“Please?” Eve said, holding her brush like a conductor’s baton. That was enough to silence them for now.
Luka wanted to take over the filming but Josette resisted; this had always been her territory. At one point, she wrested the camera from his hands. These petty quarrels seemed part of a conspiracy to keep Eve from work.
Her irritation was made worse by more phone calls from Ines Alvaro, who wanted Eve’s personal approval for the most minute details of the Gerstein hang. Should the new cobra lily piece go at the end of her eighties carnivorous sequence? Or the beginning? Should it hang alone? Ines also insisted on discussing publicity and marketing schedules for the exhibition.
“The New Yorker wants to do a profile and T Magazine is talking about a photo spread.”
“It’s really not convenient now,” Eve told her.
They finished the violet sequence and, as she painted her signature, EL, a black hieroglyph hovering in the lower right quarter of the flower field, she felt a sense of profound significance. This serious enterprise was entirely hers. She had made her mark.
They moved on to indigo. The second canvas was to be filled with a twilight image of the veined bells of Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade, its glossy dark berries with their tangy green tomato scent fatally tempting to children and unwary walkers. Of all the flowers in this florilegium, it was the plainest but it had, as Nancy would say, “brand awareness.” The name alone, homage to the Greek goddess of Fate, Atropos, announced it as the brightest star in the firmament of poisonous plants. Atropos wielded the scissors that cut the threads of human life.
The flower, and its berries, was responsible for more deaths than all the other plants combined. Its second name, belladonna, acknowledged the pupil-widening effect that it had when a diluted extract was dropped in the eyes of “beautiful women,” or would-be beautiful women—Renaissance predecessors of the Botox sorority who, hoping to acquire a mesmerising gaze, also attempted to harness a deadly poison. Instant beauty was the goal. Who cared how it would pan out? The subject of Titian’s Woman with a Mirror, whose inky pupils are as big as Venetian ducats, may have used tincture of nightshade. Side effects included heart failure and blindness.
* * *
—
At Oxford Circus, Eve hits pedestrian gridlock. Squeezing through the crowd, she turns right into Regent’s Street, whose Christmas lights are outlines of giant Blakeian angels. She cuts left into Great Marlborough Street and even here, in this more lightly populated tributary, she has to weave her way through large groups of nocturnal sightseers gawping outside the 1920s Tudor revival fantasy of Liberty’s department store. Having spent her childhood in a Tudor revival suburban enclave, Eve has no affection for the building’s half-timbered style and hurries on. She’s with Pevsner: “The scale is wrong, the symmetry is wrong, and those twisted Tudor chimneys are wrongest of all.” Kristof tried to make the case for it, praising its “exuberance,” expressing admiration for its three light wells. He was at his most exasperating when most reasonable. He never believed any of it, she felt. He never believed in her.
* * *
—
She began to dread his return from Singapore. She had no idea where her affair was heading but she wasn’t ready for its end. The boy appeared committed. His passion was a nightly miracle. But she’d lived long enough, weathered her share of disappointments and was sufficiently rational to know that most things were finite. All things, ultimately. She could only be certain of her work and she went at it with a fervour that matched her hunger for Luka. Carpe diem. And carpe puerum—seize the boy.
The presence of the other assistants imposed a necessary discipline on the lovers. Ten hours’ compulsory restraint fuelled the night’s wild release and, back at work each morning, in company, even when occupied at opposite ends of the studio, Eve felt warmed by Luka’s force field. The others must have guessed what was going on. Josette and Glynn had a taste for gossip and they were clearly jealous of him. Why wouldn’t they be? They were jealous of each other.
Glynn prepared the green ground for the nightshade canvas, laying down the ferrocyanide Prussian blue of a summer’s gloaming, while Josette filmed Eve at work on her watercolour, talking through the process and telling the story of Jeanne Baret.
