Double Vision (11 page)

He noticed her observing this, and said, with a little self-conscious laugh, ‘I keep feeling I ought to speak to him. It seems rude to ignore him.’

He’d become fascinated by the process, or by the figure perhaps, by what it represented. Either way he was no longer the impersonal, passive assistant. Now,
every day, he brought his brain as well as his muscles to the task, and that didn’t make it easy to maintain the clarity of her own conception. She was always aware of his mind pushing against hers, in the silence.

It’s in the nature of plaster that you have to work fast. It forces decisiveness on you, and yet there were many times now when she had to wait to be helped. Between the decision and the action, there was this hiatus, while she waited for him to mix the plaster, or hand the chisel up to her. Once, worn out and in great pain, she had to let him apply the plaster, and that was a small death. She watched his hands stroke it on, and told herself it didn’t matter who applied the plaster as long as she, and she alone, did the carving.

Only it did matter. Her grasp on the figure had become tentative – ‘fluid’, if you wanted to sound positive about the situation, but then ‘fluid’ wasn’t the way she worked. Normally she had the conception clear in her head from the beginning, so that the process of carving seemed almost like the uncovering of a figure already there, waiting to be released. Peter had destroyed that. Sometimes she looked down from the scaffold and saw him standing below, and his fingers would begin to twitch and she knew he was imagining the chisel in his own hands.

Her attitude to him changed. Previously she’d said almost nothing to him, apart from a brief greeting in the morning, a comment on the weather – once they’d started work, not even that. And, whether because his own inclination accorded with hers, or because he was
adept at picking up what other people wanted, he had been resolutely impersonal.

But now those twitching hands made her curious. Had he, she asked, any artistic ambitions himself? No, he said, not art, he was no use at that. He wanted to be a writer. Even this admission, which was hardly intimate, had to be dragged out of him. He made her feel she was being intrusive, though the question was natural enough in the circumstances, and scarcely intimate. ‘So that’s why you do gardening? To support the writing?’

‘Yes. I could teach, but –’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘The trouble with teaching is you’re using the same part of your mind. It’s creative if you’re doing it properly. Worst possible job for an artist. Or a writer I suppose.’

‘And not just that. It’s so circular. I did an MA in creative writing and most of the people on the course were going to teach it.’ That rare charming smile again. ‘Anyway, I enjoy gardening. I like doing things with my hands.’

Kate found that conversation reassuring. It was a situation she could easily identify with: doing odd jobs, scratching a living, because the one thing you wanted to do couldn’t be made to pay. It put him into a context she could understand. She’d done jobs like that as a student – waitressing, bar work, hotel work, anything – and for a number of years afterwards. She felt she knew him better. But then it was back to the long hours of silence, looking up from the work now and then to see his hands making those odd, involuntary movements.
Once she came into the studio and found him holding the mallet and the chisel in his hands, feeling the weight of them. He put them down as soon as he saw her.

She had no conceivable reason to object.

Winter was teasing this year. No sooner did a day of glancing sunlight suggest that spring might be on the way than another frost set in. Once again the moorhen skittered across a frozen pond, and a pale sun scarcely summoned up the strength to disperse the mists, even at midday.

On one such day she asked Peter to take her to the timber yard to stock up on logs and incidentally to buy a bag of wood chippings for the sculpture. She wanted a rougher texture, and wood chippings mixed in with the plaster might just do it. She was aiming for an almost scabby surface, not unlike the trunks of some trees.

It was the first time she’d been out in Peter’s van. It was on its last legs, a miracle it stayed on the road – but there was something nice about it nevertheless. Peter loved it. You could tell by the way he held the steering wheel. She accepted his help in hauling the seat belt across.

Travelling as a passenger, she felt her disability most keenly. She hadn’t got back behind the wheel again yet, and that made her totally dependent on other people. She was even beginning to wonder whether her reluctance to drive was not, now, more a matter of nerves
than of physical incapacity. She ought to make the effort. It was quite simple really: if she didn’t drive, she couldn’t live where she lived. Perhaps she could ask Peter to sit with her in her own car for fifteen minutes afterwards while she drove round the back roads. She looked at his profile, keen and concentrated as he checked his rear-view mirror, and thought, No, I’ll ask Angela. She wanted to keep her relationship with Peter focused on work.

