The Muse

by Jessie Burton

  Moths hurled themselves at the bulbs as she worked, but she paid no mind. For the first time in a long time, all else was eclipsed by a purer sense of purpose and the image that was emerging on the old wooden board. It was a view from the bottom of the orchard, in exaggerated colours, the finca behind it, its peeled red paintwork on every window. It had its feet in the earth, but the sky above was enormous and swirling, with a hint of angelic, silver-­grey. The scale of the house made it look smaller in the painting, the trees in the foreground laden with such fruit that in reality was not there.

  You could just about call it figurative, but it was not realistic. It had a new form of surreality Olive had never executed before. For all its grounded colours on the fields – ochres and grasshopper-­greens, the folkloric tenderness of russet furrows and mustard browns – there was something otherworldly about the scene. The sky was a boon of promise. The fields were a cornucopia of cereal crops and apples, olives and oranges. The orchard was so lush you might call it a jungle, and the empty fountain had turned into a living spring, the satyr’s canton now gushing full of water. The finca rose up like a welcoming palace, her father’s house with many mansions, its windows huge and open to her gaze. The brush strokes were loose, and colour dominated technical accuracy.

  Olive fell asleep beside it at four in the morning. The next day, she stood before the painting as the sun cracked low along the sky beyond her window. She never knew she was capable of such work. She had made, for the first time, a picture of such movement and excess and fecundity that she felt almost shocked. It was a stubborn ideal; a paradise on earth, and the irony was it had only come from this place, this lonely part of Spain to which her parents had dragged her.

  Stiffly, Olive moved to the trunk where the letter from the art school was hidden. She pulled it out, read it, smoothed it, folded it neatly, and kissed it, placing it back at the bottom of the trunk, buried deep and out of sight.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  ....................................

  4

  Last year,’ Isaac said, in English, ‘I meet a man waiting for my train at Barcelona station. A journalist. We talk. He tells to me, “It is coming. It has happened before and it is going to happen again.” ’

  ‘What’s happened before?’ Olive asked. She was standing with Isaac in the orchard, helping gather the chopped wood as he sliced it in half with his axe. She turned briefly towards the house, and saw a shadow move behind the lace curtains of her mother’s room. To hell with her; this was Olive’s time with him. Sarah always wanted to be the centre of attention, and was very good at it, but Olive loved these stolen moments in Isaac’s company.

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched his shirt lift, and saw the flash of dark brown flesh, a trail of hair leading away. She felt such pleasure when he handed her the split pieces of wood, as if he were offering her a bouquet. From a decade of devouring novels, Olive knew that charming men were deadly. Their story had been played down the centuries, unharmed through the pages, whilst girls were blamed and girls were lost, or girls were garlanded, mute as statues. Be Vigilant and Prize Your Virginity was a subtitle many of these stories could have taken, most of them written by men. Olive knew all this and she didn’t care. She didn’t give a damn.

  He had been coming to the house with less regularity than Teresa, partly because of his job in Malaga, and partly because he did not have as much of an excuse. It pleased Olive so much to see that their piles of firewood were probably the highest for several miles. If he wanted to tell her about the state of his country, she was more than happy to listen.

  He had not noticed her new hairstyle, the gobs of her mother’s pomade she had applied, to try and make it smooth and slick. These were not the sort of things a serious-­minded man might notice, of course, Olive supposed. Not when his country was in a state of unrest. Not when he was thinking of the ­people. She decided that to make the most of her time with him, it would pay to be more politically aware.

  ‘What happened before? Chapel tombs smashed open, the corpses of nuns on the ground,’ said Isaac. ‘Houses like this one, robbed.’ They both turned back to look at the finca, and the figure at the curtains dipped rapidly away. ‘They say a priest was taken from his sacristy and left hanging on a tree, found next morning with his balls in his mouth.’

  ‘Isaac!’ Olive cringed. The word balls made her nervous, and she felt childish.

  ‘The newspapers make it seem worse than it is – but they never ask the question as to why the looting happens in the first place. So, this journalist.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He starts talking to me about a polar bear.’

  ‘A polar bear?’

