The Shades Page 5

  But Rowan insisted on going. He even made arrangements for himself, applying to a coed school outside Canterbury, where he was offered a provisional place, subject to parental consent. In the face of such determination, Catherine and Michael reluctantly agreed to consult three therapists and abide by majority rule. Best of three opinions, they said, believing no sane person would fail to take their side. After two meetings, they were overruled. The consensus was that as long as Rowan stayed in therapy, it was all right for him to go. His desire to leave was a way of taking charge of his emotions at a time of helplessness. The need to carve out an identity beyond the arena of mourning was positive—basic survival, one of them had said. Catherine was forced to submit. She didn’t want to be accused of selfishly keeping him at home or using him as a crutch, but she believed that these experts had seriously underestimated the benefits of keeping the family together and was surprised by their failure to see what this meant. Two years before, when she had told Paige about plans for Hamdean, her friend had asked, “Are you sure? The rural idyll sounds all very lovely for small children, but now they are dreadful teenagers don’t you want to stay in London, where you can get them out of your hair? You’ll go mad in the country and the children won’t want to come.” Catherine had dismissed her as being negatively disposed; possibly jealous of the fullness of her life, but it was ironic to think that in many ways, for different reasons, Paige had been right.

  Shutting her laptop, she shuffled out through the back door to the garden. She had to remind herself to lift her chest and feet and walk properly. It was hard to believe that she had been athletic once: Center position netball, team undefeated. Then Pilates twice a week. Where had she found the energy or time?

  Open post, check your email, walk a little.

  All the days.

  Crossing the grass, she followed the property line, keeping her gaze averted from the parcel of putting green of the sportsmen’s lodge, absurdly manicured against the wild meadows on either side. The day was overcast, with only a few squibs of sunlight filtering through. Even so, she saw how the rays warmed the hawthorns for a moment before the cloud drifted into the light. She could see how tenderly the leaves were budding. They were vibrant, keen youngsters clambering over a hoary grandmother. Her heart ached again. She never used to look at nature this way, only if it was in a picture or representation, in a Ruisdael or Constable. This was another cruel irony of loss, that she could be half a person and the part that remained could become so much more acute.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the red car and its misplaced passenger.

  She turned away and then turned back as she decided to retreat the most direct way inside, by crossing the grass to the front door. This had once been the original entrance, with recessed Ionian pillars and a pelmet weighted with a woven mass of wisteria on the surround. She noticed the wisteria too was budding, but the stems were smooth and lithe. On their first visit after exchanging contracts with the seller for Hamdean, Michael had warned her not to get too attached to the lovely blossoms: they were invasive and compromising the brickwork and fenestrations, and destined for the chop. The children had been with them at the time. Always alert to Michael’s uncool general fogeyness, they’d howled with laughter and teased him all the way on the drive back to London. “Dad, would you open the fenestration, please?” “Did you know, Dad, that the eyes are the fenestrations of the soul?” Michael didn’t mind being the butt of the joke as long as no one was being unkind. “Glad you lot are so easy to please,” he’d said gamely. He couldn’t resist a historical reference to justify his choice of vocabulary, with a digression into the seventeenth-century religious struggles in Bohemia and the Second Defenestration of Prague, where Protestants hurled a scribe and two Catholic Regents from a tower, and thus precipitated the Thirty Years’ War. Rachel’s takeaway from the lecture was delight in the verb defenestrate. “I can’t believe there’s such a buff and excellent word for throwing someone out of the window.” Her reaction irked Rowan, who told his sister to stop using trendy expressions. What did “buff” mean? What was she trying to say? The discussion became semantic, with Catherine weighing in that buff was a neutral color and something you did to your car and nails. Her husband agreed that it was a kind of polishing, but could be stretched to mean a shining example—so her use wasn’t totally out of line. Rachel was quick to crow to her brother, “Completely appropriate—see?” with Rowan deadpanning, “That’s cut. I’m blown,” more Rachelisms, triggering another round of debate. Catherine missed their banter, the sustaining humor that balanced their frustrations and kept them all in check. Her children had given her much in the way of equilibrium. She wished she could say that she had done the same for them.

