The Detective's Daughter

39

Thursday, 20 January 2011

After the Clean Slate people had gone, Sarah Glyde went outside without sufficient warm clothes. She did not think Antony would visit now, yet she hesitated on the brick coping step, her lungs hit by cold air. A thick mist lowered the sky and shrouded the river. The country was complaining about productive hours lost, injuries, traffic jams, car accidents and cancelled trains. As she had told Antony, the white-out afforded an opportunity for meditation. She had cleared a path to the garden wall by smashing up one of the blocks of salt she kept for children’s sculpture classes and sprinkling it on the bricked surface but had left snow on the path to her studio so she would know if Antony had been there. With enough work she could sit tight and share in the joyful spirit of those adults who had taken to the hills on tea trays and – willing huskies – dragged their offspring on toboggans through streets to stock up on provisions. These people had souls; Sarah was not alone.

She had willed him to come to her and tonight he had; the strength of her powers scared her. He was called Jack Harmon and would come to her house every week. She would not tell Antony; he would spoil it.

She had planned to go out to the studio and continue with Jack Harmon’s head. She felt naughty; her mother would have disapproved and if he appeared Antony would tell her it was too cold, too late, she should take more care. The idea that she was flouting their authority should not have mattered to a woman in her fifties, but old habits die hard and the fact that her behaviour lacked parental sanction added spice to her decision.

She leant on the garden wall and damp crept through her father’s Aran jumper, making her bones ache; she pulled the cuffs over her hands, hugging herself, comforted by the ghost of his smell.

Her mother had been dead ten years, her father longer, but still Sarah’s sense of freedom was tenuous. She jealously guarded her slivers of independence: people came to the studio as models; when the piece was fired, their relationship, such as it was, ended. They paid for their time with her.

Jack was different. Sarah was prepared to pay a high price for him.

With no buildings there were few lights on this stretch of the Thames. The surface of the river was black as oil; slick and treacherous. On the horizon it reflected the kindling lights of Hammersmith Bridge like stars leaping, vanishing and reappearing when chill gusts whipped the water. The whoosh of traffic on the Great West Road was in counterpoint to an irregular tink-tink at the river’s edge of a bottle washing back and forth on the encroaching tide, tipped against a brick jutting out of the mud. The insidious sound was a warning to those who ate, drank and were merry in the cafés, pubs and clubs of London amidst the rigour and tumult of the city, that mortality awaited them as it had their forebears. The metronomic sound pointed up the hubris of human endeavour as mere flotsam and jetsam. The river had flowed when hansom cabs, broughams and horses dragging carts log-jammed the thoroughfares of London. The tide came in. The tide went out.

The man was there again. Sarah’s euphoria ebbed with the tide. He was by the shoreline, negotiating the slippery stones, squelching through mud with the poise of a dancer, behaving as if the terrain was his own. Sarah ripped at the fronds of ivy, their leaves stiff with ice, and the man looked around. She kept still. He continued to the yacht club pontoon.

It was never truly dark in London and she could make out that he was by the shallows, letting water wash around his ankles, unafraid of the river. Sarah imagined the freezing water parting for him as for Canute.

She went into her studio and, leaving the light off, made her way to her work table. She switched on her mother’s standard lamp. The colours of the shade were dulled with clay dust and sunlight. The cloth was draped like a veil over Jack Harmon’s unformed head.

Antony’s visit had cast a pall over her studio, his presence a contamination. She needed to air the place. Jack Harmon would make the house finally hers.

She whipped off the material with a waiter’s flourish and perched on her stool. The light illuminated only her corner of the room; the rest was in shadow. She did not need to see to create his features; she could have worked blindfolded.

The river filled. The relentless pull and draw of the tide hitting slime-hung walls gave a base rhythm as, methodically, mechanically, Sarah Glyde worked on.

The face that gazed back at her in the blue light of dawn was a face she had not seen for thirty years.