Spring Tide Read online

  ‘Well, isn’t that typical?’ the gander would jeer, pushing to the front in his trilby hat, as the watching animals and birds, depending on their kind, quacked or croaked or honked with disapproval and malicious delight. ‘Isn’t that just typical? They’re oh so high and mighty, they’re oh so la-de-da, but look what they’re really like when you see behind the mask!’

  And she knew that, when that day came, and her mild, bewildered, boyish husband, the professor, stumbled downstairs in his dressing gown to find out what was going on, it would be her standing outside there with her head hanging in shame, her between the policemen, her in the black dress drenched by the lake, with her hair all tangled and mud between her painted toes. The only shadow she’d have would be the one beside the professor, cast by the low sun, and stretching in from her own muddy feet across the threshold and the hallway floor, to zigzag away up the stairs.

  It was still not dawn. Yet from far off to the east she could already hear the tide of clamouring birds.

  Creation

  It’s April, the air is mild as cream and I’m sitting at my front window in a suburban street, tapping the keyboard of my laptop.

  Right opposite me is a primary school. Children are running about behind a spiked iron fence. And in the middle of the playground, between the fence and the school, is a magnificent flowering cherry tree.

  Masses of white blossom! Pure and bright as heaven!

  The pleasant purr of a passing car.

  You are here too. A few houses along from me, waiting in your front room for a taxi, looking out at the sunny street.

  And walking past your window on the opposite side of the road, Julian Smart appears, the Artist, slender, amused and clean-shaven, in a neat brown coat. To your surprise you discover you can see his thoughts, displayed in a bubble over his head.

  ‘Must get going again,’ thinks Julian. ‘It’s been too long!’

  And then another bubble appears.

  ‘Wow, look at that!’

  They are face to face. On one side of the school railings the Artist looking in. On the other the cherry tree in all its pure white brilliance.

  Again you see Julian’s thoughts:

  ‘Cherry blossom?! What am I? Alfred Sisley?’

  Whoosh. Another car.

  Mr Veronwy Roberts, the headmaster (a short, plump Welshmen with a round head and bushy eyebrows), is passing the time of day at the front of the school with a pretty young supply teacher named Wendy.

  They notice the man in the raincoat looking in over the railing.

  ‘Well, why not though?’ Julian is thinking. ‘When you come to think about it, why not? Just a question of finding a different angle.’

  But though you can see his thoughts, Mr Roberts and Wendy can’t.

  ‘?’ thinks Mr Roberts.

  ‘I’ll sort this,’ says Wendy, striding firmly over.

  ‘Excuse me. Can I help you in any way?’

  Julian gives her a dazzling smile.

  ‘You can, I’m sure, in at least a hundred ways. But listen, listen. I’ve fallen in love with that tree!’

  ‘And I with you,’ thinks Wendy with a sigh. ‘And I with you.’

  •

  Back in his studio Julian Smart gets to work on the phone.

  ‘Hello, Liz! Julian here.’ He’s standing by the window. ‘It’s about that grant money. I think I’ve got an idea …’

  ‘Hello, Julian here …’ (Now he’s sitting at a desk.)

  ‘Hello, is this Acme Tree Surgery?’ He’s standing again, in another room, lighting a cigarette, with the phone propped under his chin. ‘My name is Julian Smart. I wonder if you can give me some advice?’

  Somewhere across the city, a Gnarled Woodman stands leaning on his van: ‘No, you’d need a specialist contractor for that. It’s a big job. Very tricky.’

  The Artist passes his hand over his hair.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘my name is Julian Smart …’

  He’s interrupted by the doorbell, and goes to open it with the phone still tucked under his chin. It’s Wendy standing outside, looking even prettier than before. He signals to her to come right in and pour herself a drink.

  Later, while she reclines naked on his bed looking through a catalogue of his work, he picks up the phone again.

  ‘Hello, is this St Philip’s School? Mr Roberts? You’re still at work! The teacher’s life, eh? This is Julian Smart. The artist? We spoke briefly this morning? …’

  A year goes by.

