The Wise Friend, page 6
My aunt clearly found this facetious, and I think he was as surprised as I was that she took offence. “They’ve earned powers like those,” she said. “You’d value them if you had them.”
“I think I’m liable to have to do without.”
She might not have heard him. “And you’d miss them if you lost them,” she said.
She and my uncle said nothing more throughout the film, and not much once it was over. I went to bed wondering how much they were leaving unspoken until I was out of the way. By the time I fell asleep I’d heard no further conversation, but towards dawn my aunt’s voice wakened me. “Wait till he’s gone.”
As I took this for a belated confirmation that they were delaying a discussion of some subject, my uncle emitted a snore stentorian even for him. I was muffling a laugh at his style of answer when I realised my aunt wasn’t talking to him. She was in her studio, and so was another voice. “Not long,” it said.
It was too muted to let me tell its gender. I strained my ears so hard they throbbed, but heard no more until a single set of footsteps crossed the landing to the bedroom. I lay as still as any of my aunt’s paintings while the dawn started to revive colours all around me. Was someone hiding in the studio? I couldn’t bear not knowing. Slipping out of bed, I eased my door open not much less silently than I was holding my breath.
The door to the studio was shut, although I hadn’t heard that happen. Might my hearing have let me down in other ways? Perhaps I’d overheard just my aunt’s voice. I crept across the landing and used both hands to turn the doorknob by fractions of an inch, and then I took as much care over easing the door open.
The dawn had just found the distant treetops, but the studio was light enough to show me that nobody was hidden among the paintings and easels and other items of my aunt’s equipment, let alone behind them. I was about to close the door when a line of objects on the windowsill caught my eye – at least a dozen glass jars, and an open book resting against several. A page was settling into place as if someone had just consulted the book. Perhaps a draught had lifted the page, but the sight gave me an excuse to cross the room.
The jars and the book stood against the dark woods as if they were a secret the depths of the forest were offering. The entry on the page – a place name, I supposed, followed by an obscure annotation – meant nothing to me. Nor did the few inches of earth that were all each jar contained, never mind the initialled labels the jars bore. I picked up a jar in each hand, and the contents whispered as they shifted. They sounded like the start of a surreptitious chorus. I could have fancied that the noise wasn’t in the jars at all, and I seemed to feel the room change at my back.
I might have imagined I was in a different room, with carvings on the cornices, in every corner and elsewhere. The house was too modern to have cornices, and it wasn’t the room that had changed. The objects that I felt afraid of seeing if I turned around wouldn’t be carved – the faces hovering behind me and above. I had a sense that their shapes would prove to be dismayingly unstable, and their sizes too. Perhaps they would swell to fill the room, or some would while their companions shrank. Perhaps just one would occupy the space, bloating like a malevolent balloon. I was barely able to focus on the window, to manage to distinguish that the reflection showed just the studio behind me, with no trace of the presence I sensed looming. Nevertheless I almost dropped the jars as I hastened to replace them on the sill. I swung around to confront the deserted room, and was afraid of making too much noise as I fled. Nobody came to find me – not my uncle or my aunt – but I begrudged every second I had to spend in silently closing the door. In my room I took refuge under the quilt, and as the day brightened I succeeded in believing I’d seen and heard nothing worth a mention. It was all explicable, and I’d behaved almost as oddly as my aunt did. My parents weren’t always wrong, and I knew they would want me to put the incident out of my mind. For quite a while I did.
Chapter Seven
Old Words
Goodmanswood – fallen leaves make face. “You must turn the world over to reveal its truth.”
Monks Cross – graffiti too prominent. “The world consists of symbols few can read.”
Slatevale – eyes in cracks in rock. “If you would cease to be blind, descend into ultimate darkness.”
Priory Ford – features gather on rocks in river. “Each of us is but a stream whose wholeness it is our sacred task to grasp.”
Cloudhaven – cloud forms face. “Rise higher from the peak and breathe the atmosphere of space.”
Drummer’s Meadow – wild flowers sketch denizen. “Mistake not Spring for the season of growth, for the time of secret quickening is Winter, when Darkness comes into His kingdom.”
Darkmarsh – tussocks crawl together. “The power of the swamp restores mutability to the world.”
Dancers Oak – now housing estate – body formed of moss on trees. “Those who die on the oak may be caught and put to use.”
