— 19 — 
THE SUN
Nell leaned over the sofa where Theresa was sitting beside Van. She pointed at her face, at her nose. “See?” she said. “It’s kinked way off to the left. Fortunately, the older I get, the less noticeable it becomes among all the sagging bits.”
“What a royal arsehole,” Van said.
“That is your great-uncle you’re talking about,” she replied mildly.
“Well, he is an arsehole. Or was.” Van got up and seized a cube of peat from the basket by the hearth. He flung it into the fire with enough force to send it exploding into flames. Then, looking sheepish, he took up a broom and swept the sparks from the tiles.
“You take after him, you know,” Nell said.
Van harrumphed. “I’ve seen your pictures. I don’t look anything like him.”
“I mean your magnetism. You draw people in, just like Lark did. The difference is that you are oblivious to your charms.”
“Thanks loads.”
“It’s a compliment. Trust me.”
“Would you like more tea?” Van said.
His grandmother smiled at his attempt at redirection. “Is there whiskey left?” she said. “I’d take a whiskey before bed, after that gruesome tale.”
“There is whiskey, unless you killed the bottle last week in my absence.”
Theresa watched the two of them: the easy choreography, the gentle ribbing. She was thinking of her mother, picturing her mother’s tailored suits and carefully trimmed hair. Was there any chance that Theresa would be pouring her a bedtime whiskey when her mother was eighty-five years old? Katherine Bateman wasn’t even sixty but seemed older than Nell, or not older but fainter, more rigid and brittle. Anxious. How was it that Nell had endured such abuse, had suffered so much loss, yet had gone on to become so robust and full of life? Or maybe she had always been full of life, all along. Yes, her early work attested to it: a singularly bright flame had fueled Nell right from the start and had never failed to sustain her and her art, despite the lack of public recognition. Despite Lark.
“You’d like to hear about the painting,” Nell suggested. “The one that broke the camel’s back, as it were.”
“The painting that never was,” Theresa said, putting on a dramatic voice to mock her own interest in such things. “Or only briefly was.”
Nell gave a sly smile. “I redid it, actually.” She took a small box from the shelf beside the mantel and handed it to Van. “Could you find the Tower, please?”
While he shuffled through the tarot cards, Theresa went to the kitchen and poured three glasses of whiskey from the bottle in the pantry. After eight days at Raintree she’d come to know her way around the house, though at first its many side hallways and duplicate staircases had confounded her. The kitchen was in the very back, for one thing, surrounded by a maze of narrow corridors and storage cellars. Because of the servants, Van had explained to her: The house had been constructed in the eighteenth century in such a way that no Evans would ever be forced to cross paths with a servant going from one room to another. A labyrinth designed to protect the rich from the monstrosity of the lower classes, Van said. “Of their exploitation of the lower classes, you mean,” Nell corrected him. “The rich weren’t bothered by the poor so long as they could maintain the fiction of their own benevolence.”
In one week Theresa had come to feel more at home here than she ever had in Polina’s Toronto apartment. To her relief and delight she had discovered an ordinariness in Raintree’s extraordinary household. There was art, yes—a larger and more important single-artist collection than Theresa had ever encountered all in one place—but there was also meal planning, TV watching, walking the grounds, oversleeping, reading by the fire, searching for lost car keys, fixing the plumbing. And socialist debate. Grandmother and grandson would frequently launch midway into some minor disagreement without any pretext or provocation that Theresa could discern, as if the subject were something they’d been discussing for hours. Years, more like: She was beginning to understand that the closeness between the two had grown from their many years together in relative isolation. After coming to live with Nell as a preteen, Van had visited his mother and stepfather in Alaska only four weeks per year, during his school vacation. He said he had always felt like a tourist in their house.
“The Tower was the first card I remade, once it was all over in the Shown,” Nell said, when Theresa returned to the library with the drinks. “In those early days I was very worried about forgetting. I was afraid the details would fade, so I repainted it as faithfully as I could, as soon as I could muster the energy.”
Van passed the card to Theresa.
“You painted the tarot here at Raintree, correct?” she asked.
“I painted or repainted all of the cards here, yes. None of my original designs survived the fire.”