  •

  In an Art Gallery, people are gathered for a new exhibition. There are canapés, champagne flutes, catalogues. An Elegant Woman is speaking to an Academic of some kind, who wears John Lennon glasses and a leather jacket.

  ‘I just had a peek in the main gallery,’ she says. ‘Julian’s piece is just fantastic!’

  Behind them an Eminent Critic is inspecting a small work labelled: ‘Susan Finchley. Unfinished Story (7).’ We see the back of the Critic’s head, the outside edge of the frame, and the label beside it.

  ‘Hmm,’ say his thoughts in the bubble above his head. ‘Narrative yet to begin or narrative strangled at birth? Not very original but I’d better be careful, because knowing Susan that’s probably the point.’

  The Elegant Woman stands face to face with another of Susan Finchley’s works. Behind, in the distance, framed on one side by the Elegant Woman’s profile and on the other by the frame of Finchley’s piece, stand two members of the Metropolitan Elite, a man and a woman, each holding a champagne glass.

  ‘Ingenious, I suppose,’ the Elegant Woman is thinking, ‘but a bit B list, really. Like all of Susan’s stuff.’

  ‘With her usual acerbic wit …’ The Eminent Critic is already drafting his review in his mind as he moves from one artwork to the next. ‘… Finchley subverts our received assumptions about originality, about seriousness. And yet …’

  •

  Through the door of the next room an Admiring Group, champagne flutes in hand, can be seen standing in front of a large exhibit, which itself remains hidden from our sight.

  ‘Absolutely breath-taking!’ mutters a Man with a Beard.

  ‘Quite extraordinary!’ exclaims a Very Thin Woman.

  Well, so it should be! Because – look! – it’s nothing less than the cherry tree itself, its roots contained in an enormous hemisphere of earth, its branches laden with thick clouds of pure white blossom.

  ‘Julian Smart,’ reads the label on the stand in front of it. ‘Creation.’

  Julian and the Elegant Woman stand nearby. He wears a fetching but slightly rumpled suit and a very satisfied expression.

  ‘Talk about upstaged,’ the Elegant Woman remarks, with a small acidic smile. ‘Susan must be livid.’

  He laughs. ‘I hope so. You wouldn’t believe how much effort went into this. And the idiots I’ve had to deal with!’

  Standing to Julian’s left and two or three paces behind him, is Wendy, looking very attractive and a little nervous. She is talking to the Academic in John Lennon glasses.

  ‘Oh I can believe it,’ says the Elegant Woman, ‘I assure you of that. You don’t work in arts administration without learning what it’s like to deal with idiots. But tell me more about it. I’m fascinated by the process.’

  Julian glances back at Wendy, sees she’s busy talking.

  ‘Well, if you’re really interested, why don’t you come over sometime and I’ll tell you the whole story.’

  Over against the wall is a small group of other teachers from the school, clustered for protection around the diminutive figure of Mr Veronwy Roberts. They look dowdy and uncomfortable in this place, clutching their glasses of champagne.

  But here comes the Eminent Critic.

  He sees the tree, looks across at Julian, and smiles, getting the joke at once.

  Julian strides across to meet him. Laughing as they arrive at the same idea together, they shake hands in front of the tree like Livingstone and Stanley.

  Later
, back at home, the Eminent Critic sits working on his laptop at his kitchen table.

  ‘Creation,’ he types, ‘is easily this year’s most arresting new work. Ostensibly – and indeed ostentatiously – silent, it does in fact speak eloquently to us, sharply interrogating (with Smart’s characteristic astringency) the idea of “nature” as something prior to and outside of social discourse. Smart has deliberately chosen the most tritely conventional of subjects – cherry blossom – and has transformed it into a complex, maddeningly ambiguous statement precisely by not transforming it at all!’

