The Muse

10

The first story I ever published in England appears on pages seventy-four to seventy-seven of the London Review of October 1967. It was called ‘The Toeless Woman’, and they even paid someone to draw an accompanying illustration. They missed the e off the end of my first name, so it looks like my father wrote it. I still have two copies of that particular edition — the one that I’d purchased myself, and the other I’d posted to my mother in Port of Spain, and which was returned to me years later, after her death.

My mother had annotated her copy with the words ‘My girl!’ and to my amusement, added the missing e in biro. Years later, at her funeral, my second cousin Louisa told me that Mrs Bastien had passed that Review round all her friends like a one-woman lending library, strictly insisting that they could only have an evening with it each. I think more people in Port of Spain read that story than in the literate sections of London town. What they made of it, I’ll never know.

It was Quick, of course, who was to blame — or thank — for the story finding its way to the editor. I think she relished the symmetry of it — how, after my leaving the raw thing on her desk, she was able to leave a copy of the magazine containing it on mine. I thought it was odd, how she had sat in her garden and exhorted me to disregard the opinions of others, only to go and submit my work for mass approval.

‘Find page seventy-four,’ she commanded, scratching aggressively at the base of her neck. I obeyed her, sitting in that viewless room in the Skelton, wishing she would go away, so that I could be in private to study this vision of my almost-name on the page. But Quick did not leave, and I had to hold in the tsunami of sound I wanted to unleash across the square, a cry of satisfaction so loud it would have travelled over the rooftops to the coast of Kent. My father’s name, Odell Bastien, his daughter’s writing underneath. Next time, I swore there would be no missing e. But for now, it would do. The words, at least, were mine.

Quick smiled, and the effect on her gaunt face was transformative: gleeful, youthful, briefly illuminated with pleasure. She was dressed that day in a dark-green pair of trousers, slightly flared, and a pussy-bow silk blouse with a seasonal repeating pattern of brown leaves. I noticed the slight sag of the material on her thighs; she was definitely thinner. ‘It was an excellent story,’ she said, ‘so I sent it in. I even got you a fee. Thirty pounds.’

‘Thirty pounds?’

‘I hope that was all right. You don’t mind I went ahead?’

‘I don’t know how to thank you. Thank you.’

She laughed, sitting down opposite me, fumbling in her trouser pocket, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag. ‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. ‘It was a fantastic read. Did you base it on something that happened at Dolcis?’

‘Sort of.’

She gazed at me. ‘How does it feel, to be a published writer?’

I looked back down at the page; the ink that couldn’t be rubbed away, the deceptive permanence of the paper. I felt exalted, my mind a cathedral, with an actual congregation who wished to visit my altar. ‘Incredible,’ I said.

‘You’d better write some more,’ she replied. ‘Keep going at it. It seems to work.’

‘I will. Thank you, thank you again.’

She went to the window, cigarette in hand, and looked down at the alley where the smokers gathered. I couldn’t imagine her mixing with them, a bird of paradise amongst the canaries. ‘Would you have let me look at it,’ she asked, ‘if you’d known what I might do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was a good question.

‘I wondered. Anyway, you’ve got a terrible view here. Did Pamela choose this room? We can get you a nicer one.’

‘I’m fine, thank you. A nice view would probably distract me from my work.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘How puritanical.’

Quick could tease me as much as she wanted; I didn’t care. I was published. She remained at the window, her back to me again. ‘How about Reede’s news on Mr Scott’s painting, eh? He’s looking very pleased with himself. Looks like we are going to have an exhibition. He wants to call it “The Swallowed Century”. But we cannot exhibit only one painting.’ I could hear the disdain in her voice. Her body was slightly curled over, as if she was shielding a ball of pain.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

She turned. ‘No? Is everything all right between you and Mr Scott?’

‘Yes. No. Just a misunderstanding.’

‘I see.’ She straightened up, leaning against the wall. ‘Want to talk about it?’

‘There’s nothing much to say.’ Quick fixed her gaze on me, so reluctantly, I went on. ‘I went to his mother’s house, in Surrey.’

‘Nice?’

‘Nice. We had dinner. And then afterwards, he told me he loved me. And I didn’t say it back. And it all went wrong from there. I haven’t spoken to him for three weeks.’

Quick inhaled thoughtfully on her cigarette. ‘No harm done. I saw the way he looked at you. You’ve got him in the palm of your hand.’

‘I don’t think so. I wasn’t very polite.’

‘Odelle, you don’t have to say, or do, anything you don’t want to. I don’t suppose he loves you for your politeness.’

‘But he hasn’t called. I haven’t seen him.’

‘Does that bother you?’

I was astonished at the tears pricking my eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘Then it’ll work itself out. Don’t go flailing back in. Never helps, in my experience. Did you stay long in the house?’

‘A few hours.’

‘Big place?’

‘Fairly. I didn’t see much.’

I considered telling Quick about the pamphlet I’d smuggled out in my handbag, but something stopped me. Maybe it was my reluctance to look like a thief, but there was also something about the way Quick constantly hovered over the issue of Lawrie and the painting that made me wary. Given her attitude towards Lawrie, she might jump on anything to use against him — although what a long-forgotten pamphlet might mean in all this was anyone’s guess. Lawrie and I may not have been quite on speaking terms, but I didn’t want Quick to make him even more defenceless in the face of any attack.

‘Come and have dinner with me tonight,’ she said. ‘Let’s have champagne.’

‘Champagne?’

‘I’m feeling victorious. I’ve got a couple of lamb chops that need eating. And someone needs to give you a pat on the back.’

I hesitated. Being alone with Marjorie Quick was always a very intense experience, and after the last time in her garden, I didn’t know if I was up to it. But then I thought about another night in the empty flat, with only the crackle of the radio and my overly read books for company, and suddenly I didn’t want to be alone. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Shall we ask Pamela?’

‘She wouldn’t want to come. Besides, I’ve only got two chops.’

I felt I couldn’t insist, because it wasn’t my house, my dinner, my champagne. But I do remember thinking it would be no problem at all to pop to a butcher and buy Pamela an extra chop. Quick seemed keen to have me there alone.

‘Good,’ she said, taking my silence for assent. ‘That’s settled. See you later, Odelle. We can take a taxi home together. And well done again. I’m very proud.’

11

When I went to find Quick in her office at the end of the day, her door was closed. Voices were coming through the wood — hers, and that of Edmund Reede, more angry than I’d ever heard.

‘We should use these discrepancies as opportunities,’ he was saying. ‘Why are you undermining me, Marjorie?’

‘Edmund—’ she began, but he interrupted.

‘I’ve tolerated a great deal from you in the past, but your doggedness over this is ridiculous.’ There was a silence. Reede sighed. ‘You’ve seen the accounts, Marjorie. You’ve seen what’s happening to us. I just cannot fathom your reluctance. It’s a stunning painting. It has a story. It has a handsome young man on the end of it. Two, in fact, if you put owner and painter together. We’ll have a crowd; we might even have a sale. The Guggenheim are going to send me what they have, but there’s already so much here. The mystery of Robles — how did he die? Who ordered his death, and why?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with the painting, Edmund,’ Quick said.

‘I disagree. His personal tale reflects the international stage. It prefigures by less than a decade the vanishing of hundreds of artworks under Nazi rule, and, in many cases, their creators and families.’

‘But the art first, eh, Edmund?’

He ignored this reproof. ‘Robles is universal. When we tell the tale of this artist, we tell the tale of war.’

I heard the flick of Quick’s lighter. ‘I’m surprised you of all people want to tell the tale of war,’ she said. ‘I don’t see this painting as political at all.’

‘Look here, Marjorie, what’s the problem? We’ve always been frank with each other.’

‘Have we?’

‘Oh, come on. As frank as it was possible to be.’

Quick was silent for what seemed a long time. ‘There is no problem,’ she said. ‘It just isn’t political in the way you think it is. It’s not about war in the way you see it, Edmund. It’s not about the artist as a man. It’s about the canvas. Two girls facing down a lion.’

I was astonished at the way they were talking to each other, so fluid and intimate. Pamela said they had known each other for years, and it showed. It was almost fraternal, and he was talking to her much as he might talk to one of his friends at the club.

‘We’ll agree to disagree, Marjorie,’ Reede said. ‘As we have done for longer than I care to remember.’

I could hear Reede moving towards the door, so I ran back along the corridor to my own desk, waiting instead for Quick to come and find me. It seemed that Quick had capitulated — to what exactly, I was not sure. She was resistant to the idea of an exhibition — but the true focus of her reluctance, this wavering derision and fear, was still not clear to me. It seemed that she was placing herself in opposition to whatever Reede thought philosophically about the painting, more than she was against the idea of actually exhibiting it.

Quick indeed turned up at my desk shortly after, looking drawn and upset. ‘Ready?’ she said. ‘There’s a taxi downstairs.’

We walked past the reception desk together. I glanced at Pamela, and saw the confusion in her face. I was surprised to feel that I was betraying her, going off with Quick like this, when Pamela worked just as hard as me and had been here longer. But I couldn’t turn back. I was too drawn to Quick’s enigma, too determined to find out what was really going on.

*

After our dinner, Quick invited me into the sitting room at the front of the house. She lowered herself into a sleek grey armchair, its wooden arms carved like the strings of a harp. Everything she owned, apart from the gramophone, seemed stylish and modern. ‘Keeping an old woman company,’ she said. ‘I feel guilty.’

‘Hardly old,’ I replied. ‘I was very happy to come.’

We hadn’t talked of much over dinner; a little about Pamela, Reede and the donors he had to court, how he hated flirting with old marchionesses holed up in damp castles, where God knows what treasures were rotting in the lofts. ‘You’ve known Reede a long time?’ I asked.

‘A long time. He’s a good man,’ she added, as if I’d said otherwise.

We were drinking brandies, a quiet piano concerto floating through from the gramophone in the other room. Quick closed her eyes, and she was so still, neither of us speaking, that I thought she’d dropped off to sleep, the glow from the electric table-light beside her turning her face orange. She didn’t strike me as the kind of person to invite a guest over and then fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. She was in her fifties, not her nineties, but it was peaceful to watch her in repose and I didn’t wish to disturb. I wondered why she was so interested in me — placing my story in the magazine, the invitations to lunch, the solicitous questions over Lawrie and my future.

The electric fire was switched on, although it was a mild October. Quick even had on a shawl. I felt the brandy overheating my body and thought maybe I should leave, and I was on the point of rising from my chair when Quick said, her eyes still closed — ‘Did you ever talk to Lawrie Scott about his mother?’

I sat back down. ‘His mother?’

Her eyes snapped open and I saw their leonine intent. ‘Yes. His mother.’