“This is really a bouquet for Jeanne.” She sketched out the dark, bell-like flower heads and lustrous berries—“death cherries” was one folk name, according to the herbal. “And for all those female artists and botanists who laboured in the shadows, the Victorian women, rigorous natural scientists doomed to be perpetual amateurs, who passed on their findings to their ‘professional’ male counterparts who took all the credit.”
Fractures continued to emerge among the team and soon they threatened to undermine the work itself. Hugo and Matt took against Luka and joined with Josette and Glynn in cutting him out of conversations. One afternoon, Eve saw Hugo brush past Luka at the dissection tray, causing him to drop his scalpel. Luka coolly glanced at Hugo, bent to pick up the scalpel, and carried on with his work. If only they had all been so focused. Abi was irritating everyone, creating a consensus of sorts. Robed up in her lab coat, goggles, mask and gloves, she continued to lecture her eye-rolling colleagues on studio safety. Luka led the teasing. Was she about to tackle a moon landing?
“You are all so negative!” she said. There was a pitiful throb in her voice.
Luka laughed. “Look at yourself!”
Again, Eve intervened. “Can we get back to work? Please?”
Later, she walked in on a heated argument between Luka, Hugo and Matt and, in the moment before they noticed her presence and fell silent, she sensed the threat of violence. Luka’s fists were clenched by his side. He was holding his ground and she felt a curious proprietorial pride. That night, when she asked him about the confrontation, he made light of it—“Male egos,” he murmured.
One morning, while she worked on the bottom half of the canvas, giving the purple flowers and glossy berries the inky tint of graduated evening light, she was distracted by a squall at the far end of the studio. Abi was shouting incoherently. Eve turned to see the girl take off her safety glasses and lab coat, throw them down and stamp off in tears, her oversized brogues squeaking in the sudden silence. She wrenched open the studio door, walked out and slammed it shut behind her. She wasn’t coming back.
Glynn and Josette took Eve aside and blamed Luka for Abi’s meltdown. It was bullying, Glynn said.
“He was always mocking her,” Josette added.
“Really?” Eve dipped a fine filbert brush in a pool of zinc white to give the berries an animating glint. “She must have been very thin-skinned, poor thing.”
Hugo and Matt stood conferring in a corner. Only Luka had a proper sense of priorities. He’d returned to his duties.
That night, in bed, Luka reassured her. “It’s really a waste of your energy to think about any of this stuff. They’re pygmies these people. You know what’s important. So do I. Let’s get on with it.”
He took over Abi’s role as still photographer and volunteered to help Josette with the pigments and floating herbaria. He was a quick study and the transition appeared seamless. It was a relief not to have Abi there, frowning in her goggles—the girl was a nexus of anxiety.
But two days later, when Luka was out getting lunch for the team (Hugo and Matt had been slow to stir when Josette asked them), Glynn approached Eve. She was on the wheeled platform, working on the top half of the indigo canvas.
“Can we have a word?” he asked.
“Must we?”
She descended the ladder reluctantly. How many more interruptions would there be today?
“He’s got to go,” Glynn said.
“Who?” Eve asked, reloading her brush with colour—two-thirds Prussian blue, one-third cerulean.
“Luka. He’s a disruptive influence.”
Eve shrugged, intent on her work. “What’s wrong with a bit of disruption?”
Josette joined Glynn.
“He’s undermining the team,” she said. There was an unpleasant bleat in her voice. “We were all getting along fine—it was so harmonious—until he came along.”
“Harmonious?” Eve couldn’t hide her irritation. “I haven’t seen much evidence of that. You should know by now, I don’t give a damn about harmony. This is an artist’s studio. Not choir practice.”
They returned to their work in silence.
That night in bed, Luka seemed distracted. Eve asked what was troubling him and he turned away.
“It’s not important.”
“Tell me!”
She raised herself on her elbow and looked at him—his solemn face, the Romantic poet, too sensitive for the world; Wallis’s young Chatterton, picturesquely arranged on his deathbed.
“It’s Hugo and Matt. The Old Etonian Hell’s Angels. They’re taking the piss.”
