Chapter 6

6

Above Eris harbour sits a little row of whitewashed cottages and, in front of them, a small car park into which Becker's Prius gently rolls at 11.23. The pale stone of the causeway is visible beneath a lime-wash of shallow sea; the water looks to be wading depth, but the noticeboard to the left of his car bonnet warns of dire consequences for the poor fool who tries his luck against an incoming tide.

Becker sits, hunched over the wheel, glowering across the narrow channel to the dark wedge of grey and green that is Eris Island. On its south-eastern tip he can make out a splodge of white: Vanessa's house, so close and yet unreachable. The next low tide is at eight o'clock this evening; he will not be able to cross before five. He is tempted to turn around and drive home, but Sebastian will be annoyed and he will feel an idiot. And it's not as though he has nothing to do: he has his laptop – he can work, and he has plenty to read. He'll find somewhere for lunch, go over his notes.

First, though, he decides to stretch his legs. He climbs out of the car, kicking out his limbs to loosen them after the drive. Buffeted by a chilly wind blowing in off the sea, he shrugs on his coat and pockets his phone, heading north through the car park, past the cottages and along a well-trodden coastal path. About a quarter of a mile from the village, the path begins to climb, marking a perilous border between emerald grazing land and a sheer drop into the sea.

The sky up ahead is a soft, washed-out blue, so it is not until Becker turns his face into the wind that he sees the massed ranks of anthracite clouds closing in from the west. He hesitates. Perhaps the storm will pass overhead? He strides on hopefully, but he's not walked more than a hundred feet when the first drops of rain ping, pellet-like, against his shoulders. He turns back, moving as quickly as he can, eyes narrowed and shoulders hunched against the downpour. As soon as he reaches safer ground he starts to run, sprinting back towards the car park, skidding in the mud. As he reaches the row of cottages he slows, ducking his head to the left and wiping the water from his face. In the window of the house at the end of the row he glimpses a face – anguished, pressed against the glass. He starts, stumbles, comes to a sliding halt. When he looks back, there is no one there, just a pot on the sill.

Back in the car, heart pounding, he turns the heat up full blast. He wriggles out of his damp coat and tosses it on to the back seat. Casts about for his phone, which is, of course, still in the pocket of the coat. He twists around to retrieve it and, wiping condensation from his glasses with the hem of his shirt, is relieved to discover a bar or two's worth of signal. Enough to access the articles he's saved to Dropbox, his virtual clippings file of press articles. Profiles of Vanessa, reviews of exhibitions, obituaries and a few news pieces published once the estate had been settled, and the contents of Vanessa's will made public.

THE TIMES

4 March 2017

RENOWNED ARTIST LEAVES MULTI-MILLION-POUND ESTATE TO BITTER ENEMY

Vanessa Chapman, the reclusive artist who died of cancer in October last year, has left her entire artistic estate to a man who hounded her through the courts, it was revealed yesterday.

Chapman's artistic estate, estimated to be worth several million pounds, was bequeathed to the Fairburn Foundation, a charitable trust set up by Douglas Lennox, the philanthropist and art dealer.

Lennox and Chapman were embroiled in an acrimonious legal battle from 2002 until 2004, after Chapman withdrew from her solo show at Lennox's Glasgow Modern Gallery at the eleventh hour, incurring costs to the gallery of tens of thousands of pounds. The dispute was eventually settled out of court. Lennox claimed at the time that Chapman's actions had ‘come close to ruining [him]' and that the stress of the court case had damaged his health and his marriage.

The reviews date back to the very first exhibitions of her work in the early 1990s, when she was a more traditional landscape painter. The critic at ArtFuture magazine praised her exuberant use of colour and her expressive brushwork, but saw her paintings as nostalgic to the point of futility: ‘Chapman bravely swims against a sea of conceptualism, raging hopelessly against the dying of the paint.'

The more abstract Vanessa's work became, the more the critics warmed to it. The Independent wrote of her contribution to the 1995 Painting Today exhibition at the Southbank: ‘Chapman's colour-saturated canvases inhabit an intriguing space between abstraction and figuration and are all the more thrilling for that …'

But if the press was beginning to like her work, they did not appear to like her . ‘Where Chapman's paintings are bold,' one review stated, ‘her ceramics are delicate and restrained, as undemonstrative and chilly as the artist herself.'

This became a theme: Chapman's work received accolades, and her looks – dark-eyed, dewy-skinned, graceful, slender – were praised effusively, while her character was not. She was described by a series of critics and interviewers as tricky, disagreeable, impatient, sullen, strident and single-minded.

Rereading these pieces, Becker shifts in his seat, discomforted. He has never been able to reconcile the image of Chapman portrayed in the press with the sensitivity of the artist he loves. He scans the pages for references to her sculpture and ceramics, but little seems to have been written about her interest in media other than painting. He reads on, and on, and eventually, lulled by the sound of the waves breaking against the harbour, he drifts off.

He jerks awake, his mind grasping at the vestiges of some disturbing dream, to find someone – a child, he thinks at first – banging on the front of the car. This person, wearing a yellow high-vis jacket over an outsized grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled down so far it almost covers their eyes, gesticulates towards a sign across the car park that reads ‘NO CAMPING'.

‘Do I look like I'm fucking camping?' Becker mutters as he opens the door, clambering out of the car into the mizzle. He beams graciously at the tiny figure. ‘I'm here to visit Grace Haswell,' he says, ‘over on the island. I'm waiting for the tide to go out. Do you know what time it'll be safe to cross?'

The person's head jerks up and Becker starts: it is the face from the window – a woman, her skin weathered and wizened, her mouth twisted, her lips moving.

‘I'm sorry?' Becker calls out after her but she has turned away, walking in the direction of the cottages.

After a few paces she stops and looks back at him briefly before turning away once more. As she walks slowly away, he sees that her hands, ungloved and pale at her sides, clutch themselves into fists and release, over and over, as she goes.

A wave hits the harbour wall, making a low, threatening sound, like a muffled explosion. Becker climbs back into the car, remembering as he does that he was in the car in the dream. He was in the car and there was water coming in, pouring in through the fan vents and around the doors; there was a baby on the back seat, and it was screaming.