Rachel is seated on a bench in the centre of the main gallery. She is studying a painting of a woman with glossy black hair. The woman is looking out of an open window, leaning her elbows on the stone sill. The pale yellow paint of the house is peeling away to reveal the grey rendering beneath. The woman is smiling invitingly down to the street below.
Her teeth fascinate Rachel; they are slightly crooked but of a perfect size for her face and the artist has caught exactly the glint and translucency. There are no secrets in the woman’s eyes; everything is on display. The picture irritates her, especially since it has temporarily replaced her favourite picture, a bowl of glistening white roses. Rachel closes her eyes and breathes deeply. She feels so restless that even the picture of the white roses would not have calmed her today. She delves into her shopping bag and retrieves a sandwich box and a red thermos flask with a white screw-on cup.
It was today that she had wanted to meet Edward for lunch at Henry’s, but for some reason he had put her off until next week. And she had the girl’s ballet ticket, not that she deserved it. Fancy manipulating Edward like that. What was she playing at? If she’d seen her at Henry’s she could have taken her to task. Is that why Edward had put her off? Had he seen through her little plan? She supposed there was nothing to stop her going to Henry’s on her own. She could save her sandwiches for tea.
She thinks back to their last lunch together at the Blue Moon Café. Strange, Edward saying that about his father taking him to the art gallery, and about the Grimshaw paintings. It was as if he knew why she had been to Leeds. She had gone to see if they were still there. The ones her mother used to take her to see as a young child.
She knew instinctively the days when her mother would be taking her to the art gallery. A few days before, a restlessness would come upon her mother, a noticeable anger with her work. The bursts of the sewing machine would be faster, louder, not caring if she annoyed the neighbours on all three sides. Then one morning Rachel would wake very early, sometimes, in winter, before first light, to silence. Rachel knew that day they would be going to the art gallery.
Her mother would pack salt beef sandwiches and a thermos of strong, sweet black coffee into a canvas bag. The coffee was the family’s only luxury; coffee beans her father brought home from the market.
They would walk into the city, away from the ugliness of the back-to-back, red brick streets and always they would go to the gallery. It was free and warm and there were their pictures. Her mother would wander round and round. Rachel would try to keep to her mother’s pace but often she was too slow and Rachel would dance ahead. Sometimes her mother would sit on the bench in the centre.
‘Soaking it all in,’ she would say, ‘Storing a bit of beauty for later.’
When Rachel’s brother Ruben was born their secret visits stopped and her father stopped grumbling about her mother getting behind with work.
Her mother had never told her not to tell anyone where they’d been but Rachel knew, even as a young child, that she didn’t want to tell her father or anyone else of her favourite picture: a canal bronzed by the sinking sun, and her mother’s favourite, a dimly lit street of winter trees, a carriage waiting, the horse fretting. Her mother told her how it reminded her of her childhood in Russia, and how much she missed her homeland, and how Rachel’s granddad had been a furrier, making coats for all the rich ladies, and how she imagined them in the carriage wrapped in the fur coats her father had made for them.’
‘Why did you come to Leeds,’ Rachel had asked.
‘By mistake,’ her mother had replied. ‘We were going to America but when we got off the boat at Hull my parents thought we had arrived in New York. When grandfather realised his mistake he wanted to go on but your grandmother was already three months pregnant with your Uncle Jack and had been very ill just crossing the North Sea. She begged him to wait until after the baby was born. He agreed as long as they moved to Leeds where he had heard there was plenty of work for furriers and tailors, and that they would stay only until after the birth.
It had felt so delicious sharing these secrets with her mother.
She wonders which of the pictures were Edward’s favourites. Why had she never thought to take him as a child? She has a sudden pang of regret and then she remembers his comments about her modelling. How dare he pry into her private life?
No, she won’t go to Henry’s to see the girl.
Once home, Rachel places her sandwich box and flask on the small table next to her chair. The table had been the largest of a nest of three, and the next size down was now her bedside table. When George was alive, he had made a matching pair of white Formica bedside cabinets. She threw them out the week after he died. Hers had been stacked with books, his empty, except for a few balls of grey fluff, one gardening magazine, and a pink plastic mug containing his top set of teeth. The undertaker asked her for them but she feigned ignorance. The smallest table had been George’s. It was charred with black lines around the edge, where he had rested his burning cigarette while reading his paper. She had thrown that table out with the cabinets.
