What We Thought We Knew by Claire Dyer

Author:Claire Dyer [Dyer, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Publishers
Published: 2024-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Part 4 – Late Spring, Twenty-three Years Later

It’s Wednesday, and Nic Bradley slides the car park ticket into his wallet and then leans in to pick up his portfolio case from the back seat. He’s unusually nervous, but he shouldn’t be. He’s done this many times before, but putting his work in front of people is still a difficult thing for him to do. However, as he’s sitting in his studio, brush in hand, he does sometimes wonder what the point of it is if he doesn’t let his pictures speak for him. If he keeps them to himself, it’s like he’s being gagged, that the story he wants to tell is being whispered in back rooms to shadowy people and not, as he thinks it should be, shouted out from the rooftops. “I cocked up,” he wants to holler in amongst the concrete pillars of the multi-storey. “And I want you, whoever you are looking at my paintings, signed with the name I gave myself to hide my regret, to read this in every brushstroke, every shade of blue and to know this and know how sorry I am.”

You’d think, he muses as he strides to the lifts, that by now I would have been able to let it go. But he’d loved her, and he hadn’t expected to. It was supposed to be a mild flirtation, just something to pass the time like the others had been, and he’d expected that when it was over, he would have been able to move on, still married, still with his kids, still with everything intact. What he hadn’t counted on was the destruction, both that he imposed on himself and that done to him by others.

That first night and the following morning in the motel near Birmingham – part contrived, part-accidental – had, he sometimes thought later, sealed it for him. From somewhere deep down, near his navel, something that had been embedded and hidden had come loose and a torrent of feelings had crashed over his head, and he’d wanted her again and again and again. He kept on wanting her. In the end, he’d had to try and persuade her to stop working for him.

“Look,” he’d said. “I just think it’s best. It’s going to be too difficult otherwise.”

“But it means we won’t see each other as often,” she said, her face open, smooth, loveable, her eyes clear and shining. She’d turned round to look at him, spoon in one hand, coffee jar in the other in the tiny kitchenette of her bedsit. She’d been naked and he hadn’t been able to drag his eyes away from her. Her breasts still bore the blush from his stubble, her tight, flat stomach led down to where he’d tasted her. He’d wanted to wrap her up and never let her go. “Well?” she’d said. “We won’t, will we?”

“No,” he’d replied. “But I still think it’s for the best. Tina’s going to guess before long.”

Thinking back, it was about then that he’d wanted to start the whole shouting thing.

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