Eve cast herself out of the garden, like her original namesake, turning her back on Arcadia to wander naked in the wilderness with a compliant male. This was decluttering on an existential scale. She walked away from everything but her London studio. The derelict nineteenth-century canalside factory in the east of the city was bought and converted ten years ago by Kristof when their marriage was still viable: a fiftieth birthday gift to her, who had—he acknowledged—played complaisant, though not entirely uncomplaining, geisha to his nascent career.
The building, reconfigured, was cavernous enough to accommodate her work-in-progress—the monumental canvases, video equipment, tanks of preservatives, industrial refrigerators and drums of pigment—and what was once a warren of small back rooms (the accounts and administration offices of Bartlett’s Sweet Factory) was now her home. The compact bedroom was designed by Kristof for her rare overnight stays, when work demanded it. It isn’t quite a nun’s cell—the double bed undermines that aesthetic—and for the last eight months it has been a perfectly adequate mise en scène for her affair. There’s also a decent shower, a serviceable galley kitchen, an office, a laundry room and a small but well-equipped gym. The building’s spatial ratio is just about right: 90 per cent work, 10 per cent life.
* * *
—
Tonight, having revisited her old existence—the parallel universe, one glance away, in which she still presides with Kristof over that teetering empire heaped with goods, property, friends, connections and public esteem—she is, days before Christmas, in the season of shameless excess, hurrying back to the stringent purity of the new.
* * *
—
There was pleasure to be had in exile, as Adam’s Eve must have found. Paradise, all that ceaseless cud-chewing happiness, must have been a bore, and the sudden curse of mortality would have given the days a fresh, sweet urgency. Only the stupid and incurious could fail to be stirred by the lurking perils of the wilderness. That first Eve listened to the serpent’s sibilant arguments, weighed them up and made her choice. As for Adam, he barely came into it. He turned out to be a bit of a bore too.
* * *
—
No one talked twenty-first-century Eve into this. It’s sheer accident, lucky misstep or catastrophic stumble, that she should be here—her eye pressed against the peephole, watching the diorama of her former world—rather than there, a figurine at ease in a familiar set, unaware that out there in the darkness, she has an audience. One fateful step, a delicious, tumbling surrender, and the old life was over, rushing past her as she plummeted. How easy it is to let go.
2
What is she hurrying back to? She slows down. Calamity can wait. She feels strangely dissociated, as if pacing a deserted film set, and she’s eager for digression. Anything to take her mind off this enveloping sense of horror. She turns into the long street of artisan cottages, whose nineteenth-century residents—craftsmen, wet nurses, shop assistants, cooks—once worked to keep the residents of Delaunay Gardens in decorous ease. Today, Crecy Avenue is occupied by young professionals—medics, financial advisers, lawyers—working for the twenty-first-century inhabitants of Delaunay Gardens, maintaining their health, shepherding their funds and negotiating their divorce settlements.
They’re pretty houses—neat country cottages transplanted to the city by a Victorian landowner with philanthropic urges and Gothic Revival tastes. Nancy and her dull husband Norbert had wanted to buy one. Kristof—always a soft touch—was keen to help but Eve managed to dissuade them. It was too close for comfort. Growing up should be about getting away. For Eve, growing old seemed to be about getting away too.
* * *
—
The rain has stopped. She shakes her umbrella, rolls it up and puts it back in her bag. Her steps quicken again and she realises she isn’t hurrying, against all reason, towards her future, but trying to outpace her thoughts.
* * *
—
In Delaunay Gardens, apart from those discreet wreaths, the gaudy ficus in number 31 and that nasty poinsettia, you might fail to notice that Christmas was approaching. In Crecy Avenue, the young professionals have embraced the season, indulging their children, in a spirit of irony no doubt. Fairy lights wink, enbaubled trees shimmer and, in one window, the grinning head of Santa—the embodiment of stranger danger, sneaking into the bedrooms of sleeping innocents—is trapped in an illuminated snow globe.
