‘Landscapes. The Fens. Leicestershire. I love the English countryside.’
She said, ‘I lived in the country when I was a girl. Are there figures in your landscapes?’
‘I paint in the early morning,’ he said, ‘when there is nobody about.’
‘To capture the light at dawn?’ Eva asked.
‘No,’ Alexander said, ‘people get worried when they see a black man in a field. I got to be well acquainted with the Leicestershire police. Apparently, Jews don’t ski and black men don’t paint.’
Eva said, ‘What other skills have you got?’
‘Carpentry. The usual van-man skills – painting and decorating, garden clearance, lugging stuff about. I speak fluent Italian and I was a bad boy for ten years, a wanker banker.’
What happened?’
He laughed. ‘It was good for the first five years. We lived in a big house in Islington, and I bought my mother a little house with a garden back home in Leicester. She likes to grub around in the dirt. But don’t ask me about the next five – I shoved too much stuff up my nose, my Smeg was full of stupidly expensive fizz. I wasted it and wasted myself. I missed the first five years of my kids growing up. I suppose I was dying – but nobody noticed, because we all were. I worked for Goldman Sachs. My wife didn’t like me any more.
We were going home in a car I’d only had for two days. It was too big for me, too powerful. She started to nag that I hadn’t seen the kids for over a week and that nobody worked sixteen hours a day.’ He looked Eva in the face and said, ‘I did work sixteen hours a day. It was crazy. I started to shout, she was screaming about my coke bill, I lost control, we ran off the road and hit a tree – a not particularly tall, weedy-looking tree. You wouldn’t have known she was dead. I ran home to Leicester with my kids.’
There was a long silence.
Then Eva said, ‘Please don’t tell me any more unhappy stories.’
‘I don’t make a habit of it.” Alexander said. ‘If you draw up a list of all the jobs you’d like me to do, I’ll price them up and give you a quote. The only problem might be that I have to pick my kids up from school…’ He paused. ‘Mrs Beaver, do you mind if I make an observation? There’s no coherence in your clothes.’
Eva was indignant. ‘How can there be coherence when I don’t know who I am? I sometimes wish we had to wear a uniform, like the Chinese did during the Cultural Revolution. They didn’t have to worry and dither over what to wear in the morning. They had a uniform -baggy trousers and a tunic. That’s what I want.’
‘Mrs Beaver, I know we’ve only just met,’ said Alexander, ‘but when you feel better, I’ll gladly go shopping with you, to warn you off culottes and harem trousers and anything sleeveless.’
Eva laughed. ‘Thanks. But I’m staying here, in this bed, for a year.’
A year?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got things to do. To sort out.’
Alexander sat down on the edge of the bed. Eva moved along to give him more room. She studied his face with great pleasure. It gleamed with health and the joy of living ‘He would make the world endurable for some lucky woman,’ she thought. ‘But not for me.’ One of his dreadlocks needed re-twisting. Eva took it automatically and was reminded of how she had plaited Brianne’s hair every junior school morning. She had sent her off with plaits and ribbons. And every afternoon Brianne had slouched out of school, the ribbons lost, the plaits unravelled.
Alexander put a hand on Eva’s wrist to gently restrain her. He said, ‘Mrs Beaver, you’d better not start something you can’t finish.’
Eva let the dreadlock fall.
‘It takes more time than you think,’ he said, softly. ‘I have to pick my kids up at four o’clock. They’re at a birthday party.’
‘I still have that “time to pick up the kids” alarm in my head,’ she said.
Later, when the component parts of the wardrobe had been taken outside, Eva asked Alexander how much she owed him.
He said, ‘Oh, give me fifty pounds, on top of what your husband has already paid me for shifting that double bed.’
‘Double bed?’ checked Eva. ‘From where?’
‘From his shed.’
Eva said nothing, but raised her eyebrows.
He asked, ‘Do you want me to take the wood away? It’s solid mahogany. I could make something out of it.’
‘Do what you like with it – set fire to it, anything. ‘Before he left he asked, ‘Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?’
For some reason, both he and Eva blushed. It was a moment. She was fifty, but she was better-looking than she knew.
She said, ‘You could take the rest of the furniture away for me.’
He said, ‘Everything?’
‘Everything. ‘Well… arrivederci, Signora.’
She laughed when she heard the van starting up. She had been to a circus once and the clown’s car had sounded very similar. She lay back on her pillows and strained her ears until there was nothing else to hear.
The bedroom was huge now the wardrobe was gone. She looked forward to seeing him again. She would ask him to bring some of his paintings.
She was curious to know whether they were any good or not.
15
Poppy was sprawled on Brianne’s bed, applying black mascara to her stubby lashes. Brianne was sitting at her desk, trying to complete an essay before the 2 p.m. deadline. It was 1.47 p.m.
Poppy dropped the mascara brush and it rolled across her white T-shirt. She growled, ‘Fucking fuckety fuck! Why don’t you buy a decent fucking mascara?’ She gave a little laugh – she knew she couldn’t go too far. She had very few friends left on her corridor. There had been incidents concerning the theft of food and cigarettes.
Brianne was staring out of the window, trying to find the final paragraph and equations to complete an essay her lecturers had entitled ‘Infinity: An Endless Conversation?’ Her view from the window was of identical accommodation blocks, young trees and rain clouds the colour of gunmetal. She had been there for two weeks, and she still missed her mother. She didn’t know how to make herself comfortable without all the small things Eva had done for her for as long as she could remember.
Brianne said, ‘My mother bought me these cosmetics, but I’ve never used them.’
‘You should,’ said Poppy. ‘You’re a proper minger. It must piss you off big time that your brother is actually beautiful. How cruel is that? Did nobody ever mention plastic surgery?’
Brianne’s hands froze on the keys of her laptop. She knew she wasn’t pretty, but she hadn’t thought that she was an actual minger.
‘No,’ she said, ‘nobody has ever mentioned that I need plastic surgery.’ Her eyes welled with tears.
‘Don’t go all emo on me. I believe in being cruel to be kind.’ Poppy laid an arm across Brianne’s shoulders. ‘I’ll tell you what you need.’
The essay deadline came and went while Poppy listed the defects that were going to ruin Brianne’s future, unless she ‘went under the knife’.
Poppy said, ‘No man gives a toss how clever a woman is. Well, no man worth having. All they care about is what we look like. How many guys have I slept with since the first day of uni?’
‘Loads,’ said Brianne. ‘Too many.’
‘Don’t be so fucking judgemental!’ shouted Poppy. ‘You know I can’t sleep on my own – not since my body was violated by that monster.’
Brianne was not curious about the ‘monster’. She knew he didn’t exist.
Poppy flung herself down on the bed and began to wail like a Middle Eastern grandmother at a freshly dug grave.
Brianne had thought that she was only mildly fond of her mother, but she desperately wanted to speak to her now. She went outside into the corridor and phoned Eva’s mobile, but all she got was the dead tone. She let herself into Brian Junior’s room.