Alison Wells Author

THE EXHIBIT OF HELD BREATH By Alison Wells

 

Chapter One

You don’t want to hear this story. You told me yourself, girl at twenty, slouching on the stool, legs hanging down, eyes ablaze, your fingers stained bright red, your dark wiry hair an installation of chaos.

“Just stop. Don’t tell me. It’ll ruin everything.”

You came towards me, my mouth still open, the story still going on, how they’d come, all the people, pilgrims with their pain and their petitions, treading the wide hall to see your Twin Exhibits. You stabbed at me with your fingers, said you didn’t want to know.

The vigils, admiration, awe, the constant tread of their feet, the solace, the silence, the lights rotating in the evenings, the regular rhythm, that breath in and out, the constant consolation. And here now, chaos; paint, palette knives, brushes, pots askew, walls thick with sketches, the smell of onions from the pan – you’d been cooking when I arrived.

Glancing around at workbenches soaked with red and black paint like the scene of an apocalypse. You were like a child. Fury in your cheeks, eyes filling up.

So I swallowed the rest of my words, coal in the throat, knew it was no use. All the people at the museum-gallery, weary, and believing,  all the madness set in train and you didn’t want to know anything.

You went back to the stove, threw peppers in a pan, they sizzled. I went quiet and watched you and afterwards we sat down and ate like old friends. Quiet moment in the wreck of that room.

There’s a shape to what we make, an edge as far as a thing can hold, a pressure point beyond which glass shatters, beyond which sanity fragments, beyond which a man must scream his repertoire of revenge. You’ll find it funny. For all my passion, you know I’m a quiet man, made and unmade again in betrayal’s repeating circles. You don’t want to hear this story and, like her, like Mrs Reeves, you think what you want will stand. But now I know what you’ve done, your protests mean nothing. I have to make you hear this story.

 

***

 

I could start with Barbara Reeves all vigour and mission, ready to open the museum-gallery that bore her name. I was soundly, roundly optimistic then, like a child. But, no, instead, a different picture – the one you deserve – the last time I saw her alive.

The Reeves Institute had long since closed but I’d kept a key. I didn’t need it. I put my hand on the side door and it crumbled away. Inside, the Institute had become grim: dust shored up in the corners, spiders descending on improbable threads from the torn polystyrene ceiling. Outside the boom was in full swing with its mania of development and bright facades. Here, in contrast, the abandoned building had succumbed to decay, a building that once rose out of its stupor and shone its light far beyond the mean-spirited town in which it found itself.  Perhaps we never escape the mud of our roots. Even in its heyday the museum-gallery was too colloquial for the city folk, too esoteric for the men in brogues.

That last time, I wandered around, the smell of the rot and decay in my nostrils, dank walls seeped with mildew, rooks flapped in the chimneys. In the basement my fingers, running along the shelves turned dark with dust. These shelves had once contained our collections – they were still full of boxes and nearby were figures and objects draped with old cloths like ghostly grotesques. At my touch the shelves began to disintegrate, I coughed violently, doubled over. As I made for the stairs, a rat scuttled across my path. I tripped upwards and emerged in the stage set of reception, the black Bakelite phone still intact, faded flyers in the noticeboards. It was so quiet, dead.

I heard a noise and turned. At first indiscernible, the outline then emerged. No ghost, no damned miracle either.

“Norman White!” Barbara Reeves called out. I stumbled back. She moved forward quickly and put out her hand to shake mine,

“Look at you!” she seemed pleased to meet me, ebullient despite everything, while I could hardly speak.

“Mrs Reeves…” I managed, eventually.

“This place,” she began, filling my ridiculous silence, “all we achieved here Norman, do you remember? Art for the masses!” she looked around, “all those exhibitions…”

She shook her head, as quick and brisk as ever.

Did I remember? I just nodded, still dumb. I took her in, that delicacy of bone, that sharp look, that inner steel, the ice blue eyes that even now made my chest tighten. She still had her stick. The old familiar tapping made me sick.

She looked just the same! Down to that old sly expression of calculation and amusement. She was still waiting for my reply. So many words hammering for release but I could not articulate a single one. How, even now, could she reduce me to nothing?

“How have you been keeping Norman?” She was enjoying herself.

“Just fine,” I muttered, arranging my jacket. “And you?”

