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‘I think you know I won’t.’

‘I want to hear you say it.’

She began to laugh. ‘Later, at the right moment. For
now you’ll have to be satisfied that I’m still here at all.’

With that she rose from the sofa and, removing her hands from his, walked away across the room to carry a painting back to him. On her return she sat down, placing the painting before them. Together they began to undo the string. Amy stopped him. ‘Just one thing more, Jarret.’

‘Yes.’

‘We will never talk about or qualify our love for each other again. It’s all been said, agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ he told her.

Amy suddenly felt as if an enormous burden had been lifted off her shoulders. She felt relief, a new freedom of the heart and soul. Now she could love Jarret any way she cared to, on her terms. He was a love story to which she knew the ending. It was like reading a romantic novel from back to front. The surprises, the excitement of lust and love, were still there to be looked forward to. Nothing else except the day when there wouldn’t be any more. All she would have to do was cultivate the will that when that day came there would be no sad songs for her.

Ever since that first moment in Venice when Amy fell in love with Jarret there had been some inexplicable thing that troubled her about their togetherness. She kept fighting off something in her very soul that kept warning her that Jarret Sparrow was forbidden love. His passion in bed versus his cool indifference to her out of it; the distance and long periods of time apart versus the occasional letter of lust and love for her. The
mixed signals. These were no longer a problem for her now.

She had been constantly trying to evaluate other people’s hints, even warnings on both sides of the Atlantic about Fee and Jarret, her own concern about their lifestyle and how she could fit into it. And her obsessive love for Jarret, the power he held over her because of it. Now, thanks to this unexpected confrontation, the air was cleared, the sun had come out to kill the demons that were confusing her. The ghosts of other loves, Fee, Savannah, all those other people and places and things that haunted their affair no longer mattered to her. They were Jarret’s problem not hers.

Strangely a feeling of happiness and freedom returned. She leaned over and kissed her lover. That kiss sealed their fate. It was no less filled with love nor passion; the moment her lips touched his she knew that she was no less in love with Jarret Sparrow, simply able to deal with the reality of loving him.

Once the brown paper had been removed from the painting they were balancing on the floor in front of them Amy and Jarret were once again swept into talking about his work. She had been right. The painting stretched and framed looked twice as powerful. Walter would be impressed. Within half an hour her room had been taken over completely by Jarret and his paintings. Once more she enjoyed his moving another part of himself into her life.

Only for a fleeting moment did she find it sad that she could not be a wife in every sense of the word to
Jarret, support her husband, be the woman to nurture his talent, stand by his side and one day reap the rewards with him for a creative life and a body of work well worth giving a lifetime to. The potential for all that was right here in this room. And then that moment was gone. No sad songs for her.

It was nearly eight o’clock when Amy mentioned dinner. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m not in for dinner this evening. I’m invited out. I’ll get back as early as I can,’ Jarret told her.

Amy was neither surprised nor upset by the news. All in all it had been an emotionally exhausting day and the time and space alone would do her just fine. Living with Jarret, thinking about him all the time, sharing what was usually her solitary life with a man, did take some getting used to. She could do with a few hours to herself.

When Jarret returned from his dinner party it was well after midnight. The fire was blazing in the hearth and Amy was in bed reading. She had not touched a thing. His paintings were standing round the room, the unstretched canvases draped everywhere. Jarret dropped his coat on a chair and his jacket on another. He went directly to the fire and warmed his hands. ‘You waited up, I was hoping you would. This room looks marvellous, a haven. Thank God for it and you.’

He went directly to Amy, tearing off his tie and his shirt and dropping them on the floor. He was naked and already rampant when he slipped under the covers next to her. There was something new and thrilling about
his urgency to have sex with her. That night sex and lust took them over, both of them, and it was somehow different from ever before. They seemed more free, more ready to go that extra bit further into an erotic landscape they wanted to discover together. Their sexual life became even more vital, more full of adventure, and through it they sought those moments of sexual oblivion that could give them total oneness with each other and which they could achieve in no other way.

From that evening on for the next few weeks Amy had the best time any woman in love could possibly have. During the days they went their separate ways. Sometimes they met up to go to an exhibition, and sometimes gave up their evenings alone together for Amy to see her friends or Jarret to see his. Only occasionally did they socialise together. Within weeks they became one of the beautiful and intriguing couples on the art scene.

The gossip was out, not so much about Amy but Jarret, which made the lovers even more cautious and secretive about their love affair. Few people knew that they were living together, but most guessed that they were. Jarret claimed that he was living in the studio of the Greek artist Manatakis who was having a huge success in New York with kinetic art. He was currently living in Paris, which was were Jarret had first met him. Manatakis, like Jarret, found New York a hard place to live in, and so when the two met again at the party given at the Museum of Modern Art in honour of a Dada exhibition, several days after Jarret’s arrival in New York, a
glittering affair that brought everyone in the
Who’s Who
of the art world out in force, they clung to each other as if shipwrecked. That proved to be a godsend because Manatakis offered Jarret space to work in while he was in the city. Jarret had not planned to work while in the States. Hustling and charming the art world, his patrons, those socialites who bought his paintings, getting an exhibition with Walter, had been his objectives for coming here. But after a week the excitement generated by the new wave of young painters, the buzz and controversy they were creating, got to Jarret just as Amy had thought it would. She was somehow more thrilled than Jarret when he received the generous invitation and accepted it.