I thought about the suicide, and realized that it might have taken place in one of the very rooms I’d wandered through. I suddenly missed Lawrie. I wanted us to start again — a trip to the cinema, a walk in the park — but I had no idea how on earth to make it possible. I couldn’t let him float adrift as well as Cynth.

‘He didn’t talk about her at all,’ I lied.

‘Then he must be thinking about her an awful lot. I’d lay money on it, if I were a betting man. Grief’s a pressure cooker if you don’t deal with it. One day, you simply explode.’

‘Do you?’

She drained her brandy glass. ‘Things crumble. Bit by bit. They shift, you don’t notice. Then you notice. Jesus Christ, my legs are broken but I never moved my feet. And all the time, it’s been coming towards you, Odelle — orchestrated in the hearts of strangers, or a God you’ll never meet. Then one day, a stone is hurled — and by accident or design, that stone hits the car window of a powerful idiot who wants revenge, or who wants to impress his mistress, and — whoosh — the foot soldiers move in. The next day, your village is burning down, and because of stupidity, because of sex, there’s a coffin for your bed.’

I couldn’t think how to reply to this. Sex, death, coffins — how many brandies had she had? I didn’t see what this had to do with Lawrie at all. I stared into the electric bars.

Quick leaned forward, and the arms of her chair creaked. ‘Odelle, do you trust me?’

‘Trust you with what?’

She leaned back again, visibly frustrated. ‘You don’t, then. If you did, you would have just said yes.’

‘I’m a cautious person. That’s all.’

‘I trust you, you know. I know you’re someone I can trust.’

I think I was supposed to be grateful, but instead I felt a simmering unease. The bars of the fire were making me hotter and hotter, and I was tired, and she was in a strange mood.

Quick sighed. ‘It’s my fault. For all my conversations with you, I’m probably even more guarded than you are.’

I couldn’t disagree with this, so I didn’t try and persuade her otherwise.

‘I’m not well,’ she said. ‘I’m not very well at all.’

It was cancer, she said. Late stage, pancreatic cancer with an inevitable outcome. My own body ached at these words, which was selfish, but entirely predictable. I assumed that the outrageous fact of her cancer had made Quick want someone at home with her — a desire which had possibly surprised her and made her even more brusque. Quick, who had been alone with her secrets for so many years, no longer wished to be alone. Perhaps submitting my story, and therefore making me obliged to her, was a baroque plan to satisfy her simple need for company? When life is running out, such decisions may not seem so invasive or dramatic, and you willingly commit. This was why she spoke to Edmund Reede with no fear of reprisal; she knew she was soon to be reprised entirely.

I do think, looking back, that Quick perhaps regarded me as the child she never had, as someone who would perpetuate her essence after death. She told me at our first meeting that I reminded her of someone she once knew. I suspect that person was the closest companion she ever had. I’ll never be sure of this, and she never mentioned a name, but her expression when she said those words makes me think that it was so. She looked at me tenderly, mingled with terror, as if to come too close would lose whatever she’d lost all over again.

Sitting in that overheated front room, I realized quite how thin she was, how tired. And although I probably thought it unfair that someone should suffer something like that alone, I don’t imagine I cried. Quick was not someone you would sob in front of unless you absolutely had to, and when it was a question of her own pain and loss, you might feel a monstrous booby to cry when she herself was dry-eyed, dragging on the cigarettes that were helping to kill her. She was a curio, out of her time, not given to standard emotion — and in her presence, you did what Quick did.

‘Well, say something,’ she said.

‘Does Mr Reede know?’ I asked.

Quick snorted. ‘God, no. And he’s not to.’

‘Does anyone else know?’

‘No one else, but don’t worry, I haven’t told you because I want you to be my nursemaid.’

‘Why have you told me?’

Quick reached for the brandy bottle and refilled her glass. ‘Do you know, I got my diagnosis the day you started at the Skelton?’

‘Goodness me,’ I said. I remembered Quick coming up to my desk that first day; her flushed face, the way she batted away the porter’s questions over her absence from work.

‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘A day of ups and downs. Death imminent, followed by Odelle Bastien.’

‘I can’t imagine I was much of a tonic.’

She lit a cigarette, the last of the packet. ‘You have no idea.’

I couldn’t help wondering how long she had left, but I didn’t want to ask if she knew, nor enquire about medications, or anything practical. It seemed too brutal, as if I was asking about her expiration date. She was still here, still vital, still mercurial.

In the silence between us, I reached into my handbag and handed over the art gallery pamphlet. I still wonder why I did it, even though it felt like a betrayal of Lawrie. I think it was the pride I felt, from knowing that Quick had confided in me. It was my consolation offering in return, even though I didn’t know if it was something she’d find useful.

She took it, almost as if she was expecting it. ‘This was in Lawrie’s house,’ she said.

‘How on earth did you know?’

‘You’ve been looking like you wanted to tell me something since the moment I mentioned your visit there.’

‘I didn’t know I was so obvious,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘You’re not that obvious. I’ve had lots of practice.’ She opened the pamphlet and placed it gently on her knees, her finger tracing the pencilled message, No Sign.. ‘Was there anything else with it?’ she asked.

‘No. Just odds and ends on a windowsill. Butcher’s bills, church service sheets.’

‘Church service sheets?’ she repeated, her eyebrow raised.

‘A carol concert, actually.’

‘I see.’

‘What do you think it means — where someone’s written No Sign.? The name of a painting?’

‘I imagine it’s simpler than that. Someone was looking for something, and they didn’t find it.’

‘You know what they were looking for, don’t you, Quick?’

She looked up at me, the electric fire turning her irises hazel. ‘I do?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s just — you’re very interested in Lawrie’s mother. And Lawrie’s painting.’

‘“Interested” is not the word I would use.’

Obsessed? Frightened? I thought. As if I would say those words to you. ‘Well,’ I faltered, sensing her stiffen, ‘you seem averse to the idea of exhibiting it.’

‘I’m not averse to the exhibition of that painting. I think everybody should see it.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘But that’s not what you said last time. You said Lawrie should take it home.’

She took in a deep breath. ‘Well. I’m not entirely happy with how Reede is planning to use it. Until we get more information from the Guggenheim institution, my doubts remain.’

‘What doubts are those?’

Quick’s face took on a haunted expression. I’d seen it before, through the keyhole at the Skelton, when Lawrie had returned to continue his discussions with Reede. Her eyes darted back and forth on the rug between us. She kept breathing in as if to speak, and not speaking. It was frustrating, but I knew that to speak myself might ruin the slim chance she would finally say something.

‘Isaac Robles didn’t paint that picture, Odelle,’ Quick said, her fingers tightening on the pamphlet.

My heart began to thump harder. ‘But he’s standing in front of it, in that photograph.’

‘So? I could go and stand in front of any number of artworks and be photographed. It doesn’t mean I made them.’

‘It was taken in his studio—’

‘Odelle, it’s not that I don’t believe he painted it. I know he didn’t.’

Her last four words sang through the air between us, and hit me in the stomach. Something shivered over me, and my skin turned to gooseflesh, the way it does when someone tells you the truth and you hear it with your body.

I must have looked dumb. ‘He didn’t paint it, Odelle,’ she repeated. Her shoulders sagged. ‘It wasn’t him.’

‘Then — who was it?’

My question ruined everything. Quick looked stricken, aged, weird. Looking at her, I felt a bit sick and scared myself, because she seemed terrified. ‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Should I call a doctor?’

‘No. It’s late. I’m fine.’ But I could hear that she was out of breath. ‘You should call a taxi. I have a number, out in the hallway. Don’t worry, I’ll pay.’

I rose, stumbling over the threshold of the front room into the cool darkness of the hall, where I switched on the light standing on the telephone table. There was no number to be seen. The house behind me was silent. I sensed a presence in the shadows, and my back prickled. I turned around and something was on the stairs, moving towards me. I gripped the edge of the table, as Quick’s cat emerged into the pool of yellow light, and sat very still before me, turning his green eyes. We regarded one another, only the faintest movement from his ribs dissuading me that he was stuffed.

‘Look in the drawer,’ Quick called in a ragged voice, and I jumped. ‘There’s an address book in the drawer. T for Taxi.’ I turned back to the lamplight, feeling foolish, praying that nothing else was waiting for me in the shadows beyond the cat.

I still don’t know whether what happened next was another of Quick’s plans — her, leading me deeper into the wood — or whether in her illness, under strong medication, she just hadn’t realized what I’d find.

I pulled her address book out of the drawer, where it lay amongst old maps and balls of string and unopened mousetraps. I flipped to find T for Taxi, and saw two things. The first; under S, in Quick’s flowing black nib, were written the words:

Scott — The Red House

Baldock’s Ridge

Surrey HAS-6735

And secondly, a small white letter, folded in two, and pressed between these pages.

‘Everything all right out there?’ Quick called.

‘Fine!’ My voice quivered. ‘Just getting it now.’

I looked at the Scott address in confusion. This entry might be a recent addition, of course — Quick undertaking some investigating of her own into Lawrie and the painting — and God knows it would not have surprised me. It was unbelievable that Quick might actually know the Scott family. And Lawrie didn’t seem to have recognized her, did he? He was far too convincingly bemused by Quick to be hiding the fact that he actually knew her. And yet, here was his family’s address. None of it made sense.

I opened the letter quickly, knowing I didn’t have much time. A thin slip of paper fell out from the fold and fluttered to the floor. I knelt to pick it up and read it, hunched in the semi-darkness, Quick’s cat still watching. It was a telegram, and my eyes bulged on the words. “DARLING SCHLOSS STOP,” it read: “VERY EXCITING PHOTOGRAPH STOP WE MUST BRING R TO PARIS-LONDON-NYC STOP LOVE PEG.” It was dated: “PARIS — MALAGA 2ND JULY 1936.”

I can see myself even now, kneeling like a sinner in Quick’s hallway, skin tingling with the twitch of connecting threads, a knowledge just beyond my reach. Schloss. Harold Schloss? It was the dealer Reede had mentioned. What the hell was this telegram doing here, in Wimbledon, in Quick’s telephone book? Quick was in her living room, steps away from me, but there could have been a thousand miles between us.

I sat back on my heels, hoping time would stand still in order for me to think. Peg could be Peggy Guggenheim, R could be Robles; the date fitted, and it was sent to Malaga, where Reede said Robles resided. If this was real — and it looked real — then this was a piece of correspondence Reede might kill for. And here it was, out of Quick’s drawer and in my hands.

‘Odelle?’ she called, and I heard the note of panic in her voice. ‘Are you summoning that taxi in Morse code?’

‘The line’s engaged. I’m just waiting,’ I called back. I placed the telegram on the table and picked up the letter. The date was 27 December 1935. I inhaled the scent of the old, thin paper. There was something familiar about it; but I couldn’t place it. It was addressed to a person called Miss Olive Schloss, at a flat in Curzon Street. It ran:

Further to your application to the Slade School of Fine Art, it is our pleasure to invite you to undertake the Fine Art degree course, commencing 14th September, next year.

