At first, we slept in separate rooms. It was almost like things used to be. Jim hauled in his single mattress and made a bed for me in the lounge beside the fireplace, saying he was happy on the floor. There were not enough pillows or blankets to share, so he relinquished the ones he had and told me, ‘I’ll make do.’ He took down the heavy curtains from the bedroom and sewed them together with twine to make a sleeping bag, used a rolled-up jumper to cushion his head, and woke up trying to hide the cricks in his neck. In the days, we painted. In the evenings, we bathed and washed our clothes. I finished the novel I had brought and read it time and again by candlelight: the story of an unnamed girl whose thoughts only became more comforting by familiarity. Before I went to sleep, I leafed through National Geographic and savoured the pictures and articles.
Jim had no doubts as to the virtue of his work. He had a very set regimen. Each morning, he went out with his tattered picnic basket to forage plants—sometimes venturing no further than the beanstalk weeds in the back garden or the fringes of the surrounding trees, other times going much further, beyond the scree of the hills to their summits, or right across to the other side of the loch. He could be gone for an hour; he could be gone for five. It depended on his needs and what was out there to be found. No matter what, he always came back with a full basket of pickings: local flora he did not know the botanical terms for, and gave what I assumed were pet-names of his own. Skullcap. Redshank. Horsemint. Muck-button. The only plants that ever caught his eye were those with pinkish flowers or stems. Because I could not bear for him to go anywhere without me in those first few weeks, I accompanied him on all of his ‘scouting missions’, as he liked to call them. But I soon grew tired of hunting around in ditches and thickets, and began to suspect that Jim would prefer to do his scouting alone. One morning, as we were heading back to the cottage through the neighbouring firs, he said to me, ‘You really don’t have to come with me any more—I can tell you hate it.’
‘It’s nature,’ I said. ‘I don’t hate it.’
‘But you could do without the pissing rain and cold.’
I shrugged. ‘You might run off on me again.’
‘I’ve got a shilling to my name. It’d get me into Balloch, but then I reckon I’d be stuck. I’m too old to be scrubbing pots again for bus fare.’
Every second day, he started a new painting. His process was fixed but unusual: first, he coated all of his boards with a black primer then underpainted thickly with Cremnitz White, a very stiff material that he could spread across the board like stucco. ‘My only extravagance,’ he told me. ‘You can use it if you want, but sparingly—I find it helps to think of it as diamond paste.’ He would then add definition to the background in regular tube-oils. Next, he would dip a fat round brush into a batch of his homemade pigment (it was thin like syrup) and, holding it firmly in his left hand, he would thump his right fist hard against the base of the brush, spiking beads of paint against the board to form the Judas blossoms. They would hold there fuzzily on the surface, pink and dazzling, and he would spend the next few hours fine-detailing them with a very slim sable.
For a week or so, I slipped back into a role as Jim’s assistant. I believed in the work he was doing and felt it worthier than my own. Together, we refined the pigmentation of the plants he brought home. I made some adjustments to his timings and suggested a change from brine to icy water; I showed him a different mullering technique and altered his mix ratios, all of which helped to yield much brighter hues and more stable paints. He was grateful, I knew, but also reluctant to accept too much of my help. ‘This is starting to feel like a collaboration,’ he said, at the end of one particularly long day’s painting. We were both exhausted. Our meal of boiled rice and tinned carrots had not satisfied us and we had finished the last of the coffee that morning. We were living off what little cash I had brought with me and the few pennies Jim had left. There had been some dreamy talk about me blowing the whole lot on ingredients for a chocolate cake tomorrow, and we had tiredly reviewed the day’s progress as I cleared the table. He was pleased with how the work was developing, but twitchy about my involvement. ‘You know I’ve loved having you here,’ he went on, ‘but you’ve got a life to get back to. They’ll all be wondering where you are.’
‘Who will?’
‘Dulcie and Max.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘You need to get home.’
‘I’ll write and say I’m on a research trip somewhere. They won’t care. I’m not in any rush.’
