I’d rather not, Jane said immediately. Like I say, I’m actually pretty used to the smell.
Her mother was quite a successful painter, she went on. It was all she’d ever cared about really – she probably shouldn’t ever have had children, except that it was what you did in those days. She doesn’t think much of what I do, Jane said. Even Jane’s recent commission to photograph the Waitrose Christmas brochure had failed to impress her. She hates food in any case, Jane said. There was never anything to eat when we were growing up. Even the freezer was full of dead animals, and not the sort you’d want to have for dinner. Other kids had fish fingers and choc ices in their freezers: Jane had half-decomposed vermin. Marsden Hartley’s experiences of starvation, she added, were another source of affinity: they had rendered him both obsessed with food and terrified of it. He compensated for the episodes of hunger by overeating when the opportunity arose. It was said that, at the end of his life, he ate himself to death. It was another of those instances of dramatisation: Jane herself had eating problems – what woman didn’t – but in her case it wasn’t a question of will and control, or at least it hadn’t started that way. Her mother’s mental and often physical absences had resulted in her being, as a child, underfed: as an adult she remained haunted by hunger and by the knowledge that if she ever started to eat, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
I take photographs of food, she said, instead of eating it.
After reading about Marsden Hartley eating himself to death, she had tried to find out more about what had actually happened. She ploughed through countless pages on his brushstrokes and his influences, his developmental phases and his turning points, but no one had much to say on the subject of his eating problems. I suppose there wasn’t the language for it then, she said. In all the photographs she’d seen of him, he was a tall, narrow man with a lifted, bird-like face, but then finally, one day, she’d come across a black-and-white photo of him late in life. He was standing in an empty room, a white space – it looked like a gallery, except that there were no pictures on the walls – and he was wearing a big black overcoat buttoned up over his enormous body. His head on its still-narrow neck came out of the top, so that it looked almost dissociated from the mass beneath it; his face, though older, was more or less unchanged. In fact, if anything, it looked more childlike, so naked was its expression of suffering. It was a photograph of a tormented child imprisoned in a great rock of flesh.
What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn’t really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing – no narrative flights, no plot developments, no immersive human dramas – to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time. Just his work, she said, and in the end she had the feeling that he’d done more of that than anyone had any use for. He died in his sixties, yet reading about it you’d think his life had gone on for a thousand years. Even the social life she’d envied had started to pall on her, the shallowness of it, the same competitive faces in the same rooms, the repetitiveness and lack of growth, the lack of tenderness or intimacy.
Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there. Yet when she looked at her mother, who lived alone in such squalor that frankly they’d be better off burning the house to the ground when the time came to sell it, she saw someone happy in her solitude, in her work. It’s like there’s something she doesn’t know, she said, because no one’s ever forced her to know it.
I asked whether, had a different artist been showing at the gallery that morning in Paris, she might have recognised a different narrative, or at least a narrative that combined the same elements in a different way.
She looked at me in silence with her small, unreadable eyes.
Is that what you think? she said.
I had in fact seen a painting by Marsden Hartley. It was several years ago, in a gallery in New York: I had been there with my husband and children, I told her, on holiday, and we had gone into the gallery to get out of the rain. The painting was a seascape: it showed a heaving wall of white water, a rising cumulus strewn with lozenges of blue and green whose volcanic unfolding lay somewhere in the painting’s future. I had stood and looked at the painting while my children, who were still small, grew increasingly impatient; I had seemed to see in it a portent whose meaning penetrated me like a skewer in my chest. I could see it, in fact, still, the turbulent whiteness massing and gathering, the wave whose inability to stop itself rising and breaking formed its inescapable destiny. It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist’s vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again. But there had been other paintings, I said, before and since, that had moved me just as deeply.
I’ve got three hundred thousand words of notes, she said coldly. I can’t just throw them away.
The smell from the basement had become so overpowering that I got up and opened the window. I looked down at the deserted street, the rows of parked cars, the trees that were losing their leaves so that their branches had begun to show, like bare limbs through rags. The air came in, surprisingly cool and rapid.
Why not? I said.
I’m not listening to this, she said. I don’t want to hear this.
When I turned around I was met by the sight of her in the undulating landscape of dust sheets, the whiteness broken by the blue and green shapes of her clothing. Her face was stricken.
Obviously, I said, she could do what she liked, and I would help her as much as I could.
But I’d be wasting my time, she said.
Not wasting it, I said. But spending it.
I asked her to tell me about the evening in Paris that she had spent with the photojournalist, the night before her discovery of Marsden Hartley.
She looked at me quizzically.
Why do you want to know about that? she said.
I said I didn’t quite know why.