by Anna Kent
‘Hello, Abigail,’ she said, clasping me in her arms putting her cheek to mine so her huge turquoise earrings jostled against my skin. She smelled expensive. ‘Isn’t this a lovely area? I see why you like it here.’ She unwound her scarf and undid her coat. ‘And this gorgeous old house.’ She looked around the hall and I saw it through her eyes – it was impressive, the high ceiling with its intricate roses; the stained-glass flowers in the front door; the black-and-white geometric floor tiles; the carved woodwork of the bannister showing a little wear and tear from a century of use, but beautiful even under the dust. I watched her face. Did she feel the energy, too?
‘Thanks. I managed to persuade Rohan to buy it.’
‘He needed persuading?’ Francesca laughed.
‘He doesn’t like old houses.’ An awkward silence fell. Was I supposed just to lead her straight upstairs?
‘Can I get you anything?’ I asked. ‘Coffee? Water?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Wine? There’s one open.’
‘Not before lunchtime!’ she laughed, as if I were joking, so I turned and she followed me up the stairs. On the landing, I stopped. I’d arranged the paintings as I wanted them to be seen in the gallery: the young girl first, followed by the others. ‘You go ahead,’ I said, and I watched as she made her way up the steep attic stairs, then paused on the threshold with an audible gasp.
‘Oh my!’ Her hand covered her mouth. She moved deeper into the attic, her figure silhouetted in the light from the window, and I followed.
‘Oh my,’ she said again.
She backed across the attic to take in all the paintings at once, tilting her head and nodding as she looked. Then she scrutinized each one in detail, taking in the way the light rose and fell on each canvas.
‘A lifetime on canvas. Incredible,’ she murmured, lost in her own world while my nails made marks on my palms. ‘What happened? What happened to her?’ she murmured as she examined the later paintings. Eventually she stood up and turned to me.
‘Abigail, I wasn’t sure how you would translate from those… terrifying, almost post-apocalyptic landscapes to portraits, but these are… phenomenal. Really phenomenal.’ She chose her words carefully. I bowed my head.
‘But what’s happening? I see both love and hate. Love in the beauty of her features, and the care you’ve taken with the brushwork, but then – goodness me… I wouldn’t want to be her,’ Francesca said. ‘There’s a lot of negative emotion, too. As if you want to wipe this face from existence. And then this one.’ She looked at the baby. ‘Again, so completely different. So warm.’
‘This is my favourite,’ I said, not knowing that the words were going to come. I touched the baby’s face; stroked her cheeks, her rosebud lips. The face was bathed in such golden light I expected the canvas to be warm from the sun. ‘So much hope,’ I said. ‘So much promise. The world unfolding at her feet. Everything there for her to take. Who knows when we’re born how it’s going to end?’ I took another swig from my glass. ‘Who knows in life? If only we had the choice to be born, or not…’ I broke off because suddenly I was crying. I grabbed a tissue and blew my nose. ‘Sorry.’
Francesca touched my arm, her face creased with concern.
I steadied myself, sniffed and swallowed. ‘I’m fine.’
Francesca nodded and smoothed her trousers from where she’d been squatting down. ‘It must be emotional. I get that.’ Another squeeze of my arm. Thankfully not the bandaged one. ‘With work of this calibre,’ she continued, ‘I think we can do a launch specifically for your exhibition – invite the big guns. The media, buyers, some celebrities. I’m seeing champagne, canapés.’
‘Really?’ My voice was a squeak.
‘Yes.’ Francesca smiled. ‘This is really something. It’s really special. Way better than your last one, and you know how well that sold.’ She nodded. ‘I’d go as far as to say ground-breaking. I think the media will go crazy.’
‘Really?’ Again, the squeaky voice.
‘I have a potential buyer in mind, too,’ Francesca continued. ‘Someone I know who would be very interested. He likes this kind of “anarchy”. The destruction will appeal to him.’
Somehow, we ended up back downstairs. I wrote down the date Francesca wanted to have the paintings collected, then called Rohan to tell him the good news, my fingers skidding on the keys, my mood buoyed by Francesca and the wine.
