When I reached the garden and looked into its darkness, my eyes could not cope with the loss of light. Every time I blinked, orange orbs slunk across my sight, fading to smaller planets which danced around the outlines of the trees. The clock tower struck eight. I was in a fable again.
What I saw when I turned back to the house, I shall never forget. Quick was sitting in the kitchen, upright on a chair. The curtains here were also drawn back, the whole place lit up. I thought I might cry out in shock. Quick had no hair. There was nothing on her head but a few dull tufts, a patched map with no coordinates. She was looking at me, and I raised my hand in greeting, but she did not react, and then I realized with horror that she was not looking at me at all – but at someone – or something – beyond me, waiting in the garden.
I heard a twig snap and my throat closed in fear as I turned to face the darkness she’d lured me to, ready to fight, ready to yell. I was sure there was a presence beyond the shrubbery, concealed behind the hanging branches of the wilderness, but nothing showed.
I whirled back to the house, ran to the kitchen door and forced my way in, desperate to get away from whatever was waiting in the garden. I was in front of her now. She was still upright, still in the chair. There was a macabre perfection to her pale skull, a look of beatitude and finality on her serene face. Her wig lay on the floor like the pelt of an animal. I had no idea she’d ever worn one.
‘Quick?’ I said, the horror churning in my throat.
But of course Quick did not reply, because Quick was dead.
•
I called the police before thinking about how this looked – the house locked, but me inside it, the kitchen door still open, my foot marks in the grass. It wasn’t until the post-mortem revealed the estimated time of Quick’s death, and that her bloodstream contained ten times the amount of painkillers she had been prescribed, and the coroner learned of her cancer, that the suspicion was removed from my head and it was declared an accidental death. It made me so angry, I can’t tell you. That I, the only person she had come to trust, might ever be suspected of breaking into her house and killing her. I was the only one who’d ever been willing to wheedle out Quick’s true story.
AFTER CALLING THE POLICE I came back to the kitchen, and knelt down beside her, touching her body. It was still warm. Perhaps I had missed her by a matter of minutes. She had not strictly invited me that night; it was me determined that she should not be alone. But had she wanted this end? I told her I was coming over – she would know I would be the first to find her. Maybe she had wanted to be saved. I’ll never know.
I looked around. The bottle of pills was in front of her, and half a bottle of gin. This didn’t necessarily mean anything; she loved drinking, and she had been in pain. I could not countenance that what she’d done was deliberate.
‘Police,’ said a voice. I jumped, and went to the front door.
THERE WERE TWO POLICEMEN, AND they’d also brought an ambulance. I was in shock – their energy was so different as they came into the house; officious yet weary, seen-it-all-before. I was jumpy, new-born with the fear and shock. ‘Who’s her next of kin?’ asked one of them, and I said I didn’t know, but Edmund Reede was her boss – and perhaps they should call him.
Reede was still at work, the exhibition due to open the next day, and he was working to the nail. I couldn’t hear his response as the policeman stood in Quick’s hall, telling him what had been discovered. The call was brief. I sat in the front room, and a policeman came and placed himself opposite me. The clock ticked. He eyed me suspiciously, and then I realized what he might be thinking, and I envisaged my incarceration, the Carib murderess – the outrage it might cause, the inevitability of it, of people like me.
Reede seemed to appear within minutes. He’d hared down over Waterloo Bridge in his car, and burst through the front door, What the hell’s happened, where the hell is she, what the . . . and the words died on his mouth as he watched the paramedics carrying Quick out. She looked so tiny and frail, and I saw the shock on Reede’s face, a pain that for once he had no means to control.
It was actually thanks to Reede that the police didn’t arrest me there and then. They were intimidated by him. He gathered himself quickly, exuding power and authority, and their uniforms meant as little to him as they meant everything to me. He became angry when he got the whiff of their questions and attitude, and he told them that if they wanted to accuse me of anything, they could bloody well go through him. ‘She was with me in the office until an hour ago,’ I remembering him saying.
