Mr. Flood's Last Resort(42)

I am surrounded by canvases, stacked twenty deep around the edges of the tiled floor, covered in cobwebs and blossoming with mildew. All of them are executed in bright colors, as if they record light strong enough to burn the shadows away. But the shadows haven’t gone; they are there, inside the subjects.

They give me a strange feeling, these paintings.

They are like sunlit happy scenes moments before a disaster. A fairground ride with a bolt loose, a day at the beach before the wave hit, a lazy row along the Thames before the splash, struggle, and sweep of the undertow.

A fox roams through many of them with its honeyed eyes glinting. Its fur meticulously picked out in shades of brown madder and Indian red, coarse on top with a soft snowy front bib. Maybe it’s Larkin, or one of Larkin’s predecessors.

A canvas hung on the wall above the door catches my eye: a painting of a red-haired woman in a yellow dress. She walks holding a little boy’s hand, turning away from him to look down at the flower in her other hand, a sunny-eyed daisy with white petals. The boy’s face is suggested by a few rapid brushstrokes, a tangle of hair, a scowl. But the woman’s face is drawn in perfect luminous detail. Her face holds no tension; it is full of the peace and gladness of a long summer’s day, lulled and captivated by the weather and by nature all around her. Here is the same delicacy of touch as the portrait on the landing, but this is a very different woman. She is as light as that woman is dark.

And she is beautiful, with a calm, unwatched kind of beauty. There is the slightest blush of color on the lips and cheeks, the nostrils and earlobes and on the pale long slants of her eyebrows. Her hair is swept up and back to tumble around her shoulders; a strand blows across her face. And it burns, her hair, backlit by the dying fire of the sun that sets in a molten strip in the field behind her. In the background there is a blue and cream caravan.

Only the child in the doorway is missing.

*

WE PULL an armchair from the corner of the conservatory and drape it with an old curtain, and Cathal positions an easel and a trestle table opposite.

He lays the table with a surgeon’s precision. Unpacking a box of glass bottles, labeled with penciled writing on strips of masking tape. Soon there is a palette with tiny worms of color squeezed out on it, a clean palette knife, and brushes all in a line. Cathal disappears into the other room again and brings out a canvas, closing the door quickly behind him.

He motions for me to sit in the armchair.

“Mary is very beautiful in that painting,” I say. “That is Mary, isn’t it?”

He follows my eyes. “She wanted the boy in it. He fidgeted too much.”

“That was painted from a photograph. Mary and Gabriel in Langton Cheney.”

He ignores me, fiddling with the nuts and bolts on the easel legs.

I realize I’m shaking. Full of adrenaline and ready to run, keen on the flight aspect more than anything. But the door is locked. I could smash through the glass, with my arm over my head like a stunt girl. Or I could take a run up and trapeze out of the open skylight. But no doubt I would need spandex and the natural bounce of an acrobat for that.

“I found the photograph in the kitchen.”

Cathal glances up at me with an expression of bored confusion, as if I keep asking him questions in a language he can’t comprehend. “There are no photographs of Mary.”

“There’s one.”

“Where is it?”

On Renata Sparks’s coffee table in a plastic bag labeled Exhibit 2. “It was badly damaged.”

“Oh yes,” he says without interest.

“Her face was burnt out of the picture.”

“Was it?” His tone is flat, unsurprised. “Well, Mary would do that.” He picks up a stick of charcoal. “She didn’t like the way the camera captured her.”

“Mary would burn her own face out of photographs?”

“Lean back and put your head on your arm. Look up with your eyes—not your face, your eyes.” He gestures at me from behind the easel. “Keep your mouth closed, and stop clenching your fecking jaw. Jesus, you’ve a jaw on you.”

I move in the chair, turning myself this way and that for him. I have two thoughts racing neck and neck: Do I believe him? Do I not believe him?

I look at him, holding up his charcoal stick, squinting. Shuffling about in his slippers and raincoat with his hair on end, like some wild old Druid conducting some forgotten rite. Or a humbug wizard making up the magic as he goes along.

Without another thought I say it: “I found a photograph of two children too: Gabriel and a little girl standing next to the fountain. Her face was burnt away just like Mary’s.”

No answer.

“Who is she?”

He frowns at the canvas. “No idea.”

“So Mary defaced that picture too? Then crossed the little girl’s name out on the back?”

“Keep still now.” He holds up his charcoal. “As I said, she would do that, when the mood took her. Mary suffered with her nerves.”

“In what way?”

“She imagined things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Would you close your fecking mouth until I draw you,” he growls.

I sit in silence, listening to the slap of Cathal’s slippers as he wanders backwards and forwards in a one-sided dance with the easel.