‘I can see that,’ he said, a scratch of irritation in his voice.
‘Are you saying you don’t want me around? Is that it?’
‘Well, it’d be nice to know what your plan is, that’s all. While I’m here alone, I can make the rations last. Gas meter times out quicker with you here. Hot water runs out faster. This kind of thing should not be weighing on my mind.’
I folded my arms.
‘Look, don’t be offended,’ he said. ‘All this piddling domestic stuff just slows me down. I resent having to think about it.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll call Dulcie today and see if she’ll send me some money.’
‘No, no, no—you aren’t listening. I’m not asking for that. That’s the last thing I want.’
‘You’re the one talking about gas meters, Jim. I don’t know what you want me to say.’
He pleated his hands on the table. ‘I’m telling you, if you’re going to be here, then you’re here to bloody well paint. Not to be my assistant. Not to clear up after me. I’m happy to go hungry for the sake of your art, but not so you can be my housekeeper.’
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘It’s as easy as you want it to be, Ellie.’
‘I don’t have anything to paint. A subject, I mean. I’m just—’ And I breathed, realising I was about to say adrift.
‘Find one,’ he said. ‘You’ve done it before. I did it myself.’
‘Of course. You’re right. I should just punch someone and see where it leads me.’
He smirked. ‘Might not be such a bad idea, you know. You’re only ever ten yards from a bar fight in Scotland.’
I said, ‘Actually, it’s what Henry used to tell me—pick a fight, disturb the peace.’
‘Yeah, he gave the same advice to everyone.’
‘Really?’
‘Course he did. Only difference is, you listened to it.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
He waved away my soreness. ‘Paint what you believe. That was Henry’s way of telling you to stop moping and get on with it. If he were here now, he’d be telling you again.’
Over the past few weeks, there had been plenty of time for me to explain the plight of my recent work to Jim. He had, of course, been understanding of my difficulties in finishing paintings (‘You saw my On High pile before it was a mountain,’ he said. ‘Christ, what a mess I made of things!’) and was glad to hear that I had withdrawn from the mural project to retain ‘a little integrity’. I expected he would be much less accepting of my capitulation to the Roxborough’s chequebook. ‘Look, it’s certainly a pity to show work you aren’t proud of,’ was all he said, ‘but I suppose you must’ve had your reasons. And it doesn’t seem to have dinted your reputation any. Pressure does funny things to people—I know that better than anyone.’ His muted disapproval was almost disappointing. I wanted him to lecture me, put me straight.
It was hard to find an appropriate moment to confess to him that I was taking medication. How was I supposed to broach it? Over rice and carrots at the dinner table? While we were climbing up a hummock in search of weeds? Perhaps I should have introduced the topic one night while the two of us were in the bathroom, twisting the dingy water from our laundry? I was afraid that he would think less of me. I feared that telling him about my sessions with Victor Yail would make me seem weak and incapable: just another foolish girl sent reeling by a man. And I could not rake back over my mistakes again like that: Wilfred Searle, the pennyroyal, the caldarium and what came
after. I just wanted to be close to Jim, to be around the music of his footsteps in the house each day, to touch and smell the fabric of him.
Until that evening in the kitchen, he had afforded me the courtesy of not asking about my plans. I had carried on without a purpose, hidden my lack of inspiration just by helping him with his. But it seemed he had finally noticed my aimlessness. ‘Don’t think I was joking, by the way,’ he said. ‘The more you help me, the better these paintings are getting—that’s not a problem for me yet, but it’s going to be soon. I don’t want to look at them one day and see your handiwork. They’re all I’ve got. So I’ve got to draw a line under all this. If you want to stay, you have to stop helping me and help yourself instead. Clear that back room out and paint something.’
