Muddy Waters (5 page)

‘I'm not
ill
, Stella, you know, just
angry
. I'll come with you and join in and see if there's fun to be had. Anything to stop thinking about that bastard.' Defiantly she slugged down the rest of the wine and stood up. ‘I could have stayed at home and wallowed in fury about Martin but I thought it would be more interesting, more fun even, to be somewhere else, having a look at someone else's life for a change, you know?'

‘The idea', Stella explained to Abigail as they walked along the path towards the meeting at Bernard's boathouse, ‘is that everyone on the island involved in producing art, and that's most people actually, whether it's paintings or sculpture or textiles or whatever, everyone opens up their home – the workspace part of it – to the public and people come and look round.'

‘So it's just a promotion thing?' Abigail, accustomed to Martin's language of commerce, asked.

‘Well, not entirely. There's a charity donation at the door and it's for local interest as much as anything. It started a few years ago because people in the town thought the islanders were weird and way-out and there was a bit of hostility. Just before we moved in there were rumours of werewolves and witchcraft and really it was just because there are no token chartered accountants or stockbrokers. It's all very informal and friendly, that's all.'

‘This art fair event,' Abigail looked puzzled, ‘do people just show off how they work then and not
sell
anything? That sounds awfully
folksy
.'

Stella laughed. ‘There's not that much charitable spirit over here! Of course people sell things. Actually it's not so easy to wander into someone's house, poke around and then just wander out again. It seems such terribly bad manners. If you don't buy, it's like admitting you've come in just to be nosy. And of course most people have – it's all the “Private” notices out by the ferry, everyone in the town thinks they'll be ensnared into a cult or a commune if they set foot over here. It's quite hard to get kids to deliver the papers, in case artists are a bit on the deviant side. And the ferry makes so much noise no one can hope to land here for a sneaky look round without anyone noticing.'

‘So this open day thing is really just like having a fête in the grounds of an historic house. We do that in Sussex,' Abigail said, relieved that she'd caught up at last with something vaguely familiar. As they walked she kept slowing to look into the overgrown gardens, catching sight of a collapsing corrugated structure in one, a full-size tepee in another, and the MacIver's green and orange plastic shed. Her ears were troubled by the soft discordant jangling of wind chimes, not too far away, like someone who was just starting to practise campanology and hadn't at all got the hang of it. The island, which had looked like a sweet piece of offshore suburbia from the bank, seemed at close range to be all metals and nettles.

Stella looked at her watch and wished Abigail would walk a bit faster. The dainty beige feet were picking their way with exaggerated care along the path, a perfectly good tarmac path, as if it was root-strewn woodland. Perhaps not eating properly is making her weak, she wondered, or perhaps it was just lunchtime alcohol.

‘You don't see any of this from the bank,' Abigail said, slowing even more and staring wide-eyed through a gap in an escallonia hedge at a square of scruffy land as neatly laid out with old chrome car bumpers, hub caps and bicycle wheels as the MacIver's was with dwarf begonias. In the middle sat the wheel-less carcass of a Reliant Robin housing scrawny squawking chickens.

‘Those are Enzo and Giuliana's hens. They're Italian – Enzo and Giuliana, not the hens. They give us delicious free-range eggs. Enzo's a sculptor and Giuliana paints silk – she's his sister by the way.' Stella felt the need to point out, in case Abigail (unlikely though it was) might find the information useful during her stay. Abigail shuddered slightly, though whether at the thought of eating anything that had originated in the filthy and rotting Reliant or at the possible implications of a man choosing to live with his sister, Stella couldn't tell. Enzo combined being the scruffiest man Abigail was likely to have seen with being one of the most easily elegant. Stella put that down to having grown up within commuting distance of Milan – only Italians could look so effortlessly stylish in ripped and rust-stained Armani jeans and wearing odd Gucci loafers.

Between the houses on each side of the path, glimpses of river could be seen and Stella wondered if Abigail was feeling quite literally isolated, stuck on the island as if she'd found herself suddenly on an ocean liner, cut off for weeks with people she couldn't quite see her way to liking. Well, this ship's going nowhere, Stella thought, increasing the pace. Abigail only has to make a few energetic turns of the ferry handle and she's safely back on the mainland, two streets away from an ordinary town high street and all the familiar comforts of Boots and the Body Shop.

