Eve was in her teens when her parents divorced, though the dress rehearsal ran for years—the shouting and tears, the long sulks in which she and her brother were carrier pigeons, conveying messages between two silent encampments before battle resumed. She was relieved when her father walked out of the family home for the last time, and if her mother retreated to bed, sobbing and railing for weeks on end, Eve barely noticed. She was already out of the door herself, with school—she was a formidably focused pupil—her Saturday job in a record shop, her boyfriend, and the attractions of London; she was constantly travelling eastwards to the city’s nucleus.
Once at college, she extended her territory further east and north (though rarely as far as her father’s new home). The outer western and northern suburbs were only scantily represented in the Florilegium and the south of the city was a blank, represented on her map with the words “Terra Incognita.” And so it still was.
She used to think of travel as the necessary condition of a fully realised life, with a direct correlation between distance covered and knowledge acquired. She was disabused early, with brief excursions on the hippy trail, by the number of dimwits she met hitching across Europe to Greece, wandering India, millionaires compared to the locals, flamboyantly barefoot and searching for selves that weren’t, in the end, worth finding, in that solipsistic transhumance of privileged youth. “We are stardust, we are golden…”
She wanted grit not glitter, just as music segued from jangly acoustic introspection and bombastic stadium rock to punk—raw and, it seemed at the time, piercingly authentic. She took off for New York, hungry for transformative urban experience, keen to push boundaries, fuelled by generic rage and convinced that transplantation would make her a better artist. But the experiment produced limited creative results; its chief value lay in putting distance, psychically and geographically, between her and her family. It also, she sees now, put her safely beyond the reach of Florian Kiš.
Later, as Plus One, the trailing spouse of a successful husband, there were trips insulated by luxury—first-class travel, five-star hotels—all curiously diminishing to her sense of self, all interchangeable in memory. Sometimes, she wondered if she was going mad, a patronised patient in a secure psychiatric facility with 1,000 thread-count bedlinen and a nightly pillow chocolate.
Now she feels her focus shrinking, homing in on childhood’s delight in the proximate and miniature, in the quiet thrill of small steps, carefully observed. The protective curl of a petal, the gentle arc of filament and anther, the fat thrust of the pistil and its glans-like stamen. There’s wisdom to be found here, too.
What flower might she use to replace the dahlia in an updated Florilegium? Not magnolia. That was already taken by the cheerless suburb of her childhood. A rusty chrysanthemum—the most lifeless bloom, native of garage forecourt and hospice? Coarse kniphofia, red-hot poker, with its fiery spikes? Then it comes to her and she smiles. Of course, the flaring tongues of poinsettia. The vulgar plant must have been his lover’s choice. Kristof has better taste than that. What will it be next year, once the girl is truly entrenched? Blinking fairy lights and a shimmering nativity tableau?
* * *
—
Tonight, the train is bearing Eve east again, towards the studio—she resists the word “home.” She can’t bend her mind to the horrors that lie ahead. Instead, she steers her thoughts back, forty years ago, when she represented the studio’s nearest Tube station, Stratford, in her Underground Florilegium with a sweet violet: “referencing,” one critic absurdly stated, “the bard of the other Stratford, 130 miles west on the River Avon—‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.’ ”
Then, the studio would still have been a factory, belching sugar-scented smoke from a Heath Robinson arrangement of tubes and funnels, disgorging, on long lines of rubber belts supervised by workers in overalls and hairnets, tooth-corroding confections for the nation’s young. Eve had seen the archive photographs. Now the factory is silent, transformed into an austere temple of art; her sanctuary, a rebuke to greed, mediocrity and the season’s ostentatious clichés.
3
She closes her eyes, lulled like a baby in a cradle, nightmares held at bay by the gentle swaying of the Tube carriage.
