“I don’t understand.”
“I-I’m not cut out for it. I don’t-I’m fond of Charlotte, but she never really…warmed to me. This”-she looked towards the balcony-“this place, and Tam and Michael, this is all I’m likely to have in the way of family. I’m just not suited to looking after a child.”
“And you think Gail Gilles would do better?”
Although it was a struggle to keep her temper in check, Gemma had gone back out to the balcony and sat for a while longer with Louise. She had tried to imagine Charlotte with Louise, and found to her dismay that she couldn’t.
There was something about Louise, something more than her obvious grief, that wasn’t quite right. She seemed damaged, crippled in some indefinable way, and there was a solicitousness in the way Michael and his partner, Tam, looked after her.
In the end, she had got Louise to agree that she would do what she could, if Gail should gain custody of Charlotte, to restrict Gail’s access to the estate’s funds.
And then, as she drove the short distance to Fournier Street in the fading light, Gemma wondered if that had been a wise request. Would putting a damper on the money only make Gail more likely to mistreat the child?
She parked across from Sandra and Naz’s house, struck once again by the contrast between the severity of the church at one end of the street and the play of neon from Brick Lane at the other. How hard had it been for Sandra and Naz to balance between the two worlds? And the two cultures?
Once inside the house, she switched on lights and opened the garden door in an effort to bring in light and fresh air. In just a few days, the house had begun to smell musty, and ordinary dust had gathered on the furniture, joining the black powder left by forensics.
She walked through the rooms, feeling oddly divided between a sense of trespass and a sense of aching familiarity. In the sitting room, she picked up a stray picture book and a stuffed toy, stowing them in their respective containers, just as she would have in her own house.
Then she climbed the stairs to Charlotte’s room. She found a flowered holdall in the wardrobe and began to fill it with things from the chest of drawers. She held up a pink-printed sundress with a matching white cardigan, remembering the little girls’ clothes she had looked at in the shop windows when she was pregnant, daydreaming of the daughter she would dress.
Carefully, she folded the sundress and cardigan, then reached for a jacket in the same corally pink, a pink- and-white-striped T-shirt, and white cuffed dungarees. Then a yellow eyelet top with a pink-and-yellow-flowered skirt and a pair of pink-and-white ballet flats. Had Sandra loved picking out these things, just as Gemma had imagined doing?
She added a few more clothes and more worn stuffed toys-company for Bob the elephant-and the most well- thumbed of the picture books on the table by the bed. The photo of Sandra still stood beside the books. Gemma hesitated, but in the end she left it. Not yet, she thought. It was too soon for such a vivid reminder.
She made notes for Louise of the things she’d taken, then, leaving the bag on the landing, she climbed up to the studio.
The cup of colored pencils stood on the worktable, just where she had remembered. Looking round for a box or a bag, or even an elastic band to contain them, she was struck once more by the beauty of the collage Sandra had left unfinished.
Still searching for an elastic band, she moved to the desk and rifled through the drawers. The shallow one held the flotsam and jetsam that accumulated in desks as if drawn by magnets-broken pencils, defunct pens, paper clips, and pennies. There were a half-dozen colored elastic bands, but they were too small for the bundled pencils. Pulling the drawer all the way open, Gemma saw a bit of paper crumpled at the back. She fished it out and smoothed the crinkles. It was a receipt, written out to Sandra Gilles for one pound, in payment for an unspecified work of art, and stamped with the name and address of the Rivington Street Health Clinic.
Gemma remembered seeing a clinic on Rivington Street when she’d gone to Pippa Nightingale’s gallery-was it the same place?
On an impulse, she took out her notebook once more and found the page on which she’d written Pippa’s number. As she looked in her bag, she found one of her own elastic hair bands, which she thought would do quite nicely for the pencils.
Bundling up the pencils, she put them in her bag, then took out her mobile and rang the number for the Nightingale Gallery. It was late, and Gemma had begun to think it a wasted call, but after a few rings, Pippa answered the phone.
Gemma identified herself, then asked about the Rivington Street clinic.
“That was one of Sandra’s good-works projects,” Pippa said with asperity. “I told her she couldn’t just give things away, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“They paid her a pound. I found the receipt in her desk. What sort of clinic is it?”
“That sounds about par for Sandra’s record keeping. At least she left a proper paper trail for the Internal Revenue.” She gave a derisive sniff, then went on. “The place is a free sexual-health clinic that caters mostly to local Bangladeshi women.”
Gemma had been gazing at the piece on the worktable. She described the piece in progress to Pippa, then asked, “Do you suppose she was thinking of the women who go to this clinic? Or that she was making it for the clinic?”
“It’s possible,” Pippa said thoughtfully. “But it sounds as if the piece has a very strong Huguenot theme, which was something Sandra came back to again and again. She was fascinated by the lives and history of the French immigrant weavers, and she felt a personal connection-she
“Journals?”
“Sandra kept scads of them. Black, artists’ sketchbooks, filled with notes and drawings. That was where she worked out her ideas. They may be worth a good bit of money if she-” There was a pause, then Pippa said, “Look. I’ve got to go. But if you find those books, you’d better make a note of it for the estate. And have whoever’s in charge contact me.”
Clicking off the phone, Gemma looked round the room, thinking that Pippa Nightingale might be grieving for Naz and Sandra, but she was not about to let it interfere with business.
Gemma moved away from the desk and worktable. Hadn’t she seen black notebooks somewhere, when she was here before? Yes, there, on the shelf with the boxes of buttons and ribbons and the other objects Sandra used in the collages-at least a dozen identical black books.
Lifting the top one from the stack, she opened it and thumbed carefully through it. Notes, in many colors, the tiny script crammed into margins and any vertical and horizontal space not filled with drawings. And the drawings…Gemma looked more closely, fascinated. There were designs; some looked like bits of fabric, others seemed to be architectural details-Gemma thought she recognized the ornate curved lintel from a house opposite, and the Arabian curves of the decorative arches in Brick Lane. There were even tiny reproductions of some of the street art Gemma had seen sprayed along Brick Lane. And there were portraits. Asian women, young and old. A grizzled, shabby man under a striped market awning. A drawing that suggested, in just a few deft lines, the sweet face of a young Asian girl.
Gemma closed the book and held it, thinking. This was Sandra Gilles-here, in these pages-or at least all that Gemma, or Sandra’s daughter, might ever know of her. Pippa had suggested that the notebooks would be valuable, objects of desire for collectors, but what about their value to Charlotte? Surely, that was more important.
Setting aside the notebook, Gemma rummaged in her bag until she found her own little spiral notebook, and the list she had been making for Louise. She stared at the page for a long moment, then put the notebook back.
