Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘Eh?’ Art says.

  ‘What-did-you-find-out-about-Ramsley?’ Guthrie says again, letting the bench clap to the floor.

  ‘Just the taytoe dish won’t do without chopped garlic–’

  ‘I’ll chop the garlic!’ Guthrie says. ‘Please finish the story.’

  Art’s jovial accent and languid way of speaking are misleading. He’s sharper than Gael had supposed when she’d first clocked him in London’s Tate Modern last year. She’d taken a measure of him as a potential fling for Sive, who’d been in town to give a guest concert. (Gael knew well what her mother needed.) She’d seen him linger in the anonymity of the film screening rooms to watch films replay in their entirety. She’d seen his eyes still glistening from one showing as he chuckled at another, his feelings layering like paint. Gael had still been of the age when strangers can only be ascribed one adjective, and passionate had been the adjective she’d apportioned Art, which meant he couldn’t, too, be bright. But now he is a stranger in their kitchen, holding the mother’s-day-special dishcloth. How, if not by wiles, has he managed to nestle himself so suddenly and surely into their home?

  At least he’s as handsome under kitchen lighting as gallery lighting. He went bald when he was thirty – a fact he blames on a single dart he lost eight thousand pounds on in the autumn of ’95, but the story doesn’t stack up. He gives the impression of a person robust and immune to regret. Though, last night he alleged in passing (Gael forgets the context) that there’s a world of difference between regret and remorse, which gave her pause.

  Gael looks disdainfully at a calendar pinned on the wall beneath the clock. ‘You won’t touch the garlic, but you’ll let my little brother’s fingers smell of your ex?’

  The bowl Art is drying slips in his hands, but he catches it. ‘You what?’

  Guthrie throws a cautioning look Gael’s way, but she doesn’t notice, so he throws a clove of peeled garlic. He has already given Art his wholehearted approval, but Gael doesn’t believe in blessings and her confidence is less easily won.

  The sound of the front door opening interrupts the conversation and bags can be heard thudding to the carpet. Guthrie jumps up to help and, after a frantic assurance of love and a hurried scaling of the stairs, he returns to the kitchen bearing groceries. Sive peers through the door frame. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Good.’

  ‘Lady of the hour.’ Art throws the tea towel over his shoulder and plants a kiss on her forehead.

  Sive glances at Gael. It’s as if someone has thumbed the basins above her cheekbones with mauve paint, to frame her Irish-landscape-grey eyes. ‘I keep forgetting you’re here this weekend.’

  ‘‘The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time,’’ Gael recites, as evidence she’s been attending lectures. She memorized that one, because she suspected it would be ironic to misquote it.

  Sive looks blankly at her, as if there can be no change worth documenting in such a stalwart person.

  ‘Nietzsche,’ Gael says.

  Art knows by Sive’s tone that he’s the one being addressed when, with her eyes trained like shadows on her daughter, she asks: ‘Can you manage?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ he says in a hurry, ‘nothing I can’t handle. Is your shoulder any better?’

  Sive withdraws a fraction. ‘It’s just, I’d lie down for a minute. I’m tired today. I won’t doze but, just to be horizontal for a moment.’ She pauses in the doorway. ‘Is that desperate?’

  Guthrie has finished organizing the groceries in the fridge and stares.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Art says. ‘I’ll take you up a brew in a bit. Up and have a rest.’ Art follows her out to the hall for a word.

  ‘I can iron your suit,’ Guthrie calls. ‘Mum.’ When there’s no response, he drops an inch from his tiptoes. He opens the pantry and makes space for rue on the seasoning shelf. Gael wonders if he’s jealous, yet, of Art’s arriving so surely. Of the whispered hallway consultations. He reminds her of a wild foal. No, a captured reindeer, unsteady on its legs and shorn of antlers. He could be broken in for the better, made less isolate, but there’s something striking in what is inoperable about him. His morality has only intensified since Jarleth’s violation of the eleventh commandment. Jarleth, who’d been the one to convince him of the Lord’s unknowable ways from before he could speak; who, in one of his many tactical efforts, warned Guthrie that his fits were the Saviour’s way of shaking his fallen child into realization of original sin, that they would stop when he learned to repent. He’s all but an adult now, Gael has to admit. Taller than her, just. That chin is nearly always lifted so his nostrils are a pronounced feature of his face. Choices have been made for which he received no counsel and something at the edges of his expression speaks to that.

