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‘Robyn,’ he said again, as if to savour it. ‘I don’t think it matters why to be honest. Maybe your Medici guy is playing a game of sorts, and he wants two different sets of pictures for some reason. A special exhibition? Yeah? I don’t know and if we aren’t working for him, we can still keep each other company. It can get lonely some days. Let’s just go with it.’
I wondered if that nonchalance would stand the test of the next few days. We might come to resent the similarities and see ourselves as competitors. We also deserved an explanation from our go-betweens and distant financiers. But Joseph didn’t strike me as the curious type or ambitious either and neither of us were in it for immediate financial gain. Somebody had promised him a fair payment, yet he camped out to save money, and I had only my equipment as final payment. We’d settled for a lot less than perhaps we deserved. Why were we both willing to tolerate bizarre obligations?
The loneliness was true. ‘I’ve got a mobile number—’
‘I don’t have one. It’s the way I like it.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘No computer either. So I’m off the grid, so to speak. It’s why I like the camping. And if I have to, I’ll use a pay phone to ring Camilla, if I can find one that’s working.’ He smiled. ‘World’s changing fast, and I’m only… young.’ The smile widened.
How young? He was in his twenties like me, or a bit older. I couldn’t tell with the stubble.
‘Oh. Okay. Then I’ll see you when I see you.’ I picked up the camera bag.
He didn’t offer to carry it to the car, which was still in the town’s main car park. Instead, he walked with me, ambling around the drying puddles. His long shadow stretched across the road, dwarfing mine.
‘So you like castles,’ he said abruptly.
‘Especially their history, the stories they tell. It’s the main reason I’m doing this.’
‘I’d have thought it was the photography.’
‘Well, yes, that’s the job part. Isn’t art really about communication? The camera is my preference. Yours is the brush.’
‘Actually, it’s pencil or charcoal. But I get what you’re saying. I’m not sure that I’m enamoured of castles. Perhaps… perhaps you could share that passion with me.’
My heart jolted against my breastbone. He hadn’t belittled me for what was a deeply personal ambition. For a few seconds, the bag weighed nothing.
‘I’d love to.’
‘I’ll see you at Richmond then,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Great. Bye, Joseph.’
Twenty-One
Richmond
Turner had painted Richmond Castle. Sadly, I wasn’t inspired enough by either his version, or what I saw around me. I abandoned the easel and paint box by the curtain wall. Something would spark, eventually. I leaned my back against the stonework and waited.
We hadn’t arranged a time or an exact meeting place. It was assumed, given our previous encounters, that it would happen; in any case, Robyn had told me she was coming, and by the smile on her face, she wanted to “bump” into me again. I wasn’t superstitious. However, the idea that she was following me had frayed my otherwise robust nerves because I had only her word that she was working for somebody. Perhaps she had seen me at Warkworth, a fleeting occurrence admittedly, then tracked me down and used the camera as an excuse. I searched un-Turner like skies, thinking that idea through and decided it was unlikely. Although I had started first, we were both following the same prescribed agenda. How was that even possible?
I shifted my shoulder off the wall and turned to face the keep. There was no sign of her. If she believed I was stalking her, then the proof was here to see. I was ahead of her, and she was following me. There was plenty of other things that differentiated our projects. I wasn’t allowed to frame pictures or keep copies, and I was sending them by courier to Camilla, and then they were disappearing from there to some place else. I had no plans to form an attachment to them. It was important not to in my line of work. Robyn seemed smitten with her photographs, and she had told me as we walked back to the car, there were boxes and boxes of them at home. I wondered, given she preferred to collect images, whether she was pained at the thought of giving these new photographs away. Whatever motivated her, we weren’t twinned by artistry. Something else drew us together and it wasn’t the magic pull of castles either. Did she feel it too: the fragile connection of two lonely souls?
Sighing, I walked to the abandoned easel and picked up my things. There was one spot I could try, a terrace below the curtain wall where a garden had been planted and recently opened to the public. A garden within a castle was rather like a windmill on the walls of a fortress, something unusual.
My working day was long, so I typically started early, and Robyn – I was rather taken by the ambiguous name – was travelling from Darlington, which was reason enough for her tardiness. The weather had been an issue, and although my tent was packed into the back of the car and still a bit damp from the storm, today, I needn’t worry about rain. The temperature had risen sharply, and the sun poked out between the wispy clouds. Ideal conditions for painting. And photography. The weather was a freakishly good omen. But, I wasn’t superstitious.
I fiddled with a screw using my penknife and managed to get the wobbly leg to sit still. I hummed louder as I began sketching out the wall above and the garden below, flicking the pencil across the paper in sweeping lines. The colours drenched my thoughts, and I mixed this and that on the palette until the right one shouted out.
‘Did you know they kept conscientious objectors imprisoned here?’ Robyn emerged from the shadow of a bush with her camera strap looped around her neck and the sizeable bag knocking against her hip.
The rush of heartbeats steadied. She had that knack of stealth movement, creeping up or moving away, like she had done at Prudhoe. Was she aware of it?
‘No, I didn’t.’ I tucked the pencil behind my ear.
We stood side by side. She raised the viewfinder to her eye and focused on a tall tower. ‘You’re painting the Gold Hole Tower?’
‘Am I?’ I examined the pencil lines. ‘Was it the treasury?’
Her abrupt laughter bubbled away into a little fizz of amusement. ‘No, not that kind of gold. You’re painting latrines again.’ She blushed.
