Page 33 of The Blue Hour

It won’t, of course, far from it, but Becker has already decided he won’t broach the subject right away. For the moment, he expresses enthusiasm and gratitude, following her into the kitchen, where she fills the kettle while he stands at the Aga, looking out of the window, towards the mainland.

‘Who was he?’ he asks.

‘Who was … oh, we’re back on the gun? Just a man. Stuart Cummins. A lorry driver and sometime mechanic. His wife, Marguerite, used to come into my surgery fairly regularly – broken fingers, split lip, minor head wounds. Some other things, women’s things.’ She hands him a cup of tea. Her face is shuttered, eyes cast down. ‘She never pressed charges. They lived in one of those cottages over at the harbour, you can see it from here.’ She points. ‘Theirs is the last one, on the left.’

‘The one on the end?’ He remembers the anguished face at the window, the one that disappeared. ‘But they don’t live there any longer?’

‘Marguerite does. Stuart’s long gone, thank God.’

So itwasher. ‘Marguerite …’ he says out loud. ‘She was married to the man who attacked Vanessa? She’s mentioned in one of the notebooks, she visited Vanessa, she was confused about something …’

Grace smiles ruefully. ‘Marguerite’s been unwell for years. She has Alzheimer’s now, but even before that, her mental state was pretty fragile. Her husband did many cruel things to her, but do you know I think the cruellest of all was never to tell her when to expect him?’ They are standing side by side, looking over the water at the cottages. ‘He’d go off on a job, and she never knew when he’d be back, whether it would be a couple of hours or a couple of days. So she had no peace. For years, she was always waiting, standing at the window, watching out for him.’

There is a break in the cloud and, suddenly, the room is filled with warm light. Grace beams at him. ‘Look at that!’ The sands have turned golden, the clouds primrose and pink. They are silent for a while, watching the wind work its magic, whipping green water to white horses. Then a cloud moves in front of thesun, and the light is lost. Grace turns away. She sits down at the table with her tea and motions to him to join her.

‘What became of him?’ Becker asks. ‘The husband, I mean, the mechanic?’

Grace shrugs. ‘I’ve no idea. He got a shorter sentence than he deserved. If they’d known about all the things he did to Marguerite …’ She interlaces her fingers to make a bridge on which she rests her chin. ‘After he attacked Vanessa, I moved out here. I kept my cottage in the village because I was still on the on-call rota, and, in any case, between the tides and my work schedule, I couldn’t be here all the time. But I stayed as often as I could. Vanessa was very shaken up, very afraid. For a time, she stopped walking in the wood on her own, she started stashing weapons all over the place.’ Grace gives an odd little laugh. ‘Knives in the studio, a hammer by the front door …’

She shakes her head, pressing her lips into a line. ‘It made me very angry.’ Her dark eyes look black in the flat light. ‘Makes me angry still. To have a place tainted like that … it’sanotherviolation on top of the original one. It happens all the time – you go walking somewhere, or swimming or running – whatever it is, yourthing, the thing you enjoy – you go to a place, and it’s beautiful and unspoiled, and you are doing that thing you love, and then someone – notalwaysa man, I suppose, but usually a man – comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better.’

She is talking, Becker feels, half to him and half to herself; she sounds angry and bitter and he feels stupid, awkward – he wants to apologize to her, but for what? For casually invoking a traumatic event? For the behaviour of men? All men? Some of them? While he’s searching for something to say, her mood changes,her weather. The clouds are blown away and her face brightens. ‘Would you like to see the studio?’ she asks.

It lies in the lee of the hill, its slope a sombre green now the sun has dipped behind Eris Rock. A footworn path takes them up a steep incline that levels out after a couple of hundred yards into a plateau on which the studio sits.

Becker gnaws at his thumbnail, twitching with anticipation as Grace fiddles with the padlock; he holds his breath as she pushes back the enormous metal door, rolling it away like the proverbial stone. And there it is: a cavernous space with shelving running along the wall on the right-hand side and an ancient kick wheel on the left, the kiln at the far end.

Becker steps inside. The air is colder and drier within, it smells of dust and sulphur. Through the long picture window Vanessa had cut into the wall there is a view to the south, over the grassy slope towards the sea and Sheepshead Island.

In the middle of the room stands a trestle table on which yet more boxes are piled. ‘This is the stuff I’ve still got to sort through,’ Grace says. ‘As you can see, there’s quite a bit.’ She motions towards the nearest box. ‘I found a whole load of photographs, I’m not sure if you’ll want those?’