Brightspring – pool mouths secrets. “Become one with silence, that you may hear the songs of streams beneath the earth.”
Mountfoot – dew on grass takes restless shape. “To conquer time, contemplate the ghost that is the universe.”
Plumb Mine – large face in entrance not on poster. “The deeper it is dug, the more ancient are the secrets which the excavation shall awaken.”
Halfway Halt – trees reach for walkers in railway cutting. “Where man cracks the earth, beware the hatching of the egg.”
The last entry in my aunt’s journal was even more obscure, and hardly even legible. All I could decipher of the first word was the initial L, and the second appeared to begin as Science only to trail into a longer word. The scrawl was followed by a phrase that I eventually read as MADE ABLE but couldn’t fathom. “Well,” I said, and nothing else for some moments. “I hope you understand more of this than me.”
“Do you know which paintings it’s about?”
“I can’t identify a single one.”
“Maybe those are thoughts she had while she was painting and she didn’t put them in. Did she often talk like that?”
“If you mean all the archaic language, my guess is she was quoting.”
“Have you tried to find whichever book it was?”
“I’m afraid most of her library went to a charity shop, thanks to my mother. I only managed to salvage this and the books Thelma was involved in.”
“You haven’t searched,” Roy said and typed one of the quotations into his phone, trying several before he desisted. “Looks like it’s not online,” he said.
“I can’t recall ever seeing a book like that in her house. I’ve worked out what those jars she dropped off the roof were, though. Samples from places she listed in here.”
Leafing through the journal had reminded me of initials on the jars – MC, DF, DM or just a single letter. “But why did she drop them?” Roy said.
“I’m afraid she took her reason with her.”
“Maybe we’ll get an idea when we go wherever you want to drive to.” As though to give his eagerness a task Roy said “Shall I look up the distances for you?”
“The nearest one is pretty far.”
“We’ll still be going, won’t we?” Not entirely without childishness Roy protested “You said we would.”
“I just wonder if it’s worth it when there may not be anything to see. I know what we can do today,” I felt relieved to be able to suggest. “Why don’t we take a closer look at Thelma’s work.”
Roy shrugged in the direction of the shelves where it was represented. “Already have.”
“The actual paintings. We can see them at the Tate in Liverpool.”
“I saw the exhibition when it was in Manchester.”
“This will have a different curator and besides, you hadn’t seen her book then.”
I’d begun to feel unexpectedly if not inexplicably desperate when Roy said “Shall we bring it with us? No, I know. You hold it and I’ll take the shots.”
I thought I must resemble a criminal posing for an official record as I opened the journal for Roy to photograph the entries. Just my fingertips appeared in each shot, shifting as if troubled by holding the book. Roy even photographed the final entry before I returned the book to the shelf. “We’ll take the train,” I said.
Though the sun had been doing its job for hours, the heating was turned on throughout the train. Someone had opened every window, which didn’t help much. When we sped underground the tunnel roared at us like a beast with no need of breath. Roy pored over his phone all the way to Liverpool, and on the escalator up to James Street too. As I and a number of commuters – not quite as many as I’d thought at first – followed him into the lift that would raise us to street level, I saw he was scrolling through the photographs of Thelma’s journal.
Most of the pedestrians on the road that paralleled the waterfront were intent on their phones, like quite a few of the drivers speeding by. Some walkers were following maps or listening to them. As Roy and I made for the dockside, the relentlessly bright simulated voices issuing directions fell behind. We waited while a swing bridge let a barge painted with giant flowers into the Albert Dock. Reflections of visitors to dockland passed through the windows of the barge like film through the gate of a projector. There Roy and I went, and here we came again with somebody between us, so close that the figure appeared to have its arms around our shoulders. It must be a trick of perspective, not just because I could feel nothing of the kind but since our apparent companion’s face, unlike ours, was an undefined blur. When I glanced around, nobody was even close behind us.
Across the bridge a colonnade with pillars painted redder than the converted sandstone warehouse brought us to the Tate. A lift carried us to the third floor of the gallery, which was occupied by the exhibition of my aunt’s work, Reaching Further. Other canvases provided context – paintings by Laila Hallack, Frida Kahlo, Ithell Colquhoun and others, not least Leonora Carrington. Landscapes bristling with imminence were the work of Californian psychedelic artists – Gage Taylor, Bill Martin. I saw how these related to my aunt’s vistas on the edge of revelation, but I was looking for an explanation of the entries in her journal. While Roy followed the chronology of the exhibition I made for the further room.
