Nightshade

by Annalena McAfee

  * * *

  —

  If Nancy were here, she’d make some remark about exploitation and Eve would reply that the migrant workers were making ten times the amount they could make at home and availing themselves of the welfare state while they were at it. London is a city of blow-ins. That’s what makes it interesting. Let the English garden flourish. Like thistledown carried on the wind, some fall on fertile ground and thrive, others perish. Nature doesn’t discriminate. Why should she?

  What did her daughter, a gluten-intolerant, humbug-tolerant liberal, want? Her maid, probably an illegal, wasn’t paid much more than the minimum wage. Did Nancy want to send them all back? Eve would like to see how she fared without live-in help. These workers voted with their feet. Let them decide.

  * * *

  —

  Eve’s aware of her own hypocrisies and is usually untroubled by them. They’re part of the texture of her personality, adding tone and depth. Unlike her daughter, she hasn’t made a manifesto out of them. But now, roiled by anxiety, the contemplation of personal contradictions seems a calming diversion, like counting sheep. She has a professional interest in preserving the biosphere and a long-standing direct debit to Friends of the Earth, neither of which could ever quite offset the four houses, regular intercontinental travel and the carbon footprint of a small multinational.

  Eve sometimes wondered if she could nominate her brother as her private carbon offset scheme. John was a model of anguished virtue, living off-grid in his damp subsistence croft in the West Highlands of Scotland, his quiet asceticism a silent reproach to Eve’s clamorous world of abundance and to Nancy’s hypocrisy.

  Even this post-separation, pre-divorce scaled-down life was pre-revolutionary Versailles to John’s anchorite existence. Squinting in candlelight, in his frayed woollens and fingerless gloves, John was always too good for this world. But Nancy? The greedy child became a greedy woman, another proselytising spoiled millennial, an entitled spokeswoman for the wretched of the earth. If that wasn’t cultural appropriation, what was?

  In her Shoreditch house, a former bookbinder’s workshop bought for her by Eve and Kristof, Nancy consumed and expended as diligently as any feckless trust fund kid, the only difference being she favoured Fair Trade labels and small boutiques over big chains, shunned plastic bags and had become an advocate of something called sustainable living. Sustainable, only if your bills were underwritten by parental handouts. She justified her shopping habit by saying it was necessary as research for her work as “an influencer” and “lifestyle blogger,” for which she put in long hours before a mirror, photographing herself in a succession of indistinguishable outfits.

  Plastic bags notwithstanding, Nancy’s personal landfill site—taller than any of the Scottish Munros her Uncle John diligently scaled in his northern fastness—would be her legacy. If you seek her monument, look around. Eve acknowledges that, before the separation, she had her own wardrobe full of costly clothes. But she bought selectively and this level of couture qualified as art, referencing or challenging tradition, the product of thought, imagination and skill.

  It was, as Florian Kiš taught her, Eve’s duty as an artist to treat her body as another medium for aesthetic exploration, to deploy her keen eye in all areas of her life. She had, though she flinches at the term, one of Nancy’s favourites, “a brand” to project. Eve was fortunate enough to have had the means to invest in the pioneering geniuses of the form: the Japanese, Vivienne and Miuccia, the iconic French Houses. There was no equivalence. Nancy was dealing in ephemera and adding to the world’s imperishable cargo of tat.

  Her dog alone, that ridiculous pug—every pet dog in fact—had a bigger carbon footprint than an SUV. What was the point of it? Unless, as Eve once suggested out of pure mischief, the animal was acquired for what psychologists call “divisive normalisation”—and less tactful pundits call the “fat friend factor”—the phenomenon by which people appear more attractive in the company of a less desirable companion. With that bug-eyed midget panting in her arms, even stringy Nancy, with her unfortunate recessive chin, looked like Botticelli’s Venus. That was another row that took weeks to get over. After it, Eve began to hold back; it was a waste of breath, this engagement with her daughter. Why speak truth to weakness? Another meltdown would only result in Nancy demanding more sessions with her therapist, and who would pay for that? Now, though, there was no need for candour or discretion. Nancy was blocking her calls. They hadn’t spoken in a month. This row was terminal.