But I had nothing in me—not the remotest, flittering trace of an idea. All my thoughts were vaurien. When I told him I could not paint because I felt no thrill in it any longer, Jim stared me down. ‘Rubbish. You’re just in a slump.’ When I told him I had issues with anxiety that required weekly therapy, he gave an indignant shake of the head. When I told him I could only finish work on 100mg a day and showed him the bottles of Tofranil from my overnight bag to prove it, he grew angry—not with me, but at the world that had allowed it. ‘What kind of idiotic—I mean, who the hell put you on these?’ He pushed through the kitchen beads to view the label under brighter light. ‘They tried to fob me off with these things after the war. Anti-whatevers. I told them, listen, if I’m going to kill myself, I’ll be doing it nice and slow with a cask of single malt, thank you very much.’ Opening a bottle, sniffing its innards, he emptied out a handful of tablets and moved them around on his palm. Then he tipped them back in. Coming in to place them on the kitchen table, he said, ‘It’s no wonder you can’t paint, Ellie. You won’t feel a thing while you’re dosed up on those.’
‘How do you know I feel anything when I’m off them?’ I said. ‘They’ve been helping me a lot.’
‘Helping you?’
‘Yes.’
‘With what?’
‘With keeping my head above water.’
‘Well, you’d be better off with a snorkel.’ He had already stacked the three short bottles into a pyramid, and now he was standing over them, hands on hips, like some broken-down motorist examining his engine. ‘I know one thing: the girl who used to live up in my attic was the most natural painter I ever saw—you’d never have found her avoiding work, or moaning about having no ideas. She went out and found them. She didn’t care about pleasing anyone but herself. That was the real you, Ellie. Not this. Not those. You need to take it from someone who’s been there.’ He looked at me now, brow raised. ‘How many times did you watch me painting, pissed as a rat, and how much good ever came of it? None. It’s taken me this long to get sober, and this long to start making work I’m proud of again.’ Turning away, he went to fill a glass under the tap, and came back, slugging it. I was stuck under the dim yellow bulb light, staring at the pills. What a chore it had been in the past few weeks, sneaking off to take them while Jim was occupied elsewhere, keeping half an eye on the mantel clock all day in case I missed a dose. I did not think I was resilient enough to function without medication. But I was not alone any more, and the prospect did not frighten me the way it did when Victor used to suggest it.
Jim put a hand on the small of my back and held it there. ‘I just never imagined you needing that kind of help. You always seemed to pour everything into your work. It was like you had another life up there in that attic—your own little sanctuary.’ His thumb was rubbing now at the cotton of my blouse. It made my pulse accelerate. ‘What’s he like, this shrink of yours, anyway? You trust him?’
I nodded. ‘He’s been good to me.’
‘I suppose all those qualifications have to count for something.’ Jim paused. I could almost feel his roving eyes upon me. ‘You should probably do what he says, then. Don’t take medical advice from me. I never even got my Leaving Certificate.’
‘Me neither,’ I said.
‘See. We’re the same, you and me.’
‘Jim.’
‘What? What did I say?’ But I was not dissenting from his words, only his fingers: they had loosened the blouse from my skirt and were walking up my bare spine. His eyes were tightened, searching. He turned me slowly, brushed my clavicle with his knuckle.
I had to arch up on my tiptoes just to kiss him. His face was coarse with stubble, but his lips had a pleasing gentleness.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Now we can both stop imagining it.’
For the very first time, we slept in the same bed. Beside the fire on the single mattress. Huddled together like stowaways. His hands seemed to know where to go. They knew me in the way that Wilfred Searle’s had not even tried to. I wanted to be kept inside Jim’s skinny arms forever, wanted to hold my lips against the scuffed skin of his neck and breathe it every morning as I woke up, wanted to feel him lift and hook the trailing hair behind my ear and stroke it, nimbly and repeatedly, just as he would approach the painting of a Judas blossom. But there was no pattern or rhyme to our being together. There were nights when he lay restless and went off to be alone, and nights when he tempted me from sleep with kisses on the cheek and climbed in, undressing me, only to steal away again before the daylight broke.
