Chapter 31

31

Someone is choking, and she can't save them. It's a boy, usually, a young man or a teenager, they're choking, and Grace is not strong enough, or quick enough, she cannot get to them in time, and when she does, her efforts fail. It's not a dream, it's a thought she keeps having, a scenario she imagines, despite herself.

This started a few days ago, after Becker's visit, this thought, occurring and reoccurring. It first came when she woke: definitely not a dream, though, not so easily dismissed. It occurred on waking and now it comes to her more and more frequently: when she is walking or making coffee, reading or listening to the radio. Without wanting to, she finds herself picturing this man, his desperation.

Grace has been here before: she knows what this is. It's an intrusive thought, no more than that. Not a memory, not a premonition, just something unpleasant her subconscious keeps offering up to her conscious mind like a cat coughing up a hairball. She needs to dismiss it, but casually , she needs to ignore it without seeming to try. She needs to take better care of herself. Go for walks, eat well, don't overdo the caffeine, sleep.

She needs to break out of the bad habits she's allowed herself to slip into, her tidal-ness, her lunacy. She drives up to Carrachan to see her doctor, gets a prescription for sleeping pills, establishes a strict bedtime regimen. She sets her alarm for six, forces herself to get up and go out for a walk, she eats porridge for breakfast, she drinks her one and only coffee of the day. She starts to feel a little better.

But the doctor would only give her enough pills for ten days. Now they have run out, and she finds herself lying awake for hours. Last night, she was awake until three and so when her alarm goes off at six she reaches out and knocks it to the floor.

When she wakes again, she sees him. Not the boy, this time, but a man. And not an intrusive thought but an actual intruder: a man at the window, hands cupped around his face as he looks in on her. Grace cries out; she jerks upright, the bedclothes falling away from her to reveal her naked torso. The man outside jumps, rearing backwards like a shying horse; she can hear him calling out, sorry, sorry .

She grabs a robe, pulls it around her and rushes out into the hall. She picks up the shotgun, unlocks the door and barrels out, squinting into bright sunshine.

The man is backing away with his hands in the air: he's a hiker, wearing walking trousers, carrying a backpack. His companions – two other men, probably in their twenties – are standing a little way behind him.

‘What do you think you're doing?' Grace barks.

‘I'm sorry ,' he says again, lowering his hands to his side. ‘I was just … I thought the place was empty, I wanted to see—'

‘Empty? There's a car outside. This is private land.'

The man raises his eyebrows, spreads his arms wide. ‘Well, there's a footpath just there,' he points over his shoulder, ‘and there's right to roam here, so—'

‘Not up to my bedroom window there isn't. What is wrong with you?' The man turns away, apologizing again, but his friends are smirking. ‘Keep away from here!' Grace snaps, turning back towards the house, gathering her robe around her. She can hear them laughing as they head off up the hill towards the rock.

She feels a fool. There was no need to shout, no need to go running out here at all. She imagines them mocking her, imagines what they will say about her nakedness, the sort of jokes they will make about her repulsive body, her loose skin and sagging breasts, her desperate solitude.

She returns the gun to its position in the hallway and locks the front door. It is almost the middle of the day, she's overslept by hours and now she knows for certain she will not sleep tonight, that this will set her back, right back to square one. And sure enough, almost as she thinks this, there he is: the boy, one hand clutching frantically at the base of his throat.

She forces herself to do practical things: sweep the kitchen floor, clean the shower cubicle, take the food waste to the compost heap. There are bills to pay, but the internet is down – it failed four days ago and since she has no phone signal, she had to go across into the village to call someone about it. Which she duly did, and yet despite the call centre employee's reassurances, it is still down. She has no way of knowing why, or for how long – the only way she can make any progress at all is to drive across to the village again, and phone again, and be put on hold again. She's exhausted just thinking about it, but what choice does she have? Becker might have been trying to contact her. He said he would email, after all, to explain his disappearing act.

She showers and dresses, locks up the house and drives down the track, trundling out across the causeway under a cerulean sky. Two seal pups, fat and pale and vulnerable, sun themselves on the sands beneath the house. They raise their little heads, dog-like, to watch her pass. Look, Vee , she wants to say. Look.

On days like today, Vanessa's absence is a knife in her side.

The village seems unusually quiet. It isn't until she parks her car outside the shop and sees that it is closed that she realizes it's a Sunday. No coffee, then, no fresh bread. Her disappointment is so acute she thinks she might burst into tears.

Do the internet people even work on a Sunday? Turns out they do. Grace spends half an hour on hold but, in the end, someone answers. Yes, the person says, there is a fault. I know that , Grace replies, I know there's a fault. I know that because the internet is not working today and has not been working for four days. The person at the internet company is very sorry about that. They will investigate the fault and ring her back in a couple of hours. What time would be convenient?

