“Hush, Nicola. I know you don't. Don't you see that's partly why I am here? You conducted yourself throughout this horror like a perfect lady. In some respects, I rather wish you hadn't; I would have understood what was happening sooner. I've come to tell you that I have arranged for the divorce and made Jeremy sign the papers. That is what you desire, is it not?”
Nicola nodded.
“Good. That's sorted, then. In addition, I aim to make sure you experience no further hardship. You've had quite enough.”
“But—”
He put up a hand. “There will be a small stipend—nothing embarrassing, I assure you—but you will not be uncomfortable. It will be deposited to an account in your name every month. I have also kept your studio in St. Ives, and am leasing it out. Of course, should you ever wish to have it again …”
“Dad, you know how I love St. Ives and that studio—oh, the light! But so long as Jeremy is at Trevega House, I couldn't possibly …”
“I know. I haven't yet decided what to do about him. But in the meantime, I'm doing quite well on the studio rental, if I do say so myself!” His old eyes sparkled like those of a thief with a diamond. He took another sip of the brandy. “Oh, and there is one more thing.”
He hoisted himself from his chair, groaning from the effort, and moved slowly toward the door, where the parcel leaned against the wall.
“Nicola, I want you to have this. I know you love it, and it would please me to no end to know it was with you. Besides, should you ever find yourself in difficulties, Christie's will, I'm sure, be happy to auction it at some princely sum.”
He lifted the parcel, which was wrapped carefully in heavy brown paper, and set it before her. Nicola unwrapped it slowly, but thought she knew what it was. It was the painting she admired most in Sir Michael's collection: Laura Knight's exquisite Ella, Nude in Chair. When she lifted it from its wrapping she stared at her father-in-law, shaking her head.
“No. I couldn't—”
“I'm afraid you must, my dear; it's already written into my will. It was, actually, long before any of this trouble began. Do you know the story behind it?”
Laura Knight and her husband, Harold, Nicola knew, had been members of what became known as the Lamorna school, a group of painters who settled in the leafy Lamorna Valley, on the coast a few miles west of Penzance, in the years before World War I. Their painter friends included S. J. “Lamorna” Birch and his family, and Charles and Ella Naper. Most of these artists, drawn by the natural setting and the scintillating light, painted coastal landscapes and scenes of fishermen at sea or bathers along the shore. But Laura Knight also produced a number of studio paintings, including this nude of her best friend, Ella Naper, whom she'd posed in a gilded armchair draped with a black and red silk robe. The painting had a slightly unfinished look; though the figure in the chair was perfect, and Ella's skin was luminous, much of the background was filled in roughly, with broad brushstrokes. Nicola loved its freedom.
“Turns out,” Sir Michael began, “Laura's husband, Harold, never loved her. Oh no. He was head over heels for Ella, his friend Charlie Naper's wife. Times being what they were, of course, friendship was as far as it got. Always felt sorry for Laura, though. Knew them all, you see; Mother was part of their circle. Told me she thought the complexity of the relationship spurred Laura's art. The nude's splendid; she painted it in one sitting, is what Mother told me. Can you imagine? Pleasure to give it to someone with your talent.” He glanced again at the painting. “Maybe she'll be your muse—eh, my girl?”
Nicola rose from the chaise and descended to her kitchen. Outside, the sun had set, and the harbor was in shadow. She fed Randi, refilled his water bowl, and made herself another gin and tonic. Then she went into her sitting room, lay down on the sofa, sipped her drink, and stared at the painting of Ella Naper that now hung above the rough granite mantel. She thought of Ella as her spiritual companion, though one nearly a century removed—a free spirit, naked and confident in her world. It was who she wanted to be. It was, in fact, who she'd become in the nearly four years she'd lived in Boscastle.
Moments later, she was asleep. After a while, Randi came in from the kitchen, nuzzled his mistress's hand, got no response, and curled up in his usual place, on the rug in front of the hearth.
