I pushed the tube deep under my bunk. There was no need to consider it yet anyway. I couldn’t do anything about it over Easter.
So I tried to forget its presence while I finished cleaning the conservatory and polished a year’s grime from the windows, making the hills leap in. I blew the dust off crystals on the shelves and set Ruby’s candles there to waft their heady scents throughout the building, hoping to cover up the smell of cooking pulses which had draped itself round Raven How like wet cardboard.
On Friday afternoon the guests arrived. All six of them were over fifty; two pairs of women, two single, unacquainted men. None of them had been here before, but Ruby greeted them like long-lost cousins and showed them proudly round the place which looked even shabbier to my eyes now that I was seeing it through theirs, but which at least was clean. Russell stayed out of the way.
They took up five bedrooms between them. They admired the daffodils, poked around the scrubby herb garden and drank Ruby’s herbal tea without enthusiasm. They showed more enthusiasm as they tucked into her lamb tagine before trooping into the living room, where Russell gave them what Ruby fondly described as his Preliminary Pep Talk. But then, she didn’t stay for it.
It was a shocker. A few dim slides on one of the screens – with a projector that didn’t work properly, and no black-out on the windows – a dismal drone about materials, with illegible notes on a flipchart – and then Russell just wandered off out of the room and left us all wondering if he was coming back.
“Is that it?” said the most voluble man, who was called Ed.
“I certainly hope not,” said the most voluble woman, who was called Gaynor.
They all looked at me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s my first time here too.” We waited a few more increasingly painful minutes before I decided that Russell wasn’t going to reappear and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go and try to drag him back.
But I couldn’t just leave the class in limbo. So I told everyone to pull their chairs into a circle, and got them talking about why did they paint, what did they paint, and where? They were happy to talk about themselves, as most people are, given the chance.
What did they hope to cover on this course? I asked, and made a big list of answers on the back of the flipchart. There was enough there for a year. Colour mixing. Composition. Use of Pen. Light. Trees. Buildings. Water. Clouds. Russell was going to hate me.
Russell was very good at clouds, I told them, taught me everything I know, which was broadly true. He’s got a bit of a migraine at the moment, I offered, and they all tut-tutted sympathetically and then drove off to the pub.
I went back to the kitchen to find Ruby. She was stirring a small vat of something purple: I wasn’t sure if it was food, dye or more candles.
“They seem a nice enough bunch,” I said. “Is Russell all right? He disappeared rather quickly.”
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” she said. “He never enjoys the first evening. He’ll get into the swing of it.” She reached tongs into the vat and pulled out a length of dripping towel. “They’ll be like new. Lovely colour, isn’t it?”
“Mm.” I hoped they wouldn’t turn our clients purple.
Russell marched in, looking stormy, and headed for the coffee pot.
“Are you okay, Russell?” I asked cautiously. “They seemed to expect a bit more, so I made a list of topics that they’re interested in. I hope you don’t mind. I told them you had a migraine.”
“Have you, Russell?” Ruby looked up. “You shouldn’t be drinking coffee with a migraine! Hang on, I’ll give you a tablet.” She began to scrabble in a drawer. “What about an Indian head massage?”
“I don’t need anything,” said Russell grumpily.
“With chamomile. You know it always used to help your headaches,” Ruby said solicitously.
“I don’t have a sodding headache!”
“Here, take one of these.”
He took the pill she offered him and threw it violently into the purple vat.
“Don’t do that!”
“That’s all they’re bloody good for!” he said. “Don’t you know by now? Oh, I forget, you’re never wrong. Heaven forbid. Are you?”
And he stamped out, leaving his coffee behind. I dried the dishes and said nothing. Ruby dabbled in her dye. A few minutes later I heard the faint clink of a bottle in the lounge.
“Will he be all right tomorrow?” I ventured at last.
“Oh, God, yes. It’s just first-day nerves. Strangers, you know. He has to expose himself. It’s hard, for an artist.”
I said nothing. I hid my face in the plate cupboard, trying not to giggle.
The next morning was fine and bright. A cool clarity settled on the hilltops: it was one of those days when you could see all the way to Scotland and the Isle of Man from the right viewpoint. Russell did not appear at breakfast, but after it he turned up, to my relief, with two armfuls of battered easels, and led the class outside, dotting them peremptorily along the lane with their sketchbooks to sample the views. They began to paint.