‘Now you have professional validation,’ he said when I’d finished gabbling everything that Francesca had said. ‘Do you finally believe in yourself?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I finally do.’
Fifty-Two
With the paintings finished, I had time on my hands again. Grace was out at work every day and I rattled about the house trying to remember how I used to fill my days. I’d almost forgotten about the pet portraits – about how het up I used to get about doing them; how stressed. It all seemed a bit ridiculous now. I was a marathon runner who’d crossed the finish line with my new series. The pet portraits felt like the 25-metre race at junior school. Still, I hadn’t checked my website for ages. I called it up and clicked listlessly through the gallery that advertised the different styles I could produce, the prices and the submission procedure, but it was like looking at someone else’s work, someone else’s life, galaxies away. I closed my laptop and stared into space. All I could think about was Grace’s words: ‘Have you been to the grave?’
It had sounded ridiculous when she’d said it but, now I thought about it, why shouldn’t I go? The girl was buried right here in the churchyard that lay directly between the station and our house. And her parents were no longer around so who tended her grave? Her friends? What family? It had crossed my mind before, but to visit when I hadn’t known the girl had seemed ghoulish; macabre. So many people who lived in this house – in any old house – would have died – some in accidents – and most people didn’t seek out their final resting places, did they? Or was this different because she was young? Because it was a tragedy? I was sure I could feel her energy in the house. I pictured her here. Maybe I should go. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply and felt her smile, that dead girl. No one would know.
With an energy I hadn’t felt since I’d been painting, I grabbed my keys and coat and dashed out of the house. My steps hit the pavement briskly as I set off down the road like any purposeful commuter but slowed as I neared the churchyard. I never went to church. Did I have to ask permission, or did I just walk in? What would I say if anyone saw me? Feeling like a burglar, I unlatched the churchyard gate and stepped away from the noise of the street. I’d spent the past four years avoiding this place – refusing to take the shortcut – and now I was here through choice.
A narrow tarmac path led through well-tended gardens toward the church, each side of the path punctuated with gravestones, tombs and memorials that hunkered under towering yews and cedar trees. I knew she wouldn’t be here – just a glance told me that these graves dated farther back than ten years – but around the side of the church lay the more recent graves.
I tightened my scarf and, with my hands deep in my pockets, I made my way down the path, around the church and through another gate into another space, where the headstones here were cleaner, newer, better tended. A footpath had been carved through the grass by commuters taking the shortcut to the station and, at the far end, I could see the gap in the hedge they used to bypass the long walk down Albert Road. I stood for a moment to get my bearings, then stepped among the headstones, scouring the names and dates one by one until I found the cool grey curve and neat lettering of the one I was sure must be hers.
Face to face with the tombstone, I read the words. Dearly Beloved Daughter. Simple. Factual. Just the dates to jolt the heart; the short lifespan apparent only to those who stopped to notice. The grave looked untended, the weeds of the churchyard taking it over. I stood with my head bowed and thought about the remains of the girl who’d worn the dresses we’d found, the girl who’d
played with the toys – surely decomposed now, under my feet, and I felt tears pool. Why was life so cruel? So unfair? I bent and pulled a big weed from the edge of the grave. Then suddenly I knew what to do: there may be nothing I could do for her in life, but I could make her final resting place tidy.
With growing urgency, I pulled at the weeds that grew around the stone. Soil balled under my fingernails as I tugged the roots out of the ground, suddenly desperate to do something – anything – for the girl. On my knees, with the damp seeping through my jeans, I pulled and raked and tidied with fingers that reddened with cold until the area around the grave looked neat.
Loved.
Fifty-Three
Rohan had told me not to touch the paintings again; to leave them as Francesca had seen them.
‘Do something, do anything, do the gardening, take a sleeping tablet and go to bed, just don’t go up there,’ he’d said on what we both accepted would likely be our last phone call before he left New York for good. But the pictures were like a scab that had to be scratched – the fingers of my mind itching and rubbing at the thought of the portraits – and I couldn’t stop myself from going up to view them again.
