The Ecliptic

One

Anything I did not know about Jim Culvers before I arrived in London, I learned within a month of working for him. His reputation was founded on a conventional style of portraiture: straightforward paintings of angry young Teds and Soho brothel-workers in various stages of undress, which the critic in my borrowed copy of The Burlington Magazine had described as ‘formally impressive and profoundly unspectacular’. By 1957, when I became his assistant, Jim had already begun to withdraw from this traditional approach and was trying to perfect a credible method for removing the subjects from his portraits altogether. A typical Culvers picture, in those days, would depict an empty room (usually some dim view of his studio), rendered in thick strokes of muted colours, at the heart of which would be a vacant armchair or a single lip-smirched water glass. He invited models to pose for long durations, painting nothing until they were gone. To collectors, he claimed the new portraits showed the characteristics of the sitter in the barest terms, through revealing the shape of their absence. ‘Any space,’ he liked to postulate, ‘is altered when a person leaves it: so I paint that.’ Their response would be to ask him what he thought of Edward Hopper, and this would rile him so much that he would raise his asking price unreasonably.

Jim had a two-room studio on the ground floor of a mews house in St John’s Wood. His gallery, the Eversholt, afforded him a monthly allowance for rent, materials, and what they called ‘subsistence’ (in Jim’s case, this amounted to little except whisky and greyhound stakes). Out of this money, he paid me six pounds a week in wages, and I was given free lodging in his attic. It was a damp and charmless space up there, little more than a storage loft. The ceiling bellied when it rained. Pigeons flew in through the dormers in summertime. A burning-coal smell emanated from the neighbourhood chimneys. But there was a straight aspect to the roof that I could set a canvas underneath, and, if I craned my head out of the window, I could see all the way to Regent’s Park. I considered myself fortunate to have my own workspace and to be amidst the London art scene, albeit peripherally.

In those first few months with Jim, I was no more than an errand-runner. I procured new paints for him from a backstreet dealer in Covent Garden and took his pictures to the framers’ on Marylebone High Street, going back and forth on the bus with his suggested amendments, until he was content. I delivered bags of his dirty clothes to the launderette and made his lunch each day — always the same Cheddar cheese and pickle sandwich on wholemeal bread with the crusts removed and two thick circles of cucumber in each triangular half.

It did not take me long to realise that I could fit my own work around these artless tasks. While I waited for a pair of Jim’s shoes to be repaired, for example, I would sit by the canal in Little Venice with a flask of tea, sketching people in the mist, making studies of the bridges and the skittering London traffic. I would save all the brown bags that Jim’s whisky bottles came in, storing them inside my purse to use as drawing paper. I pinned my hair up with pencils, cross-boned, like an Oriental lady, so I would always have them to hand.

I discovered I could achieve more in a few stolen moments than Jim Culvers could muster in a fortnight. He would arrive at the studio at eight o’clock every morning, looking pink-eyed and dejected, and I doubt he ever gave much thought to my whereabouts in the hours before he got there, in the same way a restaurant patron is oblivious to the manoeuvres of the kitchen staff. He never saw me wandering about Regent’s Park just after dawn, when the grass was still etched with frost and the lake had no corrugations, drawing the birdlife and the skyline and the strange pollarded trees: details I would reconstitute in paintings, late at night. There was something about the gathering light of Paddington in the small hours that made its bombed-out spaces seem so vital and romantic, as though each ruin was an untold story. Some mornings, I set up on a wall in Brindley Street, sketching things that were not there, ghosts that lived inside the cavities. Other times, I wandered along the canal and drew the vagrants sleeping on the roofs of empty barges. As long as I made it back to the studio by eight o’clock to greet Jim with fresh currant buns, those precious hours were mine to enjoy.

Before long, I was involved more closely in Jim’s practice. He had failed to convince Max Eversholt, his only benefactor, that the empty-room paintings (‘absence portraits’, as he called them) were worthy of a solo exhibition, and so had backtracked into more familiar territory. I would find subjects for him by taking photographs of people on the street: skiffle groups rehearsing outside coffee bars, bus conductors walking home, rayon-clad girls in cinema queues, boys playing dice on the kerb. If Jim liked the look of someone in these pictures — a particular smile, a dour pout, whichever small quirk captured his imagination — he would pay me a few shillings for the photograph and spend the day copying it in oils. On top of this, I organised his charcoal studies into sketchbooks and dated each drawing so he could track the development of his ideas — he liked to tell me I was keeping a record of his downfall, and I liked to tell him to stop being so bloody miserable.

My time as his assistant lasted nine months. If anyone had deigned to suggest that I was falling in love with James Graham Culvers during that period, I would have protested. Back then, Jim was quite determined to conceal what handsomeness he had with lax grooming and booze. He could go for days without bathing and refused to wash his hair when he was working on a painting. There were times when his sour body odour infused the studio to such a degree that it overwhelmed even the turpentine. After a new work was finished, he would give his hair a close trim with the clippers and saunter in with shaving foam still caught in his ear-folds.

Idle chatter, as a rule, was wasted on Jim. If models began conversations about their holidays, he would purse his lips and nod, letting them trail off into monologue. But he would consider his reflection in the windows as I prepared his easel in the mornings. His eyes were too fat, so he said (‘like a sheep’s’); his front teeth too far apart, his chin too big, his nose protuberant (‘like a bloody outboard motor’). It was true that the constituents of his face were quite unusual, but there was still a pleasant balance to them in assembly. After a while, I came to understand that his complaints spoke more of connoisseurship than of vanity. He was intrigued by imperfections, could wonder for hours at the tessellated cracks in a china plate, at brush-hairs preserved in the gloss of a doorframe, at silly misprints in the newspaper. He believed that if something was flawless, it was artificial and suspicious. ‘All these people you’ve been taking pictures of are much too pretty,’ he would say. ‘Next time, bring me something else. I want ratty hair and scars and bad tattoos. This lot look like they’ve dropped out of a magazine. Even the bus conductor’s got long eyelashes. I’ll have to paint him ten times uglier.’

I came to learn things about Jim that only a wife should have been privy to. I knew the rumbles of his gut, the corns on his feet, the tunes he whistled in the lavatory and the sections of the paper he was partial to. I found out that he had allergies — to peanuts, rhubarb, peaches, crab — and could tell when he had partaken of these foods, even if he swore to me that he had not (the husky throat and rheumy eyes gave him away). He had a joke about Whistler’s mother that I must have heard a hundred times, and there was an anecdote he told about his childhood that always included the same phrase: ‘My old man, you see, was Anglican, and he wanted me to go into the ministry. .’

He was not the sort of man for whom you felt an immediate attraction. The first sight of him did not steal your breath or weaken your knees — and, quite frankly, women of my generation knew better than to expect such things. Instead, over time, he quietly detuned the strings of your heart, until his peculiar key became so familiar that you believed it was the only one. And if my life as a painter had begun in the backcourt of my parents’ tenement, then I owed the rest of my career to Jim Culvers. Being his assistant gave me the chance to develop my own work in privacy, and, without him, those paintings might never have been seen at all. I did not recognise the depth of my affection for him until I no longer had a duty to include myself in his routines.

It was on one of those routine days in January — cold and grey and mizzling — that I heard the bell of the studio ring and went out to let Jim in. I expected he had forgotten his keys again, but when I opened the door I found him standing with three burlap sacks about his ankles. ‘Help us with this stuff’ he said, and carried two of the sacks in with him, leaving me to manage the fullest. It was crammed with several tins of what I thought was ordinary house paint. The worn white labels said:

I hauled them into the studio and Jim made me stack them in a pyramid near the window. ‘If it’s good enough for Pablo,’ he said, ‘then it’ll do for me. Go on, open one up. I want to see what state it’s in.’

I did as I was asked, setting a can on the floor, prising the lid off with a spoon. An ammoniac scent rushed out. The oil varnish had separated from the pigment and made an oozing brown lake on the surface. ‘What is this stuff?’ I said.

He crouched before it, sizing up the swirl of chemicals before him. ‘Magic in a can,’ he said. ‘Everyone used it before the war — we used to joke about Picasso spreading it on toast — but then they had to shut the factory down and you couldn’t find it anywhere. Doesn’t look too bad, this, considering. And I got the job lot for nothing!’ I was about to stir it, but Jim slapped my hand away: ‘Ttt-ttt-ttt. Hang about.’ He stood up. ‘We need to test it. See if it’s still usable. It’s been standing around in a basement for the past twenty years. The pigment will be fine, I reckon, but that binder looks a bit mustardy; we’ll have to siphon it off somehow, or try mixing it in with the tubes we have here.’ He went and unhooked his coat from behind the door, putting it back on.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘Well, I carried that lot all the way from Drury Lane. It’s worn me right out.’ He frisked his pockets for his wallet. ‘Thought I’d just nip home and sleep it off.’

I knew Jim well enough by then to know that ‘sleep it off’ meant ‘pass out drunk’. It was not yet ten o’clock, and there was no reason to assume that he would return before dark.

‘While I’m gone,’ he said, ‘do us a favour and try the stuff out a bit, eh? Have a play with it and see what it can do. Use as many canvases as you like, but don’t waste the paint — for all I know, they’re the last ten pots of it in London.’

I spent that entire day in the thrall of Ripolin, experimenting with its qualities. It was a vexing, stubborn material that had to be coaxed into obedience. I tried a number of methods with limited results, draining one of the tins, until I found the perfect balance in the mixture: two parts oil paint, two parts turpentine, one part Ripolin, thoroughly stirred. This produced dense blocks of colour in its own right, but the trick was to undercoat the canvas with a lot of white gesso. When I did this, the paint became more opaque and also more fluid. It enabled me to hide the brushstrokes and, at the same time, allowed for subtleties of gesture that gave each image a fuller character. Every colour had resonance, a kind of visual hum.

Jim showed up the next morning, headsore and bedraggled. He did not appear to remember asking me to test the Ripolin — or even that he had acquired it — because he just went about his typical routine. It was only after he finished his coffee that he noticed the pyramid of cans and saw the canvas leaned against the wall, turned inwards. ‘Did you manage to get to grips with that stuff then?’ he asked, as though it had been there in his studio for weeks.

‘You were right,’ I told him. ‘It’s magic.’ I brought the canvas over.

Jim’s eyelids unclenched. The picture I had made was built from memory: a portrait of him in a grey raincoat, striding along a hidden pavement. There was a sense of movement to his body, created by the Ripolin and my own rather hurried technique, as well as an unnerving stillness to the backdrop, a screen of buildings I had assembled from part-remembered walks around the city. Most of the canvas was taken up by this patchy architecture, and, because I had been aiming to check how the paint responded to different applications, the landscape it created was loosely connected: doomy red fire escapes here, watery grey brickwork there; glutinous pink railings, white-leafed trees, and strange yellow windows. And yet the disparate elements of the painting somehow coalesced. All the little experiments, seen as one, made something original. There was Jim, a concentrated figure wandering across the bottom of the image, with London shimmering, faltering, transforming in his wake. It was one of the most arresting pieces I ever made.

All Jim said was, ‘Blimey,’ which I took as a strong affirmation. He must have looked at that painting for a good forty minutes, asking me how I had achieved certain effects, wanting to know about the mix ratios I had tried with the Ripolin. He particularly liked the sense of animation it gave to the human figure — it was not clear if he recognised his own likeness in it — and I spent some time explaining and demonstrating how to handle the paint to get this result. After a while, Jim took the canvas and put it back against the wall, leaning inwards, as before. I did not know if he would let me keep it, given that I had made it with his materials, his brushes, and the longer it stayed in the unlit corner of his studio, the more I resented the fact that he had left it there to gather dust. For the next fortnight or so, the canvas remained unchecked, unmoved, while Jim went about compiling his own works in Ripolin: the same old faces copied from photographs, only brighter, punchier, more effervescent.

Then, one evening, as I was reading in my attic room, I heard the rumble of a motorbike engine in the avenue below. I looked down from the dormer to see a squat man in a tight leather jacket removing his crash helmet. He shook his head as though to free some lengthy mane of curls, though all he had was a crescent of sad white hair that hung around his baldness like a shower curtain. Stepping out of the sidecar was Jim Culvers, who, judging by the indelicacy of his voice when he called out ‘Oi, Max! I forgot the key!’ was at least seven whiskies into a stupor. The bell rang — one long, urgent trill.

I put on my clothes and went down to let them in. Vernon Glasser, the American sculptor from the upstairs studio, was out on the landing in his vest. ‘He’s lucky I was only sleeping in there,’ he said. ‘Tell him, this happens again, I’ll bring out the bolt-cutters. You tell him Vern Glasser said that.’ He trundled away, covering his ears.

At the door, Max Eversholt was courteous enough to introduce himself. ‘Very sorry about the hour,’ he said, his accent prim and pleasant. ‘We shan’t keep you long.’ He appeared embarrassed by Jim’s inebriation, and kept talking to Jim as though he were a dog: ‘Come on now, James. There you go. Watch your head there. Good chap.’

Jim groped around for the studio lights. ‘Max has come to check up on me. Haven’t you, Max?’

‘I believe I was invited,’ said Eversholt, zipping off his jacket. He hooked it with one finger and slung it over his shoulder.

‘Pssh. Don’t listen. He’s a crook.’ Suddenly, Jim looked panicked. ‘Ellie — what did you do with those sketchbooks?’

‘They’re in the trunk with the blankets.’

While Jim went to rummage for them, Eversholt inspected an assortment of canvases near the doorway. He examined each painting for no more than a few seconds, tilting his head to one side, tilting it back again. ‘These are certainly better,’ he said. ‘I can see a style emerging.’

‘Emerging?’ Jim said. He had the sketchbooks now and dumped them on the floor. ‘Don’t come in here using words like that. Emerging. I’m not forcing them out of my arse.’

Eversholt rubbed a daub of wet paint from his fingers. ‘Careful, James. Ladies present.’

‘You can say anything in front of her,’ Jim said. ‘She’s heard it all.’

‘How many has he had?’ I asked Eversholt.

‘Oh, this is nothing. I’ve seen him a lot worse than this.’ He waved Jim over. ‘Come on, old chap, let’s have a look at those sketches.’

Jim slurred back at him, ‘Nah, I’ve changed my mind. They’re no bloody good. I can’t even draw straight.’

‘Don’t be a fool now. Pick them up.’

Grudgingly, Jim stooped to gather them. He took so long about it, wobbling on his haunches, that I went over to help him. ‘Which one is the best?’ he whispered to me, and I whispered back: ‘That one.’

Jim collapsed onto his rear, clawing at the floorboards. I gave Eversholt the sketchbook and he just nodded, skimming through it. After a moment, he said, ‘You’re getting there, Jim, getting there. I must say, it’s nice to see you drawing again — I can tell you’re really honing something here. It’s attractive work. But it needs more time. I’ll come back in a month or two, and then we can review things.’

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Jim said. ‘There’s more. Loads of it. Show him, Ellie.’

I was not sure what he was referring to. His best work had already been dismissed.

‘Let him see the On High pile,’ he explained. ‘Go on.’

I looked at him, unsure.

‘Go on. Show him.’

Eversholt followed me to the furthest aspect of the studio, where Jim liked to store all the paintings he had lost the motivation to complete. He called them the On Highs, as in ‘on hiatus’.

Eversholt went through them with a void expression — it was such a complete look of dispassion that he must have practised it each night in the bathroom mirror, smoothing out the tell-tale wrinkles. He was wearing the oddest plum-coloured brogues and their thick heels stayed planted as he browsed the paintings. ‘I fear there’s a long way to go with these, Jim,’ he called, and started putting on his jacket. ‘Very glad to see the work, though, as always. I shall tell everyone you’ve been hard at it.’

‘Christ, don’t start spreading that around,’ Jim called back.

Then, as Eversholt was heading through into the main room to say his farewells, he stopped, sighting the back of my Ripolin canvas against the other wall. ‘No, that’s not for sale — I mean, that’s not really anything,’ I muttered, as he went to turn the picture round. Eversholt did not listen. He rolled his eyes over the image, plain-faced. It must have been that he stood there looking at it for some time, because Jim staggered in and leaned against the architrave. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d all gone quiet in here.’

Eversholt circled his hand about the picture. ‘Tell me what’s happening with this. What’s the thinking?’

‘Long story, that,’ Jim said.

‘Self-portraits are indulgent. Difficult to sell.’

Jim sniffed. He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘That’s just an experiment.’

I wanted to interject and explain, but I also wanted to give Jim the chance to speak up for me.

‘Always thought that was a lot of guff, myself,’ said Eversholt. ‘This is giving me the shivers. Ditch everything else, is my advice. Give me another ten or twelve of these little experiments, if that’s what you’re calling them. Then you can have your show. I’m thinking, end of August. September at a push.’

‘Ah, Max. So many imperatives. I love the way you talk.’ Jim grinned, turning back for the main room. ‘I’m sorry, old pal, but you seem to be mistaking art for press-ups. I can’t just drop and give you twenty. I’m a painter. The inspiration comes, the inspiration goes.’ He raised his arms. ‘Are you hearing this, Ellie? This is what you can expect. It’s all a lot of dancing for the organ-grinder from now on.’

‘If you need another show of my good faith, that’s fine. How much?’ Eversholt reached into his jacket and pulled out a chequebook. I watched the whole thing happening without saying a word.

‘I’m not interested in your money,’ Jim said. ‘But you can make one of those out to someone else, if you don’t mind. Last name’s Conroy. First name’s Elspeth. Don’t ask me to spell it, ‘cause I’m pissed, but I reckon fifty pounds’ll be fair enough to begin with.’

Eversholt started writing the cheque. ‘Who the bloody hell is Elspeth Conroy?’

‘She is,’ Jim said, pointing at me. ‘Artist-in-residence.’

Eversholt slowly pivoted his neck. ‘You did this?’

I hardly knew what to say. The blood rushed out of my head. My palms went very cool. ‘Yes. Well, it just sort of came together really. Bit of a fluke.’

‘Rubbish,’ Jim said. ‘She has more of them. Upstairs. Tons of them. They’re loads better than anything you’ll find in this dump.’

Eversholt tore off the cheque and shut the book. ‘Show me.’

‘More directives,’ Jim said. ‘You should really learn some manners.’

‘You’re right. Let me try that again.’ Until then, Eversholt had regarded me with the passing interest he might otherwise have afforded a chambermaid or a stable boy. Now I had his full attention. ‘Miss Conroy, darling,’ he said, ‘if you’d let me take a quick look at your work, I’d be delighted. In the meantime—’ He came forward, offering the cheque. ‘Call this a down-payment on what I’ve seen so far.’

Within a few months, Max had organised a show at the Eversholt Gallery, in which a small selection of my canvases was presented in a hallway before the main exhibition. The headline attraction was Bernard Cale, a welterweight boxer turned artist, who had forged a good career making ink-and-gouache drawings of the fights. He was popular with male collectors at the time, as his pictures were brutal and unflinching, and there was a certain macho prestige to be gained from hanging a Bernie Cale in your study, all those exploding lips and broken noses to discuss over brandy and cigars. I respected the earnest themes of Cale’s pictures and admired the skill of their construction, so I was pleased to see my work displayed as an accompaniment to his. No one who attended the show arrived with the intention of seeing my gloomy bombsite paintings, but plenty stopped to look at them.

Jim turned up at the private viewing, mercifully sober. He stood smoking in the hallway with Bernie Cale himself, examining my favourite piece in the collection: Stage Ghost Rehearsal, 1958. It showed the shell of an old theatre in Kennington, upon which I had overlaid a new façade in thinned-out tones of grey; behind the pale windows, I had delicately painted the wraith of a man holding a straight-blade razor, his cheeks lathered in foam, and scratched the reflection of a young girl into his shaving mirror. ‘Bernie likes this one best,’ Jim said. ‘He thinks it’s menacing. I think it’s sad. Come and settle the argument.’

Cale nodded. ‘I want to know what that bloke is thinking. Can’t help but worry for the little ’un, I must say.’ He moved closer to the painting, blinking at it. ‘They all sort of do that, in their way — I was just telling Jim: they all make you feel some-thing — but this one puts me on edge. It’s hard to do that with a picture.’

‘Thank you, Bernie. That’s kind of you.’

‘What’re you thanking me for? I didn’t paint the bloody thing.’

‘Don’t leave us hanging,’ Jim said to me, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘Are we supposed to feel sad, frightened — what?’

I said, ‘It depends on who’s looking.’

‘Hear that, Bernie? It’s a draw.’

‘I want a refund,’ said Cale, smirking.

At the end of the evening, I found Jim waiting on the pavement outside. ‘Thought someone should walk you home,’ he said. ‘Unless you’ve got a limo coming.’

I was still living rent-free in the attic room in St John’s Wood, and I had given no thought to the prospect of finding my own studio. At Max’s urging, I was no longer ‘cheapening myself’ by working as an assistant, so I did not have the modest wages to sustain me. Instead, I withdrew funds daily from Max’s ‘down-payment’, half of which I had sent to my parents in Clydebank the moment his cheque cleared in my account. I felt, in that strange period, as though I was caught like a feather on a draught. It was clear that the course of my life depended on the outcome of the entrance hall show, but I could not tell in which direction it was going to propel me. ‘I was going to take the bus,’ I said.

We walked down Cork Street together. It was a windless night but the cold still pinched and I had not brought a coat. Jim saw that I was shivering and said, ‘A gentleman would probably offer you his blazer.’

‘He would.’

‘But then you’d know he’d burned his shirt twice with the iron. What the heck—’ He removed his jacket and I stopped so he could cast it round my shoulders. And, turning, he showed me the singe-marks on his back: two light brown impressions at the spine.

‘You had the heat too high.’

‘Well, I know that now.’

‘I appreciate the effort. You look very smart.’

He shrugged. ‘Warmer yet?’

‘A bit.’

We were at Baker Street before he said a word about the show. It was expressed almost in resignation. ‘That painting Bernie liked — the one with the bloke shaving — you’ve got something there. If I tried to paint a scene like that, I’d get the composition wrong. But you know exactly how much of the little girl’s face to show in the mirror. It’s got emotions in it most of us would shy away from.’

I found it hard to walk and feel such gladness all at once. ‘Thank you. It really means a lot to hear that, Jim.’

‘Look, I’m not saying they were all great. Don’t start leaping in the air.’ He swiped at his nose a few times with the crook of his wrist. ‘If the whole show was that good, I wouldn’t have stuck it out all night.’ He walked me halfway across the road, his hand on the small of my back. ‘Now you’d better hope nobody buys it, eh?’ A car slowed down for us and blinked its headlights. ‘At last, a decent citizen.’ He gave a thumbs-up to the driver as we passed by the bonnet.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said.

He was a few strides ahead of me now and had to stop. ‘Don’t stand about, I’m freezing,’ he said.

‘What did you mean by that?’

Traffic shone against his back. He blew into his fists. ‘Come to the pub with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘No, I’ve already had too much to drink.’

‘I know. Two glasses is your limit. Just — wait a mo.’ And hanging an arm out into the road, he was able to flag an approaching cab. It pulled over with its window down. ‘Maida Vale, mate,’ Jim told the driver. ‘The Prince Alfred.’ He opened the door for me. ‘Come on then, or you won’t get your answer.’

When we reached the pub, he did not go straight up to the bar to get a whisky, as I expected him to. He steered me to the far end of the room instead, and called out to the landlord on his way: ‘I’ll start with a double, Ron. Leave it there for me.’

‘Who’s this with you?’ said the landlord.

‘Mind your own.’

‘A bit too nice for this place, ain’t she? You want to take her somewhere proper.’

‘Oh, she won’t be here for long, don’t worry.’

He took me to a quiet table in the corner: a bench-seat upholstered in tartan. ‘This is where I do my best thinking,’ he said. ‘Grab a pew.’

I pulled out a stool and sat down. He took the bench opposite and looked at me, amused at some private thought. ‘Other way,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘Swivel round. You need to face the other way.’

I did as I was told.

There was a picture on the wall I realised was Jim’s — a portrait, done in oils, of a soldier in a beret, the fumes of a cigarette coiling up around his face. It was a small, uncomplicated painting. The soldier’s grinning features were remarkably well made. Jim had captured an attitude in the brushstrokes: helpless but defiant. ‘You’ve got to hold on to the best ones,’ he said. ‘Keep something for yourself, that’s all I mean. I could’ve sold that for a fortune once, but I chose not to. Best decision of my life.’

I stood up to get a closer view. ‘Why not hang it in your flat, or at the studio?’

‘I like it here where folks can see it. And, you know me, I tend to stop in for a drink occasionally.’

‘What if it gets stolen?’

‘Ron keeps a lookout. And someone had to elevate the decor in this place. They had some stupid cartoon of a horse up there before I got to it.’ He came to stand beside me. I could smell the linseed on him. When I moved to glance up at his face, I found that he was staring only at the portrait. His eyes were glossed and bright. ‘Honestly, I wish I could’ve sent it to the lad after I painted it, but I did it from a sketch. He died before we left Dunkirk. Wouldn’t know it from that grin, though, would you? Poor sod didn’t know what he was in for.’ Jim coughed abruptly. ‘Anyway, that’s all I wanted to show you.’ He nudged his shoulder into mine. ‘Don’t tell anyone you nearly saw me cry. I have a reputation to uphold.’

We stayed at the Prince Alfred long enough to have one drink, and then he walked me home. Coming through the frosted avenues of Little Venice, we were both trembling and tired, and I thought that he might put his arm around me then, in solidarity if nothing else. But he kept his hands inside his pockets all the way to St John’s Wood. We talked only of domestic matters: which place on the high street should he take his shirts to now for laundering? Which bakery was it that made the loaf he liked? He was readying himself for life without me. As we headed down the mews, he kicked at the cobbles and said, ‘I’ll probably just kip on the studio floor tonight then.’ I could not tell if he was being candid or suggestive, and we reached the front door before I could respond. ‘Well, it’s no bother,’ he said. ‘I’m used to it by now.’ He let us inside and unlocked the studio. Turning on the lights, he loitered in the threshold, thumbing the latch. He seemed to have something else to say to me besides ‘Goodnight’, but that was all he offered. I was left to carry his blazer up the dingy stairs, alone.

Perhaps the deflation of this moment was what made me take my consolations elsewhere. I felt so heartened by the sight of every title crossed out on the gallery’s price list at the end of my show’s run: all ten of the canvases were sold within a week. I allowed myself to absorb the compliments that Max passed on from collectors, strangers whose attentions would otherwise have meant nothing. More than this, I saw my name up in gilt letters outside the Eversholt, like the sign of a department store, and mistook it for accomplishment.

After that entrance hall show, I did not need to worry about stealing time to sketch, though I still got up at six every morning to go out with my pencils. Max arranged a studio for me in Kilburn, with an adjoining flat, and I was promised the same monthly stipend that Jim received for materials and subsistence. I felt glad of these developments, but sorry to vacate my tiny attic room, whose limitations had somehow influenced the paintings themselves, compacting each landscape, hunching every figure, cropping off so many heads and bodies, distorting all the viewpoints. Above all, I did not want to leave Jim. I had grown so reliant on our closeness, so used to the sound of his downtrodden voice, and even to the scent of him. But I could not be the kind of woman who allowed her aspirations to be stalled by sentiments like these, especially when they were yet to be requited. Jim Culvers would go on surviving, whether I was there to set up his easel every morning or not, and I expected him to stay exactly where he was forever, so I might call on him each week and he might miss me between visits.

On the day I moved out of the mews house, he stood in the doorway of his studio, watching me drag my suitcase down the stairs. He did not offer to help, just waited there, saying nothing, while I heaved the case from step to step. When I reached the bottom, he said, ‘You’ll have to get used to this, won’t you? Lugging your gold bars around.’

I leaned on the balustrade, catching my breath. ‘It’s just a few library books.’

‘I think you’re meant to give those back.’

‘Ah, but then I’d have to pay the fines.’

The suitcase burst open and a few of the hardbacks tumbled down the stairs. Finally, Jim came to assist me, collecting them. ‘The Sea-Wolf. The Reef. Billy Budd. . Never had you pegged as a mariner.’

‘Well, they happen to be classics.’

‘I’ll take your word for it. Here.’ He gave them back, and I stuffed them in the case.

I had made an effort to read widely during my time at art school, in the hope that engaging with the right books might stimulate ideas for paintings (and if they broadened my vocabulary along the way, I thought, so much the better). Our exuberant headmistress back at Clydebank High had encouraged all the girls to read Jane Austen and the Brontës—‘And, for heaven’s sake, read Middlemarch,’ she had announced one day, while teaching our domestic science class; ‘ if you never do another sensible thing for the rest of your lives, read Middlemarch!’ I found these books worthwhile and interesting, but perhaps not quite as formative as I expected, like visiting important landmarks I had spent too long imagining. The painter in me was drawn to other voices: to Melville’s artfulness and detail, to Conrad’s gloomy landscapes, to Stevenson’s thrill and adventure. These were the writers whose works I kept returning to. In fact, I reread Moby-Dick and Nostromo so often in those early days with Jim that I found their language mirrored in my journal entries; sometimes, in ordinary letters to my parents, I would copy lines from An Inland Voyage (‘To equip so short a letter with a preface is, I am half afraid, to sin against proportion!’) and felt a slight displeasure when they failed to comment on it.

‘How will you get all this on the bus?’ Jim asked.

‘I won’t. Max organised a van. Should be here any minute.’

‘Good old Max, eh? Where would we be without Max?’

‘Don’t start that again.’

He carried the case to the kerb. The sky was cement-grey and the air was sharpening for hailstones.

‘We’ll not be far from each other,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and visit.’

‘No, you’ll have work to do.’

‘I’ll still have my evenings and weekends.’

‘Ha, right,’ Jim said. He glanced back to the house. ‘Is there more to come down?’

‘Just a box or two.’

‘I’m sure you can manage those on your own.’ He would not look at me. ‘Let’s just shake hands and say cheerio, shall we? No point turning this into a ceremony.’ The skin of his palm was as dry as a dog’s paw, his fingers ridged and calloused.

‘What about this Saturday? I’ll bring you some bagels from the good Jewish bakery. We can have a cup of tea and—’

‘What? Catch up? Talk about the Arsenal?’

‘I was going to say we could look through the racing pages. I don’t mind putting your bets on, still. At the weekend, anyway.’

Jim nodded. His whole face tightened. ‘I think you’re forgetting how Max does things. He’ll have an agenda worked out for you — mark my words. He’ll be getting you in with the Roxborough crowd straight away, and God knows who else. You’re going to be divvied up: a stake in you here, a stake in you there. It’s going to mean deadlines, long hours in the studio. Real work. Why d’you think I needed an assistant in the first place? It wasn’t to keep my attic warm.’ He squinted at the sky. ‘No, you’re not going to be sitting here, eating bagels, reading me the form guide, that’s for sure. And, quite frankly, if that’s how you choose to spend your time from now on, I’ll bloody murder you.’ He sniffed. A white van was approaching now from the high street. ‘I’d do it quickly, mind — quick snap of the neck — you wouldn’t even feel it. That’s how much I respect you.’ Patting my arm, he said, ‘All right then, Miss Conroy. Work hard, keep your nose clean. Forget anything I might’ve accidentally taught you and you’ll be right as rain. Come and say hello to me at your next soirée and make me look important. Off you go.’ He trudged back to his studio, peering at the ground. And that was the last conversation I would have with Jim Culvers for a very long time.

Two

Though all artists strive for recognition, they cannot foresee how it will come to them or how much they will compromise to maintain success. All they can do is cling to the reins and try to weather the changes of their circumstance without altering their course. But no woman can improve her station in life without sacrificing a little of her identity. I was an ordinary girl from Clydebank who had somehow established herself as a prospect on the London art scene: was I really expected to remain unchanged by these experiences? Even my father, who had returned from the frontlines of war apparently untouched by its horrors, was not averse to smoothing out his accent when speaking to the council on the telephone. So how was I to supposed to sign away my life to Roxborough Fine Art and still be that same girl who once painted in her parents’ yard? I tried so hard to preserve the Clydebank in me that I soon realised I was forcing it. Perhaps if there had been some grounding presence in my life at that time — a good man like Jim Culvers who could have given me a shake when I needed it — I might have been able to retain a semblance of my old self. But on the preview night for my first solo exhibition at the Roxborough in 1960, I did not have a genuine friend in the room.

