The Authenticity Project

by Clare Pooley

  Monica had arranged the smaller café tables into a circle, with a larger table in the middle. Julian placed the lobster ceremoniously on a hastily produced platter on the central table, then handed round the sketching paper, boards, and a selection of pencils and erasers.

  “My name,” said Julian, “is Julian Jessop. And this handsome crustacean is called Larry. He gave his life so that you could be inspired. Don’t let him have died in vain.” His hard stare swept round the openmouthed class. “We are going to sketch him. It doesn’t matter whether you have any experience or not, just give it a go. I’ll wander around and help. We’re sticking to pencil this week. Drawing, you see, is to art what grammar is to literature.” Monica felt a little more comfortable. She loved grammar. “Next week we can move on to charcoal or pastel, then eventually watercolors.” Julian waved his arm extravagantly, causing the sleeve of his smock to billow like the wing of a giant albatross. Monica’s sheet of paper was blown off her table by the resulting draft. “Off you go! Be bold! Be brave! But, above all, be yourselves!”

  * * *

  • • •

  MONICA COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time two hours had passed so quickly. Julian had glided, silently, around the outside of the circle, swooping in from time to time to encourage, to praise, to adjust the tone in a shadow, as his students tried valiantly to commit the prehistoric-looking creature to paper. Monica felt relatively happy with the proportions of her Larry; she’d measured him as precisely as she could using the technique Julian had taught them of holding up a pencil and closing one eye. She couldn’t help thinking that a ruler would be more accurate and efficient. But she was aware how terribly two-dimensional her lobster looked, as if he’d been squashed by a heavy object landing from a great height. She sensed Julian behind her. He reached around her, pencil in hand, and deftly sketched a lobster claw in the corner of her page. In just a few strokes he’d created something that seemed to leap out from the paper.

  “There. Do you see?” he asked her. Yes, she could see the difference, but could she re-create it? Not a hope in hell.

  A few times the silence had been broken by the ringing of mobiles and the pinging of voice mail, Twitter, and Snapchat. Julian had swept around the room, collecting everyone’s phones into his fedora, ignoring the groans and protestations, and they’d promptly been banished behind the bar. Monica realized that it was the first time in years that she’d gone for two hours without checking her phone, except when she had actually been asleep or out of signal. It was strangely liberating.

  At nine p.m. on the dot, Julian clapped, causing half the class—lost in concentration—to jump. “That’s it for this week, ladies and gentlemen! A jolly good start. Well done to you all! Don’t forget to sign and date your drawings, then bring them up to the front, here, so we can all look at them.”

  The class shuffled forward, rather reluctantly, clutching their sketches, which—despite the fact that they’d all been drawing the exact same lobster—were hugely varied. Julian managed to find something positive to say about each of them, pointing out unusual compositions, arresting observations of light, and pleasing shapes. While Monica admired his somewhat unexpected sensitivity, she really just wanted to know one thing: Had she won?

  “Now,” Julian said turning to Monica, “what are we going to do with Larry?”

  “Er, eat him?” replied Monica.

  “My thoughts precisely! Right, we’ll need plates, napkins. Any extra bread? Cheese? A bit of salad, perhaps?”

  Monica hardly dared point out that she hadn’t meant right now. Good grief, this was turning into a dinner party. Without an iota of planning or preparation. Surely this could not end well?

  Benji and Baz dashed backward and forward from the small kitchen with plates, a couple of baguettes left over from lunchtime, half a very ripe brie, a few random salad items, and a huge jar of mayonnaise. Julian seemed to have produced a bottle of champagne from somewhere. Had it been hiding alongside Larry under his smock? What else might he have stashed up there? Monica shuddered.

  Before long, and despite herself, Monica found she was getting into the swing of things. Trying not to think about her rapidly diminishing profit margin, she brought some candles down from her apartment above the café. Soon, a party was under way.

  Monica looked over at Julian, who was leaning back in his chair, telling anecdotes about the swinging sixties.

