The Muse

by Jessie Burton

  ‘I am sure she will wait for genius.’

  Olive wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s a word that gets bandied about too much. I’m not a genius. I just work hard.’

  ‘Well, she will wait. And if my brother will not do it, I can take it to the port myself, señorita.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘You can trust me.’

  Olive kept her face hidden, still leaning her forehead on the shutter. ‘You broke my trust when you put that painting on the easel. I can never work out if you’re my friend or not.’

  Teresa was silent for a moment. ‘Señorita.’ She couldn’t hide her pain. Sometimes Olive was as coquettish as her mother, for all her determination to be different. ‘You cannot see? You can trust me with your life.’

  Olive lifted her head and smiled. ‘Never mind about my life, Tere. Do you mean it about the painting? You’ll really take it to the port?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Olive peered down the slope towards the gate, through which Isaac had long disappeared. ‘I’ve never had a true friend.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love? Have you ever been with a man?’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Been with a man – or been in love?’

  ‘Been with a man.’

  Olive turned to her. ‘But you’ve been in love.’

  Teresa felt her cheeks flame. ‘No. I do not think so. I do not know.’

  ‘You would know, if you were. Aha! There is someone. Who is it? Is he in the village?’

  ‘Yes,’ Teresa said. ‘In the village. But he died.’

  ‘Oh no – it wasn’t that boy Adrián?’

  ‘Yes,’ Teresa lied.

  ‘Oh, Tere. I’m so sorry.’

  Teresa in turn apologized silently to Adrián. She’d used him for her own rescue, which was not much better than the politicians had done, dragging the boy’s exposed body through Malaga as a piece of propaganda. Then again, Teresa thought miserably, as Olive smiled at her, waiting to understand one’s feelings does seem the same as being indebted to a corpse.

  THAT NIGHT, TERESA DID NOT go back to the cottage. She was permitted to install herself in the corner of Olive’s attic, sorting the artist’s brushes and her clothes in the heady bliss that follows a truce. Olive revealed that she had been painting a portrait of Isaac. It had been a long time coming, Teresa thought – given the speed with which the girl could usually work, the sketchbooks overflowing with the pencilled planes of his face.

  Glancing over at Olive by the easel, Isaac’s features developing on the wood before her, Teresa could see it was an astonishing beginning. He had greenish skin, and a consumptive, claustrophobic look in his eye. But his head seemed on fire, sweeps of dandelion and canary yellows up to the top of the painting, where red flecks were being spattered like the wake of murderous thoughts. It was a livid rendering, and Olive looked to be as if in a trance. Teresa knew that the balance between her brother and this girl wasn’t right, but she doubted Olive was even aware of the layers of her infatuation and fear, manifesting in front of her.

  OLIVE FINISHED HER FIRST GO at Isaac in the small hours. At three in the morning, exhausted, she lay back on her mattress, staring at the roof beams and flaking ceiling plaster, its rough raised corners illuminated by the weak glow from her bedside candle. A wolf howled, deep and distant in the mountains.

  ‘Come and sleep here,’ she said to Teresa. Teresa, who’d been reading one of Olive’s books in the corner, put it down and obeyed, climbing onto the old mattress, lying rigidly next to Olive under the dusky pink coverlet, unable to move for fear that to do so might expel her from this magic kingdom.

  They lay side by side, staring at the ceiling together as the atmosphere lightened in the room, the energy of Olive’s work and concentration dissipating into the air, until all that was left was the glowing green face of Isaac on the easel. Beyond the window, into the land, no rooster or dog or human cry broke their silence as they fell asleep, fully clothed.

  •

  Two days later, Olive decided to come with Teresa to Malaga, ‘to make a day of it,’ she said, ‘and why not?’

  ‘But how long are you going to be?’ asked Sarah. Teresa supposed she was agitated, because for the first time in months she was going to be alone.

  ‘We’re going to the shipping office for Mr Robles, and then I thought we’d have a lemonade in Calle Larios,’ said Olive.

