Page 24 of The Blue Hour

I’m not claiming to understand how you feel, of course I’m not. How could I? I don’t pretend to understand how you could spend hours describing to me his faults, his infidelities, his manipulations, his deceits, and then welcome him as you did into our home, taking him to bed, making plans to travel with him to Morocco or Venice or wherever else you were planning to run off to. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?

None of that matters now, the only thing I care about isyouand your happiness. You know that I love you dearly, that I would do anything for you, and that includes letting you be, if that is still what you want. But I worry terribly about you all alone, I know how frightened you get. If you need me, send word, and I’ll come back, to Eris and to you.

Love, always,

Grace

Reading this, Grace is amazed that she had managed to sound so rational, so resigned. When she reads Vanessa’s response it feels as though a wound has opened in her chest, a gaping hole for the wind to whistle painfully in.

I don’t know how to respond to your letter, only to say that Idon’twant you to come back to Eris. You know things you shouldn’t, and I’m not sure how to be around you again. I hope you understand what I mean.

There is more, but Grace cannot bear to read it. She turns the page and picks up another letter, one that bears just a few words.

I need you. Please, come.

There are notes from later on, too, brief shopping lists Vanessa left out, requests for more paracetamol, more whisky, oranges, cigarettes; sometimes little sketches, of the view from the kitchen window, the clouds, an idea for a vase, funny doodles of seals sunning themselves on the beach, curved like croissants, flippers raised in jaunty salute.

Looking at these bits of paper now, Grace is grateful to heryounger self, the one who knew to throw nothing away, to save every scrap, treasure every word she wrote down. Vanessa stopped drawing altogether towards the end, and her notes became sporadic, often incomprehensible. She stuck them to the fridge or simply threw them on the floor for Grace to pick up, scraps of paper covered in a tight, barely legible scrawl:

please help please help me grace please help me

Vanessa Chapman’s diary

I have been thinking about what Frances said, all those years ago, about blurring the boundaries between abstraction and representation – I thought she was being so obvious, trite even, but she’s right in a sense – that is what I’m looking for. To be unbound. Maybe not to blur but to dissolve the lines – between abstraction and figuration, organic and inorganic, ordinary and uncanny.

So. Have been working on creating a new object – a vessel – made from some of the broken fragments of ceramic. The pieces do not all come from the same broken thing, I am creating something new, uneven,uncanny– bowl but not bowl, vase but not vase. Thinking of suspending found objects above it, so that they have a direct relationship to the vessel but are not contained by it. Moving towards a sort of sculpture, I suppose. Hard to explain, but I am starting to see it. Sketching a great deal.

The suspended forms will be static, they can be seen & appreciated & interpreted from different angles, so the form of the whole changes.

The space between the objects is as important as the objects themselves, shadow as important as light.

I had an idea to enclose the whole thing in glass??? But I am in two minds: I like the distance this creates, but worry will there also be a loss of immediacy? A loss of connection?

But to whom am I connecting, after all? I have no plans to show anything. Who would show it for me?

All my bridges burned, the tide is in.

‘Division’ is complete.

I picked up the glass from the glazier on Friday and assembled everything yesterday. It took a long while to get all the pieces arranged just right, it was fidgety and difficult. But this time I very much enjoyed the process, it felt like creation rather than just repair.

I so enjoyed weighing each object in my hand, feeling it drag on the filament, gauging the mass of one object in relation to another.

It was very late by the time I finished, and once it was all done, and the glass set in place, I stepped back and found myself turning to one side, as though to say, well? What do you think? And there was no one there. No Julian, no Douglas, no Frances, no Grace. Not even a moon! Just a whole island in darkness. I felt so sad.

I went down to the house and drank a whole bottle of wine by myself in consolation/celebration.

At least I do like the piece – everything else I have made recently has felt like a failure. So, progress! Next time, though, maybe I should try something on a larger scale? More complex? Something to consider. A new direction to explore! Creative work is such a ballast against despair. For the moment, I must be content with my own appraisal, with these green shoots. I know this will not be for ever.

The tide cannot stay in for ever.

Can it?

It is good that it is summer, because I think winter darkness now might kill me.

I dream of Julian all the time, of his beautiful face and his cruelty.

I had another letter from Isobel. She’s so angry with me. I don’t know how to meet her anger, she didn’t respond to anything I said in my letter, I wonder whether she read it at all?

---