The Ecliptic

One

The road was flanked by leafless trees and ordinary grass verges. Every so often, we would pass under an empty footbridge and the lane-markings would curve slightly to the left or right, but we seemed to have been driving in one straight line since leaving the hospital. Cars that were just dabs on the horizon closed in fast and thumped right past us. The day had not yet ceded to the darkness, but it was readying itself. All the streetlamps had the bleary orange makings of a fuller light in their glass hoods. Victor kept an even speed: not more than fifty and not less than forty-five. He drove with one loose set of fingers on the steering column and his elbow on the windowsill. His other hand stayed poised on his left knee, occasionally reaching up to flick the indicator with the sedateness of a man collecting tickets at a kiosk. Soon, the hummocks began to rise in the narrows of the road ahead. And then the soot-dark loch was spreading in the windscreen and I followed it with my eyes, round to the driver’s side, till Victor’s profile fuzzed out in the window, and it all bled into an open stretch of sea.

‘How are you holding up?’ he said.

I looked away, worrying the glove box. ‘It’s difficult to say.’ I let my eyes recalibrate. There was plenty between me and the water out there — hedgerows, pasture, thickets of trees — but it was hard to reconcile it all. Every time I saw a cluster of pines I felt both homesick and at home. Being in a car, flashing over land without questioning its sureness beneath the wheels, following the road back to a place that I felt certain I had left years ago — all of these things were not easy to accept or comprehend, and yet they seemed to be the smallest of my problems. ‘I’m trying not to think about it till we get there. How much further is it?’

‘Oh, not far now,’ said Victor. ‘Five or ten minutes. We’ll pick up a sign in a moment, I should think.’

He was driving me back at my own insistence. It had taken a while to convince him. He had tried to deflect me with excuses. But now we were just five or ten minutes from Luss. Five or ten minutes from knowing.

A staff nurse and a porter had run out to fetch me. Blood was trailing in a chute all down my arm. I had an oozing hole where the butterfly had torn the skin, and I was standing in a car park in blue hospital pyjamas and a sling. ‘Come on, lovey, let’s get you inside,’ said the nurse, her kindly hand on my good shoulder. She steered me back to the entrance, under the annexe, past the waiting ambulances. The porter held the bay doors open for us, asking if I needed a wheelchair. I said no, I could walk. But voices kept sputtering in and out like mistuned radio. I was still seeing cadets in uniforms: the corridor was teeming with them. They parted for us, shaking their heads as we slow-marched through, muttering their insults in Turkish, spitting on the floor. ‘Here you go, pet — let’s put you in here,’ said the nurse, and she sat me down near the lifts between potted plants. The soil in them was dry and strewn with bent cigarette stubs. When the lift doors parted, cadets loitered in the strip-lit cavities, mouthing words at me I did not understand. The walls still seemed to be covered with pictures: old vessels in gilt frames, tall ships and steel frigates. I got lost in them for a while. I thought I smelled fresh salep. The nurse wiped my arm with a stinging wet tissue. Then Victor Yail came hurtling out of the lift, right past us. The nurse called: ‘Doctor, she’s here!’ and the porter whistled after him.

Victor’s shoes went sliding as he tried to change direction; he teetered and regained his balance. Seeing me between the plants, he held a palm to his chest and said, ‘Oh, thank goodness. You’ve got her. Well done.’

‘Where d’you want her?’ said the porter.

‘Back in the ward,’ said the nurse. ‘She needs that drip put back in her.’

‘Yes, she’s got to have that,’ said Victor. ‘But let’s put her in a chair this time.’

‘She didn’t want the wheelchair,’ said the porter.

‘No, I mean a normal chair.’

‘Aye, that’ll be fine,’ said the nurse.

They were talking about me as though I were a truant child caught stealing.

‘All right then. Up you get, love.’

Then Victor said, ‘Hang on. Let me check her over first.’

The nurse said, ‘Right. I’ll go up and sort that drip out then.’

‘Thank you. Yes.’

The porter lingered. ‘D’you want us to help you take her back?’

‘No, I can handle it from here.’ Victor crouched. ‘But, thanks — I’ll shout if I need you.’

‘Aye, all right.’ The porter wandered away, towards the bunched cadets playing dice games in the corridor. They did not seem to pay him any mind.

I felt Victor’s hands upon my knees. He was on his haunches in front of me, leaning in to get my attention. ‘Ellie? You remember me, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s Dr Yail. Victor. Can you hear me?’

I stayed quiet. The lift pinged, but when the doors slid back, the cabinet was bare.

‘Elspeth,’ he said, ‘look at me now. Look at me.’

So I did. I stared right into his face. There was a flaky ridge upon his nose from the chafing of his glasses. His beard was dense but neatly clipped. He had a waxy quality to the skin below his eyelids, and rich green irises, like two halves of an olive. These were things that I had noticed many times before. He had not changed much in ten years. Hardly at all. ‘I can hear you, Victor,’ I said.

