The Other Half Lives

19

‘Did you ever lie to please Aidan?’ Mary asks.

‘No. I don’t think so.’ I’ve only ever lied to protect myself, and Aidan.

‘Martha did. If she’d stayed true to herself-told the truth about herself-she and Aidan wouldn’t have formed their little bond against the others and gone off on their own. They wouldn’t have gone to bed together-Martha might still have pulled back from the brink. It was the night they spent together that took her love for Aidan and the despair that went with it to a deeper level.’

‘What happened?’ I ask.

‘The Five Future Failures went for a drink after The Times interview. They started talking about it again-the life versus work thing. Ended up having a blazing row. They all drank too much, and the friendly banter turned nasty. Aidan was the butt of everyone’s jokes. What he’d said about living only for his work had sounded pompous even to Martha. If there’s one thing Aidan hates more than anything, it’s having people laugh at him. You’ve heard of Doohan Champion?’

‘I’ve heard the name. Isn’t he famous?’

‘Very.’

‘You said “The Five Future Failures”.’

‘Everyone fails eventually,’ says Mary briskly. ‘It takes some people longer than others, that’s all. Doohan called Aidan a self-important wanker. Martha defended him. She told them they were a bunch of shallow losers-if Aidan was pompous, so was she, she said. She agreed with him, after all, or rather she pretended she did. By attacking Aidan’s detractors, she finally fulfilled her only ambition: impressing him. They went off on their own, ripped the others’ personalities and creative achievements, such as they were, to shreds over a curry in Soho, and ended up back at the hotel The Times had booked for them-in Aidan’s room.’

‘Do you know what the hotel was called?’

‘The Conrad.’ Mary gives me an odd look. ‘In Chelsea Harbour. ’

Not the Drummond.

‘They had sex, according to the technical definition of the phrase.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Penetration occurred, but that was about it. Aidan couldn’t hack it.’

‘Martha told you?’

‘Later, after he’d packed her in, she started to tell everyone, even her parents, because she didn’t understand. She had to understand everything, Martha. The world had to make sense, or she couldn’t cope. At the time she hadn’t minded the sex being bad because of what had gone with it. Aidan had told her he loved her, that he had ever since the day of the interview at Trinity.’

Mary jumps down from the windowsill where she’s been sitting and starts to pace restlessly. There’s excitement in her voice, as if this is the part she’s been looking forward to. ‘He told her exactly what she wanted to hear: that he’d known she was special, that he’d repelled her advances only because he was frightened of the strength of his feelings for her. He talked about the future, said he never wanted them to be apart again. He had to leave the hotel early the next morning to go to the National Portrait Gallery, where he was artist in residence. When he kissed her goodbye, he said, “I’ll be in touch. Almost immediately.”’ Mary laughs. ‘Martha was a writer. Words mattered to her. If she was certain that was what he said, then that was what he said.’

‘He didn’t get in touch.’ My question comes out as a statement of fact. The story, though new to me, is eerily familiar. Aidan did the same thing to me: told me he loved me, proposed marriage, held me all night in our room at the Drummond Hotel, then became remote and distant immediately afterwards, withdrawing more with each day that passed. Even as he moved his things into my house, he was removing himself from my life.

‘He didn’t get in touch at first,’ says Mary. ‘Martha wrote to him and phoned him-nothing. No response. Finally, when she couldn’t think of anything else to do, she waited outside the National Portrait Gallery for him. Every day for a week, but he didn’t appear. She went in and asked about him, and they told her his residency had finished the week before. He’d moved too, and not given her his new address. That’s when she started to tell the whole story to anyone who’d listen-waiters, barmen, taxi-drivers. She was a total embarrassment, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know how it could happen: how can a man say he’ll love you for ever one minute, then disappear the next?’

The smoke in the room is starting to get to me, even though the window’s open and Mary finished the last of her cigarettes a while ago. I offer what seems to me to be the obvious answer. ‘Men say that sort of thing to get women into bed.’

‘No!’ she snaps. ‘Martha was already in bed with him when he said those things. She’d have done anything he wanted, whether he talked false romantic crap or not, and he knew it. He pretended to be in love with her for the sake of his own pride. Aidan’s a perfectionist. He has to be the best at whatever he does. When he went limp inside Martha and couldn’t do anything to salvage the situation physically, he realised he needed to start talking fast if he wanted to be impressive in any way at all.’ Mary’s eyes are hard, two grey stones. Bitterness underscores her every word. ‘All his passionate whispering about everlasting love was a smokescreen, nothing more. He didn’t mean a word of it. All that mattered to him was that Martha should think it was better with him than with anyone else. And she did. Like I said, Martha was a words person. She didn’t care that the sex hadn’t worked-he’d brought her fantasy to life with what he’d said. That night was the best night of her life, a night she spent with a lying, impotent-’

‘Stop!’ I can’t stand to hear any more. ‘Where did it happen? Where did she hang herself? Here?’ I try not to think about how calm I felt when I first crossed Garstead Cottage’s threshold-as if I was arriving somewhere that had always been my destination. Somewhere I belong.

