The Ecliptic

The news came in an envelope from my mother. She had written to me with her usual gossip about the happenings in her building and reports of my father’s foul mood, with one last paragraph pleading for my company at Christmas time. And, clipped to the last page, was a cutting from the newspaper, on which she had written in the margin: Saw this in the Herald yesterday. Sorry, love xx

HOLDEN – HENRY. Peacefully, at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, on Monday 11th December 1961, Henry Mackintosh Holden (artist and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art), aged 78 years. A generous and loving man who will be sadly missed. Funeral service at Luss Parish Church, Dumbartonshire, his family’s village, on 18th December at 10.30 a.m. No flowers, please.

The funeral was three days away. I called my mother to tell her I would be coming home for a spell. Her delight was tempered by the fact that I would not arrive until after I had paid my respects to Henry. She managed to hide the disappointment in her voice. ‘All right, love. You do what you feel’s best,’ she said. ‘We’ll have the place ready for you.’

It was a very long journey to Luss. I booked myself onto the earliest train to Glasgow, first-class, reasoning that I would need the comfort and the quiet of the roomier carriages. On the way, I read most of a novel and looked through the images in the National Geographic issues I had packed for the trip. It had been a few days since I had seen Victor, and I had still not decided on a photograph to call my own—in truth, they had barely left more than a fleeting impression on me, the sort of wonderment you glean from browsing a jeweller’s window. But I vowed to keep trying.

From Glasgow, I took a connecting train to Balloch, at the foot of Loch Lomond. My suitcase was so heavy that, after a few minutes lugging it, the joints of my elbows crackled with pain. The train was crowded with families and I had to walk through several carriages just to find a seat. The stolid darkness of the Clyde and its surrounds went by the windows, familiar and yet not. It was so late when I arrived at the station that I missed the last bus out of Balloch. I stayed the night at a nearby inn, and, waking early, traipsed along the road with my suitcase to catch the rusting single-decker that would carry me into Luss.

Still, I managed to be late. The service had already started when I got to the church. I stowed my case in the antechamber behind a stack of hassocks and crept down the aisle as quietly as I could. Two young girls were playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ on recorders by the altar. Half the pews were empty. A shining casket rested on a plinth with a single wreath of heather. I found a space beside an old man in a faded suit adorned with medals. He nodded at me soberly, and I shared my hymnal with him when it came time to sing. After Henry’s widow read out a poem by Yeats, the old man offered me his handkerchief, but we both sat through the prayers unmoved.

Four strong lads carried the coffin down the aisle to the graveyard, where a fresh cleft in the ground was waiting to receive it, just beyond the hedgerows. People arced around it with the breeze whipping their hair. I clustered with the mourners, hanging back. And when the Reverend gave his words of committal and the formalities were done, I threw a fist of soil into the grave and whispered thank you to a box of wood, wondering what Henry might have thought about it all.

Walking back, I saw his widow linking arms with a man I recognised from art school: a thickset fellow named Kerr whom Henry used to tease for painting cats in every mural, regardless of its subject matter (‘Did you never think to ask yourself, Kerr,’ he once said in our weekly crit, ‘whether those wee calicos have any business at a crucifixion?’). Kerr escorted Mrs Holden to one of the black cars near the church gates before I got a chance to introduce myself. Later, in the vestibule, he came to speak with me as I was waiting to sign the condolence book. We smiled at the remembrance of the calicos, and chatted for a while about my new life in London. He seemed only half-interested in my career as a painter but was extremely curious to know how word of the funeral had reached me. ‘Big news, is it, down there?’ he said, smirking. This led us into reminiscing about Henry and his feelings about London—he used to say that it was a city ‘without compassion for the individual’ but encouraged us to experience it if we were serious about becoming artists. ‘Aye, you don’t forget a fella like him,’ Kerr said, with an air of finality. ‘He gave us a job at the School after. Life-modelling. Ha! I was skint at the time, so I couldn’t say no. Haven’t really painted much since those days.’ Kerr had inherited his father’s hardware shop in Bishopbriggs and now ran it with his sister. I told him that sounded like a very nice life, and he said, ‘Pssh. It’s about ten different kinds of hell rolled into one. But it’s a living.’ He offered me a lift to the pub for the wake, and I accepted. ‘Did you sign that yet?’ he asked, pointing to the condolence book. ‘I never know what to write. Maybe you can think of something for us.’

Kerr went off to fetch his car, leaving me in the hush of the vestibule with my suitcase at my heels. Before I wrote my message in the book, I turned back through the pages to check the tenor of the comments—I had never written a condolence before and did not want to draw too much attention to myself. There were a lot of platitudes: Deepest sympathies. Always in our hearts. So many memories. I wanted mine to be more personal. As I searched for a clear space to write, I saw that a page had been turned inwards—creased so that one stumpy half jutted outwards from the spine. I unpicked it. There was another short message there, and a signature:

Paint what you believe.

Thanks for everything you taught me.

Rest in peace, old man.

James Culvers

He jangled his car keys. ‘We could walk it, mind, but seeing as you’ve got your case . . .’ And he stooped to lift it for me. ‘You all right, love? You’re shivering.’

It was definitely Jim’s handwriting. My heart was shuddering and so was my jaw, but I managed to get the words out: ‘Do you know if Jim was here earlier?’

Kerr nodded. He eyed the tome of condolences vised against my chest. ‘You bringing that along for Mrs H? Good thinking.’

The Colquhoun Arms was less than half a mile from the church, back on the road where the bus had dropped me. Beyond the windscreen of Kerr’s Cortina, the outlying hills were yellowed by sunshine. Low clouds seeped across the birdless sky. The treetops softly stirred. We drove in silence. The squat grey cottages of Luss smudged beside Kerr’s head. When he wheeled into the parking space, I jumped out of the car so fast I almost left my case on the back seat. ‘Steady, love,’ he said. ‘It’s open bar.’

