* * *
—
She scrolled through his emails with shaking hands and found the thread. It went all the way back to April.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
2 April 2018
I’ve told her about you, shown her some photos. She’s on. All you’ve got to do is bone up (ha!) on EL’s work (document attached) then show up at the studio. £200,000. Straight split. It’ll be the easiest money you’ll ever make.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
3 April 2018
What if E doesn’t buy it?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
3 April 2018
Wanda knows her subject. Says you’ll be irresistible.
Eve thumbed forward.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
11 May 2018
She’s completely insane. Thinks her perfect flowers will save the world. Insatiable in bed. It’s grotesque. Can’t stand this much longer.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
3 July 2018
This is the only footage I could get so far. Josette blocking me.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
3 July 2018
“Get rid of her too, then!” Wanda says. Take control!
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
28 July 2018
Done! Just me and her now! Creeps me out…
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
14 August 2018
Attaching latest footage. She’s still cagey on the New York stuff.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
15 August 2015
Don’t let me down. Raise your game. Don’t fuck up. Bedroom footage?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
17 August 2018
Bedroom footage my red line. What about privacy? Aren’t there laws about this?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
18 August 2018
Wanda’s people will take care of that.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
3 September 2018
Latest footage. Comedy gold at 13:50, when she has tantrum over critics.
Eve glanced over at him. He was wailing now—her Ariel finally revealed as Caliban.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
12 October 2018
Daughter footage. WW will love this. E chucked me out but I kept the camera running.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
8 November 2018
Footage—showdown with the dealer. It’s all over for her. More to come.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
8 November 2018
Luka’s shrill shout startled her. “Where’s this fucking cab?”
“On its way,” she lied.
Her thumb froze as she saw Kristof’s name flash up…
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
13 November 2018
Yeah. Kristof wasn’t in the script. But I might have a bit of fun with this.
And again.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
15 November 2018
Wanda wasn’t sure about the Kristof thing at first. Now she’s totally on board.
Another familiar name was there too. Near the end of the thread.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
20 December 2018
Wanda thrilled. Theo N an “unasked-for gift” she says. One more batch of footage and we’re done.
The last message had been sent early that morning.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
21 December 2018
More footage. Meltdown. One more day, one more round of filming, then I’m out of here…
There must have been thirty emails. On all of them, the subject field was Artist on the Edge/The Death of Mimesis.
* * *
—
So Wanda had played a long game too. Eve’s hands were trembling. The only way she could restore her composure was to turn to her work. That was all she had left. She stood staring at that unsatisfactory red pigment congealing on the grinding slab as if it held the key to her current turmoil. Then she carefully measured out more naphthol red and sprinkled it over the mix. Still the colour wasn’t right. Perhaps some cadmium barium would add a plasmic depth.
She shut out the sound of Luka’s moans. She needed to work. She reached for another jar of pigment.
Now he was yelling.
“Where’s that taxi?”
He was wringing the rag in his fists. His eyes didn’t look that bad.
“Can’t you see I’m working?” she said, measuring out half a spoonful of the plaster-pink powder.
“I need to leave. Now!”
“Just as soon as I’ve finished my work.”
“You and your fucking worthless work! Give me my mobile and I’ll call my own cab.”
She picked up his phone and threw it into the open herbarium. He watched, mouth gaping, as it sank with a graceful pirouette to rest at the bottom of the tank.
“You bitch!”
He grabbed the scalpel from the dissection tray and lunged at her.
What else could she do to defend herself but throw the powdered pigment in his face?
He howled, clutching at his eyes with his left hand. But he was, somehow, still coming for her, scalpel flashing in his right fist. She stepped back and he cornered her against the canvas—the final, red canvas—and slashed at her wildly in blind rage. She tried to defend herself with her arms. The blade nicked her shoulder and blood began to seep through her sleeve but she felt no pain. She ducked past him and he started on the painting, ripping at it in a frenzy. She hurled herself at him and, using both hands, grabbed his right wrist, desperate to hold and twist it and make him drop the scalpel. For a moment she had him, her hands shaking as she fought to hold him back. But he was too strong for her and she had to leap away as she let go. It was over in seconds.
