I remember turning Ward away when he first turned up with a huge canvas that he had somehow managed to carry on his bicycle through the West End traffic. Too derivative, with a tinge of street art about it, I thought. Bert agreed with me then, although obviously, he thinks differently now. He says that the more you look at Ward’s work, the more you see how original he is, how fresh and complex.
“We were lucky to get him,” he insists as we sit at Pipits’ kitchen table eating Gloria’s version of Sunday lunch, an overdone beef and lentil stew. “Soon, he’ll be able to take his pick of galleries to represent his work.”
I can tell Bert feels slighted that I don’t just pick up and return to London with him. He is a little off with me, so to appease him, I move to top up his glass with the indifferent wine of Henry’s choosing. He waves the bottle away.
“I’m cutting down,” he says. “You have my share.”
I decide that I will, and fill my glass, wishing that it was gin. If I must drink wine, I would prefer it to be a good one. I think of the flask nestling in my bag and experience a sudden longing for the clean juniper taste that so perfectly comforts me. In order to stomach this lunch with a show of good humor, the bag and I will need a visit to the bathroom soon.
There is something different about Bert. I can’t quite place what. It isn’t just the cold eye he occasionally turns toward me. It’s more that the language of his body seems somehow to have subtly altered; there’s the slightest positioning of it away from me as though his attention is elsewhere. He moves with a lighter step now, and there’s an unfamiliar firmness to his voice.
“Never known you to turn down wine,” I say. “What’s brought this on?”
“Oh, Helen’s getting to me,” he says with a cracked sort of laugh. I can tell that he is embarrassed “She’s a bit of a health freak. Even got me walking to work.”
“Really?” I don’t manage to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Yes, I feel a lot better for it, too.”
Helen is my temporary replacement at the gallery. Bert met her at a dinner for a sculptress whose pieces we have shown in the past. They talked art, apparently, and she ended up offering to help out in my absence.
I taste bile in my mouth; my stomach dives. It is not Helen’s place to be talking Bert into anything. I tell myself not to worry. I remember meeting her at an opening last year. She was introduced to me as a lover of art. Ha!
I judged her to be a phony, all dressed up in some odd bohemian getup, rings on every finger, and smelling of something green, Ma Griffe perhaps. Not Bert’s type at all. And she is older than me, besides, by a good ten years I’d say, and plump verging on fat, the squishy sort, the type that Bert calls motherly. It is hard to imagine her walking anywhere without a good deal of huffing and puffing. I can count on Bert, can’t I?
“It’s time I came back,” I say now, a bit uneasily. “Back to work. Back home.”
“Well, I don’t want to force you,” he says, changing his tune. “Come when you’re ready. We’re managing well enough.”
5
BERT HAS ALWAYS BEEN susceptible to a woman’s flattery, so when it became a rare email from him that didn’t mention Helen, I decided it was time to return to my London life. I wasn’t giving up on Pipits, just biding my time. I couldn’t believe Helen was a real threat, or any kind of competition, but I wasn’t about to let her muscle into my territory.
Gloria waved me away with kisses and hugs.
“See you soon,” she said. “You know you’re always welcome, and our lovely Bert, of course.”
One of the first things I had planned to do on my return was to interview for a new gallery assistant, a young man perhaps. You know the type: Eton boy or aping it, a touch precious. We’d employed that sort before, and they suited well enough. I wanted someone I would be happy to leave as helpmeet to Bert while I worked on getting Pipits back. It would mean letting Helen go, of course, but I didn’t see that as a problem. She had only been a temporary solution, after all. Bert wouldn’t hear of it, though.
“People like her,” he insisted. “She’s warm, and there is a rather lovely openness about her.”
“Is that what we need, do you think?”
“I do, Lizzie. New money is a bit intimidated by all the trimmings. Someone like Helen puts them at their ease.”