I hauled my suitcase across the car park and dumped it by the coat racks. One corner of the pub had been roped off for the function. A huddle of glum-faced men in black were sitting at a long table with sandwiches, supping pints and rolling whisky in short glasses. There was no sign of Jim Culvers. I checked the corridors, the snug, the dark ends of the place. I peered into the Gents, but there was just a bald old fellow standing at the urinal. The barmaid saw me coming out and said, ‘It’s the other one, hen. We need to change that sign. I keep telling ’em.’

Mrs Holden was in a wingback near the fireplace, clutching a tissue. A grey-haired lady was crouched beside her. Approaching them, it occurred to me that they must have been twins. They had equally flat noses and high foreheads, and they both turned to me with the same mannequin expressions as I hovered near them, waiting to speak. ‘Mrs Holden,’ I said. ‘You probably don’t know me, but I knew your husband. He was my favourite teacher. I’m just so sad to lose him.’ It came out as ingenuously as I hoped it would. The sister stood up and said, ‘I’ll get you that brandy, Mags, OK?’ She left us alone.

Mrs Holden hung a stare on me, lids twitching. ‘So good of you to come,’ she said. And she had to bite on her lip to keep from crying. ‘Were you in—’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry. Were you in his mural class?’

‘Oh, that’s really good of you.’ She gulped something down. ‘And what is it you do now?’

‘Oh, how lovely. He was always so proud of his students. Did you know Geoff Kerr? He’s here somewhere, I think.’

‘A good lad, Geoff. He’s been such a help.’ Mrs Holden sniffed in a long breath. And, seeing the condolence book under my arm, she said, ‘Is that for me?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry—of course.’ I gave it to her. ‘I was wondering if you knew where I could find an old friend of mine. Jim Culvers. He was at the service, but I can’t see him here.’

‘He’s another student of Henry’s.’ I showed her the page with Jim’s message.

She moved her eyes over the words, but there was no glint of recognition in them. ‘James Culvers. No. I’m sorry. I don’t know who that is.’ And she paused, considering the empty fireplace. ‘There was an old student of Henry’s renting the cottage last summer, but I don’t recognise the name. Culvers—I’d remember that. This fella’s name began with a B. Bailey, or Bradley, or something like that. Henry never got me involved.’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘His father’s place. He liked to come out and paint there sometimes. Then his hands got too sore, and he preferred having the money is his pocket. We planned on selling, but it wouldn’t be worth a lot now.’ When I asked for the address, she wafted her hand. ‘Ach, it’s not far. Get to the pier and turn left. It’s the only house on the water that’s not been looked after—you can’t miss it. What was your name again, love, did you say?’

I touched her hand. The skin felt thin as a cobweb. ‘Take care, Mrs Holden.’

It was one harsh winter away from a wreck—a simple stone cottage with a pitched slate roof, so bearded with moss it was already bowing. There was a pale craquelure on the window frames, hay-coloured, moulting. The gutters were shot. The door glass was patched up with tape. A trampled path meandered up to the house, away from the brow of the loch, where the steel-blue water roiled quietly and a clutch of white sloops lilted on their moorings. I walked up the slope, skimming the waist-high grass with my palm, until I came to a doorstep, half painted black. There were old net curtains at the windows, dishes on the outer sill with food scraps: brown-bread crusts and pickle, a saucer ringed with coffee. But there was no sign of movement inside. I knocked several times and nobody answered.

There was no letterbox to peer through, and the windowpanes were coated in a sooty grime that made it difficult to see beyond the nets. I put my case down and side-stepped through the weeds. At the back of the house was a small garden, overrun with nettles, and a dank wooden outhouse. Behind it, a bank of firs, and two great hummocks pushing at the clouds. There was just one downstairs window, looking into the kitchen—a newspaper was on the table, but I could not read the headlines or the date. If the place was lived in, it was lived in sparely. The tap was dripping, a dried-up dishcloth spread over it. I could not think what I should do. Soon, I found my hand was reaching for the door. The handle turned, the latch came away. It was easy. The hinges squealed as the door opened. I waited, pondering the bareness of the kitchen. The tiles were scuffed by chair legs. The newsprint seemed bright, recent. I decided to go in.

But I was barely past the threshold when I heard his voice: ‘Never would’ve picked you for a burglar, Ellie.’ It came from directly behind me: slow, amused, admonishing. Spinning round, my knuckles grazed the doorframe, but I did not feel the pain until later.

Jim was standing there in a black woollen jacket. He was holding a small basket of flowers. His face was tanned and shaven. I could see his breath steaming out. It was close enough to gather, to bottle, to keep. ‘Why d’you look so afraid?’ he asked. ‘I’m not going to turn you in.’

‘Oh my God—Jim.’ It was all I could get out of me. ‘Jim.’ I stepped forward to hug him, and he did not move, accepting the embrace without returning it. He held the basket aloft, protecting his flowers. Then, giving me one soft tap on the back, he said, ‘All right, all right, enough.’ He smiled at me apologetically, those familiar big teeth still as gapped as ever. But there was such a newness about him, too. His hair was cut neatly and combed into runnels—it seemed hard as wicker. The skin was smooth about his cheeks and it gave off a limey scent. He looked as sober as a child. ‘Go on inside,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get these into brine.’ When I did not budge, he said again, ‘Go on. I can’t stand about all day. And you seem to ‘ve cut yourself a bad one, look.’ My knuckles were streaking blood.

He followed me into the kitchen, got the iodine from the cupboard. I sat down at the table. My head was in a daze, and I was shivering again. I could not tell if I was relieved to see him or frightened of him leaving me. Dabbing a cloth into the iodine, he came and pressed it on my wound. ‘It’ll sting,’ he said, but I did not care. ‘Just let me take these flowers in. I’ll only be a moment.’

