Postscript

The front steps of the Tate were crowded; the queue stretched all the way toward the river and snaked westward along Millbank.

It was a winter day and there were snow flurries in the air. But the crowds remained with an atmosphere of good humor. Every now and again the vast main doors were opened; ticket holders were admitted for half-hour passes only.

In the two days since the new gallery had been opened, six thousand people had seen the paintings.

Catherine Sergeant stood now in the center of the room.

She had been there for the whole two days, watching the faces of people as they entered the gallery, each one carrying the program that had the words “Donated to the Nation: The Brigham Collection” emblazoned across its cover.

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which the Tate already owned, had been rehung in center stage, with a broad strip of empty space around it. Leaflets and guides had been printed to show the detail that even a close inspection of the painting might miss: the tiny pale centaur in the bank of clover, the face of Richard Dadd’s father in the top right-hand corner of the canvas; the belts, buckles, and lacing of shoes; the deep folds of material; the faint edge of a woman’s face reflected in the mirror; and Richard Dadd himself to the right-hand side of the raised axe.

On either side of the painting were all the others, Songe de la Fantasie, brought from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; and the copy of The Master-Stroke that John and Helen had owned. Contradiction, loaned from a private collection; and Sketch to Illustrate Melancholy. One after the other the newly discovered portraits from Bedlam, each one full of terrible poignancy, faces of muddled hope and misguided obsessions, sealed forever in their cages of the 1840s; the Sketch to Illustrate Jealousy, brought from Connecticut; The Crooked Path from the British Museum.

On the opposite wall, Devon Bridge and Tlos in Lycia, and the dozens of notebook sketches of Syria that John had also owned. And, in the center of these, The Child’s Problem, which inevitably stopped each member of the crowd in his tracks. In the glass cabinets on the other side were the miniatures, again with the tiny replicas of Port Stragglin, Marius in Carthage, Flight of Medea.

Catherine closed her eyes briefly now.

The opening night had almost been too much; she had missed John so acutely, so physically, on seeing the completed exhibition. Even Amanda and Mark’s presence by her side had failed to help. She had felt, bizarrely, irrationally, that she had allowed Dadd to be inspected and exposed.

None of the compliments had moved her; none of the enthusiasm of other collectors, whose own paintings were also here for the first time under one roof. Everything became jumbled; the noise of the guests, the questions of the press. She had had to leave and stand outside, breathing in the icy air, watching the tourist boats plowing the choppy tide down to the National and Cherry Garden Pier, their lights fragmented on the water.

It was two and a half years now since John had died.

Two and a half years since the ambulance had come to the door of Bridle Lodge. They had told her that he had died almost instantly, but she doubted it. Something of him stayed in that room for a long time, some part of him that had never left her.

Helen had spent the next year in care. Catherine saw her sometimes, if she ever needed to come to London; where Helen would be the same as ever, sometimes high, sometimes haunted. They never spoke of the paintings. During her year in care, Helen had relinquished her trusteeship of the Dadds. And they never spoke of John, who had altered his will to leave Bridle Lodge to Catherine, and stipulated his wish that the paintings be left to the nation. Robert had worked abroad, in Germany, for the last two years. There had been no contact between them at all.

She walked through Derry Woods every day. It saved her sanity.

Catherine had seen two years of seasons come and go; sat by herself with Frith in the dark sometimes in summer, listening to the deer that still passed along the same route through the valley in the dark. Walked in the last weeks of winter, waiting for the spring. Walked down to the village by the bridge, and back up again to the weirs below the house.

Peter Luckham had come only last week and told her that the water beds must be cleared again. The cress had grown as thickly as he had predicted. But the whitebeam were lovely when the spring did eventually come; John had been right to plant them. Their images were in the stream all the way down to the water meadows.

John had given her that: made the world different. She couldn’t name it, or quantify it. But it was there, changed forever, a vibrant thing, of joy and significance, that he had shown to her. Even without him, even in the depths of grief, she didn’t merely exist. She lived.

It was made for love, he had told her. To be alive in the world.

She opened her eyes.

It was enough.

She wanted to go home now, to go back.

She took a long last look at the paintings and the crowds, then left and went through the reception, passing the waiting queues.

On the steps of the gallery, catching her breath in the cold wind, she stopped a moment, closing her hand around the miniature that she always carried in the locket around her neck. It was The Child’s Problem.

A piece of John that she could not let go, the only Dadd painting that she had not told them about.

She walked down the steps, her hand still closed tightly around it.