Keeping the World Away

THE JOURNEY WAS enough to put off all but the most determined, which is what she had intended. Ailsa didn’t want to be checked up on, by those few people who would worry about her, nor did she wish to be found and lectured on how selfish she was being or how much better she would feel if she accepted invitations to be looked after. What she wanted was to see if she could live by herself, entirely self-sufficient. The very possibility of managing without other people excited her, but she could not expect this to be understood. To those who knew her she was a grieving widow, devastated by the death of her husband: she must need support and comfort till she could begin to ‘get over’ the tragedy. The truth – that Paul’s death had not been a tragedy for her – was impossible to confess.

She had dressed with care for the funeral, dreading that those gathered together would detect her relief and deduce that she was not, after all, distraught. Of course, in view of the nature of Paul’s death, a certain amount of relief was permissible. The cliché ‘all for the best’ had been much used and, by the more tactful, the opinion that Paul would have wanted his suffering brought to an end as quickly as possible both for his own and her sake. They were wrong, but they didn’t need to know that. Paul had wanted every last minute of life, whatever his suffering (and he said the pain was not so very great). He had known that she wanted to be free, and that she had not forgiven him for his betrayal all those years ago. It had soured their marriage even though it had not broken it, and living with the pretence of happiness had been a terrible strain. Divorce, however, had been out of the question. It had not even been suggested, by either of them.

So she had garbed herself in black, and had worn a hat with a veil, but she had not overdone the weeping. Her head had remained bowed during the Mass, and her hands clasped, penitent fashion, in front of her. Her sons, either side of her, had adopted a similar posture, and one of them, Cameron of course, had squeezed out a few tears, quickly wiped away. She had been quite glad of those tears, they had made the family group authentic somehow, and had helped her remain controlled even when face to face with Lucasta Jenkinson, who, she was sure, had not intended a confrontation in the church – their encounter was accidental, a matter of arriving at the door at the same time – and when it happened the woman had behaved well, inclining her head respectfully and then quickly departing. She had looked old and tired, but Ailsa had taken little pleasure in this. It was all a long time ago, Paul’s infatuation, but at the time Lucasta Jenkinson’s appearance had puzzled her (though she had only ever had a glimpse of her, when she delivered the portrait). It had made her distress worse that Lucasta was not the sort of woman Paul could normally be expected to be tempted by – not beautiful in any accepted sense; whereas Ailsa, not given to false modesty, knew that she herself was thought to be.

Once she was told of the affair, she had burned the portrait. The humiliation of realising that she herself had brought Paul and this woman together was too painful to bear. She was trembling when she carried the portrait into the garden, right to the far corner beside the brick wall, and poured petrol over it before retreating and hurling a lighted taper at it. The flash that followed, and the blaze of the fire, were immensely satisfying. She watched Paul’s face disappear and with it Lucasta Jenkinson’s power over him, or so she hoped. The portrait had hung in the house for six months before she had discovered what had been going on and she had felt shamed by her ignorance. The affair went on for another six months after she knew of it, and had burned the painting, but she did not suffer as much – once acknowledged, terms were agreed upon (odd though these were) and she managed to keep her dignity. She hadn’t wanted to know when Lucasta Jenkinson left London to return to Cornwall and it was all over, but Paul had made it his business to inform her. His expression gave nothing away. He was matter-of-fact, cold, dismissive of his now absent mistress. Ailsa was not fooled. Rejection was not something her husband could tolerate easily, and she had seen all the small signs of his fury and then distress and finally his depression. She had even felt sorry for him, though not sorry enough to show any compassion. It was shocking to discover how all the love she had for Paul, over so many years, seemed to have disappeared. She could not understand where it had all gone, and was frightened by the bitterness that had so suddenly taken its place. Their marriage had never flourished again though outwardly remaining intact. If, after Lucasta Jenkinson rejected him, Paul had other affairs, she no longer cared. The ‘terms’ for continuing as they were remained the same.

And then his illness began. He was fifty-two by then, working harder still now that he was running the company. There were medical investigations of one sort and another – though it had taken him a fatally long time to go to a doctor at all – and then he had several operations and drug treatments. He told her the prognosis before the second operation but she had guessed even after the first. ‘Four, five years, if I’m lucky,’ he said. In the event, he had seven, though the last eighteen months were of a desperately poor quality. All that time, he remained at home. She nursed him herself, with plenty of help, it was true, but nevertheless she was his prime carer and he did not have to end his days either in a hospice or a hospital. His gratitude was profound and he expressed it often, but her devotion bewildered him. She saw that he cherished the hope that she might still love him, in spite of the Lucasta Jenkinson affair, and she let him think so. It seemed too cruel to tell him that it was pity that motivated her now. Keeping him at home, keeping herself in front of him, made her feel good. She knew this was a dreadful admission but then it was not one which she had to make to anyone but herself.

She had wondered, at one point, whether he would ask her to contact Lucasta Jenkinson and tell her he was dying, and she rehearsed in her head what she would do and say; but he never did, and she was thankful. Once, and once only, during the last six months, they came close to discussing what had happened in a way they never could have done before. He was heavily drugged with morphine and scarcely aware of what he was saying, but he suddenly frowned and motioned her to come near him. ‘Do you remember the painting?’ he said. She naturally thought he meant the portrait. ‘You know I burned it,’ she said. ‘No, no, the little painting,’ he said. She had no idea what he was talking about. ‘The little painting,’ he repeated, ‘the little picture.’ She kept silent, letting him ramble. ‘Looked at it often,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t know what she meant by giving it to me.’ Then he sighed. ‘The heartache in it maybe.’ There were tears then in his eyes. ‘So difficult,’ he whispered, ‘love, so difficult, isn’t it, all the trying, striving, hoping. Empty. Like the room.’ Then he slept, and she thought he might be dead, so still did he lie, so imperceptible was his breathing, but she felt his pulse and, though it was faint, he was alive.

Next morning, after a good night, he was temporarily drug-free, and she asked him what he had meant about the ‘little picture’. He shook his head, said he must have been rambling. But after he died, she soon discovered the picture. It was in a drawer, in his bedside cabinet, very carefully wrapped up in a piece of cloth. She stared at it, turned it over, and immediately connected it with Lucasta Jenkinson though without any evidence. Lucasta must have painted it and given it to him. Why else would he have hidden it? Rage that he’d thought about it while he was dying and had dared to tell her so made her want to burn it too, but the anger faded quickly and, left holding the painting, she began to study it, looking for what Paul had seen there. His comment made no sense to her. What had the corner of an empty room to do with love? Paul never talked about love. He had never said, in so many words, that he loved her, not even at the beginning. He had said, ‘You are lovely,’ he had said, ‘I adore your eyes,’ he had said, ‘Your skin, it is so beautiful, it drives me mad to touch it.’ Extravagant compliments, which had pleased her at the time. She had believed that they meant that he loved her. But he had never directly said so. Whether he had done so to Lucasta Jenkinson or any other woman she had no means of knowing; but she doubted it. It was not in his character to declare himself so completely. And yet, dying, he had spoken of love, of the difficulty of loving, the striving it involved, and the emptiness at its heart.

She showed the painting to no one. Partly, she was afraid someone would recognise it and tell her that Lucasta Jenkinson was indeed the artist. Though it did not seem likely to her that Paul’s mistress had painted this: it was not like what she knew of her work – surely she was a portrait painter? – and she preferred to think it was the work of some other woman (though why a woman, not a man?). At any rate, she wanted no other eye to behold it and tell her more than she wished to know, and so she hid it and when the time came to leave, on impulse she took it with her. It was small, it was light, it fitted easily into the flap of a case.

The sea was rough when they crossed, but she found it exhilarating. The ferryboat chugged very slowly through the waves, the noise of its engine tremendous, drowning the great slapping of the sea itself. Ailsa remained on deck, with the spray hurtling over her, until the pier vanished, and then went inside. The boatman did not speak to her – she would have been unable to make out a word anyway – but stared ahead, holding the wheel tight. There were no other passengers. Lots of cargo, but no other people. After half an hour, Ailsa felt the boat slow down, the harsh throb of its engine changing to a steadier rhythm. They were coming into the east of the island, where the harbour lay, sheltered from the fierce winds. The boatman pointed through the glass partition as land came into view, and she nodded and went back on deck for the last few minutes.