The tutors were highly impressed by the rich imagination and novelty on display in your paintings and studies. We should be happy to have a pupil such as you, continuing the rigorous yet progressive tradition of the school —

‘Odelle.’ Quick was calling very sharply now.

‘Coming,’ I said. ‘There’s no answer.’

I began to refold the letter in haste, placing the telegram back inside it. I was on the point of reaching for the discarded telephone book, open on the Scott entry, when Quick came into the hall. I froze, the letter still in my hand. My face must have been a vision of guilt. The living-room light shone through the fabric of her blouse. She seemed so small, the outline of her ribcage far too narrow.

She looked at me — stared, actually — deep into my eyes. She reached out, took the letter and the telegram from my mesmerized grip, placed them in the telephone book and closed it. And then my realization came, and I saw in Quick’s face a younger woman smiling, a woman in a photograph, a moment of happiness as she clutched a brush. O and I. O, a full circle. O, for Olive Schloss.

‘You knew him,’ I whispered. She closed her eyes. ‘You knew Isaac Robles.’

The cat brushed against my legs. ‘I’d murder a cigarette,’ Quick said.

I pointed at the telephone book. ‘Who’s Olive Schloss?’

‘Odelle, would you go and fetch me some cigarettes?’

‘You were there, weren’t you?’

‘I’ve run out, Odelle, would you mind?’ She fumbled inelegantly in her pocket, and thrust out a pound note.

‘Quick—’

‘Go,’ she said. ‘There’s a shop just round the corner. Go.’

So I left, to fetch her cigarettes. Numb, I floated into Wimbledon Village to buy her a packet, and I floated back. And when I returned, the house was in complete darkness, the curtains drawn. The pamphlet I’d taken from the Scott house was on the step, weighted down with a stone. I put it back in my handbag and knocked and knocked, and called her name quietly through the letterbox.

‘Quick. Quick, let me in,’ I said. ‘You said you trusted me. What’s happened? Quick, who is Olive Schloss?’

There was only silence.

Eventually, I had to push the cigarettes through the door, and they landed lightly onto the mat on the other side. I pushed through her change also, as if I was throwing money down a wishing well that would never grant me any wish. Still there was no movement. I sat on the other side of that door for a good half an hour, my limbs going stiff. I waited for the sound of her footsteps, sure that Quick would give in to the craving of her nicotine and come for the cigarettes.

What was true, and what was I already beginning to concoct? It mattered greatly to me as to whether Quick had intended for me to find the clues in her telephone book, or whether it was a mistake. It seemed as if she had been deliberate about it — why else invite me here, and grill me about Lawrie, and the painting? Why else tell me to look up T for Taxi? Or perhaps it had been a genuine mistake, and I had stumbled across her secrets — and now my punishment was this silent, locked door.

Outside, I could hear car doors closing arrhythmically, and see the street lamps flickering to life. I didn’t want a policeman to catch me sitting there, so I got up, and walked away to the village high street to wait for a bus.

Whatever the truth was, Quick was now fragmented to me. The illusion of her perfect wholeness and easy glamour had been shattered by tonight. Despite her confession about her ill health, I realized I knew so little about her. I wanted to put her back together, to return her to the pedestal on which I’d placed her, but our encounter tonight would make that impossible. Now, when I thought about Quick, I couldn’t stop thinking about Olive Schloss.

My imagination was extravagant, and I believed that Olive Schloss was a ghost I might control. But had I turned back that night, and looked up at Quick’s window, I would have seen a silhouette, orchestrating my retreat.

XII

Women in the Wheatfield did sell, and it was a woman who bought it. Harold had sent a telegram to the post office in Arazuelo three days after his departure to Paris, and Olive went to fetch it. The buyer was called Peggy Guggenheim, and according to Harold, she was a rich friend of Marcel Duchamp and was thinking of dabbling in the art market.

‘So not a real collector,’ said Isaac.

‘Well, she’s got the money,’ Olive retorted.

Guggenheim purchased Isaac Robles’s painting at a fairly high rate for an unknown; four hundred French francs. To Olive, the sale of the painting was glorious, hilarious: it made no sense, and yet it did. It was as if Women in the Wheatfield was a completely separate painting from Santa Justa in the Well, whilst remaining exactly the same thing. The image was identical, it just had a different title and had been made by a different artist. She was free of identity, yet what came from her was valued. She could create purely, and also bear witness to the muddier yet heady side; the selling of her art.

Having had her father unwittingly sell one of her paintings, Olive could admit to herself that part of her plan to attend the Slade had been solely to spite Harold, to show him what he had overlooked. But the Guggenheim purchase had eclipsed this desire; it was both a grander personal validation, and a much more wonderful joke.

*

Soon after Harold’s telegram arrived with the news, Teresa began to have a dream that was strange for someone who had always lived in such a dry part of the land. It was dusk, and she was on the veranda, and the body of the murdered boy, Adrián, was lying out in the orchard. She couldn’t see much beyond the small lamps she’d laid out along the ground, only the eerie glow of his body. In his tatters of flesh, he began to rise up and move towards her — and yet Teresa couldn’t, or wouldn’t, flee, despite knowing that to stay would be her end.

Beyond the boy’s body she sensed an ocean, wide and black and churning, and she noticed what he did not — that a huge wave was coming, a looming wall of water, ready to lay waste to his life for a second time, and to wash hers away with a biblical magnitude. She could almost taste the salt in the air. Olive was screaming somewhere, and Teresa called out to her, ‘Tienes miedo?’ Are you scared? And Olive’s voice came floating back over the trees: ‘I’m not scared. I just don’t like rats.’

Teresa would wake at this point, just as the wave took Adrián’s body away. She’d had the dream three times, and it disturbed her not only because of the content, but because she never normally remembered her dreams, and this one was so easy to recall. Once, she would have told Isaac about it, in order to laugh with him at her imagination, but she didn’t much feel like sharing with him these days.

Throughout the end of February and into March, Harold remained in Paris on business, and so the women were alone in the house. Teresa began to long for Harold to come back, if only to fill the place with noise, his heavy English, even his whispered German. Too much was happening elsewhere, out of Teresa’s control. It felt as if she and Olive were orbiting each other, like opposing moons. Olive would go upstairs, claiming a migraine, or women’s pains. Teresa hoped she would be painting, but often Olive was nowhere to be found, at hours that normally coincided with Isaac’s return from his job in Malaga.

If Sarah wondered about her daughter’s sudden ill-health, these domestic absences, she wasn’t saying anything. But Teresa could sense a change in the other girl; how she had become more sure of herself since the sale of the painting. Olive was crackling with energy, and the effect was remarkable. The idea that she was suffering headaches was idiotic. Teresa would watch Olive, leaning up to inhale the burgeoning jacaranda, the honeysuckle, the roses come in an early spring, her finger gripping the stems so hard that Teresa worried they were going to snap. Olive, for her part, looked through Teresa as if she was a ghost.

As far as Teresa saw it, Olive was pouring herself away into Isaac. She wondered if Olive believed that she was drawing power from pretending to be him. Teresa wanted to shake her and say, ‘Wake up, what are you doing?’ But it was Teresa, not Olive, who suffered the bad dreams and painful days. She began to regret ever swapping the painting. She’d made a gamble and failed, sacrificing the only friendship she’d ever had.

Teresa had never missed a person before. It revealed a dependency within herself which outraged her. Olive’s diverted attention was a pulsing wound, a peculiar type of torture; the loneliness hard to quantify when the source of it was before her, walking up and down the staircase, or round the orchard, out of the front door and away. Teresa never knew when the next pang of it was going to hit. And when it did, it was as if the floor had fallen away and her heart sprang into her mouth, stoppering her breath — and there was no one to catch her as she stumbled to a hidden corner of the finca to cry. What had happened to her?

Alone in the cottage at night, Teresa would sit up in bed and move through the pages of the old Vogue like a child with a storybook, savouring each image and paragraph, underlining with her nail the words she didn’t understand. She ran her finger down the side of the model’s face, before lifting her pillow and slipping the magazine under, a perpetual love note to no one but herself.

Since the sale of the painting, Sarah was gloomy, too. She would lie on her bed, not speaking, watching the blue smoke of her husband’s cigarettes disappear towards the ceiling. The telephone would ring and ring, and she would never answer it, and she wouldn’t let Teresa pick it up either. Teresa thought it odd that Sarah would not lift the receiver, to see if it was her husband. She wondered then if Sarah knew full well it would be a different voice entirely; a woman’s voice, whispering in timid German.

Teresa could now see Sarah’s fault lines — the telephone left ringing, the champagne bottles empty by three in the afternoon, the uncracked spines of discarded books, the dark roots growing from her blonde head. She stopped dismissing them as rich women’s problems, and to her surprise, in her own pitiful state, began to feel pity. Life was a series of opportunities to survive, and in order to survive you had to lie, constantly — to each other, and to yourself. Harold had the motor car, the business, the contacts, the cities and spaces he inhabited, manifold and varied. Sarah, despite her obvious wealth, had just this one bedroom and her beauty, a rigid mask that was setting her into an existential rot.

‘I was the one who discovered him,’ Sarah said to Teresa. It was a late night, and Olive was upstairs. They could hear her, pacing back and forth. Despite everything, Teresa longed to go up there, to knock and be admitted, to see what Olive was painting. Forcing herself to stay put, she picked another camisole from off the floor.

‘I was the one who suggested Isaac painted us in the first place,’ Sarah went on. ‘And I get no thanks. Harold as usual takes the reins, riding off into the sunset. I don’t even get to keep the painting, because of course he has to go and sell it. He said, “Why would we keep it here, where only the chickens will see it?” Because it was a painting of me, for him, for Christ’s sake.’

Outside, the cicadas had started to rasp in concert, so aggressively that it sounded as if the grass was vibrating. Teresa marvelled that Sarah had managed to see herself in the images of Santa Justa in the Well. Couldn’t they all see that Olive’s painting was of the same woman, repeated twice, once in her glory and again in her despair? Perhaps, Teresa supposed, if you were determined to see yourself in a certain way, you would — however much the evidence presented otherwise.

‘It should have stayed with us,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s wonderful for your brother, of course, but it’s the principle of the thing. It was something he did for us. And Harold just hands it over to the highest bidder.’

‘Did Isaac accept your money, señora?’

‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘I did try. I hope he’s happy with Peggy Guggenheim’s, that’s all I can say.’

