10

‘So who are these people again?’ Ethan asked, as we made our way down the lane to Min and Ray’s house.

‘Our neighbours, obviously,’ said Nick.

‘You don’t have to stick around, love,’ I told Ethan. ‘Just stay for a drink to be sociable, and then you can make your excuses.’ ‘Why can’t he stay for dinner?’ said Nick. ‘It’s not like he’s got anywhere to be.’

‘Well, it won’t be much fun, will it,’ I reasoned, ‘stuck with a bunch of old fogeys chewing the fat?’

‘Sounds fucking depressing when you put it like that,’ said Nick.

‘Don’t be mean,’ I said, with a reproachful smile. ‘Min’s gone to a lot of trouble. I’m sure it’ll be lovely for us.’

As we approached the porch of Min and Ray’s house, the motion-activated light clicked on, bathing us in its chilly interrogative beam. I could see the muscle flexing in Nick’s cheek, Ethan chewing his lip nervously. I clutched the bottle of wine in both hands and plastered a smile on my face as the door opened.

‘Evenin’ all,’ said Ray. He was wearing jeans and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt stretched over his pot-belly. His straggly grey hair was hooked behind his ears.

‘Hello there,’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t mind us bringing Ethan along. He’s just back from his gap year.’

Ethan closed his eyes briefly.

‘All right, mate?’ Ray greeted him with a manly handshake-cum-shoulder-clasp.

‘Is that your bike?’ Ethan jerked his head towards a vintage Norton parked a few feet away on the drive.

‘One of ’em,’ said Ray. ‘Into bikes are you?’

‘Yeah, me and a mate hired a couple of Hondas in Cambodia. Got a bit of a taste for it.’

‘Honda’s not a bike,’ Ray said scornfully. ‘That’s a bike. Play your cards right I might take you for a spin later.’

‘That’d be cool!’

‘Oh, I’m not sure that’s a good…’ I started to say but Nick flashed me a warning frown. I was surprised. It wasn’t like him to be protective of his son’s masculine pride. Against my better judgement, I banished from my mind all visions of twisted metal and butchered flesh and kept quiet.

‘Oh dear, are we early?’ I asked, as Ray showed us into the deserted living room. It was a curious mixture of good taste and eccentricity. Oak beams, exposed brickwork and a baronial-style fireplace were domesticated with warm lighting, squashy sofas, and all manner of throws, rugs and wall hangings. I couldn’t help wondering about the collection of Victorian taxidermy on the sideboard, though – a startled-looking squirrel stared out beadily from its glass coffin, a pair of greenfinches hovered for all eternity under a dome and strangest of all, a trio of fancy moths, wings outstretched, impaled on slender wires, resembled a tiny crucifixion. By the time I had taken in a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox in an alcove and – this at least should have come as no surprise – an expensively framed but hideously kitsch airbrushed poster of a motorbike hanging over the fireplace, I had warmed more than ever to our hosts.

‘No, you’re not early,’ Ray reassured me, with a friendly pat on the arm. ‘Fashionably late, actually, unlike some people…’

Cath had just walked in from the kitchen, wearing a natty electric blue suit and carrying a tray of drinks. She put it down on the table.

‘I’ve been earning my keep,’ she said. ‘Potatoes don’t peel themselves, you know.’

‘You look nice,’ I told her, going for an awkward air kiss.

‘Ach, away with you,’ she said, blushing furiously. ‘Here, try some of this. If you like it there’s a bottle in the kitchen for you.’

She poured me a glass of fizz and I took a sip. It was delicious – fragrant and light with a lovely alcoholic kick to it.

‘Home-made elderflower champagne,’ she said, proudly.

‘Mmm! Nick, you should try this, it’s amazing.’

Cath waggled the bottle at him.

‘I’ll stick to beer, thanks,’ he said.

‘How about you?’ Cath peered round me at Ethan.

‘Gosh. Where are my manners?’ I said, yanking him in front of me and remembering, just in time, not to smooth his hair as if he were still in Year One.

‘Cath, this is Ethan, my… our son. Ethan, this is Cath – she’s the most amazing gardener.’

