It could not have been more than an hour after Daniel left. Sitting in the darkness, her back to the window, Kat felt the understanding of what she had done grow inside of her, with a force that felt more like revelation than it had a right to, until she found her arms clasped tightly across her chest. As if to contain it. As if she could. It was then that she heard the sound of keys in the lock and the door being pushed open. She listened as Jonathan entered the hall and dropped his keys on the table. The sharp sound of metal hitting polished wood bounced off the walls.
She held her breath, as his heavy, solid footfalls approached the drawing room, only to pause at the threshold and then withdraw. She listened to the sound of his steps receding as he made his way upstairs. The floors were so thick that she could not hear him once he was past the landing. He would be in Will’s room. Treading lightly, slowing down as he entered, eyes adjusting to the darkness. Leaning down to his sleeping face. Moving closer to breathe him in. She thought about what it must be like to be away from Will so much. To regularly go days without seeing him. Without touching him. Without hearing his voice.
Kat turned toward the doorway, straining to hear his footfalls as he moved through the house. She could see the edge of his bag by the door. An indication of arrival or departure. As she watched, his familiar shape appeared in the doorway. Seeing her, he stopped.
“You’re here. I didn’t see you.”
“I’m here.”
She stood and went to him, almost stumbling into his embrace. She took a deep breath. The stiff, creased cotton of his shirt smelled of airplane. She heard the steady beat of his steady heart. After a moment he pulled away, holding her at arm’s length. He looked exhausted. Spent. But there was something else.
He moved farther into the room, stopping briefly by the windows to peer out into the world from which he had just come. Twisting the ends of each shirtsleeve around his wrist, he carefully extracted his cuff links and deposited them on the low table before the couch. Solid silver with a single initial that was not his own. Her mother had given them to him last Christmas. Her last Christmas. It was the first time Kat had ever known her to give away anything of her father’s. For a good man, the card had said.
“You saw the papers, then?”
She cringed and shrank from him. He had seen the tabloid. How? In the airport? And papers—he had said papers. There was more than the one?
“I am so sorry.” Her voice broke.
“I suppose I should have known. Should have seen it coming.” His brown eyes were rimmed in red and underlined by darkness. “I think I just wanted to believe it. That they were serious. That it was really going to happen this time.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate. The deal had fallen through. She relaxed so suddenly that she felt her knees begin to give way under her.
He was still talking. She willed herself to focus on his words. “I’ll tell you, though. I’ve had just about enough of this bile from the press. It’s all so very British. Success is fine, but not too much. Grow, but not too big … not too quickly … and God forbid you outgrow the boundaries of this island.
“I’ll tell you something else.” He looked at her gravely, his fingers moving swiftly down the front of his shirt, pinching the buttons free from their holes. She saw that his hands were shaking. “That whole ‘poster boy for the new British economy’ moniker. I never asked for that. They see you the way they want to see you. But, if it’s true? If I am single-handedly responsible for rekindling the Internet economy in Britain, well, then I think it might be fair to say that I’ve done my part. If they want to hang me for high treason after all of that, then let them.”
He was silent for a moment, gazing out the window.
“There is something else. It’s possible that I’ve lost the board’s confidence and that they’re considering ousting me. I know I have Angus’s support, but I’m not sure about any of the others. For better or worse, at least we should know soon. I suspect I am the subject of serious debate even as we speak.”
She pressed herself against his chest, against the hard buttons on his shirt. And then she broke. Silently. Suddenly. Because she could. Because the occasion allowed it. After a moment, feeling the damp cloth against her face, she drew herself away from him, pulling her sleeves down over her hands and pressing them to her cheeks. His dark eyes brimmed with concern and contrition.
It was a look she knew well. He wore it to varying degrees on his return after long trips away or after coming home late or forgetting something—an important appointment, an anniversary. Although meant to be remorse, it sometimes looked more like nostalgia.
“Listen, Kat. I meant what I said. I’m sorry too. I had a lot of time to think on the flight. I left you alone. I thought that was what you needed. Maybe I wanted that to be what you needed.” He ran his fingers through his dark curly hair, separating it momentarily into sections. The movement arrested her. It was the same gesture Will had made earlier that evening. “What I am trying to say is that I know that my attention has been elsewhere.” He met her eyes. “You have it now.”
