Double Vision

Eleven

During the first few weeks of their working together Peter seemed simply bored. He turned up on time, fetched, carried, lifted, mixed plaster, held buckets, cut cloth and, when not required, retreated to the corner of the room, between the plaster figures, so that often Kate would forget he was there, and then be startled when something moved on the periphery of her vision.

That changed when the figure began to take shape. She was familiar with this process: the sense, growing stronger by the hour, as she built up, carved, cut back, built up, carved again, of another presence in the room. The decisive moment came when it — he — acquired a face. With some amusement she noticed how Peter’s posture changed. Before, he’d stood easily with his back to the armature. Now he opened his shoulders when he was talking to her, as people do who feel the need to include another person in the group.

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.