Joyce coughed apologetically on the other side of the table. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. ‘You seemed lost in the moment. Do you mind if I join you? I’ve given up on sleep for tonight.’
She was wearing a long paisley dressing gown, a beautiful burst of deep purple and rich red swirls. Lorna hadn’t seen her wear it before, and the extravagant colour was a surprise after Joyce’s muted daytime clothes.
‘Of course! I’m just …’ She moved her arm to hide the colouring book. She was embarrassed to be caught with it – she’d noticed Joyce peering at the display rack downstairs, and she hadn’t smiled as most people did when they realised what they were. She’d looked rather despairing.
‘Drawing?’ Joyce supplied, tilting her head to see. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you sketched.’
‘I don’t.’
The moment hung between them. I want her to take me seriously as a gallerist, Lorna thought, cringing. How can she, when she knows I treat Old Masters as outlines for colouring-in?
But there was nowhere to hide the book. And in the middle of the night, in the kitchen, Joyce didn’t seem like the intimidating force she sometimes was. Lorna could see her pale, sun-spotted neck in the wrap of the unexpected dressing gown, the blue vein in her wrist. The softness of her silver hair, undressed for bed. A stranger in a stranger’s house, dependent on a complicated bargain.
Lorna moved her hand. ‘To be honest, Joyce … I’m colouring in.’ What the hell. After the day’s revelations, this one seemed very minor league. ‘The Mona Lisa, as dressed by Boden.’
There. Busted.
‘Oh!’ Joyce peered over. ‘How funny. She suits a stripe. Is this one of Harriet’s little sister’s books?’
‘No, they’re for adults – colouring to encourage mindfulness. You can colour in everything from Old Masters to Hollywood film posters to random patterns. I find them soothing when I can’t sleep.’ Lorna shrugged. ‘Something about choosing the right colours, and filling in the boxes, and seeing something emerge …’
‘Like colour by numbers? For adults ?’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘My son used to love those,’ said Joyce. ‘I must confess, I liked watching the colour slowly eat up the numbers as he painted. Lovely blocks of colour flooding out the digits.’
‘Yes!’ said Lorna. That was exactly how it had felt. She’d forgotten that feeling, of seeing colour and shape overwhelm the black lines and numbers.
A son, though? Joyce was talking again.
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ she went on. ‘Giving people the choice to fall in line … or not. To create something of their own within a trusted framework, or share in the joy of the original by exploring the artist’s original experience.’ She made a satisfied ‘hmmph’ noise.
Lorna stared at her punk rock Mona Lisa. She suddenly looked like a modern art statement.
‘I should have written that down,’ she said wryly. ‘I could have put a label next to the books and presented it to Calum Hardy as an Art Week experience.’
‘Indeed,’ said Joyce, and reached for the pot of pens, examining them with interest. ‘I’m sure you’ve come up with something interesting, though.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not particularly creative. I just want the gallery to be represented.’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t want to let it down.’
Lorna realised Joyce was looking at her, reading every detail of her face with her sharp artist’s eyes. What was she seeing?
‘Would you like something to colour?’ She couldn’t remember what else she’d hidden in her drawer. Maybe a book of Vogue covers?
‘Do you have any plain paper? I’m not good with lines these days.’
Lorna kicked herself. Of course – Joyce’s eyesight. It was easy to forget; she’d arranged the room cleverly to avoid any accidents. Easy access in and out, everything within reach.
‘Let me find you some,’ she said.
There was a pack of printer paper on the dresser, and Lorna handed a thick wedge to Joyce, who examined all the pens one by one, eventually selecting a pale blue.
‘Periwinkle,’ she said. ‘I always think that’s the exact colour of comfort.’
‘Cup of tea?’ The strange middle-of-the-night mood felt companionable now.
‘Yes, please.’ Joyce started doodling on a blank sheet of paper. The nib moved confidently across the page, sketching out a long wave of hair, a pointed tip of a nose. A watchful eye.
Hattie.
The pen stopped, and the spell was broken. Lorna looked up to see Joyce staring at the page.
‘How funny,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect that.’
‘What? To draw Hattie?’