She swallowed, trying to quell her nerves.
“So now what?”
“Come to bed.”
“I’ll be up in a minute.”
Kat stood by the window looking out at the bare trees. Frail and brittle, they seemed powerless to hold the darkness back and it came closer, whispering at the glass. She waited there long enough to be sure that he would be asleep before climbing the stairs. Their bedroom faced over the garden at the back of the house, so there was no light from streetlamps. She was grateful for this as she lay unseen in the darkness.
She had never seen him like this. So bowed. Almost broken. Was it really possible that the board would take the company from him? It seemed unthinkable. Jonathan had always been his own harshest critic. Perhaps he was overstating it. But he was likely right that if they were going to do it, they would do it soon. She knew that he couldn’t bear anything else now. She owed him time. She owed him more than that.
The next few days passed slowly. True to his word, Jonathan was home more than usual. Will was delighted to have Daddy along for the school run some mornings, insisting that he come through to his classroom so that he could be shown around and shown off. He was even home for dinner in the evenings. Kat cooked elaborate meals, planning the menu and visiting specialty providers for each ingredient in turn, just as she would do for dinner parties. Cheese and bread from Clarke’s on Kensington Church Street, fruit and vegetables from Michanicou Brothers on Clarendon Road, lamb from Lidgate. She did so compulsively. Anxiously filling the hours until she could collect Will from school. In the evenings, they sat together in the dining room at one end of the long table. Framed inside the window, they must have made a pretty picture to anyone looking in from the road outside. More than once she caught herself looking out into the darkness, wondering if someone was.
She stopped counting the number of times she thought she glimpsed him on the road outside the house or on the High Street, or heard his car driving by at night. Was he even in London anymore or had he gone to New York for his next show? The last thought haunted her. The possibility that he could already be gone.
Kat slowed down unconsciously as she approached the school gates with Will. The weather was warmer. She hung back from the crowd, listening to the hum of the conversations and laughter. She wondered about the seductive power of the single perspective and the way it made mysteries of others. She wondered what more there was to each of these women than what she saw.
The large double door at the top of the steps had opened and children were beginning to file up the steps in their navy-blue-and-red uniforms. She edged closer to the school, wading waist-deep into the crowd of children until Will squeezed her hand. She leaned down and kissed him, her lips catching a loop of curl and pressing it to his forehead before he disappeared. After a moment he appeared in the open doorway at the top of the steps, pausing briefly under the pediment before making his way inside.
She made her way home slowly through narrow streets lined with red brick Victorian mansion blocks and tidy stucco-fronted cottages. Past blue plaques commemorating that John Stuart Mill, philosopher, had lived here, and that T. S. Eliot, poet, had lived and died there. History, all that had come before, reduced to spots of color. Glazed blue ceramic disks on a wall.
She had run through the parks that morning, altering her usual route only slightly, so she came and went through the gate on the mews, rather than having to cross in front of the embassy. She ran sluggishly, aware that her times were off. Gravity seemed to lean more heavily on her.
Jonathan was still upstairs when she returned home. She could not remember the last time he had slept so late. He was clearly still exhausted from the travel and stress of the past few weeks. The package lay on the front hall table on top of yesterday’s post. She glanced nervously at the return address. Eliasson Architecture. She carried it through to the kitchen and opened it on the table. Inside was a small thick compliments card in Smythson’s Nile Blue and a set of architectural drawings. She read the card.
Dear Mrs. Bowen,
Please find enclosed revised plans for your home at 31 Holland Park. What we have endeavoured to do is to strip it back to its basic elements and then build from that. Everything we are proposing serves only two purposes—to highlight the essential elements and beauty of the house, and to create a space that suits your life. We have attempted to be true to the history of the house and to the way in which you wish to live your life.
To this end, the mouldings remain, as does the original flooring on the ground and first floor levels, along with the staircase and the windows. We do not recommend refurbishing the floors or the woodwork. We have left the signs of age, of wear, the markings of its history, its scars.
