Every night lately, he’d retreated to his side of the bed, falling into instant and profound sleep. Neither of them had the mental space or energy for the consuming intensity of sex. It was always hard to imagine quite how ordinary life could resume once the final frenzy of work was over. All that extra adrenaline can’t be turned off like a tap. It has to be processed somehow. The Florilegium’s end was in sight and, though it wasn’t going to be easy to let it go, once the work was done, physical passion could reclaim its place.
25
The bridge over the canal is covered with low-grade graffiti—crudely inscribed nicknames (Sax, Piq, Rok), expletives, sexual boasts and insults. Whoever dignified graffiti with the term “art” had a lot to answer for. These scrawls were “street art” just as the scribbled obscenities in public lavatories—in the days when there were public lavatories—were “toilet art.”
There was a better case for the aesthetic value of ghost signs, the palimpsests and faded lettering of old adverts once painted directly onto buildings by skilful working men on ladders with brushes, enamel paints, measures and mahlsticks to steady their line, who saw themselves as craftsmen rather than artists. These ghost signs are ubiquitous round here, if you look closely enough—elegant typographical phantoms with illustrative flourishes declaring the merits of long-gone tobacco brands, soap, beer, fountain pens, horse-carriage services, coal merchants, and haberdashers selling uniforms for maids and cooks. This is true street art, addressing the ordinary stuff of life—subject matter of the rhyparographos—conjuring a vanished world across time.
This has, in one sense, been her own project—to leave a mark, to give a sense of today’s increasingly fragile world to future generations. Should there be any future generations. Her fear, the artist’s fear, is that despite the effort expended in her mission and the monumental nature of her work, no one is looking. Luka, with his careless burst of mischief, played right into the heart of that anxiety.
* * *
—
The next morning, over coffee, he seemed contrite.
“I can’t wait to finish it. To step back and celebrate,” he said.
As an apology, that would have to do.
They continued to work on the arum canvas and by the afternoon it was almost done. Eve stood at the far wall to take in the painting in its entirety and was dissatisfied by the detail in the top left of the painting—the scale was wildly off. She was particularly vexed that it was her own work rather than Luka’s.
He turned on the video camera as she climbed the ladder to fix the problem.
“So,” he called up to her, “in the past you worked with an army of assistants. And now you’re alone.” Then he corrected himself: “We’re alone. How do you feel about that?”
Not a bad line of enquiry, she thought. She forgave him yesterday’s silliness and wanted to reclaim their easy, affectionate alliance. Once again, using a broad hog-bristle brush and a fresh batch of the green ground mix, she began to excise the offending plants.
“The artist is always alone,” she said as she painted. “Even in company.”
“In what way?”
“Florian would always say, when you address a new piece of work, the studio is crowded.”
“Florian Kiš?”
Which other Florian would it be? But the surprise in Luka’s voice was excusable. This was the first time Eve had brought up the name of her famous lover and she invoked it in a spirit of generosity. That’s what they all wanted to hear. Let Luka have it. In the substantial space of her studio, surrounded by her finest work, at the peak of her career, she had no need to feel defensive.
“Crowded,” she continued, “not just with whatever personnel the artist has hired—fabricators and administrators to help realise the project, or in Florian’s case, a single assistant and the sitter—but your past is there too, the ghosts of your family, friends, enemies, critics, supporters, and all your clamorous, competing ideas. Then you start to paint and they all begin to leave, one by one, shutting the door gently behind them until you’re left standing there, finally alone—just you and the work. Paint and a passion, that’s all you need. And then, if it goes well, you leave the studio, too, and shut the door behind you.”
“He said that?”
She nodded, climbing down the ladder to fetch a new brush, fresh paint.
“What about Girl with a Flower?” he asked. “How do you feel when you’re described as Florian Kiš’s muse?”
Now she regretted her generous impulse.
“It wasn’t exactly an exclusive club. In some circles you’d be hard-pressed to find a female art student who hadn’t posed for and slept with Florian.”
“Wanda Wilson?”
The name, in this context, made her recoil. Was he provoking her again? Wanda, a blabbermouth on the most personal subjects, had been discreet on this one—probably because it didn’t pan out too well for her. She’d been just another art groupie, vainly hoping for promotion to muse.
“Possibly. Though there’s no evidence of it. I doubt she was Florian’s type.”
In the press and on-screen, Wanda’s compulsive name-dropping had always seemed a subset of Tourette’s. She was an assiduous cultivator of celebrity, and her circle included rappers, tech innovators and reality TV stars as well as gullible intellectuals—writers, fashionable philosophers and politicians—seeking to extend their demographic reach. Was Wanda now, late in the day, bidding for artistic credibility by claiming a special relationship with the great Kiš?
“Amazing to have been part of that circle,” Luka said. “Kiš’s and Wanda Wilson’s. Did you feel you were part of an important movement at the time?”
He was testing her patience again.
“God, no. Why would I feel that? Come on. Put that camera down. Your last flowers? Top-right corner?”