‘No.’ She squinted at the page. ‘To draw at all. I haven’t felt like doing that in such a long time.’
‘Oh.’ Lorna wasn’t sure what to say, but a flame of excitement flickered under her ribs. In such a long time. Was this the beginning of something? In her very own kitchen?
Joyce picked up a grey pen and added a few tentative lines around Hattie’s hair, blending it out, adding two more lines – Hattie’s hand, always pushing the long strands behind her ear.
‘Did you stop drawing because of your eyesight?’ Lorna asked. If Joyce was frustrated because she couldn’t express herself the way she used to, there were other art forms that didn’t need such precise attention to detail as sketching. She wondered if she should suggest a trip to an art-supplies store before Joyce went back to Rooks Hall – something might grab her attention.
‘Not really. It’s more that I haven’t had any …’ Joyce stopped, and patted her chest, as if the right words were eluding her. ‘Art comes from here, you see. From inside.’ She tapped her head, then looked wry. ‘Not so much up here. Although obviously you can make it come, if you have to.’
‘And something inspired you today?’ It came out before she could stop it.
‘Harriet.’ Joyce’s eyebrows beetled, acknowledging the uncomfortable air in the house. ‘She’s a sweet girl, I can tell that. So transparent, poor thing, you can see straight inside her. I gave her some knitting to take home.’ She paused. ‘It’s good for taking your mind off things, knitting. Don’t you find?’
Lorna felt as if Joyce was looking straight into her now too. She dropped her gaze to her jazzy Mona Lisa, then turned the page, embarrassed at her safe choices. The next black and white offering was Millais’s moon-faced Ophelia, floating ecstatically down the stream like a human bouquet garni.
‘Did you run out of art you wanted to make?’ she asked instead.
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Joyce sighed, and reached for a yellow pen. This time she didn’t uncap it straight away. ‘Since Bernie died – my husband – I haven’t felt … moved. You need to be moved to create. You need something to say. Otherwise it’s just bathroom art like those terrible close-ups of cows and flowers that people—’ She stopped, obviously remembering that half the gallery downstairs was covered in exactly that. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. Sorry.’
Joyce didn’t look sorry though, Lorna thought. But she didn’t feel embarrassed.
‘Those pictures don’t do much for me either, if I’m truthful,’ she said. ‘But some people do like them. That was my job, you see. Finding art that made people feel happy, or calm, or just … better. You can’t always decide for people what should make them happy, can you? That’s up to them.’ A few weeks in the gallery had rammed home that message: there was no money in snobbery, either.
Joyce gave her an inscrutable look. ‘And what do you like?’
‘Art that makes me feel what the artist was feeling,’ said Lorna. ‘Sometimes art that shows me what I’m feeling, even if I don’t know it.’
‘I like that answer.’
‘Just the truth. So, was your husband an artist?’ There, in their dressing gowns and slippers, Lorna felt she was talking to Joyce the same way she’d talk to any other friend of a friend. Or a grandmother of a friend of a friend
.
‘No, he was a manager.’ Joyce uncapped the yellow pen and began drawing something else, something graphic, the pen jerking and flattening in a very different way to Lorna’s careful shading. ‘Bernie’s art was outside – his garden. When we moved to Rooks Hall, he mapped out every bed and square inch of lawn in marker pen on one of my canvases. I painted it in. Our aim was to have something in bloom every single day of the year. Every. Single. Day.’
She punctuated the words with strong lines on the page.
‘Like living sculpture.’ Lorna pictured the overgrown beds at the cottage, weeds and flowers tumbling together over boundaries like splattered paint. Once it had been tended and neat, just as Joyce had marshalled storm clouds of oily colour on canvas. They’d both lost their gardener, Joyce and Rooks Hall. Suddenly Lorna understood exactly why Joyce was so reluctant to leave her house. Why she hated leaving it on its own.
‘Exactly that. I preferred his work to mine. Bernie’s compositions changed all the time, from sunrise to noon to dusk. And textures for every sense, not just sight – we chose colours and scents; he found the right plants from everywhere. Ronan had an area too.’ She paused, and then, in a quieter voice, added, ‘Our boy.’
