The Ecliptic (20 page)

Perhaps the deflation of this moment was what made me take my consolations elsewhere. I felt so heartened by the sight of every title crossed out on the gallery’s price list at the end of
my show’s run: all ten of the canvases were sold within a week. I allowed myself to absorb the compliments that Max passed on from collectors, strangers whose attentions would otherwise have
meant nothing. More than this, I saw my name up in gilt letters outside the Eversholt, like the sign of a department store, and mistook it for accomplishment.

After that entrance hall show, I did not need to worry about stealing time to sketch, though I still got up at six every morning to go out with my pencils. Max arranged a studio for me in
Kilburn, with an adjoining flat, and I was promised the same monthly stipend that Jim received for materials and subsistence. I felt glad of these developments, but sorry to vacate my tiny attic
room, whose limitations had somehow influenced the paintings themselves, compacting each landscape, hunching every figure, cropping off so many heads and bodies, distorting all the viewpoints.
Above all, I did not want to leave Jim. I had grown so reliant on our closeness, so used to the sound of his downtrodden voice, and even to the scent of him. But I could not be the kind of woman
who allowed her aspirations to be stalled by sentiments like these, especially when they were yet to be requited. Jim Culvers would go on surviving, whether I was there to set up his easel every
morning or not, and I expected him to stay exactly where he was forever, so I might call on him each week and he might miss me between visits.

On the day I moved out of the mews house, he stood in the doorway of his studio, watching me drag my suitcase down the stairs. He did not offer to help, just waited there, saying nothing, while
I heaved the case from step to step. When I reached the bottom, he said, ‘You’ll have to get used to this, won’t you? Lugging your gold bars around.’

I leaned on the balustrade, catching my breath. ‘It’s just a few library books.’

‘I think you’re meant to give those back.’

‘Ah, but then I’d have to pay the fines.’

The suitcase burst open and a few of the hardbacks tumbled down the stairs. Finally, Jim came to assist me, collecting them. ‘
The Sea-Wolf. The Reef. Billy Budd . . .
Never had
you pegged as a mariner.’

‘Well, they happen to be classics.’

‘I’ll take your word for it. Here.’ He gave them back, and I stuffed them in the case.

I had made an effort to read widely during my time at art school, in the hope that engaging with the right books might stimulate ideas for paintings (and if they broadened my vocabulary along
the way, I thought, so much the better). Our exuberant headmistress back at Clydebank High had encouraged all the girls to read Jane Austen and the Brontës—‘And, for heaven’s
sake, read
Middlemarch,
’ she had announced one day, while teaching our domestic science class;
‘
if you never do another sensible thing for the rest of your lives,
read
Middlemarch
!’ I found these books worthwhile and interesting, but perhaps not quite as formative as I expected, like visiting important landmarks I had spent too long imagining.
The painter in me was drawn to other voices: to Melville’s artfulness and detail, to Conrad’s gloomy landscapes, to Stevenson’s thrill and adventure. These were the writers whose
works I kept returning to. In fact, I reread
Moby-Dick
and
Nostromo
so often in those early days with Jim that I found their language mirrored in my journal entries; sometimes, in
ordinary letters to my parents, I would copy lines from
An Inland Voyage
(‘To equip so short a letter with a preface is, I am half afraid, to sin against proportion!’) and felt
a slight displeasure when they failed to comment on it.

‘How will you get all this on the bus?’ Jim asked.

‘I won’t. Max organised a van. Should be here any minute.’

‘Good old Max, eh? Where would we be without Max?’

‘Don’t start that again.’

He carried the case to the kerb. The sky was cement-grey and the air was sharpening for hailstones.

‘We’ll not be far from each other,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and visit.’

‘No, you’ll have work to do.’

‘I’ll still have my evenings and weekends.’

‘Ha, right,’ Jim said. He glanced back to the house. ‘Is there more to come down?’

‘Just a box or two.’

‘I’m sure you can manage those on your own.’ He would not look at me. ‘Let’s just shake hands and say cheerio, shall we? No point turning this into a
ceremony.’ The skin of his palm was as dry as a dog’s paw, his fingers ridged and calloused.

