Yet there had been no way of knowing that would happen when he met Orla. Their paths crossed at a shambles of an art exhibition off the King’s Road, which he’d been talked into attending while Sorrel had been ill in bed with flu. On being introduced to Orla, she’d immediately mocked him for being an Economics student. ‘Not a creative bone in your body, I’ll wager,’ she’d said.
‘Creative enough to recognise a load of rubbish when I see it,’ he’d replied, looking at the monstrosity of a picture on the wall behind them – a large canvas that looked like it had had a bucket of blood thrown at it.
‘How do you know I didn’t paint that?’
‘I don’t. But I’d still call it rubbish even if it had Picasso’s name attached to it. Which I dare say makes me a Philistine in your opinion.’
‘I’m sure you couldn’t give a damn what my opinion is.’
Dressed in a pair of khaki dungarees splatted with paint, the legs of which were rolled up to her knees, and with her feet encased in an ugly pair of workman’s boots, she was Sorrel’s polar opposite. Her eyes were ringed with kohl and her hair, dyed all the shades of the rainbow, was bundled loosely on her head like a badly wrapped parcel. She made an arresting sight compared to all the other girls there, and by God she knew it! It was, he came to realise, all part of the carefully manufactured role she was playing, one that was guaranteed to gain attention.
There was something about her that intrigued him and he’d later offered to see her home, if only to see how she’d react. ‘Yeah, why not?’ she said. ‘Something you should know,’ she then added, ‘I live in a squat, so don’t be thinking I’ll be asking you in for coffee and After Eight mints.’
‘I wouldn’t have imagined you’d live anywhere but a squat,’ he’d responded, amused.
‘Of course it’s just for effect,’ she’d later said, ‘slumming it is a necessary rite of passage if one is going to suffer for one’s art.’
And Orla did suffer in so many ways for her art as a sculptor. Nothing she produced was ever good enough in her opinion, although to those who bought her bronze statues, they were beautiful pieces of art to be treasured. She sold well, steadily in a gallery in London as well as in Norwich and Cambridge. Ironically she hated parting with anything she’d made, regarding each statue as a child – an imperfect and vulnerable child, which needed to stay with its mother and be protected. While most of her pieces were of wildlife, she became obsessed with children, from curled newborn babies to early teens. Callum, Rachel and Jenna became her inspiration and had posed for many hours for her when they were young.
For much of their early married life, Orla had been burdened with the longing for a child of her own, but it was not to be. The fault, she was told by a less than sympathetic doctor, was down to a botched abortion she’d had when she was sixteen years old. She never spoke of the hows and the whys of that abortion, refusing point blank to explain how she’d become pregnant. She even swore Alastair to secrecy, made him promise he would never breathe a word of it to his friends. He could only conclude that the experience was hugely painful for her to discuss, and that her Catholic upbringing had caused her more harm than good.
The guilt of her stain, as she sometimes referred to her inability to have a child, both fuelled her work and tore her apart. Alastair had been all for adopting a baby, but Orla had been adamantly opposed. ‘What if I couldn’t love that child, knowing it wasn’t truly mine? What if I grew to hate it? No, no, it’s too big a risk.’ Alastair had pointed out that Danny had been adopted and look how successful that had proved to be for him and his adopted parents. But Orla, with her penchant for superstition and guilt, could not accept that she would be blessed in the same way. So she poured her maternal instinct into her work.
She ran classes too, wanting to pass on her passion to others. She was well respected within her field; articles had been written about her in various journals and magazines, which only added to the pressure she put herself under, always striving to do her best.
When he first got to know Orla, he would never have guessed at her deep-seated insecurities. To him, at twenty-one, she was fascinatingly different to the girls he’d previously known – she could be remote and self-contained, but also passionate and almost childlike. She would wake him in the middle of the night and say, ‘Let’s go for a picnic!’ There by the side of the bed would be a hamper basket filled higgledy-piggledy with items of food from the fridge.
In the mistaken belief it would make a good impression on her, he had once sent her a large bouquet of roses. Orla had hated the gesture, had told him never to do anything so disgustingly ostentatious ever again.
