*
“Sergeant Brigg rang.” Ruby, standing on a chair, had her back to me. She was busy getting something out of a top cupboard and wouldn’t look my way. Behind her the grey morning had collapsed, the clouds lying heavy and exhausted on the hills. “They want to talk to you. He said he’d send a car.”
I groggily remembered that my scooter was still parked behind Griff and Muriel’s apartment block. “Thanks. Are you all right?”
“Not really,” Ruby said. She climbed down at last, and placed a box full of small glass jars heavily on the worktop. She still didn’t look at me. Although she was carefully made up, I saw the blotchy grief beneath the mask. “Russell is leaving,” she said. “He’s decided he can’t stay any more. Too much has happened here. All these tragedies have shattered him.”
With dreadful suddenness, Matt’s ghost stood in the room, laughing, Isaac’s body underneath his feet. All those heads he’d screwed around with: all those truths he’d twisted. I saw Selena with her loose coat flapping, dangling like an awkward puppet from his thin pale hands. He’d screwed with Selena too.
But what about Ruby? Why was Russell really going? and which was the tragedy that had shattered him? I couldn’t forget his denunciation of Ruby’s treachery. I still hoped it wasn’t true.
“Does he really need to leave?” I asked. “I mean, I know last night was dreadful…”
“It seems to be necessary,” she said formally. “What happened inside the house? The police wouldn’t let me go in.”
I told her the evening’s events from the beginning. She listened in silence, shaking her head occasionally, murmuring, “Poor Griff.” “Poor Bryony.” Not, I noticed, Poor Eden.
“Matt,” she said at last, her hands clasped tight together. “I can’t believe it. Poor Freddie. Something terrible must have happened between them to drive Matt to that.”
“No. Matt was always scheming. And he used Freddie. He didn’t love him – he wasn’t even gay.” So Matt had maintained: but how did that work? How could you pretend to be gay? Maybe Matt was so tightly wound in his own deceit that he no longer knew what he was.
Ruby cast me a look of contempt, as if to say, what did I know about love?
“I knew Russell had a passion for Selena,” she began, “but that’s always been the case with his models. Especially the beautiful ones. That’s how we got together. Oh, it’s not always a physical thing, but I’ve never minded either way. I understand him. Beauty gives him inspiration.”
I thought Russell had been pretty short of that recently: but I shut up, while she went on.
“It’s the disillusionment that he can’t stand. Last night opened his eyes – he realised how deceitful Selena really is.”
“You think so?” I was doubtful. Surely last night would have only confirmed Russell’s already jaundiced view of her.
“Oh, yes. He’s always idolised his women, you know: he can’t bear to find they’ve got any weakness at all. I know this because he was so devastated when Carol died. She was such a lovely quiet, gentle person, but she had – well, cancer, and he couldn’t bear that weakness. That imperfection.”
“That’s harsh,” I said. “Cancer is hardly an imperfection.”
“But it’s nature’s way of telling us we’re taking a wrong path, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “Not breast cancer.”
“A wrong path,” repeated Ruby firmly. “Sometimes I think Carol’s death started all his problems off. It wasn’t her fault, poor Carol, but she stabbed him to the heart without knowing it.”
That, too, seemed unduly harsh on Carol. “He told me once his light went out when Carol died.”
Ruby looked startled: aggrieved, almost. “Russell told you that? Well, I suppose that’s another way of putting it.” She sounded like she preferred her own. Lifting a large bag of yellow-green rock chips out of the box, she began to decant them carefully into a bowl.
“What are those?”
“Healing crystals.” They looked like aquarium gravel. “These are citrine. They might help you, Eden. You place them in a healing net around your body to raise the energy levels and clear the mind. Would you like to try it?”
“No, thanks. What are you going to do with them?”
“Sell them at a craft fair. It’s a way to earn a bit of money, which I’m going to need now, though of course that’s not why I do it.” She counted them out on the worktop and then looked up at me, unwillingly appealing.
“Eden. We’ve got another artists’ course booked this weekend. There’s no time to cancel. I’ve told Russell he needs to stay for it, but I don’t think he will.”
“You want me to do it?”
“I hardly like to ask...”
“I know,” I said, “seeing as I’ve got such a bad reputation and all.”
I expected her to refute that, but she said, “Well, exactly,” and began to scoop the crystals into one of the jars. I dipped my hand in the bag and felt their crunchy coolness.
“I’ll think it over. Did you ever use these on Carol?” I asked.
“Well, of course I did. I told you. I helped her all I could. Not citrine, though: carnelian, to help the body heal. I made up a set to correspond with her chakra.”
