Page 30 of The Blue Hour

She smiled at Grace, wiping her hands, taking a sip of her wine. It’s rosé, Grace thinks, or maybe something with bubbles in it. ‘Don’t you want to have a go?’ Vanessa asked, holding out her hand, beckoning for Grace to come closer, and Grace laughed, shaking her head.

‘Then again,’ Vanessa said, wiping her hands, working the clay back into a solid mass, centring it once more, ‘maybe he’s right, because when you’re as plagued by doubt as I am, having so many options is a bind …’ She started over, dipping her fingers into the bowl of water, kicking the wheel into motion once more.

‘The thingIlove about working with clay,’ she said, ‘is that when things go wrong, it doesn’t matter. You throw it back, you start again, you make a new shape, every time you start over, something new … It’s not at all like painting, where all your false marks and mistakes remain. Even after you scrape away the paint and start over, the lost images remain like ghosts. With clay, once you’ve made the new form, the old one is gone, obliterated! Even if you wanted it back, you couldn’t have it. No point searching for it. So you have to learn,’ she leaned forward, her teeth biting into her lower lip, her brow furrowed in concentration, ‘to let go of what went before. To let go of the past.’

Grace is in her bedroom, which has also been known as the back bedroom and the spare bedroom – in fact, she still thinks of it as the spare bedroom even though it is the one she sleeps in, just as she still thinks of the house as Vanessa’s house rather than her own. It will always be Vanessa’s house, and the room on the southern side of the house, the one which overlooks the sea, will always be Vanessa’s room. But while Becker is here, if he chooses to stay the night, Grace will take Vanessa’s room, and he will take the spare room.

There are moments which for the sake of her own sanity Grace does not allow herself to contemplate, and the last meaningful hours she spent in Vanessa’s room count among them. Since then, the room has been left empty. Notuntouched– Grace cleans from time to time, in the summer she opens the windows to allow the sea air in, so that the room smells of salt and seaweed and not dust and damp – but essentially the room looks much the way it did the day the ambulance came across the causeway to take Vanessa’s body away. The furniture remains in place, the bed and the desk and the dresser by the wall, even the chair next to the bed where Grace used to sit.

Grace does not have to sleep in this room – she could take the sofa, or offer Becker the sofa, but it would raise questions, wouldn’t it? It would seem awkward and strange. And after all, it’s just a room. It’s not a shrine, it’s not sacred. It is not haunted.

First things first. She needs to ready the spare room: strip the bed, wash the sheets, clear her personal things away, the shirts that lie draped over the back of the armchair, the hairbrush and moisturizer on the dressing table. There should be no call for him to look inside her wardrobe, but even so, she removes the two canvases stacked behind her coats and takes them through to the living room. She shifts the old linen screen and opens the door behind it, which leads to a small, windowless room. They have never known what it was for.A priest hole!Vanessa liked to claim, but they didn’t have those up here. Vanessa used it as a darkroom. Now, Grace uses it for storage.

As she pulls aside the screen, she feels a corresponding tug of conscience. The paintings are not rightfully hers. Until now she has allowed herself to think of them as an oversight, a pair of canvases stashed in a wardrobe, forgotten. Now she is deliberately going against Vanessa’s wishes, and that feels uncomfortable. Although, if she is honest with herself, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Besides, she has plenty to give Mr Becker: boxes in the living room full of sketches, two unfinished and unframed canvases, yet more notebooks and a stack of letters. She has taken care to put the letters from Douglas Lennox at the top of the pile, the ones that show him needy and aggressive, smarting from her rejection, bitter to the point of derangement:How can you claim it meant nothing? Are you really going to use my wife as an excuse? You’ve never seemed to care much about the wives of your other lovers.This, Grace knows, is petty of her, but there is a point: it is not easy to lay yourself bare to public scrutiny; it is not easy to have those you loved laid bare, either.

She wraps the smaller of the canvases in an old towel and takes it to the little storeroom. The space is mostly bare, save for a couple of ancient, empty suitcases and a few boxes of her own personal papers, which she brought over after she let the cottage in the village go. She rests the small canvas against one of the old suitcases and goes back to fetch the larger piece. As she turns it around, so that the canvas will be facing the wall, the sheet she has wrapped around it falls away slightly, revealing, at the top of the wooden frame, Vanessa’s mark:Totem.