If she waits for her phone call, she will miss the tide, so no time is convenient. But she cannot explain that to a person who works in a call centre in Gateshead or possibly even Bangalore, so she just laughs helplessly and says, As soon as you can. Call me as soon as you can.

As she is driving back down the hill to the harbour, she glimpses, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of yellow at the end of the car park; she pulls over and parks up next to the harbour wall.

On the bench directly in front of her cottage sits Marguerite. She is wearing her high-vis jacket and smoking a cigarette. Grace walks over to say hello and raises a hand in greeting.

‘I see you,' Marguerite says quickly, ‘ à l'heure bleue , before the sunrise.'

Grace shakes her head. ‘I don't think so, Marguerite. I slept very late today.'

Marguerite pouts, aggrieved by the contradiction. Grace smiles at her. ‘How are you feeling? How's your arm?' Marguerite knits her tiny features into a frown. ‘Your arm, Marguerite. You hurt it?'

‘Ah, ?a va ,' she says, dismissing Grace's concern with a wave of her cigarette. Grace points at it and shakes her head. Marguerite scowls in reply. Slowly and deliberately, she brings the cigarette to her lips and takes a long drag. Her face breaks into a wicked grin and she starts to laugh. Then, something dawns on her, and her face changes. ‘Is your friend coming back?'

Grace's smile grows stiff. ‘Maybe,' she says, turning to go. She doesn't have the energy for this today. ‘Look after yourself, Marguerite,' she calls out over her shoulder. ‘Don't smoke too many of those, OK?'

She wonders as she walks away why she's even bothering, because Marguerite is obviously not going to listen to her, and why should she? She cannot have that much time left, why shouldn't she enjoy her remaining pleasures?

By the time Grace gets home, the internet has miraculously been restored. Grace's delight is quickly dampened by the discovery that she has no new WhatsApp messages and no emails, except for junk and a Google alert she set up years ago to search for Vanessa's name.

The alert links to an interview with Sebastian Lennox that appeared in one of the weekend papers. An Artistic Legacy , the headline proclaims. Beneath it is a photograph of Lennox, who is fine-boned and elegant-looking – he favours his mother. His father looked like a Glasgow gangster. He is pictured standing on the lawn of his home next to a Barbara Hepworth bronze; the article is illustrated with other works of art, too: a Francis Cadell of Iona, a beautiful Samuel Peploe still life, and Vanessa's Hope is Violent .

The piece itself is rather dull, a by-the-numbers Saturday feature crammed with clichés: Sebastian Lennox's ‘ancestral home' has been ‘lovingly restored'; his father Douglas was a ‘fearsome patriarch' whose life was cut short in a ‘tragic shooting accident', his mother was a ‘society beauty' whose health is ‘fragile'. Then there is the inevitable run-through of the dispute between Vanessa and Douglas and the surprising revelations of Vanessa's will.

‘Of course we were shocked,' Lennox says of the Chapman bequest. ‘Although my father and Vanessa had once been close, their falling-out was spectacular and pretty bitter.'

Lennox believes, however, that despite the bad blood between Chapman and Douglas Lennox, she knew Fairburn would be a fitting home for her work. ‘I like to think that Vanessa would have known that we would cherish her pieces and honour her legacy,' he says. There may, of course, be a more prosaic reason for the bequest: Chapman died childless, with no close family – she had no one else to whom she could bequeath her work.

Grace blinks. She reads the last bit again, and then she scrolls down, down, down to the mention of James Becker, the curator Lennox brought to Fairburn specifically because of his knowledge of Vanessa Chapman's work. ‘ To find myself the guardian of this collection is a dream come true ,' Becker says.

Despite herself, Grace finds herself smiling at the description of Becker as boyish, earnest, a ‘ state - school boy who excelled at Oxford '. She reads on, one hand pressed against her chest, filled with a facsimile of maternal pride.

Becker gives a quote about the exhibition they are hoping to mount the following year, bringing together for the first time over sixty of Chapman's paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, the majority of which have never been exhibited before.

‘It's my view that this collection could go some way to reassessing Chapman's importance and establishing her as a major figure in British abstract expressionism,' Becker says. ‘Until now, her output has been largely overlooked, in part because she's a woman, and in part because, in the early phase of her career, she was out of step with the more fashionable, conceptual artists of the YBA movement.'

