Page 49 of The Blue Hour

Despite herself, Grace finds herself smiling at the description of Becker as boyish, earnest, a ‘state-school boy who excelled at Oxford’. She reads on, one hand pressed against her chest, filled with a facsimile of maternal pride.

Becker gives a quote about the exhibition they are hoping to mount the following year, bringing together for the first time over sixty of Chapman’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, the majority of which have never been exhibited before.

‘It’s my view that this collection could go some way to reassessing Chapman’s importance and establishing her as amajor figure in British abstract expressionism,’ Becker says. ‘Until now, her output has been largely overlooked, in part because she’s a woman, and in part because, in the early phase of her career, she was out of step with the more fashionable, conceptual artists of the YBA movement.’

Another expert, a man Grace has never heard of, says that if Vanessa’s work has been ignored it is Vanessa’s own fault: she is the one who chose to withdraw from the art scene, to withhold her work from the world. This observation is – predictably enough – a cue for the usual muck-raking, the allegations about the ‘troubled beauty’, her ‘many lovers’, her ‘tempestuous marriage’ and above all the mystery of Julian’s disappearance from Eris Island.

‘I’ve been out to Eris,’ Becker is quoted as saying. Grace’s heart lifts, her eye scanning eagerly on. ‘I’ve seen Vanessa’s home and her studio, the places she lived and worked, the island she loved, the landscape that inspired her. I’ve had the pleasure of reading some of her notebooks and letters, and I can’t wait to share them with the world, to introduce her work to a whole new audience.’

Grace wants to turn a page. She wants to scroll further down, to the part where Becker mentions how the two of them have sat together at the kitchen table, reading Vanessa’s words and talking about Vanessa’s life, she wants to read the part where Becker talks about Grace’s importance to Vanessa, her devotion to her. But there is no page to turn, and nowhere further to scroll. There is no mention of Grace, anywhere at all.

The blade in her side slips deeper still.

Marguerite has her cigarettes, what pleasures are left to Grace? She can swim in the cold sea and walk on the island, but she is lonely on the beach now, and fearful in the wood. She thinks of the men from this morning, how they laughed at her; now shepictures their faces and one of them begins to change, laughter to panic, he becomes the choking boy. She closes her eyes. Have they left, those men? Or are they still here, on the island? The tide is in, and she has not seen them leave. Are they waiting for darkness? And what will they do to her then?

Her hands tremble a little as she walks back through the hallway to the front door. She places her hand on the deadbolt, but before she draws it back, she hesitates. If she opens the door now, if she goes out there, she will see the hillside, the pathway leading up towards the studio and the wood, and it won’t help. She won’tknowif the men are still on the island or not. She will have to stand in the cold and wait, she will have to wait until they walk down the hill and back over the causeway, and if they don’t? If they don’t, will she wait there all night?

Better by far to leave the door locked and turn her back, to tell herself that they are gone and let that be an end to it. Don’t give in to madness. Be rational, keep busy: cook, eat, read a book, go to bed.

But she finds she cannot move. She cannot bring herself to go through the motions, knowing that tomorrow she will have to do it all again, and again the day after that – that this is how it will always be.

This is hardly arevelation, and yet as she stands at the door with her hand on the bolt, it feels like one. There was her work, and there was Vanessa, and then there was the pandemic, which meant more work – punishing, brutal work – but though it was gruelling, at times unbearable, Grace came to see it almost as a blessing. She was not just needed, she wasessential. What purpose is left to her now? Her daydream is not going to come true: Becker is not going to visit with his family, he is not going to make her part of the Fairburn project, she will be forgotten. She has already been forgotten.

Eventually, after what seems like hours, she prises her cold fingers from the deadbolt and turns away from the front door. From the hidden storage space behind the screen in the living room, she retrieves three paintings one by one: the small portrait first, and thenTotem, and finally the largest of the three, the one that has been in there since before Vanessa died, her final black painting.

She takes all three canvases to Vanessa’s room and arranges them along the wall facing the bed so that they are looking at her. Only herself for company.