She lowers herself slowly into her chair and exhales, glad to be home. Turning, she twists the top off her flask and pours hot milk into the lid. She places the lunch box on her lap to act as a plate and peels back the lid, picking up one of the small triangular sandwiches. Her lunch and her tea can be as one, she thinks, as she places Edward’s unopened letter that she had found lying on the mat, on the table beside her.
The envelope for some reason reminds her of her brother Ruben and, for the first time in years, she yearns to see him again. To see his crooked smile.
A movement against the French window distracts her. She looks up to see the cat pressing its body against the distorted old glass, meowing to be let in. Rachel ignores him and stares up at the one remaining blood red rose. She had not had the heart to cut it back last winter and it had become crystallized by the frost. The branch must have worked its way loose from the trellis, the thorns scratching gently against the glass. She looks down the garden and notes that the few stray bells on the wild fuchsia bush are a softer red than the rose. She hadn’t had the strength to cut it back properly and now it is flowering early. In the past she had always been impatient to cut away the dead wood, knowing, as George had taught her, that if she cuts it back before March, then the flowers the following summer would be sparse against the green foliage. Maybe that was the only thing they eventually grew to have in common, the garden. He taught her that she could not have the garden as tidy as the house, that you had to wait, let nature take its course. They would argue about it when, bored with the house, she would start to tidy the garden, cutting back the dishevelled daffodil leaves.
He had shaken his head. ‘You’ll spoil it for next year, lass,’ was all he’d said. She laughed at him, told him not to be so daft, but each spring, her daffodils, that he had so lovingly planted for her one cold October day, became less and less until one year they disappeared altogether. He said nothing, just bought some more bulbs in the market and went out on a cold October day to plant them. She had helped him that year. Edward had stayed inside. She could see his face now, pressed up against the French windows, wondering what his parents were doing out together in the cold, working in silence.
That night, for the first time in years, they’d had sex. She had awoken to find him fumbling up her nightie. Is that what had aroused him, her silent submission with the bulbs? She’d felt for him, pulled him towards her.
‘Steady lass, steady.’
He began to slacken in her hand. She turned away and let him continue, after a pause, with his fumblings.
The garden had gradually become hers. That summer he had applied to the council for an allotment. They gave him one, high on the hill, south facing. In the summer, he’d told her, he could see the peaks far in the distance, and in the winter he would watch the weather roll in off the Pennines.
George had been an ordinary man, a very ordinary man. She had not wanted to be ordinary herself but, as his wife, she supposed she had become ordinary by association. He’d died one July, twenty-six years ago. An odd time of the year to die, when all the rest of the world was bursting with life. He had gone to sleep as normal, while she read her book. She had not even said goodnight to him. In the morning when she awoke, he was lying still beside her. He had always been an early riser, even in retirement. She sensed immediately that something was wrong and slowly, very slowly, put her hand out to touch him. His flesh was stone cold. She jumped out of bed and ran from the room.
She found some of her old clothes she’d put out for jumble in the spare bedroom and put them on over her nightie before ringing the doctor. She remembered thinking how quickly the doctor had arrived to see a dead body, as if it had been an emergency. When Rachel stripped the bed later, she wondered, as she threw all the bedding in the bin and turned and scrubbed the mattress, why she had felt so afraid, why she had been so frightened of a body that she had slept next to for all those years. It was still George after all. But the fact that his body was no longer warm seemed to have changed everything.
There were some things about George that she missed; the cabbages from his allotment, the neatly folded hankies in the drawer, his half-done crosswords that she would finish. But gradually, the space that he had occupied filled up, and the house, the cat, and she herself, breathed a single sigh of parting.
She took to visiting the art gallery every day, just for something to do, to get her out of the house. There was a bench in the centre of the main hall where she could gradually shift along the outer edge of the black leather circle, feeling the piping under her fingers, studying the pictures. Sometimes, she would stand up close to a painting to study a detail, a shipwreck; waves high and white, a wicker basket being carried out to sea. She wanted to know what was inside the wicker basket. Some days she imagined it was just a woman’s sewing basket, but on others it contained a baby lost at sea, to be washed up, days later, on a strange shore.