Looking Down (13 page)

‘I don’t know. It might have been hours. It was light and then it grew dark. Tell me more about ravens.’

‘Oh stop, I’m almost at the end of my slender knowledge. When there were sheep kept on the clifftop fields, a hundred years ago, they’d be guarded at lambing time because the ravens were famous for swooping down and taking out the eyes of a sleeping lamb. All I can really say is they would like what’s on our plates, but they might not eat it all. They are hungry and cautious and curious, they like bright things.’

‘Brutal.’

‘Oh yes, what isn’t?’

The doctor and the artist were objective enough to discuss the scavenger while eating what the scavenger would eat in a raw, disintegrating state. It did not affect Richard, who chewed agreeably, but John noticed he was concentrating more on the potato and the damp green cabbage that surrounded it.

‘They’re so beautiful, though,’ Richard said. ‘That sheen they have, like black ice.’

‘The beautiful and the wicked tend only to go together because of their genetic inheritance of power,’ John said, sententiously, putting his knife and fork together over his plate. It had tasted a great deal better than it looked and he realised he was pleasantly, controllably mellow, as well as being, for the first time in a long time, content to remain ever so slightly out of control. ‘And it is always a mistake to make comparisons between the kingdoms and habits of birds and those of ourselves. We behave like ravens, rather than the other way round. No need to be shocked. We take our habits from the animal and bird, not the other way round. We’re on the same spectrum and they were there first. They must laugh at us.’

‘Thank you for that.’

Richard’s uproarious laugh filled the now empty room.

Two hours later, they were still there. All the waitresses and their legs had gone home. They had touched upon another tangent, and then another, not yet including the tide and the stars they could see from the window. There was the view of the port, the sea and the sky. The food was long since forgiven. The artist could eat; got second wind on the choice of a stiff pudding and went at it with a will, while John stopped at that and toyed with coffee. Please, just bring us the port and the brandy, will you, John had said amiably to Miss Smiley face with the legs. Put it on the bill, it’ll be all right, go home, why don’t you? And watched her as she walked away. They were back, or was it forward, on another topic.

‘Something you said earlier,’ Richard was saying, slowly but unhesitatingly, ‘about the beautiful and the wicked going together. On account of a genetic quantity which has always given them power. And I suppose you meant beauty equals power, and power corrupts. I don’t buy that, but then I’ve never been beautiful, only powerful. My wife is beautiful, though. Will it make her wicked, do you think?’

‘No, of course not. Although beauty creates temptation.’

Richard had his head resting on his hand, staring out at the sea.

‘Oh good. It would be nice if she had that propensity, though. She’s so keen on respectability, disgraceful in one so young. And she thinks someone like me embodies it. It must have been part of my appeal. I’ve grown into it, I suppose. With a suit on, I look like what I am. Financier, founder of insurance company, person who serves on committees, consultant to charities. But they don’t know how I started. How I got the seed corn to start a business.’

‘We were all boys once, and shall be again, won’t we?’

‘It was easy in the seventies. I got a balaclava and robbed a bank. Best moment of my life. Better than sex.’

John had the strange feeling of having died and gone to heaven.

‘You never did.’

‘I did so.’

Then they were giggling until it hurt. Snorting and spluttering with it, shushing each other on the way out through the silent foyer, perfectly delighted with one another. Phone numbers already exchanged, and changes of subject almost de rigueur. And so they parted, slapping each other on the back, lightly. A gesture of friendship which was never going to include platitudes.

Hitting the night air as they waited for John’s taxi, suddenly more serious, they hugged one another fiercely.

‘Don’t leave me, John, not now I’ve found you. I’ve needed this.’

‘You don’t get rid of me so easy. And I’ve to come and see this friend of yours, and that painting of yours. Soon. I’ll miss you.’

The taxi hove into sight.

‘Bloody soon, John, you daft sod. Make it soon.’

John smiled as he tripped over his own doorstep. Soon sounded good. A good word,
soon.
Washing his face, it occurred to him that all the sudden changes of subject could be the result of defective memory, and thought, that didn’t matter at all. The man was a life force.

Tomorrow was soon enough for duty.

