Come Not When I Am Dead (3 page)

I am supposed to be painting a
portrait of a horse, but I need to be concentrating.
 
I need to be ‘in the moment’.
 
I sit down in my studio, pick up my
favourite brush to start the sad and doleful eye of the horse, put down my
brush, look out of
 
the window and
go into a daze staring at the caterpillars on the nettle leaves.
 
Feeling the dust in here.
  
It’s no good, I know what will
happen otherwise, I’ll make a mess of it and end up throwing it in the
rayburn.
 
There is a wet patch and
mould where the roof has been leaking somewhere, probably for a while ignored
by me and I must get uncle George to come and have a look at it.
 
“Oh fuck,” I get a box of cigars out of
my pocket, put them on the table, tantalising close to my paper and then pick
up my brush again, rest my head against my left hand, feel cosy and start
painting.
 

Someone was recently telling me how
stupid he thought hawks were, “if you put a chick on the ground just out of
their reach” he said “when they’re on the perch, they’ll bate and bate at it
all day.
 
But if you cover the chick
up, it suddenly isn’t there and they forget it.”
 
I put a piece of paper over my cigars
and I’m not temped any more.
 
I am
impressing calm on myself and it makes me laugh.
 
I am very lucky, I know I am.
 
I can do lots of things, and lots of
things very well and I can take my choice of all the things that I like to
do.
 
And I don’t mean to boast, but
I think everyone should be aware of what they’re good or bad at.
 
And for ever I’ve dipped in and out of
various things, but I’ve always painted and I suppose that’s what I do most of
all, I suppose that I am an artist.
 
And I don’t like labels or titles, I don’t like to say ‘artist’ because
to me it conjures up greater than great excellence, but then I am a far better
artist than a great many people who go under that label and people do need a
tag to understand.
 
And people
generally don’t like to think that you can do more than one thing, so I’ll just
say one thing to one person and all my other alter egos I hide under, certainly
not a bushel, but I keep to myself.

When I was little grandma had an El
Greco painting in the snuggery.
 
I
could see shapes in the clouds.
 
I
saw a gangster car, with three gangsters in it, with gangster hats, at a tilt,
sitting tight, and the rounded bonnet of the heavy black car.
 
I made up a story, they had just done a
killing and I knew their faces, their voices, their stories.
 
And one day, when I was standing there for
ever, staring at it, grandma’s friend Catherine came in and watched me.
 
“Do you like that painting Gussie?”
“yes, very much”
“what do you like about it?”
“I like the clouds”
“do you think you could paint like that?” they all loved it that I would paint
all day, big pictures of cats on tall thin white paper “well, not really, I
don’t have paint brushes that thin” and
 
I was very serious and that story was told again and again, with
millions of others, my life with adults.
 
But I can’t remember it myself and I feel just a little bit lost.
 
I paint in watercolours, the paints have
a life of their own.
 
I wet the
paper, and let it dry just a little so it is like blotting paper and then I
touch it gently with a fine brush and that tiny sepia speck becomes something
animate and it’s shape interests me and makes me put more down.
 
I don’t like confines, I don’t like
sharp lines, I don’t like barriers, I don’t like control.
 
But I love freedom and lack of
restraint, I love things that aren’t meant to be.
 
There is no such thing as a mistake and
there is no such thing as failure.
 
“Politicians are bad,” says a friend of mine, but not quite so simply
“they are, but we need them” I say
“a state of anarchy would be perfect I think” or some such thing he said, but
once again not so simply
“a state of anarchy would be a dreadful thing and we would have misrule and
oppression and the nasty, greedy, violent people would take over and it would
be feudal and unfair.
 
We need
politicians, we need police”
“do you really think that would happen?”
“yes, people are horrible”
“you’re right” he said “people are horrible.”
 
And they are, pretty much, people have
objectives and agendas, and are out for themselves.
 
A little bit, or a lot.
 
I don’t really have that much to do with
anyone.
 
My world is pretty much
quiet and silent.
 
I listen to the
silence now and I hear my breathing, it is calm and it calms me.
 
I paint and I sit and stare, I feel in
my pockets for any left over sweets and there are none, but plenty of sour
sugar which I lick off my finger, there are bits of grass there too. I think
that tonight I won’t be tired, I just feel I’m not doing enough today, I feel a
bit in a daze, this evening I will make a plan for tomorrow and exhaust myself.
 
I leave my studio and go back to
the house, to the kitchen.
 
I make
myself a late lunch of German salami, French pate and English pick and mix, I
finish it off with some health, some blackcurrants picked from the bushes by
the tortoise pen, and my day creeps by, surreptitiously.
 

And then at 4pm the front door heaves
open bringing with it a furious little breeze that rings the chimes.
 
I know someone is in my house.
 
“Hellooo, Aunty Gussie, hellooo, it’s
me”
 
and I run down the stairs as he
shouts ‘coooeeee’ like grandma always did.
 
It is my nephew Joseph’s voice breaking the silence of the house, but I
see that he’s not on his own and instantly my right hand goes up to puff my
hair up and away, and I back-kick my heavy leather clogs up the stairs and slow
down into ‘find out’ mode, there is a strange rabbit in the burrow and the air
is heavy with him.
 
I am still
silent and don’t want to destroy my own serenity by speaking, but words come,
and they sound funny, my first words of the day to someone in real life make me
realise how tired I am.
 
“Hello
kitten” Joseph says, hugging me “this is Martin” and the man is standing there
pillar-like.
 
I am all eyes, all
scent and no voice.
 
Why has Joseph
brought a man that I don’t know to my house? and as I wonder and stare at him
and he looks a little around, a little at me, a little down at the ground, I
remember.
 