There was a visible release in his expression. ‘Good girl. I knew you could.’ He patted my knees and stood up. ‘I’m very glad to see you in one piece.’ He helped me to my feet. ‘You’ve had a lot of people fretting after you.’

‘Did you get my messages?’ I said.

‘Mm-hm. Don’t worry about that for now. The registrar was showing me your bloodwork. Your liver enzymes are still elevated slightly. We’ve got to sort that out before we do anything.’

‘I’m so sorry about Jonathan,’ I said.

‘Yes. I know you are. But we don’t need to talk about that now.’ He guided me by the elbow, jabbing at the lift button. ‘I want you resting and I want you getting fluids — nothing else for the moment.’ The lighted numbers were not moving. ‘Where the heck is this thing, Jupiter?’ And when it finally reached our level, doors sliding back, a sea cadet was waiting for us in civilian clothing. ‘Can you hit three for me, please?’ Victor asked him. The cadet rolled his eyes but still pushed the button.

I was cleaned up, given a dressing gown, and put into a day room on the ward. Victor made them turn my armchair towards the window. ‘Let’s see how much of this you can register, eh?’ he said to me. ‘I’m not sure what you’ve been used to recently, but there are worse places to be.’ He sat near me on a plastic chair, reading quietly through the notes in my folder, while a pouch of clear medicine seeped through me. Now and again, he looked up to check on my progress, smiling when I caught him looking, or getting up to fuss with my drip-stand.

I still could not understand how I had got there. For a while, I studied the movements of the cars below. I watched them reverse parking. I saw a man climb out of a little Ford Anglia, place his fedora on the roof to get a bouquet from the back seat, and walk off hatless. I even saw an ambulance crawl by with VALE OF LEVEN HOSPITAL painted on its flank, noticed the same words stencilled on the backs of wheelchairs and on signs outside the annexed buildings. But I could not trace the path from where I was to where I used to be. I could not see the joins between the mornings and the afternoons, from one month to the next. And my mind kept painting things that I could not be sure were there. Coiled ropes left on the kerbside. Lifebuoys hung along the railings. Naval uniforms. So I just listened to the forward-ticking of the wall clock behind me and studied the drips as they came down the tube in perfect synchrony. I found that counting off the minutes soothed me. I sat there for sixteen more of them, Portmantle getting further from my mind, the bay of Heybeliada drifting away, and the mural escaping my reach. I got up and tried to point my chair in the other direction. ‘Woah, hold on there,’ Victor said, ‘let me do it. Are you sure you don’t want to look at the view?

‘I want to see the clock,’ I said.

He slatted his eyes. ‘All right.’ And he swivelled me round and moved my drip-stand.

I watched the thin red second hand circuiting the clock face, marvelling at it, feeling more and more secure with each shift of its mechanism.

After a moment, Victor folded his notes under his arm. My drip was finished and he went to tell the nurse. When he came back, he had taken his blazer off, and was scrolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He dragged his plastic chair very close to me. ‘They’re going to take some more bloods from you now, I think. We’ve got a good dose of thiamine in you, though, and that should make things a bit less foggy. You’re still quite undernourished. We need to start building your strength up again — so it’s a therapeutic diet for today. Once you’re eating properly, they’ll let me sign you out of here. OK?’

I shrugged, wincing.

‘The collarbone’s going to hurt you for another month or so. But that’s the least of your concerns.’ He smiled consolingly. ‘Your bloodwork’s telling us you’ve had some toxins in your system — we think it’s a reaction to your tablets, but the tests have been a little inconclusive. So they’ve been trying to see how you’ll respond after some fluids. You’re starting to look a little better. A healthier colour, at least.’

I watched the second hand complete another lap. ‘Is Jonathan all right?’ I said, addressing it to the clock.

‘He is,’ said Victor matter-of-factly. ‘My secretary, on the other hand, you almost gave a coronary. She’s on a fortnight’s leave to make up for it.’

‘I really did think—’

‘I know,’ he said.

Victor reached to throw my notes onto the bank of chairs beside him. ‘The police aren’t sure how you injured yourself. Do you remember anything?’

‘I fell,’ I said.

‘From what? The sky?’

I had forgotten how much he liked his little jokes. ‘An escarpment,’ I said. ‘And then I hit my head. On the ground, I think.’

‘Well, that would certainly make sense.’ He inhaled, folded his arms. ‘They had to drag you out from under a pier. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘All true, I’m afraid. You were in quite a state.’

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Hm?’

‘Where did they find me?’

‘A village down the road. I forget the name.’

‘Where?’

‘Hang on, I’ve got it written down.’ He arched his back to retrieve his notes, flipping through them. ‘Luss,’ he said. ‘Luss pier. L-U-S-S.’

The breath went out of me.

Victor was nodding at his page of scrawl. ‘The police said you were camped out under there. And it says here you stole the tarpaulin off a boat to wrap yourself in. They weren’t sure how long you’d been there. Any light to shed on that?’

I could not even muster a noise.

