The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  ‘Says the nephew of a lord.’

  ‘That’s irrelevant. I’m talking about art. Creativity.’ His face began to twitch. ‘You know, my uncle can’t stand the sight of me. It’s fine. The feeling’s mutual. I just wish people would stop lumping us together.’

  ‘I was only pointing out the unfairness of the world.’

  ‘I’m still right about creativity, though. Science is going to prove it one day. Just remember who it was that told you so.’ He smiled, allowing a silence to gather. ‘What time is it? We ought to see about that cab.’

  ‘Past one, I think.’

  ‘Come on, I’ll fetch your coat. Hope I haven’t lost that ticket she gave me.’ He stood, calling the barman over.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Would you have someone bring my drink up to the room, please?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’ The barman went away.

  ‘Hate to drink alone in public,’ Wilfred said, ‘and it seems a shame to waste it.’

  ‘You’re staying here?’ I asked.

  ‘For now. I’ve rather fallen out of love with London lately. I’m still working out where I want to go next.’ He made it sound so unrehearsed. Patting his blazer pockets, he mumbled: ‘Where’s that ticket she gave me? It must have got into the lining.’

  I had been to bed with two men in my life before that night—enough to keep my expectations low. But I let myself believe that sleeping with Wilfred Searle would at least be an improvement on those shy and muddling art school students who had preceded him, the first of whom had been too conscious of the act’s significance to finish what he started, the second of whom had curtly wiped his mess from my thighs with his shirtsleeve before rolling off me.

  It was in this generous spirit that I allowed Wilfred to stoop and kiss me in the hotel corridor, forgiving his clumsy lips and their lingering bitterness. I tried not to be disheartened when he insisted I undress myself in the bright lights of his room, or sigh when his dry fingers worked my breasts like sacks of oats he was trying to prise open. Even as he lay on top of me, lodging his elbows by my head so that his chest-hair tickled my chin, I stared up at the ceiling and politely stroked his back, thinking there would surely be a moment when I would feel connected to him. I let him thrust away with all the stolid purpose of a derrick bobbing in a field, and held on to the fading hope that he would notice the disappointment in my eyes and try to make amends—but he did not even have the good grace to pull out of me. A few minutes later, he fell off me, panting, and I lay tangled in the soggy hotel linen, wishing I had never met him.

  I got up and put my slip on.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Lie here with me. We need to make wedding plans.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘I’m serious. What’s a good time for you? My Thursdays are free until August.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll have to organise that with Dulcie,’ I said. ‘She’s in charge of my calendar now.’

  ‘Ah yes, I forgot—the Roxborough owns you.’ He sat up against the headboard. ‘Do you think if I call downstairs they’d bring me up some Dunhills?’

  ‘I doubt it. Have you seen the time?’

  ‘Well, I’m going for it anyway.’ He reached for the phone, patting the empty space beside him on the bed as he dialled. ‘Yes, reception, hi. I was wondering if it would be possible for the concierge to do me a small favour . . .’

  I stopped dressing and got back into bed, keeping what I thought was an appropriate distance between his hip and mine.

  ‘Cigarettes, actually . . . Yes, I know, it’s awfully late, but perhaps there’s a machine somewhere near by? It’s Mr Searle, or did I mention that already?’

  Pulling the sheets over my chest only exposed my feet and ankles, and I became aware of Wilfred staring down at them while he bartered with the concierge.

  ‘Excellent, thank you. Dunhills, yes—two packets, if you don’t mind.’ He covered the mouthpiece and asked me, ‘Anything for you?’ I shook my head. ‘No, that’s it, thank you. That’ll be everything.’ He put the phone down, exhaling. Then he turned to slide an arm across my stomach. I felt his wiry belly hair against my back, needling the silk of my slip. ‘Ten minutes,’ he murmured, kissing my ear. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait so long for a smoke afterwards.’

  ‘We could make love again twice in that time.’ I assumed he would take this as a good-natured gibe, the kind that we had spent most of the night aiming at each other. But, instead, he planted a palm between my shoulder blades and shoved me forwards, and I almost hit my forehead on the bedside cabinet. ‘What the bloody hell was that for?’

  He was already on his feet, walking naked to the bathroom. ‘If you’re so dissatisfied, you might as well go home,’ he said.

