by Neil Hegarty
But – no. She couldn’t quite say. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what John might or might not feel about it. She sat, once again, with her disquiet.
He had drawn her portrait. She had sat for him, for an hour only, in his studio at the college, and he had quickly sketched her: a soft, crumbling white crayon on green paper. The room faced north, and its large windows let in a flood of clear, cold light – even on that misty morning. But the mist, though it had not affected the air, seemed to cling to the lines and edges of the portrait. John had fuzzed its edges with his middle finger, systematically; and the result was a cloud, a snowfall on a green field.
‘Impressionistic,’ Stella said, ‘I like it.’
He shrugged. ‘I was thinking about snow, and this is what came out.’ He paused. ‘Etienne likes the Connective sequence, he says. He says he wants to buy them, the lot of them. A good price, too.’
‘Snow?’
An unfocused glance and another shrug. ‘And ice. I was thinking about the ice on the river, that time, and then I began thinking about snow. That’s all.’
She nodded.
‘Are you going to let him buy the Connective pieces?’
She had to repeat herself: and now again he shrugged, seeming to haul himself back from some edge or precipice. ‘I suppose I will.’ She looked at him, and looked at the snow-burdened portrait, and said nothing more.
Now, she contemplated a dinner with Etienne, considered ways by which this might be evaded, thought about means by which she could distance John from this person, this collector.
‘I might pass on dinner,’ she said lightly, ‘unless you mind awfully.’
‘I need you to come,’ he replied, in tones that brooked no opposition. Stella nodded. But she wondered what he did in fact need. Did he need her? Did he need Etienne? The latter, perhaps, for affirmation, and bread and butter. But the former? – well, she wasn’t certain any longer about that. There was a gap there, she was realising, that could not, perhaps, ever be bridged.
‘I’ve been working on something else,’ he said.
‘Have you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Inspired by you, I should add.’
She raised an eyebrow, tried to shed her gloomy mood. Beef-and-mango casserole, had he said? That didn’t sound like fun.
‘A distemper piece,’ he said.
She looked at him. Distemper? She said, ‘Won’t that – fade?’
‘Yes. Fade. Exactly.’ Though, not always. ‘You remember Emily Sandborne?’
‘Oh yes, poor Mrs Sandborne, that was sad. That awful husband of hers.’ Stella paused. ‘Oh – yes, that piece, that discovered piece. That was distemper too.’
‘The Jewel – it didn’t fade. Nobody knows why. So this one might fade, or it might not fade; I don’t really mind what it does.’
‘Well, good for you, darling. Plunge in.’ She watched him. ‘Nobody knows why it didn’t fade?’
He shook his head. Nobody knew. Nobody had been able to find out.
‘Gosh,’ Stella said. ‘So, she was cleverer than the lot of us, was Mrs Sandborne. Well, that must have been a comfort to her.’
She continued to study him.
*
He would have the cloth stretched tightly across the frame, as though he were some Eastern European artist with an eye on materials and how much they cost. Keep the price down. Use as little as possible. The linen would be stretched almost to breaking point, like his mum’s skin on her temples, on the knobs of her wristbones. No need to explain.
In the cold, clear light of his studio space, he worked quickly, and the piece came together. A length of linen, bought – and not cheap, either – in the haberdashery department of Peter Jones, from a snoot who couldn’t understand what a man was doing, wandering around looking for a good linen tablecloth.
‘A wedding present, sir?’
No.
‘A gift for your wife, perhaps.’
A gift for my life.
‘No.’
Not too large and not too small: but he couldn’t decide on the size, so the snoot would just have to take each tablecloth out of its smart, careful packaging, and show him.
‘But, sir—’
‘I insist.’
He insisted: and whey-faced, the snoot did as she was bid.
‘That one.’
Beautifully hemmed and simple, thickly woven yet translucent, creamy-white but not white in itself. Perfection.
‘I’ll take it.’
