Bad Things Happen

by Tim Buckley

  He smiled, then quickly recovered. “Of course.”

  “Pencil?”

  “Yes. I think it is an appropriate compromise of experience and skill.”

  He was right, of course. Pencil had always allowed me to depict emotion starkly and without the complication of paints. Simple and raw. And in the world of graphic design, pencil-based outlines or their computer-generated equivalents were the basis for everything.

  He turned to the door and waved me to follow. He walked out of the Gallery and to the storeroom door. Pulling a set of keys from his pocket, he opened the door and switched on the light inside. I followed him inside. The room developed a different atmosphere, took on a different personality in his presence. What had been a melée of junk and bric-a-brac seemed to stand to attention under his gaze.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to a pile of materials stacked on a desk. “This should get you started. And if you need anything else, just go down to Johnny Wright’s. Johnny will be able to find anything you might want.”

  Had the neatly arranged pile of paper, pencils, erasers and charcoals been there the day before, when Oran and I had been moving the great old desk? I couldn’t remember. I picked up a box of pencils. Turning to him, I asked “You had all these? I didn’t think you ever worked in pencil.”

  “I sometimes work in everything,” he said, stooping intently to brush some invisible dust from a box of brush cleaner. “It was just good fortune, I suppose, that we happened to have so much of what you might need.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, “I suppose so.”

  Lochlann left to meet a client for lunch, and I set to moving my new stock from the store to the studio. Slowly, what had been an empty shell two days before, began to take shape, to look more like how I had always pictured “my studio”. On the little desk in the corner I arranged the pencils and the charcoals and the erasers, and behind it I put a little swivel chair I had found in the store. After two or three attempts, I finally settled on a resting place for the easel, at an angle to the tall window at the back of the room. I had also found, amid Lochlann’s props, a high-backed chair carved in a dark wood, maybe teak or mahogany. I swept the stone floor and beat the old rug until its pattern emerged from under months or even years of dust.

  A flustered Pauline came bustling through the door.

  “You have a visitor,” she said, as though she had just had a Marian apparition. “A young woman.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “French, I think,” she said as though Howth had never before seen the like.

  “Hélène?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so. She’s in the reception room.”

  “Thanks, Pauline. I’ll go and get her.”

  We walked back towards the house.

  “Lochlann was in,” I said, with an accusing smile and a knowing tilt of the head.

  “Oh?” she replied. “That’s good. I’m glad.”

  “And you had nothing to do with it?”

  “No,” she said. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he said you told him I was looking for him.”

  “No, I haven’t seen him yet this morning.” She shook her head, looking genuinely puzzled. “You must have heard him wrong.”

  “Er, yes. I suppose I must have.”

  We walked back to the house in silence, and went to the reception room where agents and clients and journalists were made to wait. She was reading a magazine, flicking the pages impatiently as though looking for a promised truth that she could not find. She wore a blue linen shirt and a black skirt to just below her knees. Her nut-brown legs were bare.

  “Here he is, love,” Pauline said, reaching down to touch Hélène’s arm. “Are you alright now?” she asked softly, her voice echoing with the maternal concern that I knew so well from my childhood.

  Hélène smiled up at her and nodded.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, “I am fine now. Thank you again, you are very kind.”

  Pauline squeezed her arm and smiled.

  “Not a bit of it. If you need anything else, himself’ll know where to find me.” She nodded her head to me, and made her way back upstairs.

  “Hello,” she said to me when Pauline was gone. She gestured down to her shirt and skirt. “I was not sure what to wear? This is ok?”

  “It’s fine, Hélène,” I said, “we won’t be doing any sketching today. Just getting set up and working out what we’re going to do. Listen, are you alright? Is everything ok?”

  She nodded with a slightly embarrassed smile. “I am fine, really. I just didn’t feel too good on the bus, but that lady gave me some water and a tablet. She is very nice.”

  “Pauline? She is, and you’ll be seeing plenty of her! Come on, let’s go into the studio. Can I get you a coffee or some tea?”

  She nodded a touch too vigorously. “Yes. A coffee. Please.”

  “Me too. Let’s get the pot going.”

  We exchanged nervous small-talk while the machine gurgled.

  “The house, it is beautiful,” she said. “You grew up here?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, “a very long time ago. But I was sent away to school when I was twelve and then I went to university and then to London, so it’s been a long time since I really lived here.”

  “Why would you leave this,” she asked with a bewildered shake of her head, “ to go to London?”

  “It’s a very long story,” I said.

  “Maybe you will tell me some time,” she said from under her eyelashes with a sly smile.

  “Maybe.”

  We brought our coffees into the studio. I half-spun around and waved my arm extravagantly around the little room. I hoped my air exuded a confidence that would hide my insecurity.

  “And this,” I said, “will be our home. From now until we have a portrait that does you justice and impresses my father. Neither of which will be easy.”

