Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Letters had seemed to spill into her hand out of the back of the pig. Annie forgot she had ferreted deep into that fissured back, like a nurse delving in a septic wound. Some of this was poisoned paper, dyed in the venom of familial hatred, while other sheets, covered with Elisabeth’s own writing, were coloured with the fainter shades of pathos. Gradually, Annie could discern the difference between the various hands, although she could not guess at first who the other writers were. Elisabeth’s writing was familiar, a neat script with subdued flamboyance, the individual still clear in these juvenile letters. Annie would have thrown away such missives had they been hers, consigned into litter anything which reminded her of tears, shame or subservience, let them drift, like other detritus, but Elisabeth had kept all souvenirs of conscience, recrimination sealed down in the intestine of a wooden pig, so heavy a load, she might as well have carried it like a coffin. Perhaps she had hoped the paper inside might finally revert back to being wood.

  ‘You’re a little tart. Lizzie Young, that’s what you are. Someone sent us photos of you, you ungrateful little tart. Too good for us, are you? After all we did. Found any good artists lately?’

  And more, on pink paper.

  ‘Your father doesn’t know I’m writing, Lizzie. Thanks for the money. Don’t reply, please.’ More pink paper, yellow at the edges, cheap and nasty, like all these sentiments. Better paper for the letters Elisabeth herself had written but only to have them marked on the ivory parchment envelopes ‘returned to sender’. Annie remembered Elisabeth still used the same type of paper now, despising what was cheaper, maintaining a preference for quality which seemed to have been formed during that dim, adolescent age when the handwriting was frozen in the premature wisdom of her years.

  ‘Dear Mr Artist, they will not tell me where you are, I have tried, sent a letter to your old school, oh please say you got it and you are well. I do so need to know you are well. They tell me so, but I don’t know, I can’t see anything when I shut my eyes but colours, I dream of them. Please, please promise me if you cannot or will not write to me, that you will tell me if you need me and I shall come and look after you for ever. Please, please. Let me do that. I am so sorry, so sorry, so sorry. I told them you did not touch me, it was not like that. Please tell me if you need me, please.’

  Someone else wrote too, if not grammatically, graphically, on that anonymous, unsigned pink paper.

  ‘Lime Lizzie’s a tart, that she is. Lives on muck, is muck, goes with men. Your mother’s dead, you know. Those photos killed her …’

  They were art-school photos, Annie yelled, those photos on her desk, even I know that now, and she was a girl, a girl, not a woman of sound mind, you bastards. You stinking crapulous, evil-minded bastards, leave her alone, do you hear? Leave her alone.

  Annie did not know and could not guess at the history of the carefully preserved letters and did not care. They were written by brothers, aunts, all pens dipped in some universal ink of condemnation. They were like the anonymous letters of mad people to a murderer. Elisabeth’s replies, cringing apologies, had faded into silence.

  If Annie had not read these first thing in the morning before she had embarked on the rest of her day of discovery, she might not have begun as she had, which was with curiosity and a mind open to impression. Or seen so clearly in the course of a few hours how everybody else loved this erstwhile friend of hers, everybody. All those little people, difficult to explain, as if Lizzie had been a different person to each. (Annie was slowly learning to refer to her as Elisabeth, simply because the letters used Liz or Lizzie as a term of insult.) Elisabeth’s present acquaintance loved Elisabeth. No, not loved: love was not so easily born or sustained, or so Annie was beginning to learn, but this brusque and serious restorer of paintings seemed to inspire enormous affection (to say nothing of the lust) wherever she went. Annie had begun by sitting on the floor of her living room, glad for once to be alone, and checked off the list of the places she intended to visit that day. Namely, all the small and obscure shops which Elisabeth had ever patronized in the last few months according to the carefully preserved invoices she had stored with such businesslike efficiency and Annie had collected the day before, along with the contents of the rosewood pig and an application form explaining the photographs. A backstreet girl, Elisabeth Young: addicted to the smaller scale of things, as if she could never walk up a main road and confront a big front door, even of a shop.

