The Muse (18 page)

I must have looked dumb. ‘He didn't paint it, Odelle,' she repeated. Her shoulders sagged. ‘It wasn't him.'

‘Then – who was it, Quick?'

My question ruined everything. On hearing it, Quick looked stricken, aged, weird. Looking at her, I felt a bit sick and scared myself, because she seemed terrified. ‘Are you all right?' I said. ‘Should I call a doctor?'

‘No. It's late. I'm fine.' But I could hear that she was out of breath. ‘You should call a taxi. I have a number, out in the hallway. Don't worry, I'll pay.'

I rose, stumbling over the threshold of the front room into the cool darkness of the hall, where I switched on the light standing on the telephone table. There was no number to be seen. The house behind me was silent. I sensed a presence in the shadows, and my back prickled. I turned around and something was on the stairs, moving towards me. I gripped the edge of the table, as Quick's cat emerged into the pool of yellow light, and sat very still before me, turning his green eyes on me. We regarded one other, only the faintest movement from his ribs dissuading me that he was stuffed.

‘Look in the drawer,' Quick called in a haggard voice, and I jumped. ‘There's an address book in the drawer.
T
for Taxi.' I turned back to the lamplight, feeling foolish, praying that nothing else was waiting for me in the shadows beyond the cat.

I STILL DON'T KNOW WHETHER
what happened next was another of Quick's plans – her, leading me deeper into the wood – or whether in her illness, under strong medication, she just hadn't realized what I'd find.

I pulled her address book out of the drawer, where it lay amongst old maps and balls of string and unopened mousetraps. I flipped to find
T
for Taxi, and saw two things. The first; under
S
, in Quick's flowing black nib, were written the words:

Scott – The Red House

Baldock's Ridge

Surrey HAS-­6735

And secondly, a small white letter, folded in two, and pressed between these pages.

‘Everything all right out there?' Quick called.

‘Fine!' My voice quivered. ‘Just getting it now.'

I looked at the Scott address in confusion. This entry might be a recent addition, of course – Quick undertaking some investigating of her own into Lawrie and the painting – and God knows it would not have surprised me. It was unbelievable that Quick might actually know the Scott family. And Lawrie didn't seem to have recognized her, did he? He was far too convincingly bemused by Quick to be hiding the fact that he actually
knew
her. And yet, here was his family's address. None of it made sense.

I opened the letter quickly, knowing I didn't have much time. A thin slip of paper fell out from the fold and fluttered to the floor. I knelt to pick it up and read it, hunched in the semi-­darkness, Quick's cat still watching. It was a telegram, and my eyes bulged on the words. “DARLING SCHLOSS STOP,” it read: “VERY EXCITING PHOTOGRAPH STOP WE MUST BRING R TO PARIS-­LONDON-­NYC STOP LOVE PEG.” It was dated: “PARIS – MALAGA 2
nd
JULY 1936.”

I can see myself even now, kneeling like a sinner in Quick's hallway, skin tingling with a sense of connecting threads, a knowledge just beyond my reach. Schloss
. Harold
Schloss? It was the dealer Reede had mentioned. What the hell was this telegram doing here, in Wimbledon, in Quick's telephone book? Quick was in her living room, steps away from me, collapsed in her grey chair, but there could have been a thousand miles between us.

I sat back on my heels, hoping time would stand still in order for me to think.
Peg
could be Peggy Guggenheim,
R
could be Robles; the date fitted, and it was sent to Malaga, where Reede said Robles resided. If this was real – and it looked real – then this was a piece of correspondence Reede might kill for. And here it was, out of Quick's drawer and in my hands.

‘Odelle?' she called, and I heard the note of panic in her voice. ‘Are you summoning that taxi in Morse code?'

‘The line's engaged. I'm just waiting,' I called back. I placed the telegram on the table and picked up the letter. The date was 27 December 1935. I inhaled the scent of the old, thin paper. There was something familiar about it; but I couldn't place it. It was addressed to a person called Miss Olive Schloss, at a flat in Curzon Street. It ran:

Further to your application to the Slade School of Fine Art, it is our pleasure to invite you to undertake the Fine Art degree course, commencing 14th September, next year.