  ‘I was teasing you, that’s all. I thought you’d laugh.’

  He flicked a switch and stood there in the bathroom light, his body taut and wan. ‘Well, I don’t find that sort of thing amusing.’

  ‘You needn’t take it so personally.’

  ‘I happen to have some pride in the way I—oh, forget it. I don’t have to explain myself.’ He was scrubbing his hands firmly with soap now, from fingertips to elbow. ‘Perhaps you would’ve enjoyed it more if you hadn’t just lain there looking so horrified. It felt like I was hammering a skirting board.’

  I gathered my clothes. ‘Now you’re starting to disgust me.’

  ‘Just hurry up and leave, would you? I have an early train.’ He shut the bathroom door and locked it. I heard him clattering about in there while I stepped into my dress and found my coat. Then the door flashed open and he came bounding towards the bed. He was wearing a fresh hotel gown, and every stride he took gave off a strange crunching sound, like spare buttons rattling in a box. ‘Still here, I see,’ he said, removing a bottle of pills from the front pocket. ‘Another one who can’t take a hint.’ He dry-gulped a clutch of tablets.

  The concierge came knocking then: two discreet pips on the wood, barely audible.

  ‘Thanks for a horrible evening,’ I said, and showed myself out.

  The concierge stepped aside to let me through. ‘Madam, your scarf is trailing,’ he called after me as I made my way along the hall. ‘Madam—your scarf.’ I unravelled it from my sleeve and let it drop onto the carpet. Ahead of me, the lift doors opened but nobody stepped out.

  Our Next Great Female Painter?

  by Wilfred Searle | New Statesman | 20th February, 1960

  One can hardly blame young Scottish artist, Elspeth Conroy, for being a woman. Nor can one admonish the Roxborough Gallery on Bond Street for championing her work so ardently. In this modern art world, dominated by men of soaring talent, the claims of promising female painters are too rarely recognised. But what makes the first solo exhibition by Glasgow Schooled Conroy such a fizzling disappointment is the heightened expectation one carries into the gallery. The Roxborough’s advance publicity material is the main contributor: Miss Conroy is proclaimed to be ‘Britain’s next great female painter’ before the oil on her work is even dry. It would be tough for any living artist, with the exception of Picasso, to match the hysteria of such a promotional campaign, so what chance this young lassie?

  Well, although there is plenty to admire in the technical proficiency of all nine paintings on display, one is presented with the same niggling doubts at every turn of her debut show: Is this really the work of a true original? Or does one’s heart simply plead for it because the painter is a woman?

  As yet, no practising female painter has been able to replicate the trembling excitement we encounter in the work of Bacon or Sutherland. The fine sculptures of Barbara Hepworth have brought us close, but even this exceptional artist still struggles to elude the shadow of her male contemporaries. There is no doubt that our next great female painter will appear when she is ready, but I am sad to report that this show offers little evidence of Conroy being our girl. Her landscape paintings are so consciously mannered that they only succeed in agg
ravating, the way a child who finishes all her homework before bedtime invites suspicion from her father. In short: they try too hard to be appreciated.

  Conroy has a tendency to overstate each minor brushstroke, resulting in a suite of tepid, unconvincing images: London canal scenes with crooked, wispy figures whose obliqueness is much too premeditated. The careful abstraction of these scenes, though rendered deftly, is a transplant from another (male) artist’s heart: Picasso has lent his influence to everything Conroy paints. This might well be a habit that afflicts too many of our current painters, regardless of their gender, but it is a particularly bewildering trait in the work of a young woman from the banks of the Clyde.

  There is just one faint glimmer of promise in this otherwise cheerless show: Godfearing is a striking diptych in which Conroy attempts to loosen her stylistic restraints to tackle themes of motherhood. Still, dragged down by the weight of so much pre-show expectancy, even this well-realised work seems meek and insubstantial. One departs the gallery wishing the artist had chosen to express more of what it means to be a woman in the modern age.

  The talk in the first-class lounge was all about ‘this business’. Five men in dark flannel suits, whose faces were so similarly tapered I expected they were brothers, were constellated on the club chairs near by, turning through The Ocean Times and debating the articles of the day. Their wives were elsewhere on the ship (I heard mention of a bridge game somewhere on the promenade deck, a concert happening in the cocktail bar) and the five of them, it seemed, were damned if they were going to pass up the opportunity to converse about men’s matters over afternoon Tom Collinses.

