by Neil Hegarty
An accent she could not place. In fact, no accent. Accentless. ‘Very well, I can certainly try, or at any rate begin. But I’m afraid I’m rather burning to ask you one question. I hope you’ll forgive my curiosity: but where are you from?’
*
At the end of the evening, John and Stella and Etienne left Mildred’s together, hailed a taxi, deposited Etienne – very drunk, now (‘It’s a strain, you know, giving a dinner party; it leaves one quite exhausted’) – at the front door of his grand house which glimmered white under the street lamps, took the key from his drunken fingers, said goodnight, bundled him into his hall and closed the door behind him. He could crawl upstairs to his bed, or he could lie in a heap there in his commodious hall; they had done their best. Patrick York had slipped away from Mildred’s a little earlier: he needed to walk, he said, he needed to clear his head or he would never sleep; he would make his own way home.
Etienne deposited, safely or not safely – perhaps he would fall asleep on his back, and vomit up his good dinner and his cocktails, and die; but if he died, he died, they were not about to haul him up his broad stairs, there were some things that nobody should have to do – John and Stella walked together towards the King’s Road. Under the plane trees on Sloane Avenue, they spoke softly to each other as they compared notes. They were gentle with each other, now, with John quite as gentle as Stella; and they discussed the evening, and Etienne’s gentleman, for the industrialist was indeed Etienne’s gentleman, though he had vanished at the door of Mildred’s too, to return home to his wife (‘Did you take him in? – that was a nice jacket, and he’s not all that much younger than Etienne, thank heaven; that chap has a bit of taste; well, you would know that already, I saw the paintings, how proud you must feel, darling’), and the women (‘it’s more that I know of them; I tend to steer clear of women like that, though I’m sure they’re very nice’), and the food (‘no, not tinned mango; I’m certain it was fresh; I know for a fact that they have them in Harrod’s’). A long walk.
At the door of Stella’s little house, a scent of patchouli drifting from the nearby clutter of shops, she fumbled with the key. Now he said, ‘What were you talking about, Stella?’
She paused for a moment. With whom? But she wasn’t the sort to disclaim, to play games.
‘About myself, mainly. I’m afraid my tongue ran away with itself, rather. I daresay he found me an absolute bore.’ She found the light switch, switched it on, stepped back in the little hall so that he could close and lock the door.
‘I daresay he didn’t, you know.’
She sighed. ‘No, I daresay he didn’t.’
‘You talked and talked, and he talked and talked, in Mildred’s.’
He could tell, even though the jazz was loud that night, almost to the point of insanity, and even though the velvet darkness of the place ruled out lip-reading, ruled out sight entirely, or almost. He could tell that they had talked and talked, and talked and talked. Mildred’s jiggering plush banquette had vibrated with the sound not only of the jazz, but also of their earnest, confiding voices, of Stella’s voice and Patrick York’s deep bass voice, humming, thrumming through the thick fabric, and into his fingers.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we did. We talked rather a lot.’
He said nothing more. They climbed the steep stairs quietly, undressed and went to bed, spooned tightly as they always did, slept at once.
24
That was an end to their relationship, just like that, and John knew it. A full stop had already been applied – firmly, finely, with the tip of a brush. And he knew too that he wouldn’t fight to retain her. It wasn’t his style, he wouldn’t know how to clutch, to attempt to persuade; he shrank away even from the thought. No: she was going, she was going, she was gone, and it would be demeaning to think that this particular fate could be avoided.
How to cope with wordless distress? To keep busy, to go to this party, or that party, this opening or that opening. To paint? – not that. He tried once or twice, but gave up. He spent much time alone in gassy Camberwell. Stella was elsewhere in the city.
‘He talks to me, you see,’ Stella said. ‘He talks, as well as listens. He opens up. And I like that.’
They met once or twice – for thick, black coffee; for a drink here and there. It was all highly civilised.
‘I didn’t realise what I was missing.’
