Ruby liked Muriel. They were two of a kind: industrious, efficient organisers, and seemed to recognise each other as such despite the contrast between Ruby’s vividly eccentric clothes and hennaed hair and Muriel’s quiet respectability. At any rate, Ruby embraced Muriel with a good deal more affection than she offered me, and when Muriel gently commiserated with her on Isaac’s death I saw her eyes fill up with tears.
“He was a dear friend,” she said brokenly, “a dear, dear friend. He so badly needed someone to look after him. After Carol died, he worked too hard. I tried to get him to slow down. I tried to help as much as I could…”
“But what about Selena and the other girl who works there?” asked Muriel with mild Scots asperity. “Didn’t they help him out?”
“Help who?” said Griff. He was wearing a tie. Muriel had told me he had put it on when she’d mentioned that they were going near the home of the Lady of the Lake.
“Oh, I’m sure Bryony tried,” said Ruby. “They’re both very young, though. The young don’t have the same understanding.” And she had the cheek to glance at me. “To them, Isaac was just an old man.”
“He wasn’t that old!” I found myself saying.
“There was a gap,” said Ruby distantly. “Selena certainly couldn’t bridge it. She was stiff with him. Strained, even.”
“Selena,” said Griff, with a note of enquiry.
“The Lady of the Lake,” supplied Muriel. “Do you remember her?”
“Of course I do! We saw her in that long wet coat! Oh, yes!”
Unable to stand this, I swiftly said, “Shall I bring my things in, Ruby? Which room do you want me to have?”
“Just pick a dormitory,” Ruby said dismissively. “Any of the smaller ones.” No, she definitely didn’t want me here.
I lugged my bags upstairs and stuck my head in every cold, pale bedroom. I thought they might have been spruced up by now ready for the weekend’s arrivals, for Good Friday was only a few days away: but dust lay greyly bunched under the bunks and hazed the windowsills.
I picked the smallest two-bunk room partly for reasons of diplomacy but mainly because it felt the warmest – or rather, the least cold. It was narrower than my old prison cell, and less well-equipped. Since there was only one tiny cupboard, I emptied my bags on to the bottom bunk and slid my art box and sketchpads underneath.
Then, hearing a curse from down the corridor, I walked along it to the studio – stopping to ponder Ruby’s large, nude portrait on the way – and peered through the half-open door. There was Russell, still besmocked, dabbing discontently at a picture clipped to his easel. He looked just as ridiculous as before, and the studio looked even more alluring.
“Hallo, Russell,” I said.
His head jerked up. “What? What?”
“Hallo. I’ve just moved in.” I took a couple of steps into the room to see what he was painting. If it was a landscape, it was a weird one: I glimpsed a clump of close, black, netted lines before he lunged in front of it.
“For fuck’s sake! Can’t you see I’m working?”
“I only came to–”
“Get out! Out!”
“Sor-ry!” I said, shocked into sarcasm. He snatched something from the table and threw it at me. It hit me on the stomach and rattled down onto the floorboards. A tube of watercolour: Ivory Black.
Since I was a guest here, I just dipped my head in apology and backed out. No wonder Isaac couldn’t stand artists if Russell was all he had to go by. Though maybe I did Russell an injustice: I might have caught him in the throes of genius. Genius my Aunt Sally, said a voice inside my head, as snappy as a sheepdog.
I snook back downstairs, where the other three were drinking coffee out of Ruby’s bumpy home-made mugs. Muriel and Ruby seemed to be having a cosy chat about local delinquency. I wondered if I’d been used as an example. Certainly Ruby’s manner chilled as I walked in.
“I took room 7,” I told her. “It’s fine, thanks. I might just pop round to the farm to see how Bryony’s getting on.”
“Good idea,” said Ruby coldly. “She could probably use some help.”
Which you’re obviously not prepared to offer her, I thought, not the way you offered it to Isaac…
That snappy dog again. I admonished it silently. Ruby is a generous person, I scolded myself, and Russell is highly talented, whereas you, my girl, are just a bitch.
