Page 11 of The Blue Hour

‘Dr Haswell. Retired she was, and then came out of retirement to work at the hospital during the pandemic. Fifteen-hour shifts, they had them on. Worked to the bone.’ He glowers at Becker, asthough he is somehow responsible. ‘I’d hate to see her bothered, after everything she’s been through. She and Mrs Chapman,’ he says again, ‘no trouble to anyone.’

Upstairs in his room, Becker calls Helena.

‘It’s weird, you know, the locals seem to have been fond of her,’ he says.

‘Why is that weird?’ Helena asks.

‘I was just surprised, you know. This incomer – a southerner, an English woman, quite posh – turns up, buys an island, lives out there all by herself; and she’s got this reputation for being cold and difficult and unfriendly, and yet the locals here – well, the landlord and his wife, anyway – have only good things to say about her.’

‘Mmmm.’ Helena seems distracted, as though she’s only half-listening to him.

‘Mmmm? Mmmm what?’

She laughs. ‘Maybe she was a good customer? I don’t know, Beck, I imagine she could probably be perfectly charming if she wanted to. And all those things the critics wrote about her – that she was … what was it? – disagreeable and prickly andstrident– that’s just what people say about a woman who knows her own mind, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

Helena laughs again. ‘Yes, it is! And really, when you think about it, single-minded and selfish are just synonyms for childless, in some circles.’

‘Are they?’

Helena tuts; he can almost feel her rolling her eyes at him. ‘Look, you need to go back and talk to her – to the friend,companion, whoever she is. Isn’t that what you’re there for? If you really want to get to know Vanessa, you need to find a way tomake this Haswell woman speak to you. She’s the one who knows where all the bodies are buried.’

Becker hears a voice, from the corridor outside his room or over the line, he’s not sure. ‘What was that?’ he asks her.

‘It’s the pizza boy,’ Helena drawls huskily, ‘he’s just getting out of the shower.’ Becker exhales loudly. ‘It’s thetelevision, Beck. Jesus. I’m bingeingKardashiansin your absence.’

‘I love you,’ Becker says.

‘And we love you.’

‘You and the pizza boy?’

‘Or pizza girl.’

He ends the call and scrolls back through his Vanessa archive, reading with a rather more critical eye. Of course she wasn’t that disagreeable, of course it was just misogyny! The critics were all men, the interviewers were men, as were most of the interviewees. They were men with agendas, or men who bore grudges.

It is only on this latest pass through the articles that Becker realizes quite howabsentGrace Haswell is. She’s almost never mentioned – except once or twice as Vanessa’s carer in the obituaries – and even then, she’s never quoted. It’s possible that she didn’t want to speak to the newspapers; it’s possible that Vanessa asked her not to. But it’s also possible that while the journalists were out chasing quotes from Turner Prize winners or prominent critics, no one thought to ask Grace Haswell, a provincial GP, what she thought, how she felt.

Becker closes the laptop. He is dog-tired, his back and shoulders stiff from the drive and from sitting hunched over his computer. He clambers off the bed and then pads over creaking floorboards into the tiny bathroom, drawing himself up, rolling his shoulders backwards and his neck from side to side. He stands at the toilet, his head grazing the ceiling as he pisses, looking out through the Velux window at a solitary light in the distance.

How easy it would be, he thinks, not to see her. How easy to miss her altogether.

Back in the bedroom, he opens up the laptop once more and begins to write.

Dear Dr Haswell,

There are so many things I would like to talk to you about, so many questions I’d like to ask you. That bone – which I never for a single second imagined came from Julian Chapman’s body – is the least of them. That’s just something I have to do, a problem to clear up, a part of my job as curator of Fairburn’s collection.

I’d like to ask you about your life with Vanessa, about the woman behind the work, the woman who only you knew. This is partly about professional curiosity, of course. I wrote my thesis on the development of non-traditional landscape art, andVanessa’s work was central to that. But my connection toher work goes back further, it has deeper roots. Like anyonewho is interested in art, I have two sets of memories: personal memories, and art memories. Sometimes, the two crossover.

My mother was a talented watercolourist. She went to art college, but dropped out when she fell pregnant. She intended to return to her studies, but my father – a man I have never met – did not support her. My grandmother, who was already widowed by that point, didn’t have the means to support all three of us, so Mum had to work.

She had a job at the supermarket in the centre of Bicester, just down the road from a little art gallery called Harry West Art. It was, I’m sure you know, the first place ever to show Vanessa’s work. Mum used to go there often, in her lunch hour or after work, to look at the pictures. At one show, she bought atiny oil painting, eight inches by five. It cost her a week’s wages and an almighty row with my grandmother.

The painting was of a hedgerow, its riotous greens studded with purple and yellow wildflowers, the scent of summer rising off it. The artist had pressed things – grass seeds and petals – into the paint. I remember being startled and delighted to findin it an iridescent insect wing. Small as it was, it was the kind of picture you never tired of looking at, the sort of picture that rewarded you with something different each time you studied it.

My mother hung it on the wall next to her bed.

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