The Undertow (47 page)

“How was it, Malta?” he asks.

“It was good,” she says. Then, “Are there photographs of him?”

“Of my granddad? Don’t think so.”

“She didn’t have a single photograph of him, your grandma?”

“I never saw one. She always said my dad looked like him. He was named after him.”

Billie huffs a laugh, shakes her head.

“What?”

“The lot of you. Like a set of Russian dolls.”

“What?”

“All you men. Chips off the old block, the lot of you.”

He glances at her. “You think so?”

He means, does she think he’s just like his father. And there’s such a sharpness, an unease to it. She feels a rush of love for him. The boy he was. The years of pain. The damage done.

“You’re yourself. That’s the thing. Same block maybe, different chips.”

He says nothing.

“Is it okay to do this?” she asks, reaching out, almost touching the album. “You don’t mind?”

He nods her on: “I want to see.”

She sets the postcards down on the carpet like she is laying out a game of cards. She lifts one of a straw-roofed hut and places it next to another of some fishing boats. Turns them both over and reads the messages, the pencilled printing, the careful words. She turns them back. The colours are inked in on top of black-and-white prints. The shades are subtle, capturing the water’s rippled surface, the textures of rock and cloud. The pictures are what matters here, she realises. He’d seen the world, and even in the depths of war he’d found it beautiful. Whatever he’d written or failed to write, he’d communicated that.

HE’S STANDING ON
the platform as her train cruises to a halt. She recognises him from his description on the phone. The black blouson leather jacket and jeans, the close-cut grey hair. As she makes her way through the alighting passengers, she watches him scan the crowds for her. His erect bearing, his stillness, give him away. Ex-serviceman.

He greets her with a nod. A brisk handshake. He says, “There’s something I want you to see.”

She buttons up her coat against the cold, slips her folder under her arm and stuffs her gloved hands into her pockets. She keeps pace with him up the narrow cobbled street towards the black hulk of the castle. He walks fast. Their breath plumes. Above them the sky is clear and bright.

She hadn’t expected to go straight to the Centre—this is just a first meeting, after all, and she understands his reluctance to introduce her there. She’d thought maybe they’d go to a café, where she could spread out her slides to show him. But instead they head past blank Georgian terraces and around the flank of the castle. To the left, the ground falls away, and Billie looks down on the slate rooftops below, dusted white with frost.

The castle is a functioning prison, he tells her. Mediaeval, she says, looking up at its dark, high walls. He asks her if she knows the proportion of ex-servicemen in the prison population. She says no, even though she has some idea. He tells her, and she expresses the necessary shock and sympathy. And then the homelessness? Does she know how many former soldiers end up on the streets? She shakes her head. The support, he says. The support is just not there.

They walk under the bare trees. It is a still, quiet day. The trees and dark stone buildings are stark against the sky. The air is fresh and clean.

He’s doing up a house—the other side of town—he gestures over to his right, and she glances round, and sees the terraces snaking up another hill, and beyond that woodland and the whaleback of moor. It’s a nice town, he says. Quiet. He’s been doing this a few years now, since he left the forces. Buying a place cheap, which you can round here, even now; doing it up, selling it, moving on. That, and the work at the Centre. Keeps himself busy. Her gaze catches on his hand, swinging by his side—the nails are scuffed and blunt and white with plaster dust. Like her granddad’s hands, capable of making anything out of nothing.

They turn the corner round the flank of the castle, through the priory gates; the old church squats dark and low along the line of the hill. They walk through the graveyard.

She asks about the men he works with. He gives her a sidelong look. She wonders if she has been too brisk, but then he nods. And he starts to talk. About their wounds, the nature of their injuries. The multiple amputations, the disfigurements, the scarring. He talks about how the charity he works for kicks in once medical treatment is over, and the men are sent home to get on with their lives. To adjust.

They pass headstones, and kerbed graves, and graves with iron railings round them, and an angel with her head knocked off.

“There are some things,” he says, “you just can’t adjust to.”

He is a good man. Decent. She likes him. She’s pretty sure that he has killed people.