I went along too, in case Russell wanted errands running, and did a number of thumbnail sketches that might be turned into cards. I was thinking that perhaps I should try vignettes rather than panoramas. The Lonely Hut, or the Solitary Sheep. With an umbrella.
Meanwhile Russell was peering over shoulders, grunting and criticising. He snatched people’s brushes off them without so much as a by your leave, to show them how it should be done. I wondered at the pupils’ deference. If he’d grabbed my brush off me like that I would have stuck it up his nose.
He came up to me, peered and grunted.
“Cliché,” he said. “You’re not meant to be painting.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“You’re meant to be helping out here!”
“Sure, if people want help.”
“Of course they want help! That’s what they’re sodding here for!”
I put down my brush and said loudly, “Anybody who wants help, let me know.”
“Jesus!” said Russell.
Gaynor put her hand up. She couldn’t draw that line of hills, there were too many of them, too big an area and she didn’t know where to start.
“Let’s divide it into segments,” I said. I gave her a mount to hold up at arm’s length as a frame, and showed her my thumbnail sketches. She didn’t grunt “Cliché!” She began to do her own, in the bright greens and browns that Russell had just criticised.
“Excellent,” I said. Her friend Meg started copying the idea. So did Doug and Jenny. Russell humphed and grunted and grabbed brushes to try and draw people’s thumbnails for them.
“It’s such a beautiful landscape,” said earnest Meg despairingly after a while. “It’s so hard to do it justice.”
Ums and Ahs of agreement. “Everyone feels that way,” I said. “Overwhelmed by beauty. You can’t capture it all. But you can capture a part.”
“Hah!” said Russell. “Beauty? Beauty is superficial. It means nothing. If you could paint what lies beneath this landscape it would be as miserable and ugly as an inner city slum.”
“So what does lie beneath?” asked Ed, who had a certain bulldog truculence.
“Disorder and decay,” barked Russell. “This beauty that you think you see” – he swept a careless hand around, making Gaynor’s easel wobble – “is as deceptive as a painted woman, all sumptuous flesh on the outside and cruelty within.”
“A painted woman?” inquired Ed. “Wetherlam?”
“A masquerade.”
“So what are those sheep masquerading as?” demanded Gaynor, who I think saw herself as feisty.
“Beauty is an illusion. It conceals the truth: and truth is raw and dark and disappointing,” Russell growled.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Ed surprisingly, “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
I was impressed. “Is that Wordsworth?”
“Keats.”
“Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” snarled Russell. “That’s Wordsworth.” And then he launched into a full-blown rant about Shades of the Prison-house of which I couldn’t follow a word, although Ed and Jenny seemed to, and polite though they were, would not let go unchallenged. Quotations flew around like pigeons trying to crap on the opposition in a well-mannered war.
I think Russell lost. At any rate, it ended with him compressing his mouth and saying nothing for the next half-hour.
After that he began to lob out rasping, caustic interjections now and then at the artists’ sketchbooks, like half-bricks thrown into a goldfish pond. By the time we shuffled in for lunch, I had a pulsing headache.
“It’s not going too well,” I said to Ruby in the kitchen.
“Is it not? Just put those bread rolls out for me, will you?”
“Russell’s not in a very good mood.”
She raised an unconcerned eyebrow. “So what’s new? And the salad.”
“They’re not very happy,” I said. “Have you got any paracetamol?”
“They’re here to learn,” said Ruby firmly. “Some people aren’t good at that. If they can’t accept what Russell has to teach them, that’s their problem.”
“Yes, but…” Ruby, however, was already striding past me with the vegetarian meat-loaf.
Russell sulked over lunch and Ruby got sharp with him. It put a damper on the guests’ conversation, and they grew wary, ready to be disgruntled. It wouldn’t take much to turn them to rebellion. Ruby gave me a bottle of headache pills. They were homeopathic. It began to rain.
So after lunch we trooped into the cold conservatory where I remembered painting all those years ago. We pushed the chairs and screens back into the same positions as nine years previously and admired the same view through the glass: almost the same clouds, whole mountain ranges of mauve and grey building themselves in the sky, a Cumbrian speciality.
