Page 55 of The Blue Hour

You can’t always see what’s right in front of you.

Or who is right in front of you. He’s thinking of Sebastian, of his disarming smile.How’s our girl?Our girl. Could Emmeline be right? Has he been so blinded by love, or by guilt over the way that he and Helena got together, that he didn’t see what was playing out in front of him? Perhaps he’s been reading Sebastian wrong all along. When he looked at him, he saw stoicism, that stiff upper lip, but maybe what he was really seeing was a smooth operator playing a long game?

But what about Helena? Surely he couldn’t have misreadher? He feels his heart rate pitch up again and he checks his phone; he has no missed calls and no messages. For a few moments, he argues with himself, and then he calls her; he listens to the phone ring, the knot in his gut tightening with each beep. He tortures himself for a full minute before ending the call.

He is gasping for a cigarette. He rolls one, and then a second – just in case – and makes his way through the kitchen, noticing, as he does, the key to the padlock on the studio door hanging on the hook next to the kitchen door. He slips it into his pocket with his lighter. Outside, he huddles in the corner of the courtyard to light his cigarette, but even in what is probably the most protected spot on the island, the wind proves too strong and he gives up. He crosses the courtyard, head down and shoulders raised against the wind, and walks up the hill to the studio.

Almost everything has been cleared, though there remains a couple of small boxes on the trestle table and, right at the back of the room, a little whittling knife on a shelf. He slips the knife into his pocket and picks up the boxes to take down to the house. He’s rather hoping Grace will see him, that she’ll come out to remonstrate with him – right now, he’d relish a confrontation.And it’s not like she could prevent him taking anything, she couldn’t physically stop him, could she? Although his forearm is still smarting where she grabbed hold of him earlier – for a woman clearly not in peak physical condition, she has a surprisingly strong grip.

Back in the house, he places the boxes on the kitchen table and pauses a moment, listening out for any activity. He hears nothing over the sound of the wind and the gulls, and the ominous rumble-and-crash of waves hitting the rocks below the house. He takes out his phone and tries Helena again, but the wifi no longer seems to be working – perhaps the storm has knocked it out? It hardly matters, he tells himself, he’ll be on the road within a few hours. An optimistic forecast, given the state of the weather, but what can he do now but act? He must be decisive. He will pack up the car so he’s ready to leave as soon as it’s safe to cross. It’s still parked down at the bottom of the track, so he’ll need to bring it up – he doesn’t want to be negotiating the steps while carrying heavy boxes in this weather. He thrusts his hands deep into his coat pockets.

Where did he leave the car key?

39

The storm has hit exactly on schedule.

Grace fudged the timings a bit, because she knew he wouldn’t want to be stuck here in bad weather, but she wanted him here for the storm, she wanted him to see Eris Island at its most elemental, its most exhilarating: gales hurling rain and sea spray at the windows, wind tearing at the trees, the whole house moaning as it clings to its rock.

She’d imagined them seeing it through together – bonds are forged when you spend the night with someone during a storm. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.

It was a mistake to let him see the paintings. She has wanted to show them to him for a while, because they demonstrate so clearly the depth of her connection to Vanessa. They are evidence – indisputable evidence – that she is no minor character, no bit part in Vanessa’s story, that it is only through her that it is truly possible to understand who Vanessa was.

But she should have laid the groundwork better, she ought to have prepared him for the fact that she’d held some pieces back. In the end, she was overtaken by events – she couldn’t have foreseen the bird, she couldn’t have imagined Becker would go rushing into Vanessa’s bedroom like that.

Now, she moves to the bedroom door and presses her cheek against it. The house is moving, creaking and groaning as it resists the wind, but she can hear him, too, moving around in the next room. She glances over to the bedside table where his car key is in the drawer: she took it from his jacket pocket when she carried the gull-sullied sheet through to the kitchen to put it into the washing machine. She realized at once there would be a chance of a row once he’d seen the paintings, and she didn’t want to give him the option of leaving with things unresolved. Now, having made the phone call she needed to make, she disconnects the router.