  ‘Well, make sure you get that farmer fellow to bring you back before nightfall.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘He isn’t a red, is he?’

  ‘Mother.’

  The Orchard was a large painting, and it took two of them to carry it down the finca path, as if it was a stretcher missing a body. Teresa looked back up at the house and saw Sarah watching, staying at the window right until they were down in the valley towards the village and she disappeared from their sight. The mule man was waiting for them in the town square. Teresa tried to ignore the uneasy feeling in her gut when she imagined Sarah, on her own up there. She couldn’t pinpoint the worry, so she focused instead on the pleasure of a day trip. She was in her best blue dress, and she’d washed her hair and spritzed herself with the distilled orange blossom Rosa Morales, the doctor’s daughter, sold out of her kitchen. It could almost be feria time, for the sense of abandon and holiday Teresa felt.

  As she sat with the wrapped parcel of The Orchard propped beside her, on the back of a mule cart thirty kilometres along the Malaga road, Teresa was surprised at how bulky the package was under the string and paper. She did not question it, simply because she was now deliciously in Olive’s good books again, she would do as she was bid. Olive’s hair was flying in the wind, and her white-­framed sunglasses made her as glamorous as her mother. Why would you want to ruin such a blue-­sky day?

  The mule pulled along the white-­dust road, and Olive pointed out more red ribbons had been tied around the girths of the cork oaks. The vision was vaguely unsettling, like shining lines of blood fluttering in the breeze. ‘What are they?’ she asked in Spanish.

  The mule driver turned over his shoulder and simply said, ‘They’re trouble.’

  Teresa saw them as an omen for what violence might come to this land, as it had so many times in centuries before. No one ever saw who tied these ribbons – Adrián was one of them, apparently – but the fact that there were ­people determined to adorn the trees suggested an undercurrent of defiance, a desire to turn things on their head. Teresa didn’t want anything turned on its head. She had only just managed to achieve this day, her small advantage.

  Full of self-­importance and happiness, they reached the shipping office and arranged with the mule man when and where he should come back to fetch them. They made the post office just before it closed for siesta, sending off the parcel for today’s shipment to France. The Orchard was off to the Galerie Schloss on Paris’s Rue de la Paix.

  Afterwards, they walked the wide boulevards, admiring the wrought-­iron lampposts adorned with hanging baskets, trailing petunias and geraniums in hot pinks and scarlets. They looked through shop windows, pointing out to each other the best-­dressed of Malaga’s high society. They went inwards to the narrower, cobbled streets, all shutters closed against the midday heat. It was metropolitan, so different to their rural hideaway on the slopes of Arazuelo. Teresa was pleased to see how impressed Olive was with her native city. It might not be London, but it was by turns stately and timeless, as the sun beat down on the stone, or reflected off the polished vitrines and ornate wooden frames of department stores and pharmacists.

  They walked down to the harbour and sat to enjoy a lemonade, wondering which of the enormous ships that pulled in and out with such constant frequency would be taking away their duplicitous cargo.

  ‘Isaac knew the painting would go,’ Olive said. ‘He did agree. He j
ust didn’t want to be the one who sent it. Do you think I’m being fair to him?’

  ‘What you mean to ask is – will my brother carry on doing this for ever.’

  Olive looked at her in surprise. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

  Teresa gazed out to sea. ‘The money will never be a good reason for him.’

  She was telling the truth; it had never been enough for either of them. Even though he had kept some aside from the sale of Women in the Wheatfield, it was true that they had both always wanted things that money couldn’t buy; legitimacy and love. Teresa did think that Olive was being thoughtless, that her perpetual use of Isaac’s name as a front for her own work was not something he would continue to tolerate. As for herself, as long as Olive wanted it, she was happy to oblige.

  Olive frowned. ‘You make it sound like a threat.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Teresa. ‘But – he is a man, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Teresa couldn’t answer with the precision she wanted in English. And although she worried that Olive’s actions were bringing her closer and closer to some undefined, simmering danger that was coming, which Teresa couldn’t name but could almost taste – she was so happy to be here, by the sea, with a glass of lemonade, that she didn’t want Olive’s thoughtlessness to stop.

