The Things We Don’t Say

by Ella Carey

  Laura reached out again, but Ewan pulled his hand away from her.

  “Any scandal, any hint that came out, would mean that you were the son of the man who had copied Patrick Adams’s portrait and the grandson of the man who had elicited an illegal swap out at Summerfield. Any such thing would wreck any chance you had of building a career in the art world. I knew how much you cared about art. I also knew that after your grandfather’s death, you’d do the right thing. Step up to the plate and take on the family business. I knew you’d forsake your own passion for painting to protect his memory. And I admired the fact that your father never put his own father down in your presence. He allowed the two of you to bond in your own way. It was . . . complex.

  “And yet, I saw the fire in you, the need to be an artist, just like I recognized it in your father. He stifled it. He never allowed it to rise to fruition. Not until it was too late.”

  “Why?” Ewan whispered the words. “I had to take on the gallery, and yes, I wanted to for . . . Granddad’s sake. But why did Dad not just paint?”

  The irony of his question seemed breathtaking right now.

  “Because the person who drummed his passion for art out of him was his own father. Duncan pressured him. And I saw him do it to you. But you are made of different stuff. I knew you wanted the gallery. Your father never did. And I knew that equally well, you could paint. I just had to have faith that you would blend both your passion for painting and your talent for running a successful business. Your father was . . . not so strong. Not being able to paint killed him. It would have been impossible for him to work alongside his father. Their relationship was always complicated. Your grandfather treated you quite differently, Ewan.”

  “I sensed that,” Ewan whispered.

  “Your grandfather Duncan never wanted your father to be an artist. He saw it as the stupidest of career options. Oh, he encouraged him to study it, to understand it . . . in order to gain expertise to work in commercial art—a real job. Your grandfather saw me as a bad influence because I encouraged your father to follow his desire to paint.”

  Ewan rolled up his shirtsleeves and rested his head in his hands. “I know,” he said. “I tried to see both sides of the argument. Yours and Grandfather’s. I guess I just ended up thinking that both worlds needed to coexist. Art needs both.”

  Laura looked at him. She couldn’t help thinking of her own mother’s words. “The stupidest of careers . . .” How many times had she heard Clover utter those very words? How familiar this all was, no matter how strange.

  “If there were any hint at your father being an artist, at using that incredible talent of his to get anywhere, your grandfather didn’t want to know about it. Not that it stopped him exploiting your father,” Rosie went on. “I think, to be honest, your grandfather was jealous—your father’s talent was something your grandfather never had.”

  Laura turned her teacup on the table, hands and mind busy.

  “You see, your grandfather swapped the two paintings. He organized to have your father’s copy hanging out at Summerfield. It was his final cock of the finger at the Circle. Because Patrick had turned his gallery down when he’d offered him and Emma representation years ago, when they were working in London. Your grandfather genuinely thought Patrick was mad not to want a part of a smart art gallery in Piccadilly, when instead, he insisted on working exclusively for the collective workshop in Fitzroy Square. Your grandfather was furious, and yet Patrick remained oblivious.

  “Your grandfather’s business partner in the gallery had a deeper grudge against the Circle and Patrick, it seemed. A personal connection.”

  Laura’s head shot up.

  “Your father’s partner had never quite fit into the Circle himself, you see. So when the time was ripe, they acted. It suited your grandfather’s dishonest, commercial nature and his partner’s need for revenge against Emma and Patrick.”

  Ewan caught Laura’s glance, swift as a hawk. She sat up, her breathing quickening. Understanding hit her like a brick.

  But Rosie’s Scottish voice was firm.

  “Ewan and Laura, dear,” Rosie said, “there’s still more to it, I’m afraid.”

