Poppyland Page 8

  Jerome knows I am annoyed, and he thinks he knows why. He thinks I am helpless without him, but that is not how it is. Do I really know him? He says he loves me, though I wonder if he means the same as I do by that. He likes to control what I do and how I do it, and the love is always conditional on my fitting in with what he thinks is the right way for me to be. For a long time I was flattered that anyone could be bothered to have an interest in the right way for me to be, and Jerome made a big deal about possessing me. He says he was sure from the moment he met me that he wanted me.

  I didn’t take him in that night at the gallery in Copenhagen. I was tired and fractured by the loss of Mum, and I was bowled over by the guy who came up from the sea, Ryder. But a month or so later Jerome called me up and took me out in New York and I loved the way he made everything easy, and how he never lost his cool. Most of my boyfriends were my age and struggling to find themselves and earn a living. I loved the fact that Jerome was older; I was flattered, and I wanted something steady to hold on to in America. I love his kindness and, mostly, I am grateful for how he handles me. But being grateful and being handled isn’t a balanced relationship, and I want Jerome to let me be his equal. We have shared more intimacy than I have had with any other human being, and yet I don’t want him at the studio, and I am defensive, though he has done nothing wrong. I see him, and it is as though I am outside my body, and the man I am looking at is a stranger. I cannot imagine walking side by side with him through life. With him it is about marching ahead, dragging me after him when I want to go somewhere else.

  ‘OK, never mind the boardroom. Let’s forget work and concentrate on you and me.’

  I should never have let him come. It was an impulse of desire to share something with him, something important to me, inflated by his absence and my own. As I concentrate hard on washing up the cups in the sink, not looking at him, I realise that the trouble is that I don’t want to let him in at all. Jerome in his blue shirt, his cufflinks gleaming, his every movement slick and expensive, is making me nervous when usually I feel safe with him.

  He is by the window. ‘You’re very quiet,’ he says gently.

  Nodding, I wipe my eyes. He is in control again now, he knows how to deal with this. ‘Grace, honey, if you want your work under wraps and a broken kettle, you stick to your guns,’ he says lightly. ‘I was just checking in case you’d like me to go around the corner to pick up a new one for you.’

  ‘What?’ Pretending not to hear is easier than arguing. I pour the water that has finally boiled into the jug and carry it, with the washed-up cups, dripping, over to the table. Jerome’s skin is biscuit-brown from the trip he has just taken, a conference in Miami with other oil executives.

  ‘Let’s hear about your trip,’ I suggest, putting my hand on his cheek. ‘You’ve been lounging around getting a bit of winter sunshine on that so-called business trip.’

  He flashes a smile. ‘There has to be fun or no one would come on these trips. The next one is diving in Greenland, can you believe? It’s to sharpen our team skills and take us into elements where we are unfamiliar.’ He pulls a parody face.

  I’m laughing now. ‘It’ll be FREEZING, who wants to be familiar with that?’

  ‘I know, and in the presentation it looks as though we all have to wear black gimp masks with our wetsuits.’ He grins. ‘Look what you save yourself in this life of yours with just a studio and whatever is inside your head.’

  His phone bleeps, he takes it out of his pocket and turns it off without looking to see who is calling. He does this to show the conversation he is having here and now with me is important. I have seen him do it with colleagues. I sometimes guess that he sets the alarm on his phone timer to make the point. But not with me; Jerome doesn’t play games with me, and I’m glad of that.

  In the flat north light of this New York winter morning, I notice the splodge of a liver spot and a wispy thinness to his hair and I am smitten with a pang of something beyond my frustration with him.

  ‘Oh darling, it’s awful when we pick fights, I mean when I do, I’m sorry.’

  Jerome scans my face, his whole demeanour anxious, as if I have just been diagnosed with something worrying.

  ‘Hey, honey, it’s nothing. I guess sometimes it seems to me that you are so distant inside your head that I don’t know how to reach you, that’s all,’ he says. We are sitting side by side on the sofa now, not touching and not looking at one another. It’s a lot better for talking.

