Twenty-eight years old, and he’d behaved no better than a spoiled child. Where did he get off suggesting he was entitled to know every detail of her sad, difficult life story? Cath had been right to call him a despicable coward. Why should she have trusted him when he didn’t even possess the courage to be honest with her about what he wanted from life? To be honest with himself about it?
He’d sat down at his computer, typed a letter of resignation, and faxed it to Winston and every member of the board. In the course of ten minutes, he became a painter. Maybe a bloody
awful painter, though he hoped not. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t waste the rest of his life dancing to someone else’s tune. Not the board’s, nor any member of his family’s.
“Yes, of course I invited her,” he told his father. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, if I send her an invitation, she won’t turn up. I phoned her for days. I went to her office and her flat. I hung around the station waiting for her to show. She won’t speak to me.”
He’d pounded on the door of her flat for so long, she’d opened it eventually, but her politeness had been the sort reserved for door-to-door salesmen. Regardless of what he said, she’d behaved as if they were the next thing to strangers. She said “please” a lot, and she offered him polite smiles, and every word that came out of her mouth meant “no.”
“Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but given your lack of success in all those attempts, what makes you believe she’ll come to the show?”
“She’ll be here. I haven’t given her a choice.”
She had to come. He hadn’t touched her or had a real conversation with her in twenty-six days, and he’d been off his head with missing her for every one of them. The only thing that distracted him from thinking about her was painting, so he’d been painting as much as possible. When his arm grew heavy and his vision began to blur with fatigue, he dropped into unconsciousness on the couch in the studio. He couldn’t sleep in his bed or eat in his kitchen. There were too many memories.
He painted, and he planned. With his parents’ help—his father’s knowledge of the art world combined with his mother’s legendary ability to browbeat people into submission—he’d nearly pulled together his first art show. Mother was handling the publicity, and she’d promised the space would be filled with interested buyers on Friday evening. God only knew who she’d invited. Dreadful people, no doubt.
It didn’t matter. So long as Cath made an appearance, Mother could fill the room with her friends from the club or her charity partners or every member of Winston’s polo team. Though it would be a boon if the people she invited brought their checkbooks. He’d taken out a loan
against the building in Greenwich to cover the rent on this warehouse space. He had a mortgage to pay now.
“I saw her on that variety program last night,” Richard said.
“Me, too.” His lips wanted to smile, remembering Cath in her pink hand-knit cowboy hat, a tiny knit bikini patterned after the Union Jack, and a pair of red knitted high-heeled boots. She’d been sassy and beautiful, and she’d had the popular television presenter eating out of her hand for the entire ten minutes the interview had lasted.
The first time he’d heard her on the radio a few weeks earlier, it had been an accident. He’d flipped it on while making tea in the kitchen, hoping to find a way to get out of his own head. Instead, he’d heard her voice over the airwaves. For a moment, he’d thought himself delusional, and it hadn’t surprised him in the least. It had been ages since he’d slept. But no, it had been a real program—they’d called the segment “Knitting in the Bedroom”—and Cath had spoken at length about sex, love, and knitting, making a passionate argument that for all its practicality, knitwear had a saucy side. She was witty and sexy on the air, and they’d had her back on for a second time a week later.
It was when the
Daily Mail
ran a large, full-color picture of her in the cowboy getup that Cath had really begun to attract attention. For the photo, they’d slung pistols from holsters cinched low on her hips.
Assistant Curator Cath Talarico of the Victoria and Albert Museum takes aim at stereotypes about knitters
.
The photo taught him two things about Cath. First, she was a survivor. He’d stomped on her spirit, trying to force her into a mold in the hope of winning his family’s approval. She’d come out shooting.
Second, she had a new tattoo. The formerly empty canvas of the left side of her stomach was now filled with an urban skyline, jagged and post-apocalyptic. He’d been able to make it out quite clearly, the word CITY in crimson centered beneath the buildings. And below that, a small, anatomically correct human heart.
Her heart, he thought.
