Chapter 25

25

‘He just … he destroyed everything?' Becker has repeated this a few times, he can't seem to take it in. The details of Julian's disappearance – the missing car, the wallet – all of these were reported at the time, but this ? This act of vandalism? He has never heard mention of it. ‘He destroyed everything she'd made, everything she'd been working on? And that's why she pulled out of the show?' Grace nods. She is sitting opposite him with her hands in her lap and her head bent almost to her chest. She brushes the back of her hand against a cheek. ‘But … why didn't she explain to Douglas, at least? She could have saved herself so much pain and expense – God, the court case, years of recriminations …'

Grace looks up, moves her head gently from side to side. ‘Douglas would have wanted to go to the police, she knew that. He would have wanted her to claim on insurance, or to appeal for criminal compensation, and she … just wouldn't . Believe me, I tried to persuade her, but she was afraid …' She tails off, bends her head again.

‘Afraid? Of the police, you mean, that they would suspect her?'

When she looks up again, there is a guardedness in Grace's expression. ‘Ye-es,' she says warily. ‘She was afraid they would suspect her, she was afraid of what it would do to her sanctuary, to Eris, if people thought Julian was somewhere out here. But more than that … I think that she was also just heartbroken. And in shock. She didn't want to face up to what had happened, to the violence of it.'

She pours herself a little more wine; as she refills his glass, he can see her hand is trembling.

‘I'm sorry,' he says, ‘this must be very upsetting to talk about.'

Grace inclines her head and gives him a sad smile. ‘It changed her,' she says softly. ‘What happened that summer, it changed the way she looked at the world …' She touches her face again and looks away, out the window. A car crests the hill across the water, headlights on full beam. ‘I'm not sure she was ever the same again.'

For a minute or two, they drink their wine in silence. Becker's mind is racing, he has so many questions, not least whether or not he can keep this confidence – it's not as though he's sworn to, has he? He said he understood that Vanessa didn't want this made public, but he's made no promises. And, realistically speaking, he cannot keep this from Sebastian.

‘Grace,' he says eventually, ‘I do understand why Vanessa was afraid of what might happen if this became public, but I think I have a duty to let Sebastian Lennox know what happened to those works.'

‘No you don't!' She shakes her head vigorously. ‘We're talking about pieces that were destroyed twenty years ago, long before Fairburn inherited Vanessa's estate. They've nothing to do with Lennox. Please, Vanessa would hate to have all this picked over, to have everyone speculating again about what she did or didn't do. If you have any respect for her memory, you'll let this lie.'

He is torn between the idea that Vanessa really would hate this being known and the idea that this is part of her story, a fundamental part of her story. It will surely have informed everything that came after. He thinks of Division II , its delicate components enclosed in a glass case, protected from the world.

Until now.

‘Can you remember,' Becker asks, ‘any details about the pieces that were destroyed? What they looked like, I mean, what sort of forms they were? Vases, bowls, something more sculptural …?'

Grace shakes her head. ‘I'm sorry, I really don't remember the ceramics all that well … The paintings I can recall a bit better, but the porcelain pieces sort of … blend into one for me.' She shrugs guiltily.

Becker feels a brief flash of anger. You lived with a genius , he thinks, and you weren't even paying attention.

‘The names didn't help,' she goes on, ‘they were always so vague. Flourish or Breathe … I never understand why she didn't just call things what they were. I expect it means I'm a philistine, but why Hope is Violent ? Why not Lighthouse on Sheepshead? Why Totem , why not Grace with Bird?'

‘ Totem ?' Becker repeats. ‘ Totem was a portrait? Of you?'

‘I was holding a wood carving,' she says, her voice gruff, ‘of a little bird.'

He's not sure if it's because he's had too much wine or because the light is so dim in the kitchen, but it takes him a while to notice that Grace is crying.

‘Grace,' he says, ‘I'm so sorry …' He reaches across the table, awkwardly patting the top of her wrist. She rolls her hand over and takes hold of his fingers, squeezing their tips momentarily. She inclines her head, brushing tears from her cheek against the fabric of her shirt. They sit like this for a moment, until, mercifully, Becker's phone pings, giving him an excuse to withdraw his hand.

‘Sorry,' Becker says, glancing at the message. It's from Helena – she's exhausted, she's going to have an early night. He glances at his watch, frowning – it's barely 9.30.

Grace sniffs. ‘Is everything all right?' she asks.

He nods. ‘Yeah, it's fine, it's … my wife.'

‘Is something wrong? You look concerned.'

‘Oh,' he smiles, ‘it's nothing. It's nothing.'

Grace pats the tips of her fingers to her cheeks. ‘It's clearly not nothing .'