  She ignored the compliment and looked around.

  “Nice,” she said, nodding her head. “It’s nice. Cosy.”

  I followed her gaze around the room. “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I said, nodding slowly, “but I suppose it is, yes.”

  I gestured to the chair. “Please, have a seat.”

  “So,” she said, “how will this work?”

  I walked over to the desk and pulled the little swivel chair over middle of the room, closer to her.

  I hesitated, then shrugged. “You know what – I’m not really sure. We’re kind of going to make it up as we go along, I suppose. But we still have a few weeks.”

  “Until the exhibition starts?”

  “Yes. It goes on for a month, so if the worst comes to the worst, we could add the portrait after the show opens. At least I think we can. I’m not sure what Lochlann would think.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you call him Lochlann?” she furrowed her brow and smiled the question.

  I looked at my coffee mug.

  “Yes,” I said, hesitantly. “We don’t have what you would call a traditional relationship.”

  I was used to the reaction of people new to our home. Friends who visited our house, who came from stable, normal families, never quite “got it” when I introduced them for the first time. Either they didn’t realise that he was my father, or they thought it was a new-age hippie thing that replaced “father-son” with “equals and friends”, or they thought I was being impudent and would get a physical or verbal kicking later. Dublin wasn’t ready for our kind of family.

  “But you... like each other?” she asked.

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “I looked him up, on the Internet,” she said. “He is very famous!”

  I smiled. Another reaction to which I had grown accustomed.

  “Yes, he is. He’s very talented.�
�

  When I was young, celebrity had not yet become fashionable in Ireland. Fame was something you kept in a dark room, out of sight. There was, perhaps still is, a secret code in Dublin that prohibited approaching or even acknowledging the presence of a famous writer or actor or musician. As students, we often went to the Queen’s Arms in Dalkey. Even in those pre-boom days, Dalkey was monied Dublin, populated by a chic assortment of rock stars and motor racing drivers. We’d often walk into the pub and spy one of their number having a quiet pint with his pals, and would simply nod our heads as we passed and toss a careless greeting. Anything more profuse was simply unacceptable.

  And so the weight of my father’s reputation was lost on me. I never heard him speak of it, and to my child’s mind, the mute, the nodded greetings offered hurriedly by strangers we passed on the street in Howth were just the normal way of things. It wasn’t until I reached the Master’s class in primary school that his significance began to pierce my consciousness. The Master took it upon himself to gently extol my father’s virtues, to remark on a piece in the Irish Times or on a critic’s review or on a new commission. Always in private conversations, never in the classroom unless it was directly relevant to our work. And although some of those classroom allusions alerted my classmates to his importance, he occupied a field so far from their world, and even from that of many of their families, that he remained irrelevant. Became even more so. Had he been in charge of the fire station or played football for Dublin, that would have been a different matter. But an artist?

  “He’s very talented, and this will be an important showing of his work,” I said, my voice perhaps betraying my trepidation. “So we better be good!”

  She finished her coffee and put her mug on the floor.

  “We will be great,” she smiled. “What will he do? For the exhibition, I mean.”

  “I think he’s going to use his work over the years to show how Irish women have changed, And there’ll be a few new works as well.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. We haven’t really talked about it yet.”

  “Perhaps you should?”

  I smiled. I was being lectured on art by a twenty-year old violinist, and of course she was right.

  “And you will do something different,” she continued.

  “Yes. I’d like to stake my own claim, establish my own ground.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sorry. I mean, I don’t want to just do what he’s doing, more of the same. I can’t compete with him, or my work would add nothing to the show. I need to find a way to be relevant but different.”

  “That’s good. That makes sense.”

  Buoyed by her affirmation, I went on.

  “And I want to be different in two ways. First, I want my subject to be different, like I said to you in Malahide. I want to look not so much at new Irish woman but the new woman in Ireland. And second, I need my style to be different.”

  “What is your style?”

  “Lochlann says I should use pencil. It’s the least complex, and it’s the closest to what I’ve been doing at work.”

  “But you don’t like it.”

  I paused, taken aback slightly by her perceptiveness, picking up what I hadn’t quite recognised myself.

  “Er, no. Not really, no.”

  Since talking to Lochlann, I hadn’t allowed myself to face up to the gremlin lurking behind the curtain, but Hélène’s blunt assessment laid it bare. He had clearly given it some thought. He had gone looking for the materials that had miraculously appeared in the storeroom. And his advice was genuine, I had no doubt about that. But maybe he was protecting me. And even himself. Resigned to my inexperience and unproven capabilities, but cajoled by the Master to include my work, maybe this was his damage-limitation solution. That was why he had gone to such lengths. That was why he had dropped by the studio that morning. And despite the undeniable logic of his argument, I couldn’t help but feel that it was the safe road to invisible respectability.