To his credit, Ethan did not recoil from my touch, nor betray the monumental boredom he must, I imagined, have felt on being introduced to a middle-aged horticulturalist. In fact he acquitted himself rather better than his father, who stood gazing vacantly around the room as Cath regaled the rest of us with gossip from the green room at Gardener’s World. It wasn’t until Ray had answered the door to the next round of guests that Nick seemed to remember his manners, which might have had something to do with the fact that one of them was a striking brunette wearing a tan leather dress and an armful of bangles. Cath was still chatting away, but I kept losing the thread now, as I watched this woman thrust her hip at Nick and fiddle self-consciously with her hair. The husband wasn’t bad-looking either, though he wasn’t my type. He was short, with owlish specs, a linen scarf wound bandage-like around his neck and a head of unruly grey curls. I could see Nick sizing him up as the three of them chatted, mentally ascribing him a position in the pecking order a few rungs down from Nick’s own. The miracle, from my point of view, was that a couple who looked like this should be running a gallery in an undistinguished little town like ours instead of in Manhattan’s East Village. Along with some of the other recent developments in my life, Ethan’s return, my tentative friendship with Cath, the excitement I felt about my new art project, it seemed – notwithstanding the woman’s enviable glamour and the fact that she was all but throwing herself at my husband – to augur well for our future here.

Min came in from the kitchen, spectacles perched on her head, apron tied about her waist and a large glass of wine in one hand. She told Ray off for not putting any music on and then did the rounds of her guests offering olives and pistachios, making proper introductions that skilfully drew out the things we had in common, without seeming forced or formal.

‘I was just telling Luca and Melissa here,’ Cath told me, ‘some jakey’s taken up residence in the old barn across the way.’

‘Jakey?’ I repeated dumbly.

‘A tramp, a vagrant… sorry,’ she put on a genteel English accent, ‘a homeless person.’

‘Oh dear!’ I said, then realising that my dismay might be misinterpreted, ‘that is… it can’t be very easy, can it? Living rough… out here?’

‘Must everyone live the conventional life then,’ Luca challenged me, with a mischievous glint in his eye. ‘In his little house with his little car and his little computer?’

‘Or hers,’ Cath put in, pointedly.

‘No, of course not,’ I said with a combative smile, ‘but I wonder if you’d be so “live and let live” if you had someone sleeping rough at the bottom of your garden.’

‘I like to think I’d be pretty relax,’ said Luca. ‘Society is never going to fit every square peg into a round hole. Maybe this person, he’s happier than any of us?’

‘Och, sentimental nonsense,’ Cath insisted. ‘Do you know the stats for premature death among the homeless? Because I’m from Glasgow…’

‘… But this guy’s not shooting up heroin in a doorway, is he? He’s living close to nature. He lights a fire, he shoots a rabbit, he gets the aglio trigono from the woods, he has a feast. Maybe it’s us who are the fools with our mortgage and our online shopping from Waitrose…’

‘I wish…’ muttered Cath.

‘What’s ahlee-oh treegono?’ I asked, seizing a chance to move the conversation on to a less contentious footing. Luca warmed to his theme: wild garlic, apparently, and abundant in the woods round about, as were edible mushrooms. He’d take me foraging, he promised. ‘Early one morning, when the season come around.’

‘What’s this,’ Nick wandered over, ‘foraging with my missus? Not sure I like the sound of that.’

‘Oh no, it’s not what you think,’ Luca laughed nervously. ‘Foraging mean taking food from nature… living off the land.’

‘I know what foraging means, pal,’ Nick said, giving Luca’s shoulder a playful punch, ‘I’m not an idiot.’

There was a slightly awkward pause before Ray topped up our wine. Then we all clinked glasses and the conversation turned to more innocuous chitchat about the pleasures of the country versus those of the town, the superiority of Italian cuisine to all others and the unaccountable preference of the English for warm beer.

Min called us through to the kitchen for the first course, prompting exclamations of delight at the charm of their shabby-chic décor – the retro lighting, bentwood chairs and the weathered metal advertising signs for Fry’s Chocolate and Shell Gasoline.

An hour into the evening and we could have passed for a group of old friends. The wine helped, of course, and the informality of the set-up – the scrubbed pine table, arrayed with Min’s home-made Middle Eastern meze, which soon had us leaning across one another to hand around bread, scoop dips and snatch fat olives from the bowl with barely a by-your-leave. I was, I realized to my surprise, having a good time. Cath was on excellent form, Ethan appeared to have bonded with Ray, and Luca it turned out, shared my love of early twentieth-century British pottery and knew a great deal about it.

