‘No,’ he said. ‘Only in hell.’
If only she would cry. He looked at her, half pitying, half disgusted. No one would ever call Di a Lady.
If only she would cry. No one would pity her otherwise.
No one would pity her at all.
She had dug deep for her pot of gold.
CHAPTER ONE
Picture: Simply the sea on a calm summer day, regarded from above, as if from a window. There is a pathway by the shore with a single mongrel dog trotting along and a sense of someone outside the frame, watching it.
Tiny, but atmospheric. Circa 1950.
The Beginning. This was how Thomas remembered it. The last decade of his life had begun with the night of the storm when he had encountered Di Quigly, the thief. The happiest phase of his seventy years was the last seven, after she came back.
If she comes back after her release, Thomas, you must on no account let her in, Raymond Forrest the lawyer said to his client on the phone. You are highly vulnerable, and yes, I have monitored her progress and investigated her past, but I don’t know what she is like.
Diana Quigly did come back to the house she had attempted to burgle two and a half years before. Inside prison, after two spells on suicide watch, she had stopped beating her head against doors, stabilised and counted not only the hours, but also the days. She did not go to the hostel towards which she was directed: lied that her uncle was expecting her and the lie was accepted. She was assessed as a wild animal tamed, personality disorders undiagnosed, no longer dangerous, perhaps savage when cornered, but safe to bet that her morbid, claustrophobic fear of incarceration would surely keep her on the right side of the law. She was highly literate for a thief as well as numerate and she had domestic skills that should qualify her for some sort of basic employment, such as stacking shelves.
Going back to the house of Thomas Porteous was as great a risk as getting in there in the first place and she was going to do it anyway. Di Quigly had nothing left but instinct and instinct drew her there. This town was her home; the beach was her domain.
To have called on Thomas Porteous after dark would have been rude and entirely against her strange code of manners, but as it was, it was a bright summer’s day, the sea as smooth as ruffled velvet and the pier baked in heat. She had once been brown as a nut and now she was as pale as snow and when the sun touched her arms, it burned. She wanted the sea, but whatever else she wanted she did not know. Instinct ruled, and all the same, she felt as awkward as a snail crawling out from under a rock even as she swung her arms, twisted and turned, jumped and ran, making herself breathless with space.
She was twenty years old, small, strong and virtually starving. She ate next to nothing, could vomit at the sight of a biscuit or a burger, the staples of prison diet. Everything was behind the eyes: she relied on memories of places she loved. She had no parameters, no code by which to live, only pictures in her mind and the vision of a house full of paintings.
Di knocked on the back door, accessed by wooden steps over the same steel shutters into the garage and cellar that no longer incorporated a garage. It was an unpropitious entrance for a house which had such a fine, rarely used entrance on the sea side. Thomas answered the summons with alacrity, then stood there, holding the door, not certain, blinking in the sun that hit the back of the house in the afternoon. His eyes cleared and he stood up straight, recognising her, and then his blue eyes twinkled in genuine if suspicious pleasure, turning to real, unfeigned, incautious pleasure. She noticed how straight-backed he was, standing with his hands on his hips, examining her while at the same time his white hair was standing on end and he was acting older than he was, pretending a sort of dishevelment. Looking as if he did not know the time of year it was, let alone the day; looking as if he didn’t expect her, while all the time, he had been waiting to see if she would come. It was as if they were both children and she had called round and asked him out to play, rather than he, the householder, greeting the thief who had tried to burgle him over two years before.
‘Is it today?’ he said. ‘What time do you call this? I was wondering if it really was today.’
She looked at her watch, the only thing of her personal possessions she had managed to preserve.
‘I think it’s today,’ she said, pretending to consider it. ‘It might not be, though. It might be tomorrow. It could be the middle of next week.’
He laughed.
‘This is Alice in Wonderland, where Alice meets the Mad Hatter, and he says, come in. So come in, please.’
