Trespass (8 page)

Lloyd stood swaying there. The
toile
milkmaids and their lovers danced on, ageless, on the wall. The lavatory bowl choked up with apricot paper.

Time was getting to everybody of his generation now, Lloyd mused. Even to Benita, whose beautiful upper arms had lost their firmness and sheen. But it was getting to Anthony Verey in a satisfyingly lethal way.

Left alone in Lloyd’s dining room, Anthony soon became aware that his cigar had gone out. The paraphernalia of relighting it suggested itself as being beyond him at this particular moment, so he laid it down in the heavy glass ashtray and sat very still, doing nothing except stare at the room in all its opulence and grandeur.

Indistinctly, he caught sight of his own face in the giltwood overmantel (‘Second quarter 19th century, flower and scroll carved frame with asymmetrically carved cartouche crest’) and discovered this face to be wan-looking, rather
small
, more crumpled than it usually appeared. He heard himself sigh. He didn’t want to look small and crumpled, when Lloyd was so huge and loud, his skin so pink and bright, the collars of his shirts so stiff and immaculate . . .

And now a new cause for dismay seeped into Anthony’s mind: why on earth – for God’s sake – was he telling Lloyd Palmer the story of the tree-house? The whole tree-house thing was private. It had been between him and Lal. Between them alone. So why, suddenly, was he blurting out something so personal and precious to a philistine like Lloyd? What was the matter with him?

He realised with a shudder that he was ridiculously drunk. Perhaps this face in the overmantel wasn’t really his? It was just a . . .
suggestion
of how he might look to an unpractised eye, to someone who didn’t really know him . . . And by tomorrow, it would be gone, that face that no one knew. He’d be far away in France, in a different kind of light, with Veronica, with his beloved sister, V . . .

But he knew that it was stupid of him to have got drunk. It meant he would arrive at Avignon with a hangover. Just when he’d hoped to see things clearly again, his head would be aching, his brain in a fog. And V’s friend, that stumpy little Kitty woman – with her watercolour daubs and her shocking habit of saying her thoughts out loud – would know exactly how he was feeling and let him know that she knew, and make the first twenty-four hours hell for him . . .

Oh God, why was everything so tainted and marred, so pickled in misery and compromise? Anthony cleared a space around his table mat, which was not a table mat but a huge papier-mâché gilded plate, and he laid his head down on the plate, rather like an outcast angel, he thought, tumbling down onto its own uncomfortable halo.

He closed his eyes. The house felt silent, as though Lloyd might have gone, not to the lavatory, as Anthony had supposed, but to bed, having tired of him, tired of trying to get to the heart of things, knowing that the heart of things – the true heart – lay far behind you somewhere and could never be altered.

But that was OK. Lloyd wouldn’t have understood this anyway, but there were certain things you
didn’t want
to alter. Indeed, you had to keep rerunning them in your head, to make sure they stayed exactly the same, stayed faithful to how they had felt. Not faithful to how they had
been
, necessarily – because that was unverifiable, anyway – but faithful to how they had appeared to you. You had, precisely, to protect them from the alteration of time.

He’d had everything prepared. Everything. White linen tablecloth with a heavy border of Brussels lace. White linen napkins. Lal’s favourite blue-and-white-and-gold china teacups and saucers and tea plates and sugar bowl and slop bowl and her favourite little bone-handled knives. Blue velvet cushions for the hard chairs. Primroses in a cut-glass vase. He was nine years old.

He kept watch, so that he could help Lal climb the ladder to the hideaway. And here she came, now, through the spinney far below him, wearing a lavender dress, with a matching lavender cardigan and white canvas shoes.

‘Here I am, darling!’ she called out. And he went to the edge of the platform of the tree-house and made his answering call: ‘Here I am, Ma!’

He helped her up the ladder, though she barely needed his help, she was so agile and light. She came in and the sunshine at the doorway behind her made her fair hair shimmer white. When she saw the preparations on the tea table, she clapped her hands with delight.

