Chapter 10 Bardy
BARDY
The mellow plum.
Brilliant! Back to the seven of them. This is going to work.
“Kate?” Bardy prompts. He’s guessing art. But you never know. Maybe textile art, like her daughter Ellie. If that’s what she did in college. He can’t quite remember.
“Kate?” Bardy repeats. The woman seems miles away, looking out to sea.
It is the most amazing spot. The moon is now out above the water.
“Sorry. I was just . . .” She looks around at them, frowning.
Something’s upset her. Surely she couldn’t have liked Tash? Maybe she’s a friend? No. Not a chance.
“Sorry. I was thinking . . . would it matter . . . I mean, do people ever just come along, but don’t enter the competition?”
He would never have expected her to be this nervous. Then a warning blares in his head. Maybe she’s not over the cancer? Does she have more treatment lined up? Or, worse than that . . . Bardy’s insides lurch.
“Kate, you do whatever you want. Just come when you can manage it. If you can’t finish whatever it is you’re thinking of, it’s okay.”
Except it might not be.
She is now looking totally perplexed. “If I can get started, I expect I can finish it. That’s not really the . . .” Light seems to dawn. “Oh! I see . . . no, I’m fine. Really, I am.” She appears keen to reassure them all.
Bardy sees Linda pat Kate’s arm, and relief sweeps over him. He has an image of Kate chatting to Lou about Tina.
Kate looks around at them. “The thing is, I’ve always wanted to have a go at oil painting.
” She reaches into her bag and pulls out her tablet.
She flips it around to show them. “This is the view from my cottage. It looks out over the creek, just beyond the quay, and I’d really like to paint something of what I see each day. ”
He must have walked past her house dozens of times. There is a murmur of approval from around the table. “Lovely spot,” Lou comments.
Kate sweeps through a series of photos, light changing as it does in Bardy’s memory.
The bleak, muted colors of a marsh in winter.
Then, a salt marsh spring, strokes of sage green in the distance, yellow gorse in the foreground.
Next, summer sun bleaching the sand, below a blue-white expanse of sky.
Finally, a sunset marshland at full tide.
Land submerged, a huge expanse of water, the merging of pink and orange.
Clouds low, floating on the surface, and the creek reaching up to make watermarks in the sky.
Kate returns to her screen saver, another photo of the creek. Early morning light over a mid-tide, the passage of the creek still visible, but broad. Red rowboat, a glint of an oar breaking the surface. In the distance, two dots. Seals? Swimmers?
Kate studies this for a moment then smiles even more brightly around at them, eyes glistening, and Bardy wants to . . . what? Reach out a hand to her?
Linda: “You’ll do it, I’m sure.”
Pia, softly: “I will quilt and you will paint.”
Their words are an embrace.
How do women know? How do they do this? It’s like a secret club.
Lou raises uncomprehending eyebrows at him. Leonard is frowning at his watercolor painting. Probably looking for a focal point. Not even aware of what’s happening.
And what is going on?
Bardy has absolutely no idea.
Everyone has left, and Bardy stands at the apex where the channel leading to the harbor meets the wash toward the beach.
Cold wind in his face. The lifeboat station is to his left—a mass of dark slatted wood with sightless glass eyes.
The moon above the water has turned his world monochrome.
Hana had told him this is how the old masters used to paint.
Creating a tonal world before adding the wash of color.
The color will come with the sunrise, but for now, he is standing in a world stripped bare, eyes flicking between the glimmering sea and the blinking lights of the small dredgers and boats moored to the pontoon below him.
Were he to turn, he knows the town will be lying in layers against the same sky, sprinkled with softer lights, evoking the warmth of terra-cotta and cream.
A world of cottages, pubs, shops, and fishing boats.
Living and breathing. For now, he wants to stay where the wind talks to the waves of a breadth of existence that moves with the cycle of the moon and of migration.
The expanse of it awes him, but at the same time, it offers the relief that he is just one alone in the wind.
And that maybe it is better to enjoy the lift of the air than to imagine that he can make any impression on that huge sky.
Better to focus on the small stuff. Rather than believe he is in control of the whole.
He revisits the evening.
He still has no idea what Tay is going to do.
But that will work itself out. Sometimes he thinks she has life plotted so much better than he does.
Then at other times . . . He can’t shake the feeling that he has got something wrong.
He is glad Lou was there—the woodturner—stomach out.
As un-Chad-like as it is possible to be.
Solid. The others were solid, too. He feels something has come together, though he isn’t sure where the pieces fit yet.
Kate? Maybe this would help with what troubles her.
It has happened before. Sam, the guitarist, before and after.
A different boy. Leonard? Why did he slot in so neatly behind that thought?
Was he troubled too? The lockdown king without a kingdom.
Who didn’t like his brother painting better than him.
Brothers! He has some experience of that one.
Pasta bake.
