Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. Only these were damaged already. They deserve better.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ he mumbled. ‘I probably deserved that.’ His voice became mocking. ‘Not for what I said, but how I said it. And kicking your precious, defenceless babies.’ He pushed his hand through his hair, frustrated more by her apology: she was mutely insisting he should have the last word. ‘All I can say to you is that you’d better get rich, or get safe. You’d better start acquiring a few creature comforts against your old age, because there won’t be anyone to share it. You’d never let anyone share anything about you. We rent space off you, that’s all. You like things, love things, better than people.’

  ‘That’s my problem,’ she said, without indignation.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So it is.’

  In the aftermath of his departure, Elisabeth was tempted to tilt the wine bottle to her mouth and drain the last drop. Then found she was holding a glass still half full, her knuckles crunched round the stem, clutching so hard with her labourer’s hand that the stem broke and blood oozed, gently at first, from a cut in the soft crook of her thumb. Life, what a colourful life. She cleaned the cut in the bathroom, feeling the sting in a delayed reaction of pain, noticing the faint pink colour of the water, swirling and dancing before flowing away. There were words pumping through her head and out through the gash in her hand. He never touched me, I tell you; it doesn’t matter: he never touched me. Don’t hit him: he never touched me. Men do not like to be touched, except on the skin.

  Slowly, Elisabeth carried the damaged canvases into her studio, her hand swathed with the same gauze she used for torn canvas. She would not, could not cry, discipline forbade it, made her keep moving instead. This was the largest room in her empire, the room other people never saw. It was at the end, inadequately supplied with daylight for a studio, but immune from Enid’s eavesdropping or spying, Elisabeth’s sanctuary. The place where she kept her soul, her possessions and her work, all equally inviolate. Motley possessions. Most bizarre was a large wooden pig by the door, carved from rosewood, fashioned while the wood was fresh from the tree, unseasoned, and cleft down the back in one curving fissure which did not reach the grinning snout. Deep into the slit she had stuffed those letters she did not want to see but could not discard, the pink paper hidden in the rose-pink wood. The pig was designed to act as a small door stop, although the door was never left open and its purpose was redundant. She relied on the smooth belly of it to brush her calf in passing, always warm. Then there were heads of soapstone, three, looking like conspirators, all damaged slightly, oiled like the pig to harden the stone. They stood on an ornate Victorian table, black wood inlaid with brass and walnut on four ornate legs which formed a delicate pedestal, each leg in need of repair. Cluttered round the room were more than a hundred jugs, china and pottery, some brilliantly glazed, some duller, definite colours. Banked in the spaces left were a couple of dozen damaged paintings, hung in tattered beauty, a blazing mass of shades, the collection of a pittance. There was nothing perfect except the solid easel, made of beech and a vital tool of trade which could tilt, bow, grow or shrink, holding a small oil painting restored from sagging decrepitude. Elisabeth drew forward her tungsten light, which made all the earth colours spring into being with its extra eye.

  The light showed nuances of colour applied with the precise touch of a rigger’s brush, delineating a room of splendid self-sufficiency; a large Victorian room, perfect for a studio with its two sets of windows, where a man and a woman sat on facing leather chairs, a rug at their feet. The room was bare, apart from a magnificent fire and a set of drawers in chestnut, each drawer cross-banded in a wood as light as apple. The honey-coloured boards of the floor were scrubbed, a warm and spartan comfort, and from the far windows came a misty colour which might have been sea. The man wore a rich brown suit, and the woman a full dress of rose silk and a merino shawl of creamy softness. The rug at their feet was saffron, red, blue, fringed.

  The colours in the painting were not merely reds and greens, browns and blues, nor the skin tones merely pink. She could recite the names of the pigments like a litany. Not merely white, but flake white, best for covering and potentially poisonous. Never merely red, but cadmium light for peachier shades, Mars red and alizarin. Ultramarine, the best of blues, most precious in the palette, made from lapis lazuli. No simple yellow, but viridian, Naples yellow, raw sienna. Nothing called purple, but manganese violet and cobalt. From the simplest selection of pigment someone wove the complicated magic which ruled her existence, often mixing ruin in with his choices. Succumbing to this dominion had been wise: the fascination of it was entirely reliable.

