The Deadly Space Between (13 page)

‘How appropriate. I don’t mean the wolves. I mean Christmas.’

_{*  *  *}

Christmas was three weeks away. We drove out to Heathrow. Much against Iso’s principled inclinations we had agreed to pick up Luce and Liberty. Their night flight from New York arrived at seven in the morning. But it was grim raining dark, and we had miscalculated the traffic. The M25 rolled along like an accordion played in slow motion. We doubled back, but even the last push coming down off the M4 was irritatingly slow. The lights before us were smeared with rain. We missed the signs and got stuck in the tunnel trying to find Terminal 4. The cars stalled, nose to tail. Iso had difficulty keeping Luce’s Volvo ticking over. Liberty had left the thing in our street on the grounds that car theft was unknown outside our house and that Iso could start the beast from time to time and save the battery. But Iso was still furious with Luce and hadn’t touched the car once. The engine sputtered, gulped, shut down.

‘Don’t flood the motor. Leave it a minute.’ She was afraid of seeing Luce.

Iso swore. Nothing happened.

‘Shall I get out and run for it?’

‘No. Don’t leave me. If you do this thing will never start again.’

‘Well, should I push?’

The engine gagged as she turned the key again and again.

‘Fuck this bloody car.’

The Volvo burst into indignant life.

We had to separate at the entry to the short-term car park where the queue had ceased to move at all and desperate late passengers began hauling suitcases out of their boots. I ran through the rain into the terminal building, leaving Iso to do battle with the temperamental Volvo. The arrivals board had
LANDED
written up beside the flight. Luce came marching out of
NOTHING TO DECLARE
with her cigarette defiantly alight. She aimed straight for me like a programmed missile.

‘Well? Is he still there? Answer me, you little beast! Has she chucked him?’

I deflected the first attack. Most of the terminal building was a no-smoking zone. I confiscated Luce’s cigarette before a uniformed supervisor could pounce. He backed off.

‘If you mean Roehm, then no, he’s still there.’

‘Buggering hell!’ shouted Luce, sitting down abruptly on the caddy, which I had pushed as close as I dared to the arrivals exit.

‘Does Liberty need any help with the bags?’

‘Even if she did you can’t go in. You’re unauthorized personnel. Where’s Iso?’

‘Trying to find a space in the short-term car park.’

Luce remembered her manners. She swayed to her feet a little shakily and kissed me.

‘It’s sweet of you both to come and pick us up. God, I hate aeroplanes. We’re sitting there in mid-Atlantic, suspended over bottomless depths, the thing isn’t even wobbling, nothing but endless black above and beneath and all you can hear is a gentle roar, and I realize that it’s stopped. It’s just stopped. And Liberty is utterly infuriating. She settles down inside one of those dark blue BA blankets with a little pink cushion and she sleeps like a baby. And when I shake her awake, convinced that the thing is about to fall out of the air, all she can say is, “Stuff it, Luce, you’ve drunk too many gins.” ’

I put my arm around my great-aunt.

‘Don’t worry, Luce. Ten hours’ sleep and you’ll forget the flight. I hear that the trip was a great success.’

We had received three conciliatory and ecstatic postcards.

‘It was while we were there. People in New York tend to forget who you are as soon as you walk out of the room. I just hope that all my negotiating won’t go for nothing. I need someone to go out again soon and follow up my contacts, someone to keep pushing the samples and the catalogues, force them to watch videos of the Paris show and then sign here, just above the dots.’

She reached for her cigarettes again.

‘New York’s amazing. I feel as if I’ve been living at the same speed as the Keystone cops and now we’re back the movie has slowed down. It’s another world. They’ve heard of Europe, but they really aren’t that interested. We get the wrong idea about America from the ones that live over here. We think that they’re pseudo-Europeans. But they’re not. They’re all completely deracinated and traumatized because they’ve noticed that the rest of the world exists. And that it’s different. The ones that live in the US have yet to realize the truth. We’re aliens! What a shock! That’ll keep them in therapy for decades.’

