How to Paint a Dead Man (8 page)

Even when she could still see, there were days Annette felt unsure of the things surrounding her. The edges wobbled and warped. Sometimes she could not capture an image by moving her head around and she would require verification. ‘Am I wearing a blue coat today?’ she would ask her mother. ‘Is that a cat sleeping on the roof? Is it Mauri walking across the gardens with Uncle Marcello? Is Tommaso doing a handstand against the wall?’ ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ her mother would snap. Or, if she had a headache and was tired and angry, ‘No, Annette,’ she would say, ‘that is a dead thing, which you should be grateful you cannot see.’ Or, ‘That is a wicked sinful thing, please look away.’ Or, ‘That is the Bestia, quickly, walk on.’ And Annette would cover her face and mewl like a lost kitten as they hurried down the street.

But at school, when Signor Giorgio came to instruct the class on drafting and colouring, he told her that her paintings of flowers were in fact very good. They were small miracles that contained absolutely the soul of the still-life, he said. He told her that her name was French, and that there was a great French painter who slowly lost his sight, but that because of this he was able to create works of subtlety and innovation. Annette liked that Signor Giorgio wore heavy medical spectacles too, like the spectacles she had been issued by Dottor Florio. Whenever he entered the classroom he would smile at her, and pinch the arms of his spectacles between his fingers, as if he were saying, look, today we are both wearing our ridiculous contraptions. He did not mind if she moved her head around in arcs and circles until she could locate the object they were drawing, or the blue suspenders lying against his shirt, or his white hair. He smelled of smoke, like a bonfire in autumn, and he was wise and kind. ‘Remember,’ he told her, ‘when there is no more hope, we shall each of us see by our mind’s eye.’

If you didn’t live in London you could probably survive on your income from self-employment alone. Enough projects come your way, you’ve established yourself as a bright new talent in the field, and there are loyal galleries. But this is a city of financial haemophilia. Rent, mortgages, Oyster cards, gas, electricity, recreation, food; it costs, even to breathe. You know only a few artists who can subsist independently. It is simply the way of it here-writers teach or moonlight as journalists, painters take civic commissions, sound engineers work in advertising, actresses pull pints and make bad receptionists.

You like your other job. You like Borwood House. It’s not the best set-up for exhibitions, hasn’t the natural light or the dimensions of the Soane or the Tate Modern, but its proportions are decent and it has character–a late-Victorian town house with high ceilings, stained glass, and dado rails intact. You helped set the place up. Angela, your oldest university friend, organised the conversion with an unlikely bank loan and some family money. She wanted you in on it and pitched it in a way that sounded exciting and feasible.
It will be a different kind of production space,
she said. Imagine it.
A little Left Bank. Licensed. Quirky. Eight pounds entry with a glass of wine maybe–it’s competitive, it’ll work. Come on, Suze,
she said,
we won’t have to fanny about with P45s any more. It’s stupid not to get a bit of security at our age.
You weren’t sure she would be able to pull it off, all the advertising, the security systems, and the introductions into the notoriously elite art circuit. But her powers of facilitation were surprising. The gallery’s reputation grew, the number of visitors increasing each year. There has been Arts Council funding. Borwood has recently hosted the drawings of Schiele and Goya. It’s the real deal.

The job is interesting enough. You don’t have to be at the gallery until midday, and it’s a short walk across the heath from the flat. You suppose you qualify as management, though this has never quite been made clear. You were solely responsible for the place while Angela was on maternity leave. You help arrange the collections, write press releases, and dress the rooms. You’re usually the last to leave. You check the thermostat, switch off the lights and lock up at 6 p.m. This gives you the champagne-diamond light of London’s mornings to be at one of the studios, or to go to the lab for printing, have a run, spread a piece of toast with butter, shower, and then step into a dress or a suit. From bohemian to corporate.

When asked, over canapés and sparkling wine at viewings and parties, what it is that you do, you say you are a curator. You say nothing about photography, the Deutsche Börse, the royal portrait. It’s simpler that way. There are days when you feel like a fraud for saying it; it isn’t what you really do, it isn’t how you see yourself. But there are days you feel like a fraud for signing your work, putting your surname to it. There’s no getting away from the man that name belongs to, he who has long been established as one of the country’s greatest landscapists, he who is one of his generation’s formidable male eccentrics.

Peter Caldicutt: reliably outspoken, dashing and dishevelled, a British Council-hating Communist who is liable to drunkenly piss in nineteenth-century museum fountains after previews, and who is the subject of two short BBC films. Your dad. His paintings were the first thing you understood to be art. You had no true notion of his reputation until you went away to art college and your tutors began asking questions about what your father was really like and whether he taught you what you knew. It was just his job, making pictures. Sometimes there was money. Other times there were spells of relying heavily on the vegetable patch in the garden and on the chicken coop, and a bit of poaching on the estate. Times when your mum worked two or three jobs. Only when you became a teenager did things seem easier, and the newfound security manifested in overseas travels, the conversion of the outbuildings, and an annual young-artist award set up in his name.

