While the washed-out palette is familiar, the later work sees a sharp departure from the earlier portraits. Here Blake moves closer to his subject. His paintings from this period, numbered rather than titled, are broken down into highly detailed elements. What we see is a freckled shoulder, the detail of the corner of a pink mouth, the curve of a waist, the myriad colours within a single plait of hair.
The irony is that the closer Blake moves to the girl, the more distant she becomes. In recalling the detail, the whole is lost. The extraordinary tenderness of the earlier works is also missing, replaced with an almost scientific approach. What starts as an exploration of the whole person becomes an obsessive exhumation of pieces of the whole.
This change in approach is reflected in a change in technique and tools. Blake abandons the nuanced brushstrokes of the earlier paintings for a flat, stripped-down look. His use of palette knives on the dead spaces of the canvas serves to actively separate the girl from what surrounds her. In many of these later works, it is the dead spaces themselves that seem most alive. In “Fourteen,” the bed—stripped of covers and alive in cold light—seems to serve as a canvas within the canvas. The artist seems to be painting absence itself.
The later works are much larger and possess a deliberately talismanic quality. Their scale seems a desperate attempt to magnify their memory, to fix them in time. Unlike the earlier pieces, which seem effortless, here is where you see the effort. They are constructed with resolute, painstaking discipline. You feel each scrape of the blade across the canvas.
This part of the series seems compulsive—a conscious turning away from truth to beauty. It is the fast moment, slowed down, halted and stretched across the canvas to be examined close-up. These efforts to render the moment so clearly convey the power and the sadness of his yearning to hold on to it. These canvases haunt you. The artist provides just enough pieces to suggest the whole and you cannot stop yourself from trying to fit them together.
Blake came by his skills through a combination of classic training and osmosis. He studied at the Slade in London and then briefly at the École Nationale in Paris. His mother, Mary Blake was a popular landscape painter until her death two years ago.
Kat read the last sentence over again.
Some critics have called the show provincial. And indeed, there is nothing in the subject matter that particularly distinguishes Blake’s work from countless others. It is about a girl, as it so often is. And so why Blake? Why not Castillo with his resin spheres or Xiaolin with his lurid murals? Why not any number of other artists? Greater talent? Not necessarily. Better craft—perhaps. Timing? Ah, warmer.… Story? Warmer still.
There are those who say that the true masterpiece here is in the story. After all, Blake has been around for a while. Within a short space of time, the mystery surrounding his choice to paint this one subject over the course of so many years has done more for his fame than his considerable talent was able to achieve in his career to date. Indeed, it threatens to eclipse even the work itself.
And so what of the girl? Who is she and what is she to the artist? Blake himself has thus far refused to comment and his agent, Martin Whittaker, is cagey, saying only that whatever else their relationship was, it was certainly productive.
This writer, for one, hopes that she is not real. Because if Blake invented her, he can invent another. But if she is real, he will have to wait for lightning to strike again, something that may never happen. But while that is my hope, it is not my belief. The level of detail and the consistency with which she is rendered would be unlikely without a real subject from which to draw. But even more than this, there is a sense of purity or even piety about these portraits. A sense of urgency, a compulsion, to make us see his truth. And inherent in this is the acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of the subject. Why bother to capture on canvas that which is going to last forever?
Sadly, what I believe most likely is that the girl in the portraits is dead. This would explain both the lack of aging, and the fact that in later works she becomes hardened, more defined; and his approach to her becomes almost clinical.
It is telling that much of this article and much of what is being discussed about this show is about the story, not about the paintings themselves. We are so susceptible to context. To provenance, to criticism, to popular opinion and packaging—all that surrounds and attends. A truth that the artist, or at the very least, his agent, seems to understand well. The viewers will do well to remind themselves that it is the pictures themselves that matter. Look into the face of the young woman in the Penfield Gallery and decide for yourself what is true.
* * *
KAT’S EYES MOVED down to the reproductions of the paintings at the bottom of the page. She breathed a sigh of gratitude that the ones the Times had selected did not show her face, or indeed any of her, full on. In one she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face half turned away. The thin spine of a book visible in her hand. She felt a rush as she recognized the faded red cover. It was Rimbaud, but she could not remember which one. She bent closer to the photo. She had found it in a shop on the rue Mayet in Montparnasse. The margins had been filled with small, scrawled notes from a previous owner. Messages from a stranger. She had read them as she read the book, so that the stranger’s voice and opinions had become intertwined with those of the author. To this day, she could not be certain how much of what she knew of Rimbaud was really his thoughts and how much was the opinions of her fellow reader. She examined her face in profile. Although she was entirely familiar to herself, she doubted that anyone would be likely to identify her from this particular image.
Her eyes moved down to another, unfamiliar image reprinted at the end of the article. One of the later paintings, it was a close-up of the back of her head. Her hair was gathered loosely from the nape of her neck, held fast between the teeth of a large jade-green comb in the shape of a serpent. She looked at it closely. Although she could not remember ever having owned a comb like it, a faint sense of familiarity dogged her as she examined its intricate curves. Had she forgotten?
