Cecily’s head droops. She’s nearly asleep. I won’t jinx it by trying to put her back too soon. I’ll sit here for another few minutes, listening as Ben ushers Fran and Luke out into the night. A moment later, another burst of repressed noise as Patience and Rob depart, passing on commiserations and best wishes to me. Through the curtain, the crescent moon dances free of clouds, the sky suddenly clear and velvet-dark. More activity downstairs as Ben leads Nina and Charles through to the sitting room, and then I hear someone on the stairs. But the person who comes into Cecily’s room isn’t Ben. It’s Nina, her necklace glittering in the half-light.
‘I brought you a camomile, that’s what Ben said you’d want,’ she says, carrying the cup over to me and placing it on the little table. Cecily glances up at her briefly, without curiosity, and then her head falls back against me, heavy with weariness. In the house opposite, the frosted window goes black as someone leaves the bathroom.
Nina stands behind us for a moment, looking out at the gardens. I can smell her strange spicy scent: I realise that it’s so tied up with how I feel about her that I’ve begun, almost, to love it.
‘I’m sorry everyone had to leave,’ I say. ‘I guess Cecily rather killed the party.’
‘We’re not in any hurry,’ Nina says. ‘Charles and Ben are having a whisky and talking about the Bexhill Pavilion. It was a lovely evening. You went to a lot of trouble.’
‘Oh, hardly,’ I say, but it’s true, we did, we tried, and it was fine, pleasant, workmanlike, but no one could really call it a particular success. If anyone thinks about it tomorrow, they’ll be drawn back to the sharp moments of comedy and awkwardness: Patience on catchment areas, Luke breaking a wine glass as he reached for the potatoes, a confusion over newspaper columnists.
‘I like Fran,’ Nina is saying. ‘She’s funny. That thing about the shoe on the tube . . .’ She leans into the window. The curtains move slightly in the mild air. ‘In a week or two, it’ll be summer,’ she says. ‘Sophie’s breaking up soon for the holidays. Are you planning to go away?’
‘Don’t think so,’ I say. ‘Can’t really afford it this year. Things aren’t great at Ben’s work. There’s some contract . . . But it’ll be fine. He’s taking some time off, we’ll probably go and visit his family for a few days. A few trips to the seaside, that sort of thing.’ I think of an old picture book I’ve recently read to Christopher: a jaunt on the train, a short walk to a sandy beach, rock-pooling and paddling and kite-flying and a picnic on a rug, and then nodding off contentedly on the return leg, pockets full of shells and sand. No one forgets to bring the sandwiches, no one gets sunburned or stung by wasps, no one slips and falls in fully clothed. Where is this beach? How can I get there?
‘Because if you were interested, my dad’s house in France is free for most of August,’ she’s saying. ‘You can get quite cheap flights, even at that time of year.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘We couldn’t possibly—’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘The house is empty, my dad keeps on at me to use it. Charles and I are going there for the last week of August, right after Sophie comes back from her father’s, but you should go anyway, whenever suits you. There’s plenty of room, it’s not far from the sea, and it’s well set up for children, because of my half-sister.’
‘I don’t think . . .’
‘Well, talk about it with Ben. It’s a good idea. You’ll find I’m fairly tenacious.’
She flashes a smile at me in the darkness, comes closer and extends a hand, placing it over Cecily’s skull, long slim fingers carefully resting on the peach-fuzz of hair, the warm curve of bone.
In that instant, as well as being conscious of my own shock at being so very close to her, I’m aware of hers. ‘Oh!’ Nina murmurs, barely moving. ‘That thing, the fontanelle . . . So peculiar. I’d forgotten about it. What a funny feeling.’ She waits, then laughingly takes away her hand. ‘I mean it,’ she says, as she goes towards the door. ‘You think about it.’
‘I will,’ I say, as if I mightn’t.
I’m keen, now, to get back to work. For the weekend following the babysitting, while I dance attendance on Sophie (allowing her to colonise the sitting room with her duvet and iPad and bins spilling Kleenex, bringing her bowls of soup and green glass bottles of mineral water, popping out for oranges and the little saffron-yellow Portuguese cakes she has a weakness for), I’m greedy for Monday, itching to get back into the studio. I want to follow this new idea, this golden thread. I want to see where it will take me. My sense of it is so strong that I can almost smell it and feel its texture. It’s like an itch, an ache and a burn, all at the same time.
