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Forty-Two
After two fruitless Saturdays of badgering hotel staff in and around Coalville, I admitted defeat, and drove home. Perhaps there was a higher reason for my failure: destiny, and all that. Or more likely it was due to our collective thoughtlessness that she and I, partners for a brief while, had lost each other. Trying to find her was as ridiculous as my pathetic excuse for hunting her down: following a photo shoot, she’d left an expensive camera in my possession by mistake.
‘Really?’ one guy had said, his eyebrows arched in disbelief. ‘Why not hand it into the police?’
He hadn’t recognised Robyn anyway.
The truth was important for Robyn. I hoped she would see it as a sign of trust that I had printed new business cards using my real name. I had left one with each hotel, asking them to keep an eye out if anyone matched Robyn’s description; I’d received some very odd looks when I showed them the sketch, the incredulous kind that marked me as either a pervert or some secretive private-eye. I saw at least one person drop the card in the bin as I walked out. Hardly surprising, I was acting suspiciously.
One heavily made-up receptionist repeated her name, slowly, like she was spelling it out, ‘Robyn.’ For a second I’d thought there was a flash of recognition in her eyes. Then she shrugged and put the card to one side. ‘I’ll ask around.’ She’d spoken as if Robyn was a lost dog, but when she’d reached for the phone, staring at me warily, I panicked and bolted, not wanting to face a police inquisition.
What other clues did I have? A friend called Yvette, who worked somewhere. A professor who had gone walkabout. A patron whom she might admire but was faceless. And me, a casual acquaintance who somehow had fallen for her without actually knowing who she was.
Yeah, I should be laughing. But I wasn’t. I was miserable. Nothing had felt right from the moment I had returned home from Conisbrough.
The outstanding payment had arrived in my bank account. Just like that, without prompting from me. Camilla had thanked me for the pictures, including the one I had painted in the studio using photographs and my memory cache. However, the message was left on my answer machine, and when I returned the call, it rang forever. I kind of hated her now. If I had slept with her, like she wanted me to, I would have regretted it in a way I never would with Robyn.
I had walked away from Robyn too quickly, allowed dark thoughts to shove out the nicer ones and, in hindsight, I knew I had allowed my past to infect me with doubt, and I had seeded my fears, however subtly, wherever I went. My biggest regret was giving up on her. If Robyn had really wanted to reject me, she wouldn’t have stroked my hair and whispered caresses into my ear that night in the tent. So, buoyed with rekindled optimism, I had driven to Coalville with a list of hotels and the silly ID sketch. I had even bought a pair of smart trousers and a new shirt, and shaved.
Driving home, I wondered what to do next. I had school and evening classes to teach, although I had reduced my commitments once again in the hope of filling the extra hours with freelance stuff. A good portfolio was needed to boost my sales. The collection of paintings I had done, all fifteen of them, was out of my hands; I only had sketches and outlines left in a pad. I wondered about recreating them from memory – not too difficult to do as I had copious mental notes stashed away. But I didn’t want to dredge those weeks up and remember Robyn. It was probably best if I forgot her.
Trouble was, my memories, good or bad, had a tendency to fester, especially if they stirred up unwanted emotions. I could never forget her.
Sketching Robyn’s portrait had been somewhat cathartic. I created several versions including profile and face on, mostly in charcoal. The one I took to Coalville was simplistic and drawn in thick pencil. I wanted to put a smile on her face, like the one I had seen inside the tent, but instead I created a passport style representation that highlighted her lightness, cropped beeswax hair, and the sheen of her skin. I might have lengthened the eyelashes and plucked her eyebrows, lifted her chin a fraction. Call it artistic licence.
I would paint her properly, I decided, as I drove around the north circular road. And I would continue to pester Camilla, whose latest response to one of my stern emails was to quote the secrecy of the contract, as if she had signed some Italian code of Omerta. She must have been paid a small fortune to keep her runaway mouth shut. I swore at the invisible Medici, if he was the man behind everything, because having finished his game of chess, he had left key pieces on the board and walked off without explanation. But there again, if he had intended for Robyn and me to meet, he had achieved his goal. The end game perhaps didn’t belong to him.
