The Tin Heart Gold Mine

by Ruth Hartley

  “It’s good timing. We are building quite a good reputation here.” Gillian tells Lara. “We have started to attract some of the talent spotters from the new East End Galleries – some have moved here from Cork Street and Mayfair because the rents here are lower. It could be your big opportunity. What new work are you planning to do, Lara?”

  Lara has plenty of paintings – quite a number unfinished. In the larger space of the new studio she is able to reconsider what she is doing. She finds that she has new ideas and for the first time the space to experiment more playfully. It’s easier to pull out her planchest drawers and spread her work around to study it all. Old drawings from the Safari Camp appear; notes and plans and ideas fill her sketchbooks. She feels re-motivated. She will be able to pull a reasonable exhibition together in the month before the Open Studios dates.

  Back at the flat the front room is even more dreary and empty. Lara gets Adam to help her make decisions about how the room should be redecorated and reclaimed as a sitting room. She plans to do it very slowly but she doesn’t explain her reasons to Adam.

  “We will have to get this room in shape for Tim’s return.” she says without adding that there is no need to hurry. “First we’ll clean up again – then patch the walls and then paint – what colours do you think we should choose? We’ll have to put down a carpet too to hide the paint stains.”

  In spite of the cheap protective plastic sheeting Lara had put down on the floor, paint had seeped and leaked and splashed onto the floor and the walls.

  “It will be a Penelope room,” she explains later to Brendan. “You know how Penelope waited for the return of Ulysses from the Trojan War and each night unpicked her tapestry so that it would never be finished and she would never have to succumb to a new suitor. I won’t undo the work I do but I will really do it little by little. When I do finish it – and Tim still isn’t home – we will be quite used to his absence.”

  It hurts Lara to be so negative but she has a new reality to get accustomed to and saying negative things out loud where Adam can’t hear them seems best.

  Brendan smiles, raises an eyebrow and asks Lara how her life is to be financed from now on.

  “That’ll be the other reason why the living room will take so long to redecorate and furnish.” Lara says and her lips twist downwards.

  “Tim’s newspaper will pay his salary for the time being. Some of that comes automatically into my account for household bills. The paper will also help me with discretionary payments if I ask, but I hope not to have to ask for that. What I earn from my part-time teaching certainly won’t cover Adam’s and my other expenses, but I will, with luck, get something from selling my own art though, of course, I have got to pay the rent of the studio.”

  “Oh – this is important – I had already decided to sell Oscar’s paintings – the Otto Dix and the Käthe Kollwitz. It’s a slow process and there’s auction fees and tax to pay as well. I don’t know what the outcome of that will be at all.”

  Brendan’s eyebrows shoot up and this time he doesn’t hide his surprise.

  “Gosh, Lara!” he says. “How do you feel about that?”

  Lara isn’t sure how she feels about anything at the moment. Her strongest emotion at getting rid of Oscar’s gift is relief but she does have reservations.

  “I hate the idea of them being bought as an investment and put into a vault – they might as well have been taken by the Nazis. The auction house thinks that perhaps they might go to a German art museum because they have provenance and weren’t stolen. I do want them to be seen. I could give them away but then – I didn’t think Tim had the right to stop me capitalizing on them. I felt that was – well – unfair.”

  Lara sometimes feels curiously light as if she is suspended in space and has to make very delicate movements to stay afloat. It is all right as long as she doesn’t get tired, which of course she does. Of course she crashes into depression. She has to ‘pick herself up and start all over again’ just like in some song or other. It’s odd, but her thoughts at the moment all seem to end in snatches of songs like ‘I Will Survive’. Perhaps if she was religious it would be prayers that she would recall but all that does come are fragments and refrains of songs about grief and woe like ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.’

  “There’s Tim and there’s Adam and there’s my art and there’s today. That’s all. No future. Just now. Just one day at a time.”

  Brendan considers her quietly for a while.

  “Good,” he says. “I’m always here.”

  The first object that Adam and Lara buy for the empty sitting room is a lava lamp. It’s Adam’s choice and Lara’s suggestion. She first thought of leaving a symbolic candle alight in the window for Tim but then she decides it isn’t safe or sensible. Together they visit the lighting department of a big store and choose the lava lamp. Lara had to draw the line at the red lava lamp. A woman further down the block of flats keeps a red light in her bedroom window and Lara doesn’t want that lady’s clients to confuse their establishments. Blue or green, she suggests to Adam, are the colours that Tim prefers. In the end Adam settles on the orange light.

  “I think it will be seen from further away. Don’t you, Mum?” he says and Lara’s heart cracks again.

  Tim’s parents, Sidney and Gwen, come around once again to discuss the latest news, of which there is very little. The group who held Tim and Rod have been identified as Somalis, most probably Muslim, but without very strong political or religious affiliations.

  “Brigands or pirates of some sort, they think.” Tim’s father says. “A random chance that they encountered Tim and Rod – just very bad luck.”

  “There’s no question of the Foreign Office paying a ransom and the newspaper won’t either. They say it increases the risks both for Tim and Rod and for future hostage cases. They are searching at the moment for people who have contact with the group or for someone who can negotiate with them,” adds Gwen.

