‘Steer it round the bear traps and pull it out when it fell in them,’ Tate said sadly and she watched him until she felt ready to finish.
‘Wasn’t to be, though. Six weeks later it was all over. I still can’t look at yellow tiles …’
She swallowed hard when she felt his arm come round her, seeing herself hunched over in the upstairs bathroom unable to comprehend how the bit of sky she could see through the window could still be blue or grasp the reality of what was happening to her. All she knew was that something so tiny, barely there, was knocking a hole in her by going.
‘Yellow tiles?’ Tate asked gently.
‘We had them in the upstairs bathroom.’ That was all she could say.
Tate kept quiet for a while, just holding her before saying, tentatively, ‘You might have to go back through some of
that, Gracie sweetheart, because I’m still missing how it was your fault.’
It all came out in a rush. ‘The drink, the cigarettes, the drugs, staying up all night, not eating properly, the mess and dirt in that villa. I never gave the baby a chance … it was no different than waiting for it to be born and holding a pillow over its—’
Tate’s arm came off her shoulders and he was turning her towards him.
‘Take a breath, Gracie, and listen to me. First off, women lose babies for all kinds of reasons, particularly early on. All kinds of reasons. So, if you’d lived like a saint you might still have had a miscarriage. My sister, she had one and she’s so shiny and healthy you could eat off her.’
‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’
‘Don’t, Gracie,’ he said so severely that it made her jerk back. ‘Don’t be a smartass. This is my sister we’re talking about. I’ve never got to know her as well as I should, but I saw her right after it happened and it was real pain she was going through. Right to the bone.’ He put his hand on the back of his neck and rubbed it. ‘Did everything by the book before she got pregnant and afterwards. Same end result.’
‘But I didn’t do everything by the book,’ she shouted, wishing he’d understand. The woman with the dog was
coming back and she stepped into the gutter to avoid Grace. She remembered how, when her life had been under control, she had done that with the Special Brew man.
‘Gracie,’ Tate said forcefully. ‘You didn’t do it by the book, but you didn’t do any of that other stuff on purpose either. Having a miscarriage brings enough guilt with it as it is and you’re putting all this extra stuff on top? Surely Fliss, your sisters, they’ve said the same as I’m saying?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never told anyone. You’re the first.’ Even now she wasn’t sure she could say
I lost my baby
in front of anyone but Tate.
Tate looked as if he’d just seen something horrible.
‘You are kidding me?
Nobody
has helped you with this?’ He had her hand again. ‘Gracie, my sister took months to get over it, and I’m not sure “get over” is the right expression. She’s got a little girl now, a healthy one, but I know she still has that one day a year when she goes off on her own. Remembers. And she’s had family and friends to talk it through with. You should have had help.’
She was going to say she didn’t deserve help because that was the next line she always said to beat herself with, but she glanced at Tate and saw his eyes were filling with tears.
‘What are you doing?’ She couldn’t keep the wonder out of her voice.
‘We Americans call it crying.’
‘But why?’
‘Because it’s so damn sad,’ he said smearing the tears that were now running freely all across his cheeks. ‘No help? Not even in the hospital?’
‘Not really. I didn’t speak the kind of Spanish you needed in that situation.’ And she hadn’t missed the looks from some of the nurses, nurses who she’d seen in the bars around San Sebastián.
Tate sounded even sadder. ‘This is crap. All this time you’ve tried to cope on your own and ended up blaming the one person you should have taken care of and been kind to before anyone else.’
She continued to watch, feeling as if she was trying to find a way through her own emotions while interpreting his. She wasn’t picking up any signs of disgust or even disappointment – if you’re disgusted you don’t cry, do you? She almost couldn’t bear to have hope. She thought of the bathroom again, the rush to the hospital, the noise and activity and then the long drop into silence. It had felt like a pit with a spike in it, just for her, and every time she thought of what she’d done, that spike was still lodged in her guts.
‘I think the baby, the one in the icons, is watching me. Judging me,’ she said. ‘Asking me how I could be so callous. So careless with a life. I should have—’
‘Nope. Should have, would have, could have … all crap. It just happened.’
‘Tate, please.’
‘Please what? Agree that it was your fault because you’ve got to the point where guilt and shame feels like somewhere familiar and warm to live? No way, Gracie, I’m hauling you out of there.’
‘How can you really think it wasn’t my fault?’ she said incredulously.
