The Exhibitionist, page 10
Her mind is swift and sharp. She says Lucia’s is soft, that she should push herself more, and she’s right.
There is no future; Lucia does know this. Her heart is breaking slowly, by the hour. But, every time they meet, barely or not even touching, the air between them charged, Lucia discreetly breathing in Priya’s hair and, watching her mouth, she knows she is powerless. She cannot give her up.
But she should.
While Lucia is steady and constant, Priya’s affection is thin as ice. No, not ice; an unpredictable fire. It can be enormous, or suddenly vanish. They can be holding hands under a corner table in an old-fashioned Greek restaurant, sending each other joltingly ardent messages deep into the night, but then Lucia will admit she’s never read Dickens, or defend her love of funk, and Priya’s amusement tips into scorn. As a teenager Lucia would dress every day in her limited finery, in case her blond god and his friends passed her after school. Now, because MPs’ hours are long and prone to sudden changes, and their occasional decisions to ditch everything and meet in a pub, a freezing park, cannot be forecast or controlled, she lives in trembling desperate hope all over again.
No woman she knows has done this. Marriages do end, but slowly, not in a bonfire.
Her brakes are off. She can’t decide whether to make herself or the house look decent first, so she races around shoeless, hair dripping, while trying to sweep up ash and make vinaigrette for fifteen. She can smell her own body.
She had been certain that she could never take off her clothes in front of anyone new again. Ray was used to it; he’d say, ‘Well, I don’t care, so why’s it matter? Just me and you now, poor girl’ gently, as if to a disfigured child. And she knew she was lucky, to have escaped chemo, to have had the reconstruction straight away. Her grotesqueness was irrelevant: eyes averted from reflections, the bathroom door thoroughly locked. It would have been a form of vanity to think it mattered.
Without a minute to spare, she gazes so deeply into the past that her eyes ache. She pulls off her work jeans, faces the mirror in her knickers. She’s become expert at not glimpsing herself below the neck. The suppliers of camisole-effect lace modesty panels, discreetly ruched viscose leisurewear, all advertised by brave real women, don’t cater for those who hate even the catalogues’ envelopes, still weep quietly at every scan, tears rolling into their hair. Women like Lucia don’t need an Annabelle Soft Touch Half-Support Pocketed Tankini, because swimming shows how the misplaced back-muscle leaps and twitches at her chest, and she’ll never do it in public again. She needs other accessories: blinkers to prevent accidental sightings of one’s mutilated body, those lovely morphine pumps to blunt the sorrow.
At right angles to the mirror, arm carefully positioned, an observer wouldn’t know she’s numb from ribs to shoulder-blade, ugly as it’s possible for a woman to be. Her upper left quadrant feels wooden, no more hers than a false tooth. If she turns towards her reflection, she sees the long curved silver shark-scar below her shoulder-blade, its ends hideously pursed. Turn away: reveal, very slowly, the horror of what she has been left with, not real warm flesh or a convincing substitute, but a deflating beach-ball, a raisin: silicone in a flesh bag, distorted, pinched, however it catches the light.
And the rest of her is looking saggy and worried and old. Priya is forty-six, still a thing of beauty.
Even now, the merest edge of recollection makes her swoop inside. Should she change her knickers, in case they find a moment in the kitchen . . .
It’s past seven; this is ridiculous. This morning she’d decided on black trousers and a navy top because Ray once said she looked good in it. She can’t wear her old favourites any more, or what she thinks of as her fol-de-rol shirt, because he’ll notice, and keep on about it: ‘Well, it’s not what I’d choose’ or ‘Ooh look, someone’s making an effort,’ like a neon arrow.
Ray calls her Scruff, Wurzel. He says: ‘Straighten that sweater over your hump.’ It’s a joke, but he does it in public. It makes her hot with self-disgust. But clothes must be worn and, eventually, she chooses, or submits to, a long tubular red and grey subtly tartan skirt, and a tight but camouflaging black jumper, soon to reek of lamb fat. The skirt once seemed vaguely Sex Pistols/neo-tweed but already she’s sweaty, ashamed, like a sturdy countrywoman. Her supportive tights clutch her like a new exoskeleton. She pulls at the fabric, trying to aerate.