Eve always loathed Christmas—fake cheer, tawdry decorations, enforced consumerism and gluttony—and disabused Nancy early of the Father Christmas myth. Some of the parents at nursery took Eve to task, saying that she was “spoiling it for the other children” after Nancy became, briefly, an evangelising rationalist. The conventional view was that the more loving the parent, the more elaborate, and long-maintained, the lie. But as Eve has learned to her grievous cost, there are lies, and then there are lies.
* * *
—
She’s nearing the Tube station now and life is stirring on the streets. The gaunt high-rise Lowry House, a damp-streaked thirty-storey monolith, looms over the north end of this prosperous quarter like a bad conscience. Up there is where today’s equivalent of those nineteenth-century wet nurses, cooks and shop assistants live—the carers of other people’s young and old; the dispensers of fast food, the pickers and packers in cavernous Internet retail warehouses. Some of the women who clean the houses in Delaunay Gardens and Crecy Avenue live there too.
* * *
—
Eve and Kristof visited the block once, looking for Marie, the young Vietnamese woman who looked after them in Delaunay Gardens for twelve years, sending most of her money home to her parents in Hanoi. Two and a half years ago, just after the Brexit vote, Marie, who had never taken a day off, failed to turn up to work for three days and wasn’t answering her mobile. Around that time, a rather valuable Georg Jensen wine tray also disappeared. Eve was all for going to the police but Kristof suggested that they give Marie—after years of blameless service—the chance to explain herself and return the tray. They went together to Lowry House to confront her.
By night, the high-rise had a reputation for drug dealing and teenage gangs. In daylight, on a weekend morning, Kristof and Eve were met by children, clean and cheerful, playing football and riding bikes in the scrappy communal garden. In the lobby, predictably decorated with spray-painted graffiti, more small bikes and pushchairs were parked and a residents’ association noticeboard displayed an invitation, in five languages, to a community lunch. There were adverts for a holiday play scheme and a music-hall night for pensioners, as well as handwritten notes offering free furniture and baby clothes. This was, by day at least, no Fagin’s Den but the multilayered, child-friendly and functional “sky village” Le Corbusier dreamed of.
Marie’s flat—she shared it, she told them, with three cousins—was on the twenty-first floor. Kristof and Eve stepped into the lift, which was acrid with the smell of disinfectant. They were joined by two teenagers, maybe fifteen years old, pretty black girls, one in hijab and ankle-length skirt, the other with an exuberant Afro, cropped denims and a pink sweatshirt bearing the slogan “Love.”
They chattered and giggled—about a particular boy at their school, as far as Eve could tell: “he thinks he’s so fit…”—all the way up to the eighteenth floor, where they stepped out and turned back to Kristof and Eve. “Bye,” the girls said in unison, then they giggled again, giving the middle-aged strangers a little wave before the doors closed.
There were six shoes lined up neatly outside Marie’s door—two pairs of men’s trainers and a pair of ballet pumps. Eve and Kristof rang the bell. They could hear voices—panicked whispers, it seemed—and they stood there for a full five minutes before the door was finally opened. The frightened face of an older woman stared out at them through a four-inch crack secured by a chain.
“No. Marie’s no
t here,” she said. “Gone away.”
“Where?” Kristof asked.
“Holiday,” said the woman. Then she closed the door.
Marie had never been on holiday in the twelve years they’d known her. The following week Kristof learned that she’d been arrested on the Tube by immigration officials and deported back to Hanoi. Six months later they found the Jensen wine tray in the cellar. It had slipped down the back of the champagne rack.
* * *
—
Tonight, the concrete high-rise is en fête, a pulsating, perpendicular Vegas strip. It seems everyone here is celebrating the birth of Christ or anticipating the arrival of Santa Claus. In the windows of the lower-storey flats Eve sees flashing two-dimensional bells, glowing reindeer, glimmering snowmen, neon holly wreaths. Higher up, the outlines of these sparkling symbols of conviviality blur and merge, transforming Lowry House into a vertical City of Lights.