“Muriel?” I asked. “Would you and Griff like to come over to Staithwaites farm with me?”
Muriel looked at Griff, considering. “No,” she said. “On the whole, I think not.” Griff himself showed no reaction. So I left them to it and made my way across the field on my own.
Bryony was in the back barn with Jimmy Airey and half a dozen fat and restless sheep. She came out when she saw me.
“First lambs born today,” she said. “All twins. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks.”
“Will Selena help?”
“Selena? You must be joking. The whole process revolts her.”
“I can try and help out if you like,” I said, although the snappy dog inside me promptly yapped, you? I did my best to ignore it. “I’ve just moved in at Raven How for Easter, so I could always come round if it’s not busy there. Mind you, I don’t know owt about pregnant sheep.”
She smiled tiredly. “Well, that’d be good, but I think Ruby has other plans for you.”
“Does she?”
“Going to get you cleaning the whole place out, she says. They have a soft life in those prisons. She’ll find out what hard work is. That’s what she says.”
“So Ruby told you about me.”
“Yes. I don’t care. Forgery’s not like robbery, is it? Nobody gets hurt.”
Although I’d told myself this many times, I found myself arguing against it. “Somebody might have. I’d just never know.”
Bryony shrugged. “It’s nothing to me. But I think Ruby’s going to keep her beady eye on you.”
“Oh, great.”
“Yeah, she’s a bit of a sergeant-major, is Ruby, for all her crystal healing and that. I don’t think you can help me with the lambing. But there is actually something else you could help me out with, if you really want.”
“Sure.”
“Come inside.” She led me into the house. The old dog lay on the tattered kitchen hearthrug: when I bent to stroke him, his ears barely twitched.
“I’m trying to clear out Isaac’s room,” Bryony explained. “Selena isn’t interested, she says she doesn’t want any of it, it’s old man’s gear. So it’s down to me to sort it out, and I’m short of time. A bit of help would be great. I doubt if there’s anything of value, but if there’s any personal stuff, I think it ought to go to his sister in Melbourne.”
“What sort of personal?” I asked with some dread.
“Family letters, photos, anything like that.”
She led me into the polished hall, past the clock and the long metal chest which took on a sudden malignance as I realised it was a gun safe. The gun Luke had turned on himself… Everything is against me. There’s no place left.
Bryony was marching on up the dark stairs, which creaked meaningfully, sending secret messages to each other. The landing smelt of mildew. A dying peace lily drooped in a pot, the sad partner of the one wilting downstairs on the dresser. She went into a bedroom.
I didn’t want to follow. I was already seeing multiple imagined Isaacs, trudging up the stairs, hand on the banisters, turning through a doorway. I didn’t want to see him lying on the bed.
I’d forgotten Carol. The bed had a double dip worn into it: the imprint of her ghost, next to his.
“Does anybody sleep here now?” I whispered.
“No. Selena’s still in the front room, and I’ll be in the cottage for a few more weeks. It’s not booked till May.”
The room was faded, with grubby wallpaper and tired curtains, their wavy hems inexpertly tacked up. On the dressing table were a dusty bottle of aftershave and a tube of homeopathic arnica oin
tment, unsqueezed, which I suspected was a gift from Ruby. A massive Victorian wardrobe stood with its doors open, drab coats displayed within, no Narnia. This was all there was left of him. Black bin bags were strewn on the floor.
“I was going to sort his clothes,” said Bryony, “when the lambs intervened. Suits and anything decent go in one bag for the charity shop. Underwear and anything worn out in another, for chucking.”
I swallowed. “Shouldn’t Selena…?”
“She won’t. Says she can’t sleep properly with all his stuff around the house. She’s spooked. Says she can feel him.”
“Where is she, anyway?”
