Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  Hans puts his arm around my shoulders and we face one of the pictures, a big canvas with two figures entwined in the sea. I suddenly find myself wondering whether I should have given them gills and I giggle.

  Hans’s eyes brighten. ‘Just tell me what is wrong and we will do our best to improve it right this instant. Yes. At this moment we will change it for you.’ He flourishes a handkerchief, blows his nose, purses his lips and snaps his fingers. Two young boys arranging glasses on trays put down their tea towels and come over. I take a deep breath, and grab his arm, yanking his sleeve as he issues a torrent of instructions to these boys in Danish, during which they look at me as if I am an alien. Which of course I am, up to a point.

  I make myself interrupt: ‘No, no. You don’t understand – I mean, I haven’t made myself clear. I am not making sense. What I meant was, I love it. The pictures look incredible. They look so much more than they are. Or more than I thought they were. Oh, I’m making it worse, aren’t I?’ I wish I had made the effort to learn some Danish before coming here. I would love to be making an effort. Instead, I wave my hands and feel smiles bursting out on my face. ‘Actually, I am stunned. It’s so much more than I ever thought it could be. It’s so exciting, I feel in awe. What I really want to say, though, is thank you, that’s all.’

  Hans relaxes, relief easing every muscle and bringing the blood back to his pale face so that I suddenly realise that his pallor has been reminding me of a vampire. He rubs his hand over his stubble hair and laughs too.

  ‘Miss Hart, I mean Grace, it makes a big difference that you are here. I am so glad you like the hanging, it’s been . . .’ He trails off, and I can feel myself blushing, remembering the stilted phone calls and my endless faxed drawings which must have clogged up his office every morning as I obsessed over how far apart and in what order the paintings should be hung. How can I ever have thought I knew better than this kind, saintly non-vampiric man?

  ‘You know, it would have been a nightmare for you if I had been here,’ I confide, and Hans nods wholeheartedly. I still want to make up for causing trouble, so with a sense of climbing into a tumbrel and heading for certain death, I open my mouth and say, ‘Is there anyone you want me to talk to? I know I said I couldn’t, but if you need me to be interviewed or anything, I can. I know I can.’

  His eyebrows ping upwards. Hans considers me then claps his hands, and I follow him as he moves down the room.

  ‘Yes,’ he muses, ‘first I think you could do with eating something, you look as though you might evaporate. There will be a couple of people to talk to this evening. Your work has attracted a lot of interest in the press.’

  We are in the back office now. Hans opens a small refrigerator and reaches into it. I am expecting a special Danish snack, but he hands me a tomato and a small carton of milk.

  ‘That’s pretty weird,’ I can’t help commenting, but he doesn’t hear; he is bustling about the office putting things away and tidying. He has a tea towel over his arm and calmly polishes a glass before handing it to me.

  ‘Of course there is food, but I always have something like this first,’ Hans says. I stare gloomily at the milk and the tomato. I especially don’t want the milk. He pours it into the glass. There is no way I can refuse, he is being so motherly, and apart from the grossness of what he is actually giving me, I am grateful for the thought.

  Hans holds out the milk and, narrowing his eyes, looks at me. He grins half in embarrassment as he suddenly says, ‘You have a look of the mermaid – the Copenhagen mermaid. I think they will photograph you.’

  ‘What, naked?’ I tease, but he is not really listening, he looks at his watch.

  ‘Jerome Michaels, from the oil company, was scheduled to be here to meet you, but he’s been delayed and will arrive later this evening. If you are happy to do press now, I think we should have you with him. Glacon is big money and the press is very interested in their new sponsorship programme.’

  ‘OK, you just tell me what I have to do. I guess all artists sell out to commerce sooner or later, I just didn’t realise I had done it already,’ I joke, but the joke falls into space unnoticed. I don’t mind, Hans seems happy and anything that can help me forget the glaring reality of my pictures on the walls must be good. I like Hans, he takes things personally. Hans squeezes my shoulders in an awkward hug. ‘We just need to make sure this is not all too much for you,’ he says, and tears sting my eyes because he is so thoughtful.

