Chapter 30
Start with the Face
He opened the crate at eleven that night, alone in the studio, with the skylights black above him and every lamp on.
It took a long time. He did it the way he had done everything in that room for fourteen years: slowly, in order, with the right tool. He laid a sheet of clean paper on the table and set out on it the claw, the screwdriver, the pliers, a pad of tissue, a pair of white cotton gloves. He cut the courier's strapping with a scalpel, rolled it up and put it in a bin. He took off the lid. In the warm room the pine had begun to give up its resin, and it smelled of cold forests. As he lifted the first layer of packing he caught another smell under it, older and drier, as familiar as the inside of a cupboard: linseed and turpentine and a century of other people's rooms.
He lifted the painting out and stood it on the easel.
It wasn't large. Twenty-four inches by thirty. A plain gilt frame, old and rubbed, with a split in one corner, and in the frame a woman. A half-length portrait in oils of a woman in a dark green dress with a high collar and a cameo at her throat, seated, hands in her lap, turned a little to the left against a brown ground. It was late Victorian. It was competent. It was the sort of picture that hangs on a dining-room wall for a hundred and thirty years and is never looked at by anyone, because the sitter has been softened so thoroughly that there's nothing in her to catch the eye.
That was the first thing he saw. She had been softened.
He stepped close, under the lamp, with his hands behind his back.
The dress was right. The hands were right: firm, sure, a little heavy, painted wet-in-wet with the broad assured stroke of a trained provincial hand. The cameo was fine work. But the face was another matter. The face was glossy. It had a different kind of surface from the rest, thinner and smoother and brighter, with a faint plastic shine. When he moved his head and let the light slide across it, he saw that the fine cracking in the paint was wrong: too regular, too small, like the cracking of a varnish and not of an oil. The mouth was a soft rosebud. The eyes were large, damp and dreamy, and set a little too high. It was the face of a calendar girl. It was the kind of face a man puts on a woman when he doesn't want to look at her.
Someone has been unkind to her.
He took a lamp from the bench and set it low, to the left, so the light came across the canvas almost flat. The face leaped out. The whole surface of the cheek and brow rose into a faint, pearly landscape of brushstrokes, soft and tidy, the work of another hand, a later one, laid down in a single afternoon with a cheap medium and a small sable brush. And at the edge of the brow, along the line of the hair, where the new paint stopped, he saw in the raking light a hairline: a narrow ledge, no thicker than a thread, where the old surface began again.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
Overpaint, he said aloud, softly, to the empty room. A face on a face.
He worked through the night.
He didn't do it the way he'd have done it for a client. There was no time for the full examination, no ultraviolet, no sampling, no six weeks of tests. He did what a man does who knows what he's looking for. He photographed the surface. He took the infrared camera from its cabinet, a bulky gray machine on a tripod, set it up and plugged it in, and the screen glowed greenish in the dark. He passed it slowly over the face of the portrait while the monitor hummed.
The picture on the screen was a ghost.
Infrared goes through paint. Not through all paint, only the kinds that are clear to the long wavelength, and it picks up whatever carbon lies beneath: a drawing, a sketch, a change of mind. He had used it a thousand times. It was the gentlest, most beautiful tool he owned, a way of reading the first thoughts of the dead. As he moved the camera across the cheek, the soft glossy rosebud mouth dissolved, like a face in water, and another came up under it.
It was thin-lipped. It was wide and level and a little crooked at one corner, a mouth that didn't smile because it had better things to do. Above it the nose was longer than the repaint had allowed, and the eyes, which in daylight had been so large and wet and dreaming, were narrow and dark and set lower, under brows drawn in with a firm black line. They looked out of the screen straight into the lens. There was no softness in them anywhere. They were the eyes of a woman who had been asked to sit still for a portrait and was giving the painter a plain look in return.
There you are, he thought.
He sat back.
It was an ordinary face. That was the beauty of it. It wasn't a likeness of anyone he knew. It wasn't Isabel. It wasn't Nora. It wasn't, God forgive him, a mirror held up to his own madness; the bones were wrong, and the line of the jaw, and when he laid the screen image beside the photograph on the bench he could see no likeness at all. It was only a woman, dead for a century, who had looked out at her painter without fear, and had afterward been quietly painted over by someone who disliked being looked at.
A face keeps secrets better than a safe, because no one wants to look at it too long.
He put his hand over his mouth.
At four in the morning he fetched the X-ray plates.
He hadn't been sure he'd find anything. He had told himself so the whole way through, with the dull patience of a man who has been disappointed before. He took the plate from its sleeve, clipped it to the light box and switched it on. The sheet came up white and then gray and then, as his eyes adjusted, into a map: the bones of the stretcher in hard pale lines, the tacks along the border like a row of stars, the broad hazy cloud of lead-white in the face. And behind them, to the lower left, where the canvas hung a little slack from the bar, an oblong.
It was as clear as a thumbprint.
A rectangle about nine inches by six. Flat, pale at the edges, denser in the center. It lay between the canvas and the lining, a little to one side, and it had the clear layered look of paper: a dozen sheets, perhaps twenty, folded once, pressed so long between two surfaces that they had taken on the grain of the cloth. He could see the creases. He could see, faintly, near the edge, a ghost of dark, a small hard square that wasn't paper at all and wasn't canvas. Something plastic, or metal. The size of a finger joint.
A pocket of linen tacked behind the lining.
I didn't open it.
I looked, and I put it back.
He turned off the light box.
The skylights had begun to gray. He stood in the middle of the great high room with the plate in his hand and the first thin dawn washing over the paintings in their rows, and felt the whole of the last six months arrange itself around him like a figure drawn on a floor: the postcard, the crate, the weeks, the week of cards; and the woman in the yellow coat, in the kitchen, with her face going quiet. Start with the face. She hadn't meant him to see it at once. She had meant him to do exactly this: to sit alone in the north light with a lamp and a swab and work through the lie that had been laid on top of the truth, an inch at a time, until he came to the line where it stopped.
Slowly.
It was an order. It was a kindness, and a command, and an instruction in method; it was, he saw, a piece of the most exact and tender love. She had known him. She had known that if she sent it with a letter, with a warning, with a map, he would have torn into it and spoiled the evidence. So she'd told him how to read it. She had said: do it your way.
He took the swab from the tray.
He didn't begin at once. He sat down on the stool in front of the easel in the gray light and looked at the face, the soft sweet shining lying face with its rosebud mouth, and said to it quietly: "I'm sorry. This will take a while."
The woman in the green dress gazed back at him with her large damp dreaming eyes.
Then he mixed his solvent, a gentle one, with a drop of white spirit, wetted the cotton on the end of the stick, and touched it lightly to the very corner of the left eyebrow.