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 swallowed up by tonight’s mystique. 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.
April 1936
12
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, apparently 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 the 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 with him laugh 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 daily, 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 was 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, but 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 before it had come to blossom.