‘She’s not here any more, sorry.’ Her accent was pure Birmingham.
‘That’s okay; it was a long shot. I’m a friend of Marianne Glass – she and Emma used to share …’
The door opened several more inches. ‘I know,’ the woman said. ‘I love it that Marianne used to work here. She left some really good vibes – this is such a productive place. Look, I don’t know where Emma’s studio is these days – she had somewhere in Stepney, the last I heard – but she still works at the Speakeasy at weekends. Saturday night – you should catch her.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Just round the corner, three streets that way.’ She pointed to the main road and hooked her thumb left. ‘About halfway down. It’s not marked – hence the name – but you’ll see it. There’s a skinny window at eye height – if you look in, you’ll see the bar.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No problem. I’m so sorry about Marianne, by the way. I never met her but I really loved her work.’
The entrance to the Speakeasy was down a pungent alleyway at the side of the building. Going in, Rowan found a room lit entirely by candles with a long bar backed by glinting bottles. The tables were half barrels, the chairs all old and wooden with the chipped paint of which hipsters seemed so fond. At the nearest barrel, two men with beards and plaid shirts were drinking beer out of Mason jars.
It was still early, barely half-past six, but four tables were taken and there was a small group at the end of the bar. Rowan looked but couldn’t see Emma. The barman was wearing a beanie and a faded red T-shirt with a transfer that proclaimed the Flying Burrito Brothers. ‘Yeah, hold on,’ he said. While she waited, Rowan perused the drinks board, recognising none of the beers nor any of the extensive list of gins, all of whose names suggested they’d been made in someone’s bathtub.
She’d doubted Emma would remember her but as she emerged from the kitchen, it was clear that she did. Emma looked quite amazing, Rowan thought. She was wearing a red fifties-style halter-neck dress covered in polka dots and a pair of studded biker boots. Since Rowan had last seen her, she’d acquired large tattoos of a bannered heart, a topless woman and several feathers. A matching polka-dot ribbon tied her black hair into a high ponytail.
‘How are you?’ she said, leaning her hip against the bar. ‘I heard the news, obviously. Sorry.’
‘Thanks. We weren’t in touch any more, though.’
‘Really?’ Emma gestured to the barman who handed her a glass of what looked like lemonade. She took a sip through the straw, careful of her cherry lipstick. ‘What did she do to you?’
Rowan shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just one of those things.’
‘Well, you know you didn’t miss much.’ Emma took another sip. ‘But if it’s nothing to do with Marianne, then why – with respect – are you here?’ She raised plucked and pencilled eyebrows.
There was nothing to be gained from beating about the bush. ‘I wanted to ask you if there was any gossip doing the rounds,’ Rowan said.
‘Like what?’
‘Anything. You know everyone in the art world, I remembered, you’re so well connected. I thought that if anyone knew anything, it’d be you.’ Emma gave a cat-like tilt of the head, pleased. ‘Look,’ Rowan said, ‘Marianne was with James Greenwood, obviously, but I wondered if there was anyone else. If she was messing around.’
Another coquettish sip, Betty-Boop mouth closing on the straw. ‘If there was someone, I’d tell you, lovely, I promise, but as far as I’ve heard, there wasn’t.’ She reached across the bar and gave the glass back. ‘I wouldn’t have put anything past Marianne, though, would you? She just wound men round her little finger – personally, professionally, whatever. I used to watch her flirting with critics – no wonder she got such great reviews. Everyone’s saying she only got that show at Saul Hander because she sucked up to Michael Cory.’
‘Michael Cory? Really? I hadn’t heard that.’
‘Oh, yeah. He showed some photographs with Greenwood a year or so ago; that’s how she met him. Useful, having a top dealer as your boyfriend, isn’t it? Nice career move, Marianne. Alfie – that’s my boyfriend – he’s a photographer and he went to the private view and saw her batting her eyelashes, fawning all over him.’
‘He was there? Cory, I mean? In person?’
‘I know – I guess that’s Greenwood for you. Anyway, Cory’s repped by Hander in the States and she clearly wanted him to put in a good word. Lo and behold: one exhibition for Marianne Glass in New York City, baby. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?’
