The Exhibitionist, page 13
‘So get me a drink,’ he says. ‘Can’t believe that a daughter of mine would buy green shoes. They look like gherkins.’
‘Actually –’ she begins. She changed at the last minute, from boots her mother bought her, which he had objected to on Leah’s behalf. These are Portuguese and made of bamboo fibre, but that will give him more amusement than he deserves.
‘Where’s that elderly boyfriend of yours?’
‘I said not to, Dad.’
‘Well, he is ancient. Unlike me.’
‘Oh hello!’ says Martyn, hurrying in from somewhere, red-cheeked and excited-looking. ‘Girlfriend!’ He gives her a hello-kiss. ‘Where were you?’
They’re separated from Ray by a wall of admirers. Her brother’s come in behind him, smelling of cold. He seems fraught; his senses are on the outside, like a pioneering surgical experiment. He gives her a little nervous grin, but Ray will feel left out if they make a song and dance of their reunion.
‘It just seems odd to put himself through an exhibition,’ says Jess quietly to Martyn. She points at Ray with her chin, as if their eyes aren’t all on him already; you’re always gauging his mood, knowing exactly where he is in the room. ‘Why is he doing it? I’m worried.’
‘Isn’t she always?’ says Martyn to Leah.
‘I didn’t make him do it,’ Leah replies hotly. ‘Our father is an artist. Since before you were born. Just because he wasn’t in fashion, didn’t cheapen himse—’
‘But I thought the whole point was he can’t work much. His energy . . . Has he done many? What has he shown you?’
‘You’re very tough on him,’ Martyn tells her. ‘Your sister’s right. Anyone else starving?’
‘That’s all Mum needs,’ says Jess. ‘Looking after him, then cooking for twenty.’
‘Shh,’ hisses Leah. ‘She gets all the attention. Why shouldn’t Dad have a ch—’
‘It’s not a competition. They could both . . .’
‘Don’t be naive.’ Paisley the cat jumps on the table among Ray’s private ice cubes, swishing his puffy ginger tail from side to side. ‘What is it, Paisley?’ murmurs Leah, as to a lover, picking the cat up and cradling it like an inflated furious baby. Jess averts her eyes. ‘Picklington? Paise?’
Leah’s thoughts are unknowable. Maybe she has been missing Jess, despite her opacity, the dark threads. Maybe, like Jess, she is haunted by their coolness, the rows they have about their father, the fear about their mother, and longs to repair it. She could have done. She should have. It was her move.
‘Come on, sis. It isn’t Mum’s fault that h—’
‘And he’s been working really hard for months. So we thought we’d strike while the iron’s, you know.’
‘Hot,’ offers Martyn.
‘OK. OK. Where is Mum, anyway?’
‘He deserves an exhibition,’ Leah continues, lowering her voice to a fierce whisper. ‘He’s doing, you know,’ she says, ‘despite everything, amazingly well.’
‘Ha.’
‘Don’t,’ says Leah. ‘You know it’s not easy.’
‘Well, only because . . .’ They both glance at Martyn. ‘Can you get Dad another drink?’
Jess follows her into the corridor. They stand on shoe boxes and forgotten floppy disks as if it’s perfectly normal. ‘You promised you’d talk to Dr Mac.’
Leah’s face is blank with denial. Even the new little lines on her forehead disappear. She says: ‘He’s in pain. How can I . . . How can anyone tell him . . .’ Her eyes fill with tears, again, or natural sparkle.
‘But it’s dange—’
‘He needs it. It’s not for you to deprive him of his medicine. He’s an ill man,’ Leah says. ‘And a genius.’
‘Not exactly ill.’
‘Girls,’ says Martyn, sidling out to join them. His mad hair and wonky collar should move her. ‘He’s asking after you.’
‘Anyway,’ Leah says smoothly, ‘better find glasses for this stupid extra guest, or her husband.’
‘Politicians,’ Martyn says. ‘They’re all the same. It’s OK, though, Ray knows her, she’s a fan.’
Jess’s heart crunches in her chest, hard and small and lonely. She needs her mother. Leah always says, ‘Jess and Lucia: a love story’. She claims their love is selfish, that it leaves their father out. Since the operation Jess has been too scared to visit often, because she can’t say ‘don’t die’. Will it be her father’s fags which kill Lucia? The stress of living with him? Jess can’t understand the genetics; her mind seals up when she tries. She’s waited months to see her mother, be pressed to her bobbly jumper-bosom; Lucia once said she was the light of her life.
