Looking Down (16 page)

Lilian could not sleep. She had been so pleased to see him and Richard told her she was always a joy to behold. He dropped his bags where he stood, looked round, breathed a sigh of relief to be home and hugged her. Told her he thought his doctor friend was better off with Sarah, and what they should do, just
the two of them, was go out to dinner. He could eat a horse, he said. Richard could always eat. Puzzled but relieved by his casual abandonment of his friend, Lilian let herself be led, her own worries giving way to a mild anxiety about him at dinner. There were the occasional lapses of memory she had noticed before, such as when he could not remember what he had ordered and was surprised when it arrived. And when they emerged from the place, and he did not seem to know how they had come to be there at all. It was if he was still elsewhere, but it passed and it did not matter; he was jovial and affectionate, talked about the children and where they should go in the summer. Italy? Turkey? Should they include her family, too? No, she said, firmly. She was desperate to tell about the burglary, but she could not. If she told him the truth about what had happened, she would have to explain why she had let that muscular burglar out of the door with the only thing in the flat which had no value. She would have to explain that she had been drunk and not frightened, and she had an inexplicable but determined instinct not to mention the ridiculous garb of a man who had let her overpower him and then admired her. And Richard forgot to go into his daylight room. Maybe he would forget the painting, too, in the pleasure of shared sleep.

Then he woke her, early in the morning. Not forcefully, but by sitting on the big bed beside her, shaking her shoulder gently until it was obvious he was not going to stop. One look at his face told her he had not forgotten anything.

‘Lilian, what happened to the painting?’

‘What painting?’

‘The one on the easel.’

She was wide awake now, about to bluster and pretend she did not know what he was talking about. All the variations she had rehearsed scrambled in her mind, coinciding with the realisation
that she was afraid of him at the moment, and had been denying to herself the fact that she had been worried to death about exactly this.

‘I took it to a dealer, it fell on me, it broke,’ she said.

‘Paintings don’t break.’

She wondered about bursting into tears. Too late for that, and it would not work.

‘I’m sorry. I was cleaning up in there. I knocked it over by mistake. It stuck to the floor. It was ruined. I threw it out, so as not to upset you.’

‘So as not to upset me,’ he repeated, slowly. ‘Was it smeared? I thought it was dry.’

‘Sarah said . . .’

‘Sarah said what?’

‘She said paintings don’t break. Nothing. I told her about it. I was worried. Oh, Richard, I’m sorry.’

He was silent. She could not bear it when he was silent. Rowing, shouting, reacting any old way was better than silence. Quietness made her lose control.

‘It was an accident,’ she screamed. ‘And I hated it. It’s horrible. Why did you paint it? Why?’

He would not look her in the eye. Disconcertingly, he patted the shoulder he had shaken. She would almost rather he had struck her, then she could have retaliated. Instead there was a long pause before he replied, and his words were like sighs.

‘I drew her, sweetheart, because she was there, and I painted her to fill in the gaps of what I saw. Do you hate all my paintings, or just that one?’

It was so mildly spoken it surprised her into truthfulness. Not a time to admit how much they hid from one another.

‘I hate them all,’ she muttered, ‘but that one in particular. It was obscene. Yes, I hate them all, hate the bright colours, hate the
fact you do it at all, hate the smell. I don’t understand. You’re no good at it.’

‘Ah, I wondered if you’d noticed. About that.’

He walked out of the room and left her. She followed him to the door of the daylight room. A second realisation, worse than the knowledge of wounding him so profoundly, struck her as she looked over his shoulder into the room itself. The room was as messy as ever, showing no sign of anyone attempting to clean it, and there were no marks on the floor by the easel. It was all bathed in that awful daylight from the blue bulbs he used to illuminate the darkest room, an unflattering light to everything. He looked an old, defeated man in this light.

‘Can you at least understand why I want to try?’

‘No, I don’t. You can buy a painting. You don’t have to make it yourself.’

‘I suppose you’re terrified I might want to hang them up on the walls.’

‘I’d hate that, too. They don’t go with anything.’

