The Whispering House by Elizabeth Brooks

Author:Elizabeth Brooks [Brooks, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473555303
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2020-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

6

‘ARE YOU OK TO KEEP going, or do you need a break?’ Cory asked, never taking his eyes off the easel.

‘I’m fine.’

An abstracted smile parted his lips as he filled his brush from the palette and swept it across the canvas. The way he moved had changed since that tentative sketch on the first night: he’d become looser, swifter, more certain. There was no anxious hunching over sketch-books anymore; he was always on his feet in front of the easel, his back and arms arched like a maestro’s.

He didn’t acknowledge my answer, except by carrying on with his work. I watched him steadily, but he seemed unaware. The wind was light but cold, and it kept singing long, sad notes inside the chimney.

‘Are you painting the goose-pimples on my arms?’

A long pause as he bit his lower lip, dabbed the canvas with a rag, and stepped back to look.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

I’d already agreed to pose with bare arms, so it wasn’t fair to carp about it after he’d started. I shifted my hand to a slightly different angle, which gave the ring more prominence and made it flash in the light of the Anglepoise lamp.

‘Try not to move,’ he said from behind the easel.

Northanger Abbey was open on my lap, because Cory wanted a picture called Freya Reading, but I didn’t try to turn the pages. The last time I’d moved, to scratch my nose, Cory had made a tiny hissing noise through his teeth. I didn’t want to read, anyway. I’d already done Northanger Abbey to death for want of anything else – Cory had sold off the Byrne Hall library and he wasn’t a reader himself – besides which, I wasn’t in the mood for Gothic satire.

The only other reading material I had was the catalogue from Tom’s Raphael exhibition, and I suppose I could have brought that out – but what was the point, if Cory was going to wince every time I moved my eyes across the page? Anyway, we’d had a minor argument about the Raphael catalogue yesterday afternoon, which made me reluctant to mention it again. ‘Speaking of portraiture,’ I’d said, drawing it out of my bag, ‘this might interest you …’ Cory had given the cover a cursory glance without taking it out of my hands, and said, ‘Hmm,’ and it all kicked off from there. As I say, it wasn’t a big row.

I glanced at my notebook, and the sharpened pencil lying on top.

‘I ought to be writing,’ I said, although I was glad of an excuse not to. The other day I’d deleted that line about footsteps echoing from room to room and started a Gothic novel set in Victorian times. It wasn’t progressing, though. There was no plot. I decided to cross it out later on and start again.

‘So, what’s it going to be about?’ Cory asked. ‘This novel?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe it could be set in Byrne Hall.’

Cory leaned closer to the canvas and shook his head.

‘Maybe I could write about you and your mother—’

‘I don’t think so.

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