The Blue Hour

Chapter 20

20

Becker writes to Grace that afternoon and is surprised to receive a reply almost immediately, saying that he is welcome to come to Eris on the weekend. Saturday would be good. You mean tomorrow? he replies. Yes, tomorrow.

He calls Helena to let her know that he’ll be gone by the time she gets back from London, but her phone goes straight to voicemail. He is tempted to look at her Instagram, knowing there will be evidence of lunches in fashionable restaurants and drinks in bars, trips to the theatre perhaps, a glimpse into another life, one he feels excluded from. The fact that his exclusion is self-imposed doesn’t make it feel any better. He doesn’t look. Too dangerous.

This feeling – this longing for her – makes him oddly nostalgic for the days when she wasn’t his, when he could only fantasize about being with her. It is strangely thrilling, the idea of her as forbidden object of desire rather than wife .

In the early days, when he first came to work at Fairburn, Helena was always dropping by unexpectedly, popping her head around the door, always in a hurry, breathlessly asking him some question that might just as easily have been answered by someone else – her husband-to-be, for example? If anyone else happened to turn up, she became flustered, colour rising to her cheeks.

Becker thought he must be imagining things. He had to be! But then, on one impossibly glorious spring evening, swifts swooping low across the lawn and a golden light illuminating the creamy magnolia flowers outside his office window, she turned up just as he was shutting down his computer. She was dressed for company, a silk slip in sunset colours, high heels, red lipstick. She entered the office quickly, closing the door behind her. She walked around his desk and, before he could say a word, leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. Then she stood up straight and stepped away from him. She waited a moment for him to say something and, when he didn’t, smiled sadly. ‘The invitations are due to go out next week,’ she said, and was gone before he had the wit to respond.

He thinks of it now and cringes; he was such a coward. He did nothing, said nothing. Worse: he hid from her, turned and fled whenever she appeared in the corridors of the house. The wedding invitations were sent.

That was that.

Only fate – in the unlikely form of Lady Emmeline Lennox – intervened. A stumble in the heather, a misfired shot and Douglas was gone. The wedding had to be postponed. And while Sebastian was comforting his stricken mother and mourning his father, Becker stepped in.

Late summer, when the meadows were purple with heather and rosebay, Becker went to fetch Helena from the train station. He was there on Sebastian’s request, Sebastian having to take his mother into town to see about funeral arrangements. Becker met Helena from the train and drove her back to Fairburn, only instead of driving her up to the main house, he took her to the Gamekeeper’s Lodge instead.

It floors him still to think about it, the heat of the day, windows flung open, shadows lengthening as the long afternoon wore on, the knowledge that Sebastian wouldn’t be back until that evening, that he had her for hours.

In the blue of dusk he got up to fetch glasses of water from the kitchen. When he returned, he plucked up the courage to ask her directly: ‘What is this, Helena? Cold feet?’

She was sitting on the bed, flushed and damp-haired, her legs drawn up to her chest. ‘You think I would do this lightly?’ she asked, hurt. ‘You think I would betray him on a whim?’

Becker shook his head, handing her one of the glasses as he clambered back on to the bed. ‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand, really, why you would do this, what it is you want.’ He was shaking, he remembers that, hands trembling as he brought the glass to his lips.

It seemed an eternity before she spoke. ‘The first time I met you,’ she said carefully, ‘that night we all had drinks – do you remember? Me and Seb, Emmeline and Douglas and you, up at the house. You were so quiet, so soft-spoken … What a mouse , I thought. Handsome, but not like Seb is handsome …’ Becker winced. ‘It’s true,’ she said, shrugging. ‘You know that.’ She crossed her legs, pulling a pillow on to her lap. ‘But then Douglas started asking you questions about work, about Chapman, and you weren’t so quiet any longer … You disagreed with him about something, something curatorial, about how best to display the collection. Douglas was bellowing and boorish, adamant that everything should be strictly chronological, but you were talking about how the sculptures you’d just discovered were so directly linked to those early Oxfordshire landscapes, the ones where she took bits of grass and seeds and things and pressed them into the paint, that this was another way of using found objects and nature …’

‘And he said I needed to get my head out of my arse,’ Becker replied, pulling a face. ‘He said I needed to stop thinking like a PhD student and start thinking like the curator of a commercial space .’

