Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘What about this Saturday? I’ll bring you some bagels from the good Jewish bakery. We can have a cup of tea and—’

‘What? Catch up? Talk about the Arsenal?’

‘I was going to say we could look through the racing pages. I don’t mind putting your bets on, still. At the weekend, anyway.’

Jim nodded. His whole face tightened. ‘I think you’re forgetting how Max does things. He’ll have an agenda worked out for you — mark my words. He’ll be getting you in with the Roxborough crowd straight away, and God knows who else. You’re going to be divvied up: a stake in you here, a stake in you there. It’s going to mean deadlines, long hours in the studio. Real work. Why d’you think I needed an assistant in the first place? It wasn’t to keep my attic warm.’ He squinted at the sky. ‘No, you’re not going to be sitting here, eating bagels, reading me the form guide, that’s for sure. And, quite frankly, if that’s how you choose to spend your time from now on, I’ll bloody murder you.’ He sniffed. A white van was approaching now from the high street. ‘I’d do it quickly, mind — quick snap of the neck — you wouldn’t even feel it. That’s how much I respect you.’ Patting my arm, he said, ‘All right then, Miss Conroy. Work hard, keep your nose clean. Forget anything I might’ve accidentally taught you and you’ll be right as rain. Come and say hello to me at your next soirée and make me look important. Off you go.’ He trudged back to his studio, peering at the ground. And that was the last conversation I would have with Jim Culvers for a very long time.

Though all artists strive for recognition, they cannot foresee how it will come to them or how much they will compromise to maintain success. All they can do is cling to the reins and try to weather the changes of their circumstance without altering their course. But no woman can improve her station in life without sacrificing a little of her identity. I was an ordinary girl from Clydebank who had somehow established herself as a prospect on the London art scene: was I really expected to remain unchanged by these experiences? Even my father, who had returned from the frontlines of war apparently untouched by its horrors, was not averse to smoothing out his accent when speaking to the council on the telephone. So how was I to supposed to sign away my life to Roxborough Fine Art and still be that same girl who once painted in her parents’ yard? I tried so hard to preserve the Clydebank in me that I soon realised I was forcing it. Perhaps if there had been some grounding presence in my life at that time — a good man like Jim Culvers who could have given me a shake when I needed it — I might have been able to retain a semblance of my old self. But on the preview night for my first solo exhibition at the Roxborough in 1960, I did not have a genuine friend in the room.

Instead, I was surrounded by interested parties and loathsome hangers-on. People like Max Eversholt, who paraded around the gallery as though he had painted every canvas himself, tour-guiding young women in cocktail dresses from landscape to landscape with a delicate grip on their elbows. He brought other artists over to speak with me, one fashionable face at a time, and presumed we were already acquainted (‘You know Frank, of course. . You know Michael. . You know Timothy. .’) because surely all the painters in London were the best of friends? I stood, awkwardly pattering with them, as I might have talked to distant relations at a wake.

Occasions such as these were geared for Max Eversholt and his type. For him, the gallery floor on a preview night was the one place he felt alive. He dialled up his enthusiasm to the point of theatre, revelling in the glory of his involvement in my work, kissing cheeks, patting backs, savouring the thrum of conversations that ensued. I never understood why all this glitz and pageantry was required to sell a picture — it certainly had nothing to do with art. Every painter I respected worked alone in a quiet room, and the images they made were intended for solemn reflection, not to provide the scenery for obnoxious gatherings of nabobs and batty collectors wearing too much perfume. After a while, the company of such people became the norm, and I was expected not only to enchant them with my work, but also to fascinate them with my personality. If I baulked at placating these strangers, it merely served to enthral them even more.

I hovered in the corner with Bernie Cale for much of that private viewing, and we talked for a while about Jim, wondering aloud where he had gone to, if we had seen the last of him. Bernie had heard all the rumours and was not convinced by any of them. ‘I just don’t see a bloke like Jim lasting ten minutes in New York,’ he said. ‘Too many windbags and clever Dicks. Too much competition. And you know how he feels about American whisky. Single malt’s so dear over there, he’d never make it.’

I laughed at this, recalling the strength of Jim’s feelings on the matter. He had declined to share a drink with his neighbour, Vern Glasser, on so many occasions that, one day, I had asked him why he could not try to be more accommodating. After all, I had to share a bathroom with Vern, and their festering resentment for each other was making the atmosphere in our mews house rather fraught. But Jim said, ‘I’ve nothing against Vernon in particular. It’s just that all he has to drink is that awful stuff from Kentucky, and, frankly, I’d prefer to swig from his toilet.’ How I missed being Jim’s assistant. The simplicity of our life together. That everyday affiliation we used to have. The longer I went without hearing from him, the more I thought of those days in St John’s Wood and yearned to restore them.

‘More to the point,’ Bernie Cale went on, ‘if he’s in the States, wouldn’t somebody have bumped into him by now? I mean, it’s not like you can hide in New York, is it? Not if you’re trying to make a name for yourself. It’s a very big scene over there, but it’s all a bit — what’s the word — incestuous.’ I had never been to New York so was not qualified to pass judgement.

The rumours about Jim’s whereabouts were founded on a scarcity of facts, with the gaps coloured in by guesswork. According to received opinion, he had gone to New York to live with his sister. This theory hinged upon a drunken conversation that Jim was supposed to have had with two regulars at the Prince Alfred pub, who had told Max Eversholt that they had held Jim’s ticket for the boat in their very own hands (they also claimed that Jim had begged the barmaid for a lift to Southampton). The problem with verifying this story was that nobody knew if Jim really had a sister. His drinking pals could not remember what her name was, where she might have worked, or what part of the city she lived in. They did not even know if she was older or younger. Eversholt believed their word was reliable, even if the details rang false when I called the shipping companies: they had no recent record of a passenger named James Culvers. All in all, the New York theory was quite unsound, but we had no other clues to follow up on.

Jim had abandoned his studio just a few weeks after I moved out of his attic. ‘A midnight flit,’ was how Eversholt put it. ‘Ditched everything but his sketchbooks.’ He had shown me the eerie state that Jim had left the space in: all his oil tubes thrown into a box, his easels folded down and stacked, the On Highs painted over with white gesso, leaned up by the window. ‘If you want some extra room, it’s yours,’ Eversholt had said. ‘You can work it out between yourselves when Jim gets back. Assuming he’s not lying dead in a gutter somewhere.’ I was revolted by his glibness, and he quickly apologised. ‘Sorry. That was in poor taste, even for me.’ The prospect of a stranger moving in to Jim’s studio was so dismaying that I agreed to take it on in his absence. I used it mostly to store overflow materials, though sometimes I would go and stand in those empty rooms when I needed separation from a particularly mulish piece of work. At first, it helped me to surround myself with the remnants of Jim’s thoughts, to pace in his old circles. But each time I tried to work there, I felt that I was painting over memories of him, changing the meaning of the space, so I stopped going.