The view was almost obliterated by the rain and the thick, black banks of cloud lying sullenly over the whole island. She could barely see the hills which she knew were there, and not a building was visible except for the outline of the old fishing station, where the herring had once been cured. There was a truck parked near the jetty, and as the boat’s engine cut out, leaving only the noise of the wind, a man got out and walked to meet them. He and the boatman exchanged words, both of them turning to stare in Ailsa’s direction as she struggled to put her rucksack on and pick up her bags. Neither of them said a word to her as she stepped unsteadily onto the jetty, but the man held out his hand to take her luggage and she gave it to him, afraid that she would slip on the wet surface if she tried to carry too much. ‘MacPhail,’ the man said, and put her things into his truck. ‘Tha droch shìde ann,’ she said, to astonish him, but he appeared not to understand her Gaelic, or, if he did, to think it was a statement of the obvious: of course the weather was bad, it needed no reply.

The weather continued bad, raining ceaselessly, all the first month. It was June, but the rain fell as though it were the middle of winter, great sheets pelting from a leaden sky. Twice a day she went out, twice a day she was soaked in spite of her supposedly waterproof clothing. In the mornings, she walked east, to the furthest extremity of the island in that direction, in the afternoons to the west. There was little to see. Visibility remained so poor that the hills were still hidden and it was only when she reached the sea that there was any change in colour. The sea, for all the dim light, looked silver, a dull metallic sheen, and the white horses crashing on the shingle beach gave the waves a certain grandeur. She liked to stand there, staring at nothing; only the noise stopped the scene from being eerie. Each time she turned and left the sea, the silence closed once more round her and she was aware of her footsteps slicing through the thick wet grass. Then, she did shiver, though not with fright. This is what it meant to be alone, cut off, forced in on oneself. It was not what she had imagined.

The croft offered few comforts. It had been modernised in a minimal way – it had running water, sewage went into a septic tank, and there was a small oil tank in the garden which provided fuel for heating, luxurious by island standards. But the floors were stone and uncarpeted, and the furniture sparse and uncomfortable. There was a bed (single) in the one bedroom; and in the downstairs room, which was both kitchen and living room, a cheap Formica table, with two stools under it. Two battered armchairs stood in front of the fire, and there was no other furniture. No refrigerator, none being thought necessary since there was a larder. There was no colour in the place at all. The walls were stone and remained unpainted – they were not even rendered or plastered. The chairs were leather, the dark brown worn black with age. The table’s surface was slate grey. Hardly any light came in through the small window, which had heavy wooden shutters to close over it, but no curtains. The ‘garden’ had neither flowers nor shrubs, and the lawn was more heather than turf. A fence ran round the half-acre, broken in places, and where a gate had once been there was a gap.

‘Do you ken where you’re going?’ MacPhail had said to her, when finally he had spoken that first day. She’d nodded. Of course she did. She had come here as a child, with her family, she knew both croft and island very well. But she no longer knew the people. Most of the islanders she had got to know, in holiday times, forty years ago, had died or left for the mainland. Once, there had been more than a hundred people living here, but now there were only a dozen. MacPhail was the son of a fisherman who used to take her father out with him, she knew that, but he did not recognise her or her name, though she used her maiden name and had expected him to know it. But it suited her to be thought a stranger and so, when asked, she said only that she knew what the croft was going to be like. MacPhail seemed to doubt this. She saw him watching her closely when they reached it, looking, she was sure, for signs of dismay. She betrayed none. He unloaded her stuff and was gone, to spread the news, she imagined, of the madwoman taking up residence.

Nobody bothered her. Nobody called to see if she needed anything or to invite her to their house. The few people on the island kept themselves to themselves and expected others to do the same. There was no longer a shop or a school, and the tiny chapel had long been abandoned – no service had been held there for a decade. There had never been a hospital, and now there was no doctor either. Anyone who was ill had to take the ferry to the mainland. There was one farm, on the other side of the island from the croft, but she remembered that even years ago it was hardly worthy of the name. The farmer was old and could hardly look after his hens and goats and the plot where he grew vegetables. His wife was dead, his children long since left, and he was stubbornly resisting all attempts to make him join them. No tourists came, there was nothing to see, no historic connections. If any did venture here, they left quickly. Even on a sunny day, it was not a picturesque island, but a barren, windswept outpost with a range of hills as its backbone and no buildings of architectural interest. Indeed, everything man-made was ugly.

She had a routine worked out from the beginning and stuck to it in spite of the atrocious weather. Her mood was not one of melancholy but of hope, though hope of what she couldn’t have said. She had energy, and needed to use it, so her walks were long and made at a great pace in spite of the weight of her heavy wellingtons. She went out straight after her breakfast of porridge and long-life milk, and when she returned applied herself to learning not just Gaelic but Italian. She’d brought tapes with her, and books. She was especially determined to master Gaelic, the language of her forefathers, even if hardly anyone spoke it now and she would never be able to practise. Speaking phrases aloud in the croft, she liked the sound; and out on her walks, when she practised talking aloud to herself, the words felt part of the wind. She baked late morning, bread, made with dried yeast, and sometimes cakes like those her mother made, though these used up ingredients too quickly and she did not want to go to the mainland yet to renew her supplies. She made soup, broth, for the evening, enjoying all the chopping and cutting of onions and potatoes and carrots. Only after her second walk did she feel there was a hiatus in her day – she did not quite, at half past four, want to come inside and stay there, but there was no alternative, so she listened to the radio, though the reception was poor, and made the best of those hours. If the rain would only stop, things would be different, but she was not entirely dismayed by its continuation. She felt she was preparing for something and that the weather was forcing her to do so. She couldn’t pretend in these circumstances. She had to face things.

Every day, going in and out of the croft, she looked at the little painting she’d brought with her, and wondered if she was getting any nearer to understanding it. It looked incongruous, stuck there on the stone wall, hanging perilously from a nail she’d driven into a crack. Some days, she could hardly see it at all.

On 2 July, the rain stopped. Waking early, Ailsa could not at first account for the light – the room was full of it, every dark corner illuminated. Sitting up, she looked towards the small window, where she had left the shutters open, and saw that it was now a square of gold. Getting up, crossing the room and leaning on the deep sill, she peered out, and there was the sun, already risen from behind the hills, the sky all around it a cloudless blue. Colours she had never known existed emerged on the hillsides, slashes of bright green, streaks of white, great expanses of rich brown. It was as if she had been transported to another country. On her walk, she found tiny white flowers in the sodden grass, and when she reached an inland loch, small and dark like a tarn, there were arctic terns on the water and ravens flying above it. The wood surrounding it was full of trees she recognised and which she hadn’t thought would grow there, birch and willow, aspen and oak. She sat there for a while, looking towards the mainland and making out what she thought might be Ben Nevis.

All that day she spent outside, glorying in the warmth and brightness. She saw something jump, fifty yards or so from the shore, and knew it was not a fish. It jumped again, further out, and she wondered if it could be a seal. There was no one to tell her. The sea was calm, only the merest ripple disturbing its surface. She lay on the shingle and ran the tiny stones through her fingers, and found herself smiling. Was this happiness? Would it last? Could it last? The trick was to live in the present, hold off memories, refuse to face any future. She wanted to be suspended in time, she wanted her mind to be emptied, and then she would be ready to restock it: it would be under her control.

This was the beginning.

It took a while to become accustomed to the change in the weather. She had expected it to be a fluke, and that clouds would soon drift in and the rain start again. But the heatwave went on. She swam in the sea, bitterly cold though it remained, and grew tanned and healthy-looking. One or two people appeared on the beach she went to but did not stay long. She knew she was watched, and wondered about, but beyond the barest of greetings no one troubled her. Inevitably, when her supplies ran out, she had to take the ferry to the mainland and on the boat she saw MacPhail again. He nodded but said nothing, turning away from her for the rest of the trip. But when she had finished shopping, and staggered down to the ferry again with her rucksack full and a large, heavy bag in each hand, he helped her on to the boat. ‘You’ll want a lift home, with a’ that,’ he said, matter-of-fact. ‘I can walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll take my time, leave a bag on the jetty.’ He didn’t reply, but after they’d docked he seized the bags and swung them onto his truck. They drove to the croft in silence, he didn’t bother her with questions, and she was grateful. ‘Thank you,’ she said, gathering her bags together. ‘Any time,’ he said. ‘I’m just up the road.’ She knew that ‘up the road’ was at least two miles and round the end of the hills. She’d seen his house, stone-built like the croft, but with a corrugated iron roof, surrounded by an untidy garden full of old cars and bits of cars. She’d seen his wife, too, a wiry little woman who wore a headscarf and a man’s jacket much too big for her. They had a dog, some sort of mongrel, who barked ferociously if anyone came anywhere near the fence, as Ailsa had done on her walks. The woman had come out, when she heard the barking, but at the sight of Ailsa – who waved – she turned and went back in without responding.

