With that, Victoria hopped off the counter and went to the fridge. “Would you like anything else to eat? I don’t think one piece of toast is enough, really. You’re getting terribly skinny…”
“Mum, please.” Emily said, trying not to let exasperation creep into her voice, but unable to hide the fact that she was in no mood to discuss her weight or whether she was eating enough. Victoria at least had the good grace to look a little embarrassed.
“I’m sorry darling, I just worry. Maternal instinct, you’ll understand one day.”
“If I had a problem, I’d tell you,” Emily said, hating that she was lying but incapable of saying anything else. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
Victoria nodded with a little too much enthusiasm.
“Sit down then, Emily,” Victoria said. “We’ll talk. Please, we so rarely get to do this, after all.”
Emily nodded, thankful that her mother was willing to listen for once. She felt as though their mutual misunderstanding of each other had caused her mother to force a distance between them, acting more like a Stepford mother than one that she could talk to and form a real relationship with. She had not done much to heal that rift herself, Emily knew, and she often regretted it. She loved her mother, but it was a distant kind of love, not the sort of love she thought she should have, but then she didn’t know much about other women’s relationships with their mothers. Sometimes, though, Victoria would bring down her walls, as she was now, and Emily was thankful for those moments. They sat at the table together, but not before Emily fetched the paper from the counter. She put it down in front of them, so Volkov’s face was seemingly gazing up at them both.
“I was thinking,” Emily began. “I haven’t really done anything since I came back…”
“Nor do you have to,” Victoria said. “Not for now. Your father and I don’t expect you to earn your keep.”
“I know you don’t,” Emily said. “But I’m a grown woman and I’m living the life of a teenager. I’m going to lose it if I don’t do something.”
“While I’m glad to see you taking an interest, darling, what are you qualified to do?” Victoria said with typical bluntness. “You have a degree in Art.”
Emily closed her eyes at the barb. It was at moments like these where she felt assured in her suspicions that her parents, at least her mother, looked at her through eyes of disappointment. The words hurt nonetheless, cutting like a knife, and Emily felt furious bitterness rising in her throat. “Exactly. I have a degree in art because I’m an artist, mum. That’s what I’m qualified to do. It’s not a dirty word.”
Victoria rolled her eyes. “And what does that get you in the real world, Emily? You’ve never even had a part-time job before.”
“I want to sell my paintings,” Emily said angrily. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
Her mother seemed to stop and take notice for a second, but only a second, then the mask was back on and she was back to the interrogation.
“Sell them to whom exactly? Art shops? They’re not exactly in abundance around here.” A sudden look of fear crossed her face for a second. “Oh lord, you’re not thinking of selling them out on the street, are you?”
Emily scoffed at that; she had never told her mother that she’d already stooped so low. “That is so like you. You’re such a snob.”
“I am not!” Victoria bridled, eyes wide and indignant. “I’m just being practical, darling.”
“Practical or not isn’t the issue, we’re talking about what I want to do,” Emily said. “Mum, I want to try and sell the paintings to Mr Volkov.”
There was silence for a few moments, only the tick of the kitchen clock making any sound. Victoria was looking at her in a new way, not one of respect or disbelief, but of wonder. Emily couldn’t decipher what it might mean, but it was not a look she was accustomed to. In fact, it seemed strange to her.
“Interesting.” Victoria said, finally.
“Do you think it’s a bad idea?” Emily began to twist her fingers, a habit that often emerged when she was nervous or frustrated. In this case, it was both. Victoria rarely failed to deal in absolutes, instead preferring the simplicity of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The middle ground, she often said, only caused problems.
“Not necessarily,” said Victoria, her voice calm and even. “I just wonder if it wouldn’t be better for you to wait until…until we’ve all been formally introduced.”
“Why?” Emily asked, though knowing her mother she already knew what the answer would be.
