Where Love Lies (11 page)

‘No, darling, you fell off and broke your arm, don’t you remember? You had to wear a cast for weeks.
You wanted flamingos drawn all over it.’

Gazing at the picture now, I don’t remember breaking my arm. I must have broken it; I could see the thin line of healing on the X-ray, and I didn’t remember any other time I could have broken it. But my memory is of being caught in my mother’s arms. Surrounded by her hug, put safely back on my feet again.

‘It’s funny,’ I say to Quinn now, ‘how you remember
some things and not others. Isn’t it?’

He makes a sound of assent and I feel him waiting to hear more. But it’s so quiet here. I’ll be overheard.

‘It’s quite difficult,’ I tell him. ‘It makes me miss her.’

‘I understand. We can leave if you want.’

I shake my head. ‘No, you planned this. And now that I’m here, I feel that I should look. I just … I don’t think I can talk about it. So much of
it is so hard to explain.’

‘You don’t have to say anything.’ He takes my hand. ‘I completely understand.’

But he doesn’t. How can he? He hasn’t lost his mother. He’s always known his father. He’s always been secure of his place in the world, knowing he belonged there, and there’s nothing that could shake it away from him. Quinn doesn’t carry layers of loss and grief and guilt. He’s straightforward
and sincere. He’s never been hijacked by the past when he was least expecting it.

‘Let’s just look at the pictures,’ I say.

So much for the here and now.

I last about forty-five minutes before my head starts to throb with everything I’m containing in it. I rub my temples, which is enough of a hint for Quinn, who’s been watching me much more attentively than he’s been looking at the paintings.

‘Do you want to take a break?’ he says immediately. ‘There’s a café on the second floor.’

‘Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll meet you there. I need to find a loo.’

‘Maybe they have proper tea.’

‘I wouldn’t count on it. This is America. Tea bag with a string in a cup of lukewarm water.’

‘I’ll do my best.’ He squeezes my hand, kisses my cheek. ‘See you in a minute, love.’

As soon as he’s gone,
I can feel that I’m exhausted. My legs are shaking and though I don’t actually need the loo, when I reach the cloakroom, I put down the seat in one of the cubicles and sit on it, my head sinking into my hands. I’m sure that Quinn planned to spend at least another hour here, but I’ve had enough. I need to stop remembering and clear my head.

The coolness inside the ladies’ room makes me feel a
bit better. I sit until my legs are steadier, then I emerge from the cubicle, splash my face with water, put some more lipstick on. It makes me look more like myself in the present. We’ve seen three portraits of me, aside from the one of me on the elephant, and in none of them am I wearing lipstick. Or a wedding ring.

As I head back through the gallery, looking for the stairs, I wonder what my
mother would think of all this. The paintings are on loan from various collectors, mostly wealthy ones, although some have been lent to the gallery by Esther’s friends. Those are ones she would have given away. She never treated her work as if it were of any value. She wrote notes to my teachers on the back of old sketches; she sometimes used drawings as kindling in the fire.

Of course it’s that
cavalier attitude to her own work that means that her paintings now, after her death, are worth so much money and are so in demand. I’ve lost count of how many phone calls and emails I’ve ignored, how many letters I’ve binned, asking if I have any more work of hers for sale.

It was the same way with all of her belongings. If someone complimented her on a hat, say, she would pluck it off her head
and press it on the person who’d spoken. People came and went in her life in a similar fashion. Some lovers she stayed friends with, some – like my father – she let go. She never went backwards and she never held on to anything or anyone, except for me.

‘Walk lightly,’ she always told me. ‘Take nothing you can’t leave behind.’

I have tried to walk lightly but I can’t. Not as thoroughly as Esther
could. I hold on to things and re-use them. I have favourite books which I have carried with me from country to country, house to house. I’ve kept my favourite jacket for nearly fifteen years. I have a plastic box of photographs. I collect pretty items, postcards and dried flowers and rhinestone hair clips and shoes.

I have a husband. I have a cottage and a mortgage. I’ve accumulated a whole
life, much of it since my mother died.

