Page 40 of The Blue Hour

Grace waves away his offer of help and he collapses back into his chair. ‘Barely,’ she says. ‘She came out here on a couple of occasions with Douglas, but she didn’t have much time for the likes of me.’

Becker can just imagine: to Emmeline, Grace would appear little more than a servant. ‘I suppose I ought to be more sympathetic to her, after all she’s been through …’

Grace scoffs. ‘After suffering decades of his infidelities you’d think she’d be happy to see the back of the old goat.’

‘The circumstances were so shocking,’ Becker murmurs, ‘and there’s guilt as well as grief …’

‘Guilt?’ Grace repeats, turning to look at him. ‘Whyguilt?’

Becker’s wine-addled brain takes a few moments to process the fact that he has said too much, but it’s too late now; he can see from the expression on Grace’s face that she has figured it out. ‘Emmeline was the one who shot him?’ she says. ‘Good lord. How extraordinary.’

‘The family kept it out of the papers,’ Becker says, inwardly cursing himself. ‘Everyone wanted to protect her … she’d suffered enough.’

‘I see,’ Grace says. She is leaning against the kitchen counter,folding and unfolding the tea towel in her hands. ‘Extraordinary,’ she says again. ‘That woman could hit a rabbit through the eye with an air gun.’

Becker sits up straight. ‘I’m sorry?’

Grace nods. ‘Oh yes, Emmeline’s a crack shot. She used to boast she could’ve gone to the Olympics, if they’d allowed women to shoot back then.’

Becker pushes his wine glass away, rising unsteadily to his feet. He’s struggling to think straight – has she really just suggested that Emmeline could have shot Douglason purpose?

‘I … I probably ought to go to bed,’ he says.

‘Oh.’ Grace is clearly disappointed. ‘I wanted to show you something else. Discuss something with you, before you take the notebooks back to Fairburn. But I have to be sure, Mr Becker, that I can trust you.’ She looks at him, her eyes enormous, imploring. ‘I can trust you, can’t I?’

Grace crosses the kitchen and turns on the main light. Becker sits. Narrowing his eyes against the glare, he watches as she reaches into the box she fetched earlier, the one from which she drew Vanessa’s note to Julian, and plucks out a notebook. ‘These, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, are the things I would rather have kept to myself. You can take the notebooks, but I would ask you not to put them on display.Please.For her sake,’ she says, handing him the book, ‘and for mine.’

The notebook, another Life Vermilion, is identical to the ones he has been reading back at Fairburn, only in this one, Becker sees that Vanessa’s handwriting is not elegantly loose and looping, it has become spidery and erratic. Her hand no longer follows the lines on the page but wanders all over the place, scribbling into corners, veering off at odd angles. Many of the pages are blank except for faint, seemingly unconnected traces of pencil, a few, barely legible phrases.

‘When the cancer came back,’ Grace explains, ‘it metastasized. It went to her brain.’ She chews her lower lip, watching Becker leaf through the book. ‘She had terrible headaches, the sight in her right eye started to go. She’d long since stopped working with ceramics – she just wasn’t strong enough to handle the clay – but by this time she could no longer paint, she struggled even to draw. She became – on paper and in real life – a lot less coherent. You can see that sometimes she appears to be writing not for herself, as with the older books, buttosomeone. To Frances, sometimes, or to me.’

Becker scans the pages, trying to make sense of her scrawl. Some of it sounds very much like Vanessa:

I seek substance: literal, physical substance. Wood, again, or stone?

Some of it less so:

where did he go where did you go where did I go?

Some of it is unbearable:

is the light failing, or am I?

And some of it desperate:

You have to help me.You owe me this

the last sentence underlined so forcefully that she has ripped the page.

‘She begged me to help her,’ Grace says. ‘After a certain point, everything became about that. All our conversations. When shespoke to me, she spoke of nothing else, she begged and begged and, in the end, I did it. I did what she asked me to do.’

For a long moment, Becker is speechless. ‘Youhelpedher?’ he repeats at last, his skin prickling despite the warmth of the room. He has a lump in his throat, hard as a peach pit.

‘I don’t think there’s anything conclusive in the notebooks,’ Grace says quietly. ‘Vanessa writes about morphine at some point, but there’s nothing to damn me. Nothing toconvictme, I wouldn’t have thought. I doubt much would happen at all, were this to come out – I’m sure it’s too late to prove anything. We were careful. I gave her the dose the night of a storm, it was three days before the ambulance came to take her.’ She looks him dead in the eye. ‘It’s not the law I’m afraid of, and it’s not a matter of my professional standing either, since I’m pretty sure I’ve retired for good this time.’ She sighs, breath shuddering out of her. ‘But if people were to read this, there would be speculation,controversy, the press prying once more. Sheloathedthem, you know, she always did. She would hate to have them picking over her bones.’ As she leaves the table, she places a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘Everything is for her protection, you see. Everything I did, everything I do.’

For a while, Becker sits alone in the kitchen, trying to make sense of everything he has heard: about Julian and about Emmeline and about what Grace did for Vanessa. To Vanessa. His head is thick, he can’t seem to unpick the ragged knot of his thoughts; every thread he pulls at only seems to cinch the tangle ever tighter.

Eventually, he makes his way to bed, weaving through the gloom of the living room, trying not to crash into the furniture. He sits on the bed, head in hands, listening to the waves, willing the room to stop spinning. What happens now? What happenstomorrow? Is he going to tell her the truth, thatDivisionIIis to be broken open? That for all he knows, it might have already happened, that Vanessa’s last breath may be gone?

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