You and Danny were neither encouraged into nor intimidated out of the foundation year. Danny dropped out, predictably, and seemed only to want to go because you were going.
I’ll enrol if you do, Suze.
You finished with high marks and applied to universities. In the acceptance letter from Goldsmiths they asked for grades much lower than the prospectuses had indicated. If you’d been Susan Smith or Jones, Patel or McMillan, no doubt it would have been different. But you were Susan Caldicutt. You were, after a fashion, a celebrity daughter. Your dad was madly proud, and oblivious to the fact that he might have had, inadvertently, a hand in everything.

But even left to your own devices, there was not much chance you’d have been a brain surgeon or an accountant. Not with this colossal man in the foreground, who smoked dope and rock-climbed with the Earl’s sons, who walked around either stark bollock-naked or dressed for the theatre, who bivouacked next to precipitous cairns and had parties wilder than you and Danny. Not with the mysterious, rag-strewn room upstairs in the cottage, intermittently rendered off-limits by this seven-foot, wild-eyed, bereted king, and host to, it seemed when you were young, all the summits of human expression possible. Not with those vertiginous oil paintings hung in every alcove-even over the toilet-which you could stare at for hours and still never be able to say what it was about them you loved.

There was no getting around your father. His vim. His magnetism. The stories he used to tell you, about
The Scenes, Those Days, The Decade.
About Picasso and St Ives and LSD. At your school he was known as
The Beardy Weirdy,
or
Caldicurser
–the dad who swore all the time, regardless of the teachers.
Had a good bloody day, kids? Give the car a shove, the fucking battery’s dead again.

There were times you didn’t get on. Times when he infuriated and embarrassed you, was too loud and opinionated, too unmanageable–going on the radio, telling it like he saw it, being controversial, not being sober.
I’m not black and I’m not a lesbian, but I like a drink, and that’s what you people find interesting about me. Not the fucking art, you ignorant bastards, looking for your industry darlings and your Oxford crew. Howay, you wouldn’t recognise talent if it crawled up inside your arse-hole.
The dead airwaves. The apologies. There were times you wanted him to just be normal. To just shut up for a minute. You had your spats, your rows, and your rebellions over the years, though what constituted a rebellion when you had permission to curse, get laid, get high, travel abroad, all before you were sixteen, you never really knew.

You disliked yourself for not liking him. You always wanted to have your mum’s stoicism or Danny’s attitude of acceptance. It was so admirable, your brother’s approach to dealing with him. Do as Dad does. Drink the lethal homebrew. Get loaded. Dance in the supermarket. Read the poetry out loud. Be unabashed, be uninhibited, be free. Join the madness, is what it amounted to. Put on lunatic garb like the Emperor. And Danny never minded; he could always go there. Danny, with his family zest and his eternally game spirit. Danny with his early weakness for booze and weed, and his advocacy of all things liberal and life-affirming.

Even these last few years, the gap was there.
Wilse wants us home for Guy Fawkes,
your brother would inform you over the phone,
he’s planning some kind of shindig. He’s built the Houses of Parliament up on the moor.
And you’d complain, and he’d say,
Hey, come on, it’ll be a laugh. I’m making a mini-Blair for the roof. He’s got a rocket in his arse.
You might be the artist, but you’re also the impostor. Danny was the true chip off the old block, the apple not far fallen from the crooked tree.

Your commute on foot to the gallery, over the blustery stretch of heath, is almost satisfying enough to make living in the city worthwhile. This is what you tell yourself every day. It’s nothing like your formative landscape though, nothing like the wet invigorating ticking in the air up there, the ripe horizons, the freshened skin. But it’s the trade-off for demanding something more cosmopolitan out of life, for weighted salaries, opportunity, and being able to get a takeaway at 4 a.m.

You’re fond of the heath. While others scream themselves hoarse and escalate their blood pressure on the M25, or sardine it on the tube, you get to stroll across this cultivated wilderness. The stress of the city is temporarily jettisoned here. Kids canter about in pleated school uniforms, launching plastic sandwich boxes on the pond. Cat-hipped mothers push prams and lend lip-gloss to each other while dogs hurtle after balls. This is the meteorological zoo where the city keeps its winds. Up above, kites with streamers pitch and drag in the buffeting air. As you walk your hair straightens, your skirt snaps and flutters. In the summer you watch people wilt on blankets and pet heavily, like the couples on the prohibition signs at swimming pools. In winter, fog and rain obscure the racks of period houses on either side. You squint and step off the tarmac paths bisecting the expanse and lose your coordinates momentarily. You pretend it is your home county underfoot, crusty with moor grass and prudishly draped with cloud. Ten minutes after setting off across the heath, you arrive at work.

