How to Fall Read online

  ‘Nothing gold can stay.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s from a poem by Robert Frost.’ I was aware that I sounded a touch too intellectual for my own good. ‘I think the point of it is that perfection never lasts.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about poetry.’ Petra was regarding me with something approaching awe.

  I grinned. ‘Nor do I. I got it from a novel. It just always stayed in my head, for some reason.’

  ‘I like it.’ She turned the handle and flung open the door. ‘Here you go. Let’s play Through the Keyhole. Who would live in a room like this?’

  The short answer was: someone very lucky indeed. It was a big space, with windows on two sides overlooking different aspects of the garden. There was a window-seat at one of them and I would have loved to curl up there with a book for an hour or two. A fat velvet hippo sat there now, a much-rubbed toy. Petra went over and picked it up, cuddling it against her.

  ‘Was that Freya’s favourite?’

  ‘Mm.’ She pressed her nose against the top of its head. ‘Mr Bobo. He used to smell of her but it’s worn off now.’

  ‘Where did the name come from?’

  ‘She couldn’t say hippo when she got him.’

  ‘I should have worked that out, really.’ The room was tidy, the small bookcase arranged alphabetically and packed with children’s classics. The Secret Garden. A Little Princess. Little House on the Prairie. There were art books too, and biographies of female painters like Gwen John and Mainie Jellett. Her school books were stacked on the bottom shelf, probably where she’d left them. There was nothing on the desk at all, but the notice board above it was covered – last year’s calendar featuring maybe-ironic pictures of kittens, flyers for events that had long since taken place, scraps of material, glow-in-the-dark stars and a handful of art postcards that ranged from Degas to Renoir via the Pre-Raphaelites. There was one on its own in the corner, half obscured by a leaflet for a band night, and I recognized the heavy gold leaf of Klimt’s The Kiss. I unpinned it and looked at the other side. A scrawl I could barely read, in black ink: Thinking of you. I pulled a face.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘The painting?’ I turned it over again and looked at it. ‘Not really. It just looks awkward. He’s kissing her but she’s turning away. It should be romantic, but it isn’t.’

  ‘Freya didn’t like it either,’ Petra said. So that was one thing we had in common. I stood for a moment looking at the postcard. She hadn’t liked it and she’d pinned it up. Thinking of you . . . Was it from the boy who was better-than-Ryan? And if so, why hadn’t he signed it?

  Whatever about paintings, a quick peek in the wardrobe confirmed that Freya and I had had very different taste in clothes.

  ‘She liked vintage stuff.’ Petra pulled out a hanger and showed me a gauzy seventies dress with tiny buttons all the way up to the neck, patterned in maroon and gold. ‘She made this sort of thing look fabulous.’

  ‘I bet.’ I took it from her to look at it, then hung it back on the rail, not remotely tempted to try it on. It would not have looked fabulous on me – of that I was quite sure.

  The wall behind the bed was the most interesting thing in the room. It was essentially a gallery. ‘Did she do all this?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Petra came to stand beside me, appraising the pictures with a critical eye. ‘They’re not bad.’

  ‘They’re amazing.’ Freya had worked in different media, equally competently in each as far as I could see, and I was taken with a series of self-portraits in pencil. It was a style that could easily have been moodily self-indulgent, but there was something about the eyes that suggested a sense of humour, an irony that wouldn’t allow her to go completely over the top. She had done watercolours too – landscapes and still-life paintings rather than portraits. I lingered over three of the landscapes – windblown bushes riding a Dartmoor hillside, the sea whipping around some rocks at the foot of a headland, a lovely woodland scene that glowed with light. I thought they were remarkable.

  The photographs were black and white for the most part. Hugo scowling over the top of a book, and Tilly painting, her face tense with concentration. A close-up of hands grimy with something like engine grease was pin-sharp, technically excellent, and somehow tender. So much talent. So much life to live.

  ‘What a waste.’

  ‘I know.’ Petra sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘These aren’t sad paintings, are they? These aren’t the sort of thing you’d do if you were depressed.’

  ‘Were they the last things she did?’

  ‘Some of them. She changed this wall around all the time.’ Petra lay back and stared at the ceiling. ‘There are some paintings in the studio that she was planning to put up, and there’s a sketchpad somewhere with more drawings in it that would have been from right before it happened. She never got a chance to sort them.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘That’s what makes me sure it was an accident.’ She was still looking at the ceiling, not at me. Almost to herself, she said, ‘You’d want your best work to be on display. Your legacy. You wouldn’t want to be judged on old material.’

  I had seen a sketchpad on the bookcase. I went over and pulled it out. ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Let me see?’ Petra sat up, leaning on one elbow as she flipped through the pages, treating me to a quick slideshow of the contents. Half-finished drawings, lists, scribbles, a fragment of poetry . . . it flashed past too quickly for me to examine each page closely, but I got the idea. Freya’s sketchbook had been like a diary, and if anything was going to give me an insight into how she’d been feeling before she died, the sketchbook would.

  Petra was shaking her head. ‘Not this one. This is an old one. It’s from three years ago.’ She showed me the date on the cover, neatly inscribed in pencil. Freya had been methodical about her work, I thought.

