A Trick of the Mind (7 page)

I went down the steps, between the steep banks of brambles and dog rose and nettles to the promenade with its pretty beach huts, then took my boots and socks off and ran down the rest of the
concrete stairs to the beach.

Feeling the cool sand beneath my feet, I walked over to my friends. Pepper ran towards me and jumped up and I picked him up and kissed his warm fur.

I would try from now on to forget about the hospital. It was unlikely anything would come of my visit. You had to live in the present, as my yoga teacher was always reiterating. Be mindful of
now. I would devote myself to being a good hostess for my friends. To the Private View tonight. Tomorrow I’d help Chiara make breakfast for everyone. Kippers, as Liam had suggested, with
lemon, and poached eggs and slices of that lovely three-grain bread you could buy at the deli.

Later we could take the walk over the footbridge to the other side of the estuary, to Walberswick, and have coffee in the café there. I would begin again. I would have the weekend I
intended to have when I first invited everyone down here.

I stood welcoming people in the doorway of the gallery. The glass of Prosecco that Valerie thrust into my hands as soon as I arrived gave me a warm glow. The incident with
Patrick had gone distant, ethereal. The hospital visit, too, had faded, seemed unreal. I would leave it like that, a tiny aberration, and move on.

‘Your pictures are looking fantastic, come and see.’

I followed Valerie through the whitewashed ex-chapel, arched windows at either end letting in bright, white, seaside light.

The paintings were set off by the space. I could hardly believe they were mine.

‘I love your idea, using these magnets to hang them. Very cool,’ she said.

‘It’s what everyone’s doing in Oz,’ said Louise, standing beside me.

Valerie said, ‘They look great, don’t they? I like things on board, unframed. And they’re certainly in good company.’

One or two of the other artists sold through up-market galleries in London. I knew for a fact that one had a painting in the Tate. I’d been chosen to show my work among long-established
artists. I felt a twinge of pride. If only the other people I loved and cared about were here. Aunty May, of course. But Dad too, trapped by his agoraphobia to the confines of his little studio
flat in Greenwich. My brother Ben, off on some business trip. My mum, tied down by work.

It was busy but quiet. People moved about with catalogues, murmuring. They looked wealthy and middle-aged, well dressed in that casual, we-have-natural-good-taste way. Understated, but very
expensive fabrics. I smiled. Shook people’s hands. Answered their questions about my inspiration (rivers, mostly the Thames, though I’d started working on the Blyth recently), where I
worked (no one could believe I didn’t have a studio but worked on the sitting-room floor in our Mile End flat), my themes (the boundaries between land and sea, water and sky, light and dark,
life and death, layers beneath the surface) and who my influences were. I mentioned one or two people who had also, in different ways, taken inspiration from rivers – Alexander Pemberton,
Frank Creber – and used layering and texture as part of their works – Andrew Taylor, Paul Klee, Rothko.

My most revered artists? Turner, and Whistler. My all-time favourite painting of the moment I told them was Whistler’s
Battersea Reach
.

As I stood and chatted, Larry came past on his bike. He stopped outside the window and pressed up against the glass. He spotted me, pointed, and said something. Watching the big unformed
movements of his mouth I guessed he was talking about May being gone again, but it was impossible to hear through the window, his breath steaming up the glass. He moved to the entrance, stood in
the doorway, and repeated, ‘Lady gone. Not coming back.’

A middle-aged couple edged past him and he repeated whatever he was saying, pointing at me. They shrugged, smiled, and moved on through the door.

I turned my back on the window and when I next looked, Larry had gone.

Most people were examining the labels before they looked at the pictures. It’s often the name that captures the buyers first. They read it, then look at the painting,
trying to work out in what way it warrants the title.

Left to me I wouldn’t have bothered with them. The work, I believed, and Finn would certainly argue, should speak for itself. None of my works were exactly figurative, though they were
based on scenes, and there were allusions to shapes, forms. I allowed these to develop until I reached a point of resolution. But the galleries liked titles because they sold. People wanted to feel
they’d bought something that they understood or recognised. They also loved to buy a painting that suggested somewhere they had been or something they had experienced. Anything with local
place names sold.

