Poppyland Read online

  ‘The left, you mean?’

  ‘Do I?’ I was waving my arms in front of me with the phone under my chin, mouthing at my sister Lucy to tell me which was left and which was right.

  Hans Stettjens was unfailingly polite. ‘Yes, very good indeed, left it is,’ he said as though I had performed a rabbit-from-hat miracle. I must say, it felt a bit of a miracle. I have never shown my work before without seeing the gallery space and the pictures hanging in it. And now I am about to arrive and they will all be there, ready and waiting for me. I was trying to explain to Lucy why it was weird, and the only comparison I could find was a bit random.

  ‘Well, Lucy, imagine if you had a baby and it wasn’t with you one day and you went to a party and the baby was there all dressed and ready with someone else.’

  I knew exactly what I meant and how I would feel; I could imagine a baby all dressed in a red satin outfit looking all wrong, but Lucy raised her eyebrows and nodded in a special ‘You are bonkers’ way and said, ‘Mmm. Maybe, but I haven’t got a baby, so it’s hard to imagine any of it, Grace, and it’s a lot of fuss to make when we’ve got to deal with all this business of Mum, you know.’

  I groaned, then bit my lip. She wasn’t going to understand and it didn’t matter that she couldn’t. Lucy has always been very down to earth, and she couldn’t understand the battles I had with Mum.

  ‘Oh well, just believe me when I tell you that I need to hang my own show, it’s very personal, I always do it myself.’

  Lucy hugged me, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, and tears were swimming in her eyes.

  ‘And I’m sorry, too; the timing of everything is making this all so hard.’

  So in the end, doing this show differently is only one of the myriad things that has changed in our lives, and it is nothing to do with Lucy, and it is no one’s fault. Mum died. That’s the thing that makes life different for ever more. And now is not the time to try to come to terms with it. I have to get through this evening in Denmark and then there will be time. I shiver, afraid of just how much time there will be from tomorrow.

  I would have been in Denmark for a week by now if things had been different. I pull my knees up to my chest and hug my shins, making myself tightly small on the back seat of the cab. I wish I had someone who could have come with me, someone to talk to. Leaning back against the plumped seat back, I flirt with a wild notion of escape, of opening the door at the next traffic lights and stepping out into nowhere.

  Three weeks ago in New York, when the paintings left, I wanted to call them back, to look at them again, to give myself another final chance with them. Shock and grief are playing havoc with my mind and I am scared to admit even to myself that I have no proper memory of Mum’s face when I think of her now in the aftermath of her death, and in the same way, my pictures dissolve in bewildering chimera in my mind when I am trying to visualise them. I couldn’t command any sense of them once they had gone, and I couldn’t remember what I was trying to do with them. I kept expecting another chance, and it’s the same with Mum. I did not expect never to see her again.

  A year ago I won the award to be shown here in Denmark in a new amazing contemporary art gallery. I worked towards the show as a date, a deadline, an end in itself, without thinking much about Copenhagen or what it meant to be coming here all the way from the States on my own. To have a one-man show so far away from my life was a bigger deal than I could imagine, so I just didn’t let myself think about it. I didn’t really have time to think about anything else either; the show took a while to take shape and I was so wrapped up in the work that I didn’t notice time slipping by until all the jumbled events that make up everyday life had loomed and cleared in methodical disorder, and when it was almost time for me to leave, my work was already shipped.

  Mum was the last big thing in the way. Not Mum herself, but the way she and I could never get on, even when separated by all the dark water of the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t any different from how it had always been, the obstacles were the same. It had begun as small mutual childhood disappointments: hers that I was so chaotic and clumsy; mine that she couldn’t laugh when I spilled a drink. Instead, she would purse her lips and sigh, and even from the beginning, neither of us knew how to say sorry. Silence is easy to live with, and to break it is as frightening as it would be to walk through a pane of glass. Mum and I had never managed to talk to one another. Both of us could talk to Lucy, both of us loved Lucy, and she was stuck in the middle willing us to get on. But she couldn’t mend the fractured bond between us. In the end no one could.

