Oh shit, thinks Stella. It wasn’t loss it was internet dating. Loss was May, autumnal theme. Dead leaves, etc.
“Have you had any hits? Have you had a date?”
“Oh yes, lots,” lies Stella. “In fact, I am engaged.” She hides her hands under the table.
“Engaged? Well, that is lucky! Congratulations.” Winter gives a dry, unconvinced laugh. “I will look forward to an invite.”
“It will be a summer wedding,” the lie gets larger, “something intimate, but tasteful. On an island,” Stella adds.
“Well done,” Winter says, as though Stella, the last one out of the stalls, has won a race. The startling news has made her forget Stella’s deadline – for now.
This is not the first time Stella has lied to her boss. “You have got a child, Stella? Otherwise I’ll get Yvette to write the childrearing article.”
“Oh, yes,” Stella had lied. “I have a five-year-old. His name is Crispin.” Afterwards she is amazed at herself. Crispin?
Stella can’t work during lunch. At two the lift doors open and Marge can’t wait to show Stella what she has in her hands.
“I’m meant to be working,” hisses Stella, “but I can’t. Something has happened to Timothy. I just know it.”
“This is important,” says Marge, her eyes ablaze as if she has the answer. She is holding a newspaper. “Do you know what the weird thing is?” Marge has eyes like a goldfish and the most beautiful peachy skin and pouty lips.
“What is the weird thing, Marge?”
“I went to that coffee shop you always go to, the one across the road. This was on the table, open at this page.” She thwacks the paper down on Stella’s desk and stabs it with her brown nail-polished finger. “I mean, who reads the obituary page, apart from that weirdo Timothy? Don’t you see what this means?”
Stella reads. Marge is still talking, but she doesn’t hear her. “I have to go,” she says. She grabs her bag and stuffs the newspaper into it. “I’ll bring it back,” she assures Marge. Before her colleague can stop her she is across the floor and in the lift.
On the bus to Observatory she tries to phone Timothy.
The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try again later.
There is some terrible mistake. She opens the paper and stares at the print.
Ivor Woodall died at his home in Observatory, Cape Town, on Wednesday, 25 September, aged 42.
Why hadn’t Timothy called her?
Stella gets off opposite the hospital, walks down Main Road, turns left, left again, then right into Kingston Road. She stops. Her whole life slows down in that moment, from medically induced buoyancy to what was there before, to layers of feeling, to sadness, to memory.
She walks slowly down to the gate of No 54 and rings the bell. There is no answer. She hesitates, then slides her hand through the wooden slats of the fence and unbolts the latch. It’s a trick that Ivor taught them when they first joined his class. “Because, darlings, I might be in the bath.”
When she closes the gate behind her everything goes quiet and the smell of earth and things growing hits her. The front door is wide open, waiting for her to enter. She stands looking about her, unable to move. Like Alice, she has been shot down a rabbit hole.
No 54 exists for Stella in a separate world, separate from the noise of the traffic, the grit of the street, the shouting. It is a place where things are allowed to happen that are not permitted elsewhere.
In the midday summer heat the garden smells alive. The undergrowth is encroaching over the paving stones on the garden path. Stella finds this odd because Ivor is usually fastidious about the garden. They joked about him clipping borders with nail scissors and wiping each shiny leaf of his beloved orchids with a wet tissue. In the heat it is alarming how quickly the plants have become unruly. The moonflowers are threatening to block out all the natural light that is “so essential” for his classes. The jasmine is choking the gutters and even the aloes seem to have multiplied. The only plants that haven’t grown are the strelitzias that stand in two tubs guarding the entrance to the house, like birds of prey.
There is something else different today. There is no music. Stella realises this when she notices the sound of insects in the undergrowth. She can hear them rubbing their legs, humming in the heat, because the house is so silent. The opera that normally pours out of all the windows is absent.
As she enters the cool dusty interior she is met by a smell she can’t pinpoint, but that makes her chest tighten. Nobody comes to greet her. It is silent inside as she walks through into the art studio; a room with a bay window, high ceilings and wooden floors. French doors lead out from the far side of the room into a small enclosed back garden. The room is set up as it had been for their classes. Easels stand in a semicircle facing a Chinese screen behind which is a bed where the models used to lie or sit. The walls, usually dotted with sketches and Ivor’s paintings, are stripped bare, except for one small painting. It hangs alone near the French doors. Stella walks across to look at it. It is the same painting that has been reproduced on the exhibition invitation – Françoise, sitting thin and straight, staring at the wall in front of her, all alone in the studio. Abandoned, thinks Stella. Underneath the painting is pinned a piece of white card. Typed on it in a bold black font is: Black Girl Reading
Stella’s palms are sweaty and she finds it hard to breathe. All the time she expects Ivor to come bounding in or appear from behind the Chinese screen announcing that he has fooled her. That this is one of his elaborate pranks, the clues left to guide her here. So that what? He could forgive her and they could go back to how it had been before “the incident” with all the benefits that came with being part of his close little circle of friends. Was this his way of saying, “come back all is forgiven”?
She’d push back the screen and there he would be lying, his dark curling hair flecked with grey, his olive skin smooth for someone of forty-two. A prank! But there is no one behind the screen and no sound from the rest of the house.
Stella opens the French doors for some fresh air. The room feels like it is closing in on her. In this lush back garden they had drunk wine during the break in class. Against the wall in the dank shade grow the clivias.
“Until spring they are just drab boring green leaves. But then, darling, when they flower . . .”
A window bangs somewhere in the house. Stella runs out of the studio, out of the house and on to the street. Where is Ivor? Then she remembers, with shock, that he is dead.
She hears a voice from across the road and turns to see a young girl sitting on the low wall of the block of flats opposite, swinging her legs and popping her bubblegum. “The man’s gone out,” she says.
Stella waits awkwardly for ten minutes, hoping that someone will come back to the house. The girl watches her, a know-it-all smile on her face. Stella wonders what the girl has seen from her watching place on the wall. Did the ambulance come for Ivor’s body? Had he swallowed a whole bunch of pills from Tony’s pharmaceutical stash that he siphoned off from work? Had it been a heart attack? A stroke?
After ten minutes Stella can’t stand the girl watching her any more and walks away down Kingston Road and around the corner into Bishop. Without thinking she is retracing, in reverse, the steps that she took a year earlier when she first found Ivor’s house. When she had stopped to listen to the music streaming out of the studio windows because she had recognised it. And before she could walk away a student had come around the corner and stopped in front of her. “I’m Jude,” she had announced. “Are you part of the life drawing class?”
Stella tries Timothy again.
The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try again later.
Françoise