She still wasn’t sure how it happened, how their struggle, a grim recasting of their early passion with hatred standing in for desire, ended like that—his right hand, suddenly released, catapulted forward with all the force intended for her, plunging the scalpel deep into his left wrist. His scream was one high note of horror as the hot jet of blood spurted from the wound with shocking force, soaking her throat and shoulders, his blood on hers, and spattering the canvas. For a moment she froze, a powerless witness of unfolding atrocity. What should she do? Who should she call? Sense and feeling returned in the form of trembling panic. There was no time for phone calls. She looked around helplessly then picked up his discarded blindfold to use as a tourniquet. Her hands shook as she tried to tie it round his arm but he thrashed and pulled away from her. Then it was too late. The fountain of blood became a trickle. He slumped back against the canvas and slid to the floor.
He lay stretched out under the painting and in the stillness she knelt beside him, fumbling for a pulse. She touched his lips to feel for a whisper of breath. Then she lay down and put her ear to his heart. Silence. Minutes passed—two lovers in repose, her head resting on his stilled chest. She struggled to her feet and her stunned gaze
turned from Luka’s corpse, with its faint, pretty dusting of cadmium on the eyelids, to her work.
Then she picked up her fine sable brush and knelt again to dip it in the pooling gore, a thick, rich cinnabar vermilion with a haematite depth.
She stood before the canvas and began to paint. This was it: the telling hue she’d needed all along, the colour that conferred the third dimension, bringing the plants springing out into relief: you could prick your fingers on the barbed seed capsules.
It was, she knew then, her best work. It might not attain the universality of, say, Munch’s Scream, familiar even to the art blind. But the Poison Florilegium told a beautiful, painful truth about the potency and fragility of life. The colour alone, in the final canvas, would be her legacy—that visceral Eve Laing Red.
In the preternatural calm of the studio, she worked on until she was done. She reconciled herself to the wide gashes underscoring her signature. They were part of the painting’s story and gave the work a savage authenticity. The boy beneath the canvas was beautiful again in his gaunt pallor. She would leave the phone in the Ricinus herbarium; that was part of the story too.
As she sealed the cabinet, she noticed that the camera was on. It had been running all this time, filming the final sequence for Wanda’s summer show. Evidence of Eve’s innocence. Luka’s death was an accident. But the film would also be evidence of her achievement as an artist. Let skill, imagination and—now it could be said—genius be her final rebuke to Wanda Wilson’s feeble posturing. Not the Death of Mimesis but the Death of Deconstruction. Wanda’s show will be Eve’s triumph.
She lifted the camera from the tripod and walked round the studio, irradiated by the setting sun, filming the completed work: from the delicate watercolours laid out next to the black-and-white photographs on the table, to the floating herbaria with their seeds, flowers and leaves, glowing and undulating in their watery element like liquid stained glass. She stood by the door to get a wide-angle shot of the studio, a mighty cathedral of colour, its brick walls breached by the luminous canvases, then focused on each painting—from the meadow of violet monkshood, through the entire prism, to the blazing red finale, under which Luka lay, a beautiful martyr for art.
She turned off the camera and went to take a shower. Then she must tidy the studio, always a pleasurable ritual after completing a major piece of work. Later, she had some phone calls to make. But, before she moved irrevocably into her new life, she had to revisit the old.
And so she found herself travelling west on the Tube, a ghost of her former self, haunting her old home, now inhabited by Kristof and his new lover: the redhead, coiled and complacent as a marmalade cat in the armchair, entirely at ease. Her hand, with its small but unmistakable death’s head tattoo, gripping the wine glass. The ambitious Belle playing her finest role, staging her immersive artwork in the smoking ruins of Eve’s life.
30
She’s returning east now, to the studio, to the cold body of the boy spread-eagled beneath her magnificent new work. She knows that she’s achieved everything she spent her life working towards. Her Poison Florilegium isn’t art imitating life, but life itself. She’s moved beyond doubt to that region rarely inhabited by the true artist: certainty. She’s on familiar ground—home territory—and walks along the shabby parade of shops. The deli is boarded up. Dino and Thierry have relocated to Germany, a country more hospitable than England to European immigrants selling artichoke hearts and stuffed vine leaves.