  * * *

  —

  The Tube jolts to a halt. Between stations. Always an occasion of anxiety. An accident?

  * * *

  —

  She was old enough to remember the Moorgate crash in the seventies; the driver kept on going, smashing the Tube into the buffers then concertinaing into the terminus wall. More than forty dead. Seventy injured. A school friend’s cousin lost both legs in the crash; her colleague died in the seat next to her. Accident or foul play? No one knew. In one account, the usually conscientious driver had suffered some kind of neurological crisis—a catastrophic form of amnesia. The other, more lurid version of the story—favoured, naturally, by the press and stoked by the anguish of the grieving relatives—was that it was a deliberate act of mass murder and suicide, though there was no evidence of motive.

  Twelve years later, in 1987, the King’s Cross fire seemed personal. She was over from New York with Kristof, who was driving to an evening site meeting in Camden and offered to drop Eve off at the station. She was on her way to Mara’s new London place for supper and should have been buying a ticket when the fire, started by a match dropped by a smoker on the wooden escalator, erupted in a flash in the ticket hall, killing thirty and injuring a hundred. What saved Eve that night was her aversion to small children: she had cancelled on Mara, unable to bear the prospect of a conversation dominated by news of potty training and interrupted by infant wails, broadcast over the baby monitor like a tuneless muezzin call to prayer.

  Today’s risible health and safety culture—Abi, one of Eve’s former assistants, was absurdly neurotic about it—at least reduced the likelihood of accidents in public spaces. But these days, accidents weren’t the main concern.

  * * *

  —

  Eve looks around the carriage. In this cross section of modern metropolitan diversity, only the super-rich are missing. Everyone is nervously affecting nonchalance in the stillness of the train, while hankering for the safety of the streets above. In such moments of silent urban anxiety, forty metres of compacted chalk and London clay weigh heavily on the Tube traveller.

  The carriage rocks into life again and the Tube creeps on to the next stop. Unblown up, Eve’s life resumes and she’s returned to her thoughts, and to other terrors.

  She’s made a deadly mess of things. No question. But whatever happens now, whatever horrors lie ahead, her creative legacy is assured. This isn’t arrogance; it’s fact. What has her daughter done with her life? Reproduction is simple, achieved regularly, without thought or fanfare, by the lowest forms of life. Nematodes—lower than earworms, or those soul-gnawing memory maggots—are adept at it. There’s one, at least, born every second. And within three months of the baby’s arrival, even Nancy, who anticipated the birth as if it was the Second Coming, with added retail opportunities (that ghastly “gender-neutral” Baby Shower!), began to seem disenchanted by the project. In that respect, Nancy was her mother’s daughter.

  For Eve, reproducing the stalked and silent natural world in all its exquisite variations, on paper, vellum, canvas or film, had a stringency, and a controllable outcome, that messy human life could never possess. The earliest of Eve’s surviving drawings was of a sprig of cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris—another weed, though with the paradoxically regal common name of Queen Anne’s lace. It was done when she was about twelve, in HB pencil on a sheet of A4 graph paper. The
wary toddler had become a self-possessed child, uncomfortable with people, enthralled by nature—particularly plants, whose complications were quietly expressed and knowable—and driven to replicate precisely the natural, non-animal world on the page. Self-sufficient autotrophs, who got their life-sustaining carbon dioxide simply by being, rather than needy heterotrophs, like humans, who had to devour other life to survive—that was the scientific distinction.

  She would have been struck initially by the undistinguished presence of cow parsley. Collectively, from a distance, the flower heads were a shimmering haze. Singly, at arm’s length, they were barely there, little more than pallidly augmented blades of grass. But Eve always felt impelled to look closer. She admired the complexity of the fern-like leaves, peered into the intricate white constellations on their brittle stems, observed the structural differences between the lacy florets on the outer rim and the minutely delineated flowers at its centre, and marvelled at the hay-scented Milky Way in her hand. You only had to look.

