Leave the Grave Green

Kincaid looked round the room with interest. The paintings, spaced generously around the walls, seemed to be mostly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century watercolors, and most were river landscapes.

In the room’s center a pedestal held a sleek bronze of a crouching cat. Kincaid ran his hand over the cool metal and thought of Sid. He had made arrangements with his neighbor, Major Keith, to look after the cat when he was away from home. Although the major professed to dislike cats, he looked after Sid with the same gruff tenderness he had shown to the cat’s former owner. Kincaid thought that for the major, as well as himself, the cat formed a living link to the friend they had lost.

Near the garden door stood a desk, its cluttered surface a contrast to the spare neatness he saw everywhere else. Kincaid glanced quickly at the untidy papers, then moved into the second small room which lay a step down from the first.

He caught his breath. The painting on the opposite wall was a long narrow rectangle, perhaps a yard wide and a foot high, and it was lit by a lamp mounted just above it. The girl’s body almost filled the frame. Dressed in shirt and jeans, she lay on her back in a meadow, eyes closed, hat tilted back on her auburn hair, and beside her on the grass a basket of ripe apples spilled over onto an open book.

A simple-enough composition, almost photographic in its clarity and detail, but it possessed a warmth and depth impossible to capture with a camera. You could feel the sun on the girl’s upturned face, feel her contentment and pleasure in the day.

Other paintings by the same artist’s hand were hung nearby, portraits and landscapes filled with the same vivid colors and intense light. As Kincaid looked at them he felt a sense of longing, as if such beauty and perfection existed forever just out of his reach, unless he, like Alice, could step through the frame and into the artist’s world.

He had bent forward to peer at the illegibly scrawled signature when behind him a voice said, “Lovely, aren’t they?”

Startled, Kincaid straightened and turned. The man stood in the back doorway, his body in shadow as the sun lit the garden behind him. As he stepped into the room, Kincaid saw him more clearly—tall, thin and neat-featured, with a shock of graying hair and glasses that gave him an accountantlike air at odds with the casual pullover and trousers he wore.

The door chimed as Kincaid started to speak. A young man came in, his face white against the dead-black of his clothes and dyed hair, a large and battered leather portfolio tucked under his arm. His getup would have been laughable if not for the look of supplication on his face. Kincaid nodded to Trevor Simons, for so he assumed the man who had come in from the garden to be, and said, “Go ahead. I’m in no hurry.”

Rather to Kincaid’s surprise, Simons looked carefully at the drawings. After a few moments he shook his head and tucked them back into the portfolio, but Kincaid heard him give the boy the name of another gallery he might try. “The trouble is,” he said to Kincaid as the door chimed shut, “he can’t paint. It’s a bloody shame. They stopped teaching drawing and painting in the art colleges back in the sixties. Graphic artists—that’s what they all want to be—only no one tells them there aren’t any jobs. So they come out of art college like this wee chappie,” he nodded toward the street, “hawking their wares from gallery to gallery like itinerant peddlers. You saw it—fairly competent airbrushed crap, without a spark of originality. If he’s lucky he’ll find a job frying up chips or driving a delivery van.”

“You were courteous enough,” said Kincaid.

“Well, you have to have some sympathy, haven’t you? It’s not their fault they’re ignorant, both in technique and in the realities of life.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve nattered on long enough. What can I do for you?”

Kincaid gestured toward the watercolors in the second room, “These—”

“Ah, she’s an exception,” Simons said, smiling. “In many ways. Self-taught, for one, which was probably her salvation, and very successful at it, for another. Not with these,” he added quickly, “although I think she will be, but with the work she does on commission. Stays booked two years in advance. It’s very difficult for an artist who is successful commercially to find the time to do really creative work, so this show meant a lot to her.”

Realizing the answer even as he asked and feeling an utter fool, Kincaid said, “The artist—who is she?”

Trevor Simons looked puzzled. “Julia Swann. I thought you knew.”