  ‘My brother can speak for himself,’ she said obliquely, and Olive, not wishing to go any deeper into the sourer elements of this plot of theirs, turned away to look at the gigantic liners moving out to sea.

  THEY RETURNED TO THE FINCA at dusk, tired and happy. ‘Teresa,’ Olive said, as they reached the front door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I won’t let anything happen to you. You can trust me, I promise.’

  Teresa smiled, amazed to hear her own words being spoken back to her, the second half of the same spell. When they went inside, Sarah was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Where is she?’ said Olive, and the panic in her voice sounded childlike, so easily accessed.

  ‘She has probably gone out for a walk,’ Teresa said.

  ‘My mother doesn’t go for walks.’ Olive ran out into the orchard, and on the pretext of searching for Sarah in the upper rooms, Teresa took the opportunity to slip into the attic and confirm her suspicions. It was as she thought. The green-­faced portrait of Isaac was nowhere to be seen. By now, it was deep in the bowels of a liner, on its way to Peggy Guggenheim.

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  15

  Sarah began frequent walks out of the finca estate, an unprecedented gesture for someone usually more inclined to smoke on a sofa. She began to pull the ready vegetation from the rented land, piling it up in a wide wicker basket, the earth-­encrusted roots still attached. She would announce her trip to the village to buy artichokes, and soon there was a molehill of them in the kitchen. The vases of wildflowers had multiplied so considerably that Teresa was running out of receptacles.

  Ten days after the trip to Malaga, a telegram from Harold arrived. Teresa went down to pick it up, and ran all the way back to the finca, handing it to Olive, who was shelling peas with her mother at the kitchen table.

  ‘GREEN FACE GENIUS GOES TO GUG STOP ALSO BOUGHT MAGNIFICENT ORCHARD STOP BACK END OF WEEK STOP,’ Olive read aloud. ‘Peggy Guggenheim bought them both,’ she breathed. ‘Isaac will be pleased.’

  Teresa put her hands on her hips. ‘Both?’ she said, but Olive refused to look at her. Teresa remembered the bulkiness of the parcel they’d taken to Malaga. This family always made her face what she knew, yet did not want to know.

  ‘I wasn’t aware there were two,’ said Sarah, one fingernail flashing down an open seed-­pod. The lacquer, Teresa noted, had chipped, and her mistress had done nothing to remedy it.

  ‘There was The Orchard, and then Isaac did another painting. A self-­portrait. Lots of yellow flames in the hair and a green face.’

  ‘You saw it?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Briefly. It looks like Daddy’s coming back.’

  ‘Just when that telephone finally stopped ringing,’ Sarah sighed.

  Teresa went to the sink to busy herself with the washing up. Sarah laid down her empty pea pod. ‘Darling,’ she said to Olive. ‘Do you like it here?’

  ‘I’ve got used to it. I like it very much now. Don’t you?’

  Sarah looked through the kitchen window. The garden and the orchard beyond it were now abundant with fruit and flowers, honeysuckle, dama-­de-­noche and all the oranges and olives Harold had promised his wife and daughter back in January, when, cold, bedraggled and shaking off the after-­effects of one of Sarah’s storm clouds, they had arrived here, knowing no one.

  ‘I don’t know if like is the word I’d use. I feel I’ve lived here about ten years. It sort of . . . saturates you, a place like this. As if it’s the living embodiment of Isaac’s painted orchard.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘It’s extraordinary – how he captured it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you think he does it?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘He’s a genius.’

  Olive sighed. ‘Nobody’s a genius, Mother. That’s lazy thinking. It’s practice.’

  ‘Ah, practice. I could practise for ever and not produce anything as good as that.’

  ‘You seem better, Mummy,’ said Olive, steering the conversation elsewhere.

  ‘I do feel a lot stronger. Daddy got me that last round of pills from Malaga and I haven’t touched them.’

