Julia chapter 14 / 15

Valerie left the following morning. She gave me a sisterly hug but I didn’t manage to return it in time to give her the reassurance she was seeking. It wasn’t deliberate, just one of those strange events like handing Brian my bag instead of shaking his hand; one of those small events that pass one party by and stick in the mind of the other forever. I didn’t know what Valerie had decided to do, but judging by our conversation the previous night it was going to be her usual fear driven reaction that won the day. Had I been a betting person I would have wagered that she was going to chicken out and return to the role of subservient scared wife, anything rather than give up the trappings of success and stability. Would I have gone back to Michael had I suspected him of doing the same thing? I like to think I would, but only to challenge him and ask him why. I wouldn’t have stayed much longer if there was no good reason. I wave her off, Lucy at my shoulder like a faithful pet. Since my arrival she has adopted this role and I have largely taken over the care of mother, all except the really personal aspects that I can’t face. You have to be totally detached or else have love to be able to deal with such things and I have neither of those.

I haven’t had a chance to talk to Lucy about the strange events of the night and take the opportunity to do so whilst we are together. ‘When you were in the garden the other night Lucy are you sure you didn’t see anyone?’ Lucy looks at me with her wide dark eyes and a her face freezes for a moment.  ‘No I don’t see no one.’  ‘What made you go out in the garden then?’   ‘I hear a noise.  I think it the Fox in the bin. I just check.’ Her energy is wrong, and I know she isn’t telling the truth.   ‘I came down’ I say ‘because I saw someone walk down the garden and meet another person.  I saw them from my bedroom window.’  Lucy is clearly agitated.

‘You scaring me Mrs. I don’t like to think about peoples in the garden.’  Is she scared because of that image, or is there something else?  I can’t press her further, she clearly doesn’t want to talk anymore.  There’ll be other opportunities to broach the subject so I drop it. ‘I need to give Mrs. her breakfast’ she says pointing at the stairs.  ‘Yes, alright Lucy, I’m sorry if I scared you.’ She nods in an accepting way and leaves. 

Despite the restrictions of the plaster cast and crutch I have determined to make my way to the nearby cove this morning, and sketch.  I have a small rucksack for paints and oil card and a collapsible easel I’ll tie on the sack.  I’m determined to get in touch with nature and out of my head.  Life in my mind is far too oppressive at the moment what with Valerie, mother, Lucy, Michael and of course poor old Lilly for whom I have yet to grieve.  I have lost so many ‘things’ and yet retained all of these people and their problems and I want to get away from them for a time.  If I can distance myself for a while, then it might be possible to rethink some of these tangled thoughts, unknot the places where the threads of my life have enmeshed themselves into this clump of despair that is more debilitating than the plaster around my foot.                       

It takes time for me to accomplish the plan, but within the hour I am half limping half hopping down the track from the house with the rucksack on my back.  I must look like a damaged beetle trying to escape a predator as I scuttle my way beneath the overhanging trees and vines covering the path.  At least I’m in a beautiful place I tell myself.  If I were stuck in the city in a tenement block, or on one of those bland housing estates with hardstandings and green wheely bins and young mothers with bored children, I think I would go mad.  I need nature to calm me, I need to know there is something else going calmly about its business that isn’t human, doesn’t have problems, needs nothing but the rising of the sun and its warmth to continue.  The reassurance that we as a race need are n't necessary, my problems don’t actually count for anything when it comes down to it.  I need to know this. Half an hour later and I am sitting on a rock.  It would've taken me five minutes without my current disability, and it makes me realize how lucky I am when I’m well.  It’s a thing I take for granted until it is taken away from me.  For some bizarre reason Joni Mitchell springs into my head and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ starts to play ‘Don’t it always seem to be that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ It strikes me I am living that song. The screen door has slammed and ‘taken away my old man’ alright.  Then the thought occurs, it is a song about loss and yet it sounds so bright and cheerful, perhaps I ought to sing my life that way and see what happens? I actually laugh out loud at the preposterous thought and then look around to make sure no one is looking.  The cove is empty. It‘s the wrong time of year for visitors. In the summer it would be packed and the small café at one end of it, its shutters now up, would be selling teas and ice creams.  The beach huts are in the middle of out of season refurbishment, their paint partly stripped so that you can see the colours of other years. Next to the huts Lobster pots made from strips of old tyres and plastic hoops tumble over one another in a heap where they have been thrown.  The boats on the foreshore rest upside down like a line of strange pods waiting to be descaled and re-varnished. It is a place post-party, an outside living room that hasn’t quite been tidied up.  I like it like this.  I get the feeling that if humanity disappeared all of these objects, all of these man made things would be covered by weeds, eaten away and digested by the environment as it simply wiped clean the memory of the casual intruders mankind has become.  There is hope in this thought.   Too much thinking I tell myself, time to paint! 

