Why Don’t You Come for Me (6 page)

She contemplated returning to bed, but as she wasn’t sleepy she turned aside into the office instead, where she began to google for information on artists with associations to the Lake District. A new project was good. It was what she needed to help her forget about the postcard, because in her heart she knew that Marcus was right in what he said. The postcards had never brought them any closer to a resolution – they just jabbed at a raw wound.

She had not mentioned her idea for another tour to Marcus, because he would be sure to say something to Melissa and she wanted to retain sole ownership of the idea for a while. Incorporating a visit to Brantwood would be a given, and of course there was Friars Crag and the Lodore Falls. Plenty of artists had drawn inspiration from the area, but could you make a really good tour out of it? Where had Turner, Constable or Burne-Jones actually stayed? Clients loved to sleep in locations which had links to the subjects – even if the buildings in question had been altered beyond recognition. She would have to do a lot of proper research in due course, but the internet was always a good starting point – even if you discovered later on that half the stuff posted on there was wrong!

Jo worked steadily through the morning, scribbling notes as she went, breaking off only to chivvy Sean out to school, shower and dress herself and consume a breakfast banana. At about midday she walked briskly through the drizzle to the Old Chapel Gallery, where she was relieved to find Shelley alone, leafing through a stack of prints on the pine table, which doubled as a counter and a desk.

‘You’re not too busy for a chat, are you?’

‘Not at all. Glad to be diverted, actually. Can I get you a coffee?’ Shelley rose to relieve her visitor of a damp cagoule before pouring them both mugs of coffee from the jug on the hot plate. When Jo began to explain her ideas for a new tour, Shelley mostly listened in silence, only nodding or putting in an occasional word.

‘It would need a lot more work,’ Jo concluded. ‘None of our current guides has a fine-arts background – but I could really see this being a winner. I’d like to include some stuff about lesser-known artists – the ones who seem to have been influential at the time, but aren’t exactly household names now. Apparently there was this guy called Thomas Girtin, who died when he was only twenty-six or twenty-seven, but his paintings were really important. I’d never heard of him until this morning.’

‘Why just stick with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?’ asked Shelley. ‘If you’re going to talk about Collingwood and the start of the Lake Artists, you could bring the whole thing up to date. If you run these tours during the summer months, why not throw in a visit to the Lake Artists Exhibition in Grasmere?’

‘Shelley, you’re a genius. That would be a marvellous way of structuring it. I was worried about not having enough indoor venues to visit – famous landscapes are all very well, but the age group we cater for can’t all manage to tramp up Castle Crag. Maybe we could bring them here, too. You specialize in the best contemporary local work.’

Shelley laughed. ‘Even if they don’t buy anything, I suppose they might tell their friends about us.’

‘Have you got any books I could borrow, to help me get started?’

‘Probably more than you’ve got houseroom for. I’ll sort some out and bring them down later. It’s no good me saying I can put my hand on them straight away. You know what it’s like in our house – books four deep everywhere.’

Shelley was as good as her word, arriving at The Hideaway later that afternoon with such a weight of books that she had travelled the few hundred yards by car. Jo helped her carry in a dozen or so volumes – ‘Just for starters,’ Shelley said – which she left Shelley to arrange in piles on the sitting-room floor, while she made some tea. (Shelley invariably declined Jo’s coffee as inferior to the brew she fermented in the gallery.)

It was only when Jo carried the mugs in that she finally noticed the large bruise forming above Shelley’s left cheekbone, which had certainly not been there that morning. ‘Whatever have you done to yourself?’

‘I was reaching a book down and another one fell on me. It was a great thick book of essays – goodness knows what they’re about. I don’t think Brian will ever read them. It’s just another of his must-haves from a second-hand bookshop.’

‘Oh no! I feel sort of responsible.’

‘Don’t be silly. It wasn’t your fault – I should look what I’m doing. What’s Marcus up to this week? Is it still the Brontës?’

‘That one finished yesterday. He’s doing battlefields for the next four days.’

