The Exhibitionist, page 18
‘Hello! Yes, absolutely,’ she says, well past making sense. Marie-Claude may rock up at any moment, must be headed off at the pass but, with Priya in the same building, it’s impossible to concentrate. Eric Nakamura enters, looking puzzled, in conversation with a very tall fair man who seems to be holding Ray’s ex-wife’s hand. Lucia leans against the fire extinguisher; it’s like a merry-go-round, a swirl of everyone you least want to see. It takes a moment to notice the approach of Sukie Blackstock: the first horsewoman of the Apocalypse.
Loathing rises through her like flood water. She feels her skin wrinkling as the scrawny crow draws closer. She’s never before had a chance to hate her purely; there was too much grief. Maybe Sukie Blackstock could sense it: adultery radar, pinging in the depths to indicate prey.
Now she’s reckless: Joan of Arc with her vorpal sword. The taste of murder is so bright that, in any other setting, she’d be grabbing a napkin to make a little sketch, probably lying to Ray that it was a shopping list. Amazing, what one will do for love. But, wedged here between the Gallery and the top of the stairs, acting wife-like, she looks her foe straight in the eye.
Sukie Blackstock beams back. She has the clotted mascara and bright intimacy of a woman who gets through husbands like Tube tickets. Could she conceivably think that they’re . . . friends? ‘Is it wonderful?’ she asks.
‘What?’
‘The show! Oh I bet it is, I’m so excited,’ and Lucia, polite even now, waves her in.
Jess is mouthing something. Lucia points to herself, shrugs theatrically. Jess, in the noisy crowd of the Gallery, raises her eyebrows, en-un-ci-ates the words more clear-ly. Like identifying one’s newborn’s cry in a wristband mix-up, shouldn’t a good mother be able to sense what her daughter is saying? It’s this which alarms her, not whatever Jess is miming, because it seems absurd.
Leah’s still passing out her booklets. She has her mother’s spelling problem; Lucia could take one to check, but it’s too late. Too late. If what Jess was signing at her were true, surely Leah would have intervened? It can’t be possible; the mere thought makes her want to run away. Surely there is a limit, even for Ray.
Leah is as inscrutable as an egg.
‘Your father,’ begins Lucia.
‘What about him?’
‘He . . .’ Someone’s trying to say hello, hand on Lucia’s back, but she needs to force herself to take a look inside the Gallery. And also find Priya. And intercept Marie-Claude. Leah looks shifty; she is not Lucia’s most truthful child.
It cannot be healthy to be permanently braced but something’s off: the frequency from the main room. It’s like being in a foreign city where, underneath the café merriment, one senses the beginning of a riot.
‘You’d have told me, wouldn’t you,’ Lucia asks Leah quickly, ‘if there was anything wrong?’
30
Gillian and David, back to back, turn slowly, like characters in a rom-com blizzard. This is not romance, although tomorrow night, when they’re back in Sheffield and have showered the weekend from their pores, it will bring them together with, she is confident, impressive passion. For all David’s faults, the slow saturation of marriage, what keeps them going is: a) bed; b) he’s proud of her work; c) when it comes to his family, she knows he knows she knows.
Behind his little bum, she reaches for his hand. Squeeze; squeeze back. She doesn’t dare to face him until she’s arranged her expression; he is a giggler too. It’s why she fell for him. But the noise is too great for whispering, so they edge sideways, as if admiring the same stretch of wall.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘My God.’
‘I know.’
‘Did you guess, in advance?’
‘Of course not. Did you?’
‘No! Absolutely. Why, do you think anyone did?’
‘Well, Leah maybe,’ says David.
‘She must have. She’s organized everything. There’s a lot of work involved in these things, exhibitions, isn’t there?’
‘Well, not by the artist,’ and she can feel him beginning to shake.
‘Get a grip,’ she says. They can’t lose it now; it happened once at a performance of The Nutcracker, Becca galumphing as Bear Two and they were escorted through silent corridors by the deputy head. ‘Think sad thoughts.’
‘Right. Right. I’m back,’ he says.
‘It’s actually,’ she reminds him, ‘quite a shock.’
‘Isn’t it.’
‘Did you suspect, even?’
‘No! They go on about his genius like a . . . like evangelicals. I really assumed . . .’
