Double Vision

Eighteen

The storm blew itself out over the next few hours. Kate made no attempt to sleep again, but sat at the kitchen table, tense and watchful, eyes prickling with tiredness, mouth and stomach sour with too much caffeine.

After a while, as the light coming through the window panes strengthened, she crept out of the house into the opening eye of day, and in that watery yellow light made her way across the yard, which was strewn with twigs and small branches torn off the trees, to the studio.

The huge figure towered over her. It had changed, and yet there were no fresh chips of plaster on the floor, and no chisel marks she couldn’t remember making herself. If it looked different, it must be because her way of seeing it had changed. The belly was scored in three, no, four different places. She put her hands into the cracks. Chest and neck gouged — it looked like a skin disease, bubonic plague, a savagely plucked bird. Pockmarks everywhere. Slowly, she raised her eyes and looked at the head. Cheekbones like cliffs, a thin, dour mouth, lines graven deep on either side, bruised, cut, swollen. Beaten up. Somebody with a talent for such things had given him a right going over. This was the Jesus of history. And we know what happens in history: the strong take what they can, the weak endure what they must, and the dead emphatically do not rise.

She’d made this, not Peter, and yet it seemed to her, remembering last night, that everything she found most disturbing in this figure corresponded with his mimed movements.

Putting the problem aside as too complex to solve now, she looked round the studio, thinking he might have left things behind, and sure enough, there was his jacket on the bench. Putting scruples aside, she felt inside the pockets and found loose change, three five-pound notes and a credit card. She’d have to find a way of returning these: she didn’t want him coming here to collect them. Perhaps she could drop them off at the vicarage. He could pick them up there.

She went out, locked the door and changed the combination on the alarm. It took her a long time to remember what she had to do to achieve this, and while she was doing it the rain started again, though only a few scattered drops, just enough to freshen her burning face.

Back in the house, she forced herself to wash, dress, comb her hair, though her efforts only seemed to make the shadows under her eyes more apparent. She looked dreadful, ancient. Felt it too. And yet the improvement in her shoulder was even more remarkable this morning. They’d told her that if it worked at all, the effects would be dramatic, but she hadn’t dared hope for anything as good as this.

The lights came on at ten o’clock. Various pieces of electronic equipment clicked and whirred, the freezer light glowed red but quickly turned to green. A hum in the distance resolved itself into the sound of a car’s engine. Peter? She immediately wished she’d phoned Angela and asked her to come round, but it was too late now. The car stopped by the side of the house, and with relief she saw Stephen Sharkey walk past the kitchen window.

He was making for the studio, taking it for granted that at this time of the morning she’d be there.

‘Hello,’ she said, opening the kitchen door.

‘Hello. Rough night?’

She must look even worse than she thought. ‘Yes, it was a bit.’ She stood to one side. ‘Come in.’

He stepped over the threshold. ‘Did your lights go off?’

‘Yes, they came back on half an hour ago. And yours?’

‘The same. I expect we’re on the same bit of the grid. Did you manage to sleep through it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Do you know,’ he said, taking off his coat, ‘I saw an owl sitting on the fence back there, in broad daylight. I think I could have walked up to it.’

‘Perhaps it’s lost its tree, poor thing. There’ll be a good few of them down.’

She was remembering he’d arranged to come this morning to look through Ben’s prints. It had completely slipped her mind. ‘Would you like some coffee before you start?’

She put the kettle on, but had peppermint tea herself. Her mind buzzed and fizzed with caffeine, but not in any way that produced useful thought. Stephen watched her sip the greenish-brown liquid. She looked shaken, he thought.

‘Don’t you like thunder?’

‘No, it wasn’t that. I was woken up by I think it was a dustbin lid blowing around — but then I saw a light in the studio. So I went across…’

She told it, or attempted to tell it, as an amusing incident, unaware of the expression of fear and distress that had spread across her face and deepened as she spoke.

‘Anyway, there he was with my clothes on.’

‘Your clothes?’

‘Yes, you know, work clothes. He wasn’t prancing about in high heels and a bra.’ A spasm of irritation born of exhaustion. She controlled herself. ‘He was pretending to carve the plaster.’