  “I think Rod’s family feel that not enough is being done but for the moment we don’t have much choice – that’s what I told them,” again it was Sidney.

  Tim’s mother looks very pale and worn. Tim’s father is a quiet, grey man so indeterminate in appearance and age that it isn’t likely that any change of fortune will have much impact on his person. They had always seemed so neutral and indistinct to Lara that she finds it hard not to think of them as shadows rather than three-dimensional humans. She feels for their pain and anxiety but also wants to guard her own reserves and she really doesn’t know how to help them. They aren’t very huggable. Even Adam is inclined to be more formal with them, shaking Sidney’s hand and kissing Gwen’s cheek without putting his arms around her. Gwen and Sidney offer Lara money in case she is finding life financially difficult. They suggest that she move into their house if it would help. She replies that she is grateful but she doesn’t need money and she is determined that Adam’s life should continue as before if possible. They nod and agree and then surprise her.

  “We thought it might be nice for Adam to have a pet, Lara.” Gwen says. “We know it is difficult to keep an animal in a flat and we felt that hamsters and gerbils aren’t necessarily what a boy would like so we wondered about sharing a dog. We could look after it during the school week and if Adam likes the idea he could have it at weekends.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Sex Shop

  Lara and Gillian stand in the middle of the sex shop basement holding mugs of tea.

  “I don’t believe this place!” Lara says with a huge grin. “It’s run by women. They offer you tea and in the basement downstairs there’s a forest of black dildos and pink rubber penises. It’s totally surreal.”

  “There are educational booklets and gay woman’s magazines.” Gillian points some out.

  “So you’re not shocked are you, Lara? I didn’t think you would be but you can n
ever tell how someone will react.” She is smiling too. “It’s actually all awful kitsch isn’t it? Everything’s plastic and the colours are hideous. If you want quality sex toys in leather and steel you have to go to the very expensive places nearer Covent Garden.”

  “What is it about sex that links it to masks and whips and bondage, domination and sadism, Gillian?” Lara asks in wonder. “I can’t pretend it isn’t a turn-on in some way but I also can’t imagine using many of these instruments successfully.”

  “It does take practice – and a sense of humour.” Gillian looks wicked. “It’s fun trying but in the end – well, it’s easier to give up and use what God gave us – fingers and tongues.

  “Some sex toys are good when you’re alone you know – be free – have a look round.”

  So Lara does.

  “Thanks, Gillian – it’s cheered me up. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe I feel less crazy and less of a pervert.”

  “Because you’re not gay?” Gillian sounds surprised.

  “No! Definitely not that – it’s because this place – in its own bizarre way – helps me to recognise both my need of sex and the necessity of sex.

  “You should read Angela Carter – my favourite novelist – she says that ‘there is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer’.”

  “Does she indeed? My God!” Lara stares around her.

  Chapter Ten

  The New Studio

  Lara stands in the middle of her new studio and spreads her arms wide. She tilts her head back. The grey concrete ceiling is high above her. She spins around in a stamping circling dance. The space is freezing cold even though it’s already the end of April. The studio Health and Safety team had decided long ago that paraffin heaters and gas bottles were too dangerous in a space where there were so many flammable materials but the artists largely ignored rules that involved them in unnecessary expenses. Gillian had lent Lara a bottle gas heater and she also had a small two-bar electric heater to huddle over when she stopped work to have coffee. One of the artists has erected a plastic sheet tent in his space as a refuge from the cold but for the most part people just pile on layers of clothes. Gillian wears a charity shop ski suit and another artist paints in a duffel coat. Lara intends to go and get herself ski boots as soon as the discarded ski gear appears in the second hand shops. It’s her feet that become numb first. Sometimes they’re so cold that she thinks that she has stumps instead of toes and heels. Right now she has on two sweaters under her boiler suit and two pairs of Tim’s socks. Dancing around helps warm her up but it also makes her feel damp and sweaty. She thinks that she is so well padded that if she tumbles over she will probably bounce right back again.

  Her paintings and canvases are ranged around the walls. Yesterday it had been liberating to spread them around and get a sense of what she had done and how the paintings related to each other. Today they look like a rather small selection of work both in regard to size and number. Lara suffers that diminution of purpose and loss of self-worth that comes to all artists as they review their intentions against their achievements. No matter. There’s work to be done. She starts on the task of rearranging and sorting them – colours, categories, styles, subject matter, and size even. She won’t manage any significant new work in a month but it will be important to turn her studio into a showcase for her work if there’s even a small chance that a gallery owner might come by and look at what she had done. The studio is large, high windows go all down one side and there are steel girders above. Paintings hung under the window would be in shadow. Unless those opposite were large they might be dwarfed by the studio itself. It will be easy for visitors just to stroll through without spending time looking at them. Nowadays it isn’t paintings that interest the public or the galleries particularly. Installations, videos, giant photographic prints, performance art – this is the art of the moment. Lara and Gillian spend hours huddled over mugs of instant coffee discussing the kinds of art that would bring them to the attention of the galleries and reviewers.

