As soon as I got back to Kilburn, I cleared my studio and primed a stack of canvases taller and wider than I had ever worked upon before. The New York sketches I had made were pinned up on the Anaglypta near my bed so I could glean some inspiration from them. I ordered a few boxes of oil paints to be delivered to my door and bought in powdered milk and biscuits, tinned vegetables, corned beef, and mushroom soup from the corner grocery—enough to last me several weeks. The urge to paint was rife in me again, and I did my best to seize upon it.
I exchanged the sanctuary of my hotel room for the shelter of my studio, leaving only to collect my mail from the vestibule. I saw nobody except my downstairs neighbours: a kind old theatre director and her husband. The sun rose and set behind my curtains (I stapled them to the frame, preferring to paint in the softness of lamplight, as it helped me focus on the work). I lived sleeplessly in one room with just the kitchen window open, letting out the turps fumes and the fusty stench of my own body (I bathed nightly, of course, but sweated so much in between that my clothes were stiff and yellowed). My hair kept swinging into my eyes, so I cut it with the kitchen scissors.
What did I paint? All I know are the intentions I set out with, and where I ended up.
I hoped to reveal some sense of the caldarium in abstract, to work out how I truly felt about what happened there. But the figures I implanted in the scene looked manufactured, much too literal, so I scraped them off and tried again, only to find myself painting the exact same faces without the pleasing darkness of the originals. I scraped them off and gessoed over them. The more I tried to paint the figures, the more they seemed to signify a falsehood: I had not seen the caldarium from that dislocated viewpoint, hovering over my own body like a vulture; I had seen it mostly from the floor. So I put in a skewed doorway and built up the foreground with an impression of tiles, and then—over-thinking it—I merged it with a sunny field, a Ferris wheel, and a rag-and-bone man’s horse. Nothing cohered. The whole scene was contrived and ill-defined, but I continued with it, extending the idea just to see if it would stumble to fruition nonetheless. I ignored my instincts, guiding the paint too consciously, and lost my feeling for the work.
Week after week, I painted like this, with no end result. I reconstructed every picture I began, scrubbing it clean, scraping off and undercoating, layering and layering and layering. The canvases were laden with so much material that they warped and fell on their faces. I used up every tube of paint I owned. At one stage, I got bored of all my brushes, so dumped them in the bin and used a butter knife instead, slathering and smoothing anything still left to spread or yet to dry. My furniture got slowly caked in paint. I had to pull up the carpet in my bedroom to save the parts of it I had not ruined, and soon every floorboard was scumbled with a gunge of linseed oil and wax. Dingy liquids quivered in soup cans all about the studio. My clothes looked like a combat uniform. But still the work did not reveal a single speck of what I hoped it would. And, worse, I felt no thrill in making it.
Then, one night—so late the wireless in my room had reached the end of programming—Dulcie called to say that she was coming to the flat. She was concerned that she had not heard from me since getting back to London, and wondered if I had given any further thought to her proposal. I could not recall any proposal being put to me, so I stalled on my answer, and told her she could visit me on Saturday. In truth, I had no clue what day it was, and she said, ‘Darling, it is Saturday.’
I was greatly dissatisfied with the work and felt ashamed to show it, even to Dulcie. But I could not let her think that I had locked myself away for the past few weeks without creating anything. So when she buzzed, I let her in, and heard her feet come clipping up the stairs. I glimpsed her through the spyhole: she was wearing a fur shawl, though it was springtime and the weather had been mild, according to the radio. As I opened the door, she took a backward stride, as though moving with the draught. But it must have been the sight of me that rocked her on her heels. ‘Crikey,’ she said. ‘This is a situation, isn’t it?’
‘Kettle’s on,’ I said, standing aside to let her through.
‘Nothing for me, thanks. On my way to a party and the cab’s still on the meter.’ She had already removed her evening gloves outside the door, but, seeing the condition of my flat, she slipped them on again. ‘Is everything all right with you?’ she asked, rolling her eyes over me. ‘You’re looking skinny. I presume you’ve been hard at it.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said. The kettle began to wheeze and I went off to tend to it.
‘Would’ve been good if you’d picked up the phone once or twice,’ Dulcie called, ‘just to clue me in on what you’re up to. You know I like to let you have your space, but it’s been a few months now . . . God, this is an awful lot of soup for one person. Is this all you’ve been eating? A girl can’t live on Heinz alone, you know.’
I busied myself in the kitchen. ‘It’s hardly been that long.’ The tea had not been strained properly and leaves floated in the mug. I put three spoons of powdered milk in anyway.
‘No, darling. It’s the end of June. I’ve not heard from you since March.’ There was a pause. ‘I won’t bother asking about your hair. But you might want to think about opening a window. It’s like a reptile house in here.’
I was so tired of the timbre of Dulcie’s voice, and wearier still of the way she spoke to me.
‘So,’ she announced, as I came back in to face her, ‘where is it all?’
I sipped at my tea. It was gritty and foul, more punishment than comfort. ‘All of what?’
‘Don’t play dumb. The work.’ She waved towards the jumble of the studio, the speckled walls, the debris. ‘I see plenty of wood over there but no paintings. Where are you hiding them?’