I pushed open the attic door and breathed in the familiar smell of my hideaway: linseed oil and paints, turpentine, Liquin and, below that, the pine of the frames, the old wood of my easels, the scent of canvases, and the distinctive smell of the house itself; of hundred-year-old bricks that have baked in the sun and soaked up the rain; bricks that have heated and thawed and heated and thawed while sheltering those who lived within their walls; and finally the smell of the felt and rafters of the roof itself. And then, splayed across the attic, a nightmare on canvas, were the paintings.
The day had largely been sunny, but clouds were coming in now, shifting the light like a movie in fast-forward. As I stood at the door, a sunbeam fell on the fifth painting; on the suffocating, underwater image, illuminating it while leaving the others in shade. I swallowed, my hand on my throat, my chest tight, a diver run out of oxygen too deep to make it back up – always that struggle to breathe. Then the clouds moved and the painting faded, the gloss of its surface bouncing back the ambient light in a way that prevented me from seeing it properly and my breath returned to normal.
I slid down the wall till I was sitting on the floor, the rough rattan scratching my hands as I faced my paintings. As I drank them in, I felt again the emotion that had gone into each of them; yet, together, they were more than the sum of their parts – their impact as an entire collection unfamiliar to me. It was as if someone else had inflicted this orgy of horror onto Grace’s life. My body was empty; my soul used up and wrung-out like a holey old chamois.
Rain splattered against the window, a sudden round of gunfire, and downstairs the front door slammed, breaking my trance. Footsteps ran up the stairs. I scrambled to my feet, almost too slow: Grace’s head popped around the attic door, her cheeks flushed from the wind outside and her lips parted as she panted after the exertion of dashing up the stairs. She was still in her work clothes and she shoved a strand of hair out of her face.
‘Knock, knock!’ she called, but already she was peering past me, moving her neck like a meerkat and I was in front of her, my arms wide, sidestepping, trying to block her view. I was fast, but maybe not fast enough. Even as her mouth fell open and her skin drained of colour, I grabbed her shoulders and spun her around, pushing her so hard out of the door that she stumbled down the first few steps and landed hard on her backside.
I locked the attic door, my hands shaky, while she gathered herself and got to her feet, rubbing at her hip. I towered above her on the dark stairs, my heart thumping. Her face was a moon of white below me. How much had she seen?
‘I’ll just get changed.’ Grace turned abruptly, crossed the landing and shut the door with a click. I stumbled after her and lifted my hand to knock, wanting to follow her, wanting to ask her what she saw, wanting to explain, but my hand fell back down. What could I say to her?
I slumped onto the top step, my body scrunched like a child as I hugged my knees to my chest. How could I ever let her see the way I’d tortured and destroyed her in the portraits, suffocating her, strangling her, drowning her, pulling her flesh apart before extinguishing her? Aside from the first two and the last, these images were the antithesis to what she’d imagine. Worse, she’d see, right there in glorious colour, exactly how I felt about her. It was one thing for me to paint those images in private, but I don’t know what I’d imagined would happen when Grace finally saw the portraits – as she inevitably would – at the gallery, if not at home.
What had that website said about toxic friends? Prepare for retaliation.
I’d buried my head in the sand, losing myself in the creative process and ignoring the inevitable fallout that would follow. But of course, it was an issue. I stiffened, my hand reaching for my phone. I could phone Francesca and call off the exhibition; tell her I couldn’t go through with it. But even as the thought crystallized, I knew it wouldn’t work. She would argue with me; rope in Rohan. The pair of them would think I was having an ‘artistic wobble’ or a ‘moment’; they’d hustle around me, reassuring me how good I was.
But this wasn’t about my faith in myself. I knew those paintings were sensational.
Behind me, Grace’s door creaked as it swung slowly open. I closed my eyes and tensed, fully expecting her to strike me somehow; to smash me over the head, to kick me down the stairs, take out her anger on me. Behind me, I sensed her move across the landing towards me and I squeezed my knees tighter to my body, bracing for the impact. She stopped directly behind me and waited. Around us, the house watched.