  ‘Where would the last one be?’

  ‘I don’t know. The studio, maybe.’

  ‘I’d like to see it.’

  ‘So would I.’ She flopped back on the bed. ‘I think Freya would have wanted us to see it too. She would have wanted people to look at it. She’d never have just thrown herself off the cliff without thinking about that kind of thing.’

  ‘So you think she’d have prepared better?’

  ‘Definitely. She’d have dressed for it as well. She was wearing a summer dress, pretty but not dramatic. I know she’d have wanted something spectacular if she was going to kill herself.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t planned. Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment decision.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Petra still didn’t look at me.

  I went over to the window and knelt on the seat. The back garden stretched away behind the house, lush with summer growth and pleasantly disorganized. At the bottom of the garden there was a long wooden building with big skylights let into the roof.

  ‘What’s the super-shed for?’

  ‘Mum’s studio. That’s probably where you’d find the last things Freya was working on. She used to go down there and paint while Mum was doing other stuff.’

  ‘Is your mum working much at the moment?’

  ‘She’s not taking on any new commissions. She finished off the ones she was working on, though, when it happened. She can paint – she just says she doesn’t want to.’ Petra looked tired, all of a sudden, and too old for her years. Worry would do that to you.

  ‘So she’s not doing her own things, either?’

  ‘Bits and pieces, I think. How do you know about her work?’

  ‘Darcy said it was amazing.’

  That did get her attention. ‘When did you meet Darcy?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. She came to the cottage to see me in person. I think she was just curious.’

  ‘That would fit.’ Petra looked oddly disapproving. ‘Did she say anything about Freya?’

  ‘Lots. I only asked what she was like.’

  She managed a weak smile. ‘Darcy likes to talk.’
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br />   I couldn’t work out why Petra sounded so unenthusiastic about her sister’s best friend. I had thought she was on the ditzy side, but basically well intentioned. ‘She didn’t say anything mean, you know. She was a big fan of Freya’s.’

  Petra bit her lip. ‘Did she say anything about why they argued?’

  I had the uneasy sensation of standing on what you think is solid ground and feeling it start to slip away beneath you. ‘No. She didn’t mention an argument.’

  ‘It was the week before Freya died. I’m not sure what it was about, but I know they hadn’t made up.’

  ‘It must have been a bad one if you knew about it.’

  ‘It was. Freya and Darcy were really close. They used to see each other every day. Freya didn’t have a mobile – well, she did, but she lost it so often Mum wouldn’t replace it. Darcy phoned the house instead, first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Dad hated her tying up the phone for hours on end. He couldn’t understand how they could spend the day together and still have anything left to talk about.’

  ‘I got that from my dad when he still lived with us.’ One major reason why I hadn’t minded too much about him moving out.

  ‘They were proper friends. And then, nothing. From one day to the next.’

  ‘Freya didn’t tell you anything about it?’

  Petra shook her head. ‘I didn’t dare to ask.’

  ‘And you haven’t asked Darcy about it since Freya fell?’

  ‘I don’t know her that well. I’m just Freya’s annoying little sister. She never bothered with me. But she seems interested in you. You could find out.’

  ‘I could try.’ I could add it to the list of things I wanted to find out – the list that was getting longer, not shorter, the more I found out about Freya. It bothered me that no one knew what had happened to her. It didn’t seem right.

  I looked back out at the garden, at the trees that half screened the house behind the studio so I could only see that it was painted white and was on the small side compared to the Leonards’ house. The studio squatted at the end of the garden, the windows dark, the door shut. It looked deserted. Untouched for many months. Forgotten.

  I could stop, I thought. I could let Freya fade away into the past. Leave the door locked. Let the questions remain unanswered. Forget.

  Yeah. There was never really any chance that was going to happen.

  5

  I MADE MY way down the garden alone, the key to the studio clutched in one hand. It was starting to drizzle again, the sky dark with the promise of real rain, and soon. The ground was waterlogged already. My feet slid on the muddy path – more of a track, really – and I wished I had brought my anorak.

  Tilly had been perfectly happy for me to go and look at her workplace.

  Mum was more perplexed. ‘Why do you want to go there?’

  ‘Just curious, I suppose.’

  She frowned. ‘It’s where your aunt works.’

  ‘You make it sound like an office. It’s a bit more interesting than that.’ I saw Mum wince and wished I’d put it differently. I knew she hated her job. She worked as a secretary for an elderly solicitor who was easing into retirement gradually and spent the summer at his holiday home in Florida. Working for him wasn’t difficult and having the summer off was a nice perk, but it was boring, and badly paid, and I knew she would have loved to try making a living as a photographer if she’d thought she was good enough. Dad had never encouraged her – quite the opposite – so she’d settled for second best. But it had to be hard on Mum to see her sister doing something creative for a living, something she loved.

  Still, I did want to see the studio. I looked at Tilly. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘Don’t touch anything.’ Mum was using her extra-threatening tone of voice. ‘Don’t play with anything.’ Exactly as if I was three. To Petra, Mum said, ‘You can keep an eye on her.’