‘I’ve been keeping them at Jim’s,’ I said. ‘For extra room.’
‘Uh-huh.’ She pinched her nostrils for a second, blinking. ‘Thought Max would’ve rented that place out by now.’ Her attention caught on something else behind me. ‘Well, you must’ve been churning them out at a fair old rate. Is there anything here I could look at? What about the sketches you’ve got taped up over there?’
‘They’re nothing,’ I said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘All right. I get the message.’ She stared at me. ‘And what about January, do we still think that’s feasible? I’ve got from the 14th blocked out for you, but I can let someone else take the slot if it’s going to be a problem.’
‘Whatever you decide.’ I had forgotten about the date we had set.
‘You’re being strange,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘Yes. You’re never this accommodating.’
‘Well, perhaps you’d like to go outside again and I’ll leave you on the doorstep.’
She smiled. ‘That’s much more like it.’ Stepping over a row of huddled soup cans, she went to inspect the empty stretcher frames on the far side of the room. I knew that she would be too sharp-eyed not to notice the ragged strips of canvas that remained along the borders of each frame, the verges of the images I had carved out. ‘You cut them off the stretchers?’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Had to get them on the bus,’ I told her.
She was an astute woman, old Dulcie, and she was not easily persuaded to take your word on things, even if you had not given her much cause to doubt it. That is what made her such a fine director of galleries and such a capricious friend. ‘Elspeth darling, I want you to listen to me very carefully,’ she said, turning to me with a mothering expression. ‘Don’t let all this get out of hand, OK?’ She made a little circle in the air. ‘I know an awful thing happened to you on that ship—and I will personally feel guilty about that for as long as I live—but you can’t afford to lose the plot here, do you understand me? I don’t want to see you throw away your talent over the first good-looking idiot that comes along.’
‘I’m not following you, Dee-Dee,’ I said. It was the only time I ever called her by that name and she clearly d
id not welcome it.
‘Then I’ll be blunt.’ She steepled her fingers. ‘I don’t mind you locking yourself away like this to work. In fact, I applaud it. But if you’re not happy with the stuff you’re making, put it aside. We’ll archive it. Don’t dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of—understand? If you just want to take a break from painting, be my guest—I’ll even sort you out with a little per diem while you’re off on your tour of Van Gogh’s house, or wherever it is you choose to go. But, for God’s sake, don’t start cutting things off frames and acting stupid about it, thinking I’m some sort of moron by association. Because it might seem as though you’re protecting yourself doing that, upholding the integrity of your art or however you want to put it, but—trust me on this, darling—you’re only letting it go to waste. It’s for your own sake that I’m saying this.’ And she smiled again, as though to soothe me. ‘You’re young. There’s so much ahead of you. Don’t start worrying about being the greatest painter in the world for the time being, eh? It’s a long career, and not everyone is bound for greatness. Just be you, and you’ll do fine.’
It is the unsolicited advice that stays with you, the things that people say under the pretence of kindness. I listened to Dulcie that night when I should have plugged my ears, because I was still too fragile and naïve to argue with her. In London at that time, a word from Dulcie Fenton could just as surely leave an artist snubbed and penniless as it could get them noticed, and I knew I was not strong enough to keep on painting without the cushion of the Roxborough’s money. My studio was all I had, and I was too afraid of losing it. I could not stand to fret again about how I would pay for materials, food, gas, water, rent, all the banal concerns that populate the head and stifle the imagination.
‘And why do you believe it was such bad advice she gave you?’ said Victor Yail. ‘Sounds like she was trying to take the pressure off.’ He was posed in a suede chair with his legs crossed, readying his pen to jot my answer down. Whenever I trailed off in conversation, he always followed up with pointed questions such as this, inviting me to qualify what should already have been obvious through inference. That was the difference between his world and mine: in art, it was better to remain oblique and let the viewer decide your meaning; in rational therapy, things had to be spelled out in the plainest terms. It took me the first few sessions with Victor to get used to that incongruity.
‘Because,’ I replied, ‘it’s important to strive. If you don’t have the ambition to be the very best at what you do, then what’s the point? If you aim for greatness but keep missing—fine. At least you had the guts to aim. There’s honour in failing that way. But there’s nothing honourable about settling for mediocrity. It’s the same in any profession: if I were a dentist I’d try to be the best bloody dentist in the world, and wouldn’t stop until I’d proved it to myself.’
‘That’s really how you see it?’ Victor said.
‘I believe I just said so, didn’t I?’
Victor gave his customary sigh of forbearance. ‘You said to yourself—until you’d proved it to yourself.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s an interesting distinction, don’t you think?’
‘No. Not really.’
He scribbled something down.
‘Please stop moving around so much,’ I told him, lifting my brush from the sketchbook paper. ‘Every time you make a note like that, the angle of your head changes. And so does the light.’
‘I’ll try to hold still,’ he said.
‘Good. Or you’re going to look very odd when this is finished.’
‘I always do.’ He straightened his face. ‘Would you say there’s something particular you need to prove to yourself, then, when you’re painting?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Try to qualify it for me, if you can.’
