Page 22 of The Blue Hour

When Leah first handed the letters over, Grace was surprised – did she not want to keep her own mother’s letters? Grace kept them to one side, thinking Leah might have acted rashly, as people do in grief, that she might change her mind and ask for them back, but she hasn’t done so. Reading through them now, Grace thinks she understands why. Leah is rarely mentioned, and where she is, she’s a postscript. Or worse.

Frances:You are wrong about family! Youabsolutely canbe a mother and be free. And work, too! Look at Hepworth. (Though if I am honest, I do sometimes wonder why we kept going. One baby is enough! Why stretch love so thin?)

Leah is the youngest of three.

Grace places the letter in the ‘private’ pile, noticing as she does her own name mentioned towards the end; she picks it up again.

Frances:Is G still there all the time? You need to be careful, V, you know how you have a tendency to attract hangers-on. I imagine she finds you very glamorous. Her life must be so dreary – endlessly doling out antibiotics and scolding people for smoking and drinking too much. So joyless! I suppose we ought to feel sorry for her.

Grace’s hand clenches to a fist, scrunching the paper with it. With a huff of impatience she smooths it out again, pressing it into the wood with the heel of her hand. Idiotic to let it rankle so and yet …doling out antibiotics! It’s laughable. Yes, there were coughs and colds, but there’s also a fisherman who kept the use of his right hand thanks to Grace’s skill and quick thinking; there was a three-year-old who came into the surgery for her MMR vaccine and left with a referral to a kidney specialist. If it hadn’t been for Grace, her rare cancer would likely have gone undiagnosed for months; it might not have been caught in time. That little girl got married last year and is expecting a child of her own now.Sheis Grace’s legacy – what has Frances left behind? Earthenware pots?

Grace moves on to the next letter in the sequence and as she reads she feels her heart swell in her chest, tears springing bright to her eyes.

VANESSA:I don’t think you need feel sorry for G. She has a real life, a real job! She is rooted, connected to this community in a way I will never be. I envy her that. People rely on Grace. I rely on her! She isnota hanger-on. She is a good friend. I relish her lack of interest in the art world – she thinks it’s all pretentious crap and she’s (mostly) right. We rub along together very happily, and if (when) I need to be alone, I tell her so. It is never a problem.

Glowing with pride, Grace places this letter on top of the pile she intends Becker to read. He will see how Vanessa loved her, he’ll see that she’s a fundamental part of Vanessa’s story. After a moment’s hesitation, she plucks the letter in which Frances mentioned her children from the private pile and adds that to the one for Becker, too.

There is another cache of letters ready for sorting, the Carlisle letters, as she thinks of them, but she can’t quite face these yet, so instead she turns to the photographs. Most of these she is happy to relinquish: the majority are pictures Vanessa took of the island. Although she didn’t like to paint from them, she found them useful as reference points, or to remind her of the way the light might have looked at a certain time, on a certain day.

A few photos date back to her life in Oxfordshire – at parties, mostly, with groups of people dressed up and holding drinks in gardens – and a few snaps of people taken here in Eris, too: Frances and Mark and a few other ‘art’ friends, an unflattering one of Grace sitting stiffly on the bench overlooking the sands, one of Douglas and Emmeline Lennox, date-stamped 1999.

In the picture, the Lennoxes are tanned and glamorous, both of them in sunglasses, smoking, leaning against the hood of Douglas’s Aston Martin. A rifle rests between them. They were going on somewhere, Grace seems to recall, to hunt. Emmeline liked to shoot; she went off one afternoon on the island and came back with two rabbits, for cacciatore. She skinned them herself.

While Vanessa was showing Douglas what she’d been working on, Grace helped Emmeline with the stew, chopping onions and celery and carrots, listening to her complain about her staff and the ramblers wandering all over their estate. Last weekend, she told Grace, she’d shot a dog that was worrying the cows.

‘How awful,’ Grace said.

Emmeline’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Walkers,’ she said, shrugging, ‘they let it off the leash.’Orf, Grace remembers.They let it orf the leash.‘They had a child with them. It cried and cried. Dreadful carry-on. As if I’d shot its mother.’

