Ivory (15 page)

He couldn’t
find the motivation to move so he sat. Lost in numbness he passed
the time watching the sunlight migrate down the wine coloured wall
and onto the cream carpet. He considered watching it travel to the
other wall and to wait for it to follow the same path the next
day.

The doorbell
rang a single blast that startled him into life. Electricity danced
in his stomach and his breathing quickened. He swallowed and rushed
to unlock and open the door. Ivory offered him a fleeting smile as
a greeting and then stood expectantly in the rain, sheltering under
a broad black umbrella slick with wet and running with the fall.
Her appearance, although arranged on their previous appointment,
took him by surprise. He broke free of his hesitation and hastened
her in from the elements.

She shook the
diamond drops from her umbrella onto the path then abruptly she
looked up into his face with her deep vortex eyes, eyes that were
all seeing. Feeling suddenly naked before her he rejected any
consideration of his motives towards her and any ideas that he had
lost Jenny and the kids. He was unsure if Ivory could sense his
angst but he couldn’t look into her eyes, not after the dream he
had had. Eyes that trusted him. Eyes, that he hoped, saw him as
someone different to her other punters. He couldn’t bare the
thought of her knowing about his dream and what he had been doing
to her in it. He justified that it was just a dream. He couldn’t
think of such things in the conscious world, his mind was defiant
of the temptation and had maintained the innocence of his motives
and intentions, yet in his dream world his desires ruled. He
couldn’t be held accountable for dreams, their existence
unexplained, and their inspiration, foundations and construction
mysterious and anonymous. No one could judge him. She held him in
the same intense stare that she had bored into him the night before
when he had poured out his guilt over King.

“
Terrible day isn’t it?” he breezed taking her coat. Ignoring
his vulnerability before her and the way her top clung to her body.
“No need to get changed into that white robe-thing today, I just
want to work on your face. Finishing touches.” She declined the
offer of a drink and they went straight up to the loft
room.

Martin stared
at the almost finished painting, the fine details of the face were
the last task. It had been a pleasure and a challenge he had wanted
to savour and give a whole session over to. The light was
completely different today due to the grey overcast sky, so he
improvised with a daylight bulb from his desk lamp. He settled
before the painting and conducted his ritual of looking between the
subject and the canvas, but today, focussing so much time and
attention on the face seemed like a torturous intimacy after his
subconscious betrayal of her and himself. He didn’t know how to act
as those eyes seemed to tear away at his composure. He didn’t know
if he could cope with the session and was both relieved and pained
that it would be their last session together. The painting would be
finished and there would be no reason to see her again.

“
I hope you don’t mind, but I am going to take a few
photographs again just in case I need to come back to work on the
likeness in your absence. The pictures of you from my 35mm camera
came out distorted. It must have been the light or bad film, so I
thought I would use a digital camera.” Without using the LCD view
finder he framed her and took a series of shots, trying to ignore
the memory of King as he did so. He turned the screen on intending
a cursory check that the pictures had been stored but his attention
was caught by the poor quality of the images. It was subtle, but
there was some minor pixilation in places and a few areas of
distorted focus. He shook his head dismissively.

“
Sorry I think this is playing up now. I must be jinxed. Just
one more try.” Martin switched to the LCD view finder and scanned
it around the room. Despite the motion blur from his movement it
didn’t suffer any other distortions. He levelled the camera in
Ivory’s direction and the small screen pixelated into visible
squares and then blurred and distorted with the rainbow of colours
the screen used to provide the image. “Odd.” He caught himself
saying aloud with a little embarrassment. A quick glance at Ivory
showed she hadn’t reacted, nor had her head become a collection of
little squares, an indefinite blur, or developed a rainbow aura. He
trained the camera away from Ivory’s face and the screen’s crisp
image returned, but flickered and broke up as he once more aimed it
at Ivory. He went cold. Absently he switched the camera off and set
it down, almost missing the easel shelf in his
distraction.

King had
explained the distortions on his photographs as bad lighting.
Richard had complained that he had been unable to capture Ivory’s
likeness. Martin had also experienced the same difficulties. He
recalled overhearing one of his goth students state that the
vampire myth and folk tales of Eastern Europe described how
vampires did not have a reflection in mirrors, nor could their
image be drawn or photographed. Vampires! He dismissed it. He had
seen her reflection in the mirror on the landing AND most obviously
vampires didn’t exist. He stifled a laugh at the ridiculous
connection his mind had made but the uneasy strangeness of the
situation refused to leave him.

After three
hours and several layers of pain the face had gained accurate
shades, texture and detail. He hesitated over her vacuous black
eyes, his brush wetted with brilliant white oil poised over one of
the twin black holes he had painted on the canvas. He stared
intently into her real eyes and studied the play of light. He
swallowed, uneasy with the intimate engagement with eyes that
stripped him down to his base fears and needs. A few stabs of the
brush into the blackness on his canvas and her eyes took on their
obsidian sparkle.

Ivory was no
vampire! Martin had captured her likeness.

He beamed to
himself. He had succeeded where King and Richard had failed. The
joy of success suddenly reduced everything into insignificance. The
strangeness of Ivory, her thrall over him, the problems in his
marriage all dissolved before the perfect image of her beauty
captured like a butterfly in ice.

“
It’s finished,” he announced.

Ivory kept her
gaze on Martin as she crossed the room and walked around the easel
until she stood face to face with herself. She angled her head and
stared for what seemed like an age. She raised her hand and her
gaze passed between the real and painted appendage. She stroked her
face, as if exploring its shape and texture for the first time. She
reached out to her painted self’s face.

