The Ecliptic (36 page)

His story went that he had left London on a pilgrimage. One by one, he had revisited all of the towns where he had been stationed in the war. ‘Looking for what, I don’t quite
know,’ he said. ‘I just knew I had to get back there.’ A doctor had put the notion in his mind. He had awoken on the floor of his old studio, feeling raw from three days’
drinking, and could not feel his fingers. There was no sensation in his lower arms at all, he said, but he had managed to get dressed—‘Don’t ask me how’—and taken
himself to a doctor’s surgery near Abbey Road. The doctor had knocked his elbows with a reflex hammer and listened to his heart, told him everything was fine. If the feeling did not return by
tomorrow, he should come back again, but it was likely just a temporary side-effect of the alcohol—he should really think about cutting back. Jim had told him he would sooner cut back on
breathing. Then, on the wall above the doctor’s typewriter, he had noticed a framed print. ‘It was a reproduction of a Stanley Spencer. Horses pulling wounded soldiers into a hospital
tent on—what are they called? Travoys. You know, those big long stretchers? Anyway, it’s an incredible painting. One of his best.’ The doctor had said it was there to remind him
of his days as a medic in the Great War—not that he would ever forget his experiences, of course, just that the picture inspired him to keep practising through the more difficult moments. On
the way home, Jim could not get the image from his mind. It had made him think of his own picture of his friend at the Prince Alfred. ‘And I thought,
that’s
what my painting
has to do to people.
That’s
what I have to communicate.’ So he had cleared everything from his studio that afternoon, headed to the bank to withdraw his savings, and set
off.

The only things he took with him were a clean set of clothes, a blank sketchbook with a few coloured pencils, an old journal from his days with the regiment, and a bottle of Glenlivet, which he
poured over the side of the ferry on the way to Calais. ‘I knew I couldn’t go back there drunk. I had to stand up and face it all or the whole trip would be pointless. I felt rough as
dogs those first few days, but I got through it.’ He rode a bus down to Arras, where he had first been stationed with his unit: ‘The place had changed a lot, naturally, but the noise of
the town was the same as I remembered—there used to be an airstrip there, and planes would come in and go out all the time, but in the quiet spots, you know, there was always an alarming
quiet. The way the wind shakes up the fields over there—it’s peculiar. Something I won’t forget in a hurry.’ It was here that he had fired his service weapon in anger for
the very first time: ‘Shot an unarmed German there from seven feet away: total panic job, coming round the blindside of him.’ After several months in Arras, he caught a train north to
Dunkirk, which he said had changed unnervingly. ‘I was glad I went back. It’s important to see a city how it ought to be, you know, not clothed in all the miseries of war. Not with
tanks and sandbags and all that screaming chaos. But seeing it again, so quiet, left me feeling quite disturbed, if that makes sense. There was a part of me that I knew would always be stuck there.
I lost a lot of friends on that patch of land.’ Still, he was not satisfied with any of the sketches he made on his return to these places—the work did not resound as brightly as his
memories of them.

One night in Dunkirk, he started drinking again. ‘I thought if I just stuck to the local brew, I’d be able to handle it. Well, I’m not a particularly smart fella when it comes
to drink, as you know
.
’ He got into a brawl with a young French poet who had been reading his work aloud in the bar. ‘I wasn’t in the mood to hear poems. It was that
awful, dismal sort of French stuff—just a roll of sounds without any meaning—so I started hassling him about it and he didn’t much like it. I ended up losing a tooth—’
He paused here to show me the gap. ‘—and the lad fractured his thumb. The both of us got thrown into the locker at the police station overnight. Adjoining cells. We didn’t speak
to each other for a bit, but then he came over and started apologising—he was in tears. I thought, Hang on, this lad’s got problems. And it turns out he did. His parents had just died,
two weeks ago, so he said, and he hadn’t been coping with it very well. That’s what his poems had been about. And he’d been run out of the last town he was in because he’d
slapped some poor bloke for goading him, too. That makes him sound like a terrible lad—he wasn’t at all. Just troubled.’ They became friends (this was the only part of Jim’s
story I did not need to question, knowing how men like to find compassion for each other after they have traded punches, never before) and the poet invited Jim to stay with him and his sister in
his family’s house in Giverny for the summer. ‘I heard “Giverny” and remembered it was where Monet used to have his garden with the lilies—so I thought it
couldn’t be that bad. And it wasn’t. It was bliss. His parents had left him this beautiful old house. Wildflowers everywhere, hibiscus and pear trees. Glorious sunshine all summer. I
didn’t want to leave.’

