The Muse (32 page)

‘Any other languages I should know about?' the man asked, passing her his hip-­flask, which she drank from, hesitantly. She told him she knew a bit of German and at this, he became even more intrigued. ‘Where are you going?' he asked.

‘England.'

‘Nowhere more specific?'

‘London. Curzon Street.'

‘Very nice. Family there?'

‘Parents.'

‘I see,' he said, but he did not look convinced, and Teresa felt herself collapsing within. ‘And what are you going to do when you get there?' he pushed.

Teresa suspected that Harold and Sarah, for their separate reasons, would be glad to see the back of her. They'd done enough, bringing her out of Spain to protect their respective secrets, using their daughter's name to do so. Teresa knew she was already a nuisance they'd rather forget. She wasn't sure how far she'd be able to push her luck.

‘I don't know what I am going to do next,' she said to the man, thinking there was no harm in fusing a true statement in the middle of her evasions.

‘I might be able to help you. If you're willing to help me.'

‘How?' she asked. Behind his head, the coast of Spain had by now completely disappeared.

‘Come to this address,' he said. ‘Whenever you can. A Monday is best.'

Teresa took the small card he was proffering, and read the words
Foreign Office, Whitehall, London
. She didn't know what that was, or how to get there, but she worried that if she confessed to this man, he would take his offer away. She tried to assess him; was it her body he wanted? It didn't seem so, but then, she knew by now how false the English could be, how good they were at saying the opposite of what they really meant.

He picked up on her hesitation. ‘I promise, it's quite all right,' he said.

Teresa turned back to watch the horizon. She pictured Olive's
Rufina
, the girl and her severed head and her lion, buried deep in the ship.
A girl has died
, she thought,
because I tried to save her.
She looked down at the water and remembered the promise she had whispered to Olive's body. ‘Whitehall,' she repeated to the man. ‘Best on a Monday.'

He smiled again. ‘Excellent. I hope to see you there.'

Teresa heard his footsteps receding. She ran her fingers over the card. It was cream-­coloured, and it had weight to it, a touch of authority. She flipped it over. There was nothing on it but a name:
Edmund Reede.
She repeated the strange words under her breath, before slipping the offering into her satchel. While she could not envisage what this Whitehall was, nor what Mr Edmund Reede might do for her, she knew that there was nothing left behind that would make her turn back.

The other passengers had retired. It was very cold by now. As the destroyer carved its passage through the sea and the last of the sun began to disappear, Teresa stayed on deck. Even when she could no longer feel her limbs, even after the night sky had claimed the horizon, Teresa waited. She watched the blackness, watched the stars, hearing the water, icy and deep, as the ship moved closer to England's shores.

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Afterword

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

XX

I
recognized Quick's lawyer immediately. He was the thin man in the suit I'd seen at the gallery on the opening night of ‘The Swallowed Century', staring closely at
Rufina and the Lion
. He was called Frederick Parr, and without much ado, he welcomed me into his office and handed me a thick folder, tied at the side with a red ribbon. My hand shook slightly; the breath was tight in my throat. I wanted to ask him how he'd come to be in the gallery that night – whether it was Quick who had invited him, and why, but I was too intimidated, and the weight of the folder in my hands seemed to keep my mouth closed.

‘It was Miss Quick's request that no one read that but you,' Parr said.

‘Thank you.' I fumbled the folder into my bag and began to exit the office, relieved that our transaction was over.

‘That's not the only reason you're here,' he went on. ‘Please, come and sit down, Miss Bastien.'

I obliged, walking across his grey carpet, lowering myself into the large wooden chair in front of his desk. Parr stalked round this wide piece of furniture before settling himself opposite me. The air between us thickened. I saw why Quick might have employed him for such disbursements, for he remained unmoved by my obvious nerves. Parr suited her purposes entirely. He was a sphinx; his job to execute her wishes and nothing else. He looked down at the document on his desk. ‘Miss Bastien,' he said, pressing his spindly fingers together to make a temple. ‘Marjorie named you in her will.'

I heard these words, and although I understood them, I could not grasp their implication. ‘I'm sorry?'

Parr blinked, impassive as a lizard. Outside, below us, the city traffic honked and beeped. ‘She had a cottage, in Wimbledon,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘She bequeathed it to you. In perpetuity.'

I MUST, AT SOME POINT,
have left the offices in Bread Street and walked back to St Paul's Tube station. I imagine the walk was slow, that my heart felt odd. Quick had left me her cottage. I had signed some papers. It was overwhelming. When,
when
had she made such a decision? And why me? It was an inheritance the like of which I would never have imagined.

I must have clutched her folder tight. At least here was a solid thing – a gesture embodied in paper that I might better understand. Perhaps the answers to all my questions were in here. I was probably terrified that I might be mugged, and I must have sat on the train all the way to Clapham Common, refusing to open it in public. It burned my lap, but I needed to be alone, in quiet, when I finally read it.

