Chapter 12

12

Onions chopped, garlic crushed: a tip of the wrist, a scrape of the knife, a gentle sizzle as the vegetables hit heated oil.

On the Aga sits an ancient orange Le Creuset casserole dish in which Grace makes the tomato sauce for her pasta every night. Same pot, same ingredients, the same dinner on repeat. She used to cook properly – she's a good cook – but over time, in the face of solitude, her repertoire dwindled from a range of dishes to just a handful, and finally all the way down to one single supper.

She used to listen to the radio when she cooked, but at some point she stopped. She can't remember exactly when, but she knows she stopped at the point at which the consolation gained from listening to other voices was outweighed by the discomfort of silence ringing out when she turned the dial before going to bed. It's like a bell tolling, now, the silence she hears in the wake of Becker's visit.

She shook his hand when he left, holding on for just a beat too long.

Vanessa used to touch people all the time; it came as a bit of a shock to Grace at first, all that hand-holding and arm-linking, but other people seemed to like it. Grace watched them relax into her, allowing Vanessa to draw them closer into her orbit. Grace could never quite get that right.

So, Becker will think her odd. He will think her sad and strange. A lonely, frightened old woman, that's what he'll think.

And he'll not be wrong, will he?

After supper, she climbs the hill to the studio. She keeps the torch light trained on the ground in front of her feet and does not raise her eyes, does not glance up at the treeline, behind which there is only darkness after all. What is there to be frightened of? There are ghosts in the wood, it's true, but then again there are ghosts everywhere. In the studio and up on the rock, in Vanessa's bedroom, right here on this path. And there, if she were to stray just a few feet over to the right, she'd find the concrete lid of the septic tank where Vanessa tripped, and she'd be haunted there, too.

She opens up the studio door and turns on the light, pulls a space heater out from under one of the shelves and plugs it in. Rolls the door shut and slides the bolt across. Safe as houses.

Mr Becker made her feel safe. Isn't that ridiculous? First he frightened her, then he made her feel safe.

He's the sort of man, she thinks, lifting the lid from the nearest box of papers, who'd carry your groceries to your car. Lend you a hand if you needed to move a sofa. Fetch you a saucepan from the top shelf. Step in if he saw you in trouble.

Would Vanessa have liked him? Grace thinks so. She didn't like a critic but she loved an enthusiast. She would have smiled at him, charmed him, taken his arm, or his hand. She was so tactile, so quick to touch, to embrace. All those things they wrote about her, that she was chilly, remote … those people didn't know her. Not really. She was warm when she wanted to be, she just knew who she liked. And who she didn't.

James Becker reminds her of someone. That's it, that's why she feels closer to him than she should. He reminds her of Nick Riley, a boy she knew at university. Mr Becker has a similar manner, gives the same impression of gentility. Of decency. A slight physical resemblance, too: milky skin, long, pale lashes.

Is that why she feels like this? Is that why she feels this sudden, sharp pain in her side, why she has to hold on to the workbench, to catch her breath? Is that why she's blindsided by a sudden wave of grief? Because he's like Nick, who abandoned her?

Is that why she lied to Mr Becker? Because she wanted him to think well of her? Because she wanted to please him?

She did see that Canadian boy. The one who fell. She was in the kitchen when he passed; he saw her at the window, smiled and waved. So young. She could have run out and warned him, told him to watch his step.

You can't save everyone.

She walks to the back of the studio, crouches down and opens the store cupboard. There was a box of bones here, wasn't there? Maybe more than one. She reaches into the darkness and comes out with a rosewood box. There. It's full of tiny things, fragments, yellowing and dirty; she sifts through it, picking up the pieces. They are light in her hand, they are animal bones, without question. These don't come from a human body. They are wrong, she's sure of it, the people at the gallery in London. The bone is not human. It can't be.

She closes the box and stands up.

But of course it could be! That poor Canadian boy wasn't the first to fall from the rock. It's not likely, but anything is possible. A prickle inches up her spine, and she hears Vanessa's voice: I dream about raking through ashes .

She turns, rounds the kiln, undoes the latch and opens the door. She peers into the dark hollow, inhaling a faint scent of oil and soap. It's empty, long since swept bare.

Division II was unquestionably Vanessa's work. That's what Grace told Mr Becker and that's the truth, only it doesn't feel like the truth, not the whole truth, because Vanessa was mad around that time. She was secretive, hostile, not herself; her back began to hunch and her eyes to yellow, a sour smell rose off her, it was as though she were transforming before Grace's very eyes into someone else, some thing else. Something animal. She sat in the kitchen and smoked all day, only moving around at night after Grace had gone to bed. Grace used to hear her, bare feet slapping the floor as she moved from room to room; she used to hear the front door slam when Vanessa went out into the night. Where did you go? Grace would ask in the morning, when Vanessa was back at the kitchen table, smoking her cigarettes. Where do you go? She wouldn't answer.

I dream about raking through ashes, raking through ashes and finding bones.

But that was later, wasn't it? And she was talking about something else entirely. Still, Grace wonders whether somewhere in all these thousands of pages of notes and scribbles Vanessa wrote about those dreams. If so, Grace ought to find those words, she ought to weed them out.

Grace might have given Becker the impression that the papers she'd given him were snatched haphazardly from a pile, but that wasn't true either. She's not had time to read through everything, but she made sure to include a notebook from around the time that she and Vanessa met, and she made sure to hold back some of the later ones. She threw in a couple of those awful letters from Douglas Lennox, too, for good measure. Perhaps when Lennox's son gets a look at those he'll have second thoughts about making Vanessa's private correspondence public.

The time will come for honesty, Grace is well aware. The Fairburn people are not just going to forget the missing paintings. She'll have to come up with an explanation at some point. How much simpler things would have been if Douglas had been shot before probate was granted, rather than afterwards!

She makes a start on the first box of papers: there is no order, everything is jumbled up – notebooks and photographs and sketches and letters and postcards, notes on scraps of paper, shopping lists. Grace begins by arranging everything into preliminary piles: notebooks to one side, letters to another, and so on, and with that done, she moves on to a second box, and then a third. She tries not to let her eye linger, tries not to read. If she starts reading, she will never finish: she will be derailed. But every now and again she cannot help herself, her eye slides over faded blue ink and snags on a capital G, generously looped and rich with promise.

The winds lately are soft, warm – G and I swim when the tide is in, it is heaven.

Her heart feels suddenly tender, her eyes fill with tears. She brushes them away with the back of her hand and lets her eye travel to the top of the page:

G has time off – she chooses to spend it here. I asked would she not like to go away – on holiday, to visit family? She looked at me as though I were mad. I am grateful, in any case. We drink wine in the evenings, picnic on the rock. The winds lately are soft, warm – G and I swim when the tide is in, it is heaven.