‘It’s looking much better today,’ said Stafford, peering over his easel at me after breakfast. Oliver – to my relief – had not appeared for the meal. ‘Less painful. A potent thing, the Corsican sun … and deceptive when there’s a breeze. I’ve had it much worse than you – I remember spending a day out on the water with Elodia, and because the wind made it feel cooler than it was I had no idea I’d been fried to a crisp until it was too late. Elodia found my sunburn hilarious.’
‘Marie gave me some lotion to put on it – aloe vera.’ I didn’t mention Oliver’s part in it; it made even less sense to me now. Every time I thought about the photograph I was suffused with embarrassment.
‘Ah, yes – she learned that from my wife. Elodia was always good with anything botanical. With Gerard’s help she even managed to make something of the garden, though the soil is so poor. Oliver helped too, when he came to live here – he had his own herb garden, which he looked after with great care.
‘We all used to joke that Elodia had witch’s powers – and I think Oliver always secretly believed that it was true. She would tell us stories of the island, the history – Napoleon and all of the great Corsican men and women who had come before him, but also the folk tales of mountain creatures, magical animals, elves …’
I thought of Oliver as he was now, and found it hard to imagine that he had ever believed in fairy tales. But then I remembered that he had once been that boy in the photographs who had looked rather like a faerie creature himself.
Something Stafford had said had intrigued me, and despite my better judgement I decided to ask him about it. ‘I was wondering – you mentioned Oliver coming to live here. Why did he?’
Stafford’s expression closed, instantly, and I realized that he was not going to tell me. For someone who was prepared to be so free with his own history it seemed that his grandson’s past was a different matter.
‘Sorry,’ I said quickly, ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘It’s fine,’ Stafford said, ‘and you shouldn’t feel you have to apologize for asking. But it was a difficult time for all of us, especially Oliver. So I’d prefer not to discuss it.’
I nodded, relieved that I did not seem to have offended him.
‘Tell me,’ he said then, in a clear effort to change the subject, ‘about your walk, yesterday.’ He smiled. ‘I do hope it was worth the price you paid for it in sunburn.’
‘I didn’t go far,’ I told him, ‘a short way down the track, down to where the olive groves begin.’
‘Did you get any photographs?’
‘Quite a few – mainly of the olive trees, with the mountains in the background.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sure you’ll have more luck at capturing the olives than I have done. I have tried and tried to get the perfect shade for the foliage – that unique silver green – and to properly depict the way the sunlight comes through the branches … but it has all eluded me. Every effort has come out looking lumpen, wrong. It is terribly frustrating. Cézanne – or Matisse, undoubtedly – would have known exactly what to do.’ He smiled at me. ‘Will you show me your photographs, at some point? I should like to see them.’
‘Yes,’ I said, flattered by his interest, ‘though I don’t have any with me, and the ones I’ve taken here will need to be developed.’
Stafford looked rueful. ‘More proof that I must have a dark room installed, as Oliver keeps suggesting. But if you were to come back, perhaps?’
‘Of course,’ I told him, buoyed by the suggestion – vague though it was – that I might be welcome to return.
All was quiet for a few minutes, as Stafford went back to working in earnest at his easel. It struck me that the silence was not tense or weighted, as it so often is with a stranger – a gap that must be quickly filled with words. The brief moments of awkwardness that had followed my question had completely dispelled, and now it felt natural: the sort of silence you might expect to have with an old friend. I wondered whether this could be due to some artist’s trick of putting the sitter at ease, but dismissed the idea. It was simply how Stafford was – a mark of his calmness, his confidence.
Before I met him I had viewed Stafford merely as a conduit to the woman in his drawing, a means of discovering more about her. I had presumed that he would turn out to be the difficult, reclusive type that his lifestyle suggested, and had never anticipated that I might feel such a strong liking for the man himself.
I watched him now – he seemed entirely lost in thought. And when he spoke his words seemed to come from some hidden well of feeling: ‘Often, when I wake, I forget that I am an old man. In those first few moments I can sometimes believe that I am back in England, lying in my room at Oxford and hoping for a letter from Alice.’
He gestured out of the window. ‘That view, out there, it’s the same as it has been for centuries, perhaps even millennia, give or take a couple of the boats. When you are confronted with the permanence of other things in that way …’ He paused. ‘Well, it heightens the sense of one’s own short span here. I know that I’m lucky to have lived so long, and seen so much – luckier than Elodia, luckier than many people. That doesn’t make it any easier to see this old man’s face in the mirror when I’m not expecting it.’
I looked for something to say. ‘But your work has permanence.’
‘You’re kind. Yes, I suppose it does – in the most literal sense, at least. It will continue, hopefully, to exist when I am gone. But will it have relevance?’ He shrugged. ‘That cannot be known.’ He shook his head, as though chastising himself. ‘I’m sorry, Kate, I don’t know what has come over me. I woke up in a strange mood this morning … I can only think it is this travelling into the past. It’s all so vivid that something in me refuses to believe that so much time has gone by.’ Then he smiled. ‘She was the first person to see my work, properly, you know. She was the first person to believe in me too – as an artist, not a boy with a fantasy.’
‘Who?’ I said, rather stupidly. ‘Elodia?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Alice, of course.’