* * *
—
She remembers hearing, when she lived in New York, that the year-round Christmas lights decking the exteriors of slum buildings on the Lower East Side were a condition of tenancy, imposed by the buildings’ landlords—the Hell’s Angels; unlikely champions of the season of goodwill. Today, those buildings have gone, sold by the bikers, gutted and transformed into brownstones and condos fit for hedge-fund kings. The perennial fairy lights have vanished too.
In an unequal world, social ascent requires a degree of discretion—the more you have to shout about, the softer you should whisper. One of Mara’s old boyfriends, a dialect coach to film actors, once explained the physiology of accent to Eve and said that the upper-class English drawl was achieved by minimal movement of lips and tongue, as if the speaker were attempting ventriloquism. Those aristocrats never needed to expend energy on articulation or projection—their servants approached, leaned in to hear their commands and hung on every mumbled word.
Delaunay Gardens has come up in the world since Eve and Kristof first moved there three decades ago with new-born Nancy. Then, there were neighbourhood shops selling fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, household hardware. In their place are circumspect boutiques with expensive clothing, scented candles and yoga mats arranged in stark, spot-lit displays like exhibits in a Cork Street gallery.
Gentrification. Or re-gentrification. Eve and Kristof were part of the late-twentieth-century revival. When they moved in, Delaunay Gardens was a shambolic ruin, briefly a squatters’ collective, with graffiti inside and out, and, in one corner of the neglected central garden, the remains of a tree house above a patch of marijuana.
* * *
—
Near the Tube station is a single survivor of the old order. The family-run corner shop is still open, selling groceries, liquor and lottery tickets. The family has changed—once Bangladeshi, they are now Afghani—but the narrow aisles of tins and packets and the utilitarian window displays, tricked out for the season in a nod to local custom with copper caterpillar trails of dusty tinsel, seem just as they were when Eve and Kristof arrived.
Across the street, outside the Bull and Butcher—renamed the Bull and Broker—last orders have been called and groups of smokers shiver, sucking on their cigarettes and vape pipes in the chill. When was the last time she was in a pub? Certainly before the smoking ban. She’d never been a smoker, apart from the occasional hit of cannabis. She lacked the commitment. Wanda, who smoked Gauloises, thinking they gave her a Françoise Hardy mystique, was always fussing about getting to late-night stores for fresh supplies. Eve’s compulsions lay elsewhere. But she disapproves of the smoking ban on libertarian grounds—if people wish to wreck their health, let them. They pay enough tax on their drugs to finance their health care, as well as the health care of many of the sanctimonious non-smokers. She admires David Hockney not so much for his work—the later paintings are too garish, the line wilfully imprecise—but for his defiant insistence on lighting up wherever he chooses.
* * *
—
Judging by the group outside the pub, the young are still smoking and it continues to be an equal opportunities habit.
* * *
—
In Eve’s teens and early twenties, most pubs were grimly masculine and inhospitable to unaccompanied women. But the Railway Tavern became an unofficial extension of art college. Love affairs, student politics and even, it seemed for a time, global politics were determined over pints of cider in the wood-panelled gloom. Then they did their smoking indoors and the tobacco haze, occasionally spiced by marijuana fumes, was thought to be as intrinsic to the tavern’s ambience as incense in High Mass, or dry ice in a production of Phantom of the Opera.
The old pub regulars, many of them ex-soldiers, survivors of the Second World War, looked on the co-ed art college crowd with contempt—“They don’t know they’re born” was the accusation. “They don’t know they’re going to die” seems to Eve nearer the mark. The veteran regulars were finally seen off when the new landlord brought in live bands to attract younger, higher-spending customers. These were the heady days of punk, when abuse, shouted over a three-chord guitar accompaniment, passed for style. Old soldiers who withstood Hitler and Mussolini at Normandy and Catania finally retreated in the face of the Sex Pistols and X-Ray Spex.