It must have been the elderflower champagne, because I’d only had one glass of red with dinner, when Melissa asked me about my work and before I knew it I’d gone into a little too much detail.

‘… An installation, I think you’d have to call it,’ I heard myself say. ‘The theme? Gosh, well, I don’t know. Barrenness, I suppose.’

‘Barrenness?’ she wrinkled her nose prettily.

‘Yes,’ I said, a flush rising up from my neck, ‘the end of reproduction.’

I sensed Nick bending a worried ear in my direction from across the table.

‘And if that sounds wanky, I don’t care!’ I reached for my glass and took a defiant swig. ‘That’s what’s on my mind. I say on my mind, but I barely feel I’ve got a mind sometimes and that’s part of it too. I don’t know where you are with all this, Melissa… but if I’m honest, I’m finding it all pretty bloody awful – no pun intended.’

‘Oh, I can’t wait to shut up shop,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid it’s a few years off for me. Mind you, I’ve never wanted kids, so it’s all felt like a messy waste of time. Maybe I’d feel differently if I’d put my body to good use!’

She laughed disingenuously and I glanced across at Nick, who was looking at her as if he thought she had put it to exactly the right kind of use. I wondered if he would look at me like that if I got myself up in a leather sheath and too much lipstick and decided he would probably just laugh.

‘Anyway, I shouldn’t jinx it by talking about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve barely thrown a pot yet, but seeing as my generous husband has laid out a small fortune on a fabulous new studio for me,’ I reached across the table and caressed his fingertips, ‘I feel I should make the most of it.’

Nick allowed his hand to lie inert beneath mine for a moment and then extricated it to reach for a hunk of bread. I wasn’t sure quite what I’d done wrong, whether it was the over-sharing of my ideas, their crassly feminist nature, or perhaps even the fact that I had undercut them by turning into a simpering wifey at the end of my awkward little speech. Maybe he just wanted to keep his options open vis-à-vis the voluptuous Melissa. Maybe he just wanted to keep me guessing.

‘Well, it sounds like a wonderful concept,’ said Luca, plunging gallantly into the awkward silence, ‘and especially for being inspired by the locality here, it would be amazing if you would consider perhaps for us to take a look?’

I shrugged awkwardly.

‘There isn’t much to look at yet.’

‘Ah no of course, but at your set-up at least. Your work space,’ Luca beamed. ‘We have a little art trail that we organize each year.’ His eyes were bulging with enthusiasm now, his curls bouncing around his spectacles like bed springs. ‘We could put you on the map in your new locality, so to say…’

‘Speak, darling, so to speak,’ Melissa corrected him wearily, ‘and Karen hardly needs us to put her on the map. She’s very well established already. We’re fans,’ she added, turning to me with a sycophantic smile.

‘Of mine?’ I said doubtfully.

‘Oh sure,’ Luca said. ‘Your “She” series kicked ass, man. We wanted to buy a piece for the gallery, but your dealer said there was nothing available.’

He shrugged and looked at me, as if expecting an explanation.

My hand, clutching the serviette in my lap, seemed to have gone into some kind of spasm. My mouth opened and closed like a goldfish’s. The conversation at the other end of the table tailed off.

‘Ah well, yes, I had a…er… there was a bit of an…’

‘Some of the pots got damaged,’ Nick interrupted suavely, ‘and no one wanted to put their hand up. Legal nightmare…’

Ants swarmed in my head. I could feel the heat of the spotlights, see the grey gleam of the gallery’s concrete floor, hear my own voice howling…

I’d been pacing up and down ever since I’d arrived, minutely adjusting my pots on their plinths to show them to their best advantage. They’d been so long in the making; I didn’t want any detail to be missed. I knew what people were like once they got a glass of champagne in their hands; friends, critics – even collectors – would just stand there gassing away, more interested in the Cork Street gossip than in engaging with the work.

‘You OK on your own for twenty minutes if I pop out and buy a pair of tights?’ Claudia Fussell had said at six o’clock.

