The Muse

by Jessie Burton

  He fell back against his pillow. ‘It would have made things too complicated.’

  ‘It would have simplified them. That’s how you have the painting in your possession. Provenance and all that.’

  ‘It might simplify things for Reede, but not for me.’ He clasped his hands together into one fist. ‘Look, we never, ever talked about him, Odelle. My family doesn’t talk about things. And if you’ve spent your whole life never talking about something, do you think you’re suddenly going to be able to discuss it – just like that – to some stranger who’s after your painting?’

  ‘But why—­’

  ‘I don’t have the words for it, Odelle. I don’t have the words for something that happened when I wasn’t even there.’

  ‘But surely your mother talked about him? He was your father.’

  ‘I knew his name, that’s it. I knew my mother changed hers when she came back to England. It was her and me for sixteen years, and then Gerry came along. I wasn’t going to claim a dead man just to satisfy Edmund Reede’s little genealogy.’

  ‘All right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry for.’

  ‘I just . . .’ I thought of Quick. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of the painting, that’s all.’

  He sat up. ‘My mother never told me how she got that painting, Odelle. I wasn’t lying. My only guess is, my father never managed to get it to this Peggy Guggenheim – and then in the chaos that followed leaving Spain, my mother took it with her and brought it to England.’

  ‘What happened to their marriage, if he was in Paris and she was in England?’

  Lawrie sighed. ‘I don’t know. She came to London; he stayed there. And then the Germans occupied Paris. My mother never even wore a wedding ring before Gerry.’

  ‘And you never asked her about it?’

  ‘I may have asked,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘She didn’t like it, but she told me he died in the war being brave, and that now it was just the two of us. I heard that line at three years old, at ten, at thirteen – and you hear something like that over and over again, it just becomes the way things are.’

  ‘Perhaps she wanted to spare you the grief of it,’ I said.

  Lawrie looked grim. ‘I don’t think my mother ever really thought about sparing me anything. My guess is, either he walked out and chose not to have contact with her, or she was the one who severed ties. It was a nice idea, her and me, against the world, but it got a little claustrophobic. She was very over-­protective. Said I was her second chance.’

  ‘And that’s all she said?’

  ‘You don’t know what she was like. It just wasn’t something you talked about to her. And lots of ­people had missing dads, you know. It was after the war, lots of widows. You don’t pick at someone else’s grief.’

  ‘No, of course.’ I knew it was time for me to stop. I wanted to ask if Sarah had ever talked to him about Olive; how she might fit into all this. As I’d discussed with Cynth, a young woman with that surname could easily be Harold Schloss’s daughter – but Lawrie had never mentioned a sister, however much older than him she would have been. And if Lawrie knew as little about Harold as he was claiming to, this hardly came as a surprise. I looked at him, trying to see echoes in his face of Quick’s. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever broach the subject that he and Marjorie Quick were possibly related. I wanted Quick to do it for me.

  Lawrie sighed. ‘I should have told you about it. But things were up and down between you and me, and it wasn’t on my mind. I’m sorry you had to bump into Gerry. I hope he was wearing his dressing gown, at least.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Small mercies.’

  ‘Can I get in?’

  He lifted up the blankets and I snuggled under. We lay in silence for a while, and I wondered if Lawrie would ever have told me about his father, if I hadn’t pushed it. When it came to our blossoming relationship, I had to consider whether it mattered, either way. Lawrie was still Lawrie to me, surely, regardless of who his father was. But it did sting a little, the amount I didn’t know about him, what he’d chosen to hold back. I suppose I was holding things back, too. ‘We sat looking at Harold’s writing on the train,’ I murmured into his shoulder.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did you feel anything, looking at it?’

  ‘Not in the way you probably want me to. I was a little sad, I suppose. The way life works out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and thought again of Marjorie Quick. ‘You never quite know how it’s going to end.’

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  XVII

  Quick telephoned in sick on the Monday, and was still not back by Wednesday, and I was too tied up working with Pamela to get everything ready for the opening night of the exhibition to go and see her. Reede was amassing an impressively eclectic list of attendees for ‘The Swallowed Century’, and had placed Pamela and me in charge of organizing the invitations. Reede wanted coverage, relevance, attention – for the Skelton Institute to be cool and viable, a place where money flowed – and Rufina and the Lion was going to help him. Mixing high culture with pop, there was even a rumour that a Cabinet minister might turn up. And it had to be said, Rufina and the Lion, as both an intellectual challenge and an aesthetic offering, more than stood up to it. Reede had commissioned a frame for the painting, the first it had probably ever had. He had good taste; it was a dark mahogany, and it pinged Rufina’s colours out even more.

  Julie Christie had confirmed she was coming, as had Robert Fraser, the art dealer. Quentin Crisp, Roald Dahl and Mick Jagger had all been invited. I thought the Jagger invitation an unusual choice, but Pamela pointed out that earlier in the year, when the Rolling Stone had been put in custody on a drug charge, the papers reported that he’d taken with him forty cigarettes, a bar of chocolate, a jigsaw puzzle, and two books. Pamela knew everything about the Stones. Mick’s first book was about Tibet, she told me. The second was on art.

