The Blue Bath

by Mary Waters-Sayer

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Jacob

  acknowledgments

  Thanks are due first to my brilliant agent, Susan Golomb, for her faith and for her guidance, and to everyone at the Susan Golomb Agency and at Writers House—notably Krista Ingebretson, Soumeya Bendimerad, Julie Trelstad and Scott Cohen.

  Thanks to my terrific editor, Elizabeth Beier, and to the team at St. Martin’s Press, including Laura Clark, Katie Bassel, and Lauren Friedlander, as well as Nicole Williams and Anya Lichtenstein.

  I am enormously grateful to Jennifer duBois for her generous counsel, earnest encouragement, and for setting the bar impossibly high. Thank you to early readers, notably Adam Krause, Michelle Moulton Badger, and my fellow fledgling writers at Stanford. Thanks are also due to Chris Manby.

  I am grateful to London and Paris for the inspiration, to California for the aspiration, and to Massachusetts for the isolation—all of which proved necessary to this process.

  Special thanks to my family, whom I love dearly. Immeasurable love and gratitude to my mother, who taught me to recognize beauty, and to my father, an unabashed raconteur.

  To Nolan, who was learning to love books while I was learning to write one. You are my joy.

  And to Jacob, who believed even before I did. A truer North could not be found.

  prologue

  Entering the front hall, Kat saw it coming, but could not stop it. The swift and silent arc of the sledgehammer came to its own abrupt end as it smashed through the smooth plaster wall. She squeezed her eyes shut, momentarily stunned by the force and the sound of the impact. In the loud silence that followed, Kat peered through the dust swirling in the sunlight and stepped closer, her shoes crunching on bits of atomized plaster. She saw the adjoining room clearly through the sudden hole and noted with surprise that the wall was hollow. Between the thin layer of cream-colored plaster in each room was only narrow wooden lath, visible just inside the rough edges of the hole, and nothing. This was an old house. The wiring and plumbing had been reconfigured so many times that a bit of—what had the builder called it?—exploratory surgery was necessary to determine what was where inside the walls. Somehow she had expected it would be carried out more delicately. The word “surgery” had not conjured up a sledgehammer.

  Shouldering his hammer easily, the builder regarded her, eyes twinkling behind his safety goggles.

  “Takes you by surprise, doesn’t it, love? Something so solid as a wall.”

  She nodded, her heart beating quickly. She felt as if she had absorbed the force of the blow. Dust was in her eyes, making them itch. As the builder made his way up the stairs, Kat turned away, back into the large drawing room that spanned half the width and the entire depth of the building, and drifted to the large window facing the creamy white stucco-fronted houses that lined the wide street.

  It seemed she was seeing it all for the first time. Was it possible that she had never stood in this exact spot before? They had only just moved into the house when she had left for New York. Here, everything looked different. Standing in the darkness of the large room, far on the right side of the window with her shoulder pressed against the wall, Kat looked out at the pale silhouettes of the houses across the street, mirror images of her own. The trees were bare now, their gnarled fingers frozen in winter rigor. She shifted her gaze to the Greek embassy. Even in the murky early-morning darkness, its utilitarian brick face was a sharp contrast to the pallid confections lining the rest of the street. To its left was the back entrance to Holland Park. A small wooden door set in a whitewashed wall. Such an improbable gateway to what lay beyond it. So different from the main gates on Kensington High Street, twisted iron hung from twin brick pillars that offered visitors a greeting more befitting a royal park.

  She remembered when she had first entered the house, earlier that year. She had felt like a child walking through the large double doors, up the sweeping staircase and through the echoing rooms. And like a child, she had fallen in love with it. The bare cream walls, with their intricate moldings clinging fearlessly to the edges of the ceiling, fourteen feet in the air. The perfect weathered wood and smooth marble floors. It had seemed to her to be very romantic, all spirit and possibility, as are all things lying fallow. Coming home at night, Jonathan had taken to phoning her from the front door to find out where she was in the house. Not that either of them had been home much lately. Jonathan had left for Hong Kong the day before she had returned. It was his third trip in as many months to visit a large corporation, a sometime competitor, that had expressed interest in buying the company. It would have been a significant development except for the fact that it was almost an annual occurrence and had yet to come to any fruition.

  Since her return earlier this week, she had found a certain solace, a kind of symmetry between the bleak, frozen season and the events of the past few weeks. She knew that it would not last. That spring would come and breathe life back into the city, and back into her. Even now there were sometimes whole hours when she did not think about her mother. Not often, but there had been a few.

  Kat strained to hear something that might indicate where the builder was, this stranger in her house. She could hear muffled noises coming from the upper floors, but with more than a hundred years of history, the house had its own noises and she was only beginning to learn its language. Its sounds and its stillness. Its sighs and creaks. And anyway, it still echoed from lack of furniture and carpets.