Someone like Helen? Someone with a fine conceit of herself, someone with that lark-like voice that yanks at my nerves. How is it that a woman so odd, so strangely dressed puts people at their ease?
But with my head full of Pipits, I don’t feel like taking on Bert at the moment. I must work out how to get House back from Gloria. How to ensure that it isn’t ruined by their desire for change, by their horrible renovations. I am still reeling from the blow of losing it. I decide to let the question of Helen go for now. Just for now, though.
Since I have been back I have noticed that Bert is less obliging than usual, more determined to have his way. He shows interest in my opinion, but it seems feigned to me, part of the good manners that never let him down. It is as though he is paying me back for my desertion, for not trusting him to take care of me. As part of this payback he sleeps now in the guest room.
“I know my snoring bothers you,” he says. “We both need our sleep.”
Well, he is right about that. His snoring does bother me. I confess that I enjoy having our big bedroom to myself, the plush comfort of the king-size bed. And lately, since suffering the reading of Mother’s witchy will, I wake at odd hours through the night and need to pace. It niggles a bit, though, that it was Bert who suggested the sleeping apart.
I cannot say I am happy being back in London. Pipits is always bleeping on my radar. My first thought when I wake is how to find a way to have it to myself.
The time I have spent away from Bert has changed me, too, so that I question whether I even need him in my life. Nothing about him charms much anymore. I am irritated by his slowness, the way he wastes his time on trivia, the fact that he is late for everything, his forgetfulness.
Maybe he is questioning our relationship, too. He doesn’t take my hand as we cross the road anymore, or put his arm behind my chair in restaurants in the old familiar way. He has a shifty, concealed look about him; there are unspoken boundaries between us now, which I somehow know not to cross. He seems to have a different agenda these days, one he doesn’t care to share with me.
In my absence, he has turned the apartment upside down: clothes left lying around, damp towels in a huddle on the bathroom floor, newspapers on every surface. Left to his own devices, he would live in chaos. He has become someone I hardly know, someone whose behavior I can no longer predict. It is unsettling. And to add to my discomfort, I have become suspicious that he is up to something that is not in my interest.
I can’t imagine why Bert thinks Helen has a warm personality. A vague one, perhaps, but warm? No. One might excuse that in the young, but she is, Bert tells me, fifty-seven years old. I question sometimes whether the problem with Helen is actually vagueness or just plain insolence. She overlooks the instructions I leave her. She never apologizes when I mention her tardiness, never apologizes for anything. Her friends are always calling into the gallery; wealthy bohemians who treat me like an assistant rather than the owner. Apparently, Helen is rich, the granddaughter of some Spanish wine magnate. A trust-fund kid, still behaving like one, as she heads toward sixty. I wonder why she bothers to work at all.
I had a falling-out with her the other day about having her friends visit her at work. They are a bizarre lot, most of them around her age, fluttering about in inappropriate clothes just like her, commenting on what they consider to be our conventional choice of paintings, suggesting new artists that I haven’t heard of. I recognize a couple of them, one a television art historian, thin as a rack, and smarmy with a syrupy voice, another a sculptress who is known for creating giant wings out of glass she has somehow managed to make look like gold. It’s obvious to me they think them
selves the pinnacle of the art world hierarchy. Bert says that they are.
“Ha,” I say. “More like self-professed.”
“Aren’t we all,” he sighs.
The other day five of them came in, hardly acknowledging me. Helen opened wine, gave them free catalogs, and Bert enthused with them about the paintings we have coming up. It was as though we were having an opening.
“It’s absurd,” I told her after they left. “This is a gallery, not a wine bar.”
Bert called me aside and said objecting to Helen’s visitors was bad judgment on my part. According to him, they encourage business, liven up the place. Besides, he pointed out, what was wrong with looking like we were having an opening?
“God knows,” he says. “Things are quiet enough at this time of year.”
“Except that we are not having an opening,” I tell him. “And, if we were, invitations would have gone out to the right people.”
