13

Kat

Kat’s skin is scarlet and screaming, her fingertips numb. ‘You two don’t know what you’re missing,’ she says, towel-drying her hair. Her gaze is drawn to the salt-crusted window, left ajar to air the studio. She wonders where Lauren’s got to. Better if she doesn’t come back right now. Not with Angie in the drive smoking – what sort of idiot smokes? – and tossing her hair like a circus horse. Not until she and Flora have had a chance to talk some sense into Dad, whom they’ve followed up to the studio for this purpose.

With a small ‘oof’, Charlie sinks to the swivel stool at the trestle table. Switching on the Anglepoise, he takes a sketch from a pile and inspects it with the intense focus of a watchmaker. On the adjacent shelves, a beam of watery sunlight strikes the congealed jars of cleaners, varnishes and other nasties that now sit in his hair shaft. Kat will be relieved when they’re all on the skip.

‘Raff, for God’s sake.’ Flora is kneeling on the paint-pocked floorboard, grabbing Raff by the ankles, trying to stop him crawling inside the infamous birdcage. She looks up at Kat, her eyes glassy and pink, as though she didn’t sleep the previous night either. ‘Is the sea as cold as it looks?’

‘Colder. Crazy cold, Flo.’ Outdoor swimming shocks Kat into a calmness she can’t find anywhere else, each dip a conduit to the heavenly sea swims of her childhood summers here. The water had held her then. And it still felt like an embrace this morning, albeit an icy one, rinsing away her disquiet about the note, at least for a minute or two. But as she thaws, its wondrous effects are rapidly wearing off: the note feels, once more, like a devastating message in a bottle that’s spent twenty years bobbing about the high seas before washing back to their shore. And then, of course, there’s Angie.

At supper last night – the casserole inedible, they’d ended up with heavy pasta, more red wine – Kat stealthily interrogated her father’s new fiancée. She dug up a six-month childless ‘starter’ marriage to a Russian art dealer and a patchwork of slightly made-up sounding careers in the art and nightclub worlds. Kat, who’d been aware of her father nervously watching – willing her to be civil – tried to smile and nod, like it was a normal conversation. But she felt like she was stuck in one of those awful, claustrophobic Escape Room things, with nasty surprises, written clues, a strange soundtrack – wind, waves, parrot – and no easy method of extrication.

‘Does it burn fat?’ Flora interrupts the scratch of Kat’s thoughts. ‘The cold, I mean. I’d have to lose at least a pound for every second I was in the winter sea to make it worth it.’

‘Always worth it, Flora. You’ll feel better afterwards. Less stressed.’ It’s quite hard to see what her sister has got to be stressed about, but she is stressy under the surface of that slightly weaponized smile. Kat sinks to the sofa, her spot on the right, same as the sittings, realizing it’d feel strange settling anywhere else, like carrying her handbag on a different arm. ‘And it’s rocket fuel for the brain. Cognitive speed. Creativity. Science backs it up.’

‘Does it now?’ Charlie swivels on the stool, his interest piqued. ‘Well, I could certainly do with some of that.’ He holds up a sketch of a nude’s torso, thick-waisted, an elderly lady. Just a few lines – hair, hip, waist – but extraordinarily alive. ‘This might earn me a tenner or two. I was good once, you know.’

‘Bloody good, Dad,’ Kat says encouragingly, silently despairing he let his talent slip away. She wonders if all humans are born with a finite amount of talent – like women are with eggs – and you can use or waste it, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. If so, her father could be in some sort of creative post-menopause.

‘Annie?’ he murmurs, trying to identify the life model, head on one side, scrutinizing the sketch. ‘Yes, I think so.’

One of many. Working the studio circuit in St Ives, life models would visit Rock Point if Charlie was in residence. Kat had been wary – Dixie had been a life model, after all – but also intrigued. The women were comfortable in their own skin, however slack or dimpled, in a way her diet-obsessed mother wasn’t. The Girls and Birdcage sessions gave her a new respect too. Sitting was hard work – pins and needles, cramps, itches – and it was boring. Staying still is anathema to her now. All the desks at Spring are standing workstations, or treadmills, a decision that’s proved mystifyingly unpopular.

‘Maybe I will do that swim,’ Charlie mutters to himself, turning back to the pile of sketches. ‘Yes, yes, I will.’

‘Your doctor might have something to say about that, Daddy,’ clucks Flora.

‘Bah. I’ll do what I damn well like, Flora. I’m an excellent open-water swimmer.’ He harrumphs. ‘I taught you all to enjoy the sea, didn’t I?’

‘You did too.’ Taking them out, probably too far out, when they were little, clumsy with armbands, Kat remembers. Making them dunk their heads under the water to remove their fear of its salty sting. And then, later, with newly arrived Lauren, whom he’d carry from the surf in his arms, a scrawny thing, and bundle up on the beach, like he was trying to make up for missing her younger years. That put her and Flora on edge. They hadn’t liked that at all.

‘I want to swim,’ announces Raff, grabbing the cage bars, and heaving forward.

‘Want to come with Grandpa?’ Charlie says.

‘With sharks!’ Raff shouts, as Flora picks him up, telling him not to be silly, to get out of that grubby birdcage, and holds him, wriggling, protesting, on her hip.

