She sighs at the grim euphemism. Person on the line. That makes two of us. She gets to her feet and joins the exodus. What else would we do? Sit and wait until the police and paramedics have done their work and hosed away the last gout and smear? It would be hours.
She joins the human tide surging up the escalators to the exit. A taxi would be the simplest, quickest option, but she baulks at the idea. She is in no hurry to get back. Though it’s a cold night, it’s dry at the moment, her coat is warm and waterproof and she has her umbrella in case the weather turns again. The walk will do her good. She has a weakness for expensive high heels, but when she travels around London she is always what her mother would call “sensibly shod.” It’s a legacy from her Doc Marten student years; she likes to be equipped for flight. You can’t run in heels.
She leaves the station and sets out towards Bayswater. She has some of her best ideas while out walking. Some of her worst, too. Walking and thinking—the beat of her feet underscoring the mind’s melody, or drumming up discords.
* * *
—
In early May, the gardeners’ time of growth and renewal, the idea for her new creative engagement with the natural world seemed to come to her intact and vivid as a dream. But as a synthesis of her personal and professional preoccupations, the seed for the new Florilegium was sown long ago—twenty years at least, during her inspirational week in Paris. A trip to Ticino, where she’d gone last spring as the eternal Plus One, had been a further unconscious spur.
This new work was to be an act of restitution for the invisible women of botany and art; for the unacknowledged legion of female painters of medieval herbals and florilegia, who patiently coloured the monochrome drawings of their credited male counterparts; for Fede Galizia and Orsola Maddalena Caccia, the Italian Renaissance painters of still lifes, and their later Dutch counterparts, Clara Peeters and Maria van Oosterwijk, whose haunting mimesis was dismissed as mere mimicry; for Jeanne Baret, the eighteenth-century French naturalist who circumnavigated the globe disguised as a man on a plant-collecting voyage with her lover, Philibert Commerson, who received the credit, two years before Joseph Banks followed their route and laid claim with his own Florilegium; for the brilliant Victorian maids and matrons who spent years gathering, rigorously identifying and drawing flowers in the face of hostility from critics who thought taxonomy, with its classification of the sexual parts of plants, an unseemly pastime for women and excluded them from scientific circles.
As she walks on through late-night London, she redoes the calculations—it really was two decades ago when she took Theo, her teenaged godson, to Paris as a birthday treat. Another soul worm. How many boys of that age would have forgone the Eiffel Tower, a tour of the Pompidou Centre and a boat trip on the Seine to pound narrow cobbled streets alongside a forty-year-old woman in pursuit of eclectic intellectual passions? Theo was an appreciative companion on many thought-rich walks, eager to learn, impressed by her rusty schoolgirl French, bewitched by the Musée de Cluny and The Lady and the Unicorn in her mille-fleur field of stars, and sweetly delighted by the motto emblazoned on the Lady’s richly embroidered tent—“À mon seul désir.”
On their last day, Eve thought she was pushing her luck when, instead of taking him to the Catacombs, as promised, she dragged him off to the herbarium at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle to look at the bound herbaria and florilegia collected and compiled by Baret and Commerson. But no, Theo was as excited as she was. Perhaps too excited—he bombarded the obliging curator with so many questions that Eve finally told him to shut up.
“You’re a tourist,” she told her godson. “I’m working.”
In Ticino last spring, while Kristof spent the days discussing new vertical cities and urban infrastructure at an architecture conference, Eve hiked alone in the high pastures, marvelling at the wild flowers, a polychromatic cosmos scattered across miles of emerald turf that made her think again of the medieval tapestries in the Cluny, of Galizia and Caccia, and of the uncelebrated work of Baret, and all those botanising women of the nineteenth century.
Two weeks after the Sigmoid show opened, she was casting around for a new project. She’d dispatched the Solokoff camomile and was finishing the revisited carnivorous sequence for the Gerstein. Her meticulous botanical investigations were usually of individual specimens and these recent pieces had been mere five-finger exercises. She needed a challenge, a project that would fully engage her technically and intellectually and extend her range as an artist.