“What about them?”
“The scale’s off.”
He was indignant. “No it isn’t. It’s a perfect match.”
“No really. It’s wildly out. Can’t you see? You’ll have to do that whole section again.”
He sighed and meekly went to work.
She watched him, trying to shut out memories of another artist at a canvas. All those years ago, after her final bathroom exile—the meditative forty-five minutes while Florian pleasured himself with his visitor—Eve heard Florian’s summoning knock and emerged into the studio, which was suffused with a familiar resinous musk.
Four decades later, in her own studio, standing before her own work, Eve felt too distracted by this slideshow from her past to paint. She would deal with some head-clearing administration—the latest batch of unopened letters, including several from her husband and his lawyer. It was quite a pile. She felt sufficiently detached from Kristof, at least, to tackle them. She opened the most recent first.
It was bad. Kristof intended to keep Delaunay Gardens, “the marital home, which you deserted,” the barn—her barn—in Wales, and the Tribeca apartment. In exchange, he was offering her “half a lifetime share” in the studio and a lump sum, barely enough to match the cost of their international travel over the last few years, “in full and final settlement.” She could stay on in the studio, partly as his tenant, in a grace-and-favour arrangement in the new “technology campus” at Bartlett Business Park, as long as she managed to remain alive; if she didn’t—and she imagined vengeful Kristof was now praying for that outcome—it would revert to Kristof or, in the event of his own death, the beneficiaries of his will: Nancy, she assumed, and her baby. Kristof, with the help of his expensive lawyer, was ensuring that Luka, or any future lover of Eve’s, would never get his hands on the studio.
She tore up the letter and went back to work in a fury. The proposed arrangement infantilised her, treating her like a feckless child, as if she hadn’t been an equal partner in their marriage, as if her sacrif
ice hadn’t increased the store of his success, as if her decision to strike out on her own was foolhardy caprice. Luka was on the platform, painting the last canvas with its green base ready for the red sequence, and she picked up her final subject—a spray of castor oil plant, Ricinus, with its perky scarlet pompoms. She forced herself to narrow her vision and focus on this one, still, small object of beauty.
It was no good. Her attention was shot. She felt hatred towards Kristof, not for his insulting proposal—so petty and predictable—but because he’d thrown her off course with her work. He’d robbed her of the composure and pinpoint concentration required to tackle her new subject. She went to the grinding slab and spooned out more quinacridone gold. She would retouch the orange canvas, an exercise in Zen repetition, until she felt ready to move on to the final sequence.
Luka shinned down the ladder and began filming.
“So the three of you in New York? You still see Mara Novak? Tell us about her.”
All her irritation with him had gone, replaced now by gratitude—sensing her distress about Kristof’s demeaning letter, Luka was bringing her back to her own history, to her secure, unchallenged place in the world. Kristof could never take that from her.
They worked on and talked through the night, their edges blurred by wine and exhaustion. When they could work no longer, they went to bed and made love for the first time in days, re-energised by pent-up hunger. They were back on track.
“This time I really need a lawyer,” Eve told Mara over the phone the next day.
“I heard. I was about to phone you.”
“How did you hear?”
Mara, her old countercultural compatriot, reinvented as a lesbian feminist therapist, shunned the art world, didn’t read the Daily Mail on principle and had never been on Twitter in her life.
“Everyone knows. You’re the talk of London. An achievement, of sorts…”
Sarcasm was no way to treat an old friend in crisis. Eve bit back her anger. She needed Mara. She needed her expertise in matters of family breakdown. They agreed to meet in a bar on the South Bank that evening.
She left Luka tidying the studio ready for their advance on the Florilegium’s final sequence. By the time she arrived at the National Theatre, Mara was already there, sitting at a table in the crowded foyer, bundled up like a babushka against the cold, warming her hands on a cup of green tea. Eve queued at the bar, bought herself a gin and tonic and joined her friend.
“He’s trying to screw me financially,” she told Mara.
“Who?”
Was she being deliberately obtuse?
“Kristof. I’ll be left with nothing.”
Mara sipped at her tea. She seemed strangely distracted.
“You could look at it that way,” she said. “Or you could look at it as recognition that you’re an independent woman with a successful career in your own right.”
This even-handed therapy-speak was maddening.
“I’m going to be penniless—he’s giving me a lump sum that will barely keep me in pigments and brushes, and a half-share in the studio for my lifetime, unless Google or Amazon want to take out a lease there.”
“Why do you think you need his handouts?” Mara said in that infuriating voice of reason. “You’re at the peak of your career—the Sigmoid show was a great success. You’ve got the Gerstein coming up in January. Your stock in the art market has never been higher. Kristof is just a glorified builder with an injured ego. Move on.”
This wasn’t helpful.
“He’s punishing me,” Eve said. “Punishing me for humiliating him, for choosing passion over respectability.”
Mara put down her cup.
“Well, let’s face it,” she said, dropping her neutral tone, “this peccadillo of yours—it’s not the first time, is it?”
