The Ecliptic (55 page)

‘It’s like a tube, about eight or nine feet long. Wrapped up in black plastic sheeting.’

‘That shouldn’t be hard to miss.’

I scoured the damp and shadowed ground on both sides of the stilts. ‘Well, it isn’t here,’ I said.

Victor’s hands were in the pockets of his coat. He was staring left and right along the shore. ‘This beach runs all the way round. It’s miles.’

‘It can’t be far from here.’

‘Let’s try that way.’ He pointed south.

‘The cottage is the other way. It’s more likely to be north.’

‘If you say so.’

‘No, you’re right. The current might have washed it further out.’

I went south, combing the shoreline with my eyes, until the beach thinned out and there was nowhere left to walk. Nothing was floating on the loch that I wanted to see. ‘Let’s head
back,’ I said, and Victor tracked my footsteps quietly. He walked a few yards behind, observing my behaviour, only partially invested in my search. ‘How long?’ he called.

‘Huh?’ I was looking north along the beach towards the pier again.

‘How long until you give this up?’

‘You could help me, you know, instead of hoping I’ll fail.’

‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Let’s speed this up, Ellie. It’s getting late.’

But Victor did not understand that darkness was our ally. If the plastic had ripped back from the roll, the gleam of the paint would vent out. We might catch a glimpse of blue somewhere in the
pitch-black night and follow it.

I peered down at the shingle, looking for a knoll or a raised edge where the mural might have been covered over, buried. There was nothing. I zigzagged up and down, checking the pavement side of
the beach, walled off by cobbles. Nothing.

We reached the pier again and I checked through the windows of the wooden outhouse to see if it had been found and left there, leaned up in a corner as lost property. But no. It was only a
closet of boxes.

Victor had stayed on the bank, propped against the bonnet of his car. He looked at his watch. ‘You haven’t checked up there,’ he said, thumbing north. ‘I’ll wait
for you. My shoes are full of stones.’

I went down the slope, along the strip of shingle. A few small dinghies were moored in the shallows. There were four of them, differently coloured and named, with mainsails scrolled around their
willow masts, tied off. All but one of them was tarpaulined at the stern.

Beside me, a partition of green hedgerows ran most of the way along the beach. Above that, a hummock bristling with tall trees. Cottages dotted the lip of the shore. I knew that Jim Culvers was
not waiting for me in any of them. I understood that he had left me. I did not know precisely when, but he was gone. And there was nothing on the waterline for me to salvage, nothing that I hoped
to see. So I turned back. Each dragging footstep on the shingle seemed to drain the spirit from me.

Victor was already in the car. The windows were fogging and I could hear the throbbing voices of the radio news. He wound down the window as I approached. ‘Forecast is for thunder and
lightning this evening,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be off the motorway by then, if I can help it.’

I nodded, traipsing over. I did not want to think about the journey back to London or returning to my empty flat.

He turned the engine on. My shoulder was aching. But then, coming up the slope, I took one last glance towards the pier and I noticed something bobbing and scraping underneath the stilts,
halfway along it. A bulky cigarette shape.

I went rushing for the boardwalk, forgetting the pain.

‘Ellie!’

Reaching the middle of the pier, I lay on my good side, got on my back.

‘Ellie!’

I slid under the railing.

Victor caught up with me. ‘You’re going to do yourself another injury like that. Get away from there.’

The peaceful loch was rippling under me. My legs were dangling over the boards.

Victor must have seen it in my eyes then, because he came lurching forwards with his arms to grapple me. But I was already dropping.

Victor waded to the shore, flinging water from his arms, peeling off his coat. His shirt was rinsed, translucent, and I could see the matted hairs of his torso underneath it.
He had taken off his glasses to protect them, and was spitting the loch from his mouth, wringing his eyelids clear. I was on the gravel with my canvas roll beside me. I was soaked and tender,
slingless. The pain was stabbing through my side, but I had enough relief in me to smother it. Victor had no such consolation—only the sight of me, safe and unharmed. ‘One of these
days,’ he said, dripping at my feet, ‘I’m finding you a different therapist.’ He stooped to get his breath back, wheezing. ‘What the hell are you trying to do to me?
I’m fifty years old, for crying out loud. I’m not cut out for this.’

I was panting too much to hold my smile. ‘You didn’t have to come in after me.’

‘I bloody well slipped trying to reach you.’

‘I told you I was fine.’

‘How was I supposed to know that? I thought you were crying out for help.’ He lowered himself to the gravel next to me, shivering. The mangy roll of tape and plastic lay between us.
He glanced down at it. ‘So that’s it, is it? Doesn’t seem like much from here.’

My hand was still gripping it. ‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts.’

‘Well, that’s not always true, believe me. That thing better be worth all the trouble. There aren’t many paintings I’d jump into a freezing lake for.’

‘I thought you slipped.’

He cornered his eyes at me.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Well, about bloody time.’ He patted his hands clean of stones, hooked on his glasses. ‘My kingdom for a towel.’

‘We can dry off by the fire,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘In Henry’s cottage. It’s five minutes that way.’

He looked north. ‘That might not be such a bad idea. My teeth are chattering.’

‘I can hear them.’

He gripped his jaw to quell it.

‘It’ll be worth it when you see it,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘I just want to get dry and get home.’

‘It’s yours—the painting. I’m giving it to you.’

He rubbed his knees. ‘That’s all very sweet. But I don’t want it. Even if it’s worth a fortune, I’m not taking your work.’