  I was all set up to go to London on the way to Denmark, dropping in from another continent just to have a stilted pre-Christmas lunch with Mum. I had talked to Lucy and we had agreed it would work best if she came too.

  ‘I’ll go and get her and bring her to meet you,’ Lucy had said. ‘That way there can be no ducking out.’

  ‘I want to duck out,’ I had blurted down the phone to my sister, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘Oh no you don’t. Just remember, you live far away and you only do this once in a blue moon. I am here all the time and it’s not always easy.’

  ‘But you’re good at it, Lucy, you always have been.’ A childhood memory floated past me containing Lucy with neat hair and clean hands brushing the cat, kneeling on the floor in the hall with sunlight shafting on to her hair. I was there, sitting next to Lucy, my favourite toy, a one-eyed doll named Blue in my arms, waiting for her to finish with the brush. Maybe it’s not a memory, just a bad dream, but I think the next thing that happened was that the front door opened and Mum walked in. In my memory I held my breath, but I doubt I did in real life.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing yet, but I am about to brush Blue,’ I answered.

  ‘Blue’s got fleas, she’ll ruin the hairbrush.’ Mum picked up my doll by the head and, opening the door, flung it out into the garden. She turned and smiled, a small, sharp flash in her eyes as she looked at Lucy and me and sighed.

  ‘Find something nice to play with, darling,’ she urged, and walked briskly past us into the kitchen. I waited until she turned the radio on before I opened the front door and tiptoed out into the garden to find Blue and bring her back in. I hid her from Mum after that.

  Lucy had sighed on the phone. ‘Maybe one day you and Mum will sort it out,’ she had said.

  ‘I’ll try when I come this time. I want us to get on, Luce, I really do.’

  But Mum pre-empted my plan to see her, and let slip the vestiges of lucidity, sinking into breathless death behind her kitchen door on the day before I was to arrive. Lucy telephoned early. A call before seven in the morning can never be good news. Climbing out of sleep I heard the phone and I swallowed, a dry lump in my throat. I think I knew already when I heard Lucy’s voice, brittle and tight, staccato with confusion and strain.

  ‘Oh Grace. Oh God. Oh shit. The thing is, Mum died.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt my heart stop for a beat too many, then race away, while a desolate bell chimed in my head. ‘Good timing.’ I realised I had said it out loud. Accidentally. Me and my big mouth. I found myself staring into the earpiece of the phone as if hoping my words would come back unsaid.

  Luckily Lucy was still talking, she knew I hadn’t meant it as it sounded. ‘Yes, but the thing is, they found her all folded up and crumpled like she had fallen off a towel rail behind the door into the kitchen. She was very thin.’

  My ear was hot. I pressed the telephone tighter to it, wanting to feel something solid no matter how insubstantial. I couldn’t tell if the quaver in Lucy’s voice was grief or laughter.

  ‘Like Peter Pan’s shadow,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Lucy. ‘What are you talking about, Sis?’

  ‘You know, he kept it rolled up in the drawer.’

  Lucy gasped. ‘Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose so.’ She began to laugh, I began to laugh as well, and somehow we were both giggling and gasping across five hours of time difference
and our shock. Even when we stopped, the energy of laughing stayed inside us, propelling the first untested steps we had to take to begin our lives without our mother.

  * * *

  The taxi pulls up in an industrial part of the harbour. The sea glitters and slaps against the keel of a dark ship and the skimpy petals on the moon unfurl to cover it fully. It is as if a fall of soot has dropped through the cavern of a vast chimney and blanketed the surface of the sea. A moment of darkness exists, then a thin ribbon of light from further down the harbour brings back the dancing movement of the water. In that unlit moment, my skin crawls, and I shiver, the impenetrable blackness of night hooking me out of my reverie of displacement. On the street a taste of salt in the air hits the back of my throat, and the damp night is like a splash of cold water on my skin. Knotting the belt on my coat more tightly makes me feel pulled together. Better. Gazing around and stamping my feet to prove I am actually here in Copenhagen, I begin thinking randomly about corsets. Surely more should be made of the improvement to self-confidence that wearing them must bring? It is true, those women who wore them long ago didn’t have to cross half the northern hemisphere, or at least eighty degrees of longitude, alone, so maybe they were never fully aware of how very good it is to stand up straight, take a deep breath in and walk tall. If—

