Black Valley (28 page)

Augustus and Gwen. Somewhere she’d read that the two of them had shared rooms together when they were struggling artists, surviving, like a couple of monkeys, on a diet of fruit and nuts.
They’d been affectionate towards each other, protective, united in their hatred of their cold, unbending father, their mother having died when they were young. They’d loved one another.
Despite the fact that Augustus was the more successful of the pair, there had been little competition between them; he had admired Gwen’s talent, and predicted that in time, she would be seen
as the greater artist.

Monkeys. Twins. Castor and Pollux. When Castor, a mortal, died, Pollux pleaded with his father to let him into heaven. Inseparable, they reigned there as Gemini, the twin stars.

Isobel and Elinor, living together. No more painting, just running the art gallery, Isobel the practical one, Elinor the dreamer. Jess thought of the doll, blank-faced. The wooden box. What did
Elinor have in her box? Perhaps an artist’s box, full of paints, pencils, brushes. More paintings to come? But the doll couldn’t paint. She was inanimate. Lifeless. Gwen, stuck, a woman
alone, with no lover, walled up in her attic. It would take a man, a man like Augustus, with muscle and vigour, to breathe life into the doll, paint her big and strong and full of life, six foot
tall, as he had Dorelia, his muse . . .

Jess sat up suddenly on the couch. A man, she thought. Morris. If Elinor painted like a modern-day Gwen, with her brooding, feminine domestic world, then could it be that Isobel painted like
Augustus – bold, angry, masculine? And could it be that, rather than own up to the fact, Isobel had invented a male persona for herself, as the ex-miner and recluse Hefin Morris?

Outside, the branches of the tree continued to sigh, but Jess didn’t hear them now. She sat up in excitement. It was obvious now she thought of it. Elinor had mentioned that Isobel had
painted big abstracts when they were at art school, that she’d been seen as a talent to watch until she’d dropped out. That story about Nathan marching into the gallery with a mystery
painting, plonking it down in front of Blake and Isobel, then coming back with another one once it sold. It was so unlikely. No, it must have been Isobel who was painting the Morris canvasses in
secret, in that warehouse up on Bryn Cau. Most probably, it had been Blake’s idea, to pretend that ‘Morris’ was an ex-miner and a recluse, so as to get the right kind of
publicity, cause a stir in the art world. It was a clever scam, and one that Elinor and Isobel seemed to be continuing with, now that Blake was dead.

Jess got up off the couch, and went over to her desk. She felt a sense of satisfaction, as she often did when she understood a profound truth about one of her clients for the first time. Only
now, it was mixed with foreboding.

She picked up the phone and called Dresler, eager to share her discovery with him.

When he answered, he sounded distracted.

‘I’m just finishing off this piece. Can I call you back?’

‘It won’t take a minute.’ Jess could barely contain her excitement. ‘I’ve got something to tell you about Morris.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘There is no such person.’ Jess paused for dramatic effect. ‘I’ve worked it out, I think. Isobel Powell is painting as Hefin Morris. She and Blake cooked up this story
together, that they’d discovered this genius painter in the valleys, a recluse, an ex-miner who loathed the art world. That way they could—’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Dresler interrupted. ‘I think you’re getting ahead of yourself here.’

‘No, listen.’ In her excitement, Jess didn’t catch the irritation in his tone. ‘It explains everything. The way nobody ever sees Morris, nobody knows where he lives, or
anything about him. The way he always communicates by letter. The way the only person who’d ever met him, apparently, was Blake.’ Jess paused for a moment. ‘That story about
Nathan coming into the gallery, dropping off the paintings each time they sold one. It just doesn’t ring true. Isobel’s been churning out the paintings, up in that place in the valleys.
That’s why the guard is there, so no one can find out what’s going on.’

‘You’re way off course here, Jess.’ To her surprise, Dresler was beginning to sound angry. ‘This is just pure speculation—’

‘I don’t think so. It makes perfect sense. How would Isobel sell her paintings as Isobel Powell? She hasn’t got the credibility. You told me yourself, the quality of the work
is never enough; the art world needs a story, a myth behind the artist, too.’ Jess was thinking out loud now. ‘What if Blake and Isobel just decided to make one up, about a reclusive
ex-miner from the valleys, painting the devastation wreaked by the collapse of the mining industry there? Pretend he was a recluse, a politico, opposed to the whole circus? That way, they could
create a stir in the art world, make a splash—’

‘That’s just not possible.’ There was anger in Dresler’s voice. ‘A person like Isobel Powell could never paint the way Morris does. You can see it in his style. The
whole of his life is there on the canvas. He’s an outsider; it’s in the whole composition of the paintings, in every stroke of his brush. You can see it all in the paintings: growing up
in the valleys, the brutality of going down the mines, the crumbling of the infrastructure, the moral and spiritual vacuum created in the wake of that implosion . . .’

It was Jess’s turn to be angry. Dresler sounded as if he was giving one of his lectures.

‘I’m a critic,’ he went on. ‘I know what I’m talking about. Morris is unique. Untrained, but a massive talent.’ He paused. ‘And besides, it’s such
a masculine style.’

‘So you don’t believe a woman could paint like that?’

‘I’d be very surprised.’

There was a short silence.

‘Look, I’m going to have to get back to this piece.’ Dresler was doing his best to be polite, but Jess could hear the tension in his voice. ‘I’ll call you
later.’

She was stung. She’d hoped to talk further with him, convince him that her theory was worth pursuing, but he wasn’t interested.

‘Fine.’ She tried not to sound hurt. ‘OK, then.’

