With a finebrush and a mix of raw umber, terre verte, Indian red and Chinese yellow – he did like Chinese yellow – he concentrated on her face. “I think, perhaps, that the pregnancies are of greater significance.” “You mean the women ran off with the real fathers?”
“Probably. It’s the obvious conclusion. How do you feel about that? At the end of our last session you said that you might be pregnant. I got the feeling that you weren’t too happy about it. It’s very personal. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s OK. I hadn’t realized my misgivings were so transparent. You’re very intuitive.”
He smiled.
She shivered.
“So, you find yourself in the same position as the missing women. It’s ironical, isn’t it? It must have something to do with my shop, perhaps the air in here, or the paint. Maybe I should open a fertility clinic. That’s a thought.”
“It could only have something to do with your shop if all the women had been here.”
“Yes, I see that. But who’s to say they weren’t? A lot of people come and go and my memory isn’t what it was and it was never very good. At school I could never remember all those dates of the battles we had with the French and the names of rivers in Mauritania.” “So your memory needs a little jog?”
“Ah, the reconstruction.”
“Since I’m pregnant it would be even closer to the truth.”
“I suppose it would. But you have to remember that Mrs Harrison knew exactly what she wanted. She could be very direct and she came prepared. There was no dithering. She simply arrived and we got on with it. If there was ever a problem it was all mine.”
“Did you have a problem?”
“Well, there was a sudden retreat, certainly. The easel became my Maginot Line.”
“I believe that was breached.”
“The Germans used the back door or, rather, a side door known as Belgium.”
“What then?”
“We retreated from Dunkirk.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, then, I got on with the painting, what else?”
“So Helen was lying here, where I am, and you finished the painting. Was that the last time you saw her?”
“My goodness no. A week or so later she came back to collect the finished product. It takes that long for the paint to dry. But she’d brought one of her minders with her to carry it so she didn’t stop and we didn’t really talk.”
“And that was the last time you saw her?” tantly and said, “But Mrs Harrison…she did come back again and this time she was alone.” His eyes were drawn once more to the flimsy covering, the yellow peril. He went on, “She’d had an argument with her husband and she was angry but I never found out what it was about. There was a bruise on her chin but I didn’t like to ask. You don’t, do you? Not about things that go on between husbands and wives. Not unless you’re working for Relate. Even though she’d already had a few tipples, I’d say, I fed her some wine and she talked freely but that never came up. So how she got the bruise and exactly what led her back here remains a mystery.”
Her look was wide-eyed and quizzical. She asked, “How long did she stay?”
Without looking up and quite matter-of-factly he said, “A long, long time.”
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
“Going, my dear? She wasn’t going anywhere.”
Her pulse raced. He couldn’t fail to notice her sudden glow. The revelation had been so careless she wondered whether he was aware of making it. She snatched a deep steadying breath and said, “So what now, Mr Lawrence? Where do we go from here?”
His eyes flicked from her groin and once again focused on the painting. She should have felt some relief but didn’t. A pause might draw him back and give him time to reflect on his indiscretion. Still studying the canvas he said, “If you would let me see you in all your splendour then you can see Mrs Harrison in all of hers.” She had been waiting for the suggestion, certain that it would come, yet she could barely believe he had made it. It had to be a ploy. He was playing games again.
“You know where she is?”
“Of course.”
“Where?”
“Not far.”
“How far?”
“A short walk. I’ll take you.”
“But first you want me to take off my clothes.”
Now he looked up and met her gaze. He said, “Yes.”
“I thought your thing was landscapes.”
“I’m thinking of a career change.”
“What then?”
“Then a few finishing touches to the painting and then I’ll take you to see Mrs Harrison.”
“Helen first.”
“I think not. I know what you women are like. An old friend of mine – an old soldier – told me. A few final touches and then I’ll take you to see your friend. I’ll leave you with her and then I can get on. So, what do you think? It’s what you came for, after all.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“You don’t, but apart from the loss of a little dignity which I’m sure you’ll manage, what else have you got to lose? Up to you, my dear. How much do you want to see Mrs Harrison again?”
In their intensity her eyes became very dark, almost hooded, and her thoughtful nod, when it came, was barely discernible. Had he not been waiting for it, he would have missed it altogether.
“I imagine you will require a little fortification. I know I do. I’ll fetch us some more drinks then, shall I? I have this strange feeling that you have been right all along. My memory just needed a little jog.” Without looking back he shuffled into the kitchen. It took him longer than usual, as she guessed it might. He paused at the door. He looked odd, different, his eyes cast with that slow, esoteric quality she’d seen before on a smackhead. The wine made tiny waves against the sparkling crystal. It looked rich and potent.
