Page 23 of All Our Missing Pieces

Livvie and Orla were sitting at the table, the teapot between them, the fragrance of the lapsang souchong tea Orla drank filling the air.

‘Beatrice.’ Orla smiled a greeting. ‘They’ve kept you late again. Are you hungry? There are sausages and potatoes.’

‘How was your day?’ Livvie asked.

Beatrice didn’t answer her. ‘I’m not hungry. I’ll go straight up to bed.’

Then she turned and made her way upstairs to her room.

SIXTEEN

11 JUNE 2005

I woke to see her looking at me. Not in the flesh, of course, but it took me a moment or two to realise that, befuddled as I was by sleep and the dim light filtering through the shutters, which are the solid kind, installed God knows how long ago by God knows who.

As soon as I switched on the light I realised that my mind had been playing tricks on me – it wasn’t her at all. It was only the portrait I painted of her yesterday, as I do every year. And every year it leaves me feeling like I do today: hollowed out, as if something that was inside me before is there no longer, because it has been transferred on to my canvas. Like I’m the husk in which some sort of fruit once grew, or the shed skin of a snake.

It is the first thing I have painted since I came to this house, and more than three months overdue. All my life, I’ve harboured a dream of becoming a professional artist and all my life it has remained just that – a dream. This place was intended to be the turning point: I’d have a stable home of my own and all the time in the world, plus of course the glorious natural light that floods the top floor through the extravagant glazing, installed so that the weavers who worked there could see every intricate thread of the fine silk damasks taking shape on their looms.

If only I’d known that all there is to be found now up there is clutter, puddles and a nest of squirrels that is gradually being decimated by Maud, who presents me with a limp, forlorn body after many of her excursions upstairs.

I couldn’t wait any longer before I painted it – I’d already delayed long enough. So I had to make do with my bedroom as a studio and my legs as an easel, closing the door because I didn’t want anyone to see what I was doing.

No one has ever seen the portraits, not even Adrian, in the two years I was married to him. They have always been my secret. The previous ones – all twenty-one of them – are down in the cellar, stacked in one of my tea chests. Normally when I begin, I leaf through them, seeing the face growing older each year, changing: sometimes smiling, sometimes serious; sometimes framed by a scarf or hat; sometimes laughing and once thoughtful, her chin resting on her palm and her fingers half-covering her lips.

But this year I didn’t have those reference points. I worked only from my mind’s eye, lying on the bed as I am now, the sketchpad propped up on my knees and a jam jar of water next to me for my moulting brush.

I don’t know how good a likeness it is – I never really do. Probably I never will. But I am fairly certain that when I allow the morning light in, it will show that I’ve captured the shape of this house in the background, the dappled shade of the plane tree mottling her skin, the fall of hair brushing her cheeks and my grandmother’s eyes looking back at me.

SEVENTEEN

Before my date with Luke, I had a date with Orla. Not a date date, obviously – but something that felt almost as significant. She’d suggested that we go to Spitalfields Market to find me ‘something a bit different’ to wear and I’d enthusiastically agreed.

I had to admit to myself that part of me was sceptical about taking fashion advice from a woman so much older than me. But I instinctively felt that refusing would hurt her feelings and I sensed that, even with three of us living in the house with her, she was isolated among us. Also, I was curious to know more about her – what had compelled her to move into a ruin of a house she clearly could barely afford to live in? Where had she been before? How had her family come to own the property but never lived in it?

All those questions felt unaskable in the evenings in the kitchen or on weekends when Luke and Beatrice were so often there, their presence distracting in quite different ways.

So I booked an afternoon off work and hurried home, and Orla and I left the house, strolling through the sunny streets until we reached the market, where stall upon stall held rack upon rack of garments in rainbow-coloured profusion.

‘My God,’ I said. ‘Where do we even start?’

Orla laughed. ‘I know. When I first visited a night market in Hong Kong, I felt just like that. You get a sense for where the good stuff is.’

Another hint at her past – but there was no time to ask about her travels in East Asia now.

A rail of brightly coloured summer dresses caught my eye and I stopped, flipping through them. Next to me, Orla reached out and rubbed the fabric between her fingers.

‘Polyester.’ She glanced around, but the stallholder was a few steps away, his back to us. ‘It’s terrible for the planet, of course, but takes dye well, and obviously it’s cheap. Look at the seams though.’

Obediently, I looked. They seemed like perfectly ordinary seams to me.

‘Everything’s laser-cut now, so the seam allowance is tiny,’ Orla went on. ‘Plus they use a really tiny, busy print, so they don’t need to pattern match. It all saves the manufacturer money.’

‘They’re pretty, though,’ I argued.

She smiled. ‘They are. And perfectly all right if that’s what you want. But you can do better. Come on.’

She led me on through the maze of stalls, pausing occasionally to remark on something. ‘The trouble is, that trim could be real fur. Dog, maybe… That’s a knock-off of a Pucci print… They’ve done a decent job… This might look and feel like silk, but it’s actually rayon.’