There were murders and martyrdoms, ingenious in their methods of torture, of saints Agatha, Agnes, Catherine, Maria Goretti, Martha and Ursula. Inevitably, the pièce de résistance was the old exhibitionist herself: Wanda, photographed, po-faced in magenta robes, in the guise of St. Lucy; eyes shut, eyeballs, acquired from an accommodating abattoir, proffered on a plate. Over this image, suspended from the ceiling on wires, tinkling like a diabolic wind chime over Carl Orff’s choral medieval pastiche—“O, Fortuna!”—were thousands of bones, sterilised animal femurs donated, according to the programme notes, by that same friendly slaughterhouse.
Luka was marvelling again, pointing admiringly at the stock shots of Mexican sugar skulls—inspiration for his asinine tattoo—and, though Eve knew it was unfair, she couldn’t help thinking less of him for it.
Back in the crowded foyer, he fetched more champagne and led her towards another queue. This one, contained by ropes and supervised by self-important young marshals wearing the orange “Double U” livery, snaked through the building like an airport security line. At the head of it, behind a table stacked with hardback copies of The Artist’s I, Wanda’s latest manifesto, Eve made out her old adversary’s unmistakable froth of hair, now white, evoking an eighteenth-century monarch in powdered periwig, and that frightening mask of a face—frozen by nerve-paralysing toxins, swollen by chemical gels and stretched by surgery—with its expression of astonished hauteur. She was seated in a high-backed chair which, in the context, gave the illusion of a throne.
“Come on!” said Luka, taking Eve’s hand.
It was his touch—a reminder of their intimacy—that drew her in. Why else would she join a receiving line to pay homage to her old room-mate whom she hadn’t seen for more than three decades, by choice? Eve still, pathetically, wanted to impress her young lover and this, it seemed, was what it took.
They shuffled forwards in silence as in a New York immigration line and, as they neared the head of the queue, Eve’s misgivings grew.
“I’m not sure about this, Luka. It’s been so long since I’ve seen her. Maybe I’d rather meet her privately.”
Luka gripped her hand tightly.
“Come on, Eve. Please. This means so much to me.”
Another marshal came over. “One at a time please. Miss Wilson only gives individual audiences.”
Eve was led up to the table and Wanda was before her, a shamanistic figure with a scarab clip in her wild hair, swathes of scarlet pleated silk covering her bloated body, a ruby-topped cane in her left hand. Eve had seen her photographs over the years but even so, close up, the effects of her cosmetic surgery startled. Only Wanda’s eyes were the same, deep-set and darting. They stared out anxiously from their new waxy mask, above a whittled, upturned nose, and inflated lips that suggested freakishly distended labia.
By Wanda’s side a goateed acolyte, a Van Dyck courtier, passed Eve a copy of the book then extended his hand. “That’ll be £25 please.”
Eve fumbled in her bag for the money and handed the book to Wanda, who sat, looking frankly bored, pen in hand.
“Who shall I sign it for?” she asked, looking up at Eve briefly then down at the book, which she opened on the title page.
“Luka,” said Eve, seething at the boy for forcing her into this role of supplicant.
“How are you spelling that?” asked Wanda, pen already at work.
Eve looked round. Luka was standing several feet back and hadn’t heard their exchange. He’d been joined by his sister and they were talking excitedly, filming the encounter on their phones.
“Hi, Wanda,” said Eve, in a clearer voice. “How are you?”
She looked up. “Do I know you?”
Eve leaned across the table and murmured into the artist’s blank face.
“Come on, Wanda…You know very well it’s me, Eve…Hornsey? Hoxton? Avenue B?”
She frowned.
Eve hissed: “Mike…Kristof…Florian…Remember?”
That did it.
“Ah yes! Of course! How are you?”
Wanda bent to sign the book, snapped it shut and handed it back to Eve. “How’s the flower business?”
Eve had no time to respond—a photographer asked her to pose for a picture with Wanda, who beckoned starstruck Luka to join them. Wanda declined to stand—the ruby-topped cane, some temporary infirmity, was her get-out—so Luka and Eve were pictured stooping low over the artist, two serfs grinning sycophantically at the shoulders of a taciturn tsarina.