Bryony just spread her hands with exaggerated resignation. “Who can say? Off on one of her jaunts, I expect. You don’t mind giving me a hand with this, do you? It’s just that I’m going to have so little spare time…”
I could hear her anxiety. “I don’t mind,” I said. But I did.
After she departed, I began to finger through the clothes dangling limply in the wardrobe, pulling out hangers one by one. It seemed a dreadful liberty: one that surely Isaac would find mortifying.
But Isaac cared about nothing now. And the heavy woollen jackets and creased shirts I unloaded from the rail were poor, inadequate shadows of him, unbearably depressing. He had three suits, all ancient, with old-fashioned lapels. One bore a poppy in its buttonhole. Two tweed jackets, one streaked with whitewash. Shirts frayed at the collar and cuffs.
I began to fold them and decant them into bags. They all had an unfamiliar smell: soap, wool and something else. This was a horrible job. I had loved Isaac, but I did not love his clothes.
After the wardrobe I moved on to the dressing table. The top drawer was even worse. I dragged pyjamas and underwear out as fast as I could, in slithering coils, and jammed them into a second black bag.
The second drawer was slightly better. No underwear. Bottles of sunscreen of varying degrees and ages: I stood them next to the vintage aftershave on the top. A pile of old labels and receipts going back donkey’s years; a leaflet on sheep dip. I put them in the bin. Anti-fungal cream, aspirin, a whole untouched blister pack of tablets called something I’d never heard of that had me flummoxed until I saw the name on the prescription label. Carol’s, dated March two years previously. He’d never had the heart to throw them out.
And inside a carrier bag, a small jumble of ladies’ clothes. A lilac blouse, a printed t-shirt with a Spanish slogan. More of Carol. I had no image of Carol, the woman who had married the man I had improbably loved for a few days. A photograph underneath the clothes was no help. It was from the eighties: she looked young, pretty and fashionable for her time with that dark puff of hair, holding up a small, worried child who was presumably Luke. Now also dead. The whole lot of them, dead. The thought disheartened me so much that I had to sit down on the floor.
Eventually I tipped out the bottom drawer. More photos, mostly Luke in various sizes, acquiring as he grew a dark and dreamy sullenness, his sensuous mouth downturned and long hair flopping carelessly over one heavy-lidded eye. A wedding: Luke solemn in a navy suit and Selena smirking in a veil. On one flank, Matt stood expressionless, while on the other, Ruby leaned too close to Isaac. No sign of Russell.
I piled the photos in an empty shoebox from the wardrobe. Next were a couple of blood donor certificates – Isaac was A positive – and a letter to Carol from the hospital asking her to rearrange a missed appointment. A father’s day card with a fisherman on the front, love from Luke inside. I wondered if Isaac had ever had time to go fishing. A few MOT certificates of the old, outdated type. Did tractors need MOTs? – but on closer inspection, they were blank. Which was odd, but since the Melbourne sister was unlikely to want them, they went in the bin.
Lastly a paperback: The Poems of RS Thomas, which I had not read but which appeared on a superficial flick-through to be full of dour Welsh farmers. Isaac’s bedtime book, I thought, with a twist of my heart, until I noticed the smudged stamp on the flyleaf – Orrest Community College, Windermere – and the enigmatic, elegantly pencilled words: To Luke, son of Iago Prytherch.
That was it. Only an ancient scrap of paper was left, folded in the corner of the bottom drawer. I opened it and found a letter written on thick, dirty paper, in the old-fashioned slanting style of someone taught Proper Handwriting long ago at school.
A thank you letter. “Dear Mr Staithwaite,” it began.
“We wish to thank you for your hospitality during our delightful stay at Borrans Rigg. Nature has blessed your abode with a splendour unequalled even in these parts” – despite my gloom, I laughed aloud at that sentence – “and of all the ‘Souls of lonely Places’ I have beheld in my long Travels, a more majestic view has seldom been imparted to me. I remain, Your most grateful Servant.”
Your most grateful servant, a pretentious twonk, I thought; until I read the signature.