‘Ah, a healthy shark obsession.’ Charlie slides another drawing off the pile, dismisses it, takes another. ‘I think we’ve got Jaws downstairs.’

‘Daddy, he’s four,’ Flora says breathlessly. ‘Ow! Don’t kick Mummy.’

Charlie sticks a pencil behind his ear. ‘I let you two watch the movie around his age.’

‘Hey, how about a parenting manual? A Creative Guide to Child-rearing by Charlie Finch. It could be a side hustle to your art.’ Kat scrolls her phone, flickering with notifications, each one a spike of adrenalin. ‘Like we were.’

‘God loves a trier, darling,’ says Charlie.

‘Here. You take him, Kat. He’s your nephew.’ Flora drops Raff on her knee.

Kat and Raff stare at each other in mutual bewilderment. He’s unexpectedly soft and cushiony – he looks so blocky, like a baby rhino – but then Kat’s not sure when she last held him, or any child. Circumspectly, she lowers her nose to his hair and sniffs. What is this elixir that keeps stealing her girlfriends and the best Spring staff? Milky, sweet, an under-note of laundered sock. From a spectator’s point of view, parenting seems to involve an enormous amount of stress for very little payoff, like running a failing business. But it makes more sense when you hold a live one, she decides.

‘Kat,’ whispers Flora. She taps her watch.

Kat nods. It’s time. ‘So, Dad … out of all the women in the world, why Angie?’

Their father tenses, shoulders rising, then spins on the stool to face them. ‘I realize you’re deeply cynical about such things, Kat, but I love Angie.’ He rolls up his shirt sleeves with precision, a calculated restraint. ‘We connect. We have history.’

‘You can say that again.’ Kat can’t help it.

‘I’m damn lucky to have found love again at my age.’ His face darkens. ‘I’m not going to balls it up this time. I’m not going to lose her,’ he mutters, barely audible.

Kat exchanges a look with Flora, who pulls a face before reassembling. They both feel Dixie in the room, their father’s regrets stirred up by her death. And that’s the problem with ‘love’, Kat thinks. It’s a reaction, a corrective, to the loves that precede it. Although she’s not yet sure how her ex, Kofi, fits into this theory – he always did defy easy definition – their mothers prove it.

Charlie had felt stultified in his marriage to Annabelle – only marrying, according to Blythe, to please his mother – and Blythe was the medicine, with her hedonistic airbrushed American glamour. Then along came Dixie, passionate, political, earthy, the palliative to them both.

‘Maybe you should take a bit longer getting to know each other, Daddy,’ Flora suggests, picking her way around confrontation, always in thrall.

‘Why wait? We know each other inside out. We hide nothing from one another.’

Raff drops off Kat’s knee and pulls her by the hand to the window to spot killer whales. ‘What about from us, Dad?’ she asks, over her shoulder. ‘Any more secrets we need to know about?’

It’s his expression – the visible flinch, the muscle spasm under his eye – that tells Kat she’s on to something, that there’s more, muzzled.

‘You can be a piece of work, Kat, you know that?’ Charlie starts flipping angrily through another pile of sketches.

‘Er, excuse me?’

‘Leave it, Kat,’ whispers Flora. ‘Not on the first day. Let’s have a lovely first day.’

She won’t bloody leave it. People are always telling her to dial down, back off. A man would be applauded for asking difficult questions. ‘Okay, I’ll be blunt, Dad. When you planned this reunion, did you even consider Lauren? For one minute? Dixie’s barely been buried three months. There’s a live parrot in the house. And now you want her to deal with Angie too? Because that’s going to help her mental health, isn’t it?’ She lowers her voice, aware of the window being slightly open. ‘What if this sends Lauren into another … spiral?’

Her father freezes, a sketch in his hand, considering this awful possibility. Out of the window, Kat sees Angie, standing at the edge of The Drop, gazing out at the boiling sea. She pictures her slipping, the carmine mane lifting, swirling, as she falls. A silence stretches.

‘Well, I think it’s time I consulted my menu plan, don’t you?’ Flora says brightly, reaching for Raff. ‘And we’d love a little poke through the vintage kitchenalia, wouldn’t we, Raff?’

‘Wait.’ Charlie holds up a hand resignedly. ‘I acknowledge I may have sprung Angie on you all in my enthusiasm, okay? I’ll speak to her. Suggest she returns to London tomorrow so you three can get used to the idea. She’ll understand. But give her a chance?’ He drums his fingers on the edge of the trestle. ‘What happened here that day wasn’t her fault.’

Kat catches Flora’s eye. The wind bucks outside the window, as if channelling the energy in the room, fluting in a sharp gust, lifting a sketch off a pile on the trestle. It rocks down to the floor, landing face up, nudging the tip of Kat’s trainers. She hears her father draw in his breath sharply. They both reach down to pick it up. Kat gets there first.

A recumbent nude, a small, private smile on her lips, legs crossed at the ankle, charcoal, age-dappled paper. Kat frowns, head on one side, trying to read the spidery, scrawled date in the left-hand corner – 1980? – when her father snatches it aggressively from her hand. ‘What the …?’

Charlie doesn’t answer. Flustered, his fingers seem to tremble as he buries the sketch at the bottom of a pile, out of view. And a tiny amber warning light starts to flash in Kat’s mind.