I managed to get off at my stop, and was barely up the stairs and through the flat door before I tore the ribbon and began to read.
Dear Odelle
,
This is a long story
, it began, and I sat up till midnight reading it. I forgot to eat, my neck was stiff, but I didn't care. Here was everything Quick had ever wanted me to know, but couldn't find the words to tell me to my face. ­People, places, evenings spent under the vast Andalusian skies. Her story was bigger and brighter than anything my own imagination would have pictured. And as I finished it, my eyes red and shrunken with tiredness, my head pounding, I realized something else. Here, also, was everything that Olive Schloss had never wanted the world to know.

This folder was the evidence of Quick's perpetual, honourable silence over
Rufina and the Lion
, which conflicted with her anxiety to pass on the story of Olive Schloss before it was too late. For most of the time I knew Quick, she had been in crisis. Her centre could no longer hold. It must have been an astounding trigger to see that photograph of Olive and her brother, and the painting of
Rufina
, all those years later, to understand better than anyone what it represented – and to watch it be commodified, re-­moulded, attributed to Isaac, yet again.

As Teresa Robles, she knew Olive had wanted to remain anonymous. As Quick, she felt the injustice in that. Nothing had been resolved between these two selves. This pressure, and the memory of what happened in those last days in Spain, ­coupled with the powerful pain relief she was on, no doubt exacerbated Quick's hallucinatory states and her general inability to put it all to rest. What she left for me to read in the folder finally explained why her behaviour had wheeled between solicitous and elusive. Teresa had cracked open; the reappearance of the painting had proved too much.

I still do not know if her death was accidental. Most of the time, I believe that it was not. She realized she would never find the words to speak the trauma of Olive's last days. And one might argue, that in the face of such aggressive cancer she saw that she could at least control her end, leaving the folder for me to find through her lawyer. I think often of Teresa's notebook of English; discarded by Jorge, discovered again by Olive, and then, in that folder, by me. It seems that she – like myself – always found the written word an easier means through which to understand the world.

She left no specific instructions with Parr as to what I was supposed to do with this folder. So for years, I did nothing. In fact, until now, I never told anyone what I read, that cold November night under my bedsheets. I didn't even speak to Reede about it, although I wish I had.

In the folder, Quick didn't detail exactly what happened when she arrived in England, but she must have taken up Reede's offer to meet him in Whitehall. I imagine that with her languages, and Reede's connections in the Foreign Office, she would have been useful to Britain as the world groaned its way to war. There were quite a few Nazis in Spain by the early '40s. And in its way, I'm sure that Britain – and Reede – was useful to her too. Gratitude comes in strange shapes. A beautiful cottage on Wimbledon common, for example.

I BECAME AS GOOD AS
Teresa at keeping ­people's secrets. I never told Lawrie that Quick was possibly his aunt, an aunt he'd met several times without realizing their true connection. I didn't want to set something in motion that I could never conclusively prove, I suppose, and besides, Quick was dead. It might have made it worse for him, knowing there had been family left behind, but everything being too late. In the folder that Quick left behind for me, she mentioned Sarah's
affair
with Isaac, but not a pregnancy.
I
knew Sarah Schloss was Lawrie's mother, that she was pregnant when she came back to England, because Lawrie told me that himself. But it is arguable – given the time frame – that Teresa, and therefore Quick, had not known that Sarah was pregnant when she was having her affair with Isaac. Quick would not necessarily have made the connection between Lawrie and her brother.

This leaves unexplained, of course, why Quick had the Scotts' address in her telephone book, and her interest in the question of Lawrie's mother. It could have been due to her own investigations over Lawrie's possession of the painting, before the cancer was too much. Sometimes, I wonder. Did Quick look at Lawrie and see her brother's face, echoed there? Or did she see Harold Schloss's features imprinted in his son? Or did she think nothing of it at all? Whatever it was, she always seemed unenthusiastic that Lawrie was my boyfriend.

One only need look again at the photo of Isaac Robles to see similarities between him and Lawrie – but Harold had dark hair too. Lawrie's paternity remained a question mark. I do sometimes wonder if Lawrie knew this, too – given how vague his mother always was to him about his father. And yet, I will always remember how he requested from Reede a copy of that photograph of Isaac Robles.

SOME ­PEOPLE WILL THINK THAT
my silence all these years was wrong. After all, the rare times that an Isaac Robles comes onto the market, it sells for astronomical sums. Olive Schloss deserved her artist's triumph, Lawrie deserved to know the whole story – but is there ever such a thing as a whole story, or an artist's triumph, a right way to look through the glass? It all depends where the light falls. Teresa Robles witnessed the benefits of working anonymously, and as I read Olive's story, so did I. As far as I can tell, she certainly enjoyed the pseudonym. The work, for her, was everything.

