I went about the task of painting the mural so methodically. First, I divided my master drawing into one-inch squares with construction lines. Then I made a cartoon—a kind of knitting pattern, drawn on paper to enlarge the master sketch. This was organised into corresponding one-foot squares, helping me retain the proportions of the original. Transferring the design from the cartoon involved puncturing its drawn outlines with my roulette—a small spiked wheel on a wooden handle—and then dusting the perforations with dry poster paint, leaving behind a dotted imprint on the stretched cotton canvas that I could firm up with ink. I underpainted each square using oil pigments thinned right down with turpentine, building thicker coats upon it as the days progressed. It was important to graduate from light to dark so that the image would retain its punch and definition.
My aim was to finish most of the work by July to give the paint and resin enough time to settle, as I was going to have to roll the canvas up and transport it to the observatory in a cardboard tube—it was a five-hour drive, north to Windermere, and the longer the painting stayed on the roll, the harder it would be to install. I planned to affix the final image to the wall with lead adhesive in three separate sections, using the techniques I had learned from Henry Holden. Everything seemed to be in place.
But I was barely halfway into painting when I noticed a problem with the master drawing I was working from. In all of Jamieson’s celestial charts, two elements were persistently shown in the form of solid, candy-striped lines. The first of these represented the equator. The second was marked: ECLIPTIC. I intended to present these lines as frayed lengths of rope, arcing from right to left. But, just as I was about to start committing them to paint, I hesitated. It occurred to me that, in my great rush to finish the mural plans, I had not stopped to query the significance of these lines in Jamieson’s originals. So I went to get my dictionary (I kept it in my bedside drawer in place of a Bible).
equator / ih-kway-ter / noun
an imaginary line around the earth at equal distances from the poles, dividing the earth into northern and southern hemispheres.
This just confirmed what I already knew. It was school-level astronomy.
ecliptic / ih-klip-tick / noun
a great circle on the celestial sphere representing the sun’s apparent path among the stars during the year.
I was more curious about this definition. ‘Representing’ and ‘apparent’ seemed like oddly vague descriptors, and left me feeling quite unsatisfied. The next day, I went back to Burlington House to consult their reference books.
The ecliptic is an imaginary great circle on the celestial sphere along which the sun appears to move over the course of the year. (In actuality, it is the earth’s orbit around the sun that causes the change in the sun’s apparent direction.) The ecliptic is inclined from the celestial equator by 23.5 degrees, and crosses it at two points, known as equinoxes. The constellations of the zodiac are positioned along the ecliptic.
I went to see if the librarian could expound on this for me. She did not understand the definition herself (‘I’m part-time here,’ she said, ‘and I only studied Classics’), but advised me to speak to the archivist, who would be coming back shortly from lunch. And so I sat patiently in the reading room for over an hour until the man appeared. He had helped me on several occasions before, and I always thought that he looked much too young to be an archivist; it seemed that wearing a lot of tweed and brilliantine was his strategy for disguising it. He went to find himself a text from the shelves. As I approached him, he took off his round wire frames and gently closed his fist over them. Raising one corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Who told you?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Who told you I could help?’
‘I’m sorry. The librarian thought—’
‘She knows. I told her fifty times. It’s my day off.’
‘Oh. Then why are you here?’
‘Because I’m trying to do some research of my own.’
‘Snap,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ He sighed. ‘You might as well have a seat. I can take a few minutes out of the tedium, I suppose.’
‘You’re very kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
There was an uncomfortable moment in which I thought he sniffed my hair as I sat down at the nearest table, but it was only his peculiar way of breathing. ‘Excuse my hay fever,’ he said, standing over me. ‘Tell me what you need.’
I laid out the reference book, pointing to the extract I wanted him to clarify. He leaned in, placing a hand at the back of my chair. ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, shifting away, ‘is how the line is imaginary.’
‘It’s imaginary in the same sense as the equator and the celestial sphere,’ he replied. ‘Simple.’