The only person who did speak to her was the postmistress. The island no longer had a post office but there was a postbox on the jetty which was emptied twice-weekly and the woman who did this also delivered the mail that came over. She had a moped and chugged round the island in a self-important way, sounding her hooter unnecessarily at every bend. She wouldn’t simply leave letters on the doorstep – there was no letter-box in the croft’s door – but insisted on knocking and handing them over one by one, commenting on the postmarks. ‘Two from London,’ she would say. ‘One from South Africa, my that’s done well, getting to here.’ All the time she would stare at Ailsa, quite open about scrutinising her. She was the one who asked, ‘Here for long? Or just the summer, maybe?’ Ailsa smiled, said she didn’t know. ‘You wouldn’t fancy a winter here,’ the postmistress said. ‘I don’t fancy it myself, and I’ve had plenty of them.’ She, too, said she was ‘just up the road’ if needed. Her house, Ailsa knew, was a bungalow on the far shore, resplendent with a crazy-paving path and two urns, one either side of the bright red door, her front garden full of some hardy shrub which flowered yellow. Her name was Jeannie, Jeannie McKay. It was the only name Ailsa had been offered, apart from MacPhail’s.

The letters Jeannie brought felt like an interruption: calls to duty that troubled her. Both her sons wrote regularly, or rather Cameron wrote and James’s wife wrote for him since James was too lazy actually to do so himself. His concern was real, though, or so Melissa said. ‘James has sleepless nights worrying about you,’ Melissa wrote. Cameron didn’t mention sleepless nights but sounded irritated, asking why she had to be so ‘awkward’, spiriting herself away like that to some godforsaken remote Scottish island. It was, he wrote, ‘unnecessary’, and Dad would not have wanted her to go there. Well, he was right. ‘Dad’, Paul, would certainly have poured scorn on this retreat of hers. He wouldn’t even have begun to understand what she hoped to gain by coming to the island.

But then Paul’s understanding of her had been limited, and it was her own fault. She had allowed him to cast her in a certain mould and never once had she tried to break out of it. She was meant to be content with motherhood and domesticity and to feel no need for any other fulfilment – a common enough expectation, back in 1957, when they had married. In any case, what could she have done? She had no training for anything, marrying Paul as she did when she was eighteen. She’d been meant to go to Edinburgh University, to read Modern Languages, but then she met Paul, and any thoughts of further education vanished. She knew, given her time over again, she would do exactly the same. She became an army wife, without realising it, which meant constant moving from one base to another, and then came the birth of the boys and the frightening realisation that she felt trapped and inadequate. And what had been Paul’s response? ‘Nonsense, you’re just tired, having two babies so close together.’

He was always ambitious and determined, never content to stay still – she couldn’t keep up with him. His leaving the army and going into business did not help her feelings of inadequacy, though she benefited from the stability it gave her. Paul was hardly at home, working all hours, leaving her to bring up the boys. When he was there, he was something of a tyrant and she used all her own feeble energies to protect her sons. That, she supposed, is when it began, the dreadful awareness of not being entirely happy. She tried to hide it, and had maybe been too convincing. She never complained to Paul, but instead took pride in playing the part he wanted her to play, because she couldn’t see what else she could do. Never once did it enter her head that she could find another life – she was much too afraid of being alone and much too loyal to find anyone else.

From the island, she wrote back to Cameron, and to James and Melissa, feeling bound to. Her letters, she made sure, were cheerful though there was not much content. She told them about how beautiful the barren island had become in the sun, and how well she felt, leading such an outdoor life. But she didn’t invite them to visit her, nor did she mention returning to London. They had to be content with that. She didn’t, in any case, believe that her sons, or her daughter-in-law, were truly worried about her – they were just going through the motions of concern, and were perhaps also a little embarrassed at her withdrawal. ‘You’ll be turning to religion next,’ Cameron had said, when she’d told him where she was going. But no, she wouldn’t. Paul had been the Catholic. She had never had any faith.

Other letters delivered by Jeannie over the weeks were more problematic, and disrupted her days more seriously. There was one, forwarded from London by Cameron (she had made no formal forwarding arrangements), from Lucasta Jenkinson. In a way, Ailsa had been expecting it. The woman had left the church swiftly on the day of the funeral but Ailsa had felt somehow that this would not be the last she would know of her. Her appearance at the funeral had made her angry. This letter made her angrier still. Before reading it, but having opened it and looked at the signature, Ailsa speculated as to its purpose. An apology? She didn’t think so. It would not, she thought, be in the character of what she knew about Lucasta Jenkinson to apologise years later for having an affair with someone’s husband. What, then, would her letter be about? Something about Paul? Some tribute? Some regrets? When finally she read it, Ailsa was surprised. She ought to have known that this letter had been written because the writer wanted something.

Three glorious weeks, and then the clouds came again, but they did not bring rain. There were once more great banks of clouds, every day, filling the sky, greying it over, and then, towards dusk, they raced away and for an hour the sky would clear and the sun set splendidly, a magnificent red. There was a wind most days, coming in from the Atlantic, but it never built up into a storm. Ailsa changed her routine, adapting to the weather. She still went out every morning, to walk, but in the afternoons she turned to studying, Italian now more than Gaelic, and began trying to make something of what passed for a garden. She doubted if anything would grow, but she enjoyed preparing a small patch of ground: the digging and turning of the soil helped her to think better than walking round the island did.

What she was still thinking about was how to reply to Lucasta Jenkinson’s letter. For a while, she thought she would not reply to it at all – why should she? The woman had a cheek; she did not deserve a response. Then she veered towards thinking that it would be more satisfying to send an extremely curt reply: what you have asked is out of the question, please do not bother me again. But that did not seem appropriate either, and the longer Ailsa left it, the harder any letter seemed. She began to become obsessed, dangerously so, by the whole problem – her mind raced with alternative letters and she was near to making herself ill with repressed fury. Again and again, she looked at the little painting Lucasta Jenkinson had had the temerity to ask to be returned to her, and began to hate it. She should destroy it, then write saying she had done so. That would settle the matter. It would be spiteful, mean, the act of a philistine, of a vandal, but why should she care? Yet Paul had spoken of it when he was dying and to destroy something which had had some strange power over him, and that she herself had grown to love, too, would be akin to sacrilegious. She would have to reply.

Once she’d posted the letter in the box on the jetty, she realised how unsatisfactory it had been. It had come out more passionate than she had intended, and was far from being the polite, cold little note she had aimed for. Again and again, planning what she would say, she had schooled herself to hold back on emotion, and above all not to reveal how Paul had mentioned the painting as he was dying – that was an entirely personal and precious memory which belonged only to her. She wished, also, that she had not let Lucasta Jenkinson know that she did indeed have the painting. It would have been perfectly easy to say she had no knowledge of it and that all Paul’s effects had now been dispersed. But she had admitted to having the painting, and said that she could not possibly part with it. That would have been sufficient, but she had spoiled the dignified effect by adding that she bitterly resented Lucasta Jenkinson’s request and thought it cruel of her to make it. ‘You spoiled our marriage,’ she wrote, ‘which is something I cannot, even now, forgive you for.’

This was the sentence that kept coming back to torture her – it was foolish, unfair, childish. Paul had done the ‘spoiling’ and what had been spoiled had already been far from perfect. It was her pride that was hurt, and, most of all, she had resented the fact that he had told her about his affair – it could have been conducted discreetly as she came to suspect previous liaisons had been. But he had had to confess and by doing so humiliate her, and then on top of that to suggest ‘terms’, all to do with maintaining appearances. She should have refused his terms, thrown them in his face and told him she wanted a divorce or at least a formal separation. But she was not a woman who could survive alone, or so she believed.