  ‘Wanna play pool after the gig?’ she asks, lifting her boot back onto the bench. She’s wearing black skinny jeans with a rip across one thigh and a delicate auburn silk camisole with a band of lace across the straight neckline. The kitchen is warm with cooking, so her pale toned arms are bare. She keeps the muscles in shape, but has no time for lotions. ‘I’m in the mood for pool.’

  The tendons on the back of Guthrie’s neck engage, where his hairline dips into a woolly W. His voice is tight. ‘To see how many guys spill their beer when you lean over the table?’

  Gael tilts her head to her shoulder. ‘Don’t you think the girls’d spill their drinks too? Spilt Tia Maria and milk?’ Gael watches his back, half expecting to see all the cut threads of a tapestry’s underside. So unravelable. ‘Come on, Guth. We all know you’re popping cherries like bubblewrap.’

  He lifts the loaded pot and steam surrounds him. There’s some bite to his enunciation. ‘You should go out with your old school friends. Elaine’s always asking what country you’re living in. She’s not heard from you once since you left. None of them have.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Gael runs through the people who might want to see her, then wonders if there’s room in her carry-on for those unworn tennis shoes. They could be useful. Double as golf shoes, should she find herself needing to play the ponce. Guthrie drains the boiling water from the still-hard potatoes and readies the skillet, butter, milk, corn flour, all the pinches of herbs. His chicken-gristle body says he consumes the dish all too rarely, but has often watched it made. His skinniness becomes suddenly alarming. He had once told her about the ancient Greek method of treating epilepsy by fasting. Then he’d explained that anti-convulsants only work for eight in ten people. She asks, ‘Have you been fasting again?’ right when Art returns to the kitchen and claps Guthrie on the back for having taken over.

  ‘So.’ Art peers through the oven door at the blistering fish. ‘I’d like best guesses from the both of you, if you please. How does that hand play out: Mr Ramsley, pile of paintings, the attic.’

  ‘Is Mum okay?’ Gael asks, glancing in the direction of the stairs.

  ‘Ramsley’s her son,’ Guthrie announces before Art can answer. He continues, newly assured that he knows how the story ends; knows the example it sets. ‘Beverly gave Ramsley up for adoption before she married Lucas, but when she saw how bad the orphanage was, rotting mattresses and everything, she started fundraising for it on Sundays after mass, but that wasn’t enough, and then she did more and more. Years on, Ramsley watched from a distance, once he’d figured she was his mum, and he took the chance of the dealership to get close to her – to get to know her I mean. And then he started buying her paintings, as a way to spend more time with her. And to have something of hers.’ He looks to Art.

  ‘Blimey. That ought be the ending. Heartbreaking, that is.’

  Gael swings her legs off the bench and sits upright at the table, suppressing a grin.

  ‘Because she was an older lady,’ Guthrie adds, ‘and he didn’t want to upset her by asking, but he wanted something to remember her by. Because he wouldn’t have been in her will.’

  ‘Right. Nice touch,’ Art says. ‘Let’s hope it’s that.�
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  Gael takes out her phone and starts typing, missing the look exchanged between the men.

  ‘Let’s hear your pitch then,’ Art says.

  ‘Just a sec–’

  ‘You can’t look it up!’ Guthrie exclaims.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You won’t find it that way,’ Art adds calmly.

  ‘I’m just looking up … I just can’t remember if it’s providence or provenance. The history of a painting. Like its pedigree. Its paperwork.’

  ‘Provenance,’ Art says.

  Gael sets her phone down and tries not to look flummoxed at Art’s knowing this.