‘I know.’
‘. . . a full show. I believed them. Whatever that would be, twenty pictures? Thirty?’
‘Not three.’
‘Four. At a pinch,’ he says, the wobble back in his voice.
If anything goes wrong in his stent operation, thinks Gillian, throat suddenly tight, that’s it for me. Really, what would be the point? So she releases his hand.
Behind them, she can hear a confident young man booming about negative capability. After a pause for David to contain himself, she murmurs: ‘Does that one even count, though? It looks like . . . pencil.’
‘Christ almighty,’ David says. ‘What has the poor sod done?’
Even before Lucia turns, she knows her from the strength of her grip. Marie-Claude does not bother to speak. She simply makes a French face, demurring, droll, and holds out her arms. Lucia yields. A hug: if she’d had them more often in the last ten years, maybe none of this would have happened, she thinks, and her eyes immediately fill.
What a sap.
‘We have a talk immediately,’ says Marie-Claude.
Experienced Marie-Claude watchers know her language of dressing up. Black jeans always, because if one has legs like that in one’s sixties one shares them with the world but, if she’s going all out, it’s black biker-boots rather than All-Stars, black glasses-frames instead of red, and a smart T-shirt means business.
Tonight it’s a full house, including the best top Lucia has ever seen: short and sexy and made of huge black sequins, like a military fish.
It’s a tell. Someone here will spot it. They’ll say to Ray, ‘What’s the big excitement?’
Lucia tries to see over Marie-Claude’s shoulder, but Marie-Claude is tall and very fit, despite the smoking. She often talks to her artists from a rowing machine.
‘You should not try to escape me,’ she says. ‘That is for babies. Let him do his things,’ she says, waving her elegant hand towards the exhibition, ‘and come now with me outside so we can establish our plans.’
Lucia pulls away. She needs to prioritize disasters. Marie-Claude must be corralled, downstairs ideally; maybe if Lucia submits to a quick discussion, Marie-Claude will let her go. But the beadier artists will notice. Meanwhile, Ray will be wounded that his wife’s gallerist hasn’t bothered to attend. And what if Lucia misses Priya? Nothing, not even her career, or Marie-Claude, even Ray, will keep Lucia away from her.
Although, she reminds herself, she’s turning down Venice for her marriage.
Making the decision has nothing to do with Priya.
By pretending to check the booklet, Jess has managed to release herself from Martyn’s hot hand, but he does not budge. He isn’t even hailing acquaintances with his art thoughts.
‘Babe,’ he says, but quietly enough not to hear.
Leah or Patrick have tried to make the lack of pictures seem intentional, dramatic. They’ve spotlit what there is, as if they’re a selection from his oeuvre, but it’s still four, barely. Her face burns with Hanrahan shame; sweat drips beneath her bra-wires. The first she knows well; it has been on most of the walls in the house, propped up in every corner, spotted with coffee, its varnish crazed. The card beside it says STORMUNDDRANG, but she’s fairly sure it’s a painting of the tree house in that lovely garden on Brixham Hill, where he and its owner played at setting up an art school before falling out so badly that her mother had to apologize in writing. ‘Artist’s own. Oil on board.’ There is no date.
Christ it’s hot. Where is her mother?
Martyn, very close, emits occasional thoughtful murmurs, like a critic at a primary-school art fair. The real critics had outraged Leah by not RSVP’ing; until half an hour ago, she was cursing the arts pages of all the newspapers. Even the appearance of Bryan Chilton, Ray’s old hero, has not soothed her. But now Jess sees her stand beside their father like a bride, laughing, joining in the praise and the mockery of absent friends: the Artist’s Vivacious Daughter.
Everyone her father has ever known is here, including the people he says he hates: several of his old girlfriends from the sixties, alcoholic television directors, elderly musicians prone to groping, under-washed pub regulars. The outrageous bareness of the walls, the heat, the booze, the kaleidoscopic roll-call of teachers and neighbours who know what he is, yet are still here, make her feel unhinged. There is also, she could swear, a pungent smell of Sunday lunch.
Come on, girl. Do this for . . . for . . . someone. Do not show weakness.