Within seconds, another marshal ushered them away—the queue was building—and Luka was “wow”-ing again.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Eve.
She was longing for her studio. Longing to get back to work. Her lover held her hand and they walked out of the gallery, just as her husband walked in. They exchanged cold glances. Kristof looked from her to Luka, taking in his rival, showing disdain with a faint retraction of his upper lip. Eve drew herself up, defying Kristof to challenge her. Luka grasped her hand tighter.
“Come on. We’ve got so much to do in the studio,” he said.
They walked on towards the river and Eve looked back to see Belle, with her officious clipboard, greeting Kristof at the door. No queues for him. His commission for the Art Ranch was probably sealed by now and, if age had compromised Wanda’s memory for names and her consummate networking skills, Belle would be there to prompt her.
They worked late again—Luka spurred by exhilaration, Eve by anger and the conviction that her only defence against the affront of the evening was her work. She started on the sketch for the orange sequence—Arum maculatum—while he mixed the pigment for the canvas’s green ground. The penultimate canvas.
He was cleaning brushes and tidying the studio before they went to bed when Eve remembered Wanda’s book. It must have been a masochistic urge that led her to retrieve it from her bag. She read the dust jacket: “Wanda Wilson, world-renowned multidisciplinary artist, has challenged taboos and transformed the definition of art with her relational art and deep-immersion encounters, in which she transforms the lives of spectators in a groundbreaking discourse on the social corpus.”
Though Eve, for her own reasons, had never been a fan of Brian Sewell, she delighted in his review of Wanda’s show at the White Cube in the 1990s—“The ravings of the archetypal madwoman. Euthanasia would be a kindness,” he’d written. He couldn’t be wrong all the time. She kept a copy of that review on her phone, too. Eve turned to the book’s title page. There was the dedication—not to Luka.
“Fuck you, Eve! See you at my next show…WW”
24
Her walk has brought her to Victoria Park. The gates have been locked since dusk—hours ago. Perhaps a twenty-first-century magnolia boy and girl are kissing under bare branches at the park’s northern corner. She turns right, skirting the park’s iron railings and the canal, which is oily as pitch. Most of the houseboats look deserted but, judging by the fairy lights looped round a few windows and the plastic Christmas tree ostentatiously fixed to a prow, some are inhabited. Maybe a narrowboat and a mooring here wouldn’t be such a bad end.
* * *
—
Orange. Luka mixed the pigments. Perinone orange veers towards pink when mixed with zinc white. The addition of cadmium orange and quinacridone gold gives it heat and luminosity. She completed the drawing and watercolour of two specimens of Arum maculatum at different stages of their life cycle: the spring form with purple spadix framed by a green hood, and the summer clusters of orange berries on a pale poker stem. Now Luka was at the dissection tray, twirling a spring specimen between his fingers, preparing to photograph it.
“I’ve seen this one before. In the wild?”
“That’s right. Cuckoopint. It’s a woodland plant. Lords and ladies is another name for it. A shade lover.”
“It’s kind of phalli
c.”
“You wouldn’t want to bring that one into the bedroom,” she said. “Unless pain’s your thing…It burns the mouth—one seventeenth-century herbalist recommended it, sprinkled on meat, as a cure for unwanted guests. It shuts them up and they never come back. Plays havoc with mucous membranes.”
He dropped the specimen in the tray.
“Could be a cure for unwanted lovers, too, I suppose,” he said.
The following morning, he set up the video camera on a tripod and joined her at the canvas, taking over the top half of the green field and covering it with identical oil iterations of her watercolour cuckoopint.
Absorbed in their work, they were startled by the dentist’s drill drone of the intercom. Only couriers pressed the buzzer and no deliveries were expected that day. The studio’s few visitors—Hans, Ines, on the days when Eve would let her into the studio—knew to knock. This afternoon the sound seemed particularly malign, as if announcing a police raid.