‘No problem,’ I told her, ‘Nick’s due any time.’

‘Oh and before I forget…’ she opened a drawer, took out a couple of envelopes and handed them to me, ‘… fan mail I assume…’

The first envelope contained a congratulations card from my old tutor at art college. I hadn’t seen him for eighteen years. He’d made a massive impression on me, but I didn’t think he’d even known my name. I got a lump in my throat reading it.

The second envelope must have been hand-delivered. There was no address or stamp, just my name scrawled in an unfamiliar female script.

I was still staring at it in a daze when Nick breezed in a few minutes later.

‘Well hello, Mizz Karen Mulvaney, how’s the interface between Feminism and Fucking coming along?’

I looked up and watched the facetious smile die on my husband’s lips. His eyes moved quickly from the letter in my hands, to the discarded envelope on the floor, and back to my face.

‘Something wrong?’ he said, all bogus innocence.

‘You lied!’ I hissed.

‘Karen?’ he said, warily.

‘That one-night stand? The one you regretted with every fibre of your being?’

My voice was bitter and sarcastic but with a catch of tears. I thrust the letter under his nose, too close for him to read, before dashing it to the floor at his feet.

‘Seems like she didn’t get the memo, Nick. She seems to think it was a four-year affair.’

‘Karen, Karen, listen…’ Nick’s voice was low and urgent, ‘whatever she’s told you, it’s not true; she’s unhinged.’

He took a step towards me and reached for my hands. I knew if I let him touch me I was lost, so I turned and grabbed one of my pots to ward him off.

‘Karen, love, please don’t…’ Nick’s voice was quiet, pleading. ‘This is crazy. There’s no need.’

He made a sudden movement and I thrust the pot out at arm’s length, like a madwoman dangling her child over a cliff, eyes glistening, throat clotted with tears, weight shifting slightly from foot to foot.

‘No need?’ I nodded towards the letter on the floor, ‘What about that? Four years! Four fucking years!’

The pot was heavy in my hands, the glaze slippery…

‘It’s not what you think. You’re making way too much of it. Don’t do this, Karen, don’t punish yourself. Oh, sweet Jesus!’

I let it drop and it smashed on the floor, shards flying everywhere.

I didn’t even glance at the wreckage, just kept my eyes locked on his, while my hand groped for the next pot.

‘You’re waiting for Ethan to go to uni,’ I said, nodding towards the letter, ‘that’s what she says. You’re going to do right by your son, and then you’re leaving your sham of a marriage and going to her.’

‘Not true! Not true! Kaz, she’s a fantasist. She’d say anything. Hell hath no fury, you know that…’

I toppled the next one. He had to duck out of the way to avoid getting hit. He was cowering now, clutching his head. It was good to feel powerful…

I wasn’t even listening now. He was begging, tears in his eyes, dodging from plinth to plinth, trying to intercept me, but I was on an adrenaline high; living for the smash, living in the moment of destruction, wrecking everything, everything, everything, because none of it mattered any more.

I heard the tinkle of water being poured from a jug.

‘Here you go, lovey. You’re white as a sheet,’ Cath said pushing the glass towards me. ‘That elderflower champagne – not as innocent as it looks!’

I felt drained and disorientated. I looked at the concerned faces trained on mine and wondered how long had I zoned out for this time? A few seconds? A minute? I could hear a rasping, vibrating sound and looking down, saw that it was my own hand trembling uncontrollably in my lap. I stilled it with my other hand and when I felt able to do so, picked up the tumbler and took a sip of water. Gradually the chat resumed, haltingly at first and then more naturally, the conversation turning to local walks, the plethora of stately homes in the vicinity, which ones were open to the public and when.

I nodded along and smiled, all the while avoiding Nick’s eye. I knew if I caught it, I would read only disapproval there. It was another few minutes before it occurred to me to glance towards the far end of the table where, the last time I’d looked, Ethan had been deep in conversation with Ray. Both chairs were vacant now. I swivelled my head towards the living room, expecting to see the two of them poring over the jukebox together or leafing through a pile of old biker magazines, but when I heard the ear-splitting stutter of a motorbike engine coming from the other side of the kitchen window I leaped up in dismay, knocking a glass of rioja straight into Melissa’s leather-clad lap.