Next day I had my interview at the Ruskin Hotel. A starched manageress, new since my last stint there, looked me up and down as if I were a piece of clothing she didn’t really care for but might consider buying if it was sufficiently cheap.
“I see you’ve got a criminal conviction.”
“Yes. When I contacted you before, you said it wasn’t necessarily a problem.” The you was a hopeful generalisation.
“Hmm. I don’t think we could employ you as a chambermaid: we have to consider the feelings of our clientele.”
“I’ll clean the common areas,” I said. “Toilets. Wait on tables. I don’t mind. I’m versatile.” I tried to look bright, humble and conscientious all at the same time. I could tell it wasn’t working.
So I emerged into the cosy glamour of Bowness with my expectations low. She wasn’t going to offer me a job. I wandered the streets dejectedly, eating chocolate in a vain attempt to get my spirits up. No mints. I’d gone right off them.
When my phone rang, ten minutes later, I expected it to be the Ruskin again, with dismissive regrets: but it was my mother, terse and hurried. On the phone she always gave the impression that she wanted to dash off to deal with something more important.
“Where are you now?” she said.
“Bowness. I’ve just been for an interview at the Ruskin Hotel.”
“I thought you had a job,” she said, “that painting course thingy.”
“That’s only short-term.”
“I’ll be surprised if the Ruskin takes you on,” she said. “They’re quite choosy. So what’s the name of that place you’re living?”
“Raven How,” I said patiently.
“Nick’s been in touch.”
I stopped dead on the pavement. Two shoppers collided with me. “What! Why? How is he? Is he all right?”
“He sounded fine. He wanted to know where you were.”
“What for?” I was breathless.
“So he can get in touch with you, I imagine,” she said reasonably. “I told him I wasn’t sure of your address or new mobile number. I thought I’d better check with you first. He’s going to ring me back.”
I stood there like a stunned cow. Nick had rung. Nick wanted to talk to me – he wanted me back. Why else would he contact me now, after all this time?
“Give him my address,” I said. My heart was leaping around wildly in my chest. “Why didn’t you give him my number? Give him my number.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“Eden,” said my mother, and I could hear her feeling her way with unaccustomed delicacy, “don’t read too much into this. It’s been a long time. And consider, sometimes the past is best left in the past.”
The past is dead and buried. But I didn’t want it to be, now. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said belligerently.
“He might just be getting in touch through curiosity,” she said. “Or good manners.”
I didn’t believe that. Nick did nothing without a goal.
“Are you all right, Eden? Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” I said, and rang off before I lost my voice altogether. Then I walked down to the lakeside and watched the boats tilting and bobbing in the water, knocked this way and that at the whim of the wind. Far out on the lake, the waves twinkled, alive with promise, snatching brief sparks of sunlight from the chilly sky.
Nick wanted to get in touch. My mind flew back to the time we’d first met at that student party: Nick cheerful, handsomely tousled, always ready with a joke, eyeing me up and down in much the same way as the Ruskin’s manageress, but with a good deal more appreciation.
When my phone rang again, I fumbled and trembled in a panic to press the right button. For a horrible moment I thought I’d cut him off. For that must be Nick. He must have rung straight back. He couldn’t wait.
It wasn’t. It was Hunter.
“I’ll make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got a mountain of paperwork sitting on the desk. Car theft: you can tell the season’s started.” He paused. “Are you there?”
My throat had closed up with disappointment. I could hardly get the words out. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Okay. That poison thing. A load of rubbish, like I thought. Selena’s just fantasising because she’s got it in for Ruby. Forensics did a tox screen on Luke’s body, looking for alcohol or drugs. He’d had a drink, but not much. That was all.”
“What about the rest of the family?”
“Isaac next. Nothing showed up there. So then I went back and checked on Carol’s death. There was an autopsy, not strictly necessary because her death was clearly due to breast cancer, but they were surprised at the speed with which it had advanced. Anyway, they did their own tox tests and came up clean.”
“No poisoning, then.”
“Quite the reverse. When I say clean, I mean clean. No drugs of any kind. Nothing. Not a dicky-bird.”
It took me a few seconds to catch on. “But surely she’d be on all sorts of medication? I found some of her tablets when I helped Bryony clear out Isaac’s room.”
“What were they?”
“Exe-something.”
“Exemestane?”
“Yeah, could have been. I threw them away.”
“Unused tablets should be taken to a pharmacy,” said Hunter. “The hospital concluded that she’d taken herself off her medication. It probably only made a few weeks difference, mind you. Months at most. Maybe she’d just had enough.”