Early one morning, he took a train and then a bus from Camberwell to Sloane Square. Very early: he walked the length of the King’s Road, where traffic was still thin; Stella’s little street was still in shadow, though the sun was just clipping the roof of her house; the sky was a freshly laundered blue.
‘John, for God’s sake.’
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be said: he had tried to think, to rehearse, but the lines failed to come. He stood on her doorstep, mute.
‘Come in, for heaven’s sake.’
Although, there was one thing to say – or rather, ask.
‘Is he here?’
Stella looked at him. ‘No, John, he isn’t.’ What do you take me for? – her eyes asked him. ‘We haven’t made that progression,’ she added primly. Not that she looked prim: her hair was standing on end, as though she were Frankenstein’s monster, as though someone had administered an electric shock. She caught a glimpse of herself in the little round mirror that hung in the hall. ‘Credit me with a little class,’ she said, ‘though, would you look at me,’ and now she tried to smooth her hair flat. It wouldn’t do her bidding.
They sat in her kitchen, where the sink was filled, right to its brim, with dirty dishes and pots and pans. It looked like a sink in a cartoon, John thought. Stella caught his glance and said, ‘I know. I’m a slut, it’s a disgrace, I haven’t had much time lately.’
‘I heard you were at the BBC.’
She nodded. Very civilised. Patrick was recording a show at the BBC, she said; she had been over to Lime Grove to sit behind the cameras and watch the scene unfold. A scream, she said, the set was just partition-board, it looked as though it could fall over at any moment. But serious too.
Serious?
‘It’s certainly serious,’ John said. He didn’t want to hear about backstage assignations, scenery and sets that trembled at the slightest touch; and Stella took the point.
‘Oh John, what do you want me to say?’
He wanted her to say that he was all she needed, that he answered every need she had, that Patrick York was as flimsy as the stage sets that filled his professional life. That was all.
‘One can’t help these things,’ she said. She was upset, in spite of her crafted sangfroid: there were no tears in her eyes, because she was not that sort of girl, but her skin was paler than usual. There were no tears in his eyes either: this encounter, their last, was to be tearless. So much was clear.
She made coffee, and they drank it as London began to bustle audibly outside, as the sun rose a little higher and began to track along the upper edge of the kitchen window. Stella looked tired, he thought, and not only because she had been woken at cockcrow: she looked distressed. He looked – much the same, he imagined. The mask held. It was the early rising that gave the game away, on this occasion.
‘We might stay friends,’ Stella said. But – no: not friends. He shook his head, and after a few more minutes had dragged by, he left. No lingering on the step, no kiss, no hug. He guessed from the silence behind him that she stood there on the step and watched him walk slowly up the lane towards the main road – and the guess would have to do.
He saw Stella just one more time: some years, twelve years into the future – though this long gap was not by melodramatic design. Their paths were never going to cross very much, was the mundane truth. She married Patrick York a matter of months after that conclusive meeting in her little house at World’s End, in the Westminster register office: and when his burgeoning career took York off to America, a few months after that, she went too. They settled in Laurel Canyon, or so he
heard: they lived like Angelenos, his gossiping source told him: ‘You know,’ this at a heaving West End opening, all warm white wine and cigarette smoke, ‘swimming pools and beaches and Hollywood, you know. Real Angelenos.’
‘What,’ he said, as sour as the wine, ‘is that it? I’m sure they do more than just sit by swimming pools and on beaches. Or what, is that all that people do in Los Angeles?’
‘Oh, John, where’s your sense of humour?’
They met again, just before his assignation in West Berlin. A call out of the blue, and a coffee, what about somewhere off the King’s Road, old time’s sake, did he know any places? They met at a pavement cafe; a striped awning, yellow and white, provided shade. Stella had the tired look that came with a hot climate – though at least there was no evidence of surgery. She had aged, and so had he, and he took her in, as she was doubtless taking him in. Her skin was tired, but so was his. But.
