Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
11 JUNE 2005
I woke to see her looking at me. Not in the flesh, of course, but it took me a moment or two to realise that, befuddled as I was by sleep and the dim light filtering through the shutters, which are the solid kind, installed God knows how long ago by God knows who.
As soon as I switched on the light I realised that my mind had been playing tricks on me – it wasn’t her at all. It was only the portrait I painted of her yesterday, as I do every year. And every year it leaves me feeling like I do today: hollowed out, as if something that was inside me before is there no longer, because it has been transferred on to my canvas. Like I’m the husk in which some sort of fruit once grew, or the shed skin of a snake.
It is the first thing I have painted since I came to this house, and more than three months overdue. All my life, I’ve harboured a dream of becoming a professional artist and all my life it has remained just that – a dream. This place was intended to be the turning point: I’d have a stable home of my own and all the time in the world, plus of course the glorious natural light that floods the top floor through the extravagant glazing, installed so that the weavers who worked there could see every intricate thread of the fine silk damasks taking shape on their looms.
If only I’d known that all there is to be found now up there is clutter, puddles and a nest of squirrels that is gradually being decimated by Maud, who presents me with a limp, forlorn body after many of her excursions upstairs.
I couldn’t wait any longer before I painted it – I’d already delayed long enough. So I had to make do with my bedroom as a studio and my legs as an easel, closing the door because I didn’t want anyone to see what I was doing.
No one has ever seen the portraits, not even Adrian, in the two years I was married to him. They have always been my secret. The previous ones – all twenty-one of them – are down in the cellar, stacked in one of my tea chests. Normally when I begin, I leaf through them, seeing the face growing older each year, changing: sometimes smiling, sometimes serious; sometimes framed by a scarf or hat; sometimes laughing and once thoughtful, her chin resting on her palm and her fingers half-covering her lips.
But this year I didn’t have those reference points. I worked only from my mind’s eye, lying on the bed as I am now, the sketchpad propped up on my knees and a jam jar of water next to me for my moulting brush.
I don’t know how good a likeness it is – I never really do. Probably I never will. But I am fairly certain that when I allow the morning light in, it will show that I’ve captured the shape of this house in the background, the dappled shade of the plane tree mottling her skin, the fall of hair brushing her cheeks and my grandmother’s eyes looking back at me.