Bad Case of Loving You

“However,” I added, “The relative diplomatic détente between Britain and France is not indicative of either countries’ relationship with the rest of the world. Twenty years ago, French secret service agents committed an act of terrorism in New Zealand and bombed a Greenpeace ship.

France seems to have learnt to stop invading other countries, and hasn’t staged any significant military intrusions since it pulled out of the whole mess in Vietnam in 1954, unless you include nuking some islands it owns in the Pacific.”

Andrew’s eyes were on me. He smiled approvingly, and Henry groaned. “Now I know why Dad likes you,” he said.

“You’re just like him.”

Chapter Thirty Nine

Henry had bounced back from being squashed by Matthew before I’d dropped him off at Kendra’s, and I’d left him concocting plans to network Matthew’s laptop with my PC so they could play Counter Strike together at the weekend.

Matthew was going to call me when he’d studied his brain to a pulp, so I had some time to do domestic stuff like laundry, and unpack the boxes from my office. F had called, and I needed to take my CV into London the next day, so I had to update the damn thing and add Jackie’s reference to it.

But first, before any of that stuff got done…

I sat on my bed and undid the brown-paper wrapped packages. The smell of pastels triggered waves of nostalgia.

I’d bought a pack of handmade Fabriano Roma cotton paper, which had the most gorgeous tooth to it. The pastels were traditional style, thick in my hands, made in Northumbria. I’d bought fixative, too, and charcoals.

All of my real art supplies were in storage in the US, carefully wrapped and padded, left over from my marriage.

I’d thought, when I followed Kendra and Henry over here, that the time of my life when I painted was over, left behind in the past, along with diapers and breastfeeding and the slammed doors and unmet expectations of married life. But here I was, spreading violet and mauve and heliotrope across paper again, smudging the colours, sliding my fingers through the pigment, layering and blending and building.

This was making love to the paper, there was no other way to describe it, and I wanted to fill the house with these colours, cover the walls, feed them to Matthew, along with jasmine rice and Leonidas chocolate and Kilimanjaro Peaberry coffee…

I was making a mess; there were pastel smudges on my jeans, up my arms, and on the rumpled sheets, but I’d planned on changing the sheets anyway before Matthew came over, and the rest didn’t matter. When the first sheet of paper was covered in colour, I put it aside and looked up at the painting that was hanging in my bedroom.

When I’d come here, it had seemed important to bring the paintings over. There was a lesson learnt in each and every one. I’d painted this one while Kendra and I had been muddling through separating. She’d been composing music, spending endless days scribbling pages and pages of notes, playing fragments of sounds over and over, while Henry and I watched from a shared bemused exclusion.

It had passed, and she’d come back to our domestic world, tired and grouchy. I’d collected her pages and pages of drafts from the recycling bin, when she wasn’t watching, and painted over them.

I wasn’t sure any more why I’d clung to the painting so tightly, why I needed to be reminded that obsessions were bad for relationships. Perhaps it was to remind myself why the marriage had ended.

The new piece, with its riot of colours, made me smile. I took it out into the tiny courtyard, lit by the light streaming through my kitchen window, and sprayed it with fixative, then sat on the damp paving and waited for it to dry, guarding it from the sustained interest of the snails who obviously thought that Northumbrian chalk would taste good, never mind the lacquer.

It wasn’t subtle, not in terms of messages from my subconscious, but I moved the green and yellow painting from my bedroom to the closet in the study and tacked the pastel sketch I’d just done in its place. I was too happy to want to think about Kendra any longer.

The washing machine was chugging away, washing the sheets that Matthew and I had trashed on Sunday night, when Matthew rang.

He was sitting on his front step when I pulled up outside his house, and he tossed his pack, laptop and a shirt on a coat hanger into the back of the car, then clambered into the front.

Neither of us said anything, there really didn’t seem to be a need, then he leaned across the car and kissed me briefly. I touched his face, found his lips for another kiss, then he pulled back.

“Take me to your place, now,” he said, and he did his seat belt up.

* * *

In the shower, he turned me around and I spread my hands against the tiles, pressed my face against the hard wet ceramic, my breath coming out as a moan.