'Thank you, I appreciate it.' She did too. He didn't seem the sort to apologize very often.
'You can do it now if you want to.'
'Your picture?' She hardly dared believe it.
However much she still wanted to be left alone with the book, this was an offer to be grabbed while it was on the table and as she looked at him, her body began to overrule her head. There seemed to be a small thunderstorm building in the room, an electric potential growing in the air between them.
'What shall I do? Shall I sit down?'
His eyes were on the book again and she wanted to separate him from it.
'No, let's do it in your room. It's the light.'
The truth was the light was fading fast, but he bought it.
'Tine,' he said, turning away, and she slipped the book under her sleeping bag before following him.
In his room, with the door closed, she tried to pose him but he was sitting at an angle and whenever she glanced towards him he turned his head further away. Those were the rules she would have to get used to but it was hard for her. Her eyes were the mouth that fed her soul. She was used to devouring the faces of those around her, searching for the way she would capture them in paint. This was not an option with Don. She wondered what it would be like to have him look at her with both eyes, full face.
'Was that mirror here when you came?' she asked, just to get him talking.
It was propped against the wall, the same mirror he had been looking in the day before, when she first arrived. Odd to think that was yesterday. She already felt she had been here for weeks.
'Yes, I use it to look at my hand.'
'Why?'
'You know what phantom pains are?'
'I think so. Pains you get in part of you that's missing.'
'It fools the brain, I look at my right hand and the mirror makes it look like my left hand. If I look hard enough the pains stop, because there's nothing wrong with my left hand. That's what I mean about self-portraits.'
'You said they were lies.'
They must be, mustn't they? Same thing. Nobody else sees you the way you are in the mirror. That's why some people never like their photographs, so why should I like any picture you draw of me? If it's the truth for you it will be a lie to me.'
'My paintings tell the truth. You'll see.'
She stood at her easel and felt pure excitement swelling in her. The picture was a transaction growing between them, one which gave her more power than she had so far wielded with him. 'Face me,' she said, then she touched him for the first time, there in the old tower room. She did it without thought, taking his shoulders with both hands and turning him towards her, but a shock ran through her as she felt the warm elastic give of his muscles through the overalls. She froze for a moment, both of them staring at her left hand as a pulse that could have been her or him or both of them ran through her fingers. In that moment, something that had only been a potential between them turned into a fact.
Letting go, she picked up the table light without taking her eyes off him, moved it to where it lit the side he wanted it to light and left the scarred cheek in dark shadow. Fog had slid up the Humber and brought a thick yellow twilight with it. One thing at a time, she thought. She wanted to move him again, to touch those wide shoulders and then take his head in both hands and tilt it just so. Was that what he wanted too? She needed him to look at her and whenever her eyes turned away, she could sense his gaze darting to her face, but if she looked back it would slide away again.
She was used to grappling with the gap between her eyes and whatever she was painting, used to the gap between her eyes and the brush she was holding, used to the further gap between the brush and the canvas. It was the uncertainty produced by all those gaps that made every painting an adventure. First she had to get him to look up at her for long enough to paint him at all.
Because she wanted to so badly, she took two steps towards him and reached out her hands to lift his head. She was on the same side as the light, the smooth side of his face.
'You have to look at me,' she said.
He moved his head just before her hands reached him, so they just brushed his chin. Electric touch. He didn't jump. He should have jumped. She needed to know that he was feeling this too. 'Come on,' she said, 'I need your full attention.'
He did, for all of five seconds, enough for three quick strokes of the pencil, then his chin slanted down again.
'Come on Don, for Christ's sake look at me.'
Four more strokes.
The devil got into her then. 'It's a bit warm in here, isn't it?' she suggested.
'Warm? No, it's halfway to freezing.'
'I'm warm,' she said. 'Now, let me see, what am I going to do about it?'
She was wearing a black silk shirt which had once been glamorous but now, like most of Amy's clothes, bore the marks of a hard life. She undid the top three buttons.
'That's better,' she said. 'Ah, that's just right. Keep looking. There, you can do it when you try.'
She rotated her shoulders a little, feeling the silk sliding on the tips of her nipples and the air, cold and damp with the fog, fingering its way around her breasts. It was having the right effect. Don was certainly looking at her now. The artist in her went on turning his face into a set of planes and proportions, into lines and highlights and shadows while the woman in her felt a warm and spreading desire pushing sensible considerations of risk further and further towards the fringes of her mind.
Her pencil raced around the page, choosing, modifying, defining, getting his face just as she wanted it. She drew as fast as she could but it was not long before his self-consciousness began to reassert itself and she lost the pose she needed as he let his face dip again.
It was all she could do not to scream at him. Another thirty seconds and she would have been there, with enough in her sketch pad to work from. She restrained herself. Instead, she fanned herself with her sketch pad, said, 'Phew, it really is hot, isn't it?', undid the last two buttons and let the silk shirt slip off on to the floor.
She stood in front of Don, wearing only a pair of jeans, as if that was the most normal thing in the world.
