Page 13 of The Blue Hour

Beyond the living room is another corridor, off which is a bathroom and two bedrooms, a small one to the right, furnishedwith a neatly made single bed, a desk and a wardrobe, a larger room to the left. Becker stops in the doorway of the larger room. The walls are painted white, the double bed is stripped, a chair is placed next to it at an angle. It is Vanessa’s room, he knows, because through the window opposite he can see the sea, and a lighthouse on an island in the distance. He is looking at the view depicted inHope is Violent, Vanessa’s final painting, completed only months before she died.

Tears spring to his eyes. He retreats quickly, noticing as he makes his way back through the house thatallthe walls are bare, that the whole place feels stripped, robbed of everything that might once have adorned it. And he is among the thieves. As he walks back through the living room he picks up the white stone again. Every pebble, Sebastian said,every fucking pebble she picked up on the beach and arranged just so. Becker slips the stone into his pocket; he makes it back to the kitchen table seconds before he hears the front door open.

‘She didn’t date anything,’ Grace is saying as she re-enters the room, leafing through the pages of an A5 Life Vermilion notebook, ‘so finding what you’re looking for might not be straightforward.’ She places the notebook, along with two others and a folder stuffed with loose papers, on the table. Becker knits his fingers together to stop himself grabbing at them. ‘I don’t think these books were ever really for reference,’ Grace says. ‘They were just … part of the process, I suppose, of figuring things out.’

She catches his eye and quickly looks away. Unwittingly, she has just made the case for Fairburn’s claim on these notebooks: they werepart of the process– part of Vanessa’s artistic process. Becker lets the moment pass, unacknowledged.

‘What was I saying? Not dated, that’s it. So at least one of these is much too early, it’s from when she first moved here, but I think you’ll find it very interesting. She writes about sculpture in thesecond one, so that might be more relevant. I meant to go through all this,’ she sighs, ‘I honestly did.’

‘I know,’ Becker says quietly. ‘I understand, I really do.’ She smiles at him, grateful, and he feels wretched.

‘There are sketches in the folder, and of course you can keep all of those – I’ve no idea whether any of them have any real value or interest, most of them just look like scribbles to me …’

Philistine, Becker thinks, unkindly. ‘What’s fascinating for me,’ he says, ‘is the progression of her style, the development of it, both in terms of individual pieces and her whole body of work, so I imagine that almost all of those sketches will have value, provided I can get a sense of their order. I imagine the notebooks will help with that.’

Grace looks doubtful. ‘I suppose …’

‘One of the extraordinary things about Vanessa’s work is that there’s this real sense of coherence, even though her style changed so much over the course of her life. When you look at the paintings she did when she first got here, it’s remarkable, isn’t it, the difference between something likeSouth, which I think was one of the very first completed on the island, andThe Tide Always Comes, which was just a year later and yet the change is quite radical, it’s so much morefluid, and yet there’s no question there’s the same hand holding the brush, the same eye.’

Grace sighs impatiently. ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ she says, ‘I’m no art critic. Everyone gets so bogged down in the theory, but sometimes it’s just about necessity. You mentionedThe Tide Always Comes– well, she had to paint that differently because she couldn’t use a brush properly. She was just … squirting paint on to her fingers and applying it to canvas directly, and then using the brush, and she liked that effect, so it influenced how she did things later on, her brushwork became—’

‘Looser!’ Becker exclaims. ‘More expansive.’

‘Yes, I suppose—’

‘And the paint becomes more sculptural … but hang on, you said shecouldn’tuse a brush?’

‘Well, no, because she’d broken her wrist.’ Grace looks at him, quizzical, half-smiling, half-frowning. ‘Did you not know about that? That was how we met.’

11

Carrachan, 1998

It was a slow day. Grace had a fifteen-minute break before the next appointment, so she’d grabbed the opportunity to make herself a cup of coffee she might actually have time to drink. That was when she saw her – sawit, rather – a small, battered green car lurching into the car park before coming to a shuddering halt, angled across two parking spaces. The driver’s door swung violently open and a woman climbed out. She was tall and very thin, with hair the colour of pale amber – in dire need of a brush – hanging over her face. She carried herself awkwardly, chin tucked into her chest and her arms wrapped around herself, stumbling a little as she made her way across the car park towards the surgery entrance.

A drunk, Grace thought, gulping her coffee, scalding the roof of her mouth. From the waiting room she could hear the receptionist’s voice, quiet at first and then rising slightly. A moment or two passed and then there came a rapping at the door.

‘Sorry, Dr Haswell, could you see a walk-in?’

The woman entered her room with her back straight and her shoulders back, her left hand pinning her right forearm to her chest. ‘I think I might have broken it,’ she said quietly when Grace asked how she might help. As Grace moved closer to her, shecaught a whiff of something sharp, like nail polish remover, but the woman’s eyes were clear and focused. Not drunk, then, but clearly in pain, and wearing a wary expression, the sort you sometimes saw in victims of abuse.

‘What happened?’ Grace asked as, very gently, she examined the woman’s arm. An ominous bruise was forming just above the heel of her hand. The veins of her forearm stood out against her muscles like ropes. Her fingernails were filthy.

‘I tripped over this bloody …thing, this sort of manhole thing that covers the septic tank up behind my house.’ Her voice was soft and pleasantly gravelly, her English vowels rounded. ‘I was running to answer the phone – I’d been working in my studio, which is separate from the house – I just went flying.’ She winced, breathing in sharply as Grace turned the wrist. ‘It hurts like buggery.’

Grace smiled. ‘I imagine it does. Mrs …?’

‘Chapman. Vanessa.’

‘Vanessa, I’m afraid,’ Grace said, inviting her patient to sit, ‘that you’re right, unfortunately. I think it is a break. We’ll need to do an X-ray to make sure.’

‘Oh, fuckinghell.’ Grace flinched at the profanity. ‘How long will that take to heal?’ Vanessa inhaled sharply, wincing again as she held her forearm to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut, giving Grace the opportunity to look at her,reallylook at her: at her dark brows and the firm line of her mouth, her straight nose, just a little too large for her face.

‘That very much depends,’ Grace said, ‘on what we see in the X-ray. Did you drive here yourself?’ She knew the answer but wanted to ascertain her patient’s truthfulness.

‘Had to,’ Vanessa replied. ‘I live alone.’

‘You should have called an ambulance,’ Grace said. Vanessa smiled, briefly –dismissively, Grace thought. ‘You might have caused an accident,’ she said tartly, ‘driving with an injury like that.’

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