  “It’s who you know as well. It always has been.” Gillian says.

  Lara agrees.

  “I had a special market and a reputation in that market. It was relatively easy for me for a time – well, until I wanted to develop in a new direction and I began to experiment. Trouble is I don’t want to do installations really – well – I need to sell and I don’t want to have to go through the whole business of competing for commissions or looking for funding for projects that have to have a high profile and take up a lot of space. I reckon all the well-known artists spend most of their time hob-nobbing with celebrities.”

  “Arse-licking more like.” Gillian doesn’t waste words. “Thing is you’re a painter and that’s just not fashionable at the moment unless you are painting corpses or bovver boys.”

  “Why would I do that?” Lara thinks of the Otto Dix paintings and Enoch’s bloody body with Inonge crouched over it screaming. Imagine making money from such a personal tragedy? Yet that is what artists do. It would be therapeutic to express that horror and that pain in her painting but exploitative to sell it unless, like Otto Dix, it was all of one’s life experience and not an experience that really belonged to other people who were also her friends.

  “You’re right about me – I am a painter more than anything. It is the process of creation through the medium of paint that seems so important for me. Something happens when I play with colours – it is a kind of visual music – only it happens when I do that physical organisation of coloured pigments into relationships.”

  “You make it sound like it should be a performance art and people should watch you working. We’re starting to do that with film and video aren’t we? – You know, you are a kind of Stuckist, Lara.”

  “A what? A Stuckist? What is that for goodness sake?”

  “It just means that you are ‘stuck’ in what some people think is an old style of making art – that’s all. It’s another label that critics find useful. Some artist used it to slag off her boyfriend when he decided he was a painter and she decided she was an installation artist. Maybe it was Tracey Emin. Probably meant they split up as well. I am an installation artist too of course. My installations are supposed to challenge ideas about femininity and sexuality.”

  Gillian’s work had been bought by a national gallery of modern art and she had been able as a result to sell to other national galleries in other countries.

  “I still love painting – you are right about the process, it does magic things to one’s soul.” Gillian continues

  “I don’t see why paintings can’t be installations too.” Lara says thoughtfully. “I love your work, Gillian. It’s just not how I want to make things – I mean paintings don’t have to be framed and on easels do they – or even only two-dimensional either.”

  “Sounds interesting – you obviously aren’t thinking of murals, are you?” Gillian acknowledges smiling. “Is that what you’ll do for our Open Studios then? Better get on with it! We’ve loads to do.”

  By the first day of the Open Studios, Lara’s workspace is transformed. First she had selected paintings of the same size and subject matter then she had secured them back to back and suspended them from the overhead iron girders in the studio across its width, but each on a different girder. There were doors at either end of her room and it was necessary to walk through her space to get to the next studio. Lara has arranged the paintings to appear like a continuous barrier across the room. They are in fact staggered across the space so that it was possible to walk around and between the paintings to reach the opposite door. Returning from the other side the same process has to be repeated, but this time the paintings will be seen differently and they will be in a new relationship with each other. It is a maze. Not a very complex arrangement but it allows many possibilities of varied viewpoints and combinations of image. Lara has also
mapped the studio floor under the paintings with painted numbers, images, compasses, suggested viewpoints, footprints in an elaborate version of hopscotch to guide visitors through her space.

  “It’s fun, don’t you think? I wanted people to enjoy my work – if not for the subject matter and content then for the colours and textures. I hope it doesn’t look like walking through hanging curtain fabric and that it has a bit more to please and challenge visually. It will force people to look at the work and decide what they want to see in it.”

  “It’s great – really different – an unstuck Stuckist explosion.” Gillian walks through the space smiling. “Hey – you can put some coloured transparencies on the windows to catch the afternoon sun and add more coloured patterns on the floor and walls. You could use a few more lights to illuminate the paintings on the darker side – I’ll lend you some. Don’t forget to put up lots of personal information too – that’s essential these days. Fake it that you’re a minor celebrity!”

  Are the wives of hostages minor celebrities? Lara wonders sourly remembering the press conference that she, Adam and Tim’s parents gave when the news of Tim’s kidnap first broke. For a couple of weeks she had been harassed by journalists outside her flat but that hadn’t lasted. The breaking scandal about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton made much bigger headlines and she was left alone. Would it help our case if I flag it up here? I paint using my maiden name not my married name. Let’s leave it that way – or would it help Tim? Don’t see how.

  Working at the studio and putting up her exhibition was the most pleasure that Lara had had since Tim had left months ago. It had been pleasurable in spite of the constant presence in her mind of the horror of his kidnapping. Lara is sobered every time she focuses on Tim’s situation. He is always there in her thoughts. As she set up her exhibition she was mentally explaining to him what she was trying to do. An account of it will go into her letter to him tonight. Adam also writes a paragraph or draws a picture every day for his father. Each week Lara addresses the letter to the Foreign Office to forward to Tim. She had been told that very occasionally hostages do receive letters from family. It may form part of the process of negotiation for his release that she hopes the Foreign Office is actively pursuing, though they never disclose anything about what they are doing or if they are succeeding or failing in it.