The Ecliptic (19 page)

Jim slurred back at him, ‘Nah, I’ve changed my mind. They’re no bloody good. I can’t even draw straight.’

‘Don’t be a fool now. Pick them up.’

Grudgingly, Jim stooped to gather them. He took so long about it, wobbling on his haunches, that I went over to help him. ‘Which one is the best?’ he whispered to me, and I whispered
back: ‘
That
one.’

Jim collapsed onto his rear, clawing at the floorboards. I gave Eversholt the sketchbook and he just nodded, skimming through it. After a moment, he said, ‘You’re getting there, Jim,
getting there. I must say, it’s nice to see you drawing again—I can tell you’re really honing something here. It’s attractive work. But it needs more time. I’ll come
back in a month or two, and then we can review things.’

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Jim said. ‘There’s more. Loads of it. Show him, Ellie.’

I was not sure what he was referring to. His best work had already been dismissed.

‘Let him see the On High pile,’ he explained. ‘Go on.’

I looked at him, unsure.

‘Go on. Show him.’

Eversholt followed me to the furthest aspect of the studio, where Jim liked to store all the paintings he had lost the motivation to complete. He called them the On Highs, as in ‘on
hiatus’.

Eversholt went through them with a void expression—it was such a complete look of dispassion that he must have practised it each night in the bathroom mirror, smoothing out the tell-tale
wrinkles. He was wearing the oddest plum-coloured brogues and their thick heels stayed planted as he browsed the paintings. ‘I fear there’s a long way to go with these, Jim,’ he
called, and started putting on his jacket. ‘Very glad to see the work, though, as always. I shall tell everyone you’ve been hard at it.’

‘Christ, don’t start spreading that around,’ Jim called back.

Then, as Eversholt was heading through into the main room to say his farewells, he stopped, sighting the back of my Ripolin canvas against the other wall. ‘No, that’s not for
sale—I mean, that’s not really anything,’ I muttered, as he went to turn the picture round. Eversholt did not listen. He rolled his eyes over the image, plain-faced. It must have
been that he stood there looking at it for some time, because Jim staggered in and leaned against the architrave. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d all gone quiet in
here.’

Eversholt circled his hand about the picture. ‘Tell me what’s happening with this. What’s the thinking?’

‘Long story, that,’ Jim said.

‘Self-portraits are indulgent. Difficult to sell.’

Jim sniffed. He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘That’s just an experiment.’

I wanted to interject and explain, but I also wanted to give Jim the chance to speak up for me.

‘Always thought that was a lot of guff, myself,’ said Eversholt. ‘This is giving me the shivers. Ditch everything else, is my advice. Give me another ten or twelve of these
little experiments, if that’s what you’re calling them. Then you can have your show. I’m thinking, end of August. September at a push.’

‘Ah, Max. So many imperatives. I love the way you talk.’ Jim grinned, turning back for the main room. ‘I’m sorry, old pal, but you seem to be mistaking art for press-ups.
I can’t just drop and give you twenty. I’m a painter. The inspiration comes, the inspiration goes.’ He raised his arms. ‘Are you hearing this, Ellie? This is what you can
expect. It’s all a lot of dancing for the organ-grinder from now on.’

‘If you need another show of my good faith, that’s fine. How much?’ Eversholt reached into his jacket and pulled out a chequebook. I watched the whole thing happening without
saying a word.

‘I’m not interested in your money,’ Jim said. ‘But you can make one of those out to someone else, if you don’t mind. Last name’s Conroy. First name’s
Elspeth. Don’t ask me to spell it, ‘cause I’m pissed, but I reckon fifty pounds’ll be fair enough to begin with.’

Eversholt started writing the cheque. ‘Who the bloody hell is Elspeth Conroy?’

‘
She
is,’ Jim said, pointing at me. ‘Artist-in-residence.’

Eversholt slowly pivoted his neck. ‘You did this?’

I hardly knew what to say. The blood rushed out of my head. My palms went very cool. ‘Yes. Well, it just sort of came together really. Bit of a fluke.’

‘Rubbish,’ Jim said. ‘She has more of them. Upstairs. Tons of them. They’re loads better than anything you’ll find in this dump.’

Eversholt tore off the cheque and shut the book. ‘Show me.’