I felt as if I were encountering Thelma’s late works for the first time once I set about examining them. I knew each painting contained a distant figure, an element one critic had called the imminent presence. My aunt had refused to say what the figure represented, which had led one hostile commentator to liken it to Wally, who lurked in a series of children’s books – Wally, who adopted different identities around the world: Waldo in America, Charlie in France, Holger in Denmark, Van Lang in Vietnam… One analysis suggested that Thelma’s motif was designed to entice the viewer to look deep into the image, and as I moved from canvas to canvas it felt like a secret key to each landscape it inhabited, if not the seed of some kind of transformation. I’d always taken the figure in a meadow to be far away, but now I wondered if it was much closer and no larger than a flower. As I went close enough to nuzzle the canvas and then backed away to take in the entire image, the elaborate patterns of grass and weeds appeared to shift until I could have fancied they were about to reveal a hidden form. None made itself plain, and I moved to the next painting, where a remote watcher stood at the far edge of a faintly luminous swamp. The treacherous ground was bordered by mist and trees, and there was no telling where solidity ended or began. As I peered at the painting it started to flicker, so that the traces of ground mist twitched as though eager to converge and take a shape. None of this helped me understand the entries in the journal. “The deeper it is dug, the more ancient are the secrets which the excavation shall awaken” – but I saw no sign of this in Thelma’s painting of a slate mine almost indistinguishable from the depths of the night, in which a figure perched high above the jagged entrance became only very gradually visible. Though I couldn’t distinguish a face, I felt as if one was implicit in the image. The yawning entrance to the apparently abandoned mine could be the mouth, an impression that led me to feel other features might be scattered through the stony landscape, eager to be gathered by the spectator. Might this be true of all of Thelma’s final paintings? The spectacle of the slate walls around the entrance slowly forming from the blackness – the sense of a secret assembly – felt as though it was fastening on my mind. I didn’t know how long the sight had held me motionless when Roy said “Dad.”
Perhaps he was repeating it; his tone implied as much. I couldn’t have said whether I resented the interruption or was glad to be released from the oppressive trance. I was about to ask how the picture looked to him when he said “Here’s someone who wants to meet you.”
He was with a girl something like his age. She was half a head shorter, slim with large pale blue eyes in a slightly chubby face. She had a small nose and a mouth my mother would have called petite. Long blond hair close to silver almost hid her ears, the tiny lobes of which were virtually invisible. She wore a black T-shirt and denim overalls too baggy to outline her shape, and sandals that left her long narrow feet not far from bare. “Bella,” Roy said, “this is my dad.”
She stepped forward swiftly and gracefully to clasp my hand. Her grasp was cool and light but firm, not to mention sufficiently brief that I wouldn’t have minded a prolongation. I was instantly impressed by her confidence. “Very pleased to meet you,” she said, “Mr…”
“Not Mister anything. Well, it’s Semple like my son, but you needn’t use it. The name’s Patrick.”
I wondered how unnecessary my babbling sounded, since Roy looked embarrassed. I thought I was doing my best to put the girl at her ease, but perhaps the attempt was more for myself. “Thank you for giving it to me,” she said.
I found her turn of phrase charmingly odd. “So you’ll be Bella.”
“I will be.” She smiled at my words or her own. “I am.”
“Can I guess you’re at school together?”
“You can guess,” she said, and her smile widened as far as her small mouth would allow. “Go on.”
I was disconcerted to feel she was flirting with me, not least because the notion seemed presumptuous on my part. “Then I’m guessing you’ve known each other for a while.”
The laugh accompanying her smile came from my son. “We’ve only just met, dad.”
“Well, you’ve certainly fooled me.” This sounded rather too accusing, even if it was aimed at nobody in particular. “I expect it’s your generation,” I tried adding.
Bella gave me a gentle big-eyed look. “What is, Patrick?”
“If you want to know someone these days you go straight for them.”
My suggestion left me feeling out of my depth if not out of place, but Bella stayed serene. “Maybe we just know who we like at once.”
“That’s the easy part. It was for me.” I was addressing Roy as well now. “Getting to know your mother,” I said, “that was more of a task.”
“Maybe you never really did.” Presumably this made him need to explain “My mum and dad split up.”