She returns to the kitchen, rifling through the box of papers she has kept for herself. For quite a vain woman, Vanessa was oddly camera-shy; there are very few pictures of her, and none at all of her with Grace. At the bottom of the box Grace finds a couple of photos of Vanessa with Frances in Cornwall, on the beach at Porthmeor, along with the picture of herself and poor Nick Riley, his beautiful face scratched out. She takes them back to the bedroom and arranges them on the chair next to the bed, folding them over so that Frances and Nick are no longer visible, there is only Vanessa and Grace.

Better.

She opens the window. It is very cold, but there is no wind. The sea is placid, night falling quickly, and the air is blue and still, the gulls quietening as they drift like phantoms over the shore.

Shivering a little, she pads over to Vanessa’s dressing table and pulls open the drawer. She reaches in to retrieve a syringe and a 300ml bottle of morphine sulphate, 10g/5ml, which she places on the bedside table. Then, almost as an afterthought, she fetches a glass tumbler and a bottle of Lagavulin from the kitchen, and brings them back to Vanessa’s room.

She locks the door.

She longs for a storm. The night Vanessa died, the waves thundered against the rocks, rain and spray battered the windows, but they were safe from it all, from the gales and the hungry sea, they were together, sheltered and dry, unreachable. Grace would like to slip away on a night like that, too.

She pours herself an inch of whisky and raises the glass to her own image. She wraps herself in a blanket, leans back against the headboard and allows herself to give in: to the warmth of whisky, to the image of the young man choking, to the tears that have been building like a storm front behind her eyes.

32

Staying sane is a trick.

It’s a technique: sanity is something you hold on to – loosen your grip for too long, allow your mind to go to the places it fears, or the places it craves, and you risk letting it slip away. There are things that, for the sake of your sanity, you do not allow yourself to recall.

Grace remembers that afternoon in the studio, the terror and the thrill of it. The excitement she felt when she slipped the clay cutter around that man’s neck and pulled. The sounds he made, so stirring: his cry of surprise, the roar of anger that followed, the choking sound he made as she drew her hands together, cinching the wire tight. She remembers the wave of exhilaration washing over her as his knees buckled, the ecstasy of control she felt as she pulled, tighter and tighter, the wire cutting into his throat, blood dripping on to the collar of his overalls. She remembers the desire – oh, it was almost overwhelming – to draw the noose tighter still when Vanessa left her alone, when she ran to the house to call the police. Grace longed to punish him as he deserved to be punished. She resisted: not out of mercy but out of fear, the fear of what Vanessa might think of her, the fear that Vanessa might truly see her for who she was.

Grace remembers the days and weeks and months after Julian went missing, how difficult Vanessa became: irrational, secretive, strange. Silent. She lied to the police, she would not explain to Douglas or the newspapers why she’d withdrawn from the show, she didn’t work, didn’t walk, didn’t swim in the sea. She sat in the kitchen, hunched over an ashtray, smoking, listening to the phone ring and ring until eventually one day she ripped it out of the wall and hurled it out the window.

Grace brought food. She cooked meals that went uneaten, she cleaned and tidied and sorted through the mail. She lied, as required, to the police, to anyone who asked: she stuck to Vanessa’s version of events.

In the first week of the new year, six months after Julian’s visit, Grace drove to Carrachan to buy a new phone. She was plugging it in in the kitchen when Vanessa turned from the window and looked at her, looked at her as she hadn’t done for months. ‘Why are youalwayshere?’ she asked. ‘Every time I turn around, there you are, with your soup and platitudes. I don’t want you here.’ Grace felt a shrivelling inside her, a chill, bone-deep. ‘I never wanted you here.’

‘That’s not true,’ Grace said. She stood up straight, her voice and her gaze level. ‘Vanessa, you know that’s not true.’

Vanessa put out her cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘No, you’re right,’ she said, sighing, picking at the dry skin on the palms of her hands. ‘It’s not true. I did want you here.’ She blinked, slowly. Her eyes, when they met Grace’s, were as cold as the January sea. ‘And now I don’t.’

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