by Ella Carey
But all she could do when she looked at Summerfield’s dear facade was sigh in despair. Paint crumbled on it; the climbing roses that spread up the front of the building ran rampant, their gnarled branches intertwining in elaborate knots. The garden beds that edged the lake were overgrown, and the lawn was blousy with the last of the spring bulbs, waving like silent ghosts in the light breeze. Laura gazed upward at the cracked paintwork on the eaves, at the water stains that ran down the outside of the house, taking in the guttering that was pocked with holes. Emma’s beloved lake was only resplendent with algae these days.
Laura turned the key in the peeling front door.
Resisting the temptation to bend over and shake out the doormat that was strewn with dead leaves and rose petals, she went inside. At once, the dim interior engulfed her with the past.
She went ahead of her grandmother, aware of her stillness, of the way her footsteps were slow in the hallway, where once they would have tripped along the bare floorboards. Laura glanced left into the dim dining room, where Emma and Patrick’s painted motifs covered every surface, from the door panels to the table and chairs. The old house seemed to draw Laura in even further the deeper she went.
Being here only cemented her view that Ewan was wrong.
Emma’s steps were measured and steady in her old brown lace-up shoes. She arrived in her bedroom—the room where so much had played out.
Laura had to bring her hand up to her mouth when she caught sight of Emma’s bathtub—the bath that Patrick had installed for Emma so that she could soak and think in her favorite room. The patterns and flowers that decorated its sides looked as if they could have been painted this morning. Emma’s small wooden writing desk sat in the corner of the room, a photo of Emma’s mother on the top right-hand side. A sheaf of notepaper was laid out as if abandoned.
They both moved toward Emma’s single bed. It sat, lonesome against the wall, facing outward to the walled garden, where she used to take her breakfast on summer mornings. The blinds were halfway up, and sunlight beamed in from the flower garden outside.
It was as if by some unspoken agreement that they both looked to the portrait at the same time. Laura watched Emma, as she tried to find answers from Patrick’s interpretation of her when she was young. She hung on the wall as she’d always done, seated, her gaze slightly to the side. She rested her chin in one of her hands, her long fingers reaching up to her cheek. The rings on her fingers glinted as if they, too, held untold secrets, and behind her sat one of her own paintings, a cluster of oranges and lemons that she’d put in a vase when Patrick sent them to her after a visit to Spain. Emma’s green dress highlighted the tones in her olive skin.
“Gran,” Laura said, “shall I take it off the wall?”
Emma nodded. Laura moved the bed.
Silently she eased the painting off the wall, trying not to stare, not to feel everything at once at the sight of the darker patch of paint on the wall that looked like an unwelcome stain once the portrait was gone. With Emma padding along behind her, Laura carried the portrait down the hallway to the farmhouse kitchen, where rows of beautiful, thick cream earthenware mugs that Patrick and Emma had designed together still hung on hooks above the sink. Emma’s parents’ blue-and-white platters sat in a row above the old range where Lydia had always held court. Laura glanced toward the staircase that led up to the attic from the kitchen, stairs that Lydia used to descend from her bedroom down here, each morning, for all those years.
It was as if the house was bursting with the past. No one was ever going to live here in the way that Emma, Patrick, and the Circle had done. Laura held The Things We Don’t Say upright, then laid it out on the old farmhouse kitchen table, where they could examine it with proper care.
“I don’t know why he never signed it,” Emma murmured, standing close, peering at the space where an artist’s signature would go. “But just by looking at it, we can see that the canvas comes from the 1920s.” Emma reached out her hand, as if she were about to touch her portrait, only to let her fingers stay while in front of the frame. “Next, let’s look at the details,” Emma said.
Laura felt respect for her grandmother’s quiet professionalism.
“It’s got all the hallmarks of Patrick’s work,” Emma went on. “He always used different colors to tone a painting, and look at the way details are blurred—some things are left a little unfinished. See, if you look closely, the features on my face are a little hazy.”
Laura nodded. “It always looked a little unfinished to me. As if he was going to come back to it sometime . . .”
“No. I, too, used to blur faces. You see, it’s to show that we could never know a person entirely. That was why we believed in treating them with respect, because we can never inhabit another person’s feelings, thoughts, ideas.”
Laura searched her grandmother’s face. The irony of this statement was not something on which she wanted to focus just now.
“Look at the way he only hints at the folds in my green dress. It’s realism but with a touch of abstract modernism in his execution—that’s just what we did. And see, the influence of Cézanne there, and here, with the almost flat representation of the fabric on the chair. I can’t see that some student could have attended to all this, nor could they have captured the hallmarks of Patrick’s innate style.
“I have no doubt it’s his work. I think we could easily get an auction house to back us up, but I am so sure, darling.”
Laura reached out and stroked the back of Emma’s paint-stained hand.
“I have another suggestion,” Emma said. She raised her head from the painting and eyed Laura. “We make a counterstatement to the Times ourselves.”
Laura felt a flicker of warmth in her system. Dear, clever Gran.
“A little wicked, my dear,” Emma went on, “but perhaps just this once we could not be pacifists?”