So they had carried on afterwards, for all those years, the marriage never recovering, just the husk of it remaining, solid though it might appear. And she had realised only during Paul’s illness that she was stronger than she had ever believed and was more than ready, far too late, to be on her own. She dared to start thinking that she could have a life that had nothing to do with him. She did not want him back from the dead. In her letter to Lucasta Jenkinson she made no mention of this unpalatable truth though she had longed to, and by saying her marriage had been ‘spoiled’ she knew she had created the opposite impression. The woman would think she had always loved Paul and that her rage was due to the jealousy and resentment she still felt. But it was not – the anger was because she could have stood on her own, left Paul, or made him choose, and she never had done. But there was another source of fury which she had not let creep into her letter, about the painting itself. Lucasta Jenkinson had written that she had given it to Paul to help him understand why she had to be on her own again, but that she had regretted parting with it ever since. The memory of it had haunted her for years now, and she realised she had been wrong to part with it. It had been a present from her father to her mother, and she should never have let it go. Paul, she thought, had probably never understood its significance and she doubted if he had treasured it. If Ailsa could return the painting, hers would be a magnanimous gesture she would greatly appreciate.

But I am not inclined to be magnanimous, Ailsa had decided. She’d grown fond, truly fond, of the painting, and had got into the habit of looking at it each time she left and re-entered the room, as though checking that nothing had changed. The chair was still empty, the posy of flowers still bright, the window still closed and curtained. She’d noticed tiny details never evident to her before – the texture of the floor, the exact pattern of the wickerwork in the chair – but still she felt the atmosphere evaded her. Had Paul really understood anything about his mistress from it? Or was she right, and he had not seen what she had seen? Sometimes, especially during the weeks of rain when she came in soaked, there had been a warmth there, a welcoming glow of serenity from the picture, but other days the sense of some significant absence was overpowering. She wished the canvas were bigger, that she could see more of what was going on in order to make up her mind about whether this was a happy or a sad picture. It was impossible to decide.

Whatever her feelings, she was not going to let Lucasta Jenkinson or anyone else have it. It was hers, to make of it what she wished, almost a test of how she had changed.

Thankfully, there were no more letters from Miss Jenkinson. Weeks went by, and nothing came from her, and Ailsa’s anger faded. By October, the nights drawing in rapidly, she was almost ready to leave the island. Her tenancy had been for six months, with an option to renew for a year, but she had already decided that she had achieved what she had come for and would go before the winter began. The islanders, she knew, would see this as a defeat, but she didn’t care – it was enough that she herself would know that on the contrary it was a victory, over herself. She felt stable and confident, happy to have tested herself and not found herself wanting – the relief of not having needed anyone’s help was thrilling. She could have stayed on the island, though perhaps not in the croft, for longer, especially if she had increased her rare trips to the mainland and given herself some distraction. But she was proud that she hadn’t needed others, and she knew she had earned a small measure of respect, from those who observed her, for keeping away from the world so successfully.

October was beautiful. The bracken and heather covered the hills in shades of bronze and purple which became startlingly bright in the sun. The constant change in the light towards evening was almost theatrical, as though the shafts shooting from behind clouds were deliberately directed by unseen hands. It was cold and misty in the mornings but the mist, clinging to every bush and shrub, was a home for diamond drops of water glittering along the paths. Never had she been so aware of nature’s beauty, and never more in awe. She wanted somehow to acknowledge and celebrate this feast, and what it mean to her, what it had done for her. Slowly, an idea of what she could do was growing in her mind.

MacPhail took her stuff to the ferry on the day she left the island. ‘Had enough?’ he said. She just smiled. ‘Knew you’d never last a winter,’ he added. She went on smiling – let him have his little victory. ‘Back to London?’ He was remarkably inquisitive for an islander all of a sudden. She nodded. No need to tell him of her plans – he wanted to label her as a townie, so let him. He put her bags on the boat, and she paid him, but he seemed determined to have a conversation before she left and went on standing there, staring at her and expectant. ‘Will you be back?’ he asked, as the boat’s engine started up. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘one day, if I need to.’ He prepared to step onto the quay, then hesitated, and before jumping off the boat as the ropes tying it to the bollards were being released, he said, ‘You’ve done well, mind, managing.’

All the way across to the mainland, she repeated his words to herself: you’ve done well. How well, she had yet to see.

The cab she’d booked to take her to the station was waiting beside the pier. She chose not to sit in the front with the driver, wanting to enjoy the scenery without any distraction. But the man persisted in talking, pointing out things on the road, and she thought how hard it was going to be to adjust to the society of others. She’d lost the knack.

She wished, when they got to the station, that she did not have so much luggage. There were no trolleys at this local station and she had to ask the cab driver to carry the two heavy bags for her while she coped with the rest. He was not very willing – she should, after all, have talked to him – and she had to produce a five-pound note, an extravagant tip, surely. But he put everything on the train for her, and at last she was off, her journey home properly begun. Arriving in Glasgow was alarming. She stood on the platform, surrounded by her belongings, numbed by the noise, nervous of the crowds surging past as a train on the adjacent platform disgorged its passengers. She tried to take deep breaths, telling herself to keep calm, calm, willing herself to conjure up a vision of the island she had left. And then, behind her, a voice said, ‘Would you like a hand with all this, maybe?’ and she turned to see a young man hovering there, indicating her bags, his smile shy.

He carried almost everything for her all the way to the main concourse – all she took was her shoulder bag and rucksack – and found a trolley for her. He was off even before she had finished thanking him profusely. Her mood was transformed. There was no need to fear returning to city life – among the formidable hordes of strangers there were people like that thoughtful man. Later, she supposed that was when she had begun to relax her guard. She put her shoulder bag and rucksack on top of all the other bags and pushed the trolley towards the platform for the London train. Her progress was slow, with the concourse packed, but she did not mind, there was plenty of time. She hardly saw what happened. All she felt was a bump as someone passed her too close, and then she saw her shoulder bag, whipped off the mound of luggage, in the hand of a boy running very fast. He was gone before she had managed any kind of exclamation. Gasping for breath, she tried to go after him but the weight she was pushing, and the throng she was trying to push her way through, defeated her.

The station policeman was sympathetic. He took her to his office, leaving her luggage safely in the charge of someone else, and sat her down and gave her a cup of tea. He reassured her that her train would not be departing for another thirty-five minutes. It was only when he asked her to describe her bag and list its contents that Ailsa remembered it contained the painting. Apart from that, only some shells, a few birds’ feathers, and a bunch of heather she’d picked that morning. ‘So nothing of value, then?’ the man asked. ‘You have your money, your credit cards, cheque book, keys?’ Ailsa patted the zipped purse she had hanging diagonally across her chest and nodded. But then she began to say, ‘It’s just that the painting …’ ‘Yes?’ the man prompted. There was no way she could explain its significance. ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘it’s just a little picture, of sentimental value.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that lad is going to be a wee bit disappointed when he opens that bag – I’d like to see his face. He’ll likely chuck it away. If we find it, we’ll send it on, if you leave your address.’

He saw her onto the London train himself and stowed her luggage away for her. As soon as the train began to move, Ailsa closed her eyes. She told herself she had been lucky. Nothing important had been lost. Yet even as she was assuring herself of this, she felt uneasy. Wasn’t the painting important? It certainly had turned out to be important to Lucasta Jenkinson. She had begged for its return. But it was more than that. Over the last few months, Ailsa reflected, it has come to mean something to me, too. What, then? She wasn’t sure. It had become somehow symbolic, she decided, of what she had been trying to do on the island, which was to try to live independently and simply, as the painting suggested life should be lived. What would that boy see in it, though? Nothing. Would he throw it away? If so, who would pick it up and treasure it?

Thinking of what might happen distressed her. She warned herself not to become agitated, and tried to settle into the rhythm of the train. She was almost asleep when the ticket collector came to tell her he had had a call from Glasgow Station saying that her bag had been found in a wheelie bin near the buffet, contents apparently intact. It seemed like such a happy omen for the future. Ailsa smiled, and fell into a deep sleep which lasted all the way to London.

