Muddy Waters (27 page)

Willow's hands worked rhythmically and neatly, like a masseuse late for the next client, and Ruth felt quite sleepy. She wondered if Willow had any idea that only half an hour before she'd been having sex with Bernard on his velvet sofa. As their bodies had moved (unnecessarily slowly, she'd thought, Bernard chuffing like an old museum steam train), she'd watched little clouds of dust motes puffing upwards from the fabric and frisking above them in the sunlight. They had reminded her of Melissa telling her that flying dust was a complete pain if you wore contact lenses, and she'd wondered if it was normal to think about such stupidly ordinary things while you were supposed to be totally abandoned to passion.

‘Has he finished doing you yet?' Willow's abrupt question cut through Ruth's dozing.

‘What?' Ruth half-flipped round to look at her, to see if she was correctly interpreting the question as the depths of crudeness. Willow briskly slapped her thigh, ‘Stay
still
!' she ordered. ‘Bernard's painting – is it nearly finished? He's certainly taking his time with you.'

Ruth smirked to herself, recognizing envy and feeling triumphant, not just over Willow but over all the girls who'd presumably been sketched, seduced and discarded in mere days – some even in
hours
it was rumoured. The feeling was short-lived though as Willow followed up with, ‘Though there's an awful lot more of you to paint than most people, isn't there? I'm using twice the plaster on you that I did on that scraggy Ellen MacIver.'

‘Well, I wouldn't want
any
bits of me to look like any bits of
her
,' Ruth stated grumpily. Willow ran her hand across Ruth's left buttock, deliberately slowly as if to emphasize how far the distance was, ‘
Bits
isn't the word I'd use.
Lots
perhaps. Now keep completely still, I'm starting on the plaster.'

Ruth ignored her instruction and turned her head as far as she could so that Willow could see just how angry she was. ‘Look, do you want me just to leave right now, because I will if you carry on slagging me off.
I
know my body's OK, right? It's young and supple and soft and gorgeous.
And
I'm not the only one who thinks so.' The words ‘so there' hung unsaid and childish in the air. Willow stayed silent, which might be ominous. Ruth bit her lip, wondering if, without doubt, she had now let herself in for the torture of the peel-and-scalp treatment. It wasn't her fault, Willow deserved it. She shouldn't be so fucking personal. She shouldn't be so fucking obsessive about Bernard, not without going and doing something about it, at least
telling
him, not just twittering about making him vases and bringing him flowers. Her hair looked just ridiculous too, Ruth thought, a hacked-up, spiked-up copy of Abigail's. It looked as if she'd torn it off in a rage rather than cut it with scissors. Perhaps she had, she wouldn't put it past her. Perhaps she'd used the ripped-off bits to stir into a love potion for Bernard. She could just imagine her mixing it up with his toenail clippings filched from the bin in his bathroom, and chanting and swaying over a boiling pot. Whatever happened to old hippies being gentle old souls permanently tranquillized by too much dope and forever into peace, love and hugging the trees?

Willow silently and swiftly skimmed plaster over Ruth's bottom. Ruth kept obediently quiet, in grudging but genuine respect for a fellow artist's concentration. It felt cold and creamy, and the chalky hardening process began almost immediately, like a good quality face pack. ‘There, it's done,' Willow said, wiping her hands on a damp cloth. ‘Now just lie really still for a while till it dries and I'll be back later to take it off. Just don't move at all, remember, OK? No tightening your butt-muscles or the final cast will look as if you've got a million billion wrinkles all over you and you won't want that . . . I'm just running out to see someone. Won't be long.'

Not so much as a cup of coffee, Ruth thought with disgust, dropping her head comfortably down on to her folded arms and closing her eyes.

Willow scampered down the path, as fast as her clumpy purple and silver boots would take her. Enzo's wind chimes clanged discordantly in the wind, like a storm warning, though to Willow, exhilarated and joyous, they sounded encouragingly like wedding bells. Sounds of drilling and metallic hammering were coming from his workshop and Giuliana's hens clucked close to the escallonia, as if trying to attract someone to rescue them from Enzo's artistic din. ‘Oh, the glorious humming of the creative process,' Willow sang to herself delightedly as she trotted along, skipping girlishly over an old propeller shaft lurking dangerously beneath the fronds of cow parsley and the pink campion.

