I had to go back to the farm. My scooter was still there; but more than that, I felt I had to stand in that farmyard, to face the scene. It was the only way to make his death real.
First, however, I had to talk to Ruby. So after getting off the Mountain Goat bus and watching it bounce away towards the Hardknott Pass, I walked up the overgrown track to the grey bulk of Raven How, as squat and stately as a liner afloat on a ragged green ocean. The conservatory windows were wide open as if they were airing it; or perhaps they just enjoyed the blast of icy mountain air whistling through.
On seeing me at her door, Ruby’s red-rimmed eyes grew hard. She hadn’t forgiven me for either finding Isaac’s body, or for my incompetence when I did.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I came to apologise for the other day. I know I was useless. I had concussion,” and I touched the dressing, which I’d put back on my head, to prove it.
“You’re all right now, I trust,” said Ruby coolly.
“Yes.”
She folded her arms and leaned back against the doorframe to study me. I was uneasy.
“The police know I arrived too late to help Isaac. They worked out the timings. They know I wasn’t there when he died,” I explained. It occurred to me only now that it must have been Ruby who saw me riding my scooter down the drive, and who reported it to the police. Had she not told them at what time that happened?
“So Inspector Irlam informed me yesterday,” she said. “It seems it was an accident. Isaac slipped and fell.” But her tone and her eyes were still accusing me, and now I could guess why. I needed to own up.
“Is that what he says? I suppose that must have been what happened. But they arrested me partly because I – because I already have a criminal conviction.”
“Yes, well they would, wouldn’t they?” she said, arms still folded.
“You know about it, then.”
“I know now. Inspector Irlam let that bombshell drop when he came round to talk to me. Forgery, of all things! Were you going to mention that before you moved in here?” Her tone was scathing.
I lifted my chin. “Yes, I would have, because my probation officer says I must. Otherwise no, I wouldn’t, because I’m too ashamed of it and I hate the way people look at me when I tell them, as if I’m a cockroach they’d like to crush underfoot. Anyway, I assume the offer of a room is now withdrawn.”
Ruby looked away from me at last. “Oh, hell,” she said. “I don’t know, I can’t decide any more. I’ve got too much else to think about.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I know you and Isaac were close.”
“You know nothing about it,” she snapped.
“Did Sergeant Brigg come round here too?”
“Yes. He was grave and silent,” she said. “He’s a sympathetic man. He understands suffering, I think. Oh, God!” She turned her face away from me. “Isaac went through so much suffering, first with Carol and then Luke. Carol was a great friend, my best friend. And now for Isaac to die this way! It’s horrible. The whole family snuffed out. Three deaths, all avoidable.” She wiped her eyes.
“Carol’s death wasn’t avoidable,” I said. “She had cancer, didn’t she?”
“It’s the treatment that kills you,” said Ruby. “All three of them. I can’t get over it. The whole family.”
“Except Selena.”
“Yes. To think it’s all in her hands now!”
“What, the farm?”
“And this place.”
Of course. Raven How had been Isaac’s. I heard his deep quiet voice talking about the rent: he’d been standing against the wall, the light on his left turning his cheek from granite to golden sandstone. That voice I would not hear again. My throat closed up.
“I’ll leave you, then,” I said, with difficulty.
“Wait. Oh, hell. Come in.”
I followed her into the kitchen. Ruby seized a long knife from the block by the stove and began to chop viciously at a carrot, throwing the pieces into a large hand-thrown pot. Her lips were pressed tightly together. I stared out of the window at the track down which I had wobbled on my bike towards the grim scene at the farm. My stomach was tying itself up like the Celtic knots on Ruby’s cupboards.
When Ruby spoke, her voice was low and harsh. “I told Delilah about you being a forger. And you know what she said? Cool. She said Cool!”
“Sorry.”
She whirled round to face me, knife in hand. “How could you? How could you pass off your work as someone else’s?”
“The someone else was dead,” I said. “It was the only way of selling any work at all.”
“By deceit,” said Ruby with contempt. “By fraud.” I was stung. Room or no room, I wasn’t going to take that lying down, because Ruby should understand, if anyone did.
“Oh, come on,” I said roughly, “they were all frauds at art school, the whole lot of them. All trying to be Tracy Emins or Gavin Turks or whoever. They were all out to impress each other, copying their favourite artists, pretending to be the next big thing. It was all a massive fake.”