I stop. I dig in my handbag and take out a handful of leaflets and maps about New York. There’s a comb and an extra lipstick and an unused tissue and a mirror and some acorns that I found in Central Park yesterday. I squat down and put it all on the polished floor in an untidy pile, an offering to my mother. For a moment I’m tempted to pick up the spare
lipstick, because I quite like the colour, but I stand and walk away, a little lighter.

Against the odds, I’m smiling, and when I turn the corner I’m completely unprepared for what I see.

FRANGIPANI
.

It surrounds him in clouds of white and yellow, brighter because he stands half in shadow. He’s naked from the waist up, and the flowers give a glow to his skin, or perhaps his skin lends it to the flowers. It’s golden, his skin, golden and perfect. His hair is dishevelled, too long, glinting with warmth; one hand holds a flower, about to drop it.

I stand, mouth agape,
eyes wide, staring at him. He’s nine feet tall and rendered in strokes of oil paint.

‘Hello, Ewan,’ I whisper.

His eyes are bright blue. They gaze out of the painting as if they’re alive, as if the frame and the blank walls around it don’t exist. As if years have been erased and he’s standing here in front of me again.

The first time I saw him, he looked like this. Except he was naked.

I was
late, of course. It was July and I had a sunburn from spending all morning reading on one of the carved benches in St Pancras Gardens. The strap of my shoulder bag rubbed against my skin and I had to keep on stopping to switch sides. It was completely my own fault that I was late; I’d left the garden late, reading an extra chapter, because I was procrastinating. I hated life drawing. I wasn’t particularly
good at it, even though I’d watched my mother effortlessly drawing people for all of my life. Maybe because I’d watched her, I knew how rubbish I was. My own drawings of human beings were awkward and half-imaginary; I could never quite translate what I saw in real life to what I put down on the page, so they ended up looking cartoonish. Freakish. And of course in a life-drawing class,
there was always someone looking over your shoulder and you couldn’t take your drawing away to fix before you showed it to anyone else.

But I wanted to go to art school, because drawing was the only thing I was halfway good at. Drawing owls, mostly. And if you wanted to go to art school, you needed a portfolio. And if you scraped by doing the minimum of work in your art A-levels and then spent
the next eighteen months faffing around the world having fun, you needed to take summer classes at Central Saint Martins to bump up your portfolio.

When I got to the correct room I was dripping with sweat and it felt as if I had a blister on either side of my neck. I pushed open the door with both hands and burst in.

‘Sorry,’ I gasped. A dozen heads swivelled away from their drawings and towards
me. From this vantage point, I couldn’t see the model, but I could see the beginnings of drawings in charcoal and pencil. It was a man, a young man from the looks of it.

‘There’s a space over here,’ the instructor said quietly to me and I gave all my attention to weaving between the other students and not knocking over their easels with my bag. I didn’t like drawing young people, especially.
Older people were more interesting. I preferred drawing wrinkles. If a life model had a perfect body, if they were beautiful, it only highlighted how faithless and ugly my drawing was. The first week, we’d had a stunning, slim young woman who was probably a catwalk model in her other life, and I’d made her look pretty much like a nude Cruella DeVil.

I set up my pad on the easel and I selected
my charcoal and I wiped sweat away from my forehead with the back of my hand. Then, steeling myself for failure, I looked at the model.

He was looking directly at me.

It was like sticking my finger into a plug socket. My burned skin tingled. The hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck rose. I stepped backwards and exhaled an audible squeak.

His eyes were this incredible blue, ridiculously
blue, as if they’d been coloured in with a swimming-pool-coloured crayon in a brighter hue than the rest of the room. Eyes should not be that blue. He should not be looking at me. He should be staring fixedly into the distance because he was a life model.

There was half a smile on his face. He’d heard me squeaking. He was looking at me because I’d just made a spectacle of myself crashing in late
and then I’d been squeaking instead of calmly drawing, like a woman of the world who had seen countless naked men before.

I had in fact seen a lot of naked men. There were always naked men and women going in and out of my mother’s studio; I frequently brought them cups of tea and sometimes had to lend them my dressing gown. Also, I was twenty years old and I had been around the world. I’d had
boyfriends. I’d had sex. I was staring at this life model as if he were Adam and I were a gobsmacked Eve.

