The Muse (17 page)

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

XI

W
hen I went to find Quick in her office at the end of the day, her door was closed. Voices were coming through the wood – hers, and that of Edmund Reede, more angry than I'd ever heard.

‘We should use these discrepancies as opportunities,' he was saying. ‘Why are you undermining me, Marjorie?'

‘Edmund—­' she began, but he interrupted.

‘I've tolerated a great deal from you in the past, but your doggedness over this is ridiculous.' There was a silence. Reede sighed. ‘You've seen the accounts, Marjorie. You've seen what's happening to us. I just cannot fathom your reluctance. It's a stunning painting. It has a story. It has a handsome young man on the end of it. Two, in fact, if you put owner and painter together. We'll have a crowd; we might even have a sale. The Guggenheim are going to send me what they have, but there's already so much here. The mystery of Robles – how did he die? Who ordered his death, and why?'

‘That's got nothing to do with the painting, Edmund,' Quick said.

‘I disagree. His personal tale reflects the international stage. It prefigures by less than a decade the vanishing of hundreds of artworks under Nazi rule, and, in many cases, their creators and families.'

‘But the art first, eh, Edmund?'

He ignored this reproof. ‘Robles is universal. When we tell the tale of this artist, we are telling the tale of war.'

I heard the flick of Quick's lighter. ‘I'm surprised you of all ­people want to tell the tale of war,' she said. ‘I don't see this painting as political at all.'

‘Look here, Marjorie, what's the problem? We've always been frank with each other.'

‘Have we?'

‘Oh, come on. As frank as it was possible to be.'

Quick was silent for what seemed a long time. ‘There is no problem,' she said. ‘It just isn't political in the way you think it is. It's not about war in the way you see it, Edmund. It's not about the artist as a man. It's about the canvas. Two girls facing down a lion.'

I was astonished at the way they were talking to each other, so fluid and intimate. Pamela said they had known each other for years, and it showed. It was almost fraternal, and he was talking to her much as he might talk to one of his friends at the club.

‘We'll agree to disagree, Marjorie,' Reede said. ‘As we have done for longer than I care to remember.'

I could hear Reede moving towards the door, so I ran back along the corridor to my own desk, waiting instead for Quick to come and find me. It seemed that Quick had capitulated – to what exactly, I was not sure. She was resistant to the idea of an exhibition – but the true focus of her reluctance, this wavering derision and fear, was still not clear to me. It seemed that she was placing herself in opposition to whatever Reede thought philosophically about the painting, more than she was against the idea of actually exhibiting it.

QUICK INDEED TURNED UP AT
my desk shortly after, looking drawn and upset. ‘Ready?' she said. ‘There's a taxi downstairs.'

We walked past the reception desk together. I glanced at Pamela, and saw the confusion in her face. I was surprised to feel that I was betraying her, going off with Quick like this, when Pamela worked just as hard as me and had been here longer. But I couldn't turn back. I was too drawn to Quick's enigma, too determined to find out what was really going on.

•

After our dinner, Quick invited me into the sitting room at the front of the house. She lowered herself into a sleek grey armchair, its wooden arms carved like the strings of a harp. Everything she owned, apart from the gramophone, seemed stylish and modern. ‘Keeping an old woman company,' she said. ‘I feel guilty.'

‘Hardly old,' I replied. ‘I was very happy to come.'

We hadn't talked of much over dinner; a little about Pamela, Reede and the donors he had to court, how he hated flirting with old marchionesses holed up in damp castles, where God knows what treasures were rotting in the lofts. ‘You've known Reede a long time?' I asked.

‘A long time. He's a good man,' she added, as if I'd said otherwise.

We were drinking brandies, a quiet piano concerto floating through from the gramophone in the other room. Quick closed her eyes, and she was so still, neither of us speaking, that I thought she'd dropped to sleep, the glow from the electric table-­light beside her turning her face orange. She didn't strike me as the kind of person to invite a guest over and then fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. She was in her fifties, not her nineties, but it was peaceful to watch her in repose and I didn't wish to disturb. I wondered why she was so interested in me – placing my story in the magazine, the invitations to lunch, the solicitous questions over Lawrie and my future.