Teresa knew that Isaac had travelled to Malaga to pick up the money wired from Paris, and gone straight to the Workers’ General Union headquarters, donating two-thirds of it to pay for agitating pamphlets, clothes, an emergency fund for those laid off, and food. In some ways, you had to admire the efficacy of Olive’s plan, turning her painting into a political cause with her father the unwitting middleman. Isaac had kept the last third of the money, a fact which incensed Teresa. She’d told her brother to give it back to Olive, but he’d said that Olive wanted him to have it. ‘I have to eat,’ he’d said. ‘We have to eat. Or do you fancy eating rats this year?’

Rats. Was that why she’d been dreaming about rats?

‘Teresa, are you listening to me?’

‘Yes, señora,’ Teresa said, folding up the last of Sarah’s camisoles and placing them in the wardrobe drawer.

‘I was his inspiration.’

‘I am sure he is very grateful.’

‘Do you think so? Oh, Teresa. I wish something would happen. I’m really beginning to miss London.’

Teresa plunged her hands into Sarah’s drawer of satins and gripped her fists out of her mistress’s sight. Then go, and take me with you, she screamed silently, even though she knew this was an impossibility. For all the pity she showed Sarah Schloss, the woman would never do such a thing in return.

XIII

Her father’s absence made it easier for Olive to see Isaac, and they met several times a week, usually in the cottage when Teresa was in the finca working and Sarah was taking her afternoon rest. For days afterwards, Olive could almost physically summon the memory of their meetings, how it felt when Isaac entered her — the indescribable sensation of making space for him as he pushed deeper, and what she believed was his utter bliss, mirrored by that of hers.

And yet, she never felt sated. Her appetite was unstoppable, a revelation; and she felt so happy that here was something she could summon whenever she wanted, but which never ran out. She felt that he improved her, he made her the woman she was meant to be. And afterwards, at night, she would lock herself in her attic, and paint. She was growing ever more confident, and saw Isaac as her key. This was not something Teresa would ever be able to understand — Isaac as essential to her development as an artist. Olive couldn’t bear to look at Teresa’s mournful face, her little scowl. It was an energy the opposite of him.

The olive trees, lined in serried swoops on the hillsides, were greening. Along the road, oranges were coming into fruit, and Olive scratched her nails on the hard skin, and made a scar on the early citrus. It was fresh, it was perfect, the world was fresh and perfect. What next to paint? What next to do? Everything was possible. She was now the Olive Schloss she was always supposed to be.

When she reached the cottage, Isaac was reading a letter by the wood burner in the kitchen. She walked towards him to give him a kiss, but Isaac held the letter out and stopped her path.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘This is from Miss Peggy Guggenheim. Read it for yourself.’

Disconcerted, Olive took the letter, sat at the table, and read.

Dear Mr Robles,

Harold Schloss gave me your address. Forgive my forwardness, but I do believe that in these matters, honesty of expression is invaluable. I hope that you, as an artist relatively new to these transactions, would agree. For I have no wish to be a faceless ‘purchaser’ — your work has enlivened my wall, and I am enthralled.

Olive looked up at Isaac, her mind racing. ‘Oh, Isaac. How wonderful—’

‘Read on,’ he said.

When Schloss said he had something special to show me, I was dubious. Art dealers say this a lot to me, and I am quickly learning to develop a “sang froid” when it comes to such declarations. But Schloss was adamant; even coming to Paris specifically to show it to me. He said you were from the land of the Moors and the endless starlit skies, of Arabic palaces and Catholic forts, where blood is in the soil and the sun beats the sierra. Your dealer may sound a theatrical Viennese, Mr Robles, but I have come to entirely trust his opinion.

I am so delighted I agreed to meet. The enriching effects of your painting change by the day for me. My friends, who know better than me, call it a chimaera, a chameleon, an aesthetic pleasure and a metaphysical joy. I would rather say that Women in the Wheatfield is not an easy painting to categorize, and that this is a good thing. Whilst I admire your figurative stubbornness in a time of abstract shapes, this is not to say I think you are part of a reactionary, regressive force — far from it. You are up to something new.

The colors — where to start with your colors? I joked to Herr Schloss, “perhaps if we cut Mr. Robles open, we will find a rainbow hiding inside?” But guard your hands, Mr. Robles — I know we will only find out this rainbow through the process of more paintings.

The overall spirit of Wheatfield to me feels mythical and unbridled. Yet there is something fastidious in your animals, as if their lines have been rendered by a Renaissance master with a realist’s touch — and the fact you have painted oil onto wood compounds this sense of tradition. It is both dream and nightmare, irreligious yet striving for some faith. Yet the colors of the women — their expressions, the sweep of the sky — they seem derived from a somewhat more modern soul.

This is just what I take from it, of course. You must do as other great artists do, and ignore all “opinion”. Anyway, Mr. Robles: I love it; take or discard that as you will.

Schloss probably told you that I am planning to establish a gallery in London next year, and I have your painting intended for the opening exhibition. I do not know if I shall be able to part with it for public consumption — I do not want to share it and for now, it hangs on my bedroom wall. There is a call to intimacy within it, a personal struggle and defiance that seems so essentially human — dare I say, so essentially female — which has come to beat inside me like an extra heart.

But I want to be a good collector, you see — and good collectors always share. I would love for you to see it on the public wall.

I will never make an artist explain himself to me, unless he himself chooses to do so — so I ask here no questions of impulses, process, your wishes for what may come. But here is my one request. Schloss has assured me that there will be opportunities to see more work, and all I ask is that you consider me a supporter. To wit: when it comes to showing you to the wider world, I would love to be your first port of call. The first of anything is so often the most indefatigable.

Yours, in admiration,

Peggy Guggenheim

Olive started to laugh, giddy laughter — the laughter of someone whose lottery ticket has just come through; her winner’s mind already racing over the transformations of her life to come. ‘Oh, Isaac,’ she said. ‘You’ve made a new friend. She loves it.’

‘She is not my friend.’

‘Come on, Isa. There’s nothing to worry about.’

He went very still. ‘Is it true that your father has told her I have more paintings?’

Olive placed the letter slowly on the table. ‘I don’t know. That’s the honest truth. But it’s inevitable he would — he’s a dealer. It’s half his job. He got Guggenheim — hook, line and sinker — and he wasn’t going to let her go again without a little bait.’

He ran a hand over his face. ‘Did you know this would happen, Olive?’

‘No.’

‘Did you suppose it would happen?’

‘I didn’t think about it.’

‘You didn’t think about it.’

‘I — just knew I couldn’t tell my father that it was mine.’

‘But why not?’ He pressed his finger on the letter and she watched the skin turn white. ‘Would it not be easier than all this?’

‘Teresa put me on the spot. She interfered—’

‘Mr Robles does not have any more paintings,’ Isaac said, folding his arms. ‘That was the one painting he had. And now it’s sold. And now there are no more.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘So I am going to tell your father, the dealer, that I do not have time to paint. My work in Malaga does not give me the time for it.’

‘Peggy Guggenheim bought you, Isaac. Her uncle—’

He made a sound of disgust. ‘Listen to yourself. Peggy bought you.’

‘Peggy bought us. Don’t you see? We’re together in this. Your name, your face: my work.’

‘Olive. This is very serious. There is no balance.’

‘Just one more painting. One more.’

‘I have not enjoyed this. I said yes, like a fool. I was tired, I was stupid. And now you are like a drunk, searching for the hidden bottle.’

‘Blame your sister, not me. I never wanted this situation, but here it is.’

‘You could have stopped it. You didn’t want to.’

‘Did you give the money to the workers?’

‘I did.’

‘And didn’t that feel like you were doing something? Aren’t we all supposed to make sacrifices — isn’t that half your credo that you’ve been telling me since the day we met?’

‘And what sacrifice are you making, Olive? As far as I can see, for you this is a big joke.’

‘It’s not a joke,’ Olive snapped, pushing her chair back and facing him square-on.

‘You have been behaving as if it is.’

‘Why do you and your sister think I’m so stupid? Do you know how many artists my father sells? Twenty-six, last time I counted. Do you know how many of them are women, Isaac? None. Not one. Women can’t do it, you see. They haven’t got the vision, although last time I checked they had eyes, and hands, and hearts and souls. I’d have lost before I’d even had a chance.’

‘But you made that painting—’

‘So what? My father would never have got on a plane to Paris with a painting he thought was mine. I’ve lived with that realization for years, Isaac. Years and years, before you and I met. When I came down here, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life; I was lost. And then I met you. And then your sister — your interfering little sister, who perhaps did me the greatest favour anyone’s ever done, even though the truth of it is killing her — came along and changed everything. And I like it, Isaac, and I don’t want it to stop. One day I might tell him — just to see the look on his face. Maybe that will be a joke. But not now. It’s too late.’

‘Too late — for what? And please do not say it is because you want to carry on helping the Spanish working man. I do not think I can tolerate it.’

‘You were happy enough to take my money.’

‘Peggy Guggenheim’s money—’

‘Which was probably double your annual salary. Do you think I truly don’t care about what’s happening down here?’

‘You may care. But it is superficial. You do not understand it at the heart.’

‘But I’m the one who can actually pump proper money into it, not you. And who says you’re the expert?’ She threw up her hands. ‘All right, Isaac, I’ll tell you why I want to carry on — it is for me. But I can help some people along the way, at least. I want my paintings to be so valuable and so important that no one can pull them off the market and hide them away because — heaven forfend — they were painted by a woman. And it’s not just that. I’ve seen what success does to people, Isaac — how it separates them from their creative impulse, how it paralyses them. They can’t make anything that isn’t a horrible replica of what came before, because everybody has opinions on who they are and how they should be.’

‘I am glad you are being honest. But it would still have been the same painting if your name was on it,’ Isaac said. ‘You could have changed things.’

‘Oh, God, I could wring your neck. You’re so naive — it wouldn’t have worked out the same way at all. There’d be no flirty letter from Peggy Guggenheim, no exhibition in her new gallery on the basis of one painting, nothing like it. And it would take all my energy “changing things” as you put it, with none left over to paint — which is the whole bloody point of everything. The energy a man might use on — oh, I don’t know, making good work — you want me to use on “changing things”. You don’t understand, because you’ve lived your life as an individual, Isaac. And yet everything you do as a man is universal. So enjoy the glory, enjoy the money, and do it for me, because I certainly wouldn’t have been allowed.’

‘A cheque from Peggy Guggenheim isn’t going to change the political situation round here,’ he said. ‘You are the naive one.’

‘Well I’d rather be naive than boring. What’s wrong with the pair of you? I’ve given you this! You and Teresa are as bad as each other.’

‘My sister is angry with me,’ he said. ‘She’s right.’

‘Well she’s angry with me too. We’re hardly friends. It’s a mess. But let’s face it, when is Teresa not angry?’

This was a brief moment of unity, of levity, as they thought of Teresa and her scowling, her defiance, her sense of what was right, and her unorthodox ways of going about it. ‘I don’t think she considered any of this when she put my painting on the easel,’ Olive said. ‘She doesn’t know me at all.’

