In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  Dora stared at her. ‘I don’t believe it. You’re on their side.’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ Emmeline protested but perhaps she was. She knew how unfairly Dora had been treated. It was bitter that Toller refused to reward her for her efforts, worse still that he expected her to go back to the social pages without complaint. And yet Emmeline could not help being glad. Perhaps if Dora went back to her old job then everything else would go back to the way it had been before too. Perhaps she would talk to Emmeline as she used to, when Emmeline was her friend and not just an audience for her obsession with Matthias Rachmann and the injustices of the Berlin press.

  She avoided Dora after that, or perhaps they avoided each other. She stayed late at the studio and tried not to read the newspapers. She was experimenting with woodcuts. The technique was new to her. She had tried it briefly as a student and disliked it, dismissing it as craft rather than art, fit for book illustrations perhaps but lacking the great depth and grandeur of paint. But she no longer trusted paint, the confident gloss it gave to ideas that were commonplace or shallow or only half-thought. It was like a rich sauce, she thought, disguising tainted meat.

  Prints hid nothing. Her progress was slow, she was clumsy and inexperienced, she made many mistakes, but she liked the ritual of it, the slow acclimatisation of the wood as it settled in the studio, the sizing and the sanding and the smoothing with alcohol to remove the dust. There was something in the simplicity of the images, the reduction of line and shadow to its most essential parts, that made her feel like she was peeling off the winter layers of herself, letting the light touch her skin.

  Exaggerate the essential, van Gogh wrote to Theo. Leave the obvious vague. She was not sure why it had taken her so long to understand what he meant.

  One night, she found Dora waiting on her doorstep. There was a raw patch at the corner of her mouth. She picked at the rough skin with her fingernail as Emmeline fumbled for her key. Anton’s friend Walther had come to see her, she said, he had information but he wanted money, he would not talk until she paid him.

  ‘I thought you might lend it to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay you back. As soon as I sell the story I’ll pay you back.’

  Emmeline took out her purse. Dora mumbled a thank you and tucked the money into the waistband of her skirt. Emmeline glimpsed a brief pale gleam of skin. ‘I wish you’d stop,’ she said quietly but Dora shook her head.

  ‘How can I stop? I have to show them, don’t I? I have to prove them wrong.’

  ‘And then what?’ Emmeline asked, but Dora only glared at her.

  ‘There’s something else I have to ask you,’ she said. ‘A favour.’

  ‘What favour?’

  ‘I need you to persuade Köhler-Schultz to talk to me. On the record.’

  Emmeline gaped at her. ‘Jesus, Dora, when are you going to understand? There’s no chance he’ll ever talk to you, no chance at all.’

  ‘You don’t know that. I mean, you could at least ask, couldn’t you? He trusted me before. Why not now?’

  Emmeline bit her lip. She wanted to shake Dora. Why could she not see what was right in front of her eyes? Julius knew every newspaper editor in Berlin. He had not come to Dora because he trusted her. He had done it because she was a nobody and no one would ever trace the leak. He saw the way the wind was blowing, that his best—perhaps his only—chance of defending his own position lay in undermining de Vries’s. Julius knew quite well that de Vries had never agreed to a joint re-examination of the paintings, but he also knew that if de Vries then refused to go through with it his decision to discredit more than thirty paintings would be judged not as a confession, a courageous mea culpa, but as arrogant and one-sided. Julius had not trusted Dora. He had trusted she would be naïve enough to play into his hands.

  Dora clutched Emmeline’s arm. ‘Please?’

  Wearily Emmeline shrugged. The thought of trying to explain made her heart ache, and anyway Dora would never listen. ‘Fine. I’ll try.’

  The next morning she woke to find a note slipped under her door. Any news from JKS? D x She put the note in her pocket and did nothing. She did not write to Julius. What would be the point? The next day there was another note from Dora. Surely he’s come back to you by now? Two days later, there was a third.

  Where are you? Come to supper tomorrow. Oma misses you, she says you’re not allowed to say no.

  ‘Well?’ Dora said to Emmeline as soon as she opened the door, and when Emmeline shook her head she glared at the wall and banged her spoon furiously around the stewpot on the stove.