‘Oh this is so dear!’ she said. ‘I love it!’

He led her to the small window, and showed her how the green of the beech tree, in which the house had been built, came clustering in and how the sky seemed so near and brilliant, it was as though it were his own private sky. Then, he sat her down in one of the chairs and the house swayed gently as the tree moved, and they listened to the wind in the leaves and the afternoon chirruping of the birds and Lal said: ‘Magic. It’s magic.’

Mrs Brigstock brought the tea and the malted bread and the brandy snaps on a silver tray and Anthony climbed down and took the tray from her and – this was the moment he knew he would be proudest of – carried it aloft, without needing to hold on to the ladder with his hands. As he set the tray down in front of Lal, his heart was beating like a lover’s.

Afterwards, he could never remember what they talked about. All he remembered was the feeling: the feeling that this was perfectly achieved, that it was a work of art,
his
work of art, and that no moment of it was flawed. And that they’d both understood this. He’d contrived an hour of aesthetic perfection.

Lloyd came back into the dining room, still clutching his napkin, and found Anthony asleep with his head on a gold plate.

He gave him a prod. ‘Wake up, old man,’ he said. ‘Come on . . .’

But Anthony didn’t stir, couldn’t stir.

Shit.
Lloyd Palmer cursed. Now, he’d have all the ding-dong of getting Anthony into a bed, fretting about him throwing up onto one of Benita’s impossibly expensive carpets, arranging breakfast for him, making sure he didn’t miss his plane or his train or whatever damn thing he was meant to be catching. And all for what? Some half-baked crap about happiness.

‘Shit,’ he said again. ‘Bloody happiness.’

While Veronica shopped and cooked for Anthony’s arrival, Kitty escaped to her studio, in a stone shed behind the house, that had once sheltered animals in its dark recesses. This darkness had been punctured out of it by slabs of skylight and a heavy glass door in its west side. A wood-burning stove heated it in winter.

Kitty stood with her back to her porcelain sink and contemplated her watercolour of the mimosa blossoms, still on the easel. The thing didn’t shrivel under her scrutiny, as many of her paintings did; on the contrary, she thought it was probably the best bit of work she’d done for about a year. The colours were delicate, held back from gaudiness, and she’d captured the paradox of the blooms – their individuality and their mass – without betraying the terrible effort involved. Kitty fantasised that even her most revered heroine, the watercolorist Elizabeth Blackadder, might have given this picture some curt but thrilling nod. And she felt confident that it would find its way into
Gardening without Rain:
‘Acacia decurrens,
dealbata
’. Watercolour by Kitty Meadows.

Buoyed up by this, Kitty felt in the mood to begin something else.

In painting – perhaps in all the arts? – success drove success, failure whipped you towards failure. She should capitalise on the achievement of the mimosa and she wondered whether she wouldn’t risk having another try at the olive grove. She longed to be able to capture the movement and shimmer of this restlessly beautiful corner of the garden, but all her previous attempts had foundered. She’d made the olives look spiky, when they weren’t; the surprising whiteness in the leaf colour had eluded her; in her inexpert hands, the gnarled trunks of the trees had resembled turds.

A flush of shame at her own inadequacy overcame Kitty, obliterating her moment of optimism. Why were these trees so difficult? Perhaps because, at the heart of each tree (expertly pruned every second spring by Veronica), was an unexpected revelation of air and sky, and it was this brightness, this necessary element, which had been entirely missing from every one of Kitty’s pictures. She’d reverently tried to depict the gaps in the grey-green foliage, but then the sky had somehow pushed itself through the gaps, stupid patches of solid blue which appeared stuck on from outside, making the overall result shockingly bad.

‘Crap,’ Kitty said aloud. ‘Out-and-out crap.’