* * *
—
In February this year, two months before her show at the Sigmoid Gallery, a colour supplement journalist interviewing Eve in the studio observed that, for a painter of nature, “there isn’t much nature around.” Certainly, there was the current focus, the blaring twin klaxons of scarlet hippeastrum in a zinc pot, facing their giant mirror image, oil on canvas, leaning against the east wall. But the visitor gestured towards the glass and rusting steel, exposed brick and bare light bulbs; the teams of assistants self-importantly wrangling canvases, shifting ladders, arranging trailing wires, wheeling trolleys stacked with tubes of paints and jars of brushes, manoeuvring cameras; the computer and printers; vats of gesso, linseed oil, turpentine and preserving fluid, the microscope and magnifying glass; and the trays of dissecting tools set out on the long oak refectory table which bisected the room. Outside, through glazed triple-height windows, the canal gleamed with its viscous petroleum patina in the morning light.
“Not the natural habitat of a botanical artist,” he said. Eve fixed him with one of her stares and said quietly: “Really?”
She loathed the designation “botanical artist” almost as much as she loathed that other reductive term: “flower painter.” What’s wrong with “artist”? The journalist later wrote: “At that moment, I felt eviscerated, a subject of the artist’s cold scrutiny. Sepal, stamen, pistil…pinned, from seed to senescence, in a single forensic glance.”
Six months later, in August, all but one of the assistants had been banished. And only the Gerstein curator, Ines Alvaro, a brisk, importuning young woman who was organising Eve’s big New York retrospective, and Hans, Eve’s dealer, owner of the Rieger Gallery in Cork Street, would be admitted to the studio. By invitation only.
Ines had her own agenda and it was strictly business; the retrospective would be as much about building the curator’s reputation as it would be about celebrating the work of Eve Laing. Hans, in his autumn-hued tweed suits, blinking behind tortoiseshell-framed glasses, never pried. If he had any curiosity about Eve’s life, he never displayed it, and if ever some intimate detail was revealed, he would make a moue of distaste, take out his paisley silk handkerchief and apply it to the corners of his mouth. Prurience was kitsch. For Hans Rieger, as for Eve, the work was the thing.
* * *
—
At the next station, a young couple, teenagers, step into the carriage and slump on the seat opposite her, their arms linked, the girl’s head resting on the boy’s shoulder. Young immortals, confident in their beauty and love, oblivious of the hell that lies ahead.
* * *
—
Eve thinks again of her own first boyfriend. Memories of that time of stumbling innocence have been haunting her lately, like a snatch of a corny song she can’t get out of her head. An earworm. Only this worm burrows into the soul.
When Eve first met him at a weekend art fair, they were both sixteen, still at school and still virgins, though they affected a swaggering worldliness that suggested otherwise. They were attracted, in that drab suburb, by each other’s tentative maverick style. His army great-coat was too big for his lanky frame and his narrow feet were cartoonishly elongated by platform boots. She was a tomboy rocker, eyes ringed in sooty black, wearing a thrift-store leather jacket and patched denim.
They both had Saturday jobs—he waited tables in his father’s restaurant, she worked at the record shop—but they would spend Sundays together roaming London’s galleries and museums. It was, she realises now, an inchoate yearning for grandeur that took them on regular pilgrimages to the National Gallery, the Tate, the V&A
, the Geffrye Museum, the Museum of Childhood (two cool teenagers faking an anthropologist’s interest, as if their own childhoods were a distant country), the Wallace Collection (he loved the suits of armour; she feigned interest, though she preferred the Dutch still lifes).
They looked in the windows of fashionable boutiques, closed in those nominally God-fearing days, browsed street markets, went to the cinema and, when they could afford it, to rock concerts—once they’d paid for fares and tickets, they’d blown their budget and would share a single Coke or a juice, making it last all evening. Sometimes, they went to the Albert Hall—against the grain of their generation—and, stunned with pleasure, sat in the cheap seats to hear the big symphonies. More grandeur. Then he would travel with her on the Tube and walk her to her doorstep before getting the Underground back to his own family home, five stops away. Such quaint gallantry. The most direct route to her house from the station took them through a large municipal park. When they started seeing each other it was winter and the park closed early. He would help her climb over the railings and, rather than risk the embarrassment of discovery in the porch of the family home, they would have their long farewell kiss under a magnolia tree at the park’s northern exit before squeezing through a gap in the locked iron gates for a more formal farewell at her front door.
