Nightshade

by Annalena McAfee

  * * *

  —

  Tonight, as she walks through the city towards her studio where the paint is drying on the final canvas of her Poison Florilegium, she knows this will be her masterwork. But recognition—that arbitrary trick of the light—is not guaranteed. She knows this too. Look at Vermeer, whose genius wasn’t acknowledged until almost two hundred years after his death. Or poor Van Gogh, who died leaving nearly a thousand paintings unsold. Yes, one pure, perfect, piercingly authentic colour of her own—Eve would settle for that.

  * * *

  —

  Kristof has never been troubled by self-doubt. His legacy is assured. He isn’t daubing the portals, he’s building them. It would be hard to find a major city in the Western world, the Far East or plutocratic corners of Arabia which doesn’t have a distinctive Kristof Axness high-rise, a vaunting monument to technology, capitalism and human audacity. He’s always looking upwards, squinting against the sun at giant cranes swinging their loads, mechanical beasts doing his bidding and assembling his dream. By night, illuminated, his work defines the skyline and defies the stars. What chance did she ever have?

  Her work was, in comparison, domestic and small-scale, a sprig of speedwell hidden in moss beneath his mighty redwoods. It wasn’t surprising that details of her projects rarely registered with him. But it irked her. “Excellent, darling. You’re in your prime,” he’d always say.

  She’d been in her prime for twenty years by his reckoning. It cut both ways, though. What did she know—or care—about his new buildings, the Manila Tower and the Singapore Spire, or his proposal for Wanda’s ludicrous Art Ranch?

  * * *

  —

  Her pace slows as she skirts Hyde Park, where the Sigmoid Gallery is now showing the work of an artist whose medium is seaweed. Something skilful could be done with marine algae, Eve supposes. But this isn’t it. She has seen the posters and concluded that more craft, creativity and meaning is in evidence among juvenile sandcastle builders on an average bank holiday beach.

  * * *

  —

  In those moments when she’s had a good day in the studio, when she considers the abysmal efforts currently lauded as great art, she can banish self-doubt, look around and ask, “How do they get away with it?” Then she knows it is her misfortune to be the real thing in a world of mountebanks.

  In most areas of creative endeavour, there is some kind of measurable standard. Writers, mostly, need a grasp of the rudiments of language. Musicians don’t get far if they can’t actually play their instruments. Only in the visual arts can you set yourself up as a practitioner without a single baseline skill, though acting comes a close second as a forum of opportunity for the inept. How can you trust the judgement of someone who thinks Wanda Wilson has a scrap of talent or anything interesting to say?

  Eve distrusts all responses to her work. She has spent too long parsing the nuances of polite indifference. But Luka’s excitement was new. It was all new: this directness, honesty, passion—in the studio as well as the bedroom.

  Her new project would be a departure, she explained, telling him about the anonymous medieval women colour artists, about the Italian and Dutch women painters, geniuses of the still-life genre, who were ignored by art historians, and the Victorian women botanists excluded from the Royal Society and the Linnean Society on account of their sex. She showed him photographs of the flower-starred pastures of Ticino and the tapestries in the Cluny—omitting details about her young companion at the museum two decades before—and she suggested he read a biography of Jeanne Baret, whose lover and botanical partner gave his name to seventy species while she was written out of history entirely.

  Luka made a note of the book’s title on his phone. “Sounds amazing,” he said.

  His next question, though, was dismayingly crass: “Does your new Florilegium have anything to do with those Russians poisoned in the West Country last month?”

  “No it does not,” she said firmly. “Because then it would be journalism, not art.”

  He wouldn’t make that foolish connection again. She forgave him and continued to outline her plans. Monumental in scale, intimate in focus, the Poison Florilegium would be a seven-panel full-scale interpretation in oils of those Swiss meadows. Alpine flowers, sweet and bright as candy, would be exchanged for the deadliest plants, lovely as their innocent sisters, venomous as snakes—nature’s most vicious prank. Each 8ft by 15ft green “field” would be devoted to sixty-seven repeated representations of a single flower, one for every year of Baret’s life, its colour chosen to depict an element of the Newtonian rainbow. Seven canvases for seven colours, scattered across their parcel of green ground.