Theresa suppressed the urge to ask Nell for details about the fire in the Shown. She was already learning that it was best to let the stories unfurl on their own. Van had modeled this listening technique for her during the first days of her stay. Theresa had noticed how, whenever his grandmother began to speak about her past, Van would tend to stop whatever he was doing, draw nearer and seat himself somewhere close to her—sometimes even on the floor near her feet, sitting cross-legged like a child. His body would become very still and his gaze would soften and fix on some point across the garden, if they were outdoors, or into the flickering flames if it was a damp evening like this one and they were gathered in the library. He would tilt his head slightly to one side and nod or frown at what his gran was relating. Sometimes he reacted, as when Nell showed them her broken nose, but never, ever did he interrupt her.
“You know, I learned something important from hearing Simon talk about Oceanie,” Nell said now. She took a thoughtful sip of her whiskey. “How can I describe it? That poor boy was so bitter toward himself. ‘I never avenged her,’ he would say. ‘All these years I’ve lived in Oceanie’s skin. I’ve tried to hold her within me, to hound him with her, to haunt him’—he meant Corvo, of course. Remember that, in Simon’s eyes at least, Corvo wasn’t only a thief, a fraud and an abuser, but a murderer to boot. ‘But in the end I’ve done nothing,’ he’d say, ‘not for Oceanie nor for any of the other poor souls trapped by Corvo.’ ”
All week long Nell had been telling them about Simon Shawcross, her lover in the Shown. Even when one of her anecdotes began somewhere else—such as when she told them about the Surrealism in Britain exhibition, where she had felt invisible in her white robes, indistinguishable from other residents of the Shown, while her brother was being photographed and interviewed with Oceanie Ringold on his arm; or when she described the Shown’s Lunar Rite, wherein they were made to link arms and circle the lawns in complicated patterns in order to “draw down the moon”—somehow the tale would always come back around to Simon Shawcross.
“I tried to tell Simon I thought the ‘poor souls’ in the Shown had at least chosen their places with Corvo, in a way that poor Oceanie had not. I reminded him of what he’d told me about Corvo’s stranglehold on Pilgrim: that he controlled Pilgrim’s money, that he’d been ready to let Pilgrim take the blame for Oceanie’s death, that he kept threatening to lock him in an asylum if he didn’t keep producing the Eyeopener. In addition to protecting Pilgrim, I argued, Simon as Oceanie had worked hard to keep the Shown’s excesses in check and the perceptants safe and fed. But Simon would not be consoled.”
Nell pointed with her glass at Theresa. “I looked up that word you used the first time we met. ‘Transgender.’ I’ve been reading about it, and I’ve been reflecting on how for me it never truly mattered whether Simon was a man or a woman. Or neither, or both.” She shrugged. “I fell in love with him when he was still Oceanie to me, after all.
“But certainly it mattered to others. Certainly Simon was living with immense risk, immense danger. Reading about the history of violence against transgender people, I’ve recognized the extent of that danger more clearly. I’ve seen how it very likely played a role in what happened to him in the end. Simon wasn’t a transgender person by any definition I have found; to the best of my understanding, he was satisfied being a man and had no desire to change that. So why? Why would he have persisted in such a precarious position for so long? What could possibly have been the payoff?
“Looking back, I believe his guilt fed him, toxic a diet as it was. The bad feelings were their own addictive payoff. And for Corvo Ringold too—it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it, that Corvo would concede to Simon’s presence for so long. But I believe that over the years the two of them had become perversely dependent on one another, locked together in a twisted kind of partnership. Secrecy, shame, control, resentment. Those dark powers had sustained Simon for years, and he wasn’t ready to let them go, not on my account or anyone else’s.
“And so, in learning about Oceanie’s tragedy, I learned that Simon Shawcross wasn’t available to me. He loved me, but he could never be…for me.” Nell pursed her lips and shook her head, groping for the right words. “People can enjoy each other, but no one is really for anyone else. I had grown up believing—it was an assumption, never a tested hypothesis—that people were made for each other; namely, that I was for Lark and Lark was for me. Simon shattered that assumption. It sounds sad, doesn’t it? It sounds like a sad lesson for a girl of twenty-two to learn. But do you know? It was immensely freeing for me.”
