The Blue Bath (8 page)

Close to the center of the wall was a quartet of birds, so devoid of detail that she thought that they were already gone. That their silhouettes were all that remained, sculpting the pulsating blue sky around them. The other paintings seemed to orbit around it. Its vivid tones providing an anchor to the surrounding chaos. She imagined what it might look like from the different vantage points of the other paintings. The soldier. The sad-eyed woman. How they saw it.

The collection had been a wedding present from her father to her mother. The beau geste of a besotted groom and the final straw for his disapproving parents, who found beauty without provenance to be suspect. They had disapproved of the marriage, fearing that she was after their money, and the gift of the paintings played into these fears. Worse, she was Catholic, as certain an indication of lower class as they required.

There had been a larger canvas that had hung just to the left of the birds. Although she suspected that it had not been the first to go, it was the first one whose departure she was conscious of. She could not have been more than five years old at the time that the empty space appeared where it had been. She remembered the feeling of it, more than she did the actual painting. There was a girl before an open window—the light casting her flesh in a soft, shellfish pink. She had thought that there must have been an ocean outside the window, not because she remembered seeing an ocean, but because the light that poured into the room was a kind she had only ever seen reflected off the sea in the early evening.

And while she was too young to understand everything about the paintings, she still felt them. She thought that the great ones were like that in any art form—music, painting, dance. While the technical genius might not be easily visible to the naked eye, that which was beautiful and true needed no explanation. Later, she had also come to know them by the artists who had painted them. But despite this later knowledge, they had always remained for her as she had first known them to be. She thought that it was best this way. To first experience something in its pure state—to feel something before fully understanding it.

Over time, their number continued to diminish. After the initial departure, she took more notice of them. Cataloguing them with her callow child’s eye. Each its own world. Of color and line and style. Of age and time and reason. Each with its own rules, its own borders, its own palette. She had made a story from the pictures. Her story drew them together. United them and changed the rules of each of their worlds, blurring the boundaries that separated them.

The Matisse had been the last to go. For a while it hung oddly off-center on the wall. And then for a while it was only the ghosts, but then they went as well, there being no one there to remember them.

The empty spaces where the paintings had hung were never filled. Instead, the walls held only their shadows. Their varying degrees of darkness on the moss-colored wall, a testament to how long each painting had been there. The last ones to be removed were memorialized by squares of deepest green—deeper even than the surrounding wallpaper.

Sometimes long periods passed between departures, as had been the case following the exodus of the girl before the window and the seascape. When she grew up, she understood that they were more than pretty pictures. That they were important. That they had value. And that her mother had sold them off one by one, as needed. The paintings had sustained them. Perhaps not in the way that her father had intended, but in the way that had been necessary. She saw all that they had given her and she felt that maybe she owed them something in return.

She had seen the Matisse once, years after its departure. Through the window of a small gallery in SoHo. It had seemed to her that they had recognized each other at the same time. Old friends passing on a crowded street. After her initial excitement, an odd sense of shyness and propriety had caused her to keep walking, preventing her from stopping and running her eyes over its familiar curves, allowing her gaze to linger in its expanse of blue, as if she did not have the right. Not anymore. When she had found herself on the same street several weeks later, it was gone from the window.

She wondered about the order in which they had been sold and those that had been the last to go. What did they represent? Were they her mother’s favorites? Each possessing its own special significance? Or were they simply the most likely to sell? Would they have fetched the best prices at auction? She thought about her mother and how she would never know the whole of her story. She thought about the possibility that what had shaped her, what had defined her most markedly, was not what was in her life, but what was not. And how she had built her life around those empty spaces.

When her mother had informed her father’s family of her pregnancy and of her intention to raise the child in her Catholic faith, her father’s family had responded that they had no interest in the child. And so she did not know them.

