Chapter 10

10

Becker wonders, as he climbs the steps up to Vanessa's house, whether Grace will show him the studio. God, what he'd give to see it! What he'd give to go up to the top of the rock, to look at the view.

‘You could go up,' Grace says, when he asks her about it. She is pouring coffee into his mug: she's not been welcoming , exactly, but civil enough. There's been no sign of yesterday's anger. ‘But I wouldn't recommend it.' She juts her chin towards the window, indicating the fog. ‘The last chap to go up there in a haar didn't come back down. Well, he did, but via the express route.' She looks at him with raised eyebrows, a low whistle on her lips. ‘He washed up on the beach a week later.'

Becker almost chokes on his coffee.

‘It was in the papers,' she says coolly. She sits down opposite him, blowing gently on to the surface of her own drink. ‘A couple of years ago … maybe three? I lose track. Pre-pandemic, in any case.'

‘Good God. Who was he?'

Grace shrugs. ‘A walker. A tourist. Canadian, I think. Some poor soul far from home. I never actually saw him. His hire car was parked down on the track for a couple of days, that's how I knew something was up.'

They sip their coffee. Becker shakes his head. ‘I had no idea it was so treacherous … the rock was one of Vanessa's favourite painting spots – wasn't it?'

Grace nods vigorously. ‘Oh yes, she was up there all the time. And in all weathers, too. The more you see a place, the more you can extract from it. That's what she said. She used to haul all her kit up, paints and canvases, the whole caboodle, on the quad bike as far as it went. And then on foot.' Her brows rise towards her hairline again, a quiet smile on her face. ‘She lost more than one canvas to the wind. It used to put the fear of God into me, but nothing would stop Vanessa.' She purses her lips. ‘Almost nothing.'

There's no question: Grace is different today. There's more eye contact, she's less defensive, more effusive. The letter did the trick.

‘She knew this place, you see,' Grace says. ‘She knew every inch of this island, every rock and every root, every crevice, she knew where the ground was unstable, where the wind might catch you …' She shakes her head. ‘Not today; you'd be a fool to go up today. And I'm afraid I can't show you the studio yet either. It's not ready.' Their eyes meet, and Grace sits up very straight in her chair. ‘ I'm not ready. In any case, I need some assurances from you. I want to know how you plan to proceed from here on in.'

Becker inclines his head, taking another sip of his coffee. Sensing that charm is unlikely to work, he opts instead for deference. ‘What I was hoping,' he says carefully, ‘if you have time, of course, if you're willing, is that we – you and I, I mean – might be able to read through some of Vanessa's papers together …' He doesn't look up, just keeps his eye on the table and his voice even. ‘In that way we might come up with a solution acceptable to both sides.' Now he does look up, his gaze meeting hers. ‘I need your help,' he says.

Grace presses her lips together, a faint flush spreading over her cheekbones … She is pleased. She is flattered. ‘That would be … I think that would be fine,' she says, and Becker curls his hands into victorious fists under the table.

They come to an agreement. Grace will give him a sample of papers – a few notebooks, a couple of letters perhaps – to take back to Fairburn. He will speak to Sebastian and ask – no, tell! – him to call off the dogs. From now on, Grace will deal directly with Becker, and only with Becker. There will be no more threats of legal action. Becker makes a solemn promise, crossing his ankles beneath his chair like a child.

‘I'll fetch you some notebooks to look at, then,' Grace says, getting up from the table. Becker waits until he hears the front door open and close again and then he seizes his chance. He slips out of the kitchen and into the darkness of the cluttered living room. Windowless and airless, it has the feel of a space rarely used. A faded screen in hospital-green linen rests against one wall, a small blue sofa vies for space with two ratty armchairs and an ancient television sits on a metal catering trolley.

