Looking Down (29 page)

‘Is he very ill? Fritz told me he was hit.’

‘He had a seizure of some sort, they don’t know what, and he’s supposed to stay in bed and have tests and stuff. Which is what he’s doing, but already he says he can’t stand it and wants to get out. Wants to go and stay with that doctor friend of his, near the sea, he says. I suppose he’d be better off with a doctor than anyone else. God save me from wailing women, he says. I did
not
wail. Not once. I bloody felt like wailing, though.’

She was crying now, working at the same time, replacing unbroken jars and condiments inside the cupboards.

‘Because it’s not
me
he wants. He wants his kids, they’ve all
been, and his doctor friend. And I thought he was going to die. And he hates looking weak in front of me, and rambles on about not being able to paint any more. Just when I want him to do it, just when I see the bloody point  . . . ’

She brushed away tears, leaving unsullied make-up, and laughed.

‘I tell you what, Sarah. We should do a swap. I’ll have your brother and you can have Richard. More your age and you’ve probably got more of a knack for looking after men than me.’

She was tackling the hob of the cooker, which was already clean from disuse. ‘Oh, and I forgot to say, can you go and see Richard? He’s always liked you. I’ll do your bedroom next, but if it’s like ours was, it’s not bad really. They were just throwing things about, looks worse than it is.’

‘Are you sure, Lilian? You’re being very kind.’

‘No, I’m not being kind. I’m not a kind person like you. I know what I’m good at.’

Sarah stepped over the damp floor and hugged her. It took them both by surprise: Lilian hugged back, fiercely and then let go, embarrassed, giving Sarah a gruff pat on the back.

‘You are kind, Lilian, believe me. Bloody men, they never know what they want  . . . ’

‘Yes, they bloody do, they always do. I tell you what, Sarah, when Richard dies or leaves me, I’m not having another. I think I’ll be a tart. I think I’d be good at that, don’t you?’

‘Tart with heart? Yes, I daresay you would.’

‘Go and see my husband, will you? Where is it you keep your hoover?’

The Beaumont flat seemed to have changed. Sarah remembered the fine living room and admired the long corridor with its artful lights, harmonious prints and ornaments, providing a vista of sterile good taste. No wonder Steven had thought he might find
rich pickings here. There was an acre of pale cream walls, limpid pastels, interestingly neutral carpet, so that she could scarcely see where one surface met another. She remembered the subdued regency stripe of the receiving room, the off-white curtains folding on to the floor, the flower paintings carefully chosen to contribute to the pastel uniformity, offset here and there by a patch of vibrancy, like the glass display in the kitchen and the single bright ornament in the hall. The pictures in the long corridor had been drawings, she remembered, architecturally exact prints of London, chosen for size and sepia tints and surrounded by slender, gilt frames, everything tailored to be restfully easy on the eye. In the living room, comfort was paramount. Deep seats arranged around a coffee table of pale, polished oak, where the putting down of a heavy glass of wine would not make a sound.

The corridor, leading towards the bedrooms she had never seen, showed the significant change. It was bare of all decoration and looked, with its predominant colour of cream, like a hospital corridor with no purpose other than to lead somewhere else. The reek of cleanliness added to the impression. Sarah liked it like that, free of tasteful clutter. She visualised the alignment of this flat to her own, thinking that the reasons she had given to the police officer as to why her flat and this should have been the only ones targeted by the fleeing Chinese had a convincing logic. They were unlikely to notice the chalk marks on the ironwork in the well.

Richard Beaumont had turned the matrimonial bed into a scene of carnage, which Sarah guessed Lilian would long to clear into the order that prevailed everywhere else. A satin coverlet had been thrown to the floor, a dismembered newspaper had been discarded sheet by sheet to the four corners of the room, looking as if he had chewed it first. The bedclothes erupted around him, the table by the bed was littered with small bottles of pills and three different unfinished glasses of fruit juice. His own presence
was untidy and large among the delicacy of the lace-edged pillows, hair sticking up on end, his pyjama jacket wrongly buttoned, giving him a sleepy but belligerent appearance. In Sarah’s view, pyjamas were an abomination on a man. A vase of tulips drooped and twisted on the dressing table he faced. He looked like the proverbial bull in a china shop, with a large, swaying head, wondering what to smash next. He saw her out of the corner of his eye as his head was turned to the open window, as if seeking a route of escape. Then he smiled, faintly.