… flash floods arise when the ground becomes saturated with water so quickly that it cannot be absorbed. This leads to “run-off.” Run-off is part of the hydrologic cycle connecting precipitation and channel flow. It occurs when the infiltration capacity of the soil surface is exceeded, and the subsurface can no longer absorb moisture at the rate at which it is supplied.
Boscastle Flood Special Issue,
Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293
three
“Guess what, Drew?!”
Andrew had just opened the door of his cottage to a soft August Sunday morning. Lee was in her usual place. She had on her new wellies.
“You're going to finish the tour today and take me to see the sacred wells and the witches?”
“No, silly; it's nearly time to go to church! You'd better hurry up.”
“Well, thank you for that reminder, but I'm afraid I have other plans. I'm going walking this morning, since somebody I know cut short yesterday's outing.…”
Lee squinted at him from the wall. “You sure you're not one of those Methodists?”
“Positive.”
“Well, suit yourself, then. I'm off.”
And she was. She pivoted on the stone at the top of the wall, legs outstretched, hopped off the other side, and dashed across the meadow toward home.
Lee Trelissick made Andrew's heart ache, the way it does when you long for something you know you will never have. Lee was exactly the kind of child he'd dreamed of having with Katerina—and was glad they hadn't. Andrew was a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania when he and Katerina Vogel met, at an awards dinner for the school's most promising graduate students. She'd worked in real estate but had discovered that her strength was in finance, not selling property. When she completed her MBA at the top of her class, Mellon Bank snapped her up and put her on their executive fast track.
Katerina—“Kat” to her friends; “the Ice Queen” to those jealous of her poise and style—was older than her fellow students and far more sophisticated. When Andrew first saw her, it seemed to him as if she'd been created by a Cubist. She was all sharp angles and hard edges. Even her shiny, jet-black hair was asymmetrically cut. Almost painfully thin and taller than average, Kat stood apart from her classmates and, Andrew noticed, spent most of her time talking with the professors. That evening, she was wearing a simple sleeveless sheath dress in smoke-gray silk charmeuse. It fell to her calves and was kept from simply pooling on the floor by two thin spaghetti straps that emphasized her broad shoulders. When she turned away, he realized that the back plunged in soft, draped folds almost to her waist. The only color she wore was a small red clutch purse that matched perfectly the scarlet of her lipstick. She was the kind of woman who, had she smoked, would look perfectly normal holding her cigarette in a long ebony holder. She stood as if she was waiting for someone with a lighter. It put him in mind of old black-and-white movies. When she noticed him in the crowd, she simply lifted an eyebrow. He was mesmerized.
When they married a year later, she was far too busy with her career to consider children. That made perfect sense to him at the time; though he was a full ten years older than she, Katerina, at thirty, had plenty of time left on her biological clock. But he also sensed that she was ambivalent about children, as if she feared she wasn't mother material. This surprised him because whenever they socialized with his colleagues, she was imaginative and playful with their children. It made him happy and proud. But later she'd say, “I love to be with them, and then I love to leave them with their parents.” When she passed her thirty-fifth birthday, Andrew began to resign himself to childlessness.
Then she left him. Now, he'd learned, she was pregn
ant.
It was hard to know which had been more of a surprise. Or more painful.
He finished his tea, laced on his boots, grabbed his day pack, and headed north along a single-track lane above the farm. After a half mile or so, he turned left onto the path that led down through Minster Wood to the footbridge over the Valency where Lee had left him at the day before. He was headed for St. Juliot's, an isolated parish church the young architect Thomas Hardy had restored before he became a novelist and poet.
Andrew hadn't seen the end coming. Yes, Kat had been distant for some weeks, but he put that down to mourning: Her mother, a lifelong smoker, had died of lung cancer three months earlier. Katerina had grown quiet, distracted, and cold—not that she'd ever been especially passionate, come to that. When she announced she was leaving, one Saturday just before the end of the spring term, he had been so stunned, so utterly blind-sided, he'd simply stared at her. He felt poleaxed.
