‘You know, you said once if Toby died you’d come back here and paint the countryside he grew up in. You said you’d want to paint what made him, not what destroyed him.’
She smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve done.’
‘Does it help?’
‘No, nothing helps.’
He waited, but she was not to be trapped into a line of conversation that might end in tears.
‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
They walked across the yard where a few white hens pecked in a desultory way at the dust. A cockerel stalked towards them, shaking his blood-red comb, the last rays of the setting sun waking an emerald gleam in his black neck feathers.
‘I work in the barn now. I find it helps to leave the house in the morning, you know? To actually go to work.’
‘I’m just the same, I thought at first I’d hate getting up in the mornings and going to the Slade, but actually I prefer it.’
The barn was dark at first, so dark he almost stumbled, but there was a door immediately ahead. Once that was open, he saw that the interior was flooded with light: oblique, amber light at this hour of the afternoon, but the windows faced north. The morning light must be wonderful.
Facing the door was an easel, partially draped in a paint-daubed white cloth. Instinctively, he looked away; work in progress was always private. The completed canvases were stacked against a wall.
She waved him over to them. ‘Go on, have a look.’
He took his time. To be brutally honest, he’d expected nostalgia: scenes from rural life, happy children, impossibly long, golden summer days. Instead, he found himself looking at a series of winter landscapes, empty of people. Well, that was his first impression. When he looked more closely, he realized that every painting contained the shadowy figure of a man, always on the edge of the composition, facing away from the centre, as if he might be about to step outside the frame. Many of these figures were so lightly delineated they might have been no more than an accidental confluence of light and shade. He stood back, trying to pin down his response. At one level these were firmly traditional landscape paintings, but there was something unsettling about them. Uncanny. Oddly enough, he recognized the feeling. It was the paradox of the front line: an apparently empty landscape that is actually full of men. How on earth had she managed to get that?
‘They’re very good,’ he said, at last.
‘It’s not about that.’
‘No.’
He held up a canvas, one of the few she’d had framed. It showed the hill behind the house; under the trees, at the edge of the painting, was a patch of deeper shadow that might, or might not, be the head and shoulders of a man. Paul intended to say how much he admired it. Instead, he said, ‘He looks as if he’s trying to get out.’
Her eyes flared. ‘It’s interesting you should say that. I had a lot of trouble with that one. I thought I’d got it and … and then when I came down the next morning the figure had moved.’ She caught his expression. ‘Of course, I don’t mean actually moved. I must have remembered it wrong.’
‘He’s in every painting. Toby.’
‘A male figure.’ She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Oh, all right, Toby. But I’m not running away from it, you know. It’s not like you and your corpseless war.’
‘Don’t let’s argue. They are very, very good.’ Clearly, Toby had become her muse. Her talent flourished on his death, like Isabella’s pot of basil growing out of a murdered man’s brains. Elinor wasn’t flourishing, though. When he turned to look at her, he noticed again the shadows under her eyes. ‘You must be pleased.’
‘Ye-es. Only I don’t seem to know where I’m going any more.’ She pointed to the easel. ‘I’ve been trying to finish that for … Oh, I don’t know, feels like for ever.’
‘Perhaps you need a break. Why don’t you come to London?’
‘Yes, I will, I do need a break, but it can’t be next weekend, I’ve got to go to my sister’s. It would’ve been Toby’s twenty-eighth on Saturday. I can’t not be there for that.’
He took a last look round. The sunlight was almost gone and there was a distinct chill in the air.
‘Come on,’ she said, touching his arm. ‘Let’s go and eat.’
Dinner was rabbit stew with herbs and vegetables from the garden: better food than you’d easily find in London these days. At first they ate in silence. Fastidiously, he removed a slug from his cabbage and set it down carefully on the side of his plate.
‘Protein,’ she said, drily. ‘Don’t waste it.’
‘I’ll stick to the rabbit, if you don’t mind.’
After they’d finished eating, they returned to sit by the fire. She was drinking quickly, always an encouraging sign, and as she drank some colour returned to her cheeks and her cheekbones looked a little less sharp, but she was much too thin. Her breasts hardly lifted the cotton blouse, though he caught the shadows of her nipples as she leaned forward to refill his glass.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I was trying to remember the first time I saw you.’
‘It would’ve been in the Antiques Room, surely?’
‘No, I mean, really saw you. Saw you, saw you. You were running down Gower Street with the girls —’
Her lips curved. ‘Oh, the wild girls —’
‘And you must’ve got a stone in your shoe or something because you suddenly stopped and took it off, and you had these black stockings on, and there was a great big hole in the heel and all this pink skin peeping out. I thought it was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen.’
She burst out laughing. ‘Paul, that is pathetic.’
‘No, it’s not —’
‘You were drawing naked women every day.’
‘Nudity’s not all that interesting. Your heel — that was the thing.’
Self-consciously, she tucked her feet under the chair. She sipped her wine, not looking at him, but she was aware of him now, and, more importantly, she was aware of herself, of her nipples rubbing against the rough cotton of her blouse, of the tops of her thighs pressed moistly together under the thick woollen skirt. Feeling his gaze on her, she put a hand up to the nape of her neck.
‘You’re growing it again.’
‘Not really, I just can’t be bothered to get it cut.’
He began deliberately to talk about the past. The weekend war broke out they’d all been together in this house: Elinor, Toby, Kit and himself. Blazing hot, he remembered it, and as the dusty, late-summer days passed, the news from London had become grimmer.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘I looked out of the window and you and Dad were on the terrace talking about it.’
‘Oh, and Toby’s friend was staying too — what was his name?’
‘Andrew? He was killed in 1915. It changed Toby, there was always a kind of sadness about him after that.’
‘They were revising, weren’t they? And the rest of us all went off to see a church. The Doom. And on the way back Kit fell off his bike. Do you remember?’
‘Yes — he asked me to marry him.’
‘Then?’
‘Lying on the ground like a wounded hero.’
‘I didn’t know that. The slithy tove.’
‘Did you ever see him out there?’
‘Once, in Ypres. That was back in — oh, I don’t know. December, ’14? He was incredibly drunk, and we spent the entire evening talking about you.’
‘Hmm, did you? I’m glad I wasn’t a fly on that wall.’
‘All very flattering.’ Though it hadn’t been. Our Lady of Triangles, Neville had called her, and he certainly hadn’t meant it as a compliment. Well, no triangles now: just a strange, solitary woman obsessively painting her dead brother. ‘This is good,’ he said, taking another sip of the wine.