Instead, I was surrounded by interested parties and loathsome hangers-on. People like Max Eversholt, who paraded around the gallery as though he had painted every canvas himself, tour-guiding young women in cocktail dresses from landscape to landscape with a delicate grip on their elbows. He brought other artists over to speak with me, one fashionable face at a time, and presumed we were already acquainted (‘You know Frank, of course. . You know Michael. . You know Timothy. .’) because surely all the painters in London were the best of friends? I stood, awkwardly pattering with them, as I might have talked to distant relations at a wake.

Occasions such as these were geared for Max Eversholt and his type. For him, the gallery floor on a preview night was the one place he felt alive. He dialled up his enthusiasm to the point of theatre, revelling in the glory of his involvement in my work, kissing cheeks, patting backs, savouring the thrum of conversations that ensued. I never understood why all this glitz and pageantry was required to sell a picture — it certainly had nothing to do with art. Every painter I respected worked alone in a quiet room, and the images they made were intended for solemn reflection, not to provide the scenery for obnoxious gatherings of nabobs and batty collectors wearing too much perfume. After a while, the company of such people became the norm, and I was expected not only to enchant them with my work, but also to fascinate them with my personality. If I baulked at placating these strangers, it merely served to enthral them even more.

I hovered in the corner with Bernie Cale for much of that private viewing, and we talked for a while about Jim, wondering aloud where he had gone to, if we had seen the last of him. Bernie had heard all the rumours and was not convinced by any of them. ‘I just don’t see a bloke like Jim lasting ten minutes in New York,’ he said. ‘Too many windbags and clever Dicks. Too much competition. And you know how he feels about American whisky. Single malt’s so dear over there, he’d never make it.’

I laughed at this, recalling the strength of Jim’s feelings on the matter. He had declined to share a drink with his neighbour, Vern Glasser, on so many occasions that, one day, I had asked him why he could not try to be more accommodating. After all, I had to share a bathroom with Vern, and their festering resentment for each other was making the atmosphere in our mews house rather fraught. But Jim said, ‘I’ve nothing against Vernon in particular. It’s just that all he has to drink is that awful stuff from Kentucky, and, frankly, I’d prefer to swig from his toilet.’ How I missed being Jim’s assistant. The simplicity of our life together. That everyday affiliation we used to have. The longer I went without hearing from him, the more I thought of those days in St John’s Wood and yearned to restore them.

‘More to the point,’ Bernie Cale went on, ‘if he’s in the States, wouldn’t somebody have bumped into him by now? I mean, it’s not like you can hide in New York, is it? Not if you’re trying to make a name for yourself. It’s a very big scene over there, but it’s all a bit — what’s the word — incestuous.’ I had never been to New York so was not qualified to pass judgement.

The rumours about Jim’s whereabouts were founded on a scarcity of facts, with the gaps coloured in by guesswork. According to received opinion, he had gone to New York to live with his sister. This theory hinged upon a drunken conversation that Jim was supposed to have had with two regulars at the Prince Alfred pub, who had told Max Eversholt that they had held Jim’s ticket for the boat in their very own hands (they also claimed that Jim had begged the barmaid for a lift to Southampton). The problem with verifying this story was that nobody knew if Jim really had a sister. His drinking pals could not remember what her name was, where she might have worked, or what part of the city she lived in. They did not even know if she was older or younger. Eversholt believed their word was reliable, even if the details rang false when I called the shipping companies: they had no recent record of a passenger named James Culvers. All in all, the New York theory was quite unsound, but we had no other clues to follow up on.

Jim had abandoned his studio just a few weeks after I moved out of his attic. ‘A midnight flit,’ was how Eversholt put it. ‘Ditched everything but his sketchbooks.’ He had shown me the eerie state that Jim had left the space in: all his oil tubes thrown into a box, his easels folded down and stacked, the On Highs painted over with white gesso, leaned up by the window. ‘If you want some extra room, it’s yours,’ Eversholt had said. ‘You can work it out between yourselves when Jim gets back. Assuming he’s not lying dead in a gutter somewhere.’ I was revolted by his glibness, and he quickly apologised. ‘Sorry. That was in poor taste, even for me.’ The prospect of a stranger moving in to Jim’s studio was so dismaying that I agreed to take it on in his absence. I used it mostly to store overflow materials, though sometimes I would go and stand in those empty rooms when I needed separation from a particularly mulish piece of work. At first, it helped me to surround myself with the remnants of Jim’s thoughts, to pace in his old circles. But each time I tried to work there, I felt that I was painting over memories of him, changing the meaning of the space, so I stopped going.

Max was good enough to keep on covering the rent for Jim’s flat in Maida Vale. The landlady was thrilled to tell me all about the dirty pots that had been left to moulder in Jim’s sink, how his bins had not been put out for collection, and how she needed to let herself in with the master key when the smell became insufferable. She had promised to put Jim’s things in a storage locker for me if I paid her twelve shillings a month — I was sure that she would only dump everything and pocket the money, so instead I arranged for someone to pack up Jim’s possessions and kept the boxes in his studio, guessing he would thank me for it some day. But fortnights passed and still no hospital could account for Jim’s admittance when I called around, no duty officer could identify him in the drunk tank, no long-lost friends emerged to claim him as their lodger. I waited months for a letter to arrive, a postcard from America, anything. My heart flinched every time the phone rang, tempering when all I heard was the voice of Max (‘Darling, I’m headed your way. Any chance I might swing by with some friends? They’re itching to see what you’re working on’), or another gentle enquiry from Dulcie Fenton, the director of the Roxborough Gallery, who checked on my progress more frequently than I believed was necessary: ‘Anything you need from this end, just say the word.’ It took me a full year to accumulate the pieces for the show. Through that long, intensive period of work, I attuned myself to the idea that Jim would not be there to see the paintings when they were finished. In fact, I began to wonder if he would ever see another work of mine again. I accepted my aloneness, embraced it as my fate.

‘Paris is a decent bet, I reckon,’ Bernie Cale said, pushing out his lip. He picked off a handful of canapés from the server’s tray as it went by. ‘He used to go on about Giacometti and that crowd all the time.’

‘It’s possible,’ I said, doubting it.

‘Wasn’t he there for a bit, after the war?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t talk about it much.’

‘He’d like the lifestyle, I reckon. And the racing’s not bad either. You might want to put the feelers out, just in case.’

‘Paris is a mystery to me. I don’t have any feelers. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. Par-iss. Pa-ree? Which is it?’

‘Not a clue.’ He looked for somewhere to put his used cocktail sticks, settling for the floor under his boot. ‘I’ll start asking round, if you want. I know a few people.’

‘Sweet of you, Bernie. Thanks.’ I smiled at him, truly meaning it. ‘I was thinking St Ives might be worth looking into — Dulcie says a lot of painters have been moving down to Cornwall lately. I know Jim always loved the city, but he grew up on that part of the coast.’

‘Why’d I always think he was a northerner?’

‘I’m not sure. You must’ve been punched in the head too often.’

‘That’d explain it.’ He stuffed a finger in his ear and waggled it, studying the damp, waxy deposit under his nail. Another server went by with a tray, but this time he let her pass. ‘Well, wherever he’s gone and buggered off to, I’m sure he’s doing all right. Always thought Jim could handle himself, if he needed to.’

Coming from a boxer, this was oddly reassuring. ‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Course I am.’ Bernie stared at me. There was a slothful quality about his features that made him seem permanently on the edge of passing out. But he seemed to take a particular interest in my face that night, appraising it in long, heavy gazes that I tried to ignore. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I hear this lot are taking you to Wheeler’s after.’ He nodded in the general direction of the crowd, but it was clear to whom he was referring: Dulcie Fenton and her two fawning assistants.

‘I’d rather go straight home to bed, to be honest with you.’

Bernie hung a stare on me. ‘If the gallery’s paying, you should have the number two oysters.’

‘I might just do that.’

‘You won’t find better in London. It’s a proper old place is Wheeler’s. They do a cracking dressed crab to start with — make sure you get that. And the turbot, if you’ve room.’ He must have noticed my attention was wandering. ‘Or I could drive you back to Kilburn, if you like. I’m going that way anyway.’

‘I can’t just leave. It’s rude.’

‘Go on, duck out with me. Who’s going to notice?’

‘It’s my show, Bernie. I can’t.’

He scanned the room, deflated. ‘All right. But no one’s here to look at your paintings, you know. They’re here to be seen looking at your paintings. I thought you were clever enough to know that already.’

‘I’m trying to stay open-minded.’

‘Waste of time. Jim’d back me up on that, if he was here.’

I did not take kindly to this summoning of Jim’s name just to unsettle me. ‘So that’s why you came tonight, is it, Bernie? To make the society page?’

He shrugged. ‘I won’t lie. When Max tells me to be somewhere, I show up nice and punctual. It’s a lucky bonus if I like the paintings.’

‘And how do you feel about these ones?’

‘Still making my mind up on that.’

‘Well, no rush. Send me a telegram when you decide.’

This seemed to injure him more than I expected. ‘Actually, I like your other pieces better. Nothing’s really moved me tonight,’ he said.

‘Did you see the diptych yet?’

‘Yeah, that was my favourite. But it didn’t frighten me like the older stuff.’

I could not pretend to Bernie Cale or anyone else that I was satisfied with the work that had been chosen for the show. Only three days before, I had been installing the pieces with Dulcie and had been overcome with such a sense of anti-climax that it took a great deal of resolve not to run out onto Bond Street and hail a taxi home. We had themed and organised the paintings on the walls, rearranged them in every possible configuration before agreeing on the final hanging. The technician had tacked the title cards into place, and Dulcie had said, ‘Wonderful. I think we’ve finally cracked it.’ I had expected this moment to be joyous — the culmination of so much dreaming and endeavour — but I did not feel that way at all. Of the nine canvases that appeared in the show, seven had been worked on steadily, over months, and the labour that underpinned them was much too obvious. I had wanted to include six different pieces: older paintings I had made in a bloodrush late one night in Jim’s attic. These works, I knew, were not as technically refined, but there was an exciting tension in their rawness. Dulcie made me second-guess them: ‘I’m just not sure I understand what you see in them. I mean, they’re certainly striking, and I think they’d be fine in a retrospective further down the line, but we’re looking to establish a genuine presence for you here — you understand that’s the point of this whole exercise, don’t you? It’s a staggered process. It’s fine for the men to go straight for the jugular with their first big show. We have to tantalise a little. Play hard to get. You know what I’m saying. Show the bolder stuff next time, once you have a captive audience.’

Dulcie had a way of turning every dialogue into a soliloquy. She had risen up the echelons at the Roxborough, starting as a secretary to the gallery’s owners, proving her acuity by managing the diaries of artists on the books. Soon, they asked her to stand in as assistant to the director, and, when his tenure ended due to illness, she was made director in her own right. There was no more respected woman on the London art scene at that time. She had established a reputation for intuiting trends in the market and had helped to launch the careers of many artists I admired. Max Eversholt deferred to her instincts on most matters, and I was swayed by her opinions because I thought they were born of an experience greater than my own. When she said that my newest paintings were the most sophisticated, I had to listen. Every time the word ‘collectable’ escaped her lips, it stung my heart and then recoiled into the ether like a wasp to die. Perhaps I would have felt that sting much harder if Jim had been there. Perhaps. Too many perhapses.

As it turned out, the only painting that did not sell at the private viewing was the work I was most proud of: a diptych that Dulcie had agreed to include in the show by way of a compromise. I had called it Godfearing. The left-hand panel was six feet wide and four feet tall, depicting a layered mountainscape in dark grey oils that I had dragged through repeatedly with the edge of a plasterer’s trowel, dulling the paint in sections with the heels of my hands (you could see the grain of my skin impressed in some of them). Across one corner of this image, a dazzle of blurred white stripes was roughly scraped on a diagonal. These stripes flowed into a right-hand panel of the same height and half the width. This smaller canvas showed the hollow profile of a baby. It was a ghostly figure that touched the edges of the space, as though enwombed by the frame; a faceless shape, hiding behind a gauze of pallid streaks. Its arching back was pressed against the left side of the canvas and seemed to hold up the landscape behind it. From afar, the baby appeared to be damming an avalanche with its shoulders, and, in turn, the jagged rocks seemed to keep the baby from toppling backwards. I had mounted the two panels a quarter of an inch apart, hoping to imply a sense of conjunction between them. It was the point of much discussion over dinner at Wheeler’s that night.

‘I’m surprised nobody took it, given the others went so quickly,’ Max Eversholt said. He offered to fill my glass with Chablis and I shook my head. ‘Still, I have to say it looked a tad incongruous. The title alone was a challenge for some people. Ted Seger’s wife didn’t even want to stand near it — and we all know who controls the chequebook in that particular household.’

‘The Segers haven’t bought a piece from us in years,’ was Dulcie’s response. ‘I only invited Ted because he’s a handy chap to have in my pocket in certain situations: tax season looming and all that. Besides, the diptych will find a home eventually. You know what they say in Egypt. .’ This caused both of her assistants to chuckle, and Max threw me a helpless look. I could only blink back at him.

‘We seem to have walked into a private joke,’ he said. ‘How unfortunate.’

Dulcie straightened her face. Her assistants went quiet. ‘Just something we were talking about on the way over here. In Egypt, when you come to the end of a good meal, it’s respectful to leave a small amount of food on your plate.’

‘I see. Respectful to whom?’

‘To the cook.’

‘Well, terrific. Thank heavens you invited so many Egyptians tonight — oh, no, wait,’ Max said, beaming.

‘Not for the first time, old love, you’re rather missing the point.’ Dulcie shucked an oyster, barely gulping. ‘If we’d sold all nine pieces already, what would I tell collectors once the reviews start coming in?’ She made a telephone of her thumb and pinkie: ‘Yes, that’s right, sir, only one left, I’m afraid — oh, by far the most progressive piece in the show, yes, sir — it would take someone with a particular insight just to see its — pardon me? The price? Well, hold on a sec, and let me check the book for you. I’m not sure the artist really wants to part with it. .’ Dulcie retracted her fingers. ‘Don’t you know anything about the market, Max? I thought this was your game.’

‘You’re forgetting who brought Ellie to your attention in the first place. I didn’t hear you patronising me then.’ He gestured at the waiter. ‘Another round of number twos over here, please!’

Dulcie laughed. ‘I do wish they’d call them something else.’

‘Never. It’s half the fun of eating here.’

I had become accustomed to this sort of discussion — the type in which I sat as an observer, hearing my own work being spoken about without being invited to contribute an opinion. I was passed around between people like the head on a coin, regarded only when questions needed a quick answer or small points required clarification.

At least I was not the only person who was adrift from the conversation that night. The young man in the seat opposite had not said a word since ordering his green salad, which he had proceeded to nudge around his plate with a lot of indifferent forkwork. He had told me his name on the pavement outside the gallery, but I had misheard it in the drawl of passing traffic and been too embarrassed to ask for it again. It had sounded like ‘Wilfredson’.

He had a smooth, slender face and an attractive way of smoking with one arm slung over his chair-back, as though entirely bored by everything Max and Dulcie had to say. The jacket he was wearing had neat cross-stitching around the lapel in yellow thread, and he kept more pens in his breast pocket than I suspected he required. His blond hair was thickly pomaded, but it flicked into a strip of tight dry curls above his brow, giving his head a curious lopsidedness. ‘If I might ask something about the diptych,’ he said, gazing at me. ‘Unrelated to the pounds-and-pence of things. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.’

‘Why would she be uncomfortable?’ Dulcie cut in.

‘Sometimes it’s difficult for artists to explain their work.’

‘This is just a friendly dinner, not an interview — I thought I’d made that clear.’

Wilfredson tapped his cigarette. He seemed irritated by the interruption, resetting his gaze on the table before addressing me again. ‘For what it’s worth, I thought it was the only thing in the show of any substance. Which is probably why nobody paid it the least bit of notice all evening. And why no one bought it. Sorry if that’s a bit forthright. It’s only my opinion.’

I was about to say thank you, but Max got his words out first: ‘Dulcie just said the very same thing.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Wilfredson. ‘Though I admit I wasn’t hanging on her every word like you were.’

‘Well, I’m telling you she did. Progressive — that’s what she called it.’

‘Really. Gosh. That’s even more egregious.’

Dulcie wafted the smoke from her face. ‘They warned me you had an attitude. I can see I needn’t have worried.’

Wilfredson gave a flickering smile. ‘I’m just wondering who decided to shunt the best work to the back end of the room tonight. Can’t think it was the artist’s choice. I mean, I know the Roxborough’s a commercial gallery, but do all the hangings have to look like they’ve been thought out by an Avon lady?’

‘Steady on,’ said Max. ‘No need for that.’

Dulcie’s two assistants blushed on her behalf. But she would not be distracted from her plate of oysters. She picked up another shell and tipped its glistering flesh right down her throat. ‘Please, go on. I’m not one to stand between a man and a good tirade.’ She reached for her wine glass. ‘Just keep in mind: we only show the work, we don’t make it. So if you’re going to attack the gallery or its staff in print, don’t be surprised to get uninvited to our shows.’ Dulcie tidied the sides of her grey bob and sat back, awaiting a response.

‘Oh, you’ve nothing to fear in that regard. I don’t mention the names of incidental people in my reviews.’ Wilfredson let ash fall upon his meal. His arm was still slung around the chair. ‘Enough old faces in the room tonight, I noticed. You’ll get your flatter-pieces in the broadsheets, no question. How much do you have to pay those good old boys, by the way, Dulcie? They must charge by the adverb, from what I’ve seen.’

‘Tread carefully now. I’m losing my good humour.’

He grinned. ‘I just thought I’d take the opportunity to let Miss Conroy know what I truly think of her work. Before those other critics go parroting your press release and fill her head with applause. If that’s OK by you.’

‘I’m sure Elspeth can stand to hear an opinion,’ Dulcie said. ‘Even an ignorant one.’

They both looked at me.

‘Actually, I wouldn’t mind knowing what he thought,’ I said.

‘Then I suggest we move our discussion elsewhere,’ Wilfredson replied. ‘I refuse to discuss art in a place like this. Let’s go and have a cocktail.’

Dulcie quaffed her wine. ‘You had me fooled for a moment there. If all you wanted was a quiet drink with Elspeth, you should’ve just said so.’

‘Can’t bear the sight of oysters, that’s all.’

‘I’m not really much of a drinker,’ I said.

Wilfredson paused. ‘Thing is, people tend to resent me for having an opinion, even when they’ve asked for it. So if I buy them the best daiquiri in London first — well, who could possibly resent a man after that? I take it you’ve never had cocktails at the Connaught.’

‘No.’

‘There you are then. A whole new world of happiness awaits.’ He stood up and threw on his coat. ‘I’ll be outside.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Dulcie said. ‘He isn’t worth the trouble.’

Wilfredson turned up his collar. ‘So she’s heard, anyway.’

When he was gone, there was a momentary hush. Max stroked breadcrumbs from the tablecloth. ‘Phew, he’s a bold fellow, isn’t he? What’s his name again?’

‘Wilfred Searle,’ Dulcie said.

‘Searle. He wouldn’t be related to Lord Searle by any chance?’

‘Nephew.’

‘Blimey.’

‘They just gave him Phil Leonard’s column at the Statesman.’

‘Blimey.’

‘Yes, do keep saying that, Max. It’s helping.’

‘But — wait a minute. What happened to Phil Leonard?’

‘Early retirement.’

‘Damn. Poor bugger. Always liked Phil.’ He tossed his napkin to the table. ‘That’s a fair readership, you know. More than a drop in a bucket.’

‘Which is why I invited him to join us tonight. I was told that he loved oysters.’

‘Remarkably poor research on someone’s part.’

‘Quite.’ Dulcie did not glare at her assistants, but they slumped into their chairs at the mere implication.

Then one of them said, ‘It’s not right what he was saying, though. About the diptych. We had some firm enquiries.’

‘Yes, the Levins asked me if the panels could be sold separately,’ Max added. ‘Just the mountains, not the baby. I told them, “How much would I have to pay to separate the two of you?” They seemed to think I was joking. .’

Dulcie ignored him. She reached across the table to pat the back of my hand. ‘On reflection, darling, there’s never a bad time for a daiquiri. And you might enjoy hearing his views. Couldn’t hurt to keep him company.’

‘Is he really that important?’ I said.

‘Not right now. But he will be eventually.’ She patted my hand again, as though we were sisters in church. ‘I was watching him all night — he kept sneaking glimpses at you through the crowd. They’re all the same. Critics. Men. Can’t ever separate the woman from the art.’ She nodded to the glass façade of the restaurant where he was waiting. ‘They don’t make very good friends, I’m afraid, but we wouldn’t want them as enemies. I don’t think he knows which one he wants to be yet.’

My mother had raised me to be wary of good-looking men. But even she — a woman so disheartened by the chores of marriage that she was impervious to romance — would have softened in the presence of Wilfred Searle. He was refreshingly decisive about life’s small details: instructing the cabbie to drive us to the Connaught and directing him as to the fastest route to Mayfair, taking my coat in the lobby and delivering it to the cloakroom, ordering our drinks as he escorted me to a table: ‘Two daiquiris, please. And stick to the recipe. We’ll have that table in the corner.’ He was just as commanding on the subject of art, and somehow made his disapproval of my work sound charming, as though he felt I was capable of greatness but was allowing my potential to be squandered by other people. When he talked, I had to look across the room, at the bar, at the monograms on the carpet. I hoped my aloofness would help me seem invulnerable to criticism.

‘There’s an undertone of something in the rest of them,’ Wilfred said, ‘but it’s hard to say what — you’ve buried the meaning too deeply in the paint. Your approach to abstraction is rather cumbrous. I don’t know if that’s what you’ve been encouraged towards in art school, but it’s all so oddly constrained. You make one or two leaps of expression here and there — not enough for my liking. I don’t blame you. It’s a symptom of the bad advice you’re getting. You have considerable talent — there’s no doubt about that. But your show tonight was so competent it bored me. I mean, it was perfectly — oh, here we are. Thank you.’ The barman arrived with our cocktails. He lifted them from a silver tray and set each one down on a crisp paper coaster. ‘Look, if you want the absolute truth, I know there’s a lot more to come from you. They’re not awful paintings, on the whole, they’re just painfully unmoving. But then you pull that diptych out of your sleeve, that completely spectacular diptych — come on now, dig in.’ He handed me a glass and clinked it with his own. ‘If it had been the only piece in the show, I would’ve gone home and written my review right away, the kind that’d make old Dulcie’s knees knock together. But then I suppose we wouldn’t be having this little moment together, would we? How’s that daiquiri treating you?’

I sipped at the dainty drink and made the favourable noises I thought he was waiting for.

‘Not very hard to make one of these, you know,’ he said. ‘Just white rum and lime, a bit of crushed ice, that’s all there is to it. Staggering how often people mess it up.’

‘It’ll do,’ I said, and turned to look at the night. There was a row of stately red-brick houses across the street from the hotel. Under the lamplight at the side of the road, a man was unfurling the tarpaulin on his sports car. For a moment, I felt an urge to be out there with him. I imagined going with him all the way to Southampton.

‘The thing about Dulcie, as much as I detest her company,’ Wilfred went on, ‘is that her instincts are usually sound. She can tell when an artist has longevity. That’s why she let you show the diptych. She’s no fool.’

‘She didn’t let me. I insisted.’

‘If you say so.’

‘That’s how it was.’

‘In any case, her style of management isn’t for everyone. It’s too early to say how you’re going to fare with her, but you shouldn’t get complacent. I know she didn’t think much of your friend Culvers, or his work for that matter. I always thought he had some promise.’

‘You know Jim?’ I asked.

‘Only by reputation.’

‘That’s how most people know him. He’s a good man, really.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Someone told me he’d dropped off the map.’

‘Well, Jim was never really on the same map as the rest of us.’

‘Yes, I could tell that from his paintings.’ Wilfred smiled. ‘It’s a shame he lost his way. I liked his early stuff. Before he started with those Hopper pastiches.’

There was a time when I might have taken exception to this remark, but I had come to view Jim’s old ‘absence portraits’ as nothing more than portents of his disappearance — great flashing signs that I had failed to see. ‘I don’t want to talk about Jim tonight,’ I said.

‘Good, because I don’t have much else to say on that score.’

The daiquiri was strong and, after a few long sips, the rum began to bite the back of my throat. Outside, the man turned the ignition of his sports car and it gave a rusty, disappointing sound underneath the bar’s piano music. ‘He’s been trying to start that bloody thing for ages,’ Wilfred said. ‘There’s a point at which perseverance becomes denial. I think we’re about four weeks past it with this chap.’

‘I suppose you must come here often,’ I said, which only showed him my naïvety.

‘You mean, do I bring all my women here?’

‘All? That implies a fair number.’

‘I can’t deny it’s a popular place.’ He thinned his eyes at me. ‘You have an unusual way of talking, you know that?’

‘I grew up near Glasgow.’

‘It’s not how you speak, it’s what you say. Your accent’s very gentle.’

‘Don’t you ever stop criticising?’

‘No. It’s a permanent vocation.’

‘Well, frankly, the way I speak is none of your concern.’

‘It just seems to me that you’re very careful with your words, very measured. Makes me wonder if you approach painting the same way. It would explain a lot about the show tonight.’

‘Your ice is melting,’ I said.

He looked down at his drink, as though remembering it was in his hand. ‘I like to let the lime settle a bit first. Tastes better.’

‘I wonder what that says about you.’

He simpered, putting the glass down on the table, twisting its stem so the coaster spun beneath it. ‘Look, obviously I’m not going to get to know you in the course of one evening, Ellie, so I’m having to make a few assumptions — is it all right if I call you that?’

I nodded.

‘Not that there’s anything wrong with the name Elspeth, of course.’

‘That was nearly a compliment.’

‘Close enough.’ The glass came to rest in his fingers. ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you got in the cab tonight, I thought you were going to be like all the rest of them.’

‘The rest of who?’

‘You know—’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

He blinked. ‘There’s a certain pliability about the women Dulcie takes on at the gallery, if you get what I mean.’

‘You make it sound like a bordello.’

‘That wasn’t my intention. Really,’ he said, tidying the cuffs of his blazer. ‘I was only trying to say that you’re not the average Dulcie Fenton sort of artist. I thought I’d buy you a drink, tell you a few cold truths, and you’d cry on my shoulder and I’d say, There, there, darling, your work will get better, I know you have it in you. But I can tell you prefer to keep people at a distance.’

‘Not everyone.’

‘Just me then. Why? Because my opinion is important?’

‘Actually, you have a very high opinion of your own opinion. It could just be that I don’t like you very much.’

‘Ha. Maybe so.’ Wilfred moistened his lips. He sat forward, bringing a cigarette case from his breast pocket, flipping it open. There was only one left. He held it out for me to take but I declined. ‘What I know for sure,’ he said, drawing out the cigarette, tapping it on the back of the case, ‘is you haven’t come here for praise.’

‘That’s lucky.’

He smirked, taking the hotel matchbook from the ashtray and tearing off a strip. ‘It’s confirmation you want, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do.’ He angled his head. The matchflame illumined his face like a Halloween pumpkin. ‘It’s not that you need me to explain why the diptych is so good. You already know that. It’s authentication you’re looking for. You’re here to make sure I understand how good you are.’

For the first time all night, I looked directly into his eyes. They were not quite the colour I had thought they were — a murky, gutter-moss green. ‘Honestly, I couldn’t care less what you write about me in your magazine. Where I’m from, people who sit around criticising other people’s work all day instead of doing their own get a very bad name for themselves. I happen to like men with strong opinions. I find them interesting to talk to. But don’t fool yourself — it’s not your approval I’m after.’

‘Then what?’

‘Nothing. Just a chance to have a proper conversation about art. I haven’t had a genuine discussion about painting since—’

‘When?’

‘A long time ago. Since I moved to Kilburn. It’s difficult to be taken seriously when you look like me.’

‘I have a similar problem.’

‘You’re a woman too, are you?’

‘No, but I look younger than I am, which puts me at a certain disadvantage.’

‘Oh, please. Don’t even try to compare.’

‘Well, all right — we’re getting off topic.’ As he inhaled and savoured the smoke, his arm succumbed to its old habit, drooping over the chair-back. ‘You should care what I think, because I care what you paint. That’s how it works. Our interests are aligned.’

‘You presume an awful lot.’

‘I do, I know.’ He edged forward, shifting his legs. ‘Give me a moment and I’ll explain.’

‘It’s past midnight already.’

‘Five more minutes.’

I leaned back. ‘Three.’

‘I’ll start with the diptych then,’ he said. ‘A quintessential Elspeth Conroy painting, if ever there was one.’

I laughed. ‘And how would you know?’

‘Easy. I don’t read press releases. They go straight in the dustbin. I just look for the piece that resonates most. I could tell that painting came from a different place than all the others.’

‘So you haven’t even seen my other work? That’s hardly fair.’

‘Context is overrated. It wouldn’t have mattered if the diptych were the first work of yours I’d seen or the last. I’m no artist, but I can tell when one is fully in tune with herself, not just trying to fake it for the sake of an exhibition. You can feign a lot of things in modern art, but emotion isn’t one of them. It has to be there in the paint, not tagged on after. And it’s probably the most important thing a reviewer can convey, that distinction. Not everyone can spot the difference, so they leave it up to people like me. And whether I print it in the Statesman or stand up on a soapbox in the park and shout it out loud — doesn’t matter. Real artists come along so rarely nowadays that modern art is hard to justify. Most people can’t tell pitch dark from blindness any more, and that’s what makes our interests so aligned. I need artists like you to make great art so I have something to shine a light on. And you need critics like me, or nobody will notice what you paint. That’s the nature of the game we’re in.’ He slugged the whole of his daiquiri, blinking away the sourness. ‘Can I buy you another?’

‘I should really be getting home.’

He twisted round and made a circling gesture to the barman anyway. ‘You’re still not convinced,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘I’m not like you. I don’t see art as a game.’

‘All right. Let’s try it another way.’ He picked something from his tongue — a tiny node of lime-flesh — and flicked it to the carpet. ‘I’ll bet when you painted the diptych you weren’t even thinking of painting, were you? You didn’t have a purpose in mind, not even a theme, you were just trying to express a feeling — you let your arm go wherever it wanted until you ended up with mountains. Am I warm?’

‘I’m still listening,’ I said.

He wet his lips again. ‘Something felt wrong after that, I’ll bet — I don’t mean erroneous. Less than whole would probably be more like it. Anyway, let’s say you stepped back from the painting at this point — exhausted most likely, sweating a lot and ready to give up working on it altogether — but then — and you don’t know exactly where it came from — you saw another form leaning against that panel: not completely there, in the same frame, just set off against it somehow, almost joined but not quite. It just dropped into your mind. And that’s how you painted the baby on the right — from nowhere. You didn’t copy from a photograph — not your style. You just painted it straight out of your imagination, didn’t you? From memory. It just sort of felt right to paint it, so you carried on. And, I don’t know, maybe you were afraid of what you were painting as you were doing it, mountains and babies not being your normal kind of subject matter, but you had to see where it all led. Because it felt right. In fact, it probably seemed as though the entire thing was somehow predetermined. Like it was happening to you. What was that old line Michelangelo had about his sculptures waiting for him in the marble? That. I’ll bet you made the whole painting so quickly you didn’t even stop to eat or sleep. And that’s why you begged for it to be in the show. Because you composed all the others yourself, thought about them very deliberately, but that diptych was pure inspiration.’ With this, he sat back, returning his cigarette case to its frayed little pocket. ‘See, that’s the kind of thing you need someone like me to communicate. Your average person can’t just intuit it when they walk in off the street.’