‘Have you come to tick me off? Hello, Sarah.’

She sat on the crumpled duvet at the foot of the bed, regarding him from a distance.

‘What I’d like is strong amber drink, like the sort the doctor keeps in his car. I want sea and cliffs and a view.’

He was aggressive and defensive in one.

‘There’s one thing I wanted to ask you,’ she said, ‘before I talk to you at all. Did you seduce Minty? What I mean is, did you lead her on? Only if you did, if you made her follow you and then ran away from her, I shall despise you for ever. If you
made
her follow you, and then abandoned her, that’s despicable, to put it mildly. You don’t have to answer but I do need to know.’

He had surprisingly stubby hands, toying with the duvet, clawing at it without desperation, the fingers agile, as if dying to do something else, expressing the energy that wanted to be somewhere else. He groaned.

‘Do you think I haven’t asked myself that? Again and again, since I manage to forget almost everything? No, sweet Sarah, I didn’t. I looked at her, that’s all. I watched her move, stared at her. Like I look at all women. I stared at her when she sat downstairs. That’s all. She was rather graceful. She was a body and a face.’

‘And you might have encouraged her, by the looking.’

‘Not as far as I knew. I looked at limbs and features, without
desiring, or promising, I promise you. She had my limited sympathy, that’s all. Oh no, I didn’t encourage her. Believe me, Sarah, please, I didn’t. What would she want from an old man?’

‘An old, rich man.’

‘An old man, with a mind going south, but the same old habits of fidelity. We do exist, you know. I look, never touch, unless very specifically invited by one woman at any time. Lord, you know that. I’m losing my marbles, but not my habits. Not my scene. Never done it. But I looked, I always look, I record it in my mind. Live models are hard to find. I love shapes and faces.’ He paused.

‘I’ve been working it out. Fritz told her where I went. I always told Fritz exactly where I was going, even described the places, in case I forgot. He might have thought I would help her more, at the right price. He might have encouraged her to follow. Fritz would never understand that a man goes off, really wanting to be alone. Not a man my age, anyway.’

Fritz had never quite been what he seemed. Sarah knew the man she faced fairly well. As well as you ever knew any man.

She made herself more comfortable. Difficult with hands crossed across bosom, perched on the very end of a vast bed.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘They don’t know. Could be the ghastly breathlessness which precedes heart attack. Shock, blow to the head, more of a cuff, actually. Seeing Lilian come through the door with the light of everything behind her.’

He coughed, painfully.

‘Maybe a cold. And because I’d been remembering earlier what I’d done and I was already ill with shame. I’d run away and hidden from that girl, because I knew she wanted something I couldn’t give and it was a sunny day, when the light was perfect and there was so much else to see and do. And then I drew her. I didn’t know who she was any more than I cared. She was a
form.
A model. She was
there
.’

‘An
it.’

‘That’s what’s wrong with me. The ice chip.’

She counted her fingers, yet again. ‘I found your painting of her. It’s a good painting.’

‘I’ll never do a good painting. Never.’

‘The difference between an amateur and a professional,’ Sarah said in her official voice, ‘is that either can produce a masterpiece, although one does it more consistently than the other. The learner can do it as well as the master, but not often. You did it.’

‘Something with
zing,’
he murmured.

‘And you do it at a cost,’ she continued. ‘To yourself and other people. You have to push people aside, I suppose. Why should they understand what you want to do? Perhaps all artists have to be shits, one way or another. By which I mean, full of selfish determination, not to miss the light, or the chance of a live model, even if she’s dead.’

‘Are you criticising, Sarah?’

‘No, simply observing. In case you didn’t realise the cost. And what will really break your heart.’

His stubby hands had grown quiet. He reached for one of the fruit juice glasses.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘And I shall have to go on paying and coping with my losses. And my mistakes. And living with my shame.’

She knew there was no worse punishment than that.

Lilian whistled down the hall.

