Lorraine sensed that she had been about to say something else, but had stopped herself. ‘Well, that can’t be true,’ she said. ‘You’ve produced a well-regarded body of work, haven’t you?’
‘A well-regarded body of work,’ Sonja repeated, almost mimicking Lorraine. ‘Much fucking good it does me.’ She drained the rest of the glass. ‘People don’t live on “regard”. Or on the past.’ She was silent for a moment, then began to speak again, her manner now almost academically impersonal. ‘What’s the point of the past, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lorraine said, ‘I often wonder.’
Well, I can tell you,’ Sonja went on, bitter again. ‘It’s to flavour the present. In some people’s lives the memory of the past is constantly present, like a sweetness, but for others it’s like a poison or a mould. No matter how far you think you’ve got away from something, it’s still always there — in every word you speak, everything you are. Every piece of work you do.’ She gestured around her at the empty room.
‘Are you talking about Harry?’
‘Of course,’ Sonja said, pouring herself another drink. ‘All I ever do is talk about Harry.’ She paused again. ‘I can’t seem to stop. I loved him, you know. Perhaps I didn’t realize how much.’
‘Until he died?’ Lorraine said gently.
‘Until he died.’ Sonja fell silent. ‘Something in me died too.’ She looked up at Lorraine, her strange eyes bright and still, and Lorraine felt again the presence of something behind them, as though death itself were looking out.
The atmosphere was unbearable, and Lorraine felt she had to talk, to make some connection with the other woman. ‘That’s how I started drinking. Someone I loved died.’
‘Your husband?’ Sonja asked.
‘No,’ Lorraine said. ‘He was my partner at work. I used to be a cop.’ She felt a strange intimacy with Sonja, so that it didn’t matter what she said. Lorraine began to talk about her own life, remembering her police training and how she had been taught to talk people back from the edge, to make them feel connected. She found that she wanted to tell it all, wanted someone to understand. She could not stop herself, as though a dam had been breached. But then, mid-flow, her voice suddenly tailed off. ‘God knows why I’m telling you all this.’
‘I’m sure he does,’ Sonja said, taking another slug of vodka with a smile. ‘Why don’t you just spit it all out? You tell me your ghost stories, and then I’ll tell you mine.’ Life seemed to flow back into her with the current of sympathy, and she swung her feet up on the table with a lop-sided smile. ‘We’ve got a while.’
A while till when? Lorraine was sure that it was no coincidence that Sonja Nathan had been ready to blow her brains out the day before she would become the legal owner of all of Harry Nathan’s property. Did she want to show she didn’t care about money — or was it something she felt she had no right to accept? She smiled to see how Sonja’s problems were distracting her from her own.
Lorraine could feel the past surging up inside her again, and she had to get up and walk around. Sonja said nothing, and it was because she didn’t speak, either to encourage or discourage anything, that Lorraine’s pent-up emotions were able to find release. ‘Drinking became my life — I refused point-blank to believe I had a problem, but I was on a downward slope.’
Lorraine put her hands over her face and started to weep. Sonja sat motionless. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s got into me.’
‘Same thing that’s got into me,’ Sonja said simply, swinging her legs down. She walked over to Lorraine and touched her shoulder lightly. Lorraine knew that the touch had been something Sonja felt she ought to do rather than an instinctive response: she was not a caring woman. ‘Except my drug is my work. Was my work. I won’t do any more now.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Lorraine said, wiping her eyes. ‘All artists get blocked from time to time.’
‘Art!’ Sonja said. ‘It’s all just fucking pain and damage. Harry damaged me. I didn’t know how much.’
Until he died, Lorraine mentally filled in.
‘He made me like himself — dirty, commercial, tacky,’ she went on, describing a mirror image of the process Vallance had attributed to her, and Lorraine wondered what she was talking about: no one could call her own austere and disturbing work commercial, but it was clear that Sonja’s standards were not those of other people. ‘He made me feel things, do things, I never wanted to feel or do, filled me up with bitterness and hate. I did my best to... exorcise them. But I didn’t succeed. They possessed me, diminished me.’ She was talking slowly and deliberately. ‘They caused me to lose my work. Which he gave me too. Which is myself.’
What the hell did she mean? She was raving, everything she said was a riddle.
‘But you said you were working here tonight?’ Lorraine said.
‘On myself,’ Sonja said, and the peculiar resonance was back in her voice.
‘With a gun?’ Lorraine asked.
‘Smoothest tool of all,’ Sonja said, still not looking at Lorraine, and a smile spread across her face, as though she was looking at an unseen watcher. Then she turned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I sound like Raymond Vallance. I think about death a lot. Liquor makes me maudlin. But you can stop babysitting now.’ She poured herself more vodka and gave Lorraine a meaningful look. ‘I’ll never die drunk — in case people say I didn’t have the guts to do it sober.’
‘I used to think that,’ Lorraine said, ‘that I should have died. My husband left me too, you know.’ She knew somehow that, despite what Sonja had just said, she had to keep talking.
‘Did you get divorced?’ Sonja asked.
‘Yes, I did, and he got custody of the children. Rightly so — I wasn’t capable of looking after myself, never mind the kids.’ She lit a cigarette, no longer feeling like weeping, no longer feeling anything except the awful, cold guilt that she would carry to her grave.
‘Everyone who loves has a right to be loved, Lorraine,’ Sonja said. ‘Whatever happened in your past can’t change that.’
The sigh was long and deep, and Sonja noticed that Lorraine’s hand was shaking as she flicked the ash from her cigarette. ‘You want to bet?’
‘Try me,’ Sonja said softly.
‘OK. I was on duty, a few months after my partner had died. I had been drinking heavily. We’d been called out to what they thought was going to be a drug bust to act as backup because they said the kids were tooled up. There were four kids and they split up and ran. One ran past my patrol car, so I got out, chased him and cornered him in an alley. I gave him three warnings to stop or I would shoot. He didn’t stop, and I fired all six rounds. I couldn’t stop squeezing the trigger, even when he went down.’
She let the smoke drift from her pursed lips, then turned to look at Sonja. ‘He wasn’t armed. It was a Walkman he had in his hand, and he had earphones in so he couldn’t hear me. He was just a kid, and I killed him because I was drunk. If I’d been sober I would have fired a body shot.’
‘That’s hard to live with,’ Sonja said quietly. She seemed to be watching Lorraine with particular intensity.
Lorraine stiffened as she heard a sound outside. ‘Do you hear something?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ Sonja said evenly as she picked up the gun and cocked it. God, Lorraine thought, gooseflesh breaking out all over her body: she had meant what she had said about Vallance. Now they could both hear someone’s footsteps right outside the door, which still stood an inch ajar. Sonja turned round slowly, noiselessly, until the gun was aimed chest high at the door panels. After a moment they heard a knock.
‘Who is it?’ Sonja said. Her voice was sweet and pure as a bell, as though a longed-for visitor had finally called, and Lorraine saw the beatific calm of the central figure of her wood of women appear on her face.