The Muse (20 page)

‘Just one more painting.
One
more.'

‘You are so bossy, Olive. So careless with other ­people's feelings.'

‘Am I? What about you? You didn't even want to kiss me when I turned up.' They sat, facing each other in silence. ‘Please, Isa. I know it's a lot. But I've got a painting called
The Orchard
. We could give Peggy Guggenheim that.'

‘The more we play, the more dangerous this gets.'

‘Nothing bad is going to happen.' Olive knelt down by Isaac's side, her fists locked together in supplication, resting on his knee. ‘No one will ever know. Please, Isa.
Please.
'

He ran his hands nervously over his head. ‘What if Peggy Guggenheim wants to meet me?'

‘She's not going to want to come down here.'

‘What if she invites me to Paris? She has already mentioned London.'

‘Then say no. Play the elusive artist.'

Isaac narrowed his eyes. ‘Now is not the time for English irony.'

‘No, I mean it. Isaac,
please
.'

‘What will you do for me?'

‘Anything you want.'

Isaac closed his eyes and ran his hand down his face again, as if he was washing away his thoughts. He lifted her from the floor and rose from the table, leading her through across the kitchen towards his bedroom door. ‘One painting, Olive,' he said. ‘And then – no more.'

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

14

I
saac demanded to see
The Orchard
before it was shipped to Harold's office in Paris, ‘so at least I know what I am putting my name to.' Teresa suggested that perhaps Sarah should view it too, because it would be useful for her to see Isaac with
The Orchard.
This would reinforce the general belief that the painting was his, should Sarah ever mention seeing it to her husband.

Olive was surprised at Teresa's suggestion. ‘I suppose it's a good idea,' she said to her. ‘But I thought you didn't want anything to do with this?'

Teresa merely shrugged.

‘OH, IT'S WONDERFUL,' SAID SARAH,
standing in front of the painting that afternoon in the front east room. Olive scuttled away from it – rather like a crab, it seemed to Teresa – running from a great wave, unable to put her head out of her shell. Her confident attitude had evaporated, and she sat herself in her father's armchair to watch her mother. Teresa took in the vision of Sarah's red woollen trousers, the deep blood shade against her creamy skin; Sarah had clearly rallied herself. ‘It's so like
our
orchard,' she said. ‘But . . . different.'

‘Thank you, señora,' said Isaac, in visible discomfort.

‘Isn't it good, Liv?'

‘Yes,' said Olive, unable to meet Isaac's eye.

Sarah insisted that Teresa fetch Isaac tea and
polvorones
. ‘We're so glad to have Teresa,' she said. ‘It would all be such a palaver without her. And I'm so proud of finding you, Mr Robles,' she said to him, leaning against the back of the sofa where he was sitting. She was warm, conciliatory. ‘How does it feel, to be the toast of Paris? she asked.

‘What is
toast
?'

‘It means you're everyone's new favourite. He'll be champing at the bit when he sees this.' She waved her hand in the direction of
The Orchard
. ‘Honestly, Mr Robles, I'm just so glad I commissioned you in the first place, although it's hard to share you. It's just such a shame my painting is hanging on another woman's wall.'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘Well,' she sighed, and it sounded like twenty words in one. ‘My husband will be home soon.' The marital noun made it sound as if Isaac would have no idea who Harold was.

‘It will be good to see him,' said Isaac.

Sarah smiled and left the room, and Teresa felt as if the wattage of the day had dimmed as they listened to her moving back up the main staircase. Olive stepped quickly to the door and shut it. ‘Well, Isa?' she asked, whirling round. ‘Do you like it?'

They all stared at the painting, the undulating patchwork of fields, the surreal intensity of colour, the white house which once was his to roam and now the home of someone else. ‘Does it matter whether I like it?' he asked.

Olive looked uncomfortable. ‘You don't like it.'

‘I can see its merit, but it is not what I myself would paint,' he said.

‘He doesn't like it,' said Teresa.

‘It is not that simple,' Isaac snapped.

Olive stood before the painting. ‘I think it is that simple, really. What don't you like about it?'

‘My God!' he cried. ‘Why do I have to
like
it? Is it not bad enough I am pretending I have made it?'

‘Do keep your voice down,' she said.

‘You have even painted my initials on it.'

‘A necessary touch.'

He stood up. ‘I hate it,' he said, savagely. ‘I hope your father does too.'

‘Isaac—­'

‘Good day, señoritas.'