  ‘Off you trot,’ Art says. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘The fish is done,’ Gael says, making circles with her wrists so that they crack and pop. Her nails are painted black. A neighbour’s toddler screams into action somewhere outside, which compels her audience to lean in a little. She begins. ‘Everyone knows twentieth-century art’s as rip-offable as male strippers’ trousers. Not only because Miro channelled a three-year-old, Mondrian sabotaged a French flag and Frida’s monobrows are just straight lines … but because of the materials. The older the work, the harder the hardware is to replicate. And it sounds as if these attic frames were genuinely classy. So, scenario one: Rams was buying them for the frames, which he used to legitimize his own black-market fakes. Manet Monet Money. Scenario two: he visited galleries’ archives under the premise of doing research, but he was really creating fake provenances’ – a nod towards Art – ‘for Beverly’s paintings. There was a guy who got jailed for that. Rams saw the documentary. He was a big fat copycat. Likely, Bev’s paintings fit into some dribbly school of modern art and they didn’t look conspicuous in the archives. Scenario three: Beverly might be no Edward Hopper, but she’s got moves. And she didn’t tell her nephew the whole story.’

  Art laughs in halting, trumpet surges. ‘That’s three bets,’ he says, turning to manage the potato dish.

  ‘Trifecta,’ Gael says.

  ‘No trifecta, duck. Trifecta’s getting the first, second, third winners in the exact order. Win a trifecta, you’ll know about it. There’s only one possible answer here, so what you’ve done’s a place bet. Lower odds than Guthrie’s straight wager, mind.’

  ‘I kind of feel bad for the cows,’ Gael says, squinting at the fogged window.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘With how much you’re milking this.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ Guthrie says.

  ‘Yeah. Trifeck this.’ Gael gets up to help her brother set the table.

  ‘Hold your horses, the pair of you. Can one of you check on your mother, please? She might rather we start without her. But–’

  ‘Doesn’t she need to be there at, like’ – Gael checks the clock – ‘twenty to seven?’

  Guthrie disappears while Gael transfers the oily fizzing fish and split tomatoes from the oven tray to the plates, and checks if tinfoil has latched on the undersides. Foil makes her mother’s ancient metal fillings screech. When she’d been in one of her lighter moods, Sive had told Gael that if she’d admitted the situation to herself earlier, she would have gotten all her dental work done pre-emptively. Guthrie returns and puts the fourth plate back in the cupboard.

  ‘Not hungry, is she?’ Art asks.

  Guthrie shakes his head.

  Gael only knows of one stretch in Sive’s life when she refrained from eating: the great famine of Jarleth’s making. Cromwellian cunt. Besides that emptiness, her appetite has always been reliable, if particular, much to the envy of her friends as, regardless of what she eats, her body remains honed in its proportions. Her collarbones are like carpentry showpieces. She never exercises and rarely breaks a sweat, but she might well burn a week’s worth of demons every time she steps up to the podium.

  When Sive finally calls for them at the front door, she seems impatient to get on the road and get it over with. Her Burlington-wool tuxedo suit appears to be causing her some discomfort, so that she has foregone the silk cummerbund. Gael wonders if her gestures will be looser or more conservative as a result, like a beltless weight lifter relenting to the hernia likelihood. As Sive twists off her rings and throws them in the drawer of the hall table, she grumbles about the disconcerting weather. The humidity is sixty-three per cent. She reverses out the drive without turning to check the back window. They might as well be living in the water-logged west, she says. She’ll have to send the string sections to dry off in some air-conditioned foyer. ‘They play the scherzo so laxly when their fingers have been plump with dampness all day.’ No one says a thing for how inept their solutions would be, but the image of the spruced and rosined fifty-large string section cooling off in the lobby is somehow amusing. Art mouths ‘dis-concert-ing’ in the passenger mirror, which makes Guthrie snort. ‘If one person in the green room tells me, “It’s awful close” …’ Sive doesn’t articulate what she would do. Art asks what she means by ‘close’. She says it’s an Irishism for declaring muggy weather that’s as overused as Dvořák’s New World Symphony. ‘Oh. You mean maffing,’ Art says, as if lending sense to the eccentricer culture.

