Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  Annie Macalpine was familiar with this sensation, sicken-ingly familiar. Halfway through Tuesday, with never a client in sight, the Antiques Centre awash with wasted and jaundiced electric light, her hands full of paper and her eyes dizzy with print, sorting and checking the contents of her huge desk. This was the day for doing her accounts, tracing all those slips and notes she vowed she would file but never did until this frightful day of reckoning. Stocktaking, inventory-taking, panicking, the day she dreaded and postponed until it could be delayed no longer, even allowing for the fact that what she told the VAT-man and the Inland Revenue relied heavily on her creative skills, her flair for telling an elegant lie which had been so well rehearsed with the clients. Not that I cheat, mind, Annie promised others as well as her own reflection. She did not cheat, was simply frugal with the truth if the truth was likely to hurt her, and she would abandon truth altogether if the pursuit of it beggared herself and profited government officials. On their behalf, she had no conscience: they were a load of non-laughing hyenas, the lot of them, sent to savage her carcass before it was dead. She had even seduced one once. But for the clients, a different matter. She gave up. Sat on the floor in her corner with the dust and the despair and the shared telephone line. What a shit hole. What a bastard. What a time to tell her he was not coming back. The man who had been sharing her bed for the last nine months, a period other people regarded as the proper incubation period for a baby or a reliable love affair, but which was for Annie the time it usually took to be loved and abandoned. The bastard.

  ‘And you … and you … and you.’ She threaded pieces of paper, invoices and receipts on to a spike, like a short-order cook overwhelmed in a busy kitchen. ‘And especially you.’ A letter from him, as prosaic as most, ending, ‘Look after yourself, Annie. I hope we’ll always be friends,’ was the one she ripped with her teeth and let flutter to the floor with all the rest of the detritus from her desk.

  I hope we’ll always be friends … Elisabeth had helped her with her accounts before, was a friend in need, an efficient and compulsive keeper of paper who never cheated anyone, not even a government hyena. And whose concern is she? Not mine, not mine, not mine. There was a moment of terrible alarm, a sense of guilt as sharp as indigestion. Annie pretended it was indigestion. Tears had melted her favoured purple and pink eye shadow into the colour of a dead violet on her cheek. What unhinged her now was her own bloody inefficiency. Love had proved bad for the memory.

  There was a picture, a sodding picture, just for something completely different, and while she bloody well knew where it was, in Lizzie’s house being cleaned or something, she could not, for the life of her, remember who owned it. Annie was not quite a jack of all trades, but she not only sold pictures, she got other pictures restored for customers, she did whatever she was asked to do provided it turned a profit or commission, half of which she declared to the hyenas, while the other half went on friends, wine and men, she recalled, not necessarily in that order. A picture of a room with two leather chairs, a fire and a lot of space, a good but over-detailed picture in her own estimation, but Lizzie had liked it, she who loved the oddest things and was owed two thousand pounds. A picture without a signature which came from some client she could not remember for love or money, damn. Lizzie might know to whom it belonged, that and the other three she could not recall. But Lizzie was owed two thousand pounds which was also owed to the taxman, so Annie did not phone, because she did not want to feel even worse. Coloured tears fell on the floor between her crossed legs. They splashed against the grey-black of her leggings, hugging her rounded calves and thin ankles grown grubby on the bare bone against the floor still littered with the gold flakes from a frame. Shit. She could not bear to forget: could always account for all her stock and all her clients, had the reputation of never letting anyone down and she would have died for that reputation. When Francis Thurloe telephoned, he was surprised by the bruises in the voice, waited for the frenetic conversation he had encountered before, from a woman who was as loquacious as her friend Elisabeth could be taciturn. It was Annie who had sent him to Elisabeth in the first place. She was usually highly efficient.

  ‘Oh. Francis who? Oh, I get you. Hi.’

