chapel of rest was silent in the winter-dead landscape. Most of the graves were old, with mossy stones from which the writing had long ago faded into indecipherability. Next to the newly dug earth, overgrown by the grass and an encroaching laurel, the polished granite of the more recent grave stood out. There were flowers on this grave too, but it was as if the wind had caught them and scattered their petals in a splash of dark red against the black of the earth, a freak wind that had ripped the flowers apart, and strewn their petals across this one grave. Ellie. Love…as strong as death.
The frozen stillness of the morning thawed to rain, chill, persistent and driving. Eliza turned up the heater in her car as her wipers struggled to keep her view clear. The windscreen fogged, and she had to wind her window down a little to clear it. Her hat was pulled down over her ears, and her scarf muffled round her face, but she still felt cold. It was as if the hour spent in the chapel of rest and standing by the frozen grave had chilled her to the marrow, and it was going to take time for the warmth to creep back in.
The dullness of the afternoon depressed her as she drove back into the centre of the city in a slow-moving line of traffic. The rain splashed up from the road, and she speeded up her windscreen wipers to give herself some chance of seeing ahead. The traffic shuffled forward a couple of yards and stopped again.
The grey of the weather carried echoes of the chill graveyard, and she thought of Maggie alone in the dark, under the ground, dead and gone. And Ellie, with all her bright promise. She wanted to be back in the summer of Spain, or failing that, home in the warmth and colour of her flat, or in the spaciousness of the gallery. The traffic inched past the bus station and then she was on to the confusion of the massive Park Square roundabout. She switched lanes with the expertise of practice, ignoring the impatient horn that sounded behind her, and drove down past the new developments of the canal basin and along the road where the old industrial buildings still stood, unchanged and deserted.
The gallery and Eliza’s flat were housed in one of the old warehouses beyond the expensive and redeveloped canal basin that seemed to be the demarcation line between new Sheffield and the promise of prosperity, and old Sheffield, upon whose flesh the beneficiaries of industrial wealth had fed, and where now there were only the decaying bones. At night, when the gallery was empty, Eliza sometimes felt as isolated as if she were living on a remote island in the Shetlands rather than in the centre of a massive urban sprawl.
She drove past the hotel that seemed to mark the end of the gentrified area and under the bridge to the road that led along the canal side. The change was abrupt. The brickwork on this side of the bridge was crumbling, the surface stained with the water that ran from the broken fall-pipes. Beyond the bridge, there was a narrow alleyway, a cul-de-sac, where old household rubbish was dumped and then left to rot.
She took the turning that led to the canal road and drove past the chained and padlocked gateways of the old loading bays and the canal company offices. She was at the gallery now, the old warehouse looking dark and forbidding in the fading light. It had a mellow brick frontage and arched windows that gave balance and symmetry, and made the building beautiful in the daylight, even before its restoration.
Eliza locked the car and set the alarm. This was an area where you had to be careful. Her mind was already moving away from the events of the morning, and towards the work she still had to do. She noticed that Jonathan Massey’s car was parked at the side of the old warehouse.
Jonathan Massey was the gallery director. Eliza had known him for years – he had been her tutor at college, and Maggie’s tutor as well. She hadn’t been expecting him in today. He’d had some kind of meeting at the education department.
She went into the gallery, nodding a hello to Mel, a young trainee Jonathan had taken on before Eliza’s appointment. Mel had dropped out of an art and design course at the local college. They couldn’t teach her anything, she’d claimed to Eliza. She was sitting on one of the window sills reading a magazine, More, or Hello!, Eliza assumed from past experience. She tried to suppress her irritation. Mel was supposed to be working on the opening today, checking the invitations, making sure the replies were in, checking the catering arrangements, while Eliza worked on the exhibition.
‘Have you finished checking the invitation list?’ she said as she pulled off her hat and unwound the scarf from round her neck.
Mel looked round and shrugged. ‘I was waiting for you,’ she said. She was affecting boho glamour today, Eliza noticed, a tiered skirt of leather and chiffon, an embroidered jacket, DMs. Mel made most of her own clothes. Her hair, which was currently black, was gelled severely back.
So that’s a ‘no’, then. ‘You don’t need me to do that,’ Eliza said shortly. ‘Next time you’re waiting,’ she began, then decided that she couldn’t be bothered. Mel’s contract only lasted for another five months, and then she would have to move on.
Jonathan must be in his office. She knocked on his door and went in. He was rummaging through his desk drawer, his back to her. ‘Jonathan?’ she said.
He looked round quickly. ‘Eliza! I didn’t…’ He pushed the drawer shut. ‘How did it go?’
Eliza shrugged. A funeral was a funeral. What did you say? ‘I thought I’d get on with setting up the exhibition. What have you lost?’
‘Oh, just a letter,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Mel…There was a message for you earlier, about Friday.’
‘From Daniel?’ She’d last seen Daniel six months ago, a brief glimpse in a bar on her last night in Madrid. ‘What did he say?’
‘No idea.’ Jonathan began putting papers back into folders. ‘Mel took it.’
‘OK.’ The Triumph of Death. It was Eliza’s triumph as well, vindicating her appointment, relatively inexperienced, as curator of the new gallery. But Jonathan had been surprisingly unenthusiastic when she’d suggested that they try for a preview of Daniel Flynn’s latest exhibition. ‘Flynn?’ he’d said. ‘He’s overrated. And he thinks far too much of himself to come somewhere like this. What’s the point? He’s only ever been interested in London.’ Jonathan and Daniel had trained together at St Martin’s. Jonathan’s low-key response to the exhibition, the most prestigious the gallery had had since its opening six months ago, had been a constant irritation to Eliza.
The rationale of the Trust that funded the gallery was to bring important and innovative work to the provinces, breaking the stranglehold that London had on the arts scene. ‘Daniel Flynn would be perfect,’ Eliza said. ‘There’s a real buzz about his work – a lot of people will come. Look, The Triumph of Death is already scheduled for London, but I think he’ll agree to a preview. The dates are right and I know this is the kind of setting he’s thought about.’
Jonathan’s agreement had been grudging. She’d enjoyed showing him the letter agreeing to her suggestion: a one-week preview before the exhibition transferred to London. Even then, he’d had been oddly subdued. ‘Must be some kind of gesture towards his roots,’ he’d said. Daniel Flynn had grown up in Sheffield.
He was having problems with his own work – a series of photographs around the idea of social exclusion, photographs of children whose lives and origins more or less put them out of the race from the very beginning. The idea was good, but he had been working on it for the past five years, and it still seemed no nearer completion. Which would explain his rather sour response to the success of one of his fellow students.
He’d said, almost as an afterthought, ‘That was good work on your part, I suppose.’ She hadn’t told him about her personal connection with Daniel
