Drawing with Light (22 page)

‘I was so lonely. Rob was away all day, working till late. I didn't have anyone close. I felt crushed. I hardly knew who I was, any more. I lost myself totally.'

I can guess the rest. I don't want to hear her spell it all out. She goes to an art class. She starts life drawing. Her teacher is this amazing, attentive man: dark-haired, olive-skinned, good-looking. Pierre encourages her. He tells her how talented she is. She feels alive again. Under his tender touch, she feels herself coming back to herself. And when it's time for him to go back to France, he asks her to go with him. And she does.

It's an agony to her, I can see that, to tell me what she did.

‘I left you. It was a terrible thing to do. And more than that, I was a total coward. If I cut you out of my life completely, no contact at all, I could pretend not to feel anything. I would eventually stop imagining what it was like for you. But how can you pretend about such deep, important things for long? You would truly go mad, to keep that shut down inside. So it came out in paintings. Hundreds of paintings, most of them awful, too raw and ugly to show. And just a few that I kept, and eventually showed to other people, and they liked them, and I began a different life as an artist. And the passion with Pierre had burned out by then: fast, furious, as that kind of love is. Not lasting. But I had myself back by then. I would survive.'

She weeps, and I won't look at her, or touch her, or comfort her. She wants me to forgive her, even though she hasn't asked, not outright, and just as well, because the answer would be no.

5

Neither of us hear Josep's car returning. When I stand up, I see Josep outlined in the doorway, watching us, waiting for the right moment he can go to her, comfort her.

I make myself walk towards the gate, but as soon as I'm through to the lane, I start running. I don't have a clue where I'm going. I just need to escape, just keep moving: one foot, the other foot.

I try to remember what Seb says. Keep the breathing steady: in, out. It's all in the mind, running.

I follow the lane as it winds along the contours of the land, slightly uphill all the way, so I start getting out of breath, my heart hammering. It goes more steeply for a while and then peters out altogether, becoming a rough track. My sides are aching. I stop to take deep, racking breaths, and I start to cry. I walk, cry, walk up the winding track, up to where it finally stops, in a hay meadow that hasn't yet been mown. I walk through the long grass right to the middle of the field, and lie down, flat on my back. Above me bees and flies and biting insects hover and hum, and the grass seed rustles as the wind blows through it. The sky is a deepening blue, and the sun goes higher, and gets hotter and hotter, burning down and baking the earth. Finally I've no more tears left.

There, I think. That's done with. It's all over.

Not long after I've finished crying, I sit up. I don't know what makes me look – it's too far off for me to hear footsteps, yet – but from my viewpoint high in the hay meadow I spot a small figure hurrying along the lane in the valley, a tiny ant in the green landscape. She keeps going, up and up, until she disappears from sight.

And then she appears again, right at the edge of my field.

I don't move. I don't lie down, to hide. I wait to see what she does.

She's already seen me.

She walks slowly through the long grass, and she comes and sits on the grass right next to me. It's as if she's thought out what she's going to do, that she's made some sort of decision and won't let herself stop now.

She picks up my hand and holds it between both of hers. I let her. I don't pull away, or anything. Her hands feel cooler than mine.

We sit for ages, silent, in the middle of the field, like that.

I didn't expect her to come after me. Lying in the grass, I'd imagined the scene I left behind in the garden: Josep comforting her, making her more coffee. I imagined her climbing the stairs to the bathroom, swooshing cold water over her swollen, tear-stained face, wiping her hands on the white towel. I imagined her going back to sit with Josep in the sunny garden. I saw it all as vividly as if I was actually there.

But I was wrong about her.

She lets my hand go. She pulls her hair back from her face and over her shoulder in a gesture that is so like Kat I want to hug her and tell her so. One day, maybe I will.

She starts talking to me, her eyes very direct, and bright.

‘Thank you for listening to all that. For letting me speak. I know it was horrible. Too hard for anyone to hear. And thank you for searching me out in the first place, and for coming all this way. It was a brave thing to do, Emmy. Brave and bold.'