I recognise this feeling. It fills me with joy.
The pull of this other reality is so strong and so appealing that it makes the real world – the world of eating and tidying and paperwork – feel very flat and dull by comparison.
For a long time I’ve been preoccupied by coldness, but now, having seen that photograph, I’m thinking about heat: an exposed restless sort of heat blowing over salt flats and close-cropped grass, settling for a moment in a sandy hollow and then moving on again: impulsive, scatterbrained, careless. The dry wind murmuring in miles of barbed wire and humming in the power cables strung between the relentless procession of pylons. Skies so high and pale they seem to have no colour at all.
These ideas come to me in snatches, like visions or ghosts or dreams, only briefly revealed in the quiet moments as I brush my teeth or stand in front of Sophie’s wardrobe, putting shirts on hangers. The land laid out in the heat, the silence of the farm tracks, the sprays of cow parsley. The sweet mealy smell of the barn interior, the way your eyes fought the darkness to find the shapes in there: the sacks of feed, the hay bales and pieces of rusting machinery.
These ideas need solitude and time to develop, but Sophie is demanding, carelessly possessive, entirely confident of my attention. She won’t wait her turn. For the last year or so she has been pulling away from me, trying to shake me off, and so this dependence – the way she calls for me, in a baby voice, from the sofa:
Ma-ma!
– feels novel yet nostalgic, and also claustrophobic. I love it, I always have; and yet now, for the first time, I find myself resenting it. Perhaps while Sophie has been moving on, I have moved on too.
In any case, I’m unable to think usefully about work when I’m at home. The tyranny of domesticity is just too strong. There’s always something else that needs addressing. Something that must be put away or bought or fixed or folded or picked up or wiped down. The little things I won’t leave for Lenka, the unimportant details that no one else bothers with. The questions no one else can answer.
Sophie goes back to school on the Tuesday, protesting a little, coughing like an urchin, and as I let myself out of the house and walk down the street in the weak sunshine, I feel that old luxurious exhilaration: the hope of a new idea.
My walk to the studio is always valuable, whatever the weather. I like being out in the world, yet detached from it: meditative yet purposeful.
Today, as I leave the high street and enter the park by the wrought-iron gates, passing beneath the candles of magnolia buds, the sherbet bubbles of apple and cherry blossom, I feel light, alive, full of possibility. I step onto the bright fresh grass, avoiding the static clusters of mothers whose buggies are snarling up the path. A dog flies after an acid-yellow ball. Above the trees in the clear promising sky a flock of birds: twisting and bobbing, rolling and weaving, cohesive as mercury.
I put my hands in my jacket pocket, and my fingers find the leather tassel keyring Charles brought back from Milan, an expensive pointless trinket, one that pleases me when I remember to think about it. The cold hard shock of the keys.
Out through the lower gate, past the white tiers of Sixties housing, cutting between the Victorian terraces and down a narrow leafy alleyway leading to a footbridge over the railway line. As usual, I walk a little faster at this point, not wanting to meet anyone here, in this enclosed suspended space that seems to belong to no one, to neither side; not looking down, through the bars and the wire, at the black mouth of the tunnel, the graffiti and broken bottles, the insistent push and creep of weeds between the gravel.
Far below me, the tracks are humming: a tiny sound. Something approaching, or travelling further away. I cannot tell which.
I keep walking. On the other side, I pass the school – the playgrounds over the wall empty and silent at this time of day – and the percussion of the main road starts to build: the distant wail of a siren, the sighs and expostulations of buses.
As I unlock the studio door, I can see the fruitlessness of the last few weeks laid out there, on the racks and propped up against the walls, on the large pieces of paper strewn over the floor. It feels good to collect the rough work and to put it away, out of sight; to open the metal-framed windows and let in the air. I fill the kettle and switch it on. While I’m waiting for it to boil I go to the plan chest and pull open the drawer, looking for the old manila envelope hidden under other papers that mean far less. I pull it out. It’s soft with age, as soft as chamois. The gum under the flap is just a dull stain now, no adhesion left.
I haven’t looked inside for years, though I’ve thought about the pictures often; what they show or, more accurately, don’t show. Remembering what was happening elsewhere: in the distance, or behind the camera, off to one side.
