After the Last Dance (21 page)

A week, then two, went by. They were already halfway through a grey, damp November.

Jane had joined the holistic gym around the corner and in the space of a day had made friends that she had coffee and pedicures and trips to Harvey Nichols with. Leo would never, ever be able to keep her in the style to which she'd long been accustomed but he went to the office every morning with Rose. There he'd meet up with Mark and spend the rest of the day with the maintenance crew.

The other guys, from the young apprentices to the seasoned pros who had been working for Rose for twenty, even thirty years had treated Leo with some scepticism at first because he was Rose's own personal black sheep. But it turned out that his plastering skills
were
still second to none and now that he didn't have a hangover each morning Leo's hands hardly shook at all, so they welcomed him into the fold and let him use the drill and the nail gun.

It was a routine and Leo couldn't remember the last time he'd had one of them. All of a sudden he had tangible goals: a freshly plastered wall all glossy and salmon-pink smooth. Skirting boards sanded down and waiting for primer. Dimmer switches installed. Sinks unblocked. Bathrooms freshly grouted. All those things done in a day, when there had been weeks,
months
, that Leo hadn't been able to produce one decent painting.

It meant he could come home to Rose and have something to talk about that wasn't her decay or his failures. Every time he showed her a picture on his phone of an ancient panel of William Morris wallpaper revealed when they dismantled a cupboard, a fully working thirties Bakelite light switch or even the gimp mask that they'd found under one of her tenants' beds, it was another attempt at finding a way back to each other.

Maybe Rose was unbending slightly, because on a Saturday morning when even she didn't go into the office, she asked if he'd mind doing her a favour as they were having breakfast.

‘Anything,' Leo said through a mouthful of porridge.

‘I wouldn't be too eager,' said Lydia, who might have been unbending slightly too. ‘Rose, weren't you saying something about needing a kidney?'

‘Would that be a problem, Leo?' Rose was teasing him in a way that she hadn't done since the awful night he'd come home hammered. Leo was so relieved that he probably would have agreed to give her a kidney, not that his were in any great shape.

She wasn't after any of his vital organs, but wanted him to go to Leytonstone where some of her paintings were stored, to do an inventory. ‘Take Jane with you,' Lydia said. ‘Otherwise she'll go to another of those yoga classes where they turn the central heating up high.'

‘It's meant to improve blood flow,' Jane said, because she'd joined them for breakfast that morning too. ‘I have a class at eleven but I suppose I could give it a miss. I've never been to Leytonstone, so that might be quite an adventure.'

‘Only someone who'd never been to Leytonstone would think that,' Rose muttered and Leo wished that Rose were with them when they got to High Street Kensington station and Jane confessed that she'd never been on a Tube train before.

She'd never been to a football match either. Or eaten at McDonald's (or Burger King for that matter), placed a bet on a horse, been to Scotland or Wales, or even Devon or Cornwall, and a multitude of other things that an ordinary person might have done in the course of their life.

‘So, have you ever been to a supermarket?' They were in Rose's air-conditioned unit at the warehouse now. It was a fiddly business. Each artwork had to be unpacked, checked off against a master list on the iPad Rose had loaned Leo, then photographed and packed up again.

‘Of course I have! I don't live a completely rarefied existence, darling.'

‘Not a fancy organic supermarket, but a bog-standard supermarket with a budget range and a frozen food section.' There were only fifty or so paintings in storage; the rest of them were either in Kensington or on loan to various galleries or museums. They'd be finished in hour, which was just as well as he didn't think Jane liked Leytonstone very much or Rose's preference for English pop art.

‘Does Waitrose count?' Jane asked and Leo was about to grudgingly concede that it did when he came across the painting and he felt his forehead grow immediately clammy, his skin prickle and his heart start to race as if he'd just snorted a line of pure, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. Which was horribly and laughably appropriate given the circumstances in which he'd last seen the picture. God, he'd hoped never to see it again.