As you reminded me when we met, the quality that is required most with a house like this is restraint. Sometimes it is that which remains unfinished that remains most beautiful.
Of course, only you can decide what is essential.
Kindest regards,
Charles Eliasson
She removed Will’s breakfast dishes from the table and spread the plans out before her.
This time she recognized the now-familiar bones of the house. The large entryway and the sweeping staircase at its heart, the thick exterior walls. Examining the drawings, she saw that the layout was more open. The wall between the dining room and kitchen had been replaced with a segmented arch, creating a single spacious, light-filled room, with direct sight lines into the garden. The bricked-up side windows on the upper floors had been opened. She noted with surprise that the canopy over the front walkway had been retained. While it was not original, she saw that it served a purpose. The excessive decoration that had characterized the previous plans had been replaced by a pared-down, functional approach that allowed the original beauty of the architecture to come through. The house seemed to have returned to being a vessel. Something that served them rather than something they served. A marriage of life and history. A compromise. It wasn’t what it had been before. It wasn’t all that she wanted it to be. She wondered if it could ever be enough.
She almost missed the stiff envelope clinging to the package. It had already been opened and the exposed glue had adhered it to the underside. She pulled out the card and read it. “Sir Richard Hawthorne and the Cavendish Restaurant Group invite you to the opening of the Tate Restaurant, 21 February.” Her eyes scanned to the bottom. “Featuring original artwork by Daniel Blake.” The card trembled in her hands. She saw that Jonathan had already filled in the response card indicating that they would attend.
She tried to think rationally. Just because it was Daniel did not necessarily mean that the paintings were of her. But the car keys were already in her hand. She told herself that there was only one way to be certain. The now-familiar route to the studio elicited a kind of Pavlovian anticipation that mingled with her growing fear, so that she arrived at the studio in a profound state of disquiet.
The main door to the building was propped open with a thin wedge of raw wood. She thought about removing it after she entered. It didn’t seem safe. But she replaced it, trapping it between the door and the frame. Her knocks on the studio door produced a series of sharp echoes that traveled the length of the long hallway. After a few moments, she rapped again on the metal, harder, the noise reverberating and then dying in the space. She knew he was here. She had seen his car outside.
When he finally opened the door he wavered briefly before pulling it open wide without a word. She slipped past him under his outstretched arm. He was unshaven and his hands were streaked with color. The fans were switched off and there was a ripe, sweet smell in the still air. Turpentine.
“I just…” She took a quick breath. Her mouth was dry. “I just got this.” She pulled the folded invitation out of her coat pocket and held it out to him. “An invitation to the Tate opening. It has your name on it. Original artwork by Daniel Blake.”
He said nothing. He was smiling at her. She lowered the invitation. It had seemed important that she bring it with her, but it just felt ridiculous now. The metal radiator along the far wall began to hiss.
“Daniel.”
“I knew you would come back.”
He was still smiling at her, although he seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes on her, he kept looking past her. She turned around. A large unfinished canvas sat on a low easel behind her. She recognized the shape. He had transferred her outline from the wall to the canvas. But this was no mere outline. Although it was far from finished, the color had been blocked in and the detail had begun to emerge. Unlike the pure, almost sculptural form on the wall, this figure had weight and warmth and substance. She cringed, taking in the bared flesh, the thickening middle, and the start of faint silvery markings spreading across her white belly. The downturned breasts, bordered by the outlines of an arrangement of soft limbs. Her face, with its sad mouth, was half turned away. A thin sheet, an afterthought, lay next to her. Used. Discarded. Was this the way he saw her?
She turned back to him. He was gazing at the portrait, his head tilted to one side.
“This for the Tate?”
He didn’t answer, eyes still on the painting before them.
“Daniel. You can’t do this. You can’t put this on the wall of the Tate.”
“I signed the contract.” He turned to look at her. “With the money we can get away. Then it won’t matter what’s hanging on the walls of some restaurant in London.”
He looked back at the portrait. He wasn’t listening. He wasn’t hearing her.