Eight people she had had to talk to in the first twenty-four hours. Her sister Fiona, Cameron, James, Melissa, her neighbour Virginia, Virginia’s husband Morton, her cleaner Pat and Pat’s little boy, Ryan. Eight people, all of them demanding time and concentration and responses, all of them so kindly welcoming her, treating her as if she had recovered after a long illness. Their expressions of relief were various and hopelessly misplaced but all sounded undoubtedly sincere. ‘You’re back!’ they cried, in tones of congratulations, and she found it hard to bear. ‘Now you can start again,’ they said, and beamed at her. Start what? she wanted to ask, but knew quite well that they meant her life. Her old life. Her life as she had lived it with Paul – only without him.

Fiona, in particular, scrutinised her carefully. She had never liked Paul, who had patronised her and made her feel that her job as a social worker was a waste of time. Sometimes, Ailsa thought Fiona had suspected a little of what had happened to her sister’s marriage, but she had never asked outright what was going on and there had never been any temptation to tell her and seek advice or consolation. They were not close enough for that. But now, no longer concerned with keeping up appearances, Ailsa was more prepared to be truthful, so when Fiona commented on how well she was looking and wondered if this was just the result of a healthy, outdoor island life, she said, ‘No, actually. It’s the result of standing on my own two feet and not falling over.’

‘But you’re not the independent type,’ Fiona said, ‘you went straight from Daddy to Paul, looking for another strong man to adore you.’

‘That’s very bitchy, Fi.’

‘No. Just the truth. Men do adore you. They don’t adore me.’

‘Fiona, don’t be so, so …’

‘Petty? Pathetic?’

‘Don’t be so self-pitying. I never wanted to be adored, as you put it. I’d rather have what you have. You’ve got a career, you do something worthwhile, and what have I ever done?’

‘Worthwhile? Not what your late husband used to say.’

‘Never mind what Paul said, I know it’s worthwhile and I admire you.’

‘Rubbish. How can you? How can you admire me when I spend my whole time putting what Paul called sticking plasters over gaping wounds and watching them fall off?’

‘There’s no point in talking to you when you’re like this, Fi.’

‘No, there isn’t, but you’ve never wanted to talk to me, anyway, have you, not really talk, as sisters should.’

‘I don’t know about “should”. It would be nice if we could.’

‘Then why can’t we?’

‘There are two of us, Fi, it isn’t just me.’

‘It is. I don’t mind being truthful about how I feel – it’s you, you won’t share.’

‘Please.’

‘There, you see – the distaste on your face.’

‘It’s just the word …’

‘Then I’ll choose another word. You won’t open up, you won’t tell me, your only sister, how you’re really feeling.’

‘I’m feeling fine. Better than for years. There, that’s the truth, that’s being open and honest.’

‘It isn’t being open and honest enough. Why did you really go to that island? I don’t remember you loving it as a child, neither of us did, it was Daddy who did. You hated being made to go there when you were a teenager. You loved dancing and parties, don’t you remember? Why go there, on your own, now? Be open and honest about that, and I might believe you’re trying.’

‘This is very tiring, Fi.’

‘Honesty is tiring, it’s a struggle, but it gets easier, once you’ve got into the habit.’

‘And that’s irritating.’

‘So, evasive as usual, too frightened to let me see what worries you, why you’re so buttoned up, the perfect little wife and now the noble widow.’

Looking at her sister, Ailsa thought it would be quite easy to say that she hated her and never wanted to see her again. She looked, as she always had done, manic, wild, not at all how a social worker should look – there was nothing calm and capable about her. Taller than Ailsa, heavier, with once red and now thick grey curls overwhelming her narrow features, she was alarming. Paul had said she looked madder than some of her mad clients, and the boys thought she looked like a witch. Her clothes added to this impression, always black or dark navy, always shapeless. She was, Paul had decided very early on in his acquaintance with her, ‘one unhappy woman’, and he was sorry for her husband. But Ailsa had spoken the truth when she’d said she envied Fiona’s career – she did. Whatever her sister herself said, however much Paul had mocked her ‘do-gooding’. Ailsa knew Fi was passionate about her job and that she was good at it. Unhappy she might be in her personal life, but she had a sense of direction Ailsa had lacked, and craved to have.

‘Maybe, Fi, I’ll learn to open up, but not today, some other time, I promise.’ Surprisingly, Fiona smiled and said she’d look forward to that, she’d hold her to it.

No one else directly challenged her. Her sons never asked a single question about her island life, seeming to regard her months there as an aberration, never to be referred to again. Virginia, who had kept an eye on the house, wanted to know if she had taken any photographs and was disappointed to hear that the answer was no. She’d brought some shells back, though, and gave them to Ryan, who clearly was not impressed, since they were very ordinary shells, not nearly as pretty as those his grandmother had brought back from the Caribbean.

By the time she got rid of them all and went to bed she was exhausted. She’d lost the skill to relate to people and had practically lost the basic skill of conversing at all. Her long silences while she tried to think of how to answer the most straightforward questions puzzled people – she could see them wondering whether she had some kind of illness which made her so slow or whether she was being rude and ignoring them. Every innocent query seemed either too simple or too complicated to respond to. She had a blinding headache just from hearing all the voices, and when one by one they ceased, and her family, and Pat and Ryan, left, she could still hear them in her head, one roaring noise. Even when she was at last alone in her bedroom the silence was not complete, it was not the thick silence of the island. The noise of traffic was muted but it was there, and then there were all kinds of other sounds which once she had never noticed and now seemed so loud. The central heating sent a groan through the radiators at regular intervals which alarmed her, and there was a ticking somewhere, like a clock (but there was no clock), which she could not locate. When the telephone rang the shock made her heart race and she rushed to stop the hideous sound, then afterwards detached the instrument from its socket.

Already, there were decisions to be made and her head had begun to whir with alternatives. Cameron thought she should sell the house. It was, he said, too big for her, and she would get a good price for it and could buy a flat and a cottage in the country and still have money left over. James thought selling the house would be a mistake and that instead she should let it out, for a fortune, something he had wanted her to do when she left for the island. Fiona telephoned, wondering if she would like her to move in with her. Her divorce had been fairly recent, she soon would have nowhere to go because her house was to be sold and the money split with her ex-husband. Ailsa didn’t want to have to think about any of this. There was no need. She could take her time, but no one seemed willing to allow her time. It was, she saw, to be the first test of her new self: to tell all these people to leave her alone without offending or alienating them. Thinking about it, she discovered that she did not really care if she did offend them – they, after all, were offending her by being so persistent, so sure that they knew what was best for her.

She hung the painting at the end of her bed, on the wall facing it, where it immediately looked comfortable. This wall was not large – her bedroom was long but not wide and the end walls were narrow – and the pale grey patterned wallpaper suited the quiet picture. It did not look awkward, as it had done in the croft, and the light thrown upon it from the side window was flattering. She liked lying and looking at it in the morning, lit by this natural light, and at night the two lamps positioned either side were equally kind to the painting. She had begun to see the point of there being no overt human presence in that room – people were disturbances. It was only possible to be tranquil if there were no people around. But if that were so, in the opinion of the artist, she wondered how any kind of life could be managed unless one withdrew entirely from society. Not even on the island had she done that. Human contact had been minimal, and never meaningful, and perhaps that was the trick – but if so, was not existence rendered barren, loveless?

In the days that followed her return, days she found a great strain, and each one of which ended with her in a state of turmoil over quite trivial matters, she thought ‘loveless’ might be the clue. She was not without love, of varying kinds and degrees, and it was love, bringing with it the need to show concern, that robbed her life of the tranquillity she had experienced on the island. She loved her sons. They were grown men who had long ago moved away from her emotionally, but she was still bound to them by love and could not expel them from her life. Cameron, the elder, in particular, exhausted her with his arguments and persuasion and insistence that she should take his advice. He was especially maddening when he brought his dead father into it. ‘Dad said I was to look after you,’ he told her, ‘see you didn’t get into any financial mess, and I’m telling you, Mum, you have to be sensible and sell the house and invest some money for your old age. It’s the sensible thing to do, trust me.’ She wanted to say to him that it was not a question of trust but of his wanting to take her over and command her as his father had done, and she was not going to have it. She was in charge, of herself, of the house, and would do what she thought fit when she was ready. But she couldn’t speak like that to him. He would be hurt. He wanted her to regard him as wise and responsible and knowledgeable, the very image of how he had seen his father.