‘Shouldn’t the question be: how can I really think it was?’
She didn’t answer. She had scrunched up her face to try to keep everything from spilling out into wet, guttering sadness. She heard Tate sigh.
‘OK, different approach. I’m gonna be blindingly honest. Would that help? It would? Well, here goes. This is my head talking, not my heart. No, I don’t think a diet of Rioja and weed and all that other stuff is a particularly good start for a baby, but babies survive worse – doesn’t do them much good, but they make it to getting born. And there are a million reasons why what happened to your baby happened. You gonna go through all of them and feel responsible for each one? Or you gonna do the sensible thing and howl at the moon because sometime’s life is just a bitch and takes the very things from you that are gonna hurt the most?’
She considered that for a while, every now and again checking his face to see if his expression was changing to something more critical. If anything, the warmth in his eyes seemed to be intensifying.
Was it possible to think back on those days in Spain without them being slicked in black, sticky guilt?
They watched a man in a suit walk by, surreptitiously checking on their faces as if he was worried that their emotion would leak out and touch him. Tate squeezed her hand.
‘Howling’s gotta be better than this, hasn’t it? And, come on. I’m sensing there’s something else. Am I right?’
She nodded. ‘I … I was the one who burned Bill’s paintings. I built the bonfire. I hurled them on.’
He did a good job of trying to look as if that didn’t shock him but he had cut the blood supply off to her fingers he was gripping her hand so tightly.
‘I told you when I go I really go.’
‘Yup, you did. Jeez.’ He gave her a sideways glance. ‘So …’
‘When I came back to the villa after leaving hospital, Bill couldn’t cope with how I was. He was fine with emotion on a canvas, daubing great swirls of despair in paint, but not the real, standing-in-the-bathroom-sobbing kind. I think he felt guilty too, but in him it came out in bluster.
And I spooked him. Suddenly I seemed to be more of a grown-up than him. I was sober and sad – he couldn’t handle that.’
Tate made a noise but didn’t say any actual words.
‘One evening Bill lost it completely. He was ranting about how he knew I blamed him for what had happened and really I should just get over it – after all, it was for the best.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. ‘You can imagine how good that was to hear. He just kept spouting about how he was a free spirit; nothing weighed him down, not even his paintings. Boasted that he’d even destroy them if he suspected they were trapping him.’
‘And you called his bluff.’
‘I went to the bottom of the garden, to an area of scrub, and piled up a load of brushwood. It was so dry it went up really fast and I ran to the studio and grabbed the nearest painting.
Two Sidewinder Days in Madrid
it was.’ She heard herself laugh. ‘The look on Bill’s face was worth it. And you know what, Tate? It felt so good to see it go up. Felt right. He ought to lose something he’d created and cared about like I had.’ She remembered how the thick oil paint had made the flames spark into different colours.
‘Bill had followed me out and just stood there watching. I asked him if it hurt seeing his painting burn and he said
it didn’t. I could tell he was lying. Always a liar about how much of a rebel he was. I roasted another painting and he still stood there, his hands twitching as he tried to fight the urge to salvage something.’
‘Weren’t you tempted to pick him up and hurl him on?’
She managed a smile at that. ‘I did throw a lot of his clothes on, but he wasn’t in any of them. After that second painting I would probably have stopped, if Bill hadn’t suddenly rushed into the villa and come out with a box. He upended it into the fire and I saw it was all my baby books.’ She stopped talking for a while and let Tate pull her in closer.
‘After that I got three of his smaller works and immolated them, but I could feel my rage subsiding and I just felt weary. I needed to sleep but he told me I should finish the job. When I said “no”, he went and got one of his best pieces and chucked it on. Said he was going to show me what real courage looked like.’
Tate slapped his leg. ‘Love it. He even had to be top pyromaniac.’
‘Yes, he did. He just kept bringing them out and burning them. When I felt that I was so tired I was likely to fall in after them, I left him to it and went to bed.’
Tate gave a low whistle. ‘All of his Spanish period up in flames.’
‘Not quite. When I woke up next morning, the villa smelling of smoke, ash blowing about in the garden, I knew everything was over. I went home not long after. By the end of the year Bill had taken himself off to Mexico, but before he went he’d been busy. A couple of months after I got home, a big crate was delivered to the house in Newham. It had six new paintings in it – a record of our love affair from those blissful times on the beach to the gut-stabbingly awful trauma of the last months. The letter with them said Bill had painted them in the empty villa, wanted me to have them to make up for how he’d been. Said he regretted the way it had ended, how he’d been about me, about the baby.’
