Under the Overpaint

They give me a workroom on the second floor, an old morning room with north light, except that the north light is wasted on a household that does not seem to keep mornings, and so I work the panel by lamp and by the daylight nobody else uses, and for three days I almost convince myself that nothing happened in the library.

This is a skill of mine, too. I am very good at deciding that nothing happened. I have a sister who is a genuine prodigy, who at fourteen had a piece in a real gallery and a write-up with her photograph, and I learned early and thoroughly the art of standing in a room where something is happening to someone else and deciding, for my own survival, that nothing is happening at all. So when a thousand-year-old man, though I do not yet know to call him that, tells you that you smell of every colour at once and then visibly restrains himself from crossing a room, you set up your easel, you decant your solvents, and you decide that nothing happened.

The panel will not let me.

I start, as you always start, conservatively, at the edge, in a place where a mistake will not show: the lower corner, where the original ground meets the frame, where the overpaint laps over onto wood it has no business touching. I roll a cotton swab the size of a match-head, I wet it with the gentlest solvent in the kit, the one that will lift a modern grime and nothing older, and I touch it to the dead black of the widow's gown, and the black gives.

It should not give, not to this. The black is the lie, the centuries-later black, but a centuries-later black is still old, still set, still stubborn. This lifts like it has been waiting. It comes away on the swab in a smear the colour of a bruise, and under it, where the obedient black widow's gown was, there is a band of deep red going to gold at the hem, a gown for a woman who was not in mourning, a gown for a woman who was going somewhere, and I sit back so fast my stool scrapes, because my hands have started before my head has agreed to anything, because I am not cleaning this painting so much as I am being told, swab by swab, what it actually says.

And I am humming.

I notice it the way you notice you have been holding your breath. I am humming, under the work, a small repetitive falling tune, three notes down and one back up, the shape a tune makes when it is meant to put a child to sleep, and there are words to it, and the words are not in any language I have ever studied, and yet I know them, they are right there, soft and certain at the back of my mouth: dormi, dormi, the rest of it just beyond reach, dormi and a word like umbra and a word like mille. I have never learned a syllable of Latin. I took French in school and was middling at it. I close my mouth so hard my teeth click, and the tune goes on anyway, behind my closed teeth, like a draught under a door.

"You sing while you work," says Sabre.

He is in the doorway. I do not know how long. The candle in the sconce by his shoulder has not flinched, which means he came in the way the cold comes in, without disturbing the air, and I am beginning to assemble a list of things about this house that do not disturb the air and I do not like the list.

"Sorry," I say. "Bad habit. It helps me concentrate." I do not tell him I do not know the song. You do not tell the difficult recluse client, in his candlelit house with no mirrors, that you have caught yourself singing a lullaby in a dead language. You clean his painting and you take his money and you go home to your flat and your sister's voicemails and your manageable, mirrored, ordinary life.

"It's a beautiful habit." He has not come further than the threshold. I am noticing that he never comes further than he means to, that there is always a visible governor on him, a man driving a very fast car at a careful speed because he knows exactly what it would do if he let it. "What have you found?"

I almost say nothing. It is what I would say to any other client, the senior conservator's smooth deflection, we are at a very early stage, it is too soon to characterise the underlayers, all the careful nothing that keeps a difficult patron at the comfortable distance the studio prefers. But there is a hunger in the question that I recognise, because it is the same hunger I have, the restorer's hunger, the need to know what is actually under there, and I have never in my life been able to refuse another person who wanted the truth of a painting as badly as I do.

I show him the corner, the red-and-gold under the black, because it is my job and because, God help me, I want to. "She wasn't a widow. Someone made her one. They took a woman in a travelling gown and turned her into a respectable matron who stays home." I gesture at her smoothed face, her lowered hand. "And they took her hand down. It's raised, underneath. I can't prove that yet, I'd want infrared before I touch it, but it's raised. She's reaching for the doorway, or warding it. I'll know which when I'm in."

Something happens to his stillness. I have spent three days learning his stillness the way I learn a varnish, and this is a new fracture in it, fine and deep. "Warding it," he says.

"Or reaching. I said I don't know yet."

"No." He looks at the panel, and there is on his face that turning weather again, but slower now, sadder, a man looking at a photograph of a house he used to live in. "You don't yet."

There is a weight on the word yet that I do not like, the same weight a doctor puts on a word when the news is bad and they have decided to let you arrive at it in stages. I have heard a great many people say a great many small words as though they were heavy. My sister Bea says my name that way, when she calls and I do not answer fast enough, Lio with a little freight of disappointment on it, as if I have already, by existing, slightly let her down. But this is not that. This is a man looking at a painting of a woman in a doorway and saying you don't yet as though he knows precisely what I will find when I am in, and is grieving it in advance, and has decided, for reasons I cannot fathom, to let me find it anyway.

I should let it go. I am very good at letting things go. Instead I hear myself say, "You don't keep any mirrors."

The fracture in his stillness becomes a thing he decides to allow. He almost smiles. "No," he agrees. "I find I don't care for them."

"Everyone cares for mirrors. Especially "

"Especially the vain?" Now it is a smile, dry, old, and it does not reach the exhaustion under his eyes, nothing reaches that. "I am extremely vain, Lio. I have had a very long time to practise. But a mirror only ever tells you the same thing, in the end, and after the first several hundred repetitions you would rather not be told." He steps back, one step, into the dark of the corridor, governing himself, always governing. "You'll want better light for the infrared. Yves will arrange whatever you need. Charge it to me. Charge everything to me." A pause, and then, lower, as though it has been pulled out of him against a great resistance: "I find I want very much to know what she was reaching for."

"You could just tell me," I say, "if you already know. You keep looking at her like you've met."

He goes very still. For a moment I think I have lost the commission, that I have said the unsayable thing to the difficult patron, and then he does something I do not expect. He laughs, once, soundless, the laugh of a man at his own funeral. "She kept her hand raised," he says, "for a long time. Longer than was wise. I used to think it was a warning." He looks at the panel, not at me. "I have had a great deal of time to decide I was wrong about what she meant by it, and no way at all to ask her." Then, before I can take hold of any of that, before I can ask how a man looks at a four-hundred-year-old painting and says I used to think, he adds, light, courteous, ruinous: "Be careful with her, Lio. Whatever you scrape back. Some images were painted over for the kindest of reasons. You will not always be able to tell, under the raking light, whether you are saving a thing or letting it out."

He is gone the way the cold goes.

I sit in the wasted north light with a swab going dry in my fingers and the falling tune still behind my teeth, dormi, dormi, and I look at the woman in the doorway, at her raised hand coming up out of four hundred years of obedient black, and I understand two things at the same time, and neither of them will let me sleep.

The first is that he did not say it the way you speak of a painting. He said it the way you speak of a person.

The second is worse, and it arrives in the grain beneath my own overpaint, in the part of me that hummed a dead language at a swab, and it is not a thought so much as a certainty laid down under everything I believe about my own life: I am not restoring her.

I am uncovering myself.