She followed his gaze to the painting and all its immediate, irrefutable detail, desperation and dread rising in her chest. Here were her sins. Reduced to what fit within this rectangle of stiff cloth. A single image, a single perspective. Without explanation or palliation. And while people might not have recognized her nineteen-year-old face on the walls of Penfields, this was certainly a more familiar face. The canvas seemed to expand before her. Here was what Jonathan would see. What Will would see. It would become the truth. That, she knew, was what art did.
Her heart was racing. No. No. No. She would not allow this to happen. Not now. Not like this. Daniel was saying something now, but she couldn’t hear the words. The sound from the radiator had evolved into a thin, high-pitched scream.
The flat blade was cold against her wrist. Her fingers closed around the wooden handle. He hadn’t seen her pick it up. She moved toward the portrait. Close-up, the detail overwhelmed her. Her thighs, her stomach, the hollow of her hip, the weight of her breasts, her shoulders, her neck. Her face. The ruins of her. She crossed in front of the portrait and stepped behind it.
And then she was gone. The painting was between them now. The blank back of it stiff and tightly drawn between its wooden bracers. A different possibility. Just as real as what was on the other side. She relaxed her fingers and felt the knife slide down the inside of her wrist.
She heard him moving on the other side of the portrait. It had to be now. She lifted the blade over her head. Feeling its lightness, she brought her other hand up and, grasping it desperately in both hands, drove it down with all the force she had inside of her. She felt the canvas give way gratefully under the sudden pressure and heard the ragged sound as she pulled the blade through the thick cloth. The portrait wobbled dangerously and there was a sharp, short cry. She stepped back, pulling the knife out as the painting listed to one side and then clattered to the floor, bringing the easel down with it, and revealing Daniel hunched over, clutching one hand in front of him, eyes wide with pain and confusion. Blood trickled from a small angry gash at the base of his palm.
Seeing the wound triggered an automatic response in her and she reached for him. He recoiled, stepping backward, knocking into a low table and sending various jars and metal containers crashing to the floor. She looked down to see the knife still in her hands, and pushed it from her, sending it spinning across the floor to the far wall, where it lay inert.
Once she was disarmed, Daniel reversed direction, veering past her to the painting. His knees sagged and he fell beside it, leaning across it to inspect the wound, a long vertical tear bisecting her forehead and left cheek. His fingers traced the scar, gently feeling along its edges.
She inched closer, peering at the rip from above. It gaped back at her in mute surprise, a fine down of severed weft softening its hard edges. As her shadow moved across the canvas, she saw that there were several bloodstains just underneath the tear. The largest, a bright red dime-size ellipse, with a short tail pointing downward. He must have been trying to move the portrait, maybe tilt it forward on the easel to see her behind it, when the knife had found him.
He turned to look up at her, his face a mask of confusion. “What did you do?”
She didn’t answer. Looking down, she saw that there was more blood on the canvas now. Small florid drops of it had collected above her shoulder. She watched, transfixed, as more traced a diagonal slanting path down the underside of Daniel’s forearm, falling from his elbow. He saw it, too. “Shit!” He scrambled to the side of the fallen portrait, landing sitting on the floor beside it. She stood frozen, her eyes on the vivid trail of blood migrating down his arm.
As she watched, he drew his hand absently across his shirt, leaving a bloody smear in its wake. The lurid stain woke her from her shock. “Daniel!” She cast about, looking for something to help stanch the flow of blood. There was a collection of paint-covered rags mounded under the legs of the upturned easel. She knelt and reached for them. The floor around the easel had acquired fresh spatter; she could feel it sticking to her. There were several discarded brushes strewn about on the concrete floor, their bristled heads crusted with newly dried pigment.
Kat grabbed a fistful of the rags, but they were too small. Kneeling beside him, she pulled the scarf from her neck and wrapped it around his hand, the blood immediately soaking into the soft material. Up close, she could smell it. A heavy, primal odor. She pulled hard on the ends of the scarf, straining until the flow of blood stopped, and knotted it. Her hands were shaking.
He reached up and touched his fingers to her mouth, the slight pressure parting her lips. She could taste him. It was almost more than she could bear.
