The Ecliptic (30 page)

‘Stop moving around. You’re ruining my composition.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Ellie—come on—time to be serious.’

I dumped the sketchbook on the floor. ‘All right.’ The page was not quite dry and some of the colour bled with the impact: tiny veins streaking the paper from the centre outwards.
‘As far as feeling anxious goes:
no
, I don’t feel anything, not with this kind of work. I could make little pictures like this all day because that’s all it is:
picture-making. There’s no emotional connection with this process whatsoever. I mean, no offence to you, Victor, but doing a quick portrait of you in watercolours isn’t any sort of
challenge. This whole exercise is meaningless.’

‘Ah, but you’re painting,’ he said. ‘That isn’t meaningless.’

‘I see what you’re trying to do. I get it. But, really, this is just like all the stuff I’ve been knocking out for Dulcie in the last few months—I can finish it, and you
can hang it on your wall and say I painted it if you want to, but there’s nothing of me in it. It’s not art, just decoration.’

‘Can I see it?’ he said.

I shrugged.

He got up from his chair, flexing his legs, then stooped to gather the portrait I had made. It had taken me just under twenty minutes. Sliding his glasses along his nose to appraise it, he made
no sound, tilting it to the afternoon light, as though it were some lost relic he was trying to authenticate. Then he said, ‘If that’s just decoration, then I mustn’t know much
about art. May I keep this?’

‘All yours.’ I held my hand out. ‘A couple of hundred ought to cover it.’

‘Payment in services rendered.’

‘Cheapskate,’ I said, and he permitted himself a laugh.

He sat down again with the picture on his knees, admiring it for a moment before swivelling it round for me to look at. ‘Why did you paint it this way, if you don’t mind my
asking?’

‘I can’t do faces very well,’ I said.

‘Ellie—serious now—please.’

I had been seeing Victor for the past six months. It had taken an enormous effort just to dial his number to organise an appointment, and an even greater determination to present myself at his
office for the first time. But I had done it in the hope of salvaging some aspect of my old self, and Dulcie had been only too delighted to foot the bill. When I had suggested that I might see a
therapist instead of taking a break from painting, she had responded with all the enthusiasm I had expected: ‘Oh, absolutely—that sounds like a very fine idea to me. Did you have anyone
in mind?’ I had told her Victor Yail would be the only person I would feel comfortable with. ‘Well, if that’s something you think you need,’ she had said. Then: ‘Does
that mean January is still a possibility?’ I reasoned that if I was going to relax my principles just to appease the Roxborough, then I might as well get something useful out of it, and
Victor had been so confident that he could help me overcome my problems.

His practice was on the third floor of a Georgian townhouse in Harley Street. It was a rather clerical environment: just an oak-panelled waiting area with an array of mismatched chairs, and
then, through a doorway behind the receptionist’s desk, Victor’s imperious consulting room, where all my issues were laid bare for him and picked apart. This was a space I knew he took
great pride in. Burgundy carpet, mahogany bureau (obscuring most of the good light from the picture window), blocky suede furniture arranged in a perfect L. Between the couch and Victor’s
armchair was an ankle-height coffee table that held a chessboard, its ornate marble pieces uniformly placed, and the bookshelves were replete with dimly titled volumes and obscure foreign
artefacts. Drab lithographs of birds and trees were hung on the walls beside two mystifying Aboriginal tapestries and the many foiled certificates of Victor’s education. I had included all
these details in the portrait, knowing how much he valued them.

At the beginning of the session, he had given me a rudimentary box of paints, a brush, and a pot of water. ‘We’re going to try something new today, if that’s all right with
you.’ He had invited me to spend the full hour painting his portrait whilst we conducted our usual discussion. ‘I’ll just sit in my normal spot, as still as I can, while you talk
and paint. Let’s see what we end up with.’