She turns off the light and climbs into Vanessa’s bed, she crawls under the cover and pulls it up to her chin. She luxuriates in the thrilling sound of the coming storm, in the comfort of knowing that she is safe and warm and dry andnot alone.

In the darkness, she can make out the pale lines of her own body inTotem, she can see the shape of her shoulders, her cradling hand. Whatever happened to that little bird? She hasn’t seen it in such a long time. In the storeroom, perhaps?

When Vanessa paintedTotem, she had been going through a carving phase: whittling wood, trying her hand at stone, too. You could hear it from the house, the noise of the hammer singing as it struck the chisel, regular as a bell.

It’s possible the little bird is in the living room somewhere, in one of the cupboards – they’re full of all sorts of things, maquettes and shells and stones from the beach, whittled spoons and trinkets Vanessa collected from all over the place.

A bird in the hand is a good thing, a bird in the house not so much. It foretells a death, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what they say? Whoevertheyare, the weak-minded, those gripped by superstition.

It’s unsettling, though, that’s for sure, a wild thing trapped in a domestic space. Impressive, too, the ferocity with which an animal will struggle, the violence of the urge to escape, tolive. When they are desperate, people are like that, too.

40

Eris, summer 2002

It had been raining for weeks, but that morning, the sun shone.

Grace was sitting in the kitchen, reading the newspaper over breakfast, when Vanessa appeared, shyly smiling. Her face was flushed and her fingers trembled a little as she took Grace’s hand. ‘I have something to show you,’ she said.

Up at the studio, leaning against the wall, was the picture, the portrait of Grace holding the wooden bird. Vanessa had been working on it ever since the rain started.

‘I call itTotem,’ Vanessa said. She paused for a moment, then inhaled quickly. ‘Well, what do you think? Do you like it?’

Grace swallowed. She was embarrassed to find herself moved to tears. ‘I do,’ she said. She coughed to clear the lump in her throat. ‘I really do.’ She is not beautiful in the portrait – she could never be that – but she is majestic. Sitting at their kitchen table, she has pushed her chair back a little so that you can see that she is holding, in her lap, a carving. The wall behind her is the yellow of old paper, the afternoon light soft and warm. In her faded blue shirt, Grace looks a nobler and more relaxed figure than she ever could have imagined herself.

Vanessa slipped her arms around Grace’s waist and squeezed. ‘I’m so pleased. I’m so happy with how it’s turned out, but I knowwhat it’s like to sit for a portrait and expect one thing and then to be confronted with it … it’s never an uncomplicated sensation.’ She squeezed again. ‘Grace … are you crying? You are! Oh,Grace.’

There had been something between them lately, an awkwardness, unspoken; they both knew where it came from, but both had been ignoring it. ‘You don’t mind, do you,’ Vanessa said, ‘not coming to opening night? Iwouldlike to have you there, it’s just … we belong to different worlds, you and I, don’t we? And those things are always so stressful, I never feel myself, I’m so nervous, and I’ll have to be pressing flesh and …selling, and you won’t know anyone, and I won’t be able to look after you. I worry you won’t enjoy yourself—’

‘I don’t mind,’ Grace said quickly, though she did. She’d not told Vanessa that, although she’d grown to suspect she might not be invited, she had already picked out an outfit to wear; she’d been pricing rooms at three-star hotels, thinking about where they might eat before the show. ‘I understand completely. I’ll come the week after the opening, and then we can relax and enjoy ourselves, have dinner somewhere nice.’ She fell silent a moment, swallowing her disappointment, tamping it down, determined that it would not ruin this moment between them. ‘It’s soodd,’ she said finally, ‘to think that this will be hanging there in a fancy gallery, and people will be looking at it, and then someone will buy it and take it home. Me! On the wall!’

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