Isaac leant back in his chair and exhaled the moment of truce. ‘No. It did not go according to her plan. But she still idolizes you. And I think she knows you better than you know yourself.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That maybe, Olive, you didn’t want your painting to be so secret after all.’

She stared at him. ‘What?’

‘You let her into your bedroom. You showed her your paintings. Did you never wonder that my sister might skip ahead of you a few steps?’

‘I showed her my paintings as a friend.’

‘Teresa did not do this to you maliciously. Stop pretending that she has done you a harm.’

Olive slumped onto the table. ‘If you’re so worried about your sister’s feelings you should never have touched me in the first place. That’s what’s really bothering her. I don’t know why.’

‘Olive, you came to me — you wanted. . All right. How about we stop this, now?’

‘Olive lifted her head. ‘What do you want to stop?’

‘This. . lie. I feel I am deceiving your father—’

‘It doesn’t matter about him. He’s happy. He’s delighted. He’s sold a piece of art and he’s cultivating the reputation of a very promising artist—’

‘Who doesn’t exist.’

‘But the Isaac Robles we created — he exists.’

‘We are going round in circles.’

‘Just one more painting. One more.’

‘You are so bossy, Olive. So careless with other people’s feelings.’

‘Am I? What about you? You didn’t even want to kiss me when I turned up.’ They faced each other in silence. ‘Please, Isa. I know it’s a lot. But I’ve got a painting called The Orchard. We could give Peggy Guggenheim that.’

‘The more we play, the more dangerous this gets.’

‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’ Olive knelt down by Isaac’s side, her fists locked together in supplication, resting on his knee. ‘No one will ever know. Please, Isa. Please.’

He ran his hands nervously over his head. ‘What if Peggy Guggenheim wants to meet me?’

‘She’s not going to want to come down here.’

‘What if she invites me to Paris? She has already mentioned London.’

‘Then say no. Play the elusive artist.’

Isaac narrowed his eyes. ‘Now is not the time for English irony.’

‘No, I mean it. Isaac, please.’

‘What will you do for me?’

‘Anything you want.’

Isaac closed his eyes and drew his hand down his face again, as if he was washing away his thoughts. He lifted her from the floor and rose from the table, leading her across the kitchen towards his bedroom door. ‘One painting, Olive,’ he said. ‘And then — no more.’

XIV

Isaac demanded to see The Orchard before it was shipped to Harold’s office in Paris, ‘so at least I know what I am putting my name to.’ Teresa suggested that perhaps Sarah should view it too, because it would be useful for her to see Isaac with The Orchard. This would reinforce the general belief that the painting was his, should Sarah ever mention seeing it to her husband.

Olive was surprised at Teresa’s suggestion. ‘I suppose it’s a good idea,’ she said to her. ‘But I thought you didn’t want anything to do with this?’

Teresa merely shrugged.

‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ said Sarah, standing in front of the painting that afternoon in the front east room. Olive scuttled away from it — rather like a crab, it seemed to Teresa — running from a great wave, unable to put her head out of her shell. Her confident attitude had evaporated, and she sat herself in her father’s armchair to watch her mother. Teresa took in the vision of Sarah’s red woollen trousers, the deep blood shade against her creamy skin; Sarah had clearly rallied herself. ‘It’s so like our orchard,’ she said. ‘But. . different.’

‘Thank you, señora,’ said Isaac, in visible discomfort.

‘Isn’t it good, Liv?’

‘Yes,’ said Olive, unable to meet Isaac’s eye.

Sarah insisted that Teresa fetch Isaac tea and polvorones. ‘We’re so glad to have Teresa,’ she said. ‘It would all be such a palaver without her. And I’m so proud of finding you, Mr Robles,’ she said to him, leaning against the back of the sofa where he was sitting. She was warm, conciliatory. ‘How does it feel, to be the toast of Paris?’ she asked.

‘What is toast?’

‘It means you’re everyone’s new favourite. He’ll be champing at the bit when he sees this.’ She waved her hand in the direction of The Orchard. ‘Honestly, Mr Robles, I’m so glad I commissioned you in the first place, although it’s hard to share you. It’s just a shame my painting is hanging on another woman’s wall.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she sighed, and it sounded like twenty words in one. ‘My husband will be home soon.’ The marital noun made it sound as if Isaac would have no idea who Harold was.

‘It will be good to see him,’ said Isaac.

Sarah smiled and left the room, and Teresa felt as if the wattage of the day had dimmed as they listened to her moving back up the main staircase. Olive stepped quickly to the door and shut it. ‘Well, Isa?’ she asked, whirling round. ‘Do you like it?’

They all stared at the painting, the undulating patchwork of fields, the surreal intensity of colour, the white house which once was his to roam and now the home of someone else. ‘Does it matter whether I like it?’ he asked.

Olive looked uncomfortable. ‘You don’t like it.’

‘I can see its merit, but it is not what I myself would paint,’ he said.

‘He does not like it,’ said Teresa.

‘It is not that simple,’ Isaac snapped.

Olive stood before the painting. ‘I think it is that simple, really. What don’t you like about it?’

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘Why do I have to like it? Is it not bad enough I am pretending I have made it?’

‘Do keep your voice down,’ she said.

‘You have even painted my initials.’

‘A necessary touch.’

He stood up. ‘I hate it,’ he said, savagely. ‘I hope your father does too.’

‘Isaac—’

‘Good day, señoritas.’

Olive looked as if he had slapped her in the face. When he left the room, Olive ran to the window, watching his figure disappearing down the slope to the rusting gates. He pushed them open roughly, not looking back once.

‘Do not be upset,’ said Teresa, stepping forward. ‘What does it matter if he doesn’t like it?’

Olive made a sound of frustration. ‘He can hate what I create, but I can’t create if he’s angry with me. I just can’t.’

‘But why not? You painted before you knew him.’

Olive gestured at The Orchard. ‘Not like this, not like this!’ She pressed her forehead against the peeling wooden shutter. ‘And if he doesn’t like it, how can we be sure he’ll ship it to my father? It has to go soon. We’ll lose momentum with the Guggenheim woman.’

‘I am sure she will wait for genius.’

Olive wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s a word that gets bandied about too much. I’m not a genius. I just work hard.’

‘Well, she will wait. And if my brother will not do it, I can take it to the port myself.’

‘You?’

‘You can trust me.’

Olive kept her face hidden, still leaning her forehead on the shutter. ‘You broke my trust when you put that painting on the easel. I never know if you’re my friend or not.’

Teresa was silent for a moment. She couldn’t hide her pain. Sometimes Olive was as coquettish as her mother, for all her determination to be different. ‘You cannot see? You can trust me with your life.’

Olive lifted her head. ‘Never mind about my life, Tere. Do you mean it about the painting? You’ll take it to the port?’

‘Yes.’

Olive peered down the slope towards the gate, through which Isaac had long disappeared. ‘I’ve never had a true friend.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘Have you ever been in love? Have you ever been with a man?’

‘I have not.’

‘Been with a man — or been in love?’

‘Been with a man.’

Olive turned to her. ‘But you’ve been in love.’

Teresa felt her cheeks flame. ‘No. I do not think so. I do not know.’

That night, Teresa did not go back to the cottage. She was permitted to install herself in the corner of Olive’s attic, sorting the artist’s brushes and her clothes, a heady bliss that followed truce. Olive revealed that she had been painting a portrait of Isaac. It had been a long time coming, Teresa thought — given the speed with which the girl could usually work, the sketchbooks overflowing with the pencilled planes of his face.

Glancing over at Olive by the easel, Isaac’s features developing on the wood before her, Teresa could see it was an astonishing beginning. He had greenish skin, and a consumptive, claustrophobic look in his eye. But his head seemed on fire, sweeps of dandelion and canary yellows up to the top of the painting, where red flecks were being spattered like the wake of murderous thoughts. It was a livid rendering, and Olive looked to be as if in a trance. Teresa knew that the balance between her brother and this girl wasn’t right, but she doubted Olive was aware of these layers of infatuation and fear, manifesting by her very own hand.

Olive finished her first go at Isaac in the small hours. At three in the morning, exhausted, she lay back on her mattress, staring at the roof beams and flaking ceiling plaster, its rough raised corners illuminated by the weak glow from her bedside candle. A wolf howled, distant in the mountains.

‘Come and sleep here,’ she said to Teresa. Teresa, who’d been reading one of Olive’s books in the corner, put it down and obeyed, climbing onto the old mattress, lying rigidly next to Olive under the dusky pink coverlet, unable to move for fear that to do so might expel her from this magic kingdom.

They lay side by side, staring at the ceiling together as the atmosphere lightened in the room, the energy of Olive’s work and concentration dissipating into the air, until all that was left was the glowing green face of Isaac on the easel. Beyond the window, into the land, no rooster or dog or human cry broke their silence as they fell asleep, fully clothed.

*

Two days later, Olive decided to go with Teresa to Malaga, ‘to make a day of it,’ she said, ‘and why not?’

‘But how long are you going to be?’ asked Sarah. Teresa supposed she was agitated, because for the first time in months she was going to be alone.

‘We’re going to the shipping office for Mr Robles, and then I thought we’d have a lemonade in Calle Larios,’ said Olive.

‘Well, make sure you get that farmer fellow to bring you back before nightfall.’

‘I promise.’

‘He isn’t a red, is he?’

‘Mother.’

The Orchard was a large painting, and it took both girls to carry it down the finca path, as if it was a stretcher missing a body. Teresa looked back up at the house and saw Sarah watching, staying at the window right until they were down in the valley and she disappeared from their sight. The mule man was waiting for them in the town square. Teresa tried to ignore the uneasy feeling in her gut when she imagined Sarah on her own. She couldn’t pinpoint the worry, so she focused instead on the pleasure of a day trip. She was in her best blue dress; she’d washed her hair and doused herself with the distilled orange blossom Rosa Morales, the doctor’s daughter, sold out of her kitchen. It could almost be feria time, for the sense of holiday Teresa felt.

As she sat with the wrapped parcel of The Orchard propped beside her, on the back of a mule cart thirty kilometres along the Malaga road, Teresa was surprised at how bulky the package was under the string and paper. She did not question it, simply because she was now deliciously in Olive’s good books again. She would do as she was bid. Olive’s hair was flying in the wind, and her white-framed sunglasses made her as glamorous as her mother. Why would you want to ruin such a blue-sky day?

The mule pulled along the white-dust road, and Olive pointed out more red ribbons that had been tied around the girths of the cork oaks. The vision was vaguely unsettling, like shining lines of blood fluttering in the breeze. ‘What are they?’ she asked in Spanish.

The mule driver turned over his shoulder and said, ‘They’re trouble.’

