How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  Uncle Marcello speaks with reverence about the early English gardeners who experimented with reproduction using hazel catkins and cabbages, carnations and tulips. To Annette the English surnames seem as unusual as the experiments conducted two hundred years ago: Fairchild, Dobbs, Wentworth, Miller, Morland. To make her uncle happy, she recites the list and adds ‘Marcello Tambroni’. Pinned to the wall of the office are drawings of English garden fairies, and photographs of fairies that are hoaxes. Uncle Marcello tells her he has seen fairies hiding in the grass heaps, but when Mauri sings pop songs loudly they are frightened away.

  His hands are precise and slow whenever he fixes the end of Annette’s braids with a ribbon. Just as carefully he scrapes powder from the stamen of one varietal and transfers it to the organs of a different species altogether. He re-pots. He waits. He waters. He hopes. In one of the small glass conservatories he has a laboratory of attempted fusions. They are his garden children, he tells Annette, and he loves them as a father. It is very sad when they fail.

  Over lunch or dinner, Annette’s mother sometimes makes wild breeding suggestions, many of which Marcello declares immediately impossible, like the marriage of marigolds and cyclamen, apples and limes, pumpkins and zucchini. ‘Rosaria, if you come to the nursery I will show you the correct procedure,’ he tells her. ‘You have not been for a very long time. Did you not use to visit my brother there every day?’ When he says this, the room becomes quiet, except for Tommaso popping his mouth and Mauri scraping up the last of the soup from the tureen. ‘You don’t understand what it is I am suggesting,’ she says. ‘You are mistaking me for someone else, Marcello.’ Then Uncle Marcello says quietly, almost in a whisper, ‘Sometimes we must put away our sadness and remember what fortune offers us. You are not a nun.’ ‘God gives me no options. He is the only choice,’ she replies, her voice as bitter as radicchio.

  Arguments such as this are difficult for Annette to follow. There seem to be strange currents at work when her mother and her uncle speak. They might be playing chess or a card game. When she asks Mauri why they can never agree, Mauri tells her it is a question of frustration. He says one day it will all explode, then maybe they will have another little brother or sister. ‘A half-breed!’ he laughs, pleased with his joke. Annette giggles, though she does not know exactly what he means. In her mind’s eye she pictures Tommaso as a baby, mixed with a tropical flower. There are green shoots growing underneath his toenails and in his navel. His tongue, when he cries, is a blue spotted tube, sticky with sap.

  Rosaria Tambroni prays every day at the foot of her bed, or beneath the coral rosary in the kitchen, which was her grandmother’s. She prays with intensity, forgetting Tommaso’s milk, which burns in the pan, and the coffee on the stove, which spits dryly. She prays frequently, but seldom goes to mass. She does not attend the festivals or the parades. She does not help prepare mosto under the piazza trees, or join in the October celebrations with the other women. She does not leave the house unless it is for a particular reason–a religious expedition of some kind, a feeling that comes upon her like a fever and will not leave her until she has put on her shawl and prepared herself to face whatever it is that she must face. Then she will march out, her arms swinging, her knuckles swelling and whitening, as if the skin might burst open, to see Father Mencaroni, or to inform the vendor of magazines and books that he must stop selling profane material to her second youngest son, or to the house of her sister, or to stare at the road leading to the cimitero di campagna. Until these purposeful moods arrive, she prepares tall cascading sprays for weddings in the stone room of Castrabecco, cuts silks, which she sells to dressmakers, and weaves funeral wreaths. Sometimes Annette wishes her mother would march to the church of San Lorenzo and, with her extraordinary, livid piety, which withers all its recipients, demand that the Bestia stop leering at her daughter. She imagines her taking an axe to the panel of the Deposition and extracting the evil face, then burning it. But this event is unlikely.

  Once her mother was more sociable. There is a photograph in a frame on her dresser, in which she is dancing with Annette’s father. She is wearing a bolero jacket and a skirt now out of fashion. Her hair is long and loose. They are linked severely by the hands, their expressions fierce and amorous. There is another photograph beside it, in which she is practising ballet. Behind her is a row of diplomats or honoured guests in dark suits and tall hats. Once, when she was very little, Annette’s father said that before their engagement, her mother had been to Austria and Germany and had danced before royalty. Annette wishes she had seen her mother dancing. Often she goes into the bedroom and lifts the photographs and brings each in turn close to her face. From the wardrobe comes the smell of her mother’s old clothes and her petticoats, the smell of vinegar and lace. On the table is her gold-edged Bible.

