‘That’s not the only reason you’re here,’ he went on. ‘Please, come and sit down, Miss Bastien.’
I obliged, walking across his grey carpet, lowering myself into the large wooden chair in front of his desk. Parr stalked round this wide piece of furniture before settling himself opposite me. The air between us thickened. I saw why Quick might have employed him for such disbursements, for he remained unmoved by my obvious nerves. Parr suited her purposes entirely. He was a sphinx; his job to execute her wishes and nothing else. He looked down at the document on his desk. ‘Miss Bastien,’ he said, pressing his spindly fingers together to make a temple. ‘Marjorie named you in her will.’
I heard these words, and although I understood them, I could not grasp their implication. ‘I’m sorry?’
Parr blinked, impassive as a lizard. Outside, below us, the city traffic honked and beeped. ‘She had a cottage, in Wimbledon,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘She bequeathed it to you. In perpetuity.’
I MUST, AT SOME POINT, have left the offices in Bread Street and walked back to St Paul’s Tube station. I imagine the walk was slow, that my heart felt odd. Quick had left me her cottage. I had signed some papers. It was overwhelming. When, when had she made such a decision? And why me? It was an inheritance the like of which I would never have imagined.
I must have clutched her folder tight. At least here was a solid thing – a gesture embodied in paper that I might better understand. Perhaps the answers to all my questions were in here. I was probably terrified that I might be mugged, and I must have sat on the train all the way to Clapham Common, refusing to open it in public. It burned my lap, but I needed to be alone, in quiet, when I finally read it.
I managed to get off at my stop, and was barely up the stairs and through the flat door before I tore the ribbon and began to read. Dear Odelle, This is a long story, it began, and I sat up till midnight reading it. I forgot to eat, my neck was stiff, but I didn’t care. Here was everything Quick had ever wanted me to know, but couldn’t find the words to tell me to my face. -People, places, evenings spent under the vast Andalusian skies. Her story was bigger and brighter than anything my own imagination would have pictured. And as I finished it, my eyes red and shrunken with tiredness, my head pounding, I realized something else. Here, also, was everything that Olive Schloss had never wanted the world to know.
This folder was the evidence of Quick’s perpetual, honourable silence over Rufina and the Lion, which conflicted with her anxiety to pass on the story of Olive Schloss before it was too late. For most of the time I knew Quick, she had been in crisis. Her centre could no longer hold. It must have been an astounding trigger to see that photograph of Olive and her brother, and the painting of Rufina, all those years later, to understand better than anyone what it represented – and to watch it be commodified, re--moulded, attributed to Isaac, yet again.
As Teresa Robles, she knew Olive had wanted to remain anonymous. As Quick, she felt the injustice in that. Nothing had been resolved between these two selves. This pressure, and the memory of what happened in those last days in Spain, -coupled with the powerful pain relief she was on, no doubt exacerbated Quick’s hallucinatory states and her general inability to put it all to rest. What she left for me to read in the folder finally explained why her behaviour had wheeled between solicitous and elusive. Teresa had cracked open; the reappearance of the painting had proved too much.
I still do not know if her death was accidental. Most of the time, I believe that it was not. She realized she would never find the words to speak the trauma of Olive’s last days. And one might argue, that in the face of such aggressive cancer she saw that she could at least control her end, leaving the folder for me to find through her lawyer. I think often of Teresa’s notebook of English; discarded by Jorge, discovered again by Olive, and then, in that folder, by me. It seems that she – like myself – always found the written word an easier means through which to understand the world.
She left no specific instructions with Parr as to what I was supposed to do with this folder. So for years, I did nothing. In fact, until now, I never told anyone what I read, that cold November night under my bedsheets. I didn’t even speak to Reede about it, although I wish I had.
In the folder, Quick didn’t detail exactly what happened when she arrived in England, but she must have taken up Reede’s offer to meet him in Whitehall. I imagine that with her languages, and Reede’s connections in the Foreign Office, she would have been useful to Britain as the world groaned its way to war. There were quite a few Nazis in Spain by the early ’40s. And in its way, I’m sure that Britain – and Reede – was useful to her too. Gratitude comes in strange shapes. A beautiful cottage on Wimbledon common, for example.