I switched it off the moment ‘my’ item finished. I hadn’t got the stomach for any other news. I felt cold and exposed, like a roll of film. This was how it would be to the power of ten if Ed was charged. I would be dragged out from the darkness behind the easel to become the sitter, the lab-rat under the microscope. But who would be painting my portrait? No one who was trying to understand me. There wouldn’t be any truth in it. When is a portrait not a portrait? When it’s a picture painted by someone who isn’t trying to understand. When it’s a picture painted by someone who doesn’t know you.
I glided over to the island where Nell’s laptop was charging and sparked it up. While it creaked into life, I opened a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé Ed had been given by some grateful new parent and poured myself a tumbler. The wine was delicious. It sluiced through my insides as I typed ‘alice sheahan’ into Google and a fanfare of references lurched into life. Might as well start at the bottom. I clicked on to the Daily Mail website.
They hadn’t let their readers down. Under the heading ‘Society Painter in Murder Investigation’ there was a large picture of me haranguing round-face and an opening paragraph shoehorning everything the paper and its readers held dear into a single sentence: ‘Alice Sheahan, the Cambridge-educated society portraitist, was involved in an extraordinary outburst today after helping the police with their inquiries into the death of the heiress Araminta Lyall, daughter of business tycoon Sir Rudolph Lyall, who was found murdered in her flat on Stokes Croft in the Montpelier district of Bristol last month.’ Immediately below this ridiculous sentence was a video opportunity to watch me exploding. My cursor hovered momentarily above the ‘start’ triangle before scrolling past. There’s only so much fame you can take.
The ‘story’ had nothing to say but said it at length. It namechecked my Great-Uncle Oliver, who had been i/c paperclips in some pre-war government, the Querry family firm (long since sold), Tenterden Naseby, the city broker started by my grandfather, Ed’s professional rosettes, meaningless quotes about us from unnamed ‘friends’, a map of Bristol with arrows pointing to Clifton and Stokes Croft, an OS ruler emphasizing the mile or so between them, photos of Ed and me, his from the St Anthony’s website, mine from God knows where, the tired old picture of that woman at the Dering Street party, and the Carriage Works apartment block, described gleefully as ‘the murder scene’. It concluded that this could be a Lord Lucan-sized story of murder amongst the privileged classes that could add greatly to the gaiety of the nation and profits of newspapers while destroying the lives of participants and bystanders in some style.
I scrolled down to the blogged responses below the article. Fatal. First refuge of the time-rich and perspective-poor. In the old days they just shouted at the telly. Now they have a platform for their bile. @Drizzlybriton reckoned I was ‘a stuck-up bitch who is definitely guilty’. Obviously they’re entitled to their view, though why anyone would want to share an uninformed opinion on someone they’ve never met with lots of people they will never meet is beyond me. Maybe Nell would know. ‘What is it with the rich’, wondered #modernman, ‘means they think they can do whatever they want?’ I flicked through them quickly to see how many comments there were – twelve, plus a couple deleted, presumably too rude to publish on a ‘family’ website. Only one took my side, berating the press invasion even as he or she hitched a ride on it. Eleven to one. Convicted.
A tear formed. That’s not how it was. How would these people like to be pushed and shoved and turned into public property just because their husband had combined bad luck and bad judgement to an unprecedented degree? I clicked on to another site. I didn’t want to but it was weirdly compelling. For the first time I understood why people who were being bullied on social networks felt compelled to read on. Who were these people? How unhappy must they be that they had to sound off about everything from my looks to my presumed guilt to, in one instance, what he (or she?) would do to me, a punishment the law courts were not empowered to give and which suggested he/she had wound up on the wrong website.
By the time I’d finished, tears were careering down my cheeks, of a size and saltiness I hadn’t tasted since my father died. They weren’t tears of self-pity, though I could justify it if they were; they were bigger tears for a new world in which I found myself, one I was no longer sure I understood, which seemed too complex, too violent and interconnected, one without boundaries, one in which everything I had been taught or encouraged to hold as true counted for nothing. Everyone had a voice now, and how ugly and vicious they sounded when they all shouted together.
