The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  Victor lit the stove and put the kettle on. He stroked his beard as though trying to remove it with one hand. ‘I was looking at your work, while you were sleeping. Hope you don’t mind.’ And he gestured to the mural that was bracketed to my studio wall, unfinished.

  I twisted round to glare at it. The flaws were still so obvious.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to look at.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Well, your taste is questionable. I’ve seen your office.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my office?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘If you like that academic sort of look.’

  ‘I happen to adore that academic sort of look. That academic sort of look is exactly what I was striving for. So I’ll take that back-handed compliment and return it to you, forehand.’ He acted out the shot, and I could not help but laugh at his ludicrous expression. I was still winding in my smile when he said, ‘I’d like to ask about the ships, though.’

  ‘It’s just a design,’ I told him. ‘And not a very good one, it turns out.’

  ‘Yes, but ships. I thought it was an observatory you were painting it for.’

  ‘It is. It was.’

  I started to recount all the ways in which astronomy was linked to seafaring, and Victor raised his finger, wagged it at me. ‘That’s not what I was getting at,’ he said. ‘It just seems curious that the first piece of work you’ve been excited about for a while contains so many ships—even when it’s meant to be about the stars.’ He folded his arms. ‘It’s also interesting that you failed to bring this up when we last spoke.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ I did not understand why he was pressing this point quite so forcefully.

  ‘We could have talked about the significance of those ships, for starters, and stopped you getting yourself into such a state again.’ He angled his body to address me. ‘There’s only so long we can go on dancing round what happened on the Queen Elizabeth, you know.’

  I ruffled my hair in frustration. ‘You see, this is the problem with psychiatry. Everything has to be connected to something else. I just liked the idea—that’s all. It got me excited. It’s not even the same kind of ship!’

  ‘So what happened?’ Victor said, blank-faced. ‘Why haven’t you finished it?’

  ‘Because. It stopped making sense to me.’ In through the nose, out through the mouth. ‘There’s a fault in it. In my design.’ I tried to justify it, but it did not seem to register.

  Victor stepped to the sink. He began to rinse the meat-flecks off my plate under the tap. ‘That doesn’t explain why you’ve been holed up in this place again with your curtains stapled and your telephone cut off. Shall I tell you what I think?’

  ‘No. I’d rather you just left.’

  ‘Tough luck. I’m here for the night.’

  ‘Nobody asked you to be.’

  ‘Yes, I’m here out of the goodness of my strange little heart. Please sit down.’

  ‘I don’t have to.’

  ‘Ellie, sit down. We’re not having an argument. We’re just talking.’ He was staring at my reflection in the kitchen window. I could see myself framed in it, too, inside a sallow block of light. My face had the greyness of decomposing fruit, the kind that is put out on a still-life table and forgotten. I went to sit down on the couch. Victor had not tidied anything in the studio—he knew better than to move the things that mattered to me.

  His theory was that I had chosen to paint ships as a way of expressing what I could not previously evoke in the caldarium pieces. I did not understand how this could be the case, but he seemed quite certain of it: ‘See, it’s not a choice you made consciously. Genuine creativity, as you always tell me, doesn’t come from any conscious thought. It’s an agglomeration of things. A happy accident. And there’s no doubt that your head is predisposed to certain types of imagery. Of course you’re painting ships. You lost a baby, Ellie—that’s a terribly traumatic thing for anyone to go through alone—and it happened while you were sailing on an enormous passenger ship thousands of miles from home. Are you trying to tell me that you can’t see the connection? That you don’t still feel adrift from things? Lost at sea? All of those clichés you use in our sessions and think I don’t pick up on.’

  I found it difficult to answer him. He was barrelling on as though I was not there.

  ‘And as soon as you come off your medication—as soon as you consciously take note of what it is you’re actually painting—you find some way to stop yourself completing work. There’s this fault with it here, that problem there. You can’t finish anything. The tablets help, because they keep you from thinking too much about what you’re doing. Isn’t that how you got the work done last time for Dulcie?—“Knocking them out,” you said. That’s when you were taking your pills regularly. You can finish things when you’re medicated. But when you come off it—’ He paused, letting the point resound. ‘You get anxious again. You start worrying. You see ships and think of everything you’ve lost. I don’t just mean the baby—I mean the ships your father built. Clydebank. Glasgow. Your mother. Home. Jim Culvers. You see paintings and you think of all the ones you made before, when you were happier. In that attic room you had. Before you spent the night with that man. Before you got pregnant. You don’t need me to go on listing things, Ellie. I know you get all this. You’re as sharp as they come. What we have to do is find some way for you to cope with it that doesn’t involve me writing you a prescription. Because, at the moment, you do not have a grip on it. And I’m here to help you get one, if you’ll let me.’

