Facing the Light (55 page)

At first, she had been in a state of shock. While she and Chloë were still in the gazebo, she'd wept and sobbed in a completely undignified way, and the poor child hadn't known what to do to comfort her. Leonora had accepted the endearments and the soothing sounds she'd made, but couldn't begin to explain to her granddaughter that her tears were as much from blinding rage as sorrow. Ethan, her father – if he'd been in front of her at that moment, she would have attacked him with her bare hands.
How could he?
was the thought that exploded in every corner of her mind. How could he steal from his own wife the very thing that she most valued? How could he deceive
his only daughter, and go on accepting the love of an innocent child when he'd behaved so badly? Leonora shook with fury at the sheer injustice of it. After a while, she had no more tears left to shed and told Chloë that she was fine, really, and would like to go back to the house now, please. She'd been led up over the lawn so gently that for a moment she really did feel like the old lady she was supposed to be.

She'd kissed Chloë and gone straight to her room, where she sat unmoving for a full fifteen minutes before all the separate pieces of what she had learned came together to make some kind of sense. She felt as though some giant had taken up her whole life and shaken it about and then set it down again, with everything about it differently arranged; all her memories, her entire past, everything. But in the end, she'd pulled herself together and had even managed to be her normal self when she'd spoken to Rilla. I'm used to it, she said to herself. I'm used to putting a brave face on things. It's what I've been brought up to do.

Now, she looked round at her family, who were all staring up at her in total silence. Ought she to explain the background before she started? Or later, when they'd listened to these words that had been hidden for so long? No, she would plunge straight in and let her mother's voice be heard at last. She coughed and began to read, concentrating on the marks on the paper; trying to think neither of her audience nor of the writer, but only of the words themselves:

Leonora looked up from the page. The familiar faces
around the table had been transformed into creatures from a nightmare. Beth gasped, her eyes wide. Gwen had her hand clamped over her mouth, and Rilla was openly weeping. Alex had both hands over his face, covering his eyes. Chloë and Philip were sitting very upright, and James was reaching for the wine bottle. Darkness had gathered in the corners of the dining room while she'd been speaking. Leonora broke the silence.

‘It's rather a long letter, I'm afraid, but I felt I should read all of it, so that you would understand. It was written on the back of the wallpaper used to cover the entire dolls' house roof, and I'm very grateful to Philip and Chloë for removing it so carefully that not a word has been lost, and for making me the typed copy I've just read. The original is very faint and hard to make out. Thank you, both of you.'

Still no one spoke. She continued. ‘I hope that my mother's somewhat disjointed style wasn't too difficult to follow. What this letter does not make clear – how could it? – is that I found her. I found her dead, floating in the lake, just before my eighth birthday. The shock of it made me ill and when I got better, well, they'd decided – my father decided, I suppose, and Nanny Mouse went along with his plan – that I shouldn't be told the truth. I expect they thought it would upset me too much to be reminded of such a dreadful thing.'

Gwen and Rilla cried out almost in unison, ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, oh how … how …' and both started to get up from their chairs. Leonora put out a hand to stop them, and they sank back. Gwen was as white as the tablecloth in front of her and Rilla's tears were running unchecked down her face. She saw Sean hesitate, then lean towards her, touching her arm to comfort her.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, looking at him, and dabbing at her cheeks with a napkin. ‘Only it's such a shock. It's so awful. I can hardly believe it.'

Sean whispered something to her and put an arm around her shoulders.

‘I wish I could have kept this from all of you,' said Leonora. ‘At least until after the party, but I know that I will feel easier in my mind if everyone is aware of the truth. When I say it baldly, out loud like this, I still find it hard to believe, but it's true. Maude Walsh, my mother, is the person who painted the pictures hanging all over the house. He, my father, took her work and passed it off as his. Oh, it's a monstrous thing to have done. Monstrous.'

‘But I don't understand
how
he did it,' Efe said. ‘He must have started out by doing some painting himself, surely? I mean, he was an artist, wasn't he? When did he decide on the deception? And how come he wasn't discovered during Maude's lifetime?'

