This speech had enabled her to take some deep breaths, and she felt calmer, lighter. “See those metal tongs beside the fireplace?” She pointed to the red dress painting “She must’ve wanted to take them up and bash his brains out sometimes. I know I would. Still, being looked at by Paul Cézanne the same way he looked at an apple, or a mountain, is no small thing. It’s not the life I’d want, but I guess you already know that.” She bumped shoulders with him, jokingly.
He was forgiven, he thought, they were making a truce. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t deserve it. He was using fragments of information gathered from what he’d read in her book, acting as if he didn’t know anything about the Cézannes’ marriage, to deliberately draw Sophie back towards him. It was monstrous and the flashing impulse to jab himself resurfaced. He sat with it for a few seconds, until it faded.
“…hated himself a lot of the time,” Sophie was saying, “and completely trapped by bitterness and frustration, though some people did love him, strangely. I think he loved his male friends the most, inseparable, until Zola’s betrayal that is. I think this stuff’s in the movie from what I’ve heard. It still amazes me that he was able to move away from his torment and inner violence — well, not completely — but that he was able to do all this.” She swept her arm around the room, enveloping the apples, the primroses, the mountain, everything on display.
He didn’t react to her all-encompassing gesture, and his continued silent scrutiny of the drawing unnerved and irritated her — Hortense was hers, like Annie’s book was hers. It felt so good to hold it again, to inhale its slight perfumed mustiness.
“Let me show you something,” she said.
She’d found the drawing she was looking for, a simple pencil and watercolour sketch of a cluster of flowers and some partially painted leaves. To the right, smaller and rendered in pencil lines only, was a beautiful study of a woman’s head, resting on a pillow. She looked like she’d just woken up and turned to her husband at that tranquil moment of waking. A few light strands of hair had come loose from her perfect centre parting and rested on her brow.
“When I first saw this I thought it was one of the most beautiful things he ever did. All this delicacy and lightness.” She planted a finger on the caption, Madame Cézanne with Hortensias, 1885. “But she’s always Madame Cézanne, isn’t she — on these labels and in these books? Hardly anyone knows what her real name was, even when it would make more sense to tell you. He must have drawn those particular flowers — hortensias — to reference her”.
Joel focused on the restful gaze looking out from the page. It was hard to credit this as the same woman sitting in front of them. Cézanne was looking at someone he truly loved, it was certain, and so was she looking back at him — Joel felt it. But still love hadn’t been enough to make them happy.
“For someone whose manner was so antisocial and so, so brutish.” Sophie continued, “to capture her like this… maybe that pure oval face was what he loved; the perfect shape of it.” Just then, a child’s voice called out across the gallery “Flower!”
Sophie turned and saw a woman with a buggy smiling across at them. Her kid, all twisted round in the straps, was waving at Joel with a crumpled piece of paper and Joel waved back.
Sophie was rippled by a cold shiver, imagined him with this woman, who had a child with him. He had another life, without her. The woman’s gentle smile and small nod towards Joel confirmed it “Who — who’s that?” she was able to ask.
“Oh, I don’t know. I met them in the park while I was waiting for you. The little guy was acting up so I did a drawing for him — well, a pencil rubbing actually, of a flower carved into the bench. See it?” he said, “in his hand? I think he likes it.”
It seemed he’d conjured them, somehow, right then, to show Sophie he wasn’t a bad man at all. She understands now, that mom, seeing him and Sophie together, why he was peculiar before. Why life is difficult for him right now. She exonerated him, too, for unnerving her by ranting at nothing. He intuited all this and was immediately grateful.
Sophie watched as the woman passed through the space, her kid still waving his happy paper at Joel. A low, rhythmic voice was saying something about Cézanne’s questions… his questioning of whoever was looking. A tall, thoughtful-looking museum guide with heavy spectacles and a grey linen scarf furled around his neck was standing in front of a gorgeous landscape. Constructed of pale lozenges of green, orange, blue and white, a tour group were gazing at it with varying degrees of interest.
Joel pulled himself up from the bench and moved towards Still Life With Apples and a Pot of Primroses. He scrutinised its mountain of white cloth, the fruit and flowers and glorious blue, all its dizzying colours, as Sophie had. He had to approach it — her — obliquely, not head on, had to direct the action so that anything decided today would seem like Sophie’s decision.
He felt her join him, at his side. He couldn’t afford to make the wrong move. A life can be totally transformed in a moment by that kind of mistake, he knew — like the day he’d told her he had to leave them. How might their lives have ended up if he’d never spoken those words? They might still be together, as a family. Were things really as simple as all that; an act of senseless violence on a staircase, painting a woman in a red dress or a blue dress, the difference between speaking and not speaking?
“The whole thing’s about to give way,” Joel said. “Have you noticed? The table’s going to topple over, and those apples are going to roll right out of the frame — the flowerpot will smash to pieces on the floor. All the objects existing at the same time, in the same space, but it’s impossible, physically, seeing them from different angles all at once like this — and yet here they are, all held together by him, in their own beautiful, fragmented world.”
