The Shades Read online

  “Oh, for God’s sake. You think they were Diana and Dodi, do you? And that makes it okay?” Catherine made that snorting sound again.

  “How dare you insult me at such a time? My son is dead.”

  “But your daughter is alive.”

  There was a stunned quiet before Mrs. Azadi sobbed, “Take me to see him. Mojan, Mojan.” Her cry seemed to startle her husband out of his anger. Embracing his wife, Mojan Azadi turned her away from the offending sight, nodding to Jackie to continue on their course. Jackie hurried in front of them, leaning in as she walked, presumably to comfort the stricken woman. Michael heard Mr. Azadi utter something in Farsi, before calling back, “When you mocked his memory, you also mocked your daughter. What kind of woman are you?”

  Michael saw Catherine was going to answer again but stopped her this time. “No, Catherine. No.”

  Jackie led the Azadis down the corridor. Outside the room where Michael and Catherine had just seen Rachel, they turned and entered the room across the hall.

  It wasn’t long before Catherine began to regret the ugly scene: a matter of minutes. After seeing their destination, she was able to calm herself. She said she hadn’t been in control; something about Mr. Azadi’s arrogance and lack of apology, had triggered her into becoming a vengeful and cruel person who wanted to see him punished. She didn’t need Michael to point out how unfortunate the situation had been, or how badly she had behaved, so he didn’t comment, listening quietly to her expressions of sorrow and remorse while suppressing his own. In the days that followed she had a keen urge to see Mira and her family. She wanted to talk to them, find out how Rachel had been on the last day of her life. She wanted to know if there had been anything between Rachel and Merhan. Mr. Azadi’s accounting of their relationship wasn’t enough; she wanted to know more—no detail would have been too small. The idea that Rachel had experienced some sort of love or affection before her death now seemed beautiful for being brief and fragile. She wrote letters asking forgiveness to Mr. and Mrs. Azadi. These were returned unopened. The flowers that she sent were also returned the same day. Catherine’s behavior at the hospital had inflicted untold damage on everyone, but there was no one she had hurt more than herself.

  Michael Francis stared through the window. The buildings seemed less triumphant, compromised by their aggressive proximity. Even the newer ones seemed to have lost their sheen.

  He saw the voicemail icon flashing and wondered what Catherine could be wanting. It was unusual for her to use the office number and call so late in the afternoon.

  Catherine was outside Hamdean when she first saw the girl. A red BMW deposited her, made a quick U-turn, and drove off at such a speed that Catherine thought that if she was ever to see that car again she would be sure to give its idiot driver a bollocking. From a distance, she sized up the young woman: slight but not athletic, rounded shoulders, poor posture—apparently, no one had ever told her that she needed to stand up straight. Her dark, choppy hair was pushed back in an Alice band and tufted up behind. No sleek, amber mane. The girl didn’t seem to register her, but instead rummaged inside her bag to find sunglasses and put them on, raising her head in the general direction of the house. The bag she carried was the same slouchy, unstructured kind that Rachel liked, although this hadn’t always been her taste. When Rachel was eight, she had become attached to a stiff ’50s snap purse that had belonged to Catherine’s mother and had refused to go anywhere without it. Catherine remembered the age it took for her to assemble its contents: crayons, plastic animal—usually a horse—some kind of snack (this would be negotiated), before she was ready to make a gap-toothed promenade, her ladylike accouterment swinging over one small arm.

  She turned away, wishing that Judith would give her patients better directions so they did not come by and bother her. This was precisely why she didn’t like going out.

  That morning Catherine had moved twenty stacks of mail from the dining room, where it had been sitting, an unwanted visitor, to the kitchen, where it could no longer be avoided or ignored. The sight of so many unopened letters was daunting, as each one represented an unspoken demand. Michael had offered to come down to help, but she had insisted on leaving it to do in her own time. It was important to hang on to the last semblance of competence. Besides, she had become accustomed to being alone. She made a cup of Judith’s muddy tea, ignoring complex brewing instructions, dunking the pouch, chucking it away. She managed a surprisingly efficient pre-sort, soon determining that most of the mail was junk and could be tossed without opening. Personal correspondence was easily identified. She recognized the determined hand of Paige, doubtless full of intention and useless prescription. There was little chance that Catherine would get involved with another foundation, take up meditation, tai chi or Zumba. Anything that looked as though it might contain a condolence was put aside to be opened at some future date. As she had discovered, sympathy did nothing for her. She didn’t need it, nor did she want it. She also made a start on her electronic backlog, pulling up pages upon pages of unopened bold that seemed to glare out at her. Reproach from her inbox was mutual: she resented the messages for presuming on her at a time when she had no interest in reading them. She made a decision that emails could wait another day. Now that contact had been reduced to essentials—everyone who mattered knew to telephone (or in Rowan’s case, text), and Lewis called only when there was something that she absolutely needed to know—this pared down existence, the habit of ignoring anything extraneous was beginning to seem like an economical use of time.

