Chapter 17

17

Grace sits at the kitchen table, a pile of correspondence in front of her. It is almost two o'clock in the morning; the tea she made an hour ago sits in the pot, cold and stewed. Within the hour, the tide will be in and she will go to bed, but for now she continues her work, reading, considering, sorting everything into neat little piles.

The windows rattle, and she looks up. The darkness is thick as pitch, but she can tell that weather is coming. She makes a note to close the shutters on the south side of the house – it bears the brunt of the wind – and to make sure the studio doors are secured.

Pulling a blanket up over her shoulders, she returns to the letter in front of her. It's one that Vanessa wrote to Frances Levy, an artist friend, part of a stack of correspondence that Frances's daughter, Leah, returned to Grace after Frances died of Covid last year. Grace is putting the letters into sequence, making sense of their call and response, a twenty-five-year conversation which is concerned almost entirely with the art they were making, Frances down in Cornwall and Vanessa in Oxfordshire and up here in Eris.

V ANESSA: The paint is the thing! Since I broke my wrist I feel I'm so much more aware of the materiality of the paint. I love this feeling of moving into a more sculptural space on the canvas. Sometimes I wonder though if all this change, this constant metamorphosing, makes the work seem incoherent?

F RANCES: Developing an aesthetic language, in the way a writer cultivates a voice – isn't that what we aim for? Your shift from figuration to abstraction and back, that is part of your language, and it is right that it should morph sometimes, it should develop – after all, we must change if we are to stay relevant.

V ANESSA: I'm not bothered about relevance. I'm not interested in unmade beds or sharks cut in half! But still I shift, as sands do. I think what you make should be influenced by where you make it, how you make it and with what. Every day I wake and am thrilled to be here – divided from the land by sea – speaking the language of nature and tide, not of politics or human society.

Grace grits her teeth. The letters are written in what she thinks of as Vanessa's ‘art voice', the pretentious one she used to impress people she thought were her social superiors, one she never used with Grace. She finds most of the correspondence with Frances either baffling or banal. How could they take themselves so seriously? They were painting pictures, for Christ's sake, not curing cancer. Still, she imagines Becker will find this all thrilling, and so she places the letters about art in the pile of papers destined for Fairburn. Others, those where life – love affairs, friendship, enmities – intrude, she places in a separate, ‘private', pile.

Frances: Dora came to see me. She and Mark have split again. She was very distressed, begged me to intervene on her behalf – to ask you to finish things with Mark. I told her I had no control over you! But I will say this: if Mark is not important to you (as a lover, I mean to say, I know he is important as a friend), end it . Do not pursue it, or let him come back to you. She is so broken. It was ugly and sad to see. The baby is only eight months – I worry Dora isn't coping.

V ANESSA: Frances, you know that this thing with Mark isn't really my doing. I break it off and break it off (I have broken it off again) and still he comes back. I am sorry for Dora. I am sorry that she is hurt. But I think her problem is with Mark, not me. Awful to think of her struggling with the child – I cannot imagine how that feels, I have always been so grateful that I couldn't get pregnant when Julian wanted me to. It has always seemed to me that family is the antithesis of freedom.

When Leah first handed the letters over, Grace was surprised – did she not want to keep her own mother's letters? Grace kept them to one side, thinking Leah might have acted rashly, as people do in grief, that she might change her mind and ask for them back, but she hasn't done so. Reading through them now, Grace thinks she understands why. Leah is rarely mentioned, and where she is, she's a postscript. Or worse.

Frances: You are wrong about family! You absolutely can be a mother and be free. And work, too! Look at Hepworth. (Though if I am honest, I do sometimes wonder why we kept going. One baby is enough! Why stretch love so thin?)

Leah is the youngest of three.

Grace places the letter in the ‘private' pile, noticing as she does her own name mentioned towards the end; she picks it up again.

Frances: Is G still there all the time? You need to be careful, V, you know how you have a tendency to attract hangers-on. I imagine she finds you very glamorous. Her life must be so dreary – endlessly doling out antibiotics and scolding people for smoking and drinking too much. So joyless! I suppose we ought to feel sorry for her.

Grace's hand clenches to a fist, scrunching the paper with it. With a huff of impatience she smooths it out again, pressing it into the wood with the heel of her hand. Idiotic to let it rankle so and yet … doling out antibiotics ! It's laughable. Yes, there were coughs and colds, but there's also a fisherman who kept the use of his right hand thanks to Grace's skill and quick thinking; there was a three-year-old who came into the surgery for her MMR vaccine and left with a referral to a kidney specialist. If it hadn't been for Grace, her rare cancer would likely have gone undiagnosed for months; it might not have been caught in time. That little girl got married last year and is expecting a child of her own now. She is Grace's legacy – what has Frances left behind? Earthenware pots?