Teresa saw them as an omen for what violence might come to this land, as it had so many times in centuries before. No one ever saw who tied these ribbons — Adrián had been one of them, apparently — but the fact that there were people determined to adorn the trees suggested an undercurrent of defiance, a desire to turn things on their head. Teresa didn’t want anything turned on its head. She had only just managed to achieve this day.

Full of self-importance and happiness, they reached the shipping office and arranged with the mule man when and where he should come back to fetch them. They made the post office just before it closed for siesta, sending off the parcel for today’s shipment to France. The Orchard was off to the Galerie Schloss on Paris’s Rue de la Paix.

Afterwards, they walked the wide boulevards, admiring the wrought-iron lamp posts adorned with hanging baskets, trailing petunias and geraniums in hot pinks and scarlets. They looked through shop windows, pointing out to each other the best-dressed of Malaga’s high society. They went inwards to the narrower, cobbled streets, all shutters closed against the midday heat. It was metropolitan, so different to their rural hideaway on the slopes of Arazuelo. Teresa was pleased to see how impressed Olive was with her native city. It might not be London, but it was by turns stately and timeless, as the sun beat down on the stone, or reflected off the polished vitrines and ornate wooden frames of department stores and pharmacists.

They walked down to the harbour and sat to enjoy a lemonade, wondering which of the enormous ships that pulled in and out with such constant frequency would be taking away their duplicitous cargo.

‘Isaac knew the painting would go,’ Olive said. ‘He just didn’t want to be the one who sent it. Do you think I’m being fair to him?’

‘What you mean to ask is — will my brother carry on doing this for ever.’

Olive looked at her in surprise. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

Teresa gazed out to sea. ‘The money will never be a good reason for him.’

She was telling the truth; it had never been enough for either of them. Even though he had kept some aside from the sale of Women in the Wheatfield, they had both always wanted things that money couldn’t buy; legitimacy, love. Teresa did think that Olive was being thoughtless, that her use of Isaac’s name as a front for her own work was not something he would continue to tolerate. As for herself, as long as Olive wanted it, she was happy to oblige.

Olive frowned. ‘That sounded like a threat.’

‘No, no,’ said Teresa. ‘But — he is a man, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

Teresa couldn’t answer with the precision she wanted in English. And although she worried that Olive’s actions were bringing her closer to some undefined, simmering danger that was coming, which Teresa couldn’t name but could almost taste — she was so happy to be here, by the sea, the lemonade, that she didn’t want Olive’s thoughtlessness to stop.

‘My brother can speak for himself,’ she said obliquely, and Olive, not wishing to go any deeper into the sourer elements of this plot of theirs, turned away to look at the gigantic liners moving out to sea.

They returned to the finca at dusk, tired and happy. ‘Teresa,’ Olive said, as they reached the front door.

‘Yes?’

‘I won’t let anything happen to you. You can trust me, I promise.’

Teresa smiled, amazed to hear her own words being spoken back to her, the second half of the same spell. When they went inside, Sarah was nowhere to be seen.

‘Where is she?’ said Olive, and the panic in her voice was so childlike, so easily accessed.

‘She has probably gone out for a walk,’ Teresa said.

‘My mother doesn’t go for walks.’ Olive ran out into the orchard, and on the pretext of searching for Sarah in the upper rooms, Teresa took the opportunity to slip into the attic and confirm her suspicions. It was as she thought. The green-faced portrait of Isaac was nowhere to be seen. By now, it was deep in the bowels of a liner, on its way to Peggy Guggenheim.

XV

Sarah began frequent walks out of the finca estate, an unprecedented gesture for someone usually more inclined to smoke on a sofa. She began to pull the ready vegetation from the rented land, piling it up in a wide wicker basket, the earth-encrusted roots still attached. She would announce her trip to the village to buy artichokes, and soon there was a molehill of them in the kitchen. The vases of wildflowers had multiplied so considerably that Teresa was running out of receptacles.

Ten days after their trip to Malaga, a telegram from Harold arrived. Teresa went down to pick it up, and ran all the way back to the finca, handing it to Olive, who was shelling peas with her mother at the kitchen table.

‘GREEN FACE GENIUS GOES TO GUG STOP ALSO BOUGHT MAGNIFICENT ORCHARD STOP BACK END OF WEEK STOP,’ Olive read aloud. ‘Peggy Guggenheim bought them both,’ she breathed. ‘Isaac will be pleased.’

‘I wasn’t aware there were two,’ said Sarah, one fingernail flashing down an open seed-pod. The lacquer, Teresa noted, had chipped, and her mistress had done nothing to remedy it.

‘There was The Orchard, but Isaac had another painting. A self-portrait.’

‘You saw it?’ asked Sarah.

‘Briefly. It looks like Daddy’s coming back.’

‘Just when that telephone finally stopped ringing,’ Sarah sighed.

Teresa went to the sink to busy herself with the washing-up. Sarah laid down her empty pea pod. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘Do you like it here?’

‘I’ve got used to it. I like it very much now. Don’t you?’

Sarah looked through the kitchen window. The garden and the orchard beyond it were now abundant with fruit and flowers, honeysuckle, dama-de-noche and all the oranges and olives Harold had promised his wife and daughter back in January, when, cold, bedraggled and shaking off the after-effects of one of Sarah’s storm clouds, they had arrived here, knowing no one.

‘I don’t know if like is the word I’d use. I feel I’ve lived here about ten years. It sort of. . saturates you, a place like this. As if it’s the living embodiment of Isaac’s painted fields.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘It’s extraordinary — how he captured it, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you think he does it?’

‘How would I know?’

‘He’s a genius.’

Olive sighed. ‘Nobody’s a genius, Mother. That’s lazy thinking. It’s practice.’

‘Ah, practice. I could practise for ever and not produce anything as good as that.’

‘You seem better, Mummy,’ said Olive.

‘I do feel a lot stronger. Daddy got me that last round of pills from Malaga and I haven’t touched them.’

‘Really? Is that a good idea? You gave me and Tere a real fright when we got back from Malaga and you weren’t here. I was worried you’d—’

‘I wouldn’t do that, Livvi. It’s not like it was.’

They continued shelling peas in silence. Her mother had caught the sun, and she seemed peaceful; self-contained. It was once again painful to Olive how attractive her mother was, and how Sarah barely registered this fact — her hair a bit of a mess, her sundress crumpled as if she’d just pulled it out of a trunk. Her roots had now grown out considerably, and she didn’t seem to care. Her natural dark blonde was a stark, yet oddly pleasurable visual contrast to the peroxide ends. Olive had the itch to paint her, to capture this ease, in the hope that she too could have some of it for herself.

‘Summer’s nearly here,’ Sarah said, breaking Olive’s thoughts. ‘It’s going to be so hot.’

‘You were complaining when it was cold.’

Sarah laughed at herself. This too, was rare. ‘It wasn’t a terrible idea of your father’s to come here. Not a terrible idea at all.’ She reached over and squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘I do love you, you know, Liv. Very much.’

‘Goodness. What’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. I just think you should know.’

Sarah went out onto the veranda with her packet of cigarettes and the latest Christie shipped over from a friend in London, and Teresa began to mop the flagstones in the hall. Olive followed her, standing on the dry patch Teresa hadn’t yet reached.

‘Teresa, will you sit for my next painting?’ she asked, her voice quiet. ‘I’d love to use you as a model.’

Teresa’s spine stiffened, her fists tightening round the mop handle. ‘You didn’t tell me about the second painting we took to Malaga,’ she said.

‘I didn’t want to get you into any more trouble.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Look, I know you think this whole undertaking demeans me as an artist.’

‘Demeans?’

‘Makes less of me. You think Isaac gets more importance round here than he deserves. But it’s what I want. I want the freedom. You’re my friend, Tere. Let me give this to you.’

Teresa straightened, meditatively plunging the head of the mop into her bucket of filthy water. She knew, in a way, that she had wanted this moment ever since she saw Isaac in the sketchbook. And the decision to help Olive in her deceptions — taking the paintings into Malaga, making sure Sarah still believed they were by Isaac, keeping the attic clean — had all been leading to this less than noble truth; that Teresa wanted to be painted. She wanted Olive to want her as a painting.

As Teresa walked behind Olive upwards to the attic, she knew she had departed from her place in the script. She turned back once to view the floor, only half agleam, the mop resting, accusatory. She was no longer the servant who rid the house of stains; she was going to make a mark so permanent no one would ever forget it.

It was to be a painting of Rufina, Olive told her, locking the attic door. ‘I’ve done Justa in the Well, and you’ll be my Rufina. It was you who told me the story, after all. I’ve been wondering what part of it to tell.’

Teresa nodded, not daring to speak. What would Isaac say, when he found out Olive had painted his face green and sent it as a self-portrait to Peggy Guggenheim? When would he realize that painting after painting would come out of this girl? Olive believed Isaac was the source of her inspiration, but Teresa thought that nothing he could do now — no tantrum, no withholding of affection — would stop the flow.

‘Rufina with her pots, Rufina with the lion, or Rufina, beheaded, with her sister?’ said Olive, mainly to herself. ‘The last one’s grim, but it is the apogee, even though she’s down a well.’

Teresa heard the unusual word, and thought Olive had said apology. ‘There is nothing to be sorry for,’ she said.

Olive smiled. ‘I’m glad you think so, Tere.’

She had decided to abandon the diptych format that she’d used for Women in the Wheatfield, and paint just one scene. In the end, she wanted all the stages of the story involved. So Rufina would be there in her full body, but she would also be carrying her own head.

‘You could put your face in it, too,’ said Teresa, then immediately wished she hadn’t, for she was probably overstepping herself.

Olive bit her lip, considering the idea. ‘Well, let’s paint yours first,’ she said. ‘I’ll decide later whether to add mine. It is supposed to be one person, after all. But I’m definitely going to lay gold leaf on the lion’s mane. He’ll be tame as a pussycat.’

Olive placed her on the chair she usually sat in when Teresa brushed her hair. There was a surety to Olive’s touch, she was operating in her space of confidence and possibility. ‘Such solemn eyes,’ Olive told her, as she put her paintbrush to the treated panel. ‘So dark and watchful above your little snub nose. You and Isaac have become as engraved in my mind as a woodcut.’

Her expression grew distracted as she began to draw away from the outer elements of the room and closer to her artistic vision. Teresa was locked out of it, and yet she felt the source of it. She willingly sank into this phantom role, where she could disappear and be anything Olive wanted. She had never felt so invisible, and yet so seen.

XVI

In the end, Harold returned the first week of June, driving himself back from Malaga airfield. ‘Where is he?’ he called, as soon as he’d parked up the Packard. ‘Where’s my prodigy?’