  Annie, having slammed out of her flat as far as the road, groaned. Rain pissing down as if the Atlantic had come to roost in the nearest clouds. Back to her own door, cursing, fretting for keys, not knowing what to put down first. Remembering the umbrella thrust into her hands by Enid, the one as beautifully antique as the other was not, she grabbed it, started out again. The rain stopped immediately. Turning right at the end of the road, she ignored her normal route, following the correspondence in Elisabeth’s extraordinarily tidy personal business file. She was led both by the need for action over inaction, to compete with Francis’s larger contribution of actually taking a train and going North, and by a growing curiosity for the way this woman lived. Elisabeth had kept receipts and invoices for every single purchase, a record of everything acquired, decorative or prosaic; she kept notes with the dedication of a clerk. In the neat bound pile of these, Annie had found invoices for pottery and paintbrushes, medium and varnish, bandages, acetone, carbon tetrachloride, swatches of material, tiny quantities of gold leaf, wax – all acquired in different places as if the shopping were an art in itself. And in all these places, Elisabeth’s human contacts were light and undemanding but precious to all concerned.

  The first was a hardware shop, the sort of place Annie imagined hung on to existence by a line thinner than the picture wire it sold by the yard. There were nails and screws by the gross, copper piping, lead piping, soldering irons, pure white spirit, pints of linseed oil, cables, electrical fittings, security grilles, shelves, wholesale paint and preparations, stuff for restoring houses rather than portraits. A crude, chemical, dusty, metallic set of smells to it all. Annie never minded barging in and stating her business without preamble: she was usually immune to embarrassment.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for a friend of mine, buys stuff from you, Elisabeth Young, seen her by any chance, recently?’

  It was the shop where, according to the invoices, Elisabeth bought glues and poisons, a shop where, in common with the staff in other shops even more obscure, they stopped and smiled at the mention of the name. An old man in brown overalls which made him look as if he were dressed in wrapping paper beamed. Elisabeth, oh yes, our friend Elisabeth. A willingness to talk all day about our friend Elisabeth. Will you call if you see her? Annie leaving a card and backing away from the kind of affection she knew she could never inspire. The same in the shop where Elisabeth bought gauze, and in the next where she bought pigment, better known and loved in shops than anywhere else. Known by name, face, shape and charm, for the magic of her smile. It began to rain again. Annie opened the umbrella with distaste.

  The madonna of the portrait was not complete: she was slow to give up her secrets. Each of her secrets gave way to another and Elisabeth shied from the decisions. She had half formed her suspicions, waited for them to be fully formed. Acting on instinct, she turned the madonna to the wall, hiding what she had recently, and ever more boldly, done. She started work on the third painting, which she knew, really, mattered to neither Thomas nor anyone else. A Victorian landscape of heathery hills with a brown road leading away, heavy-handed asphaltum, suitable only for thin glaze spreading, painted thick like this it cracked to the core with crazing so wide and deep she could insert the tip of a brush handle. Asphaltum, beloved of the age for paint and tarmacadam roads, which reminded her obscurely of all her little shops and things she did not have.

  In the kitchen there was a list for Thomas. One heat probe, Thomas, please, so I can attempt to reconstitute this asphaltum rather than pick it out
and start again, get it from Macey’s, address supplied. Two kinds of restorer’s colours, only those two, Linney’s have these, address supplied. Some gauze for the holes in the still life, medical suppliers, Devonshire Street, address supplied, all convenient. He liked shopping: it gave him satisfaction. The realization that he might well have followed her around all those shops was a knowledge she was trying, if not to dismiss, at least to digest with cautious slowness. She could remember that clicking metal, like her father’s stick: so like her father’s stick she had assumed it to be the same, following her round on all those errands.

  Maria was back. It was raining outside, the dog’s claws pattering in the kitchen, Thomas’s voice murmuring to Maria, sounding peculiarly like an endearment. The front door opened and closed, the sense of his having left only apparent from the sudden lightness of her own breathing.

