LIFE STUDY: JOSH MACARTHUR (1959).
Pencil on paper.
This exquisite study is one of several drawings, from the life and from magazines, which the teenage Kelly included in her portfolio when applying to art school. It’s small wonder that Ontario College of Art offered her an unconditional place and – according to their admission records – a full scholarship. It’s doubly sad that all the other drawings from the submission were destroyed by her mother as obscene evidence of a damaged mind. The draughtsmanship is assured – and by this date she had received no more than ladylike tuition – but there is so much more than draughtsmanship on display here. Kelly’s light handling of her heavily muscled subject at once eroticizes him and suggests vulnerability beneath his self-confidence. Josh MacArthur, who went on to become her brother-in-law, was CEO of the MacArthur motel chain until his death in 2001.
(From the Collection of Mrs Josh MacArthur)
The young porter glanced at the coins she had dropped in his hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and left, leaving Winnie to fret that she had either tipped him too much or insufficiently.
She shrugged off the worry; she was a foreigner so was allowed to get things wrong. The only thing she couldn’t abide was being constantly mistaken for an American here, something an American would never do.
She unzipped her case and fancied she heard her clothes give a little sigh at the release of pressure. The case was her biggest, the one Josh had always used on their holidays together but where she had always borrowed overflow space. She was a lousy packer and had little idea how long she was there for.
She took in the room and saw it was as shabby-genteel as the hotel’s reception area. The curtains were sun-faded, there were stains on the ceiling and there was one of those silly little kettles and a bowl of tea and coffee sachets where she would have welcomed a minibar. If she needed a drink she would have to enjoy it in public, in one of those big downstairs rooms dotted with people who looked so ancient and so rooted that she suspected they were permanent residents parked there by their families. She had heard the English did that.
The bed did not look promising – after a lifetime of sleeping with a much bigger man, her back was rarely in the right alignment – but at least the linen would be clean. She tugged aside the pointless net curtains – she was on the fourth floor and quite unoverlooked – to reveal the view of the bay and distant boats and felt immediately better. It was for the view and anonymity she had chosen a big old place like this over one of the boutique B&Bs Petey had researched for her. She was a city girl and did not relish interrogations over breakfast, especially in chichi surroundings, especially on this trip.
She unpacked her things, picked out the slacks and blouse she would wear and hooked them above one end of the bath before leaving the shower running on its hottest at the other in the hope of their wrinkles dropping out in the steam. Then she kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed, thinking to doze a little. The overnight flight from Toronto and then the little shuttle from Gatwick and then the hour’s taxi ride from Newquay had left her physically shattered. She was too keyed-up to sleep, however, and her mind was spinning.
Close your eyes, at least, she told herself. Listen to the sea out there. This is the sea She must have listened to. And swum in. And stared over.
His e-mails hadn’t exactly been chatty – he wasn’t like some of the guys she’d bumped into online who barely had your name before they were giving you way too much information – so she decided he was simply one of those men who only spoke when they deemed it necessary. A Quaker. Her brother-in-law.
She got shivery when she thought back to it. All those years, through her mourning for Joanie, through her marriage to Josh, through her mother’s quick last illness and her father’s long decline, Ray Kelly had remained her private demon. Whenever another schizophrenic stabbed a complete stranger, whenever she heard colleagues spooking themselves with tales of blank-eyed psychos pacing empty hotels or driving deserted late-night buses, it was Ray Kelly’s face that sprang to mind. If Josh was away on business, it was Ray Kelly she thought of as she remembered too late to draw the curtains or bolt the back door. She could not believe a person could have that traumatic an effect on four lives then disappear so entirely. Had she read about her killing someone else or being arrested finally or knocked down by a tram somewhere it might have lessened her bogeywoman potency and maybe made her banal or even pitiable.
Then, when Winnie had been idly searching for old school friends, to see her name there so starkly on the new genealogy postings with the note ‘born Toronto 1940s, lived Gerrard Street East, died this year,’ had taken her breath away.
Yes, she thought. Yes! The mad bitch is dead at last!
As for when she had clicked on the attachment tab and come face to face, not with blank-eyed Ray, that image so sickeningly familiar from the press coverage, but with darling Joanie, no longer rebellious and maddening but suddenly just young and vulnerable-looking… Winnie had doubted her own sanity for a minute or two then had to call in Petey, who ran the shop with her, and ask him to compare the photograph with the one she kept in a cherrywood frame on her desk and tell her, please, if he thought it really was the same girl on the screen.
