He’d taken them off the wall and carted them proudly to show her on the first night of class. No matter that it was life drawing she was teaching, he wanted her to know from the very start that he was a cut above all the rest, raw talent just waiting for someone to mould him into the next Manet.
She’d surprised him from the fi rst. Perched on a stool in the corner of her studio, she began by offering no instruction at all. Instead, she talked. She hooked her feet round the rungs of the stool, put her elbows on her thoroughly paint-spattered knees, cupped her face in her hands so that her hair spilled through her fi ngers, and talked. At her side stood an easel holding an unfinished canvas, depicting a man sheltering a tousle-haired little girl. She never pointed to it as she spoke. It was clear that she expected they would make the connection.
“You’re not here to learn how to put paint on canvas,” she had said to the group. There were six of them: three elderly women in smocks and brogues, the wife of an American serviceman with time on her hands, a twelveyear- old Greek girl whose father was spending a year as a guest lecturer at the University, and himself. He knew at once that he was the serious student among them. She seemed to be speaking directly to him.
“Any fool can make splatters and call it art,” she had said. “That’s not what this course is all about. You’re here to put part of yourself on canvas, to reveal who you are through your composition, your choice of colour, your sense of balance. The struggle is to know what’s been done before and to push beyond it. The job is to select an image but to paint a concept. I can give you techniques and methods, but whatever you produce ultimately has to come from your self if you want to call it art. And-” She smiled. It was an odd, bright smile, completely without self- conscious affectation. She couldn’t have known that it wrinkled her nose in an unattractive fashion. But if she did know, she probably didn’t care. Externals did not seem to have much importance to her. “-if you have no real self, or if you have no way of discovering it, or if for some reason you’re afraid to find out who and what it is, then you’ll still manage to create something on canvas with your paints. It’ll be pleasant to look at and a pleasure to you. But it’ll be technique. It won’t necessarily be art. The purpose-our purpose-is to communicate through a medium. But in order to do that, you must have something to say.”
Subtlety is the key, she had told them. A painting is a whisper. It isn’t a shout.
At the end of it all, he’d felt ashamed of his arrogance in having brought his watercolours to show her, so confident of their having merit. He resolved to slink unobtrusively out of the studio with them safely tucked, in their protective-and suitable-brown wrapping paper, under his arm. But he wasn’t quick enough. As the others filed out, she said, “I see you’ve brought some of your work to show me, Dr. Weaver,” and she came to his worktable and waited while he unwrapped them, feeling as he hadn’t felt in years, in a welter of nerves and completely outclassed.
She’d gazed on them thoughtfully. “Apricots and…?”
He felt his face grow hot. “Oriental poppies.”
“Ah,” she said. And then quite briskly, “Yes. Very nice.”
“Nice. But not art.”
She turned her gaze to him. It was friendly and frank. He found it disconcerting to be engaged so directly by a woman’s eyes. “Don’t misunderstand me, Dr. Weaver. These are lovely watercolours. And lovely watercolours have a place.”
“But would you hang them on your wall?”
“I…?” Her gaze flickered under his, then held quite firmly. “I tend to like a painting that challenges just a bit more. It’s a matter of taste.”
“And these don’t challenge?”
She studied the watercolours once more. She perched on the work-table and held the paintings on her knees, first one then the other. She pressed her lips together. She blew out her cheeks.
“I can take it, you know,” he said with a chuckle that he realised was far more anxious than amused. “You can give it to me straight.”
She took him at his word. “All right,” she said. “You can certainly copy. Here’s the evidence of that. But can you create?”
It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it might. “Try me,” he said.
She smiled. “A pleasure.”
He’d thrown himself into it for the next two years, fi rst as a member of one class or another which she offered the community, then later on as a private student, alone with her. In winter they used a live model in the studio. In summer they took easels, sketch pads, and paints out into the country and worked off the land. Often they sketched each other as an exercise in understanding the human anatomy-the sternocleidomastoid muscles, Tony, she would say and put her fingertips to her neck, try to think of them like cords right beneath the skin. And always she filled the environment with music. Listen to me, if you stimulate one sense, you stimulate others, she explained, art can’t be created if the artist himself is an insensate void. See the music, hear it, feel it, feel the art. And the music would start-a haunting array of Celtic folktunes, a Beethoven symphony, a
In the presence of her intensity and dedication, he’d begun to feel as if he’d emerged from forty-three years of darkness to fi nd himself walking in sunlight at last. He felt completely renewed. He felt his interest engaged and his intellect challenged. He felt emotions spring to life. And for six straight months before she became his lover, he called it all the pursuit of his art. There was, after all, a certain safety in that. It did not beg an answer for the future.
Sarah, he thought, and he marvelled at the fact that even now-after everything, even after Elena-he could still wish to murmur the name that he hadn’t allowed himself to say for the past eight months since Justine had accused and he had confessed.
They’d pulled up to the old school on a Thursday evening, just at the time he’d usually arrived. The lights were on and a fire was burn-ing-he could see its shifting glow through the drawn front curtains-and he knew that Sarah was expecting him and that music would be playing and a dozen or more sketches would be strewn among the pillows on the fl oor. And that she would come to meet him when the doorbell rang, that she would run to meet him, throw open the door, and draw him inside saying Tonio I’ve had the most marvellous idea about how to compose that picture of the woman in Soho, you know the one that’s been making me wild for a week…
I can’t do this, he said to Justine. Don’t ask me to do this. It’s going to destroy her.
I don’t much care what it’s going to do to her, Justine replied and got out of the car.
She must have been passing the door when they rang the bell, because she answered it just as the dog began to bark. She called over her shoulder, Flame, stop it it’s Tony you know Tony you silly thing. And then she turned back to the door, to the sight of them both- he in the foreground and his wife in the background and the portrait wrapped in brown paper and held under his arm.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even move. She merely looked beyond him to where his wife stood, and her face summed up the count of his sin. Betrayal works in two directions, Tonio, she’d said in the past. And he understood that clearly when she dropped into place that insubstantial patina of breeding and civility that she actually believed was going to protect her.
Tony, she said.
Anthony, Justine said.
They walked into the house. Flame trotted out of the sitting room with an old knotted sock between his teeth and he barked through it happily at the sight of a friend. Silk looked up from a doze by the fire and undulated his long serpent tail in lazy greeting.
Now, Anthony, Justine said.
He lacked the will: to do it, to refuse, even to speak.
He saw Sarah look at the painting. She said, What have you brought me, Tonio, as if Justine were not standing at his side.
There was an easel in the sitting room and he unwrapped the painting and set it there. He expected her to fly to it when she saw the great smears of red, white, and black that obscured the smiling faces of his daughter. But instead she simply approached it slowly, and she gave a low cry when she saw what she had to have known she would see on the bottom of the frame. The little brass plaque. The scrolled
He heard Justine move. He heard her say his name, and he felt her press the knife into his hand. It was a sturdy vegetable knife. She’d taken it from the drawer in the kitchen of their house. She’d said get it out of my life, get her out of my life, you’ll do it tonight and I’ll be there to make sure.
He made the first cut in a blaze that mixed both anger and despair. He heard Sarah cry
