Page 20 of The Blue Hour

D complains that I hold too tightly to my pieces – he thinks it is about confidence. It isn’t. It’s aboutchoice. I will surrender my work to the world only when I feel ready, I will not be hurried or harangued or bullied. Those days are over.

Mark says he will drive up in the van next week, he is bringing Frances’s old kick wheel.

Fetched 20kg porcelain paper clay from Carrachan. Roof still leaking, man came out yesterday, he is quoting £2k to repair!

J not responding to my letters. I shall have to go south to wring the money out of the bastard. No idea why he is being so tight, Celia is filthy rich – it’s the thing he likes most about her.

Studio finished at last. I fired the kiln for the first time yesterday!

I work at least from dawn to dusk, often well into the night. I barely notice time, I hardly eat, hardly write. I am consumed, feel I need nothing else. Working with ceramics is a joy. None of the anxiety I feel when painting – there is such freedom with clay: nothing is set, nothing decided, nothing finished until it is fired. I’m working almost solely at the wheel – tall, elegant pieces, long-necked and fine. I’m experimenting with colour. Moving here has opened up a new palette for me: I breathe in air that is cold and crisp and crystalline: it feels white, and sometimes blue or violet. I imagine it as needles in my lungs (that sounds violent, but it is not). My mood feels lighter and I start to find a fluidity that I lacked before.

D sent over the Sunday Tel. piece. Beautiful picture taken from the top of Eris Rock, another of me, in the studio, looking daggers. I am describedas attractive, prickly, sullen, uncommunicative. Not much about the work. (D says this is my fault because I was so ungenerous.) Quotes from ‘friends’ (which friends???) about how work consumes me, how I never have time for anything else (i.e. my marriage), I am single-minded,obsessive. All the usual shit they say about women who fail to devote themselves body and soul to family aka dreary domesticity. At the end there is a line saying I was ‘instrumental in the breakup of Mark Brice’s marriage’. Unfair and untrue. Bet that came from Isobel, the vindictive bitch.

Have not felt so pissed off since I got here. Rang D and told him it’s the last fucking time I talk to a fucking journalist. Afterwards, Iwalked up the hill, right to the top of the rock, looked out to the sea,to the islands, I turned round and saw that the tide was in. I was cut off from the world, nowhere to go and no one to bother me. I ranback down to the studio, put it all out of my mind and was serene again.

Now, in the kitchen, darkness fallen, I long to create something that conveys that feeling of breaking from the rest. How to capture? The feeling of cleaving – clean and painful and freeing.

J writes, furious that I should be airing our dirty laundry in the newspapers???? Threatening to come here. I threw his letter in the binand went back to the studio, worked all day, didn’t think of him once.

Darkness here is sudden, complete, inhuman. With the haar in there is no light at all save the flash, every 23 seconds, from the lighthouse on Sheepshead.

Some days, the sun barely rises.

No light, no shadow, and yet I find I am desperate to paint.

A while ago (two days or three?), I went to my southern spot to finish my Sheepshead painting. Strange weather: it was bright when I left the house, but by the time I set up, the sky was a peculiar yellow – like gas in the atmosphere – and the sea was still – black andterrifying. Like the end of the world! I started a fresh canvas and painted with a sense of urgency I cannot explain, only that the darkness and the fear seemed to draw me in and consume me.

Now that canvas – completed in a matter of hours – is in the spare room and I hardly want to look at it. It is a haunting presence, disquieting. A black painting.

15

Holding his cigarette lightly between his lips, Becker rubs his hands together to warm them. He is leaning over the guardrail on the footbridge, the water beneath it covered with a thin layer of ice. His head swims. A black painting! And it wasn’t about cancer or Julian Chapman or any of those things Sebastian came up with, it is a painting of the sea. The impossible sea! She found a way to paint it.

He spent much of the night going through the first notebook, luxuriating in it, taking his time, making his own notes. Vanessa mentions bones just once –the wood is thick with finds … teeth and old bones …Why old bones? Did she know they were old? Or is that just a figure of speech? Bones are always old, aren’t they? The fact is she might have found the rib on one of those early forays into the wood, right back when she first came to the island, more than twenty years ago. It might have been hanging around in her studio for years before she found a use for it.

(He wonders, briefly, about the teeth. What sort of teeth? Surelythosecouldn’t have been human? After all, you don’t have to be a forensic anthropologist to recognize a human tooth.)

In any case, the bone question is moot now, isn’t it? Theexperts have deemed it human, and they’re to test it. It’s out of his hands.

His cigarette finished, he walks up to the main house, entering at the back as usual. He can see, as soon as he turns into the hallway, that the door to his office is ajar. He strides quickly along the corridor, hands clenched into fists, indignation bubbling up: yes, the house is Sebastian’s, but surely he is entitled to some privacy in his workspace? He pushes the door open hard, keen to provoke a reaction.

From the opposite side of the desk, Lady Emmeline looks coolly up at him. Spread over the desk are pieces of paper covered in fine pencil and blue ink – the contents of the folder he brought with him from Eris.

‘Are you planning to put these on display?’ she asks.

‘Uh … some of them, yes,’ Becker replies. ‘I’ve not had time to read everything yet. There’s a lot to go through and I—’

She holds a hand up to silence him, expression pained; she squeezes her eyes shut for a second. ‘What is it that you find so interesting,’ she asks, turning away from him slightly so that her face is hidden, ‘about Mrs Chapman? She reminds you of your mother, Sebastian said, is that right?’ Very slowly she turns towards him again, lips drawing back from her teeth. ‘She died of cancer too, didn’t she?’

‘Sh … She did, yes.’ Becker stumbles slightly over his words. ‘When I was a child—’

‘And was she also a whore?’

Becker is stunned into silence. Emmeline moves around the desk towards the door, but her eyes do not leave his. ‘If in the course of your work as curator here you choose to humiliate me, Mr Becker, I will make certain that you pay for it. Do you understand? And if you think that an elderly woman such as myself is incapable of causing you harm, I assure you you’re mistaken.’

She moves past him, a waft of L’Air du Temps and the sound of heels clacking along the marble tiles. For a few moments, he cannot move.

He feels as though he’s been slapped; he is ashamed to find himself close to tears. Closing the office door, he crosses quickly over to his desk, pressing his hands down on the desktop, breath coming painfully sharp. He reaches out and takes hold of the letter Emmeline was looking at when he entered the room; he turns the page around so that he can read it.

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