“True enough,” I said, not without pique. “You shouldn’t be too ready to believe you know anyone.”
“I hope I won’t make anybody think they don’t know me,” Bella said.
“Then I’m sure you won’t. Can I ask why you wanted to meet me?”
“Roy was saying you knew Thelma Turnbill.”
“I stayed with her and my uncle quite a few times. I take it you’re an admirer.”
“It’s lucky we were here when you came,” Roy told her.
“I’ve been before. I was always interested in her work.”
“What’s the appeal for you?” I said.
“The mysteries. The things you aren’t supposed to understand but let them come to you. They’re what brings me back.”
“And have they? Come, I mean.”
“Maybe you need to know what she thought she was painting.”
“That’s what we think too, isn’t it?” Roy said. “We know some of the places she did. I think that’s Drummer’s Meadow there, and that one’s got to be Darkmarsh, and that’ll be Slatevale or else it’s Plumb Mine.”
Bella looked impressed and eager to be more so. “How do you know all that?”
“We’ve got a book she wrote the places down in. I’ll show you if you like.”
“Roy,” I said, “we haven’t talked about making it public.”
“Bella’s not the public. Can’t she see?”
“You mustn’t show me if your father wouldn’t like it. You’ve told me where she went.”
“There’s more in here than that,” Roy said, flourishing his phone. “You’d like how Bella sees things, dad. It’s the way your aunt would.”
I thought he was trying to prolong their encounter. More urgently than he might have wanted her to notice he said “Tell him how some of the pictures look.”
“Maybe that’s the face the night has.” It was the entrance to the mine, and Bella turned to the painting of the marsh. “The mist could be the swamp breathing,” she said.
Though I found her views a little studied, I said “Are you an artist yourself?”
This prompted an appreciative smile. “I’ve never tried to be one.”
“Sounds like you could be, though,” Roy said.
I felt they’d reached a point where they could do without me, if indeed they weren’t wishing me away. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I? I’ll be in the first room.”
“Wait, dad. She’s got a book. Show him.”
Bella reached into her capacious shoulder-bag, which might have been plaited out of dried grass, and produced a history of polar expeditions, graced with Thelma’s early painting of a thatched cottage halfway up a glacier. At the time the use of the image was criticised for being too narrowly English. “Is history your thing, then?” I said.
“I think I’m liable to have to do without.”
She might not have heard him. “And you’d miss them if you lost them,” she said.
She and my uncle said nothing more throughout the film, and not much once it was over. I went to bed wondering how much they were leaving unspoken until I was out of the way. By the time I fell asleep I’d heard no further conversation, but towards dawn my aunt’s voice wakened me. “Wait till he’s gone.”
As I took this for a belated confirmation that they were delaying a discussion of some subject, my uncle emitted a snore stentorian even for him. I was muffling a laugh at his style of answer when I realised my aunt wasn’t talking to him. She was in her studio, and so was another voice. “Not long,” it said.
It was too muted to let me tell its gender. I strained my ears so hard they throbbed, but heard no more until a single set of footsteps crossed the landing to the bedroom. I lay as still as any of my aunt’s paintings while the dawn started to revive colours all around me. Was someone hiding in the studio? I couldn’t bear not knowing. Slipping out of bed, I eased my door open not much less silently than I was holding my breath.
The door to the studio was shut, although I hadn’t heard that happen. Might my hearing have let me down in other ways? Perhaps I’d overheard just my aunt’s voice. I crept across the landing and used both hands to turn the doorknob by fractions of an inch, and then I took as much care over easing the door open.
The dawn had just found the distant treetops, but the studio was light enough to show me that nobody was hidden among the paintings and easels and other items of my aunt’s equipment, let alone behind them. I was about to close the door when a line of objects on the windowsill caught my eye – at least a dozen glass jars, and an open book resting against several. A page was settling into place as if someone had just consulted the book. Perhaps a draught had lifted the page, but the sight gave me an excuse to cross the room.
The jars and the book stood against the dark woods as if they were a secret the depths of the forest were offering. The entry on the page – a place name, I supposed, followed by an obscure annotation – meant nothing to me. Nor did the few inches of earth that were all each jar contained, never mind the initialled labels the jars bore. I picked up a jar in each hand, and the contents whispered as they shifted. They sounded like the start of a surreptitious chorus. I could have fancied that the noise wasn’t in the jars at all, and I seemed to feel the room change at my back.
