The Light House Read online

“How do I choose the right canvas?”

  It was easier for him to show her than it was to explain. She trailed him back down the hallway and into the studio. Blake went to the rack and pulled out two different-sized canvases. They had both been painted orange.

  “Horizontal, or square?” he held them up.

  “Horizontal,” Connie decided. The canvas she had selected was about two feet wide and perhaps sixteen inches high.

  Blake gave her the canvas, put the other back into the rack, and then noticed the perplexed look on Connie’s face when he turned back to her. She was sliding her hand over the canvas, as if trying to rub away the orange under paint.

  “There’s something wrong with this one,” she frowned.

  Blake tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. “Trick number one,” he said and then went through a pantomime of checking over his shoulder lest anyone hear what he was about to reveal. “Canvas preparation. Five coats of primer before the orange under paint.”

  “Five coats?” Connie was shocked. She knew it was conventional for a canvas to be primed, but five coats was unheard of.

  “Think about the harsh weave of a canvas,” Blake explained. “It’s like trying to drag a house brush over a corrugated iron roof. The result is that you miss in the hollows, and you apply too much paint on the high ridges. It’s the same with a canvas,” he explained. “I’ve never seen a wave with a fuzzy edge, nor a boat with blurred lines. So I put five coats of primer on every canvas. It fills in the weave of the material, yet retains just enough of the pattern for the casual observer to clearly see that it’s an oil on canvas. What I am trying to do is to smooth the surface to allow me to paint clear crisp lines.”

  Connie blinked at the logic. She thought about her old paintings and went to her seascape that was still resting on the crossbar of the easel. She saw immediately what Blake had meant – yet not in a million years of painting would she have stumbled upon the idea herself.

  Blake set up the projector and turned out the studio lights so that the image thrown onto the canvas would be clear and well detailed. “I’ll be down at the beach,” he said. “It’s almost sunset.”

  He pulled the door quietly closed behind him and left Connie at work in the studio to trace the image. Tomorrow morning he would teach her how to paint.

  45.

  “If you are going to paint a convincing seascape, you must paint the sky first, and you must mix up at least three times the amount of blue sky color you think you will need to cover the canvas,” Blake announced from the studio window. He was leaning on the sill, looking away towards the ocean, feeling the morning’s sun through the glass, warm on his face. He turned to where Connie was sitting nervously at the easel.

  “Why so much paint?” she asked. Her hands were trembling. Now she was in front of a blank canvas with Blake tutoring her, the fear of the experience twisted a knot in her stomach.

  “Because the color of the sky influences everything else in a seascape,” he said. “Therefore you will need more paint than you expect.” He could see Connie frowning and he urged her to take a close look at the printout of the reference photo she had in her hand. “See the ocean – can you see the colors of the sky reflected in the water? Of course you can, because it makes sense. The ocean always mirrors the color of the sky, so you will need that color to mix with the shades of the ocean. And see the shadows of the sand dunes? There is a hint of blue in them, and in the wet sand along the shore.” He paused for a moment. Connie was peering at the image. “And the distant headland. Can you see the blue haze of its shape?”

  After a long moment Connie looked up at him, quite incredulous. “How did you know that, Blake?” she asked almost in awe. “You barely glanced at the image last night. How could you possibly have memorized the colors?”

  “I didn’t,” Blake shook his head. “I know nature. As an artist of seascapes, you need to study nature. Those things I just mentioned were not from observing the photo, they come from understanding how nature affects the photo. If you’re going to paint, you need to become a keen observer.”

  Connie bent over the paint table and began mixing. Blake went to the radio and the room filled with quiet background noise.

  “And remember that the sky at the horizon line is always lighter,” he cautioned her from the studio door. “Make sure you reflect that when you begin painting.”

  He left her alone, went out into the living room and sat with Ned. The dog was sleeping, barely lifting his lids open when Blake sat on the edge of the mattress and patted his head. After an hour he went back to check on Connie’s progress.

  She was painting the sky, working in long horizontal strokes across the canvas. He grabbed her by the elbow so that she squealed in surprise.

  “Wrong!” he said. “You can’t paint realism by swinging your arm like you are swatting flies, and you can’t paint realism by holding the top of the brush.” He took the paintbrush from her hand and showed her how to hold it like a pen, fingers gripping the metal just above the bristles. “To paint real, grip the steel,” he told her the rhyme. “And to paint real, you must reduce the leverage so that you control the stroke. If you power each stroke with your elbow, it’s like using a long lever – you lose control. So you must learn to power each stroke with your wrist. The closer the energy to the tip of the brush, the more control you will have of each stroke.”

  Blake filled in the hours walking in quiet contemplation along the beach and came back again in the afternoon. He was bare-chested. The long days in the sun had darkened his skin to the color of mahogany. Connie had finished painting the sky and looked up at him, eagerly seeking comment.

  Blake reached for his glasses and peered carefully at the canvas, then compared the color to the reference photo. He nodded, inclined his head, and then stood up. “Pretty good,” he admitted gruffly, and Connie felt the grin break out wide across her face.