Valerie came over to me about half an hour in.

She leant her head towards mine and spoke in an undertone, nodding towards a man in a suit with a petite silver-haired woman.

‘They asked me to introduce you. Come on.’

They were looking at my picture that was based on the creek over near May’s house, where it was broad and flat, where the sky was massive and the horizon melded into the edge of the water.
I’d begun it in the winter during one of my visits after May died, trying to express this blurring of boundaries, the water reflecting the sky, the sky reaching right down to the
water’s surface, the sense of an underlying menace beneath the beauty. I had used the same blues and silvers Whistler employed, and it was a painting I was quietly proud of.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ Valerie asked.

‘Sure,’ the man said. ‘And perhaps you could help, we were wondering about the starting price of this.’

‘This is Ellie, the artist. I’ll leave you to chat while I fetch the list,’ Valerie said.

‘How are you?’ He was grey-haired, but his skin was smooth. He seemed to shimmer as if everything he wore was made of the best-quality silk in that indeterminate shade of grey that
speaks of exquisite taste. ‘So
you’re
the artist. Wow! We were admiring this piece.’

The woman, who had a pleasantly lined face, pink lipstick, and twinkling turquoise eyes, took my hand. ‘You’re a very talented young woman,’ she said. ‘We’ve picked
you out. My husband runs a gallery in his restaurant in New York. We’d like to have a chat with you sometime, could we have your card?’

‘Ellie?’

Valerie had come back with the price list, gave me an almost imperceptible nod, and moved away to greet another gaggle of well-dressed people who had just arrived.

‘We’ll put in a bid for this. But we wondered whether you took commissions.’

The man flipped a card out of a calf leather wallet and put it into my hand. ‘Here are my contact details.’

I groped in my bag for my diary, where I kept cards like his. It wasn’t there. I slipped it into my purse instead.

‘We’re looking for something for a restaurant in the Meatpacking District, a fish place. Something similar to this, but it must be six feet by four. Are you interested? We need it by
August.’

‘Of course.’ Trying to suppress the rising excitement I really felt.

‘I’ll call you to discuss details. Give me your cell number.’

‘What did he say?’ It was Chiara, when the man and his wife had moved away.

‘He’s buying the big oil,’ I said. ‘And they commission work.’

She beamed at me and I allowed myself to beam back.

‘Bloody hell! Exciting! I knew you’d do it! At last the world is recognising your true talent.’

‘What’s all this?’ said Louise.

‘Blimey!’ she said, when Chiara had filled her in. She held up her glass. ‘Guy! Liam, over here. Listen to this. That’s so fantastic for you, honey. I’m
thrilled.’

I smiled at her, and she looked pleased for me. She really did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Liam had to leave after our kipper breakfast on Sunday morning, as he was doing the sound check for a gig in our local pub that night, and I was relieved that it meant Chiara
would be coming back in the car with me. She would be my other pair of eyes, like a second pilot, ensuring I wasn’t distracted. A chaperone to make sure I didn’t get obsessed with some
daft idea that I’d hit someone on the road!

Last night my friends had stayed up late.

Liam had got the fresh fish he’d talked about the night before from one of the fishing huts – sea bass – and wanted to do it in a salt crust as he’d seen all the TV chefs
doing, and Guy offered to help, so we women sat by the wood-burner with bottles of wine and talked. It was like old times – in our first year when we’d shared a student flat at art
college. One of those memorable evenings when everything seemed to slot into place. Louise told us the whole tale of how she’d met Guy trekking in the outback, and then we all admired
Chiara’s tiny bump and talked about names for her baby. And my friends wanted to know all about Aunty May, about my special relationship with her and why she’d left me her house.

‘We sort of bonded over painting,’ I told them. ‘My mother was working, or on research trips, or writing retreats, drumming up plots for her romantic fiction. Before she and my
dad split up, he would be working at the museum, and so they would send us down to Aunty May’s in the holidays.’