“Jesus,” said Russell forty minutes in when nobody knew what they were supposed to be painting. He hadn’t told them. “I’m buggered if I’m doing this any more.” And he walked out, again.
This time they all looked straight at me, expectantly, with a distinct hint of threat. They’d walk out too if I didn’t do something.
“Okay,” I said, “more migraine, I expect. We’ll make a fresh start. Let’s try a few warming up exercises,” and I dredged up some activities remembered not so much from art school as from primary school: drawing with eyes closed, without looking at the paper, taking a line for a walk. Fun stuff to make them relax and laugh.
Meanwhile I went and fetched the best of Russell’s old paintings off the walls, and then used them to give a talk about clouds and light: Russell’s original talk from nine years ago, which had impressed itself so deeply on my mind. Clouds are never white. Anything but. Clouds are shadow and reflection: a mirror, a window, a thought. It sounded like bobbins when I said it, but they listened courteously.
Then they dutifully copied me as I demonstrated: a wet-in-wet wash of Cerulean Blue in the palest of layers, as faint as a whisper: sponge out, then introduce hints of Alizarin Crimson or Raw Umber. We painted lots of clouds with different values, with two colours at a time, no white paint allowed, let the paper shine through.
I was careful not to grunt at all but to praise everything worth praising, which in Doug’s case was a lot. The others were a mixed bunch of happy amateurs but he, the most silent, had both skill and a good eye.
Russell did not reappear. Ruby came in half way through with tea and biscuits and crept out again without comment. When I sensed they’d had enough of clouds I switched to trees and told them all my Usual Tree Stuff. How to give form by editing the trunks and exposing the branches, how to use damp mix, how to mottle the foliage with cow gum erasers. Giving away all my tricks and cheats. Then we put trees and clouds together into imaginary landscapes and produced a few efforts that their friends might admire; so by teatime, they were fairly happy.
I was knackered. My headache was worse and my throat was sore from talking. For the first time in years I felt some sympathy for Greta: for I had only six people to keep on track, while she had thirty-three.
The artists went off to loll around before dinner. I went to help Ruby cook it. I felt drained: emptied of myself. Peeling potatoes was all I was capable of.
“Where’s Russell?” I asked.
“He’s gone to pick up Delilah.”
“I had to do nearly all that session on my own.” I tried to keep the whine out, but it crept in regardless.
“You seemed to be coping,” Ruby said.
“Will I have to do the same tomorrow?”
“Russell will be here tomorrow,” said Ruby firmly. Her face was flushed. It might have been just the heat of the oven. She was cooking chicken with lentils and coriander. “I do appreciate your efforts, Eden,” she added rather stiffly. “Russell’s not usually this… unreliable. But he’s under quite a bit of stress right now.”
“So am I,” I said. “Those tablets you gave me didn’t work. Have you got any real painkillers?”
“They work for me,” said Ruby sternly. “You probably have too many toxins in your body.”
“I know. That’s why I need paracetamol. Or ibuprofen would do.”
“We don’t use either in this house.” She piled peppers in a roasting tin. “I can give you some essential oils if you like. Lavender’s very good for stress.”
“I’d rather tackle the cause,” I said.
“Paracetamol won’t do that,” said Ruby with reproof. “All it does is fill your body up with chemicals. You shouldn’t dismiss alternatives: they help you cope. They helped poor Carol. I just wish I could have persuaded Isaac that they could help him too.”
“I don’t think homeopathic tablets would have saved him from the bull.”
Ruby leant on the table. I saw she was unhappy. “That’s what Russell says. He seems to think it proves something. But it was the stress Isaac was under, don’t you see? He was careless. He grew clumsy. That’s why he fell: he’d lost his balance in every way, emotionally and psychically. I could have helped, if he would only let me. Selena was no emotional support at all.”
“She had her own problems to cope with,” I said.
“Well, perhaps.” She sprinkled salt on the peppers. “Selena is a dear girl, but very young for her age. Sometimes she’s almost infantile. She tells lies, you know. She told me Bryony was having an affair with Luke. Dumpy little Bryony! Imagine!”
“Mm,” I said.