Helena laughed. ‘Yes, and then Seb tried to join in – he was siding with his father, of course – and I don’t remember what he said, probably because he had nothing to say, everything that came out of his mouth was so glib and so facile, and you were so … controlled .’ She smiled, blushing. ‘It was very attractive. I kept thinking about it afterwards, how steely you were.’ Her blush deepened. ‘It struck me then, right then, that first night, that you had substance , and that, as sweet as Seb is, there’s nothing to him.’

Becker relives it now, the pleasure he took in Sebastian’s belittling, delicious and hot and shaming.

‘It’s not his fault,’ Helena added. ‘He’s had everything handed to him, he’s never really had to work, he’s never had to struggle … and do you know, neither have I? I’m the same. I’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I need someone to tether me. I want it to be you.’

Later, when she was in the shower and Becker was downstairs in the kitchen, pouring a glass of wine and trying to think of what he should say to her before she left, he was blindsided by the realization that he’d have to resign his post. He’d have to give up Vanessa if he was going to have Helena. And he froze, the glass an inch from his lips. He wanted this so much, this opportunity to study Vanessa, to read her words, to write about her, to immerse himself in her. His whole life had been leading towards this point and now he was going to have to walk away from it.

It’s not worth it, he thought. She’s not worth it. He only thought it for a second – a fraction of a second, perhaps – but he did think it.

When Helena came downstairs, her long hair combed back and twisted into a bun, her face scrubbed clean of makeup, her eyes were a little red, from shampoo or tears. She was breathtaking. Of course she was worth it. ‘I’ll resign,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave, we’ll go somewhere else.’

She made a face. ‘Why?’

‘ Why? ’ he spluttered. ‘You’re … engaged to him, Helena, and we—’

‘Becker!’ She kissed him, open-mouthed. ‘Don’t be so bourgeois! Yes, it’ll be messy. He’ll be angry, it’ll be painful at first, but he’ll get over it. There’ll be another girl in a month or two, and another one a month or two after that. Don’t worry about Sebastian.’

So he stayed. They stayed. And Sebastian – sweet, stiff-upper-lip Sebastian – did get over it. He disappeared for a few months, he went diving in the Maldives and hiking in Spain, he picked up girls and discarded them and, when the pandemic hit, he returned alone. No hard feelings, he swore. All’s fair and all that. The best man won.

Becker spends the rest of the afternoon clearing his desk, sending emails, speaking to a couple of auction houses about forthcoming sales, contacting a private collector about the possibility of a loan for the exhibition they’re planning to hold next summer.

Just before Sebastian is due to leave, he sticks his head around the door. He is wearing an evening suit, his tie not yet done, his jaw artfully stubbled, like a man in an aftershave advertisement. ‘Did you by any chance swipe that notebook I was looking at?’ he asks. ‘The one with the list?’

Becker sighs in exasperation. ‘I’m going to Eris tomorrow, I need to show her that – it’s the only thing resembling evidence of missing works that we have.’

Sebastian nods. ‘Fair enough.’ He half-turns to go and then appears to think better of it. ‘You’ll keep me informed, won’t you? I want to know how she reacts when confronted with the smoking gun.’ Becker nods, but doesn’t reply. ‘I mean it, Becker, I want results this time – you need to start playing hardball with her.’

‘All right,’ Becker replies, ‘but I still think it’s worth at least trying to keep her onside.’ Sebastian rolls his eyes, but Becker presses on regardless. ‘I have a feeling this may turn out to be more complicated than you think – after all, Grace gave us the notebook with that list in it. Why would she do that if she were trying to conceal something?’

Sebastian shrugs, shakes his head, glancing at his watch. He has the attention span of a gnat, Becker thinks, he’s already on to the next thing, he’s out the door, on his way to dinner. ‘Just keep me in the loop,’ he says. He has his phone in his hand now, reading something as he walks away; he’s almost out of sight and then he stops. Turns back. ‘Have you ever asked yourself, Beck, why it is that we got everything?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Do you not think it’s odd?’ Sebastian asks. ‘That this Haswell woman was Vanessa’s friend, her carer, her companion for twenty years, and yet Vanessa left her – as you put it – with nothing. Why was that, do you think?’