The through-door from the kitchen was just a wall of beads like you might find at the back of a dreary restaurant. As he pushed through them, they swung and clattered, and I could see into the room beyond. It was a bare shell with no carpet and only a wooden rocking chair for furniture. He had made it into a studio. Two narrow tables were arranged beside an easel with a board set up to paint on.

I trailed after him. He was unscrewing the lid of a tall jar filled with cloudy water. The painting beyond him was only part-finished, but it appeared to show the dying blossoms of a cherry tree scattered over flagstones. He tipped the flowers from his basket into the jar. ‘How’re the fingers?’ he asked, not turning to face me. When the lid was screwed tight, he shook the jar vigorously, side to side.

‘It’s a process. Helps with the yield.’ And he stopped quaking the jar and put it on the table. He took a metal colander and a bucket from underneath its legs. Removing the lid again, he poured the contents of the jar into the bucket, straining out the sodden flowers. He picked up the colander and began sorting through the petals, selecting only the pinkest, which he placed on a wad of fabric to dry.

‘Sorry, it’s really quite time-sensitive. I just need another moment.’ He patted the flowers and folded them into the fabric, as though wrapping a parcel. ‘You might want to close your ears.’ With the base of his fist, he thumped down several times on the parcel, and all of the brushes and tube paints on the table rattled like fine china. Then he scraped the flowers into a mortar and started grinding. He turned to me, working the pestle, and looked over at the clock above the hearth. ‘Twenty minutes until this lot needs to come out,’ he said. ‘That’s all the time I have for talking.’

I sensed that Jim’s account of things had been rehearsed so many times in his head over the years that he had learned how to hesitate at just the right moments in the telling of it; when to stutter and stumble over details, which gaps to skim over and which joins to show. But I was simply glad to hear him speak. Too much time had elapsed without the sound of his voice near me. I did not try to interrupt or scrutinise. I just sat in the rocking chair, watching the motions of his mouth as he formed the words. How much of what he told me was a falsehood I could not tell, but if it hurt me less than the truth, I was willing to bear it.

His story went that he had left London on a pilgrimage. One by one, he had revisited all of the towns where he had been stationed in the war. ‘Looking for what, I don’t quite know,’ he said. ‘I just knew I had to get back there.’ A doctor had put the notion in his mind. He had awoken on the floor of his old studio, feeling raw from three days’ drinking, and could not feel his fingers. There was no sensation in his lower arms at all, he said, but he had managed to get dressed—‘Don’t ask me how’—and taken himself to a doctor’s surgery near Abbey Road. The doctor had knocked his elbows with a reflex hammer and listened to his heart, told him everything was fine. If the feeling did not return by tomorrow, he should come back again, but it was likely just a temporary side-effect of the alcohol—he should really think about cutting back. Jim had told him he would sooner cut back on breathing. Then, on the wall above the doctor’s typewriter, he had noticed a framed print. ‘It was a reproduction of a Stanley Spencer. Horses pulling wounded soldiers into a hospital tent on—what are they called? Travoys. You know, those big long stretchers? Anyway, it’s an incredible painting. One of his best.’ The doctor had said it was there to remind him of his days as a medic in the Great War—not that he would ever forget his experiences, of course, just that the picture inspired him to keep practising through the more difficult moments. On the way home, Jim could not get the image from his mind. It had made him think of his own picture of his friend at the Prince Alfred. ‘And I thought, that’s what my painting has to do to people. That’s what I have to communicate.’ So he had cleared everything from his studio that afternoon, headed to the bank to withdraw his savings, and set off.

The only things he took with him were a clean set of clothes, a blank sketchbook with a few coloured pencils, an old journal from his days with the regiment, and a bottle of Glenlivet, which he poured over the side of the ferry on the way to Calais. ‘I knew I couldn’t go back there drunk. I had to stand up and face it all or the whole trip would be pointless. I felt rough as dogs those first few days, but I got through it.’ He rode a bus down to Arras, where he had first been stationed with his unit: ‘The place had changed a lot, naturally, but the noise of the town was the same as I remembered—there used to be an airstrip there, and planes would come in and go out all the time, but in the quiet spots, you know, there was always an alarming quiet. The way the wind shakes up the fields over there—it’s peculiar. Something I won’t forget in a hurry.’ It was here that he had fired his service weapon in anger for the very first time: ‘Shot an unarmed German there from seven feet away: total panic job, coming round the blindside of him.’ After several months in Arras, he caught a train north to Dunkirk, which he said had changed unnervingly. ‘I was glad I went back. It’s important to see a city how it ought to be, you know, not clothed in all the miseries of war. Not with tanks and sandbags and all that screaming chaos. But seeing it again, so quiet, left me feeling quite disturbed, if that makes sense. There was a part of me that I knew would always be stuck there. I lost a lot of friends on that patch of land.’ Still, he was not satisfied with any of the sketches he made on his return to these places—the work did not resound as brightly as his memories of them.

One night in Dunkirk, he started drinking again. ‘I thought if I just stuck to the local brew, I’d be able to handle it. Well, I’m not a particularly smart fella when it comes to drink, as you know.’ He got into a brawl with a young French poet who had been reading his work aloud in the bar. ‘I wasn’t in the mood to hear poems. It was that awful, dismal sort of French stuff—just a roll of sounds without any meaning—so I started hassling him about it and he didn’t much like it. I ended up losing a tooth—’ He paused here to show me the gap. ‘—and the lad fractured his thumb. The both of us got thrown into the locker at the police station overnight. Adjoining cells. We didn’t speak to each other for a bit, but then he came over and started apologising—he was in tears. I thought, Hang on, this lad’s got problems. And it turns out he did. His parents had just died, two weeks ago, so he said, and he hadn’t been coping with it very well. That’s what his poems had been about. And he’d been run out of the last town he was in because he’d slapped some poor bloke for goading him, too. That makes him sound like a terrible lad—he wasn’t at all. Just troubled.’ They became friends (this was the only part of Jim’s story I did not need to question, knowing how men like to find compassion for each other after they have traded punches, never before) and the poet invited Jim to stay with him and his sister in his family’s house in Giverny for the summer. ‘I heard “Giverny” and remembered it was where Monet used to have his garden with the lilies—so I thought it couldn’t be that bad. And it wasn’t. It was bliss. His parents had left him this beautiful old house. Wildflowers everywhere, hibiscus and pear trees. Glorious sunshine all summer. I didn’t want to leave.’