‘Alice wasn’t so clever about time, either,’ she said.
His eyes twinkled, the joy of a teacher seeing an old pupil he had liked.
Come in, come in. I’ll make tea.
They were in the gallery room before she had time to think, as if he had been prepared for her and the kettle already boiled. There was a tray of china cups, a tarnished silver pot, sugar in a delicate bowl.
‘I expect you’ve come to see Madame de Belleroche. Have you come to see Madame de Belleroche? She’s been waiting for you, since ever she decided she belongs to you. It was you who saved her after all.’
He was gabbling a little, suspicion returning, the warning of his lawyer echoing in his ears. If she comes back, don’t let her in. She’s not a child.
But I am, Thomas had said.
She noticed the hesitation.
‘I haven’t come to take anything away,’ Di said, handling the cup with care. It felt so different to a plastic beaker. ‘I came to say I’m sorry I did it, and I came to say, thank you.’
He was prowling round the room with a teacup in his hand, stopped in surprise.
‘Now that really is rich,’ he said, ‘You thanking me. You shame me.’
‘I meant thank you for the books you sent me,’ she said, quietly.
‘I’m so pleased they arrived,’ he said, formally, before beginning to prowl again.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t keep them,’ she said. ‘No one keeps anything in prison. But I did read them. And I cut things out and put them on the wall.’
‘So at least you got to look at pictures.’
He looked at her closely, searching for signs of self-pity and resentment, finding none. She was too busy looking round, smiling at Madame de Belleroche, looking, looking, looking, with wide-eyed, hungry wonder.
‘Got a question for you,’ Thomas said, suddenly. ‘There’s this new painting my friend Saul found for me,’ he began, stopping short of it. ‘Well, old but new to me, and I’ve been longing to know your opinion. I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong.’
It was an oil painting in thick paint, showing a small child with tiny fists, sitting in an old, wooden highchair and banging the tray. The face was as angry as the fists and it was a powerful image from a distance, drawing her towards it with a shared joy in the wilfulness of the subject and the noise it made. Di put down the cup and moved towards it, noticing with something like disappointment that the closer she grew, the more lifeless it became. She touched the surface, puzzled by her own reaction, because against all expectation of this hectic, flushed, bumpy-looking baby face, the surface was smooth. She touched it again.
‘It’s flat,’ she said. ‘It shouldn’t be flat, should it? He used so much paint. I should be able to feel it. Touch it.’
He nodded agreement, suppressing his own excitement.
‘Yes, you should. And why do you say “he” for the artist? Why does it have to be a He?’
‘Because it usually was,’ she said, thinking aloud as she spoke. ‘When this was painted. Look at the chair. Look at the baby’s clothes. It’s a hundred years old, or thereabouts. Those days, lady artists didn’t paint babies in chairs, they were too busy feeding them.’
She stared, closely, almost myopically, touching the surface with the tips of her fingers. He looked down on the back of her head, noticing her thin hair, and then he grinned. My word, she’d got it, she’d got it in one. That painting was over-restored, relined, flattening the paint
to bland smoothness. He half knew it and she had seen what was wrong. He stepped back, close enough to tap her shoulder, keeping his distance, terribly shy and enormously pleased.
‘It’s still good, though,’ she said. ‘Still looks like an angry baby does. But it isn’t quite what he wanted to do, was it? He wanted the paint to stand up and cheer, not lie down and die. It’s sort of lost its own shadows.’
Thomas wanted to shout ‘hurrah!’ He noticed that her shoulders beneath the cotton coat were thin and sharp.
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘How thoughtless I am. What can I get you, Ms Quigly? The sun, the moon and the stars? The touch of the sea, salt on that pale skin of yours? A good meal? What do you want to do first? Go for a swim?’
She had paused then, confused and dumbfounded with choices. The thought of being in that vast, salt water beyond the window made her faint with longing, and yet she did not want to move, yet.