I might have imagined I was in a different room, with carvings on the cornices, in every corner and elsewhere. The house was too modern to have cornices, and it wasn’t the room that had changed. The objects that I felt afraid of seeing if I turned around wouldn’t be carved – the faces hovering behind me and above. I had a sense that their shapes would prove to be dismayingly unstable, and their sizes too. Perhaps they would swell to fill the room, or some would while their companions shrank. Perhaps just one would occupy the space, bloating like a malevolent balloon. I was barely able to focus on the window, to manage to distinguish that the reflection showed just the studio behind me, with no trace of the presence I sensed looming. Nevertheless I almost dropped the jars as I hastened to replace them on the sill. I swung around to confront the deserted room, and was afraid of making too much noise as I fled. Nobody came to find me – not my uncle or my aunt – but I begrudged every second I had to spend in silently closing the door. In my room I took refuge under the quilt, and as the day brightened I succeeded in believing I’d seen and heard nothing worth a mention. It was all explicable, and I’d behaved almost as oddly as my aunt did. My parents weren’t always wrong, and I knew they would want me to put the incident out of my mind. For quite a while I did.
Chapter Seven
Old Words
Goodmanswood – fallen leaves make face. “You must turn the world over to reveal its truth.”
Monks Cross – graffiti too prominent. “The world consists of symbols few can read.”
Slatevale – eyes in cracks in rock. “If you would cease to be blind, descend into ultimate darkness.”
Priory Ford – features gather on rocks in river. “Each of us is but a stream whose wholeness it is our sacred task to grasp.”
Cloudhaven – cloud forms face. “Rise higher from the peak and breathe the atmosphere of space.”
Drummer’s Meadow – wild flowers sketch denizen. “Mistake not Spring for the season of growth, for the time of secret quickening is Winter, when Darkness comes into His kingdom.”
Darkmarsh – tussocks crawl together. “The power of the swamp restores mutability to the world.”
Dancers Oak – now housing estate – body formed of moss on trees. “Those who die on the oak may be caught and put to use.”
Brightspring – pool mouths secrets. “Become one with silence, that you may hear the songs of streams beneath the earth.”
Mountfoot – dew on grass takes restless shape. “To conquer time, contemplate the ghost that is the universe.”
Plumb Mine – large face in entrance not on poster. “The deeper it is dug, the more ancient are the secrets which the excavation shall awaken.”
Halfway Halt – trees reach for walkers in railway cutting. “Where man cracks the earth, beware the hatching of the egg.”
The last entry in my aunt’s journal was even more obscure, and hardly even legible. All I could decipher of the first word was the initial L, and the second appeared to begin as Science only to trail into a longer word. The scrawl was followed by a phrase that I eventually read as MADE ABLE but couldn’t fathom. “Well,” I said, and nothing else for some moments. “I hope you understand more of this than me.”
“Do you know which paintings it’s about?”
“I can’t identify a single one.”
“Maybe those are thoughts she had while she was painting and she didn’t put them in. Did she often talk like that?”
“If you mean all the archaic language, my guess is she was quoting.”
“Have you tried to find whichever book it was?”
“I’m afraid most of her library went to a charity shop, thanks to my mother. I only managed to salvage this and the books Thelma was involved in.”
“You haven’t searched,” Roy said and typed one of the quotations into his phone, trying several before he desisted. “Looks like it’s not online,” he said.
“I can’t recall ever seeing a book like that in her house. I’ve worked out what those jars she dropped off the roof were, though. Samples from places she listed in here.”
Leafing through the journal had reminded me of initials on the jars – MC, DF, DM or just a single letter. “But why did she drop them?” Roy said.
“I’m afraid she took her reason with her.”
“Maybe we’ll get an idea when we go wherever you want to drive to.” As though to give his eagerness a task Roy said “Shall I look up the distances for you?”
“The nearest one is pretty far.”
“We’ll still be going, won’t we?” Not entirely without childishness Roy protested “You said we would.”
“I just wonder if it’s worth it when there may not be anything to see. I know what we can do today,” I felt relieved to be able to suggest. “Why don’t we take a closer look at Thelma’s work.”
Roy shrugged in the direction of the shelves where it was represented. “Already have.”
“The actual paintings. We can see them at the Tate in Liverpool.”
“I saw the exhibition when it was in Manchester.”