‘What about this Saturday? I’ll bring you some bagels from the good Jewish bakery. We can have a cup of tea and—’

‘What? Catch up? Talk about the Arsenal?’

‘I was going to say we could look through the racing pages. I don’t mind putting your bets on, still. At the weekend, anyway.’

Jim nodded. His whole face tightened. ‘I think you’re forgetting how Max does things. He’ll have an agenda worked out for you—mark my words. He’ll be getting you in
with the Roxborough crowd straight away, and God knows who else. You’re going to be divvied up: a stake in you here, a stake in you there. It’s going to mean deadlines, long hours in
the studio. Real work. Why d’you think I needed an assistant in the first place? It wasn’t to keep my attic warm.’ He squinted at the sky. ‘No, you’re not going to be
sitting here, eating bagels, reading me the form guide, that’s for sure. And, quite frankly, if that’s how you choose to spend your time from now on, I’ll bloody murder
you.’ He sniffed. A white van was approaching now from the high street. ‘I’d do it quickly, mind—quick snap of the neck—you wouldn’t even feel it. That’s
how much I respect you.’ Patting my arm, he said, ‘All right then, Miss Conroy. Work hard, keep your nose clean. Forget anything I might’ve accidentally taught you and
you’ll be right as rain. Come and say hello to me at your next soirée and make me look important. Off you go.’ He trudged back to his studio, peering at the ground. And that was
the last conversation I would have with Jim Culvers for a very long time.

Though all artists strive for recognition, they cannot foresee how it will come to them or how much they will compromise to maintain success. All they can do is cling to the
reins and try to weather the changes of their circumstance without altering their course. But no woman can improve her station in life without sacrificing a little of her identity. I was an
ordinary girl from Clydebank who had somehow established herself as a prospect on the London art scene: was I really expected to remain unchanged by these experiences? Even my father, who had
returned from the frontlines of war apparently untouched by its horrors, was not averse to smoothing out his accent when speaking to the council on the telephone. So how was I to supposed to sign
away my life to Roxborough Fine Art and still be that same girl who once painted in her parents’ yard? I tried so hard to preserve the Clydebank in me that I soon realised I was forcing it.
Perhaps if there had been some grounding presence in my life at that time—a good man like Jim Culvers who could have given me a shake when I needed it—I might have been able to retain a
semblance of my old self. But on the preview night for my first solo exhibition at the Roxborough in 1960, I did not have a genuine friend in the room.

Instead, I was surrounded by interested parties and loathsome hangers-on. People like Max Eversholt, who paraded around the gallery as though he had painted every canvas himself, tour-guiding
young women in cocktail dresses from landscape to landscape with a delicate grip on their elbows. He brought other artists over to speak with me, one fashionable face at a time, and presumed we
were already acquainted (‘You know Frank, of course . . . You know Michael . . . You know Timothy . . .’) because surely all the painters in London were the best of friends? I stood,
awkwardly pattering with them, as I might have talked to distant relations at a wake.

Occasions such as these were geared for Max Eversholt and his type. For him, the gallery floor on a preview night was the one place he felt alive. He dialled up his enthusiasm to the point of
theatre, revelling in the glory of his involvement in my work, kissing cheeks, patting backs, savouring the thrum of conversations that ensued. I never understood why all this glitz and pageantry
was required to sell a picture—it certainly had nothing to do with art. Every painter I respected worked alone in a quiet room, and the images they made were intended for solemn reflection,
not to provide the scenery for obnoxious gatherings of nabobs and batty collectors wearing too much perfume. After a while, the company of such people became the norm, and I was expected not only
to enchant them with my work, but also to fascinate them with my personality. If I baulked at placating these strangers, it merely served to enthral them even more.

I hovered in the corner with Bernie Cale for much of that private viewing, and we talked for a while about Jim, wondering aloud where he had gone to, if we had seen the last of him. Bernie had
heard all the rumours and was not convinced by any of them. ‘I just don’t see a bloke like Jim lasting ten minutes in New York,’ he said. ‘Too many windbags and clever
Dicks. Too much competition. And you know how he feels about American whisky. Single malt’s so dear over there, he’d never make it.’

