The Shades Page 4

  “Our experiment, dear girl—big enough for flowers. A Catherine Jug. What color should it be?”

  “Blue,” she’d replied.

  “What shade? Be more exact.”

  “Anything but navy.” She’d smacked the box pleats of an offending uniform skirt.

  “What would you have against navy?”

  “Boring.”

  He allowed the wheel to slow to a halt.

  “Ah, no mystery. I agree it appears a little solid. Color comes from light. What you see depends on how many wavelengths the object can absorb or reflect and send back to the eye.”

  “You mean the color isn’t there?” This information was disorienting, as it flipped her understanding of the physical world on its head.

  “That brain of yours decides. Do you think gray could pass muster?”

  “Only if it has blue in it.”

  “The mist.”

  With a deft press of his thumb, a spout appeared on the rim.

  “You’re not alone in your passion,” he continued. “Centuries ago, people crossed seas, climbed the mountains of Afghanistan to find precious stones of lapis lazuli to grind into pigment to make the most profound and sacred of blues, ultramarine.”

  “Was it expensive?”

  “More valuable than gold, because it was rare and prized by all the master painters.”

  He slid a piece of wire under the jug, neatly slicing it from the turntable. “Are there any other blues you’d find acceptable?” His voice was clipped. She sensed that he hadn’t liked her question.

  “The sky when it’s sunny, the sea in photos when it’s clear, baby blue and turquoise rings . . .”

  When Rachel was born her eyes were blue, but turned brown. Rowan’s were the same, then a curious gray, flecked with moss green. Irish twin. Why did she ever think that was funny?

  Her father started calling her Manager Catherine, which she didn’t find as amusing as he seemed to do, but she was pleased when she heard that the jug had sold for the same price as the more labor-intensive tea set.

  Then there was her mother’s silence that began after the episode—a chill that hardened into a freeze, fragile enough to shatter at any moment.

  Rosemary Hall hadn’t always been so brittle.

  As a younger woman, she was mild and conscientious. She managed the farm and the family’s tenuous finances, supervising Catherine’s homework, attentive to the details, the minutiae of her needs—she was emphatic that her daughter should work hard to succeed academically, to qualify herself to enter any field of interest she desired. The only hint of the forecast might have been her mother’s hovering air of anxiety, but as she lived in perpetual wait, whether for rent from tenants who never paid on time—like her husband they were artisans, surviving sale by sale—or for her husband to emerge, to receive pieces that would be packed carefully in newspaper and loaded into the shuddering Morris Minor for distribution around local gift shops, a certain apprehensiveness could have been perfectly natural. That her mother was capable of a singularly destructive act, at first sight seemed not just unlikely, but impossible.

  The episode in question involved a commission from Kitty Lisle, widow of the Liberal MP Sir Richard Lisle, who owned an Elizabethan jewel house and garden on the West Sussex– Surrey border. Mrs. Lisle, previously of Cape Town, and married to one of the directors of De Beers, had cultivated an interesting sculpture garden of Moore, Hepworth, and Caro at Rother Park, with a small but choice collection of ceramics inside. She had seen one of Frank’s vases at a craft show, made enquiries about its maker, and discovered that he was somewhat local. After inviting Frank Hall to view her galleries, she commissioned a work as a present to herself for her sixtieth birthday.

  Many vessels fell on his wheel before this beauty could rise, more delicate than his usual weightier stoneware, but still wide and generous in proportion. It had a lustered serpent chasing around the rim, over a body burnished with oxidized rings of hot gold. The day he presented the vase as complete, Catherine thought she had never seen such a radiant and cosmic glaze, nor her father so proud.

  Her mother denied having touched it. She claimed that when she’d walked in, she’d found it already smashed on the stand.

  Don’t come near my studio.

  Tell her about your girlfriend’s money.

  Stupid woman. I would pay to do what I do.

  You do pay.