“It’s working, you know,” his father added. “Her campaign, I mean. The exhibit will be a smashing success.” He hesitated. “I did try to make the donation.”
“Did you?”
“Christopher phoned me back and said they weren’t in a position to take it.”
“She didn’t want it.”
“No. I assume she decided she’d rather get the money on her own terms.”
“That is how she prefers to operate.”
At the bus stop, when she’d first told him her story, the unrelenting misery of it had blasted him speechless. To the extent he’d been able to think at all, he’d thought it meant he didn’t know her. But he’d been wrong. He knew her inside out. It was his own character he’d been too blind to see properly.
Now he had his head screwed on straight. Whatever she said, however many times she told herself he was a mistake, she was wrong. She’d tattooed City’s name onto her body, not his. He wasn’t City. Not anymore.
“Shall we hang the new ones?” his father asked. “The paint is dry, I think.”
They walked over to the false wall he’d had erected directly in front of the building’s entrance—the first thing people would see when they came into the room. It was painted a stark, bright white, with five large Copperplate numerals in black. One for each tattoo.
Imagining how it would look in two days’ time, he allowed himself to hope. He smiled as he said, “Not yet.”
She loved him. He would show her.
Chapter Nineteen
Sharing dumplings with Judith and Christopher was weird, but taking a walk with them afterward was even weirder.
When Christopher had dropped by the office and insisted they accompany him to dinner, Cath had wanted to say no. Exhausted from juggling public appearances on top of the crazy final-week-before-the-exhibit-opens workload, the last thing she needed was to have to spend the evening in the company of her boss and her boss’s boss.
Sadly, unwritten employment etiquette said that when the big kahuna invited you to dinner to celebrate your smashingly successful guerrilla PR campaign, you had to go. So she’d gone, and now here she was, strolling the artsy streets of Shoreditch with the voluble and opinionated Christopher on one arm and the prickly, offbeat Judith on the other. She played Monkey in the Middle and wondered how soon she could politely excuse herself and go home.
“Where are you taking us?” Christopher asked Judith. They’d left Hoxton Street behind several minutes ago, and the neighborhood was getting more run-down and eclectic, industrial spaces mixing with tattoo parlors and art galleries and tiny restaurants that smelled of curry powder and emitted clouds of dishwasher steam.
“There’s an opening around here somewhere tonight. I thought we could check it out.”
Cath tried very hard to keep her sigh internal, but some of it might have escaped. Judith’s knowledge of art openings was bizarre and encyclopedic. They were like church for her, both tedious and mandatory. On Monday mornings at work, she often reported back on the terrible food and the talentless artists, relishing her own disdain.
Please let Christopher not want to go
.
“Sounds lovely,” Christopher said.
Crap
.
They rounded a corner, and a warehouse came into view. Expensive cars choked the narrow street. It was the rich-people-slumming sort of opening, then, not the humble kind. Maybe there would be champagne. She could use a drink.
They made their way toward the entrance, weaving among people who seemed to be waiting to get in and others who’d simply chosen the single most obstructive place to plant themselves. Nearly everyone in attendance wore black tie, making Cath feel seriously underdressed in her black shirtdress, fishnets, and ankle boots. “Whose show is this?” she asked as they neared the door.
Judith didn’t answer. Maybe she hadn’t heard the question.
Cath was about to ask again when she overheard the name “Chamberlain.” Suspicion tightened her shoulders. “Judith.” She grabbed her boss by the arm. “Whose show is this?”
But she didn’t need an answer, because just then the last two people standing between her and the inside of the room stepped aside, and she saw a wall full of paintings that sucked all the air out of the night sky.
Oh, shit. She set me up
.
Cath wanted to get angry so her righteous indignation could propel her back down the street and onto the Tube and home. She intended to. In a minute. As soon as her feet stopped marching her directly at those paintings for a closer look.
“Hey, that’s her,” someone said.
“Don’t be such a gobshite,” a man answered.
It
was
her. The white wall presented five large images, each labeled with a numeral in the same font she’d used on her skin. Each featuring one of her tattoos, a thick, black swirl of pigment resembling wrought iron, like a gate. And behind it, a scene from her life.