Theresa studied the tarot card in her hand. The Tower depicted Oceanie Ringold not in the act of poisoning herself but leaping from the roof of the lodge. Lightning forked from the sky like bright, jagged talons that reached for Oceanie’s arching body as if to pluck her from her fate. The rope noosed around her neck had already snapped from the weight of her fall; it trailed after her amid the avalanche of roof tiles loosened by her boots. On the other side of the building, plummeting in parallel as in a grotesque ballet, was a young Simon Shawcross. By lifting the card closer and tilting it to the firelight, Theresa could just make out a third face in the picture. Corvo—the thief, the murderer—peered smugly from an upper-story window. The gravel drive below them was nothing but a crust over the abyss that opened its blue-black arms to receive Oceanie and Simon. And what was that glistening mass at the center of the earth? A tangle of serpents, of flames, of viscera, of nebulae: the writhing aborted hopes of every young person in history cut down by the murderous, selfish desires of their elders.
Nell said, “It’s so strange finally to speak all this aloud. I can see how you’re struggling to imagine the details. The story sounds like a fantasy, doesn’t it? It sounds outlandish, like something set in ancient Greece, or on another planet.”
“Actually, no,” Van told her. “It sounds like any one of your paintings. I have to say it’s filling in a lot of blanks for me, hearing what happened to you in the Shown.”
Nell arched an eyebrow. “My work is one long answer to the trauma of my youth?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “But this history you’ve been telling us, it makes your pictures seem less strange. You know, people wear masks. People fool each other, people hide in the woods, people worship each other. People drop bombs. All this stuff, when you paint it, looks like a hallucination or a bad dream. But it was real. I mean, it is real.”
Nell put down her whiskey glass. She rose, crossed to Van’s chair, placed a hand on his shoulder and bent to kiss the top of her grandson’s head. “It is real,” she agreed.
Theresa had been listening to their exchange with only half an ear. “We have got to get the tarot paintings back from Russell,” she said. “It’s not just the public curiosity about the Ringold Tarot that makes them important. This image”—she waved the Tower card—“I can tell this comes from a special painting. We have to get it back.”
“Oh, I have that painting somewhere.” Nell said it so nonchalantly that Theresa and Van gaped at her, then at each other.
“The Tower? Where, Gran?” he said. “And how?”
“The printing company closed down during the war, and then the owners emigrated to New Zealand. By the time my inquiries were finally answered, the business had been sold and my paintings had long vanished. All I had was the single set of cards they’d sent for my approval. But several of the pictures found their way back to me over the years. A shop assistant had kept two or three of them after taking them home to show his parents. He particularly liked The Tower—he thought it prophetic of the Blitz.”
“And you have it here? At Raintree?”
Nell laughed at Theresa’s badly concealed excitement. “I still haven’t turned you loose in the barn, remember? That’s where most of my work ends up sooner or later.”
And so, not many days afterward, Theresa was working in the barn with the heavy doors open to the afternoon sun. She’d swept the stone floor. In the past decades the building had been used to house cars, not livestock, so it was relatively free of animal smells and dust. She was sitting on the floor where the sun slanted in and warmed the flagstones, and she’d propped a number of Nell’s paintings against the metal buckets and milking stools she’d found stacked in the corners. The pieces currently on display around her were all paintings of Van, of different stages of his life between the age of five and the present day. Despite what Nell had said about the dangers of trying to depict one’s descendants, she’d managed to avoid any traps of sentimentality. In one picture, for example, young Van had a half-eaten apple in his hand. Caught in the act of swallowing, or choking, he looked startled and slightly hostile, the natural warping of his jaw and throat made weirder by green shadows from the leaves of the tree under which he stood. In Theresa’s opinion the portraits, taken together, offered an illuminating cross-section of Nell’s work, a story of the ongoing development of her technique and of her adaptations to various material limitations.