Leah and Martyn are whispering and grinning as if she’s not there.
‘I’m going to find Mum,’ she says, and Leah, who has survived their parents, stares back at her like a stranger.
21
Dreamily, Lucia touches the side of her face and discovers she’s wearing the spirally studs Priya gave her.
‘Mum?’ she hears Leah yelling, but she’s already running upstairs.
She closes the door, opens it again, re-drapes her mother’s precious blue scarf over the dressing-table mirror, beside the graveyard of belts from when she still had a waist. It no longer smells of the past; it smells of nothing. It’s unthinkable that Priya may never meet her mother. Not for the violet depth of her eyelids, the strength of her arthritic and spotted hand, which Lucia needs to draw constantly, but because Carmel Brophy, while absolutely disgusted, would appreciate Priya’s grit, her resolve.
Priya’s mother seems to have died when she was a teenager. Every time Lucia glimpses Priya’s past pain she falls deeper; faster, even, than at the sight of the cut of her triceps, her temples, the tiny gold hoop in her uppermost ear-edge, completely hidden under that swoosh of shining hair.
Was that the phone? Definitely not the doorbell. Oh God; should she quickly change back into trousers?
This morning an urge began to creep over her: to touch the depths. Recklessly, she’d sent a message: What’s happening to us?
Quite quickly, Priya texted back: Are you scared?
I am. A bit. Are you?
Of course Priya didn’t reply.
It’s an irresistible drip of adrenaline, this permanent not-knowing. Racing around the bedroom like a rogue spaniel at Crufts, picking up ugly tops, half getting into alternative tights, she feels an edge of panic. There’s a sound in her throat, a suppressed excited scream. It’s the opposite of vertigo; she is unmoored. Any moment now, she’ll hear the diesel chug of a taxi and there will be Priya, fresh from the Chamber.
Lucia holds herself still but there’s only self-conscious laughter, creaking floorboards, the clink of glass from the living room. And then, almost before it starts, like a predator’s footstep, she hears the landline begin to ring.
She’s so sure it will be Priya, cancelling, that Marie-Claude’s accent is a relief. ‘Hello?’ she says, very quietly. ‘Oh! Please, I can’t now. I can’t, he’s here.’ The chambers of her heart are draining, like caves at low tide. ‘I will ring as soon as the weekend’s over, but I . . . sorry. What?’
‘I think you are ignoring me. Sit down,’ says Marie-Claude, possibly smiling, and something like an arrow is let loose.
‘Sorry. Sorry, sorry. I – it was difficult. I was working, amazingly, and then there’s this quite – for – you know, I told you Ray’s having this show, tomorrow; there’s a big party, food. I think you’re invited. Anyway, I couldn’t . . . OK, I’m sitting. Are you going to tell me what’s up?’
‘He is there? With you?’
Everything felt monumental: cherubs tootling through trumpets, the sky gone black. ‘Not exactly. Downstairs, with some . . . Listen, I know we need a catch-up, but there’s a lot going on. I’m a bit frazzled. Can’t I ring on Monday?’
Marie-Claude has always been intensely diplomatic about Ray. Now she says: ‘I do not care about his show, Lutsia. Listen to me. Breathe, and listen.’
Lucia tried a casual breath out. ‘I’m already— Is it something bad?’
‘Stupid,’ says Marie-Claude. ‘I want you to guess who telephoned me.’
‘Oh, I can’t. I should really . . .’
‘Guess.’
‘I’ve no idea! Whatever it is, is it really so urg—’
There is an important pause. ‘I wait,’ said Marie-Claude.
‘OK. I really ought to go. Um. The Pope.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘OK. Um. The . . . what’s exciting? A magazine?’
‘Bigger.’
‘I haven’t got . . . Bobbie?’
‘Big-ger.’
‘Another collector?’
‘James Duguid.’
‘Why,’ Lucia asks carefully, ‘would James Duguid ring?’ She leans against the bed; her chest is light.
‘So you know what it means. Yes?’
‘I do . . . I know . . . but why, why would he . . . ?’ And she thinks: Priya. I need to tell her whatever this is.