The electric fire was switched on, although it was a mild October. Quick even had on a shawl. I felt the brandy overheating my body and thought maybe I should leave, and I was on the point of rising from my chair when Quick said, her eyes still closed – ‘Did you ever talk to Lawrie Scott about his mother?'

I sat back down. ‘His mother?'

Her eyes snapped open and I saw their leonine intent. ‘Yes. His mother.'

I thought about the suicide, and realized with a shock that it might have taken place in one of the very rooms I'd wandered through. Sitting here, I suddenly missed Lawrie. I wanted us to start again – a trip to the cinema, a walk in the park – but I had no idea how on earth to make it possible. I couldn't let him float adrift as well as Cynth.

‘He didn't talk about her at all,' I lied.

‘Then he must be thinking about her an awful lot. I'd lay money on it, if I were a betting man. Grief's a pressure cooker if you don't deal with it. One day, you simply explode.'

‘Do you?'

She drained her brandy glass. ‘Things crumble. Bit by bit. They shift, you don't notice. Then you notice. Jesus Christ, my legs are broken but I never moved my feet. And all the time, it's been coming towards you, Odelle – orchestrated in the hearts of strangers, or a God you'll never meet. Then one day, a stone is hurled – and by accident or design, that stone hits the car window of a powerful idiot who wants revenge, or who wants to impress his mistress, and – whoosh – the foot soldiers move in. The next day, your village is burning down, and because of stupidity, because of sex, there's a coffin for your bed.'

I couldn't think how to reply to this. Sex, death, coffins – how many brandies had she had? I didn't see what this had to do with Lawrie at all. I stared into the electric bars.

Quick leaned forward, and the arms of her chair creaked. ‘Odelle, do you trust me?'

‘Trust you with what?'

She leaned back again, visibly frustrated. ‘You don't, then. If you did, you would have just said yes.'

‘I'm a cautious person. That's all.'

‘I trust
you
, you know. I know you're someone I can trust.'

I think I was supposed to be grateful, but instead I felt a simmering unease. The bars of the fire were making me hotter and hotter, and I was tired, and she was in a strange mood.

Quick sighed. ‘It's my fault. For all my conversations with you, I'm probably even more guarded than you are.'

I couldn't disagree with this, so I didn't try and persuade her otherwise.

‘I'm not well,' she said. ‘I'm not very well at all.'

IT WAS CANCER, SHE SAID.
Late stage, pancreatic cancer with an inevitable outcome. My own body ached at these words, which was selfish, but entirely predictable. I assumed that the outrageous fact of her cancer had made Quick want someone at home with her like this – a desire which had possibly surprised her and made her even more brusque. Quick, who had been alone with her secrets for so many years, no longer wished to be alone. Perhaps submitting my story, and therefore making me obliged to her, was a baroque plan to satisfy her simple need for company? If your life is running out, such decisions may not seem so invasive or dramatic, and you willingly commit. I realized too, that this was why she spoke to Edmund Reede with no fear of reprisal. She knew she was soon to be reprised entirely.

And I do think, looking back, that Quick perhaps regarded me as the child she never had, as someone who would perpetuate her essence after death. She told me at our first meeting that I reminded her of someone she used to know. I suspect that person was the closest companion she ever had. I'll never be sure of this, and she never mentioned a name, but her expression when she said those words makes me think that it was so. It was a tender look, mingled with terror, as if to come too close to me would lose whatever she'd lost all over again.

Sitting in that overheated front room, I realized quite how thin she was, how tired. And although I probably thought it unfair that someone should suffer something like that alone, I don't imagine I cried in front of her. Quick was not someone you would sob in front of unless you absolutely had to, and when it was a question of her own pain and loss, you might feel a monstrous booby to cry when she herself was dry-­eyed, dragging on the cigarettes that were helping to kill her. She was a curio, out of her time, not given to standard emotion – and in her presence, you did what Quick did.