* * *
—
This show reel of memories seems to be her only defence against a creeping, vaporous sense of fear. She walks down the steps to the Tube station and taps her card at the automatic barriers, which open obediently. Another innovation. Not a bad one. At a stately pace, the escalator draws her deeper towards the platform below, where the air is fetid as a mummy’s tomb. That, at least, hasn’t changed—it’s as comfortingly foul and familiar as it was when she was in her teens, fleeing the claustrophobia of home for the galleries, clubs and concert halls of central London.
A gust is building, a warm wind machine ruffling her hair. The train rattles past, each window a bright frame of film reel with its own starring cast and complicated backstory, before creaking to a halt.
* * *
—
She spent so much of her youth on this subterranean network, the veins and arteries conveying corpuscular citizens to London’s pulsing heart. In 1979, it inspired her first major work, the Underground Florilegium—much reproduced, copied and pirated—for which, referencing Harry Beck’s classic 1930s Tube map, she replaced the names of stations with botanical paintings.
Reputationally, Eve has been cursed with connections—to Florian Kiš and his indelible, ubiquitous portrait of her, to Kristof, even to the despicable Wanda Wilson. Fame, as Florian used to say, was a cheap trick of the light. If Eve has any profile for her own work among a wider public, the Underground Florilegium is its source. But, just as the demeaning association with “the famous” rankles—the idiocy of a public that gives esteem to a fraud like Wanda—Eve resents being known for one piece of work completed when she was fresh out of college. The licensing fees, which continue to bring in a decent income, are small consolation.
* * *
—
She takes her seat in the carriage in a daze of dread. It’s been tough to keep going, to stay true to her vision and continue to refine her skills in the face of that belittling public perception. She’s lost count of the number of times people, introduced to her at events with Kristof, have said: “Oh, I love your Florilegium!,” or worse “…your Tube map!”
But tonight, returning to the studio and to the major work she has just completed, she’s confident of creative vindication, at least. The years of struggle have paid off. It has come at a terrible cost but no one will deny the groundbreaking quality of her latest work; a departure, certainly, but also the summation of a lifelong exploration. All roads—intellectual, technical, aesthetic and emotional—led here.
* * *
—
In the Underground Florilegium, all those yea
rs ago, she used a salmon-pink dahlia to denote this Tube station. The same Marxist feminist critic who lauded her later work argued that the dahlia represented “corporeal decay and a parody of the bourgeois conformity that defined the materially affluent, spiritually impoverished district in which the artist lives.” This critic knew as little about London as she did about Eve. But it would have been pointless, and a little ungracious, to respond that the Florilegium was completed more than a decade before Eve moved to the area, that she had no connection with Delaunay Gardens back then; that salmon pink was the only colour available to her at that moment, and that a stylised dahlia was a pleasurable challenge for a young artist striving to develop her skills.
She was twenty-one, footloose after graduating from art college and living in London’s East End. She rarely travelled west, the direction of that dull outer borough where, after the divorce, her mother lived on alone in the half-timbered semi that had been the family home. Whole centuries passed, it seemed, civilisations rose and fell, while her mother remained the same, only dwindling in size, in that barren suburb until her death.
Eve was always an outsider, straining against the confines of family—“like your father,” her mother said, just before she died. That was only half true. Her father fled the family—Eve, her younger brother and their mother—only to set up an identical arrangement with his former secretary in another outer London borough, sixteen miles north-east.
The secretary, Sandra, was brash and bosomy, one of the grosser Toulouse-Lautrec serveuses transported to twentieth-century suburban London. She wore patent high heels, sweet perfume and gelatinous, cherry-hued lipstick that left traces, like smears of gingival blood, on her big yellow teeth. Sandra soon produced a son and daughter in direct riposte to her new husband’s first family, but motherhood didn’t curb her style. It wasn’t loyalty to her own mother that made Eve recoil from her father’s new wife. The woman was an embarrassment. Even in adulthood, Eve couldn’t bear to be seen with her stepmother in public.
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