He’d thrown himself into it for the next two years, first as a member of one class or another which she offered the community, then later on as a private student, alone with her. In winter they used a live model in the studio. In summer they took easels, sketch pads, and paints out into the country and worked off the land. Often they sketched each other as an exercise in understanding the human anatomy—the sternocleidomastoid muscles, Tony, she would say and put her fingertips to her neck, try to think of them like cords right beneath the skin. And always she filled the environment with music. Listen to me, if you stimulate one sense, you stimulate others, she explained, art can’t be created if the artist himself is an insensate void. See the music, hear it, feel it, feel the art. And the music would start—a haunting array of Celtic folktunes, a Beethoven symphony, a salsa band, an African mass called the Missa Luba, the nerve-shaving whine of electric guitars.
In the presence of her intensity and dedication, he’d begun to feel as if he’d emerged from forty-three years of darkness to find himself walking in sunlight at last. He felt completely renewed. He felt his interest engaged and his intellect challenged. He felt emotions spring to life. And for six straight months before she became his lover, he called it all the pursuit of his art. There was, after all, a certain safety in that. It did not beg an answer for the future.
Sarah, he thought, and he marvelled at the fact that even now—after everything, even after Elena—he could still wish to murmur the name that he hadn’t allowed himself to say for the past eight months since Justine had accused and he had confessed.
They’d pulled up to the old school on a Thursday evening, just at the time he’d usually arrived. The lights were on and a fire was burning—he could see its shifting glow through the drawn front curtains—and he knew that Sarah was expecting him and that music would be playing and a dozen or more sketches would be strewn among the pillows on the floor. And that she would come to meet him when the doorbell rang, that she would run to meet him, throw open the door, and draw him inside saying Tonio I’ve had the most marvellous idea about how to compose that picture of the woman in Soho, you know the one that’s been making me wild for a week…
I can’t do this, he said to Justine. Don’t ask me to do this. It’s going to destroy her.
I don’t much care what it’s going to do to her, Justine replied and got out of the car.
She must have been passing the door when they rang the bell, because she answered it just as the dog began to bark. She called over her shoulder, Flame, stop it it’s Tony you know Tony you silly thing. And then she turned back to the door, to the sight of them both—he in the foreground and his wife in the background and the portrait wrapped in brown paper and held under his arm.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even move. She merely looked beyond him to where his wife stood, and her face summed up the count of his sin. Betrayal works in two directions, Tonio, she’d said in the past. And he understood that clearly when she dropped into place that insubstantial patina of breeding and civility that she actually believed was going to protect her.
Tony, she said.
Anthony, Justine said.
They walked into the house. Flame trotted out of the sitting room with an old knotted sock between his teeth and he barked through it happily at the sight of a friend. Silk looked up from a doze by the fire and undulated his long serpent tail in lazy greeting.
Now, Anthony, Justine said.
He lacked the will: to do it, to refuse, even to speak.
He saw Sarah look at the painting. She said, What have you brought me, Tonio, as if Justine were not standing at his side.
There was an easel in the sitting room and he unwrapped the painting and set it there. He expected her to fly to it when she saw the great smears of red, white, and black that obscured the smiling faces of his daughter. But instead she simply approached it slowly, and she gave a low cry when she saw what she had to have known she would see on the bottom of the frame. The little brass plaque. The scrolled ELENA.
He heard Justine move. He heard her say his name, and he felt her press the knife into his hand. It was a sturdy vegetable knife. She’d taken it from the drawer in the kitchen of their house. She’d said get it out of my life, get her out of my life, you’ll do it tonight and I’ll be there to make sure.
He made the first cut in a blaze that mixed both anger and despair. He heard Sarah cry No! Tony! and felt her fingers on his fist and saw the red of her blood when the knife slid across the back of her knuckles to carve a pathway through the canvas again. And then the third cut, but by that time, she had backed away with her bleeding hand held like a child against her, not crying because she wouldn’t do that, not in front of him, not in front of his wife.
That’s enough, Justine said. She turned and left.
He followed her out. He hadn’t said a single word.