‘You look well,’ he said, meaning that she looked happy.
‘You don’t.’ Further scrutiny. ‘Why not, I wonder? You’re doing well, they tell me, you’re still selling. But you don’t look well.’
Seedy, she perhaps meant.
Later, as he surveyed the afternoon, his mind’s eye provided an alternative history. He explains to her what it is that he actually does, that provides the impressive flow of funds into his bank account. The niche he profitably occupies. He is frank.
‘Do you remember the distemper piece I did, the piece on linen?’
She smiles. Of course she remembers.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ve a lot more of those now. On linen, on canvas, the works.’
Stella smiles again. She isn’t surprised to hear that: the colours sang, she remembers; impossible to forget them. Though, the colours on that first piece, they must be faded now, she says, and he nods.
‘Fading, anyway. I take it out sometimes, and look at it. Fading fast,’ he says. ‘But I still work using distemper,’ he says, ‘and with more lasting colours too, of course.’
Not everything has to fade, Stella says.
‘But I don’t show them.’
She can see that, she says. She follows the art, she listens to the chatter, she knows that no such pieces have ever been mentioned. Just the harsh, difficult ones. Why not show these others?
He says, ‘Privacy, really. The colour pieces feel like my own best work. But it doesn’t feel right to show them. I don’t want to, not any more. I’d rather stick to the difficult stuff.’
‘That sells,’ she says.
‘That sells,’ he agrees. Then he tells her that he forges a little. Now and again: and it turns out he’s exceptionally good at it. He watches her face go still, as she polices her shock. She says nothing for a moment, and then asks why he would do such a thing.
‘Lucrative,’ he says. She knows the business: she must know just how lucrative it is. And not exactly uncommon. And the means of doing it getting easier, better every year. ‘Though,’ he adds, ‘I’m small fry. You want to hear the stories about the European forgers.’
Stella doesn’t want to hear the stories. ‘But you don’t need the money,’ she says, ‘do you?’ And he shakes his head.
‘Not really.’
And then he tells her about the theft here and theft there, and watches her expression change again. It was Etienne’s idea, originally. Etienne had observed the colour drain – from his very person as from his public work – and observed the cynicism take hold: and realised that he had, once again, found his man. The expertise, and the attitude, embodied as one. And, John adds, it too is lucrative, it’s enormously lucrative.
And she can see it, can she not? The seediness: he looks unwell, he looks pallid, he can pass unremarked in any environment – and this very colourlessness acts as a protection, a magical cloak, he walks unseen.
She asks, appalled now, all expressions now visible, ‘Why?’ But she must know why.
‘Because they owe me.’
They being the world, the system, the authorities, governments and institutions: a generalised they. He hadn’t yet been adequately recompensed for the loss of a home on Regina Road, for what they did to his parents, for the chain of events, all beyond his control, that have shackled his life. They had put a car park where his home had stood. How to explain the sense of dispossession? – and besides, she must know already. ‘And besides, they deserve it.’ He laughs a little. ‘Provenance,’ he says, ‘when they didn’t care about mine.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ Stella says, ignoring the taunt, the opportunity provided to quiz him about this now-generalised ‘they’. ‘Nonsense,’ she says again, ‘what, they violated your life, so you take to a career in violation? That hardly makes sense, darling.’
He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t expect you to understand,’ he says, and now it is her turn to shake her head.
‘I understand all too well,’ she says. ‘The indulgence of it. I’m ashamed of you.’
He thinks of the small portrait, on copper, hanging at this moment on a Berlin wall, that would soon be his. ‘I didn’t expect you to understand,’ he says, and they part in anger.
What in fact happened was that he mentioned Etienne, as Thatcher’s brassy London marched along the pavement. ‘Etienne,’ he said, ‘well, he always championed me. And he still does.’