Our corner of the bar now seemed more private. The gentle piano music had become an unmelodious ripple, as frustrating as a dial tone that never engaged. ‘You might have a bit more understanding than I gave you credit for,’ I said, and took a last sip of daiquiri, just to steady myself. His level of insight had disarmed me. ‘I suppose you’d like me to cross your palm with silver now.’

‘We’ll consider it a freebie,’ he said. ‘There’s no magic involved. Anyone who’s ever created anything remotely original will explain his process in the same way. As if he had no control, just influence. Channelling — that’s the word that seems to get used.’

‘And I take it you’re more cynical than that.’

He shrugged. ‘I told you, I’m no artist. I don’t know for certain. But I prefer to think that great work is made through talent and sheer hard work. If some can channel greatness and the rest of us can’t even get an outside line, it’s a very unfair system.’

‘Says the nephew of a lord.’

‘That’s irrelevant. I’m talking about art. Creativity.’ His face began to twitch. ‘You know, my uncle can’t stand the sight of me. It’s fine. The feeling’s mutual. I just wish people would stop lumping us together.’

‘I was only pointing out the unfairness of the world.’

‘I’m still right about creativity, though. Science is going to prove it one day. Just remember who it was that told you so.’ He smiled, allowing a silence to gather. ‘What time is it? We ought to see about that cab.’

‘Past one, I think.’

‘Come on, I’ll fetch your coat. Hope I haven’t lost that ticket she gave me.’ He stood, calling the barman over.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Would you have someone bring my drink up to the room, please?’

‘Of course, sir.’ The barman went away.

‘Hate to drink alone in public,’ Wilfred said, ‘and it seems a shame to waste it.’

‘You’re staying here?’ I asked.

‘For now. I’ve rather fallen out of love with London lately. I’m still working out where I want to go next.’ He made it sound so unrehearsed. Patting his blazer pockets, he mumbled: ‘Where’s that ticket she gave me? It must have got into the lining.’

I had been to bed with two men in my life before that night — enough to keep my expectations low. But I let myself believe that sleeping with Wilfred Searle would at least be an improvement on those shy and muddling art school students who had preceded him, the first of whom had been too conscious of the act’s significance to finish what he started, the second of whom had curtly wiped his mess from my thighs with his shirtsleeve before rolling off me.

It was in this generous spirit that I allowed Wilfred to stoop and kiss me in the hotel corridor, forgiving his clumsy lips and their lingering bitterness. I tried not to be disheartened when he insisted I undress myself in the bright lights of his room, or sigh when his dry fingers worked my breasts like sacks of oats he was trying to prise open. Even as he lay on top of me, lodging his elbows by my head so that his chest-hair tickled my chin, I stared up at the ceiling and politely stroked his back, thinking there would surely be a moment when I would feel connected to him. I let him thrust away with all the stolid purpose of a derrick bobbing in a field, and held on to the fading hope that he would notice the disappointment in my eyes and try to make amends — but he did not even have the good grace to pull out of me. A few minutes later, he fell off me, panting, and I lay tangled in the soggy hotel linen, wishing I had never met him.

I got up and put my slip on.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Lie here with me. We need to make wedding plans.’

‘Very funny.’

‘I’m serious. What’s a good time for you? My Thursdays are free until August.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to organise that with Dulcie,’ I said. ‘She’s in charge of my calendar now.’

‘Ah yes, I forgot — the Roxborough owns you.’ He sat up against the headboard. ‘Do you think if I call downstairs they’d bring me up some Dunhills?’

‘I doubt it. Have you seen the time?’

‘Well, I’m going for it anyway.’ He reached for the phone, patting the empty space beside him on the bed as he dialled. ‘Yes, reception, hi. I was wondering if it would be possible for the concierge to do me a small favour. .’

I stopped dressing and got back into bed, keeping what I thought was an appropriate distance between his hip and mine.

‘Cigarettes, actually. . Yes, I know, it’s awfully late, but perhaps there’s a machine somewhere near by? It’s Mr Searle, or did I mention that already?’

Pulling the sheets over my chest only exposed my feet and ankles, and I became aware of Wilfred staring down at them while he bartered with the concierge.

‘Excellent, thank you. Dunhills, yes — two packets, if you don’t mind.’ He covered the mouthpiece and asked me, ‘Anything for you?’ I shook my head. ‘No, that’s it, thank you. That’ll be everything.’ He put the phone down, exhaling. Then he turned to slide an arm across my stomach. I felt his wiry belly hair against my back, needling the silk of my slip. ‘Ten minutes,’ he murmured, kissing my ear. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait so long for a smoke afterwards.’

‘We could make love again twice in that time.’ I assumed he would take this as a good-natured gibe, the kind that we had spent most of the night aiming at each other. But, instead, he planted a palm between my shoulder blades and shoved me forwards, and I almost hit my forehead on the bedside cabinet. ‘What the bloody hell was that for?’

He was already on his feet, walking naked to the bathroom. ‘If you’re so dissatisfied, you might as well go home,’ he said.

‘I was teasing you, that’s all. I thought you’d laugh.’

He flicked a switch and stood there in the bathroom light, his body taut and wan. ‘Well, I don’t find that sort of thing amusing.’

‘You needn’t take it so personally.’

‘I happen to have some pride in the way I — oh, forget it. I don’t have to explain myself.’ He was scrubbing his hands firmly with soap now, from fingertips to elbow. ‘Perhaps you would’ve enjoyed it more if you hadn’t just lain there looking so horrified. It felt like I was hammering a skirting board.’

I gathered my clothes. ‘Now you’re starting to disgust me.’

‘Just hurry up and leave, would you? I have an early train.’ He shut the bathroom door and locked it. I heard him clattering about in there while I stepped into my dress and found my coat. Then the door flashed open and he came bounding towards the bed. He was wearing a fresh hotel gown, and every stride he took gave off a strange crunching sound, like spare buttons rattling in a box. ‘Still here, I see,’ he said, removing a bottle of pills from the front pocket. ‘Another one who can’t take a hint.’ He dry-gulped a clutch of tablets.

The concierge came knocking then: two discreet pips on the wood, barely audible.

‘Thanks for a horrible evening,’ I said, and showed myself out.

The concierge stepped aside to let me through. ‘Madam, your scarf is trailing,’ he called after me as I made my way along the hall. ‘Madam — your scarf.’ I unravelled it from my sleeve and let it drop onto the carpet. Ahead of me, the lift doors opened but nobody stepped out.

Our Next Great Female Painter?

by Wilfred Searle | New Statesman | 20th February, 1960

One can hardly blame young Scottish artist, Elspeth Conroy, for being a woman. Nor can one admonish the Roxborough Gallery on Bond Street for championing her work so ardently. In this modern art world, dominated by men of soaring talent, the claims of promising female painters are too rarely recognised. But what makes the first solo exhibition by Glasgow Schooled Conroy such a fizzling disappointment is the heightened expectation one carries into the gallery. The Roxborough’s advance publicity material is the main contributor: Miss Conroy is proclaimed to be ‘Britain’s next great female painter’ before the oil on her work is even dry. It would be tough for any living artist, with the exception of Picasso, to match the hysteria of such a promotional campaign, so what chance this young lassie?

Well, although there is plenty to admire in the technical proficiency of all nine paintings on display, one is presented with the same niggling doubts at every turn of her debut show: Is this really the work of a true original? Or does one’s heart simply plead for it because the painter is a woman?

As yet, no practising female painter has been able to replicate the trembling excitement we encounter in the work of Bacon or Sutherland. The fine sculptures of Barbara Hepworth have brought us close, but even this exceptional artist still struggles to elude the shadow of her male contemporaries. There is no doubt that our next great female painter will appear when she is ready, but I am sad to report that this show offers little evidence of Conroy being our girl. Her landscape paintings are so consciously mannered that they only succeed in aggravating, the way a child who finishes all her homework before bedtime invites suspicion from her father. In short: they try too hard to be appreciated.

Conroy has a tendency to overstate each minor brushstroke, resulting in a suite of tepid, unconvincing images: London canal scenes with crooked, wispy figures whose obliqueness is much too premeditated. The careful abstraction of these scenes, though rendered deftly, is a transplant from another (male) artist’s heart: Picasso has lent his influence to everything Conroy paints. This might well be a habit that afflicts too many of our current painters, regardless of their gender, but it is a particularly bewildering trait in the work of a young woman from the banks of the Clyde.

There is just one faint glimmer of promise in this otherwise cheerless show: Godfearing is a striking diptych in which Conroy attempts to loosen her stylistic restraints to tackle themes of motherhood. Still, dragged down by the weight of so much pre-show expectancy, even this well-realised work seems meek and insubstantial. One departs the gallery wishing the artist had chosen to express more of what it means to be a woman in the modern age.

Three

The talk in the first-class lounge was all about ‘this business’. Five men in dark flannel suits, whose faces were so similarly tapered I expected they were brothers, were constellated on the club chairs near by, turning through The Ocean Times and debating the articles of the day. Their wives were elsewhere on the ship (I heard mention of a bridge game somewhere on the promenade deck, a concert happening in the cocktail bar) and the five of them, it seemed, were damned if they were going to pass up the opportunity to converse about men’s matters over afternoon Tom Collinses.

First, there was the bantering about ‘this business with the Pioneer satellite’ and how it proved that the American space programme would be nowhere without the help of British engineering. Then it was ‘this business with the train crash’ and how, in their glib assessment of the tragedy, such accidents ought hardly to be possible in a place as vast as California, where surely there was enough land for rail and road to never intersect. I could not decide what bothered me more: the ignorance of these men or their total lack of courtesy towards other passengers. Even the drone of the ship’s engines — that incessant rumble I had still not learned the skill of tuning out — was preferable to their chirruping and complaining: ‘You’d think they’d have laid on something better than the Archie West Trio, wouldn’t you?’ one of them said. ‘We heard all the same acts last year,’ said another. ‘Getting a bit tired of the Verandah, too.’ ‘That whole place is looking tired.’ ‘Oh, absolutely.’ ‘I wish they’d stop trying to foist that onion soup on us at breakfast, as if it’s such a bloody wonder of creation.’ ‘Oh, good heavens, yes.’ ‘Probably the same batch they’ve been feeding us since ’55!’ ‘Certainly tastes like it.’ ‘Ha-ha-ha.’

I hoped the purser or a steward might come along to quiet them, but the lounge was fairly empty and the crew were otherwise engaged. It was easier to move to a different spot. There were plenty of other rooms where I could sit and finish my book. And if I could not find the peace to lose myself in reading, I had a brochure’s worth of ‘on-board facilities’ to distract me from my troubles: swimming pools and restaurants and a cinema showing Gidget, all of which I would have traded for a single hour of painting in my dingy Kilburn studio.

I had already tried the smoking room: too much chatter in there, and not much oxygen. The library had suited me just fine, until the pitching of the ship began to make the books slide fore and aft along the shelves, giving me a dose of seasickness. I had gone to ward it off in the salon before the crew manager arrived to direct the preparations for the evening’s cabaret dance and everything got noisy again. The ship was over a thousand feet long—‘a floating city’, according to Dulcie. It had thirteen decks and enough cargo space to hold the luggage of two thousand passengers. So how was it that I could not find a single place on board where I felt comfortable?

It did not help that Dulcie had arranged a suite for me, when I had asked for a much simpler room in cabin class. We were sailing to New York because she was terrified of aircraft (‘A hangover from the Blitz,’ she said) and I agreed to go with her because I did not trust myself to fly alone. The gallery was covering our expenses. Dulcie claimed that she would only sail first-class on someone else’s shilling, so she booked two of the dearest rooms the Queen Elizabeth had available. Thanks to her, I was committed to spending the entire voyage in the company of wealthy cruisers I would never have spoken to by choice: tiresome New Yorkers returning from family weddings in ‘charming little towns’; well-dressed London couples with an appetite for exaggerating the splendours of the ship’s decoration (‘We haven’t seen another tapestry quite like it — and so many exotic woods! We’ve been bowled over!’); obnoxious men of industry who slurped their gimlets and left shrimp-tails on the tabletops. Everywhere I turned, I saw haughtiness and self-absorption, and heard the sneering tones of people who reminded me of Wilfred Searle.

I had found no respite at all since leaving Southampton. My suite was the only place on board where I had total privacy, but this presented its own problems. The room was dwarfing and elaborate — so grand that the bedcovers were made of a fabric more decorous than the evening gowns Dulcie had loaned me for the trip — and, although I slept well enough each night, I could not settle there in the daytime. It was not that I pined to be down in tourist class where I belonged, because sailing the Atlantic was a much less poetic experience than Melville had led me to believe, and I was very glad to be away from the cramped quarters of the lower decks. In fact, the suite afforded so much shelter from the goings-on about the ship that it made me jittery, vulnerable to my own thoughts.

If I could not see the movements of the other passengers, or sense the quiet workings of the crew around me, it was hard to maintain perspective. Alone, my problems smothered me and I grew so dismayed with myself that I could not pass my own reflection in the mirror without wanting to destroy it. I drank cups of pennyroyal tea with honey, and soaked for hours in a bathtub that never quite got hot enough, silently composing telegrams I did not have the courage to wire back to England:

WILFRED: GREETINGS FROM RMS QE. HALFWAY TO NYC ALREADY. HATING YOU MORE BY THE NAUTICAL MILE. 5 WKS PREGNANT AND COUNTING. ELSPETH.

Leaving the men to scrutinise The Ocean Times, I went out to stretch my legs awhile, going up and down the promenade deck until I got weary. It proved difficult to go ten yards without having to side-step a meandering old lady, or skirt around a steward undertaking some fresh errand. I stopped at the guardrail for a moment to breathe in the air. The grey Atlantic swathed the hull. The soft seam of the horizon was too vast to comprehend. It occurred to me that I was as far from Clydebank as I had ever been in my life, that I was sailing first-class on a ship my own father had helped to build in the John Brown & Company yard. He would have smiled at the thought of me now, being kept afloat by joints he and his friends had caulked, but I did not feel proud. I wanted the ocean to swallow me whole.

A part of me believed I would find Jim Culvers hiding in New York. I tried to tell myself that I would have made this trip regardless, and that any dreams I had of chancing upon Jim and his sister in Washington Square Park were not a factor in my decision. When people on board asked my reasons for travelling, I said that I was going to meet the owners of the art gallery that represented me. Invariably, this would lead to the question of how much money my paintings sold for, as though it were the defining credential of any real artist. Dulcie would often interject at this point; but, in her absence, I would say, ‘Enough to travel first-class,’ and this would prompt them to confess they were embarrassed not to know my name. People would have been less enamoured of the truth, I suspect, which is why I never told it. The fact was, I had not finished a single piece of work since that awful night I spent with Wilfred at the Connaught, and had felt so anxious about painting since his Statesman piece was published; therefore, an exhibition of new work — be it in London or the depths of Siberia — was a very distant prospect.

I had only made the trip on Dulcie’s insistence. ‘You need a change of scenery,’ she had told me. ‘Go and travel round Europe for a month, see some things, take a few pictures, meet a few men. Get that imbecile out of your mind. Or better still—’ One of the founders of the Roxborough, Leonard Hines, was looking at potential sites for a sister gallery in Manhattan. ‘Len’s got some ridiculous idea that I should run the place for him. I keep saying I don’t have time to gallivant across Midtown, sizing up locations, but he’s been getting rather adamant lately. We should go together — I need a good sailing companion, and he needs to get better acquainted with your face. It’ll do us both some good.’ I would not have considered going anywhere with her except New York; the faint hope that Jim was lurking in its midst had never left me. And I knew that seeing him was the only thing that could rid my heart of Wilfred’s strangle-marks.

Desperate now for peace and quiet, I took the stairs up to the sun deck. It was a warm day and the cheerful wives of first-class were out on the terrace. As I scouted for a table, passing sunhats and bare shoulders, I realised there was no comfort to be found amongst these women either. I could not sit listening to their appraisal of the entertainments bulletin: ‘Gordon Cane and his Orchestra — quarter to four in the lounge. I’m game for it if you are, Lucy. Unless you’ve other plans?’ I did not even interrupt my stride, just walked a perfect loop around the terrace, back downstairs, gripping my damp copy of Below the Salt.

There was nothing left to do but head up to the racquet court. For the past three afternoons, Dulcie had been competing in the ship’s squash tournament. She was an avid player — a fact she had surprised me with early in the voyage, when she had come to my door wearing a bright white tracksuit with a towel tucked inside the collar. She claimed that everyone had to have a reliable form of exercise unless they wanted ‘to stroke out in their fifties’, and explained that squash was ‘sort of an art form in itself — the only one I’m any good at, anyway’. The standard of the competition on board was low by all accounts, and Dulcie had advanced through the early rounds with ease, giving me a shot-by-shot report of every set she played in the Verandah Grill at dinnertime. Today’s match, however, was a tricky semi-final (her words) against a woman she knew from her old racquet club in Mayfair. ‘Amanda Yail’—she had announced the name with a slight tremor. ‘Beat me last year at the Open, second round, then got smashed off court by Heather McKay in the next. I must have missed her on the passenger list. It’s going to be a long old match.’ I had never heard Dulcie sound so unconfident, which led me to suspect that she did not want me there to cheer her on.

As I went up the steps to the viewing gallery, I could hear the rhythmic pop of rubber against walls, the skid of sports shoes. I had never seen a squash match in my life and did not understand how one was played, or how to follow it as a spectator. When Dulcie used phrases like ‘the nick’ and ‘counter drop’ and ‘short line’ in her summaries, I would nod as if I knew exactly what she meant. She had a certain skill for describing the to-and-fro of her matches and it seemed rude to interrupt her. I envied this gift of Dulcie’s, in fact — she could find enthusiasm for the most tedious of things and bestow it unto others through sheer force of will.

The viewing gallery was empty, but for one man standing at the railing with his son. I was going to ask for the score, but then it struck me that the proper etiquette might be to wait for a break in play, so I held back. ‘Daddy,’ the child said, staring at me. ‘Do we have to move our things now?’ He was not quite tall enough to see over the top rail — a boy of seven or thereabouts, all buttoned up in a stiff Oxford shirt and trousers pulled too high over his waist. The balcony was smeared with his handprints; he was in the throes of driving his Dinky cars over the glass in slow figures-of-eight. His father hummed. ‘Huh, what?’

‘For the lady. She wants to sit down.’

‘Which lady?’

The man turned. He was what Dulcie liked to call ‘a studious fellow’, meaning he was bearded and bespectacled and not especially handsome. He had hair that thinned on top and greyed around the edges. His jacket was slung over his left arm like a waiter’s cloth. It had not been apparent right away, but now I could see that his attention was on something other than the court. He was wiping a leaky fountain pen with a handkerchief. Blue ink marred the fabric of his shirt — a jagged island right below his nipple. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘just a moment.’ He finished cleaning off the pen and carried it to the chairs behind me.

I told him not to worry. ‘Really, I’m better off standing.’ But he seemed intent on clearing his belongings, as though they were in some way humiliating. There was a briefcase full of dog-eared folders and a few of the child’s toys were scattered on the seat — plastic soldiers, horses and artillery; a tin rocket with chipped-off paint. The man snapped the case shut and began to collect the toys rather hurriedly. ‘Come and help,’ he told the boy. ‘Put them in your pockets.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t move anything on my account.’

‘No, no, we shouldn’t be acting like we own the place.’ He carried on gathering the soldiers. ‘Jonathan — come here! Excuse all this,’ he said. ‘My wife hates it when I do paperwork on holiday. Have to steal these moments when I can.’ His son just drove his little car along the glass, ignoring him. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me, son. Do you want that cream soda we talked about or not?’

The boy came trudging over. Before he could reach his father, though, a cry rose up from the court. Dulcie was stretched out on her side, having lunged to reach a dropping ball, and her opponent was exalting in the glory of a shot well hit. Dulcie kept slapping the floor with her palm. The man rushed back to the railing. ‘What happened? Did you see?’

‘I think she might have lost that one.’

‘Who?’

‘Dulcie.’

‘Well thank God for that!’ he said.

‘Are they finished?’

‘No. It’s two all. They’ll have to play a final set.’

‘Oh. Exciting,’ I said, half-heartedly. ‘And really good news for your paperwork.’

He smiled. ‘Well, it would be if all my pens weren’t broken. I don’t suppose you have one, do you?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘I’ll have to fetch another from downstairs. What’s that you’re reading?’

I showed him the cover of my book.

‘Any good?’ he said.

‘I don’t know — it depends how much you like the Plantagenets. I’m finding it difficult to care about them.’

‘Then why are you still reading it?’

‘Because I didn’t bring anything else.’

‘Ah. I used to make that same mistake. Now I don’t have time for novels at all — makes packing a lot easier.’ He offered me his ink-stained hand. ‘Victor Yail. Pleased to meet you.’

His shake was very gentle.

‘Elspeth Conroy,’ I said.

On court, Dulcie was adjusting her headband, walking back to make a serve. She glanced up and saw me on the balcony, giving a little gesture with her racquet. ‘Are you much of a squash fan?’ said Victor. ‘Don’t really have a choice in my house. Amanda has four brothers and all of them play for their county. I’ve married into the faith.’

‘Well, I’m just here for moral support.’

‘You don’t play yourself?’

‘No. You?’

‘Once upon a time.’ He flexed his arm. ‘Bad elbow.’

The two women were hitting the ball at such a speed that I could barely follow the blur from wall to wall. Each shot gave a whipcrack. Their feet thudded the planks as they hustled back and forth. ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘They’re really smashing it. I never knew Dulcie had that kind of strength.’

‘Yes. Her game’s all power.’

‘Is that good?’

‘Can be, I suppose.’ Victor chuckled. ‘I prefer to see a bit of grace in the lady’s game, that’s all, a nonchalant slice and nimble footwork — you know what I mean. Élan.’

‘They both seem to be whacking it quite hard.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s apples and oranges down there. Apples and oranges.’

‘Well, Dulcie’s not sweating as much as your wife is. I’m no expert, but that has to be an indication of something.’

‘Only that Amanda hasn’t changed her shirt yet.’

I grinned. ‘A pound says she loses.’

‘A pound? Phew, that’s steep.’ He eyed the motions of his wife on court. ‘Frankly, I can’t trust Mandy to maintain this pace. She only plays well after an argument. Tried to pick one with me this morning, but I wasn’t having it.’

‘How selfish of you.’

‘Yes, that’s just what she said.’

Victor was an easy man to talk to. There was a serene quality about his face that appealed to me: his eyes soft-lidded, his mouth all thick and pursy. Perhaps I just found him unthreatening. He seemed like a person who would be incapable of tempting me away from the life I should have had.

‘Daddy, is it OK if I lie on the floor with this?’ The boy came rushing to his father’s kneecaps, holding up a comic.

‘As long as you stay on the carpet, I don’t see why not.’

‘Yesssss.’ He dropped immediately and crawled into the space between the chairs.

‘And Jonathan?’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Please read it in your head this time.’

‘OK.’

Victor rolled his eyes at me.

‘Sweet boy,’ I said.

‘He’s a gifted actor, that’s what he is. You should see the hell he gives his mother. Are you on B Deck?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’ll have missed all the screaming last night. Lucky you.’ As if it were not clear enough that he was joking, he gave a little wink to underline it. Then he craned his neck to say to the boy, ‘Nearly had to throw you overboard last night, didn’t we, son? See if you could swim all the way to America?’

‘Shshhh,’ said the boy, ‘I’m reading.’

‘Oh, pardon me.’ Victor leaned close to my shoulder. ‘We mustn’t interfere with Superman and his adventures.’

‘Who?’

He waved this away. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

Dulcie was flagging now on court. She seemed to be stuck in a pattern of sending the ball back in the same direction — three times she hit it to the far left corner, and three times it came back, with added spin. I did not understand the point of having an opponent when the purpose of the game was to stand there striking the same shot repeatedly. ‘It’s getting a bit attritional down there,’ Victor said. ‘I might just finish that paperwork, after all. Do you mind if I—?’ He thumbed towards the chairs.

‘Feel free.’

He went to get his briefcase, but stopped partway, clicking his fingers. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Pen.’ For a long moment, he stood there looking from his son to me, his son to me, apparently caught in the same futile rhythm as Dulcie’s squash game. ‘Is there a chance you’d do me a huge favour and watch the pipsqueak here?’

‘Oh, I’m really not qualified for that. .’ The boy was ensconced in the reading of his comic. He was flat on his belly, kicking his heels together. ‘But I suppose he doesn’t look like too much trouble.’

‘You’re very kind.’ Victor patted his son’s head. ‘Be good for Miss Conroy. I’ll be back in ten.’ And so the boy and I were left alone.

I kept him at the edge of my vision, not wanting to seem overbearing, and tried to involve myself in what was taking place on court. The frantic squeal of shoes continued, as Dulcie scampered from one wall to the other like a captive rat, and Amanda Yail dodged around her. It was a claustrophobic sport, lacking in variety — the kind of game I could never imagine myself taking seriously — but it was obvious that Dulcie and the boy’s mother were deeply invested in the task of beating each other. They refused to concede a single ball that had the smallest chance of being redeemed, panting and wheezing between shots. It was quite an inelegant thing to watch. I tried to absorb myself again in Below the Salt, but could not focus on the words. Then I remembered I was supposed to be looking after Jonathan.

He was still on the carpet, flipping through the pages of his comic. I went over and sat down on the chairs near by. ‘Do you understand this game?’ I asked.

The boy twisted round to glance at me. He shook his head and turned away again.

‘Perhaps there’s something I’m missing. I don’t know about you, but if someone told me to go and run around inside a box for a few hours with a stick of wood, I’d say they were mad.’ He was not listening. ‘I suppose grown-ups can be funny, though, can’t they?’ The boy began to wriggle on his stomach then, as though irritated by my voice or the chafe of his trousers. ‘You know, I don’t mind if you want to read out loud. I’ve never heard of this super man before. What’s so super about him anyway?

Jonathan climbed to his knees.

‘I mean, does he do his own washing and ironing?’

‘No!’ he said, aghast. ‘That’s silly!’

‘Does he look into your eyes when he’s talking to you?’

‘No, but lasers come out of them.’

‘Ah. Sounds dangerous.’ I smiled at him. He was gawping at me now, gauging my sincerity. ‘Well, he must open doors for ladies, then. Buy them flowers on their birthday, that kind of thing.’

‘No, no, no — he’s not super like that.’ His face was alight. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He came and sat in the empty club chair beside me, laying the comic across the armrest. The front cover had a masthead that said SUPERMAN in stocky 3-D lettering. A muscly blond wrestler in a blue-and-red uniform was swinging an identical man (but for his dark hair) into a telephone pole. The caption read: A GREAT 3-PART NOVEL: THE SUPER-OUTLAW FROM KRYPTON! ‘The one with the black hair is the real Superman. The other one is just pretending.’

‘He can’t be all that super if he’s being smashed through a pole,’ I said.

‘It’s because Kull-Ex is strong, too. That’s Kull-Ex—’ He prodded the blond man’s face. ‘You think he’s Superman to begin with and that he’s turned bad, smashing up all these buildings and things, and everyone’s upset with Superman for a long time, but then he takes off his mask and you see it’s really Kull-Ex and he’s from Kandor on Superman’s home planet. And he’s trying to get revenge on Superman because Superman’s dad stole his dad’s invention. But that turns out to be a lie, anyway.’ Jonathan gulped. ‘Want me to show you the bit where he finds out it’s a lie?’

‘Of course I do. I’m hooked.’

He shifted closer. I could smell the lavender of ship-issue soap in his hair. There were dry flakes about his crown. I wondered what it might be like to comb that floppy fringe into a nice side parting, if it would make him look more like his father. Keenly, he set about unravelling the convolutions of his comic book story, conducting the flow of action from panel to panel with his finger, calling out the speech that jutted from characters’ mouths in white balloons. He did not have any trouble reading — even the longer words, like ‘confession’ or ‘solitude’, and the stranger ones, like ‘Zenium’—though I sensed he might have memorised the script in places. ‘And look, this is the bit when Supergirl goes into the Fortriss of Sollichood and tries to pull him out with tweezers! It’s silly, but I like it. I like that she can see things that are really really really small. And I think on the next page is where Superman comes up with his plan to save them. Or is it on — no wait—there it is.’ He went on breathlessly for minutes, rifling through the pages, until his father came back up the steps and we had to curtail things.

‘Managed to scrounge one off a steward in the lift,’ Victor said, flashing a silver pen at me. ‘I promised to get it back to him, but let’s just see how well it writes first, eh? This could be the pen of my dreams.’ He saw that Jonathan had been showing me the comic. ‘Oh God, sorry about him. Has he been boring you with Dr Telex and his Fortress of Whatever It Is?’

‘I believe it’s Kull-Ex,’ I said, ‘son of Zell-Ex.’

‘Right!’ the boy cried. ‘See, Daddy. I told you it was interesting.’

Victor crossed his arms. ‘Oh, thanks for nothing, Miss Conroy. I leave you alone for one minute and you start colluding with the enemy.’ He strode to the balcony and gazed into the court. ‘What’s happening down there? Any idea?’

‘I’m afraid we got a bit sidetracked.’ I leaned back in the chair. ‘And, I have to tell you, this super outlaw from Krypton is much more riveting than any squash game. Isn’t that right, Jonathan?’

‘Yup,’ said the boy, sliding the pages. ‘Loads better.’

His father spun round, looking half amused, half agitated. ‘They’re still playing. From the looks of it, Dulcie’s got the beating of her.’

‘That’s what Kull-Ex thought on the mountaintop,’ I said, ‘but it didn’t turn out too rosily in the end.’

Victor stared at me, eyes bulging behind his spectacles. ‘Wow, he’s really done a job on you. I wasn’t even gone that long.’

I reached to ruffle the boy’s hair as a show of unity, then thought better of it, patting his shoulder instead. Standing up, I said, ‘He’s impeccably behaved. A real credit to you both.’

This seemed to resonate with Victor more than I anticipated. ‘Oh — well, yes,’ he said, ‘thank you for that. I mean, we’ve always liked him.’

The crack of rubber on walls grew louder. I glanced down at the match: Amanda’s shirt was now so wet I could see the straps of her bra through it, and Dulcie’s knee was trickling blood. I was not sure how much longer the two of them would survive if they kept up this intensity of play. Their arms were shining, their faces burning red, like two old fighters in a Bernard Cale drawing.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really see enough of the boy these days,’ Victor went on. ‘That’s mostly what this trip is about. I thought, if work’s going to drag me to New York again, then we’ll all go this time — make a holiday of it. He’s never been further than Hunstanton before.’ His voice was quieter now but more intense. ‘Maybe that’s why he’s so fixated on the planet Krypton, I don’t know. Mandy is convinced the comics are stunting him socially.’

‘And what do you think?’ I said, peering back at the boy. He seemed content, even composed.

‘I think they definitely stimulate his imagination — no bad thing — but I worry how much they’re occluding his perspective on the world.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘I’m saying, if he fixates too much on the land of superheroes, there’s a danger that reality will always seem disappointing. That can lead to genuine behavioural problems in the long run. I’ve seen it in a lot of my patients. Not with comics, in their case, but science fiction novels, television. The research suggests we ought to be wary.’

‘You’re a doctor?’ I said.

‘Yes — a psychiatrist. Did I not mention that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I try not to lead off with that leg, you know. Sets people against me before I’ve had a chance to lobotomise them.’ He coughed awkwardly. ‘That was a joke. An old one. Anyway—’ He sniffed and steered his eyes down to the court again. ‘You haven’t told me what you do. How’d you know an old tyrant like Dulcie?’

‘Her gallery represents me. I’m a painter.’