  The newspapers picked up the story of the exhibition, as Reede had hoped they would. The Daily Telegraph ran a headline on page 5: The Spanish Saint and the English Lion: How One Art Expert Rescued an Iberian Gem. According to the journalist, An extraordinary, long-­lost painting by the disappeared Spanish artist Isaac Robles has been discovered in an English house, and will be brought to public recognition by Edmund Reede, art historian and Director of the Skelton Institute. I wondered what Lawrie might make of this last sentence – or indeed, Quick – for both of them, in very different ways, were helping Reede achieve his aims. It annoyed me, but it did not surprise me.

  In The Times, the art correspondent, Gregory Herbert, wrote a long essay focusing on rediscovered artists like Isaac Robles – and how paintings such as Rufina and the Lion both reflected and extended our understanding of the turbulence of the first half of the twentieth century. Herbert was invited for a private view, and he told us, as he stood before the painting, that he’d fought in the International Brigades in 1937, before the Spanish government had sent the volunteers home.

  In Auschwitz and at Hiroshima, Herbert wrote, the toll has been written in ledgers and carved on sepulchres. In Spain, the Republican dead can be tallied only in the heart. There are few marked graves for those who lost the Civil War. In the name of survival, damage was internalized, becoming a psychic scar on toxic land. Murderers still live near their victims’ families, and between neighbour and neighbour twenty ghosts trudge the village road. Sorrow has seeped into the soil, and the trauma of survivors is revealed only by their acts of concealment.

  Even today, Pablo Picasso still stays away from the Andalusian city of Malaga, despite being its most famous son. When Spain broke apart, many artists escaped the cracks, fleeing to France or America rather than endure isolation, imprisonment and possible death. Life in its
variety was cauterized, and so was art. For the poet Federico García Lorca it was too late to escape. One can only surmise that Lorca’s fellow Andalusian, the painter Isaac Robles, may have met a similar fate.

  Spain’s past is a cut of meat turning green on the butcher’s slab. When the war ended, ­people were forbidden to look back and see the circling flies, and soon they found themselves unable to turn their heads, discovering that there was no language allowed for their pain. But the paintings, at least, remain. Guernica, the works of Dalí and Miró – and now Rufina and the Lion, an allegory of Spain, a testament to a beautiful, wild country at war with itself, carrying its own head in its arms, doomed for ever to be hunted by lions.

  By the end of Herbert’s essay, you would imagine that Isaac Robles was well on his way to becoming highly collectible, enjoying a second renaissance of prices the likes of which the humble painter himself would never have dreamed. Herbert sounded so sure that he knew what the painting was about, that Isaac Robles had intended a political commentary on the state of his country. But I thought the painting, combined with the images of Justa in Women in the Wheatfield, seemed more personal – sexual even.

  By the Thursday, when Barozzi and the other Guggenheim ­people from Venice arrived with their paintings – an ambassadorial art entourage, with better presents and suits – Quick was still not back, and Reede was furious.

  ‘She’s not well,’ I said. Quick wasn’t answering her telephone. The nearer the exhibition had drawn to opening night, the further she had shrunk away from it. Even though I feared the pressure of the impending opening was crushing her, I almost hoped it would crack her open whatever the consequence, so the secret she was hiding from me would be forced into the light.

  ‘I don’t care if she’s on her death-­bed,’ Reede raged, and I shuddered his the macabre accuracy. ‘This is the most important visit to happen to the Skelton in all my twenty years and she can’t even be bothered to show up?’

  He was in an extremely bad temper, for he had failed in his bid to get the Prado museum in Madrid to loan him the Goya. ‘Then who’s the person I can speak to in the convent with the Murillo?’ I had heard him saying through his open door one afternoon.

  In Quick’s absence, Reede had directed the hanging of the paintings himself, ordering Pamela and me to oversee the tea-­making and the clearing up of boxes, packing crates and twine. The Venetians were very friendly, I recall, and slightly disturbed by the freezing London winter. ‘Have you ever been to Venice?’ one of them asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Go. It is like the theatre has been turned onto the street.’

  The photograph of Isaac Robles and the unnamed woman had been blown up to cover four enormous boards. Two archivists were trying to affix it to the end of the gallery wall. No one dared point out that the camera was clearly centred on the slightly blurred face of the smiling young woman, holding the brush. ‘It’s the only photograph we have of him,’ Reede said, ‘so it’s going in.’

  The Venetians pulled their own Isaac Robles out of a crate and a great gasp went up from Pamela.

  ‘Oh, Dell,’ she said. ‘Look.’

  The Orchard was indeed worth gasping at. It was stunning, far larger than I was expecting, at least five foot long and four high. The colours had lasted well over the past thirty years – it was so vibrant and modern in its sensibility, it could have been painted yesterday. There were echoes in the patchwork fields of Rufina and the Lion, but the detailing was almost hyper-­real, diligent on the ground, giving way to a symphony of brushstrokes in the sky.

  ‘It is my favourite,’ admitted one of the Venetians.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Where does Signor Reede want it?’