‘Well, they tried to get you in the squad car, but you blacked out. So they put you in an ambulance instead and took you here. You’re lucky you were close to a good hospital. They got you on an IV right away.’

Luss, I thought. L-U-S-S.

‘They got my name from a prescription in your pocket,’ Victor went on. ‘I told them to hold you here till I could get a train up. But they’ve been doing lots of engineering works — delays across the board. I had to drive up. It took me a while to arrange things. And by the time I got here, well, you’d already discharged yourself, so to speak. I wish I could have come sooner.’

‘Does Jim know I’m here?’ I said.

‘I’m sorry.’ His brow bent. ‘Jim?’

I told him that I had been in Luss for Henry Holden’s funeral, and found Jim Culvers living there in the old cottage. I told him I had stayed with him for several months. He absorbed the news without much change in his expression. ‘So do I take it that’s where you’ve been holed up since I saw you last? With Jim Culvers?’

‘Not the whole time.’

‘Where else?’

‘I don’t think I can explain it,’ I said.

‘Try.’

‘It’s hard to separate the truth from the rest of it.’

‘Well, I can work on that with you.’

‘Part of me still feels as if I’m there. I know I’m not — I know I can’t be. But it hurts to think I never was. Does that make sense?’ I could not tell where it was coming from, but a great swell of sadness came over me then. Tears hung fat in my eyelids and spilled.

Victor put the notes down. ‘Shshhh, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take some time for things to level out. I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard.’ He offered me his handkerchief. ‘Go on. It’s clean.’

I took it and dabbed my eyes. I could not take them off the clock.

‘I’ve got something that might help you,’ he said. Standing up, he took the leather wallet from his trouser pocket and sifted through it, lowering himself down again. ‘It was in here last I looked. Gah, where is it? — all right, phew. It’s here.’ He lifted out an oblong photograph, folded up to wallet-size. Passing it to me, he said, ‘We took that last summer. At our place in Norfolk. He didn’t want to pose for it, but Mandy got her way — I’m glad she did. Not so much of a pipsqueak any more, but you just try and get that costume off him.’

In the photo, Jonathan Yail was no older than eleven. He was standing high up on a drystone wall, his arms outstretched and fists closed tight. The wind was surging through his hair. A clouded sky behind him. Sunlight on his face. He was dressed in a snug blue jersey with a sinuous cape. Across his breast, the yellow-red emblem of Superman, stitched on by hand. He had a look of purest focus. I was very glad to see his face.

‘The things I have to put up with, eh?’ Victor said. He turned the photo round in my hands, pointing at the caption he had written: Whooshing to the Broads, Aug. ’62. ‘He’s just about to start big school now. Still a bloody great pain in the neck, but I should think the world would lose all meaning if I ever lost him. I could never find a way to cope with anything like that. So whatever you think happened, just be happy that it didn’t. And keep thinking about that happiness until the rest of it gets easier.’

The friendship I had worked on with MacKinney over time, the admiration I had felt for Quickman, the baiting closeness I once shared with Pettifer: such things are not easy to release when you have nothing to replace them with. But speaking about them was not denying their existence. I could accept the truth and still be grateful for my fabrications. And I knew that Victor would not belittle them.

That afternoon in the day room — with the next infusion draining through me and another chalky therapeutic milkshake not quite finished in my cup — I felt clearer-headed but no less conflicted in my heart. ‘I understand that where I’ve been is not really where I’ve been,’ I found myself saying. It came so abruptly from the silence that Victor flinched. ‘But I can’t decide what’s worse: keeping that place to myself so nobody can share it, or letting it all out so it just disappears.’

Victor had been mostly occupying himself with paperwork, and had now started on a crossword in the newspaper. He looked up. ‘Well, you don’t have to share anything that you don’t want to. But I would think it’s always better to talk about experiences than repress them. And you know how much respect I have for your imagination.’ He did not try to write notes. ‘I’m your doctor,’ he said, ‘but I’m also your friend. I’m here to listen when you feel ready. I won’t force it out of you.’ I nearly revealed it all to him in a rush, as Jonathan had once explained to me the world of Superman. Except I could not bring myself to voice it. I felt that if I spoke the word ‘Portmantle’ I would diminish it, and I was not prepared to let it go yet.

Victor went back to his crossword. ‘Naturally, I’d like to bring you off the Tofranil,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘It might have been a huge mistake to put you on it in the first place. But you weren’t exactly sticking to the dosage.’

‘No one’s blaming you for this, Victor.’

‘I blame myself on everyone’s behalf.’

‘You did what you thought best.’

‘Perhaps that’s how I failed you — by not listening. I’ve made plenty of blunders in treating you. I’ll be reviewing all your notes when I get back, and seeing what I could’ve done better. But for now, I’m just glad you’re OK.’ He unscrewed his pen lid and sighed. ‘Fourteen down. Atavistic. Seven letters. What is that, “primeval”? Does that fit?’

‘Jim could still be there, you know,’ I said. ‘In Luss. At the cottage.’