Art is a form of meditation.  If you think about what you are doing then you aren’t an artist.  Of course to begin with you have to master your particular skill, whatever that may be.  After mastery comes letting go.  The motor skills are embedded and you just allow the muse to flow.  It sounds so simple, and it is, and yet at the same time it is profoundly difficult.  So many things can get in the way, mostly me. I hope this morning they won’t.  I spend time allowing myself to scan the area, to watch the gulls and the water, the shadows on the rocks, the clouds and scant vegetation on the edge of the cliff face.  I’m waiting.  Waiting for the scene, for the image to catch me, for a part of the landscape to invite me to paint it.  This is where it takes time and patience, and where if one gets it right, one is welcomed into the picture. It is never my choice.  If I chose, if I take control, then I lose the freedom and the immediacy that comes from letting go.  I breathe, I close my eyes, I open them again and there it is, the scene I am going to paint. Rocks, sea, a wave smoothed block of oak that was once part of the breakwater but now stands alone, and on it a gull, head bent beneath it’s wing tucking feathers in place; simple but beautiful in its simplicity. I am on my way, I am free at last.

‘You looking after your mother?’   An hour has passed and the voice jerks me from the colour on the canvass.  ‘Sort of,’ I say, ‘but she does have a carer.’ It’s George the longshoreman, brown as the keel of an upturned boat, and weathered as the oak post I am painting. He stands with eyes narrowed by the sun, his small peaked cap set slightly back upon his head. 

I’ve known George for more years than I care to remember. As long as mother and father have lived at Cove House in fact. He never introduces himself, never says ‘pleased to see you,’ he just starts a conversation as he’s always done, as if you had been talking for an hour or so already.  ‘Oh yes,’ he sighs when I mention Lucy, ‘the little woman.’  I take it from his sigh that Lucy’s presence is tolerated but not considered all that positive.

‘Got plenty of people round here looking for work.  Seems a shame.’  He finishes the sentence in mid air as he always does as though he expects the other person to know what he is thinking.  I tell him I was not involved in the hiring of Lucy but don’t comment on his obvious disapproval.  ‘Your mother alright?’ he asks.  ‘Yes, she’s as well as can be expected given the circumstances.’   ‘Circumstances’ he repeats. ‘You could call them that.  Can’t say I took to that feller.  He wasn’t what you might call friendly.’  George spits on the rocks as if ridding himself of the thought of Brian.

‘No, well I only met him once and we didn’t get on.’   ‘Once? He was around quite a while. Still I suppose you’re busy up there in the city.’   I explain as briefly as I can that family relationships had gone down hill since father moved out. It is a small community and I know George is aware of most of the history, such is the nature of life on the Island.

‘Not surprised he ended up on the rocks’ says George. ‘No, I suppose thinking about it neither am I.’  ‘They’ve got it all wrong of course.’  I think I have misheard him.  ‘I’m sorry?’  ‘About that body.’ My mind picks up on what he is saying, or at least I think it has.  ‘Brian’s?’  ‘That’s the one’ he replies tersely, as if there are several. ‘What do you mean George?’  ‘They’re looking in the wrong place.’ ‘Sorry, can you explain?’  ‘They don’t know nothing about the tides around here. They said the body come from over Culver way, that his car had been found there and so he’d dropped into the water over that side. It’s not possible.  Currents don’t come direct this way any more, not since they built them sea defences at Bonchurch and Ventnor.  That body would have gone halfway to France before it come back.  Anyway they don’t listen.’

‘Did you tell them this?’ I ask.  ‘Of course I did, but you know what people are like, they always thinks they knows best.  I see it all the time round here.  You tells them not to go out swimming off the point because of the current and what do they do?  They looks at you as if you’re mad, then out they go.  One day I’m going to leave em out there, see what they do when they disappears round the corner.’  I sympathise.  George knows the sea around this part of the coast better than anyone and he is right of course, people don’t pay him heed because he has an accent, because he hasn’t got certificates, because he catches lobsters and crabs and doesn’t say much.

‘So where do you think it came from?’  I ask. He looks out at the horizon as if trying to catch a glimpse of his thoughts.

‘I reckons it was dumped somewhere not far from here, he could even have been killed at the spot he was found.  Some of the driftwood in that bay has been stuck there a year or more, the current doesn’t come and go much there, only the rough weather in winter takes things out.’ 