I have to admit, I was surprised. I never thought the day would come I would feel in debt to Edmund Reede, and I didn’t really like it, because I didn’t know what I would be able to give in return. We left the house together; him giving me a lift back to my flat in Clapham.
‘How did she sound when you called her?’ he asked, as we zoomed along Clapham Common.
‘Weak.’ I went to say something more, but I stopped.
He looked at me. ‘What is it?’
‘She was ill, Mr Reede.’
‘Ill?’
‘Very ill. I don’t think she – had long left.’
He looked back to the road. ‘Jesus Christ. She always was too good at keeping secrets. And so are you, apparently. No wonder she liked you.’
We sat in silence. I felt completely drained. I couldn’t believe she’d gone, with so many of my questions left to answer.
‘Mr Reede – did you know her long?’ I asked eventually.
‘Since she was practically a girl.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I wondered what he was thinking – was he hurt that Quick hadn’t told him how ill she was, or was he simply in shock and sadness that she was dead?
‘I’d like you and Miss Rudge to organize the funeral,’ he said.
‘Of course. Does she have any family I should tell?’ I asked.
‘None that I know of. But you’ll have a bit of time. The police won’t release her body yet.’
‘Why won’t they? What do they think I’ve done?’
‘Don’t worry, Miss Bastien. It will all be fine.’
But I didn’t see how it would be. ‘Will the exhibition still go ahead?’ I asked.
‘Don’t see we have much choice. And it’s what she would have wanted.’
But half the problem, I thought, kicking off my shoes and sinking on to my bed still in my clothes, as Reede’s car revved off up the road, was that none of us had ever really known what Marjorie Quick had wanted.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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XIX
The next evening, the exhibition opened, with Quick’s body still lying cold in the police morgue. I couldn’t marry these two facts easily; she, dead and alone, and here, so much noise and colour, milling bodies, excitement brewing at the discovery of the new Isaac Robles.
Julie Christie walked past me, her face too good to be true. The gallery was full. I recognized her, but who were these other people? Actors, critics, lords and bankers, gold buttons forged not from battles, but casts of power. Wine being drunk like it came from their own cellars. Jagger wasn’t there, much to Pamela’s chagrin. Rotund cabinet ministers talked to haggard-looking old men of art as some optimist put on a blues record, the trumpet’s scattered notes whirling towards the ceiling. At the unleashed sound, two men in blazers swapped glances of disdain. Where were their deft van Dycks, their easy Gainsboroughs, their plump majestic Stubbesian horses? All they had here were modernist streaks of colour, women, holding heads, women, curled amidst their shattered pots, a poised lion, third wheel in a tragic game of Renaissance saints.
A snare drum snuck into the blues, a syncopation that only just nipped my bud of bitterness. I felt utterly disorientated without Quick. She should have b
een there; she was going to tell me the truth. At the end of the room, the photograph of Isaac Robles and Olive Schloss loomed, black and white and granular, the girl’s face locked in what I now felt was a misplaced expression of hope. It was almost an insult that the photograph was up there. I wanted the blues to be louder, for a pair of these wine-flushed stuffed shirts to break into a jive, whirling one old tanty round till she false teeth fly.
With an inward sigh, I moved on, my wine glass a burden, a weapon. Shuffling past the growing crowd, I neared Rufina and the Lion, protected now by a scarlet rope, two guards flanking its sides. Reede clearly knew the special touches to make things seem official.
I noticed a thin, grey-haired man in a suit, leaning over the rope to peer at one of the painting’s corners. He was very close, his nose inches from the minuscule crests of paint on the girl’s severed head. He was incredibly curious; he couldn’t stop looking. The left guard’s feet shifted, sensible shoes of menace. I felt a surging anxiety that something bad was going to happen; but then again, the worst already had.
‘It’s ghoulish, Frederick,’ said a woman, coming to join the man. ‘It’s painful.’