“Oh!” she sang out, “Always, good, you know Norman!”

She began to examine her surroundings, smiling, the way she’d done when courting her luminaries on their visits to the Reeves Institute. All “haw, haw” and “darling” before the door closed on the serious business dealings that she never revealed but must have been what kept the Institute alive. How many facades did she have? Yet I felt I knew her once.

She was resting her hand against the raised reception desk, looking towards the door that had once been open to the public, – the door from which you could see the river below. I’d spent plenty of time there, watching out on early mornings before the visitors arrived, always foolishly nervous that they might not come, until I heard the first crunch of feet against gravel.

Mrs Reeves was speaking. “Is it too late to start again, here?”

Was she saying..? I found my voice, though indistinct, pathetic “Surely, you wouldn’t want to…”

“Oh yes, naturally, that’s all over now,” she said, matter-of-factly, closing straight down, what? Some absurd notion? I pulled at my tie, felt fire in my cheeks.

“I’m seventy-five now, past my three score and ten…too late now for more of this,” she jerked her head in the direction of the upper exhibition floors then swivelled back towards me with a click of her stick.

“Oh but wouldn’t it be something…one last Exhibit, Norman, what would it be? I can see it,” she stared into empty space, then her face lit up – “an installation, The Art of Dying – conceptually compelling…a gallery owner’s last days…”

She laughed out loud, again, amused, “but dying is a private matter, when you can manage it. Some things are too avant-garde even for me!”

 

Mrs Reeves came close and took my arm. I flinched. We turned, by mutual, unspoken consent towards the flight of stairs, impetus undisguised now, making for the main exhibition room. Where else? All that drama, me playing my part as directed, and there the stage. Along the way, glimpses of the upper rooms, where old histories had been presented, old animosities reworked. Document, image and artefact now invisible, cleared out. Reclaimed? Rehoused? Destroyed? I’d been long gone before she took it all apart.

We hardly slowed at those openings, we kept on. I glanced at her, her lips pressed together, very definitely. Every step we took her fingers, presumptive, hot sparks pressing into my arm, leaving a mark. Every step we climbed, resentment rose.

There was the room. In the fading light, a spectre of dust drifting from the corridors and the wide staircase. I loosed myself from Mrs Reeves and pushed at the heavy doors. I could hear Mrs Reeves’ breath as the doors slowly opened, revealing the tall windows and the dark wooden floors.

Blood pumped in my ears. I grasped the doorframe. There, in the half-dark, I saw the twin spheres: the Exhibit of Held Breaths and the Exhibit of Sighs as if they had never been gone.   

Barbara Reeves shook her head, frightened at my expression. “It wasn’t me!”

 

The Exhibits had been placed in the centre of the room, exactly in their old position. I couldn’t move first, legs paralysed, tears that I quickly removed from sight. The bubbles still rose from the heart of Sighs, strange lights played round Held Breaths.

I might have choked, my throat closing up with the poison of the past, the weight of those times, observations day after day after day… But Mrs Reeves had already recovered – her old self coming back, the tap, tapping of her foot and her stick on the hard floor as she made her way towards The Exhibits. I waded after her as if through the river in thick galoshes. We stood. The peace I had been missing fell over me. My breath came back. Then Mrs Reeves began to talk, that strident tone of old…

These Exhibits in front of us: did she not remember the people who’d come, and all their stories? Her people, she’d called them. She didn’t care. As I reeled with remembrance, I could see her cold composure, her wretched scheming. Even so, still staring at the orbs and the bubbles and the lights, I wasn’t prepared for her words.

“Norman, do you remember Child with Balloons?”

I closed my eyes before realising the weakness I displayed. The Exhibits kept on in their strange comforting rhythm. Mrs Reeves kept on too.

All that had happened, she must have known. But what was left of my family and my life, it was nothing to her. She went past all that, following some train of thought, right back to that damned painting, testing out her outlandish theories. She smiled, clasped her fingers together and began to pace, the stick tap tapping like time running out. She began – in that measured, infuriating way – to interrogate me, as if she did not know it all already.

“What did Child with Balloons mean to you that day?” she asked, “who was it for, really?”

