw Aidan grinning down at something. ‘What?’ I asked.
He passed me the envelope. I opened it, pulled out two stiff rectangular cards and a folded leaflet.
‘
Access 2
Art? What’s that?’
He waited for me to read the leaflet, knowing all the relevant information was there. He and I have never been good at answering questions.
‘It says here hundreds of artists will be exhibiting,’ I said.
‘Have you ever been in a maze?’
‘You mean like the one at Hampton Court?’
‘That’ll do,’ said Aidan. ‘Picture Hampton Court maze, except bigger. Instead of hedges, picture endless rows of stalls selling paintings, prints, sculptures, so many that you start to worry about finding your way out once you’ve gone in. You start to walk a little bit faster, unsure if you’ve walked down that aisle ten times already or never before. You look at so many pictures that you lose the ability to see them. You start to feel as if you’ve eaten a bucket-load of sweets, or the visual equivalent. It gets to the point where you don’t think you could stand to see another painting as long as you live . . .’
‘I’d never feel like that,’ I told him.
‘. . . but you’ve got no choice. Every corner you turn, there’s more of the same: hundreds of artists and galleries flogging their wares.’
‘Stop it!’ He was teasing me deliberately. ‘You’d better be telling the truth.’ There was a light, fluttery feeling in my stomach. What Aidan had described was my idea of heaven. I was already fantasising about finding something special. I hadn’t felt strongly about anything I’d seen for several months—not since
Abberton
, which I tried very hard not to think about—but I was used to seeing only nine or ten paintings at a time, twenty at most; no more than a small gallery’s walls could accommodate.
‘I’ve got to go to this,’ I said, clutching the tickets as if someone might take them away from me.
‘It starts on Thursday the thirteenth of December,’ said Aidan. ‘All you have to do is square it with your boss for you to have the day off. Oh, that’s me.’ He pretended to think about it. ‘You can have the day off.’
‘I won’t need to. It says here it’s all weekend. We could go on the Sunday.’ Aidan and I sometimes worked Saturdays if we were busy, which we usually were.
‘No. Take the Thursday off,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to an art fair you need to be there when it opens.’
‘The pictures can’t all sell before we get there,’ I protested. ‘The stuff I like best never sells, anyway. Apart from to me.’
‘That’s not why,’ said Aidan. ‘You’ve got to see the pictures before any of them are sold, or as few as possible. Once red dots start to appear, you look at the work in a different way: the successes and the failures. The popular ones and the rejects.’
‘Let’s go for the whole thing,’ I suggested, bobbing up and down on the balls of my feet, too excited to keep still. ‘Thursday to Sunday. If we’ve got a full four days, we’ll be able to see everything. I won’t have to choose too quickly, or panic that I’ve missed anything.’
Aidan’s face had lost its happy glow. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It might take that long to do it justice, but . . . Ruth, I can’t go. I can’t close up here, not even for a day. Too many people are relying on me for exhibition deadlines.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and heard my own disappointment thudding dully through the air, like a clumsily thrown ball. I couldn’t imagine going without him. We’d hardly been apart since the day we’d first met in August. ‘Can’t you . . .?’
‘Oh, sack it,’ he said, changing his mind so quickly that I didn’t understand what he was saying at first. ‘They can wait. They can all wait.’
‘You mean . . . you’ll come?’
‘I’ll come, but only for Thursday and Friday. I’ll go home Friday evening. Saturday and Sunday I’ll stay up all night if I have to and make up the time I’ve lost.’
I smiled. ‘So they won’t have to wait after all.’ Aidan pretends to have contempt for our artist customers, but I think secretly he admires them. Maybe he even envies them a little. How could he feel no affinity with artists, when his approach to his work is so creative? If he’s framing something for me, he doesn’t use ready-made mouldings. He starts from scratch. The same for himself: all the frames on the walls in his room behind the workshop are hand-made—the ones with nothing inside them. ‘They’re my only works of art,’ he once said. ‘Frame-makers used to be perceived as artists, and frames as works of art, before they were mass-produced. At one time, it was normal for a picture frame to cost more than the picture inside it.’
‘I’ll come back with you on Friday and help,’ I said. ‘Two days will be fine.’
‘We need to start training now, like marathon runners,’ said Aidan. ‘That’s the only way we’ll be able to get round the whole show. Don’t wear high heels or we’ll never make it.’
I laughed. Aidan gave me the look, the one that made my heart twist. I knew he wanted to grab me and kiss me but didn’t dare. I didn’t either. We spent a lot of time looking at each other in those days, as if we were both trapped behind glass. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. I said it back to him. It was what we did instead of touching. To us it seemed normal. I knew that most couples kissed or held hands before declaring love for one another, but I didn’t care. Aidan and I were all that mattered. We were perfect, just right. It was other people who were conducting their relationships the wrong way round.
Aidan turned back to his gold-leafing. ‘Shall we stay in a hotel in London?’ he asked, his voice giving nothing away. I knew what he was asking me. I said yes.
Every day after that, I thought about the art fair. Aidan and I talked about it endlessly. We’d looked on the website at the list of artists who were going to be exhibiting. Some Aidan had already heard of; quite a few had been his customers at one time or another. One or two still were. He wanted to show me some of the individual artists’ websites, but I didn’t want to look at them. I wanted to see everything for the first time on 13 December, the opening day. As the date approached, I started to worry about how I would feel when I didn’t have any of it to look forward to any more—
Access 2
Art, our night in the hotel. I couldn’t bear to think that the two things I was awaiting so avidly would soon be in the past.