“Then you might stand a better chance, darling,” Victoria said in an infuriatingly matter-of-fact way. “He might actually want to buy one once he knows who you are.”
Emily felt a sudden coldness sweep over her; the room tilted sickeningly. She had expected the answer and it had still affected her. “You don’t think I can do it on my own?”
“Of course I do, darling!” Victoria cried. She leaned over and tapped on Emily’s knuckles. “But do stop twisting your fingers like that, it’s unladylike.”
Emily sheepishly placed her hands in her lap, repressing the urge to tell Victoria that she didn’t care about being ladylike in the slightest. Instead, she took a deep breath, and counted to ten before speaking again. “Then why should I wait?”
Victoria sighed, clearly baffled that her daughter would be so ungrateful. “Because, darling, connections get you places. Like I said, it’s the real world, a world that, need I remind you, you are a part of.”
“But I want to do this on my own,” Emily said. “I don’t want him to buy my art because I’m a Van Buren. I want him to buy them because he thinks they’re worth buying.”
Victoria looked at her for a moment, exhaling loudly through her nose. “I need another cigarette after this.”
She reached for her bag and pulled out a pack. Emily watched in silence as she withdrew a cigarette and put it to her lips.
“I didn’t think it’d be so hard for you to talk to me,” she said, unable to prevent the venom from slipping into her voice.
Victoria finished lighting up and inhaled deeply, never taking her eyes off her daughter. When she next spoke, it was through a cloud of smoke.
“It’s not hard to talk to you, darling,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you about your future.”
“Why, because I don’t have one?” Emily asked quietly. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“No, Emily,” Victoria sighed, “I don’t think anything. I worry. I worry you’ll have a future that you don’t deserve.”
Emily looked down at Volkov’s photo. “I want to earn it myself. I want to…I want to be more than Christopher and Victoria Van Buren’s oddball daughter!”
“I don’t know why I’m arguing,” Victoria said, giving her head a little shake. A drop of ash fell on her skirt, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. “I was exactly the same when I was your age.”
“I’m not sure I do,” Emily said peevishly. “You’re successful.”
“Yes, darling, but I was only successful after I met your father.” Victoria said. “I didn’t know Christopher until I was twenty-seven years old. My mother thought I should be a secretary or a nurse, something ‘traditional.’”
“What did you want to do?” Emily asked, genuinely interested.
Victoria sighed again, but this time the sigh had a mournful air. It was a sigh that spoke of things beneath the surface. “It doesn’t matter now. The difference between you and me, Emily, is that you are talented and I am not.”
It was probably the first time that her mother had ever really, truly acknowledged her abilities as a painter. She didn’t feel warm or happy to hear it, though she had often wondered how it would feel.
“I didn’t know you thought I was talented,” Emily said.
“That doesn’t prevent the fact that talent will only get you so far,” Victoria said. “Talent doesn’t always pay the bills. It’s a cold fact of life.”
Emily pushed herself off the ta
ble and stood up. “Thanks for having so much confidence in me, mum, really.”
Victoria made an exasperated choking sound in the back of her throat, clearly holding back something she might later regret. The ash from her cigarette, by now burned down to a stub, fell onto the table. Victoria wiped at it ineffectually, leaving a sad grey smudge across the surface. “You’ll just do what you want anyway. You’ve always done what you wanted.”
“You’re right,” Emily said as she left the kitchen. “I will.”
***
Back in her room, Emily inspected herself in the mirror. She was pale, though a light spray of freckles across her nose would appear after exposure to the sun. As it turned out, Emily was not fond of the sun and actively avoided it most of the time, so no one really knew about them. In a way her freckles were like a secret, insignificant as it was, and she held that secret close to her. She had her mother’s hair: an explosion of auburn waves that ended a little way past her shoulders, and her eyes, light green and slightly too big for her face, were uncannily like the eyes of her father. Those were the only traits that she inherited from them. Her brother had more of the look of them really, a constant reminder that Emily was the black sheep and always would be. But then her brother rarely even came to England. He was hardly a presence in her life.
