why? We’d only just started, he barely knew me. I felt like he’d hoisted me onto a pedestal and left me with my legs dangling, and of course I’d managed to turn it into a trauma for the pair of us. Being alone was always so much easier.
I glanced only once at him, his profile coming in and out of the orange light as the car moved under the street lamps. His eyes were on the road, his jaw set. I didn’t know which of us felt more humiliated.
When we reached my flat, he pulled in. ‘I left your present in Surrey,’ he said, the engine still running.
‘Oh – I—’
‘Anyway. I’d better go.’ I got out, he revved the car and was off. I stood in the road, until the noise of his engine was replaced in my head by the sound of a silent scream.
I lay in bed awake, my bedside light still on past three. In my chest, my stomach, in my aching head, I felt pain for us both. That Lawrie loved me, I could not easily believe. Though he had never made me feel like an outsider, I couldn’t help worrying that he only liked me because I looked different to all the other girls in that gang he’d turned up with at Cynth’s wedding.
Lawrie had rushed in with his declaration of love – but did he really see me? I couldn’t imagine being someone who dived in for another like that; the sense that one’s molecules were being recalibrated; the sheer, multi-layered joy of being seen and adored, and adoring in return, the cycle of shyness to confidence as each new step was taken. To seek your beloved in a crowd, to lock your eyes and feel you have no truer place – it seemed impossible to me. I was – both by circumstance and nature – a migrant in this world, and my lived experience had long become a state of mind.
I didn’t know if I loved him, and that was also frightening – not to know, to be sure. Just be careful of him. You don’t just happen upon a painting like that, Odelle. I had tried so hard to shut Quick’s voice away. I wondered if she was the reason I could not drop my anchor with him as confidently as he’d declared his love. I leaned over, switching off the light, hoping in the dark for sleep. As I lay there, I couldn’t tell which fears were mine, now Quick had slipped her own inside my head.
VII
The painting Olive had finished was propped against the wall. She was more proud of it than even The Orchard, and felt that she was creeping ever closer to that shining citadel. The new piece was a surreal composition, colourful, disjointed to the gaze. It was a diptych; Santa Justa before her arrest and after, set against a dark indigo sky and a shining field. Olive had decided to call it Santa Justa in the Well.
The left half of the painting was lush and glowing. Olive had used ordinary oils, but had also experimented with gold leaf, which glinted in the light as she held the painting up. She’d always thought of gold leaf as an alchemist’s dream, a contained ray of sun. It was the colour of queens, of wise men, of shimmering land in high summer. It reminded her of the Russian Orthodox icons she had always wanted to touch as a little girl, when her father took her to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
In the middle of the healthy land on this left-hand side stood a woman, her hair the colour of the crop. She was carrying a heavy pot with deer and rabbits painted on it, and in its centre was the face of the goddess Venus. Both the faces of the woman and Venus looked proud, staring out at the viewer.
On the right half of the painting, the crop was deadened and limp. The woman appeared again, except this time she was curled inside a circle, hovering over the crop. This circle was filled with an internal perspective to make it look as if it had depth, as if the woman was lying at the bottom of a well. Her hair was now severed and dull, her pot had smashed around her, a puzzle impossible for anyone to piece together. Around the rim of the well, full-sized deer and rabbits peered down, as if set free from the broken crockery. Venus had