‘Pretending?’

‘Oh, yes, he didn’t touch it.’

‘Imitating you.’

Imitating domesticated it, she thought. It had been a lot more than that.

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing very heroic, I’m afraid. I just came back here and locked the door.’

‘Did you phone the police?’

She shook her head. ‘The lines were down.’

‘Have you tried this morning?’

‘No, I don’t see the point.’

‘Was there any damage?’

Good question. ‘No, not really.’ She couldn’t explain that the damage was to her belief in herself and in the project. There was nothing the police could do about that.

Stephen was silent for a moment, holding the steaming mug in his clasped hands. ‘Did you know he’d been in prison? Did Alec tell you?’

‘No. How do you know?’

‘Justine told me. It’s about five years ago, so he’s been out for a while.’

‘I don’t suppose he did anything dreadful. Possession of a Category A drug?’

‘I think it was a bit more than that.’

‘Doesn’t Justine know?’

‘No, he never told her.’

‘Alec would know.’

‘Oh, yes, he’d know.’

‘I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.’

‘No, well, I agree. I think you had the right to know what you were taking on.’

‘Yes.’ She was starting to feel angry. A simpler and much more enjoyable response than the mixture of disgust and self-doubt she’d experienced till now.

After Stephen finished his coffee, she took him off to Ben’s studio, tapped in the combination and unlocked the door. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘why don’t I write this down for you? Then you can come and go as you want.’ He gave her his notebook and a pen, and she leant against the wall to write the numbers down. ‘I hope you have a good morning,’ she said, handing the pad back to him.

She went back into the house, but a few minutes later she came out, got in her car and drove away.

Parking outside the churchyard gate, Kate realized she could see the headstone of Ben’s grave, backed by bleached blond grass. She’d wanted him to be there, on the edge of the cemetery, with the rolling moors shrugging their bare shoulders behind him, rather than close to the village with its dense, secretive life, its rivalries, feuds and gossip.

As she walked up the path to the front door of the vicarage, she saw pale gashes in the trees that had been damaged overnight. Twigs and small branches were scattered over the lawn as they were over her yard, but, more worrying for Alec, there were broken slates mixed in as well.

She rang the bell twice, resigning herself to a long wait and possible disappointment, but after a few minutes she heard footsteps — too light to be Alec’s — and turned to the door, expecting to see Justine.

But it was Angela who stood there. They stared at each other. The buttons on Angela’s blouse had been done up in the wrong order, obviously fastened in a hurry. Kate blushed, Angela didn’t. Trying to keep her eyes off the button, Kate asked, ‘Is Alec in?’

‘Yes,’ said Angela, not moving aside.

Somewhere in the depths of the house Kate heard the slapping of bare feet on lino. ‘Could I have a word with him, please?’

She had never spoken to Angela in that chilly, formal way before, but it had an effect. Angela stood aside and let her in. Kate followed her along the corridor and down a flight of steps to the basement kitchen. A dreadfully old-fashioned place. The gas cooker had clawed feet. Kate sat at the table. Angela filled a whistling kettle at a tap that juddered with the effort of producing water, and put it on the cooker to boil.

The window looked out over the churchyard. It said a lot for the kitchen that one appreciated the comparative cheerfulness of the view. Kate said, ‘I’m not surprised Victoria ran away.’

Angela shrugged. ‘She’d only herself to blame. The bishop offered them a modern house, but she wouldn’t have it because it was on a housing estate. She was quite county, you know, Victoria.’

‘Was she? I never really got to know her.’ A pause. ‘Where’s Justine?’

‘With Stephen, I suppose.’

‘With Stephen?’

‘Oh, yes. That’s been going on quite a while.’

Alec had come in on slippered feet and was standing just inside the door. ‘Hello, Kate. What can I do for you?’

She didn’t want to say anything in front of Angela, but it was difficult to make that clear without appearing to snub her. She looked so pink and pleased with herself, presiding over the teapot in this desolate kitchen with its smells of congealed fat and mice. Poor Justine.

‘I’d like to talk about Peter, but there’s no hurry. Have your tea, first.’