  ‘Really? Is that a good idea? You gave me and Tere a real fright when we got back from Malaga and you weren’t here. I was worried you’d—­’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, Livvi. It’s not like it was.’

  They continued shelling peas in silence. Her mother had caught the sun, and she seemed peaceful; self-­contained. It was once again painful to Olive how attractive her mother was, and how Sarah barely registered this fact – her hair a bit of a mess, her sundress crumpled as if she’d just pulled it out of a trunk. Her roots had now grown out considerably, and she didn’t seem to care. Her natural dark blonde was a stark, yet oddly pleasurable visual contrast to the peroxide ends. Olive had the itch to paint her, to capture this ease, in the hope that she too could have some of it for herself.

  ‘Summer’s nearly here,’ Sarah said, breaking Olive’s thoughts. ‘It’s going to be so hot.’

  ‘You were complaining when it was cold.’

  Sarah laughed at herself. This too, was rare. ‘It wasn’t a terrible idea of your father’s to come here. Not a terrible idea at all.’ She reached over and squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘I do love you, you know, Liv. Very much.’

  ‘Goodness. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. I just think you should know.’

  SARAH WENT OUT ONTO THE veranda with her packet of cigarettes and the latest Christie shipped over from a friend in London, and Teresa began to mop the flagstones in the hall. Olive followed her, standing on the dry patch Teresa hadn’t yet reached.

  ‘Teresa, will you sit for my next painting?’ she asked, her voice quiet. ‘I’d love to use you as a model.’

  Teresa’s spine stiffened, her fists tightening round the mop handle. ‘You didn’t tell me about the second painting we took to Malaga,’ she said.

  Olive laughed. ‘I didn’t want to get you into any more trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Look, I know you think this whole undertaking demeans me as an artist.’

  ‘Demeans – what does it mean?’

  ‘Makes less of me. You think Isaac gets more importance round here than he deserves. But it’s what I want, Tere. I want the freedom. You’re my friend, Tere. Let me do this for you.’

  Teresa straightened, meditativ
ely plunging the head of the mop into her bucket of filthy water. She knew, in a way, that she had wanted this moment ever since she saw Isaac in the sketchbook. And the decision to help Olive in her deceptions – taking the paintings into Malaga, making sure Sarah still believed they were by Isaac, keeping the attic clean – had all been leading to this less than noble truth; that Teresa wanted to be painted. She rested the mop on the bucket, and it lay at a haphazard angle.

  As Teresa walked behind Olive upwards to the attic, she knew had departed from her place in the script. She turned back once to view the floor, only half-­gleaming, the mop accusatory. She was no longer the servant who rid the house of stains; she was going to make a mark now, a stain so permanent no one would ever forget it.

  IT WAS TO BE A painting of Rufina, Olive told her, locking the attic door. ‘I’ve done Justa in the Well, and you will be my Rufina. It was you who told me the story, after all. I’ve been wondering what part of it to tell.’

  Teresa nodded, not daring to speak. What would Isaac say, when he found out Olive had painted his face green and sent it as a self-­portrait to Peggy Guggenheim? When would he realize that painting after painting would come out of this girl? Olive believed Isaac was the source of her inspiration, but Teresa thought that nothing he could do now – no tantrum, no withholding of affection – would stop the flow.

  ‘Rufina with her pots, Rufina with the lion, or Rufina, beheaded, with her sister?’ said Olive, mainly to herself. ‘The last one’s grim, but it is the apogee, even though she’s down a well.’

  Teresa heard the unusual word, and thought Olive had said apology. ‘There is nothing to be sorry for,’ she said.

  Olive gave her a confused look. ‘I’m glad you think so, Tere.’

  She had decided to abandon the diptych format that she’d used for Women in the Wheatfield, and paint just one scene. In the end, she wanted all the stages of the story involved. So Rufina would be there in her full body, but she would also be carrying her own head.

  ‘You could put your face in it, too,’ said Teresa, then immediately wished she hadn’t, for she was probably overstepping herself.