‘What happened to her? Does he say?’
‘I haven’t had time to read it, but I’ve done a good bit of dipping. The author starts by saying that it’s hard to know for certain when even her true name remains a mystery, but then he relates a new theory that she broke Radcliffe’s heart by stealing some jewellery – a family heirloom – and running off to America with another man.’
Elodie thought back to the Wikipedia entry she’d read, the robbery in which Edward Radcliffe’s fiancée was killed. She shared the outline quickly with Pippa and said, ‘Do you think it was the same robbery? That this woman, his model, was involved in some way?’
‘No idea. It’s possible, though I’d be careful about taking the theories too literally. I did a quick JSTOR search this morning and found some criticism pointing out that the author relied on a single unidentified source for a lot of the new information. What is useful is the painting of our woman in white; now we’ve established for certain that she and Radcliffe knew one another.’
Elodie nodded, but she was thinking about the loose page in the sketchbook, the scrawled lines about love and fear and madness. Had those desperate lines been written by Radcliffe after the woman in white, his model ‘Lily Millington’, disappeared from his life? Was it she who’d broken his heart by absconding to America with his family’s heirloom treasure, and not his pleasant-faced fiancée? And what of Stratton? What had his relationship to the woman been? For it was he who’d kept her framed photograph, tucking it for safe keeping in the satchel belonging to Edward Radcliffe.
Pippa had gone to the kitchen bench for the bottle of pinot and was now topping up their glasses.
‘Elodie, there’s something else I wanted to show you.’
‘Another book?’
‘Not a book, no.’ She sat down, a new and unnatural hesitance creeping into her manner, putting Elodie on guard. ‘I’d mentioned to Caroline that I was asking all of this for you, because of what you’d found in the archives. She’s always liked you.’
Pippa was being kind. Caroline barely knew Elodie.
‘I told her I was making your dress and we got to talking about the wedding, about the recordings, the music, and what it must be like for you to watch all of your mum’s concerts, and then Caroline came over quiet. I was worried at first that I’d said something to offend her, but then she apologised to me, excused herself and went to get something from her studio.’
‘What was it?’
Pippa dug again inside her backpack and pulled out a thin plastic folder with a piece of card inside it. ‘One of her photographs. Elodie – it’s a photo of your mum.’
‘Caroline knew my mother?’
Pippa shook her head. ‘She took it by chance. She said she had no idea who they were until later.’
‘They?’
Pippa opened her mouth, as if to explain, but evidently thought better of it, simply handing the folder to Elodie instead.
The photograph inside was larger than usual, with the rough edges and crop marks indicating that it had been printed from a negative. The image was black and white, of two people, a man and a woman, deep in conversation. They were sitting together in a beautiful place outdoors, with masses of ivy and the very edge of a stone building in the background. There was a picnic blanket and a basket, and detritus suggesting lunch. The woman was wearing a long skirt and strappy sandals and was sitting with her legs crossed, leaning forward so that her elbow rested on one knee and her face was partly turned towards the man beside her. Her chin was lifted and the beginnings of a smile seemed to be playing at the corners of her mouth. A shard of sunlight had broken through a gap in the foliage to bathe the scene. The image was beautiful.
‘She took it in July 1992,’ said Pippa.
Elodie didn’t say anything. They both knew the importance of that date. Elodie’s mother had died that month. She had been killed in a car with the American violinist, returning from a performance in Bath, and yet here she was, sitting with him in a leafy grove somewhere only weeks – days? – beforehand.
‘She said it’s one of her favourite photographs. The light, the expressions on their faces, the setting.’
‘How did she—where was she?’
‘In the country, somewhere near Oxford; she went out for a walk one day, turned a corner, and saw them. She said she didn’t think twice; she just lifted her camera and captured the moment.’
Most of the questions she wanted to ask wouldn’t occur to Elodie until later. For now, she was too distracted by this new image of her mother, who didn’t look like a celebrity, but like a young woman in the middle of a deep, personal conversation. Elodie wanted to drink in every detail. To study the hem of her mother’s skirt where the breeze was brushing it against her bare ankle, the way the fine chain of her watch fell low on her wrist, the elegant fluidity of her hand as it gestured towards the violinist.
It put her in mind of another photograph, a family snapshot she’d discovered at home when she was eighteen years old. She’d been about to graduate from sixth form and the editor of her school newspaper planned to run childhood pictures of the whole class beside their school portraits. Her father was not a neat man and decades’ worth of photos in their Kodak envelopes had been stored inside a couple of boxes at the bottom of the linen cupboard. One of these rainy winter days, he always said, he was going to pull them out and sort them into albums.
From the bottom of one box, Elodie had plucked a series of square, yellow-tinged photographs showing a group of young people laughing around a dining table covered by half-mast candles and wine bottles with elegant necks. A New Year’s Eve banner was suspended above them. She’d thumbed through the pictures, noting fondly her father’s turtleneck and flares, her mother’s slim waist and enigmatic smile. And then she’d come to a shot from which her father was missing – behind the camera, perhaps? It was the same scene, but her mother was sitting now beside a man with dark eyes and an intense bearing, the violinist, the two of them deep in conversation. In that photo, too, her mother’s left hand had been blurred in motion. She had always spoken with her hands. As a child, Elodie had thought of them as small, delicate birds, weaving and fluttering in harmony with her mother’s thoughts.
Elodie had known at once when she saw that photo. A deep, human, intuitive knowing. The electricity between her mother and the man could not have been clearer had a cable been strung from one to the other. Elodie hadn’t said anything to her father, who had already lost so much, but the knowledge cast a shadow; and several months later, when they were watching a film together, a French film in which infidelity was a central theme, Elodie had made a barbed comment about the cheating woman. It had come out sharper and hotter than it sounded in her head; it had been a challenge – she was hurt for him, and angry with him; angry with her mother, too. But her father had not risen to the bait. ‘Life is long,’ was all he’d said, his voice calm; he hadn’t looked up from the film. ‘Being human isn’t easy.’