I stepped towards her, hands in fists. She stepped back but she was no longer afraid. I hardly knew what I was doing. I took her wrist, pulled her towards The Exhibits, their eternal, infernal humming. All that had happened. Those visitors, day after day, my life measured by the pulse of them. Our joined hands traced the outside of the Sighs. I pressed her palm against the hot surface.

“My turn for questions,” I gestured towards The Exhibits, “You did this. Why do this?”

She tugged her hand away, I let her.

“It wasn’t me!” she scolded, aggrieved. “Could it have been..?” She said your name after all these years, just like that, implicating you, and the light on Sighs went out. I stood between the Twin Exhibits, as if for comfort. I knew who and what she really was. I’d had enough of it.

I can’t forget that last time before disaster, those objects still breathing and puffing and withholding their sighs. I should have yelled into her satisfied face, instead I fled the room, hurtling down the stairs, keeping going, wanting it all to end. The worst of it was that she was right. That damned painting is where the game began all those years ago. Now you are culpable too. You must hear the story. I will bend to the puppet master and go back to the start of it.

 

Chapter Two

 

Why did we come to this town, Jenny and I? There was nothing wrong with the place we were from – where we’d grown up – a pleasant country village in a vale, the old railway closed down. To ache for something new is a forward momentum, not necessarily running away. Besides, I’d applied for a job and got it, so in 1979, Jenny and I were newcomers to this typical midland town. At first we rented – a dank two bed terrace near the main street and then bought a new three bed semi-d redbrick in a newly built estate. There was an open fireplace in the living room, a decent kitchen and a small garden out the back on a slope.  It was more than what we’d hoped for, a place to grow into.

Rivenstown was a regular market town, large but not expanding, a town without ambition, or perhaps a town that once had ambition but had grown too cynical for it. When we moved there, there were plenty of family run businesses; Doyle’s butcher’s, clothes at McCarthy’s and down further a shoe repair. The grocery shop changed hands and facades every couple of years. The bakery, which despite calling itself a delicatessen was never quite artisan and never quite delicate, but the cakes were damn delicious. What I liked about the town most was how you went right down through the Main Street and then hit the river. When I saw the river first, I thought I’d fish in it and that worked out later. Slow by the time it reached the town, the colour never changed from mud. The walkways alongside were kept well and the streets swept quite clean and while the people were not over familiar, they were polite, industrious and pleasant. There were a number of run-down buildings that were boarded up, a dancehall with red, faded block letters and an old sprawling house in a prominent position on the hill at the edge of town. I paid it scant attention then.

Every evening after work, Jenny and I kissed each other on the front step, young and newly-wed. On Saturday afternoons we’d go down and stroll along the river. Jenny volunteered in the church; taking home the linen to wash. In fine weather the vestments made a strange ecclesiastical dance on the washing line.  I said to Jenny that she should join the choir -she was a lovely singer – but she said she didn’t want to be on show. She was happier with women’s groups and fundraisers and keeping out of the limelight. We’d often meet people on the street, pairs of women in stout shoes and long cardigans. Jenny would chat with them, animated and lively while I stood waiting, a cheesy smile on my face. She knew people so well that it was hard to believe we’d arrived in the town at the same time.

It wasn’t that long at all after we moved in to the redbrick that Jenny got involved in the charity auction; paintings by local artists – amateur renderings of river scenes and still-lifes, glades in forests, fog over river; that sort of thing. She helped hang the paintings in the local hall. Before the auction began she took me round to see all the pictures, we chatted and joked and I said the right things. I admired the efforts of the artists, exclaimed at the scenery and the perfect perspective. Many of the paintings had been done by her friends, so that I showered them with extra praise. There were several pieces that originated from a painting course they had attended. The whispers were that the course had been given by a man with dark eyes and long curls. As they worked the women from the charity group seemed genuinely appreciative of Jenny, there was plenty of bustle and banter and I stepped back from the chit chat.

 

At the end of the mottled wall one small painting stood out from the rest: a child holding balloons. It was rendered in pastels, with a deep golden glow resonating in the picture. The child seemed to be on his way to somewhere but the background was empty, creating a sort of loneliness and a sense of falling. But equally the child seemed at any moment about to be lifted by the balloons, his arms were stretched high and strained and he was a little raised on his toes. There were splashes of red, including one of the balloons, although on each balloon appeared a little window of reflected light from an unknown source. There was a question whether the child would continue on into the undepicted future – or past ­­– or whether he’d be raised into the sky. The painting entitled simply Child with Balloons was signed, almost illegibly, but I thought it said Angel.