The current exhibition will be something of a novelty. You still aren’t entirely sure about its concept. At first you did not like the idea at all. Being something of a purist, it sounded to you like a gimmick, its focus on personality rather than art. You thought the public wouldn’t want to pay to see a collection of memento mori and soiled knick-knacks. But Angela was gung-ho as usual. She secured loans from private museums, archives and well-off families, and the show is going ahead. Currently en route to Borwood House are a number of heavily insured dispatches containing some real anthropological curiosities. There are combs, and surrealist pipes, callipers, brass-handled syringes with needles still bearing addict DNA, tooth-cups and hairbrushes. There’s a wicker girdle used by Manet that is currently listing in the Channel, waiting for permission to enter the port of Dover. There are spectacles, monocles, inkwells, and beads. A pair of bed slippers. A lock of hair from Kokoschka’s infamous doll. There are handkerchiefs, photographs, letters, and the Italian diary, which Tom is translating.

You thought your father, of all people, would disapprove. You thought he would issue you with one of his standard lectures about idiotic administration, money wasted,
dimwits with purse strings.
But he did not. Instead he seems peculiarly interested in the items of the collection. Last night you rang to see how your parents were, to check in, to tell them what you are doing and to reassure them, as you do most days now, that they still have one of their offspring. His spirits lifted a little when you talked about the exhibition.
Hey, I bet there’s some bloody deviant stuff, eh Suze? I bet there’s vintage dildos and all sorts of jiggery-pokery. Those randy old sods! When’s the opening? You’ll get us on the bloody list, eh?

It was nice to hear his gigantic old voice back again, banging down the phone after weeks of quiet depression, good to imagine him sitting in his usual chair with his foot up, balancing the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, and rolling his tobacco into a black paper while he nattered on with you. His great rimy sole stretched out towards the hearth, toes furling and unfurling. You were midway through a sentence when he clattered the phone to the floor and you heard him yell out
I’ll be back in a minute, Sue.
Then squeaking stair boards, and silence except for a faint crackle down the line. After several minutes he picked the receiver up again.
I just needed a pee.
You talked a while longer, then said goodbye.

After you hung up, you thought about the place downstairs in Shoreditch. You’d walked along its corridor with Tom, not touching, but close together. There was the smell of something sweet in the air, like unpasteurised honey, speckled with pollen and lustrous. There were liquorice-black doors with small windows. You’d expected a worse environment, somewhere silty and culpable. You’d expected disturbing scenes inside. Multiples. People being stretched and held down perhaps. Everything done roughly and expressions of distress, breasts being flung and rocked beneath bodies. As you walked down the corridor you wished for a moment you hadn’t come here with him, and you weren’t sure how it had happened, how it had been agreed. It was only the second time you’d arranged to meet in the city. In the bar you’d had a drink, two drinks. You had both heard of the place, but you don’t know which of you suggested it. Because of what you’d begun doing you felt adventurous. You felt upended, sensed the lees of sex drifting in the air around you. The idea seemed un-boundaried and appropriate.

When you looked through the glass pane it was very delicate, exquisite even. A man kneeling in front of a woman, giving her oral sex. A second man came into the room. He entered her by fractions; pain and rapture registered on her face, though she must have been used to it. The glass panel was thin enough to hear their sounds. She was shaved. You couldn’t see it all. The act was carried out as if you were not there looking. Watching excited Tom and his reaction excited you. Afterwards, you wanted each other urgently. You tore your dress on the railing of the churchyard. He couldn’t stop himself coming inside you.

You could say you didn’t mean for it to happen. You could say that it is out of your hands, out of your control. You are simply searching for feeling, for meaning, and it was this that sent you to him the first time, and to the hotels, and to that accommodating place of voyeurs. It is this which made you show him the hidden clasp of your dress under your lifted arm, while your other hand held his wrist, letting go of it as he worked his fingers across your ribcage, to your softly polished nipple. It is a workable defence. These exchanges are simply a confirmation of life to your entropic atoms, an attempt to reverse the exodus of your psyche. You are simply grief fucking. But you are too good at it. This beautiful wet correction, this deep erotic. You are too generous and emotional at his mouth and his prick not to recognise the possibility of something else, something meaningful. You have both become reckless. Once Angela was still in the building, holding their baby on her lap, nursing it. You kissed, only two doors away from her, after he found you sitting in the cloakroom, your mobile pressed against your forehead, having scrolled no further in the index than Danny’s undeleted number.