Grace moves on to the next letter in the sequence and as she reads she feels her heart swell in her chest, tears springing bright to her eyes.

V ANESSA: I don't think you need feel sorry for G. She has a real life, a real job! She is rooted, connected to this community in a way I will never be. I envy her that. People rely on Grace. I rely on her! She is not a hanger-on. She is a good friend. I relish her lack of interest in the art world – she thinks it's all pretentious crap and she's (mostly) right. We rub along together very happily, and if (when) I need to be alone, I tell her so. It is never a problem.

Glowing with pride, Grace places this letter on top of the pile she intends Becker to read. He will see how Vanessa loved her, he'll see that she's a fundamental part of Vanessa's story. After a moment's hesitation, she plucks the letter in which Frances mentioned her children from the private pile and adds that to the one for Becker, too.

There is another cache of letters ready for sorting, the Carlisle letters, as she thinks of them, but she can't quite face these yet, so instead she turns to the photographs. Most of these she is happy to relinquish: the majority are pictures Vanessa took of the island. Although she didn't like to paint from them, she found them useful as reference points, or to remind her of the way the light might have looked at a certain time, on a certain day.

A few photos date back to her life in Oxfordshire – at parties, mostly, with groups of people dressed up and holding drinks in gardens – and a few snaps of people taken here in Eris, too: Frances and Mark and a few other ‘art' friends, an unflattering one of Grace sitting stiffly on the bench overlooking the sands, one of Douglas and Emmeline Lennox, date - stamped 1999.

In the picture, the Lennoxes are tanned and glamorous, both of them in sunglasses, smoking, leaning against the hood of Douglas's Aston Martin. A rifle rests between them. They were going on somewhere, Grace seems to recall, to hunt. Emmeline liked to shoot; she went off one afternoon on the island and came back with two rabbits, for cacciatore. She skinned them herself.

While Vanessa was showing Douglas what she'd been working on, Grace helped Emmeline with the stew, chopping onions and celery and carrots, listening to her complain about her staff and the ramblers wandering all over their estate. Last weekend, she told Grace, she'd shot a dog that was worrying the cows.

‘How awful,' Grace said.

Emmeline's mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Walkers,' she said, shrugging, ‘they let it off the leash.' Orf , Grace remembers. They let it orf the leash. ‘They had a child with them. It cried and cried. Dreadful carry-on. As if I'd shot its mother.'

Grace disliked her intensely. She remembers scrubbing the potatoes, the skin across her knuckles red and raw, and she remembers the pleasure she took, in that moment, thinking that Vanessa was likely not showing Douglas her work at all.

She picks up the photograph and squints at it again, examining Emmeline's expression, the firm line of her mouth, the upward tilt of her chin. She remembers the dismay on Emmeline's face when Douglas and Vanessa came down from the studio, late for dinner, their clothes dishevelled, stinking of sex. Grace remembers how her feeling of pleasure dissipated like smoke.

She wakes just before nine, pulling back the curtain to let in the light. The window is spattered with raindrops, a soft sky dappled with clouds. She opens the window and leans out and tastes salt on her tongue. The hillside is burnished with damp copper bracken; the deep, muted green of the wood is an invitation.

She dresses quickly and leaves the house before she can talk herself out of it. She has become fatter, less fit over the past year; she needs to stop the rot. Living out here on the island all alone requires a certain level of fitness.

The tide is falling, the water in the bay stippled like pebbledash. On the far end of the causeway she spots a figure on foot. She cannot tell at this distance who it is, but they seem to be carrying something, a bucket perhaps? A mussel-picker.

She turns her back to the sea and heads up the hill, alarmed at how quickly breathlessness sets in. She's never been svelte, but always strong: hands like a butcher's, a man once told her, legs to kickstart a jumbo jet. The slope up towards the wood is steep, but she used to walk alongside Vanessa – taller and slimmer with much longer legs – and keep pace. Now she stops every twenty paces or so, breathing hard, sweat prickling between her breasts and in the small of her back.

At the brow of the hill lies the studio, and then a small stand of trees, and beyond another more gradual slope to the wood. The wood has been left untended, and is sunless as a cave, cold, too, and pungent with leaf mould. Once you enter its embrace, the sound of the sea is deadened; you hear only the ominous creak of old pines, the cry of gulls.