“They are the right people, Lizzie.”
Well, clearly, we don’t agree on that. He finds Helen’s friends quite charming, and of course they love him to bits.
I cannot get through to him. He listens to me with his head on one side, eyes widening, nodding a little, as though he agrees with me, then he goes his own way.
Helen knows that Bert is on her side. She has that look on her face as though she is hugging a secret to herself. It is quite ridiculous that suddenly I am the one who feels like the outsider. If Bert won’t sack her, then I will.
“If you insist, if you really can’t get on with her, then I’ll have a word,” he says when I tell him. “It will be better coming from me.”
“You’ll ask her to leave?”
“Yes. I don’t think that we will find anyone as good, but my loyalty is to you, Lizzie. And if that’s what you want . . .”
He suggests we take a break before he talks to Helen. Go somewhere nice, somewhere warm. Spend some time together, reconnect.
“Are we disconnected, then, Bert?”
“I think that we are, Lizzie.”
Now that Bert has caved in, I am suddenly torn. Despite the fact that I could change things, get rid of Helen, return us to something like the way we were, is that really what I want? Never mind Bert, never mind Helen. I wouldn’t be here at all if Pipits were mine. It’s all I long for, it is my priority, it is everything.
Something is wrong with my stomach. It hurts all the time, a strange sort of pain as though I am bruised inside. The thought of food stirs a tannic saliva in my mouth.
Against my will, Bert books me an appointment with the doctor. He knows how much I hate seeing doctors, hate being probed and questioned, so he drives me there to make sure that I go.
“And your appetite?” the doctor asks.
“Okay, I suppose. I’ve never had a big appetite.”
He takes my blood pressure, presses his clammy hands on my stomach, weighs me, murmurs a little as he makes notes.
“Well, nothing obvious is wrong that I can see,” he says. “Your weight leads me to suspect possible malnutrition. Not something that I see much of these days, but you are much too thin. You must eat more, drink less. Take a break, perhaps. Stop work for a bit, if you can manage it, and go somewhere relaxing. I would suggest you are suffering from stress. Sunshine, heat, and food is what you need.”
Stop work for a bit, he’d said. And so I will. Bert will understand that I am not well, that I left Pipits too soon, that I must continue my convalescence where I am at home in every sense of the word. I have no wish to go abroad to fester under the sun and pretend to be enjoying myself. I won’t say that to Bert, though, I want to keep him sweet, keep things running smoothly until I decide how to move forward.
“You can’t be serious,” he says. “Surely somewhere warm with me would be better.”
“I don’t feel well enough to travel far,” I say. “Perhaps later.”
“It’s always later with you, Lizzie. Do what you want. You will anyway, no matter what I say.”
I’ve never heard him speak so bitterly.
“We can go away another time,” I say. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“Far from it,” he says, and something in his tone unsettles me. “You go. I’ll look after things here.”
“I need your support,” I wheedle. “I don’t feel well enough to travel abroad at the moment.” This time, though, he doesn’t smile, doesn’t gobble up the bait.
I email Gloria and tell her I am coming home.
* * *
GLORIA WELCOMES ME BACK with a hug, but I notice a reserve in Henry’s greeting. His jaw tightens a little, his smile is a touch too bright.
Alice is sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of soup. Is she never at work?
“Good heavens, Alice,” I say. “Here again. Who’s dishing out the books while you visit us?”
“There’s been a mouse infestation in the library van,” she tells me. “Two nests found behind the shelves. Pages nibbled from Hemingway and Wordsworth, and my chocolate bar tattooed with teeth marks. Ugh!”
“Highbrow mice,” Gloria laughs. “And only the best dark chocolate for them.”
“The van’s being decontaminated,” Alice says. “So I have the day off. It’s lovely to see you.”
“Mm,” I murmur. “You too.”
What I want to say is, Why don’t you spend your day off in your own house, stop imposing yourself in mine. Manners must be observed, though. I bite my tongue.
