The Very Picture of You

by Isabel Wolff

  So as I waited for Nate to arrive for his fourth sitting, I decided to be reserved with him, in order to re-establish a distance between us. But although my mind was happy with this strategy, my body rebelled. With five minutes before he arrived, my pulse began to race. It was as though all my nerve endings were attached to twitching wires. The ring of the bell induced an adrenalin charge that was like an electric shock. As I opened the door to him my heart was pounding so hard that I thought he’d see it beating. He smiled, and a sudden heat suffused my face.

  I’d never felt a physical longing like this for any man. As Nate followed me up the stairs, past my bedroom, the door of which was ajar, allowing a glimpse of bed, I imagined taking his hand and pulling him inside and putting my hand on the back of his head and drawing his mouth to mine and unbuttoning his shirt and— What was I thinking? The man was marrying my sister! I felt a wave of guilt and shame.

  As we went into the studio, I wished that Chloë had never asked me to paint him. Then I could have gone on believing that Nate was a duplicitous creep rather than the decent and desirable man I now knew him to be.

  I remembered my resolve to be remote. So I asked him how the project he was working on in Finland was going and what he thought of the coalition. I told him that I was looking forward to the engagement party that night, which was a lie because I was dreading it and had been obsessing about how I could get out of it. I’d say I had a migraine: Chloë knew that I got them sometimes …

  ‘Ella …’ Nate was looking puzzled. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘No reason – you seem a bit … subdued.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘No … I mean, yes. I am – though I might be getting a migraine.’

  ‘Do you need an aspirin? Or a glass of water?’

  ‘No, I’m fine … really … thanks …’ I dipped the brush in the flesh tone. ‘I’m … perfectly … okay,

  I’m …’

  To hell with being reserved, I thought. Why shouldn’t I chat to Nate, and just enjoy being with him? I’d done nothing wrong, and I wasn’t going to do anything wrong.

  Was I?

  So we started talking about Nate’s schooldays, and about mine, about his dog, Chopsy, and about the opera singer, Raymond, who’d lived in the apartment below them and who used to get them free tickets for the Met. Then Nate talked about his first girlfriend, Suzanne, whom he’d dated at Yale.

  ‘Suze and I were together for two years – I was crazy about her.’ I felt a stab of jealousy. ‘After we graduated, I wanted us to get an apartment together in New York, but she’d just gotten a news traineeship with NBC and said she didn’t want a full-on relationship. She said she needed to feel free as she’d be spending a lot of time on assignment, with periods abroad, and so …’ Nate drew his finger across his throat.

  ‘She ended it?’

  He nodded. ‘Broke my heart.’

  Another shard pierced me. ‘And … after Suze?’

  He shrugged. ‘I had a few relationships, none of them special. I tended to date women who I knew I could never feel serious about.’

  ‘Why? Out of fear of committing yourself to anyone?’

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘No. It was because I still hoped that it would work out with Suze. Whenever she was back in New York we’d see each other; we’d often e-mail and phone; we both kept fanning the embers when we should have doused them. We’d often joke that we’d get it together one day. But then a couple of years ago Suze phoned me to tell me that she was getting married to this guy she’d met three months before, and that she was very happy – and so …’ He gave a philosophical shrug. ‘Finita la comedia. Honey had been badgering me to come and work with her in London, so it seemed a good time to accept.’

  ‘I see. So it wasn’t so much because your mum and sisters were hassling you to settle down?’

  ‘Well, they were. They’d been telling me for ages to forget Suze and just try and find someone I could live with, without expecting a great love or anything. And I’d just come round to their way of thinking when I met

  Chloë.’

  ‘At the Harbour Club?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nate grinned. ‘She annoyed the hell out of me to start with, because she kept rushing on to my court to retrieve her balls, but then I realised what was going on and I thought it was quite funny; then we got chatting in the bar—’ He gave a bemused shrug. ‘Which is how we come to be where we are today. But Chloë’s really … sweet.’

