Touching the Dark Page 9

  Jack leaned back. She could feel him looking at her, his gaze considering as though weighing her and how best to proceed. “Problem is,” he said at last, “that people who are, let’s say, emotionally damaged, don’t always know what is good for them. What’s best. Sometimes others have to show them. Give them a guiding hand.”

  “I’m not sure that I agree,” she replied.

  “No? You surprise me, Naomi. I’ll just bet that after your accident the last thing you wanted was to have to make decisions or even think things through. You were grateful to your family, friends, doctors, whoever it was that made those decisions for you. Told you what to do until you felt strong enough to take your life back.” He paused and waited for her response. Naomi did not reply. “Am I right?” he asked her. “Or am I right.”

  “It’s hardly the same thing,” she said at last, irritated at how lame that sounded.

  “Isn’t it? Maybe it’s a matter of scale, I’ll acknowledge that, but neither Simon nor Tally are thinking straight just now. You can’t argue there.”

  No, Naomi thought, she probably couldn’t. Simon was certainly not behaving in an rational manner.

  “Look,” he said, his tone placating. “I know a little about Simon. I know he has a good family and I know now that he has good friends. People who’ll see him through this little crisis. Who’ll be as ashamed of his behaviour last night as Simon himself should be and who, hopefully will drag him back onto the straight and narrow, but you see, Tally doesn’t have any of that. When it comes down to it, she only has me so I have to be the one to look after her interests.”

  “Simon knows he behaved badly,” Naomi conceded. “He won’t be doing it again.”

  “And I’m so glad to hear that. Tally is fragile, you see. She’s had more than her share of tragedy in her life. Simon was a nice distraction for a little while, but it’s over now and a broken love affair is bad enough without anything more traumatic happening.”

  “Traumatic? Like what. Jack, you are threatening this time.”

  “Am I?” He got up, scraping the chair legs again and then placing his hands on the table and leaning over her. “I’m offering more advice, Naomi. You’re Simon’s friend. If you want to help him, keep him away from Tally.”

  *

  For the second time in as many weeks Naomi found herself climbing the stairs to Tally Palmers flat.

  Jack had rattled her but it took more than that to scare Naomi Blake and as many people had found before, you annoy Naomi you stir up the proverbial hornets’ nest.

  She had reported her conversation with Jack to Shirley and told her to call security should he come back again but they had agreed it was probably not worth reporting the incident to the police. No actual threats had been made and Jack had left quietly without disturbance when Naomi had said she thought that he should go.

  “Tell Alec about it,” Shirley had insisted and Naomi had promised that she would. It hadn’t been until she was on the way home that she had thought about visiting Tally. Once the thought had occurred it had become nigglingly insistent and she had asked George, her regular taxi driver on advice centre days, to go home first so that she could collect something and then bring her here.

  “You want me to wait for you?” he had asked as she paid him off.

  “No, I can get the bus from the corner, I think. If I get stuck, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Right you are love. I’ll see you on Thursday. Just don’t get too independent on me, will you. I’d miss you.”

  Naomi laughed. George had become a good friend and though Naomi could now use buses on routes she knew with a degree of confidence, she was still a long way from dispensing with George.

  Tally had buzzed her through the main door and was waiting as she reached the head of the stairs.

  “Are you here on Simon’s behalf?” she asked briskly, “because if you are I’ve nothing more to say.”

  “No,” Naomi had already thought of her excuse. It was a more or less truthful one. “Actually I’m not here for Simon’s benefit. He behaved like a complete jerk last night and no one expects you to have any truck with him.”

  “Oh,” Tally said. She sounded oddly deflated. “For what then?”

  “Two things,” Naomi told her. “I’ve talked to Lillian and Samuel and they want you to know how bad they feel. They really liked you, said you’d been good to Darien, helping him with his photographs and everything. They’re horribly embarrassed by what Simon did last night but Lillian thought if she phoned you herself you probably wouldn’t take the call.”

  “Oh,” Tally said again. “Oh, I see.”

  “The other thing is, I wanted to return this. Simon left it at my place with the pictures, but I didn’t realise.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “If people don’t tell me where things are, it can take me a little while to find them.”

  She reached into her coat pocket and withdrew the key ring then held it out to Tally.

  “Simon’s key,” Tally said. She sounded almost wistful as though his giving back the key was a finality she had not anticipated.

  Cool slender fingers lifted the metal ring from Naomi’s hand. She sensed Tally hesitate and then she said, “look, come in for a while. I feel bad about you having to come all the way here, the least I can do is make you coffee. Be careful though, there are bags just inside the door. Should I take your arm or something?”

  Naomi smiled at her. “Napoleon will sort me out,” she said. “He’s a bright dog.”

  “He’s beautiful.” She stood aside and allowed Naomi and her four footed guide to enter the room. The space echoed in Naomi’s ears. She had become very good as estimating the size of the room from the way it sounded and this was big. Very big. She said so.

  “It was a warehouse,” Tally told her. The offices were on this floor but the developers ripped out the dividing walls and now there’s this big room, a kitchen at one end and a bedroom at the other.” She laughed suddenly and went on, “do you know what made me buy this place?”

