The Other Half Lives

7

The Access 2 Art fair at Alexandra Palace in London was the first one I’d ever been to. I didn’t know such things existed until Aidan told me. One of the artists he frames for was going to have a stall there, and sent Aidan two free tickets. Aidan tore open the envelope at work one day-it must have been October or November last year. It’s strange, that’s the one detail I don’t remember. Everything else about the art fair is fixed in my mind as clearly as if someone had filmed what happened from start to finish and implanted the footage in my brain.

I saw Aidan grinning down at something. ‘What?’ I asked.

He passed me the envelope. I opened it, pulled out two stiff rectangular cards and a folded leaflet.

‘Access 2 Art? What’s that?’

He waited for me to read the leaflet, knowing all the relevant information was there. He and I have never been good at answering questions.

‘It says here hundreds of artists will be exhibiting,’ I said.

‘Have you ever been in a maze?’

‘You mean like the one at Hampton Court?’

‘That’ll do,’ said Aidan. ‘Picture Hampton Court maze, except bigger. Instead of hedges, picture endless rows of stalls selling paintings, prints, sculptures, so many that you start to worry about finding your way out once you’ve gone in. You start to walk a little bit faster, unsure if you’ve walked down that aisle ten times already or never before. You look at so many pictures that you lose the ability to see them. You start to feel as if you’ve eaten a bucket-load of sweets, or the visual equivalent. It gets to the point where you don’t think you could stand to see another painting as long as you live…’

‘I’d never feel like that,’ I told him.

‘… but you’ve got no choice. Every corner you turn, there’s more of the same: hundreds of artists and galleries flogging their wares.’

‘Stop it!’ He was teasing me deliberately. ‘You’d better be telling the truth.’ There was a light, fluttery feeling in my stomach. What Aidan had described was my idea of heaven. I was already fantasising about finding something special. I hadn’t felt strongly about anything I’d seen for several months-not since Abberton, which I tried very hard not to think about-but I was used to seeing only nine or ten paintings at a time, twenty at most; no more than a small gallery’s walls could accommodate.

‘I’ve got to go to this,’ I said, clutching the tickets as if someone might take them away from me.

‘It starts on Thursday the thirteenth of December,’ said Aidan. ‘All you have to do is square it with your boss for you to have the day off. Oh, that’s me.’ He pretended to think about it. ‘You can have the day off.’

‘I won’t need to. It says here it’s all weekend. We could go on the Sunday.’ Aidan and I sometimes worked Saturdays if we were busy, which we usually were.

‘No. Take the Thursday off,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to an art fair you need to be there when it opens.’

‘The pictures can’t all sell before we get there,’ I protested. ‘The stuff I like best never sells, anyway. Apart from to me.’

‘That’s not why,’ said Aidan. ‘You’ve got to see the pictures before any of them are sold, or as few as possible. Once red dots start to appear, you look at the work in a different way: the successes and the failures. The popular ones and the rejects.’

‘Let’s go for the whole thing,’ I suggested, bobbing up and down on the balls of my feet, too excited to keep still. ‘Thursday to Sunday. If we’ve got a full four days, we’ll be able to see everything. I won’t have to choose too quickly, or panic that I’ve missed anything.’

Aidan’s face had lost its happy glow. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It might take that long to do it justice, but… Ruth, I can’t go. I can’t close up here, not even for a day. Too many people are relying on me for exhibition deadlines.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and heard my own disappointment thudding dully through the air, like a clumsily thrown ball. I couldn’t imagine going without him. We’d hardly been apart since the day we’d first met in August. ‘Can’t you…?’

‘Oh, sack it,’ he said, changing his mind so quickly that I didn’t understand what he was saying at first. ‘They can wait. They can all wait.’

‘You mean… you’ll come?’

‘I’ll come, but only for Thursday and Friday. I’ll go home Friday evening. Saturday and Sunday I’ll stay up all night if I have to and make up the time I’ve lost.’

I smiled. ‘So they won’t have to wait after all.’ Aidan pretends to have contempt for our artist customers, but I think secretly he admires them. Maybe he even envies them a little. How could he feel no affinity with artists, when his approach to his work is so creative? If he’s framing something for me, he doesn’t use ready-made mouldings. He starts from scratch. The same for himself: all the frames on the walls in his room behind the workshop are hand-made-the ones with nothing inside them. ‘They’re my only works of art,’ he once said. ‘Frame-makers used to be perceived as artists, and frames as works of art, before they were mass-produced. At one time, it was normal for a picture frame to cost more than the picture inside it.’

‘I’ll come back with you on Friday and help,’ I said. ‘Two days will be fine.’

‘We need to start training now, like marathon runners,’ said Aidan. ‘That’s the only way we’ll be able to get round the whole show. Don’t wear high heels or we’ll never make it.’

I laughed. Aidan gave me the look, the one that made my heart twist. I knew he wanted to grab me and kiss me but didn’t dare. I didn’t either. We spent a lot of time looking at each other in those days, as if we were both trapped behind glass. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. I said it back to him. It was what we did instead of touching. To us it seemed normal. I knew that most couples kissed or held hands before declaring love for one another, but I didn’t care. Aidan and I were all that mattered. We were perfect, just right. It was other people who were conducting their relationships the wrong way round.

Aidan turned back to his gold-leafing. ‘Shall we stay in a hotel in London?’ he asked, his voice giving nothing away. I knew what he was asking me. I said yes.

Every day after that, I thought about the art fair. Aidan and I talked about it endlessly. We’d looked on the website at the list of artists who were going to be exhibiting. Some Aidan had already heard of; quite a few had been his customers at one time or another. One or two still were. He wanted to show me some of the individual artists’ websites, but I didn’t want to look at them. I wanted to see everything for the first time on 13 December, the opening day. As the date approached, I started to worry about how I would feel when I didn’t have any of it to look forward to any more-Access 2 Art, our night in the hotel. I couldn’t bear to think that the two things I was awaiting so avidly would soon be in the past.