He was nothing like his father. She had known that almost from the beginning – even as a baby, he had lacked that unmistakable vigour which James later displayed. Cameron was a dreamer, like her. He was a child who smiled a lot and seemed to want to please, and his very amiability had worried Paul. With James, it was different. She was a puzzle to him and his bafflement over her behaviour since his father had died had made him uneasy in her company. He kept trying to show concern, and then backing off from the implications if there turned out to be any. ‘Are you all right, Mum?’ he kept asking, but there was nothing hesitant about the question, and he clearly expected the answer to be yes. And then, insultingly, though she knew he was unaware of the insult, ‘Maybe you should talk to Melissa, you know, have a chat with her?’ Melissa had done a course in counselling, and James was proud of her caring nature. No, she told him, as gently as possible, she didn’t think she needed to have a word with his wife, she was perfectly all right, he need not worry. ‘But I do,’ he said, in an irritable tone of voice, as though she were being difficult. ‘I can’t stop worrying about you. Melissa says …’ She thought how shocked Melissa would be to know just how far she had moved on, just how swiftly she had come to terms with Paul’s death. This had to remain unspoken.

But she went so far as to say, ‘I’m fine, James. I find I like being on my own.’ He patted her hand, and smiled. She was just a little afraid of James. Even his size – he was over six foot, and powerfully built, like his father – intimidated her. He never looked right in her house, seeming to make chairs too small and rooms too full. His marriage, so young, to Melissa had been a surprise but also a relief – she felt that Melissa, American and clever, took the place she had never adequately filled. If, behind his convincingly mature façade, there lurked a more uncertain James, then Melissa could deal with him. Neither of her sons, she knew, could stand in for their father, and she was glad of it.

She wasn’t sure, that first month back in London, whether it was quite true that she liked being on her own in the family house. It was, of course, quite different from being alone in the croft on the island. Here, at every turn, there were reminders of that other life, the life she had lived with Paul all those years. Inevitably, they disturbed her. The memories of happier times were sharp and persistent and it puzzled her that they were not also comforting.

The house, which she had always loved, began to get on her nerves. She didn’t fit in any more, she wasn’t a woman who wanted a large sitting room full of furniture, or a kitchen where family feasts could be accommodated. Cameron was right, she must sell it and find somewhere smaller; much smaller. Then, she could get rid of all the belongings which had begun to haunt her with their history. She could choose new things, uninfluenced by Paul’s taste – and everywhere she looked she saw his taste. It always struck people as odd that Paul collected modern art. Such a hobby (though rather more serious and expensive than a hobby) did not fit with his persona as a man of action, ex-army, known to be ruthless in the conduct of business. But Ailsa had seen this other side of Paul from the start and had been convinced it showed the ‘real’ Paul, the true self he did not wish to reveal to others, in case they thought him soft. Sometimes she had heard him lie, telling people that some painting he’d bought had been his wife’s choice. This was especially true if the painting was of a nude woman. She hadn’t minded, but she knew that in fact her own influence was absent so far as their paintings were concerned. Her own taste was only evident in the colour of a pair of curtains or the pattern on a rug (a rug Paul had never liked). It could all go, and Paul’s art collection too. The boys could have what they wanted and the rest could be sold.

First, though, she had to sort through all the many drawers and cupboards and dispose of personal effects. About this, Melissa was right, she had indeed been in denial. She’d gone off to her island leaving everything just as it was, closing the door especially firmly on the room that had been Paul’s study, and into which he had liked to be wheeled even during his last weeks. She thought about asking one of her sons to tackle this room, but feared that what they might find would shatter their image of their father as devoted husband. She had to do it herself, and quickly, in a matter-of-fact way. So one dark November day she took into the room a roll of black bin liners and a few large cardboard boxes and set to, starting with the desk. It had six drawers, all crammed with papers, neatly arranged. She saw that in fact there were little labels on the rims of the drawers – ‘Insurance’, ‘Car’, ‘Stocks and Shares’. They could go to Paul’s accountant, she needn’t bother with them. The sixth drawer was locked. She hunted around for a key, but there didn’t appear to be one. She doubted very much whether Paul had opened this drawer in the last year – he couldn’t have managed to bend down that far, nor had he had the strength in his by then almost useless fingers to turn a key. She would have to force the lock. But standing looking at the desk, she remembered that there was another desk Paul had used before this one which looked very much the same.

It had been moved to Cameron’s old room, where he still slept when he stayed with her. Six drawers, exactly the same, and in the sixth, the bottom one, a key was, helpfully, sticking out. She knew it would fit before she even removed it, and returned to Paul’s study. The drawer held letters, all still in their envelopes. They were tied in bundles, with ordinary string or elastic bands. Some were from her. The sight of the pale green envelopes (very expensive these had been, lined with a sort of tissue paper) made her feel slightly nauseous. Only twelve of them, written to Paul in the six months before they became engaged when she had gone back home to Scotland to help nurse her dying father. She didn’t need to read them to remember the contents. Most of these letters had been full of details about her father’s condition, and professions of love for Paul. These had been extravagant, probably embarrassingly so. She’d been so passionately in love, so desperate to be with him, swearing that she couldn’t live without him. She thought she’d burn them, late in the afternoon, in the garden. Nobody would see her.

A small collection of letters from the boys, only nine in all, six from Cameron, three from James, written from school. They might like to have them, though the letters were not of much interest. They were addressed to her as well as Paul, but it was Paul who had elected to keep them, which now seemed touching. She was sure that Melissa would read great significance into James’s illiterate scribbles. Another bundle, also slim, from his mother, written from the cruises she was so addicted to. And then the last packet. It was sealed. She opened it: two letters. Plain white envelopes, bold writing. They could only be from Lucasta Jenkinson. The Cornish postmarks were clear.

She thought how, a year ago, she would have grabbed these letters feverishly, with shaking hands, and devoured every word in them even while her vision clouded with hate. She would have wanted to know everything, every last thing that this woman had been saying to her husband. Had she been begging Paul to leave, and come to her? But no, it couldn’t have been like that, she had dumped him. Paul would not have lied about that. So why, if she had rejected him, did she write to him at all? Because he had written to her? The answer would be in these letters, or the clues to the answer. She must surely have been responding to letters from Paul. What had he said? Had he begged her to take him back? Had he said he would leave his wife? Holding these two envelopes in her hands, hot with tension, sweaty with it, Ailsa felt the weight of her decision. Was she strong enough to burn these letters too, without reading them? Was she strong enough to read them first? Was there any need? Was there any benefit to be had?

Paul had kept them. Locked up. Hidden from her.

Cameron took charge of selling the house. He assumed she would not want to show people around, or even be in the house when the estate agent did so, but he was wrong. She wanted to see who might be taking her place and said she would always be there whenever a prospective buyer was brought to look round. The estate agent, never mind her son, did not quite like this, but she was firm. All appointments were for the afternoon, except on Saturdays and Sundays when she agreed to almost any hour. The moment the house went on the estate agent’s books there were many applicants – six different lots of people came to look round on the very first day, and thereafter never fewer than two in an afternoon.

Ailsa enjoyed it. She didn’t feel in the least (as Cameron had warned her she would) ‘invaded’ by these people. On the contrary, she felt absolutely in control of them and took them round the house as though she herself were the agent (who pattered behind, occasionally pointing out things she’d missed). ‘What a lovely house,’ everyone said at some point, usually when she led them through to the conservatory and they saw the terrace and the garden. They all enquired how long she had lived here and when she told them almost twenty years they were impressed. They had been told, of course, that she was a widow, and so did not ask any upsetting questions – it was enough that she wanted somewhere smaller now that it was understood she was on her own. Offers were quickly made, so quickly that she was advised to hang on and she might very well get more than the asking price. (Property prices were buoyant in the 1980s.) Cameron thought she should wait for a cash buyer who could complete in the minimum time, without waiting to sell their own property, and at the end of the second week one appeared.

She was French, but spoke excellent and almost accentless English. She was married, with three young children, but she came on her own, in the evening. The estate agent brought her but, by mutual agreement, left her to be shown round by Ailsa, who by then had grown used to the inevitable questions about boilers and central heating, and felt she could cope. The woman, a Mme Verlon, Claudette Verlon, didn’t ask any of them. She smiled, but was virtually silent as she was taken from room to room. Ailsa saw her eyes darting about, though, and knew she was taking everything in. When the tour was over Ailsa ended up in the kitchen and, on impulse, asked Mme Verlon if she would like a glass of wine while she thought if she wanted to see anything again. The offer was accepted. Ailsa poured two glasses of white wine, and they sat at the table.