‘Well, say something,' she said.

‘Does Mr Reede know?' I asked.

Quick snorted. ‘God, no. And he's not to.'

‘Does anyone else know?'

‘No one else, but don't worry, I haven't told you because I want you to be my nursemaid.'

‘Why have you told me?'

Quick reached for the brandy bottle and refilled her glass. ‘Do you know, I got my diagnosis the day you started at the Skelton?'

‘Goodness me,' I said. I remembered Quick coming up to my desk that first day; her flushed face, the way she batted away the porter's questions over her absence from work.

‘Indeed,' she said. ‘A day of ups and downs. Death imminent, followed by Odelle Bastien.'

‘I can't imagine I'm much of a tonic.'

She lit a cigarette, the last of the packet. ‘You have no idea.'

I couldn't help wondering how long she had left, but I didn't want to ask if she knew, nor enquire about medications, or anything really practical. It seemed too brutal that night, as if I was asking about her expiration date. She was still here, still vital, still mercurial.

IN THE SILENCE BETWEEN US,
I reached into my handbag and handed over the art gallery pamphlet. I still wonder why I did it, even though it felt like a betrayal of Lawrie. I think it was perhaps the pride I felt, from knowing that Quick had confided in me. It was my consolation offering in return, even though I didn't know if it was something she'd find useful.

She took it, almost as if she was expecting it. ‘This was in Lawrie's house,' she said.

‘How on earth did you know?'

‘You've been looking like you wanted to tell me something since the moment I mentioned your visit there.'

‘I didn't know I was so obvious,' I said.

She smiled. ‘You're not that obvious. I've had lots of practice.' She opened the pamphlet and placed it gently on her knees, her finger tracing the pencilled message,
No Sign.
‘Was there anything else with it?' she asked.

‘No. Just odds and ends on a window sill. Butcher's bills, church ser­vice sheets.'

‘Church ser­vice sheets?' she repeated, one eyebrow raised.

‘A carol concert, actually.'

‘I see.'

‘What do you think it means – where someone's written
No Sign
? Was it the name of a painting?'

‘I imagine it's simpler than that. Someone was looking for something, and they didn't find it.'

‘You know what they were looking for, don't you, Quick?'

She looked up at me, the electric fire turning her irises hazel. ‘I do?'

‘Well,' I said. ‘It's just – you're very interested in Lawrie's mother. And Lawrie's painting—­'

‘ “Interested” is not the word I would use.'

Obsessed? Frightened?
I thought.
As if I would say those words to you.
‘Well,' I faltered, sensing her stiffen, ‘you seem averse to the idea of exhibiting it.'

‘I'm not averse to the exhibition of that painting. I think everybody should see it.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘But that's not what you said last time. You said Lawrie should take it home.'

She took in a deep breath. ‘Well. I'm not entirely happy with how Reede is planning to use it. Until we get more information from the Guggenheim institution, my doubts remain.'

‘What doubts are those?'

Quick's face took on a haunted look. I'd seen it before, through the keyhole, when Lawrie had returned to continue his discussions with Reede. Her eyes darted back and forth on the rug between us, as if she was working out a means to express something incredibly difficult. She kept breathing in as if to speak, and then not speaking. It was frustrating, but I knew that to speak myself might ruin the slim chance she would finally say something.

‘Isaac Robles didn't paint it, Odelle,' Quick said, her fingers tightening on the pamphlet.

My heart began to thump harder. ‘But he's standing in front of it, in that photograph.'

‘So? I could go and stand in front of any number of artworks and be photographed. It doesn't mean I made them.'

‘It was taken in his studio—­'

‘Odelle, it's not that I don't believe he painted it. I know he didn't.'

Her words ran over me like a shiver, and my skin turned to gooseflesh, the way it does when someone tells you the truth and you hear it with your body. The simplicity of her last four words sang through the air between us, and hit me in the stomach.