Ten
Rowan drove back from London with the sense of a day wasted. Even Emma’s bitchy remarks about the New York show were toothless: the Greenwood Gallery’s homepage mentioned an affiliation with Saul Hander, and Marianne had never needed to flirt to get ahead.
When she reached Fyfield Road, the house looked forbiddingly dark. She’d expected to be back from London before nightfall so she hadn’t left any lights on, and anyone could see the place was empty. On the motorway, she’d been trying to contain her anxiety: what if someone had broken in, turned the house upside down, stolen Marianne’s work? What would she say to Jacqueline? Now she swallowed the anxiety as best she could, unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the car.
As she unlocked the front door, her heart beat faster, and she reached round the jamb and turned on the ceiling light before stepping in. Everything in the hallway was just as she’d left it, however, and when – turning on lights as she went, ears primed – she took the stairs to the kitchen, the back door was still locked and secure, all in order.
Nevertheless, the thought of an intruder had set her on edge, and after checking the whole house and making sure lights showed at both the back and front, she took her laptop, locked up again and got back in the car.
In those days, they’d spent a lot of time in Jericho. The area was only five or six minutes’ drive away but where Park Town was serene and almost entirely residential, Jericho had pubs and restaurants and a distinct Bohemian vibe. The slope down to the canal was a maze of Victorian terraces built for workers at the old Eagle Ironworks, which had still been hammering away at the top of Walton Well Road when they were teenagers. It was gone now, converted into apartments, and the lovely yew-lined cemetery of St Sepulchre’s was overlooked by modern blocks with names like Foundry House. Some of the old landmarks stood their ground, however: the Phoenix Picture House, Freud’s, the Jericho Tavern, where Turk and the band had played several times, and this place, the Jericho Café, where they’d met on Sundays to read the papers.
Very little had changed here, even the red velvet curtain round the door looked familiar, and they still had Marianne’s favourite carrot cake by the slice. Rowan ordered then took their old preferred table near the window.
In the car, she’d been thinking about Michael Cory. She’d encountered enough celebrities in her time at the BBC not to be star-struck but she was impressed – even a little jealous – that Marianne had met him. Despite keeping a Salinger-style low profile, he was still one of the handful of contemporary artists whose name was public currency. While Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin had been front-page news since the start of their careers, however, Cory’s fame had been triggered by a particular incident.
Taking out her laptop, she entered the café’s Internet password – the WiFi was new – and typed his name into Google. Even now, years later, Hanna Ferrara’s name appeared in every one of the top hits.
Cory was a painter. His work wasn’t sensational in the pickled-shark sense: he worked alone with paint on canvas; there were no piles of elephant dung or giant cartoon figures cast by teams of assistants. If he was unknown to the general public before Ferrara, in art circles he’d been acknowledged as a big talent, both for his technical ability and psychological depth.
Somewhere, Hanna Ferrara had heard him described as America’s Lucian Freud and she’d decided he would paint her portrait. Rowan remembered reading at the time that Cory had alwa
ys been adamant about turning down commissions, insisting he chose his own subjects, but Ferrara wouldn’t have it. She was the star of The Woman Who Had Everything, one of the first comedies with a female lead to gross more than $300 million at the box-office, and people didn’t say no to her: every time Cory turned her down, she became more determined, as if he were merely testing her commitment. She’d hassled and hassled, apparently, both in person and via her representatives, until, losing patience, Cory said he would paint her for three million dollars, a fee he’d never thought she’d pay. She’d agreed.
As the papers reported, he’d also insisted she agree to his usual terms: they’d work in his studio, and he would have total control over the picture, which no one, not even she, would be allowed to see until it was finished. Also as usual, he would show the work publicly before it became part of her private collection. Ferrara had agreed and blocked out time in her schedule for the sittings.
