‘Has the Fat Controller gone?’ He looked at me. ‘That was what Daddy called Mr Howdon.’
‘I don’t know.’ She frowned. She didn’t like him talking to me about family things. ‘You’ll have to come anyway.’
He stood up reluctantly, scattering crumbs and slivers of cheese.
She turned, knowing he would follow her, a young dictator. She hadn’t acknowledged my existence with a glance or a nod. I might have been invisible. Dickon gave me a little wave and ran after her. She marched along the path, her long plait bouncing up and down, glinting silver, the newly developed bum swaying.
I stayed where I was. The sun had moved behind a tree and it was pleasantly cool. And my head was full of questions. If Philip really was a friend of Ronnie Laing, he must have heard of a stepson called Thomas Mariner. So why had he needed me to trace him? He could have asked Ronnie to make the introductions, or to give Howdon the information he was after. But that would have meant acknowledging Thomas as his son. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to do that before he died. I longed for Philip still to be alive. I wanted him sitting beside me in the shadow of the church. I wanted his arm around my shoulder. Most of all I wanted an explanation of all this mess.
Chapter Twenty-two
I walked down to the beach to finish my picnic. The tide was higher than it had been when I’d first talked to Dickon, high enough for me to hear the water sucking back against the sand. Something happened to me there. A change of mood. The righteous indignation I’d felt about being pissed about by Howdon turned to fury. Lisa the nurse would have told me there was other stuff going on as well. Stuff about Nicky and not wanting to be a victim again. Perhaps I knew that even then, but it didn’t make any difference. I was seething. I needed an acknowledgement from Howdon that he was playing games. I needed to take control. I sat on the empty beach and thought of revenge.
When I got back to the house all the visitors had gone. The big top was a heap of canvas and rope on the grass. The rubbish bins were overflowing. People were clearing up, but there was no one I recognized. A torn paper mask was all that was left of the Countryside Consortium stall.
Of course, I could have gone straight home. I’d given Jess and Ray long enough on their own. I tried the deep breathing that they tell you relieves stress. I tried to persuade myself that Howdon wasn’t worth the hassle. But it didn’t work and I didn’t really want it to. I thought it was just as well I’d changed out of my jeans and was suitably dressed. It was years since I’d gate-crashed a party.
Joanna’s exhibition was being held in a room over a café bar on the main street. The bar was one of those places which makes you believe you’re in the Cotswolds or Hampstead, full of expat southerners with loud voices. I’d been there for a meal once with a couple of social workers. They weren’t local either. One of them had written a play. Upstairs that day there’d been a poet reading and a woman playing a tenor sax. At the same time. We’d listened for a while, then we’d gone downstairs to eat. The menu had been chalked on a blackboard beside the bar, but I’d not been able to read it because two women had stood right in front of it, debating their choice of wine. Showing off. Performance art to compete with the poet. I’d been well behaved and only caused a minor scene.
I parked next to Safeway’s and walked through an alley. A pack of adolescent girls prowled up the middle of the street in search of a pub which would serve them. I checked my appearance in a shop window, pulled my fingers through my hair. There was a faint green stain on the back of the dress – seaweed from a rock or lichen from the church step. I hoped the lighting inside was dim. Otherwise I’d have to stand with my back to the wall.
Joanna had hired the whole place for her party. There was a young man with an open-necked shirt and a game-show host’s smile collecting cards at the door.
‘Oh, shit!’ I said, putting my hand to my mouth. The arty middle classes like bad language. ‘I didn’t think about the invitation… Look, it’s Lizzie, Lizzie Bartholomew. You can always check with Joanna. Or Stuart if he’s here…’ I smiled. My voice was ditzy, apologetic. I’m a girlie. Decorative. I don’t do organized. And I don’t want to brag, but you’d have sworn I was born south of Sunderland.
He smiled back. ‘No problem. Drinks and canapés down here. The exhibition’s upstairs.’
There was no natural light in the bar. It had an old-fashioned feel which I’d not noticed on my previous visit, candles in bottles, a natural-wood floor, cane chairs. Perhaps the décor had recently changed and rustic Mediterranean was in fashion again. It was so dark in there that I thought I could have gone topless without embarrassment. I hadn’t needed to worry about the stain on my dress. A woman in jeans and a skimpy top stood in the light of the doorway carrying a tray of drinks. I took an orange juice. My anger didn’t need fuelling with alcohol. The juice had that bitter aftertaste which meant it had come out of a long-life carton. Every expense spared.
I looked around for Howdon. I didn’t have a game plan. I wanted to know what he was playing at. I wanted to see his face when I said, Strange you don’t remember me. Ask Dickon. He does.
I walked to the end of the room. It was long and narrow. Everyone seemed to be smoking. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I picked out groups of people who seemed to be there for the free party, not the photos. The bar’s usual Saturday night clientele. I wondered how many others the charmer on the door had let in without invitations. There was no sign of Joanna or Howdon. I set my glass on the bar and made my way upstairs.
The exhibition space was larger than I’d expected, much bigger certainly than the bar below. It must have spread over the neighbouring shops. Again the light was artificial. There were black blinds at the windows. The photographs were lit by a series of ceiling spots. And there were a lot of photographs. They hung on the walls and on freestanding screens which partitioned the room. I was impressed. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting. Not something this professional. A lad was standing at the top of the stairs. He handed me a folded sheet of printed paper, a catalogue or programme, with the titles numbered. It said which of the pictures were for sale and gave a list of prices which made me whistle under my breath. It said that a percentage of any profits would be donated to the Countryside Consortium. It didn’t tell us how big a percentage.
The exhibition was called A Landscape under Threat, though as far as I could tell the specific nature of the threat wasn’t explained. Despite myself, I got hooked into the images. I knew what I was there for but I found myself distracted. The pictures disturbed me. They were all in black and white. Some were enormous, huge landscapes with chiselled valleys. Some were little and the subjects were domestic – not in any sense family snaps, but they seemed as accessible as that.
There were a lot of people in the big room but they spoke in reverent whispers. If background music was playing, it was so faint that I couldn’t hear it. The screens acted like the walls of a maze, guiding us through the room. Howdon could have been there, hidden just round the next corner, but I didn’t hurry past. My attention was held by the pictures and I stopped before each one. They had all been taken in Northumberland. There was a sweep of sand dunes with a brooding, thunderstorm sky. A field of fat lambs surrounded by grey dry-stone walls, lit by a low evening sun. A swollen river sweeping past a barn. Then there was a scene which was familiar. It showed sunlight slanting through bare winter trees onto a narrow lane. I’d seen it before on Ronnie Laing’s wall. If it wasn’t a print of the same photo the shot must have been taken at the same time on the same day.