‘Oh, wow. Forgive me. That is exciting.’ He lifted his brow to edge up his glasses. ‘I suppose that means she works for you then, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s not quite how I’d put it. But she’s very good at what she does.’

‘No doubt she’s tenacious,’ Victor conceded. ‘What sort of pictures are we talking about here? Portraits?’

‘Now and then. I usually paint from memory. Things I’ve seen or imagined. But I’m not sure there’s much of a future in it.’

‘Why not?’

I shrugged. ‘The research suggests I ought to be wary.’

‘Ah, very good,’ he said, nodding. ‘Still, research can be flawed. There are charlatans and scoundrels in every walk of life.’

‘Yes, I suppose I’ve got to stop doubting myself and just paint. But I’ve got so many voices in my head at the moment. I thought I might be able to outrun a few of them out here.’

‘Well—’ He surveyed the limits of the viewing gallery. ‘If you can find any relief aboard this heap of metal, good luck to you. Failing that, I know a very good person in New York who you could talk to. I have his number somewhere.’

‘A professional, you mean?’

‘Yes, he really is terrific.’ He squinted at me, tapping his chin. ‘What are you? Five foot five, twenty-odd years of age. I wouldn’t think he’d charge you any more than thirty dollars an hour.’

This seemed to be another of his jokes.

‘Look,’ he said, evening his face, ‘you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. But this chap is a friend of mine, and he’s helped a lot of people get their muses back. Can’t move for struggling artists in the Village these days.’ He reached into his pocket, as though to retrieve a business card, but came out with a scrap of paper. ‘In case you want to look him up while you’re in town. .’

Victor had such a placid temperament, such an innocuous way of inducing conversation that I almost felt obliged to explain myself to him right there in the viewing gallery. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never really believed much in the powers of psychiatry. No disrespect to you. The only thing that’s ever helped me feel any better is painting. And now — well, now I suppose I’ll have to take up squash.’

‘Perhaps you will.’ He unscrewed the cap on the steward’s pen and scribbled a line on the paper, holding it to the rail. Then, folding it up, he said, ‘That’s the number, anyway. He’s just a block from Union Square.’

‘Thank you.’ I put the paper inside my book without even glancing at it.

‘Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever known Jonathan stay this quiet before,’ Victor said, pocketing the pen. ‘How on earth did you manage it?’

‘Kryptonite.’

‘Please. You’d be amazed how often I hear that.’

Almost in unison, we moved to check on the boy. He was crumpled in the chair, asleep, with the comic still open at his chest.

‘He seems to be out for the count,’ Victor said. ‘Hang on. Don’t say anything — you’ll jinx it.’ He walked over to Jonathan and took the comic gently from his clutches. Then he laid his jacket across the boy, sat down on the chair beside him, and skimmed the pages with a face of consternation.

The match trudged on below us. I could hear Dulcie grunting like a bull, her thudding footwork, and Amanda’s helpless cries. The ship began to pitch again, and I felt a quiver in my knees, a rising nausea. I gripped the railing, and must have looked unstable on my feet, because Victor called out in a hushed voice: ‘Everything all right?’

‘Just a little seasick,’ I said.

‘There are medicines for that, you know.’

‘Yes, I’m taking pennyroyal and honey. Dulcie swears by it.’

‘Crikey. That won’t do. You might as well take salt and pepper.’ He stood up, stooping to lift the boy, jacket and all. ‘A little Dramamine is all you need. Hand me that briefcase, would you? I have to get this one downstairs before he wets the upholstery.’ The boy’s legs hung and swayed like wind chimes in his father’s arms. ‘He doesn’t sleep much, but when he does, the bladder goes with him.’ Victor reached to take the case from me; I hooked it over his fingers. ‘Thank you.’

‘Will I see you at dinner?’

Victor inhaled, considering my question; his answer came rushing out in one breath. ‘Depends.’

‘On what?’

‘The result,’ he said, nodding at the court. ‘Mandy hates to lose.’

When I got back to my suite, I found my telephone had been replaced with a much fancier unit: it had a carved jade handset and a golden stand, like something Fabergé could have crafted. I had asked the crew manager to remove the original phone that morning, as the ability to call London from my room at any moment was too great a temptation. But he had clearly mistaken this request for a complaint about the furnishings and had supplied me with an item several times more alluring.

‘Connecting now,’ said the girl at the switchboard. The engaged tone sounded again, and the girl’s voice came back: ‘I’m sorry. It seems to be busy. Should I try it one more time?’

‘Yes, if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. Connecting now.’

The warble of the dial tone went on and on, and then: ‘Hello. Connaught Hotel.’ The line was surprisingly clear.

‘Oh, good. It’s been hard to get through. Are you closed?’

‘My apologies, madam. I’m the only one at the desk at the moment and the phones haven’t stopped.’

I had forgotten there was a time lag between London and the mid-Atlantic, and I must have been calling in their peak hour. Now what was I supposed to say? ‘Well, I think I left a scarf somewhere in your hotel. About five weeks ago.’

‘I see. And where exactly did you lose it?’

‘In the corridor. I think it might have been handed in by one of your guests.’

‘Do you know the guest’s name?’

‘It’s Searle, Wilfred Searle.’

‘Ah yes, of course. Mr Searle. I’m afraid he’s no longer staying at the hotel, but if you describe the scarf I’ll see if I can—’

‘Did he leave a forwarding address? It’s just that, well, I’d really like to thank him for his kindness.’

‘I’ll check that for you, madam. Please hold.’ I could hear nothing for a moment but my own huffing in the earpiece. Then: ‘I’m sorry, he didn’t say where he was moving on to this time. But we do have his billing address. So if you’d like to write to him care of the hotel, we’ll make sure the letter reaches him.’

‘Thank you. I’ll do that.’

‘Now perhaps you could describe—’

There were three little knocks on my door. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ I said. ‘Have to let someone in.’

‘Of course, madam.’

I set the phone down on the table and went to answer, expecting to be met by a stewardess with a silver trolley and a little dish of English honey for my tea. Instead, I found Dulcie standing crookedly in the corridor. She was listing to the right, as though missing a crutch, with her tracksuit top buttoned all the way up. ‘I’ve completely wrecked my shoulder,’ she said, nudging her way past me. ‘Have you got any aspirin?’

‘Yes. Somewhere, I think.’

She smelled a little tarry. Her hair was wet and combed, clipped oddly at one side. ‘Sorry, were you in the middle of something?’ she said, noticing the phone was off the hook.

‘Oh, don’t mind that. Just calling my mother.’ I went and put the ugly thing back on its perch.

‘Well, that’s no way to treat her, is it?’ Dulcie said. ‘Poor woman.’ She fixed herself a glass of tonic water at the bar, one-armed, and sat down on the couch. ‘Anyway, aren’t you going to ask me the score?’

‘It was two all when I left. I assume you didn’t lose.’

‘Of course I bloody didn’t!’ She downed half the tonic, then rolled her arm about in its socket, wincing. ‘Actually, I thought she was getting on top of me in the last, but then I started to clear a little bit faster to the T, and she didn’t have the energy to keep up.’

‘What happened to your shoulder?’ I said.

‘Not sure. It’s just muscular, I think. A good massage ought to fix it.’

‘I’ll get you that aspirin.’

‘You’re a darling. Thanks.’

I went to the bathroom and dug out a bottle from my vanity case. There were only two pills left. Coming back into the sitting room, I found Dulcie lying on the couch with my fancy phone clutched to her ear and her dusty squash shoes on the cushions. ‘Mm-hm. All right, then we’ll just have to take what’s available,’ she was saying. ‘Very good of you to fit us in. Thank you.’ Hanging up, she reached out for the aspirin bottle. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’

‘Yes, sorry, I thought I had more.’

‘They’ll do for now, I suppose.’ She tipped the pills straight into her mouth and swallowed, chasing them with tonic. ‘There’s a dispensary aboard somewhere. Let me know if you need anything.’

‘Have you ever taken Dramamine?’ I said.

‘No, and I don’t think I want to.’

‘I’m still getting the queasiness, that’s all.’ My hands dropped to my belly.

‘Always takes a while to find your sea legs, first time round. We’re not far off land now, anyway.’ She gave a timid burp into her fist. ‘Ugh. Sorry. Your tonic’s awfully warm.’

‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘The Turkish baths,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked us in for quarter past.’

‘You’re not dragging me down there with you.’

‘Well, I can’t go on my own again,’ Dulcie said. She got up, kneading her shoulder. ‘You never quite know who’s lurking in those cubicles, and, yesterday, I got saddled with the most dreadful Chicago woman. Please don’t be difficult about this. I’m in agony.’

As we headed down the corridor in our dressing gowns and slippers, Dulcie paused by a room marked electric therapy. ‘I’ve always wondered what goes on in there,’ she said, trying to see in through the keyhole. Narrow strips of ultraviolet light tinged the edges of the doorframe, brightening her face, showing all its downy hairs. ‘I don’t see any electrodes or wires. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.’ She straightened up, clutching her shoulder as though plugging a bullet wound. We moved past the locker rooms towards a line of cubicles screened off with drapes. At the reception desk, an attendant in a white uniform greeted us and ticked our names in his ledger. ‘Mrs Fenton, if you’d like to follow Katarina, she’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you,’ he said, then set his big wet eyes on me. ‘Miss Conroy, is there a particular treatment you’re interested in today? I’m afraid the jet-showers are currently out of order, but everything else is more than shipshape.’

‘I’d rather go with Dulcie,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right.’

The attendant went quiet. He knitted his lips and brought his hands together. ‘Well, there’s only space for one in the massage room — it’s fully booked.’

‘You can wait for me in the baths, darling. I shan’t be long.’ Dulcie headed off with her masseuse, calling back to me, ‘Raymond will take care of you, won’t you, Raymond?’

‘She’ll have nothing but the best,’ the attendant said. He turned to me, presenting the empty corridor. ‘Let me show you to the hot rooms, madam.’ He walked on, reeling off a very practised script about the levels of pampering that were available to me, and I trailed behind, pretending to be tempted by all his talk of ‘alcohol rubs’ and varieties of soap. The further we went, the drier the air became, and my forehead began to mist over. I could not tell if I felt more or less seasick, but I was building up a serious thirst. ‘Tell me, madam, how much heat do you favour?’

I thought it was a very strange question and did not know how to reply.

The attendant smiled, as though familiar with this type of silence, as though it were the lifeblood of his working week. ‘If I might make a suggestion?’ He paused here, quite dramatically. ‘Most of our female guests prefer the caldarium — we keep that running at a hundred and seventy-five, Fahrenheit, that is. But if you like it a bit warmer, we have the laconicum.’

‘And how hot is that?’

‘Well, we’d never let you cook all the way through,’ he said, tittering. ‘We keep it around two hundred degrees. As I say, most of the female guests prefer—’

‘The caldarium,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’

‘Lovely. You’ll find towels as you go in. It’s just this door to your right, madam.’

Nobody will teach you this at art school, but there are many ways to paint a room from memory. You can construct it from delinquent parts: take a fixture from the ceiling of your childhood bedroom, a fall of light from the refectory of a hospital you once attended with your mother, a carpet borrowed from a rented flat in Maida Vale, and assemble them like scraps. You can add flesh to a skeleton of facts: keep the magnolia tiles you know for sure were there and colour them in grey; thicken the mist with candle wax; steal the women from the first-class poolside, paint them lounging chest-down on those tiles in swimming costumes, shine their hair, fatten their legs, shade their backs a different pink. With enough thought and industry, you can paint a room that has no visible joins, which reveals more truth than any photograph could capture, because who could ever dispute what you have seen with your own eyes? Only by painting it this way — grinding it to powder and rebuilding it, particle by particle — can you fully understand what a room means to you. But, sometimes, all this does is reconstitute a whole that would be better left in fragments, like fixing up a shredded letter just to read your old bad news. If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

Sitting down to lean my head against the tiles, the tension in my breast began to ease, and I could feel the heat drawing the dirt of London from my body the way that sunshine teases oil out of tarmac. The caldarium was almost empty. On the tiled shelf that skirted the far wall, two women lay frontwise with their arms bent out, their heads a yard apart, just close enough to talk without raising their voices. I could not see their faces, only the scoured pinkness of their backs, the long wet knots of hair that fell over their shoulders. There was a soothing scent of rosewater, a kindness to the light. And it occurred to me that I had found the one space on the ship where I could be at peace: a priestly kind of sanctum between decks, not quite silent, not quite vacant. So what if it was hot enough inside to raise a soufflé?

I spread a towel upon the shelf and lowered myself onto it. The air was thick as plaster and I had to concentrate on breathing. Ten-second inhalations through the nose, out through the mouth. As the rhythm of my heart slowed down, so did my mind. I shut my eyes, surrendered to the heat. It was as if my thoughts started to pearl and separate, like a paint that rests too long inside a can. Everything relaxed: my limbs, my tongue, my neck. And soon I was envisioning things in the bleary heat. I was outdoors, walking in a field beneath the high noon sun. There were fairground rides in the distance. A rag-and-bone man was ambling up the grassy slope towards me, his horse beleaguered, nostrils steaming. It was pulling a cart with a pile of old rocking chairs and balusters. And then I heard the women stirring near by, and this picture fell away.

My pulse felt like a dripping tap, and I was strangely cool inside. The ship’s engines were juddering the shelf I lay upon. And the attendant was calling over a loudspeaker: ‘Would you describe it as an aggravating scarf, madam? Is it meek and insubstantial?’ The tiles looked greyer when I opened my eyes.

Such heat.

In through the nose, out through the—

My body was laced in sweat — strangely cool — but mostly it was underneath me, in the creases of my thighs. I tried to sit up, and I felt the bones lurch out of me, slip right through my skin— ‘Let me show you the On Highs, madam. We’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you’—or perhaps I had just skidded off the shelf and dropped onto the carpet—‘There, there’—because, when I glanced up — strangely cool — Dulcie was standing right over me, wrapped in a towel, squeezing my hand—‘Don’t you ever stop criticising? No, it’s a permanent vocation’—and she was padding my forehead with a cold flannel, and saying, ‘I’ll wait with her. You go.’

The sweat between my legs was heavy, cloying, cold. I thought I gave an answer: ‘No, it’s just a cheap thing from the market, not even real silk,’ but I must not have got the words out. I must only have murmured something meaningless. And she shushed me— ‘There, there, darling, your work will get better’—and padded my brow and squeezed my hand tighter. Then, reaching down, I felt my belly sink and spill.

‘Ellie, don’t move now, you hear?’ Dulcie said, and she tore off the towel from around herself and pushed it on my thighs. I did not understand. What difference did it make? I was not seasick any more. ‘Just lie still,’ said Dulcie. ‘The doctor’s coming.’ She was a scrawny, chicken-boned woman, old Dulcie, but she had a lot of strength—‘No doubt she’s tenacious’—and she stopped me touching what was all over my calves and ankles. I thought I answered her again: ‘She never even used that icing knife, you know.’ But I did not hear the noise come out of me, and the next face I saw belonged to some man I did not recognise. He said, ‘Miss Conroy, I’m just going to slip these off you now, all right?’ Then I felt him cut the sides of my swimming costume briefs and watched as he slung them, red and heavy, like the tresses of a butcher’s mop, onto the rolling floor that held us.

Another room, a different ceiling. The ship was full of them. I woke up in the hospital bay with the doctor and a po-faced nurse about my feet. My mouth was parched, my lips felt raw. It took effort just to hold my eyelids open. I was curtained off in blue. A tube was in my arm, feeding me what looked like seawater, and the quiet consultation of the voices at the end of my bed was giving me the sense that I had not yet fully come to.

‘Miss Conroy, good evening,’ the doctor said. He stepped onto my starboard side and strapped me with a blood pressure cuff. ‘You’ve had a bit of an ordeal, my dear, but everything will be fine now.’ He told me his name — Dr Randall — and explained that he was making his very first voyage as the ship’s physician. ‘I thought it would be easier than joining the Navy,’ he joked. ‘I was wrong.’ Smiling, he pumped at the rubber bulb inside his fist until there was a tightness in my arm and the flesh beneath my elbow seemed as numbstruck as the rest of me. He waited, nodded slightly at the reading on the dial, and hummed. ‘That’s looking better.’ The pressure released, tingling my fingers. ‘You know, if you’d made someone aware of your condition,’ he went on, all the good humour fading from his voice, ‘they could have warned you against the Turkish baths. It’s such a shame this had to happen to you.’

I did not want to disagree with him, and my tongue was too dried up to speak anyway.

‘Would you like some water?’ said Randall, watching my attempts to quench my palate. The nurse filled up a beaker for me. She left it on the table, just within reach.

It tasted like metal, but I glugged it all down.

Randall stood there, fiddling with his tie. ‘Do you understand what’s happened to you, Miss Conroy?’ he said. When I did not answer, he cornered his eyes at the nurse.

‘Do you know where you are, dear?’ she said.

‘I think so.’

‘Where?’ The little watch on her uniform was hanging upside down, confusing me.

‘On the QE,’ I said. ‘The hospital.’

This seemed to come as a relief to them. ‘Good,’ said Randall. ‘That’s good.’ He was fidgeting so much with his tie that the knot was getting smaller, tighter. ‘I don’t think you’ll require surgery. You’ve passed a lot of blood and tissue on your own. But we’ll keep you in overnight just to be sure. It should be fine to disembark tomorrow with the rest of the passengers — but I won’t rush you out of here, if your fluids are still down.’

‘Where’s Dulcie?’ I said.

‘I don’t know who that is, I’m sorry.’

‘Mrs Fenton,’ said the nurse.

‘Ah, yes. I believe she went up to her room to change. I can have somebody reach her, if you like.’

I nodded. ‘We’re supposed to have meetings in New York tomorrow night.’

‘Well, I’m sure you can postpone. It’s no small thing you’ve been through here.’ He gave me a kindly look, tapping my feet. ‘Bed rest for a few days, I should think.’ Then he backed out through the curtain.

The nurse refilled my beaker. She checked the steady drip of fluid in my tube. ‘Don’t you worry, my love,’ she said, rocking my shoulder. ‘My sister lost hers at seven months. It’s just about the worst thing that can happen, it really is, but she’s had two since then, and never had no trouble. So don’t you worry about anything like that. You’re going to be fine. Here you are — drink this — let’s get keep those liquids up. We can’t have you stuck on this old boat forever now, can we?’

Dulcie felt so guilty about her part in things that she withdrew from the final of her squash tournament and came visiting me in the hospital bay twice that evening, and once more the day after. I would have preferred to be left alone. I did not blame her, or anyone else, for what had happened, but she was insistent on claiming responsibility (‘I should never have made you go for that drink with him. . We should probably have flown. . I should never have forced you to come down to the baths. What was I thinking?’). Honestly, I could not abide this type of self-involvement, as though the entire balance of the world hinged on the probity of one person’s actions. I was grateful for her sympathy, of course, and for the way she had looked after me in the caldarium. But the longer I spent in Dulcie’s company, the harder it became to ignore the blankness of her personality, and I wanted — more than anything — to stay friends.

So I let her sit at my bedside, chuntering on about the gall of Wilfred Searle, and how she was going to personally see to it that he never set foot in the Roxborough again: ‘I don’t care who his uncle is — it’s about time someone taught him how a real man should behave.’ That evening, she brought in copies of Life magazine and read aloud the captions from the photo essays for me, speaking in superior tones about the people in them. She made no mention of the blood and tissue that had spilled out of me just a few hours before, the human thing that I had lost and could not reconcile my feelings for. It was not her fault, of course. Even if she had tried to broach the matter, I would not have wanted to listen. Because I was not yet sure what I needed to be consoled for — the life I had evacuated, or the one I was forced to continue. And so, to prompt her into leaving, I pretended to fall asleep on each of the occasions that she visited. I could not bring myself to answer any of her questions, and spent long moments gazing into space.

‘You really mustn’t worry,’ Dulcie said. ‘I know we all keep telling you that — and it probably sounds like a lot of molly-coddling — but, really, you will get over this. Things will get back to normal. Elspeth, darling, are you listening? Please. I can’t bear to see you in this state.’

Evacuated. That was the word the physician had used. A horribly clinical term — compassionless — and yet it captured how I felt about myself for so long afterwards: as though I were a danger that required escaping. I wondered if it was truly possible to feel bereft of something I had never wanted. Part of me had hoped to be rid of Wilfred’s burden, and I had speculated, once or twice, if I possessed the wherewithal to throw myself down a flight of stairs to make it happen. Of course, these instincts had been overruled by that other part of me, the one that had pathetic notions of bringing the child to term, of loving it, raising it to be a fine member of society just to spite its father. But there was no denying the fact that I had chosen to lie down in the heat of that caldarium — it was no accident or oversight — and perhaps that is why I was overcome by such torpor that I could barely lift my head from the pillow. I could not blame Wilfred Searle any more for my misfortunes. I had chosen to put myself where I was, and there was no forgiving it.

Dulcie must have said something to Amanda Yail about my being in the hospital bay, or else the news must have found its way to Victor by some other means. Because, not long after breakfast on the last day of the voyage, he appeared at the fringes of my cubicle with his briefcase. ‘Present for you,’ he said, setting an envelope on my table. The flap was not stuck down and I could already tell what was inside. ‘You don’t have to open it now,’ he said, but I did.

It was a home-made card with get well soon! scribbled in dark blue crayon. There was a muddy picture of what looked like Kull-Ex flying over a New York skyscraper. And, on the reverse, in adult writing, it said: Your super friend, Jonathan.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’

‘Not my idea,’ said Victor. ‘Actually, I thought you might find it a little insensitive. I wasn’t sure if I should bring it or not.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘Well, the lad wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mandy’s taken him down to the pool to keep him occupied — he was begging to come with me, but I thought I’d spare you that, at least.’

In fact, the thought of talking to the boy again about his comics was as close as I had felt to happiness in days. ‘I really wouldn’t have minded,’ I said.

‘He’ll be very glad you liked the card. Took him ages to draw. May I—?’ He gestured at the empty chair beside the bed and did not wait for my approval, sitting with his briefcase on his lap. ‘I hope you don’t mind me visiting you like this, but I heard you weren’t in the best of spirits, and I just — well, I wanted to make sure you were OK. Only natural to get depressed, considering.’

‘I appreciate the thought,’ I said, and looked away — anywhere but into those sympathetic eyes. I did not deserve them.

‘Look,’ Victor said cagily, ‘you can tell me if I’m overstepping the mark here, but something’s been nagging me all afternoon.’

I did not respond, just rolled my head in his direction.

‘You were taking pennyroyal,’ he said, with a querying tone. ‘For the seasickness.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Hmm.’ He drummed his briefcase. ‘And how much of that were you taking?’

‘God, I don’t know, Victor. What does it matter?’ I hoped to sound just the right amount offended.

‘It’s been known to have certain side effects, that’s all, in large doses.’ His fingers pushed at the leather, rippling it. ‘I wondered if Dulcie was aware of that when she recommended it.’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t.’

‘No, of course not. I wasn’t suggesting — never mind.’ He looked around the hospital bay, studying the decor. ‘This place seems very well equipped.’

‘It’s a hospital. They’re all the same.’

‘Oh, not true. You should see some of the wards I had to train in.’ We were completely alone in the room. Victor was the only person I had seen besides Dulcie, the physician, and the nurse for the past twelve hours or so, and I suspected he knew it.

‘Look, if you don’t mind, Victor, I’m getting rather tired.’

But he would not be hurried or distracted. ‘It’s an abortifacient, that’s my point. Well, supposedly it is. No medical proof for it, as such, but, anyway — there you are.’ Pushing up his glasses with his little finger, he stood, and lingered by my bedside for so long I thought he was about to kiss my forehead. ‘Like I said, it’s been nagging me all day. Why would you be taking penny royal? I should have spotted it sooner.’ And he gave a disbelieving chuckle. ‘That number I gave you,’ he said. ‘Throw it out. The chap I recommended won’t be right for you. Too Freudian.’

‘What?’

‘I’m serious.’ He set down his briefcase on the foot of my bed, unclipped it, and began rummaging underneath the files. ‘I want you to come and see me once you get back to London. It might take a bit of time, but I think I can help you.’

‘With what?’

‘Your anxiety depression.’ He glanced up from his case. ‘I don’t mean what happened yesterday — I mean what came before. Those are the issues you need to confront, or you’ll never come to terms with what you’ve lost. And I won’t just stand aside and watch that happen to you.’ He went back to rooting for whatever he was searching for. It was as though I was still on the grubby banquette in Henry Holden’s office.

‘I told you, I don’t need a psychiatrist,’ I said. ‘I have painting.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I’m sorry if that puts you out of a job, but it’s how I’ve always dealt with things.’

‘And how would you say that’s been working for you so far?’

‘Don’t patronise me, Victor.’

He gave a surrendering nod. ‘It’s just, I heard you didn’t really do much painting these days, or finish anything, at least. Isn’t that what you told me?’ At last, he gave up rummaging in his briefcase and shut the lid. ‘Look, I’m afraid I’ve run out of cards. So this’ll have to do—’ He tore off the top page of a white prescription pad and handed it to me. ‘I really hope you’ll take me seriously.’

DR VICTOR YAIL, M.D., F.R.C.P, D.P.M.

‘Can’t trust a man with letters after his name,’ I said. ‘That’s what my father used to say.’

‘I tell you what—’ Victor clipped his case shut. ‘If you can make it through the next few days without leaping off any skyscrapers, I’ll let you know what they all stand for. Now, can I bank on you to make an appointment?’

Four

At the factory, my mother punched her timecard every morning, then counted down the hours before she got to punch it out again. From the year she left school into her middle fifties, she kept exactly the same job, and if the amount a person complains about her work is an adequate barometer of her satisfaction, then she must have found great joy in it.

At the John Brown & Company yard, my father scorched the skin right off his knuckles daily, caulking ships with men he looked upon as brothers, some of whom he brought back home to share our dinner, some of whom he lent our rainy-day money. He wore down every rung of cartilage in his spine, broke several ribs, developed shin splints, and laboured through the agony, one shift at a time, for measly pay and no assurance of a future.

I admired the doggedness of my parents more than I was ever able to express to them. They grafted to accomplish things for other people, knowing all their hard work would go unseen. My father never felt what it was like to cross the ocean on a vessel he constructed with his friends, nor did he really care to — in his mind, every ship died when it left the yard. My mother never walked the aisles of the department stores that stocked her sewing machines, though she brought home boxes of the reject needles to stitch our curtains and communion dresses for the neighbours’ children.

I cannot say how much of their resolve I managed to inherit. Some days, it felt as though I had been gifted with my father’s vim, and I could stand up at my easel for long periods, forgetting where I was. Other times, I was steeled by my mother’s uncomplaining attitude, and would not let a good idea escape my grasp, even if it took me several weeks to tame it.

But doggedness in art is no substitute for inspiration. The thrill of painting turns so quickly to bewilderment if you let it, and nobody can help you to regain your bearings afterwards. Talent sinks into the lightless depths like so much rope unless you keep firm hold on it, but squeeze too tight and it will just as surely drag you under.

By the summer of 1960, I was unable to determine a clear reason to continue making pictures, aside from the dim hopefulness that kept lifting me from bed at 6 a.m. to try again. The only way to shake off failure, I thought, was by perseverance and hard work, and if I did not rise to paint each morning at my usual hour then I was denying myself another chance to succeed. And so I carried on through the soreness, as my father would have done, without protest, even though my hands no longer had the skill to translate what I asked of them. I approached each canvas as I always did — with no preconceived ideas, just a willingness to paint — and proceeded to get nowhere.

It is a painter’s job to give shape to things unseeable, to convey emotion in the accumulation of gestures, the instinctive, the considered, the unplanned. There is both randomness and predestination to the act of painting, a measurement and a chaos, and the moment you allow the mind to implicate itself too much in the business of the heart, the work will falter. It is not something you can control. You might toil long and hard, bullying the paint until it agrees to do your bidding, but you will only beat the life right out of it. And when you reach the stage where you are not expressing feeling in your work but engineering it, you might as well become a forger, or present yourself at a museum and donate your skills to the conservation of its masterpieces. Otherwise, you will be tempted to hang your feeble efforts on the wall and say, ‘Good enough,’ seeing pound signs where there should be meaning. You must resist this temptation with every fibre of your being. I tried everything I could to remain true to such convictions during the New York trip and afterwards. I stayed each day in my hotel room on Sixth Avenue, staring out at the gridded puzzle of the city from my thirty-fifth-floor window, drawing the patterns of its dense, dissembling streets and the polished deadness of its architecture. I filled both of the sketchbooks I had brought with me, then used up the hotel notepaper, until all I had left to draw on were a few blank pages at the end of Below the Salt. Of course, I had some yearning to go out into the city and experience it on foot, to understand it the same way that I had learned to appreciate the mysteries of London, but something kept me cooped up in the hotel all week — an anxiety that tensed my throat when I stood at the bathroom mirror putting on my make-up, a shame that wetted my eyes. The first morning, I got up and dressed but could not get beyond the threshold. The next, I reached the midpoint of the hallway and panicked; I heard the voices of other guests approaching in the corridor, got very shallow-breathed and wobbly, then paced back to my room, groping the walls. It did not feel right to be amongst people yet, and the city was teeming with strangers.

During the cab ride from the harbour with Dulcie, I had felt the kerbside energy of the place so intensely it had stunned me into silence. It was as though we had arrived at the very terminus of possibility, the patch of land where everything I cherished most about the world — art, imagination, freedom of expression — existed in the shade of everything I feared: corporations, brinkmanship, the preying of dogs on dogs. It was obvious to me that Jim could never have endured a town so hustling and kinetic, so pitiless and upward-facing, and this robbed me of the only scrap of purpose I had left. I had no interest in a New York City without Jim Culvers in it. So, when the hotel porter showed me to my room, I tipped him a dollar, sent him on his way, and locked the door. I was supposed to join Dulcie and Leonard Hines that night for dinner at Delmonico’s, but I cried off, and twice more in the days that followed. Eventually, a breakfast meeting was arranged for us in the hotel restaurant, and we sat clumsily discussing things, not mentioning my sweats or the trembling of my hands upon the teapot. Leonard Hines introduced himself by saying, ‘Dee-Dee tells me you’re her girl most likely. Hope that’s true. I’ve seen a little of your work, it’s — well, it’s interesting. I wonder, though, where are you taking things right now? I mean, in what direction are you headed?’

I just dabbed at the table with my napkin and told him, ‘I’m not sure yet. Somewhere good, I hope.’ And I turned to Dulcie, saying, ‘I’ve been thinking: would you mind if I flew back tomorrow instead?’

‘If that’s what you want. She didn’t have the best time on the ship with me,’ Dulcie said, by way of explanation to Leonard, who was squinting at her for assurance. Nothing was said about my brief stint in the hospital bay or what had put me there, bloody evacuations on the high seas not being the anecdote one prefers to tell during business hours.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sure my secretary can look into that for you. We have a very good arrangement with Pan Am.’

‘I suppose I’ll be sailing home alone then,’ Dulcie said. ‘Terrific.’

I thanked them both and went back to picking at my pancakes. We exchanged the lightest talk about Leonard’s youngest daughter — she had just been admitted into the art history programme at Radcliffe, a feat that made him ‘just incredibly proud’. Had I realised that this was a prestigious women’s college at the time, I might have feigned some admiration for her achievements, and not mistaken Leonard’s constant use of the phrase ‘Seven Sisters’ for the area of North London where I once went to buy a second-hand gramophone from a woman with no teeth. He was obviously unimpressed by me, and this exasperated Dulcie, who sat across the table making reproachful faces at my lack of discourse. ‘Don’t ever embarrass me like that again,’ she said, as we went back up in the lift. ‘You could’ve at least tried to look interested.’ It was a painful and disastrous meeting, but I had no regrets about it.