‘Yes, the thought had occurred.’ He peered up at me. ‘But I’m not sure you’ve quite reasoned that one out in your head, Ellie. Keep resting. Let that thiamine do its job.’

‘I need to get back to that pier,’ I said. ‘I left something there. It’s important.’

He ignored me. ‘“Primeval” seems to work. Seven down: Whittles. Six letters.”’

‘Victor, I need to go back.’

‘Yes, I heard you,’ he said, filling in the blank spaces. ‘“Carves” seems to be right, but that means I’ve got the other letters wrong.’

‘Victor.’

He crossed his legs, eyeing me over his lenses. ‘I really don’t think going back there will help you. It’s better you keep thinking ahead. Rest now and we’ll be driving home by tomorrow morning, all being well.’

‘It’s important to me — I need to find it.’

‘You aren’t listening now, Ellie.’

‘Please. If you come with me, you’ll understand why.’

‘Sit back and relax. We aren’t going anywhere.’

‘But I was painting again,’ I said. ‘I really was painting.’

‘You never had a problem painting, as I recall,’ he said. ‘Stopping was the issue.’

‘Well, I finished my mural.’

This loosened something in him. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Yesterday you were under a pier.’

‘Before then. Please, Victor. You have to drive me back there.’

He pulled at the grey of his sideburn. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I left it on the beach somewhere. It’s the best work I’ve ever done in my life. I can’t just leave it there.’

‘What’s it of, this finished picture?’

‘It’s abstract. You just have to see it. I can’t put it into words.’

‘Would there be ships in it at all?’

‘No, not a single one,’ I said. ‘It’s pure abstraction.’

‘And how exactly did you get it down there? If it’s half as big as the mural I saw in your studio, it’s—’

‘I cut it off the frame and rolled it up.’

‘Why?’

‘So I could carry it.’ I stared at him, pleading. ‘What does it matter, Victor? If you don’t take me there, I’ll find some other way. I’ll take the bus. I’ll walk. Isn’t it better you come with me?’

He shifted in his seat, folding his newspaper, casting it aside. ‘The ward doctor wants you here till morning. I can’t sign you out without his agreement.’

I could sense that he was wilting, so I kept on at him. ‘Just take me when they say it’s all right.’

He huffed. ‘I really must get back to London by the afternoon. I’ve appointments, other patients to see.’

‘Please, Victor. It’s important.’

‘I only planned on being here for one night.’

‘Then take me on the way home.’

‘You’re just like Jonathan, you know,’ he said. ‘I don’t respond well to this sort of pestering. It’s not how I prefer to do things.’

But I could tell that he had already decided.

The road took a dip and we were passing by the loch almost at the level of the shore. Boats and bright red buoys were moored out there in fitful patterns. Dinghies, sloops, and cruising yachts, tarpaulined. I did not want to ask Victor if he could see them, too. I just let them smear out behind the thickening treeline. One more turn and we approached a sign that welcomed us to Luss. ‘You’d better direct me from here,’ he said.

We went on, past low stone cottages, slate roofs, farm walls shaped like pommel horses, barbed-wire fences. We left grassland behind us, firs and oaks and chestnuts, ivy-coated monsters. The hummocks bulged in the dimness, patchy brown and misted under clouds. ‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘Everything’s how I remember it.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘It’s not the place I thought it was, that’s all.’

‘I don’t get what you mean.’

‘I know you don’t, Victor. It’s OK that you don’t.’

The stuccoed barns of the Colquhoun Arms were on our left now. I told Victor to go right, and, braking quickly, turning, we came along the road that Geoff Kerr had brought me down after the funeral. Quaint beige cottages with steaming chimneys on both sides and so much green. Up ahead of us: the pier. A shingle beach and placid water. A vast sky darkening above the frosted hills on the far side of the loch. It was familiar and yet somehow meaningless to me, this scenery. A backdrop to a play I had not seen.

‘You ought to park up,’ I said.

Victor rolled us slowly to a stop. We were right beside the pier now and I still felt so removed from what lay beyond the windscreen. I tried to think back to the night that I had left this place for Portmantle — when Jim had walked me to the bus that would carry me to Balloch. The way I still imagined it, I had travelled on to Glasgow, taken the train to catch a ferry at Dover, on to Calais, on to Paris, on to Milan, through Belgrade and Sofia, and into Istanbul. I could remember everything about that journey: from the noises of the Gare de Lyon to all the speckled china in the train carriages and the brief conversations I had held with other travellers. But the winter gloom of Luss was somehow less substantial in my memory.

I left the car and Victor trundled behind me. There was a wood-panelled building at the nearside of the pier and a hard-worn boardwalk ranging out into the loch. The water was clear enough in the shallows to see the pebble-bed and, further out, it creased and eddied as though stirred by something deep beneath. I came sideways down the steps and onto the shingle. There was a hollow underneath the pier’s stilts, and I got to my knees to search around in all the sand and grit and goose muck, one-handed. My sling pulled at my neck. ‘Can you tell me what I should be looking for?’ called Victor from behind me.