She put down the phone. She was disappointed by Dresler’s reaction. She’d expected him to be intrigued, at least to listen to what she had to say. Then, as her excitement ebbed away,
she began to think more clearly about what her theory had meant to him. Dresler had championed Hefin Morris’s work from the beginning. He was convinced that Morris was the greatest painter to
come out of Britain in years. He loved the idea that Morris hadn’t emerged from an art school but was a kind of noble savage, untainted by the corruption of the art world. He’d staked
his reputation on him, and now here she was, questioning the whole myth. Obviously, if her theory was correct and Isobel was shown to be behind the Morris paintings, Dresler’s entire career
would be ruined. He’d be a laughing stock. He’d be revealed as being conned by the same nonsense that he complained of in the art world – building a myth round an artist, rather
than simply judging the work for itself.

Jess gave a sigh of frustration. How could she have been so insensitive? she wondered. Clearly Dresler would be thoroughly rattled by the idea that Isobel Powell was painting the Morris works.
Why had she told him her theory? Why hadn’t she thought about how he’d feel, what it would mean to him?

She stared at the screensaver on her computer, Rose’s childhood drawing of their family home. It seemed anachronistic now, she thought, rather sadly, in passing; she must change it some
time. She typed in a search for Hefin Morris, then pressed ‘images’. A set of paintings by Morris came up on the screen, and she scrolled through them absent-mindedly. Strangely, on the
screen, the complexity of them didn’t come over at all. They were lifeless, dull expanses of black.

She began to wonder if she’d imagined what she’d seen in them – scenes of destruction, of a vortex, a black hole, drawing her in.

Perhaps she’d been wrong about Isobel, too, she thought. No doubt Dresler was right, and Hefin Morris really was who he claimed to be, an ex-miner from the valleys.

She glanced up at the darkening sky outside the window. She’d stayed in the consulting rooms too late, worrying away at a problem until she’d lost all perspective. It was time to go
home.

The following day, Jess went over to the deli at lunchtime, bought herself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and came back to the consulting rooms. She’d been wrong about
Isobel being behind the Hefin Morris paintings, she realized. Free association – letting thoughts come into the mind with no conscious direction or censorship – was a technique in
psychoanalysis that sometimes yielded profound insights; but in this case, it seemed to have led only to wild conjecture. Even so, she instinctively felt that Elinor and Isobel were keeping some
kind of secret, colluding together in a way that was oppressing and frustrating both of them. If Elinor were to come back into therapy, Jess would need to reflect more deeply on what it might be.
Besides, as a therapist, she was naturally curious. The twin relationship fascinated her, and she was certain that exploring it further would help to explain Elinor’s anguished psychological
condition.

When she’d finished eating, she went over to the shelf in the corner of the consulting room, where she kept her reference books. There was a small section on twins – it was an
under-researched area in psychoanalysis, with most studies focussing on twins separated at birth, rather than on the actual relationship of twins brought up together within a family.

She took down a book,
The Twin in the Transference
by the Kleinian psychotherapist Vivienne Lewin, and began to leaf through it:

The specialness with which we regard twins stems in part from our narcissistic wish to be totally understood and merged with an object, as well as from a sense of the uncanniness of the
double.

The uncanniness of the double.
It had been uncanny, Jess thought, the way she’d mistaken Isobel for Elinor at the party. And the way both twins constantly appeared to make the same
mistake, psychically speaking. Both twins seemed fundamentally unaware that for most people, there are firm boundaries between selves – not shifting, unmanned borders that can be slipped
across at any time, at a whim.

The book wasn’t an easy read, but she felt excited and inspired by the ideas Lewin put forward. The theory she advanced was that from birth, twin babies inevitably experience a certain
amount of maternal deprivation, simply from having to share their mother in a ‘triadic’ relationship. Depending on how overwhelmed the mother is by this situation, the babies may begin
a lifelong habit of seeking comfort from each other, rather than from her; and as they grow up, their relationship may become so close that they begin to exclude their parents altogether. When this
happens an ‘enmeshed’ twinship develops: the twins become entirely dependent on each other, but there is also an extreme rivalry, such that, when they become adults they will be tempted
to use partners and children as substitute twins.

Jess looked up for a moment, considering all this in relation to Elinor. It made perfect sense where she was concerned, she realized. Elinor’s dependence on Isobel had been compounded by
Ursula’s inability to mother the twins. But over the years, the twinship had become enmeshed, holding her back:

A shadow of the other.
Jess thought back to her theory that Isobel had been painting as Hefin Morris. Perhaps it wasn’t so stupid after all. Such a dynamic would have made it easy
for Isobel to take on the identity of Hefin Morris; as a twin, she was used to merging her personality with another’s, and experiencing no sense of guilt or discomfort when doing so. For
‘enmeshed’ twins, it didn’t seem inappropriate to adopt other people’s identities at the drop of a hat; after all, it was what they’d been doing all their lives.

She read on:

That helped to explain the claustrophobia, she thought. Ursula’s death, after Isobel’s departure, had caused Elinor’s already fragile sense of self to collapse. Meanwhile,
Isobel had managed the situation better, by transferring the ‘internal twinship’ onto her marriage with Blake, in quite a healthy way. Perhaps, also, by expressing her sense of loss by
continuing to paint, in secret, as Hefin Morris?

There it was, the void that Hefin Morris always painted. Surely, she thought, looking up for a moment at the white relief on the wall opposite, there must be something in her theory that the
real Hefin Morris was Isobel Powell.

The circle within the squares began to pulsate. Jess looked away.

What she read next made her afraid for Elinor: