The Other Half Lives

21

‘Aidan and I used to paint in this room,’ says Mary. ‘Together. For hours at a time, without speaking. After Martha died, I had a key cut for him, for the cottage. He often stayed overnight.’ She turns to me. ‘He slept in the spare room, where you slept last night.’

I make sure to keep my face neutral. There’s something I don’t feel quite right about in this room, but I’m not sure what it is. I stare at the pile of ruined paintings in front of me, barely able to believe it’s real.

‘Do you mind that I didn’t tell you?’ It dawns on me that Mary is talking about Aidan, the spare bed. ‘It’s only a room. I don’t believe rooms retain memories of the past. There’s no such thing as an atmosphere-it’s in people’s minds, like everything of any interest.’

‘You had a key cut for Aidan?’ Suddenly, it seems important to check all the facts. ‘But it’s not your cottage. You don’t own it.’

Mary shrugs this off. ‘So? I’m the one who uses it.’

‘How did Martha’s mother feel about Aidan staying here?’ If I had a daughter who’d hanged herself after being treated badly by a man, I’d want him nowhere near me or any house of mine.

If I’d watched my best friend hang herself, or my lover, or ex-lover, the last thing I’d want is to spend any time at all in the room where it happened.

‘I didn’t tell Cecily,’ says Mary. ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’

‘Why didn’t Martha’s parents give up the cottage after Martha died?’ I ask. ‘Why do they carry on paying the rent so that you can use it-someone who’s not even related to them?’

‘I’m a leftover from Martha’s life.’ Mary smiles. ‘Cecily doesn’t think much of me, but she wants me around even so-a dog-eared souvenir of her precious daughter.’

My eyes return to the mound in front of me. ‘How many paintings did you cut up to make… this?’

‘I didn’t count. Hundreds.’

‘Whose were they?’

‘Mine. I painted them and I owned them. Though for a while I thought I’d sold some of them to other people.’

I wait for her to say more.

‘Aidan used to tell me when my paintings weren’t good enough. He was always right, which made it worse. Eventually, with his help, it happened less and less often. He doesn’t find it easy to give praise, but the criticisms stopped. One day he asked me if I felt ready for my first exhibition. He mentioned a gallery I’d never heard of, said he knew the owner. If I didn’t mind, he said, he’d take my pictures to London for this guy to look at.’ Mary barks out a laugh. ‘Of course I didn’t mind. I was thrilled. Aidan took the pictures-eighteen of them, there were. Came back the next day with the best news-the gallery wanted me. They wanted to give me a show.’

I watch the happiness and excitement drain from her face as she remembers what happened next. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t ask to go to London with Aidan, see the gallery for myself-I did none of that, asked for nothing. Aidan kept saying, “Leave it to me,” and I did. When I asked him when the private view would be, he told me there wasn’t going to be one. This gallery never did them, he said. Now I know there’s no such thing as an art gallery that doesn’t do previews-they’re crucial for sales, and publicity. At the time, though, I was new to the art world. Aidan was the experienced one, the one who’d had a sell-out exhibition and residencies at Trinity College, Cambridge and the National Portrait Gallery. I believed what he told me. I said I wanted to meet the gallery owner who’d liked my work, but Aidan advised against it. “They hate it when artists hang around,” he told me. “Better to stay away, use me as a middle-man to communicate any messages.” He said the gallery owner was intrigued by the idea of me, and we needed to keep it that way by making sure I kept my distance. Like a fool, I fell for it.

‘He brought me back an exhibition catalogue. Nothing fancy, just a few sheets of paper folded in the middle and stapled. But it had the titles of my paintings, the dates of the exhibition, some biographical notes about me. I was so proud of it.’ Mary blinks away tears. ‘Aidan went back and forth to London-or I thought he did-to check on how things were going. Well; it was going well, that was what he said whenever he came back. He seemed genuinely pleased for me. My pictures were selling-I couldn’t believe it. One day Aidan came back and told me they were all sold. He even…’ Her face screws up in agony. ‘He had a sales list, so that I could see who’d bought what. There were nine names on it. I don’t need to tell you what they were.’

I have no idea what she’s talking about. How could I know who had bought her paintings?

‘The first was Abberton,’ she says softly. ‘Don’t say the others, please. I can’t bear to hear them.’

A shiver runs the length of my back.

‘Aidan took me out for dinner that night, to celebrate the sell-out. That’s when I betrayed Martha.’

‘You spent the night with Aidan.’ I’d prefer to say it myself rather than have her tell me.

‘No.’ Her face sets in a mask of displeasure. ‘Aidan and I have never had sex. Martha slept with him, and I knew what a failure that had been.’