Bernard was on his balcony sipping an early Beck's and looking out across the river for inspiration. A young, slender woman strolling on the opposite bank with her baby in a pushchair was quite unaware that Bernard was using her to ponder the relative perfect distances between chin and nipple, nipple and navel. Ruth's finished portrait stood on the easel close to the table, which meant that it was still officially work in progress. Every now and then he glanced at it, trying to catch it with an objective eye, trying to decide if it really was as finished as he'd decided it was, or if just a little more tweaking was required. Thinking about this, and concentrating hard on the woman across the river, meant that he didn't hear Willow coming up the spiral stairs and into the room. Usually, by means of the sound of her boots, she gave him several thought-gathering seconds of notice in which he could choose quickly whether to indulge her with a bout of quasi-mystical heavy conversation (especially if she'd brought him a nice present), or fend her off and pretend he was just going out. This time he heard nothing till she stood behind him, filling the space with the sound of her breathing. He heard nothing because she had removed the boots and for luck had removed everything else as well. For a split, silly second it crossed his mind that she was naked so her clothes would make no warning sound – a pretty drastic measure if all she wanted was coffee and a chat or to borrow some linseed oil. It was with an uneasy sense of dread that he dared himself to turn and face her fully, and properly take in the bizarre sight.

‘We are all a gift from nature,' she stated, her hands hanging simply by her sides and her feet close together. Her eyes looked straight ahead of her, just missing Bernard's and staring out past him to the horizon. She looked like a schoolchild at a medical about to have her height measured, Bernard thought. He slugged down the rest of his beer and put the glass on the balcony ledge.

‘You'd better go further back inside,' he told her, looking nervously across to where the woman on the bank, thankfully oblivious, still pushed her sleeping baby.

‘Why? Am I not something to be seen? What is to be hidden?' she asked, forcing him to look at her properly. Terrific tits, he caught himself thinking, to his own surprise. Her crazy hair was haloed with a circlet of ox-eye daisies. Smaller daisies, the child's daisy chain type, were looped round her wrists and ankles and threaded through her pubic hair. ‘Peter Blake did one of his Alice paintings like that,' he commented feebly, wondering how he could decently get past her to the fridge for another, much needed, beer.

‘Er, sit down, why don't you, I'll get you a drink.'

‘I don't want a drink, I want to be painted,' she demanded.

‘What,
now
? Just like that? Come on, Wills, you know better than that. Preparation, forethought, all that.' Just like sex, he thought, wondering if the same idea was going through her mind. Of course it was, why else was she there? He sidled past to the fridge and slyly checked out her back view. Great rear end too, worthy of casting in solid gold. Muscle tone most women would kill for – must be something to do with humping all that heavy clay around. He fumbled in the drawer for the bottle opener and thought of her working, sitting upright and braced at her wheel, legs apart, concentrating with those big teeth biting the bottom lip and hands moulding and tending the clay, teasing it up into shape. He thought of her doing all that as she was now, fresh-naked. Something stirred, at last, and he realized she'd won. Though the defeat, now it had come, wasn't so bad. A small, but vitally conceited part of his mind fast-forwarded to the grand and celebrated old age he'd planned for himself, to future Sunday supplement profiles, to Desert Island Discs, to speeches at his knighthood celebrations, at his Royal Academy presidency acceptance dinner – all the folklore-ish anecdotes and rumoured notoriety. Think Eric Gill, he mused, think Gilbert and George, Ruskin, Picasso, Dali, Warhol – man's fame, in art, depended on so much more than his work alone. Willow, capable of gestures such as this, could become quite an asset for him. She was certainly a more than worthy match.

Stella, arriving home in the middle of the afternoon, immediately missed the council man's car parked outside the rowing club. There was no longer any sign of the pristine Peugeot. He must have finished surveying us, she assumed as she parked opposite the ferry. She wondered what conclusion he'd come to, and if it was either accurate or useful. Toby's garage was closed and padlocked, all work on the Beetle finished too. She'd missed the little car's inaugural run, she realized with regret as she stacked her bags onto the ferry raft. She'd have liked to see it go, polished and immaculate, so different from the sorry wreck that had been towed in a year before, bought more in a spirit of hope than reality from an advert in
Wheelspin
that promised it was ideal for a ‘ground-up body-off resto project.'