My journey home reached its end early evening. I parked on the street, grateful that this quiet side-road had achieved sufficient infamy that shoppers from the nearby high street shunned parking on it. The reputation wasn’t anything to do with me, for once, but due to the suitably spooky graveyard. Abandoned long ago, the most recently interned corpse was probably a hundred years old. The bad reputation was perhaps, and occasionally, justified. Junkies climbed over the rusty metal railings and dropped needles behind the crooked gravestones. I wasn’t tempted to slip into that shitty world again, once was enough. The police sometimes stopped by and raided the forgotten cemetery. I was perfectly safe behind the stone walls of my home.
On the outside, my little cathedral – Dad had called it that on one of his rare visits – had suffered badly from neglect. I hadn’t painted the flaked woodwork or mended the fence as it wasn’t my job. The perpendicular windows, which weren’t as grand as Dad thought, were invaluable for light, and why I rented the place. The landlord was the absentee type, and that suited me fine. He had bought the old Methodist chapel with the view of turning it into smaller flats, then ran out of money. The lack of a modern kitchen and missing partition walls never bothered me. I moved seamlessly around the place, unhindered by brick walls. The upper horseshoe tier had been boarded up to reduce heating costs, and the enclosed gallery now functioned as a vast attic. An ideal place for storage. My favourite spot for painting was under the arched window that once lit up the altar. I had a view of trees through the unstained glass, and early in the mornings, the birdsong outperformed the grumbling car exhausts.
The front door key jingled in my hand. Chapels, unlike parish churches, weren’t blessed with porches, so I suffered the rain for a moment while I forced the deadlock cylinder to turn anticlockwise.
‘Joseph?’
I dropped the key. The clatter filled the gap where my missing heartbeat should be. I froze on the spot, drenched less with rain and more with disbelief. She couldn’t be here. My imagination had conjured up her voice, like an echo. There was no way she could have got from Coalville to London ahead of me. So If I looked, and she wasn’t there, I would know I always wished it otherwise.
My throat closed, trapping my held breath in place. Slowly, I turned.
She had done it again; crept up on me.
Forty-Three
Ibent and picked up the key, and held it out to him; I couldn’t disguise my trembling hand. The tips of our fingers touched, a brief second of reunion, then he backed away. It seemed like a bad omen, but his face said otherwise.
I tilted the umbrella down. ‘Can I come in?’
He nodded. This time, he managed to unlock the door.
My breathing wasn’t back to normal. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I dashed from over there, on the other side of the road. I’ve been standing under a tree for an hour, waiting for you.’ Like he might have done in York.
He held the steel door open, and I shook the rain off the collapsed umbrella before crossing the threshold. I followed him through what must have been the little entrance hall into vast space of the old chapel.
‘Wow!’ The word dropped like a stone out of my mouth and immediately echoed. ‘Joseph, this is perfect. It’s no wonder you love it. When you said studio’—I twittered on while eyeballing the stone architrave of the windows— ‘I wasn’t thinking of this.’
He cleared his throat. ‘It’s convenient.’ He placed the key on a low table. Next to it was a chewed settee, one that a dog must have once favoured. Joseph had kept things minimal, right down to the kitchen that had obviously been cobbled together from bits and pieces out of a household tip or charity shop. Everything was clean, yet also shabby and used too many times to be worth anything. There was no television.
I rested the umbrella against a whitewashed wall. Above my head, inlaid into the wall, was a memorial plaque to the dead of a war. Very little had been done to hide the chapel’s origins other than to strip out the wooden lecterns, railings and pews. Beneath my feet, a patchwork of Hessian mats covered the creaking floorboards. A cast iron radiator rattled. I touched it and flinched.
