Fingers sift through ash. It smothers the landscape, a film of dust accumulating: on the surface of the Thames; on the blackened roots of rose bushes; on skin. Flakes of it hang in the air, suspended between charcoal clouds above and snow-like drifts below. But these frail particles, even skyward-bound, have long ceased to impress Klara; grey is, after all, the least remarkable colour. She picks through the ash for a brighter pigment, like a magpie ransacking a fleshless corpse for a silver necklace.
Beneath an upturned swing-set, she spies a cat-skull. Bone, burned black, can be ground into the darkest powder. Klara pockets it and moves on to the next garden. The neighbourhood is unfamiliar, comprised of houses she could never have afforded, now overgrown with frost-bitten ivy and dappled with the droppings of pigeons that feast on the remaining cadavers; the cold does its best to mask the stink of ruptured intestine, half-eaten, glistening through front-porch glass. In the wake of a stranger’s entrails, Klara finds half a dozen blackberries. Withered almost beyond recognition, they retain a fraction of their purplish colouration. She prises them from the vine and stashes them alongside the cat-skull, careful not to burst their husks in case any juices remain entombed within.
Not for the first time, Klara feels a pang of longing for her old studio, and for the stones of lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan which she used to crush into ultramarine. But blue is scarce in nature, scarcer still at the world’s end, so she must make do with ashes and bones and the few colourful things which endure.
Ice clinks against the riverbank in imitation of whisky-soaked cubes jostling in a highball glass. Swifts cross the darkening sky; Klara mimes shooting them down one by one. Unscathed, they slip quietly into the dusk. Iridescence lines her pockets: white chalk; pink foxgloves; yellow soil. She was fortunate to find the flowers intact, rosy bells preserved in their summer guises by the frost.
She clings to the southern bank of the Thames, trading pigeons and spilled guts for the shade of willow trees. Half a mile up-river, invisible from the opposite bank, a barge is moored; Klara’s husband and daughter sleep in shifts within. Both emerge at the sound of her approach: the almost imperceptible compression of ash underfoot. She scoops Belle, the child, up into her arms, then sets her down to rummage through her pockets.
“Look what I found.” She presents the flower heads to her daughter.
“What are they?”
“Foxgloves — I’d have preferred roses. If you make a pigment from their petals, the paint will smell sweet.”
“And roses won’t kill you,” her husband interrupts.
“They’re flowers, Malcolm, not razorblades.”
Stale cigarette smoke lingers on his person. It is a scent distinct from charred woodland and sulphur.
“You’ve been smoking again,” Klara says.
“What am I meant to do when you’re out trawling the riverbanks from dawn ‘til dusk?”
“I suppose you’ve had worse vices.”
Malcolm sucks air through his teeth but says nothing; her words are the cold twist of a bayonet in his belly.
It is Belle who breaks the silence, “Daddy caught a bird.”
When did she get so adept at navigating her parents’ loathing? Klara wonders.
The bird in question is a sparrowhawk. Blood encrusts its cappuccino plumage: a smear of ketchup over coffee and cream. It is evident that her husband is not the killer. Claws, perhaps a fox’s, have left rust-coloured trails along the hawk’s underbelly, but there is no indication as to why the dead thing was abandoned.
“I’ll light a fire,” she says, planting a fleeting kiss on Malcolm’s cheek. Bristles poke through the skin of his jaw. His neck smells of sweat, his breath of tobacco.
There is never a shortage of dead wood; lightning storms crack the post-twilight skies, leaving the skeletons of trees for anyone’s taking, like overripe fruit littering an orchard’s grass. Klara stacks willow branches beside the barge; Malcolm plucks blood-soaked feathers; Belle salivates. Before long, clementine tongues of flame lick at specks of old ash. The sparrowhawk spits fat while it roasts.