“This will have a different curator and besides, you hadn’t seen her book then.”
I’d begun to feel unexpectedly if not inexplicably desperate when Roy said “Shall we bring it with us? No, I know. You hold it and I’ll take the shots.”
I thought I must resemble a criminal posing for an official record as I opened the journal for Roy to photograph the entries. Just my fingertips appeared in each shot, shifting as if troubled by holding the book. Roy even photographed the final entry before I returned the book to the shelf. “We’ll take the train,” I said.
Though the sun had been doing its job for hours, the heating was turned on throughout the train. Someone had opened every window, which didn’t help much. When we sped underground the tunnel roared at us like a beast with no need of breath. Roy pored over his phone all the way to Liverpool, and on the escalator up to James Street too. As I and a number of commuters – not quite as many as I’d thought at first – followed him into the lift that would raise us to street level, I saw he was scrolling through the photographs of Thelma’s journal.
Most of the pedestrians on the road that paralleled the waterfront were intent on their phones, like quite a few of the drivers speeding by. Some walkers were following maps or listening to them. As Roy and I made for the dockside, the relentlessly bright simulated voices issuing directions fell behind. We waited while a swing bridge let a barge painted with giant flowers into the Albert Dock. Reflections of visitors to dockland passed through the windows of the barge like film through the gate of a projector. There Roy and I went, and here we came again with somebody between us, so close that the figure appeared to have its arms around our shoulders. It must be a trick of perspective, not just because I could feel nothing of the kind but since our apparent companion’s face, unlike ours, was an undefined blur. When I glanced around, nobody was even close behind us.
Across the bridge a colonnade with pillars painted redder than the converted sandstone warehouse brought us to the Tate. A lift carried us to the third floor of the gallery, which was occupied by the exhibition of my aunt’s work, Reaching Further. Other canvases provided context – paintings by Laila Hallack, Frida Kahlo, Ithell Colquhoun and others, not least Leonora Carrington. Landscapes bristling with imminence were the work of Californian psychedelic artists – Gage Taylor, Bill Martin. I saw how these related to my aunt’s vistas on the edge of revelation, but I was looking for an explanation of the entries in her journal. While Roy followed the chronology of the exhibition I made for the further room.
I felt as if I were encountering Thelma’s late works for the first time once I set about examining them. I knew each painting contained a distant figure, an element one critic had called the imminent presence. My aunt had refused to say what the figure represented, which had led one hostile commentator to liken it to Wally, who lurked in a series of children’s books – Wally, who adopted different identities around the world: Waldo in America, Charlie in France, Holger in Denmark, Van Lang in Vietnam… One analysis suggested that Thelma’s motif was designed to entice the viewer to look deep into the image, and as I moved from canvas to canvas it felt like a secret key to each landscape it inhabited, if not the seed of some kind of transformation. I’d always taken the figure in a meadow to be far away, but now I wondered if it was much closer and no larger than a flower. As I went close enough to nuzzle the canvas and then backed away to take in the entire image, the elaborate patterns of grass and weeds appeared to shift until I could have fancied they were about to reveal a hidden form. None made itself plain, and I moved to the next painting, where a remote watcher stood at the far edge of a faintly luminous swamp. The treacherous ground was bordered by mist and trees, and there was no telling where solidity ended or began. As I peered at the painting it started to flicker, so that the traces of ground mist twitched as though eager to converge and take a shape. None of this helped me understand the entries in the journal. “The deeper it is dug, the more ancient are the secrets which the excavation shall awaken” – but I saw no sign of this in Thelma’s painting of a slate mine almost indistinguishable from the depths of the night, in which a figure perched high above the jagged entrance became only very gradually visible. Though I couldn’t distinguish a face, I felt as if one was implicit in the image. The yawning entrance to the apparently abandoned mine could be the mouth, an impression that led me to feel other features might be scattered through the stony landscape, eager to be gathered by the spectator. Might this be true of all of Thelma’s final paintings? The spectacle of the slate walls around the entrance slowly forming from the blackness – the sense of a secret assembly – felt as though it was fastening on my mind. I didn’t know how long the sight had held me motionless when Roy said “Dad.”
Perhaps he was repeating it; his tone implied as much. I couldn’t have said whether I resented the interruption or was glad to be released from the oppressive trance. I was about to ask how the picture looked to him when he said “Here’s someone who wants to meet you.”