‘John sends his regards,’ Sarah said, formally. ‘He thought you might need male company, and says you’re welcome. He wants to paint his house, and bury a body, with style.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

Spring had reached its zenith and faded out to make way for the less exotic pleasures of summer before the girl known as Minty was buried in accordance with her sister’s wishes in a shady English churchyard, chosen for its similarity to something that was home.

A West End dentist named William found that he had hired an attractive young woman as a part-time receptionist, although he had not been aware that he needed one. She was a student the rest of the time, and although her command of English was not good, it was better than most of his patients’ and improved rapidly with her studies. It was when she began to smile more, he noticed how useful she was. She kept the patients at bay. She would go far, he thought, and the bit of weight she had acquired since she began suited her.

Dr John Armstrong promised himself he would tend this grave and knew he would keep his promise. Look at you, he said to Minty: look at the lives you touched and changed. For the better, child: all for the better. Look at the hole you made.

He had asked his daughter if she would visit him and go to the
funeral with him, and to his delight she readily agreed. You only needed to ask, she said. You shut me out: I thought you would never need me.

A Chinese woman was arrested departing the country with a suitcase containing a valuable painting, ownership of which she could not explain, nor the cash in which it was wrapped. She was arrested as the result of anonymous information. Following that, forty Romanies, each with a yellow necklace, sought asylum in return for evidence. The deal was being considered. The process would take some time.

Lilian Beaumont was busy, decorating the penthouse in an entirely different style to the flat below. She had plans for a lofty gallery, or something else, and had permission for either. She sang as she worked and complained about nothing.

After a day too hot for the time of year, the cliffs were covered in a dense, kindly mist.

Some might suggest,’ John Armstrong said to Richard, ‘that it is a waste of time sitting on a clifftop when there is absolutely nothing to see. It might clear in a minute.’

The early-morning, late-spring mist quarrelled with the threat of heat, swirled around them, eerie and thick, making them feel as if they hovered above ground themselves, weightless and invisible.

‘I thought that was the whole purpose. To be content to see nothing. To have a new experience. I’ve never been out here when it’s been as mysterious as this. Exhilarating in a way.’

‘Now why would that be?’ John asked, gently.

‘You and your whys . . . is the word never off your tongue? All right, here goes. The mist saves me, because it blots everything out. I have to listen instead, and concentrate on what I can hear.
That’s good for me. It defines what I have to do: listen, concentrate, instead of trying to
capture.
I always hate that, when someone looks at a painting and says, he’s really
caught
something, hasn’t he? As if it was there to be tamed and reined in and put in a cage. Although that is what I was trying to do. Trying to capture what I could no longer remember. Train my memory; beat it into submission. It’s easier just to listen.’

‘Then you might get haunted by sound.’

‘Yes, but I know I can’t reproduce it. Whoever heard of a sound artist?’

‘What else is a musician, or a composer? They might be similarly tormented.’

The hovercraft hummm filled the sky, throbbing into a climax of echoing sound, then dying away. A requiem sound. A reminder of life in the mist. They sat peacefully, two no longer young men, happier on the bench than on the ground.

‘Your memory is better than it was,’ John said.

‘Like the curate’s egg, good in parts. Good when I’m with you, and I know not to be frightened by the blank patches. Better today, with this mist, because I know it’s a real mist, not the one that seeps into my head so often. And I know it will clear. Sometimes I wish my brain was clear, although at other times, I wish it would remain as foggy as this.’

‘You know you can stay as long as you like. And I know what you mean. Often better not to remember.’

‘That’s kind of you, John. You mean, perhaps, it’s better not to remember the things which shame you.’

They stared into the mist from the new spot they had found by mutual consent, further away from the car park by the first overhang, still a long way from Cable Bay, a good spot, carefully chosen for the placement of the bench, donated by someone who had walked the cliffs and sat where they sat, countless times. It gave a sense of continuity. John was right. The mist was
beginning to clear, form itself into mysterious threads, so that peering down and across they could begin to see the water. As the mist cleared, the sound of the sea rose from out of the blanket of fog, louder than before. The day promised well. Richard was good today, John thought, although he was still a man in mourning for a former self, the man he had been before the first stroke, and the second, equally mild one that followed the month before.