Burial of Ghosts

Chapter Twenty-two

I walked down to the beach to finish my picnic. The tide was higher than it had been when I’d first talked to Dickon, high enough for me to hear the water sucking back against the sand. Something happened to me there. A change of mood. The righteous indignation I’d felt about being pissed about by Howdon turned to fury. Lisa the nurse would have told me there was other stuff going on as well. Stuff about Nicky and not wanting to be a victim again. Perhaps I knew that even then, but it didn’t make any difference. I was seething. I needed an acknowledgement from Howdon that he was playing games. I needed to take control. I sat on the empty beach and thought of revenge.

When I got back to the house all the visitors had gone. The big top was a heap of canvas and rope on the grass. The rubbish bins were overflowing. People were clearing up, but there was no one I recognized. A torn paper mask was all that was left of the Countryside Consortium stall.

Of course, I could have gone straight home. I’d given Jess and Ray long enough on their own. I tried the deep breathing that they tell you relieves stress. I tried to persuade myself that Howdon wasn’t worth the hassle. But it didn’t work and I didn’t really want it to. I thought it was just as well I’d changed out of my jeans and was suitably dressed. It was years since I’d gate-crashed a party.

Joanna’s exhibition was being held in a room over a café bar on the main street. The bar was one of those places which makes you believe you’re in the Cotswolds or Hampstead, full of expat southerners with loud voices. I’d been there for a meal once with a couple of social workers. They weren’t local either. One of them had written a play. Upstairs that day there’d been a poet reading and a woman playing a tenor sax. At the same time. We’d listened for a while, then we’d gone downstairs to eat. The menu had been chalked on a blackboard beside the bar, but I’d not been able to read it because two women had stood right in front of it, debating their choice of wine. Showing off. Performance art to compete with the poet. I’d been well behaved and only caused a minor scene.

I parked next to Safeway’s and walked through an alley. A pack of adolescent girls prowled up the middle of the street in search of a pub which would serve them. I checked my appearance in a shop window, pulled my fingers through my hair. There was a faint green stain on the back of the dress – seaweed from a rock or lichen from the church step. I hoped the lighting inside was dim. Otherwise I’d have to stand with my back to the wall.

Joanna had hired the whole place for her party. There was a young man with an open-necked shirt and a game-show host’s smile collecting cards at the door.

‘Oh, shit!’ I said, putting my hand to my mouth. The arty middle classes like bad language. ‘I didn’t think about the invitation… Look, it’s Lizzie, Lizzie Bartholomew. You can always check with Joanna. Or Stuart if he’s here…’ I smiled. My voice was ditzy, apologetic. I’m a girlie. Decorative. I don’t do organized. And I don’t want to brag, but you’d have sworn I was born south of Sunderland.

He smiled back. ‘No problem. Drinks and canapés down here. The exhibition’s upstairs.’

There was no natural light in the bar. It had an old-fashioned feel which I’d not noticed on my previous visit, candles in bottles, a natural-wood floor, cane chairs. Perhaps the décor had recently changed and rustic Mediterranean was in fashion again. It was so dark in there that I thought I could have gone topless without embarrassment. I hadn’t needed to worry about the stain on my dress. A woman in jeans and a skimpy top stood in the light of the doorway carrying a tray of drinks. I took an orange juice. My anger didn’t need fuelling with alcohol. The juice had that bitter aftertaste which meant it had come out of a long-life carton. Every expense spared.

I looked around for Howdon. I didn’t have a game plan. I wanted to know what he was playing at. I wanted to see his face when I said, Strange you don’t remember me. Ask Dickon. He does.

I walked to the end of the room. It was long and narrow. Everyone seemed to be smoking. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I picked out groups of people who seemed to be there for the free party, not the photos. The bar’s usual Saturday night clientele. I wondered how many others the charmer on the door had let in without invitations. There was no sign of Joanna or Howdon. I set my glass on the bar and made my way upstairs.

