Louisa

Grace Shield has been up to see me again today. I enjoy her company. We tell each other things. ‘I don’t usually talk to people about things I care about,’ she says with a smile that is embarrassed and pleased both at once. ‘Maybe if you knew someone back when you were a child, you have that childish trust that they wish you well. Maybe when you’ve known someone when they were a child, you don’t feel the need to dissemble because children use information as stories not weapons. Maybe that’s it; us having known each other all those years ago.’

‘Or maybe you need to speak to someone and you know that I will probably have forgotten what you said as soon as you’ve said it.’ Grace looks up at me with such a shocked expression that I start to laugh. ‘My mind works differently these days. I know that I sometimes make connections where none should be. I know I remember as if it were yesterday what happened half a century ago, while what happened yesterday is covered in mist. But it’s quite normal, you know, when you’re as old as I am.’

I tell her about Georgie. About how my son died. The seeds of the tragedy were sown long before it happened, by his father and by me. One of the reasons that he settled in Canada was for the wilderness. He would go off for days on end and reappear, so his wife told me, with a new calm that would last a few months before the old restlessness took over and he disappeared once more. Even with a young wife and a new baby, he still felt the need to withdraw, to walk far beyond any human contact. He was found floating face down in a quiet bay of the great lake. It was assumed that the ice had broken beneath his feet. I had to find out every detail of his last long walk, every detail of his dying. No one understood my seemingly unquenchable thirst for information, anything to do with my son’s disappearance into the vast winter whiteness. At first even I didn’t quite understand but eventually I knew: while I was busying myself finding answers to the questions, I was busying myself with my son; and while I was busy with my son it was not yet over and he was not quite gone.

So I look at Grace Shield with compassion. She thinks I hold the answers to all her questions but soon enough she will realise, as I had to, that the one answer she needs she knows already: the one you loved is gone and will not return. But for now I let her have her head, although it isn’t easy. I tell her as much as I can bear to, although I have to take it slowly. It hurts, having grown tough skin over the wounds of the past, to tear them open again.

And downstairs Noah grunts and frets about his book. When he came to see me last night he told me a quote he had come across. Writing is easy; all you do is sit down at your desk and open a vein.

Remembering is a bit like that.

‘You mooch, child.’ How does she do it, Lydia, my mother-in-law; how does she, tiny birdwoman, make me feel small when I tower over her? ‘Can’t stand mooching. It’s high time you took over some of the running of the household. Responsibility, tradition, duty. Arthur needs everything to be just so or he won’t achieve the calm he needs, the peace to do his work. It’s our task to make sure he gets that peace. I won’t be around for ever.’

You don’t really believe that? I know you are quite incapable of imagining the world without you, of truly, in your heart of hearts, believing that there will be a time when there is no you. Women like Lydia Blackstaff are never truly gone. Their spirits live on in the anxious glance of a clumsy maid or the nervous laughter of a poor relation and in myriad rules designed to make life uncomfortable: no hot water in the mornings, jam with the bread for the children’s tea only on Sundays, no log fires after the first day of the fourth month no matter what the fickle April weather turned up. That same mean spirit reigns in the fruit-cages in the garden where nettles stand guard around the raspberry canes so that you are lucky to get half a punnet of berries before your hands start burning from the stings. Oh no, Lydia Blackstaff would never truly be gone from Northbourne House.

I am told to take over doing the flowers for the main rooms. ‘Find my trug and the secateurs, and you may take my gloves.’ Here she glances down at my hands that I hold folded across my middle like a schoolchild, and adds, ‘No, I think you had better ask Jenkins for a pair of his.’

I don’t know many of the plants by name, other than the obvious ones like dahlias and asters, but I know what will look pleasing and find more than enough for every main room of the house and a couple of the bedrooms too. I gather plenty of foliage. I’m especially taken with the shrub whose small leaves glow in the sun like old Madeira. I arrange those branches with the golden-orange asters and the deep-yellow and pink dahlias and some late-flowering dusky pink roses in a blue jug for the drawing room. The colours of a slow sunset, I think to myself, as I stand back admiring my handiwork.

