Epilogue
The Last Seven Minutes
On the fourteenth of November, a year to the day, it rained.
He had half expected sun. He had wanted it, in a small superstitious way, the way you want a good journey after a bad one. But the morning came up gray over the Candlewick, and by ten the rain was coming down straight and fine and without drama, the kind that doesn't so much fall as hang. He stood at the kitchen window of the flat with a cup of tea going cool in his hand and watched it run down the glass.
He didn't go to the bridge. He had gone in June with Nora, and once in September alone, and each time he'd stood at the new rail, which was steel now, and higher, and painted a council green, and found nothing there but a view. The council had put up a plaque. It said only Greaves Bridge, rebuilt 2026, and it was the kindest thing they could have done.
Instead he went to Alder Weir on the nine-forty with a bunch of white roses on his knee. Verity was already at the grave when he arrived. She had Esme with her, in a school coat, with her hair in two plaits, and Gareth stood a little way off under a big black umbrella like a man guarding a sleeping child. They said very little. Esme laid a jam jar on the turf with a single button in the bottom of it, a plain one, shell-colored, with two holes. When her mother raised an eyebrow she said, "It's from the jar. Uncle Callum let me. It's the one I like." She tapped the stone once, shyly, with her knuckle, and stepped back.
Nobody asked her what she meant by it. It was understood.
"Lunch," said Verity afterward at the gate, in the fierce abrupt voice he had learned to hear as tenderness. "You'll come. Gareth's made a pie."
"I've a thing at two."
"What thing?"
"A woman," said Callum, "in a green dress."
She almost smiled. It had taken a year. She put her hand for a moment on his sleeve and took it away, and between the two of them that was as good as an embrace.
The painting had gone to the museum in March.
It hung now in the Hale Gallery, between a landscape of the Dunmere in flood and a small fierce portrait of a sea captain, under a card that gave her name, and her sitter's date, and the words Conserved by C. Wray and P. Anand, 2026. The card didn't say that the last touch on her cheek had been made on a night in February with a sable hair and a cup of black tea. It didn't say what had been found behind her lining. It didn't say a woman had died for it, or that the picture had been bought at a house sale by a woman who thought it was worth nothing, or that a restorer had written Not inpainted on a form and then, for a month, been unable to sleep. People came and stood in front of it. They looked at the gilt, and the green, and the narrow, level, furious eyes, and soon, if they were the right kind of person, they found the mark.
He watched them do it, sometimes, from the bench at the end of the room.
It was Priya who told him that people asked. "They stand there," she said, "and they say, what's that, a scratch? And the guard says, it's an original loss. They left it in on purpose. And they go quiet." She grinned. "I think it's the best thing in the building."
At two o'clock on the anniversary there was a school party, thirty children in red caps, all shuffling and whispering and sniffing, and a teacher with a clipboard. They stood in a semicircle. The teacher said, "Now, who can tell me what's special about this one?" and a boy at the back put up his hand and said, quite loud: "She's cross."
The room laughed. The woman in the frame looked down on them, unmoved. And Callum on the bench, hands on his knees, found he was smiling so widely that a guard glanced over to see if he was well.
Nora came at four.
She'd been in London for three weeks, doing a series for the radio, a long one, a drama in nine parts about the Cornish tin miners, in which she played a dozen people. It had been good for her. She was thinner and brighter, and she had cut her hair short, the way a girl does in a French film, so that no one now could have mistaken her for anybody. He found, as she came up the length of the gallery in the late gray light with her scarf over her arm, that he looked for the likeness out of old habit and didn't find it, and was relieved, and a little sad, and then neither, and simply glad.
"I've brought something," she said.
"What?"
"A thing." She sat beside him on the bench. She took from her bag a small flat tin, once red, now pale and scuffed, that had held a brand of mints no longer made. "I found it in Mum's loft. I was looking for the radio scripts. It was in a shoebox." She turned it over in her hands. "It's got nothing in it but a button."
"Whose?"
"Mine, I think." She opened it. In the bottom, on a pad of cotton wool, lay a small brass button with a worn edge. "It was the other half. Of the first. Izzy tore the cloak, you remember, in the wings. There were two. I said keep one." She laughed shakily. "I found the other. I never threw it out. I just didn't remember."
"You kept it twenty years."
"I'm a hoarder, it turns out. I always have been. I thought I was the one who let things go." She closed the lid. "It's the oddest thing, finding out you were both."
They sat in the quiet gallery. The rain ran down the long windows. Across the room the school party had thinned and left, and the gallery lights had come up, one by one, in the dusk, and a guard was putting out the stands.
"Do you want to hear it?" said Nora.
"What?"
"The voice. I've been practicing. It's going to be a joke." She straightened her back and put her hands in her lap. Her whole face changed. Not much; a shift at the corners of the mouth, a lift of the chin. And she said, in a low dry amused voice with a little crack in the vowels, "Well, there's a thing."
He sat quite still.
"That's not hers," he said slowly.
"No."
"That's not hers at all."