The exhibition space was larger than I’d expected, much bigger certainly than the bar below. It must have spread over the neighbouring shops. Again the light was artificial. There were black blinds at the windows. The photographs were lit by a series of ceiling spots. And there were a lot of photographs. They hung on the walls and on freestanding screens which partitioned the room. I was impressed. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting. Not something this professional. A lad was standing at the top of the stairs. He handed me a folded sheet of printed paper, a catalogue or programme, with the titles numbered. It said which of the pictures were for sale and gave a list of prices which made me whistle under my breath. It said that a percentage of any profits would be donated to the Countryside Consortium. It didn’t tell us how big a percentage.

The exhibition was called A Landscape under Threat, though as far as I could tell the specific nature of the threat wasn’t explained. Despite myself, I got hooked into the images. I knew what I was there for but I found myself distracted. The pictures disturbed me. They were all in black and white. Some were enormous, huge landscapes with chiselled valleys. Some were little and the subjects were domestic – not in any sense family snaps, but they seemed as accessible as that.

There were a lot of people in the big room but they spoke in reverent whispers. If background music was playing, it was so faint that I couldn’t hear it. The screens acted like the walls of a maze, guiding us through the room. Howdon could have been there, hidden just round the next corner, but I didn’t hurry past. My attention was held by the pictures and I stopped before each one. They had all been taken in Northumberland. There was a sweep of sand dunes with a brooding, thunderstorm sky. A field of fat lambs surrounded by grey dry-stone walls, lit by a low evening sun. A swollen river sweeping past a barn. Then there was a scene which was familiar. It showed sunlight slanting through bare winter trees onto a narrow lane. I’d seen it before on Ronnie Laing’s wall. If it wasn’t a print of the same photo the shot must have been taken at the same time on the same day.

I got so caught up with the shapes on the walls that it took me a while to work out why I found the images disturbing. I mean, they were attractive, pleasing, so why did they make me feel uncomfortable? Because they weren’t real. Even when I recognized the place in the picture, the sense of place was wrong. I thought it wasn’t true that the camera never lies. I mean, the physical shape of the landscape was true, but the viewer’s response to it had been manipulated. Perhaps that’s what art’s all about. Perhaps I was being naïve. But I’m straightforward. I don’t like being messed with.

The pictures of the coast, for instance. In a storm like that, there’d have been litter blown against the grass. There’s always litter. In the distance there should have been one of those concrete bunkers they put up in the war to stop the German tanks rolling up the beach. Even further away I’d have shown the cokeworks at Lynemouth or the chimneys of Blyth power station. And none of her farmhouses had satellite dishes, or scrappy machinery in the yard, or black polythene covering silage. There was no sign of foot and mouth, no Keep Out police notices. If this was a threatened landscape, why hadn’t she shown that dump at Widdrington, where the carcasses were buried and the lorries leaked blood? What I’m saying is that this isn’t a pretty landscape and she’d made it look pretty. It made me think she had a fairy-tale vision of how the world and her life should be. Philip’s illness and death must have come as a shock. She wouldn’t have been expecting something like that.

I turned away from the picture I’d seen on Ronnie’s wall and there was Howdon, standing in a corner with a glass in his hand, talking in a low voice to a man I’d never met and a little woman in a purple jacket and a purple skirt with thin pleats, like the umpires at Wimbledon wear. She had a thin rat-like face and a complexion drained of all colour. She shouldn’t have worn purple. She had a long-suffering look, which made me think she was Howdon’s wife. He hadn’t noticed me and suddenly he began to laugh. It wasn’t loud. A restrained chortle which he held in with his handkerchief. Perhaps the man had told him a joke. Perhaps he’d told one himself. Anyway, that laughter pushed me over the edge. I could believe it was me he was laughing at. I lost it.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ I’ve told you I don’t usually swear. I like to think I don’t need to any more. But I needed to then. The words rang out in that quiet room. I could imagine them bouncing off the walls and the high ceiling, the sound waves like ripples, but getting bigger not smaller. No one intervened. Thank God for English embarrassment.