  A replacement was made, but it lacked the planetary curves of the original; the new version had the look of a lesser reproduction. Her father still received generous payment for the commission—Catherine discovered later when he made a gift of a startling £25,000 to each of her children—but there was no compensation for the creative frustration that dogged him beyond the incident. With every failed attempt to reacquaint craft with inspiration, the pile of rejects burgeoned in the yard. Catherine reckoned these objects had been abandoned with good reason, as they were eerily deformed. When she said as much, asking her father to move the dump somewhere else, he barked, “Get used to it, young lady. It’s permanent. I wouldn’t think of moving it any more than I’d try and move Pompeii.” Seeing his daughter’s bewilderment, he told her to look up Vesuvius in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which she did to no immediate understanding. It was many years before she could wrap her mind around the analogy and figure out who was the victim and who was the volcano, and determine that her parents were a confusing mix of both. Gradually time and the elements worked a metamorphosis on the heap, with mold and leaves unifying the wreckage into one great hopeless masterwork that seemed to cry out with the burden of defeat.

  With her father’s anger subsiding into disappointment, grave enough to cast a pall over the household, the absence of any further denial of the breakage acted as confirmation of his wife’s guilt.

  Whether she had been given cause for provocation was less certain.

  That the relationship between artist and patron had made her insanely jealous was clear, but whether she had been given grounds for suspicion was harder to establish. It never occurred to Catherine to ask—that would have been indelicate and to breach a boundary containing things too personal to discuss. After the incident, Catherine was taken to Rother Park by her father, and was finally introduced to infamous Kitty. Instead of meeting a femme fatale, she discovered an old lady in coral linen with platinum hair, and only a faint glimmer of glamour. She had greeted Catherine’s father in a vague but friendly manner—he’d still managed to look dusty even though he’d washed and changed before going out. Catherine was sorry that Mrs. Lisle hadn’t paid her more attention and recognized her specialness, but instead wasted time talking to everyone else who happened to be in the garden. In terms of revealing the lovers’ complicity, the meeting was inconclusive. However, because her father had been paid well over the odds by Mrs. Lisle—tell her about your girlfriend’s money—she could see how easily that could be construed as a sign of a special relationship, and fed into Catherine’s mother’s jealousy, justified or irrational. A likely scenario was that without the tools to temper a coiling tension, she became so tightly wound that she snapped.

  Her mother broke things.

  In another household it might have been a saucer or coffee mug, in hers it was trust and an Olmec and Etruscan– influenced bell krater.

  She snapped because you can.

  After the incident, her father made his own deliveries, and once a Mr. Durlacher, at the request of Mrs. Lisle, came to the farm to pick up a cardboard box. Catherine never saw or wondered what was inside—by then the eruptions of puberty were more compelling than her parents’ intrigues. With her mother retreating behind a carapace of unhappiness, Catherine’s prayers that she might get away from her eccentric parents and their shambolic farm were miraculously heard when she was told that she was going to board full-time at a school near Cranbrook. She never asked how the fees would be paid; that might have been to discover that a mistake had been made and there was no money for her to go. Applying
a similar instinct to that of the school fees, Catherine never brought up the subject of the vase—avoiding questions was the best way of avoiding unpalatable answers, she quickly learned. Catherine received different explanations of her mother’s passing when she drowned on her fifty-fifth birthday swimming in calm seas at Camber Sands, ranging from Your mother did it to fuck us up (her father) to Poor Rosy’s heart must have given out (Catherine’s maternal aunt). Catherine was at university when she heard the news. She returned home to find her father drunk, alternating grief with anger. He railed against his dead wife and claimed that her death had been a hostile act. “She baked me a cake, and left it on the table with tea. No note, Cath. She couldn’t bring me down in life, so she’d bring me down with death.”