It was two weeks before Christmas and dark outside, and had been since soon after four. The kitchen was not cosy – it was much too big – but it was colourful, with a fine collection of plates on the pine dresser. Mme Verlon admired the plates, recognising several as being from Provence, and ventured the opinion that Ailsa was artistic. Ailsa shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have no feeling for art. It was my husband who collected most of the pictures and pottery. He had an eye, though it was untrained.’ ‘And was it he who bought the little painting in your bedroom, Madame?’ Ailsa stared at her in astonishment. They had only been in her bedroom a couple of minutes, with only one lamp switched on, and she had never drawn attention to the attic painting. She had instead mentioned only the large cupboard (because the estate agent was forever telling her to point out such ‘features’). Mme Verlon hadn’t mentioned the painting either, and she hadn’t had time to study it.

‘The little painting,’ she echoed, ‘on my bedroom wall, facing the bed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why ever does it interest you? How did you notice it?’

Mme Verlon shrugged, drank some wine. ‘I think I recognised it,’ she said. ‘It is quite valuable, no?’

‘Is it? I’ve no idea. I’ve never had it valued.’

‘Your husband bought it, perhaps?’

Ailsa hesitated, then said, avoiding Mme Verlon’s gaze, ‘No. It was a gift. To him.’

‘How fortunate he was. You have it insured?’

‘I don’t think so, not on its own, I mean, only as part of the house and contents insurance.’

‘You should treasure it, but perhaps you do, or it would not be on your bedroom wall. It means something, yes?’

Again, Ailsa hesitated. She felt herself blush, and said, hurriedly, ‘I don’t know. I’m never sure. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It seems sad, mostly.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, no. Though her life was maybe sad.’

‘Whose life?’

‘The artist’s.’

‘Tell me!’ Ailsa felt suddenly excited, and leaned across the table to touch the other woman’s hand. ‘I’ve always wanted to know who painted it, and why. I don’t think my husband knew either, or the person who gave it to him.’

‘She was English, but lived in Paris. I’ve seen some of her work. Your painting is like one of her other paintings, almost a copy of it, but I don’t think it is a copy. I would have to look at it carefully.’

Ailsa went to fetch the painting.

Mme Verlon held the little painting in her hands and studied it closely. ‘May I?’ she asked, turning it over, poised to take off the frame. Ailsa nodded. The canvas came out of it easily. Mme Verlon turned it over and scrutinised the back of the canvas. ‘I believe she rarely signed her work,’ she said. ‘It is not significant that this bears no signature. But I think it is genuine. I think it is by Gwen John.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘No, no. Dead long ago, I don’t know exactly when, but before the last war, I think.’

‘Did she live in a room like this?’

‘I think so. She was poor. Her brother, you know him, Augustus John, was more famous, and much richer.’

‘And she was his sister? How odd. Was she married?’

‘No.’

‘Children?’

‘No.’

‘So she was lonely, it is a sad painting.’

‘I don’t know. Someone will be able to tell you. But if I am right, it is precious. You must take care of it. I would love to have it, but I cannot afford to buy it, at the moment, if I am to buy your house, which I would like to do, please.’

The sale went through very quickly, without a hitch, and Ailsa had only a month to find somewhere else and to dispose of the furniture and contents. Cameron, delighted at the amount of money the house had raised, thought his mother should come and stay with him, or else rent somewhere, while she looked ‘properly’ for her future home, but Ailsa had already made her mind up. She was going to travel, and needed only a base until she’d satisfied her wanderlust, so she bought a tiny flat through the estate agency which had handled her house sale – one room, with kitchen and bathroom, in a new block by the river. Her sons couldn’t understand her choice, but were bound to admit it was sensible, for a woman her age. There was a lift, and a porter, and it was new so maintenance would be easy. It would do, for the time being, and be easy to sell when their mother was ready to settle down.

They moved her things for her. It was not an arduous job, since she was keeping hardly anything from the family house. Most of what went into her pied-à-terre was new – a new (smaller) bed, because her existing one would have filled the room; a new small pine table; two rather uncomfortable cane chairs – and that was it. ‘Pretty comfortless, Mum,’ James said, ‘and what about a fitted carpet?’ No, she didn’t want the white-tiled floor covered. She would buy a rug, eventually. In spite of its size, the room fortunately had plenty of storage space, cleverly hidden behind a false wall, and all Ailsa’s clothes and boxes went into this long, narrow compartment. The kitchen, though there was hardly room to turn round in it (literally) was well and cunningly equipped. So was the bathroom. She had everything, she announced, that she needed.

The walls were white, a brilliant white. Everything in the place was white – kitchen appliances, kitchen floor, bath, bathroom floor. She’d deliberately put a white woven cotton bedspread over her new bed and made white cushions for the chairs. The effect, not surprisingly, was stark and hurt her eyes, she had to admit. There was so much light, with two big windows, both large, double-glazed panes of glass, flooding the room with sun whenever the weather was good and illuminating it strongly when it was not. There were white slatted blinds in place, but she had rolled them up and never intended to use them – no one, except passing seagulls, could see in and she liked the panorama before her. But something would have to be done eventually about the whiteness, to tone it down. She thought she might buy a grey rug, and maybe one comfortable chair, covered in grey linen. She would also have some sort of curtains, even if she would rarely draw them – there was enough space either side of the windows for them to hang and tone down the whiteness of the other walls.

‘You need some pictures,’ James said. ‘Haven’t you brought some nice pictures? What’s happening to all Dad’s pictures?’

‘I’ve brought one,’ Ailsa said.

There was no one else in the block as yet, though the other flats had all been sold, and unlike being in the croft on the island, Ailsa found the atmosphere eerie. All that emptiness below her made her feel curiously vulnerable, though in fact the porter was there, in residence, and she was quite secure. Going into her flat she felt startled each and every time – she found herself catching her breath at the sight of this unknown space. No memories at all. No reminders of any previous life. All that connected her with the past was the little painting, said to be by a well-respected artist, Gwendoline Mary John. The focus of attention, it now looked lost on the white wall. The eye was drawn to it, in the strong light, and stayed, reluctant to leave the only interruption in all that bright white.

She had not, as Mme Verlon advised, taken the painting to an expert. She was content to accept the Frenchwoman’s opinion and had found out from her all that she wanted to know. She hadn’t insured it separately either – she didn’t want anyone to look at it. The first thing she would have to do when she returned from Italy was to have the wall upon which the picture hung repainted, a beige colour, she thought. It pleased her to think she had this to come back to, the simplicity of it, contrasting so strongly with the complexity of the family house. She wouldn’t get overwhelmed ever again – this room was her life now down to the core. She didn’t even want her sons to come into it, or not as they once had done. She was quite free of entanglements, at last. The picture, when she locked the door upon it, reassured her that this was true.

Cameron and James had both been left with keys to her flat, though they were not required to do anything. But all the same, eager not just to be dutiful but to see what his mother might have done to the flat between moving in and leaving it to go travelling, Cameron visited it the first weekend after she had gone. He hadn’t a great deal to do on Sundays since he and Elspeth, his partner of five years, had split up and he missed the routine. He still slept late, went out for newspapers, bought croissants, took them home and ate and read, but after that there was a dismal gap. He thought he might take up some sport, tennis probably, but had done nothing about it. He could have visited James, but he couldn’t stand Melissa who would be sure to offer her interpretation of why he was on his own again: he couldn’t, according to his sister-in-law, ‘commit’.

He was living in his father’s flat, though whether he would stay there he hadn’t yet decided. The existence of this flat in the mews off Devonshire Street had been a surprise to all of them. The moment he and James were told of it by the solicitor, they had worried about their mother. Would she guess? Would she be forced to realise what they had suspected for so long, that their father had had other women and that this was where he took them? But she hadn’t appeared to be in any way disturbed. She’d simply seemed to think the flat was another of Paul’s clever investments, and there had been no need to protect her. Protection was what their mother had always needed – she seemed to them frail, dependent on their father’s strength, and sometimes they imagined that this irked him. ‘For heaven’s sake, Ailsa,’ they had heard him say often enough, ‘have a mind of your own.’