Why would anyone court disaster? She and Priya are hardly going to run off together, risk either of their marriages, their careers; Priya is clear as diamonds about that. Lucia needs to stop this breathless hoping. But what about the journalists who orbit the Central Lobby, begging for something quotable? Any observant passer-by could expose them, bring ruin.
It’s like striding off across a frozen lake, tender ice barely holding. You would need such strength, if it were for yourself. You’d have to have started to imagine, after so long in the wilderness, that you could be loved. You would need to trust that you might not disintegrate, that your work could even flourish, however much your lungs hurt.
You would only dare to do it to save a life: your children’s, or your own.
‘Seen Patrick?’ asks Martyn in the hall.
Lucia pokes her head round the living-room door but Ray’s still deep in chat with Eric Nakamura. The back door bangs shut behind Martyn as she re-enters the kitchen; he’s in a hurry.
She keeps checking the kitchen clock but not making sense of the time. ‘He’s getting hungry,’ she hears Leah call. ‘Everything under control?’
She has the instincts of a piranha whiffling through the muddy Orinoco. Lucia hadn’t even heard her on the stairs. Hold it together. Be alert.
The garden is calling to her, black and delicious. Even when she was convalescing, Ray would hate it when she disappeared.
‘It,’ he’d say, ‘is a mania,’ and she denied it, while her fingers twitched for the secateurs. She’d often creep out into the cold private night with a torch when he’d had people over until ruinously late, opening amusing liqueurs. It was peace and joy and her alone; it fed her soul. They all know that nothing would keep her from her snail-hunting, her weed-pulling, which is why, since November, they have been a perfect excuse to disappear into the deepest corners, phone glowing in her pocket, and begin the chains of texting which feed her through the days.
In the process of burying her libido, Lucia had forgotten ever wanting women. Nowadays, apparently, queerness, gayness, whatever it was, is fine, not a big drama for certain young people. But not everyone is relaxed about it. Not even in her world.
And she was embarrassingly monogamous for three decades. Even to think of another person as attractive felt treacherous; on the street, let alone in bed, so a lid was soldered over the thought of women’s soft mouths, their smooth planes and curves, the shock of discovery. Life was easier without.
Then, somewhere south of King’s Cross, on a December night so cold her eyeballs had felt like peeled grapes, Priya prised the lid open.
It was Monday; she was, as usual, chopping carrots. She was wiped out; Ray still insists on all the family Christmas traditions. He was upstairs, so her phone was on the kitchen table, in case he needed her. Or Patrick might send her a message from the caravan, or Archway Bridge.
‘Stop making allowances,’ Ray says.
Might the gentle ache in her chest be the usual sadness, or could it be the tuning-fork, the first reverberations of an idea? Was it a thought about India?
Lately, India kept popping up. She was becoming curious. She wanted to try puffed chickpeas, goat tikka; tired old Bombay Nights on Holloway Road can’t quench her interest. She began – and she told herself that this was purely for inspiration – to search for photographs of Gujarat; to attempt, very tentatively, to read an old and ungripping history of the Raj.
On Thursday Ray would be out until late, at a PV for his racist pal Philip.
‘I’m not going,’ Lucia had said.
‘Not important enough for you,’ said Ray. ‘I get it.’ He has always hated Philip, but hides it now that his creepy oils are selling. ‘He says you’re snotty. Others agree.’
When her phone peeped and she grabbed it, her heart was already racing for the gory disaster, the blue light. But it was Priya, with an invitation.
Thursday eve, I need fun, are you around? Chinese?
17
The Hanrahans are on edge. Lucia keeps checking her watch, biting her lower lip. She must be wound up about the exhibition; whatever is bothering her, Martyn thinks, will vanish in the joy of my decision. Ours. They need us back here, even if they don’t know it yet.
He folds the feeling safely away, like a tooth.
Ray in his chair is surrounded by small bowls of crisps, like a bear. Enormous shadows flare over the bookcases; the house smells of garlic and illegal wood smoke. The living room is filling up but Martyn manages to pass Ray the better peanuts; the man is insatiable for salt. When Martyn knocks into the table, Leah urgently hushes him, then apologizes to Ray, as if he’s disturbed a sacred rite.
‘People can simply come to me,’ he says, ‘if they have questions. I mean, I know the place. Oh, hello, Graeme.’
