SEVENTEEN

‘You look pale, dear. And long in the face. Anything the matter?’ Edith said as Catherine wheeled her through the utility corridor. For today’s visit, Edith wore a tweed skirt and jacket, trimmed with leather, that looked to have been designed for outdoors as well as having the canny ability to pass as contemporary, and of quality. But so wizened was the elderly woman the clothes might have been handed out by a charity in the Blitz. Her skeletal hands were concealed again, this time inside a fur muff.

‘No. I’d rather not—’

‘Because you left here quite elated with what you discovered under our roof. You wished to return and I granted your wish. We have enough of our own troubles here without you bringing more to us.’

What could she say to that? What could be said to anyone so determined and self-involved? She’d never felt more insubstantial in her life. She was merely to be picked up and dropped, invited and then insulted. She was bobbing flotsam and it was dangerous to consider herself anything else.

Merely crossing the threshold of her flat that morning had required a mighty exertion. And she now wondered if she had come here as an attempt to start rebuilding herself and to show Mike what he had lost, or whether she had nowhere else to go and she could do nothing but follow instructions and mimic her former self.

Why not just sit still upon a mantel in peaceful repose like a preserved rat?

Catherine stopped her thoughts because they were giving her that expression in a white face already aching with misery. She intuited that it would not be beneficial to let Edith see her face like that. At least she’d remembered not to wear make-up.

‘Stop here.’ Edith turned inside the wheelchair and looked up at the wall of the hall. ‘That was taken in the garden.’

Squinting in the faint rouged light, reaching up and onto her toes, Catherine followed Edith’s gaze to a dim brownish photograph of a woman in a long dress. ‘Family, Miss Howard. Family are everything. Why go into the world and try and prove otherwise? I bet you wish you hadn’t.’

‘Pardon?’

‘My mother, Violet Mason. A genius in her own right. You know why? I will tell you. She had the foresight to sublimate her own talent to assist her brother’s vision. She was the background and foreground painter of his tableaux, dear. She was also his seamstress, costumer and set builder. For the entire duration of his vocation. There is no shame in serving something greater than you ever will be yourself.’

Even in the dimness and against the dark panels of the wall, Violet Mason was an unappealing sight. A thin, severe face that looked to have never smiled, glared from behind a patterned veil and from underneath the wide brim of a Watteau hat. The full crown was piled high with black roses, and the hat’s size and the cottage-loaf hairstyle both dwarfed and accentuated the narrow face grimacing below. The thin mouth and small eyes suggested a suppressed rage that was unnerving to look at, even in the thinnest light. A high-necked blouse, reinforced by bone, functioned like a pedestal to mount the horrible head, to support it. In the background of the picture, dark foliage blurred into sepia and shadow as if the very world was fading and disintegrating around the formidable woman.

‘I can see the family resemblance, Ms Mason.’

‘And here. You can see her with my uncle.’

Catherine pushed the wheelchair forward. The misted effect used in the picture’s development, and the dour tones of what was a staged formal portrait, did not detract from the catastrophic head injury the man must have suffered at the front. The silhouette of the side of Mason’s face, partially turned away from the camera, was uneven. A fraction of the forehead was missing. No wonder he’d shunned the world. The other half of his face was perfect, proud, handsome, generously moustached, but sad.

Beside the vast wooden chair he sat upon, that looked to have been carved decoratively on the high back and along one visible arm, his sister stood beside him. From behind a spotted net, that was triangular from the wide brim of the elaborate hat to her pointed chin, her black eyes were stern with either disapproval or malice. Catherine was tempted to believe the veil was a form of protection for the viewer, and she had never seen such a tiny waist, probably pinched by an S-bend corset. Folds of white satin formed the corsage of her blouse, ending at her belted waist. A long skirt, and the lower embroidered corsage, fell to a tiny foot inside a pointed boot. Curiously, the Masons both wore white kid-skin gloves.

The painted background behind the two figures broiled like storm clouds and suggested a seething absence of solid matter. She’d never seen anything like that in a photograph from the same period, which must have been the 1920s or even 1930s, though here were the stylings of the late Victorian era. Typically, the family portraits she had seen from that time were set before painted depictions of English gardens or Italian vistas. But this background had been chosen for a reason she didn’t understand, and one she found herself unwilling to dwell upon. But she did notice that the backdrop also featured what looked like tiny bright stars. Or maybe they were blemishes in the photographic paper.

Before passing into the unlit passageway of the ground floor that led to the rooms displaying Mason’s dioramas, they passed a selection of other photographs that Edith did not draw Catherine’s attention to. But she looked up at them as they passed by and she caught glimpses of two tall figures dressed in black against lighter backgrounds, but surrounded by a group of what she thought were children.

‘Stop here!’ Edith commanded from her chair in the barely lit passage. ‘This one, I think. This is the right one, yes, I’m quite sure. Now, if you would be so kind . . . The door is unlocked.’