North Light

Jo had offered to come with him, twice, and he had said no both times, and the second no had cost him more than the first because by then he understood she was right to offer and he still wasn’t going to accept.

“It has to be you,” she’d said, in the study, the receipt book still open between them. “Not because I don’t want to be there. Because if I’m in the room, she’ll be answering the insurer, and I need her to answer her oldest friend’s husband instead. Those are different confessions, and only one of them is any use to you.”

He had known she was right and resented it anyway, the whole tram ride to the Jordaan, the way a man resents the person who has correctly identified the hardest version of a thing and then declined to spare him it.

He had rehearsed nothing. That was new for him. Every difficult conversation of the last three years had arrived pre-managed, softened at the edges before he’d said a word of it aloud, and he found, watching the canal slide past the tram window, that he had no idea what he was actually going to say to the one person who might still be able to tell him the truth about his own wife. He decided, somewhere around the second bridge, that arriving without a script might be the only honest thing left to try.

Els’s studio smelled of turpentine and, underneath it, the same mineral note he now recognised without needing anyone to point it out to him — fresh paint, applied recently, in a room that had no obvious canvas on the easel to explain it. He noticed it the way Jo would have noticed it, cataloguing rather than accusing, and understood, standing in the doorway with his coat still on, that some of what she did for a living had rubbed off on him whether he’d asked for it or not.

“You didn’t call ahead,” Els said, not quite a greeting, wiping her hands on a rag that had long since stopped being useful for cleaning anything. “You never come without calling ahead.”

“No.” He didn’t sit, though she gestured at the chair the way she always did. “I need to ask you something, Els, and I’d rather you heard it plainly than have me work up to it the way I usually would.”

Something crossed her face then, fast, gone before he could name it. “All right.”

“Annelies sold the original. Four years ago. To a man called Roos, acting for a company called Halbrecht Kunst BV. There’s a receipt, or the ghost of one, in her own handwriting, in a book she kept in the desk in her study.” He said it the way Jo would have said it, in order, without softening the shape of it to make the next part easier for either of them. “The painting that’s hung in this gallery, and then in a private collection, for the last three years, is a copy. A very good one. Good enough that nobody’s caught it in three years, and I don’t believe for one moment that Annelies could have painted it herself, however good her eye was. She wasn’t a painter. She was a cataloguer.”

Els’s hands went still on the rag. “Anselm—“

“I need you to tell me if it was you.” He said it and heard, saying it, that his voice had none of the anger he’d expected to arrive with it, only a flat, exhausted need to finally hear the whole of something instead of another careful half of it. “Not because I’ve already decided the answer. Because I’ve spent three years deciding what I could bear to know about my own wife, and I am finished doing that, and I would rather hear it from you, today, than find one more page torn out of one more book.”

He took out his phone and showed her the photograph Jo had taken of the older receipt, the foxed one that had fallen loose from between a ledger’s back pages, the single crossed-out word beneath the HKB initials worn to little more than a shape. “There’s a second hand on this. Not Annelies’s. I think it might be yours.”

Els looked at it for a long moment without reaching for the phone. “It’s mine. I wrote no, the day she first asked me, and then I crossed it out an hour later and told her I’d do it, because I could already see she wasn’t going to ask anyone else, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her trying and failing alone.” Her voice had gone very quiet. “I kept meaning to tear that page out properly the way she’d taught herself to do with everything else in that desk. I never got round to it. I suppose some part of me wanted a record, even then, that I’d said no once, before I said yes to all of it.”

She didn’t answer straight away. She crossed to the window instead, the north light she’d always claimed by right of forty years’ practice, and stood with her back to him for long enough that he thought she might simply refuse to turn round at all.

“She came to me in the spring,” Els said, finally, to the glass rather than to him. “Four years ago. She didn’t tell me everything, not that first day — only that the gallery needed money faster than any bank or buyer could move, and that she’d found someone willing to pay well for the panel, quietly, without the sale going through any of the usual channels. I asked her why quietly. She said because Anselm can’t know yet, and I need it to look, for a while, as though nothing has changed.”

“Why couldn’t I know?” The question came out smaller than he’d meant it to, a boy’s question rather than a man’s, and he didn’t try to make it sound larger. “She could have told me. Whatever it was. I’d have found the money, sold something else, gone to the bank myself—“

“She knew that. That was rather the problem.” Els turned to face him now, her own eyes wet in a way he hadn’t expected and found he couldn’t look away from. “You’d have sold the gallery itself before you let her carry a debt alone, Anselm. She knew that about you better than you know it about yourself. She didn’t want to watch you give up your grandfather’s house to save her project, when there was a version where nobody had to lose anything at all — except the truth, for a while, which she was quite sure she’d have time to put right once she was well again.”

“So she asked you to paint a copy.”

