Summer Lies Bleeding (13 page)

Pulling the blanket around him, he starts to scroll through the internet. He is wide awake now but his eyes sting as he types a familiar name into the search engine. It has been almost twenty-four hours since he last checked but he needs to know if anything has changed, if there have been any developments.

The search engine yields 1.9 million results for ‘Seb Bailey'. Mark clicks on the top result: Seb's Twitter page. A thumbnail photograph of Seb sitting in a park with his wife and daughter comes up immediately and, as the page develops, a black and white landscape photograph of the words Asphodel Art provides a backdrop to the happy family shot.

Mark scrolls down the page to see if @asphodel1 has tweeted anything new. There are a couple of retweets – one about an arts project in Manchester looking for funding; the other a tweet from @therosegarden with a link to the opening night menu – but nothing directly from Seb since the last one on 21 August when he had posted a rather cryptic message:

From a puddle to a lake – almost finished x

Mark reads the tweet over and over, trying to make sense of it but it baffles him just as much tonight as it did when he
first read it almost a week ago. He scrolls back up the page and clicks on @therosegarden. The page fills with deep pink roses set against a black background; a photograph of a tall, elegant Soho townhouse sits in the foreground. Unlike Seb's page, Yasmine's seems to be updated pretty regularly. Mark reads:

Two days to go until doors open! So excited! 1hr ago

Watching my o/h work his magic on the walls x4 hrs ago

She'd probably typed the last one just after he saw them. He wonders if they are there every day. Probably. There will be lots to prepare, getting everything ready for the press launch. He scrolls further down the page but the rest of the tweets are familiar, he must have read this page a hundred times at least.

He goes back to the search results. He is working on autopilot now; he could recite the information on the screen verbatim but still he has to check each day just in case some new piece of information comes up. It is not an obsession, he tells himself, it is reconnaissance, evidence gathering. This is what his father would have done before going into battle – find out as much about the enemy as possible, know their strengths, their weaknesses, their routines and habits. Know thy enemy.

Mark clicks on Seb's Wikipedia page. A fuzzy photograph of Seb in a black suit, holding a glass of champagne is displayed in the right-hand corner. Underneath is a brief biography:

Born: 18 February, 1975 (age 37), Garsington, Oxfordshire

Occupation: Artist

Spouse: Yasmine Bailey (nee Rachi)

Children: One daughter, Cosima

Then a link to his website:

www.asphodelart.co.uk

Though he knows the information by heart, Mark cannot help reading on:

Sebastian Bailey is an English painter and gallery owner …

Sebastian studied Fine Art at the Royal College, graduating in 1997 …

In 2005, he and his business partner Henry Walker launched the art gallery Asphodel in Battersea, South London … as well as exhibiting work by leading British and international artists, the gallery also supports new talent through its scholarship scheme …

Bailey has exhibited around the world and in 2006 he made the headlines when his oil on canvas painting entitled ‘Rotherhithe' sold to a US dealer for a six-figure sum
.

In late 2011, he was asked to produce a series of paintings as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrating London life. These paintings were exhibited around London in the build-up to the 2012 Olympic Games; the most prominent being a three-metre high canvas, entitled ‘Running Out of Time' which was displayed outside Leicester Square Tube Station
.

Underneath this biography is a list of links. Mark scans his eyes across them then pauses at the bottom link – a new one. He reads the name: Sir Miles Alfred Bailey. Curiously, he clicks on the link and another Wikipedia page opens up.

Sir Miles Alfred Bailey CBE, QGM, KCB (Born 7th November, 1939, Edinburgh) is a retired British Army officer …

Mark sits up in bed, his eyes widening as he reads the words again. British Army Officer.

He tries to read the rest of the page but his head feels hot and clammy, the words float across his eyes without settling:

… educated at Bryanston School and Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst
.

Military Career: Falklands War, Bosnian War, Kosovo …

Mark's heart thuds against his chest, an ice-cold shiver flutters through his body. The Falklands War. His father's war. He looks away from the screen and stares at the door, as if the answer lies somewhere out in the darkness of the room. He throws his phone onto the floor but the screen stays alight, illuminating the rest of Sir Miles Alfred Bailey's life: his two children Sebastian and Claire, his ex-wife Elizabeth Stanley, daughter of a South African landowner, now a resident of Knightsbridge, his new wife, Barbara Picard, a concert pianist with whom he lives in a grand country house in Somerset. But that information is lost to the scuffed, brown carpet; it is nothing compared to the words Mark now rolls around inside his head like a grenade.