‘You kept that portrait I did of you.’

‘That had diagnostic value.’

‘So does this, probably. I wouldn’t have found it without you.’

‘Well, I’ve already diagnosed you once, and that didn’t turn out very well, did it? We’re not great adverts for the wonders of psychiatry.’ He stood up, extending
his arm to me. ‘Come on. Let’s find somewhere to dry off and then we’ll hit the road.’

I let him haul me up.

We walked along the shore, the pair of us doused and shuddering. The canvas sagged and drooped in my clutches. ‘You’d better check that’s actually what you think it is,’
Victor said. ‘People dump all kinds of stuff in lakes, you know.’

But I could tell from the configurations of the tape around it, from the way that I had tucked and joined the pieces over its ends, that my mural was inside. The outer plastic was torn up; the
inner layers still seemed to be intact. ‘I just hope it isn’t ruined,’ I said. ‘If the water’s really got to it, I might as well throw it back in.’

‘It’s probably more soaked than we are.’

‘I knew you’d find a way to cheer me up, Victor.’

‘You’re lucky I’m still talking to you. I’ve not been this drenched since I set the hotel sprinklers off on my honeymoon.’ He snorted a laugh from his nostrils.
‘One cigar. I’ve had one cigar in my life and I nearly set fire to the whole bloody building.’

And the thought of this did cheer me up somehow. We trudged along the beach, with the dregs of the daylight waning above us, and the silhouettes of dinghy-masts scratched darkly on the sky.

When we reached the nettled pathway to the cottage, Victor hung back. There were no lights on inside and the mossy roof was sagging ominously in the middle. The chimney had crumbled off. One of
the windows had a brick-sized hole in it. The general impression of the place amidst the gloom was of a shipwreck. I pushed on, through the high weeds and grass. Part of me was still hoping to find
Jim coming through the woods with a basket of fresh pickings. Part of me was thinking of Portmantle.

The front-door fixtures were corroded shut, so I led Victor round the side, into the thicket of the garden. There was a rusted oil drum lying in the nettles. The back door was unlocked and there
must have been a shilling or two still left in the meter, because the bulb blinked yellow as I turned on the switch. The kitchen sink was stacked with unwashed crockery, and all across the table
there were stale food scraps, tea left mouldering inside cups. It was colder in than out. The room had the upsetting reek of sour milk and Victor covered his mouth. ‘Blimey,’ he said.
‘All the medication in the world couldn’t make me put up with this mess. You’d have to hold me here at knifepoint.’

But this was not where I had really been. This was just the place my body had been ghosting.

I laid the mural across two of the kitchen chairs and went to find the matches in the drawers—there were none. Victor had already parted the beads in the doorway and was looking through
into the lounge. He turned the lights on and, going through, said, ‘Well, this is one way to live, I suppose.’

I followed after him.

A mattress was spread out by the fire, covered in dirty blankets that looked more like decorator’s dustsheets. The fireplace was crammed with singed paper and splinters of pine cones. The
curtains were taped around the window frame. A fold-up table was loaded with rags and hardened tubes of paint, jars of briny water and murky bottles of linseed oil. There was a scattering of flora
all across it and the floor, and a bucket of mulched pink petals, soaking. ‘That’s all Jim’s stuff,’ I said. ‘Or it was Henry’s. I can’t tell the
difference any more.’

I found matches by the hearth and crouched to light some of the kindling scraps I found left in the scuttle. ‘Is there any paper over there that I can burn?’ I said.

But Victor’s mind was on something else. He was standing, cross-armed, by the wall at the far end of the room. ‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Come and see this.’

‘I thought you wanted to get dry,’ I said.

‘Just come and look.’

I left the kindling fizzling out and went to him. ‘Honestly, we’re going to catch pneumonia if I don’t get this lit.’ And, when I gazed towards the aspect of the wall
that so fascinated him, I saw that it was pasted with images—they were glued right onto the plasterwork. Vivid colour photographs showing lush greenery, white houses glinting on a summer
waterfront, men driving horses and carriages, two enormous buildings nestled in dense pines. I stepped closer, near enough to read their printed captions in the borders:

The only cars allowed on the islands are police and utility vehicles. Instead, there are horse-drawn carriages known as phaetons (‘faytons’ in Turkish). . .

‘
National Geographic
, if I’m not mistaken,’ Victor said. He walked towards the window, where there was another workbench of materials. I could not take my eyes from
the wall. ‘You seem to have given my exercise some thought. Perhaps too much so.’

Heybeliada’s most visited attraction is the nineteenth-century Aya Triada Manastiri, a Greek Orthodox school of theology, which looks down over the island from its northernmost peak .
. .

‘At least now I understand what you were trying to tell me in that message. My secretary couldn’t figure out what you were saying. She thought she heard “Istanbul”, but
it wasn’t the best of connections. You were rather garbled at the end.’ Victor was a blur now in the fringes of my vision. ‘I thought you said able something, table something,
maple something. I should probably get my hearing tested.’

On the south side of the island is Heybeliada Sanatorium, a refuge for TB sufferers at the farthest point of Çam Limani Yolu.

I felt so numbed. There must have been ten or twenty of these images, cut from the magazine and glued down flat. And, surrounding them, I could see lines of my own handwriting in pencil. Ribbons
and ribbons of scrawled text curving and bending all along the wall. I had copied it straight from the magazine, verbatim.