  ‘Oh, she is. She’s lovely – and there’s got to be some material in that for your wedding speech. You can joke about her putting the ball in your court, or wanting to play doubles.’ Or making all the running, I thought wryly. Chloë wasn’t exactly shy when she set her sights on a man. She’d met Max right in front of his wife.

  ‘She’d obviously had a bad time with her last boyfriend,’ I heard Nate say. ‘Not that she talks about it, but it’s there, in your portrait of her. You can see it.’

  ‘He … just wouldn’t commit to her,’ I said truthfully. ‘The usual story,’ I added casually. ‘But she’s so happy to have met you.’

  ‘She does seem happy, yes.’ There was a silence. ‘Anyway … now you know all about my past.’

  ‘I’m disappointed that it isn’t more lurid.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘But c’mon, Ella – it’s your turn now – what about your past?’

  ‘Oh. Do I have to?’

  ‘Sure you do. You can’t just get all this information out of me, without revealing anything about yourself.’

  ‘Fair enough. Okay …’ I cleared my throat. ‘Let’s see …’ I talked about Patrick, who I’d dated at the Slade and about the two or three brief relationships I’d had in my twenties, and then I told Nate about David.

  ‘Two years is a long time,’ Nate remarked. ‘So what was wrong with the guy?’

  ‘Nothing. He was nice – and very talented. But … I don’t know. We liked each other, but we weren’t in love …’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I tend to date men that I’m not really in love with.’

  ‘Why? To make it easier when it ends?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I knew the real reason, though I didn’t want to discuss it with Nate. And suddenly I didn’t want to talk about relationships any more because I didn’t want to hear him tell me how adorable he found Chloë or how happy he was with her, so I steered the conversation back to the safer topic of his family, then, as I re-drew the line of his left shoulder – I’d got the angle all wrong – Nate told me how much he liked Roy.

  ‘Roy’s a lovely man,’ I agreed proudly. ‘He’ll be a great father-in-law,’ I added, to remind myself again of Nate’s impending marriage.

  Nate was looking at me quizzically. ‘So you’ve always called him “Roy”?’

  ‘Yes; because I was five and a half when I met him; so I could never bring myself to call him “Dad” if that’s what you mean.’ Nate nodded. ‘Plus I knew that my own dad was out there somewhere … not that I had any idea where.’ I suddenly wanted Nate to know my story. ‘Maybe Chloë’s mentioned it.’

  ‘She said very little – only that you haven’t seen your father since you were five.’

  ‘That’s right. He’d run off to Australia with his girlfriend – not that I knew that until I was eleven.’

  ‘So, where did you think he was – before that?’

  I shrugged. ‘I had no idea. My mother would say only that he’d left us and that it was best not to think about him. But I was convinced that he was somewhere nearby. I kept imagining that I’d see him drive up in his big blue car, like he used to do when we lived in our flat.’

  I had a memory of how my mother used to stand by the sitting-room window, looking down the street. Then I’d hear her call out, ‘Daddy’s here!’ and I’d run to her and we’d see him pulling up …

  I heard the chair creak as Nate sh
ifted. ‘You must have missed him so much.’

  ‘I did – and of course I did think about him – all the time. Whenever I saw a car like his, I’d look to see if he was driving it. I’d search for his face in crowds and in the windows of passing buses and trains. I remember once, when I was ten, following this man around the supermarket because he looked like my father. But if I ever asked my mother where he was, she’d give me the same answer – that he’d gone, and wasn’t coming back. I remember panicking, thinking that he must be dead. Mum assured me that he was alive, but that as we couldn’t see him any more it was best to put him out of our minds. Every time I asked her why we couldn’t see him, she’d make me feel that it was too painful for her to discuss – so I learned not to ask.’

  Nate shifted on the chair. ‘Did she know where he was?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Then why didn’t she just … tell you?’

