Looking Down (12 page)

The shaking started again. Post-climb nausea. He was hideously visible in front of the glass door, as exposed as if he was naked. The traffic outside passed slower than by day, but it still passed, the noise of it insulated. It would be easy to bypass the lock, if only he were not so ridiculously visible through the glass door, and if only he could concentrate. Instead he slunk back upstairs again. Shivering and shaking, he leant against Sarah’s bell. He had lost track of time.

He was leaning against the door and the bell, normally used only by Fritz since all other callers announced themselves at the front door. Hurt stung his eyes when Sarah did not reply. Surely she knew that the times he stayed with her he also desired to protect her? She
should
be there when he needed her. The refrain, what about me, what about me, was beginning to echo as he slumped against the door, until it opened so suddenly he fell across the threshold on to the painting he had posted through, landing against it so that the sharp edge of the rudimentary frame of the canvas dug into his ribs. He groaned and rolled over, exposing belly and groin, legs outside the door, torso inside, and looked up to see his sister looking like an avenging angel in that dressing gown, with a knife in her hand. Not a discreet knife, either: a big, fuckoff kitchen knife, suitable for sawing raw meat, and all he could think of to say was, Oh God, sis, not another one. I’m in love. Forget everything else, I’ve just had
zing.

Love. A subject men rarely discussed, John thought long after the tail end of a meal best consigned to memory for its culinary insignificance, late service, poor quality and startling price, which his companion Richard Beaumont did not question, just waved away in the manner of a Londoner. They had begun late, in this wretched hotel where ‘late’ meant resentment, because John had
been called out, did not get there until ten, an unheard-of hour to eat in these parts, where the curtains came down and the closed sign was up long before that. True, they were a little slurred, the pair of them, at whatever the hell hour it was in the morning, alone in a restaurant with a view of the sea and bright moon, magnificent through clouds which disfigured the power of the thing and made it all wonky. The staff had long since given up on them and gone home. It was that nice degree of inebriation, all loose tongues and freedom of speech, and nothing to care about except the comfort of communicating with someone of the same sex and like mind. John told himself it was brilliant, and then amended his own description to stimulating. Brilliant conversations were those one had with women. It was the utter and complete frankness of the man that was so appealing, and the raving honesty it inspired in himself.

They had begun to order and eat when the others were ending. The hotel aspired to the old-fashioned, not to say outdated, standards of service which insisted that the waitresses wore black dresses and white pinafores while not insisting they knew anything about food or how to put it on the table. There was one smart French lad who knew better and was clearly loathed and feared by the rest. Their own table attendant, when finally allocated, redeemed her clumsiness by a pretty smile and plenty of leg. John had noticed how Richard looked at her and the other two girls, who were quite different in shape and size. He watched their movements as they advanced and retreated with unabashed curiosity and attention. It took a long time to get their attention, so there was plenty of opportunity. John watched Richard watching and was amused by it, wondering if any of them would notice or complain, or offer to slap the customer’s face. But then, they were in a bit of a cleft stick, he supposed. You could not say you had noticed a customer looking at your legs when you were also pretending not to have seen him yet. Richard Beaumont also
watched a group containing two women as they left the restaurant, intently enough to be making an inventory of what they wore, leaning over to watch them until they had gone. His attention to them was curiously impersonal. Then he looked at the waitress’s feet as she went away with their orders.

‘I do wish they still wore high heels,’ he said wistfully. ‘But I suppose it’s bad for their feet.’

‘Would you like stockings and suspenders, too?’

‘Of course. Wouldn’t you?’

‘I have to confess, I would like to imagine it. But what I would do if actually presented with the sight, I really don’t know. Do you always look at women so closely?’

Richard sighed, and bit into a bread roll with good strong teeth.

‘Yes. They fascinate me. The form in all its varieties fascinates me. I’m afraid it embarrasses my wife. Not my previous wife, who understood it for what it was, but my present wife who is ridiculously young and finds it insulting. Which is terribly odd, don’t you think, for someone who is always the most beautiful creature in the room or the street. I forced myself to stop doing it for the first year or so of being married to her, but the habit’s ingrained. Live models are hard to find, you see. You have to watch all the time and imprint them in memory.’

