He came further into the room, chafing his hands together. His nose was red with cold.
‘Have a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Get warm.’
They stood over the wood stove together, and she had a second cup, and he stared around him. He was obviously fascinated by the plaster figures that lined the walls. No, don’t look, she wanted to say, they’re not finished. They were part of a sequence she’d started after 9/11, not based on Ben’s photographs, or anybody else’s for that matter, because nobody had been there to photograph what chiefly compelled her imagination: the young men at the controls who’d seized aeroplanes full of people and flown them into the sides of buildings. There they were, lean, predatory, equally ready to kill or die. She thought they might be rather good in the end. They certainly frightened her.
Peter started on the wire, cutting and shaping under her direction. She went back to her drawings, rolled them out and pinned the curling edges down with chisels and mallets. Because her hands were not touching the material, she felt doubtful about ideas that had once seemed persuasive. She knew she was being uncharacteristically tentative. The grave cloths were a problem. All her instincts had been for a nude figure – There’s no logical reason why the Risen Christ should go on wearing the dress of a first-century Palestinian Jew for the rest of eternity, and even less reason for him to have got stuck in the robes of a medieval English king, and yet she knew that a naked Christ would cause uproar. A lively faith in the Incarnation often goes with a marked disinclination to have the anatomical consequences staring one in the face. She’d compromised by having him tearing off grave cloths vigorously, but not so vigorously as to uncover those parts that would occasion letters to The Times if they were to be revealed. She was becoming middle aged. Once she might have fought for the purity of her original conception. These days she just didn’t think cocks were worth the bother.
If only she had been able to do the work herself, she’d have known immediately which ideas worked and which didn’t. She felt frustrated, and was trying desperately hard not to show it, because, in all fairness, Peter couldn’t have been any more tactful. He had such a talent for blending into the background that once or twice she’d actually managed to forget he was there.
Twelve weeks to go, and here she was still cutting wire. She fought the panic down and reached for the next bale.
Eight days later she had a complete figure. She wasn’t sure about the torso, and she knew she was going to have to rethink the head, but the legs were all right. Everything depended on the legs. Once, in a television interview, dazzled by the lights, her face weighed down by more make-up than she’d ever worn in her life – she felt like a geisha – she’d heard herself say, ‘You see, the thing is, you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t fall over.’
She’d buried her head in her hands and groaned aloud when she watched the video. Profound, or what? Oh, well, yes, thank you, Ms Frobisher, that’s really got the direction of twentieth-century sculpture sorted out. But yes, she thought, looking up at the chicken-wire figure, actually that is the thing. It mustn’t fall over.
This was stable enough, though the proportions were all wrong. Cautiously, she craned her head back, trying, despite the pain in her neck, to decide what changes needed to be made. ‘There’s a spotlight over there. Would you mind putting it on?’
She walked round the floodlit figure. The head was the problem. People would be looking up – well, obviously – from the foot of the plinth, and that meant the head had to be considerably larger than was anatomically accurate. She reckoned about a third larger. But the plinth itself stood on a small hill to the right of the path that led to the west door, and it was from this vantage point that the majority of people would see it – still looking upwards, but at a greater distance and from a much less acute angle. The problem was simple: the distortion that worked from the foot of the plinth might well look grotesque from the path. Simple to formulate. By no means simple to solve.
‘It’s a wonderful site, isn’t it?’ the dean had enthused, white hair blowing in the wind, when he took her outside to see it. Meaning, she supposed, that it was prominent. It was that all right. She’d stared at him in complete astonishment. Wonderful? she’d wanted to say. It’s a bloody nightmare. It wasn’t just the technical problems of the position, it was the fact that the statue was going to stand next to one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe. A wonderful site if you didn’t mind making a total prat of yourself.
‘Peter, would you mind standing there?’
He’d been hovering behind her, silent as always, waiting for her to tell him what to do next. He went and stood where she indicated, beside the figure.
Self-conscious but determined, she lay down on the floor at his feet and looked up at him.
‘No, don’t look at me. Look straight ahead.’
When he looked down, his eyes almost vanished. Even staring straight ahead they were difficult to see.
‘Can you take your specs off?’
He did as she asked, reaching behind him to put them on the table. His eyes still made no impact, and yet they were larger than most. The eyes on the Christ were going to have to be enormous, and she’d underestimated how big the head had to be. She looked from Peter’s head to the ball of wire on top of the figure, memorizing the changes that would have to be made before she could start on the plaster. She felt Peter tense up under her gaze.
‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ she said, laughing a little with embarrassment as she tried to stand up. ‘It’s not turning into a portrait.’
He didn’t help her to her feet, though she struggled on her knees for several seconds because her back had gone into spasm. He never touched her. When he handed tools up to her, his fingertips never brushed hers. Once or twice she’d seen him reach out a hand as if to steady her on the scaffolding, but he never actually did. He was elaborately formal, impersonal.
‘Ouch,’ she said, pressing one hand into the small of her back, laughing.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine. I just needed to get the size of the head right.’
‘Does it need to come off?’
‘Yeah, but it’s a bit late now. We’ll start on it tomorrow.’
