'What are we doing here?' I asked.
'We've come to choose something for the party,' he smiled. 'I want you to have a dress you like, not some old thing you feel you have to wear because it's what you've already got.'
'I can't do that. Not in here. I haven't got enough money, Greg.' I looked around at the few rails and their outfits that cost the equivalent of half my rent for the month. I felt a surge of longing accompanied by a sense of the impossibility of ever owning anything like these dresses with their diaphanous layers and bursts of beads and sequins. I thought of Rachel again. This was the sort of place she shopped. I wondered whether she had ever brought Greg here but quickly fought the thought away. I had to learn not to resent the past.
Back in London Greg had sat on the end of my bed watching while I tried on my two evening dresses. Both were veterans and I wasn't enthuasiastic about either. I had a red velvet one that was a good eight or nine years old and reminded me of a university ball when I'd drunk so much that I'd ended up passing out on one of the benches. It was well cut, though, and good quality, which weighed in its favour against the other, a cheap black number that gave me a decolletage like the mid-Atlantic rift. I'd been wearing that one when I asked for his opinion.
'Well, it's certainly a showcase for your assets,' he'd said, suppressing a grin.
'You're not helping. What about the red one?'
'Bring the black.' He saw my face and held his hand out. 'Come here.' He pulled me close to him and buried his face in my cantilevered bosom. His hair tickled my chin. 'I think you'll look gorgeous.' I'd felt his hands starting to slide up the outside of my thighs, inside the dress, and he'd looked up at me with that particular light in his eyes that I had come to recognise well.
'Greg, we can't. We're supposed to be at the house. We'll be late.'
'Stuff them,' he'd said and hooked his thumbs into the sides of my knickers on his hands' downward journey.
'You're thinking about what I'm thinking about, aren't you?' he asked now, with a knowing smile. 'Perhaps, if you're quick enough about choosing something, we could try that again before lunch.'
'I can't afford to get anything here.'
'Jo, are you being deliberately obtuse? I want to buy you a dress.'
'No. No way. I can't. I'm not that sort of girl. I don't feel comfortable with it.'
'It's got nothing to do with being that sort of girl. Think of it from my point of view. I want to buy you a present and you're not letting me. Now get on with it. You're wasting time.'
The marquee had arrived by the time we got back. As we parked on the front drive, the men from the hire company were carrying the enormous canvas round to the lawn from their van. We said a quick hello and then sneaked inside and upstairs to our room before anyone saw us.
When we came back down Diana was at the kitchen table making the place cards for dinner. On her left was a stack of plain cream cards and on her right a much smaller pile of the ones she'd already written. I picked one up. It was beautifully done, her black ink calligraphy confident and professional. 'Robert Clifford,' I read. 'There's a name I haven't heard for a long time. He was a friend of Lucas's from school.'
'I hadn't realised how many people had accepted until I started this,' said Diana, crossing a name off the list and taking a fresh card.
'How can I help?'
'The marquee guys could probably do with a cup of tea. Would you mind?'
I made up a tray and took it outside. They'd rolled the canvas over the frame and all it needed now was to be pegged down. I went inside. The sun filtering through the thick material was muted, casting the interior in a strange sort of half-light. It was the largest marquee they had, Lucas had told me, and it did feel huge. I imagined what it would be like by the following evening, the tables laid and the band playing, and got a rush of excitement. I liked big parties, ones so huge they became almost impersonal and where, beyond a certain point in the evening, one could wander among the other guests with hardly an interruption. That was my plan, to keep a low profile and enjoy it as if I were anyone else, just let the time pass until it was all over.
After lunch Diana was going to walk Greg and Michael round the garden, to explain how she wanted the Roman candles laid out. 'Lucas, why don't you and Jo do the seating plan?' she'd said on her way out, giving him a handwritten list of all those who had accepted. 'It's no good my doing it. I don't know the politics.' She'd left us alone in the kitchen and we'd hesitated. I was touched by her action. It was obvious that she'd meant it as an opportunity for us to talk.
