The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  She might have wept, even, as she read. She had been alone, and her curtains pulled. Nobody could see.

  If she had a fault to find with the piece, it was that it had mentioned nothing about the walls. As if such paintings could be hung just anywhere, against any backdrop, on any background! When a moment’s thought would show the truth of the matter! Surfaces – and Roisin knew this, even if nobody else seemed to, even if everyone else thought that the opposite was the case – surfaces matter.

  Maeve knew this, long ago. Perhaps all Irish people know how much meaning and deception and distraction can be condensed into the surfaces of things. As for Roisin’s own surface: it too had stories to tell. It was one aspect of a life curated with care.

  ‘I thought we could go for a cup of coffee some time. Maybe even today, if you have time.’

  He had run into her, or she into him, between the book stacks. The first month of university, a mild autumn sun glancing through the library windows. She knew the ropes, was already in her groove, all was well. She chipped into seminar discussions, and wrote an essay, another essay; she went for dark, tar-like coffee with little groups of other first-year students, all of them finding their feet.

  He – Ronan – came from County Cavan. The height of him, a mop of curly hair: he stood out. She’d caught a Galway girl laughing at his accent (as if her accent was anything to write home about), but Roisin enjoyed listening to the lightness of it, and the lightness of his voice.

  ‘Or a drink, even.’

  And they’d caught each other’s eye. A couple of times, now.

  She closed the heavy art book she’d been browsing, and slid it back into its slot on the shelf.

  ‘Now, even, maybe?’

  ‘A drink might be better; that coffee’ll kill me, some day soon.’ She had an essay to write. ‘Now, why not.’

  They crossed the road, weaving through the traffic, to Bowe’s, and sat over pints of Guinness. Nothing remarkable – she thought later, tracing the drink, and the later drinks: just comparing notes about teachers and their fellow students, the bad ones, the mad ones, the obviously crazy ones. A drink; and then another drink, and a bit of a laugh. His hair was glossy black, with a bit of a curl, and he knew how to laugh; and he seemed to like her – or, as well as she could tell.

  One afternoon – another mild afternoon, autumn wearing on now, after three weeks, four weeks of this, and she was easy in his company now, and enjoying the laughs – she bobbed up at his desk in the library. ‘What about a drink – say, at five o’clock? Just the one.’

  But now Ronan kept his head bowed to the textured plastic surface of his desk. ‘I’d better not,’ he said. ‘I should stay here.’

  At first – for the first thirty seconds, or perhaps a minute – she thought nothing of it. Though it was unlike him, to put work first. She said something else, about how all work and no play would make Ronan – but paused then, taking in the bent head, the flush in the skin on his neck.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I should just get on with this.’

  Roisin looked up, and across the expanse of library to where the girl from Galway was sitting, facing her, facing them, taking it all in. The avidity. Roisin looked at her, then looked back at Ronan as he looked up, and seemed to steel himself.

  ‘I heard that – that that girl, that she was your sister. I didn’t know that you were that O’Hara. My mother wouldn’t like it.’

  A pause.

  ‘What would your mother not like?’

  He shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t like the whole thing.’

  But his mother was in Cavan. Which wasn’t the point, exactly: but it was all Roisin could think to say.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ronan said. He bowed his head to his book once again. She turned and left, passing the Galway girl, whose excitement had the texture of a force field.

  Never put yourself into such a situation again, was the moral of the story. Better to stay on the surface. She took the lesson to heart.

  She explained none of this to any of her colleagues. Nothing about distempered finishes, and the microscopic changes that a dusty surface can reveal; nothing about shade and tone; nothing about context and background. They would hardly understand. She had said her piece in her job interview, she had won over Dr Read; she would never have to speak in that way again, except when she was called upon, professionally, to do so.

  She would never be in danger, again, of giving herself away. And besides, the art was the thing. She had made certain of that.

  ‘And this?’

  Viktor’s fingertip hovered, that day, over a small piece, in oils. A small patchwork of fields, in spring; a hedge, hawthorn, blooming white. A tiny piece, heavily framed; the colours breathing.