  Naomi shook her head.

  “The most stupid reason imaginable. I bought it for the floor. Not the view or the space...well, kind of for the space and the view is fantastic, but mostly for the floor.”

  Naomi tapped her foot. “Wood, she said. Not laminate. My flat has that phoney laminate stuff. It’s nice, but not the same.”

  “Polished Beech,” Tally said. “Here. Let me get you sat down.” She took Naomi’s arm, a little nervously, Naomi thought, but she’d grown used to that reaction from people who wanted to be useful but were not sure how. Tally led Naomi to what felt like a small sofa and sat her down. Napoleon, at home just about anywhere, slumped down across her feet and deflated with an elaborate sigh.

  “When I was a little kid,” Tally went on, “my mum had a friend who owned this big house with a massive front hall. Polished wooden floors. We had to take out shoes off when we went in and...”

  “You used to slide.” Naomi laughed. “Oh lord, do you remember the big hall at school? It had that what’s it called, parquet flooring. We used to sneak in after the caretaker had finished buffing. I got caught once, sent to the head. She kept me waiting outside her office for a full half hour before I got my dressing down. Then she went on about respect for school property or something.”

  “Can’t imagine you getting sent down for anything,” Tally said. “I remember you, the prefect, deputy head girl wasn’t it?” She giggled like a child. It was a contagious sound and Naomi laughed too, shedding the tension that had brought her here.

  “I think it’s a perfect reason for buying this place,” she said.

  Tally made coffee and they talked, exchanging reminiscences about their school days and the teachers they had hated. Those few that they had actually liked. Ordinary things such as people talk about when they have a common past and from that talk turned to the lives they led now. The careers they had chosen and eventually, inevitably, back to Simon.

  “You know, the ironi
c thing? It was Simon’s idea I go on this trip. He suggested it. Thought it would be a brilliant idea for me to go back and re photograph the places I had visited. Put the then and now images together in the retrospective. The gallery loved it, so now, I’ve got to actually go and get on with it and it doesn’t give me much time.”

  “Does it worry you? Going back. I mean some of the places you photographed were in war zones.”

  “Most still are, but they’ve quietened down for the most part. The fighting has...relocated. I’m not going to high risk areas. I’ve no story to tell except for the way things have changed. If they haven’t changed, there seems little point in reprising something I did the best job I knew how to do the first time round.

  Naomi nodded. “I went to your last big exhibition,” she said. “I’d love to come to your new one, see what’s changed in Tally Palmer’s world.”

  “Would you?” She could not keep the surprise and doubt from her voice. “I mean...”

  “Because I can’t see?” Naomi shook her head. “I guess if I’d been born blind, I’d have a different attitude. It may sound strange, but I still don’t know how blind people think, how they perceive the world. Those who’ve never been sighted, I mean. I know that most of the time I still think like a sighted person. I still get pictures in my head that I use when I’m trying to work out where I am or what it might look like. I still love films, either video or on at the pictures and my friends know that if they take me anywhere it has to be described in the minutest detail.” She laughed. My sister says I’m a right pain in the backside, but I’ve got my nephews well trained.”

  “I never thought about it that way,” Tally mused. “I couldn’t cope with it. I really couldn’t. It would be like dying...sorry, that must sound really, I don’t know, selfish. Stupid.”

  Naomi shook her head. “No, I know what you mean. All my life it was the thing I was most afraid of and when I woke up in hospital after the accident and they eventually told me I would probably never see again, there was a moment when I wished I hadn’t survived.” She smiled awkwardly at the memory. “You know I think the thing that got me through was that I was too ill to care much about anything at first and by the time I’d actually started to get better there’d been a month, six weeks maybe, of living in this new world. I found I’d, well a part of me at least, had kind of got used to the idea.”

  “It can’t have been that easy,” Tally objected.”

  “Oh, no, I never meant to say it was,” she paused and frowned, “I had this friend who was a recovering alcoholic. He always said you had to take things one step at a time, one day at a time and I guess that’s what I did and you now the odd thing, it was the small details, like figuring out how to put on lipstick without looking like a clown that made me feel most myself again. I guess it’s different for everyone.”

  “How do you do it?” Tally asked. “I have to use a mirror.”

  “Oh, I cheat, use my finger and stick to glosses or light colours. Anything really red and I get my sister to do it.”

  Tally laughed. “You know,” she said and there was a sadness, a loneliness in her voice that caught Naomi completely off her guard. “If things had been different I think the two of us could really have been friends.”

  “Are you really ok?” Naomi asked her as she left. She sensed Tally hesitate for the merest instant before she said brightly that she was fine, looking forward to getting back to work. Trying her best to get over Simon but as Naomi heard the door close behind her she could not shake the feeling that the younger woman had wanted to say so much more. That Simon, wrongheaded maybe, and going about things in totally the most stupid of ways, actually might have a case when it came to his suspicions over Jack.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tally stood quietly in the centre of the big room after Naomi had gone, slowly absorbing what was left of the presence of woman and big black dog. They seemed so vibrant and full of life, the dog’s tail whipping happily at Naomi’s coat when they had left that they left an emptiness behind them.

