by Ella Carey
Laura stayed quiet.
“I made the mistake of trying to outshine Emma, you see, Laura. But in all the struggle, I realized too late that in order to be close to Patrick, the person I had to impress was not him . . . it was Em.”
“Well, you know when you haven’t impressed Em.” Laura chuckled. “In spite of all her silences, she’s no good at hiding the things that matter to her.”
“Quite. As for the painting, Patrick sent it up to Summerfield from London as soon as it was done, and then he, too, went back to Summerfield and Em. He went back to her, and he never left her. My affair with Patrick was done. As for Clover, she was a much easier nut to crack than her mother, and the fact that she was in the midst of a rebellion against Emma . . . can you see how that suited us both?”
“So you seduced her?”
Crinkles appeared at the corners of his eyes. “Oh, you slay me, darling. Nope. Your mother seduced me! It was she who took me for a wicked ride.”
Laura felt her eyes widen.
“Clover wanted to razz up Em. I thought I’d win my revenge. But it was your mother who won that round. But one thing I can tell you is that I’ll be in love with the memory of Patrick until the very day I die.”
Laura heaved out a shuddering sigh.
“The painting, done by Patrick, was delivered to Summerfield from London. It’s simple, Laura. Don’t you think it’s funny now—that they all took me for a useless sap?”
“Thank you for talking with me,” she said.
He placed his old hand down between them on the bench. “Well, you see, I did learn, finally, not to alienate any woman who is linked with Patrick!”
In spite of everything, Laura felt herself grinning at him. But still, the largest piece in her puzzle—Ewan’s story—would not, in any way, fit.
Summerfield, 1944
The affair between Clover and Jerome seemed as interminable and impossible as the war that rolled on in Europe. A military unit was stationed in the fields next to Summerfield. Anyone who was staying in the house had to present their identity card to get through the front gate. Patrick lost his on several occasions, but he always charmed his way past the guards.
But the worst of it was that Patrick’s studio in Bloomsbury had taken a direct hit, and everything he’d stored there was lost, his preliminary sketches for The Things We Don’t Say, along with some of Emma’s early works. But still, when Lawrence wanted to take The Things We Don’t Say up to London to show it at a small wartime exhibition of works from the Circle that he was organizing in Hampstead, Emma and Patrick agreed to let him borrow it just this once, as long as it was stored safely in his cellar at night.
“I feel wretched,” Patrick said, sitting with his head in his hands in the sitting room. “What I am going through is nothing compared with those on the front line. Again. And yet, I am lost as to what to do about Jerome and Clover. I’m so sorry, Em.”
Emma stood close to the tiny electric heater. The small light that hung from the center of the room did little to relieve the resolute darkness from the blackout curtains.
“It’s not your fault,” Emma said. Desperate, she’d taken to writing to Jerome in London, admitting that she knew she got on her daughter’s nerves, knowing that the way she’d raised Clover away from the reality of the world had restricted her ability to deal with certain things. He’d returned the letters unopened. She was at her wits’ end with him.
She felt, irrationally, as if he’d stolen her child. He had cut her off and was refusing to communicate with her at all. All the while, Emma found it hard to grasp that Clover had a part to play in this ghastly scenario too.
No matter that she’d filled Summerfield to the brimming point with decorations, the house seemed strange and empty now. Summerfield had lost its spirit now that Clover had gone under such dramatic circumstances.
“I have been such a gloomy companion for her these past years since Calum’s death,” Emma said. “She’s made me realize that I must not ignore what is in the palm of my hand, no matter how overcome by grief I might be.”
Patrick looked up at her, his expression fierce. “Keep writing to her. The problem is . . .” Emma waited.
“Jerome plays games with people,” Patrick said. “He’s a manipulator.”
Emma sighed. She paused a moment. Saying what needed to be said seemed so hard most of the time. “He was once in love with you, Patrick,” she murmured. “Surely that will constrain the way in which he treats Clover.”
The sound of footsteps outside on the gravel ground into the room—one of the military undertaking a routine watch, no doubt.
“I neglected Clover, there is no doubt, Patrick. It’s not your fault.”
“Personal grief in war is a double dagger, flecked with the blood of the entire world,” Patrick murmured. “For heaven’s sake, Em, no one could ever blame you for grieving.”
“Were we wrong to try to adhere to our principles? Do they not work in this darned world? I worry that we brought Clover up in a bubble, that we protected her too much.”
Patrick’s eyes were red rimmed with lack of sleep. His hair curled on his collar, and gray shadows colored his cheeks. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I just don’t know.”
He stood up, and she moved over to him, her head resting on his shoulder. “I don’t know what to believe in anymore in this world,” she whispered. “But I do know that I have every faith in you.”
The sounds of gunfire ricocheted over the hills from France for the second time in their lives. The fighting, once again, knew no boundaries between day and night. Life and death, hope and despair seemed to exist on a dark and shifting spectrum, and no one could tell how their circumstances would change during these days of war.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
London, 1980
A call came through the moment Laura walked into her flat. Resignation spread its own unique shadow over her when she recognized the voice on the end of the phone.