I blinked back at him.
‘Oh dear. You’d better shift over.’ Wearily hooking his glasses back on his ears, he sat down in the space beside me. He turned back his sleeves. ‘All right. Astronomy for naïfs, lesson one. The celestial sphere.’ He talked very quickly and flatly, as though dictating a letter: ‘The way we envision the stars is by imagining they’re attached to a giant invisible sphere surrounding the earth. It’s a total fiction, really—just a construction we came up with to help us get our heads around the complexity of it all. And, of course, we can only see half of this sphere at any given time. So, you could say it’s more like a dome, or a semi-sphere, but we prefer not to call it that. Our prerogative. Anyway—’ He tapped the page: one heavy clop of his index finger to get my attention. ‘The ecliptic, put simply, is the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun. But since we all live here on earth, we observe the sun to be moving along this plane instead. Why? Because what would be the point of looking at things from the perspective of the sun? That’s no use to anyone. And it’s important to have a governing system.’ He nudged closer, wetting his lips. ‘Ergo, it’s an imaginary circle, as it’s only a part of our human construction of the cosmos. To call it a genuine circle would be quite incorrect. But to avoid confusion, we say that the sun moves in a circular path through the stars over the course of the year. We can observe it going eastwards through the constellations along a sort of line. That line is what we call the ecliptic. It’s not actually there, of course. In fact, it’s a complete inversion, because it’s really the earth that’s moving, not the sun. But to all intents and purposes, it’s a bloody great circular line in the sky made by the sun throughout the year.’ His brow was crumpled now. ‘It seems I’m quite incapable of explaining this succinctly. Shall I draw you a picture?’
Perhaps the only way to describe the cosmos was by analogy. The archivist took out a notebook and a pencil. ‘Imagine the sun is on top of this maypole, here.’ He made a line with a head like a matchstick. ‘And you’re the earth, dancing round it. For the sake of time, let’s forget about the fact that you’re tilted at twenty-three and a bit degrees to the pole—it only complicates things.’ He drew a wobbly circle and marked it with a cross, then added a dotted line to show my viewpoint with a smaller cross on the opposite side.
He moved the pencil slowly in a clockwise loop. ‘So, from your point of view, keeping your eyes on the tip of the maypole as you go round, it seems to track out a circle against the celestial sky. That circle would be your ecliptic. It’s not actually there; it’s just the way you perceive it. Really, it’s you that’s going in circles. The maypole stays where it is. Understand now?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The picture helped.’
‘Oh good. Welcome to basic astronomy,’ he replied. ‘Now you’d better let me get on with wasting my day off.’
‘What are you researching, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I’ve been trying to write a biography of Eddington for a while now.’
‘Edison?’
‘No. Good gracious, why does everybody say that?’ He closed my reference book. ‘One day, people are going to stop asking me that question. They
’ll say, “Ah yes, Eddington, of course.” And I shall have a good old laugh about it. Until then—’ He slid the book to me under the tow of his middle finger. ‘Best of luck.’
I never got the chance to thank him properly. He was already on his feet, browsing the shelves.
When I got back to my studio, the stars in my mural seemed dimmer. I could not see a way that I could include the ecliptic or the equator in the form that I had originally devised. To present imaginary lines as ropes—solid, tangible things—felt insincere. But to show them as candy-striped tracks, as Jamieson had done, seemed equally wrong. How could I represent things that were themselves just representations of other people’s representations? And how could I make them fit the themes of my design without contriving them? I could not continue with the painting until I had resolved these issues in my mind. And so it stayed on the stretchers, half-made.
For a time, the telephone did not ring at all—nobody cared where I was or what I was doing. But, after a week or so, the calls became more frequent and more difficult to ignore. I left the phone unhooked and, when the bellyaching noise started to bother me, I cut the wire.