The barge glides along the Thames, unseen, parting slivers of ice which have not yet had a chance to seize the current. The nights are growing colder; when the river freezes the vessel will be rendered useless. They do not fancy themselves as actors in a Venetian charade, December gondoliers breaking canal-ice into slush with willow branches. But such fears are unlikely to come to fruition: in the distance, what little remains of the London skyline brushes the violet dusk. They are almost at their journey’s end.
Klara works by lamplight; the cat-skull, burned alongside the sparrowhawk’s ribcage, crumbles into black dust. She sieves the powder and starts again, grinding the larger shards of bone with a mortar and pestle. The blackberries have been pulverised and left to soak; most flora is worthless until the water evaporates; it is the residue Klara wants. She has neglected to ask her daughter to return the foxgloves. Pink is the final colour she needs to paint a sunrise. Purple and yellow, Klara has in abundance, white too. Red, once born of crushed lice, is intangible. At long last, pink’s impossibility recedes, but she could never hope to cover the sky with a handful of flowers. Klara sighs and tips the black pigment into a jar, simultaneously relinquishing her grip on a crepuscular dream.
She turns her attention to an unfinished painting. Serpentine, a version of the Thames, painted in ash, unwinds across the paper. She is unsure of its purpose; the majority of her subject matter is decided by the limitations of her palette. If she could make emerald, Klara would paint pigeons. Guts, too, are off the table, unless they are coated in ash. At times like these, she is thankful daylight never spears through the clouds; even the subtlest trace of blue would complicate things. Mixing the black pigment with water, Klara binds it with linseed oil, then takes her smallest brush and paints the silhouettes of evening swifts above the river. She dilutes the paint with excess water, and adds their faltering reflections to the ash. It is a fanciful depiction; it has been a long time since the sun emitted enough light to cast shadows.
“I thought modern art was all unmade beds and period stains.”
Klara flinches; the black-edged paintbrush slips from her hand onto the floor. She did not hear the creak of the wooden step under Malcolm’s weight.
“You’ve such a way with words; is that Byron or Shelley?”
“Aren’t landscapes a little played out? Surely postmodernity has other fascinations.”
She ignores the fact that her husband cannot distinguish between modernism and postmodernism.
“Had.”
“Is it postapocalyptism now then?”
He stoops to retrieve her paintbrush, testing the loaded horsehairs on his thumb, enjoying the syllabic tangle of his own joke.
“I’ve not given it much thought.”
“Don’t you get enough of the Thames through the window?”
“Monet painted his lily pond hundreds of times.”
Malcolm snorts so loudly that Belle’s face appears in the doorway; wide eyes search the yellow haze of the cabin.
“Belle?” Klara says, looking past her husband and snatching back the paintbrush. “Add some willow trees for me. I need a word with your father.”
The girl obliges in silence, knowing from experience it is best to hold her tongue, washing the brush and selecting pigments with an artificial concentration. Her parents file out, tension stringing them together like a spool of intestine. Outside, thunder rolls off distant heathland. Frost encrusts the tiller; Malcolm scrapes it away with a penknife and adjusts the barge’s course for a bend in the river.
“I’m not saying your art isn’t important,” he begins. Even in the pitch-dark, Klara knows he is smirking; it is as if the cruel twist of his upper lip is audible over the weather and the slosh of icy water against the hull. “But you’re hardly Claude Monet.”
What would you know about Claude Monet? she thinks.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says. “And there’s only beggars left.”
“Beggars who care nothing for art.”
“So what?”
“So why bother?”
Klara sighs. Malcolm rolls himself a cigarette; even without light, his fingers move with practised ease.
“Monet felt the same. His wife died. His sons got butchered in the First World War. Yet still he painted lilies.”
Malcolm lights his cigarette. He jettisons a curl of smoke overboard. “I’m sure you’ll indulge me in the relevance of this little anecdote.”
“We all live our own apocalypses.”
“For Christ’s sake, I’ve had enough of metaphors. You’re not a fucking impressionist, and this isn’t a fucking war. The world’s ending, Klara. No one is going to study your paintings in an art history class.”
