Facing the Light (6 page)

Beth smiled, as she often did when she thought of Rilla. She's batty, she said to herself, but fun, which is more than most people can say for their parents. And we
get on, which is also a bonus. She often wondered whether it had something to do with the fact that Rilla wasn't her real mother, but someone her father had married before she knew about things like wicked stepmothers. Maybe that was why she had no trouble at all loving her. Chloë claimed to hate her mother, and Beth remonstrated feebly with her from time to time. It was difficult to see how anyone could hate Gwen, who was a mild, gentle sort of person, but Chloë, who was spiky and aggressive and rather boringly rude these days, seemed to have a positive talent for disliking people. Beth realized that she'd been lucky, ending up with Rilla out of all her father's girlfriends. She was warm and affectionate and funny and forever flinging together unexpected ingredients and exotic spices and making wonderful smells – and a dreadful mess – in the kitchen. Also, she was self-absorbed, which Beth never minded, because it meant that she herself had been allowed to do more or less what she'd wanted to all her life. But from quite an early age, Beth realized that Rilla needed looking after, and organizing. She was untidy, not only in her cupboards and drawers but also in her head. She'd gone down to Willow Court yesterday, and Beth imagined what her packing must have been like, imagined her stuffing garments haphazardly into some bag that had seen better days. She smiled as she stood up and went to fetch her suitcase. Then she locked the flat and made her way down to the street.

As she drove to Alex's flat, she reflected on family secrets. No one knew about her feelings for Efe. They had given up, most of them, worrying about her being so firmly unattached. I bet they've decided I'm a virgin, she thought. Well, let them! Beth never spoke about her sex life. They, Leonora and Gwen and even darling Rilla, thought she was on the shelf. Beth smiled to think of their reaction if they knew. Just because you were suffering
from unrequited love didn't mean you had to do without sex. It was just that you never committed. Never got involved. Wouldn't let yourself. She was exactly like many of the men she knew.

These days in Efe's company would be a test. She couldn't wait. Quite apart from curiosity about his news, she was longing to see him, to talk to him, to be near him, to smell his smell when they kissed ‘hello' and at the same time she dreaded it. It would be an ordeal. Fiona would be with him, and so would Douggie, and every time she looked at them she'd feel like the little mermaid in the story, as though she were walking on knives.

*

‘You drive, Alex, go on,' said Beth. ‘You know you're longing to.'

‘Sure you don't mind?' Alex grinned at her. They'd piled his belongings on to the back seat with Beth taking great care to see that everything was tidily stacked.

‘No, go on. I'm exhausted. I'll probably be rotten company. I might even fall asleep.'

‘I'm used to that,' said Alex. ‘You being rotten company. Go to sleep and see if I care. I'd rather listen to whatever crappy stuff you've got in the tapedeck.'

Beth slapped him with a newspaper that he'd somehow managed, in spite of her best efforts, to keep about his person. She pulled it out of a pocket and batted him over the head with it. Then she turned round and tucked it into one of the carrier bags on the back seat.

‘You're not touching that till we get there,' she said. ‘I don't trust you not to drive and read at the same time. And don't think I'm ignoring your dig at my music. It's the Buena Vista Social Club. Take it or leave it.'

‘No, that's okay. Quite civilized for you. Branching out, are you?'

‘Shut up and drive, Alex. I'm going to sleep.'

‘Right,' Alex said, and pressed some buttons. The
music filled the car, and he saw Beth relaxing into her seat and closing her eyes.

*

There were very few people in the world Alex felt comfortable with and Beth was one of them. He was two years younger than she was, and he'd always known how much she liked looking after him. By rights, she should be married with lots of children of her own, but as she wasn't, Alex enjoyed watching her mother everyone who came into her orbit. She tried as hard as she could to organize Rilla; she took an interest in his love life and all his attempts to be evasive counted for nothing. She had a gift for making him speak, and he confessed things to her that he wouldn't have dreamed of telling anyone else, not even Efe. Worries he had, like, why didn't he feel what he was supposed to feel for all the various women he'd had short and unsatisfactory relationships with? Beth had patience and never minded listening to him mumbling and muttering. She also, very comfortingly, did it while feeding him delicious meals because she believed he never ate properly.