Olive looked as if he had slapped her in the face. When he left the room and the two girls were left alone, Olive ran to the window, watching Isaac's figure disappearing down the slope to the rusting gates. He pushed them open roughly, not looking back once.

‘Do not be upset,' said Teresa, stepping forward. ‘What does it matter if he likes it?'

Olive made a sound of frustration. ‘I don't care about that. You have no idea what you're saying. He can hate what I create, but I can't
create
if he's angry with me. I just can't.'

‘But why not? You painted before you knew him.'

Olive gestured at
The Orchard.
‘Not like this, not like this!' She pressed her forehead against the peeling wooden shutter. ‘And if he doesn't like it, how can we be sure he'll ship it to my father? It has to go soon. We'll lose momentum with the Guggenheim woman.'

‘I am sure she will wait for genius.'

Olive wrinkled her nose. ‘That's a word that gets bandied about too much. I'm not a genius. I just work hard.'

‘Well, she will wait. And if my brother will not do it, I can take it to the port myself, señorita.'

‘You?'

‘You can trust me.'

Olive kept her face hidden, still leaning her forehead on the shutter. ‘You broke my trust when you put that painting on the easel. I can never work out if you're my friend or not.'

Teresa was silent for a moment. ‘Señorita.' She couldn't hide her pain. Sometimes Olive was as coquettish as her mother, for all her determination to be different. ‘You cannot see? You can trust me with your life.'

Olive lifted her head and smiled. ‘Never mind about my life, Tere. Do you mean it about the painting? You'll really take it to the port?'

‘Yes.'

Olive peered down the slope towards the gate, through which Isaac had long disappeared. ‘I've never had a true friend.'

‘Neither have I.'

‘Have you ever been in love? Have you ever been with a man?'

‘I have not.'

‘Been with a man – or been in love?'

‘Been with a man.'

Olive turned to her. ‘But you've been in love.'

Teresa felt her cheeks flame. ‘No. I do not think so. I do not know.'

‘You would know, if you were. Aha! There
is
someone. Who is it? Is he in the village?'

‘Yes,' Teresa said. ‘In the village. But he died.'

‘Oh no – it wasn't that boy Adrián?'

‘Yes,' Teresa lied.

‘Oh, Tere. I'm so sorry.'

Teresa in turn apologized silently to Adrián. She'd used him for her own rescue, which was not much better than the politicians had done, dragging the boy's exposed body through Malaga as a piece of propaganda.
Then again
, Teresa thought miserably, as Olive smiled at her,
waiting to understand one's feelings does seem the same as being indebted to a corpse
.

THAT NIGHT, TERESA DID NOT
go back to the cottage. She was permitted to install herself in the corner of Olive's attic, sorting the artist's brushes and her clothes in the heady bliss that follows a truce. Olive revealed that she had been painting a portrait of Isaac. It had been a long time coming, Teresa thought – given the speed with which the girl could usually work, the sketchbooks overflowing with the pencilled planes of his face.

Glancing over at Olive by the easel, Isaac's features developing on the wood before her, Teresa could see it was an astonishing beginning. He had greenish skin, and a consumptive, claustrophobic look in his eye. But his head seemed on fire, sweeps of dandelion and canary yellows up to the top of the painting, where red flecks were being spattered like the wake of murderous thoughts. It was a livid rendering, and Olive looked to be as if in a trance. Teresa knew that the balance between her brother and this girl wasn't right, but she doubted Olive was even aware of the layers of her infatuation and fear, manifesting in front of her.

OLIVE FINISHED HER FIRST GO
at Isaac in the small hours. At three in the morning, exhausted, she lay back on her mattress, staring at the roof beams and flaking ceiling plaster, its rough raised corners illuminated by the weak glow from her bedside candle. A wolf howled, deep and distant in the mountains.

‘Come and sleep here,' she said to Teresa. Teresa, who'd been reading one of Olive's books in the corner, put it down and obeyed, climbing onto the old mattress, lying rigidly next to Olive under the dusky pink coverlet, unable to move for fear that to do so might expel her from this magic kingdom.

They lay side by side, staring at the ceiling together as the atmosphere lightened in the room, the energy of Olive's work and concentration dissipating into the air, until all that was left was the glowing green face of Isaac on the easel. Beyond the window, into the land, no rooster or dog or human cry broke their silence as they fell asleep, fully clothed.

•

Two days later, Olive decided to come with Teresa to Malaga, ‘to make a day of it,' she said, ‘and why not?'