And then the image of the girl came back.

Ah, yes, another woman would be nice, to displace her.

Sarah Fortune, for all her habits, knew the difference between night and day, and left almost all conversation with her brother until breakfast. An early breakfast, by which time she had retrieved the clothes from beyond the dustbins, dusted him down. She was a night owl, but not that much. Nor did she share his capacity for instant sleep. Her own in the intervening three hours had not been refreshed by indigestible, now calmer rage, slightly mollified by the fact that Steven was also a little pale and wan and exhausted by his rushed explanation of events. She let me out, I couldn’t get out, so I came back, was how he had ended it. Sorry.

The picture with the rough frame sat propped up against the back of a chair, next to the boiler, while both sat facing it in the kitchen, eating fresh bread and butter, like they had as children at tea. In a minute the phone would ring. Sarah knew it was going to be that kind of day. She was unspeakably angry with him, but for the time being it best remained unspoken. The knife was back in the drawer.

They looked at the painting.

It was highly coloured in the centre, brilliant reds and flesh tints. Beyond the centre, nothing to do with anything, there were vaguer blues, the suggestion of water, and a small clutch of pink, all of it littered with dark splodges.

‘I wish he didn’t use so much paint,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s distracting. Like he was carving with it and hadn’t finished yet. It needs a strong light and a different angle. Shoving it through a letterbox and covering it with a towel hasn’t helped either. The paint’s so thick, it’s scarcely dry.’ She picked off a thread of dark-blue towelling from the corrugated surface.

Steven nodded speechlessly.

‘Haven’t you got to go to work today?’

He nodded again. She rose and poured another cup of coffee. He was dressed in his loose-fitting suit, with a plaster over a small, sore puncture wound in his buttock; she was wearing her dressing gown, the colouring of which suited them both. They both turned back to the painting.

‘It’s not finished,’ Steven murmured, mournfully. ‘I sort of like it, but it scares me. A figure surrounded by vultures. I hope she wasn’t sunbathing. And I’m very sorry about damaging it.’

‘There’s not much damage, and never mind that,’ Sarah said, drily. ‘You broke into the flat of the wife of an almost millionaire and stole it. It should frighten you to death.’

‘I didn’t steal it. She gave it to me. I told you. And oh, Sarah—’

‘I know, I know, you talk in your sleep, and you’re in love. With someone who could put you in prison and is probably thinking of it as we speak. Now, look at this thing . . .’

‘It isn’t a
thing
, it’s a painting. Don’t you dare call it a thing.’

‘Listen, Steven, you’re a hopeless aesthete, and so blind with the looking you can’t see anything. Does it move you at all?’

It moved her, although Sarah reserved her most intense responses for real faces, and only occasionally for paintings. Such
as the cow in the field in the next-door room, too big for its place, too intrusive, which was there because it inspired an absurd amount of daily happiness. There must be a word for a response like that.

‘No. It doesn’t
zing
to me because it’s interesting but foul.’

‘Doesn’t
zing.
Therefore it’s a thing without meaning for you. And for the first time in your pathetic life you’ve got a real buzz from a real woman, probably because she looked like a poster of those old film stars you loved. I am sincerely pleased for you. A little lust never comes amiss. Well, maybe you were hyped up at the time, but you have to accept it warped your judgement. Why on earth did you take this away? There’s a fine collection of glass, some highly saleable paintings, plenty for a common little thief—’

‘She asked me to take it. And come back for the rest. Sarah, she was lovely, I can’t tell you.’

‘Yeah, she stabbed you.’

He ignored this as well as the rising tide of anger which made her want to get the knife back out of the drawer and stab him again wherever it would hurt most. Instead, she pointed at the painting.

‘What do you see?’

He considered it.

‘A naive palette. He’s not good at mixing colours. Relies on primary, and building them up, like walls against what he sees. Too much physical matter. He’s making defences, and he’s trying out stuff as he goes. I don’t like it, much. Amateur. Good, though.’

‘Yes, but what do you
see?
’

He considered, with maddening swiftness.

‘I see a mess. Done by a painter on a learning curve, long before peak. And I can see why she wanted it out of the house. It’s only small, but it’s powerful and unpleasant.’