  I rubbed a drip of paint off the corner of the canvas. ‘She said that it had been to protect me from unnecessary hurt: she said it would have felt like another rejection to know that he’d gone so far away – and she was right, because when she did eventually tell me, I was very shocked and upset, because then I understood not only that he wasn’t coming back, but that he’d never intended to.’

  ‘So … who was his girlfriend?’

  ‘I don’t know – I only know that she was Australian and that her name was Frances. In fact, I didn’t even know that until I was in my teens; my mother had only ever referred to her as “the other woman”. But Frances must have had an amazing hold over my father for him not just to give up his wife and child for her, but to let her take him so far away from them.’

  ‘Did Roy know that he was in Australia?’

  I shook my head. ‘Mum had concealed it from him too, because she was worried that, if he knew, then he’d tell me. She’d drawn a veil over her first marriage because of the awful way it ended. She’d been aware that there was this other woman: she once told me that she’d found a hotel bill in his jacket pocket, and another time a love letter that Frances had written him. But when my mother actually saw them together it was a terrible shock: she said it was “traumatic” …’

  ‘Even though she’d known about the affair?’

  ‘Yes. It would have made it horribly real. Then, not long after that, Mum had her fall. She said that she was so upset and distracted that she missed her footing, so she seemed to blame my father for that too. In her darker moments she’d say that he hadn’t just betrayed her, he’d “destroyed” her.’

  ‘Poor woman …’

  ‘But she was very lucky, because a few months later she met Roy, who fell in love with her, and she saw that with him she had the chance for a new start. That’s why she wanted Roy to adopt me – in order to erase my father. So when I was eight I became Ella Graham.’

  ‘That must have felt … weird.’

  ‘It … altered my whole sense of who I was; it took me years to get used to it.’ Now, as I squeezed some zinc white on to the palette, I wondered how the adoption had worked. Did the natural father have to agree to it – especially where he’d been married to the child’s mother? And was there any formal hand-over of paternal responsibility? I decided to ask Roy about this some time.

  I began to outline Nate’s right arm. ‘But Roy’s been the most wonderful father to me. Though it wasn’t easy to start with … I remember my mother telling me that she was having a baby with him – I was very upset. She then dropped several more bombshells because she said that she and Roy would be getting married and that we’d be moving to London where we’d all live together in a place called Richmond. She said that Roy would work in a hospital nearby and that I’d go to a nice new school, even though I liked the school I was already at.’

  ‘So much change in your life,’ Nate murmured sympathetically.

  I nodded. ‘I told my mum I didn’t want her to marry Roy and I didn’t want there to be a new baby.’ I dipped the brush in the cobalt blue. ‘I said that we couldn’t leave our flat in case Dad came back and didn’t know where we were. On the day of the move I had to be prised out of it, screaming, and would only agree to go once I’d been allowed to leave a note for him to say where we’d gone – not that it would have been particularly legible, as my writing couldn’t have been up to much at that age …’

  ‘Poor little kid,’ Nate said.

  ‘So I hated Roy because I saw him as the cause of all this change. I used to clamp myself to my mother to keep him away from her; if he spoke to me I wouldn’t reply; I used to hide his shoes in the garden. I hated seeing his pictures and his books and told my mother that she should burn them on a big fire. But Roy was always wonderful to me. He told me that he understood why I felt cross: he said that he’d feel cross if he were me. But he added that perhaps I wouldn’t feel so cross once I met the baby.’

  Now, as I mixed the colour for Nate’s hair, I remembered being in the garden of the house we’d first lived in, in Richmond. Roy sat next to me on the bench and told me that the baby would be coming soon – in the next day or two. I started to cry. And he told me that there was no need to be upset because the point was that someone was coming into the world who was going to love me. He said that that was all I needed to know …

  I looked up from the painting. ‘And Roy was right. Because when I saw Chloë for the first time my anger just … vanished. Roy would put her in my arms and I’d just gaze at her, and talk to her for hours, telling her all the things that I was going to show her when she was older. I almost fought with my mother to push the pram. In the mornings they’d find me asleep on the floor by her cot. And from then on I didn’t mind Roy being in my life, because I understood that without him I wouldn’t have had Chloë. But of course I still hoped …’ My brush stopped. ‘I’d never stopped hoping …’ I could hear the tick of the clock.