The review was also accompanied by a photo of Daniel, leaning forward and gazing impatiently at the camera. His hands, resting on his knees in the foreground of the photo, appeared unnaturally large. Kat examined his face, its hard planes more prominent rendered in the stark grays of the newsprint.
She was still studying it when the phone rang, startling her. Even with the volume turned all the way down, the sound reverberated off the bare walls. While her eyes lingered on the newspaper in front of her, Kat reached behind her and felt along the counter for the handset.
“Hello?”
There was a brief pause. When it came, the voice on the other end of the line was flat.
“Did you think you could run away from me again?”
She recognized the voice before the sentence was completed. Staring into his eyes in the newspaper before her, she caught her breath.
And then he laughed. Suddenly, graciously, convincingly.
After a moment she laughed, too. Eagerly, gratefully, not entirely convinced.
“Daniel.”
“Hello, Kat.”
Again there was silence. It was her turn to speak. “I’m sorry … I shouldn’t have just come to the gallery last night.”
“Yes, maybe not the best time or place for a reunion.” His voice was smooth, betraying no trace of emotion.
“No, I suppose not. I’m sorry … we didn’t get a chance to talk. Congratulations on the show.…” While she spoke, her eyes strayed to the window, following the guard across the street as he approached a dark blue sedan in the diplomatic parking space in front of the embassy. She watched him stop short as it pulled away suddenly from the curb.
“Yeah—it’s all a bit mad at the moment. Listen, can we meet up? I’m at the Dorchester.” She heard a male voice saying something in the background. “Actually, how is this afternoon, if you’re free?”
Kat had stood up and was crossing the dra
wing room, moving deeper into the house, away from the front windows. How had he found her? Her name was on the guest list, but it was her married name. How had he known it was her?
“So, you’ll come, then? This afternoon—say, two o’clock?”
The words were out of her mouth and the phone back in the cradle before she registered what had happened. She looked around the empty room for witnesses, but there were none.
chapter seven
The short, balding man from the gallery answered the door. Upon seeing Kat, he paused only briefly to run his eyes down the length of her body and then back up to her face in that involuntary way some men do. Opening the door wide, he smiled brilliantly at her.
“You must be Katherine. I’m Daniel’s agent, Martin Whittaker.”
Although he stood very straight, he must have been only five and a half feet tall. He was slightly larger on the bottom than he was on the top, which had the effect of making him seem closer to the ground than he actually was. She took his outstretched hand, which felt small and soft in her own.
“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering her into the large sitting room of the suite. “Daniel will be along shortly. Do make yourself comfortable.”
Hotel rooms. Kat had always found them such odd, artificial places. She had spent too much time in them while she was working. She looked across the room. Glass doors spanned the far wall, leading to a terrace overlooking Hyde Park. The decor was more modern than she remembered of the Dorchester. Less chintz. When had she stayed here last? Could it have been ten years ago when she had first moved to London? The firm had put her up here while she looked for a flat.
The city had seemed so different to her then than it did now. Everything about her life in London back then had seemed so wonderfully new. As an expat she had not known how long she would actually be here. Daily life had a veneer of the temporary that had made her appreciate it more. At some point in the past ten years, her perspective had shifted and all that had been exotic and fleeting had become comfortable and familiar.
Kat unwound her scarf and took off her coat. Too tense to sit in a cab, she had walked from Holland Park, an alternative that had proven ill-advised, as her newly acquired paranoia had impelled her to hide behind her sunglasses, scanning the faces around her and altering her course every time she thought she saw anyone she knew, anyone who could have been at Penfields, anyone who might make the connection between her face and the face on the walls. This had resulted in a rather circuitous route through the park at a rather frenetic pace.
She was warm. Her face felt flushed. She stood with her coat in her hand for an awkward moment while Martin regarded her impassively, before it occurred to him to offer to take it from her. Once he had done so, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it, finally laying it over the back of an armchair. Would she like tea? After ten years in England there was only one answer to that question. This seemed more within Martin’s area of familiarity, as he ably picked up the phone to ring room service.
With Martin occupied, Kat moved toward the wall of glass. The park stretched out in the distance, brown and bare in the meager winter sunshine. It was an unusual perspective on a place that she knew so well. She and Will walked through it nearly every day. It seemed so close, a sensation enhanced by the fact that from this height she could neither see nor hear the moat of traffic that separated her from it. The sun was so low that the hotel’s shadow stretched nearly to the Serpentine.
Martin put down the phone and walked over to stand beside her at the glass doors, smiling a wide, solicitous smile at her. He was dressed simply, but the carefully curated materials belied what at first glance was modest attire. She took in the soft cashmere sweater, the solid silver cuff links, and, most notably, the watch. A vintage Piaget, it looked in perfect condition. Encircling his wrist loosely, it moved smoothly as he raised his hand to his chin, coming to rest against his shirt cuff, so that she could almost feel the weight of it. Everything about him spoke of wealth, while simultaneously dismissing it in favor of the most discriminating taste and pedigree.