“She begged me.” Els said the word plainly, without flinching from it. “I told her no, the first time. I told her a copy that good would take me the better part of a year, that I’d need to work from her own condition photographs and cross-sections she’d have to steal from her own files, that if it was ever discovered it would end both our careers and very possibly put us in a courtroom. She said she knew all of that. She said she was asking me anyway, because I was the only person alive good enough to make it hold, and because she trusted me to tell him the truth the moment she was strong enough to help me tell it properly, together, rather than leaving me to carry it to you alone.”

“And then she died before she was strong enough.”

“And then she died,” Els agreed, very quietly, “before either of us had found a week that felt like the right one. There was never a good week, Anselm. I told myself that for three years, and it was true every single time I told it to myself, and it was also, I understand now, simply the truth that was easiest to believe.”

He sat down at last, in the chair she’d offered him at the start, because his legs had stopped feeling entirely reliable and there was no longer any dignity to preserve by staying upright.

“You let me grieve her as an honest woman. For three years.”

“She was an honest woman, in everything except this one thing, done for love of a house and a man and a life she was terrified of losing.” Els came and knelt by the chair, not quite touching him, the same careful distance Jo kept when she wanted to give a thing room to be true without crowding it. “I’m not asking you to forgive either of us today. I don’t think there’s a version of today where that’s a reasonable thing to ask for. I’m telling you because you asked me to, plainly, and because I think I’ve been waiting three years for someone to finally make me.”

“Where’s the original now?”

“I don’t know. I delivered the copy to her, once it was finished, in this room, and I never asked what became of the real panel afterwards, because by then I’d already decided not to know anything I might one day be asked to repeat under oath.” She said it with a bitter, exact honesty that told him she had thought about this moment, in some form, for three years. “That was cowardice too, if you’re taking stock. I chose not to know, the same way you chose not to look at that ledger a year ago. We’re neither of us as different from each other as we’d like to be, Anselm.”

He didn’t answer that, because there was nothing in it he could honestly dispute.

“What happens now,” Els asked, after a silence that had gone on long enough to need breaking. “To me.”

“I don’t know yet.” He stood, finally, because staying seated any longer felt like a decision he wasn’t ready to make either way. “I’m not going to protect you the way I protected her memory. I’ve done enough protecting of people I love at other people’s expense to last several lifetimes, and I’ve only just noticed how much it’s cost the people I was supposedly protecting. But I’m not going to hand you to anyone today either, because I don’t yet know what the true, whole shape of this is, and I’ve learned, this year, what happens when I act on half of something instead of waiting for the rest of it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s the truest thing I can give you today. You’ll have to let that be enough, the way I’ve had to let a great many unfinished things be enough this year.”

He left her standing in the middle of her own studio, north light falling across an easel with nothing on it, and did not look back at the door the way he might have a year ago, checking whether she was watching him go. He walked instead, a long way, past two bridges he didn’t need to cross, and let himself feel the whole of it in no order he could have named. Grief for a wife he now understood less completely than he had that morning. Underneath it, something that was not quite relief and not quite anger, but closer than either to simply having, at last, the entire shape of a thing he had spent three years too frightened to finish looking at.

He did not destroy Els today. He did not forgive her either. He found, walking the last bridge home in the cold, that both of those were decisions a man could only make once he’d stopped needing to make either of them at once — and that this, too, unfinished as it was, was its own kind of truth, arrived at honestly, for the first time in longer than he could easily remember.

Jo was waiting at the gallery when he got back, not in the north room but in the front window, standing near the empty chair without sitting in it, coat still on as though she hadn’t quite decided whether she was staying. She didn’t ask him anything the moment he came through the door, which he had learned, by now, was her own way of telling him the room was his to fill however he needed to.

“She admitted it,” he said, because there was no version of easing into that sentence that made it any smaller. “The copy. All of it, more or less as we’d worked out, except that she talked Annelies down first and lost, and has apparently been waiting three years for someone to finally make her say so.”

“How are you.”

“I don’t know yet. I keep waiting to find out and it keeps not arriving.” He sat down, finally, on the small bench beneath the window rather than in the chair itself, which felt, tonight, like a piece of furniture that belonged to someone else’s grief rather than his own to occupy. “I didn’t shout at her. I thought I might. I think I was almost disappointed that I didn’t, as though shouting would have proved something about how much this actually costs me.”

“It doesn’t have to prove anything. Not tonight.” Jo sat beside him, not touching him yet, giving the moment the same room she gave everything. “What did you tell her happens next?”

“That I don’t know yet, and that I wasn’t going to protect her the way I’ve protected everyone else, but that I wasn’t going to hand her to anyone today either.” He turned to look at her properly for the first time since he’d come in. “I think that’s the first time in three years I’ve told someone the truth instead of the version I’d already decided they could carry.”

“Then it was worth doing badly,” Jo said, “which is the only way anything worth doing gets done the first time.” She took his hand then, the way he’d taken hers in the study, deliberately rather than by accident, and he let himself, for a while, simply be a man sitting in a window with someone who had never once asked him to manage what he felt in front of her.