12

The van from Pearsons arrived at Bridle Lodge at nine the next morning.

John had watched it from the kitchen window coming up the drive, and seen Catherine’s car directly behind it. He walked out now onto the doorstep just as she got out. She walked across the gravel, smiling at Frith, who ran in circles around her.

“I didn’t expect you,” John said.

“I didn’t plan to come, until last night,” she told him. She paused, another flush heightening her color. He watched her blush with surprise. She put a hand to her face, smoothed her hair, turned away, as if she were embarrassedly aware of it. She stepped ahead of him, following the gesture of his hand into the house.

He showed the porters through to the kitchen, where everything that had been in the dresser was now laid haphazardly on the table. Without a word, they began releasing the backboard. John switched on the kettle for tea.

“Do you want the doors removed or taped?” Catherine asked.

“Taped,” he said.

She looked around at the table.

There was plenty of mundane stuff from the drawers: receipts, maps, the usual stack of bills. She picked up a paperback, read the back cover, replaced it. He tried not to look directly at her. Every time he did so, he saw drops of water on skin and felt her fingers urgently laced over his.

They exchanged small talk, watching the dresser being loaded onto the van. After ten minutes or so, Catherine let the men go without making any effort to follow them. Instead, she came back to the kitchen with John and sat down, looking speculatively at him.

“Do you have any paintings?” she asked.

The question, out of the blue, shocked him. Automatically he glanced at the door to the hall, to the alarm outside the drawing room.

“Yes,” he told her. “I have some.”

“Any particular period?” she asked.

He paused. “Victorian,” he said.

“Figurative?”

He sat down alongside her, putting the items from the dresser into piles, not replying for a moment.

“You saw the miniature,” he said.

She took a deep breath. “Yes, I did,” she said. “The Child’s Problem. Is it a copy?”

“No.”

She put a hand to her throat. “Original? Genuine?”

“Yes.”

She looked up at the ceiling, closed her eyes, opened them again with a smile. “Oh, my God,” she said. “My God.”

He got up and went out of the room. When he returned, she was still sitting in the same position at the table. He put a small box in front of her, took off the lid, and folded back the tissue paper.

She looked at him and then leaned forward. She took out the disc slowly, resting it in the palm of her hand. She said nothing for a long time.

Her utter immobility was fascinating to see.

For her own part, shock was the first emotion; it felt almost like walking through a brick wall, something she had previously felt to be impervious, immovable. But it was not only the accepted logic of Dadd’s history that was fragmenting here—the knowledge that he had painted more than she knew, and might have painted far more, if he were as industrious as this—but it was herself, her own image of what she was. It was that which was changing, and more rapidly.

She was not in control; she was out of her own carefully constructed picture. She felt so drawn to John that she could hardly look in his face. All the rules of reason were seemingly obsolete. She held an unknown Dadd in her hand, but more curiously still, she knew the stranger who had put it there, knew John intimately, recognized him, as if he had always been at her side.

She put a hand to her face briefly, as if to hide the pleasure that might be painted there.

John was still watching her acutely.

“You know this picture,” John said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen it in the Tate.”

“It’s not on public display.”

“That’s right,” she replied. She turned the miniature this way and that in the light. “It’s extraordinary,” she said. “It’s exactly the same. Exactly the same as the watercolor in the Tate. The scale is perfect.”

He watched her face, seeing her appreciation. “Claire always thought it was disturbing,” he said.

“It is,” Catherine agreed. “It really is. It’s the most peculiar and frightening painting I think I’ve ever seen. I’ve always thought so.”

He drew his chair closer to her, and she tilted the picture toward him. “It’s the child’s face, the expression on the face,” she said. “You think at first that he must have seen something terrible on the chessboard. You see the way he’s reaching out his hand, as if he’s going to move a piece, the castle?”

“Yes,” John said. “White to play, and mate in two.”

“Except for the contortion, the way the wrist goes …” She shook her head. “He isn’t even looking at the castle. In fact, he’s not looking at the board. He’s looking beyond it, to something outside the picture. Recoiling from something horrible, terrifying.” She sat back in her chair. “I always wondered what the problem was, the problem in the title. The Child’s Problem. What was Dadd thinking of?” she said. “The problem isn’t the chess move. I don’t think it’s even the knife beyond the chessboard, or the grotesque old man asleep in the chair alongside him. It’s something else, beyond the board.”