  After Dad stopped living with us we hardly saw him. Sometimes he would come and pick me up from school, but he never explained why he left, or talked about that time; he just carried on as though the strange way we now lived without him was normal. The trust between us couldn’t be repaired. It lay like a broken mirror whenever we saw one another. And all we did now was drive home from school with him which took an hour and meant we didn’t have to sit face to face and talk. My father had nice cars – or cars that I liked, at any rate, because they had cracked leather seats and shiny wood and they smelled like him, of cigarettes and cedar oil. Being with him was odd. I always hoped he was coming to rescue us. I didn’t know him any more; he left when I was six and I thought he’d left because Mum was always crying. But maybe she was always crying because he left. I asked him once on the way home from school, ‘Why don’t you live with us any more, Dad?’

  He looked at me with tear-clouded eyes, and I shrank back against the door and wished I hadn’t asked. Men mustn’t cry, especially not Dad.

  ‘I don’t know how to come back,’ he said. I wanted to bang my head against the dashboard, anything not to hear his sadness. I never asked again.

  Mum cried a lot, but she also liked to have fun. Her idea of fun, though, involved bringing Adrian into our lives. Adrian arrived when I was seven, and Mum had moved with us from the cliff-top house to Norwich. It was fun being in the city, but our school was a long way away and Mum didn’t have a car, so we had to go on the bus unless Dad came. Adrian arrived as a lodger, but that set-up didn’t last long. Adrian moved into Mum’s room and so did his collection of guitars. With him arrived a permanent smell of beer in the house. Mum stopped crying, but she didn’t come and sleep in our room any more. She and Adrian stayed up late and she sang along to his guitar and it didn’t feel like a family house should feel; it felt like a very embarrassing pop video. I never asked anyone home from school, and neither did Lucy. Dad never got out of the car to say hello to Mum, and I was convinced that if he did they would fall into each other’s arms and we would all live happily ever after.

  ‘If we could just get him up the garden path . . .’ was the yearning secret wish between me and Lucy. Mum never knew, and I still don’t know if she cared.

  When Jerome leaves the studio I feel both relieved and bereft, and wander around with my arms folded as if I am hugging myself. I send Lucy an email, but the loneliness is intensified when I remember it is not even dawn yet in England. ‘If this is long-term relationship at its functioning optimum, give me a shag pal and a bottle of oblivion.’

  It’s tempting to write her a whole long letter, spilling all my heart out to my faraway sister, but I know I am just trying to put off my work, to displace the discomfort of doing it with a drama about Jerome. I stomp around the studio a bit; unless I give up and go home, or go into town and look at a gallery, the only thing I can do here is work. My big picture is still impenetrable, so to try to fool myself that I’m not doing anything much, I sidle up to a small canvas I have hardly begun and start painting. No form grows like I want it to. I put on Billie Holiday, and her mellifluous voice floats like a delicious scent on the air, and she helps a bit, but I can only ever get the work to flow when I can forget myself and the details of daily life and reach into my soul. I don’t ever really know when that will happen, or even how it does. But the act of applying paint to a surface, of transforming the tangled images and feelings in my head into something tangible and visible is a life-saving process. I am not usually paintin
g a picture for a reason, I am trying to make sense of something I cannot express any other way.