Shelley sipped her tea. ‘I always thought the Brontës were a massive bore myself. We were made to read
Wuthering Heights
at school, and quite frankly I didn’t get it. Give me Jilly Cooper any day of the week.’ This observation took them in a pleasantly literary direction until Shelley asked, as she put her empty mug on the side table, ‘How’s Marcus’s mother, by the way?’

Jo sighed. ‘She’s still the same. It’s just a matter of how long she lasts, really.’

‘Poor Marcus. We’ll all have to go through this in the next few years I suppose. My parents are pretty good for their age, but they aren’t getting any younger.’ When Jo said nothing, Shelley, sensing that she had somehow hit a wrong note, asked rather awkwardly: ‘Are your parents still alive?’

‘No, they’re both dead.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t know that. You’re very young to have lost both parents.’

‘I’m thirty-nine,’ Jo snapped. ‘I don’t suppose it’s that unusual.’

‘Of course not.’ Shelley cast around desperately for some other subject. Most people were prepared to bore for England once they got started with their families, but it was obvious from Jo’s voice that this was an off-limits area.

It was Jo who broke the short silence. ‘Have you heard about The Old Forge?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Maisie told me.’

‘Naturally!’

They both laughed, but Shelley could sense that the discord she had inadvertently sounded was still ringing out faintly around the room, and Jo made no protest when she said that she must get back to the gallery.

After seeing Shelley out, Jo returned to the sitting room, where she selected the first book from the nearest pile. For some reason the illustration on the front reminded her of a children’s story in which people could step into pictures and explore them at will, seeing beyond what the artist had actually painted. If you stepped into this bucolic landscape, she thought, you would probably need to watch out for cow pats. She peered at the grass in the foreground for evidence of realism, but the image seemed to have faded, its place taken by a set of wooden garage doors, one of which stood ajar. She only had to reach for the handle in order to pull one of the doors wide open and see what was inside. She recoiled from the thought, and fought to refocus on the book in her lap, noting that it must have spent a long time on a shelf which caught the sun, because the spine had faded from the rich red of the front and rear dust jackets to a muddy brown. The scene chosen for the front cover, of cattle grazing peacefully in an idealized cow-pat-less landscape, was surrounded by a border of this deep blood red. Jo tried hard to concentrate on the cream and brown cows against their backdrop of woodland and sky, but the grassy meadow kept turning into the park across the street from William Street School, viewed through two sets of metal railings: the tall ones, which surrounded the park itself, and a smaller set, which had been erected on the edge of the nearest pavement – the kind of waist-high railings which were placed at every school gate to prevent pupils from running straight out into the road.

When the bell sounded at half past three, all the infants came swarming out of that gate to where their mothers were waiting, some grouped on the pavement, some in nearby parked cars, some with shopping bags, or pushchairs containing younger brothers and sisters. She looked up into the faces of all these mothers: even down among their feet for a sign of the familiar scuffed trainers, but her mother was not there. Gradually the other children and their mothers thinned out, until it was possible to see right up and down the road: to know that her mother was not approaching from either direction. Left alone, she pressed her back against the wall which ran all around the school’s perimeter, until she could feel the rough brickwork through her thin clothes.

At ten minutes to four the juniors were let out of another gate, which stood a few yards further along the road. Some of them were met by grown-ups too, but none of these adults noticed her: something or someone always screened her from their potential concern. A couple of bigger girls did stop and tried to talk to her, but when she refused to answer they continued on their way. Some bigger boys came and pinched the belt out of her mac: they tossed it around for a while, then threw it in the gutter and ran off. She was frightened by the big boys, but she ignored them, pretended they were not there, even when they came close and shouted something at her. She knew she would be in trouble about the belt, but although she could see where it lay, she could not bring herself to cross the pavement and retrieve it. The pavement looked so wide, the park a million miles away. She liked the swings in the park, but she was not allowed to cross the road alone, so she stood with her back pressed hard against the brickwork and wondered why her mother didn’t come.

Jo shook herself back to the present, and hastily discarded her first choice of book in favour of another. She wished Shelley had not mentioned her parents. It was not Shelley’s fault, of course. If she had known what happened, she would never have asked the question.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘So,’ Melissa said, ‘it’s agreed that we drop Lawrence from next year’s itinerary, and replace him with Daphne du Maurier.’