'Good,' she said. 'Now I seem to finally have your full attention. Just hold it there.'
The light was off to one side in between them and she moved backwards and forwards as she worked, darting into the glow of it to check an angle, then out into the darkness before he could respond. There was no need for worry. Don sat like a statue, staring at her with an expression of wonder on his face, following her every movement as that light splashed around the curving, moving contours of her body.
There came a moment when she knew that there was enough in her sketch pad and when she knew it wasn't a sketch that she wanted but a full portrait. It was time to turn to the palette, to find the human colours to clothe that framework. She closed the sketch pad with a snap and it brought him back from somewhere so that he frowned and seemed to move just a tiny distance further away from her.
'Don't move,' she said, reaching for paint and squeezing tubes on to her palette.
She looked hard at him. Black and white, she thought. Those are the dominants. His skin is pale and his hair is so black, shiny black as oiled coal. Whether his head dropped or not, the power of her position was too much. She had gone too far to stop now – could simply not imagine the anti-climax of dressing again. She put down the palette, undid the tight button of her jeans, zipped them open unnecessarily slowly and slid them down over her hips, all the way to the floor with a controlled, sensuous wriggle, then she kicked them out of the way and started to mix the paint again.
'What are you doing this for?' he said in a husky voice.
'For me,' she said, 'and for you. I'm bloody cold, though.' And that was when he shook his head as if to clear it, got to his feet and, as she dropped the palette on the floor, put his arms out to her. He didn't put them round her. Instead he stood like one amazed in front of her, feeling her neck and her shou
lders with his good right hand, then slowly tracing his fingers down to her breasts and running his hand around and down her back. As his hand reached her bottom and slipped between elastic and skin, she stepped in towards him, staring into his eyes, seeing those eyes so full of lust that they gave nothing else away. When, moments later, she was on top of him on the bed, straddling him and pumping with a desperate urgency as if she could save something by emptying him into her, only then did she see a man return into those eyes and as she was gazing at him, he reached down to the plug on the wall and turned out the light so that they lay together in the masking gloom of evening.
When it was time to talk, she looked down at the mirror leaning against the wall next to them. 'That's an antique,' she said. 'It's quite ancient, really.'
'Quite bloody battered, anyway,' he said. 'A mirror's a mirror. It's got a frame. It reflects. That's all it has to do. Like my mother said, you are what you are and the rest is gravy.'
'What does that mean?'
He shrugged. 'She used to say if you had to ask, it wasn't time for you to know. You got something going with Dennis?'
She hoped it was a joke, but his voice was sharp and it jarred through her.
'He's a nice old bloke. Funny.'
Don shrugged.
'I wouldn't say that. Don't trust him and don't listen to him.'
She sat up, but he traced his fingers down her spine and seemed to regret the harshness of his words.
He looked around the room. 'When I arrived, this room was completely full of crap. They'd shoved all kinds of stuff in here over the years. It was worse than yours.'
'Why didn't you take mine?'
He pointed with his good right hand at the end wall where there was a small square window. 'Light on two sides,' he said. 'I liked that. It was worth the effort.'
Amy wondered if he had wanted to put himself as far away as possible from the rest of them. 'When was that?' she said.
'Eight months ago. When the job started.' He seemed to read her mind. 'Before … before this happened. I've been off a lot lately.'
'They kept your room for you.'
'Nobody else wanted it. Too many spiders. Anyway, Mr Parrish was looking after my interests.'
'He seems a nice man.'
'Yes? You'd know, would you?'
Whoops, she thought. Careful.
'I only got the job because of him. My mother was his secretary for a long time, you see. He's pushed me along all the way. You know, school, college and that. That's how I know about this place. She was the one who typed up the journal for him.'
'Amelia's journal?'
He nodded.
It struck her that there had been a finality about the way he described his mother. 'Is she dead?'
'Ellen? No, why?'
'Just the way you were talking.'
'No, she's alive and kicking and still smoking forty a day.'
'But she's not working for Parrish any more?'
'That was back then. She treads a hard road, does my mother.'
'What does she do?'
'Runs a project.' Something had gone out of his voice, warning her not to go down this road.
'She lives in Hull?'
'Mum? Yes. She came up from London before I was born.'
Lying there against him, skin to skin, she suppressed an urge to nuzzle her head down into his neck, knowing it would be too intimate for the moment. How odd, she thought. I've just screwed a man I met yesterday and there's this weird etiquette about the way we have to lie here. I don't know any pans of him that I can snuggle up to. For a moment, the fog parted and a last ray of the setting sun reached through the window in the western wall to paint them both gold.
'Anyway, the point is she loved Amelia's book. She used to read me bits when she was typing in the evenings.'
She ran her fingers across his chest. It was smooth.
'So you've known about Amelia for ages.'
'Simply ages, darling.' Was he taking her off? Did she sound posh to him? Amy did not like sounding posh.
'Cut that out,' she said sharply and took her hand away.