I look at her. ‘I couldn't have done it without Seb,' I say. ‘It was Seb loving me like he does that made me brave.'

‘Well, I'm glad for Seb, then,' Francesca says. ‘But you are still courageous, Emily. My beautiful daughter. In spite of what I did to you.'

We talk some more as we walk back down to the house together.

‘Really, I'm fine,' I say. ‘I survived, didn't I? Dad did a good job. Dad and Cassy.'

‘More than good,' Francesca says.

I tell her about their new baby. ‘I'm looking forward to it, now,' I say, and I find it's actually true: I am! It's funny how things change.

* * *

I go upstairs for a shower. I lie on the blue quilt in the bedroom for a while, afterwards. Someone has closed the shutters, and the room is deliciously cool. Without the sunlight on it, the three trees in the painting look flat, now, instead of alive and glowing. I lie on the bed, and think about Francesca's story.

Was it worth it? I wonder. Giving up everything? Just so she can paint? I think of everything she has lost.

Seb stays out of my way all day. At some point in the late afternoon, I get up and have another shower, and when I go downstairs I find the three of them sitting in the garden. Josep brings out a tray of drinks. Francesca doesn't say much. She goes into the house to finish making our meal.

I'm exhausted, even though I have slept most of the afternoon. Seb comes up with me as soon as we have finished eating. We lie together side by side, and he smooths my hair back from my face, and he kisses me.

‘I've wanted to do that all day,' he says to me.

His tenderness makes me cry all over again. How can there be so many tears?

The next morning, Francesca takes me to her studio, in one of the outhouses in the garden.

‘I don't let many people in here,' she says.

It's messy, with piles of paper and frames stacked against the rough whitewashed walls. An old paint-splashed trestle table under the window is covered with pots of paint and brushes in jam jars and odd things like a piece of wood and a pile of stones and a load of books propped open with old, stained coffee cups. A plan chest like Dad's, with lots of thin drawers, stands at the other end of the barn, and there's a mat and a wooden chair with a faded blue cushion.

‘You have the chair,' Francesca says. ‘We'll look at your work first, yes?' She sits on the floor, at my feet. She pays each photograph proper attention. My heart's hammering; I'm nervous about what she'll say. Suddenly it matters to me, where it didn't, before.

‘This one: I love this. The composition, the light; the way the shadow falls on his face. This one is good, Emmy.' She smiles. ‘It takes a long time. You have to find your own style, something special that is just yours. You start by looking at what other artists do. Sometimes you copy; try the same things. But you must go on, push yourself further. Not everyone can do that. This picture is good because I feel the emotion behind it. The way you are looking at the boy.'

‘Seb.'

She flips through the others again. She picks out the willows, and the avenue of sycamores and the beech tree with the sunset. ‘Trees are special for you too,' she says. Her voice catches.

‘That little painting in the blue bedroom –' I start to say.

‘From a long time ago. One of the first I did, way back, as a student.'

‘I love it,' I tell her. ‘And it's like I know it already. Like I've seen it somewhere before.'

Fran hunches her knees up, hugs them to her. ‘It hung in the house,' she says. Her voice sounds strained, too tight in her throat. ‘When you were a baby. But you can't possibly remember that. Can you?'

I shrug. Can I? Maybe it is possible.

‘More likely it reminds you of something else,' Francesca says. ‘It's a bit derivative. My Emily Carr phase! I hadn't found my own style, back then.'

‘The man you went away with,' I say. ‘The one you fell in love with. What happened to him? Why didn't it last?'

‘I don't know . . . Maybe because of what I'd given up, for him? The stakes were too high. Who knows? Or perhaps because we didn't really know each other well enough. We rushed into it.