As I sat and related those holidays to my friends I could actually feel my little brother Ben’s hot little hand in mine as my mother deposited us on the train that took us from Liverpool
Street to Darsham where Aunty May would pick us up and drive us back to her house.

‘Aunty May let us have more freedom than we ever had at home. We had whole days out on the beach, or in her beach hut, swimming, crabbing, building sand castles.’

‘Sounds idyllic.’

‘It was.’ I was thinking about what Ben had said, when we’d cleared her things out of the house back in the winter.

‘Looking back, though,’ I said, ‘I realise she could be a bit vague, distracted . . .’

‘Ah-ha. Like you!’ Chiara said.

‘Really?’

‘Der!’

They laughed.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘My happiest memories are of being with her. Nights on the beach in midsummer when it barely grew dark. Visits to see the insects trapped in amber in Dunwich
museum. She told us some moments in life are perfect, like the amber. Precious and glowing with an almost unearthly light. Those holidays were like that for me.’

I paused, remembering. ‘Then she would say, only you have to beware. Sometimes insects get trapped in the amber when it’s soft and then it hardens and they are trapped there forever.
Even the most perfect things can be treacherous.’

‘I guess she must have decided later that there were no more amber moments for her, because why else would she have committed suicide?’ Louise said.

‘What an odd thing to say, Louise,’ Chiara said, looking at her.

I
had
loved those holidays, but I was only young. I’d loved going painting with my aunt, out on the shore. But even back then I’d always had to do my three
taps on the gatepost to make sure May wouldn’t die while I was here. Why, I wondered now, had I been so frightened, even at such a young age, that Aunty May might die? Was it to do with being
left in charge of my little brother in this house that was so far from the world I knew, from streetlamps and shops and traffic lights and buses and the things that made the world feel safe to
me?

If May died while we were there we would be left all alone with nothing but the sea, and miles of unchartered countryside between us and civilisation and I would never be able to let Ben out of
my sight in case he ran away and drowned.

And so although I was happy to be with my aunt by the sea, I tapped the gatepost, to keep Ben and May safe.

Now as we drove back towards London, Chiara holding Pepper on her lap on the front seat, I was aware of that lift in my heart again, that felt like happiness. The weekend
had
been a success in the end. It had been so lovely spending time with my friends. They
had
helped bring life back into May’s house. And, although I didn’t say this
out loud, the knowledge my art was going to appear in New York gave me a delicious warm excited feeling in the depths of my belly. I was moving on at last! May would have been thrilled for me.

I might have been tempted to do a detour through Cambridge to see my mother, tell her my news. But she hadn’t made it to my Private View and I didn’t want to guilt-trip her. She was
busy. This was a full-on time of year for her, she was finishing a novel and would feel she ought to stop and pay me some attention, but would be distracted, her head in a storyline. I’d just
have to save it for another occasion.

‘
Madonna!
’ Chiara said, as we sat in a traffic jam coming into London. ‘Does everyone have a second house on the coast? I could do with a wee –
it’s the baby, pressing on my bladder.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes. I can just about hold on. Distract me, tell me a bit more about these Americans. How soon do they want the commission?’

‘I’ve got till August,’ I said, leaning forward, afraid of taking my eyes off the cars in front.

‘It’s fantastic, Els, just what you needed.’

‘I know!’ I looked at her quickly, unable to suppress a grin. ‘I feel blessed, actually. Things seem to be slotting into place.’

I pushed the thought of the man in the hospital out of my mind; the incident was done with, he was alive. He would be OK. He would probably forget he’d ever seen me. It was over.

‘Ellie! Oi, Ellie! Wakey-wakey. I think you are.’

‘I am what?’

‘Missing him. Finn. I was going to say something on Friday night. You seemed distracted.’

‘I was nervous. About the exhibition.’

‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? You can still move on in your career and stay with him too!’

‘I just have to try this,’ I said. ‘I just have to see.’

‘OK.’

‘ Look, Chiara, it wasn’t Finn I was thinking about on Friday. I’ve sorted it now, and it probably sounds bonkers. It was just that – you remember on the way down Louise
was delayed, and you and Liam had to go on a diversion? There was an accident on the B road into Southwold?’