Staring At The Light Read online

  ‘What a selective conscience you have,’ she murmured.

  She turned the painting so that it faced the wall and could no longer seduce her, but hiding such a beautiful thing felt like another sin. In her kitchen, Sarah shoved the cork back into the neck of the half-empty wine bottle with unnecessary force. The bottle slipped from her grasp and fell. No satisfying sound, merely a timid thud and the wine seeping away across the floor-boards. A bloody waste, like all this bloody effort. What she saw in her mirror was a bit-player in some melodrama that no-one but a dreamer would believe. She opened another bottle of wine and looked for something to do. If Cannon’s imprisonment and the wife he had met on the first stop of his road to total reformation had failed to cure him of casual dishonesty, as they patently had, then why should she place any belief in him at all? Wasn’t a thief also a liar?

  She wanted more than anything to turn back the clock on the day that had passed to the evening that had preceded it, when she could still hold on to belief in Cannon, and all he had told her about his brother, as an obstinate act of faith, before he had shown he could not be cured of dishonesty. Before she had seen that ridiculous, harmless body barrelling through swimming-pool water. Before she had listened to the last bulletin from Ernest Matthewson’s wife, relating Ernest’s impression that John Smith was a clown. That was where the rot had set in.

  She moved round her own abode, restless, the whole state of her a travesty of Saturday-night calm, peering into rooms as if she was a stranger, the pictures on the walls mocking her. There was no real reason to move house, except for the memories and the way that movement always granted the illusion of freedom, as if a fresh start wiped clean a scratched slate and got the blood and tears off the walls. She opened the balcony windows; the air bit nicely cold.

  Cannon stood below, poised to throw a pebble against the glass, a method of gaining attention he seemed to prefer to ringing the bell. Perhaps another part of his fantasy life. She was coldly, furiously angry, ready to spit, but then when she opened the door, she saw him slumped and his face bloated with tears. He made no effort to cross the threshold. He had forgotten his coat and his teeth chattered with cold.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. It was an awful thing to do. Not just awful, stupid. Insulting. Sometimes I just don’t know better. I can’t stop. I don’t know until afterwards. Can you see that? Can you? I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’ she spat. ‘Stealing? Or lying?’

  She stared at him, the anger melting even as she struggled to retain it. She had never been able to harness anger to good effect: it always failed to have enough force and she could never make it last quite long enough to stop it feeling ridiculous, even by dwelling on it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he wept. ‘You rescue me from prison and from fire … You believe me and what do I do for you? Steal. I’ve never stolen anything except from him, and that was mine. And I don’t know how to lie. I just don’t think.’

  She saw him then as she had seen him first: a confused and clever child. Julie had seen the child in him. He stumbled into her perfunctory, motherly embrace and she led him inside. The phone rang. Cannon squatted in front of the fire, the reflection of the gas flames glowing against his wet face; she watched as she answered.

  ‘Sarah?’ William sounded more distant and hesitant even than usual. ‘Sarah, could I see you? I could get a taxi …’

  No. She did not want these two under her roof at the same time; it was too much. She did not want William to see the stolen painting. She did not want William receiving any explanations whatsoever: what he did not know would not harm him. She did not want him to know she had become a thief.

  ‘Could it wait, love? Tomorrow, if you like.’

  Cannon coughed; a prolonged, hacking cough, a development of the dry spasm of the morning. He needed the warmth of the fire. Her mind moved on to think about food, shelter, warmth. She had an hour to get food into him: he would never stay longer than that.

  Johnny would know. He would find you.

  ‘Oh, yes, it can wait.’ There was disappointment in William’s voice; it irritated her. I suppose you had another bad dream, was on the tip of her tongue until she remembered, with difficulty, how much she liked him. She liked them all; it was the hazard of her life to like the rejects no-one else even noticed. My God, they did not know what they were missing.

  ‘Tomorrow, then?’

