Life Drawing for Beginners Page 4

  She’d begun to consider possible names as she’d drifted to sleep, and somewhere during the night, the perfect one had floated into her head. She lifted the pup now and looked into her face.

  “Dolly,” she said.

  The pup yapped, one of her ears pricking up, her pink tongue darting towards Audrey’s face.

  “Dolly,” Audrey repeated. “I hereby name you Dolly Matthews.”

  Her first pet, with a name chosen by her, totally dependent on Audrey for food and shelter. She’d look on it as a rehearsal for the real thing—because the babies would come along in due course, like they came for everyone else. So what if Audrey had to wait a bit longer? She was still only thirty-seven, lots of people didn’t start having children until they were that age, or well past it even.

  Didn’t things always fall into place eventually? Hadn’t her life drawing model come along, just like Audrey had trusted she would? Within minutes of meeting her, Audrey could tell that Jackie was just what she’d been looking for, and now everything was sorted for Tuesday. Things always worked out if you waited long enough.

  “Come on,” she said, pushing away the sheet and sliding to the edge of the bed, “time for breakfast—and I suppose you need to spend a penny.”

  She slipped her feet into the fluffy purple mules she hadn’t been able to resist a week ago and pulled on her blue-and-white dressing gown, and she and Dolly left the room and went downstairs.

  And happily, the discovery of pennies spent during the night wasn’t made until well after the full Irish breakfast.

  —————

  As soon as James cut the engine Charlie unclipped her seat belt and shot from the car.

  “Easy—” he said, but she was already halfway up the garden path. The front door was opened before she reached it, and Charlie was enfolded in her grandmother’s arms.

  “There you are at last,” James heard. He locked the car and walked up the path as the other two disappeared inside. He met his father-in-law in the hall.

  “Peter.” Timothy shook his hand. “How’re you keeping?”

  His tone was perfectly civil. If you didn’t know either of them, if you were ignorant of their history, you’d swear the two men were as close as any in-laws could be.

  “Keeping well,” James said. “And you should know that I’m not using ‘Peter’ anymore, I’ve switched to ‘James,’ my second name. Thought it was best.”

  “Right.” Timothy nodded, unsurprised. “I’ll mention it to Maud.”

  “If you would,” James said. “It’s just for Charlie, so she doesn’t get confused. I need everyone to use the same name.”

  “Of course. I can understand that.” Timothy indicated the sitting room. “Come on in. You’ll have a drop of something.”

  They’d been there for Charlie, all through the nightmare. When James was useless with grief and rage, when everyone had been convinced that he’d done it—he must have done it, he was the husband—Maud and Timothy had taken care of Charlie, somehow managing to see past their own devastation to the bewildered little girl who kept asking when her mother would be coming home.

  And they’d never once said a word against James to her, never tried to turn her against him—even though they must have suspected him too, they must have had questions they’d hardly dared to voice, even to each other. They must have wondered, lying awake in the night, if James had ended their daughter’s life. Maybe they still did.

  “How are things?” Timothy filled a glass with room-temperature 7UP and handed it to James. “How’s the new job?”

  “Fine,” James answered.

  The new job wasn’t fine, the new job was far from fine. Being an architect was all he’d ever wanted, and if the fates hadn’t decided to destroy his life, he’d still be an architect, with his own company. But there was little to be gained by saying that now. Timothy didn’t want to hear any of that.

  “And the house is all right?”

  “The house is okay,” James answered. The house actually was okay, insofar as it was fairly clean and tolerably well furnished. It was the neighborhood that was the problem—but saying that would sound horribly snobbish, and again, it wasn’t what Timothy needed or wanted to hear.

  “And Charlie? She’s settling into the new school?”

  “She is, aye. She seems to like it.” James sipped his drink, wishing for ice, and a lemon slice to cut the sweetness. “I think she has a boyfriend,” he added.

  Timothy raised his eyebrows. “At six?”

