Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘Because,’ I replied, ‘it’s important to strive. If you don’t have the ambition to be the very best at what you do, then what’s the point? If you aim for greatness but keep missing — fine. At least you had the guts to aim. There’s honour in failing that way. But there’s nothing honourable about settling for mediocrity. It’s the same in any profession: if I were a dentist I’d try to be the best bloody dentist in the world, and wouldn’t stop until I’d proved it to myself.’

‘That’s really how you see it?’ Victor said.

‘I believe I just said so, didn’t I?’

Victor gave his customary sigh of forbearance. ‘You said to yourself —until you’d proved it to yourself .’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s an interesting distinction, don’t you think?’

‘No. Not really.’

He scribbled something down.

‘Please stop moving around so much,’ I told him, lifting my brush from the sketchbook paper. ‘Every time you make a note like that, the angle of your head changes. And so does the light.’

‘I’ll try to hold still,’ he said.

‘Good. Or you’re going to look very odd when this is finished.’

‘I always do.’ He straightened his face. ‘Would you say there’s something particular you need to prove to yourself, then, when you’re painting?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Try to qualify it for me, if you can.’

‘Well, I don’t know. It really depends on the painting.’

‘That sounds like an evasion.’

‘Yes, I’m glad you cottoned on to that, Victor.’

For once, he let my glibness go unchecked. ‘OK, we’ll come back to it.’ He scribbled again. ‘How do you feel now, about this painting you’re doing?’

I stabbed my brush into the gummy square of cad red. ‘ This silly thing?’ The tone needed lightening with a small dab of water. I mixed it to a suitable pallor on the inside of the paintbox. ‘It’s difficult to say.’

‘Please, try to qualify it.’

I did not lift my head up from the paper. With the cad red, I dimpled the fabric of the strangely patterned wall-hanging beyond Victor’s head, adding some reflected colour in the windowpanes and the glass-topped surface of his desk. ‘Honestly, this has to be the dullest picture I’ve ever made in my life, and I would very much like to set the thing on fire before I leave so nobody will have to look at it.’

‘Right,’ Victor said, scribbling. Then he folded his arms. ‘I asked you how you were feeling and you’ve come back at me with a volley of opinion. If you’re not going to be sincere about this, we might as well call time on it now.’

‘Stop moving around. You’re ruining my composition.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Ellie — come on — time to be serious.’

I dumped the sketchbook on the floor. ‘All right.’ The page was not quite dry and some of the colour bled with the impact: tiny veins streaking the paper from the centre outwards. ‘As far as feeling anxious goes: no , I don’t feel anything, not with this kind of work. I could make little pictures like this all day because that’s all it is: picture-making. There’s no emotional connection with this process whatsoever. I mean, no offence to you, Victor, but doing a quick portrait of you in watercolours isn’t any sort of challenge. This whole exercise is meaningless.’

‘Ah, but you’re painting,’ he said. ‘That isn’t meaningless.’

‘I see what you’re trying to do. I get it. But, really, this is just like all the stuff I’ve been knocking out for Dulcie in the last few months — I can finish it, and you can hang it on your wall and say I painted it if you want to, but there’s nothing of me in it. It’s not art, just decoration.’

‘Can I see it?’ he said.

I shrugged.

He got up from his chair, flexing his legs, then stooped to gather the portrait I had made. It had taken me just under twenty minutes. Sliding his glasses along his nose to appraise it, he made no sound, tilting it to the afternoon light, as though it were some lost relic he was trying to authenticate. Then he said, ‘If that’s just decoration, then I mustn’t know much about art. May I keep this?’

‘All yours.’ I held my hand out. ‘A couple of hundred ought to cover it.’

‘Payment in services rendered.’

‘Cheapskate,’ I said, and he permitted himself a laugh.

He sat down again with the picture on his knees, admiring it for a moment before swivelling it round for me to look at. ‘Why did you paint it this way, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I can’t do faces very well,’ I said.

‘Ellie — serious now — please.’

I had been seeing Victor for the past six months. It had taken an enormous effort just to dial his number to organise an appointment, and an even greater determination to present myself at his office for the first time. But I had done it in the hope of salvaging some aspect of my old self, and Dulcie had been only too delighted to foot the bill. When I had suggested that I might see a therapist instead of taking a break from painting, she had responded with all the enthusiasm I had expected: ‘Oh, absolutely — that sounds like a very fine idea to me. Did you have anyone in mind?’ I had told her Victor Yail would be the only person I would feel comfortable with. ‘Well, if that’s something you think you need,’ she had said. Then: ‘Does that mean January is still a possibility?’ I reasoned that if I was going to relax my principles just to appease the Roxborough, then I might as well get something useful out of it, and Victor had been so confident that he could help me overcome my problems.

His practice was on the third floor of a Georgian townhouse in Harley Street. It was a rather clerical environment: just an oak-panelled waiting area with an array of mismatched chairs, and then, through a doorway behind the receptionist’s desk, Victor’s imperious consulting room, where all my issues were laid bare for him and picked apart. This was a space I knew he took great pride in. Burgundy carpet, mahogany bureau (obscuring most of the good light from the picture window), blocky suede furniture arranged in a perfect L. Between the couch and Victor’s armchair was an ankle-height coffee table that held a chessboard, its ornate marble pieces uniformly placed, and the bookshelves were replete with dimly titled volumes and obscure foreign artefacts. Drab lithographs of birds and trees were hung on the walls beside two mystifying Aboriginal tapestries and the many foiled certificates of Victor’s education. I had included all these details in the portrait, knowing how much he valued them.

At the beginning of the session, he had given me a rudimentary box of paints, a brush, and a pot of water. ‘We’re going to try something new today, if that’s all right with you.’ He had invited me to spend the full hour painting his portrait whilst we conducted our usual discussion. ‘I’ll just sit in my normal spot, as still as I can, while you talk and paint. Let’s see what we end up with.’

Now, he was sitting with the results of my endeavour on his lap, asking me to give the rationale behind it. I did not know where to begin. Therapy seemed to be such an inexact procedure, like wetting your finger and circling it around the rim of a glass, again and again, until it finally rang a note you could define as music. ‘The striking thing,’ he said, ‘is that I’m not in this picture at all. Why is that?’

It was true that I had quite deliberately left Victor out of the image. I had noticed that the watercolour box contained a pot of masking fluid, so I had blanked out the shape of him with this invisible solution and then painted in everything else around him. The fullness of his office was rendered in blotchy detail, right down to the outlying rooftops in the window behind his back, the snowy trail of Harley Street, but Victor was just a white void on the paper, a frame without substance. ‘You can still tell it’s you, though,’ I said.