He stayed in Giverny for a full year, in fact, trying to make sense of the sketches in his book, painting with gouache on board. ‘The French have a wonderful word: ‘vaurien’. It means ‘good-for-nothing’. That’s what all of those paintings were like. I couldn’t seem to get the tone right, no matter what I tried.’ Because the poet and his sister drank so little, and with Jim living off their charity and provisions, he was forced to become reacquainted with sobriety. ‘For a while, I was living off whatever was in the cupboards—I had a lot of stale cognac, and some disgusting old Dutch advocaat. But that ran out soon enough, and I had no money, so it was either I went and stole it, or—well, I didn’t want to come back to France after all that time just to start looting the place like a bloody Nazi. It took me until the spring to really get my act together.’

The spring was when the Judas trees in the village came into bloom. He had gone walking one day with the poet’s sister and, suddenly, the winding avenues of Giverny had blushed with so many shades of pink. ‘To begin with, I thought they were just like the cherry trees and magnolias back home, but she told me they were Judas trees. When she was a little girl, her mother used to collect all the petals to make pot-pourri. There was so much of the stuff.’

As the weeks passed, Jim had noticed how the Judas blossoms separated from the branches so quickly, how they dusted the ground in endless configurations, every one of them unique. ‘The wind gathered them all up and scattered them however it wanted—like it was painting the scenery all by itself. Some of them would just sit there on the ground, stuck on the gravel, on the soil, or they’d get caught between long blades of grass. They’d just sit there for weeks, fading, shrivelling, turning brown. Then the wind would finally brush them away. They reminded me of the war. The transience of it all. On patrols, it always used to get to me, thinking about the future. Your life always felt so inconsequential, you know, but at the same time you’d try and savour every last moment of it, while you still had it. Anyway, the thought occurred to me, What am I just looking at all these petals for? I need to paint them.’ He set up a board in his room at the house and started work. ‘And right away I got that glorious feeling in my chest again—you know the one I mean. That swell in your heart when a painting takes over you. I knew I had something to say. There was nothing else that mattered—I had to paint that and nothing else. Just Judas blossoms on the ground, in as many shapes and patterns as I could think of, forever, until I die.’

By the end of the summer, he had filled the farmhouse with boards. Most of them he gave to the poet and his sister as presents, and they lined the walls of every room. Some of them he kept and carried back with him. He came to understand that he did not need to stay in Giverny any longer. The Judas blossoms did not have to be on his own doorstep for him to paint them. He needed no clear view of them from his window, no sketches, no photographs, just his own memories and speculations. That was the only way he could express their real meaning. And so he begged one last favour from the poet and his sister—just a few more francs to get him back to Calais and to England. ‘They were sad to see me go, I think, and I was sad to say goodbye to them. But you know how it is: the work is always more important. Art and happiness won’t stand each other’s company for long. It’s hard to explain that to people who aren’t artists. I mean, the lad wrote poetry, but it wasn’t his life—I got the impression it was just a hobby for him until he found a job in a bank some day, you know?’

Once Jim had landed back in Dover, he had thought about coming to find me. ‘I knew that if anyone would understand, it’d be you. But I can’t remember why I didn’t—the timing just felt wrong. And, honestly, I couldn’t face you yet. Not until the work was done. I had visions of putting on a show again in London and you seeing it by chance.’ (It would have been the autumn, when I was still working on my mural. If he had only knocked on my door then, just once . . .) Instead, he took a room for a few weeks above a Chinese restaurant in Soho, and worked there, scrubbing vats, until he had earned enough to take a night coach up to Glasgow. ‘The only other person who believed in me was Henry. I thought he might be able to find me an attic somewhere, like I used to have as a student, or let me sleep for a while in his office. I didn’t really have a plan. But that’s what made Henry Henry, wasn’t it? If he believed in your work, he’d go out of his way to help you, even if it cost him. That’s how I heard about this place. He said he wasn’t using it any more, but some bloke had been renting it and left it in a state. Bailey or something, his name was—Henry didn’t speak well of him.’ The agreement was that Jim could have the cottage, rent free, in exchange for light repairs. ‘He only wanted me to do a little gardening and sprucing up—no big overhaul. I admit, I haven’t got round to it yet. But I’ve only been here since September.’

The twenty minutes were almost up and Jim was still standing at his work table, grinding away at the flowers in the mortar. Each turn of his pestle gave a biting sound—he had been using these noises to punctuate and dislocate his sentences, as though he assumed we had been apart so long that I could not read the language of his movements any more. He was disguising something, but I was not going to risk the consequences of making him admit it. And, really, there was only one question I cared for him to answer.

He looked at me, then at the clock. ‘You haven’t said much. I can’t tell what you’re thinking about any of this.’ His pestle kept on circling. ‘It’s the God’s honest truth, I promise you. Look at me—’ He stood tall. ‘I’m a year sober. Not touched a drop since I got back, and I don’t bother with the races any more. I’ve just been doing this.’ And, gesturing with his bowl of ruined flowers, he said, ‘This is what’s important to me now. Nothing else. I thought you’d understand that.’