  “Ach no, I’m joking—but she’s got friendly with some boy in her class. I’m just glad she’s happy.”

  Timothy poured himself a small dark sherry. “Of course.” The mantel clock ticked. From the kitchen they could hear Charlie’s piping voice.

  “I’ve enrolled in an evening class,” James said when the silence started to stretch. “Art.” He wouldn’t say life drawing, Timothy might get the wrong idea.

  “Evening class? Have you someone to mind Charlie?”

  James smothered the stab of irritation. Timothy was concerned, that was all. Just looking out for his granddaughter. “The next-door neighbor,” James told him. “Nice woman. Her husband goes out on Tuesday nights, which happens to be when the class is held, so it suits her to babysit.”

  “That’s good…I didn’t knew you had any great interest in art, though—I mean, that kind of art.”

  “I thought I’d give it a go,” James said. “You never know.”

  They passed the time with this idle conversation, this polite chitchat, until Charlie appeared at the door.

  “Granny says lunch is ready.”

  And James saw, with a stab of sorrow, that his daughter looked happier than he’d seen her all month.

  —————

  Michael Browne warmed milk and added a dessert spoon of whiskey to it like he always did. He brought the glass upstairs and sipped from it as he undressed and got into his blue pajama bottoms. He washed his face and cleaned his teeth in the bathroom before putting on the pajama top. He got into bed and set his alarm for half past seven and switched off his bedside lamp and lay down.

  So far, so normal. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep, suspecting it wouldn’t come.

  Why had she turned up? Why had this…vexation been visited on him? Hadn’t he had enough, hadn’t the fates dealt him more than his share of rotten hands? Leave me alone, he shouted in his head to whatever malevolent beings might be listening. Get the hell away from me, go and bother someone else with your nasty little tricks.

  We were together, she’d said. Me and Ethan. Which could, he supposed, be the truth—what had he known about his son’s friends in the last eight years of Ethan’s life? Not a thing.

  Not since you threw him out of the house at sixteen. The voice was back, the voice he thought he’d silenced forever.

  Michael turned over, punching his pillow angrily. “He left me no choice,” he said loudly into the darkness. “It was his own doing.” How many times had he used those very words to Valerie, in tears at the thought of her brother roaming the streets in the rain?

  “You can’t just desert him, Dad,” she’d wept. “It’s cruel, he’s only a child.”

  “He’s an addict,” Michael had insisted, over and over. “We can’t help him unless he admits he needs help. You saw what he was like before he left—”

  “Before you kicked him out, you mean.”

  “Valerie, he was out of control. He was stealing from me, he was lying—”

  But nothing Michael said had made any difference. Whatever his problems, Ethan was her big brother, and Michael was the monster who’d banished him from the house. So of course Valerie had left too, as soon as she could afford it, and now what little contact they had was forced and polite, more like distant acquaintances than father and daughter.

  She visited him out of a sense of duty, he knew that; affection didn’t come into it. And he’d never once been invited to her apartment—his only glimpse of i
t had been on the day she’d moved in, when he’d insisted on helping.

  He looked at the clock and read 2:53. A car passed in the street outside, tires sloshing through water. He was sick of this country, sick of the interminable rain, the awful unrelenting greyness. He and Ruth had dreamed of living in the south of Spain, or somewhere equally balmy. Italy maybe, or Greece. You could open a pet shop anywhere. And the kids would love it, growing up with blue skies and sunshine.

  But before they had a chance to put their plan into action, Ruth had pulled up at a roundabout on the way to visit her mother, and a truck in the next lane had braked too sharply and jackknifed into her car, and Michael hadn’t been allowed to view her body. Ethan had been four, Valerie just two—

  Enough, enough of that. Michael shoved the memory away, the pain of it still sharp after more than twenty years, and turned his thoughts instead to yesterday’s dilemma.

  Who was to say that the boy was Ethan’s? There was only the mother’s word for it. Presumably she had known Ethan, it sounded like that part was true—but couldn’t they simply have been casual acquaintances? It was hard to see what might have attracted Ethan to such a downtrodden, pathetic creature.