The second painting is familiar too, with that crick-cracking the fixative he likes gets when it ages. It’s very pink and orange, faded creamy-white dripping like candle wax down what might be thighs. Three or four brave admirers stand possessively close, commenting on its freshness, the rugged masculinity of the palette-strokes. Beyond them, like an outer planetary ring, lesser disciples prepare their expressions.
Jess stares straight ahead, head up: a scapegoat ready for torching.
Where is her mother?
The third is definitely a nude, just about; blue, thickly applied. It looks very new; the areas of bare canvas sharp and clear. It is smallish but magnificently framed like a cathedral centrepiece: deep mount, double-layered gilt cassetta, as if a child has drawn an elaborate margin to distract a teacher. Even at this distance, over the heads of the populace, Jess sees that it has her sister’s eyes.
By the time she has extracted herself and Marie-Claude, Lucia feels pulled thin as copper wire. Get out my way for this conversation I don’t want to have, she wants to scream at every local dignitary: the weird optician, the horrible woman who once almost won MasterChef. She knows her cheeks are ablaze with awkwardness, menopause, lust, all three. Gillian catches her eye, looks puzzled at Marie-Claude. If, Lucia thinks, Sukie Blackstock crosses my path, I might push her over. I could do it.
‘I have cancelled another party for you,’ says Marie-Claude, groping in her pocket for a fag. ‘You know Eduard Previn?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You see?’ she says. ‘This is serious,’ and Lucia looks at her feet. She needs an explanation for when someone spots them. She’s usually good at this; tonight her mind is blank.
They are in a storage room off the entrance-hall, with jingling hangers, precarious stacks of foil serving platters, scuffed plastic salad bowls and, for some reason, several panettone in ornamental tins. Focus, she tells herself, watching Marie-Claude’s lips.
Marie-Claude is insisting on excitement. ‘Don’t be a silly girl,’ she says. ‘This is not to resist.’ She could not give a damn that this is Ray’s evening, weekend, year. When Lucia tries to remind her, she looks so dismissive that Lucia checks behind her that no Ray-supporter is peering through the door. Fear dies hard, Priya once said.
Love dies hard too, unfortunately. God knows, she has tried to cure herself.
‘I can’t . . . it’s not silly,’ says Lucia.
Accepting is impossible. She has to make Marie-Claude understand. Ray always says she’s an over-explainer, that people wilt, lose the will to live, while she feints at what she wants to say.
It’s why I’m an artist, Lucia wants to tell him. But that argument would last for days.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ Marie-Claude is saying, ‘do not be absurd. This is joy. It is enormous success. Biography-defining. You have earned it. And your hus––’
‘It isn’t,’ begins Lucia. ‘It can’t be. Look, I truly am so sorry.’
‘For what? You pay me. ’Andsomely,’ and Lucia almost laughs.
‘Yes, yes, but you’ve been working on this for ages. My whole career, even. You’ve been so brilliant,’ and Lucia hears the echo of how she talks to Ray, the sucking-up, the creeping serf. ‘The thing is, it really would be amazing. Life-changing. But I can’t.’
‘Tell me. Why not?’
‘You know why.’
‘You could choose it to be possible.’
‘But . . .’ Marie-Claude’s life has not been one of marriage, although she has had two husbands (‘and,’ Ray says, ‘many more’). She lives with a needy Oriental cat and has a series of rich, horrible men as lovers, but Lucia would forgive her anything, cross a motorway behind her like a loyal duckling, because whatever success she has had was brought to her, coaxed and summoned and left at her feet, by Marie-Claude.
And Marie-Claude knows where other successes are buried.
Here’s one. Four years ago, Ray was interviewed about his technique by a famous-ish novelist on the radio; they all went out for dinner, Ray and the novelist and the wives. The novelist asked about Lucia’s work; Lucia conceded that she too was an artist.
‘Tell me about it,’ he’d said, so Lucia tried, then mentioned Hertz-Chamaut.
Already, this was a monstrous betrayal.
Then the novelist told the radio people, who summoned Lucia’s documentation from Marie-Claude. They invited Lucia ‘in’ to discuss recording a big profile; sent her flowers. Lucia felt sicker and sicker. She hid from the postman. Ray kept pointing out that she’d brought this on herself, had clearly chosen her priorities long ago. His friends, he said, thought she was disgusting; Dr Mac, armed with barely any of the facts, dropped by her studio to explain her crime, hoping for whisky. Lucia listened for longer than she should have, hurried straight to Hertz-Chamaut, begged Marie-Claude to ring the radio people to retract her interest in their interest. Marie-Claude barely spoke to her for months.