‘I do,’ I said, and stopped the rocking motion of the chair with my heels. ‘I do.’

‘Then why are you so quiet all of a sudden?’ His eyes shifted, left and right. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about it. You don’t believe me, is that it?’

‘So I can get on with my work.’ He sniffed. ‘I can’t have all this guilt hanging over me.’

‘You know what,’ he said, and gave a shake of his head. ‘Don’t make me say it.’

‘No.’ The pestle was working harder now. ‘Not for leaving. Not for doing what I had to do. But I feel guilty for not getting in touch.’

‘I was out of my mind with worry about you,’ I said. ‘You could’ve phoned, or sent a letter. A telegram would’ve done. Just something to let me know you were safe.’

‘Yes. I wanted to. I really wanted to.’ And he put the mortar down on the table weightily. ‘This lot has to get onto the slab right now or it won’t give out much colour.’ He turned his back to me, a shield from my voice.

‘I didn’t know that I was supposed to,’ he said. The pulped flowers dropped down onto the slab—a lumpy pink cement. ‘I didn’t know that you wanted me to think about you. Not in that way.’

‘If you’d told me that before you moved out, it might have been different. But I don’t see there’s much I can do to change anything now. And I needed to do it for myself. I needed that trip.’ He glugged about a tablespoon of linseed oil upon the paste of flowers. Taking the muller from the table, he began to slide it up and over the paste and the oil. It was a large glass object like a flat iron and it sent drips careening everywhere. ‘Oh, for crying out loud—another dud batch. It’s not giving me anything. Hand me that trowel, would you? I need to scrape it off and start again.’

I got up and passed him what he wanted. ‘You didn’t mention her name,’ I said.

‘Oh. Helène. Ana Helène.’ He took the trowel, laughing quietly. ‘There was nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was young enough to be my daughter. And engaged to someone else.’

‘I’m really not going to listen to this. I told you: it wasn’t like that.’

‘Stop it now. You’re better than this, Ellie.’ He slammed down the trowel, throwing a shock of oiled pigment over the table, onto my funeral dress. ‘That was an accident,’ he said, walking off. I just rubbed the stain into the fabric, but he came back with a wet tea towel, the bead curtain clattering behind him. ‘Fine, ruin it. Who cares?’ He tossed it aside. ‘I really thought you and I were above this sort of nonsense. Jealousies and petty suspicions. You’re the only woman I’ve ever thought about in that way.’

‘Christ. This is ridiculous. This is why I prefer painting to talking.’ He went and dumped himself into the rocking chair. ‘I suppose I’m trying to say you’re the only woman I’ve ever really cared for. Not because of how you look, which God knows is fine enough to stun any idiot with two working eyes in his head, but because of what you are, how you think. Actually, it’s how you paint. That’s what makes you who you are.’

‘Then you might as well go back to France,’ I said, ‘because I don’t paint the way you think I do. Not any more.’

He squinted at me, arms folded. ‘Two solo shows at the Roxborough—that’s what I heard. Can’t be bad.’

‘Now you’re sounding like Max.’ I looked away. ‘Who told you that, anyway? About the shows?’

I pushed my thumb into the scabbing wounds of my knuckles. ‘And what did you think?’ The pain was sharp but not unbearable.

‘Like I said, the images weren’t the best . . .’ Jim gave the slightest cough.

‘All right.’ He inhaled deeply, casting his eyes to the floor. It seemed that he was reluctant to voice the thought, but then he just let it escape: ‘Vaurien,’ he said. ‘A long way from your best.’

And my heart lost its rhythm for the tiniest moment. I felt tears brimming. ‘Don’t you ever disappear on me again, Jim Culvers,’ I said. ‘You’re the only one who’s ever seen the difference.’

He did not take my head against his chest to try and console me. He did not even tell me he was sorry. Instead, he rose from the chair and started unscrewing the lid on an empty jar. And he said, ‘I think the problem is I agitated them a bit too much. They need to bruise in the brine but not bleed out. Have you ever made pigments this way? It’s fussy work but the paint really sings if you do it right. I could use some help perfecting it. You were always better at this kind of stuff than I was.’

It was later day, as the sun was dropping into the loch, that I walked down to the phone box in the village and telephoned my mother. She made me swear that I would travel up again to be with her at Easter, and I promised I would write to her and call on Christmas morning.

At first, we slept in separate rooms. It was almost like things used to be. Jim hauled in his single mattress and made a bed for me in the lounge beside the fireplace, saying he was happy on the floor. There were not enough pillows or blankets to share, so he relinquished the ones he had and told me, ‘I’ll make do.’ He took down the heavy curtains from the bedroom and sewed them together with twine to make a sleeping bag, used a rolled-up jumper to cushion his head, and woke up trying to hide the cricks in his neck. In the days, we painted. In the evenings, we bathed and washed our clothes. I finished the novel I had brought and read it time and again by candlelight: the story of an unnamed girl whose thoughts only became more comforting by familiarity. Before I went to sleep, I leafed through National Geographic and savoured the pictures and articles.

Jim had no doubts as to the virtue of his work. He had a very set regimen. Each morning, he went out with his tattered picnic basket to forage plants—sometimes venturing no further than the beanstalk weeds in the back garden or the fringes of the surrounding trees, other times going much further, beyond the scree of the hills to their summits, or right across to the other side of the loch. He could be gone for an hour; he could be gone for five. It depended on his needs and what was out there to be found. No matter what, he always came back with a full basket of pickings: local flora he did not know the botanical terms for, and gave what I assumed were pet-names of his own. Skullcap. Redshank. Horsemint. Muck-button. The only plants that ever caught his eye were those with pinkish flowers or stems. Because I could not bear for him to go anywhere without me in those first few weeks, I accompanied him on all of his ‘scouting missions’, as he liked to call them. But I soon grew tired of hunting around in ditches and thickets, and began to suspect that Jim would prefer to do his scouting alone. One morning, as we were heading back to the cottage through the neighbouring firs, he said to me, ‘You really don’t have to come with me any more—I can tell you hate it.’

