The teacher, Mrs Wilkinson, smiled at him over the head of a little boy who was standing in front of her. He was talking almost without pausing for breath, all the time looking down at the wheel of a toy car he was spinning instead of at her.
“Excuse me, Terence, Jacob’s here with his daddy,” she said, easing past. The narrative continued without a break as the boy turned and followed her, still concentrating on the car wheel.
“Morning,” she said to Ben over the top of the monologue.
She was a plump woman in her forties, with a saint-like patience that made Ben feel both envious and mildly guilty. “Terence, why don’t you and Jacob go and see what Melissa’s doing?” The teacher gently ushered the boys towards the other children, and Ben tensed as he saw what was coming next.
“I was so sorry to hear about your wife,” she said, and the sympathy in her voice almost choked him.
He nodded, retreating from it. “Thanks. I, uh, I’ve arranged for someone to pick Jacob up this afternoon. Anyway. Got to dash.” He gave her the best smile he could manage and headed for the door before she could say anything else. He couldn’t bear to see the understanding look he knew she would be giving him. It was a look he was beginning to know well.
He hated it.
Outside the sun was still shining, and the air was still thick with the smell of cut grass. Ben took deep breaths as he walked through the peaceful scene. He felt he had no right to be in it. He kept his head down as he went back to his car. When he reached the gates he looked up and saw Sarah coming towards him.
It wasn’t her, of course. The impression lasted only an instant, the woman’s hair and clothes giving a fleeting illusion, but Ben felt as though he had been kicked in the heart. The woman gave him an odd glance as she came through the gates, and he realised he had stopped and was staring at her. He went quickly to his car and got in. He gripped the steering wheel and banged his head softly up and down.
“Oh, fuck, Sarah, why did you do it?” He sat with his head resting on the wheel for a while longer, then started the engine and drove away.
The studio was on the top floor of an old factory. He had taken a lease out on it when the lower three floors were almost derelict. Since then they had been split into units and let out to design companies, marketing agencies and recording studios, and Ben paid less for nearly twice as much floor space than any of the tenants in the cramped, post-renovation quarters.
He let himself in and turned off the alarm system. The sunlight was dazzling through the three large skylights he’d had fitted to replace the rotting originals, and through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the full white-painted length of the east-facing wall. In the afternoon it would be equally bright through the windows on the other side. One of the reasons he’d taken the place was because it was perfect for shooting in natural light; the only way he could have got more would have been either to go outside or have the roof taken off.
It also made it like a greenhouse. Ben turned on the big overhead fan, and as it cranked up like the idling blades of a helicopter, he went to the drawstrings that lowered the blinds over the skylights and windows. The sunlight was reduced to a soft, muted glow.
He slipped off his shoes and socks, enjoying the feel of the varnished floorboards on his skin. He preferred working barefoot in summer, although Sarah had grumbled about the state of his feet when he got home and made him wash them before he got into bed. It gave him a sense of freedom that he knew was slightly ridiculous, as he was as much dependent on the income from his photography — and on pleasing his clients — as any office worker. But he felt it put him in contact with the studio itself; feeling the bare boards beneath his feet, he could walk around without taking his eye from the viewfinder, relying on their touch alone to guide him.
He was arranging the big reflective screens for that day’s shoot when the door opened and Zoe came in. She flung her canvas rucksack on to one of the two overstuffed couches.
“Fucking Tube strikes.”
“Morning, Zoe.” She fanned herself with the tight black T-shirt that showed a band of skin above her white jeans. “I’m really sorry I’m late, but I was stuck in traffic on the fucking bus for nearly an hour before I gave up and walked, and now I’m sweating like a pig! God, what’s happened to your hair?”
“I felt like a change.”
Zoe tilted her head to one side, considering it. She was in her early twenties, slim but without the angular shapeliness of a model. Her own hair was cropped and currently dyed black, although the colour changed regularly. Not long ago it had been blonde, before that red. Once it had been green, the accidental result of a cheap dye. She hadn’t been fit to talk to for days.
“Looks okay,” she said. Judgment given, she resumed the heated account of her journey. Ben took no notice. Zoe was bad at mornings, and in the twelve months since he’d hired her as his assistant he’d grown to ignore her pre-eleven o’clock tirades. It was just her way of geeing herself up for the day.
He began sorting through a drawer for a screwdriver as she slammed around the studio. “Oh, great! We’re out of fucking milk!” The fridge door was banged shut. “Have they phoned to say what time the clothes are going to arrive? What time is it? Half past ten? Shit, they should be here by now! Where’s their fucking number?”
The waterfall of words and curses was actually quite soothing, a balm of normality after the solicitude he had been smothered in. The first day he had gone to the studio after Sarah had died, Zoe had awkwardly told him she was sorry, then crept around as though the slightest noise would make him shatter, shooting him anxious glances every few minutes until finally he had turned on her and told her to for God’s sake stop it. She had looked hurt and shocked, and Ben had thought, Jesus, please don’t let her start crying, because he didn’t think he’d be able to stand it. Then her cheeks had flared red and she’d thrown down the armful of clothes she had been carrying.
“Pardon me for fucking breathing!” It had put her in a bad enough mood to make her forget he was part of the alien species of bereaved and treat him like a normal person again, and pushed him back on to his precarious platform of self-control. Half-listening to Zoe berating the people responsible for delivering the models’ clothes for the shoot, Ben closed the drawer and began setting up the lights.
Thank God for this, he thought, fervently.
It was after seven when he pulled up outside Maggie and Colin’s house. They lived in a curving row of villas not far from the Portobello Road, with half a dozen steps running up to the heavy, lustrously-painted black front door. They had been there three years, and Ben wondered how soon it would be before they took the next step up the housing ladder. Not long, he guessed, judging by Colin’s success in the music law business, and Maggie’s capacity for advertising it.
Ben pressed the stiff brass bell and yawned, though not exactly from tiredness. The shoot had gone well, but the sense of satisfaction he’d felt had been snuffed the moment he emerged from his universe of angles, light and shade to an awareness of the real world again.
The door was answered by Scott, who greeted Ben with a brief lift of his chin before turning away and leaving him to come in and close the door himself. At nine he was already showing signs of being an objectionable little shit, although Ben wouldn’t have dreamed of telling Maggie or Colin that. He suspected that Colin already knew, but Maggie was overseeing to the point of blindness.