There had been one time. She could not have been more than five years old. It had been a weekday, but her mother had instructed her to put on one of her Sunday dresses. As she pulled the smocked garment over her head, Kat had wondered expectantly at the occasion. Coaxing the strap of her shoe into its buckle, she had heard the doorman ring up and, minutes after that, the doorbell. When her mother had called her to the drawing room, she had entered shyly. The good tea set sat on the low table, its small delicate white cups embroidered with flowers and rimmed in gold. An older woman perched behind it on the edge of the couch, the frayed edges of her tweed jacket perfectly matching the fringe of the pillows.

As Kat entered the room, the woman turned and rose slowly. Her lips were shiny red and her face wore an alert, almost surprised expression. After a moment she extended her hand stiffly. Her skin felt soft and dry, like crumpled tissue paper. Kat looked at the blue veins visible just under the surface.

“Katherine, this is your grandmother.” Her mother seemed almost as incredulous at the unlikely figure before her as Kat was.

Kat had been amazed. She had a grandmother. She knew of them, of course, from stories and fairy tales. She regarded hers with interest. Her hair rose off her head and was frozen in high waves around her face.

Her mother had excused herself and gone into the kitchen, leaving the two of them alone in the room. Mother and daughter, separated by the one absent person who made each of them so. She was surprisingly tall. For some reason Kat had imagined most older people to be small. She had looked down on Kat, arrayed before her in her Sunday best.

“You are the image of your mother.”

Even to her young ears, it had the ring of accusation.

She had answered solemnly. “I have the red hair like my mommy.”

“So you do.” As she spoke, her gaze slid off Kat, and onto the paintings behind her, where it lingered. Kat had been keen to regain her attention.

“You like Mommy’s pretty pictures?”

Her grandmother wrinkled her nose and pressed her lips together. Kat thought that maybe she had smelled something bad.

“Pretty pictures. Is that what they are?”

After a moment, she refocused on Kat, although her face still retained traces of its prior expression. “Well, now, no need to let the tea go cold, I suppose.”

Her grandmother had leaned toward the table between them and lifted the teapot. Its bulbous shape threatened to be too much for her thin wrists to bear and her hands shook slightly under its weight. Kat closed her eyes and listened to the distinctive sound of the hot liquid being poured, so different from the sound of something cold being poured. The faintly citrus scent of the tea reached her and she opened her eyes in time to see her mother emerging from the kitchen bearing a tiered platter of small, round cakes in varying subtle hues of such delicacy that they seemed like petals from a flower.

“Look at what your grandmother brought.”

In her delight at the sight of the cakes, Kat opened her arms wide to clap. Her right hand made abrupt contact with one of the cups, sending it flying off the table, its contents arcing out behind it like the tail of a comet. The older woman let out a short scream, rising from her chair, a look of abject horror on her face. Kat froze. The back of her hand stung from the momentary contact with the hot porcelain, and tears welled in her eyes. It took her a moment to realize that she was not burned. It took her another moment to realize that her grandmother’s concern was not directed at her. That instead she was looking past her to the trail of tea that traced a path across the rug to the wall, where tiny dark liquid drops had fallen in a fan shape, its far edge interrupted by the lower left corner of the painting of the young soldier. The older woman turned on Kat, her face taut with anger.

“Dear God! What have you done?”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Kat sobbed, looking from the unfamiliar angry face of her grandmother to the familiar concerned face of her mother, who was already kneeling on the floor beside her, reaching for her hand, which she clutched close to her chest.

“Are you okay, darling? Let me see your hand.”

Kat nodded meekly, extending her hand to her mother, who rubbed it gently between her own hands, murmuring, “It’s all right. It’s only an accident.”

After examining her hand to make sure she had not been scalded, her mother stood. Plucking a napkin from the table, she moved to the canvas, blotting gently, working quickly to remove the small traces of tea that had fallen on it. Turning the napkin over, she repeated the process, diligently examining it when she was done to make sure there was nothing on it.

“Is it all right?” her grandmother asked anxiously, edging closer to the wall.

