Zach was struck by the idea that Aubrey was the kind of man women were proud of. He thought back and tried to identify a time when Ali had been proud of him-proud to be his woman, his wife-but what came instantly to mind were her expressions of disappointment. That slow exhalation through her nose as she listened to his explanation of some mishap, some missed opportunity; the wrinkle between her brows that she was often wearing when he caught her studying him. With a slight shock, he realized he’d seen the exact same expressions on his mother’s face, before she’d left. While his grandfather had been criticizing his father for something trivial; while the three of them had roamed the footpaths of Blacknowle, years ago, and his dad had searched in vain for answers. Was it in the blood, then? Would men like Aubrey always make men like the Gilchrists seem the poor alternative? Zach was troubled by this idea-that he would inevitably disappoint the women in his life, including Hannah.
“Haven’t you brought any pictures with you this time?” said Dimity, as Zach stood up to leave. “Pictures of me?” There was a hungry light in her eyes.
“Yes, but I didn’t think you wanted to talk about that this time?”
“Oh, I always want to see the pictures. It’s like having him here in the room again.” Zach rummaged in his bag and withdrew the latest set of printouts he’d made. Several drawings and one large oil canvas of a crowd of figures, kicking up dust with their feet. There were blue and red mountains behind them, and the ground was orange-brown, the sky above a vast, clear swath of green and white and turquoise. The people were wrapped in loose robes, some of the women veiled as well, with only their eyes left naked. In one corner was a woman with her hair piled up loosely on her head and many strings of beads swinging around her neck. She was standing, calm and nonchalant, her face turned towards the viewer. She wore no veil, and her eyes were heavily kohled, catlike. She was wearing a cerulean caftan, which billowed in a hot breeze that the viewer could almost feel; the fabric clinging to the shape of her thighs and hips. It was not the Mitzy Zach knew from the early sketches, nor the Mitzy standing in front of him now. It was a fairy-tale version of her, a vision; a desert princess with her face standing out from the crowd like a single flower in a field of grass. The painting was called Berber Market, and it had set the record for an Aubrey painting when it sold in New York eight years ago. It was easy to see why. The painting was like a window into another world.
Zach handed the picture to Dimity. She took it with a small cry, lifted it up to her face and inhaled, as though she might be able to smell the desert air.
“Morocco!” she said, with a beatific smile.
“Yes,” said Zach. “I have more drawings of you from there as well, if you’d like to see them… Haven’t you got copies of these? In books, or as prints, I mean? Copies you can look at?” Dimity shook her head.
“It didn’t seem proper, to gaze at myself like that. Vanity, I suppose it seemed. And never the same as seeing the real thing, of course, and knowing that your hands were touching where his touched before… I haven’t seen this since it was painted. And even then I never saw it finished.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Charles…” A shadow dulled her delight. “Charles went up to London to finish it, once my part was done. He had… other business there.” She studied the image of herself closely and smiled again. “That was the first time, you know,” she said conspiratorially.
“Oh?”
“The first time we… were together. As man and wife, I mean. As we should have been. The first time we realized how much in love we were… I’ve never been back there. To Maroc. Some memories are too precious to risk, do you see? I want it to always be as it is now, in my head.”
“I understand, yes.” Zach was surprised to hear her use the French pronunciation: Maroc. “How long were you over there with him?”
“Four weeks. The best four weeks of my life,” she said.
Dimity shut her eyes and in front of them was a light so bright that everything glowed red. That was her first impression of the desert, the first thing she remembered. That and the smell, the way the air tasted. Nothing like the air in Dorset; different in the way it touched the back of her throat, and the inside of her nose; in the way it filled her lungs and ran through her hair. She felt heat scorch her skin, even as she sat at her own kitchen table with its sticky linoleum top pressing into the heels of her hands. She tried to find the right words. Words that could somehow convey all the things she’d seen and felt and tasted; bring them back to life. She took a slow breath in, and Valentina’s voice echoed angrily down the stairs, Morocco? Where the bloody hell is that, then? In a flash she saw Valentina’s eyes, bloodshot and bewildered, trying to work out how much such a trip was worth. And how in God’s name has this come about? Was it her mother, she wondered, who cursed the trip? Was it Valentina’s envy and spite that made the best four weeks of her life also the worst?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dimity waited. She waited for Charles Aubrey and his family to come back, and waiting made the winter longer than ever. Dimity spent it alone. Wilf spent more and more time working with his father and brothers, and only rarely came to meet her. When he did, he was warm and eager, as ever; but Dimity was distracted, only half present, and he often went away frustrated. Dimity roamed the cliffs, the hedgerows, and the beach. She picked baskets full of smooth white field mushrooms and sold them door-to-door for a few pennies. She loitered in the village, missing the company of other people more than ever before, and seeming to notice more than ever how people’s eyes brushed over her, cold and dismissive. Nobody noticed her the way Charles did.
They came later than usual, not until the beginning of July. In the last two weeks of June, Dimity checked at Littlecombe four times a day, and carried around a weight of dread and worry in her stomach that made it hard for her to eat, or to think. Valentina swore at her. Gave her a shove that cracked her head against the wall one day when she let the potatoes boil dry; shook her; made her drink a tonic of oak bark to improve her appetite, because her collarbones were standing proud above her ribs and her cheeks had lost their fullness and bloom.
“You looked younger than your years till this winter, Mitzy. Better by far to keep that than to lose it. No man’ll want you if you’re old before your time.” Valentina scowled as she pressed the cup of bitter tonic to her daughter’s reluctant lips. “Marty Coulson’s been asking after you lately. What do you say to that?” she said curtly, and had the good grace to look away when the implication of this hit home, and her daughter’s eyes widened with horror. Dimity made a choking noise in her throat, and could not speak. Valentina said abruptly: “We all must pay our way in this world, Mitzy. You weren’t born with that face for nothing, and if that artist of yours don’t show this year… Well, you’ll have to find some other way to make it pay, won’t you?”
It was warm and bright, the morning they finally came. Dimity was sitting on a field gate to the west of Littlecombe when she spotted the chalky sheep wash billowing above the lane-the rising cloud of dust that told of an approach. When the blue car pulled up, she went so boneless with relief that she slithered forwards from the gate and knelt on the dusty ground in front of it. She was crippled by joy, unsurprised to feel tears running down her cheeks. She wiped them away with gritty hands as she made her way down towards the house. She saw Élodie and Delphine run off, together with another girl she didn’t know, through the garden gate and down towards the path to the beach. Élodie had grown much taller, and Delphine’s hair was much longer. Their appearances spoke of the wealth of life they had seen and experienced since their last visit, while Dimity had remained the same, static. She watched their slender figures vanish, and walked up to the open kitchen door with her blood crowding her head so that she could hardly hear a thing.