  First, there was the bantering about ‘this business with the Pioneer satellite’ and how it proved that the American space programme would be nowhere without the help of British engineering. Then it was ‘this business with the train crash’ and how, in their glib assessment of the tragedy, such accidents ought hardly to be possible in a place as vast as California, where surely there was enough land for rail and road to never intersect. I could not decide what bothered me more: the ignorance of these men or their total lack of courtesy towards other passengers. Even the drone of the ship’s engines—that incessant rumble I had still not learned the skill of tuning out—was preferable to their chirruping and complaining: ‘You’d think they’d have laid on something better than the Archie West Trio, wouldn’t you?’ one of them said. ‘We heard all the same acts last year,’ said another. ‘Getting a bit tired of the Verandah, too.’ ‘That whole place is looking tired.’ ‘Oh, absolutely.’ ‘I wish they’d stop trying to foist that onion soup on us at breakfast, as if it’s such a bloody wonder of creation.’ ‘Oh, good heavens, yes.’ ‘Probably the same batch they’ve been feeding us since ’55!’ ‘Certainly tastes like it.’ ‘Ha-ha-ha.’

  I hoped the purser or a steward might come along to quiet them, but the lounge was fairly empty and the crew were otherwise engaged. It was easier to move to a different spot. There were plenty of other rooms where I could sit and finish my book. And if I could not find the peace to lose myself in reading, I had a brochure’s worth of ‘on-board facilities’ to distract me from my troubles: swimming pools and restaurants and a cinema showing Gidget, all of which I would have traded for a single hour of painting in my dingy Kilburn studio.

  I had already tried the smoking room: too much chatter in there, and not much oxygen. The library had suited me just fine, until the pitching of the ship began to make the books slide fore and aft along the shelves, giving me a dose of seasickness. I had gone to ward it off in the salon before the crew manager arrived to direct the preparations for the evening’s cabaret dance and everything got noisy again. The ship was over a thousand feet long—‘a floating city’, according to Dulcie. It had thirteen decks and enough cargo space to hold the luggage of two thousand passengers. So how was it that I could not find a single place on board where I felt comfortable?

  It did not help that Dulcie had arranged a suite for me, when I had asked for a much simpler room in cabin class. We were sailing to New York because she was terrified of aircraft (‘A hangover from the Blitz,’ she said) and I agreed to go with her because I did not trust myself to fly alone. The gallery was covering our expenses. Dulcie claimed that she would only sail first-class on someone else’s shilling, so she booked two of the dearest rooms the Queen Elizabeth had available. Thanks to her, I was committed to spending the entire voyage in the company of wealthy cruisers I would never have spoken to by choice: tiresome New Yorkers returning from family weddings in ‘charming little towns’; well-dressed London couples with an appetite for exaggerating the splendours of the ship’s decoration (‘We haven’t seen another tapestry quite like it—and so many exotic woods! We’ve been bowled over!’); obnoxious men of industry who slurped their gimlets and left shrimp-tails on the tabletops. Everywhere I turned, I saw haughtiness and self-absorption, and heard the sneering tones of people who reminded me of Wilfred Searle.

  I had found no respite at all since leaving Southampton. My suite was the only place on board where I had total privacy, but this presented its own problems. The room was dwarfing and elaborate—so grand that the bedcovers were made of a fabric more decorous than the evening gowns Dulcie had loaned me for the trip—and, although I slept well enough each night, I could not settle there in the daytime. It was not that I pined to be down in tourist class where I belonged, because sailing the Atlantic was a much less poetic experience than Melville had led me to believe, and I was very glad to be away from the cramped quarters of the lower decks. In fact, the suite afforded so much shelter from the goings-on about the ship that it made me jittery, vulnerable to my own thoughts.

  If I could not see the movements of the other passengers, or sense the quiet workings of the crew around me, it was hard to maintain perspective. Alone, my problems smothered me and I grew so dismayed with myself that I could not pass my own reflection in the mirror without wanting to destroy it. I drank cups of pennyroyal tea with honey, and soaked for hours in a bathtub that never quite got hot enough, silently composing telegrams I did not have the courage to wire back to England:

  WILFRED: GREETINGS FROM RMS QE. HALFWAY TO NYC ALREADY. HATING YOU MORE BY THE NAUTICAL MILE. 5 WKS PREGNANT AND COUNTING. ELSPETH.