A British Army Officer; the Falklands War. So Bailey had a father who had fought in that war, the war that had haunted Mark's childhood, turned his father mute, made him a pariah among the Thatcher-hating union men in the pub. Bailey had gone through that too, then, thinks Mark, experienced what he had: the tight feeling in the chest when his mam turned on the news; the roll calls, Goose Green … Bailey had gone through that too. A pinprick of recognition opens in Mark's consciousness letting in a miniscule shaft of light; a shared experience, a shared pain. But then Zoe's face appears before him and the light fades.

There is no greater pain than that, he thinks, no greater pain than what happened to Zoe. Fuck it, he spits. Bailey's father was an officer, a fucking Rupert. He was as far removed from Mark's father and his background as it is possible to be. He had heard his father talking about officers with his army mates – there had been a couple of half-decent ones, men his father had respected but Mark has made up his mind that Sir Miles Alfred Bailey was one of the bad ones. He can see the man in his head now, jowly red face, small cruel beady eyes, hawkish nose, an upper class tosser who lived on another planet from the men. Only by thinking like this will he have the strength to see it through.

‘I wish you could hear me, Dad,' Mark whispers into the hot, cloggy air. ‘I'm not going to let you down, like I did with Zoe. I'm going to rip that man's life apart, like ours was ripped apart. Can you hear me, Dad?'

Somewhere down the corridor a toilet flushes and he hears footsteps thudding past then the sound of a door slamming.

He turns over and pulls the thin quilt up to his neck. The news has rattled him, but he can do this, he really can. If he keeps focused, if he carries his father's war inside him these next few days, then he can take this to the end.

‘Come on, Cosima, it's almost eight,' shouts Seb, trying to make his voice heard above the rumble of the boiling kettle and the shouting weather forecaster on BBC Breakfast News.

He sets the table: two glass tumblers, two earthenware cereal bowls, two spoons. It is just him and Cosima for breakfast this morning. Yasmine had already left for the restaurant when Seb's alarm went off at seven. He hadn't heard her get up, get dressed and leave, but then he never does; Yasmine has it down to a fine art now, creeping silently out of bed, tip-toeing along the passage, making sure the bathroom door is closed as she takes a shower. Seb's father, who stayed with them for a couple of days over Christmas, joked that Yasmine would have made a good SAS soldier, with her ability to enter and leave a building like a silent shadow.

Seb feels better this morning. The black mood that had settled on him last night seems to have dissipated. Nothing like a good night's sleep for a clear head, he thinks to himself as he
ladles steaming porridge into the bowls. As he leans across the table, he becomes aware of a presence behind him. He turns to see Cosima in the doorway. She is wearing her lilac furry dressing gown and her long curly hair is tangled, the fringe matted to her forehead.

‘Come on, sleepy,' he says, pouring fresh orange juice into the tumblers. ‘We've got a busy day ahead and you're off to Gracie's house, remember? Just think, a full day looking after those guinea pigs of hers.'

Cosima makes a grunting noise as she shuffles into the room and plonks herself down onto the chair. Seb smiles to himself as he prepares the coffee; his daughter is certainly not a morning person, yet neither was he at that age. In the long summer holidays back from boarding school with its 6 a.m. wake-up calls and freezing cold showers, he would lie in bed until midday, buried under his quilt, away from the world, alone with his dreams.

He sits down at the table next to Cosima. She takes a large swig of orange juice then puts down her glass and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Seb watches her as she picks up her spoon and starts to eat the porridge. She is not a baby anymore, he thinks. She is becoming a person in her own right.

He remembers when she was about a year old he had been looking after her on his own one afternoon. She had just started to move onto more solid foods – sticks of carrot, slices of apple, bread rolls, cubes of cheese – and she was sitting in
her high chair munching away merrily on a piece of apple when Seb's phone had rung. He had picked it up from the table on the other side of the room – he can't remember who it was now, someone from the office, maybe – and spoken for a few seconds when he heard the most awful noise, a rasping choking noise. He turned and saw his baby girl, her eyes bulging, her face red and contorted. He dropped the phone and ran towards her, desperately trying to unhook her from the straps of the highchair. Then he hauled her out, his mind utterly blank, panic enveloping his entire body. He did the first thing that came into his head – he shoved his fingers down her tiny little throat, something he would later discover was the worst thing possible to do. But his hands managed to get a hold of the scrap of apple that was blocking her airways and he pulled it out in one swipe. It was horrendous, Cosima started screaming, he was shaking and he clutched her to his chest and rocked her for what seemed like hours but was actually only a few minutes, because that was when Yasmine came home. The horror of those few seconds when he thought his little girl might choke to death prompted him to take a first-aid course. He had been so vulnerable, he had no idea what to do and that terrified him.

