The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  Quickman thudded his fist on the door and it swung back. He called, ‘Tif, you big lump, we’re coming in! We’re soaked!’ and went right inside, collapsing the umbrella and tossing it to the floor. He marched through the studio with the self-assurance of a man in his own household, going straight up to the dresser to fetch me a towel. I took off my shoes, wrung out my socks, rolled up the hems of my trousers. He did the same, then went to put more coke in the stove—it appeared to have been quite recently ignited. There was a very welcome warmth about the studio, in fact: lamps were glowing in every corner, the walls were covered in sketches and charts, and the spread of unwashed clothes about the room was so profuse that I felt completely enveloped.

  Pettifer was just a snoring shape under the blankets. He slept on his front, as though strapped to a knife-thrower’s wheel, his arms stretched out, his feet hooked over the mattress. The rise and fall of his breaths was both pacific and unpleasant. Quickman went to bring him round, slapping his toes. ‘Rise and shine. We’ve got some news for you.’

  I put my shoes and socks beside the stove.

  Pettifer groaned. ‘This better be an emergency. Can’t you see I’m working?’

  His drafting table was set up under the window but there was nothing on it. I assumed that he had placed it there so he could take inspiration from the view into the woods. He always said that it was the job of an architect to absorb and reinterpret nature. ‘The truest measure of a building,’ he once told me, ‘is how quietly it recedes into the past. And nothing is quieter than a tree, or a mountain, or a mulberry bush, or—you get the point.’ The adjacent wall was loosely collaged with pencil drawings. All of them depicted a doorway of some kind. There were too many shapes and sizes to count; some were basic, some more ornamented; there was one, drawn deftly on a slip of elephant paper, that looked like a portcullis, and another, rendered in ink, that showed two squat pillars with the structure of pine cones. I rarely called on Pettifer at his lodging because the extent of his productivity always left me feeling insecure. But I could see now that most of the drawings on the wall had been there a very long time. The only project that had developed since my last visit was the model ship he had started building last winter. It was now a fully formed vessel with balsa masts and fabric sails and even a tiny crow’s nest. He kept it dry-docked on the top of his plan chest on a precarious wooden stand, which led me to suspect the drawers below were not in use.

  ‘You’d work all day if we let you,’ Quickman said.

  Pettifer did not open his eyes. He spoke into the pillow: ‘Go away.’

  ‘MacKinney’s leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Piss off, Q. I need my sleep.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said? Mac is leaving.’

  ‘I heard you. Ha bloody ha.’

  ‘Tell him, Knell.’

  The coke was crackling nicely in the stove. I warmed my feet against the grate. ‘He’s not kidding. She’s taking the ferry, first thing.’

  Pettifer was quiet. After a moment, he levered himself upright, yawning. ‘If I find out this is a joke, I’ll skin the bloody pair of you.’

  I brought over the provost’s notice and he snatched at it, screwing up his face as he read. He lay on his side, still holding the message. ‘Well, isn’t this just a perfect way to start the day.’

  ‘Be happy for her,’ Quickman said. ‘It’s a huge achievement.’

  ‘I’m elated.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘I’m so elated I’m distraught.’

  I went and sat on the bed. ‘Chin up, Tif, you’re not the only one who’s going to miss her. We’re putting on a reading tonight. I was hoping you’d help out.’

  Pettifer dropped the note and rolled onto his front. ‘That’s a terrible idea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you ever seen me act? Mac would look foolish, and I would look foolish, and everything would turn out badly for all concerned.’ He turned his head away. ‘You two do what you like. Just keep me out of it.’

  ‘It isn’t acting, it’s reading,’ I said. ‘Don’t be a pain. We’re going to need a few copies of the script typed up—at least help us with that.’

  Quickman made a throat-cutting gesture, but it was too late.