  ‘To see your father again?’ Nate asked quietly.

  I nodded. ‘But this was very hard to imagine, because I was already forgetting what he looked like.’

  ‘Didn’t you have any photos of him?’

  ‘No. My mother said that she’d lost them. So I drew and painted him, obsessively, to try and remind myself.’ I thought of the faded drawing of him in my desk. ‘And I believed that if I did a really good picture of him – so that it was the very picture of him – then that would somehow make him come back.’

  ‘Which is why you became a portrait painter,’ said Nate softly.

  I nodded. ‘It probably is. Because I was searching for this one face; hoping to see him again. I kept on hoping … even after I knew the truth.’ I felt my throat constrict. ‘I’d tell myself that I didn’t want to see him.’ The image on the canvas had blurred. ‘But of course I did want to, I did …’ My hands sprang to my face.

  I heard the chair creak, then footsteps, then I felt Nate’s arms around my shoulders. A tear seeped into the corner of my mouth with a salty tang.

  I was aware of the softness of Nate’s jumper, of the gentle pressure of his arms, and of his breath, warm against my ear.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, then pulled away, awkwardly. As I did so I saw that there was a red stain on Nate’s chest. ‘I’ve got paint on you,’ I croaked. ‘From my brush. I’ll fix it.’ I went to my work table and tipped some white spirit on to a tissue; then I walked back over to Nate and without even thinking about it, slid my left hand under his jumper then gently rubbed at the wool with my right. ‘There …’ I murmured. ‘It’s gone.’

  I knew that if I looked at Nate I would want to kiss him; so I turned away; but he put out his hands, caught my face, and stroked away my tears with his thumbs.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I whispered. ‘I’m fine now. Thanks …’ I went to the sink and started cleaning the brush, in order to disguise my turmoil.

  ‘Now I know why you seemed so subdued,’ I heard Nate say. ‘Your father must have been on your mind.’

  ‘He has been.’ I turned off the tap. ‘Very much so.’ I
didn’t tell Nate why, or that he himself had also been on my mind.

  ‘Maybe you’ll hear from him one day …’

  I exhaled. ‘Maybe …’

  ‘What would you do if he did ever get in touch? Would you want to talk to him – see him?’

  ‘See him?’ I looked at Nate. ‘I … really don’t know.’

  So much for being reserved, I thought grimly as I got ready for the party a few hours later. I’d bared my soul to Nate – impulsively telling him things that I’d never even told Polly – and had ended up being held in his arms. Now I was going to have to go and make polite small talk with him at his engagement party.

  The invitation was for eight o’clock, but I was so anxious about it that I was running late. I couldn’t decide what to wear and changed my outfit three times; then I made up my mind not to go, then I decided that I would go but ended up walking because my front tyre was flat, then the bus didn’t come and I didn’t have enough money for a cab because I’d forgotten to go to the cashpoint. So by the time I turned into Redcliffe Square it was a quarter past nine and I was feeling flustered and unhappy.

  Nate’s flat was on the south side of the square in a big porticoed house with a huge magnolia in front that was shedding its last waxy white petals. I rang the bell and an aproned caterer opened the door, took my coat then offered me a glass of champagne from the tray on the hall table. I gratefully took one and had two large, nerve-steadying sips. I was bracing myself to enter the room on my left where the party was clearly in full swing, when Chloë came out into the hallway. I felt a stab of envy, then loathed myself for it.

  Chloë gave me a radiant smile. ‘There you are, Ella!’

  ‘I’m so late,’ I mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind – you’re here now: come and join the party.’