  As she hadn’t been to the gallery in months, it was just as well that most of her business had devolved upon the administration of artists’ estates, with only one group show planned for later in the year. It was also good that Lewis had become so adept at keeping it all going in her absence. One of her better decisions was turning out to have been the hiring of Lewis, the son of a prominent American literary agent who had transplanted to London. Lewis had been raised in the UK and was now indistinguishable from any young Englishman who had been to Stowe and the London School of Economics, having turned from a career in economics to art with the realization that the two were not mutually exclusive. He was subtle and polite, persuasive but not pushy. She had once observed him with a collector looking at a Camden School gouache, and credited him for knowing exactly what to say: something scholarly about Matisse’s découpées, followed by something subjective, and she’d liked the way he’d known to withdraw in a timely manner, allowing the collector to bond with the picture and fall in love. Being front man suited Lewis. He was making it easier for her to opt out, and he was benefiting from the exchange.

  That she would have left the gallery to a subordinate for more than one week would have been inconceivable at any time before the accident. Having devoted twenty years to a business that manifested a vision of what was relevant and mattered, she managed every detail and left nothing to chance. No one else could have replicated her interaction with artists and clients, which was always specific and direct. In terms of her professional development, certain relationships were more significant than others. No association had been more formative or important to her than with the artist John Bramley.

  She had been sent to see him by her boss, Jay Katz, to check progress on five paintings that were overdue for delivery. She was a novice then, having worked at Katz Inc. only two months, hired straight from the front desk at Christie’s, where she had been seated after finishing her master’s—Jay had told her he’d recognized in her the look of a hungry cub. She considered herself lucky to have been given the task, even knowing all the different levels of responsibility the visit involved. There was pleasing Katz, a maverick on the contemporary art scene, whose entry to London from New York and brash pricing was causing unrest amongst his competitors in Cork Street; there was satisfying herself, unlikely by her own exacting standards; and there was impressing the artist, a formidable talent but an unknown quantity personally—all she knew about the man was that
he’d been married three times. His first wife had left him for another woman, his second, for his first dealer. She didn’t know much about his third wife, also an artist, said to have been very beautiful until her looks were ravaged by alcohol. At the time of Catherine’s visit, John’s work had been undervalued in the marketplace, but perception of him was quickly changing thanks to representation by Katz and entry into key collections, resulting in rapid leaps in the prices he commanded.

  She was two hours late for the meeting: road works and a ten-mile tailback had turned the drive to his Suffolk cottage into a constipated crawl. In her apologies to the master she never could bring herself to admit that she’d added another thirty minutes to the journey, circling a labyrinth of un-signposted lanes and hedgerows, wishing she had been sensible enough to bring a map. He lived on a working farm, not unlike her parents’ home in Sussex, only Catherine’s father, a potter, had converted all the outbuildings to make a compound for local craftsmen and had rented the fields to a neighbor for grazing. Sweet hay and rancid silage were the smells of childhood, but the familiarity did little to soothe nerves aggravated by the journey.

  John Bramley was polite to the point of courtliness, pulling up a chair, offering refreshment with the clipped articulations of a Cambridge education. He regarded her with a stark curiosity that bordered on concern, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that he wasn’t severe but serious. When he invited her to eat supper—he’d been cooking lamb on a greasy Aga when found—Catherine was bold enough to ask to see his studio. He handed her boots (size 5: wife number three?) for the march across a sodden field to a corrugated metal– clad structure, fitted with skylights that must have been a hay barn once. Inside were four large abstract landscapes, executed with dark, gestural swathes that seemed to sweep all the terror and beauty of existence into the impasto. No less powerful than the big-scale canvases, was a small oil sketch of lilting rhomboids that drew her attention. Outlined in graphite, three alabaster forms floated on a pale field of striated gray. Unlike the angst and turmoil of the other pieces, the image was magnetically serene. However, the sun was lowering—the artist only worked in natural light—there was no electricity, only a wood-burning stove; Bramley made it clear that he was unhappy for her to look at his paintings in this way. They returned to his cottage and drank some good Burgundy while eating an aromatic stew. He plied her with questions. What kind of man was her partner? (“A good one.”) Were they planning to marry? (“We’re on track.”) The conversation turned to Constable, Matisse, Gauguin, and his transition from portraiture to expressionism. He caught her off guard by asking why Katz hadn’t come to see him himself. The truth was that her boss had stayed behind to receive a collector who was circling a knockout Bacon, a newly discovered version of The Buggers. The owner of the picture, a friend of Francis’s and regular of the Colony Room, had been persuaded by the wily dealer to release it for a condition report, giving Jay Katz five days to come up with an over-the-odds, irresistible offer before the picture had to be returned. The gallerist knew from experience that when people were separated from their possessions they were most susceptible to cash offers. He had already lined up three punters: one duke, one government minister, and the manager of a rock band who was likely to trump them both.

  At first Catherine had tried to cover for her boss—“Jay is truly sorry that he has been detained in London”—before opting for a more direct approach, with omissions. “He doesn’t know if you’re working, and that worries him. So here I am. I came instead.” She’d sounded more upbeat than she’d intended.

  “And he thinks you will magically beguile me into producing more than I have?”