  This would be an exercise in science and craft as well as art. The oils would be mixed in the studio from pure powdered pigments, plants would be dissected and photographed, and complementing the large canvases would be smaller botanical watercolours on vellum of each flower, alongside which would be printed accounts of their properties, uses and place in folklore. Specimens of the flowers, dissected and whole, representing their entire life cycle, provided by specialist nurseries in South Africa and Latin America, would be suspended in preserving fluid in seven under-lit glass-and-steel display cabinets, creating a floral aquarium, or floating herbarium. Alongside the canvas panels, the works on paper, the photographs and the herbaria, would run a time-lapse film of the life cycle of each species—the footage provided by a U.S. government–funded ecology institute, itself facing extinction under the current bio-sceptical administration—opening with the first tentative thrust through soil and grass, through the hopeful unfurling, to full bloom and the gaudy moment in the sun, before the shrivelling and obliteration of decay.

  “You should film it, too,” said Luka. “You at work!”

  She resented his interruption. “It will be filmed. Josette always videos the process.”

  “You need more than that. Proper documentation, start to finish, with interviews, commentary.”

  Her assistants usually knew better than to offer suggestions about work in progress. This was her work, not theirs. But there was something in his idea. She could screen the life-cycle sequence in parallel with studio footage, in which she would talk through the inspiration for the project, telling the story of Jeanne Baret and the forgotten women painters, naturalists and botanical artists, and explaining the studio process, from the drawing and watercolour stage, to the last colour-laden brushstroke on the final oil canvas.

  She outlined her plans to Hans who nodded and murmured mildly but expressed no view. She wasn’t discouraged. He received his 20 per cent for selling her work, not for his aesthetic judgement. He did, though, go on to discuss this proposed new work with some select clients—major galleries in America, including the Gerstein, private collectors in the Middle East and Russia, as well as a new corporate player in Shanghai. There was, he reported later, with the faintest hint of enthusiasm in his voice—a slight rise in pitch and warming of timbre—already some interest and keen competitive bidding.

  There was much to be done and, in the unprecedented spring heatwave, as London impersonated Southern Europe in high summer—thronging street cafes, supine sunbathers on every parched patch of grass—Eve felt a vigour and urgency she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Not since art school. It can’t all have been down to Luka.

  Glynn and Josette began to prepare the canvases, stretching them, sizing them with rabbit-skin glue and applying gesso primer. They ordered the powdered pigment, funnelled it into reagent jars sealed with glass stoppers and stacked the jars on shelves built for the purpose. That corner of the studio began to look like an old apothecary shop.

  Vats of glue and primer, sealed jerry cans of formalin for the floating herbarium, and fresh supplies of turpentine and oil began to arrive. Josette and Glynn brought in two rock roadies in denim and bandanas to set out the chemicals, help with the
canvases, lean them against the wall at just the right angle—“this is about precision. No Pollock drips here,” Josette warned them—and assemble the display cases for the floating herbaria. It turned out that these two musclemen, Hugo and Matt, were well-brought-up ex–public schoolboys with an interest in art. As the most recent recruits to the studio, they were also responsible for coffee-making and fetching lunch from the nearby deli, tasks which they undertook grudgingly.

  “It’s as if handing out sandwiches is an assault on your masculinity,” Josette scolded.

  In contrast, Luka, primarily in charge of specimens and dissection, volunteered for every chore and offered to help Josette with filming. Another addition to the team was Abi Fulton, a recent Slade graduate who dressed like an Amish matron, her geeky look heightened by a white lab coat, gloves, mask and protective goggles. She supervised the pigments and still photography and in her self-appointed role as health and safety representative, insisted on ordering protective equipment for everyone in the studio—“standard practice these days,” she said. The other assistants, who preferred their own customised utility wear, were sceptical.