I look at Joseph, all
blonde hair and pale skin and sparkling eyes.
 
I look towards the kitchen door and my
first words come “Hello Martin” and I am a ship on the ocean and all the seas
are calm around me and I ask him if he’d like to make his way to the kitchen
and put the kettle on.

A year ago, maybe more, I can’t
remember, when I was lying on the rug in the sitting room and Joseph was
dribbling with excitement over my foot because I had a splinter in my toe, we
came up with a plan: He’d find me a suitable husband, one that would be kind
and love me, one that I could respect but not fall wildly in love with (because
that’s uncomfortable), one that would want to look after me and be wealthy
enough to do so and one that would not want to curtail my freedom.
 
It sounded a good plan, it was perfect,
but that was just in our heads and this was a real life person.
 
“Joseph, is he the first of the
presentable men?”
 
I questioned him
in Mrs Haversham’s room, around a quiet corner “he is number one?”
 
And Joseph puts his hands up in an
apologetic manner, and whispers “but I don’t actually think he’s going to be
any good” Joseph’s face is as animated as mine “unfortunately he doesn’t have
that much to say.
 
But it’s OK, I
told him we were popping in to see you on our way to Dartmouth so he doesn’t
know he’s here to be inspected, I’ll just loose him there somehow” and it is as
easy as that.
 
Joseph talks very
quickly, I talk very quickly, it is a family trait.
 
Excitedness.
  
The foreign visitors we used to
have when I was little would say “I don’t understand you, you talk so quickly”
and I would say “this freezer is full of chocolate eclairs” or some other too,
too exciting thing.
 
But now we are
back to talking about the man.
 
“Have
you seen his shoes Joseph?
 
His
shoes are square at the end!” It is too awful to contemplate, having anything
to do with a man with shoes like that, that would really annoy you about
someone, I mean just look what it says about his taste, and I can’t think that
I’d ever respect anyone who had appalling taste, although they wouldn’t
necessarily need to have good taste.
 
“I know, I know, I know, aren’t they
disgusting?
 
But I didn’t see them
on the train” and we are both serious, but we are laughing and I need this
lightness in my life just now.
 
“Where did you get him anyway? and who is
he?
 
What is he?” we are talking at
the same time, we are talking over each other, but we don’t miss a thing the
other says, and we are looking up at the ceiling, and now we are looking at the
big pastel picture I did of my cat Coningsby.
 
She is sitting looking down a little
hole and I’d written ‘I can wait all day if I have to’.
 
And then I look at Joseph and he looks
at me
“he’s an accountant”
“Oh God!” and that is that, Joseph is apologetic
“but there has to be a first one doesn’t there? Just to get the ball rolling”
and we both laugh again, then talk about something else, fast, two bad mice
squeaking over a piece of bread.
 
We
get distracted, ‘scatter brained’ someone called us both recently, and then
something popped into my head “do you remember that night, last year, on the
drive back from that Japanese restaurant, when we stopped for petrol and
Gabriel got out of the car at the garage to stretch his legs, and he was
standing by the boot talking to me and when I got the petrol nozzle to put it
in to my petrol tank on the other side of the car, and the hose pushed
Gabriel’s head really hard against the back windscreen? Remember?
 
Remember the noise and the look on his
squashed surprised face?
 
That was
so funny, I was thinking about it earlier” and we are both laughing again.
 
“Can the next man be more suitable
please?
 
Handsome would be nice,
well not really handsome, interesting?”
“No” and then he is showing me his new trousers and I am admiring them.
  

We are now heading in to serious to
strangers mode as we try to make as little noise as we can, we tread the
floorboards to the kitchen where the man is, treading on the very outer edges
of the floor and creep in, trying not to bump into each other, trying to be
quiet.
 
And in the kitchen the man
is standing trying to pick the kettle up off the stove, trying to make himself
that drink “it’s stuck there”
 
I
say, and I tell him how my uncle super glued it there years ago to trick my grandma
and no one ever unstuck it and Joseph and I laugh again, laugh too much and
Martin raises his eyes away from his horrible shoes and sinks his hands in to
his pockets, uncomfortable, our closeness is creating a distance for him, he
steps away from the stove and mumbles “ah,” poor creature in the hyena’s pen.
 
“We have to go, it’s later than I thought” Joseph looks up at the clock, he is
a whirlwind tossing a leaf about in his wildness, he is a fly batting off the
walls, bzz, bzz, bzz “see you later dear little creature” and he kisses me and
I laugh again.
 
He leaves and
blossom falls from apple trees.
 
And
now I’m alone again and feel vulnerable again, not vulnerable, fragile, but not
weak either, I feel tough, I don’t know.
 
It is silent again and I say “pah” just to hear my own voice.

Later on Charlie came and that was
all very nice, but unsatisfactory.
 
We talked about my latest painting, and went for a walk around the
orchard, arm in arm, made love and I got over excited as usual by his presence
and sad when he went, I want more than all of this.
 
There is a big unbalance there but I am
trying hard to make it perfect, it’s not what I want, having a relationship
with a married man.
 
I can’t have
all of him, every single, devoted bit of him.
 
But I do love him I tell myself.
 
Or I just want to love him.
 
And I’ve never felt guilty either.
 
It just happened.
 
I don’t ever think of his wife, unless
she makes demands on his time and it gets in the way of my life.
 
And then I spit out my fury.
 
I don’t like his wife.
 
And then thinking about how revolting she
is makes me wonder why Charlie ever married her and I doubt his intelligence
and question other aspects of his character and it’s not alright really.
 
But I don’t ever feel guilty.