Page 51 of The Blue Hour

‘No, I don’t think so.’ She looks at him, unsmiling. ‘You had something you wanted to talk to me about?’

He exhales loudly.Jesus Christ.‘Yes, Grace, I have things I need to speak to you about. I’ve been running back and forth up here to try to finalize Vanessa’s estate and we really need to get this done now, we—’

‘Oh, I see,’ she cuts him off. ‘And there I was thinking that maybe you’d come to apologize. Or perhaps to return the letter you stole?’

Wrong-footed, he starts to mumble an apology but she is already walking away from him, not back up towards the house, but on to the beach.

Becker follows her over the sands, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets and his eyes narrowed against glare and grit. A couple of paces behind her, he has to strain to catch the words snatched from her mouth by the wind.

‘It was a betrayal of trust!’ she shouts. ‘You promised me that we would work together and then you took that letter, you left without a word, you—’

‘You’re right,’ he says, annoyed with himself for ceding the moral high ground. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I saw the wordDivision, and I couldn’t resist … I was in such a state, I wasn’t thinking—’

‘Of me? Of my wishes? Of how I would feel about you taking a letter I’d told you was private? You certainly were not. I saw that article in the newspaper. Anyone reading that wouldn’t know I existed at all. I’m just an obstacle to you, aren’t I? Aninconvenience.’

‘That’s not true,’ Becker says, breaking into a jog to keep up with her, feeling ridiculous and wretched at the same time. ‘Please don’t think that. I’ve never wanted to make you feel that way, I’ve never wanted to make the loss of Vanessa’s work harder for you.’

‘It’s not aloss,’ Grace retorts, wheeling around to face him. Her face is blotchy, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘I didn’tloseanything,she gave it all away. As you said in the newspaper, she had no one else to leave it to, did she? She had no one in her life.’

Becker shakes his head vehemently. ‘I did not say that, the journalist did and he was wrong. Had he put it to me like that, I would have set the record straight.’ Even as he’s saying this, though, he’s remembering what Sebastian said: how was it that Grace was left with so little when she and Vanessa had been so close?Why was that, do you think?

This far out, Becker can see that the sea is wild, the wind-whipped waves crested with poisonous-looking yellow foam. ‘You left Eris, didn’t you?’ he says to her. ‘At the time of that letter, you were living somewhere else, somewhere in England—’

‘Carlisle.’

‘That’s it, and Vanessa wrote to you, she said—’ He is interrupted by a cacophony of screeches – gulls overhead banking into the wind, diving and whirling like fighter planes in a dogfight.

Grace folds her arms and starts to walk, more slowly now, towards the sea. ‘Vanessa didn’t want me around any longer,’ she says. ‘After Julian … she changed.’ Becker lets her lead the way; he walks at her shoulder, careful not to crowd her but desperate to hear every word. ‘She became difficult. Secretive, watchful … she was like someone with post-traumatic stress.’ She glances quickly at him. ‘Do you know what that’s like? She was hypervigilant, fearful, she lost her temper easily … When I suggested she get help –properhelp, you know, from a psychologist – she became enraged.’

Becker is struck by the similarity with Emmeline’s situation – also suspected of having PTSD, also infuriated by the idea that she needs professional help. Discomforted by the thought of similarities between Vanessa and Emmeline, he bats the idea away. ‘Did anyone help her?’ he asks. ‘Did anyone helpyouwithher? In the later notebooks, she doesn’t talk about people much, there’s barely a mention of Frances or—’

‘She cut everyone off,’ Grace says. ‘She wouldn’t see a soul. I walked about on eggshells for months. Then, just after Christmas, about six months after it all happened, she asked me to leave. She was’ – Grace exhales forcefully through puffed-out cheeks – ‘rather cruel about it.’

She turns towards him, face stretched into a strained smile. ‘I was terribly upset, but I did as I was asked. I got myself a locum job in England and off I went. I thought … I assumed that she needed to grieve, to be alone, to deal with … whatever guilt she was feeling.’ Their eyes lock and Becker startles at the implication. ‘I wrote to her often, but for months she didn’t reply. Eventually I got that letter, the one you took.’

‘When you say she had to deal with her guilt,’ Becker says, ‘do you mean …? Whatdoyou mean?’

Grace lifts her hand to shade her eyes; she squints at the sea. ‘We should go back,’ she says, ignoring his question. ‘The tide is turning. We don’t want to get caught out.’ To Becker, the water still looks to be a safe distance away, and he says so. ‘You’d be surprised,’ Grace says, ‘by how quickly it comes in, how quickly you can lose your footing, even in shallow water.’

They turn their back to the water. Scraps of sea foam skitter like birds across the sand in front of them, and the sky ahead threatens rain, but with the wind at their backs, it’s easier to talk.

‘You said Vanessa felt guilty?’

Grace nods, glancing behind her, towards the sea. ‘About Julian,’ she says.

‘About Julian?’

She nods again, impatiently. ‘Yes, about Julian. I suppose she thought she could have done more for him.’

‘More? How do you mean?’

‘Given him more time, or more money, I suppose, which is what he always wanted.’ She shakes her head. ‘We never really spoke about it. After I left, we didn’t really talk about him again.’

‘But you came back?’ She gives him a look. ‘I mean,obviouslyyou came back.’

‘She found a lump,’ Grace says. ‘She was frightened, so she asked me to come back. She begged me to come.’

They walk towards the island quickly and in silence, Becker’s eyes trained on the damp grey sand beneath his feet.

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