Rufina
now hangs, of all places, in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, beyond those huge lions where once I saw Cynth waiting, dressed in her new sheepskin coat. After several years in a private collection, it went back into auction, and was purchased by the nation as part of the gallery's drive to acquire more twentieth-­century art. There was fierce competition from the Prado in Madrid, and I expect Reede was grimly satisfied that they didn't get it. He never forgot the time they wouldn't lend him that Goya. The photograph was returned to the Prado. How it got there in the first place is a mystery; I can only suppose that Sarah returned it to Spain's national gallery, in a mistaken attempt to keep their interest in Isaac Robles alive.

IT WAS A STRANGE TIME,
after Quick died. The exhibition was considered a success by the Skelton, and Reede was pleased with the attention and income it generated. Gerry did sell Sarah's house, so Lawrie lost his home, just as I found mine. The sale of
Rufina and the Lion
severed Lawrie's ties to his mother's past, to Gerry; all of it. Or at least, he probably hoped it did, for art rarely obeys human desire. I expect such a painting left its imprint, even when he couldn't see it. With
Rufina
sold, Lawrie used some of the funds to go on a trip to America. He invited me, but I stayed in London, because I wanted to be in Quick's house, to keep working at the Skelton.

In the end, Lawrie didn't come back.

I'd like to say that the elasticity of youth meant the skin stretched easy. He would call from New York every week, to tell me he missed me, why didn't I come over – but I was where I wanted to be, and the fact was, I did not miss Lawrie as much as I might have missed my work. He had told me to keep writing, so I did. I would have preferred not to have to choose between writing and loving; because for me, they were often the same thing.

It was a time of new experiences, without the benefit of the old to mitigate the after-­effects. My life was a beanstalk and I was Jack, and the foliage was shooting up and up, abundant, impressive, at such speed that I could barely cling on. I loved and I lost love; I found new creativity and a sense of belonging. And something deeper happened, something darker, which we have all gone through – and if we have not, it is waiting for us – the indelible moment when we realize we are alone.

Perhaps I didn't have to choose. Perhaps that was a dichotomy I set up myself. Regardless; the phone calls became more sporadic, and then they stopped.

ON THE DAY I WENT
to Quick's cottage with the keys, I took both Cynth and Pamela with me. The place was much as it had been that night the ambulance men carried Quick out on the stretcher. There was the faint smell of her Eau Sauvage in the air. It was cold. The heating had been off and it was nearly December. I expected the face of her cat to appear at the kitchen door, but he had fled.

We went from room to room. It is not a large cottage. There are four rooms upstairs – three bedrooms, and a bathroom that freezes your skin in the winter months due to the inappropriately huge single-­glazed window and tiles everywhere. Quick didn't have much. Simple beds, attractive rugs, cracked ceilings. In the room I assumed was hers, she had a small table wedged under the window, which overlooked her garden. On the table was a typewriter, the same she had used to write the contents of the folder. I stared down at the machine. It felt like it was staring back at me.

Every day since, I have tried to put that typewriter to good use.

ON THE OCCASIONS I AM
asked to look back and reflect on my own books, I realize it has been my lifetime's purpose to try and understand what happened when I started working with Marjorie Quick. It started with me writing her eulogy, and has gone on from there. The preoccupations, the timbre, the shape of my writing have hinged on that short period of my life. My writing is the constant reconfiguration of how I myself was once reconfigured.

I often visited the gallery, specifically to see
Rufina and the Lion
, to stand with the public and admire its enduring power. What Teresa intended all those years ago, had, in its own way, come true. And yet more recently, as I have watched the sisters, I know that behind those eyes and underneath those brushstrokes there is another story, a story that is now partly mine,. One woman, her body buried by the roots of an olive tree. Another, fleeing and facing unknown waters. Then me.

The rediscovery of
Rufina and the Lion
in 1967 was bound up with my own awakenings: my understanding of Quick, Cynth and her baby, my affair with Lawrie, a growing confidence in my own writing. That painting set delayed time bombs, which carried on exploding – sometimes gently, sometimes with perturbing force – as the decades rolled on.

And last year, a question began to press inside me, as persistent as a lion who sets his sight upon you and will not go away. For years I had enjoyed the girls' hidden truth, this extra privilege, this miraculous secret of a nineteen-­year-­old painting in the attic of her father's rented house in Spain. And I wondered: might someone look at Rufina, at me, and believe such things? A new curiosity, rather than my hard-­earned confidence, became the fuel to write.

Although any collective answer to my question remains to be seen, personally I feel quite certain of it. Because if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: in the end, a piece of art only succeeds when its creator – to paraphrase Olive Schloss – possesses the belief that brings it into being.