‘It’s like a tube, about eight or nine feet long. Wrapped up in black plastic sheeting.’

‘That shouldn’t be hard to miss.’

I scoured the damp and shadowed ground on both sides of the stilts. ‘Well, it isn’t here,’ I said.

Victor’s hands were in the pockets of his coat. He was staring left and right along the shore. ‘This beach runs all the way round. It’s miles.’

‘It can’t be far from here.’

‘Let’s try that way.’ He pointed south.

‘The cottage is the other way. It’s more likely to be north.’

‘If you say so.’

‘No, you’re right. The current might have washed it further out.’

I went south, combing the shoreline with my eyes, until the beach thinned out and there was nowhere left to walk. Nothing was floating on the loch that I wanted to see. ‘Let’s head back,’ I said, and Victor tracked my footsteps quietly. He walked a few yards behind, observing my behaviour, only partially invested in my search. ‘How long?’ he called.

‘Huh?’ I was looking north along the beach towards the pier again.

‘How long until you give this up?’

‘You could help me, you know, instead of hoping I’ll fail.’

‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Let’s speed this up, Ellie. It’s getting late.’

But Victor did not understand that darkness was our ally. If the plastic had ripped back from the roll, the gleam of the paint would vent out. We might catch a glimpse of blue somewhere in the pitch-black night and follow it.

I peered down at the shingle, looking for a knoll or a raised edge where the mural might have been covered over, buried. There was nothing. I zigzagged up and down, checking the pavement side of the beach, walled off by cobbles. Nothing.

We reached the pier again and I checked through the windows of the wooden outhouse to see if it had been found and left there, leaned up in a corner as lost property. But no. It was only a closet of boxes.

Victor had stayed on the bank, propped against the bonnet of his car. He looked at his watch. ‘You haven’t checked up there,’ he said, thumbing north. ‘I’ll wait for you. My shoes are full of stones.’

I went down the slope, along the strip of shingle. A few small dinghies were moored in the shallows. There were four of them, differently coloured and named, with mainsails scrolled around their willow masts, tied off. All but one of them was tarpaulined at the stern.

Beside me, a partition of green hedgerows ran most of the way along the beach. Above that, a hummock bristling with tall trees. Cottages dotted the lip of the shore. I knew that Jim Culvers was not waiting for me in any of them. I understood that he had left me. I did not know precisely when, but he was gone. And there was nothing on the waterline for me to salvage, nothing that I hoped to see. So I turned back. Each dragging footstep on the shingle seemed to drain the spirit from me.

Victor was already in the car. The windows were fogging and I could hear the throbbing voices of the radio news. He wound down the window as I approached. ‘Forecast is for thunder and lightning this evening,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be off the motorway by then, if I can help it.’

I nodded, traipsing over. I did not want to think about the journey back to London or returning to my empty flat.

He turned the engine on. My shoulder was aching. But then, coming up the slope, I took one last glance towards the pier and I noticed something bobbing and scraping underneath the stilts, halfway along it. A bulky cigarette shape.

I went rushing for the boardwalk, forgetting the pain.

‘Ellie!’

Reaching the middle of the pier, I lay on my good side, got on my back.

‘Ellie!’

I slid under the railing.

Victor caught up with me. ‘You’re going to do yourself another injury like that. Get away from there.’

The peaceful loch was rippling under me. My legs were dangling over the boards.

Victor must have seen it in my eyes then, because he came lurching forwards with his arms to grapple me. But I was already dropping.

Two

Victor waded to the shore, flinging water from his arms, peeling off his coat. His shirt was rinsed, translucent, and I could see the matted hairs of his torso underneath it. He had taken off his glasses to protect them, and was spitting the loch from his mouth, wringing his eyelids clear. I was on the gravel with my canvas roll beside me. I was soaked and tender, slingless. The pain was stabbing through my side, but I had enough relief in me to smother it. Victor had no such consolation — only the sight of me, safe and unharmed. ‘One of these days,’ he said, dripping at my feet, ‘I’m finding you a different therapist.’ He stooped to get his breath back, wheezing. ‘What the hell are you trying to do to me? I’m fifty years old, for crying out loud. I’m not cut out for this.’

I was panting too much to hold my smile. ‘You didn’t have to come in after me.’

‘I bloody well slipped trying to reach you.’

‘I told you I was fine.’

‘How was I supposed to know that? I thought you were crying out for help.’ He lowered himself to the gravel next to me, shivering. The mangy roll of tape and plastic lay between us. He glanced down at it. ‘So that’s it, is it? Doesn’t seem like much from here.’

My hand was still gripping it. ‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts.’

‘Well, that’s not always true, believe me. That thing better be worth all the trouble. There aren’t many paintings I’d jump into a freezing lake for.’

‘I thought you slipped.’

He cornered his eyes at me.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Well, about bloody time.’ He patted his hands clean of stones, hooked on his glasses. ‘My kingdom for a towel.’