It was a delicate moment, a tipping point in the conversation.
Lorna trod carefully. ‘Does Ronan … live locally?’
‘He died when he was eighteen. A silly accident. He went away on a gap year, volunteering in remote places, and one day he was in a car crash. Not a serious one, but miles from a proper hospital. It was the infection that killed him. He died before we even knew he was hurt.’
‘Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, Joyce.’
The grief was visible in Joyce’s body, the sudden tension in her shoulders as if a weight had been loaded on her back, the pen in her hand too heavy to move.
Lorna recognised the pain, but also the shapeless guilt hanging over it, of not being there, of not sharing the final breath, not hearing the last word. Knowing someone was alone. ‘I can’t imagine how hard that was,’ she said softly. ‘I wasn’t there for my mother, or my father. At the end. I wish so much I had been. Even if it was awful.’
It hung between them; then Joyce shook her head. ‘Funnily enough, that gave me plenty to express for a while, but after that …’ She started drawing lines. When the pen shook, she made the next line follow the wobble, until the page was covered with bulges spreading the sadness out across the blank paper like a map contour. A map of grief.
Lorna watched the pen, feeling as if she was seeing something more than drawing, and hearing more than Joyce was actually saying. Quietly, she began to colour Ophelia’s hair, floating in the stream, the same pale ashy blonde as Hattie’s. And her own.
Chapter Fifteen
Lorna spent Monday morning hovering over every telephone she walked past, expecting it to ring. She was braced for anything – Jess in tears, Hattie in tears, even Ryan in tears at being caught out – but the only call she had was from an artist who wanted to come in to show her his watercolours of haunted pebbles.
Calls, plural. He phoned a second time, thinking he was speaking to a gallery in Hartley this time, and Lorna let him outline the Maiden Gallery’s new owner’s stupidity and rudeness for five minutes before putting him straight, and driving a mental stake through his head. She really wasn’t in the mood for being told she had no artistic vision, not this morning.
‘Was that Jess?’ asked Tiffany, bearing a tray of tea.
‘Nope. Another artist who thinks I should be honoured to share his mad fantasies with the town.’ Lorna wrote MARTIN ALLENSMORE in capitals on her Never Deal With page. There were two ceramists and someone who made ironic models of dogs out of cat hair there already. She rammed the pen back in the pot, and the top fell off. ‘Should I call her? I thought I’d have heard something by now.’
‘Won’t she be at work?’ Tiffany handed Lorna her peppermint tea and went over to where Joyce was sitting in the chair from the back room. She was knitting another dog coat in two kinds of wool. ‘There you go, Joyce, milk, no sugar. I’ll put it here, don’t want to interrupt you.’
‘Too kind.’ Joyce was at a critical stage with the final leg hole and didn’t look up.
‘Probably.’ Lorna stirred the teabag. ‘Do you think I should call Hattie instead then?’
Tiffany stopped, her hand in the biscuit tin. ‘No! Definitely don’t call Hattie.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’ll realise you don’t know what’s going on. And that’ll just confirm in her head that something is . Trust me,’ she added when Lorna looked bewildered, ‘I’ve done a whole module on teenage paranoia.’
‘I’m sure your sister is dealing with it in her own way,’ said Joyce, finishing off the final stitches. ‘She seems a very capable woman. Now, scissors?’
Lorna sighed and opened the stationery drawer. Jess was capable. At work . She’d had no experience of crises like this, unlike Lorna who’d entered and exited relationships on a pretty much yearly cycle since she’d left school. Jess had only ever had one falling-out with Ryan – when he went to Birmingham to work for his big brother, Craig, who had a building company, instead of applying to university as planned. They were only apart for a few months, but it felt like years.