  Pigment and mixtures. The spotting on the bandage was already turning duller red to brown. Did hearts really break and did blood spill out like spilt wine? It felt so. She wondered idly how one would mix the paint to make the true, ever-changing colour of blood, which seemed to have drained from all her limbs and left her dark skin the colour of parchment.

  She did not weep for Francis. The cut was simply a punishment for the blow, the defection inevitable. There was nothing else she deserved. There was only herself, the way it had always been. There was nothing left now but a spreading bruise of hurt, and her eyes for the work and the colours, a conduit for other versions of beauty.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Elisabeth stayed the night in the studio because she felt safe in there and because it faced the garden at the back. Should footsteps echo through her sleep, she would be able to tell herself they were dreams. No sound penetrated into the garden other than the distant drone of cars. She had opened the window to dispel the trace of chemical fumes, the lingering remnants of the products which made her hands scalding pink whenever she forgot the gloves. Poisons. Before oils, painters had used the gifts of the earth: tempera was composed of pigment and egg, casein made of milk solids, glaze and varnish made of honey, ingredients reminiscent of cookery books. She, on the other hand, used poison as often as not. The contrast made her laugh, this simplicity of what they had so durably created and what she now used to mend.

  There was another reason for staying in the studio apart from the footsteps and Enid’s pointed ears. Had she lain in her own bed, she might have thought of Francis, the sight of whom, despite her fierce awkwardness and taciturnity and deliberate distance, had always filled her with an almost crazy happiness, and she did not want to think of him. In the studio room was the rosewood pig and its secrets, the jugs of a thousand colours, the paintings, the flags of her existence and anything she had ever acquired with love. Elisabeth wanted to remain with them, covering her bareness with that hidden hoard guarded for more than a decade. Sometimes she was relieved when the room’s supply of light was hard on her working eyes. In the morning, the dribble of sunlight showed the paucity of it all, revealed her sentimental addiction to anything flawed, made her possessions look cheap and her taste half formed. Elisabeth shut her eyes, pulled around her the favourite dressing gown, feeling the worn material and the lumpy cushions beneath her chilled back.

  The studio reflected the cold of preservation: she had an intense desire for physical comfort, warmth and above all light, in a richer, less shoddy, more secure cocoon than this, even though this was the only room, and these the only things which revealed who she was, intensely, puritanically materialistic and fanatically private. She had never explained this to Francis, nor to any other friend or acquaintance. Elisabeth did not expect to be understood: to date, that negative expectation had not been disappointed. No one had ever asked.

  Instead of either memory or introspection, she turned her attention to breakfast, a selection of two-day-old bread, stale milk, fruit which had lingered too long. None of that mattered: she bolted through grocery shops like a convict on the run, lived on the output of corner stores, frozen foods and pasta, a hurried carelessness about feeding which did not result in slenderness. For once she looked at her bare cupboa
rds in dismay, wished her controls of these minor disciplines of life were not as sporadic as they were. When Enid knocked at the door, Elisabeth was victim to a fit of miserable and untimely hunger, a state of physical and emotional grief which had, at long last, brought her to the brink of tears, jerked into life by black coffee. Opening the door was less threat by daylight: there was the half hope that it would be Francis, but, as it was, no stupid woman and certainly not this particular woman, was going to see her crying.

  ‘Yes? What is it? Oh, it’s you. Anything wrong?’