‘We can dry off by the fire,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘In Henry’s cottage. It’s five minutes that way.’

He looked north. ‘That might not be such a bad idea. My teeth are chattering.’

‘I can hear them.’

He gripped his jaw to quell it.

‘It’ll be worth it when you see it,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘I just want to get dry and get home.’

‘It’s yours — the painting. I’m giving it to you.’

He rubbed his knees. ‘That’s all very sweet. But I don’t want it. Even if it’s worth a fortune, I’m not taking your work.’

‘You kept that portrait I did of you.’

‘That had diagnostic value.’

‘So does this, probably. I wouldn’t have found it without you.’

‘Well, I’ve already diagnosed you once, and that didn’t turn out very well, did it? We’re not great adverts for the wonders of psychiatry.’ He stood up, extending his arm to me. ‘Come on. Let’s find somewhere to dry off and then we’ll hit the road.’

I let him haul me up.

We walked along the shore, the pair of us doused and shuddering. The canvas sagged and drooped in my clutches. ‘You’d better check that’s actually what you think it is,’ Victor said. ‘People dump all kinds of stuff in lakes, you know.’

But I could tell from the configurations of the tape around it, from the way that I had tucked and joined the pieces over its ends, that my mural was inside. The outer plastic was torn up; the inner layers still seemed to be intact. ‘I just hope it isn’t ruined,’ I said. ‘If the water’s really got to it, I might as well throw it back in.’

‘It’s probably more soaked than we are.’

‘I knew you’d find a way to cheer me up, Victor.’

‘You’re lucky I’m still talking to you. I’ve not been this drenched since I set the hotel sprinklers off on my honeymoon.’ He snorted a laugh from his nostrils. ‘One cigar. I’ve had one cigar in my life and I nearly set fire to the whole bloody building.’

And the thought of this did cheer me up somehow. We trudged along the beach, with the dregs of the daylight waning above us, and the silhouettes of dinghy-masts scratched darkly on the sky.

When we reached the nettled pathway to the cottage, Victor hung back. There were no lights on inside and the mossy roof was sagging ominously in the middle. The chimney had crumbled off. One of the windows had a brick-sized hole in it. The general impression of the place amidst the gloom was of a shipwreck. I pushed on, through the high weeds and grass. Part of me was still hoping to find Jim coming through the woods with a basket of fresh pickings. Part of me was thinking of Portmantle.

The front-door fixtures were corroded shut, so I led Victor round the side, into the thicket of the garden. There was a rusted oil drum lying in the nettles. The back door was unlocked and there must have been a shilling or two still left in the meter, because the bulb blinked yellow as I turned on the switch. The kitchen sink was stacked with unwashed crockery, and all across the table there were stale food scraps, tea left mouldering inside cups. It was colder in than out. The room had the upsetting reek of sour milk and Victor covered his mouth. ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘All the medication in the world couldn’t make me put up with this mess. You’d have to hold me here at knifepoint.’

But this was not where I had really been. This was just the place my body had been ghosting.

I laid the mural across two of the kitchen chairs and went to find the matches in the drawers — there were none. Victor had already parted the beads in the doorway and was looking through into the lounge. He turned the lights on and, going through, said, ‘Well, this is one way to live, I suppose.’

I followed after him.

A mattress was spread out by the fire, covered in dirty blankets that looked more like decorator’s dustsheets. The fireplace was crammed with singed paper and splinters of pine cones. The curtains were taped around the window frame. A fold-up table was loaded with rags and hardened tubes of paint, jars of briny water and murky bottles of linseed oil. There was a scattering of flora all across it and the floor, and a bucket of mulched pink petals, soaking. ‘That’s all Jim’s stuff,’ I said. ‘Or it was Henry’s. I can’t tell the difference any more.’

I found matches by the hearth and crouched to light some of the kindling scraps I found left in the scuttle. ‘Is there any paper over there that I can burn?’ I said.

But Victor’s mind was on something else. He was standing, cross-armed, by the wall at the far end of the room. ‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Come and see this.’

‘I thought you wanted to get dry,’ I said.

‘Just come and look.’

I left the kindling fizzling out and went to him. ‘Honestly, we’re going to catch pneumonia if I don’t get this lit.’ And, when I gazed towards the aspect of the wall that so fascinated him, I saw that it was pasted with images — they were glued right onto the plasterwork. Vivid colour photographs showing lush greenery, white houses glinting on a summer waterfront, men driving horses and carriages, two enormous buildings nestled in dense pines. I stepped closer, near enough to read their printed captions in the borders:

The only cars allowed on the islands are police and utility vehicles. Instead, there are horse-drawn carriages known as phaetons (‘faytons’ in Turkish). .

‘National Geographic, if I’m not mistaken,’ Victor said. He walked towards the window, where there was another workbench of materials. I could not take my eyes from the wall. ‘You seem to have given my exercise some thought. Perhaps too much so.’