With Nell’s permission Theresa was making notes on their conversations and compiling them into a narrative of sorts. She was slowly populating a timeline with the events between March 1938—the Larkin siblings’ arrival in England—and Nell’s arrival at Raintree in October of that same year. Nell’s history was emerging piecemeal, backward and forward through time, but she seemed committed to recounting it and having it recorded by Theresa. Van liked to listen too, but he was often absent, helping the neighbors build a drystone wall. Other times he’d be off in the woods near Newborough or other spots, hunting for the elusive ingredients he used to prepare the Eyeopener—which turned out to be the main commodity in his commercial dealings. “It’s not illegal,” he pointed out, “since no one’s ever heard of it.” He wouldn’t divulge much about the nature of the drug except to say they would try it together soon, and then she’d See for herself. Van often invited Theresa to accompany him on his excursions, whether to the woods or to town, but she nearly always declined. She was too absorbed with Nell and her work—too mindful of her luck in having been selected, too drawn to the paintings, which beckoned her from their crates and wrappings like ghosts clamoring to be revivified—to stray far from Raintree.
Another portrait of Van among those Theresa had found in the barn figured him in a reverse Pietà tableau, cradling across his knees the sprawled body of his mother. Alison Larkin Worth was depicted as a 1940s Hollywood pinup girl whose cherry-red lips gaped wetly at the sky and whose unnaturally spherical breasts were tipped with shiny chrome caps, like bullets or bombs. It was a troubling image, and Theresa had asked Nell about it. Oedipal violence? Intergenerational trauma?
Nell had replied by recounting the time Alison and another girl were sent home from school for wearing blue eyeshadow they’d nicked from the chemist’s. Then she shrugged. “I don’t remember the impulse behind every painting,” she said. “You’ll just have to make something up.” Nell’s memories of her daughter seemed to cause her more pain than her memories of the Shown. Fresher pain, anyhow. Nell had told her that Alison displayed a lot of artistic talent as a child but always loathed the strange, secluded life her mother had chosen at Raintree. By the time she was a teenager she was desperate to escape; she was only seventeen when she ran off to America with a guitarist in a rock ’n’ roll band.
Theresa did hitch a ride with Van, one of the times he offered. She went to London to meet with Ernie Seaver, the man who’d found the tarot paintings and eventually sold them to Russell. She’d floated her plan and double-checked her facts at breakfast that morning. “Was there ever more than one Astarte in the Shown?” she asked Nell.
“It’s possible,” Nell replied, “but not while I was there.”
“Do you remember Dr. Horber mentioning her name? He said Ernie told him that his mother called herself ‘Astarte.’ ”
“I did note that, yes,” Nell said, “but I was too busy pretending I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Van confessed that during Russell’s visit he had been too confused by his grandmother’s playacting to pay much attention to the conversation. “And too jealous, watching you with Horber,” he said to Theresa, ducking his head to avoid her eye.
Van remembered a useful detail about Ernie, though, from when he’d first made contact with the man. He had discovered that Ernie ate his dinner most nights at his local pub. If Theresa wanted to talk to him, he suggested, she might have more luck stopping in on him there than at his flat. So that afternoon Van dropped her off at the Crown and Gable, where the bartender confirmed that, yes, Ernie came in every day at exactly 5:45 p.m. so that he could be home again in time for Coronation Street. Theresa ordered herself a pint and settled into a booth by the window to wait, rereading her copy of On Seeing and working over her notes. One by one, four solitary white men in their late fifties came into the pub and ordered dinner. By the time it was Ernie’s turn, the bartender was weary of shaking his head in response to Theresa’s keen looks of inquiry and simply pointed him over to her booth.
Ernie was a small man with a large nose and close-set eyes that blinked rapidly when he spoke. Sometimes the lids seemed to stick shut, quivering at the corners. After she introduced herself he didn’t want to sit with her; he’d given the press everything he cared to share, he said. The paintings weren’t his problem anymore, and quite frankly he wished he’d never laid eyes on them that day in the shop. But when Theresa mentioned the name Astarte, Ernie paused and frowned. “What do you want to know about her?” he said.
“I think the painter of the tarot cards was friendly with her.”
“Lark Ringold. Yes, I know,” he said, a bit impatiently. “They were both caught up in that cult.”
“No, I mean Lark’s sister, Nell.”
“Nell?” Ernie closed his eyes. “Who was Nell?”
