Robert Ethan Locke was born in a small village in southwest Scotland in 1930. The story told was that his father was a coal miner and his mother a seamstress. These were facts he’d often pressed into service when describing his early life, though how much mining or sewing was done depended on whom one spoke to.
His father, as a young man, had worked a summer in the mines at Muirkirk, but the family had a sheep farm near Priesthill where Robert spent most of his childhood. And his mother did make shifts and petticoats, but mostly as a charitable effort for the local Women’s Aid Committee. Robert had one sibling, an older brother who died in a drowning accident as a teenager, an incident he could never be drawn to discuss. In interviews, he’d spoken about how he spent a year at the Slade studying fine art in his early twenties, then dropped out to travel to India and South America before settling in Cambridgeshire, where he married Eleanor. In 1968 they moved to West Cork.
All of this Nessa had known from her undergraduate days, and none of it was what Eleanor wanted to talk about now. What she wanted to talk about was how badly Robert had treated her that time he disappeared for several weeks in 1972. This was also well known; Nessa had already heard it from Eleanor herself several times.
Eleanor had her mouth to the Dictaphone. “He was like a beggar when he came back that time,” she said. “A beggar you might find sleeping under a piece of cardboard in the street. The filth of him. His hair sticking out like he’d hacked it off with a knife. His shirt torn.” She sighed. “If he had to go away,” she said, “would it have killed him to take a change of clothes? If you saw him then, you’d have offered him the price of a cup of tea.” She turned toward the alcove. “Wouldn’t you, Loretta?”
Loretta put down her book. “My father never took much interest in his appearance,” she said. “It wasn’t important to him.”
“And he brought nothing home for the child,” Eleanor said. “Washed up on my doorstep in the same clothes he was wearing the day he left, and nothing else. Not even a small trinket for his daughter. Remember, Loretta?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter, Mother,” Loretta said. “It makes no difference.”
They sounded, Nessa thought, as if they were discussing something that had happened only the week before.
“How difficult could it have been to find something small?” Eleanor said. “Some little souvenir for his own child. A knickknack from a stall, a plastic donkey. You know the sort of thing. Anything would have been better than nothing.” She paused. “And he wouldn’t even tell us where he’d been.”
Nessa was aware that Loretta had gone back to her book, but her expression was strained, and she wasn’t turning any pages.
“Quite a man for the vanishing acts,” Nessa said. She managed a polite smile.
“Vanishing acts!” Eleanor said, “You make them sound like something delightful. He ran away, that’s all. Ran away like a little boy to hide. But young women like you, you always come wanting to give him medals.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. It must have been terrible for you, not knowing where he was.”
Eleanor glared. “You have no idea,” she said. Then, as if the Dictaphone and Nessa were two separate audiences, she dipped her head low again to address the machine: “You have no idea.”
Corralling Eleanor’s thoughts was never easy, and that afternoon, still raw from her fight with Philip, Nessa found the job slower and more difficult than usual. She’d had an idea to write a paper, perhaps a newspaper article, to be published at the time of the gallery’s unveiling of the studio: Robert Locke through the eyes of the women who lived with him. Loretta had refused outright. Eleanor had taken to the idea when Nessa explained that it would, in part, be about her, but cracks had begun to emerge as to the precise nature of that part. Nessa was on the point of packing away her Dictaphone when Eleanor said, “You’re missing a button.”
Nessa looked down at her blouse. “So I am.” She shrugged.
“You must let me fix it.”
“It’s fine. I have to go. I’m giving a talk on Robert’s work at the gallery later.”
“My mother won’t be able to attend that talk,” Loretta said quickly. “I’d prefer that she got some rest.”
“I understand,” Nessa said. “It’s just that I need to be on my way. The button doesn’t matter.”
“No,” Eleanor said, “go and take the blouse off. Loretta will fetch you something to put on while I’m sewing. It won’t take a minute.”
Nessa hoped Loretta would interject, but she put her book down on the floor and came over to the table. “Come on,” she said, in a tone that suggested We might as well get this over with. She beckoned Nessa toward the stairs.
She had been in the house half a dozen times, but had never gotten farther than the studio, the back room, the downstairs toilet. If she hadn’t been running late, she realized, she would’ve been grateful for the missing button. In curating the life of Robert Locke, what little she had learned so far of these women’s personal lives was confined to their roles as wife and daughter. Of their personal day-to-day existence she knew very little. And it was no small thing to know that Locke himself had slept in one of these very rooms, albeit almost two decades ago. Her student self would have blushed at the idea; now she thought that she’d like to settle herself, even briefly, on his bed. In some ways, Nessa thought, she was not that different from those people who came to paw at the Chalk Sculpture.