Another expert, a man Grace has never heard of, says that if Vanessa's work has been ignored it is Vanessa's own fault: she is the one who chose to withdraw from the art scene, to withhold her work from the world. This observation is – predictably enough – a cue for the usual muck-raking, the allegations about the ‘troubled beauty', her ‘many lovers', her ‘tempestuous marriage' and above all the mystery of Julian's disappearance from Eris Island.

‘ I've been out to Eris ,' Becker is quoted as saying. Grace's heart lifts, her eye scanning eagerly on. ‘ I've seen Vanessa's home and her studio, the places she lived and worked, the island she loved, the landscape that inspired her. I've had the pleasure of reading some of her notebooks and letters, and I can't wait to share them with the world, to introduce her work to a whole new audience. '

Grace wants to turn a page. She wants to scroll further down, to the part where Becker mentions how the two of them have sat together at the kitchen table, reading Vanessa's words and talking about Vanessa's life, she wants to read the part where Becker talks about Grace's importance to Vanessa, her devotion to her. But there is no page to turn, and nowhere further to scroll. There is no mention of Grace, anywhere at all.

The blade in her side slips deeper still.

Marguerite has her cigarettes, what pleasures are left to Grace? She can swim in the cold sea and walk on the island, but she is lonely on the beach now, and fearful in the wood. She thinks of the men from this morning, how they laughed at her; now she pictures their faces and one of them begins to change, laughter to panic, he becomes the choking boy. She closes her eyes. Have they left, those men? Or are they still here, on the island? The tide is in, and she has not seen them leave. Are they waiting for darkness? And what will they do to her then?

Her hands tremble a little as she walks back through the hallway to the front door. She places her hand on the deadbolt, but before she draws it back, she hesitates. If she opens the door now, if she goes out there, she will see the hillside, the pathway leading up towards the studio and the wood, and it won't help. She won't know if the men are still on the island or not. She will have to stand in the cold and wait, she will have to wait until they walk down the hill and back over the causeway, and if they don't? If they don't, will she wait there all night?

Better by far to leave the door locked and turn her back, to tell herself that they are gone and let that be an end to it. Don't give in to madness. Be rational, keep busy: cook, eat, read a book, go to bed.

But she finds she cannot move. She cannot bring herself to go through the motions, knowing that tomorrow she will have to do it all again, and again the day after that – that this is how it will always be.

This is hardly a revelation , and yet as she stands at the door with her hand on the bolt, it feels like one. There was her work, and there was Vanessa, and then there was the pandemic, which meant more work – punishing, brutal work – but though it was gruelling, at times unbearable, Grace came to see it almost as a blessing. She was not just needed, she was essential . What purpose is left to her now? Her daydream is not going to come true: Becker is not going to visit with his family, he is not going to make her part of the Fairburn project, she will be forgotten. She has already been forgotten.

Eventually, after what seems like hours, she prises her cold fingers from the deadbolt and turns away from the front door. From the hidden storage space behind the screen in the living room, she retrieves three paintings one by one: the small portrait first, and then Totem , and finally the largest of the three, the one that has been in there since before Vanessa died, her final black painting.

She takes all three canvases to Vanessa's room and arranges them along the wall facing the bed so that they are looking at her. Only herself for company.

She returns to the kitchen, rifling through the box of papers she has kept for herself. For quite a vain woman, Vanessa was oddly camera-shy; there are very few pictures of her, and none at all of her with Grace. At the bottom of the box Grace finds a couple of photos of Vanessa with Frances in Cornwall, on the beach at Porthmeor, along with the picture of herself and poor Nick Riley, his beautiful face scratched out. She takes them back to the bedroom and arranges them on the chair next to the bed, folding them over so that Frances and Nick are no longer visible, there is only Vanessa and Grace.

Better.

She opens the window. It is very cold, but there is no wind. The sea is placid, night falling quickly, and the air is blue and still, the gulls quietening as they drift like phantoms over the shore.

Shivering a little, she pads over to Vanessa's dressing table and pulls open the drawer. She reaches in to retrieve a syringe and a 300ml bottle of morphine sulphate, 10g/5ml, which she places on the bedside table. Then, almost as an afterthought, she fetches a glass tumbler and a bottle of Lagavulin from the kitchen, and brings them back to Vanessa's room.

She locks the door.

She longs for a storm. The night Vanessa died, the waves thundered against the rocks, rain and spray battered the windows, but they were safe from it all, from the gales and the hungry sea, they were together, sheltered and dry, unreachable. Grace would like to slip away on a night like that, too.

She pours herself an inch of whisky and raises the glass to her own image. She wraps herself in a blanket, leans back against the headboard and allows herself to give in: to the warmth of whisky, to the image of the young man choking, to the tears that have been building like a storm front behind her eyes.