Painting any picture is about gradually eliminating all other possibilities. The blank canvas, or in this damned case, the dark board, held infinite choice. The first mark of paint diminished those choices a little and every subsequent mark took one down a narrowing funnel of decisions to the point where to carry on would merely cloud the issue. All right, you could always overpaint and for the sake of attempting that glimpse of her sexuality, I would certainly do so once at least, but this was not a two-month painting or even a one-month painting. Marvell was ahead of me in the competition already and time was short. This would be a right-first-time painting and it would be more than that. I knew I would not be happy unless the picture that emerged from the next few frantic days was the best I had ever done.
It would have to be different from all that had gone before it.
I walked back to Paull Holme in shoes that squished on my feet at each step, wondering whether this whole contest might not just be a camouflage for an affair already in progress between Amelia and Marvell. It takes something for a woman to attend an assignation in a graveyard at night. I felt the poem in my pocket and fretted on the meaning of 'hadwyburt' and how I might safely discover it. Arriving at the house, I climbed the steep stair to my tower room and opened its door to find it ablaze with candlesticks everywhere, as bnght as day. Amelia stood up from where she had been sitting on my bed and said, 'Is this bright enough for you to work?' Then she reached behind her, unclasped the cotton gown which was all she wore and let it drop to the floor, a goddess in the candlelight.
TWENTY-SIX
Saturday, April 14th, 2001
There had been a moment on the tower's dark landing when they might have gone in through the same bedroom door, but it was past before either of them could overcome the uncertainty and they went their separate ways to their separate beds. In the night, it was Dennis who came to Amy, walking into her dreams with a tray of tea in his hands and a rictus grin on his face, then falling apart in two halves as he laid it down. She reared up out of sleep in her cold bed in her cold room, sobbing, then lay back on the pillow and let quiet tears flow, crying silently as she had not cried since childhood. Afterwards, when the salt exhaustion of her tears dumped her back into sleep, kinder variations of Dennis continued to keep her company and when she woke up in the early morning, she was fooled for a moment into believing that his death had also been part of the dream.
She left her bed as if the dreams and the sorrow were a snake coiled on her mattress and, convinced that the world should look significantly different after all that had happened, she went to the window and looked out into the faint dawn light. Below and left, amongst the huts, bright tape around the saw bench caught her eye and she saw the man standing by it, staring at it.
Don.
He stood still, looking hard at the place of Dennis's death, mercifully indistinct in the dawn distance. Watching him, she felt a longing, a need to go straight down there with open arms and lead him away from the savage place where he had cradled his accuser. Then she remembered once again that she had promised Dennis she would read Vin's account, Vin's missing account. Betraying thoughts slipped into her mind despite herself, each one pulling another after it. Don and Dennis, Don and Vin. Jealousy and saws.
'Oh, come on,' she said to herself out loud. 'Forget it. That's not what happened.' But it wouldn't go completely away, however hard she wished it.
She stared at Don then, looking for an omen. If he turned away before she could count to ten all would be well. At seven she slowed down her count. She reached twelve before he turned but another sign came, so unexpected that she chose to regard it as a superior omen to her count. He dropped his head as if in prayer, crossed himself and turned to walk back to the house. Astonished by the gesture, she took it as proof that he was grieving for Dennis.
There was no work that day, 'Don't think it's a bloody holiday,' said the Hawk as he paced from room to room, face dark with fury. 'I'm not bloody paying you. Ask the tossers out there if you want your money.' The tossers out there were two tough women from Health and Safety who had shut down the site until some breaches of the regulations were set right.
Amy sat in her room, trying to work on her portrait of Don. She was sketching the outline of his face on to the canvas before she began to paint but it was proving hard. Somewhere behind the image, she kept discovering an unsettling ambiguity. Full-face, he always looked like a 'wanted' poster. She tried the half profile favouring his undamaged cheek and it reeked of compromise. The scar would have to be within the focus of the picture but, oppressed by the problems it raised, she left it to last and worked on his forehead, eyes and nose instead. In outline, without colour and highlights, she found she was still only able to draw eyes which frightened her, blank eyes, eyes which fuelled her doubts.
Early in the afternoon, WPC Percival knocked at her door again.
'Miss Dale?'
'Hello.'
'I see you're drawing Mr Gilby again.' She was looking at the easel.
'Oh, yes I am. He's not an easy subject.'
'A bit of a hero, I understand.'
'That's right.'
'You asked me a question last time we met,' said the policewoman. Amy noticed how tired she looked.
'Did I?' She couldn't remember asking any questions.
'It was one I couldn't answer, and I shouldn't be answering it now.'
Belatedly, Amy got it. Dennis's criminal record. 'Don't,' she said. 'I've changed my mind, I think I'd rather not know.' Whatever Dennis might have done, she knew she would rather be able to dismiss it as youthful error, paid for in full. It would be harder to know the facts.
The other woman raised her eyebrows. 'Really? I only wanted to say you didn't need to worry. He had a drunk and disorderly when he was nineteen and that was it.'
Around teatime, Don knocked on the door and brought in a tray of sandwiches and beer.
