I discovered I could achieve more in a few stolen moments than Jim Culvers could muster in a fortnight. He would arrive at the studio at eight o’clock every morning, looking pink-eyed and dejected, and I doubt he ever gave much thought to my whereabouts in the hours before he got there, in the same way a restaurant patron is oblivious to the manoeuvres of the kitchen staff. He never saw me wandering about Regent’s Park just after dawn, when the grass was still etched with frost and the lake had no corrugations, drawing the birdlife and the skyline and the strange pollarded trees: details I would reconstitute in paintings, late at night. There was something about the gathering light of Paddington in the small hours that made its bombed-out spaces seem so vital and romantic, as though each ruin was an untold story. Some mornings, I set up on a wall in Brindley Street, sketching things that were not there, ghosts that lived inside the cavities. Other times, I wandered along the canal and drew the vagrants sleeping on the roofs of empty barges. As long as I made it back to the studio by eight o’clock to greet Jim with fresh currant buns, those precious hours were mine to enjoy.
Before long, I was involved more closely in Jim’s practice. He had failed to convince Max Eversholt, his only benefactor, that the empty-room paintings (‘absence portraits’, as he called them) were worthy of a solo exhibition, and so had backtracked into more familiar territory. I would find subjects for him by taking photographs of people on the street: skiffle groups rehearsing outside coffee bars, bus conductors walking home, rayon-clad girls in cinema queues, boys playing dice on the kerb. If Jim liked the look of someone in these pictures—a particular smile, a dour pout, whichever small quirk captured his imagination—he would pay me a few shillings for the photograph and spend the day copying it in oils. On top of this, I organised his charcoal studies into sketchbooks and dated each drawing so he could track the development of his ideas—he liked to tell me I was keeping a record of his downfall, and I liked to tell him to stop being so bloody miserable.
My time as his assistant lasted nine months. If anyone had deigned to suggest that I was falling in love with James Graham Culvers during that period, I would have protested. Back then, Jim was quite determined to conceal what handsomeness he had with lax grooming and booze. He could go for days without bathing and refused to wash his hair when he was working on a painting. There were times when his sour body odour infused the studio to such a degree that it overwhelmed even the turpentine. After a new work was finished, he would give his hair a close trim with the clippers and saunter in with shaving foam still caught in his ear-folds.
Idle chatter, as a rule, was wasted on Jim. If models began conversations about their holidays, he would purse his lips and nod, letting them trail off into monologue. But he would consider his reflection in the windows as I prepared his easel in the mornings. His eyes were too fat, so he said (‘like a sheep’s’); his front teeth too far apart, his chin too big, his nose protuberant (‘like a bloody outboard motor’). It was true that the constituents of his face were quite unusual, but there was still a pleasant balance to them in assembly. After a while, I came to understand that his complaints spoke more of connoisseurship than of vanity. He was intrigued by imperfections, could wonder for hours at the tessellated cracks in a china plate, at brush-hairs preserved in the gloss of a doorframe, at silly misprints in the newspaper. He believed that if something was flawless, it was artificial and suspicious. ‘All these people you’ve been taking pictures of are much too pretty,’ he would say. ‘Next time, bring me something else. I want ratty hair and scars and bad tattoos. This lot look like they’ve dropped out of a magazine. Even the bus conductor’s got long eyelashes. I’ll have to paint him ten times uglier.’
I came to learn things about Jim that only a wife should have been privy to. I knew the rumbles of his gut, the corns on his feet, the tunes he whistled in the lavatory and the sections of the paper he was partial to. I found out that he had allergies—to peanuts, rhubarb, peaches, crab—and could tell when he had partaken of these foods, even if he swore to me that he had not (the husky throat and rheumy eyes gave him away). He had a joke about Whistler’s mother that I must have heard a hundred times, and there was an anecdote he told about his childhood that always included the same phrase: ‘My old man, you see, was Anglican, and he wanted me to go into the ministry . . .’