At the sawmill she climbed down and greeted Fred and his son Craig with pleasure. While Peter and Craig collected the logs, she chatted to Fred, who was saying, as everybody did, that foot-and-mouth had put a stopper on his business. You heard the same story in various voices and accents everywhere you went. The path that ran past the timber yard was a public right of way through the forest, and that was still closed off. Originally they’d tied their blasted yellow tape right across the entrance so nobody could get in or out of the yard at all, and it had taken three visits to the council offices and God knows how many phone calls to get them to come and shift it so Fred could carry on with his business.

‘Isn’t it picking up at all?’ she asked.

No, he couldn’t see it. It was a body blow, he said. His skin was sagging on his bones, and she saw that the red veins in his cheeks no longer looked like the natural high colour of an outdoor life but something much less healthy: hectic, purplish, mottled, the precursor of a stroke perhaps. Craig, standing behind him, suddenly
looked less like a gangly teenager, more like a young man, stronger than his father, resilient. And so the generations pass, she thought, as they went off to pile logs into the back of the van, but would Craig keep the business on? Would there be a business to keep? Oh, but surely, she thought, looking at the forest that hung over the clearing like a green wave about to break, surely anything based on timber would survive? Some of the farms might not restock, shops and restaurants might go bust – in fact they had, they did, you saw it all around you – but the forest would survive.

It was growing colder, the puddles iced over. Her eyes watered with the cold. I will ask him if I can drive back, she thought, feeling Fred’s depression as something she had to counter by taking the next move on her own path to recovery. It was only a mile or so along the forest road, and it would do her good to drive past that place in particular. It would lay the ghost of that night.

She was looking at the back of the van as she thought these things, the three men standing a little to one side, talking, in clouds of breath now that the setting sun was beginning to slip behind the trees. Fred’s red tartan jacket matched the raw red of his cheeks and nose. She looked at the number plate on the van, the mud splashes, and suddenly she was back on the forest road, at night, tailing a white van. She’d forgotten that till now. Or had it been another occasion? Her mind reached back into its own darkness. No, definitely that night.

Peter’s van. How could she tell? There’d been no reason to focus on number plates then – and there must be dozens of white vans around in this area alone. Virtually every small business for miles around seemed to have a white van. And yet she felt it was Peter’s van she’d passed that night. He hadn’t mentioned seeing the accident.

Because he hadn’t seen it.

But if it was his van, he must have seen it. There was no turning after the crossroads. So he must have been the first person on the scene. If it was his van. The man who came and stood beside the car could have been Peter, but he hadn’t phoned the police. Another person turned up and did that. She could hear a voice saying, ‘…and an ambulance.’ Not Peter’s voice.

Because he hadn’t been there. He didn’t ring the police because he wasn’t there. He didn’t mention it because he wasn’t there. She was getting herself into some kind of paranoid spiral over nothing.

He was coming towards her. She framed her face muscles into a smile. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Would you mind if I drove back?’

‘No, of course not. The gears are stiff, mind.’

‘I think I can manage.’

He held the door open for her, always so polite, so helpful. She climbed into the driver’s seat and leant out of the window to say goodbye to Fred.

Peter was standing by the passenger door, also saying goodbye. She turned and saw his apparently headless
figure in the jacket, the only jacket he seemed to possess. Her heart bulged into her throat.

She couldn’t say anything. This might well be based on nothing more than the delusion of a semi-conscious woman, a woman who forty-eight hours later had been unable to give her own name and address to the nice young woman doctor. Who hadn’t realized she was in hospital. Who couldn’t remember the crash. No, she couldn’t mention it.

He opened the door and slid in. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sharply.