  “Marianne Faithfull? Such fun! Face like an angel, obviously, but she had a better range of dirty jokes than a sex-starved schoolboy,” she heard him say. In the mellow candlelight, and with his face animated, he looked, for a moment, just like his portrait in the National Gallery.

  “What was Fulham like back then, Julian?” she asked him.

  “Dear girl, it was like the Wild West! I was just on the border with Chelsea, and many of my friends would refuse to venture any farther in. It was very grubby and industrial and poor. My parents were horrified and never came to visit. They were only happy in Mayfair, Kensington, and the Home Counties. But we loved it. We all looked out for each other. To Larry!” he cried, raising his glass of champagne. “And, of course, to Monica!” he added, as he looked over at her and smiled. “Talking of which, everyone stick a tenner in my hat for the dinner. We don’t want her out of pocket!”

  And, at that, Monica smiled too.

  TWELVE

  Hazard

  Andy placed a large platter of fish down on the table.

  “Gosh, how yummy!” said the new arrival, in an accent that Hazard guessed had been kicked off by a traditional nanny, molded in an English country prep school, and finessed in the officers’ mess. He was looking rather uncomfortable and out of place in chinos and a tailored, buttoned-up shirt. At least it was short-sleeved. Hazard set himself the challenge of getting him into a sarong before the week was out.

  Hazard had already done some groundwork. He knew that the floppy-haired, braying, but very jolly and well-meaning newbie was called Roderick and he was the son of Daphne. So far as Hazard could tell, he was totally oblivious to his mother’s grand love affair with Rita. He’d told Hazard that he’d given up waiting for Daphne to come back to the UK and had decided to visit her for a couple of weeks instead. He couldn’t quite understand why she insisted on staying so long, but if it helped with her grieving for his dear departed father, then that had to be a good thing. Hazard had nodded gravely, not mentioning that he hadn’t seen the slightest evidence of mourning from the merry widow.

  “Where do you live, Roderick?” asked Hazard as he helped himself to rice and fish.

  “Battersea!” he replied. “I’m an estate agent!” Roderick barked out every word with such energy and enthusiasm that Hazard couldn’t imagine him ever being negative or depressed. He would cheer Monica up no end, surely? Hazard was rather fond of estate agents, who languished alongside bankers as the nation’s most loathed people. Monica didn’t strike him as so narrow-minded that she’d rule out an entire profession, and at least it meant that Roderick was likely to be comfortably off, and a home owner. Battersea was another bonus. Only just over the river from Fulham.

  “Your wife not with you?” asked Hazard, trying to sound casual.

  “I’m divorced,” replied Roderick as he picked little fish bones out of the side of his mouth, revealing, as he did so, acceptable levels of oral hygiene. He placed them neatly on the side of his plate. “All jolly amicable though. Lovely girl. Childhood sweethearts. Just grew apart. You know how it is.” Hazard nodded, sympathetically, despite the fact that he didn’t know how it was at all, having never had a relationship longer than a few months.

  “Has it put you off marriage, though? Do you think you’d ever do it again?”

  “Crikey, yes, like a shot. Best institution in the world.” His expression softened as he looked over at Daphne, not appearing to notice her hand resting on Rita’s knee as she whispered in her ear. “My parents
were terrifically happy, you know. Married for more than forty years. I do hope Mummy isn’t too lonely.” He looked rather wistful for a moment, then pulled himself together. “I don’t manage very well on my own, to be honest. Need someone to keep me in line, not to mention do the cooking. Ha ha! Just need to find someone foolish enough to take me on!”

  Hazard thought back to Monica’s story in the book: I try not to be too fussy, to ignore the fact that they haven’t read any Dickens, have dirty fingernails, or talk with their mouth full.

  “I don’t suppose you brought any books with you, did you? I’m running out. I’d love a Dickens to read,” said Hazard, crossing his fingers under the table.

  “Only on Kindle, I’m afraid, and I haven’t read any Dickens since school.”