‘I don’t suppose they’ll find who did it anyway.’ I say. ‘Perhaps not’ replies George.  ‘It ain’t anyone local that’s for sure.’  ‘Why do you say that?’  ‘Oh if I wanted to get rid of a body I knows far better ways of doin’ it than dumping it in a bay what has no current.’ He half chuckles to himself.  It is a good thing that I know George wouldn’t hurt a fly, so his remark leaves me with no worrying aftertaste.  ‘I likes your picture by the way’ he says as he walks off without any thought of saying ‘goodbye.’

I’d forgotten the world when painting and for an hour or more had settled into the nothingness of being.  Now George had unwittingly brought it back, it would be difficult to return to the flow of it all and so I decided to call it a day as far as the painting was concerned.  I examine the picture.  Not bad for my first attempt at a seascape in such a long time. I’m not a natural seascape artist but like most formally trained artists I can turn my hand to anything when I wish to.  Packing my things up it occurs to me perhaps I might make a living of sorts painting for the tourist trade.  There are far worse jobs and at least I’d be doing something I liked. Maybe, just maybe there might be a way forward.  I am glad of the moments hope. 

Chapter 15    By the time Valerie reached home was two in the afternoon.   She’d sent Geoffrey a text to tell him what she was doing but had received no reply. The house was empty and for some unknown reason smelt slightly stale.  Geoffrey would not have thought to have opened the windows whilst she was away so she did, hoping the air would circulate enough to refresh the place before the inclement weather set in. The forecast was for storms and already there was that heavy sense about the sky that foretold of rain.  On the kitchen table were several letters addressed to her and she fanned through them guessing what they were before opening them. Her mail fell into two categories, bills and begging letters neither of which she enjoyed opening. Paying the large bills was never a problem but they often triggered a sense of guilt, this feeling going back to childhood when her mother always questioned the need for her or Julia to have new things as though she was jealous of them.  Due to Geoffrey’s earnings the feeling softened over the years but it still remained.  As far as the begging letters were concerned they went in the bin.  She particularly disliked the ones containing cheap pens and stickers with her name and address on them as if such gifts deserved gratitude.  She thought of it as a minor form of blackmail and a complete misuse of public funds.

Pouring herself a cup of tea she thought about the approach she might take with Geoffrey and came to the conclusion it would have to be direct.  If it were not then her husband would railroad her into dropping things and she would be no nearer a resolution of the problem.  The moment the police asked about the BMW car she had realized she could not give up the things she had; and if she could not do that then she had no alternative but to come to terms with living with Geoffrey at least for the present. Having seen her sister’s destitution she was convinced that life without Geoffrey would be intolerable.  Fear or no fear she told herself she had to do it. There was a vague plan forming in her mind that involved her living abroad for part of the year and perhaps alternating between their cottage in the South of France, the chalet in Switzerland and their house in England. She could remain married but sufficiently detached to avoid any feelings of oppression.  Whether Geoffrey would agree to this was another question. The plan would be to make a gradual move away, for any sudden change would not sit well with her husband, who by nature was a creature of habit.  Perhaps the children would join her for a time during a gap year from university. It was as she was mulling over the options that the telephone rang. Valerie crossed the room and picked it up.

‘Hello?”   ‘Is that Mrs. Mitchell, is your husband there?’  ‘No he’s not, he’s at work.  Can I ask whose calling?’   ‘Its Steven’s Automotives, about his car.’    ‘Do you have his work number?’ asked Valerie. ‘Yes I’ve tried that number.  They say he’s working abroad.’  ‘Pardon?’  ‘They say he’s abroad.’  ‘Well you must have the wrong number then.  Geoffrey isn’t abroad.’ ‘I need to drop the car off somewhere because it is in the way in the workshop.  We’ve fixed the wing and given the interior a complete steam clean as requested. So where can we deliver it?’  Valerie asked the man for the registration number of the car in case he had a wrong telephone number but as it turned out it was Geoffrey’s.

‘Well you’d better drop it off here’ she gave her address and told the man she’d be there all afternoon. As soon as he’d put the phone down she dialed Geoffrey’s work number.  Minutes later she was sitting confused, telephone still whirring in her hand.  The office confirmed Geoffrey was abroad, according to them he was in Dallas Texas.  Why hadn’t he told her, and what was he doing in Texas?   Valerie went to the bedroom to check whether his traveling case had gone and what clothes Geoffrey had taken with him.  When she opened the wardrobe door she couldn’t quite take in what she saw.  Where Geoffrey’s clothes should've been there was just empty, it was as if he no longer existed.