“But the whole point of art is–”
“To show the truth? Bollocks. What artist ever did that? Tree in the wrong place? Move it. Sky the wrong colour? Change it. House the wrong shape? Rebuild it. Happens all the time. Don’t tell me it doesn’t.”
“But that’s not the same as–”
“Why? How is it different? At least I was trying to paint,” I said vehemently. “Most of them didn’t give a stuff about painting. Too busy being modern and neo-conceptual and deconstructing their little segment of self-centred world.”
Ruby fell silent, looking at me. I felt myself deflate. My tirade had been a mistake. “I’ll go,” I said. “You don’t want me here.”
“Hang on.” She rotated the knife in her hand, considering, then spoke with deliberation. “I don’t. That’s true. But I made you an offer, and I’m a woman of my word.”
I was incredulous. “Is the offer still open, then?”
“For Easter,” said Ruby flatly. “After that, we’ll see. But it’s down to Russell anyway. Go and ask Russell: he has the final say.”
“All right,” I said, grateful and also apprehensive, because she might be relying on Russell to turn me down and save her the trouble.
Delilah, however, thought I was cool. Mounting the threadbare stairs to Russell’s studio, I allowed myself the faintest of smiles.
I heard a clatter and a curse as I approached. The studio door was open. There stood Russell, by his easel, in a smock – a real painter’s smock, such as I had never seen except in photographs. His feet were in the middle of a puddle of dirty water. A jar rolled across the floor towards me, and I dived to retrieve it.
“Stupid,” he muttered.
“Shall I mop it up?”
“Leave it. It doesn’t matter.”
“It’ll ruin the floor,” I said, although the floorboards looked pretty ruined in any case: that wasn’t the first jar of paint-water to soak into them, by any means. It was a good room for painting, though, awash with clear light through the north-facing windows. I was bowled over by a sudden longing to be standing at that easel, in a real studio, even in a smock.
Russell glowered at his picture.
“Can I look?” I asked.
“If you must.” He was surly. He didn’t stand aside for me. I peered round him at scratchy trees on a gravelly hill. He’d been using masking fluid which left odd, conspicuous edges as if his landscape was peeling. It was strangely, bleakly, insistently clumsy. I didn’t like it much.
“Interesting,” I said.
He sniffed, and rasped a half-dry brush across the paper. “I saw your work at Freddie’s when I was there the other day.”
“Oh. What did you think?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
“It was very good,” he said sulkily. “How much did you earn from your Holbecks?”
So he knew too. “Nothing,” I answered. “I got caught before I got paid.”
“Hmph,” he said.
“I couldn’t have done that.”
“No, well, I know you’d never consider–”
“I can’t copy other styles,” said Russell moodily. “Never could. I can’t do any style but my own.”
I studied his peeling hills. “Your own has changed from nine years back.”
“Everything changes. And not for the better.” That was certainly true of his painting. “Death,” said Russell to his easel, “Death changes everything.”
“Yes. Isaac’s death was a terrible tragedy.” The words sounded limp and trite. I wondered how I could utter them without breaking down. Isaac’s death? Why did I not weep?
“I wouldn’t say a tragedy,” Russell grunted, his chin on his chest. “Hazardous job, farming. Tractors tipping over. Poisoning by pesticide. Tumbling into combine harvesters. Fact of life. Not tragic. Just unfortunate that Isaac didn’t have the wit to get out of the way of the bull.” The brush squeaked, and I flinched.
“The wit?”
“Something farmers aren’t renowned for. Most of them possess about as much as imagination as their cows.”
“Isaac wasn’t stupid!”
“I didn’t say he was. I said imagination. What this bloody cultural cliché of a place is desperately short of. Incestuous, big-headed and small-minded,” grumbled Russell to his chest.
“I think that’s a rather sweeping–”
“Anyway, how would you know what Isaac was? You’d only just met him.” Russell lowered his brush and turned to me with a sneer. “You obviously took a shine to him, though. Latched on to him like a limpet at that bloody dinner party, didn’t you? And Isaac took a shine right back.”
Did he? I didn’t know. I found myself hugging the thought, and pushed it aside.
“We got on all right, if that’s what you mean,” I said stiffly.
“Hah! Don’t flatter yourself. He had a taste for young ladies, according to Selena.”
“Selena? Why, what did she say about it?”
He grinned at me like a hyena. “When she sat for her portrait last year, she got talking to me. Implied that Isaac had tried to get off with her. Schmoozing up to her, she said.” He was waiting for my reaction: he wanted to see me shocked. I wasn’t going to give him that pleasure. So I said casually,
“I expect Isaac tried to be nice to her, that’s all. I doubt if it was anything more than that.”