Now looking at her eating her porridge, a fine girl of six, he thinks how precarious every little stage is. Though he is less afraid of her choking now, there are new concerns, new dangers to look out for – talking to strangers being the biggest
one as Cosima is such a chatty, outgoing child, trusting and open. And as she grows up there will be other dangers, ones that he won't be able to protect her from …

‘Can we switch over to the cartoons?' Cosima's voice interrupts his thoughts. She is pointing her spoon at the small, flat-screen television that stands on the kitchen worktop, wedged between various open cookery books and a thick wooden chopping board. The bright red graphics of BBC Breakfast flash across the screen accompanied by sharp, tinny music. The cartoons would be a welcome respite from this, thinks Seb.

‘All right,' says Seb, picking up the remote control. ‘But just a couple, okay? We'll have to be getting ready in a bit.'

‘Thanks, Daddy,' says Cosima, flashing her widest, gappy smile. She is starting to wake up now and her eyes dance as she follows the movement of the little cartoon mouse in a tutu and ballet slippers as it pirouettes across the screen.

Seb finishes his porridge and drains his cup of coffee then takes the dishes over to the sink. He picks up his iPad from the worktop and scrolls through his online calendar. Each day is filled with appointments, lunches, dinners, meetings, reminders and work schedules and today, 28 August, is no different. He glances down the page:

10 a.m.: Drop Cosima at Gracie's – Wandsworth Common

11 a.m.: Meeting Vita from Royal Opera House re: poss commission @Asphodel

1 p.m.: Lunch with Henry at Chelsea Arts Club

3–5 p.m.: Painting

5:30 p.m.: Collect Cosima

And there it is; almost every minute of the day accounted for, every spare moment filled. But it has to be this way, otherwise all would descend into chaos. He and Yasmine sit together every Sunday morning and compare their diaries, making sure there are no overlapping appointments. They made a decision early on that as far as possible, one of them should be with Cosima, and if that couldn't happen then Maggie would step in. Nannies and childminders were completely out of the question and anyway, Seb's hours are a lot more flexible than Yasmine's and he was happy to take on the primary carer role. Yet they still have difficult times. The restaurant launch has meant that Yasmine is often in Soho from early morning until last thing at night, and Seb has only just finished a big project for the Cultural Olympiad creating eight giant portraits of real Londoners that have been displayed around the city. From January to June, he was pretty much locked away in his studio at the back of the gallery, emerging late at night to eat a hurried dinner before falling into bed and waking up to do it all over again. That period was tough, he missed Cosima terribly, but thank goodness for Maggie stepping in as always, making everything okay.

But it will all be worth it, he tells himself as he closes the calendar. He and Yasmine are laying the foundations not just
of their own future but Cosima's too, and there aren't many people who can say that they earn a living, a good living from doing the thing they love. The late nights and long hours are a small price to pay for the happiness Seb feels he is creating for his family.

‘Come on then, tatty head,' he says, as the closing credits of
Angelina Ballerina
flicker across the screen. ‘Time to get ready.'

‘Oh, Daddy,' moans Cosima.

Seb is opening the blinds at the window. The sky is bright and clear and a hazy sun is filtering through the trees in the park. There are people walking their dogs, others are jogging, some are doing both.

‘Right,' he says, clapping his hands as he turns from the window and looks at his daughter who is sitting at the table stirring the remnants of her porridge sulkily. ‘I'm going to time you and if you're ready in ten minutes we can have take-away pizza tonight. Just don't tell Mum, okay?'

She looks up at him and raises her eyebrows. ‘Ham and pineapple?'

‘Ham and pineapple,' he agrees. ‘And a tub of Cherry Choc ice-cream if you're ready in five.'

She jumps up from the table and disappears down the corridor, leaving Seb standing at the window. An old, lumpy dog stops outside, cocks his leg and pisses against the lamppost. ‘Oh, yes,' thinks Seb. ‘Another day in London town.'

*

Even before Kerstin opens the door she knows that something is wrong. She felt it as she crossed Green Park and stepped onto St James's Street just a few minutes ago; a strange sensation of change, of time altering, the silent inhalation of breath the world takes before one age gives way to another. It stays with her as she slowly climbs the stairs, as she steps onto the third floor landing and carefully types the numbers 6043 into the white plastic security panel.

It is such a strong feeling, that when she eventually opens the door and steps into the reception area of Sircher Capital it is like she already knows, has had a prior warning that things are not the same.

