Julian woke up with a sense that something was different. It took him a while to work out what it was. These days he felt like his mind and his body were running at different speeds. First thing in the morning, his body would wake up, but his mind would take a little while to catch up, to work out where he was, and what was going on. This was odd, as he was always in the same place, and there was never anything going on. There would be a brief moment of intersection, of synchronicity, then—for the rest of the day—his body lagged several steps behind his mind, struggling to keep step.
While he thought, Julian stared at the lines of green on the wall next to his bed; different shades, like blades of grass dappled in the sunlight. Mary had painted these when she was trying to decide how to redecorate their bedroom. In the end, none of those colors had been chosen, and the room remained the same grubby ivory. Perhaps Mary had known by then that there would be no point.
Eventually, Julian realized what was new about this morning: a sense of purpose. Today he had things to do. An appointment. People were expecting him. Relying on him. He threw back the covers with more gusto than usual, hauled himself out of bed, and walked carefully down the spiral staircase that led from the mezzanine floor, where his bedroom and bathroom were, to the open-plan sitting room and kitchenette. There, pinned to the fridge door, was his list.
Choose outfit
Collect materials
Art shop
Props
Be at Monica’s 7:00 P.M. prompt
He’d underlined prompt twice. Not because he was likely to forget, but because he hadn’t had to be anywhere, with the possible exception of his dentist, prompt for years, and it was giving him a curious thrill.
Having drunk his first strong coffee of the day, Julian walked into his dressing room. It had, in the days when he and Mary had had overnight visitors, been the guest room, but now it was filled with rows and rows of Julian’s clothes, all hanging on metal rails, with boots and shoes lined up underneath. Julian loved his outfits. Each one held a memory—of an era, an event, a love affair. If you closed your eyes and inhaled extravagantly, some still held the scent of a bygone age—Mary’s homemade marmalade, the cordite from a firework display at a masked ball in Venice, or the rose petal confetti from a wedding at Claridge’s.
The chaise longue in the corner was draped with a variety of potential outfits for today, which Julian had decided to sleep on (not literally; that would just lead to more ironing). Getting dressed took so long these days that it was crucial to get the wardrobe selection absolutely right before he started, or he could be there all day, doing up and undoing buttons with increasingly uncooperative and arthritic hands. He cast a critical eye over the various options, before deciding to go with the understated one. Professional. Workman-like. He didn’t want his clothing to distract from the matter at hand—the art lesson.
Next, Julian went into his studio, double height and flooded with light from the glass roof and the floor-to-ceiling windows, and opened the drawer marked PENCILS. Julian was not, by nature, a tidy person. His cottage was, by anybody’s standards, rather a mess. But the two areas of his life that were beautifully maintained and arranged were his clothes and his art materials. He carefully selected a range of pencils, graphite sticks, and erasers, some fairly new, some dating back to the Beatles era, and everything in between. Julian’s favorite pencils had been sharpened so many times that they were barely long enough to hold, but he couldn’t throw them away. They were old friends.
Julian was rather chuffed that he could still pull a crowd. That nice lady, Monica, had told him ten people were coming to that evening’s class. She’d even had to turn people away! There was, it appeared, life in the old dog yet.
Julian moved around the studio, collecting things that might be useful for his new students. He found a selection of boards for them to pin their sketches to. He pulled an assortment of fabrics from the mannequins they were draped over, for use as a backdrop. He rifled through his lovingly curated reference books to find the ones that might be most inspirational for the ingénue. He tried not to get distracted by his chronologically arranged collection of exhibition catalogs, which could so easily transport him back to the London art world of the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Monica was charging fifteen pounds per head for the two-hour lesson. He’d thought that was rather a lot, but she’d pooh-poohed him, saying, This is Fulham. People pay their dog walkers more than that. He was being paid seventy-five pounds for the session (a small fortune!), and Monica had given him what she’d described as “petty cash” to spend on any extra supplies he needed from the art shop.
Julian checked his pocket watch. It was 10:00 A.M. The art shop would just be opening.
AS JULIAN WALKED past the café, he could see Monica negotiating her way around the queue at the counter, carrying a tray of drinks. Monica, he had noticed, was never still. Even when she was sitting, she was animated, her jaunty dark ponytail swinging from side to side. When she was concentrating on something, she’d twist a strand of hair round and round her index finger, and when she was listening to someone, she cocked her head to one side, just like his old Jack Russell had done.
Julian still missed his dog, Keith. He’d gone just a few months after Mary. He blamed himself for being so wrapped up in his grief about Mary that he didn’t pay enough attention to his pet. Keith had just pined away, gradually becoming less energetic and less animated, until one day he’d stopped moving at all. Julian had tried to emulate this slow, determined manner of checking out, but in that, as in so many things, he’d failed. He’d carried Keith’s body into the cemetery in a Waitrose reusable bag for life (ironically), and, when no one was looking, had buried him next to the Admiral.
Monica always appeared to know what she was doing and where she was going. Whereas most people seemed to be swept along by the vicissitudes of life, Monica looked like she was directing, or even fighting, it, every step of the way. He’d only known her a week or so, yet already she seemed to have picked him up, rearranged everything around him, and put him down in a strangely, wonderfully, altered reality.
Yet, while Monica had already had a huge impact on his life, Julian was aware that he barely knew her. He really wanted to paint her, as if his brushes might be able to uncover the truths beneath the protective barrier she seemed to have erected around herself. Julian hadn’t wanted to paint anyone for nearly fifteen years.
How many times in the last few years had Julian walked down this road marveling at all the people rushing past him, wondering where they were going and what they were doing, while he was just putting one foot in front of the other for no particular reason at all, apart from the fear that if he didn’t he would completely seize up? But today, he was one of them; someone with somewhere to be.
Julian started humming to himself, causing a couple of people to turn and smile at him as he passed by. Unaccustomed to eliciting this reaction, Julian glared at them suspiciously, at which point they picked up their pace and hurried on. At the art shop, he picked up twenty large sheets of high-quality drawing paper and took them to the till. There was, he mused, nothing more exhilarating, nor as terrifying, as a blank sheet of paper.
“I’m buying supplies for the art class I teach,” he told the cashier.
“Uh-huh,” he replied. He was not what you’d describe as a conversationalist.
“I wonder if there’ll be any budding Picassos in the class this evening,” Julian said.
“Cash or card?” replied the cashier. A badge on his lapel displayed five stars for customer services. Julian wondered what the one-star cashiers were like.
Next stop: props.
Julian paused at the corner shop, where large baskets of fruit and vegetables spilled out on to the street. A bowl of fruit perhaps? No. Dull and clichéd. Even a beginner’s class could be more adventurous than that, surely? Then, much like being slapped in the face by a wet kipper, he was hit by the smell of the fishmonger. He looked in the window and there it was: just the thing.