  She did not ask what he wanted, electrified as she was by a brief surge of hope. ‘Listen, Francis, I know you’ve bought from me before, and this might seem an odd question, but did you ever give me a picture for our Lizzie to clean? An interior, with chairs? No? What? Never mind. Just a wild guess, only I can’t remember who it bloody belongs to, must be someone highly memorable, can’t have been a handsome man like you. You’ve seen it at her place? Course you have, that’s not the question.’

  Well, she knew about that: he’d seen everything there was to see in Elisabeth’s place, lucky bitch, and hadn’t she done them a favour by introducing them to one another, and what thanks did she get? When did anyone ever do that for her, introduce her to someone single, reliable and good-looking? Even Elisabeth had someone now, as well as a painting by some damn owner who would be howling for it soon. Annie did not like the human race at the moment.

  ‘All right are you?’ she asked, wiping pink from her sleeve, noticing the dirt on her shoes. ‘You want a chat, you said? Something important? Ooh, that I should be so lucky. Yeah, come in any time. A drink? Yeah, when?’

  Piss off. Her mind cleared, miraculously. Why worry, why be in such a state when a little mountain exploded into a minefield of molehills? Whoever the lost client was, he would phone, in time. Then she would remember his name, get the painting back, everything fine and the same for the others she could not recall. Francis Thurloe had sounded so concerned. He had, she noticed, a very nice voice and if Elisabeth was as cavalier and unpredictable with him as she had been with other perfectly presentable, unmarried men, she, Annie, might just do something about it. Such as offer a bit of home comfort, draw him out of his upper-crust shell. She wiped her nose on the dirtied sleeve. There was more than one fish in the sea: she didn’t have to settle for an eel. Proud of her pun, she rocked with noisy mirth.

  Elisabeth squinted in the last of the daylight. Her back hurt, deceived into stooping for longer by that bonus of an hour of extra light which would have been denied in her own studio. That dark room was a foreign place now: she felt as if she had been here for ever.

  The face in the painting smiled fainter: Elisabeth knew that same flood of recognition for a friend seen in different clothes. Two days to remove the varnish: how kind of Thomas to understand the necessary slowness of progress, how rare in a client to see what she had to do. Acetone, dilute with white spirit, to remove the varnish, a different dilution for each small portion of the picture. You can’t just wash it all over, she explained: the varnish may not be the same varnish or the same thickness; beneath that, there may be glazes, thin coloured washes with more varnish used as the medium, making pigment more vulnerable in one area than another. I must experiment with this, one centimetre at a time. Look at the drapery behind, and isn’t she lovely?

  She was indeed lovely, this woman, lovelier still without the varnish which had aged and darkened her. A dark-haired woman surprised, a nineteenth-century portrait, but not with the face staring stolidly at camera or presenting her best profile. Not the full-frontal or seductive side-view pose, which was all most sitters could maintain. The woman here was leaning over the back of a chair, the chair tilted while she gestured with her outstretched hand, palm upwards as if reaching for another outstretched hand, smiling, beckoning the world into her own. She could have been reaching or inviting: the expression was teasing without malice, but there was also a shade of anxiety, the glance of a woman looking back, over her shoulder, turning to something precious from which she had come, giving a warm welcome which would ask questions later. She could have been inviting in a child or a ghost, but the slight matronliness of her clothing suggested a child. Whoever it was, the woman knew the nature of love denied but would not cease to offer it. There was a richness in the dress, the
abundant brown hair was coiffed, the brilliant blue taffeta of her gown bunched by the violence of her twisted stance, swirled round her hidden knees in stiff glory, the chair back brittle, creaking with the weight of the gown, not the slender form inside it. Against the stiff silk of the high-necked dress, the skin was olive, slightly wrinkled round the eyes, and creased at the wrist of the hand. She had been messed about, this woman, and her necklace was all wrong.

  At the moment, there was a white film covering the varnish-clear surface, the residue of purely superficial cleaning. Beneath that, slightly raised areas on the neck, raised areas in the upper corner of the room into which she compelled the onlooker to enter. Elisabeth concentrated on these patches where the craquelure was less, perhaps betraying later additions and dark suspicions.