“I have good news, Laura. We can offer you full-time work.” Her supervisor from the supermarket seemed enthusiastic, and Laura’s heart sank at the sound of his voice. “If you need overtime, then we should be able to supply you with more hours on weekends and in the evenings.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You give our regular employees a good run for their money. In fact, let me know if you are interested in our company management program. I’d be happy to recommend you for it later in the year. Can you start the additional shifts next week?”
Laura’s performance exam was in seven days. “Would the following week be all right?”
As soon as they’d worked out the timing, Laura hung up and dialed the bank.
“Ivan?” she said. “I’ll start paying you back the principle in a fortnight.”
A vivid picture of Ivan’s own resignation came into Laura’s mind. “Yes, we will need you to do that, Laura, but I’m afraid my superiors are advising that we need to recover Emma’s assets now in order to recoup the principle amount that is due immediately.”
“Ivan. Please! She may only have such a short time left. I will pay you back as fast as I can. It was my loan. It’s my responsibility.”
“I was about to call Emma.”
“No, please don’t,” she said. “Can you give me another twenty-four hours?”
“I’ll try.”
When Laura placed the handset back down, she ran her fingers over the shiny green phone and dialed Ewan’s number.
“Laura?”
“Can I meet you after work?” The words came out as if by automaton.
“I don’t know, Laura.”
“Ewan. I have no choice.”
Silence hung a moment. “I’ll come up to Bloomsbury,” he said. “How about I meet you at the Lamb in an hour?”
“Perfect,” Laura said. “And thank you.”
An hour later, she slipped into the interior of the Lamb, marching past the wood-paneled bar and the old snob screens that hid
the bar staff from wealthy patrons who came there to drink. Laura made a beeline for the man who was already sitting on one of the leather banquettes.
When Ewan looked up at her, Laura blanched. His face was pale, and his chin was covered with three-days’ growth.
“Can I . . . ,” he said, his words coming out as the barest of whispers. “Can I tell you something? Personal?”
Laura nodded. “Please. I want you to talk to me.”
“My father,” Ewan said, “killed himself over this.”
Laura held his gaze, watching the way his mouth worked. He covered it with his hand, and she reached her hand toward him on the table, leaving it sitting there, a gesture, such inadequate support.
“The whole thing was a tragic mess,” Ewan said.
“Ewan,” Laura whispered.
“He hanged himself in our garage.” He looked at her, scouring her face, willing her, she couldn’t help thinking, to turn away from him, to walk away, out of this pub, to leave him alone with his grief.
The wood under her fingers felt slippery and soft.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked. His eyes held an ancient form of pain that Laura knew she’d never be able to reach.
“Sure.” But her voice sounded as if it were some long-distance version of itself.
When he returned, placing a beer and a glass of wine down between them along with a bag of crisps, Laura reached for the packet and took one, only to find herself unable to stomach it. Slowly she pushed the crisps away.
“It’s my responsibility to help you, you have to see that. I couldn’t let the painting be loaned to the Tate when my father did it, and I couldn’t tell you about my father because . . .” His words drifted off, and his hands shook as he tried to pick up his beer. He put it down again.
Laura could only stare at her drink.
“My father,” he said after what seemed an age, “studied art in London when he was young. Once he’d graduated, he was fortunate enough to secure representation with a gallery owner. He was a great admirer of early twentieth-century modernism in Britain, and like Patrick Adams, he used to copy the works he admired when he was a student. It was part of his practice. Just what he did. He went to the galleries by himself and copied iconic works. When Lawrence showed The Things We Don’t Say briefly in London at a private showing of Patrick’s work, my father jumped at the opportunity to copy it.”
Laura nodded.
“Unfortunately, something went wrong, I don’t know what, and my father stopped painting for years. He gave up. It was the one big unspoken thing in our house. He had a career in insurance until I was a teenager. In his forties he started painting again, just for himself—he hated his job. He set up a studio in our garage. He needed to paint just as you need to play music, and I, well, I need to paint too. But all I knew was that he killed himself over something to do with art fraud . . .”
“Oh, dear God.”
“The thing was, he’d become so happy when he finally started painting again,” Ewan said. “You’d hardly have recognized him, physically even, from the person he was before.”
Laura took in the washed-out man sitting opposite her.
“My father had told me he always put a secret red mark on every copy he made in order to distinguish them from the real works of art. He’d started to become completely brilliant at making copies by the time he was in his early twenties, so he marked his work. He showed me what he did. He’d left his practice pieces in storage, and one day, when he’d started painting again, he took me to see them.”
Laura nodded, still mute.
“It was like going to a field of derelict old aircraft. I can’t tell you what I felt when I saw his work. He’d done stellar copies of van Goghs, Cézannes . . . he loved the Post-impressionists. He’d made several copies of Patrick’s paintings.