'I thought you might be hungry,' he said.
Amy shrugged, staring at him.
'Why did you tell me Dennis had a record?' she demanded.
'That's what I heard.'
'Who from?'
'I don't know. One of the lads.'
'Well, just so you know, he didn't. Come to that, why did you tell the police Dennis was showing off to me?'
He didn't try to deny it. 'Because I think he was,' he said.
'Because he fancied me?'
'Yeah, maybe. Whatever.'
'Don't be so casual, Don. It's crap. Dennis was just a nice old man and we had some good jokes together, that's all.'
'If you say so.'
'I do say so.'
'All right,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I suppose I got it all a bit out of proportion. Let's not row over the poor old sod.' He looked at her and smiled. For a moment it turned the scar into something nearer a laughter line. His smile exorcized all the ghosts of doubt and fear inside her and it melted her.
'I'm sorry too,' she said. 'I had a horrible night.'
'I know. So did I.' He came to her and kissed her gently on the forehead. 'Have a sandwich.'
'Thanks,' she said, and reached out to take one, then her hand stopped in mid-air. 'The tray,' she said.
'Yeah?'
'That's Dennis's.'
Don shrugged. 'It's a tray, that's all.'
'You took it from Dennis's room?'
'It was lying around. I think it was in the kitchen. He must have left it there. I didn't know it was his.'
Amy looked at the tray wanting to believe him, seeing its age and remembering that Dennis had been pleased with his purloined antique. She wanted to believe Don, unable to bear the thought that he might have raided a dead man's room.
'Do you want some escapism?' he asked. 'We could read some more of the day-book.'
Escapism was exactly what she wanted. 'Yes,' she said, 'why not? But you have to read it to me for a change.'
'Why's that?'
'Because we're going to do it in your room and I'm going to be painting yo
u while you do it.'
'I can't read her writing, you know that.'
'But you can read the journal, can't you? The one Ellen typed out?'
'All right. Where is it?'
'I've got it in my bag.'
Parrish had lent it to them as he had promised. It was another exercise book, matching the one he had first lent to Amy. The same typed pages were stuck into it but there were many more of them so that the whole book bulged with the extra load it carried.
Another sea fog had rolled in up the Humber on a wisp of east wind. Somewhere out on the water a steel cow was bellowing for its lost calf. The fog drifted in through gaps in the tower's windows and made Amy shiver. It coalesced into a misty rain which might have been sent to wash away the residue of Dennis's death.
In Don's room, she set the table light carefully to make useful shadows and, by its light, he read slowly and carefully.
'All right. She says: I will confide in this my most private journal which is not to be read by any other but me, that it is only in the cause of obeying the express directions of my husband that I continue to endure the indignities forced upon me by this Dutch ape. He has once again insisted that the sketches for this day's painting must be made in his midden of a chamber where the stink of him lies thick in the air. What's a midden?'
'It's a farmer's dung-heap, isn't it?'
'She really doesn't like him, does she?'
'That's what she says. Go on. Don't stop there.' Amy couldn't get it, couldn't find the balance of colour, light and shadow to make the scar work as she wanted.
'Okay. The stink of him lies thick in the air. The reading room wherein I have sat for the painting thus far is a fair room where the servants may pass to and fro and have some knowledge of what may come about within. This vile room is far from aid were aid to be required. The limner insists that the men who fix the panelling in the reading room do prevent and interfere with our business there and for the matter of the sketching, this room wherein he resides has a quality which suits his task best but I am not fond of this tower which is not a gracious place for people to inhabit and …'
Amy stopped drawing. The tower? This is all happening in the tower for God's sake. He's got her up in his room and it's in the tower. It's this room, Don. She's talking about this room' She felt her scalp prickling. There was a foghorn moan from the river.
'Not necessarily. There are three floors and there's two rooms on this floor, for a start.'
'No. Listen, that's not right. There are no windows lower down, just slits. This is the only floor with light coming in.'
'It is now. Remember, there were two old towers then, weren't there? Not just this one. Mr Parrish says they built the new part of the house between the towers. All right, the other one fell down, but when this was written they were both standing. How do you know it wasn't that one?'
'It just wasn't, Don, believe me.' She had never been so certain of anything. 'I'm a painter, too, I know. The other tower would have got the wrong light. This is the one. This one gets the light you want.'
'The windows could have been north, south or east in that tower, you don't know.'
'He was drawing her in this room, right here, where I'm painting you. It had to be here because he wanted the light,' she insisted.
'Amy, come on. The light's got nothing to do with it. It wasn't because of the light that he had her up in his room. He was after her, wasn't he? That's why he wanted her out of the way of the servants. He wanted to have his wicked way with her.'
'All right, maybe that was what it was. It was here though, I just know it.' She knew it the same way she knew the nature of the prize Amelia had offered her two rival suitors. 'Either way, think about it, Don. Rembrandt was here, in this room, with Amelia.'
'You think.'
'I know.'
'What did you say to the police, Amy?'
She took advantage of the lift in his head to sketch rapidly, trying to capture the rare moment of his keen, direct look, before the meaning of his question hit her.
'Why do you ask?'