He was on his feet, straightening his tie, preparing to leave,
turning away from the thing as if it had nothing to do with him. She hated all men at that moment.

‘Sit down.’

He sat. The phone rang.

‘Stay there while I answer it.’

Steven sat gazing into space, gazing anywhere where he did not have to look at the thing, conjuring other images into his mind.
Oyster white and purple, red lips.
A tear rolled down one cheek and he brushed it away, half hearing Sarah’s voice murmuring in the other room. She came back and leant in the doorway, blocking his way out.

‘Right, dear, now here’s a conundrum. Richard Beaumont, painter of this
thing
, husband of the lovely Lilian, that’s her name, by the way . . .’

‘Lilian,’ he murmured. ‘Lilian.’

‘Is on his way home and wishes to call here for a chat this afternoon, possibly with a friend. Steven, you shit, why did you have to choose
here?
I suppose you were thinking of just buggering off and leaving me with this? What if you run into the lovely Lilian on the way out? She’ll recognise you for sure. Fritz knows you. How am I going to get this painting back?’

‘Lilian doesn’t want it back,’ he said indignantly. ‘She wanted it taken away. And she won’t recognise me. Not without a skullcap furrowing my face and making me look like a monkey, no hair and, oh God, what did I look like?’

‘But what about Richard?
He’ll
want it.
He
painted it, and he probably hasn’t finished it. Am I to sit and talk to my old friend with his latest work of art on the premises? Or talk to Lilian, for that matter, without mentioning her burglar? Oh Christ, what a mess you’ve made.’

‘I was looking for something special, and I found something special. She won’t recognise me,’ Steven was repeating sadly. ‘She’ll never know me again.’

The thought was so terrible it made him choke on the words.

‘Never,’ he repeated.

‘Oh, shut up. No, she probably wouldn’t; observation’s not her strong point anyway, but what about me? What am I supposed to do?’

He took her by the shoulders and moved her to one side.

‘You’ll manage, sis, you usually do. And you won’t give me away, will you? You’d never do that.’

‘And the advantage to me is that you can never come here again.’

He pecked her cheek. ‘I love you, too, sis,’ he intoned bitterly, which left her fuming with the usual feeling it was all her fault. As the front door closed behind him she ran to it, opened it again and listened intently until his footsteps had faded away, then stood there listening to silence. There were a couple of feathers on the hall carpet, disturbed by the draught. Fussily, she picked them up, hearing more footsteps coming towards her. They were the weary, wheezy footsteps of Fritz, with the post. She went back inside, counting on her fingers.

Supposing he had lied . . . Supposing he had attacked Lilian, he was capable; supposing . . . No, he had not lied, no one, not even he, could invent what he had described; he had been too tired to lie. Lilian would still be asleep. Lilian never talked to Fritz. Fritz already knew Steven as an innocent, irregular visitor. Richard Beaumont had never met Steven. Lilian was playing some game with Richard, the hell with them all. Back in the kitchen she picked up the painting, carried it through to the living room and propped it on the floor. Leaving the curtains closed, she focused one of the spotlights on to the surface and stood back.

Seen from this angle, with the light raking and raising the contours of the paint, she could see what he was about, and the central image of the painting assumed sudden and startling shape.

It was a corpse; that’s what it was, unmistakably a corpse. Hideous in its dead certainty. And nice, worldly-wise Richard Beaumont was coming to see her later, announced by the phone call, bringing a friend he wanted her to meet. Richard, who seemed to have crouched over this corpse, pimping for a friend. He’s very nice, Richard said. He needs someone like you. Life was rich.

The problem with having a good time and drinking too much was the morning after, when John struggled to describe to himself how he felt. ‘Corpselike’ seemed appropriate for the colour of his skin, until he remembered that corpses were devoid of feeling and retained only the capacity to inspire it in others. And he was not without feeling, this morning, far from it. He was stuffed to the gills with feeling, and it was mainly loneliness. Not an unhappy loneliness, but a symptom of what companionship did: made you lonelier later. Until, with the remembrance of pleasure and laughter, the guilt came in on the wake and you remembered duty, towards the living and the dead.