  Catherine was too stunned to know what to believe. In the absence of any psychiatric or medical evidence, the coroner ruled her mother’s death an accident. With the person she would normally look to for answers gone, she was left hollow and weightless, as if her core had been ripped out and her center of gravity missing. She no longer recognized herself or her father. With her mother’s act, they became strangers to each other, unreliable witnesses for having no clue or knowledge of what had been going on. In search of a place that would still be familiar, Catherine went back to university directly after the funeral. She didn’t want to be around her father and listen to his drunken spewings. To stop and mourn the opaque woman who had been her mother would have been to comprehend and absorb something of her pain. The best she could do was launch back into her studies and finish her dissertation, and hope that whatever had happened, her mother hadn’t suffered at the end.

  With Rowan gone, and from the recesses of a darkened room, Catherine had a better understanding of what it was like to have been her mother. Like a caring companion, her own frailty had brought with it a more keenly developed compassion for her mother as she tried to fathom the anguish that had driven her to take her life. What had been her mental state before she died? Was she aware that she was suicidal? If she was, had she deliberately concealed her intentions? Now that she was five years away from the age that her mother had been when she died, Catherine saw similarities in herself but mostly differences. Whereas Catherine had sought solitude as a solace, her mother’s isolation had been different. It hadn’t been a choice for her: loneliness had only brought her despair.

  There were other distinctions.

  Unlike her mother, she was making an effort in case Rowan came home. She was doing it alone because she didn’t want the help of bereavement counselors. She had consulted them about Rowan and they had failed to recognize her son’s vulnerability. In doing so they had misadvised and betrayed her.

  The morning of the accident they left the hospital and returned home. As it was still early, there was nothing for them to do except wait for Rowan to wake; they hadn’t wanted to disturb him before and interrupt his last innocent sleep. At six thirty a.m., they heard stirrings in his room and had gone in to find him sitting at his computer. When he looked up, his placid eyes were already knowing. Catherine had managed to stop crying, but only for a moment. Rowan allowed her to hang rag-doll limp in his arms while she’d blurted out the news, accepting the information without any reaction. Michael later said that he was proud of his son’s presence of mind and consoling strength; also, that he’d seemed to know his limits because when it was time, he’d walked them out of the room and closed the door behind them. Thirty minutes later Rowan was downstairs in his uniform, ready for school, refusing entreaties to stay home or be driven. He’d insisted on taking the bus as usual, and left the house with his earbuds in, just as if it were any ordinary day. A call to the headmaster confirmed that he was indeed there and was, to all outward appearances, fine.

  On the way to the funeral, Rowan announced that he wanted to read at the service. The stoicism of this request had taken both parents by surprise.

  After the priest intoned the service, Michael read Psalm 23, and “Amazing Grace” was sung, Rachel’s school friend Charlotte Nestor took her turn to go to the lectern to speak. She told the congregation that Rachel had standards before any of her group knew what that meant, that she had an annoying tendency to always be right—but this made her the best person to turn to for advice. In opposing teams for debate, Rachel had taken her aside and said, If I win, it’s not personal, which made being thrashed in front of the whole school seem all right. She spoke of her loyalty. “When Mum was ill, she came with me to the hospital. When Mum died, I remember Rache saying, That’s bloody awful, and bursting into tears.” Charlotte looked to the heavens, mugging slightly. “Sorry, Lord, for saying ‘bloody.’ Oh my God, that’s twice! . . . Her last Facebook status was Life=insane+beauty. She was right. The beauty is that she existed. The insanity—the bloody awful part—is that she’s gone.” Her voice cracked. “I’m just so grateful to have known her.”