Alex was on the staff of a good newspaper and photographed beautiful women much of the time. He got sent around all over the place to take shots of this starlet and that pop singer and the other society person for one or other page, and sometimes he even got lucky and pulled somebody, but one-night stands were what they always turned out to be. Love never seemed even to be a possibility.

It wasn't just he who made confessions, though. Alex was willing to bet he was the only person who knew that Beth was in love with someone. She'd made him swear not to tell a soul, and he never had. She'd told him about it at Efe's wedding, and fair enough, she'd had a bit to drink, but no one could have called her pissed. She knew what
she was saying. It wasn't a very long conversation, but he remembered it well.

I'm broken-hearted, Alex. Have I told you?

No, but you can, Beth. You know you can tell me anything
.

I do know that. Yes, I do. But I can't speak about this. It's secret
.

Even from me?

From everyone. It's secret and it's hopeless and I'm going to grow up and forget all about him
.

Alex had wanted to ask every sort of question. Who is this person and why can't he love you and are you quite sure he doesn't, but in the end, as usual, he'd said nothing. Later he decided that Beth's secret love was probably married. Nothing more secret and terrible than that. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. Married and not going to leave his wife. One day, he thought, I'll ask her about it again.

He changed gear, and turned his mind to Willow Court. It'd be great to see Efe again. They didn't meet nearly enough in London. This morning there had been a brief text message on his mobile that mentioned needing to discuss something. Urgently. That was typical of Efe. Everything for him was urgent. Top priority, etc. etc. Alex had always idolized his elder brother. There was only a two-year difference in their ages, but when they were kids, he'd followed Efe around and Efe put up with it because a brother who didn't say much and never told tales was quite useful. Alex remembered a game of cowboys when he'd been tied to one of the willow trees down by the lake for hours and hours after having been captured by Efe's cattle rustlers, which was basically just Efe and Beth. They'd threatened to come back and shoot him and then they'd gone up to the house for tea and totally forgotten him in some other excitement. According to Beth, it wasn't till bathtime that Gwen suddenly noticed he wasn't
there and Efe was sent to untie him. Efe's version was that they'd been prevented by the adults from getting back to the lake again, but Alex never even listened to his brother's excuses. He'd just rubbed his wrists where they'd been bound and trudged up through the wild garden to the house.

It never occurred to him to complain about it to anyone and probably it wasn't hours and hours that he'd been tied up for anyway. His love for Efe was so great and unquestioning that, in those days anyway, he'd have put up with anything just to be allowed to be a part of the bigger boy's world. He'd been about six years old when that happened, but he'd always had a hazy idea of the passage of time and that hadn't changed at all.

Another thing that hadn't changed was his inability to speak. Ridiculous to find yourself tongue-tied at his age, but words often struck him as being like a lot of little black insects, flying around in the air when people spoke them; wriggling about in lines of print and causing nothing but trouble and misunderstanding. It was Leonora who'd told him about the things that could never be called back,
the sped arrow, the spoken word
, and all his life Alex had watched words humming through the air and doing damage. He saw how his mother flinched when Chloë was being particularly nasty to her; he noticed how Leonora never managed to speak properly to Rilla, as though her love had somehow got bottled up on the journey between her heart and her mouth; he knew his father thought it was a joke, calling his mother silly, or a fool, or some such, but it wasn't really. It was meant. Words were always meant in some way, and Alex wasn't going to risk saying too many in case they hurt someone when he spoke them.

He was looking forward to seeing his grandmother. Efe always said he was Leonora's favourite, but Alex sometimes wondered whether that was quite true. There was something, some special relationship between her and Efe,
which you couldn't quite put your finger on, but yes, she did love him too, in a different way. She was not the same person with Alex that she was with other people. With him, ever since he was a tiny baby, she'd been girlish. She'd played games for hours at a time. She'd played puppets and put on silly voices when they were alone. She'd read to him every night, and Alex never discovered whether this worried his mother or not. She never said. Even now that everyone was grown-up, he was the one Leonora wanted sitting next to her, and when he was at Willow Court he was generally the person chosen to find things for her, or carry them about for her as she moved around the house.

