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“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I will be fine.”
The man started to close the door behind him and then stopped suddenly. He stared down at the floor for a moment of decision and then raised dark, troubled eyes to Connie.
“Are you good at your job?” he asked softly.
Connie was taken by surprise. She considered the question objectively. There were just a few inches of space between them, the man’s closeness and the tone of his voice somehow intimate.
“Yes,” she said. She held the man’s gaze.
He nodded. “And so you know art and artists well?”
Connie nodded. Said nothing.
The man shut his eyes and sighed, like a haunting burden from the past had come upon him. “Then you know that Bill Mason is really Blake McGrath, right?”
Connie trapped her lips between her teeth, her body racked with a strain of tension. “Yes,” she whispered. “I know.”
The man nodded again. He looked away, seemed to choke on words that were like broken shards of glass.
“I’m Blake McGrath,” he said at last.
Before Connie could react – before even the realization could show on her face – he drew the door quietly closed behind him and left Connie alone with her shock.
9.
Blake stood on the front porch and stared out into the dark night. The wind off the ocean had an icy chill, and he could hear the percussive boom of the surf as the lingering tail of the storm carried through the swells. He draped a heavy coat over his shoulders and glanced back through the open door to the living room. Ned was lying on his bed, but he was alert and watching, waiting for Blake to beckon him. Blake held up the palm of his hand and the dog set its great head down between its paws in disappointment.
It was still raining, sweeping across the coastline in isolated downpours so that one moment the sound on the old iron roof was like the thunder of a thousand drums, and the very next moment there was almost eerie silence.
Blake turned the flashlight on and went down the steps, splashed through the mud, following the track back to Connie’s stranded car.
He went into the dark with the anger upon him.
Deep down, he had always known that this day would come – must come – for the art world was one of ancient heroes and immense riches. It would never quite forget him, never let him become just a memory. But he had not anticipated this. He had not expected to be discovered after all these years by a young woman. He had always believed the moment would somehow be tainted with the tarnish of greed when they found him, not the apparent wonder of one woman for his craft. Somehow the notion seemed so pure that it was naïve.
For seven years he had lived on this rugged, isolated piece of coastline, and the first two years had been the happiest of his life. He had worked, invigorated and inspired by the majesty of the sea and her many faces, her many moods. He knew that time of his life had been the pinnacle of his career. Each new painting that came off his easel had been better than the last, each new canvas was a fresh wonder of infinite skill and passion so that there was a point where even he himself was almost content.
Almost – for no true artist can ever be satisfied or ever feel they had captured the perfection and majesty of nature. But he had come close; near enough to at last grudgingly accept the admiration of others and not feel like a fraud for the clumsiness of his devotion.
Yet none of those paintings had ever been shown, for the ocean that had inspired him and driven him to the heights of his career had turned on him – taken that which was so precious as to be priceless. The ocean had robbed him of life, of love, until all that he wanted was to hide, turn his back on all that had been, and wash away his misery in hopeless tears of heartbreak.
He had coveted the loneliness, drowned his sorrow in a mire of misery so that it left him emotionally scarred in a way that would never leave his life.
And in the despondency of those dark days, so too had gone his passion, his gift, until he had thrown down the brushes in despair and vowed never to paint again.
Five years of a life sentence of guilt had been served on this barren beach, this broken rocky coast. And now the world had found him. It was as though the ocean that had dragged him down into a deep dark trough had suddenly determined to wash him stranded and unwilling onto the shore again.
The irony was that it was all too late…
When Blake reached the car his blood was pounding at his temples. He slipped in the mud, crashed against the driver’s side door, then flung it open and climbed across the chaos. He forced the passenger window up to shut out the rain, switched off the headlights, and then twisted at the waist to reach across the back seat. The suitcase had wedged into the foot well. Blake heaved it free, then hauled it back out through the open door. He gave the door a nudge and the tilted angle of the crashed car worked with gravity to slam it shut.
A squall of grey slanting rain swept across the path and Blake ran heedless through it. The wind came through the trees in undulating moans, a debris of dead leaves fell from the sky. He clutched the suitcase against his chest and forced himself back into the darkness until at last he saw the bright lights of the house and he slowed to a stagger, and then a trudging walk.
The futile anger that had come upon him had gone – been burned away to become despondency. He went heavily up the porch steps and stood shaking the rain from the coat. He could hear the hiss of water in the plumbing. He draped the wet coat over the porch bannister and carried the suitcase through the front door. Ned raised his head with a look of curiosity but Blake didn’t notice the dog. He went through to the bedroom at the end of the corridor and set the suitcase on a floor rug.
He heard the shower water cut off at last and he tapped lightly on the bathroom door.
“I got your things,” Blake called out. “They’re in my bedroom, down at the end of the hall.”
To his surprise, the door cracked open an inch and Connie’s face peeked through the gap. Her face glowed with freshly scrubbed color and her hair w
as wet. She smelled of soap. Drops of water clung to her lashes. She was leaning around the protection of the door so that her face was all he could see, and he realized with a shock that she was pretty.
“Thank you,” she said.
Blake flicked his eyes away, stared at a space an inch above her head with a twinge like guilt. “Do you feel better?”
She nodded. “Much.”
There didn’t seem to be any more to say. Blake shuffled his feet, found something interesting on the floor to focus his attention on for an awkward moment, then simply turned and walked away towards the living room.
10.
Connie came hobbling from the bedroom wearing a dress that hung to her knees and a mismatched sweater against the coolness of the night. Her hair was wet, combed out so that it hung black and shimmering down her back. She wore no makeup and Blake saw that her lips were the pale pink color of coral, her face squarish so that her features created a vulnerable and tender kind of beauty. He watched her sag onto the sofa, her injured leg still painful enough that she grimaced, before he sat down carefully beside her.
He ran his hand lightly across her knee, felt the swelling, and then rested her leg across his lap. The skin was abraded, but most of the damage was obviously internal. He wrapped the injury gently with a pressure bandage so that her leg was stiff and unmoving.
He set her leg down and then asked her to stand.
“I’m not a doctor,” he said. “This might just help to support your weight and allow you to drive to medical attention. With luck the swelling will go down overnight.”
Connie got to her feet and took a couple of rigid steps with her jaw clamped. The pain was less – a dull throbbing ache. She eased herself back onto the sofa and thanked him with her eyes and smile.
She was sitting disconcertingly close to him, Blake could feel their thighs touching and the press of her through the stuff of her dress and the denim of his jeans seemed to burn like fire. He was unnerved. He leaped to his feet and went to the kitchen, called over his shoulder to her as he went.
