Black Valley (9 page)

‘I didn’t know you were an art buff.’ Elinor was curious.

‘I’m not. A friend invited me.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re here.’ Elinor adopted a conspiratorial tone. ‘I hate these kind of events. I find them such an ordeal.’ She paused. ‘I had to be
here, of course, to support Isobel and Blake. Hefin Morris is their new find.’ She hesitated. ‘D’you know his work?’

Jess shook her head.

‘I think you’d like it.’ She hesitated. ‘We can go upstairs now, if you like, and have a look at the paintings. I can show you round, before everyone goes up.’

‘I’d love to, but I’m meeting a friend.’ Jess extricated herself as tactfully as she could. ‘I think I’d better go and find her.’

Elinor nodded, but she looked disappointed.

‘See you later, then.’

‘OK. Later.’

Jess went off to look for Mari. She felt uncomfortable about bumping into Elinor. It really didn’t do for her to be hobnobbing with a client outside the sessions. And it was entirely her
fault that this had happened. She should have realized that Elinor and her family, as the owners of the Powell Gallery, would attend the opening of a major new exhibition at the museum. And that
the artist they were showing might well be one of their protégés.

She spotted Mari heading for the drinks table. This time, she was alone.

‘There you are. I wondered where you’d got to.’ Mari gave her a hug.

Jess hugged her back. ‘You seemed to be busy.’

‘Mmm. I was.’ Mari sighed. ‘Lovely guy. Works for the Millenium Centre.’ She sighed again. ‘Married, unfortunately. No kids, though,’ she added after a
moment, brightening.

‘He looked quite keen.’

‘He was. But I can’t go in for all that cloak and dagger stuff. Not at my age.’ Mari put her head on one side, scrutinizing Jess’s appearance. ‘You know, that up-do
really suits you. Very
continentale.
’

Jess rolled her eyes, but she was pleased at her friend’s compliment. She often felt a little dowdy next to Mari, who was always the epitome of glamour, whatever the occasion.

Mari drained her glass. ‘Let’s go up and take a look at these paintings, shall we? Then we can sneak off. I don’t want to get stuck listening to a load of speeches.’

They walked up the grand stone staircase, Mari teetering on her platforms, hanging on to the brass banister for safety. When they got to the upper floor, Jess lingered beside the cabinets
displaying the old china. She’d always loved wandering around the museum. It was a fine early twentieth-century building, constructed as part of the capital’s civic complex, with a
graceful art deco interior. When the children had been little, Jess had often taken them there, to the natural history rooms to look at the filmed volcanic explosions and the woolly mammoths that
bellowed and moved their heads mechanically. Since then, over the years, she’d dropped in occasionally to visit the collection bequeathed by the Davies sisters, two spinster daughters of a
Victorian coal baron who’d spent their fortune on the groundbreaking art of their day. There were Turners, Corots, Millets, Rodins, Cézannes, and a fabulous array of Monets. Part of
her felt she owned these paintings; whenever they were loaned out she missed them, and was glad when they returned. That was one advantage of living in a small capital city: you felt affectionate
towards its treasures, rather than overwhelmed by them.

Once inside, Jess and Mari worked their way around the Morris exhibition. The paintings on show were striking, if not exactly to Jess’s taste. They were extremely large, and very dark in
colour, mostly brown and black with only a few specks of greenish grey, petrol blue and ochre. They were painted in oil, and covered in streaks of what looked like coal dust. Now and then, the
streaks caught the light, showing a gleam of silver.

‘These are awful,’ whispered Mari. ‘Don’t you think?’

Jess gave a non-committal shrug. Mari was always too quick to form an opinion, in her view.

Mari went off and stood by the door, ready to make her getaway. Jess continued to walk slowly round the room, gazing at each painting, waiting to see what might happen. She knew from experience
that there might be more here than met the eye; she’d often, in the past, gone to an exhibition and been unmoved, only to find herself thinking about the works later. She had a feeling these
might have the same effect.