Eve flinched. There was hostility in Mara’s tone.
“What do you mean?”
“It seems to be your thing. Uncorrupted young flesh…At least your current victim is above the age of consent.”
So that was it. The civilised veneer they’d maintained and polished over decades had finally cracked.
“If you’re talking about Theo, that was years ago. You know that. A moment’s folly.”
“Folly? That would be a kind way of putting it.” Mara’s voice was hard, accusatory. “He was a child. You were a predator.”
“That’s ridiculous. Theo was sixteen. It was perfectly legal.”
Mara was looking at her with open hatred.
“Actually, he was fifteen, if you remember. A week away from the birthday that you took him to Paris to celebrate.”
Eve pushed away her glass.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mara. You know that’s just pedantry. Why bring this up now? There’s no comparison. I thought you were fine with it. You had Kristof—I had Theo.”
“Actually, I didn’t know—until two weeks ago. Theo told me in a rambling phone call from Thailand.”
Astonishingly, Mara began to cry. Eve, embarrassed on her friend’s behalf, leaned over to pat her hand. So Mara hadn’t known. Eve never expected Theo to keep their secret—what teenage boy could resist boasting of his first serious sexual encounter?—but apparently he had. Until now. Eve’s satisfaction at her exquisite revenge, all those years ago, had been misplaced; Mara hadn’t been sent reeling by the news that her beloved son was the subject of a retaliatory seduction. Nor had she turned a blind eye to the affair, accepting that her own behaviour justified Eve’s response. Mara never saw a thing. All the same, even if she’d only just found out, her response to this old story seemed over the top. Did this new emotional lability signal a mental breakdown—maybe she and Dot had split up—or even herald dementia?
“I can’t believe you’re bringing this up now,” Eve said, chiding her softly. “You know I was fond of Theo. You know I did everything to help during his difficult teens, paid for his rehab, got him an internship at a recording studio, sent him back to Paris…”
Mara, her eyes puffy and bloodshot, withdrew her hand sharply and looked directly at Eve.
“Did it ever occur to you that his teens might not have been so difficult if he hadn’t been thrown off course by a powerful older woman who exploited his innocence?”
Eve reached for her glass. She could match anger with anger. She wasn’t taking this from Mara, the friend who betrayed her and did her best to wreck her marriage.
“That’s ridiculous,” Eve said. “Theo was perfectly mature. Maybe you don’t want to hear this, but it was an innocent, beautiful thing, an intense physical relationship between emotional equals. And he wasn’t a virgin. He’s not saying that, is he? Blaming me for his derailed life?”
“He’s not saying anything any more.”
“What do you mean?”
“He died of a drug overdose in Thailand last week. They’re flying his body home on Tuesday.”
Eve rocked back in her seat and closed her eyes. “No!…Theo?…God…” She shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”
She leaned across the table to grasp Mara’s hand, as much for her own comfort as for her friend’s. This time she was swatted away.
“Yes. You probably are. But you’ll never be sorry enough.”
Mara’s chair scraped noisily as she got up to leave. “You’d better find your own divorce lawyer.”
26
Eve’s heart starts to thud, it seems, even before she hears the sound. It’s a lone vehicle whose distant whirr becomes a whine and then a soft roar as it approaches her. A moped. Once seen as an effete mode of transport—the “mobile hairdryer” of parka’d mods, dwarfed by the Harleys and Nortons of the “ton-up boys”—now, in this context, a real threat. She’d heard the news—moped-riding thieves were the vicious new highwaymen plaguing London streets. “Your money or your life.” Sometimes “and your life.�
� She grips her bag tighter, knowing that the wisest thing would be to let it go. Just give it all—cash, cards, phone, keys—to the thief who might slash her with a knife or douse her with acid.
Just as she fears, the moped stops right by her.
“Excuse me,” the lone biker calls out.
She walks on, sick with dread but defiant. Tonight she’s facing a greater reckoning than mere robbery and violent assault.
“Excuse me, miss.”
Was this politeness irony? She turns to face her tormentor, to challenge him with her anger, knowing that, after a series of fantastically stupid missteps, this might be the most stupid thing she’s ever done.
He lifts his helmet so she can see his face—pale, acne-scarred, ludicrously young.
“Can you tell me the way to Sewardstone Road?”
She looks again at the moped, sees the logo on its storage box, and directs the pizza delivery boy back towards the bridge over the canal. She walks on. The rain is beginning to seep through her coat.
* * *
—
In the days after Eve heard the news from Thailand, work was a balm. Luka had calmed down and his silent presence was a solace as she fussed at the edges of the orange canvas. Soon she would be ready to tackle the red sequence. She was less than a week away from completing the Poison Florilegium.
One morning, she received a terse text from Hans. He was on his way to the studio. Luka was setting up the camera when there was a soft knock at the door. Hans barely looked at him as he walked towards Eve. His expression was solemn.
Nightshade Page 19