‘No sense of colour.’ Lydia leans on her son’s arm and points an accusing finger at my arrangement. ‘And that jug, it’s a kitchen jug, child. Have you no idea?’

But soon I find myself useful even by my mother-in-law’s standards; I am expecting.

The baby appears, a bruised fruit prised from its shell, and I look down into his unfathomable eyes and swear I will not let him down.

Arthur glances at his son before kissing me tenderly on the forehead, saying I have made him the happiest, the proudest man in all the world. He does not stay long. There is a smell of blood around still and Arthur has an uncommonly sensitive stomach. But for months afterwards the villagers talked about how Mr Blackstaff had come running from the big house with no coat and only his sheepskin slippers on his feet, shouting out the news and standing everyone a drink at the Dog and Hound.

When he next comes to my room, two days later, he presents me with a prettily carved cameo pin before going over and inspecting his sleeping son. ‘Ugly little brutes, aren’t they, babies?’

I barely glance at the brooch and ask him instead why he has not been in to see us both, his son and I, since the birth.

Arthur looks displeased. He was a man who expected more thanks for his efforts. ‘Don’t you like your pin? It’s very fine.’

‘Yes, Arthur, I like it very much.’

‘I’ve been in my studio. This little fellow,’ Arthur nods towards the infant in its crib, ‘inspired me. I couldn’t bear to leave the canvas even for a moment.’ He bends down and pecks me on the cheek. ‘I’ll let you rest. I can see that you are still a little out of sorts.’

I watch him go and place the brooch back in its velvet-lined box. My son is awake now and looking at me with eyes the undecided colour of the newborn: a deep mysterious hue that is neither brown nor grey nor blue but a mix of all three and others too, like the water in the glass where Arthur rinsed his brushes. I smile at my son and then I cry from the sheer weight of all the love I feel.

Jane enters as quiet as a draught. She bends over the cot and coos, ‘Your grandmama is most pleased with you, little man.’

‘And is my son pleased with his grandmama?’

Jane perches at the foot of the bed. ‘I know it’s not my place to interfere …’ she pauses but although I say nothing to contradict her she continues ‘… but I feel that as an old friend of Arthur’s, and I hope a new friend to you …’ I still say nothing. Jane’s sallow cheeks colour but her pale eyes maintain their mild expression. ‘Arthur is a great man, a great artist; we all know that. And he must not be upset or worried with the trivia of everyday concerns. Aunt Lydia has been wonderful; she knows him so well. And …’ Jane puts her cool hand on my strong one, ‘Of course you try as well. It’s just that sometimes … maybe you don’t quite see. This morning, just as an example, he has been so distracted by your bad humour that he has not touched his brushes. He cannot understand what it was he had done to vex you. And he’s at a very delicate stage of his new painting. Of course you’ve only just delivered. Don’t think I don’t understand that it must be an emotional time for you too, but Arthur is not like other men. And we … well, it’s up to us not to upset the careful equilibrium that makes him able to create. We have a duty, don’t you think, to smooth his path and leave him free to take flight on the wings of creation?’

‘Why should he need a smooth path if he has wings?’ I ask.

Grace Shield listens and then she says, ‘Men are precious, particularly artists; every little distraction puts them off their stride. Then, to be fair, I don’t know how good my work would have been if I had had children. Not being able to, sent me mad for a while, but it forced me to walk down a different road than I would otherwise have done.’ She pauses, smiles and shakes her head. ‘Of course that way too ended in a bit of a disaster, but a different kind. It’s the usual choice, isn’t it? Turn left for a little bit of love and happiness, some pain and certain death, or go right for … well, what do you know … a little love and happiness, some pain and certain death. But what I’m saying is: to do the really good work you need to be single-minded. Women are supposed to be good at multi-tasking; and maybe that is the true enemy of promise.’