  Much more likely that they’d somehow become known to each other, that she’d discovered by chance that Ethan’s father owned a shop, and decided to try passing her boy off as his grandchild. Ethan wasn’t around to confirm or deny it, so how could Michael challenge her?

  I was dealing, she’d said—and Michael knew all about that, how drugs turned you into a liar and a thief, how they stripped you of your self-respect, tore away every shred of decency you possessed. He’d hardly recognized Ethan in the last few terrible weeks before the final row. The surly teenager who went through his father’s pockets and stayed out all night bore no resemblance to the little boy Michael had pushed on the swing, or taken to the park to feed the ducks.

  The child in the shop was younger than Ethan had been when Ruth was killed, no more than two or three, by the look of him. What kind of a life must he have, with an absent father, whoever he might be, and a mother involved in drugs? Michael dreaded to think what kind of a dump she and the boy shared with other down-and-outs.

  She claimed to have given up dealing, which Michael doubted. Why would she give it up if she was making money from it? So easy to prey on the weakest, so tempting to wrest every last cent from them when they were begging for a fix, when they’d do anything for it.

  She’d said something about being thrown out of wherever they were living—so the boy would be homeless, not even a filthy bed to lie in.

  Stop. Michael punched his pillow again, willing his mind to shut down, longing for sleep—but the thoughts refused to leave him alone, Ethan refused to leave him alone. Michael’s only son, his only beloved son, dead two years ago from an overdose, aged just twenty-four. Lying under six feet of earth in the graveyard, next to his mother.

  And what if her story was true, what if Ethan had become a father before his death? Because distasteful as it was to Michael, there was an infinitesimal possibility, wasn’t there, that she was telling the truth? Maybe Ethan had held that boy as a baby, maybe he’d had feelings for that girl—

  Michael shook his head angrily. Nonsense, all nonsense and lies. Someone trying to pull a fast one, someone trying to con money out of him. He wasn’t responsible for a couple of down-and-outs, they were nothing to him.

  He heard the wind whipping up, and a fresh rattle of drops on the window. More bloody rain. He remembered lying in bed after Ethan had gone, listening to the rain pelting on the roof and wondering if his son had any shelter from it. He remembered wondering what Ruth would have thought of him kicking Ethan out of the house. He imagined her arguing with him, like Valerie had. Maybe if she hadn’t been killed, Ethan wouldn’t have gone near drugs.

  He turned over again, pulling the covers up to block out the sound of the rain—and at two minutes to seven he finally tumbled into a deep sleep.

  Monday

  The minute Audrey let herself into the house a high-pitched yelping sounded from the kitchen, accompanied by a frantic scrabbling at the door.

  “Yes, yes,” she called, dropping her canvas bag at the bottom of the stairs and shrugging out of her jacket. “I’m coming. Here I am.”

  She opened the kitchen door and Dolly flew at her, yapping joyfully and leaping around her ankles.

  “I told you I was coming back.” Audrey lifted the wriggling bundle and hugged her, feeling the rapid heartbeat through the warm, rough hair. She’d felt bad leaving the little dog alone in the kitchen for the school day, but what choice did she have? The garden wasn’t secure enough to hold an energetic animal, and the shed was much too small.

  The kitchen would suffer, of course. Audrey scanned the room and counted five puddles on the floor. The newspaper sheets she’d optimistically laid down that morning looked untouched, apart from one that had been shredded and scattered across a wide area. Kindling that usually sat on top of the logs in the basket was strewn across the floor, along with several fronds from Audrey’s asparagus fern.

  A corner of the yellow canvas blind on the window above the sink had been chewed and was fraying. The salt and pepper cellars on the table had both been upended, their contents sprinkled over the wooden surface. One of the turquoise-and-orange seat pads on the chairs had an ominous darker patch in the middle.