She had talked one night in class about the risk and the reward of making art personal, of offering little here-and-there bits of one’s essence to a public who might misunderstand, ridicule, or reject. Although he had listened dutifully to her words, he had not understood the meaning behind them until he had seen her face when he destroyed the painting. It wasn’t a reaction to the weeks and months of effort it had taken her to complete it for him, nor was it a response to his mutilation of a gift. It was simply that three times he had driven the knife through what had represented to Sarah the most singular manner in which she could show him compassion and love.
This was, perhaps, the greatest of his sins. To have prompted the gift. To have ripped it to pieces.
He took his watercolours—those terribly safe apricots and poppies—from the wall above the sofa. They left two darker spots on the wall-paper, but that couldn’t be helped. No doubt Justine would find something suitable to replace them.
She said, “What are you doing? Anthony, answer me.” She sounded frightened.
“Finishing things,” he said.
He carried the paintings out into the hall and balanced one carefully, thoughtfully, on the tips of his fingers. You can copy, she said, but can you create?
The last four days had given him the answer that two full years with her had failed to provide. Some people create. Others destroy.
He smashed the painting against the newel post at the foot of the stairway. Glass shattered and fell onto the parquet floor like crystal rain.
“Anthony!” Justine grasped his arm. “Don’t! Those are your paintings. They’re your art. Don’t!”
He smashed the second with even greater force. He felt the pain of connecting with the wooden post shoot like a cannonball through his arm. Glass flew up at his face.
“I have no art,” he said.
Despite the cold, Barbara took her cup of coffee out into the ruined rear garden of her house in Acton and sat down on the cold block of concrete that served as the back step. She pulled her coat more closely round her and balanced the coffee cup on the top of one knee. It was not black dark outside—it never could be when one was surrounded by several million people and a teeming metropolis—but the heavy night shadows still made the garden a less familiar place than was the inside of the house, and thus a place less weighted down by the conflict that sprang from the opposing forces of guilt-ridden memory and simple necessity.
What kind of bond truly exists between a parent and child, she wondered. And at what point does it finally become necessary to break or perhaps redefine that bond? And in either case, is breaking or redefining even possible?
During the last ten years of her life, she had grown to believe that she would never have children. At first, the realisation was a source of pain to her, inextricably connected as it was to the knowledge that she would probably never marry. She knew quite well that marriage was not a prerequisite for parenthood. Single-parent adoptions happened more and more, and with her career finally off the ground, she would be a serious contender in the pool of prospective single parents seeking a child. Should she volunteer for a hard-to-place child, her success would be virtually guaranteed. But, perhaps too conventionally, she had always seen parenthood as a joint venture between two partners. And as the likelihood of a partner in her life grew more remote every year, the distant possibility of becoming a mother grew more hazy-edged, more like a fantasy ungrounded even slightly in the reality of her circumstances.
It wasn’t something she thought of very often. Most of the time she was simply too busy to dwell upon a future that felt like ice. But while most people, getting older, experienced the growth of family and the increase in connection brought about by the ties of marriage and children, her own family was steadily diminishing now, and her own connections were being severed one by one. Her brother, her father, both dead and buried. And now she faced the prospect of cutting the final tie with her mother as well.
In the end, life is all about seeking reassurance, she thought, we’re all engaged in looking for some kind of sign that will tell us we’re not really alone. We want a bond, an anchor that will hold us fast to a landmass of belonging somewhere, of being close to someone, of having something more than the clothes on our backs or the houses we live in or the cars that we drive. And in the end we can only gain that reassurance through people. No matter how we fill our lives with the trappings of a carefree independence, we still want the bond. Because a vital connection with another human being always carries the potential to act as a viable approbation of the self. If I am loved, I am worthy. If I am needed, I am worthy. If I maintain this relationship in the face of all difficulties, I am somehow whole.
What, indeed, was the real difference between Anthony Weaver and herself? Wasn’t her behaviour—like his—governed inherently by an anxiety that the world might withdraw its approval of her? Didn’t her behaviour—like his—mask a desperation which rose from the same insidious source, guilt?
