to find something they had in common. That was what mattered; not the actual, invisible, though no doubt very good needle. She turned it in the air: ‘Very, very good,’ she assured him, eyebrows raised and head tilted in a parody of earnestness which he then mirrored so that she smiled.
Also in that linen pouch were floss silks of various colours. Her method was to lay them on the dark glossy tabletop to make her selection. The skeins were greens and blues, reds and yellows: the greens from fresh and bud-like to velvety firblues; the blues from palest lunar glow to deepest ultramarine; the reds from cat’s tongue rosiness to alizarin; the yellows from the creaminess of blossom to the confidence of lemons and the darker, greeny-gold of pears. The best needles might well come from Spain, but everyone knew the best embroidery came from England.
Rafael would watch Cecily choosing her colours. She’d feel her way along the range, not touching: fingers walking above the row, rising and falling as if idling on the keys of a virginal. Then – yes – she’d pick one up, pleased to have made the decision but perhaps also a little regretful, Rafael detected, to have committed herself. The selection would be hung over her finger, unregarded, while she made the next few choices, then she’d drape them all in the fold between thumb and forefinger to trail across her palm. That little handful she’d lift into the light, whatever remained of it, sometimes even leaving the room, presumably in search of what was left of it. The scrutiny involved a slow turning of her hand one way and the other, then a flip so that the skeins could dangle free and light run the length of them. The final test was a single strand concentrated in a tiny loop, like an insect’s wing, which she’d press to the embroidery for consideration against what was already there. From what he could glimpse, her design was of some kind of beast – stylised – prancing or pawing inside a geometric border. Her brilliant colours were so unlike those in which his designs were realised by Antonio. His and Antonio’s colours were incidental: ochre tints in marble and patinas on bronze. And her materials, lax in her lap, were so pliable in comparison to theirs, which needed tackling.
Whenever he was too tired to think, he sketched what he saw in the room: the immense fireplace and, in detail, the Tudor roses carved into it; an expanse of wall-panelling and its delicately carved frames; sections of the decorative plasterwork on the ceiling; several floor tiles of differing heraldic designs; and the table clock from all angles. One evening, he began sketching Nicholas: unapproachable Nicholas. And perhaps that was why, the dare of it. Nicholas: approachable only like this, in surreptitious glances from across the room. And, anyway, Rafael found himself thinking, he stares at me, from that first evening, from the doorway, and ever since. Nicholas had never yet spoken in Rafael’s presence, nor smiled. What he did – all he did – was stare. There was no blankness to that stare, it was full of intent: Leave me alone. Whenever their paths crossed, Nicholas stared Rafael down; stared until Rafael – smile abandoned – looked away.
Not now, though, for once. Not when the boy was relatively off-guard, weary at the end of the day and wedged under the wing of his mother. He was kneeling beside her, playing with a tin of buttons. Well, not playing. Play must have been his mother’s intention – ‘Here, look!’ – and he was obliging her to the extent that he was doing something with the buttons, but all he was doing was gazing at them as he dabbled his fingertips in the tin. Rafael had considered him an unnaturally still child – never running around, always clinging to Cecily – but now he noticed how much the apparently motionless Nicholas was in fact moving: chewing his lip, and shifting his shoulders – one, two, one, two – in a strange, rigid wiggle. The poor boy was so taken over by this restlessness that there was nothing of him left for button-playing.
Francisco would be lost to those buttons, he’d love them. He’d line them up on the floor, transforming them in his imagination into something else, creating a drama for them and probably talking them through it. He was always occupied. What he was actually doing might well not be clear to an observer. He’d be sitting straight-backed with that downward incline of his head, his attention on his hands, and his hands busy.
Cecily shifted on her cushion and her son’s gaze snapped up to her. However unwelcoming those eyes were to anyone but his mother, there was no denying that they were extraordinary: huge, almond-shaped, and a proper blue, not what passed for blue in most eyes here in England but was really an absence of colour, a mere shallow pooling of what passed for light.
Francisco’s smile was famous, lightning-quick and lightning-bright, all eyes and teeth, almost absurd in its intensity. People would laugh aloud when first faced with it, and turn to Rafael, incredulous and celebratory: What a beautiful smile! Truly it was a gift: such a smile could never be learned. Rafael recalled it from Francisco’s earliest days: Leonor turning around to walk away, and there over her shoulder was the baby and in a flash that cheeky, laughable smile. Nothing withheld, nothing watchful or measured in it. Such a smile anticipated no knock-backs, no caution on behalf of the beholder, nothing but the absolute best in response. It was wonderful to witness and Rafael understood the seriousness of being the guardian of it.
Naïvely, he’d not intended Cecily to see his sketch of her son. But on one of her trips from the room with her silks, she glanced over and exclaimed. Instantly, though, came a hesitancy, as if it might have been presumptuous of her even to have recognised the subject. Rafael sat there with it in his lap, helpless, exposed. Was it a gift? Just because that hadn’t been his intention … It was a gift, wasn’t it, this sketch of her boy. Had to be.
‘Nicholas,’ she said, sounding amazed. ‘Look.’ And then that hesitancy again: to Rafael, ‘May I?’
He handed it to her, and she knelt beside her boy to show him. ‘It’s you.’
He stared at it, no less wary than when confronting Rafael himself, studying it, intent and grave, as if looking for something, before surrendering it back to his mother. She received it with a slight reluctance. In turn she went to hand it to Rafael, but he declined with a smile and a raising of his hands. He hoped to strike the right note – a glad giving up of it, but not too dismissive of it, either – but didn’t know that he’d been all that successful. She withdrew gingerly, looked for somewhere to place it and laid it face-up on the table, where it seemed, to Rafael, vulnerable.
The following evening, he sketched Cecily’s hand; not the one busy with the needle but the other, the steadying one, her left. The one on which she wore a wedding band. And he wondered: was she a widow? He’d been presuming so, but maybe there was a husband working away somewhere – perhaps for Mr Kitson, abroad, or at the country house. Rafael hadn’t a clue as to the ways people lived and worked here in England. Perhaps it was normal for spouses to live – to work – apart. If she was a widow, how long had she been bereaved? The child was only four. Clearly she’d had him late in life, and Rafael wondered if there were others, elsewhere, grown up. Rafael imagined opening the conversation: You know, my wife and I, we only ever had the one, and late. They had so nearly not had him; he had so nearly never happened.
There would become a graininess to the dusk and soon they’d see that it’d already happened: the lovely, velvety mix of light and dark would finally have lost balance in favour of darkness. However hard Rafael tried to see the moment happen, he never succeeded. It was, he knew, in the nature of it: it had to happen unseen or it couldn’t happen at all. This evening, as on all others, they’d been sinking into the shadows, letting themselves and the room be taken. But soon Cecily would get up and begin lighting candles, and the candlelight would gently scoop them up, set them apart and make them observers of those shadows.
He could see how unscarred her hands were: unburned, uncalloused; no signs of hardship. Certainly she endured none in this house. She was a seamstress who didn’t do the laundry; she shopped for food rather than pulling it from the soil or kneading or cooking it. But she’d have come from somewhere. She’d have survived things; there would have been things to survive, there were always things to have to survive. Had she always lived and worked in houses like this?