She turned the ferry handle, wondering if she was imagining that it was less of an effort than usual or if she was simply trying to justify the expense she and Abigail had gone to at Chameleon. The island seemed very quiet, with no sounds of human activity at all. She could just hear Enzo's chimes from the far end and the squabbling cackle of ducks close to the bank. It was almost as quiet as a dormitory suburb, as if everyone had at last given in and got themselves proper jobs and gone off to city desks. There was a scent of sleepy summer, warm dank leaves, overlong grass and musky wildflowers.

Fresh from the calm of Abigail's pale and empty house, a silent haven of peace where there was so much space that even the shouts and tantrums of the children seemed to be diluted and diminished, her own home seemed crumpled, noisy and crowded. It wasn't a matter of the number or sounds of people it contained – Stella felt crowded in from the moment she stepped into the front garden and had to battle through the overgrown weigela that had taken the opportunity, the moment her back was turned, of reaching out its pink-flowered branches to try to join forces with the cotoneaster on the opposite side. No one in the family, of course, had thought to cut it back. They must simply have shoved it out of the way every time they passed, in the sure unthinking confidence that Stella would deal with it when she got back. On the steps she fumbled in her bag for her door key, noticing that two bulging bags of old newspapers lay abandoned in the porch, too late for that week's collection by the recyling company which picked them up outside the rowing club if anyone remembered to drop them off. No one had, and what else, she wondered, as she let herself in, had they all forgotten to do? She felt a quiet resentment bubbling away, quite obliterating the lovely looking-forward-to-seeing-you feeling she'd carried with her all the way from Sussex. Now she simply envied Abigail her domestic organization. There was not the slightest sense in her immaculately run home that any member of the oh-so-efficient staff could forget to top up the Rinse-Aid in the dishwasher, or allow ten (as they had here) rinsed empty milk bottles to accumulate beside the sink. Mrs Morris had presumably been along to clean as usual, but the family knew she didn't do milk bottles – these had to be hauled along to the stack of empty crates by the ferry where the milkman eventually picked them up. The house could have done with a make-over, too, she thought, wondering how long the efforts of a team of professional Mrs Mops would last, and feeling immediately daunted by the amount of pre-cleaning that would have to be done before any such team could be invited to tackle the job.

She hauled her bags up the stairs and decided to unpack and calm down before going down to the summerhouse and finding Adrian. She didn't want to confront him immediately with trivial domestic grievances – that would be shrewish. She'd work those into general conversation later, when they were all assembled for a decent family telling-off. Much better to present him, as she'd intended, with her newly beautified self, give him a chance to be happy – no, positively invigoratingly
thrilled
to see her. She pottered reasonably happily around the room, stuffing underwear from her bag into the laundry basket and putting the crumpled red dress on the bed, ready to take along to be dry-cleaned later. She picked it up again and sniffed at it. There was still a salty, seawater scent lingering on it, still a trace of sand dropping flecks onto the white duvet cover. Simon, she thought, with a guilty smile, was one of the past week's activities that would be better never mentioned. She'd have to stick to telling them all about Aqua-splash aerobics, seaweed wraps and the hotel restaurant's outrageous mark-up on a couple of bottles of Pol Roger.

Stella was just thinking about trawling through the pile of problem letters that she knew would be waiting for her out on the landing, next to her computer, when the kitchen door slammed violently and a desperate wailing sound filled the house. It soared upwards towards her, the kind of awful it's-so-unfair keening that small children specialize in when their best friend has stolen their favourite toy, followed up by their mother believing the blatant lie that it was a
gift
.

‘Ruth? Whatever's wrong?' Stella hurtled down the stairs and gathered her sobbing daughter into her arms. Only then did she notice that Ruth seemed to be wearing only a fringed Paisley bedspread wrapped round her trembling body. Behind her, leading to the back door was a trail of what looked like white chalk, interspersed with sugary lumps of plaster.