At the far end of the room was the largest canvas, spanning almost an entire wall. Beside it hung a nineteenth-century painting borrowed from the museum’s collection. It was one that Jess
knew well, a charming portrait of a goose girl by Jean-François Millet. The girl leaned on a stick, guarding her flock, the dawn light casting a soft glow over her, lending her the grave
dignity of a biblical figure. At first, Jess wondered what she was doing next to the great black slab of the Morris painting. Then she looked closer at the girl’s face, and noticed, for the
first time, the look of exhausted dejection on it. Despite its fairy-tale setting, the painting was by no means romantic; the child – for she was not much more than a child – looked
lonely and neglected; her shoes were too big for her, her clothes rough.

Jess took a step back, so that she could see the two paintings side by side: the Millet small, delicate, and vibrant with colour; the Morris huge, brutal, and coal-black. She thought she could
see a connection. Perhaps Morris was implying that nothing much had changed over the centuries, that the miners who had dug the coal from the South Wales valleys were the direct descendants of
Millet’s peasants: poor, oppressed, exhausted, yet with a kind of ageless dignity in their toil. Jess peered into the gloom of the black hole, and wondered whether Morris was perhaps making a
further point: that the last shred of dignity afforded the miners, of selling their labour to live, had been stripped away from them, leaving nothing behind but a great void, like the interior of
the disused mines that still existed up in the valleys.

‘What do you think?’

Jess gave a slight start as the man next to her spoke. He’d been standing beside her for a while, but she hadn’t noticed.

She turned back to the painting. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s to do with the mines closing down.’ Jess paused. ‘But I don’t think I’d have got the point if
it hadn’t been for the goose girl.’

‘Hmm.’

They both continued to look at the two paintings, side by side.

‘I mean, you’re never sure what you’re seeing with this kind of painting.’ Jess spoke quietly, as if to herself. ‘You could just be reading things into it,
couldn’t you?’

‘Isn’t all art like that?’

Jess turned to look at the man. He was taller than her, but not much, with dark curly hair, brown eyes, and a day’s stubble on his chin. He was dressed in a blue jacket, with a striped
scarf around his neck.

Jess was slightly nonplussed. He looked like someone from the art world, clearly not just a gallery-goer like her. However, she persevered.

‘I suppose so. But this contemporary stuff seems to be all about context, doesn’t it? Commenting on what’s gone before. Trying to do something different.’

She looked back at the painting.

‘I’d say all important artists do that.’ He followed her gaze.

‘Millet was certainly commenting on the romanticism of his contemporaries when he started to paint common peasants, like this little girl. He was scorned at the time. Nobody wanted to see
the reality of what was going on. Morris is the same, I think.’

He knew his subject, Jess thought. But he didn’t seem to be a snob about it.

She turned and gave him a look as if to say, I’m not entirely convinced.

The man laughed.

‘Are you . . . connected to this in any way?’ She hazarded a guess.

‘Kind of. I’m giving a speech tonight—’

There was a shout from the other corner of the room and the sound of people shushing. Jess turned to see Elinor and Blake walk in. Isobel was nowhere to be seen. They took their places beside a
banner advertising the exhibition, with a microphone and lectern in front of it, surrounded by a crew of young women stylishly dressed in black.

‘Ah. That’s my cue.’ The man smiled at her. ‘See you later perhaps.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ Blake stepped forward to the microphone and his voice rang out around the room. ‘Tonight is a momentous occasion. We’re here to celebrate the
purchase by the National Museum of Wales of this painting’ – here he waved a hand at the huge canvas at the end of the room – ‘by the most talented Welsh artist of his
generation, Hefin Morris.’

There was a small burst of applause. Jess noticed that Elinor, standing behind him, didn’t join in.

‘Now, as you know, Morris doesn’t make public appearances, so he can’t be with us tonight. But he’s asked me to say a few words on his behalf. He is delighted that the
National Museum has finally bought the magnificent
Heb Ditel Deuddeg ar Hugain
’ – Blake didn’t stumble over the words, but he had to concentrate – ‘so that it
can be seen by the people to whom it rightfully belongs: the ordinary people of Wales.’

A woman at the front of the crowd clapped enthusiastically. She was a beaky-nosed blonde, dressed in an electric-blue shift, with what looked like a bicycle chain around her neck. This must be
Mia, Blake’s business partner, Jess surmised; and she obviously admired him greatly, judging by the look of adoration on her face as he spoke.