‘I know. I know. It is incredible. But completely correct.’
‘I don’t . . .’
‘They want you. Venice! It is so exciting, the most exciting. The biggest honour. It is what we dreamed of, your Dolly and now I. You in the pavilion, darling, making whatever you want, however big. Representing your country. This is the most – the greatest – accolade of all.’
‘So have you seen my lesser daughter?’ Jess hears from the living room. It’s her father’s convivial voice; it makes her teeth clench. ‘Probably looking for something to correct,’ and she imagines walking in there, telling him how he makes people feel. She could peel him to his sheeny bones, if he hadn’t raised her.
‘What,’ he says, ‘are you wittering on about?’ and she can tell he’s speaking to Martyn. She waits to hear what will happen to her next.
‘Formally,’ Martyn’s saying. There’s a feeling of something about to drop. Then she hears: ‘I know I should speak to her.’
She thinks: I’m going to be sick. Her hand grips the bannister, as if she can make courage bleed from the wood. She could run in and distract Martyn, pretend not to realize what he’s asking her father. She thought they wanted the same future: far from home and Ray. A floorboard creaks under her ugly green shoe. Is that what he wants?
She thinks: I want Mum.
Quiet foot on the bottom stair as she creeps upstairs, nicking a phone charger on the way. Lucia is murmuring in the darkness on the other side of her bedroom. Jess squints; is she lying down? Sitting on the carpet? That, or the tone of her voice, makes Jess pause with her hand on the door, listening.
‘No. Not seriously,’ Lucia says again.
‘Yes.’
‘No. You are joking. This is a – a trick.’
‘Not at all.’
Apparently, it began at Frieze. Donna Magorian, one of the British Council’s panel for the Biennale, had visited the Hertz-Chamaut booth. As luck would have it, they were showing a version of Grim: they’d paid to have it fabricated but on the small side, easily dismantled.
‘Sorry, when was this?’ says Lucia.
‘I told you! Zero-six.’
‘Oh. Then. I see.’ Lucia had been there but only in body, drifting around the huge tent on the West Side piers like a ghost. A few weeks before, hand on the door after visiting her GP for advice about Patrick, she had asked a casual question. The GP frowned. She referred Lucia for a scan, then another; the new year, in increments, turned dark. And then, although everyone said it wouldn’t, the worst did happen, a sledgehammer spinning slowly from the sky, and she stopped caring. It was like struggling to one’s feet in a rough sea, for another wave to smack one over the head.
Lucia had thought, before and afterwards, that she was over.
She had rung Marie-Claude to tell her, from a bus on Piccadilly, and Marie-Claude ran down from the gallery to meet her, with actual tears. She has a history of kindness; once at the Armory, when Lucia and Ray had a particularly horrible row in public, about how it demeaned Ray to hold her hand when they entered the tent, Marie-Claude ignored everyone else and made herself a human shield until Lucia had semi-recovered.
So, when Julian Hertz spotted Donna Magorian looking thoughtful near the Frieze booth, he told Marie-Claude, who pronto rang Lucia, who immediately wiped it from her mind.
‘So,’ Lucia is whispering into the phone, ‘hang on.’ With every piece she proves to herself that she’s both a genius and a moron but she has always suspected that Grim has a sort of strength. ‘You definitely told me? It was me?’
‘Naturally.’
‘What did I say?’
‘It is not relevant, now,’ says Marie-Claude. ‘The point is she – she – must have recommended you. On the basis of that piece.’
‘You are joking?’
‘When ever do I joke?’
‘True. But you can’t . . . it can’t be . . . I’m not even old. This is ridiculous.’
‘They have offered you a show. Not a retrospective.’
‘No.’
‘Of course I am completely serious. It is happening.’
‘You, you’re saying it’s . . . me? They’ve chosen me. My God.’
‘You represent Britain now. In that funny little hilltop palace; all the materials, the assistance, you could wish for. Let it sink into your mind.’
But it won’t. It can’t. Maybe it’s a test, devised by Ray. Then Lucia thinks: any minute Priya will arrive, and I can tell her.
‘And,’ says Marie-Claude, who sounds a bit champagney already, ‘I didn’t say to you but she also came to the stand at List.’
‘What? Last year?’