  ‘I’m not going. Seen it before.’ The break from the table seemed to have done Petra’s appetite a world of good; she was hoovering up the remaining sandwiches as if she was taking part in an eating contest.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll come to any harm in the studio,’ Jack said, smiling at me over Mum’s head. ‘The kids go down there unsupervised all the time. Or they used to.’

  ‘And I’m not working on anything at the moment.’ Tilly sounded matter-of-fact about it rather than tragic. ‘So there’s really no problem with Jess going wherever she likes.’

  ‘Freya’s stuff is on the right, in the corner. It’s all still there, Mum, isn’t it?’ Petra wasn’t looking at her mother when she asked, so she missed the way Tilly’s expression tightened, even though she answered calmly.

  ‘It’s all there. Almost as she left it.’ And she was smiling as she added, ‘Just a bit tidier.’

  The grass had grown up in front of the studio door, tall and lush. Weeds and nettles were threaded through it. I trod it all down so I could get at the door, wondering how long it had been since anyone else had been there. The key turned at the first time of asking, much to my surprise, but it was a modern lock that was well oiled and the door was solid. Mum was right: it was where Tilly worked, and far more organized than the house was. It was immaculate, the floor swept clean, the art materials filed away, the paintings arranged in racks. There were several big plan chests and I slid open a few drawers, feeling highly self-conscious about snooping. They turned out to contain drawings – preparatory sketches mainly. I couldn’t help being impressed by the sketches Tilly did to prepare for the proper portraits – fast ones that were nothing more than a few lines but captured the essence of a basset hound’s humpy back, or more detailed ones that she had worked on, shading in the delicate feathering of a cat’s fur around its eyes. I could see she was good at what she did, professional and dedicated in equal measure, and it was a lot better than the greetings-card cutesiness I had been expecting. Tilly’s own artwork was interesting too, but not as appealing to me, basically because I wasn’t sure I got it. Darcy had been reverent about her watercolours but I didn’t really know why they were supposed to be good. Mum’s artiness was something else that had passed me by. I had inherited Dad’s logic instead, which seemed a fair trade.

  The room smelled of paint and varnish – the classic artist’s studio – but there was a stale quality to the air. I was glad I had left the door open to allow the fresh green smell of damp earth and crushed grass to fill the space. The main thing that made it a bit different from the usual studio, at least in my eyes, was the collection of dog beds stacked up against one wall beside a basket full of toys of various shapes and sizes. On a high shelf, I spotted jars of Bonios and cat treats, and as I walked across the room I kicked a jangling ball that skittered away into the corner. Catering for the clientele, I supposed.

  I was really there to see Freya’s paintings, I reminded myself, turning towards the right side of the studio where Petra had said I would find them. There was a stack of canvases leaning against the wall, wrapped in an old dustsheet. I pulled the sheet away carefully and saw I had guessed correctly – Freya’s signature was on the bottom of each painting. It was a scrawl, a confident F and a low, looping y the only identifiable bits, but it matched the signature on the pictures I had seen hanging in her bedroom. I wouldn’t have recognized the paintings as hers otherwise. Darcy had said she was trying out new things, experimenting with her style, but these were strikingly different from one another. I flicked through the canvases: abstract paintings where the paint was plastered on in layers, a still life of a bowl with cherries in it that was as realistic as a photograph, and right at the back some studies of a half-dressed girl that I identified after a moment’s confusion as Freya herself. Rationally, I knew I wasn’t the subject of the paintings but there was still something unsettling about them, something uncomfortably intimate about seeing my double posing with her naked back to the viewer, piling up the great weight of her hair on her head. The colours were mut
ed, the tones of her flesh pale and ghostly, and I could understand why Tilly had hidden them at the back of the collection. The Freya they depicted was a wraith, otherworldly, and I wondered if she had had a premonition that she was going to die young. I wondered if she had planned her own death, despite what her sister thought. Dressing for the occasion would have drawn attention to her, and attention was presumably not what you wanted when you were planning to fling yourself off a cliff.

  I was staring at one of the semi-nudes when I became aware of something – a disturbance in the air more than an actual sound. I glanced over my shoulder to see Will Henderson standing in the doorway, watching me. With a smothered exclamation I let go of the paintings I was holding so they fell back against the wall. The clatter sounded shockingly loud in the quiet studio, and my voice sounded too loud too.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I was just about to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘You first.’ I started to rearrange the paintings – more for something to do than because they needed it.

  ‘I saw you coming down the garden. I thought I’d drop in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To say hello.’ I raised one eyebrow, not even trying to hide that I was sceptical, and he laughed. ‘OK, OK. To find out what you’re doing here.’

  ‘That sounds more like the truth.’

  ‘I was curious.’ He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. ‘Are you looking for something?’

  ‘Not really. Just nosing around.’ I didn’t want to talk to him about what I was doing, I realized. I couldn’t have said why that was the case, but it was true. I went for a half-truth instead. ‘I hadn’t seen Tilly’s work before. I was curious.’

  ‘Those aren’t Tilly’s paintings.’

  I looked down. ‘No. I know.’

  ‘Still wondering about Freya?’

  There was no point in lying. ‘I still want to know what really happened last summer.’