‘If I ever recover my sight, I shall paint that scene, exactly as you describe it. And then I’ll give it to you.’
‘Of course you’ll paint it,’ she said. ‘You’ll paint hundreds more things. And you can paint another scene of the cliffs for me too – I may as well order a pair while I’m at it – a certain spot near Beachy Head.’ She paused. ‘It’s where my grandmother took me the day I went to live with her. We had a picnic there – cream of tomato soup and cheddar cheese sandwiches. I remember it like it was yesterday.’
She’d always been reluctant, until this, to say much about her family or her past, and Robert saw an opening. ‘How did you come to live with your grandmother?’ he asked.
She was quiet for so long that he began to regret his question.
‘My father didn’t want me,’ she said. ‘Or rather, he didn’t know how to deal with me. Well, he didn’t know how to deal with anyone, really. People weren’t his strong point.’
‘Ah, yes. Some people are simply like that,’ he said. ‘Most of them appear to have joined the senior ranks of the British army.’
He could hear her scratching around in the undergrowth with a stick. ‘It’s why he became a forensic pathologist,’ she said. ‘So that he only had to deal with dead patients, not living ones.’
‘He sounds like a difficult man,’ he said carefully, aware of the understatement – the man was clearly a swine. ‘What happened precisely,’ he ventured, ‘for him to send you away?’
She sighed. ‘He had a new woman. She didn’t want me either. She was desperate for them to move to Australia and start a new life. In the end he chose her over me.’
‘That was extraordinarily cruel.’ And, he reflected, had clearly left an indelible mark.
‘Yes.’ She fell silent. ‘But it was all right. I much preferred living with my granny.’ There, he thought, the attempt to shut off the topic once again.
‘You must miss her terribly.’
‘Yes.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Wise, direct. She worried that I went through life with my head in the clouds, just reading books and daydreaming. She didn’t like to think that I’d be left on my own one day, without her; that I’d have to make my own way.’
‘Reading books and daydreaming one’s way through life actually sounds rather wonderful,’ he said. ‘What would your grandmother have rather you’d done instead?’
‘Oh, just spend more time with people my own age, I suppose. Go along to parties, join clubs, that sort of thing. But it wasn’t me. I think she saw that, eventually, and gave up.’
‘And your mother?’ he asked. ‘What was she like?’
‘I barely remember her. All my memories of her are like old photographs, sort of frozen and faded – you’ve seen them so many times you have no emotional attachment any more. Do you know what I mean?’
Then, all at once, there it was again, and his heart stilled. This time there was no doubt: she must have moved her head, and the sun must have caught it at that exact moment.
‘I saw it!’ he cried. ‘Your hair! The sun was on it. I saw a shimmer of gold!’
She was quiet for what seemed a long time. Finally:
‘That’s wonderful,’ she said quietly. ‘You see? I told you your sight would come back.’ But this time he couldn’t detect a smile in her voice.
***
That night Louisa slept fitfully and dreamt vividly of her father. Then she woke early, before dawn, and found herself unable to go back to sleep again. And so she gave herself permission to think back to her childhood, in a way she hadn’t done in years.
In her mind’s eye she saw the three of them in her father’s car. Herself in the back, her father driving, Lucinda in the seat next to him. They were almost there. She’d spent the entire journey feeling as if she was going to be sick, debating whether to throw herself on her father’s mercy and tell him she was sorry for all the trouble she’d caused. That she’d be nicer to Lucinda and stop playing truant from school. But then they were pulling up outside Cliff Cottage, and it was too late. He’d told her to wait with Lucinda while he went to knock at the door. Back then she’d barely known of her maternal grandmother’s existence. From the little she’d been able to gather, when she was born there had been some kind of falling out between Granny and her father which had resulted in him refusing to allow her any kind of contact with Louisa.
‘You’re going to love living here, Louisa,’ Lucinda had said, jarringly brightly, into the thick silence. ‘Just look at all these animals – what a menagerie! You’ll have such fun going to collect the eggs every morning. Look! There are even ducks.’
Louisa could detect the relief in her voice – the note of magnanimity in victory – and it grated horribly.
‘Would you like your own pony?’ Lucinda had persisted. ‘I can speak to your father.’ Louisa had just frowned and looked away. ‘Well, perhaps I’ll walk back to the road and wait for your father there, let you say your goodbyes,’ Lucinda had said. ‘Think about what I said: we’d love you to be our bridesmaid. You and I could go and choose a pretty dress, then have lunch at a posh restaurant. What do you say?’ Nothing. ‘Well, all right then. Goodbye, darling.’
Then, horrified, Louisa had realised that Lucinda was going to try to kiss her – and she turned quickly so that Lucinda’s lips brushed awkwardly against her ear. Then she looked Lucinda square in the face. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘I saw you kissing my father when my mother wasn’t even dead yet. You’re a whore.’ It was a word she’d heard in one of the old black-and-white films she loved. To her intense satisfaction Lucinda’s eyes dilated with shock – and without a word she walked away.
Then her father had come back. ‘Alors, Louisa,’ he’d said awkwardly, and in French, for he only ever spoke to her in French – it was one of the many things about which he was extremely pedantic. ‘We’d best be on our way. You will be good for your grandmother, won’t you?’
She remembered being struck again by how dark his hair was, how tanned his skin. Physically, she was nothing like him at all – which only served to further underline their utter foreignness to each other. She remembered her hands seemingly suddenly ridiculous. Not knowing quite what to do with them, she let them dangle limply at her sides. And her father was also at a complete loss as to what to do when it came to such things – as always.
As she’d got older, as she’d studied medicine and pieced things together, she’d come to realise that he was most likely somewhere on the autistic spectrum, probably had Asperger’s syndrome. He had little idea of how to relate to people emotionally – least of all his own child. And the despondency he’d fallen into after his wife’s death had made him even more self-centred. But back then she couldn’t understand why he was the way that he was; she had simply assumed that it must be largely to do with her own shortcomings as a daughter.