  ‘I’ll see,’ he said, and put the phone down sharply. Slowly, less abruptly, she did the same.

  8

  Isabella Dalrymple woke with a Sunday-morning headache and the memory of snoring during the night. She was cold because the man on the other side of the bed was warm, with the whole of the double duvet wrapped around his ample body. Not simply draped, but inextricably linked with his limbs and jammed under his chin, thoroughly, if unconsciously, appropriated. Until she recognized that fact, and the futility of any attempt to get it back without waking him, she had been unsure of where she was; there had been half a minute of disorientation and a sense of another place and more forgiving time.

  In the years of her marriage William had been an agitated sleeper, who moved and muttered and sometimes spoke aloud, but he was more likely to relinquish the duvet and wake cold himself than he was to take it. Isabella thought of William with regret, tinged at the corners with a nasty little shadow of conscience that hung over her eyes, like something minute stuck to an eyelash. There was no longer any point in staying in bed.

  In the scale of marital misdemeanours recounted by contemporaries, William had done nothing wrong; no infidelities, no serious addictions, if the dentistry itself were discounted, no unpleasant self-indulgences otherwise, no obnoxious personal habits, no outstanding social gaffes. It was just that he had done nothing right either; he had simply ceased to be an asset. All he had done for his wife was do everything she asked him to do. In retrospect, an obedient husband who pandered to the ambitions of a wife without ever sharing them was the worst kind of partner. She had moulded him and schooled him, organized him and ordered him until he was a nothing more than slightly afraid of her shadow, and all she could remember now was how he had never once stolen the duvet.

  With a backward glance at the sleeping form of William’s far richer, more colourful replacement, Isabella took to the bathroom. For every morning of her marriage to William, she had presented him with a flawless face over his breakfast tea, a time-consuming challenge that should have commanded appreciation and was now such an ingrained habit that she had made herself regard it as a virtue. This is the face he will remember when he goes to work. Avoid having children if at all possible: it wrecks everything.

  Everything had proved capable of wrecking itself by the slow, disintegrating process of her own disappointment and contempt, and this was what she had now. A richer, shorter partner with a far finer apartment and a far more interesting clientele of friends, plus a shared interest in bigger and better. Isabella tested the water in the shower with a delicate hand. It was too hot. She felt lethargic: the prospect of the hour-long ritual of hairwash, hairdry, maquillage, the selection of clothes, all seemed incredibly arduous, and that was the real cause of the malaise. If she had still been with William, none of this would be mandatory. He wouldn’t have noticed; hadn’t noticed for years. She had – as she still did – bled William dry in maintenance costs to sustain a face, a style of life and a wardrobe that meant absolutely nothing to him. Which meant she had taken away nothing.

  Life seemed suddenly to be one long series of clichés lived out against a backdrop of hope. She brushed her teeth cursorily. Life with William meant that everything about teeth bored her; her own had never been any trouble; everyone else made such a fuss. The rest of her year seemed to unfold in an endless succession of doing exactly this. She raised her upper lip in front of the mirror, the better to remove a speck, saw blood on her gums and had a sudden vision of a face without teeth. No, no, her teeth were excellent and permanent –
William said so, didn’t he? But if they were not, who would love her then?

  He would.

  The bathroom wallpaper was richly decorated with birds of paradise, which made her want to screech in tune. The world divided, he had told her once, between those who loved wallpaper and those who detested it. She was cross and tired and could remember nothing that had given her any pleasure in the last week. Except, of course, the comforting thought that, in a similar fashion to the planned stripping down of the paper in here, her own life could be altered. Nothing was permanent about the way one lived, and whenever she wanted, she could go back to the husband who did not snore.

  Mrs Matthewson, loyal spouse to Ernest and equally loyal friend to the few she otherwise loved, laid the table for the ritual family lunch in a dining room of many colours: creamy yellow walls, vibrant swagged curtains festooned with brilliant blue hummingbirds, whose motif had been repeated throughout the house ever since a holiday in the West Indies. The house, which was large and solid as befitted Ernest himself, bore tribute to that vacation.