Wm. Wordsworth.
Fake, I thought immediately. But I sat up straight and read it again. Almost certainly a fake. A scruffy effort. The ink was brown and blotchy. The content was uninteresting. Why not a line or two of poetry? That would make a fake worth having. And what would an original Wordsworth letter be doing buried in Isaac’s ugly 1960s dressing-table?
I went slowly down the murmuring stairs, out of the dark stillness of the house to breathe in the bright pungency of the yard. I found Bryony and Jimmy Airey in the barn attending to a sheep who was making a strange groaning noise.
“Bryony? How long have the Staithwaites lived here?”
She pushed her hair back, looking strained and young. “I don’t know. Quite a while, I think.”
“Not as long as us, according to my old man,” said Jimmy. He had a faint lisp. “We’ve been here longer. He’s very proud of that. We’ve got 1692 carved on our lintel. I always tell him, anyone could have done that, but he swears it’s genuine.”
“1692?”
“Probably,” he said, cheerful and unbothered. “He reckons the Staithwaites can’t beat that.”
“But they could have been here in the early eighteen hundreds.”
“Oh, sure. Almost certainly.”
“Is there any documentation from back then?”
“What do you mean?” asked Bryony. “Do you mean deeds? I imagine Isaac’s lawyer has those.”
“Okay,” I said, and left them to it.
Upstairs, I read the letter again. The writer was still a pretentious twonk, in my opinion, but I was no longer so sure that it was a fake. I was prejudiced, I thought, by my own history, which gave me the expectation of fraud everywhere.
The door banged downstairs. I put the letter together with the photos in the shoebox and carried them down into the kitchen. Selena was there, kicking off her boots. She sat down in Isaac’s chair and held her stockinged feet out to the tepid range. The old dog heaved himself off the rug and slunk away.
I approached her cautiously, mindful of our last meeting in the lane. She looked tired and dejected, rubbing at her brow with languid hands.
“Hallo, Selena. I just called round and Bryony suggested I should clear out Isaac’s room. I don’t know if you want to look through his things.”
She pulled a face. “No way! Why would I? Old man’s leavings. I had enough of that with all Luke’s stuff. I kept the clothes, and threw the rest away. What’s the point?” She sounded depressed.
“You might be interested in this letter. I found it in Isaac’s drawer.” I held it out.
She glanced at it briefly. “So?”
“No, but read it! Look at the signature.”
Selena pushed it away. “I can’t read that scrawly writing. You read it.” So I did, while she sat listlessly unimpressed.
“Wordsworth,” I said. “You’ve heard of Wordsworth? At school? I wandered lonely as a cloud?” I felt a tweak of pity for poor Wordsworth, remembered by so many people, me included, chiefly for that one short poem. As if I were to be famous only for one minor painting. You should be so lucky,
growled the snappy dog inside me.
“Yeah, I think Luke might have told me about that letter once,” Selena said. “I’d forgotten. Is it worth anything, then?”
“It could be, if it’s really Wordsworth’s. What do you want to do with it? Do you want to check it out?”
“Christ, I don’t know,” said Selena wearily. “Can’t you do it?”
“Well, I could try if you want. Are you all right?” I asked her cautiously. “Been somewhere nice?”
She heaved a huge sigh. “Just out. Looking at people.”
“Looking at people?”
“To see what makes them real.”
That again. She was play-acting. I leaned against the range to study her.
“So what makes you think that you aren’t real, Selena?”
“I feel sort of empty,” she said, staring at the rag rug. “Like I’m just made of skin and clothes and nothing much inside.”
She wasn’t play-acting. “That’s no great surprise,” I said more gently, “considering everything you’ve been through. You’ve had a rough few months. But things will get better.”
“How? How will they get better?”
“Time helps everything,” I said. I knew it was a lie. “You’ll get used to coping with it. You won’t forget Luke, but it will all get easier.” Hah! said the snappy dog, a snarky counterpoint to the listless one now hiding underneath the table. Are you sure about that? Getting easier for you, is it?