He was not the sort of man for whom you felt an immediate attraction. The first sight of him did not steal your breath or weaken your knees—and, quite frankly, women of my generation knew better than to expect such things. Instead, over time, he quietly detuned the strings of your heart, until his peculiar key became so familiar that you believed it was the only one. And if my life as a painter had begun in the backcourt of my parents’ tenement, then I owed the rest of my career to Jim Culvers. Being his assistant gave me the chance to develop my own work in privacy, and, without him, those paintings might never have been seen at all. I did not recognise the depth of my affection for him until I no longer had a duty to include myself in his routines.
It was on one of those routine days in January—cold and grey and mizzling—that I heard the bell of the studio ring and went out to let Jim in. I expected he had forgotten his keys again, but when I opened the door I found him standing with three burlap sacks about his ankles. ‘Help us with this stuff’ he said, and carried two of the sacks in with him, leaving me to manage the fullest. It was crammed with several tins of what I thought was ordinary house paint. The worn white labels said:
I hauled them into the studio and Jim made me stack them in a pyramid near the window. ‘If it’s good enough for Pablo,’ he said, ‘then it’ll do for me. Go on, open one up. I want to see what state it’s in.’
I did as I was asked, setting a can on the floor, prising the lid off with a spoon. An ammoniac scent rushed out. The oil varnish had separated from the pigment and made an oozing brown lake on the surface. ‘What is this stuff?’ I said.
He crouched before it, sizing up the swirl of chemicals before him. ‘Magic in a can,’ he said. ‘Everyone used it before the war—we used to joke about Picasso spreading it on toast—but then they had to shut the factory down and you couldn’t find it anywhere. Doesn’t look too bad, this, considering. And I got the job lot for nothing!’ I was about to stir it, but Jim slapped my hand away: ‘Ttt-ttt-ttt. Hang about.’ He stood up. ‘We need to test it. See if it’s still usable. It’s been standing around in a basement for the past twenty years. The pigment will be fine, I reckon, but that binder looks a bit mustardy; we’ll have to siphon it off somehow, or try mixing it in with the tubes we have here.’ He went and unhooked his coat from behind the door, putting it back on.
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Well, I carried that lot all the way from Drury Lane. It’s worn me right out.’ He frisked his pockets for his wallet. ‘Thought I’d just nip home and sleep it off.’
I knew Jim well enough by then to know that ‘sleep it off’ meant ‘pass out drunk’. It was not yet ten o’clock, and there was no reason to assume that he would return before dark.
‘While I’m gone,’ he said, ‘do us a favour and try the stuff out a bit, eh? Have a play with it and see what it can do. Use as many canvases as you like, but don’t waste the paint—for all I know, they’re the last ten pots of it in London.’
I spent that entire day in the thrall of Ripolin, experimenting with its qualities. It was a vexing, stubborn material that had to be coaxed into obedience. I tried a number of methods with limited results, draining one of the tins, until I found the perfect balance in the mixture: two parts oil paint, two parts turpentine, one part Ripolin, thoroughly stirred. This produced dense blocks of colour in its own right, but the trick was to undercoat the canvas with a lot of white gesso. When I did this, the paint became more opaque and also more fluid. It enabled me to hide the brushstrokes and, at the same time, allowed for subtleties of gesture that gave each image a fuller character. Every colour had resonance, a kind of visual hum.
Jim showed up the next morning, headsore and bedraggled. He did not appear to remember asking me to test the Ripolin—or even that he had acquired it—because he just went about his typical routine. It was only after he finished his coffee that he noticed the pyramid of cans and saw the canvas leaned against the wall, turned inwards. ‘Did you manage to get to grips with that stuff then?’ he asked, as though it had been there in his studio for weeks.
‘You were right,’ I told him. ‘It’s magic.’ I brought the canvas over.
Jim’s eyelids unclenched. The picture I had made was built from memory: a portrait of him in a grey raincoat, striding along a hidden pavement. There was a sense of movement to his body, created by the Ripolin and my own rather hurried technique, as well as an unnerving stillness to the backdrop, a screen of buildings I had assembled from part-remembered walks around the city. Most of the canvas was taken up by this patchy architecture, and, because I had been aiming to check how the paint responded to different applications, the landscape it created was loosely connected: doomy red fire escapes here, watery grey brickwork there; glutinous pink railings, white-leafed trees, and strange yellow windows. And yet the disparate elements of the painting somehow coalesced. All the little experiments, seen as one, made something original. There was Jim, a concentrated figure wandering across the bottom of the image, with London shimmering, faltering, transforming in his wake. It was one of the most arresting pieces I ever made.