  That would do. Hazard smiled to himself. After several weeks of grilling every single man of roughly the right age to no avail, it looked as if he might finally have cracked the brief.

  Hazard realized, as he exchanged banter with his newly appointed Romeo, that he felt a little sad. Bereft. His quest to fix up a girl he’d never even spoken to might have been a little odd, but at least it had taken his mind off his own issues. What was he going to do now?

  Monica and Roderick. Roderick and Monica. Hazard pictured Monica looking at him again, but this time with an expression of the deepest gratitude, where before there’d been disgust. Now, how was he going to arrange a meeting of his two star-crossed lovers when he was on the other side of the world? That’s when he remembered the book. He needed to find a way to plant it in Roderick’s luggage. The book would lead him to her.

  Hazard was about to go back to his hut to retrieve the notebook when he remembered the final and most important test of all.

  “Did you and your wife have children?” he asked Roderick.

  “One. Cecily,” he’d replied, with a goofy smile on his face, fishing around in his wallet for a photo. As if Hazard cared what she looked like. All he cared about was the answer to the next question.

  “Would you like to have more, one day? If you found the right woman?”

  “No chance of that, old boy. I had the snip. The wife insisted, said she wasn’t going through all that again. You know—pregnancy, nappies, sleepless nights.” Hazard didn’t know. Nor did he want to, at least not right now. “That was one of the things we argued about. Beginning of the end, and I just wanted her to be happy. Plus, it was either that or no bedroom action. Ha ha!”

  “Ha ha,” echoed Hazard, groaning inwardly, because with that, all his well-laid plans, like Roderick’s sperm count, had been dashed. The reproduction thing was a nonnegotiable for Monica. He had to cross Roderick off the list and start again.

  * * *

  • • •

  MANY TIMES OVER the following weeks, Hazard considered giving up on his matchmaking game. It seemed so improbable that the right man would just show up on this tiny beach on this tiny island. But, as is so often the case, as soon as he’d decided to stop trying, as if the universe was flirting with serendipity, the perfect solution just dropped into his lap.

  THIRTEEN

  Julian

  Julian couldn’t quite believe how much his life had changed since he’d left his notebook in Monica’s Café five weeks ago. He wasn’t sure what he’d imagined would happen when he’d started The Authenticity Project, but he certainly wasn’t expecting to end up with a job and a group of people who were well on the way to becoming his friends.

  He’d walked round to the Admiral’s gravestone last Friday, as usual, with his bottle of Bailey’s, and as he’d approached he’d thought his mind was playing tricks on him. It wasn’t unusual for the past and present to collide in his head, so he wasn’t entirely surprised to see two of his old friends waiting for him, glasses and bottle of wine in hand. But this time it wasn’t a memory, it was Benji and Baz (such nice boys). Monica must have told them where to find him.

  He realized that he had a slight spring in his step, where until recently there’d only been a shuffle. Where was it now, he wondered, that little book that had caused such a transformation? Had his project ground to a halt so soon, or was it out in the world somewhere weaving more magic?

  Tonight was the third week of his art class. It had grown to fifteen students, as word had spread, aided by the fact that Monica had pinned up a few of the best sketches of Larry on the café pinboard. The casual, but rowdy, suppers (still charged at ten pounds in the hat) following the class had proved as much a draw as the class itself. This evening he’d brought some velvet slippers, a leather-bound book, and an old pipe from home, which he’d arranged on a swathe of patterned fabric in a tableau on the central table. Having covered the importance of tone, using pencil and charcoal, he’d brought boxes of pastels along for his students’ first foray into color and was showing the class some simple techniques.

  Julian was just passing round some examples of Degas pastels for inspiration, when there was a rattle behind him, and he turned to see someone trying the door handle. Monica pushed back her chair and went over to open the door.

  “I’m afraid we’re closed,” he heard her say. “It’s a private art class. It’s not too late to join in, though, if you have fifteen pounds and you’re game enough.”