“When?” he'd finally said.
“Today. Now. I've already packed my car. My lawyer will contact you. Don't worry; I don't want anything that's yours.”
But Andrew was still back at the leaving.
“Why?”
She looked at him with a mixture of pity and disgust. “You really don't have a clue, do you?”
His forehead furrowed, as if he was puzzling out a design problem.
“I'm sorry; no, I don't.” And he didn't.
“I can't believe I have to spell this out for you.”
He stared at her, and what went through his head was that he thought being her husband warranted at least an explanation. Then she unloaded.
“Look, I want to spend my life with a man who wants to make a mark on the world. You call yourself an architect. But what do you actually do? You sit in your tidy, minimalist university studio and develop abstract notions about shape and form and space. You lecture to your doting students. You write papers for scholarly journals. I used to think it was great to be ‘Mrs. Professor Stratton,’ until I realized how dull your life is. Our life is. Tell me something, Mr. Architect: Where are your clients? Where are your buildings? Where are your muddy construction sites? Not to mention that you could be making ten times as much as they pay you at that damned university.”
“I guess I'm just not that interested in money,” he'd said. “And I don't see what this has to do with money, anyway.”
“Everything has to do with money, but that's not even the point. The point is, you have no passion; it's like you have ice in your veins instead of blood.”
“That's not true; I love working with my students—”
“And here's the saddest thing.” She was on a roll now. “You don't even know this is a lousy way to live! You don't even know you're only half alive. You know what being half alive means? That you're also half dead! And I'm dying being here with you. That's why I'm leaving!”
Andrew had heard some of this before, but never delivered with such fury. He didn't understand how, suddenly, his profession had become a reason for leaving. He didn't understand how being good at what he did was now a fault. He didn't understand how the Ice Queen could tell him he was passionless. He listened stoically, as he sometimes did at faculty meetings when one of his more “artistic” colleagues went on a rant. He breathed slowly to calm himself in the face of Kat's verbal flame throwing.
“Have you arranged someplace to stay?” he asked when Katerina finally flared out.
She stared at him in disbelief, then abruptly stood.
“I am so out of here,” she said.
And then she was.
Andrew and Kat lived in an early-nineteenth-century brick row house—three windows across, three stories high—on Delancey Street. Andrew had spent years renovating the old house, turning its stacked warren of dark, cramped rooms into a flowing, light-filled, contemporary space. An inventive cook, he'd built himself a sleek commercial-grade kitchen on the ground floor—an oasis of stainless steel and marble that opened to a dining room overlooking an urban garden. A blackened steel staircase with maple treads rose to the second-floor living room and library; a second stair climbed to the master bedroom, bath, and guest room on the top floor. Skylights opened the master bedroom to the stars. To warm up what would otherwise have been a visually cold interior, he had collected a number of primitive pine antiques, most from the Pennsylvania Dutch country west of the city: a stripped pine dining table; a large, hand-painted cabinet originally made for storing bread dough; a wormwood side table to stand by his favorite reading chair; a thick and worn cobbler's workbench, cut down to serve as a coffee table.
An hour after Katerina left—an hour spent staring blankly out at the garden and replaying the scene on a continuous loop in his head—Andrew got up from the dining table at which he'd been sitting since her departure. He left the house and walked across Rittenhouse Square, picked up a couple of bottles of Australian Shiraz at the state liquor store, then went on to the Italian delicatessen on South Nineteenth Street, where he'd shopped for years. He felt scorched. Blistered. Charred. Part of him wondered why no one on the street noticed and called an ambulance.
“Buongiorno, Professore!” Mario, the deli owner, roared above the heads of the shoppers crowding the store. “The usual?”