  Leaving the men to scrutinise The Ocean Times, I went out to stretch my legs awhile, going up and down the promenade deck until I got weary. It proved difficult to go ten yards without having to side-step a meandering old lady, or skirt around a steward undertaking some fresh errand. I stopped at the guardrail for a moment to breathe in the air. The grey Atlantic swathed the hull. The soft seam of the horizon was too vast to comprehend. It occurred to me that I was as far from Clydebank as I had ever been in my life, that I was sailing first-class on a ship my own father had helped to build in the John Brown & Company yard. He would have smiled at the thought of me now, being kept afloat by joints he and his friends had caulked, but I did not feel proud. I wanted the ocean to swallow me whole.

  A part of me believed I would find Jim Culvers hiding in New York. I tried to tell myself that I would have made this trip regardless, and that any dreams I had of chancing upon Jim and his sister in Washington Square Park were not a factor in my decision. When people on board asked my reasons for travelling, I said that I was going to meet the owners of the art gallery that represented me. Invariably, this would lead to the question of how much money my paintings sold for, as though it were the defining credential of any real artist. Dulcie would often interject at this point; but, in her absence, I would say, ‘Enough to travel first-class,’ and this would prompt them to confess they were embarrassed not to know my name. People would have been less enamoured of the truth, I suspect, which is why I never told it. The fact was, I had not finished a single piece of work since that awful night I spent with Wilfred at the Connaught, and had felt so anxious about painting since his Statesman piece was published; therefore, an exhibition of new work—be it in London or the depths of Siberi
a—was a very distant prospect.

  I had only made the trip on Dulcie’s insistence. ‘You need a change of scenery,’ she had told me. ‘Go and travel round Europe for a month, see some things, take a few pictures, meet a few men. Get that imbecile out of your mind. Or better still—’ One of the founders of the Roxborough, Leonard Hines, was looking at potential sites for a sister gallery in Manhattan. ‘Len’s got some ridiculous idea that I should run the place for him. I keep saying I don’t have time to gallivant across Midtown, sizing up locations, but he’s been getting rather adamant lately. We should go together—I need a good sailing companion, and he needs to get better acquainted with your face. It’ll do us both some good.’ I would not have considered going anywhere with her except New York; the faint hope that Jim was lurking in its midst had never left me. And I knew that seeing him was the only thing that could rid my heart of Wilfred’s strangle-marks.

  Desperate now for peace and quiet, I took the stairs up to the sun deck. It was a warm day and the cheerful wives of first-class were out on the terrace. As I scouted for a table, passing sunhats and bare shoulders, I realised there was no comfort to be found amongst these women either. I could not sit listening to their appraisal of the entertainments bulletin: ‘Gordon Cane and his Orchestra—quarter to four in the lounge. I’m game for it if you are, Lucy. Unless you’ve other plans?’ I did not even interrupt my stride, just walked a perfect loop around the terrace, back downstairs, gripping my damp copy of Below the Salt.

  There was nothing left to do but head up to the racquet court. For the past three afternoons, Dulcie had been competing in the ship’s squash tournament. She was an avid player—a fact she had surprised me with early in the voyage, when she had come to my door wearing a bright white tracksuit with a towel tucked inside the collar. She claimed that everyone had to have a reliable form of exercise unless they wanted ‘to stroke out in their fifties’, and explained that squash was ‘sort of an art form in itself—the only one I’m any good at, anyway’. The standard of the competition on board was low by all accounts, and Dulcie had advanced through the early rounds with ease, giving me a shot-by-shot report of every set she played in the Verandah Grill at dinnertime. Today’s match, however, was a tricky semi-final (her words) against a woman she knew from her old racquet club in Mayfair. ‘Amanda Yail’—she had announced the name with a slight tremor. ‘Beat me last year at the Open, second round, then got smashed off court by Heather McKay in the next. I must have missed her on the passenger list. It’s going to be a long old match.’ I had never heard Dulcie sound so unconfident, which led me to suspect that she did not want me there to cheer her on.