‘Hello,’ he said kindly, putting down the borrowed brush and wiping his hands on his painter’s apron. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Ambrose.’
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. It was something about the intensity of his gaze. The way you could believe, in the moment that he looked at you, that he cared, utterly and completely. That there was no one else in the universe who mattered to him as much as you did. That you were alone, in a crowded room.
‘I’m … I’m Isa,’ I said at last. ‘Isa Wilde.’
‘I’m Fatima,’ Fatima said. She dropped her bag to the floor with a little thump, and I saw her looking around, as full of wonder as I was at this Aladdin’s cave of treasures, so different from the plainness of the rest of the school.
‘Well, Fatima,’ Ambrose said, ‘Isa, I am very pleased to meet you.’
He took my hand in his, but he didn’t shake it, as I’d expected. Instead he pressed my fingers between his, a kind of clasp, as if we were promising each other something. His hands were warm and strong, and there was paint so deeply engrained into the lines of his knuckles and the grooves around his nails that I could see no amount of scrubbing could ever remove it.
‘Now,’ he said, waving a hand to the room behind him. ‘Come in. Pick an easel. And most important, make yourselves at home.’
And we did.
Ambrose’s classes were different, we learned that straight away. At first it was the obvious things I noticed – that Ambrose answered to his first name, that none of the girls were wearing ties or blazers, for example.
‘Nothing worse than a tie dragging across your watercolour,’ he said that first day as he invited us to take them off. But it was more than that – something other than straight practicality. A loosening of formality. A space, a much needed space, to breathe, in amongst all the sterile conformity of Salten House.
In class he was a professional – in spite of all the girls who ‘pashed’ on him, unbuttoning their shirts to the point where you could see their bras, as they reached across the canvas. He kept his distance – physically, as well as metaphorically. That first day, when he saw me struggling with my sketch, he came and stood behind me, and I had a sharp memory of my old art mistress, Miss Driver, who used to lean over her students’ shoulders to make alterations, so that you could feel the heat of her pressed against your spine, and smell her sweat.
Ambrose by contrast stood his distance, a foot behind me, silent and contemplative, looking from my page up to the mirror I had propped on the table in front of my easel. We were doing self-portraits.
‘It’s crap, isn’t it?’ I said hopelessly. And then I bit my tongue, expecting a reprimand for the bad language. But Ambrose didn’t even seem to notice. He just stood, his eyes narrowed, seeming hardly to notice me at all, his whole attention fixed on the paper. I held out the pencil, expecting him to draw in corrections like Miss Driver. He took it, almost absently, but he didn’t make a mark on the page. Instead he turned to look at me.
‘It’s not crap,’ he said seriously. ‘But you’re not looking, you’re drawing what you think is there. Look. Really look at yourself in the mirror.’
I turned, trying hard to look at myself, and not at Ambrose’s lined, weathered face standing over my shoulder. All I saw was flaws – the spots on my chin, the hint of baby fat around the jaw, the way my unruly flyaway hair wisped out from the elastic band.
‘The reason it’s not coming together is because you’re drawing the features, not the person. You’re more than a collection of frown lines and doubts. The person I see when I look at you …’ He stopped, and I waited, feeling his eyes on me, trying not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze. ‘I see someone brave,’ he said at last. ‘I see someone who’s trying very hard. I see someone who’s nervous, but stronger than she knows. I see someone who’s worried, but doesn’t need to be.’
I felt my cheeks flame, but the words, which would have been unbearably corny coming from anyone else, somehow sounded matter-of-fact, when delivered in Ambrose’s gravelled voice.
‘Draw that,’ he said. He handed the pencil back to me, and his face broke into a smile, crinkling his cheeks, and drawing lines at the corners of his eyes as if someone had sketched them in there and then. ‘Draw the person I see.’
I could find nothing to say. I only nodded.
I can hear his voice in my head now, clipped and husky, so like Kate’s. Draw the person I see.
I still have that drawing somewhere, and it shows a girl whose face is open to the world, a girl with nothing to hide but her own insecurities. But that person, the person Ambrose saw and believed in, she doesn’t exist any more.
Perhaps she never did.
FREYA WAKES AS I tiptoe quietly into Luc’s room (I can’t think of it as anything else) and though I try to lull her back to sleep, she’s having none of it, and in the end I take her into my bed – Luc’s bed – and feed her lying down, bracing myself with an arm arched over her compact little body, so I don’t let my weight fall on top of her when I fall asleep.
I lie there, watching her, and waiting for sleep to claim me, and I think about Ambrose … and Luc … and Kate, all alone now, in this slowly crumbling house, this beautiful millstone around her neck. It is slipping away from her, into the shifting sands of the Reach, and unless she can let go, it will drag her down too.
The house shifts and creaks in the wind, and I sigh and turn my pillow to the cool side.
I should be thinking of Owen and home, but I’m not. I’m thinking of the old days, the long languid summer days we spent here, drinking and swimming and laughing, while Ambrose sketched, and Luc watched us all with his lazy almond-shaped eyes.
Perhaps it’s the room, but Luc feels very present to me in a way he hasn’t for seventeen years, and as I lie there, my eyes closed, the ghosts of his old possessions around me, and the cool of his sheets against my skin, I have the strangest sensation that he is lying next to me – a warm, slender stranger with sun-dark limbs and tangled hair.
The impression is so real that I force myself to turn over and open my eyes to try to dispel the illusion, and of course it’s only Freya and me in the bed, and I shake my head.
What am I coming to? I am as bad as Kate, haunted by the ghosts of the past.
But I remember lying here, one night, long ago, and I have that feeling again of the record skipped in its groove, tracing and re-tracing the same voices and tracks.
They are here: Luc, Ambrose, and not just them, but ourselves, the ghosts of our past, the slim laughing girls we used to be before that summer ended with a cataclysmic crash, leaving us all scarred in our own ways, trying to move on, lying not for fun, but to survive.
Here, in this house, the ghosts of our former selves are real – as real as the women sleeping around and above me. And I feel their presence, and I understand why Kate can’t leave.
I am almost asleep now, my eyes heavy, and I pick up my phone one last time, checking the clock, before I surrender to sleep. It is as I am putting it down that the light from the screen slants across the gapped, uneven floorboards, and something catches my eye. It is the corner of a piece of paper, sticking up between the boards, with something written on it. Is it a letter? Something written by Luc and lost, or hidden there?
My heart beats as though I am intruding on his privacy, which I am, in a way, but I tug gently at the corner and the dusty, cobwebbed piece of paper slides out.
The page is covered with lines, and seems to be a drawing, but in the dim light from my phone’s screen, I can’t quite make it out. I don’t want to turn on the light and wake Freya, so I take it to the open window, where the curtains flutter in the breeze from the sea, and I hold it up, angling it so the moonlight falls on the page.
It’s a watercolour sketch of a girl, of Kate, I think, and it looks like one of Ambrose’s, though I can’t be sure. The reason I cannot tell for certain is this: the drawing is crossed and slashed again and again with thick black lines, scoring out the face of the girl with lines so thick and vicious that they have torn the paper in places. Pencil holes have been stabbed through where her eyes would have been, if they weren’t obscured by the thicket of scribbles. She has been erased, scratched out, utterly destroyed.