Letting go of the past is necessarily a selective enterprise. Some things you hold on to and some things you release. When it comes to the portraits and the letters she has chosen to keep, Grace is holding tight to what she and Vanessa were to each other. This is not a matter for explanation or interpretation or speculation; it belonged only to them. Now it belongs only to her.

All those years, she slept in the spare room and was called, when Vanessa was written about, a companion or a carer, a friend, sometimes a partner – each word wrong in some fundamental way, though neither of them ever explained how – Vanessa, because it was in her nature to resist explanation, and Grace, because she was never asked.

What could she have said if someone had asked? How could she have explained, when all other loves are seen as subordinate to romantic love? What she and Vanessa had was not romantic, but it was not subordinate, either.Just a friend, that’s what people say.Oh, she’s just a friend.As though a friend were something commonplace, as though a friend couldn’t mean the world.

My beloved, Grace could have said, were she asked, she was my beloved.

In the kitchen, she sits at the table and makes a list of things she needs to get before Becker arrives: milk, bread, eggs and bacon for breakfast, a chicken to roast for dinner, vegetables. Wine. It’s a long time since she’s had to cook a proper meal for anyone, a long time since there have been guests at the house. In the very old days, before Grace moved into the spare room, Vanessa’s art friends would visit often, and sometimes people from the village came for lunch, or drinks, though they didn’t usually stay, unless they missed the tide. Probably the last person to stay the night was Julian. And he wasn’t really a guest, he just turned up one day, uninvited.

22

Eris, summer 2002

There was a man in Vanessa’s kitchen. His blond hair was receding a little, his torso was deeply tanned. He was wearing shorts, the baggy sort favoured by younger people, and nothing else. When he turned to face her, Grace saw that the shorts sat so low they revealed a deep iliac crest and a tuft of pubic hair.

‘You must be Grace,’ the man said, holding out a hand for her to shake. ‘I’m Julian. What are you cooking for us tonight?’

Grace ignored his hand, hoisting the shopping bags on to the kitchen table. ‘I’m not cooking. I picked up a few things for Vanessa,’ she said. ‘If she were left to her own devices, she’d starve.’

‘Good of you,’ Julian said. Peering into one of the bags, he drew out a packet of butcher’s minced beef, raised an eyebrow and replaced it. ‘Did you get fags?’ he asked, looking up at her with a smile.

Grace turned her back on him. ‘She’ll starve, but she won’t forget those,’ she said, and left the room. She walked into the hallway and out of the front door; she marched across the courtyard, and straight up the hill.

Vanessa was throwing, her foot on the flywheel, her attention wholly focused on the task at hand, and yet before Grace could speak, she said, ‘I’m working.’ A warning tone.

‘I brought some shopping,’ Grace said.

‘Thanks.’ Vanessa did not look up; instead, she turned her shoulders very slightly, angling herself away from the door. Away from Grace.

Grace didn’t move. She stood in the doorway for a minute, two, in complete silence, waiting for Vanessa to look at her, to explain – to explain herself, to explain why he was here – to saysomething.

But Vanessa did not yield. Frustrated, Grace turned away and saw that he had followed her from the house. He was standing on the path, halfway up the hill, cigarette in hand, watching. Smiling his dumb smile.

She was going to have to walk past him. She was going to have to endure his gaze all the way down to the car, feel his eyes on her pale, fleshy limbs, on the sweat patches blooming under her arms, on her face, puffy with summer allergy. As she walked down the path, he didn’t move, only stood and smoked and as she went past said quietly, ‘À bientôt.’

In those days, Grace still had her cottage in the village, so she could have avoided seeing Julian again. Only she couldn’t bear to stay away. It needled her so, his presence on their island, she had to knowwhy, she had to knowfor how long.

The day after that first encounter, she drove back over, hoping against hope that he’d be gone. But the little red sports car was still parked in the courtyard.

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