Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘God, Mac. I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s OK. I just wish I could’ve been there for her.’ She went extremely quiet. ‘I’d still be working in my uncle’s bakery if it weren’t for her, you know. Boiling bagels for a few shillings an hour. She took me out of that. Always believed in me.’

‘And never stopped,’ I said.

‘I don’t know. I always thought she’d be the first person to read my play when it was done, and now she’s dead. It feels as though I’ve let her down.’

‘I’m sure she’d tell you that was nonsense.’

‘Well, I’ve got precisely nothing to show for all the time I’ve spent here. That tells its own story.’ Mac combed through her hair with her nails, gathering it at the side. ‘Fact is, I don’t know how much longer they’ll let me stay. Her lawyers have been sending letters to the trustee board, asking what the cheques are for. Can you believe that? Miserable vultures.’

‘How long have you known about this?’ I said.

‘Days. I wasn’t supposed to say anything until the provost gets back. That’s where he’s gone — to speak to the trustees — but I don’t like my chances. They’re going to boot me out, I know it.’

‘It won’t come to that.’

‘There’s always some procedure to follow. You know what the provost’s like — he’s a bureaucrat to the core. If there’s a precedent, he’ll find it.’

‘God, Mac. I don’t know what to say.’

She pointed to the sheaf of papers in my hands, smiling. ‘You don’t need to say anything. Just read for me. Tell me there’s a sentence worth keeping in that lot or I’m better off away from here.’

There were short-termers in the library — five of them, reading in silence — and all but one of their heads lifted as I came in, bothered by the intrusion. Only the Spanish poet, who was sitting cross-legged on the sofa with an encyclopaedia, failed to look in my direction, though he gave a grunting cough as I left.

It proved difficult to find any space in the mansion that was not already possessed: there was another group of short-termers in the lobby, conversing timidly in French, and they turned their backs when I approached, lowering their voices; Gülcan was folding bedsheets in the portico; Ardak was chopping wood by the front steps and tossing the shards into a barrow. Even the sky seemed busy with the flow of birds and the tangled streams of aeroplanes.

And so I headed to my studio with Mac’s pages, feeling duty-bound to find potential in them. There was a good reason why the four of us did not share our work with anyone. We had given too many seasons of our lives to Portmantle, invested too much in the pursuit of clarity to ever doubt we would accomplish it, or to wonder if all the solitude and sacrifice would have meaning in the end. We were comfortable in the vacuum we had created, and told ourselves that other people’s validation of our efforts was nothing but a crutch. That was why we had come to Portmantle, after all, to rid ourselves of external influence and opinion — to be originals. And so we declined to attend the readings and performances that the provost arranged for departing guests, and took no notice of the workshops and get-togethers that sprung up like crabgrass every summer amongst the residents. Of course, we were curious about each other’s projects, and knew just enough to satisfy this interest — Pettifer had his cathedral designs; Quickman his epic novel;

MacKinney her great play; and I had my mural commission — but we never enquired too deeply or encroached beyond these limits. Our work-in-progress was the one thing we truly owned, and to release it to the eyes and ears of the world was to corrupt it. When Quickman’s book was ready, we would be thrilled to set eyes on it. When Pettifer had built his cathedral, we would all go side by side to wonder at it. Until then, we supported one another just by sharing the same objective.

MacKinney, in her desperation, had now broken this arrangement. I was terrified to look at what she had given me. It was unlikely to be a shambling mess, but what if she had written an equivalent of the pictures in my studio: something competent but lifeless, unexceptional? I lay down on my bed and forced myself to read:

WILLA ( hushed ): No, the problem is I love you more. ( She comes down the last stair to comfort Christopher. He shrugs off her hand as she touches his back .) Listen to me. I’ve thought about this. ( Pause — the slightest gesture of interest from Christopher .) Before I met you, I was alone for so long that I had a system all worked out, you know, a way of turning that aloneness into something good. The only thing I had in my life was painting. Any intimacy I got, that’s what it came from — a brush and a canvas and my own imagination. It was like having a husband in a lot of ways. I mean, I was devoted to it, spent all my private time in rooms with it, went to sleep dreaming of it. Having something in your life like that, well, I suppose it stops you from missing what you don’t have — can you understand that? Painting was there for me when I had nothing. ( Willa sits down beside Christopher and he does not resist .) Then I met you. . ( She nudges her hip against him .) Once you love a man more than your art, that’s it, you lose it forever. You can’t get the intimacy back, no matter what you try. It gets replaced by something so much better. ( Responding to Christopher’s confused expression ) This is not about me blaming you — don’t look at me like that. I’m just trying to explain what I’ve been feeling. And what I’m trying to say is that I’ll never paint the same way ever again. I’ll always feel adrift. ( Willa takes his hand, but Christopher is not responsive .) When I’m painting, my whole heart has to be invested, and it just isn’t any more — it’s chosen you instead. It’s not big enough to hold all things at once, and I have to cope with that somehow, but I can’t. You’re always saying that I pine too much for the old days, and you’re right, that’s part of it. I do. Always. But what I can’t figure out is: how can I miss the loneliness of it all? How can I miss the unhappiness? ( Long pause .) I know this doesn’t change anything. I’m not dumb enough to think it will. And maybe it’s true what you’ve been telling me — maybe this is what I’ve really wanted from the start. But I don’t regret falling in love with you, Christopher. How could I? You’re the best thing in my life.

Christopher waits, then stands up slowly.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, I regret it enough for the both of us.

There was nothing for me to measure this fragment of a scene against. I had no experience of reading scripts, and could count on one hand the number of serious plays I had watched at the theatre that were not by Shakespeare. I was neither a critic nor a writer. But I felt sympathy for Willa from the outset, and that seemed to be the most important thing Mac could have achieved. Perhaps the dialogue could have been more tidily constructed, perhaps the staging was too static, perhaps it was all too composed, or not composed enough — it was not my right to make those judgements. What mattered most was that Mac’s characters seemed real to me, that they raised questions I had not previously considered. I was honestly relieved to find such values in her work.

The afternoon was getting away from me, though, and I had not yet cleaned my studio. All my palette knives were in the sink, unrinsed. The muller and slab were resting on my workbench, encrusted with dried paint. The tables needed wiping down. I could see a few spilled globs of powder on the wood — the pigment was pure white in the daytime, like ordinary flour, but if I didn’t wash away the spillages properly, they would sink into the grain and glow weakly in the night. At times like this, I yearned for an assistant.