Chapter 31
Behind the Lining
The face came up in nine days.
He took no leave. He went to the studio at eight each morning and worked until the light failed. In the evenings he went home and ate what Dev had left on the doorstep, and slept, and was amazed to find that he could. The weather had turned. The first week of June came in with a hard white sky and a hot wind off the moors, and the skylights in the roof ticked as they expanded, and the whole long room, with its ranks of easels and its shelves of glass bottles, filled with a dry resinous warmth like the inside of a violin.
Priya watched him from the far end with a grave, anxious, unspoken delight. She didn't ask what he was doing. She brought him tea. On the fourth day she turned up with a stool, set it beside the easel and sat on it for three hours handing him swabs without a word. When he looked at her over his magnifying visor she said, primly, "You said an attribution. I'm just learning."
It was calm, almost sacred work. A millimeter at a time, in a circle the size of a coin, with a roll of cotton wool and a solvent so mild it would hardly have lifted a stain from a tablecloth, he took away the face. It came off in a faint pink film that clung to the swab and curled, and under it, grain by grain, the way the surface of a pond clears when the mud settles, the other began to appear.
He did the eyes on the sixth day.
They came up dark, level, slightly narrowed, with a fine crease at each outer corner. The lids were heavy. There was a speck of white in each iris, laid in with a single quick touch, that gave the whole look a startling life. They didn't flatter. They didn't plead. They looked at him across a hundred and thirty years with the dry, tired, unimpressed politeness of a woman who has been told to hold still and has decided to be seen.
"Oh," said Priya softly. "She's cross."
"She's not cross."
"She is. Look at her mouth."
He looked. The mouth was coming up under his hand at the end of the ninth afternoon, thin and level, with a small drag at the left corner, like a woman who has just been asked a question and is deciding how little to say. It was the mouth of someone with a good deal of sense, a good deal of money, and no patience whatever with fools.
"She's amused," said Callum. "It's the same thing."
It was Sunday before he touched the back.
He had put it off. He told himself there was no hurry, that the front must be finished first, that the face deserved some time. It was true. He had stood in front of it for an hour on Saturday evening, with the cleaned canvas gleaming under the lamps, the dark green dress, the sharp cameo, the narrow level eyes, and felt for the first time since November that something had been given back to him. But there was another reason. It lay at the foot of the stairs in his mind like a stone in a doorway. He was afraid.
On Sunday morning he turned the picture over.
The back of the frame was a plain brown wood panel nailed at the corners, covered in a century of dust and the pale furry bloom of a damp cellar. Across the top, in blue pencil, a long-dead dealer had scrawled a number and a price. Lot 41. £340. Below it, in faded ink, in clerkly copperplate: Portrait of an unknown woman, c. 1890. Property of G. Marlow.
He took out the first nail with the claw, very gently, and laid it on the paper. Then the second. The backing board came away with a dry crack, like a mouth unsticking. Under it was the inside of the stretcher: pale wood, a lattice of bars, and across it the old brown linen of the lining, soft and tight, with the gray bloom of age on it like the skin of a plum.
It had been opened.
It was obvious as soon as he saw it. The tacks along the lower left, where the lining met the stretcher, were a different color from the rest, a brighter steel, a hundred years newer, and had been driven in at slightly the wrong angle by a hand more used to a hammer than a tack-lifter. Between them the linen bulged. It made a low shallow pocket about nine inches wide, flat and slightly lopsided, like a purse.
He sat quite still on his stool.
It was seven minutes to ten on a Sunday morning, in an empty studio, in the first hot light of June. A wood pigeon was walking on the glass above him, tick, tick, tick, on claws like pins. Down in the street, a long way below, a church bell had begun to ring, slowly, for a service he wouldn't attend.
He lifted the first tack.
There were three things inside.
He laid them out one at a time on a sheet of clean white blotting paper, the way you lay out the contents of a pocket at an inquest. The first was a bundle of papers, folded once, about twenty sheets, held together with a rusty paperclip. The second was a small gray envelope, sealed. The third, set a little apart, lay on its side on the paper with a soft click: a plastic memory stick the size of his little finger, with a sliver of masking tape stuck to it, and on the tape, in blue ballpoint, in the hand he now knew better than his own, three letters. CAL.
He began with the papers.
They weren't what he'd expected. He had thought, if he had thought at all, of a will, a deed, the grave brown legal documents of fiction. These were photocopies. They were the faded, grayish, slightly furry photocopies of ordinary people, from a time before everything was scanned, and they were of cheques.
Pay: The Principal and Governors, Halvern Conservatoire of Drama. £250,000.00. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds only. Dated the twenty-second of March, 2010. Signed in a cool upright hand: H. J. Marlow.
Pay: St. Aldric's Private Hospital, Whitby. £38,400.00. August 2011.
Pay: Mrs. F. Albright. £5,000.00. September 2012. Beside it on the photocopy, in a different hand, a margin note in pencil: N. to leave Halvern. Done.
