label as outright madness.”
Shelby Summerton, the daughter of a property developer in the business of building flats in the East End, was more extravagant than anything Elizabeth had ever seen before. Her wide-leg trousers were so baggy that Elizabeth had at first taken them for a skirt, and her blue satin blouse was cut so low you could see a tiny promise of what was beneath. Her hair was long and inexplicably voluminous at the crown, with half of it swept back away from her face.
“You see, it’s about community living,” Shelby was telling Elizabeth regarding the flats her father was building, her cigarette wafting back and forth, creating little trails of smoke. The patterns reminded her of the Milky Way. “Not a community like this village you have painted here, but one that makes a splendid profit.” The snort rose from her gut as she laughed at what Elizabeth hadn’t taken for a joke. “I will be buying this one,” she said, pointing to the painting of the Porthsennen harbor, the boats with nets draped over the side. In the center of the composition stood a sole figure of a man on the end of the breakwater, staring out to sea. “And this one. It’s my favorite.”
Shelby’s favorite was of Wolf Rock itself. It was painted in a storm, the waves crashing against the sides, swallowing the structure into the tempestuous mass. Although it was almost undetectable when you viewed the work from a distance, if you got up close your eye was unquestionably drawn to a small yellow brushstroke depicting a flashlight at an open front door. If you looked harder still you could just see a man, supine and injured on the surface of the rocks below. Elizabeth’s collection told a story she kept close to her heart, one she had told not a soul about but that was, if you looked hard enough, there for all to see.
“And about the commission?” probed Frank.
Shelby threw her cigarette to the floor, stamped it out with a platformed heel. “You worry too much, Frankie, and work as if you need the money. Don’t be so crass.” She looked to Elizabeth, winked. “We have all the time in the world for the details, don’t we . . .” She paused. “What’s your name?”
“Elizabeth Warbeck.” It didn’t matter how many times she said it. Even seven years after her marriage it still sounded wrong.
* * *
“So, tonight was a success,” James said as he met her at the door. Most people had left by then, just a few lingering in a corner talking with Frank.
Elizabeth gazed about the room, noticing the little tickets tucked alongside each painting. “It was. I sold everything.”
“That’s great.” He nudged at the rubbish on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “What did that awful woman want?”
“To pay me an equally awful sum of money to produce a painting of Porthsennen so that she might have it printed and hung in her father’s apartment blocks.” He nodded approvingly. “I will be paid for each print. And there will be one in each flat. All two hundred and fifty-six of them.”
“A fine and charming lady,” James joked.
“I’m sorry if you were bored,” she said. “You seemed it at one point.”
He shook his head, reached in his pocket for his cigarettes. Cravings for the habit he’d picked up during his tour in Malaya had returned not long after their wedding, and he hadn’t been able to shake it since. “I wasn’t bored. I was proud of you.” He looked down to the floor. “Very proud of you, in fact.”
“Shall we go back to the hotel? Maybe have a drink in the bar, make the most of a night away from being parents?”
Any other time he would have taken her up on the idea. He loved her as much as he loved Kate, which was to say without limits. But after seeing her paintings all there together, proof of her thought processes for the last seven years, he had realized that she wasn’t really his, never had been, in fact. In some way he had achieved what he wanted; she did love him, he knew that. But she didn’t love him in the right way. The lies inside him had swollen, were taking over like cancer. They required excision if he was to survive, find himself again.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Elizabeth.”
“Why not?”
Her heart quickened as he took a step forward toward the closest paintings. He stopped