On the Thursday morning, we got up at 4 a.m., packed our overnight things in my black hold-all, drove to Rawndesley and caught the six o’clock train to London in order to be there in good time for the fair’s opening. We ate cooked breakfasts in a bar at King’s Cross station that was full of groups of loud men gulping down pints of lager and burping. ‘I can’t believe they can do that first thing in the morning,’ I said to Aidan, which prompted him to order a bottle of champagne.

‘There’s drinking and then there’s drinking,’ he said. ‘This is the first time we’ve been away together-we should celebrate.’

‘And it’s the art fair,’ I reminded him.

His smile vanished.

‘Aidan?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Nothing,’ he repeated. It sounded more convincing the second time he said it. ‘If you want to spend two days looking at art then so do I. I hate the thought that I’m getting behind with work, that’s all.’

‘We’ll work late Saturday and Sunday,’ I promised. ‘We’ll catch up. There isn’t that much to do.’ I wanted to erase the troubled expression from his face. ‘You’ve got to train yourself to be your own best friend,’ I said. I’d been reading a book called Be Your Own Life Coach, and this was one of its recommendations. ‘Would you tell your best friend to spend every waking second working, or would you think he deserved to relax and treat himself occasionally?’

This made Aidan smile. ‘I’d tell him to start reading proper books instead of the personal growth crap he seems to be addicted to,’ he teased me. ‘There’s better ways to help yourself than sitting around all day examining your own psyche, and working hard’s one of them-that’s what I’d say to him.’ I elbowed him in the ribs. I didn’t mind him teasing me. I loved the fact that we could disagree and it didn’t matter.

We got to Alexandra Palace ten minutes before the art fair opened. We were the only people there, waiting. ‘Like fanatics,’ Aidan said. I told him I was proud to be one. We were tipsy, sleepy, heavy and full from the bacon, eggs and black pudding we’d eaten, but I knew I’d shake off my physical lethargy as soon as the doors opened-I’d be off like a racehorse.

In the large foyer, two women sat behind a table, selling tickets and programmes. I was about to dart through the double doors into the main hall, but Aidan pulled me back. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ He bought a programme, turned to the back and spread it open so that I could see it. ‘This is the only way you can appreciate the scale of what we’re about to walk into,’ he said. On the inside of the back cover, there was a map of the fair, a double-page spread that folded out. The stalls were depicted as small white squares, with black numbers inside them. There were four hundred and sixty-eight in total, filling two large interconnecting halls. On the floor plan’s reverse side was a list of all the numbers with a name next to each one-the artist or gallery whose stall it was. ‘Aidan!’ I said, clutching his arm. ‘Jane Fielder’s here-stall 171.’ I couldn’t believe I’d missed her name when Aidan and I had looked at the list of exhibitors.

‘Who?’

‘You know-Something Wicked. The red thumbprints, the first painting I ever bought.’

‘Your favourite artist.’ He pretended to be worried. ‘There won’t be much left for sale on her stall once you’ve done your worst. I’d better hire a lorry, and get myself an early morning job cleaning offices.’

‘Do you think she’ll be here herself?’

‘Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Right, where do you want to start?’

‘Jane Fielder,’ I said without hesitation. At first we followed the plan, but stall 171 was on the far side of the second hall, and I found it impossible to walk down the aisles without looking. I got sidetracked, then sidetracked again. Most of the stalls, if they belonged to individuals rather than galleries, were manned by the artists themselves and they all seemed eager to talk to me, happy to answer my questions about their work. By lunchtime we were still nowhere near stall 171, and I was losing track of the list I’d been keeping in my head of possibles: the pictures I thought I might be interested in buying but needed to see again. ‘I need to write down the numbers of the stalls I want to come back to,’ I told Aidan. ‘Can we find the entrance we came in at and start again, retrace our steps?’

Aidan laughed. ‘I told you it was a maze. We can do whatever you want, but…’

‘What?’

‘Why don’t we just have a wander? There’ll be plenty of time for writing lists tomorrow.’ Seeing my impatience with this attitude, he said, ‘I know you’ve seen a lot of stuff you want to look at again, and met some people you like, but I don’t think you’ve seen it yet.’

‘Seen what?’

‘It. The picture you’d do anything to get your hands on, the one you’d pay double the price for in order to be able to take it home.’

We spent the rest of the day browsing, talking to artists. Or rather, I talked. Aidan hung back, listening, happy to leave me to it. Between stall-stops, he warned me against being too effusive. ‘You’re getting the artists’ hopes up,’ he said.

‘But I like their work,’ I told him. ‘Why shouldn’t I be enthusiastic? Surely they’re happy to be praised, even by people who don’t end up buying their pictures.’

Aidan shook his head. ‘Praise minus sales equals lies. That’s the equation in these people’s heads. Until you put your money where your mouth is, they won’t believe you however much you say you love their stuff.’

After lunch-a quick sandwich in the foyer café-I came to a stall that had me mesmerised. The artist was a woman called Gloria Stetbay, who looked scarily elegant. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her; she was surrounded by a tight circle of people who didn’t seem keen to make room for one more. Stetbay’s work was mostly abstract, and made me realise that many of the other abstracts I’d seen were far from being the real thing. Stetbay’s pictures looked like multi-coloured sand dunes, ruched and textured; I could have been looking at the skins of strange, glowing planets. She did things with colour and surfaces that made everything I’d seen up to that point look anaemic.

Aidan waved a flyer in front of my face. ‘You’re in good company,’ he said. ‘She’s got work in Charles Saatchi’s private collection.’ I didn’t give a monkey’s about Charles Saatchi. ‘Is this it?’ Aidan asked. ‘Have we found it?’

‘I can’t. The cheapest one’s two thousand pounds and it isn’t my favourite. I won’t tell you how much that is.’

‘I’ll buy you whatever you want,’ he said, surprised I didn’t know this without having to be told. ‘Which is your favourite?’

‘No. It’s too much.’