Behind me, the noise in the gallery lifted. As the temperature rose and the crowd grew, guests began looking through each other like open doors. A woman laughed above the swell, and it sounded like a cry for help. Why were these people here? They didn’t care about Isaac Robles. They didn’t care about Quick.
I felt a tug at my elbow; Pamela. ‘You all right?’ she said. ‘Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I think I have.’
Pamela frowned. I hadn’t told her about Quick; Reede had said he wanted a lid on it until the exhibition was on its feet.
‘You read too much, Dell,’ Pamela said. ‘Ain’t no such thing as ghosts. Listen.’ She looked pained. ‘I broke up with Billy.’
‘Oh, Pamela. I’m sorry.’
A cloud passed across her face. ‘Turned out he didn’t want to marry me. I gave notice on my room and everything, and then the bugger broke it off. And another girl’s moving in.’
I wondered if she meant on Billy, or into her old room. I didn’t ask. Instead, I said the words I never thought I’d say. ‘Would you like to share with me?’
Her face opened into a smile. ‘That’d be good. That’d be really good.’
‘I’d like it too.’
Pamela went pink, giving me a hug before she turned away and melted into the crowd.
I FOUND LAWRIE, AND STOOD close beside him. ‘My mother would never believe all this,’ he said, drawing his arm in an arc across the gallery. ‘She’d love it though. What a snowball. It’s just got bigger and bigger.’
‘Lawrie,’ I whispered. ‘I have to tell you. Quick’s – she’s dead.’
He turned to me. ‘What?’
‘I found her. Last night.’
‘Oh, Delly. I’m so sorry. Are you all right?’
‘Not really.’
‘What happened?’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said – for how to explain, at the launch of his exhibition, that I didn’t think the paintings around this room were by Isaac Robles at all, that the real painter behind these works had died with her secret intact? Cynth had warned me to keep all my ideas about Olive Schloss and Marjorie Quick to myself, if I wanted harmony in my love life. But if this entire exhibition was predicated on a lie, that sat uneasily with my sense of creative integrity. I was struggling to work out which was more important – Lawrie’s feelings, or Quick’s artistic restitution. If it was me who’d painted these pictures, I’d bloody well want everyone to know.
Lawrie took my hand. ‘I know she meant a lot to you.’
I hadn’t thought of mine and Quick’s connection in that way before – in terms of affection, or quality. Nor did I think I’d ever communicated such a sentiment. Until now, I’d treated Quick as an interesting conundrum, a diversion, both a source of inspiration and an obstacle. But Lawrie was right. She did mean a lot to me. Despite her mercurial manner, Quick had welcomed me, helped me. I liked her. And it was too late to tell her so. There was still, at the back of my mind, some niggling thought that she had wanted me for something, but that now it was too late.
‘Dell, do you want to leave?’
‘No, of course not. I’ll be fine.’
‘All right. Listen, Gerry wants you to come over for dinner. He’s here, you know.’
‘Really? That’s good he’s out and about.’
‘Yes it is, I suppose. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. But he’s always asking after you. When he read your story in the London Review, he boasted to his friends he knew a writer. I think you’ve got a fan.’
‘I’m not a writer.’
‘Of course, I forgot. You’re a typist.’ The exasperation in his voice made me turn. ‘Well really, Odelle,’ he said. ‘Are you going to keep on like this? Do you know how many people would give their eye-teeth to be in the London Review? I wouldn’t waste it.’
‘I’m not going to waste it,’ I said. I was tired, unable to keep the hurt out of my voice. ‘And it’s not up to you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t call myself.’
He up put his hands in surrender. ‘All right. I just – you must keep writing, you know.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘You sound like Cynthia. You sound like Quick. Everyone wants me to write, but they never try it themselves. If they tried it themselves they might shut up.’
He shrugged. ‘Quick did you an enormous favour. And I bet if she knew you were dragging your heels—’
The last few hours finally caught up with me. ‘I’m not dragging – don’t use her – she dead, Lawrie. She dead. I don’t – I can’t – we don’t all have paintings we can sell, you know. I have to do other work.’