On the Thursday morning, we got up at 4 a.m., packed our overnight things in my black hold-all, drove to Rawndesley and caught the six o’clock train to London in order to be there in good time for the fair’s opening. We ate cooked breakfasts in a bar at King’s Cross station that was full of groups of loud men gulping down pints of lager and burping. ‘I can’t believe they can do that first thing in the morning,’ I said to Aidan, which prompted him to order a bottle of champagne.
‘There’s drinking and then there’s drinking,’ he said. ‘This is the first time we’ve been away together—we should celebrate.’
‘And it’s the art fair,’ I reminded him.
His smile vanished.
‘Aidan?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Nothing,’ he repeated. It sounded more convincing the second time he said it. ‘If you want to spend two days looking at art then so do I. I hate the thought that I’m getting behind with work, that’s all.’
‘We’ll work late Saturday and Sunday,’ I promised. ‘We’ll catch up. There isn’t that much to do.’ I wanted to erase the troubled expression from his face. ‘You’ve got to train yourself to be your own best friend,’ I said. I’d been reading a book called
Be Your Own Life Coach
, and this was one of its recommendations. ‘Would you tell your best friend to spend every waking second working, or would you think he deserved to relax and treat himself occasionally?’
This made Aidan smile. ‘I’d tell him to start reading proper books instead of the personal growth crap he seems to be addicted to,’ he teased me. ‘There’s better ways to help yourself than sitting around all day examining your own psyche, and working hard’s one of them—that’s what I’d say to him.’ I elbowed him in the ribs. I didn’t mind him teasing me. I loved the fact that we could disagree and it didn’t matter.
We got to Alexandra Palace ten minutes before the art fair opened. We were the only people there, waiting. ‘Like fanatics,’ Aidan said. I told him I was proud to be one. We were tipsy, sleepy, heavy and full from the bacon, eggs and black pudding we’d eaten, but I knew I’d shake off my physical lethargy as soon as the doors opened—I’d be off like a racehorse.
In the large foyer, two women sat behind a table, selling tickets and programmes. I was about to dart through the double doors into the main hall, but Aidan pulled me back. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ He bought a programme, turned to the back and spread it open so that I could see it. ‘This is the only way you can appreciate the scale of what we’re about to walk into,’ he said. On the inside of the back cover, there was a map of the fair, a double-page spread that folded out. The stalls were depicted as small white squares, with black numbers inside them. There were four hundred and sixty-eight in total, filling two large interconnecting halls. On the floor plan’s reverse side was a list of all the numbers with a name next to each one—the artist or gallery whose stall it was. ‘Aidan!’ I said, clutching his arm. ‘Jane Fielder’s here—stall 171.’ I couldn’t believe I’d missed her name when Aidan and I had looked at the list of exhibitors.
‘Who?’
‘You know—
Something Wicked
. The red thumbprints, the first painting I ever bought.’
‘Your favourite artist.’ He pretended to be worried. ‘There won’t be much left for sale on her stall once you’ve done your worst. I’d better hire a lorry, and get myself an early morning job cleaning offices.’
‘Do you think she’ll be here herself?’
‘Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Right, where do you want to start?’
‘Jane Fielder,’ I said without hesitation. At first we followed the plan, but stall 171 was on the far side of the second hall, and I found it impossible to walk down the aisles without looking. I got sidetracked, then sidetracked again. Most of the stalls, if they belonged to individuals rather than galleries, were manned by the artists themselves and they all seemed eager to talk to me, happy to answer my questions about their work. By lunchtime we were still nowhere near stall 171, and I was losing track of the list I’d been keeping in my head of possibles: the pictures I thought I might be interested in buying but needed to see again. ‘I need to write down the numbers of the stalls I want to come back to,’ I told Aidan. ‘Can we find the entrance we came in at and start again, retrace our steps?’
Aidan laughed. ‘I told you it was a maze. We can do whatever you want, but . . .’
‘What?’
‘Why don’t we just have a wander? There’ll be plenty of time for writing lists tomorrow.’ Seeing my impatience with this attitude, he said, ‘I know you’ve seen a lot of stuff you want to look at again, and met some people you like, but I don’t think you’ve seen it yet.’
‘Seen what?’
‘It. The picture you’d do anything to get your hands on, the one you’d pay double the price for in order to be able to take it home.’
We spent the rest of the day browsing, talking to artists. Or rather, I talked. Aidan hung back, listening, happy to leave me to it. Between stall-stops, he warned me against being too effusive. ‘You’re getting the artists’ hopes up,’ he said.
‘But I like their work,’ I told him. ‘Why shouldn’t I be enthusiastic? Surely they’re happy to be praised, even by people who don’t end up buying their pictures.’
Aidan shook his head. ‘Praise minus sales equals lies. That’s the equation in these people’s heads. Until you put your money where your mouth is, they won’t believe you however much you say you love their stuff.’
After lunch—a quick sandwich in the foyer café—I came to a stall that had me mesmerised. The artist was a woman called Gloria Stetbay, who looked scarily elegant. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her; she was surrounded by a tight circle of people who didn’t seem keen to make room for one more. Stetbay’s work was mostly abstract, and made me realise that many of the other abstracts I’d seen were far from being the real thing. Stetbay’s pictures looked like multi-coloured sand dunes, ruched and textured; I could have been looking at the skins of strange, glowing planets. She did things with colour and surfaces that made everything I’d seen up to that point look anaemic.