‘Downstairs,’ says Mary. ‘I’ll show you. Come on.’

‘No! Is that why you’ve brought me here? I don’t want to see it!’

‘What do you think I’ve got down there, Martha’s dead body? It’s nothing like that. It’s an exhibition, that’s all. You like art, don’t you?’ Before I have a chance to respond, she says in a sing-song voice that chills me, ‘Aidan had an exhibition. He sent Martha an invitation.’

‘You mean… before they spent the night together?’ If I keep her talking, I won’t have to look at whatever it is she wants to show me.

‘After. A couple of weeks after, when Martha was struggling to come to terms with his failure to get in touch “almost immediately”, as promised. She was getting ready to give up on him all over again, and then an invitation to his private view arrived via her publisher. No note with it, nothing personal, just the gallery’s printed card. The stupid cow got her hopes up all over again. She was so sick of feeling miserable, she’d have latched on to anything.’

‘Did she go?’

‘What do you think? Her mother went with her, allegedly for moral support, though the secret plan was to put the Wyers financial muscle behind Aidan, make him do the right thing, as she saw it-make her daughter happy.’

‘You mean bribe him?’

‘Basically. In as subtle a way as possible.’ Seeing my shock, Mary smirks. ‘Villiers families do it all the time-a crate of champagne to the head to secure a good reference, that sort of thing. Martha knew exactly what Cecily had in mind, and was desperate enough to turn a blind eye. She wanted Aidan, and she didn’t care how she got him. At the private view, he barely looked in her direction. When she cornered him and asked why he’d invited her, he said, “You’re interested in my work, aren’t you? You always seemed to be. I thought you’d want to come.” ’

I find my voice and say, ‘I don’t believe he’d be so insensitive.’ No one would.

‘Yes, you do,’ says Mary. ‘You believe it because it’s true. When Martha got upset, he sneered at her, called her a fake. Said he’d hoped she’d still want to support his work, even though things hadn’t worked out between them personally. That was what he said-“hadn’t worked out”-as if he’d tried his hardest. Martha lost it then, told him she’d been lying when she’d said her work was more important to her than a happy personal life. The others were right about him, she said-he was a self-important wanker. Bit awkward, when some of those others were also there, at the preview. Not as awkward as Cecily, though.’

Mary shakes her head in disgust. ‘Martha had finally realised it was finished-the years-long fantasy died that night. He’d invited her knowing how she felt about him, knowing he didn’t feel the same way, but hoping she’d buy one of his grim paintings all the same. She couldn’t pretend after that. But her mother didn’t know it was game over, so she started to wage her campaign: poured charm all over Aidan, told him she was Martha’s mother, hinted at the size of the family fortune, dithered over which picture to buy and declared herself so unable to decide that she might have to buy more than one. Martha took her to one side and begged her not to buy anything, but Cecily wouldn’t have it. She did agree to buy one picture, not two-she made that concession, but she didn’t take Martha seriously when she said she wanted Aidan’s show to be a failure. Martha often said things she didn’t mean in the heat of the moment, and Cecily was used to her breaking down in tears immediately afterwards and taking it all back. She didn’t see that this time was different.’ Mary lapses into a brooding silence.

‘Different because Martha had finally given up on him?’ I say tentatively, knowing I will never give up on Aidan, though he might have given up on me a long time ago. I love him, no matter what he’s done.

‘Different because she hated him,’ says Mary crossly, as if I’m lagging behind. ‘She decided to destroy herself, and him, with one gesture: her suicide. Martha was a fan of the grand gesture. She invited Aidan here on the pretext of wanting to commission a picture from him. He said no at first-he worked from inspiration, didn’t do commissions, all the predictable shit she knew he’d come out with. She put a stop to it by promising him fifty grand. The noble artist was willing to take a bribe, it turned out, as long as the bribe was big enough. Martha sent him a cheque for fifty grand the next day, along with directions to this place-her little writing hideaway.’

I can’t disguise my shock. ‘Fifty grand? She had access to that kind of money?’

‘You haven’t got a clue, have you? For people like me and Martha-for your average Villiers girl-fifty grand isn’t “that kind of money”. It’s about the equivalent of what, I don’t know, maybe five hundred pounds would be to you.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound quite as patronising as it did.’

‘I can guess the rest,’ I say, wanting it to be over. ‘He came here, and she hanged herself in front of him.’

‘She had it all set up. She was standing on a table. She’d left the cottage’s front door open, put music on…’

‘ “Survivor,” ’ I murmur.

‘Right. So that he’d know she was in, so that he’d walk in and look for her. He found her in the dining room, on the table with a rope round her neck, attached to the light fitting. He didn’t say anything when he saw her like that, and she said only one thing to him: “You can keep the fifty grand. I won’t be needing it.” And then she jumped.’ Both of us shift suddenly as Mary says the last word, conscious of how it would feel to fall through the air, your fall broken only by a sharp jerk that snaps your neck.