“
Don’t!” Martin blurted, then added more calmly, “It will be
months before the paint is touch dry and even then it shouldn’t
really be touched until it is sealed.” There was a feathery quiver
in his throat and stomach as he wondered if she liked the
portrait.

He had his sense of achievement at having captured her
likeness and rediscovered his talent, but his interest in her had
refused to lift. He had exorcised the urge to paint her from his
mind yet he was no closer to understanding her appearance, the
relationship she had with Ebony or why she sold herself. He wanted
to know what she was like, what her life was like beyond the few
things he knew about her, what she thought of what she did, what
she thought of Ebony, of the world… of Martin. Although the
question that troubled him the most was what did
he
want?

Martin heard
the key grit against the lock and felt a draft from the front door
as it opened. He acted as casually as he could at hearing Jenny
return, but he felt like laughing at his ridiculous and irrational
fears that she had left him. The whole time he had been preparing
the apology meal he had been wondering if she might never return.
He shuddered against a chill. She was still standing in the open
door with the rain teeming down behind her.

“
Close the door, it’s cold.” Jenny obeyed but still stood at
the end of the hall. Face passive. Martin offered a weak smile from
the kitchen door and dried his hands on a tea-towel. “Kids with
friends? Why don’t you run upstairs and get changed and we can sit
down and eat together. I am going to make us spaghetti bolognese
and I have a bottle of wine ready to go.”

Jenny smiled
weakly but there was clearly no feeling behind it. “Sounds nice.
But I’m not really feeling up to eating or drinking.” Her hair was
plastered to her head and the sides of her face, the fringe
sharpened into thorns by the rain. The water dripped audibly onto
the floor. She held her position until Martin lost his smile and
set down the tea-towel to one side.

Martin sagged
and he couldn’t look her in the eye. “It’s about last night isn’t
it? I’m so sorry. I was asleep when I started what I did, and I had
a nightmare. When I woke up I was startled…”

“
Disorientated. Yes, I know, you said already.” Jenny walked
down the hallway and Martin found himself retreat into the middle
of the kitchen. “I’m not sure I believe you, but I accept your
apology.”

He experienced
a mix of panic and indignation. “You don’t believe me?”

“
I think when you looked at me and recoiled last night you did
so because you thought I was someone else.”

“
Who?” He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of
incredulity.

Jenny clenched
her eyes and pressed the thumb and forefinger of one hand against
them. “It doesn’t matter. You have explained yourself, and I can’t
really argue any differently.” She opened her eyes again and there
was a hardness in them. She spoke as if she had rehearsed the
moment. “I said to you last week that I wondered how long it would
take for you to neglect me and Oscar and Finn again, and we didn’t
have to wait long did we? You have spent so much time with your
student, that girl. I called Bea and asked after her, I described
the girl to her and she said she didn’t know of any such student,
nor did Donnie. I was so embarrassed.”

“
It’s a big university.”

“
And the guilt that you have on your face now?” Jenny
shrugged. “I have seen flashes of it when she arrives and leaves,
and you do your damnedest not to talk about her. I don’t know what
that means, whether you’re having an affair…” He objected but she
closed her eyes against him and talked over his bluster. “or this
is an affair in the making, or this is all in my head, it doesn’t
matter because it’s not just about this. We aren’t a married
couple, we aren’t a family. You can only be those things if
everyone plays their part.”

“
I play my part,” he was surprised by his anger when he knew
she was right.

“
Yes, you do. Poor choice of words on my part but an accurate
description for you to use; you ‘play your part’. To be married and
to make a family you need to give yourself over to it, and you only
give a 110 percent to your work – your art.”

He bowed his
head. “I’m sorry.”

“
I know. I genuinely believe you are, but it’s too late. I
have been holding the marriage and the family together myself and I
am fed up with it.”

“
What are you saying?”

“
I haven’t been at work today and the children aren’t at
friends. I ran them down to Surrey to my parents. I came back to
tell you that I don’t want to do this anymore.”

He was
starting to give over to panic. “No, don’t do this to me. We can do
this. I will give up my private work, just focus on university
work. I can change my ways.”

Jenny clapped
her hands to her face and ran them down under her chin until she
held her own throat. “You aren’t listening to me. Even if you could
change, I don’t want to do this.”

Martin was
crushed. He had feared this happening but not really expected it.
It was all so unreal. “Do the kids know?”

Jenny’s hands
dropped away from her neck and she picked at her nails. Now she
couldn’t look him in the eye. “I’m going to tell them tomorrow. I
didn’t want a scene.”

“
How can you do this to them.” He meant ‘me’.

“
Yes, there will be tears. But there have been tears already
because of the arguments and your absence. The irony is I think
they have become used to you only being in the background
already.”

A sensation
ran through him but he didn’t know how to feel it. “They need to be
here, they have school on Monday.” All he could do was offer
practicalities that might cause her to rethink the decision.

“
I will let the school know what’s going on. I will get some
work from them, mum can get back into teacher mode at the drop of a
hat so she can keep them ticking over until we sort something
out.”

“
You don’t mean it.” He grabbed desperately.

“
I do Martin. It’s over. Done. Finished.”

Suddenly
Martin was frightened, his fate seemed sealed, as though the moral
vows of his marriage had been all that stood between him and the
danger that Richard had warned him about, between the side of him
that his father and King had recognised. He found himself collapse
and he struggled to catch his breath around sobs that wracked his
body and caused his eyes and nose to stream. He reached out for her
and begged. “Please. Stay!”

Jenny pulled
away, her eyes running, but her face passive as she shook her head.
She turned away from him then froze. He knew what she had seen and
only in that moment realised how insensitive and reckless he had
been. Jenny strode into the lounge and pointed at the completed
portrait of Ivory that he had hung on the chimney breast in place
of the family portrait.