Laura caught the light in her grandmother’s eyes and grinned.
CHAPTER EIGHT
London, 1980
Late that afternoon, Emma stood, silent in her hallway once Laura had gone home. She’d put on a brave face with Laura. It was what she always did. And in any case, if Emma had learned one thing in this life, it was that understanding of others came only with the acceptance that we were all flawed and vulnerable, just in our own unique ways.
But Patrick? Was he capable of lying to her? They’d avoided conflict, but did that mean they’d not told each other important things?
She could look at the painting today and say that it was his work—that was certain. But still, she could never push aside the pain she’d felt that summer in France when Jerome had been living with them and loving Patrick. Sometimes, she knew, pain was something she’d constructed herself, by imagining a problem that might not exist. Emma knew she was susceptible to such things, given her wild imagination and her need to give in to it in order to carry out her work. And yet, deep down she had always been in conflict over the extent of Patrick’s love for her.
Emma made her way up the stairs to the studio at the top of this house. She sat at her easel. Work had always been her salvation. Goodness knew, it had saved her through two world wars.
But now, what sat in front of her was a gift for Laura, a portrait of her. Emma knew there was a chance it would be the last piece she ever did. She’d rendered her granddaughter in a chair, ironically, much as Patrick had painted Emma. But Laura gazed straight at the viewer, confronting head-on whoever was looking at her. There was no hint of Laura looking away or avoiding anything. If character was what Emma was trying to capture, Laura seemed far more straightforward a subject than herself. Or was she? The fact that Emma had begun the faint sketch of Laura’s violin in the painting now seemed awful, brutal. She would not, while she had breath in her body, cut the violin out.
But how to prove without doubt that Patrick had painted her? Intuition was one thing, but Emma’s own memories were only confusing her when she tried to look back. It seemed that what she did r
emember were only the times that were the brightest flowers in a vase full of everyday blooms. What if she simply couldn’t recall some momentous detail of what may have transpired that long-ago summer when Patrick put paint to canvas for her portrait? Emma worried that her inability to recall the past would cause Laura to lose the career that Emma knew would save her granddaughter from the worst that life could throw at her.
Thinking about it all was so very much harder without those she loved who’d lived through everything with her—Patrick, Ambrose, Lawrence, Oscar, Freya. Dear Calum. Sometimes, looking back, life seemed to fold out behind her like one endless stream of loss.
And yet, the memory of all the people she’d loved kept them alive in her heart. But her memories were only her own interpretations, a myriad blend of feelings, emotions, and thoughts that, in the end, were nothing to do with how others felt, thought, and behaved. Memory, in the end, existed only in the imagination. It was just a story we made up.
Emma looked down at her folded hands in her lap. So that was all she had to work with—a story of some long-ago artistic life. If working through her own past was a daunting and complex task, then saving Laura’s future was looking more impossible than anything she’d ever faced. And she was ninety. It had to be almost time for her to let go of this world.
But both her beautiful granddaughter’s future and Patrick’s memory were worth fighting for.
Emma nodded, as if making some final deal with herself. She went to the telephone, collected her glasses, picked up her address book, and opened to B. For Bank. She would start to make steps herself. Patrick’s biographer might be dead, but there were other people to whom she could reach out.
“Good afternoon,” she said when Ivan answered his direct line. “It is Emma Temple.”
“Mrs. Temple.”
Her bank manager had always seemed like a measured person. So how would she best get through to him? Mathematics? Logic? Surely a bank manager lived by such things. He wouldn’t be moved by art or beauty, as all her old friends were.
“Your granddaughter has been to see me,” Ivan said. “I’ve explained where we stand. I’m sorry.”
“I know. But it is a shame that the person in question is no longer alive to put this . . . problem to rest,” she said.
There was a pause.
“Mrs. Temple—”
“Emma.”
“I can’t do anything except give you a couple of weeks. I know you understand the finances only too well. I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t know if she told you the time frame.”
Emma traced a pattern on the delicate painted wood of the little table on which her telephone sat. Of course Laura had not worried her with that.
She closed her eyes when she spoke. “I am willing to give away everything I own to pay you back, Ivan, but I can’t sit by and let Laura lose her reason for living.”
There was a silence down the line. “I believe she does not want to cause you distress in turn. But I can’t get away from the agreement.”
Emma reminded herself that the man was only doing his job.
“I have no doubt that the portrait is Patrick’s work. We will prove it is so, and I’m sure everything will be fine. Please be reassured that I will keep in touch with you and ensure you’re updated on any developments. Laura and I will do our utmost to keep the loan going, and please be aware that there is not, in any way, any deception on either of our parts where our relationship with the bank is concerned.”
“Of course not.”
Emma said goodbye and hung up the phone. Slowly she made her way back to her painting and picked up her brushes.
Who could verify the painting if the one expert on the Circle was dead? An auction house? But then the very person, the expert curator who’d been called out to appraise it, had claimed it was a fraud. He’d probably worked at Sotheby’s before owning this gallery himself.