The grandfather clock ticked, as it always had done, and the deep silence of the hall amplified the sound up the stairs, the seconds passing like gunshots. Then I heard the whisper of Grace’s clothes as she took a step, and my nostrils filled with the sickening scent of her perfume. Slowly, she sat down next to me on the top step. Her elbow brushed mine, raising goosebumps on my arm.
‘Your husband’s back tomorrow,’ she said, and I couldn’t breathe. ‘I don’t want to outstay my welcome.’
My heart thudded with each tick of the clock.
‘I’ve arranged some house viewings in Kent,’ she said slowly, as if savouring my discomfort. ‘And you’ve finished your paintings now. I’d like you to come down to help me look.’ Her words were bullets. ‘You’ll know all the best places.’
I swallowed. ‘It’s been years. It’ll all have changed.’
‘Those villages don’t change much.’ Grace gave a little laugh. ‘They’ve been the same for hundreds of years. Maybe we can do some sightseeing while we’re down there. Make a day of it. We could stop by the house where you grew up, if you like.’
‘My dad moved years ago.’
I felt Grace shrug. ‘But still. It’d be interesting to see. As we’ll be so close. So – you’ll come? Tomorrow?’
I closed my eyes against my knees, and squeezed them shut as if the force of my eyelids could squeeze her away, out of my life for good, but she carried on speaking, her voice sliding over me like those thick cobwebs that trail across your face, making you swat at yourself until every touch is gone. Around us, the house held its breath. Through the layers of time, the girl reached out, swirling around me, whispering truths through the ether that I never thought would be told.
‘Can you book a cab to take us down?’ Grace said, and the clock struck seven sombre notes that reverberated through the house.
Fifty-Four
We waited in silence for the taxi the following morning. I hadn’t eaten, my insides too fragile.
‘By the way,’ Grace said as she peered out of the window for the cab, ‘I did a bit of research and found out that the accident – you know…’ she nodded upstairs, as if the dead girl was up in her room, ‘happened quite close to the first property we’re seeing.’ She named a small village. ‘Do you know it? I think I remember it from my own holidays in
Kent. I thought we could take down one of her toys and lay it there. What do you think?’ She rummaged in her bag and pulled out the pink-and-white dog. ‘I just thought it might… mean something. I don’t know. Reunite her with it – not that she’s there. But put something right in the universe.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s better than chucking them in the bin, don’t you think?’
Before I had a chance to formulate a reply, she shoved the dog back in her bag and tapped her phone. ‘Anyway, the traffic’s clear apart from the Dartford Crossing. We should be there in a couple of hours, which is great as our first appointment’s at eleven thirty.’
‘There’s a weather warning for the South East. Did you see that?’ I said.
‘We’re not going all the way down to the coast. And, anyway, it’s been downgraded to yellow.’ Grace craned her head once more. ‘Right. Cab’s here.’
I climbed in and the driver headed toward the M25. It was true what Grace had said about the accident. I remembered the estate agent telling me that the girl had been on holiday when it happened. I remembered her mentioning Kent and wondering if I’d ever met her. As we turned onto Albert Road and made our way toward the M25, I put myself in the girl’s shoes: how would she have felt pulling away from the house in a car with her family at the start of the long summer holidays? Making this exact drive? I remembered from my own childhood that feeling of freedom and excitement that used to buzz in my stomach at the start of the holidays. Had it been the same for her?
Grace was right: the traffic was clear and, as we joined the motorway, she got a folder out of her bag.
‘I’ve made five appointments for today,’ she said, patting the folder. ‘Do you think that’s too many? I tried to space them out so we’ve got time to grab something to eat or get a coffee. I’m specifically looking for a two-bedroom place. Ideally a cottage. You know,’ she laughed, ‘so predictable, right? The chocolate-box house with the low ceilings, the fireplace and the roses in the summer, though I get that that might not happen. So today’s a bit of a mixed bag. Some old, some new. More new, to be honest. But this is my favourite.’ She held out a picture of a pale, stone-fronted cottage with smart white paintwork and vines twisting around the front door. ‘Have a look.’