Chapter 3
Laughing in Threes
The conservation studio took up the whole top floor of the Halvern Museum of Art, under a roof of north-facing glass. It let in the kind of light painters have wanted since the sixteenth century: cool, even and soft, as if the sky had been told to behave. On a gray morning it was almost too bright. Callum had always liked that. It made lying difficult.
He came in at eight on Friday and hung his coat on the third hook, where it had hung for fourteen years. He stood for a moment at the long north window with his hands in his pockets, looking over the roofs of the Candlewick to the river. He did this every day. It was the only part of his routine that had come through the winter unchanged, and he was grateful for it, the way you're grateful for a handrail.
"You're early," said Priya.
She was his assistant, twenty-six and cheerful, with a degree from the Courtauld and a habit of working in socks. She was bent over a trestle at the far end, doing something delicate with a swab, wearing a magnifying visor that made her look like a diver. She didn't look up. In the six months since November she had got good at talking to him as if nothing had happened, in a tone of such cheerful calm that he had finally realized it cost her something.
"I'm going away tomorrow," he said. "I thought I'd tidy."
"You don't tidy."
"I'm thinking of starting."
"Good. Start with the Mackenzie. It's been sitting on the easel like an accusation." She lifted the visor, finally, and looked at him. Her face softened for a moment and then arranged itself. "Is it the Carrow thing? Dev told me. I think it's brilliant. Have you got the speech?"
"I've got the speech."
"Is it good?"
"It's competent."
"That's what I'd say about a funeral," said Priya. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and went red to the roots of her hair. "Oh, God. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean—"
"It's all right."
"I'm an idiot."
"It was funny," said Callum, and was surprised to find he meant it. "It was nearly good."
He moved off down the room before she could answer. She let him. That was one of the things he liked best about her.
The crate stood in the corner by the lift, where it had stood since the eleventh of November.
It was a plain pine packing case, about three feet by two, with rope handles and a yellow courier's label curling at one corner. He knew it was there without looking. It was like the dent in the pillow. He knew where it was the way you know where the low beam is in a house where you keep banging your head. Every morning he walked past it at a distance of six feet, eyes on the middle of the room. He did it now.
Then he stopped.
He didn't know why. A breath of cold from the lift shaft, maybe. A change in the light. He stood with his back to the crate and his hands loose at his sides and said aloud, too low for Priya to hear, "Not today."
He turned round and looked at it anyway.
The note was still taped to the lid. It was written in blue felt-tip on the back of a postcard of the Halvern Infirmary. He had read it a hundred times, and the sight of her handwriting, the quick forward-leaning hand with the t's crossed too high, still went through him with a small clean pain, like a splinter.
Cal. Found this at the Pelham sale. Someone has been unkind to her. Start with the face. Slowly. I'll tell you why on Sunday. I.
She had sent it by courier on the Tuesday. It arrived on the Wednesday while he was at a meeting. Priya signed for it and put it by the lift. He came in and read the postcard and smiled, he remembered smiling, and said tomorrow, and went back to the Gerard. On Friday she died. On Sunday there was nothing to tell. Since then the crate had stood in the corner with its note, turning slowly from an errand into a relic. Every day he didn't open it, opening it got harder. Now he could picture himself standing in front of it with a scalpel, unable to put the blade to the lid.
Start with the face.
He didn't know what was under the lid. A portrait, she said. A woman. A sale lot from Pelham's, a small auction house at the bottom of town where Isabel sometimes went on Saturdays to look at rubbish and buy a button. He had never doubted her eye. She had an eye for things that weren't what they seemed, and he had always privately thought that was part of what had drawn her to him.
Someone has been unkind to her.
He looked at the words for a long time. Then he laid his hand flat against the pine, the way you lay a hand on a horse, and went to find the Mackenzie.
They had met over a painting in the spring of 2014, and for the first hour he thought she was a nuisance.
It was a Saturday, a public open day. The studio had been put on show for schoolchildren and old ladies in raincoats. Callum, who hated open days with a quiet, dutiful hatred, was at the easel explaining how a cradle works to a girl with a plait. Then he noticed a disturbance at the door. A woman in a green coat was backing into the studio, pulling a wheelchair after her by one handle. She was talking in a low steady murmur, not to him or the room, but to the person in the chair: a tall, gaunt old man in a tweed cap, whose hands lay in his lap like gloves left on a seat.
Come on, Mr. Aubrey, she was saying. It's a long way up, but I told you there'd be light. Didn't I say there'd be light?
The old man said nothing. He looked about the studio with a tired, blank, settled confusion, like someone arriving in a foreign country where he doesn't speak the language. The woman parked him in the middle of the floor in front of the easel, straightened up, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. And Callum, who had come over with his worn-out sentence about the cradle, found he had lost it.
She was about twenty-five. She had a long, lively, clever face, a wide mouth and dark hair coming loose from a clip. She was staring at the painting on his easel, a small oil of a harbor, with the open stare of someone who hasn't been told it's rude. She said, "Oh. It's got the weather in it."
What?
The sky. It's got actual weather. She turned to look at him. Her eyes were gray and surprised and not at all embarrassed. Sorry. I'm Isabel. I'm from the stroke ward at St. Brannock's. This is Mr. Aubrey. He used to be a painter. He's had a bleed, and his speech has gone, and his right hand, and I told him there was a place in Halvern where they keep paintings alive.