  The younger contingent burst into applause. Catherine saw that many of them were sobbing. She was moved by poor Charlotte and remembered the shock waves Sue Nestor’s cancer had sent through her own family. She would never forget Jack Nestor’s broken appearance at his wife’s funeral and her own embarrassment in the face of his loss, at being helpless to do anything to relieve his suffering. She’d seen the same pitying looks and shame on faces when she’d entered the church, as if she had a terminal disease that was public knowledge but there was nothing more that could be done. No cure for being tired after driving from the country, having been out late at a party for a Chinese photographer in London the night before, because the Asian market was the fastest-growing area of contemporary art, and at the time that seemed so terribly important. No remedy for not following her instinct to say no to her daughter, and saying yes because it was so much easier than arguing the point. No absolution for being permissive when it suited her and strict when it did not, and for being the type of mother who passes for competent but is in truth neglectful.

  Charlotte’s bovine face was flushed with the effort of public speaking. She was trying so hard to honor her friend that she had the quality of an actress who had just nailed a part and was giving it her all. Although there was a lot of childish “I” in her speech, there was a brightness to her description that Catherine envied, making her question whether her own memories were already starting to fade. She asked herself what kind of mother she had been, taking Rachel to ballet before she could walk. To gymnastics before she could run. She remembered the fatigue of being with a tired and hungry child after school, and that when Rachel had become serious about tennis—and Rowan, for a while—she had made the au pair do the driving. Catherine helped with projects on the weekend, but only if they interested her; most often she was in the gallery, or racing up to see John Bramley in Norfolk. Rachel hadn’t told her about Merhan or any other boyfriends—for all she knew there might have been many. She had once asked whether there was anyone she liked but had been met with a scathing gaze. As if I would tell you. The images of Rachel were blurred, but she realized that it wasn’t her memory that was at fault, it was because during Rachel’s short life she hadn’t been present enough to see.

  Then Rowan took his turn, walking up to the altar.

  The sight of him by his sister’s coffin was a double affront.

  Someone had propped a tennis racket there. Rachel had been a talented player, one of the select few selected to participate in the “Way to Wimbledon” program sponsored by the club, requiring long hours of training, seven days a week, to the sacrifice of all her other extracurricular activities. She saw her own hubris that she had harbored so many hopes and ambitions for her daughter when all along this had been her destiny. Such efforts seemed wasteful now, and she wondered whether she should have encouraged her to spend more time at home or with friends relaxing, instead of putting her on a relentless treadmill. Perhaps the pressure had made her reckless? Literally, driven her to make foolish choices? She wanted to take the racket and smash it over the altar. Smash the false hope of resurrection. Cry
and show God what punishment really meant.

  But that wouldn’t have been appropriate.

  “I wrote this poem,” Rowan said.

  There was a collective holding of breath. Everyone was still in anticipation, except Michael, who squeezed her hand.

  “That was the title,” Rowan continued deadpan.

  Everyone laughed, grateful at the release of tension, although Catherine wasn’t sure that this had been Rowan’s intention. He didn’t smile.

  He continued at a measured pace.

  Sixteen years pass

  Is there a better way

  or are we still the same?

  Then, without making eye contact with anyone, Rowan walked back to his seat.

  In contrast to the emotional release after Charlotte’s speech, the congregation was nonplussed and silent. Then there was a polite rustle of movement, a fidgeting of programs and murmur, as if people felt obliged to react because to remain quiet might have seemed hostile or rude. Michael leaned in and whispered encouragingly, Not bad. Almost a haiku. Catherine could have kicked him for being so naïve. She thought that if Rowan was going to bother getting up there, he could have at least have found something nice to say about his sister. Is there a better way seemed to imply criticism of her—maybe of them all? Michael’s interpretation of the poem was different. He thought his son’s words were about as philosophical and inspirational as you could expect a fifteen-year-old boy’s to be.

  The day after the funeral, Rowan made another announcement. He informed his parents that he “wanted out of London” and to go away to school. In the context of his odd, affectless behavior—that he had yet to show one iota of sadness—his sudden declaration was alarming and seemed another way for Rowan to repress his feelings and run from his grief. Catherine took the news the hardest. The idea that Rowan would go away from home at a time of crisis, to a strange situation where he might not be supported, seemed a terrible one, and Catherine strenuously resisted the notion.