The women stood on the front step, shielding their eyes from the sun. Harold’s wave was breezy. He’s been with her, Teresa thought, surveying him as he neared the front door. He looked sated, well fed, and yet his grin was a little fixed. He seemed to have the air of a man rolling away from vice and back into the straits of virtue. Maybe he sent her a ticket to Paris. The anonymous woman’s timid German, which had grown fainter in Teresa’s memory, now returned. Harold, bist du es?

Teresa glanced over to Sarah. She had a self-contained look, as if she was conserving her energies, girding herself. Does she know? Teresa thought. She knows.

‘Hallo, darling,’ Sarah said. ‘Isaac doesn’t live here, you know.’

Harold stalked forward, depositing two kisses either side of his wife’s face. ‘It’s Isaac now, is it?’ He turned to Olive. ‘You look well, Liv. In fact, you look glorious.’

Olive smiled. ‘Thank you, Papi. So do you.’

Teresa cast down her eyes, hoping Harold wouldn’t see her thoughts. ‘Buenos días, Teresa,’ he said. She looked; the journey had left him with a day’s stubble. She discerned the smell of travel, the possibility of someone else’s perfume mingled on his skin.

‘Buenos días, señor.’

‘Fetch my suitcase, will you.’

She descended the step, feeling folded inside the Schlosses’ life with such cloying intensity that she could hardly breathe.

That night, Teresa waited for Isaac outside their cottage, as the shadows lengthened and the cicadas began to build their rasping wall of sound. He appeared at the base of the hill at about seven o’clock, and she was struck by how tired he looked, burdened down by an invisible weight as he moved towards her.

‘He’s back,’ she said, by way of greeting.

Isaac dropped his knapsack on the grass, where it clunked.

‘What’s in there?’ she asked.

‘You’ll see.’ He sank to the earth and lay on his back, his hands enlaced beneath his head.

‘There’s something you should know,’ she said, irritated by this evasion. ‘Olive didn’t tell you, but she sent an extra painting to Paris. Don’t be angry. He’s sold it. I wanted to tell you before Harold did.’ Isaac remained prostrate, and he nodded, patting his jacket pocket, pulling out a box of battered cigarettes. ‘Are you angry, Isa?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you would be. Why aren’t you?’

‘Do you want me to be angry? What’s the point? She’s done it. And it doesn’t surprise me.’

‘More money for the cause, I suppose.’

‘Always that.’

‘Isa. I know what’s going on.’

He looked up at her, sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I know what you two do. Apart from the painting stuff. That she’s in love with you.’

A look of relief passed across his face as he lit a cigarette. ‘Olive,’ he said.

‘Are you in love with her?’

Isaac sat up and dragged on his cigarette, hunching his knees as he looked down over the sierra. It was dusk by now, and the bats had started to appear out of the copses at the foot of the valley. The air was warm, the earth still giving off its heat. ‘They’ll leave,’ he said. ‘They won’t last here. They belong in the city. In the salon.’

‘Sarah, yes. Harold, maybe. Not Olive.’

‘She’s turned you into a romantic.’

‘The opposite. I understand her, that’s all. She won’t leave you. She’ll follow wherever you go.’

‘What makes you so sure of that?’

‘She says she can’t paint without you.’

He laughed. ‘True in one way, perhaps. Well, if she does love me, that doesn’t make any of this all right.’

‘I don’t think she needs you at all.’

‘And that doesn’t surprise me either, Teresa.’

Paris had been a triumph, Harold said; Isaac Robles was now the pole star in the firmament of Galerie Schloss Paris. The next afternoon, Harold, legs stretched out in the front east room, drinking a glass of fino, told them in no uncertain terms that thanks to Women in the Wheatfield, The Orchard, and Self-Portrait in Green, he and his partners were enjoying a renaissance.

‘People heard through Duchamp that Peggy wants to buy art,’ he said. ‘But I got there first. She’s incredibly excited about the next one, your companion piece to Women in the Wheatfield. She wants a photograph of it in progress, though, if that’s possible. Is it possible, Isaac?’

Olive slugged back another fingerful of sherry. ‘The “companion piece”?’ said Isaac.

‘Am I rushing you?’ said Harold. ‘Tell me if so. We don’t have to send her a photograph if you don’t want that. It’s what’s best for you. You have a great gift, Isa. Truly. I cannot wait to see your future.’

‘It will not be what any of us expects,’ Isaac replied. ‘Mr Schloss, I have brought something for you.’

Olive put the sherry glass down and began to rise from her chair, but Isaac reached into his knapsack and withdrew a pistol, the barrel made of shining steel. No one spoke as he weighed it in the flat of his hand.

‘Is that real?’ Sarah asked.

‘Real, señora.’

‘Why on earth have you brought us a gun?’ said Harold, laughing. ‘Bring me a painting, for Christ’s sake.’

Olive sat back, the relief visible on her face. ‘Do you shoot, señor?’ Isaac said.

‘I can. I have.’

‘Can the women shoot?’

‘Of course we can’t,’ said Sarah. ‘Why do you ask? This is terribly dramatic.’

Isaac hung an old flour sack, packed with earth, upon a protruding branch of a cork oak at the end of the garden. One word covered the rough sacking, HARINA, and they agreed that the makeshift bullseye was the space between the ‘R’ and the ‘I’. They all trooped past the empty stone fountain and lined up to have a go, and there was almost a carnival atmosphere to their endeavour; the silly swinging sack, the birds scattering out of the oak at the crack of Isaac’s pistol.

Harold hit the last A. Sarah shot into the bark and handed the pistol back to Isaac, saying she would never touch it again. She went to lie on her back in the grass, staring at the sky, her hands resting on her stomach. Isaac shot the middle of the N, and looked sheepish. He handed the pistol to Olive, and Teresa watched the intertwining of their hands.

Olive lumbered over to the shooting spot and raised the pistol. She squinted, and pulled on the trigger, releasing the bullet with a gasped shock as the pistol recoiled in her hand.

‘Liv,’ cried her father.

‘I’m fine.’

‘No, you nearly shot the centre.’

Olive looked in surprise towards the sack. ‘Did I?’

Teresa thought it natural that Olive should have such a good eye, a steady hand. ‘Do that again,’ Harold said.

‘No. It was a fluke.’

Sarah lifted her head up to look at the bullet-riddled sack. ‘Liv, you’ve got a hidden talent. Maybe we should enter you in competitions.’

Teresa hurried over to take the pistol from Olive, and Isaac came to check she was reloading it correctly. Teresa brushed him off, setting the pistol perfectly on her own. ‘You bought this with her money, didn’t you?’ she whispered to him.

‘It won’t be the last. It’s a Soviet T33,’ he replied, with a note of admiration.

‘Are you giving this gun to them?’

‘They might need it.’

‘Why? Are you trying to protect them, or put them in danger?’

‘Keep your eye on the target, Tere. And your voice down.’

Teresa wondered where Isaac was finding the means to source Soviet weapons, but part of her didn’t want to know. She concentrated on raising the pistol, her legs apart, her other hand supporting her wrist. Her body was taut, every muscle tensed on her spare frame, the set of her jaw fixed as hard as the stone satyr in the fountain. She inhaled deeply and pulled the trigger. You’re not the only one who shoots rabbits, she thought. The pistol went off and the bullet sailed through the air, hitting precisely through the knot attaching the sack to the branch. To Isaac’s cry of frustration, the entire thing tumbled to the grass. The packed earth spilled everywhere, and the game was ruined.

*

Late that afternoon, Harold said he was driving to Malaga. He wanted to visit a bodega, pick up some new supplies of sherry. Sarah announced that she would accompany him. ‘I need a chemist,’ she said. ‘Then I’d like a coffee on Calle Larios and a walk along the sea.’

Teresa saw Harold’s hesitation, but he said, ‘That’s a good idea, get some air into your lungs. Isaac, would you join us? A man with local knowledge might help when it comes to the sherry.’ But Isaac, who Teresa knew would once have craved a drive in such a powerful car, who had to content himself with a bicycle, did not wish to join them at all. He demurred, politely. ‘Of course,’ said Harold. ‘You’ve got work you want to do.’

Outside the finca, Olive and Isaac waved her parents off. ‘We could take the photograph for Peggy Guggenheim now,’ she said, as their car disappeared. ‘Daddy has a camera in his study.’ Isaac was silent, staring at the swinging gate, gaping open on the path towards the village. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I was foolish,’ he said.

‘You’re weren’t.’

‘I thought your confidence, your happiness, was out of love for me.’

‘It was. It is.’

‘I do not think so. I think this has always been inside you, waiting to come out. I just happened to be there, at that particular time, in order for you to use me as your canvas.’

‘I love you, Isaac,’ she said. The words landed short between them.

‘Your love is not with me. It is for the walls of the Guggenheim house. How is this going to end, Olive?’ he said. ‘Because it is going to end.’

Olive turned to him, placing a hand on his arm, but he brushed it off. ‘I’ve made you angry,’ she said. ‘But I do love you—’

‘You say one more painting. But then there is another. A green face, one more, one more, one more.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This will be the last. I promise, I swear. I swear on my life.’

He turned to face her squarely. ‘Did you and my sister plan all this from the very beginning?’

‘Of course not.’

‘She seems very comfortable with the situation now. She sounds like you. Always, she has a plan.’

‘No, there was never a plan, Isaac. This just happened.’

‘Teresa is a survivor. She was the one who put you on the easel, but don’t think she will always put you first.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He laughed, without humour. ‘I am famous in Paris, a city I have never even seen. I paint portraits of my own face I have never even seen. You are stealing me, Olive. I feel like I am becoming invisible, the more visible I become.’ The breath had got stuck in his throat, and he looked embarrassed, his words breaking up. ‘And after all this, you expect me to believe you love me.’

‘I don’t expect anything, Isaac. I never wanted you to feel like this. I do love you. I never expected you to love me. I’ve got carried away, I know that. But I — we’ve — been so successful, I never thought it could be so easy—’

‘It is not easy, Olive. It has never been easy. I cannot, I will not do this any more. And if you send that Guggenheim woman one more picture, then I cannot promise my actions.’

‘What does that mean? Isaac, you’re frightening me.’

‘The painting you are working on — you must destroy it.’

She looked horrified. ‘But I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Because they’re waiting for it in Paris.’

‘Then you cannot expect me to have anything to do with it.’

‘Isaac, please. Please—’

‘You promised me, Olive. You went behind my back.’

‘And you haven’t touched me for four weeks. Is that the price you’re forcing me to pay, for once in my life doing something brilliant?’

‘And what about the price you are forcing me to pay? No man would put up with a woman who asks so much. A man needs a woman who understands him, who supports him—’

‘Who puts him first?’

‘My absence from you is an exchange you seem more than willing to make, as long as Miss Guggenheim continues to sing your praises.’

‘That’s not true. I miss you.’

‘You do not miss me, Olive. You miss the next chance to send a painting over.’

‘I do miss you. Just come upstairs and see it,’ she pleaded. ‘And then tell me if you still feel the same.’