‘Nothing’s too much if it’s for you,’ he said solemnly. We were still standing inside Gloria Stetbay’s stall. Two American women next to us were talking about another art fair they’d been to that was much better attended on the first day. ‘London isn’t what it used to be,’ one said. ‘Even Frieze is starting to look like it’s trying too hard. And what is it with razor blades? Suddenly everyone’s covering their canvases with razor blades-is that supposed to be edgy?’

‘I didn’t know what it was like to have good feelings in me until I met you,’ Aidan said, not caring who heard. ‘I love the way you love art. I love the way you want to buy it, and keep buying it, not because of any bullshit about investment or profit or status but as a kind of good luck charm. You love it and you want it close to you, to ward off harm. It’s like magic for you, isn’t it?’

I nodded. I’d never expressed it in that way to myself, but he was right.

‘That’s what you are for me,’ he said. ‘I was planning to wait until later to ask you, but I can’t. Will you marry me?’ I didn’t do what women are supposed to do, didn’t remain cool and elegant as I told him I’d think about it. I screamed and waved my arms in the air like an idiot. ‘Is that a yes?’ he asked, as if there could be any doubt. There was none-not in my mind, at any rate. Aidan looked worried, though. ‘Sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow before saying yes?’ he asked. I knew what he meant: we’d come to London to have sex for the first time, among other things. This wasn’t the first clue I’d had that he was nervous about it.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nothing could change my mind.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he told me, looking even more anxious.

He bought me the Gloria Stetbay piece I loved instead of an engagement ring. We never did get to Jane Fielder’s stall; instead, we wandered happily and aimlessly, arguing about the art we saw-what had substance and what was empty. When I remember that day-which I do, often-it appears in my mind separately from what happened next, as if one world closed down at some point on Thursday 13 December, and a new one opened up, a horrible, frightening one that I wanted no part of.

I know the exact moment it happened: ten thirty at night. Aidan and I had been out for dinner at an Indian restaurant called Zamzana. We’d taken the Gloria Stetbay with us, leaned it against the wall so that we could admire it while we ate. Afterwards we went back to our hotel, the Drummond. At reception, Aidan stood back, left it to me to hand over a credit card so that an imprint could be taken, to sign the receptionist’s form in two different places. I was acutely aware of his presence behind me, of him listening intently to every word I said, every nuance of my voice, even though all I was talking about was wake-up calls and morning newspapers: ‘No thanks. Yes please, the Independent.’ Once we had our room key, I turned away from the desk to face him. He looked serious. Prepared. ‘Shall we have a drink before going up?’ I said. ‘I’m sure the bar’s still open.’

He shook his head, and I felt like a coward. We’d put this off for too long, that was the problem. Now too much hinged on it being a success.

In silence, we walked to the lift, took it up four floors. Thank goodness no one was in there with us; I don’t think I could have stood that. When the doors slid open with a ping, I decided to lead the way, following the arrows on the oval-shaped brass signs. I wanted Aidan to see that I was as bold as he was. I was doing fine until I had to unlock our room with one of those stupid keycards. The tiny square light kept flashing red, and I got flustered. After my third try failed, my fingers were so slippery I couldn’t even get the card out of the slot. Aidan took over. For him, the light flashed green. We were in.

We stood beside the double bed, looking at each other. ‘So. What now?’ I said.

Aidan shrugged. ‘I suppose we should touch or something.’ I ought to have found it absurd-perhaps laughter would have shattered the tension-but this was the first direct reference either of us had made to the four months of agonised, yearning celibacy that we’d endured. Aidan’s words were enough to pierce the invisible barrier between us. I ran to him and threw myself, hard, at his chest. It was a few seconds-a terrifying chasm that seemed to grow wider and wider-before I felt his arms close around me and I dared to breathe again. We kissed. For more than an hour we did nothing but kiss, standing beside the double bed, with the black hold-all containing our overnight things lying by our feet.

Eventually our lips were throbbing, raw, and we had to stop. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Aidan.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Better. You?’

‘Still scared.’ Inspired by his bluntness, I thought I’d try the direct approach too. ‘I’m not sure how we get from here to… the next stage.’

‘Neither am I,’ he said.

‘How do other couples do it?’ I was thinking: how did I used to do it, with other people? Seventeen others, before Aidan. At one time it had seemed easy. The first time Aidan took me out for dinner, we’d talked about our previous relationships. He told me there had been nothing serious for him, only ‘a lot of futile one-night stands-non-starters, each and every one’.

‘There are no other couples like us,’ he said now. ‘We’ve both known what we’ve got in common from day one, haven’t we? I saw it in your eyes, when I found you on my doorstep last summer. You saw it in my eyes too.’

I nodded mutely. His new-found frankness was making me feel uncomfortable.

‘We’ve both been to Hell and managed to claw our way out. I’ve spent most of my life wanting nothing but to bury what I’ve been through-you seemed to need to do the same.’

‘Aidan, I can’t…’

‘We haven’t asked questions. We haven’t pushed it. I reckon we’ve respected each other’s privacy a bit too much.’

His words turned me back into a coward and I didn’t care. ‘Don’t ask me,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t.’

‘It’s not going to work,’ he said. I heard despair in his voice, as if something had torn inside him. It frightened me. ‘We can’t make it work, not like this, not if we’re both determined to hide everything that matters.’

‘We love each other.’ My voice shook. ‘That’s what matters most, and we haven’t hidden that.’

‘You know what I mean. I know you’re scared. I’m not exactly feeling calm about it myself, but I think we need to tell each other.’ Aidan cleared his throat. ‘I’m willing if you are.’

It’ll be easy from now on. That’s what he said, once I’d agreed. Once I’d said I was willing. If he meant the sex, he was right. It felt natural from the start, has ever since: passionate, intense, binding. It has become our refuge, the safe, dark place we escape to when the glaring brightness of everything that’s wrong between us shines in our eyes until we feel we’re going blind. Ironic that the one thing we lacked has become the only thing that sustains us.

In that hotel room, Aidan told me he’d killed someone years ago, a woman. As soon as he said her name, Mary Trelease, I felt a coldness clutch at my heart, a sense of something being off balance, in the wrong compartment.