As soon as I got back to Kilburn, I cleared my studio and primed a stack of canvases taller and wider than I had ever worked upon before. The New York sketches I had made were pinned up on the Anaglypta near my bed so I could glean some inspiration from them. I ordered a few boxes of oil paints to be delivered to my door and bought in powdered milk and biscuits, tinned vegetables, corned beef, and mushroom soup from the corner grocery — enough to last me several weeks. The urge to paint was rife in me again, and I did my best to seize upon it.

I exchanged the sanctuary of my hotel room for the shelter of my studio, leaving only to collect my mail from the vestibule. I saw nobody except my downstairs neighbours: a kind old theatre director and her husband. The sun rose and set behind my curtains (I stapled them to the frame, preferring to paint in the softness of lamplight, as it helped me focus on the work). I lived sleeplessly in one room with just the kitchen window open, letting out the turps fumes and the fusty stench of my own body (I bathed nightly, of course, but sweated so much in between that my clothes were stiff and yellowed). My hair kept swinging into my eyes, so I cut it with the kitchen scissors.

What did I paint? All I know are the intentions I set out with, and where I ended up.

I hoped to reveal some sense of the caldarium in abstract, to work out how I truly felt about what happened there. But the figures I implanted in the scene looked manufactured, much too literal, so I scraped them off and tried again, only to find myself painting the exact same faces without the pleasing darkness of the originals. I scraped them off and gessoed over them. The more I tried to paint the figures, the more they seemed to signify a falsehood: I had not seen the caldarium from that dislocated viewpoint, hovering over my own body like a vulture; I had seen it mostly from the floor. So I put in a skewed doorway and built up the foreground with an impression of tiles, and then — over-thinking it — I merged it with a sunny field, a Ferris wheel, and a rag-and-bone man’s horse. Nothing cohered. The whole scene was contrived and ill-defined, but I continued with it, extending the idea just to see if it would stumble to fruition nonetheless. I ignored my instincts, guiding the paint too consciously, and lost my feeling for the work.

Week after week, I painted like this, with no end result. I reconstructed every picture I began, scrubbing it clean, scraping off and undercoating, layering and layering and layering. The canvases were laden with so much material that they warped and fell on their faces. I used up every tube of paint I owned. At one stage, I got bored of all my brushes, so dumped them in the bin and used a butter knife instead, slathering and smoothing anything still left to spread or yet to dry. My furniture got slowly caked in paint. I had to pull up the carpet in my bedroom to save the parts of it I had not ruined, and soon every floorboard was scumbled with a gunge of linseed oil and wax. Dingy liquids quivered in soup cans all about the studio. My clothes looked like a combat uniform. But still the work did not reveal a single speck of what I hoped it would. And, worse, I felt no thrill in making it.

Then, one night — so late the wireless in my room had reached the end of programming — Dulcie called to say that she was coming to the flat. She was concerned that she had not heard from me since getting back to London, and wondered if I had given any further thought to her proposal. I could not recall any proposal being put to me, so I stalled on my answer, and told her she could visit me on Saturday. In truth, I had no clue what day it was, and she said, ‘Darling, it is Saturday.’

I was greatly dissatisfied with the work and felt ashamed to show it, even to Dulcie. But I could not let her think that I had locked myself away for the past few weeks without creating anything. So when she buzzed, I let her in, and heard her feet come clipping up the stairs. I glimpsed her through the spyhole: she was wearing a fur shawl, though it was springtime and the weather had been mild, according to the radio. As I opened the door, she took a backward stride, as though moving with the draught. But it must have been the sight of me that rocked her on her heels. ‘Crikey,’ she said. ‘This is a situation, isn’t it?’

‘Kettle’s on,’ I said, standing aside to let her through.

‘Nothing for me, thanks. On my way to a party and the cab’s still on the meter.’ She had already removed her evening gloves outside the door, but, seeing the condition of my flat, she slipped them on again. ‘Is everything all right with you?’ she asked, rolling her eyes over me. ‘You’re looking skinny. I presume you’ve been hard at it.’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said. The kettle began to wheeze and I went off to tend to it.

‘Would’ve been good if you’d picked up the phone once or twice,’ Dulcie called, ‘just to clue me in on what you’re up to. You know I like to let you have your space, but it’s been a few months now. . God, this is an awful lot of soup for one person. Is this all you’ve been eating? A girl can’t live on Heinz alone, you know.’

I busied myself in the kitchen. ‘It’s hardly been that long.’ The tea had not been strained properly and leaves floated in the mug. I put three spoons of powdered milk in anyway.

‘No, darling. It’s the end of June. I’ve not heard from you since March.’ There was a pause. ‘I won’t bother asking about your hair. But you might want to think about opening a window. It’s like a reptile house in here.’

I was so tired of the timbre of Dulcie’s voice, and wearier still of the way she spoke to me.

‘So,’ she announced, as I came back in to face her, ‘where is it all?’

I sipped at my tea. It was gritty and foul, more punishment than comfort. ‘All of what?’

‘Don’t play dumb. The work.’ She waved towards the jumble of the studio, the speckled walls, the debris. ‘I see plenty of wood over there but no paintings. Where are you hiding them?’

‘I’ve been keeping them at Jim’s,’ I said. ‘For extra room.’

‘Uh-huh.’ She pinched her nostrils for a second, blinking. ‘Thought Max would’ve rented that place out by now.’ Her attention caught on something else behind me. ‘Well, you must’ve been churning them out at a fair old rate. Is there anything here I could look at? What about the sketches you’ve got taped up over there?’

‘They’re nothing,’ I said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

‘All right. I get the message.’ She stared at me. ‘And what about January, do we still think that’s feasible? I’ve got from the 14th blocked out for you, but I can let someone else take the slot if it’s going to be a problem.’

‘Whatever you decide.’ I had forgotten about the date we had set.

‘You’re being strange,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. You’re never this accommodating.’

‘Well, perhaps you’d like to go outside again and I’ll leave you on the doorstep.’

She smiled. ‘That’s much more like it.’ Stepping over a row of huddled soup cans, she went to inspect the empty stretcher frames on the far side of the room. I knew that she would be too sharp-eyed not to notice the ragged strips of canvas that remained along the borders of each frame, the verges of the images I had carved out. ‘You cut them off the stretchers?’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Had to get them on the bus,’ I told her.

She was an astute woman, old Dulcie, and she was not easily persuaded to take your word on things, even if you had not given her much cause to doubt it. That is what made her such a fine director of galleries and such a capricious friend. ‘Elspeth darling, I want you to listen to me very carefully,’ she said, turning to me with a mothering expression. ‘Don’t let all this get out of hand, OK?’ She made a little circle in the air. ‘I know an awful thing happened to you on that ship — and I will personally feel guilty about that for as long as I live — but you can’t afford to lose the plot here, do you understand me? I don’t want to see you throw away your talent over the first good-looking idiot that comes along.’

‘I’m not following you, Dee-Dee,’ I said. It was the only time I ever called her by that name and she clearly did not welcome it.

‘Then I’ll be blunt.’ She steepled her fingers. ‘I don’t mind you locking yourself away like this to work. In fact, I applaud it. But if you’re not happy with the stuff you’re making, put it aside. We’ll archive it. Don’t dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of — understand? If you just want to take a break from painting, be my guest — I’ll even sort you out with a little per diem while you’re off on your tour of Van Gogh’s house, or wherever it is you choose to go. But, for God’s sake, don’t start cutting things off frames and acting stupid about it, thinking I’m some sort of moron by association. Because it might seem as though you’re protecting yourself doing that, upholding the integrity of your art or however you want to put it, but — trust me on this, darling — you’re only letting it go to waste. It’s for your own sake that I’m saying this.’ And she smiled again, as though to soothe me. ‘You’re young. There’s so much ahead of you. Don’t start worrying about being the greatest painter in the world for the time being, eh? It’s a long career, and not everyone is bound for greatness. Just be you, and you’ll do fine.’

It is the unsolicited advice that stays with you, the things that people say under the pretence of kindness. I listened to Dulcie that night when I should have plugged my ears, because I was still too fragile and naïve to argue with her. In London at that time, a word from Dulcie Fenton could just as surely leave an artist snubbed and penniless as it could get them noticed, and I knew I was not strong enough to keep on painting without the cushion of the Roxborough’s money. My studio was all I had, and I was too afraid of losing it. I could not stand to fret again about how I would pay for materials, food, gas, water, rent, all the banal concerns that populate the head and stifle the imagination.

‘And why do you believe it was such bad advice she gave you?’ said Victor Yail. ‘Sounds like she was trying to take the pressure off.’ He was posed in a suede chair with his legs crossed, readying his pen to jot my answer down. Whenever I trailed off in conversation, he always followed up with pointed questions such as this, inviting me to qualify what should already have been obvious through inference. That was the difference between his world and mine: in art, it was better to remain oblique and let the viewer decide your meaning; in rational therapy, things had to be spelled out in the plainest terms. It took me the first few sessions with Victor to get used to that incongruity.

‘Because,’ I replied, ‘it’s important to strive. If you don’t have the ambition to be the very best at what you do, then what’s the point? If you aim for greatness but keep missing — fine. At least you had the guts to aim. There’s honour in failing that way. But there’s nothing honourable about settling for mediocrity. It’s the same in any profession: if I were a dentist I’d try to be the best bloody dentist in the world, and wouldn’t stop until I’d proved it to myself.’

‘That’s really how you see it?’ Victor said.

‘I believe I just said so, didn’t I?’

Victor gave his customary sigh of forbearance. ‘You said to yourself—until you’d proved it to yourself.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s an interesting distinction, don’t you think?’

‘No. Not really.’

He scribbled something down.

‘Please stop moving around so much,’ I told him, lifting my brush from the sketchbook paper. ‘Every time you make a note like that, the angle of your head changes. And so does the light.’

‘I’ll try to hold still,’ he said.

‘Good. Or you’re going to look very odd when this is finished.’

‘I always do.’ He straightened his face. ‘Would you say there’s something particular you need to prove to yourself, then, when you’re painting?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Try to qualify it for me, if you can.’

‘Well, I don’t know. It really depends on the painting.’

‘That sounds like an evasion.’

‘Yes, I’m glad you cottoned on to that, Victor.’

For once, he let my glibness go unchecked. ‘OK, we’ll come back to it.’ He scribbled again. ‘How do you feel now, about this painting you’re doing?’

I stabbed my brush into the gummy square of cad red. ‘This silly thing?’ The tone needed lightening with a small dab of water. I mixed it to a suitable pallor on the inside of the paintbox. ‘It’s difficult to say.’

‘Please, try to qualify it.’

I did not lift my head up from the paper. With the cad red, I dimpled the fabric of the strangely patterned wall-hanging beyond Victor’s head, adding some reflected colour in the windowpanes and the glass-topped surface of his desk. ‘Honestly, this has to be the dullest picture I’ve ever made in my life, and I would very much like to set the thing on fire before I leave so nobody will have to look at it.’

‘Right,’ Victor said, scribbling. Then he folded his arms. ‘I asked you how you were feeling and you’ve come back at me with a volley of opinion. If you’re not going to be sincere about this, we might as well call time on it now.’

‘Stop moving around. You’re ruining my composition.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Ellie — come on — time to be serious.’

I dumped the sketchbook on the floor. ‘All right.’ The page was not quite dry and some of the colour bled with the impact: tiny veins streaking the paper from the centre outwards. ‘As far as feeling anxious goes: no, I don’t feel anything, not with this kind of work. I could make little pictures like this all day because that’s all it is: picture-making. There’s no emotional connection with this process whatsoever. I mean, no offence to you, Victor, but doing a quick portrait of you in watercolours isn’t any sort of challenge. This whole exercise is meaningless.’

‘Ah, but you’re painting,’ he said. ‘That isn’t meaningless.’

‘I see what you’re trying to do. I get it. But, really, this is just like all the stuff I’ve been knocking out for Dulcie in the last few months — I can finish it, and you can hang it on your wall and say I painted it if you want to, but there’s nothing of me in it. It’s not art, just decoration.’

‘Can I see it?’ he said.

I shrugged.

He got up from his chair, flexing his legs, then stooped to gather the portrait I had made. It had taken me just under twenty minutes. Sliding his glasses along his nose to appraise it, he made no sound, tilting it to the afternoon light, as though it were some lost relic he was trying to authenticate. Then he said, ‘If that’s just decoration, then I mustn’t know much about art. May I keep this?’

‘All yours.’ I held my hand out. ‘A couple of hundred ought to cover it.’

‘Payment in services rendered.’

‘Cheapskate,’ I said, and he permitted himself a laugh.

He sat down again with the picture on his knees, admiring it for a moment before swivelling it round for me to look at. ‘Why did you paint it this way, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I can’t do faces very well,’ I said.

‘Ellie — serious now — please.’

I had been seeing Victor for the past six months. It had taken an enormous effort just to dial his number to organise an appointment, and an even greater determination to present myself at his office for the first time. But I had done it in the hope of salvaging some aspect of my old self, and Dulcie had been only too delighted to foot the bill. When I had suggested that I might see a therapist instead of taking a break from painting, she had responded with all the enthusiasm I had expected: ‘Oh, absolutely — that sounds like a very fine idea to me. Did you have anyone in mind?’ I had told her Victor Yail would be the only person I would feel comfortable with. ‘Well, if that’s something you think you need,’ she had said. Then: ‘Does that mean January is still a possibility?’ I reasoned that if I was going to relax my principles just to appease the Roxborough, then I might as well get something useful out of it, and Victor had been so confident that he could help me overcome my problems.

His practice was on the third floor of a Georgian townhouse in Harley Street. It was a rather clerical environment: just an oak-panelled waiting area with an array of mismatched chairs, and then, through a doorway behind the receptionist’s desk, Victor’s imperious consulting room, where all my issues were laid bare for him and picked apart. This was a space I knew he took great pride in. Burgundy carpet, mahogany bureau (obscuring most of the good light from the picture window), blocky suede furniture arranged in a perfect L. Between the couch and Victor’s armchair was an ankle-height coffee table that held a chessboard, its ornate marble pieces uniformly placed, and the bookshelves were replete with dimly titled volumes and obscure foreign artefacts. Drab lithographs of birds and trees were hung on the walls beside two mystifying Aboriginal tapestries and the many foiled certificates of Victor’s education. I had included all these details in the portrait, knowing how much he valued them.

At the beginning of the session, he had given me a rudimentary box of paints, a brush, and a pot of water. ‘We’re going to try something new today, if that’s all right with you.’ He had invited me to spend the full hour painting his portrait whilst we conducted our usual discussion. ‘I’ll just sit in my normal spot, as still as I can, while you talk and paint. Let’s see what we end up with.’

Now, he was sitting with the results of my endeavour on his lap, asking me to give the rationale behind it. I did not know where to begin. Therapy seemed to be such an inexact procedure, like wetting your finger and circling it around the rim of a glass, again and again, until it finally rang a note you could define as music. ‘The striking thing,’ he said, ‘is that I’m not in this picture at all. Why is that?’

It was true that I had quite deliberately left Victor out of the image. I had noticed that the watercolour box contained a pot of masking fluid, so I had blanked out the shape of him with this invisible solution and then painted in everything else around him. The fullness of his office was rendered in blotchy detail, right down to the outlying rooftops in the window behind his back, the snowy trail of Harley Street, but Victor was just a white void on the paper, a frame without substance. ‘You can still tell it’s you, though,’ I said.

‘Is this how you see me, Ellie?’ he asked. ‘An empty shell? Not really there?’

‘No. Don’t be ridiculous. I just painted it that way because—’ And I trailed off. I could not explain why the notion had come to me. When I tried to, the words came out so unpersuasively: ‘I don’t know, I thought it would make for a more interesting picture, that’s all. Obviously, I see you as a person. Bloody hell. I see everyone as a person.’

‘Do you see any connection between this picture and your life in general? Absences and what have you?’

‘Yes. Fine. You caught me out. I was thinking of Jim, OK, not you.’

‘That wasn’t quite my point.’

‘I know what you were getting at. And I’m still not comfortable discussing it.’

‘All right. We’ll move past that for now.’

I huffed. ‘It’s just me trying to be less ordinary. I don’t want to be so literal with everything I paint — that was Jim’s problem. He had good ideas but he stopped himself exploring them.’

‘We aren’t here to talk about Jim’s problems.’

‘Well, it hardly matters. I’m still not abstract enough for some.’

‘Who’s said that about you — not abstract enough?’

‘It wasn’t said, necessarily. Just implied.’

‘By whom?’

I tried to look unfazed by the memory of it. ‘There was an important show a few months ago, at the RBA. Situation, it was called. You probably heard.’

Victor shook his head. ‘I don’t get out much. And when I do, it’s only to the squash club.’

‘Well, Dulcie was pushing to include one of my pieces, a diptych I made last year. But they wouldn’t have it in the show.’

‘Why not?’

‘I have my suspicions.’

‘Such as?’

‘Doesn’t matter. They liked the scale of it, but seemed to think it was too figurative. They said my references to mountains and what have you were a bit too clear and they were after something different.’

‘What were they looking for?’

‘Pure abstraction, I think. No obvious representations of reality, just gesture.’

‘I see.’ Victor was still holding the portrait up in both hands, but he nodded at me in such a way that I expected he was itching to scribble something down. ‘And that made you feel bad, did it?’

‘At first, yes. No one likes rejection.’ I smoothed the creases from my skirt and gazed into the window. The snow was skeltering down the pane. ‘It’s really picking up out there again.’

‘But now you feel differently about it?’ Victor said. His professionalism could be so irritating at times — I was never allowed to deflect from a sore subject while we were in session.

‘Yes. Now I feel much worse.’ I smiled. ‘Look, they didn’t take Nicholson or Lanyon’s work either, and a lot of others they should have, in my opinion. So I got over the rejection side of things quickly enough — it happens and you have to deal with it. But then I went to see the show.’

‘Ah. Not very impressive?’

I just stared at him. ‘Sometimes, Victor, you’re so far off the pace it worries me.’

He set my sketchbook on the armrest and glanced down at his watch. ‘You’re saying the show was good, but it left you deflated in some way.’

‘In every way.’ I threw up my hands. ‘I mean, there I was, surrounded by all of this outstanding work — stuff that really pushes at the limits of what painting can do — and the only thing I could think about was the pile of rubbish I’d left back in my studio. I felt ashamed, if you really want to know. That these artists were so brave, and I was so desperate to be ordinary.’

‘That word again,’ Victor said. ‘You use it a lot.’

‘Would you prefer average? Middling? Mediocre?’

He gave a small sigh of indifference. ‘Let’s talk about your pieces for the January show. You’ve been going through the motions with those, you said.’

‘Yes. God. How many times do I have to repeat myself?’

He ignored me, thumbing towards the sketchbook. ‘And that’s how you approached the portrait here, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re not being truthful about that, Ellie. You told me — hang on, I’d hate to misquote you—’ He leaned to flick back through the pages of his notebook, one-handed. ‘That’s just me trying to be less ordinary. Not be so literal. Isn’t that what you just said?’

‘Well, I didn’t think you’d be transcribing every last bloody word when I was saying it. Is this a courtroom now?’

With this, he eased off, reclining in his chair, softening his stance. ‘My point is, what you’ve made for me here is by no means ordinary. I’m not in it, for a start. That’s fairly unusual for a portrait, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It depends on your frame of reference.’

‘All right. Fair enough. I don’t profess to be an expert on art. But I can tell the time well enough: eighteen minutes and forty-one seconds. That’s how long it took you to complete it. And you showed no obvious anxiety behaviours as you were painting it. So, I’m left wondering if it’s the act of painting that’s been causing all your apprehensions, like we discussed, or if it’s something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not sure yet. We need to talk that through a bit more, but I’m confident we’ll get there,’ he said. ‘And I think it’s probably wise to keep you on the Tofranil for now. It appears to be helping. Unless you’ve any objections?’

For once, I had no answer.

‘Good then.’ Victor leaned to make one last scribble on his notepad. ‘I think we’ve made terrific strides today already.’

Staying away from the Roxborough in January proved difficult. I managed not to be there for the hanging of my paintings, letting Dulcie and her deputies ascribe the order to the turgid mess I handed them. When the private viewing came around on the 14th, I stayed home, knowing they would make me stand beside my wretched work for photo opportunities and give interviews all night about the (lack of) thought behind them. Still, there were so many quiet afternoons in the weeks after, when I was tempted to drop into the gallery to see the paintings in situ, hoping the sight of them in this context might somehow redeem them.

In the lead-up to the opening, Dulcie had posted me the text for the show’s catalogue, seeking my approval. She had commissioned a foreword from a writer called Ken Muirhead, a fellow Scot who had commended my previous show in the Telegraph. Of my new paintings, he wrote this:

[. .] these muted, reflective compositions mark a departure from her bracing early work and show the clear maturation of her talent. Building on studies of the city from one fixed vantage point, Conroy presents New York as a constellation of tiny human acts occurring in slow motion. In her hands, what should be scattershot and frenzied becomes reposed, serene. A view of life as though from the stars.

I was almost hypnotised by the language in this paragraph, but I resisted it. Clearly, Muirhead had failed to notice the sheer apathy that underpinned the paintings, how poorly I had gone about the task of executing them, how knowingly I had let them be carried from my studio, one after the next, like meat leaving an abattoir. And then it struck me that Ken Muirhead and I were one and the same: factotums, glad to dash off work for the cost of our subsistence. I agreed to the text and sent it back to Dulcie without comment, thinking nobody would ever take such drivel seriously. She called me after the private viewing to tell me, ‘Ken was rather sad not to see you there. He said he’d never wanted to meet an artist so much in his life. And he doesn’t even know how pretty you are yet. We ought to set the two of you up. I don’t think he’s married any more.’

What I did not expect was the commotion that followed. The reviewers were even more fulsome in their praise of my paintings than Muirhead—‘staggering’, they said; ‘exceptional’, ‘dazzling’, ‘ambitious, affecting’—and the public seemed to mistake the ignorance of these critiques for testimonials. The Roxborough attracted so many visitors in the show’s run that it had to extend its opening hours to accommodate them. Had I ventured there on any of those quiet afternoons in January, I would have found myself queuing at the door. I learned all of this from Dulcie, when she came by the studio at the close of the show with Max Eversholt and a bottle of champagne already opened. ‘Well, somebody’s got to celebrate your success,’ she said, ‘even if you won’t.’

I was obliged to get three glasses from the kitchen cabinet and sit with them, toasting my so-called achievements in the bedlam of my flat. Max toed a bundle of rags from my sofa and sat down. He had lost more hair since I had seen him last, but he was no less prone to fussing with it. ‘Doesn’t matter who the artist is — after a while, all these places look the same to me,’ he said, regarding my studio. ‘Shouldn’t you be looking for a bigger space now?’

‘I’m fine where I am,’ I told him, pretending to drink.

‘She’s fine where she is,’ Dulcie said. ‘Stop trying to spend her money.’ She dragged a stool all the way from the other side of the room and dusted it off with her coat-sleeve.

We clinked our dirty glasses and I just sat there, letting them assume the yoke of conversation, as always. They went on for some time about the show, how quickly all the pieces had been sold, talking figures and ‘next steps’, and soon they got round to more interesting matters. ‘That little project for the observatory could be worth doing in the interim,’ Max said, tossing his hair back. ‘Before we start planning too much overseas, I mean.’ I was not quite sure how much of my earnings Max Eversholt still had a stake in, but he never stopped speaking as though his involvement in my affairs was paramount.

Dulcie explained that three of the paintings in my show had been bought by an architect named Paul Christopher. They had talked for a while at the private viewing: ‘He’s good pals with Ken, actually. That’s how we got on to the subject. . Ken asked him where he was planning on hanging all the paintings, and he said, “They’re going in my office, if I can find the space.” So I said, “It’s a shame you don’t have a bigger practice — you could’ve bought another three,” and he said, “Well, that doesn’t stop me commissioning more.”’ According to Dulcie, the architect had been hired to build a new planetary observatory in the Lake District. ‘I think it’s linked to one of the universities up there — Durham, I think he said — but it’s all privately funded. You know how these things go: some rich idiot messed around with a telescope when he was a lad and now he gets his name on an observatory. Whatever the reasons, it’s more or less built already, and our friend Christopher wants you to do a mural for the science centre.’

‘Only problem is,’ Max added, ‘who the bloody hell’s going to see it, all the way up there?’

‘I don’t know. Scientists and students, I’d expect. I’m sure they wouldn’t have built it otherwise.’ Dulcie went on talking in the manner she knew I hated: studying her fingernails when she ought to have been addressing me. ‘Christopher says he wants to make a real feature of the entrance, and he was knocked out by your show. I asked him what kind of budget he had in mind and he told me there was plenty in the pot. It might be worth considering.’

It seemed to me that anyone whose taste in art was so undiscerning as to appreciate my New York paintings could not be a very good architect. So I dismissed the suggestion of meeting him offhand. ‘All right,’ Dulcie said. ‘Just thought I should mention it.’ But as the days went by, the idea of working on a mural grew more appealing. I thought a lot about the intensity of my student work on the top floor of the Glasgow School, the fearlessness of those images I once made for Henry Holden, and I wanted to see if I could restore some of that spirit. When I called Dulcie to tell her of my change of heart, she did not seem surprised.

Five

The drawings for the mural at the Willard Observatory were submitted in April 1961 and approved that same month. I met just once with the architects at their offices in Montague Street. They showed me their original concepts for the science centre and how their blueprints had evolved, and, referring mostly to photographs and scale models, they talked me through their various stipulations for the interior—‘the brief’, as they insisted on calling it. The dimensions of the entrance hall were not as vast as I had hoped, but, discussing the project further with Paul Christopher, I sensed that we had similar perceptions of what a mural in that space should do. He was a waifish, softly-spoken man who had a very clumsy and unthinking manner: clattering his hips on table corners as he escorted me through the office, picking a clod of earwax from the dip of his right lobe during our meeting. Despite the fact that he had bought three of my weakest paintings from Dulcie, he had a good sensibility for art, and we seemed to share opinions on most aesthetic matters: he had his misgivings about the ideals of Le Corbusier, preferred the sculptures of Brancusi to Modigliani, and had also liked the purely abstract works in the recent RBA show. Everything about the project felt right to me. I had just one condition for accepting the job and Paul Christopher agreed to it: I would paint the mural on a set of canvases in my own studio and install it in pieces when the deadline came. ‘Yes, however you see it working best,’ was what he said. ‘I didn’t expect you’d want to do a fresco, and I’m not thrilled with the plastering job anyway — you’d be doing us a favour.’ He had thought of me for the mural because of what he called ‘the starriness’ of my recent work, and I did not care to press him for a fuller explanation.

My initial ideas lacked verve. I knew very little about astronomy and did not want to paint something that failed to reference its surroundings, or that referenced them too bluntly. So I took to visiting the Planetarium for their evening shows to develop my understanding of the cosmos, and took membership of the Royal Astronomical Society, pulling texts from their library in the afternoons. During that spell of research at Burlington House, I was exposed to so much inspiring work: rare celestial charts by Andreas Cellarius from the seventeenth century, ornate star maps from Bayer’s Uranometria, and Galileo’s remarkable moon drawings. I found myself compelled by the mythologies that supported these early visions of the stars, making detailed studies of Pegasus, Ophiuchus, Hercules, Orion and other featured characters, thinking I might incorporate them into the mural somehow. In John Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis, and all the great celestial atlases of the Georgian era, I found the same constellations appearing as mythical creatures, symbolic animals (the serpent, the eagle, the owl), and objects of war (the shield, the spear, the bow and arrow). It seemed strange to me that such precise works of science could be cloaked in so much allegory.

I kept returning to one particular atlas. The archivist said it was compiled by a schoolteacher called Alexander Jamieson in 1822. ‘Another great Scot,’ I said, but he did not answer me. These celestial charts of Jamieson’s were just as meticulous as the others, but the renditions of the animal forms — Cygnus, Leo, and Aries, especially — were better expressed and proportioned. I was taken with the thought of reimagining a section of his atlas in my mural. For a few days, I developed sketches from Jamieson’s originals, depicting Centaurus — half man, half horse — skewering the constellation of Lupus, the wolf, with a spear. Each figure was badged with tiny stars, showing the framework of the constellations. But something about this concept failed to convince me. It addressed the subject too directly. The image was too oppressive for the space. I abandoned it.

My brain was not geared to understand the complexities of the science, but I delighted in reading more about the history of astronomy. I grew fascinated by its importance as a means of navigation. In the age of sail, accurate maps of the stars were vital to aid the passage of ships at sea (I read somewhere that this was the sole reason for the appointment of John Flamsteed as Britain’s first Astronomer Royal). This relationship between the stars and the oceans reverberated with me. In spite of my experiences aboard the Queen Elizabeth, I had not lost any affection for Melville and Stevenson or the cheap pirate adventure novels I remembered from my youth.

I moved my research to the National Maritime Museum and taught myself about the early instruments of navigation: the astrolabe, the sextant, the back staff, the nocturnal. It seemed for a time that I would include data from old nautical almanacs in my drawings, too, but I could not bring these ideas to a resolution. Then, one afternoon, I chanced upon a compendium of sail-plans and diagrams for merchant sailing ships in the museum bookshop. They were not from the same period as the Jamieson atlas, but there was a clear similarity between these precise designs (made by naval architects to determine the structure and placement of ships’ sails) and the star charts I had studied at Burlington House. In the sail-plans, key points of the ship’s rigging were numbered and connected by solid or broken lines, in much the same way that the gridlines of the celestial sphere were drawn out by Jamieson. I noticed clear parallels and overlaps. When I traced the sail-plans in the studio and laid them directly on top of my copied star charts, the natural cohesion of the images excited me.

I completed the drawings for Paul Christopher over the next few days. I proposed a mural eight feet high by fourteen wide, depicting a scrapyard for old sailing vessels, seen from various perspectives — a junkpile of merchant sailing ships arranged at curious angles, filling the entire space. I plotted these ships against a chart expanded from Jamieson’s atlas so that the junctures of their sails and rigging correlated with the patterns of the stars. I posted the drawings to Christopher & Partners, expecting I would not hear back for at least a fortnight, but he called the very next morning to tell me how much he admired them. The commission was finalised, and I was set a deadline of late September to complete the work, with an extra week for installation and final touches.

I went about the task of painting the mural so methodically. First, I divided my master drawing into one-inch squares with construction lines. Then I made a cartoon — a kind of knitting pattern, drawn on paper to enlarge the master sketch. This was organised into corresponding one-foot squares, helping me retain the proportions of the original. Transferring the design from the cartoon involved puncturing its drawn outlines with my roulette — a small spiked wheel on a wooden handle — and then dusting the perforations with dry poster paint, leaving behind a dotted imprint on the stretched cotton canvas that I could firm up with ink. I underpainted each square using oil pigments thinned right down with turpentine, building thicker coats upon it as the days progressed. It was important to graduate from light to dark so that the image would retain its punch and definition.

My aim was to finish most of the work by July to give the paint and resin enough time to settle, as I was going to have to roll the canvas up and transport it to the observatory in a cardboard tube — it was a five-hour drive, north to Windermere, and the longer the painting stayed on the roll, the harder it would be to install. I planned to affix the final image to the wall with lead adhesive in three separate sections, using the techniques I had learned from Henry Holden. Everything seemed to be in place.

But I was barely halfway into painting when I noticed a problem with the master drawing I was working from. In all of Jamieson’s celestial charts, two elements were persistently shown in the form of solid, candy-striped lines. The first of these represented the equator. The second was marked: ECLIPTIC. I intended to present these lines as frayed lengths of rope, arcing from right to left. But, just as I was about to start committing them to paint, I hesitated. It occurred to me that, in my great rush to finish the mural plans, I had not stopped to query the significance of these lines in Jamieson’s originals. So I went to get my dictionary (I kept it in my bedside drawer in place of a Bible).

equator / ih-kway-ter / noun

an imaginary line around the earth at equal distances from the poles, dividing the earth into northern and southern hemispheres.