The landing was wide, with one wall shelved floor to ceiling and stuffed with all kinds of oddities. On closer inspection, she saw that many of them had gift tags or handwritten notes attached. It reminded her of Jennifer’s bedroom, but with varnished shells and boxed soaps instead of eye shadows and celebrity-endorsed perfumes. Loretta caught her staring. “Mostly they bring her ugly, sentimental things,” she said, “things my father would have hated.” She lifted a box from a shelf, grimaced, put it down again. “What use they think a statue might have for embroidered hankies I can’t imagine.”
“Are people still coming to see the Chalk Sculpture?” The house was no longer meant to be open to visitors. This was something on which the gallery and the Lockes had had extensive negotiations. The publicist was busy whipping up excitement about the planned unveiling of the sculpture in its new home at the gallery. These home visits were diluting the brand.
Loretta flushed. “These are from before. I used to toss everything out as soon as people left, but then I came to an arrangement with a woman who owns a souvenir shop farther up the coast. If she needs extra stock during the regattas, I give her a box of things to sell.”
Loretta unlocked a door to a room that might once have belonged to a lodger or servant: a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and chair. “Take your blouse off. I’ll get you something to wear while you’re waiting.” She left, and Nessa heard another door opening, the metallic ring of hangers sliding across a rail. Loretta returned with a blouse that was most definitely Eleanor’s: a chiffony thing with a froth of lace around the neck, mother-of-pearl buttons at the cuffs. “Come down when you’re ready,” she said, in the same kind but brisk tone the nurse at the GP’s practice used when leaving Nessa to undress before examination. Nessa looked around. Finally she was in the sleeping quarters of the house where Robert Locke had once lived. This room was so bare, though, that it was hard to imagine it had witnessed much living.
The blouse, being Eleanor’s, was much too small. Having failed to do up more than three buttons, Nessa clutched it closed at the front. She sat on the edge of the bed, not wishing to go downstairs. She would be late getting home to cook dinner, and she would have no time to go over her notes for the lecture. After what felt like an eternity, and holding the blouse closed with one hand, she stepped out onto the landing. She paused in front of the shelves stuffed with oddities. Loretta was right, what need had a sculpture for hankies, or lace doilies or paperweights or pincushions, for that matter? But then, the pilgrims were paying a visit; they could hardly have come, as her mother might have said, with their hands hanging. Perhaps they did not wish to scupper their chances by appearing mean. Ten years previously someone claimed to have become pregnant after touching the Chalk Sculpture, and for a while it did a brisk trade in superstition. It became an object of pilgrimage for the desperate, the ones who’d spent all their money on IVF, who’d said their last prayer, and whose only remaining hope was to push their last tenner into the donation box placed discreetly to one side. Then they’d rub the Chalk Sculpture’s magnificent belly, cry a bit, and leave a box of scented candles, say, or a string of rosary beads, on the floor by her feet. Nessa had read all about it in a newspaper at the time, back before she’d ever known Loretta and Eleanor, when Locke himself was just the brilliant man she’d studied at college. The day she got the letter from the gallery confirming funding had come through, that she was to be contracted to work on Locke’s studio, Philip had cracked a joke about keeping well back from that statue, how one child was quite enough. How they’d laughed! That was over a year ago, before Cora Wilson. Proof that they’d been happy once.
Downstairs, she found Eleanor struggling with the blouse and a needle, the fabric held close to her face. Loretta was in the chair that was usually Nessa’s. “Don’t get up,” Nessa said, but Loretta was already drifting back to the alcove. Eleanor paused, needle midair. “I used to get shirts sent over from London when we moved here first,” she said. “It was hard to get well-made clothes back then. Much better selection now. For those that want them. For those that have an eye.” Then, with a flourish, she brought the thread to her mouth, bit it, and handed over the blouse.
Nessa wondered if she should go back upstairs to change, if they would consider it improper if she whipped the borrowed blouse off in front of them, exposing her graying Marks & Spencer’s bra, but she was in a hurry. She compromised by changing in the hall.
When at last she could get away, Loretta waved goodbye to her from the porch. Nessa walked to her car, sidestepping the wild rhubarb plants that protruded onto the path, their giant leaves heavy with rainwater.
She had never found nature comforting. Even as a preschooler, the cultivation of watercress in cotton wool had held a peculiar terror, the stealthy colonizing while she slept. A smattering of fuchsia blossoms dappled the car windshield. She frowned, and pulling her sleeve down to cover her hand, she swept them off before getting in.
A thing that she would later learn: Robert Locke spent those lost weeks in 1972, the weeks that had so pained Eleanor, in a small fishing village in the Inishowen peninsula, boarding with a fishing family who didn’t usually take boarders. She imagined him turning up on their doorstep, not bothering to cajole them into friendship, simply placing himself in their midst, whether they liked it or not. There was a photo of him with that family, the men ruddy-faced, their hands hanging in front of them, fists clenched, not to fight, but as if hauling imaginary nets. And Locke in the middle of them, looking like a colonel who’d happened upon a tribe in the jungle. When she found out later where the photo had been taken, she kept it to herself. It no longer mattered by then.