  “We’re dealing with toxins, heavy metals,” Abi protested.

  “You look like a beekeeper,” Luka told her.

  Eve had her own studio uniform—in the laundry room she kept a rail of identical navy sailcloth boiler suits, made for her in Suffolk—and she had no intention of wearing one of Abi’s cheap white coats. But she was determined to ignore any messy personal undercurrents from the team and shelled out for the safety gear. Let them sort it out. Nothing was going to divert her. She had a vision and she was intent on pursuing it.

  She started on the violet sequence. She was done with the eponymous sweet violet, “half hidden from the eye,” of the Underground Florilegium. Sweet anything was over for this new work, and so was reticence. This was about toxic beauty—the flower that entices then destroys. No one could confuse this project with flower fairies; scale alone propelled it beyond the tame domestic sphere. These canvases would only find a home in big institutional spaces. And the plants themselves, our subtle, seductive enemies, would pre-empt the most hostile critic’s sneering reference to sprigged furnishing fabrics.

  Monkshood was to be her first subject. She chose a single specimen, an intact cluster of cowled petals flaring from a tapering stem, and started sketching for the small watercolour.

  “It’s kind of creepy, this one,” said Luka, bent over the dissection tray, scalpel flashing, carefully dismembering the flower, wearing the gloves Abi had insisted on. “It looks poisonous.”

  “Aconitum napellus,” said Eve, reading from a herbal manual. “Monkshood. Devil’s helmet. Wolf’s bane is another name. They used to smear arrowheads with it.”

  He looked up. “Should I be doing this?”

  Abi, fully robed, masked and gloved at the grinding slab, gave a snorting laugh.

  “Now you’re worried!” she said.

  “Relax,” Eve said. “It won’t hurt you. Just avoid eating it, okay?”

  “What happens if you do?” Luka asked.

  Eve consulted the herbal. This information would be typed in for the printed panel that would hang alongside the watercolour.

  “Mmm…‘Death can be instantaneous,’ ” she read. “ ‘Or at least within the hour. Gastrointestinal crises, sweating, headache, confusion and—’ ”

  “Sounds like a bad hangover,” one of the muscle boys said.

  His friend sniggered into the awkward silence. These two hadn’t grasped the first unspoken rule of the studio; no one—least of all rude mechanicals—interrupted Eve.

  “And?” Josette asked, overriding the interruption and prompting Eve to finish her sentence.

  “ ‘Paralysis of limbs followed by paralysis of the heart,’ ” Eve read out. She closed the book with a dramatic snap and resumed her sketching.

  Glynn whistled. “You won’t get far with a paralysed heart.”

  “And the name? Monkshood?” Luka asked, marvelling at the beautiful weapon of mass destruction in his hand. “What’s that about?”

  “Look at it,” Eve said, getting up and walking over to him, conscious of a throb of heat passing between them. She pointed. “The answer’s in your hand. Those flowers, half hidden by their mantles…like the faces of medieval monks shrouded by sinister drapery.”

  “Wow. Yes. I see it.”

  He saw it. That was the great thing about Luka. He saw her work and he understood its value. He saw her too.

  While Eve finished her preliminary sketch for the water-colour, Glynn and Josette measured out the powdered pigment—phthalocyanine green with cadmium, two parts to one—for the meadow base on the large canvas. Bickering like tetchy sous chefs, they took turns to use the glass pestle—the muller—mixing the heaps of powder with linseed oil and turps on the grinding slab, checking the density of the finished colour with Eve. Then they carried their trays of paint up ladders onto a wheeled platform, loaded the big hog-bristle brushes and began work on the first canvas, laying out the flat green field over which Eve was to scatter sixty-seven spikes of monkshood, rendered in manganese violet, dioxazine mauve and carbazole purple, their grassy stems and palmate leaves picked out with viridian and gamboge yellow, highlighted by zinc white.