‘How did you betray Martha?’ I ask.

‘I told Aidan that if I had to choose between a happy, fulfilling personal life and my work, I’d choose the work. My painting. He smiled at me when I said it, and we both knew what it meant: that we were the ones, that Martha had never been like us. We’d discussed it, you see-Aidan told me Martha had admitted to having lied to the journalist who interviewed them.’ Mary squints at me. ‘Did I tell you about that?’

I nod.

‘She pretended she’d choose her writing, when really she’d have given it up like a shot if she could have kept Aidan. He despised her for lying. He despised her shallow attitude to her work-he didn’t want to be with someone like that. Martha didn’t deserve Aidan, she never did.’ Mary presses her hand against her mouth.

‘Tell me about the exhibition,’ I say. Eighteen paintings. Eighteen empty frames on Aidan’s walls. But I don’t know there are eighteen of them. I never counted.

‘The day after our celebratory dinner, once I came back down to earth, I started to ask questions: when would I get the money? Was the gallery empty now, if my paintings had all sold? Aidan teased me for my ignorance, explained that the show stays up until the end of the final day, as planned. Buyers collect after take-down and that’s when they pay. He’d made me inflate the prices in order to be left with a decent whack once the gallery had taken its commission. He joked about taking commission himself, since he was the one who set it up. I never stopped to wonder why he’d want to help me to that extent. He was spending more time on me and my exhibition than he was on his own paintings. If I’d thought about it, I’d probably have decided it was down to my talent, which had overwhelmed him.’

I hear the self-hatred that underlies the casual sarcasm.

‘I knew how good I was. I could see it. Aidan was an artist-artists should care about art more than anything. I believed he did. Until I found myself in London one day visiting a friend, and decided to disobey his orders.’

‘You went to the gallery?’

‘I couldn’t resist.’ Mary turns on me. ‘Would you have been able to? I thought it couldn’t do any harm, as long as I didn’t go in. I was going to look in the window, nothing more, just to catch a glimpse of my work in that strange, exciting setting-a real gallery. I wanted to see the red sold stickers on the labels…’ Her words peter out. A solid, paralysing silence descends on the room, one I’m afraid to break.

‘Mary? What did you see?’

She doesn’t answer. I ask again.

‘He should never have told me the name of the gallery. Or he should have made one up-how hard is it to make up a name? He’s got no imagination. That’s why I’m a better artist than he ever was. Artists need imagination. Connaughton.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The gallery. Connaughton Contemporary. My pictures weren’t there. The man there had never heard of me. I rang Aidan, and when I told him what had happened, what I’d seen-not seen, rather-he told me to come back to the cottage. His voice sounded so… unwelcoming, so flat, nothing like the person I thought I knew. It was as if he’d been possessed by some remote, horrible stranger, and the old Aidan had been wiped out. That’s when I remembered that the old Aidan had driven Martha to suicide. I’d allowed myself to ignore what I knew about him in my desperation to latch on to someone after Martha’s death. We’d experienced the horror of it together-for a while, that was all that mattered.’

I shut my eyes and think about London, when Aidan’s behaviour towards me changed. Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies. He’d written that in a card to Martha Wyers, after she sent him a copy of her published novel. Did he set Mary up for a fall because he was jealous of her talent as a painter? I wish he was telling me the story instead of Mary, to help me understand why he did what he did.

‘I came back here,’ she says quietly. ‘The door was open. I called his name-nothing. So I started looking. I found him in here. On the floor next to him was a pile-like that one, except smaller. I had no idea what it was. It just looked like a mess, although I could see little familiar things, colours and shapes I recognised, but I didn’t grasp the truth until Aidan told me straight out.’

She starts to walk slowly around the mound of detritus. ‘He was so proud of his plan to destroy me-he described it as “genius”. There was no exhibition, never had been. No one in London had seen my work. Aidan took my paintings-I let him take them-and he destroyed them one by one. Thanks to my trip to London and my lack of self-control, I found out early. He’d been planning this…’ She kicks the heap and lets out a low groan that startles me, as if the pain inside her has a voice of its own, deeper and more raw than hers. ‘Planning my surprise for the end of the exhibition, when I’d have been expecting a cheque from the gallery.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, understanding at last why she doesn’t sell her work, why she keeps it all in her home and entrusts it to no one.

‘I stood where you’re standing now, sobbing, begging him to tell me why. He said he had another surprise for me. It was an exhibition sales list-not the one he’d given me already, the one he’d faked, but a real one, from his exhibition at TiqTaq. The names, Abberton and co? They were Aidan’s buyers. Not mine, never mine. All the people I’d imagined loved my work-all along it was Aidan’s work they loved.’