  ‘Yes. He tells me he interviewed a duke in his house,’ Isaac said, laying the wood blocks on her open hands. Olive saw how the tips of her fingers were stained red. She hadn’t stopped painting since meeting him. She was working on smaller canvases, filling notebooks with sketches; it was as if she had plugged herself in – to what, exactly, she wasn’t entirely sure – and although she was terrified that this long seam of inspiration was going to end, she felt that as long as Isaac was close, and that she was ready for it, for him, her output might continue.

  She knew that by staying down here, she had avoided a confrontation about her true self – no art-­school confession with her father was required. She was still stuck with her parents, but she was happier than she’d been in a long time.

  ‘He told me the duke had a polar bear in his drawing room,’ Isaac was saying. ‘Lo había cazado?’

  ‘He’d hunted it down.’

  ‘Yes. With a gun.’

  Olive curled her fingers up, hoping he might comment on their dyed appearance, so she could say, Oh, I paint a bit too. Would you like to see? He would come and see the painting and reply, This is extraordinary, you are extraordinary. How did I not see? And then they would kiss, him taking her face in his hands, bending down to brush his lips on hers, full of astonishment at how good she was. She so desperately wanted him to see how good she was.

  But Isaac did not notice her fingers, and so Olive turned instead to the anomalous polar bear in her mind’s eye, a piece of the Arctic, a grotesquery in the Spanish heat, the barbarity and expense of it, the chill in the heart of the home. ‘Why did you tell me about that priest?’ she asked, trying to assert herself. ‘Were you trying to frighten me?’

  ‘No. I want you to see what’s happening here. So when you go home, you will tell other ­people.’

  ‘I’m not going home, Isaac.’

  She waited for him to express his pleasure, but he did not. ‘Isaac, you do know I’m not like my parents, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re always frightened of things. I’m not.’

  All she wanted to communicate was that whatever he thought they were, she was the opposite. She didn’t see things in black and white, like they did. She was nothing like them at all. It felt very important that he should know this.

  ‘There’s a gypsy camp, out in the hills,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘They lost one of their boys. Not lost,’ he corrected himself. ‘They didn’t lose him. He was beaten by a gang of men. He was twelve. He died.’

  ‘How awful.’

  Isaac put down the axe and walked towards a slope at the end of the orchard. ‘Ven aquí,’ he said. Come here. Together, they surveyed the land before them. A ­couple of far-­off buzzards wheeled in the sky in search of prey along the ground. The skies were so large, the mountains beyond so solid; it seemed the only violence possible here was the violence of the natural world.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Olive whispered. She imagined slipping her hand into his, the two of them, standing here for ever.

  His face was hard. ‘The ­people hold this soil in their blood. That
is why the landlords fear them.’ He paused. ‘I worry for my sister.’

  Olive was surprised by this. ‘Teresa? She’ll be fine.’

  At the beginning, Teresa had come every other day to clean and cook. Now she was coming daily. The house still had its dark corners, and its sense of absent occupancy, but it had benefited from her quiet and watchful presence. She never said much, just going about her business through the rooms, taking the weekly envelope of pesetas from Harold with a nod.

  ‘Teresa is not married,’ said Isaac. ‘She is not rich. She is nothing that fits.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s the daughter of a gypsy—­’

  ‘A gypsy? How romantic.’

  He raised his eyebrow. ‘And the sister of a socialist. I do not know what will end up being worse for her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The police, the mayor, the caciques. My own father. They do not like me. I’ve been in fights. And she is too close—­’

  ‘Isaac, don’t worry,’ she said, attempting a tone of mature assurance. ‘We’ll look after her.’

  Robles laughed. ‘Until you leave.’

  ‘I told you. I’m never going to leave.’

  ‘What do you want from this life, señorita?’

  ‘I – I don’t know exactly. I know I’d like to stay here.’

  Isaac looked as if he was going to say something, and her whole body willed him to say how glad he was to hear this – but he was interrupted by a sound of crunching leaves. Teresa appeared at the bottom of the slope, her satchel strapped across her body, a flat expression in her eyes. ‘La señora te necesita,’ she said to Isaac.