He was with a girl something like his age. She was half a head shorter, slim with large pale blue eyes in a slightly chubby face. She had a small nose and a mouth my mother would have called petite. Long blond hair close to silver almost hid her ears, the tiny lobes of which were virtually invisible. She wore a black T-shirt and denim overalls too baggy to outline her shape, and sandals that left her long narrow feet not far from bare. “Bella,” Roy said, “this is my dad.”
She stepped forward swiftly and gracefully to clasp my hand. Her grasp was cool and light but firm, not to mention sufficiently brief that I wouldn’t have minded a prolongation. I was instantly impressed by her confidence. “Very pleased to meet you,” she said, “Mr…”
“Not Mister anything. Well, it’s Semple like my son, but you needn’t use it. The name’s Patrick.”
I wondered how unnecessary my babbling sounded, since Roy looked embarrassed. I thought I was doing my best to put the girl at her ease, but perhaps the attempt was more for myself. “Thank you for giving it to me,” she said.
I found her turn of phrase charmingly odd. “So you’ll be Bella.”
“I will be.” She smiled at my words or her own. “I am.”
“Can I guess you’re at school together?”
“You can guess,” she said, and her smile widened as far as her small mouth would allow. “Go on.”
I was disconcerted to feel she was flirting with me, not least because the notion seemed presumptuous on my part. “Then I’m guessing you’ve known each other for a while.”
The laugh accompanying her smile came from my son. “We’ve only just met, dad.”
“Well, you’ve certainly fooled me.” This sounded rather too accusing, even if it was aimed at nobody in particular. “I expect it’s your generation,” I tried adding.
Bella gave me a gentle big-eyed look. “What is, Patrick?”
“If you want to know someone these days you go straight for them.”
My suggestion left me feeling out of my depth if not out of place, but Bella stayed serene. “Maybe we just know who we like at once.”
“That’s the easy part. It was for me.” I was addressing Roy as well now. “Getting to know your mother,” I said, “that was more of a task.”
“Maybe you never really did.” Presumably this made him need to explain “My mum and dad split up.”
“True enough,” I said, not without pique. “You shouldn’t be too ready to believe you know anyone.”
“I hope I won’t make anybody think they don’t know me,” Bella said.
“Then I’m sure you won’t. Can I ask why you wanted to meet me?”
“Roy was saying you knew Thelma Turnbill.”
“I stayed with her and my uncle quite a few times. I take it you’re an admirer.”
“It’s lucky we were here when you came,” Roy told her.
“I’ve been before. I was always interested in her work.”
“What’s the appeal for you?” I said.
“The mysteries. The things you aren’t supposed to understand but let them come to you. They’re what brings me back.”
“And have they? Come, I mean.”
“Maybe you need to know what she thought she was painting.”
“That’s what we think too, isn’t it?” Roy said. “We know some of the places she did. I think that’s Drummer’s Meadow there, and that one’s got to be Darkmarsh, and that’ll be Slatevale or else it’s Plumb Mine.”
Bella looked impressed and eager to be more so. “How do you know all that?”
“We’ve got a book she wrote the places down in. I’ll show you if you like.”
“Roy,” I said, “we haven’t talked about making it public.”
“Bella’s not the public. Can’t she see?”
“You mustn’t show me if your father wouldn’t like it. You’ve told me where she went.”
“There’s more in here than that,” Roy said, flourishing his phone. “You’d like how Bella sees things, dad. It’s the way your aunt would.”
I thought he was trying to prolong their encounter. More urgently than he might have wanted her to notice he said “Tell him how some of the pictures look.”
“Maybe that’s the face the night has.” It was the entrance to the mine, and Bella turned to the painting of the marsh. “The mist could be the swamp breathing,” she said.
Though I found her views a little studied, I said “Are you an artist yourself?”
This prompted an appreciative smile. “I’ve never tried to be one.”
“Sounds like you could be, though,” Roy said.
I felt they’d reached a point where they could do without me, if indeed they weren’t wishing me away. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I? I’ll be in the first room.”
“Wait, dad. She’s got a book. Show him.”
Bella reached into her capacious shoulder-bag, which might have been plaited out of dried grass, and produced a history of polar expeditions, graced with Thelma’s early painting of a thatched cottage halfway up a glacier. At the time the use of the image was criticised for being too narrowly English. “Is history your thing, then?” I said.