“Meaning?”
“They don’t take the work seriously.”
“Look,” she said, “they wouldn’t be my first choice as assistants. But they’ve been useful for the heavy, technical work. Let Josette and Glynn handle them. I really can’t get involved with this level of micromanagement.”
“I know, I know,” he said, reaching to draw her in for a kiss. “I didn’t want to trouble you. It’ll be fine. The work is all that matters. I know that.”
“The work—and us,” she corrected him.
13
Eve has skirted the hideous Swinging London theme park of Carnaby Street and is now in Berwick Street, where she, Mara and Wanda used to shop for rag trade remnants, bright scraps of silk, velvet and taffeta, plumes of ostrich and peacock feathers, to make wild party costumes, embellished by cheap treasures they found in vintage markets and jumble sales. When they weren’t costumed as post-apocalyptic punk warriors, they dressed like odalisques in Aladdin’s harem. She remembers a particular morning-after when she had to make her way back on a rush-hour Tube towards Hackney from Gloucester Road wearing nothing but a beltless embroidered kimono and a pair of knee-length boots. Her youthful fondness for costume was one trait she bequeathed to Nancy. That and an impatience with motherhood.
She walks on down Wardour Street, breasting waves of drunks, mostly merry, some wearing inane Santa hats, others paper crowns, and she feels a pang for the bad old days when Soho was a place of real danger rather than a hangout for tourists, office workers and students on a bender. Best not to dwell in the past, though lately it’s been more hospitable than the present.
* * *
—
For the first few days after Abi’s walkout and Glynn and Josette’s attempt to oust Luka, the atmosphere seemed to settle. Eve was back on the platform, completing the nightshade canvas. From this vantage point, with her assistants toiling below, true groundlings, she pressed on with her work. Glynn and Josette went at their duties diligently and, while the silence in the studio may have been loaded, the quiet suited Eve. If she wanted external stimulus, Luka would put on some music, or the radio news—accounts of global conflict and economic gloom usefully gave perspective to any studio spats.
Even Matt and Hugo were amenable, volunteering for errands with implausible eagerness. They assembled the first display cabinet without fuss, poured in the preservative for the herbarium and, once Josette had dropped in the monkshood specimens, they sealed the tank with an acetylene torch. There was a celebratory atmosphere as they crowded round to admire the purple flowers, leaves and seeds shivering in their watery tomb.
Eve went back to the canvas feeling buoyant. With a delicate Japanese sable brush, she layered titanium-white highlights on the phthalo-green leaves. Lunch, ferried without complaint by Matt and Hugo from the deli, seemed a collegiate affair. Then out of the calm, the crisis.
They were sitting eating and drinking coffee when Luka jumped up and threw his sandwich across the table.
“Come on. The food’s not that bad!” Matt said. He and Hugo were grinning.
“You bastard!” Luka shouted.
“Lighten up,” Hugo said, leaning back in his chair and stretching out his legs, hands clasped behind his head.
Luka walked over to him, fists bunched. “You just tried to kill me.”
Now Hugo and Matt were on their feet, squaring up.
They had the advantage of height and bulk.
Eve had to step in. “What’s this about?”
Luka turned to her. “They tried to kill me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Hugo said.
“He’s gone mad. Completely flipped,” Matt said.
“Let’s calm down.” Glynn stepped in, placatory palms raised. “No one’s trying to kill anyone.”
Luka reached for the sandwich and peeled it apart. On top of the cheese and salad filling were two purple petals. Monkshood.
Hugo and Matt denied it, of course. But who else could it have been? The amount of aconite used may not have had fatal consequences. But that wasn’t the point. The atmosphere in the studio was toxic and this level of disruption was unsustainable. Hugo and Matt had to go.
Josette and Glynn pleaded on their behalf, but Eve was firm. The pair had done much of the manual groundwork required anyway—all the canvases were ready, primed and in position against the walls, most of the display tanks had been assembled and were waiting to be filled and the chemical supplies were set out in order.
