The Ecliptic (28 page)

Dulcie must have said something to Amanda Yail about my being in the hospital bay, or else the news must have found its way to Victor by some other means. Because, not long after breakfast on
the last day of the voyage, he appeared at the fringes of my cubicle with his briefcase. ‘Present for you,’ he said, setting an envelope on my table. The flap was not stuck down and I
could already tell what was inside. ‘You don’t have to open it now,’ he said, but I did.

It was a home-made card with get well soon! scribbled in dark blue crayon. There was a muddy picture of what looked like Kull-Ex flying over a New York skyscraper. And, on the reverse, in adult
writing, it said:
Your super friend, Jonathan.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’

‘Not my idea,’ said Victor. ‘Actually, I thought you might find it a little insensitive. I wasn’t sure if I should bring it or not.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘Well, the lad wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mandy’s taken him down to the pool to keep him occupied—he was begging to come with me, but I thought I’d spare you
that, at least.’

In fact, the thought of talking to the boy again about his comics was as close as I had felt to happiness in days. ‘I really wouldn’t have minded,’ I said.

‘He’ll be very glad you liked the card. Took him ages to draw. May I—?’ He gestured at the empty chair beside the bed and did not wait for my approval, sitting with his
briefcase on his lap. ‘I hope you don’t mind me visiting you like this, but I heard you weren’t in the best of spirits, and I just—well, I wanted to make sure you were OK.
Only natural to get depressed, considering.’

‘I appreciate the thought,’ I said, and looked away—anywhere but into those sympathetic eyes. I did not deserve them.

‘Look,’ Victor said cagily, ‘you can tell me if I’m overstepping the mark here, but something’s been nagging me all afternoon.’

I did not respond, just rolled my head in his direction.

‘You were taking pennyroyal,’ he said, with a querying tone. ‘For the seasickness.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Hmm.’ He drummed his briefcase. ‘And how much of that were you taking?’

‘God, I don’t know, Victor. What does it matter?’ I hoped to sound just the right amount offended.

‘It’s been known to have certain side effects, that’s all, in large doses.’ His fingers pushed at the leather, rippling it. ‘I wondered if Dulcie was aware of that
when she recommended it.’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t.’

‘No, of course not. I wasn’t suggesting—never mind.’ He looked around the hospital bay, studying the decor. ‘This place seems very well equipped.’

‘It’s a hospital. They’re all the same.’

‘Oh, not true. You should see some of the wards I had to train in.’ We were completely alone in the room. Victor was the only person I had seen besides Dulcie, the physician, and the
nurse for the past twelve hours or so, and I suspected he knew it.

‘Look, if you don’t mind, Victor, I’m getting rather tired.’

But he would not be hurried or distracted. ‘It’s an abortifacient, that’s my point. Well, supposedly it is. No medical proof for it, as such, but, anyway—there you
are.’ Pushing up his glasses with his little finger, he stood, and lingered by my bedside for so long I thought he was about to kiss my forehead. ‘Like I said, it’s been nagging
me all day. Why would you be taking penny royal? I should have spotted it sooner.’ And he gave a disbelieving chuckle. ‘That number I gave you,’ he said. ‘Throw it out. The
chap I recommended won’t be right for you. Too Freudian.’

‘What?’

‘I’m serious.’ He set down his briefcase on the foot of my bed, unclipped it, and began rummaging underneath the files. ‘I want you to come and see me once you get back
to London. It might take a bit of time, but I think I can help you.’

‘With what?’

‘Your anxiety depression.’ He glanced up from his case. ‘I don’t mean what happened yesterday—I mean what came before. Those are the issues you need to confront, or
you’ll never come to terms with what you’ve lost. And I won’t just stand aside and watch that happen to you.’ He went back to rooting for whatever he was searching for. It
was as though I was still on the grubby banquette in Henry Holden’s office.

‘I told you, I don’t need a psychiatrist,’ I said. ‘I have painting.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I’m sorry if that puts you out of a job, but it’s how I’ve always dealt with things.’

‘And how would you say that’s been working for you so far?’

‘Don’t patronise me, Victor.’

He gave a surrendering nod. ‘It’s just, I heard you didn’t really
do
much painting these days, or finish anything, at least. Isn’t that what you told me?’
At last, he gave up rummaging in his briefcase and shut the lid. ‘Look, I’m afraid I’ve run out of cards. So this’ll have to do—’ He tore off the top page of a
white prescription pad and handed it to me. ‘I really hope you’ll take me seriously.’

‘Can’t trust a man with letters after his name,’ I said. ‘That’s what my father used to say.’

‘I tell you what—’ Victor clipped his case shut. ‘If you can make it through the next few days without leaping off any skyscrapers, I’ll let you know what they all
stand for. Now, can I bank on you to make an appointment?’

At the factory, my mother punched her timecard every morning, then counted down the hours before she got to punch it out again. From the year she left school into her middle
fifties, she kept exactly the same job, and if the amount a person complains about her work is an adequate barometer of her satisfaction, then she must have found great joy in it.

At the John Brown & Company yard, my father scorched the skin right off his knuckles daily, caulking ships with men he looked upon as brothers, some of whom he brought back home to share our
dinner, some of whom he lent our rainy-day money. He wore down every rung of cartilage in his spine, broke several ribs, developed shin splints, and laboured through the agony, one shift at a time,
for measly pay and no assurance of a future.

I admired the doggedness of my parents more than I was ever able to express to them. They grafted to accomplish things for other people, knowing all their hard work would go unseen. My father
never felt what it was like to cross the ocean on a vessel he constructed with his friends, nor did he really care to—in his mind, every ship died when it left the yard. My mother never
walked the aisles of the department stores that stocked her sewing machines, though she brought home boxes of the reject needles to stitch our curtains and communion dresses for the
neighbours’ children.

