By the time she climbed into the upper gallery, and saw by her quick glance around that there was nothing more to expect, she felt that her own mood of elevated expectation was become something false in itself, because there was nothing on the walls to meet it. She was disappointed – and indignant, too, that Zachary could have thought these works were anything like hers, or these colours. The muted pastels reminded her of the Edinburgh rock of her childhood, sent by distant relatives at Christmas, chalky pink and yellow sticks in a tin, dusted with powdered sugar. Often before, she remembered, she’d been out of sympathy with Zachary’s enthusiasms. He was too hopeful, too easily persuaded by others, distracted by clever effects – as of course he had needed to be, if he didn’t want empty walls in his gallery. His eye wasn’t cruel enough. Christine felt the cooling of something fervid, in her imaginative connection with her dead friend. She began remembering him with a new realism – which left her in a dry parched place, alone.
She bought herself black coffee and sat in the cafe reading through a leaflet advertising local arts events, surprised by how much was always going on, and somehow not at all interested in it. Then Hannah, whom she hadn’t seen for months, perhaps not since the funeral, came out through a door which opened into the private apartments beyond the gallery, and was usually kept locked. Looking past her into the room behind – before Hannah saw her and closed the door quickly, as if to shut in a secret – Christine glimpsed the walls denuded of their paintings, the floor without its rugs, shelves bare of books, things packed into piled-up boxes. Hannah and Jenny were going to move in, it all made perfect sense. Hannah came to sit down at the table with Christine, but their conversation was awkward, for no good reason; after all, Hannah wasn’t answerable for anything Alex and Lydia had done, and she’d never taken sides. Christine said how much she’d enjoyed the exhibition, made all the required noises about its purity and simplicity. This wasn’t merely out of politeness. She was convinced that if she were dismissive of the paintings, Hannah would put it down to sour grapes, see her as the eternally minor artist resenting the achievement of her betters. It wasn’t clear to Christine why she felt she had to shield herself so defensively against Hannah’s insight, put on this show of charm and enthusiasm.
Inevitably, before they parted, Hannah said that she’d love to know what Christine was working on now, whenever she was ready. And Christine smiled brilliantly, just as if she actually had something good to hide. She lied and said that she’d love to have Hannah take a look, see what she thought, very soon. Only not yet. She wasn’t quite ready.
Christine got out of the cab and paid the driver in haste, tipping more than she needed to. She couldn’t really afford a cab all the way from Farringdon Road, but she’d been agitated after her encounter with Hannah, and by her whole ambivalent relation to the exhibition. It was good to be home. She didn’t belong in that public world of art, she thought, and perhaps now it was closed to her forever. Perhaps her work of lifelikeness and representation and stories was banal, in the face of silver grids and stripes. Alex had said once that she ought to give up her hope of wholeness, of a whole meaning, because it was naïve.
Letting herself into the flat she was glad to be alone. Solitude and silence had begun to be sensuous pleasures for her. It would have been awful in that moment to have to give false explanations to anyone, perform the sociability she did not feel. Instead she slipped off her shoes before she walked around the rooms, as if she didn’t want to intrude even her own presence noisily. She made herself a gin and tonic and stretched out on the sofa, listening to music as it grew dark. After a while she lost concentration and her thoughts wandered, but still the music was the essence of the mood of openness and spacious feeling that came upon her. She had been playing with an idea, these last few weeks, for a series of small studies which began with an image of a woman on a bed, beside an open window. On her she had photos of Isobel sleeping, pregnant, she could draw from those. When she went into the kitchen to make herself supper, she first lifted down the blue coffee pot from a shelf, took out the key to her studio. Of course it was too dark to do anything in there now. That was what made it safe.
Opening the studio door, she hesitated on the threshold: she could smell rain on the wet autumn garden, mixed up with the studio’s particular smell of turps and linseed oil and stale paint rags, and when her eyes adjusted she saw that a sash window had been left open a couple of inches through all these months. She groped for the light switch beside the door but found when she tried it that the bulb had blown. So she stepped inside the room in the imperfect light from the passage behind her, half feeling her way by touch between the tall armoire with the broken door where she stored her materials, the sink scabbed and filthy with dried paint, the pots of pencils and pots of brushes, her art books, her bags of bits of fabric and plastic. The walls were crowded with pictures obscure in the shadows – her own and a chaos of other art images, as well as things torn from magazines or found in the street. Here among all these substantial tokens of her working life, she felt such promise of relief and happiness that it frightened her. A haze of dust was on her fingertips, and brushing them in the dark across the raised grain of the thick paper on her desk, she thought that now at least she had made the first mark, she had begun something.
Acknowledgements
With warmest thanks to dear Dan Franklin and Jennifer Barth, Caroline Dawnay and Joy Harris. And thanks to colleagues and friends at Bath Spa University, which is so generous in support of its writers.
About the Author
TESSA HADLEY is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short story collections, the most recent of which, Bad Dreams, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.
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Also by Tessa Hadley
ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME
EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT
SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES
THE MASTER BEDROOM
THE LONDON TRAIN
MARRIED LOVE
THE PAST
BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LATE IN THE DAY. Copyright © 2019 by Tessa Hadley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing.
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © De Agostini / G. Gnemmi / Getty Images
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Digital Edition JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-247671-5
Version 12082018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-247669-2
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