‘But how long are you going to be?' asked Sarah. Teresa supposed she was agitated, because for the first time in months she was going to be alone.

‘We're going to the shipping office for Mr Robles, and then I thought we'd have a lemonade in Calle Larios,' said Olive.

‘Well, make sure you get that farmer fellow to bring you back before nightfall.'

‘I promise.'

‘He isn't a red, is he?'

‘
Mother.
'

The Orchard
was a large painting, and it took two of them to carry it down the finca path, as if it was a stretcher missing a body. Teresa looked back up at the house and saw Sarah watching, staying at the window right until they were down in the valley towards the village and she disappeared from their sight. The mule man was waiting for them in the town square. Teresa tried to ignore the uneasy feeling in her gut when she imagined Sarah, on her own up there. She couldn't pinpoint the worry, so she focused instead on the pleasure of a day trip. She was in her best blue dress, and she'd washed her hair and spritzed herself with the distilled orange blossom Rosa Morales, the doctor's daughter, sold out of her kitchen. It could almost be
feria
time, for the sense of abandon and holiday Teresa felt.

As she sat with the wrapped parcel of
The Orchard
propped beside her
,
on the back of a mule cart thirty kilometres along the Malaga road, Teresa was surprised at how bulky the package was under the string and paper. She did not question it, simply because she was now deliciously in Olive's good books again, she would do as she was bid. Olive's hair was flying in the wind, and her white-­framed sunglasses made her as glamorous as her mother. Why would you want to ruin such a blue-­sky day?

The mule pulled along the white-­dust road, and Olive pointed out more red ribbons had been tied around the girths of the cork oaks. The vision was vaguely unsettling, like shining lines of blood fluttering in the breeze. ‘What are they?' she asked in Spanish.

The mule driver turned over his shoulder and simply said, ‘They're trouble.'

Teresa saw them as an omen for what violence might come to this land, as it had so many times in centuries before. No one ever saw who tied these ribbons – Adrián was one of them, apparently – but the fact that there were ­people determined to adorn the trees suggested an undercurrent of defiance, a desire to turn things on their head. Teresa didn't want anything turned on its head. She had only just managed to achieve this day, her small advantage.

Full of self-­importance and happiness, they reached the shipping office and arranged with the mule man when and where he should come back to fetch them. They made the post office just before it closed for siesta, sending off the parcel for today's shipment to France.
The Orchard
was off to the Galerie Schloss on Paris's Rue de la Paix.

Afterwards, they walked the wide boulevards, admiring the wrought-­iron lampposts adorned with hanging baskets, trailing petunias and geraniums in hot pinks and scarlets. They looked through shop windows, pointing out to each other the best-­dressed of Malaga's high society. They went inwards to the narrower, cobbled streets, all shutters closed against the midday heat. It was metropolitan, so different to their rural hideaway on the slopes of Arazuelo. Teresa was pleased to see how impressed Olive was with her native city. It might not be London, but it was by turns stately and timeless, as the sun beat down on the stone, or reflected off the polished vitrines and ornate wooden frames of department stores and pharmacists.

They walked down to the harbour and sat to enjoy a lemonade, wondering which of the enormous ships that pulled in and out with such constant frequency would be taking away their duplicitous cargo.

‘Isaac knew the painting would go,' Olive said. ‘He did agree. He just didn't want to be the one who sent it. Do you think I'm being fair to him?'

‘What you mean to ask is – will my brother carry on doing this for ever.'

Olive looked at her in surprise. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.'

Teresa gazed out to sea. ‘The money will never be a good reason for him.'

She was telling the truth; it had never been enough for either of them. Even though he had kept some aside from the sale of
Women in the Wheatfield
, it was true that they had both always wanted things that money couldn't buy; legitimacy and love. Teresa did think that Olive was being thoughtless, that her perpetual use of Isaac's name as a front for her own work was not something he would continue to tolerate. As for herself, as long as Olive wanted it, she was happy to oblige.

Olive frowned. ‘You make it sound like a threat.'

‘No, no,' said Teresa. ‘But – he is a man, you know.'

‘What do you mean?'

Teresa couldn't answer with the precision she wanted in English. And although she worried that Olive's actions were bringing her closer and closer to some undefined, simmering danger that was coming, which Teresa couldn't name but could almost taste – she was so happy to be here, by the sea, with a glass of lemonade, that she didn't want Olive's thoughtlessness to stop.