forty-nine

When Jack entered the drawing-room at noon, he made no comment on the portrait of Justine hanging on the wall. Under his arm he carried a painting wrapped up in brown paper so that I could not see what it represented. He handed the parcel to me. I was struck yet again by the aura of his physical well-being. He was a painter, a creator, not like me, a collector. He had not been paralysed by the definition of what was art. I carefully unwrapped the painting and leant it against the sofa.

The painting was a grotesque meaningless jumble of different lines in clashing colours. The colours were in slurry dark shades of muted browns and greys. These were muddy, earthy colours, dirty and entrenched. Gashes of vulgar orange and lime peeped through the monstrous murkiness. The painting gave off an odour of sickly intimacy, a green stench.

‘You don’t like it?’ Jack asked. I could tell by his amused, patronizing tone, that his sense of confidence in his own talent was set as hard as concrete.

‘I don’t understand what it is about,’ I said. I was also surprised. Hadn’t Juliette told me that Jack was a literalist, a believer in the truth? How many more versions of the truth could I stand?

‘So you don’t think it’s a good likeness?’ Now I really felt that he was laughing at me.

‘That’s a portrait?’ I asked, flabbergasted.

‘Don’t you recognize her? I was painting from a photograph.’

He handed me a photograph which he had taken from his pocket. It was a Polaroid of Justine, naked, sitting in an obscene position. She had moles, in the star shape of the plough across her torso.

‘Did she know that photograph was being taken?’

‘Justine loves to have dirty photographs taken of her. Look at her – she’s posing.’

I thought of the photos I had found in Juliette’s flat. Was Justine somehow involved in the taking of them, rather than an innocent victim of Juliette’s jealous voyeurism? But this photographic image of Justine was not of the Justine I knew. This was a different vulgar Justine, a woman who exhibited her sexuality like a whore, a Justine that I would not believe in.

Looking more closely at the painting I could begin to make out the shape of Justine’s face, surfacing from the incoherence of the contradictory colours and the vehement brushwork. But her face had been deformed. Cut into blocks. And the delicacy of her drawn-back face had been smashed, turned into flabby slabs of thick oil paint. Her lucid eyes had been slit into grimaces of malicious intent. The soft wide mouth prised open into a twisted scream. All traces of her aloof serenity had been eradicated, instead this monstrous defamation of feminine beauty was all there intrusive, demanding and repulsive.

‘There are different versions of Justine,’ Jack said. ‘That is mine. Who’s to say which one is right? Justine’s sister, Juliette, looks just like her. But whereas Justine demands nothing from me, Juliette pulled, like a child, at my soul. But who’s to say that Juliette isn’t just another version of Justine? The version that I hurt.’

‘But what about Justine? She must know which version is right?’

‘I care what Justine thinks as little as you do.’