  She always left the laying of the table until last, waiting until she was sure everyone was in attendance. There was nothing more insulting than a fully laid table displayed as an accusation of parental incompetence on the many occasions when her son had failed to turn up. The provision of food was one secret of marital stability – it had been sufficient to keep Ernest more or less in control – but it was not enough to ensure the consistent attendance of an emancipated son. With girlfriend, a pallid little thing with a pretty enough face mostly subsumed into over-large spectacles and an adoring smile for her affianced. Mrs Matthewson never ceased to marvel at what a good-looking, personable man her son had become. The revolutionizing of his body from the grossly fat boy she had nurtured to the streamlined and athletic male he was now had been his own work; the acquisition of social graces and, at long last, an appreciation of his parents had been the work of Sarah Fortune. Mrs Matthewson approved violently of Sarah; she resisted the impulse to give the new girlfriend the napkin with the stain, just as she would try to avoid the temptation to pour gravy all over her skirt. Such activities would be childish and counterproductive, and would not achieve her heart’s desire, which was to have cataclysmic Sarah Fortune, her friend, back in the family fold. Forgiveness of her son for the monumental carelessness of losing her was beyond Mrs Matthewson, even though she privately, if not publicly, agreed with Ernest that a marriage would have been a disaster.

  They sat. Malcolm and his father talked about the law, as lawyers do. A careful listener, and Mrs Matthewson was certainly that, would recognize that this apparently intellectual exchange was no more than pure gossip, not about the law itself but the personalities in it, who was earning what with whom, which dog was eating which, and how they were managing to digest. Malcolm had become boringly ambitious. Sarah would not have let you do that, Mrs Matthewson muttered to herself over the grapefruit segments, turning her face and a saccharine sweet smile to the newest replacement.

  This girl was not stupid; a businessperson, with hungry eyes. Malcolm would never go for anyone stupid, not after Sarah, but he would, quite unconsciously, choose something more amenable, a little less vivid. Mrs Matthewson watched the eyes, enlarged behind the specs, straying away from her own. Tricky; scenting an enemy; she was not going to engage in girl-talk with Darling’s plump, middle-aged mummy, was she? She was going to cosy up to the men and refuse to be excluded.

  ‘How’s Sarah?’ Mrs Matthewson asked Ernest pointedly, ignoring his wince.

  ‘Oh, very well, blooming. God alone knows what she does. As I was saying …’

  ‘When are you going to make her a partner?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, when are you?’ Malcolm, amused, was not letting him get away with it, or his mother either; Ernest was glaring, finally giving in. It was no good resisting once it was started: when they were together, the three of them, they wanted to talk about her.

  ‘Still giving her the no-hope clients?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘She finds them of her own accord. She seems to have an aversion to clients who either make money or have it. She loves awkwardness,’ Ernest protested defensively.

  ‘I wonder why.’ Malcolm’s eyes were on his mother, who lowered her gaze towards her food. The girlfriend ate doggedly.

  ‘We’ve one awkward client she won’t go near. We’ve tried him with everyone. No-one lasts. Now, if she’d deal with John Smith and make him happy, the partnership would love her, but she won’t. I don’t understand her sometimes.’

  All the time. Mrs Matthewson shifted uncomfortably, and began to clear the plates. The new girlfriend was supposed to say, ‘Let me help.’ She didn’t.

  Malcolm adopted his dry cross-examining voice. ‘Not berthing her alongside the dangerous ones again, are you, Dad? Leaving our Sarah to handle the psychotics? You know what happens when you do that. If he’s half-way mad already, she’ll make him madder. Why don’t you give her a decent client for a change?’ His voice had risen. The girlfriend smiled into an empty face.

  ‘She doesn’t want decent clients,’ Ernest shouted. ‘She wants eccentrics. Like she wanted you.’

