Jessie Burton - The Muse

‘She wouldn’t want to come. Besides, I’ve only got two chops.’

I felt I couldn’t insist, because it wasn’t my house, my dinner, my champagne. But I do remember thinking it would be no problem at all to pop to a butcher and buy Pamela an extra chop. Quick seemed keen to have me there alone.

‘Good,’ she said, taking my silence for assent. ‘That’s settled. See you later, Odelle. We can take a taxi home together. And well done again. I’m very proud.’

When I went to find Quick in her office at the end of the day, her door was closed. Voices were coming through the wood — hers, and that of Edmund Reede, more angry than I’d ever heard.

‘We should use these discrepancies as opportunities,’ he was saying. ‘Why are you undermining me, Marjorie?’

‘Edmund—’ she began, but he interrupted.

‘I’ve tolerated a great deal from you in the past, but your doggedness over this is ridiculous.’ There was a silence. Reede sighed. ‘You’ve seen the accounts, Marjorie. You’ve seen what’s happening to us. I just cannot fathom your reluctance. It’s a stunning painting. It has a story. It has a handsome young man on the end of it. Two, in fact, if you put owner and painter together. We’ll have a crowd; we might even have a sale. The Guggenheim are going to send me what they have, but there’s already so much here. The mystery of Robles — how did he die? Who ordered his death, and why?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with the painting, Edmund,’ Quick said.

‘I disagree. His personal tale reflects the international stage. It prefigures by less than a decade the vanishing of hundreds of artworks under Nazi rule, and, in many cases, their creators and families.’

‘But the art first, eh, Edmund?’

He ignored this reproof. ‘Robles is universal. When we tell the tale of this artist, we tell the tale of war.’

I heard the flick of Quick’s lighter. ‘I’m surprised you of all people want to tell the tale of war,’ she said. ‘I don’t see this painting as political at all.’

‘Look here, Marjorie, what’s the problem? We’ve always been frank with each other.’

‘Have we?’

‘Oh, come on. As frank as it was possible to be.’

Quick was silent for what seemed a long time. ‘There is no problem,’ she said. ‘It just isn’t political in the way you think it is. It’s not about war in the way you see it, Edmund. It’s not about the artist as a man. It’s about the canvas. Two girls facing down a lion.’

I was astonished at the way they were talking to each other, so fluid and intimate. Pamela said they had known each other for years, and it showed. It was almost fraternal, and he was talking to her much as he might talk to one of his friends at the club.

‘We’ll agree to disagree, Marjorie,’ Reede said. ‘As we have done for longer than I care to remember.’

I could hear Reede moving towards the door, so I ran back along the corridor to my own desk, waiting instead for Quick to come and find me. It seemed that Quick had capitulated — to what exactly, I was not sure. She was resistant to the idea of an exhibition — but the true focus of her reluctance, this wavering derision and fear, was still not clear to me. It seemed that she was placing herself in opposition to whatever Reede thought philosophically about the painting, more than she was against the idea of actually exhibiting it.

Quick indeed turned up at my desk shortly after, looking drawn and upset. ‘Ready?’ she said. ‘There’s a taxi downstairs.’

We walked past the reception desk together. I glanced at Pamela, and saw the confusion in her face. I was surprised to feel that I was betraying her, going off with Quick like this, when Pamela worked just as hard as me and had been here longer. But I couldn’t turn back. I was too drawn to Quick’s enigma, too determined to find out what was really going on.

*

After our dinner, Quick invited me into the sitting room at the front of the house. She lowered herself into a sleek grey armchair, its wooden arms carved like the strings of a harp. Everything she owned, apart from the gramophone, seemed stylish and modern. ‘Keeping an old woman company,’ she said. ‘I feel guilty.’

‘Hardly old,’ I replied. ‘I was very happy to come.’

We hadn’t talked of much over dinner; a little about Pamela, Reede and the donors he had to court, how he hated flirting with old marchionesses holed up in damp castles, where God knows what treasures were rotting in the lofts. ‘You’ve known Reede a long time?’ I asked.

‘A long time. He’s a good man,’ she added, as if I’d said otherwise.

We were drinking brandies, a quiet piano concerto floating through from the gramophone in the other room. Quick closed her eyes, and she was so still, neither of us speaking, that I thought she’d dropped off to sleep, the glow from the electric table-light beside her turning her face orange. She didn’t strike me as the kind of person to invite a guest over and then fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. She was in her fifties, not her nineties, but it was peaceful to watch her in repose and I didn’t wish to disturb. I wondered why she was so interested in me — placing my story in the magazine, the invitations to lunch, the solicitous questions over Lawrie and my future.

The electric fire was switched on, although it was a mild October. Quick even had on a shawl. I felt the brandy overheating my body and thought maybe I should leave, and I was on the point of rising from my chair when Quick said, her eyes still closed — ‘Did you ever talk to Lawrie Scott about his mother?’

I sat back down. ‘His mother?’

Her eyes snapped open and I saw their leonine intent. ‘Yes. His mother.’

I thought about the suicide, and realized that it might have taken place in one of the very rooms I’d wandered through. I suddenly missed Lawrie. I wanted us to start again — a trip to the cinema, a walk in the park — but I had no idea how on earth to make it possible. I couldn’t let him float adrift as well as Cynth.

‘He didn’t talk about her at all,’ I lied.

‘Then he must be thinking about her an awful lot. I’d lay money on it, if I were a betting man. Grief’s a pressure cooker if you don’t deal with it. One day, you simply explode.’

‘Do you?’

She drained her brandy glass. ‘Things crumble. Bit by bit. They shift, you don’t notice. Then you notice. Jesus Christ, my legs are broken but I never moved my feet. And all the time, it’s been coming towards you, Odelle — orchestrated in the hearts of strangers, or a God you’ll never meet. Then one day, a stone is hurled — and by accident or design, that stone hits the car window of a powerful idiot who wants revenge, or who wants to impress his mistress, and — whoosh — the foot soldiers move in. The next day, your village is burning down, and because of stupidity, because of sex, there’s a coffin for your bed.’

I couldn’t think how to reply to this. Sex, death, coffins — how many brandies had she had? I didn’t see what this had to do with Lawrie at all. I stared into the electric bars.

Quick leaned forward, and the arms of her chair creaked. ‘Odelle, do you trust me?’

‘Trust you with what?’

She leaned back again, visibly frustrated. ‘You don’t, then. If you did, you would have just said yes.’

‘I’m a cautious person. That’s all.’

‘I trust you , you know. I know you’re someone I can trust.’

I think I was supposed to be grateful, but instead I felt a simmering unease. The bars of the fire were making me hotter and hotter, and I was tired, and she was in a strange mood.

Quick sighed. ‘It’s my fault. For all my conversations with you, I’m probably even more guarded than you are.’