I shut down the computer and climbed the stairs to our bedroom. Ed was asleep, breathing smoothly. The bedside lamp was still on, a copy of last week’s The Week on the duvet as if he had fallen asleep mid-sentence. I got into bed. I hadn’t the energy to clean my teeth. I needed to put my arms around an offline human being. I needed to reclaim myself and the only way to do that was to try to reclaim our love, to try to return to a green and innocent world, the way it was before this had happened. I touched Ed. I ran a finger in slow rhythmic circles down his back, his bottom, his thigh, his knee. He slept, he stirred, he mumbled. I continued, my finger describing looping patterns on his stomach, homing in, my hand gliding imperceptibly along his flesh as he grunted in a lazy male way and slowly awoke and turned towards me, pleasure cracking his face as I wondered whether even perfect intimacy could soothe the pain and loneliness I was feeling inside.
‘Ed?’
‘Mmm.’
‘You awake?’
‘No.’
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’ve been awake since one.’
‘Love you …’
‘I’m frightened.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘They’re getting close.’
‘OK.’
‘Everyone is on to us – the websites, the police, probably even Julian.’
‘Don’t worry. They haven’t got anything.’
‘But what if they have?’
‘They haven’t. They were fishing.’
‘That’s not what the trolls think.’
‘The trolls don’t think.’
‘I can’t think about anything else.’
‘If they had anything they wouldn’t have let us go.’
‘If they didn’t have anything they wouldn’t have taken us in.’
‘Pretend it didn’t happen.’
‘But it did.’
‘We’ve just got to stay calm.’
‘This sort of thing doesn’t happen to people like us.’
‘It won’t.’
‘But …?’
‘We’ll get there.’
‘What if it’s too late?’
‘If what’s too late?’
‘If there’s no there there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ed, I’m frightened I won’t ever be able to paint again.’
‘Why shouldn’t you be able to?’
‘Because I’ve become the subject.’
At breakfast, Ed was his usual businesslike self. He ate muesli with Greek yoghurt, a piece of dry toast with Marmite and swallowed a mug of tea and a beaker of orange juice he machine-squeezed himself. He asked about my plans for the day, if Arthur was in a cricket match and hoped Nell had done her Science prep. There was nothing in his demeanour to suggest that less than twenty-four hours earlier two men had knocked on his office door shortly before he was due to head off to London for a memorial service and the taller had said: ‘Mr Sheahan, please could we have a word.’ There had been no question mark, no choice, just the gun-barrel flash of a police badge cupped in a palm catching the overhead light.
In his only concession to the scrum the day before, he left via the back gate, walking down the overgrown path behind the crescent to the river. He needn’t have bothered: news moves faster than a fox and the hounds were already hunting elsewhere.
After he’d gone, I looked at Nell and Arthur sile
ntly eating their Cheerios, Arthur reading the back of the packet, Nell memorizing French verbs. It was impossible to know how yesterday would affect them or even how much they would know. They had still been at school when I was press-ganged and we had made sure they hadn’t seen the news. That wasn’t hard. Their interest in current affairs is silicon-chip thin. The danger lay in what other children had seen, or what their parents had told them. I was reasonably confident their friends’ interest in the news was as vigorous as Nell’s and Arthur’s, but what about the Internet? No one could control that Hydra and, whatever I might hope or believe, it was inconceivable someone somewhere – an older sibling, a random surfer – would not chance upon my name or a link. I shuddered. Please God, don’t let either of them see the comments beneath the clips.