She was smiling as she took off her gloves and put the pliers down. But trying not to sound disconsolate was one of the burdens of the situation. Her moods, the ebb and flow of hope and conviction, were supposed to be private. Her work, what she chose to show, became public at the moment when somebody pulled off the sheet and not one second before.
After Peter had gone, she walked round the figure again, comparing its shape with the figure in her head, mentally altering the proportions, itching to get up there, to feel the wire, but even looking up for any length of time produced pain. She had to admit defeat.
As she turned to go, she noticed that Peter had left his specs behind on the table, and she picked them up. Greasy fingerprints all over them. Impossible to keep glasses clean in a studio. She went over to the sink, dampened a sheet of kitchen paper and worked at the lenses till they were clean, holding them up against the light to check she’d removed every mark. She hoped he was all right to drive without them. Experimentally, she put them on, looking round the studio at the complex patterns of light and shade cast by the figure on the plinth.
Suddenly, she realized what she was not experiencing: the wave of nausea you feel when you put on somebody else’s spectacles. And she could still see perfectly well, although somebody else’s prescription lenses ought to have blurred the scene. Thinking she must be mistaken, she took them off and put them on again, but no, there was no doubt. The ‘lenses’ were clear glass.
Lots of people wear clear specs, she told herself. She put them to one side and started clearing up. But then she thought: who wears them? Rising young executives wanting to look older and more authoritative. But not gardeners. In any outdoor job glasses are a nuisance. Oh, well, not my business, she told herself firmly, and got back to
work.
When she’d finished, she wrapped the specs in kitchen paper and put them by the sink, then, dragging herself reluctantly away from the warm fug of the studio, let herself out into the icy winter air.
Seven
Stephen woke before dawn. Nothing like this darkness in the city, ever. Deep black, like some of those nights in Africa. He located his body purely by the sense of touch: skin on sheets. His hands and feet were far-flung colonies. He daren’t switch the light on, because in this state he found light more frightening than darkness. All the while the details of the dream went on invading his waking mind. Being buried alive. No source of light in this dream – only the smell, gasping breaths, other people’s blood soaking him to the skin, the knowledge that if he moved or cried or stirred, the people up there, the people he never saw, were waiting with knives and guns and machetes to finish the job.
Exerting every scrap of willpower, he turned over, and stared into the darkness until beyond the swirls of orange and purple he managed to distinguish shapes: a chair, a wardrobe, the door to the landing. When he was sure he knew the way, he got out of bed – there was no point lying there, he would never get back to sleep, he was too afraid the dream would return – and naked, sweating, a pink, peeled prawn of a man – that’s how he saw himself – he edged his way downstairs, feet overlapping the sixteenth-century treads at every step. He entered the stone-flagged kitchen, where he drew back the curtains and put the kettle on for coffee.
He drank it sitting by the window, the hot fluid delineating his oesophagus, another part of his living body reclaimed from the dark. He watched the stars turn pale, saw the empty road curving towards the sleeping farmhouse, and the frost-bound fields, the fires waking in the white grass as the light strengthened. All the time he was debriefing himself, sorting out the dream. He knew if he didn’t take time to do this, it could stain and corrupt the whole day.
Before starting work, he jogged to the top of the hill. Not a breath of air, not a blade of grass or a twig stirred. On the crest he leant against a tree, watching darkness drain down the slopes of the hills as if somebody at the bottom of the valley had pulled the plug on night. Details emerged as the light grew: knobbly black buds of ash, brittle brown oak leaves still clinging to the tree, the veins on the backs of his hands. And then the sun erupted, shredding clouds, pouring streams of light down the valley, turning the moon, that lingered in blue translucent space, into a crazed eggshell.
All around him were the baby fists of new ferns, though there was a rawness in the air that threatened more snow. He began searching for the owl’s nest. It had been hooting again last night, on and on with hardly a pause, as if it thought it was a nightingale. One tree half covered in ivy looked more promising than the rest. He scuffled through the mulch of dead leaves until he found what he was looking for, picked up three or four fibrous brown pellets and put them in his pocket.
Back in the cottage, he took them out and rolled them between thumb and forefinger. He’d picked them up automatically, as he would have done as a boy, but now he thought that Adam might like them. He’d take them up this afternoon, as soon as he saw Justine’s car parked outside the house.
Relations between the farmhouse and the cottage had quickly settled into a routine. Stephen hardly saw Robert and Beth except at weekends, but observed their comings and goings almost as if they were strangers.
Both were busy, and Beth added to the strains of a full-time job by doing a lot of community work. She was a regular churchgoer. That rather surprised Stephen, because Robert was a militant atheist: ‘There is no God, and Sharkey is his prophet’ – that was Robert’s creed. So unless Beth’s brand of Christianity was remarkably accommodating, they must find plenty to disagree about.
Robert worked incredibly long hours. Sometimes, in particularly bad weather, he stayed overnight in the city rather than risk snow drifts blocking the moor road.
Or so Beth said, expressionlessly, her eyes dead.
‘Where does he stay?’ Stephen asked.
‘Oh, There’s always somebody who’ll give him a bed.’