  In truth, Will had quickly commandeered most of the house. He had taken to riding his scooter around the dining room, which held only their table and chairs, suddenly elfin in scale. More toys and scooters were stacked and parked in most corners, and the couch cushions spent more time arranged as a fort than as a couch. With no concerns about scratched paint or damaged upholstery, he had the run of the house.

  The sudden sound of the phone reverberated in the stillness, startling her. She answered it more to silence it than for any other reason.

  “Hello, beautiful.” Jonathan’s voice sounded almost as far away as he was.

  “What time is it there?” she wondered out loud.

  “It’s late. Or early. Can’t tell. How’s our boy? Off to Hampshire already?”

  “You know your parents. Crack of dawn.”

  “How are you holding up? Shall I come home?”

  It was a real offer, she knew, but she was already shaking her head. “That would be lovely. Not sure what good it would do, though. You need to be where you are now.”

  “You may be right. Kowloon gave us a letter of intent this morning. It looks like they’re serious this time.”

  “Now? With the stock price where it is?”

  As she said the words, she realized that she did not know where the stock price was. She had not looked at it for days.

  She barely recognized the company as it was today. One bright October morning two years ago, she and Jonathan had sat in the bankers’ offices in th
e City, watching numbers on the screen tracking, rising and then rising again, and she had understood that something was happening that would change them. Gone was the fast, action-driven, nimble band of colleagues. In its place was a large, proper public company. With each uptick, she had seen him move further away from what he was doing and closer to what he had done. She watched as the bankers’ deference increased in time with the upticks of the stock price. Thousands of employees in many countries worldwide, regulations, structure, politics, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. It is always easier to love something that you can hold in your hands, and the company had become too big and too complex to allow any one person that depth of understanding anymore, although Jonathan came close.

  “It’s the momentum. They’re afraid the deal with the Chinese is going to ramp sales more quickly than even we anticipated. They’re realizing that they need to move before we update guidance for the first quarter. And they are right.”

  She recognized the sharp, quick cadence. This was a language she knew, a world she understood. “I don’t know. An LOI is pretty meaningless. And the Chinese deal is hardly news. Why would they move now?”

  “Doesn’t matter why. So long as they’re willing to pay us what it’s worth.”

  “So what’s it worth?”

  “A thing is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay for it.”

  “So then you can make something more valuable simply by paying more for it than what it’s worth?”

  “Sure. Happens all the time.”

  She sighed, too tired to engage. “Okay. So what are they offering? Are they still pushing a stock swap?”

  He cut her off. “Kat … I’m not looking for your thoughts on valuation. We have a whole team of analysts working on that.” She heard the subtle emphasis on the word “analysts.” “I’m just looking for a little perspective.”

  The phone line crackled. Silence was hard to maintain over such a great distance. As if without the words, the connection would collapse under the weight of all that was between them.

  “What would I do if we sold it?” he asked.

  “Something else.”

  He laughed, the sound rough with lack of sleep. “It is that simple, isn’t it? But it’s quitting. I would be giving up my seat at the table. For what? Money?”

  She leaned against the icy glass and closed her eyes, letting him talk, listening to his voice in the darkness. This was what he wanted. What he needed. Somewhere in the waning blackness, the day stretched out before her. She had been up early to see Will off with Jonathan’s parents for a fortnight in the country. She had awakened suddenly well before dawn, and gone into his room, curling around his warm, still-sleeping body. Breathing in his powdery smell and feeling the rise and fall of his back against her chest, she had thought that maybe this was all there was.

  Unable to fall back to sleep, Kat had used this time to come up with several very creative and semiplausible reasons why Will could not go to the country. None of them had been quite plausible enough, though. She fought against her desire to keep him home with her. He was so looking forward to his trip to his grandparents’ house, an annual visit with his much-revered older cousins. She didn’t want to be selfish. And maybe she did need some time to deal with her grief. She didn’t want Will to be burdened with her pain. Although the possibility of her bundled up in a blanket, weeping, seemed equal parts unlikely and pointless.

  She had a photograph of Will taken moments after he was born. In it she was lying propped up in the hospital bed, holding him in her arms, and Jonathan was leaning in over her shoulder. In the weeks after they brought him home from the hospital, she would sometimes stare at the photo, waiting for emotion to overtake her the way everyone said it would. She knew that one day that photo would mean the world to her.

  Opening her eyes, she saw her mother’s face in the smooth pane of glass before her.

  “What is it like?” she asked.

  “Hong Kong?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He laughed softly and she heard the static on the line, reminding her of the distance between them.