"It's Esme's." Her eyes were bright. "I went down on Saturday. We had tea. She made me do it, she wanted to hear it from outside." She dropped her hands. "She said I'd got it wrong. She said her th is softer. Then she did mine, and she got that wrong too, and we laughed until we had to go and sit on the stairs."
"Good."
"It is good." She laid her head briefly on his shoulder. It was a light, friendly weight, like a bird landing, and she took it away almost at once. "That's the thing nobody tells you. It stops. It stops being a copy and it becomes a language. Everyone's got a few phrases they borrowed. And you don't know whose they are until you hear them said back."
He said, "Nora."
"Yes?"
"I'm going to watch it tonight."
She was silent.
"The video," said Callum. "Hers. The rest of it."
It was seven minutes and thirty seconds long. That was what was left.
He had watched the first four minutes and ten seconds in June, in the studio, with the pigeon walking on the glass, and had closed the laptop and not opened it since. Kovac had told him, in the spring, in her dry way, that her people had copied the file and watched it through. She said it wasn't evidence of anything that wasn't already proved. She said, The rest is for you, Mr. Wray. I'd watch it when you're ready. Not before. She'd said it the way you hand a man a coat.
He had put the memory stick in the second drawer of the desk, beside the unopened letter from Brindle Hill, and left it there for five months.
"Do you want me there?" said Nora, in the gallery.
"No." He found his voice was perfectly steady. "I think it's for me. Ask me tomorrow."
"All right."
"If I go quiet."
"I'll come." She got up, put the red tin in his hand and folded his fingers over it, briskly, as she had once done with a different button at a different grave. "Go home," she said. "Eat something. Don't be brave about it."
He ate toast at the kitchen table, washed the plate, dried it, and put it away. He did it all slowly, with a kind of careful ceremony. At nine he sat down. He opened the laptop, and put the memory stick in, and turned off the overhead light. The rain went on at the glass, a bus went by in the street below, and the room settled round him with its familiar sounds.
FOR CAL — IF.
He dragged the little marker along the line, past the first four minutes, to the place where the picture had frozen in June: his wife's face, caught in the middle of a smile, one eye half shut, looking off to the left. Shall we do it together? He pressed play.
The picture came to life. Isabel turned back to the lens and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Behind her the geranium on the sill, the blue-and-white tiles. A bar of yellow light on the table. She laughed, a little shakily, at someone he couldn't see.
"All right," she said. "Where was I."
She told him the rest.
She told it in order, as she'd promised. She told him about the bridge, which she had used to go to when she was low, and about the meeting she'd planned with her mother. She told him where the cheques were, and what he must do with them, and who to go to. She said, Not Cairns. She said, Find the one with the tired eyes. She said, You'll know her. At minute six she said, quite simply, with her chin up, I'm not afraid. I want you to know that. I'm just sorry, if it goes wrong, that I made you the one who has to find out.
And at minute seven, with thirty seconds left, she looked off to the left again, and her face went soft.
"Come on," she said. "Sit. You're in the shot."
There was a pause. The kitchen was silent. A chair scraped, off screen, and someone sat in the empty chair beside her, close, so that they were shoulder to shoulder, and the camera caught only an arm. A bare right hand came out of the edge of the frame and lay on the table next to Isabel's, palm down. The nails were bitten short.
Isabel laughed. She laid her own hand on the table, beside the other.
"Say it with me," she said. "For Cal."
The two hands rose together. The two forefingers lifted, and came down on the pine.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
And on the third, just as the screen began to fade, the stranger's hand turned a little on the table, toward the light, and he saw plainly the base of the thumb.
There was a scar there. It was small, and white, and neat.
He stopped breathing.
He didn't move. He sat with his finger an inch above the keys. The screen had gone black, and the file said END. Outside, rain fell on the sill; the lamp hummed; the stack of books shifted a little and was still. His mind went, with great calm, through the facts one after another, like a man checking his pockets. Nora's hand has a scar on the thumb. I saw it in June, in the long gold light, on the slope. Nora said she had never been in this kitchen. That she was going to stand in it for the first time on the Sunday. The file says Tuesday the eleventh of November. The afternoon of the museum. He knew where she had said she was that Tuesday. She was in Carrow, in rehearsal, and there were forty people to say so.
A bread-board accident. A knife slipping. A cut that could happen to anyone. It could be a second scar. It could be a woman I haven't met. He thought of Nora's face on the grass, and the lightness of the eyes, and the voice that came out of her like Esme's. He thought that he would ask her in the morning, and that she would tell him the truth, whatever it was, in her low dry voice, and that it would be perfectly simple. A mistake of dates. A shared kitchen visit she had forgotten to mention, out of shame. There was always an explanation. He had spent a year learning to believe in them.
He thought: I shall ask her in the morning.
He looked up at the black window. In it a man sat at a table in a small yellow room with the rain running down the glass; and across the table from him, in the reflection, a fraction fainter, the second chair stood a little pulled out. In the glass someone sat in it.
He did not turn round. He knew what he would see if he did. A kitchen. A chair. An empty side of a table.
He pressed the arrow, and watched the last seven minutes again from the beginning.
And in the kitchen on the screen a tired young woman in a gray cardigan looked into the lens and into the dark glass of the window behind her, and spoke.
THE END