And despite her sabotaging it for him, her endless soothing and explaining, Ray’s fury was infinite. She told no one, at his special request, how upset he was; considered leaving Marie-Claire because now Ray mistrusted her too, questioned her motives, said Lucia was her slave. Lucia cannot say yes to the Biennale and expect to have a marriage at the end of it.
Marie-Claude says: ‘But this is your life. Your art. Maybe you can choose.’
31
Everyone is making the best of a difficult situation, thinks Gillian, and that’s what counts. Neither of her children has shown bad manners; Ray hasn’t loudly blamed Lucia, perhaps because Lucia seems not to be around. That won’t go down well.
And at least there is food. First, Leah was spotted hurtling downstairs; then, after some time, she press-ganged Becca and some of Ray’s keener students and they started bearing trays of chopped-up wholemeal loaves and what looked like cream crackers into the Gallery. Relief all round, until Ray started scowling. It seems that he was not consulted; Becca reported that, when Leah realized that the caterer she thought she’d hired had gone to the football, she started to cry. And then, oddly, rather than trying to cheer up her father, she spent a long time trying to get hold of the caterer on the phone. Meanwhile, everyone was starving, so Becca organized the convoy of nutritionally disappointing snacks. It seems incredible that they’re allowed to eat near the art at all.
All of which would be a perfectly standard Hanrahan drama, except that Lucia really has disappeared.
Gillian still can’t meet David’s eye; there is a high risk that he will corpse. So far they’ve coped very well. In fact, no one is looking much at anyone. They have been pointedly focused on what art there is, which amounts to a couple of splodgy naked ladies, a maybe landscape and a pencil sketch on very rough brown paper of the back half of a horse. If Gillian, not a rural person, can tell it’s equine, that’s something.
So now everyone has gorged themselves stupid on bleached flour and saturated fats, which arrived too late to keep them sober; except for Gillian, who does not drink. She is a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, keeping a lookout for Lucia’s sake. She watches Ray’s guests acting as if everything is normal, catches the moment Ray spots his previous wife, always too good for him, with her hand on the flat stomach of a Scandinavian man-god who’s laughing with the Japanese curator. This is the point at which Ray storms, with assistance, off.
She will not concern herself with him.
Jake seems tipsy, telling a series of lovely young women about His First. David has managed to return twice to the trestle tables, olive juice and mustard dripping into his cuffs. Leah, that seedy doctor and some of the acolytes have formed a splinter-group back downstairs, to comfort Ray. Jess, however, is sitting on a wine box telling her boyfriend that she’s absolutely fine, promise, just mingle without me, really thanks, no, really. David is cornered by a rather vivacious woman in a revealing blouse and try-hard heels, at whom Gillian has narrowed her eyes. When he escapes, on his way for more Wotsits, he bends his head to whisper, and Gillian’s skin tingles. She smiles up at him.
But what he says is not what she had hoped. ‘We aren’t ever coming back here. It’s too much.’
Gillian, like a passenger watching her ship pull out of the dock, sees their future financial stability sliding away from her. Sweet coward; he’s not going to save them.
Right, she thinks. I’ll do it myself.
She bides her time, until she can approach her favourite niece from behind, the better to prise her from Martyn. ‘Any chance of a chat?’ she asks.
Then she sees the look on Jess’s face. ‘Oh. Are you OK?’
‘No, I’m—’ begins Jess.
Martyn bounces back towards them but Gillian grasps Jess’s hand; it’s like country dancing. ‘It has stopped raining,’ she tells her. ‘And there’s a lovely garden. Let’s go for a walk.’
Lucia, alone, bites her varnish-tasting fingers, tries to imagine going up the stairs. She can’t sneak into the exhibition at this stage without Ray noticing. Jess will be free range and looking for trouble; Leah, enraged that she was left to do everything; Patrick, probably in a pickle of some kind, or being blamed for the wrong colour tape on the cabling. See, she’s a mother above all, not thinking about Priya.