  When Michael had sentenced the wisteria, Catherine had wholeheartedly agreed. She was as pragmatic as her husband; to be sentimental about a plant that would eventually undermine would have been bloody stupid. Looking again at the vines, two on the right, winding across to greet a smaller one on the left, she saw them as determined graces, more vigorous and alive, and worthy of a reprieve, than the staunchly inanimate façade that was little more than a shell. She decided to tell Michael that he should lay off the wisteria.

  A girl’s voice close by.

  “Sorry to bother. I used to live here.”

  He was pleased, if a little surprised, to hear Catherine sounding so animated when she called to tell him about the girl. She said the girl had appeared on her doorstep, on her way somewhere else. She had decided spontaneously to stop by to see the place of her youth—Catherine reported this ironically, as the girl was eighteen and had just left school. She said that the girl was Clive Martin’s daughter and had lived at Hamdean in the ’90s when her mother, a French dancer, whatshername, had brought her over from Toulouse to play happy families and give her one-night romance with the director one more go. That ambition proved a folly and the relationship ended unhappily with the dancer going back to Paris to flit around and send her daughter away again, this time to stay with an aunt in Lyons—the poor thing had already been passed between various relatives. The child’s name was Keira, although for a while Catherine seemed to prefer calling her the girl. Catherine said she was sparky and had an unusual quality. “You would have been fascinated by her. Other than you, she’s the only person in the world who cares where the boiler room used to be. That’s why the living room has that high slip of a window—it was the only light source for the original boiler room! You always said that the French doors were an anomaly and that the developers must have been in league with the planners to allow them to be put in. Well, you were right if there was no pre-existing opening. She couldn’t get over the transformation—said it used to be a total dungeon in there. . . . Do you know that there used to be a maze of box hedges on the terrace? She said they were ‘scrawny but good for finding robins’ nests.’ I felt sorry for her. She’s obviously had a difficult time, treated like an accessory, pulled out when needed, thrown away when not. You have to wonder how broke and desperate her mother must have been to uproot an eight-year-old to live with someone you’ve only met once—even if he is the father of your child. Let’s face it, the life-span of a dancer is about the same as a moth. She’s taking a gap year and doing temp jobs when she can.”

  By the time they had finished talking, Michael had Googled the director Clive Martin. He read that he did have a daughter by the ballet dancer Marine Deveaux. Her name was Keira Martin, as Catherine had said. He had already heard about the director. When he and Catherine were negotiating for the house, the estate agent had put in a one-sheet about Clive Martin along with the specs. He’d thought it savvy, the use of glamorous forebears in the advertising: mystique and provenance were all part of a package for which people paid good money.

  The next day, Catherine went to London. They met each other for dinner that evening, tentatively holding hands as they walked along the New Kings Road. They stopped at a new tapas restaurant that was dimly lit and cozy and ru
n by noisy Andalusians; they avoided going anywhere they had ever been with the children. Over a plate of oily pulpo, she told him that all was seemingly functioning at the gallery, but admitted that it was time for her to step up during the selection for the group show. She needed to do the rounds, make sure the best work was going in, otherwise she would be negligent. She was building up to see a Northern Irish artist she represented, Aggie Mackay, who built layers of lacquered newspaper in floorscapes, or Soul-maps, as they were called. All a good sign. When she left to go to the bathroom between courses, Michael looked in her Boots shopping bag and saw that she had refilled the antidepressants prescribed to her by her GP—not a bad thing as well. She’d said that she couldn’t tell whether the medication had made any difference but was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Michael couldn’t see much change in her, apart from sleeping more than usual. Whilst it was good that she was rested, it was also bad for any hope of sex.