“She was the real artist,” Theresa said. “Lark took the credit but Nell did all the painting. ‘Nell’ is short for Penelope.”
Without a word Ernie turned and walked away. He said something to the bartender and then disappeared down an unmarked corridor beside the bar. Was it the loo or a back exit? Theresa waited a few long minutes and began packing up her things, trying and failing to meet the bartender’s eye. She was just about to ask him where Ernie had gone when the man reappeared. He slid onto the bench opposite Theresa as if there’d been no interruption at all. “That big fellow’s grandmother,” he said.
It took Theresa a moment. “Penelope Larkin, yes. She’s Ivan’s grandmother.”
“She goes by Nell, does she?”
“Do you…?” It was hard to read his expression, what with all the eye-blinking. “Do you know Nell?”
“Of course not,” he said. “She’s still alive, then?”
“Is Nell alive? Yes, she’s very much alive, and still painting, on Anglesey.” Ernie was nodding slightly, so Theresa took a risk. “Your mother must have talked about her.”
“Lord, no,” he said. “She never talked about her time in the Shown, never. Dad wouldn’t have liked it, for one thing. But it’s all there in her diary, you see.”
Theresa nearly dropped her fork. “Astarte kept a diary?”
“That’s why I was suspicious about handing over the paintings,” Ernie said, “because I hadn’t read nothing about any Penelope in Mum’s diary. Nell, though…That would’ve been a different story, if the big fellow had said Nell.”
“Of course,” Theresa said. A sudden thought made her press her knees together under the table. “Did you sell the diary to Dr. Horber along with the paintings?”
His eyebrows shot up. “No! A diary is private business.”
The bartender arrived at their booth with a pint of stout for Ernie and two plates: meat pies, chips, pickled onions, chutney. Ernie had evidently ordered for Theresa too, and she thanked him, but he screwed his eyes shut tight and said it was only polite. They spent a few minutes digging into the food while Theresa thought carefully about how to word her next question. “If I were to ask to have a look at the diary,” she said, “just to confirm certain dates and details about Nell’s life as an artist, would you say yes?”
He chewed and swallowed, looking down at his plate.
“I’m writing a study of Nell’s work. I would only be interested in Astarte’s observations about Nell from that time, when they were both in the Shown.”
“Mum’s name was Constance.”
“Constance. Of course.”
He shook his head slowly. “Like I said, it’s private.”
Theresa sipped her beer, forcing herself to take her time, and then put down her glass. “I know your mother must have been in love with Corvo Ringold. She must have been utterly devoted to him. They all were, in the Shown. Nell has told me how he drew everyone in and manipulated their loyalty.”
“She was very young,” he said. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“No, it wasn’t her fault. And I can promise you that I won’t linger over those parts of Constance’s story, how she was fooled by Corvo and made to do things she never would have done normally.”
“He was a decent bloke, you know.”
He couldn’t mean Corvo, obviously. “Who was?”
“Our Orrie. He died just after Mum did, in eighty-nine.”
Theresa still wasn’t following. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“My half-brother. His name was Orion,” he said.
Now she had it. Ernie meant an older half-brother. Theresa thought back to the Empress, the tarot card depicting Astarte’s pregnant belly as a beehive. Nell had told Theresa about the pregnancies, how Corvo had claimed the babies as children of the Shown, but how, from the survivors’ accounts, he was believed not to have fathered any of them himself. Nell had asked Simon once about the babies’ paternity, asked him whether he thought any of the children were Corvo’s. Simon’s answer had been scathing: “If he could do it himself,” he’d said, “why would he allow men into the Shown at all?”
“That Ivan fellow knows all about it, I suppose,” Ernie continued. “His mother, she would be about the same age Orrie was.”
“Yes,” Theresa said, and thought, Of course. Nell and Simon. Nell hadn’t spelled it out for her, but she hadn’t tried to conceal it either. Her daughter Alison was a child of the Shown. And that would make Simon Van’s grandfather. Why was Theresa only putting the dates together now? She’d been staring so hard at the artist’s work that she’d overlooked a key detail in her biography. “Nell’s daughter moved to America when she was quite young,” she told Ernie.