  Annette wonders if her mother will ever recover from such loss. She still wears the long black dresses that cover her ankles and fall in a gather, like a curate’s hood, at the shoulders. She communicates feverishly with God about her past misfortune, and finds no joy in living. Uncle Marcello says it is a shame for such a young woman to continue to wear such dresses. That she wears them to hide herself.

  Annette’s mother’s eyes are only a little short-sighted. She does not wear glasses, not even on the fine chain around her neck, but she has seen things. She has seen that there are great oceans of darkness in which her daughter might be swept away. There are daily assaults her daughter might encounter. An avalanche of aubergines rolling towards her in the market, or a hole in the pavement with Southerners inside, or a lascivious kiss from a stranger. She will not tolerate her daughter’s curiosity about these subjects. ‘Enough of this inquisition!’ she cries, when Annette asks how the aubergines would get loose, or why the hole has not been filled by street workers, or when she asks whether the Bestia can climb from the heavy gilt frame and move unnoticed through the street, and whether he wears the crimson wattle of a cockerel, or has sallow haunted eyes like the wolf of Saint Francis. ‘Just promise me you will be vigilant and good. That is all I ask!’

  Annette promises, and tries to do her best. But if she brings home fish with fingermarks on the scales her mother will always notice. ‘You should be more careful not to grope at things,’ she says. ‘It gives you away.’ When Mauri dances with Annette in the courtyard holding her hips and swaying her like a bell, she will rap on the window, or fling it open, and say, ‘How many more times must I tell you.’ When she suffers headaches the whole house must muffle itself, and tiptoe and whisper. Annette must go to the cupboard in the kitchen and find the tin of camomile flowers with which to make an infusion. She must soak a cotton napkin in the grassy tonic while her mother lies on the crocheted cover of her bed. She drapes the towel over her mother’s forehead and presses it gently. She hears her mother weeping. ‘I am so tired,’ she whispers. ‘I have been left alone with too many reminders. Other mothers have daughters who are able to help them. Other women have husbands who fell poplars for their daughter’s wedding. What hope is there?’

  ‘Let me help more,’ Annette suggests, stirring the bowl of dusty yellow flowers and floating stalks. ‘I know where the flour is kept, and the eggs.’ But her mother continues to weep; she is inconsolable. ‘It’s OK. Leave me alone now. Go to mass. Take flowers to Papa’s grave and tell him we miss him.’

  Before her vision deteriorated completely, Annette would look at her mother sitting at the dresser, anointing herself with oils. She would watch her brushing her hair and smoothing her eyebrows, plucking them in the centre so they became separate, and she would think her most beautiful. Before the final sickness, the blizzard that descended from nowhere and severed the nerves, there were still tunnels of sight. She could move her head around and find the cameo of this sombre, elegant woman. At the table when they sat for meals, if she looked up and to the right, she could see her mother’s crucifix, lying in the milky hollow of her breasts. The sunlight would glimmer and flash against it, like a match
flaring inside Annette’s head. ‘It makes you seem simple,’ her mother commented, ‘when you dip and tip your head like that. Are things getting worse, Annette? Should we go back to the doctor and see if he can provide some dark glasses?’ ‘Yeah. Then she can sing the Blues,’ said Mauri.

  When she was ten years old, warm drops were sprinkled into her eyes from a pipette every night. Annette imagined that the solution melted the frost creeping around her pupils, like the ice on the windowpanes of Castrabecco in winter. She would stay very still while her mother held her chin and administered the prescription, trying not to blink just at the moment the splash landed on each eye. She always did blink and her lashes would squeeze out the fluid and it would trickle over her cheeks. And they would try again, Annette looking up, her neck stretched long and her eyes wide, like a baby bird.