  ‘Why?’ said Olive. ‘Why does my mother want him?’

  Teresa and her brother stared at each other, until eventually Isaac capitulated, sighing as he moved back down the slope, not saying another word.

  AS ISAAC MOVED THROUGH THE trees, Teresa imagined for a moment that she and Olive were hunters together, watching their prey before deciding to let it go, preferring instead to stand side by side in the cold air. It was not the thrill of the kill they wanted, it was simply the companionship that came from sharing a mutual target.

  Isaac was fond of saying that Teresa was the kind of girl who’d sell her grandmother if she had to, not that she’d ever had a grandmother to sell. The worst thing was, Teresa sometimes did feel a sort of icy indifference to those around her, who’d never helped her, making it clear that she wasn’t worth the bother. She looked over at the furrows she and Olive had made with the gardening forks. The seeds were still deep in the soil, and would not show green shoots for months. Teresa had been relieved to discover that she wanted to hand Olive those seeds. Olive reminded her that she was still capable of feeling something akin to happiness.

  ‘Let’s go and smoke on the veranda,’ said Olive. ‘I stole three of my father’s cigarettes.’

  ONLY OLIVE SMOKED. FROM ABOVE them inside the house, they heard the sound of a slamming door. ‘Do sit,’ she said to Teresa, but only when Harold’s motor car at the front of the house had revved down to the rusting gates at the bottom of the slope did Teresa obey. ‘That’s Daddy out again,’ Olive said.

  ‘Will your mother see us? I must work.’

  ‘You don’t have to work every minute of the day, Tere. They won’t get rid of you for sitting down for five minutes. And besides.’ Olive lit the cigarette and took an inexpert drag. ‘She’s talking to your brother.’

  Teresa had seen the empty pill bottles in Sarah’s room, the indecipherable stretch of words around the small brown vials. She’d heard her sobbing once, trying to bury the sound in her pillow, and had seen a flash of silvery white scars running down in criss-­cross lines at the top of her legs. Surmising from the stolen cigarettes that Olive was in a more reckless mood than the last time she’d brought this up, Teresa asked, ‘Is your mother very sick?’

  ‘She’s a depressive.’ Olive sat back in the rocking chair, blowing out a funnel of blue smoke.

  ‘A depressive?’

  ‘Smiles in ballrooms and weeps in bedrooms. Ill, in her head.’ Olive tapped her temple. ‘And inside here.’ She touched her heart. ‘She gets worse, gets better. Gets worse again.’

  ‘That is hard,’ Teresa said, surprised by the other girl’s frankness.

  Olive turned to look at her. ‘Do you mean that, or are you just saying it?’

  ‘No, señorita. I mean it.’ And Teresa did mean it; but really her wish was for Olive to confide in her about everything, and she would say what she had to, in order to make it so. Olive looked out at the orchard, and Teresa stole a glance. Olive seemed so unselfconscious, at ease in her skin. Her clothes, unusual and boyish, suited her; even her untameable crown of hair seemed intrinsically to fit. Being here in Arazuelo seemed to have brought her out of herself.

  ‘It is hard,’ said Olive. ‘Daddy calls them her “storm clouds”, but that’s just a nice way of saying that she drags us around. The doctor says her mind’s like honeycomb, chamber upon chamber, broken, rebuilt again. She sees her pain in colours, you know.’ Olive gave a grim laugh. ‘Steel Blue, Yellowed Bruise, German Measles Red.’ Teresa tried to keep up with the language. ‘It’s an illness we’ve always had in her side of the family. I’ve got a great-­grandmother buried in an unconsecrated grave, an aunt – whom no one speaks of – locked in an asylum. Then there’s a cousin, Johnny; he hated boarding school, and tried to drown himself in the River Ouse. It’s wretched really, and I’m so selfish, I just worry I’m next.’

  Teresa could hear the snag of Olive’s breath in her throat, before she inhaled deeply again on her father’s cigarette. ‘I can feel it sometimes, in my bones – just how easy it might be to catch it off her.’ Olive turned to her. ‘Do you think you can catch it, Tere?’