It was still in its simple wooden frame. An oil painting of a jagged cliff edge. Down below was the dark navy sea, the tide pulling away from shore and creating pools of turquoise topped with frilly waves. Painted in 1967 by Dame Laura Knight, who Rose had been introduced to just after the war. It had been one of Rose's favourite pieces. It had hung in her study in the house in Lullington Bay, then in her cluttered home office in Kensington, but after… well, she obviously couldn't bear to even look at it either.

‘Darling! I said, does Waitrose count?'

‘What?' Leo forced himself to turn round, to stop looking at the painting. Jane was standing behind him, holding the iPad. ‘Right. We should stop mucking about and get on with this.'

She nodded, but seemed quite peeved that he didn't want to play any more.

Her peevishness gave way to anxious sidelong glances when they were back on the Tube. ‘Darling, are you all right?' she asked, after every stop, because she was so used to him playing to the crowd that his silence had to be unnerving.

But there was nothing to say. Not just to Jane, but to Rose either. Leo understood that now he'd seen the painting again. Sometimes at night, over the years, he'd dreamed about that painting. Often he would be painting over it, destroying it, with thick strokes of dripping black paint, while Rose begged him to stop.

But his nightmares couldn't begin to live up to the bitter reality of oil on canvas.

When they got back to the house, Leo's mind was set. It was best for everyone, Rose mostly, if he just wasn't here.

‘Darling? Are you sure you're all right? What do you want to do for lunch?' Leo was already halfway up the stairs. He paused to look down at Jane. Her beautiful face tilted towards him, like a flower seeking the sun. That suddenly didn't make sense either.

‘What are you even doing here, Jane?' Leo asked her wearily and she looked affronted all over again, started to say something, but Leo turned away, took the stairs two at a time, so her words were lost.

All Leo needed to do was pick up the Vegas money and his passport but instead he sat in his dressing room on the sagging Chesterfield he'd liberated from the house in Lullington Bay when Rose decided that it had long ago passed antique and was now simply ancient. He'd snagged the whisky decanter from the first-floor drawing room on his way up but hadn't actually started drinking yet as he could only handle so much self-loathing in one twenty-four-hour period.

He stood up. There was an antechamber off his dressing room – too small to be a room, too large to be a cupboard. Stored in there were his paintings. Leo didn't like to call them his art, because that made him sound like a wanker.

He flipped through the A2 mounted boards like he was flicking through a set of cards. Then he sat down in the middle of a circle he'd made of all the pictures that had never set the world alight. The only way to do that was to douse them with lighter fuel and strike a match. Make a bonfire and warm his hands on his broken dreams and failed ambition. That was what he'd do.

‘Darling, please, won't you tell me what's wrong?' Jane was standing in the doorway. It felt as if their entire relationship had been spent with one or other of them loitering in a doorway, not willing to take those few steps that would bring the two of them closer. Then Jane took those few steps so she could sit down on the floor next to him and pick up the decanter.

‘I haven't drunk any, if you've come to check up on me,' Leo told her. ‘Not yet anyway.'

Jane put the decanter down, then leaned forward to peer at one of his sketches; a charcoal study of an old man in a betting shop. ‘So, what is all this anyway?'

‘My juvenilia,' Leo said. Jane looked at his work, her eyes narrowed and assessing, like she was in a jewellery shop with a man who'd just asked her if there was anything that she particularly fancied.

Leo had liked to think that his niche was nineties popular culture rendered in gritty black and white. Take That,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and Leonardo DiCaprio rendered in muddy watercolours to give them some gravitas. He'd assembled enough for an exhibition that he was going to call
Born
in the Nineties
, but the dealers would barely look at them. That was when he could get through the door to see a dealer and only then because of Rose.

His technique was flawless. Everyone had said so. And even now, when he got a rare commission to draw someone's wife, usually with a freshly fucked glow, his technique was still flawless and OK, he wasn't going to faithfully record the fine spider-webbing of lines at the corners of their eyes or the faintest suggestion of sagging under their chins.

‘So, what do you think, then? Does my art have any depth?' Leo tried to sound flippant.