‘You could be had up for being a dirty old man.’

‘I suppose I could, but most mature women know the difference between looking and leching, and I find it extraordinary that anyone, male or female, should think themselves defiled by the simple fact of being looked at, especially when, in my case, it’s invariably with admiration. Whatever age or shape, I love looking at them.’

John nibbled, and smiled.

‘Being stared at could be threatening. I don’t dare do it. But
that might be because I don’t want to be reminded of how frustrated I am. How much I’d like to bed one of them, and be good at it.’

‘It could be construed as threatening, I suppose. But it is the nature of the male beast to observe the other, and the nature of an artist, even a not very good male artist, to look wherever he’s allowed. I mean, just look at the shape of that leg.’

A plump leg skirted by their table en route to the kitchen. A slab of leg, John found himself thinking, leading beneath the black skirt to a wobbly bottom, not something he found appealing.

‘It’s the variety that is so extraordinary,’ Richard went on. ‘And you simply can’t afford to miss another variation. You need it for the memory bank. And you should do something about this frustration. Lack of sex addles a man’s mind, just as much as too much of it.’

He leaned forward to take another bread roll from the basket, his third. John doubted if it would affect his appetite. He felt he was issuing questions like a parrot, but he supposed that was habit, and he was invigorated by the responses.

‘I thought you painted landscapes.’

‘I do, but I’m enamoured by the idea of a female form in a landscape. Have you ever noticed how a landscape curves? Dips into hollows, seems to move? Often seems to mirror the form of a body. I see women rising out of landscapes. That’s why that body on the cliff seemed entirely natural. It was as if she had grown there. I felt I was seeing what I’d seen before. Maybe it’s a boy’s dream, coming across a pliant body in long grass. This must sound perfectly weird.’

He laughed, a loud but musical sound, refreshingly unself-conscious. The same waitress arrived with the fish, smoked trout in his case, salmon for his host. Neither looked particularly appealing, but Richard ate with the enthusiasm of someone who
did not care what he ate as long as it was food, pausing only to look at her as she retreated.

‘Are you married?’ Richard asked. John nodded with his mouth full. The food was better than it looked.

‘Was. She died.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Oh no, men did not talk about their marriages. They did not, in John’s experience, talk about the intimate side of their lives. In all the years of talking to Edwin, did he know if the man lived alone, or with another man or a woman? They would talk about their children, rarely their spouses. He chewed thoughtfully, then answered. The wine Richard had ordered was far better than the fish. Let me do it, he’d said; we’ll just have the best.

‘I’m married to a ghost. She died of cervical cancer, three years ago, never bothered me with it until it was too late. My daughter blames me. Says I should have cured her. And I should have been able to. Very stoic and efficient, my wife. The guilt comes from the fact that we’d scarcely communicated for years. I bored her, and kept her. I shouldn’t have taken so much of her life without honestly loving her. Or thinking ahead, instead of just wallowing in work and a comfortable enough status quo. And despising her for not being able to leave and try it on her own, just like I couldn’t. So she lives with me still, in my guilty conscience. And from beyond the grave she encourages other women to torment me. About which I do nothing, and can hardly blame her.’

‘Oh, what rubbish. Guilt’s useless. Say sorry and get on with it. But see here, loneliness gets to be a habit. And it’s no basis for making a choice, although that’s the way we normally do it.’ He paused, with a sudden gleam in his eye. ‘You need a transitional woman. I should introduce you to this friend of mine. You need a kind, sexy lady to clear your mind. Worked for me.’

‘At my age? Chance would be a fine thing,’ John laughed.
‘She’d have to be a listener and bloody patient. She’d have to be . . . never mind. She doesn’t exist, not here. They think I’m a depressive misanthrope in this town, and they’re halfway right. I feel as if I live on the other side of the glass. Not like you. You seem to be sorted.’