Then it came to her—she would address her own mille-fleur study and subvert the form, take it away from wholesome wild-flower meadows and formal imagery of feminine abundance. Her field of stars would be scattered with vivid representations of the most venomous flowers in the ecosphere.
When she told Luka about her plans for the Poison Florilegium, his response was encouraging.
“Fantastic! So ambitious! So different from your previous work.”
If this was veiled criticism, she didn’t pick it up. His eager approval was a gift. She wasn’t used to it. Real excitement hadn’t been part of her emotional palette for years. Kristof always expressed the sort of irksome, empty effusiveness displayed by Mara, three decades ago, when presented with a clumsy drawing by one of her small children: “Marvellous, darling. What is it? Now, here’s more paper—do another.” Eve, for all her flaws as a mother, always credited her own daughter with a degree of sophistication and refused to pander to her. If Nancy’s drawing was crude or indecipherable, if the colours were muddy, Eve would say so. This tougher, more honest school served Nancy well. She soon realised art of any sort was not for her.
Whenever Eve discussed new work with Hans, he listened with grave attention but she could never banish the suspicion that he was calculating his percentage. The muted response resonated. Eve always questioned what she was doing, wondered if it amounted to much, or anything at all. Was it Freud who described art as dung daubed on the portals of civilisation? By this account, she’d been permanently on “dirty protest,” like those Irish prisoners in the seventies; in her case, painstakingly inscribing flowering plants in ordure.
Just before the Sigmoid show, she had been surprised and encouraged by support from the notoriously acid reviewer Ellery Quinn, chief critic of the influential Art Market journal. He had, for most of her career, when he mentioned her at all, made slighting references to her and her work (“an ape of nature,” those Cicely Mary Barker and furnishing allusions). Then, in his preview of her show, he seemed to have come round to her, calling her “one of the most interesting, and unsung, practitioners on the circuit today.” After the opening, his review was rapturous.
* * *
—
She pauses by a doorway—a money-changing shop offering loans, still open for those in urgent need of credit at punishing interest rates—and pulls out her phone. She scrolls through the good reviews she keeps in her notes: her prayers and invocations in times of need. To passers-by, she might be consulting a map.
Here it is. “By scrupulous observation and consummate skill, Eve Laing bestows on us the gift of sight, allowing us to see the natural world as if for the first time. Her botanical reflections engage the entire sensorium, a glorious, vividly hued tribute to Nature in all its intricate, infinite variety. This isn’t art imitating life, but life itself.” The fact that Quinn was said to have lately bedded Eve’s dealer didn’t spoil her pleasure in the review. She walks on, recharged.
* * *
—
It was partly about legacy. Wasn’t that the root of all ambition? What mark would she leave on the world? A child—that spoiled and brittle daughter who didn’t even like her—was not enough. Here was the hard unspoken truth: most children were disappointments. Whether their parents were honest enough to admit it was another matter.
As a child, Nancy was a prodigious fancy-dresser. They gave her a trunk of
costumes, some of them Eve’s discarded designer clothes and shoes. The child was always mincing around the house like a tiny drag queen in feather boas, wide-brimmed hats that slipped over her face, and perilous gargantuan heels. It was sometimes difficult to dissuade her from wearing her costumes to school.
Eve and Kristof hoped this appetite for display suggested a future in theatre—design or even performance—and signed her up for drama classes. But Nancy proved a poor actress—flat enunciation, off-key timing, no presence—and showed little aptitude for stagecraft. Her talent for drama was confined to the domestic sphere. But a childhood spent flouncing about in other people’s clothes was a perfect apprenticeship for her adult métier as a blogger, a chirpy tweeter and ceaseless Instagrammer whose only undocumented corners of life took place in the lavatory and on the therapist’s couch, and whose highest aspiration was a sponsorship deal with a high street chain store, albeit one that claimed to pay a living wage to employees in its Third World factories. Of all the curses that might be visited on one’s children, the cruellest was mediocrity.