‘Why were you there?’ I ask, trying to banish the creeping hollow sensation Mary’s story has left me with.

‘Martha and I were inseparable,’ she says, her eyes and voice flat.

‘Until she met Aidan?’

‘Even after that.’

‘So…’ I struggle to pin down what’s niggling at me. Was Mary in the room when Martha put the rope round her neck? Did she egg her on? Did she stand by and watch, saying nothing. Aidan and Mary, the two people closest to Martha, both artists. ‘Did Aidan know you were a painter too?’ I ask.

‘I wasn’t. Before Martha died, I’d never painted anything in my life, apart from the bowls of fruit people put in front of me at school.’

Impossible, I want to say. ‘But…’ You’re too good for that to be true.

‘It’s true,’ says Mary. She kneels down in front of the dressing table mirror, lifts her chin and strokes her neck. ‘Aidan was the one who made me start painting. We… both of us were there, when she died. Neither of us saved her. Afterwards, we were both complete wrecks. We only had each other to talk to about what had happened. No one else would have understood. Aidan told me painting was what he’d always done to get rid of his pain. He didn’t say “pain”. He called it “all the shit that’s in my head”. There was shit in my head too, plenty of it, so I took his advice. He helped me, told me I was good, properly good. He said I was better than him.’

She breaks off. ‘There’s no excuse for the way I… forgave him everything he’d done to her. He told me what it had been like for him, and it sounded so different. Not at all like what Martha had told me. Even knowing how he’d treated her… As I said, there’s no excuse.’

‘Did you and Aidan…’

Mary snorts. ‘We became friends, nothing more. Or rather, I thought we were.’ She turns her head the other way, stares at her lined face, reflected. ‘So, now you see how selfish I am. I don’t hate Aidan for what he did to Martha. I like to tell myself I do, because it makes me feel better about myself, but it’s not true. I hate him for what he did to me.’

I haven’t got it in me to ask.

Mary rises to her feet. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I’ll show you.’

I follow her out of the bedroom. It’s less smoky on the landing, though some of the smell has drifted out. We go down the steep staircase into the large kitchen, through an open-plan lounge-cum-study with a beamed ceiling. This leads through to a narrow hall, at one end of which is a closed door. Mary reaches up for the key that’s balanced on top of the door frame. ‘I keep it locked,’ she says. ‘What’s inside is precious to me. No one’s seen it apart from Cecily, Aidan and the police.’

‘The police?’

‘The various unlucky members of the Farnham constabulary who come round periodically, when I get paranoid, to check Aidan isn’t hiding in the house with an axe. Except the one last night, he didn’t ask to look inside. They’re so sick of me by now, they don’t check properly any more.’

She unlocks the door and pulls it open, standing aside so that I can see. The stench of paint fumes from the room is almost unbearable. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at. An enormous pile of something: rubbish. As if a skip full of some kind of debris has been emptied onto the floor. The mess looks fluffy in parts, like feathers from many different birds, none of them matching, but I can also see wood, cloth, every colour I can imagine, and pieces of… is it canvas?

Abberton. Inside the outline of a person, this is what Mary stuck on to the picture: rags and rubble from this pile.

I see, all at once, dozens of tiny fragments: a painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky, a patch of something flesh-coloured. A small chair, no more than a few centimetres high and wide, torn in half. ‘Pictures,’ I breathe. ‘These were paintings, canvases. And frames, sawn into pieces. How many…?’

The mound is nearly as high as I am. Over it, someone has splashed several tins of paint, maybe even dozens, so that it looks as if it’s been wrapped in multi-coloured string. Hard, dried pools of paint cover the floor. As if someone stood next to the pile with a tin of paint and poured it in, so that it dripped all the way through and seeped out at the bottom. The same colours have been splashed randomly over the cream and gold wallpaper, over the three large framed botanical prints on the walls: yellow, blue, red, white, green, black. At the back of the room there’s a dining table, which has been pushed up against the large sash window, with more tins of paint on it, as well as a portable telephone lying beside its base, an ashtray, three unopened tins of Heinz ravioli and a rusty tin-opener.

‘Pictures,’ Mary confirms. ‘Frames. And stretchers-the wooden structures you stretch canvas around. I like the way that word sounds medical, makes you think of emergencies. It seems appropriate. If it hadn’t been for an emergency, I’d never have picked up a paintbrush.’

I am transfixed by the size of the mountain of broken wood and shredded canvas, the glimpses I keep getting of landscapes and interiors, people’s faces and clothes: an earlobe, a necklace, a jacket pocket. It’s almost as if some pieces have been cut deliberately larger than the rest, to allow part of something to survive. I narrow my eyes, blur my focus, and it looks like a heap of multi-coloured precious stones. The pile stretches almost all the way across the room, leaving only a small gap on either side.

‘Whose paintings are… were they?’ I ask.

‘Mine,’ says Mary. ‘All mine, now. I got them back.’ She turns to me and smiles. ‘Welcome to my exhibition.’