The question, So what? resurfaces on the tip of her tongue. She swallows it.
“Art will survive. It’s come a hell of a long way to get here. From cave paintings in the Amazon, to the Sistine Chapel, to Picasso, to me. Haven’t you ever wanted to leave something behind — other than cigarette butts?”
“What’s worth leaving behind on a doomed planet?”
“Something more concrete than ashes. And when the sun fails, even without witnesses, that’ll still be a work of art in itself: the obliteration of spent masterpieces.”
“And their piss-poor imitations,” Malcolm adds.
“Does it count for nothing: to be the last artist on earth?”
For a while, there is no sound other than the creak of waterlogged wood. Malcom tosses his fag-end overboard; it hisses as it is swallowed by the Thames. Then he speaks:
“No. Not at the expense of our daughter.”
“Don’t pretend to start loving her now.”
Dawn no longer breaks, it unravels, rosebuds of mist opening over the morning frost. Ash, the remnants of yesterday’s silver-birches and last week’s jackdaws, floats upstream. The barge seems to sag under its weight, as does its crew. Malcolm stretches and yawns, a pantomime of tiredness; he has whiled away the night beneath a canopy of lightning. Inside, mother and daughter take turns with a paintbrush, conjuring fairy tales of London from false memory and even falser hope; they are still working as the clouds lighten.
Klara adds the finishing touches to an ash-less Trafalgar Square.
“Is that a real building?” Belle asks, pointing at a domed structure striated with columns, undercoated in white chalk, the details picked out afterwards in daffodil-yellow.
“It’s a gallery. Full of paintings — real paintings.”
“Can we visit?”
“It’s probably ashes now.”
Klara envisages The Fighting Temeraire ripped in two, a graffiti cock emblazoning the splendid yellow sky.
“What’s next then?” Belle pushes her mother’s painting away. “Foxgloves?”
“Only if you paint them in grey, sweetheart. I’d need to grind them up into a pigment to get a colour-match.”
As Belle sketches an outline, Klara is confronted by the weight of ineptitude. She has never been much of a painter; already her daughter’s talents surpass her own. It took the death of every other artist for Klara to make the transition from paint-maker to painter, a decision born of the demise of three and half decades, and the realisation that she’s pissed the years away. What use are chartreuse and carmine and cerulean, when those who devoted their lives to their application are now heaps of flesh amongst the ashes?
Birdsong: a blackbird, a skylark, a finch of some kind. It’s the sort of thing she never used to notice and now cannot escape. When she first imagined the end of humankind, Klara never considered the soundtrack. A goldfinch probably can’t tell the difference between ash and snow, she reasons. And even if it could, would it cease its singing?
The barge rests between the rusting bulks of abandoned vessels. There are no signs of life in any of them: no disturbances in the ash; no gas lamps; no conversation. The family travels under cover of darkness to avoid detection, concealing the barge between sunrise and sunset while they scavenge or sleep. It’s been a long time since they’ve crossed paths with anyone not disembowelled by pigeons.
Malcolm and Klara venture out on foot, leaving Belle behind to finish her foxglove still-life. London’s skyline, only a few miles downstream, is jagged and incomplete, like a cage of broken ribs prised open for a groping hand to remove the urban heart. Lightning can only be attributed to some of the destruction; how the rest disintegrated — solar flares, spite, or some other undefinable sin — is anyone’s guess. They cross a succession of fields and join a dual-carriageway. Road signs advertise nearby settlements, though many have been replaced by slogans or threats. Gutted cars throng the lanes; the smell of old rot rises from the wreckage. They loot the steel carcasses for tinned food and blister packs of medicine, but the majority have been picked clean already.
