Page 48 of The Blue Hour

When she wakes again, she sees him. Not the boy, this time, but a man. And not an intrusive thought but an actual intruder: a man at the window, hands cupped around his face as he looks in on her. Grace cries out; she jerks upright, the bedclothes falling away from her to reveal her naked torso. The man outside jumps, rearing backwards like a shying horse; she can hear him calling out,sorry, sorry.

She grabs a robe, pulls it around her and rushes out into the hall. She picks up the shotgun, unlocks the door and barrels out, squinting into bright sunshine.

The man is backing away with his hands in the air: he’s a hiker, wearing walking trousers, carrying a backpack. His companions – two other men, probably in their twenties – are standing a little way behind him.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Grace barks.

‘I’msorry,’ he says again, lowering his hands to his side. ‘I was just … I thought the place was empty, I wanted to see—’

‘Empty? There’s a car outside. This is private land.’

The man raises his eyebrows, spreads his arms wide. ‘Well, there’s a footpath just there,’ he points over his shoulder, ‘and there’s right to roam here, so—’

‘Not up to my bedroom window there isn’t. What is wrong with you?’ The man turns away, apologizing again, but his friends are smirking. ‘Keep away from here!’ Grace snaps, turning backtowards the house, gathering her robe around her. She can hear them laughing as they head off up the hill towards the rock.

She feels a fool. There was no need to shout, no need to go running out here at all. She imagines them mocking her, imagines what they will say about her nakedness, the sort of jokes they will make about her repulsive body, her loose skin and sagging breasts, her desperate solitude.

She returns the gun to its position in the hallway and locks the front door. It is almost the middle of the day, she’s overslept by hours and now she knows for certain she will not sleep tonight, that this will set her back, right back to square one. And sure enough, almost as she thinks this, there he is: the boy, one hand clutching frantically at the base of his throat.

She forces herself to do practical things: sweep the kitchen floor, clean the shower cubicle, take the food waste to the compost heap. There are bills to pay, but the internet is down – it failed four days ago and since she has no phone signal, she had to go across into the village to call someone about it. Which she duly did, and yet despite the call centre employee’s reassurances, it is still down. She has no way of knowing why, or for how long – the only way she can make any progress at all is to drive across to the village again, and phone again, and be put on hold again. She’s exhausted just thinking about it, but what choice does she have? Becker might have been trying to contact her. He said he would email, after all, to explain his disappearing act.

She showers and dresses, locks up the house and drives down the track, trundling out across the causeway under a cerulean sky. Two seal pups, fat and pale and vulnerable, sun themselves on the sands beneath the house. They raise their little heads, dog-like, to watch her pass.Look, Vee, she wants to say.Look.

On days like today, Vanessa’s absence is a knife in her side.

The village seems unusually quiet. It isn’t until she parks hercar outside the shop and sees that it is closed that she realizes it’s a Sunday. No coffee, then, no fresh bread. Her disappointment is so acute she thinks she might burst into tears.

Do the internet people even work on a Sunday? Turns out they do. Grace spends half an hour on hold but, in the end, someone answers. Yes, the person says, there is a fault.I know that, Grace replies,I know there’s a fault. I know that because the internet is not working today and has not been working for four days.The person at the internet company is very sorry about that. They will investigate the fault and ring her back in a couple of hours. What time would be convenient?

If she waits for her phone call, she will miss the tide, so no time is convenient. But she cannot explain that to a person who works in a call centre in Gateshead or possibly even Bangalore, so she just laughs helplessly and says,As soon as you can. Call me as soon as you can.

As she is driving back down the hill to the harbour, she glimpses, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of yellow at the end of the car park; she pulls over and parks up next to the harbour wall.

On the bench directly in front of her cottage sits Marguerite. She is wearing her high-vis jacket and smoking a cigarette. Grace walks over to say hello and raises a hand in greeting.

‘I see you,’ Marguerite says quickly, ‘à l’heure bleue, before the sunrise.’

Grace shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so, Marguerite. I slept very late today.’

Marguerite pouts, aggrieved by the contradiction. Grace smiles at her. ‘How are you feeling? How’s your arm?’ Marguerite knits her tiny features into a frown. ‘Your arm, Marguerite. You hurt it?’

‘Ah,ça va,’ she says, dismissing Grace’s concern with a wave of her cigarette. Grace points at it and shakes her head. Marguerite scowls in reply. Slowly and deliberately, she brings the cigaretteto her lips and takes a long drag. Her face breaks into a wicked grin and she starts to laugh. Then, something dawns on her, and her face changes. ‘Is your friend coming back?’

Grace’s smile grows stiff. ‘Maybe,’ she says, turning to go. She doesn’t have the energy for this today. ‘Look after yourself, Marguerite,’ she calls out over her shoulder. ‘Don’t smoke too many of those, OK?’

She wonders as she walks away why she’s even bothering, because Marguerite is obviously not going to listen to her, and why should she? She cannot have that much time left, why shouldn’t she enjoy her remaining pleasures?

By the time Grace gets home, the internet has miraculously been restored. Grace’s delight is quickly dampened by the discovery that she has no new WhatsApp messages and no emails, except for junk and a Google alert she set up years ago to search for Vanessa’s name.

The alert links to an interview with Sebastian Lennox that appeared in one of the weekend papers.An Artistic Legacy, the headline proclaims. Beneath it is a photograph of Lennox, who is fine-boned and elegant-looking – he favours his mother. His father looked like a Glasgow gangster. He is pictured standing on the lawn of his home next to a Barbara Hepworth bronze; the article is illustrated with other works of art, too: a Francis Cadell of Iona, a beautiful Samuel Peploe still life, and Vanessa’sHope is Violent.

The piece itself is rather dull, a by-the-numbers Saturday feature crammed with clichés: Sebastian Lennox’s ‘ancestral home’ has been ‘lovingly restored’; his father Douglas was a ‘fearsome patriarch’ whose life was cut short in a ‘tragic shooting accident’, his mother was a ‘society beauty’ whose health is ‘fragile’. Thenthere is the inevitable run-through of the dispute between Vanessa and Douglas and the surprising revelations of Vanessa’s will.

‘Of course we were shocked,’ Lennox says of the Chapman bequest. ‘Although my father and Vanessa had once been close, their falling-out was spectacular and pretty bitter.’

Lennox believes, however, that despite the bad blood between Chapman and Douglas Lennox, she knew Fairburn would be a fitting home for her work. ‘I like to think that Vanessa would have known that we would cherish her pieces and honour her legacy,’ he says. There may, of course, be a more prosaic reason for the bequest: Chapman died childless, with no close family – she had no one else to whom she could bequeath her work.

Grace blinks. She reads the last bit again, and then she scrolls down, down, down to the mention of James Becker, the curator Lennox brought to Fairburn specifically because of his knowledge of Vanessa Chapman’s work. ‘To find myself the guardian of this collection is a dream come true,’ Becker says.

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