“Do you really want to save me?”
“Of course.” She spoke the words softly without moving her lips. After a moment he sagged back against the wall and his fingers fell away. The charcoal outline was above him, already smudged and fading. His eyes fixed somewhere behind her, an expression of despair etched on his face.
“I’ll give you up. If that’s what you need. I’ll do that for you, but you can’t ask me to stop painting you. You can’t take that from me.”
“Why me, Daniel? What about all those other women?”
He turned to face her, his head still resting against the wall behind him. “What other women?”
“The girl from the gallery.” Kat turned to where the sketches had been taped to the wall, but they were no longer there.
Daniel leaned forward, following her gaze to the vacant wall. “Annabel? Her father is paying me to paint her portrait. It’s just for money, Kat. That’s all.”
“But, she was at the gallery with you. And the other women. In New York.”
He shook his head. “None of that is real. It’s all just … Martin thinks it’s good for me to be seen with them.”
She said nothing.
He lifted his head and faced her. “There’s no one else. After you left, I lost myself for a while. I did some things I’m not proud of. But, all these years, it’s only ever been you.” He looked down at the painting and then back up at her, his eyes the color of water. “Don’t you see that?”
She looked down at the portrait beside them. She saw now that the surface had been heavily reworked, wiped down and started again, the layers of paint imbuing the figure with an almost corporeal presence so that it seemed to float above the raw canvas that surrounded it. There was a confidence, a sublimity to the rendering, that made it seem whole even in its unfinished state. She leaned in closer, brushing her fingers against the bright white weave of the still-unpainted spaces.
She lies across the bed. A vertical streak, a willful smudge. All her colors pressed and pulled into the sheets. They bleed together so that in some places it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. Her face, turned to the side, seems to consist entirely of darkness and light, in all their infinite combinations. Softened by shadows, she is neither old nor young. Her eyes are closed. The tips of her front teeth visible where her lips part.
The sheet is bunched loosely beside her hip. A vestigial modesty. There is a heaviness, a weariness to her. A stillness, which she has paused within and seems reluctant to leave. It is an image not only of the moment itself, but of all that came before it. That which has already passed.
Buried somewhere among the overlaid paint, Kat recognized the shadow of the girl she used to be. In her eyes maybe and the bones of her face. In the delicate flush of her cheeks and gentle softening of her aspect. It was the kind of insight that came from pure understanding, independent of context. Daniel’s unwavering gaze, undeterred by time or even by absence. And she understood at last that this was what love looked like.
Just as she turned back to Daniel, she heard the rusty rasp of the door swinging open. She hadn’t heard a key in the lock, but she hadn’t seen Daniel close it either. Martin. He stood in the doorway, looking as disheveled as she could remember seeing him, the narrow point of one of his collars poking up indignantly from his shirt. His expression of mild surprise when he saw her quickly escalated into shock as his eyes fell first on the lacerated portrait, then on Daniel’s bloodied shirt and arm.
“What the devil?” He stepped inside and shut the door abruptly behind him, looking from Daniel to Kat and then to the damaged portrait that lay beside them.
“It was an accident,” Kat said. “I … I didn’t see him. I didn’t know he was there.”
Martin’s eyes left the wounded canvas and moved to where Daniel was, still sitting beside the portrait, one hand cradling the other close to his chest. The radiator had run out of breath and was now emitting a frantic metallic clanking.
Kat stood up and took several tentative steps toward Martin. “It was an accident,” she repeated.
Martin’s eyes traveled around the room, cataloguing the damage. “You should go.” His eyes were dull and dark in his face. He didn’t look at her, but moved farther into the studio, stepping over the upturned easel, squinting down at Daniel against the wall.
He was still talking. “Go now. I’ll take care of this.” She started to protest, but he interrupted. “He needs a doctor. Maybe an ambulance. I know you want to be here, but how would it look?” His words were conciliatory, but his voice was impatient and agitated.
