Girl From the South (v5) Page 8

  ‘Haven’t you done your accounts, either?’

  Henry looked at her.

  ‘My accounts,’ he said. ‘My problem.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. Sorry.’

  She went back to the table and lifted her briefcase to the floor.

  ‘I met a really nice girl—’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The party was awful. I didn’t stay long enough to see quite how awful because I threw wine all over this girl in the first five minutes so I had to take her out to supper.’

  ‘You threw wine—’

  ‘Someone knocked into me,’ Tilly said. ‘A whole glass just went flying. You can’t believe how much wine there is in a glass until you see it all over someone’s jacket.’

  Henry propped himself against the sink and crossed his arms.

  ‘But she was OK about it?’

  ‘Amazingly,’ Tilly said. She began to take the pins out of her hair, and to lay them on the table. ‘She’s American. She worked for some museum in the South and now she’s working for a couple of restorers, doing their research and stuff.’

  ‘D’you want some coffee?’ Henry said.

  Tilly shook out her hair. It fell well below her shoulders, polished and heavy.

  ‘No, thanks. I’d like a herbal.’

  Henry turned to open the cupboard above the sink.

  ‘She’s called Gillon,’ Tilly said. ‘I suppose she’s about my age. We really got on, she was easy to talk to, really easy.’

  ‘Camomile?’

  ‘Fine,’ Tilly said. She picked up her pink band and pulled her hair into it. Henry wanted to ask her to leave her hair loose but was prevented by being without a plan – or even a clear intention – for what might follow.

  ‘She’s living somewhere pretty awful,’ Tilly said. ‘Some kind of hostel in Kentish Town. She was very philosophical about it, but it sounds dire. Shared loos, no privacy.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she get somewhere decent?’

  ‘Money, I think. London’s chronically expensive for foreigners and I don’t suppose the Hopkirk Partnership is paying her more than a pittance.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be for long, will it,’ Henry said. ‘Work permits and stuff—’

  ‘Henry,’ Tilly said.

  ‘What.’

  ‘I really liked this girl,’ Tilly said. ‘And I felt sorry for her. She didn’t ask me to be, she didn’t complain or anything, but I kept thinking how grim to be experiencing London like this, especially London for your first visit.’

  Henry looked at her.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, I wondered – I mean, could we offer her William’s room? Just for a few weeks, just till she finds somewhere better?’

  ‘Tilly,’ Henry said, ‘I thought that the whole point of William going was so that we had the flat to ourselves. I thought that’s what you wanted. We – did what you wanted—’

  ‘I know,’ Tilly said. She looked down at the table.

  ‘What’s changed? What’s happened then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Tilly said in a low voice and then, in an even lower one, ‘that’s the point. That’s the problem.’

  Henry came across the room and took hold of her shoulders.

  ‘Why do you want a complete stranger here now? Tilly, what is going on?’

  Tilly didn’t look up. She muttered something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe – maybe I need an ally—’

  ‘Tilly, you don’t even know this girl. You throw wine over her and take her out to supper and then you suggest she comes to live with us?’

  Tilly looked up at him.

  ‘Yes. For a few weeks only. Yes.’

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please,’ Henry said. ‘Tell me. Explain to me.’

  Tilly took a step back so that Henry’s hands slipped from her shoulders. She said, ‘I wanted – things to change. When William went, I wanted, I hoped—’ She stopped and then she said, loudly, angrily, ‘Henry, I can’t humiliate myself any more, I can’t keep just waiting and wishing, I can’t—’ She stopped again.

  He said brusquely, ‘Do you want me to go?’

  She stared at him in sudden horror.

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘Then—’

  ‘I just can’t not do anything, Henry. I can’t just be, keep just being.’

  ‘So having someone else here, someone you hardly know—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Tilly screamed. She pulled her cardigan from round her neck and threw it clumsily, ineffectually, in his direction. ‘Just shut up, will you? At least she’ll be somebody to talk to!’