  Hampshire, 1980

  “I think you’d better let me in, Rupert. Long time, no see, but sometimes that’s the way things move, don’t they? In circles.” Despite the dark images that haunted her—this circle was not a clear, honest one at all—Emma managed to keep her tone even. There were boundaries, and Rupert had crossed every one. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

  His brown corduroy trousers were neatly pressed, and around his soft cashmere cardigan, which was the color of a gaudy marigold, the delicate scent of aftershave lingered. His fair features were no longer strong in his older face, but his blue eyes still peered at Em. Emma stopped herself from turning up her nose. There’d been enough of that for one lifetime . . . she had to think about her own role in this. Put herself in Rupert’s shoes.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Em?” He peered at her. “Good God, it’s been more than ten years.”

  “Who on earth else would it be?” Emma tapped her cane on the ground. “The journey has been quite long enough and tedious, Rupert. Lengthy car rides are not something I do these days. Unless I have good reason.”

  After what seemed an age, he led her into the hallway, turning right into an elegant sitting room filled with the sorts of antiques that Emma’s father would have approved of without a doubt. The complete antithesis of everything to do with modernism.

  Emma decided for once to speak out. She gave him a blow-by-blow version, sparing him no details of Laura’s predicament nor her own. At the end, she simply eyed him.

  He stood up and went to the drinks cabinet. “Gin?”

  “Yes.”

  Rupert took a sip of his own drink and finally he spoke. “I admit, things got a little out of hand.”

  “Out of hand?” Emma placed her glass of gin back down herself. The astringent drink, which she hated, had given her strength. “What a ridiculous euphemism. I am sick, Rupert, of not telling the truth.”

  Rupert shot his head up. “Your utopia, if such a thing exists, and it doesn’t, was my bloody apocalypse. I made the heinous mistake of falling in love with you both. And forgive me, but I couldn’t help my feelings, nor the fact that they were never returned. By God, it was hard to stay away, and God knew that I tried. But in the end, staying away from someone or, in my case, two people whom I loved, well, it was impossible. Because, you see, my love did not fit in with your theories.”

  Emma stared and stared at his smart mantelpiece. “Patrick was in love with you during the war. You know he was. And yet, you wanted me as well.”

  But Rupert seemed to be miles away. “I didn’t swap the painting for myself. I did it for Clover,” he said.

  As the words circled around the room, flying like some long-trapped nightingale that had been let out of its cage, Emma reeled backward against Rupert’s silken cushion. “Clover?” she said.

  Edinburgh, 1980

  “Mum.” Ewan’s gaze ricocheted from Laura to Rosie. “Where is the original? If it was swapped for Dad’s painting, then where is Patrick’s original work?”

  Rosie’s lips were white. “I have it,” she said. She spoke with complete dignity.

  He pushed back his chair with a clatter.

  “Safe,” she said, holding up a hand. “When your grandfather died, I insisted on taking back all your father’s works. Your grandmother, when she was alive, had no idea it was the original. Your grandfather must have been hoping it would go up in value. He’d sell it when the time was right, I’m sure of it. So I’m afraid, favorite person that I am of his, I took it and kept it safe. Until the ghastly mess resolved itself. It’s under the house. I was just waiting for . . .” Her eyes widened, and she looked scared. “I don’t know what. You, Laura? The right time?”

  Ewan swore silently under his breath.

  Hampshire, 1980

  Emma
took in the replica of that once handsome blond man who sat opposite her. She had to get him to talk. The reasoning that she had tried to use before she came here in order to elicit some sort of empathy for Rupert was dissipating faster than she could think. She felt Rupert’s eyes on her.

  “Rupe.” She sighed. “Everyone was in love with Patrick.”

  “I was in love with you too, though,” he insisted. “You always did underestimate your own allure. We certainly operated in complex patterns. It was far more than a simple circle.”

  “An unfathomable kaleidoscope, I think. And was I the one turning it, or was it Patrick? You, during the war? It was hard to know at times.”

  “All of us in turn, I imagine,” Rupert said.

  In spite of all the complications, a sense of almost unbearable loss for it all washed over her.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “It’s not so easy to talk, despite what you just said about the truth, Emma.”