  ‘Also very beautiful,’ he said. ‘The colours, they are from heaven.’

  Roisin smiled a little. ‘That’s an Emily Sandborne,’ she said. ‘My Emily Sandborne. She had a way with colours,’ she said. ‘This is a favourite of mine. So simple. We have another of hers at the gallery. A famous one, nowadays, on cloth. The colours,’ she added, and she moved to clear away the orange cake, the china cups, ‘they sing in that one, too.’

  28

  It was not a pre-Raphaelite number, nothing so hackneyed. No tall virgin, red and crimped of hair, with a gleaming lip. No tall virgin dead of eye – or worse, wicked of eye, dedicated to the ideal of entrapment of some man, of achieving his death by drowning, of casting him into a slumber that would last a thousand years. The Tate had enough of those, God knows, stacked in storage and pinned on walls, and Roisin had seen them all. She was, as her mother used to say (though not about pre-Raphaelite paintings), she was scunnered by the sight of them – for all that the last pre-Raphaelite show had the punters queuing down the steps and around the corner. Each to their own – but she, for one, found such paintings disturbing, distasteful, verging on the grotesque.

  ‘It isn’t a question of taste. It isn’t taste I’m talking about,’ she had told Michael Clancy, as she sat in his pleasant kitchen one hot evening. A baking London summer day drawing to a close, an August day, and the grime lying on the surface of her skin, as though she were herself a dusty old painting that was sadly in need of restoration: and Michael Clancy listening to her, and expecting her to speak.

  He had called in to see her at the Tate: out of the blue; she hadn’t seen him for years, for decades. He was all Londoner now, after years in the Schmoke, as he called it; he was long transformed from the gawky string bean of long ago, when he and Maeve would hang around together after school, and he’d have her in stitches. For years, Roisin hadn’t heard from him at all: and now up he popped, suggesting a coffee.

  She’d drawn herself up, she remembered: she had work to do, she couldn’t just walk off the job. This was the Tate, it wasn’t some factory floor.

  ‘Wise the fuck up, Roisin,’ he told her, with the same startling familiarity. ‘And don’t be getting high and mighty with me. It’s the Tate. I’m not talking about going on strike, I’m not talking about starting a revolution, I’m just talking about a coffee. They tell me you’re doing well here, so presumably you can have a cup of coffee without asking permission. We don’t even have to leave the fucking building if you don’t want to.’

  So casual, as though they had been friends for years.

  ‘Who’s telling you?’ she asked. ‘And keep your voice down, and stop swearing.’

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ he said. And, ‘Everybody’s telling me. Roisin O’Hara and her fancy job. Come on now, girl, move.’

  His language might have been bad, but he was dressed well, even Roisin could see this – good jeans, dark, straight, nicely cut, nice jacket, nicely cut – and his hair looked good too. They went downstairs to the cafe: she felt nervous, as though he were a teacher from long ago; and she felt she ought to try to impress him – though she had no idea how to go about doing such a thing. She felt her own – wilful frumpiness, she supposed it must be,
in the face of his snappy metropolitan clothes and his obvious sense of ease and happiness; frumpiness and an absence of happiness. His happiness was tangible; and surely her own absence of happiness was just as evident.

  He told her about himself: he lived in Bow, he had a partner, Tim, English, they’d been together for a thousand years, they even had a little place on the north Devon coast, imagine! – and she felt herself blushing painfully as she tried and failed to encapsulate her own life in the same few easeful sentences.

  Michael had always been sharp, she remembered: sharp of voice, quick to see things, to read people, to extract information and read between the lines. It had been one of the things Maeve had loved about him.

  ‘He could buy you and sell you,’ Maeve had said, long ago. ‘Takes no prisoners.’ He had to be that way, she went on to explain, long ago: it was that or die. A ‘fruit’, she called him: and a fruit needed protection in those days, in that place. A cage, a grille; you’d be pecked to death, otherwise. A fruit needed to protect himself or be protected by other people. It was the first, for Michael – and it worked, too.