‘I’ve got a shilling to my name. It’d get me into Balloch, but then I reckon I’d be stuck. I’m too old to be scrubbing pots again for bus fare.’

Every second day, he started a new painting. His process was fixed but unusual: first, he coated all of his boards with a black primer then underpainted thickly with Cremnitz White, a very stiff material that he could spread across the board like stucco. ‘My only extravagance,’ he told me. ‘You can use it if you want, but sparingly—I find it helps to think of it as diamond paste.’ He would then add definition to the background in regular tube-oils. Next, he would dip a fat round brush into a batch of his homemade pigment (it was thin like syrup) and, holding it firmly in his left hand, he would thump his right fist hard against the base of the brush, spiking beads of paint against the board to form the Judas blossoms. They would hold there fuzzily on the surface, pink and dazzling, and he would spend the next few hours fine-detailing them with a very slim sable.

For a week or so, I slipped back into a role as Jim’s assistant. I believed in the work he was doing and felt it worthier than my own. Together, we refined the pigmentation of the plants he brought home. I made some adjustments to his timings and suggested a change from brine to icy water; I showed him a different mullering technique and altered his mix ratios, all of which helped to yield much brighter hues and more stable paints. He was grateful, I knew, but also reluctant to accept too much of my help. ‘This is starting to feel like a collaboration,’ he said, at the end of one particularly long day’s painting. We were both exhausted. Our meal of boiled rice and tinned carrots had not satisfied us and we had finished the last of the coffee that morning. We were living off what little cash I had brought with me and the few pennies Jim had left. There had been some dreamy talk about me blowing the whole lot on ingredients for a chocolate cake tomorrow, and we had tiredly reviewed the day’s progress as I cleared the table. He was pleased with how the work was developing, but twitchy about my involvement. ‘You know I’ve loved having you here,’ he went on, ‘but you’ve got a life to get back to. They’ll all be wondering where you are.’

‘I’ll write and say I’m on a research trip somewhere. They won’t care. I’m not in any rush.’

‘Well, it’d be nice to know what your plan is, that’s all. While I’m here alone, I can make the rations last. Gas meter times out quicker with you here. Hot water runs out faster. This kind of thing should not be weighing on my mind.’

‘Look, don’t be offended,’ he said. ‘All this piddling domestic stuff just slows me down. I resent having to think about it.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll call Dulcie today and see if she’ll send me some money.’

‘No, no, no—you aren’t listening. I’m not asking for that. That’s the last thing I want.’

‘You’re the one talking about gas meters, Jim. I don’t know what you want me to say.’

He pleated his hands on the table. ‘I’m telling you, if you’re going to be here, then you’re here to bloody well paint. Not to be my assistant. Not to clear up after me. I’m happy to go hungry for the sake of your art, but not so you can be my housekeeper.’

‘I don’t have anything to paint. A subject, I mean. I’m just—’ And I breathed, realising I was about to say adrift.

‘Of course. You’re right. I should just punch someone and see where it leads me.’

He smirked. ‘Might not be such a bad idea, you know. You’re only ever ten yards from a bar fight in Scotland.’

I said, ‘Actually, it’s what Henry used to tell me—pick a fight, disturb the peace.’

He waved away my soreness. ‘Paint what you believe. That was Henry’s way of telling you to stop moping and get on with it. If he were here now, he’d be telling you again.’

Over the past few weeks, there had been plenty of time for me to explain the plight of my recent work to Jim. He had, of course, been understanding of my difficulties in finishing paintings (‘You saw my On High pile before it was a mountain,’ he said. ‘Christ, what a mess I made of things!’) and was glad to hear that I had withdrawn from the mural project to retain ‘a little integrity’. I expected he would be much less accepting of my capitulation to the Roxborough’s chequebook. ‘Look, it’s certainly a pity to show work you aren’t proud of,’ was all he said, ‘but I suppose you must’ve had your reasons. And it doesn’t seem to have dinted your reputation any. Pressure does funny things to people—I know that better than anyone.’ His muted disapproval was almost disappointing. I wanted him to lecture me, put me straight.

It was hard to find an appropriate moment to confess to him that I was taking medication. How was I supposed to broach it? Over rice and carrots at the dinner table? While we were climbing up a hummock in search of weeds? Perhaps I should have introduced the topic one night while the two of us were in the bathroom, twisting the dingy water from our laundry? I was afraid that he would think less of me. I feared that telling him about my sessions with Victor Yail would make me seem weak and incapable: just another foolish girl sent reeling by a man. And I could not rake back over my mistakes again like that: Wilfred Searle, the pennyroyal, the caldarium and what came after. I just wanted to be close to Jim, to be around the music of his footsteps in the house each day, to touch and smell the fabric of him.

Until that evening in the kitchen, he had afforded me the courtesy of not asking about my plans. I had carried on without a purpose, hidden my lack of inspiration just by helping him with his. But it seemed he had finally noticed my aimlessness. ‘Don’t think I was joking, by the way,’ he said. ‘The more you help me, the better these paintings are getting—that’s not a problem for me yet, but it’s going to be soon. I don’t want to look at them one day and see your handiwork. They’re all I’ve got. So I’ve got to draw a line under all this. If you want to stay, you have to stop helping me and help yourself instead. Clear that back room out and paint something.’