‘You’re right. Of course. But sometimes I do think you need reminding how good you are.’
We stood in silence for a few minutes. I knew it was true that I had stalled again on my writing. For once, I was too caught up with actually living my life to stop and turn it into words. People like Lawrie – who never wrote a single line of prose, as far as I knew – seemed to want those who did to walk around with a pad and pencil hanging round their neck, jotting down the whole thing, turning it into a book for their own pleasure.
As if he knew he’d trod on tender ground, Lawrie changed the subject. ‘It looks like there’s a couple of people interested in buying Rufina,’ he said.
‘That’s good.’ I saw his rueful grin. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Grass greener for Rufina. Told you I was a poet. Thing is, now there’s a chance I’m not going to have it any more, I’m rather reluctant.’
‘Well, it’s not any old painting.’
Lawrie looked across the gallery, where the colours of Rufina and the Lion glowed, the people crossing back and forth, intermittently obscuring our view. ‘It certainly isn’t. But what am I going to do with it, Dell? I don’t have any money and it isn’t going to feed me.’
As we looked at the painting, vanishing and reappearing again and again behind people’s heads, I knew that Lawrie and I were looking at different things. In its uniqueness, I read multiple stories. Through its technical brush-strokes, I experienced metaphysical sensations. It was a one-off I should do my utmost to protect and keep in public view. I could guess at the impulses behind the artist’s decisions, I could meditate on how the painting made me feel, but I understood that I would never know its truth.
But Lawrie saw something else. The new frame Reede had commissioned was a window, and the painting within was a curtain he was pushing aside. He claimed he was reluctant to sell it, but he hadn’t seen the cheque yet. He didn’t really want to keep hold of Rufina – although it was his mother’s, he seemed unbound by the memories it might have invoked in her. And why else had he come to the Skelton
in the first place? He said it was to find me, but maybe I was a bonus. For him, the painting was a thing for sale, a transitional object that might take him places. He saw in it opportunity, a chance to start again. An image so solid and two-dimensional could stay the same, yet transform entirely, depending on who was looking.
Reede tapped his wine glass and began to address the crowd. He stood in front of Rufina and the Lion, starting by taking us through the skeleton story of Isaac Robles; his importance in the early journey of art in the twentieth century, his gift cut short. He thanked the Guggenheim foundation in Venice, and built on the particular mystery of the discovery, pointing out Lawrie in the crowd, who blushed and raised his glass to appreciative applause at his good fortune for having such a painting concealed in his house, and his generosity in deciding to show it.
When Reede spoke of how Robles’ work was a meditation on adversity, the people in the Skelton gallery probably thought he was talking about war and dictatorship, and the struggles many of them were old enough to have lived through and remember on a visceral level. But I just thought what Quick had said about it: It’s the subject that overwhelms. As if there’s an extra layer to the painting we’re not privy to, that you just can’t get at.
Rufina and the Lion moved me that night in a transcendental way; it was the conduit through which I channelled my sense of loss, of accepting I might never know the truth, but that that was the secret of art. And perhaps I wasn’t alone. Because after Reede had finished speaking, I noticed how people – even the old buffers in club blazers – began to look at Rufina with a little more respect.
•
The reviews for the opening night of ‘The Swallowed Century’ were mixed. Some were veritably lukewarm. ‘The painting is a tableau that summons death, and it is wrong to ignore it,’ was as praising as the journalist in the Telegraph went the next morning, before going on to speculate how much money it might fetch – ‘Edmund Reede confirmed at the end of the night that Rufina and the Lion was going to auction.’ In The Times, there was an article on the star-studded event, with very little information on the artist himself. I smiled; Quick would have seen the irony in that. And when the journalist referred to the ‘express symbolism’ in the paintings, I disagreed. He was dismissing the painting as obvious, but I think there was another language in those paintings, and the only person who knew how to speak it was gone.