The Tin Heart Gold Mine Read online

  The

  Tin

  Heart Gold

  Mine

  Ruth Hartley

  Copyright © 2017 Ruth Hartley

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 9781785898143

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For John.

  “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.” - Pablo Picasso

  Contents

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Five

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Six

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Seven

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Eight

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Nine

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Ten

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Eleven

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Twelve

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Thirteen

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Ruth Hartley’s first novel, The Shaping of Water, is a character-driven story set around a lake in Central Africa during the Liberation wars.

  “With its fragmented time lines, cast of diverse characters and wonderful rendering of landscape, this is a novel of challenging intellect and big ideas,” says Tanvi Bush, author of ‘Witch Girl’, published by Modjaji Books.

  Ruth Hartley has published on Kindle “The White and Black Blues”, a short story about African jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong and Tom Waller who loves jazz but is inside the ‘wrong’ skin.

  She grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe, learnt about art and politics in South Africa and about life in swinging London. After working in Zambia for many years she returned to England to study, write and travel. Ruth now lives in France and continues to write, draw and paint.

  www.ruthartley.com

  Prologue

  OSCAR AND LARA 1985

  Oscar and Lara watch the liquid heat of the day hatch out of a misty lopsided sun. It’s cool and fresh on the riverbank where they sit together, shoulders touching, under a huge fig tree. Its looped and tangled roots half in, half out of the river protect them from a frontal ambush by a crocodile while behind them, its aerial roots and twisted branches mean they won’t be surprised by wild creatures coming down to the water to drink. Oscar and Lara only speak to point out a bird or to identify its song. Their voices are so quiet they’re inaudible half a pace away. The sibilance of whispers carries for a greater distance, but by remaining still and speaking at this low pitch, they won’t disturb the most timid of wild animals.

  “What a pretty creature!” Lara touches the back of Oscar’s hand to draw his attention to the creature she’s just seen.

  “Beautiful and lethal.” Oscar links his little finger over Lara’s.

  They have no need to tell each other that it’s a “boomslang”, a juvenile tree snake. Oscar told Lara a while ago how he watched a friend die from the internal haemorrhage caused by its slow-acting venom.

  They watch the elegant reptile wind itself down the curves and folds of the tree nearby. Its apple-green scales shimmer with turquoise light, its bright round eye is functional and pitiless.

  “It’s had breakfast – a bird’s egg – now it’ll sleep,” Oscar observes.

  Halfway along the snake’s slender length there’s an oval swelling larger than its head that doesn’t impede its supple descent.

  Lara looks up to see which bird’s nest has been raided, which bird is fluttering distressed above her head, but there is only the long thin call of a bush shrike and the busyness of the yellow and scarlet bishop birds in the reeds on the sandbank in mid-river. In a moment the boomslang vanishes among the shrubs at the tree’s roots. Lara makes a mental note of its nest and remembers another snake in hiding: the warlord from Angola known as General Njoka, or General Snake. He is rumoured to
have burnt down villages a little way north and the local villagers are terrified. Oscar, alone, appears unconcerned.

  The grip of Oscar’s hand makes Lara shivery. Yesterday she made sketches of him and his men launching the camp’s flat-bottomed boat into the river for a fishing trip. Though quite short, Oscar is as fit and strong as his African workers and as unselfconscious about his body. Lara can’t imagine him preening himself beside a swimming pool. Oscar is different. Oscar is tough. His body tells the story of his life, of his journeys and his wars. She finds this thought thrilling. She wants to know what he knows. It pleases her that he is so much older than her. Oddly, it makes her feel powerful. Yet last night drifting off to sleep in the iron circle of his arms, Lara had noticed that Oscar’s skin is softening, his flesh is slack in the hollows of his collarbones and under his chin. The hair on his chest is as grey as the hair on his temples. It made her feel tender, but it also made her a little sad. She felt something else as well. Did his mortality excite her? Last night Lara pushed the idea away and snuggled her head into Oscar’s neck.

  Now, sitting by Oscar, Lara is certain everything is just as perfect as it should be.