  Paul Christopher was disappointed that I had to default on the commission and did not understand my reasons. I found it difficult to broach the matter of my real anxieties with him, so tried to convince him of the flaws in my design instead—I used the word ‘insurmountable’ a few times too often. From his perspective, the drawings we agreed on were still faultless. He said he doubted that another artist would be able to envision something quite so perfect for the space. I told him painters like me were a ten a penny, that he should consider approaching someone from the RBA show. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve half a mind to leave it blank for you, until you come to your senses.’ Over the telephone, his voice had even less substance. ‘Of course, we won’t be able to pay you for the work you’ve done so far. I’m sorry if that’s going to land you in any trouble.’ I told him I would not have blamed him if he’d wanted to besmirch my reputation with everyone in town. ‘Never,’ he said, chuckling. ‘That would only devalue the paintings I’ve already bought.’ He thanked me for my time and cheerfully hung up.

  Dulcie cared very little about my withdrawal from the project. While I had been worrying about imaginary lines, she and Max had been in negotiations with galleries overseas. They had already recruited the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris and the Galerie Gasser in Zurich to my cause, with exhibitions of my New York paintings organised for the spring. The work was set to tour Italy like some wayfaring stage act, starting at L’Obelisco in Rome and moving on to Milan and Turin before the end of 1962. In her own way, Dulcie was doing her best for me, and I did not want to seem ungrateful for her efforts. It was through her links at the British Council that Godfearing was accepted for a group show in Athens that summer, alongside pieces by Matthew Smith and other painters I revered. She professed to have a ‘seven-year plan’ that would see my work shown in a Tate retrospective before I turned thirty-two. In truth, I was glad to have someone like Dulcie championing my paintings, as I could barely muster a positive thought for them.

  After my recent leave of absence, as Dulcie liked to describe it, she did not let a week go by without making contact. We talked regularly on the phone over the summer, and I would sometimes get an impromptu telegram inviting me to lunch at her new favourite restaurant in town. We met in September at the Rib Room in Cadogan Place, where the sirloin was particularly to her liking. ‘Look, this European stuff is all very exciting, bu
t it’s time we started thinking about your next show in London,’ she advised me, mopping up the blood from her steak with a crust of bread. ‘Max thinks we can’t afford to let all the interest wane—and he’s not entirely wrong. It’s such a fickle market at the moment. But, in my judgement, a little yearning tends to go a long way. I think we can hold off until next autumn. Unless that’s putting you under too much stress?’ Somewhere between dessert and coffee I was finagled into it. An exhibition of new paintings was scheduled at the Roxborough for November 1962.

  That gave me a full year to compile the work, but I was so securely tranquillised by Tofranil that I was able to complete ten of the paintings before Christmas. I followed the method that had helped me to produce the New York pieces: filling sketchbooks with a raft of street scenes, choosing any that sustained my interest, and transferring them bluntly onto six-by-six-foot canvases. I felt so detached from the process. The images I painted were striking but meaningless. It was as though someone had crept into my studio to make them while I was sleeping.

  I drew all of the sketches on the top deck of the number 142 bus. For six straight days, I rode it back and forth from Kilburn Park Station to Edgware, studying the pavements underneath me every time the bus stood still. I hoped to present something of London life from an overhead perspective—an approach that had been so widely praised in my New York paintings that I reasoned nobody would mind if I kept on dumbly replicating it. The only piece that I could say possessed a flicker of artistic value was Off at the Next One, a picture that showed two smeared figures in trench coats on Watling Avenue struggling to keep their dogs from scrapping in the street. The men were posed within the frame obliquely, like two bullfighters viewed from above, their Alsatians reared up on hind legs, baying and straining at their leads. (‘All these dogs going berserk,’ the woman behind me remarked as I was sketching. ‘I’ll wait and get off at the next one.’)

  Throughout this period, I met once a week with Victor Yail in Harley Street. We spent a long time weeding through my thoughts, trying to define the exact point at which the mural work had started to elude me. It was not necessarily his recommendation that I withdraw from the project: ‘But my inkling is, if you finish it while you’re medicated, you’re always going to view it as a compromise. What we want is for you to reach a stage where you can finish it to your satisfaction, without the need for drugs at all.’ He was right. The mural had to mean something. I did not want it to be another piece of work that I could not be proud to stand beside. There had to be one painting I refused to sacrifice, even if I never found the strength to complete it.

  Victor’s way of helping me was to get me to address the issues he believed were causing my anxiety. We spent several sessions talking through the episode in the caldarium, my night with Wilfred Searle, my feelings about Jim Culvers, and my childhood in Clydebank—all with no particular outcome, apart from the vague guilt that comes from sharing secrets with a stranger. There were some days when I knew Victor was just grasping at the ether, trying to make associations between things that had no reason to be linked. At other times, he seemed able to locate thoughts inside my head that I did not even realise were hiding there. ‘What about Searle?’ he asked me, during one of our first sessions back. ‘Do you think he would’ve been relieved?’

  ‘I’m sure he would’ve thrown himself a party.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was that fair, do you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  Victor gave a little hum. ‘And how about you? Were you relieved?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was a very long silence. I picked the paint from the creases of my knuckles. ‘I can’t say I wasn’t at the time. But I don’t feel that way about it now.’

