Page 21 of The Blue Hour

November 1999

Vanessa,

Since your last visit I struggle to think of anything but you. Right now I would leave my wife and son to perish in a burning building if only I could have you again, spend a night with you, an hour. I think of nothing but your luscious mouth, your delectable cunt.

I have to see you.

Douglas

Becker feels his face grow hot. He tugs at his collar, embarrassed, as though he and Emmeline now share some filthy secret. Rounding the desk, he sits down and starts to gather up the papers she has spread out, shuffling them into some sort of order. Sliding them back into the folder, he spies letters from Vanessa to her great friend Frances Levy, another from a potential buyer, a rough sketch of the studio, and a note, written on headed paper from Douglas Lennox’s Glasgow Modern Gallery, in Douglas’s spiky hand.

I should cut your fucking throat for what you’ve done to me

16

In bed, he lies behind Helena, his right hand on her hip, his lips pressed against the back of her neck. She smells ripe,almost overripe, he thinks, and in the darkness he smiles. She raises a hand and drapes it over his leg, lightly grazing his thigh with her fingernails.

‘I found Emmeline in my office this morning,’ he says.

‘Oh?’

‘She called my mother a whore.’

‘What?’ Helena wriggles away from him, rolling over and propping herself up on one elbow.

He pulls a face. ‘Actually, that’s notquitefair. She was calling Vanessa a whore, and then asked if my mother was one, too.’

Helena shakes her head, incredulous. ‘Beck, that’s horrible. She’s … I honestly think she’s becoming deranged.’

Becker rolls on to his back. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘When I arrived, she was looking through some of those papers I got from Grace Haswell. She’d found a letter from Douglas to Vanessa. It was …explicit.’

‘Really?’ Helena slides one leg over his. ‘How explicit?’ she breathes into his ear. When Becker laughs, she lies back down, sweeping her hair out of the way so that she can rest her head onhis shoulder without it catching. ‘Obviously that can’t have made pleasant reading, but it’s not like she didn’t know. From what I’ve been told, Douglas was not discreet. And it wasn’t like Vanessa was the only one – he was monstrously unfaithful.’

‘I suppose we really ought to feel sorry for her,’ Becker says. ‘The whole thing must be humiliating.’

‘Well, maybe,’ Helena murmurs. ‘But it’s not your fault, is it? Or your mother’s.’

‘No, quite.’ Becker is looking up at the crack in the ceiling that starts in the far corner and has been tracing its spidery way towards the centre of the room ever since he moved into the lodge three years ago. He ought to do something about that, he thinks, get someone to look at it. Leave it too long and the whole lot’ll come down on them. ‘Has Emmeline always been like this?’ he asks, but Helena doesn’t answer; she shifts in his arms, her breath slowing, deepening, as she falls asleep. He lies awake for a long while, listening to Helena’s soft breath, looking up at the crack in the ceiling, praying the roof’s not about to cave in.

17

Grace sits at the kitchen table, a pile of correspondence in front of her. It is almost two o’clock in the morning; the tea she made an hour ago sits in the pot, cold and stewed. Within the hour, the tide will be in and she will go to bed, but for now she continues her work, reading, considering, sorting everything into neat little piles.

The windows rattle, and she looks up. The darkness is thick as pitch, but she can tell that weather is coming. She makes a note to close the shutters on the south side of the house – it bears the brunt of the wind – and to make sure the studio doors are secured.

Pulling a blanket up over her shoulders, she returns to the letter in front of her. It’s one that Vanessa wrote to Frances Levy, an artist friend, part of a stack of correspondence that Frances’s daughter, Leah, returned to Grace after Frances died of Covid last year. Grace is putting the letters into sequence, making sense of their call and response, a twenty-five-year conversation which is concerned almost entirely with the art they were making, Frances down in Cornwall and Vanessa in Oxfordshire and up here in Eris.

VANESSA:The paint is the thing! Since I broke my wrist I feel I’m so much more aware of thematerialityof the paint. I lovethis feeling of moving into a more sculptural space on the canvas. Sometimes I wonder though if all this change, this constant metamorphosing, makes the work seem incoherent?

FRANCES:Developing an aesthetic language, in the way a writer cultivates a voice – isn’t that what we aim for? Your shift from figuration to abstraction and back, that is part of your language, and it is right that it should morph sometimes, it should develop – after all, we must change if we are to stay relevant.

VANESSA:I’m not bothered about relevance. I’m not interested in unmade beds or sharks cut in half! But still I shift, as sands do. I think what you make should be influenced by where you make it, how you make it and with what. Every day I wake and am thrilled to be here – divided from the land by sea – speaking the language of nature and tide, not of politics or human society.

Grace grits her teeth. The letters are written in what she thinks of as Vanessa’s ‘art voice’, the pretentious one she used to impress people she thought were her social superiors, one she never used with Grace. She finds most of the correspondence with Frances either baffling or banal. How could they take themselves so seriously? They were painting pictures, for Christ’s sake, not curing cancer. Still, she imagines Becker will find this all thrilling, and so she places the letters about art in the pile of papers destined for Fairburn. Others, those where life – love affairs, friendship, enmities – intrude, she places in a separate, ‘private’, pile.

Frances:Dora came to see me. She and Mark have split again. She was very distressed, begged me to intervene on her behalf – to ask you to finish things with Mark. I told her I hadno control over you! But I will say this: if Mark is not important to you (as a lover, I mean to say, I know he is important as a friend),end it. Do not pursue it, or let him come back to you. She is so broken. It was ugly and sad to see. The baby is only eight months – I worry Dora isn’t coping.

VANESSA:Frances, you know that this thing with Mark isn’t really my doing. I break it off and break it off (I have broken it off again) and still he comes back. I am sorry for Dora. I am sorry that she is hurt. But I think her problem is with Mark, not me. Awful to think of her struggling with the child – I cannot imagine how that feels, I have always been so grateful that I couldn’t get pregnant when Julian wanted me to. It has always seemed to me that family is the antithesis of freedom.

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