I felt Jenny’s soft movement against my arm as she returned. With Jenny there were many kinds of silence, all with their own quality. She communicated without clamour and I admired that integrity and self-possession. The rhythm of her breath, the level of proximity, the satisfaction of her smile, all spoke to me. I was like a dog, picking up signals. But we’d known each other since we were children, growing up side by side. And I could see that she’d taken a shine to this picture. She was rapt: gazing at it like I did, her hand touching mine, quiet smiles.

A crowd was gathering. The event was a diversion from the everyday and people wanted to be seen at it. The auction was to be conducted by a popular woman; tall, broad shouldered, wearing a floral blouse – I remember the blouse because at one point it blended almost perfectly with one of the paintings. The woman had a particular talent for wry humour and in another era may have made an excellent stand-up comic. As far as it went, her talents were utilised in the yearly Tops of the Town shows and she had the punters in stitches in the local pub on a Friday night. Raucous laughter always rose from her corner.

“An excellent cause I’m sure,” someone said in my ear. “But it’s all trash.”

I jumped a little. The voice was strident but tempered with gentility, old money. She was impeccably dressed. The kind of outfit that is not bought just anywhere. Her hair was faded from its original blonde but beautifully done.

“Barbara Reeves,” she forced her hand into mine to shake it.

“Norman White,” I let go of her hand as soon as was polite. We exchanged some pleasantries about the weather.

“Where do you work?” she asked looking me up and down. I was pleased I’d put on a suit, inexpensive though it was.

“In the Town Council.”

I did not mention that I was in charge of Dog Fines – the unfortunate implementer of dubious government policy in an unpopular department.  I did my best, letting the people know, through look, tone and – on occasion – leniency that I thought the fines an unwelcome and unnecessary burden on them. I took their money with a heavy sigh and issued them a receipt with a conciliatory smile. Sometimes, this stance sometimes only served further to incense them. Then, the irate punter would suggest that the messenger (me) might deserve to “be shot”. The alternative threat was of the aforementioned dogs who sometimes (unauthorized) accompanied their owners, both parties straining at the leash.

I was in the lower grades of the council. I’d managed in the time I’d been there to rise one level to a Grade 3 position. I wasn’t the kind of person that did myself favours in terms of chasing promotions. There was a game to be played, a cronyism and mutual back scratching that I was first not aware of and once aware did not have the nature to play along with. I was a hard worker, diligent, self-contained. I did not realise that the brother in law of the county manager was the Grade 6 Manager of Finance or that his wife was in charge of Personnel. At that time I was principled, you may laugh, later I looked back and considered myself naïve; stupid even.

Barbara Reeves seemed to have finished pursuing her line of enquiry. She was greeted by several of the ladies organising the event, their high bright tones matching the levels to which they hoped she would bid. She was even greeted by the local mayor who had wandered in to give the event his seal of approval. Barbara Reeves was polite to the point of freezing out all genuine exchanges but her admirers did not seem to notice. Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps I recognized that trait only too well.

I looked at my wife as she still hovered beside Child with Balloons and decided in an instant that I would buy it for her. Jenny still appeared so young. I was a couple of years older. She was still only twenty-three but looked sixteen. Her hair was pale, her frame and features small, she had a smattering of freckles across the top of her cheekbones and most of the time she kept her hair tied back. Her hands were small but robust; she was stronger than any other woman I knew, she could open the lids of tightened jars as if it were nothing, she would bring in coal and chop wood where necessary. She had painted or papered all the rooms of our house singlehandedly, stripping layer upon layer of wallpaper. On occasion I arrived home and found her in a sweat, water dripping down the walls and the glue stuck to her hands. I would take her in my arms and she would flail, trying not to ruin my suit. But to have her there, to pull close, to kiss within the walls of our own home was to me extraordinary. It had been a long time since I’d felt that physical comfort. Sometimes it hurt, like warming up after frost. I was looking at her now, all business, holding the auction list in her hand and the dots in the other. Some of her hair had fallen down around her face and she blew it away from her mouth like a child, she sensed me looking, she looked up and smiled at me, amused.

Once her attendees had dispersed Barbara Reeves reignited the conversation.