  This time the silence was longer.

  ‘Do you like your beef rare or medium?’ Mrs Matthewson asked the girl.

  ‘Rare, please,’ the girl said.

  ‘What a shame,’ Mrs Matthewson said, carving the burnt piece off the end of the roast and putting it on a cold plate. ‘Tell Malcolm about this John Smith, Ernest, do. What does he look like? So interesting.’

  And then, much later, she would tell Sarah. All the gossipy pickings from the rich man’s table, in case, woman to woman, they were useful.

  They finished the last of the overdone beef, followed it with ice-cream, and then said grace. The offer of alcohol had been made, but it was a token offer. Imelda had announced it as a challenge immediately after Sarah came into the refectory and remembered to stand for the prayer preceding food. ‘Would you have some wine, Sarah? We’ve plenty,’ she yelled, as a Christmas-present bottle was brandished like a club for the juggling. The parish priest followed its progress with a longing glance; the others with mild curiosity. Sarah could see herself sipping a single glass, for ever in debt for this special treat while they followed her consumption of it with their eyes, concerned for her soul in case she asked for a second. Only the one bottle between the thirty here present, as if a drop of the stuff would intoxicate instead of reawaken a growling need. Sarah refused politely, and prepared to drown the food in water, remembering to ask for more in order to flatter the cook. Not Julie; not today, although they wished it was. Your day of rest, dear. Let us bugger the beef.

  ‘I wish they wouldn’t,’ Julie whispered to Sarah, on her left.

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’

  ‘Buy beef at all.’ She had caught from them a certain Irish intonation, a rhythm of speech alien to Pauline’s crystal tones, which showed she did not spend most of her time in Pauline’s company. Sarah waited for a topical reminder of beef-related disease while she and Julie ate the meat with equal feigned enthusiasm.

  There was a buzz of voices in the convent dining room, none of them raised, all animated, argumentative even, discussing the day’s news, the week’s news, each speaker with a separate ailment that was never discussed in public except in an earnest invitation to make a joke of it. They were all slightly disabled, by age at least. They had faces without lines, bent bodies; they were old without protest; a dying breed, who knew they were unbanishable. Oh, for a life of virtue, free from acquisitive needs, never even wanting to house-hunt and full of appreciation for burnt beef. Sarah had learned her manners at this kind of table; she had a certain gratitude about eating, whatever it was.

  ‘Once a month, child, you eat with us. You don’t eat enough. Look at the size of you.’ Not once a complaint, or a curiosity for the outside world. Plenty to talk about, especially the prospect of the Cardinal’s Advent sermons in the cathedral; they all went, even m
ost of the walking wounded. What happened here was the will of God, illness included. That, and that alone, was what Sarah abhorred rather than admired. This dependence on the will of another, either divine or sent by the National Health Service, each couched in inefficacy and mystery. She loved their capacity for acceptance, but she could not revere it. God was a perverse old man to be indulged, with a passing resemblance to Ernest Matthewson, in her view. Deities and more temporal authorities begged and deserved the challenge of sheer bloody-minded disobedience.

  There was a garden of a kind, which sprouted rather than grew, the better for that on a good summer day, not now. These retired sisters had been too much in the world and moved about too much to find time to cultivate a garden. They were neat and tidy without being versed in domesticity or horticulture. The front garden doubled as a car park, the garden element revived from time to time with indoor potted plants and gifts and surviving shrubs, unlike the back area, which no-one noticed until the nettles reached the height of the dustbins. The heart of the convent was the chapel, where each item was polished and revered, each statue and seat, shining with the touch of a hundred loving hands.

  In the watery sunshine of the afternoon, Sarah noticed that Pauline looked frail, her skin like parchment and her movements less than brisk. It was only after dark, in electric light, that her deepset eyes looked powerful; for the moment, although she was the strongest of her contemporaries, she looked an old woman. Until she spoke, and all the authority returned.