Kate Lawson - Mum’s the Word

‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ was all Susie could come up with.

‘You know, I knew you’d say that,’ snapped Alice.

‘Mum, can I move now please? I’m getting cramp. My leg is absolutely killing me.’

Susie looked past the easel to where Jack was sitting. He was at her workbench surrounded by the weekend papers, a mug of coffee and half a packet of biscuits. Late-morning sunshine caught his fringe and the beginnings of a beard, so that he appeared to be surrounded by a great corona of golden light, although her gaze was slightly abstracted so it wasn’t exactly Jack she saw but the painting he might become – if only he would just sit still.

‘No.’

He groaned.

Susie had had nothing planned for the weekend – if you discounted the bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge, the fresh strawberries and the Belgian chocolates that she had bought in anticipation of a long, lingering celebration breakfast in bed with Robert – which was why she needed to keep her mind firmly occupied with work.

She closed her eyes, trying very hard to clear her head. Her throat was locked solid and a heavy pain hovered above her heart. Bloody man.

Susie let her eyes move slowly across the canvas. It was blank and creamy white, the surface very slightly raised and rough to the touch so that as she drew a stick of charcoal across it, it bit, giving a satisfying, almost mouth-watering, sensation.

‘Please, Mum? I’ll wash up the breakfast things,’ whined Jack.

‘I’ve got a dishwasher.’

The studio – once the washhouse adjoining Susie’s cottage – smelt of linseed oil, turps and oil paints, mixed today with the smell of hot wood, baked tin and stone where the sun burned in through the open French windows and drank up the spilt water from the profusion of herbs and geraniums in pots and window boxes. The cottage and the little studio formed an L shape, with a flagstone terrace set with tubs and planters, and cane furniture framed in the crook of the right angle.

Outside, Milo, the hairy hound, had found his spot in the sunshine and was snoring softly.

Susie taught art three days a week at the local college in Fenborough, and worked on her own projects in the time left over. Not that there had been that much time since she’d been going out with Robert; he found the whole art thing completely unfathomable.

The charcoal rasped softly under her fingertips. Susie had drawn and painted for as long as she could remember, long before she knew what art was, discovering very early in life that, somehow, laying her feelings and thoughts down on canvas or board or paper made more sense of them. When it was going well she felt as if she painted right from the core of herself, totally connected to the painting and yet at the same time almost an observer, as if the hands working across the canvas weren’t her own.

Not that she told many people that, having come from a family who were about as creative as tin tacks. Susie was altogether more pragmatic when she talked about her work, realising that people had enough preconceived notions about artists without being told that when it was going well she felt she was possessed by the spirit of Elvis. Worse still, Susie really did paint at the top of her game when she was unhappy. This morning the lines were flowing onto the blank canvas effortlessly, like melted chocolate.

‘I don’t mind unloading it. Or I could walk the dog – oh, how about I water the garden?’

‘For god’s sake, Jack, I’ve only just started. And you chose the pose: young man reads newspaper.’

Jack shifted his weight without breaking position. ‘I hate doing this. My leg’s gone numb now. I should have done young man sleeps peacefully in hammock.’

‘Bear in mind that you could have very easily been doing young man emulsions spare room. And besides, you didn’t used to hate it.’

‘Only because you bribed me and Alice with sweets and money and trips to the zoo.’

‘You could always go and stay with your father.’

Jack sniffed and flicked the page over. ‘Did I tell you you’re a cruel and heartless woman?’

‘I thought we’d already established that. Now, do you want me to put the radio on?’ Susie said, glancing back at the canvas and then back at Jack, her eyes darting quickly between the two, trying to catch him in the cross-hairs of her imagination.

‘Radio Four?’

‘Yup.’

‘Not really.’ There was a second’s pause and then he said, ‘So, are you going to ring what’s-his-face, try to kiss and make up?’

‘You know the rules, Jack,’ said Susie, without taking her mind’s eye off Jack’s silhouette. ‘At least ten minutes at a time without talking, now stay still. And no, I don’t think I’ll be ringing Robert, we’ve got nothing to say to each other as far as I can see. He wants a baby and, let’s be frank, I’m all babied out.’

She smudged the charcoal with her thumb and then paused to gauge the effect.

Jack sniffed. ‘Radio Four then?’

‘If you want, the afternoon play will be on soon. It’s always good on a Saturday.’

‘Says you. Are you feeling okay?’

Susie nodded. ‘Bit battered but I’ll be fine, now sit still.’ She had made a habit of never discussing her emotional life in depth with her children and she wasn’t going to start now. All the way through the death throes of her marriage, the hand-to-hand combat of divorce, and the new men, broken hearts and false starts since, she’d always kept the gory details to herself, never expecting her children to take sides or, worse still, dispense advice. Besides, she wasn’t the only one nursing a broken heart. It couldn’t have been easy for Jack to come home and find that Ellie had upped sticks and gone. Ironic really that they were in the same boat, and that while she kept encouraging Jack to talk about it, saying it could really help, she kept her own pain neatly tidied away.

Susie let the charcoal sweep down the page, catching the line of Jack’s back, working down over his shoulders, her eye and fingertips guiding the charcoal, trying to capture the subtle thing that was him, wondering as she always did if there was any way to truly capture the shadows and the texture and the vitality, so that someone would look at the finished work and see Jack as she did.

Jack had broad shoulders but was still rangy like a colt; he had his father’s jaw line and her long neck, blue-green eyes deep set under heavy brows, a good tan, and taut skin that reflected the light so he seemed to glow. She smiled; her baby had grown up to be a rugged outdoorsy man, with strong, gentle features.

She had painted and drawn Jack and Alice and their father hundreds of times, but never Robert. Robert had objected, saying it felt invasive, and that he didn’t like the way she looked at him. It felt, he said, one day when she got him to sit for half an hour, almost as if she could see right through him. Shame she hadn’t really, thought Susie miserably as she added another line, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

‘He seemed like a bit of a no-hoper to me,’ said Jack, without moving.

‘Really? And how could you tell?’ said Susie, eyes working back and forth, back and forth. When Susie was certain she’d got the right line, she’d look less often, for reference, but at the moment Jack’s pose was the only thing she had to hold the image. At the moment there was no dense safety net of lines or shapes or shading, just an idea caught by the most fragile gossamer of charcoal marks.

‘I was being polite,’ he said. ‘If I’m honest, I don’t really know what you ever saw in Robert, Mum, he didn’t seem like he was your sort at all – came across like a real stuffed shirt. Selfish, a bit spoilt. How long did you say you’d been going out with him?’