He was beautiful, all lean muscle, smooth chest, flawless skin. The ripple of his ribs was visible, and the scattering of hair on his chest and belly. He sat on a wooden stool and, probably fortunately for me, his genitals were hidden by his thigh. He was, of course, looking in my direction
because that was the pose he had chosen. He just happened to have his head turned to this side of the room, where he could see the woman whose brains had temporarily deserted her.

‘Are you all right?’ whispered the instructor. She knew my mother and was inclined to be kind to me because of it. Though that made it worse for me, because my work could never live up to my genetic inheritance.

‘I’m
fine,’ I said, with lips that had gone numb. ‘Just … observing.’ I raised my charcoal to my page. My palm was slick with sweat. My fingers were trembling. I made a mark – tentative, random.

‘Interesting,’ murmured the instructor and then, mercifully, she walked away.

I tried to draw. I tried to look at the page. I made other marks, supposedly the line of his arm, the tilt of his head. They were
wrong, and besides, he kept on looking at me. His face had gone serious now. He looked as if he were thinking. Thinking about me.

I tore off the top sheet and tried again. But it was so hard to keep my eyes on the paper. And I should be observing his body, but his gaze kept catching mine. All this eye-contact. In a normal situation you would never stare at someone like this, right into their
eyes, without speaking. It would never feel as if their gaze had taken hold of you, captured you with all that blueness, stolen all your thoughts, erased everyone else from the room.

‘Shall we take a break?’ The instructor’s voice broke the silence and the people around me started to move, to stretch, to speak to each other. The model turned his head to something said to him and I was able, at
last, to see what I’d done on my paper. It was a mess. It was random lines and smudges, the drawing of a four-year-old. My skin hot, I hurriedly ripped the page off and crumpled it into a ball.

‘Hi,’ said someone, and I knew without looking that it was him. Sometimes, quite often, the models moved around the room to see what people had drawn. I shoved the crumpled paper into my bag and tried
a nonchalant smile.

He’d wrapped a cloth around his waist. But it was his eyes that I saw. ‘Hi,’ I said. I felt breathless. ‘I’m sorry, my drawing was crap.’

‘Fancy a coffee, after?’

That half a smile he’d had when I came in, had widened to a full one. Oh no. He’d seen me staring at him. He thought I was an easy conquest. He thought I was a silly little girl with clumsy feet and shaking hands.
I should say no.

‘Okay,’ I heard myself say.

‘I’ll meet you at the front of the building,’ he said. ‘Once I’m dressed.’

‘Are we ready for the next pose?’ called the instructor.

I stand, now, in front of this painting of Ewan done by my mother. Two shadows of people who have left my life, in this one piece of art and memory. I check the white plaque by the painting, which says it is on loan
from the owner, Mrs T. Kilgore from Florida. It’s been in her house, sheltered from the tropical sun, for ten years. Mrs T. Kilgore of Florida has gazed at Ewan every day without knowing the story of the painting: what happened before, what happened next, what has happened since. She has only known the title:
Portrait of a Young Man in Love
.

And Ewan stands there unchanged. He’s so fresh. So
tender. Of a piece with the petals before they fall.

My arms are gooseflesh. If I took a step forward I could step into the painting – a shadow myself – and touch him again for the first time, palm to palm, across a table.

Live it all again.

I stood on the pavement with sweat collecting in the small of my back, running the strap of my bag through my hands. It had got hotter while we were inside,
as the asphalt and buildings collected the heat and radiated it back out again. All of the rest of the people in the life-drawing class had already filed past me, several of them giving me curious looks. He wasn’t coming. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d nipped out of the back door as soon as he was dressed. He’d been looking the other way during the other poses, but I still hadn’t been able
to draw anything. Tracing the line of his back or the curve of his buttocks with my charcoal was too similar to touching him. And I wanted to touch him so much that I couldn’t bear any substitute.

He was probably a wanker. He was probably full of himself. You had to be pretty full of yourself to stand in front of a whole load of people in a room and let them draw you naked, right?