Rachel gets up that morning with the intention of giving the back room a good bottoming, and cleaning the French windows so the whole garden gleams back at her.
She doesn’t bother getting washed or dressed, but instead slips her old housecoat over her nightdress. When she has finished cleaning, she intends to pack herself some lunch and catch the bus into town; maybe go to the gallery above the library. She hasn’t been there in years. She could see if Edward is back at work. She stands back from the window, searching for any rogue traces of Windowlene she may have missed.
She hears a knock on the door, perhaps the milkman. She looks at the clock, 11.30. It can’t be, maybe the postman. She scoops the slumbering cat off the chair and goes to open the front door. There is no one there. She looks up and down the street, no one. She hears the side gate banging against the catch. Holding the cat closer to her, she steps outside onto the wet concrete in her bedroom slippers. She waits. Someone is knocking on the side door.
‘Hello?’ she shouts.
The gate clicks shut and, from behind the overgrown Buddleia bush, Angela emerges. Rachel steps back onto her threshold, stroking the cat harshly between the ears. She says nothing.
Angela looks up at her from the garden path and smiles shyly, ‘Sorry. I forgot you used your front door.’
Rachel nods.
‘I’d have rung only I’ve lost your number.’
Rachel looks down at her cat, ‘I see.’
The girl advances towards her, then hesitates. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’
Rachel wants to refuse, but instead steps aside, her back pressing against her front door. Angela wipes her feet on the coconut mat. Rachel nods in the direction of the kitchen. She is stunned. Caught unwashed and undressed, she lets the girl enter her kitchen. She motions to a chair, ‘Excuse me? I’ll just get dressed.’ She closes the kitchen door.
Angela sits at the kitchen table. She can hear Rachel moving about upstairs. She wishes she hadn’t come. She has spooked the old bird by turning up unannounced and catching her all unawares in her scruffy old housecoat.
Delving into her rucksack she brings out the old-fashioned photo album that she had purloined from Claudette’s. She places it on the table, smoothing her hand over its leather surface. She glances around the room. Under the window is an old pot Belfast sink. She stands up and walks over to the window. The sink has a tarnished brass plughole and a large rubber plug in swirls of green and white like the inside cover of an old book. She remembers the Belfast sink her gran had before her modernisation purge. It had the same plug but with pink swirls instead of green. Her gran would fill the sink to brimming and place her in it. The water would spill over the side and her gran would always tell her off for being careless.
To the right of the window is a rack with willow pattern plates, blue on white, the bridge where the lovers meet, the willow tree hanging low. The cups are on white hooks under the cupboard. The kitchen has the smell of an old person about it; old people, food, cabbage and the linger of pork dripping. A slight draught comes in through the cat flap at the bottom of the door. Angela can feel it around her ankles. It lifts, ever so slightly, a white envelope lying on the coconut mat. She crouches to pick it up, Edward’s handwriting. She shakes her head, what a funny pair. She props the envelope against a small glass vase of snowdrops in the centre of the scrubbed pine table and then sits back down again.
She hears Rachel coming back down the stairs. She turns in her chair, waiting, a cautious smile on her face. ‘I hope you didn’t mind me coming.’
Silence.
Angela feels she should say something else but the words stick in her throat. She hesitates and then stands up. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’
Rachel looks at her, mouth pulled tight. She has on a beige dress and a necklace of tiger-eye beads. She’s put on her armour, Angela thinks.
‘Come unannounced, I mean. Sorry, I’ll go.’ She picks up her rucksack.
The cat jumps out of Rachel’s arms. She smiles a cold hard smile, ‘Why did you come?’
Angela blushes, stammers, ‘I wondered if you’d seen anything of Edward, or you’d got his new address.’ She flumps her shoulders, ‘I can’t find him anywhere.’
Rachel’s voice is icy. ‘I think that is my business, don’t you?’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘My son’s whereabouts are my business. If he wanted to see you he’d contact you.’