Sophie had never heard him speak about Cézanne this way before. If you could learn anything from these paintings, she thought, it wouldn’t only be from the questions they posed, but from what was spoken in front of them, the words people said to each other about them, which were really words about themselves.
“He knows how to push it to the limit, that’s for sure,” she responded. “It could all break down but he manages to make the foundations solid with colours, and through form. He’s just about preventing the whole world he’s created from collapsing.”
“It’s like being shown what it means to be human,” Joel said. “You can kind of accept the imbalances because — the whole thing — just — works.”
She said, “He’s not trying to impress you with, you know, ‘This fruit’s so lifelike you could bite into it’, or, ‘Go ahead, smell these realistic flowers’. He’s making a different statement about reality. He’s not trying to capture the transitory moment either. He’s more into setting down permanence, or appealing for it to arise.”
Sophie recalled the strange sensation of having shattered she’d felt earlier, and of the effort required in putting herself back together. Of putting her and Joel back together.
“Even though Mont Sainte-Victoire never changes, each time he paints it, it’s different. Like the portraits of Hortense are different. What’s he really painting when he paints an apple, or the mountain? What’s he painting when he paints his wife? He’s painting himself. That’s what changes.”
As she was speaking, Joel could heard another voice, laid on top of hers, not low and rhythmic, like that museum guide, but light and urgent, as the little boy’s — Speak to her. Go on, speak to her! Was he here again?
No — it was the small pink primroses, he realised, crying out, and then the apples, in which Cézanne had placed a total affirmation of life, a life in which anything and everything was possible, joined in and chorused: Say what’s true, Say what’s true, Say what’s true…
You can’t get it right all the time but you can get it right some of the time. You can put some things right. He can. He can reach out to her. He can speak.
“Soph, I wanted to — to apologise — for the way I am. I’v
e been scared my whole fucking life. I kept so much from you and that made me even more scared — if I even tried to tell you half the things I’ve kept back… but we can’t let ourselves end up like them.”
It was possible to become trapped in mute frustration, or worse, bitterness that showed itself in violently fragmented, scribbled hands. What if he was a clever, cynical, manipulating bully, just like his dad, tricking her into loving him? But he had to give her more credit. She was stronger and cleverer and better than that.
But was he just using the same techniques he’d learned to bring his father round? Softening the mood and soothing a situation, which was really a manipulation, even when his feelings were genuine and good. He didn’t know any other way to be and he hated himself for it.
Then the pencil jabbing — he felt the jabbing again — and thrust his useless, non-writing hand into his pocket and gripped the pencil there, but it couldn’t hold him together as it usually did, the world falling apart just as he’d foreseen, the table collapsing, the pot smashing on the floor, the apples scattering and tumbling out of the frame.
The cloth was smothering, suffocating him — he felt a cry rise in his throat — he would empty out all the words trapped inside.
Then, one of the apples dropped into his hand. He’d caught it, small, dry, and perfect, when it rolled towards him.
He looked down to examine it and there, instead, resting in his hand, was Sophie’s hand.
J-P, Liverpool — 2008
J-P watched Marius through the viewer, rehearsing his gestures, movement, and expressions. Following J-P’s instructions, the make-up technician had sallowed his face, applied pale violet shadows under his eyes, and created visible cracks on his lips. All this, along with the grubbing up of his neck and collar, the greased and dirtied hair, paint-streaked, unwashed hands, painted a picture of Paul’s neglect and unease.
First, they’d film him stalking and storming through Paris, then shoot his awkward reaction to Émile shouting to him from the carriage, followed by Paul’s reluctant embrace of his closest friend. In the flashback J-P had written, to explain Paul’s fear of touch, he conflates the young Paul being kicked down the school stairs with their first meeting, when Émile had intervened in a separate episode of bullying. In the film version of their story, this moment marks the beginning of them as the Inseparables, and that’s all that matters.
They had a few minutes to go before shooting, so J-P tried Maria’s mobile again. She already felt like a friend, and he wanted to tell her what he’d decided, about his dad.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked so openly than with her last night, over dinner. J-P knew Maria had spied their hands touching in the car that ferried him and Marius from the airport that first day. She’d known about them the whole week and not said a word until he brought it up himself, which meant she could be trusted. When she answered the phone, J-P heard a background clamour and someone shouting before the call got dropped. She must be busy on set, organising everything, which she was so good at. She was going to be a great P.A.
They’d all be in New York together first, before heading over to L.A. for J-P to make a start on the edit. Last night, he’d told Maria about his first time there. He’d won an award at film school; a six-month post-grad course at NYFA, all paid for, with flights and accommodation included. Walking round the Metropolitan Museum, soaking it all in, he’d come across a painting of some apples and a pot of pink primroses set against a joyous blue-green background.
When he’d read the label and saw it was by Cézanne he was flooded with missing his mum, who died when he was eleven. “It made me cry, like properly cry, for the first time in ages.”