All Jim said was, ‘Blimey,’ which I took as a strong affirmation. He must have looked at that painting for a good forty minutes, asking me how I had achieved certain effects, wanting to know about the mix ratios I had tried with the Ripolin. He particularly liked the sense of animation it gave to the human figure—it was not clear if he recognised his own likeness in it—and I spent some time explaining and demonstrating how to handle the paint to get this result. After a while, Jim took the canvas and put it back against the wall, leaning inwards, as before. I did not know if he would let me keep it, given that I had made it with his materials, his brushes, and the longer it stayed in the unlit corner of his studio, the more I resented the fact that he had left it there to gather dust. For the next fortnight or so, the canvas remained unchecked, unmoved, while Jim went about compiling his own works in Ripolin: the same old faces copied from photographs, only brighter, punchier, more effervescent.
Then, one evening, as I was reading in my attic room, I heard the rumble of a motorbike engine in the avenue below. I looked down from the dormer to see a squat man in a tight leather jacket removing his crash helmet. He shook his head as though to free some lengthy mane of curls, though all he had was a crescent of sad white hair that hung around his baldness like a shower curtain. Stepping out of the sidecar was Jim Culvers, who, judging by the indelicacy of his voice when he called out ‘Oi, Max! I forgot the key!’ was at least seven whiskies into a stupor. The bell rang—one long, urgent trill.
I put on my clothes and went down to let them in. Vernon Glasser, the American sculptor from the upstairs studio, was out on the landing in his vest. ‘He’s lucky I was only sleeping in there,’ he said. ‘Tell him, this happens again, I’ll bring out the bolt-cutters. You tell him Vern Glasser said that.’ He trundled away, covering his ears.
At the door, Max Eversholt was courteous enough to introduce himself. ‘Very sorry about the hour,’ he said, his accent prim and pleasant. ‘We shan’t keep you long.’ He appeared embarrassed by Jim’s inebriation, and kept talking to Jim as though he were a dog: ‘Come on now, James. There you go. Watch your head there. Good chap.’
Jim groped around for the studio lights. ‘Max has come to check up on me. Haven’t you, Max?’
‘I believe I was invited,’ said Eversholt, zipping off his jacket. He hooked it with one finger and slung it over his shoulder.
‘Pssh. Don’t listen. He’s a crook.’ Suddenly, Jim looked panicked. ‘Ellie—what did you do with those sketchbooks?’
‘They’re in the trunk with the blankets.’
While Jim went to rummage for them, Eversholt inspected an assortment of canvases near the doorway. He examined each painting for no more than a few seconds, tilting his head to one side, tilting it back again. ‘These are certainly better,’ he said. ‘I can see a style emerging.’
‘Emerging?’ Jim said. He had the sketchbooks now and dumped them on the floor. ‘Don’t come in here using words like that. Emerging. I’m not forcing them out of my arse.’
Eversholt rubbed a daub of wet paint from his fingers. ‘Careful, James. Ladies present.’
‘You can say anything in front of her,’ Jim said. ‘She’s heard it all.’
‘How many has he had?’ I asked Eversholt.
‘Oh, this is nothing. I’ve seen him a lot worse than this.’ He waved Jim over. ‘Come on, old chap, let’s have a look at those sketches.’
Jim slurred back at him, ‘Nah, I’ve changed my mind. They’re no bloody good. I can’t even draw straight.’
‘Don’t be a fool now. Pick them up.’
Grudgingly, Jim stooped to gather them. He took so long about it, wobbling on his haunches, that I went over to help him. ‘Which one is the best?’ he whispered to me, and I whispered back: ‘That one.’
Jim collapsed onto his rear, clawing at the floorboards. I gave Eversholt the sketchbook and he just nodded, skimming through it. After a moment, he said, ‘You’re getting there, Jim, getting there. I must say, it’s nice to see you drawing again—I can tell you’re really honing something here. It’s attractive work. But it needs more time. I’ll come back in a month or two, and then we can review things.’