She remembered the incident with the glasses. Next morning she’d handed them back without comment, but somehow he knew she’d tried them on. They went straight into his pocket and never reappeared.

‘Nothing.’ She forced a small, hard laugh. ‘I’m just a bit nervous, I suppose.’

‘No, well, don’t be. I’ll keep an eye out.’

He was turning round, looking over his shoulder, doing the checking for her, as he spoke.

She took a deep breath and turned the key.

Twelve

Despite his closeness to Ben, Stephen had met Kate Frobisher only twice, the last time in an art gallery where some of Ben’s photographs were being shown. Stephen had walked round the exhibition, finding some of the images very hard to take in this setting. You needed to be alone with them to achieve an honest reaction. He’d left as soon as possible after congratulating Ben.

Despite the map, he struggled to find Woodland House, which was set back from the lane behind a thick shrubbery that virtually hid it from sight. It was, as Beth said, isolated.

The spray of gravel under his wheels was as good as a burglar alarm. Kate emerged at once, arms crossed under her bosom, bending down to peer into the car with a shy, friendly smile. She was still wearing a surgical collar, though it must have been weeks since the accident. He looked for obvious marks of grief and found none, except for two broad white streaks in the dark hair that she’d bundled off her face anyhow. They hadn’t been there before, or perhaps they had, and she’d just stopped bothering to hide them. He wound down the window and she offered her hand and then immediately withdrew it, apologizing, laughing, wiping wet clay
or plaster off on the already streaked side of her smock.

He got out of the car and, after a moment’s hesitation, they kissed, briefly, on each cheek. It felt foreign here, belonged in the overcrowded art gallery with trays of cheap white wine. Here in the country they didn’t know each other well enough to kiss. Answering polite inquiries about the difficulty of finding the house, he followed her over the threshold and into a stone-flagged corridor.

One ladder-backed chair, a small uncurtained window, an earthenware jug with three gigantic heads of hogweed casting an intricate pattern of shadows across the white walls. A cool, even chilly interior, but then she threw open a door and ushered him into a room full of deep reds and blues, pools of golden light from the lamps falling over books and paintings. Pale yellow sunlight flooding through the large windows made the fire burn dim.

‘Would you like a drink? Gin, wine…?’

‘White wine, please.’

While she poured, he turned to one side and there, on top of a carved oak chest, was a portrait bust of Ben – obviously her work – and powerful, he thought. Suddenly there were three people in the room, and this third presence produced a charge that was too strong, too complex, for the length of their own acquaintanceship. Stranded between small talk and the conversation they didn’t know each other well enough to have, they smiled and nodded, but found it difficult to think of anything to say. She had a streak of white plaster on
her chin that was beginning to dry and flake. He was aware of wanting to brush it away with his thumb. His hand actually began to move towards her, but then he stopped, horrified by the inappropriate intimacy of the gesture.

‘That’s amazing,’ he said, pointing to the bust.

‘I’m glad you like it. I did it last summer.’

So easy and light the reference, but as she spoke the firelight leapt over the bronze face and for a moment the features seemed to move.

Lunch served at the kitchen table was simple but good. Chicken casserole, hot, crusty bread, followed by cheese and fruit.

He remembered Robert saying how much she loved the house so he asked her about that, and she became animated at once. Her face flushed – but she had been too pale before – as she told him about how she and Ben had found it, the state it was in, filthy, the old farmer who owned it had no children and so, as he sank into senility, the place had become not merely dilapidated but squalid. They’d walked round it with a torch on their first visit, dismayed by the dark rooms – the windows had been almost overgrown with ivy – but then, drifting out into the yard with an increasingly disconsolate estate agent in tow, they’d seen the outbuildings and immediately, in spite of all the work that would be needed to put it right, they’d known this was the place. Had to be. ‘Can you imagine what it would cost in London to get a place with two studios? Two million?’

‘More than that.’ It wouldn’t come cheap even here
in the North, where you could get a country house with a deer park for the price of a three-bedroomed flat in Notting Hill. ‘Aren’t you nervous here by yourself?’