  Audrey sighed and held the little dog at arm’s length and regarded her sternly.

  “I thought I explained about the newspaper,” she said. “I thought you understood about that. And chewing blinds is not allowed either. And what have you done to my poor asparagus fern?”

  Dolly yapped happily, her whole rear end wagging enthusiastically.

  “I know you’re sorry, but I still have to clean up.”

  She needed help; she had no idea how to house-train an animal. Unfortunately the vet was on holidays till Saturday. His answering machine had given a number to use in case of emergencies, but Audrey doubted that learning how to handle a small dog, however disruptive, constituted an emergency. She’d do her best till Saturday.

  In the meantime she had to return the carrier to the pet shop, and buy the leash the supermarket didn’t stock. She left the house again, ignoring the indignant yaps as soon as she closed the kitchen door, and made her way hurriedly through the late-​afternoon streets.

  It took her less than a quarter of an hour to reach the laneway that housed the pet shop. The man inside looked as glum as before, and gave no sign that he remembered her. Audrey placed the carrier on the counter, determined to get her business over with as quickly as possible.

  “I borrowed this on Saturday,” she said, “when I bought a little dog from you.” Keeping her voice perfectly civil, but unable to muster up more than a tiny, stiff smile.

  He looked tired. He made no comment as he transferred the carrier to a shelf behind the counter.

  “And I need a leash,” Audrey continued in the same polite tone.

  “Second aisle on the left,” he said, flicking through pages on a clipboard.

  What was wrong with the man? Would it kill him to be pleasant? Audrey crossed to the aisle and selected a red leash. Don’t let him get to you, she told herself as she brought it to the counter. Don’t let him see you’re the least bit put out.

  The transaction was conducted in silence. Audrey took the leash and tucked it into her bag. “Thank you so much,” she said. “Do enjoy the rest of your day.”

  She walked from the shop, not waiting for a reply. She wouldn’t return, not if it killed her. Whatever else she needed that wasn’t available in the supermarkets or at the vet’s would be bought in Limerick. So what if it meant a round trip of nearly sixty miles? It would be worth the bother not to have to face him again.

  “I hope you realize that I rescued you from a cranky old man,” she told Dolly when she got home. “If I hadn’t come along, you’d still be sitting in that window making eyes at all the passersb
y, trying to escape from Mr. Grumpy.”

  She took the seat pad off the chair and put it into the washing machine. She mopped up the puddles on the floor and tidied up the kindling and swept away the plant debris. Then she set out fresh newspaper and placed Dolly in the center of a sheet.

  “Here is where you go,” she said firmly—and the little pup promptly walked off and squatted on the tiles next to it.

  “No—” Audrey lifted her hastily and brought her out the back and deposited her on the grass by the hedge. She stood by the door and watched Dolly scampering around the garden, nosing into shrubs, reaching on her hind legs to sniff at the clothes on the rotary line, pawing at the coal bunker, scratching at the shed door.

  Caring for a young animal was a lot more complicated than Audrey had imagined. Her bedroom still smelled strongly of Dettol, and she doubted that the duvet would ever fully recover. She hadn’t anticipated Dolly’s ferocious energy: It was like having a miniature whirlwind in the house. She hadn’t been prepared for the upheaval one small creature could cause.

  But they’d learn, both of them. They’d cope, given time. The puddles on the floor would become a thing of the past—and hopefully Dolly would grow out of chewing everything in sight. And maybe this evening’s walk on the new leash would tire her out. Maybe she wouldn’t mind so much where she slept tonight.

  Audrey scanned the patio on the other side of the hedge, but there was no sign of life next door. Her neighbors must still be in Cork. She forgot how long Pauline had said they were going for.

  Her stomach growled and she turned her thoughts to dinner. She had an idea there was a chicken and rice dish in the freezer. The pack said serves two but really, you’d want the appetite of a bird to be happy with just half of it.

  She turned back inside just as Dolly discovered the compost heap behind the shed.

  —————