Becker shakes his head. ‘It's just me. I worry about her. The pregnancy, and the stress of the situation at Fairburn …'

Grace raises her eyebrows. ‘The situation? You mean our situation?'

‘Oh, no,' Becker says, shaking his head again. ‘I don't mean that.'

He's drunk, he realizes, he must be, because he's started to talk too much, and before he knows it, he's running his mouth, pouring his heart out. ‘Helena was engaged when we met,' he says, ‘to Sebastian Lennox.' Grace's eyebrows creep closer to her hairline, and Becker blushes, fidgeting with the tassels of the tablecloth. ‘She … uh … she changed her mind.' He looks up. ‘It wasn't really my doing,' he says, and Grace smiles. ‘No, no, honestly. It wasn't like I tried to take her from him. I would never have imagined for a minute that she would leave him for me. He's a great deal more eligible.'

Grace tips her head to one side, her eyes meeting his. ‘Your Helena sounds a good judge of character,' she says. ‘Not everyone wants someone flashy or obvious or terribly rich. Some people see past that, don't they? And sometimes people like us have our own quiet attractions.'

Becker nods, smiling idiotically, unsure of what she means. People like us? Does that mean her and him? What does she imagine they have in common?

‘So this Sebastian,' Grace says, leaning forward as she tips the last of the red wine into Becker's glass. ‘He wants rid of you?'

‘Actually,' Becker says, his blush deepening, ‘Sebastian has been a lot more forgiving than I would've been in the circumstances.' He laughs nervously. ‘It's Seb's mother who's the problem. She didn't like me in the first place – she thinks I'm common – but she loathes me now, and she's become quite … unpleasant .'

‘Oh, Emmeline was always unpleasant,' Grace replies, getting to her feet.

‘Of course.' Becker pushes his chair back, rising to help her clear the table. ‘I'd forgotten you know her.'

Grace waves away his offer of help and he collapses back into his chair. ‘Barely,' she says. ‘She came out here on a couple of occasions with Douglas, but she didn't have much time for the likes of me.'

Becker can just imagine: to Emmeline, Grace would appear little more than a servant. ‘I suppose I ought to be more sympathetic to her, after all she's been through …'

Grace scoffs. ‘After suffering decades of his infidelities you'd think she'd be happy to see the back of the old goat.'

‘The circumstances were so shocking,' Becker murmurs, ‘and there's guilt as well as grief …'

‘Guilt?' Grace repeats, turning to look at him. ‘Why guilt ?'

Becker's wine-addled brain takes a few moments to process the fact that he has said too much, but it's too late now; he can see from the expression on Grace's face that she has figured it out. ‘Emmeline was the one who shot him?' she says. ‘Good lord. How extraordinary.'

‘The family kept it out of the papers,' Becker says, inwardly cursing himself. ‘Everyone wanted to protect her … she'd suffered enough.'

‘I see,' Grace says. She is leaning against the kitchen counter, folding and unfolding the tea towel in her hands. ‘ Extraordinary ,' she says again. ‘That woman could hit a rabbit through the eye with an air gun.'

Becker sits up straight. ‘I'm sorry?'

Grace nods. ‘Oh yes, Emmeline's a crack shot. She used to boast she could've gone to the Olympics, if they'd allowed women to shoot back then.'

Becker pushes his wine glass away, rising unsteadily to his feet. He's struggling to think straight – has she really just suggested that Emmeline could have shot Douglas on purpose ?

‘I … I probably ought to go to bed,' he says.

‘Oh.' Grace is clearly disappointed. ‘I wanted to show you something else. Discuss something with you, before you take the notebooks back to Fairburn. But I have to be sure, Mr Becker, that I can trust you.' She looks at him, her eyes enormous, imploring. ‘I can trust you, can't I?'

Grace crosses the kitchen and turns on the main light. Becker sits. Narrowing his eyes against the glare, he watches as she reaches into the box she fetched earlier, the one from which she drew Vanessa's note to Julian, and plucks out a notebook. ‘These, as I'm sure you've guessed, are the things I would rather have kept to myself. You can take the notebooks, but I would ask you not to put them on display. Please. For her sake,' she says, handing him the book, ‘and for mine.'

The notebook, another Life Vermilion, is identical to the ones he has been reading back at Fairburn, only in this one, Becker sees that Vanessa's handwriting is not elegantly loose and looping, it has become spidery and erratic. Her hand no longer follows the lines on the page but wanders all over the place, scribbling into corners, veering off at odd angles. Many of the pages are blank except for faint, seemingly unconnected traces of pencil, a few, barely legible phrases.