He prepared and applied the size, he set the linen aside for the size to set, he waited impatiently – for there was never any time to wait, not once he had an idea – and now he prepared his colours. His hands trembled a little – but no: Stella was right. You could, if you wanted to, she’d said, and now his yellow shone like the dense brown-gold of the Thames in sunlight; and the silver had the sheen of the Thames shingle at low tide; and the blue was the washed blue of early morning, when two little boys went scrambling down to the Quaggy to see what could be fished from the tidewrack. And the green – not that anyone could be expected to understand this – was the pure, welling green that shone on the very edges of a polluted London sunset, viewed from his mum’s living room in her city in the sky.
‘Look, Mum,’ he’d said, once, ‘can you see that colour, that green? You don’t often see that.’
She looked. ‘No.’
It wouldn’t last, this distemper piece – but that was part of the deal; and Stella understood this, too.
‘Yes, I see,’ she said – this, after a long period of silence, as she took in this single piece, this large piece, this cloth transformed into something that dazzled. ‘Give it its time, and let it go,’ she said. ‘Is that what it is?’
He nodded.
‘Yes, I see,’ she said again, and smiled. ‘It sets my heart beating,’ she said, ‘fit to burst. And not for public consumption.’
‘No, I mean yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, exactly.’
20
‘Why,’ Stella repeated, and shrugged. ‘Well, why not, really.’
A fresh afternoon on the Embankment. The pier, and pleasure craft, and in the distance a train rattled across Hungerford Bridge, striking out for points south. A bus belched past, and another. Noise and diesel fumes and traffic.
‘Let’s get away from the river,’ she added. ‘Let’s go to St James’s Park.’
They walked in silence. On Whitehall, he asked the question again.
‘Tell me, though, why Stella?’ He was not insisting on knowing: but there was a little curiosity.
She looked up into the lime trees, around at the groomed buildings. Nearby, Big Ben struck the quarter-hour. A shrug. ‘I suppose you could call it a wish, or an invocation.’ A pause. ‘The pouring of a libation.’
A libation?
She laughed lightly. ‘Did I ever tell you?’ – but of course she knew she hadn’t told him – ‘when I was thirteen or fourteen, and a difficult, spotty, monstrous creature, I would take a glass of milk, or a glass of squash, and pour it into the ground in our garden, in our little orchard, as a libation. I read about libations in some book or other, in Daddy’s library, God knows why there was a book like that in a place like that, but anyway, there was, and I read about libations in it, and off I would go, and make a libation of my own.’ A pause. ‘Several, in fact.’
A libation? He was impressed. Nobody had poured libations in Deptford, that he’d ever been aware of.
‘No, you never did tell me that.’
Stella laughed again. ‘I suppose you think I’m a fruitcake.’
‘No, I don’t think you’re a fruitcake,’ he told her. ‘But—’
‘Why?’
He nodded.
‘Well, that was the serious thing.’ She looked serious too: they entered the park, and she took a breath of the fresher air, and frowned a little. ‘Very serious indeed. I read Swift’s poems to Stella, you know, Jonathan Swift in Dublin, and Stella was his soulmate, his love, his no
ble, great-hearted love, and she seemed so sensible too, as well as love-inspiring, and he wrote all these poems to her, and I read them; and I had Daddy’s damned book, and it occurred to me that I could pour a libation, or two, or three, and request help to get away from Berkshire, and away from everything, and meet a man, and have a love like Swift and Stella.’
She had spoken much faster than usual – or rather, she had sped up noticeably as the words tumbled out. Embarrassment, or mortification, or – was it possible, in Stella? – nerves, and now she had to pause for breath.
On the lake, willows and swans and ducks, and a heron motionless by the water’s edge.
‘I don’t know these poems,’ John said. What poems did he know? He looked up at the fresh green of the willows. ‘What sort of a love did they have?’
‘Oh, well, I mean, the first thing to say, really, is that they had quite a complicated life; and there was another woman, a younger woman, and then Stella herself went off and died on him, to cap it all. So it wasn’t much of a life. But the love.’ Again she stopped.