“I can’t get used to it,” said Selena quietly. The clock’s tick was louder than her voice. “I can’t forget. I can’t forgive.”
“Forgive who?” Did she mean Luke, for dying? Or Isaac, for not being sympathetic enough? “Who do you mean, Selena?”
“Nobody.” With a dismissive gesture she sat up straighter and fixed me with those deep, demanding eyes. “When are you going to paint me again, Eden?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got lots of other things to think about just now.”
“But you must! You promised me, remember?”
“When I get time,” I said, “I will. But right now I need to get to back to Raven How. I’ll be busy helping Ruby for a while.”
“You going to paint Ruby?” she asked with a sudden flare of jealousy.
I had no intention of painting Ruby. Nevertheless, I didn’t want Selena to get the idea she held exclusive rights to me. So I casually replied, “Why not? She used to be an artist’s model.”
Selena’s lip curled. “You mean like in that big painting with all her bits hanging out? It makes her look a right slag.”
I was taken aback by her distaste. “That’s not true. It’s a good picture. And Ruby’s been very kind to you.”
“Kind? She’s like a bloody social worker, with her Now now and her Let’s not tell tales!” Selena’s eyes flashed. “I could tell you a tale or two! If you knew what Ruby did, you wouldn’t want to paint her!”
Leave it, warned the snappy dog: she’ll say anything when she’s riled. I ignored it.
“Why? What did Ruby do?”
“Come here.” Selena beckoned with a crooked witch’s finger. When I came close, she caught my hair and pulled my head down to the level of her mouth.
“Get off,” I said.
Her breath buzzed in my ear. “What she did to Carol. The two-faced cow. She was poison,” her voice said, like a fly inside my head. “You just ask Luke.”
“What?” I tore myself free. “What did you say?” Just then Bryony came marching in and I had to clamp my mouth shut.
“Who’s doing tea?” demanded Bryony. Selena sighed and got up to drag a bag of potatoes out from under the sink. I hung at her elbow.
“You heard,” she said.
“I didn’t.” Had she said Poison? Or poisoned? I wasn’t sure. Who was poisoned? Ask Luke what? How could I ask him anything?
“How did you get on with the clothes?” said Bryony.
“All bagged and labelled on the bed.” I looked at Selena, but she was mute. I’d thought Selena was in awe of Ruby; I’d thought she liked her. This sudden vicious outburst rattled me. I didn’t believe a word of it. Poison? I felt like she was poisoning me.
So I said goodbye to Bryony and walked out, taking the Wordsworth letter with me. First the birth certificate, then this. It had to be a fake too. The world was full of them. And as for Selena and her accusations, she was just one big attention-seeking fraud. The biggest of the lot.
When I reached Raven How, Muriel’s car had gone and there was no-one around. I went upstairs to my tiny dormitory to sort out my meagre piles of clothes. Then I got out my sketchbooks and looked through them. I’d done no sketching since his death. The one time I’d started, I had to lay the brush down, too heartsick to continue.
The only answer was to compel myself to paint. There was no point waiting for inspiration: it never struck unless I got it in a corner and poked it with a brush. Painting would take my mind off Isaac and Selena’s crazy accusations. I thought with longing of the relative warmth of Russell’s studio. If I was very quiet, perhaps he wouldn’t mind...
I carried my sketch book out into the corridor. The sound of raised voices brought me up short outside the studio door.
“Well, then, you should have said no!” That was Ruby, loudly vehement. “Why do you think I left it up to you?”
An indecipherable rumble came from Russell in answer.
“I do not leave everything up to you!” cried Ruby hotly. “The courses wouldn’t run without me. Who does all the bookings, and the housekeeping, and the meals, I’d like to know?”
Russell’s voice rose. “At least you don’t have to teach a bunch of bloody morons! Blathering on about light and shadow when they don’t have a fucking clue.”
