For the Sake of Elena

23

Justine met him at the front door. He’d only inserted his key into the lock when she opened it for him. She was, he saw, still dressed for her working day, and although she had worn the black suit and pearl grey blouse for at least thirteen hours now, they remained unwrinkled. She might have just put them on.

She looked beyond him to the receding lights of the panda car in the drive. “Where have you been?” she asked. “Where’s the Citroën? Anthony, where are your glasses?”

She followed him to his study and stood in the doorway while he rooted through his desk for an old pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that he hadn’t used in years. His Woody Allen specs, Elena had called them. You look like a clod with those on, Dad. He hadn’t worn them again.

He looked up at the window in whose refl ection he could see himself and his wife behind him. She was a lovely woman. For the ten years of their marriage, she had asked for little enough from him, only that he love her, only that he be with her. And in return she had created this home, into it she had welcomed his colleagues. She had given him support, she had believed in his career, she had been perfectly loyal. But she had not been able to give him that ineffable connection that exists between people when their souls are one.

As long as they’d had a mutual goal towards which they were working-scouting round for a house, painting and decorating, purchasing furniture, looking at cars, design ing a garden-they’d existed quite securely within the illusion of their ideal marriage. He had even thought: I’ve got a happy marriage this time round. It’s regenerative, devoted, committed, tender, loving, and strong. We’re even the same astrological sign, Gemini, the twins. It’s as if we were meant for each other from birth.

But when the superficial commonalities had disappeared-when the house had been purchased and furnished to perfection, when the gardens had been planted and the sleek French cars sat shining in the garage-he had found himself left with an indefi nable emptiness and a sense of vague, uneasy incompletion. He wanted something more.

It’s the absence of an outlet for creativity, he had thought. I’ve spent more than twenty years of my life in dusty academia, writing, giving lectures, meeting students, climbing up. It’s time to broaden my horizons and stretch my experience.

As in everything else, she had supported him in this. She did not join him-she had no abiding interest in the arts-but she admired his sketches, she mounted and framed his watercolours, and she clipped out of the local newspaper the announcement of the class that Sarah Gordon would teach. This is something you might like to take, darling, she had told him. I’ve never heard of her myself, but the paper says she’s quite an astounding talent. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for you to get to know a real artist?

That, he felt, was the greatest of the ironies. That Justine should have been the instrument of their acquaintance. But then, her having made him aware of Sarah Gordon’s presence in Grantchester in the first place actually completed the circle of the story in a well-balanced fashion. Justine, after all, was uniquely responsible for the final set of events in this obscene tragedy, so it was only appropriate that she also would have been instrumental in setting in motion the initial events that began with a life-drawing class in Sarah Gordon’s studio.

If it’s over between you, get rid of the painting, Justine had said. Destroy it. Get it out of my life. Get her out of my life.

But it hadn’t been enough when he defaced it with oils. Only its complete destruction would appease Justine’s anger and assuage the pain of his infi delity. And at only one time, in only one place, could this act of destruction be carried out in order to convince his wife of the sincerity with which he was putting an end to his affair with Sarah. So three times he had driven the knife through the canvas as Justine looked on. In the end, however, he’d been unable to bring himself to leave the ruined painting behind.

If she’d only been what I needed in the fi rst place, none of this would have happened, he thought. If she’d only been willing to open her heart, if she’d got in touch with her spirit, if creating meant more to her than merely possessing, if she’d done more than just listen and appear sympathetic, if she’d had something to say about herself, about life, if she’d tried to understand me at the deepest level of who and what I am…

“Where’s the Citroën, Anthony?” Justine repeated. “Where are your glasses? Where on earth have you been? It’s after nine o’clock.”

“Where’s Glyn?” he asked.

“Having a bath. And using most of the hot water in the house to do it.”

“She’ll be gone tomorrow afternoon. I’d think you could manage to put up with her that much longer. After all-”

“Yes. I know. She’s lost her daughter. She’s been crushed and devastated and I ought to be able to overlook everything she does-and every rotten thing she says-because of that fact. Well, I won’t buy it. And you’re a fool if you do.”

“Then I suppose I’m a fool.” He turned from the window. “But that’s something you’ve used to your advantage more than once, isn’t it?”

A spot of deep ruby appeared on each of her cheeks. “We’re husband and wife. We made a commitment. We made vows in a church. At least I did. And I’ve never broken them. I wasn’t the one-”

“All right,” he said. “I know.” The room was too warm. He needed to take off his coat. He couldn’t summon the will to do so.