  In the kitchen Maria uttered the kind of comforting noises which made Butler change back into a shambling old dog as she fetched him water. Over the sound of his long pink tongue slurping and splashing liquid on to the clean floor, Maria found herself thinking. Oh, if only he would not come back. The dog drank as if he had just run a marathon in a desert. Maria watched for a moment, crooning to herself, then, swifter of thought and movement than usual, sidled quickly out of the kitchen door and slammed it shut behind her. Immediately Butler began to howl, one long note of fury. The door shook as he flung himself against it. ‘Bastard!’ Maria yelled, kicking the door in sudden delight. The sound brought Elisabeth running. There was a silence and Maria began to laugh.

  The two women stood in the hall, silent as the dog fell silent, Maria’s mirth a soundless heaving punctuated by wheezing noises which brought tears to her eyes. Elisabeth put a hand round her shoulders: Maria clutched her and the two of them stood in a fierce embrace, patting each other like strangers at a funeral, unknown to each other, but suddenly locked in a mutual affection.

  It would be all right, Maria thought wistfully, if my brother did not come back: I could love this one instead and she would be kind to me. I know now what I must say. I know what I can show her.

  By some process as mysterious as the making of paint, they had become friends of a sort, Maria and she, through the passage of little gestures and smiles. Elisabeth had used up her small supply of gauze to bind that injured hand, whilst daily, Maria watched over the other, apparently helpless. Maria’s mind was racing into dreaming. Oh, if this girl trusted her and did not trust Thomas, they could just set up home here, full of the right kind of pictures: they could do without him. They blinked at each other, laughed again.

  ‘Shopping?’ Maria stuttered. ‘He? Shopping?’ She gestured towards the door, stabbing with her finger.

  ‘Shopping. Maybe an hour, maybe not so much.’ Elisabeth replied with gestures of her own hands, exaggerated, as if she were talking to someone deaf. The information was understood. Maria sighed. Beyond the kitchen door the dog barked again, then changed the tune to a slow, ominous growling.

  ‘No tea,’ said Maria, face clouded before they both smiled again. Maria felt redeemed in the presence of a kindred spirit who understood vital things, such as love of the madonna in the picture, a love of other saintly virtues and a hatred for that dog. She pulled at Elisabeth’s arm, furiously smitten by the shortcomings of her inarticulacy, wanting to communicate so much that she shook with the effort. Why have I ignored you, Elisabeth thought, why pushed you to one side when you were so kind and could have told me so much? I ignored you because I was preoccupied and the fact you cleaned for a living, but then, so do I.

  ‘Come with me, come now …’

  ‘Where, Maria, where?’

  ‘Now, now.’ The insistence was distressing. Finally, Elisabeth took Maria’s hand, allowed herself to be led down the long corridor towards Thomas’s room. At the door both shrank back, but the mood of hilarity prevailed until Maria opened the door and pulled her inside. By day, the room was bleaker still, as quiet as a deserted cell, colder than a grave as the half-open window admitted a knife edge of breeze. Light made the ceiling higher. There was no sign of the telephone, hidden, along with Thomas’s strange psyche and all his scars, somewhere in this room.

  Set in the wall opposite the monastic bed with the smooth white coverlet where Elisabeth had sat in the middle of the night, there was a large cupboard, in front of which she had seen those familiar canvases. Now they were gone: perhaps Maria had moved them in response to orders, orders which were issued and obeyed every day while she worked undisturbed in her studio room, like a queen spinning straw into gold inside a fairy-tale tower. Maria leapt toward the vast cupboard doors and flung them open.

  ‘Here, here, look!’ Elisabeth looked.

  It was more a dressing room designed for the Edwardian gentlemen who might have occupied these spacious apartments with the necessary servants. A valet could have walked in here in the morning and sorted out the wardrobe for the day, pressed and suggested the appropriate apparel for the evening, almost dwelt in here. It was the size of an old-fashioned linen cupboard, too small for human habitation and airless, but still three or four steps from front to back when empty. Large enough, even full as it now was, for someone to enter, then stop and stare.