‘Yes, but I need to see him. It’s important.’
‘What, so you can take further advantage of the poor man? Tell me, why on earth do you want to draw his poor deformed body,’ she pauses for breath. ‘What do you intend to do with the pictures when you have completed them? Parade them in front of the whole world?’
‘But it’s not like that.’
‘Isn’t it? It looks very much like it from where I’m standing.’
Angela looks down at the black and white tiles. She presses her teeth hard together. Don’t cry, she says to herself, for God’s sake, don’t cry. ‘I thought you of all people, Mrs Anderson, would’ve understood.’
‘Oh, I understand. I understand very well.’
‘I see his body as something different, a thing of beauty.’
‘Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? A thing!’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t force him to do it,’ she ends on a plaintive note.
‘No, you didn’t have to. Any man like Edward would be flattered to receive the attentions of a young girl like you.’
‘But we are good friends.’ She looks up, still gritting her teeth, willing herself not to cry. ‘I really like him.’
Rachel snorts, ‘Oh, I bet you do. I’m sure he suits your purpose admirably.’
Angela says nothing but takes the two short steps to the back door, putting her hand up to the Yale lock. She tugs at the latch. It does not open. She struggles in silence, eventually yanking it free.
By the time she reaches the garden gate the tears are already dropping from her jaw. ‘What a bitch! What a bitch! What a bitch!’ She repeats to herself over and over again.
There is a woman with a perm and a prim face coming towards her along the street. Angela crosses the road and sees a footpath that leads down to a small river. The bank, spread with weeping willows, slopes steeply to the water’s edge. Over the other side of the river she can see the main road and the tops of buses and lorries. She sits down on her rucksack and cries in huge, self-indulgent sobs.
Why had Rachel been so horrid to her? Edward was right about her; she was a bitch. But why had he told her about the sittings? When he’d asked her not to mention it. She shouldn’t have gone to see the old cow in the first place. Why had she wanted to be friends with an old witch like that anyway? She starts to cry again.
She remembers in her rucksack the present she had bought for Rachel, two handmade chocolates in the shape of cats, one each for them to have with their cup of tea. The cellophane bags are tied with little yellow ribbons, the ends stretched so that the ribbons curl back on themselves. She tears the bag open and eats both the cats, heads first, then smiles to herself thinking, had she really been so insensitive?
Was that how other people would see it? That she was using Edward? Alex hadn’t seen it like that. In the first instance, her reason for drawing him had been his deformity, she had to admit that, but after a while it all sort of linked, became part of him. She’d never thought to study the deeper reasons for the deformity. She recalls his analogy of a basket and smiles. It would be interesting to see the inner workings. She could even do some sketches.
In the university library she searches for a book on spinal deformities. She finds pictures of spines writhing like the skeletons of snakes. X-rays of backs pinned and rodded and straightened and yet, still left scarred and imperfect. She makes lots of quick sketches. For the first time, she feels the enormity of what Edward has to put up with. She had never imagined for one minute the twisting and turning that had gone on in Edward’s body to create the shape he is. Had it ever really impacted on her that he might be in real pain and not just grumbling in his usual way? Had she ever really taken his disability into account, tried to make things more comfortable for him? He was always going on about how awful she was. Well, he was right. All she had cared about was drawing him, as if he were little more than an odd-shaped vase.
She looks down at the sketches she has made. These could work in really well with the charcoal drawings. It is dark outside. She hopes she has not missed the last bus.
Angela clutches her pink hot water bottle and snuggles further down the bed. She listens to the rain lashing against the window. What would Paul be doing now? Would he be out at sea, in the dark? She wonders if he has even given her a second thought, whether he had those sort of encounters all the time. That night it had felt as if something inside her had been unleashed, but it wasn’t just that night was it? It had it happened once before, in the studio. Maybe she should have stayed in Cornwall an extra couple of days, seen Paul again, banished these stupid thoughts she’s had of Edward. She is mixing her art up with her emotions.