‘Can we look at some more paintings?’ she asked.
‘Let’s go out first,’ he said. ‘And look from the outside in. It’s a perfect day for a swim.’
Moving downstairs, Di noticed how he never closed the doors, how most of them would not shut properly anyway; how nothing had a lock except the door from the snug room to the cellar. She hated closed doors: she believed that if she was ever placed under lock and key again, she would die. She could not believe this was happening, and yet she knew it was, as natural as it was bizarre. But then, she had no idea of what normal was, nor did he. He led the way, whistling happily.
Outside the house, their footsteps seemed to take the same direction without any discussion as they moved along past the last of the big houses and away from the pier towards the quieter stretch of an already quiet beach where the shingle sloped out of sight of the path and the sea stood proud. Below the slope, the shore flattened out and at low tide, like now, sand peeked through an overcoat of shingle, shells and bleached relics of the sea. Wading into the water was automatic, as if they were pre-programmed to do just that, just now, both drawn to it, inexorably, obeying the call and the dictates of the day. There were few enough days as still and warm as this when the clarion call of the sea was irresistible to those who heard it.
She stripped off her jeans and ran in, the sound of the splash loud in her ears, the sensation one of burning cold, then fresh heat and freedom to scream. Thomas passed her at a fast crawl; she trod water and watched. He was a fine swimmer, as sleek and ageless in the water as a seal and she wanted to say: don’t go far, come back.
That was what he reminded her of; a seal in water, and a nimble, long-legged bird on land.
He threw a towel round her shoulders when they sat on the bank, he being careful to keep a distance from her and her shivering until the heat of the sun began to penetrate. Then she shrugged off the towel, wanting the sun on her skin, and he handed it back.
‘Keep it on, I would,’ he said, gently. ‘Keep wrapped up for now, or you’ll burn.’
The sea, and that single act of solicitude, made her want to weep, and she gripped the towel closer. He had skin like lovely old leather and even then, she wanted to touch it to see if it was real. She looked down at her own legs and began to struggle back into her jeans.
‘Milk bottle white, you are,’ he said. ‘Never seen such white pins. Perfect for an artist’s model. Luminous white.’
She expelled the air from her lungs in a big balloon of breath in a moment of happiness so unfamiliar it made her giddy. There were so many variations of white.
‘Could I be alabaster white? Chromium white? Titanium white? Or maybe something more like the colour of sand?’
‘So many kinds of white,’ he said. ‘Most of them toxic. Such a struggle to find a non-poisonous white. What was it like In There?’
‘Grey,’ she said. ‘Grey and beige. But I dreamt in colour. I dreamt of paintings and paint.’
‘I do that all the time,’ Thomas said. ‘I need the sea to distract me from it. Give me balance, perspective. Thank God for Nature.’
Di knew no God, but she was briefly in heaven.
‘Were you born here?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Me too.’
He already knew she was. Both of them born within the sound of the sea, albeit decades apart, but with the same response.
‘And your children?’
‘My daughters? No, they were born in London. Never took to the sea, even in a painting.’
‘Poor them,’ she said.
That subject closed itself. They drifted back along the beach, retreating higher as the tide came in, both of them with their eyes to the ground, picking things up as they went along, the way he did, most days. Feathers and shells, shells and feathers, nursed in the towel as the sun sank lower and the breeze and the shadow took away the danger from the sun. He noticed how carefully she selected: she was starving hungry but she still had time to choose. Only the best shape, the cleanest white, the least damaged razor shell, the perfect conch, the stone with the hole all the way through, as though she was arranging them into something in her mind: as if they already had another purpose other than to be where they were. The rejects were gently replaced on the ground, waiting for another day. Watching her concentration, he thought she had the instincts of a true Collector, a connoisseur with an innate respect for the perfect as well as that which was less. She found a piece of flint shaped like a bird. No man-made sculpture could rival such a thing. There was a waft of barbecue smoke from a long way away. Her stomach made an ominous growling sound, audible over all the rest, and she clutched her abdomen in apology.