“And she implied that Isaac was trying it on with her – as if he would! Selena tells some dreadful tales, you know, things that couldn’t possibly be true. Honestly, she sees sex everywhere. Very odd considering what her life with Luke was like.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she and Luke didn’t have a sex life.” She slammed the roasting tin into the oven. I didn’t really want to hear about Selena’s sex life, but Ruby went on, “They didn’t sleep together most of the time, you know. She was averse to sex. Luke slept on the sofa. Isaac was quite worried about them. He asked for my advice.”
“What advice did you give him?”
“I told him that Selena was immature and possibly inexperienced and afraid of sex, but that time and a loving husband would put that right.” Ruby sighed. “In the end, though, there wasn’t time.”
“And was Luke a loving husband?”
“Certainly. He was also a depressed husband.”
“Maybe things would have been different if Carol hadn’t died.”
“Don’t remind me,” Ruby said. She paused, the oven glove wrapped tight around her hands which she clasped to her chest. “Isaac rang me that morning. Carol hadn’t slept, he said, she’d felt ill all night. Restless and moaning. He wanted to take her in to hospital. She didn’t want to go. While we were still discussing it, she died.”
“My God.”
“When I went over, I could hear Luke screaming all the way. Tha
t was the worst day of my life.”
I’d had plenty of those; but nobody had died. Today’s trials were nothing, I told myself, compared to what the Staithwaites had endured. Just a passing glitch.
None the less, I hoped that Ruby was correct, and that Russell would be there next day.
Although he showed up for the class next morning, one look at his face made my heart sink. He was monosyllabic as he glanced at the previous day’s efforts. At least he didn’t snort too loudly.
Then he propped up one of the early works I’d used to demonstrate his skills, and told everyone to copy it.
Gaynor immediately objected. “That’s not what I came here for!”
“You can learn a lot from copying,” said Russell sourly, “as Eden knows. And earn a lot from it as well. Isn’t that right, Eden?”
“Up to a point,” I said warily, my heart beginning to thump in case he elaborated; but then Ed started to object as well, and the others tried to get their quietly disapproving pennyworths in, until finally Russell threw up his hands.
“I’ve had it!” he announced. “You do it, Eden. They’re all yours. You’re the bloody expert now.” He charged out of the living room, but this time reappeared a minute later with Ruby charging him back in.
“Don’t you dare!” she cried. “You’re not dipping out of this one!” She paused, momentarily, to flash a reassuring smile at the group before switching it off again and turning back to Russell. “Just do your job!” she hissed.
“This is NOT my job!” thundered Russell with all his old, leonine authority. “I did not ASK to do this job. You VOLUNTEERED me for this job, and I have never had a CHANCE to get off the bloody sodding TREADMILL ever since!”
“Let’s go outside,” I suggested brightly to the group. “Let’s do buildings this morning, shall we?” They all obediently trooped out after me with their gear, shell-shocked as children who had just witnessed their parents fighting.
Subdued and studious, we positioned ourselves a safe distance from Raven How and observed the stonework. It was a picturesque enough old building, despite the obvious joins where new bits had been tacked on to the original: I pointed them at the most paintable feature, the solid doorway with “J.S.1778” inscribed above the top. But I don’t think they were really looking. While I rabbited on about perspective, barely aware of what I was saying, they weren’t listening either, what with Ruby and Russell’s shouts firing through the open conservatory windows like the cracks of a whip. Hate and slave and duty were being lobbed sharply to and fro, swift grenades of words.
A sudden shower of small pellets clattered on the glass. One came through the window: it was an oil pastel. A sketchbook sprawled itself against the pane and fluttered downwards like a stunned white bird.
A moment later Delilah came out to join us. “I’d rather be out here than in there,” she said. Her mouth was turning down.
I immediately declared, “Brick! That’s what we need! Enough of stone. I know where there’s some very paintable brickwork. Just follow me,” and I set off, leading the group across the field towards Borrans Rigg and its breath-taking backdrop.
“This farmhouse belongs to some friends of mine. I’m sure they won’t mind us visiting for a little while,” I told them as I clambered over the stile and entered the farmyard.
They loved it. Six variations on “Look at that view!” were breathed in awe.