I cannot say how much of their resolve I managed to inherit. Some days, it felt as though I had been gifted with my father’s vim, and I could stand up at my easel for long periods,
forgetting where I was. Other times, I was steeled by my mother’s uncomplaining attitude, and would not let a good idea escape my grasp, even if it took me several weeks to tame it.

But doggedness in art is no substitute for inspiration. The thrill of painting turns so quickly to bewilderment if you let it, and nobody can help you to regain your bearings afterwards. Talent
sinks into the lightless depths like so much rope unless you keep firm hold on it, but squeeze too tight and it will just as surely drag you under.

By the summer of 1960, I was unable to determine a clear reason to continue making pictures, aside from the dim hopefulness that kept lifting me from bed at 6 a.m. to try again. The only way to
shake off failure, I thought, was by perseverance and hard work, and if I did not rise to paint each morning at my usual hour then I was denying myself another chance to succeed. And so I carried
on through the soreness, as my father would have done, without protest, even though my hands no longer had the skill to translate what I asked of them. I approached each canvas as I always
did—with no preconceived ideas, just a willingness to paint—and proceeded to get nowhere.

It is a painter’s job to give shape to things unseeable, to convey emotion in the accumulation of gestures, the instinctive, the considered, the unplanned. There is both randomness and
predestination to the act of painting, a measurement and a chaos, and the moment you allow the mind to implicate itself too much in the business of the heart, the work will falter. It is not
something you can control. You might toil long and hard, bullying the paint until it agrees to do your bidding, but you will only beat the life right out of it. And when you reach the stage where
you are not expressing feeling in your work but engineering it, you might as well become a forger, or present yourself at a museum and donate your skills to the conservation of its masterpieces.
Otherwise, you will be tempted to hang your feeble efforts on the wall and say, ‘Good enough,’ seeing pound signs where there should be meaning. You must resist this temptation with
every fibre of your being. I tried everything I could to remain true to such convictions during the New York trip and afterwards. I stayed each day in my hotel room on Sixth Avenue, staring out at
the gridded puzzle of the city from my thirty-fifth-floor window, drawing the patterns of its dense, dissembling streets and the polished deadness of its architecture. I filled both of the
sketchbooks I had brought with me, then used up the hotel notepaper, until all I had left to draw on were a few blank pages at the end of
Below the Salt
. Of course, I had some yearning to
go out into the city and experience it on foot, to understand it the same way that I had learned to appreciate the mysteries of London, but something kept me cooped up in the hotel all
week—an anxiety that tensed my throat when I stood at the bathroom mirror putting on my make-up, a shame that wetted my eyes. The first morning, I got up and dressed but could not get beyond
the threshold. The next, I reached the midpoint of the hallway and panicked; I heard the voices of other guests approaching in the corridor, got very shallow-breathed and wobbly, then paced back to
my room, groping the walls. It did not feel right to be amongst people yet, and the city was teeming with strangers.

During the cab ride from the harbour with Dulcie, I had felt the kerbside energy of the place so intensely it had stunned me into silence. It was as though we had arrived at the very terminus of
possibility, the patch of land where everything I cherished most about the world—art, imagination, freedom of expression—existed in the shade of everything I feared: corporations,
brinkmanship, the preying of dogs on dogs. It was obvious to me that Jim could never have endured a town so hustling and kinetic, so pitiless and upward-facing, and this robbed me of the only scrap
of purpose I had left. I had no interest in a New York City without Jim Culvers in it. So, when the hotel porter showed me to my room, I tipped him a dollar, sent him on his way, and locked the
door. I was supposed to join Dulcie and Leonard Hines that night for dinner at Delmonico’s, but I cried off, and twice more in the days that followed. Eventually, a breakfast meeting was
arranged for us in the hotel restaurant, and we sat clumsily discussing things, not mentioning my sweats or the trembling of my hands upon the teapot. Leonard Hines introduced himself by saying,
‘Dee-Dee tells me you’re her girl most likely. Hope that’s true. I’ve seen a little of your work, it’s—well, it’s interesting. I wonder, though, where are
you taking things right now? I mean, in what direction are you headed?’

I just dabbed at the table with my napkin and told him, ‘I’m not sure yet. Somewhere good, I hope.’ And I turned to Dulcie, saying, ‘I’ve been thinking: would you
mind if I flew back tomorrow instead?’

‘If that’s what you want. She didn’t have the best time on the ship with me,’ Dulcie said, by way of explanation to Leonard, who was squinting at her for assurance.
Nothing was said about my brief stint in the hospital bay or what had put me there, bloody evacuations on the high seas not being the anecdote one prefers to tell during business hours.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sure my secretary can look into that for you. We have a very good arrangement with Pan Am.’

‘I suppose I’ll be sailing home alone then,’ Dulcie said. ‘Terrific.’

I thanked them both and went back to picking at my pancakes. We exchanged the lightest talk about Leonard’s youngest daughter—she had just been admitted into the art history
programme at Radcliffe, a feat that made him ‘just incredibly proud’. Had I realised that this was a prestigious women’s college at the time, I might have feigned some admiration
for her achievements, and not mistaken Leonard’s constant use of the phrase ‘Seven Sisters’ for the area of North London where I once went to buy a second-hand gramophone from a
woman with no teeth. He was obviously unimpressed by me, and this exasperated Dulcie, who sat across the table making reproachful faces at my lack of discourse. ‘Don’t ever embarrass me
like that again,’ she said, as we went back up in the lift. ‘You could’ve at least
tried
to look interested.’ It was a painful and disastrous meeting, but I had no
regrets about it.