  Oma took Emmeline’s hand. ‘Dear Emchen,’ she said softly, smiling up at her, and Emmeline bent down, gathering her bones in her arms. There were towers of Dora’s notebooks and folders stacked on the tiny table. They had to move them on to the floor to make room for supper.

  ‘When Dora was very little her governess put a pile of books on her chair so she could reach the table but Dora refused to sit on them,’ Oma said. ‘Remember, Dodo? You thought you would squash all the people who lived inside.’ She smiled at Dora, but Dora was not listening. She eyed the piles of papers, nudging them pensively with one foot. After supper, as Emmeline carried the dirty plates to the sink, she took a manila folder from a pile and leafed through it. Oma looked up from her armchair.

  ‘Enough work for one day,’ she coaxed. ‘Come and sit down.’

  Emmeline sat. Dora frowned, turning a page.

  ‘Dora, we’re waiting,’ Oma said more sharply but Dora did not look up. Emmeline took the old woman’s hand.

  ‘Why don’t I start?’ she said. ‘When I walked through Alexanderplatz today they were setting up the Christmas market. The air smelled like cinnamon and, behind a stall piled with oranges, there was a man with a huge moustache all tucked in on itself like the bow on a present.’

  ‘The brother, Em,’ Dora blurted. ‘We forgot the brother!’

  ‘Don’t interrupt,’ Oma scolded but Dora waved a hand, batting her words away.

  ‘Gregor Rachmann,’ she said. ‘He liked you, didn’t he? He liked you a lot.’

  Emmeline shrugged. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Think about it. He and Rachmann are in on this together. They both went to Holland to see that Dutch expert, Hendriksen. So he’ll know what’s going on, the inside story. All you have to do is send him one of your letters full of charming sketches, you’re lonely, you’ve been thinking of him, how about a little private dinner, a drink or two in an intimate bar where we can be alone? A silk dress, a few glasses of wine, a hand on his sleeve when you laugh—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Emmeline hissed. ‘Don’t say another word.’

  ‘But it’s perfect, don’t you see? He was the one to start it so he—’

  ‘You’re my pimp now?’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s not like that. A favour, that’s all, and you never know, you might like it . . .’ Dora grinned, baring her teeth, and it was like grasping something on fire, Emmeline snatched up all the rage and the pain before she could feel it and threw it as hard as she could.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ she shouted. ‘You think you can pimp me out for a paragraph in your stupid fucking newspaper? Well, fuck you, Dora. Fuck you.’

  ‘Emchen, please!’ Oma said, distressed, but Dora only rolled her eyes.

  ‘Oh, please, don’t be so melodramatic. I’m not asking you to—you know—just to soften him up a bit, make him think he’s in with a—’

  Emmeline stood up. Her legs were shaking. ‘What the hell happened to you, Dora?’ she said and each word was something breaking inside her. ‘When did you stop being you?’

  Dora’s bewildered frown made her want to scream and smash something. Instead, snatching up her bag, she slammed her way out of the flat. On her own landing she rummaged for her key, scrabbling and raking until in a fury she upended it, hurling its contents out on to the landing. The key skittered on to the floor, a bright glint of silver, and Emmeline bent her head
and wept, only there were no tears, just the sharp corners of something she could not swallow. She pressed her fingers into her eye sockets as though she could push the tears out but instead, in the darkness, there was only the flicker of burned-down candles, the white gleam of paper translucent with oil.

  We’ll cross your ethics when we come to them. And here they were.

  12

  She went to the studio. She wanted to be where she was no one, where the work was all that mattered. Beyond the tram window the city floated in the darkness, its lights gauzed in fog. The studio was freezing. She kept her coat on as she worked but the cold still made her clumsy. When she came to cut the block she gouged too hard. The gashes gaped white in the pale wood.

  Slowly a grey dawn leaked in. Some of the other artists arrived. When it grew dark they went away again. Emmeline did not want to go home but she could not think where else to go. It was snowing when she got off the tram. At the shop on the corner she bought a bottle of cheap Russian brandy. She hugged it against her as she pushed open the door to her building. Frau Schmidt was in the lobby, talking to a woman in a flowered apron. She looked round as Emmeline came in.