  As she undressed for bed and leaned down to pull off her shoes, he saw the slope of her back. She’d always had beautiful shoulders, imbued and sculpted by an athleticism that went with her determined, head-of-hockey sexiness he had always found so attractive. Her muscles were denuded now; the ridges of her vertebrae formed a distinct bony crest. No longer a radiant host of pheromones, her skin had sallowed and stretched tightly across her spine. There was pathos in her alteration, yet awe that her body could still make him stir after twenty-seven years. Desire didn’t flare in the way that it used to do, but then nothing could match the volatile lust of the early days, when they would meet in the studio that she shared with a friend and squeeze into the bathroom in case of her roommate’s return. How determinedly she guarded against interruption, locking themselves inside the tiny space, where they stripped each other, crouched and sucked, getting some knocks and bruises from the sink—the urgency of their needs had been a pleasurable surprise to them both. Sex continued to be robust, with a natural tapering after marriage and with another dip in frequency after the children were born. It was understandable that Catherine had become unreachable in the last year, but that didn’t stop him wanting her or remembering how it used to be between them. He saw her lift off her bra, quickly smother her body in an outsize nightshirt, and give him a rueful glance that told him sorry, whatever he was wanting she wouldn’t be able to give him tonight—or, as he interpreted, anytime in the foreseeable future. He watched her slide between the sheets and roll away onto her side, with her back looking as approachable and welcoming as a face of Mont Blanc. His vital signs pulsed, I’m still here. He would have liked to make love to her to shake off his sadness, but the moment quickly passed as he heard her breathing slow with her descent into sleep.

  When they had spoken on the phone the day before, after establishing that neither one had heard from Rowan, he’d asked, “Do you think she’ll ever return?”

  She had understood that he was talking about Keira. “I invited her back, actually. Whether she’ll come, who knows?”

  Michael was glad to hear of her offer, as he’d become curious about Keira as well.

  One of his last thoughts before drifting into slumber that night was a hope that he might meet her. He had questions about some foundations he’d found in the garden; whether during her time there had been some type of structure—a summerhouse, perhaps? In the morning, he would ask Catherine whether Keira had mentioned one.

  He also hoped that Catherine hadn’t scared her away.

  The first weekend it was warm and sunny: everyone spilled out to the courtyard, lying on the grass and steps to take advantage of the heat. Like most of the school, the quad had been built in the ’30s and nodded back to traditional forms while looking forward to modernism. With white-boxed windows and spare stucco lines, the overall effect was attractive in a utilitarian way. Most of the students were already in groups, but Rowan felt no pressure to join them. After being the target of so much attention at home, being anonymous was a relief and it was liberating to walk around unnoticed—a bit like being invisible in a stealth game, moving about under the radar, evading an unspecified enemy. He was aware that he should make the most of this new advantage, as he knew it wouldn’t last.

  Canterbury Downs had a good vibe—a bonus, as he’d chosen it randomly from the Internet. Rowan had scanned the school’s website, clocked its off-center, arty philosophy, and seen that it had no uniform and offered A-level courses he liked. It was a plus that he’d had to go really low on the page to find anything about phys ed.; a novelty that there was a lot of talk about emotional development and balance. The laid-back atmosphere of the students seemed to testify to this experience.

  He’d met his neighbors in the house that morning Fred and Osei (or Oz, Ozzy, or Ozman as he was variously known). Fred had come from Holland Park Comp. He’d been sent away because his parents were under the illusion that he couldn’t get drugs outside of London. Osei was the son of Ghanaian diplomats, a hyperactive math wiz and electronic-sound geek who never stopped moving, dodging punches with an imaginary sparring partner. He had already been at the school two years. “If you don’t mind greasy food and greasy girls, the place is all right,” he told Rowan. “I eat healthily—like to take care of myself.”

  Fred objected, “You eat so much junk.”