“Did you enjoy the show?” he asked, turning briefly from the windows.
Kat regarded him with mild surprise. He recognized her from the gallery? He had been so absorbed in his own conversation that she was surprised she had even registered on him. Or had Daniel told him she had been there?
“I did.”
“Daniel is getting marvelous reviews. We are very pleased. Very pleased, indeed.”
He paused and after a moment turned and regarded her with a practiced thoughtful expression.
“Of course, all of this has been a long time coming for him. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Kat wasn’t sure where he was heading, but was uncomfortable with his sudden familiarity. “Has it?”
“Well, at least the twenty years since I met him in Paris.” He paused, letting the reference break over her. “I believe I have you to thank for that, Katherine.”
It was at this moment that she heard the door to the bedroom open and she and Martin turned at once to see Daniel emerge, unshaven and more wrinkled than the evening before. Gone was the immaculately tailored suit, replaced with jeans and a shirt that looked as though he might have slept in it.
He strode effortlessly through the room and through the years between them to kiss her lightly on both cheeks, startling her with his presence and his proximity, as his face brushed hers. He smelled like coffee and shampoo, and she laughed out loud despite herself. It seemed such an odd greeting. She wondered whether it was always so strange to greet old lovers. To have had that intimacy and to then to go back to being polite acquaintances seemed so affected. So dishonest. Although she could not think what would have been more honest.
Distracted, she glanced at Martin as he looked on, smiling broadly. Was he still here?
It took her a moment to realize that the voice she heard talking to Daniel was her own.
Was he really asking her about the weather? Was she really replying? She glanced at Martin again. Was he really going to stay?
The knock on the door signaling the arrival of room service brought her back to herself. As Martin excused himself to answer it, Daniel opened the glass doors leading to the terrace, letting in the cold air and the traffic noise from Park Lane below. Looking back at Kat, he inclined his head toward the terrace.
“Come,” he said softly. “See the view.”
Kat crossed the room and stepped out to join Daniel on the terrace, only too glad to be leaving Martin inside. After waiting in the cold air for a moment to make sure Martin wasn’t going to tag along, she turned her attention to Daniel. Alone at last. They stood in silence, the small talk having evaporated in the open air. As he leaned forward gazing over the park, his hands braced on the railing, she had a chance to study his profile.
There had always been something faintly indecent about his lower lip. A slightly crooked, surprisingly soft, pink interruption of his strong, lined face. She wanted time to examine it. To remember it. She needed to study him. To place him in a context she could make sense of. There were things that she had forgotten. Important things. She needed just another minute to get a grip on him again, to figure it out. Perhaps she didn’t know him now, but she knew what the hollow of his throat smelled like and the way his hands felt on her skin. She knew the sounds he made in the dark.
He glanced at her sideways, causing her to blush, before turning back to the park. Again, older. And again, unnervingly, Daniel.
He turned to face her again. She could see him dismissing thoughts and looking for more appropriate things to say. The Daniel she had known didn’t know how to do that and had no interest in learning. The fact that he was trying so hard was new. He looked tired, she thought. She wanted to help him, but couldn’t think what to say.
“How long have you lived in London?” he asked finally.
Although he was trying his best to appear relaxed, his features seemed to be in constant motion, struggling to avoid s
ettling into a particular expression, although which particular one was not clear.
His manner was so incongruous that for a fleeting moment she questioned whether she could have remembered it wrong. The way it ended. Or the whole of it even. Or maybe time had simply smoothed off the sharp edges.
“About ten years now.”
About two feet of flat metal railing separated them. Beneath them seven floors of hotel. Beyond them only the sky and the tops of the bare trees.
“Do you like it?”
It was as if he were reading from a script. Saying the things that people are meant to say if they have not seen each other in many years. Slipping into character, she conjured a response.
“I love it. It’s a wonderful, vibrant city and it is great to be so close to the rest of Europe. Only two hours and you’re in Paris.…”
She blushed and let her voice trail off. Paris. The scene of the crime. The repository of memory. Maybe she couldn’t handle small talk with him after all.
It was true, Paris was only two hours away. Not that she went there often. They had bought a French company a few years ago and she had been there for a fortnight handling the negotiations. It had been an intense deal and she’d had little free time. She had sneaked out of the closing dinner early and gone for a walk along the Right Bank, telling herself she needed to clear her head. As she walked along the river, seeing things that were not there, she felt the city watching her back with familiar eyes. In the glow of the yellow bulbs it all seemed unchanged. It was harder to forget in a city that wears its past so conspicuously.
She had thought of the studio on the rue Garancière. She traced the path there in her memory. Across the Pont Royal and through Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She could be there in ten minutes. She started over the bridge, its cobblestones lit up by garlands of lights. Her shadow moved ahead of her, splintered and broken on the uneven stones. Lifting her gaze, she was surprised to see the bridge disappear before her. The arch meant that she could no longer see the other side. Instead, it seemed to end at its apex. She imagined the cars and people dropping off the high curve into the dark river below and strained to hear the splashes as they entered the water.
The Blue Bath Page 9