‘I lived in his house to begin with. But the winter was cold and wet and horrible. Everything was hard work. I wasn't used to chopping wood to heat a house. I couldn't drive in those days. I was trapped in the house. The passion burned out. But I was painting all the time by then. Pierre helped me get that first important exhibition. He was good to me. I sold some work. I made a tiny bit of money for myself, but more importantly, I started to believe I could do this. And after a while I moved out, and rented a place by myself. That time alone was essential for me as an artist. I needed it, like people need air or food.

‘Even when I met Josep, I knew I would still live alone. When I am in the middle of a painting I immerse myself completely. I don't want to do anything else or think about anyone else.' She looks at me sadly. ‘How can you do that, as an artist, and be a mother too?'

‘Some people manage it,' I say.

‘Yes. But not me. And small children need so much of you. All of you, really. An adult might understand that: Josep does, though not all men would. Most would find it hard, perhaps. But a child – no. It is asking too much.'

I try to make sense of what she's explaining to me, but it hurts.

‘You should have worked that out before you had children,' I say. ‘It wasn't fair, what you did.'

‘No.'

‘Aren't you lonely? Living alone?'

‘Yes. Of course. Though now I have lots of friends, and Josep stays here some of the time. But it's the life I have chosen. We each have to find our own way to live, and to love. Don't ever let anyone else tell you how it should be, for you.'

She stretches her legs out, and then she gets up. She touches her arm round my shoulders, briefly. ‘Do you want to see some of my photographs, now?'

We open the drawers in the plan chest, and she shows me her photographs, and then the tree paintings, and finally we look together at the series of drawings for her mother-and-children paintings.

‘The ghost children don't grow up, do they?' I say. ‘They are all little. Like the age when you left us.'

Francesca can't speak. She's biting back tears again. She leans against the wall of the barn, her hand holding her head.

‘It's all right,' I say to her. ‘I think I understand it a bit, now. I'm glad you told me everything. It's better to know the truth about things.'

6

The river near here is called La Bidouze. Seb and I have been running along it each morning for the last five days, before it gets too hot, and today we saw two kingfishers flash across near the bridge, blue streaks of light.

Yesterday, we walked with Francesca and Josep to the top of the mountain we can see from the house: Pic de Belchou.
Walking into the view,
Josep calls it. All the way up, the air was full of the sound of bells, all different notes: the sheep as well as the cows wear thick leather collars with bells of different sizes depending on how old they are and their place in the herd. Josep explained how they still farm in the old ways here: in the spring, the animals are taken up from the farms into the hill pastures, where they stay for the summer. The bells guide the shepherds to their herds.

At the top of the mountain our mobiles actually got reception, unlike the house in the valley, and I read the two texts from Cassy and Dad:

Thinking of you. Missing you. Take care. Hope it's all going OK.

Hospital think baby will be here in next week or so. Moat House not ready!

We climbed back down a different way, through beech and sweet-chestnut woods. The trees have silver bark, and roots like fingers, and moss and lichens grow like long hair. ‘It's a proper fairytale forest,' Francesca said. ‘Like in a storybook.'

I told her about Kat and me, reading the storybook she left for us. I told her how we traced her name with our fingers, and about the picture I used to stare at, of the woman in the blue dress, leaning over the river, because I thought it was her.

Each day we are here, we are stitching something together, Francesca and I, Emily, her daughter. Piece by small piece. Filling in some of the gaps.

And at night, it's just Seb and me, laughing and talking in the dark. I've never been any place where it is quite so dark as it is here, on the hot, cloudy nights when there's no moon or stars.

We have three more days and nights like this. And then we'll travel back to our other lives: school and my AS results, and Cassy and Dad and the new baby, and Moat House, and Seb's new course at college. I'll have a whole new load of photographs to download.

Seb talks about working with stone, how it's like cutting a block of light: the line of the chisel makes the darkness and the shadow. As the shadow of each mark gets stronger, the light in the stone seems to get brighter. It's the opposite with a photograph: it's the light that you draw with, rather than the dark. But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other. And I think the same is true with painting, and stories too.