Straight away, I knew I’d heard the name before, though I was certain Aidan couldn’t have mentioned it to me until now. There was no way he’d have casually dropped the name of a woman he’d killed into one of our previous conversations. Could I be imagining it? I wondered. Briefly, I considered telepathy as a possibility. If Aidan had killed a woman called Mary Trelease, as he claimed, her name would be imprinted on his consciousness for ever; could it have passed from his mind into mine, without being spoken aloud? I dismissed the idea within seconds. Was Mary Trelease famous? Was that why I’d heard her name before? Not knowing was the worst thing, the inexplicability of it. I couldn’t know the name, and yet I did. I sat motionless on the bed, bathed in dread. I wanted to ask Aidan who Mary Trelease was, but we’d agreed not to ask questions, and all the ones that occurred to me sounded frivolous and flippant when I rehearsed them silently.

Aidan was in a terrible state after he told me. I couldn’t look at him, but I could hear him. It sounded as if he was disintegrating, and all I could do was sit there with my hands clenched in my lap, staring at the floor. Aidan and extreme violence, life-threatening violence, did not go together. No, I thought. No. I pictured Him and Her, allowed myself to think of their names for the first time in years, and something flared in my mind as it never had before, making them real; it was as if I was in the hotel room with them instead of Aidan. The three seemed to merge, so that I couldn’t distinguish between them, and for a fleeting moment I hated them all equally.

Aidan kept saying my name-‘Ruth? Ruth? Say something! Tell me you love me, Ruth, please!’-but I couldn’t answer. He reached out to touch me and I flicked his hand away. I sat like a prim statue on the edge of the bed, doing and saying nothing, though I wanted to scream and hit him and call him a murderer. Eventually he stopped trying to get a response from me, and deafening silence engulfed us. I’d rejected him when he most needed love from me, and we both knew it.

That’s my biggest regret. Whatever Aidan has done or not done, I hate to think of how badly I let him down that night.

But of course, he hasn’t done anything. I’m not the only one convinced of this; the police agree with me.

I don’t know how long that awful silence lasted. All I know is, after a while, the horror-haze that had filled my head cleared. I remembered who Aidan was: the man I knew and loved. If he’d killed someone, it couldn’t have been murder. There had to be an acceptable explanation. I got up, put my arms round him, told him it didn’t matter-whatever he’d done, I still loved him. I would always love him. I hated myself for saying those words-‘it doesn’t matter’-about a woman’s life; I only said it to compensate for what I saw as my own treachery. How could I have felt hatred for him? How could I have believed him? Aidan wasn’t evil. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to think of him as a killer. He’s got it wrong, I thought. Even before I knew it wasn’t true, I didn’t believe it.

We made love for hours and hours, delaying the moment when words would once again become necessary. The morning sky was already breaking up the darkness by the time we finally fell asleep early the next morning. I woke up to the sound of Aidan saying my name. I opened my eyes. He wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s midday,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed half the day.’ His eyes were dull and hard. I’d never seen him look so out of reach before, and it scared me.

I said nothing as we got dressed. Aidan made it clear with his body language that he didn’t want to talk. He phoned reception and asked for a taxi to be ordered. I heard him say, ‘Straight away’ and ‘Alexandra Palace’.

‘We’re going back to the art fair?’ I said.

‘That’s why we came.’

‘We don’t have to go back,’ I told him. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted us to be alone, not in a hall full of people and noise. ‘We could go home. Let’s go home.’

‘We’re going to Alexandra Palace,’ he said tonelessly, as if a machine were speaking from inside him.

I knew then that something was badly wrong. I wanted to ask him what was the matter, but it would have sounded ridiculous. The night before, he’d confessed to a killing. That would be traumatic for anyone; today he had to live with the consequences. We both did. I wanted to ask who else knew about what he’d done. I’d only known him four months. He might have been in prison before I met him. Mainly I wanted to apologise for the way I’d frozen and shut him out when he’d first told me, but I was so afraid he wouldn’t forgive me that I didn’t dare.

When a receptionist phoned the room to say that our taxi was outside, I asked Aidan about the Gloria Stetbay picture-did he think it would be safe in the room? ‘No idea,’ he said, as if he couldn’t have cared less. He pretended not to notice that I started crying.

We arrived at the art fair and went through the motions, walking up and down the aisles. I looked at paintings without seeing them. Aidan didn’t even look. He kept his eyes straight ahead, glazed, and marched up and down as if he’d set himself a goal of a certain number of footsteps and was counting them off one by one.

Eventually I grabbed his arm and said, ‘I can’t stand this any more. Why are we like this? Why aren’t we talking?’

I saw him grit his teeth, as if he couldn’t bear my touch. Less than twelve hours ago we’d been having passionate sex. It made no sense. ‘I’ve already said too much,’ Aidan muttered, not looking at me. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry.’

‘Of course you should have told me.’ I made a mistake then. I said, ‘Was it an accident? Was it self-defence?’

He let out a harsh, contemptuous laugh. ‘Which would you prefer? Accident or self-defence?’

‘I… I didn’t mean…’

‘What if it was neither? What if I murdered someone in cold blood, a defenceless woman?’

I felt my face twist in pain. Defenceless. ‘You didn’t. You can’t have,’ I said faintly.

‘People change, Ruth. People become different people during the course of their lives. If you loved the person I am now, you’d forgive anything I’d done in the past, no matter how bad. I’d forgive you anything, anything at all. There’s no crime so terrible that I wouldn’t instantly forgive you for it. Obviously the feeling isn’t mutual.’

He was breathing hard and fast in my face, waiting for my response. I said nothing. He kept using words that paralysed me like shots from a stun-gun, words that had been repeated endlessly in court seven years ago: a defenceless woman. Parcel tape over my mouth…

By the time I recovered and realised I had said nothing, that I’d failed to respond, Aidan was walking away. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after him, but he’d turned a corner. I ran as fast as I could, trying to keep my eyes fixed on the point at which he’d disappeared from view, but by then I was hysterical, shaking, babbling nonsense to myself, convinced I’d driven him away for ever. There were too many corners, too many intersections between one row of stalls and another. Every junction looked the same as all the others. I looked down one aisle, then a second, then a third, but saw no sign of Aidan. In desperation, I asked some of the artists who were sitting in little white cubicles decorated with their own work. ‘Have you seen my boyfriend? He might have come down here a minute ago. He’s tall, wearing a black jacket with shiny patches on the shoulders.’ Nobody had seen him.