‘More directives,’ Jim said. ‘You should really learn some manners.’

‘You’re right. Let me try that again.’ Until then, Eversholt had regarded me with the passing interest he might otherwise have afforded a chambermaid or a stable boy. Now I had
his full attention. ‘Miss Conroy,
darling
,’ he said, ‘if you’d let me take a quick look at your work, I’d be delighted. In the meantime—’ He came
forward, offering the cheque. ‘Call this a down-payment on what I’ve seen so far.’

Within a few months, Max had organised a show at the Eversholt Gallery, in which a small selection of my canvases was presented in a hallway before the main exhibition. The
headline attraction was Bernard Cale, a welterweight boxer turned artist, who had forged a good career making ink-and-gouache drawings of the fights. He was popular with male collectors at the
time, as his pictures were brutal and unflinching, and there was a certain macho prestige to be gained from hanging a Bernie Cale in your study, all those exploding lips and broken noses to discuss
over brandy and cigars. I respected the earnest themes of Cale’s pictures and admired the skill of their construction, so I was pleased to see my work displayed as an accompaniment to his. No
one who attended the show arrived with the intention of seeing my gloomy bombsite paintings, but plenty stopped to look at them.

Jim turned up at the private viewing, mercifully sober. He stood smoking in the hallway with Bernie Cale himself, examining my favourite piece in the collection:
Stage Ghost Rehearsal,
1958.
It showed the shell of an old theatre in Kennington, upon which I had overlaid a new façade in thinned-out tones of grey; behind the pale windows, I had delicately painted the
wraith of a man holding a straight-blade razor, his cheeks lathered in foam, and scratched the reflection of a young girl into his shaving mirror. ‘Bernie likes this one best,’ Jim
said. ‘He thinks it’s menacing. I think it’s sad. Come and settle the argument.’

Cale nodded. ‘I want to know what that bloke is thinking. Can’t help but worry for the little ’un, I must say.’ He moved closer to the painting, blinking at it.
‘They all sort of do that, in their way—I was just telling Jim: they all make you feel some-thing—but this one puts me on edge. It’s hard to do that with a
picture.’

‘Thank you, Bernie. That’s kind of you.’

‘What’re you thanking me for? I didn’t paint the bloody thing.’

‘Don’t leave us hanging,’ Jim said to me, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘Are we supposed to feel sad, frightened—what?’

I said, ‘It depends on who’s looking.’

‘Hear that, Bernie? It’s a draw.’

‘I want a refund,’ said Cale, smirking.

At the end of the evening, I found Jim waiting on the pavement outside. ‘Thought someone should walk you home,’ he said. ‘Unless you’ve got a limo coming.’

I was still living rent-free in the attic room in St John’s Wood, and I had given no thought to the prospect of finding my own studio. At Max’s urging, I was no longer
‘cheapening myself’ by working as an assistant, so I did not have the modest wages to sustain me. Instead, I withdrew funds daily from Max’s ‘down-payment’, half of
which I had sent to my parents in Clydebank the moment his cheque cleared in my account. I felt, in that strange period, as though I was caught like a feather on a draught. It was clear that the
course of my life depended on the outcome of the entrance hall show, but I could not tell in which direction it was going to propel me. ‘I was going to take the bus,’ I said.

We walked down Cork Street together. It was a windless night but the cold still pinched and I had not brought a coat. Jim saw that I was shivering and said, ‘A gentleman would probably
offer you his blazer.’

‘He would.’

‘But then you’d know he’d burned his shirt twice with the iron. What the heck—’ He removed his jacket and I stopped so he could cast it round my shoulders. And,
turning, he showed me the singe-marks on his back: two light brown impressions at the spine.

‘You had the heat too high.’

‘Well, I know that
now
.’

‘I appreciate the effort. You look very smart.’

He shrugged. ‘Warmer yet?’

‘A bit.’

We were at Baker Street before he said a word about the show. It was expressed almost in resignation. ‘That painting Bernie liked—the one with the bloke shaving—you’ve
got something there. If I tried to paint a scene like that, I’d get the composition wrong. But you know exactly how much of the little girl’s face to show in the mirror. It’s got
emotions in it most of us would shy away from.’