‘Don't worry, dear,' she'd say to Mum. ‘I've got my Alex here now.'

She occasionally called him that. ‘My Alex.' He smiled. The others would bring her expensive presents for her birthday and she'd like his best of all, an album of photos of every single thing – corners of the house, animals, flowers in the garden, individual portraits, groups – the whole of Willow Court life between leather covers. On her actual birthday, the album would be empty, but as soon as she opened it, he'd tell her about his surprise. A history of the whole celebration in pictures. She'd love it. She loved anything that showed Willow Court and the paintings in a good light.

Ethan Walsh's paintings. They all talked about them a lot, and spent ages setting up visits for this or that art expert to come and look at them. Every summer, people came trooping past them dutifully but Alex wondered whether anyone apart from him and Leonora actually looked at them. That was another bond between them. They understood what was going on in the pictures. They realized that there was more, much more, to them than just paint on canvas, or pastels on thick paper, or watercolours.

For one thing, they were uncharacteristically modern. Most of them had been painted in the early years of the twentieth century, and you could see the influences on them of Impressionism and Surrealism, but there were tricks of perspective there that were very much more modern than that. Some of them, also, harked back to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. They had that sense of drama, of things being arranged for effect. And then there was the matter of light. Certain of the paintings (the portrait of Leonora herself as a girl, for instance) seemed actually to shed light outside the frame. Night scenes showing imaginary landscapes (mountains, seashores, forests) had moonlight spilling out of them, skimming surfaces, touching the edges of things, making shadows that contained more than you first thought. Walsh hid things in the pictures. Did anyone else realize this? Did they see the eyes in the reeds behind the swans? The clawing fingers at the ends of tree branches? A suspicion of darker things underneath the smooth surface of the world he was depicting? And did anyone notice that the colours were always strangely luminous? There were unexpected combinations in the still lifes that couldn't possibly be exactly true. The painting of a blue teapot, for example, was one of Alex's favourites. The real thing was still used by Mary, the housekeeper at Willow Court, and his mother, and there was just no comparison. The blue paint sang and vibrated and flooded your heart with something like joy. The real thing was okay. Nothing to write home about. Just a teapot. That was Ethan Walsh's real gift, Alex thought. He made things more than they were in life. Better. Brighter and filled with light. And that's what I want as well. That's what my photos do, or what I want them to do. Be like life, but more than that. Have the same luminescence about them that the Walsh Collection has.

‘Wake up, Beth,' he said. ‘We're here.'

He looked down at her. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

‘I'd like to take a photo of you looking like that,' he found himself saying.

‘You're mad, you are!' Beth answered. ‘I must look ghastly, all crumpled and sleepy. You should have woken me earlier, Alex. I could have driven for a bit.'

‘No, that's okay. I love your car.' He smiled at Beth. ‘And what's more, you can't be a backseat driver if you're sound asleep, can you?'

*

Beth stood in the corridor. She could hear Fiona and Douggie giggling in their room. They must have just got here too, she thought. She listened for a while, but couldn't hear Efe's voice. I should go and say hello at least, she thought, and sighed. She'd already unpacked and arranged everything in the drawers. She was in her old room, the one she always had when she came to Willow Court, with windows overlooking the drive and the wide sweep of lawn at the front of the house. She'd looked out of them as soon as she arrived and seen that the marquee for the party was already being put up. Men were swarming all over the lawn carrying slender steel tubes and hammering together a silver skeleton to hold up the vast greenish folds of the tent, still lying on the grass. Leonora was in the room next door on one side and Chloë on the other. I can't face them, she thought. Not Fiona and Douggie, not just yet, but they'll know where Efe is. She stood listening to Douggie's childish words, gathering herself as though for a battle or some kind of confrontation, and then knocked lightly on the door.