“One has to be seen at these kinds of things.” Then: “You aren’t from around here.”

Not a question; just a statement of fact. No, I told her, we were just settled there, a new beginning, although I didn’t know from what; the possibility had arisen and we had taken it.

It was obvious from whereabouts Barbara Reeves hailed. There was a country estate outside the town with a small but thriving country house on its grounds. She had done what at that time wasn’t all that commonplace – opened the doors of the house to the public and rented it out for small wedding parties and functions and the occasional cream tea on the lawns. A lot more than that could be achieved she told me as our conversation developed. I could see that she had an appetite for expansion.

“Impetus,” she said. “Even the amoeba had it!” I had to laugh at that and I could see the pinks of pleasure in her cheeks as I chuckled.

We were turned in Jenny’s direction but Barbara Reeves wasn’t looking at her; it was the painting she now considered.  I took in the picture of my wife as naturally as I took in breath but Barbara Reeves wanted my attention.

“It’s an interesting piece isn’t it?”

I became wary. I wondered if somehow she had read my thoughts.

“There’s a quality in it that isn’t in the others.”

I couldn’t fail to engage any longer, I nodded in agreement.

“Yes,” she said, still looking, “definitely something special.”

 

The auction began amidst laughter and excitement. The large woman broke the ice by commenting that she had confused the venue for a Parisian art gallery and had found herself saying ‘Oui.’

“I beg your pardonne,” she emphasised.

The paintings received bids from the enthusiastic relatives of the painters, by old ladies with a nostalgic eye for the ubiquitous mountain and sea scenes, paintings that included a doleful farm animal with soulful eyes, who – although anatomically incorrect – seemed to represent the kind of life they had left behind – a life which was better, in their view than the type of existence they now endured genially.

As the auction went on, the figures raised were surprisingly large and contributed to a mass bonhomie, a rising tide of goodwill. Some of the money was to be sent to African children and some donated to the geriatric hospital situated beside the river, where the old folk could watch the boats going by, disappearing into the horizon. A couple of the pictures by more established local artists raised significant sums, one fetching forty pounds. Barbara Reeves bid on a number of pieces; one particularly fine landscape she paid a handsome sum for, others she let go for less. Then it came to the child with the balloons.

The auctioneer (whose name I can’t remember) had roped in her husband to assist her. He was a tall, grim man, like the sidekick to a comic book villain. He held the painting aloft for the assembled crowd so the brightness from the long hall windows and the electric lights bounced over it, embellishing the gold and lemon pigments. On the pretext of finding refreshments I moved away from Barbara Reeves at this point, further back into the crowd but at an angle at which I could see even more perfectly the fine characteristics of the painting. I looked around for Jenny but I couldn’t see her. She was involved in the catering for the event and had been busy earlier in the kitchenette off the main room. A round of teas and coffees was again due.

The bidding for the painting began with plenty of interest. The image of the child, alone, playful but vulnerable was one that might play on the sentiments of women, the recollections of men. It presented somehow an idealised version of childhood freedom while at the same time possessing an undercurrent of another, stronger but hidden emotion.

The old ladies and a childless couple who lived at the Old Rectory wore out the first round of bidding. A well-dressed man – who I later discovered was a doctor from a nearby town – raised the stakes. I waited. There was a flurry of bids when the wife of one of the town councillors entered the fray and as the bidding slowed I prepared to intervene. The price was still within my budget. As I raised my hand I looked around for Jenny and saw her re-enter the hall with a tray of cups. She hadn’t yet seen me. My bid was noted but the doctor seemed to have become possessed with a renewed enthusiasm and bid again. I was about to counter when a bid was made from the front, accompanied by a vocal instruction.

“Bid with Mrs Reeves,” said the auctioneer.

She’d accelerated the increments by bidding a further ten pounds. I paused for only a moment, raising my hand but indicating a smaller advancement. I caught sight of a small turn of her head, perhaps a small smile. I became aware of the sound of cups clinking, then silence. I felt Jenny’s gaze even though I could not see her from this angle. Mrs Reeves countered with another more modest bid.

I bid again. The doctor conversed with someone beside him then shook his head. Mrs Reeves must have inclined hers because the auctioneer called out a further offer.

