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mates...
     

     
    *3*
    Jack was working in his studio when Sarah's key finally grated in the lock at around eleven o'clock. He looked up as she passed his open door. "Where have you been?"
    She was very tired. "At the Hewitts'. They gave me supper. Have you eaten?" She didn't come in, but stood in the doorway watching him.
    He nodded absent-mindedly. Food was a low priority in Jack's life. He jerked his head at the canvas on the easel. "What do you think?"
    How much simpler it would be, she thought, if she were obtuse, and genuinely misunderstood what he was trying to achieve in his work. How much simpler if she could just accept what one or two critics had said, that it was pretentious rubbish and bad art.
    "Joanna Lascelles presumably."
    But not a Joanna Lascelles that anyone would recognize, except perhaps in the black of her funeral weeds and the silver gold of her hair, for Jack used shape and colour to paint emotions, and there was an extraordinary turbulence about this painting, even in its earliest stage. He would go on now for weeks, working layer on layer, attempting through the medium of oils to build and depict the complexity of the human personality. Sarah, who understood his colour-coding almost as well as he did, could interpret much of what he had already blocked in. Grief (for her mother?), disdain (for her daughter?), and, all too predictably, sensuality (for him?).
    Jack watched her face. "She's interesting," he said.
    "Obviously."
    His eyes narrowed angrily. "Don't start," he murmured. "I'm not in the mood."
    She shrugged. "Neither am I. I'm going to bed."
    "I'll work on the jacket tomorrow," he promised grudgingly. He made a living of sorts by designing book jackets, but the commissions were few and far between because he rarely met deadlines. The disciplines imposed by the profit motive infuriated him.
    "I'm not your mother, Jack," she said coolly. "What you do tomorrow is your own affair."
    But he was in the mood for a row, probably, thought Sarah, because Joanna had flattered him. "You just can't leave it alone, can you? No, you're not my mother, but by God you're beginning to sound like her."
    "How odd," she said with heavy irony, "and I always thought you didn't get on with her because she kept telling you what to do. Now I'm tarred with the same brush, yet I've done the exact opposite, left you to work things out for yourself. You're a child, Jack. You need a woman in your life to blame for every little thing that goes wrong for you."
    "Is this babies again?" he snarled. "Dammit, Sarah, you knew the score before you married me, and it was your choice to go through with it. The career was everything, remember? Nothing's changed. Not for me, anyway. It's not my fault if your bloody hormones are screaming that time's running out. We had a deal. No children."
    She eyed him curiously. After all, she thought, Joanna must have been less accommodating than he had hoped. Well, well! "The deal, Jack, for what it's worth, was that I would support you until you established yourself. After that, all options were open. What we never considered, for that I blame myself because I relied on my own artistic judgement, was that you might
never
establish yourself. In which circumstance, I suspect, the deal is null and void. So far, I have kept you for six years, two years before marriage and four afterwards, and the choice to marry was as much yours as mine. As far as I remember we were celebrating your first major sale, your only major sale," she added. "I think that's fair, don't you? I can't recall your selling a canvas since."
    "Spite doesn't suit you, Sarah."
    "No," she agreed, "any more than behaving like a brat suits you. You say nothing's changed, but you're wrong, everything's changed. I used to admire you. Now I despise you. I used to find you amusing. Now you bore me. I used to love you. Now I just feel sorry for you." She smiled apologetically. "I also used to think you'd make it. Now I don't. And that's