Now, he was sitting with the results of my endeavour on his lap, asking me to give the rationale behind it. I did not know where to begin. Therapy seemed to be such an inexact procedure, like
wetting your finger and circling it around the rim of a glass, again and again, until it finally rang a note you could define as music. ‘The striking thing,’ he said, ‘is that
I’m not in this picture at all. Why is that?’

It was true that I had quite deliberately left Victor out of the image. I had noticed that the watercolour box contained a pot of masking fluid, so I had blanked out the shape of him with this
invisible solution and then painted in everything else around him. The fullness of his office was rendered in blotchy detail, right down to the outlying rooftops in the window behind his back, the
snowy trail of Harley Street, but Victor was just a white void on the paper, a frame without substance. ‘You can still tell it’s you, though,’ I said.

‘Is this how you see me, Ellie?’ he asked. ‘An empty shell? Not really there?’

‘
No
. Don’t be ridiculous. I just painted it that way because—’ And I trailed off. I could not explain why the notion had come to me. When I tried to, the words
came out so unpersuasively: ‘I don’t know, I thought it would make for a more interesting picture, that’s all. Obviously, I see you as a person. Bloody hell. I see
everyone
as a person.’

‘Do you see any connection between this picture and your life in general? Absences and what have you?’

‘Yes. Fine. You caught me out. I was thinking of Jim, OK, not you.’

‘That wasn’t quite my point.’

‘I know what you were getting at. And I’m still not comfortable discussing it.’

‘All right. We’ll move past that for now.’

I huffed. ‘It’s just me trying to be less ordinary. I don’t want to be so literal with everything I paint—that was Jim’s problem. He had good ideas but he stopped
himself exploring them.’

‘We aren’t here to talk about Jim’s problems.’

‘Well, it hardly matters. I’m still not abstract enough for some.’

‘Who’s said that about you—not abstract enough?’

‘It wasn’t
said
, necessarily. Just implied.’

‘By whom?’

I tried to look unfazed by the memory of it. ‘There was an important show a few months ago, at the RBA.
Situation
, it was called. You probably heard.’

Victor shook his head. ‘I don’t get out much. And when I do, it’s only to the squash club.’

‘Well, Dulcie was pushing to include one of my pieces, a diptych I made last year. But they wouldn’t have it in the show.’

‘Why not?’

‘I have my suspicions.’

‘Such as?’

‘Doesn’t matter. They liked the scale of it, but seemed to think it was too figurative. They said my references to mountains and what have you were a bit too clear and they were
after something different.’

‘What
were
they looking for?’

‘Pure abstraction, I think. No obvious representations of reality, just gesture.’

‘I see.’ Victor was still holding the portrait up in both hands, but he nodded at me in such a way that I expected he was itching to scribble something down. ‘And that made you
feel bad, did it?’

‘At first, yes. No one likes rejection.’ I smoothed the creases from my skirt and gazed into the window. The snow was skeltering down the pane. ‘It’s really picking up
out there again.’

‘But now you feel differently about it?’ Victor said. His professionalism could be so irritating at times—I was never allowed to deflect from a sore subject while we were in
session.

‘Yes. Now I feel much worse.’ I smiled. ‘Look, they didn’t take Nicholson or Lanyon’s work either, and a lot of others they should have, in my opinion. So I got
over the rejection side of things quickly enough—it happens and you have to deal with it. But then I went to see the show.’

‘Ah. Not very impressive?’

I just stared at him. ‘Sometimes, Victor, you’re so far off the pace it worries me.’

He set my sketchbook on the armrest and glanced down at his watch. ‘You’re saying the show
was
good, but it left you deflated in some way.’

‘In every way.’ I threw up my hands. ‘I mean, there I was, surrounded by all of this outstanding work—stuff that really pushes at the limits of what painting can
do—and the only thing I could think about was the pile of rubbish I’d left back in my studio. I felt ashamed, if you really want to know. That these artists were so brave, and I was so
desperate to be ordinary.’

