Winter’s studio was in a former piano factory in Kentish Town. An elongated two-storey building between a builder’s yard and a new development of mixed-use office and living space, there was nothing to mark it out as what it now was. No sign, no name plate above the door. Only a circular bell push that didn’t seem to work.
Katherine stepped back. The windows on the upper floor were bare. The way round to the back was blocked on one side by a brick wall topped with nasty-looking barbed wire, on the other by a tall mesh fence. Nothing to do but bang on the door and shout.
After several minutes that yielded nothing aside from making herself hoarse, Katherine kicked at the ground in annoyance and turned away. Almost as if he’d been waiting, Winter unlocked and opened the door.
‘What’s all the hullabaloo? Noise enough to wake the dead.’
‘The bell’s not working.’
‘Of course it’s not working.’
‘Then how d’you expect people to let you know they’re here?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Fine. In that case don’t ask them to come round.’
She was approaching the side entrance to the new building, the narrow strip leading out onto the street, before he called her back.
‘Katherine, wait.’
If she’d carried on walking, perhaps it would have been different. But instead she stopped, hesitated, slowly turned and walked back.
‘I was busy, working. Any distraction …’ Winter made a vague gesture with his hand. ‘You’re here now. Better come in.’
He went back inside, expecting her to follow.
The room ran the length of the building, save for one end which had been partitioned off. A curved staircase led up to a second floor which was open and stretched less than a third of the way across. At the rear, broad arched windows reached down towards the ground. The bare boards were shiny with use and thickly speckled with paint. Canvases, turned inwards, rested in twos and threes against the walls. Tins of paint in various sizes were piled on top of one another on a metal plan chest and others sat abandoned here and there across the floor.
By the central window a large easel was angled towards an empty bed, in front of which a glass vase of failing poppies, purple, white and red, stems arching outwards, stood on a tall three-legged stool draped with a velvet cloth.
‘Just give me a minute. A minute. Look around. Make yourself useful. There’s coffee. Down at the end there. Black for me.’
The partitioned area divided into two: toilet and shower to one side; small, overcrowded kitchen to the other. A toaster sat uneasily on a pile of books; the lead from the electric kettle trailed down towards the floor. The remains of what looked like lasagne was encrusted round the inside of an oval dish on the stove. Katherine found a jar of ground coffee in the cupboard above the sink; a coffee pot – the kind that Chrissy swore by – in the sink itself, waiting to be washed. Milk was in the small fridge on the counter, a Roberts radio resting on top.
Newspaper clippings and postcard reproductions of paintings overlapped on the wall.
Katherine thought she recognised a Picasso – a woman’s body splintered into ugly segments and then put back clumsily together again. The other artists she couldn’t identify. A blotchy portrait of a man reflected in a bathroom mirror, head shaven, dark holes where the eyes were meant to be. A naked man on a brown settee, legs spread wide, genitals showing, holding a small black rat in his right hand. The clippings seemed to be a mixture of reviews of other artists’ work, recipes, and odd news items – three people fall to their deaths from same clifftop in a single day; epidemic of flying ants drives family from their home.
When it was ready, Katherine poured the coffee into mugs and added milk to her own.
Hesitated, uncertain.
‘Shit!’ came the sudden shout from behind. ‘Shit and fuck again!’ And the sound of something being hurled to the ground.
When she stepped out from behind the partition, Winter was standing away from the easel, wiping the end of a paintbrush on a torn piece of rag. ‘Just when you think you’ve got it cracked, another fucking petal falls.’
They sat up on the mezzanine floor. A day bed and two canvas chairs either side of a small folding table. Winter pressed buttons on a remote control and music started up from speakers above their heads, something classical, some kind of string quartet Katherine thought, the sort of thing Abike went sneaking off to see, Sunday mornings at Wigmore Hall.
‘So, tell me about yourself,’ Winter said.
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
Katherine shrugged and turned her head away, avoiding his gaze.
‘Where are you from? Originally, I mean.’
‘London, I suppose. We moved up to Nottingham when I was just starting secondary.’
‘We?’
‘My mum and dad. My mum’s still there. My dad’s in Cornwall. Well, mostly.’
‘And you, you’re …’
‘Stuck in a holding pattern, Stelina says …’
‘Who’s Stelina?’
‘One of my flatmates.’