  I wonder if any artist enjoys the experience of watching people looking at their work? I find it unreal, and dreamlike. Or nightmare-like, more often. I keep reminding myself that I am grateful anyone has turned up at all, as the gallery fills with people and flashbulbs explode like snowballs in the crowd. There is an unhurried yet insistent current as the guests mingle, greet one another and move through the gallery in front of the pictures. Often at a private view no one looks at the work. The ones I go to in New York are usually attended by friends and everyone stands in huddles, their backs to the paintings, drinking glass after glass of cheap red wine.

  The Danish scrutiny is thorough and serious, and I want to run for cover, but there is nowhere to go and I am tensed for the critical equivalent of a bucket of cold water to be thrown over me. The air is full of energy, a combination of excitement and exhilaration, partly caused by people coming in from the cold, I suppose. It’s exciting to hear the babble of other languages, and also to be among people who seem to be really talking about art. Of course, I don’t know for sure, they could be discussing the plot of Denmark’s leading soap opera, but I don’t think so. This would never happen in London. My spirits are flipping up and up in the warm and unexpected welcome I have found in Denmark. In New York when it happens, it is always bound up with money. The atmosphere in an uptown private view only becomes charged when the show sells out. Copenhagen feels purer, but maybe it’s just the drink talking. I look down at the ice in my glass, and decide not to have another vodka. Isn’t vodka and milk a cocktail? I think it’s a Black Russian. But that’s when they are mixed, not when they are drunk one after the other in separate glasses. Looking around at all the unfamiliar faces I slump inside with the effort of doing this alone. Denmark feels very foreign suddenly.

  When I won this award, I wasn’t entirely sure if Denmark was nearer to Norfolk, where I grew up, or New York, where I live. Painting my way through the year towards the show, I secretly acquired Danish material, each bit revealing to me the depths of my ignorance. There are so many things I know nothing about, but it felt uncivil to know nothing about a country hosting a prize which had made such a difference to me. I think I thought they might take it away if they found out how little I knew about them. I liked the stuff I found out – the first king of Denmark was Gorm the Old, commemorated along with his queen Thyra by the Jelling Stones, two great rune stones planted in a churchyard at Jelling. He was succeeded by his son Harald Bluetooth. Knowing these things served no purpose beyond the pleasure of knowledge, and I filed the information away, telling myself that by the time I finished the work and got to the show, I would have met someone to share it with, someone who might come with me to Jelling and Elsinore. Someone to look over the harbour at the Oresund, the stretch of water that connects the Baltic to the North Sea. Someone who wanted to know what I know and what I feel. It was a measure of hope I threw up into the universe. I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend for a couple of years and although I was scared to admit it even to myself, I wanted that to change. Now, all of a sudden, here I was, standing alone in the middle of the room at this exhibition, my own solo exhibition and the first since my degree show eight years ago, and no one I know is here with me, and there is no one specially here with me who wants to know what I feel. I’m not so sure I even want to know myself, though sadness is creeping into me like incoming tide. I look around, and my mind detaches and takes off, floating above me, separated by unchangeable circumstances from everyone else here: I made the pictures, and I am not one of the crowd. The warm wel
come feeling evaporates and I feel like a deflated balloon, strung out with the strain of being on show, exposed and visibly alone. That is the most tiring part. Like a bride, I am at the centre of a party but also the outsider, the one person here with a different function from everyone else. But at a wedding there is the bridegroom too. And he is the other half of the bride. Another person also experiencing the aloneness, and thus sharing it. I love the idea that somewhere on earth each of us has someone who is our other half. I wonder if we only have one, or if in all the millions and billions of people there are several with whom we could feel equally whole? It seems unlikely, but then so does the idea of there being even one. And it’s just as unlikely that there should be none. What would be the point of that?

  The point is that there is no point, one of the top three favourite arguments at art school. I never really went for it. How can we be put on this earth with all our instincts to yearn and strive and seek to find meaning if there is no meaning? And without meaning, how can there be love? And love is real. Often flawed and sometimes dangerous, but love is the spark that ignites us and burns through life. I believe that. I don’t know what else I believe.