  Part One

  London 1997

  Chapter One

  Mile End

  At nine-thirty the sun breaks through the clouds above Bow Church Station and tips its load of blinding light into the second floor flat. Its rays are as sharp and clean as knives. Shielding her eyes from its glare, Lara hides behind the curtain in her studio and spies on Tim, her tall husband, and Adam, her small son, as they cross Mile End Road below her.

  The part of Lara that is artist observes her family with professional detachment and clarity. Her visual brain calculates the differences and likenesses between her subjects, together with their relationship to the light and colour of their environment. Yesterday Lara told Tim and Adam that it suited her very well to stay home and paint while they spent the day together.

  She lied.

  The part of Lara that loves Tim and Adam knows that she won’t add one splodge of colour to any of her canvases today. She has no desire to paint. She feels as if she’ll never paint again. It seems a pointless activity. She was working on a commission for her agent but can’t decide if it is complete. She doesn’t care if it ever sells though once she was proud of it. The painting is large; the brushstrokes free and confident, the colours swirl from cool greens and greys to a focus of warm red and orange. It is a painting of the wild and overgrown Bethnal Green Jewish Cemetery in a pearl-pink twilight. A bright-eyed fox sits in the foreground, its front paws neatly together under its tidy tail. Behind the fox a homeless man sleeps on a grave stone under a litter of plastic sheets and dirty blankets. Lara has made several successful paintings inspired by the wildlife and rough sleepers in the cemetery but now she is wearied by the thought of them.

  She has assets sitting silently in a bank vault that free her from the need to earn her living. These assets belonged to Oscar and infuriate Tim. Lara has no idea what to do with them. The problem is driving her mad.

  When a canvas is almost finished, Lara has a private ritual that helps her judge if she can stop working on it. This ritual amuses Tim and intrigues and puzzles Adam when they catch her behaving oddly outside her studio door.

  “I have to catch my paintings by surprise.” she explains. “I get stale – I look and look at what I’ve done – I need to see it with new eyes. Sometimes I turn the painting the wrong way up – sometimes I turn myself upside-down. Sometimes I go into the studio with my eyes shut and then open them fast and blink at my painting. Obviously my painting alters as I work but it seems to go on changing after I’ve finished. It sounds mad I know – it’s actually my perception that changes. I can’t immediately be certain if it’s good or bad or needs more work. I have to leave a painting alone for a while – then see if it’s okay. An artist I know carries on working on his paintings during exhibitions and even after they’ve been bought if he can get away with it.”

  Tim’s sympathetic. “It’s the same with writing. Even after publication I sometimes change my judgement of how well or how badly I’ve written an article.”

  Adam takes Lara’s explanation very seriously. He turns his back on Lara’s painting, bends over, hands on floor to avoid somersaulting and studies it from between his legs. “I see what you mean, Mum,” he says. “That fox isn’t jumping out at me today like it did yesterday. It belongs inside the picture now.”

  Lara is in turmoil. She has no new perspective on her life. No fresh vision. Her mind and body are wrenching themselves apart. A sour resentful fear burns inside her. She didn’t ask for any of this. She didn’t want money or assets. She didn’t plan wars or commit murders. She hasn’t traded in blood diamonds. At least, she didn’t know anything about that. Really!

  Shit! Shit! Shit! Money is shit, isn’t it?

  She’s never had much money. It’s true she wanted it but does she still want it now?

  Lara shivers. She’s made some bad choices. Who hasn’t at some point in their lives? Liseli, her old school friend, had teased her about her sun-bleached hair and her looks. “Oscar fancies blonde women,” she warned. Lara is angry at the memory. She tugs a lock of hair into a twist behind her ear. There’s not enough sunshine in London for her hair to be any colour but mouse brown.

  “I’m first a person – second an artist. Or is it the other way around? Art comes first. Definitely! Except – I can’t make it anymore.” Lara is submerged in a well of self-doubt and held down by the weight of her sadness. “I’m no use to myself if I can’t paint and draw.”