I laughed at this, recalling the strength of Jim’s feelings on the matter. He had declined to share a drink with his neighbour, Vern Glasser, on so many occasions that, one day, I had
asked him why he could not try to be more accommodating. After all, I had to share a bathroom with Vern, and their festering resentment for each other was making the atmosphere in our mews house
rather fraught. But Jim said, ‘I’ve nothing against Vernon in particular. It’s just that all he has to drink is that awful stuff from Kentucky, and, frankly, I’d prefer to
swig from his toilet.’ How I missed being Jim’s assistant. The simplicity of our life together. That everyday affiliation we used to have. The longer I went without hearing from him,
the more I thought of those days in St John’s Wood and yearned to restore them.

‘More to the point,’ Bernie Cale went on, ‘if he’s in the States, wouldn’t somebody have bumped into him by now? I mean, it’s not like you can hide in New
York, is it? Not if you’re trying to make a name for yourself. It’s a very big scene over there, but it’s all a bit—what’s the word—incestuous.’ I had
never been to New York so was not qualified to pass judgement.

The rumours about Jim’s whereabouts were founded on a scarcity of facts, with the gaps coloured in by guesswork. According to received opinion, he had gone to New York to live with his
sister. This theory hinged upon a drunken conversation that Jim was supposed to have had with two regulars at the Prince Alfred pub, who had told Max Eversholt that they had held Jim’s ticket
for the boat in their very own hands (they also claimed that Jim had begged the barmaid for a lift to Southampton). The problem with verifying this story was that nobody knew if Jim really had a
sister. His drinking pals could not remember what her name was, where she might have worked, or what part of the city she lived in. They did not even know if she was older or younger. Eversholt
believed their word was reliable, even if the details rang false when I called the shipping companies: they had no recent record of a passenger named James Culvers. All in all, the New York theory
was quite unsound, but we had no other clues to follow up on.

Jim had abandoned his studio just a few weeks after I moved out of his attic. ‘A midnight flit,’ was how Eversholt put it. ‘Ditched everything but his sketchbooks.’ He
had shown me the eerie state that Jim had left the space in: all his oil tubes thrown into a box, his easels folded down and stacked, the On Highs painted over with white gesso, leaned up by the
window. ‘If you want some extra room, it’s yours,’ Eversholt had said. ‘You can work it out between yourselves when Jim gets back. Assuming he’s not lying dead in a
gutter somewhere.’ I was revolted by his glibness, and he quickly apologised. ‘Sorry. That was in poor taste, even for me.’ The prospect of a stranger moving in to Jim’s
studio was so dismaying that I agreed to take it on in his absence. I used it mostly to store overflow materials, though sometimes I would go and stand in those empty rooms when I needed separation
from a particularly mulish piece of work. At first, it helped me to surround myself with the remnants of Jim’s thoughts, to pace in his old circles. But each time I tried to work there, I
felt that I was painting over memories of him, changing the meaning of the space, so I stopped going.

Max was good enough to keep on covering the rent for Jim’s flat in Maida Vale. The landlady was thrilled to tell me all about the dirty pots that had been left to moulder in Jim’s
sink, how his bins had not been put out for collection, and how she needed to let herself in with the master key when the smell became insufferable. She had promised to put Jim’s things in a
storage locker for me if I paid her twelve shillings a month—I was sure that she would only dump everything and pocket the money, so instead I arranged for someone to pack up Jim’s
possessions and kept the boxes in his studio, guessing he would thank me for it some day. But fortnights passed and still no hospital could account for Jim’s admittance when I called around,
no duty officer could identify him in the drunk tank, no long-lost friends emerged to claim him as their lodger. I waited months for a letter to arrive, a postcard from America, anything. My heart
flinched every time the phone rang, tempering when all I heard was the voice of Max (‘Darling, I’m headed your way. Any chance I might swing by with some friends? They’re itching
to see what you’re working on’), or another gentle enquiry from Dulcie Fenton, the director of the Roxborough Gallery, who checked on my progress more frequently than I believed was
necessary: ‘Anything you need from this end, just say the word.’ It took me a full year to accumulate the pieces for the show. Through that long, intensive period of work, I attuned
myself to the idea that Jim would not be there to see the paintings when they were finished. In fact, I began to wonder if he would ever see another work of mine again. I accepted my aloneness,
embraced it as my fate.