I could see Bryony in the back field, which seemed to have grown a new crop of wobbly lambs, but nobody was in the yard except the old, lame dog; so I stationed the artists round the place with instructions not to try and paint every individual brick. They settled to contented, murmuring work. I wanted to sketch, but watched and praised and pointed out instead. Delilah petted the old dog, who was grateful.
The peace lasted all of twenty minutes. Then the farmhouse door flew open and Selena came rushing out in a long quilted dressing-gown.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. “How dare you? You’re trespassing! Get off my land!”
I stepped forward. “Selena? It’s me! I didn’t think you’d mind. It’s the painting course. We only wanted to spend an hour or so–”
She wasn’t listening. She rampaged at Meg and Jenny, dashing water out of jars and slamming sketchbooks shut. The others rapidly began to gather up their things and withdraw to the stile before she could reach them.
Selena marched over to me and grabbed me by where my lapels would be if I had any.
“I only asked you!” she said fiercely. “On your own! Not all your mates. I didn’t say you could bring all your mates! What do you think I am? A public peepshow for everyone to gawp at? I hate that! I hate it!”
“Sorry.”
“You let me down!” She released me with a furious push and shouted at the retreating backs. “This place is mine now! Mine! Don’t you forget it!”
“Sorry,” I said again, this time to the startled artists as we trailed back across the field to Raven How. “Sorry, everyone. I misjudged. She’s been a bit upset lately because her father-in-law recently got trampled to death by a bull.”
“Really?” Gaynor’s eyes widened.
“Well, actually, she’s not been right since her husband shot himself last Christmas,” I amended.
“My goodness!” exclaimed Ed, almost jauntily. “Whatever happened?”
Delilah began to relate the circumstances of Luke’s death, quite a colourful version, as we walked. The artists arrived back at Raven How full of a sprightly eagerness that nonplussed me until I saw Meg cheerfully pick up a candlestick that had been hurled out of the window and understood that what they had lost in painting they had gained in drama. At least they had a story to take home, if not much else.
The subsequent and thankfully last meal took place in near-silence, Russell presiding stony-faced while Delilah expanded on the story of how Selena had met Luke at his own mother’s funeral. I didn’t comment. Neither did Russell, until he suddenly burst out,
“Just shut up! You think everyone wants to hear this tittle-tattle?”
Delilah’s eyes half-closed. I think she was trying to give him a hard stare.
“Please don’t speak to me like that. You’re not my father,” she said.
“Thank God,” said Russell, at which the group exchanged furtive glances. I was afraid it was all about to kick off again and began to talk at random about Cornwall and the Tate. They would much rather have heard about Selena and Luke. But at least we got through the meal without bloodshed.
An hour later, they had packed their bags and carried them downstairs ready to leave. Doug beamed and pressed my hand.
“I enjoyed your trees,” he said. “Lovely food. A memorable weekend.” The others concurred, although I doubted if any of them would be recommending Raven How to their friends. Once the last car had driven off, I dragged myself up to my little dormitory to lie exhausted on my bunk.
Well, that wasn’t all that bad, I told myself. Not the worst day of my life by a long chalk. Not as bad as Ruby’s worst day, when Carol died.
As for the worst day of my life, I knew what it was it without any thought at all. It was always there, an immoveable boundary stone dividing past and future.
It was not the day of Isaac’s death. Nor the day I was convicted, nor even my first day in prison, bad though all those were.
It was the day of Nick’s letter, five months into my sentence, a perfectly unremarkable day in every respect apart from that sheet of paper sticking up like a pale tombstone in the middle of it. After which nothing was the same. I wasn’t the same. It wasn’t jail that changed me: it was that letter. The last time I ever heard from Nick.
I got out my phone and looked at the text from N. No point ringing that number. I rang it anyway: it didn’t work. Nobody was nowhere. And as for Nick: well, he was somewhere, but he wanted me to be nowhere in his world.
I slid down off the bunk and lay on the floor. My unfinished head of Isaac lay parallel to me, underneath the bed.
Like Nick, I felt him slipping further and further from me with every lengthening day.
Below him lay my painted hills and lakes; behind him was a long, cylindrical, grey shadow. Nobody wanted me, even if Nick didn’t. Nobody thought I had a talent. I turned my head and gazed at the snake-like tube beneath the bed, a secret promise hidden in the darkness, as ever-present as a heartbeat.
Chapter Twenty-three