  Henry bent and picked up the cardigan. He put it on the table without looking at her.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Chapter Six

  When Gillon had arrived to work for Stephen Hopkirk in late June, she had been expecting a professional place of business, a studio complex perhaps, a suite of offices, a fine-art operation involving several people at least, something between a clinic and a gallery. What she found was a converted garage behind a terraced north London house from which several small Hopkirk children constantly emerged to stand breathing and shouting against the glass door that prevented them actually gaining access to their father. The glass door, Stephen explained to Gillon, was made of toughened glass, the kind used in windows of armoured cars. He had acquired it for security reasons, he said, but was largely thankful for it for paternal ones. The glass itself was smeared with lick and fingerprints up to four feet from the ground. After a few days Gillon grew almost used to the semi-permanent frieze of flattened noses and tongues and palms against the glass.

  ‘The seventh circle of hell, really,’ Stephen said comfortably.

  Stephen’s business partner was an angular girl called Madeleine who worked for unrelieved hours on end under a bank of spotlights focused on the easel supporting the painting she was restoring, or bent over a panel on a work surface wearing a pair of goggle-like binocular magnifiers. They both specialized in painting on wood, panels from altar pieces, chests, overmantels. Madeleine had been trained with Stephen years before and their relationship, as far as Gillon could see, was confined to restoration and restoration only. Stephen ran the business and dealt with clients as well as doing his own restoration work. Madeleine, in her black cotton overalls with her hair pulled back into a plastic clip, never strayed from work, either physically or psychologically. When Gillon had arrived, she looked up long enough to say, without any particular warmth, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy your time here,’ and had then gone back to what she was doing.

  ‘Can you work here?’ Stephen said.

  He indicated a table bearing a lamp and a computer. It didn’t look a very new computer.

  ‘I don’t know how good you are with these things,’ Stephen said, putting his hand on the computer. ‘The better you are, of course, the more you’ll get out of it.’

  ‘I’m good,’ Gillon said.

  He looked at her.

  ‘I believe you.’ He gestured round the ex-garage space. ‘I’m afraid this is all there is. We all work in here. If you need to use the loo, you’ll have to run the gamut of the kids and go into the house.’

  The house was a revelation to Gillon. Houses, in her experience, had a kind of order to them, a sense that they did not, could not, overwhelm the humans who lived in them and thus become the dominant partner in the house/human equation. The houses of her childhood, her young adulthood, possessed the established serenity of knowing their place. But Stephen and Jenny Hopkirk’s house had exploded out of their control like a giant creeper. Aided and abetted by three children under six, it made its arbitrary and chaotic presence felt at every turn, spewing out the contents of drawers and cupboards, hurling cushions and pillows to the floor, rumpling curtains and bedlinen. The first time Gillon had tried to find the bathroom it had been physically almost impossible to climb the stai
rs for the detritus littering it on every step, and when she finally reached the lavatory it was entirely full of lightly piled lavatory paper, right up above the seat, painstakingly unwound from two new rolls by the youngest Hopkirk who was not yet two and who had already learned that the upside of fairly constant neglect was considerable freedom.

  Jenny Hopkirk – a botanical artist of extraordinary precision – appeared oblivious to her house, and, largely, to her children. She worked for hours each day at a trestle table set up in a north-facing window bay, under a sort of psychological bell jar, while seas of muddle and noise and argument swirled around her. There was something in Stephen, Gillon decided, that was drawn to these deeply preoccupied women, Jenny and Madeleine, as if their absorption in matters other than him, but in no way threatening to him, gave him a peculiar kind of liberty. The children, Gillon thought, would either become clamorously emotionally needy in later life, or devise their own versions of their parents’ detachment. They were nice kids, in their careless, messy, English way: she liked their directness, even their disconcerting frankness.

  ‘You’ve got funny hair,’ the middle one said most days.

  ‘I know.’

  He considered her. He wanted a reaction.