In the gallery space below Bernard's living quarters, the unsold remnants of the last exhibition had been removed from the rough white walls and stacked face-inwards ready for collection. Once safely inside on level ground, Abigail perked up and started looking around with interest.

‘Goodness, are these all rejects? Didn't whoever it was sell many then?' Abigail asked, peering round curiously as she and Stella clicked across the beech-plank floor towards the spiral iron staircase that led up to Bernard.

‘Hardly any. Usual lack of publicity, I think. Poor chap will have to load them all up on a trolley and wheel them back the whole length of the island. It'll be quite embarrassing for him, I should think. He'll imagine everyone's looking but they won't be. They're used to it.'

‘Perhaps they aren't any good.' Abigail tweaked one away from where it faced the wall like a punished schoolchild and peered over the top of it. ‘Ugh! Dead babies – at least I think they are. Not one for the dining room!'

‘Actually, I think you'll find it's allegorical.' Willow's slow voice came from somewhere above them. Each syllable of ‘allegorical' was pronounced with careful separation as if it was the day's new word that she was determined to practise. She sounded like a small child but with far more carrying power. Deceptively fey, Stella always thought. Willow then appeared, clattering down the spiral stairs on her high round-toed lace-up boots, painted by herself in shades of purple with silver stars.

‘Good grief,' Abigail murmured, taking in, above the boots, the drifty, high-waisted, many-layered, multi-ribboned chiffon dress in shades of pink and mauve. Then there was the long mousey mottled plait that was greying so brazenly unchecked from the roots that it looked like a pro-ageist policy statement. Here was someone close to fifty yet determinedly hanging on to toddlerhood.

‘Hello Stella,' said the bizarre vision, reaching the last step, and then turning to Abigail, added with a voice of breathy welcome and a show of big creamy teeth, ‘hello Friend-of-Stella, I'm Willow. Now you're Taurus, I can just
tell
.' She held out a heavily ringed hand and Abigail shook it carefully as if Willow might really turn out to be a fragile glass dolly.

‘I'm Abigail, actually,' she announced, in a voice that strongly disdained belief in horoscopes.

‘Oh. Oh,
right
,' Willow sighed, her smile faltering only slightly.

The three of them clanged up the iron stairs into Bernard's loft where several residents were already settling themselves on to the enormous ancient sofa whose ragged shabbiness was decently hidden by lustrous velvet cloths. Bernard's domestic arrangements could be described as how a romantic teenager might
imagine
an artist to exist. There was a strong smell of oil and turps, and the walls near his easel were flecked with drops of paint. The walls were white, hung here and there with blown-up black and white photos of the Artist at Work – action shots of Bernard when he was still young enough to be described as up-and-coming in upmarket colour supplements.

Among those already arrived, Charlotte chased her unsteady baby around, fending her away from the stairs and from Bernard's carelessly left out paints. Peggy swayed gently in a rocking chair, wrapped in crocheted shawls to protect her increasingly arthritic joints, and smoking a small cigar. Ruth was there at the kitchen end of the long room, busying herself importantly with coffee cups and a tray, opening and shutting drawers and the fridge and generally showing off with maximum clatter.

‘Ruth, why aren't you at your afternoon classes?' Stella asked her daughter, anxious that independence and irresponsibility might have become confused since Ruth had been at the sixth form college and not school.

‘It's OK, it's allowed. Time off for research,' Ruth explained glibly, smiling past her mother to Abigail. ‘Hi Abigail, haven't seen you for ages, it must be at least a year or two.' Her happy smile then disappeared, and her face took on an instant expression of sorrow as she remembered the reason for the visit. ‘Are you
all right
?' she asked with intense concern, but looking as if she, being only seventeen and not equipped to help, dreaded any answer but ‘Yes, fine.'

‘Yes, fine,' Abigail replied reassuringly, looking her up and down and clearly dying to say ‘Goodness you've grown'. ‘Stella and I just had lunch – don't you students get time to eat?'