  ‘I’m a woeful typist,’ said Pettifer. ‘If you want the truth, I’m useless in every respect. But especially—most spectacularly—in the field of architecture, which is a bit of a handicap for an architect, I think you’ll agree.’ He took the pillow out from under his cheek and covered his whole head with it. ‘My God. I can’t believe Mac’s actually finished. You realise this means she’s better than us, don’t you? We’re never getting out of here. I’m going to be working on this stupid building till they put me in a box.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Quickman said. ‘I knew you’d see the bright side.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘It could be worse,’ I said. ‘You’d have seen it up on the bulletin board if we hadn’t told you.’

  ‘Go. Away.’

  Quickman retrieved his shoes, stepping into them barefooted. ‘Come on, Knell. This was a mistake.’ He draped his wet socks on the back of a chair and collected the umbrella. ‘Let him stew in his self-pity for a while. We’ll try again at lunchtime.’

  Pettifer lifted his arm. ‘Finally, some sense.’

  It was easy to forgive his selfishness. The end of Tif’s project was so far off that every departure bruised his confidence, brought on a panic that made him thorny and humourless for days. We had never had to say farewell to anyone as consequential as MacKinney before, so I could not blame him for wanting to stay in bed. If there had not been the consolation of knowing Mac’s project was unfinished, I might well have behaved the same way. Looking about his studio now, I could see the remains of so much labour, so much pursuit, but no coherence. How many sketches of doorways could a man draw before he settled on the perfect form? How long could he keep on prospecting the same dry patch of land before it collapsed beneath him?

  I knew that Pettifer worked harder at his craft than any of us. From his very first day at Portmantle—when Mac and I had watched him lumbering through the gate with a plan-tube strapped across his chest—he had been toiling at the same project. He had told us all about it on his second night. ‘They’re building a new cathedral in Manchester,’ he had said. ‘I’m sorting out the drawings.’ What we came to understand later, over the course of so many seasons in his company, was that he had already won the commission. There had been an exhausting competition between him and four other architects and his initial concept had impressed the Archbishop most. It had been a thrilling time in his career—‘the very pinnacle’. But, a week before construction was due to start, Pettifer had noticed a serious flaw in the design.

  The way he explained it to us, the problem was not a structural error, more of an aesthetic lapse—he would never qualify exactly what this meant, but he often talked of ‘light imbalance’. The issue did not concern the engineers, who were eager to break ground; the Archbishop had no reservations; even the partners at Pettifer’s firm were confounded by the delay. But Tif believed the fault in the design to be so fundamental that he withdrew from the project altogether, taking back every last plan, elevation, and section he had submitted. He returned his fee to the Archbishop and vowed to pursue other commissions. Still, the issue with the cathedral hounded him, day after day. He told us it had felt like a test of his passion. Competition deadlines came and went. Further commissions were declined or not sought at all. He found that he was no longer interested in anything except fixing the deficiencies of his cathedral—a process that took him so deep into the fog of creation that he began to question everything he knew about architecture. He rejected his own mannered style of drawing and found a different way to express his ideas, contrary to his training. When this new style did not work, he tried another, and another, ad infinitum. He told us that he changed his personal philosophy so often that his mind became a soup. He no longer truste
d his own decisions. He lost all sense of proportion, fixating on the tiniest details. His cathedral was stripped down like an engine and reassembled; it was minimised, exploded, modernised, pared back, reshaped. He started anew, and anew, and anew, and anew, until every day became an exercise in undermining the epiphanies of the day before. Soon enough, his colleagues ran out of patience and dissolved their partnership. They left him at his drafting board one afternoon, steeped in his own sweat and sour breath. He carried on without them in an empty office, a solo practice with no clients and one resigned commission to sustain him, until an old friend intervened. The friend (his eventual sponsor) saw the depth of Pettifer’s troubles and decided he should be told about Portmantle. The only thing Pettifer had said in reply was, ‘How soon can I get there?’

  Or so his story went. I did not know if his cathedral was any nearer to perfection than it had been when he arrived, because I had never deigned to open his plan chest to see what lay inside the drawers. Part of me was afraid to. But I had no doubt that Pettifer would achieve it, given time. His doggedness, his principles, his courage in defeat—all of these things made me proud to know him, even if his attitude was sometimes hard to tolerate.

  The rain was still hurtling down outside and I feared that lightning was not far off. Quickman and I huddled back under the umbrella and trudged up the slope. ‘He took it rather well, I thought,’ Q said. ‘What now?’