Number one. Wren in the foreground. Behind her, a visibly pregnant adolescent on a stepladder, stringing tiny Christmas lights along the ceiling of a beige suburban living room. Her face filled with hope and the naïve light of childhood.
Number two. A lit match, its black flame illuminating a burning house and the young
woman sitting on the curb in a huge fireman’s jacket, her arms wrapped around her knees and her hands missing in the sleeves. A policeman’s uniformed legs and belt crowded the side of the frame, suggesting the woman’s culpability. Her expression spoke of loss, anger, and abandonment.
Number three. A series of books forming the black squares of a checkerboard, and each square in between featuring a scene of Cath in college. Daydreaming in a classroom. Drinking from a plastic cup at a party. Wrapping her arms around the neck of an anonymous boy and smiling flirtatiously. Sitting on a thin, narrow dorm room bed and staring into space. In every image, her eyes were edgy, tormented.
Number four. A black maze of tangled lines covering the entire canvas like a thicket of brambles, and a series of tiny renditions of her figure wandering through it. One small Cath in a nightgown, trying to free the fabric from a thorn that protruded from the labyrinth. Another sitting in a corner, her head back to look up at the sky. A third holding a passport in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, striding forward as if she knew precisely where she was headed. More of them. All alive, all lost. All carrying on bravely, if purposelessly.
And in the middle, the largest painting of all. Number five. In this one only, the tattoo was no overlay. It was the shattered urban skyline on her own bare stomach. A man knelt in front of her, half in the frame and half out, the back of his head and the breadth of his shoulders as familiar as the shape of her fingernails. He wore the red T-shirt he favored for the studio and a daub of green paint below his ear. She wore a pink cowboy hat emblazoned with the image of a phoenix rising from the ashes. She wore his hands, too, one on her breast, the other at her waist. His thumb sank into the spot where the word
CITY
was supposed to be. Under his fingers, the tattoo smudged, as if he were wiping it off. She looked down at him. She smiled. Her eyes were in love.
A small paper placard on the wall offered the title of the series.
Mary Catherine: A Life
. The paintings were unbelievably good. The paintings weren’t for sale.
Something was crushing her lungs, squeezing hard and tight until black spots danced
before her eyes. “Breathe,” Judith’s voice instructed, and she opened her mouth and sucked in a loud, gasping breath. Hands to her stomach, she shut her eyes and inhaled, inhaled, inhaled.
He’d painted her. Everything she’d told him, he’d painted. In ocher and vermillion, rendered by Nev’s hands, her life looked different.
She
looked different. She looked like a victim and a survivor, the final painting a redemption. He promised a happy ending.
Her
happy ending.
Her lungs still hurt. “Exhale,” Judith said, and she did, and then she inhaled again.
“I have to get out of here.” Her voice filtered up from the bottom of the ocean.
But when she turned around, she spotted him off to her right, surrounded by strangers. He wore a tuxedo with the bow tie undone. His cheeks were pink, his collar button unfastened, and he was saying something to a woman Cath recognized as the arts reporter from
The Guardian
who had interviewed her the week before. He looked absolutely, devastatingly handsome. Water in the desert. A life preserver thrown to her drowning heart. He was everything in the world she wanted and couldn’t have.
He saw her. He saw her, and then he smiled the way he’d always smiled at her, as if they were the only two people in the room, and he loved her, and he’d very much like to find out what she had on under her dress. That shark smile. That Big Bad Wolf grin. It got to her like nothing else ever had or ever would.
She needed a wall to lean on. A column. An arm. Anything. She reached out for Judith, but Judith had disappeared. There were only strangers, and the paintings, and Nev striding toward her looking like 007.
He arrived, and so did the smell of him, that blend of turpentine and peppercorns and forest floor and man that her nervous system had filed away under the heading “Sex.” The room got smaller and hotter, more crowded and empty of anyone but Nev.
“Hello, love,” he said.
Put up a fight
.