  Years later, she was astonished to find that early drawing, folded between the pages of a book—Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols—when she was clearing the house after her mother died. The discovery was shocking, condemning Eve to replay childhood memories in the unsettling light of this new information: her mother valued her work.

  Their relationship was always tense; Eve found her mother’s emotional lability mortifying and was enraged by her attempts to persuade her to go to secretarial college rather than to art school. Further education was for boys. John’s application to university had their mother’s blessing; John always had their mother’s blessing. For all the good it did him, it might as well have been her curse—he dropped out of his philosophy course and drifted north to live in a rickety “peace camp” outside a military base. Eve’s later success seemed to baffle rather than please her mother. But she held on to that single childhood drawing, wrapped it in tissue and preserved it in a book on her bedside table. Eve trusted that her mother never knew the other common name for cow parsley—“mother die.”

  Ines Alvaro, the Gerstein curator, fell on this scrap as if it were a lost fragment by da Vinci. Tightly framed in beech, with a cadmium-green mount, it was to be placed in the first room of the exhibition, next to the introductory panel—Eve’s life, sanitised and encapsulated in two hundred words of 42pt roman—opposite the wide wall on which her Underground Florilegium, borrowed from the Dallas Museum, would hang, and next to the better-preserved watercolour of the crimson-tasselled Amaranthus caudatus, love-lies-bleeding, which she completed in her second term at art college.

  The museum’s explanatory notes would include a rote reference to her as “muse of Florian Kiš—one of the leading portraitists of the twentieth century,” but she had managed to veto use of Girl with a Flower anywhere in the show. This would be Eve’s retrospective, and also a corrective—she was no mere extra, queuing naked with hundreds of other saps to touch the hem of Florian Kiš’s paint-smeared overalls, livid as a butcher’s apron. He was a footnote in her story.

  6

  Eve’s moment, finally, seemed to have arrived, dovetailing with the fad for ecology among all the social media virtue signallers, her daughter included, who trumpeted their concerns for the planet even as they trashed it. Her work had science on its side, as well as fashionable high-mindedness. Eve outlined the case to the magazine journalist who came to interview her in February.

  “One in eight plant species faces extinction while the human population soars,” she said. “There are new concerns about ‘plant blindness’: as modern humans’ view of the world has shrunk to between zero and 15 degrees below eye level, and the anthropocentric focus on the animal world increasingly ignores the importance of vegetal life in the biosphere.”

  Though he was diligently taking notes, she could tell she had lost him.

  She persevered. “The human eye seeks movement, conspicuous forms, and unconsciously scans the environment for food, sex—reproductive opportunities—and threat. Static plants, for all their beauty, kaleidoscopic variety and nutritional value, are modest; they aren’t cute, they don’t require stalking and violence to prepare them for the pot, they don’t make great companions and, even in the furthest reaches of human fetishism, they have zero sex appeal.”

  The sex appeal line woke him up. He smiled, turned a page in his notebook and continued to write, taking dictation.

  “Zoo chauvinism and technophilia have meant that the names of common flowers—bluebell, dandelion—are vanishing from children’s dictionaries and making way for words said to reflect contemporary reality—bullet point, voicemail, broadband and blog. How long before the plants themselves vanish from the world?” she said.

  “Once the bluebell goes, we all go. After the dandelion, the deluge. Then, as in the wildest dreams of psychopathic loners and murderous ideologues, the whole thing will blow up. We’ll be doing their job for them, packing the dynamite, lighting the blue touchpaper and standing back to watch a planetary version of that exploded shed in the Tate. Except we won’t be standing back and watching. We’ll go up with it.”

  Eve always scorned the limitations of the eye-level gaze: she liked to look down, the full 90 degrees, to seek out the discreet and the hidden. In the eyes of her recent champions, her art is a passionate propaganda tool. She doesn’t see it like that. Her purpose has always been simply to look, and to reflect, as accurately as she can, in tranquillity. For this she has endured years in the wilderness, been dismissed by critics as “the Laura Ashley of the art world,” and compared to Cicely Mary Barker, spinster illustrator of the saccharine “Flower Fairies” children’s stories. Meanwhile, Wanda Wilson and her cohorts were elevated by those same critics. Not just “plant blind” but “art blind.” This is Eve’s moment, at last. She’ll take it, and they can interpret her intentions whatever way they wish.

