Page 49 of The Silent Patient

“Yes.” I stared at the painting. “Yes, I can see that.”

Jean-Felix began carefully wrapping up the pictures again.

“And theAlcestis?” I said. “Can I see it?”

“Of course. Follow me.”

Jean-Felix led me along the narrow passage to the end of the gallery. There theAlcestisoccupied a wall to itself. It was just as beautiful and mysterious as I remembered it. Alicia naked in the studio, in front of a blank canvas, painting with a bloodred paintbrush. I studied Alicia’s expression. Again it defied interpretation. I frowned.

“She’s impossible to read.”

“That’s the point—it is a refusal to comment. It’s a painting about silence.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“Well, at the heart of all art lies a mystery. Alicia’s silence is her secret—her mystery, in the religious sense. That’s why she named itAlcestis.Have you read it? By Euripides.” He gave me a curious look. “Read it. Then you’ll understand.”

I nodded—and then I noticed something in the painting I hadn’t before. I leaned forward to look closely. A bowl of fruit sat on the table in the background of the picture—a collection of apples and pears. On the red apples were some small white blobs—slippery white blobs creeping in and around the fruit.

I pointed at them. “Are they…?”

“Maggots?” Jean-Felix nodded. “Yes.”

“Fascinating. I wonder what that means.”

“It’s wonderful. A masterpiece. It really is.” Jean-Felix sighed and glanced at me across the portrait. He lowered his voice as if Alicia were able to hear us. “It’s a shame you didn’t know her then. She was the most interesting person I’ve ever met. Most people aren’t alive, you know, not really—sleepwalking their way through life. But Alicia was so intensely alive.… It was hard to take your eyes off her.” Jean-Felix turned his head back to the painting and gazed at Alicia’s naked body. “So beautiful.”

I looked back at Alicia’s body. But where Jean-Felix saw beauty, I saw only pain; I saw self-inflicted wounds, and scars of self-harm.

“Did she ever talk to you about her suicide attempt?”

I was fishing, but Jean-Felix took the bait. “Oh, you know about that? Yes, of course.”

“After her father died?”

“She went to pieces.” Jean-Felix nodded. “The truth is Alicia was hugely fucked-up. Not as an artist, but as a person she was extremely vulnerable. When her father hanged himself, it was too much. She couldn’t cope.”

“She must have loved him a great deal.”

Jean-Felix gave a kind of strangled laugh. He looked at me as if I were mad. “What are you talking about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Alicia didn’t love him. She hated her father. She despised him.”

I was taken aback by this. “Alicia told you that?”

“Of course she did. She hated him ever since she was a kid—ever since her mother died.”

“But—then why try to commit suicide after his death? If it wasn’t grief, what was it?”

Jean-Felix shrugged. “Guilt, perhaps? Who knows?”

There was something he wasn’t telling me, I thought. Something didn’t fit. Something was wrong.

His phone rang. “Excuse me a moment.” He turned away from me to answer it. A woman’s voice was on the other end. They talked for a moment, arranging a time to meet. “I’ll call you back, baby,” he said, and hung up.

Jean-Felix turned back to me. “Sorry about that.”

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