  As Kat hung up the phone, she saw the builder move in the doorway. She was unsure how long he had been there. He looked smaller under the high ceilings. Seeing her look up, he pointed a thick finger at four large rectangles of fresh emulsion on the otherwise bare walls of the drawing room. The varying shades of delicate eggshell were difficult to distinguish in the wan early-morning light.

  “To give you a better idea of the colors. Should dry quick. Sorry for the smell.”

  Kat tipped her head back and breathed in deeply.

  “Don’t be. I love that smell.”

  chapter one

  Sometime after the arrival of the second builder and the ensuing chorus of intermittent hammering, Kat left the house and made her way through Holland Park, glad for the relative peace of its wooded paths. The tops of the trees strained to catch the low, rose-colored sun. It was well into January, with less than eight hours of daylight a day. It seemed impossible to believe that in just a few weeks the daffodils would bloom, nodding their hope-colored heads along the wide paths. It was all there underground, waiting to happen. She pulled her scarf more closely around her neck. In the winter, when it was too cold or wet to run outside, she ran at the gym just on the other side of the park.

  Years of distance running had taken its toll on her knees. These days she limited herself to four or five miles several times a week. She kept her time up, running about an eight-minute-mile pace, which meant that it was always over before she wanted it to be. On the days that she ran, she would pass the Greek embassy on her way home. Seated on a folding chair inside his small hut, the security guard would look up from his newspaper and smile at her, out of breath and covered in a combination of sweat and morning moisture, and unfailingly greet her with the same word. “Why?”

  Kat found solace in running. In the beginning of her mother’s illness, she had made deals with herself. If she ran for an extra mile in the morning, her mother’s white-cell count would increase. If she could cut two minutes off her usual time, this week’s tests would be negative. The thoughts had come to her unbidden, and she had recognized them as both pointless and childish, but once they had presented themselves, she could not bring herself to dismiss them. It had become a kind of active form of prayer.

  She set a challenging pace for herself on the treadmill and was about halfway through her run when she saw his face. He reentered her world just above the drinking fountain and to the left of the Pilates studio. She recognized him immediately. She might have gasped, she could not be certain, but the noise was lost in the din of the gym. His hair was darker and seemed somehow closer to his head, making his face appear larger. He seemed so near—or maybe that was just a result of seeing him on television. He was speaking, but she could not hear him. Stepping unsteadily onto the side of the treadmill, its belt still spinning, she plugged in her headphones and switched the audio channel to the BBC. She missed the question, asked by the reporter, but she caught the pause, always the pause for thought before the answer, which followed, delivered in a steady, unbroken stream.

  “I believe in the immediate, visceral reaction to art. Or to anything. I think it’s dangerous to subvert that.”

  His voice was surprisingly clear. Amid the newly unfamiliar surroundings of her daily life, the effect was the opposite of disorienting. She half heard the reporter again, her eyes remaining on his image now frozen in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

  “Before this beautiful, haunting collection of work came to light, the name Daniel Blake was little known outside a small corner of the art world. That looks set to change as an exhibition of his works opens to the public this Saturday at London’s Penfield Gallery. Blake is also in the running to do a series of paintings for Sir Richard Hawthorne’s new Tate Restaurant, a commission widely regarded as among the most prestigious in contemporary art today. The artist is here in London for this, his f
irst solo show.”

  And then he was gone. Replaced on the screen by the latest sports scores. Looking around, Kat was surprised to find all that remained. Registering her absence, the treadmill had come to a halt.

  The artist was here in London.

  * * *

  EVEN IN THIS house where she had spent so little time, Kat knew just where to look. On the top shelf in the corner of the second-floor library—lined with three walls of books, and furnished entirely with brown boxes of more books, stacked in various configurations in the room and in the hallway outside. Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. It was a French-edition paperback. There was a newer English translation here somewhere as well, but this was the one she was after. Still in her running clothes, she sank down against the wall by the window, letting the book fall open on her lap. She was oddly proud to see that it did not open automatically to the page she was seeking. She did not visit it often.

  Flipping to the back pages, she found what she was after. As her eyes fell on the endpaper, she savored the feeling in her chest—at once familiar and surprising—grateful as it took her breath once again. The sketch had been done quickly in pencil. Nothing more than a few lines and curves and some gentle shading defined the face—eyes closed and mouth relaxed, but with the unmistakable hint of a smile. Feeling the ache in the pit of her stomach, she closed her eyes. Not to block out the memories, but to conjure them. It was only in darkness that she could properly call up that time.

  Unwilling to postpone the inevitable, she had arrived early for her program in French literature at the Sorbonne. Four months early. There were blossoms on the trees and tourists in the streets. Her first impression of the city had been that it must always have been old. It seemed to have been born in that sweet state of decay. She found it so beautiful, so beguiling, that she had no initial desire to enter its museums, restaurants, galleries, shops. She was content to know it from the outside, to gaze on its face in all its pale pink perfection.