‘When the cancer came back,' Grace explains, ‘it metastasized. It went to her brain.' She chews her lower lip, watching Becker leaf through the book. ‘She had terrible headaches, the sight in her right eye started to go. She'd long since stopped working with ceramics – she just wasn't strong enough to handle the clay – but by this time she could no longer paint, she struggled even to draw. She became – on paper and in real life – a lot less coherent. You can see that sometimes she appears to be writing not for herself, as with the older books, but to someone. To Frances, sometimes, or to me.'

Becker scans the pages, trying to make sense of her scrawl. Some of it sounds very much like Vanessa:

I seek substance: literal, physical substance. Wood, again, or stone?

Some of it less so:

where did he go where did you go where did I go?

Some of it is unbearable:

is the light failing, or am I?

And some of it desperate:

You have to help me. You owe me this

the last sentence underlined so forcefully that she has ripped the page.

‘She begged me to help her,' Grace says. ‘After a certain point, everything became about that. All our conversations. When she spoke to me, she spoke of nothing else, she begged and begged and, in the end, I did it. I did what she asked me to do.'

For a long moment, Becker is speechless. ‘You helped her?' he repeats at last, his skin prickling despite the warmth of the room. He has a lump in his throat, hard as a peach pit.

‘I don't think there's anything conclusive in the notebooks,' Grace says quietly. ‘Vanessa writes about morphine at some point, but there's nothing to damn me. Nothing to convict me, I wouldn't have thought. I doubt much would happen at all, were this to come out – I'm sure it's too late to prove anything. We were careful. I gave her the dose the night of a storm, it was three days before the ambulance came to take her.' She looks him dead in the eye. ‘It's not the law I'm afraid of, and it's not a matter of my professional standing either, since I'm pretty sure I've retired for good this time.' She sighs, breath shuddering out of her. ‘But if people were to read this, there would be speculation, controversy , the press prying once more. She loathed them, you know, she always did. She would hate to have them picking over her bones.' As she leaves the table, she places a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘Everything is for her protection, you see. Everything I did, everything I do.'

For a while, Becker sits alone in the kitchen, trying to make sense of everything he has heard: about Julian and about Emmeline and about what Grace did for Vanessa. To Vanessa. His head is thick, he can't seem to unpick the ragged knot of his thoughts; every thread he pulls at only seems to cinch the tangle ever tighter.

Eventually, he makes his way to bed, weaving through the gloom of the living room, trying not to crash into the furniture. He sits on the bed, head in hands, listening to the waves, willing the room to stop spinning. What happens now? What happens tomorrow? Is he going to tell her the truth, that Division II is to be broken open? That for all he knows, it might have already happened, that Vanessa's last breath may be gone?

He is woken by a loud beeping. He forgot to turn off his alarm. He sits up in the darkness, head thumping, stifles a groan, scrabbles around on the nightstand for his phone. He knocks something over.

Shit.

It's not his alarm, it's a WhatsApp call, it's Helena.

‘Beck? Can you hear me?' Her voice is full of tears, there's an echo, as though she's in an empty room.

‘Yes, I can, what's going on?'

‘Oh!' She starts to cry and his heart stops.

‘Helena, what is it? Where are you? Helena?'

‘There's blood. I'm bleeding.'

‘Jesus, where are you? Are you in London?'

‘No, I'm home, I'm in the bathroom, I—'

‘OK, OK.' He tries to keep the panic out of his voice. ‘Is it … how much blood? Is it spotting?'

‘I don't think so.' Her voice is tiny.

‘Call an ambulance. No, I'll call an ambulance. No, fuck, I can't. I don't have service. You call the ambulance, I'm going to call Sebastian and tell him to go round to wait with you. Get out of the bathroom, Hels, go downstairs, unlock the front door. Do it now, I'll ring Seb.'

‘OK.' She makes a strange noise, somewhere between a laugh and a cry. ‘I'm frightened, Beck.'

His hands are shaking as he calls Sebastian. It rings and rings; he hangs up, tries again, and again. The third time, Sebastian picks up.

‘Helena's bleeding, you have to help her.' He is trying not to raise his voice, struggling to keep the lid on his terror. ‘You have to go to her, now! Don't ask questions, please, please, just go!'

‘I'm going,' Sebastian says, ‘I'm going now!' Becker has barely ended the call when he remembers the tide. He throws his clothes on, sprints through the living room to the front door, he runs outside. Water is just starting to lap the causeway. He runs back into the house, grabs the rest of his things. He needs to leave a note for Grace, he can't find anything to write on. He grabs handfuls of paper from the box Grace left, letters and cards – he can't write on those. He finds a receipt in his inside coat pocket and scribbles on that. As he's writing his eye snags on a word on the letter at the top of the pile: Division . He grabs the letter and stuffs it into his jacket and runs out of the door.