  ‘Smelly funny hair,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ Gillon said, taking her cue, ‘I guess you’re just smelly.’

  The table at which she worked, from which she tried to access the great art libraries in search of names and dates and birthplaces and provenances, faced a wall. It was a white wall; thick white paint applied over the unplastered bricks of the original garage, and after a few weeks, the grains and dimples and streaks in the paint grew as familiar to her as a known landscape. With Stephen’s permission, after the first month, she pinned up her poster of Picasso’s La Soupe and would, as she had in Charleston, rest her eyes on – rather than see – the grave protective pose of the woman offering, yet withholding, somehow, the bowl from the waiting child. Otherwise, she worked. Steadily, patiently, her view the wall and her computer screen, she endeavoured to answer all the ancient, unanswerable questions about provenance that the panels on Madeleine’s and Stephen’s easels threw up, to answer them in order not to ask herself why she was where she now was and where – if anywhere – she thought she was going.

  She sent Paul Landers back in Charleston, at the Pinckney Museum, e-mails, of course. She told him London was wonderful, that she was in love with most of the paintings in the National Gallery and half those in the Wallace Collection and Somerset House. She told him where she walked, what she saw, what she noticed. She did not tell him how hard it was to meet anyone, how hard it was to go back at night to the dismal, frugal room in the hostel, how hard it was to tell herself that she had made a right move. She did not tell him, either, that sometimes, when on-line to an American database such as the Getty Provenance Index in California, she had sharp pangs of homesickness of which she was both ashamed and frightened. He played the game with her. ‘I am glad,’ he’d e-mail back, ‘I am so glad things are working out.’ It was a relief, then, when she could at last communicate a tiny first breakthrough, a small step to living in London, rather than sliding unhappily across its heedless surface.

  ‘I’ve met a charming girl,’ Gillon wrote. ‘She’s features editor of an arts magazine here. She’s asked me to room with her in the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. I haven’t met him yet. He’s a wildlife photographer.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Paul e-mailed back laconically. ‘And your work???’

  But Gillon didn’t want to tell Paul about work, she didn’t want to give him any information he could catechise her about. She wanted him to know, instead, that she was making a life in London, that she had new friends, a girl called Tilly and her boyfriend, called Henry. Henry, Tilly explained to Gillon, was very easygoing.

  ‘Too easygoing, sometimes. I have moments of wanting just – just to galvanize him.’

  ‘Is it OK,’ Gillon said, ‘I mean, really OK, me just moving in with you guys—’

  ‘Yes,’ Tilly said firmly.

  ‘I should meet Henry—’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gillon hesitated.

  ‘Should I call him?’

  Tilly looked at her. Then she bent to pick up her bag.

  ‘No. I’ll get him to ring you.’

  Henry didn’t ring. Four days passed, four nights in the hostel bed. Gillon felt she couldn’t call Tilly and remind her. She began to regret e-mailing Paul as if everything was breezily certain. It was, she told herself, as it always was with her, the usual pattern of mistaking a hungry hope for reality. Then Henry rang. He rang on Stephen’s office line and Stephen took the call. He brought the telephone across to Gillon’s table and laid it on her mouse pad.

  ‘For you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, startled. ‘Oh, I’m sorry—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Stephen said. ‘Often isn’t fine, but once in a while is quite OK.’

  Gillon picked up the handset.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi,’ said a man at the other end. ‘Are you Gillon Stokes?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘I’m Henry Atkins. Tilly’s—’ He stopped.

  ‘Oh,’ Gillon said. ‘Yes—’

  ‘Sorry I haven’t rung before.’

  ‘That’s OK—’

  ‘I wondered,’ Henry said. He sounded tired and unenthusiastic. ‘I wondered if perhaps we should meet before – well, before we all go ahead with this.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t want to put you on trial or anything, but I do sort of feel—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Henry said, his voice lightening. ‘Tilly says you work in Camden Town.’