  As he continues to tap at his keyboard you can see on the screen the following text, under a standard Microsoft toolbar:

  ‘by insisting on his own complete absence, Smart, almost teasingly, invites us to question what precisely it is that makes this work so unmistakably and triumphantly a work of art. The caption? The gallery setting? The funding – both from public and private sources – that made the work possible? The fact that Julian Smart is a recognised artist? The’

  He takes a break in mid-sentence, wandering across his large and well-stocked kitchen to pour himself a glass of red wine. As he stands sipping at it, he flips idly through the TV guide from Saturday’s paper. He is still thinking in prose.

  ‘But that only opens up another whole line of questioning, of course. What makes Julian Smart an artist? Who gave him this licence?… Mmm, must watch that. Last episode too … Ultimately it is critics who are the arbiters. Indeed it is perfectly possible to argue that we are the actual creators of art.’

  Stark shadows give his face a certain mythic quality, like the famous poster of Che Guevara, though nothing like as handsome.

  Two weeks after the show, on a frosted door marked ‘Headmaster’ the pot-bellied silhouette of Mr Roberts holds the receiver of a phone in one hand, the rest of the phone in the other, while the coiled flex dangles in between.

  ‘Is this Mr Julian Smart? Yes? Well, we’re not happy, Mr Smart. We are not happy about this at all. The agreement was that the tree would be returned unharmed!’

  Inside the room he is pacing about with beads of sweat on his forehead. Behind him are shelves lined with lever arch files with labels like ‘Literacy Strategy’, ‘Sex Education Guidelines’ and ‘Promoting Creativity’.

  You can see the tree in the playground through the window.

  ‘Our parents are very distressed. Many of them grew up with that tree themselves …’

  From the far side of the metal railings you can just see Mr Roberts’ upper half as he paces his office.

  In front of him is the tree, completely bare, apart from a few shrivelled leaves.

  ‘…would never have agreed in the first place…’ he’s saying.

  A jet passes overhead.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, mate, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do.’

  Julian Smart is sitting at a table outside a café. He looks defiantly across at Wendy as he slips his phone back into his jacket pocket.

  •

  ‘What does he think I am? Some kind of plant resurrectionist?’

  Smartly Dressed Professionals chat at the tables around them. Cars and pedestrians hurry by.

  ‘And what a ridiculous fuss anyway! Anyone would think I’d murdered one of the kids.’

  Wendy’s face looks troubled. ‘Yes but …’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, don’t you start! It was only a bloody tree. There are trees everywhere. But just for a moment there that particular tree got to be a unique and famous work of art.’

  We see Julian’s lean and handsome face reflected in the window of the café. A single thought hovers in the bubble above him.

  ‘And there are pretty women everywhere too.’

  Mr Roberts sits down wearily at his desk, passing his hand over his face.

  I stand with my back to my window watching my story churn out of the printer.

  Your doorbell rings.

  Transients

  There was a delicious, agonising goodbye in Ellie’s car, with gentle hands, and moonhoney, and lips still warm from the night, but at last reluctantly they had to heed the honking taxis and the shouting man.

  The car door closed. Space and time opened up between them. Thomas watched Ellie rejoin the stream, waved and blew kisses, then turned to hurry into the station, feeling for his ticket in his jacket pocket.

  ‘I really must catch this train,’ he’d told her. ‘I wish I could stay longer with you, I truly do, but I need to be there for this meeting.’

  And yet, when it turned out he’d got the time wrong and that his train was already pulling away, he found he didn’t care that much about the meeting, or mind that the hour and a half he now had to wait would be on his own when it could have been with Ellie. He phoned his work to apologise – really it was no big deal at all – then bought some coffee and sat on a kind of gallery above the platforms, under Victorian arches of iron and glass, with four or five big intercity trains beneath him, lying side by side beneath their power lines like metal whales.

  What could be better than the solitude of a railway station at half past 9 in the morning, he thought? It was beautiful as a cathedral, but a cathedral whose god was real and performed miracles many times in every hour. It was a temple of power and speed.