Daniel was trying to hold his hand to his chest, but it kept falling toward his side, leaving rust-colored arcs on his shirt. It was not an unfamiliar sight. She could almost believe it was cast-off paint. The knot must have loosened. “You need to tighten it. He’s bleeding.” Kat took a step toward Daniel, but her foot slipped in a puddle of something on the floor. She caught herself on the edge of a table and regained her footing.
“Katherine!” Martin’s voice was harsh and close. She looked up to see he was beside her, between her and Daniel. There was rage in his eyes now. She moved to go around him. With a quickness that surprised her, his hand shot out and he grabbed her by the wrist, holding her firmly. Her heart was beating very quickly and she could feel her pulse compressed under his fingers. She could smell his breath, musty and unfamiliar, and pulled back from him, but he grabbed her other arm, shaking her roughly. She opened her mouth, but no words came. All the breath had gone out of her.
“Take your hands off her!” Daniel’s voice like thunder from behind them.
Martin froze, his hands unyielding, digging into her skin. Daniel was moving toward them. He stopped just before he reached them, his gaze fixed on Martin. After a moment, she saw something pass between them. Martin lifted his hands from her, nodded briefly, and stepped back. She started toward Daniel, but he held out a hand to stop her.
Around them everything was still. Even the shadows on the wall behind him were fixed in place. The only movement was Daniel’s gaze following Martin as he retreated behind her. He waited a beat before shifting his eyes back to her. There was something in his expression. Something that got her attention.
“It was never any less real, you know. It was never any less real because only we could see it.”
“I know.”
She met his eyes and for a brief moment there was nothing but the slender thread of their gazes. There was a lightness in his face, a peace that she had not seen there before. He smiled at her, a small one, but real.
“Go.” He said it softly, to her alone.
Behind her Martin opened the door. She kept her distance, stepping sideways around him into the hallway. Both men watched her leave, but her eyes remained on Daniel, arms now braced against a table. His face was ashen.
Just before the door swung closed she caught sight of the damaged painting where it had fallen. It wasn’t a large cut. Maybe six inches. But it was irrevocable. Terminal. The door closed in front of her.
She stood in the deserted hallway, waiting for her breathing to return to normal. As she turned to walk toward the lift, she thought she heard the chink of the dead bolt being slid into place.
She thought she might see the ambulance before she left, or hear it at least, but she didn’t. She drove aimlessly, following the flow of traffic through gray and indifferent midmorning streets and roundabouts. Daniel would be fine. Martin would see to that. She repeated it to herself. Gradually, her hands stopped shaking. The lingering odor of paint surrounded her. It was on her clothes. Small spots and streaks on the knees of her pants. Her wrists ached. When she looked down at them she saw there were red stains on the edge of her sleeve as well. These were not paint.
It was afternoon when she arrived home. She had a vague sense that she had forgotten something. The tall crystal vase stood empty on the side table. She hadn’t bought her lilies this week. Perhaps that was it. Jonathan must have noticed it, too. The doorbell rang later with a large bouquet of the blooms from him. Kat laid the flowers on the counter and untied the coarse brown cord wrapped tightly around their damp stems. As she separated them, their insistent perfume was already filling the air, reaching for the edges of the large room. She could hear the housekeeper moving about across the hall. The radio was on to the BBC and she listened to the news while filling the vase with water. Using a small pointed scissors, she cut the ends off each of the thick stems before arranging them one by one inside the tall, angular container.
She heard his name first. Suspended, without before or after. And immediately she was alert—listening to what followed it while desperately trying to claw back the words that had preceded it. For the first few moments, these fragments, conveyed in the crisp home-counties accent of the BBC newsreader, were vague enough for her to doubt.
“… the cause of a fire that broke out at his Shoreditch studio, destroying several adjacent studios, is under investigation.”
“… speculation that a number of recently painted canvases that had been cut out of their frames and stuffed into a closed rubbish bin…”
“… oxidized…”
“… combusted…”
“… killing the artist.”
He exited her life in the room where he had stood only days before, silhouetted against the garden lights. And like then, there was nothing for her to hold on to. She grasped at the vase and felt it fall heavily onto its side. The voice of the newsreader continued unabated, but she no longer heard him.