She said, “Where have you been? What have you done with the car?”

“It’s at the police station. They wouldn’t allow me to drive it home.”

“They…The police? What’s happened? What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Not any longer at least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She seemed to grow taller as some sort of realisation dawned upon her. Under the fi ne material of her suit, he could imagine her muscles ripple and coil. “You’ve been with her again. I can see it in your face. You promised me, Anthony. Anthony, you swore to me. You said it was over.”

“It is. Believe me.” He left the study and headed for the sitting room. He heard the sound of her high heels tapping along behind him.

“Then what…Have you been in an accident? Have you wrecked the car? Are you hurt in some way?”

Hurt, an accident. There could be no greater truth. He wanted to chuckle at the grim, gallows humour. She would always assume that he was victim, not avenger. She couldn’t conceive that he might take matters into his own hands for once. She couldn’t conceive that he might fi nally act at his own behest, without regard for opinion or condemnation any longer, because he believed it was right to do so. And why should she, really? When had he ever acted on his own before? Other than to walk out on Glyn and he’d paid for that decision for the last fi fteen years.

“Anthony, answer me. What’s happened to you today?”

“I finished things. Finally.” He went into the sitting room.

“Anthony…”

He’d once thought the still lifes hanging above the sofa represented his very best work. Paint something that we can hang in the sitting room, darling. Use colours that match. He had done so. Apricots and poppies. One could tell what they were at a single glance. And isn’t that what true art is all about? An accurate duplication of reality?

He’d taken them off the wall and carted them proudly to show her on the first night of class. No matter that it was life drawing she was teaching, he wanted her to know from the very start that he was a cut above all the rest, raw talent just waiting for someone to mould him into the next Manet.

She’d surprised him from the fi rst. Perched on a stool in the corner of her studio, she began by offering no instruction at all. Instead, she talked. She hooked her feet round the rungs of the stool, put her elbows on her thoroughly paint-spattered knees, cupped her face in her hands so that her hair spilled through her fi ngers, and talked. At her side stood an easel holding an unfinished canvas, depicting a man sheltering a tousle-haired little girl. She never pointed to it as she spoke. It was clear that she expected they would make the connection.

“You’re not here to learn how to put paint on canvas,” she had said to the group. There were six of them: three elderly women in smocks and brogues, the wife of an American serviceman with time on her hands, a twelveyear-old Greek girl whose father was spending a year as a guest lecturer at the University, and himself. He knew at once that he was the serious student among them. She seemed to be speaking directly to him.

“Any fool can make splatters and call it art,” she had said. “That’s not what this course is all about. You’re here to put part of yourself on canvas, to reveal who you are through your composition, your choice of colour, your sense of balance. The struggle is to know what’s been done before and to push beyond it. The job is to select an image but to paint a concept. I can give you techniques and methods, but whatever you produce ultimately has to come from your self if you want to call it art. And-” She smiled. It was an odd, bright smile, completely without self-conscious affectation. She couldn’t have known that it wrinkled her nose in an unattractive fashion. But if she did know, she probably didn’t care. Externals did not seem to have much importance to her. “-if you have no real self, or if you have no way of discovering it, or if for some reason you’re afraid to find out who and what it is, then you’ll still manage to create something on canvas with your paints. It’ll be pleasant to look at and a pleasure to you. But it’ll be technique. It won’t necessarily be art. The purpose-our purpose-is to communicate through a medium. But in order to do that, you must have something to say.”

Subtlety is the key, she had told them. A painting is a whisper. It isn’t a shout.

At the end of it all, he’d felt ashamed of his arrogance in having brought his watercolours to show her, so confident of their having merit. He resolved to slink unobtrusively out of the studio with them safely tucked, in their protective-and suitable-brown wrapping paper, under his arm. But he wasn’t quick enough. As the others filed out, she said, “I see you’ve brought some of your work to show me, Dr. Weaver,” and she came to his worktable and waited while he unwrapped them, feeling as he hadn’t felt in years, in a welter of nerves and completely outclassed.

She’d gazed on them thoughtfully. “Apricots and…?”

He felt his face grow hot. “Oriental poppies.”

“Ah,” she said. And then quite briskly, “Yes. Very nice.”

“Nice. But not art.”