  ‘You seen your friend, the one from 11C?’ she asked and when Emmeline shook her head she shrugged, turning back to the woman in the apron. ‘Well, I ain’t goin’ up there. I told her, a hot dinner, that’s all, not nurse-maidin’ while she’s out all hours.’

  The flat was colder than the studio but Emmeline did not light the stove. She climbed into bed with her coat on and drank the brandy out of the bottle. The snow was getting heavier. She watched it swirl and swarm, black against the light-stained sky. She could see her breath. She wondered if Frau Schmidt had remembered to stoke the stove for Oma. She did not always remember.

  The brandy burned her throat. She drank more. She should have expected it. You found someone you thought was special and, sooner or later, when the newness wore off and they turned out to be like everyone else, you woke up and they were gone. You expect too much of people, her mother used to tell her, but Emmeline did not listen because who listened to someone who thought what mattered was to know the right people and wear the right clothes and always remember the right knife and fork, who believed that as long as your life looked perfect to other people it did not matter if everything was wrong inside?

  It was her own fault, she knew that. She should have left before, while it was still her choice to do the leaving. She had forgotten to be careful. The pain of it shimmered behind the brandy, bright as a migraine.

  The brightness faded. Time slipped. The building made its evening noises. People shouted. Infants wailed. The clank of the lavatory cistern banged through the pipes. Dora would be home from work by now. The snow was seething outside the window, the air solid with it. Emmeline thought of Oma alone and ill, the stove out. She could not get the picture of her out of her mind. Jamming the brandy bottle in her pocket, she went upstairs.

  The stove was still warm. Oma was in her armchair, a rug over her knees. Her brow burned with fever. Berlin was unbearable in summer, she muttered to Emmeline, so hot, there was never enough air to breathe, but she shivered violently as Emmeline helped her to bed and tucked the blankets around her.

  ‘There you go,’ Emmeline said, slurring a little. ‘All settled now.’

  The old woman’s face softened as she drifted back into sleep. Emmeline’s own head was heavy, it was an effort to keep her eyes open. Kicking off her shoes, she lay down next to Oma.

  The slam of the front door woke her. Shivering, she sat up, drymouthed and gritty-eyed, wiping the drool from her chin with the back of her hand, half-remembered dreams clinging to her like cobwebs, Julius and Gregor Rachmann, his hand on the small of her back. In the bed beside her Oma murmured something in her sleep. Emmeline put a hand on her forehead, checking her temperature. Beneath her downy hair her skull was as fragile as an egg.

  In the other room all the lights were burning. Emmeline squinted in the brightness. Dora stood beside the stove, scrawling in a notebook. She was hatless and there was snow in her hair, on her coat, clumped on the soles of her boots. Her nose was pink with cold. When she saw Emmeline in the doorway she grinned at her and Emmeline could not help it, her heart turned over. Dora turned back to her notebook.

  ‘Oma’s not well,’ Emmeline said.

  Dora frowned. ‘What kind of not well?’

  ‘She has a fever. I—Frau Schmidt said someone should stay with her.’

  Dora’s frown deepened. Still reading her notebook, she walked past Emmeline and into the bedroom. Her boots left white petals of snow on the linoleum. A moment later she came out again. She turned a page. ‘She’s fine. She’s sleeping.’

  ‘You don’t think we should fetch the doctor? She was so hot.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Dora said again. She took a pen from the table and scribbled rapidly. ‘Thanks for coming up.’

  It was not coldness as much as indifference. If it was not in the notebook it did not concern her in the least. Suddenly all Emmeline wanted was to smash the hard, heedless shell of her, to make her sorry.

  ‘Julius Köhler-Schultz said no,’ she said. ‘He wants nothing else to do with you.’

  Dora shrugged. She did not look up. ‘No one cares what he thinks anyway. What people want is the inside story, don’t you see? A personal portrait of Matthias Rachmann by the woman who knows him best in the world. I’ve got him this time, Em. I think I’ve finally got him.’

