Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘I suppose you must come here often,’ I said, which only showed him my naïvety.

‘You mean, do I bring all my women here?’

‘ All? That implies a fair number.’

‘I can’t deny it’s a popular place.’ He thinned his eyes at me. ‘You have an unusual way of talking, you know that?’

‘I grew up near Glasgow.’

‘It’s not how you speak, it’s what you say. Your accent’s very gentle.’

‘Don’t you ever stop criticising?’

‘No. It’s a permanent vocation.’

‘Well, frankly, the way I speak is none of your concern.’

‘It just seems to me that you’re very careful with your words, very measured. Makes me wonder if you approach painting the same way. It would explain a lot about the show tonight.’

‘Your ice is melting,’ I said.

He looked down at his drink, as though remembering it was in his hand. ‘I like to let the lime settle a bit first. Tastes better.’

‘I wonder what that says about you.’

He simpered, putting the glass down on the table, twisting its stem so the coaster spun beneath it. ‘Look, obviously I’m not going to get to know you in the course of one evening, Ellie, so I’m having to make a few assumptions — is it all right if I call you that?’

I nodded.

‘Not that there’s anything wrong with the name Elspeth, of course.’

‘That was nearly a compliment.’

‘Close enough.’ The glass came to rest in his fingers. ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you got in the cab tonight, I thought you were going to be like all the rest of them.’

‘The rest of who?’

‘You know—’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

He blinked. ‘There’s a certain pliability about the women Dulcie takes on at the gallery, if you get what I mean.’

‘You make it sound like a bordello.’

‘That wasn’t my intention. Really,’ he said, tidying the cuffs of his blazer. ‘I was only trying to say that you’re not the average Dulcie Fenton sort of artist. I thought I’d buy you a drink, tell you a few cold truths, and you’d cry on my shoulder and I’d say, There, there, darling, your work will get better, I know you have it in you . But I can tell you prefer to keep people at a distance.’

‘Not everyone.’

‘Just me then. Why? Because my opinion is important?’

‘Actually, you have a very high opinion of your own opinion. It could just be that I don’t like you very much.’

‘Ha. Maybe so.’ Wilfred moistened his lips. He sat forward, bringing a cigarette case from his breast pocket, flipping it open. There was only one left. He held it out for me to take but I declined. ‘What I know for sure,’ he said, drawing out the cigarette, tapping it on the back of the case, ‘is you haven’t come here for praise.’

‘That’s lucky.’

He smirked, taking the hotel matchbook from the ashtray and tearing off a strip. ‘It’s confirmation you want, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do.’ He angled his head. The matchflame illumined his face like a Halloween pumpkin. ‘It’s not that you need me to explain why the diptych is so good. You already know that. It’s authentication you’re looking for. You’re here to make sure I understand how good you are.’

For the first time all night, I looked directly into his eyes. They were not quite the colour I had thought they were — a murky, gutter-moss green. ‘Honestly, I couldn’t care less what you write about me in your magazine. Where I’m from, people who sit around criticising other people’s work all day instead of doing their own get a very bad name for themselves. I happen to like men with strong opinions. I find them interesting to talk to. But don’t fool yourself — it’s not your approval I’m after.’

‘Then what?’

‘Nothing. Just a chance to have a proper conversation about art. I haven’t had a genuine discussion about painting since—’

‘When?’

‘A long time ago. Since I moved to Kilburn. It’s difficult to be taken seriously when you look like me.’

‘I have a similar problem.’

‘You’re a woman too, are you?’

‘No, but I look younger than I am, which puts me at a certain disadvantage.’

‘Oh, please. Don’t even try to compare.’

‘Well, all right — we’re getting off topic.’ As he inhaled and savoured the smoke, his arm succumbed to its old habit, drooping over the chair-back. ‘You should care what I think, because I care what you paint. That’s how it works. Our interests are aligned.’

‘You presume an awful lot.’

‘I do, I know.’ He edged forward, shifting his legs. ‘Give me a moment and I’ll explain.’

‘It’s past midnight already.’

‘Five more minutes.’

I leaned back. ‘Three.’

‘I’ll start with the diptych then,’ he said. ‘A quintessential Elspeth Conroy painting, if ever there was one.’

I laughed. ‘And how would you know?’

‘Easy. I don’t read press releases. They go straight in the dustbin. I just look for the piece that resonates most. I could tell that painting came from a different place than all the others.’

‘So you haven’t even seen my other work? That’s hardly fair.’

‘Context is overrated. It wouldn’t have mattered if the diptych were the first work of yours I’d seen or the last. I’m no artist, but I can tell when one is fully in tune with herself, not just trying to fake it for the sake of an exhibition. You can feign a lot of things in modern art, but emotion isn’t one of them. It has to be there in the paint, not tagged on after. And it’s probably the most important thing a reviewer can convey, that distinction. Not everyone can spot the difference, so they leave it up to people like me. And whether I print it in the Statesman or stand up on a soapbox in the park and shout it out loud — doesn’t matter. Real artists come along so rarely nowadays that modern art is hard to justify. Most people can’t tell pitch dark from blindness any more, and that’s what makes our interests so aligned. I need artists like you to make great art so I have something to shine a light on. And you need critics like me, or nobody will notice what you paint. That’s the nature of the game we’re in.’ He slugged the whole of his daiquiri, blinking away the sourness. ‘Can I buy you another?’

‘I should really be getting home.’

He twisted round and made a circling gesture to the barman anyway. ‘You’re still not convinced,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘I’m not like you. I don’t see art as a game.’

‘All right. Let’s try it another way.’ He picked something from his tongue — a tiny node of lime-flesh — and flicked it to the carpet. ‘I’ll bet when you painted the diptych you weren’t even thinking of painting, were you? You didn’t have a purpose in mind, not even a theme, you were just trying to express a feeling — you let your arm go wherever it wanted until you ended up with mountains. Am I warm?’

‘I’m still listening,’ I said.

He wet his lips again. ‘Something felt wrong after that, I’ll bet — I don’t mean erroneous. Less than whole would probably be more like it. Anyway, let’s say you stepped back from the painting at this point — exhausted most likely, sweating a lot and ready to give up working on it altogether — but then — and you don’t know exactly where it came from — you saw another form leaning against that panel: not completely there , in the same frame, just set off against it somehow, almost joined but not quite. It just dropped into your mind. And that’s how you painted the baby on the right — from nowhere. You didn’t copy from a photograph — not your style. You just painted it straight out of your imagination, didn’t you? From memory. It just sort of felt right to paint it, so you carried on. And, I don’t know, maybe you were afraid of what you were painting as you were doing it, mountains and babies not being your normal kind of subject matter, but you had to see where it all led. Because it felt right. In fact, it probably seemed as though the entire thing was somehow predetermined. Like it was happening to you. What was that old line Michelangelo had about his sculptures waiting for him in the marble? That . I’ll bet you made the whole painting so quickly you didn’t even stop to eat or sleep. And that’s why you begged for it to be in the show. Because you composed all the others yourself, thought about them very deliberately, but that diptych was pure inspiration.’ With this, he sat back, returning his cigarette case to its frayed little pocket. ‘See, that’s the kind of thing you need someone like me to communicate. Your average person can’t just intuit it when they walk in off the street.’