Jo said nothing. It was yet another of those decisions which Marcus and Melissa had effectively made already, during the course of their joint excursion the week before. Just like the decision to hold this meeting in Melissa’s sitting room – ‘much more comfortable than the office’ Melissa purred – where they were now planning the programme of tours to be advertised for the following year.

‘I’ve been thinking about that hotel in Fowey,’ Marcus said. ‘I know it’s a long way to go, but we’ve always inspected the hotels personally before using them. I think one of us should go down.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Melissa nodded. ‘But who can fit it in? It has to be done before the material goes out – any changes from the advertised itinerary always shake customer confidence.’

‘I could do it,’ Jo said. Some Cornish sunshine would be a welcome change to the persistent Cumbrian drizzle. She had just begun to imagine herself looking out across a rocky headland when Marcus cut across the vision.

‘It ought to be me, as I’m the one who’ll be accompanying the tour.’

Jo was about to say that she couldn’t see what difference it made: hadn’t Marcus said only the other day that it was a team effort, in which it did not matter who did what? Melissa chimed in first with: ‘I think you’re right, darling. It puts you on familiar ground when you get there.’ Melissa addressed everyone as ‘darling’. It was one of the things which ground Jo’s gears.

Marcus was already thumbing through his diary. ‘I can see a possible window in a couple of weeks,’ he said.

‘Hold on …’ Jo began, knowing perfectly well that the ‘window’ in question could only be during a period when they were scheduled to be at home together. A Vesuvial warmth of indignation was rising within her. If Marcus hopped off down to Cornwall, that inevitably left her alone with Sean, and she could not help thinking that in volunteering himself for the Cornwall trip, Marcus was taking another of his favourite maxims, ‘what’s yours is mine’, rather too much for granted. Step-parenting was hard work, and if anyone needed a break in Cornwall, it was not Marcus. Rather than say anything which hinted at marital disharmony in front of Melissa, she kept her eyes fixed on him, awaiting the moment when he registered her expression of mute protest and passed the Cornwall trip along, but once Marcus had finished jotting in his diary, he returned his full attention to their hostess without so much as glancing Jo’s way, thereby ratcheting up her annoyance by several more notches.

‘Just going back to the scheduling –’ Melissa paused to drag the chart across the floor, so that they could all see it better. She was sitting on the carpet, at just the right angle for Marcus to see down the front of her top. ‘I see we’ve got Jo on a back-to-back here …’ she indicated the block of dates with her pen, ‘when there’s no need, because I can take over Mary Queen of Scots in the Lowlands.’

‘No!’ Jo almost shouted. ‘I always do Mary Queen of Scots.’

‘Not always,’ Marcus began.

‘Yes – always.’

‘But it means disembarking the American Plantagenet Society at Manchester Airport, then driving all the way to Newcastle to meet the coach at four o’clock.’

‘I’ll have plenty of time,’ Jo said. ‘The airport drop is early morning, and my car will be there already.’

‘But why on earth stretch yourself like that in the middle of a busy season?’ Melissa protested. ‘I’ll be available, and I can do a perfectly good job on old MQS.’

That’s another thing, thought Jo. I hate the way she abbreviates things and Marcus picks up on it and copies her. ‘But I
want
to do it. I have a special affinity with Mary Queen of Scots.’ She saw Melissa raise her eyebrows in Marcus’s direction and instantly regretted her words.

‘Sorry, darling, I didn’t realize that.’ The amusement in Melissa’s voice was evident. ‘Perhaps we could rejig the schedule so that someone else takes care of the Richard III groupies.’ She pretended to consider for a moment. ‘Of course, if Marcus stayed home with Sean instead of … no, no, that won’t work. Who else could we call on to take care of Richard III for us?’

‘There’s no need to call on anyone,’ Marcus broke in impatiently. ‘It’s perfectly obvious that you should take the MQS tour in place of Jo. There’s no need to bugger up the whole schedule just so that Jo can have a monopoly on MQS. Besides,’ he turned to Jo, ‘you shouldn’t go wearing yourself out by doing a back-to-back when there’s no need. We get so little time at home together, and this way it gives us an extra three days.’