by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie
The sea was a swathe of petrel blue, the paint laid on joyously, haphazardly, not caring what it looked like.
You could stare at this mess – this joyous mess – for some minutes and see nothing but that. Then click! Your perception shifted and the church and the little houses were all in place again.
Like magic, Christine thought. As if the Norman windows and the miniature village existed only for her.
The artist’s name, Jeff Turner, was stuck up beside the painting on a little white card. A short paragraph of typed text informed anyone who wanted to know that Jeff Turner had trained in Glasgow but had fallen in love with the softer, more pearlescent light of the North Cornish coast. He had arrived there in ‘87 and never left. Christine wondered if his name was a burden to him, if he was ever teased about this, then thought no, it was the right name, he was a good enough painter to carry it off. Not a genius like the real J. Turner perhaps, but the truth was that she liked Jeff Turner’s painting better.
She had seen the real Turners at Tate Britain, and they were beautiful, she supposed, you wouldn’t dare suggest otherwise. But they reminded her of the rooms in stately homes that were made up to look lived-in but in reality were museum exhibits. No one sat in them now, or came through in the afternoon to play the piano. They belonged to everyone and no one. They were dead.
Whereas Jeff Turner’s painting was speaking to her right now. If she wanted to she could buy it and take it home.
Trevor had wandered away from the paintings to look out of the window. He was getting restless, Christine knew, because the tide was on the turn.
“I think we’ve seen enough here, don’t you?” he said, turning towards her. “This stuff’s all a bit overpriced if you ask me.”
“Okay,” Christine said. With Trevor it was always easiest just to agree. She wished he would leave her where she was and go down to the beach. She could explore the town by herself then, and join him later. It was a small place; they were hardly going to lose track of each other. But she knew from past experience that Trevor did not like them to be separated. If she suggested they do their own thing for a bit he would insist on staying with her until she was ready, growing more impatient with each passing moment but pretending nonchalance, believing he was giving her what she wanted.
Her pleasure in Turner’s painting would be ruined. She moved towards the door, stumbling over the step as she cast one hurried glance backward at ‘The Barricade.’
“I liked that painting of the church,” she said to Trevor once they were outside. “Did you see it?” She thought about linking her arm through his, at making some small effort at intimacy. She touched his elbow instead, as a compromise. He glanced sideways at her, raising his eyebrows.
“They all seemed much of a muchness to me,” he said. “Derivative.”
Derivate of what? she longed to ask. Imagining his discomfiture if she had done so was almost as satisfying as voicing the question aloud. Trevor didn’t care about art. He selected his opinions with care from the Sunday papers. She released his elbow and moved slightly ahead of him, trying to imagine how it might feel if they were no longer married. The heady rush of adrenalin caught her off guard.
She knew that in her way she did still love him. She loved his unworldliness, his delight in detail, the fact that he was an acknowledged world expert on the Common Dog Whelk. It was the dog whelks that brought him to life. When he was down exploring the strand line Trevor seemed almost a different person. His attention became steely-focussed, like a gold prospector’s or a big game hunter’s. The fussy turn of mind, the part of him that liked to store his woollens in plastic wrappers during the summer and insisted on table napkins even when they were just having bread and soup for lunch, seemed to vanish then entirely.
The first time she saw him, the Atlantic wind whipping his hair back as he gazed across the sand at Aberystwyth, she had imbued him with those qualities of the intrepid she had been looking for without even knowing it. Perhaps she had not been entirely wrong, perhaps Trevor even possessed some of those qualities. But whatever the truth of the matter it was the table napkins and the neatly bagged jumpers she noticed more now, rather than the bashful charm and sense of adventure that had initially captured her attention and then her heart.
Quite suddenly she found herself wondering what Jeff Turner looked like. A picture formed in her mind, an image of a tall man with jutting elbows and unkempt hair. She knew her idea of him was probably romanticised. The real Jeff Turner was just as likely to be old and bent and crazy, or pedantic and bespectacled, like Trevor.