The Dada exhibition was by invitation only. Amy had one and so she and Jarret attended the affair together. That was where they bumped into Manatakis who was not at all fazed by his new fame. Amy was by no stretch of the imagination a celebrity such as he was in the art world. She was relatively unknown, a minor player in that world. She was astounded when Jarret appeared to be anything but a minor player, although the reality was he was an unknown artist still struggling to get a one-man show and find recognition. He seemed to know most every one of the wheelers and dealers, the heavy-duty collectors and millionaire patrons of the arts who kept the art carousel going round and round. There was no question about it – Jarret was very well connected. She watched him work the guests with his charm, flirt outrageously, and saw him swept up into the social whirl.
She still found that side of him unattractive, but somehow it didn’t matter any more. The flaws in her lover were there for her to see as so many chinks in his armour, not hers.

Dadaism was a period of art that every painter and sculptor was fascinated by and so brought out the artists who could get an invitation and they brought those who couldn’t. That made the show immensely exciting and fun. People were debating art and Dadaism in clusters throughout the exhibition rooms, critics and art historians having heated confrontations. And everyone was talking about where American Art was going to go now that Abstract Expressionism was seriously being challenged by the new young painters and their works.

When Jarret and Amy finally did leave the exhibition they went with Manatakis and a sculptress whose work he was raving about. From the museum they went to West Fourth Street and the basement studio where Manatakis was living and working. It was more like a mechanic’s workshop than an artist’s studio, a poor and wretched place that in daylight would need artificial lighting. It had a cot in one corner and a filthy loo in another behind a free-standing cupboard, the only piece of furniture in the room except for two cheap wooden chairs.

But none of that mattered once they saw the amazing sculptures that Manatakis created. There were small pieces and large pieces, and magnets in all shapes and sizes, bronzed and shining or in other metals polished to a patina of infinite beauty, assembled with other
metals and wires. They were sculptures like all great modern sculptures where the empty spaces are a work of art in themselves. The spaces within Manatakis’s sculptures were created with the help of the force magnets can create and the pieces of metal he could keep floating between them. They were magnificent works that stunned the imagination. Inspirational.

From there the four of them went to the sculptress’s studio, a vast warehouse space she lived and worked in on the third-floor walk-up of an old unheated building. In the freezing cold they were given a viewing of one more exciting piece of sculpture after another: huge tablets of white plaster with hundreds of white plaster letters from the alphabet applied to them. There was about her work a certain magic combined with unsung genius. She was one of those artists awaiting her moment.

It was near midnight, and high as they were on art they were down to earth enough to know they were all starving. Amy invited them to go home with her where she had food and could cook a meal and their art whirl would not have to stop. They could see Jarret’s work. It was dawn before the two artists left her flat and Jarret and Amy fell exhausted into bed. That evening the four of them became close friends.

The following day Jarret carried his paintings through the streets of New York to the Walter Cordigon Gallery. He stubbornly refused Amy’s help and so had to make two journeys. Only on his return for the second batch of paintings did Amy realise that he no longer wanted her
involved in his business. She made excuses for his suddenly cutting her out but for a few hours it hurt her more than it should have. He did promise to return and tell her what Walter thought about them, or at least call and tell her. He did neither.

It was two in the morning when Amy heard the key in the lock. She had not been sleeping, only lying in the dark coming to terms with the fact that Jarret was distancing himself from her. She switched on the lamp next to the bed.

‘I’m dead. Can we talk about this in the morning?’ he asked as he undressed. Amy drew the covers off her and he slid into bed next to her, kissed her briefly on the cheek and turned on his side, instantly falling asleep.

As usual Amy was awake before him. When he did awaken he smiled at her. ‘I know you watch over me while I sleep. Did I ever tell you how much I like that, your watching and waiting for me to come alive for you, for another day?’

He was naked and snuggled up next to her, removing her nightgown. Like a hungry child he fixed his lips upon her breast and sucked on the nipple. He bit into her flesh. They rolled round in the bed together, kissing and licking each other to a fever pitch until their urgency to be locked together in lust caused him to take her from behind, plunging deep inside as he bent her over the edge of the bed. There were the usual protestations of love and lust for her, some crude talk of things he wished he had the courage to do to her sexually. None of that was unusual; such talk did in fact excite them both. But
for the first time he pulled on her hair between ravaging the back of her neck with kisses and told her, ‘You have too much power over me. This fucking and lust is driving me wild, enslaving me to you.’

She had come several times and was only half in this world. The other half of her was lost in passion and sexual lust so that though she heard it she had not the clarity of mind to realise how dangerous talk like that was to their relationship. She would only remember those words when, much later over breakfast, there was something odd about the silence that was screaming between them.

She had handed two letters from Fee to him and he had sat reading them while she scrambled eggs. Now those pages lying on the table next to his plate seemed to reinforce the sense of danger Amy had briefly sensed when they had been in the throes of sex, and his words came back to mind. Waiting for him to speak was excruciatingly painful. She could bear it no longer.

‘How is Fee?’

‘Very well, he sends his love.’

‘Does he?’

Amy knew the moment the words slipped from her mouth she should have kept quiet. They were provocative. She prayed that Jarret would let them pass.

He did, went all silent again. Amy thought she could wait him out. That he would come out with the thing that was bothering him. He didn’t. She finally asked, ‘Aren’t you going to tell me what happened at the gallery? What Walter had to say about the paintings, a show?’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Oh, that? Jarret, I waited all day and all night for a word about “Oh, that”. “Oh, that” was the most important thing in your life a few days ago.’

The look that he was giving her was not one of anger for being put on the spot nor for her subtle chastisement of him for not calling. It was far worse – indifference. He seemed distracted, thinking of other things, other people. It was then that Amy realised that Jarret never said he was sorry. He apologised for nothing, took everything for granted.

He refilled his cup with hot black coffee and told her, ‘He was thrilled with them, thought the new work impressive, but like all dealers at the moment he’s nervous about the dramatic changes happening in the art world. He said yes, in principle he is interested in giving me a one-man show but he wanted to give me a final answer later in the day.’