  The rudeness was transparent. Enid jumped backwards. The cat, ignored as always by its rightful owners, stood at her ankles, cautious, recriminatory, slipping inside in one prudent act of avoiding Enid, who hid her dislike for cats behind a façade of concern and strange, mewing noises. Enid now gaped at Elisabeth, half hidden behind the door, the one forgetting what passed for manners, the other forgetting what it was she needed to say. Enid craned to look round the door, her curiosity to see inside suddenly intensified by Elisabeth’s determination that she should not, the sense of rejection and need to know sharpened into a necessity by the disdain of the occupant and the sidling solidarity of the cat. Dumbly, Enid held out her hand, with a cream envelope. Before she could begin to say, This came for you last evening: I don’t know how, but I thought I’d bring it down for you in case it was urgent since you might not bother to come up, and besides, I have bad news for you …, Elisabeth’s long, pink and pale forearm extended and plucked the letter from Enid’s proffering fingers.

  ‘For me? Thanks, see you.’

  The door closed so suddenly that Enid’s fingers barely escaped injury. She had combed out her curls before she had dressed, but now they shook a little; she had worn a clean skirt and blouse to cope with Sunday and besides she wanted to tell Elisabeth about her battered car. The house was empty: the freer amongst them gone away. On a Sunday like today Enid’s husband had left; on a Sunday her son had emigrated; on the Sabbath she had quarrelled with her daughter because there had been nothing else to do. So it followed that on Sundays she deserved at least the courtesy of conversation. She raised her hand to knock again, opened her mouth to speak. The mouth closed and the hand went into the pocket of her skirt. Then she went back to the silence of her flat; the emptiness of a day without shops, friends, neighbours, or anything but envy.

  Elisabeth read the invitation inside the envelope, written in a civilized hand on fine cartridge paper. She always admired good paper. The same courteous invitation as those on the answerphone messages: a pleasant, hesitant voice. There was nothing to lose in her acceptance: nothing but fear. The day and the life beyond the day were a vacuum, black and bleak with colours premonitory of winter and her father’s footsteps.

  Annie Macalpine grumbled about getting out of bed early after a long Saturday. She grumbled and joked more about getting out of bed alone than the indignity of getting out of bed at all, since neither loneliness beneath the duvet nor working on Sundays counted as favourite activities. Annie had never lived alone: in some ways she envied Elisabeth that strange ability which she could not share, especially since her own man of the moment, who had used her bed and eaten the food she presented with such cheerful generosity, seemed to have disappeared on a European trip which probably disguised many purposes other than business, including escape from those sinewy arms which held him. For the moment, Annie did not mind this as much as she imagined she would. Hard as nails, she told herself: that’s me; here I am. Any kind of man was better than none at all, but they were all grief and she tried to tell herself she was used to it. Industry was her substitute, along with a thousand and one friends. None of whom, she noticed, was present when needed, but might have been if she had remembered to ask any of those who had shared Saturday night in her kitchen before she had fed and wined them on the profits of a moderate month, and gone to bed less sober than was wise for a person who had to pack up for an art fair in the morning. Annie was not inclined to introspection unless she had a hangover, but on this grey day, within the sound of church bells which somehow suggested the need to think and the need to believe in more than her frenetic and hedonistic existence, she did wonder about her life for all of thirty seconds.

  Annie regretted she had not asked Elisabeth to help with this Sunday exhibition in a hotel, because Elisabeth never questioned: you said, Be there, would you mind? and she simply said, When? She would have humped these large framed canvases with her sensitive strength, never dropping or complaining, organizing lights for the stalls and nails for the walls, a workmanlike greaser of the wheels of selling, disappearing before Annie had put on her face, pushed up her hair, donned her pink eye shadow and started to talk the leg off anyone who might want to buy. A temporary, easily rationalized guilt had prevented her from asking Elisabeth Young, a woman who had obliged so many times before. Annie owed Elisabeth Young more than two thousand pounds in unpaid bills. It weighed heavily with them both, heavier with Annie who wished Elisabeth would scream about it instead of being so self-effacing and letting her get away with it, which, in the nature of trade, was what Annie tried to do all the time, without personal discrimination. Even to a friend who deserved better, but after today, she vowed, while she bruised her thumbs and wished she had the use of Lizzie’s clapped-out car for the small pictures, after today she would pay Elisabeth and stop spending on those who did not matter. The lights were blinding in the back of the hotel, but half of her own would not work. Liz would have fixed them. Why am I such a bitch, Annie thought, why cut the nose off my face? She arranged the Victorian canvases next to the modern ones on her expensive stand, put on her lipstick, then sat and looked as if she were preoccupied, a person who never dreamed of earning a living which she largely gave away by entertaining all those friends, the Alistairs and the Nicks, in her addiction to popularity. She looked more or less clean, armed with last night’s mascara, off-beat arty in her dusty black, pretty and world-weary, sober, sharp and knowledgeable. For the moment, as the first customer swung into view, she felt a passing acquaintance with all of these surface qualities; wished, with that Sunday guilt, she was better at honouring the undemanding friend, especially a friend with a car.