The auctioneers sat above the audience on the stage where the locals regularly performed their concerts. Along the sides of the hall where we were standing, high windows let in the blazing afternoon sunlight. I suddenly became aware of the heat of the room and the jostling bodies that now felt too close. Without thinking I raised my hand again, my heart now beginning to make itself known in my chest, its dread thump like the footsteps of villains in those dark horrors of early film. There was moisture on my forehead and jowls. The auction was moving on too fast for anything to be done. I could no longer afford the painting.

There was now a restless excitement within the crowd. I knew that Jenny was to the right of me, somewhere near the tea station. I imagined her face; surprise, or confusion changing to delight. I had seen how much she took to that painting but she’d said nothing. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the feeling of her, folding tea towels in our ordinary kitchen, putting good plain food on our ordinary table, laying out crockery that we had purchased on sale and was utilitarian but not beautiful, not what she lingered over in shop windows, vibrantly patterned florals or once a delicate poppy repeating over the pale background. She later laughed at herself, the pieces were beyond her reach and that was that. When she kissed me in the evenings, it was on the cheek, so affectionate, a fleeting, pleasant token, no need for yearning.

 

Mrs Reeves’ bid had come, slower this time but definite nonetheless. The painting was now so expensive that I too would have laughed as I passed by a gallery window, not stopping to look because what was the point. It had reached over fifty pounds – over half of my weekly salary.

I could feel my pulse throbbing in my neck and wrists. My hand shot up. The crowd began to close in, their animal energy increasingly aggressive. They at once resented and revered Mrs Reeves. The Reeves had been part of this community for the last two hundred years, but they were still outsiders. I too was a blow-in but still the everyman, the stuff of the people, hard work versus privilege. The crowd was behind me.

The auctioneer flustered a little, her neck deepened in colour and she hesitated as she called out the price. I was no longer listening to the figures. When Mrs Reeves raised her hand, so did I. I was sitting with my friend Michael McCarthy listening to the horses charging to the finish line at Newmarket. My horse would win. It had to.

Jenny, Jenny, her face as she looked at the painting, her face as I’d never seen it.

The crowd was shifting again, the swell of a wave, pushing up then parting. As they moved, Mrs Reeves latest bid had been accepted. There was some money that I received after my brother’s death. I’d never touched it.  My father’s bequest had been used on the house move. This was money that had been put by a long time ago by both my parents, my mother making special economies, my mother – a sudden thought of my arms raised round her neck in the dark. It was too much wasn’t it, for such a small painting, a child with a balloon about to fly into the ether to somewhere else, somewhere better?

The swell of people rushed right up to me, as if I was their shore. The jolly auctioneer wanted to get this over; even her humour now failed her, she laughed weakly at her own feeble attempts – “a nice holiday in Spain you’d get for that now” – she said apropos of the bids. The people were willing me on, mentally, physically too. Deep down somewhere a conversation raged between my ego and my id, the sensible and the crazy. I acted on instinct. I would walk out of here to my ordinary job and my ordinary life, what was the harm of…

The people parted and there was Jenny, her face dark, her hand rolled into a fist.

“Stop,” she whispered so fiercely it pierced me. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Her anger was unfathomable. The auctioneer was waiting. Even she now wanted me to win above Mrs Reeves, they all did. All the shop door pleasantries and the pleasant community gathering were a gloss over the towns true sentiments towards the doyenne of their town. And right now I could feel those sentiments gather and stake the room. The people waited, the nearest offering me valiant smiles, the movement of the crowd further back egging me on. But in a flash the sentiment found another target. It zoned in on Jenny, standing in the way of my heroic pursuit.

“Stop it,” she whispered again, the room so quiet that her whisper seemed to reach every corner.

“At one hundred and fifty pounds now,” said the auctioneer. “Going once.” They hated Jenny. “Going twice.” I shook my head.  If I raised my hand now, I felt certain the crowd would cheer. “Going three times, sold to Mrs Reeves, for one hundred and fifty pounds well done! Well it’s um, you know, all for charity!”

Her attempt at lightening the mood was as effective as cutting steak with a plastic knife.

The crowd sighed. I could feel the weight of it, pressing down. I could hardly stand. The auction ended. The silence split and scattered into fragments of chatter as the crowd headed out or to the catering table. One or two patted my back as they moved off. The world was accelerating away from me. I had been the hub of everything but now even Jenny was no longer at my side.