Still, in photographs she always looked a little out of place, like a changeling child, the differences and separations only subtle to the eye but enough to set her apart as ‘other’ in her own family. She had never particularly thought of herself as being beautiful, had never really cared, but right now she felt as plain and dull as a piece of paper.
The argument with Victoria had her with left a sour taste in her mouth and a knot in her stomach. She had felt like a disobedient teenager desperately trying to convince her mother to extend her curfew by an extra half an hour. She had felt like a joke, and now she was sulking in her room and doubting herself once again. In many ways, it was like she had never left. Over her shoulder, she caught a glimpse of the newspaper lying on the bed. She didn’t remember bringing it with her. In fact, she could have sworn that she left it on the kitchen table. Even from a distance, Volkov’s sharp and strange eyes reached her in the reflection, as if he were mocking her for her weakness. Emily grabbed the paper and stuffed it into the wastebasket with more vehemence than was necessary, finding a channel for her frustration. She looked at the clock; it was already after ten and she still hadn’t showered, still hadn’t done anything worth doing. She was twenty-five years old and still in her pyjamas, fighting with her mother as if she still had authority over her, while the world outside didn’t care if she was left behind. Emily hurried off to the bathroom, already sick to death of the day with the way things were going.
Under the hot stream of water, Emily could finally think straight and find herself again. Her muscles relaxed, slowly and deliciously, and she closed her eyes in pleasure. All the sick, cramping feelings of frustration and anger in her gut were washed away with the water. After a few moments daydreaming, enjoying the feel of the water too much, Emily felt a sudden and very peculiar stinging sensation in her left hand. She shook it absent-mindedly, thinking little of it, but the ache did not subside. Instead, it was growing, moving past irritation and into genuine pain. It didn’t feel like a cramp, or one of those random pains you sometimes get, but like a cut or a particularly vicious scrape. When she opened her eyes and looked down to where her arm hung at her side, she saw drops of ruby red blood seeping from her fingers and to the floor, turning the water a thin, pinkish-red colour as it swirled into the plughole and down the pipes.
“Shit,” Emily hissed. Looking at her hand, she saw a long, thin slice in her flesh blooming along the palm. The water washed away the blood and stung the skin cruelly, but it continued to bubble up and out of her, sliced flesh gaping like a mouth. Her hand was no longer stinging, but burning. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Emily lurched out of shower, not caring that she was still soaking wet. She pulled desperately at the roll with damp and useless fingers, gathered up a ream of toilet paper and pressed it tightly to her hand, holding it down as hard as she could. She could feel the blood pulsing close to the surface of the skin, making it throb almost unbearably. It hurt so much that she might have smashed her hand with a hammer or trapped it in a doorframe. Knowing that her mother kept some medical supplies in the bathroom cabinet, Emily was thankful to find a few old bandages and sticking plasters behind one of Victoria’s seemingly endless jars of anti-ageing cream. Once the bleeding had stopped she washed the cut fastidiously, taking care to sterilise it as best as she could. It covered the whole of her palm, from the base of her thumb to that of her little finger. The flesh was white, puckered and angry-looking, starved for blood thanks to the pressure she had applied. She touched it gingerly and found that the skin around it was numb; hopefully the pain would begin to fade soon, once she was over the initial shock. How on earth had she hurt herself so severely without noticing? Emily didn’t even think there was anything in her vicinity that she could have cut herself on to begin with; the whole situation was completely absurd. It could have been a paper cut, perhaps, but it didn’t look as clean and simple as that. It looked like she had been messily sliced open with a knife. Emily dressed the wound clumsily, wrapping bandages around her hand until the offending injury was no longer visible. Thank God, she thought, it wasn’t the hand that she painted with.
