Double Vision

Seventeen

Kate got back from the hospital on Monday afternoon, amazed at the improvement to her shoulder, but still drowsy from the anaesthetic. After making a few phone calls to tell people she was home, she stood at the window, pulling Ben’s amulet up and down the chain. It was some comfort, but no substitute for his arm around her shoulders.

She resisted the idea of going to sleep, and set off for a walk instead. She needed to clear her head, but also she wanted to enjoy the improvement in her mobility. She walked along, bending her head from side to side, circling her right arm. If anybody had seen her she’d have been locked up, but there was nobody to see. The weather was keeping everybody else indoors.

It had been blowing a gale all day. Even in the hospital she’d been aware of it, great blasts hurling rain against the window, though inside her cubicle there was only the heat of the radiator and mingled smells of antiseptic and rubber. Never mind, she was free of all that now. No more hospitals. No more surgical collar, and for the next two days at least — no Peter. She’d given him Monday and Tuesday off — paid, of course — partly because she hadn’t known how she’d feel after the operation, but also because she needed to spend some time alone with the Christ, to try to recapture her original conception.

Above the forest the clouds massed together, a huge black anvil obscured by veils of drifting grey. The trees heaved and thrashed, and then suddenly went quiet, only the topmost branches tweaking, like the tip of a cat’s tail while it’s watching a bird. And then the rain came, great slanting silver rods, disappearing into the black earth.

The deer would still be dry, she thought. She imagined them, moist nostrils quivering as the storm passed over their heads. Other animals were less lucky. In the fields cows huddled around their feeding trough in muddy trenches they’d dug for themselves; horses tilted a hind hoof and stood, blank with misery, water matting the coarse hair on their flanks; rabbits raced for cover, the wind making pale grey stars in their fur.

She ran the last few steps to the front door, struggling to keep her balance, and let herself into a house whose fading warmth told her at once that the fire was either dead or dying. She managed to rescue it, and sat down by the fire with a stiff whisky to warm her through. Outside in the yard dead leaves were blown about like specks on an ageing retina. The hens, affronted by the constant ruffling of their feathers, had retired to the barn, where they clucked peevishly on their brooding perches.

After a while, feeling fully restored by the walk, she got out her drawing pad and looked back to her original sketches for the Christ commission. They worried her because they had an energy that she knew the finished, or nearly finished, figure lacked. She spent a couple of hours working out what had gone wrong, increasingly convinced that something had and knowing there was very little time left to put it right. In the end she put the work aside in despair and went to the window, resisting the urge to go across to the studio and try out new ideas. It would be mad to work now. She was in no state to take decisions.

The sky had darkened. Trees strained and groaned in the yellow light. A flock of birds flew over, rooks, probably, flapping big, black, ungainly wings, but after that there was nothing. Feeling suddenly exhausted, as much by doubts about her work as by the anaesthetic, she switched off the lights and went early to bed.

She felt she would sleep at once, and did, only to wake again, half dreaming, thinking how the wind in the trees sounded like the sea. It was like being back in the lighthouse she and Ben had rented once, where one stormy day she’d forced the window open to find a seagull level with her face, its rapacious golden eyes glinting as it rode the wind. And that night she’d run her hands along Ben’s spine, feeling the knobs of his vertebrae as secret and mysterious as fossils.

‘Hey,’ he’d said, turning to face her. ‘I’m not clay.’

You are now, she thought. Oh, my love. At such moments, stranded between sleep and waking, the pain tore into her, as fierce as it had been the day she took the call. Sleep, she told herself, turning over and curling up. The only cure for this was sleep.

But the long fall from waking into sleep ended with a thump. She was sitting up in darkness, dry-mouthed, staring, knowing that some particular sound had dragged her back into consciousness. Not the spatter of rain on the glass, or the whistling of the wind — these were natural sounds and easily screened out. No, some specific, wrong sound — a sound that shouldn’t have been there at all — had woken her. She stared into the darkness, tense, waiting for it to be repeated.

Nothing. She settled back against the pillows, telling herself she couldn’t have heard anything unusual against the clamour of the storm, and that a noise in a dream can seem to come from the outside world if you wake suddenly. But she couldn’t get back to sleep. At last, she got out of bed, reached for her dressing-gown and looked out into the yard, through the buffeting of the wind that seemed, in some extraordinary way, to have become visible, bending the trees sideways, beating the bushes till they showed the white undersides of their leaves as if in fear. Light came and went in fitful gleams on the choppy surface of the puddles, and for one insane moment the eye of the moon stared up at her from the yard.

Anything could’ve woken her, she thought. A dustbin lid clattering against a wall, a door banging, but then she saw it, a glow of light from inside the studio where no light should have been. A moving light, a torch or a small lamp. She saw the reflection on the hillside rather than the light itself, a tinge of purple on the heaving grass.

