Nightshade

by Annalena McAfee

  They were both devoted to Eve but they bickered—they were gay so at least fucking wasn’t an option—and they jostled for her approval. She once took them to Paris for the weekend, for the opening of her exhibition in Rue Casimir Delavigne, and they’d fought like wolverines.

  Luka, the quiet boy in the shadows, crept up on Eve. His silence began to intrigue her. He had the face of a young poet—the heroic jaw and tousled hair of Rupert Brooke, the haunted eyes of Rimbaud. He looked sensitive and damaged, running for cover from a world of extroverts, and she felt a curious kinship with him. Even odder, for a woman who openly admitted to scant nurturing urges, she found herself wanting to make things better for him. She silenced the others to give him space to speak, sought him out and gave him interesting tasks, all of which he performed with exemplary rigour. Glynn and Josette, she noticed, began to give him a hard time and soon the boy was the studio pariah, taking lunch on his own outside at one of the canalside benches, a cordon sanitaire cleared around him. Those stupid kids. You’d think they would have worked it out, that she, the artist, a perpetual outsider, would be drawn to the pariah. And now she was one herself.

  The night before her Sigmoid vernissage in April, Hans arranged a party in the studio to thank the assistants, who’d worked through the previous night to get everything ready in time. Kristof refused to come. “You don’t need me there. The real party’s tomorrow night.” For a moment, she considered listing the innumerable dreary work events she’d attended on her husband’s behalf, but she had no time for a row. She would go to the studio, raise a glass and smile at the assistants, make her excuses and leave them to get as drunk as they liked at her expense.

  The weather was exceptionally warm and the glass doors were open onto the canal. Someone had strung up coloured lanterns round the studio, the sound system was ramped up, a vegan catering company had prepared a spread of salads, and there was a vat of punch, which Josette, wearing a joke-shop tiara, ladled into plastic cups. In the early-spring heatwave, it felt like high summer. Everyone was already a little drunk—Eve knocked back another cup to fortify herself against the evening’s social duties.

  The noise level was almost intolerable. She watched the boy silently skirting the room. He caught her glance and held it. There seemed to be a question in his returning gaze. Turning her back on Glynn, who wanted to introduce her to his new boyfriend, Eve walked over to Luka. She had an urge to put this gauche kid at ease. They moved together towards the open doors, where it was quieter, and looked out at the moon reflected in the waxy sheen of the canal. She asked him where he lived, about his studies, his work: perfunctory enquiries masking the big questions—Who are you? What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?

  He told her he shared a flat with his sister in Archway. After a foundation course in Canterbury he’d gone to Eve’s old art college, now part of a new corporate university which makes its money charging exorbitant fees to overseas students.

  “I scraped through then did my dissertation at the Royal College.”

  For the past five years he’d been earning a living copying Old Masters and Impressionists to order for an American website.

  “The money isn’t bad.”

  Then he parried with some questions of his own. He wanted to hear about her time at art college, about New York in the late seventies and early eighties.

  “It’s all so tame now,” he said. “It must have been amazing to be there then.”

  She scanned his face and took in, for the first time, the full extent of his beauty. How had she missed it? With his dark curls, pale unblemished skin and cobalt eyes he was an exquisite St. Sebastian. What arrows had pierced that perfect torso?

  “And Florian Kiš? One of the greats,” he continued. “What was he really like?”

  She tensed. Her assistants, all her circle, knew better than to mention Kiš’s name. Normally, when it came up, she would walk away. But her inquisitor was an innocent so she smiled, ignored his question and asked him the subject of his dissertation—she might have been interviewing him for a job. He hesitated, drained his drink and lowered his eyes, modest as a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. She pressed him and he sighed, lifted his chin and looked at her, full-on, before giving his answer.

  “You,” he said.

  Someone turned up the volume on the sound system and there were ragged outbreaks of dancing. Josette came around with more drinks and shot a hostile glance at Luka. Hans had already said his goodbyes and left. Normally, this would be the cue for Eve to head slyly for the exit and get a taxi back to Delaunay Gardens. Instead, she heard herself asking: “Aren’t you going to dance?”