I didn’t speak to Mrs Reeves again that day and in fact not for a long time afterwards.

That evening at dinner Jenny displayed no trace of her earlier anger. Later when she slipped behind to clear the plates her hand ran along my neck in an unconscious, unconsidered gesture. I sat for a while, watching Jenny moving about, putting the dishes in the sink. I got up to help but she indicated the sitting room.

“You go and relax.”

I found I could not stay still. I went out into the garden and lit a rare cigarette; they were expensive and I was trying to cut down. The nicotine was a welcome jolt. Watching the smoke rise and it calmed me. The sky in the dusk had a bleached look, the fading quality reproachful. I finished smoking and, turning, almost collided with Jenny at the door. She looked at the stub that was still in my hand and said nothing. For the first time since we had married, that pathetic air of quiet forbearance annoyed me.

Later, downstairs, listening to the creak of the floorboards as she knelt down beside the bed like a little girl, I wanted to tear upstairs, grab her by the elbow, drag her to her feet, shout in her soft, silent face.

That night of the auction, I lay against her unmoving form. I looked at the sky through a crack in the curtains, among rough musings, thoughts of the artist surfaced. Had she been there? Yes, even then I thought of it. Many of the local folk who had attended the art auction had themselves been the creators of the paintings, standing proud or cast down when their pieces had sold enthusiastically or been less than popular. Even the most casual of hobbyists could not have failed to hope their piece might capture the interest of someone enough to want it in their own homes. If the artist of Child with Balloons had witnessed the fervour with which both Barbara Reeves and I had bid, would they have been moved?

I felt stupid, lying there, the blankets across my chest, my wife steadily asleep. I’d been too downhearted at the auction to think of it but there was nothing to stop me finding the artist,   commissioning another painting, perhaps paying far less than had been asked. The image of the child, hand aloft, holding the balloon that indicated promise, salvation, comfort, joy stuck with me and I didn’t want it to be lost entirely.

 

Chapter Three

 

I hold in my mind a picture of that time and place. Time out of mind but this long gone picture lingers.

On the Monday morning after the auction I went back to Dog Fines. The atmosphere had changed.   At break time a couple of the lads came and gave me a betting tip.

“Ten to one but a sure thing, Norman,” they said.

Jane – a young typist – put a cake on my desk that had been “left over from a meeting.” Several colleagues stopped by for a chat. I had not secured the painting but it seemed that they had placed me as the David to Mrs Reeves Goliath.  My failure seemed irrelevant.

The following weekend Michael McCarthy and his wife Margaret stepped out of their shop to greet me on Main Street. They chatted about the business of the town, who was thriving and who could hardly drag themselves to open up each day.

“You couldn’t be up to their shenanigans!” Michael volunteered with a wide smile and thick eyebrows dancing, hinting at drunkenness, laziness, loose living.

It was on the cusp of July but there was a chill in the wind that day. I remember fearing for Mrs McCarthy with her fragile frame but she seemed impervious to the elements.

The McCarthys were the first people that I got to know reasonably well. They were both remarkably thin. In her this manifested itself as a strange bluish translucency and a preponderance of chin. In him, the phrase as long as a piece of string came to mind. (He was a long, lanky man with a colourless complexion, he sported a longish moustache and strands of his thin hair fell over his brow) In thought and action he also epitomised the phrase. Michael McCarthy never gave a straight answer. I’d once asked them had they been running the shop long. Michael leaned his bony elbows on a low wooden counter that was almost obscured by the till and a pile of thin sheets of paper used for wrapping. There was also a measuring tape and, for some reason, a screwdriver.

“Well…” he directed his communication through the back of his head towards his wife. “Has it been twenty years, Margaret?” She stared ahead out through the shop window, her long pale face dour, “Or has it been more?”

On the subject of numbers he continued to be inexact. There were no obvious labels on the clothes. If you asked him for the price he would shout to an unseen Margaret to enlighten him. Her soft grunts never made me any the wiser and when passing on the information Michael offered one of several possibilities. Is that £5.99 he pondered or £7.99?

When taking measurements he was similarly circumspect. He’d stretch out his tape across the back or along the leg, converse quietly to himself, let out long sighs and then start again. He never volunteered the measurements, so he was the only witness to a person’s dimensions, but every suit fit as if it were the skin you stepped out in. I often wondered was he a genius or just lucky; if he might, in another life, have been the professor of mathematics at some Dublin university and if his mathematical mumblings might be looked on as evidence of his beautiful mind.