He stayed in Giverny for a full year, in fact, trying to make sense of the sketches in his book, painting with gouache on board. ‘The French have a wonderful word:
‘
vaurien’
. It means ‘good-for-nothing’. That’s what all of those paintings were like. I couldn’t seem to get the tone right, no matter what I
tried.’ Because the poet and his sister drank so little, and with Jim living off their charity and provisions, he was forced to become reacquainted with sobriety. ‘For a while, I was
living off whatever was in the cupboards—I had a lot of stale cognac, and some disgusting old Dutch advocaat. But that ran out soon enough, and I had no money, so it was either I went and
stole it, or—well, I didn’t want to come back to France after all that time just to start looting the place like a bloody Nazi. It took me until the spring to really get my act
together.’

The spring was when the Judas trees in the village came into bloom. He had gone walking one day with the poet’s sister and, suddenly, the winding avenues of Giverny had blushed with so
many shades of pink. ‘To begin with, I thought they were just like the cherry trees and magnolias back home, but she told me they were Judas trees. When she was a little girl, her mother used
to collect all the petals to make pot-pourri. There was so much of the stuff.’

As the weeks passed, Jim had noticed how the Judas blossoms separated from the branches so quickly, how they dusted the ground in endless configurations, every one of them unique. ‘The
wind gathered them all up and scattered them however it wanted—like it was painting the scenery all by itself. Some of them would just sit there on the ground, stuck on the gravel, on the
soil, or they’d get caught between long blades of grass. They’d just sit there for weeks, fading, shrivelling, turning brown. Then the wind would finally brush them away. They reminded
me of the war. The transience of it all. On patrols, it always used to get to me, thinking about the future. Your life always felt so inconsequential, you know, but at the same time you’d try
and savour every last moment of it, while you still had it. Anyway, the thought occurred to me, What am I just looking at all these petals for? I need to paint them.’ He set up a board in his
room at the house and started work. ‘And right away I got that glorious feeling in my chest again—you know the one I mean. That swell in your heart when a painting takes over you. I
knew I had something to say. There was nothing else that mattered—I had to paint that and nothing else. Just Judas blossoms on the ground, in as many shapes and patterns as I could think of,
forever, until I die.’

By the end of the summer, he had filled the farmhouse with boards. Most of them he gave to the poet and his sister as presents, and they lined the walls of every room. Some of them he kept and
carried back with him. He came to understand that he did not need to stay in Giverny any longer. The Judas blossoms did not have to be on his own doorstep for him to paint them. He needed no clear
view of them from his window, no sketches, no photographs, just his own memories and speculations. That was the only way he could express their real meaning. And so he begged one last favour from
the poet and his sister—just a few more francs to get him back to Calais and to England. ‘They were sad to see me go, I think, and I was sad to say goodbye to them. But you know how it
is: the work is always more important. Art and happiness won’t stand each other’s company for long. It’s hard to explain that to people who aren’t artists. I mean, the lad
wrote poetry, but it wasn’t his life—I got the impression it was just a hobby for him until he found a job in a bank some day, you know?’

Once Jim had landed back in Dover, he had thought about coming to find me. ‘I knew that if anyone would understand, it’d be you. But I can’t remember why I
didn’t—the timing just felt wrong. And, honestly, I couldn’t face you yet. Not until the work was done. I had visions of putting on a show again in London and you seeing it by
chance.’ (It would have been the autumn, when I was still working on my mural. If he had only knocked on my door then, just once . . .) Instead, he took a room for a few weeks above a Chinese
restaurant in Soho, and worked there, scrubbing vats, until he had earned enough to take a night coach up to Glasgow. ‘The only other person who believed in me was Henry. I thought he might
be able to find me an attic somewhere, like I used to have as a student, or let me sleep for a while in his office. I didn’t really have a plan. But that’s what made Henry Henry,
wasn’t it? If he believed in your work, he’d go out of his way to help you, even if it cost him. That’s how I heard about this place. He said he wasn’t using it any more,
but some bloke had been renting it and left it in a state. Bailey or something, his name was—Henry didn’t speak well of him.’ The agreement was that Jim could have the cottage,
rent free, in exchange for light repairs. ‘He only wanted me to do a little gardening and sprucing up—no big overhaul. I admit, I haven’t got round to it yet. But I’ve only
been here since September.’

