Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  On his last whole day, we carried Ernest downstairs, the nurses and me, and laid him in the garden, with cushions and blankets and oxygen and the sun on his face. He watched me and I knew what he was doing. I slipped my arm through his and said, “Stop it,” but he’d already done it. It was too late. He’d been doing it for days now, picturing the world without him in it. He was erasing himself from his usual place, withdrawing, saying goodbye, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

  Ernest said it was a bit like being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back. The very fact that they don’t need you makes them a thousand times more desirable and beautiful and the object of your devotion. Sometimes it’s the impossibility of a thing that makes it irresistible. And right then, being alive was the thing he was in love with, the thing that didn’t care if he was there or not. Every leaf, every blade of grass, every bug and footprint and pebble was bathed in a new kind of light for him. I knew I couldn’t see it the way he could. Every single thing Ernest looked at was breathtakingly, effortlessly, perfectly itself. Even the most ordinary thing he could think of – a dustbin, a lamppost, an envelope – was part of the biggest, most persuasive, most extraordinary miracle there is, as solid as a rock and at the same time as fine and breakable as a single hair.

  He said, “When you know for certain you are losing a thing, you suddenly see how much you have loved it, and how you ought to have taken better care of it all along.”

  It was dark when he died. Outside, bands of mist dropped on to the garden, obscuring everything, and then were just as suddenly gone. I sat with him, with Jane and Lisa and Dawn, me with my feet and my knees pressed together, my hands in my lap, my face composed, because I had no say in anything else but my own reaction. I tried to hold him with me in the room, to keep him here, but I couldn’t do it. There was a storm coming and the trees thrashed in the wind. The air bellowed and cracked and the rain began to lash against his windows, louder and louder, until there was a noise above me like a filling sail, like a parachute opening. I pretended it was the sound of angels landing. I pictured a legion of them on the roof, their wings cumbersome and wide, punching great holes in the air. I thought maybe they had come for him. He was ready to go. I figured that’s what happens when you get that close. It’s just a step down, no big deal. I hoped so anyway. I hoped he was watching us by then from another place entirely, somewhere quiet and painless and apart. And while I was hoping, and holding his hand, he slipped away.

  They left me alone with him. For a while he was still warm, and I convinced myself that he wasn’t all gone, that part of him still occupied the high corners of the room. I stroked his hand, slack and heavy now, his emptied skin like a breeze on the surface of still water. I’m sure I spoke to him but I don’t remember what I said. Ernest’s face was the same and not the same, a quiet house, his lips bloodless and tight as if stitched to his teeth, his flesh deflated like punctured dough, sunk and settled closer to its bones. It shocked me how quickly he abandoned it. Just so you know, dead doesn’t look like sleeping. Dead looks gone.

  Some of his things were on the bedside table. His watch, his toothbrush, a comb, everyday objects that seemed instantly, overwhelmingly significant because they were his, or had been, and useless too, because he wouldn’t need them, not again. There was a book and a half-finished crossword, and I knew already that I’d start reading it, that I’d solve the last few clues in an effort to inch nearer to him now that he was so finally and irretrievably lost. Pointless, I knew, too late, but I’d do it anyway.

  Dawn came back in with her head bowed and her hands clasped. I heard her voice from very far away. I was a wasp in a jar and she was talking to me. She told me that Ernest didn’t suffer, that he wasn’t in any pain.

  “He knew what was coming,” she said, “and he wasn’t alone. You were with him and he wasn’t afraid.”

  I was grateful. I wondered if she said that to everyone. I wanted very much for some of it to be true.

  Later, when I couldn’t sleep, I found myself looking for him everywhere, waiting for him to come back. I didn’t find him in the drawers of mildewed papers I emptied, in the pockets of his dun-coloured overcoat, English made, the same as his dad’s. He wasn’t smiling from the countless drawings of faces at crowded tables, of long-ago parties and marble statues and elegant cities, all the sketches that he asked me to clear out and round up and burn. He wasn’t in the half-drunk bottle of milk in his fridge. I saw it and it felt like an insult, like a punch in the stomach, that the milk was still fresh and Ernest was gone forever.

  I looked at more old pictures – a freckled boy with strong cheekbones and straight teeth and an undiluted light in his eyes. I hadn’t seen them before. I was sure I’d looked in that photo album and found nothing. One last check and there he was, smiling right at me from forty years ago. It felt like an extra moment of his life, an instant’s grace. I figured then that as long as I could keep finding new things about him, Ernest wouldn’t be completely dead.

  The night before Ernest’s funeral, I dreamt about Thurston. He was standing so close to me that I could smell the exact warm smell of his skin, even in my sleep. He didn’t say a word in my dream but when I woke up I had the definite feeling that he’d been there, that he was nearer to me than you’d think. It faded quickly, the way dreams do, but it left traces of itself all over my morning, brief pictures of him that stopped me dead and got my heart pounding, as if he was suddenly there in the room, and I only had to turn my head to see him.