She turned her gaze to him. It was friendly and frank. He found it disconcerting to be engaged so directly by a woman’s eyes. “Don’t misunderstand me, Dr. Weaver. These are lovely watercolours. And lovely watercolours have a place.”

“But would you hang them on your wall?”

“I…?” Her gaze flickered under his, then held quite firmly. “I tend to like a painting that challenges just a bit more. It’s a matter of taste.”

“And these don’t challenge?”

She studied the watercolours once more. She perched on the work-table and held the paintings on her knees, first one then the other. She pressed her lips together. She blew out her cheeks.

“I can take it, you know,” he said with a chuckle that he realised was far more anxious than amused. “You can give it to me straight.”

She took him at his word. “All right,” she said. “You can certainly copy. Here’s the evidence of that. But can you create?”

It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it might. “Try me,” he said.

She smiled. “A pleasure.”

He’d thrown himself into it for the next two years, fi rst as a member of one class or another which she offered the community, then later on as a private student, alone with her. In winter they used a live model in the studio. In summer they took easels, sketch pads, and paints out into the country and worked off the land. Often they sketched each other as an exercise in understanding the human anatomy-the sternocleidomastoid muscles, Tony, she would say and put her fingertips to her neck, try to think of them like cords right beneath the skin. And always she filled the environment with music. Listen to me, if you stimulate one sense, you stimulate others, she explained, art can’t be created if the artist himself is an insensate void. See the music, hear it, feel it, feel the art. And the music would start-a haunting array of Celtic folktunes, a Beethoven symphony, a salsa band, an African mass called the Missa Luba, the nerve-shaving whine of electric guitars.

In the presence of her intensity and dedication, he’d begun to feel as if he’d emerged from forty-three years of darkness to fi nd himself walking in sunlight at last. He felt completely renewed. He felt his interest engaged and his intellect challenged. He felt emotions spring to life. And for six straight months before she became his lover, he called it all the pursuit of his art. There was, after all, a certain safety in that. It did not beg an answer for the future.

Sarah, he thought, and he marvelled at the fact that even now-after everything, even after Elena-he could still wish to murmur the name that he hadn’t allowed himself to say for the past eight months since Justine had accused and he had confessed.

They’d pulled up to the old school on a Thursday evening, just at the time he’d usually arrived. The lights were on and a fire was burn-ing-he could see its shifting glow through the drawn front curtains-and he knew that Sarah was expecting him and that music would be playing and a dozen or more sketches would be strewn among the pillows on the fl oor. And that she would come to meet him when the doorbell rang, that she would run to meet him, throw open the door, and draw him inside saying Tonio I’ve had the most marvellous idea about how to compose that picture of the woman in Soho, you know the one that’s been making me wild for a week…

I can’t do this, he said to Justine. Don’t ask me to do this. It’s going to destroy her.

I don’t much care what it’s going to do to her, Justine replied and got out of the car.

She must have been passing the door when they rang the bell, because she answered it just as the dog began to bark. She called over her shoulder, Flame, stop it it’s Tony you know Tony you silly thing. And then she turned back to the door, to the sight of them both- he in the foreground and his wife in the background and the portrait wrapped in brown paper and held under his arm.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even move. She merely looked beyond him to where his wife stood, and her face summed up the count of his sin. Betrayal works in two directions, Tonio, she’d said in the past. And he understood that clearly when she dropped into place that insubstantial patina of breeding and civility that she actually believed was going to protect her.

Tony, she said.

Anthony, Justine said.

They walked into the house. Flame trotted out of the sitting room with an old knotted sock between his teeth and he barked through it happily at the sight of a friend. Silk looked up from a doze by the fire and undulated his long serpent tail in lazy greeting.

Now, Anthony, Justine said.

He lacked the will: to do it, to refuse, even to speak.

He saw Sarah look at the painting. She said, What have you brought me, Tonio, as if Justine were not standing at his side.

There was an easel in the sitting room and he unwrapped the painting and set it there. He expected her to fly to it when she saw the great smears of red, white, and black that obscured the smiling faces of his daughter. But instead she simply approached it slowly, and she gave a low cry when she saw what she had to have known she would see on the bottom of the frame. The little brass plaque. The scrolled ELENA.

He heard Justine move. He heard her say his name, and he felt her press the knife into his hand. It was a sturdy vegetable knife. She’d taken it from the drawer in the kitchen of their house. She’d said get it out of my life, get her out of my life, you’ll do it tonight and I’ll be there to make sure.