'We'll go up to the study for some peace and quiet,' said Lucas. I followed him upstairs, past all the boxes, which now filled the back of the house. The caterers had delivered their equipment in advance and the passageway was lined with crates of glassware and dinner services. Cases and cases of wine were stacked in the flower lobby. There were stands for the flowers that we were going to do the next day and also two kegs of beer.
In the study he flipped down the lid of the desk and laid out the plan, fifteen tables of ten. We sat side by side, careful not to let our arms touch, respectful of each other's calls on the placement. We began to fill in names, avoiding putting together groups of people who knew each other too well or not at all, and any potentially acrimonious exes. I realised that it had been more than a year since I'd seen or spoken to a lot of the people on the list and that we must be completely out of touch with their news. 'You've invited Paul,' I said. 'I haven't seen him for ages. I didn't even know he was back from Hong Kong.'
'He's just back. He rang me the other day. I thought you'd like to see him.'
'Definitely. God, do you remember the time he had that party at his parents' house, while they were away?'
'When he and Martha wanted a bonfire but the weather had been so dry and it ended up burning half their lawn?' Lucas grinned.
'And everyone was running in and out of the kitchen with bowls of water, like something from
The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
That was funny.'
'Terrifying until it went out, though.' He laughed.
'Yes, although it would have been worse if we'd been sober. We would have realised how close we were to setting the actual house on fire.' I wrote Paul's name down and turned back to the list.
'I've invited Marianne, too,' he said. 'We've got to be really careful not to put her anywhere near Roger.'
'I thought that was a bit better now.'
He shook his head. 'No, she'll never forgive him. It was her sister, though.'
We looked at each other. There was a dancing light in Lucas's eyes and his amusement was as infectious as ever. He raised his eyebrows and I couldn't stop myself from laughing. 'Don't,' I said. 'It's too mean of us.'
'Sorry. I don't know why that cracks me up so much. I think it's just because it's like something out of
Dear Deirdre.
"My boyfriend ran off with my sister."
The laughing dispelled much of the tension in the air and we both relaxed. I turned my attention back to the plan. After a quarter of an hour or so, I moved my chair back and looked round the room. 'It's tidier in here,' I said.
'We had a clean-up, sorted out some of the paperwork. It's a bit less chaotic.' He got up and went to the window. Taking me by complete surprise, he put his fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistled loudly. 'Looks great from this angle,' he shouted. I heard Diana laugh.
'Tomorrow should be good,' he said, sitting down at the desk again. 'Thank you again for coming - it means a lot to me, as you know. It's going to be an end and a beginning. The beginning of my new life, getting going on my book properly, but also a kind of goodbye to Patrick. A send-off and a thank you. I've got something to show you.' He pulled open one of the drawers and removed a roll of paper about a metre long that he spread out on the desk, carefully weighting down the corners with books from the stack on the floor. 'Do you recognise it?'
I stared at it. 'It's the picture on the ceiling.' I leant in to get a better look. It was all there, the design for the painting that filled the dome in the main hall. It was a charcoal sketch, smudged but instantly recognisable. There were all the characters, the huge man lolling on his chaise longue with the women at his hands and his feet, the beautiful Ganymede with his drinking bowl, the huddle of men behind and the children in the foreground. The trailing vines, too, were sketched in. 'It's amazing,' I said. Even on such a small scale, the grandeur of the finished painting was visible.
'But look,' said Lucas, running his finger down the edge of the paper to the bottom right-hand corner. 'Look at this. PCH. Patrick Charles Heathfield.' He took another roll of paper from the drawer. 'There's more. Detailed sketches.' He laid three smaller pieces of paper out on the desk. There they were, ink studies of the faces of the women and of the illustration of the hares and deer chasing each other in perpetuity around the edge of the golden drinking bowl. The lines were fine and clear, the ink more of a match for time than the charcoal.
'What does it mean? Patrick painted the ceiling?' I said. 'Did you know?'
'Never.' He smiled and shook his head.