The tutors were highly impressed by the rich imagination and novelty on display in your paintings and studies. We should be happy to have a pupil such as you, continuing the rigorous yet progressive tradition of the school –

‘
Odelle.' Quick was calling very sharply now.

‘Coming,' I said. ‘There's no answer.'

I began to refold the letter in haste, placing the telegram back inside it. I was on the point of reaching for the discarded telephone book, open on the Scott entry, when Quick came into the hall. I froze, the letter still in my hand. My face must have been a vision of guilt. The living-­room light shone through the fabric of her blouse, she seemed so small, the outline of her ribcage far too narrow.

She looked at me – stared, actually – deep into my eyes, and then she smiled. She reached out, took the letter and the telegram from my mesmerized grip, placed them in the telephone book and closed it. And then my realization came, and I saw in Quick's face a younger woman smiling, a woman in a photograph, a moment of happiness as she clutched a brush.
O
and
I.
O
, a full circle.
O
, for Olive Schloss.

‘You knew him,' I whispered. She closed her eyes. ‘You knew Isaac Robles.'

The cat brushed against my legs. ‘I'd murder a cigarette,' Quick said.

I pointed at the telephone book. ‘Who's Olive Schloss?'

‘Odelle, would you go and fetch me some cigarettes?'

‘You were there, weren't you?'

‘I've run out, Odelle, would you mind?' She fumbled inelegantly in her pocket, and thrust out a pound note.

‘Quick—­'

‘Go,' she said. ‘There's a shop just round the corner.
Go.
'

SO I LEFT, TO FETCH
her cigarettes. Numb, I floated into Wimbledon Village to buy her a packet, and I floated back. And when I returned, the house was in complete darkness, the curtains drawn. The pamphlet I'd taken from the Scott house was on the step, weighted down with a stone. I put it back in my handbag and knocked and knocked, and called her name quietly through the letterbox.

‘Quick. Quick, let me in,' I said. ‘You said you trusted me. What's happened? Quick, who is Olive Schloss?'

There was only silence.

Eventually, I had to push the cigarettes through the door, and they thumped lightly onto the mat on the other side. I pushed through her change also, hearing the coins land one upon the other, as if I was throwing money down a wishing well that would never grant me any wish. Still, there was no movement. I sat on the other side of that door for a good half an hour, my limbs going stiff. I waited for the sound of her footsteps, sure that Quick would give in to the craving of her nicotine and come for the cigarettes.

What was true, and what was I already beginning to imagine? It mattered greatly to me as to whether Quick had intended for me to find the clues in her telephone book, or whether it was a mistake. It seemed as if she had been deliberate about it – why else tell me else invite me here, and grill me about Lawrie, and the painting? Why else tell me to look up
T
for Taxi? Or perhaps it had been a genuine mistake, and I had stumbled across her secrets – and now my punishment was this silent, locked door.

Outside, I could hear car doors closing arrhythmically, and see the street lamps flickering to life. I didn't want a policeman to catch me sitting there, so I got up, and walked away to the village high street to wait for a bus.

Whatever the truth was, Quick was now fragmented to me. The illusion of her perfect wholeness and easy glamour had been swallowed up by tonight's mystique. Despite her confession about her ill health, I realized I knew so little about her. I wanted to put her back together, to return her to the pedestal on which I'd placed her, but our encounter tonight would make that impossible. Now, when I thought about Quick, I couldn't stop thinking about Olive Schloss.

My imagination was extravagant, and I believed that Olive Schloss was a ghost I might control. But had I turned back that night, and looked up at Quick's window, I would have seen a silhouette, orchestrating my retreat.

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

April 1936

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

12

W
omen in the Wheatfield
did sell, and it was a woman who bought it. Harold had sent a telegram to the post office in Arazuelo three days after his departure to Paris, and Olive went to fetch it. The buyer was called Peggy Guggenheim, and according to Harold, she was a rich friend of Marcel Duchamp and was thinking of dabbling in the art market.

‘So not a real collector,' said Isaac.

