by Ann Swinfen
They let themselves out of the back door and crossed the stableyard to the studio. Inside, Gregor turned on the lights, illuminating the Venus Rampant, straddling her plinth and eyeing them aggressively.
'I suppose I don't like it,' said Frances, 'because I know it's true. And I don't want to be reminded.'
'Reminded?' Gregor looked at her aghast. 'You didn't think that it was supposed to be what I felt about you?'
'Isn't it?'
'Oh, my dear. How have we come into such a state of confusion!' He stepped back and viewed the statue coldly. 'I was trying to say something about sexual appetite, yes. But the kind of destructive addiction that has nothing to do with love. And which isn't even the simple copulation of animals for the continuity of the species. No, I was thinking about the kind of abuse of sex that is an exercise in power. And the figure could just as well have been male as female. Maybe I should have made it hermaphrodite.'
'Would your Texan millionaire have cared for that?'
Gregor laughed. 'Probably not. I've come to hate it myself. If I were younger, I might make the grand gesture and smash the Venus. But to tell you the truth, I need the money, and so does St Martins. And I suppose it would be dishonest to destroy it. After all, it marks a phase in my development, just like everything else I've ever done. But it was a dead end. A road not further taken. Almost a caricature of my real intentions. I'm going another way now.'
'I'm glad.'
'Yes, I think you will be.'
He took her hand again. 'Frances . . . This whole day . . . Natasha meant it to be about celebration. Not just looking back, on the fiftieth anniversary, but looking forward. She was talking to me earlier today about new beginnings.'
'New beginnings. Yes. I've been thinking of new beginnings. But Natasha . . .' For the first time since she and Hugh had found Natasha in her chair, Frances could not control her voice. Gregor put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against his solid bulk.
'Come back here. This is what I really wanted to show you, not the Venus.'
He led her to the far end of the studio, and drew back the curtain which made a partition. His modelling table was here, and a shape covered with damp sacking. On the edge of the table lay a black case that had once held a slide-rule. Its corners were scuffed now, but the leather glowed with years of polishing. Frances touched it with her finger, then picked it up and opened it. The pale wood of the modelling tools had darkened with age and handling to a warm gold. They were spotlessly clean, but showed the marks of heavy use.
'I had no idea you still used these. I wouldn't have thought they would be good enough for a professional.'
'Oh, yes. Quite good enough. And they fit my hand with familiarity and love.'
'All this day,' said Frances, 'I've been feeling as though I have been asleep for years. And now I have woken up. Woken up to so many things that I was stupid about in the past.'
He smiled to himself, and lifted the sacking from the figure he was modelling.
'It is nearly finished. I'm going to cast it in bronze. And then, if you will allow me, I want to give it to you.'
The figure was about three feet high. It was a young girl – kneeling amongst meadow flowers, but in the very act of springing up – her arms joyously raised and her head thrown back so that her hair was caught by the wind.
Frances looked at it silently and smiled. 'Yes,' she said. 'Oh, yes – this is your true vision.'
Then she turned to him. 'Is it Katya?'
He put his arms around her again. 'I call it “The Awakening”. It isn't Katya. This girl is a little older. Sixteen or seventeen perhaps? Look again.'
She looked. 'It's me,' she said.
'It's you.'
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The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She read Classics and Mathematics at Oxford, where she married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for an MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public. Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. Her fourth novel, The Testament of Mariam, marked something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her latest novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. She now lives on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband (formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee), a cocker spaniel and two Maine Coon cats.
More by This Author
The Travellers
A Running Tide
The Testament of Mariam
Flood
Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels:
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
Victoria Glendinning
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph
'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
Peter Rhodes, Express and Star
