At last, she glimpsed him in the corner of the gallery by the drinks table and made her way towards him. Nancy intercepted her.
“Congratulations, Mama!” She kissed Eve on the cheek and reached for her hand. “You’ve really done it!”
Nancy’s hand was cold and her nails were lacquered a sickly stone grey. What was she wearing? Yellow had never suited her—it gave her a jaundiced cast.
“Thanks, darling.”
Eve slipped from her daughter’s grasp. By the time she reached the drinks table, Luka had vanished.
Hans appeared and together they posed for a press photographer. At least her dealer didn’t gush.
“Solokoff is here.” He pointed towards the Russian energy magnate, a bluff, bearish figure known for his contemporary art collection and his taste for young lingerie models. “You must meet him.”
“Must I?”
The Russian gripped her hand and smiled, flashing a set of iridescent veneers.
“Very nice,” he said, indicating, with a tilt of his chin, her oil painting of four stems of shaggy golden Taraxacum—dandelions—hovering next to the ghostly globes of their seed heads.
He was with two lanky girls, anorexic by the look of them, barely out of their teens, skinny calves taut in heels that seemed longer than their skirts.
Eve thanked him and walked away, leaving Hans to talk to him. All she wanted was a sight of the boy. The noise of the crowd was oppressive. No one was looking at the pictures, and the video booth, whose set-up had involved days of tantrums from Glynn and Josette, was empty. The life cycle of Chamaenerion angustifolium, rosebay willowherb, from wind-borne seed to flowering spire, was playing, unobserved, on repeat.
Glynn and Josette rushed over to greet Eve with an overfamiliarity which suggested they were all in on some shared joke, or, worse, that she was the shared joke. They would have seen her dancing with Luka the previous night and must have found the spectacle ridiculous.
Glynn was a roving Jackson Pollock in his paint-spattered overalls while Josette was wearing can-do denim dungarees and a Rosie the Riveter turban. “We are workers in the service of art,” their costumes declared.
Eve dismissed them with a remark about an unsatisfactory juxtaposition in the hanging. “Buddleia next to lilac? I thought I said that was a no-no?”
They hurried away to deal with it.
Then she saw him, talking to a waiter by the door. Ignoring greetings on all sides, she pressed on through the crowd. Luka turned to her and smiled. He seemed limned in gold, dazzling among the dull, homogenous crowd. A Greek icon set in a Lowry street scene.
“Fantastic!” he said. His eyes reflected the light of the setting sun streaming through the windows.
“You like it?”
“Amazing!”
Hans was back, grabbing her arm, trying to pull her away. She shrugged him off.
“Later…” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on Luka.
He was wearing a faded tuxedo with a pristine white collarless shirt—a Singer Sargent Endymion in Converse sneakers. She was touched that he’d made an effort to dress up for the evening, unlike Glynn and Josette. His tuxedo—probably a charity-shop find—was slightly too big and gave him a louche vulnerability.
“What do you like best?” she asked him.
“All of it,” he said.
She needed to keep him there, to keep him talking so she could feast on him. A waitress came between them with a tray of canapés. Eve shook her head impatiently and the girl shrank away.
“Did you get back okay last night?” asked Eve.
A stupid question. He’d clearly got back all right.
“Yes. Kind of. There were no buses so I walked most of the way. Is that Richard Rogers? Talking to Nick Serota and Timor Heschel from the Alt Gallerie?”
She sensed his awkwardness. He was out of his depth.
There was a tap on her shoulder. It was Ines Alvaro from the Gerstein, her small face tight and beseeching.
“Eve! I’d really like for you to meet some of our most important patrons. This is Mr. and Mrs. Wennacker…”
“Not now, Ines,” said Eve. She turned back to Luka. She wanted to stay on the subject of last night. “It was so late, wasn’t it?”
He smiled. “Yeah. I didn’t realise the time until we left the studio. Amazing party.”
Then Hans and Kristof were upon her—a pincer movement—and guided her away.
“You must meet the mayor,” said Kristof. “He’s just about to leave.”
She looked back towards Luka, who smiled and nodded a farewell. Then he was gone.
8
The young man sitting diagonally opposite her on the Tube is dark-eyed and tawny-skinned, with the black beard and erect bearing of a Velázquez knight. He has planted a large rucksack between his trainer-shod feet. Her pulse falters. In her youth, such a sight would have had no meaning for her, and at a time when pubs and department stores, as well as Tube stations, were targets for bombers, it was the Irish who were in the frame; an innocent bystander with a telling accent, the wrong religious affiliation and a Hibernian name could be arrested, tortured and handed a life sentence. Terrorism makes racists of us all. Racists and juvenophobes.
She stares at the sinister bulk of the rucksack. The worst outcome—blinding flash then annihilation—would have the advantage of being quick. Survival with “life-changing” injuries, that dreadful circumlocution, would be insupportable. She talks herself down. He’s probably a student doctor, carrying his textbooks. She’s no racist, Eve assures herself—whatever Nancy might say—and she doesn’t share the automatic hostility of the old towards the young. It might have been better for her if she did. She thinks again of another young man, pale-skinned, equally beautiful, lying waiting for her tonight, fifteen miles across town.