  Here were the three hundred, the rest of his cache of paintings, oils on canvas and wood, panel, paper, ranged by the dozen, neatly if sometimes dangerously stacked in their profusion. The light which followed them in from the window seemed slow to penetrate the cupboard room which had no light of its own. The chill, far removed from the luxurious warmth of the rest of the flat, inhibited Elisabeth’s eyes: she was like a wine connoisseur suddenly invited to inspect the labels in a dark cellar, excited but half blind. Light sprang from some of the nearest canvases: light was hidden in them with vivid colours. She turned away from these, reluctantly, responding to Maria’s heavy hand on her arm, not there, here, pulling away her eyes and the fascination of all her senses, damping down her euphoria, that of someone who has stumbled into a treasure trove and wants no more than to look and dream of riches.

  ‘Here, here … Look. Oh, please look ….’

  To the left there was the neatest and the largest stack, from which rose a pungent smell. Elisabeth, eyes now attuned to the angle of the light, squatted on her haunches in front of these. The nearest were old, dirty, damaged. Some were icons on board, scratched and neglected, bashed and ignored: they were among the odoriferous ones, reeking of kitchens, onions, oil and coal fires, must and mice. But the ones behind were aggressively clean, sharp with the scent of new varnish and nutty oil. The first of these was exquisite: a woman lying on a couch, reading a book and patently at ease. Behind that another portrait, then another and another. There were faces male and female, handsome, flawed, smiling or grim, posing or preening, relaxed or cautious. All were rich in colourful garments – official or unofficial robes, boots and spurs, a nightdress. They were déshabillé or fully clothed, but, however dressed, they were all bursting with the richness of flesh, had in common the prime of life, their portraits celebrations of the impudence of beauty or success, mostly beauty. None of the pictures was framed; all eighteenth or nineteenth century, none showed signs of bloom, damp, heat or neglect, but all had been rescued and restored, not left in attics or held in safes, that trick of millionaires who do not know that a picture must breathe or else rot.

  Elisabeth could feel her heart stand still and the skin prickle at the base of her neck where the breeze from the window chilled the sweat seeping down from beneath her hair. In two or three of the portraits, she recognized her own hair, like the hair of the olive-skinned madonna which she had worked on and had invested with love, mahogany-coloured hair pinned back to hide an embarrassing, uncontrolled richness. The olive-skinned lady with the wounded neck and vulgar jewellery had something else which she shared with Elisabeth, but not with these staring foreheads and mouths. None of them had eyes.

  Someone had gouged out that evidence of life with knife thrusts so small and preci
se that he might have been trying to prise out the brain beyond, like a man teasing lobster flesh from the claw, ferreting greedily with a pick. They were sad, staring and angry, these distinguished, beautiful faces: their lives full of vigour had been punctured into death. Where there had been sparkle, amusement, discretion, taste, vanity, fear, there were now only these neat stiletto holes.

  A human finger cannot resist a hole. Of the holes which had been eyes in the first three of the murdered portraits, most were big enough to admit Elisabeth’s smallest finger; she could not resist a gentle if compulsive touching of these neat wounds. Only eyes were lost. These had been delicate attacks.

  ‘Murder.’ Maria echoed her thoughts. ‘Gone to hell. Poor things.’ She sounded remote with her strange voice, sympathetic, but also obscurely satisfied. From the back of the cleaned paintings, those without eyes and leaning against the ones which smelt, Elisabeth dragged a single canvas, held it aloft, falling back on the addictive, professional alter ego which was her constant defence, the guardian against horror. Before her was another olive-skinned woman, painted with a palette so similar to the one she knew that she would recognize the colour of those absent eyes, would know how to reconstruct the carnage of that face with her gauze and her pigments. Thinking this deferred a sensation of madness.