  ‘Let’s ask the boy.’

  ‘I had a feeling you’d say that.’

  We carved our way through the trees, considering every step, and made it to level ground. The distant sky was misty, dull as iron, and the mansion chimneys puffed out brooks of smoke that seemed solid enough to climb on. As we came round the west side of the building, we found the provost’s dog sitting upright in the middle of the path. The rain had made a ragged chamois of her fur and water streamed from her muzzle, but she sat there patiently, shivering. Her nostrils steamed. It was as though she had been waiting there especially for us. She did not bay, just eyed us as we approached. Quickman stooped to pet her. ‘Not the smartest of mutts, are we?’ he said, wiping the rain from her face. He told me to hold the umbrella and reached into his coat, brought out a dried fig. She was not interested. ‘Suit yourself.’ When he got up again, she stood right at his heels.

  ‘She must think you’re the provost,’ I said.

  He ate the fig himself. ‘Don’t know if it’s much of a compliment.’

  As we moved off towards Fullerton’s lodging, the dog followed closely. I could feel the thump of her tail against my calves.

  ‘I guess we’re stuck with her,’ Q said.

  The pine needles sagged under the deluge. All around the boy’s hut there was a drear daylight. Rain struck the sides of the oil drum that was still out on the grass, playing a dud calypso tune. The windows were shuttered and the flue was smokeless. ‘If he agrees to this,’ Q said, ‘I might just let him keep that lighter.’

  ‘You’re more sentimental than you look.’

  We stepped up to the walkway and I knocked hard on the shutters. Nazar went to the door and sniffed around the threshold. She began to scratch at the wood, shadow-boxing. ‘Come away,’ Quickman said, nudging her aside with his ankle. He rapped his knuckles on the door. The dog slipped by him, scratching again, and then she began to howl and bark.

  When I bent down to quiet her, I noticed what she had already seen: water was coursing from the underside of the door. It was not just a backwash from the rain, but a leak all of its own. It was gushing like a wellspring over the concrete, merging with the runnels on the path. My shoes were too sodden to feel it. ‘Quickman—look,’ I said.

  He tried the handle but nothing budged. ‘That’s a bit off,’ he said.

  I knocked again on the door, calling the boy’s name. Quickman banged and banged. We folded back the shutters but all I could see was our reflected faces and the lime-green halo of our umbrella. Nazar kept on barking.

  ‘Go and find Ardak,’ Q said. He must have spotted something I had not. There was a hardness to his voice. ‘Go!’ He pushed the umbrella into my hand and backed away, hauling off his sheepskin. The rain devoured him. His beard hung down in clumps. The dog was scrabbling and yapping.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  Quickman wound his coat around his arm. ‘I said get help.’ But I could not move. He cursed me under his breath, making for the window. ‘Take the dog then,’ he said, ‘or it’s going to get hurt. Hurry up!’ I grabbed Nazar’s collar and, although she bucked against me, barking even more, I managed to drag her off the walkway.

  Quickman punched the corner of the pane and the glass fractured into webs. Before he could strike it again, the whole window shattered, falling down over his shoes. He kicked away the shards from the frame and jumped inside.

  However long that moment lasted (I was crouched there on the grass for some time, with Nazar fighting to get loose and nothing to see except the roller-blind flapping in the window cavity), everything happened too slowly to comprehend. I could tell the dog was barking wildly, and yet the noise was somehow inscrutable, subdued. Every sound diminished. I thought I could taste my own blood.

  Then the front door swung open. Quickman was shouting at me. I let the dog go and she bolted towards him. ‘Help me lift him!’ I could hear him now. ‘Help me lift him!’ He retreated into the gloom.

  I went running after.

  Inside, the studio floor seemed to sway. A shallow of clear water rushed over it, like the stream of a hose on a patio deck. The bathroom light was on and Quickman was waiting there with the dog rounding his feet. He had turned off the taps, but the bathtub was still overflowing. Fullerton was slumped inside it, face down. A leather belt was tied around his neck, fixed to the base of the tap. Bands of duct tape ran all round his head. His hair eddied on the surface. ‘Hurry up, take his feet,’ Quickman said, untangling the belt. ‘I can’t lift him on my own.’