  Tally could still catch the faint scent of Naomi’s light perfume, floral and slightly citrus and the warm animal smell of Napoleon earthy, and somehow reassuring. She held in her hand the keyring that Naomi had returned to her. Tally had not known that Simon had attached Tallulah’s spare head. For a long time she had carried it with her own keys until the twist of wire had broken a month or so after she had first met Simon. It touched her in an odd way that he should have gathered this piece of detritus and treasured it so.

  She recalled the evening when she had given Simon the key to her flat and the heavy silver initialled ring. It had been a wonderful week, one that had been a highlight of his brief career and which he should have been able to treasure evermore. She wondered if he treasured it now, or if it had grown sour in his memory

  *

  For Simon, the week had been an eventful one that he knew he would have a hard time ever bettering. His article on Tally, commissioned by the local paper, had been syndicated and appeared in full in one of the glossy Sunday supplements. He knew that Tally had pulled strings for him and he didn’t care. The article was one of the best pieces he had ever done and featured pictures from Tally’s personal collection that had never before been published. He might have had a little help getting noticed but Simon knew that he stood up well on his own merits.

  That Sunday morning they shared breakfast in bed, the white linen scattered with the crumbs from pain au chocolate. They drank champagne admiring Simon’s handiwork, amused that in the same supplement two of the ads and the fashion shoot were also Tally’s work.

  “I think you’re trying to take over the world piece by piece,” Simon told her.

  “What, starting with the clothes horses and the breakfast cereals?”

  Simon laughed, flicked again through the four pages of his own article struck by the strange juxtaposition of a breakfast ad on the right hand page and one of Tally’s pictures from her early days set on the opposite page illustrating his words. It was a powerful image, two small boys playing in the dirt, with a handful of clay marbles, bandoleers slung across the chest of one, the Kalashnikov lying within reach of the other, the site of their game a bombed out building taken and retaken by opposing sides in the days before.

  “What made you give it up?” Simon asked her.

  “What?”

  He looked sideways at her. “You know what I mean.” He pointed at the photograph. “From this to cornflakes and temperamental fashion queens. It’s some trip.”

  She shrugged. “Like I said before, I got tired of being shot at. What I’m doing now might not change the world, but its regular, safe and it pays well.”

  Simon grimaced. He’d asked the same question before and received the same off hand reply. He said. “You gave up after O’Dowd was killed, didn’t you. I heard you two were really close.” He had hinted in his article that this was the reason and Tally hadn’t challenged it. Hadn’t confirmed it either.

  Tally regarded him thoughtfully over the rim of her glass “You know we were, she said. “You wrote about us in the article, remember. How he gave me my first break.”

  She poked him playfully in the ribs. “Jealous?”

  “Of O’Dowd? Hard to be jealous of him, poor bastard.” He was curious though. He’d expected, feared upsetting her, having her shut him out again but instead she’s made a joke...sort of.

  “Is that why you gave it up?”

  Tally got off the bed and crossed to the window “one reason,” she said. Then, “Do we have to talk about this now? Look, this is your big day, we should be celebrating.” She smiled warmly at him and he found himself returning the smile but it occurred to him that he’d spent weeks researching this woman, spent so much time with her, made love and slept beside her and yet even now she was so often way beyond his reach.

  *

  She took him for lunch at The Cardinal, a newly opened restaurant converted from a sixteenth century manor house. Th
e stone building was mellowed with age and softened by climbing roses, a few still in flower despite the lateness of autumn. Inside, the carpets were so deep that Simon imagined himself being swallowed by the red expanse, the walls were panelled and the windows gave a view out over the terraced gardens and down towards the river.

  He studied the menu. Dishes he had never heard of – fortunately, described in lush detail – with prices that made him gasp and a wine list the length of a Dickens’ novel and bound in soft, gold blocked leather. And she gave him a gift, as they finished their meal with coffee and an amber cognac that reflected the afternoon sun. The key to her apartment fastened to a silver key ring cast in the shape of an elaborate initial S.

  “Tally?” Simon couldn’t quite believe that she had offered this.

  “I want you to have it. I want you to be there, sometimes when I come home. To be a part of my life, Simon.”

  He hadn’t expected this at all and, somehow, he felt that Tally hadn’t decided completely whether or not she should give this to him until the last moment.

  “I love you,” he said, aware that alcohol had slurred his words. “I love you so much.”

  *

  When Tally returned home that night she knew that Jack would be waiting and she knew also that she had to confront him. Tell him how important Simon was becoming and that he had to back off and let things be.

  She told him about the key and watched his expression change. The dark eyes narrow and the lines on his forehead deepen.

  “When will you learn, Tally? Just when will you learn.”

  She turned away from him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t know...Tally, for God’s sake. You tried to do this before, shut me out, replace me and look what happened.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t replace you, Jack. I wouldn’t try. Simon is different, he’s special, he cares about me.”

  “And I don’t? God’s sake Tally. You’re everything to me.”

  She said nothing and kept her face turned away from him as knowing that if she met his eyes her resolve would utterly crumble.