At first, their kisses were awkward under the bare branches of the tree. She knew what they were meant to do, or at least she thought she knew, but what exactly was she meant to feel? In the weeks that followed, small furry buds burst through twig tips, pale green shoots split grey bark, and leaves began their slow unfurling as the couple moved on to a ritual of mild fondling and she let him massage her breasts through her coat. It was an odd sensation, this urgent pummelling. She wasn’t sure how to respond.
Later, she sat with him in the back row of the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square and endured the same routine during a showing of Emmanuelle. She was mortified and repelled by the film—so much moist pink flesh, such animal sounds, funny when they weren’t frightening—even as she submitted to her boyfriend’s clammy kisses and kneading hands.
By the time the magnolia was coming into flower, the farewell rite was extended. He unbuttoned her coat and blouse, insinuated his hands under her bra and squeezed her breasts, skin on skin, as if testing fruit in a greengrocer’s. His hands were cold and she tensed herself to avoid flinching. Soon he was pressing for more. She was ashamed of her innocence and knew she must submit, and pretend to enjoy her submission, if she was to attain full maturity. She learned from more worldly classmates—girls who arrived in school each Monday with fading love bites on their necks—that if you wanted a boyfriend, and all the freedom and independence that entailed, this was the bargain.
And so, under a full moon, beneath the tree’s flushed pink candelabra, each thrusting bloom a fat spear tip, he guided her hand towards his zip. The layer of fabric beneath was parted and his penis, another pink bud, thick and fleshy, was unleashed. His muffled moans grew louder as she touched its silky heft. She knew, now, what to expect—she’d read the books, heard the accounts—but when he climaxed noisily, coating her hand with sticky warmth, she retched.
* * *
—
She sits on the Tube, lost in memory, eyes resting on the couple opposite. The girl glances up and returns Eve’s gaze with a stare of frank contempt. Eve parries with a withering look of her own. The young are no match for the Gorgon glares of the old. The girl turns away and nestles deeper into the arm of her oblivious lover.
* * *
—
It took practice, sex. It wasn’t like crack, or what they say about crack—one hit and you’re hooked. Just as you had to work at cultivating a taste for alcohol and cigarettes, patience and discipline were required to overcome initial revulsion before you could move on to the intermediate stage of tolerance. Actual enjoyment was advanced level. And compulsion, she learned from those sophisticated classmates, before finding out for herself, was a whole other league. She got there, eventually; though not with Magnolia Boy. Poor kid. He was patient, kind, sincere. He didn’t stand a chance.
Art school was the portal. At first, Eve lived in fear of being rumbled. Her libertinism was a pretence. She was a timid suburban schoolgirl on the loose, disguised as a free-spirited, hedgehog-haired punk in outlandish clothing, black eyeliner and permanent scowl. Before long, there was no pretence at all. She was the real thing, albeit the art student version, involving intellectual pretensions, sound personal hygiene and a preference for anguished pretty boy poets over mouthy proletarian nihilists, though she had her moments with a few of those.
How much time and energy did she expend on the pursuit of intimacy? It’s clear, now, that hoggish youthful hormones were at work, tricked up to look like a quest for connection. Whatever its spur, the endless pursuit and flight was destabilising, the urge a ravening beast that consumed most of her late teens and twenties. From the distance of years, it looked frantic, foolish and such a waste of time. And Florian Kiš? Well, she was still working through that one.