“Chianti, in particular, must be taken at cellar temperature.” His voice was strangely different too, slightly husky, his speech more measured and delayed. “It comes originally from Gaiole, Castellina and Radda. Don’t be fobbed off with the re-drawn area that takes in just about the entire region of Tuscany.”
Those sleeping eyes caught the crystal and flashed awake. He came on with deliberate steps. “As with all wine, my dear, you must go with the most expensive that you can afford. You might remember the fiasco with its straw jacket. They’re often used as candleholders. The wine itself is irresistibly feminine, and mysterious
– I mentioned that before.”
She stood beside the sofa, her long hair cutting black trails over her breasts, her dress clinging to her thighs, her back reflected in a painting that leant against the wall behind her, birds flying from a pond. Ducks, he thought. How wonderful.
He nodded, hugely satisfied, for he had begun to wonder whether events would turn out as he had planned. Where women were concerned, as the late colonel had often stated, nothing could be taken for granted. Logic, that key to the door – the dawn – of man, had been lost in the unfolding of woman and replaced by that curiosity, female intuition, that damned and satanic second sight that had led her to him. He handed her the wine. She returned his gaze with a steadiness he found endearing.
“We might as well finish it today.”
“That sounds very final.”
“All things come to an end and the painting is, save for a few final touches, all but finished.”
“But we’re not, are we?”
He retreated quickly to his Maginot.
She drank her wine in one. Her lips were left with the touch of sangiovese grape – sanguis Jovis – the blood of Jove. She reached down and placed the glass on the small table where her handbag lay, just out of reach from the sofa. Her breasts sagged slightly then firmed up again as she stood upright.
“So this is what it has come to.”
He smiled sweetly.
She reached beneath her dress and bent again and her breasts sagged again and she stepped out, one foot then the other, and left the flimsy yellow underwear on the oak floor. She watched his eyes but they didn’t flicker. But his lips moved and she was drawn to them. “Everything is coming back,” he said. “It is all so clear now.” She reached down to the hem of her dress and drew it over her thighs, over that tricky uncomplicated place, the Devil’s Triangle, over her navel and jutting hips.
Navel and jutting? Naval and Jutland came to mind, the largest naval battle in history, the battle that no one won. Life’s like that, he thought, with both sides, life and death, claiming victory. He smiled. He couldn’t help it. Everything, suddenly, was so maddeningly clear. The Devil’s Triangle, also known as the Bermuda Triangle, seemed so delightfully befitting.
He shook away the thought and concentrated again on that glossy overgrown thatch, black as coal and burning bright, the burning bush, hayah on Mount Horeb, the downfall of so many men – a blue would do it, with burnt sienna or raw umber and in that way, the sheen, the rainbow of split coal, would have the heart leaping with spring lambs in the silence of a dewy meadow. What was it about the common crack, he wondered, that could send men wild, to murder, to suicide, to go head-to-head with antlers or knives and guns? What was it about the crazy slit, marked indelibly and incomprehensibly in the head and no longer requiring the stink of readiness or the animal clock, that slow turn to spring, that could send the blood – Chinese blood in particular – rushing to the rut.
It was beyond him and he shook away the questions but another came at him, out of nowhere, and he smiled again.
Was he a religious man?
What simpletons to ask such a question? And what a silly girl to think that the dance of veils – in her case just two – would be the answer.
And from the pond and through the dark bracken the ducks took off across her sleek behind.
And Mr Lawrence shook his head in wonder.
“On or off?” she said, tugging apprehensively at her dress. He remembered their first meeting when she’d asked that very same question about her spectacles.
“Off, for now,” he said, repeating his line too. It could all have been a rehearsal, he smiled, and now it was for real.
She dropped the dress and stepped out of it, all arms and legs. Her breasts were nothing more than small swells, no more than force two or three, with dark nipples that stuck out and reminded him of the pink rubbers on the end of school pencils that you could nibble and suck until your lips turned pink. He thought about his school in Nicosia and the first girl he’d ever played with. She was a Cypriot so didn’t count and a couple of years younger, about five, maybe. While the sun blistered his bony shoulders he’d explored every inch of her limp body before covering it with huge rocks he carried from the dried-up riverbed.
Even then he knew that rigor would not begin to set in for three hours or so. He’d learned that much from the lizards.
For a few moments she stood motionless then, without taking her eyes from him, she took three long strides to the sofa and keeping her knees firmly clamped together, she sat down.
He selected a brush and nodded. “The finishing touches,” he said. An unexpected feeling of panic tightened her chest. Her risky position became all too apparent and even the knowledge of Sam Butler stationed outside did little to stem her sudden reluctance to continue. She said too quickly, “You can’t blank out the dress so easily. I don’t want my picture ruined.”
He tut-tutted. “I’m only concerned with your face. I want that uncertainty that your nakedness has brought about. I have seen defiance and provocation, even a challenge, but never before this hint of fear.”