Suppressing the urge to splurge there and then, to send Antony a great stream of wheres and whys and hows had been one of the hardest things but she found she was too choked by anger and hurt to be more than curtly careful in her initial response. Restraining Petey was harder yet; he had a tendency to wild overexcitement, which was why she hired him in the first place. And then to get those other photographs and suffer the twin convulsions of having Joanie age decades and raise a family in minutes then having her die all over again! It was small surprise if Winnie had been drinking by daylight for the first time since Josh’s death.
Small surprise, either, if her memory had been working so hard dredging up things she had no wish to recall that she was having trouble remembering her own address and twice this week had called herself Joanie when talking to strangers on the phone.
Her mother’s illness had been short and merciful and whatever terrible secrets she had nurtured went to her grave alongside her, buttoned up in her mock croc purse. Her father had taken far longer to die so had suffered more time for recriminations and longing glances over his arthritic shoulder at the paths not taken.
As his end approached, once he was being kept alive by machinery and the cancer was finally chewing at the parts that no ingenuity or donor could replace, he began to talk. Trapped in her dutiful vigil at his bedside, his only surviving kin, she had been obliged to listen. Years too late, years after it could do anyone any good, he began to talk about poor little Joanie and how bad he had always felt. Winnie loved him dearly, truly she did, but she could have finished him with a pillow right there.
Joanie had been raped, he said. That night when he and Mom had found Winnie with the drawings and Mom had raced her to safety, Joanie had been raped, repeatedly, by a whole gang of boys.
‘Did anyone see?’ she asked him softly, feeling a chasm open beneath her sweaty hospital chair.
‘They didn’t have to,’ he said. ‘One of the boys brought her home, saying he’d found her lying drunk on a bench on the street. But from the state of her it was obvious something had happened. She was bleeding and …’ He broke off, overcome by weakness as much as emotion.
She gave him a sip of water from his beaker, hoping he would shut up now.
‘I told her to get in a bath,’ he went on, ‘and clean herself up. And go to bed. When your mother came back she went into her and Joanie told her and … And your mother told her not to be so disgusting. She said she was depraved, that those boys came of good families, families she’d be proud to have come to our house. Our shitty little house in Etobicoke.’
He took another sip of water and looked at Winnie as though he were already being pawed by other lost souls.
‘Shush there,’ she said. ‘Shush now. It doesn’t matter any more.’
But he had to speak. ‘Your mother told me the same thing and I did what I always did with her and said yes dear and knuckled under. Joanie cut her wrists the next day, while we were in church. She was in the Clarke by lunchtime. And then she …’
Winnie soothed him as best she could but had to break off from her vigil to visit a hotel bar just along the street from his hospital because his nasty little revelation had made her admit what she had always known: the things her older self had been telling her younger self for years.
He lost consciousness that night and died when she encouraged them to turn his machines off the following week but he had one more story saved up for her when she came back from the bar, frantically chewing a mint.
‘Your mother,’ he kept saying.
‘Yes?’ she would prompt him repeatedly.
They made that little exchange about eight times and just when she thought that’s all there was going to be to it, that he was maybe trying to say her mother had been good or that he’d always loved her or that she was waiting for him on the other side, he had a coughing fit then began the sentence another way.
‘There’s one thing I could never forgive her.’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘She did?’
‘Joanie had a twin. It happens. Her twin died during the birth. Caught up in Joanie’s cord. Not a thing that would happen now. And Joanie was a beautiful child. A cute baby. Perfect. And your mother told her. When she was, what, five or six could she have been? Could she?’
‘Maybe Dad. What did she tell her?’
‘She’d been a bit bad and your mother told her, and told her the wrong one had died. That was evil of her.’
Evil. The word so rarely on his lips. The word that even in church only got said once a sitting, during the Lord’s Prayer. It buzzed in the room between them like a meat-fattened fly.
Which was just where Winnie’d left it. She couldn’t take stories like those back to Josh to see his kind face wrinkle in the effort to understand. And now, twenty years on, that fly was out and bothering her again.