Half a mile down the road, the stink intensifies: of rusted metal and ruptured bowel. The sweetness of decay is absent; the scent of spilled blood is fresh. Almost a dozen corpses are strewn across the tarmac. They have been stripped half-naked; the women have been raped and the men castrated. Tire tracks lead away from the massacre; the responsible party had no intention of watching the blood dry. Crows have already descended to feast. Klara shoos them up into the air, and they take refuge in the boughs of ash trees, laden heavily with their namesake.
“Why?” she asks, more of the corvids than her husband.
Malcolm prods the chest of a man close to himself in age. His legs have been hacked away; the spray of arterial blood dapples the tarmac. It still pulses out weakly, unable to coagulate but less vigorous in the absence of a heartbeat. True vermillion, Klara thinks, despite herself.
“Hunger.”
A crow caws, as if in agreement.
“What food was there to be found in her cunt?”
Klara gestures towards a middle-aged woman, her breasts exposed, her skirt bunched around her hips, her legs splayed, one twisted at a sickening angle, urine and blood hardening over the bruising on her inner thighs. It’s not clear whether she was killed before or after.
“The stomach isn’t the only organ with an appetite.”
“Would you be this calm if they’d raped me? Or our daughter?”
Malcolm inspects the defiled woman, then lights a cigarette, flicking away the excess ash.
“Puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it? How futile your little artworks are.”
For a moment, Klara’s words fail her. She grew thick-skinned to Malcolm’s taunts when he used to drink, but now even sober he is hard to stomach. She kneels, ignoring the blood soaking into her jeans, and straightens the dead woman’s skirt.
“If you tell Belle about this, I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the crows.”
Darkness pulls at the last of the light, like a hawk tugging at a reluctant string of flesh. The barge glides on into the outskirts of London.
“What do you think birdsong looks like?”
Confronted by a blank sheet of paper, Klara poses the question to her daughter.
Belle gives it more thought than her mother expects. “Depends on the bird. A peregrine’s would look different to a nightingale’s.”
“It’s something an old artist said: I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
“And did he?”
“No, just lilies upon lilies.”
Belle smiles as though this proves her point.
“Does that make birdsong a worthwhile subject?” Klara presses. She does not intend to sound so sorry for herself, but Malcolm’s words ricochet inside the walls of her skull.
“No less than lilies.”
She is only half paying attention; she is distracted by a painting of her own. Her tongue pokes out between her lips, foamed over with saliva, the way it always does when she’s focusing on something.
“But what’s the point of lilies, or foxgloves, or anything?” Klara says.
“Isn’t that up to the painter?”
Everything is so simple in youth. Pigments lack subtlety; the world is painted in black and white.
“Then why should there still be painters?”
Belle shrugs. The hypotheticals have overstayed their welcome. She returns to her artwork, foxglove-pink tongue prising apart cracked lips.
Klara still has some yellow left over from daffodils picked in the spring. She overloads her brush, then adds uneven strokes to the paper. Usually, she is more sparing with her pigments, but she needs the paint’s texture to spill off the page like the white horse of a collapsing wave. Without rinsing her brush, she switches to a reddish-brown extracted from clay, then to the cat-and-hawk-bone black. When she is finished, the paper is sodden with contrasting pigments; smudges of paint decorate her forearms.
“Birdsong?” Belle says, grinning through baby teeth as though she’d envisaged the finished article before her mother began.
“Something like that: scraps of post-apocalyptic melody. Swifts, goldfinches, pigeons, sparrowhawks, crows.”
The trio disembarks beneath soft veils of lilac; it is the first coloured dawn any of them can remember. Bodies have always been dumped in the Thames, where they bloat beyond recognition and come apart at the seams. But now corpses choke the current from bank to bank, and ahead the concrete offal of a collapsed bridge penetrates the ash’s duckweed patterning. They can go no further in the barge. On foot, each looks to the other to decide a destination.
“Do you recognise anything?” Klara asks.
Malcolm snorts, but not unkindly. “Do what’s left of the pavements not ring any bells? We could be in Covent Garden for all that remains.”