Uncle Graeme ignores him, bumbling across the hall with two bursting carrier bags in each hand like pantomime paws.
‘I thought,’ murmurs Martyn to Leah, ‘he lives down the road?’
‘He does.’
‘In the big flats?’
‘Yes,’ says Leah. ‘Though don’t go over. Ever.’ Martyn opens his mouth, closes it.
‘Anyway, he’s staying here tonight. Maybe tomorrow too.’
‘Um, why?’
‘Because,’ Leah explains, as if to a dunce, ‘he’s family. The brothers need to be together.’
With an oomph of relief, he sits on the squashier sofa in the living room, drink in hand, cushion feathers flying, and starts casually leafing through an old Argos catalogue. Patrick materializes, fleetingly. Ray’s stubble glitters like sand. However familiar his stories, you always laugh; it’s his delivery, the edge of shock. His eyes are perpetually upon you; also you’re generally standing, which makes you nervous. Ray says it strengthens the legs.
‘Will Jess be here soon?’ asks Lucia sotto voce.
‘Definitely,’ Martyn reassures her.
Even without Jess, he is in the bosom, although Ray won’t answer when he asks about how the exhibition’s shaping up. Leah said it wasn’t ready; Patrick, looking antsy, said Leah was in charge. There’s a surprising amount of anger inside her, like Lady Macbeth. Honestly, from the way those girls behave, you’d think they hated each other.
Jess told him that they’ll have spent a fortune on sorting out the Hall for this show. She once claimed that, as insects in hotter, hungrier countries race towards sugar, the dodgy tradespersons of North London gravitate to Ray.
‘He laps it up. Thinks they’re friends, or he’s their sort of . . . patron? God, you should hear his builder-charming voice.’
Leah keeps him in sight, like an eyelid tremor, even when she’s being the hostess, listening to Uncle Graeme’s painstaking exposé of traffic-calming corruption. Everyone’s asking about the show, commenting tactlessly on how late Jess is. And her mother seems tenser than usual, a cable pulled too tightly.
Patrick’s AWOL again, Martyn notices. People keep coming in but never him: the shabby gallery owner, trying to conceal balding with an elevated fringe. Gerry something, another of Ray’s gang, is standing in the hallway, apparently reading a book he himself has written, and Salvo the wine-shop man, a beefy cockney Italian, has arrived with much manly embracing, booming about people Martyn doesn’t know. Next is a poet and his distraught-looking critic wife, or is it the other way round? The wife is wearing a furry gilet; ‘Why’s she come as a Flintstone?’ Ray says, at normal volume, and after that the wife keeps her face turned from him. Then it’s one of Ray’s protégés, a youngish artist whom Jess calls the Catamite, and Leah calls his slave. Ray seems to love him, arm round his shoulders. Martyn, as one of the men of the house, begins to fret. It’s time to tell Ray that he and Jess are staying: a shiny treasure to bestow. He who hesitates ends up back in Dalry, Ayrshire, where things are not, technically, as Martyn has portrayed them.
It’s definitely time to talk to Ray. I need, he thinks, a chance to catch up man to man, mano a mano. I’m family now. Gradually, respectfully, he moves nearer. There’s a gap on the wall where one of Ray’s pieces must have been taken for the show.
‘I’ll show you some of Leah’s photographs later,’ he is promising the Catamite and Eric Nakamura. ‘She gets her talent from me. And her gorgeousness. And her hair.’
Leah’s relationship with her father is what Jess’s could be, if she was nicer to him. When Martyn sees Leah encouraging him, sitting on his knee, it moves him in a number of confusing ways.
‘Don’t you think it’s weird?’ Jess says that Ray has an unseemly fascination with his elder daughter’s love-life, that he was too interested in Leah’s old school friends, pouring more wine, extracting tales of their horrible parents, crowing that they ‘love hanging out here’. He’d boast about the condoms and bongs.
‘It’s not . . . you know, though . . .’ says Martyn. ‘Bad?’
‘Course not! At least . . . no. I’d know.’
‘Then you’re just jealous. Envious. Jealous. Whichever. Anyway. They’re really close; it’s sweet. And you always say you’re the lucky one, not being entangled like she is. You can’t have it both ways.’