Grace disliked her intensely. She remembers scrubbing the potatoes, the skin across her knuckles red and raw, and she remembers the pleasure she took, in that moment, thinking that Vanessa was likely not showing Douglas her work at all.

She picks up the photograph and squints at it again, examining Emmeline’s expression, the firm line of her mouth, the upward tilt of her chin. She remembers the dismay on Emmeline’s face when Douglas and Vanessa came down from the studio, late for dinner, their clothes dishevelled, stinking of sex. Grace remembers how her feeling of pleasure dissipated like smoke.

She wakes just before nine, pulling back the curtain to let in the light. The window is spattered with raindrops, a soft sky dappled with clouds. She opens the window and leans out and tastes salt on her tongue. The hillside is burnished with damp copper bracken; the deep, muted green of the wood is an invitation.

She dresses quickly and leaves the house before she can talk herself out of it. She has become fatter, less fit over the past year; she needs to stop the rot. Living out here on the island all alone requires a certain level of fitness.

The tide is falling, the water in the bay stippled like pebbledash. On the far end of the causeway she spots a figure on foot. She cannot tell at this distance who it is, but they seem to be carrying something, a bucket perhaps? A mussel-picker.

She turns her back to the sea and heads up the hill, alarmed at how quickly breathlessness sets in. She’s never been svelte, but always strong: hands like a butcher’s, a man once told her, legs to kickstart a jumbo jet. The slope up towards the wood is steep, butshe used to walk alongside Vanessa – taller and slimmer with much longer legs – and keep pace. Now she stops every twenty paces or so, breathing hard, sweat prickling between her breasts and in the small of her back.

At the brow of the hill lies the studio, and then a small stand of trees, and beyond another more gradual slope to the wood. The wood has been left untended, and is sunless as a cave, cold, too, and pungent with leaf mould. Once you enter its embrace, the sound of the sea is deadened; you hear only the ominous creak of old pines, the cry of gulls.

Keeping her pace steady, Grace makes her way along the path as it meanders north to the heart of the wood and then hairpins back to the south-west, ascending once more. She has just turned that sharp bend when, out of the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse of colour, bright red. Her breath catches, her heart rate rocketing. It’s nothing, it’s no one. It’s a Coke can. For God’s sake! She grits her teeth and walks over to pick it up. Hikers usually clean up after themselves, but not always. Sometimes you get kids out here, huffing glue or gas or whatever else they can get their hands on. Not so often in winter.

She carries the can with her towards the western end of the wood, where two enormous trunks, trees brought down in a storm almost thirty years ago, once forced the path into a sharp detour. The trunks eventually rotted away, but this part of the wood still feels different: a gap in the canopy allows the light in, so smaller plants grow here, wych elm and holly and inhospitable hawthorn, its berries gleaming like gouts of blood. The ground beneath her feet is firm and undisturbed. Grace scuffs through the leaves; she crouches down and presses her hand against the cold earth, tracing her fingers along the ground. The dank smells of the thicket stir something in her, a memory of a camping trip, of sleeping under the stars. Another life.

With some difficulty she straightens up and turns, walking briskly down the hill towards home. It isn’t until she has passed the studio that she notices someone sitting on the bench overlooking the sands – the mussel-picker. A child, wearing a high-vis jacket, a blue bucket at its feet.

‘Hello?’ she calls out hesitantly. She has no desire to cope with a lost child. But it turns, and Grace sees with relief that it is not a child at all, it’s Marguerite, her wrinkled face breaking into a smile. She slips off the bench and picks up her bucket.

‘Allo!’ She is wearing a pinafore and wellington boots, the high-vis jacket swamping her tiny frame. She holds out her bucket, showing Grace a small collection of mussels and some kelp. ‘You want some?’ she asks, eyes wide, expectant.

‘Oh no,’ Grace says, shaking her head, ‘not for me, thank you.’

‘You don’t like?’

Grace shakes her head. She does like mussels, but she’d think twice about eating anything picked on the coastlines; you can’t go a day without reading a story about water companies pumping sewage into the sea.

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