‘Food,’ he said. ‘Food. I have food at home. I can grill some fish and bake some potatoes. Tomatoes.’
Her stomach went into spasm at the very thought of real food, but all the same, they forgot it and talked about paintings. Paintings on the walls, painting behind corners, paintings on the computer screen. Pictures which made her clap her hands. Photographs of children: she wanted to know about his children. Time passed. When they finally ate, she consumed it like a starving waif, and then she was violently sick.
Raymond Forrest phoned the next day.
‘So, did she arrive?’
‘Yes, and she’s still here. Asleep at the top of the house.’
‘Get her out of there. You old fool, Thomas.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘She can’t stay with you.’
‘Yes, I know.’
But the weather changed. Rain in torrents, thudding against windows for two days: the sort of rain that defied movement out of doors and made it easy to stay in. It was August, but all the same Thomas lit a fire in the gallery room. She kept protesting that she should go, but it was weak protest, from a weak body, and she would fall asleep at the drop of a hat.
He worked at the computer in the gallery room. It was still a source of amazement to him, that he could view and buy paintings from all over the world. She hovered, sometimes, watching. Do you write something every day? she asked.
Every day, sometimes all day. It’s a good thing to do. Here, try it.
She could use the keyboard, clumsily, then easily. Hers was such an open mind, there was nothing she could not learn. And when he was not looking, she talked to the paintings. My, but you’re a fine one, she said to the Portrait of a Boy on the Stairs. Don’t you love your own hair? He could tell that her hands itched to rearrange what she saw, make space for more; and he wished she would.
He was glad she had been so ill so soon and he thanked heaven for the rain. It gave him time to observe her and to acknowledge that she had not come back to blackmail him, although she still could. They never talked about the night of the storm; they talked about the house.
He found her in the big room, early on the morning of the fourth day, talking to Madame de Belleroche. Look, now, she said to the grand, kind lady in the hat whom she had just dusted with tender loving care. Do you think, Di said to her, that he lets me stay just to see if I’m going to pinch
anything? I hope not, but even so, I’d better go before I do. And what about his children? Why don’t his children want to come and see you, even if they don’t want to come and see him? Why don’t they? Or is it just me who’s the freak? Yes, I am a freak – bet you were, too, looking like that.
He loved the fact that she talked to the paintings, as if she knew, as he did, that they were alive. Thomas had so quickly grown accustomed to her presence in the house, moving about like quicksilver: it unnerved him how right it felt. As long as it rained, and as long as she was weak, she would stay, but he did not want her to stay for that reason. He wanted the child who talked to paintings, and he wanted her strong.
On this morning it was bright again and the outdoors beckoned. She was wearing the cotton coat she had carried with her when she first arrived and her little bag was by the door. His heart slowed to a standstill. Di sensed his presence, spoke over her shoulder.
‘My mother told me about the parties there used to be in this house. Parties for children, when it was a school, and then after that. Your father had parties for children. They were magic, she said.’
‘My father was a headmaster who believed in magic,’ Thomas said. ‘And that was a long time ago.’
‘You could do it again.’
The wonderful, glorious possibility of that, of filling this house with children, entered his mind for a minute, took hold and then began to fade.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
She shook her head. ‘Pity, Mr Porteous, Thomas. Perhaps it’s just me, but if I was magicked by this house and all the paintings in it, so would other kids, other people be. There’s nothing different about me. If I could have kept on coming to a place like this more often than the few times I did, I’d have known there was another world outside my bastard own. So, I just thought if more people could see all this, love all this, for free, there might be a few less thieves. Kids need magic. People need paintings, don’t they? Even if they don’t know they do, they do.’
He sat down, impossibly excited this time. How did she know what he had always wanted? She was frowning, looking like a monkey, frustrated by her own lack of coherence.
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