Free Looking Down by Frances Fyfield Page B

back.’
    ‘You can’t have seen the chough. The chough hasn’t been here for decades.’
    ‘Well, I saw it.’ He swallowed. There were times when alcohol, in which he had never overindulged, tasted far more divine than any advertisement could describe. ‘It was there. And now I’ve painted it. So it must have been there.’
    ‘Ah. Imagination has its own reality.’
    ‘It had red feet and a curved red beak. And there was a plan to reintroduce the chough to this coastline.’
    A plan which had come to nothing yet. The doctor was silent for a moment. They both looked ahead at the vast expanse of sky through the windscreen. He noticed that Richard’s colour had improved and thought how good the interior of a car was for encouraging conversation. Cars had an anonymous intimacy.
    ‘So did you come back in the hope of seeing the chough again? Or to look for another body? They aren’t that regular.’
    ‘Neither, really. I’ve been here many times in the last few weeks, watching it change. Strange, isn’t it, how a place you’ve chosen at random should become addictive. Perhaps because you’ve chosen it yourself and no one else has done it for you.’
    ‘But why choose this? There are stretches of coast far morebeautiful than this. Think of Wales or Cornwall . . . You might actually see your red-beaked chough.’
    ‘Too far away, and I was born there and I can’t go back, but you’ve got the point about
this.
’ He gestured towards the rising cliff path, visible to the left and marked by a litter bin. ‘The point is that so much of it is bleak and ugly. And the town you can see isn’t so lovely either. The cliffs have bald patches like an old head with alopecia. The wind stops it being lush. I couldn’t do with it being completely beautiful. It would be too much for me.’
    ‘I thought an artist might seek perfection?’
    ‘No, and I don’t much care for flowers. I don’t know what I like until I see it. Bodies and shapes and something I can paint later.’ He had balanced the whisky glass on the sketchbook on his knees. ‘Do you think I’m odd for sketching her? There was nothing else I could do.’
    ‘I’ve often found a certain beauty in a dead body,’ John said. ‘They sometimes look marvellous, especially the old. Streamlined and serene in a moment of perfection before the rot sets in. But not when the death is violent and untimely, and at her age it was definitely that. She was about twenty, that girl. I wish I could give her a name. Is this drawing and painting lark a recent hobby of yours?’
    ‘The sketches are the ideas. The framework. I take them home and paint from them, and memory. I wish it was a hobby, but it isn’t.’
    John waited out the pause. Lord, they were sipping their whisky like little old ladies.
    ‘It’s an addiction. It simply has to be done. It’s . . . like being blind and struggling to find sight. It must have grown on me over the years because suddenly it was there, a fully fledged disease.’
    He held the whisky in his left hand, tapped the sketch pad with the fingers of his right.
    ‘An overpowering desire to paint or die in the attempt. I’ve hadan incredibly dull and boring life, making money, raising children. Second marriage, early retirement, and now all I want to do is learn how to paint.’
    ‘Hmm. What does second wife think?’
    ‘I don’t know, which doesn’t mean I don’t care. We don’t discuss it and she’s waiting for it to pass. She also has to learn how to live by herself, anyway. It was high time she acquired a bit of self-sufficiency. She’s much younger than I. She’d have to learn in time.’
    ‘Not yet awhile, surely. You’re a youth yet. Not even sixty, as I recall.’
    Richard laughed, more relaxed and at ease than he had been in days.
    ‘You’re good at this, aren’t you, Dr John? Good at asking questions. Well, as you know, John, we all have our individual span, which has nothing to do with the number of years.