Eight months later, when she’d flown to New York to see it, she’d had a panic attack in the gallery. People who knew her said Cory had got her in a way none of her photographs did. He hadn’t shown her as a vampy sex object or the approachable if stunning girl-next-door she occasionally impersonated, or even as an ordinary person stripped of Hollywood glamour. Instead, in her face, he had captured a mix of hunger, drive and desperate need. But that wasn’t why she’d been taken to hospital. She’d been dressed for the sittings but Cory had painted her naked. Full-length, the portrait showed her standing in front of a mirror. Between her painfully skinny thighs dangled a long penis. He’d called the painting The Woman Who Has Everything.
Ferrara’s nervous breakdown had stopped her working until two years later when she’d had a supporting role in a film panned in every review Rowan had seen.
Cory’s behaviour had been discussed ad infinitum. Most people thought it was a cruel publicity stunt but many in the art world supported him. He was a serious artist, they said, too serious to jeopardise his reputation like that, and the picture was an outstanding depiction of a woman in acute psychological pain, dealing with body image, female ambition and the struggle of women to succeed in a sexist world. Months later, the Daily Mail discovered he’d secretly donated three million dollars to a foundation for young women with mental illness.
Cory himself said nothing. He’d been there when Ferrara first saw the painting – she’d lunged at him and scratched his face so badly he’d needed stitches – but a minute later, he’d slipped away through the gallery’s back door. By the time journalists had got to his apartment, he’d gone from there, too. He hadn’t answered his phone or been seen in public for a long time afterwards and he still refused to give interviews or attend events, even his own private views. If he really had been at the Greenwood, it was remarkable.
Rowan opened Google Images and typed his name again. The first twenty or thirty thumbnails showed either Ferrara or the portrait, and she had to scroll beyond the bottom of the screen before she saw a picture of Cory himself.
She double-clicked.
It was a pap shot. He’d been coming out of what looked like a New York deli, the collar of a long dark coat up around his ears, a dusty black fedora pulled down on his forehead. Between his fingers was a packet of cigarettes. As he’d turned to look at the photographer – hearing his name called, she guessed – his expression was both startled and furious, his eyes wide, mouth half-open.
Rowan experienced a jolt of realization: she’d seen him herself, in the flesh. The man at the funeral who’d caught her eye in the mirror and looked at her so frankly had been Michael Cory.
Immediately her mind flooded with questions: how well had he and Marianne known each other? Were they friends? Why hadn’t she, Rowan, recognised him?
Movement at the corner of her eye: the waitress with her omelette. Distracted, Rowan thanked her and shifted the laptop to make room.
‘Can I bring you anything else? Ketchup?’
‘Sorry? Oh – no. Thanks.’
To have come to the funeral, Cory must surely have been more than an acquaintance. Opening another window, she searched for the show of his photographs at the gallery when, if Emma’s testimony was reliable, Marianne had talked to him. October 2013: fifteen months ago.
It was understandable, at least, Rowan thought if she hadn’t recognised him at the funeral: in every one of the scant recent photos, his face was partially hidden. He wore a hat in most, and in the few older ones where he didn’t, he’d had a lot more hair. She went back to the deli picture. Under the coat he wore a wrinkled denim shirt with a conspicuous coffee stain, and one leg of his jeans was caught in the top of his boot, but even dishevelled and caught off guard, he projected the physical confidence she’d felt, the aura of someone with no doubt about his value and position in the world.
Clicking back to the gallery’s website, she read the short bio. Forty-six, born and brought up in Chicago, he’d done his degree at the California Institute of the Arts and then moved to New York. A list of prestigious museums and awards, and then finally: Cory has lived in London since last year.
Wikipedia told her that his father owned a company importing Turkish carpets and his mother had been a good amateur water colourist. He had twin sons, now nine or ten, from a brief marriage to a folk singer called Jessa McKenzie but there were no details of his current personal life.
What if he and Marianne had been having an affair? What if she loved him and he’d ended it? Or maybe Greenwood had found out. Elbows on the table, Rowan pressed her fingers to her lips.
At a light touch on her shoulder, she jumped. ‘Sorry.’ The waitress again, smiling. ‘I just wanted to say: we close at ten so …’ She looked at the untouched omelette.