“Well, that’s why they come!” said Ruby in exasperation.
“And I wish they bloody wouldn’t!” Russell snarled. I tried to tiptoe away, and froze on a creaking floorboard.
Ruby’s answer covered the creak. “Well, for crying out loud, how else are we going to subsidise your painting?”
“Maybe you could get a job for a change,” retorted Russell, “instead of swanning around with your herbs and candles and fucking crystals pretending to heal the fucking world.”
“That’s–”
“All your pills and potions couldn’t save Isaac from the bull, though, could they? They couldn’t stop him being crushed like an egg.” There was a jeering malevolence in his voice. “You couldn’t help your sad old farmer in the end. Any more than you helped Carol!”
“Oh!” There was a crash. Another water-jar, or something bigger. “I suppose you wish I was dead too!” Ruby yelled. A roar. Another crash.
At that I fled, hurtling down the stairs as quietly as I could and into the kitchen, where Delilah was cutting herself a piece of carrot cake.
“Hallo, Delilah. Good day at school?”
“Very good, thank you,” said Delilah politely. “It’s the Easter holidays, actually. I’ve been on an athletics course.”
“That’s nice.” I could hear muffled shouting through the ceiling. “Track or field?”
“Both,” said Delilah, “but my best event’s the long jump.” There was a thud upstairs. She raised her eyes. “I’d better go and tell them I’m in.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I’m good, thanks. It’s always a bit fraught before the courses start. It gets on top of Mum, and Russell’s not really into cleaning and that.”
“I see. Well, I’m here to help out now, anyway.”
“That’s cool,” said Delilah kindly, and wandered out, cake clutched between long black fingernails.
I burrowed in the pantry for the Hoover, carried it upstairs and began to clean my bedroom thoroughly, including mattresses and curtains as my mother had taught me. When it was done, I unplugged the Hoover and dragged it out into the hall. The banging and shouting had ceased. I plugged it in again, quickly, and began to loudly vacuum all the other rooms in
case the fracas started up again.
I didn’t like the shouting. It reminded me of prison: those belligerent flare-ups, the yells of rancour echoing down the corridors. My parents had never shouted, not loudly anyway. Nick had never shouted, not even when he learnt about my long deception, which I had never thought of as deception, merely as expediency. Instead he went quiet and remote. During the nine interminable months of the police investigation he grew ever quieter and remoter: and when finally that nightmarish gestation ended with my trial, he packed his things and left.
Nick never visited me in jail. He wrote to me informing me why our relationship was over. I can’t stay with you, he said. I don’t want to have children with you. I can’t commit myself to a. It won’t, it isn’t, you haven’t. I couldn’t bring myself to read it fully. All I knew was that Nick, having chosen me, had now unchosen me again.
No shouts. I’d rather he had shouted than left it to that mumbling letter. I hadn’t seen him since.
But one day, one day, I thought, leaning on the Hoover, Nick would ring my parents, ask for my address, knock on my door, hold out his hand. It couldn’t just end like this. It mustn’t. The longer the time since I had seen him, the more I felt myself dangling in mid-air, while the drop beneath me grew longer, deeper, darker.
I wanted Nick. I wanted somebody to hold. I paused in my vacuuming beneath the nude portrait, Ruby’s eyes gazing soulfully at something just beyond my shoulder. Ruby looked sexy, warm and comforting, saying Lie down here with me and you’ll be fine.
No wonder Hunter had admired it; it made me want to touch that luscious, luminous flesh. I ran a tentative finger along the curving thigh. But there was no smooth skin, just the slick, hard ridges of the oils, as deceiving as Snow White’s rosy apple.
And Russell no longer felt this way about his wife. He no longer painted her. For the first time, I wondered why.
Their marriage was a battleground. Russell was grey and bitter, while Ruby – according to Selena – was just like Snow White’s apple. Wholesome on the outside: and poisonous within.
Chapter Nineteen