* * *
—
There was a thrilling inevitability about it. She didn’t so much stumble towards the precipice as run at it and hurl herself over. After the Sigmoid show opened, the freelance assistants were no longer needed. Only her permanent staff, Josette and Glynn, remained.
But Eve told them that she wanted to keep Luka on—“the tall, quiet boy”—for a while.
“He’s a good worker. No trouble,” she said.
Then she arranged to send Josette and Glynn to New York to liaise with Ines Alvaro.
They resisted: “How will you manage without us?”
How indeed. But the lure of an all-expenses-paid trip trumped their sense of duty and she was left alone in the studio with Luka.
For two days, over the May bank holiday weekend, she worked with him on an oil commissioned by Solokoff—a spray of camomile, national flower of Russia, suspended against an azure background. She resented the work and resented Hans for persuading her to take it on, as a project to tide her over once her exhibition opened. It seemed like treading water, and she was glad that this empty, formal study was going to disappear into a private collection.
The work was of no interest, but her assistant was. Luka referred to the painting as “the daisy work,” and she didn’t contradict him. As she delineated the petals with zinc white and stippled the feathery leaves in phthalo green, he worked beside her diligently, deepening the blue background with intense cobalt at the edges of the canvas. His hand was steady and his brushstrokes were swift and efficient—his time spent turning out copies of Old Masters had not been wasted.
They talked only rarely as they worked and the silence between them echoed in the empty studio. Sometimes, she found it unbearable. Her centre of gravity seemed to have shifted to her groin and she could think of nothing but that ache of need. She wanted to put down her brush, give up this pretence of work and ask him to retreat with her—now!—to the bedroom. Only the fear of his refusal, of making herself look ridiculous, stopped her. Then she would pu
t on music, jazz or baroque, at full volume to distract herself. Their late-evening farewells were constrained as he headed towards north London and she to Delaunay Gardens. It was as if that night of playful wonder on the eve of the Sigmoid opening had never happened.
The third night—after their last day alone—they worked until eleven, when she arranged a delivery from a local Indian restaurant. She found a bottle of good red, left by Hans more than a year ago, dimmed the studio lights and lit a couple of candles. In the wavering flames, Luka was a brooding, chiaroscuro Caravaggio, poised over the glinting foil cartons.
They forked curry desultorily (too oily, too spicy, they weren’t hungry anyway) and talked on in the half-light. She asked the questions and he answered.
The flat he shared with his younger sister, Belle, in Archway was a rented basement.
“It’s too small. It’s all we can afford. We’re driving each other crazy.”
Belle, another fine arts graduate, had won a prestigious scholarship to study in the States last year.
“She’s just back, doing a temporary job in promotion and arts marketing, and she’s impatient with my lack of focus,” he said.
Eve had no interest in his sister’s career plans but she was happy to let Luka talk. This confiding mood might be a prelude to a more profound unburdening.
“She’s driven,” he told her. “Ambitious. A born networker. She’ll end up marrying some rich old bloke to subsidise her art and keep her in style. But I don’t want that kind of life. Trouble is, five years on from leaving college, I still don’t know what kind of life I do want. The copying job brings in enough money to keep me going. So, I’m Matisse one week, Constable the next. I finished another Haywain at the weekend!” He laughed. The wine was making him expansive. “Once, I thought I’d be an artist myself but now I know I don’t have the talent to make it. Technique isn’t enough. You need ideas.”
She poured another glass for him. “What do you really want? What gives you pleasure?”
“I guess I’m just happy hanging around, waiting for inspiration.”
“What about a more permanent position in the studio? Would that inspire you?”
He put down his fork.
“What? Here?”
She nodded.
“With you? Sure!” He grinned.
“Only,” Eve said, meeting his smile with her own, “I’m in a state of flux myself. I’ve got to make some changes round here.”
She’d set it all up but it had to be initiated by him; she needed that small corner of self-respect. How could she know that her self-respect would be making its farewell appearance that evening? They clinked glasses, sealing the deal, drained the last of the wine and fell silent. Then he reached across for her hand. That was the only cue she needed. Within minutes they were making their way towards bed.
That morning, while he’d worked at the canvas, she had rearranged the bedroom with the attention of a set designer: fresh linen, flowers—a jar of blowsy peonies—a tuberose candle. She’d prepared herself too—the extra shower, the buttressed silk underwear from the French atelier, the scent—anxious about presenting her sixty-year-old body to this beautiful boy. Even as she hurried like a housemaid to get everything ready, she knew she must steel herself for humiliation.
Over the years, she had worked to keep herself in shape. The studio gym was part of her daily programme. An hour alone on the machines cleared her head. It also, with regular bouts of fasting, slowed the spread and droop of flesh. Slowed, but didn’t halt. Her hair was dyed every six weeks at a Belgravia salon—her daughter had more grey hairs than she did—and each morning and evening she massaged some expensive cream, derived from crushed slugs, into her face. But nothing could convincingly smooth and reinflate ageing skin, elevate breasts and butt, erase veins livid as a drunk tattooist’s scrawl and eliminate the mutilating snail-trail scar of a C-section.