Heybeliada’s most visited attraction is the nineteenth-century Aya Triada Manastiri, a Greek Orthodox school of theology, which looks down over the island from its northernmost peak. .

‘At least now I understand what you were trying to tell me in that message. My secretary couldn’t figure out what you were saying. She thought she heard “Istanbul”, but it wasn’t the best of connections. You were rather garbled at the end.’ Victor was a blur now in the fringes of my vision. ‘I thought you said able something, table something, maple something. I should probably get my hearing tested.’

On the south side of the island is Heybeliada Sanatorium, a refuge for TB sufferers at the farthest point of Çam Limani Yolu.

I felt so numbed. There must have been ten or twenty of these images, cut from the magazine and glued down flat. And, surrounding them, I could see lines of my own handwriting in pencil. Ribbons and ribbons of scrawled text curving and bending all along the wall. I had copied it straight from the magazine, verbatim.

‘The Heart of the Princes’ Islands’ by scratched out of the wall with a blade. We know little about the island before we step off the ferry, but there are some things we have researched. This is as much a scouting mission as it is a relief exercise. Heybeliada lies twelve miles off the coast of Istanbul, the second largest of the islands that the locals know as Adalar. It is crowned by two steep forested hills to the north and south and its middle section bows into a plane of settlements where the natives live and ply their trades. Much of the work is seasonal. In the winter, the squat apartment blocks and rangy wooden houses stand vacant and unlit, but when the bright weather comes again they fill up with summering Istanbullus, who sit out on their fretwork balconies, sunbathe on the rocky beaches, flock upon the shining Marmara like gulls, and drink merrily on their roof-decks until dark. The Turkish meaning of its name — Saddlebag Island — evokes its shape at sea level. It is far up on the south-eastern peak, amidst the dense umbrella pines and pomegranate trees, that the Heybeliada Sanatorium is positioned. And we are—

I heard a noise like buttons rattling in a jar. Victor was holding a glass medicine bottle with the label ripped off. He shook it and shook it and the tablets clattered weakly inside. ‘I don’t know how many were in here to begin with — maybe sixty or so,’ he said, and tipped out a mound of them into his palm, ‘but this suggests our toxicology’s been off the mark.’ He picked up a tablet and examined it. ‘It’s Tofranil, no question. Looks to me like you stopped taking them. So, whatever’s been showing in your blood-work, I wouldn’t think it’s necessarily from these.’

‘Then what?’

‘You tell me.’ He brushed past me. ‘Could be the oil paints. They’re full of chemicals. Or the turps, maybe.’

‘I don’t know.’

My eyes turned back to the wall, picking up a section further down:

We have been advised to chart a horse-drawn fayton when we leave the ferry port. The best way to reach the sanatorium is from the east, via a dirt road that leads up to a spear-top fence, cordoning off the property. On the way up, we pass warning posters stapled to the trees along the slope: DIKKAT KÖPEK VAR /BEWARE OF THE DOG. But we are not worried.

The sea view from the promontory affords tuberculosis patients an abundance of fresh air and serenity, removed from the hustle and the noises of the city. Built when the disease was at its most widespread and fatal, the sanatorium was opened in 1923, a year after the founding of the Turkish Republic. Previously under the ownership of Greek authorities, the building was revamped under the aegis of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey—

It was a complete transcription of the entire article, scribbled from the ceiling to the skirting boards. On and on it went in detail:

Most of the patients are students from all over Anatolia who came to Istanbul for their education at the city’s universities. They take in the sea air in the daytime and engage in debates at night over çay and salep. Friendships boost morale amongst the patients and so do activities—

Victor was busy at the hearth. He tore something, and struck a match, and then I heard the sudden puff of an ignition.

Concerts are organized and films are projected for the residents in the day room twice a week. The sanatorium is also equipped with a rehabilitation centre, where local craftsmen such as Ardak Yilmaz (pictured right) are brought in to teach woodworking skills to patients. Although it has established a fine reputation over the years as a centre for thoracic surgery, the facility is now extremely underfunded and the chief doctor is concerned that a—

‘Come and get warm,’ Victor said. ‘It’s really getting going now.’ He was kneeling at the fireplace with both hands extended to the flames. The orange light dappled his face. He looked so entrenched in the glow of it, and I felt so cold and jittery, that I could not resist.

Kneeling beside him, I saw that he had ripped the topmost pages of another magazine and fed them to the fire. The uncomfortable dampness of my clothes began to bother me. We stayed there on our knees together for a while, saying nothing, letting our bodies gently warm through. And then I said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll get over this, Victor.’

He kept his eyes upon the flames. ‘You’ll be all right. We’ll work through it together.’

‘I’m not sure I can go back with you. Not yet. I always thought that I could live without anything as long as I had painting. Now look at me — I’d be better off in a factory, doing something useful. I think I’d be much happier that way.’