And suddenly I realized I couldn’t face the outside world, not yet, and I certainly couldn’t face the crucible of gossip and innuendo that is the school playground, which meant there was no alternative but to ask Bea to take the children to school again. Bea who, being Bea, would definitely have seen the news, the links, the videos, the comments and who also, being Bea, would let me know she had through the silent generosity of her help. Plan Bea. She was always there when there was no alternative. I reached for the phone. It was answered immediately, as if she had been waiting for the call. Her voice sprang into action, the anticipation of meeting the star of News at Ten offering greater pleasure than a brand-new pair of Air-Nikes. When she came to pick up Nell and Arthur she patted them on the head as they passed her at the gate, almost as if she was counting them out – any other dead bodies in there? – gave a cartoon grimace of support and hissed, ‘They’re no better than animals, those people.’ I nodded and murmured, ‘Thank you’, but I was thinking that if I wanted orchestral sympathy or to be looked at like a specimen in a jar I could have dropped them at school myself.
I don’t know how long I sat in my studio. I couldn’t work, or read, or do anything at all except stare at the wall and the resting canvases stacked against it and wonder how or if I would ever recover the objectivity required for portraiture. All the tricks I used for concentration whenever things were tough proved hopeless. I was the one blinded by the light. If you cannot see, you cannot paint. But if I couldn’t paint I couldn’t live. There was no way to square the circle.
I could see how much had changed. There had been occasions – not many, but more than once – when I had to be called by the school because I was so engrossed in a painting I had forgotten to pick up the children. Having received the call from the trying-not-to-sound-irritated duty master, who no doubt assumed I was shopping or lunching, maybe playing tennis or had stayed too long in the gym, I sheepishly had to collect them from the man himself, feeling like a naughty schoolgirl. Nell’s and Arthur’s expressions asking, ‘Why can’t you be on time like everyone else’s mum?’ or, more likely, ‘Why can’t you be like everyone else’s mum?’ or even, on a really late one, ‘Why can’t we have someone else’s mum?’
In the end the silence and inactivity and smell of defeat in the studio were broken by my mobile. Even though it was on the metal trolley beside me it took me a few moments to register it was ringing. I clicked it on and grunted. An unknown voice, as haughty as a national institution actress playing a salty-tongued matriarch, said ‘Alice Sheahan?’
The voice belonged to Chrissie Wright, PA to someone who, for reasons Chrissie didn’t wish to elaborate, preferred to remain anonymous but would like me to paint their portrait in early July. It was, I hoped, what I needed to get me going again. After an impressive amount of cross-referencing and diarizing and conference-call-style clarification we agreed a date.
Chrissie’s refusal to divulge the sitter’s name didn’t bother me. Pre-portrait secrecy didn’t happen often but it wasn’t entirely unknown. It was usually employed by men who were rather less famous than they thought, sunset actors, fading politicians, CEOs who wanted to impress. Women were different. They instinctively understood the emotional negotiation in a portrait so they actively wanted to meet you. They wanted to befriend you. Ironically, on the rare occasions some self-important minor celebrity had refused to reveal his identity it had proved a bonus as it gave me an angle to take into the first meeting, one that wasn’t necessarily to his advantage.
The bigger problem was my inability to meet the sitter at all before we started. Chrissie’s boss was in the US for a week, back home ‘but completely hectic’ for a short period, and off again on a quickfire tour of the skittle-cities of the Gulf. My suggestion that we meet, however briefly, wherever, was brushed aside. Yet the pre-portrait meeting is essential. It’s amazing how much you learn, even if only over a cup of coffee. Simply where the sitter chooses to meet reveals so much. Do they want to come to my studio, meet on neutral ground, or on their home turf? If the latter, which is normally the case, given it allows them to feel in control of a project that is essentially out of their control – not a situation they are used to or comfortable in – do they want to meet formally in their office or less formally at home? Do they stand while you sit? How do they treat their kids or the cleaner? People assume the sitter will be wary, showing their best side like a teenager on Facebook. Yet aspects of their character will shine through, often because they are on guard. That wasn’t going to apply here. I just had to hope that staying at the sitter’s home during the sitting, as Chrissie had suggested, would allow me time to take what I needed for the portrait. If not, it could affect the psychological realism of the finished work. I wasn’t sure what I would do if that did happen, because even if no one else noticed, I would, and I was my own sternest critic. I had to be. It was my reputation, not the sitter’s, on the line.