Ruth grinned. ‘Oh, I had something here with Bernard,' she informed Abigail, her voice raised a good deal more than was necessary and aimed across the room in the direction of Willow. Stella, who was trying to stop Charlotte's baby chewing strands of wicker from the chairs immediately worried about the fact that she hadn't specified
what
it was she had had with Bernard. It might not be food. What a lot of girls of Ruth's age had with Bernard, she'd heard, was sex, which was rather a shame because it suddenly occurred to her that he, as a kind of runner-up to Enzo the sculptor, might, just for this visit, do for Abigail. It was a grown-up version of what her ‘Go Ask Alice' column would have advised a dumped-by-the-boyfriend teenage girl – extend the social life, find new friends. On the problem-solving professional level, she knew it wouldn't help over Martin's disappearance, but it might do something about Abigail's self-esteem, and she could then perhaps cope with (or without) Martin.

Ellen and Fergus MacIver, dressed in identical Aran sweaters, hauled themselves up the iron staircase and looked around for the right place to sit. Stella, pulling Hob Nobs from their packet and wondering why Bernard thought himself too grand to do his own biscuit-arranging, watched the matched pair looking alarmed at the possibility that they might have to sit separately. The two of them had taken early retirement from an insurance company and installed themselves on the island, deaf to all possible off-putting and determined to join in. They spent their days gleefully making the most of OAP concession rates at adult education classes, at one of which they had learned, they thought, to paint, going about the process as methodically as they had at Beginner's Upholstery, Your Camcorder, and Yoga for Health. Ellen's speciality was indistinct boats at sunset, which she described as atmospheric, but Fergus preferred river fowl which he painted in meticulous detail. ‘His coots,' Ellen had announced proudly at the last arts fair meeting, ‘are close to perfection.'

Fergus looked around the room, approving of the turnout and studying the paintwork. He ran a finger over the wall behind the sofa. ‘Very nice. You can't go wrong with Brilliant White, I always say,' he commented to Bernard, ‘Brilliant White vinyl silk, clean and fresh, just the thing.'

‘Just
white
actually, standard trade white,' Bernard replied archly, ‘completely different wavelength, I think you'll find.'

‘Oh, quite,' Fergus said, confused.

Bernard strode forward to the middle of the room and assumed his place as chairman of the meeting. His sweater, paint-streaked to the point where it was hard to see its original colour, was unravelling in places just like his cane chairs. He wasn't terribly appealing, but he did have a small amount of fame, which had to count for something. Stella sneaked a look at Abigail's face to see if she was registering any initial interest in him – her eyes had always been a complete giveaway when she'd fancied someone at the college, Stella remembered. They'd light up and focus beadily on the object of desire who would have no possible doubt about her dishonourable intentions. Abigail made it easy for them, the lucky boys, putting out none of those ‘will-she, won't-she, is she just a teaser' adolescent signals. But just now she was simply perched neatly on a canvas chair, looking placid and polite, waiting and watching without the slightest hint of sexual interest. That must be what happens when you're heartbroken, Stella thought with sympathy, watching, for contrast, the rapt face of Willow who sat on the floor cross-legged in front of Bernard, gazing upwards like an acolyte at the feet of a prophet.

Ruth sat back, a little apart from the others as if she didn't need to be part of the throng, she knew already all she needed to know. She leaned against the rail at the top of the stairs, arms behind her, linked round the cool metal uprights, and her magnificent breasts jutting forwards towards the focus of her own desires. She felt glorious and powerful with youth, but didn't forget to pray that the balustrade wouldn't give way beneath her considerable weight.

‘Just a few loose ends to clear up,' Bernard was saying, ‘to do with the route the punters, sorry, visitors, should take. We should decide whether they get off the ferry and immediately have something to go and see or whether they should be directed up to the far end, start, say here at the gallery and work their way back.'

‘If they start at the ferry end they might not even bother to walk as far as here. Especially if they're loaded down with her great fat pots,' the speaker, Enzo, jerked his scarred thumb rudely towards Willow, who pouted crossly. Stella wondered if Abigail had noticed how wolf-like his face was, with cool defensive eyes just that bit too close together.