‘I need to get the anger, or something, out of my soul, Lilian. I need to try to paint the images in my mind, because I know I see things other people don’t see. I’m transfixed by certain things, can’t rest until I’ve explained them, by this.’ He gestured at the empty easel. ‘I’m no longer sure of what I see until I try to paint it. Being good or bad isn’t the point. I have to do it.’ She was quiet, shivering in her nightdress. Not the oyster white.

‘And it’s difficult, Lilian. It’s hard and frustrating and maddening . . .’

‘It doesn’t look hard.’

He shrugged, aiming for nonchalance, trying to control himself.

‘I don’t need you to appreciate what I try to do, darling, but it would be nice if you tried to understand why. Perhaps if you ever tried to understand what goes into a painting . . .’

‘But I do understand,’ she protested. ‘I love pictures. I love beautiful things, you know I do.’

‘You like
pretty
things, Lilian. They have to be wrapped for you. You only see beauty where you expect to see it. You have so much of it yourself it no longer disturbs you. I wish you knew what it was like to see it everywhere, not pretty beauty either. It’s like being on one long visual assault course. Always confused and amazed and feeling punched in the eyes. And wanting to remember it, and not being able to.’

The sadness in his voice made her want to cry. She felt deficient, and then confused and defensive. He never talked like this: it frightened her, she wished he had not started.

‘And the paint itself,’ he murmured. ‘Oil paint. Such gorgeous, tactile, lovely stuff, unbearably beautiful all by itself. The agony of mixing it, going too far, watching it turn into sludge. And then, that fatal little stroke that ruins the whole thing.’

He kicked at the pile of canvases to his left. They remained immovable.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said sharply. The violent movement frightened her. He turned and smiled at her, shrugged his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets, the way he did when he wished to end a conversation.

‘Don’t worry, Lil. You’re probably right. It doesn’t matter. It might be just as well, but I wish I’d finished it. There was something else to go in there. Something I saw out of the corner of my eye. And it might be the last memento of someone dead. Like a gravestone. Never mind. We’ll just have breakfast, shall we?’

He moved to put his arms round her, held her briefly. It was a distant embrace, but it was still forgiveness, and more humiliating than anything else. She knew he knew she had lied, but he did not know how much. She would not cry; she would
not
cry.

‘I’m sorry, Rich, I’m
sorry.
I’ll try and understand. I’ll go and look at paintings until I understand. I’ve already started. I shall, I promise.’

‘No, don’t force yourself. Doesn’t work.’

‘. . . And I’ll try to get it back, that thing.’

‘I thought you threw it out.’

‘I did, but I can try and get it back.’ He was patting her gently as if she was a child with hiccoughs.

‘That would be nice, but don’t worry. What’s gone is gone.’

Lilian knew he was referring to something other than a painting. Something vital in their relationship. It would be so much easier if she did not love him. She padded down the long corridor towards the kitchen, angry again, wishing for once he would lock himself in the daylight room and leave her to her own thoughts, but now he followed her, sat and watched her, irritatingly, as she fetched crockery. She was used to him watching her and usually enjoyed it, but now it unnerved her.

‘I tell you something, Lilian. You aren’t so bad at art appreciation, at that.’

‘Why?’ she asked, bending into the freezer, letting him see the fluid lines of her behind beneath the black satin slip of nightdress.

‘Because at least you could see the vital thing about that painting of mine. You may not have much brain, but you do have eyes. It
was
obscene.’

‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

‘No. You made it easy.’

‘I have a theory,’ Sarah said to John, ‘that if men knew more about women, it would be a very bad idea.’

‘It’s the basic conflict,’ John said. ‘The basic dilemma of human relations. One sex cannot possibly know what it is like to
be
the opposite sex. To
think
like the opposite sex. Therefore, complete understanding is always impossible. I could deliver a
dozen babies, and still not know what it’s
like
to have one. I don’t know what your orgasm is
like.
I never knew what my wife was
like.
It’s like living parallel lines you can never cross.’

‘Does that matter? Why do men always concentrate on the differences, instead of what’s the same? Same pain, same lust, same needs, same old bruises.’

‘Only different.’