I ran and ran, up and down the aisles in both halls. Aidan wouldn’t have left without me. He couldn’t have. He would never abandon me like that. Completely by accident, I found myself at Jane Fielder’s stall, number 171. I didn’t ask the woman standing next to it if she was Jane Fielder, or tell her how much I liked her painting that I’d bought from the Spilling Gallery-finding Aidan was the only thing in my head. Anything, I thought. I’d forgive him anything. ‘Have you seen a man with dark hair, tall, wearing a black jacket with shiny patches here?’ I tapped my shoulders. The woman shook her head.

‘I saw him,’ a voice called out from across the aisle. ‘He walked past a minute ago. Like a sort of donkey jacket, is it?’

I turned, saw a young woman. Hair dyed yellow, with black roots showing, a red patterned scarf wrapped round her head. Skinny legs, cerise fishnet tights over black sheer ones, heavy black boots to halfway up her calves. She was minding the stall opposite, sitting beside a large free-standing sign that said, ‘TiqTaq Gallery, London’.

I ran over to her, nearly colliding with her chair and knocking her to the ground. I managed to stop myself just in time. ‘Which way did he-?’ I broke off as something caught my eye. I blinked, breathed. No. No. I backed away. This was some sort of hideous practical joke; it had to be.

‘Which way did he go?’ the young woman asked on my behalf, seeing I was having trouble getting the question out. ‘That way-towards the exit there. Are you okay?’

I wasn’t. I had to get away, but felt too weak to move. I leaned against the partition that separated Jane Fielder’s stall from the one beside it, and stared at the TiqTaq Gallery’s space from across the aisle, rubbing my forehead with my left hand, pressing my fingers hard against my skin.

‘Careful, you’re leaning on a picture,’ said a voice behind me. I couldn’t speak, or shift my weight elsewhere. I couldn’t do anything except stare past the woman with the dyed blonde hair at the painting in a green-stained wood frame that was hanging behind her. It stood out from all the others. It would have even if I’d never seen it before; it was in a different league from everything else TiqTaq had to offer.

Abberton. Framed, signed, dated 2007. I forced myself to close my eyes, then open them and look again, to make sure it was real. I walked towards the picture, seeing nothing else; it might have been the only thing in an otherwise empty room. Now I understood why the name of the woman Aidan said he’d killed had sounded familiar, even though she’d never introduced herself to me. I’d done plenty of paperwork for Saul; I’d probably sent her a bill or a receipt, or seen her name on one of the ‘Work Pending’ lists Saul used to pin up everywhere.

That same name was painted in neat black letters in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in front of me: Mary Trelease.

It took me about four seconds to realise that if Mary Trelease had painted Abberton in 2007, Aidan could not have killed her years ago. He’d made a mistake. I felt myself swell with relief. Of course he wasn’t a killer. I’d known that all along. All I needed now was to find him so that he could see the picture for himself, but the woman from the TiqTaq Gallery had said she’d seen him heading for an exit. What if he was in a taxi on his way to King’s Cross?

I was unwilling to move from TiqTaq’s stall. I knew I couldn’t let Abberton out of my sight. It was my evidence-indisputable proof that Aidan hadn’t done what he thought he’d done. It occurred to me that there might be more than one Mary Trelease, but I quickly dismissed the idea. Even if there were dozens or hundreds of women with that name, the artist who had assaulted me in Saul’s gallery had to be the one Aidan thought he’d killed. She was a painter; he framed pictures. They both lived in Spilling. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Perhaps they’d had a fight. She might have attacked him-a hypothesis that seemed entirely consistent with what I knew of her character-and he’d defended himself… My mind raced ahead, going through the possibilities, but I couldn’t focus on anything for long. Shock was still slamming through me and I couldn’t think coherently.

‘I need to buy a painting,’ I said to the woman with the dyed hair. ‘That one there.’

She shrugged. If I wanted to forget about the man I’d been looking for and boost her profits instead, that was all right by her. ‘Great,’ she said, though her tone and manner conveyed little enthusiasm. She hadn’t looked to see which picture I’d pointed at. ‘Let me dig out the relevant forms.’ Languidly, like someone with all the time in the world, she bent to open a desk drawer.

‘Can you put the “Sold” sticker on first?’ I asked, trying not to sound as impatient as I felt. ‘I don’t want anyone else to see it and think it’s still for sale.’

She laughed. ‘You might not have noticed, but people aren’t exactly queuing up. I’ve barely had anyone glance in my direction since yesterday morning.’ Pulling the lid off a pen with her teeth, she said, ‘Right, I’ll fill in my bits, then I’ll hand it over to you to do yours. You know you pay the total upfront? It’s a fair, so there’s no deposit system.’

I nodded.

‘We take cash, cheques, all major credit cards. Which picture is it you want?’

‘Abberton,’ I said. It was a lie. I didn’t want it; it was the last thing I wanted. Neither did Mary Trelease want me to have it. She had made that clear enough. I couldn’t put a picture on my wall knowing the artist didn’t want it there. As soon as I’d found Aidan and shown him Abberton, I would give it away-to Malcolm, I decided. He often made admiring remarks about my art collection.

Please let Aidan still be in London, I thought. I didn’t want to have to take Abberton back to Spilling. The idea of having it in my home was unthinkable. Already I felt oppressed by it in a funny sort of way, even though I hadn’t touched it yet and didn’t own it. I had always known it was an object that possessed a certain power-that was what had drawn me to it in the first place-but now that its maker had traumatised and humiliated me, the force of the picture seemed wholly negative. It was ridiculous, I knew, but I was afraid of it.