  The motherly kindness of Hans Stettjens approaching now with a small plate of rolled silver-backed fish and three slate-grey capers, and the goodwill in the gallery is suddenly unbearable. I can’t be the object of so much kindly focused attention for a moment longer. I feel the pressure building inside me; the gallery is filling up with an increasingly physical energy and it’s like a giant blancmange or a pink cloud, benign, absurd, but engulfing and too much. The heat in the room presses against my temples and sweat breaks on my neck. I am near the door. It opens as more people come in, fresh air stiff on the folds of their overcoats. I turn my back on the room and step through the slice of space separating inside from out. I am suddenly free.

  The moon has moved. It peeps from behind a church spire further along the front. A gilt cord of light loops away towards the church like a fishing line, but it is impossible to see the way properly or to work out where the sea ends and where the land begins. The breeze cuts through my dress, I am chilly now, and shivery after being so warm. But I can’t go back into the gallery yet. I sit down on the low wall looking out to sea, confused and relieved to be outside gathering my thoughts. I am a long way from home. In fact, I am not even sure where I think of as home unless it’s my studio. I am alone and I have forgotten my coat. Looking around in the dark, my impression of the city is oddly one of light. The streets are broad, the buildings set back on wide pavements. All the lines are crisp and clean, and the shadows of verticals and horizontals loom huge in the chiaroscuro of street lights. Along the line of harbour, tall multicoloured buildings like doll’s houses stare through many windows at the sea as it stretches towards Norway, and somewhere much nearer is the mermaid, small and naked on her rock. These unfamiliar yet familiar elements of a city combine with my solo travelling and the grey shroud of grief for my mother which I forget and remember with the flashing regularity of a lighthouse beam. I feel as if I am the eye of my own storm, still, like the mermaid, at the centre of my own chaos.

  Chapter 2

  The sound of a boat’s engine is scarcely noticeable in the slap of water, the hushed whisper of chains undulating, snaking, weightless in the current. Above and overriding is the clang of metal on masts and the background breath of traffic in the town. When the engine cuts, the memory of its sound reverberates in the harbour mouth, followed by the slippery creaking of oars guiding a passage through the boats anchored in the oily water. A pause, almost silence. Then it begins again. More creaking, a whipping sound of a rope running through a fastening. Footsteps. Oddly, they seem to be coming from the water; my imagination leaps into a scene from a horror movie, where anything can happen as long as it’s gruesome. My heart thuds and nervously I scan the surface of the sea in front of where I’m sitting, but nothing is visible. The footsteps stop behind me. I hold my breath, tensed for flight.

  ‘Christ. That’s psychedelic, I wonder if it’s a bar?’

  The voice that comes with the footsteps is not what I was expecting. It’s English, for a start, and I wasn’t really expecting a voice – maybe a club to the back of my head, or a chloroformed rag on my mouth, but certainly not a comprehensible English-speaking man’s voice. Sexy, and with an owner who must be right behind me. Looking around in the dark I am disoriented and confused. And no longer alone. A man is standing in the middle of the road behind me, his head tilted back, looking up at the gallery. He has appeared from nowhere. The road was empty up and down, still is. I don’t think he has seen me. I stand up and move towards him, still without him seeing me, and laughter and excitement tingle through me because it feels silly, a bit like playing Grandmother’s Footsteps. I am so close now, and I still haven’t been seen.

  I am aware of stepping into the unknown when I open my mouth to speak. ‘It’s a gallery.’

  He swivels to face me, and he is so near to me I could touch him, and I want to touch him, even though I don’t know him. We look at one another, careful, like startled cats. ‘You’re English?’

  ‘Yes. And so are you.’ I can’t see him properly, I don’t know what he looks like, but he has an air of being stopped in his tracks. Slowly we circle one another, and it hardly feels like moving, but it is something to do, almost instead of talking, as we take one another in. ‘I don’t live there.’