‘Okay. Thanks.’ The clock at the top of the screen said 21.44. Rowan picked up her fork then opened a new window and searched for ‘Michael Cory profile’. 218,000 results.
Into the silence of the kitchen at Fyfield Road, the bells of St Giles struck midnight, every note coming crisp through the freezing air. Eight, nine, ten. Marianne loved bells, they gave her a sense of continuity and order, she said, history, but Rowan could never hear the tolling of the hour without thinking about mortality, the counting off of time. Another hour gone, another day. Eleven, twelve. The stroke lingered then died. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids and resisted the urge to rub.
The next link took her to a New York Times piece from 2009, when Cory had had a new show at Saul Hander. The article was long, likely a full page in the paper, but in contrast with the ten or twelve she’d already read, it handled the Hanna Ferrara business only briefly. It focused instead on the new work, a series of portraits of his mother that Cory had made in the five years before her death of cancer in 2008.
The journalist, Jonathan Schwarz, wrote about the visible evolution and deepening of the artist’s relationship with his subject, the delicate picking-apart and examination of a tangle of love and bitterness, gratitude and anger, resentment and painful tenderness. Cory did not flinch, he said, from showing his horror and disgust at his mother’s failing body even while he acknowledged his debt to it. He referenced a painting in which he had depicted his mother covered by a white sheet that had barely covered her greying pubic hair, the twin focal points of the work a livid scar on her stomach from the removal of a large portion of her bowel and the faded white line of the C-section by which Cory himself had been born. In another painting, this one shown, he’d represented her cancer as an incubus crouching on her skeletal chest like the hideous figure in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare.
No one, of course, could ask Rebecca Cory how she felt about her son’s work but then it was nearly impossible, Schwarz said, to find anyone he’d painted who was prepared to talk. Whether this was another of his conditions or their own choice was unclear. Despite weeks of research, Schwarz wrote, he’d been on the point of conceding defeat when, almost by chance, he’d managed to make contact with Margaret Robinson, the pianist who had been Cory’s upstairs n
eighbour in the East Village when he first moved to New York at twenty-four. She’d been in her late-forties at the time, almost fifty, but they’d become lovers the night they met and Cory had painted her over and over again during the three years they’d been together.
Despite his relative youth, she said, it had been one of the most intense experiences of her life. ‘He wanted to know me,’ she said, ‘really know me, as if there was something inside me – an essence, a truth – that he could pull out, wind out of my chest like a silk thread. Or maybe it was the other way about and what he wanted was to go deeper and deeper, follow the thread into my psyche like Theseus in the labyrinth. I’m a New Yorker, I saw a shrink for years, but being analysed was nothing compared to sitting for Michael. I’ve never felt like that before – laid bare, exposed, but seen. Witnessed.’
Schwarz had also tried to contact Greta Mulraine, an old girlfriend and the subject of the six nudes Cory had painted at CalArts that attracted his first gallerist. In trying to track her down, however, he’d hit one brick wall after another: barring references to the portraits, she was invisible online and when he tried to contact her parents, he found they’d left Oregon for their native Australia. His efforts to locate them there had come to nothing. It was only when he left a Facebook message for one of Cory’s old CalArts classmates that he’d discovered what happened. Six months after he’d painted her for the final time, Greta Mulraine had committed suicide.
Eleven
Outside the window, a winter landscape raced past. The fields resembled muddy corduroy, and horses stood disconsolate in paddocks drab with thistles. On the river at Reading, the little pleasure boats huddled under tarpaulin.
Despite the frost glittering at the track edge, the train was hot. It was mid-morning, she’d waited until after the rush, and the seat next to her had been empty all the way from Oxford. Rowan closed her eyes and let her head drop back against the bristly plush upholstery, the heat hitting her like a sleeping pill.
On Saturday night, she’d shut her laptop shortly after one but had lain awake again, brain humming. When St Giles struck three, she’d thrown off the covers, taken Marianne’s dressing gown from the bathroom and gone upstairs. Marianne was everywhere in the house – every room, every picture and piece of furniture triggered a memory – but the studio was where she felt closest.
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