They come up to the graveyard wall, a gateway. He pauses here, one hand on the gate. He doesn’t open it. This must be what he wants her to see. Below them a meadow slopes down to the woods below. Dry grasses and the dead heads of cow parsley stand rimed with frost. There are stands of hawthorn trees, scarlet berries and a rustling of birds. Further off, there’s a sweep of silvery water, and then, blue with distance, a scalloped line of peaks and hills.

“That’s Morecambe Bay,” he says. “Beyond, those hills there, that’s the Lake District.”

“It’s really lovely.”

“Those hills there,” he says, gesturing to the distant peaks. “That one’s Helvellyn, that’s Hawkshead Moor, and that’s the Old Man of Coniston.”

“It’s beautiful, really.”

He nods. She looks round at him. There’s a muscle twitching in his cheek.

“Sometimes I go climbing,” he says, and then for a moment he says nothing more. She follows his thoughts down what is clearly a well-worn track. The life he has. That there is no particular reason that he should have it when others don’t.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He shakes his head. “No. It’s okay. My point is, you could paint that.”

He looks round at her. His eyes are startlingly blue.

“Seriously,” he says. “Why not paint that, that kind of thing? That’s breathtaking, that is.”

She nods. He’s right. Of course he’s right, it’s beautiful, it’s sublime. It’s wonderful to look at, to be in, to climb, to breathe. She wants to tell him about the hare’s skull, the dry newt with its dimpled eyes, the earlobe. These things, these damaged treasures, they need to be looked at, considered. They have their own beauty too.

“I know,” she says. “I know what you’re saying. You’re absolutely right.”

“So?”

“So I’m not a landscape painter. I don’t need to be. There are like a gazillion paintings of those mountains.”

She pulls a hand out of her pocket, tugs off the glove.

“Look,” she says. “I’m—I want to paint what we, what people don’t look at. I want to paint it and put it in a frame and make it something that people
really
look at. Deliberately. That they linger over.”

He studies her face, assessing her. She straightens herself up, brushes a strand of hair back from her cheek.

“You think it’s going to get you noticed?”

She shrugs. “I don’t care either way. It doesn’t matter.”

“Because, what, you think it’s worthy?”

“It’s necessary.”

She slips her folder up onto the flat surface of the wall; she goes to loop the black elastic.

“Can I show you?” she asks.

He nods.

She lifts out a polypocket of slides, hands it to him. Her fingers are pale. It leaves her raw, bringing these pictures into the light. But if she’s not prepared to do it, to expose her inner self like this, she can’t ask anybody else to open themselves up to her scrutiny. He takes the sheet of slides off her, and holds it up to the sky. She watches his eyes as they move from image to image, following the descent of her mother’s illness.
When his gaze lingers, she glances from him to the sheet, trying to work out what in particular has snagged him. Her cheeks burn. She feels ashamed of herself. Overeager.

“Who was this?” he says. He doesn’t look at her.

She swallows. “Mum.”

He nods. He puts the page down. She slips it back into her folder.

“I’ll ask for you,” he says. “At the Centre. If they’re up for it, I’ll introduce you to some people.”

She paints other men, but these are the three that matter most.

She paints Corporal Simon Gregg in front of his patio door. You can just see a glimpse of foliage and the red metal cup of a barbecue in the back garden beyond. He lost his right arm to a sniper bullet on patrol outside his FOB in Afghanistan: his sleeve is pinned up to his shoulder. He is planning to do a degree; he’s not quite sure what yet. He’s still working on his one-handed typing. His girlfriend is blonde, pretty, harassed, straight in from work and glancing at the drinks tray on the sideboard. He never seemed drunk, not once, not all the time Billie was working on his portrait. But he was never without a drink. She paints his whisky glass in his left hand.

She paints Private Louis Hargreaves in his bedroom. He sits on his single bed, his duvet cover a spread of stars, the wall behind him still stuck with posters. He’s lost both legs at the knee. The stumps are shiny and livid. He keeps his guitar on his lap, between him and what isn’t there. He keeps his face turned towards the guitar. He’s civil, but he doesn’t want to chat. He picks out tunes as she paints. He has a nasty scar up the side of his head: you can see it through his stubbly hair. He got that in a motorbike accident. Lost control on a bend and slammed into a tree: he was just a kid, still at school. She thought the army would sort him out, his mother did. She feeds Billie coffee and biscuits after the sittings. Custard creams and Bourbons and Garibaldis. Billie sits in the immaculate, tired kitchen, trying to dislodge clumps of biscuit with her tongue, listening to Mrs. Hargreaves talk, hearing, between the statements, the faint thrum of Louis’s guitar from his room upstairs. Mrs. Hargreaves talks about how good this is for Louis, Billie’s taking an interest, Billie’s being there, being company for him. He’s not a talker, doesn’t find it easy. And Billie, she’s been a real help.

