going out of the door.
‘No problem,’ said Vanessa. ‘I’m fine here.’ But Titus was gone by the time she’d finished her sentence, and she found herself speaking instead to his brother-in-law, who stood facing her with his hand on the door handle.
He looked at her for a moment without speaking and then, bringing his feet together as if standing to attention, he bowed his head but not his back before turning around and leaving the room, pulling the door shut behind him. Vanessa half-expected to hear a key turning in the lock, but nothing happened, and she was left alone in a sudden strange silence.
A phrase she’d read years ago in some forgotten book floated unbidden into Vanessa’s mind: ‘Politeness is one of the most potent weapons in a civilized society.’ Franz Claes didn’t just make her feel uneasy, she realized. She actively disliked him as well.
Vanessa screwed up her eyes and shook her head, doing her best to clear all thoughts of Claes from her head. She preferred to think of Titus. She often found it difficult to summon an image, to accurately visualize a place or a person when they were not there in front of her, but with Titus it was different. He had impressed himself on her mind’s eye from the first, long before they had started seeing each other. Nobody could say that he wasn’t a fine figure of a man. An inch more than six foot from the top of his thick wavy silver hair down to his Italian leather shoes. Generally she had never been attracted to men with beards, but with Titus it was different. The carefully groomed beard and moustache were an extension of his beautiful hair, and she liked the rough texture of it under her fingers.
She didn’t know his exact age but she guessed him to be in his late fifties, and yet he was clearly physically very fit and never seemed tired or deflated. His bright blue eyes, perhaps his most attractive feature, were constantly alert, and sometimes it seemed as if they sparkled, lighting up his face.
He had beautiful taste. His clothes, his house, his possessions — everything was perfect. And yet worn and possessed with an effortlessness that Vanessa had never encountered before. He liked to show her things — between two high bookshelves in his study, for example, a tiny, terrifying painting of the Gorgon’s head by Caravaggio that gazed at her malevolently out of its dark frame, or in the drawing room a silver box embossed with Cyrillic letters and a royal crest in which the last tsar had kept his cufflinks.
‘You know the Bolsheviks told the imperial family to get ready to go out before they shot them. Perhaps this was the last of his possessions that the tsar touched at Ekaterinburg that morning.’
Vanessa remembered how Titus had held the box lightly between his two fingers, holding it up to the afternoon light, as he brought its significance to life with his words. It was the objects themselves, their beauty and their provenance, not his ownership of them, that he seemed to care about. He clearly knew an extraordinary amount about many different things and yet he always seemed interested in Vanessa’s opinion; he was always trying to find out what she really thought. He would press her if he sensed she was just being polite until she had told him her true opinion, and then he would weigh her words, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing with her point of view.
On a visit to the house two weeks earlier he had elicited a lukewarm response from her to a standard-quality Italianate landscape hanging in the hall, and now on this visit she noticed it had been replaced with a wonderfully vivid, brightly coloured picture of one of the smaller canal bridges in Venice. She knew the place because she’d been there years before with her husband, and the memory had upset her for a moment before she rejected its poignancy with a surge of anger against the man she had left. She remembered the long silences at mealtimes, the empty space between them in their double bed; the way Bill had worked later and later hours down at the police station. He had had no interest in her opinion; he’d made her feel unwanted, useless, a dead weight. Not like Titus, who made her feel so vital — alive in every part of her mind and body.
And Titus was mysterious. She had to admit that was part of the attraction. She liked his foreignness, his elaborate courtesy and the slow deliberation with which he spoke, choosing his words carefully, as if weighing each one of them before use. She realized, of course, that she knew almost nothing more about Titus than what her husband had told her and what she had read about in the newspapers at the time of the Swain trial two years earlier. He was from Antwerp. He had made a fortune dealing in diamonds and had helped Jews escape from Belgium during the war, and then afterwards he had come to England, to Oxford, and become a philanthropist and an art collector, a man of influence and standing, well respected in the town, moving in its highest social circles. So why then would he want her? Vanessa had asked herself this question a thousand times since Titus first started showing interest in her eighteen months earlier, but she had never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Perhaps it was the thrill of the chase, the fact that she was so obviously unavailable; perhaps it was the challenge of bringing a smile to the face of someone who was so sad and lost; or perhaps it was just that Titus found her attractive. Perhaps she was beautiful and fascinating just like he said, lost to the world all those years, sitting at home in her North Oxford house, unhappily married to her misanthropic husband.