Bardy’s grunt of laughter emerges to sit for a while with his thoughts, then sinks beneath the sound of waves, wind, and the creaking of wood.
Leonard does have Linda on his side. He decides Leonard should be okay.
He is a lucky man. No color floods Bardy’s mind when he looks at Leonard.
But when he looks at Linda . . . boy, what a rich and wonderful color.
She had stood by the window looking out toward the beach, and even against that immense backdrop, her color had shone, full and rounded.
Occasionally, Bardy finds it difficult to define a color, unable to pin it down with descriptors.
This had been particularly so in his inexperienced teens, but as his strange synesthesia settled into him, he started to read more, look about him more.
Visit galleries, take an interest in paints and pigments.
What a language they had revealed. And Hana had helped him.
She had the natural eye of an artist. But still, there are times when even the words he loves fail him.
However, with Linda, it’s easy. For Bardy, Linda is mellow plum.
Just like the fruit. A proper plump purple.
He detects the merest hint of an underlying green, a bygone color from a younger girl.
But these days, overlying all of that glorious purple is a bloom, making the color dusky.
In the fruit, the bloom is a protection against bacteria.
Bardy suspects Linda has developed her own protection over the years.
He recalls Leonard saying she was a nurse.
Maybe she has had to grow a second skin.
Bardy can also see that Linda is a smiler.
During teacher training, his first head teacher, Mrs. Ovenden, had said, “Look for the smiler.” She had then added, “But don’t rely on them.
” He had no idea at the time what she was talking about.
Forty years on, he gets it. And there is no doubt in his mind that Linda would have been a smiler.
That one child in a class who is looking at you with eager anticipation, willing you to get everyone on board.
Keen to raise a hand. Mrs. Ovenden had warned him, “Don’t always turn to them.
They don’t represent the measure of what everyone knows.
And don’t ignore the tricky ones . . .” The Tays of this world, he thinks.
“That is just what the tricky ones are expecting. They know that no one cares. Are certain that not a soul believes they can do better.”
“What you are trying to do,” Mrs. Ovenden had confided, “is to make those children believe they can do more.” It was the days of being able to call a student a child. “And if you are really lucky, you will create a few more smilers along the way. Not a lot, mind you, but a few.”
That wise woman had been right. He had tried not to lean on the smilers in class. But on a really bad day, it was sometimes the smiler that got him through. Willing him to succeed. Ellie Oliver had been a smiler. Kate’s youngest. That girl had no idea how she had helped him.
Was it bad with Hana even back then? That would have been about seven years ago now.
A couple of years before she left. Had he been floundering even then?
Knowing he was getting so much wrong with Hana, but unsure how to change or even what he was doing that made her turn away from him.
Trying to catch a color within his hands, to grasp it and hold it.
When he knew full well it only existed as a gleam in his mind.
He thinks that on some days, Ellie Oliver saved him from going under.
Especially when his dad died and he had no idea how to be, how to grieve.
Feeling like a disappointment as a son in death, as well as in life.
His father had been a bank manager. He had half imagined having In the days when being a bank manager meant something inscribed on his grave.
It had been his mom’s favorite refrain until she died of heart failure three years before her husband.
During those three years, Bardy had made a point of regularly visiting his dad, along with his brother, Richard.
Richard was an accountant, the financial director of a nationwide group of solicitors.
If Richard were away skiing or playing golf, Bardy still suggested he visit alone, but his father’s inevitable response was:
“Not much point. Wait until Richard’s back.”
He remembers when they started fostering, his father had been scathing.
“If you needed more money, you should have chosen a different job, trained for a profession.” He didn’t need to add, “Like your brother.”
Bardy knew there was no point in saying that he rather thought teaching was a profession, or that they didn’t do it for the money, or even that most of the cash was spent on food and the extras they needed.
He sometimes thought that if they did need more money, he could take up driving a cab.
He had navigated his way to most places in the county, and beyond, accompanying their foster kids to visit social services, case officers, education services, doctors and hospitals, mental health workers, estranged family members, and occasionally to the police and the courts.
But when his dad died of complications following routine surgery on his knee, he had been disoriented by the grief and the sense of never having said what he really wanted to.
Any hopes he had that his father’s death might bring him and Richard closer were short-lived.
His father had made his brother sole executor of his small estate, and Richard had left the funeral tea early, dodging what Bardy had known was an awkward attempt at an embrace.
Fending him off with a formal handshake, Richard told him he would email him in due course.
During the following weeks, Bardy relied on Kate’s daughter, Ellie, the smiler, more than he should have. Although he is certain she had no idea how her optimism and general “fuck-it-let’s-do-this” attitude had helped him. He hopes he never needs Linda in that way.
And Pia? The woman with no color.
Oh, how Lou would laugh at him.
The man in the cerise sweater.
This makes him feel better.
Another thought lifts him. But it brings with it an afterwash very close to terror.
Before she left tonight, Pia agreed to meet him for coffee.