She was anartiste– which was her way of justifying her every character trait, good or bad. And yes, she could be bad, extraordinarily bad – wilful, stubborn, demanding and spectacularly self-absorbed. She had loved a stormy row; the more furiously angry words exchanged, the better. On one occasion, in a fit of rage, she had thrown a glass paperweight at him, which had caught him on the side of his cheek and left a perfectly round mark for several days, just as if he’d been punched. She had been mortified, as she always was at her loss of control. Invariably the stormy rows were followed by intense make-up sex that culminated in her crying in his arms, begging his forgiveness.
He had accepted it all as another outlet for her guilt, a means to expunge the self-hate that had increasingly intensified and begun to eclipse the dazzling radiance of her personality. It was that brilliance, coupled with her childlike vulnerability, that he had fallen in love with all those years ago. He’d been bowled over by her uniqueness, and her insistence that she demanded in others only what she demanded of herself.
Her death had consumed him, haunted his every waking and sleeping moment, alternately filling and draining him of all emotion, but paramount was the feeling of anger. He had not known before her death that one could be angry and grief-stricken simultaneously.
That was why, and as unseemly as it must have appeared, coming so soon after the inquest and her funeral in October last year, he had gone away; he had needed to put as much distance between himself and Linston End, and ultimately Orla and her death. He’d grown scared that if he stayed he would go mad with guilt and grief, always fearful that he would be blamed.
Never did he think he would then experience the next pivotal moment in his life, that of meeting Valentina. Just as Orla had been dramatically different to Sorrel, so too had Valentina been different to Orla. She was refreshingly straightforward, there were no artistic or temperamental foibles at play, just a candid simplicity. He wished there was a way to explain that to his oldest friends. But they would never understand just how far to the brink Orla had pushed him.
Now, sitting at the breakfast bar absently spreading marmalade onto a piece of buttered toast, and once again mulling over the reaction of his friends, as well as that of Jenna, Callum and Rachel, a stirring of annoyance began to make itself felt. What right did they have to question how he led his life, or his desire to start afresh somewhere new? Was it because they were jealous, stuck in their ruts as they were? Lacking the imagination to do anything out of the ordinary themselves, would they deny him the right to do so himself, to grab this chance to be happy?
He stared at the piece of toast in his hand and bit into it angrily, thinking again of Simon and his accusations late on Saturday night after everyone else had gone to bed.
Simon may not have intended to question Alastair’s state of mind, but that was exactly what he’d done. ‘Look, mate,’ he’d said, ‘we know it’s been a hell of a time for you, to put it mildly, and it’s understandable that you would want to, well you know, get back into the saddle, so to speak, but this feels all wrong to me. And if you really thought about it, you’d see that I’m right.’
‘I havereallythought about it and it feels totally right,’ Alastair had replied.
‘But to sell Linston End, that can’t feel right to you, surely? Trust me, I know you, and I know you wouldn’t do something like that unless you’d lost the plot. That’s what grief does to you, makes you behave illogically.’
‘I think you’d better be quiet now and go to bed, Simon, before you annoy me.’
The next morning, Simon had apologised, acknowledging that he had been out of order. ‘Too much wine,’ he’d said, ‘it made me shoot my big mouth off. You know what I’m like.’ Naturally Alastair had pretended no offence had been taken; that Simon, along with the others, was just looking out for him.
The rest of the weekend had been a case of them all tiptoeing around him, desperate to say the right thing. Never before had the atmosphere between them felt so strained or so false. Oh yes, they all asked questions about Valentina, forcing themselves, he supposed, to show interest, and so he had filled them in with all the details he felt they needed to know: that her parents were Russian and had emigrated to France where she was born and that she grew up in Paris. Her first husband, whom she’d married when she was only twenty, had been French and after no more than a couple of years of marriage he had left her for a man, finally finding the courage to admit to her, and himself, that he was gay.
Her second husband, a Russian art dealer called Ivan Petrov and many years her senior, had died three years ago. She had a stepson and a stepdaughter in their mid-thirties called Nikolai and Irina, both of whom had been educated at boarding school in England.
For many years she had worked for the UN as a translator. Her full name was Valentina Moreau-Petrov-Zima – Zima being her maiden name and to which she had reverted to make things easier. Her pragmatic approach to life appealed to Alastair enormously. ‘No regrets,’ she said, ‘that is my golden rule in life. No matter what mistakes I make, I will not regret them.’