They're not alive, Callum said. They're just carefully not dead.
That's what I meant, said Isabel. She gave him a look he couldn't read at first, a look of such quick, delighted understanding that it was as if she'd told a joke and he'd got it in the same moment.
Mr. Aubrey was staring at the harbor.
He didn't move. He didn't blink. It seemed to Callum afterward that the whole studio, the schoolchildren and old ladies, the radio, the soft clatter of voices, went somewhere a long way off. The old man leaned forward in his chair, with enormous effort, one inch, then another. His mouth worked. A dry noise came out of his throat, then another, like a door being forced. His left hand lifted from his lap and moved toward the canvas, shaking, and stopped in the air.
Ba, said Mr. Aubrey.
Yes, said Isabel, softly.
Ba. Bo. Bwwah.
Take your time.
Boat.
It dropped into the silence like a stone into a well. The girl with the plait gasped. Isabel didn't move. She stood quite still with one hand against her mouth, and the tears ran down her face in two straight lines, and she was smiling. That's right, she said. That's right. That's a boat. She said it over and over, calmly, the way you talk to a child learning to walk. That's a boat, Mr. Aubrey. That's a boat.
It was the first word he had spoken in seven weeks.
Callum stood by the easel with his sentence dead in his mouth and thought, clearly, I am going to marry this woman. It was such an absurd, unprofessional, reckless thing to think that he shut it away at once in a box at the back of his mind. But it stayed there. Over the next few weeks he took it out from time to time and looked at it, and each time it was exactly the same size.
She wasn't a quiet person. That was what he explained to people afterward, the ones who knew her only from the funeral, from the photograph, from the gentle uniform of grief. She had been funny. Properly funny, in the dry, sideways, delighted way of someone who found the world a bit ridiculous and was fond of it anyway. She did voices. She could do any accent, a Glasgow docker, a vicar from the Home Counties, a fishwife from a village he had never heard of, so well that he laughed until he had to sit down. She said it was a trick she'd picked up when she was young, from a friend.
Nonie, she would say. Nonie could do anyone. She did the Dean of Studies at the Conservatoire so well he gave her detention for slander. And she'd be off, into a story about a goat and a stage in Verona and a night when the lights went out. He would sit across the table and watch her tell it with her hands and think that if he lived to a hundred he'd never get tired of it.
Who's Nonie? he asked once, early on.
A girl I knew. A shrug, a quick glance sideways. We were a double act. Half the school thought we were sisters. Then she moved away, and I grew up, and the act folded. She tapped the table three times with the flat of her forefinger, tap, tap, tap, and burst out laughing. She was dreadful. You'd have hated her. She'd have eaten you alive.
He assumed it was a story. A character. A sort of imaginary friend that had survived into adulthood, the kind some people keep to tell their stories through. He never asked her again. There was always so much else to ask.
And she laughed in threes. He thought of it often now. Tap, tap, tap. Then the laugh, the rich, helpless unwrapping of it. The first time she did it was in a café, at a joke of his that wasn't good. He looked at her hand on the marble, and she looked at him and said, I know. It's a tic. It's awful. I can't help it.
I wasn't going to say anything, he said.
You were thinking it.
I was thinking I'd like to hear it again.
She went pink. Well, she said. There's a thing.
At four he went down the museum stairs with his bag over his shoulder and found Dev sitting on the bottom step.
"I was passing," said Dev.
"You don't pass. You arrive."
"I was passing in a careful way." He stood and brushed off his trousers. He was a stocky, energetic man of forty-five with a beard going gray at the chin and an air of cheerful mess that Callum suspected he cultivated as camouflage. He looked at the bag. "You've got a face on."
"It's my face."
"It's the one you wear when you're about to do something kind for yourself and hate it." He fell into step. "I wanted to say. Tonight. After you've seen Sorel. Come to mine. Not for the aubergine. For the company."
"I've got Rookhill at seven."
"Ah." A pause. "Helen's doing the send-off."
"It's a supper."
"It's a send-off, Cal. With napkins." Dev pulled a face, then quickly, as if he regretted it, turned it into something else. "She's been very good to you. I know that. She's been good to me." He stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I just never know where I am with her. It's like being very warmly watched."
Callum looked at him.
It was a strange thing to say. Dev didn't say strange things. He was a warm, loud, uncomplicated friend with a studio at the Mill, rented at a low price from the Marlow Trust, and he adored Helen Marlow the way you adore a benefactor, with thanks and a small unspoken unease. In fourteen years Callum had never heard him say a word against her.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Nothing." Dev's smile came back, wide and easy. "I mean I'm a bit jealous. She's never made a supper for me." He clapped Callum on the shoulder, hard. "Go on. Be sad at the right people. I'll ring you at eleven."
He went off down the steps into the afternoon, jauntily, a short broad figure with his collar turned up against the damp. Callum stood a moment on the pavement, the museum behind him and the light going flat along the river, and watched him go.
He noticed, because it was his habit, that Dev hadn't looked back. And he noticed, with the other part of his mind, the careful part, that for the first time in fourteen years he had seen his friend choose a word.