Vanessa got up from the sofa and went and stood in front of the fireplace, examining herself detachedly in the beautiful oval gold-leaf mirror that hung over the mantelpiece. Yes, she did look different. She could see that now. Better than she’d done in a long time. There was colour in her cheeks, a new lustre in her dark brown hair, and more flesh in her face and on her body, replacing that worn-down boniness that had made her avoid her reflection for so long. The truth was that she’d begun to look after herself since leaving her husband the previous year. She’d discovered she was a good cook. Bill had always seemed to want solid British fare, but now she was free to experiment. She enjoyed shopping in the Covered Market off the High Street, buying herbs and spices with exotic names and trying out recipes that she would never have dreamt of attempting back home in North Oxford. Sometimes her concoctions ended in disaster, but it didn’t matter if there was no one there to criticize. It was all a learning experience, and by the time that Titus started coming to dinner, she found that she knew what she was doing, and it was obvious that the compliments he paid her on her cooking were genuine. Such a contrast to her husband, who had never said anything about the food she put in front of him; he was too self-absorbed to care about what he put in his mouth or what his surroundings looked like.
And she’d also begun to paint again for the first time in as long as she could remember, taking advantage of the long summer evenings after work to ride her bicycle out onto Port Meadow with a folded-up easel across her back and her watercolours and paper in a canvas bag hanging from the handlebars. She’d been quite good once, or so her tutor at the art school that she’d attended for a year after college had told her, and she’d enjoyed the paintings and sketches she’d made on the sunlit holidays in France and Italy that she’d taken with Bill in the years after they were first married. In fact she didn’t really know why she had stopped. Lack of encouragement perhaps. Whatever the explanation, it was certainly Titus’s encouragement that had got her started again. She had hung one or two of her old pictures on the walls of the little flat that she’d rented behind Keble College, and he’d stood admiring them on his first visit, wanting to know the name of the artist. And then when he found out it was her, he’d insisted on taking her to an art supplies shop he knew down a tiny side street off George Street and buying her the materials to start again.
‘It’s a crime,’ he’d told her in a voice that brooked no argument, ‘to waste such God-given talent.’
And since then she hadn’t looked back. The painting made her happy, and when she painted, she thought of Titus.
Vanessa’s paintings now covered the walls of her flat, lighting it up with colour and life. It was a small place, just enough for her needs, but she’d grown to like it more and more as the months passed. She’d deliberately rented the flat unfurnished and then bought the furniture herself piece by piece. She didn’t have much money. The temporary job that she’d taken on as a secretary and personal assistant to an overworked professor in the university’s English faculty didn’t pay well, but she had come to relish the challenge of shopping on a shoestring, finding treasures in secondhand stores that she’d never previously heard of, down narrow side streets in parts of Oxford that she’d never visited before. She’d made her own home and she was proud of it. The flat, of course, was a million miles away from the grandeur of Blackwater Hall, but Titus genuinely seemed to like it there when he came to visit.
He had a way of making her seem special, and in his company she had begun to come alive again. It had been more than three years now since Joe died and she still felt the pain. It was there all the time but it was dulled. After it happened she’d spent more than a year feeling that the world was entirely without point, dragging herself through every day in a grey blur. She’d contemplated suicide more than once, even weighed up the pros and cons of the different possible methods of putting an end to her pain, but she saw now that she had never been truly serious. The will to live was too strong inside her. It had flickered for a while like a guttering candle, but it wasn’t