  My thoughts break into shards. The taxi has gone, the quay is empty yet romantic, lit with just a few street lights with pools of gold glowing beneath them. I turn my back to the sea and am dazzled by a lighting projection I was too close to see before. The Stettjens Gallery has a façade of exquisite purity. Or rather, it usually does; I’ve seen photographs of it in newspapers and design books, and among the paperwork that Hans Stettjens, the owner, has been sending me. Nothing has prepared me for the reality. The strips of steel and glass and concrete have inspired rapturous adjectives from the press and the architectural world at large and it is taut and beautiful. But it is not the building that is startling, it is the projection mounted on its façade. A huge green-lit screen covers the whole front of the building, and on it, slowly changing like a kaleidoscope, are magnified images of my work. It is like a giant window lit up at night with the figures I painted appearing huge, and slowly moving one after another like a giant shadow-puppet show. The effect is bigger than the sum of its parts. No actually, it’s not. The projection is big, but so are all the parts of it. The thing that is small is me. It’s a bit scary to see such a public representation of my work, but at least it’s facing the sea, not a busy street. Probably no one will notice it. Anyway, this is the right place. I should go in.

  Gripping the handle of my suitcase, I gaze at the shifting colours on the wall. It reminds me of a lava lamp. I can’t go on standing outside for ever, but I also can’t bring myself to go inside. So I hang around a bit, gawping up at the projection, unable to make much sense of it. I look across at the harbour mouth and find myself wondering what it would be like to be out at sea and see this vast projection. I haven’t got an answer except that I’m sure it would be a lot better than being here in front of it as the accidental author. I am cold now, and I’m running out of excuses. I set off across the road and then stop again. Until I go in through the door and introduce myself, no one knows who I am or that I am here. This limbo feels the most comfortable place to be. No demands are being made of me, no expectations burden my psyche. This is a moment where I could vanish. I could hide, I could unzip the suitcase and get into it. As it has wheels, there is a good chance that I might roll off the harbour into the sea, and I would have to be Houdini to escape. Or I would float away, bobbing up the coast to another part of Denmark, maybe Elsinore. Vaguely I remember Elsinore is on the Sound. Wherever that might be. At school, Lucy and I fought like cats to be chosen to play Ophelia in the pantomime version of Hamlet which our English teacher wrote. Lucy won. It was so annoying, and I had to be Laertes in drag.

  ‘. . . Was your father dear to you,

  Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,

  A face without a heart?’

  I didn’t even know I knew these lines until I woke with them running through my head on the morning of Mum’s funeral. And now that they have come back to me, they rush round and round in my head. I’d like to try to make a painting of a sorrow. It might be a painting of Mum, I don’t know yet, but when I get back to New York and my studio I can start to make sense of everything that has happened since I left. Until then I have to go wherever life takes me. I want to see Elsinore. I wonder how I can get there. Who can I go with? Suddenly loneliness hits me, and it is like vertigo in the way it swoops and grabs me from the guts and I wish like a howl that I had someone to go there with. Within the gallery the space is white. Dizzy, soporific white like being inside snow, except for the three large canvases hung at the far end and the paintings on both of the walls leading there. There is a sense of hard-won serenity in the room, a reverberating almost-stillness that I recognise as the aftermath of excessive action. It is like a stage set, and I can feel, though I cannot see, the last dust being swept from the floor, the papers and staple tucked away in a drawer and everybody smoothing themselves down, ready for the evening to begin. The warmth of the space flares and a vein on my temple throbs as loud in my head as a drum beat.

  The gallery staff all turn round when I come in and the weight of their anxiety lifts and floats away from them to fall on top of me almost palpably. The pictures are mine and now I am here to speak for them. But I don’t want to. I want them to speak for themselves. In the silence someone’s bracelet or perhaps the metal strap of a watch hits the rim of a wineglass. The glass sings a pure note into the noiseless moment and the sound is renewing and spine tingling. I shrug off the anxiety I felt when I came in and it is like a coat slipping off.