  It was not only the restorer in Elisabeth who had begun, by Tuesday, to experience the first feelings of unease.

  Skin tones: she must look at the skin of this olive neck, where the necklace had yielded a faint trace of pigment on to her cotton wool. There were signs of previous restoration beneath the varnish, so thick and crystalline in parts that she had actually rubbed it off with a forefinger. There had been someone’s hands at the neck of this lovely, inviting lady. Perhaps that necklace, the painting comparatively clumsy, was not quite the set of sapphires it seemed. As the tungsten light (new, thoughtfully provided in the comprehensive provision which was contributing to her unease) flooded the painting, Elisabeth heard from the door of the room a gasp of admiration. Maria was watching. Elisabeth turned and smiled.

  The small figure at the door was the ghost of the apartment, whom Elisabeth had ignored from the moment of their introduction as an incomprehensible creature who was apparently vital to the ménage, the oil and the cog of domestic arrangements which allowed Thomas to live with almost invisible support. Maria, the servant, the factotum, the walker of the dog, the link with the world who brought none of the world into his home, Elisabeth did not know quite what she was. Maria, encountered on Sunday, out and in during Monday, was suddenly, speechlessly here now. All Elisabeth knew of Maria, or had cared to know, was that she was wiry, middle-aged, stooped, strong, moustachioed, and, if she were to speak at all, would be slow and reluctant to articulate. ‘Maria,’ Thomas had explained succinctly, ‘does for Butler and me. Nicely.’ Now, removed from that moment of terse explanation, Elisabeth wondered if Thomas needed around him in his splendid isolation people and living things which were, like Butler and Maria, somehow ugly and incomplete. So far, in her brief glimpses of Maria dragging out the vacuum cleaner like a captive animal, arriving with eggs, milk, frozen foods on which the household dined regularly, departing with tail-wagging Butler, Elisabeth had not detected a hint of beauty, spiritual or otherwise. But then, Elisabeth had not been looking: she was long since blinded by colour into something like indifference for anything which breathed.

  ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ Elisabeth asked conversationally.

  No response. Then a quick nod of the head, an agreement; then a folding of the arms, a self-hugging rather than defiance which revealed another person intensely impressed by what she saw, enough to make Elisabeth like her for ever. On one wrist, there was a large, fresh bandage; the other hand cradled the injury. The bandage callously reminded Elisabeth of the materials she did not have here, such as medical gauze or a certain kind of spatula. Less callously, out of her own profound kindness which bled when others flinched, she asked the only polite question which came to mind.

  ‘Have you burnt yourself, Maria? What happened? Cooking?’ She did not know why she asked this: there was no evidence that Maria ever cooked beyond the preparation of frozen suppers which Thomas ordered and she merely collected for this house. Maria opened her mouth to show her appalling teeth, raised the bandaged wrist and made little snapping motions within inches of her fingers, shrugged, cradled her arms again. Elisabeth had no idea what the gesture meant, clucked in sympathy, felt the cut on her thumb and empathized. Maria’s eyes were back on the picture, excited.

  ‘Like a mother!’ she spat, pointing at the face with her bandaged hand, using the good hand to smooth her own hair which sprang grey and black in all directions. They were all the same colours in this house. ‘Like our mother … beautiful.’ It sounded like a curse, whispered with such effort, such severe approbation, such intensity, but in her ugly face with its deplorable teeth Elisabeth saw the same affection, the same link with that smiling, uncertain, suffering face on canvas that she herself knew. She was right, of course: out of the mouth of babes … the painting was like a madonna, a serenely blessing madonna. Claptrap, utter nonsense, life in a painting. Ha! In that one moment of mutual grinning, both with their damaged hands, they were allies of a sort, she and half-dumb, mysterious Maria. Elisabeth had no need of an ally: she had paintings and colour and warmth and light and privacy and tools and everything and Thomas, defective, charming, Thomas. There was a light behind the head of the portrait, cast by a lamp in the painted room, which made that lovely face look as if it wore a halo. From around her wrist, Maria suddenly produced a set of rosary beads, cheap, plastic and garish. She held them against the madonna’s face, then against Elisabeth’s face, studying the effect.

