Kat stood up and took several tentative steps toward Martin. “It was an accident,” she repeated.
Martin’s eyes traveled around the room, cataloguing the damage. “You should go.” His eyes were dull and dark in his face. He didn’t look at her, but moved farther into the studio, stepping over the upturned easel, squinting down at Daniel against the wall.
He was still talking. “Go now. I’ll take care of this.” She started to protest, but he interrupted. “He needs a doctor. Maybe an ambulance. I know you want to be here, but how would it look?” His words were conciliatory, but his voice was impatient and agitated.
Daniel was trying to hold his hand to his chest, but it kept falling toward his side, leaving rust-colored arcs on his shirt. It was not an unfamiliar sight. She could almost believe it was cast-off paint. The knot must have loosened. “You need to tighten it. He’s bleeding.” Kat took a step toward Daniel, but her foot slipped in a puddle of something on the floor. She caught herself on the edge of a table and regained her footing.
“Katherine!” Martin’s voice was harsh and close. She looked up to see he was beside her, between her and Daniel. There was rage in his eyes now. She moved to go around him. With a quickness that surprised her, his hand shot out and he grabbed her by the wrist, holding her firmly. Her heart was beating very quickly and she could feel her pulse compressed under his fingers. She could smell his breath, musty and unfamiliar, and pulled back from him, but he grabbed her other arm, shaking her roughly. She opened her mouth, but no words came. All the breath had gone out of her.
“Take your hands off her!” Daniel’s voice like thunder from behind them.
Martin froze, his hands unyielding, digging into her skin. Daniel was moving toward them. He stopped just before he reached them, his gaze fixed on Martin. After a moment, she saw something pass between them. Martin lifted his hands from her, nodded briefly, and stepped back. She started toward Daniel, but he held out a hand to stop her.
Around them everything was still. Even the shadows on the wall behind him were fixed in place. The only movement was Daniel’s gaze following Martin as he retreated behind her. He waited a beat before shifting his eyes back to her. There was something in his expression. Something that got her attention.
“It was never any less real, you know. It was never any less real because only we could see it.”
“I know.”
She met his eyes and for a brief moment there was nothing but the slender thread of their gazes. There was a lightness in his face, a peace that she had not seen there before. He smiled at her, a small one, but real.
“Go.” He said it softly, to her alone.
Behind her Martin opened the door. She kept her distance, stepping sideways around him into the hallway. Both men watched her leave, but her eyes remained on Daniel, arms now braced against a table. His face was ashen.
Just before the door swung closed she caught sight of the damaged painting where it had fallen. It wasn’t a large cut. Maybe six inches. But it was irrevocable. Terminal. The door closed in front of her.
She stood in the deserted hallway, waiting for her breathing to return to normal. As she turned to walk toward the lift, she thought she heard the chink of the dead bolt being slid into place.
She thought she might see the ambulance before she left, or hear it at least, but she didn’t. She drove aimlessly, following the flow of traffic through gray and indifferent midmorning streets and roundabouts. Daniel would be fine. Martin would see to that. She repeated it to herself. Gradually, her hands stopped shaking. The lingering odor of paint surrounded her. It was on her clothes. Small spots and streaks on the knees of her pants. Her wrists ached. When she looked down at them she saw there were red stains on the edge of her sleeve as well. These were not paint.
It was afternoon when she arrived home. She had a vague sense that she had forgotten something. The tall crystal vase stood empty on the side table. She hadn’t bought her lilies this week. Perhaps that was it. Jonathan must have noticed it, too. The doorbell rang later with a large bouquet of the blooms from him. Kat laid the flowers on the counter and untied the coarse brown cord wrapped tightly around their damp stems. As she separated them, their insistent perfume was already filling the air, reaching for the edges of the large room. She could hear the housekeeper moving about across the hall. The radio was on to the BBC and she listened to the news while filling the vase with water. Using a small pointed scissors, she cut the ends off each of the thick stems before arranging them one by one inside the tall, angular container.
She heard his name first. Suspended, without before or after. And immediately she was alert—listening to what followed it while desperately trying to claw back the words that had preceded it. For the first few moments, these fragments, conveyed in the crisp home-counties accent of the BBC newsreader, were vague enough for her to doubt.
“… the cause of a fire that broke out at his Shoreditch studio, destroying several adjacent studios, is under investigation.”
“… speculation that a number of recently painted canvases that had been cut out of their frames and stuffed into a closed rubbish bin…”
“… oxidized…”
“… combusted…”
“… killing the artist.”
He exited her life in the room where he had stood only days before, silhouetted against the garden lights. And like then, there was nothing for her to hold on to. She grasped at the vase and felt it fall heavily onto its side. The voice of the newsreader continued unabated, but she no longer heard him.
She looked down at the empty vase that lay before her, still whole. A thin thread of water flowing from it connected the table to the bare floor. She thought that it must be a mistake. Then she remembered the stale air. The fans had been switched off. The studio was filled with combustibles. Something had spilled. She had slipped on it. She thought about the paint-covered rags. All it would have taken was a single spark. As she watched, the line of water broke, falling into the small puddle at her feet, and she felt him leave her, taking with him everything that he had seen. As the room swam around her, her eyes fell on a stack of new school jumpers awaiting name tapes. What time was it? She had forgotten to collect Will at school.
