17 #5
Emily nodded, looking almost pleased. It was as if, somehow, Lyssa’s presence here and now was some sort of vindication.
‘So you do know. Somehow, I thought you would.’ She gave a little smile, then shrugged painfully.
‘Yes, I wanted to paint,’ she admitted quietly.
‘My first real memory was of drawing our house with our neighbour’s cat sat on the doorstep.
I used to scrawl on any scrap of paper I could find and made sure that everyone knew what I wanted for birthdays and Christmas – paint sets, sketch books, inks, pens, anything like that.
I never felt truly real, you see, unless I was working on something.
Even as a kid. It was all-consuming. I needed to paint – to become a great artist. I never wanted to marry, never wanted children, didn’t play with dolls, nothing like that.
All I wanted was to go to art school and be shown how to make what was in my head appear on canvas.
It was like torture, not being able to do that.
No matter how much I practised, and got better, I needed to do more, always more .
. . To make the images that I saw become real . . .’
She slumped back in the chair, exhausted by her sudden outburst of emotion, and gave a little shake of her head. ‘Ah, but what does it matter whether I can make you understand or not?’ She began to cough and wheeze, and for a while struggled to regain her breath.
Lyssa sat very still and waited, sensing that any attempt to help her would be unwelcome. And she understood why. For six decades this woman had lived with her terrible secret and had chosen Lyssa for her confessor.
Painfully, slowly, Emily began to rally strength from her fragile frame. Her voice, though, was little more than a scratchy whisper now.
‘And suddenly, there she was – this woman who stood between me and what I needed. I hated my brother for leaving her his money, and couldn’t understand why he’d done it.
It was as if he loved her more than us. I felt so resentful and angry that I just sneaked up behind her and shoved her hard in the back. ’
She sighed. ‘Even as she hit the water, I expected her to come up spluttering right away, and be mad as hell at me and chase me around the garden and tan my hide for me. But she didn’t,’ Emily said simply, her voice full of remembered wonderment.
‘She sort of floundered around for a bit in the water and then just . . . slowly sank down. I watched it happening but didn’t really understand what it all meant.
I was eleven – I’d never seen death before. I didn’t know what it was . . .’
The robin suddenly hopped up on to the windowsill, cocked his head in that way that all avian creatures seemed to have, looked at her, then hopped back down out of sight again.
Emily watched it avidly. ‘Once I could have painted that bird. But not now.’ She looked down at her hands, which Lyssa saw were twisted cruelly with arthritis, and again shook her head.
Then there was another silence, which went on so long that Lyssa concluded the other woman had now said all that she wanted to say.
In a way, it was a relief not to have to listen to anything more, but another part of her, a small voice in the back of her head, insisted that she couldn’t leave it quite at that.
‘I understand you’ve had a long and fairly successful career painting,’ Lyssa said gently.
‘Would you mind if I asked . . . I just wondered . . . did you ever regret what happened that night?’
For a moment, Lyssa didn’t think Emily Bannister would answer her, but then, slowly, she turned her skull’s head towards her and that strange spark of dark fire in her eyes gleamed once again.
‘I painted and sold a lot of canvases. I won a few prizes. A few patrons collected me avidly. I was regarded as a good, solid painter. But you know what I was never able to do?’
Lyssa held the old woman’s dying gaze for a long, sad moment, and asked quietly. ‘No, Emily. What couldn’t you do?’
‘I could never transfer on to canvas the image that was in my mind.’
Emily Bannister’s lips twitched. ‘Do you see, what a joke the universe played on me? Oh, sometimes I came close. Sometimes it almost seemed that greatness came within reach, and that divine spark of genius every artist craves was about to burn in me, but with my next brushstroke . . . I was back to being a superior mediocrity again. And do you know – to this day, I sometimes wonder if it was because I could never let myself become really great? Because, subconsciously, I was afraid that if I were ever to reach my full potential, something terrible would happen to me. Either that, or perhaps my soul had already decided failure was a just punishment for what I did that night.’
Once more she turned to look up at the blue sky. ‘I don’t suppose it will be too long now before I find out.’
Again, Lyssa waited, hoping for a little more, but after a while Emily Bannister dozed off, and to the sound of her quiet, shallow breathing, Lyssa finally tiptoed away.