Выбрать главу

There was a steamer trunk filled with old curtains and drapery, all smelling of must and mold. There was a stack of local newspapers with dates in the forties. There were several cartons of old clothing, all of them smelling as uninviting as the drapes.

And there was the picture.

It was lying flat in a corner and she very nearly missed it. Then she happened on it and just gave it a quick glance, not wanting to waste any time on it, not really wanting to waste any more time in the cold attic. And then she saw what it was.

“Hey!”

“Find something?”

“It’s a picture. I think it’s a painting.”

“Of what?”

“I can’t tell. Help me get it over to the window, will you? I want to see it in the light.”

“Can’t you manage it?”

“The frame weighs a ton.”

Together they got the picture over near the window where enough light filtered through to illuminate the painting. It was a portrait. The frame was a massive wooden rectangle with an oval opening. The frame had been gilded, and most of the gold paint still adhered.

The oil portrait was of a woman who looked to be in her twenties or early thirties. Her perfectly straight light brown hair flowed down onto her bare shoulders. Her face was wedge-shaped, her skin very pale but glowing with vitality. Her hands, narrow and long-fingered, were clasped at her waist, holding a single red rose. Her eyes, small and pale, looked directly out of the picture at the viewer, burning with a passionate intensity.

“I wonder who she was.”

Erskine shook his head. “Must be very old.” He extended a forefinger, touched the painting where the woman’s hair met her shoulder. The surface sported a web of tiny cracks. “All dried out,” he announced. “It could be a hundred years old. Maybe older.”

“I wonder if she lived here. In this house.”

“Maybe. She could have lived here a hundred years ago. Or maybe she lived in England and never saw this house and ten years ago somebody found her in an antique shop and bought her and stuck her in this attic.” He giggled. “There’s no way to tell, is there? Unless there’s a signature on the painting and we can find out something about the artist.”

They looked, but there was no signature visible.

“She lived here,” Ariel announced.

“Maybe.”

“She did.”

He looked at her curiously. “Whatever you say,” he said. He extended his forefinger again but this time he touched the woman where her cleavage began just above the top of her gown. He moved his finger down over her breasts. “Nicely built,” he said.

“You’re disgusting.”

“I know.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Are you crazy, Jardell? All of a sudden I’m not allowed to feel up a picture?”

“Just quit it, okay?”

“Okay, but I think you’re nuts.”

“Help me carry her downstairs.”

“Why?”

“So I can see her better.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to get a flashlight and bring it up here? Remember how much trouble we had dragging her over to the window.”

“If you don’t want to help me, just say so.”

“I didn’t say that. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said. She didn’t know what was the matter but the picture was having an effect on her. And she wanted it downstairs in her room.

“I’ll help you, Ariel.”

“Not if it’s too heavy.”

“No, we can carry it. If we got it this far we can carry it downstairs.”

“Maybe it’s too heavy. I’ll ask David to do it. Your delicate condition and all.”

“You fucking shit.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“You’ve been weird all day. Have you got your period or something, Jardell?”

She started to giggle.

“What’s so funny?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” she said, blushing. “But I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Can we please take her downstairs now? Please?

Carrying the portrait downstairs to Ariel’s room turned out to be less of an ordeal than either of them had anticipated. Once they had the right sort of grip on it the weight was not difficult to manage. They placed the picture on the floor, leaning it up against Ariel’s dresser for support. She got a towel from the hall cupboard and wiped all of the dust from the picture and its frame.

The woman’s visage, arresting enough in the dimly-lit attic, was positively imperious in a bright room. The woman’s gaze was almost hypnotic.

“She’s beautiful,” Erskine said. His voice was pitched higher than usual, and he sounded as though he was surprised at the beauty of the woman.

“And she belongs in here.”

“Not on the floor, though.”

“On that wall.”

He looked where she pointed. “It would fit there.”

“I’ll get David to hang her for me.”

“You figure they’ll let you keep it?”

“Why not? She belongs in this room.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Look at her,” she said. “Who does she look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at her.”

He shrugged, studied the painting once again. Ariel tried to watch his eyes but his glasses concealed their expression. Then Erskine wheeled abruptly and scanned Ariel’s face. He looked at the painting, then back at Ariel again.

“Oh,” he said.

“It’s true, isn’t it? I’m not just imagining it?”

“She looks like you.”

“She really does, doesn’t she?”

“The shape of the head, the way the mouth is formed, the eyes. But you don’t stare that way.”

“Just watch me,” she said.

Her eyes burned into his. Erskine held her stare for a moment, then took a step backward and took his eyes away. “Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

“All right.”

“She really does look like you. It’s incredible.”

“I know.”

David hung the picture for her after dinner. She had been prepared for an argument from one or both of them but none was forthcoming. Roberta had started to ask what she had been doing in the attic in the first place, but Ariel’s vague reply that they had just been looking around evidently satisfied her. David at least showed a certain amount of interest in the picture, while Roberta barely glanced at it, merely wondering aloud why Ariel would want a gloomy thing like that on her wall.

David pointed out a few interesting things about the picture. He showed her how the artist had painted the foliage of the rose in such a way that part of the model’s hands were concealed. “Hands are sometimes hard to paint,” he explained. “A lot of old portraits are the work of amateur artists, gifted people who taught themselves how to paint. They lacked academic training and so they don’t always get proportions correct. They don’t know much about perspective and they don’t understand anatomy. This artist had more of a feel for his subject than most of them. There’s a lot of character in her face.”

She summarized the events in her diary before going to bed, noting David’s comments:

But he didn’t see the resemblance. He looked at how the hands were painted but never noticed who she looks like. But Erskine didn’t notice either until he really took a good look at her.

I saw it right away.

No I didn’t either. What happened was this: I looked at the picture and I recognized her. That’s what it was. I never saw her before but I recognized her and it felt strange. I got dizzy for a minute. Then I was looking at her and I realized why I recognized her, namely that she looked like me.