My sister left me the gallery on condition that I learned to look at a picture. Those were the words in her will. As I had been painting pictures on public-house signs for forty-three years, I considered this unnecessary.
Her son Leo considered it typical.
“There are three keys,” he said. “When you’ve got them, you can open the back room. She put your letter in there.”
“Why didn’t she post it?”
“You posted the last one back.”
This was true. It had arrived on my birthday and had begun with an observation about sentimentality. I sent it back unopened beyond the first paragraph. Then she died, which was an unreasonable way of having the last word.
I had come for the letter. I intended to sell the gallery and divide the proceeds with Leo, who had spent three years arranging his mother’s pillows and defending her against soup. He wanted to leave town. He said the sale would help, and that he did not want to spend the rest of his life answering questions about her.
The gallery occupied a narrow house. Its front room held eight pictures, a stool, and a locked case containing three keys. Beside the case were three brass number wheels. Set the correct three digits, Leo said, and the case would open. He had built the mechanism for her while she could still stand at the easel.
On the wall above it, her handwriting read: EACH ANSWER IS IN A PICTURE. COUNT WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN ASKED TO SEE.
“Couldn’t you just tell me the numbers?”
“She made me promise.”
“She isn’t here.”
He sat on the stool. “I am.”
I hung up my coat.
The first card said: HOW MANY APPLES ARE BEHIND THE BOWL?
There was one still life: a blue bowl, a folded cloth, and five apples. Three were in front, two behind. I set the first wheel to two.
Nothing happened, of course. I had two more numbers to find.
The second card said: HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT YOU?
The large painting opposite showed a crowded bus. I counted nine passengers facing outward. Then I noticed a man looking down at his boots and took him out of the count. Eight.
Leo offered me tea. I refused it. He made himself some, which was wise.
The last card said: IN THE HARBOUR PICTURE, HOW MANY WINDOWS LET YOU SEE THE SEA?
The remaining paintings included two landscapes and a portrait of our mother. One landscape showed a row of houses along a harbour. Four windows reflected bright blue. I took it for sky: the houses faced away from the water. In the other landscape, a room overlooked a square of sea through an open window. I knew what a sea view looked like. The harbour houses had none.
Two, eight, zero. The case remained shut.
Leo drank his tea.
“I could get a screwdriver,” I said.
“You could.”
He sounded exactly like her. I told him so, and he put his cup down rather hard.
“She’s been dead for six weeks. I’d like to have my own voice back.”
I looked at the floor. It was the same brown linoleum she had kept since we were girls. Her work had been discussed in magazines, acquired by important collections, and sold for sums that would have bought new linoleum in every house on the street. I had never understood why she didn’t replace it.
“Tea would be good,” I said.
He went to make it. I returned to the apples.
The two behind the bowl were not whole apples. One was a reflection in its glazed side. I should have seen that. I knew more about painting reflections than she did; I had painted a horse in a brewery window with an entire village upside down in the glass.
I changed two to one.
In the bus, I counted eyes. The driver looked at the road. A woman looked at the person beside her. A girl had shut her eyes against the sunlight. Only four people looked straight out of the picture.
I changed eight to four.
The harbour windows still looked like sky. I checked the card again. It asked what I could see, not what the people inside the houses could see.
One, four, zero. Nothing.
I carried my tea to the harbour picture. The reflected blue was broken by the same white sail in three separate windows. A fourth blue window had no sail, but an angled strip of quay crossed its lower corner. You could see the sea in all four, reflected behind you.
I tried four for the final answer.
The case clicked.
“That was quite good,” I said, unwillingly.
Leo came to my shoulder. “You said that last time.”
“What last time?”
“The exhibition. You came, saw these, and said that about the harbour.”
I remembered now. I had come after closing because I did not like the people at her openings. We had talked about reflections, cheerfully for once. Then she had asked whether I planned to keep doing signs forever, and I had gone home.
The three keys were labelled TOP, MIDDLE, BOTTOM. I unlocked the back-room door from top to bottom, since it seemed she had finally tired of subtlety.
Inside were my signs.
Not the actual boards, most of which were still outside pubs. Paintings of them. My black bull swung over a wet pavement. My kingfisher leaned above a canal. My crooked-looking mermaid, who had become less crooked each time I repainted her, stood in four small canvases arranged by date.
On a desk lay the letter.
I sat before opening it. Leo stayed in the doorway.
She did not say she had loved the signs all along. I would have distrusted that. She wrote that for years she had thought repetition a waste of my talent. Painting the mermaid had made her notice that repetition could be revision, and that I had been revising in public while she kept her mistakes turned to the wall.
Then she wrote: I still think you should have taken the commission in the city. You still think I was a snob. Neither opinion has prevented me from looking at your work.
There was a paragraph about how difficult I was to write to. I skimmed that, then made myself read it properly.
At the bottom she asked me to show the paintings if I wanted to, but not to call the exhibition a reconciliation. She had not asked my permission to paint my work, and she was leaving me the choice of what happened to hers.
“Did you know?” I asked Leo.
“I brought some of them down from her studio. She wanted to do the mermaid again.”
I examined the last mermaid. My sister had got the weight of the hanging board wrong. Too little iron at the top. But the pavement beneath it was lovely, and the patch of sky beside its tail.
“We could sell the building after a month,” I said.
Leo nodded. “A month would be fine.”
“You wouldn’t have to sit here.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
We opened the shutters. I took a card from the desk and wrote my sister’s name on it, followed by PAINTINGS OF SIGNS BY ADA WREN. Then I crossed that out. It sounded as though I had painted the canvases.
I started again: MIRIAM WREN: LOOKING AT HER SISTER’S WORK.
Leo read it. “She’d have argued with that.”
“Good,” I said.
He laughed, and for a moment I heard neither of us sounding like her.
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