  ‘I’ll paint you all the colours of the sea.’ I have no idea if I have read this phrase somewhere, or heard it in a song, or made it up myself, but it doesn’t matter. Something tight unclasps inside me and suddenly I know what I’m doing. It could just be crap. And it could just be a pool of blue. Making a blue with powder pigment exploding in a puff like spores, reminds me of school and the mindless pleasure of holding my ink pen on blotting paper, watching the ink well out in a gently expanding circle, creeping through the fibres of paper which in turn begin to flow with the energy of the colour itself. Blue. Limitless blue, stopping at nothing, not even the horizon where the skin of the sea meets the sky covering all. Black-blue like the cloak of night in a starless sky, or a starry night when the sky sparkles and pinprick illumination radiates electric kisses from the wide, blue distance. Of course, it isn’t the intensity of the coloured pigment that causes the ink to move through the paper; it is a combination of the absorbency of the paper and the penetrative quality of the liquid. Colour is irrelevant. How can colour ever be irrelevant? An hour of painting is like listening to music or making love – it’s restorative. I’m not thinking, I’m being. Standing back to look at what I have done makes me want a cigarette, but I don’t have one, so I bite my nails instead.

  Jerome would be furious if he saw me. It’s odd, or perhaps it’s not, that the very qualities which attracted me to Jerome five years ago when we met at that very strange exhibition in Denmark, his calm assurance, his ability to keep order in the face of chaos, his belief that he could take care of me better than I could do it myself, are now the parts of him that make me want to scream and flail my way to an escape route. But at the same time, I’ve been such a willing slave to his velvet-fisted kindness.

  My compliance lights me up inside with shame, like a potent secret. It is hot and dirty and reminds me of being eleven and letting Sandy Fletcher put his fingers into my knickers and then wiggle them inside me during scripture lessons in the top class of primary school. The third time he did it, I felt the flooding, tugging, flaring of an orgasm without knowing what it was. It took a while for me to equate the delicious honeyed sensation with what Sandy Fletcher was actually doing, as I was convinced that it was the result of something that happened to me by my thinking a certain sequence of thoughts.

  I wouldn’t dream of telling Jerome or anyone else about the fluttering excitement in my prepubescent body when an eleven-year-old boy touched me all those years ago, and neither would I tell him that now, in some twisted way, I am turned on by my own passivity, by the way I allow him to rule the roost at home. Not here in the studio. I have built a structure for my working life here in New York, because, even if I don’t stick to it, having it makes me feel I belong in the world and have a reason for being here. Without one I don’t always believe I exist. Sometimes I lose faith that the structure exists – it is hard to be convinced by something of my own making, when I have trouble being convinced by even myself.

  When I was at art school I laid the foundations for all my work as I tried to express the solid physical existence of human beings on canvas. What I found was that it is incredibly difficult to keep people’s feet on the ground. It certainly felt like a metaphor for life, and I was obsessed with the human form. I don’t know when, or even if, it got better, but at first it was like a dream, everybody I painted, whether clothed or nude, seemed to be about to float out of their bodies. They were all irrepressible. Like helium-filled balloons, they kept wanting to float off out of the top of the canvas. All the great sculptors and painters from the Renaissance have addressed this – so many painters depicted their figures knee-deep in cloud, or like Botticelli’s Venus coming out of the sea in a giant scallop shell, or surrounded by a pile of rumpled fabric. I fell in love with the fragile bones of the human foot. Finally, when I had left art school and started to paint on my own, I realised that the problem was in me; I approached all my work feeling unsubstantial and until that changed, I could paint my figures into cement bases or chain them to the ground, but they would still float away.

  So now I’ve learned that it is important that I have a routine, even though it exists not to be adhered to. It begins with the walk to the studio, calling in on the Spanish bakery for a croissant half a block away. I really like the wink the proprietor Jaime unfailingly throws my way, no matter how crowded his shop is, or how loud the hiss of the milk steamer is. It’s a moment of connection that I create in my day. Why is that such a big deal? It is paradoxical that the pleasure of being alone to think and do the thing I want and need to do more than anything else is also the part of my work that I find most difficult. No one talks much about loneliness in New York. Or their feelings, unless they have worked them into something malleable and acceptable with the help of an Upper East Side shrink.

  Three years ago, my sister Lucy talked about the clanging sense of loneliness she experienced when Mac went back to work after their first baby was born.