She and Josh had not been blessed with children. They had tried. They had tests. They had discussed and rejected adoption. Leastways, she had discussed and he had rejected it. He was funny about wanting his own and wouldn’t go for the idea; she had to respect that.
There were advantages. She kept her figure. He kept his hair. They never had to go without interesting adult holidays and she’d had the freedom to build her own career after all and to put in three hours a week as a volunteer counsellor at the Clarke, helping distraught relatives work through their feelings at having a loved one join the wavering ranks of the mentally ill.
Josh’s sisters had three apiece but their husbands took them to Los Angeles and Chicago respectively, so they were never close. The time she had really missed motherhood, of course, was during Josh’s bypass surgery and its failure. When there was no one to prop her up or cosset her.
In a curious way her little business had become her child and her employees, her family. Simple Gifts sold wooden furniture and household items and a small range of clothes and linens, all produced by Amish or Shaker communities. Housed in an old warehouse in Cabbagetown, the old Irish district whose fortunes had greatly improved, it had doubled in size since she first opened it with a single assistant and now had an Internet-based mail order side that had greatly increased its turnover. She was not quite a millionaire but what had begun as an indulgence, a venture in which Josh humoured her, had bought her a security. She was well past retirement age and had handed the running of the business over to her junior partner Petey, a sweet man who had come in as her first sales assistant straight out of high school. But she retained a desk in the office and came in almost every day because being home alone was lonely and boring. Something in the eagerness with which Petey had packed her off on this adventure told her it was time to cut everyone a little slack and try to be a merrier widow. Take cruises and stuff.
She sat up. She couldn’t sleep, not with all those seagulls screaming outside, and she wasn’t going to doze.
She reached for the phone and her diary, took a deep breath and rang him.
‘Hello?’ He didn’t sound so old.
‘Antony? It’s Winnie MacArthur.’
‘What?’
‘Hello!’
‘Sorry. Let me turn up the volume on this thing.’ There was a deafening clunk as if he had dropped the receiver on a table then he came back on. ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Winnie MacArthur, Antony. From LongLost.com. Joanie’s sister? Rachel’s sister, if you like.’
‘Oh. Oh yes. Hello. How are you?’
‘Excited. Tired.’
‘Ah. Sorry if I sounded a little distracted. We’ve rather a full house at the moment. My son Hedley’s here, still, and my daughter, Morwenna, who isn’t very …’
‘Oh. Antony, you must say if it’s not a good time to visit.’
‘Why? Where are you?’
‘The Queen’s Hotel,’ she told him. ‘Just around the corner from you, according to my map.’
‘The Queen’s. I see. I thought you were calling from Toronto. Come. Of course you must come.’
‘What. Now?’
‘Why not? Just … Hang on a second.’ She heard that clunk again. Evidently his phone wasn’t cordless. And then there was the sound of a closing door. He picked up again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit deaf and I worry about shouting without realizing it and hurting people’s feelings. Morwenna isn’t very well, that’s all. If she strikes you as a bit … Oh dear.’ He sighed. ‘Sorry. Life has been rather interesting.’
‘It’s a bad time. I knew I should have waited to hear back from you.’
‘I’ll leave you in peace. We can meet another day.’
‘No. Please come. I insist. I’ll be looking out for you. But I… I haven’t had a chance to explain who you are, that’s all.’
‘I understand. Sometimes I’m not sure I know who I am any more.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. I’ll be there in about half an hour, Antony.’
She had trouble hanging up neatly because her hand was shaking. Then she made herself roll off the bed (in the special way her latest back man had taught her), strip off her travelling clothes, retrieve the steamed ones, shower and dress before she could panic and change her mind. At least by calling round in the early afternoon she spared anyone the obligation to lay on any kind of meal.
It was a sort of terrace of charming houses, much older than the houses she had walked past along the seafront. He met her out on the street, so perhaps he was as nervous as she was. He smiled. She laughed. They shook hands and then he just looked at her.
‘You’re so like her,’ he said.
‘No I’m not,’ she laughed. ‘She was always so dark and striking and…’
‘You’re like who she became, then. Because I can see you were sisters.’
‘Oh. Oh good. What a beautiful place. Have you lived here long?’
‘I was born in this house.’
‘Oh goodness.’
‘After you. Please.’
She walked through the unexpectedly subtropical garden to the pretty Georgian porch and through the open front door.