The charismatic wild man of twentieth-century art, monstre sacré and keeper of the flame of figurative painting, Kiš was almost four decades older than her. She was a guileless student, awed to attend his life-drawing class. He asked her to sit for him and who could resist that invitation to immortality? Then, in a sustained campaign that in those days was called seduction, and would now be called harassment, he cajoled her into bed. As a lover he was vigorous, demanding, sometimes cruel. He was also fanatically elusive—he never gave her his phone number; she would be summoned to his ramshackle house in Mornington Crescent, sometimes late at night, by a scrawled message posted through her door by one of his henchmen.
Sexual infidelity, or profligacy, was as much an article of faith to him as the primacy of portraiture.
“The human clay is the only concern,” he said once, scoffing at the idea that he might join Eve at the opening of an exhibition of pottery.
And in his rough, deft hands, Eve was more malleable than mud. He educated her, told her how to dress (architectural lines, exquisite fabrics), what to read (Gombrich, Doerner, Shakespeare, Rochester, the French symbolists, the war poets, the metaphysicals), what to look at (the human form in all its variety, flesh puckered by emotion and experience) and how to look at it (the telling light, concealing shade, and the spaces in between). Abstract painting was “infantile daubing,” conceptual art “the empty posturing of talentless nincompoops,” ceramics was “craft—mere women’s work”—and video art and the entire pop culture movement was “image harvesting: technology-assisted theft.” Eve wonders what he would have made of Wanda’s new “relational art.” Grand larceny? Robbery with violence?
Eve was enthralled by Florian and he caught her subjugation in his famous painting, Girl with a Flower, an oblique self-portrait, which he worked on over the nine months of their relationship. Naked, her blonde hair straggly and unwashed, her eyes huge, moist and wounded, she is sprawled on the floor by the artist’s bare feet, which are rendered with more care and tenderness than her slender young body. Her flesh is given a livid blotchiness by thick impasto brushstrokes. Behind her, stacked facing the wall, are dozens of completed canvases. Her portrait, if it is spared one of his regular bonfires of inferior work, will join them there, in a Bluebeard’s archive of lovers who made the grade. In her right hand, she holds a mauve pansy—“heart’s ease.”
She came to hate that picture, which smacked of the abattoir and conferred immortality not on her beautiful youthful self but on a time of confusion and idiotic vulnerability. She hated the fact that its fame, Florian’s fame, had eclipsed any of her own achievements. Until now, perhaps.
* * *
—
Gently rocking with the rhythm of the train, the young couple sit entwined, an urban re-enactment of Pierre-Auguste Cot’s Springtime, the Tube seat with its check uphols
tery standing in for a bosky swing. Let’s see how they fare in Wintertime, this enraptured pair.
* * *
—
Eve thinks of the portfolio that never was: each lover must have cost her at least one decent painting. Her body of work was sacrificed for the demands of her restless, greedy flesh. That same hunger cost her old friend Mara her entire career. It was, however, no real loss. As a painter, Mara was a retro abstract expressionist, smearing pigment with a disgusted brio as if it were seepage from her psychic lesions, as if that hadn’t been done before and just as badly. She turned to sculpture, producing giant geometric puzzles in welded steel. More abstract expressionism. You might admire the technical challenge and sheer effort involved, but her work never contributed much to the conversation. It was, though, one way to go if you couldn’t actually draw.
Wanda Wilson took the other route. After a shaky start with her first performance piece in New York, the witless fairground sideshow Love/Object, Wanda’s whipped and scarified body, its needs and wounds, became her subject, rendered in her own secretions. You broke her heart and you did her a favour. Every slight was immortalised in one of her masochistic enactments: your initials carved on her bleeding chest as she lay naked for five hours groaning on a bed of nails in a downtown gallery; a five-day hunger strike—also conducted naked—in a Perspex box in an uptown museum; publicly shaving her head and keening over an empty coffin on the steps of City Hall.
Nightshade Page 3
