White Nights - Ann Cleeves [3]
Perez came up behind her. She sensed the movement and turned. The first thought, as it always was when he caught her in an unguarded moment, was that she wanted to sketch him. Her fingers itched to be holding charcoal. It would be a fluid drawing, no hard edges. Very dark. Perez was a Shetlander. His family had lived in the islands since the sixteenth century, but there was no Viking blood in him. An ancestor had been washed ashore after the wreck of a ship from the Armada. At least that was the story he told. She wondered if he’d just bought into the myth because it was a way of explaining his difference. The strange name. There were a few people in the islands with his dark hair and olive skin – black Shetlanders, the locals called them – but in this gathering he stuck out, looked exotic and foreign.
‘It seems to be going well,’ he said. Tentative. He seemed in a strange mood tonight. Nerves, perhaps. He knew how much this meant to her. Her first exhibition. And anyway, they were feeling their way in the relationship. She was keeping her distance, her independence. If she got tied up with Perez, she wouldn’t only be taking him on. It would be his family, the whole Fair Isle thing. And he’d be taking on a single mother. A five-year-old child. Too much to contemplate, she thought. Only she was contemplating it. In these long summer nights, when it never seemed to get dark, she thought of him. Pictures of him rattled around in her head, like old-fashioned slides dropping into a projector. Occasionally she got up and sat outside her house, watching the sun which never quite set over the grey water, and thought about how she would draw him. His long body turned away from her. The bones under his skin. The hard spine and the curve of buttock. And it was all in her imagination. He had kissed her cheek, touched her arm, but there had been no other physical contact. Perhaps there was some other woman in his life. Someone he dreamed of when he too was kept awake by the light. Perhaps he was waiting for a decision from her.
Soon after they’d first met she’d gone south for a month. She’d told herself it was for her daughter’s sake. Cassie had been through the sort of drama that would traumatize an adult and Fran had thought time away from Shetland would help her recover. When Fran had returned Perez had contacted her, asking how things were with her and the girl. Professional interest, Fran had thought, hoping however that perhaps there’d been more to it. An easy friendship had developed. She hadn’t pushed it; she was still an outsider here and she wasn’t sure exactly what was expected. The failure of her marriage had shattered her confidence. She couldn’t face another rejection.
‘It’s not going well at all,’ she said now. ‘There’s hardly anyone here.’ She knew she sounded ungracious, but couldn’t help herself. ‘You’d think people would come, if only for the free wine and the chance to see Roddy Sinclair.’
‘But the people who are here are interested,’ he said. ‘Look.’
She turned away from him and back into the room. Perez was right. People had turned their attention from the wine and the music and had begun to promenade around the gallery, looking at the paintings, stopping occasionally to concentrate on something specific. The space was evenly divided between her work and Bella’s. The exhibition had been designed as a Bella Sinclair retrospective. She was showing thirty years’ worth of art; pictures and drawings had been pulled in from collections all over the country. The invitation for Fran to show with her had come out of the blue.
‘You should be proud,’ Perez said. She wasn’t quite sure how to react. She hoped that he would say something flattering about her work. Tonight, jittery and exposed, she could use the flattery.