Page 52 of The Blue Hour

At the bottom of the steps, Grace stumbles, falling heavily on to her left knee. Becker tries to help her up but she waves him away furiously, struggling back to her feet, pink-faced and breathless.

‘What else is it you’ve done?’ she snarls at him.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’ve been skulking like a kicked dog since you arrived. You owned up about the letter, we’ve talked about that interview. What else do you have to tell me?’

For someone with so few social skills, Becker thinks, Grace can be remarkably astute. All the time they’ve been talking, he’s had in the back of his mind Helena’s disappearing phone message and all the scenarios, all of them painful, it conjures up. But he’s certainly not about to confide in Grace about that.

Instead, he tells her about the sculpture. ‘They opened the case toDivisionII,’ he says flatly. Before she has time to react, he gets it all out. ‘They haven’t done any tests yet, but there’s no question the bone is human.’

Grace turns away from him. Dusting sand from her knees and thighs, she starts to climb, her knuckles whitening as she grips the rusted handrail. ‘Did I ever tell you about the wolves?’ she asks.

‘The wolves?’

‘They used to bury the dead out here. For hundreds of years, the people who lived on this coast brought their dead to the islands to bury them, to keep the bodies from being dug up. To keep them safe from wolves.’

Vanessa Chapman’s diary

Who am I writing all this for? Not for myself, presumably, not to remember, because if I were writing to remember, wouldn’t I writeeverythingdown, leave nothing out?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Douglas. Since I got ill again I find myself wanting to write to him, to explain everything, but it feels too late. Why didn’t I tell the truth right away? I couldn’t remember, and so I went to my notebooks for the answer and found nothing – they were no help at all. If I knew the answer back then, if I ever knew the answer, I kept it to myself.

(but aren’t these books myself?)

My memory isn’t all that good. I don’t think that’s new. I don’t think it’s ever been good, or at least, not in the way I need it to be now. Idon’t remember the exact way things happened, the sequence of events, who said what to who and when.

I remember images, snapshots. I see my bloody hands, white porcelain all over the studio floor. The ruined pictures. I see the faces of the policemen,how they looked at me, their mouths turned down, doubtful, dubious. Like they knew I was lying to them.

This is what I think now: it was too late to tell the truth, even before Ibegan to lie.

It was already too late: the blood had been washed away, the evidence destroyed. How, then, could I have said to them (to the police, to anyone?), look what he did! He tried to kill me! (Because I have to believe that’s what Julian tried to do, that he must have known that when I saw the wreckage I would have wanted to lie down in its midst and die.)

By the time I saw the whole picture, it was already too late. I was at war: with Douglas, with myself, with Grace too, though she didn’t seem to know it.

I can’t remember when I started to put the pieces together, when it was that I stood back and allowed the whole image to come into focus, when the trees became the wood and the sheepskin fell away to show me the wolf. Maybe I did glimpse it right away, maybe I was too frightened to acknowledge it. Too frightened, or too loving. I don’t think I knew then how murderous love can be.

I only know it was already too late.

And now it’s too late to tell.

How can I write to Douglas now? I can barely make sense of it all for myself.

I took horror and I made something of it: I painted and I created and now I have something to give. I can be kind, I can be generous. I can make amends to Douglas. I can’t give him the work I promised him, but I can give him everything I’ve made since. And to Grace, I can show mercy.

35

They hear the sound as soon as Grace opens the front door. Something slamming, or falling, and then a cry of pain.

Someone is in the house.

‘The door was locked!’ Grace cries out; she turns back, pressing her body against Becker’s as she tries to escape. Repulsed by the feeling of her soft belly and breasts pushing into him, he shrinks back, flattening himself against the wall.

Grace is panicking, she pushes past him, she runs back out of the house on to the lawn; she seems terrified. Becker picks up the rifle and, wielding it like a bat, creeps into the kitchen. Empty. He stands very still, listening. Laughter bubbles up inside him – he is ridiculous. He lowers the gun and rests it against a chair, pulls off his jacket and slings it on to the table and –there! Wait. Someoneisin the house. He can hear a muffled sound now, quite definitely, too gentle for footprints, a sort of rustling, as though something is being dragged along the floor.

‘Hello?’ Becker cries out, picking up the gun once more. ‘Is someone here?’

He walks back through the hall into the living room, ducking quickly into the back bedroom. It’s empty. He comes out again, pauses in the hallway, holding his breath, listening once more.The silence expands, pressing into him. He hears something behind him and jumps: it’s just Grace, closing the front door behind her. He wants to giggle again; he’s like a child watching a horror movie, waiting for the next jump scare, caught somewhere in that strange limbo between terror and delight.

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