Chapter 3

3

It stirs her blood, the pull of the tide, it wakes her in the dead of night. All the years on Eris Island – more than twenty of them now – have made Grace tidal. A lunatic. An actual lunatic! Governed by the moon. She no longer sleeps when the tide is out, she only rests when the sea separates her from the land.

When she knows no one can sneak up on her.

Eris Island is not in fact an island. Like Grace, Eris is tidal. An almost-island, fused to the mainland by a slender spit of land roughly a mile in length. For twelve hours of the day, in two six-hour chunks, this causeway is passable on foot or by vehicle. When the tide comes in, Eris is unreachable. If, like today, low tide is at 6.30 in the morning, then the causeway is safely traversable from around 3.30 until 9.30.

In the dead of night, then, Grace wakes.

She lights a fire in the wood burner in the kitchen and puts the coffee pot on the Aga. She stands at the stove making porridge, stirring the oats gently, adding a pinch of salt, a slug of cream to finish. Breakfast is taken at the kitchen window: she can't see the sea, but she can hear it: a shiftless beast dragging its claws across the sand as it draws back from the coast.

Afterwards, she sits at the kitchen table with her laptop. Rereading the email that arrived yesterday afternoon, she feels a flutter of panic behind her ribs; a nag of unease like the Sunday-evening dread of homework left unfinished. Five years Vanessa has been gone, five long years, and still her affairs are not settled, still Grace is harangued, in letters and emails, by men she has never met. It's her own fault, and that doesn't make the feeling any better. Makes it worse, in fact. Five years! Five years of grief, of work. Of procrastination. Of hiding. She gets abruptly to her feet, the scrape of her chair on the tiles jarringly loud. It seems she can hide no longer.

Later, showered and dressed in warm clothing, she returns to the kitchen to fetch her spectacles. The day is yet struggling to dawn, a concrete sky pressing on the hills across the channel. Grace empties the coffee pot into a flask, grabs her mac and picks up the studio key from the rack in the hall, weighing it briefly in her hand before slipping it into her pocket.

She steps out of the front door and pulls it closed behind her, inhaling a lungful of cold, salty air, looking over to her right, where the island falls away into the bay. A light is on in the cottage at the harbour. Marguerite is up. Another lunatic.

Grace turns to her left and walks away from the sea, up the path that leads to the studio, and if she chose to follow it, beyond: to the wood, to Eris Rock, to the Irish Sea.

Halfway up the hill, she hesitates. From the front door to the studio is a few hundred feet but it might as well be a thousand miles; it has been more than a year since she last unlocked its door. She has found every excuse – work, exhaustion, her broken heart – to put off this reckoning. But the emails and the phone calls and the threats are not going to go away. She needs to face this, because what is the alternative? To hand over the key in her pocket and be done with it? To let some stranger sift through Vanessa's papers, to let some outsider decide which parts of their lives should remain private and which parts should be laid bare for all to see?

She takes a deep breath.

Up she goes.

The key turns surprisingly easily, and the huge metal door rolls back with a groan, releasing a gust of cold clay and dust, paint and turpentine. Grace stands in the doorway, her eye fixed on the three-legged stool in front of the potter's wheel. For a moment she finds herself unable to move, assailed by a memory of Vanessa sitting there, her foot on the flywheel, oblivious to the wind and the weather, oblivious to Grace, to the whole world but the clay moving beneath her fingertips.

Grace blinks Vanessa away, and the rest of the studio comes into focus: the workbench in front of the window, stacked with boxes, the kiln at the back of the room, the trestle in its centre, thick with dust and strewn with papers and notebooks and yet more boxes. The shelves towards the back of the room are loaded with pots and brushes stiff with paint, palette knives, nubs of hardened clay, a perfect sphere of rose quartz, birds' skulls, a kittiwake and a curlew with a long, curved beak, like a plague mask. There are clay harps and cutters, needles and rusted pliers, a whittling knife and a set of beautiful beech-handled mason's hammers in various sizes, lined up like matryoshka dolls.

The hammers were a gift, Grace thinks. From Douglas, perhaps, or one of her other men. They were rarely used, in any case. Vanessa loved the idea of stone carving, but she grew frustrated with the practice. Too hard, too loud, too violent. She returned, as she always did after a period of infidelity, to the materials she loved, the ones she mastered: clay, paint.

Vanessa's canvases are long gone, her pots and vases, too. Three years ago, once probate had finally been granted, Grace had the artworks shipped south to Fairburn, the foundation that was named in Vanessa's will as the benefactor of her artistic estate.

Grace, who is executor of Vanessa's will and her only other heir, had every intention of sorting through her papers – her letters and notebooks and photographs – before sending on anything she deemed part of the artistic estate, but there was just so much of it, and the Fairburn people proved impatient, demanding everything and all at once. Grace dug her heels in. Relations quickly deteriorated. It was suggested that Grace wasn't up to the job of executor. Accusations were flung about, claims that there were pieces missing, that Grace was holding things back, going against Vanessa's wishes. Grace used what power she had: she stopped engaging, let the phone go to voicemail, ignored their emails. For a while everything went quiet.

Lately, though, it's been getting noisy again, with two solicitor's letters arriving last month – one demanding a comprehensive catalogue of Vanessa's papers and the other demanding a catalogue of her ceramics – and then, yesterday, an email. Which came not from a lawyer, but from a Mr Becker, the curator at Fairburn. Grace has become accustomed to deleting all email correspondence on the subject but this message stood out, its tone rather different from the legalistic belligerence she's got used to from those people. There is a matter of some urgency I would like to discuss with you , Mr Becker wrote. Please, do contact me – there was something imploring about the tone, it was almost touching.

And so, here she is – in the studio. She walks around the room one more time; she runs her fingers through the dust on the trestle table, picks up a small, sharp scoring tool, weighs in one hand the largest of the mason's hammers, in the other the featherlight kittiwake skull.

She picks up the nearest box of papers and starts down towards the house.