Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Isabelle couldn’t have said why she hadn’t confided in Jilly; over all those long phone conversations they’d had since Isabelle moved back to the island, they certainly shared everything else in their lives. But it seemed too ... secret. Kathy had known, because she’d been there from the beginning, and Rushkin—if it hadn’t been for Rushkin, none of it would have happened in the first place.

Initially, Rushkin’s teachings had seemed so amazing, like stepping into an enchantment, or receiving a gift from faerie. Then after the fire, she just couldn’t speak of it. The secret didn’t die, but it locked itself away inside her—just as she locked away the impulses to render realistically.

The abrupt change into the abstract had garnered her the worst reviews she’d ever received, before or since. The only one in Newford’s art community who had simply accepted the new paintings for their own worth, rather than judging them against the work Isabelle had done earlier in her career, had been July.

She’d dropped by Isabelle’s studio—half of a loft she was sharing with Sophie Etoile in the Old Market—one afternoon a few weeks before the show. Wandering about Isabelle’s side of the small loft, she’d viewed the works-in-progress and finished canvases with an unprejudiced eye.

Jilly had been surprised, certainly, but also moved by the power of some of the work. Granted, there were paintings that were noble attempts, and nothing more, but there were also some that conveyed everything she’d ever said before, only now in primal, throbbing colors and abstract designs.

After Jilly had complimented her on the new work, Isabelle had admitted her nervousness concerning how the new paintings would be accepted.

“But are you happy with this direction your work’s taken?” Jilly had asked.

“Oh, yes,” Isabelle had lied. “Very much so.” It would be years before the lie would come true.

“Then that’s all that counts,” Jilly had told her.

Isabelle had had cause to remember and be comforted by those few simple words many times as she worked to reestablish her earlier position in the Newford art community. What had dismayed her earlier admirers, she slowly came to understand, was not the new work itself, but what they perceived as the frivolity of her turning her back so abruptly on the old. Once they saw her seriousness, she began to win them back, one by one.

All except for Rushkin. He hadn’t expressed approval or disapproval. Long before the show opened, Rushkin was gone. Out of her life, out of Newford; for all she knew, out of the world itself, for no one had ever heard of or from him since.

Speculation ran rampant in the Newford art circles as to where and why he’d gone, but it never went beyond rumor. Isabelle suspected that the fire had killed something inside him, just as it had inside her.

She’d lost innocence, her sense of wonder. She didn’t know what he had lost, but she suspected its absence had put as deep an ache inside him as her own loss had put in her. For all his unsociability and sudden rages, he had understood, better than anyone Isabelle had met before or since, the intrinsic worth that lay at the heart of all things, the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was the prefect example of what it was. It was the artist’s sacred task to illuminate that beauty, Rushkin had told her, to create a bridge between subject and viewer; to craft a truthful vision that left both the artist and the audience wiser, allowing them to wield the weapon of knowledge in their daily confrontations with an increasingly hostile world.

Isabelle sighed. Sometimes she missed her old mentor so much that it hurt. But then she’d remember the other side of him, the part that swallowed the good memories with hateful shadows: his elitism and his towering rages. His small cruelties and his hunger to control. His hunger ...

As inevitably happened when she thought of Rushkin, she couldn’t understand why it had taken her so long to extricate herself from his influence. It hadn’t simply been her greed to learn all she could from him. But what exactly had been the hold he’d had on her? How could one man be responsible for so much that was good in her life and so much of the misery and pain?

She sighed again, staring out the window. Morning twilight was growing lighter by the moment. As she watched, the long shadow cast by the barn withdrew toward its foundations. The dawn chorus sounded—more muted every day as, species by species, its choristers migrated south. But at least the day was dawning sunny, the storm was gone and the power was back on. It looked to be the morning of a perfect autumn day.

She didn’t feel nearly as tired as she thought she should after spending a sleepless night. Her eyes were a little itchy and her back was stiff from being hunched over the drawing table for so many hours, but that was about it. She rubbed at her eyes, then looked down at her hands and realized what she was smearing all over her face.

“Lovely,” she muttered.

Standing up, she stretched and went into the washroom to take a shower before going downstairs to wake Alan. She’d make him breakfast before rowing him back to the mainland. But first they’d have to talk some more. She hoped he’d be able to meet her demands—she wasn’t asking for much—but even if he didn’t, she knew she’d take on the project because it was long past time to fulfill that broken promise.

She would do it.

For Kathy and her dream of the lost children’s arts court.

And for herself, so that she could try to regain defunct courage and so be brave enough to accept the responsibility of a gift she’d once been given.

Alan woke groggily to the sound of tapping on the guest-room door. He struggled upright in a tangle of bedclothes, disoriented, body and mind still thick with sleep.

“Breakfast’s almost ready,” Isabelle called through the door.

“I ... I’ll be right out,” Alan managed to mumble in response.

He listened to her footsteps recede before he slowly swung his feet to the floor. His gaze traveled to the window, but all it found was sunshine streaming in through the panes, giving the room the air of an early Impressionist’s painting, all bright yellow light with deep mauve shadows pooling where the sunbeams didn’t reach. There was no wild girl with her red hair and oversized man’s shirt.

Rising from the bed, he crossed the room to look out on the lawn outside the window. The sun had already burned off the dew, so the faint path of footprints he remembered from his dawn visitor was gone as well.

If he’d even had a dawn visitor, he thought, turning from the window.

The whole encounter lay like a dream in his memory now. It seemed far more reasonable to believe that he had simply imagined Cosette and her odd conversation. His sleeping mind had conjured a patchwork individual out of Kathy’s story and Isabelle’s painting to visit him in his sleep and voice the curious mix of desire and bafflement he felt whenever he thought of Isabelle.

He felt better after he’d had a shower—more alert, if a bit scruffy from being unable to shave. When he joined Isabelle in the kitchen, it was to find she’d prepared him a huge country breakfast: pancakes, eggs and bacon, muffins, coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice.

“You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” he said.

“It wasn’t any trouble,” Isabelle assured him. “I enjoy cooking.”

“I just thought that after working all night, the last thing you’d feel like doing was putting together a spread like this.”

Isabelle turned from the stove, the surprise obvious in her features. “Now how did you know I’d been up all night?” she asked.