Quite unexpectedly, he placed his arm around me. ‘Elspeth,’ he said, ‘you are twenty-six years old and you are still alive. And the sun will rise tomorrow, as it always does. That’s all you have to think about for now.’ I wanted to lean my head on his shoulder, but I could not get past the pain. ‘What happened to your sling?’

‘It came off in the loch.’

‘Then I’d better make you another.’ He reached onto the bed and removed the grubby slip from the pillow. He ripped along the seam, folded a triangle, and put my arm inside it, knotting it at the back of my neck. ‘You have people who care for you. Remember that,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known Dulcie Fenton get sentimental about anyone. But she is genuinely fond of you — and not just because she has a vested interest.’

‘Well, she tries to make it seem that way, at least.’

‘No, I think it’s quite sincere. She must have called me twenty times, asking if I’d heard from you.’

‘Worried about the show, most likely.’

‘At first, maybe. She said that you’d written to her. Gave me an earful about it, actually — I told her you would be OK travelling on your own, that we shouldn’t be alarmed. But even after your show went on, she was still calling about you. I think she even phoned your mother a few times. Everyone said the same thing. Travelling. None of us knew where to look for you.’

He tore off another page of National Geographic, balled it up, and threw it on the fire. I could not tell what time it was. The mantel clock was smashed and buried outside. But it did not matter. We were drying out, slowly and steadily, and soon we would get back to the car and he would drive me all the way to Kilburn, where nobody was awaiting my return.

‘So what do we do now? Go back to having sessions once a week?’ I said. ‘Pretend this didn’t happen?’

‘If you feel that’ll help.’

‘I doubt I could afford you any more.’

‘Nobody can. After this, my fees are tripling. I’m pricing myself out of the psychiatry game entirely.’

‘That’s probably for the best,’ I said. ‘You’re a bad influence on people.’

‘Precisely. The world is better off. I’m going into show business.’ He grinned. ‘Jazz clarinet has always been my calling. There has to be a career in it for me.’

I smirked.

‘You think I’m joking. I’ve actually got—’ The bulb went off above us, and the kitchen light had blinked out, too. ‘I suppose that’s the last of the meter,’ Victor said. ‘We ought to be making tracks. Are you dry yet?’

The hospital had given me back my wretched painting clothes: a paint-smattered flannelette blouse and stiff cotton trousers. They were grimy and still damp, but I felt much warmer now. ‘Not quite,’ I said.

‘We’ll put the blowers on in the car.’

He helped me up. The flames gave off the last remaining light inside the cottage. It quavered on the floor and our moving bodies flashed and dulled it. Victor reached down for the bucket of mulched petals. Lifting it, he sniffed the liquid to make sure it was not flammable, and, when he was satisfied, he came and threw it on the flames. They spat and sizzled into blackness, and gave off the smothered scent of a dud firework. For a second, it was so dark that I could not see where Victor was standing. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘I’ve got the matches in my pocket.’ And I heard him get them out and fumble with them. But before he could strike one, the far end of the room brightened, swelling with a pale blue light. I could see Victor’s outline now before me, burnished like the moon. ‘What is that?’ he said.

He went after it, walking into the blue glow on instinct: a moth in the tow of a porch light. I trailed after him. Beyond the hallway was the storeroom that I had once cleared out with Jim. The door was shut but there was a clear blue eking out from the gaps around the frame, between the hinges. Victor looked at me, slightly fearful. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Nothing can harm you.’

‘What can’t?’

He was dithering now, so I twisted the handle and showed him inside.

All he said was: ‘Jesus, Ellie.’

The walls were banked with wooden painting boards, turned inwards — there must have been over a hundred. Victor hardly paid them any mind. He was staring at the gleaming garland by the water boiler. It was hanging from the clothes-rail at the back end of the room. As he approached it, the radiance of the mushrooms was so strong that his whole body seemed floodlit. He moved even closer, shielding his eyes. ‘What are they?’ he said, clasping one of them in his fingers. ‘They’re unbelievable.’ But I did not answer. I was moving for the door, breaking through the hallway, through the lounge, and swinging back the kitchen beads. Victor did not call after me. He was transfixed by the shine.

Now the kitchen sink was faintly humming blue as well. Drips of the pigment had hardened on the edges of the mixing slab that lay inside the basin; flecks of it were on the handle of the muller, drying on the rack beside it. I felt a prickling elation, scoring along my spine.

With my good arm, I cleared everything from the table, sending food and dishes careening, smashing. I picked up the mural and laid it there, dropping it to the surface like a cut of meat. With my sore nails I picked at all the tape along the corners and the seam. I pulled at the plastic and lifted it away. There was a blush of pallid light. The canvas unfurled. It spread across the table, moist in my grip. It spilled over the edges, kissed my boot caps.

Victor clattered through the beads. He stood at the threshold, dazed. Three blue circles bloomed upon his lenses and I could not see his eyes behind them. I thought he was about to speak, but he stopped himself. He moved slowly to the canvas, knitting his hands behind his head. It was a gesture of surrender. He did not ask me any questions. All the darkness in the room was painted out.