I found it hard to walk and feel such gladness all at once. ‘Thank you. It really means a lot to hear that, Jim.’

‘Look, I’m not saying they were
all
great. Don’t start leaping in the air.’ He swiped at his nose a few times with the crook of his wrist. ‘If the whole
show was that good, I wouldn’t have stuck it out all night.’ He walked me halfway across the road, his hand on the small of my back. ‘Now you’d better hope nobody buys it,
eh?’ A car slowed down for us and blinked its headlights. ‘At last, a decent citizen.’ He gave a thumbs-up to the driver as we passed by the bonnet.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said.

He was a few strides ahead of me now and had to stop. ‘Don’t stand about, I’m freezing,’ he said.

‘What did you mean by that?’

Traffic shone against his back. He blew into his fists. ‘Come to the pub with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘No, I’ve already had too much to drink.’

‘I know. Two glasses is your limit. Just—wait a mo.’ And hanging an arm out into the road, he was able to flag an approaching cab. It pulled over with its window down.
‘Maida Vale, mate,’ Jim told the driver. ‘The Prince Alfred.’ He opened the door for me. ‘Come on then, or you won’t get your answer.’

When we reached the pub, he did not go straight up to the bar to get a whisky, as I expected him to. He steered me to the far end of the room instead, and called out to the landlord on his way:
‘I’ll start with a double, Ron. Leave it there for me.’

‘Who’s this with you?’ said the landlord.

‘Mind your own.’

‘A bit too nice for this place, ain’t she? You want to take her somewhere proper.’

‘Oh, she won’t be here for long, don’t worry.’

He took me to a quiet table in the corner: a bench-seat upholstered in tartan. ‘This is where I do my best thinking,’ he said. ‘Grab a pew.’

I pulled out a stool and sat down. He took the bench opposite and looked at me, amused at some private thought. ‘Other way,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘Swivel round. You need to face the other way.’

I did as I was told.

There was a picture on the wall I realised was Jim’s—a portrait, done in oils, of a soldier in a beret, the fumes of a cigarette coiling up around his face. It was a small,
uncomplicated painting. The soldier’s grinning features were remarkably well made. Jim had captured an attitude in the brushstrokes: helpless but defiant. ‘You’ve got to hold on
to the best ones,’ he said. ‘Keep something for yourself, that’s all I mean. I could’ve sold that for a fortune once, but I chose not to. Best decision of my
life.’

I stood up to get a closer view. ‘Why not hang it in your flat, or at the studio?’

‘I like it here where folks can see it. And, you know me, I tend to stop in for a drink occasionally.’

‘What if it gets stolen?’

‘Ron keeps a lookout. And someone had to elevate the decor in this place. They had some stupid cartoon of a horse up there before I got to it.’ He came to stand beside me. I could
smell the linseed on him. When I moved to glance up at his face, I found that he was staring only at the portrait. His eyes were glossed and bright. ‘Honestly, I wish I could’ve sent it
to the lad after I painted it, but I did it from a sketch. He died before we left Dunkirk. Wouldn’t know it from that grin, though, would you? Poor sod didn’t know what he was in
for.’ Jim coughed abruptly. ‘Anyway, that’s all I wanted to show you.’ He nudged his shoulder into mine. ‘Don’t tell anyone you nearly saw me cry. I have a
reputation to uphold.’

We stayed at the Prince Alfred long enough to have one drink, and then he walked me home. Coming through the frosted avenues of Little Venice, we were both trembling and tired, and I thought
that he might put his arm around me then, in solidarity if nothing else. But he kept his hands inside his pockets all the way to St John’s Wood. We talked only of domestic matters: which
place on the high street should he take his shirts to now for laundering? Which bakery was it that made the loaf he liked? He was readying himself for life without me. As we headed down the mews,
he kicked at the cobbles and said, ‘I’ll probably just kip on the studio floor tonight then.’ I could not tell if he was being candid or suggestive, and we reached the front door
before I could respond. ‘Well, it’s no bother,’ he said. ‘I’m used to it by now.’ He let us inside and unlocked the studio. Turning on the lights, he loitered in
the threshold, thumbing the latch. He seemed to have something else to say to me besides ‘Goodnight’, but that was all he offered. I was left to carry his blazer up the dingy stairs,
alone.