Contents (57)
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Also by Sharon Gosling
Twelve
It was late, the sun having sunk below the horizon hours before. Edie sat at her bench, bent over the block she had been working on for days now, the focused blue-white glare of her work light illuminating the narrow ridges and whorls she was carving at a snail’s pace into the boxwood’s surface. Around her, Muddy Waters was busy smudging the air with his voice. Her candles, standing on the work surfaces that ran around the periphery of the room, did the same. The flamelight was no longer good enough for Edie to work by, not with her ageing eyesight. Still, the light was good enough to soften the edges of her vision, to buffer her from the rest of the world and make her forget about anything but this piece of wood and the image in her head for which it could provide a medium.
For the past few days she had found herself in the print room much later than was her usual custom. Or at least it hadn’t been her usual time for working since she’d lived in Newton Dunbar. Working at a time when everyone else was in bed had been a necessity during her marriage, when Edie had still been full-time at the council. Her art had been just a hobby then, although she’d been to art college back in the 1960s, when true emancipation had seemed possible, probable even, for a girl like her. Then Dez had come along. Dez, with his ingrained snobbery that regarded anything other than eight hours of physical daily labour as being indicative of hateful, lazy privilege, with his dislike of her college friends and his deliciously hard body (like a Michelangelo, he had been then, and how could one look like an artwork and not be worth her reverence?), and out had gone the idea of her as a full-time artist. Looking back now, Edie didn’t understand how or why she had stuck it for so long, except that once you got used to a regular wage it was terrifying to think of being without one, and she supposed the same went for marriage. Dependency of any form was an awful thing, and especially the sort by which you were still able to tell yourself that you weren’t dependent at all.
Thus her art had been pushed into the background, into the few gaps that her husband had not felt the need to fill with his own needs, which essentially meant late at night. When Edie had finally left him and set up here, she’d let the art take over her days in the way she had dreamed it would back in her youth. She woke early and was usually in her studio by 8 a.m. She worked through until 5 or 6 p.m., as if it were an office job. Sometimes, if Edie had a piece on the bench that she just couldn’t leave alone, she’d come back after her evening meal and continue working. The evenings, however, were for entertainment, or for sketching. Edie loved her life as it was now. She loved how much time she could devote to the one thing she had always known for sure she was good at, and something at which even now, when other women her age had already retired, she was still improving.