The problem seemed to be in the materials themselves: oil paints were versatile, but they could not give me the illusory qualities I wanted. Graphite on paper was so categorical, ink so permanent. Gouache was flat, acrylic like toothpaste. I was aiming to show lines that were not really there, and felt limited by the tools at my disposal. There were tricks of perspective I attempted: re-ordering my scrapyard of ships so that the arc of their upturned hulls, the shadows of their masts, the limits of their sails were subtly aligned and, from a certain angle, alluded to an arcing line. But doing this ruined the balance of the image: what had been an ordered jumble became a clot of pieces, too conveniently manoeuvred into position.
I thought of masking certain areas of the painting, using vacancies in the drawing to suggest a lurking presence. This worked fine on paper, but when I came to transfer it to the canvas, the image looked skeletal, dead. I needed to find some method of getting the paint to vary with the light or decay over the course of time. Ripolin might well have worked, but I did not know where to acquire it or if it was still being manufactured. I mixed various types of glue into the paints I had—no luck; it hardened them or glossed them or turned them lumpy. My telephone was broken so I could not ring around to ask the dealers for their suggestions. And what would I have said? ‘I want something to make my lines look more imaginary.’ ‘Ah, yes—I’ve got just the thing. When can you come and collect it?’ ‘Don’t you deliver? I can’t go outside.’ ‘No, you’ll have to come and get it. Our delivery boy is sick.’ ‘But, I can’t leave the flat.’ ‘Why not? What’s wrong with you?’ ‘I can’t leave my work, that’s all.’ Going outside was simply not possible. It was foggy out there. Full of noises. I had stapled the curtains. Nothing could get in. The water was brown when it came from the taps, but I was still drinking it. So what? Work my way through it—that was the best thing. Just like my parents. Get my head down. No complaining.
The phone rang.
Paul Christopher.
No.
Someone was buzzing. Down there, on the street, at my door.
A startling racket. Bzz-bzz, bzz-bzz-bzz. I could not see out the window. Bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz, bzz-bzz. It did not go away until I pressed the button.
Different feet this time, not Dulcie’s. The thumping on the stairs was deeper. A man’s. I looked through the spyhole.
Victor Yail. He was in a cricket jumper, but he still had his briefcase. As he leaned in to knock, his face bent and swelled. I undid the latch.
He stood on the landing, peering into the flat. ‘Thought you’d like some fresh air.’
I shook my head.
‘Just a quick walk to the corner and back. We shan’t go far.’
I did not move.
‘OK. Then would you please let me in?’
I held the door open for him.
‘You missed your last few appointments,’ he said, surveying the room with tightened eyes.
I closed all the locks.
‘Is this the mural? It’s enormous.’
‘Don’t touch it,’ I said.
He turned sharply, looking for a clean spot on the floor to set his case down, and settled for the milk crate near the kitchen counter. ‘Is it all right if I look around a bit? I promise I won’t move anything.’
‘What are you doing here, Victor?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, piloting a route between the obstacles around him. Boxes, jam-jars, soup cans. ‘If you drop off the radar for several weeks without a word, people get concerned.’ Bottles, paper, tin foil. Clods of paint and drips of ink. ‘Dulcie got in touch. She said she’d tried to phone but you weren’t answering.’ Dishes, plates, and parcel tape. Paint rags, clothing, bits of wire. ‘Happened a few times now, she said. So I thought I’d come over.’ Knives and forks and spoons and spatulas. ‘I’m very glad I did. What’s this?’ He pointed to the bench where I had been working on my pigments.
‘A mortar and pestle,’ I told him.
‘I can see that. What’s inside?’
‘An experiment.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Victor said. And, when he turned back to me, he was holding something in his hand: a brown glass bottle with a torn-off label. In a kind of pantomime, he turned it upside down to show me it was empty. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.
I shrugged. I was not exactly sure I could account for all of them. Some were skinned over in the cans about his feet, some congealed on scraps of paper, some had made it to the small test canvases in stacks under the window—the firewood pile, I liked to think of it. The rest could have been anywhere.