Look at Mara. Did she honestly rejoice when Esme, a doggedly unambitious IT consultant, announced that she was on a regime of hormones prior to gender reassignment and was from now on to be known as Emmet? Mara went through the motions and even held a small party to celebrate Esme’s announcement. But would a health food purist who never knowingly let sugar or additives pass the lips of her children, a science sceptic and conspiracy theorist who believed all doctors were butchers and poisoners in the pay of Big Pharma, seriously delight in the news that her daughter—or rather her son—would be taking daily medication and had signed up for major surgical intervention? Perhaps if there were a homeopathic remedy—a handful of sugar pills and a herbal cream you could rub on the offending parts—that would transform unhappy Esme into fully realised Emmet, Eve would have believed in Mara’s smile when she first imparted the news.
And, before that news, there was the job. Would anyone truly wish on their child a future spent tinkering with the computers of the technically illiterate? Mara’s second child wasn’t a source of unalloyed pleasure, either. Having enjoyed Esme’s early years so much, and displayed such prodigious patience for finger painting, plasticine modelling and nursery songs, Mara went on to adopt a toddler from a benighted corner of North Africa. Theo, the glimmering boy. Eve, with an atheist’s misgivings, agreed to be his godmother. It was a reciprocal deal; Mara took on mentoring duties with Nancy. At first, Eve got the better half of the bargain. Theo was a gifted musician and mathematical prodigy with a winning nature and the dreamy-eyed looks of a Giorgione pageboy.
He could have done anything with his life but that sweet, accomplished teenaged companion in Paris—so eager to learn, so responsive—subsequently soured. He fell in with a bad crowd and abandoned his studies. In the old days, at art school and in New York, Mara and Eve had flirted with bad crowds themselves—some said they were the bad crowd—but they remained engaged and productive. Theo didn’t have the backbone. He drifted, funded by Mara and later, when he needed rehab after a spell of drug-induced psychosis, by Eve. He went back to Paris for a while, said he wanted to make his way as a DJ—it still mystifies Eve how anyone could make a career out of putting on records. He even flunked that. Now a seedy, marginal figure in his mid-thirties, he was running a beach bar in Thailand. The last time she heard from him was a phone call from Phuket more than eight months ago. He wanted more money, it seemed.
Mara never complained and went on to rebuild her life, up to a point. She’s living with a new lover, Dot, an older woman, a former social worker. With her new stepchildren, clever Dot took on a challenging caseload to occupy her in retirement. Mara abandoned sculpture—she was never much good anyway (her real medium was plasticine)—and retrained as a psychotherapist. A pity she didn’t try her hand with Nancy and give her a friends-and-family discount. Mara’s own wounds, caused by anguish over her children, must be deep. Psychotherapist, heal thyself.
In that last phone call, Theo asked Eve about her work and wistfully expressed interest in the Sigmoid show.
“I’m stranded,” he said, “I wish I could be there but I’m completely broke.”
He was angling for the fare home, trying to please her with references to that trip to Paris, so long ago.
“À mon seul désir…Remember?” he said.
He had caught her at the wrong moment, with much to do in the studio and the Sigmoid opening only days away.
“Since we’re talking about money,” she said, “how about getting a real job and repaying me some of the thousands I’ve spent bailing you out?”
The line went dead. Perhaps she’d been too harsh.
That was the last she heard from him.
11
“Any spare change?” The voice by her feet breaks her thoughts. A young man sits cross-legged in the filthy doorway of a souvenir shop. Displayed in the window, framed by strings of Christmas lights, are Union Jack mugs, Beefeater teddy bears, and teacups marking the Queen’s ninetieth birthday and recent royal weddings. There are also miniature replicas of Routemaster double-decker buses and red telephone boxes—both unremarkable, everyday features of Eve’s London youth, now exalted to the status of historical artefacts. Which must make her a historical artefact.
“Merry Christmas, missus.” The voice by her feet is trying another tack.