A rather cross-looking young woman, pale, with a doughy face and thin, bobbed, auburn hair, is sitting behind the reception desk, occupying the place that, yesterday, belonged to someone else. Like the art that mysteriously appears on the walls, someone had smuggled this girl into the office overnight, or so it seems to Kerstin. She hadn't particularly liked Susie, the last receptionist, had in fact found her loud and brash, an annoying presence, but a familiar one; part of the landscape of the office, like a desk or chair. The girl sitting here unnerves Kerstin with her newness, her strangeness, her out-of-place-ness. If she had known yesterday that there would be a new receptionist she could have prepared herself for the change. Doesn't Lindsay, the office manager, think it important to tell when the personnel changes or does everything
have to be thrust on them, like the ever-changing artwork and Cal's choice of lunch, to keep them on their toes.

‘Good morning,' says the receptionist, a thin, blank smile flickering across her impenetrable face, and Kerstin feels something die inside as she smiles politely and turns left into the office.

There is something unreal about the receptionist, about all the receptionists that come and go in this place; before Susie there was Christine, a bespectacled blonde from Northern Ireland; before her there was a black American girl called Hilary and before her someone else and someone else and someone else, a long line of them spreading back in time like holograms, fluid half-people, they seem like to Kerstin, propping up the beams of London without being seen, bit-players coming on and saying their lines – like this one's ‘Good morning' – before disappearing into the shadows.

The issue of the receptionist bothers Kerstin as she sits down at her desk and turns on her computer; it bothers her as she opens up the unfinished report which now stands at twelve-and-a-half pages and tries to ignore Cal's loud post-mortem of his dinner last night. She tries to focus as she scrolls through her emails but it feels like her brain is stuck.

Familiar names flash in front of her as she mentally notes which need immediate attention, which can wait and which are pointless, and then she sees a name that she doesn't recognise: Honey Vision PR. Probably spam but she clicks on it anyway. The
screen fills with black and then an outline of a tree emerges, followed by white fairy lights, spindly tables and chairs – a line drawing developing in front of her eyes like a photograph in a darkroom. Then the music starts, soft Moroccan voices and a hypnotic guitar, strumming the same vibrato note slow at first then faster and faster, the voices rising to a crescendo as the screen fills with rose petals falling down from the darkened ‘sky' of the picture. As they settle they merge and form a set of words in pinks and reds and deep orange: Launch Party. The words then dissolve and the petals scatter and form a set of numbers: 29.08.12. The music grows louder and louder as the petals explode into the sky like fireworks then sprinkle across the screen as though tiny fireflies, dancing and twisting, jumbling and untangling themselves until, again, they reassemble and form a set of letters. The voices stop and the guitar strums one solitary note over and over while the words the petals have spelled grow bigger and bigger until they fill the screen, obliterating the tables and chairs and fairy lights. Kerstin feels like she has been hypnotised as she reads the name: THE ROSE GARDEN, then watches as it slowly fades and the screen grows dark.

‘I see you got your invitation. It's cool isn't it?' Cal's voice snaps her out of the spell and she quickly closes the email.

‘Yes, it's nice,' she says.

‘Will you be going?' asks Cal, leaning back in his chair.

Kerstin shrugs, hoping that by not engaging Cal he will take the hint and leave her be.

‘I bet you won't,' he says, rapping his fingers on the desk. ‘You never come out; I mean I've worked here two years and not once have I seen you outside this office. We'd all love it if you came to at least one office night out.'

There is nothing Kerstin would like less, she thinks, but his use of the plural unsettles her. So they all talk about her when she is not there? When they are on their ‘office nights out', they huddle together and pick her apart; probably egged on by Sharon Porter, the horse-faced PA to Dominic Stratton who has been watching her like a hawk for the past few months. Should she be worried?

Suddenly Cal leans over her desk and clicks the computer mouse.

‘What are you doing?' She is horrified that he has touched her computer and she tries to rack her brain as to how many sets of counting she will have to complete to remove the taint of his sweaty hands from the mouse.

Cal grins at her as he walks across to the printer on the far side of the room.

She stares at the mouse in disbelief; how can she work today? How can she even begin to touch it now he has had his hands all over it?

‘Here you go.'

She looks up and sees him holding out the printed invitation. She will not take it; all at once her whole world has
become as filthy as a cess-pit; her carefully controlled workspace has been violated in the most horrendous way.

‘Here you go,' he repeats, leaning across the desk and placing the invitation on top of her in-tray. Now you've no excuse not to come.'