‘Abberton,’ the woman repeated slowly, writing it on her form. ‘Artist’s name?’

‘Mary Trelease.’ I was surprised to have to tell her. Saul Hansard wouldn’t have needed to ask. How could she represent her artists properly if she wasn’t familiar with the titles of their work? Everything about her demeanour suggested indifference. I wondered how much commission TiqTaq took. Aidan had told me most galleries take fifty per cent, even the ones that make no effort to promote an artist’s work.

‘Mary Trelease?’ The woman looked up at me, seeming suddenly nervous. For a moment, I was terrified she was about to tell me something I knew to be impossible. You must be mistaken. Mary Trelease died years ago. She was murdered.

The young woman walked over to Abberton and tapped its surface with the biro she was holding. ‘This is the picture you want?’ The disbelief and annoyance in her voice let me know that I was making life difficult for her.

‘Yes.’ I took my credit card out of my wallet to show her I wasn’t going to back down, waited for her to say I couldn’t have Abberton-Mary Trelease had told her to sell the painting to anybody but me. But I hadn’t told this woman my name; how could she know who I was?

‘Sorry, my mistake,’ she said, a rueful smile appearing on her face. ‘It’s already sold.’

‘What? But… it can’t be. There’s no red dot on the label.’ I noticed for the first time that there was also no price, nothing written beneath the title and Mary Trelease’s name. All the other pictures on TiqTaq’s stall had prices apart from one or two that were labelled ‘NFS’-not for sale-and their labels were printed. Why was Abberton’s handwritten? Had it been added at the last minute?

‘I told you-I made a mistake. Someone bought this picture yesterday.’ The smile was still there but it was straining to stay in place. ‘I meant to put a “Sold” sticker on, but I never got round to it. I was rushed off my feet.’

‘You told me it had been quiet since you got here,’ I blurted out. ‘I don’t believe the picture’s sold. Why won’t you sell it to me?’ I had to be allowed to take Abberton away with me. I had to. Aidan needed to see it; it would make everything all right between us again, as if his confession last night and his anger today had never happened.

The young woman screwed her eyes up, the better to inspect me: this crazy specimen that had put itself in front of her. ‘Do you think I don’t want to make money? I’d gladly sell it to you if it was for sale.’

A combination of confusion and desperation had emboldened me, and I spoke to a complete stranger as I never would have dared to if there had been less at stake. ‘Show me the sales form,’ I said. ‘Show me your copy, the yellow copy.’ I indicated the form she’d been filling in for me. All the artists and galleries at the fair had the same ones, with three layers: white, yellow and green. Aidan and I had watched Gloria Stetbay’s assistant fill one in yesterday and keep the yellow copy for herself.

‘This is ridiculous.’ Dyed-hair woman tried to laugh, but it wasn’t convincing.

I walked towards her. She moved to stand in front of Abberton, as if she feared I might snatch it off the wall. ‘You represent Mary Trelease, is that right? If her painting’s up on your stall, that means you must represent her.’ Aidan had taught me the basics about how the art world worked. ‘If this picture is sold, I’d like to buy something else by her. Does she have other work that’s available?’

‘I wouldn’t know that sort of thing. You’d have to pop into our gallery on Charlotte Street and-’

‘Is someone there now, one of your colleagues?’ I wasn’t going to let it drop. She was lying to me, and I would force her to admit it. ‘You could ring and ask them. Tell them you’re with someone who’s keen to buy any painting you’ve got by Mary Trelease, as long as it’s signed, dated and recent.’

‘There’s no one there who’d… Look, I’m not…’ She was getting flustered. She spread both her hands and lowered them slowly in a calming gesture. ‘To be honest, I don’t think we’ve got any other stuff by her, okay?’

‘Do you represent her or don’t you?’

‘I’m not going to discuss details of the gallery’s relationship with a particular artist…’

‘An artist who refuses to sell any of her work,’ I snapped. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? Mary Trelease sells her paintings to nobody. Why not?’ I was certain my hunch was correct. Mary often used to bring in pictures for Saul to frame, ignoring me as she walked past me time after time, yet he never put her work up in the gallery. Saul always exhibited paintings by the artists he framed for; he used to tell me all the time that it was the best way to advertise his own work as well as theirs. So why not Mary’s?

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the woman. ‘All I know is, we’ve sold one picture for her. This one.’ She jabbed her thumb at Abberton. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t un-sell it. I’d be happy to sell you any of the other stuff you can see here. Everything else is available.’

I shook my head. ‘If Abberton’s sold then whoever bought it will be back here to collect it, won’t they? Did they say when?’ An art fair wasn’t like a gallery exhibition, Aidan had told me the day before. You didn’t have to wait until it finished to collect your purchases-you could pick them up any time before the end of the last day.

I got no answer, so I kept pushing. ‘Are they coming to collect it? Or did they pay extra to have it delivered to their home? Can you check that for me, on the yellow form?’

‘No, I can’t. Even if I knew, I couldn’t… Look, I really don’t see how I can help you any more. I hope I’m not going to have to call security.’

This shocked me, the idea that someone could feel threatened by me. ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Just… could you do me one favour?’

She eyed me suspiciously, waiting for the worst.

‘Could you make sure the picture stays where it is until I come back? I don’t care about buying it-I don’t want it. But I need to show it to my boyfriend and… I don’t know where he is.’

‘The tall bloke in the donkey jacket you were looking for?’

I nodded.

She sighed, and seemed to soften. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said, ‘but if the buyer comes to pick it up, there’s not an awful lot I can do.’

I left without saying thank you or goodbye. I’d wasted enough time already. She was right. Assuming Abberton really was sold and she wasn’t lying, the person who had bought it could arrive to collect it at any moment. I ran outside and stuck out my arm to stop a taxi, then realised there weren’t any, only several people who looked as if they were waiting. One glanced at his watch, sighed and walked off down the road.