Used to the clean lines and calm paintwork of Simple Gifts and her house in Rosedale, the initial impression was one of a kind of crazy 1970s exuberance now frayed at the edges. Her mind had nowhere to settle. She had startled a shorthaired woman sitting on one of a pair of old brown sofas with her back to the door. As Winnie said, ‘Hello. I’m Winnie,’ she turned, stared at her with an expression she knew all too well from patients at the Clarke and slipped quickly past her and up the stairs.
‘Morwenna,’ Antony said quietly.
‘I guessed.’
The woman had looked confusingly like a combination of how Joanie might have turned out and her early memories of their mother early in the mornings, without makeup. Perhaps illness had aged her but she looked at least twenty years older than Joanie was when Winnie last saw her.
A young man, clearly her brother, but cut of a sunnier cloth, was visible in a paved area at the back. He was talking excitedly on a cell phone.
‘Jack, our GP, wanted to hospitalize her,’ Antony said. ‘But I wouldn’t let him. I don’t want her locked up.’
‘Is she …?’
‘She turned up out of the blue. She’s been wandering, staying all over the place for more than ten years now. She seemed quite calm at first but perhaps that was just the shock of learning about Rachel having died. Then she …’ He sat at the bashed-up old pine table. Winnie sat across from him. ‘There’s an old lido across the seafront from here. A sea-water bathing pool from the Thirties, you know?’
‘I know,’ she nodded, although she didn’t.
‘She took herself off there without warning one morning and tried to drown herself.’
‘Jeeze.’
‘Jack has got her medicated now but, well, we’re all a little jumpy.’
Winnie could not believe she had managed to impose herself at such an appalling time. ‘Maybe I should go,’ she said. ‘Gee, I’m so sorry.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said with a rueful smile. ‘We’re just happy to have her back where we can care for –’
‘Hello?’
The young man had come in, tucking his cell phone back in his jeans pocket. He was a honey, in that poignant stage between being a pretty boy and whatever came next. Just Petey’s type. He looked her straight in the eye and held out his hand. Just her type too, actually.
‘I’m Hedley,’ he said. ‘How d’you do.’
‘This is Winnie,’ his father said. ‘From Toronto. We’ve been e-mailing.’
Hedley glanced quickly from one to the other and for a second she could see he thought they’d met on some wrinklies’ dating site.
‘You knew Mum,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m your long-lost aunt.’
‘Oh my God of course you are!’ He laughed, kissed her, hugged her and sat her down again. ‘Let me put the kettle on. Have you had lunch? When did you get here? Antony didn’t say anything.’
‘Well it sounds as though you’ve had other things to …’
‘Oh. Well. Quite. But still. Tea?’
‘Yes please.’ She chuckled.
He had that gift, Petey had it too, of being able to improve the atmosphere in a room simply by entering it. He busied himself filling the kettle, putting a cherry cake and teacups and little plates on the table. Nothing matched but it was charming.
‘One good thing about a death,’ he said, ‘is not having to bake another cake for months. This freezer is packed! That was Oliver,’ he told Antony. ‘He and Ankie have driven down this morning. He was calling from Truro so they shouldn’t be long. They’d been to that gallery on Lemon Street. Oliver’s my hubby,’ he explained.
‘And who’s Ankie?’ Winnie asked and saw that his face briefly clouded over.
‘Oh. She’s … she’s a painter friend.’
They had tea and cake and then Winnie opened her bag and took out the envelope of photographs she had brought them, of Joanie, of her parents, of their house in Etobicoke, of Simple Things, of her place in Rosedale, of their grandparents, of her Josh. An instant second family. She wrote down names for them, dates when she could recall them. She sketched out what she knew of the Ransome family tree. She told them they must come visit. Prompted by questions, she told them about the Clarke Institute and volunteering there and Joanie escaping it and managed not to cry, although she got a little choked up when she explained about Ray Kelly and the whole train thing.
There was what her grandmother used to call a speaking silence then, as the two of them took everything in. Even chatty Hedley fell quiet and his eyes looked full and teary.
‘You must be very hurt and angry,’ Antony said at last. ‘At the way she cut you all out of her life.’