He turned the page. There was a letter. It was short, typed on heavy cream paper, addressed to a firm of solicitors in the city. Dear Mr. Fane. I write to confirm that I wish the sum of £200,000 to be held in trust for a child born on the twelfth of August, 2011, the daughter of my younger daughter, to be released at her twenty-first birthday. I do not wish my wife to be informed of this arrangement. G. H. Marlow. Underneath, a further paper: Trust cancelled by order of the settlor's executor, 4 March 2016.
The executor of Gerald Marlow's will, he knew, had been his wife.
Done.
He sat for a long time with the paper in his hand. The pigeon on the glass above him stopped walking, and cooed, and began again. The bell down in the street fell silent. In the clean bright room he heard his own breathing, quite even, quite slow, like a man alone in the open air, and he understood with a dry, amazed certainty that he wasn't shocked.
He was only, finally, being told.
The small gray envelope was addressed to Isabel. He knew the hand before he turned it over. It was an old man's hand, large and unsteady and loopy, the hand of a man who preferred to dictate. My dear Izzy, to be opened after I'm gone. He opened it with a thumbnail, unfolded a single sheet of squared paper torn from a notebook, and read.
My darling girl,
I am not clever about people, as you know. I am clever about maps. A map is a thing that tells you exactly where you are. I have found, in my seventieth year, that I have not known where I was for most of my life.
Your mother is a remarkable woman. I do not say this to criticize. She has kept this family from ruin, and shame, and the gutter, on four separate occasions to my knowledge, and I have let her. I have let her because it was easier. I have been, in my way, a coward.
I know about the child. I have known since the summer. Your mother thinks I do not, and I have let her think so, because I could not bear a quarrel and because I saw no way to undo it. But I have put aside the money. I have done what I can. It will not be enough. It is never enough.
If she ever comes to you, Izzy, and says that she did it for your sake, remember the pattern. She has never once done a thing in her life for anyone's sake but the family's name, and she cannot see the difference. She will not hurt you out of malice. She will hurt you out of love, and that is far worse, because there is no appeal.
Be careful of her. Be careful of the people she keeps.
Your loving father, G.
P.S. There is a man who drives for her. I do not like his hands.
He read the postscript twice.
He laid the letter down very gently on the blotting paper beside the cheques. He put his two hands flat on either side of it on the bench and bent his head, like a man at prayer, and stayed that way for some time.
I do not like his hands.
Then, because there was only one thing left, he picked up the memory stick, carried it to the laptop at the end of the bench, and sat down in front of the pale blue screen.
There was one file.
It was a video, nine hundred megabytes, the title typed in capitals. FOR CAL — IF. It was dated the eleventh of November. A Tuesday. The week of the storm.
He moved the cursor over it.
For perhaps a minute he sat with the pointer trembling above the little icon, in a room full of paintings, in the full white light of a June morning, and thought of nothing at all. Then he double-clicked, and the screen turned black, and white letters came up and faded, and a picture swam into being.
It was their kitchen.
It was the kitchen in the flat on Lantern Row: the pine table, the blue-and-white tiles, the window over the sink with its geranium. It was shot from the shelf above the cooker, he knew, from the place where the radio stood, in a wide shaky frame, with a faint hum of refrigerator behind everything. It was afternoon. A bar of thin yellow light lay across the table. And at the table, hands clasped, chin lifted, eyes fixed on the lens, sat his wife.
She was in her gray cardigan. Her hair was tied back. She looked tired and thin and very much alive. She had been crying, and stopped, and washed her face, and she sat now with a faint pinched calm, like a person who has made a decision and is waiting for her nerve.
"Cal," said Isabel.
His whole body shut like a hand.
"Cal, it's Tuesday. It's twenty past three. You're at the museum." She drew a long breath. "I'm going to say this once, to the camera, in case I'm a coward on Sunday. I want to get through it in order. You like things in order."
The picture shook slightly. A thread of steam rose from a mug at her elbow.
"The first thing is that I love you," she said. "The second thing is that I'm sorry."
He watched four minutes.
He watched them without moving, with his hand over his mouth, while his dead wife explained to him, in her flat clear voice, with her chin up, about a green room and a bar of steel and a boy in a wing. About a baby in a hospital bed. About a woman in pearls with a cheque book. At four minutes and ten seconds she stopped and looked off to the side of the camera at something he couldn't see, and smiled, and said, in a different voice, warm and shaky and amused, "Shall we do it together?"
He pressed the space bar.
The picture froze. Isabel's face, caught in the middle of a smile, hung on the screen, one eye half shut, her mouth a little open, looking off to the left at a person who wasn't there.
He couldn't watch any more.
He sat looking at the frozen face for a long time. The file said there were seven minutes and thirty seconds left. In the great bright room the light moved across the floor. Soon, because he couldn't do otherwise, he closed the laptop, very gently, until it clicked, and sat with his two hands flat on the lid, the way you hold down a door.