Jessie Burton - The Muse

‘You were snooping?’

I looked away, embarrassed. ‘He told me about your mother giving you her maiden name when the war was on. When Reede mentioned Harold Schloss — why didn’t you just say something?’

He fell back against his pillow. ‘It would have made things too complicated.’

‘It would have simplified them. That’s how you have the painting in your possession. Provenance and all that.’

‘It might simplify things for Reede, but not for me.’ He clasped his hands together into one fist. ‘Look, we never, ever talked about him, Odelle. My family doesn’t talk about things. And if you’ve spent your whole life never talking about something, do you think you’re suddenly going to be able to discuss it — just like that — to some stranger who’s after your painting?’

‘But why—’

‘I don’t have the words for it, Odelle. I don’t have the words for something that happened when I wasn’t even alive.’

‘But surely your mother talked about him? He was your father .’

‘I knew his name, that’s it. I knew my mother changed hers when she came back to England. It was her and me for sixteen years, and then Gerry came along. I wasn’t going to claim a dead man just to satisfy Edmund Reede’s little genealogy.’

‘All right. I’m sorry.’

‘There’s nothing to be sorry for.’

‘I just. .’ I thought of Quick. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of the painting, that’s all.’

He sat up. ‘My mother never told me how she got that painting, Odelle. I wasn’t lying. My only guess is, my father never managed to get it to this Peggy Guggenheim — and then in the chaos that followed leaving Spain, my mother took it with her and brought it to England.’

‘What happened to their marriage, if he was in Paris and she was in England?’

Lawrie sighed. ‘I don’t know. She came to London; he stayed there. And then the Germans occupied Paris. My mother never even wore a wedding ring before Gerry.’

‘And you never asked her about it?’

‘I asked,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘She didn’t like it, but she told me he died in the war being brave, and that now it was just the two of us. I heard that line at three years old, at ten, at thirteen — and you hear something like that over and over again, it just becomes the way things are.’

‘Perhaps she wanted to spare you the grief of it,’ I said.

Lawrie looked grim. ‘I don’t think my mother ever really thought about sparing me anything. My guess is, either he walked out and chose not to have contact with her, or she was the one who severed ties. It was a nice idea, her and me, against the world, but it got a little claustrophobic. She was very over-protective. Said I was her second chance.’

‘And that’s all she said?’

‘You don’t know what she was like. It just wasn’t something you talked about to her. And lots of people had missing dads, you know. It was after the war, lots of widows. You don’t pick at someone else’s grief.’

‘Of course.’ I knew it was time for me to stop. I wanted to ask if Sarah had ever talked to him about Olive; how she might fit into all this. As I’d discussed with Cynth, a young woman with that surname could easily be Harold Schloss’s daughter — but Lawrie had never mentioned a sister, however much older than him she would have been. And if Lawrie knew as little about Harold as he was claiming to, this hardly came as a surprise. I looked at him, trying to see echoes in his face of Quick’s. I couldn’t imagine how I’d broach the subject that he and Marjorie Quick were possibly related.

Lawrie sighed. ‘I should have told you about it. But things were up and down between you and me, and it wasn’t on my mind. I’m sorry you had to bump into Gerry. I hope he was wearing his dressing gown, at least.’

‘Yes.’

‘Small mercies.’

‘Can I get in?’

He lifted up the blankets and I snuggled under. We lay in silence for a while, and I wondered if Lawrie would ever have told me about his father, if I hadn’t pushed it. When it came to our blossoming relationship, I had to consider whether it mattered, either way. Lawrie was still Lawrie to me, surely, regardless of who his father was. But it did sting a little, the amount I didn’t know about him, what he’d chosen to hold back. I suppose I was holding things back, too. ‘We sat looking at Harold’s writing on the train,’ I murmured into his shoulder.

‘I know.’

‘Did you feel anything, looking at it?’

‘Not in the way you probably want me to. I was a little sad, I suppose. The way life works out.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and thought again of Marjorie Quick. ‘You never quite know how it’s going to end.’

Quick telephoned in sick on the Monday, and was still not back by Wednesday, and I was too tied up working with Pamela to get everything ready for the opening night of the exhibition to go and see her. Reede was amassing an impressively eclectic list of attendees for ‘The Swallowed Century’, and had placed Pamela and me in charge of organizing the invitations. Reede wanted coverage, relevance, attention — for the Skelton Institute to be cool and viable, a place where money flowed — and Rufina and the Lion was going to help him. Mixing high culture with pop, there was even a rumour that a Cabinet minister might turn up. And it had to be said, Rufina and the Lion , as both an intellectual challenge and an aesthetic offering, more than stood up to it. Reede had commissioned a frame for the painting, the first it had probably ever had. He had good taste; it was a dark mahogany, and it radiated Rufina’s colours out even more.

Julie Christie had confirmed she was coming, as had Robert Fraser, the art dealer. Quentin Crisp, Roald Dahl and Mick Jagger had all been invited. I thought the Jagger invitation an unusual choice, but Pamela pointed out that earlier in the year, when the Rolling Stone had been put in custody on a drug charge, the papers reported that he’d taken with him forty cigarettes, a bar of chocolate, a jigsaw puzzle, and two books. Pamela knew everything about the Stones. Mick’s first book was about Tibet, she told me. The second was on art.

The newspapers picked up the story of the exhibition, as Reede had hoped they would. The Daily Telegraph ran a headline on page 5: The Spanish Saint and the English Lion: How One Art Expert Rescued an Iberian Gem . According to the journalist, An extraordinary, long-lost painting by the disappeared Spanish artist Isaac Robles has been discovered in an English house, and will be brought to public recognition by Edmund Reede, art historian and Director of the Skelton Institute . I wondered what Lawrie might make of this last sentence — or indeed, Quick — for both of them, in very different ways, were helping Reede achieve his aims. It annoyed me, but it did not surprise me.

In The Times , the art correspondent, Gregory Herbert, wrote a long essay focusing on rediscovered artists like Isaac Robles — and how paintings such as Rufina and the Lion both reflected and extended our understanding of the turbulence of the first half of the twentieth century. Herbert was invited for a private view, and he told us, as he stood before the painting, that he’d fought in the International Brigades in 1937, before the Spanish government had sent the volunteers home.

In Auschwitz and at Hiroshima , Herbert wrote, the toll has been written in ledgers and carved on sepulchres. In Spain, the Republican dead can be tallied only in the heart. There are few marked graves for those who lost that war. In the name of survival, the damage was internalized, a psychic scar on toxic land. Murderers still live near their victims’ families, and between neighbour and neighbour twenty ghosts trudge the village road. Sorrow has seeped into the soil, and the trauma of survivors is revealed only by their acts of concealment.