Chapter 41
The Loss in the Left Eyebrow
The painting was finished on the first Friday of December, and it was Priya who noticed that he had stopped.
She came in at nine with the Courier under her arm and her coat still on. She found him standing in front of the easel at the north end of the studio with his hands behind his back, quite still, in the hard white light of a winter morning. He hadn't turned on the lamps. He hadn't touched a swab. The long room was cold, the radiators ticked, and on the roof the first small hard flakes of snow were ticking too. He stood in the middle of it all with his chin a little lifted, looking up at the face of the woman in the green dress.
"Is it done?" said Priya.
"Nearly."
"It looks done."
"There's a loss." He didn't turn. "In the left eyebrow."
She put down her bag. She crossed the floor softly in her socks, came to stand beside him, and looked.
It was a beautiful thing. It had taken him five months. It stood on the easel in its worn gilt frame like a window thrown open on a room that had been shut for a hundred and thirty years, and the woman who looked out of it was alive. She sat very upright in her dark green dress, with the cameo at her throat and her hands in her lap, and looked at the viewer with narrow, level, unamused, clever eyes, as if she had just been asked a question by a fool and was deciding what to say. The mouth was thin and drawn up at one corner. The skin had the dull gold of old ivory. There was a smudge of unfinished impatience at the jaw where the painter had left a thumbprint in the wet paint, and a single hair from a sable brush, caught in the glaze of the cheek a hundred and thirty years ago, was still there, curving, like a mark on a map.
"She's marvelous," said Priya softly.
"She's cross."
"She's glorious."
"She's a woman with no patience," said Callum. "She sat for three days for a man she didn't like. And someone painted her out because it made them uncomfortable to be looked at."
"Who?"
"I don't know." He moved his shoulders. "A later owner. A daughter. It doesn't matter. We'll never know." He raised a hand and pointed, without touching, at the upper left of the face. "There."
She leaned closer.
Over the left eye, in the dark arc of the brow, there was a place where the paint had gone. It was tiny. It was a nick no longer than a quarter of an inch, in the fine dark hair of the stroke, where at some time in the last century a sharp object had caught the surface and a flake had lifted. A sliver of the ground showed through, bare and cream-colored, like a thread of white against the dark. It ran across the brow at a slant, right through the hair. It had been hidden entirely by the overpaint. It had come to light on the ninth day, under the swab, and he'd looked at it for a long time and said nothing.
"I can fill that," he said. "I've done the others. I can make it vanish. A touch of watercolor, a hair of umber. You wouldn't see it from a foot away."
"Then why don't you?"
"It's the one mark on her that tells you she was a person." He lowered his hand. "The rest I've done. The cracks, the old retouching. I've closed every one. It's right to. A conservator's job is to make the picture readable. But I've been thinking about it for a week, and I think this is the one I'll leave."
Priya looked at him sideways.
"You always say you don't leave things."
"I say you don't hide them." He almost smiled. "It's different. You mustn't pretend a loss isn't there. You mustn't paint over it so well that no one can tell where the old paint stops. That's what was done to her. Someone made her prettier." He folded his arms. "I'd rather she looked like what she was. A woman with a mark. And let the person who stands in front of her see it, and ask."
"And what do they say?"
"I imagine," said Callum, "that they say, well, there's a thing."
She burst out laughing. She laughed so suddenly and so loudly that a pigeon on the skylight took off in a flap of wings and the snow whirled. And he found, to his own astonishment, that he was laughing too, a little, in the back of his throat, for the first time in that particular sentence.
The letter had come on the Tuesday.
He hadn't opened it. It lay now in the second drawer of the desk, under the Highways Department's apology and the mortuary inventory and a half-sheet of police notepaper with a Carrow number on it. He looked at it each morning as he took out his pencil, and shut the drawer. It was a small cream envelope, stiff, addressed in a hand he knew: upright, elegant, backward-curving, blue-black ink. The postmark said Brindle Hill. It was a women's prison in the next county, where certain people awaiting trial were held. She had written the date in the corner. 1st December.
He knew what it said. He thought he knew. It would begin, Dear boy. It would go on for two pages in a hand that didn't shake, and it would explain, very clearly and tenderly, that none of it had been meant, and that she'd done everything out of love, and that she hoped he'd understand. It wouldn't say sorry. She didn't have the word. She would ask, instead, whether he was eating.
I will read it, he thought. I shall. Not yet.
Perhaps when I've forgiven her.
Perhaps when I haven't.
He was surprised to find the second might be the easier. That was the oddest thing of all the odd things of that year: the anger he'd braced for had never come. There had been grief, and it went on. There had been a long cold rage at a man in gloves. But Helen had left him with something stranger, a sort of dark pity, the kind you feel for a house you're pulling down, and the knowledge that the house had been, in its own way, a place of love. She had loved. That was the pity of it. She had loved, and she had been absolute. She had never in her life been shown that the two were different.
"There's snow," said Priya, from the window.
He turned.
It was coming down thickly now, large and soft, in great slow spinning flakes past the north glass of the skylight, and the sky above the Candlewick was the color of milk. It fell on the roofs and the chimney pots and the dark river, silently, without hurry, covering everything. A boy ran across the museum forecourt with his arms out. A woman with a pram stopped to look up. In the studio the light had gone a pearly blue, without shadows, the kind painters pray for.
She stood at the window with her hand on the cold pane, small and dark and eager, a girl of twenty-six with a visor pushed up on her head. "Do you know," she said, "when I came here, I thought it was the loneliest room in the world."
"It's very quiet."
"It's not now." She glanced back at him, and her face was full of warmth. "I mean you. You're not the same. I used to think of you as the man who looks at the wall. And you've turned round."
"Have I?"
"You've got a face." She said it quite shyly. "I mean, it moves."
He didn't answer. He turned back to the painting, and the woman in the dark green dress looked down at him with her cross, clever eyes.
A copy is always more careful than the original, he had told a hundred students. Look for the carelessness. That's where the person is. He had believed it for twenty years. He believed it more now, in the pearly snow-light, with the old painter's thumbprint at the jaw and the quarter-inch of white across the brow. It was the only truth he had. It had taken a dead wife and a stranger to show him the other half of it: the carelessness wasn't only where the person was. It was where you could love them. You couldn't love a perfect thing. You could only love a flaw.
He picked up his pencil. He wrote the last line of the condition report, in his small upright hand, on the cream-colored form.
Loss in left brow, c. 6 mm, retained. Not inpainted. Visible to the unaided eye.
He signed it. He wrote the date. And he stood a moment longer with the pencil in his hand, looking up at the face on the easel while the snow fell silently on the glass, and the woman in the frame looked back at him with her one small deliberate mark, and did not look away.