But I had nothing in me—not the remotest, flittering trace of an idea. All my thoughts were vaurien. When I told him I could not paint because I felt no thrill in it any longer, Jim stared me down. ‘Rubbish. You’re just in a slump.’ When I told him I had issues with anxiety that required weekly therapy, he gave an indignant shake of the head. When I told him I could only finish work on 100mg a day and showed him the bottles of Tofranil from my overnight bag to prove it, he grew angry—not with me, but at the world that had allowed it. ‘What kind of idiotic—I mean, who the hell put you on these?’ He pushed through the kitchen beads to view the label under brighter light. ‘They tried to fob me off with these things after the war. Anti-whatevers. I told them, listen, if I’m going to kill myself, I’ll be doing it nice and slow with a cask of single malt, thank you very much.’ Opening a bottle, sniffing its innards, he emptied out a handful of tablets and moved them around on his palm. Then he tipped them back in. Coming in to place them on the kitchen table, he said, ‘It’s no wonder you can’t paint, Ellie. You won’t feel a thing while you’re dosed up on those.’

‘How do you know I feel anything when I’m off them?’ I said. ‘They’ve been helping me a lot.’

‘Well, you’d be better off with a snorkel.’ He had already stacked the three short bottles into a pyramid, and now he was standing over them, hands on hips, like some broken-down motorist examining his engine. ‘I know one thing: the girl who used to live up in my attic was the most natural painter I ever saw—you’d never have found her avoiding work, or moaning about having no ideas. She went out and found them. She didn’t care about pleasing anyone but herself. That was the real you, Ellie. Not this. Not those. You need to take it from someone who’s been there.’ He looked at me now, brow raised. ‘How many times did you watch me painting, pissed as a rat, and how much good ever came of it? None. It’s taken me this long to get sober, and this long to start making work I’m proud of again.’ Turning away, he went to fill a glass under the tap, and came back, slugging it. I was stuck under the dim yellow bulb light, staring at the pills. What a chore it had been in the past few weeks, sneaking off to take them while Jim was occupied elsewhere, keeping half an eye on the mantel clock all day in case I missed a dose. I did not think I was resilient enough to function without medication. But I was not alone any more, and the prospect did not frighten me the way it did when Victor used to suggest it.

Jim put a hand on the small of my back and held it there. ‘I just never imagined you needing that kind of help. You always seemed to pour everything into your work. It was like you had another life up there in that attic—your own little sanctuary.’ His thumb was rubbing now at the cotton of my blouse. It made my pulse accelerate. ‘What’s he like, this shrink of yours, anyway? You trust him?’

‘I suppose all those qualifications have to count for something.’ Jim paused. I could almost feel his roving eyes upon me. ‘You should probably do what he says, then. Don’t take medical advice from me. I never even got my Leaving Certificate.’

‘What? What did I say?’ But I was not dissenting from his words, only his fingers: they had loosened the blouse from my skirt and were walking up my bare spine. His eyes were tightened, searching. He turned me slowly, brushed my clavicle with his knuckle.

I had to arch up on my tiptoes just to kiss him. His face was coarse with stubble, but his lips had a pleasing gentleness.

For the very first time, we slept in the same bed. Beside the fire on the single mattress. Huddled together like stowaways. His hands seemed to know where to go. They knew me in the way that Wilfred Searle’s had not even tried to. I wanted to be kept inside Jim’s skinny arms forever, wanted to hold my lips against the scuffed skin of his neck and breathe it every morning as I woke up, wanted to feel him lift and hook the trailing hair behind my ear and stroke it, nimbly and repeatedly, just as he would approach the painting of a Judas blossom. But there was no pattern or rhyme to our being together. There were nights when he lay restless and went off to be alone, and nights when he tempted me from sleep with kisses on the cheek and climbed in, undressing me, only to steal away again before the daylight broke.

We lived this way for months, as intermittent partners, lovers, individuals. We were bonded in our isolation and invested in each other’s purpose. Occasionally, we quarrelled. We spent hours—full days sometimes—apart, in protest. And neither one of us could work without listening for the noises of the other, so came to recognise the creaks and thuds and hums of one another’s practice the way that a piano-tuner can discern a slackened string from corridors away. But we shared the few rooms of that tumbledown cottage as happily as any two people could. Our connection felt immutable.

Jim even helped me clear the junk from the back room, and we found a trove of objects that we could sell: Henry’s old fishing gear and tackle, a roll of boat upholstery fabric, a box of earthenware crockery, and five reels of soldering wire. It was agreed that Jim should take them to the weekend market in Balloch. ‘Henry would be telling us to flog the bleedin’ lot if it keeps us fed and watered,’ Jim said. ‘You should hang on to that cloth for painting, though. It’s proper marine canvas.’ He left that Saturday with everything loaded on his body like a pack-mule and came back with a crate of groceries, including flour and cooking chocolate. ‘For the celebration cake,’ he said, pecking my forehead.

I started thinking again about my mural, and tentatively trialled a new white pigment made from thistles Jim discarded; but these experiments came to nothing. Mostly, I worked on sketches of myself: the grimy cottage windows reflected my face strangely, ruffled and distorted it. I found this spectacle curious enough to occupy me. The drawings came out less like studies of myself than Pathé newsreel stills of strangers. And, through all of this, Jim remained committed to his Judas blossom paintings. They grew steadily more arresting. It was difficult to glean the meaning of them when each piece was seen in isolation, but soon the lounge grew cluttered with his boards—each scattering of pink blossoms different from the last, the colours in them shifting, layers deepening—and I could feel the strength of the work as a collection. I was proud to have made a contribution to it, however incidental.