“Something that only Dadd could see,” John said.

She shook her head. “There’s another painting of his,” she said. “Of a woman and two satyrs. The same eyes as these look out at you through leaves. The faces are pulled upward, as if something has hold of the hair. The brows go upward and the eyes slant. All Dadd’s eyes began to look like that, eventually. Wide open eyes, showing the whites. Mothers, children. Even the babies.”

John seemed to be about to say something, but had stopped himself.

Catherine glanced up again from the miniature. “Where on earth did you get it?” she asked.

“I found it,” he said.

“Found it?” she echoed. “Where?”

He glanced downward. “In a flea market.”

“No!”

She was gazing at him, a broad, delighted smile on her face.

He felt so guilty for the lie.

“You found a Dadd original?” she repeated, and started to laugh in astonishment. “But it must be worth a fortune!”

“It is,” he said.

“How did you know it was real?”

“There’s a signature.”

She had put the miniature on the table between them, but now picked it up again.

“Turn it over,” he said. “Look inside.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I may damage it.”

He smiled at her. “You mean you can resist looking at Dadd’s signature?”

She gave him a quirky grimace of a smile. “Oh, Jesus,” she breathed. With a slow, gentle movement, she prized the fastening apart.

“You didn’t take it to an expert?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

She opened the back. Inside, the fabric was folded tight, with a tiny piece of canvas backing held in place with a brass pin. She looked up at John, hesitating. “I can’t do it,” she said finally. “This is a job for a restorer, a specialist. I shouldn’t touch it.” She stared down at the canvas and the pin with a kind of longing, running the edge of her thumb along the rim of the metal. He looked at her with deeper interest, recognizing that look, that longing.

“It’s painted on a little piece of stiff cotton, quite dirty,” he told her. “Like a corner of a handkerchief, perhaps even a corner of a bed-sheet. And there’s a scrap of paper in there about two inches square. There’s Dadd’s handwriting on it.”

“Dadd’s handwriting is under this canvas?”

“Yes.”

She sat back in her chair, smiled with delight, and replaced the miniature on the table. Then she stared at him. “You know that he’d killed his father? That he was in lunatic asylums, Bedlam and Broadmoor, for most of his life?”

“Yes,” John said. “And to think that he painted something like this in prison …” His gaze went back to Catherine.

“The Child’s Problem in the Tate has his inscription on the front top left,” Catherine said. “In tiny little script. You almost need a magnifying glass.”

“That’s right,” John said. “Only the date and address are different on this.”

Catherine’s eyes were fixed on his. “December 1857,” she said. “Bethlehem Hospital, London. St. George’s in the Fields.”

“And this one,” John told her, pointing at the miniature, “says, November 14th, 1885.”

“A month before he died?” Catherine murmured.

“Yes.”

“The last thing he ever did.”

He nodded. “Probably.”

“Even to the eyes,” she said.

“Even to the empty eyes,” he said. “Looking at empty spaces.”

She sat back in her chair, regarding him. There was a silence for a second or two. “What did Claire think of it?” she asked.

“She thought I should get it insured.”

“You didn’t? Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It would mean telling people that I had it.”

She looked at him questioningly. “Art galleries would be very interested in it. There are so few Dadds anywhere. Most of his paintings have vanished.”

“I know.”

“And to find a new one …”

“I know,” he said, cutting short the conversation. He got up, picked up the miniature, put it into the box, and replaced the lid. She watched him; he felt her gaze lingering on him, and not just the miniature.

“Which is your favorite?” she asked at last.

“My favorite Dadd painting?”

“No,” she said. “I meant which is your favorite from the others. You said you had other paintings.”

John paused, passing the miniature from hand to hand. “I’ve never had them valued,” he said.

“I didn’t mean value,” she replied. “I meant which one has the most meaning for you. Which one you like best.” She saw his mixed expression. “You don’t think I’m asking you so that I can assess them?” she asked.

He didn’t reply.

“You think I’m showing an interest because I’ve got half an eye on commission?” she said. “Just in case you ever want to sell? I wasn’t asking for that reason,” she said, standing up. “I was asking out of interest. That was all.”

