Odelle, would you mind?’ She fumbled inelegantly in her pocket, and thrust out a pound note.
‘Quick—’
‘Go,’ she said. ‘There’s a shop just round the corner. Go.’
So I left, to fetch her cigarettes. Numb, I floated into Wimbledon Village to buy her a packet, and I floated back. And when I returned, the house was in complete darkness, the curtains drawn. The pamphlet I’d taken from the Scott house was on the step, weighted down with a stone. I put it back in my handbag and knocked and knocked, and called her name quietly through the letterbox.
‘Quick. Quick, let me in,’ I said. ‘You said you trusted me. What’s happened? Quick, who is Olive Schloss?’
There was only silence.
Eventually, I had to push the cigarettes through the door, and they landed lightly onto the mat on the other side. I pushed through her change also, as if I was throwing money down a wishing well that would never grant me any wish. Still there was no movement. I sat on the other side of that door for a good half an hour, my limbs going stiff. I waited for the sound of her footsteps, sure that Quick would give in to the craving of her nicotine and come for the cigarettes.
What was true, and what was I already beginning to concoct? It mattered greatly to me as to whether Quick had intended for me to find the clues in her telephone book, or whether it was a mistake. It seemed as if she had been deliberate about it – why else invite me here, and grill me about Lawrie, and the painting? Why else tell me to look up T for Taxi? Or perhaps it had been a genuine mistake, and I had stumbled across her secrets – and now my punishment was this silent, locked door.
Outside, I could hear car doors closing arrhythmically, and see the street lamps flickering to life. I didn’t want a policeman to catch me sitting there, so I got up, and walked away to the village high street to wait for a bus.
Whatever the truth was, Quick was now fragmented to me. The illusion of her perfect wholeness and easy glamour had been shattered by tonight. Despite her confession about her ill health, I realized I knew so little about her. I wanted to put her back together, to return her to the pedestal on which I’d placed her, but our encounter tonight would make that impossible. Now, when I thought about Quick, I couldn’t stop thinking about Olive Schloss.
My imagination was extravagant, and I believed that Olive Schloss was a ghost I might control. But had I turned back that night, and looked up at Quick’s window, I would have seen a silhouette, orchestrating my retreat.
XII
Women in the Wheatfield did sell, and it was a woman who bought it. Harold had sent a telegram to the post office in Arazuelo three days after his departure to Paris, and Olive went to fetch it. The buyer was called Peggy Guggenheim, and according to Harold, she was a rich friend of Marcel Duchamp and was thinking of dabbling in the art market.
‘So not a real collector,’ said Isaac.
‘Well, she’s got the money,’ Olive retorted.
Guggenheim purchased Isaac Robles’s painting at a fairly high rate for an unknown; four hundred French francs. To Olive, the sale of the painting was glorious, hilarious: it made no sense, and yet it did. It was as if Women in the Wheatfield was a completely separate painting from Santa Justa in the Well, whilst remaining exactly the same thing. The image was identical, it just had a different title and had been made by a different artist. She was free of identity, yet what came from her was valued. She could create purely, and also bear witness to the muddier yet heady side; the selling of her art.
Having had her father unwittingly sell one of her paintings, Olive could admit to herself that part of her plan to attend the Slade had been solely to spite Harold, to show him what he had overlooked. But the Guggenheim purchase had eclipsed this desire; it was both a grander personal validation, and a much more wonderful joke.
*
Soon after Harold’s telegram arrived with the news, Teresa began to have a dream that was strange for someone who had always lived in such a dry part of the land. It was dusk, and she was on the veranda, and the body of the murdered boy, Adrián, was