We lived this way for months, as intermittent partners, lovers, individuals. We were bonded in our isolation and invested in each other’s purpose. Occasionally, we quarrelled. We spent hours—full days sometimes—apart, in protest. And neither one of us could work without listening for the noises of the other, so came to recognise the creaks and thuds and hums of one another’s practice the way that a piano-tuner can discern a slackened string from corridors away. But we shared the few rooms of that tumbledown cottage as happily as any two people could. Our connection felt immutable.
Jim even helped me clear the junk from the back room, and we found a trove of objects that we could sell: Henry’s old fishing gear and tackle, a roll of boat upholstery fabric, a box of earthenware crockery, and five reels of soldering wire. It was agreed that Jim should take them to the weekend market in Balloch. ‘Henry would be telling us to flog the bleedin’ lot if it keeps us fed and watered,’ Jim said. ‘You should hang on to that cloth for painting, though. It’s proper marine canvas.’ He left that Saturday with everything loaded on his body like a pack-mule and came back with a crate of groceries, including flour and cooking chocolate. ‘For the celebration cake,’ he said, pecking my forehead.
I started thinking again about my mural, and tentatively trialled a new white pigment made from thistles Jim discarded; but these experiments came to nothing. Mostly, I worked on sketches of myself: the grimy cottage windows reflected my face strangely, ruffled and distorted it. I found this spectacle curious enough to occupy me. The drawings came out less like studies of myself than Pathé newsreel stills of strangers. And, through all of this, Jim remained committed to his Judas blossom paintings. They grew steadily more arresting. It was difficult to glean the meaning of them when each piece was seen in isolation, but soon the lounge grew cluttered with his boards—each scattering of pink blossoms different from the last, the colours in them shifting, layers deepening—and I could feel the strength of the work as a collection. I was proud to have made a contribution to it, however incidental.
But then, one morning, I got up to find Jim already gone. The coals were pallid in the hearth. A pot of tea was stewing on the kitchen table, still warm. Outside, a gauzy rain was teeming. I lit the fire and made a pan of porridge, knowing he would come home cold and hungry, and sat by the fireplace eating most of it until he returned. When he stepped in through the back door, he was drenched and broody. His basket was very short of pickings. He went straight into the bathroom to towel off, saying nothing. His quietness seemed very determined, so I asked him what was wrong. ‘Just counting all the things I’ve got to do today,’ he said. Then, later, when he went to light the stove under the kettle after lunch, h
e found the matchbox empty and it left him quietly incensed. For most of the day, I could hear him huffing and sighing from the back room, where I had begun inking some of my sketches (a mere gesture to convince him I was working). Around three, he called me into the lounge. ‘Ellie, get in here.’ His voice grew increasingly desperate. ‘Ellie—I need you!’ I expected to find him mullering another batch of pigment. In fact, he was over by the window with several of his paintings laid across the floor on bedsheets. His easel and his workbenches were pushed against the walls. He was stooping over the paintings with a camera, twisting at the aperture. ‘How the heck do you work the light gauge on this thing?’ he said. ‘I’ve got two rolls of film and I don’t want to waste them.’
‘Where’d you get that from?’ I asked.
He handed me the camera—shoved it at me. ‘It’s the same one I’ve always had. I’m not sure the light is good enough. Might have to wait until the morning.’
I peered through the viewfinder, focused the shot. The gauge was unresponsive. ‘I think it needs a new battery,’ I told him. ‘What’s your film speed?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘You’ve got it on 400.’
‘Sounds about right.’
‘Well, I can try to set the f-stop where I think it should be, but I’m no good without a light meter. I can’t promise it’ll be perfect.’
‘You might as well just do it,’ he said. ‘Set it up however you think’s best. I don’t know where I’d get a battery from round here, and I don’t want to waste time.’
‘What are the photos for, anyway?’ I asked.
‘Portability,’ he said.
In the viewfinder, his paintings were much less vivid. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘You don’t have to. Here—give it back. I can manage the rest.’
I had not even clicked the shutter yet. ‘It’s difficult to get the whole thing in the frame. You’ll need to stand up on a table.’ And then his meaning finally landed. ‘Are you taking these to show someone?’
The Ecliptic Page 27