But before she could think of an answer they were interrupted by Hedley’s phone chirruping and a video message coming through of the first trimester scan of his sister-in-law Lizzy’s baby. Which of course made everyone happy and led to congratulation phone calls and Antony had to take the phone upstairs to Morwenna’s room to show her the scan too, although there was really nothing to see but a blob with a heartbeat. Winnie knew he’d be asking her to come down and join the party and she’d be shrinking in on herself and saying no, not just yet. She badly wanted to be able to go up there and say hello and look I’m not so bad really and give her a big hug and buy her a ticket to Toronto for a nice long visit. Even offer the poor woman a job if she wanted one. But although her mind was upstairs with that stricken deer she had encountered on arriving, she sat with Hedley and slipped into counselling mode instead. She told him she knew it was hard for him because it was always hard when you wanted to help the one you loved and they sort of pushed you away but at least she was here at last and at least she was safe. And he gave her a long, tearful hug, which was nice of him as she needed it too by now.
Antony came down again, looking shattered, and Winnie thought she really should be leaving them, at least for today but then they started pulling out photographs for her to see and then suddenly this drop-dead gorgeous man appeared, a real silver fox, who turned out to be Oliver and so there was another round of introductions and a confusing explanation of how Ankie, who sounded kind of demoralizing, had insisted on being dropped at the airport suddenly which had held him up. Then there was more tea and she felt she badly needed the bathroom, less to use the John than to sit quietly in a clam space for a few minutes to give her poor jetlagged head a chance to catch up.
When she came out, Antony was loading the dishwasher and the boys had disappeared somewhere. She was an inveterate snoop so she thought to seize the chance of looking around the place before she started socializing again. There was a broad staircase, very light because of a tall, thin window to the back of the house with blue glass at the edges.
And then, of course, she came face to face with some of the paintings. She’d somehow guessed they were Joanie’s even before she saw the signature – R. Kelly – that was exactly like the J. Ransome one she’d been working on in her teens, the same Greek E and neat underlining.
She knew absolutely nothing about what she thought of as modern art. On holidays with Josh they’d tended to home in on buildings rather than galleries, although she liked museums and museum shops. There was a big painting above the staircase and another on the landing. She could see they weren’t of anything but the colours were fantastically intense, probably too intense to be hung so near one another. There was a blue like seawater over sunny sand and a thin strip of orange you could almost feel like heat on your face if you stood near enough. She caught sight of other smaller paintings through open bedroom doors. (Morwenna’s door – she assumed it was hers – remained firmly shut.) There were no pictures anywhere but Joanie’s and Winnie sensed how her sister would not have made life easy for this kind family.
She came upon a little flight of wooden steps, a ladder in effect, let down from an attic room off one end of the landing. She started up there then stopped because Hedley was up there with Oliver’s arms about him but they sensed her and called her up.
‘Sorry,’ Oliver said. ‘Haven’t seen him properly for weeks.’
‘We were just looking at these,’ Hedley said. ‘Come and see. Can you manage?’ He held out a hand to hoist her up off the last few rungs. God alone knew how she would get back down.
It was a kind of lookout tower, like being in a lighthouse.
‘Was this her studio?’ she asked him.
‘One of them. But look. This is what she was working on at the end.’
There were six pictures. The boys had arranged them in a rough semicircle which made the little room feel like a sort of chapel. Six circles. Only they weren’t all circular. One was a sphere, like a burning sun, but the others seemed less even. Or perhaps it was an illusion? She had built up layers of paint in such a way that the longer you looked, the more colours seemed to emerge until it was like cloud lifting off a planet. One, which seemed murky brown at first, nothing like the intense canvases on the stairs, slowly revealed itself as having patches of bronze and even purple within its texture.
‘Did she tell anyone what they were?’ she asked tentatively, shy of revealing her ignorance. ‘I mean, they’re beautiful, really, but what was she trying to do here?’
‘I think it’s whatever you want it to be,’ Hedley told her, still staring at the paintings and she saw how his waist had gotten enfurled by Oliver’s arm again.
She heard another door open and the woman, the girl for God’s sake, Morwenna appeared at the foot of the ladder thing.
Winnie smiled what she hoped was her least threatening smile. Morwenna stared up at her. It could so easily have been Joanie down there, an older, wounded Joanie, that Winnie had to swallow before she dared speak.
‘Hi,’ she said, her voice still cracking a little bit. ‘Did you see these already? Come and see them. Come on up.’ And she held out a hand.