“If we stick to the Thames, we’ll reach the Tower of London sooner or later.”
“What do you hope to find in there? The ravens deserted a long time ago.”
Belle looks up at her mother; it is a glance that speaks volumes: Another bird’s song to paint.
“Let’s get off the street. We’ve all the time in the world to decide what comes next.”
London is a far cry from the city they expected. Naivety convinced them that the streets would house humanity’s final refuge. But those who tried to wait out Armageddon here now litter the pavements. They pass rows of terraced houses, where blood-bloated rats squat on doorsteps to defecate amongst the ashes. It lies heavily on the cobblestones, sticking to concrete with more surety than to the rolling fields that border the Thames closer to its source. Cold takes root beneath pale skin; plumes of breath crystallise before they have a chance to dissipate. Kicking aside a rat whose fur is clotted with gristle, Malcolm tests a front door. The lock is broken, and they comb through the ground floor rooms, unearthing tinned peaches and beans in the kitchen, and a coffee table in the lounge which they break into firewood. Shadows soon dance up the walls, tomato juice hardens on upper lips, and varnished oak spits embers over the remaining furniture.
Hunger curbed, Belle explores the nooks and crannies of the house; compared to the confinement of barge, it seems a castle. Behind the kitchen, she finds a stairwell which climbs up for two flights. High above, a window illuminates the lowermost steps in grey tones. But something interrupts the square of light falling across her feet, something other than the layer of ash that buries the glass pane. Curiosity drives her upstairs; with each step, the light recedes a little more. The obstruction is a man, she realises. He touches neither the floor nor the ceiling; a toppled chair rests below. His feet are missing, and shafts of exposed bone point downwards, encircled by strips of loosened flesh. Rat droppings darken the circle of his shadow, and a length of rope disappears into the greyness above. Belle cannot make out his features, backlit as he is by the window. It is not the first dead man she has encountered, but his corpse is preserved more serenely than others that spring to mind.
Her parents are less intrigued by her discovery. She returns to the fireside while they remove the length of rope from around the stranger’s neck. The noose is efficient, and as soon Malcolm shifts the man’s bodyweight upwards, the line slackens and Klara is able to loosen the knot. They lower him to the ground, ignoring the bloody pulp of what’s left of his Adam’s apple.
“Some folks have all the luck,” Malcolm says.
“You’ve had plenty of chances to throw yourself in the Thames,” she snaps, then softens. “Sorry.”
Malcolm runs his fingers over the laceration in the dead man’s throat. “Broken neck; a better way to go than drowning.”
“Suicide’s an ideation I never expected from you.”
“Look around, Klara. There’s nothing here. All we do is find corpses. I’d rather die at the end of a rope than by hunger, or cold, or a stranger’s hands.”
Klara rights the chair beneath the noose. “Be my guest.”
He drags his tongue over lips.
“Not alone.”
“We’re not having this conversation.”
“Is it unspeakable to confront reality?”
“You won’t hang my daughter to prove a point.”
“I thought you’d beg for a chance to kill yourself. Isn’t that what all the great artists did? Van Gogh shot himself in the chest and the world worshipped him for it.”
“And Rothko slit his wrists and nobody gave a shit; what’s your point?”
Malcolm sighs.
“No point. I just need a drink.”
Klara relents; the blues always used to descend before the devils of the same colour.
“One drink, then you bury these thoughts for good.”
London has no shortage of pubs; Malcolm used to say that pubs in London were like whores in Amsterdam: there’s one on every corner, but you feel guilty if you try a new one instead of an old favourite. As far as Klara’s aware, her husband has only visited the capital half a dozen times, and Amsterdam never. But he always thought the expression so clever she tended to let the technicality slide. He repeats it now as they cross the threshold of a darkened bar.