Kat made her way through Kensington automatically, the earth no longer beneath her feet. A fine mist of rain was falling around her, obscuring the red brick buildings, blurring their hard edges so that they dissolved into pavement, melting into their own reflections on the slick streets. Cars sluiced by as she crossed the High Street, throwing off sprays of white noise. He was already gone. He had been gone for hours and she had been unaware of it.
As she walked on, the mist grew thicker, rising around her, as if all the rain that had ever fallen on the city, running off its rooftops, spilling into its streets and seeping into the ground, was issuing forth from it. Lifting itself out of the crevices between the stones, out from the dirt, out from the roots themselves, returning to the air in a great exhalation. The particles enveloped her, and she breathed them in. The mist tasted of him. Of sweet breath.
It seemed altogether such a soft thing, but the droplets burst like sparks in her eyes, blurring her vision and making her blink. Ahead of her streetlights flickered on. The mist trapping their light, compressing it into yellow halos hung just out of reach.
The mournful peal of the bells of Saint Mary Abbots reverberated around her. In that instant she was struck by the thought that the bells themselves no longer existed. That the act of ringing had caused them to break apart and all that remained was the sound itself. It was as if the city around her had been vaporized. Everything had come apart and the molecules were reeling around her, rearranging themselves into another world. A world without him.
By the time she arrived at the school there were no children or parents outside. She climbed the steep steps and stood for a moment, catching her breath before ringing the bell. Her hands were shaking.
The door buzzed open. Kat made her w
ay down the narrow corridor to the headmistress’s office, assaulted by sharp points of brightly colored paper bunting hung from the low ceiling. Empty of children, the school was eerily quiet. The headmistress, a soft, drowsy-eyed woman with silver hair, stood up behind her desk when Kat entered.
“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Garland. I…” Recognizing that an explanation was what was called for, Kat started speaking automatically before realizing that she couldn’t provide one. Instead she extended the apology, her words coming from some emergency reserve of politeness. “I do hope I haven’t put you out too much.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Bowen.” The room was dimly lit and the large window behind the desk heavily draped. Kat was vaguely aware of brightly colored children’s drawings on the walls. As Kat approached her, Miss Garland’s face registered concern. “Is everything quite all right?”
The answer she would have given did not come. Instead Kat nodded, reaching up to smooth her hair, damp and curling from the drizzle. A shroud of mist had settled on her skin.
“Won’t you sit a minute? I’ve just sent William off to the library to return some books.”
Kat sat in the proffered armchair as Miss Garland came out from behind her desk and settled herself in the large wingback chair opposite, ankles crossed demurely before her. She smiled briefly, reassuringly, faint flecks of pink lipstick visible on her front teeth. The chairs seemed unusually close to each other. Downy seedlings in plastic pots were arranged on a tray under a bright lamp on the table beside them. Tender, half-formed things bowing toward a false sun.
Miss Garland inclined her head forward, eyes gray and grave beneath heavy lids. “I had wanted to extend my condolences, Mrs. Bowen. We were all so very saddened to hear of your loss. Such a dreadful blow. To lose the person who knows you best. Who truly sees you for all that you are.” She shook her head sadly.
Kat sat speechless, her mouth open. How could she possibly know?
“Makes no difference what age one is. There can be no substitute for that kind of love.” She placed her small hand on Kat’s knee, patting it lightly. A conciliatory gesture of the type one might extend to a small child. “But of course, it’s never really lost. It’s the same love that we pass on to our own children.”
Her mother. Of course. Kat watched the drawings on the wall behind her soften and blur. When a neatly folded handkerchief appeared before her, she took it and pressed it into the corners of her eyes.
Miss Garland didn’t speak nor did she seem to expect her to do so and for that Kat was grateful. They sat in silence. A lingering odor of pine from recently removed Christmas decorations hung in the air. After a few minutes, Kat heard footsteps in the hall outside and raised her head. Miss Garland shifted in her seat and looked up.
“That’ll be William.” Miss Garland’s voice was a crisp whisper. “You’ll want to collect yourself now.”
Kat patted at her face with the handkerchief and cleared her throat. As Miss Garland stood, a small needlepoint cushion dropped forward from where it had been trapped behind her, gasping and swelling on the seat of the chair.
And then there was Will, blinking in the doorway, all his molecules miraculously in place, save for one long sock that had slipped down, exposing a pale pink knee.
* * *
THAT NIGHT SHE lay awake, listening to Jonathan’s steady breathing beside her. She imagined Daniel alone in his studio. After the doctor or the paramedics had left. After Martin had left. Saw the shape that his body made on the bed. She wondered if he could still smell her on the pillows.
For a moment she thought that she might have stayed with him. And for a moment, she is there. They lie skin-to-skin under the soft rectangles of sky so far out of reach above them. She can hear his heart beat and feel his breath in her hair. Would the fans have been on if she had been there? Would she have smelled smoke or fumes? For a moment she wondered, but she knew that ashes were not her fate.