“Don’t go,” he said.

“I must,” she replied. “I’m late already.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m defensive about them.”

“It’s your prerogative,” she said.

He stepped in front of her as she turned for the door. “I’ve collected since Claire died,” he said.

“They’re personal,” she said. “I understand.”

“No,” he told her. “You don’t.”

“But I do,” she replied calmly. “I’ve lost count of the number of clients who don’t want to show me. Or who show me by degrees. I understand very well. But I wasn’t asking you as a potential client.”

“Look,” he said, “please …” And he took hold of her arm. She looked down at his grasp and he released it almost immediately.

“I worked in London after Claire died,” he said. “I wanted nothing in my life. I didn’t even want the furniture we had owned together. And then, after a while, when I’d gone to Spain, I bought a painting. It wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t a Dadd, or anything like him. It was a surrealist picture. Nobody famous. I hung it on the wall.” He moved his eyes away from her face. “I built my house, and that’s all I did. Work on the house. Walk Frith. I walked for miles that first summer. I walked at night. I’d moved out there for the landscape, the difference. But I never looked at the landscape. I couldn’t.”

She stood still, listening, her gaze fixed on his downturned face.

“And then, one day, I bought the picture,” he said. His tone had dropped. “And I thought … I can’t say what I thought, exactly … that there was something here …”

“To fill the empty spaces,” Catherine said.

At last he raised his eyes.

“Tell me your favorite,” she said softly.

He knew which one. But there was no way he could tell her. She would know right away. If he told her the title, she would realize what he was talking about. See the weight that his life had become.

He tried to think of something inconsequential.

All he could think of was drops of water. The water in the river below the house as it fell from the weir. The cool drops of his dream, cool on warm skin. And the way he was drowning now.

“There must be something,” Catherine said.

“There’s someone called Sorolla y Bastida,” he said. “Spanish. There’s a wonderful painting … it has two women … the blue behind the women, it’s beautiful. The sea, beautiful …”

He couldn’t continue. He took hold of her hand. This time, she didn’t resist. She let it lie within his. He put the miniature down on the table.

“What do you think Richard Dadd saw beyond the picture?” he asked. “That was so terrible?”

She didn’t hesitate.

“The past,” she told him.

He walked out into the hallway, taking her with him. He stopped outside the drawing room and keyed the alarm. When it was released, he looked at her only briefly before opening the door and taking her inside.

It was a large room with a huge window that must have looked out onto the lawn, but the curtains were drawn. In the gloom, Catherine saw only shapes: frames on the wall, what seemed to be a sculpture by an opposite door. The paneling close by them was exactly the same as that which ran up the stairway.

“Have you been in here before?” John asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Mrs. Aston used to see me in here whenever she wanted to sell something.”

They used to drink tea in here, she remembered. The frail old lady had held that tradition, taking an age to bring a little trolley by the window.

John switched on the light and he walked forward into the center of the room, but she stayed where she was. Shock rolled over her.

Three vast sideboards occupied the back and side walls, each one matching, and eight or nine feet long. They were Jacobean. Old oak, very dark. On their broad tops were dozens of items: Bow and Chelsea porcelain, vases, dishes, salt cellars, scent flasks, figurines, plates, tea canisters. There was silver, although much more porcelain than silver. The nearest chest was simply a flood of ornate gilded blue; toward the back was a line of plates echoing the same shade, but simpler.

She recognized the soft-paste porcelain of Bow from the mid-1700s. The two salt cellars before them were the most complicated design of crayfish and shell, modeled in detail so that it looked almost alive. At one end was a small service, again from Bow, transfer printed in brown and painted with enamels of some Chinese design. Here on one cabinet was perhaps a hundred thousand pounds of delicate, infinitely perishable craftsmanship.

She walked a step forward and looked at the other sideboards. This was much more of a mixture. There was an 1860s plaster bust of Marianne, of the kind that sometimes were found over town hall doors in rural France; it sat on a small gilded chest, much battered and wormed. There was an unbelievable nineteenth-century Baltic bedroom cabinet on top of its Jacobean brother—a thin confection of white paint and crown-topped columns. And a white marble figure, barely sixteen inches high.

“This is Henri Laurens,” she said.