Emma knew she could waste time getting other opinions, but her best bet was within her. She had to remember the past. Freya had started the idea that people were like books. We had no chance of knowing them at all beyond the titles that sat on the covers. And she and Patrick had been struck by that idea—and so they’d blurred faces in their art. Had Laura picked up the irony of that in his portrait today? Well, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that somehow, Emma was going to have to prove that theory wrong.
Provence, 1913
Patrick passed his cigarette to Emma while they waited on the steps of Beatrice and Thea’s chateau. His fingers lingered on Emma’s; his eyes narrowed behind the smoke.
Oscar had taught Emma to smoke during their honeymoon in Rome. They’d both laughed at the disapproving stares she’d received from Englishwomen. Now, she tapped the ash off the end of the cigarette and took in Beatrice and Thea’s charming garden, which spread before them surrounded by cool, mysterious cypress trees.
“An independent woman is still seen as a difficult one, you know,” she said, extending the cigarette back toward Patrick. “I’m probably just as outcast as you even though I am not of your persuasion. We will both have to be strays . . .”
Patrick held out his hand for the cigarette, blowing smoke rings that were both sexy and resonant with attitude. He was elegant, exotic, the most attractive of men. Her attraction for him was worlds away from what she’d felt for Oscar or Lawrence. Now, it was clear to her that those relationships had been protective, born, first, out of Frederick’s death and, next, out of Oscar’s betrayal. But with Patrick, it was as if she was finally meeting with someone on her own terms. That seemed fascinating to her. It was almost as if he were a mirror image of her own complex, creative, questioning self. And she had no problems confessing that she liked that.
“You’re not difficult,” he said. “You’re extraordinary. The most extraordinary and interesting woman I’ve ever met by far. You are nothing like other women.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment to my sex or not?” She couldn’t hold back a laugh.
An amused expression passed across his face in turn. “I’m not trying to be offensive. Just honest. I’m saying that I’m intrigued by you, and I’m telling you that you’re not difficult. You’re delightful. And bloody attractive.” He nudged her.
She threw back her head and laughed louder now. “I still think that a woman who wants to be more than decorative is viewed as trouble.” She leaned back on the front steps, stretching out her legs and lifting her face toward the sun.
“Just be yourself. It’s too hard to be anyone else,” he said. “On the other hand, being a sodomite, I am thought of as either a harmless lunatic or a criminal.” He sat up, changing tack like the little boat with its poppies out on the sea. “Emma, would you mind very much if I started to make some preliminary sketches of you? Right now? I want to make up hundreds of sketches before I take my brush to the canvas for you. It will be my ultimate gift to you, you know that.”
Streaks of white ran across the otherwise eggshell-blue of the sky. Emma inclined her gaze downward to his hands and regarded them under her eyelashes. The heady, roguish, light-headed attraction she felt toward him was overwhelming her. Were her body and mind playing tricks on her? And was there any possibility that Patrick might not be playing tricks himself?
“I don’t mind if you work on the preliminaries now,” she murmured. And watched him as he pulled a small sketch pad out of his pocket.
He undid the tie that bound the leather notebook together, turning the leaves until he came to a fresh white page.
Emma entwined her hands in her lap. She gazed out at the garden, unable, for some reason, to stare directly at him. A flutter of nerves, excitement, she knew not what, danced through her system. But she shouldn’t be nervous. Goodness knew, she’d sketched countless models herself at the Royal Academy, not to mention Freya, Frederick . . . her father.
“I don’t subscribe to the Sitwell Circle. I’m not some dandy or a cliché,” Patrick said, his tone conversational.
Emm
a swiped a glance down at his sketch pad before just as quickly turning away. He had already captured her expression so closely to the way in which she viewed herself as to be almost uncomfortable to see it.
“We are all lumped together in this sort of Wildean aestheticism,” he said. “And yet, we are individuals. As different from each other as anyone else. Why do we humans persist with convenient ways of categorizing each other when we can hardly begin to work ourselves out?”
“From what I know of my circle of friends, sexuality can be as complicated and individual as human nature,” Emma said. She couldn’t help but be honest about how she’d lain awake last night, her mind wandering over delicious thoughts about Patrick. There were far more colors in this world than black and white.
“I hope you didn’t mind my raising that Frederick told me about your father and about the restrictions he imposed on you because of your sex,” he said.
“They were difficult years.”
“Frederick told me other things, Emma. I don’t want to probe, but . . .”
“You had a very open relationship with my brother?” She spun around to face him all of a sudden. “I cannot tell you what it means to me to speak of him, to sit with someone who was truly close to Frederick—who got beyond discussions about politics, economics, and the world. Please, do not in any way hold back!”
He placed his charcoal down a moment before reaching out and taking her hand. He held it. “Emma,” he said, “for one thing, you know Frederick adored you.”
She sighed, wanting to drink this man in. Frederick had opened up her world in ways that no one else had done or could do. Had the timing been different and had Arthur not married and her father not died when they did, she would have ended up like so many women, the possession of her father and then owned by a husband, with no control over the way she lived. She owed Frederick her freedom and marriage that did not restrict her in any way. She knew, for her, at least, this was a vital thing to have as an artist, as a person, and as a woman.