  Even when she could still see, there were days Annette felt unsure of the things surrounding her. The edges wobbled and warped. Sometimes she could not capture an image by moving her head around and she would require verification. ‘Am I wearing a blue coat today?’ she would ask her mother. ‘Is that a cat sleeping on the roof? Is it Mauri walking across the gardens with Uncle Marcello? Is Tommaso doing a handstand against the wall?’ ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ her mother would snap. Or, if she had a headache and was tired and angry, ‘No, Annette,’ she would say, ‘that is a dead thing, which you should be grateful you cannot see.’ Or, ‘That is a wicked sinful thing, please look away.’ Or, ‘That is the Bestia, quickly, walk on.’ And Annette would cover her face and mewl like a lost kitten as they hurried down the street.

  But at school, when Signor Giorgio came to instruct the class on drafting and colouring, he told her that her paintings of flowers were in fact very good. They were small miracles that contained absolutely the soul of the still-life, he said. He told her that her name was French, and that there was a great French painter who slowly lost his sight, but that because of this he was able to create works of subtlety and innovation. Annette liked that Signor Giorgio wore heavy medical spectacles too, like the spectacles she had been issued by Dottor Florio. Whenever he entered the classroom he would smile at her, and pinch the arms of his spectacles between his fingers, as if he were saying, look, today we are both wearing our ridiculous contraptions. He did not mind if she moved her head around in arcs and circles until she could locate the object they were drawing, or the blue suspenders lying against his shirt, or his white hair. He smelled of smoke, like a bonfire in autumn, and he was wise and kind. ‘Remember,’ he told her, ‘when there is no more hope, we shall each of us see by our mind’s eye.’

  The Mirror Crisis

  If you didn’t live in London you could probably survive on your income from self-employment alone. Enough projects come your way, you’ve established yourself as a bright new talent in the field, and there are loyal galleries. But this is a city of financial haemophilia. Rent, mortgages, Oyster cards, gas, electricity, recreation, food; it costs, even to breathe. You know only a few artists who can subsist independently. It is simply the way of it here-writers teach or moonlight as journalists, painters take civic commissions, sound engineers work in advertising, actresses pull pints and make bad receptionists.

  You like your other job. You like Borwood House. It’s not the best set-up for exhibitions, hasn’t the natural light or the dimensions of the Soane or the Tate Modern, but its proportions are decent and it has character–a late-Victorian town house with high ceilings, stained glass, and dado rails intact. You helped set the place up. Angela, your oldest university friend, organised the conversion with an unlikely bank loan and some family money. She wanted you in on it and pitched it in a way that sounded exciting and feasible. It will be a different kind of production space, she said. Imagine it. A little Left Bank. Licensed. Quirky. Eight pounds entry with a glass of wine maybe–it’s competitive, it’ll work. Come on, Suze, she said, we won’t have to fanny about with P45s any more. It’s stupid not to get a bit of security at our age. You weren’t sure she would be able to pull it off, all the advertising, the security systems, and the introductions into the notoriously elite art circuit. But her powers of facilitation were surprising. The gallery’s reputation grew, the number of visitors increasing each year. There has been Arts Council funding. Borwood has recently hosted the drawings of Schiele and Goya. It’s the real deal.

  The job is interesting enough. You don’t have to be at the gallery until midday, and it’s a short walk across the heath from the flat. You suppose you qualify as management, though this has never quite been made clear. You were solely responsible for the place while Angela was on maternity leave. You help arrange the collections, write press releases, and dress the rooms. You’re usually the last to leave. You check the thermostat, switch off the lights and lock up at 6 p.m. This gives you the champagne-diamond light of London’s mornings to be at one of the studios, or to go to the lab for printing, have a run, spread a piece of toast with butter, shower, and then step into a dress or a suit. From bohemian to corporate.

  When asked, over canapés and sparkling wine at viewings and parties, what it is that you do, you say you are a curator. You say nothing about photography, the Deutsche Börse, the royal portrait. It’s simpler that way. There are days when you feel like a fraud for saying it; it isn’t what you really do, it isn’t how you see yourself. But there are days you feel like a fraud for signing your work, putting your surname to it. There’s no getting away from the man that name belongs to, he who has long been established as one of the country’s greatest landscapists, he who is one of his generation’s formidable male eccentrics.

