Chapter 25 #3
When the doorbell rang around lunchtime a week later, she was surprised to find their son on the doorstep.
“Oh,” she said, instinctively lifting her hand to cover the split in her lip, which she’d felt reopen as she’d smiled hello.
“Oh, look at me. I hadn’t realized you’d be coming.
” She was flustered, unsure how to conceal the change in her appearance in the days since he’d left.
“I fell,” she said, as she ushered him into the hallway.
“That damn rug. The corner curls up and—”
“Mum, don’t. I know it was him. But it’s okay, you’re going to be safe now.” He held out his palm, and in it were two keys.
“Oh, you don’t need to give those back. Or did your father ask you to return them?”
“They’re not mine. They’re his.”
And he told her then. How he’d just come from visiting his father at the practice. How he’d shown him video footage uploaded to a secure server online. Footage he’d collected from their house, on tiny hidden cameras planted before he’d left.
“I wanted to make sure there was enough evidence; I’m sorry I had to leave you all week. I know how bad it’s been.”
“You’ve been filming us?” She looked around the room, at a photo frame, at a table lamp.
“They’re in the smoke detectors.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling her eyes grow large as she gazed up.
She remembered him replacing the batteries in them all recently, but most of the time they seemed to disappear unseen into the fixtures of the house.
“Is it still filming us?” she asked, putting a hand to her hair, suddenly self-conscious.
Then she remembered herself. “And you told—But—What did he say? Is he coming here now?”
“He’s not coming back. I told him he could go immediately and avoid a public scandal and prison sentence.
Or I could send the footage to the other partners at the practice and the police…
So these keys, they’re yours now,” he said, handing them to her.
“He’ll sign over the deed of the house to you later this week. ”
She sat down on the sofa then. Hands in her lap.
Looking about her—at the sideboard, the TV cabinet, the wooden coffee table.
Into the kitchen. Out into the hallway—these rooms, which for so many years had been her world, already shifting in her vision.
Such a peculiar emptiness. Such an absence of anything to suggest it might be a place she’d call home.
Cora can still remember the mix of independence and fear she felt each time she used those keys to let herself back into that house. She’d not stayed long—just a few weeks; a part of her always feeling he was about to come up behind her.
She’d only seen him once more, on the day of their divorce.
Maia and Gordon had both booked the day off work and stayed close to her side as they’d walked into the solicitor’s office, as they sat across a table from him.
Neither exchanged words with him. They had, Cora felt sure, barely looked at him.
Her eyes had met his, though. Only for a second.
And he’d been the first to look away. She remembers that, because it had surprised her.
And because in the next moment she’d noticed a small stain on his shirt.
Two orange dots, as if a pan of tomato soup might have spattered up at him.
She thinks of it often. Of the things it seems to tell her: that it had escaped his notice; that he was alone; that he was fallible. And it somehow makes her less afraid.
It’s summer now. Gordon is in Spain with Comfort, Ida, his mum, Maia, and Kate.
The others want to go to the boating lake, and no one objects when he says he might head off to a nearby gallery instead.
He works his way through the rooms at random, wanting to be surprised by the painting he knows he’ll find there.
The one he’d last seen all those years ago, when it was on loan in London.
Eventually he arrives at a room that’s smaller and darker than the others.
And where the paintings that came before were in gilt surrounds, these are framed in onyx.
The space is almost empty: just a young couple and a child with her grandmother.
His own footsteps echo between their whispers and the silence.
He makes his way methodically around the room, studying each of the paintings in turn.
They are dark, heavy, macabre. The voice in his headset tells him they are known as Goya’s “black paintings,” applied directly to the walls of his house, only transferred onto canvas posthumously.
It’s hard to imagine anyone painting these horrifying images on their living-room walls.
Gordon moves slowly, not allowing his eyes to skip ahead, but knowing he is drawing closer. And then it is there, halfway around the left-hand wall. Saturn Devouring His Son. He stands. Looking. Listening.
The audio explains how contemporary art movements—even literature and cinema—have roots in this work, created in isolation, without self-censure.
It goes on to discuss how the mythological god—Saturn—can be seen as the personification of feelings such as the fear of losing one’s power; that he is said to have consumed his children out of a terror of being overthrown.
And then, almost as an afterthought, the narrator says that one of Saturn’s sons—Jupiter—escaped.
That Jupiter’s mother protected the child, kept him safe.
And that as an adult, he returned and made good on the prophecy.
That the boy did indeed overthrow his father.
He studies Saturn’s features. He remembers feeling terrified by this face the first time he saw it, recalls the hopelessness he felt that night in the restaurant discussing it with Maia.
But he sees something different in the figure now.
Where once he’d seen power and rage, now he sees desperation. Fear.
Gordon crouches down, touches his hands to the cool black floor and breathes in the scent of oil and aging canvas that permeates the space.
He’s not sure why the painting resonates so much, or why he’s so willing to draw parallels with his own life.
But he feels relief in discovering the more recent part of his story—that freedom, for him, for his mum—was hidden in it all along.
Gordon stands, turns from the painting, and heads back through the rooms of the gallery.
Past Sorolla’s days at the beach and walls filled with shrines to other stories and alternate endings; maybe some of them his own.
And finally, he steps out into the brightness of the day and turns to walk across the park, ready to meet his family.