Ruthless - [25]

He walked forward, switched the music off.

Orla stopped what she was doing and turned, startled.

‘Orla?’ he said more softly. He looked at the canvases, back at her face, then again at the canvases. They were propped up all around the walls, in colours so vivid they were shocking. And… they chilled him, these paintings. There were swirls and huge great gouts of colour. The pictures were awash with an anguish that seemed to scream out at him.

‘Sorry,’ she said, turning away from him, back to what she was doing. ‘Did I disturb you?’

He looked at her. Everything she did disturbed him more, every day. He was getting a sinking feeling, and that saddened him. He’d been so thrilled to see her again. But… oh, something was wrong here. Something was terribly wrong.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, although it was obvious. He stared around at the paintings, the violent clashing colours, and he thought, My God, what is this?

Every single painting was of a man – tall, slender, handsome and pale, with neat red hair. The man was enveloped in a swirling tornado of colours, or down a dark tunnel, falling; smiling out of a canvas here, screaming out of another one there. She was painting Redmond, her twin, over and over again, like a stuck record.

Rufus didn’t know what to say.

He was seriously spooked. Orla’s old dad had spouted nonsense ever since he’d arrived, saying things like Redmond called today, while you were out.

Ah yes? his wife would say, with a smile that didn’t reach her sad eyes. Is that a fact?

But of course it wasn’t. Redmond was dead, and so were Tory and maybe Pat and even young Kieron. All dead, all gone.

This is a haunted place, thought Rufus with a shudder.

‘What do you think?’ she asked, and her smile had a manic edge to it that unnerved him. ‘Kieron was a painter, you know. Exhibited in Dublin and then in London, he was big news. Of course I don’t have his sort of talent, but I enjoy it. Whenever I can’t sleep, I come out here.’

Yeah, he thought. If someone’s in bed with you, someone you’re supposed to love, you can’t sleep. So you come here and do this.

His heart felt chilled in his chest. This wasn’t right. This behaviour… it was beyond him. He couldn’t understand it.

‘That’s Redmond,’ he said at last.

‘Yes.’ She paused, gazing at the canvas she was working on, her eyes caressing it. ‘It is.’

He moved closer. ‘You’re very talented,’ he said. He didn’t mean it. He was… horrified. Yes. That was the word. Horrified, and trying to understand where this madness might have come from. He hated the paintings. They made him think of Van Gogh’s mad desperate eruptions of colour, and of that one they called The Scream. These canvases were evidence of her obsession with someone, someone other than him. A dead man, someone he could never hope to compete with.

‘So you don’t… exhibit?’ he asked.

‘No. Why would I? This is for my own pleasure, no one else’s.’

‘Orla.’

She was back at it again, flinging thick gobs of pure viridian green on to the canvas, smearing it about with a pallet knife. ‘Hm?’

‘We have to talk.’

‘About what?’ She didn’t even look round.

‘About why you tense up when I try to make love to you. About that.’

Her shoulder stiffened; there was no other sign she’d heard him.

‘Orla.’

She turned to him then, brightly smiling; there was a smear of yellow ochre on her cheek.

‘It’ll come right in the end,’ she said.

But it went on like that: nothing changed. Rufus tried to make himself useful during the long days, and every evening he sat with her and watched TV with the old ones, seeing Haughey elected for a third term as Taioseach, and Thatcher visiting Moscow.

Often he awoke to find himself alone, hearing faint the hammer-drill of Guns N’ Roses or Deep Purple coming from the barn. He persisted, spending the nights with her whenever she’d allow it. But it was useless.

He’d heard of this sort of thing, he knew what it was called: vaginismus. The woman he loved, the woman he worshipped, had been hurt somehow in the past, hurt so badly that a normal response to a man was impossible for her.

He was going to talk to her about it. He had to.

But then something else happened, and that problem was pushed aside.

23

He was out in the grounds as autumn sailed in with fierce gusts of wind wrenching the leaves from the trees. He was muffled up warm and sweeping up piles of the things. In summer, the place was marvellous, but as winter approached it was rough being buffeted by gales. The moisture from the water hit the windows, caking them so that they were diffused, and from inside it was like looking through gauze, as if you were trapped in a bubble.

It was a cosy enough bubble though. The old folks were no trouble. And Orla… well, he loved her. They sat sometimes in the evenings when the old couple had gone to their rooms, just curled up together on the big sofa, chatting or watching TV, and he thought This is bliss.

Only, of course, it wasn’t quite. He no longer even attempted to make love to her. He could see she hated it, that her body rejected it utterly.