‘Well, I'm afraid it doesn't,' Jane said, as if she knew that, for once, she had to stick to the truth. ‘Don't get me wrong, it's very
amusing
but it doesn't have any soul. But you already knew that, didn't you?'

Leo wanted to make a crack about her knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing but that would have been as clichéd as his shitty pictures. Jane's kindness was as illusory as his talent. It was just a façade when really she held herself as aloof and inviolate as a dictator. ‘You wouldn't understand,' he said dully.

‘Probably I wouldn't,' she agreed. ‘But I know that we were joking about, having fun, and then you took one look at that painting, the one with the sea and the cliffs, and you shut down.' She took hold of his hand and entwined her cold fingers through his. ‘Will you tell me about that painting? Why it upset you so much? You don't have to if you don't want to, but problem shared and all that, darling. Please…'

And Leo wasn't going to, but something about the way Jane held his hand and murmured wordlessly and encouragingly had him drawing a picture of himself at eighteen years old. He'd come to London, bag stuffed full of pencils and paints, head full of dreams and schemes, and he'd sit in Rose's home office when he wasn't at college and stare at the Laura Knight painting. In much the same way that he'd stared at it when he was a little boy and it hung in the house in Lullington Bay.

There was something about the picture; so different from the seascapes he'd painted on the beach during those long summers. The hard rock, the forbidding sea; he thought about what it would feel like to stand on the cliff-top and look down. It had called to him – a couple of times, he'd even sketched it – but the kind of art that brought glory and gallery shows wasn't pictures of the sea.

It was 1999. Everyone on his degree course at Central St Martin's was experimenting with video and performance and light installations. Drawing what you saw in front of you wasn't going to cut it.

The only thing that Leo was good at, as good as all his friends were with their transparent sculptures and interactive videos, was getting wasted. Art was about the whole lifestyle. You couldn't walk the streets of Soho without falling over a Young British Artist and if you hadn't got drunk with Damien Hirst, puked up outside the White Cube, done a couple of lines with a Turner Prize nominee, then you didn't get to call yourself an artist.

After his final degree show, when everyone else on his course had signed up with agents and had scholarships and prizes flung at them, they'd all suddenly found their work ethic. Leo had just found the bottom of another bottle.

‘Take a year out,' Rose had said. ‘Don't think about painting. Come back to it fresh.'

He could have travelled. Done Ibiza. Gone to Goa. He'd stayed in London because that was where his friends were and if he still went drinking and clubbing and partying with them every night then he was still an artist.

Rose had threatened to cut him off a few times. ‘Nobody likes a drunk, Leo,' she'd say to him when he'd stumble in saucer-eyed, after days of going MIA. ‘They're too boring for words.' For all her worldliness, she hadn't imagined that he was getting his kicks with pills and powders. He had friends who would work through the night, chopping out a line each time they started to flag, but he wasn't working, just dancing, fucking and jabbering to anyone who'd listen about how he was going to be someone.

Every now and again he'd get the fear. Like the morning he'd woken up with chest pains and a heart galloping so fast that he'd sat in A&E for hours, until his heart had slowed to a brisk canter and he'd slunk away. Or when one of his friends was found dead in a Camberwell squat with the usual detritus around him: syringe, rubber hose, twists of paper like confetti.

It had scared him straight for a while. ‘I just need to do something real,' he'd said to Rose. ‘Stop messing around and start growing up.'

That was when Leo had begun to go out with the property maintenance crew. Painted and plastered, learned basic electrical and plumbing skills, even designed, recast and replaced a ceiling rose. He felt a certain sense of satisfaction at the end of each day but he still carried on drinking. Some mornings he was too hungover to go to work; the mornings became days, became weeks and he fell back into his old habits, his old crowd.

But Rose never gave up on him until Leo began to resent her too because she was the one who'd filled his head with nonsense. Made him hunger for a world away from Durham, away from the safe little life that his parents had wanted for him. She was so convinced of Leo's talent that Leo had also believed he was destined to be a great artist. When you'd spent most of your life expecting greatness, it was impossible to settle when greatness never came.