“I’m not frightened of you, Mr Lawrence.”
“Not that. Not that at all. It’s more to do with modesty and propriety.”
He filled a fine brush with the colours of blush.
“I want to bring out that vulnerability a little more. I’ll tell you what we’ll do for, after all, at the core of your splendour is your pudenda.” “I don’t think so. That’s a little too far.”
“Mrs Harrison went that far.”
“I saw the painting. I don’t need reminding. And I’m not Helen Harrison.”
“But you do want to see her.”
His suggestion brought a sudden rush of thoughts, jumbled and confused, and she felt quite disorientated. For an instant she considered the whole situation ludicrous and she laughed out loud.
Mr Lawrence shared the joke and smiled back.
Colours deepened in waves and she felt light-headed. She put it down to anxiety and the adrenalin she’d used up. She gulped a few deep breaths, trying to control her racing pulse.
She thought of Butler listening to it all and imagined his expression should he burst in. She laughed out loud again. The DS might have dreamt of her in such a position. For a moment she wanted him to walk in just so she could see the look on his face.
“Sam, you better get in here,” she called out and Mr Lawrence’s smile widened.
She felt the heat radiating from her body and the colour rising in her face, just as Mr Lawrence wanted, but she laughed again in the knowledge that it was out of elation rather than embarrassment. Mr Lawrence had got it wrong. She was leading him on, too far gone, invincible, and nothing else mattered. What was it he wanted? Giddy with euphoria and with the room starting to slant this way and that, she tried to bring back the notion of what she was doing and why she was there at all. Even as she frowned in concentration she knew there were things she had to do and defiance returned with a steely look. Mr Lawrence smiled knowingly.
She lay back, without hesitation, and in that same moment drew her knees apart.
“It’s such a mysterious place,” he said. “A little Milky Way, a spreading supervulva.”
“You shouldn’t be looking, not really. I shall have to arrest you and take you in. I feel strange, like I’m swimming.”
“Relax. Do what you want to do. It’s the wine, you see, or rather, what is in the wine. I should market it.”
“Oh, Mr Lawrence, my head is spinning and I’m out of control. Why haven’t you seduced me, Mr Lawrence, like the others? Did you fuck the others, Mr Lawrence?”
“In my own way, my dear.”
“Are you going to fuck me, Mr Lawrence?”
“In my own way, my dear.”
He put aside his brush for the painting was complete and just right. Those questions in her dark eyes were answered by a subtle smile that left the faintest of dimples on her cheeks, an enigmatic expression – alluring and aloof – that hinted of triumph.
She watched him move from behind the easel and shuffle to the very edge of the studio. There, using a steel lever, he prised up a long floorboard. He moved again and pulled the hook and tackle along the rail until it hung directly over the narrow opening. He used the controls to drop the hook. The steel groaned and squealed as pulleys turned on their blocks and released the chain. As each clashing link fell over the wheel the chain extended with a clanking and screeching that reverberated through the room.
She sat quite immobile and watched a brick wall rise from the floor until it stood as tall and as wide as a door. Clumps of dusty black cobweb dropped from the crumbling edges and settled on the floorboards.
He moved back to the sofa and extended his hands toward her. She reached up, childlike, and took them and he pulled her to her feet. “I feel so shaky,” she said and began to wobble. He slipped an arm around her waist and held her steady. Her skin beneath his cold hand felt smooth and warm. He stroked that infuriating hip, that ball-andsocket joint, and realized that he no longer found its prominence disagreeable. In fact, this tall skinny figure had grown on him. “Let me show you,” he said and guided her to the wall.
“The wall, Mr Lawrence. It’s the wall in your picture…in the other room!”
She leant against him, a long streak of Indian amber. She was living in a distant place, a place called rapture. He could see it in her eyes, not that they were slipping for they were wide and fixed on the dusty bricks.
He caressed her slight breasts and tugged gently on the extended nipples.
“Oh, Mr Lawrence, what are you doing?”
“Indulge an old man, just this once.”
He dropped his hand to her behind – that flawed wonderland that had given him so much grief in the painting – and traced between her buttocks until, finally, he cupped that seat of genesis and let his middle and ring fingers slip upward. Unconcerned, perhaps even unconscious of the source of this digital sensation, she began to gyrate and writhe and swell until she ended up on tiptoes.
“Oh, oh, Mr Lawrence,” she said.
He pulled his hand away and her feet came down to earth.
“I think it’s time to find Mrs Harrison.”
“Shall I get dressed again?” she asked, surprising him. It wasn’t simply the way she said it, which was lucid, but what she said as well. That she could put words together that made any kind of sense, was extraordinary.
“Not necessary,” he said. “We would only have to take them off again.”
With his hand gently resting on her right buttock, he directed her to the cellar door.