  As Monica rejoined the group with a young man in tow, it was obvious to Julian why he hadn’t been sent away. He was not the sort of man who was often turned down, Julian imagined. Even with his critical eye for facial symmetry and underlying bone structure, he had to admit the newcomer was gorgeous. Dark-skinned, and even darker brown eyes, but a mop of unruly, improbably blond curls. And as if that wasn’t enchanting enough, he turned to greet the group with “All right, guys? I’m Riley,” in an Australian accent that brought the beach with it.

  Monica collected an extra sheet of paper and placed it on the same table as hers, pulling up an additional chair, and moving her things along to make room.

  “Just give it your best shot, Riley,” he heard her explain. “Apart from Julian here, we’re all amateurs, so don’t be embarrassed. I’m Monica, by the way.” Everyone else around the circle took turns introducing themselves, ending with Julian, who announced his name with a theatrical bow and a flourish of the Panama hat he’d chosen that morning to go with his cream linen suit, causing three mobile phones to fall out. With one swoop of the arm he’d morphed from looking like a plantation owner to a pickpocket.

  Julian had noticed how each new entrant to the class changed the dynamic and the mood of the whole group, like mixing a new color on to a palette. Riley added yellow. Not a pale-primrose yellow, a deep-cadmium yellow, or a dark ochre, but the bright, hot yellow of sunshine. Everyone seemed a bit warmer, more animated. Sophie and Caroline, the two middle-aged mums who always sat together, exchanging gossip from the school gates as they worked, turned toward him like daffodils seeking the light. Baz looked totally smitten, and Benji a little jealous. Riley himself seemed totally unaware of the effect he was having, in the same way a pebble doesn’t see the ripples it forms in a pond. He frowned in concentration at the blank black paper in front of him.

  Sophie whispered something to Caroline as she nodded over toward Riley. Caroline burst out laughing.

  “Stop!” she said. “Please don’t make me laugh. After three children, my pelvic floor can’t take it.”

  “I have no idea what this pelvic floor is,” said Julian, “but next time please leave it at home and don’t let it disrupt my art class.” That told them, he thought, and was a bit miffed when Sophie and Caroline laughed even harder.

  Julian began his customary circuit of the room, adding a word of encouragement here, a smudge of color there, a quick correction to proportion or perspective. When he reached Monica, he smiled. Monica was one of his most diligent students. She listened intently and was really keen to get it right. But today, for the first time, she was drawing with her heart, not just her head. Her strokes had
loosened up, become more instinctive. As he watched her laughing and joking with Riley, he knew what had made the difference: she’d stopped trying so hard.

  Julian wondered, for a moment, whether he might just be witnessing the start of a romance. A grand love affair perhaps, or just a brief interlude. But no. One of the benefits of being an artist is that you spend so much time watching people, looking not just at all the shades and contours of their faces, but into their souls. It gives you an almost uncanny insight. You gained, particularly when you got to Julian’s age, the ability to read people and know how they were going to react. Monica, Julian could tell, was far too independent, too driven and focused to be distracted by a pretty face. She had loftier ambitions than marriage and babies. That was one of the things he admired so much about her. Even back in his heyday, he wouldn’t have made a play for Monica. She would have terrified him. Riley, he surmised, would be wasting his time.

  FOURTEEN

  Monica

  The rattling of the door had irritated Monica. She’d been deep in concentration, trying to re-create the right shade of burgundy for her slippers. She’d gotten up to send the unwanted visitor away, but then she’d opened the door and been met by a man with a smile so bewitching that she’d found herself ushering him in and making a space in their circle. Next to her.

  Monica was not terribly good with strangers. She was usually far too concerned about making the right impression to be able to relax. She’d never forgotten being told before her first big job interview that 90 percent of the opinion people have of you is formed in the first two minutes. But Riley wasn’t the type of man who could ever feel like a stranger. He seemed to just slot into their group, like the final ingredient in a recipe. Did he fit in like that everywhere he went? What an extraordinary skill. She always had to muscle her way into a circle, using her elbows, or stand on the outside, craning her neck to look in.