She looked down at the empty vase that lay before her, still whole. A thin thread of water flowing from it connected the table to the bare floor. She thought that it must be a mistake. Then she remembered the stale air. The fans had been switched off. The studio was filled with combustibles. Something had spilled. She had slipped on it. She thought about the paint-covered rags. All it would have taken was a single spark. As she watched, the line of water broke, falling into the small puddle at her feet, and she felt him leave her, taking with him everything that he had seen. As the room swam around her, her eyes fell on a stack of new school jumpers awaiting name tapes. What time was it? She had forgotten to collect Will at school.
Kat made her way through Kensington automatically, the earth no longer beneath her feet. A fine mist of rain was falling around her, obscuring the red brick buildings, blurring their hard edges so that they dissolved into pavement, melting into their own reflections on the slick streets. Cars sluiced by as she crossed the High Street, throwing off sprays of white noise. He was already gone. He had been gone for hours and she had been unaware of it.
As she walked on, the mist grew thicker, rising around her, as if all the rain that had ever fallen on the city, running off its rooftops, spilling into its streets and seeping into the ground, was issuing forth from it. Lifting itself out of the crevices between the stones, out from the dirt, out from the roots themselves, returning to the air in a great exhalation. The particles enveloped her, and she breathed them in. The mist tasted of him. Of sweet breath.
It seemed altogether such a soft thing, but the droplets burst like sparks in her eyes, blurring her vision and making her blink. Ahead of her streetlights flickered on. The mist trapping their light, compressing it into yellow halos hung just out of reach.
The mournful peal of the bells of Saint Mary Abbots reverberated around her. In that instant she was struck by the thought that the bells themselves no longer existed. That the act of ringing had caused them to break apart and all that remained was the sound itself. It was as if the city around her had been vaporized. Everything had come apart and the molecules were reeling around her, rearranging themselves into another world. A world without him.
By the time she arrived at the school there were no children or parents outside. She climbed the steep steps and stood for a moment, catching her breath before ringing the bell. Her hands were shaking.
The door buzzed open. Kat made her way down the narrow corridor to the headmistress’s office, assaulted by sharp points of brightly colored paper bunting hung from the low ceiling. Empty of children, the school was eerily quiet. The headmistress, a soft, drowsy-eyed woman with silver hair, stood up behind her desk when Kat entered.
“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Garland. I…” Recognizing that an explanation was what was called for, Kat started speaking automatically before realizing that she couldn’t provide one. Instead she extended the apology, her words coming from some emergency reserve of politeness. “I do hope I haven’t put you out too much.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Bowen.” The room was dimly lit and the large window behind the desk heavily draped. Kat was vaguely aware of brightly colored children’s drawings on the walls. As Kat approached her, Miss Garland’s face registered concern. “Is everything quite all right?”
The answer she would have given did not come. Instead Kat nodded, reaching up to smooth her hair, damp and curling from the drizzle. A shroud of mist had settled on her skin.
“Won’t you sit a minute? I’ve just sent William off to the library to return some books.”
Kat sat in the proffered armchair as Miss Garland came out from behind her desk and settled herself in the large wingback chair opposite, ankles crossed demurely before her. She smiled briefly, reassuringly, faint flecks of pink lipstick visible on her front teeth. The chairs seemed unusually close to each other. Downy seedlings in plastic pots were arranged on a tray under a bright lamp on the table beside them. Tender, half-formed things bowing toward a false sun.
Miss Garland inclined her head forward, eyes gray and grave beneath heavy lids. “I had wanted to extend my condolences, Mrs. Bowen. We were all so very saddened to hear of your loss. Such a dreadful blow. To lose the person who knows you best. Who truly sees you for all that you are.” She shook her head sadly.
Kat sat speechless, her mouth open. How could she possibly know?
“Makes no difference what age one is. There can be no substitute for that kind of love.” She placed her small hand on Kat’s knee, patting it lightly. A conciliatory gesture of the type one might extend to a small child. “But of course, it’s never really lost. It’s the same love that we pass on to our own children.”
Her mother. Of course. Kat watched the drawings on the wall behind her soften and blur. When a neatly folded handkerchief appeared before her, she took it and pressed it into the corners of her eyes.