  “I hate dancing,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  She grabbed his hand and led him through the crowd to the centre of the studio. There, lost in the throng, they embraced, and it pleased her to see him laugh as they swayed satirically to cheesy Europop. Someone passed him a joint. As he inhaled, a slow smile spread across his face. He held his breath for twenty seconds then blew out the smoke and passed the joint to her. She drew on it deeply—she hadn’t smoked cannabis in two decades but to refuse would have been prissy. She sensed some amused glances around them. To hell with propriety.

  The music changed. Some awful hip hop. They disengaged. How were you meant to dance to this? She tried to mirror his moves, simple side steps, swaying hips, pumping arms, following the pulse of the bass. For two non-dancers, they weren’t bad. The cannabis—bred for potency these days—may have had something to do with it. She and Luka were in perfect sync. They looked at each other and laughed again. Swirling strings announced a slow ballad—who chose this music?—and they were in each other’s arms again. His tensile warmth was a current coursing through her body. He held her gently at the hips. Did she imagine the extra pressure—the ghost of a grope? Time expanded, then folded in on itself. The music speeded up, the party raged on. But for Eve, it seemed that she and Luka were alone, vacuum-sealed, two cosmonauts spinning through uncharted space.

  Sometime later, she sensed the room was emptying; there were shouted goodbyes, outbursts of laughter trailing off into the distance, the door opened, casting a rhombus of light across the floor, then closed, and finally the music stopped. When she and Luka disengaged, they were alone and the sun was beginning to rise, casting a brassy glaze over the canal.

  They hurriedly left the studio in its post-party disarray and locked up, barely able to look at each other. Josette and Glynn would be back to deal with the mess later. Eve called a cab to take her home and Luka turned away and walked towards the bus stop. Their farewell was awkward and hasty. They didn’t even kiss, though she was usually adept at the affection-free social embrace. In the dawn light, the night’s mystery evaporated. She was the employer, a woman of means and status, and he was her employee. Only in his youth did he have the advantage. On that scale, he was a feudal lord in silks and lace, surveying the pleasures of his vast estate, and she was a serf, toiling in rags on her diminishing smallholding.

  7

  The Tube has stalled again, the lights flicker, and a noisy crowd of young people stumble through the connecting door into her carriage. Three of them are wearing red caps trimmed with white fur—Santa hats. Drunk or stoned, or both, they look around, laughing, assuming their hilarity is shared. These days, not everyone observes the rules of Tube etiquette; silence, eyes averted, and in the press of rush hour, body against body, the shared pretence that boundaries remain intact and you are in this alone.

  Eye contact with the grinning boobies must be avoided. Eve opens her bag and takes out a book as cover—Wanda’s book, with its taunting inscription, unopened since last month’s exhibition. There are other young people in the carriage, gazing at their phones or staring ahead, pretending to be absorbed in their thoughts. Let the revellers draw them in. Who would want to engage with an unremarkable woman on the brink of old age, swathed in soft-hued win
ter clothing, staring at a book, lost in her past?

  Wanda—now here’s an occasion for bitter laughter. There she is, in a collage of photographs, in various states of phoney self-abasement, on the subject of love:

  “In the absence of the love object, I cut myself to reinforce and sanctify the pain of loss…”

  “I shave my head in a ritual akin to that undertaken by those seeking admission to holy orders, a postulant nun, dedicating her life to art, transcending the limited possibilities of womanhood; love object, whore, mother, crone. My physical renunciation begins…”

  “With fire—branding—and water—submersion—the transition is final and I move away from the earthly and on to the spiritual plain…”

  Hogwash. It was a toxic combination—masochism and grandiosity. The plain fact was that men, even the sadists, could never stand Wanda and her neuroses for long. It wasn’t simply Eve’s talent that rankled with Wanda but her success with men. Was it Eve’s fault that she had romped, feted and unscathed, through the carnival and that, when the music finally stopped and the party was over, she left the scene on the arm of a handsome Dane who was destined for success?