Going there with the keys for the first time, Cameron had wondered how long it had been empty. He knew, from what the solicitor had told him, that it had been let for several years, during his father’s illness, but the place had an air of such abandonment it did not feel as if it had been lived in for a very long time. It did not feel, either, as though it could ever have been anything as vulgar as a love-nest. Everything about it had a clinical precision – the way the furniture was arranged, the austere shades of the fabrics, the extreme tidiness. Who on earth had his father brought here to satisfy his lust? What a sad business it must have been, going into that bare bedroom with its grey-covered bed, the bedspread stretched tight across it. No hint of warmth or colour anywhere, nothing on the walls, no mirror, only smooth-fitting drawers and cupboards along one grey painted wall.

Cameron changed it dramatically, made it colourful and comfortable, hung London Transport posters on the walls, and yet still he could not banish the previous atmosphere, not quite. He was glad his mother had never been there before he had managed to transform it as much as he could – it would have upset her, she would have sensed something. Surely. Going up in the lift, on Sunday afternoon, to his mother’s new home, Cameron thought how odd she had become. She hadn’t always been odd. She’d been quite conventional in behaviour. He’d always been rather proud of her – she was the best-looking mother of all his friends’ mothers, and he’d been glad she’d never had a career. She was always there when he and James were at home from school, a comforting presence. Had they taken her for granted? He supposed so, but she’d seemed happy enough about it. There’d been no problems with his mother, ever. It was with his father there had been difficulties, with his father there were arguments and fights. His mother was the peacemaker, though she hadn’t always succeeded. His father had been powerful, dominant, determined to win whatever struggle he was engaged in. He’d quite often hated his father.

The first thing he did was rush to lower the blinds. Why hadn’t his mother done that? The light was unbearable with the sun blazing through the plate glass. But she didn’t seem to have done anything to the place. The room looked almost exactly as it had done the last time, the only time, he had seen it, when he and James moved her stuff. The word sterile sprang into his mind. It even struck him that it reminded him of his father’s secret flat. The very opposite of the home she had left. Well, this pared-down existence appeared to be what she wanted. It was her way, he supposed, of coping with his father’s death, however peculiar it seemed.

He sat for a moment on one of the cane chairs. It made him feel more depressed than ever to think of his mother coming back to this – it wasn’t what he had envisaged when he’d urged her to sell the house. He’d imagined her in another house, a neat little terraced house in Chelsea maybe, near James and Melissa (and perhaps, soon, grandchildren nearby to occupy her). But maybe she would not come back from this Italian jaunt of hers. Maybe she would meet someone – but that was absurdly unlikely. His mother had adored his father. No one would be able to take his place, she wouldn’t want any other man to attempt to.

He was going to leave the blinds down. Securing the cords either side, he turned and stood with his back to the windows for a moment, looking at the room. She’d hung one picture only on the opposite wall. It looked ridiculous, one tiny painting on a largish wall, dead centre, like a target. He peered at it. It wasn’t one he recognised. The wall cried out for his father’s colourful, dramatic paintings, the ones by someone who painted like Matisse, a series of three he’d bought years ago and cherished. But this picture his mother had selected was a pretty little nothing, almost colourless, quite unable to make an impression hanging where it did. He must ask her why she liked it, why she had chosen it, when she returned. Perhaps it was simply that it was an echo of herself.

It wasn’t like going to Scotland, to the island. She’d felt nervous enough then, travelling alone, but this was different, this was abroad, with no one to help her, no Paul to organise everything. Reaching Paris was adventure enough – she was exhausted. Managing the language made her head ache and after she’d forced herself out, to look at Notre Dame, she was glad to get back to her hotel. She ate in her room, not up to facing a restaurant, and despised her own cowardice. This would not do. She was meant to be savouring her freedom, rejoicing in her new-found independence, and yet here she was, scurrying about, enjoying nothing. She almost went home.

She tried hard, instead, to analyse what she was afraid of, what made her so uncertain and nervous when, alone on the island, she had felt so strong and sure of herself. It was, she decided, the presence of other people that did it, being one in a crowd – it was the crowd that unnerved her. If people were all around you, especially people speaking a different language from you, then the sense of isolation, of loneliness, intensified. Her mind was like a locked box, so much in it trying to get out, a great store of trivia jamming the works. Walking down a quiet street, or along an empty corridor in the hotel, her own footsteps scared her, emphasising her solitary state. She began to suspect that she was attracting odd looks, as though this inner turmoil was showing on her face and alarming people, and she took to walking with her head down.

Once, in the Luxembourg Gardens, as she wandered aimlessly among the statues and trees, watching an old woman feeding the sparrows, a man spoke to her. He came alongside her and said, in French, but she understood, that he was lost and did she know the way out of the gardens into the Boulevard Saint Michel. She said, in French, that no, she was sorry, she did not. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re English.’ He was American, he said, but his grandmother had been British, Welsh actually. He walked with her until they reached the Observatoire and he saw a sign pointing to the boulevard he wanted. He was young, about Cameron’s age, from Ohio. She listened politely to his account of why he was in Paris, and when he left her, with ‘Been nice talking to you,’ she realised she herself had hardly said a word. But the effect of this minimal human contact was extraordinary. She could feel herself more at ease, and she went to sit on a bench and exchanged pleasantries with a young woman holding a child on her knee, teaching it a song. The child, a girl of about four, leaned towards Ailsa and drew her into the song, and she joined in, her accent making both child and mother laugh. It could be done. She would not go home. She would learn how to function as a woman alone, among others.

She thought of Paul more than she had expected to, especially on train journeys, as she sat staring out of the windows, half in a trance as the countryside sped past. Had she loved him? Had she really known him? She’d lived with him all those years, in close proximity most of the time, and yet still there were mysterious glitches in his personality which had never been explained, things that did not fit her knowledge of him. Lucasta Jenkinson, her power over him. Sexual? Possibly. So, had she herself failed him in that respect? It irritated her intensely still to be going over and over this sore place, refusing to let it heal even while she was assuring herself that it had done so. She was fifty-four years old, Paul had been dead a year, yet here she was, travelling through Europe, torturing herself with questions which could never be answered. She must look forward, not back. But in struggling to look forward, there was no place in her vision of the future for another man. She did not want another lover or husband, emphatically not. She did not want ever to be taken over again, even if this would bring security and companionship. She had to stick to her resolution made so successfully on the island: to be herself, beholden to no one. It might amount to going against the grain of the woman she was, or the kind of woman that life with Paul had made her, but this was what she wanted.

Ailsa had taken the letters with her. They lay at the bottom of her bag and every now and again she took them out, wondering if she was ready to read them (that is, if ever she decided she was going to). Each time, she got only as far as fingering the envelopes and then put them down. She was not ready, not ready in Paris, not ready in Venice, not ready anywhere until she reached Florence. She stayed in a pensione she’d been told about, near Fiesole, and there was something so cheerful about the little villa, the attic room she was given there, that she felt a surge of optimism and thought it might be time to lay this ghost to rest.

Sitting on the terrace, among great tubs of brilliant scarlet flowers, she drank her coffee in the morning and took out the letters. Whatever she decided, they were not going back into her bag. She was going to destroy them, read or unread. What was it Paul had said? About love, about how hard it was? She was shocked to find she could no longer exactly remember. It had been something to do with the little painting. He had wanted her to look at it, to understand. She had looked, and not understood.

She opened the first letter and read it, and then left the other unread. It had not hurt her or even angered her, reading Lucasta Jenkinson’s words to her now dead husband. The words were nothing. Paul’s might have meant more, but those of his mistress did not, at this distance of time, affect her. So far as Ailsa could make out, Lucasta Jenkinson was trying to persuade Paul that they had never really loved each other but had been in the grip of a physical passion which was now spent. He loved his wife, she wrote, couldn’t he see that? Apparently, he couldn’t, or there would not have been at least one more letter. How sad, Ailsa thought, that Paul must have gone on pleading and Lucasta Jenkinson continued to reject him. If only she had known she was wrong: that Paul had really loved her and not his wife.

Well, she, his wife, his widow, did not now care. She put the letters in the stove which even in this weather seemed always to be lit. ‘Just paper,’ she said to the kitchen girl. Just paper. But she would keep the picture, for ever. Some day, she might understand its significance.