The house greets me with a quiet hum, but I can tell it is restless, the signs are all around me: plugs spark, pipes gossip, dust motes fly madly in the halls and stairwells.
“Soon,” I whisper to my fretting Pipits. “Don’t fuss.”
I unpack, settle into my room, and the house begins to echo my own questions. Where to from here? How will I make it mine?
Every morning I hear Gloria retching into the toilet bowl. She is saintly about the sickness, of course. No complaints that it seems to be going on throughout the pregnancy. Her stomach is a globe now, no discernible sign of her waist. Fingers crossed she won’t get it back.
In my absence, they have named the embryo the Apple.
Henry rolls his hand around her stomach possessively. “Our little apple,” his voice is pure sugar.
Mother’s bedroom is to become the nursery. They have stripped off her chinoiserie wallpaper, taken apart her four-poster bed and stored it in the woodshed. They plan a circus scene on the walls, white floor paint, mobiles dangling. A commercial artist will do the mural; Gloria has already given her a plan, a clown with a halo of red hair, gigantic shoes, and the big top with a monkey hanging from its guy rope. Everything about the scene is a visual cliché. I’m finding it hard to breathe.
I’ve noticed a tiny patch of loose carpet at the top of the stairs. I was going to mention it, but I fear it will encourage them to rip up the whole thing, discard the lovely old wool, and replace it with something new, some eco-friendly thing made of grass, no doubt.
If I don’t do something soon, I will be standing among the ruins of Pipits. I will have lost it to Henry and Gloria’s mutation. It will have become entirely theirs. Is it any wonder I feel betrayed?
I must find a way to right the wrong that I have been dealt.
I asked them the other day if they would sell Pipits to me.
“But why?” Henry said. “You stay whenever you want to. We love it, too, you know.”
He didn’t say I was welcome to stay whenever I wanted to, just that I did. I couldn’t fail to notice the drop of venom in his words. And, really, Henry, if you love it, why have you so viciously set about changing it? Go find yourself another house to tear apart. You have each other. The pair of you could be happy anywhere.
What I actually said, in my sweetest voice, was “Thank you, Henry, how kind.”
Mother let this happen. She stupidly allowed them to work on her with their charm, their neediness. The one thing I thought I could rely on her for, and she let me
down.
I’ve loosened the carpet a tiny bit more, just under the nose of the top stair where you can hardly notice it, where it could easily catch the heel of a shoe. The stairs murmured their approval.
* * *
ALONG WITH THE HOUSE martins, summer has left. I wake to the sight of soft frosts icing the lawns and to the honking cry of the departing Canada geese repeating harshly on the air. Good riddance.
Foolishly, this year under Gloria’s new rule, the geese have been encouraged, because she thinks them beautiful, and says it is cruel to unsettle them.
She doesn’t seem to mind that they defecate like dogs, foul the swimming hole, and will increase year after year until hardly a blade of grass will be left to us.
“One season of them is not enough to see the worst of it,” I warn.
In the past, even though Gloria pleaded for them, Mother discouraged them from laying by driving her car straight at them, banging saucepan lids, running toward them whooping like some mad person. If they persisted, as is their way, she would get one of the local farmers to shoot over their heads and scare them off.
“They must not be allowed to lay,” she would insist. “Once they lay, it’s all over.”
Gloria was probably too young to remember, but I recall Father complaining as he reached for his gun, “Those damned Canadians are back.” He knew how to manage the land and would shoot them without a thought. It is probably illegal now, although if I had a gun, I wouldn’t bother with merely scaring them off; I’d do the same as Father. Horrible, messy, uneatable things.
The meadows are full of mushrooms. Henry loves them. He’s out each morning gathering them up, laying them tenderly on the paper towel that lines his basket. He takes his illustrated mushroom book with him and meticulously inspects each cap, each little pleat of their velvet underbellies.