She decided with a sigh that now was definitely not the moment to attempt the olives again. In a few hours’ time, Anthony would be here, and the thought of trying to paint something so elusive within the range of his appraising eye made Kitty Meadows feel sick.

She resorted, in an aimless, slow-moving kind of way, to tidying her studio. She sharpened all her pencils. She rewashed and regrouped her brushes in their stained and familiar jars. She scrubbed her sink, swept cobwebs off the stone walls. Her thoughts drifted and stumbled from present to past. She soon enough became, in her mind, the lowly, untalented manual worker she somewhere knew herself to be.

She gathered up all her failed paintings of the olive grove, tore them to shreds and threw the scraps into the blue recycling bin. She felt hot and fearful, full of her menopause and her mortal failings. She became again the timid library assistant, trundling her book cart from steel stack to steel stack, as the afternoon darkness came down over Cromer.

Dark was nearing as Anthony stepped out of the train at Avignon TGV Station and trundled his suitcases, like two obedient black dogs, towards the car rental offices.

He’d slept in the train, slept off most of his hangover, while the woods and valleys and industrial zones of France hurtled by, unseen. A shame, he thought now, to have missed France – the whole country, almost, from north to south. But that was what drink did to you: it made you miss things. You aimed at this or that grand notion in your delirium and then you missed it.

But now, leaving the station behind, Anthony lifted his face to smell the sweetness of the air. Pines and starlight, things dark and bright and pure: the air smelled of these. Among the lines of rental cars, Anthony set the suitcases down. He stood very still.

I’d forgotten this, he thought: the feeling of arrival; the heart-lift.

He watched dark dragon clouds stretch themselves across the pearly horizon. He felt the last traces of his hangover evaporate.

‘Old age,’ an actor friend of his had once said, ‘arrives in short flurries. Between the flurries, there’s a kind of respite.’ And this was what Anthony felt he’d been given now: respite. He could even have termed it remission. So he instructed himself not to waste the remission time or tarnish it with unkindness. He’d be a good guest in his sister’s house. He’d rhapsodise about her garden, drink pastis with her French friends, conform to her chosen routines. And – just as long as she didn’t insult him – he’d be nice to Kitty Meadows.

As he drove the hired black Renault Scenic north-west towards Alès, Anthony felt a radical new idea beginning to form in his mind. He congratulated himself that it wasn’t only radical, but also logical: if his life in London was over, then to regain his happiness all he needed to do was to admit that it was over and to dare to move on. He’d never imagined himself living anywhere else but Chelsea, but now he had to imagine it. He had to imagine it, or die.

So, in its essence, the idea was simple and straightforward. He’d sell the flat and wind up the business. From the great emporium of
beloveds,
he’d keep only those pieces for which he felt extreme ardour (the Aubusson tapestry, for instance) and put the rest into the appropriate sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. One or two pieces he might sell direct to American clients over the phone for reasonably stratospheric prices, and then ship them to New York or San Francisco. And at the end of all this, he would easily have enough money to buy a beautiful house down here in southern France, near V, in this kinder and simpler world, and here he would start his life again – a different life.

Anthony drove fast, loving the sight of the dark road blossoming up to embrace the rented car. The orange-lit dash cast enough light on his features for him to be aware of a stubborn smile engraved there. His evening with Lloyd Palmer, with all its complicated feelings of material envy, seemed a world away. Anthony was fully in the present now, beautifully alive. His plans chattered away in his mind like Happy Hour drinkers. Hadn’t he subconsciously thought for a long time that it would be good to live near V, near the one person for whom he still felt genuine affection? Because, with V, he could become the younger brother again, yield up some of that oppressive responsibility for his own well-being that he was finding harder and harder to sustain.

At Les Glaniques, Veronica and Kitty waited in silence. From the hall, they could hear the familiar tick of the grandfather clock. It was as though, Kitty thought, they were waiting for something momentous, something dangerous and potentially catastrophic, like a NASA launch.