Luka opened the door to an angry emissary of Eve’s old life—her daughter. Nancy walked in, pug in arms, a self-righteous Boudicca in frayed denim, throwing a cold glance at Luka. He smiled, grabbed his jacket, murmured some excuse about getting supplies, and left the studio.
“Was that him?” Nancy asked, nodding towards the door.
“Luka. His name’s Luka.”
“He’s a kid. Is it even legal?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. A ‘how are you?’ would have been nice. How are you? Daughter?”
Nancy’s face darkened and she tightened her grip on the pug.
“How do you think I am? My father’s in pieces because my mother’s just run off with someone half her age—a student. How am I meant to be?”
“A student!” Eve laughed. Her daughter always had a genius for exaggeration. “You’ve seen him, Nancy—Luka’s a mature, independent young man.”
“Independent? I very much doubt it. And mature? Hardly. You’re sixty. Remember? He’s my age, for God’s sake.”
Eve lowered her brush with a sigh. “Can’t you see I’m working? I don’t have time for this.”
Nancy stroked her panting dog. She really believed that the two of them made a winsome picture—Singer Sargent’s portrait of Beatrice with her toy terrier, perhaps. Only George Grosz, or maybe Diane Arbus, could do this pet and owner justice.
“This isn’t about me,” Nancy said. “It’s about you, and about Dad.”
“Is this a first? My daughter is actually concerned about someone other than herself?”
Tears began to seep from Nancy’s eyes.
“Oh, Mum…”
Eve always winced at that diminutive. As a new mother, she made the case for “Mor”—the Danish word, with its apt suggestion of Oliver Twist and the empty bowl. She could even have coped with the chilly, timeless Mother. She settled for Mama—international and not completely unsexy. But Nancy had, as Nancy continued to do, responded to peer pressure, and every time she reverted to “Mum” it seemed to Eve an insult; a deliberate suburban belittlement.
A year and a half ago, when Nancy announced her pregnancy, Eve got in early and told her that she would veto Grandma, Granny, Nana or any other crone designation. When Nancy’s baby finally spoke, Eve insisted, it would call her Eve. And now the baby, little Jarleth, that plump, caterwauling, twenty-three-pound sack of needs, would never call her anything. Her name would be excised from the family record, her statue toppled in the domestic equivalent of damnatio memoriae.
Her daughter’s shoulders were heaving and she was holding her dog against her cheek—was she wiping her tears on her pet?
“You’ve seen the press, I suppose?” Nancy said, struggling to compose herself. “The diary stories?”
“No. I’m working.”
“They’re mocking you,” Nancy said, with a glint of sadistic pleasure in her eyes.
Eve turned back to the canvas.
“If you’ll excuse me? As I said, I’m working.”
The cuckoopint, as Luka noticed, had a subpornographic Carry On sauciness—particularly in its spring form, with the purple phallus of the spadix nestling in the vulva of its false flower. Some artists would play up that connection. Eve chose subtlety, always harder to master.
“A grandmother!” Nancy continued. “Ditching her successful husband for a toy boy.”
“That’s pathetic,” Eve said, over her shoulder. “One of those trashy papers you read, I suppose?”
“One of those trashy papers everybody reads—the Daily Mail. Twitter’s full of it, too.”
Eve dropped her brush in a jar, wiped her hands and turned to face her daughter again.
“Do you really think I care what a bunch of envious imbeciles think about me?” But her voice betrayed her. She took a breath and spoke more softly. “Now I see what’s upsetting you. What other people think. All you’ve ever been concerned with is surfaces—reputational damage. Damage to your reputation, that is…”
Nancy was crying openly now. But these were tears of anger.
“You don’t see it, do you? What you’re throwing away—Dad, me, Jarleth, Delaunay Gardens, all the rest. That whole life you built together. And for what? A dumb pretty boy with his eye on the main chance.”
“You know nothing. Nothing about Luka, nothing about me.”
“I know enough to see an old woman about to trash what’s left of her life for a gold-digging gigolo who’ll dump her as soon as she’s no longer any use.”
Eve didn’t flinch.