So I ran a finger down the cement-coloured spine of a concrete-block-sized tome on Oscar Niemeyer, glanced at the postcard of the Sagrada Família Ed had sent me from a gynaecological conference in Barcelona (how long did it take you to choose that image, Mr S?) and said,
‘You do appreciate that not meeting the sitter beforehand can have an effect on the final portrait in terms of my understanding and representation of the subject?’
I expected Chrissie to reply along the lines of she was very sorry but it simply couldn’t be helped, she was sure I’d be able to pull it off, but the weird thing was she appeared not to care whether the portrait would be affected or not.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in full-on abstracts. I thought you said there always had to be some figurative element.’
Ed stood in my studio looking at a small all-black canvas sitting on the easel. He was in his suit, erect and professional, silhouetted against the open window. The air was hot, as thick as paint. He rarely came up to my studio, any more than I went to St Anthony’s. We respected each other’s workspace and I think, just then, he realized I needed my own space more than ever. I was perched uncomfortably at one end of the chaise longue.
‘I don’t believe in them.’
‘An escape?’
He moved across to the paint-spattered table and leant against it, having wiped a finger across the edge to check the paint was dry. He was wearing an ochre-lined sharply tailored narrow-lapelled herringbone suit and a cerulean shirt, open at the neck. He moved smoothly, the regular tennis player, retriever of lost causes. Ed hadn’t put on any weight in the last few weeks, or lost any. When he shot his cuffs, gold monogrammed cufflinks glinted at his wrists. I gave them to him when we got engaged. Momentarily, I glimpsed the man from years before, the handsome young doctor in a rented morning coat and golden cufflinks turning from the altar towards his veiled bride as she glanced nervously at the man walking up the aisle beside her, at her brother’s pale brow, his drenched grey collar, and I feared my love for him had changed. My desire to paint had changed. Yet standing in my studio, Ed looked as if nothing had happened to disturb the rhythm of his life from his wedding day forward. I guess if you spend your days working with life and death you learn how to move on, to shut down anything that might distract from
the task at hand. Even so, Ed’s capacity to compartmentalize was awe-inspiring. I said,
‘There’s no escape.’
A streak of remorse flashed across his face. He wasn’t as strong as he gave off. The appearance of strength was for my benefit. He took two large steps across the room and sat down beside me on the chaise longue, twitching his suit at the knee to ensure he didn’t crease it. He put his hand in my hair and started to stroke my head, up and down, running the back of his fingers around the nape of my neck. They were cold and I was conscious of their strength despite his gentle touch. He didn’t speak for a long time, just ran his fingers contemplatively around the side of my throat. I waited. There had been times before the children when we’d made love in my studio, my fingers teasing Ed out of his suit, his unpeeling my jeans, popping the buttons on my dungarees, sliding my belt out like a train, but this mood was different. Having taken the decision not to give himself up it was too late to go back on it. Manslaughter was no longer an option. This was what living with it would be like.
‘Darling, I am really sorry about this and believe me I understand what you are going through. But everything will be all right just as long as we keep our cool. I promise. They’re shooting at shadows. If they had anything on us at all, they wouldn’t have let us go so easily.’
‘Easily? Honestly, I don’t know how you manage to stay calm. I’m being eaten up inside. I’m frightened to go out. I can’t work. This whole thing, what it means, not just what might happen, it’s hanging over me like … I don’t know … but I’ve got three portraits lined up and with the state I’m in I won’t be able to do any of them.’
He took my hand.
‘You have to try not to think about it. Because there’s nothing we can do, except wait.’
What Alice Knew Page 13