‘Etienne,’ Stella repeated. She studied his face. ‘Well, of course he always championed you; and he’s quite the mover and shaker still. So I hear.’ She stirred her coffee, and a silence fell. ‘It’s easy to hear things,’ she added, ‘even all the way over there.’
‘I daresay.’
They sat, quietly. A mass of words, of conversation that might yet be had, that would not be had; yet the silence was companionable rather than awkward; the coffee was strong and good.
‘As long as you’re happy enough, content enough,’ she said at last, and he nodded. Enough could mean anything, which was perhaps the point. And they parted gently, with something like tenderness. Who could tell what Stella knew?
But this was for the future.
On this day, her hair was on end as she stood on the doorstep of her house at World’s End and watched him walk slowly up the lane towards the main road. He retraced his steps to Camberwell, tube to bus, and walked from the bus stop into the college, and into his studio. He had intended to knife all the canvases, charcoal and oils, that he had worked on while Stella had been on the scene. The very many pieces, in their blacks and whites and greys. The knife was ready and waiting: it was sharp and not serrated – for nothing blunt would do when it came to slicing canvas to size – and he imagined that there would be satisfaction in the clean, economical movement of the knife, and its sound, a gasping of death, as it sliced through the fabric.
He would tuck his distemper piece away. He wouldn’t even look at it.
But in the morning light, he laid the knife gently down on the table, and looked around the room. All these pieces, piled against walls: let them go out in the world, if anyone would have them. Etienne would buy the lot, most likely. Or his chums would.
So he would paint to order, his blacks and his greys: he could make some money that way. His distemper piece would remain tucked away, locked away, its colours fading year by year: nobody need see it, and Stella would tell nobody. And if it came to it, he could have it buried with him, just like Emily Sandborne.
Paint to order. Paint by numbers. Give them what they want.
After a few minutes, he took the distemper piece from the drawer in which it was rolled, and stowed, and locked away. The colours sang still, and the linen was as creamy-white as ever. He passed a thumb gently over the cloth, and after a moment he returned it to its drawer, and turned the key once more. He would hold the colours close.
Later again – it was still barely eleven o’clock – he lined up his razor knife (no serrated edges) carefully on the tabletop, vertical to horizontal, and left the studio, and walked up the hill to his gassy room, and fell on his bed, and s
lept.
25
Pauldron.
It gleamed now, The Jewel. The pauldron, on the great silk-hung wall in front of him. The hall was lit in dimness: by the venom-green emergency signs suspended to left and to right, by the grey-yellow light that leaked from unseen high windows, though not by the blinking red of the security sensors, for these blinked no longer. Beyond these windows, the subdued hum of the nocturnal city: a police siren, a distant rumble of heavy traffic, a hiss of wheels on wet streets.
Very dim – but sufficient light to see by: to illumine the white carven figures dotted through the hall; to bring forth a poisonous phosphorous sheen from the green-white hanging silk; to cast into dark relief the doorways that opened, as if cut with shears, into the high galleries on either side. And to see the painting.
To see the pauldron, set with a green stone, flame out of a world of darkness and light captured by the artist.
And besides, John had his memory to guide him.
Only two days ago he had visited: on the very day the gallery had reopened to the public, and rapidly become thronged. He had threaded his way, his anonymity guaranteed amid such a mass of humanity, through the crowds spilling into the atrium and up the white steps to see the place. It had been closed for three years, they’d told him in the briefing, for three or four years, for ages, anyway: and they had pushed a brochure across the table at him. Voids in this venerable building now opened for the first time to public view, top-lit galleries, a thrilling development – the brochure went on and on.
John leafed and flicked in silence. He had seen it all before, and in Milan, in Basel, in galleries more illustrious than this one. He was not so easily impressed.
They pointed out the Sculpture Court, in the centre of the building: one such newly reopened void, the literature said; previously it had been a damp courtyard, useless, gloomy. Now it was glorious, silk-hung, just the one painting displayed amid a throng of marble. Just the one, the most famous of them all, maximum effect – they said. A marvel.