50

Kat

Kat hates being wrong. Today she wants to be spectacularly wrong. If her hunch is right, her father lives with a secret so big it’d crush most people. It’d be like trying to breathe with a boulder lying on your chest. But Charlie Finch is not most people. He’s a Finch. He’s an artist. He has an ability to detach from his subjects, to see human beings as arrangements of form and flesh in space, volume and light, a technical challenge to be solved. And if he can’t solve a problem, he can paint over it, destroy it – or hide it in a neglected studio for years. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. She can still hear him saying that.

‘Kat, what’s going on?’ says Flora, anxiously. Angie’s face, her slack mouth, asks the same question.

‘Before she died, Dixie tried to tell Lauren –’ Kat begins.

‘Leave it, Kat,’ Charlie cuts in too sharply, giving himself away.

‘I want to know, Dad,’ Lauren says. Kat can almost see Lauren’s mind streaking after her own, like a wild hare through the grass.

‘Can I borrow you a moment, Lauren?’ Kat stands up and walks towards the colder air of the hall, darker places. She waits by the door, her heart starting to pound, unsure if Lauren will follow.

‘Don’t get dragged into this, Laurie,’ Charlie warns.

But Lauren walks across the room determinedly. In the hall, she peers up the staircase, as if instinctively understanding where they must go next.

‘Wait!’ Flora thunders up behind them. ‘I’m not being left out of this one, thank you very much.’ And they ascend together, up to Rock Point’s paint-spattered messy heart.

Lauren quickly finds the key to unlock the bottom cabinet drawer: it was always kept in the cranium of a rabbit skull displayed on the shelves, she explains, dipping in two fingers and plucking it out.

‘So, what are we hunting for?’ Flora crosses her arms with a shiver. Winter has crept deep into the studio tonight.

‘Bodies,’ Kat says, half joking, flicking through a jumble of documents: letters from galleries, invoices, old exhibition invitations. At the bottom, she pulls out a sheaf of drawings. ‘Bingo,’ she murmurs, pulling out the charcoal sketch her father snatched earlier in the week, and a clutch of similar ones beneath it. She slides them to the trestle, the charcoal nude on top. Lauren switches on the Anglepoise.

‘Can you identify the model?’ Kat asks, not wanting to steer them.

Lauren’s breathing quickens. ‘Viv?’ Lauren says weakly. ‘I think it could be Viv.’

Flora rests her chin on Kat’s shoulder, frowns down. ‘No. I don’t see it … Actually maybe … But she’s a lot younger here.’

Now Kat’s seen Viv in the flesh again – although not this much flesh, and decades later in the gloom of an unlit cottage – it seems so obvious. The tilt of the nose. The curl of the mouth.

‘More than one sitting.’ Lauren starts sifting through the other sketches.

In all of them the rapport between sitter and artist is palpable. And while Kat’s used to their father’s nudes – the ick factor never quite going away – these seem, well, intimate. She takes a sidelong glance at Lauren, checking she’s okay, that this is not too much. ‘Go back to the first sketch, Lauren. There. Look.’ She points to the left-hand corner. ‘I thought it was 1980. But that’s a loopy six, isn’t it? 1986.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Do the maths.’

‘Really not my strong point,’ says Flora.

‘The year I was born.’ A shadow slides over Lauren’s face. ‘Oh. Oh, no.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ says Flora.

‘I suspect we’ve been misled, not lost,’ Kat says, squeezing Lauren’s hand.

Downstairs in the hall, Kat pauses, walloped with doubt, wondering what the hell she’s doing. It’s Lauren who nudges her forward, Lauren who pushes her into the light.

Their father is on the sofa, huddled against Angie, his hand laced in hers and resting on her knee, like a nervous boy and his mother in a dentist’s waiting room. Man-child. He never grew up, Kat realizes. The art world celebrated this. Granny passive-aggressively encouraged it, outsourcing his parenting to Rock Point summers. Grandpa just wanted his difficult, baffling artist son to be happy, and for no more family fall-outs.

‘Well?’ Their father’s gaze moves slowly from one of them to another, seamlessly, like a pencil between points without lifting from the paper.