  ‘OK. Maria, OK, OK, OK …’

  The little woman spun round, like a weather-house doll propelled by machinery, left the room as quietly as she had arrived, apart from the sound of her beads. Thomas and Butler stood in the doorway she had vacated, framed by electric light from the corridor, all of them drawn and held still by the earth tones on the easel, lit by the tungsten light. Butler shuffled, sat and sighed: it was a kind of mimicry of Maria: Elisabeth wondered if there had been some snapping of Thomas’s good fingers to make the dog do that and to make the other woman, who looked oddly like him, move so abruptly, as if she were afraid.

  ‘“Like a mother”,’ he remarked neutrally. ‘I don’t know what Maria might mean by that. Her own, I suppose, poor soul. Do come and have a drink. I know these lights work miracles, but too much of them must be bad for the eyes. Take a rest. You’ve been working too hard. How beautiful she is.’

  Down the long corridor there was a soft thud as a door shut. Elisabeth realized she could not even remember how she had reached the dizzy heights of this floor, was it fourth floor or fifth? By the lift, or by the stairs? Had she walked in humility or allowed herself to be carried aloft, still afraid of those footsteps? A blur, a foggy blur of memory, the few days since stretched into as many years. The colours had taken over. Madame in the picture beckoned. So did Thomas and his silly dog and the prospect of a drink in a fine-cut glass, but for the moment the madonna of the portrait ruled supreme.

  ‘My father’s house has many mansions, my mother’s house has many rooms.’ Thomas’s voice teasing and mesmeric and still, dancing before her eyes, that faint glaze of alarm, like a pigment mixed with varnish rather than oil, not quite a solid colour. Soothed, smothered by the brandy and the wine and this lack of responsibility as well as the prospect of work tomorrow. All that.

  ‘Is there anything you need?’ asked Thomas, looking like a Christmas elf from behind his darkened glasses.

  ‘Oh no, not yet. But I should go home tomorrow. Things, you know. Other things. I need to collect a few things, tend to a few things.’ She found her laugh unnecessarily loud.

  ‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘Just when we were doing so well. I could go back and fetch anything you wanted, you know. Send dear old Butler in advance. After all, what else do I have to do? A rich man’s life can be so dull, you know. Amazingly dull.’ The pixie face, puckered beneath the dark glasses, was so rueful, he looked so comic, the disfigured man with his odder dog presenting a paw. She laughed at this solicitude, became suddenly sober, all the same reassured, but resolute.

  ‘All right, not tomorrow. The next day. We could move some of these pictures to my own studio without any harm, you know. Oils on canvas are durable. Do you know the first practical application of oils, or if not the first,
nearly, was for banners? They tried using oil to hold pigment and make it spread instead of egg white, which was hard but unbendable, found they could use pigment and oil on the same hemp they used for battle flags, not just on board … Tempera was always on board, panels for churches, that sort of thing. Oil paint could bend. Marvellous: you could wrap it up and move it, more marvellous still. The first painters in oil must have been sign writers. Paid the equivalent of what you’d pay a man to decorate your shop today. But you shouldn’t bend oil paint on canvas, not really. Thieves think you can, because of films, but you can’t, not if you fold it outside in, which is what a thief might do, to protect the surface, and what thieving dealers do all the time. Actually, if you were stealing a canvas, you should roll it outside out. That way, it won’t crack, the paint, I mean: it does the other way, especially if you leave it rolled tight.’ She was almost weeping at the thought of such destruction, realized she was rambling, the custom of exhaustion, did not mind about anything. Except another glass of wine to replace the first large one thrust into her hand and drunk rapidly. And about anyone going into her house. Her flat was her bastion of stability, her island: she had temporarily forgotten its sublime importance in her life, and she was shocked by her fickleness. She had liked this man up to now: how dare he suggest such an invasion. He did not suggest it again.