‘Well, apparently she's got the money,' Olive retorted.

Guggenheim purchased Isaac Robles's painting at a fairly high rate for an unknown; four hundred French francs. To Olive, the sale of the painting was glorious, hilarious: it made no sense, and yet it did. It was as if
Women in the Wheatfield
was a completely separate painting from
Santa Justa in the Well
, whilst remaining exactly the same thing. The image was identical, it just had a different title and had been made by a different artist. She was free of identity, yet what came from her was valued. She could create purely, and also bear witness to the muddier yet heady side; the selling of her art.

Having had her father unwittingly sell one of her paintings, Olive could admit to herself that part of her plan to attend the Slade had been solely to spite Harold, to show him what he had overlooked. But the Guggenheim purchase had eclipsed this desire; it was both a grander personal validation, and a much more wonderful joke.

•

Soon after Harold's telegram arrived with the news, Teresa began to have a dream that was strange for someone who had always lived in such a dry part of the land. It was dusk, and she was on the veranda, and the body of the murdered boy, Adrián, was lying out in the orchard. She couldn't see much beyond the small lamps she'd laid out along the ground, only the eerie glow of his body. In his tatters of flesh, he began to rise up and move towards her – and yet Teresa couldn't, or wouldn't, flee, despite knowing that to stay would be her end.

Beyond the boy's body she sensed an ocean, wide and black and churning, and she noticed what he did not – that a huge wave was coming, a looming wall of water, ready to lay waste to his life for a second time, and to wash hers away with a biblical magnitude. She could almost taste the salt in the air. Olive was screaming somewhere, and Teresa called out to her, ‘
Tienes miedo?
'
Are you scared?
And Olive's voice came floating back over the trees: ‘I'm not scared. I just don't like rats.'

Teresa would wake at this point, just as the wave took the Adrián's body away. She'd had the dream three times, and it disturbed her not only because of the content, but because she never normally remembered her dreams, and this one was so easy to recall. Once, she would have told Isaac about it, in order to with him laugh at her imagination, but she didn't much feel like sharing with him these days.

Throughout the end of February and into March, Harold remained in Paris on business, and so the women were alone in the house. Teresa began to long for Harold to come back, if only to fill the place with noise, his heavy English, even his whispered German
.
Too much was happening elsewhere, out of Teresa's control. It felt as if she and Olive were orbiting each other, like opposing moons. Olive would go upstairs, claiming a migraine, or women's pains. Teresa hoped she would be painting, but often Olive was nowhere to be found, at hours that normally coincided with Isaac's return from his job in Malaga.

If Sarah wondered about her daughter's sudden ill-­health, these domestic absences, she wasn't saying anything. But Teresa could sense a change in the other girl; how she had become more sure of herself since the sale of the painting. Olive was crackling with energy daily, and the effect was remarkable. The idea that she was suffering headaches was idiotic. Teresa would watch Olive, leaning up to inhale the burgeoning jacaranda, the honeysuckle, the roses come in an early spring, her finger gripping the stems so hard that Teresa was worried they were going to snap. Olive, for her part, looked through Teresa as if she was a ghost.

As far as Teresa saw it, Olive was pouring herself away into Isaac. She wondered if Olive believed that she was drawing power from pretending to be him, but Teresa wanted to shake her and say, ‘
Wake up, what are you doing?
' But it was Teresa, not Olive, who suffered the bad dreams and painful days. She began to regret ever swapping the painting. She'd made a gamble and failed, sacrificing the only friendship she'd ever had before it had come to blossom.

Teresa had never missed a person before. It revealed a dependency within herself which outraged her. Olive's diverted attention was a pulsing wound, a peculiar type of torture; the loneliness hard to quantify when the source of it was before her, walking up and down the staircase, or round the orchard, out of the front door and away. Teresa never knew when the next pang of it was going to hit. And when it did, it was as if the floor had fallen away and her heart plunged into her mouth, stoppering her breath – and there was no one to catch her as she stumbled to a hidden corner of the finca to cry. What had happened to her?

