We broke for a late lunch shortly after three o’clock. I could see that Stafford was tired by the morning and ready to finish for the day. As he worked, he had told me of those afternoons spent in Oxford with Alice. Already, I felt that I was beginning to form a sense of the person she might have been.
The meal set out for us on the terrace was a simple affair: bread and cheese, a bottle of dusky wine. It was oddly reminiscent of the picnic that Stafford had described eating with Alice in the Oxfordshire countryside. I wonder if he noticed too. Here the cheese was a pungent Corsican variety, herby and friable, made from the milk of the island’s goats. And our bread was a loose-grained white baguette of the sort that doesn’t exist in England.
I looked at Stafford and once more experienced that strange double vision. I was certain in that instant that I could again see both Thomas Staffords before me, as in one of those Victorian composite photographs where many faces are layered to form one visage. I could see the elderly man – the famous artist who had spent the morning looking back upon his life – and I could see the young man, too, still really a boy, who had not yet made his mark in the world and was unsure whether he ever would.
When we’d finished eating, Stafford disappeared inside for his afternoon rest. I decided to go for a walk, taking my Nikon with me, though I knew I wouldn’t get any very good shots in the fierce light. At four o’clock the sun was barely weaker than at midday, and it wasn’t the most sensible idea to head off in such heat – pale-skinned and ill-adjusted to the Corsican climate as I was. But after spending the morning indoors I felt the need to explore, to re-engage with the present.
I headed further down the track that ran past the Maison du Vent. I soon discovered that as it continued the way became even less defined. Stafford’s house was apparently the last mainstay of civilization before the land took over once more.
The path was covered in dust a couple of inches thick, fine as flour and bone-white. There couldn’t have been rain for weeks. The heat pressed down upon me, but I began to enjoy its fierce embrace. On either side of me the vegetation was alive with the rapid-fire staccato of cricket song. It gave off the most tremendous aroma, this shrubbery – complex, warm, by turns sweet and savoury. This was the scent of the Corsican maquis, a native tangle of herbs, wild fig and bracken. ‘When Napoleon was in his prison on Elba,’ Stafford had told me, ‘he claimed he could smell it, carried across the water on the wind – the scent of his homeland.’
I followed the road around and away from the sea, inhaling deeply to draw the perfumed air into my lungs. I stretched my arms up above me and out to the side in windmills, feeling slightly foolish and glad of my solitude.
Gradually the bush thinned and the land opened out on either side to reveal rows of pale olives, nets spread out beneath them to catch the fallen fruit. There was an oddly temporary look to the scene, though for all I knew olives had been grown here for millennia. It was as if the island had permitted the clearing of the natural vegetation and the taming of the rocky soil, but with the proviso that it could claim back the land whenever it wanted without warning.
I heard a mewing, high above, and saw a bird of prey plummet from the blue – as true and deadly as an arrowhead. I watched, transfixed as prey, as it swooped close to the earth, claws raking the ground. As it rose, moving away from me towards the purple shadow of the mountains, I saw that some small creature wriggled in its grasp.
Corsica was a wild place, I thought. I had never been anywhere quite like it. Mum and I had always travelled to cities – Rome, Paris, Berlin – because that was where her work took her. Yet I knew she would have loved it here. She loved anything in its untamed state. At the time of her death she had still been performing, though it wasn’t technically ballet. The best thing about her success, she explained to me once, was that it had given her licence to experiment. She had begun to perform improvisations, barefoot, which proved a liberation for her point-battered feet. These dances were beautiful but raw – her movements remarkable not for their choreographed precision but for their instinctual animal grace. It was, you could say, what free jazz is to a piano recital. Some of the purists turned their backs on her then, but I believe it was at this time in her career that she was at her happiest – and most exceptional. It was how she danced for me, when as a child I had asked her to, following her about the room on stumpy legs.
The memory became an ache in the centre of my chest, as though it had opened up some cavity there. I knew that I could not allow the pain to take over, lest it split me in two. So I took my camera from its case and flipped off the lens cap, training it upon the wheeling black arc that was the bird soaring with purpose towards the distant mountains. It would be a terrible photo, undoubtedly – the light was too harsh, and would wash all detail out. But the act of finding the shot, bringing it into focus, breathing my way through that all-important click: it was the best way of forgetting that I knew.
When I returned to the house, labouring my way up the – I counted them – eighty-five steps, Oliver was standing on the terrace with his back to me, looking out to sea. He was quite still. I was tempted to try and sneak behind him into the house, to avoid having to make any awkward pleasantries. But I would be my braver, better self, I decided.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He gave a tiny start and turned. In that unguarded moment I thought I saw something in his face that I recognized. Akin to loneliness, though altogether more complex than that. Then it vanished without trace, and I wondered if I had imagined it completely.