After Jess and Ryan’s baby bombshell, Dad’s initial threat to drag them all off to Hay-on-Wye came to nothing, thanks to Lorna’s pleas not to separate her from her schoolfriends (by which she meant Sam). Dad was worried about Jess’s prospects, but Mum loved the studio they’d built on the side of the house; none of them really wanted to leave. The Protheros, on the other hand, decided Ryan needed a dose of reality – if he wanted a family, Mr Prothero insisted, he’d have to learn how to provide for one. It seemed ridiculous now, and if anything, it had only solidified their determination to get married, but Ryan’s dad had been adamant. Ryan went off to learn how to project manage shop fittings while Lorna suffered Jess’s sulks, their father’s bewilderment at the sudden explosion of his hitherto low-maintenance family, and Mum shutting herself in her studio for days on end. The summer dragged on to the sound of ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay, over and over from the room upstairs, and the smell of Pot Noodles, which Jess ate by the pallet-full.
Lorna stared out of the gallery window, over the shelves of glass fishes and the smooth porcelain bowls, into the street, and something about the familiar shape of the shop doorway opposite brought back the shapeless gloom of that summer. She’d spent most of that holiday hanging around the gallery to escape Jess’s furious moodiness and the smell of rehydrated pork flakes. And, of course, hoping she’d bump into Sam.
‘… would be fine. Lorna? Lorna!’
She looked up. Tiffany was holding up a dog jacket; the way Joyce had blended the colours made it look like tiger stripes. ‘We can sell these for Mrs Rothery, can’t we? They’re works of art.’
‘Um, Tiff, you do know Joyce is an actual artist,’ said Lorna. She tipped her head imperceptibly to remind Tiff that Joyce was there.
‘I think these are actual works of art,’ said Tiffany.
‘Perhaps. If you displayed them on cats and called them a post-modern commentary on transexuality.’ Joyce’s expression was straight but Lorna – now – was starting to tell when she was joking. It had taken time to spot the slight downward cast of the eye, the dry lift at the end of the sentence. ‘A cat in dog’s clothing. Rather political.’
It went over Tiff’s head. ‘I don’t think we could get that on a cat? But we’ll display them on Rudy. What would you like us to charge? I think you could easily ask twenty quid. They’re bespoke!’
‘Oh, heavens, no. Charge whatever you like, but give the money to charity,’ said Joyce, reaching for her tea. ‘Bernard came from that rescue place on the hill. Give it to them.’
‘Of course,’ said Lorna, and although Joyce was pretending to be dismissive about her efforts, there was a glimmer of … pride? Even knitting, even half-blind, Joyce was head and shoul
ders above the rest of the artists here.
They’d only had two customers since the gallery had opened, but Lorna didn’t mind. Her brain was still worrying away about Hattie and Jess, yet sitting there with Joyce knitting and Tiffany rearranging the cards, and some tea on the go, with lemony sunshine spreading though a gallery that was really starting to look like hers … it felt nice not to be on her own.
Then the gallery phone rang on the desk.
Joyce and Tiffany both looked up, and Lorna reached for it. Could it be Jess calling from work? She tried to sound as normal as possible. ‘Hello?’
‘Is that Lorna Larkham?’ It was a man’s voice.
‘Yes?’
‘Lorna, this is Calum, Calum Hardy, from Longhampton Art Week?’
‘Oh, hello, Calum ,’ she said, for the benefit of Joyce and Tiffany. ‘How nice to hear from you!’
Tiffany perched on the desk and made an ‘ooh’ face. Joyce put down her knitting needles.
‘Is this about my Art Week proposal?’ Lorna went on. She was pleased Joyce was here to witness this – anything that made her look like a thoughtful and discerning gallerist had to help her plans to host Joyce’s eventual retrospective.
‘It is.’ Calum coughed. He didn’t sound as friendly as the last time they’d spoken. ‘Listen, we’re busy people, I’ll get to the point – we need to discuss your submission. This … artists drawing customers, and customers drawing artists concept.’
‘Great! Hang on a second, Calum …’ She winked at Tiffany and put the phone on to speaker, so they could hear the conversation. ‘That’s better. So! Did you like it? I really wanted to open up a dialogue about how art and artists are perceived, and how art is—’
‘Lorna, let me stop you there,’ said Calum. His voice sounded distorted on loudspeaker. ‘When I say, discuss, I really mean … we don’t think it’s going to work.’
Her face fell. ‘What?’