‘That word again,’ Victor said. ‘You use it a lot.’

‘Would you prefer average? Middling? Mediocre?’

He gave a small sigh of indifference. ‘Let’s talk about your pieces for the January show. You’ve been going through the motions with those, you said.’

‘Yes. God. How many times do I have to repeat myself?’

He ignored me, thumbing towards the sketchbook. ‘And that’s how you approached the portrait here, too?’

‘
Yes
.’

‘But you’re not being truthful about that, Ellie. You told me—hang on, I’d hate to misquote you—’ He leaned to flick back through the pages of his notebook,
one-handed. ‘
That’s just me trying to be less ordinary. Not be so literal.
Isn’t that what you just said?’

‘Well, I didn’t think you’d be transcribing every last bloody word when I was saying it. Is this a courtroom now?’

With this, he eased off, reclining in his chair, softening his stance. ‘My point is, what you’ve made for me here is by no means ordinary. I’m not in it, for a start.
That’s fairly unusual for a portrait, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It depends on your frame of reference.’

‘All right. Fair enough. I don’t profess to be an expert on art. But I can tell the time well enough: eighteen minutes and forty-one seconds. That’s how long it took you to
complete it. And you showed no obvious anxiety behaviours as you were painting it. So, I’m left wondering if it’s the act of painting that’s been causing all your apprehensions,
like we discussed, or if it’s something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not sure yet. We need to talk that through a bit more, but I’m confident we’ll get there,’ he said. ‘And I think it’s probably wise to keep you on
the Tofranil for now. It appears to be helping. Unless you’ve any objections?’

For once, I had no answer.

‘Good then.’ Victor leaned to make one last scribble on his notepad. ‘I think we’ve made terrific strides today already.’

Staying away from the Roxborough in January proved difficult. I managed not to be there for the hanging of my paintings, letting Dulcie and her deputies ascribe the order to the
turgid mess I handed them. When the private viewing came around on the 14th, I stayed home, knowing they would make me stand beside my wretched work for photo opportunities and give interviews all
night about the (lack of) thought behind them. Still, there were so many quiet afternoons in the weeks after, when I was tempted to drop into the gallery to see the paintings
in situ
,
hoping the sight of them in this context might somehow redeem them.

In the lead-up to the opening, Dulcie had posted me the text for the show’s catalogue, seeking my approval. She had commissioned a foreword from a writer called Ken Muirhead, a fellow Scot
who had commended my previous show in the
Telegraph.
Of my new paintings, he wrote this:

I was almost hypnotised by the language in this paragraph, but I resisted it. Clearly, Muirhead had failed to notice the sheer apathy that underpinned the paintings, how poorly I had gone about
the task of executing them, how knowingly I had let them be carried from my studio, one after the next, like meat leaving an abattoir. And then it struck me that Ken Muirhead and I were one and the
same: factotums, glad to dash off work for the cost of our subsistence. I agreed to the text and sent it back to Dulcie without comment, thinking nobody would ever take such drivel seriously. She
called me after the private viewing to tell me, ‘Ken was rather sad not to see you there. He said he’d never wanted to meet an artist so much in his life. And he doesn’t even know
how pretty you are yet. We ought to set the two of you up. I don’t think he’s married any more.’

What I did not expect was the commotion that followed. The reviewers were even more fulsome in their praise of my paintings than Muirhead—‘staggering’, they said;
‘exceptional’, ‘dazzling’, ‘ambitious, affecting’—and the public seemed to mistake the ignorance of these critiques for testimonials. The Roxborough
attracted so many visitors in the show’s run that it had to extend its opening hours to accommodate them. Had I ventured there on any of those quiet afternoons in January, I would have found
myself queuing at the door. I learned all of this from Dulcie, when she came by the studio at the close of the show with Max Eversholt and a bottle of champagne already opened. ‘Well,
somebody’s
got to celebrate your success,’ she said, ‘even if you won’t.’