'Why not? That's mad. If he did, why didn't he tell you?'
'I don't know why no one ever told me but I'm almost one hundred per cent sure it was him. Take another look at the women.'
I recognised them from the films more than anything. The finished painting looked so like a classical scene in the Renaissance style that it had never occurred to me to try to ascribe the women real human identities, but on the sketches, at close range, there could be no doubt about who they were. Claire and Elizabeth, in their twenties, stared up at me from their two dimensions. I grabbed Lucas's arm. 'It's your mother. And Elizabeth.'
'Have a guess who the children are, then,' he said.
'My God, Lucas, you're in a painting.' I laughed. 'And Patrick was a painter, a really, really good one.'
Lucas was laughing, too, clearly pleased by my reaction to the news. 'I knew you'd like it. Only you and I and Diana know at the moment. It's incredible, isn't it? I'm seeing a Patrick I never knew.'
I stood up and walked out on to the landing. Exactly like the first time I ever saw the picture, light was streaming in through the windows at the base of the dome, flooding the space above. The light was softer now, though, than the intense winter light of that first morning. It offered a kinder view of the painting. Tipping my head back to look at it properly, I realised I was looking at a family portrait. Now I knew what I did, the two children were clearly a male and a female. I turned to Lucas beside me. 'So who's the man on the couch?'
'I think it's Patrick, don't you?' he said.
We went back into the study. I still couldn't quite believe it. If Patrick had painted the ceiling, and it did seem he had, why didn't anyone know about it? Lucas explained that he had come for the Christmas holidays once and found the painting under way. 'The scheme of it was sketched out on the plaster,' he said, 'and the part with the wine bowl was painted in. Patrick told me that the artist had gone to see his family in America for Christmas and wouldn't be back until I'd gone to school. At Easter that year we went to Italy on one of Patrick's educational tours - makes sense now, Italy, given the style of it - and when I came back for the summer holiday, it was finished and the alleged artist was gone.'
'He must have worked like a demon to do it in less than a year,' I said.
'He was like that,' Lucas replied. 'No half measures ever.'
'So why the hell didn't anyone know he did it?'
He turned up his palms and shrugged. His face was lit by his smile and I couldn't take my eyes off him. At first, I couldn't understand what it was about his expression that was so arresting and then I realised: I was looking at the old Lucas, the one I hadn't seen for months. He was still there; beneath everything that had happened during the year - the difficulties between us and his drinking - the old, kind Lucas was still there. The thought made my heart happy. Perhaps, even after everything, with some more time that Lucas would become the dominant one.
He turned to the projector. 'There's something else I want to show you,' he said, picking out a cassette. 'It was the last one in the box.' He snapped on the machine and the familiar round-cornered square of light filled the wall above the fireplace. The iron rings clattered along the rails as he pulled the curtains and plunged the room into darkness.
The camera is outside the study. It is a secret eye. The hand
that holds it
is
steady for the most part but now and then a
tremor moves the lens and it catches the edge of the door in
close-up, the glossy white paint, the familiar knot in the wood
at eye-level.
Inside the room are two Elizabeths. One is a silhouette in
front of the window, her face in shadow, the sun falling
through her thick black hair from behind, turning it blue. The
other sits at a table in the evening, a white silk dress fitting
closely around her shoulders and her breasts. One hand cups
her jaw, the other holds a cigarette between the middle and
index fingers, the touch so light it seems she might drop it at
any time, just let it fall without noticing.
The second Elizabeth looks like a Helen of Troy The artist
has captured the haematite sheen of her hair, the nacre skin.
She is a woman whose beauty might lead a man to lose
himself
The first runs her fingers over the surface of her alter-ego,
feeling where the paint is thick and textured, where its
smoothness lets her lines flow. She lingers in front of the
easel, enchanted.
She turns and, in the fear of discovery, the lens ducks,
shows the doorjamb. A few seconds pass in examination of
the landing's pale-green carpet until, reassured that its presence
is undetected, the camera resumes its position in the
crook of the open door.