‘I am. Definitely. It’s just I’d have liked the chance.’
If Ray does self-medicate, who could blame him? Jess won’t discuss it, but clearly something is going on. Martyn’s shoved it to the side. He’s hoping it will disappear, like a couple of other matters.
He’s about to touch his imminently father-in-law’s arm, ask him for a private and, well, exciting word, when the poet says: ‘I hear you’ve something lined up. A show, is it? At Camden Arts?’
‘No, no,’ Martyn steps in. ‘At a Hall. St John’s Guild, Almoners . . . something. Lectures, events; very illustrious.’
‘Interesting features,’ claims the Catamite. ‘Tucked away off the roundabout, that big Gothic . . . famous garden, apparently. Like, a fern collection. But won’t it, you know, be a strain?’
‘My father’s not weak,’ says Leah sternly.
‘Are we invited?’ says the wife, hopefully, leaning down to stroke the cat. ‘You’re a handsome –’ she says, peering underneath – ‘fellow.’ She looks startled; Paisley, Ray frequently proclaims, is all man. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Paisley,’ Martyn says, and he sees the corner of Ray’s grin.
‘Oh. That’s . . . unusual. As in the pattern?’
‘As in,’ says Leah, ‘the politician.’
‘Of course. Are you . . . Irish?’
‘Just Mum,’ Leah replies as Ray says: ‘Only Lucia, thankfully.’
There is a small, not unfamiliar, hesitation. ‘But I thought, Hanrahan must b—’
Ray cuts across her. ‘Fully English, thank you very much.’
‘I see,’ the wife says, frowning.
‘Leave it,’ says Leah abruptly.
She doesn’t hear. ‘So . . . sorry, your mother, Lucia, must be a Protestant?’
‘No.’
‘But then, Ian Paisl— Isn’t that quite inflammatory?’
‘It’s a joke,’ says Leah, sighing.
‘I’ll fetch you a drink,’ Martyn offers in the pause but, when he returns, single ice cube, just how Ray likes it, the Catamite had barged in and is sitting on the arm of his chair. Annoying boy: everything about him, from his mighty knees to the golden back of his neck, his milk-fed femurs, riles Martyn. He can’t stop looking at him, just to be irritated.
So, swift as a careful arrow, he goes to help Leah count the RSVPs.
The first floor is Ray’s and Lucia’s domain. On either side of the door to Vivienne’s flat are hung stormy woodcuts by the notorious George Gregory Pye, one of Ray’s friends since art college, until the final falling-out. Some have AUCTION scrawled on the backs; Leah’s bagsied most of the others. Ray knows how much Jess loves the GG Pyes. He once promised her the second one along but, last time they were here, she checked and it was labelled LEAH.
On every stair stand pillars of old newspapers, which must remain in precisely the order they were once placed. The corridor is a perilous ravine, with only a bumpy gully through which to move, goose-stepping over fleetingly steady places. He takes a breath, taps on the door of Ray’s office.
In the slithering landslide of ignored paperwork in the corner, on Jess’s old single bed, he spots two boxes of unused invitations, embossed on thick green card. The floor is a cascade of curly envelopes and crumbling rubber bands. A slab of unopened post serves as a table; on a cat-treat advent calendar lies a bowl containing grapes at every life-stage, two forks, a fluffy wax earplug and a jumbo pack of painkillers.
He starts trying to tally the numbers for tomorrow, but tactfully, because Leah’s getting very defensive about her long paper list of Nos and Possibles.
‘Liggers,’ she’s muttering. ‘Lightweights.’ With each new name an ancient grudge is exposed. ‘Bruce Spender? He should be so lucky. And, seriously, the Jessups?’
There seem to be over fifty Yeses. ‘That is,’ he says lightly, ‘a hell of a lot of vol-au-vents.’
‘It’s fine,’ says Leah. ‘The catering’s all sorted.’
‘Excellent,’ says Martyn. ‘Um, so what banqueting have you got planned?’
There’s something in her eyes which might be panic. She starts twisting a strand of hair; ‘That’s going to be the really amazing part,’ she says. ‘We’ve . . . There’s a brilliant guy, who, maybe you’ve heard of him, Pablo Nathaniel?’
‘What, that gallery man?’