Her gaze remains fixed on the window and she winces as she recognises, on a rack of postcards of Big Ben and Tower Bridge, a fragment of her own work—a postcard-sized print of the central section of the Underground Florilegium. Who sends postcards these days?
“Please. If you can spare anything for a cup of tea?”
She looks down at him and he extends a hopeful grimy hand. His soft, girlish face is so far unmarked by degradation—he could be the model for Guido Reni’s pretty St. Michael, whose ornately sandalled feet trample the head of Satan. But Satan seems to have got the better of this St. Michael. Someone else’s lost child. She walks on.
* * *
—
It was a cycle. She was a disappointment to her own parents. Though they lived long enough to see and admire her material success, they always regarded her as an unnatural daughter, too wilful and wayward to be properly feminine. On this, through disputatious marriage and poisonous divorce, they agreed. They were appalled by the publicity over her affair with Florian Kiš—“he’s older than your father,” her mother said. “Couldn’t you have put some clothes on?” was her father’s pained response to Girl with a Flower. Now she wishes she had. After New York and the years of estrangement, they thought she’d become too grand, as the wife of an internationally successful architect, to be bothered with them. They had a point.
Parents start out as household emperors and end their days as barely tolerated buffoons; the only difference being the speed and gradient of descent. She couldn’t remember the time when her parents bestrode her world, though they must have done, once. Let-down set in early for Eve. Forget love or grief. Disappointment—dashed hopes and humbled dreams—is the intractable human condition.
Progeny couldn’t cut it. She never wanted a child—least of all with Florian, who was said by the end of his life to have sired some thirty offspring with a succession of daft girls who, their brains addled by romantic fiction, thought the role of muse was the highest calling. Eve was grateful for his parting gift—£100 cash for an abortion, posted through her Hackney letter box by the same henchmen who once delivered regular summonses to his bed. Two months later, when the money started coming in from the Underground Florilegium, she returned his £100 along with a single pressed pansy.
Ten years later, pregnant again, she let Kristof talk her out of a second termination. After Nancy’s birth, Eve, in a retrospective rage, insisted Kristof have a vasectomy. Never again. From now on, she said, she would focus on work. Time was running out, she declared, a
t what she thought of then as the advanced age of thirty. Today she’s twice that, her own distracting experiment with romantic love seems to be over and all that is left is work. No wonder she’s been going at it in a frenzy.
It always came down to the work. She didn’t make it easy for herself. The field was crowded, with mediocre successes as well as brilliant failures. Wanda Wilson—one of the Three Msketeers, as Mike Arrigo called them, referencing the honorific then favoured by second wave feminists—could barely draw a straight line with a sharpie and became a titan of the New York conceptual and performance art scene. Mike could reproduce a da Vinci sketch with his eyes closed but ended up, before his health gave out altogether, feeding his drug habit by churning out bad abstract oils for a budget hotel chain.
And then there were the giants. Who could compete with a body of work like Van Gogh’s, achieve perfection of line like Botticelli, or make pigment ring with the commanding clarity of country church bells like Matisse? Deconstruction was over—from cheeky, one-joke Duchamp to the po-faced ninnies of Fluxus and those self-mutilating clowns, the Viennese Actionists. They’d thumbed their noses and swung their wrecking balls through the academy. Demolition complete, where could they go from there? For Wanda, it seemed the only way was down. She was now deploying industrial excavators to dig her barren furrow. Soon she’d strike the earth’s core and invite the public to watch her—or one of the hapless victims of her new “relational art”—bathe, howling, in molten magma.
Eve took a less fashionable approach, relying on a degree of patience, skill and hard work that would have been familiar to Renaissance masters. She went on to make a decent living and finally achieved a six-figure sum at auction for her Rose/Thorn series. But that wasn’t enough to lift her above the herd. Purity of purpose was the artist’s aim, Florian said. “Paint and a passion” was all you needed. One pure work was all she ever hoped for or, failing that, one pure colour, like Yves Klein, who gazed at a cloudless French summer sky and dreamed up a hue so brilliant and so obvious that it was a miracle no one came up with it before: Yves Klein Blue.
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