It was never a good idea to get the worker muddled up with his work. If you did you ended up disappointed. If she’d learned anything in the course of her marriage it was that.
They made their way to the edge of the town, following the esplanade as far as it went then turning on to the strip of greying asphalt that eventually became the coast path. Narrow tracks ran off at right angles from the broken hardcore, dusty runnels that led directly on to the beach. The tide was out, the sea a grey-blue smudge at the horizon. Christine had an eyeliner pencil of a more or less identical shade, though it had been a long time since she had used it, or any other. Trevor didn’t care for make-up; he thought it was tarty.
She watched him as he stepped off the path, his plimsolls making shallow grooved impressions in the damp sand. She knew that now he was in sight of his goal he had more or less forgotten she was there.
He’s like a man on the moon, Christine thought. One small step for man, one giant leap for Trevor Bailey. He picked his way carefully across the seaweed-strewn rocks. He didn’t like to mark his clothes, not if he could avoid it, and Christine could not help finding something ridiculous in his fastidiousness. Jeff Turner, she felt certain, would enter his studio dressed in filthy jeans and an open-necked, paint-spattered shirt.
She thought about the painting in the white-walled gallery, the way it seemed to hide itself, the church and the tiny houses sliding into invisibility even as you looked at them. She knew exactly where she would hang it: the window alcove in the small back bedroom Trevor’s parents slept in when they came to stay but that was really Christine’s sewing room. She had a small fold-down table in there, and the built-in wardrobe had been fitted with shelves to hold her various fabrics and embroidery silks. Trevor had paid to have the shelves put in. That was the only interest he had ever taken in her sewing.
Jeff Turner’s painting would glow quietly in its alcove, like the doorway to another world. The image was so clear in her mind she could almost convince herself that ‘The Barricade’ was already hers.
“Trevor,” she called. “I’m going to buy some postcards. I’ll be back in about half an hour, okay?”
“Right,” Trevor said. He was bent over a rock pool, the jagged chunks of granite jutting out of the sand like the scattered, half-buried remains of some lost civilization. Trevor moved from one to the next, turning over stones and gently moving aside clumps of seaweed like an investigating forensic scientist at the scene of a crime. No trace of separation anxiety now, Christine thought. She knew she could be gone for an hour, perhaps several, and that Trevor would not even notice.
If he did he could always call her. Trevor had been the one who insisted on her getting a mobile. If it had been up to her she would not have bothered. What was a mobile phone after all but an electronic tagging device under an assumed name?
For a moment she imagined a future Trevor, a man in cream-coloured chinos clambering across these same rocks a thousand years from now and uncovering the corroded body of her discarded 3G Nokia. The idea made her shudder. It brought home the fact that nothing lasted, not even the seeming endlessness of her marriage to Trevor.
She found the gallery again quite easily. She went inside, hoping it would be empty as it had been when she and Trevor first arrived there. She was disconcerted to find three or four men standing around with mugs of coffee and chatting to the woman behind the desk. Gallerina, Christine t
hought. That’s what they call them these days. It was a ridiculous word, like WAG or newbie, words that Trevor refused to acknowledge even existed.
Perhaps she had gatecrashed the woman’s lunch break. Christine started wishing she hadn’t come.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “If you’re closed I can call back later.”
“We’re not closed,” said the gallerina. “Weren’t you here earlier?” She was Christine’s age at least and a bit raddled-looking. As a gallerina you could get away with a bit of beraddlement, Christine supposed. It made you look as if you led an interesting life. If you worked on the checkout at Sainsbury’s though, the same drooping eyelids and smoker’s pout were more likely to make people think you were heading down the slope to death from lung cancer or liver disease.
“I was,” Christine said. She could feel herself blushing. “I wanted to have another look at one of the paintings.”