  Osei pulled up his T-shirt to show a six-pack. “I supplement. I’m vegetarian. I have to because here in Great Britain, you call one hairy piece of lettuce a salad when it’s garnish.” Fred cracked up. Rowan figured this was an in-joke of sorts. Osei chuckled, tucking his T-shirt into his jeans, nodding toward his friend, “For him the only side-salad is grass.” They admitted to being mellow and that they were going back out into the woods to get even more mellow—they told him the safest place to smoke da garnish was behind the pet shed, where the lonely kept rabbits and rats. Fred hoped the wind was blowing in the right direction, otherwise them bunnies and rodents are getting high. They invited Rowan to join, but he said, Later. Osei did some more air boxing, then with a tucking motion he and Fred were gone. Rowan was okay when they went. He’d never been one for partying, preferring clarity to stonersville. He wanted to go back to his room and think.

  Lying on his bed, duvet and cover not yet united but comfortably entwined underneath, he had time to get his bearings, allowing himself to be pleased and quite a lot relieved that the compass directing him was working well enough to have got him so far. Being away in a new environment had made him feel a nice, newly mature calm, where he could acknowledge and respond to where he was at without being so fucking reactive all the time—for sure this wouldn’t have been possible if he’d stayed at home. He could lie there and consider his situation without getting worked up, revisit episodes that had exasperated him before and see them in a different light, and be grateful that they had set him off and pushed him a few steps closer to where he was now.

  His attitude toward the carnations was an example. His reaction to them before had been harsh. He’d found them on the steps of the front door—he’d already waded knee-deep through plastic bouquets on the path to get to them. The petals had been spray-painted electric blue and their stems gold the way people did pinecones at Christmas. The idea that someone would dye a flower and an even bigger twat pay money for a bunch, and leave it with a note: “Love you Rache. Missing you so much,” or “RIP wherever you are, will never forget Glastonbury,” had made him want to go as far away as possible from where anyone knew there was a Rachel. He despised the flowers. If his mother hadn’t been waiting for him inside, he would have taken them and put them straight into the bin.

  It wasn’t just the lurid flowers that offended, it was the disrespect to her extinction to keep talking to her as if she were alive. The messages and bouquets were mawkish, and he couldn’t stand the way his mum had lapped them up with a tragic thirst as if they could actually make her relationship with Rachel any less crap.

  He’d seen the only way forward was to move on.

  This didn’t mean he didn’t care. He’
d overheard whispers that he was cold and unfeeling, which was rubbish because he cared more about Rachel than everyone put together. He’d gone with her in his mind, living her last moments being mangled in a car—imagining her pain, terror, disbelief, before she became nothing.

  Wrapping his thoughts around the elimination of her consciousness was its own massive head trip. He saw her brain as having been wiped like a hard drive, with millions of gigabytes gone—he pictured one final burst of activity this way as she had constantly been hooked up to the Internet. That done, he wasn’t buying into the collective hysteria that cheapened emotion and wasn’t changing a thing. His experience of her was exactly that: his own—he resented all the pressure to share, join revisionism, myth-making, and her elevation to a sainthood that distorted her into someone he didn’t know. At the funeral, he had listened to Char Nestor turn a story about Rachel trying to spook her before a debate into one about kindness and friendship. In the same speech, she had made out that Rachel was so sympathetic when Char’s mother had died, when really what Char had been describing was that Rachel had been selfish enough to co-opt her grief by managing to cry first. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have paid much attention to what Rachel or Char Nestor said, but now Rachel was dead, he was more inflexibly attached to what had been, even if it wasn’t flattering. As he explained in a session with his new school’s impressively impassive therapist, who operated on Fridays in a tidy cubicle off the sick bay, he used to get on better with her, but she’d changed. She’d become mercenary.

  The therapist, whose name was Lakme, asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Mercenary—as in, you only care about money.”

  “I meant, in what way?” she qualified with persistent calm. She wasn’t easily ruffled. Lakme was in her forties—even her olive skin refused to wrinkle.