He looked over at me. He could hardly pretend I didn’t exist. Not with such a big audience. For a moment he didn’t know how to respond. He stood with his mouth open – a cartoon fish.

‘Who is this, Stuart?’ The woman. She thought I was his mistress. Perhaps he had a history of screwing around. I wouldn’t have been surprised. If he felt the need to justify the affairs, he’d have told himself he’d lost the love of his life to Philip Samson, and he needed the comfort. That was the sort of pathetic man he was. ‘What’s going on?’

Her voice was firmer than I’d have expected from her appearance. She might put up with infidelity but not with a scene at a friend’s party. Not a grand friend like Joanna. And she’d sensed that he’d recognized me. I could tell. She wouldn’t let him pretend otherwise.

‘Stuart?’

I wanted to scream, Christ, I’m not his girlfriend. Credit me with some taste. But that would have implied that she had none and my quarrel wasn’t with her.

‘Your husband lied about me to the police,’ I said, lowering my voice, keeping it calm, fuming inside.

‘Stuart?’ she said again, impatient now. She might have been talking to an annoying and not very bright child.

Still he couldn’t find the words to reply. I yelled at him, ‘I was arrested for murder. And it’s all your fault.’ Pathetic. Like a kid in a school playground. But the scary thing is that if I’d had a knife I’d have had a go at him.

At last he regained his powers of speech. ‘No, no. I never meant that.’

‘Well, what did you mean?’

‘He was trying to protect me.’ It was Joanna in 1930s film-star mode. Every time I’d seen her, there’d been a different style. I couldn’t get a grip on her. Tonight she was in a long sheath dress. Her lipstick and nails were red, the red of fresh blood. It was quite an entrance. Everyone was looking at her. They pretended to stare at the pictures, but none of us were fooled. I thought then that she was enjoying the attention, but perhaps I was wrong, because she took my arm. ‘Let’s find somewhere to talk,’ she said. ‘Somewhere quiet.’

There was a little room off the main space, an office with a desk, a computer and a couple of chairs. No window. She must have changed there; someone had propped a full-length mirror for her against one wall and there was a make-up bag on the desk. She showed me through the door and disappeared. I wondered if she wanted Stuart there to hold her hand, but she returned almost immediately with a bottle of wine in a cooler and two glasses.

I told her I was driving but I took one glass. That was all. When I left her later, the bottle was nearly empty. She must have been drinking steadily, though I didn’t realize at the time. Her voice was quite reasonable throughout.

‘Did you know he was married?’ she asked. ‘In Morocco.’

‘I guessed.’ Immediately. In the bus.

‘Look, I don’t blame you for what happened. I just wondered if he mentioned me.’ Her eyes were hungry.

He’d said she’d deny him nothing. I wasn’t sure that was what she wanted to hear. He’d said she was a saint and even then I’d thought I’d heard an implied criticism.

‘It was just one night,’ I said. Not lying.

‘You made an impression all the same.’ She was trying to make a joke of it, but there was still that look in her eyes.

‘How do you know what happened in Marrakech?’

‘Philip told me.’ She stared at me steadily over her glass. ‘I didn’t mind. How could I? He knew he was dying. It was only natural that he would want to have as many experiences as possible. I should be grateful to you. I find that difficult, of course, but I certainly don’t resent you.’

‘Did you know about Thomas?’

‘No.’ It seemed hard for her to admit it. ‘I never even guessed.’ She refilled her glass. ‘Stuart explained it all this afternoon. It unnerved him bumping into you at Wintrylaw. He told me about the instructions Philip left with the will, about the boy being murdered.’ She looked up at me again. ‘Stuart was distraught. Really. It can’t be easy for a solicitor to lie to the police.’

I didn’t say that in my experience solicitors lie all the time. She was an innocent. She probably even believed in God.

‘He didn’t want me to find out that Philip had had an affair in Morocco and he didn’t want me to know about the child. He was thinking about me and the children. Our children. Honestly.’

Like I said, she was an innocent.