He made the first cut in a blaze that mixed both anger and despair. He heard Sarah cry No! Tony! and felt her fingers on his fist and saw the red of her blood when the knife slid across the back of her knuckles to carve a pathway through the canvas again. And then the third cut, but by that time, she had backed away with her bleeding hand held like a child against her, not crying because she wouldn’t do that, not in front of him, not in front of his wife.

That’s enough, Justine said. She turned and left.

He followed her out. He hadn’t said a single word.

She had talked one night in class about the risk and the reward of making art personal, of offering little here-and-there bits of one’s essence to a public who might misunderstand, ridicule, or reject. Although he had listened dutifully to her words, he had not understood the meaning behind them until he had seen her face when he destroyed the painting. It wasn’t a reaction to the weeks and months of effort it had taken her to complete it for him, nor was it a response to his mutilation of a gift. It was simply that three times he had driven the knife through what had represented to Sarah the most singular manner in which she could show him compassion and love.

This was, perhaps, the greatest of his sins. To have prompted the gift. To have ripped it to pieces.

He took his watercolours-those terribly safe apricots and poppies-from the wall above the sofa. They left two darker spots on the wall-paper, but that couldn’t be helped. No doubt Justine would find something suitable to replace them.

She said, “What are you doing? Anthony, answer me.” She sounded frightened.

“Finishing things,” he said.

He carried the paintings out into the hall and balanced one carefully, thoughtfully, on the tips of his fi ngers. You can copy, she said, but can you create?

The last four days had given him the answer that two full years with her had failed to provide. Some people create. Others destroy.

He smashed the painting against the newel post at the foot of the stairway. Glass shattered and fell onto the parquet floor like crystal rain.

“Anthony!” Justine grasped his arm. “Don’t! Those are your paintings. They’re your art. Don’t!”

He smashed the second with even greater force. He felt the pain of connecting with the wooden post shoot like a cannonball through his arm. Glass flew up at his face.

“I have no art,” he said.

Despite the cold, Barbara took her cup of coffee out into the ruined rear garden of her house in Acton and sat down on the cold block of concrete that served as the back step. She pulled her coat more closely round her and balanced the coffee cup on the top of one knee. It was not black dark outside-it never could be when one was surrounded by several million people and a teeming metropolis-but the heavy night shadows still made the garden a less familiar place than was the inside of the house, and thus a place less weighted down by the conflict that sprang from the opposing forces of guilt-ridden memory and simple necessity.

What kind of bond truly exists between a parent and child, she wondered. And at what point does it finally become necessary to break or perhaps redefine that bond? And in either case, is breaking or redefining even possible?

During the last ten years of her life, she had grown to believe that she would never have children. At first, the realisation was a source of pain to her, inextricably connected as it was to the knowledge that she would probably never marry. She knew quite well that marriage was not a prerequisite for parenthood. Single-parent adoptions happened more and more, and with her career finally off the ground, she would be a serious contender in the pool of prospective single parents seeking a child. Should she volunteer for a hard-to-place child, her success would be virtually guaranteed. But, perhaps too conventionally, she had always seen parenthood as a joint venture between two partners. And as the likelihood of a partner in her life grew more remote every year, the distant possibility of becoming a mother grew more hazy-edged, more like a fantasy ungrounded even slightly in the reality of her circumstances.

It wasn’t something she thought of very often. Most of the time she was simply too busy to dwell upon a future that felt like ice. But while most people, getting older, experienced the growth of family and the increase in connection brought about by the ties of marriage and children, her own family was steadily diminishing now, and her own connections were being severed one by one. Her brother, her father, both dead and buried. And now she faced the prospect of cutting the fi nal tie with her mother as well.

In the end, life is all about seeking reassurance, she thought, we’re all engaged in looking for some kind of sign that will tell us we’re not really alone. We want a bond, an anchor that will hold us fast to a landmass of belonging somewhere, of being close to someone, of having something more than the clothes on our backs or the houses we live in or the cars that we drive. And in the end we can only gain that reassurance through people. No matter how we fill our lives with the trappings of a carefree independence, we still want the bond. Because a vital connection with another human being always carries the potential to act as a viable approbation of the self. If I am loved, I am worthy. If I am needed, I am worthy. If I maintain this relationship in the face of all difficulties, I am somehow whole.