‘The paintings,’ I say, more to myself than to Mary. ‘Outlines of people with no faces-because they weren’t real.’ That’s how Aidan knew, how he could predict the series, what Mary would call the eight paintings that followed Abberton.

‘The ones who bought Aidan’s paintings were real enough, I suppose,’ she says, off-hand.

‘Why? Why would he do something like that?’

‘He never told me. That was almost the worst thing. He bragged about what he’d done to me, but he wouldn’t explain. As always, he avoided talking about his reasons or his feelings, apart from to say he’d been pleased when we went out for dinner and I said what I did about choosing my work over a happy personal life. It sounds so pompous-I’d barely been painting for a year, at that point-but already it was my life’s work. It was all I wanted to do. It still is. When I told Aidan that over dinner, he knew he’d picked the perfect way to damage me beyond repair.’

Seeing my confusion, perhaps mistaking it for disbelief, Mary says, ‘Oh, I can give you reasons if you want them. They were clear enough when he threatened me. Before he walked out of this room and out of my life, he put his hands round my throat and squeezed so tight I thought I was going to die. He said, “You’re never going to paint another picture. Understand? And you’re never going to tell anyone what happened when Martha died. If I find out you’ve done either, it’ll be you swinging from the end of a rope next time.” ’ Mary shudders. ‘No one was going to ruin his career, he said. He was going to be a star, and Martha and I couldn’t do anything to stop that happening.’

‘But… Martha committed suicide,’ I say numbly.

‘He could have saved her,’ says Mary. ‘By the time he tried, after he’d phoned the ambulance, it was too late. He couldn’t risk that becoming public knowledge. Think of it. What a thing to be known for-an act of cowardice that caused the death of a promising young writer who had her whole life ahead of her.’

‘But you hadn’t said anything so far, and if he hadn’t destroyed your pictures, you’d have had no reason to…’

‘He hated me anyway, long before Martha died. He’d never forgiven me for the letters I sent him when he was at Trinity, messing Martha around. I could see through him, all the way through. I knew he was scared and damaged, too gutless to deal with his problems, preferring to make other people suffer instead. I can prove how much he hated me. Look.’ Mary runs from the room. I follow her up the stairs to her bedroom. It’s covered in discarded clothes, with no visible floor-space, and stinks of cigarettes. Every drawer in the scratched mahogany chest gapes open. Mary pulls something out of the bottom one. ‘This is the sales list from Aidan’s exhibition.’

It’s handwritten but clearly legible.

‘Look at the title of the last painting on the list.’

‘The Murder of Mary Trelease,’ I read. ‘He called one of his pictures that?’

‘That was the first threat. He took great pleasure in telling me the painting didn’t even have me in it, or a murder. He said he liked titles that kept people guessing. Now does it make a bit more sense to you-him confessing to the police that he killed me? It’s part of a game he started years ago.’

Her question barely registers. My eyes have fixed on a name I wasn’t expecting to see: Saul Hansard. Saul bought one of Aidan’s paintings. Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow-they’re all there too, under the heading ‘Buyers’. Cecily Wyers also bought one of Aidan’s paintings, as did someone called Kerry Gatti (Mr).

‘You understand why Aidan wants to kill me,’ says Mary in a lifeless voice. ‘I didn’t stop painting. He did. He can’t allow that to go unpunished.’ She starts to cry. ‘I took such care to make sure he never found out. I didn’t exhibit my work, didn’t sell it-I did everything I could to keep my painting a secret, but he still found out. Thanks to you.’ She puts her hand on my arm. ‘I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I know it’s not your fault.’ Her fingernails dig into my skin. ‘For years, after what he did to me, I painted nothing but him. Over and over again, from memory: how his face looked when he told me what he’d done. Each time I finished a picture of him, I destroyed it immediately and added it to the pile. My exhibition, ’ she says sadly. ‘The only one I’ll ever have.’

My heart beats as if someone’s bouncing it against the wall of my chest. I stare at the names and addresses of the people who bought Aidan’s pictures, picture I’ve never seen. If I had them in front of me, would it make anything clearer? Would they take me closer to the person Aidan really is? I try to tell myself they wouldn’t, but it’s useless. The need to see them swells inside me-a physical craving, beyond rationality. It’s obvious where I ought to start: with my friend, Saul Hansard.

I look up, catch Mary’s eye. I don’t even have to ask. She knows. She understands. ‘I’ll call you a cab,’ she says.