  ‘It was terrifying, Grace. When Mac left every morning, I heard the door shut, then looked at my house with everything I had longed and hoped for in it. I looked at my lovely baby, and then, suddenly, life was terrifying. In seconds I was climbing the walls. Actually, I started painting them. I needed an activity to stop the rising panic.’

  Lucy had laughed, making a funny story, but there was fear in her eyes. We both remembered Mum’s unhappiness, the way she crawled into our room when we were tiny, the way she cried when Dad left, and then the darkness that the drink brought when she met Adrian. What did she need? I don’t know if she even knew herself.

  ‘It is not our littleness we fear, it is our greatness.’ These words are engraved on Mum’s headstone. At first I did not understand them and felt angry that they had been chosen without anyone consulting me. Adrian had suggested them, and Lucy had agreed, and I did nothing when the fax came to me in New York asking if I could think of anything else. I couldn’t. I was frozen. Even so, I felt a stinging sense of exclusion. The headstone was erected six months after Mum died, so I didn’t see it until another eighteen months had passed, when I came back to England to see Lucy’s baby. Lucy was different, she was pinkly triumphant and seduced by motherhood to a more sensual and gentle version of herself. I held tiny Bella in my arms, and when I kissed her head, the skin was softer than a peach.

  ‘Look what you’ve made, Luce, she’s beautiful.’ I had never imagined that a baby could be so moving, or that Lucy, my sister, could create another being. And here she was, revealing new levels of competence, being a mother. Everything about her was radiant as she fed the baby; her voice was a soft coo, her gestures were all encompassing and flowing. Mac made us supper, and we ate in the kitchen with the baby in a basket at the end of the table.

  ‘It’s risotto,’ he said cheerfully, adding, ‘it’s the only thing I can cook apart from bacon sandwiches. My Italian grandmother taught me, so Lucy’s getting used to it on a daily basis. Aren’t you, babe?’

  He kissed the top of her head, but I was glad for her. It was way out of my league. The house was full of flowers and their scent combined with the sunlit smell of baby talcum powder, and an ambrosial loveliness emanated. It was delicious to be near to, and it felt as though it belonged to Lucy and she had earned it with all her sense and carefulness as a child.

  Is happiness earned? It’s definitely hard won. I saw Lucy with Mac and their baby, and I could see that I had nowhere near experienced the level of happiness she had. The birth of Bella was the moment I decided that I could have it too, and that I would.

  Some things might have to change, though. At this point I was twenty-nine, and living in New York with Jerome. We didn’t eat risotto, we barely ate a single carbohydrate, in fact. I don’t know if I liked my life then, I just lived it. We went to a lot of parties. I got into my role as the artist girlfriend when they were Jerome’s work parties. It was a relief not to be me, just to be
a cipher. The artist girlfriend is a good mask, easily worn. With my friends, of course, it was different, and no one expected anything of me, but in the art world I felt the weight of expectation and I was convinced I could not live up to it. There is such an element of the Emperor’s New Clothes in making a reputation and it has nothing to do with the work or the person. If Stephan from the rubber dress days hadn’t turned up working for my gallery, I would have sunk without trace. Instead, I had collectors and an agent and a permanent feeling of fraudulence. How could anyone take me seriously?

  I drove alone to Norfolk to visit Mum’s grave the day before I flew back to New York. I would have liked to go with Lucy, but there was no way she could move with her newborn and, in a way, to go alone was better. March mist and rain clouds gathered as I approached the coast and the sea was a mess, blurred and hissing with churning waves, blue-grey like the gulls that wheeled above it. The wind spat raindrops in my face when I got out of the car and I leaned into it, hair whipping my face, my coat flailing as I inched through the grassy mounds and marble-edged squares of gravel to the windswept corner where Mum was buried. It was the only new grave in this part of the churchyard, where the tombs were mossy and the writing on headstones hard to make out, and it looked as though it had been brought in as a prop. No flowers lay on any of the graves save hers, just a few empty containers lolling like the remnants of a forgotten picnic in the long grass.