Page 29 of The Blue Hour

‘Do you not think it’s odd?’ Sebastian asks. ‘That this Haswell woman was Vanessa’s friend, her carer, her companion fortwentyyears, and yet Vanessa left her – asyouput it – with nothing. Why was that, do you think?’

Vanessa Chapman’s diary

I don’t really know how to write about this. I will recount everything Iremember, though I doubt this is wholly accurate.

I was working in the studio around four, it was dark, night not quite fallen but the sun had not shown itself all day.

Cold and blustery.

I thought I heard the noise of a car and I went outside but saw nothing, no lights on the causeway or the track, so I went back inside and carried on working. I had just put some pieces into the kiln for glaze firing when I thought I saw something moving past the window.

A second or two later, a man appeared in the doorway. I knew immediately that he was going to hurt me, I recognized him as the man who fixed the quad last winter.

The shotgun was leaning against the wall and I grabbed it. He started to come towards me – he didn’t say anything, didn’t make asound, just came towards me. I raised the gun. He kept coming and Itried to fire but it jammed. I tried to hit him with it but I was tooslow.

He grabbed hold of me and pushed me to the ground.

I was screaming and screaming, he had one hand on my throat, the other trying to undo my jeans.

I must have closed my eyes, because the next thing I knew there was a horrible gurgling sound and he was no longer on top of me. Irealized that someone else was in the room.

Grace had wrapped one of my clay cutter’s wires around his neck and was pulling him backwards. He was kicking out, trying to freehimself. He was trying to get his fingers under the wire, to stop it slicing into his throat.

He struggled for a while, kicking and making an awful choking sound.

I don’t think I did anything at this point. I was on my knees, Ithink. He stopped struggling after a bit. Grace pushed him forward, so that he was on his front. She kept the wire around his neck and shouted at me to call the police.

I still didn’t do anything. I was shaking so violently I felt I could not control my movements.

She shouted again, For god’s sake, go call the police, take the gun, call the police.

I got up then, ran to the house. I called the police. I was crying on the phone, I told them, A man attacked us, my friend killed him. Icouldn’t really answer their questions, I was just crying and crying.

He wasn’t dead.

When I went back up, I could hear him shouting and screaming – Grace had secured his ankles with twine and strapped his wrists together with her belt. The wire was still around his neck.

We stood there until the police came. Grace knelt in the small of his back holding the wire and I stood over him with the gun.

All the time we were waiting, he did not stop talking, all that time he kept telling me all the ways he’d hurt me, the things he’d do to me, the tools he’d use.

The police took an hour and a half to come.

Grace stayed the night.

I owe her my life.

I owe her everything.

21

Grace remembers an evening, a rare evening when they were together at the studio, talking. Drinking wine, maybe? The sun was still high in the sky, it was summer. Vanessa was at her wheel, she was talking – in a way that she rarely talked to Grace – about work.

‘The thing about clay,’ she was saying, ‘is that you can make it look like anything.’ Her head was bent, her hair tied at the nape of her neck; one hank had fallen forward over her eye and every now and again she shrugged it away, sweeping her cheekbone against her shoulder. ‘That makes it tricky.’

She dipped her fingertips into the water and returned them to the form spinning on the wheel. ‘I don’t mean tricky to work with. Stoneware is quite simple, porcelain is harder of course, but I don’t really mean tricky like that. I mean that if youcanmake anything –anything!– then what should you make? There are too many possibilities.’

Another dip, another trickle, another shrug of the shoulder. ‘There’s this sculptor, Isamu Noguchi – a brilliant, brilliant man, he died in the eighties – anyway, he once said that clay istoofluid,toofacile, it gives you too much freedom … Oh!’ She sat back laughing. The form had lost its centre, crumpled in on itself,bent double like a drunk on the pavement at closing time. ‘I don’t think I could ever have too much freedom …’

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