'Look, when Parrish first hired me, it wasn't as a builder, right? I was going to do the historical stuff with him. I brushed up on the journal and all that. Then I – then I got hurt and I blew the chance. This was all there was to do when I got back here. He'd had to do the research himself. So what I want to know is, what have you found? If it's anything to do with the history of the house, you'd better give it to me.'
They all bloody wanted it. 'Surely I should give anything I find to Parrish, not you?'
'I know my stuff. I can tell you if it matters or not.'
'I haven't had a chance to look, but I really don't think it's anything at all.'
'Dennis doesn't seem to agree with you.'
'Dennis thought he sniffed a few quid, that's all.'
'That's what he's good at.' Don's voice hardened. 'In this house, Amy, you can't be on both sides, right?'
Even though she was still pressed close against him, even though the smallest of movements would have brought him into her again, she felt the distance between them widen dizzyingly.
'Why is that?' she said. 'I don't understand.'
'You don't need to. It's him or me, that's all. You can't believe in both of us. You have to choose.'
'Why?'
'I'm not going to tell you. Not now. If I do, it'll all be about facts and who did what, when. It'll be about who's got the best story. You make up your mind on who we are, not what we say. Can't you see what he's like? He's seen that book you found and he wants it. Doesn't that give you a clue? If you trust me, show it to me. If not, keep it to yourself. If that's the way you want it, so be it.'
Because that wasn't the way she wanted it, because she still thought she could find a way of accommodating the two men into different parts of her single universe, she got out of Don's bed, peered outside to check the coast was clear and went to fetch the book. Getting into bed again, adding a new layer to their intimacy, Amy ran her fingers over the pale grey cover. Its texture was somewhere between thick paper and cloth, stitched along the spine to the papers inside with two loops of dark thread.
He took it from her and opened it and she was pleased to see the care he took. 'It's her, isn't it?' he said. 'It's Amelia,' She could hear the excitement in his voice and she thought this might have the power to bring them even closer. 'Is it more of the journal? Can you read it?'
The first page began with a paragraph in thin strokes of faded ink, written in the writing which she already felt she knew well.
'Read it aloud, will you?' he said, and she did, hesitating over the harder parts, straining to make out the faint lettering.
'This is the day-book of Amelia Dahl, commenced in the year of our Lord 1662 and intended for her eyes only so that she entreats any other person who may come upon it to refrain from reading in it any further than these first words.'
She could have no more obeyed that ancient injunction than she could cease to breathe. 'What's a day-book?' she said, but Don just shook his head. Underneath that first paragraph there was a space, then in smaller, more crabbed writing, harder to read even than the dusty microfilm image from the library, the story began.
'January the First in the year of our Lord 1661/62, this being the second year of the reign of our King Charles who is restored to us. In this day-book, I will write my words in rough so that I may later write again those that are worthy of my husband's perusal in that excellent journal book which he has given me for that purpose. I must remember always his solemn instruction to choose my words carefully because once chosen, they remain upon the page until time erases them. It is a good time, being the start of our new life here in our new house at Paull Holme. The air here is clear and fine and there is no more smell of burning oil-cake. That is indeed a special joy.'
'It's what she really thought,' Don said. 'That's what it is. The journal's the prettied-up version, the one she wrote for her husb
and. This is the rough copy, the way she wrote it first-off. This is the real thing.'
Amy read on as Amelia covered the same, familiar ground that she had already read in the journal, the familiar Norwegian place-name, the fertility of Holderness and the fact that the local people had more to think about than the recent civil war. Then came an unfamiliar passage:
'I think we came it too high in Hull once it were known General Monk would cast his lot for the return of the King. My dear husband is one to settle old scores when the chance may arise and he perhaps was too fast to cry down those who had hounded him for a King's man in the darker days. Better then to be here in the quieter land beyond the hue and cry where we can
The page ended there.
'She cut some of that out when she wrote it in the other journal, didn't she? She thought better of letting her husband read that bit,' Amy said.
'He wouldn't have liked it.'
Don understood, she thought. Don was as excited as she was. They could share in this.
The bottom of the book had balled out into a swollen callus of paper. Amy tried to separate the first page so as to turn it over but she could feel the paper start to come to pieces as soon as she applied any pressure at all.
"We need a knife,' she said. 'Something with a really thin blade to separate them.'
'There's one in the bag.'
'Will we damage it?'
'Not if we're very, very careful.'
So, sealing their conspiracy, Don took the book from her, slipped the blade of the table knife carefully into the wad of paper and began to separate the pages that would tell them what had really happened at Paull Holme Manor.
ELEVEN
Tuesday, January 14th, 1662
The next morning, I started to paint Dahl and he sat before me, as unwilling a model as any I have ever had, as if I were forcing him to miss a tide.
'Sit like this,' I said and, not wanting to give away the fact that I knew he might understand my language a little better than he was letting on, I twisted him into shape with my hands until he made a moderately tolerable subject.
The Painter Page 12