20
A crowd blocks the street outside Shoreditch Town Hall. She picks out French and Spanish accents, possibly Russian and Italian too—all well-heeled, milling around, embracing, waiting for cabs, too absorbed in each other to notice the lone woman pedestrian trying to make her way through. They have been to the Michelin-starred restaurant which now occupies a wing of the pale Italianate building, once the seat of local government. She steps off the kerb to walk round the crowd and looks up at the tower—the fierce stone woman brandishing a torch is named on the plinth as Progress. Nearby is a stained-glass window engraved with the old municipal motto—“More Light, More Power.” Now there’s a maxim to live by.
* * *
—
Belle was poised and pretty, though her looks wouldn’t last—no bone structure. Her hair was hennaed and she had a churlish lipsticked pout. A tattered fox fur was draped round the collar of her unseasonal tweed coat, which she unbuttoned and handed to Luka. He took it, with its dangling dead vermin, as if he was her valet. Under the oversized coat, she was gamine, a panto principal boy up for some spirited business with Buttons in leopard-print jacket, leather miniskirt and fishnet tights. The look—ironic tart—was complemented by clumsy lace-up boots. This was fashion as oxymoron. Only the young could get away with it. Belle was a clichéd throwback to the days of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, the edgy London of power cuts, demonstrations and Rock against Racism—more than a decade before she was even born. Eve had lived the real thing. She’d done it all. Worn it all. Now the young, intellectually and culturally enfeebled, were condemned to rummage in the dressing-up box and recycle insipid versions of their elders’ countercultures.
Eve poured Belle a glass of wine and noticed the girl had the same small tattoo as Luka—the grinning Mexican skull—on her right hand between thumb and forefinger.
“There must be a gene for tattoo selection,” said Eve.
Belle frowned. “We got them done at a festival.”
Either she hadn’t grasped Eve’s mild attempt at a joke—a social overture—or she’d taken offence. This generation, as Nancy regularly demonstrated, was uniquely good at taking offence.
The girl looked up, glass in hand, taking in the enormity of the studio.
“Cool. I’ve seen photos but there’s nothing like being in the physical presence…”
“You won’t have seen photos of this work,” said Eve. “No one’s seen it yet except my dealer.”
“And me,” said Luka.
“And Luka,” Eve corrected herself.
“Fantastic,” said the girl, in a flat voice.
Luka led his sister to the dissection tray.
“This is part of what I’ve been doing,” he told her, picking up a scalpel and swishing it through the air. “Stripping the plants right back to their elements, then I photograph them and drop them into preserving fluid in these herbariums—herbaria—along with the whole specimens, so you can see the entire life cycle.”
His excitement about the project was not shared.
“And here,” he said, leading her over to the artemisia canvas. “I worked on this painting with Eve. Can you tell my work from hers?”
Belle shrugged off her jacket. Her black lace shirt was unbuttoned almost to the waist and a tangle of cheap costume jewellery was looped over plump breasts brimming in a red bra. She could have been a shop girl at Vivienne’s Chelsea boutique in the seventies.
“Is there any more wine?” she asked, holding up her glass as if proposing a toast.
What was it with these young women—self-described feminists all, demanding their right to dress like old-school prostitutes? “Look at me!” they yelled. “Look at me! Don’t look at me, you sexist pig!”
Belle wandered away, glass refilled, walking past the glowing canvases as if they didn’t exist, gazing up at the girders in the studio’s darkest corners. She was the younger sibling but she was clearly the dominant one. Luka danced around her, trying to ingratiate himself, to win her approval. The more he advanced, the further she retreated.
If Belle had been more congenial, or enthusiastic, if she’d even made an attempt at polite interest in the work, Eve might have opened another bottle and ordered a food delivery. She was dreading Nancy’s party; an evening of shrill vacuity and bad wine. But if the alternative was several hours in the company of the unpleasant Belle, Eve was glad to be leaving.
“Luka can show you round. Stay as long as you like,” she said.
* * *
—
The wail of an approaching emergency vehicle starts up. Someone’s merry evening—an office party, perhaps—has ended badly. Eve puts her hand against her ears to shut out the noise as an ambulance flashes past, its blue lights oddly festive, merging with the Christmas decorations flickering from shops and flats around her.
* * *
—
As young teenagers—fifteen and sixteen years old—Eve and her brother would sometimes walk the city at night. Not the tourist routes of London but the ugly twenty-five-mile link road fringing the city’s bleaker suburbs—the North Circular. This wasn’t sightseeing. The act of walking, aid to conversation and reflection, was the spur—the chance to talk and think, unhindered, outside the stifling bounds of home. Back then, there was no awareness of the health risk of traffic fumes. Their main impulse was to flee the contaminating mental sickness of their mother, a bitter spectre, her pallor ghastly in the light of the television set which was always on, long after the service shut down. Amazingly, Eve and John were only challenged once—a police car stopped to check on them as the lorries hurtled by, somewhere outside Wembley, and having established that they were siblings out for a blameless, if eccentric, late-night stroll, the two bemused policemen drove on. It had been, she could see now, a preparation for the flight of adult life—a willed act of self-propulsion into the future.