  To no one in particular I say: ‘Oh, I love that. Wouldn’t it be great if we had some music in here?’

  There is a flurry towards me, a girl with wheat-blond plaits smiles and says, ‘We often have music before the show, we just weren’t sure you would . . .’ she tails off, looking a little apprehensive.

  I smile at her. ‘Don’t worry, you’re very kind to think of it. I don’t want to interfere with your preparations.’

  She presses my hand between hers and the warmth of her welcome is physical, too, on my cold skin. I don’t feel so stiff and alarmed now, the gallery is running smoothly, the show is hung and looks like someone else’s work to me. I like the sensation of seeing it for the first time much more than I thought I would, and everyone here is overflowing with goodwill. A boy takes my suitcase and disappears with it behind a partition. Hans Stettjens comes across from the desk where he has been talking on the telephone and we shake hands. His eyes are long and narrow like flints, and his hair is a dusting of iron filings on his perfectly domed head. He bows over my hand. It is nerve-wracking. I cannot live up to expectation, I have never been able to. I can feel a wobbling expression forming on my face and I bite my lip to get rid of it as he speaks in beautiful English that makes me embarrassed that I don’t know a single word of Danish.

  ‘Miss Hart. I’m so glad to meet you. How was your flight?’

  ‘Oh. God. I mean good. Please call me Grace.’

  He has a sweet smile and is staring at me kindly. Like everyone I have seen in Denmark, he has a fine, chiselled face and nice clothes.

  I babble on, filling the silence before it happens, ‘Outside is quite a statement of – of— Well, it’s certainly saying something. I mean—’ I can’t talk properly because I am trying to take Hans in; I am wondering if he will be an ally, and I’m not sure if I can allow myself to like the way he has hung my work, even though he has done exactly what we talked about on the phone.

  I struggle with the silence again as his kind eyes regard me, and off I go in another peal of talk: ‘I suppose it’s like asking someone else to look after your baby – I mean having someone else hang your show.’ I can’t keep looking at him looking at me, it’s embarrassing and I am getting hotter an
d hotter in the room. I tear off my coat and just stop myself chucking it on the floor behind me. Immediately the girl with plaits glides over and takes the coat.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, and repeat it as she hands me a glass of water. As I drink it I surreptitiously look around the room at the work. It looks just as I would have hoped if I had dared hope anything. Excitement begins to bubble up inside me.

  ‘Let me show you the hanging,’ says Hans, guiding me around the paintings, his hand under my elbow so I cannot be surreptitious any more. I have to look and I will have to answer, there is no way out as he is beside me, his eyes moving ceaselessly between the paintings and my face, his expression still wise, thoughtful and kind. I do not know him, I am often hostile in a new situation like this, but now I feel his warmth and I begin to relax. In a comfortable silence, we walk around the pictures, and I begin to absorb what the show looks like as a whole. I smile at Hans without speaking, I am so grateful he has not directly asked, ‘What do you think?’ and that he is giving me time.

  And the bubbling excitement I felt a moment ago is gaining ground. This is thrilling. I am so excited because I could never have imagined that all together, hung by Hans Stettjens, the pictures could look so amazing. And now I realise what someone unconnected might see and it is fascinating. Hans is clasping one waxy thumb and forefinger in a tight circle about the bony wrist of the other hand. He really wants to know what I think. It is a jolt to realise this. And he is nervous.

  I want to reassure him. I open my mouth, ‘I want to cry.’ Great. That was definitely not what I meant to say.

  ‘Oh no, that’s not what I mean.’ Appalling to say that, when I mean it is wonderful, and now I am crying, tears prick at the corner of my eyes and my nose tingles.

  ‘They look great. I . . . I can’t tell you. I’m sorry I’m not making sense . . .’ How maddening. It is so easy to perpetuate a myth, to believe your own demons. So hard not to make the same mistake over and over again. Hans is anxious, his eyes contract into small black knots, he has one hand over his eyes, he swallows. He is a little theatrical, but frankly, so am I. Oh God. The show is about to open and we are all awry with one another and there is no reason for it. Shit. I press my palms into my eyes and take a deep breath. ‘I love them.’ Oops, more crying because it is true.