“A customer,” said one of the coffee drinkers. “I thought you turned them all to stone, Evelyn, with your basilisk stare.” He was a skinny lad, almost skeletal in fact. His black LadyBoys T-shirt was torn in several places. Evelyn, she supposed, was the gallerina. Christine’s cheeks felt tight and hot, as if she were sunburned.
Two of the other coffee drinkers began to laugh.
“Shut up, Tony,” said Evelyn. She turned to look at Christine, and Christine saw that beneath the drooping lids her eyes were in fact a bit peculiar: yellowish green and slightly protuberant, with the glassy quality of polished beach pebbles. “Which of the paintings were you interested in?”
“The one called ‘The Barricade,” Christine said. “The artist’s name was Turner, I think.”
The two men who had been laughing before started laughing again, and the skinny one, the one called Tony, slapped the third man on the back.
“Jeffrey,” said Tony. “You never told me you had fans.”
Evelyn ignored him. “You’re in luck today then, madam,” she said to Christine. “This gentleman here is Jeff Turner. I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you about his work.”
She waved a hand towards the man Tony had slapped on the back. He was not at all as he had been in Christine’s imagination. A small man, shorter than Trevor definitely. His hands were wrinkled and rough-looking. In his checked cotton shirt and yellow baseball cap he looked more like a builder than a painter.
There was an awkward silence. Christine wondered why she had ever thought she could perform an act as complicated and pretentious as stepping into an art gallery to buy a painting. She should have known it would all go wrong. The only good thing was that Trevor was not here to see her make a fool of herself.
Jeff Turner took off his yellow cap. He held it between his hands and tugged at the cloth. He looked as uncomfortable with the situation as Christine felt.
She also felt sorry for him, and angry with Evelyn and LadyBoy Tony for embarrassing him in this way. She found her anger made it possible for her to finally say something.
“Hello,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Turner took a shuffling step towards her and held out his hand. As Christine reached forward to take it, the door to the gallery swung open and four large adults wearing identical Pirates of Penzance T-shirts piled in off the street. They spoke loudly together in American accents.
Oh, isn’t this place just darling? crooned one of the women. She was buxom as Dolly Parton, and with an identical bouncing mane of peroxide curls.
Christine smiled at Jeff Turner and Jeff Turner smiled back. Tony and the other men had started talking amongst themselves. Evelyn was busy fussing over the Americans.
For the moment at least they were alone.
“I’m glad you liked the painting,” Turner said. “Will you tell me what you liked about it?”
He had a Scottish accent, the words softly nuanced, not at all like the harsh Glaswegian she remembered from the trip to Saltcoats she had once made with Trevor.
“The colours,” she said. She was afraid of sounding stupid, of saying something that might reveal her ignorance, but Jeff Turner’s presence was quietly calming and she had the sense that even if she did make a mistake he would not make a thing of it. “I like the way the houses are sometimes houses and sometimes white squares. I like the title, too.” She paused. “It makes you look at the painting differently. Thinking of the harbour wall as a barricade, I mean. As if it was the only thing saving the town from inundation.” She clasped her hands tightly together across her stomach. “It makes me think of a war.”
She wondered why she had used the word inundation, what had made her think of it. Not an uncommon word exactly, but you didn’t often hear it in everyday speech.
She said the word silently again to herself; it rolled across the roof of her mouth like an incoming wave. They had moved to stand in front of the painting. Christine had been afraid that seeing it again would make her think less of it, but if anything the opposite was true. She felt now as if she had a stake in the painting. She knew she would not be able to leave it behind.
She wondered how she was going to be able to keep her purchase secret from Trevor. Her heart sank.
“It is a war,” Turner said. He was looking at her strangely, as if she presented a riddle that needed unravelling. “Do you mind my asking where you come from?”
“Not far from here, actually. I was born out near Gwithian, in a room above a pub called the Harbour Arms. I don’t remember it though, or only from visits. My mother moved us away to Reading when I was six months old.” She raised her eyes briefly to his. “Why would you want to know that?”