  ‘It’s near the Kentish Town Underground—’

  ‘I have to come up that way,’ Henry said. ‘Tomorrow. There’s a photographic lab I need to visit. Could – well, could I collect you from work and take you for a drink maybe, a cup of coffee?’

  Gillon looked up at her poster. The child was dancing almost, eager, her hands lifted towards the bowl.

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Good,’ Henry said. ‘Fine. About five-thirty, five-forty-five—’

  Gillon glanced across at Stephen. His back was turned towards her but he was alert. He imagined – she could tell – that she was being asked on a date. She smiled into the telephone.

  ‘A quarter of six,’ Gillon said, very slow, very Southern, ‘would be just fine.’

  Henry rang the Hopkirks’ front doorbell three times before anyone came. He could hear children inside, chattering and whispering in a little cluster right up against the door, and when he stooped to push open the letter-box and said, ‘Is your mummy there?’ he could see their eyes shining in the dimness inside. They began to shout, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ and to run away down the wooden floor of the hallway inside and then there was the soft, heavy thud as one of them fell over and started wailing.

  ‘Sorry,’ Henry said automatically when Jenny Hopkirk opened the door. She was wearing a floor-length dress of blue-green cotton and her feet were bare. Two little boys came and held on to the folds of her dress possessively and stared at Henry.

  ‘I’m looking for Gillon Stokes,’ Henry said. Jenny looked briefly puzzled.

  The smaller child said, ‘She’s with Daddy.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jenny said. ‘I forgot her name. For the moment.’

  ‘Could I—?’

  Jenny took a small step backwards. The little boys stumbled as she moved and trod on her feet. She seemed not to notice.

  ‘She will be in the studio,’ Jenny said. ‘Caspar will show you.’

  ‘No,’ Caspar said. He turned his back on Henry and pressed his face against his mother’s legs.

  ‘I’m sure if you could just direct me—’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Of course.’


  He stepped into the hallway, flattening himself against the wall on account of the narrowness of the space. The smaller boy looked up long enough to hiss at him. For a second, Henry considered hissing back.

  ‘Through there,’ Jenny said, pointing towards an open doorway. ‘And then through the kitchen and out of the garden door.’

  Henry moved towards the open door. As he did, the smaller boy peeled himself away from his mother’s legs and shot past Henry, crunching toys and scattered cereal underfoot as he ran. Henry followed him through the kitchen – it reminded him with a pang of lost times, of that long-ago student flat in Leamington Spa – and out through a pair of french windows into a time-worn space of garden littered with overturned plastic buckets and bicycles. At the far side of the garden was a building with three windows looking towards the house and a glass door against which Caspar had already hurled himself with yells.

  Henry put his hand on the door handle above Caspar’s head.

  ‘Are you allowed in?’

  Caspar stopped yelling in an instant and looked stealthy instead.

  ‘I see,’ Henry said. He peered in through the glass. There were three people inside, a man, and a woman in black dungarees, and someone at the back, in front of a computer. The man looked up from the easel he was standing by and raised a hand. Then he came over to the door and opened it six inches.

  ‘No,’ he said decidedly to Caspar.

  Caspar began to yell again. Stephen opened the door a further few inches.

  ‘Come in,’ he said to Henry. ‘Quickly.’

  ‘Seems a bit mean—’

  ‘Maybe,’ Stephen said, ‘but vital.’

  Awkwardly, Henry manoeuvred himself inside and shut the door rapidly behind him. On the far side Caspar thumped impotently against the glass with the flat of his hands and put his tongue out. Right out.

  ‘Sorry,’ Stephen said. He smiled. ‘Stephen Hopkirk.’

  ‘Henry Atkins,’ Henry said. He looked back at Caspar. ‘Why—’

  ‘Because then they all come,’ Stephen said. ‘And destruction takes precedence over work.’

  The person at the far side of the room had risen and was standing watching.

  ‘You’ve come for Gillon,’ Stephen said, with an edge of heartiness.