  Teresa saw the worry that flickered over Olive’s face, the spray of freckles over her nose, those dark brown eyes, the mouth ajar in worry. ‘I do not think you will be mad,’ she said, and Olive laughed and nudged her, and the touch of her shoulder on Teresa was sudden and shocking.

  ‘Well, that’s that, then. If you don’t think I’ll be mad, I won’t be. Just my mother.’ Olive paused. ‘Do you think she’s beautiful?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course. She loves herself so much I think she’s a sex maniac.’ Olive laughed, but the sound died quickly, because her words had the vague air of medical viability and seemed less of joke than she might have wanted. The girls sat in silence for a while, watching the kites circle in the distance. Teresa did not think Sarah Schloss loved herself at all, but she did not wish to contradict Olive. She wanted only that time might cease, that this view, and this strange, confiding peace, be all that existed. To have a friend like this, you would own the world.

  ‘I should be engaged to be married by now,’ Olive said.

  ‘There is a man?’

  ‘Oh, no. No. It’s just – most of the girls I know in London – I wouldn’t call them friends – are “taken” now. I’m not. But whenever I saw their engagement rings, I felt sad. They were so eager to run away, change their names. It’s all so uniform. Maybe they all liked being the same as each other.’

  Olive seemed to be talking to herself now, and Teresa was failing to manage the unstoppered bottle that was Olive’s English, pouring out words and words that seemed to have been waiting inside a long time.

  ‘And the fiancés!’ Olive said. She hooted ferociously. ‘They’re so peripheral. Do you know what “peripheral” means?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On the outside. Not important. They’ve got interchangeable names, like Philip and Ernest and David. Just one floating face, of a man with no discernible chin. When I said I wouldn’t get married, one of these girls said to me, “You wouldn’t understand, Olive. You’ve been to Paris – I haven’t made it past Portsmouth.” Imagine being so idiotic! Imag
ine thinking being a married woman is the same as travel!’

  ‘Perhaps it is?’

  Olive glanced at her. ‘Well, there are plenty of miserable wives in Paris. Some of them are my parents’ friends. One of them’s my own mother.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Marriage is a game of survival,’ Olive said, and it sounded as if she had heard this somewhere else, before repeating it herself.

  ‘How did your parents meet?’

  ‘A party. Paris. Mother was seventeen. “An English nettle” – her words. Daddy was twenty-­two. It was a bit shocking, her becoming engaged to a Viennese Jew. Her family took a while to accept it, but then they loved him.’

  Teresa nodded, thinking this an exaggeration. Harold was not easily loveable, she thought. He reminded her of a beetle, deep within the wood and plaster of the finca’s walls. He needed his hard wings to be kept shiny, his antlers polished with a soft cloth, his body buffed and fed so he didn’t bite.

  ‘He was interned during the war,’ Olive said. ‘They let him out and he worked for the British government. He never talks about that. He represented everything Mummy’s life didn’t, I suppose. She gets bored so easily, and likes to cause a stir. Condiment Heiress, Cocaine Flapper, Rebel with Hun Groom. It’s all so garish,’ she added, and although Teresa did not understand the adjective, she could taste its jealousy.

  ‘It’s astonishing,’ Olive continued, ‘how easily she can hoodwink other ­people that she’s whole, when inside she’s spiralling, as broken as a shattered pot. I sometimes wonder whether we could have had a stable life – Daddy, walking daily to the Foreign Office – bowler hat, club on St James’s, mother at home doing embroidery. I doubt it. Don’t you doubt it?’

  Teresa didn’t know what to say to this fizzing girl, with her plaintive, open face. The Schlosses were so short-­handed with each other, that it usually neutralized any depth of reference to their past lives. They were actors in costume, in the moment, performing through the house as if it were a theatre stage and Teresa their sole audience. She desperately wanted to see what happened when they took off their robes and walked into the wings, the darker corners where memories shifted. Olive had now lifted the curtain a little, and shown her the shapes and patterns beyond. Teresa worried that to say something wrong would make that curtain drop again, and break the spell of their solicitude.