‘Yes,’ John said. ‘The love. What was the love like?’
The love was beautiful, she told him, then. The lake water shone suddenly, a sudden onset of what felt like grace: and she told him that the love that had caught her eye, as a sullen, trapped girl in Berkshire: the love was respectful. Mature. Paced and balanced and based in mutual delights, on a meeting of minds, on beauty and harmony. And Swift wrote poems to capture the essence of all this.
‘And so you poured a libation to the gods, to bring you a similar love.’
‘In our garden. In our orchard,’ she said in her best Berkshire tones.
‘Oh yes, you said that, your orchard.’
‘I didn’t plant the wretched orchard.’
He looked into the shimmering water. ‘These poems. I’ll go and read them for myself.’
Did he – she asked again, there by the lake – think she was a fruitcake? He shook his head. It was unorthodox, for sure: but then it was unorthodox to get down on your knees and pray in a church, or beside your bed, depending on how somebody looked at it.
‘I was just a child.’
He nodded again. A libation was fair enough. Easier on the knees, too.
It all gave him a lot to think about. The nature of love, and the love that somebody might want in their life, and the means by which it might be acquired. He gazed at the heron and said slowly, ‘Maybe libations will become all the rage.’
Anyone can pour a libation, Stella told him, anyone can make an offering. To the gods, to the dead, to the dear departed. You just needed a little bit of wine, or rum, or anything at all, and a candle, and an intention.
To the Devil himself, in his coal-black waistcoat.
He thought of his broken mother, and his pulverised and splintered father. He thought of his gran, long ago now, sick with longing for the North. Would he pour a libation, would he say a prayer, would he ask for their help?
And help with what, exactly? There was so much: he would hardly know where to begin.
And the nature of love. Was that what they had? Stella was observing the waterfowl, now, she was back to herself, she was looking at the heron that seemed to be looking back at her. And yet she was subtly different. Something had shifted, just a little. She had revealed something of herself, of her wishes, of the trajectory of her life that had brought her here, to this lake in the middle of London, and that had not yet run its course. She had told him something, she had trusted that he would not laugh at her childhood self. A libation? She had told him of her dreams. And that was good.
He slid a glance in her direction. And yet. She had relinquished a good deal, to be where she was today: and now, suddenly, he saw that she might travel further on, and that she might leave him behind. A verse swam suddenly into his head. It had been spoken in the crematorium.
Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live.
Would she leave him for dead?
He knew, suddenly, what he ought to ask for. He also knew he could never ask for help: this was not his style.
They walked on, under the heron’s eye, along the shining lake.
21
On the Friday, they came blinking to the surface at South Kensington station, and walked slowly through the side streets. They were late, as usual – Stella’s timekeeping was even more atrocious than his own – and his bottle of cheap greenish Portuguese white, his usual choice, was warming in his hand. Not that any of this mattered – not to him, at any rate.
‘Too bad,’ he said shortly when Stella queried the cheap greenish white. ‘We’re impoverished artists, remember? We arrive cheap, they feed us well, and we sing for our supper, isn’t that the deal?’
Stella nodded, angled her head in false sadness. Her parents had recently disinherited her, and had taken the trouble of writing to tell her so. The letter had arrived written on her father’s headed cream-coloured notepaper (‘he orders it from Bond Street’), and Stella had read it aloud to him, over the oilclothed table on Camberwell Grove. ‘I’m beyond the pale,’ she said thoughtfully, turning the page over and over. ‘A python strike. Well, goodness.’