They were close then, Eve and her brother, but she was aware that, though their sibling relationship wasn’t as obviously unhealthy as Belle’s with Luka, it didn’t bear close examination. She always held the upper hand. Poor John. Like Magnolia Boy, he never stood a chance.
It started young. Family dynamics were forged in the womb. In Eve’s case, her resolve and tenacity rushed in to fill the cavity left by her parents’ emotional absence—her mother’s thwarted ambitions, her father’s dogged adherence to rules and routine. There were a few missteps in her teens and twenties, when she confused sexual hunger with love; Florian exacerbated that confusion. What her childhood did give her was a rare talent for solitude, even in company. She always knew that she was on her own, even through the most social years of art college, New York and the best, early times with Kristof. The sealed capsule in which she made her way through life became her protective armour, and then her skin.
John shared her taste for solitude but he never acquired a carapace. From the start, he was rubbed raw by life. For him, that absence of childhood warmth led to a lifetime of yearning. For unloving parents and a bossy sister, he swapped bossy, unloving wives—two of them, the second worse than the first. They reinforced his sense of guilt that he could never do enough for others. This was his doomed vocation—to bring happiness where there was misery. So he sought out misery and in the process visited even more of it on himself.
* * *
—
The temperature has dropped and the rain has turned to sleet. Eve shivers and looks around at the sparse passing traffic, hoping to see the friendly yellow light of a black cab for hire. No luck. She takes out her phone to summon an Uber. But to get in a taxi would mean social interaction and even the most basic level—“Had a good night?” “Going home?”—would be more than she could stand. If the driver were to start on the subject of Brexit—they talked of little else—she’d be tempted to unclip her seat belt, open the door and hurl herself onto the road. Besides, a cab, with or without
political commentary, would deliver her to her future too soon. She isn’t ready. Better to shiver outside on a wild night, alone with her thoughts.
As they worked on, Luka began to tell her his family history. It was Eve’s turn to ask the questions, though she had little interest in the precise details—the dead mother, the lonely years at boarding school, the hastily remarried father and the wicked stepmother who, eventually widowed, cut Luka and Belle out of the family fortune. It was like listening to the synopsis of a soap opera she had no intention of watching. What drew her in was Luka’s urge to confide; it bound him to her even more. His loneliness touched her, and mirrored her own. They were kin and she could save him from bitterness.
They made such progress with the Florilegium, and were so mutually enraptured, that it became difficult for Eve to remember that she had a life outside the studio. She began to get careless. She stayed overnight at the studio and texted late, lame excuses to Kristof. He was preoccupied with work—a firm of German architects had come in at the last minute with a counterproposal for the Wanda Wilson project, forcing him to cut his fees—and he didn’t challenge Eve about her absences.
After a lifetime spent struggling to achieve some equilibrium between domestic life and the call of work, Eve went with the work, loosened her grasp and leapt, relishing the sensation of free fall, a delicious swoon into herself. All the calls of convention and conscience could go hang. This was what mattered, where she wanted to be—at the surging confluence of creativity and sensuality.
One night, in play, Luka hid her mobile and by the time he gave it back to her the following morning, she saw she’d missed three calls from Kristof. She built up a story about a mislaid phone—that much was almost true—and a studio emergency. Her husband had never been the suspicious type, a fact that had irritated her wildly in the past when she embarked on her retaliatory affairs. But, though he bought her story about the lost mobile and a studio power failure, he seemed to withdraw from her.
Discovery was inevitable. She’d been seeking exposure all along. The invitation to Belle was the first step. The following week, after two nights’ absence without explanation, she returned to Delaunay Gardens. Luka, as if he knew what she was about to confront, sent her off with a tender farewell.
“You, me and the work—that’s all there is,” he said.
Kristof was waiting for her, his face taut with anger. “I know something’s going on.”
He wasn’t a violent man. She wasn’t afraid of him, as she had been of Florian, who would lash out without provocation and was roused to fury by the perceived crimes of mediocrity and insubordination as much as by any imagined betrayal. But then Florian was a genius at loving reconciliation, too.
“Tell me!” Kristof shouted, thumping the kitchen table with his fist.
For a few seconds, she considered denial. It was not too late to save herself, to return to the floating, sensationless medium of her marriage. It would have been easy. All she had to do was flip the switch and shut down. But she didn’t want to shut down. She didn’t want ease. She wanted difficulty—passionate, consuming difficulty.
So she told him.
Kristof’s challenge had the stinging force of a slap. “Are you serious?”
He was belittling her.
“I’ve never been more serious!”
She even used the word “love,” which she’d so far withheld from Luka. It felt good to say it, to give weight to their commitment. Yet still it was all in the balance. She could, if she wanted, repent, row back, and resume her old life. There was time.