He paused, but I could think of nothing sensible to say.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks. See you later.” I couldn’t get my head round Carol and her tablets. All I could think about was Nick.
As I trundled home to Raven How on the scooter, my mind was back in that crumbling bedsit we once shared; in that ancient, lumpy bed. A wonder we didn’t have bedbugs. I remembered it so clearly: the iron-shaped scorch mark on the table-top, the smell of burnt dust from the electric fire, the black flower of mould that blossomed behind the sink. We didn’t care. It was all romantic because we were in love. It was romantic until Nick got his job, anyway, and had to buy shirts and needed a proper wardrobe to hang them in, and the dust and mould and lack of an ironing board lost their glamour.
And when was I going to get a worthwhile job? he said. I shouldn’t waste myself just waitressing, he said, I should use my talents. He didn’t want me to grow embittered and unfulfilled. But using my talents wasn’t earning me any money: until I met Lionel. So when I sold my first MacLeish to Lionel, I was triumphant. The wodge of dirty notes in my purse proved me worthy of Nick’s love.
Now I willed him to ring. He didn’t. My mobile sat in my pocket like a stone.
When I got back to Raven How, I walked into the kitchen to find the air was thick with a heady, musty, stifling scent. Ruby was making candles, dipping them by their wicks, one by one, and hanging them from hooks on a clothes airer to drip onto newspaper on the kitchen floor. The smell gave me an instant headache.
“For the course this weekend,” she explained. “Freshly made, the scent is so much more intense.”
“Certainly is,” I said. “Why don’t I finish cleaning out the dormitories?” I wanted to stay in her good books, since I seemed unlikely to get onto the Ruskin’s books at all.
“All right. Just three rooms will do. We’ve only got six people coming this weekend.”
That wasn’t many. I’d been expecting more – surely Raven How could sleep twenty people in its eight dormitories? I was counting in my head as she continued, “Four women and two men. They can share.”
“Are you sure that’ll be all right with them?”
“They can share,” repeated Ruby, with iron in her voice.
“Okay.” I took the bucket and cloths and Hoover upstairs and cleaned out all the rooms, because the guests might not want to share, or might like to have the choice at least. I wiped down paintwork and polished windows with a critical gues
thouse owner’s eye, something which had evidently not been applied to them for a while. Rifling through the linen cupboard for towels, I failed to find any that weren’t threadbare, faded and pink. The bedding wasn’t much better. I used the most presentable to make up two beds in each cell. But that was what they still looked like: cells.
I ran down to Ruby. “Are there any new towels? And the rooms could do with brightening up. Have we got spare vases? Pictures?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ruby. “It’s all in there.” She pointed a toe at a low kitchen cupboard. It was full of clutter, mostly home-made. Gathering together the least objectionable pots and less chipped vases, I washed them at the sink before placing them artfully around the rooms. Then I ran down to the road to pick an illegal armful of daffodils and stuffed them in the pots.
When I finished the last room I stood back to survey it. It was sad. It looked like a prison cell that belonged to a junkshop proprietor. But Ruby, when she came to inspect, was pleased. I returned to my own cell with the feeling of a job well done, and saw my phone, which I’d left on the bunk, winking at me to let me know I’d had a text.
I snatched it up with shaking fingers. It could have been waiting there for hours. I stared at the message, reading the words over and over again until they finally made sense.
“Meet in drunken duck car park 6 pm to talk about future love N”
I had to sit down on the lower bunk and take deep breaths. Nick. At last. Love Nick. Did he mean that love? What was he going to say? What was I going to say? The future – did he mean our future? Come back to me. Please, God, let it be, please, my love, Nick. I’d do anything.
I put my head in my hands. It was well over a year since I’d seen him. What would he think of me, now? Thin and scruffy and straggly. I hadn’t had a haircut in months.
I jumped up and ran to the meagre bathroom where I showered and washed my hair. Then I dried it, tied it back, shook it loose, tied it up, let it down, put on a black top, took it off, put on most of my other tops, took them all off, realised it was half past five and frantically pulled on the jumper I’d first thought of, ran out without any explanation as I passed Ruby, climbed on the scooter – the helmet promptly squashing my careful hair – and belted off to the Drunken Duck at Barngates, where I arrived fifteen minutes early.
Its two car parks held five cars between them, all unmanned. The pub was miles from anywhere in the midst of knolled and spinneyed pasture straight out of the Tale of Mr Tod. I went in: no Nick, so I came out again.