Leonora said, ‘I don't suppose we'll ever know the answers to those questions. The only person who might have been able to tell us is Nanny Mouse, and she's becoming more and more confused. But I think perhaps he realized almost as soon as they were married that Maude's paintings were much better than his own, and he couldn't bear it. Maybe a dealer offered a good sum for one of her canvases and that gave him the idea. I don't know. But he took the credit for her art while she was alive, and once she was dead, he made sure that her work was as near to being buried alive as possible. That, I think, and nothing else, accounted for the fact that he wouldn't hear of her paintings leaving Willow Court.'

‘And don't forget, Leonora,' said James, ‘that there
were
a few of his very early paintings out there, because he'd sold them before he was even married to your mother. If anyone had started comparing the early and late Walshes, his plan probably wouldn't have worked. Even as it is, he took a risk.'

‘He could have said he'd changed his style,' Chloë
suggested. ‘Artists are always doing that. If anyone had asked him why the paintings were so different.'

‘That's true,' said Efe. ‘But what a scam!'

‘You sound as though you admire him, Efe,' Beth said, angrily. ‘It's one of the cruellest things I've ever heard. Worse than his physical cruelty.'

Leonora saw Efe blush as Beth glared at him. Had they been quarrelling? She had no time or energy to worry about it if they had. There was enough, quite enough, to take in without concerning herself with her grandchildren's squabbles. She took her reading glasses off and leaned forward. ‘It
is
a dreadful thing, of course. No one would deny that, but finding it out like this, so many years later, is perhaps even worse, because now I have to look back at almost my whole life knowing that there was a lie at the heart of it. And my father acted in a way that I find quite unforgivable. Appalling. Terrible. He not only destroyed my mother with his physical cruelty and unkindness, but also stole from her the one thing, the
best
thing, she had and made it his own. And the very worst thing of all is …'

Leonora stopped speaking. She felt her lower lip tremble and tears come to her eyes. She blinked fiercely to stop them from falling and took two deep breaths before continuing. ‘This is very hard for me. The worst thing of all is that I've helped him. I've spent most of my adult life making certain that his work, his art, should be shown to its best advantage. I've guarded the canvases from the world in exactly the way he wanted. And I've loved him. I've loved him and his memory all my life and now I can't any longer. The person I loved didn't exist. Most of what he really was he covered up. He dressed himself in my mother's talent and helped himself to the honour that should have been hers. And to all my love. I didn't have any left over for her. I've overlooked her, not only since she died but also while she was alive. Ethan Walsh
sucked up all the attention, everyone's attention, all the time.'

The sound that came out of her mouth resembled laughter, which surprised her a little, because it had felt like a scream as she voiced it. ‘It was always a little eccentric, wasn't it? Not wanting your pictures to leave the walls of your home? All that talking and talking about how people wouldn't appreciate them properly, and how much they were an integral part of the house … it was lies, nothing but hideous lies and I believed them and helped him. I aided and abetted him in his deception and his unkindness to my poor mother so that he could go on hurting her even when he was dead. I'm sorry to be crying now, but I can't help it.'

Gwen and Rilla both stood up and went to comfort Leonora.

‘Please, please don't say sorry,' Gwen murmured, her arms around her mother.

‘You should cry if you want to,' Rilla added. ‘As much as you like.'

‘I'm all right, darlings, honestly. Do sit down again. Some of these tears are simply rage. I feel … I feel murderous when I think about him. The truth of it is this: he wanted the paintings kept at Willow Court not only because he didn't want to be found out, but because he wanted to make sure that my mother was never acknowledged as the artist. He wanted to see to it that she never, ever got her due. That much is clear to me. He wanted them here for ever, safe at Willow Court. He made me promise to carry out his instructions, just as he'd written them down in his will, and I told him I would. I promised. Now I see that that promise was unfairly extracted from me when I didn't know the truth. As you all know, there are instructions in my will, too, but on Tuesday morning I shall see to it that they're altered.'

She took a sip of wine. I must pull myself together, she
thought and dabbed at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

‘There's a prayer I used to recite when I was a girl, which said
If I should die before I wake
. I have no intention of dying before I wake and missing my birthday party, but just in case I do …' she smiled. ‘I'd like to say in front of all of you, and you're my witnesses, that I have every intention of spreading the story of Maude Walsh's paintings throughout the art world, and Efe, dear …'