Keeping her pace steady, Grace makes her way along the path as it meanders north to the heart of the wood and then hairpins back to the south-west, ascending once more. She has just turned that sharp bend when, out of the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse of colour, bright red. Her breath catches, her heart rate rocketing. It's nothing, it's no one. It's a Coke can. For God's sake! She grits her teeth and walks over to pick it up. Hikers usually clean up after themselves, but not always. Sometimes you get kids out here, huffing glue or gas or whatever else they can get their hands on. Not so often in winter.

She carries the can with her towards the western end of the wood, where two enormous trunks, trees brought down in a storm almost thirty years ago, once forced the path into a sharp detour. The trunks eventually rotted away, but this part of the wood still feels different: a gap in the canopy allows the light in, so smaller plants grow here, wych elm and holly and inhospitable hawthorn, its berries gleaming like gouts of blood. The ground beneath her feet is firm and undisturbed. Grace scuffs through the leaves; she crouches down and presses her hand against the cold earth, tracing her fingers along the ground. The dank smells of the thicket stir something in her, a memory of a camping trip, of sleeping under the stars. Another life.

With some difficulty she straightens up and turns, walking briskly down the hill towards home. It isn't until she has passed the studio that she notices someone sitting on the bench overlooking the sands – the mussel-picker. A child, wearing a high-vis jacket, a blue bucket at its feet.

‘Hello?' she calls out hesitantly. She has no desire to cope with a lost child. But it turns, and Grace sees with relief that it is not a child at all, it's Marguerite, her wrinkled face breaking into a smile. She slips off the bench and picks up her bucket.

‘Allo!' She is wearing a pinafore and wellington boots, the high-vis jacket swamping her tiny frame. She holds out her bucket, showing Grace a small collection of mussels and some kelp. ‘You want some?' she asks, eyes wide, expectant.

‘Oh no,' Grace says, shaking her head, ‘not for me, thank you.'

‘You don't like?'

Grace shakes her head. She does like mussels, but she'd think twice about eating anything picked on the coastlines; you can't go a day without reading a story about water companies pumping sewage into the sea.

‘That's a snazzy jacket you've got there,' Grace says. Marguerite giggles. ‘It doesn't look terribly warm, though.' Marguerite shakes her head, looking up from beneath lowered lashes, as though she's been caught doing something she shouldn't. ‘Will you come in for coffee?' Grace asks, and the old woman nods and smiles again, trotting along at Grace's side towards the house.

Marguerite is in her seventies now, but unlike Grace she remains wiry and agile, her tanned forearms lean and muscled. She places the bucket outside the door and takes off her wellies, padding into the house in damp-socked feet. Her eyes light up when she sees the table piled high with papers; after a few attempts to stop her picking things up and putting them down in the wrong place, Grace gives up. She makes coffee while Marguerite marvels at sketches and old photographs, smiling toothily at Grace whenever she recognizes something or someone.

Suddenly, she stops. She looks at Grace, her expression grave. ‘There is a man at the harbour,' she says solemnly. ‘He is watching you.'

Out at the harbour? Grace walks over to the window and picks up the binoculars on the sill. ‘Now?' There are no cars parked at the harbour wall, she sees no one at all.

‘ Non, non, il y a deux jours. '

‘In English, Marguerite,' Grace says, replacing the binoculars. ‘I don't understand you otherwise.'

‘Not today.' Marguerite shakes her head. ‘There are two days, maybe three days, four, five. A man. Watching, waiting.'

Grace nods. ‘It's all right, he was just someone who needed to talk to me.' Marguerite probably means Becker, though she might not. She's been drifting into dementia for years now, a slow decline at first, but it's picking up – almost two years of lockdown-induced isolation have surely not helped; she is frightened of strangers and her memories are jumbled, characters from one life popping up in another. ‘You don't have to worry about him,' Grace says, ‘he came over to see me, but he's gone now.'

‘He comes back?'

‘Yes, maybe …'

‘Oh.' Tears well in Marguerite's eyes, her fingers working at the ends of her hair.

Grace sits at her side. ‘It's OK, Marguerite. He's not a bad man. You don't need to be frightened of him. You don't need to be frightened at all.'

‘Yes,' she says, shaking her head as she says it, ‘yes, yes.'

‘He's not … he's not Stuart. Stuart is not coming back.'

‘No,' Marguerite says. Tears run down her cheeks; she wipes them away with the tips of her fingers. ‘But maybe yes? On ne sait jamais. We can never know.'