  Peter Caldicutt: reliably outspoken, dashing and dishevelled, a British Council-hating Communist who is liable to drunkenly piss in nineteenth-century museum fountains after previews, and who is the subject of two short BBC films. Your dad. His paintings were the first thing you understood to be art. You had no true notion of his reputation until you went away to art college and your tutors began asking questions about what your father was really like and whether he taught you what you knew. It was just his job, making pictures. Sometimes there was money. Other times there were spells of relying heavily on the vegetable patch in the garden and on the chicken coop, and a bit of poaching on the estate. Times when your mum worked two or three jobs. Only when you became a teenager did things seem easier, and the newfound security manifested in overseas travels, the conversion of the outbuildings, and an annual young-artist award set up in his name.

  You and Danny were neither encouraged into nor intimidated out of the foundation year. Danny dropped out, predictably, and seemed only to want to go because you were going. I’ll enrol if you do, Suze. You finished with high marks and applied to universities. In the acceptance letter from Goldsmiths they asked for grades much lower than the prospectuses had indicated. If you’d been Susan Smith or Jones, Patel or McMillan, no doubt it would have been different. But you were Susan Caldicutt. You were, after a fashion, a celebrity daughter. Your dad was madly proud, and oblivious to the fact that he might have had, inadvertently, a hand in everything.

  But even left to your own devices, there was not much chance you’d have been a brain surgeon or an accountant. Not with this colossal man in the foreground, who smoked dope and rock-climbed with the Earl’s sons, who walked around either stark bollock-naked or dressed for the theatre, who bivouacked next to precipitous cairns and had parties wilder than you and Danny. Not with the mysterious, rag-strewn room upstairs in the cottage, intermittently rendered off-limits by this seven-foot, wild-eyed, bereted king, and host to, it seemed when you were young, all the summits of human expression possible. Not with those vertiginous oil paintings hung in every alcove-even over the toilet-which you could stare at for hours and still never be able to say what it was about them you loved.

  There was no getting around your father. His vim. His magnetism. The stories he used to tell you, about The Scenes, Those Days, The Decade. About Picasso and St Ives and LSD. At your school he was known
as The Beardy Weirdy, or Caldicurser–the dad who swore all the time, regardless of the teachers. Had a good bloody day, kids? Give the car a shove, the fucking battery’s dead again.

  There were times you didn’t get on. Times when he infuriated and embarrassed you, was too loud and opinionated, too unmanageable–going on the radio, telling it like he saw it, being controversial, not being sober. I’m not black and I’m not a lesbian, but I like a drink, and that’s what you people find interesting about me. Not the fucking art, you ignorant bastards, looking for your industry darlings and your Oxford crew. Howay, you wouldn’t recognise talent if it crawled up inside your arse-hole. The dead airwaves. The apologies. There were times you wanted him to just be normal. To just shut up for a minute. You had your spats, your rows, and your rebellions over the years, though what constituted a rebellion when you had permission to curse, get laid, get high, travel abroad, all before you were sixteen, you never really knew.

  You disliked yourself for not liking him. You always wanted to have your mum’s stoicism or Danny’s attitude of acceptance. It was so admirable, your brother’s approach to dealing with him. Do as Dad does. Drink the lethal homebrew. Get loaded. Dance in the supermarket. Read the poetry out loud. Be unabashed, be uninhibited, be free. Join the madness, is what it amounted to. Put on lunatic garb like the Emperor. And Danny never minded; he could always go there. Danny, with his family zest and his eternally game spirit. Danny with his early weakness for booze and weed, and his advocacy of all things liberal and life-affirming.

  Even these last few years, the gap was there. Wilse wants us home for Guy Fawkes, your brother would inform you over the phone, he’s planning some kind of shindig. He’s built the Houses of Parliament up on the moor. And you’d complain, and he’d say, Hey, come on, it’ll be a laugh. I’m making a mini-Blair for the roof. He’s got a rocket in his arse. You might be the artist, but you’re also the impostor. Danny was the true chip off the old block, the apple not far fallen from the crooked tree.