‘Ellie, how long have you been grinding up your tablets like this?’
Again, I was not sure. But I answered, ‘A week or so.’
‘I gave you a month’s supply. Are they all gone?’
I shrugged again.
Looking earnestly into my eyes, he said, ‘Well, this is quite a setback, Ellie, I won’t lie to you.’ He tossed the bottle onto the couch. It made an oddly noiseless landing. ‘We need to get you back on those right away. You can’t just suddenly stop. It’ll shock your system.’ He went to his briefcase, treading without care. A rag stuck to his shoe. In the top compartment, he found his prescription pad and filled out a sheet. ‘As soon as the pharmacy opens tomorrow, take this, do you hear me?’
I sat down. The muscles in my legs felt hard as metal.
‘In fact, here—’ He drew something from a different pocket of the case. Another bottle: plastic, rattling. He made to throw it, then decided not to. ‘These are Jonathan’s. He takes them for his bedwetting. It’s Tofranil, the same as yours but a very low dosage.’ He pressed them into my hand. ‘I keep them with me for emergencies. Take them. They’ll tide you over till tomorrow.’
‘What for?’ I asked. I was so tired.
‘Don’t worry what for. You’d better have something in your stomach first,’ he said. ‘How long has it been since you ate?’ He went rummaging in my kitchen. The fridge door opened, the fridge door closed. ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘Fish paste and sweetcorn. No wonder you look malnourished.’ And he rolled up his sleeves to muck out my sink. ‘Is there someone who could stay with you tonight? A friend, a neighbour? I don’t think you should be alone at the moment.’
‘No.’ I looked down at the bottle. ‘No one else.’
‘What about the people downstairs?’
‘I don’t know them very well.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Miles away.’
‘Dulcie, then.’
‘You must be joking.’
Victor heaved out a sigh. He wiped his forehead with the crook of his wrist, soapsuds clinging to his arm-hairs. ‘I’ve a spare room at home,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to insist, but I can’t let you stay here alone. It’ll just be for the night.’
And he repeated the words back to me, slower. ‘You can’t leave your work. All right.’ He surveyed the room, nodding. ‘I’ll stay here tonight then. As a friend. I just need to use your phone.’ But when he got to the wall, he found the wire had been snipped. ‘Actually, there’s a phone box down the road. Why don’t I bring us back some fish and chips, eh? My treat.’ He took my door keys from the kitchen counter. ‘Won’t be long.’
He came back a while later in a different set of clothes and without his briefcase. Instead, he had a leather overnight bag and a box of groceries. ‘The chip shops were all closed, so I’ve brought you some provisions from home.’ Unpacking the box, he showed me everything he had: sardines and mackerel in tins, bread rolls, canned tomatoes, rice, Oxo cubes, an onion, a pint of milk, some parcelled meat. ‘I’ll get cooking,’ he said, ‘once I’ve cleaned this place up a bit. Why don’t you come and keep me company?’
I told him I was not hungry, but Victor Yail was not the sort of man who could be persuaded from a path once he had started on it. While he sorted through the clutter of my kitchen, changing the bins and clearing the surfaces, I lay down on my couch and allowed myself to sleep.
The meal was nothing fancy—just minced beef and tomatoes with rice—but it was one of the finest I ever ate in my life. Victor let me finish it in silence, while he leaned on the cooker, reading through the newspaper. It was either very late or very early. The kitchen was gleaming and spare. There was a stillness behind the curtains and the peak-time blaring of the television set downstairs could not be heard. I was already feeling much better. Victor took my plate and I thanked him. He came back with a small glass of milk and two tablets. ‘Just those for now, but we’re going to start upping your dosage.’ I swallowed them down and he gave me a pat on the shoulder. It was strange to be looked after in this way, as though I were a child again. I had not known closeness like this for years.
The Ecliptic Page 23