  They’re halfway to the National Concert Hall before Art deems the atmosphere right to finish his story, which he does while rubbing Sive’s shoulder as she drives – his hand beneath the suit jacket so as not to rumple it. Her baton case balances on his lap. Gael’s eyes flit between the road in front and the muscles of Art’s arm bracing and relaxing through his sleeve.

  ‘Conservators don’t consider an oil painting fully dry till it’s nigh eighty year old,’ he explains. ‘So imagine it’s dry, it’s been sandpapered, had an isolation coat and a layer or two of varnish bobbed on top, it’d be solid as you like. Good as glued. Add a layer of white gesso to that lot, you can reuse it to paint on, only the paints won’t behave all that nicely. There’s none of the tooth of a canvas to pull off the brush. Nothing absorbs. It’s more like painting on plastic. But Beverly’d no experience to complain about surface textures – she blamed everything on her lack of skill. Ramsley took an infrared camera to confirm his suspicions the first chance he had after laying eyes on them paintings. Tough to analyse, mind, all those thin layers merging into one blob. But he needn’t have bothered. It was worth the gamble and a half. Fact, if you only had one sorry pound to your name, it’d’ve been worth a go. And Ramsley’d pounds to pave a town with.’

  ‘What’s that in euro?’ Gael asks.

  Guthrie groans.

  ‘The acrylic paints Bev used were soluble in a different way to the oil layers under,’ Art continues. ‘I can just see Ramsley, in his double garage, kneeling in his workshop garb – not his best bib and tucker, mind, the grubby old Dolcheegabana – rubbing the corner of Beverly’s portrait with a soft cloth and a dab of denatured alcohol. Her painting would’ve mopped easy as jam off a scallywag’s face. Bit of liquid soap and water, the residue’d slough right off and then you’re down to the gesso and glazing layers. Happy as a banker in dosh.’

  ‘There were paintings hidden underneath?’ Guthrie sounds more horrified than astonished.

  ‘Aye. Late Renaissance pieces. Ramsley knew by the frames. Worth a fortune an’ a half.’

  ‘And he dissolved your Auntie Beverly’s paintings, that she spent years of her life on?’

  ‘That he did. Gladly.’

  ‘Of her widowed life?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell her?’ Guthrie’s voice is lifting into the upper remits of his head.

  Art mutters, ‘No,’ softening his enthusiasm for the story.

  ‘Have you your meds?’ Sive asks.

  ‘And he didn’t give her any of the money he made off them, that was hers to begin with? Or compensate her for destroying her paintings?’

  Art’s eyes flick from Sive to the road in front.

  Guthrie’s gone red in the face and the veins in his neck are dancing. How much money could Late Renaissance paintings raise for charity? How much more
on top could her own paintings have raised? Art glances back at him and withdraws his arm from Sive’s shoulder. He goes to say something, but Sive clicks her tongue, indicates left and the ticking stands in for silence.

  Gael wonders how much Art knows about Guthrie, who is pressed up against his door and is chewing on the outer corner of his palm, where it meets his wrist. His elbow is jerked out in front of him, so he can get at the spot.

  Gael pushes back into the seat and projects her voice over the traffic din: ‘How’d she take it, when you told her?’ She pauses, not long enough for Art to respond. ‘She must have been livid. I guess you’d have helped her take Ramsley to court, on principle?’

  The car swings left onto Leeson Street Lower and Art faces the dirty fumes of the oil-leaking Honda in front. Guthrie chews his palm more hungrily, as if dinner’s lone whitebait had been a poor substitute for loaves and fishes.

  ‘You did tell her?’ Gael asks, knowing it could push her brother to fit, but it’s vital that he be warier of guests. It’s vital that Art be clear about who he is and who he is not. They’ve missed the green light and are waiting at the intersection to turn left one last time onto Earlsfort Terrace.