Grace takes hold of Marguerite's hand and squeezes her fingers. ‘We do know, don't we? I've told you. He's not coming back.' Stuart was Marguerite's husband; he's been gone more than twenty years and she's still terrified of him. ‘Come on now, look at these pictures, there you go.' Grace pushes a shoebox full of unsorted photographs towards her. ‘You take a look at those while I get the coffee.' Marguerite does as she's told, chattering away to herself quietly – possibly in French, Grace can't make out any words. Grace makes a strong batch of coffee – she knows just how Marguerite likes it – and places a mug and the sugar bowl on the table, watching in amusement as Marguerite spoons sugar into her drink, one, two, three …

‘That's enough,' Grace says, laughing as she stays the older woman's hand. Marguerite giggles.

Blowing on her coffee before tasting, she sips, smiles. ‘Good,' she says. ‘Very good.' She takes another sip, swinging her legs under her chair, and looks around, cocks her head to one side like a fox listening for prey. ‘Where is he, your friend?'

‘My friend? You mean Vanessa?'

‘Yes.' Marguerite nods. ‘Where is he?'

‘ She's gone, Marguerite, a while ago now, you remember? You came to her funeral.' The smile drops from Marguerite's face. ‘She was very sick, for a long time, and then she died.'

‘ Ah, non. ' Vanessa always had time for Marguerite, she was kind to her without ever intruding on her privacy. One of Vanessa's gifts, knowing how to give people what they needed.

Now Marguerite is tearful again, and this time Grace's attempts at distraction with more photographs and sketches are unsuccessful. ‘But where is he, your friend?' Marguerite asks again, her brow knitted.

This is how it goes. There is always another question, another friend, another man, another something or someone to be afraid of. And a moment later, it's forgotten.

When Grace offers to drive her back across the causeway, Marguerite demurs. ‘Good for me,' she says, grinning, mimicking marching. ‘Keep me young!' Her front tooth, a porcelain replacement for one lost years ago, has become discoloured by nicotine and coffee; it gives her a neglected air. ‘Thank you, thank you,' she sings, kissing Grace on both cheeks. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.' And off she goes, bucket swinging, down the track towards the sea, chattering her thank - yous into the wind.

Back in the kitchen, Grace restores order to her stacks of letters and photographs; she flicks quickly through the pictures in the shoebox, most of which are unlikely to be of great interest to anyone. Becker is welcome to them.

Finally, she turns to the Carlisle letters: the ones she and Vanessa wrote to each other over an eighteen-month period when Grace left the island and took a locum job in the north of England, the year following Julian Chapman's disappearance.

These are hard to read.

January 2003

Dear Vanessa,

I'm not claiming to understand how you feel, of course I'm not. How could I? I don't pretend to understand how you could spend hours describing to me his faults, his infidelities, his manipulations, his deceits, and then welcome him as you did into our home, taking him to bed, making plans to travel with him to Morocco or Venice or wherever else you were planning to run off to. But it doesn't matter now, does it?

None of that matters now, the only thing I care about is you and your happiness. You know that I love you dearly, that I would do anything for you, and that includes letting you be, if that is still what you want. But I worry terribly about you all alone, I know how frightened you get. If you need me, send word, and I'll come back, to Eris and to you.

Love, always ,

Grace

Reading this, Grace is amazed that she had managed to sound so rational, so resigned. When she reads Vanessa's response it feels as though a wound has opened in her chest, a gaping hole for the wind to whistle painfully in.

I don't know how to respond to your letter, only to say that I don't want you to come back to Eris. You know things you shouldn't, and I'm not sure how to be around you again. I hope you understand what I mean.

There is more, but Grace cannot bear to read it. She turns the page and picks up another letter, one that bears just a few words.

I need you. Please, come.

There are notes from later on, too, brief shopping lists Vanessa left out, requests for more paracetamol, more whisky, oranges, cigarettes; sometimes little sketches, of the view from the kitchen window, the clouds, an idea for a vase, funny doodles of seals sunning themselves on the beach, curved like croissants, flippers raised in jaunty salute.

Looking at these bits of paper now, Grace is grateful to her younger self, the one who knew to throw nothing away, to save every scrap, treasure every word she wrote down. Vanessa stopped drawing altogether towards the end, and her notes became sporadic, often incomprehensible. She stuck them to the fridge or simply threw them on the floor for Grace to pick up, scraps of paper covered in a tight, barely legible scrawl:

please help please help me grace please help me