If he didn’t want ‘the full story’ excavated he shouldn’t have brought them back to Rock Point, Kat thinks, trying to shore her conviction. Subconsciously, perhaps he wants to come clean, and Dixie knew this too. Yes, that’s it. Still. Anything could be true at Rock Point. This could blow up in her face. Nerves make her movements exaggerated, clumsy, as she places the drawing on the coffee-table, forcing him to face it. The firelight licks over the sinuous lines of waist and hip and hair, eerily bringing the sitter to life. ‘Viv. We think it’s Viv.’

Any emotion that flickers across her father’s face is quickly controlled.

‘Ooh.’ Angie leans forward, tapping a tooth with a fingernail. ‘Maybe I did get it right first time.’ She turns to Charlie, awaiting an explanation. ‘You never told me.’

Their father tries to smile. Hold it together. Thinks he can bluff it, Kat realizes, with a heavy heart. He’s going to make this difficult. ‘Oh, long time ago,’ he says, with forced mildness, still trying to stamp out the questions, like small fires in dry scrub. ‘If I remember rightly, we did a few sessions while I was at Rock Point on a peace mission, trying to patch things up with Mum after our estranged hiatus, when she’d been scandalized by her portrait. Among other things.’ Like his affairs and the out-of-wedlock children she had to explain to her friends. Granny had refused to meet or acknowledge Dixie and baby Lauren. She’d hated Blythe too – before Dixie took the crown for most unsuitable girlfriend – and wanted her son to stay married to Annabelle. ‘Viv was on the life-model carousel,’ Dad adds.

‘Clearly,’ Angie says. Then, bluntly, ‘Did you screw her too?’

He opens his mouth to deny it, then closes it again, and for a second or two he looks quite trapped, caught in a cage of his own making.

‘The date, Dad,’ Kat says gently. It brings her no pleasure to see her father squirm.

Glasses steamed up, he takes them off, rubs the lenses on his denim shirt. He doesn’t need to look. The date must be etched on his heart.

‘I’d have been a baby.’ Lauren’s voice trembles. ‘And you and Mum were together. So … that’s it, isn’t it? The thing that made her leave you.’

‘Oh, Daddy.’ Flora stares at him, horrified, his godlike status crumbling. ‘How … how foul of you – and Viv!’

‘Viv didn’t know about Dixie, or you, Lauren,’ he says, correcting this quickly. ‘It happened just the once, a late-night session. Not that that makes it … you know.’ His face sags with sadness. ‘It was the worst mistake of my life. I confessed to Dix … I thought if I was honest … But, no. That was it. Lesson learned.’

Lauren walks to the fire, her back to them, taut, sharp shoulder-blades visible under her thin black sweater, and rising.

Flora huffs into the nearest armchair, ripping off the F Post-it note, balling it in her hand and throwing it to the floor. ‘Then you employed Viv, a decade or so later, as a housekeeper. Ugh.’

‘No, Flora, I really didn’t. Viv stuck a leaflet through the letterbox,’ he says. Kat thinks, Another note, the irony. He wipes sweat off his forehead with the corner of his shirt. ‘I wasn’t in Cornwall at the time.’

‘So, Granny never knew you’d had a – a thing.’ Lauren sits on the fender, small, brave, the conflicting emotions they’re all feeling – disgust, pity, love – streaking across her face.

‘Oh, wait a minute!’ exclaims Flora, bolting up in the armchair. ‘I think Granny guessed. “A most terrible suspicion!” Don’t you remember? Bertha would call it in Granny’s voice, and it’d send Granny into such a fluster.’

But Kat wonders if Granny, mind like a trap, suspected something else. She pictures Viv in her red coat – ‘I know you lost someone that day too, Charlie’ – and Dixie dying, trying to tell Lauren a secret, and she readies to plunge into the family’s deepest, coldest waters. ‘Dad, should we talk about the corn-dolly bird?’ As her words settle, something in their father’s face seems to rearrange itself, surrender, open like a door. ‘It wasn’t Granny who took and hid that bird, was it?’ Kat adds softly. ‘It was you.’