  “But you will need to understand the importance of brush stroke direction before you take the next step,” Blake cautioned, and saw her smile slip just a little. “Every time you paint something you must be instinctively aware of its shape and its form, and then mirror that with the way you use the brush.”

  Connie had a vague understanding of the concept but the look on her face gave Blake no confidence. He picked up a paintbrush and began waving it in the air, as though he were painting on an invisible canvas.

  “If I am painting waves, I paint in curled strokes because I want to replicate the dynamic of the subject,” he said, demonstrating as he spoke. “And if I am painting a ball, then my strokes are going to curve around the shape, because I’m trying to replicate the dimensions and depth,” he said. He threw the brush down on the paint table. “It will also help you with shine and shadow – so understand the objects you are about to paint, and try to paint them as they were formed.”

  Connie started on the distant headland and Blake explained the logic behind color mixing – how the greens and browns of the promontory must include elements of the sky in order for it to be rendered convincingly. Connie spent an hour mixing color and another two hours painting before she was satisfied.

  “Now blur the edges of the headland,” Blake said. “To create the illusion of distance. Melt it into the haze of the horizon.”

  Connie worked on the canvas for another hour then looked up with a sudden start. The day had passed her by, and through the window she could see the afternoon beginning to fade into dusk. She stood and yawned. She could not remember a more exhausting day, or a day where she had learned so much about painting. She turned to Blake with deepened respect and admiration in her eyes. “You taught me things I could never have understood before today,” she leaned against him and lifted herself onto her toes to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Even though you were mean and demanding.”

  She cupped his face and kissed him again, this time more passionately, and it was not until later when he showered that he realized she had deliberately left sky blue fing
erprints of paint smeared on his cheeks.

  The days that followed were filled with exhausting activity for Connie. She painted in the studio every morning under Blake’s painstaking tuition, and in the afternoons she began photographing his old seascapes in preparation for the opening of the gallery. Tradesmen repainted the building in Hoyt Harbor, and new lighting was installed. Finally, catalogues arrived from the printers and were sent around the world to galleries and collectors in Europe and Asia.

  She tumbled into bed each night and curled up in Blake’s arms, languid and contented, and they made slow unhurried love until the passing of time became a blissful blur.

  After a week the painting was finished and she stood back in astonished amazement, unable to believe the work was by her hand. It was by no means flawless, but the miraculous leap she saw between the art of her past and this new painting defied description.

  Blake inspected the painting critically and then smiled into her eyes with pure unaffected admiration. “Terrific,” he said and picked her up into his arms, swinging her around in a circle of laughter. “You, young lady, have some serious talent.”

  They hung the painting in the living room and Blake took photos of Connie standing proudly next to the finished canvas with Ned by her side.

  Connie beamed a smile for the camera. Her dream to paint had been re-kindled and the gallery was just a month away from opening. She was falling in love with Blake and the house by the beach had become a happy home, still echoing the sadness of the past, but now with those sounds of sorrow at last drowned out by the tinkle of laughter and the soft murmurs of loving.

  They were the happiest days of her life.

  46.

  It was on the last day of summer that Blake woke up and realized that his world had turned to darkness and he was utterly blind. In an instant their world fell apart – came crashing down, and plunged them into black despair and devastation.

  Despite always knowing it was coming – despite the steady diminishing of his sight – now suddenly Blake was shocked. He was blind, and the realization appalled him and filled him with trembling terror.

  He sat up in bed, groped wordlessly for his jeans, and pulled them on. His blood had turned to ice in his veins, dread clutching at his heart so that his breathing was short and shallow. He got to his feet on shaking legs and the sound in his throat was a pitiful sob.

  “Connie, I’m blind.”

  He heard her move on the bed, heard the urgent rustle of the sheets around her and then her sudden startled gasp of disbelief.

  His words echoed in his head for long numbing seconds – and then an unholy anger came upon him, roaring and snarling and ravenous behind his sightless eyes.

  His instinct was to rage against the atrocious cruelty of it. He blundered through the house, kicking over furniture and bellowing his desolation like a wounded beast. He stumbled over the sofa, groped sightless for the living room wall and clawed his way towards the studio. A glass at his elbow fell to the floor and shattered, one of the rugs slipped from beneath his feet and he crashed painfully to the ground.

  Connie came from the bedroom behind him, her hands clutched to her mouth, and she was sobbing tears of distress and helplessness. She heard the torture in Blake’s voice and she was powerless to reach him. She cringed against the doorway as he crashed futilely through the house.

  In a spare room closet was a cane that Blake had been given by the eye specialists many years before. He groped for it now like an angry drunkard, felt it in his hand and wielded it like a sword.

  “Why me?” he screamed. “Why did you do this to me? Haven’t I suffered enough?” He groped his way back along the hall. He was breathing raggedly. He stumbled to the screen door and kicked it open in his wrath. Ned cowered, not understanding. The great dog slinked timidly with its head hung low to where Connie crouched against the wall, and both woman and beast were trembling.

  Blake swung the cane viciously in front of him, heard it crack loud against the porch railing. He stumbled down the stairs and fell into the sand. He felt rain spatter against his head, and sensed the anger of the sky, humming in the air like electricity. He went away down to the beach, falling again and again, but each time dragging himself to his feet, sobbing in grief and anguish with each step until he was just a small broken figure on the sand, against the backdrop of a boiling grey sky full of thunder and menace.