‘Different for me. I’m the marrying kind. I loved being married, didn’t want anything else. If I’m brutally honest, I
need
to be married, need a woman in my life, just the one, perfectly bloody incomplete without, blundering around like a drunken bull after my wife died. Hopeless without sex and a female ear. Then Sarah, she’s the friend I mentioned, looked after that side of things and knocked some sense into me, so that I was freed up to make a proper choice. I’m going to introduce you to Sarah.’

He grinned and waved his fork. He was a man who could eat and speak at the same time without one interfering with the other. He spoke like a person short of time, but not impatient.

‘She’s the sort of tart who sorts out your body and your mind, and puts things into perspective. Not wife material, thank God. Anyway, I fell in love with beauty and had to marry it. And no, I may not have been fair to her, and she’ll probably leave me, but she will at least be well off. Do you think women can be bought?’

John chewed carefully, feeling slightly giddy.

‘None I’ve ever been able to afford. No, I don’t think they can be bought. And I think they need us less than we need them, if only they realised. They have the power, if only they knew.’

Richard nodded, and sighed.

‘That’s what I’m hoping mine will realise. That I don’t own her, or she me. And yet she wants to be owned. I’ve only got a lease on her. That’s all you ever have.’

Beef arrived, slightly cold and past its best. John wondered what his wife would have thought of Richard, could see her disapproval, and almost smiled at the thought. His mind was floating free. How strange to be talking about these passionate,
mysterious creatures so dispassionately, and how cold-bloodedly accurate to equate depression and a sterile existence with a simple lack of sex.

‘I began by wanting to paint birds,’ Richard said. ‘Of the feathered variety. But then I looked up and saw women floating among the clouds. And now it’s shapes I want to paint. I think. I might go back to birds. I have, in a manner of speaking. Only I know so little about them. What do you know about ravens?’

John was becoming accustomed by now to the sudden changes of subject, even enjoying it and imagining that by the time they reached brandy and dessert they should be well into the realms of astrology or physics, and felt he was in the presence of a man who had smatterings of knowledge along a dozen lines and had waited until the brink of old age to find himself the victim of insatiable intellectual curiosity about life, the universe and everything. The artist, and that was how John described him to himself, was wisdom and naivety, impertinence and courtesy, all in one: a man who had confessed already that the greatest regret in his life had been the gaps in his education. He had read all his life, he said, not always wisely or well, and he had drawn, but never seemed to find an answer to any question without asking someone else. John found his own enjoyment invigorating and outrageous. Any subject would do.

The beef was tough and slower to be eaten. Richard’s three bread rolls in advance of anything else were slowing him down.

‘Ravens? Why ravens? Afraid I’m the softer type whose interest is flora, though birds have to come into that at some level, simply because their habitat and their habits might lead me to something I might see. You need Edwin on the subject of ravens, if he ever consents to talk to you, which he might, once the person who killed that girl is found. Or she’s identified. Not yet, though. Why do you want to know?’

‘It still might have been
me
who killed her,’ Richard said softly.

John ignored him. He liked to answer questions and he had been asked about ravens, and he was, as he rarely did, enjoying the sound of his own voice. He was floating on all this free-moving speech, the eclectic range of subject matter, the effortless chat. He was high on being heard.

‘. . . Ravens are the subject of myth and legend, liking and loathing. They are the hardest birds to know because of their cleverness. They were celebrated by Edgar Allan Poe. remember. Quoth the raven
nevermore
, although it probably said
quork.
Noah sent a raven out from the ark to discover land, in advance of sending the dove. The raven did not come back, possibly distracted by carrion. It will eat any dead animal. Preferring not to kill the animal itself, it can pinch the kill of others, already dead. It will master its own environment and exist on fruit and grain, I understand. It will also kill other birds, or their young, if hungry. Its tribal allegiances are difficult to detect, Edwin says, except among cousins of the same genetic inheritance. I wonder if the only real loyalty is blood and genes? I doubt it. I like you tremendously, by the way. Ravens can certainly kill rabbits, but they prefer to find carrion rather than kill it. They’ll approach the carrion with suspicion. How long were you up on the cliff before the rescue team came?’