I grimace. “Not thehat.”
“Xavier, it is a perfectly functional beanie.”
“I am a supermodel. There is not an inch of my body that should be adorned by functional clothing.”
“Hat,” he says firmly, so I grimace and do as he says, ramming the hideous brown wool beanie he gave me down over my head and following him down the garden path towards where his garage is situated.
The Sound is glistening in the early morning sun, and a ferry is chugging solemnly across it. The sky is a clear, cold blue, and the pine trees look deeply green against it. The air is so clear, and it feels like it could wash your whole body clean.
“It’s so pretty here,” I say.
He shoots me a look of startled pleasure. “One of the best views I’ve ever seen.”
We approach a stone outbuilding at the bottom of the garden. My interest stirs. I haven’t been in this one yet. Despite some heavy snooping, I hadn’t been able to find the keys. As if prompted, Reuben fishes a key out of his pocket and opens the door, gesturing me gallantly in.
“Is this like Bluebeard’s lair?” I ask.
“Hardly. I haven’t got the time for multiple uxoricide.”
“How reassuring that you not being a serial killer comes down to a scheduling conflict.” I step inside and stop dead. “Wow.”
It’s his studio. The walls are plastered and painted white, and the floor is flagstoned, the stone worn shiny through the years of use.
I turn in a circle, looking at the pictures on the walls. They’re huge, black-and-white canvases of his photographs, but there doesn’t seem to have been any effort to categorise them intocollections. Therefore, pictures of plants and flowers share space with views of sun-bleached landscapes and strangers whose only similarity is that something about them once interested Reuben Langley.
The place smells of paint, wood, and some kind of chemical. “You know for a war journalist, you’re a fucking amazing photographer.” I shake my head in amazement. “You finally found your beautiful, then.”
“What?”
I turn and give him a wry smile. “In the Cotswolds, I told you to find your beautiful. I suppose you forgot all about that.”
“I couldneverforget that,” he says, like it’s an absolute fact.The earth is round, the stars are bright, Xavier Conway once gave me unsolicited career advice.His eyes search mine, and the uncertainty I see in his gaze makes my stomach hurt. He hadn’t expected me to bring up the past.
Then he says, “I’d already found my beautiful when I met a sassy boy in a little bar. I just never realised it in time.”
“What?”
His response is to disappear through the door with the alacrity of the white rabbit taking a shortcut. He meant me, didn’t he? There’s no other way to interpret that statement.
Startled pleasure warms my belly. I examine the feeling and then mentally shove it into my emotional waste disposal unit and press the button. Then I move around examining the photos.
I’m looking at a picture of children playing football on a dirt road when the door opens, and he appears with a large canvas padded bag. After crossing to a wall where a load of canvases have been stacked, he starts rifling through them, occasionally stooping to take out some images and slide them into the bag.
I drift closer, as unable to stay away from him as ever. “How do you know which ones to pick?”
“Some are for the gallery, and some are for an exhibition next year in London.” He rolls his eyes. “A retrospective exhibition of my past work.”
“Oh, dear. Hope they don’t ask me to star.” He snorts, and I look at the pictures he’s holding. “Are they ones you don’t like anymore?”
He smiles, puts the pictures in the bag, and then carries on flicking through the pile. “I’m not attached to any of them,” he finally says.
“Really?”
He looks up, startled, and I gesture at a picture of the Sound. He’s captured a moment during a storm when a ray of sunlight escaped the clouds and illuminated the water. It gleams golden where everything else in the picture is turbulent layers of darkness. “I’d definitely keep that.”
“Why?”
“It’s beautiful but threatening at the same time.”