Captain Peter Reynolds she paints in the sitting room of his family
home. His wife stands behind the armchair, her hand on his shoulder. She is a neat, faded woman with pale hair and an upright posture. She wears a lavender cardigan and fawn skirt, and says very little. Her husband is chatty though. The scar tissue wrinkles up the side of his face as he speaks; it catches the light differently, makes it harder to paint him. She wonders if he always talks like this, on and on, asking questions, asking his wife to remember, telling Billie family stories: it’s his attempt to fill up the empty space around him, to populate the darkness. Billie makes assenting noises, can’t really listen, not while she works.

One of his eye sockets is a darkened pit. He still has the other eye, but it’s not much use to him any more.

“Light, a kind of milky light. Bits of colour.”

Their son, Christopher, comes home from school. He sits nearby, and watches Billie paint. He watches first the way her eyes flick from canvas to subject, then back again, tireless, scrutinising both. He moves in and stands at her shoulder, small in his school uniform, and looks down at the sweep and dab of her brush, then back up at his mum and dad. His gaze falls into synch with hers. She glances round at him and smiles.

“Sorry,” he says, and is about to step away.

She reaches out a hand, stilling him. “Not a problem. Do you do art at school?”

He nods.

They stare back at his parents, considering lines and shapes and distances. Then, quick as a cat, Mrs. Reynolds pokes out her tongue. Billie laughs, the boy laughs.

“What?” Captain Reynolds turns his face up to his wife. “What is it?”

His wife bends down to explain; her hand cups her husband’s ruined cheek.

HER FIRST INSTINCT
is to turn on her heel and walk right back out again, but Alexis is there, and grabs her by the elbow, and moves her into the cool white room, talking smoothly. Billie is ushered along and introduced, and her hand is shaken, and she makes some comment about the weather (clammy, threatening a storm) to a man in a grey suit, and thinks,
If this is the best I can come up with, I just shouldn’t talk. I just shouldn’t talk at all
.

She should have come with Norah. She could just be with Norah; she wouldn’t have to make conversation; Norah would understand. But Norah’s coming straight from work, and bringing unspecified people with her, which is in itself alarming: more strangers, more small talk. Or old friends, and that’s alarming in its own way too.

Her paintings—there aren’t many, but this is a good gallery, this is a game-changing gallery—hang along the end wall. She can’t even look at them. Ed’s and Jake’s pictures take up the sides, and three of Clare’s ceramics stand glittering on pedestals down the centre of the room. Alexis and Gabrielle have done a good job: everything looks gorgeous, and the room is busy and loud, and she spots Ed himself standing chatting in good jeans and trainers and a sharp jacket, completely at his ease, and Captain Reynolds, Mrs. Reynolds with her hand under his arm, and Christopher on his other side. The three of them are looking at one of Ed’s abstracts; Mrs. Reynolds is standing up on tiptoe to speak into Peter Reynolds’ ear, describing the pictures for him. He nods. Christopher just stares. Billie goes over to them, says hello. Together they stand and look at the abstracts—a glory of complementary colour, of aquamarine blues and sunset shades of orange.

“Are you able to get any of that?” Billie asks.

Captain Reynolds turns his head towards her voice. He pulls a face, making his scars twist.

“Lorna likes them,” he says.

Mrs. Reynolds leans round her husband to peer at Billie. “How are you feeling?”

Billie laughs. “God.” She shakes her head. Mrs. Reynolds smiles sympathetically.

The guy in the grey suit reappears beside her, and he starts to ask her about her work, and it makes her palms sweat. She’s looking round: there are little clusters of people she half knows, and her eyes bounce from one face to the next, catching an eye here or there, smiling a hard little smile, wishing Norah would get here, with or without whoever it is she’s bringing.