Could his mother really have done these? They were signed, simply but deliberately, in upright letters, as though she wanted there to be no mistake about it, Sibella.
He had always discounted his mother. Other than when he heard her calling to him on the cliffs, he rarely thought about her. It was his father he had grieved over, not out of love but out of sorrow. His father had made small beautiful things. Miniature ring bowls whose rims fell away like lace around wrists, mahogany trinket boxes with secret compartments so finely concealed that people who hid things in them sometimes never found them again, slender swaying single-rose vases carved out of ‘whispering walnut’ — his father’s phrase, whispering this, whispering that, their whole lives lived in a whisper. How could such delicacy of work proceed from so frightened, unhappy and lumpen a temper? His mother too had been unhappy, but she was no artist and Kevern Cohen was sentimental about art. Now he had to revise his thinking.
His father had kept this folio of hers. Why? Did he secretly admire her gift? Did he ever tell her, Kevern wondered.
It even crossed his mind, for the very first time, that his father and mother might have loved one another. The idea, at least, of his father being proud of her, made him tremble with the realisation that he’d known as little about his family as he knew about the earth he trod on.
How good an artist was she? He couldn’t tell. Her hand was strong and sure, the colours piercing, but were the images hers? He felt he had seen some of them before, or at least that they gave off an atmosphere he had breathed before. Even had they been copies, they were good, for copies too are distinguishable by the feeling they show. But where had she seen such work to copy? He couldn’t recall her ever having left the village. Nor did he remember her poring over art books. And if they were hers entirely, out of what depths of visionary dread had she drawn them?
He knew someone he could ask. Ailinn. But if he suddenly rang her to say he had unearthed remarkable art made by his mother she would smell a rat. If you want to talk to me, just talk to me, Kevern, she would say. You don’t need a pretext. Besides, what if she didn’t value the work? She wouldn’t be able to say so. And thereafter there’d be a dishonesty between them. It wasn’t fair to ask her.
Then he remembered someone else. Everett. Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky.
iv
‘And these were done by whom again?’ the eminent professor asked.
He was nervous. Only nerves could explain such a question, given how clear Kevern had been about finding the notebook in a drawer in his father’s workshop, how he recognized other entries in her hand, and how sure he was of her signature. Did Zermansky feel he’d been compromised by Kevern’s excitement because it showed that he wasn’t only illegitimately hoarding heirlooms but hankering inordinately for something in the past? Surely not. Everyone knew that everyone else kept more than they should. Curiosity had not been altogether stifled anywhere.
‘My mother. I told you.’
‘And you never knew?’
‘Never.’
‘Never saw her do these?’
‘Never.’
‘So they might not be hers?’
‘Believe me, that’s her signature.’
Zermansky shrugged. In the world of art a signature was nothing.
‘I can’t imagine her signing what she hadn’t done,’ Kevern continued. ‘Nor can I think of who else could have done them.’
‘You?’
‘Why would I be passing them off as hers?’
Zermansky scratched his head. Good question.
They were standing in Zermansky’s studio, on his easel the beginnings of another golden sun setting like liquid gold behind St Mordechai’s Mount. ‘I am perhaps the wrong person to ask,’ he said, nodding at the unfinished painting and laughing uncomfortably.
‘You must be able to 
udge the quality of work even when it’s unlike your own,’ Kevern said. ‘Your students’ work, for example.’
‘Oh, if any of my students were to do what your mother did. .’
His voice trailed off.
‘What?’
‘Well, they just wouldn’t. Couldn’t.’
‘Are you saying what my mother did would be beyond them?’
‘Not beyond them technically. Not beyond the best of them technically, anyway. But beyond them — how can I best put this — emotionally and volitionally. They wouldn’t know where in themselves to find such thoughts. And it wouldn’t occur to them to try. Why would it?’
‘Why wouldn’t it?’
‘Because that isn’t how we see any more. To be frank with you, Kevern, that isn’t how I’d like them to see any more.’
‘That sounds prescriptive, Everett.’
‘No. I don’t mean it to. I don’t run a dictatorship of the arts here. My students paint what they feel. But some things are no longer felt, and I am glad of that.’
‘What is it that my mother felt that you are glad your students don’t?’
‘Kevern, I never knew your mother.’
‘Neither, it seems, did I. But we aren’t talking about her personally, are we. What is it in the work—’
‘Kevern, look. I don’t know when your mother did these. But they are of another time. Art has changed. We have returned to the primordial celebration of the loveliness of the natural world. You can see there is none of that in what your mother did. See how fractured her images are. There is no harmony here. The colours are brutal — forgive me, but you have asked me and I must tell you. I feel jittery just turning the pages. Even the human body, that most beautiful of forms, is made jagged and frightful. The human eye cannot rest for long on these, Kevern. There is too much mind here. They are disruptive of the peace we go to art to find.’
‘You make me proud of her.’
Zermansky took a moment to process a thought. Like mother, like son — I bet she too had difficulty apologising.
But he was quick to reassure Kevern of his motives. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘because it’s not my aim to make you ashamed of her. She was certainly gifted — primitively gifted, I’d say, in the way that a particular period of art was cerebral and primitive at the same time — but not every gift needs to see the light of day.’
‘I wasn’t proposing to mount an exhibition of her work.’
‘Excellent, excellent. You enjoy looking at them, that’s sufficient. I’d keep them as something between you and her.’