Gently, I coax out the wad of square white-framed photographs, spacing them over the table. No surprises here, nothing I haven’t seen before. Some carefully composed shots of the Downs, the white scored lines of the footpaths drifting and spiralling over the gradient. The view from my bedroom window: lawn and trees and red-brick wall, and the flat reach of fields beyond. A still life of seed heads in a milk bottle. A girl in green jeans, seen from behind as she stands at a farm gate, one tennis shoe resting on the lowest bar: a tangled fall of fair hair, a terrier at her heels. Cakes and vegetables and flowers set out on a trestle between some ‘Best in Show’ cards. The old lighthouse, with the boxy grey sprawl of the power station in the background. My mother in a headscarf, standing in the porch, holding out a bowl of redcurrants. My father’s pale face among the shadows as he sits at the piano, the sinuous twist of cigarette smoke as it rises from the ashtray the only other point of illumination. I pick out this picture: the best of the lot, I think. Accidentally, I caught something about him that was true then and remains so now.
We’re not quite finished. There’s still something in the envelope. I upend it, and the bracelet slips out. A knotted circle of dirty string threaded with a brass button stamped with an anchor, ceramic beads in neon green and orange, an Evil Eye, a few cheap silver-plated charms, the sort we used to pick up in Dorothy Perkins for 50p a pop (a star, a pineapple, a horseshoe for luck). With only a little difficulty, I draw it over my wrist.
The weight and sound of it.
‘Keep it. You can give it back when we meet up next time,’ she said, pulling it off, and dangling it over my open palm. And then, seeing my expression, ‘It’s not valuable, it’s just bits and bobs, silly old stuff. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it.’
I loved her for that, for the sudden doubt, the rare moment of insecurity. And I hated her, too, for the same reason.
The kettle has boiled. I pour the water over a spoonful of granules, and then I stand by the open window with the cup in my hands, the metal and glass beads cool on my wrist, looking out over the rooftops, the unseen landscape of chimney pots and air-conditioning units and broken TV aerials. I know what I want to paint now, and I’m free to enjoy the pleasurable apprehension, the promise of this moment.
I drink the coffee and allow my pencil to catch and shape a few thoughts, the soft graphite racing over the paper, just to ease myself into it; and then I select the brushes I’ll need. Most paintings you’re unaware of beginning. They appear out of something else quite gradually, even modestly, suggestions rather than statements. A few paintings present themselves, urgently insist on being addressed; and in my experience those are the ones that work the best. This feels like one of those.
The excitement of making a start, of not being held back anymore. Pulling something out of nothing. Shades and tones move across the canvas. The sky comes first, as it usually does, a large pale wash of gradual colour: heat, emptiness. At the edge, I start to imagine the thing that isn’t being directly looked at, the vague presence of something: a house, a wall, a hedgerow. Your eyes will slip beyond this, into the bleached air, but you should know it’s there, and eventually your attention will come back to it. That’s how I want it to work, anyway.
I’m remembering the walk to the Pugh farm, how it seemed miles away, though it was probably less than a kilometre: the listing stile and the footpath over the field, the cracked earth underfoot, the itch of corn stubble against my ankles, the sound of sheep and seagulls and sometimes the raw caw of rooks. This is how it felt to me, as I stood in the hollowness of the hedge, twigs scratching at my arms and legs. Dry leaves and cobwebs in my hair as I watched the empty yard, the perambulations of chickens, the dog asleep in the shade. There were people inside the house. I heard them as they moved to and fro within the rooms, slamming doors, running up and down stairs, calling to each other; but apart from the occasional shadow passing behind dark glass, a brief movement at an open window, they were invisible. Still, I waited.
That evening, Charles says, ‘Let me guess. You’ve started a new painting, and you’re happy with it.’
‘So far,’ I caution, reluctant to say anything more: wary of assuming anything at this point, and also conscious that I mustn’t talk about it yet. As if it might benefit from secrecy, even from deceit. ‘I don’t know exactly where it’s going.’
‘I can always tell,’ he says, and I love him for that: for noticing, for minding, for being glad, for understanding that I don’t want to say more about it – that I mustn’t. Sophie is slumped over the kitchen counter, fluorescent marker poised over Alain-Fournier. If I say anything to her, she will slink off to her room, so I don’t address her directly.