He’d asked himself why, of all the pictures in the Met, it should be a painting of apples and flowers that would release those emotions in him, even before he knew who’d made it. And he asked the painting those questions too, was continuing to do so, in his film, trying to make sense of how paintings live on in the world, speaking beyond their intention to the many thousands of people who look at them every day. Of course, he’d worried these questions were of no interest to anyone but himself except here he was, years later, standing outside the Walker where it all really started, making his film.
J-P told the story of how his dad would take him to the Royal when his mum was having her chemo because he insisted on going with them. His mum agreed as long as he didn’t wait in the hospital. “It’s dead time, love,” she’d say. “Go and do something nice instead.”
They’d go round the city centre until the call came to go and pick her up and, one rainy afternoon his dad had taken him to the Walker Art Gallery, for something a bit different. “He trailed after me as I wandered around,” J-P said, “looking at picture after picture, and that’s when I first saw The Murder. He tried to move us on but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I had questions he couldn’t answer — What was happening, Why was it so dark, Who were the people in it and who’d make a thing like that?”
That afternoon, he took his mum her cup of tea in bed and heard his dad telling her how weird he thought it was for a ten year old to like this ugly, creepy painting so much.
His mum laughed softly, and said “He’s funny that one.”
And then his dad said, “Morbid more like.”
“Maybe it’s something to do with what’s happening to me,” his mum suggested. “We should try talking to him about it.”
J-P took the tea in and his mum pulled herself up to sitting. “There’s my lad,” she said. “Your dad’s just been describing the picture you liked. Will you tell me about it?”
“I can’t remember now exactly what words I used,” he told Maria, “but I felt the killer’s white shirt flying up at the back, then holding the knife and looking into the woman’s open mouth and being scared by the other woman, goading me on. It was like I was in the painting, not looking at it. But I couldn’t say that. I didn’t know how to. I think I was scared of being judged, of being loved less because of liking such a horrible thing.”
His mum was propped up on her pillow, cradling the tea in her lap. His dad’s words about him went round and round in his head and when he’d finished his own description his mum simply said, “I’ll go and see it with you, once my bones are better.”
J-P thought he might cry then, his voice shaky and high as he told how his mum got admitted to the Royal the next week and he and his dad went up there every day, after school. Eventually, she was moved into her own room. One time, the doctor came in and asked to talk to his dad on his own and as they were going out into the corridor he heard the doctor say, “She’s had a bad night.”
His mum was curled up in bed, holding her stomach, frowning, eyes closed, mouth open a little and he’d thought, she looks like the woman in the painting — the one being killed — “and that was when I realised she wasn’t going to get any better,” he said.
He’d sat down on the bed next to her, which roused her and she opened her eyes, reached out to squeeze his hand and whispered, “I just want to go somewhere nice.” Maria had put her hand in his then, and she too was all trembling and teary.
“Oh Maria, love,” J-P said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
She’d laughed huskily and wiped her eyes on her napkin. “It’s not your fault. It’s… an emotional night. My life’s about to change, that’s all.”
Truth be told, Maria reminded him of his mum. Being back in Liverpool meant he was thinking about her all the time as it was. The job he’d offered her was difficult for her to accept, he could tell. She wanted this opportunity, but she was nervous, doubtful, scared of taking chances when they were offered. It only made him more determined to help Maria realise her dreams in a way that he’d never been able to do for his mum, who’d wanted to design her own clothes, maybe open a shop, but never had the chance or the money, and was only thirty-five when the cancer took her.
To change the subject, and more than a few glasses of prosecco in, J-P had
told her how he and Marius first met at Cannes before getting it together in L.A. He plunged in to the story of collecting and saving the LaChapelle and Cosmo photos, and the film stills, which he’d never said out loud before. It was such a relief he only then realised the amount of pressure he’d been putting his relationship under. “I’m going to delete them all,” he declared, “as soon as I get a spare bloody moment. I don’t need them anymore, do I? I’ve got the real thing.” They clinked glasses at that.
His needing Maria there, now, standing next to him on set, made him realise he was doing the same thing with her as he’d done to Marius. He was conflating his image of his mum with his perception of her. This sudden concern wouldn’t stop him. She was her own person, after all, and she’d be great to have around. He’d have his own band of Inseparables. Maria and Marius, Marius and Maria; it was going to be perfect.
He was about to get the Assistant Director to call quiet on the set but Marius suddenly gestured at him to come over. J-P went to him, put an arm around his shoulder and led him away behind one of the columns of St. George’s Hall. “What is it?”
“J-P, listen — I — there’s something I need to say and I know I shouldn’t hold things up like this, but — I want you to know that I think you’re doing a great job. I don’t think I’ve said that to you before now, not explicitly. Take it from me, this is your movie and you wrote a great fucking script and whatever happens, in the future, don’t let me, or anyone else, take that away from you. Okay?”
“Marius… what?”
“I love you, you know that?”
“Yes, I think so.” J-P lowered his voice, just in case. “And I love you.”
Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is Page 18