‘Come on,’ I breathed through gritted teeth. A taxi had to come. I had to get back to the hotel-that’s where Aidan would be. He’d have gone back there to check out, to pick up our bag and the Gloria Stetbay. A taxi appeared, and a woman in a grey trouser suit with a mobile phone pressed to her ear moved forward to greet it. She opened the back door. I ran at her with my wallet already open and offered her twenty pounds if she’d let me take it instead. It was an emergency, I told her. She looked unconvinced, but took the money and stepped back, relinquishing the cab.

At the Drummond, I told the driver to wait outside for me. I didn’t have the patience to wait for the lift, so I ran up four flights of stairs to room 436. I banged on the door and called Aidan’s name. ‘Please be here,’ I whispered. ‘Please.’

The door opened, but not very far. I heard footsteps walking away. I pushed the door fully open, banging it against the wall. Aidan stood in the centre of the room with his back to me. Short of leaving me stranded outside in the corridor, he couldn’t have been less welcoming. I didn’t care; I knew this bad patch would end as soon as he’d heard what I had to say. ‘Mary Trelease, ’ I panted.

He swung round.

‘What does she look like?’

‘I don’t know. That depends how long it takes a body to decay. You’d need to ask a pathologist.’

‘Skinny, masses of black curly hair that’s starting to go grey, cut-glass accent, bad skin-lined, like a much older woman’s. Pale brown mole beneath her lower lip that’s shaped like… like a double-ended spanner, sort of. Or how you’d draw a dog’s bone in a cartoon…’

Aidan roared and flew across the room at me, clamping his hands around my arms. I screamed, frightened by the strength of his reaction. ‘What are you saying?’ he demanded. ‘Where did you get that description from?’

‘I’ve met her. Aidan, you’ve got to listen to me. You haven’t killed her. She isn’t dead. She’s an artist, isn’t she? Remember the woman I told you about, the one I had a run-in with at Saul’s gallery? It was her! The picture she brought in, the one I wanted to buy-I’ve just seen it at the art fair, on a stall belonging to a gallery. TiqTaq, they’re called. The painting’s called Abberton. It’s of a sort of person, but with no face…’

Aidan released me, staggered back across the room as if propelled by a physical force. ‘No,’ he said. Flecks of white had appeared at the corners of his mouth. He wiped them away with his hand. He’d started to sweat. ‘Shut up. Shut up. You’re lying. What are you trying to do?’

‘You got it wrong!’ I told him triumphantly. ‘You didn’t kill her, years ago or at any other time. She’s not dead. The picture I saw, Abberton, it’s dated 2007. It wasn’t framed when I met her six months ago, but since then she’s had it framed. She’s alive, Aidan.’ I didn’t need to ask if the woman I’d described was the right one; his face was white with terror.

‘I killed Mary Trelease,’ he said. ‘But maybe you’ve known that all along. Maybe that’s why you turned up at the workshop asking for a job, and why you’re telling me this now.’ Fury blazed in his eyes. ‘Who are you really, Ruth Zinta Bussey?’ His sarcasm shook my heart. ‘What was the plan?’ He walked towards me slowly. ‘Make me fall in love with you and then wipe me out? Drive me insane? Is that going to be the extent of my punishment, or is there more to come? Are you going to go to the police?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ I sobbed. ‘There’s no plan. I love you! I’m not trying to punish you, I’m trying to make you see that you’ve done nothing wrong. Come back to Alexandra Palace with me and I’ll show you the picture, Abberton. I’ve got a taxi waiting outside.’

He looked at me, through me. ‘Abberton,’ he said in a hollow voice. ‘You’re telling me I’ll find a picture called Abberton, by Mary Trelease at the Access 2 Art fair?’

‘Yes! Dated 2007. But you’ve got to come now-the woman on the stall told me it was sold. I think she was lying, but I’m not sure, and if someone comes to collect it…’

Aidan picked up his wallet and the black hold-all, and pushed past me into the corridor. He left the Gloria Stetbay picture-my engagement ring substitute-leaning against the wall. Watching him slam the door on it, I knew the answer to the question I was too scared to ask. Our engagement was off. Aidan wouldn’t mention it again.

By the time I got to the taxi, he was sitting in it as if he’d been there for hours, shoulders hunched, his face a grim mask. ‘Get in,’ he said. I didn’t understand. He was acting as if he was forcing me to go with him, when I was the one who had suggested it. ‘Alexandra Palace,’ he told the driver. ‘As fast as you can.’

‘Talk to me, Aidan, please,’ I begged him. ‘What happened between you and Mary Trelease? Why did you think you’d killed her? Why do you think I’m trying to drive you mad? Why would I?’ I’d been so certain that the nightmare would be over as soon as I told him about Abberton, but it wasn’t; I couldn’t bear the disappointment. I buried my face in my hands and started to weep.

‘Don’t cry,’ said Aidan. ‘It won’t help.’

‘Please, tell me what’s going on!’

‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I should never have mentioned her name to you.’

‘Why don’t you trust me? I don’t care what you’ve done-I love you. I should have said that last night, as soon as you told me, but I was confused. I knew it wasn’t right-I knew you could never kill anyone!’

‘Keep your voice down.’

‘That’s why I clammed up, not because what you’d told me changed how I felt about you but because I didn’t believe it could be true. And the name Mary Trelease-I knew I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t remember where. I must have seen it when I worked for Saul, on a bill or something.’ I stopped, out of breath.

Aidan didn’t look at me, but he took hold of my hand and squeezed it. He was staring out of the window, thinking hard, concentrating on something I couldn’t see or share, something from his past. Almost whispering, I asked, ‘Did you and Mary Trelease have some kind of… physical fight?’ I pictured Aidan pushing her, her falling, knocking her head against something. Aidan panicking, fleeing the scene, assuming he’d killed her…

‘Shhh,’ he said, drawing out the sound as he exhaled slowly. As if I was a child, still young enough to accept comfort without substance. I knew then that there was no point asking him anything else.

We arrived at Alexandra Palace and I paid the driver. ‘Do you remember the stall number?’ Aidan asked me.

‘It’s opposite Jane Fielder’s stall, number… number…’ The churning in my head had dulled my memory.