This just confirmed what I already knew. It was school-level astronomy.

ecliptic / ih-klip-tick / noun

a great circle on the celestial sphere representing the sun’s apparent path among the stars during the year.

I was more curious about this definition. ‘Representing’ and ‘apparent’ seemed like oddly vague descriptors, and left me feeling quite unsatisfied. The next day, I went back to Burlington House to consult their reference books.

The ecliptic is an imaginary great circle on the celestial sphere along which the sun appears to move over the course of the year. (In actuality, it is the earth’s orbit around the sun that causes the change in the sun’s apparent direction.) The ecliptic is inclined from the celestial equator by 23.5 degrees, and crosses it at two points, known as equinoxes. The constellations of the zodiac are positioned along the ecliptic.

I went to see if the librarian could expound on this for me. She did not understand the definition herself (‘I’m part-time here,’ she said, ‘and I only studied Classics’), but advised me to speak to the archivist, who would be coming back shortly from lunch. And so I sat patiently in the reading room for over an hour until the man appeared. He had helped me on several occasions before, and I always thought that he looked much too young to be an archivist; it seemed that wearing a lot of tweed and brilliantine was his strategy for disguising it. He went to find himself a text from the shelves. As I approached him, he took off his round wire frames and gently closed his fist over them. Raising one corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Who told you?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Who told you I could help?’

‘I’m sorry. The librarian thought—’

‘She knows. I told her fifty times. It’s my day off.’

‘Oh. Then why are you here?’

‘Because I’m trying to do some research of my own.’

‘Snap,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ He sighed. ‘You might as well have a seat. I can take a few minutes out of the tedium, I suppose.’

‘You’re very kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

There was an uncomfortable moment in which I thought he sniffed my hair as I sat down at the nearest table, but it was only his peculiar way of breathing. ‘Excuse my hay fever,’ he said, standing over me. ‘Tell me what you need.’

I laid out the reference book, pointing to the extract I wanted him to clarify. He leaned in, placing a hand at the back of my chair. ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, shifting away, ‘is how the line is imaginary.’

‘It’s imaginary in the same sense as the equator and the celestial sphere,’ he replied. ‘Simple.’

I blinked back at him.

‘Oh dear. You’d better shift over.’ Wearily hooking his glasses back on his ears, he sat down in the space beside me. He turned back his sleeves. ‘All right. Astronomy for naïfs, lesson one. The celestial sphere.’ He talked very quickly and flatly, as though dictating a letter: ‘The way we envision the stars is by imagining they’re attached to a giant invisible sphere surrounding the earth. It’s a total fiction, really — just a construction we came up with to help us get our heads around the complexity of it all. And, of course, we can only see half of this sphere at any given time. So, you could say it’s more like a dome, or a semi-sphere, but we prefer not to call it that. Our prerogative. Anyway—’ He tapped the page: one heavy clop of his index finger to get my attention. ‘The ecliptic, put simply, is the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun. But since we all live here on earth, we observe the sun to be moving along this plane instead. Why? Because what would be the point of looking at things from the perspective of the sun? That’s no use to anyone. And it’s important to have a governing system.’ He nudged closer, wetting his lips. ‘Ergo, it’s an imaginary circle, as it’s only a part of our human construction of the cosmos. To call it a genuine circle would be quite incorrect. But to avoid confusion, we say that the sun moves in a circular path through the stars over the course of the year. We can observe it going eastwards through the constellations along a sort of line. That line is what we call the ecliptic. It’s not actually there, of course. In fact, it’s a complete inversion, because it’s really the earth that’s moving, not the sun. But to all intents and purposes, it’s a bloody great circular line in the sky made by the sun throughout the year.’ His brow was crumpled now. ‘It seems I’m quite incapable of explaining this succinctly. Shall I draw you a picture?’

Perhaps the only way to describe the cosmos was by analogy. The archivist took out a notebook and a pencil. ‘Imagine the sun is on top of this maypole, here.’ He made a line with a head like a matchstick. ‘And you’re the earth, dancing round it. For the sake of time, let’s forget about the fact that you’re tilted at twenty-three and a bit degrees to the pole — it only complicates things.’ He drew a wobbly circle and marked it with a cross, then added a dotted line to show my viewpoint with a smaller cross on the opposite side.

He moved the pencil slowly in a clockwise loop. ‘So, from your point of view, keeping your eyes on the tip of the maypole as you go round, it seems to track out a circle against the celestial sky. That circle would be your ecliptic. It’s not actually there; it’s just the way you perceive it. Really, it’s you that’s going in circles. The maypole stays where it is. Understand now?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The picture helped.’

‘Oh good. Welcome to basic astronomy,’ he replied. ‘Now you’d better let me get on with wasting my day off.’

‘What are you researching, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I’ve been trying to write a biography of Eddington for a while now.’

‘Edison?’

‘No. Good gracious, why does everybody say that?’ He closed my reference book. ‘One day, people are going to stop asking me that question. They’ll say, “Ah yes, Eddington, of course.” And I shall have a good old laugh about it. Until then—’ He slid the book to me under the tow of his middle finger. ‘Best of luck.’

I never got the chance to thank him properly. He was already on his feet, browsing the shelves.

When I got back to my studio, the stars in my mural seemed dimmer. I could not see a way that I could include the ecliptic or the equator in the form that I had originally devised. To present imaginary lines as ropes — solid, tangible things — felt insincere. But to show them as candy-striped tracks, as Jamieson had done, seemed equally wrong. How could I represent things that were themselves just representations of other people’s representations? And how could I make them fit the themes of my design without contriving them? I could not continue with the painting until I had resolved these issues in my mind. And so it stayed on the stretchers, half-made.

For a time, the telephone did not ring at all — nobody cared where I was or what I was doing. But, after a week or so, the calls became more frequent and more difficult to ignore. I left the phone unhooked and, when the bellyaching noise started to bother me, I cut the wire.

The problem seemed to be in the materials themselves: oil paints were versatile, but they could not give me the illusory qualities I wanted. Graphite on paper was so categorical, ink so permanent. Gouache was flat, acrylic like toothpaste. I was aiming to show lines that were not really there, and felt limited by the tools at my disposal. There were tricks of perspective I attempted: re-ordering my scrapyard of ships so that the arc of their upturned hulls, the shadows of their masts, the limits of their sails were subtly aligned and, from a certain angle, alluded to an arcing line. But doing this ruined the balance of the image: what had been an ordered jumble became a clot of pieces, too conveniently manoeuvred into position.

I thought of masking certain areas of the painting, using vacancies in the drawing to suggest a lurking presence. This worked fine on paper, but when I came to transfer it to the canvas, the image looked skeletal, dead. I needed to find some method of getting the paint to vary with the light or decay over the course of time. Ripolin might well have worked, but I did not know where to acquire it or if it was still being manufactured. I mixed various types of glue into the paints I had — no luck; it hardened them or glossed them or turned them lumpy. My telephone was broken so I could not ring around to ask the dealers for their suggestions. And what would I have said? ‘I want something to make my lines look more imaginary.’ ‘Ah, yes — I’ve got just the thing. When can you come and collect it?’ ‘Don’t you deliver? I can’t go outside.’ ‘No, you’ll have to come and get it. Our delivery boy is sick.’ ‘But, I can’t leave the flat.’ ‘Why not? What’s wrong with you?’ ‘I can’t leave my work, that’s all.’ Going outside was simply not possible. It was foggy out there. Full of noises. I had stapled the curtains. Nothing could get in. The water was brown when it came from the taps, but I was still drinking it. So what? Work my way through it — that was the best thing. Just like my parents. Get my head down. No complaining.

The phone rang.

Paul Christopher.

No.

Someone was buzzing. Down there, on the street, at my door.

A startling racket. Bzz-bzz, bzz-bzz-bzz. I could not see out the window. Bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz, bzz-bzz. It did not go away until I pressed the button.

Different feet this time, not Dulcie’s. The thumping on the stairs was deeper. A man’s. I looked through the spyhole.

Victor Yail. He was in a cricket jumper, but he still had his briefcase. As he leaned in to knock, his face bent and swelled. I undid the latch.

He stood on the landing, peering into the flat. ‘Thought you’d like some fresh air.’

I shook my head.

‘Just a quick walk to the corner and back. We shan’t go far.’

I did not move.

‘OK. Then would you please let me in?’

I held the door open for him.

‘You missed your last few appointments,’ he said, surveying the room with tightened eyes.

I closed all the locks.

‘Is this the mural? It’s enormous.’

‘Don’t touch it,’ I said.

He turned sharply, looking for a clean spot on the floor to set his case down, and settled for the milk crate near the kitchen counter. ‘Is it all right if I look around a bit? I promise I won’t move anything.’

‘What are you doing here, Victor?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said, piloting a route between the obstacles around him. Boxes, jam-jars, soup cans. ‘If you drop off the radar for several weeks without a word, people get concerned.’ Bottles, paper, tin foil. Clods of paint and drips of ink. ‘Dulcie got in touch. She said she’d tried to phone but you weren’t answering.’ Dishes, plates, and parcel tape. Paint rags, clothing, bits of wire. ‘Happened a few times now, she said. So I thought I’d come over.’ Knives and forks and spoons and spatulas. ‘I’m very glad I did. What’s this?’ He pointed to the bench where I had been working on my pigments.

‘A mortar and pestle,’ I told him.

‘I can see that. What’s inside?’

‘An experiment.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Victor said. And, when he turned back to me, he was holding something in his hand: a brown glass bottle with a torn-off label. In a kind of pantomime, he turned it upside down to show me it was empty. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

I shrugged. I was not exactly sure I could account for all of them. Some were skinned over in the cans about his feet, some congealed on scraps of paper, some had made it to the small test canvases in stacks under the window — the firewood pile, I liked to think of it. The rest could have been anywhere.

‘Ellie, how long have you been grinding up your tablets like this?’

Again, I was not sure. But I answered, ‘A week or so.’

‘I gave you a month’s supply. Are they all gone?’

I shrugged again.

Looking earnestly into my eyes, he said, ‘Well, this is quite a setback, Ellie, I won’t lie to you.’ He tossed the bottle onto the couch. It made an oddly noiseless landing. ‘We need to get you back on those right away. You can’t just suddenly stop. It’ll shock your system.’ He went to his briefcase, treading without care. A rag stuck to his shoe. In the top compartment, he found his prescription pad and filled out a sheet. ‘As soon as the pharmacy opens tomorrow, take this, do you hear me?’

I sat down. The muscles in my legs felt hard as metal.

‘In fact, here—’ He drew something from a different pocket of the case. Another bottle: plastic, rattling. He made to throw it, then decided not to. ‘These are Jonathan’s. He takes them for his bedwetting. It’s Tofranil, the same as yours but a very low dosage.’ He pressed them into my hand. ‘I keep them with me for emergencies. Take them. They’ll tide you over till tomorrow.’

‘What for?’ I asked. I was so tired.

‘Don’t worry what for. You’d better have something in your stomach first,’ he said. ‘How long has it been since you ate?’ He went rummaging in my kitchen. The fridge door opened, the fridge door closed. ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘Fish paste and sweetcorn. No wonder you look malnourished.’ And he rolled up his sleeves to muck out my sink. ‘Is there someone who could stay with you tonight? A friend, a neighbour? I don’t think you should be alone at the moment.’

‘No.’ I looked down at the bottle. ‘No one else.’

‘What about the people downstairs?’

‘I don’t know them very well.’

‘Your parents?’

‘Miles away.’

‘Dulcie, then.’

‘You must be joking.’

Victor heaved out a sigh. He wiped his forehead with the crook of his wrist, soapsuds clinging to his arm-hairs. ‘I’ve a spare room at home,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to insist, but I can’t let you stay here alone. It’ll just be for the night.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave my work.’

And he repeated the words back to me, slower. ‘You can’t leave your work. All right.’ He surveyed the room, nodding. ‘I’ll stay here tonight then. As a friend. I just need to use your phone.’ But when he got to the wall, he found the wire had been snipped. ‘Actually, there’s a phone box down the road. Why don’t I bring us back some fish and chips, eh? My treat.’ He took my door keys from the kitchen counter. ‘Won’t be long.’

He came back a while later in a different set of clothes and without his briefcase. Instead, he had a leather overnight bag and a box of groceries. ‘The chip shops were all closed, so I’ve brought you some provisions from home.’ Unpacking the box, he showed me everything he had: sardines and mackerel in tins, bread rolls, canned tomatoes, rice, Oxo cubes, an onion, a pint of milk, some parcelled meat. ‘I’ll get cooking,’ he said, ‘once I’ve cleaned this place up a bit. Why don’t you come and keep me company?’

I told him I was not hungry, but Victor Yail was not the sort of man who could be persuaded from a path once he had started on it. While he sorted through the clutter of my kitchen, changing the bins and clearing the surfaces, I lay down on my couch and allowed myself to sleep.

The meal was nothing fancy — just minced beef and tomatoes with rice — but it was one of the finest I ever ate in my life. Victor let me finish it in silence, while he leaned on the cooker, reading through the newspaper. It was either very late or very early. The kitchen was gleaming and spare. There was a stillness behind the curtains and the peak-time blaring of the television set downstairs could not be heard. I was already feeling much better. Victor took my plate and I thanked him. He came back with a small glass of milk and two tablets. ‘Just those for now, but we’re going to start upping your dosage.’ I swallowed them down and he gave me a pat on the shoulder. It was strange to be looked after in this way, as though I were a child again. I had not known closeness like this for years.

Victor lit the stove and put the kettle on. He stroked his beard as though trying to remove it with one hand. ‘I was looking at your work, while you were sleeping. Hope you don’t mind.’ And he gestured to the mural that was bracketed to my studio wall, unfinished.

I twisted round to glare at it. The flaws were still so obvious.

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to look at.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Well, your taste is questionable. I’ve seen your office.’

‘What’s wrong with my office?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘If you like that academic sort of look.’

‘I happen to adore that academic sort of look. That academic sort of look is exactly what I was striving for. So I’ll take that back-handed compliment and return it to you, forehand.’ He acted out the shot, and I could not help but laugh at his ludicrous expression. I was still winding in my smile when he said, ‘I’d like to ask about the ships, though.’

‘It’s just a design,’ I told him. ‘And not a very good one, it turns out.’

‘Yes, but ships. I thought it was an observatory you were painting it for.’

‘It is. It was.’

I started to recount all the ways in which astronomy was linked to seafaring, and Victor raised his finger, wagged it at me. ‘That’s not what I was getting at,’ he said. ‘It just seems curious that the first piece of work you’ve been excited about for a while contains so many ships — even when it’s meant to be about the stars.’ He folded his arms. ‘It’s also interesting that you failed to bring this up when we last spoke.’

‘What difference does it make?’ I did not understand why he was pressing this point quite so forcefully.

‘We could have talked about the significance of those ships, for starters, and stopped you getting yourself into such a state again.’ He angled his body to address me. ‘There’s only so long we can go on dancing round what happened on the Queen Elizabeth, you know.’

I ruffled my hair in frustration. ‘You see, this is the problem with psychiatry. Everything has to be connected to something else. I just liked the idea — that’s all. It got me excited. It’s not even the same kind of ship!’

‘So what happened?’ Victor said, blank-faced. ‘Why haven’t you finished it?’

‘Because. It stopped making sense to me.’ In through the nose, out through the mouth. ‘There’s a fault in it. In my design.’ I tried to justify it, but it did not seem to register.

Victor stepped to the sink. He began to rinse the meat-flecks off my plate under the tap. ‘That doesn’t explain why you’ve been holed up in this place again with your curtains stapled and your telephone cut off. Shall I tell you what I think?’

‘No. I’d rather you just left.’

‘Tough luck. I’m here for the night.’

‘Nobody asked you to be.’

‘Yes, I’m here out of the goodness of my strange little heart. Please sit down.’

‘I don’t have to.’

‘Ellie, sit down. We’re not having an argument. We’re just talking.’ He was staring at my reflection in the kitchen window. I could see myself framed in it, too, inside a sallow block of light. My face had the greyness of decomposing fruit, the kind that is put out on a still-life table and forgotten. I went to sit down on the couch. Victor had not tidied anything in the studio — he knew better than to move the things that mattered to me.

His theory was that I had chosen to paint ships as a way of expressing what I could not previously evoke in the caldarium pieces. I did not understand how this could be the case, but he seemed quite certain of it: ‘See, it’s not a choice you made consciously. Genuine creativity, as you always tell me, doesn’t come from any conscious thought. It’s an agglomeration of things. A happy accident. And there’s no doubt that your head is predisposed to certain types of imagery. Of course you’re painting ships. You lost a baby, Ellie — that’s a terribly traumatic thing for anyone to go through alone — and it happened while you were sailing on an enormous passenger ship thousands of miles from home. Are you trying to tell me that you can’t see the connection? That you don’t still feel adrift from things? Lost at sea? All of those clichés you use in our sessions and think I don’t pick up on.’

I found it difficult to answer him. He was barrelling on as though I was not there.

‘And as soon as you come off your medication — as soon as you consciously take note of what it is you’re actually painting — you find some way to stop yourself completing work. There’s this fault with it here, that problem there. You can’t finish anything. The tablets help, because they keep you from thinking too much about what you’re doing. Isn’t that how you got the work done last time for Dulcie? — “Knocking them out,” you said. That’s when you were taking your pills regularly. You can finish things when you’re medicated. But when you come off it—’ He paused, letting the point resound. ‘You get anxious again. You start worrying. You see ships and think of everything you’ve lost. I don’t just mean the baby — I mean the ships your father built. Clydebank. Glasgow. Your mother. Home. Jim Culvers. You see paintings and you think of all the ones you made before, when you were happier. In that attic room you had. Before you spent the night with that man. Before you got pregnant. You don’t need me to go on listing things, Ellie. I know you get all this. You’re as sharp as they come. What we have to do is find some way for you to cope with it that doesn’t involve me writing you a prescription. Because, at the moment, you do not have a grip on it. And I’m here to help you get one, if you’ll let me.’

Paul Christopher was disappointed that I had to default on the commission and did not understand my reasons. I found it difficult to broach the matter of my real anxieties with him, so tried to convince him of the flaws in my design instead — I used the word ‘insurmountable’ a few times too often. From his perspective, the drawings we agreed on were still faultless. He said he doubted that another artist would be able to envision something quite so perfect for the space. I told him painters like me were a ten a penny, that he should consider approaching someone from the RBA show. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve half a mind to leave it blank for you, until you come to your senses.’ Over the telephone, his voice had even less substance. ‘Of course, we won’t be able to pay you for the work you’ve done so far. I’m sorry if that’s going to land you in any trouble.’ I told him I would not have blamed him if he’d wanted to besmirch my reputation with everyone in town. ‘Never,’ he said, chuckling. ‘That would only devalue the paintings I’ve already bought.’ He thanked me for my time and cheerfully hung up.

Dulcie cared very little about my withdrawal from the project. While I had been worrying about imaginary lines, she and Max had been in negotiations with galleries overseas. They had already recruited the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris and the Galerie Gasser in Zurich to my cause, with exhibitions of my New York paintings organised for the spring. The work was set to tour Italy like some wayfaring stage act, starting at L’Obelisco in Rome and moving on to Milan and Turin before the end of 1962. In her own way, Dulcie was doing her best for me, and I did not want to seem ungrateful for her efforts. It was through her links at the British Council that Godfearing was accepted for a group show in Athens that summer, alongside pieces by Matthew Smith and other painters I revered. She professed to have a ‘seven-year plan’ that would see my work shown in a Tate retrospective before I turned thirty-two. In truth, I was glad to have someone like Dulcie championing my paintings, as I could barely muster a positive thought for them.

After my recent leave of absence, as Dulcie liked to describe it, she did not let a week go by without making contact. We talked regularly on the phone over the summer, and I would sometimes get an impromptu telegram inviting me to lunch at her new favourite restaurant in town. We met in September at the Rib Room in Cadogan Place, where the sirloin was particularly to her liking. ‘Look, this European stuff is all very exciting, but it’s time we started thinking about your next show in London,’ she advised me, mopping up the blood from her steak with a crust of bread. ‘Max thinks we can’t afford to let all the interest wane — and he’s not entirely wrong. It’s such a fickle market at the moment. But, in my judgement, a little yearning tends to go a long way. I think we can hold off until next autumn. Unless that’s putting you under too much stress?’ Somewhere between dessert and coffee I was finagled into it. An exhibition of new paintings was scheduled at the Roxborough for November 1962.

That gave me a full year to compile the work, but I was so securely tranquillised by Tofranil that I was able to complete ten of the paintings before Christmas. I followed the method that had helped me to produce the New York pieces: filling sketchbooks with a raft of street scenes, choosing any that sustained my interest, and transferring them bluntly onto six-by-six-foot canvases. I felt so detached from the process. The images I painted were striking but meaningless. It was as though someone had crept into my studio to make them while I was sleeping.

I drew all of the sketches on the top deck of the number 142 bus. For six straight days, I rode it back and forth from Kilburn Park Station to Edgware, studying the pavements underneath me every time the bus stood still. I hoped to present something of London life from an overhead perspective — an approach that had been so widely praised in my New York paintings that I reasoned nobody would mind if I kept on dumbly replicating it. The only piece that I could say possessed a flicker of artistic value was Off at the Next One, a picture that showed two smeared figures in trench coats on Watling Avenue struggling to keep their dogs from scrapping in the street. The men were posed within the frame obliquely, like two bullfighters viewed from above, their Alsatians reared up on hind legs, baying and straining at their leads. (‘All these dogs going berserk,’ the woman behind me remarked as I was sketching. ‘I’ll wait and get off at the next one.’)

Throughout this period, I met once a week with Victor Yail in Harley Street. We spent a long time weeding through my thoughts, trying to define the exact point at which the mural work had started to elude me. It was not necessarily his recommendation that I withdraw from the project: ‘But my inkling is, if you finish it while you’re medicated, you’re always going to view it as a compromise. What we want is for you to reach a stage where you can finish it to your satisfaction, without the need for drugs at all.’ He was right. The mural had to mean something. I did not want it to be another piece of work that I could not be proud to stand beside. There had to be one painting I refused to sacrifice, even if I never found the strength to complete it.

Victor’s way of helping me was to get me to address the issues he believed were causing my anxiety. We spent several sessions talking through the episode in the caldarium, my night with Wilfred Searle, my feelings about Jim Culvers, and my childhood in Clydebank — all with no particular outcome, apart from the vague guilt that comes from sharing secrets with a stranger. There were some days when I knew Victor was just grasping at the ether, trying to make associations between things that had no reason to be linked. At other times, he seemed able to locate thoughts inside my head that I did not even realise were hiding there. ‘What about Searle?’ he asked me, during one of our first sessions back. ‘Do you think he would’ve been relieved?’

‘I’m sure he would’ve thrown himself a party.’

‘But you didn’t tell him.’

‘No.’

‘Was that fair, do you think?’

‘I couldn’t care less.’

Victor gave a little hum. ‘And how about you? Were you relieved?’

‘I don’t know.’ There was a very long silence. I picked the paint from the creases of my knuckles. ‘I can’t say I wasn’t at the time. But I don’t feel that way about it now.’

‘Where did you get the pennyroyal?’

‘From Dulcie.’

‘Yes, but where did she get it?’

‘She said from a Chinese woman somewhere. Portobello, I think.’

‘I see.’ Victor inched forward, setting down his notepad. ‘Do you think you’d like to have children in the future?’

I shrugged. ‘I can live without them. I’ve lived without other things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Love, I suppose. Intimacy. Affection.’

‘It’s not too late for that. You’re young.’

‘Yes, but I’ve chosen this instead.’

‘Therapy?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Art.’

Session after session, we talked this way. Every Tuesday afternoon, I would put down my paintbrush, throw on my coat, and hail a cab to Harley Street. I would traipse up the stairs to Victor’s office, nod hello to his secretary, and wait for him to come and wave me in. And he would sit me down in my regular chair with my regular blue cushion to pick up our discussion from the session before. We talked a great deal about my apathy towards the new paintings. He wanted to know about every stage of their creation. For a time, it almost seemed that we were painting them together.

Then, one day, I arrived at Victor’s practice to find it adorned in Christmas tinsel. He was standing at the apex of a ladder in the waiting area, hanging a white paper snowflake from the light fixture. ‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘What do you think of the decorations?’

‘They’ll do.’

‘Jonathan made this one at school.’ The snowflake swung and hit his cheek. ‘Good to know they aren’t wasting any class time on algebra and elocution.’

‘It might help his geometry a bit,’ I said.

Victor laughed. He stepped down from the ladder and passed his secretary the roll of tape he had been using. Looking up at the snowflake, he said, ‘That should just about hold, I think.’ And he turned to me, patting his sides. ‘All right, Miss Conroy. Shall we?’

As soon as we got settled in the consulting room, I began to tell him all about the painting I had started working on that morning — how I knew that Dulcie was going to think it was the best piece in the show. ‘It’s just three old women sitting on a bench with a few pigeons streaking past them in a blur,’ I said. ‘It’s about the most boring thing I’ve ever done, but obviously that means Dulcie’s going to love it.’

‘I wonder sometimes if you’re being a little hard on her.’

This surprised me. ‘Hmm.’ I pretended to scribble a note on the armrest. ‘Would you care to qualify that for me, Victor?’

His face twitched in acknowledgement of my clever-cleverness, but he did not smile. ‘You know I’m not Dulcie’s biggest supporter, but she’s really come through for you in the last few years. Don’t forget that.’

I stayed quiet, heeding his sermon.

Victor got up and went to his bookshelves. ‘What are your plans for Christmas?’ he asked, his back to me. ‘Will you be visiting your parents?’

‘They want me to,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure I can face the journey.’

‘How long is it on the train?’

‘About six hours.’

‘Well, if you can’t put yourself out for your parents, then who can you do it for? I’d like to think Jonathan will make the effort for me when I’m in my dotage.’

‘I take it you’ll be visiting your folks this year, then?’

‘I’ll put some flowers on their graves, no doubt.’

‘Oh, I’m — sorry about that.’

He did not give this any further credence. Instead, he came and stood beside my chair with a set of magazines. As he dropped them on the coffee table, the pieces on his fancy chessboard rattled. ‘We’re going to start you on an exercise today,’ he said, peering down at me. ‘It’s something I’d like you to keep working on over the holidays, until I get back.’

The thought of him leaving brought me a jolt of panic. ‘You’re going somewhere?’

‘Just for a couple of weeks. Seeing relatives in Kent, then back to the States again. I’m delivering a paper.’

‘So I won’t see you until the new year?’

He shook his head. ‘Let’s not worry about that for now. This exercise will help. You’ll hardly miss me.’ On the coffee table, he fanned out the magazines. The covers were marigold-yellow with decorated borders: National Geographic. ‘Every time I’m in the States, they have these in my hotel room. I must have a full set by now. Take a look.’

I picked up a copy. June 1957. The inside pages were mostly colour photographs of strange foreign landscapes: the Grand Canal in Venice; tourists camping in the Black Forest; rhododendron pastures in Roan Mountain, Tennessee. The November 1958 issue featured illustrated articles—The Booming Sport of Water Skiing, The Emperor’s Private Garden: Kashmir—and maps with accompanying images: The Arab World: A Story in Pictures. I had seen a magazine just like it in the first-class lounge when I was sailing to New York.

‘The pictures are wonderful, aren’t they?’ Victor said.

I nodded.

‘My favourite is January ’57—an expedition through the fjords in Norway. The stillness is incredible. I find myself going back to that one now and again, when things get hectic. Helps me relax.’

‘You should go and see it for yourself,’ I said. ‘Take a trip.’

‘I almost went with Mandy a few years ago. But, quite honestly, I prefer to look at the pictures. If I actually went there, I think I would spoil it.’ He moved back to his armchair, leaving me to browse the covers of other editions. There were so many articles, so many places I had never seen before:

Year of Discovery Opens in Antarctica

Across the Frozen Desert to Byrd Station

The Heart of the Princes’ Islands

Lafayette’s Homeland, Auvergne

Jerusalem, the Divided City

Seychelles: Tropic Isles of Eden

‘Choosing one is really the challenge,’ he said. ‘I want you to take a few away with you and really have a proper look. Study the photographs. Find a place that does for you what the fjords do for me.’

I was not sure that a photograph could ever calm me. ‘I don’t know, Victor. That seems a bit pointless.’

There was an expression he always brought out when I was not taking him seriously — lips pulled in, eyes rounded — and he was showing it to me now. ‘We’ve been at this for quite a while, haven’t we?’ he said. ‘I’ve sat here listening to you for months and, honestly, I’m not sure that we’re any further forward than we were the day I met you. Aside from you being on a lot of tricyclics and getting more paintings done — most of which you seem to detest. We’ve reached a point where we have to find a strategy for you to cope with your anxieties or they’re going to seriously affect your future. Eventually, you’re going to work yourself into a depression I can’t help you with. That’s why you need to try your best with this exercise. It’s just a visualisation technique — not a cure — but I think it will benefit you.’

At once, the spread of magazines on the table began to seem further away. ‘I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Good.’ He took off his glasses and breathed on the lenses. ‘We all need a place that’s ours and ours alone. The fjords are mine — you have to choose somewhere else.’

I flicked through the pages of the topmost issue.

Skiers in Alta, Utah.

Oxen in Schneeburg, Austria.

‘It can’t be anywhere you’ve been before — nowhere with memories,’ Victor went on. ‘How you imagine the place is what’s important. That’s the only way it can belong to you.’

Boulder Peak, Idaho.

Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire.

Diamond Rock, Martinique.

‘Do you understand the exercise?’

‘I think so. But—’

‘No buts. No evasions. Just do your best.’

Perhaps it would be like the first time I left Clydebank as a child after the Blitz. My mother took me on a coach to see my great aunt in Coldstream. I was not told what to expect, apart from a lot of countryside, so I imagined it as any five-year-old would have: a small town of grey-bricked cottages beside a river that was permanently frozen, happy people skating on the ice in special wooden clogs and drinking hot chocolate. We arrived into something greener and less magical. The Coldstream I had pictured dropped away, no longer mine.

‘I don’t need to know which place you’ve chosen,’ Victor said, ‘but when I come back in January, I want you to be ready to start calling it to mind. If you can visualise this place when you start feeling anxious, centre yourself there when you need to, then we might be able to bring your dosage down, over time.’ And he reclined, scraping the dull leather caps of his shoes together. ‘I’ll bet that journey up to Scotland isn’t so bad if you can go first-class, you know. Six hours on a train won’t kill you.’

Six

The news came in an envelope from my mother. She had written to me with her usual gossip about the happenings in her building and reports of my father’s foul mood, with one last paragraph pleading for my company at Christmas time. And, clipped to the last page, was a cutting from the newspaper, on which she had written in the margin: Saw this in the Herald yesterday. Sorry, love xx

HOLDEN — HENRY. Peacefully, at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, on Monday 11th December 1961, Henry Mackintosh Holden (artist and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art), aged 78 years. A generous and loving man who will be sadly missed. Funeral service at Luss Parish Church, Dumbartonshire, his family’s village, on 18th December at 10.30 a.m. No flowers, please.

The funeral was three days away. I called my mother to tell her I would be coming home for a spell. Her delight was tempered by the fact that I would not arrive until after I had paid my respects to Henry. She managed to hide the disappointment in her voice. ‘All right, love. You do what you feel’s best,’ she said. ‘We’ll have the place ready for you.’

It was a very long journey to Luss. I booked myself onto the earliest train to Glasgow, first-class, reasoning that I would need the comfort and the quiet of the roomier carriages. On the way, I read most of a novel and looked through the images in the National Geographic issues I had packed for the trip. It had been a few days since I had seen Victor, and I had still not decided on a photograph to call my own — in truth, they had barely left more than a fleeting impression on me, the sort of wonderment you glean from browsing a jeweller’s window. But I vowed to keep trying.