‘Works for an airline, does she? Air-traffic control?’
‘The NHS.’
‘Currently going down without a parachute.’
Katherine wasn’t sure if she was meant to laugh. It felt awkward, strange, sitting there talking to someone she hardly knew. Someone close to her father’s age; partway, she supposed, to being some kind of celebrity. Made her feel as if she were sixteen again. Not a good feeling at all.
‘So, modelling, for you it’s a sideline, not a career?’
‘I suppose.’
‘V says you’re very good. And she’s an excellent judge.’
‘I don’t even know enough to know what being good is.’
‘Maybe that’s better. More instinctive.’
‘I doubt that.’ She drank some of her coffee, hooked one ankle over the other. Whatever movement she made, no matter how small, his eyes followed. ‘What’s it mean anyway, being a good model? Aside from how you look?’
Winter leaned forward, fingers loosely interlaced, elbows resting on the edges of the chair. ‘What distinguishes a good model, a really good model – above all else they want to give the artist what he or she needs. And the closer they come to one other, the more they work together – the good model knows what that is without a word having to be passed between them.’
‘And does that happen often?’
‘Hardly at all.’
His mobile rang and he glanced at the screen. ‘I’ll have to take this.’
Downstairs, he paced the length of the room. ‘Rebecca, I understand … I’ve got it … Of course I’ve fucking got it. You think I’m some kind of naive …? Yes. Yes, I know.’
Katherine stood, went to the window. On the far side of the builder’s yard the railway line ran west towards Hampstead and the Finchley Road. Beyond that she could see the beginnings of the Heath, Parliament Hill Fields, grass and trees; people, little more than matchstick figures, out running, pushing buggies, walking their dogs.
Winter’s voice, louder, closer to exasperation. ‘Well, tell Rupert he can … Yes … I don’t know, anyway you can. Just make sure it gets done.’
By accident or design, he kicked over a pot of paint on his way back to the stairs.
‘Sorry about that. Business, I’m afraid. I’m supposed to have this show coming up, a year, eighteen months from now. Maybe sooner, I don’t know. And now it’s got mired in all these fucking negotiations …’
He lowered himself back down into his chair. ‘It used to be, once upon a time, when I started, all I had to do was paint. That was it, get up, go to the easel, dip a brush, paint. Hockney … You’ve heard of Hockney?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘When he was a young man, still a student, he made this sign, like a poster, and stuck it on the chest of drawers beside his bed so it would be the first thing he saw when he woke. Get Up and Work Immediately. Lucky bastard, to be able to do that. Could then, can now.’
‘And you can’t?’
Winter laughed. ‘Yes. Yes, I can. Except, you know, life … life fucking intervenes. Life and money. Reputation. Lack of it. Hockney now, what is he? Eighty? He’s got it made. Has for years. Decades. Do what he likes. Always has. Dye his hair, smoke like a fucking chimney in the face of all the available advice; flaunt the fact that he was gay before it was practically bloody essential. Except now it’s bisexual that’s the thing. Bisexual and then some. Fluidly fucking gendered, whatever the fuck that is. LGB fucking T. And no matter what, he’s still a national fucking treasure. Hockney. He could pose naked save for a piss pot on his head on top of the plinth in Trafalgar Square and everyone would cheer.’
‘You sound as if you’re jealous.’
‘Jealous? That’s not the word. A certain amount of envy perhaps. Not for the work, though I like the work, some of it, quite a lot in fact, the early stuff especially, not this iPad nonsense. No, it’s that somehow he’s earned the right to do what he likes, say what he likes, without having to manoeuvre, second-guess, smarm up to the right people, the right collectors.’
Katherine didn’t know what to say, how to respond to the flurry of angry words. She picked up the empty mugs and moved towards the stairs. ‘Why don’t I just take these down and …’
‘And come back.’
‘What?’
‘Come back tomorrow. Early. We’ll get an early start. Eight, can you make it by then? Eight-thirty?’
‘But I haven’t said …’
‘This show, the one I was on the phone about earlier, it’s going to be big. A big deal. And there’s at least another three canvases I’ve got to have finished by then, if not four. And I can’t do that on my own.’
She made the mistake of looking into his eyes.
‘What do you say then? Eight sharp?’
‘Okay.’
Back outside, she was slightly unsteady on her feet without knowing quite why.