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Jim said. ‘There’s more. Loads of it. Show him, Ellie.’
I was not sure what he was referring to. His best work had already been dismissed.
‘Let him see the On High pile,’ he explained. ‘Go on.’
I looked at him, unsure.
‘Go on. Show him.’
Eversholt followed me to the furthest aspect of the studio, where Jim liked to store all the paintings he had lost the motivation to complete. He called them the On Highs, as in ‘on hiatus’.
Eversholt went through them with a void expression—it was such a complete look of dispassion that he must have practised it each night in the bathroom mirror, smoothing out the tell-tale wrinkles. He was wearing the oddest plum-coloured brogues and their thick heels stayed planted as he browsed the paintings. ‘I fear there’s a long way to go with these, Jim,’ he called, and started putting on his jacket. ‘Very glad to see the work, though, as always. I shall tell everyone you’ve been hard at it.’
‘Christ, don’t start spreading that around,’ Jim called back.
Then, as Eversholt was heading through into the main room to say his farewells, he stopped, sighting the back of my Ripolin canvas against the other wall. ‘No, that’s not for sale—I mean, that’s not really anything,’ I muttered, as he went to turn the picture round. Eversholt did not listen. He rolled his eyes over the image, plain-faced. It must have been that he stood there looking at it for some time, because Jim staggered in and leaned against the architrave. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d all gone quiet in here.’
Eversholt circled his hand about the picture. ‘Tell me what’s happening with this. What’s the thinking?’
‘Long story, that,’ Jim said.
‘Self-portraits are indulgent. Difficult to sell.’
Jim sniffed. He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘That’s just an experiment.’
I wanted to interject and explain, but I also wanted to give Jim the chance to speak up for me.
‘Always thought that was a lot of guff, myself,’ said Eversholt. ‘This is giving me the shivers. Ditch everything else, is my advice. Give me another ten or twelve of these little experiments, if that’s what you’re calling them. Then you can have your show. I’m thinking, end of August. September at a push.’
‘Ah, Max. So many imperatives. I love the way you talk.’ Jim grinne
d, turning back for the main room. ‘I’m sorry, old pal, but you seem to be mistaking art for press-ups. I can’t just drop and give you twenty. I’m a painter. The inspiration comes, the inspiration goes.’ He raised his arms. ‘Are you hearing this, Ellie? This is what you can expect. It’s all a lot of dancing for the organ-grinder from now on.’
‘If you need another show of my good faith, that’s fine. How much?’ Eversholt reached into his jacket and pulled out a chequebook. I watched the whole thing happening without saying a word.
‘I’m not interested in your money,’ Jim said. ‘But you can make one of those out to someone else, if you don’t mind. Last name’s Conroy. First name’s Elspeth. Don’t ask me to spell it, ‘cause I’m pissed, but I reckon fifty pounds’ll be fair enough to begin with.’
Eversholt started writing the cheque. ‘Who the bloody hell is Elspeth Conroy?’
‘She is,’ Jim said, pointing at me. ‘Artist-in-residence.’
Eversholt slowly pivoted his neck. ‘You did this?’
I hardly knew what to say. The blood rushed out of my head. My palms went very cool. ‘Yes. Well, it just sort of came together really. Bit of a fluke.’
‘Rubbish,’ Jim said. ‘She has more of them. Upstairs. Tons of them. They’re loads better than anything you’ll find in this dump.’
Eversholt tore off the cheque and shut the book. ‘Show me.’
‘More directives,’ Jim said. ‘You should really learn some manners.’
‘You’re right. Let me try that again.’ Until then, Eversholt had regarded me with the passing interest he might otherwise have afforded a chambermaid or a stable boy. Now I had his full attention. ‘Miss Conroy, darling,’ he said, ‘if you’d let me take a quick look at your work, I’d be delighted. In the meantime—’ He came forward, offering the cheque. ‘Call this a down-payment on what I’ve seen so far.’
The Ecliptic Page 13