‘Yes. She greeted me. Looked for some time.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Jesus, this is too m—’
Marie-Claude snorts. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You think, what, I should stop fainting in the middle of the gallery and send you a message? And what do I say: “Lucia, it is I, this has happened, it will definitely not lead anywhere but here’s a thing to make you hope”, while you are having all that trouble with Patrique . . .’
‘But you cou—’
‘Of course I do not tell you. But I had a good feeling. They asked us for your CV, your documentation, you know.’
‘I didn’t know. How could I have, if you hadn’t . . .’
‘Well,’ says Marie-Claude, ‘there was no point. You’d be excited. Wouldn’t you?’
‘I . . .’
‘Or perhaps not. I know you and your . . . self-destruction.’ Marie-Claude pauses and, for a horrible moment, Lucia wonders if she could possibly mean Priya. No: there are other incidents, never discussed, degrading but only professionally. ‘But you understand.’
‘What?’ Lucia asks her.
‘From today everything changes. You tell Ray immediately, and start thinking of ideas. And they want us to visit next week, for meeting and feasting, and then as much time as you will. The work must be done there, as much as possible, what a hardship, so they set it up. Even somewhere for you to stay, a per diem for pleasure. Oh, I could kill you; Venice is the most beautiful. Did I not always say you could do it, be on top of the others?’
‘I – I assumed you said that to everyone.’ Lucia’s eyes feel blocky, as if she’s forgotten how to blink.
‘Now it all begins. I accepted anyway,’ Marie-Claude tells her. ‘On Behalf of the Artist. You don’t have time to bother with these things.’
‘Jesus. When? You didn’t ask me?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ says Marie-Claude.
‘Hang on, though,’ says Lucia. ‘I need to think,’ as if they don’t both already know what her answer will be.
Then, from the other side of the room, Lucia hears a voice.
‘Mum?’
She whips round, pushes herself up to look over the mattress. Silhouetted in the hall light is her lovely Monkey, her girl. What has she heard?
Shit.
‘It’s you!’ she says joyously, then whispers back at Marie-Claude, ‘Could you hang on, sorry. Sorry. I’m not alone. Don’t—’
‘What’s happening?’ says Jess, and the overhead light flicks on. ‘Who are you talking to?’
Lucia squints, stands, adjusts her face. ‘I need to, oh . . . just finishing this silly work thing,’ she says with a big smile. ‘One sec . . . I’ll ring you tomorrow. OK?’
She hangs up, billows around the bed to the door. She is too astonished to breathe.
‘What did you . . . what’s up?’ says Jess.
She gazes at her daughter like a cod. ‘Nothing! Why? It’s so late, isn’t your . . . ?’ Her new secret is scattered all over the bedroom. She needs to get Jess out of here. No time to let it sink in; it isn’t going to. Her mind pulls away to Priya; she hasn’t thought about her for maybe a full minute. Shouldn’t she be here already? What if she’s already in there, with Ray?
A little moan of anticipation escapes her. Forgetting to change earrings, top, shoes, she hurries past Jess, saying: ‘There’s so much to do, in fact. Wow. Yes. Bloody, um, students. Come and help me with dinner,’ and, craning her neck to make sure there’s no Priya in the living room, glancing hungrily towards the spyhole, she herds Jess down to the kitchen.
Something’s different; not only her mother’s hair, although it’s less dusty and twiggy than normal, and she’s tucking it behind one ear. And, when she stood, Jess saw she was dressed as if she’d noticed skirts suit her, which Jess has told her a million times. But there’s more; she seems not quite herself.
‘Mum. Are you honestly OK?’
‘Me? Of course. Totally. I mean, nothing new but . . . Are you? God, I have missed you, it’s been ages,’ her mother says, but she sounds insincere. ‘Not that it’s not great you’re making a new life. Here.’ Lucia passes her the appalling oven glove. ‘Tell me how everything, um, is.’
‘Let me,’ says Jess. She picks up a pot of plain yoghurt, grimaces at the date. The rice is under a dishcloth, steaming; roast carrots and garlicky greens and chickpeas. ‘Do we have lemons?’
‘Your father will . . .’ her mother starts saying, but she’s patting her pocket, looking for her phone.
‘Shall I take this up in the pan? Can’t believe you’ve managed to cook so much. He doesn’t deserve you.’