From Glasgow, I took a connecting train to Balloch, at the foot of Loch Lomond. My suitcase was so heavy that, after a few minutes lugging it, the joints of my elbows crackled with pain. The train was crowded with families and I had to walk through several carriages just to find a seat. The stolid darkness of the Clyde and its surrounds went by the windows, familiar and yet not. It was so late when I arrived at the station that I missed the last bus out of Balloch. I stayed the night at a nearby inn, and, waking early, traipsed along the road with my suitcase to catch the rusting single-decker that would carry me into Luss.

Still, I managed to be late. The service had already started when I got to the church. I stowed my case in the antechamber behind a stack of hassocks and crept down the aisle as quietly as I could. Two young girls were playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ on recorders by the altar. Half the pews were empty. A shining casket rested on a plinth with a single wreath of heather. I found a space beside an old man in a faded suit adorned with medals. He nodded at me soberly, and I shared my hymnal with him when it came time to sing. After Henry’s widow read out a poem by Yeats, the old man offered me his handkerchief, but we both sat through the prayers unmoved.

Four strong lads carried the coffin down the aisle to the graveyard, where a fresh cleft in the ground was waiting to receive it, just beyond the hedgerows. People arced around it with the breeze whipping their hair. I clustered with the mourners, hanging back. And when the Reverend gave his words of committal and the formalities were done, I threw a fist of soil into the grave and whispered thank you to a box of wood, wondering what Henry might have thought about it all.

Walking back, I saw his widow linking arms with a man I recognised from art school: a thickset fellow named Kerr whom Henry used to tease for painting cats in every mural, regardless of its subject matter (‘Did you never think to ask yourself, Kerr,’ he once said in our weekly crit, ‘whether those wee calicos have any business at a crucifixion?’). Kerr escorted Mrs Holden to one of the black cars near the church gates before I got a chance to introduce myself. Later, in the vestibule, he came to speak with me as I was waiting to sign the condolence book. We smiled at the remembrance of the calicos, and chatted for a while about my new life in London. He seemed only half-interested in my career as a painter but was extremely curious to know how word of the funeral had reached me. ‘Big news, is it, down there?’ he said, smirking. This led us into reminiscing about Henry and his feelings about London — he used to say that it was a city ‘without compassion for the individual’ but encouraged us to experience it if we were serious about becoming artists. ‘Aye, you don’t forget a fella like him,’ Kerr said, with an air of finality. ‘He gave us a job at the School after. Life-modelling. Ha! I was skint at the time, so I couldn’t say no. Haven’t really painted much since those days.’ Kerr had inherited his father’s hardware shop in Bishopbriggs and now ran it with his sister. I told him that sounded like a very nice life, and he said, ‘Pssh. It’s about ten different kinds of hell rolled into one. But it’s a living.’ He offered me a lift to the pub for the wake, and I accepted. ‘Did you sign that yet?’ he asked, pointing to the condolence book. ‘I never know what to write. Maybe you can think of something for us.’

Kerr went off to fetch his car, leaving me in the hush of the vestibule with my suitcase at my heels. Before I wrote my message in the book, I turned back through the pages to check the tenor of the comments — I had never written a condolence before and did not want to draw too much attention to myself. There were a lot of platitudes: Deepest sympathies. Always in our hearts. So many memories. I wanted mine to be more personal. As I searched for a clear space to write, I saw that a page had been turned inwards — creased so that one stumpy half jutted outwards from the spine. I unpicked it. There was another short message there, and a signature:

Paint what you believe.

Thanks for everything you taught me.

Rest in peace, old man.

James Culvers

‘Are we all set then?’ said Kerr.

I did not even realise he was behind me.

He jangled his car keys. ‘We could walk it, mind, but seeing as you’ve got your case. .’ And he stooped to lift it for me. ‘You all right, love? You’re shivering.’

It was definitely Jim’s handwriting. My heart was shuddering and so was my jaw, but I managed to get the words out: ‘Do you know if Jim was here earlier?’

‘Who?’ Kerr said.

I showed him the page.

‘Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘Who is he?’

I held the book tight. ‘A friend of mine.’

Kerr nodded. He eyed the tome of condolences vised against my chest. ‘You bringing that along for Mrs H? Good thinking.’

The Colquhoun Arms was less than half a mile from the church, back on the road where the bus had dropped me. Beyond the windscreen of Kerr’s Cortina, the outlying hills were yellowed by sunshine. Low clouds seeped across the birdless sky. The treetops softly stirred. We drove in silence. The squat grey cottages of Luss smudged beside Kerr’s head. When he wheeled into the parking space, I jumped out of the car so fast I almost left my case on the back seat. ‘Steady, love,’ he said. ‘It’s open bar.’

I hauled my suitcase across the car park and dumped it by the coat racks. One corner of the pub had been roped off for the function. A huddle of glum-faced men in black were sitting at a long table with sandwiches, supping pints and rolling whisky in short glasses. There was no sign of Jim Culvers. I checked the corridors, the snug, the dark ends of the place. I peered into the Gents, but there was just a bald old fellow standing at the urinal. The barmaid saw me coming out and said, ‘It’s the other one, hen. We need to change that sign. I keep telling ’em.’

Mrs Holden was in a wingback near the fireplace, clutching a tissue. A grey-haired lady was crouched beside her. Approaching them, it occurred to me that they must have been twins. They had equally flat noses and high foreheads, and they both turned to me with the same mannequin expressions as I hovered near them, waiting to speak. ‘Mrs Holden,’ I said. ‘You probably don’t know me, but I knew your husband. He was my favourite teacher. I’m just so sad to lose him.’ It came out as ingenuously as I hoped it would. The sister stood up and said, ‘I’ll get you that brandy, Mags, OK?’ She left us alone.

Mrs Holden hung a stare on me, lids twitching. ‘So good of you to come,’ she said. And she had to bite on her lip to keep from crying. ‘Were you in—’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry. Were you in his mural class?’

‘I was. I came up from London as soon as I heard.’

‘Oh, that’s really good of you.’ She gulped something down. ‘And what is it you do now?’

‘I’m an artist,’ I told her.

‘You make a living that way, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘A good one?’

I did not know if it was right to smile, but I did. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh, how lovely. He was always so proud of his students. Did you know Geoff Kerr? He’s here somewhere, I think.’

‘Yes, I just got a lift with him.’

‘A good lad, Geoff. He’s been such a help.’ Mrs Holden sniffed in a long breath. And, seeing the condolence book under my arm, she said, ‘Is that for me?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry — of course.’ I gave it to her. ‘I was wondering if you knew where I could find an old friend of mine. Jim Culvers. He was at the service, but I can’t see him here.’

Idly turning through the book, she said, ‘Who?’

‘He’s another student of Henry’s.’ I showed her the page with Jim’s message.

She moved her eyes over the words, but there was no glint of recognition in them. ‘James Culvers. No. I’m sorry. I don’t know who that is.’ And she paused, considering the empty fireplace. ‘There was an old student of Henry’s renting the cottage last summer, but I don’t recognise the name. Culvers — I’d remember that. This fella’s name began with a B. Bailey, or Bradley, or something like that. Henry never got me involved.’

‘The cottage?’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘His father’s place. He liked to come out and paint there sometimes. Then his hands got too sore, and he preferred having the money is his pocket. We planned on selling, but it wouldn’t be worth a lot now.’ When I asked for the address, she wafted her hand. ‘Ach, it’s not far. Get to the pier and turn left. It’s the only house on the water that’s not been looked after — you can’t miss it. What was your name again, love, did you say?’

‘Elspeth.’

‘Elspeth what?’

‘Conroy.’

‘I’ll keep an eye out for it,’ she said. ‘In the papers.’

I touched her hand. The skin felt thin as a cobweb. ‘Take care, Mrs Holden.’

‘Aye, you too. Thanks for coming.’

It was one harsh winter away from a wreck — a simple stone cottage with a pitched slate roof, so bearded with moss it was already bowing. There was a pale craquelure on the window frames, hay-coloured, moulting. The gutters were shot. The door glass was patched up with tape. A trampled path meandered up to the house, away from the brow of the loch, where the steel-blue water roiled quietly and a clutch of white sloops lilted on their moorings. I walked up the slope, skimming the waist-high grass with my palm, until I came to a doorstep, half painted black. There were old net curtains at the windows, dishes on the outer sill with food scraps: brown-bread crusts and pickle, a saucer ringed with coffee. But there was no sign of movement inside. I knocked several times and nobody answered.

There was no letterbox to peer through, and the windowpanes were coated in a sooty grime that made it difficult to see beyond the nets. I put my case down and side-stepped through the weeds. At the back of the house was a small garden, overrun with nettles, and a dank wooden outhouse. Behind it, a bank of firs, and two great hummocks pushing at the clouds. There was just one downstairs window, looking into the kitchen — a newspaper was on the table, but I could not read the headlines or the date. If the place was lived in, it was lived in sparely. The tap was dripping, a dried-up dishcloth spread over it. I could not think what I should do. Soon, I found my hand was reaching for the door. The handle turned, the latch came away. It was easy. The hinges squealed as the door opened. I waited, pondering the bareness of the kitchen. The tiles were scuffed by chair legs. The newsprint seemed bright, recent. I decided to go in.

But I was barely past the threshold when I heard his voice: ‘Never would’ve picked you for a burglar, Ellie.’ It came from directly behind me: slow, amused, admonishing. Spinning round, my knuckles grazed the doorframe, but I did not feel the pain until later.

Jim was standing there in a black woollen jacket. He was holding a small basket of flowers. His face was tanned and shaven. I could see his breath steaming out. It was close enough to gather, to bottle, to keep. ‘Why d’you look so afraid?’ he asked. ‘I’m not going to turn you in.’

‘Oh my God—Jim.’ It was all I could get out of me. ‘Jim.’ I stepped forward to hug him, and he did not move, accepting the embrace without returning it. He held the basket aloft, protecting his flowers. Then, giving me one soft tap on the back, he said, ‘All right, all right, enough.’ He smiled at me apologetically, those familiar big teeth still as gapped as ever. But there was such a newness about him, too. His hair was cut neatly and combed into runnels — it seemed hard as wicker. The skin was smooth about his cheeks and it gave off a limey scent. He looked as sober as a child. ‘Go on inside,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get these into brine.’ When I did not budge, he said again, ‘Go on. I can’t stand about all day. And you seem to ‘ve cut yourself a bad one, look.’ My knuckles were streaking blood.

He followed me into the kitchen, got the iodine from the cupboard. I sat down at the table. My head was in a daze, and I was shivering again. I could not tell if I was relieved to see him or frightened of him leaving me. Dabbing a cloth into the iodine, he came and pressed it on my wound. ‘It’ll sting,’ he said, but I did not care. ‘Just let me take these flowers in. I’ll only be a moment.’

The through-door from the kitchen was just a wall of beads like you might find at the back of a dreary restaurant. As he pushed through them, they swung and clattered, and I could see into the room beyond. It was a bare shell with no carpet and only a wooden rocking chair for furniture. He had made it into a studio. Two narrow tables were arranged beside an easel with a board set up to paint on.

I trailed after him. He was unscrewing the lid of a tall jar filled with cloudy water. The painting beyond him was only part-finished, but it appeared to show the dying blossoms of a cherry tree scattered over flagstones. He tipped the flowers from his basket into the jar. ‘How’re the fingers?’ he asked, not turning to face me. When the lid was screwed tight, he shook the jar vigorously, side to side.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s a process. Helps with the yield.’ And he stopped quaking the jar and put it on the table. He took a metal colander and a bucket from underneath its legs. Removing the lid again, he poured the contents of the jar into the bucket, straining out the sodden flowers. He picked up the colander and began sorting through the petals, selecting only the pinkest, which he placed on a wad of fabric to dry.

I said, ‘Can’t you stop all that for a second and talk to me?’

‘Sorry, it’s really quite time-sensitive. I just need another moment.’ He patted the flowers and folded them into the fabric, as though wrapping a parcel. ‘You might want to close your ears.’ With the base of his fist, he thumped down several times on the parcel, and all of the brushes and tube paints on the table rattled like fine china. Then he scraped the flowers into a mortar and started grinding. He turned to me, working the pestle, and looked over at the clock above the hearth. ‘Twenty minutes until this lot needs to come out,’ he said. ‘That’s all the time I have for talking.’

I sensed that Jim’s account of things had been rehearsed so many times in his head over the years that he had learned how to hesitate at just the right moments in the telling of it; when to stutter and stumble over details, which gaps to skim over and which joins to show. But I was simply glad to hear him speak. Too much time had elapsed without the sound of his voice near me. I did not try to interrupt or scrutinise. I just sat in the rocking chair, watching the motions of his mouth as he formed the words. How much of what he told me was a falsehood I could not tell, but if it hurt me less than the truth, I was willing to bear it.

His story went that he had left London on a pilgrimage. One by one, he had revisited all of the towns where he had been stationed in the war. ‘Looking for what, I don’t quite know,’ he said. ‘I just knew I had to get back there.’ A doctor had put the notion in his mind. He had awoken on the floor of his old studio, feeling raw from three days’ drinking, and could not feel his fingers. There was no sensation in his lower arms at all, he said, but he had managed to get dressed—‘Don’t ask me how’—and taken himself to a doctor’s surgery near Abbey Road. The doctor had knocked his elbows with a reflex hammer and listened to his heart, told him everything was fine. If the feeling did not return by tomorrow, he should come back again, but it was likely just a temporary side-effect of the alcohol — he should really think about cutting back. Jim had told him he would sooner cut back on breathing. Then, on the wall above the doctor’s typewriter, he had noticed a framed print. ‘It was a reproduction of a Stanley Spencer. Horses pulling wounded soldiers into a hospital tent on — what are they called? Travoys. You know, those big long stretchers? Anyway, it’s an incredible painting. One of his best.’ The doctor had said it was there to remind him of his days as a medic in the Great War — not that he would ever forget his experiences, of course, just that the picture inspired him to keep practising through the more difficult moments. On the way home, Jim could not get the image from his mind. It had made him think of his own picture of his friend at the Prince Alfred. ‘And I thought, that’s what my painting has to do to people. That’s what I have to communicate.’ So he had cleared everything from his studio that afternoon, headed to the bank to withdraw his savings, and set off.

The only things he took with him were a clean set of clothes, a blank sketchbook with a few coloured pencils, an old journal from his days with the regiment, and a bottle of Glenlivet, which he poured over the side of the ferry on the way to Calais. ‘I knew I couldn’t go back there drunk. I had to stand up and face it all or the whole trip would be pointless. I felt rough as dogs those first few days, but I got through it.’ He rode a bus down to Arras, where he had first been stationed with his unit: ‘The place had changed a lot, naturally, but the noise of the town was the same as I remembered — there used to be an airstrip there, and planes would come in and go out all the time, but in the quiet spots, you know, there was always an alarming quiet. The way the wind shakes up the fields over there — it’s peculiar. Something I won’t forget in a hurry.’ It was here that he had fired his service weapon in anger for the very first time: ‘Shot an unarmed German there from seven feet away: total panic job, coming round the blindside of him.’ After several months in Arras, he caught a train north to Dunkirk, which he said had changed unnervingly. ‘I was glad I went back. It’s important to see a city how it ought to be, you know, not clothed in all the miseries of war. Not with tanks and sandbags and all that screaming chaos. But seeing it again, so quiet, left me feeling quite disturbed, if that makes sense. There was a part of me that I knew would always be stuck there. I lost a lot of friends on that patch of land.’ Still, he was not satisfied with any of the sketches he made on his return to these places — the work did not resound as brightly as his memories of them.

One night in Dunkirk, he started drinking again. ‘I thought if I just stuck to the local brew, I’d be able to handle it. Well, I’m not a particularly smart fella when it comes to drink, as you know.’ He got into a brawl with a young French poet who had been reading his work aloud in the bar. ‘I wasn’t in the mood to hear poems. It was that awful, dismal sort of French stuff — just a roll of sounds without any meaning — so I started hassling him about it and he didn’t much like it. I ended up losing a tooth—’ He paused here to show me the gap. ‘—and the lad fractured his thumb. The both of us got thrown into the locker at the police station overnight. Adjoining cells. We didn’t speak to each other for a bit, but then he came over and started apologising — he was in tears. I thought, Hang on, this lad’s got problems. And it turns out he did. His parents had just died, two weeks ago, so he said, and he hadn’t been coping with it very well. That’s what his poems had been about. And he’d been run out of the last town he was in because he’d slapped some poor bloke for goading him, too. That makes him sound like a terrible lad — he wasn’t at all. Just troubled.’ They became friends (this was the only part of Jim’s story I did not need to question, knowing how men like to find compassion for each other after they have traded punches, never before) and the poet invited Jim to stay with him and his sister in his family’s house in Giverny for the summer. ‘I heard “Giverny” and remembered it was where Monet used to have his garden with the lilies — so I thought it couldn’t be that bad. And it wasn’t. It was bliss. His parents had left him this beautiful old house. Wildflowers everywhere, hibiscus and pear trees. Glorious sunshine all summer. I didn’t want to leave.’

He stayed in Giverny for a full year, in fact, trying to make sense of the sketches in his book, painting with gouache on board. ‘The French have a wonderful word: ‘vaurien’. It means ‘good-for-nothing’. That’s what all of those paintings were like. I couldn’t seem to get the tone right, no matter what I tried.’ Because the poet and his sister drank so little, and with Jim living off their charity and provisions, he was forced to become reacquainted with sobriety. ‘For a while, I was living off whatever was in the cupboards — I had a lot of stale cognac, and some disgusting old Dutch advocaat. But that ran out soon enough, and I had no money, so it was either I went and stole it, or — well, I didn’t want to come back to France after all that time just to start looting the place like a bloody Nazi. It took me until the spring to really get my act together.’

The spring was when the Judas trees in the village came into bloom. He had gone walking one day with the poet’s sister and, suddenly, the winding avenues of Giverny had blushed with so many shades of pink. ‘To begin with, I thought they were just like the cherry trees and magnolias back home, but she told me they were Judas trees. When she was a little girl, her mother used to collect all the petals to make pot-pourri. There was so much of the stuff.’

As the weeks passed, Jim had noticed how the Judas blossoms separated from the branches so quickly, how they dusted the ground in endless configurations, every one of them unique. ‘The wind gathered them all up and scattered them however it wanted — like it was painting the scenery all by itself. Some of them would just sit there on the ground, stuck on the gravel, on the soil, or they’d get caught between long blades of grass. They’d just sit there for weeks, fading, shrivelling, turning brown. Then the wind would finally brush them away. They reminded me of the war. The transience of it all. On patrols, it always used to get to me, thinking about the future. Your life always felt so inconsequential, you know, but at the same time you’d try and savour every last moment of it, while you still had it. Anyway, the thought occurred to me, What am I just looking at all these petals for? I need to paint them.’ He set up a board in his room at the house and started work. ‘And right away I got that glorious feeling in my chest again — you know the one I mean. That swell in your heart when a painting takes over you. I knew I had something to say. There was nothing else that mattered — I had to paint that and nothing else. Just Judas blossoms on the ground, in as many shapes and patterns as I could think of, forever, until I die.’

By the end of the summer, he had filled the farmhouse with boards. Most of them he gave to the poet and his sister as presents, and they lined the walls of every room. Some of them he kept and carried back with him. He came to understand that he did not need to stay in Giverny any longer. The Judas blossoms did not have to be on his own doorstep for him to paint them. He needed no clear view of them from his window, no sketches, no photographs, just his own memories and speculations. That was the only way he could express their real meaning. And so he begged one last favour from the poet and his sister — just a few more francs to get him back to Calais and to England. ‘They were sad to see me go, I think, and I was sad to say goodbye to them. But you know how it is: the work is always more important. Art and happiness won’t stand each other’s company for long. It’s hard to explain that to people who aren’t artists. I mean, the lad wrote poetry, but it wasn’t his life — I got the impression it was just a hobby for him until he found a job in a bank some day, you know?’

Once Jim had landed back in Dover, he had thought about coming to find me. ‘I knew that if anyone would understand, it’d be you. But I can’t remember why I didn’t — the timing just felt wrong. And, honestly, I couldn’t face you yet. Not until the work was done. I had visions of putting on a show again in London and you seeing it by chance.’ (It would have been the autumn, when I was still working on my mural. If he had only knocked on my door then, just once. .) Instead, he took a room for a few weeks above a Chinese restaurant in Soho, and worked there, scrubbing vats, until he had earned enough to take a night coach up to Glasgow. ‘The only other person who believed in me was Henry. I thought he might be able to find me an attic somewhere, like I used to have as a student, or let me sleep for a while in his office. I didn’t really have a plan. But that’s what made Henry Henry, wasn’t it? If he believed in your work, he’d go out of his way to help you, even if it cost him. That’s how I heard about this place. He said he wasn’t using it any more, but some bloke had been renting it and left it in a state. Bailey or something, his name was — Henry didn’t speak well of him.’ The agreement was that Jim could have the cottage, rent free, in exchange for light repairs. ‘He only wanted me to do a little gardening and sprucing up — no big overhaul. I admit, I haven’t got round to it yet. But I’ve only been here since September.’

The twenty minutes were almost up and Jim was still standing at his work table, grinding away at the flowers in the mortar. Each turn of his pestle gave a biting sound — he had been using these noises to punctuate and dislocate his sentences, as though he assumed we had been apart so long that I could not read the language of his movements any more. He was disguising something, but I was not going to risk the consequences of making him admit it. And, really, there was only one question I cared for him to answer.

He looked at me, then at the clock. ‘You haven’t said much. I can’t tell what you’re thinking about any of this.’ His pestle kept on circling. ‘It’s the God’s honest truth, I promise you. Look at me—’ He stood tall. ‘I’m a year sober. Not touched a drop since I got back, and I don’t bother with the races any more. I’ve just been doing this.’ And, gesturing with his bowl of ruined flowers, he said, ‘This is what’s important to me now. Nothing else. I thought you’d understand that.’

‘I do,’ I said, and stopped the rocking motion of the chair with my heels. ‘I do.’

‘Then why are you so quiet all of a sudden?’ His eyes shifted, left and right. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about it. You don’t believe me, is that it?’

‘You’re very defensive, Jim,’ I said, ‘for a man telling the truth.’

‘Well, I need you to believe me.’

‘Why?’

‘So I can get on with my work.’ He sniffed. ‘I can’t have all this guilt hanging over me.’

‘What’s there to feel guilty about? You just explained yourself.’

‘You know what,’ he said, and gave a shake of his head. ‘Don’t make me say it.’

‘Apologise, you mean?’

He stayed quiet.

‘Are you actually sorry?’ I said.

‘No.’ The pestle was working harder now. ‘Not for leaving. Not for doing what I had to do. But I feel guilty for not getting in touch.’

‘I was out of my mind with worry about you,’ I said. ‘You could’ve phoned, or sent a letter. A telegram would’ve done. Just something to let me know you were safe.’

‘Yes. I wanted to. I really wanted to.’ And he put the mortar down on the table weightily. ‘This lot has to get onto the slab right now or it won’t give out much colour.’ He turned his back to me, a shield from my voice.

‘You couldn’t have spared a thought for me just once in all that time?’

‘I didn’t know that I was supposed to,’ he said. The pulped flowers dropped down onto the slab — a lumpy pink cement. ‘I didn’t know that you wanted me to think about you. Not in that way.’

‘Well, I did.’ There seemed little point in hiding the fact any more.

‘If you’d told me that before you moved out, it might have been different. But I don’t see there’s much I can do to change anything now. And I needed to do it for myself. I needed that trip.’ He glugged about a tablespoon of linseed oil upon the paste of flowers. Taking the muller from the table, he began to slide it up and over the paste and the oil. It was a large glass object like a flat iron and it sent drips careening everywhere. ‘Oh, for crying out loud — another dud batch. It’s not giving me anything. Hand me that trowel, would you? I need to scrape it off and start again.’

I got up and passed him what he wanted. ‘You didn’t mention her name,’ I said.

‘Huh?’

‘The sister.’

‘Oh. Helène. Ana Helène.’ He took the trowel, laughing quietly. ‘There was nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was young enough to be my daughter. And engaged to someone else.’

‘Young and unavailable. Yes, I hear that’s quite a turn-off.’

‘It wasn’t like that, Ellie.’

‘She must’ve been beautiful, though. From the way you talk about her.’

‘I’m really not going to listen to this. I told you: it wasn’t like that.’

‘So you didn’t even look at her? Not once?’

‘Stop it now. You’re better than this, Ellie.’ He slammed down the trowel, throwing a shock of oiled pigment over the table, onto my funeral dress. ‘That was an accident,’ he said, walking off. I just rubbed the stain into the fabric, but he came back with a wet tea towel, the bead curtain clattering behind him. ‘Fine, ruin it. Who cares?’ He tossed it aside. ‘I really thought you and I were above this sort of nonsense. Jealousies and petty suspicions. You’re the only woman I’ve ever thought about in that way.’

‘In what way, Jim?’

‘Christ. This is ridiculous. This is why I prefer painting to talking.’ He went and dumped himself into the rocking chair. ‘I suppose I’m trying to say you’re the only woman I’ve ever really cared for. Not because of how you look, which God knows is fine enough to stun any idiot with two working eyes in his head, but because of what you are, how you think. Actually, it’s how you paint. That’s what makes you who you are.’

‘Then you might as well go back to France,’ I said, ‘because I don’t paint the way you think I do. Not any more.’

He squinted at me, arms folded. ‘Two solo shows at the Roxborough — that’s what I heard. Can’t be bad.’

‘Now you’re sounding like Max.’ I looked away. ‘Who told you that, anyway? About the shows?’

‘Henry. He showed me the press clippings.’

‘Did you see any pictures?’

‘A few. But they were only from the newspaper. Black-and-white.’

I pushed my thumb into the scabbing wounds of my knuckles. ‘And what did you think?’ The pain was sharp but not unbearable.

‘Like I said, the images weren’t the best. .’ Jim gave the slightest cough.

‘First impressions will do.’

‘All right.’ He inhaled deeply, casting his eyes to the floor. It seemed that he was reluctant to voice the thought, but then he just let it escape: ‘Vaurien,’ he said. ‘A long way from your best.’

And my heart lost its rhythm for the tiniest moment. I felt tears brimming. ‘Don’t you ever disappear on me again, Jim Culvers,’ I said. ‘You’re the only one who’s ever seen the difference.’

He did not take my head against his chest to try and console me. He did not even tell me he was sorry. Instead, he rose from the chair and started unscrewing the lid on an empty jar. And he said, ‘I think the problem is I agitated them a bit too much. They need to bruise in the brine but not bleed out. Have you ever made pigments this way? It’s fussy work but the paint really sings if you do it right. I could use some help perfecting it. You were always better at this kind of stuff than I was.’

‘Show me,’ I said, and I stood beside him.

It was later day, as the sun was dropping into the loch, that I walked down to the phone box in the village and telephoned my mother. She made me swear that I would travel up again to be with her at Easter, and I promised I would write to her and call on Christmas morning.

At first, we slept in separate rooms. It was almost like things used to be. Jim hauled in his single mattress and made a bed for me in the lounge beside the fireplace, saying he was happy on the floor. There were not enough pillows or blankets to share, so he relinquished the ones he had and told me, ‘I’ll make do.’ He took down the heavy curtains from the bedroom and sewed them together with twine to make a sleeping bag, used a rolled-up jumper to cushion his head, and woke up trying to hide the cricks in his neck. In the days, we painted. In the evenings, we bathed and washed our clothes. I finished the novel I had brought and read it time and again by candlelight: the story of an unnamed girl whose thoughts only became more comforting by familiarity. Before I went to sleep, I leafed through National Geographic and savoured the pictures and articles.

Jim had no doubts as to the virtue of his work. He had a very set regimen. Each morning, he went out with his tattered picnic basket to forage plants — sometimes venturing no further than the beanstalk weeds in the back garden or the fringes of the surrounding trees, other times going much further, beyond the scree of the hills to their summits, or right across to the other side of the loch. He could be gone for an hour; he could be gone for five. It depended on his needs and what was out there to be found. No matter what, he always came back with a full basket of pickings: local flora he did not know the botanical terms for, and gave what I assumed were pet-names of his own. Skullcap. Redshank. Horsemint. Muck-button. The only plants that ever caught his eye were those with pinkish flowers or stems. Because I could not bear for him to go anywhere without me in those first few weeks, I accompanied him on all of his ‘scouting missions’, as he liked to call them. But I soon grew tired of hunting around in ditches and thickets, and began to suspect that Jim would prefer to do his scouting alone. One morning, as we were heading back to the cottage through the neighbouring firs, he said to me, ‘You really don’t have to come with me any more — I can tell you hate it.’

‘It’s nature,’ I said. ‘I don’t hate it.’

‘But you could do without the pissing rain and cold.’

I shrugged. ‘You might run off on me again.’

‘I’ve got a shilling to my name. It’d get me into Balloch, but then I reckon I’d be stuck. I’m too old to be scrubbing pots again for bus fare.’

Every second day, he started a new painting. His process was fixed but unusual: first, he coated all of his boards with a black primer then underpainted thickly with Cremnitz White, a very stiff material that he could spread across the board like stucco. ‘My only extravagance,’ he told me. ‘You can use it if you want, but sparingly — I find it helps to think of it as diamond paste.’ He would then add definition to the background in regular tube-oils. Next, he would dip a fat round brush into a batch of his homemade pigment (it was thin like syrup) and, holding it firmly in his left hand, he would thump his right fist hard against the base of the brush, spiking beads of paint against the board to form the Judas blossoms. They would hold there fuzzily on the surface, pink and dazzling, and he would spend the next few hours fine-detailing them with a very slim sable.

For a week or so, I slipped back into a role as Jim’s assistant. I believed in the work he was doing and felt it worthier than my own. Together, we refined the pigmentation of the plants he brought home. I made some adjustments to his timings and suggested a change from brine to icy water; I showed him a different mullering technique and altered his mix ratios, all of which helped to yield much brighter hues and more stable paints. He was grateful, I knew, but also reluctant to accept too much of my help. ‘This is starting to feel like a collaboration,’ he said, at the end of one particularly long day’s painting. We were both exhausted. Our meal of boiled rice and tinned carrots had not satisfied us and we had finished the last of the coffee that morning. We were living off what little cash I had brought with me and the few pennies Jim had left. There had been some dreamy talk about me blowing the whole lot on ingredients for a chocolate cake tomorrow, and we had tiredly reviewed the day’s progress as I cleared the table. He was pleased with how the work was developing, but twitchy about my involvement. ‘You know I’ve loved having you here,’ he went on, ‘but you’ve got a life to get back to. They’ll all be wondering where you are.’

‘Who will?’

‘Dulcie and Max.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘You need to get home.’

‘I’ll write and say I’m on a research trip somewhere. They won’t care. I’m not in any rush.’

‘I can see that,’ he said, a scratch of irritation in his voice.

‘Are you saying you don’t want me around? Is that it?’

‘Well, it’d be nice to know what your plan is, that’s all. While I’m here alone, I can make the rations last. Gas meter times out quicker with you here. Hot water runs out faster. This kind of thing should not be weighing on my mind.’

I folded my arms.

‘Look, don’t be offended,’ he said. ‘All this piddling domestic stuff just slows me down. I resent having to think about it.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll call Dulcie today and see if she’ll send me some money.’

‘No, no, no — you aren’t listening. I’m not asking for that. That’s the last thing I want.’

‘You’re the one talking about gas meters, Jim. I don’t know what you want me to say.’

He pleated his hands on the table. ‘I’m telling you, if you’re going to be here, then you’re here to bloody well paint. Not to be my assistant. Not to clear up after me. I’m happy to go hungry for the sake of your art, but not so you can be my housekeeper.’

‘It’s not that easy.’

‘It’s as easy as you want it to be, Ellie.’