It has been looted before: the front windows have been caved inwards; shards of glass glitter on table-tops which are sticky with beer and mould; dust clings to it all. There are candles, pockmarked with dribbles of cold wax, on each table, and Malcolm lights them before taking stock of the liquor behind the bar. Many of the bottles have been emptied or smashed, but enough remain to wet Malcolm’s tongue a thousand times over. Klara is surprised; she thought desolation would have compelled more of London’s men and women to drown their sorrows as they waited for the end.
“What’ll it be?” Malcolm asks, lining up three glasses.
“I’m not thirsty.”
Belle, recognising the familiar gleam of madness in her father’s eyes, stays quiet.
“One drink, you said.”
“Gin, then.”
“There’s no ice or tonic.”
He fills a tumbler almost to the brim and tops it with lime cordial. A few drops of blackcurrant remain under the bar, and he dilutes them with Thames water for Belle. He pours himself a whisky. The women take sips; the man drains his glass. Malcolm pours himself another, readily discarding his earlier pledge to stop after one.
“What shall we drink to?”
“To Claude Monet.”
He laughs with whisky-induced relish; if he realises Klara is mocking him, it doesn’t show.
“To Claude fucking Monet.”
Klara takes a second sip. It slides down her throat like a nosebleed. Two drops of gin, and already her stomach is unsettled. Malcolm does not share her discomfort; he empties and refills his glass.
“If the National Gallery’s still standing, we might see a few Monets.”
She finds it best to venture such notions before his mood inevitably sours.
“It’d make a fine change to see you in the company of some decent art.”
Belle’s face falls. She slurps from her glass; the blackcurrant is so sweet it hurts her teeth.
“What if we took some of our paintings and hung them up?” she asks.
Neither parent answers. Malcolm occupies himself rolling a cigarette. His hands falter as he tries to spread the tobacco; apocalypse has battered his tolerance. Klara senses the atmosphere turning ugly, like the rising scent of petrichor in the moments before rain.
“Gin always goes straight through me,” she says, only half-lying, weighing each word carefully. “I don’t want to be sick on your shoes. Do you mind if I step outside?”
It has the intended effect. A cruel peal of laughter escapes his lips. “Your mother always was a lightweight.”
Belle looks as if she might ask to join her. Klara flashes her a warning look.
“I’ll only be ten minutes. Keep your father company.” She passes over her rucksack. Then, in a softer tone, says, “Paint me something while I’m gone. We’ll talk about the gallery later.”
Outside, gusts of wind agitate the denser clumps of ash; displaced, they rearrange themselves like piles of leaf mould. Klara spits out the taste of gin and walks up the street. After a hundred yards, she takes a left turn, committing the road name to memory so she can find her way back. Even beneath the ash, there is something familiar about the route. A memory blooms through the rubble, accompanied by peculiar a twist of fate.
We’re a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square, she realises.
A pigeon takes flight. A fox slinks down a back alley. She follows the bird. Klara knows her return must be timed perfectly: too soon and Malcolm’s anger won’t have subsided; too late and she’ll resurrect it. Her pace quickens; she passes a London bus; blood darkens the already crimson paintwork. And behind it, an impossible sight: stone lions covered in pigeon-shit; the alabaster columns of the National Gallery set against a sky of slate. She smiles, and feels the weight of despair slip from her shoulders.
Maybe we’ll see some water lilies after all.
Breathless, she retraces her steps to the pub, her heart lighter than a flake of ash floating in the breeze.
Inside, Belle lies facedown, as if asleep. Malcolm is slumped over on a barstool; a maroon pool expands across the floorboards, clotting as it reaches the size of a Rothko canvas. Klara lifts up her daughter’s head. Pink foam coats her lips; a string of tinted drool has congealed on her chin; a torn foxglove petal sticks to her cheek. Blood still drips from Malcolm’s wrists; his penknife rests atop the bar. There are vestiges of pink on his fingers; he must have forced the flower-heads into Belle’s mouth. Klara approaches her husband. A piece of paper is taped to his crotch. In pencil, Belle’s handwriting spells out: Foxgloves in Foxglove. She had sketched three bell-shapes below, but had not finished grinding the pigment. The drawing is smeared over with her father’s blood. Malcolm used a brush to paint a parting message, before tacking it to his genitals: Go ahead. Feed ‘em to the crows.