Luce lit up another cigarette with a vindictive flourish. She looked up at me through a little cloud of dragon’s breath. She was still thinking about Roehm.

‘Does he come to the house?’

‘Yes. Not often. Luce, you can’t smoke here.’

‘How often?’

‘Oh, how should I know how often? She has sex with him in the studio.’

Luce smoked an entire cigarette before replying. Then she stood up and gave me a glare that would have mesmerized Medusa.

‘And you watched?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m in two minds as to whether I should ring the social services or the police.’

‘Luce, there’s no point. I’m eighteen. You can’t say anything to her. She doesn’t know I saw.’

Luce suddenly exploded at full volume.

‘How dare you watch your mother making love to another man, you infantile pornographer!’

Everybody within earshot stared at us. I felt surprisingly nonchalant. I had intended to shock Luce, and was delighted that my ploy had worked. The tale had the advantage of being true. I looked at her indulgently, as if I was humouring a mad relative who made scenes in public. My motives were obscure, even to myself. I wanted someone else to know what had happened. But my own view of the event had altered radically in the weeks that followed. I was no longer angry, humiliated, ashamed, but strangely excited. The worm of pleasure had entered my skin and begun to burrow and turn. It was as if Roehm had made me a promise and offered me a gift.

‘I didn’t mean to watch them. I wasn’t spying or anything. I was in the garden and they turned on all the lights. The entire neighbourhood was probably watching too. I was a bit freaked out at the time. But I’ve gotten over it. Luce, I see and hear far worse things at school.’

Luce sat back down on the caddy. Her shoulders sagged. She was exhausted. A wave of tired excited faces began to pour out through the glass doors. We found ourselves surrounded by chauffeurs waving placards:
BENSON
,
ARIANE PLC
,
GREY WOLF PUBLISHERS
,
HENDERSON ELECTRONICS
,
MRS S
.
GUPTA
, pushing their block capitals before them like a bizarre Scrabble game. A woman in a wheelchair, being propelled at speed by a British Airways official, ran over my foot. Everything smelt of humid winter rain. Far above us the security announcements faded into a verse of ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen . . . tidings of comfort and joy’. Here comes Liberty with a spiky, dyke haircut. She has clearly gone native in Greenwich Village. Her huge hug engulfs me.

‘Guess what, kiddo. I went out and got myself a tattoo. D’you want to look?’

_{*  *  *}

The doorbell rang at five the next day. It was either grasping carol singers or the local Evangelicals bent on explaining the True Meaning of Christmas. We had dealt with both last year. I paused in the hallway and put on the porch light. The bulb was still alive. Through the organic swirls of green and red Victorian glass, I saw a huge dark shape standing just inside the pergola. Roehm. She hadn’t cut back the Virginia creeper, which hung in sad dead strands over the entrance. I saw him framed by dead vegetation as if his presence had caused the world to darken and to die. He knew I was there, watching. I hesitated. He spoke.

‘Toby? Open the door.’

It was the sound of his voice that changed everything; measured, firm, expecting nothing but immediate obedience. It was the implicit acknowledgement and recognition in the way he used my name, which made me catch my breath. You’re here again. You’ve come back for me. I was chosen. Addressed. I flung open the door.

‘Why didn’t you ring me? I wanted to see you.’

He spoke the words. They were burning my mouth. I could never have said them out loud, neither to myself, nor to him.

‘I dunno. I should’ve thanked you for dinner. I thought you might come round.’ I faded out. ‘She never told me you were expected. Come in anyway.’

He was carrying three bags from Safeway. As he stepped past he kissed my cheeks, lightly, in the French way, the way men kiss one another in France, when they are family or when they have always loved each other.

‘Your mother invited me to dinner. But you know what she’s like,’ he took off his coat and hung it up as if he had lived in the house all his life, ‘so I went to Safeway on the way here and bought the food. Now we shall cook it together.’

