I LAY IN BED AWAKE, my bedside light still on past three. In my chest, my stomach, in my aching head, I felt pain for us both. That Lawrie loved me, I could not easily believe. Though he had never made me feel like an outsider, I couldn’t help worrying that he only liked me because I looked different to all the other girls in that gang he’d turned up with at Cynth’s wedding.
Lawrie had rushed in with his declaration of love – but did he really see me? I couldn’t imagine being someone who dived in for another like that; the sense that one’s molecules were being recalibrated; the sheer, multi--layered joy of being seen and adored, and adoring in return, the cycle of shyness to confidence as each new step was taken. To seek your beloved in a crowd, to lock your eyes and feel you have no truer place – it seemed impossible to me. I was – both by circumstance and nature – a migrant in this world, and my lived experience had long become a state of mind.
I didn’t know if I loved him, and that was also frightening – not to know, to be sure. Just be careful of him. You don’t just happen upon a painting like that, Odelle. Quick’s voice again: I had tried so hard to shut it away. I wondered if her warnings about Lawrie had arrested my affection, if Quick was the reason I could not drop my anchor with him as confidently as he’d declared his love. I leaned over and switched off the light, hoping in the dark for sleep. As I lay there, I couldn’t tell whether the fears were mine, or whether Quick had slipped her own inside my head.
February 1936
7
The painting Olive had finished was propped against the wall. She was more proud of it than even The Orchard, and felt that she was creeping ever closer to that shining citadel. The new piece was a surreal composition, colourful, disjointed to the gaze. It was a diptych; Santa Justa before her arrest and after, set against a dark indigo sky and a shining field. Olive had decided to call it Santa Justa in the Well.
The left half of the painting was lush and glowing. Olive had used ordinary oils, but had also experimented with gold leaf, which glinted in the light as she held the painting up. She’d always thought of gold leaf as an alchemist’s dream, a contained ray of sun. It was the colour of queens, of wise men, of shimmering land in high summer. It reminded her of the Russian Orthodox icons she had always wanted to touch as a little girl, when her father took her to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
In the middle of the healthy land on this left--hand side stood a woman, her hair the colour of the crop. She was carrying a heavy pot with deer and rabbits painted on it, and in its centre was the face of the goddess Venus. Both the faces of the woman and Venus looked proud, staring out at the viewer.
On the right half of the painting, the crop was deadened and limp. The woman appeared again, except this time she was curled inside a circle which was hovering over the crop. This circle was filled with an internal perspective to make it look as if it had depth, as if the woman was lying at the bottom of a well. Her hair was now severed and dull, her pot had smashed around her, a puzzle impossible for anyone to piece together. Around the rim of the well, full--sized deer and rabbits peered down, as if set free from the broken crockery. Venus had vanished.
Olive could hear soft knocking at the attic door, and she sat up. ‘Who is it?’ she asked, her voice half--strangled with hope that it might be him.
‘It is Teresa.’
‘Oh.’
‘The party is in a few hours, se?orita. Can I come in?’
Olive leapt up and hid the painting under the bed. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Recently, Teresa had begun to help Olive keep her room in order. It was an unspoken agreement. Olive had not invited it, but she liked it; the attention, the paint brushes laid out for another day’s work. Her clothes were always neatly folded on her chair or hanging in her cupboard, her unfinished canvases were turned to face the wall, the way she liked it when it was time for bed. Olive would turn them back in the morning, and work up there unbothered.
Teresa stood at the doorway, her satchel across her chest. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
Olive lay back on the bed. ‘I want to look like Garbo,’ she said languorously, stretching herself out, running her fingers through her hair. ‘Tere, how good are you at making waves?’
?
The girls set up a chair in front of the oval mirror, which Teresa had found in a spare room and nailed to the wall. The glass was foxed and misty round the edges, but the centre was clear enough. They were using a series of illustrations from one of Sarah’s Vogues in an attempt to recreate Greta Garbo’s look. Teresa lit candles around the room as the light outside faded.
‘I’ve never been able to have finger waves anyway,’ Olive said. ‘My hair’s too thick. But we should be able to do these curls.’
They remained in companionable silence for a good five minutes, Olive enjoying the calming administrations of Teresa through her hair; a repetitive, smoothing motion that made her close her eyes. ‘I suppose it’s good news about the election, but I keep thinking about that poor boy Isaac knew,’ Olive said finally.
Teresa kept her eyes down, working at the nape of Olive’s neck. ‘One day, left, next day, right. The government change the street names more than I change my bed. And at the end of it, se?orita, I never see the difference.’
‘Well, thank goodness there are men like your brother who do care.’
Teresa was silent.
‘Do you like your father, Tere?’ Olive asked.
‘He is a legend here.’
‘Doesn’t sound like you think that’s a good thing.’
Teresa frowned at the back of Olive’s head. ‘I do not like the stories.’
Olive opened her eyes. ‘What stories?’
The girls looked at each other in the mirror. Teresa wrapped small portions of Olive’s sizeable mass of hair round and round her finger, before securing it tightly with the pins sequestered out of Sarah’s bedroom. ‘They say that once he cut a man’s thing off and nailed it to a door.’
Olive swivelled her head round, and the hair sprang from its curl, the pin skittering across the floorboards. ‘What? To a door?’