The chance didn’t arise because he laid low after the notorious Fistfight at the BR Corral. Ring his flat and the answering machine never inspired him to call back.
Sadie, my wife, predicted that Robin was finished. She is the bright half of the partnership, a watcher who sees more of the game. Keeps pouring the drinks, listens more than she talks. Sadie pointed out that the Ratcliffes were a modestly moneyed clan and Robin had a trust fund from some grandma or other.
“Just enough to keep him afloat, not enough to stop him feeling sour and hard-done-by, down the road.” She gave me a hug. “That’s why I stick with you — nothing like a working-class boy made good, they toil away from force of habit. Class isn’t everything, my love.” I’m sure she was just teasing.
It’s much easier to uphold “No man is an island” when doing nothing troublesome about it. I kept telling myself I’d hunt him out and gee him up, give him a name or two to approach — without making the effort. Robin might still be hurting and resent my intrusion, was the cop-out.
Gradually he slipped to the back of the filing cabinet. About a year later my shop offered a David Hockney reproduction lithograph for free, featuring it on the cover of the Saturday color supplement. Tiled floor, a director’s chair half in sunlight, lots of blue California sky. It put me in mind of Robin through being so unlike his hoodoo picture, and I wondered for all of ten seconds what that had been all about.
While no sounder on art than Robin, I have been known to put my nose into the occasional gallery. Now that I bothered to notice, there were no end of interiors and still lifes in myriad styles showing furniture and flooring. Half-consciously I would think, Not that one or It’s a plank floor or Can’t be those tiles, they’re glowing, really gladden the eye.
Sadie was first with news of Robin Ratcliffe. She heard from a mutual friend just back from vacation that Robin was living in Mexico as an upmarket beach bum, supposedly involved in a jet-ski rental venture but hardly knocking himself out over it. “Told you so,” Sadie said. “Trust Robbo to go to seed in a good climate.”
A similar report surfaced a long while afterwards, only this time Robin was loafing around the French Alps.
Then in the mid ’seventies we ran into each other during a baggage-handlers’ strike at Heathrow Airport. I’d been looking at Robin, among other castaways, for minutes before recognising him. Terrific tan and hair so sun-bleached that I’d taken it for a peroxide job.
He was pleased to see me and I was inquisitive, so the long delay became acceptable in a flash... Robin was on his way back to Cyprus, where by implication he was based these days. Good jumping-off spot for the entire Middle East, he said in a slightly defensive way I found puzzling.
Ah, great, I said, so you’re back in the business — what, freelancing, running other freelancers, where do you fit in? Vague and evasive, he talked of looking around, weighing up the market and seeking a niche; or maybe he’d try writing a book instead. Sounded uncannily like bone idleness to me.
Still, he was talkative enough on other matters, and I couldn’t decide whether to be embarrassed on his behalf — Robin was pushing forty, addressing someone digging his heels in at the approach of the big five-oh — or amused and compassionate. He enthused like a teenager. He had Met Somebody and she’d turned his life around.
“God, Charlie, fate and chance, eh? None of us knows what is for the best... It seemed the end of the world when the Respectable fired me but if they hadn’t, then I would never have met An — Annabelle — and that... Brrrr! Makes my blood run cold.” Robin laughed joyously enough to draw attention to us.
He had it bad, poor chump. They do, eternal bachelors of the heterosexual persuasion, on falling in love at last. Annabelle (Robin produced the hastily-altered name without hesitation next time around) had been the making of him, he enthused. “I was in a bad way, on the sly. It crept up on me. Well, that picture obsession... did I ever tell you about a picture that gave me the horrors?”
There’d been fleeting references, I agreed with a poker face. Robin was only half listening, a fault with besotted lovers. “My mind was... I dunno, an attic full of garbage I’d let pile up, cobwebs and dead flies and Lord knows what.” Another of those good-to-be-alive laughs. “She spring-cleaned me! Came along, opened all the windows... Oh, I wish you could meet her, you will one day.”
A little of that lasts me ages. “Married, I take it?” Why else would Robin stumble over naming her, but he gaped at me. He was rusty; good reporters don’t need too many clues.
“Yes,” he conceded, slightly cast down. “It’s not sordid, mind you. He’s old enough to be her father, it’s a hollow marriage. His career depends on having a wife; in fact, Annabelle’s probably the main reason he has a career. He’s agreed to divorce her as soon as he retires — I don’t want to talk about it.” But of course he did do, avoiding the goddess’s awkward marital status but extolling her peerless worth.
His mistress, Robin asserted with a trace of reproach, had been the only person to perceive that he was a seriously sick puppy. “She nursed me, just by talking, and turned me clean around. Somehow I’d let things warp me out of shape, you see. I mean, that gallery thing... Annabelle says the first thing we’ll do when she is free, is go to New York so I can spit in that old hag’s eye — metaphorically, of course.”
Only now that he could mock what had poisoned his peace of mind did Robin Ratcliffe tell me the full story of that gallery visit. He was celebrating release from self-generated torture, and championing his lover as a miracle worker.
He spoke of the previous Robin Ratcliffe as he might have of a stranger to be pitied for falling prisoner to a bizarre delusion. The recollection was punctuated by his head-wagging, “What an idiot!” or “That gives you an idea of how much trouble I was in.”
He was walking away from the camouflaged woman in the chair, still considering the concept of arrested motion and its depiction on canvas, when Robin stopped dead.
A voice, clear although unspoken, enquired coldly: What makes you so sure that she is not moving behind your back? His shoulders crawled and breathing took a conscious effort. Robin didn’t fear or suspect or torment himself with an impossible fantasy. He simply knew that behind his back the old woman was shifting on that beastly chair.
He did not want that to be so, he really didn’t. Crushed by overwhelming, imperious dread, Robin’s fear was total. If he ever saw her face... That would be bad, very, very bad.
It wasn’t horror-movie stuff, the new Robin Ratcliffe broke off to assure me. He hadn’t expected a stripped skull within the dark cage of bonnet, or a hideous face deformed by hatred and malice. It was just that if she set eyes on him, and he met her gaze...
“That’s the crazy part, I had no idea what would happen next, apart from it being unthinkably... well, not in my best interests,” said Robin, cocky enough now to be fake-pompous. “And there was something else — she’d been waiting for me. She was set there to recognise certain people, God knows how many or why, and if I hadn’t happened to wander in I’d have been safe. I mean, how daftly weird is that?”
Hence the subsequent nightmares. He’d be back in the gallery, but it was a split second after meeting the painted woman’s eye and indescribable ruin was his next heartbeat away.