him, absolutely sure he would get their attention. Conversation faltered and the room grew quiet. He looked at his aunt, who gave him a smile which was at once indulgent and grateful. He lifted his fiddle, gripped it under his chin and waited again. There was a moment of silence and he began to play.
They had known what to expect and he didn’t disappoint them. He played like a madman. It was what he was known for. The show. That, and the music. Shetland fiddle music, which had somehow caught the popular imagination, was played on national radio, raved about by television chat-show hosts. Impossible to believe – a Shetland boy in the tabloids for drinking champagne and dating teenage actresses. He’d hit the big time suddenly. A rock star had named him as his favourite performer and then he was everywhere, in newspapers and on the television and in glossy celebrity magazines.
He hopped and jigged, and the respectable middle-aged people, the art critic from the south, the few great and good who’d driven north from Lerwick, set down their glasses and began to clap to the rhythm. He fell to his knees, lay back slowly so that he was flat on the floor and continued playing without missing a beat, then sprang to his feet and still the music continued. In one corner of the gallery an elderly couple were dancing, surprisingly light-footed, arms linked.
The playing was so furious that the watchers’ eyes couldn’t follow his fingers. Then suddenly the music stopped. The boy bowed. The people cheered. Perez had seen him play many times before, but was still moved by the performance, felt a jingoistic pride in it, which made him uncomfortable. He looked at Fran. Perhaps this was too sentimental for her. But she was cheering along with the rest.
Bella walked from the shadow into the light to join Roddy. She held out an arm, a self-consciously dramatic gesture to acknowledge the performance.
‘Roddy Sinclair,’ she said. ‘My nephew.’ She looked around her. ‘I’m just sorry that there weren’t more people here to see him.’ And in fact the room only contained a scattering of people. Her comment made it suddenly obvious. She must have realized that because she frowned again. Clearly she wished she hadn’t mentioned it.
The boy bowed again, grinned, raised his fiddle in one hand and his bow in another.
‘Just buy the paintings,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re here. I’m only the warm-up act. The pictures are the main attraction.’
He turned away from them and took a glass of wine from a long trestle laid out against the one bare wall in the room.
Chapter Two
Fran had already drunk several glasses of wine. She was more nervous than she’d expected to be. When she’d worked on a London magazine she’d attended dozens of these events: first nights, openings, exhibitions. She’d circulated, chatted, remembered names and faces, hidden her boredom. But this was different. Some of the paintings on these walls were hers. She felt raw and exposed. If people rejected or dismissed her work, it would be as if they were dismissing her. She wanted to shout to the people who were catching up on island gossip, who stood with their back to the art:
And there were fewer people here than she’d expected there to be. Bella’s openings were always well attended, but even some of the people Fran had invited – people she’d considered friends – had failed to show. Perhaps they had only been polite when she’d mentioned the exhibition. They’d seen her art and didn’t care for it. At least not enough to turn out on a beautiful evening, when there were other things to do. This was the time of year for barbecues and being on the water. Fran took the poor turnout personally.
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
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.
But his attention was turned to the visitors. ‘There’s someone who seems very keen.’ She followed his gaze to a middle-aged man, who was smart in an arty, unbuttoned sort of way. Slim, almost girlish figure. Black linen jacket over a black T-shirt, loose black trousers. He’d been standing in front of an early self-portrait of Bella. It was Bella at her most outrageous. She was dressed in red with a scarlet gash of lipstick as a mouth, her hair blown away from her face, at once disturbing and erotic. It was an oil, the paint thick and textured, the strokes very free.
Then he moved on to stand next to Roddy Sinclair and to stare at a work of Fran’s, a drawing of Cassie on the beach at Ravenswick. Something about the intensity of his looking made her uncomfortable, though it wasn’t the sort of picture that would allow him to recognize Cassie in the street. He looked horrified, she thought, not keen. As if he’d just witnessed an atrocity. Or seen a ghost.
‘He’s not local,’ Perez said. Fran agreed. It wasn’t just that she didn’t recognize him. It was the man’s style, which marked him out as a soothmoother. The clothes; the way he held himself and looked at the picture.
‘Who do you think he is?’ She looked over her glass, tried not to seem too obvious, but still he was staring at the drawing, lost, so she didn’t think he’d notice even if he turned round.