Initially, He’d been afraid Adam would ignore the unspoken rule of no weekday contact and take it into his head to visit his uncle in the cottage. He was such a still, strange, isolated little boy. In Robert’s place he might not have thought it wise to bury Adam in the depths of the country, miles away from other children of his own age. Out of school he seemed to see nobody except his parents and Justine, whose little red Metro spluttered up the lane every day at four o’ clock, bringing him home from school. Stephen wanted to say to Robert, ‘But our childhood wasn’t like this.’ They’d run wild, at least until the first shades of the exam prison house started to close in. Contrasted with their childhood, Adam’s seemed both overprivileged and depleted. Stephen would encounter him sometimes, trotting along, searching for roadkill or following tracks in the snow, but always, except for Justine, alone.
When Stephen spoke to him, Adam would duck his head, avoid eye contact, mumble something and then, as soon as possible, drift away.
His evident disinclination to have anything to do with his uncle made Stephen perversely more interested in him. So that afternoon, shortly after Justine’s car with Adam in the back had coughed and wheezed its way up the hill, he took the owl pellets round to the house, and spread them out on a sheet of kitchen paper on the table.
‘What do you think they are?’
Adam wrinkled his nose. ‘Poo?’
No kid who regularly brought home roadkill had any right to be fastidious. ‘Wrong end. They come out of the beak.’
‘Owl pellets?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Cool.’
‘Have you got any tweezers?’ Stephen asked Justine, who was standing by the cooker, frying sausages for Adam’s tea. She didn’t look as if she had. Like everything else about her, her eyebrows were flourishing and entirely natural.
‘Got a meat skewer.’
She rattled about in the cutlery drawer and produced one.
‘That’ll do.’
He showed Adam how to tease out the small bones, skulls, feathers, fur and other indigestible parts of the owl’s nightly diet. Adam was totally absorbed. Stephen met Justine’s eye over the sleek, bowed head. She smiled and said, ‘You can come again. This is the quietest he’s been for weeks.’
Before long a neat row of skulls was lined up on the table.
‘Now you can wash them,’ Stephen said, starting to clear away the debris.
Adam ran off to the downstairs bathroom with his treasures in his cupped hands.
Stephen dusted off his hands and was about to go – he hadn’t intended to do more than deliver the pellets and retreat to the cottage – when Justine said, ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’
He fancied something a bit stronger than tea, but he could scarcely ask Beth’s au pair to raid the drinks cupboard. ‘Yeah, good idea.’ He was tired, he realized, sitting back in the chair, and He’d hardly spoken to anybody all week. ‘You nearly finished for the day?’ he asked, as she filled the kettle at the sink.
‘Just about.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Beth’s always late back on Thursdays. There’s some sort of meeting after work, and it just seems to run on.’
How on earth had this bright girl ended up doing this? Over tea – Adam busy with his skulls at the other end of the table, snuffling through his mouth as kids do when they’re interested – she talked about her life, the job, how it was this or being a barmaid and Dad had thought this would be easier. There was no mention of her mother.
‘What does your mother think?’
‘God knows. Buggered off years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
A shrug. ‘No need, it was a long time ago. It was a great scandal at the time, you know? Vicar’s wife runs off. Not supposed to happen.’ She smiled. ‘You didn’t know I was a vicar’s daughter, did you?’
‘No.’ He wondered if she was a virgin. ‘Do you have to do anything?’
‘Do anything?’ She was amused. ‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Good works.’
‘No. Well, I don’t, anyway. No, I just keep lots of spiteful old cows supplied with gossip.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘I inherited that role from my mother.’
‘You could go off somewhere.’
Her face darkened. ‘It’s difficult.’
Deserted, possessive dad? ‘You’re going to stay here all year?’
‘No, well, don’t tell Beth, will you, because it’ll freak her out, but I think I might talk Dad into letting me go on one of those crash secretarial courses. And then I could get a proper job. You can’t get a job with just A-levels. Nobody wants to know.’
‘Sounds like a good idea. Where would you do it?’
‘London.’
‘Ah.’
He thought of Justine and her milkmaid cheeks in some office in Kensington tapping away on a keyboard thinking real life had started at last. Though he was the wrong one to criticize anybody for thinking real life was somewhere else – He’d devoted his whole working life to that particular delusion.
‘What’s this?’ Adam asked, holding up a skull with two long, orange-coloured teeth in the front.
‘A mouse,’ Stephen said.
‘How do you know it isn’t a shrew?’
He didn’t, of course.
‘You’ve got plenty of books,’ Justine said. ‘Why don’t you look it up?’
Stephen stood up to go. She came to the door with him, looking, he thought, prettier than she had the other night. He did find her attractive, though by now he was so frustrated he would have found almost any young woman attractive – and his definition of ‘young’ was becoming more generous by the day. But this one was too young, and much too close to home. If things went wrong – and how with a twenty-year difference in age could they not go wrong? – it could become very messy. And they wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing each other.
Thinking like this implied he stood a chance, whereas in fact she probably thought of him as even more decrepit than her father. At best as a nice, kind, avuncular figure helping to amuse Adam.