  At the small easel, she began to fill in her pencil sketch with limpid watercolour. She felt Luka’s presence across the studio as a voltaic charge. It was hard to resist looking at him. When she was confident she was unobserved, she watched him for minutes at a time—his beautiful face sombre with concentration, his long pale fingers using the scalpel to strip the sepals then the petals, splitting the ovum and setting out the parts on vellum for Abi to photograph later. His subtlety and precision was a personal tribute to Eve, an act of love, and turning back to sketch the flower, she felt a mad, transgressive glee, recalling those delicate hands playing over her body.

  That month, with perfect timing, Kristof went to Singapore to work on the Imperial Straits Bank commission, leaving her free to move into the studio and devote herself exclusively to her own project, and to Luka.

  Their night-time routine would begin at 8 p.m., as the others prepared to leave. Luka would make a show of departure, pack his bag and head for the door with them. Once outside, he lingered a little and then, when everyone had dispersed, he doubled back. At the sound of his soft knock she opened the door to his lovely form—all hers—framed in the doorway. He stepped back in and they shut out the world.

  In the studio, with the sulphur-tinged darkness of the city night outside gilding the canal, and the bright task lamp beaming over his shoulder, Luka’s face glowed golden in the shadows as he worked on at the dissection tray, a figure from one of Joseph Wright’s portraits of Enlightenment experimentation—a tenebrous study of patience, dexterity and wonder.

  They went to bed just before dawn and she lay basking in his regard, renewed and infused, in a benign contagion, by his youth and beauty.

  12

  She continues down Oxford Street which, even at this late hour, is thronging. Thousands of LED snowflakes drift over this busiest, ugliest retail strip in London. Crowds stand hushed and awed, faces shining in reflected light, gazing like medieval pilgrims before candlelit altars into extravagantly decorated shop windows. She catches a glimpse of one display—a long table spans the window horizontally, Last Supper–style, and sitting behind it, apparently enjoying Christmas dinner and pulling crackers, are a number of giant poodle mannequins wearing paper crowns and garish Italian designer clothing. The tableau is no less artful than one of Jeff Wall’s staged photographic conversation pieces from the seventies. It’s wittier than anything by Jeff Koons, too.

  What does the average window dresser earn in a year? £30,000? £35,000? She read recently that one of Koons’s Balloon Dogs, made under his orders by German fabricators, fetched $59 million
at auction.

  She would never delegate her work to a fabricator. She’s always loved the process and relished the craft. She’s good at it. She bumped into Koons a couple of times in New York in the early eighties. A charming snake oil merchant, even then. She didn’t think he could blow up a balloon unaided. Eve’s assistants were there merely to support her with minor tasks. She, alone, was at the centre of the work.

  * * *

  —

  With Luka’s help, she entered a phase of unprecedented productivity. The weeks unfolded—days and evenings devoted to work, nights to love.

  Gradually, she became aware that an atmosphere had developed in the studio. It was like low-level traffic noise intruding on an exquisite piece of chamber music; once noticed, it was hard to ignore. For the first few days, taking turns to mix the powdered pigments and handle the formalin, all the assistants wore Abi’s masks, gloves and glasses against possible toxic fumes. But putting all the equipment on and taking it off was cumbersome and time-consuming and they rebelled. Soon, only Abi wore the full rig. She was furious.

  “If you all want to risk your health, that’s fine by me,” she said one morning.

  Luka, at the dissection tray, waved his gloved hands at her. “This will do me, thanks. I don’t suppose Leonardo da Vinci and his team went around in HazMat suits.”

  Hugo and Matt laughed.

  Abi’s small face was contorted with injured defiance. “It might have been better for him if he did. All that lead and mercury didn’t do him any good.”