  Unlike Wanda, Eve never “got off,” as the phrase went, on pain. Wisely, at a time when wisdom wasn’t at a premium, Eve intuited that there would be enough agony down the line, not necessarily physical and not all of it connected to love. After the bracing interlude with Florian, pleasure became Eve’s guiding principle. Work and pleasure. Only now did she see that while she stayed true to the work, even as family life conspired to divert her from it, the pleasure principle was forgotten. It had taken the boy, and the ensuing cataclysm, to return her to herself.

  * * *

  —

  By the time she got home after the studio party, the sun was above the trees in Delaunay Gardens. She slipped into bed alongside her gently snoring husband and lay awake, exultant, keenly alert, thinking of the evening, and of Luka, the lightning strike of that first glance, then the embrace that seemed to promise more, thinking of how the evening might have ended if she’d been bolder. It was thrilling and preposterous. To those young people whooping and smirking opposite her on the Tube tonight, it would be grotesque. She was a sixty-year-old woman. A grandmother. He was thirty. She had made a complete fool of herself. Had her drink been spiked? They were a druggy lot, some of her assistants.

  * * *

  —

  The Tube train Santas and their friends have quietened down, chastened by the silence of the other passengers. She puts Wanda’s wretched book away. She no longer needs a prop.

  * * *

  —

  Eve tries to remember the last time she’d felt that physical need. By her mid-fifties, it seemed that her recently fitful inner fire had finally died and, after a period of mourning, she came to see it as liberation rather than loss. Let work at last be her sole passion. Yet there she was, eight months ago, lying in her marital bed feeling the old hunger, crazily consumed by it, touching herself at the thought of a boy who was younger than her daughter.

  Perhaps the cold hearth was Kristof’s all along. Sexual indifference seemed mutual. She thought of a sign she once saw outside a village hall in Wales: “Ukulele classes—Discontinued due to lack of interest.”

  At first, they sought medical advice: unguents for her, small blue pills—Viagra—for him. It worked, for a while. Then, as with shared undertakings to new exercise regimes—biweekly Pilates, high-intensity training—their resolve fell away.

  She remembers listening to a radio programme in which a woman in her nineties described a conversation she’d overheard as a girl. Her mother and her aunt, in their forties, were talking about a mutual friend of their own age.

  “She doesn’t go to parties any more. She’s given up dancing,” the mother said.

  In the pomp of girlhood, the eavesdropper shuddered and thought: “If I ever give up dancing, kill me, because I might as well be dead.”

  And now, sitting immobile in her retirement home—her walking days, as well as her dancing days, long behind her—the old woman reflected that, in the end, it hadn’t been so difficult to give up youthful pleasures. “Nature can be kind,” she said, “and it reconciles us to loss.” When creaky hips and knees banish us from the dance floor, we look on as wallflowers and find the hectic capering faintly absurd. So it was with Eve and sex. Then she met Luka.

  That morning, Kristof began to stir from sleep. He stretched his long limbs, grey and slack as a corpse in a Cranach pietà, softly grunted and, as usual, left the bed without checking whether she was awake. If he’d bothered, he would have been surprised by her sudden need. When was the last time? As he closed the bathroom door, she shrugged herself further under the duvet and closed her eyes, her consoling hand still between her thighs. Then she slept. By the time she finally woke, her husband had left for work.

  They were to reconvene as a family at the opening of her Sigmoid show that night. Nancy was coming with her husband, Norbert, an earnest, woolly-bearded entrepreneur from the Netherlands who ran a technology start-up, “providing integration points for platform-enabled websites,” the purpose of which, even after three years, Eve had never quite discerned. When does a start-up cease to be a start-up? At what point, she had resisted asking her son-in-law, would it be sufficiently self-financing to enable her and Kristof to end their subsidy? Would Norbert’s company then become a carry-on? And if it failed, what would they call it?

