Alice lived for another year. She died in the autumn of 1987. Julie said that it had started as a cold that had taken root and wouldn’t let go, eventually turning itself into something lethal. She refused to be moved into a hospital, even at the end, and insisted on being taken to the gallery each day until she was too ill to leave her bed.
You could say that the grief I felt was disproportionate to the short time I had known her, but I don’t think so. After all, it wasn’t as if we were really strangers before I met her that first time – even before I first heard about her from Stafford. There were so many ways – her strength of character, her beauty, her bravery – in which she was like my mother. And I hope that in some ways she was also a little like me.
She left me almost everything she owned of Stafford’s work – including those pieces that she had kept in private, at her study in the gallery. At first, I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered what she had said about hoping, one day, to be able to share them with the world. Several of them now hang in the National Portrait Gallery in London, though the De Rosier Gallery has the lion’s share.
There was also the study Stafford had made of me. He showed the finished work to me when I next went to visit, and I understood then what it was he had seen that first time we met. Looking at it made my heart ache, for it seemed that I found two other faces there besides my own, both so dear to me. When Stafford asked if he could keep hold of it for a while, I agreed. After all, I never felt that it was really mine to keep.
The strangest thing is that it was found in Alice’s apartment after she died, hanging beside the photograph I had sent her of Mum. Yet something stopped me from questioning Stafford about it. A few months later, when we were re-framing the picture for display, I discovered an envelope tucked between the parchment and backing: an odd place to keep such a thing. It was addressed, care of the museum, to Miss Alice Eversley. The letter that must have come with it was never found. It is almost as though Alice took it with her when she went.
Stafford is gone now too. Though whenever Oliver and I visit the Maison du Vent, which we do often, I always feel that he is there, somewhere out of sight. Down at the cove, perhaps, or taking a swim in the freshwater pool. The floor and walls of the studio are still splattered with colours of every hue, and in certain lights the paint gleams as though newly wet, and it makes me smile.