  Still, the comparisons with Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as Mapplethorpe and Matson, grate, and she can never escape Florian’s portrait. Every feature about Kristof, each review and press mention of her own work (including that recent colour supplement interview), is an excuse to reproduce Girl with a Flower. It’s like being chained to the naked corpse of her dumb teenaged self. Luka had laughed when he pointed out a reference to Eve as “the flower lady” in a tabloid story about a TV soap star who turned up at the Sigmoid party. Eve was furious. It made her sound like some cockney street seller of posies, an Eliza Doolittle cheerfully offering bunches of violets to passing punters. One of their first rows. Not their last. These passionate storms became more frequent, more intense. But, she tells herself, they were preferable to the temperate civility of her marriage.

  * * *

  —

  The Tube has stopped at Earls Court—marked in her Underground Florilegium by a crimson waratah, Telopea speciosissima, in acknowledgement of the number of Australians who lived in the area in the seventies.

  Two labourers wearily get to their feet and leave. Their seats are taken by a middle-aged couple, man and woman. Middle-aged and middle class. They’re probably tourists—both wear the parodic British costume of beige raincoats (Burberry knock-offs), deerstalkers and tartan scarves, and they are carrying Madame Tussauds jute bags. What self-respecting Londoner goes to Madame Tussauds? If it weren’t for their identical outfits and souvenir bags, you wouldn’t guess they were actually together. They scrutinise their phones in silence. At some point, like Eve and Kristof in their early days, they must have been unable to take their hands off each other. What keeps them together now? Children? Grandchildren? Inertia? A shared interest in heritage tourism? The ecology of relationships is always unknowable. The life cycle too, though there’s only one outcome. It’s doomed, one way or another. Death for those with staying power. Divorce for the fainter of heart, or the courageous, then death.

  * * *

  —

  Eve’s affair wasn’t exactly a coup de
foudre. She barely noticed Luka when they first met. Perhaps she took in the pleasing symmetry of his face and the self-conscious bohemianism of his style—the tattoo and the utilitarian workwear, livery of all the postgrads and tyro artists who vied for a position at the studio. His apparent shyness was a welcome contrast to the noisy assertiveness of the other assistants; they were always either fighting at work or fucking off duty. Luka just quietly got on with the job—stretching and sizing canvases, priming them, leaning them against the wall ready for Eve’s attention, arranging specimens, mixing paints, cleaning brushes, angling cameras—a silent, muscled paragon of diligence.

  Gradually, he made himself indispensable. Eve, who saw herself as uniquely self-reliant, was perplexed and a little thrilled by this new sensation of dependency. The other assistants had, whatever gloss they might put on it, always been labourers—personally demanding and irksome, but necessary for the heavy-lifting required to complete her work. She sometimes enjoyed playing them off against each other, beaming the searchlight of her attention on this one for a day, casting him or her into outer darkness the next.

  Some almost became her friends: lanky Glynn, with his paint-stippled overalls and his George V beard; Josette, the quirky drama queen—Billie Holiday with pink hair, a bubbling laugh, and a weight problem. They’d both once had ambitions to be artists themselves, and in her early twenties, Josette featured in the Observer colour supplement as one of the promising “New Generation Minority Artists.” Her silhouette cut-outs with gritty themes—crack addicts in urban wastelands, street violence, non-binary zombies—were compared to the work of the American artist Kara Walker.

  Walker was now globally renowned—almost as renowned as Wanda Wilson. But Josette D’Arblay abandoned her own work to become a handmaiden to another artist. Eve never asked about the crisis of confidence that must have been behind Josette’s decision to walk away. Was she still working on her paper crafts, thanklessly snipping away in her tiny flat in south-east London? Eve meant to ask, but it always slipped her mind. Glynn was open about his failed career as a sculptor. “I was crap,” he volunteered to Eve. “This is what I’m good at, what gives me pleasure—making order out of chaos. Getting to watch a real artist at work and help her achieve her vision.”