As Kristof harangued and pleaded, she saw two futures, a vivid diptych: one a tableau mort, in which she lay frozen in the mausoleum of her marital bed; the other a tableau vivant, with the tumbled sheets and ripening fruit of life with Luka. It was no coincidence that, since her sensual self had been unleashed, she was producing the best work of her life. She knew it. Luka said so. Even Hans said so.
To betray this new love would be to betray herself. Even the word love—cover for so much sentimentality and bad art—was an inadequate description of her bond with Luka. He was her psychic twin. His ambitions, vulnerabilities and darkest urges reflected hers. He saw through her to her core, as she did to his. For the first time in her life, she was understood and appreciated, as an artist and as a woman, and she felt invincible. Emboldened by Luka’s belief in her, she could step out of the shadows and claim her place as an artist ablaze with potential.
“He’s a boy,” Kristof said. “You’re making a complete fool of yourself.”
“No more than you did with the luscious Elena.”
“Precisely!”
Eve knew, even as she said it, that hers was a weak rejoinder. That the name of the vapid girl, troublesome for a few months, who vanished from their lives long ago, should spring to her lips, came as a surprise to her. To Kristof too. He thought Eve was over it. So did she.
They sat in the growing gloom of their kitchen, lobbing insults, summoning ancient slights and injuries unexpressed for years, so intent on retribution that to get up and put on the lights would be a banal interruption to an enthralling drama which promised victory at last to the righteous. Each was amazed by the pettiness of the other. The grudges of decades, nurtured in darkness, had borne monstrous fruit. As night fell, the green winks of the kitchen timer displays grew brighter—coffee machine, microwave, cooker and hob counting down the seconds—and it seemed they were in the cockpit of a spaceship hurtling towards the black extremities of the galaxy.
21
Is that singing she hears? Not a gaggle of drunks but a tuneful little choir. Carol singers? Here? There are six of them, young, ethnically diverse, arms linked and advancing towards her with broad smiles. An ambush of goodwill. Alcohol may have been involved—they seem impervious to the sleet, which is gusting into their faces—but it hasn’t impaired their skilful harmonies. Local music students on the razzle? Or stragglers from some church event, who’ve taken literally the injunction to “let nothing you dismay.” They look too well adjusted and playful to be bona fide believers. They walk on past her, broadcasting tidings of comfort and joy. A more fitting musical accompaniment on this Via Dolorosa, Eve reflects, would be “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
* * *
—
When the truth about her affair was out, she was relieved to the point of elation. She wanted to see Kristof suffer and found a giddy joy in provocation as she listed the flaws of their marriage and pronounced it dead: their non-existent sex life, his arrogance, his lack of interest in her work, his constant absences. He gave as good as he got, citing coldness, self-absorption and her lack of interest in his work. In this exchange of historical indictments and spiralling recriminations—an arms race of obloquy—she wanted not just to burn her bridges but to strafe the approach roads. If she and her husband were both to perish in the firefight at that moment, so much the better. There was no going back.
“And let’s not forget Mara…” she said. She paused for breath and it was Kristof’s turn to rant.
He coldly recounted some unwifely business of nine years ago—support not given, enthusiasm not shared, attention elsewhere—then turned to her failures as a mother.
“You have no interest in our daughter. Never had.”
Eve could take no more. She left the room, walking into the bright glare of the hall, leaving him fulminating behind her in the dark.
“And as for our grandson…” he shouted. “What’s wrong with you?”
Upstairs, she packed a few clothes and toiletries in an airline carry-on. It was so easy. In this new phase of life, it would be hand luggage only.
By the time she came downstairs, Kristof was pouring a single glass of wine. He’d had enough too.
“I’ve ordered your cab,” he said. “The studio, I assume.”
“That’s good of you.”
&
nbsp; If there were obituaries for marriages—summarising the good points, glossing over the bad—this would be theirs: even in extremis, they could revert to chilly civility.
Her husband’s face was haggard in the half-light as she stood at the door.
“Eve,” he said softly, “are you sure you know what you’re doing? What you’re turning your back on?”
She knew exactly what she was doing. All she could do was submit to the pull of gravity and fall towards her future. One step and a delicious, tumbling surrender.
* * *
—
More sirens sound in the distance—another ambulance, or a police car. The noise bears down on her and she ducks into a quiet side street where the slate face of a new luxury apartment block glowers across the road at the festering concrete of a low-rise council estate. She walks on and sees, before it’s too late, a group of people standing in the shadows ahead. They are all, as far as she can tell, young men, and there are about eight of them. She slows her pace. Can she shrink back, undetected? To turn and run would be provocation. All evening, she’s been struggling against a dragging sense of terror. Now she’s swamped by it; terror is all there is. The luxury apartments look empty and defended against outsiders. Should she cross into the council estate and hope to find help there? Or at least a witness?
Her saviour, it seems, is a car that comes speeding along from the other end of the street. It brakes noisily by the group and they go over to it, surrounding it, leaning in to talk to the driver. The car starts up again and they step back. Now the car pulls up alongside Eve. The driver lowers his window and holds up a small plastic bag.
“You buying?” he asks her.
Nightshade Page 16
