Page 25 of The Blue Hour

I dream of Julian so often I thought I would try to paint him, see if that might exorcise the ghost? When I try, I can no longer conjure him up.

Perhaps I don’t deserve to.

Rain, and a haar stole in during the night and wrapped itself around us and was so thick I could not see the water from the bedroom window. I waited and waited for it to lift, but it didn’t and so, stir crazy, I went for a walk in the wood. It was eerie, frightening, the mist hanging like phantoms between the trees. I couldn’t walk more than a few paces before looking behind me, so sure there must be someone there.

Sometimes I imagine the most terrible things.

I found a perfect bird skeleton. Tiny, a tit maybe, or a sparrow. Icame all the way back to get a box to put it in and carried it backtothe studio. I have no idea what to do with it, but it thrills me. Lately I find myself so excited by thoughts of death.

For some reason I keep thinking of the time I broke my wrist. The crack! The impression of whiteness, of my mind clearing. The clarity that comesfrom pain.

Pain is clear, grief a fog.

Solitude, too, is clarifying, revelatory.

Love, like grief, obscures.

Creation from destruction takes courage, it is an act of will, it is violent, like hope.

I found a small, hard lump in my right breast, rigid, almost like a little lump of cartilage beneath the skin. I must see someone about it, but I don’t like the doctor they’ve brought in to replace Grace, he is young & sly and when I went in to see him last he looked at my body not the way a physician looks at a patient, but the way a man looks at a woman.

18

Becker recoils as though struck. Is this it? The start of Vanessa’s illness? For the first time since he started reading her notebooks, he feels as though he is intruding. It is not just the feeling of someone sneaking a look at a private diary, glimpsing something deeply personal, it’s worse than that: he knows what the author does not, he has seen the terrible ending before she has even conceived of it.

He puts the journal down. It is late, past midnight, his head buzzes with exhaustion and yet he knows he won’t sleep. He’s alone, and ill at ease. Helena has gone to London, suddenly but not entirely unexpectedly. Her sister is having one of her periodic relationship crises, during which Helena is generally summoned to advise, console. Conspire. Thick as thieves, the two of them.

She’d already left by the time he got home this evening. He’d had to drive all the way down to Penrith to look at a couple of sculptures Sebastian is interested in – very nice, but the seller was asking too much for them – then on the way back, a digger somehow slipped its moorings and fell off the back of a lorry on the M6. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but it added two hours to his journey.

He found a note when he arrived home:

Crisis in Chelsea! Seb’s giving me a lift to the station. See you Saturday. Xxx

Now he feels anxious and frustrated. Does her sister really need her? There will be another boyfriend next month, and another breakup a month or two after that.

He reaches for his wine glass and brings it to his lips. It’s warm and tastes sour. Getting to his feet, he pours it down the sink, rinsing out the glass and filling it with water from the tap. He takes a long draught, watching his reflection in the window. He looks pale, his eyes sunken into their sockets. Turning away, he returns to the table and sees that the pages of the notebook have turned by themselves. He is looking at a fresh page.

Cold, a fine mist hanging over the island, the sea restless.

Walking in the wood this morning I found a bone, picked clean.

If he believed in signs, if he believed in ghosts, he would think that she was here in the room with him, that she had turned the page on her illness herself, guiding him towards the thing he was looking for:

Walking in the wood this morning I found a bone, picked clean.

Perfectly white, almost luminous, dry and smooth. When I picked it up, I found that it was broken, cracked almost all the way through. I knew at once what I wanted to do, I could see the whole of the new piece.

I took the bone to the studio – it is elegant, slender and tactile, light and yet somehow substantial. Sheep, perhaps? Or deer? G would know.

The feeling I had, when I held it, I think it is a feeling of control.

He reads those last few lines over and over: this is it. This must be it. She found the bone, and she thought it was sheep, or deer. There is nothing strange or sinister about it. He leans back in his chair, exhaling slowly. He is relieved, he realizes, genuinely relieved – which means that he must on some level have suspected something of her. How stupid of him! Grace said it was stupid, and she was right.

He reads on.

Marguerite came to see me this morning. She asked after Grace and seemed confused not to find her here. When I told her that Grace is in Carlisle, that she’s been gone more than a year now, she got terribly worked up, she kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.

I gave her a brandy, which cheered her up a little. She started speaking to me in French, I could only understand one word in three, but there was a lot of talk of bad men. She seems to be losing track of the here and now – just a few moments after I told her Grace was in Carlisle she said that she had seen her. I asked when did you see her? Today? Last week? She kept saying, ‘before the sun rises’.

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