Ernie nodded, lifted his glass in a kind of toast and drank.
“So what do you think, about the diary?”
He blinked. “I’d need to think on it.”
“Maybe read it through once more,” she suggested. “If it’s not too painful for you, that is. See if there’s anything that might be useful to me in helping Nell tell her story.”
“About the fire, you mean?”
Theresa looked at him, but Ernie was busy dragging a forkful of chips through the chutney. “Yes,” she said, “especially about the fire.”
At Raintree Theresa could hardly keep track of the passing hours and days. She was beginning to grasp how an artist like Nell Larkin could spend a lifetime here without feeling much nostalgia for the wider world. In the mornings the early light broke through Theresa’s bedroom window and jolted her awake. She’d stuff extra pillows behind her back and begin her day’s work right there in the narrow bed, with her notebook propped in her lap. When she glanced up from the page, her eye would catch on the clouds rolling over the distant treetops, the mist glowing pink on the low spots in the field, the gulls massing where the farmer had turned up the soil. It astonished her every time: the big sky, the teeming earth, and the obliviousness of both to the human activity going on within Raintree’s walls. No wonder its inhabitants had discovered the secrets of perception. No wonder Henry Evans, a.k.a. Pilgrim, had penned a philosophical treatise called On Seeing. You just had to look out the window and you couldn’t help but See.
Nell’s most recent portrait of Van featured its subject reclining nude on the sofa in the library at Raintree. Tawny-pelted, sleepy-eyed, he gazed out at Theresa with all the calm indifference of the Sphinx. The leonine effect was augmented by Van’s hair, chin-length at the time of the portrait and combed into a glimmering mane, but simultaneously diminished by the pleat of his hip beneath his belly, the whorl of his navel, the sag of his penis—the whole soft underbelly of the beast exposed to Nell’s brush. And exposed also to Theresa’s gaze. She hoped she wasn’t objectifying Van; she hoped her analysis of the piece wasn’t being bent by her deepening crush on its subject. Why, after all, had she selected this particular group of paintings for special study? Didn’t it just boil down to a desire to ogle Ivan Worth?
In the portrait, the brush adored the flesh. That was it. Cross-legged on the flagstone floor of the barn, Theresa wrote the statement in her notebook: The brush adores the flesh. She knew it was correct, because it felt like a shaft of clean light into her brain, not dissipating her pleasure in the painting but taming it a little, making it available to a gentle elucidation in words. There was a way to write about art, Theresa was discovering, that didn’t diffuse or stopper up the Feeling but rather allowed her to translate it and convey it on the page. Theresa had never before had a chance to sit with a group of artworks in the total absence of other critics’ and scholars’ comments and interpretations. In retrospect it seemed preposterous that she could have completed a PhD in art history without ever having had this experience—this freshness, this newness. At Raintree Theresa could plunge fully into the Feeling for as long as she liked, for as long as it took. She sounded out her heart and mind and then swam back up to where the words were.
The slam of a car door made her look up from the page. Theresa was on her feet even before she consciously recognized the silhouette in the doorway. She spun around, lifting two paintings from their stools and setting their faces together, lowering two others face down to the floor, shielding the fifth and sixth with her body until she found their paper wrappers. Finally she peeled off her cardigan and slung it over the last canvas to obscure most of its surface.
“I’m not giving them back,” she said. “You can forget about it; it’s not happening.” A few more days, she thought wildly. I want just a few more days. A week.
Russell Horber swiveled his head left and right, scanning the sunlit barn, taking in the dozens of unwrapped artworks propped along the walls and laid out on tables or sawhorses and planks set up by Van for the purpose. “Give what back?” he said.
“Your paintings.” Even as she said it, she knew that Russell hadn’t noticed the items were missing from his archive. But she kept confessing anyhow, almost panting between sentences, unable either to catch her breath or to stop talking: “I stole two paintings from you. From the Vortex. Nell’s early one, from Guelph. Oceanie as High Priestess. I brought them here, to her.”
“Good to know.” Still, he was barely listening. His gaze bounced around the barn.
Theresa put her hands on Russell’s shoulders and half shoved, half danced him clumsily backward out the doorway, away from Nell’s pictures, so that they both almost lost their footing on the gravel outside. “What the hell are you doing here, Russell?”