Michael was a decent sort, so much so that I thought of him later as something close enough to being a friend. We ended up spending quite a bit of time together off and on. He was a great man for the betting, horses mainly though he wouldn’t steer away from the odd wager on a prize fight. He bet on McGuigan in the early days when no-one else had taken note and must have done well out of it, how well of course is, well, as long as a piece of string. He gave me several tips for the horses and we met in the betting shop that was down by the banks where the river slows and becomes almost stagnant, where the silt is thick, pungent and herons waded.

Over the years we would sit on the high stools together in companionable silence watching the 3.30 at Newmarket or the 4.15 at Fairyhouse, the horses (in our minds eye) streaking towards the finish line, the beauty of their fluid movement something joyful and elemental. With each ooph of hoof into the turf we took a breath, our betting slips getting warmer between our fingers, the sharp edge of the betting slip the crossing line. Sometimes we won. We carried our satisfaction carefully as if it could spill. We allowed ourselves a single grunt of approbation on collecting our money and walked wordlessly to Ryan’s to stand ourselves a quiet pint. I never knew how much he’d raked in but his pockets looked heavier than mine. At the bar we conspired to say nothing, tell nothing, to spin out long comfortable silences.

On this Saturday after the auction, Michael and Margaret insisted I come inside the shop. Michael went over to one of the displays, picked out a blue silk tie and gave it to me. This was uncharacteristically generous. I showed my confusion.

“Take it,” he told me. Margaret nodded enthusiastically. I didn’t know what to say.

 

In the days following the auction I had made some inquiries about the artist. At first the information seemed forthcoming and when I met that auctioneer woman, whose name continues to evade me, she was eager to help.

“Angel, that would be… I think… she’s a daughter of…”  She took to examining the sky with a studied air, then flicked her attention back to me.

“I’ll find out for you, Norman. It should be no problem at all.”

But after several more inquiries, she (Kathleen? Máire, I really can’t remember), could not enlighten me and my further research came to nothing.  

 

Around that time Jenny and I took a holiday to a seaside town, beautiful but full of tacky tourist attractions. We enjoyed a tiny place selling freshly cooked clams and crayfish, a cove that bestowed razor and scallop shells.

The seafront walk continued up an elevated promontory, further on was a hill overlooking the sea. It was possible to make a pilgrimage up and across the hill’s mud slopes and granite slabs to a large cross at its peak. Jenny and I were eager to complete it; me for the rare chance to exert my limbs and she, well, for Jenny it had many attractions.

I strode on at first through a collection of trees whose roots protruded from the mud as the side of the cliff washed away. Day trippers passed us coming the other way, their voices musical with humour. We were quieter. I inadvertently fired ahead several times leaving Jenny moving along behind. Looking back I noticed she seemed overexerted and pale. I stretched out my hand but she refused it, wanting to do it all herself. When we got to the top she was even paler but on witnessing the cross her face lit up.

It occurred to me then how rarely I saw in her such abandoned happiness. But on that particular day the sun was shining, yes, and the sky so clear that the sea and it became one and both went on forever. As we rested the sun warmed Jenny’s pale face. Now her cheeks were shining, her voice, louder, animated and exuberant like the kind of child she’d never been.

The geology gripped me; ice dug moraines, the resilient granite, and the life, gulls circling in the highest reaches, insects crawling on the stems of grass. I remember myself as a boy, short trousers, sensible haircut, bent down over some creeping creature, lice or beetle in the woodwork. I might have studied the sciences. Mrs Reeves and her amoeba indeed.

Jenny clasped my arm.

“Look at everything!” She indicated the expanse of sea. Strands of her hair whipped in the breeze.

“This is wonderful. We should live by the sea!” She didn’t mean it, not really. She liked where we lived. She put her hand against the cross.

“What kind of life will we have?” she said, leaning against me as we sat in the sunshine with the cross at our backs. She was thinking perhaps of us, children once, and now on the brink of our life together. Standing at midday on that hill filled with sunshine, the cross casting hardly a shadow, I thought of the amoeba again, all that impetus, hope. Pictures eh? These pictures that never leave us.