  For a day and a night Blake wandered endlessly along the length of the deserted beach while the storm winds snarled against him and the rain fell in a thick grey swirling mist. Lightning flickered in the sky and thunder growled, always far off in the distance like the sound of muffled cannons. By the morning he was haggard and drawn, his legs numb and faltering so that his feet dragged exhausted in the wet sand and he fell time and time again.

  Connie had sat at the window in silent vigil and watched him, her face filling with a wrench of agony each time he had come into sight, and then following him with sad eyes until he disappeared towards one of the rocky headlands. The tide had come in through the night, sweeping the sand smooth of his ragged footprints.

  In the morning she could bear the torture of his pain no longer. She went fearfully down the porch steps towards the beach and into the sickly pale dawn, with no choice but to put their love on the line.

  47.

  He did not sense her there, did not hear her soft footfalls above the effervescent hiss of the waves running up across the shore, so that when she spoke, the sound of her voice seemed to come from a great distance away, like an echo in his memory.

  Blake looked about, blind and frowning.

  “Connie?”

  “Yes,” she said, and felt her breath jag.

  Blake’s face was gaunt, his eyes haggard dark holes in his face. He was unshaven, the color seemingly drained from his body so that he looked pallid as ash. He turned away from the sound of her voice, bone-weary and drowning in his despair.

  “I want you to leave,” Blake said, his voice hollow.

  “What?”

  He turned back, seemed to gaze sightless past her shoulder. “I said I want you to leave,” he repeated, trying to embellish his words with cruelty and anger. “I want you out of my life.”

  Connie nodded. She felt a tear run down her cheek. “Why?” she asked in a whisper, the sound of her voice so soft that Blake barely caught the word.

  “Because you don’t need this!” he cried suddenly, every word seething with his frustration and bitter hopelessness. “You don’t need to be dragged down into this… this tortured hell of darkness. You still have your life. You’re young and beautiful. Don’t do this to yourself or to me. Don’t stay here out of sympathy. I couldn’t bear that.”

  “You’ve given me no choice,” Connie whispered.

  “I have!” Blake hissed. “I’m giving you that choice right now. I’m giving you the chance to get away from me, to start your life over again. God!” he clenched his fists suddenly and threw his head back to the looming sky, his oath seeming to echo against the clouds. “Please. I’m begging you. I couldn’t live with myself knowing you were staying here just because you felt sorry for me.”

  He started to stride away, sightless along the beach. He took three shuffling steps and then stopped, turned back. “I would know, Connie,” he said with raw emotion. “I would hear it in your voice, feel it every time you gazed at me… and it would kill me. I don’t want you drawn down into this. You’re a good soul, a beautiful person. Leave the darkness to ghosts and shadows like me. Get away while you can.”

  He turned away again, felt the icy chill of the breeze of the ocean slap against his cheek. He felt his feet stumble, but he steadied himself and hunched his shoulders. Connie ran after him. She clawed at his arm, and spun him around. She was weeping now, the tears slick on her cheeks, her face flushed red from the aching pain that clamped down like a heavy weight in her chest. She glared at Blake and her words were like a lash.

  “I don’t want to live with a
disabled man!” she screamed at him. “And that’s what you are right now. Not because you’re blind Blake, but because your heart is hollow. It’s so filled with sadness and misery and self-pity that there is no room for me. Your blindness isn’t your problem. The grief that you cling to is your problem. Let it go!”

  “It’s who I am!” Blake shouted. “It’s who I have become. Not because I wanted to, but because I was punished. You don’t have to live with it, Connie. I do!”

  “No!” she screamed, her voice becoming shrill and piercing. “You don’t, Blake!” You can let it go, free yourself of it all, and make room for me in your life and your heart. The blindness doesn’t affect how I feel about you!”

  He stood, his lungs filling like a bellows with great ragged trembling breaths. She could see the fury on his face but she stood braced before the storm of it, defiant and desperate to appeal to him.

  “Go!” Blake shouted again. “Get away from me.”

  “I wish I could!” Connie cried. “But I can’t, Blake. I can’t walk away from the only man I’ve ever met who has seen the real me – seen through me – who has seen my soul…” her voice went silent suddenly and dropped to a whisper, “and who adores me…” she repeated the words he had revealed when she had seen the portrait.

  Blake felt the shock of it like a physical slap. His voice became empty, dead on his lips. “How I feel about you doesn’t matter,” he spoke slowly, his voice rumbling like an uneasy volcano. “This is not about my feelings. It’s about your future, Connie, and all the happiness you would be giving up. I can’t live with your seeping sadness. I’ve suffered enough pain already.”

  Blake had wandered down to the edges of the surf. Wavelets lapped around their feet and splashed up their legs. Connie barely seemed to notice.

  “I know you’ve suffered,” Connie’s voice cracked with her frustration. “But it’s time to let that go, Blake. If you want me in your life, you have to make space for me in your heart – enough space so that Chloe’s tragedy and every other setback is just a shadow.”