Now he gazed back at me, impassive as ever. ‘Does that hurt?’ he asked.
I followed the direction of his gaze – saw that the loop of skin above my T-shirt was a raw and flaming red. So too, no doubt, was my face. Now that I was aware of it, the skin felt tight and painful. I’d thought, in my foolhardy English way, that the sun cream I’d applied first thing in the morning would suffice.
‘Oh,’ I said, gazing down at the burnt skin in horrified fascination. ‘I’d better—’
He cut me off. ‘How long are you staying?’
‘I …’ his question had ambushed me – and I was thrown for a moment. ‘I don’t actually know.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I should tell you something, while you’re here. I know that Grand-père will be too polite to ever say it, but he gets tired. It is one of the reasons that he rarely has guests. And the few times he has had them, it is only for a day or two. Never longer.’
The message was clear: don’t overstay your welcome.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as civilly as I could, unable to believe his rudeness. ‘I will bear it in mind.’
Once within the sanctuary of my room I went to the mirror, and saw that it was as bad as I had suspected. I was angry, humiliated, thinking of how foolish I must have looked to Oliver. I drew closer to the glass to inspect the damage, and jumped at a knock on the door. For an awful second I thought it might be him, having decided he wasn’t quite finished with me.
It was Marie. She had a white tube, which she held towards me. I read the label: aloe vera lotion.
‘You put it …’ She gestured to my chest and face.
‘Oh – thank you.’
‘He tell me,’ she said.
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Mr Stafford?’
She shook her head. ‘Ollie.’
It took me a couple of seconds to realize who she meant – that it must be her name for him. ‘Oh,’ I said again, quite stupidly.
When Marie was gone I slathered the stuff all over the burn. It was cool and immediately soothing, with an unusual marine scent.
I was mystified. After his words on the terrace, it seemed bizarre, almost perversely so, that Oliver had then chosen to do something that could only be construed as kind. Still, I thought, not too kind. It wasn’t as though he had deigned to bring it to me himself. And perhaps he was merely trying to spare his grandfather the unpleasantness of having to look at my raw face over his easel.
I woke early the next morning. My sunburn was hot and uncomfortable, and there was a clamour of thoughts in my head. My immediate thought on waking was of Mum. Even now, in those first few moments of consciousness I had to re-remember that she was gone, that it had not all been a bad dream, that I would never see her again. As always, there was some stubborn part of me that refused to believe it.
Now these thoughts were joined by all that Thomas Stafford had told me the day before. Even if he had not told me he loved her, the woman named Alice, I would have been able to hear it from the way he first spoke her name. But it was more than that, I felt. He loved her still.
I knew I was not going to go back to sleep now, so I resolved to head outside and feel the cool morning air on my raw skin. I slipped from my bed and padded out into the corridor. I was making for the front door, but the pictures that hung in the hallway drew me back to them again – inevitably, as though they exerted some invisible pull upon me.
This time, when I looked at the photograph of Oliver and his mother, I realized something. That same look, that one I thought I had glimpsed the previous afternoon, was there in his face. Fascinated, I unhinged the picture from the wall so I could examine it more closely. I studied her – haughtily beautiful and immaculate, her slender white arms exposed by the sleeveless black shift, her hair upswept to reveal the two delicate drop earrings. I was struck anew by the way her hand on his shoulder seemed to hold him away from her body – not at all the caress that it pretended to be.
I was so absorbed that I didn’t hear anything – no door opening, no approaching footsteps – until the sound of his voice, loud and very near, sent shock exploding through me.
‘What are you doing?’
I spun around. There wasn’t time to do anything other than drop the hand holding the picture, in an attempt to shield it from sight with my body. It was a vain effort: his eyes went straight to the empty space on the wall where it had hung. I don’t know if it was his intention, but I felt that he had caught me stealing, or spying. Which wasn’t, in fact, so far from the truth.
‘Oh – I was looking at something.’
‘That?’ Oliver pointed behind me, to where my concealed right hand clutched the photo. Slowly, I brought it into sight.
‘Yes,’ I said, and heard my voice waver, guiltily.
‘Have you seen everything you wanted?’
‘I didn’t—’ I began. ‘I mean, I was on my way outside, and I spotted this. It’s you, isn’t it?’ It seemed best to be frank about it. ‘And your mother?’
He nodded.
‘She was beautiful.’
‘She died.’ He said it impassively, a simple statement of fact.
I stared up at him, shocked by his bluntness. ‘I’m … sorry.’
‘Don’t upset yourself about it,’ he said, almost viciously.
Then he moved past me, out on to the terrace, while I stood there clutching the photograph to myself. Slowly, I turned back to the wall to rehang it, trying to ignore how my hands shook as I did.