Cosmetic surgery inflicted its own disfigurements. Several acquaintances had submitted, with mixed results. Mireille Porte had changed her name to Orlan and turned her surgical addiction into performance art. Wanda had signed up too, as evidenced by the photos. Eve wasn’t impressed. They all looked related, these plastic surgery addicts—like close family members who’d suffered burns in a house fire and undergone reconstructive surgery at the hands of the same bungling amateur. Now Wanda, after all that expense and pain, simply looked like a fat burns victim. An old, fat burns victim.
Eve was an artist. She knew how tricky it was to get the line right, how once you’d committed to paint, erasure was more difficult; how much harder it would be to correct mistakes—a clumsy slip, a miscalculation—when your medium was flesh. Why would she place her delicate physical carapace in the care of the surgical equivalent of a cack-handed Sunday painter? If Michelangelo were to open a Harley Street consultancy she might reconsider. Until then, lighting would be her cosmetician. Lighting, and good red wine, for subject as well as spectator.
All this anxiety, she realised, was an amplified echo, resounding down the decades, of that tremor of insecurity she always felt, despite her sexual confidence, before she went to bed with a lover for the first time. Then, the final tumble into bed, after whatever complex preliminaries and spasms of self-doubt, was inevitable. Now, it was far from a foregone conclusion. Only the self-doubt was certain.
* * *
—
A sudden flurry of pale pink in her peripheral vision draws her attention down the carriage. It’s that old-fashioned, self-important gesture of newspaper page-turning. Big broadsheet pages, unwieldy as a duvet cover. The Financial Times. Its rosy hue, these straitened days, could be a guilty blush.
He’s the only passenger in the carriage reading a paper. He must be a City worker or, as they call it now, a financial services employee. Fifty years ago, his counterpart would have worn a pinstriped suit and a bowler hat. This one has a tattooed dragon snaking above the collar of his loden coat.
* * *
—
They are all tattooed now. The hand that took hers that first night had the inky outline of a small grinning skull, a Mexican Day of the Dead calavera, with a tiny stylised flower between the eye sockets, etched between his thumb and forefinger. Luka pulled her towards him, leaned in and kissed her. Only then was she free to lead him across the studio into the bedroom. There was no haste, but there was no hesitation either.
The lights were on their lowest, warmest setting and she didn’t look at him as she undressed, hoping he would return the favour. She pulled back the duvet, slipped beneath it and quickly drew it up to her neck, as if she was cold. He was seconds behind her. They laughed uneasily. She closed her eyes as, with trembling fingers, they tentatively explored unfamiliar flesh. Gradually mutual self-consciousness yielded to a rapt awareness of the other. His skin was a marvel of warmth and softness, taut yet yielding over the swell of muscle. The hunger was back and only he could sate it. It had been so long yet it was all so familiar—the sweet agony of need and the sublime relief of surrender.
The following morning, they showered together, all inhibitions gone, and as the hot stream beat down on them, he knelt and kissed her scar.
Glynn and Josette, fresh off the plane and full of vicarious New York energy, were already at work, stretching a canvas. Eve felt a pulse of warmth towards them. If they knew what was going on when Eve and Luka emerged from the studio living quarters, they were circumspect. After their presumptuousness at the Sigmoid party, the shutters had come down again. No further reference was made to the wild night at the studio. Their practised cool had its advantages.
They all worked well together that day although, as the hours passed, jet lag set in for Josette and Glynn and they became unusually quiet. Glynn put some John Cage on the sound system—a piano solo, “In a Landscape”—and its tidal reflectiveness, waves of notes tumbling and receding, seemed apt, a series of beautifu
l questions posed and almost answered, again and again.
While Eve stippled cadmium yellow at the centre of Solokoff’s camomile, Josette and Glynn imposed some order in the studio and Luka unpacked new deliveries from Latin America—flesh-eating cobra lilies, their curled leaves rising like snakes poised to strike their prey. At Ines Alvaro’s suggestion, Eve was preparing a multi-media addendum to her early New York carnivorous work for the Gerstein show. She was through with damned daisies.
She watched Luka surreptitiously as he stacked the plants in the fridge. That beautiful body, flexing and stretching, had flexed and stretched for her. Those hands, tearing at packaging then gently cradling the bloated flower heads, moved so decisively and tenderly over her and would do so again. In the studio over the next week Glynn would dissect the lilies, she would paint their parts, Josette would film the process, and Luka would be there, her ministering angel, bestowing grace and light on the whole project. A new project for a new life.
But how would it work, this new life? There was the inconvenient matter of the old one. Easier to postpone difficult questions and respond to the call of the body. She and Luka exchanged furtive glances weighted with longing, but they had no time alone together during this first day. As evening fell, Josette and Glynn packed up to go and Eve looked across at Luka expectantly—how would they arrange this? He smiled back and she watched, with a sudden billowing confusion, as he began to gather his own belongings and walk towards the door. He was leaving too. There was no time or privacy for an explanation. She couldn’t put Glynn and Josette’s discretion to the test by asking him directly. What was he doing? Where was he going? Why?
Nightshade Page 7