'Fair's fair. You've been giving me the third degree.'
'Nothing. I told them he wasn't after me. I said he was showing off to everybody, not just me.'
'Was that all?'
'Yes.'
She could have challenged him, demanded to know what he meant but she was trying to paint his eyes and once again, what she saw in those eyes was not the Don she wanted to see.
Before either of them could say anything else and to Amy's relief, someone shouted for them. She followed Don out of the room and found Sandy standing peering through the gap in the wall.
'We're having a bit of a drink,' he said. 'A wake, you might say. Down the pub. Leaving in ten minutes.'
'I'll pass on that one,' Don said.
'No you won't, mate,' said Sandy firmly. 'Did I give the impression it was voluntary?'
It was a cheerless evening. Some of them did their best to tell Dennis's jokes but nobody could do it the same way he could. Amy, stuck at the crowded pub table a long way from Don, watched him when possible, seeing him reply in monosyllables whenever someone tried to draw him in. She did her best for a couple of hours as darkness settled around the pub and seeped in around the door. When she returned from a trip to the loo, she saw that Don had gone.
'Coming into town, love?' asked Tel. 'We're taking Gengko for a tandoori.'
'I'll pass on that, thanks,' she said.
'Go on. Go and find him. Someone's got to get that guy straightened out,' he said.
'That might be beyond me.'
'There had been a brief downpour while they were inside, turning the road into a black mirror of the pub lights, but with a final flurry of drizzle, the rain blew away as she stepped outside and she went to stand on the sea wall, That first day she had seen this place, brought here by Dennis, seemed impossibly long ago. What had happened to her since then? Where had her independence gone, her control over her own life?
Looking up at the sky without any intention for once of seeking an omen, one came despite that. Raising her head to look at the high moon, she saw in the direction of the river mouth that the rain and the bright moonlight had combined to make a great arch in the sky, glistening in graduated bands of silver-grey, a rainbow of the night sky with one end, she judged, meeting the earth on the rise which marked Paull Holme Manor. It shimmered there in the sky for a few more seconds, then faded like a beautiful dream as the rain-spray in the air drifted onwards out of the moon's light.
I'll never ask for another sign, she said to herself, not if this one tells the truth. What was that truth? If gold was buried at the foot of the daytime rainbow, then surely what lay at the end of this night-time wonder must be even better. Wondering, she watched lights flashing on the Humber buoys and listened to the sounds of the ships out on the water, then she turned her back on all that and started up the road, eastward to the old house, going back to face some music to which she no longer knew the tune. Weary through and through, what she most wanted to do was to put it all out of her mind and curl up with Amelia's journal, to be Amelia for a little while and not herself. She wanted to find out what happened next in someone else's life, not her own. She wanted to prove to herself that Amelia thought better of the painter than she dared say in words her husband might read.
What happened next in her own life was that, walking down that dark road, a greater darkness loomed up to her right, with moonlight catching pale stones in front of it. Amy was not frightened of very much but she had forgotten Paull church and its graveyard. Her legs stopped walking of their own accord and she stood rooted to the road just short of the graveyard. Somewhere in the space between her imagination and the thick night, Dennis's shade walked near her. The sense that he was in some way really there was so strong that for a moment, she thought she could see his ghost moving among the gravestones, a lighter flicker in the deep blackness. Those who die for the sake of a joke don't haunt us, she thought, only those who
meet a darker end, so why would he be here? She stretched out to sense the remnant of Dennis and knew that if something was there, there was no joke on its lips. Her promise came knocking again, her promise to read Vin's missing account, missing from Dennis's room, where Dennis's tray had also gone missing. That was when all her suppressed doubts about Don came together in a chilling core of fear and that was also when a figure coalesced out of that darkness, moving towards her from amongst the graves.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The shape among the tombstones spoke to Amy in Don's voice. She was still afraid but the words that came out of the graveyard darkness took away her fear:
'Had we but world enough and time. This coyness, lady, were no crime.'
'Don. Is that you? What are you trying to do to me?'
He came into plain view from between two graves, silver-faced in the moonlight. 'I was heading home and I knew you'd come.'
'Bastard. Were you trying to scare me?'
'I didn't want you to see me. Then I did.'
'Why?'
'I want to talk to you properly and I couldn't in the pub. If you were feeling anything like I was, I knew you would walk back.'
Did she trust him? She wanted to very much. Underneath it all, at some fundamental level it had become impossible for her to believe that someone she longed for so much could be capable of harm. Surely not harm to her at least. She wasn't scared any more, couldn't be after hearing those words. The poem seemed to tip the scales, cementing Don into gentleness.
'Those lines. That was Marvell's poem, wasn't it? To His Coy Mistress.'
'I can say it to you in the dark. I can do a lot of things in the dark.'
'Can you remember the rest of it?'
'Oh yes. I think so.'
'Will you say it for me now?'
'Here?'
'Here.'
'There are some other things I want to tell you, Amy. Why don't we go back?'
'I'm not ready to go back. You started the poem here. This is where I want to hear the rest of it.'
'All right,' he said. 'Let's go round the other side. It's quieter.'
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