  Emma clasped her old hands together. “You are not telling me a thing.”

  The expression on Rupert’s face softened a little. “I met Clover in London toward the end of the war. She was gorgeous and charming and delightful.”

  Emma shot him an alarmed glance. First Jerome, and then Rupert? Had she underestimated her and Patrick’s daughter entirely?

  “No,” he clarified. “Nothing happened, my dear.”

  Emma sank back in her seat.

  “We talked about things, though. About it all.”

  “Clover talked to you? Well, that is just grand.”

  “Clover was confused. Upset, hurt by what she saw as Patrick’s and your betrayal toward her. She had just ended things with . . . Jerome.”

  Emma wiped her hand across her brow. She had thought she was of the interesting generation. What a mistake that was!

  “And by God, I was open to listening to her talk about that and about your not telling her she was Patrick’s daughter. She was so young, twenty, charming, innocent . . . so I cooked up a plan. The most precious darned thing in Summerfield was that bloody artwork. As a dealer, I managed to convince her to place The Things We Don’t Say into safekeeping for the duration of the war. To protect the only thing she was going to inherit from you both that was of value back then. I wanted to help her gain some semblance of . . . I don’t know what, exactly . . .” His voice trailed off, and Emma found herself seeing him as vulnerable. Not the other way around.

  “Summerfield was too close to the coast, Em. You’d already had your studio in London bombed. You’d lost all your work there. I asked her if the portrait was insured. We did a lot of that sort of work, you see. It wasn’t unusual for our clients to move their paintings into safe storage. My partner, Duncan Buchanan, and I, well, we were familiar with this.”

  Emma looked at him, incredulous. “What did you just say?”

  “Duncan Buchanan. I had an interest, a financial one mainly, in his gallery in Piccadilly. We were old friends. He owned it, of course; I just had a financial stake in it. As you know, I was able to afford not to work after I inherited my father’s estate. But, quietly, I always kept an interest in art.”

  Emma narrowed her eyes. And her thoughts rolled back, to that dealer who had approached her when they’d been working in Fitzroy Square. She had dismissed him out of hand as nothing, and so had Patrick. He’d turned the dealer down with no discussion. But they’d never heard anything of him again—until now . . .

  “I thought at the time that there was no point trying to convince you to place the portrait somewhere safe. I knew how bloody-minded you could be about Summerfield, that you’d never see it as anything but the darned haven that it never was to me.

  “So we decided the only way to protect the original portrait was to switch it over with Duncan’s son’s copy. It was easy enough for Duncan to suggest his talented son, Hamish, make a copy of the Adams portrait when Lawrence took it up to London to show. Duncan’s son was studying at art school. Sensitive. Talented. An earnest, deep-thinking young fellow. Trusting. Wouldn’t hurt a flea.

  “Clover, your daughter, did the switchover. She was young; I convinced her to do so, convinced her that it should never have been left out at Summerfield in the first place . . . It wasn’t her fault—she thought it was the right thing to do, in fact, could see it needed protecting. In some strange way, it meant everything to her; it was representative of the love between her parents, although she would never, ever admit as much, feeling so left out by you as she did.

  “She became convinced that someone had to be sensible in your world, Em. Someone had to start behaving in a normal, responsible manner. She’s a more practical girl than you ever were, darling.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Em said. She fanned her face with her hand.

  “So she agreed it needed to be taken out for safekeeping, but then, she went off and got married to her butcher husband and didn’t want anything to do with it or the Circle—let alone me! Duncan hung on to the portrait, and well, if I were honest, I think he would have sold it a few years ago had he still been alive when Patrick died and the value of it skyrocketed, the rest of his work being held in museums, of course.”

  “Rupert!”

  But Rupert bent forward and rested his old hands on his knees. “I’d created my own little circle, you see. One based on good financial sense. Protecting the painting from people who were so airy-fairy they had no idea about its value at all. It was, in the end, quite different from your approach, I know that, but there was nothing wrong with Clover looking after her own future. After all, you’d kept a pretty darned serious secret from her yourself, Em . . . She told me all about it, you see. It didn’t seem wrong to have a few secrets of our own . . . Bring things full swing and all that.”