I stood at the lonely crossroads and watched the cars go by. They were sparse: about one per minute. I promised myself that the third car would be Nick. All right, the sixth. All right, the ninth–
The ninth car swerved into the lower car park and pulled up. Only it wasn’t a car, it was a small white delivery van, and when I ran down to look the driver wasn’t Nick: he was older, middle-aged, with a leather jacket over his paunch and an unlikely moustache. I was turning away when he said,
“Eden.”
I turned back.
“You are Eden?”
I found my voice, though it didn’t sound like mine. “Are you a friend of Nick’s?”
“I’m a friend of Dawn’s. You remember Dawn. From Her Majesty’s holiday camp, right?” His moustache smiled.
“Where’s Nick?”
“No idea, love. He gave us your number. I’ve got a message from Dawn.”
“What do you mean? Where’s Nick?”
“Nick isn’t here,” he said, patiently, as if I was stupid, “there’s only me. Dawn sends her love.”
“Why?” I said blankly.
“Fond memories. She’s still inside. But there’s a little something she’d like you to do. In return for past favours, like.” He reached into the passenger side of the van and pulled out a long cardboard tube, the sort that posters come rolled in.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a painting she’d like you to copy for her. Don’t worry, it’s nothing under the table, it’s just a picture she’s taken a fancy to and she’d like her own version on the wall. A photo isn’t the same, she says, it needs a decent artist.” He tapped the tube. “There’s a colour photocopy in there for you to work from. And some special paper.”
I just looked at him. Something was thundering through my head: my future without Nick, probably, my hopes all galloping away.
All I could think of to say was, “Did you talk to Nick?” It came out as faint as a cobweb. He ignored it.
“Dawn says you’re a bloody good artist. But you know that, don’t you? She wouldn’t bother otherwise.” He held out the tube to me.
“I don’t want it.” I put my hands behind my back.
The moustache pouted. “No? That’s not very friendly of you. Dawn saved you a lot of grief in the nick, you know. This is your chance to say thank you.”
All I could hear was the word Nick. All I could do was shake my head, and keep on shaking it.
He nodded. “She said you’d be cautious. Quite right too. Terrible shame what happened to you in the past. You wouldn’t like it to happen again, though, would you?”
“What do you mean?”
He took out a smartphone and began scrolling until he found what he wanted. Then he held it out with a flourish. I saw a photo of a painting. Rae Bridge, by Antony MacLeish: by me. The one that was hanging in Latrigg Galleries.
“What’s that?”
“I think you know,” he said. “That’s quite a price.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had turned dumb and imbecilic. He put the cardboard tube into my hand.
“There you go. Don’t sign it. It’s for Dawn’s personal use. All above board. We’ll be in touch. We’ll text you.”
He started back to his van, then stopped. “By the way, don’t bother trying to ring us on that number. It’s one use only.”
“Wait! Did you speak to Nick? How did you get hold of him? How is he?”
“We traced him through your lawyer. He didn’t want to talk about you, I’m afraid.” The moustache crinkled for a moment. “Not until I told him I was your new probation officer.”
“But did he give me a message? The text was signed from N!”
“N for Nobody,” he said, got back in his van and revved the engine hard. I had to jump back as the van swung out of the car park and was gone.
I was left there with the tube held between thumb and forefinger like a stick of dynamite. I knew what I should do: dump it and leave. Go straight to Latrigg Galleries and confess to how I forged their masterpiece, go through the whole rigmarole of accusation, proof, contempt.
The police questions. The files reopened. My licence revoked. Could they bring me back to court again, with this new evidence? Would it mean a longer sentence, or a whole new prosecution?
Either way, I was pretty sure I’d end up back in jail. And Nick would definitely never, ever come near me. That would be the end.
I couldn’t own up to it. Rae Bridge was hurting no-one. I’d hold Dawn off. How, I didn’t know: but I’d think of something.
I stared down at the tube. Eventually I prised the plastic stopper off the end, slid out the contents and unrolled them.
The photocopy wasn’t of a landscape. It was like nothing that I’d painted since my student days: an abstract with blotches of unmixed colour – red, brown, moss green – hemmed in by thin, urgent lines. A bit like a Kandinsky. It glowed attractively in the early evening light. The blank watercolour paper wrapped around it was dense, rough-pressed, slightly yellowed: old. A single sheet. No room for error. That was optimistic.
The whole thing was optimistic. I wasn’t going to do this, not for anybody, certainly not for Nobody. Love Nobody. That love meant zero.
I rolled the paper up and replaced it in the tube. Then, rather than litter the Drunken Duck’s undefiled surroundings, I tied it to the back of the scooter and gave it a ride home.
Chapter Twenty-two