What, indeed, was the real difference between Anthony Weaver and herself? Wasn’t her behaviour-like his-governed inherently by an anxiety that the world might withdraw its approval of her? Didn’t her behaviour-like his-mask a desperation which rose from the same insidious source, guilt?

“Mum had a fine day today, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson had said. “She started out a bit rough round the edges, though. At fi rst, she wouldn’t mind me at all and she kept calling me Doris. Then she wouldn’t eat her teacakes. And she wouldn’t have her soup. When the postman came, she thought it was your dad and she wouldn’t let me hear the end of wanting to be off with him. To Majorca, she said. Jimmy promised me Majorca, she said. And when I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t Jimmy, she tried to chuck me out the door. But she fi nally settled down.” Her hand fl uttered nervously upwards towards her wig like an indecisive bird and she touched her fi ngers to the stiff, grey curls. “She hasn’t wanted to go to the loo, though. I can’t think why. But the telly’s on for her. And she’s been as good as gold for the last three hours.”

Barbara found her in the sitting room, in her husband’s tattered easy chair, lolling back into the greasy indentation which his head had made over the years. The television was roaring at a volume that accommodated Mrs. Gustafson’s failing hearing. It was Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The film that had that line about whistling. Barbara had seen it at least a dozen times, and she shut it off just as Bacall made her fi nal shimmy across the room in Bogart’s direction. Barbara had always liked that moment best. She’d always liked its veiled promise of the future.

“Now she’s all right, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson said anxiously from the doorway. “You can see she’s all right.”

Mrs. Havers was slumped to one side in the chair. Her mouth was slack. Her hands played with the hem of her dress which she’d drawn up to the height of her thighs. The air surrounding her was foetid with the odour of excrement and urine.

“Mum?” Barbara said.

She didn’t respond although she hummed four notes as if with the intention of beginning a song.

“See how quiet and nice she can get?” Mrs. Gustafson said. “She can be a real jewel, can your mum, when she wants.”

On the floor just inches from her mother’s feet, the hose of the vacuum cleaner was curled into a coil.

“What’s that doing here?” Barbara asked.

“Now, Barbie, it does help keep her-”

Barbara felt something inside her give way, like a dam that crumbles when it cannot contain the pressure-build of standing water any longer. “Didn’t you even notice that she’d messed herself?” she said to Mrs. Gustafson. She found it a miracle that her voice sounded so calm.

Mrs. Gustafson blanched. “Messed? Why, Barbie, you must be mistaken. I asked her twice. She didn’t want the loo.”

“Can’t you smell her? Haven’t you checked her? Have you left her alone?”

Mrs. Gustafson’s lips quivered with a hesitant smile. “I can see you’re feeling a bit put out, Barbie. But if you’ve spent some time with her-”

“I’ve spent years with her. I’ve spent my whole life with her.”

“I only meant to say-”

“Thank you, Mrs. Gustafson. You won’t be needed again.”

“Why, I-” Mrs. Gustafson clutched at the front of her dress, approximately in the location of her heart. “After all I’ve done.”

“That’s right,” Barbara said.

Now, she stirred restlessly on the back step, feeling the cold seeping through her trousers, trying to force from her mind the image of her mother as flaccid as a rag doll in that chair, reduced to inertia. Barbara had bathed her, feeling struck to sadness at the sight and the feeling of her withered flesh. She led her to bed, tucked in the covers, and turned out the light. Through it all, her mother did not say a word. She was like the living dead.

Sometimes the right thing to do is also the most obvious thing to do, Lynley had said. There was truth in that. She had known from the first what had to be done, what was right, what was best, what would serve her mother. It was in the fear of being judged as a callous and indifferent child-by what she knew was largely a callous and indifferent world-that Barbara had floundered, waiting for direction, instruction, or permission that wasn’t going to come. The decision rested with her, as it always had. What she hadn’t realised was that judgement rested with her as well.

She pushed herself off the step and went into the kitchen. The smell of mouldy cheese was in the air. There were dishes to be washed and a floor to be scrubbed and a dozen distractions to allow her to avoid the inevitable for at least another hour. But she’d been avoiding it since her father’s death in March. She couldn’t do so forever. She went to the phone.

Odd to think that she’d memorised the number. She must have known from the fi rst that she’d be using it again.

The phone rang four times on the other end. A pleasant voice said, “Mrs. Flo here. Hawthorn Lodge.”

Barbara spoke on a sigh. “This is Barbara Havers. I wonder if you remember meeting my mother Monday night?”