He lit a cigarette and strolled into the kitchen. I could no longer conceal my pleasure.

‘I’m glad you’ve come. Do you want a drink?’

We went through the wines lodged under the stairs. Some were still in the wine rack, but some were piled up on top of her shoes. Roehm disentangled a bottle from a muddy pair of lace-up boots.

‘Juilènas. Did she buy that in France?’

‘Present from Françoise, I think.’

‘Let’s open that. Will she mind?’

‘Oh no. She won’t even notice.’

‘Don’t underestimate her. She doesn’t miss much.’

I felt rebuked. He acknowledged this at once.

‘She doesn’t always comment on what she sees. And she isn’t always clear. You think she has abandoned you. But nothing could be further from the truth. Toby, if she ever had to choose between us she would choose you.’

The grey eyes met mine. The extraordinary content of this speech and its inappropriateness in the situation never occurred to me. I felt judged and reassured. It was as if he could not only read my feelings, but control them.

Roehm began opening the bottle. The corkscrew snapped apart in his hands.

‘Oh dear,’ said Roehm calmly, ‘it must have had rust fatigue.’

We began a futile search for another bottle opener. In the end Roehm constructed one from a discarded drill, which we unearthed among the archaeological layers of her painting equipment box, and a piece of driftwood she had used as an object in a nautical still life. I felt odd being near to him in the studio. I backed away from the table under the window. Roehm chuckled to himself, but gave no other sign that he knew what I was remembering. He studied the speckled shells, rounded stones, dried starfish and oysters that were carefully arranged on a ripped piece of canvas.

‘She doesn’t paint traditional subjects,’ he said thoughtfully, staring at the beach relics.

‘No. But she draws them.’

I flicked open her sketchbook, which lay upon the table. She drew something every day. Sometimes it was domestic, my foot hanging over the edge of the sofa as I lay watching television, the core of an apple left on the draining board, the handle of the stove just below the radio, a vase with a crack which we no longer used for flowers. But here too were all the elements of the classical still life, fruit in a bowl, a pyramid of flour alongside a breadboard, a rolling pin and a wooden spoon, a peach and a pear assaulted by bees, wilted flowers lolling in a glass. She used pencil, inks, charcoal. Roehm looked at each image carefully as if he were recording them and storing them away.

‘She tells the students to draw something every day. It helps them to see. You have to learn how to see. Observe, observe perpetually.’ I imitated her Do As I Say tones.

Roehm laughed out loud.

‘Let’s cook,’ he said.

We were having trout. He laid out the pink-speckled fish upon the draining board. There were four. I suggested that we should have one each and lay the other in amongst her oceanic
objets trouvés
.

‘Not a bad idea,’ said Roehm. He washed his hands carefully. ‘The subject of every still life is really eternity, death and immortality. So you wouldn’t be wrong to do that. If you look at the still lives of the great masters they will often contain dead rabbits or a death’s head. But even if you paint the passage of time on the furred nap of a peach your audience will still get the message. All picked fruit rots and dies. It’s possible to paint death, even to paint the moment of death itself, but hard to paint its inevitable approach.’

He reached for the potato peeler and we set to work. I noticed something strange about the way he moved about the kitchen. He didn’t rummage in drawers or cupboards as guests do when they are trying to help. He didn’t look for herbs or utensils. He already knew where they were. So far as I was aware Roehm had never stayed in our house. He had never been there in the mornings. I began to wonder if I had been ignorant of his passage through the household and imagined a secret conspiracy, complete with priest’s holes and roof-top exits, to disguise his presence and his departures. But it was impossible. I knew every groan and creak of the doors and stairs. I plotted her every movement across the floors. I had a clear view of the front entrance and the porch roof from my attic. I could hear every word spoken three floors down at the bottom of the staircase. He had never worked in the kitchen. He could not have known the kitchen. But he did.