  Nancy and Norbert were leaving the baby at home with the couple’s “help,” their term for the low-paid Sri Lankan woman who cooked, cleaned and “walked” the pug—insofar as the hideous creature ever waddled anywhere—and looked after little Jarleth for them. Since her teens, Nancy had reproached her mother for the crime of neglect, largely because Eve had availed herself of regular childcare. By this calculation, Nancy and Norbert were arch-criminals too.

  At least Eve had delegated the child to concentrate on work. Nancy saw herself as a countercultural warrior but chose to live like a fifties suburban housewife, abandoning her fledgling career in magazine journalism for married life, motherhood, homemaking and—the twenty-first-century twist—blogging. What else would Nancy have to write about in her blog but married life, motherhood and homemaking, particularly if it involved shopping? Online, Nancy was silent on the subject of her other occupation—full-time victim with a borderline eating disorder, engaged in weekly therapy (paid for by Eve and Kristof), and hooked on antidepressants. Offline, in the company of her parents, Nancy talked about little else.

  Her recent, definitive sulk was, in many ways, a blessing. How seductive was the narrative of the perpetual injured party. “Look how I suffer!” “Someone did this to me!” Political movements, entire national narratives, were built on this premise. Nancy’s bespoke version had a narrower focus. Eve tried talking to her, when they were still talking: We are given the materials to make an artwork of our lives. What we do with them is up to us—a Goya masterpiece of light and shade? a Dürer engraving of fabulous complexity? or some lightly incised graffiti on a lavatory wall? You choose. She might as well have been talking to Nancy’s pug.

  Eve’s opening at the Sigmoid that night should have felt like a triumph. Instead, it was a distraction: the dressing-up, the limo, the champagne, the throng of cultural dignitaries, the press. There was some satisfaction in the social reversal. Once, these titans of the art world would have looked over her shoulder to seek out Kristof. Now they queued to shake her hand, while she looked over their shoulders for a glimpse of the boy.

  Kristof knew them all and glided through the crowd, drink in hand, smiling and nodding, a sharp-suited, vulpine version of a plastic dashboard dog. This was his medium, not hers. He greeted them—arts bureaucrats, sponsors, journalists, artists, architects, finance types, actors, models and pop stars with intellectual aspirations—as if they were old friends coming to lend personal
support to the exhibition. As if, in fact, this was his exhibition.

  She was under no illusion. They came not to celebrate Foundlings—an Urban Florilegium, the culmination of a two-year exploration of London’s wayside and wasteland plants, and her recent giant hippeastrum canvas. Nor were they there to laud, in her sixty-first year, her lifetime’s labours. They turned up because there were worse ways to spend an exceptionally warm spring evening than drinking icy champagne at a fashionable party in Hyde Park. Behind the public congratulations was private scepticism—the dagger concealed in the firmest handshakes. “How does she get away with it?” It was a question Eve often asked of herself. Her confidence wasn’t boosted by the fact that the venue for her exhibition was offered after Kristof agreed to design a satellite gallery for the Sigmoid in Shanghai.

  As a young woman, Eve had the edge on talent and on sexual attractiveness, but in creative self-belief Wanda always took the prize, even as a student. The galleries, duped by Wanda’s arrogance, competed for the chance to host her travesties. It had been one long round of awards and honours for her ever since. Where did it come from—Wanda’s effrontery and Eve’s self-doubt? Nature or nurture? Florian’s scepticism about Eve’s work had undermined a confidence that was always fragile. She feared the public exposure craved by Wanda. While Eve wanted recognition—what artist doesn’t?—she hated scrutiny. This show was said to be the pinnacle of her career—her night, as everyone kept telling her. Others in her position would have preened. But she’d always been ill at ease at these events. She walked the room, running the gauntlet of goodwill, deflecting plaudits, yearning for the real thing. For connection. Where was Luka?