She reached out and ran her fingers slowly along the contorted lines of the female nude, roundly misshapen, rigid-backed, heavy-breasted, arms raised over a head twisted on an impossibly long neck.

John still had said nothing. Catherine was aware he was standing behind her. She turned to say something to him, and saw the Sargent portrait.

She was on the far wall, behind where John was standing. She was half sitting, half lying on a seat by a window, her head tilted back, her arm lying extended along the backrest. Summer light flooded the picture and the face of the woman with her dark coiled hair, the glitter of diamonds at her neck, the bare shoulder above the cream-colored gown. She had a face of removed, even bored calm. Beyond the open window was a bank of roses and a distant parkland, shimmering in the haze of an August day. Below her, her dress cascaded to the floor in deep folds of cream satin. As the fabric fell farther from the light from the window, the painter had picked up its drop in swiftly executed single lines of color, shining in the shadows. A shawl, patterned with red and gold, had dropped to the floor of the room.

Catherine walked forward.

John Singer Sargent’s style was unmistakable. The greatest of the Victorian portrait artists shone out in the subdued light, spilling a summer day into the north-facing drawing room, that, even with curtains open, could be dark. Voluptuous light, fresh and lovely; the woman’s flawless skin gleaming above the dress. One of Sargent’s heiresses. One of the endless procession of American and French women who had sat for him in the 1880s and 1890s, and in the end, along with the English aristocracy, finally bored him beyond endurance.

John was watching Catherine’s face.

“Her name is Amy Clanville-Wright,” he said. “She was sixteen.”

Catherine said nothing. She couldn’t. She walked to his side.

“I was given her to pay for a debt,” he said.

Catherine stared at him. “A debt?”

“I built a client a house in Guadalhorce, and he couldn’t pay,” he explained. “He gave me this.” He smiled. “I think he was a crook,” he said. “One of those East End boys living in Spain to escape the long arm of the law.” And he started to laugh softly. “I never did dare ask where he made his cash. And I never dared ask where he got Amy Clanville-Wright. I dread to think.”

She shook her head. “John,” she said, “this is serious money. Are you crazy, keeping it here? My God! This isn’t a joke.” She turned on her heel. “And this …” she said, waving her hand at the porcelain.

“I’ve bought it over the last eight years.”

“All this? Everything?”

“All of it,” he said.

“The Laurens …”

“I had to have her,” he said.

She met his eye. Then she looked about herself again, trying to take it in. “I don’t know what to say to you,” she said.

“It isn’t about money,” he said.

“Not about money!”

“No,” he said. “You know that, of all people.”

She looked around at the whole room. She did know what he meant. She knew the fixations and passions. She knew what came out of loneliness, above all. She glanced back at John, with a glance of sadness.

“Don’t pity me,” he said.

“I don’t,” she said.

“I didn’t buy them to collect,” he said. “Although I did collect. I bought them because they reminded me of what the world was like.”

She waited.

He went to the Laurens. He rested his hand on the figure’s neck, on the cool and perfectly smooth texture. “It was made for love,” he said, “not money or status. But because it had to be made. A compulsion.”

He looked across at the porcelain. “A compulsion to make something wonderful,” he said. “To be alive in the world.”

He turned back to her and saw that she had her hands to her face. She turned half away.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It’s nothing.”

But it was something. She had begun to cry. “Catherine,” he said. “Catherine.”

She tried not to look up at him. She was suddenly overcome with memories. Herself, alone, bent over books while she studied. Herself as a little girl, and alone in a house, sitting at a window, very like the window in Sargent’s painting. Looking out onto an empty garden. Playing with the flaking paint of the sill, making it into patterns, drawing with a pencil around the patterns, while the day drifted away. Saw herself with Robert, making do with less than she needed, for an idea of what he was, instead of what he really was.

Saw herself in the empty spaces. And John Brigham, too, scribbling in time, filling it with colors and shapes. Living in paintings.

That’s all they did, she thought. They lived in paintings.

She turned her gaze to him.

He held out his hand, that same hand that had sent a rush of longing through her, a telegraphed impression of longing, just yesterday.

“Catherine,” John said. He made another hesitant step, and then quickly took her in his arms. “Catherine.”

It was nothing more than a whisper, in a room crowded with desire.