‘Are you – are you alright?’ He felt truly shocked, even if she did not. She looked at him: the buttercup yellow of the oilcloth was shining on the underside of her chin, as buttercups themselves were supposed to do, and she seemed to gleam a little in the otherwise dingy light.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Well, no: but I will be, given a little time.’ Family money came first, she had explained to him: and if she couldn’t be trusted to marry well and bring the money with her into another generational safe haven – well, it would all go to her sister instead. ‘Nobody talks about it, it’s the height of vulgarity to even mention it, but that’s the way it works, you know, darling, in that class. In my class. It’s all about the money.’ She set the page down gently on the yellow oilcloth. ‘Money, money, money, money, money. Well, there are some things a girl should never do. Will you make me tea?’
He nodded, and moved silently to the tiny hob.
‘Some tea,’ she said, ‘and I shall be quite myself again.’ But his eye could detect the dusty film of grief in her eyes that night, and for days afterwards. A dry layer of sadness, like the dust on a wall. Money, money, money, money, money. Stella could do without money – but she couldn’t live without love.
*
The house off the Brompton Road was very handsome. It was one of a curving terrace of white townhouses, all columns and elegance, facing a private, gated park. Impossibly posh. ‘No pioneers here,’ Stella said as they moved slowly along the graceful sweep. No: the pioneers would be disgusted to live in a house like this. ‘Gosh, what a thought I’ve just had.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Just, let’s pray my parents aren’t here.’
They mounted the steps, she rang the bell. She knew this terrain. He, in spite of his careless bottle of cheap Portuguese white, knew it less well, and was in his heart less at ease. This was a long way from Deptford. The door opened.
‘Welcome, John. I’m so glad you could come.’ Etienne spread his arms wide; behind him, a wide lamplit hall, dark walls hung thickly, a graceful staircase ascending. ‘Please, come in. And you must be—’ and he beamed at Stella.
‘Stella,’ Stella said. ‘Lovely to meet you, and thank you so much for including me.’
‘It’s a pleasure,’ said Etienne, smiling even more broadly. Queers understood Stella: John had noted this over the months they had been together, and moving through London together, and been thrown together with all manner of people. Women were wary, by and large, and men liked to think of going to bed with her, you could see it in their eyes – and queers delighted in her company, they clapped their hands in delight, almost, when she appeared amongst them. What fun she would be, what style she had. It happened every single time. And, much though she liked to complain about the Ura
nians, as she called them, Stella was fond of them too: ‘They love me, the Uranians, they really do. Why, I simply do not know.’
And now Etienne did clap his hands.
‘Your coat, your bag!’ he carolled, Stella’s remarkable effect waxing now with a speed that was almost alarming. ‘Let me take your beautiful wraps!’
‘Well, not all of them, I hope, darling,’ Stella said, reprovingly. (‘They seem to want me to beat them, darling,’ she had told John one evening. ‘Nicely, I mean. I don’t quite understand it. They actually ask me. They seem to think I carry a carpet-beater around with me, and that nothing would please me better than to flourish it, and then beat them on their bare bottoms. They act as though they would simply love it. It really is the strangest thing.’) Her girls appeared as she shed her light jacket and her scarf and handed Etienne her bag. John was left to hang his own jacket (second-hand); he had half expected a butler to lurk invisible in the shadows.
‘And you found us quite easily!’ Etienne went on. Then he took Stella’s arm, and John’s elbow, and in another moment, they were in the drawing room. A mass of paintings, and more dark-red walls, lit with white beeswax candles and yellow lamplight.
‘Friends, this is John Irwin, the artist I’ve been telling you about. You’ve all seen his work,’ Etienne said with some energy, his arm still on John’s sharp elbow, ‘including in this very room: and now here he is! And – Stella!’ he added, as though this were the Royal Variety Performance, and he the compère. ‘This is Stella!’
Quickly now, Etienne introduced the room: a male television producer here and another one there, a male television personality whose face John recognised dimly. A pair of women, one older, all skin tanned like leather and hanging jewels, another younger and leggy with blonde hair, of the type he knew could be found on every Chelsea street and shop, and eclipsed, already by Stella’s mere presence in the same room. Names gabbled rapidly by Etienne, names forgotten in an instant, drinks dispensed with miraculous rapidity.