She wondered if any of it had been real. If he had really returned. Or if he had been a ghost. Someone she had conjured. Someone only she could see. But, it was in the papers the following day.
The artist is the sole casualty of the fire, which destroyed his studio and several others, causing extensive damage to the rest of the building. Also lost were dozens of recently completed works and works in progress, notably a triptych intended for the Tate Restaurant. Initial investigation indicates the cause of the fire to have been accidental.
Sir Richard Hawthorne, who had recently selected Blake for the Tate commission, has made the following statement. “Daniel Blake’s death is a tragedy. One mourns not only the loss of the man, but of all that he had yet to create. It is the death of possibility.”
Blake’s longtime agent, Martin Whittaker, issued the following statement. “In the end, Daniel has become like his most famous subject—ageless. And while it is tragic that we have been robbed of seeing what more he would have given us, it is equally true that we will be spared knowing what time and age might have taken from him. He exists forever at the height of his artistic abilities and fame.”
This, then, was the genesis of the myth. This was where it began. She could hear Martin testing out the words, refining them, weighing them against his aims.
In the days that followed, Kat mourned under Jonathan’s watchful eye. She did so silently, ritualistically, behind an impassive face, surrounded by the things he left behind. Sky through a window. The smell of wet pavement. Dust swimming in the light. She walked Will to and from school, one hand in his, her other hand empty. She attended the start-of-term coffee morning for his class and made small talk with the other mothers, smiling over accounts of Christmas holidays and making the expected promises of play dates and evenings out. She confirmed the arrangements for an upcoming trip to Klosters with friends. In the evenings, she sewed name tapes into Will’s new school jumpers, feeling the prick of the needle and watching a bead of blood rise on her fingertip while outside the darkness licked at the glass.
His was an absence she had lived with for twenty years. The shape of it, the size of it hadn’t changed. But its permanence and its proximity had altered it. It was calcified now. And it was present. She felt the nearness of it. London was irrevocably without him in a way that it had never been before. His absence mingled with her daily life, sullying it, insinuating itself among the moments, expanding into the empty spaces and scraping its rough edges against the smooth surfaces of her days. It crouched, snarling, in corners and sprang from among the colors in the pages of Will’s storybooks. Hid behind closed doors and lurked in the shadows in the garden. Overtook her on the stairs and stared back at her from every window.
She pored over their time together. Trying to fix the fragments in her mind. She was the sole witness. Only she could see it now. Of course, there was another absence. No one saw her the way that he had. Without him, she disappeared. She began deliberately walking by the Greek embassy in the mornings when she knew the guard would be there, just to see him avoid her gaze and look away from her. To reassure herself that it had been real. That it had happened. That she had not dreamed it.
chapter eighteen
Kat had just put the kettle on when she heard the door chime. One sudden high note followed immediately by a longer, lower one that resonated pleasantly in the kitchen. She approached the door, wondering if the builders had returned.
The two men who stood in front of the door were not builders. It was the uniformed man whom she noticed first. The police were a familiar presence in their area of London. She and Will passed them on the street almost every day. Unlike police in other parts of the city, most of the officers she saw were charged with guarding Kensington Palace and the various embassies nearby. Armed with semiautomatic weapons slung low across their chests, they conveyed an unsettling combination of reassurance and fear.
“Katherine Lind?” the older, plain-clothed man inquired.
“Yes.”
“I’m Detective Chief Inspector Flood and this is
Sergeant Singh.”
“Yes?”
“We would like to ask you a few questions about Daniel Blake. May we come in?”
Turning, she saw Jonathan, frozen on the stairs above her. His shirt still open at the neck, one foot suspended in midair over the step below him. She saw his face change instantly as the uniformed officer entered the hall.
They sat in the drawing room, the kettle going cold in the kitchen. The detective’s blue bulk weighing down one end of the couch while she sat lightly on the other end. The uniformed sergeant stood in the doorway, his black stab vest visible underneath his open overcoat, hat held lightly under his arm. Jonathan had done up the buttons on his shirt and sat on the edge of an armchair across from the detective, the skin on his cheeks slightly raw from shaving.
“What is this about?” Jonathan’s voice was grave. Cautious.
“As I explained to Ms. Lind…”
“Mrs.”
“Mrs. Lind … we would like to ask her a few questions regarding Daniel Blake.”
“Who?”
“Daniel Blake. He was killed in a fire in Shoreditch last Thursday.” The detective swung his gaze to Kat, taking in her response to the news. “I don’t know if you had heard.”
Kat shifted on the couch and opened her mouth to speak without knowing exactly what she was going to say, but aware of an expectation that she say something. She was relieved when Jonathan stopped her, holding out his hand, palm toward her. His eyes remained on the detective.
“And this concerns my wife how?”
“We’re speaking to all the people with whom Mr. Blake was in contact in the days prior to his death. There was a photo taken of your wife with Mr. Blake shortly before his death.” Kat watched as the uniformed officer opened a file and produced a copy of the photo that had run in the magazine and extended it to Jonathan.
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