“Just curious, you know. I was wondering if you might have selkie blood.”
Christine laughed, not from the belly as LadyBoy Tony had done but quietly and with a hint of nervousness. “But the selkies aren’t real. They’re just a legend.” Though when she looked into Turner’s eyes there was a stillness that said he wasn’t joking, a stillness that caused her to add, “Aren’t they?”
The selkies were sea people, what the children’s fairy tales usually referred to as mermaids. She knew of the selkies from her Cornish grandmother, and from the church at Zennor, where a carving on one of the pews told the story of the mermaid who had stolen away the fiancé of the coachman’s daughter. There had been many sightings of selkies down the centuries, but everyone knew that these were cases of mistaken identity. Some of the larger sea mammals – seals, dugongs, manatees – could easily be mistaken for people swimming, especially from a distance.
None of the stories were true, though. Her grandmother said that all the old myths and legends had a reason behind them, and that most selkie tales had been invented by fishermen as a way of explaining what happened to ships that disappeared or went astray.
But just because things had a reason didn’t make them so.
“Every coastal community in the world has its selkie tales,” Turner said. “The names change, but the stories are mostly the same, or very similar. The Earth’s surface is nearly four-fifths water, did you know that?”
“Yes,” Christine said. “I did, actually.”
“It makes you think. About all the parts of our planet we’ve never seen. If nobody’s ever been there, how can we know for sure what’s real and what isn’t?”
“I suppose.” She didn’t know if Turner was being serious, or poking gentle fun at her. She found she didn’t care much either way. What he said was weird, certainly, but there was an internal logic to it also, something she found oddly compelling. She liked the idea that people didn’t have all the answers. She remembered a documentary she had watched with Trevor in which the ocean had been referred to as the last great unknown. Trevor himself was always going on about how there were probably thousands of marine gastropods still unknown to science.
If dog whelks why not sea dogs, or even selkies?
“They wouldn’t like it, you know. What we’re doing to the sea. All our deep-sea fishing and drilling for oil and nuclear submarines. The
y’d hate us for that, in the end. They’d want to get their own back. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt that. You understand the sea, I can tell.”
Turner spoke so quietly that Christine found herself wondering if his words were really imaginings inside her own head. She felt herself jump, although she couldn’t have said precisely what had startled her. She could hear one of the American women asking if Evelyn had one of the paintings in a larger size.
“I’m sorry,” Christine said. “I didn’t quite catch what you said.”
“I said I’d like to offer you the painting at a discount if you still want it,” Turner said. “I can’t give it to you – that would be cheating Evelyn and Michael out of their commission – but I can name a new price.” He did so, and the amount was so much lower than what was written on the white card that Christine was worried she had misheard him. Two minutes later she was watching Evelyn the gallerina wrap ‘The Barricade’ in several large sheets of tissue paper and bubblewrap.
“Can I pay extra and have it sent to my home?” Christine asked. Her heartbeat quickened in excitement at this sudden brainwave. Trevor always left for work at around eight-thirty, and no post was ever delivered before eleven. She could hide the painting in her sewing cupboard for a couple of weeks. For a couple of months if that felt safer. Trevor never looked in her sewing cupboard; there was no reason to.
Eventually she could hang the picture in the alcove, exactly as she had imagined. Trevor would probably think it had always been there. If he even noticed, that was.
She paid by Visa. She didn’t mind that the four Americans were standing round, nodding and smiling as if the transaction had been put on for their entertainment. She said one more thank you to Evelyn then looked around for Turner to thank him also.
There was no sign of the artist, and Christine decided he had taken advantage of all the excitement to make his escape. She didn’t mind, and in a way she was glad. Artists are like that, she thought. They need to be alone. She glanced down at her watch, anxious suddenly about the time. The thought of Trevor coming to look for her shot steely darts of panic into her chest.