“But after he showed me his storage unit, full of all these wonderful treasures, everything changed. He withdrew. Stopped eating, washing, painting. And started refusing to go to work.”
“No.”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
He caught her eyes, reaching his hand across the table for a brief moment, only to pull it back. “When I knew without a doubt that the painting was Dad’s work, not the original Adams, sitting out there at Summerfield, it tormented me. I can’t tell you how it tore me up inside. But now, I can’t help thinking that Dad killed himself because his copy of The Things We Don’t Say was not there with all his other paintings when we went to look at them all in storage. Somehow, I think he must have found out that his copy had replaced the original. I was never told details after his death. I was a teenager. Everyone wanted to protect me.”
“Of course,” Laura said, closing her eyes and thinking of her mother, and how Emma had protected her from her secret . . .
“But you see, the thing is this, Laura: apart from the shame and the betrayal of telling you, I simply cannot face telling my mother that Dad’s painting is hanging out at Summerfield. After my father’s death she went downhill, and everyone was worried about her. I thought that until I did say something to my mother about my father’s work being substituted for Adams’s most famous piece, I didn’t think it was right to share what I knew with anyone else.”
Laura took in what Ewan had told her. The ramifications of this spread endlessly, and yet, she felt as if she were locked in a long silence that seemed impenetrable.
Summerfield, 1946
Unable to communicate with her daughter, devastated at the breakdown in her relationship with Clover, Emma did what so many of her Victorian ancestors used to do: she took to her bed.
It wasn’t until Clover and Jerome ended their tumultuous affair soon after the war finished that Patrick persuaded Clover to travel. She showed promise as a decorative painter and had chosen porcelain as her medium. Her pieces were exquisite, and Patrick arranged for her to meet with contacts of his in Limoges. But Clover never went to Europe. Instead, she met a butcher named Ed in a pub in the country when traveling with friends and married him within a month of their meeting.
Neither Patrick nor Emma was invited to the wedding.
Clover wrote to Emma and told her that she wanted a normal family, not a complicated bohemian utopia that was Emma’s ideal.
“She wants security because she feels she’s lost it,” Emma told Patrick. “Why didn’t we tell her the truth about us earlier? I feel we had such a responsibility to speak out.”
They sat together in their studio at Summerfield on the chairs they’d set up on either side of the fireplace. Bach played on the small radio, sending a beautiful, crackling rendition out into the otherwise silent room. Emma put down her predinner drink. The sherry tasted off.
“All we can hope is that Clover is happy,” Patrick said.
“I don’t bear her any grudge for wanting to make her own decisions as to how she lives her life,” Emma said.
Patrick placed his wineglass on the table between them. “If only Jerome could understand that I loved you and him as much as each other. Just in different ways.”
Emma focused her gaze out the picture windows that overlooked the garden.
“You have been my constant, my security,” Patrick said. “I’m going to feel the same way about you until the day I die. I don’t want you to ever doubt it, Em.”
Emma faced him.
“You know, you must not worry on your part in all this,” he said, his words settling in the twilight. “I think we have to allow Clover the freedom to live her own life now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
London, 1980
Emma placed the phone back down on its cradle after taking Laura’s call. She sat on her sofa in the familiar room in Gordon Square and traced her fingers over the patterns in the fabric. How frustrating it was not to be able to leap up and stalk around the room or, better still, to take a turn around Bloomsbury, march through the squares, and have a good old think. The squares lent the whole bohemian, artistic, and intellectual s
uburb such a well-set-out sort of feel. Logical. Unlike the complicated lives of some of its artistic inhabitants, that was a certain thing.
And yet, a little thought was forming into a full-blown idea in her head. Yes, Jerome had been upset by the Circle, by the idea that he’d never really fit in. Emma understood that. She knew that she had been somewhat exclusive in the way she gathered those who were close to her around her and held them as if she were clasping on to a string bag that always seemed to threaten to burst.
She was haunted now by one terrible thought. And the more Emma gave it any foothold in her imagination, the more it might make perfect, yet awful, sense.
Laura’s sleep was fitful. Explanations made no sense to her as she lay awake in the all-too-familiar early hours turning on her bright bedside light, only to turn it off again in despair at the slow ticking of her clock.
When Laura looked at her face in the mirror the next morning, all she could see was the same grayness that haunted Ewan. The malaise now hung over them both. She splashed cold water on her face.
Her exam loomed over her like another shadow. She’d practiced until midnight, and her fingers ached. She should put in at least six hours of playing time. Laura sighed at the sight of the score that rested on her stand. The music was so marked with her own performance notes that it was surprising Laura could see the notes when she needed to practice. When it came to performing from memory, she didn’t think about any of it. It was as if she forgot all the rules in the end.
Laura fixed herself some breakfast. Drank coffee. Grumbled at the bowl of cereal she’d made and rested her aching head in her hands. She went to the phone and dialed Ewan’s number, which, like the Bartók and the Bach Double that she was performing straight afterward, she had committed to memory now.