Her mother turned away from the painting and addressed Kat. “Go into the kitchen and get me another cloth from the drawer, would you, darling?”

Taking care to angle herself away from the table, Kat retreated hastily to the other room. She reached up to open the drawer, standing on her toes to find what she sought. Pausing to press the cloth to her damp cheeks, she hesitated at the door, listening to her grandmother’s deep patrician voice in the next room, shaping and polishing her words so that they shone with admonition.

“… irresponsible to have a child in an apartment with something of such value…”

After a brief pause, her mother’s voice.

“You have made no secret of the fact that you find my behavior to be irresponsible. And today you have made it very clear that you value the paintings more than you do your own granddaughter. They are what you really came to see.” Her mother’s voice was ice. Kat froze where she stood, her hand on the doorknob. “Take a moment. Have a last look at what you love. Then see yourself out.”

While the incident had put a stop to any further contact with her father’s family, it had not stopped the discussion of her father.

“What was he like?”

It was almost a refrain in her childhood. There had been many responses, of increasing depth and detail as she grew older. A few she remembered better than others. Some she remembered because they had been repeated, becoming answering choruses to her refrain. “I sometimes think we must have known on some level that we didn’t have much time.” Others she remembered because they had not been repeated. “Maybe I was lucky. It never had a chance to fade.”

chapter five

Kat changed her clothes twice. Stopping before the mirror in the front hallway, she braided her hair in one long, loose plait, wrapping a bit of the ends around it to hold it fast. She liked having it out of her face. She should just cut it short, but it seemed somehow to be an admission of age.

Passing the arched window on the landing, she realized she was not alone. She wondered how long he had been there, body cloaked by lingering night, just beyond the garden doors. She had first seen the bright yellow eyes watching her the week that they moved into the house. She had seen the small red foxes on the paths in Holland Park in the early morning. In the springtime, reckless with desire, they came into the gardens behind the houses to mate, their sharp, keening cries waking her at night. Something both urgent and mournful about them. It surprised her to see such an untamed thing in the city. Somehow, just knowing that they were there gave her hope. As if she needed that wildness—even if she never did more than lock eyes with it. She needed to know that it was out there.

She had dismissed their driver early in the day. She seldom used him when Jonathan was out of town. Instead, she caught the number 9 bus to Mayfair. It was nearly full and she took a spot standing by the back door. She kept her long coat pulled tightly around her, hiding her dressy clothes. She very rarely bumped into anyone she knew on the bus in London. She felt that it was her own little secret world of public anonymity.

Two young women got on at Palace Gate, tottering on spindly heels, talking animatedly about a party. Kat wondered briefly what she was doing, thinking that Jorie must have talked her into it and reasoning that she was just curious about his work. And maybe he wouldn’t be there at all. Daniel had never liked openings.

An older woman in a bright red coat boarded at Exhibition Road and took a spot by the door, her long neck hidden under the folds of an expertly arranged Hermès scarf. Kat watched her as she swayed gracefully in sync with her fellow passengers as the bus stopped and started its way through traffic on Kensington Gore, her fluid movements elevating them to a corps de ballet.

Her mother had loved spending time with them in London, visiting so frequently over the years that Kat would tease her that she knew the city better than Kat did. On the mornings that Will was at school and Kat had something in the diary, her mother would set out alone to the museums. She had fallen on the last visit. Misjudging the distance from the bottom step of the bus to the pavement, she had fallen. Kat had gotten the phone call from the National Gallery and had raced over to find her resting on a couch in the staff break room, a cup of Earl Grey by her side. If she was shaken by the incident, she had not shown it, insisting on viewing the Vermeers that she had come to see, and then maintaining that it would be rude not to pay her respects to the Turners, as if they were old family friends. And so Kat had followed along beside her as she moved from Canaletto to Rubens to Ingres to Goya. Watching the changing shapes of joy in her face as the paintings passed her from one to the next. Looking like a schoolgirl with plasters on her knees.