  ‘Oh. What a shame. I live in London on a boat.’

  ‘Did you come here in your boat?’

  He laughs and the frisson of tension leaps like a sudden kick of a pulse. My eyes are adjusting now and I can see him better as he speaks. ‘No, it’s moored in Little Venice, it doesn’t go far. Though actually, I did come here on a boat, so in a sense you’re right. But what about you?’ He has a smile in his voice, and it has become a game between us because he echoes my words, ‘Did you come in your boat?’

  Somehow his words sound intimate, gentle, almost as if he is stroking me. I blush and press my fingers to my face over my smile.

  ‘No. Mine was an airship. I’m working here, that’s why I came.’ I am playing with my hair, rolling a lock of it around my fingers. I am trying to have a straight face, but my grin breaks out in a flash.

  He ducks his head and looks at me again, a matching smile all over his face. He is handsome and rugged, unshaven and tall. ‘Me too, but I got distracted by something on the quay, and it turns out it was you.’

  I gasp, laughing, excited. ‘How did you see me? It’s dark.’

  ‘I don’t think I saw you immediately, but I sensed you were here,’ he says, and in the street light I catch a shadowy glimpse of smiling eyes. My heart thumps but I like it. The chemistry between us is exhilarating, I can hardly believe this is happening. Flirtation is instinctive; I catch myself flashing him a saucy look, and I giggle, excitement bursting out of me.

  ‘You’ve got an instinct for finding people, have you?’

  He is closer now. ‘Not sure, really, but I must have an instinct for finding you.’

  He is backlit between me and the building and it is like being in a movie, the two of us alone in the dark by the glittering water.

  I like his voice. Maybe I have heard too many American accents, and he sounds familiar and English. I have a sense of warmth from him, and I love the potent intimacy of his interest in me. It’s not what he has said, or not said, it’s the feeling of being next to him, the sense of him near me. I could listen to him talking for as long as he likes.

  Talking myself is more difficult: ‘I’m Grace Hart, how do you do?’ Oh. A nervous shiver slips out as a gasp and I bite my lip, staring at the ground. He holds out his hand and I put mine in his, conditioned for shaking a greeting. But, instead, he puts his other hand on top. He has a scar like a seam running from the base of his thumbnail straight down to his wrist. It’s sexy.

  ‘Hey, Grace,’ he says, finally, ‘my name is Ryder James.’

  ‘Do you mean Ja
mes Ryder and you are saying it the wrong way round like “Bond, James Bond?”’ Laughing I pull my hands away. It is the most tantalising thing. Every nerve and fibre in my body is turning towards him. The breeze blows my hair in a curtain between us.

  ‘No, I mean Ryder as in . . . as in . . . well, I can only think of Haggard, unfortunately, although spelled differently, and James as in . . . er . . .’ He stops, looks at his shoes, glances at me and goes on. ‘Well, as in James and the Giant Peach.’ He closes his eyes, winces, and mutters almost to himself, ‘Great, you would think I could have a better chat-up line than James and the Peach to impress a girl on a quay at night.’ His words tail off into my laughter and our circling around one another has positioned him with his face completely in darkness. My breath is jagged. I want our conversation to keep going so we have no reason to leave.

  ‘He wrote She,’ I offer.

  ‘Umm.’ Ryder moves back, raises one eyebrow, and I feel he is teasing me. ‘No, he floated off in a peach with some undesirables— Oh, you mean Rider Haggard. Yes, he did. I’ve never read it. Though of course my mother has, and, in an uncharacteristically romantic moment, named me after him.’

  We are standing right in front of one another now, and it is so exciting. It feels as though something missing has been found. This is what I have been waiting for, but how can it be? In the silence between us I am holding my breath, which I don’t realise until I let it all out in a rush.

  ‘I’m not supposed to be here, we’re leaving tonight,’ he says. ‘I should have been back on the boat, but I saw the lights – this place – and I wanted to find it.’ He gestures at the gallery and looks from it to back at me. ‘It’s mesmerising,’ he says. I don’t know if he is talking to me or to himself.