Chapter 39

39

The storm has hit exactly on schedule.

Grace fudged the timings a bit, because she knew he wouldn't want to be stuck here in bad weather, but she wanted him here for the storm, she wanted him to see Eris Island at its most elemental, its most exhilarating: gales hurling rain and sea spray at the windows, wind tearing at the trees, the whole house moaning as it clings to its rock.

She'd imagined them seeing it through together – bonds are forged when you spend the night with someone during a storm. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be.

It was a mistake to let him see the paintings. She has wanted to show them to him for a while, because they demonstrate so clearly the depth of her connection to Vanessa. They are evidence – indisputable evidence – that she is no minor character, no bit part in Vanessa's story, that it is only through her that it is truly possible to understand who Vanessa was.

But she should have laid the groundwork better, she ought to have prepared him for the fact that she'd held some pieces back. In the end, she was overtaken by events – she couldn't have foreseen the bird, she couldn't have imagined Becker would go rushing into Vanessa's bedroom like that.

Now, she moves to the bedroom door and presses her cheek against it. The house is moving, creaking and groaning as it resists the wind, but she can hear him, too, moving around in the next room. She glances over to the bedside table where his car key is in the drawer: she took it from his jacket pocket when she carried the gull-sullied sheet through to the kitchen to put it into the washing machine. She realized at once there would be a chance of a row once he'd seen the paintings, and she didn't want to give him the option of leaving with things unresolved. Now, having made the phone call she needed to make, she disconnects the router.

She turns off the light and climbs into Vanessa's bed, she crawls under the cover and pulls it up to her chin. She luxuriates in the thrilling sound of the coming storm, in the comfort of knowing that she is safe and warm and dry and not alone .

In the darkness, she can make out the pale lines of her own body in Totem , she can see the shape of her shoulders, her cradling hand. Whatever happened to that little bird? She hasn't seen it in such a long time. In the storeroom, perhaps?

When Vanessa painted Totem , she had been going through a carving phase: whittling wood, trying her hand at stone, too. You could hear it from the house, the noise of the hammer singing as it struck the chisel, regular as a bell.

It's possible the little bird is in the living room somewhere, in one of the cupboards – they're full of all sorts of things, maquettes and shells and stones from the beach, whittled spoons and trinkets Vanessa collected from all over the place.

A bird in the hand is a good thing, a bird in the house not so much. It foretells a death, doesn't it? Isn't that what they say? Whoever they are, the weak-minded, those gripped by superstition.

It's unsettling, though, that's for sure, a wild thing trapped in a domestic space. Impressive, too, the ferocity with which an animal will struggle, the violence of the urge to escape, to live . When they are desperate, people are like that, too.