We stop in a seafront pub and pay a ridiculous price for beers, reckless on the promise of Chloe’s success and being on holiday. Afterwards we trawl charity and second-hand shops for picture frames that she can re-use for her own work. We don’t find any, but buy an old instant camera that comes with half a dozen peel-apart films. We use them all on the seafront, counting down out loud as we wait for them to develop, only to find blank squares of emulsion underneath. Just one picture takes, of Chloe standing in front of the pier grinning as she poses like a model. She hates it but I hold it out of her reach when she laughingly tries to snatch it away. At her insistence, we book into a B&B that’s well above our budget and eat a garlic-laden dinner in an Italian restaurant. We’re more than a little drunk when we go back to the hotel, shushing each other in a fit of giggles as we unlock our room, and then make even more noise making love.
After three days we catch the train back to London, an indulgence Chloe grandly insists we can now afford. We arrive back in the late afternoon, to the news that the gallery owner has been declared bankrupt, the gallery’s opening cancelled and all its assets seized. Including Chloe’s paintings.
‘They can’t do that! The bastards, they can’t just do that!’
I try to tell her she’ll get the paintings back eventually, but I know it isn’t just them. It’s the opportunity they represented.
‘Leave me alone,’ she says flatly when I try to console her.
‘Chloe…’
‘I mean it! Just leave me alone!’
So I do. I’m glad for the excuse to go out. I want some time to come to terms with this myself, not so much the disappointment as the shameful sense of relief I felt when I heard. Nothing is going to change after all.
I consider calling Callum but I don’t really want to talk to anyone. There’s a retrospective season of French film at an art-house cinema in Camden. Along with half a dozen people I sit through a back-to-back screening of Alain Resnais’s
It’s raining outside, and the buses are full of commuters on their way home. When I get back the flat is in darkness. I switch on the lights. Chloe is sitting on the floor, the torn and broken canvases of her art scattered around her. Tubes of oil paint have been squeezed and discarded, smearing everything in a rainbow frenzy. The easel holding my unfinished portrait has been knocked over, the painting stamped on.
Chloe doesn’t acknowledge me. Her face is streaked where she’s dragged her oil-coated fingers across it. I pick my way gingerly through the littered canvases, slipping a little on a patch of paint. When I sit beside her and pull her to me she doesn’t resist.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I tell her, emptily.
‘Yeah,’ she says. Her voice is the only thing in the paintsmeared room that’s dull. ‘Of course it will.’
THE SCAFFOLD CREAKS and sways like a tired ship. I climb the ladder one rung at a time, resting my knee on the wooden bars rather than using my injured foot. It’s not much harder than going into the loft. At the top I test the rickety-looking platform before cautiously stepping onto it, gripping the horizontal scaffolding bars for support.
The scaffold feels dizzingly high. Still, the view from up here is even better than from the loft window. Resting to catch my breath, I can see the lake down in the woods and beyond that the surrounding fields and hills. It brings home more than ever just how cut off the farm is. I spend a few more minutes enjoying that fact, then I turn to see what I’ve let myself in for.
Half of the front of the house and one of its sides is covered with scaffold. Mortar has been hacked out from between the stones, and some of them have been completely removed and left on the platform. A lump hammer and chisel lie nearby. They’re both rusted and the hammer is as heavy as a brick, its wooden handle worn smooth with use. The chisel is angled like a knife rather than having a flat blade like the one lying in the cobbles below. When I prod at the wall with it, the mortar crumbles easily. If the entire house is like this it’s a miracle it’s still standing.
Suddenly I’m convinced I’m making a mistake. I know how to mix mortar and I’ve tried my hand at laying bricks, but that was years ago. My few months spent as a labourer on a building site hardly prepared me for anything like this.
I step blindly away from the wall and catch my crutch on one of the stones scattered on the platform. I stumble against the horizontal scaffolding bar that acts as a railing, and for an instant I’m teetering out into space with nothing between me and the courtyard thirty feet below. Then I haul myself back, causing the tower to squeak and sway in protest.
Slowly, the motion subsides. I rest my head against the pole.
‘What’s happening?’