‘I don’t have anything to paint. A subject, I mean. I’m just—’ And I breathed, realising I was about to say adrift.

‘Find one,’ he said. ‘You’ve done it before. I did it myself.’

‘Of course. You’re right. I should just punch someone and see where it leads me.’

He smirked. ‘Might not be such a bad idea, you know. You’re only ever ten yards from a bar fight in Scotland.’

I said, ‘Actually, it’s what Henry used to tell me — pick a fight, disturb the peace.’

‘Yeah, he gave the same advice to everyone.’

‘Really?’

‘Course he did. Only difference is, you listened to it.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

He waved away my soreness. ‘Paint what you believe. That was Henry’s way of telling you to stop moping and get on with it. If he were here now, he’d be telling you again.’

Over the past few weeks, there had been plenty of time for me to explain the plight of my recent work to Jim. He had, of course, been understanding of my difficulties in finishing paintings (‘You saw my On High pile before it was a mountain,’ he said. ‘Christ, what a mess I made of things!’) and was glad to hear that I had withdrawn from the mural project to retain ‘a little integrity’. I expected he would be much less accepting of my capitulation to the Roxborough’s chequebook. ‘Look, it’s certainly a pity to show work you aren’t proud of,’ was all he said, ‘but I suppose you must’ve had your reasons. And it doesn’t seem to have dinted your reputation any. Pressure does funny things to people — I know that better than anyone.’ His muted disapproval was almost disappointing. I wanted him to lecture me, put me straight.

It was hard to find an appropriate moment to confess to him that I was taking medication. How was I supposed to broach it? Over rice and carrots at the dinner table? While we were climbing up a hummock in search of weeds? Perhaps I should have introduced the topic one night while the two of us were in the bathroom, twisting the dingy water from our laundry? I was afraid that he would think less of me. I feared that telling him about my sessions with Victor Yail would make me seem weak and incapable: just another foolish girl sent reeling by a man. And I could not rake back over my mistakes again like that: Wilfred Searle, the pennyroyal, the caldarium and what came after. I just wanted to be close to Jim, to be around the music of his footsteps in the house each day, to touch and smell the fabric of him.

Until that evening in the kitchen, he had afforded me the courtesy of not asking about my plans. I had carried on without a purpose, hidden my lack of inspiration just by helping him with his. But it seemed he had finally noticed my aimlessness. ‘Don’t think I was joking, by the way,’ he said. ‘The more you help me, the better these paintings are getting — that’s not a problem for me yet, but it’s going to be soon. I don’t want to look at them one day and see your handiwork. They’re all I’ve got. So I’ve got to draw a line under all this. If you want to stay, you have to stop helping me and help yourself instead. Clear that back room out and paint something.’

But I had nothing in me — not the remotest, flittering trace of an idea. All my thoughts were vaurien. When I told him I could not paint because I felt no thrill in it any longer, Jim stared me down. ‘Rubbish. You’re just in a slump.’ When I told him I had issues with anxiety that required weekly therapy, he gave an indignant shake of the head. When I told him I could only finish work on 100mg a day and showed him the bottles of Tofranil from my overnight bag to prove it, he grew angry — not with me, but at the world that had allowed it. ‘What kind of idiotic — I mean, who the hell put you on these?’ He pushed through the kitchen beads to view the label under brighter light. ‘They tried to fob me off with these things after the war. Anti-whatevers. I told them, listen, if I’m going to kill myself, I’ll be doing it nice and slow with a cask of single malt, thank you very much.’ Opening a bottle, sniffing its innards, he emptied out a handful of tablets and moved them around on his palm. Then he tipped them back in. Coming in to place them on the kitchen table, he said, ‘It’s no wonder you can’t paint, Ellie. You won’t feel a thing while you’re dosed up on those.’

‘How do you know I feel anything when I’m off them?’ I said. ‘They’ve been helping me a lot.’

‘Helping you?’

‘Yes.’

‘With what?’

‘With keeping my head above water.’

‘Well, you’d be better off with a snorkel.’ He had already stacked the three short bottles into a pyramid, and now he was standing over them, hands on hips, like some broken-down motorist examining his engine. ‘I know one thing: the girl who used to live up in my attic was the most natural painter I ever saw — you’d never have found her avoiding work, or moaning about having no ideas. She went out and found them. She didn’t care about pleasing anyone but herself. That was the real you, Ellie. Not this. Not those. You need to take it from someone who’s been there.’ He looked at me now, brow raised. ‘How many times did you watch me painting, pissed as a rat, and how much good ever came of it? None. It’s taken me this long to get sober, and this long to start making work I’m proud of again.’ Turning away, he went to fill a glass under the tap, and came back, slugging it. I was stuck under the dim yellow bulb light, staring at the pills. What a chore it had been in the past few weeks, sneaking off to take them while Jim was occupied elsewhere, keeping half an eye on the mantel clock all day in case I missed a dose. I did not think I was resilient enough to function without medication. But I was not alone any more, and the prospect did not frighten me the way it did when Victor used to suggest it.

Jim put a hand on the small of my back and held it there. ‘I just never imagined you needing that kind of help. You always seemed to pour everything into your work. It was like you had another life up there in that attic — your own little sanctuary.’ His thumb was rubbing now at the cotton of my blouse. It made my pulse accelerate. ‘What’s he like, this shrink of yours, anyway? You trust him?’

I nodded. ‘He’s been good to me.’

‘I suppose all those qualifications have to count for something.’ Jim paused. I could almost feel his roving eyes upon me. ‘You should probably do what he says, then. Don’t take medical advice from me. I never even got my Leaving Certificate.’

‘Me neither,’ I said.

‘See. We’re the same, you and me.’

‘Jim.’

‘What? What did I say?’ But I was not dissenting from his words, only his fingers: they had loosened the blouse from my skirt and were walking up my bare spine. His eyes were tightened, searching. He turned me slowly, brushed my clavicle with his knuckle.

I had to arch up on my tiptoes just to kiss him. His face was coarse with stubble, but his lips had a pleasing gentleness.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now we can both stop imagining it.’

For the very first time, we slept in the same bed. Beside the fire on the single mattress. Huddled together like stowaways. His hands seemed to know where to go. They knew me in the way that Wilfred Searle’s had not even tried to. I wanted to be kept inside Jim’s skinny arms forever, wanted to hold my lips against the scuffed skin of his neck and breathe it every morning as I woke up, wanted to feel him lift and hook the trailing hair behind my ear and stroke it, nimbly and repeatedly, just as he would approach the painting of a Judas blossom. But there was no pattern or rhyme to our being together. There were nights when he lay restless and went off to be alone, and nights when he tempted me from sleep with kisses on the cheek and climbed in, undressing me, only to steal away again before the daylight broke.

We lived this way for months, as intermittent partners, lovers, individuals. We were bonded in our isolation and invested in each other’s purpose. Occasionally, we quarrelled. We spent hours — full days sometimes — apart, in protest. And neither one of us could work without listening for the noises of the other, so came to recognise the creaks and thuds and hums of one another’s practice the way that a piano-tuner can discern a slackened string from corridors away. But we shared the few rooms of that tumbledown cottage as happily as any two people could. Our connection felt immutable.

Jim even helped me clear the junk from the back room, and we found a trove of objects that we could sell: Henry’s old fishing gear and tackle, a roll of boat upholstery fabric, a box of earthenware crockery, and five reels of soldering wire. It was agreed that Jim should take them to the weekend market in Balloch. ‘Henry would be telling us to flog the bleedin’ lot if it keeps us fed and watered,’ Jim said. ‘You should hang on to that cloth for painting, though. It’s proper marine canvas.’ He left that Saturday with everything loaded on his body like a pack-mule and came back with a crate of groceries, including flour and cooking chocolate. ‘For the celebration cake,’ he said, pecking my forehead.

I started thinking again about my mural, and tentatively trialled a new white pigment made from thistles Jim discarded; but these experiments came to nothing. Mostly, I worked on sketches of myself: the grimy cottage windows reflected my face strangely, ruffled and distorted it. I found this spectacle curious enough to occupy me. The drawings came out less like studies of myself than Pathé newsreel stills of strangers. And, through all of this, Jim remained committed to his Judas blossom paintings. They grew steadily more arresting. It was difficult to glean the meaning of them when each piece was seen in isolation, but soon the lounge grew cluttered with his boards — each scattering of pink blossoms different from the last, the colours in them shifting, layers deepening — and I could feel the strength of the work as a collection. I was proud to have made a contribution to it, however incidental.

But then, one morning, I got up to find Jim already gone. The coals were pallid in the hearth. A pot of tea was stewing on the kitchen table, still warm. Outside, a gauzy rain was teeming. I lit the fire and made a pan of porridge, knowing he would come home cold and hungry, and sat by the fireplace eating most of it until he returned. When he stepped in through the back door, he was drenched and broody. His basket was very short of pickings. He went straight into the bathroom to towel off, saying nothing. His quietness seemed very determined, so I asked him what was wrong. ‘Just counting all the things I’ve got to do today,’ he said. Then, later, when he went to light the stove under the kettle after lunch, he found the matchbox empty and it left him quietly incensed. For most of the day, I could hear him huffing and sighing from the back room, where I had begun inking some of my sketches (a mere gesture to convince him I was working). Around three, he called me into the lounge. ‘Ellie, get in here.’ His voice grew increasingly desperate. ‘Ellie — I need you!’ I expected to find him mullering another batch of pigment. In fact, he was over by the window with several of his paintings laid across the floor on bedsheets. His easel and his workbenches were pushed against the walls. He was stooping over the paintings with a camera, twisting at the aperture. ‘How the heck do you work the light gauge on this thing?’ he said. ‘I’ve got two rolls of film and I don’t want to waste them.’

‘Where’d you get that from?’ I asked.

He handed me the camera — shoved it at me. ‘It’s the same one I’ve always had. I’m not sure the light is good enough. Might have to wait until the morning.’

I peered through the viewfinder, focused the shot. The gauge was unresponsive. ‘I think it needs a new battery,’ I told him. ‘What’s your film speed?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘You’ve got it on 400.’

‘Sounds about right.’

‘Well, I can try to set the f-stop where I think it should be, but I’m no good without a light meter. I can’t promise it’ll be perfect.’

‘You might as well just do it,’ he said. ‘Set it up however you think’s best. I don’t know where I’d get a battery from round here, and I don’t want to waste time.’

‘What are the photos for, anyway?’ I asked.

‘Portability,’ he said.

In the viewfinder, his paintings were much less vivid. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘You don’t have to. Here — give it back. I can manage the rest.’

I had not even clicked the shutter yet. ‘It’s difficult to get the whole thing in the frame. You’ll need to stand up on a table.’ And then his meaning finally landed. ‘Are you taking these to show someone?’

His cheek stayed pressed to the camera. ‘You’re right — I need to get up much higher.’ He slid one of the workbenches closer to the paintings and leapt onto it, the legs buckling slightly under his weight. ‘Better,’ he said, focusing. ‘A tripod would be nice, but you can’t have it all.’ He clicked, and loaded the next frame, his thumb jabbing hard at the lever.

Jim had deflected so much attention onto my plans and my lack of purpose in the past few months that I had not paused to consider where his own ambitions were steering him. The daily accretion of Judas blossom paintings had been his priority for so long that I assumed he would go on forever. Until I die—they were his words. Until I die. The thought that he might suddenly stop making them had not once entered my mind. ‘What are you planning to do with these, Jim? I don’t see what the rush is.’

He jumped down from the table and squared his eyes at me. ‘Look, first things first, I need to get them onto film. Can’t do much until that’s sorted.’ Nudging the table further along, he climbed back onto it. ‘Then I’ve got to sell the camera. I reckon I could get fifteen, twenty quid for it, if I can take it to a proper shop in Glasgow — that’ll be enough to get the prints done and pay for the train down.’

‘Down where?’

‘London.’ He said it so nonchalantly. ‘I want these paintings to be seen.’

I went very quiet.

Jim clicked the shutter, reloaded, clicked again. ‘Don’t get all upset. I’ll be back in a few days.’

‘You’ve told me that before.’

‘Well, you’re just going to have to trust me this time, aren’t you?’

I was not sure that I could, and he read this in my attitude before I could voice it.

He widened his stance on the tabletop. ‘Look, you could come with me. I mean, if I can get a decent price for the camera, we’ll have enough for two returns. But then I’d have to leave all my paintings here, and I don’t want to risk it. You can think of them as a deposit — if I don’t come back inside a week, flog them, burn them, do what you like with them.’

This was all the encouragement I needed. In London, there was Dulcie and the Roxborough and a tranche of worthless canvases to finish. In London, there was Victor Yail and the endless recitation of my problems and mistakes. In London, there was nothing. ‘Can’t you just stay a few more days — at least until you can find a battery?’

He shook his head, wincing.

‘You’re not doing the paintings any justice like that. All the exposures will be off.’

‘We’ll see how they come out,’ he replied. ‘People only need to get the gist of what I’m up to. And I can carry a few boards down with me. I was thinking of getting a suitcase to put them in. The others I’ll come back for.’

‘Are you showing them to Max?’

‘No, I’ve had my fill of him for one lifetime, thanks very much.’ He let the camera hang from his neck like an old gas mask in a box. ‘Thought I’d start with Bernie, actually. He can get my foot in a door or two. Everyone likes Bernie, and everyone who doesn’t like him owes him a favour.’

‘Bernie Cale?’

‘Yup.’ He hopped down. And, placing the cap back on the lens, he said, ‘Come on, don’t be getting yourself so worked up. I’ve known Bernie for ages. I knew him before I knew you. We used to go the track together.’

‘I don’t care about that. I don’t care about Bernie, for God’s sake.’

He tried to embrace me but I turned away. ‘Then what’s the matter? You’ve got a terrible frown on you.’

‘I just—’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that you’re abandoning me all over again.’

‘Woah, steady on. I’m coming straight back. I told you that.’ He gathered the lapels of my blouse and drew me in close. ‘Four or five days, that’s all it’ll be. You won’t even have time to miss me.’ And he kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Nobody’s getting abandoned. Come on, don’t chew on your lip like that — you’ll make it sore.’

I was biting it to keep from crying.

‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘I don’t think Bernie would let me bunk with him longer than a week.’

I should have waited for a moment to let the bright idea that came to me cloud over and extinguish itself. But I did not. I said, ‘Why don’t you just use the flat?’

‘Whose flat?’

‘Mine.’

Jim’s eyelids quivered. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to — I mean, that wouldn’t be — no, I’d feel terrible. I couldn’t do it.’

‘Well, I’m not having you sleeping on Bernie’s floor. He takes all-comers in that place of his. Pays for most of them, from what I’ve heard.’ I had no real evidence for this, of course, just bits of gossip. But Bernie was the sort of man it was easy to envision staggering from a Soho doorway in the small hours with his shirt-tails untucked. So I did not feel too sore about accusing him.

‘Only if you’re sure,’ Jim said. ‘Only if you’re certain.’ He kissed me in that way he favoured most: dead centre of my forehead, the first spot I had been taught to reach for when I blessed myself in church. But as he moved his lips away, he did not look at me.

Seven

The heavy heartbeat of the mantel clock, the noiseless turning of its hands; another second lost to waiting, another hour without Jim. And where was I? Alone again, sleepless, the summer running down, new ochre leaves fringing the loch and so much rain. Steam lifting on the hills. Rare sprays of traffic. A flavour to the air: bonfires, boat fuel, cold wet pasture. I slammed the clock against the kitchen wall repeatedly — the glass smashed but the mechanism purred, continued, no complaints. With my bare hands, I dug a shallow grave out in the garden. I buried it alive. Now I did not have to worry about the hours ticking by. There were no hours. Just the slow spread of aloneness and a quickly fading hope. But at least I had the work to occupy me. At least I had the work.

Except the work itself was hopeless. I had tried so very hard with it. At first, I did not bother. I lay in bed, reading that same novel and my magazines, and wondered what Jim was doing in London. Not just silly speculations: good day, bad day, which? I mapped his whereabouts precisely in my head. He was at the barber’s shop on Allitsen Road getting a shave; he was in a meeting with the Leicester Gallery; he was eating chips and saveloy with Bernie Cale by the canal; he was standing with me at the bathroom mirror; then he was gone. And I was standing at the bathroom mirror alone, looking sinewy and shucked. My hair was like pulled thistles. My face had dark abrasions. I was decaying. Whose skin was this? I could not remember bathing yesterday or the day before. And I grew very anxious about Jim coming back — he would be coming back any day now — to find me stewing in my idleness — not sure exactly when — and he would spin right on his heels and run. Leave me for a third time. The last. So I ran a hot bath — I had done this before — and lowered myself in.

Next morning, the day was drier, brighter. I took a sketchbook, took a satchel, took Jim’s coat. I found some pickings of my own. Lavender, petunias, geraniums. Brought them back to the cottage and mulched them. I did the same thing Jim used to do, or what I used to do for Jim. I worked the muller, smoothed it, left the paint so nice and thick. A dash of Cremnitz in it—sparingly. Such a pleasant paint to load onto the brush, upon the knife-edge. But it was much too sunny in that room to concentrate. Shrieking crows and gulls outside, cats stalking the tall grass. Things flashing: glints of chrome on distant boats, wobbling on the loch. Strange how metal sharpened beams of sunlight into needles. The hulls rocked gently, side to side. One moment, there they were — those bright white shards — the next thing, gone. But what if I could capture them somehow? What if I could paint them all in Cremnitz? Everything except those tiny spikes of light. Render the scene so thickly that from ten feet away you would see a formless blur—pure abstraction—and from an arm’s length you would see the definition. Detail. Clarity. It was possible to achieve a feat like that. But who had tried before? Someone, definitely someone. Men of soaring talent.

I made the stretcher frame myself from planks — from leftovers in the outhouse, paintings of Henry’s, never started, never finished — and I hammered every brass tack through the fabric with the blunt end of a pestle. Good strong boat upholstery, tightly fibred. Quick to prime. And I hung a swathe of it over the window, tacked that too, holding the light at bay. It stopped me trying for a glimpse of Jim out there. Removed all distractions. Focused.

But no, but no, but nothing.

Accept the flaws or fix them. Someone had told me that once. Over the phone: Accept the flaws or fix them. That’s what I always say. Like something from a textbook. A very gentle voice. Meek and insubstantial.

And then I ground up all the lavender and geraniums. The petunias would not give.

Blue paste in the mortar. A smidge of oil, then mix.

There was plenty to eat, but nothing I wanted.

I was fine for a while.

A bit light-headed.

I thought the mantel clock was ticking in the ground beneath me. I felt the tremors in my feet. But it was just the crunch of glass under my shoes.

Still, a candy-striped line did not seem right.

I had to show it in the paint.

Try the lavender with geraniums. More linseed oil. A good dose of that Cremnitz White would do it. Except nothing would appear. No — it had to ache more. The paint. It had to ache. Not shine, not glisten, not hum. There had to be one painting I refused to sacrifice. Straight for the jugular. Possible, if I kept on going. There were no hours any more. The clock was missing. And where was I supposed to go exactly? What was I supposed to do?

Outside again and sketching. Strange how metal sharpened sunlight into needles but so difficult to draw. The masts were easier. Flick of the pencil — he would be back any day now — and that was it. Those simple boats. A lot more people on the pier. Pickings in the basket from the verges of the hills. Mostly weeds. Yes, he would come back any day now. He told me so. I trusted him. And I could throw his paintings in the loch if he did not.

Crushed another tablet in the mortar and went straight in with Cremnitz. Smearing the paint, it seemed to ache a fraction more. There were sixty-four tablets when Jim left and now just fifty-two. Coral-coloured things, made white under the pestle. Powdered just like salt. A pinch of it did not go far. That night, for dinner: soda bread, the way my mother used to bake it. Jim made sure to leave me with some matches. He put them in the drawer: two boxes. Some of them were blackened, struck already. When he got back, we would need more. We could exhume the clock or get another. We could get back what we lost.

Night-time and barely a light on. Trees a dense black cluster up ahead. The whispering boat ropes straining with the tide. And everywhere so quiet and cool. The smells of night so sheer and fulsome. I was carrying two of his best Judas boards above my head, pall-bearing.

It had taken all day to work up the courage — his messages must not have reached me; the last train must have left without him — but I had waited and waited and waited too long.

They were heavy and rough at the sides. Took them down to the rim of the loch. Silt and sand beneath me, the water bracing, ankle-high. I threw them forwards and they splashed. They hardly flew at all. But still the water doused me. The boards drifted away like rafts and vanished in the dark. The boat ropes tightened, gave.

He had gone to look for Ana Helène. It was foolish to think otherwise. There were plenty more boards in the cottage. I had stacked them up in the back room. The kitchen light ahead of me, a woozy yellow star to guide me back. I had his permission for this, I had his approval. But no more for tonight.

The boat ropes were still tightening when I opened my eyes, but they were nowhere to be seen. I was lying in Jim’s sleeping bag of curtains, amongst his clothes, the musk of them, and day was falling onto me. The ropes were very close by, the creak of them prolonged, repeating. I stood up in the sleeping bag until it peeled right off me. I followed the sound, along the hallway — creaking — to the lounge. And Jim was in the rocking chair, arms folded. A fierce look about his face: all tensed. His boots were new and glassy. He wore a hefty opal ring. ‘Where are they?’ he said, letting the words hang. ‘The best two are missing. Where are they?’ Those steady creaking rockers, back and forth.

‘In the loch,’ I said. ‘You told me I could do it.’

He nodded. ‘After a week, I told you. It’s been six days.’ But his words could not be trusted any more. Standing now, dusting his hands. Sizing me up, as though for a portrait. Head down and to the side. No pencil to measure me. The proportions would be wrong. ‘Ellie,’ he said, ‘how concerned should I be?’

I did not understand his question. The room was much too bright. He was wearing a fine set of clothes, the kind for impressing: serge blazer, a well-ironed shirt. His hair was no shorter, no longer, but the remnants of his tan still shaded his cheekbones. And that big opal ring. ‘Not at all. I’ve been painting,’ I said.

He glared at me. ‘Yes, I can see that.’ A note of contempt in the voice. ‘But you don’t look well,’ he said. ‘Just awful, in fact. Have you been eating?’

I shrugged. ‘A bit of soda bread.’

‘Soda bread. That’s all you’ve had?’

‘Well, just a few bites. I made it too salty.’

‘In the whole six days?’

‘My mother used to bake it.’

‘Uh-huh. All right, I see.’ He stepped forward, softening. ‘I think you’d better lie down.’

‘When did you get back?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Early.’

‘You missed your train.’

‘Not exactly. Come on — bed now.’ He walked me backwards. ‘I’ll make you some hot milk and then you’ve got to eat something.’

Warm milk in our stomachs and half a pack of biscuits. Things were better after that. We sat in the kitchen with the back door open, letting in the dregs of summer, all the giddy bugs. The brightness hard to bear. But Jim was home now. Head of the table, watching me chew. His chin resting on his fists. Slack-faced, sighing. ‘I should cook you something proper,’ he said. ‘Have another.’ Raisins in the biscuits were shrivelled and delicious. I kept on eating, drank more milk. ‘That’s a fair-size canvas in the back room,’ he said. ‘You stretched that on your own?’

I said, ‘No one else around to help me, was there?’

‘Well, the painting is—’ Head to one side.

‘Not finished.’

‘More like you can’t stop working on it.’

‘It won’t come together.’ No more biscuits.

‘It reminds me of something.’

‘A very bad Turner.’

‘No, I don’t mean it’s derivative.’

‘Your eyes need testing.’

‘Ellie — you’re worrying me.’

‘I’m eating, aren’t I? What more do you want?’

He bit on his knuckle, considering the answer. His eyes did not leave mine. I could see the gap in his teeth from fighting. He said, ‘Actually, it reminds me of the work I did when I was drinking—heavily drinking. Your thoughts are leaking out of so many different places you can’t hold them. There’s no control, no discipline. Everything’s just streaming out of you and you can’t stop it. I understand what that feels like, believe me I do. Feels like freedom but all you’re really doing is shutting things out. It leads you nowhere good.’

‘You shouldn’t have left me here,’ I told him.

‘Yes, I think you’re probably right.’

‘Then why did you?’

‘Because I had to.’ Staring at the tabletop. ‘I’ve been in the state you’re in now, Ellie, and I can’t go back to it. As much as I care for you, I won’t.’

He did not say love. He did not even think it. ‘I’m hopeless on my own,’ I said.

‘That isn’t true. You’ve always been alone. You thrive that way.’

‘Well, I don’t feel it.’ And I pushed myself upright. ‘I can’t paint any more. I’m done with it all.’

The chair legs scraped. Jim grabbed for my arm. He took my wrist. I scowled at him. ‘Ellie, please, sit down.’ A kindly flutter of his hand. ‘I need to tell you something. It’s important.’ Such levelness to his expression: he gave nothing away. (Petunias.) So I did as he asked.

Inhaling once, sharply. His palms pressed together. ‘I wore this for the trip,’ he said. The opal ring slipped off. It wobbled on the table. ‘It’s not the subtlest bit of jewellery in the world, but it has sentimental value.’ I did not pick it up. My mouth was dry.

‘Sentimental why?’ I said.

‘It belongs to someone dear to me.’

‘Ana Helène.’ Only a fool would assume otherwise.

‘No.’ He smiled. ‘A man from my regiment.’

‘Oh.’

‘I know it’s an ugly old thing, but it makes me proud to wear it.’

‘Is there any water left?’ I said.

Slitting his eyes. ‘Of course. I’ll get you some.’

Filled a glass from the tap. Studied the birds in the garden. The daylight made me sore, but not Jim Culvers. He admired the afternoon for what it was. He passed me the water and sat down again. ‘Listen now, I want you to hear this. It might just stop you doing something stupid.’ I took very slow gulps. ‘I lied to you, months ago. When you asked me where I’d been, I lied to you. And I’m sorry, but I had to.’

‘I know you weren’t in London,’ I said. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘Ellie, listen to me now. It’s important that you hear me.’

‘You don’t have to pretend. You care for me, that’s all. And yes, I care for you. Now we just have to get on with it. We don’t need to get married.’

He reached across the table. For the ring, I thought. But no — for my hand. He gripped it tightly. ‘Ana Helène is just a name,’ he said. ‘I made her up — I had to think of something on the spot. Please listen.’

His words could not be trusted.

My mouth felt worse for the water. Pasty thick.

‘Everything I told you about the doctor and the trip to France — that was true. I did go back to Arras. The bar fight part was true, except it happened in Paris not Dunkirk. I hit a poet in the mouth. The rest was just a story. I don’t know if he had a sister but I didn’t go to Giverny with him or anywhere else. I got arrested that day and my friend came to get me. He lives in Paris with his wife. He’s a playwright now, quite a famous one, actually — doing lots of script work for the films. And this ring, I promise you, it genuinely belongs to him. I need you to know I’m telling you the truth.’

‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘You’re here now. And you care for me. That’s all.’

He slipped it back on his finger, twisted it round. ‘I don’t even know if there are Judas trees in Giverny. That isn’t the place I saw them. Ellie, keep listening to me, please. You’re not even — all right, let’s do this later. You rest a bit. You rest, and I’ll see if I can get us something that’s worth eating. How would you like some—’

Fried eggs and beans. The only time Jim ever cooked me anything. The sight of it was sickening. And how long had I slept? The kitchen beads were taped against the frame. Just embers in the hearth. He made me eat again. Some of the beans and most of the eggs. And then we carried on. The ring belonged to his playwright friend — he had told me this before — and his wife who lived in Paris — yes, I knew all this, I said.

‘We served together. He was my sergeant. I’d seen him just a few times since the war, but we wrote to each other a lot. Anyway, that day he came to bail me out the station — well, I could tell how concerned he was about me, you know? I was in an awful state. Worse than in the Army. It was him and his wife who helped me get sober. To begin with, at least.’

Jim made the tea too strong. I could not drink it.

‘Listen, Ellie, listen.’

I still felt a bit light-headed.

‘So I was in a bad way, I’d given up on painting — he could see that I was struggling just to get out of bed in the morning. I was always the one who used to keep his spirits up, you know — I’d draw him pictures to cheer him up when we got stationed anywhere new. Just sketches of the fellas in the regiment. And he knew how much it meant to me, to be painting well. We used to talk about it all the time in our letters.’

He was telling the truth. His eyes were bright and clear. Nothing evasive, nothing shifting. Finally, Jim Culvers was telling me the truth.

‘Anyway. One day, his wife goes out to meet someone, and we’re alone. And he tells me all about this time when he was younger, how he’d been through a similar thing to what was happening to me now — drinking a lot, and hardly writing. Even though his plays were being put on every year, he said he’d felt this despair inside, eating away at him. Something just wasn’t right. He’d tried to kill himself a few times, he said, and I was — well, I didn’t know what to think. Got your attention now, though, I see.’

I was staring at him — at his mouth.

‘Well, he’d clearly managed to get himself straightened out, so I asked him how he’d done it. And he starts talking very fast about everything he’d been through, hitting rock bottom, all of that. I don’t know if he was worried about his wife coming back and hearing, or what, but he really did talk quickly. And, next thing, he’s telling me all about this place he knows in Turkey. Some island off the coast of Istanbul. There was a set-up there, he said, a kind of sanatorium. A place only for artists — not a colony, not a resort or anything like that. A refuge. He claimed it turned his life around, this place, just being there. Gave him back his sense of purpose. Completely cleared his mind.’

It sounded like a perfect spot to disappear.

‘So I just looked at him, you know — same way you’re looking at me now — and my heart was thumping in my chest. I knew I had to get there, wherever it was. No matter what, I needed to get there. I asked him how to find it, and he said, “It’s not that simple. There are rules you have to follow.” I said, “I’ll do anything. Just tell me how to get there.” So he did. He told me everything. And I want you to hear this now, Ellie, and really listen, really listen, because I won’t have a chance to repeat it.’

Waiting at the phone box on a street somewhere in Luss. Expecting it to ring. Jim said I should stay in bed, but I could not sleep a moment longer. The food had strengthened me a bit. I could stand up straight without faltering. We were half under the streetlamp. No cars on the road. Grey smoke shuffling in the darkness, a line of cottages turned in for the night. Already Jim had dialled a number and spoken to his contact. ‘All right,’ he had said, ‘we’ll stand by,’ and he had read aloud the number of the phone box. ‘Doesn’t matter when. However long it takes. If we don’t hear in a few hours, we’ll have to — all right, thank you.’ That seemed like forever ago.

We sat on the kerb, throwing stones, like two kids playing in the lane. ‘You don’t have to worry about anything,’ Jim said. ‘It’s going to be difficult at first, but, trust me, it gets easier. My first season there, I hardly painted anything. I just tried to get used to the surroundings. That’s OK, by the way — you can’t be afraid of losing time. Just let your mind absorb things, let it settle. And, eventually, you’ll work yourself out. My advice is, go up to the mansion roof a lot. That’s where you’ll see things clearest. All the Judas trees come out on the islands in the spring — it’s like nothing else on earth. You can see them from across the water. And when you see them, think of me, remember this moment, OK? Because the main thing out there is not to get lonely. There’ll be people who you’ll get along with, and people who you won’t, but it’s important not to get lonely. It happened to a few people I—’ Phone was ringing. ‘This is it,’ Jim said. He patted the dirt from his hands. Swinging the rusted door open, stepping in. He looked at me, smiling. Picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’ A nod, a nod, another. ‘Thank you, sir, yes. I’m keeping well. The work is flowing. Things are selling, too, which helps.’ Pause. Nod. ‘I’ve no doubt that it did, sir, yes.’ A genteel laugh I had never heard him give before. An odd formality to it all. ‘Of course, of course. Well, I won’t keep you. I’ll pass on the good news. And thank you so much again for — no, but I really do appreciate it.’ That laugh again. ‘I will, sir, yes. Hoşçakal.’