  And while I pretended to myself that it wasn’t impossible, while I imagined Thurston on his way, leaving home and at the airport, taking a taxi, moving towards me, something else happened. I remembered a time, back when I was little. I’d been trying and trying to find them, and suddenly there they were, these snapshots I’d been storing in my head all along.

  Ernest, scooping me from my bed like feathers and carrying me outside into the cold night, into the car.

  Ernest, on the driver’s side, and the car rocking gently when he shut the door.

  My mother’s hair, loose like dark water, and the jewels on her pearly fingers glistening.

  The sky’s dark lavender when I sat up and the car turning down towards the sea, as if the whole world was set out below us.

  I remember the tide being out, far away on the smooth grey empty sand. I’ve been at the beach before dawn enough times with Thurston to know how it feels, like you’ve slipped through a seam in time, the night poised to tip over into day, but not quite, not yet. The edges of things are blurred and grainy and you can’t quite see where one ends and another begins. It’s all just atoms.

  I remember Ernest leaning against the car, watching the waves; Hannah stepping out of her dress and walking barefoot down the long dark stretch to the sea, her slip flowing and gathering around her like mercury in the coming light.

  Him taking my hand and pulling me, squealing and leaping and gasping, across the acres of damp, sucking sand and into the cold, cold arms of the water.

  Your heart stops when you go under like that, a sudden quiet in your ears and chest that fills the air like thunder as you break the surface again to breathe. I was a foundling, swimming with my clothes on. I was a water baby.

  The brushed-cotton fabric of my nightdress billowing with caught air then clinging to my legs like a heavy second skin, trying to pull me down. Ahead, Hannah’s skin flashing white against the gunmetal water as she swam.

  Me and Ernest. Ernest and I. We pretended to be washed up after a shipwreck, staggering out of the water and collapsing on to the sand of a far-flung shore, coughing up deep lungfuls of ocean, clinging to life with our fingertips, until we rolled over and I let him pull me upright so we could run at the waves again.

  Afterwards I think we must have built a fire. Brushwood and flotsam dragged into a pile on the sand, parched rope and a curl-leafed book, sun-bleached branches from the straggle of trees above the dunes. Ernest showed me how to get the dry grass and
the paper and twigs going, how to blow on the flames to make them stronger. They pulled at me like a magnet. To stare at anything else seemed impossible, seemed plain wrong.

  I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried.

  In the morning, I didn’t think I would ever get up. I held on to those images of my father as hard as I could, when he was young and strong and I knew without question that he loved me.

  “Time to go,” I said out loud into my empty room in his emptied house. “Time to say goodbye.”

  Outside on the drive, Hannah and Lowell posed like film stars. I saw Ernest’s coffin in the back of the hearse and I tried not to think about him lying in there. I did my very best to look at him and smile.

  “Come on then,” I said, just in case he could hear me. “Let’s get this done.”

  Before my last bonfire, before it smouldered against the darkening sky, a man introduced himself and blew open my afternoon. I’d seen him at the service. Tall, with grey hair, rich skin and a charcoal-coloured suit, he came up to me in the garden and smiled.

  “You must be Iris,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “You look just like Margot,” he said, and I said that I knew.

  He shook my hand. “I’m Alexander Brown.”

  I looked around to see if Hannah and Lowell were watching but they were nowhere.

  “Did Ernest mention me?”

  “I’ve never heard of you,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  Mr Brown smiled and said, “Good. That’s very good.”

  “Were you friends?” I asked.

  “Colleagues. For over thirty years.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said, with his hand on my shoulder, and I thanked him, “Your loss too, I guess.”

  He asked me to come with him. He said, “There’s someone here I think you’d like to meet.”

  I felt kind of rooted to the spot. I suppose I thought Ernest might still be here somewhere, watching me. What if he was right beside me and I moved away? I didn’t want him to feel abandoned.

  “What? Now?”

  “I think you’ll want to. I don’t think you’ll want to wait.”

  Alexander Brown slipped a scrap of paper into my hand, and when I looked down it was there in my palm, a drawing of an eye, the round black pupil, the white outline, the bright swirl of colour.

  “Thurston?” I said, and I couldn’t get the air out of my chest.

  He nodded.

  “Where is he?” I said. “Is he here?”

  Alexander Brown nodded. “He’s inside the house.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said, and I heard my own voice rising. “Do you mean it? Where? Let me see him. Can I see him right now?”

  “Try to stay calm,” he said, with his hand over mine. “It’s important that we don’t attract attention at this stage.”

  “What stage?”

  I sat down hard on a window ledge. All of a sudden, my legs wouldn’t hold me any more. I looked up. Birds lined the rooftops of Ernest’s house, looking down. They flew up like thrown papers at the first hint of something amiss, at the pop of a champagne cork, at the lick of a lit flame. Thurston told me that birds see everything much faster than us, at so many more frames per second, like a film in fast-forward. That’s why they can see danger coming early and why they leave the ground so quick. He said that even if you put the giddiest, most breakneck, edge-of-your-seat action movie on for a bird to enjoy, it would feel like it was watching geriatrics moving underwater. At the time, it made me think of the fire I lit on the pigeon-thick roof of the old Parkway cinema, standing up in the beat and fluster of panicked wings and watching it burn. Now I thought about all the things going on around me that I hadn’t been quick enough to see.