Alec beamed as he accepted a cup. He looked so happy, so nice, so rubicund and smiling, so engagingly and endearingly well fucked above his clerical collar, that it was difficult to go on being angry.

But Kate made the effort, and, sensing her mood, Alec suggested they should take their tea into his study.

Kate followed him down the corridor, wondering what the smell was. Some powerful floor cleaner that failed to live up to its promise and simply pushed the grime around from place to place. Though perhaps there was no grime. Perhaps it was just that the lino had reached a stage of wear when all the colours run into each other and become shades of grey. It reminded her of high teas with her great-aunts when she was a little girl. That graveyard smell of boiled beetroot leaking red on to wilted lettuce leaves.

Alec’s study was overshadowed by trees. He closed the door behind them and stood at an angle to the window, facing her. ‘I dream about them sometimes. The trees. I dream the branches come in at the window.’

Kate realized, with some surprise, that in over five years of so-called friendship this was the most intimate thing she’d ever heard him say. ‘You should cut them down.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’

‘They’re too close, Alec. Anything that’s been blocking the light for 200 years needs to come down.’

He sat down with a creak and protest of ancient wood. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Something rather strange happened last night.’

In telling the story again, she rediscovered her anger. She was flushed by the time she finished. ‘It’s thrown me completely. I was really frightened.’

Alec steepled his fingers, as if she had posed some abstract question in moral theology. ‘I wonder what made him do that? He does have problems with boundaries between people.’

Kate was getting angrier by the minute. She could have accepted any amount of Christian preaching — he was paid to do it, after all — but this was just psychobabble. And he hadn’t acknowledged the salient fact, which was that she was the injured party.

‘You mean, he can’t tell where he stops and other people start?’

‘He’s not dangerous.’

‘Alec, that is dangerous.’

‘I can see it must’ve been a terrible shock.’

She felt like giving him a few shocks of her own. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he’d been to prison?’

‘It didn’t seem relevant. He hasn’t been in trouble with the law for more than five years.’

‘I was the person to decide if it was relevant. It’s quite simple, Alec. If you want him in your house getting off with your daughter, that’s your business. But I have the right to decide who I want to trust. You should’ve warned me.’

‘Well,’ he said at last, after a long dragging pause.

‘It’s difficult.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Do?’

‘What did he do to get sent to prison?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘It wasn’t a sexual offence. I always specified I couldn’t take sex offenders because of Justine.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What, then? Murder?’

She expected, hoped, that he’d laugh and accuse her of being melodramatic. Instead, he sighed. ‘I really can’t talk about this.’

And that was that. She could tell he wouldn’t budge.

‘I was alone with him, hour after hour, day after day, and you can’t say, “Well, so what? Nothing happened,” because last night something did happen.’

‘Did he threaten you?’

She was silent. ‘Alec, do you know what it is to be really frightened?’ She wasn’t explaining this well, because she didn’t understand it herself.

‘Are you going to tell the police?’

She stared at him. His glasses flashed in a glint of light that struggled through the leaves. ‘Why? Why is it so important for me not to tell them?’

‘It could be very serious for him.’ He started to speak, stopped and started again. ‘He hasn’t really done anything, has he?’

‘You mean he’s on parole?’

Alec looked down at his hands.

‘No, I won’t tell them.’ She looked at the carrier bag at her feet. ‘I’ve brought all his stuff. I haven’t got his address — I always paid in cash. And this’ — she held up the envelope on top — ‘is payment to the end of the month.’

‘What’s he done, Kate? Except get a bit obsessed?’

‘Mucked up the contents of my head. But I quite agree that’s not a crime. You see, I’m not being spiteful. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t understand, and I don’t think you do either. And it does seem to me that while you were dishing out the Christian charity, you might have spared a bit of it for me.’

‘Perhaps he’s in love with you, Kate. Have you thought of that?’

She shook her head vigorously, involving her shoulders, back and arms, like somebody trying to shake off an unpleasant insect. ‘No, I don’t think that’s it, at all.’

She was almost in tears. Alec reached out his hand, but she moved out of range. ‘Don’t bother getting up, Alec. I can see myself out.’