The twenty minutes were almost up and Jim was still standing at his work table, grinding away at the flowers in the mortar. Each turn of his pestle gave a biting sound—he had been using
these noises to punctuate and dislocate his sentences, as though he assumed we had been apart so long that I could not read the language of his movements any more. He was disguising something, but
I was not going to risk the consequences of making him admit it. And, really, there was only one question I cared for him to answer.

He looked at me, then at the clock. ‘You haven’t said much. I can’t tell what you’re thinking about any of this.’ His pestle kept on circling. ‘It’s the
God’s honest truth, I promise you. Look at me—’ He stood tall. ‘I’m a year sober. Not touched a drop since I got back, and I don’t bother with the races any
more. I’ve just been doing
this
.’ And, gesturing with his bowl of ruined flowers, he said, ‘This is what’s important to me now. Nothing else. I thought you’d
understand that.’

‘I do,’ I said, and stopped the rocking motion of the chair with my heels. ‘I do.’

‘Then why are you so quiet all of a sudden?’ His eyes shifted, left and right. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about it. You don’t believe me, is that it?’

‘You’re very defensive, Jim,’ I said, ‘for a man telling the truth.’

‘Well, I need you to believe me.’

‘Why?’

‘So I can get on with my work.’ He sniffed. ‘I can’t have all this guilt hanging over me.’

‘What’s there to feel guilty about? You just explained yourself.’

‘You
know
what,’ he said, and gave a shake of his head. ‘Don’t make me say it.’

‘Apologise, you mean?’

He stayed quiet.

‘Are you actually sorry?’ I said.

‘No.’ The pestle was working harder now. ‘Not for leaving. Not for doing what I had to do. But I feel guilty for not getting in touch.’

‘I was out of my mind with worry about you,’ I said. ‘You could’ve phoned, or sent a letter. A telegram would’ve done. Just something to let me know you were
safe.’

‘Yes. I wanted to. I really wanted to.’ And he put the mortar down on the table weightily. ‘This lot has to get onto the slab right now or it won’t give out much
colour.’ He turned his back to me, a shield from my voice.

‘You couldn’t have spared a thought for me just
once
in all that time?’

‘I didn’t know that I was supposed to,’ he said. The pulped flowers dropped down onto the slab—a lumpy pink cement. ‘I didn’t know that you
wanted
me
to think about you. Not in that way.’

‘Well, I did.’ There seemed little point in hiding the fact any more.

‘If you’d told me that before you moved out, it might have been different. But I don’t see there’s much I can do to change anything now. And I needed to do it for myself.
I needed that trip.’ He glugged about a tablespoon of linseed oil upon the paste of flowers. Taking the muller from the table, he began to slide it up and over the paste and the oil. It was a
large glass object like a flat iron and it sent drips careening everywhere. ‘Oh, for crying out loud—another dud batch. It’s not giving me
anything
. Hand me that trowel,
would you? I need to scrape it off and start again.’

I got up and passed him what he wanted. ‘You didn’t mention her name,’ I said.

‘Huh?’

‘The sister.’

‘Oh. Helène. Ana Helène.’ He took the trowel, laughing quietly. ‘There was nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was young enough to
be my daughter. And engaged to someone else.’

‘Young and unavailable. Yes, I hear that’s quite a turn-off.’

‘It wasn’t like that, Ellie.’

‘She must’ve been beautiful, though. From the way you talk about her.’

‘I’m really not going to listen to this. I told you: it wasn’t like that.’

‘So you didn’t even look at her? Not once?’

‘Stop it now. You’re better than this, Ellie.’ He slammed down the trowel, throwing a shock of oiled pigment over the table, onto my funeral dress. ‘That was an
accident,’ he said, walking off. I just rubbed the stain into the fabric, but he came back with a wet tea towel, the bead curtain clattering behind him. ‘Fine, ruin it. Who
cares?’ He tossed it aside. ‘I really thought you and I were above this sort of nonsense. Jealousies and petty suspicions. You’re the only woman I’ve ever thought about in
that way.’