Alone in her cottage at night, Teresa would sit up in bed and move through the pages of the old
Vogue
like a child with a story-­book, savouring each image and paragraph, underlining with her nail the words she didn't understand. She ran her finger down the side of the model's face, before lifting her pillow and slipping the magazine under, a perpetual love note to no one but herself.

SARAH WAS GLOOMY, TOO. ALTHOUGH
she didn't weep, she did something worse – she would lie on her bed, not speaking, watching the blue smoke of her husband's cigarettes disappear towards the ceiling. The telephone would ring and ring, and she would never answer it, and she wouldn't let Teresa pick it up either. Teresa thought it odd that Sarah would not lift the receiver, to see if it was her husband. She wondered then if Sarah knew full well it would be a different voice entirely; a woman's voice, whispering in timid German.

Teresa had begun to see Sarah's faultlines – the telephone left ringing, the champagne bottles, empty by three in the afternoon, the uncracked spines of discarded books, the dark roots growing from her fading blonde head. She stopped dismissing them as a rich woman's problems, and to her surprise, in her own pitiful state, began to feel pity. Life was a series of opportunities to survive, and in order to survive you had to lie constantly – to each other, and to yourself. Harold had the motor car, the business, the contacts, the cities and spaces he inhabited, manifold and varied. Sarah, despite her obvious wealth, had just this one bedroom and her beauty, a rigid mask that was setting her into an existential rot.

‘I WAS THE ONE WHO
discovered him,' Sarah said to Teresa. It was a late night, and Olive was upstairs. They could hear her, pacing back and forth. Despite everything, Teresa longed to go up there, to knock and be admitted, to see what Olive was painting. Forcing herself to stay put, she picked another camisole from off the floor.

‘
I
was the one who suggested Isaac painted for us in the first place,' Sarah went on. ‘And I get no thanks. Harold as usual takes the reins, riding off into the sunset. I don't even get to keep the painting, because of course he has to go and sell it. He said, “Why would we keep it here, where only the chickens will see it?” Because it was a painting of
me
, for
him
, for Christ's sake.'

Outside, the cicadas had started to rasp in concert, so aggressively that it sounded as if the grass was a sea of vibrating strings. Teresa marvelled that Sarah had managed to see herself in the images of
Santa Justa in the Well
. Couldn't they all see that Olive's painting was of the same woman, repeated twice, once in her glory and again in her despair? Perhaps, Teresa supposed, if you were determined to see yourself in a certain way, you would – however much the evidence presented otherwise.

‘It should have stayed with us,' Sarah said. ‘It's wonderful for your brother, of course, but it's the principle of the thing. It was something he did for us. And Harold just hands it over to the highest bidder
.
'

‘Did Isaac accept your money, señora?'

‘No,' said Sarah. ‘I did try. I hope he's happy with Peggy Guggenheim's, that's all I can say.'

Teresa knew that Isaac had travelled to Malaga to pick up the money wired from Paris, and gone straight to the Workers' General Union headquarters, donating two-­thirds of it to pay for agitating pamphlets, clothes, an emergency fund for those laid off, and food. In some ways, you had to admire the efficacy of Olive's plan, turning her painting into a political cause with her father the unwitting middleman in Paris. Isaac had kept the last third of the money, a fact which incensed Teresa. She'd told her brother to give it back to Olive, but he'd said that Olive wanted him to keep it. ‘I have to eat,' he'd said. ‘
We
have to eat. Or do you fancy eating rats this year?'

Rats. Was that why she'd been dreaming about rats?

‘Teresa, are you listening to me?'

‘Yes, señora,' Teresa said to Sarah, folding up the last of her camisoles and placing them in the wardrobe drawer.

‘I was his inspiration.'

‘I am sure he is very grateful.'

‘Do you think so? Oh, Teresa. I wish something would
happen.
I'm really beginning to miss London.'

Teresa plunged her hands into Sarah's drawer of satins and gripped her fists out of her mistress's sight.
Then go, and take me with you
, she screamed silently, even though she knew this was an impossibility. For all the pity she showed Sarah Schloss, the woman would never do such a thing in return.