Police. She picked up the phone, unable at first to understand why there was silence rather than a steady purr, then realized the lines must be down. Checking, she switched on the bedside lamp. Dead. She went downstairs, trying lights on the staircase and landings, then found the torch she kept in a drawer of the hall table. Through into the living room, swinging the beam around her, she brought the light to a stop on Ben’s portrait. Oh, my dear, she thought, and touched his face.

If there’d been burglars in the house, she’d have locked the bedroom door and let them have the lot. But this was her work. She wouldn’t let that be stolen or destroyed.

In the kitchen she pulled on wellies, her bare feet jamming against the rubber, cold toes wiggling in space — too much space — she must’ve put on Ben’s boots, not her own. No time to change, she was out in the yard, switching the torch off as she left the house. She felt that carrying a light would make her conspicuous, though she switched it on again as she ventured out into the yard, briefly creating a wobbling sphere of light with slanting, silver lines of rain sweeping across it, then switched it off again, paused for a moment to get her eyes accustomed to the dark, and set off to the studio door. She opened it quietly, and stood in the lobby among the familiar daily smells, aware of somebody on the other side of that door. Deep breaths. Blood clamouring in her head and neck, destroying her ability to think. She put her eye to the crack in the door, wanting to know who and what she had to confront.

She couldn’t see anybody. The shadow of the huge Christ lay across the floor and climbed the wall, and a second smaller shadow flickered around it, like a grey flame. She pressed closer to the door, wondering if she dare push it open, trying to remember if it creaked, and then she heard the last sound she expected to hear — though it was the sound that filled the studio almost every day of her working life — the tapping of a mallet on a chisel. She pushed the door further open.

Peter Wingrave stood there, a torch propped up on one of the benches behind him, his shadow huge against the wall of the studio, but this was Peter as she’d never seen him before. Her mind grappled with the wrongness of the image, and then she realized he was wearing her clothes, even to the fur hat with earflaps that she sometimes wore when the studio was really cold. He looked ridiculous — and terrifying. Deranged. His bare arms protruded from the plaster-daubed fisherman’s smock. She was a tall woman, but on him the sleeves were barely past his elbow, and his legs stuck out of her tracksuit bottoms, bare legs, white and hairy in the torchlight, more clearly visible than the rest of him. Only her moon boots had defeated him. He was barefoot, his strong prehensile toes gripping and relaxing as his feet moved across the mess of white plaster dust, towards the figure, pause, strike, away. Decision, action, contemplation: the constant comparison of the shape in the mind with the shape that was emerging from the plaster. The shadow of the figure thrown on to the wall in front of him, one shadow threading in and out of the other, like a weaver’s bobbin.

He looked mad. He looked totally, utterly deranged, and he was destroying her Christ.

But then, a second later, something that had been tugging at the edges of her mind became clear. There was something wrong about the sound. She strained to listen. The scuff of his feet moving across the floor, a snap as a larger piece of plaster broke under his weight, then again the tap of mallet on chisel. There was no impact, no jar and squeak of the chisel biting into the plaster. He was miming. Pretending to be her. In his own mind, perhaps, he had become her.

The first rush of relief at knowing the figure wasn’t being damaged gave way immediately to a deeper fear. If he had been destroying her work, she must and would have confronted him, but this was so different from anything she’d expected to see that she stepped back into the darkness and stood there, thinking. He was stealing her power in an almost ritualistic way. She couldn’t confront him, because she couldn’t begin to understand what she was dealing with — she couldn’t foresee what his reaction would be.

Slowly, being careful to make no noise, she backed out of the lobby and ran across the yard into the house, where she locked and bolted the door behind her.

She began searching for her bag, but when she found her mobile she couldn’t get a signal. And in any case, she thought, putting it down, what could she say? There’s a man in my studio. Did he break in? No, I gave him the key. Is he doing any damage? No. Is he threatening you? No. Are you frightened? Yes. Terrified. Are you a neurotic, stupid bitch? Yes — probably.

They wouldn’t say that. All the same she didn’t particularly want to have the conversation. She put the mobile down and sat at the kitchen table, in darkness, torn between the desire to go back over there and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, and her fear that what he was doing made so little sense, even on his own terms, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be able to answer, and that the question might therefore topple him over into some state she couldn’t predict and wouldn’t be able to deal with. No, better left.

He was wearing her clothes.

She felt a spasm of revulsion, not from him but from herself, as if he had indeed succeeded in stealing her identity. It was easy to believe that what she’d seen in the studio, through the crack in the door, was a deranged double, a creature that in its insanity and incompetence revealed the truth about her.

Half an hour later, perhaps a little less, she heard the studio door close, footsteps walking along the side of the house and then the noise of his van driving away.