‘One seven one,’ he said.

I followed him as he pushed past people milling in the aisles, browsing idly as Aidan and I had the day before. It seemed like a lifetime ago. ‘There it is,’ I blurted out when I saw Tiq Taq’s sign from a distance. I looked at my watch: three o’clock. I’d left to go back to the hotel at half past one. My throat tightened. Blood pounded in my ears.

The woman with the dyed blonde hair had gone. In her place was an older woman with a pre-Raphaelite hairstyle-a long plait coiled into a conical bun at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a white linen suit, a clingy red scoop-necked T-shirt and brown sandals with coloured beads on them. Her face, hands and feet were tanned. As we approached, Aidan said, ‘There’s nothing there that’s anything like what you described.’ He turned away in disgust.

Mary’s painting had gone. A picture of exactly the same size hung in its place, of an ugly naked woman standing next to a chicken. She had straggly hair and limbs as thick as a rugby centre forward’s. I hated her, whoever she was. She had no business being there, where Abberton ought to have been. I thought, I knew this would happen. I knew it. All the way to Alexandra Palace in the taxi, I’d had a feeling not of hope but of dread: I was convinced Abberton would be gone, though I’d tried to deny it to myself. I’d read about negative expectations leading to negative outcomes, and now I blamed myself for the picture having vanished. ‘Whoever bought it must have picked it up,’ I said to Aidan. ‘It was here, I swear it.’ I grabbed his arm, tried to make him look at me, but he pushed me away.

‘Excuse me?’ I said to the woman with the coiled plait, loud enough so that Aidan could hear me from the other side of the aisle. ‘I was here at lunchtime. I spoke to your colleague, the one with blonde hair.’

‘Ciara,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘She’s gone, I’m afraid. I’m Jan Garner. TiqTaq’s my gallery. Can I help you?’

‘You had a picture called Abberton. By an artist called Mary Trelease. It was there.’ I pointed to the naked woman and the chicken.

Jan Garner shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We didn’t and it wasn’t. You must be mistaken.’

I couldn’t speak. Well trained though I was in fearing the worst, I hadn’t foreseen this. Why was this stylish, polite, sophisticated-looking woman telling me a blatant lie? She must have known I knew she was lying.

‘It was here at half past one this afternoon,’ I insisted. ‘The girl-Ciara-said it was sold, someone had bought it yesterday. Whoever bought it must have come to collect it.’

‘I’ve always hated telling people they’re wrong, but I’m afraid you are.’ Jan Garner pulled a sheet of paper out of a file. ‘Look, here’s the list of everything we brought with us from the gallery: title and artist’s name.’

There was no Abberton on the list. No Mary Trelease.

‘But… it was here!’ I turned to look at Aidan, who had moved further away. I could see from the set of his back and shoulders that he was listening to every word while pretending to look at another gallery’s stall.

Jan Garner shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘When I took over from Ciara, she said we hadn’t sold anything so far. Which means the same pictures are up now as were up yesterday morning-nothing’s changed. Are you…?’

I didn’t hear the rest of what she said. Aidan had started to walk away, and I ran to catch him up. I was terrified of losing him again. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after him. ‘She’s lying! I swear on my life! Come back with me and I’ll prove it to you. We can ask the people on the stalls opposite. They must have seen Abberton.’

‘Shut up.’ He took my arm and dragged me out of the hall into the foyer. ‘I need you to tell me everything. Everything, Ruth-every detail.’

‘I’ve already told you…’

‘Tell me again. This Abberton picture-what is it, what’s it of? What did the other woman say to you-Ciara? What happened at Hansard’s gallery between you and the woman you think was Mary Trelease? What exactly was said?’

‘I don’t remember, not word for word-it was six months ago.’

‘I don’t care how long ago it was!’ Aidan bellowed. People nearby turned to watch. He lowered his voice. ‘I need to know. Start talking.’

So I did. I described the picture: the street scene background in greens, purples and browns, the outline of a human form filled with a kind of stuffing: stuck-on scraps of hard, gauze-like material, some painted, like curled-up jewels. Aidan let out little gasps through clenched teeth as he listened to my description, as if every word I uttered caused him terrible pain, but each time I stopped, worried about the effect I was having on him, he demanded I carry on.

I went over my conversation with Ciara. Aidan wanted to hear about every look that had passed across her face, every movement she made, the inflections in her voice. Then I told him as much as I could bear to about what had happened at Saul’s gallery. I didn’t mention the red paint.

That I didn’t understand no longer mattered to me. Aidan didn’t either; I could see that clearly, from the way the frown-lines on his forehead deepened as he listened to what I had to say. When he’s worked it all out, he’ll tell me, I thought. At least now he seemed to believe me. I comforted myself with the knowledge that Mary Trelease was alive.

Aidan said nothing in the taxi on the way to King’s Cross. Neither of us mentioned the Gloria Stetbay painting. Four thousand pounds, and it would probably be found by a maid and thrown in the bin. I should have gone back for it-I can see that now; it was criminal not to-but at the time I didn’t feel entitled to go back and claim it as my own, not once Aidan had decided to leave it in the hotel.

On the train, forty minutes into the journey, he finally spoke. ‘When we get back, we’ll go to mine to pick up a few things and then we’ll go to yours,’ he said. ‘I’m moving in with you. I’m not letting you out of my sight from now on.’ He said it as if he was passing sentence, suggesting something that would be unwelcome to me-a punishment-instead of what I’d wanted to happen since the day I met him.

‘Good.’ I searched his face for an indication of his meaning. Was he worried about me and wanting to stay close to protect me? Did he think Mary Trelease was a danger to us? Or was it a lack of trust that made him feel he had to watch my every move?

Did he regret not having killed Mary, now that he knew he hadn’t?

I had no way of answering any of these questions. ‘I’d love it if you moved in,’ I said.

But my punishment wasn’t over yet. Aidan said, ‘I’ll need that proof you promised me. If the painting you’re talking about really exists, if you didn’t make it up, find it. Find it and bring it to me.’