  “Breathe,” Alexander Brown told me, and we did. I sat there and copied his breathing, because I’d forgotten how to do it right on my own.

  “How did he get here?” I said.

  “Your father.”

  I smiled. My face broke open and light poured out. That’s how it felt.

  “Ernest did it? Ernest arranged this?”

  “Of course he did.”

  “How did he find Thurston? How the hell did he do that?”

  “He sent the same people who never managed to find you. He made him an offer.”

  “What offer?”

  “One favour for another. Would you like to see him? Are you calm? Shall we go?”

  I took another look at the garden, at Hannah and Lowell lording it over the silver service and the smarter sets of guests. There was a cloud over the sun, soft grey and edged with brilliant light. I followed Alexander Brown into the relative dark of the house, where Thurston was waiting.

  “He has some important information for you,” he said.

  “What sort of information?”

  “Life-changing. Eye-opening. From Ernest.”

  “Wait. They spoke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ernest and Thurston have spoken to each other?”

  He blinked very slowly. He said, “It is vital that you compose yourself.”

  I laughed, following him through the reception rooms and out into the back kitchen.

  “You’ll need to listen,” he said.

  I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.

  Across the room, on the other side of a river of wait staff and canapés and empty bottles, was my best and only friend in the world, tall, dark, skinny, pale, with his arms out ready to catch me, and smiling.

  I waded in.

  We found a place to be, just Thurston and me. I held on to his hand and we walked out of the house and away from the funeral party.

  “I can’t believe he found you,” I told him, and Thurston said, “I think that man would have done anything for you.”

  “So many times,” I said, “I thought about how you two would have liked each other, and wished that you could have heard his voice.”

  “And I did,” he said.

  “What did he talk to you about?”

  We’d got to the place in the woods I’d swept clean, the night of my fire. Thurston stopped walking. “We have to sit down for this. You have to be quiet and try not to interrupt so I can remember it right. You have to do your best just to listen.”

  “OK,” I said. “So what did Ernest tell you?”

  “He told me his secrets,” Thurston said. “He told me so that I could tell you.”

  It was because of Margot that Ernest came into his line of work. She was broke and struggling, cut off without a penny, and Ernest said he’d have done anything to help her.

  He painted something.

  He copied it from the original, which hung in his mum’s dressing room. Ernest measured the dimensions, and he got the whites just right. He used old paints. He’d unearthed a box of them in a cupboard somewhere, from his grandfather’s time, possibly. He knew enough even then to know that old materials are the lifeblood of a good forger.

  Oil on canvas board, eight inches by sixteen, a Charles Courtney Curran painting of the Grand Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, 1900. Ernest took it to Margot in London. He went on the train on his own. Margot loved it. She thought it was the original, stolen from home.

  Ernest told her to sell it. He didn’t tell her it was a fake.

  And then she phoned him, three weeks later.

  “I thought you’d like to know, little brother. That little Curran you stole fetched over ten thousand pounds at auction. Look out for the postman. I’m sending you your cut.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Ernest said. “I painted it.”

  Margot went quiet. She never went quiet. He thought she was angry with him.

  “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.”

  He could hear the grin in her voice before she spoke. “You little genius.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  Margot laughed. “Mind?” she said. “God no. I’d never be such a snob. Art’s art and all t
hat. Even Michelangelo started out as a forger.”

  I knew that. When Michelangelo was a struggling artist, he tried to pass off one of his own marble sculptures as an ancient Roman statue, so he could get a better price. With the help of a dealer, he damaged and buried it, so someone would ‘discover’ it and trick the market.

  “Let’s do it again,” Margot said.

  “Do you think we ought to?”

  Margot breathed into the phone. “No, but if it’s good enough for Michelangelo,” she said, “it really should be good enough for us.”

  That same week she found a willing art historian, a dealer and an expert in his field, and persuaded him to work with Ernest. She met him at a cocktail party. His name was Alexander Brown.

  Those are the people with power in the art market, apparently, the experts and dealers. With one dip of the head or tilt of the chin they can make or break a fake painting. Thurston said that Mr Brown was a very useful friend to have. Margot sorted out an introduction. She was going to Mozambique at the end of the month.

  “If you want this opportunity,” she told Ernest, “you’d better bloody well seize it.”

  So he did what Margot would have done. He jumped in.

  The trick, apparently, wasn’t to copy a famous painter, but to become him, the way a method actor inhabits his role. Ernest never copied existing paintings stroke for stroke, not to sell. Instead, he invented other versions of them – abandoned attempts, lost prints, early sketches. He imagined gaps between works.

  “Why are there forty-four documented Dali works for the year 1932 and only twenty-eight for 1931?” Thurston asked me. “What did Magritte paint in 1961, after The Memoirs of a Saint in 1960 and before The Great Table in 1962?”