  Elisabeth’s car stood grinning, the front bumper twisted into a peculiar kind of leer, the front offside door stove in, the back window crazed, with the jack lying on the road behind, the bodywork of the car dusty. A car used for moving things, never for the pleasure of driving, never treasured and never driven fast. After the shock, the hand-in-mouth fear, Elisabeth felt indignation for her elderly, serviceable machine. Phrases came to mind, injunctions from the past: never throw away what has worth, save anything serviceable. I cannot leave it, will not leave it to rot, which is the most economic thing to do. And why did not Enid tell me this? She walks back this way each day from the grocer’s and the paper shop. She knows which car is mine; she knows everything, and there was a gleeful message with her this morning. And you have been unkind to both of us, the bumper leered with a permanent smile: you let me in for this kind of rape, don’t pity me now. Grim, but nervous, Elisabeth drove the sad red car, the flank scraping on the wheel even after she stopped to drag the metal from the worn rubber with her muddy hands. She did not call the police: it never occurred to her. I am sick, she said, of worn things. When she clanked it shut, the door had shuddered as if live, rattling as she chugged the ten miles eastwards to a garage on the outskirts of London, open Sundays, cheaper than most but never cheerful. There she was forced to leave the grimacing bumper not with the greedy proprietor of the garage, whom she knew well and charmed easily, but with his son.

  ‘Least a week’s work,’ said the son. ‘What a mess. I mean, do what you like, I don’t care. Take it or leave it.’

  In dad’s absence, the son thought his father mad and dangerous: they did not get on well. With some accuracy, he saw his papa as a violent bully and, on this cold day, he did not like Elisabeth or, for that matter, anyone else. She stood in the forecou
rt at noon, the victim of shrugging rudeness, lack of decision and lack of choice. Leaving the car where it was, she knew faintly, then, what she might have done to Enid by her similar, less aggressive indifference. She thanked the boy pleasantly out of conscience for them both, felt for the letter in her pocket as if it were a talisman. The same letter Enid had brought down with such ceremony, unaware that it carried the promise of a newer car for her indifferent neighbour, to say nothing of what else. Come mend my pictures, the letter said, like the messages on her answerphone, courteously imperative. Stay here; do whatever you please; use the safety of this address, but please work for me. Somewhere, between the lines of this letter and those messages, a voice was shouting, Come on, girl, you can do better than this. You are poor and Sundays stink.

  It was, Thomas supposed, a good enough address. In any event, it was his one. Near the river, near an abbey and a cathedral and also close enough to the more temporal lures of shops. London spread beyond him on other days, not today. Sundays were for lies and emptiness and duty. Thomas did not have an answerphone: otherwise he would have checked it every five minutes to ensure there was no message, denied his own confidence that because today was the day he had suggested to Elisabeth, by letter and by phone, for coming to see the pictures, it was the day she would actually do as he dictated. About five in the evening, he had said in his note. The time of day when the cold sharpened and the light had gone, an unenviable time of day for anyone who lived by light. Since there was that large gap of hours between morning and evening, the doing of his irregular Sunday duty bothered him less than usual. He could afford to be generous.