  Emma felt the sudden need to rest right back in her seat. The swell of pain that spread through her chest was like a heavy butcher’s knife cutting into one side, soaring up her arm, down her back . . . She gripped the sides of the sofa and felt her head throw itself backward. Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Hampshire, 1980

  Faces and images blurred. Emma focused on colors, trying as if with some last desperation to keep her eyes open, but she was unable to control the way her eyelids fluttered. People surrounded her, their uniforms, she tried to think valiantly, were a pale green tinged with a touch of blue, like the sea at its most mysterious and beautiful in Provence. But all she could do was lie there, her breath laborious through the hideous mask they’d strapped to her face . . .

  Her mind drifted on through the fog. Now she was lying in the grass in Kensington Gardens, staring at the vivid sky through the canopy of trees. The sun shimmered on the vines in the South of France, and a few moments later, she was flying over Summerfield, the low rise of the South Downs below her young, floating self. And back to the first time she laid eyes on Patrick, the sting of that baguette piercing her lips and salt licking the cut.

  Perhaps someday people would appreciate her meager efforts to try to make sense of any of it on canvas—beauty, children, family, loss, war, hope, and, ultimately, love. As she lay there, prone, the whole lot seemed to merge into a great swirl . . .

  As the ambulance made its way back to London, she became aware of a cold hand clasping hers. Emma wrapped her fingers tight and held on, just as a newborn baby does, as if needing some form of contact—except Emma knew this would be the final one for her.

  With her other hand, free from needles and drips, she pulled at the mask on her face.

  “Only a moment, then you need it back on. Oxygen,” the voice that belonged to the hand said.

  “I have a daughter.” Emma pushed out each word, her old eyes scanning the stranger’s face. “If I die before we get back to London, I need you to tell her two things.”

  Emma saw the way the woman’s eyes caught with her own, as if in some unspoken acknowledgment. She was not going to say that Emma would make it back alive.

  Emma held
fast to the nurse’s hand.

  “Tell her that life was always a matter of wishing and dreaming for me . . . I’d always tried to create something better than the world I found myself in, both through my art and the way I lived and in the way I very much wanted to love someone,” Emma whispered, the words seeming almost impossible to form right now. “It wasn’t a matter of keeping it from her. I just didn’t want this world to hurt her if I could help it. But in not telling her, I can see I did just that. Please tell her that I love her and that I always will.”

  Emma saw the slight incline of the young woman’s head. She closed her eyes and let herself drift away as the young woman who still held her hand stroked her aching head. It seemed odd and yet comforting that the touch of a stranger whom she would never know was the last thing she would ever feel in this life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  London, 1980

  Laura sat next to Emma’s bed. The sound of the hospital monitor’s beeping was alien, taking up the space where Emma’s voice should have been. They’d told her it was unlikely Emma would ever wake up. Laura rested against Ewan’s shoulder. He’d driven her straight back to London after a resourceful Lydia called Ewan’s office and tracked them down. He’d sat up with her all night.

  Dawn light was sneaking through the hospital curtains now, sending strange patterns onto the linoleum floor. Waiting for Emma to leave this world, in turn, was one of the strangest things that Laura had ever done. She’d never imagined that what she’d dreaded for so long would become the thing that she wanted for her beloved gran. But now, she wanted Em to be able to rest in peace. The inevitable wait for death to lend a final stroke to a person one loved seemed like one of the most impossible things to endure.

  When the door to the room cracked open and a tentative footstep edged inside, Laura laid Emma’s cool hand down on the still, white sheets. She moved across to hug her mother. Clover’s face blanched as she caught sight of Emma, and she brought her long-fingered hand up to her throat. Clover took a step backward when she saw the old man sitting in the shadows in the room.