Page 35 of The Blue Hour

When Grace comes back, she frowns at the mess he’s made of the chicken and hands him a bit of kitchen towel. She places a piece of paper on the table in front of him and picks up the carving knife and fork herself. ‘Read that,’ she says, as she sets about finishing the job he has started.

It’s a note, Becker sees, written on paper stained with dark brown smudges, in Vanessa’s now-familiar hand.

J, we can’t keep going round and round and round!

I’m going to be back on the weekend and youmustbe gone. There’s no more money in the pot.

We have loved each other and we have hated each other and now we can be free of each other.

Isn’t that wonderful?

You must find your own way.

Love,

Nessa

‘They had beentogetherthat week,’ Grace says, as she hands him a plate. ‘Spending time together, sleeping together. They’d argued, too, because as usual he was after money. I left them to it, I went back to my cottage in the village. I didn’t want to be around all that. And to be frank, I didn’t like him.’ She serves herself and sits. ‘In any case, he arrived on the Saturday. They had a few days together, and then Vanessa left on Thursday to drive to Glasgow to see Douglas Lennox, to finalize arrangements for the show – it was just a month or so away at that point. Vanessa took a few of the paintings in the car – the ones you have now. The rest – all the ceramics and the largest canvases – were to follow later, in a van. Most of it was laid out in the studio, ready to be packed.

‘So, as I say, Vanessa left that Thursday, early because of the tide. Julian was still asleep, so she left him that note.’ Grace takes a bite of her food. She chews, shaking her head as she does. ‘Thiscannotcome out, do you understand, Mr Becker? She never wanted any of this to be made public.’

‘Yes, all right,’ Becker replies impatiently, ‘but any ofwhat? What are you saying?’

‘Vanessa left the note for him next to the bed, and she found it when she returned on Sunday, among the debris in the studio. All the ceramics had been smashed, the canvases slashed. Everything destroyed.’

24

Eris, summer 2002

When she arrived that Sunday, Vanessa’s car was parked in the courtyard, but the house was empty, so Grace set off up the hill towards the studio. As she approached, she heard a strange sound, a scraping sound, like a turning tool against the wheel, only louder, much louder.

When she reached the doorway, she realized that it was Vanessa; she was crying, keening, the noise was coming from her throat. She was on the floor, and she had blood on her: in her hair and on her clothes and on her hands. There was blood on the floor, too.

‘Vanessa!’ Grace ran to her, falling to her knees. ‘What happened? Vanessa, are you hurt? What happened?’ Vanessa didn’t speak, she just kept making the awful noise, kept squeezing her hands into fists until blood dripped from between her fingers.

‘Vanessa! Stop,stop.’ Grace was trying to open Vanessa’s hands, trying to prise her fingers apart; she was starting to cry herself, starting to shout. ‘Where are you hurt? Answer me! Please tell me what happened.’

‘All of it,’ Vanessa whispered. She swept one hand to the side, opening her fist, shards of bloodied porcelain falling from her hand. ‘It’s all gone.’

Grace could hardly bear to look. There was debris all around them. Obscene gashes in the paintings against the walls gaped like wounds.

‘Your hands,’ Grace said. Vanessa opened her right fist and from it Grace took a scrunched piece of paper, a note. To Julian. ‘Vanessa, where is he?’ Grace said. ‘Where is Julian now?’

Vanessa shook her head and closed her eyes.

When eventually she opened them again, Grace helped her up from the floor and, with one arm around her shoulders and the other holding tightly to her left wrist, guided her over to the basin. Vanessa did not resist as Grace placed her hands under the running water; she stood silent and unmoving as Grace did her best to remove the remaining splinters of porcelain from her fingers and palm.

Neither of them spoke.

A while later, Grace took Vanessa back down to the house. She sat her on the edge of the bath while she cleaned the blood from her skin, disinfecting and dressing her hands. She gave her a sleeping pill and put her to bed. Then she went back up the hill to the studio. She collected up the larger pieces of ceramic, placing them carefully on the table in groups, trying to figure out which fragments belonged with which. She swept and washed the floor, sluicing the last of the blood and debris out on to the grass where it soaked into the soil.

It was a beautiful, mild evening, a soft breeze coming off the sea and over the gorse bushes, carrying with it the scent of kelp and coconut, but every breath Grace took tasted of blood and disinfectant. When finally she was done, she sat in the kitchen and drank whisky to purge the taste of metal from her mouth.

She checked on Vanessa, who was still sleeping, then she phoned the emergency contact for the surgery to tell them shewouldn’t be able to come in the next day. It was the first time in a decade she’d miss a day of work.

She fell asleep at the kitchen table, the whisky bottle open in front of her.

Some time after midnight she jerked awake. Sitting up, she wiped the spittle from her mouth, rolled her aching shoulders, tipped her head from one side to the other to stretch out the muscles in her neck. She was about to get to her feet when she realized that she was not alone, that in the darkness Vanessa was sitting on the other side of the table, her face white, like a death mask.

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