“Right.” I let the stones run through my fingers. “Did you give her homeopathic tablets too?”
“Certainly! They couldn’t possibly have hurt her. Isaac didn’t approve of them, but that’s because he didn’t understand. I didn’t give Carol anything that could have side-effects.”
“Or any effects at all.”
“They were far better for her than those terrible chemicals she was supposed to put into herself! Pure toxins! She could never get better while she was taking those.”
I stared at her. “You told her to stop taking her medicine,” I said.
“I advised her to detoxify,” said Ruby stiffly.
“Don’t you think that might have hastened her death?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Not in the slightest. My remedies helped her. They would have helped her more if she hadn’t been ingesting that chemical poison for so long.”
“Chemotherapy is meant to be poisonous,” I said. “That’s how it works.”
“Exactly.” She rested one hand on the large jar, upright and confident. I opened my mouth and closed it again. There was no point in contradicting her. Russell must have known that for years.
“This art course,” I said. “What will you do if Russell and I are both no-shows?”
“I’ll have to send the students home.”
“How many have you got coming?”
“Eight.”
Eight eager artists with those blank pages, those tubes full of promise. There were unlikely to be any conceited seventeen year old schoolgirls among them. But still.
“All right, I’ll do it, if it means I can stay here a bit longer. Where will Russell go?”
Ruby’s lips compressed. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t seem to care. To London or some other urban sprawl, I suppose. But it won’t last: he’ll come back. He’ll have to, in the end.”
“If you say so,” I replied, and went upstairs.
Russell was clearing out the studio. There were sheets of paper and dust everywhere. At the draught from the open door, a pile of paintings took flight off the rack with a harsh rustle. When I picked them up, they felt stiff and warped.
“Just put them there,” said Russell. He was wrestling with a portfolio.
“I’ve told Ruby I’ll help out with the next course.”
“Good. You won’t need me, then. You seemed to know what you were doing last time.”
“And what will you do?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter, does it? As long as I’m away from her and her hypocrisy.”
I didn’t like his tone of contempt. I considered him the hypocrite. “I thought you had an open marriage,” I said. He stopped and glared at me.
“What’s that got to do with anything
?”
“So is it honest to leave Ruby because she had an affair with Isaac?”
“Affair? What affair? Isaac would never have contemplated such a thing.”
“But I thought–”
“She nearly mothered him to death after Carol died,” he said. “As if that made up for all the rubbish she fed Carol, mind and body alike. Carol was thin as a wraith before the end. And the pain – she wouldn’t admit to it, but you could see it in her face. Ruby persuaded her the drugs were killing her. Wouldn’t let her take them. She was in agony. And when she died–” His mouth worked silently for a few seconds before he could continue.
“When Carol died,” he went on gratingly, “at last, at the bitter end, after all that suffering, Ruby denied she had anything to do with it. It was the drugs’ fault, she said. Carol should have listened to her earlier. I can’t forgive Ruby for what she put her through.”
“So that was it.”
“Wasn’t that enough?”
Looking down at the pictures I still held, I began to pile them on the table one by one, a heap of scratchy, muddy, snarling landscapes painted with clenched fists. I saw at last what they portrayed: disappointment, anger and despair. They bored into my guts with a pang of recognition.
They weren’t rubbish at all. They were powerful. I didn’t like the rancorous rage of which they spoke, but I acknowledged the skill with which they did it.
I dragged my eyes away at last and looked up at him. “Will you keep painting, Russell?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s worth painting?” He threw a handful of brushes into a box.
“These are,” I said. “They’re good.”
“They’re crap. My life is crap.”
“But these are good. You should keep painting,” I insisted. He just grunted at me and carried a sliding armful of stuff out and down the stairs. I wandered around the studio, savouring its space, planning how I could use it for at least the short time that I stayed here.
The white corner of a sheet played peepo from behind the cupboard. I pulled it out. It was the portrait of Selena, naked and bound with those strange black criss-cross lines as if she was caught in a fishing net. The wide eyes weren’t seductive, after all, but frightened, trapped and begging to be rescued. It made my heart thump with nervous dread. In comparison to this, my sixth-form painting of Selena was about as searching and accomplished as a cartoon sheep.
I was wrong to think Russell had lost his talent. He had simply lost his hope. For him, nothing was worth painting any more.
And what about me? What could I bear to paint, how could I bear to paint, to live, with Nick lost to me and Isaac dead and Hunter barely talking? I would never escape the meshes of the past. My one mistake would never be erased. I dropped the picture of Selena on the pile and walked out of the room.
Chapter Thirty-one