Chapter 21

21

Grace remembers an evening, a rare evening when they were together at the studio, talking. Drinking wine, maybe? The sun was still high in the sky, it was summer. Vanessa was at her wheel, she was talking – in a way that she rarely talked to Grace – about work.

‘The thing about clay,' she was saying, ‘is that you can make it look like anything.' Her head was bent, her hair tied at the nape of her neck; one hank had fallen forward over her eye and every now and again she shrugged it away, sweeping her cheekbone against her shoulder. ‘That makes it tricky.'

She dipped her fingertips into the water and returned them to the form spinning on the wheel. ‘I don't mean tricky to work with. Stoneware is quite simple, porcelain is harder of course, but I don't really mean tricky like that. I mean that if you can make anything – anything! – then what should you make? There are too many possibilities.'

Another dip, another trickle, another shrug of the shoulder. ‘There's this sculptor, Isamu Noguchi – a brilliant, brilliant man, he died in the eighties – anyway, he once said that clay is too fluid, too facile, it gives you too much freedom … Oh!' She sat back laughing. The form had lost its centre, crumpled in on itself, bent double like a drunk on the pavement at closing time. ‘I don't think I could ever have too much freedom …'

She smiled at Grace, wiping her hands, taking a sip of her wine. It's rosé, Grace thinks, or maybe something with bubbles in it. ‘Don't you want to have a go?' Vanessa asked, holding out her hand, beckoning for Grace to come closer, and Grace laughed, shaking her head.

‘Then again,' Vanessa said, wiping her hands, working the clay back into a solid mass, centring it once more, ‘maybe he's right, because when you're as plagued by doubt as I am, having so many options is a bind …' She started over, dipping her fingers into the bowl of water, kicking the wheel into motion once more.

‘The thing I love about working with clay,' she said, ‘is that when things go wrong, it doesn't matter. You throw it back, you start again, you make a new shape, every time you start over, something new … It's not at all like painting, where all your false marks and mistakes remain. Even after you scrape away the paint and start over, the lost images remain like ghosts. With clay, once you've made the new form, the old one is gone, obliterated! Even if you wanted it back, you couldn't have it. No point searching for it. So you have to learn,' she leaned forward, her teeth biting into her lower lip, her brow furrowed in concentration, ‘to let go of what went before. To let go of the past.'

Grace is in her bedroom, which has also been known as the back bedroom and the spare bedroom – in fact, she still thinks of it as the spare bedroom even though it is the one she sleeps in, just as she still thinks of the house as Vanessa's house rather than her own. It will always be Vanessa's house, and the room on the southern side of the house, the one which overlooks the sea, will always be Vanessa's room. But while Becker is here, if he chooses to stay the night, Grace will take Vanessa's room, and he will take the spare room.

There are moments which for the sake of her own sanity Grace does not allow herself to contemplate, and the last meaningful hours she spent in Vanessa's room count among them. Since then, the room has been left empty. Not untouched – Grace cleans from time to time, in the summer she opens the windows to allow the sea air in, so that the room smells of salt and seaweed and not dust and damp – but essentially the room looks much the way it did the day the ambulance came across the causeway to take Vanessa's body away. The furniture remains in place, the bed and the desk and the dresser by the wall, even the chair next to the bed where Grace used to sit.

Grace does not have to sleep in this room – she could take the sofa, or offer Becker the sofa, but it would raise questions, wouldn't it? It would seem awkward and strange. And after all, it's just a room. It's not a shrine, it's not sacred. It is not haunted.

First things first. She needs to ready the spare room: strip the bed, wash the sheets, clear her personal things away, the shirts that lie draped over the back of the armchair, the hairbrush and moisturizer on the dressing table. There should be no call for him to look inside her wardrobe, but even so, she removes the two canvases stacked behind her coats and takes them through to the living room. She shifts the old linen screen and opens the door behind it, which leads to a small, windowless room. They have never known what it was for. A priest hole! Vanessa liked to claim, but they didn't have those up here. Vanessa used it as a darkroom. Now, Grace uses it for storage.

As she pulls aside the screen, she feels a corresponding tug of conscience. The paintings are not rightfully hers. Until now she has allowed herself to think of them as an oversight, a pair of canvases stashed in a wardrobe, forgotten. Now she is deliberately going against Vanessa's wishes, and that feels uncomfortable. Although, if she is honest with herself, it wouldn't be the first time.

Besides, she has plenty to give Mr Becker: boxes in the living room full of sketches, two unfinished and unframed canvases, yet more notebooks and a stack of letters. She has taken care to put the letters from Douglas Lennox at the top of the pile, the ones that show him needy and aggressive, smarting from her rejection, bitter to the point of derangement: How can you claim it meant nothing? Are you really going to use my wife as an excuse? You've never seemed to care much about the wives of your other lovers. This, Grace knows, is petty of her, but there is a point: it is not easy to lay yourself bare to public scrutiny; it is not easy to have those you loved laid bare, either.

She wraps the smaller of the canvases in an old towel and takes it to the little storeroom. The space is mostly bare, save for a couple of ancient, empty suitcases and a few boxes of her own personal papers, which she brought over after she let the cottage in the village go. She rests the small canvas against one of the old suitcases and goes back to fetch the larger piece. As she turns it around, so that the canvas will be facing the wall, the sheet she has wrapped around it falls away slightly, revealing, at the top of the wooden frame, Vanessa's mark: Totem .

Letting go of the past is necessarily a selective enterprise. Some things you hold on to and some things you release. When it comes to the portraits and the letters she has chosen to keep, Grace is holding tight to what she and Vanessa were to each other. This is not a matter for explanation or interpretation or speculation; it belonged only to them. Now it belongs only to her.

All those years, she slept in the spare room and was called, when Vanessa was written about, a companion or a carer, a friend, sometimes a partner – each word wrong in some fundamental way, though neither of them ever explained how – Vanessa, because it was in her nature to resist explanation, and Grace, because she was never asked.

What could she have said if someone had asked? How could she have explained, when all other loves are seen as subordinate to romantic love? What she and Vanessa had was not romantic, but it was not subordinate, either. Just a friend , that's what people say. Oh, she's just a friend. As though a friend were something commonplace, as though a friend couldn't mean the world.

My beloved, Grace could have said, were she asked, she was my beloved.

In the kitchen, she sits at the table and makes a list of things she needs to get before Becker arrives: milk, bread, eggs and bacon for breakfast, a chicken to roast for dinner, vegetables. Wine. It's a long time since she's had to cook a proper meal for anyone, a long time since there have been guests at the house. In the very old days, before Grace moved into the spare room, Vanessa's art friends would visit often, and sometimes people from the village came for lunch, or drinks, though they didn't usually stay, unless they missed the tide. Probably the last person to stay the night was Julian. And he wasn't really a guest, he just turned up one day, uninvited.