  The caffeine lit him up, transforming his veins into branching fingers of contentment. He watched the pigeons, the electric trolleys, a giant electric advertising hoarding that changed every ten seconds: girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit – girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit …

  Another train came hissing to a standstill right below him. For two seconds it just stood there, and then suddenly, all along its flank, doors slid simultaneously open to disgorge a crowd of people with bags, suitcases, baby buggies, bicycles, who began at once to hurry towards the city. In poured another crowd, equally keen to get away.

  For some reason, the image came into his mind of a great sphere hanging up there at the mouth of the station where the trains came and went. One side of the sphere was in sunlight where he couldn’t see it, the other within the shadow of the station roof.

  10.58! Jane jumped out of a taxi with a badly packed bag in her hand. Oh for God’s sake keep the bloody change then, you crook. Which bloody platform? Which bloody train? Why don’t they fix that bloody departure board? God damn it if I have to sit around here and wait for the next train I swear I’ll bloody kill someone.

  She was angry. She was riding a great red horse with teeth of steel and people had better stand back because it could bite and kick and shoot out gamma rays from its hell-fire eyes. Platform 9! Okay, now run. She’d finally done it after threatening it so many times that she herself ceased to believe in it. She’d ditched the bastard, she had crawled out of the hole, she’d let the red horse loose from the catacomb where it had champed in the darkness for so long. And, look, it was twelve feet tall, strong as a tank, lethal as a bloody bomb.

  ‘Hurry up please, miss, we’re about to go.’

  I am fucking hurrying, you stupid man. I am in fact running as you may possibly have observed.

  And don’t call me ‘miss’.

  God will you look at this shower in here with their smartphones and their bloody tablets.

  Where am I going to sit?

  Miss. Patronising git. Miss. What does he know about my marital status? Mind you he’s right. I am single now. I’m bloody single and that’s the way it’s going to stay for a long long time.

  No, mate, I am not going to sit by you, you look as if the art of washing is one that you have not yet mastered.

  No, madam, you may be very nice, but my red horse doesn’t like you and I fear it might bite your big soft ears.

  Single!

  No, certainly not you, your reverence. Anyone who munches sandwiches with their mouth open like that should be doomed for all eternity to sit alone. Nor you either, kind sir. I make it a golden rule in life never to sit with people who look at my tits and visibly salivate.
/>   The train began to move as she passed on to the next carriage.

  Settled at a window seat facing forward with a whole table to himself, Thomas checked his phone. It was odd, now he thought about it, that it had never occurred to him to do this during all the time he’d been sitting on that gallery watching the trains. It was even odder that, after making the call to work to say he’d be late, he’d set his phone to silent.

  Sure enough, there were three separate messages from Ellie.

  ‘Missing you but VERY happy.’

  ‘Can’t wait till the weekend.’

  ‘I love you SO much, Thomas, I can hardly stand it.’

  He looked down at them coldly. It was impossible to deny it any more: that thing that always happened had happened again. He’d really believed it wouldn’t this time, he’d really believed that this was a different case entirely, but it had happened. He could remember having feelings. He could remember having very powerful ones as he said goodbye to her outside the station, but now, looking down at her texts, he felt … what? Embarrassment. Guilt. Shame. And something else that could almost be called revulsion.

  He’d foolishly encouraged another sentient entity to transform itself into the excited bundle of hope and need that had sent him these three texts, no doubt hoping to provoke a similar excitement in himself, and to elicit texts in return in a cycle of mutual affirmation. But the idea of their having become a couple now just seemed distasteful and bizarre. She was a stranger to him, as much of a stranger as the various other passengers who were settling themselves down in the carriage around him, stowing bags, opening laptops, fiddling with phones. All that had happened was that she had briefly worn that mask he sometimes handed out: the Object of Love, the Object of Desire, the One Who Is So Like Me that I Need Not Be Alone.

  That stupid mask. When King Midas embraced a woman she turned to gold, but, for him, it was the other way round. What had briefly seemed golden became… well… just this. No wonder he’d silenced his phone. Since he’d called his office to say he was going to miss the meeting, he’d really not thought of Ellie at all. Well, he’d not thought of anyone. Why would he, when he’d been so entirely content by himself?