  This misery is about losing Tim when he goes to Uganda next week. He must come back so she can stop feeling this way. Tim must understand her dilemma, mustn’t he? So why is he going away? Will he ever come back?

  Lara twists her right hand into the shirt buttons between her breasts and thrusts her knuckles against the blade bone of her chest, but the self-inflicted pain is too minimal to counter her growing panic. It can’t hold her together. It can’t stop the swelling agony in her heart. Lara thinks her body will burst with the pain. If she yells out of the window at Tim he won’t hear her above the traffic. He might not come back anyway and if Adam was to be distracted as he crosses the road she might be responsible for an accident and for his death.

  In another week Tim will be back in Africa. Lara’s left breast still tingles from last night’s love making. The closer their parting approaches, the rougher their lovemaking becomes. Each of them is trying to use physical sensation to block emotional pain.

  Lara continues to watch as Tim takes Adam’s hand and they cross over the Mile End Road at the pedestrian lights. Neither of them looks back at the window of the flat. Lara is bitterly disappointed and greatly relieved.

  The thrusting, deafening traffic below also makes conversation between father and son impossible, so they walk quickly towards the Underground Station. This is their special day together. It is the result of weeks of strategic planning. It will be a good day for Adam to remember when his father is in a distant and dangerous land. In spite of how she feels, Lara can’t help half-smiling. Neither Tim nor Adam had thought to comb Adam’s hair before they left home. It pokes out and up in a bird’s crest at the back of his head.

  Lara glances around her studio. Perhaps she’ll make herself a coffee. Perhaps she won’t. Most of her paintings are hidden inside bubble wrap ready to move to her new studio near Victoria Park. There’s not much to see. The plan chest contains her drawings; her sketchbooks are stored in boxes. Outwardly it all appears safe, neat and bland. Some of her sketchbooks haven’t been opened in years. Perhaps some of the drawings in the plan chest should remain unseen and untouched. Lara imagines the layers of paper stirring like leaves in a dry breeze or rustling like grasses in a hot wind. She imagines a whirlwind of drawings flying around the room and adding to the storm of confusion in her he
ad. There are many drawings of African landscapes and wild animals and birds. There are also sketches of people she knows, sketches of Bill and Maria, of Inonge, of Enoch and of Oscar.

  Chapter Two

  Adam and Tim

  Lara is present at some of Tim and Adam’s planning sessions for their trip to the South Bank.

  “We’ll go first to Stanford’s to buy guide books and maps,” Lara hears Tim say to Adam, “then to the Africa Centre to see if they have anything on Somalia. Next over the Hungerford Bridge to the South Bank Centre for that jazz concert and a pasta lunch.”

  Lara would have liked to go with them just to stop in the middle of the Hungerford Bridge and stare out over the Thames River. The experience is always magical. The beauty of its silvered waters glittering in the slanting London light enthrals her with its poetry, romance and history. She likes to journey in spirit down the Thames all the way to the sea. Her imagination carries her over oceans and up the distant Kasama River until she comes to the rock pools gleaming in the setting sun of Chambeshi and sees again the wild creatures she had once painted from life. Lara knows however, that Adam needs time alone with Tim. She knows that Tim loves Adam and they are both excited at the prospect of their day together.

  “Sure, Dad – Central Line to Holborn first – then afterwards we’ll go home on the Green Line.” Adam agrees. He likes to display his knowledge of London Transport. “Here, Dad, Give me your specs – they’re all smudgy again.”

  During this discussion Adam pulls a corner of his shirt out of his jeans and reaches up for Tim’s glasses. Tim and Lara both grin. Tim loves Adam’s concern about his specs even if it meant means they end up with fine scratches on them. Lara is forever pointing out that Adam also needs to wipe smudges off his own glasses. Father and son are both short-sighted but, aside from his spectacles, Adam is more like Lara, his mother, in appearance. He has the same golden complexion and pale brown hair. He doesn’t have Tim’s generous over-wide mouth. It is too soon to say if Adam will need orthodontic treatment, as Tim had done as an adolescent.