‘That was big of him. And so that painting last week?’
‘Sold it while I was in Edinburgh. I had no idea that it was on loan until I saw it with you. Another two I sold to a banker in Houston. The other three are still under my bed. Selling some meant I could get a nice flat, pay off a lot of the mortgage. It also gave me the freedom to take a job that I liked rather than one I needed for the money. You see, for a long time I wasn’t any good with pressure or stress.’
She was seeing that bonfire again. ‘Oh God, I can’t believe I burned those paintings. Is that what love becomes?’
‘No. And stop feeling guilty. Bill got what he deserved
and, really, he could have stopped you at any point if he’d wanted. A guy who can break his own son’s jaw isn’t gonna be backward in getting his own way. He goaded you. It was all down to him.’
‘Have you taken a course in forgiveness?’ she said, putting her hand to his face.
‘Yeah, but it didn’t cover Bill. I’m thinking of going back to that gallery, pulling his painting off the wall and putting my foot through it.’ He laughed and there was so much warmth in it Grace felt it defrost her a little.
‘Right,’ he said, taking hold of her hand and waggling it about. ‘Gonna tell me you’re responsible for the fall of the banks? Climate change? Volcanoes erupting in the Pacific? No? Well, great. Means we can go to Paris then.’
‘Just like that?’ She heard the panic in her voice.
‘Exactly like that.’
She looked at the taxi and saw the driver had reached the sport’s page of his newspaper. ‘The train will have gone.’
He snorted. ‘Don’t think so. Got over an hour yet.’
‘But you said I had twenty minutes, half an hour at a stretch.’
‘Only ’cos I knew if I told you the real amount of time we had, you’d fight me for that long. Figured I’d go for the shorter fight.’
‘I’m not sure I can do it, Tate. Even if I come round to thinking I’m not responsible for losing the baby and destroying the paintings, I still feel happier when I have structure, guidelines, rules, routines … without them, I don’t know where I’ll end up. I mean, look at the last few weeks: I started opening up to you, letting my grip loosen and everything went wrong. The robberies, Gilbert, Esther—’
‘Alistair dressing up in women’s clothes.’
That stopped her in her tracks. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘Picked the lock on his cabinet when he was out. Boy, they were big strappy shoes.’ He planted a kiss on her hand and let it drop.
‘You picked the lock? That’s so …’
‘Bad,’ he said with an evil smile.
She was finding it hard to remember why she couldn’t go with him.
‘You didn’t make any of those things happen, Gracie. I made Esther have the hots for me. I got Gilbert drunk. Everything else would have happened anyway. You’ve just fitted everything into that negative theory in your head, like your dad fitted me into his theories.’
She looked at the taxi driver. He was on the back page.
‘I can’t go. I’m starting a new job. A proper one. They’ll be expecting me. I’ll be letting them down.’
‘They’ll live. Got time to get someone else in.’
Tate was standing up and he pulled her up too.
‘Gracie, you’re a bat-shit crazy woman, but ’cos you’re the bat-shit crazy woman I love, I’m gonna humour this Surtees Theory of Chaos. First stop in Paris is a stationer’s. Wall planner, notebooks, little sticky, coloured tags. We’re having rotas, rotas for everything, even sex. And boy, I’m going to keep you so busy you won’t have time for spinning out of control. You’re a natural organiser, Gracie, a manager par excellence. And you speak French, don’t you? So either you can get yourself a grown-up job, or you can manage me – I’m not dicking around with painting like it’s a hobby or a sideline. Besides, I’ll need you to do all the translating and interpreting. I can only say, “Vouz avez des seins magnifiques,” which I’m sure as hell gonna be using a lot on you, but it’s not gonna get me far with any potential clients. Might even get my face slapped. Proper wages, Gracie, though. You’re not being my handmaiden. And …’ There was the subtlest of pressure changes in the way he was holding her. ‘Maybe, when you feel up to it, we could find some head guy to sort out all that guilt you’re carrying around. You know us Americans, we like to spill it all out and pay top dollar for the privilege.’ Another, stronger hug. ‘No, you’re not gonna have a minute free to slide anywhere and I’m gonna carry a handrail with me at all times so you can’t fall off the edge.’