Of course he’ll want them! They make a fascinating record of Vanessa’s years on Eris; there are dozens and dozens of shots of the house, of works on the roof, the renovation of the barn. And dozens more of the island itself, of its changing landscape, rusty bracken and purple heather, electric-yellow gorse. ‘Did she paint from these?’ Becker asks, as he sifts through shots of the sea at every hour in every weather, trees fallen in the wood, piles of seaweed strewn across the sands like bodies.

‘Not often. Well, not in the early years anyway,’ Grace replies.She is opening and closing the cupboards at the very back of the studio, looking for something. ‘Though she did later on, when she fell ill, when it became harder for her to work outside. She liked to have them, though, just in case. To remember the light, she said, although then she’d complain that the light never looked the same on film.’

‘She’s right,’ he says, selecting another photograph, ‘the light never does.’ In the picture he’s holding, two people stand side by side, elbows propped on a railing, against the background of a wild sea. One of the people is Grace – many years younger but essentially the same, with her bowl haircut, her soft, round face, her chin receding beneath a shy smile. The other person is tall, coltish and leggy in a vest and shorts, dirty-blonde hair falling over bony shoulders – Vanessa, he assumes, though he cannot say for certain because her face is obscured. No, not obscured,erased. It has been scratched out.

‘Oh God.’ Grace appears at his side. ‘That’s a very old picture, that’s mine.’ Becker turns it over:Grace and Nick, St Malo ’81.

‘I thought it was Vanessa,’ he says, and Grace shakes her head, taking the picture from him. She studies it a moment. ‘No, it’s not. It’s Nick. I don’t know why she did that …’

‘Vanessa did that?’ he says. He finds he’s not altogether surprised – she shows her temper in her diaries, with an occasional flash of spite.

‘She could be quite funny about things sometimes. Quite possessive,’ Grace says quietly, ‘which I always thought was a bit unfair when you consider that she demanded complete freedom for herself. Nick Riley was a friend of mine, at university. We were flatmates for a while. We went on a camping holiday once, with another girl, Audrey. She must have taken the photo.’ She seems uncomfortable, a little embarrassed. ‘Nick and I were very close for a while. It wasn’t a romantic involvement, but … he wasspecial to me. He was quite beautiful. And Vanessa always saw beauty as her purview.’

Grace slides the picture into the pocket of her cardigan. She moves away from him, over to a small wooden cabinet underneath the window, and opens a drawer. ‘That makes her sound awful, which she wasn’t at all,’ she continues. ‘She had a bit of a temper, that’s all. Ah, there it is.’

She takes something from one of the drawers, a wooden box. ‘Look,’ she says, placing it on the table, ‘come and take a look at this.’ The box is rosewood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Grace opens the lid: inside are bones. Bones and fragments of bone, broken, discoloured things, none so pure as the one inDivisionII. They all look tiny to Becker, as though they come from some sort of small animal, like a rodent, but really, what does he know?

‘Could I take these?’ he asks. ‘I think they might be useful, and in any case, they are … they are things she collected to use in her art, aren’t they?’

‘Mmm,’ Grace nods, ‘all right.’ She turns back to the cabinet. ‘There’s another box somewhere, filled with pebbles and shells, and another with feathers, and oh, look here …’ She pulls out a little box, a plainer one, and opens it to reveal a tiny bird’s skull. Carefully, Becker takes it between thumb and forefinger. He turns it over, examining its eye sockets, the neat little beak. ‘Sparrow, maybe?’ Grace says.

Becker shrugs; he’s no idea, but it reminds him of something he read in one of the notebooks. ‘She wrote about finding a bird’s skull … or perhaps a skeleton? It was around the same time, in fact, that she wrote about completingDivision… I think you were away at the time. Have I got that right?’

Grace ignores the question, picking over bits of bone. ‘Pretty sure none oftheseare human,’ she says. ‘Feel how light they are.’ She hands him one of the larger pieces. ‘Human bone is muchdenser than animal. That’s probably from a lamb. I had a feeling there were some larger ones somewhere.’ She holds her fingers up to her lips, head tilted backwards a little, considering. ‘She made copies, you know, she’d make moulds in plaster and then cast them – that’s howDivisionIIwas made – she would find bones, or pieces of bone, and she knitted them together with ceramics, which is rather neat, since it’s actually what you use to repair and replace bones in medicine these days—’

‘Grace.’ Becker sees an opportunity and takes it, interrupting her. ‘About the ceramics – I wanted to ask you about the ones she made for the Glasgow Modern show.’ Grace turns her attention back to him, her eyebrows raised, expression expectant. ‘In the back of one of the notebooks you gave me to read, there’s a list, a list of the works that she and Douglas agreed on for the show. Do you remember that? There are around thirty ceramic pieces on that list, but almost none of them came to Fairburn. Do you know where they went? Did she sell them? Are there any records of sales?’

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