  ‘What are you talking about?”

  Dora put down her pen. She looked up at Emmeline, a small hard smile on her lips, and suddenly she was talking, the words coming faster and faster, tumbling over one another. Stupid with sleep and brandy, Emmeline could barely follow her. She thought of Irina, her eyes glittering with cocaine as though she was dazzled by the brilliance of the lights in her head. As though nothing that had happened before that moment had ever really happened.

  ‘There it was, tucked away in this tiny magazine no one’s heard of,’ Dora gabbled. ‘No one else seems to know she exists, certainly no one’s talked to her, but once I saw that Rachmann wheeled her on Sundays by the lake it was easy. Name, address, everything. And, best of all, she’s on the telephone.’

  ‘Who is?’ Emmeline said.

  ‘Rachmann’s mother, you blockhead. Haven’t you been listening at all?’

  Early in the morning was best, she said, people were less guarded when they had only just woken up. Besides, the woman was old and frail and almost certainly lonely, she would not refuse a distressed young mother with a sick child. She would let Dora inside to use the telephone and Dora would cry and they would talk about their sons. An exclusive: VAN GOGH CHEAT, A MOTHER’S HEARTBREAK. Nils had even lent her a tiny camera, small enough to hide in her sleeve. This was a story of pictures, after all, a photograph would be worth—

  ‘Shut up!’ Emmeline cried, unable to endure another word, and she swiped at Dora’s notebook, knocking it on to the floor. ‘Shut up or I swear—’

  Dora’s lip curled. ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘I am. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to help.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘You don’t understand me?’ Emmeline laughed bleakly. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Why do you always have to be like this, why can’t you just be happy for me for once? This is my big chance—’

  ‘To do what? To break into an ill old woman’s home?’

  ‘It’s not breaking in. It’s—’

  ‘Lying and cheating? Well that’s all right then. As long as you don’t have a shred of decency or conscience. Anything for the story.’

  ‘People have a right to know the truth.’

  ‘The truth?’ Emmeline shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dora, don’t you see? All this, it’s—it’s shit. Twisted delusional muck-raking shit. Seizing a pile of folders, she hurled them on to the floor. Papers scattered.

  Dora stood very still. Her eyes were chips of ice. ‘Get out.’
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br />   ‘How long before this is all you are, Dora, till there’s none of you left?’

  ‘I said, get out.’

  Emmeline looked at Dora, the lines of her so familiar she could feel the movement of them in her fingers. Then silently she squatted, gathering up crumpled handfuls of papers, shoving them back into the folders, piling the folders in a stack. There were chalky marks on Dora’s boots where the snow had melted. When she stood, the folders in her arms, Dora reached out for them, but Emmeline did not give them to her. Turning her back, she yanked open the door of the stove and rammed them inside. Dora screamed. She clutched at Emmeline’s arm, thrust her hip against her, struggling to push her out of the way, to grab at the burning papers, but Emmeline pushed back, bracing herself against the sink as she snatched up the poker and pushed the folders deeper into the stove. The papers darkened, then caught, a bright surge of flame before Emmeline kicked the door shut.

  Dora stared at her, her eyes stretched, the flesh shrunk tight against the bones. Her lips peeled back from her teeth like an animal’s. Then with a sharp cry she set upon Emmeline, scratching, slapping, snatching at her hair, raining down blows with her fists. Emmeline hunched her back, covering her head with her arms, then, twisting round, struck out as hard as she could with her elbows. There was a sickening crack as bone met bone.

  Dora fell backwards. Her hands were over her face, blood running between her fingers. Emmeline stared, frozen, mesmerised by the glossy redness of it. She put out a hand, her fingers brushing Dora’s, touching the slick warm blood.

  Dora scrabbled backwards, her hands still over her face. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she hissed. The blood ran down her pale wrists and into the cuffs of her coat. Dark patches glistened stickily on the black wool of her lapels.

  Emmeline looked at her outstretched hand, smeared with Dora’s blood. It seemed to belong to someone else. ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said helplessly.