  I looked at the plan. Reede wanted Rufina and the Lion to share a wall only with Women in the Wheatfield, which was still in its crate. The Orchard, because of its size, was unlikely to share wall space. ‘Put it here for now,’ I said, indicating that the Venetians could park it safely in a corner of the gallery.

  Although it was very exciting to be in that space that day – opening the wooden crates feeling like Christmas on a grand scale; sawdust and nails everywhere, and a magical sense of occasion – I had a deep sense of unease. Yes, there was the momentousness of this being Isaac Robles’ first ever London exhibition – but the one snag was that Quick didn’t think Isaac Robles painted these paintings at all.

  I wandered down the gallery to take another look at the photograph, and stood, looking up at the woman I was so sure was Olive Schloss, Rufina and the Lion half-­finished behind her. It felt imperative that I understand this photograph more, that it was the key to unlocking the truth about that painting, and what was happening to Quick. I sought in that girl’s slightly blurred face a younger Quick, full of hope and passion. And although Quick had become gaunt over the past months, I felt I could see in this bounteous, full visage, the girl she once had been. But I could not be sure of it. Over the last months, Quick had given me so much, in a way – and yet at the same time, far too little. My desire for answers had supplied me with my own, and although they were attractive to me, they were not necessarily true. Looking again at this life-­size photograph, and with no time left, I knew what I had to do.

  In my lunch break, I sneaked up to Quick’s office and took some Skelton headed paper from her supplies, hurriedly practising Reede’s signature several times on a notepad. I typed up a brief letter of introduction and explanation, with regards to enhancing the contents of The Swallowed Century, before taking a deep breath and faking Reede’s squiggle at the bottom. With the letter in my handbag, I walked over to the main office of the Slade School of Art on Gower Street, and asked to check their alumni records. They barely glanced at the letter, and I spent the whole hour looking through 1935 to 1945.

  No Olive Schloss had ever been registered. It felt like one of the last remaining threads had snapped, but I refused to believe that Olive had truly disappeared. She was there – in the Skelton, on those walls, surrounded by her work – she was in Wimbledon right now, a person I was determined to pin down. I found a phone box and dialled Quick’s number, praying that she would answer.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘You never made it, did you?’ I said.

  ‘Odelle, is that you?’ The words came out slightly disorientated, her voice slurring. She sounded frail, and my relief at finally hearing her voice soon gave way to fear.

  ‘Quick, I’ve been to the Slade.’

  There was silence on the other end. I went on, frustrated and desperate, my face getting hot, my heart beginning to thump hard. ‘No Olive Schloss ever registered at the Slade. But you knew that, didn’t you? Just tell me the truth.’

  ‘The Slade?’ she repeated. ‘The Slade . . . why were you at the Slade?’

  ‘Quick, the exhibition opens tomorrow. Isaac Robles is going to get your glory. I don’t think you should be alone.’

  ‘I’m not alone.’ She stopped, wheezing for breath. ‘I’m never alone.’

  I peered through the phone box’s grimy squares of glass. Londoners were rushing back and forth in front of me. I felt as if were underwater, and their bodies were not really bodies, just smudges of colour, moving across my sight.

  ‘I’m coming to see you,’ I said, surprised at how adamant I sounded with her – more than I’d ever dared to sound before.

  I could hear Quick hesitate, thinking, the catch of breath as she stopped resisting. ‘What about your work?’ she said. ‘They need you for the exhibition.’

  Her protest was weak, and her words were everything I needed to hear. Quick needed me; she knew she did. ‘You are my work, Quick,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘I’m not in a good way.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No – you don’t understand. I’m scared. They’re coming. I never meant to hurt her.’

 
Suddenly I felt very claustrophobic in this phone box; I wanted to get out. ‘Who’s coming? Who didn’t you want to hurt?’

  ‘I can hear them—­’

  ‘No one’s coming,’ I soothed, but she was unnerving me. I needed air, and her voice was so odd and desperate. ‘Don’t be scared,’ I said. ‘Quick, are you still there? You can trust me, I promise.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Listen, Quick. I’ll be there soon. Quick?’

  The line had gone dead. Feeling sick, I pushed my way out of the phone box, and hurried to the nearest Tube.

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  September 1936

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  18

  It was still warm by late September, the air in Arazuelo still heavy with honeysuckle, the earth reddened and cracked. Lying beneath this beauteous landscape was sour matter, but it still didn’t feel like war; not how the Schlosses thought war was supposed to be. It was something worse, a localized, persistent terror. Italian and German bombers would fly overhead, shooting at stationary planes on airfields, at Malaga port, at petrol tanks. But there was a strange sense of limbo, an intermittent hope that all this would be tied up soon, that the Republican government would sort a resistance against these nationalist rebels and their foreign allies, who were stretching their reach across the country.

  The nationalists had gained control of Old Castile, Leon, Oviedo, Alava, Navarre, Galicia, Zaragoza, the Canaries and all the Balearics, except Menorca. In the south, they had seized Cadiz, Seville, Cordoba, Granada and Huelva. Malaga was still in the Republican zone – as was Arazuelo – but nevertheless, the rebels felt very near.