  I held the boy’s ankles and Quickman dragged him up from the armpits. We heaved him out of the water and fell back against the tiles with his body pale and slick between us. The duct tape was wound over his mouth and nose, puckering his skin. Quickman tried to free it. There was another clump of it inside the bathtub, covering the plughole.

  ‘Help me,’ Quickman said. ‘Come on!’

  I needed this—a direction, a firm hand—because I was unable to think forwards. My mind had seized and I could hear the blood skulking inside me. The boy’s eyes were thick and swollen. I picked away the tape until I saw the whites of his teeth. Quickman started to press at the boy’s sternum, blowing air into his mouth. The dog yapped right in his ear and he batted her away. I buckled against the wall. I was voiceless and afraid and crying. ‘Do something!’ Q said. ‘Run and get someone!’ He pumped at the boy’s ribs and kissed him. The dog would not be quiet. I staggered to my feet, quivering and weak with fright. I was sick all down my front. I was sick again on the walkway. But once I started running, I did not stop until I reached the mansion and found Ardak in the lobby. ‘Ne oldu?’ he said. I rushed into his arms and he held me close. ‘Neyin var?’

  Rooms from Memory

  Anything I did not know about Jim Culvers before I arrived in London, I learned within a month of working for him. His reputation was founded on a conventional style of portraiture: straightforward paintings of angry young Teds and Soho brothel-workers in various stages of undress, which the critic in my borrowed copy of The Burlington Magazine had described as ‘formally impressive and profoundly unspectacular’. By 1957, when I became his assistant, Jim had already begun to withdraw from this traditional approach and was trying to perfect a credible method for removing the subjects from his portraits altogether. A typical Culvers picture, in those days, would depict an empty room (usually some dim view of his studio), rendered in thick strokes of muted colours, at the heart of which would be a vacant armchair or a single lip-smirched water glass. He invited models to pose for long durations, painting nothing unti
l they were gone. To collectors, he claimed the new portraits showed the characteristics of the sitter in the barest terms, through revealing the shape of their absence. ‘Any space,’ he liked to postulate, ‘is altered when a person leaves it: so I paint that.’ Their response would be to ask him what he thought of Edward Hopper, and this would rile him so much that he would raise his asking price unreasonably.

  Jim had a two-room studio on the ground floor of a mews house in St John’s Wood. His gallery, the Eversholt, afforded him a monthly allowance for rent, materials, and what they called ‘subsistence’ (in Jim’s case, this amounted to little except whisky and greyhound stakes). Out of this money, he paid me six pounds a week in wages, and I was given free lodging in his attic. It was a damp and charmless space up there, little more than a storage loft. The ceiling bellied when it rained. Pigeons flew in through the dormers in summertime. A burning-coal smell emanated from the neighbourhood chimneys. But there was a straight aspect to the roof that I could set a canvas underneath, and, if I craned my head out of the window, I could see all the way to Regent’s Park. I considered myself fortunate to have my own workspace and to be amidst the London art scene, albeit peripherally.

  In those first few months with Jim, I was no more than an errand-runner. I procured new paints for him from a backstreet dealer in Covent Garden and took his pictures to the framers’ on Marylebone High Street, going back and forth on the bus with his suggested amendments, until he was content. I delivered bags of his dirty clothes to the launderette and made his lunch each day—always the same Cheddar cheese and pickle sandwich on wholemeal bread with the crusts removed and two thick circles of cucumber in each triangular half.

  It did not take me long to realise that I could fit my own work around these artless tasks. While I waited for a pair of Jim’s shoes to be repaired, for example, I would sit by the canal in Little Venice with a flask of tea, sketching people in the mist, making studies of the bridges and the skittering London traffic. I would save all the brown bags that Jim’s whisky bottles came in, storing them inside my purse to use as drawing paper. I pinned my hair up with pencils, cross-boned, like an Oriental lady, so I would always have them to hand.