  Nobody talked about fruits any longer, nobody she knew, anyway – but evidently, all these years later, he remained sharp. She reflected that of course he hadn’t known her so very well: not when they were children, and not later either, after Maeve, and then he had left home, never or hardly ever to return – ‘I scrubbed the dust of that place from my sandals, darling, there wasn’t a speck left by the time I’d finished’ – but now, in London, he seemed well able to read her, to take her in, to lean in slightly across the silver, curvaceous Tate table and watch her as she haltingly spoke. As if they had known each other, had been friends, for years and years.

  Also, his sharpness seemed coated now in something softer, a fleecy lining that must come along, did it? with happiness and security. She didn’t relax that day, exactly, as she drank her coffee and listened to him and spoke a little when asked to do so: but she didn’t keep her guard completely up either, not after the first ten minutes. She allowed him to peep over the battlements, and see the empty spaces behind the walls, and she didn’t much mind that he could see them. It was a relief, really.

  ‘Why did you come looking for me?’

  They met again – for a glass of wine this time, at his suggestion – the following week. In a Shoreditch wine bar (impossibly on trend; all her rustiness and insecurity returned in a rush; one would think that she was accustomed to the company of artists, and they were here in abundance, like a flock of gulls; but not a bit of it; here she was, tense all over again), where they sat in a corner, two wide glasses between them.

  ‘Why did you come looking for me?’ she said. ‘So much time has passed, and it isn’t as though we were particular friends to begin with.’

  Michael swirled the Riesling in his glass. ‘True.’

  ‘You were Maeve’s friend more than mine, and even then: we were hardly more than children, both of you. Any of us.’

  It was difficult to speak Maeve’s name.

  ‘I was back in Ireland a few weeks ago,’ Michael said, ‘and I ran into your mum in town. She was being a proud mummy,’ he said, ‘all Roisin this and Roisin that. Roisin in London, doing well, Roisin is at the Tate, of all places. Mind you, it is impressive, a position at the Tate. I’m impressed myself.’

  ‘I had a good CV,’ Roisin said, ‘a few articles and a few exhibitions that went down nicely, in Leeds, in Manchester, and I did a good interview. They seemed to like me,’ she said, barely able to sand the puzzled note out of her voice.

  After a moment, Michael went on. ‘I thought she looked, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, sad as well as old, your mum, so I stopped and said hello, and after she stopped boasting about you, she told me you didn’t come back all that much, so I found myself wondering how you were.’ He paused for breath, took a delicate sip of wine. ‘I came away feeling sad too, about Maeve, and I wondered if you felt the same way, if you’ve been carrying sadness with you all these years. We didn’t know each other all that well, maybe, but we both knew Maeve. So I felt I owed it to Maeve.’ He took another sip. ‘Belatedly, of course: it took me long enough; you’d almost think I didn’t owe her all that much. This is nice,’ he added, meaning the wine.

  Roisin didn’t like to think about Maeve. She had trained herself out of it. It was of a piece with not going to Ireland all that much, of not talking all that much about herself, of holding the world at arm’s length. Of not saying Maeve’s name if she could help it. So now she looked at her own glass of wine – red, ‘fruity’, the wine list had promised her, with ‘notes of redcurrant’ – and said nothing, and he didn’t press the matter.

  After this, Michael would from time to time suggest a meeting: a coffee, a drink; in due course, she had dinner in Bow, in the house he shared with Tim. She continued to wonder, at first, what it was that Michael wanted: what could he want, from her? It took a while for her to recognise that he wanted nothing – nothing, that is, except her friendship. That she represented a connection to a past that he valued, to a person that he had loved, to a whole suite of memories and associations that they shared. And eventually, that he liked her for herself: liked her enough to want to spend a little time with her, to introduce her to his life, his partner, his home.

  These were strange sensations: again, Roisin felt rusty in the face of them. It took some time to relax into his friendship, though she managed it – fitfully – in the end.

  Enough to assert herself in the matter of art and paintings. This was her thing: something she knew more about than did Michael. She had opinions, and she might as well voice them.