  “Anyway, I guess he knows best, and it’s his show. So pencil it is.”

  I gestured with a sweep of my hand that the debate, such as it had been, was now over. She nodded as only the French can, at once agreeing and expressing unqualified dissent.

  “And what about me?” she asked, “How do you want me to be?”

  “Well, I’d really like to make a feature of your music. It’s what you bring, almost like your gift to a family you’re visiting. And I’d like to...”

  I hesitated. I wanted to capture that lost look I had seen in her eyes on the doorstep in Malahide, the fragility, vulnerability.

  “When I saw you at your house the first time, you – and please, don’t take this the wrong way – you had a look, an almost haunted, fragile look. It was very powerful. And if I can capture it, then this piece will speak.”

  She looked at me in silence for a few endless moments. Then she smiled.

  “Some day you will tell me what that means,” she said, quietly. Then she sat up straight and regained her verve.

  “So you still haven’t told me. How do you want me to be, to sit?”

  This was perhaps the only element of the project that I could see clearly in my mind’s eye. I leaned forward in the chair, elbows on my knees.

  “I’d like you to sit like this, and in your hands will be your violin and bow. I need you to stare straight ahead. And I’d like your hair untied, falling down either side of your face in front of your shoulders. A bit wild.” It was clear in my mind, but I wasn’t sure if it translated readily into words. “Does that make sense?”

  “I think so. Like this?” She slouched forward in the chair.

  “Exactly. Perhaps your shoulders a little more hunched, your back not quite so straight. You should look a little lost, a little confused. And your eyes, wide and looking for an answer.”

  “And what do you want me to wear?”

  “A plain white, long sleeved shirt, and a long, black skirt. To the floor. Like a member of an orchestra might wear. Is that ok?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I think so. I think I have things like that.”

  I pointed to the chain around her neck, with the silver cross. “And that would be good too. It’s nice, simple.”

  She lifted her hand to touch it, and nodded.

  I was suddenly worried that this was too much, too proscriptive, that she might not be comfortable.

  “Look, I don’t want to sound like I’m giving orders. You have to be happy too, comfortable I mean. Is that all ok?”

  She started to speak, then stopped and drew a deep breath.

  “Yes, it’s ok. I mean, it’s fine. But... you want me to look sad. Why do you want me to look so sad? You think we are sad?”

  She could be so disarming, she could strip the wind out of my sails.

  “I think maybe we’re all looking for something. Searching.”

  “It sounds like you are.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I need a coffee.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The kitchen was my sanctuary. Making coffee gave me an excuse to talk but not to engage in uncomfortable conversation, to look at her but not to get locked into her gaze. If I hadn’t found another way, I’d have died from caffeine poisoning and killed her. Hélène had gone wandering in the garden and I could see her from the kitchen window, leaning on an old garden bench, looking out over the Irish Sea.

  I brought the two mugs and the pot out into the garden. She didn’t hear me approach and she jumped almost imperceptibly when I said her name.

  “Here you go, Hélène,” I said, handing her the mug and putting the pot down on the bench.

  “Thank you.”

  We stood in silence a few moments, sipping coffee and getting lost in the vista spread out before us.

  “It is beaut
iful,” she said, eventually.

  I nodded.

  “So where are you from, Hélène?” I asked.

  “Biarritz,” she said, “on the Atlantic coast.”

  “You must have the ocean in your blood then,” I smiled. “A bit wilder than the Irish Sea though, eh?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Why did you come to Ireland?”

  She looked at me and smiled.

  “It’s a long story too! And you have to tell me yours first. Why you left this place.”

  I waved an index finger at her.

  “Oh no, I’m not that easy. You need to do a whole lot of sitting before I go there.”

  She shrugged and laughed the laugh of a child that knows she’s been caught but isn’t afraid to be caught.

  “Touché,” she said.

  The door to Aoife’s story was ajar. I stepped up to it, my senses straining for any sign of trouble on the other side, and gently nudged it further open.

  “Seriously though, it’d really help me to understand why you came here,” I tried to pick my words, like a parent explaining some sensitive truth to a child. “What was it made you leave your home for a strange place, with a different language and a different culture? It’s almost a way of life for the Irish to go to London and America and Australia, but not many French men come here, and I’d say even fewer French women come here alone.”

  She shrugged again.

  “It’s no big secret. We came to play music, we wanted to play exciting music, to play for real audiences. When you play the violin, there is nowhere better than Dublin.” She smiled.

  “We?”

  She didn’t understand for a moment, then realised that she had recounted in the plural. A cloud of faint annoyance passed over her face.

  “Yes. Aoife and me.”

  And I was in, through the door and in. Aoife might have been who knows how far away, but I was closer to her than I had ever been.

  I couldn’t trust my face to keep my secret, and so I turned to pick up the pot and fill my mug again. From under eyelids that were focused on the pouring, I stepped carefully on.