Blake continued to talk about the painting now being owned by the ‘ordinary people of Wales’, very few of whom seemed to be present, and then turned to the man Jess had just been
speaking to.

‘I’d like to introduce Professor Jacob Dresler, one of our foremost critics and historians’ – was there a slightly sardonic edge to his voice, or did Jess imagine it?
– ‘who has championed Morris’s work from the start . . .’

Jess noticed Mari standing by the door, looking questioningly at her. She nodded her head over at Dresler to show that she wanted to stay. Mari gave her a knowing smile and retreated to the
corridor.

Dresler took Blake’s place in the centre of the small crowd. ‘It’s a great pleasure to be here tonight. And that’s because, in my view, Hefin Morris is the most exciting
painter working in Britain today. He’s the Anselm Kiefer of the Welsh valleys, and like him, his work asks: what does the aftermath of destruction look like,
feel
like? What happens to
a people when their entire history, knowledge, skills, culture disappear overnight?’

He seemed quietly assured as he spoke, his genuine, unhurried manner contrasting sharply with Blake’s brittle enthusiasm.

‘Morris was seventeen years old, just starting work as a miner, when the great strike began in 1985. The pit he worked in was closed for good two years later. As you can see from the
paintings around you, he uses the metaphor of the mineshaft to tell the story of what happened to him, to his community, after that seminal moment in British history. Yet it’s not just a
metaphor; those abandoned shafts are, in reality, all that remains of a whole way of life.’

Dresler paused. He was an engaging speaker, Jess thought. Direct, to the point, and genuinely passionate about his subject.

‘Hefin Morris was born in 1967 in Treorchy, the Rhondda Valley. He grew up . . .’

Jess listened, intrigued, as Dresler outlined Morris’s career. He explained how the artist had begun to paint after being laid off, how he’d never been to art school, how he’d
started to incorporate coal dust, iron ore, ochre, and various kinds of detritus in his work, how he’d eventually been spotted by a London dealer – here the woman wearing the bicycle
chain smiled proudly – and finally, how he’d continued to maintain his anonymity throughout, as a measure of his disgust for the capitalist system in general, and the machinations of
the art world in particular. Jess was sceptical about the last point – wasn’t it more likely that Morris was simply trying to generate a mystique about himself by refusing to step out
of the shadows? – but nevertheless, she found Dresler’s account engaging. She also realized, as she watched him, that she was attracted to him. He was a good-looking man, like an older
version of Blake, but with more genuine charisma; his dark eyes sparkled as he spoke, and there was a real passion in his voice and gestures. He was intelligent and decisive, both qualities she
liked in a man; he held firm opinions, and he seemed to know what he was talking about. He’d be an interesting person to get to know, she thought – as a friend, of course. At first,
anyway.

The speech came to a close. There was more clapping, and then people began to circulate again. Jess was surprised to find that, straight after he’d finished his speech, Dresler came over
to her.

‘Well done,’ she said. ‘That was great.’

‘Thanks. I tried not to go on too long. After all, people are here to see the paintings.’

They looked around. Everyone in the room was talking to each other, clutching a glass. Not one single person was standing in front of a canvas.

There was an awkward pause, and then they both laughed.

‘I’m going to have to leave in a minute,’ Dresler said. ‘They’re dragging me off to a restaurant or something.’

Jess looked over at the doorway. Mari had reappeared, and was talking to a rowdy bunch of fellow thespians who were on their way out.

‘I’ll have to get going, too.’

Dresler reached into his jacket pocket, took out a card, and handed it to her. ‘I’m coming back to Cardiff next week, to talk to the museum people. I wondered . . .’ He
hesitated, then made his decision. ‘I wondered if you’d like to meet up at some point?’

‘Oh.’ Jess was surprised. She somehow hadn’t realized until that moment that Dresler had been chatting her up. ‘Well . . .’ She hesitated, flustered by the
unfamiliarity of the situation. ‘That would be nice.’ She took the card, glancing at it. It was printed on cream paper, with black lettering. Stylish, but simple.

‘I’ll be here from Monday to Wednesday.’

‘Thanks.’ She put the card in her bag.

Over his shoulder, she could see Mari looking at them with curiosity.