“Mum had a fine day today, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson had said. “She started out a bit rough round the edges, though. At first, she wouldn’t mind me at all and she kept calling me Doris. Then she wouldn’t eat her teacakes. And she wouldn’t have her soup. When the postman came, she thought it was your dad and she wouldn’t let me hear the end of wanting to be off with him. To Majorca, she said. Jimmy promised me Majorca, she said. And when I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t Jimmy, she tried to chuck me out the door. But she finally settled down.” Her hand fluttered nervously upwards towards her wig like an indecisive bird and she touched her fingers to the stiff, grey curls. “She hasn’t wanted to go to the loo, though. I can’t think why. But the telly’s on for her. And she’s been as good as gold for the last three hours.”
Barbara found her in the sitting room, in her husband’s tattered easy chair, lolling back into the greasy indentation which his head had made over the years. The television was roaring at a volume that accommodated Mrs. Gustafson’s failing hearing. It was Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The film that had that line about whistling. Barbara had seen it at least a dozen times, and she shut it off just as Bacall made her final shimmy across the room in Bogart’s direction. Barbara had always liked that moment best. She’d always liked its veiled promise of the future.
“Now she’s all right, Barbie,” Mrs. Gustafson said anxiously from the doorway. “You can see she’s all right.”
Mrs. Havers was slumped to one side in the chair. Her mouth was slack. Her hands played with the hem of her dress which she’d drawn up to the height of her thighs. The air surrounding her was foetid with the odour of excrement and urine.
“Mum?” Barbara said.
She didn’t respond although she hummed four notes as if with the intention of beginning a song.
“See how quiet and nice she can get?” Mrs. Gustafson said. “She can be a real jewel, can your mum, when she wants.”
On the floor just inches from her mother’s feet, the hose of the vacuum cleaner was curled into a coil.
“What’s that doing here?” Barbara asked.
“Now, Barbie, it does help keep her—”
Barbara felt something inside her give way, like a dam that crumbles when it cannot contain the pressure-build of standing water any longer. “Didn’t you even notice that she’d messed herself?” she said to Mrs. Gustafson. She found it a miracle that her voice sounded so calm.
Mrs. Gustafson blanched. “Messed? Why, Barbie, you must be mistaken. I asked her twice. She didn’t want the loo.”
“Can’t you smell her? Haven’t you checked her? Have you left her alone?”
Mrs. Gustafson’s lips quivered with a hesitant smile. “I can see you’re feeling a bit put out, Barbie. But if you’ve spent some time with her—”
“I’ve spent years with her. I’ve spent my whole life with her.”
“I only meant to say—”
“Thank you, Mrs. Gustafson. You won’t be needed again.”
“Why, I—” Mrs. Gustafson clutched at the front of her dress, approximately in the location of her heart. “After all I’ve done.”
“That’s right,” Barbara said.
Now, she stirred restlessly on the back step, feeling the cold seeping through her trousers, trying to force from her mind the image of her mother as flaccid as a rag doll in that chair, reduced to inertia. Barbara had bathed her, feeling struck to sadness at the sight and the feeling of her withered flesh. She led her to bed, tucked in the covers, and turned out the light. Through it all, her mother did not say a word. She was like the living dead.
Sometimes the right thing to do is also the most obvious thing to do, Lynley had said. There was truth in that. She had known from the first what had to be done, what was right, what was best, what would serve her mother. It was in the fear of being judged as a callous and indifferent child—by what she knew was largely a callous and indifferent world—that Barbara had floundered, waiting for direction, instruction, or permission that wasn’t going to come. The decision rested with her, as it always had. What she hadn’t realised was that judgement rested with her as well.
She pushed herself off the step and went into the kitchen. The smell of mouldy cheese was in the air. There were dishes to be washed and a floor to be scrubbed and a dozen distractions to allow her to avoid the inevitable for at least another hour. But she’d been avoiding it since her father’s death in March. She couldn’t do so forever. She went to the phone.
Odd to think that she’d memorised the number. She must have known from the first that she’d be using it again.
The phone rang four times on the other end. A pleasant voice said, “Mrs. Flo here. Hawthorn Lodge.”
Barbara spoke on a sigh. “This is Barbara Havers. I wonder if you remember meeting my mother Monday night?”