“Get out! Now!” Eve told them.
When she was finally alone with Luka that night in the studio, he made light of what amounted to an attempt on his health, if not his life.
“We don’t need those two. End of,” he said.
He didn’t want to dwell on it. He began to film Eve at the canvas. Josette might try to hog the camera during the day, but at night it was exclusively his.
“We can focus on your work now,” he said. “Not the egos of those two goons. It’s so amazing to be involved in this project. That was the problem with Hugo and Matt—they just didn’t get it.”
He was confident he could take over all their roles.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said, adjusting the camera’s focus. “I’ve watched them. How difficult can it be to knock up a flat-pack glass case and shift a few cans of chemicals about?”
She relaxed, marvelling at his competence, and in bed later, there was a heightened passion in their lovemaking.
“I’ve never known anything like this,” he told her. “You’re better than any drug.”
They lay together, exhausted and exultant. It would have been absurdly reductive to suggest that gratitude played a part in his ardour, but Eve knew that Luka had much to thank her for—for sticking up for him, for giving him a purposeful life. Though neither of them liked to talk about it, she’d also given him a good salary, topping the wage he’d earned from the Old Masters website, then increasing it to compensate for the extra work he’d taken on when Abi walked out. And, with the departure of Matt and Hugo, he was about to take on even more.
The next day she sketched out the watercolour for the blue sequence—aquilegia—while Glynn tackled the ground for the large canvas and Josette, wearing Abi’s goggles, mask and gloves, carefully picked out specimens of nightshade with tweezers and released them into the glass tank of formalin.
Eve, watching Luka, noticed Josette bridling when he leaned over her.
“Let me help, Josette,” he said.
“I’m doing fine, thanks.”
“Let him have a go,” Eve said, conscious, even as she spoke, that she sounded like Mara, intervening with her squabbling toddlers, reminding them that it was “nice to share.”
Josette stepped back, removed the safety glasses and gloves and thrust them ungraciously towards Luka. He ignore
d her, picked up the tweezers and let the last few plants fall into the herbarium.
“Easy,” he said.
So it seemed. Josette, her arms folded, still sulking—her expertise and authority undermined—asked Eve if she wanted to check the tank before they sealed it.
Eve wasn’t interested in technical details. The thing itself, the bright box of anatomised flowers, was what she wanted to see. It looked exactly as she’d envisaged. The nightshade specimens, suspended in their transparent medium, seemed to hang in space, shivering faintly, and the backlit berries glistened like black tears.
“Perfect,” she said.
Before Josette could object, Luka put on the safety glasses, picked up the acetylene torch and, in a spray of sparks, swiftly sealed the cabinet. Usurped again, her jaw set grimly, Josette walked around the tank, leaning in to examine the seams, tapping them with a screwdriver, clearly unhappy that she couldn’t find fault with Luka’s handiwork.
“That’s enough, Josette. Leave it,” Eve said. “Let’s get on.”
Josette dropped the screwdriver on the lid of the sealed tank.
“Watch it!” Luka said, in an unnecessarily teasing tone. “You’ll crack it!”
Josette glared at him.
“Come on, Jose,” Glynn said. “Let’s get these pigments sorted.”
Eve turned on the radio to reports of wildfires in Greece—up to a hundred dead—and she thought of her own wildfires here. No fatalities, so far. But the sparks were spreading. The tension in the studio was palpable—Glynn and Josette now refused to address Luka directly. Eve reminded herself that tension was good for the creative process. It seemed to be good for the bedroom too.
Glynn had almost finished the base colour for the third canvas and the fresh green field would soon be ready for its scattered blue stars of aquilegia. Josette resumed filming and, with her eye behind the camera, seemed to regain composure, zooming in on Eve as she worked on the watercolour, questioning her further about her methods, filming the extravagant sweeps of Glynn’s arm as he laid the chromium oxide wash across the canvas, moving in for close-up footage of the two floating herbaria and the five empty tanks waiting to be filled.
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