“How was your drive, Russell?” He smiled, unbothered by her hostility, and answered his own question: “Unpleasant, actually. The car’s AC doesn’t work, so I had to keep the windows open, which meant I had to stop to buy hay fever meds. No one has heard of hay fever on Anglesey. Turns out that around these parts they call it grass-nose. ‘Aye, mun, you’ve got a titch of the grass-nose.’ ”
This is a man who has been all over the world, Theresa thought. Everywhere he goes he has been welcomed. No one has ever turned him away. No one has ever denied him what he wanted. And if they did deny him, he would go ahead and take it anyway.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She was staring, probably looking as ill as she felt. “I’m surprised to see you.” She wasn’t surprised, not truly. Ever since Margot had told her Russell had called in search of her, she’d known he would remember her questions about Sonia Crane and trace her chain of reasoning back to Penelope Larkin, back to Raintree. But her work here had lulled Theresa into a kind of suspension of disbelief, into a fairyland of absorption and wonder that allowed her to pretend that Russell had lost interest. That he would let her have Nell all to herself.
“So where is the lady of the manor?” he said.
“Out on the marsh with Van at the moment.”
“Gathering magical fungi?”
“Something like that.” The barn doors sagged on their hinges too heavily for Theresa to drag them closed on her own, and anyway Russell was already striding back through them to have another look inside. She followed him, her mind churning, and stood there surrounded by her piles of notes while he strolled around with the leisurely authority of a gallery patron.
“And what are you making of all this?” he said.
In the absence of any better strategy she retrieved her notebook from the floor, squinted to decipher her own handwriting and read aloud from the top of the page:
…moving away from Surrealism proper, or at least from any of the familiar ways of aiming the Surrealist lens. Here the artist’s attention is not on the cruel metamorphoses of the body so much as on the direction in which the transformation is headed, a premonition or a prefiguring of a world in which bodily integrity, and at the outer limit even recognizability, is no longer a prerequisite for being called human.
“It’s rough, obviously,” she said.
“It’s good,” he said. “No idea what the hell you’re talking about. But it sure makes me want to see the painting in question.”
“Well, that’s the idea.” How excruciating that it should still matter to Theresa, even in a temporary, muscle-memory kind of way, what Dr. Russell Horber thought of her prose! Even worse, though, was the fact that the others were due back any minute. Under no circumstances was Theresa going to let them find her supervisor gawping at Nell’s work. Ex-supervisor, she reminded herself. This man had no authority over her anymore. “Have you ever tasted violet cordial?” she asked him.
As Russell unloaded his suitcase from the car, Theresa saw a battery of swallows swoop from the house and skim off across the field. They nested under the eaves despite all attempts to deter them. Gwennol in Welsh, Van had taught her. He said they augured shifting fortunes.
She led her unwelcome guest down to the kitchen, where she mixed the cordial with gin and lemon. Her anxiety about Nell and Van’s return was so acute that her stomach cramped at the first sip of her drink. They’d think she’d invited him. They’d think she had let slip something at least—that she’d emailed to ask Russell a research question or to apologize for taking the pieces from his archive. They’d think she was weak, stupid, untrustworthy. Unworthy.
For the next ten minutes she kept up a manic prattle about Anglesey’s weather, the endangered population of red squirrels in Newborough Forest, Rose’s recipe for lavender sponge pudding, the local methods for constructing drystone walls, and the antics of a vole that had somehow wedged itself into the pipe under the sink and squeaked them all awake one morning. She nearly collapsed when she heard grandmother and grandson coming in upstairs, taking off their boots, calling hello.
“We’re in the kitchen!” she bellowed preemptively.
“Whose car is—?” Van froze in the doorway at the sight of Russell.
Nell, however, didn’t miss a beat: “Dr. Horber, what a surprise. Your timing is perfect, as ever.” She stepped forward and took his hands in hers. “You have come to take the Eyeopener with us.”
Over her head, Russell’s eyes went wide. “No, I haven’t,” he said.
“Oh yes, you have. It’s Ripesummer Eve,” Nell declared. “It’s a tradition.”