Klara hovers in the atrium. Revolving doors soften the bite of the wind. Birds nest in the alcoves and corpses are piled in the gift-shop, like replicas of artworks that visitors are invited to purchase for their homes. The floor is slick with frost; Klara trembles, but from shock or cold she cannot tell. Her hands are clammy with pink saliva; she pried the foxgloves from Belle’s throat, and listened in vain for the iambs of a heart. After the silence threatened to deafen her, she slipped her daughter’s body into Thames and left Malcolm to rot.
Her husband’s stale words resurface now. The National Gallery is untouched: nobody has broken in; no footprints disturb the dust; no-one left alive gives two shits about art — except Klara. She climbs a staircase, overwhelmed by her proximity to the millions dead that have ascended before her. Through the glass doors behind, she watches the day fail; she ignites Malcolm’s cigarette lighter. It is speckled with blood.
Klara visited once before, when she was about Belle’s age. She only half-remembers it. Still, in this past-imagining of herself, she sees her daughter’s vacant expression, unfixed eyes trawling the floorboards as she lay dead. But grief is a spent force; Klara does her utmost to quash it, and catches her breath on the top step.
To her right, oil paintings catch and refract the orange glow of the cigarette lighter: down a hallway, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Rembrandt’s Self Portrait, Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, among countless others which she recognises but cannot name: Cezannes and Canalettos and Michelangelos. The last in a long line of voyeurs, she studies them all; hers shall be the only eyes to witness the history of art’s closing act.
Nestled among mediocrity, Klara spots three depictions of Monet’s lily-pond: one at sunset; one comprised of contrasting colours that seem to invent a time of day; and one painted beneath a bright sun, dominated by a wooden bridge. Klara removes her rucksack and unveils all of her and Belle’s postapocalyptic contributions. Belle wanted them hung around the gallery, but its walls are busy with the works of old masters. Within Klara, aimless love blossoms; it convinces her to strip the walls bare. She takes the canvases down one by one and piles them on the floor. Portraits, she lies upside-down, so as to avoid their pale faces and be reminded of her daughter’s fatal pose. Some paintings are made heavier by gilded frames — these she is forced to drag. They leave trails of gold filigree across the tiles, like impatient snails shedding parts of themselves for the world to see. Many have been ravaged by damp or frost; the rest have been so utterly forgotten that even the elements have not bothered to destroy them. Klara stacks the entrails of the gallery at the top of the stairs, and replaces them with the contents of her rucksack: willow trees beside the Thames, sunrises without colour, birdsong. Then she withdraws Belle’s final artwork from her pocket, the one Malcolm defaced with his blood. Ignoring any inklings of guilt, Klara removes the smallest of Monet’s water-lily paintings from its frame and replaces it with the outlines of foxgloves. She hangs it up so that it overlooks the piled efforts of the past.
Then, as if immersing herself in a piece of performance art, Klara kneels. The flaking paint of long-dead men deserves no reverence, she decides. Grief eggs her on; she holds the lighter to the corner of a landscape depicting a mill. She does not know the painter, but the order of erasure is of no importance. Flames spread, yellow serpents writhing between renditions of Paris and England and places unspecified; they send up plumes of smoke to blacken the ceiling.
At last, Klara stops shaking. She slips off her gloves and watches masterpieces turn to ash. They burn in every colour, and she categorises the flames into pigments, from their cobalt bases to their apricot tips. Pink hues douse the walls; the pencil outline of a foxglove swells with a rosy glow. Klara rises, sweat greasing the handle of Malcolm’s penknife, to inscribe beside her daughter’s incomplete swansong:
Foxgloves in Foxglove: pencil, blood and firelight on paper.