‘No. Just different levels of intensity at different times. What you bloody men tend to suffer from is this dreadful need to know. I think it might have something to do with power. Needing to know what the hell is going on at any given time. And you can’t.’

‘You seem to.’

‘No, I don’t. I just respond.’

‘I noticed.’ He felt incredibly, ludicrously comfortable, lying on Sarah Fortune’s bed with Sarah, so comfortable he wanted to pinch himself. This was not him, it was someone else, aeons younger, cheerfully irresponsible, lying on a bed with a woman fifteen years his junior and twice as wise, talking his head off and not giving a shit. This was not Dr Armstrong. It was a man talking to a woman about everything and feeling entirely natural. It could not last, but then it was not supposed to do so. That gave it the freedom. He felt very grateful to Richard Beaumont, and that reminded him.

‘We never did get around to Richard Beaumont last night, did we?’

‘We touched upon the subject, among other things. You said you were worried about him. So am I. I stopped when I realised you scarcely knew him. I was wrong, I think. You do know him. We talked about other things.’

‘And drank too much.’

‘Not too much. Just enough.’

John felt a faint stab of envy that Richard knew Sarah better.
That Richard might have
used
Sarah, just as he was doing, but no, that was all wrong. Sarah was not used by anyone. She gave; she was not taken from. The envy was also about Sarah knowing Richard better than he did. It came and went like a frivolous storm cloud, and he knew she could feel it.

‘Am I taking up too much of your day?’ he asked.

‘The day’s young yet, and it’s yours as far as you want it. But I expect Richard will come along at some point and scoop you up.’

‘What am I going to do about my life?’

‘You’ll know what to do about your life when the time comes. I expect you already know. But for what it’s worth, I think you’re too young to compromise and hide away, the way you are. Now, about Richard, your friend.’

‘My new friend. Your old friend.’

Envy again.

‘Old friend, old lover, same thing in my book, whatever. He’s a husband now. I think he needs help, but I don’t know what kind. You never even told me how you met him.’

John’s sense of responsibility came back. Responsibility to that other world, to other people; the innate sense of responsibility for that girl at the foot of the cliff, the odd responsibility he felt for Richard ever since he had met him. He closed his eyes, but no, it was all right. He could share this one, too.

‘I met our mutual friend because I was called to see him. He was sketching on the cliff near me, you must see it some time. A girl either fell or was pushed from above him, literally fell past him, or so he recalls, although he cannot remember how he got where he was. She was killed, of course, although perhaps not quite as instantly as one could wish. Instead of raising the alarm, he sat where he was and sketched her. Probably for hours. He was, understandably, suspect. I was called to assess him.’

‘And what did you assess?’

‘A humble, likeable, honest man. With that ice chip in the heart that doctors and artists might share, perhaps. The ability to be objective, opportunistic, even, in the face of death. My professional kind carve up the cadaver after death and sometimes find it beautiful. We know when there is nothing else we can do, and so did he. He sat and sketched it. We understood one another, I imagined, at a rather profound level. And he was sure he had seen a chough. It’s a rare bird, black with a red beak, by the way, and he couldn’t possibly have seen it. And he suffers from vertigo. I can’t imagine how he ever made himself go down that path to where he sat, unless he was desperate to hide. Avoiding someone? And he isn’t as well as he looks, or what he seems.’

He was going on too long. She was not prompting him, which was reassuring, so he resumed.

‘As I grow even older, I find I trust my own instincts more. Am able to fall prey to sudden likings and believe what I find. Perhaps it’s a feature of being alone. It’s liberating, or this has been. Richard could have pushed that lass, and then gone down to his overhang to examine the result. Deliberately stayed hidden. In my dreams, I thought she might have been some awkward mistress who’d followed him up there, and he simply dispensed with her and forgot. His memory lapses are worrying. But that’s wild conjecture and I don’t believe it. I believe he could be violent, but not that way.’

He loved the way nothing surprised her. It was infectious.

‘Hmm. Pretty wild. I don’t see the mistress angle. He’s monogamous by nature, a one-woman man with newish, gorgeous wife. And Lilian might not know much, but she’d know about that, I bet. And if Richard had a mistress, he’d acknowledge it, I think. That’s the type.’