The high street is deserted—all life seems to have been swept from it and deposited in the pub, which, though long past closing time, is glowing and thrumming like a nuclear installation. Through the window she sees a scene of wild carousing that could have been lifted from Bosch’s Last Judgement. She walks on and, looking back, notices for the first time, a ghost sign, a secular Turin shroud, on the pub’s gable end—the faded remnants of a painted advertisement for a long-vanished brewery: “Take Courage.”
It’s snowing lightly as she turns into the strip of scrubland—terra incognita—by the river, between the high street and motorway bridge. No man’s land. No woman’s either. Paris, that week so long ago, À mon seul désir, was a no man’s land, too—a liminal hyperspace without constraints of time and place, a realm of pure connection where all the diversions of the city around them shrank away into a soundless, two-dimensional backdrop. But that no man’s land was also terra vetita, forbidden ground. Theo was a boy. A beautiful, tender boy who loved her. And she loved him. So long ago.
Her feet crunch over broken glass and in the sulphurous half-light the shrubs rustle ominously. As she passes the lilacs they shiver with their incongruous burdens, now dusted with snow. She hears, against the background roar of the motorway, another sound—a human cough or rasp—and makes out a hunched figure sitting on the bench looking at the river.
“All right, love?” the figure calls out to her.
It’s the old woman drinker from outside the pub. Was that really four months ago? Another seeker of solitude.
“Fine,” Eve answers. “You?”
“Not so bad.” The woman stares at the river and puts a bottle to her lips.
Eve joins her on the bench and they gaze out at the water in companionable silence.
“Happy Christmas!” says the woman, passing Eve the bottle.
Eve shakes her head, smiling, and asks, “What brings you here?”
“What? Here? Now?”
Eve nods, and sees for the first time that this old woman is probably younger than her, though ravaged, like a Brueghel grotesque, by poverty and drink.
“Nature. Peace and quiet. Just like you,” says the drinker.
“Just like me.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Eve stares up into the blind opal eye of the full moon.
“Beautiful,” she agrees.
“Such a waste. I could do with a new one.”
Eve is puzzled, then sees that her companion is looking not at the night sky, but at an upturned supermarket trolley half submerged in the river, glinting like a silver spider’s web in the moonwake.
“My old chariot’s getting rusty,” says the drinker. She pats her trolley. Tied to its front is a plastic Santa.
The snow is getting heavier. Soon it will settle, erasing everything, the beautiful and the ugly, with its achromatic mantle. Eve gets up to leave and the two women exchange goodbyes.
“Take care of yourself, love,” the cracked voice calls as Eve walks on up the steps.
Halfway across the motorway bridge, she stops to look down at the speeding traffic. Is there a lonelier, lovelier sight? Those headlights hurtling through swirling snow towards fixed points, towards friends, family, work—streaming galaxies, pulses of heat and light in a black, indifferent universe.
And her fixed point? A dead boy and a reckoning.
But there is her work. That will always be there. One perfect work. Paint and a passion. That’s all you need. And if it goes well, you leave the studio, too, and shut the door behind you.
Her hands tense on the rail. All she can do is submit to the pull of gravity and fall towards the future. One step, a delicious, tumbling surrender, and the old life will be over, rushing past her as she plummets. How easy it is to let go.
Freeze-frame. Then rewind.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The following books were invaluable aids to research: Erika Langmuir’s A Closer Look: Still Life (Yale University Press); Wilfred Blunt’s The Art of Botanical Illustration (Collins); Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (Secker & Warburg); Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels through the Paintbox (Sceptre); and Sarah Simblet’s Botany for the Artist: An Inspirational Guide to Drawing Plants (Dorling Kindersley).
I’m indebted to Jennie Erdal and Polly Clark for sustaining comradeship and for introducing me to the remarkabl
e Cove Park artists’ residency in Scotland.
Finally, and above all, thanks to my husband, Ian McEwan, my first reader and a font of wise counsel and encouragement.
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Nightshade Page 22