  The pre-Raphaelites. Dinner in the house in Bow: a warm evening at the end of a hot day; a green salad, tabbouleh and hummus, and cold chicken.

  ‘It isn’t a question of taste,’ she said. ‘It isn’t taste I’m talking about.’

  *

  One face looks out from all his canvases,

  One self-same figure sits or walks or leans:

  We found her hidden just behind those screens,

  That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

  A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

  A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,

  A saint, an angel – every canvas means

  The same one meaning, neither more or less…

  Roisin spoke the lines with a fresh sense of indignation. Michael and Tim’s garden seemed to overflow into their neat kitchen: pots of bay and thyme and rosemary basking in the warmth of this summer evening. It would be dusk soon here in Bow, but for the moment the sunshine hung on; a bar of brightness shone on the high wall of brown London brick that terminated the view from the kitchen windows. The brown wall glowed red, as if lit from within. Beyond, the unending city sound, a hum, a drone. Tim bent to lift a platter from a low cupboard, arranged chicken on the platter, drizzled a yogurt-and-garlic dressing across the chicken. He was a man of precision, of few words, and he listened: Roisin had noticed him listen to her, at any rate, to absorb her words, ask a question now and again. Chicken and yogurt, and tabbouleh and hummus; salad with a dressing, both sweet and acid, honey and lemon juice; crusty white bread; a sweating bottle of pink wine.

  ‘Dig in,’ Tim said.

  Michael was a listener too, though this was not immediately apparent: he joked, he drummed his fingers on the hard glass-like surface of the modern kitchen table until Tim gently rested his own hand on top, he was filled with a sort of energy that might set the nerves jangling were he not amusing with it, spirited, fun. But he too knew how to listen. They made a good couple, these two men; Roisin could see this at a glance. She did glance: indeed, it was difficult not to stare, to drink in what they had.

  Difficult not to envy what they had.

  However. She would not be rude: she could hardly just sit there, staring, or chomping her way through the meal set so generously before her, without giving something back. She must speak, she must opine, and suggest, and
float. She must sing, a little, for her supper. Michael had mentioned art, the new exhibition coming up at the Tate, and she heard herself speaking, through forkfuls of parslied tabbouleh, of taste. It isn’t, she heard herself saying, a question of taste. And she remembered that there was a virtue in what she had just said. The virtue was that this was what she actually thought.

  ‘They didn’t care about the actual women,’ she said, watching as Tim spooned more tabbouleh, a perfect pyramid of green-flecked tabbouleh, onto his plate. She had a sense that Tim didn’t know exactly what to make of her, at moments such as these: from silent to opinionated in one leap, but she could hardly help this; Michael himself had introduced the subject, and she must speak.

  ‘I see the Tate has a big pre-Raphaelite exhibition coming up,’ he’d said to her. ‘Have you had a hand in that, darling? We’ll go along’ – a glance at Tim – ‘what do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I should imagine so,’ Tim said.

  ‘I haven’t had much to do with it,’ she said: and both Tim and Michael picked up – it wasn’t difficult – the reserve in her voice.

  ‘Not a fan?’ enquired Michael, with faux delicacy.

  ‘Not really, no.’

  How could she be? You only had to look at those paintings, one after another after another, to see what those men thought of the women they were painting – and by extension, all women. The women were as flat as the canvases themselves, was the truth of the matter. She recited Christina Rossetti’s poem – and now she filled in the detail.

  ‘She was writing about her own brother, and essentially about all the men he had around him. She wasn’t blind, and she wasn’t deaf; she knew what was going on.’ These women were dead, or as good as: and suddenly she felt a lift, a wave of emotion, and she stopped speaking. She could tell that neither Michael – who was gazing at her – nor Tim – who was eating his chicken silently, listening all the while – had particularly thought of the pre-Raphaelites in such terms; she could tell that she had given them something to consider. And she could tell that they had detected, as she herself detected, the sudden thickening of the atmosphere in the warm, darkening kitchen.