Emily went back to her room with a towel wrapped around her chest, droplets of water still clinging to the ends of her wet curls. As she walked, she kept her fist clenched as if trying to keep the mark a secret even to herself. When she was back in her room, she looked around carefully, taking in the shrine to the adolescence that she thought she had left behind. The off-white walls had been covered in her favourite reprints, postcards, letters from friends, random mementos from her old, younger life. She had even pinned up a silly little back-and-forth note between herself and a friend from middle school, debating on the best-looking boys in their classes. Emily couldn’t remember why it had been deemed worthy enough for the wall, but it had probably made complete sense at the time. A lot of trivial things are important at some point in most people’s lives, and it was usually when they were teenagers.
The wall behind her bed, however, had been left unadorned in the fashion of the others. Instead, Emily had spent hours and hours decorating it with her own brush and paint, creating a mural. To her the wall was the perfect canvas and finally, after much begging and pleading, her parents had given her permission to do with it as she pleased. With only her brush and her imagination, she created a world that lay just beyond her bed, a world that was just for herself. She had been a dreamy youth, fantasising about sleeping beneath a canopy of stars, where she would rise to join the fairy revels under the hill and dance until the sun rose, and she created it all through the course of her teenage years. There wasn’t a single patch of the original paint to be seen on that wall. It was the only part of the room she felt any true connection with now.
Emily leant against the window frame and looked out into the grey landscape. She could see the Fairbanks house, sitting upon its hill with the waves crashing up the cliffs, and her mind turned again to the man that now inhabited that house. She recalled his eyes staring out from the page, the eyes that challenged her, beckoned her, and was slowly filled with resolve.
“I’m coming,” she said. Her words hung in the air for a second before fading into silence. For a moment, she wondered if he could hear her.
3
There was a strong breeze out, one that only intensified the further Emily got up the hill. She had her portfolio bundled up under her arm and was beginning to wish that she had brought along a bag to keep it in; the package kept slipping out from under her armpit and her fingers had gone numb from trying to keep it in her grip. Her gloves were thin and useless against the bitter wind that continually raged in from the sea. She desperately hoped that Volkov would be home and open to
visitors. In the week that he had been here, Emily hadn’t seen a single person go up to the house other than her mother, welcome basket in hand, and her father on mayoral duties of course. It seemed like Mr Volkov would soon be very well-acquainted with the Van Burens if no one else. Emily felt a premature pang of sympathy for him.
The house loomed above her, growing larger as she approached. She sometimes forgot how imposing it could be up close. This was the first time she had been back to the house since her family’s last dinner with Hugo, and that was years ago now, right before she left for college. At that point she was used to it, even strangely fond of it, but for her peers it was a completely different story. At school they irritated her by asking if she’d seen any ghosts lurking in the corridors, and it was clear that most of them found the place to be creepy and old fashioned. Her best friend, a girl named Simone Dawson, had said that it was a wonder Hugo didn’t have a secret, insane wife shackled up in the attic. Emily hadn’t seen Simone or the others for a long time, having gone their separate ways as young friends often do. She didn’t even know if Simone was still living here, if she was married, anything, and she was alarmed to realise that she hadn’t even thought about her until this very moment.
Her feet crunched along the gravel drive, the wind still howling in her stinging ears; as she approached the door, she took notice of the parked Bentley with interest. Her mother and father had a fondness for old cars themselves, the current model being a vintage Rolls Royce, and she foresaw it as a talking point at future dinners. Stopping to catch her breath and hopefully regain some composure before finally knocking on the door, she turned for a moment to look at the view. The misery of the day had rendered the landscape violent and strange. It barely looked like the unremarkable seaside town she had grown up in and sought to escape for that same unremarkable-ness. The grey sea was choppy and dangerous in the vicious winds, the waves crashing up the cliffs higher and higher with each surge. From where she stood, it looked strangely menacing. The clouds overhead were swollen with rain, their usual whiteness now a darkly bruised purple in the deepening light of the day. There was a storm coming.
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