‘Well, I don’t know. It really depends on the painting.’
‘That sounds like an evasion.’
‘Yes, I’m glad you cottoned on to that, Victor.’
For once, he let my glibness go unchecked. ‘OK, we’ll come back to it.’ He scribbled again. ‘How do you feel now, about this painting you’re doing?’
I stabbed my brush into the gummy square of cad red. ‘This silly thing?’ The tone needed lightening with a small dab of water. I mixed it to a suitable pallor on the inside of the paintbox. ‘It’s difficult to say.’
‘Please, try to qualify it.’
I did not lift my head up from the paper. With the cad red, I dimpled the fabric of the strangely patterned wall-hanging beyond Victor’s head, adding some reflected colour in the windowpanes and the glass-topped surface of his desk. ‘Honestly, this has to be the dullest picture I’ve ever made in my life, and I would very much like to set the thing on fire before I leave so nobody will have to look at it.’
‘Right,’ Victor said, scribbling. Then he folded his arms. ‘I asked you how you were feeling and you’ve come back at me with a volley of opinion. If you’re not going to be sincere about this, we might as well call time on it now.’
‘Stop moving around. You’re ruining my composition.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Ellie—come on—time to be serious.’
I dumped the sketchbook on the floor. ‘All right.’ The page was not quite dry and some of the colour bled with the impact: tiny veins streaking the paper from the centre outwards. ‘As far as feeling anxious goes: no, I don’t feel anything, not with this kind of work. I could make little pictures like this all day because that’s all it is: picture-making. There’s no emotional connection with this process whatsoever. I mean, no offence to you, Victor, but doing a quick portrait of you in watercolours isn’t any sort of challenge. This whole exercise is meaningless.’
‘Ah, but you’re painting,’ he said. ‘That isn’t meaningless.’
‘I see what you’re trying to do. I get it. But, really, this is just like all the stuff I’ve been knocking out for Dulcie in the last few months—I can finish it, and you can hang it on your wall and say I painted it if you want to, but there’s nothing of me in it. It’s not art, just decoration.’
‘Can I see it?’ he said.
I shrugged.
He got up from his chair, flexing his legs, then stooped to gather the portrait I had made. It had taken me just under twenty minutes. Sliding his glasses along his nose to appraise it, he made no sound, tilting it to the afternoon light, as though it were some lost relic he was trying to authenticate. Then he said, ‘If that’s just decoration, then I mustn’t know much about art. May I keep this?’
‘All yours.’ I held my hand out. ‘A couple of hundred ought to cover it.’
‘Payment in services rendered.’
‘Cheapskate,’ I said, and he permitted himself a laugh.
He sat down again with the picture on his knees, admiring it for a moment before swivelling it round for me to look at. ‘Why did you paint it this way, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I can’t do faces very well,’ I said.
‘Ellie—serious now—please.’
I had been seeing Victor for the past six months. It had taken an enormous effort just to dial his number to organise an appointment, and an even greater determination to present myself at his office for the first time. But I had done it in the hope of salvaging some aspect of my old self, and Dulcie had been only too delighted to foot the bill. When I had suggested that I might see a therapist instead of taking a break from painting, she had responded with all the enthusiasm I had expected: ‘Oh, absolutely—that sounds like a very fine idea to me. Did you have anyone in mind?’ I had told her Victor Yail would be the only person I would feel comfortable with. ‘Well, if that’s something you think you need,’ she had said. Then: ‘Does that mean January is still a possibility?’ I reasoned that if I was going to relax my principles just to appease the Roxborough, then I might as well get something useful out of it, and Victor had been so confident that he could help me overcome my problems.
> His practice was on the third floor of a Georgian townhouse in Harley Street. It was a rather clerical environment: just an oak-panelled waiting area with an array of mismatched chairs, and then, through a doorway behind the receptionist’s desk, Victor’s imperious consulting room, where all my issues were laid bare for him and picked apart. This was a space I knew he took great pride in. Burgundy carpet, mahogany bureau (obscuring most of the good light from the picture window), blocky suede furniture arranged in a perfect L. Between the couch and Victor’s armchair was an ankle-height coffee table that held a chessboard, its ornate marble pieces uniformly placed, and the bookshelves were replete with dimly titled volumes and obscure foreign artefacts. Drab lithographs of birds and trees were hung on the walls beside two mystifying Aboriginal tapestries and the many foiled certificates of Victor’s education. I had included all these details in the portrait, knowing how much he valued them.
At the beginning of the session, he had given me a rudimentary box of paints, a brush, and a pot of water. ‘We’re going to try something new today, if that’s all right with you.’ He had invited me to spend the full hour painting his portrait whilst we conducted our usual discussion. ‘I’ll just sit in my normal spot, as still as I can, while you talk and paint. Let’s see what we end up with.’
Now, he was sitting with the results of my endeavour on his lap, asking me to give the rationale behind it. I did not know where to begin. Therapy seemed to be such an inexact procedure, like wetting your finger and circling it around the rim of a glass, again and again, until it finally rang a note you could define as music. ‘The striking thing,’ he said, ‘is that I’m not in this picture at all. Why is that?’
The Ecliptic Page 21