  ‘Where did you get the pennyroyal?’

  ‘From Dulcie.’

  ‘Yes, but where did she get it?’

  ‘She said from a Chinese woman somewhere. Portobello, I think.’

  ‘I see.’ Victor inched forward, setting down his notepad. ‘Do you think you’d like to have children in the future?’

  I shrugged. ‘I can live without them. I’ve lived without other things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Love, I suppose. Intimacy. Affection.’

  ‘It’s not too late for that. You’re young.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve chosen this instead.’

  ‘Therapy?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Art.’

  Session after session, we talked this way. Every Tuesday afternoon, I would put down my paintbrush, throw on my coat, and hail a cab to Harley Street. I would traipse up the stairs to Victor’s office, nod hello to his secretary, and wait for him to come and wave me in. And he would sit me down in my regular chair with my regular blue cushion to pick up our discussion from the session before. We talked a great deal about my apathy towards the new paintings. He wanted to know about every stage of their creation. For a time, it almost seemed that we were painting them together.

  Then, one day, I arrived at Victor’s practice to find it adorned in Christmas tinsel. He was standing at the apex of a ladder in the waiting area, hanging a white paper snowflake from the light fixture. ‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘What do you think of the decorations?’

  ‘They’ll do.’

  ‘Jonathan made this one at school.’ The snowflake swung and hit his cheek. ‘Good to know they aren’t wasting any class time on algebra and elocution.’

  ‘It might help his geometry a bit,’ I said.

  Victor laughed. He stepped down from the ladder and passed his secretary the roll of tape he had been using. Looking up at the snowflake, he said, ‘That should just about hold, I think.’ And he turned to me, patting his sides. ‘All right, Miss Conroy. Shall we?’

  As soon as we got settled in the consulting room, I began to tell him all about the painting I had started working on that morning—how I knew that Dulcie was going to think it was the best piece in the show. ‘It’s just three old women sitting on a bench with a few pigeons streaking past them in a blur,’ I said. ‘It’s about the most boring thing I’ve ever done, but obviously that means Dulcie’s going to love it.’

  ‘I wonder sometimes if you’re being a little hard on her.’

  This surprised me. ‘Hmm.’ I pretended to scribble a note on the armrest. ‘Would you care to qualify that for me, Victor?’

  His face twitched in acknowledgement of my clever-cleverness, but he did not smile. ‘You know I’m not Dulcie’s biggest supporter, but she’s really come through for you in the last few years. Don’t forget that.’

  I stayed quiet, heeding his sermon.

  Victor got up and went to his bookshelves. ‘What are your plans for Christmas?’ he asked, his back to me. ‘Will you be visiting your parents?’

  ‘They want me to,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure I can face the journey.’

  ‘How long is it on the train?’

  ‘About six hours.’

  ‘Well, if you can’t put yourself out for your parents, then who can you do it for? I’d like to think Jonathan will make the effort for me when I’m in my dotage.’

  ‘I take it you’ll be visiting your folks this year, then?’

  ‘I’ll put some flowers on their graves, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, I’m—sorry about that.’

  He did not give this any further credence. Instead, he came and stood beside my chair with a set of magazines. As he dropped them on the coffee table, the pieces on his fancy chessboard rattled. ‘We’re going to start you on an exercise today,’ he said, peering down at me. ‘It’s something I’d like you to keep working on over the holidays, until I get back.’

  The thought of him leaving brought me a jolt of panic. ‘You’re going somewhere?’

  ‘Just for a couple of weeks. Seeing relatives in Kent, then back to the States again. I’m delivering a paper.’

  ‘So I won’t see you until the new year?’


  He shook his head. ‘Let’s not worry about that for now. This exercise will help. You’ll hardly miss me.’ On the coffee table, he fanned out the magazines. The covers were marigold-yellow with decorated borders: National Geographic. ‘Every time I’m in the States, they have these in my hotel room. I must have a full set by now. Take a look.’

  I picked up a copy. June 1957. The inside pages were mostly colour photographs of strange foreign landscapes: the Grand Canal in Venice; tourists camping in the Black Forest; rhododendron pastures in Roan Mountain, Tennessee. The November 1958 issue featured illustrated articles—The Booming Sport of Water Skiing, The Emperor’s Private Garden: Kashmir—and maps with accompanying images: The Arab World: A Story in Pictures. I had seen a magazine just like it in the first-class lounge when I was sailing to New York.

  ‘The pictures are wonderful, aren’t they?’ Victor said.

  I nodded.

  ‘My favourite is January ’57—an expedition through the fjords in Norway. The stillness is incredible. I find myself going back to that one now and again, when things get hectic. Helps me relax.’

  ‘You should go and see it for yourself,’ I said. ‘Take a trip.’

  ‘I almost went with Mandy a few years ago. But, quite honestly, I prefer to look at the pictures. If I actually went there, I think I would spoil it.’ He moved back to his armchair, leaving me to browse the covers of other editions. There were so many articles, so many places I had never seen before:

  Year of Discovery Opens in Antarctica