But then, one morning, I got up to find Jim already gone. The coals were pallid in the hearth. A pot of tea was stewing on the kitchen table, still warm. Outside, a gauzy rain was teeming. I lit the fire and made a pan of porridge, knowing he would come home cold and hungry, and sat by the fireplace eating most of it until he returned. When he stepped in through the back door, he was drenched and broody. His basket was very short of pickings. He went straight into the bathroom to towel off, saying nothing. His quietness seemed very determined, so I asked him what was wrong. ‘Just counting all the things I’ve got to do today,’ he said. Then, later, when he went to light the stove under the kettle after lunch, he found the matchbox empty and it left him quietly incensed. For most of the day, I could hear him huffing and sighing from the back room, where I had begun inking some of my sketches (a mere gesture to convince him I was working). Around three, he called me into the lounge. ‘Ellie, get in here.’ His voice grew increasingly desperate. ‘Ellie—I need you!’ I expected to find him mullering another batch of pigment. In fact, he was over by the window with several of his paintings laid across the floor on bedsheets. His easel and his workbenches were pushed against the walls. He was stooping over the paintings with a camera, twisting at the aperture. ‘How the heck do you work the light gauge on this thing?’ he said. ‘I’ve got two rolls of film and I don’t want to waste them.’

He handed me the camera—shoved it at me. ‘It’s the same one I’ve always had. I’m not sure the light is good enough. Might have to wait until the morning.’

I peered through the viewfinder, focused the shot. The gauge was unresponsive. ‘I think it needs a new battery,’ I told him. ‘What’s your film speed?’

‘Well, I can try to set the f-stop where I think it should be, but I’m no good without a light meter. I can’t promise it’ll be perfect.’

‘You might as well just do it,’ he said. ‘Set it up however you think’s best. I don’t know where I’d get a battery from round here, and I don’t want to waste time.’

I had not even clicked the shutter yet. ‘It’s difficult to get the whole thing in the frame. You’ll need to stand up on a table.’ And then his meaning finally landed. ‘Are you taking these to show someone?’

His cheek stayed pressed to the camera. ‘You’re right—I need to get up much higher.’ He slid one of the workbenches closer to the paintings and leapt onto it, the legs buckling slightly under his weight. ‘Better,’ he said, focusing. ‘A tripod would be nice, but you can’t have it all.’ He clicked, and loaded the next frame, his thumb jabbing hard at the lever.

Jim had deflected so much attention onto my plans and my lack of purpose in the past few months that I had not paused to consider where his own ambitions were steering him. The daily accretion of Judas blossom paintings had been his priority for so long that I assumed he would go on forever. Until I die—they were his words. Until I die. The thought that he might suddenly stop making them had not once entered my mind. ‘What are you planning to do with these, Jim? I don’t see what the rush is.’

He jumped down from the table and squared his eyes at me. ‘Look, first things first, I need to get them onto film. Can’t do much until that’s sorted.’ Nudging the table further along, he climbed back onto it. ‘Then I’ve got to sell the camera. I reckon I could get fifteen, twenty quid for it, if I can take it to a proper shop in Glasgow—that’ll be enough to get the prints done and pay for the train down.’

‘London.’ He said it so nonchalantly. ‘I want these paintings to be seen.’

Jim clicked the shutter, reloaded, clicked again. ‘Don’t get all upset. I’ll be back in a few days.’

I was not sure that I could, and he read this in my attitude before I could voice it.

He widened his stance on the tabletop. ‘Look, you could come with me. I mean, if I can get a decent price for the camera, we’ll have enough for two returns. But then I’d have to leave all my paintings here, and I don’t want to risk it. You can think of them as a deposit—if I don’t come back inside a week, flog them, burn them, do what you like with them.’

This was all the encouragement I needed. In London, there was Dulcie and the Roxborough and a tranche of worthless canvases to finish. In London, there was Victor Yail and the endless recitation of my problems and mistakes. In London, there was nothing. ‘Can’t you just stay a few more days—at least until you can find a battery?’

‘You’re not doing the paintings any justice like that. All the exposures will be off.’

‘We’ll see how they come out,’ he replied. ‘People only need to get the gist of what I’m up to. And I can carry a few boards down with me. I was thinking of getting a suitcase to put them in. The others I’ll come back for.’

‘No, I’ve had my fill of him for one lifetime, thanks very much.’ He let the camera hang from his neck like an old gas mask in a box. ‘Thought I’d start with Bernie, actually. He can get my foot in a door or two. Everyone likes Bernie, and everyone who doesn’t like him owes him a favour.’

‘Yup.’ He hopped down. And, placing the cap back on the lens, he said, ‘Come on, don’t be getting yourself so worked up. I’ve known Bernie for ages. I knew him before I knew you. We used to go the track together.’

‘I don’t care about that. I don’t care about Bernie, for God’s sake.’

He tried to embrace me but I turned away. ‘Then what’s the matter? You’ve got a terrible frown on you.’

‘I just—’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that you’re abandoning me all over again.’

‘Woah, steady on. I’m coming straight back. I told you that.’ He gathered the lapels of my blouse and drew me in close. ‘Four or five days, that’s all it’ll be. You won’t even have time to miss me.’ And he kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Nobody’s getting abandoned. Come on, don’t chew on your lip like that—you’ll make it sore.’

‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘I don’t think Bernie would let me bunk with him longer than a week.’

I should have waited for a moment to let the bright idea that came to me cloud over and extinguish itself. But I did not. I said, ‘Why don’t you just use the flat?’

Jim’s eyelids quivered. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to—I mean, that wouldn’t be—no, I’d feel terrible. I couldn’t do it.’

‘Well, I’m not having you sleeping on Bernie’s floor. He takes all-comers in that place of his. Pays for most of them, from what I’ve heard.’ I had no real evidence for this, of course, just bits of gossip. But Bernie was the sort of man it was easy to envision staggering from a Soho doorway in the small hours with his shirt-tails untucked. So I did not feel too sore about accusing him.

‘Only if you’re sure,’ Jim said. ‘Only if you’re certain.’ He kissed me in that way he favoured most: dead centre of my forehead, the first spot I had been taught to reach for when I blessed myself in church. But as he moved his lips away, he did not look at me.