Andrew nodded. The usual was a selection of cured meats—dry salami, prosciutto, thinly sliced bresaola—and a plastic container each of oil-cured black olives with thyme and green picholine olives in brine. These latter were from the south of France, and Mario always gave him a hard time about his preference for them over the fat Sicilian green olives. Andrew's response was always “If you don't want me to buy them, why do you sell them?” Mario's response was always a shrug and a smile. In fact, he carried them especially for “il Professore.”
Andrew had always been fond of Mario; they'd known each other now for almost a decade, ever since Andrew started coming into the store. It had taken a couple of years before he realized the source of the fondness: He wanted to be Mario. He longed to come from a big Italian family. A noisy family with a multitude of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. A family that yelled a lot. And laughed a lot. And talked and fought and loved. A family whose members were inseparable, no matter who wasn't talking to whom that week. A family, in short, awash in emotion.
Instead, he'd grown up as the third member of a pathologically peaceful triad: a father who embraced his English heritage by wearing tweed and being a man of few words (and those mostly platitudes), and a mother who knew her husband could have married someone more beautiful, more vivacious, more sophisticated, but didn't. The war threw people together and made them think they'd better grab whomever they could, as soon as they could. She'd become pregnant within a month of meeting Andrew's father and, times being what they were, Graham Stratton and Sheila O'Leary married immediately. The child, a daughter, died hours after being born. It was quite a few years before Andrew came along, and, looking back, it seemed to him his parents had run out of child-rearing energy by then. He'd been left pretty much to his own devices as he'd grown up.
As he was ringing up Andrew's order, Mario said, “So, some nice antipasti, olives, wine … a party tonight, eh, my friend?”
Andrew looked blankly at his old friend and suddenly Mario knew something was wrong.
“Ah, no; trouble with a woman, I think.” He tapped a pudgy forefinger on the side of his nose and nodded, the universal Italian gesture of confidentiality and understanding.
Andrew gave him a thin smile.
On the walk back across the square, he paused at the play area. The day was warm and fragrant from the flowers in the formal plantings at the park's four corners. All around him, children of privilege dashed about in absurdly expensive spring outfits. Their sleek young mothers, in equally stylish clothes, lounged on the dark-green benches lining the walkway, skirts hiked up a few inches so their long, lithe legs could catch the sun.
At the corner, while he waited for the light, a hand touched his elbow and a silky voic
e purred, “Hey, handsome.”
The voice belonged to a rather Rubenesque beauty called Phyllis Lieberman, a colleague in the art and architecture school who lived a few blocks away. Single, roughly the same age as he, Phyllis never missed an opportunity to flirt with him. Andrew liked her: liked her irreverent take on modern art, about which she was an expert; liked her cavalier attitude toward the university bureaucracy; liked the easy rapport she had with her students—“her children,” as she called them. He also liked her flirting. Much as he loved her, Katerina didn't have a seductive bone in her entire elegantly trim body. Phyllis was a walking embodiment of eroticism, squeezed into a small but lush package.
The light changed, but he didn't cross. He thought briefly of giving Phyllis a jaunty, deflecting response. Instead, he turned toward his friend and said, “Kat's left me.”
The woman hesitated a moment, then slid her arms around him and gave him a warm, full-body hug. Then she stood back, shook her mane of henna-tinted hair, flashed him a dazzling smile, and said, “Well now, this is my lucky day!”
Andrew laughed in spite of himself, and they crossed the street.
Phyllis slipped her arm in his and said, “How about we two go for a walk?”
“Sure,” Andrew replied, but without much enthusiasm.
She steered him east toward the river. They walked slowly, Phyllis, in her customary three-inch heels, gracefully picking her way along the uneven brick sidewalk. They'd reached Washington Square and were taking a turn around Independence Hall when she said, “You might as well hear this from me, ducks: not many people are going to be surprised by your news.” She hugged his arm.
“No, apparently I haven't been a particularly satisfactory husband. That's what Katerina says, anyway.”
“That's bullshit, for starters. For Christ's sake, Stratton, you're a first-class gent; and anyway, the affair's been going on for months. She hasn't exactly been discreet about it.”
Will North Page 4