“Really? Why would I value your opinion on anything? Look at you! You can’t even dress properly. Those jeans? With your thighs?”
Usually, a remark like that would provoke an aggrieved outburst from Nancy. But she stood her ground, tears dripping on the wrinkled head of the pug, whose bulging eyes widened further, as if taking offence on his owner’s behalf.
“Don’t try to change the subject. I’m here for your sake, as well as Dad’s. I’m trying to pull you back from a disastrous decision.”
Her voice was measured. Her equanimity was almost admirable. How little they knew each other. And now, they would always be strangers.
“You know nothing, Nancy. Never have. Never will. What are you doing here? Don’t you have an important dispatch to write? ‘Scarves—In or Out?’ ‘Hemlines—Up or Down?’ ”
Nancy shook her head. “You have no idea what it looks like, do you? You, with that boy.”
“Maybe not.” Eve paused, then smiled and lowered her voice: “But I know what it feels like.”
Nancy groaned. “You disgust me.”
Those were her daughter’s final words. She walked out of the studio and Eve stood for a moment, listening to the fading reverberation of the slammed door, before returning to the canvas.
The late-summer form of the cuckoopint was another beast altogether, its toxic berries bright as burning coals. She cleaned her brush and worked it through the orange paint. Then it struck her—Nancy had been in the studio for a full twenty minutes without demonstrating the slightest curiosity about the giant, colour-saturated canvases lining the studio walls, about the herbaria, the photographs, the watercolours. She’d never had any interest in her mother, or her work. Good to get that straight.
Luka returned ten minutes after Nancy’s departure and they went back to work without a word. She was still seething at her daughter’s visit and appreciated his silence.
Outside, night was falling and the street lamps came on, ochre auras staining the growing darkness. In the studio, the orange berries of Eve’s cuckoopint seemed a light source all of their own. Luka sealed the herbarium and uncoupled the video camera from its tripod.
“Do you ever think,” he asked, levelling the camera at her, “that it’s all a bit tame?”
“Tame?” Eve held her brush mid-air.
“Don’t
you ever get tired of it? Isn’t it sometimes like working in a florist’s.”
“No, I don’t tire of it,” she said, glaring at him. “And it’s never like working in a florist’s. You know that.”
What had got into him? He plunged on.
“Or, that you’re one of those women in a TV costume drama? All you need is a bonnet and a basket. A grandmother’s bonnet?”
He’d gone too far. He was sending her up now. She stabbed her brush into the pool of colour.
“We don’t have time for this. Put down the camera and help me here. I need you to mix more pigment.”
He reattached the camera to the tripod and walked over to measure out the powder.
“What about Florian Kiš? He wasn’t exactly a fan of your flowers, was he?”
She froze. “Fuck Florian Kiš.” She dropped her brush on the table. “It’s a completely different aesthetic. He found ugliness in the beautiful and beauty in the ugly. I choose beauty, unmediated. This is about me, not some ancient art world behemoth. Now, let’s get on. Unless you’ve had enough of floristry…”
Was that a smile on his face? He bent over the grinding slab, working at the new mix of cadmium and quinacridone with what seemed like parodic zeal. What was up with him? She expected abuse from her daughter. But her lover? She picked up her brush and returned to the canvas but her anger and confusion gave a shaky imprecision to her line. It was no good. After another hour, dismayed by her own shoddy work, she dipped a hog-bristle brush in the colour and painted over her afternoon’s work. Tomorrow, she would have to start again.
They went to bed in silence and through the night Eve lay awake while Luka, his back turned to her, slept on like a contented child. She stared up at the ceiling, rerunning their exchange, recalling his cruel words, making excuses for him; they’d been cooped up together for so long now, he’d been so diligent, she’d been heedless of his needs and insecurities, something had to give. She countered each excuse with rising indignation—How could he? How dare he?—before rerunning the loop of excuses. It must be the strain of work. Eve was used to the long hours, the skipped meals, this degree of feverish concentration as a project neared its end—she’d trained for it all her adult life—and she hadn’t considered that it might take its toll on him. It had certainly taken a toll on their physical relationship.
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