On the floor are piled books, yellowing newspapers, ancient copies of The Doctor magazine. On every other horizontal surface – on every shelf and coffee table, on the mantelpiece above the gaping maw of the fireplace – are found objects: driftwood the colour of milky coffee, orbs of pure white quartz, bright green glass worn smooth and shapely by the sea. Becker selects a stone, white with a line of rose running through it like a vein, and rolls it around in his hand, returns it to its place on the mantelpiece.

Beyond the living room is another corridor, off which is a bathroom and two bedrooms, a small one to the right, furnished with a neatly made single bed, a desk and a wardrobe, a larger room to the left. Becker stops in the doorway of the larger room. The walls are painted white, the double bed is stripped, a chair is placed next to it at an angle. It is Vanessa's room, he knows, because through the window opposite he can see the sea, and a lighthouse on an island in the distance. He is looking at the view depicted in Hope is Violent , Vanessa's final painting, completed only months before she died.

Tears spring to his eyes. He retreats quickly, noticing as he makes his way back through the house that all the walls are bare, that the whole place feels stripped, robbed of everything that might once have adorned it. And he is among the thieves. As he walks back through the living room he picks up the white stone again. Every pebble, Sebastian said, every fucking pebble she picked up on the beach and arranged just so . Becker slips the stone into his pocket; he makes it back to the kitchen table seconds before he hears the front door open.

‘She didn't date anything,' Grace is saying as she re-enters the room, leafing through the pages of an A5 Life Vermilion notebook, ‘so finding what you're looking for might not be straightforward.' She places the notebook, along with two others and a folder stuffed with loose papers, on the table. Becker knits his fingers together to stop himself grabbing at them. ‘I don't think these books were ever really for reference,' Grace says. ‘They were just … part of the process, I suppose, of figuring things out.'

She catches his eye and quickly looks away. Unwittingly, she has just made the case for Fairburn's claim on these notebooks: they were part of the process – part of Vanessa's artistic process. Becker lets the moment pass, unacknowledged.

‘What was I saying? Not dated, that's it. So at least one of these is much too early, it's from when she first moved here, but I think you'll find it very interesting. She writes about sculpture in the second one, so that might be more relevant. I meant to go through all this,' she sighs, ‘I honestly did.'

‘I know,' Becker says quietly. ‘I understand, I really do.' She smiles at him, grateful, and he feels wretched.

‘There are sketches in the folder, and of course you can keep all of those – I've no idea whether any of them have any real value or interest, most of them just look like scribbles to me …'

Philistine , Becker thinks, unkindly. ‘What's fascinating for me,' he says, ‘is the progression of her style, the development of it, both in terms of individual pieces and her whole body of work, so I imagine that almost all of those sketches will have value, provided I can get a sense of their order. I imagine the notebooks will help with that.'

Grace looks doubtful. ‘I suppose …'

‘One of the extraordinary things about Vanessa's work is that there's this real sense of coherence, even though her style changed so much over the course of her life. When you look at the paintings she did when she first got here, it's remarkable, isn't it, the difference between something like South , which I think was one of the very first completed on the island, and The Tide Always Comes , which was just a year later and yet the change is quite radical, it's so much more fluid , and yet there's no question there's the same hand holding the brush, the same eye.'

Grace sighs impatiently. ‘I wouldn't know about that,' she says, ‘I'm no art critic. Everyone gets so bogged down in the theory, but sometimes it's just about necessity. You mentioned The Tide Always Comes – well, she had to paint that differently because she couldn't use a brush properly. She was just … squirting paint on to her fingers and applying it to canvas directly, and then using the brush, and she liked that effect, so it influenced how she did things later on, her brushwork became—'

‘Looser!' Becker exclaims. ‘More expansive.'

‘Yes, I suppose—'

‘And the paint becomes more sculptural … but hang on, you said she couldn't use a brush?'

‘Well, no, because she'd broken her wrist.' Grace looks at him, quizzical, half-smiling, half-frowning. ‘Did you not know about that? That was how we met.'