They had fast-track tickets for the Van Gogh Museum too.
‘Wow, this is massive,’ said Vicky, looking up at the number of steps there were between floors. ‘How many pictures did he do?’
‘I think it’s nine hundred actual paintings plus a zillion drawings,’ said Lara, recalling a TV programme she and Freddie had watched recently. ‘And do you know how many he sold in his lifetime?’
‘A hundred?’ Pip guessed.
‘Don’t be daft, it has to be more. Two hundred?’ said Vicky.
‘No, I know this – the answer is one,’ said Jo.
‘That’s a myth, Jo, but the truth is that he hardly sold any. He used to swap some for paints and pencils and even food, sometimes,’ Lara answered.
Vicky whistled. ‘He could have bought a lot of pancakes for what they sell for now. How come you know so much about him anyway? I wouldn’t have had you down as an art expert.’ She nudged her friend playfully.
‘Freddie,’ explained Lara. ‘He’s got such a soft spot for old Vincent that he made me into a fan too. He was going to bring me here last year, but I said I didn’t fancy it much then.’ And she sighed. ‘I should have, shouldn’t I?’
‘Well, you can come with him in the future, can’t you?’ said Pip.
‘Yes, and I will,’ replied Lara.
Anyone who judged Freddie by how he looked would never have thought that underneath that rough-looking outer shell was a very gentle soul who enjoyed walking around museums. He watched TV programmes about history and music and read books about art. He might have been a lover of AC/DC and Meatloaf, but that didn’t stop him from listening to classical music too. He liked to take a long bath and have Beethoven booming out of the old ghetto blaster he’d had since he was a boy. It was still going strong because Freddie looked after things. And that included Lara. She had never been with anyone who treated her as something valuable, as he did.
‘I used to hate going around museums when we were at school, didn’t you?’ said Pip. ‘Remember that place with all the mummies?’ She huffed. ‘Seen one, seen ’em all.’
‘Yep,’ agreed Vicky. ‘There were only so many Anglo-Saxon spearheads I could look at without slipping into a coma.’
No one was bored here though. There were floors and floors of paintings, each one a footstep on the path of Vincent’s short and tragic life.
‘He died at the same age we are now,’ said Lara.
‘Look at everything he did in his thirty-seven years,’ said Vicky. ‘He really was a man with some get-up-and-go.’
Lara’s thoughts once again strayed to Danny. Vincent Van Gogh could have taught him a thing or two.
The next floor up was much busier than the first one.
‘Ah – that explains the crowds and the queues,’ said Jo as they came to a large information board. ‘The famous Starry Night picture is here on loan from New York. We have to see that.’
Vicky, who was very good with her elbows, pushed a way through the people to get to the front, and her friends followed close behind. And there it was: one of the most famous paintings ever. Lara shivered because, whenever she saw it in books or magazines or on the TV, she thought of another starry night sixteen years ago. The night when Danny Belfont proposed to her.
It had been winter and midnight, and the sky above their heads was like a black velvet blanket. It was studded with millions of stars that twinkled like diamonds. The moon was a beautiful silver curve that sat among them like a smile. Lara hadn’t been expecting Danny to ask her to marry him. His words made her head so fuzzy that those stars began to spin and blur, until they looked just like they did on Vincent’s artwork.
Except . . .
As she looked at the lovely painting now, she began to remember something else, something less romantic: how it really was. For a start, it was freezing and that’s why all the stars were out: because there was no cloud cover in the sky. And why were they outside when Danny proposed? It came to her then – because they’d had a massive row and she’d walked out of wherever they were into the car park.
She tried to recall where they were in detail. A grotty pub car park. Then she remembered why they’d argued. Ah yes . . . He’d found the gig, after she had told him that she was sick of getting no help from him in booking places to play. But only a handful of people came because Danny hadn’t sorted out any advertising. So the landlord had refused to pay them. She had told Danny that night that she was done, she was finished. She’d stormed out to the van and he’d followed, tried to talk her round.
‘No, Danny, that’s it. I’m fed up. I don’t want to do this any more.’
‘But, babe, I can’t do it without you.’
‘No. Go solo. It’s not for me . . .’
‘Marry me.’
‘What?’
‘Marry me.’
And that was the moment when she’d thought she was going to pass out, and looked upwards and saw those stars start to swirl – and not in a good way. And Danny had caught her before she fainted. And the reason she’d nearly passed out was not because she was dizzy with happiness. It was because she hadn’t eaten all day, as she’d been too busy trying to do lots of last-minute advertising. Sorting out Danny’s mess.
It appeared Vincent Van Gogh’s picture of a starry night had unlocked something in her brain that she had painted over, hoping to make a better picture, the way poor artists often did with their canvases.
He didn’t buy her a ring, because he couldn’t afford one at that time. Then he’d turned up with a new guitar that he told her he’d bought at a rock bottom price. He’d lied, because she found the receipt for it. He could have got her a lovely ring for what he paid for it. She had never told him though. She just kept waiting for the ring he promised to buy for her, but never did.
She’d remembered the story of the starry-night proposal all wrong. She’d told herself it was romantic and perfect, but it hadn’t been at all. People said you couldn’t lie to yourself, but you could. You could, until something made you face up to the truth.
The four women were all getting crushed in the crowd, so they moved away from the Starry Night painting into the next part of the gallery.
‘Who does that remind you of?’ said Vicky, as they all stood in front of one of Van Gogh’s self-portraits.
‘Andy Beech,’ Pip and Jo answered without even needing to think about it.
‘Oh my goodness,’ said Lara. In the picture, Vincent had a small pointed chin, hooded eyes, no beard and brushed-back strawberry-blond hair.
‘That was another lucky escape you had, Lara,’ said Pip, and she shuddered.
‘You really have been out with some total idiots,’ said Jo, shaking her head.
‘I always thought he was so good-looking.’ Lara let loose a long sigh.
‘He was, Lara, but he was also an animal that you didn’t need in your life,’ replied Vicky.
Andy Beech had been really nasty underneath his good looks and charm. When he hit Lara in a nightclub, just for talking to Pip’s brother, that was the end of that relationship. The slap had hurt less than the shame of everyone witnessing it. Lara chased away the memory by moving on to the next picture: a lovely vase of sunflowers.
‘I thought Van Gogh only painted one load of sunflowers, but he painted twelve,’ said Pip, reading the information board next to it.
Sunflowers. Freddie had sent her sunflowers the day after they had been to Bistro Marco for the first time. The card read: ‘Thank you for bringing some sunshine to my Sunday, love Freddie Elmtree.’ The flowers were as sweet as Freddie was. He’d bought her sunflowers every year on the anniversary of the day they met. They were so special to her that she was going to have them everywhere at her wedding. They would be on her cake, in the church and on the bridesmaids’ headbands. The men would even be wearing silk sunflowers in their buttonholes. Sunflowers were happy flowers with no rotten memories fastened to them.