The painting was the same size as Women in the Wheatfield, and yet it felt bigger. Up in the attic, Isaac stood before it, staggered by its sensuality and power. Even though it was still unfinished, the lion already looked possessed by the sight of the double-headed Rufina. This piece was breathtaking, sinister, revolutionary.

‘Is that you?’ he asked. He pointed at the disembodied head. ‘And is that Tere, holding you?’

‘Yes, and yes,’ said Olive. ‘But it’s supposed to be the same person. It’s called Rufina and the Lion. That’s Rufina, before and after the authorities got hold of her.’

Isaac stared at the painting, the riot of colours and gold leaf, the curiously level gazes of Rufina carrying her head; the lion, waiting to take action.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

‘It’s wonderful.’

She smiled. ‘It happens sometimes. My hand guides my head without much pause to worry or think.’

In that moment, all she wanted was for Isaac to see her as talented and confident — and to love her for it. ‘We’ve done a wonderful thing, Isa,’ she said. ‘The paintings are going to be famous.’ But Isaac kept his focus on Rufina and the Lion. ‘Let’s use the camera,’ she said with a bright voice. ‘Peggy wanted snaps.’

‘Snaps?’

‘Photographs. Of the painting. Isa,’ she said gently, ‘do you really want me to destroy it?’

He looked at the floor, and Olive knew in that moment that she had won this battle, if not the war. ‘You could fight a lion too, Isaac — if you had to. I know it.’

‘And a lion would run away from you. Do you know how to use the camera?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she replied, unnerved, unable to pinpoint what was happening between them. ‘But — I was hoping Teresa would take a photograph of the two of us, together.’

Isaac closed his eyes, as if in pain. ‘Let’s get it done,’ he said. ‘Call her.’

‘I’m a lion,’ Teresa roared, putting her free hand up, a pantomime paw as she hovered her finger over the camera button. She’d been taking rather formal pictures for the last half-hour — of the painting, of Isaac next to it, but in this moment, Olive threw back her head in laughter, eyes slightly closed, whilst next to her, Isaac, impervious to his sister’s humour, gazed straight down the lens with a look of such possession on his face that Teresa forgot she was the king of the jungle at all.

Teresa knew then, as she pressed that button and captured them in these poses, that something had broken in this room. And she understood, for the first time, that they could never go back.

When Isaac went to pick up the developed film in Malaga a week later, he discovered that in some of the pictures, Teresa had put Olive in the centre of the image, and the painting itself was half-obscured. He thought he looked funereal in every single one. Olive, because she had been moving so much — jumpy in the face of his acute reluctance that afternoon — was slightly blurred, her mouth ajar, her lips making a silent O of pleasure. The sight of her — her expression of freedom and joy — made his conscience flicker briefly before dying away.

When Harold was shown a photograph of the painting on its own, cropped closely so you couldn’t tell its location, he asked Isaac, ‘Why is the girl carrying a head?’

‘In my mind, it stands for duplicity,’ Isaac replied. ‘Because we are surrounded by lies.’

XVII

Olive continued to paint Rufina and the Lion throughout the rest of June and into July. Harold’s telephone began to ring again in his study, every two or three days, and he would close the door on them in order to answer it, his voice hushed and incomprehensible. When he’d been in Paris, he said, the news from Vienna had not been good. Businesses were closing, crimes going unpunished; but not even smashed shop windows were as frightening as the political rhetoric being hurled from one side to the other. Jews were coming in from Germany for shelter, but he wondered how long their luck would last.

He told his family that he would focus on the Paris gallery, trying to work out the logistics of getting his artworks out of Vienna before the business suffered. Peggy Guggenheim was going to open her gallery in London, and he was hoping he might be able to transfer some of his stock to her there. In Vienna, he told them, Jewish friends were selling their art for knock-down prices to raise capital to pay for train fares, lodgings, food, new lives beyond the borders of Austria. People who had prided themselves on varied, intelligent and abundant collections of old masters and new were forced to accept prices they would have baulked at twelve months earlier.

Harold was unsurprisingly gloomy, only perking up when there was talk of the next work by Isaac Robles. Isaac Robles had become his raison d’être, two fingers to the nationalistic narrowness peddled in every paper; his colourful child, his man with a vision, his delight and defiance. ‘Paint, Isa,’ he said one night, drunk. ‘God knows we need you to paint.’

It was odd to think such tempests were happening all around Europe, for Arazuelo seemed relatively peaceful. Sarah continued with her walks out; by now there was a mountain of artichokes in the kitchen. They would never be able to consume them against the pace that Sarah was coming home with them, and Teresa regarded them with a sense of foreboding. She noticed how freckles had appeared over the bridge of Sarah’s nose, from the punishing July sunshine; she had lost some of her brittle elegance, and seemed somewhat more grounded in her surroundings. At night, Teresa could hear the Packard’s engine as Harold trundled it down the slope and through the gates towards Malaga. Sarah seemed serene about Harold’s leave-taking. She slept in, and complained of headaches, rising late enough for her husband to have made his way back home in the dawn, as if he’d never left.

Olive no longer commented on her father’s disappearing acts. Teresa wondered whether she was using it as a spur, duping her father as he was duping her. Perhaps Olive’s pursuit was not one of success, but of an enemy’s humiliation. Teresa wasn’t exactly sure. Olive simply seemed most herself when painting, day and night, to finish Rufina and the Lion.

July was a good month in Arazuelo. The smell of sage fields and rosemary, lizards making their way like small secrets out of the walls, jerky and neurotic in motion, ever wary of predators in the sky. But when they stilled themselves to bask, how poised they were, such pragmatists of nature, soaking up the heat of the sun.

It was a time of long evening shadows, the raw rasp of crickets filling the hot night. The fields were now shades of parsley, lime and apple. Wildflowers; spattered reds and royal purples, canary-yellow petals moving in the breeze. And when the wind got up, salt tasted on the air. No sound of the sea — but listen, and you could hear the articulated joints of a beetle, trundling through the corn root.

From the hills came the dull music of bells as the goats overtook these smaller sounds descending the scree through the gauze of heat. Bees, drowsing on the fat flower heads, farmers’ voices calling, birdsong arpeggios spritzing from trees. A summer’s day will make so many sounds, when you yourself remain completely silent.

*

They didn’t see it coming. Of course they didn’t. Who wants to look for trouble, every single day? You turn away, as long as you can. Even the government didn’t see it coming. Perhaps later, when the locals recalled how no one had ever been brought to justice over Adrián the factory boy, or when they considered those red ribbons tied on trees, or the shot statue of the Madonna, they would turn to each other, and say, Ah yes; the writing was on the wall.

The Schlosses were too wrapped up in their own internal battles to realize what was going on north in Madrid, what was going to surge up towards them from Morocco. They were not paying attention when on the twelfth of July in Madrid four Falangists shot dead the socialist lieutenant of the Republican Assault Guard. In retaliation, his friends assassinated the country’s monarchist deputy, a prominent right-winger. Life in Spain, and life in the finca, was on the cusp of being broken apart, letting in a flood of recriminations, ambitions and long-buried resentments. But at the same time, in those early days, it didn’t seem that war was on its way at all.

Sarah and Olive heard it on the radio first. On the eighteenth of July, four generals, out of the eighteen that ran the national army, rebelled against their left-wing government and took over their garrisons. The Prime Minister, frightened of revolution and mass unrest, ordered all civil governors not to distribute arms to the workers’ organizations, who would inevitably want to resist potential armed rule. He then resigned that night.

Isaac came racing up to the finca. Harold was out — in Malaga, of course. ‘Get the pistol,’ he was calling, and on hearing him, women spilled out of the house.

Later, Teresa would think about the Schloss women’s conflicting expressions. Olive looked relieved. Perhaps she believed that Isaac still cared about her — so much so that he had run all the way because some soldiers were throwing their weight around. Teresa remembered Sarah’s smile of pleasure, her steady hand as she poured him a glass of water.

Seville was the nearest city to Arazuelo to fall to the army rebels. Its conquering general was a man called Queipo de Llano, who used the radio at ten o’clock that night to broadcast his intentions. Isaac and the three women sat listening in Harold’s study, the fear they felt mirrored in each other’s faces as Queipo de Llano’s haranguing crackled through the speaker:

‘People of Seville: to arms!’ he bellowed. ‘The Fatherland is in danger and in order to save it a few men of courage, a few generals, have assumed the responsibility of placing ourselves at the forefront of a Movement of National Salvation that is triumphing everywhere. The Army of Africa hastens to cross to Spain to join in the task of crushing that unworthy Government that had taken upon itself to destroy Spain in order to convert it into a colony of Moscow.’

‘A colony of Moscow?’ said Sarah. ‘What the hell is he talking about?’

‘Shut up!’ hissed Olive.

‘All the troops of Andalusia, with whom I have communicated by telephone, obey my orders and are now in the streets. . all the authorities of Seville, and all who sympathize with them and with the so-called Government in Madrid, are under arrest and at my disposal.’

‘Isaac,’ Olive whispered. ‘He’s talking about you. Isaac, you have to run.’

He looked up at her, and she saw the hollows under his eyes. ‘Run? I am not going to run,’ he said. ‘You think I am going to hide from a man like him? You think because Queipo de Llano has telephoned some people, they will do as he says? We have already mobilized. We will fight back. They did not succeed in Madrid or Barcelona, and they will not succeed here.’

‘People of Seville!’ the general bawled on. ‘The die is cast and decided in our favour, and it is useless for the rabble to resist and produce that racket of shouts and gunshots you hear everywhere. Troops of Legionnaires and Moroccans are now en route to Seville, and as soon as they arrive, those troublemakers will be hunted down like vermin. Long live Spain!’

‘Isaac,’ Olive said, her voice rising in panic. ‘They’ve got troops. Weapons. Trained soldiers. What would men like that do to you?’

They could hear the sound of Harold’s motor, fast and loud, crashing up the hill. The car door slammed. ‘Are you there, are you there? Have you heard?’ he shouted through the hallway.

Teresa veered away from the desk, stumbling along the unlit corridor, bashing into the walls as she fought her way through the kitchen and onto the veranda, as far away as possible from everybody else. She ran down into the darkness of the orchard and felt the bile come, her body retching the words she could not find to spell out the terror inside — that this was it, the wave was here, the land ripped, her brother taken, and Olive — Olive would leave. She kept shaking her head, willing herself to get a grip, that she’d got this far — but in her heart she could hear the soldiers. Stomping jackboots along dark routes, thump thump thump, butt of a gun, split head; no place to hide.

‘Tere? Tere!’ It was Olive, calling for her. ‘Tere, don’t be scared. Where are you?’

But this was how she would end, Teresa knew. Here, on her knees, in the dark, in the company of those Spanish wolves.