Miss Garland didn’t speak nor did she seem to expect her to do so and for that Kat was grateful. They sat in silence. A lingering odor of pine from recently removed Christmas decorations hung in the air. After a few minutes, Kat heard footsteps in the hall outside and raised her head. Miss Garland shifted in her seat and looked up.
“That’ll be William.” Miss Garland’s voice was a crisp whisper. “You’ll want to collect yourself now.”
Kat patted at her face with the handkerchief and cleared her throat. As Miss Garland stood, a small needlepoint cushion dropped forward from where it had been trapped behind her, gasping and swelling on the seat of the chair.
And then there was Will, blinking in the doorway, all his molecules miraculously in place, save for one long sock that had slipped down, exposing a pale pink knee.
* * *
THAT NIGHT SHE lay awake, listening to Jonathan’s steady breathing beside her. She imagined Daniel alone in his studio. After the doctor or the paramedics had left. After Martin had left. Saw the shape that his body made on the bed. She wondered if he could still smell her on the pillows.
For a moment she thought that she might have stayed with him. And for a moment, she is there. They lie skin-to-skin under the soft rectangles of sky so far out of reach above them. She can hear his heart beat and feel his breath in her hair. Would the fans have been on if she had been there? Would she have smelled smoke or fumes? For a moment she wondered, but she knew that ashes were not her fate.
She wondered if any of it had been real. If he had really returned. Or if he had been a ghost. Someone she had conjured. Someone only she could see. But, it was in the papers the following day.
The artist is the sole casualty of the fire, which destroyed his studio and several others, causing extensive damage to the rest of the building. Also lost were dozens of recently completed works and works in progress, notably a triptych intended for the Tate Restaurant. Initial investigation indicates the cause of the fire to have been accidental.
Sir Richard Hawthorne, who had recently selected Blake for the Tate commission, has made the following statement. “Daniel Blake’s death is a tragedy. One mourns not only the loss of the man, but of all that he had yet to create. It is the death of possibility.”
Blake’s longtime agent, Martin Whittaker, issued the following statement. “In the end, Daniel has become like his most famous subject—ageless. And while it is tragic that we have been robbed of seeing what more he would have given us, it is equally true that we will be spared knowing what time and age might have taken from him. He exists forever at the height of his artistic abilities and fame.”
This, then, was the genesis of the myth. This was where it began. She could hear Martin testing out the words, refining them, weighing them against his aims.
In the days that followed, Kat mourned under Jonathan’s watchful eye. She did so silently, ritualistically, behind an impassive face, surrounded by the things he left behind. Sky through a window. The smell of wet pavement. Dust swimming in the light. She walked Will to and from school, one hand in his, her other hand empty. She attended the start-of-term coffee morning for his class and made small talk with the other mothers, smiling over accounts of Christmas holidays and making the expected promises of play dates and evenings out. She confirmed the arrangements for an upcoming trip to Klosters with friends. In the evenings, she sewed name tapes into Will’s new school jumpers, feeling the prick of the needle and watching a bead of blood rise on her fingertip while outside the darkness licked at the glass.
His was an absence she had lived with for twenty years. The shape of it, the size of it hadn’t changed. But its permanence and its proximity had altered it. It was calcified now. And it was present. She felt the nearness of it. London was irrevocably without him in a way that it had never been before. His absence mingled with her daily life, sullying it, insinuating itself among the moments, expanding into the empty spaces and scraping its rough edges against the smooth surfaces of her days. It crouched, snarling, in corners and sprang from among the colors in the pages of Will’s storybooks. Hid behind closed doors and lurked in the shadows in the garden. Overtook her on the stairs and stared back at her from every window.
She pored over their time together. Trying to fix the fragments in her mind. She was the sole witness. Only she could see it now. Of course, there was another absence. No one saw her the way that he had. Without him, she disappeared. She began deliberately walking by the Greek embassy in the mornings when she knew the guard would be there, just to see him avoid her gaze and look away from her. To reassure herself that it had been real. That it had happened. That she had not dreamed it.