  “No, of course not,” she’d said, mortified that he would think she would be so crass, although fine with the perception that Katz might be. “I can only tell you that I will do my utmost to support your immense talent and see it properly represented.”

  She was relieved that he didn’t contradict her credo.

  “If Katz has become fat and indolent,” he said, “I hope the condition has not affected his eyes.” With that, he’d raised his glass to her. She was glad to see that he was smiling.

  He asked her to stay, but she declined, retreating instead to the discomfort of a concave mattress at the local B&B, to spend the night wondering whether she’d been presumptuous about the nature of his invitation—maybe all he’d been offering was a decent bed? The next morning he’d telephoned her early. Instead of returning to the studio, he wanted to show her a place of “greater significance.” He picked her up and drove her ten miles to Sutton Hoo, where an excavation had been in progress, intermittently, since 1939.

  The site seemed to lie in supplication to the sky; skinless and exposed with its topsoil scraped away. Most of the burial mounds had been restored and allowed to grass over once again, while those still under examination gaped open like cystic wounds. Bramley was a familiar on the scene. He was on first-name terms with archeologists and researchers alike and afforded the privilege of circulating unsupervised. With one hand on Catherine’s elbow, the other daubing the direction of points of interest, he guided her around while speaking of the venerable Miss Pretty, who had owned the land and lived in the austere white house across the field. Miss Pretty had been interested in spiritualism. After hearing reports of supernatural activity in the area, she had funded the first excavation that yielded the monumental discovery of King Raedwald’s ship, with its trove of chattels and treasures. When John had taken her to see the grim figures of the sand men, where they lay hunched and undefended in their pits—like those caught in the molten lava of Vesuvius, they looked as though they might have been buried alive—she’d had the impression that he was posing some sort of question by bringing her there, but was at loss to know what it was. He seemed to intuit her thoughts: “I come here often to visit my neighbors, the ones that came before. Each hill and rut belongs to them and echoes with their call. They remind me what it means to be alive.” His connection with the ancient dead was startling: equally, the clarity with which he seemed to be looking at his own mortality, even challenging it with a willful stare. As she stood by, the rhomboid abstract that she had glimpsed in his studio came to her, allowing her to understand what the image represented: a preoccupation with places of interment, past, present, future. For Catherine, the insight was profound, so disarming, that she stepped back, as if she were to stay too close to the trench’s edge, she might be propelled down there in the direction of his gaze. That he had revealed himself to her was an act of trust, a vote of confidence that braced an eighteen-year bond. She went on to co-curate one more show for him with Katz, then another independently as his sole dealer. Her final tribute to John Bramley was the organization of a museum retrospective, fulfilling the promise she had made to him the day that they met.

  She had been warned about the first anniversary, that it was a mistake to think that it would push her one day further away from her loss, when it would only bring her one day closer to its permanence. It wasn’t until the weekend after the first anniversary of Rachel’s death that the cold weight of this eternity had flattened her. By force of will, she had made herself get up before she surrendered to the silence.

  There were different kinds of quiet. Not all bad. There was the fertile kind of artists, which she knew from studio visits and enjoyed. She liked the economy of speech, that words came from seeing; conversation only happened when there was something to say. Silence was always productive: full of ideas and crowded with consciousness. John Bramley was famously taciturn. Over the years he’d unnerved many a sitter. Although in the evening, in the company of friends, when work was done and his brushes were down, he would exhale and expand like the Burgundy in his decanter, and become confidential and downright talkative.

  Her father was the same when he was making. He didn’t speak much or waste time with small talk or chatter. When Catherine appeared in the shed, he’d hand her a lump of clay in lieu of conversation, and hours wou
ld pass while she watched him etching and molding, making glazes that were alchemical in their ability to fire from dull colors into iridescent hues, with barely a word passing between them—and that was fine too. Once, seeing her anticipation, he cautioned her that for all his experience he still never could be sure that a ceramic would survive a double firing. Sometimes, for reasons unknown—air pressure, water quality, mineral composition of the clay—a piece would emerge from the kiln fissured or broken. He likened the pale bisque-ware on the shelf, lined up for passage through the infernal heat, to souls waiting for a chance of eternity. These variables aside, he told her that art only happened when labor, intention, and craft came together. “You can toil all you want and the object of your attention is ugly, but with one brave turn it can become rare and beautiful. To an outsider that looks like a flick of the wrist, but I warrant you, it’s not.”

  In spite of all the hours spent in the studio receiving so many wisdoms, she developed no talent for the medium and did little more than toy with the clay—his processes were far more interesting to watch. She did like to coil and made legions of snails. “Another escargot?” he’d ask, indulging her, and she’d nod and set about making yet another pinwheel mollusk. Only when she reached a precocious eleven did she force questions about his pottery that was mostly sold in gift shops. How much did a tea set cost to make? How much did he charge? She noted that one teapot was really three pieces by the time he’d made the body, attached the handle, made the lid—then there were those pesky cups. Why didn’t he make a jug or vase that would be quicker, then he could make and sell more? She’d observed with some anxiety that money was tightly parsed.

  Her father laughed, praising her acumen. Taking a lumpen mass of clay to the wheel, he raised a cylinder, as only a conjuror could do.