“You don’t believe her? Neither do I, as it happens. She’s an inveterate liar.” Russell turned back to wash his brush, rattling it fiercely around the remnant of water in the jar. He seemed grimly satisfied. “Can’t trust a word she says. It’s all hogwash. Or should that be bullshit? It’s irrelevant now, anyway. Isaac’s dead. Leaving no trace, no marker, nothing to tell the world he ever mattered.”
I grew hot with indignation, and had to command myself to be polite, since I was dependent on his goodwill for a roof over my head. So I countered as composedly as possible.
“I think Isaac mattered. Quite apart from the farm, he mattered to me and he mattered to you, too. Didn’t you just say, Death changes everything? So his death must have affected you.”
Russell grabbed a paint tube from the table and squeezed it viciously before stabbing at the helpless yellow worm of gamboge on his palette.
“I wasn’t referring to Isaac’s death,” he rasped.
“Whose, then? Luke’s?”
He prodded at his painting, adding an invisible, pointless smear before he answered. The words seemed dragged painfully out of him. “I meant before that. I meant Carol. Isaac’s wife.”
“Oh! Right. I mean, I never met her, but Ruby was obviously very close.”
“They were supposed to be best friends. It was horrific.”
“Well, cancer is a dreadful thing,” I said helplessly, from the depths of total ignorance.
The brush hovered in mid-air. Russell spoke very quietly. “Ruby couldn’t accept that Carol was that ill. Couldn’t accept the endless interventions, hospitals, drug regimes, you know. Ruby’s always been ridiculously healthy. People like her don’t believe in illness. They think pain is imaginary. She didn’t want to understand.”
“Carol’s death must have been a terrible shock.” Two heartbeats. “Just like Isaac’s.” Still no inclination to burst into tears. Why not, when Ruby’s eyes were so red-rimmed?
Russell shrugged, and began to paint again, more intently. He had cared for Carol, evidently, more than for Isaac. I changed the subject.
“Ruby suggested that I should ask you about me moving in here for a bit. Helping with the cleaning and cooking for the Easter painting course.”
“What did she think about it?” His tone was cold.
“She said she was prepared to take me, but she left the final decision up to you.”
“Did she.”
I got the message. He wasn’t interested. I was wasting my time.
“Never mind,” I said. “I understand your reasons for refusing. Ruby doesn’t actually want me here either, not surprisingly in the circumstances. Give my love to Delilah.” I just wanted to get away now.
“The course starts on Good Friday,” Russell grunted. “Finishes on Sunday. Can you move in before then?”
“Really?”
“You might be useful with the clients. Help them mix the paints and so on. You’d be surprised how many colour-blind imbeciles we get. Should be in bloody nursery school: can’t tell blue from purple, some of them. And as for any sense of perspective!”
“Oh.”
“Tell Ruby it’s a trial run,” said Russell. “We’ll see how it goes.”
“Okay. Right. Thank you!” Turning to leave, I caught sight of a portrait of Selena on the drying rack. I didn’t think I’d seen it at the dinner party: it looked new, barely dry. I swivelled it to see it properly.
“That’s good,” I said, on impulse. It was true: it had a life and vigour that his landscapes lacked. “I tried to draw Selena, but it wasn’t very successful. She’d make a great model, though, wouldn’t she? If only she’d keep still.”
“She only sat for me the once,” said Russell, with a hauteur that forestalled any further conversation. So I went back down to Ruby and reported my success, news which she received evenly, with lips again compressed and disapproving.
Yet when I left her, and set out along the field path to the farm, I reflected that Ruby’s disapproval was preferable to Greta’s. According to my sister, I should be ashamed of the disgrace, of the consequences, of the blight I brought upon my family. Ruby’s was a purer indignation. For her, the act of forgery itself was shameful.
And I was ashamed, to be sure: I was ashamed that my Holbecks hadn’t been good enough to even give the experts pause. My talent had been unequal to the task, I thought, as I climbed the stile and Borrans Rigg farm loomed into view.
Its dignified brick face brought a rushing wave of memory hurtling through me. Such a short time ago he’d stood there. Then everything had changed, whirled into chaos by the muddy maelstrom in the shed. I waited for the pricking of my eyes: reached for a handkerchief in readiness. Yet still no tears.
Chapter Fifteen