Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘Well, I did.’ There seemed little point in hiding the fact any more.

‘If you’d told me that before you moved out, it might have been different. But I don’t see there’s much I can do to change anything now. And I needed to do it for myself. I needed that trip.’ He glugged about a tablespoon of linseed oil upon the paste of flowers. Taking the muller from the table, he began to slide it up and over the paste and the oil. It was a large glass object like a flat iron and it sent drips careening everywhere. ‘Oh, for crying out loud — another dud batch. It’s not giving me anything . Hand me that trowel, would you? I need to scrape it off and start again.’

I got up and passed him what he wanted. ‘You didn’t mention her name,’ I said.

‘Huh?’

‘The sister.’

‘Oh. Helène. Ana Helène.’ He took the trowel, laughing quietly. ‘There was nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was young enough to be my daughter. And engaged to someone else.’

‘Young and unavailable. Yes, I hear that’s quite a turn-off.’

‘It wasn’t like that, Ellie.’

‘She must’ve been beautiful, though. From the way you talk about her.’

‘I’m really not going to listen to this. I told you: it wasn’t like that.’

‘So you didn’t even look at her? Not once?’

‘Stop it now. You’re better than this, Ellie.’ He slammed down the trowel, throwing a shock of oiled pigment over the table, onto my funeral dress. ‘That was an accident,’ he said, walking off. I just rubbed the stain into the fabric, but he came back with a wet tea towel, the bead curtain clattering behind him. ‘Fine, ruin it. Who cares?’ He tossed it aside. ‘I really thought you and I were above this sort of nonsense. Jealousies and petty suspicions. You’re the only woman I’ve ever thought about in that way.’

‘In what way, Jim?’

‘Christ. This is ridiculous. This is why I prefer painting to talking.’ He went and dumped himself into the rocking chair. ‘I suppose I’m trying to say you’re the only woman I’ve ever really cared for. Not because of how you look, which God knows is fine enough to stun any idiot with two working eyes in his head, but because of what you are, how you think. Actually, it’s how you paint. That’s what makes you who you are.’

‘Then you might as well go back to France,’ I said, ‘because I don’t paint the way you think I do. Not any more.’

He squinted at me, arms folded. ‘Two solo shows at the Roxborough — that’s what I heard. Can’t be bad.’

‘Now you’re sounding like Max.’ I looked away. ‘Who told you that, anyway? About the shows?’

‘Henry. He showed me the press clippings.’

‘Did you see any pictures?’

‘A few. But they were only from the newspaper. Black-and-white.’

I pushed my thumb into the scabbing wounds of my knuckles. ‘And what did you think?’ The pain was sharp but not unbearable.

‘Like I said, the images weren’t the best. .’ Jim gave the slightest cough.

‘First impressions will do.’

‘All right.’ He inhaled deeply, casting his eyes to the floor. It seemed that he was reluctant to voice the thought, but then he just let it escape: ‘ Vaurien, ’ he said. ‘A long way from your best.’

And my heart lost its rhythm for the tiniest moment. I felt tears brimming. ‘Don’t you ever disappear on me again, Jim Culvers,’ I said. ‘You’re the only one who’s ever seen the difference.’

He did not take my head against his chest to try and console me. He did not even tell me he was sorry. Instead, he rose from the chair and started unscrewing the lid on an empty jar. And he said, ‘I think the problem is I agitated them a bit too much. They need to bruise in the brine but not bleed out. Have you ever made pigments this way? It’s fussy work but the paint really sings if you do it right. I could use some help perfecting it. You were always better at this kind of stuff than I was.’

‘Show me,’ I said, and I stood beside him.

It was later day, as the sun was dropping into the loch, that I walked down to the phone box in the village and telephoned my mother. She made me swear that I would travel up again to be with her at Easter, and I promised I would write to her and call on Christmas morning.

At first, we slept in separate rooms. It was almost like things used to be. Jim hauled in his single mattress and made a bed for me in the lounge beside the fireplace, saying he was happy on the floor. There were not enough pillows or blankets to share, so he relinquished the ones he had and told me, ‘I’ll make do.’ He took down the heavy curtains from the bedroom and sewed them together with twine to make a sleeping bag, used a rolled-up jumper to cushion his head, and woke up trying to hide the cricks in his neck. In the days, we painted. In the evenings, we bathed and washed our clothes. I finished the novel I had brought and read it time and again by candlelight: the story of an unnamed girl whose thoughts only became more comforting by familiarity. Before I went to sleep, I leafed through National Geographic and savoured the pictures and articles.

Jim had no doubts as to the virtue of his work. He had a very set regimen. Each morning, he went out with his tattered picnic basket to forage plants — sometimes venturing no further than the beanstalk weeds in the back garden or the fringes of the surrounding trees, other times going much further, beyond the scree of the hills to their summits, or right across to the other side of the loch. He could be gone for an hour; he could be gone for five. It depended on his needs and what was out there to be found. No matter what, he always came back with a full basket of pickings: local flora he did not know the botanical terms for, and gave what I assumed were pet-names of his own. Skullcap. Redshank. Horsemint. Muck-button. The only plants that ever caught his eye were those with pinkish flowers or stems. Because I could not bear for him to go anywhere without me in those first few weeks, I accompanied him on all of his ‘scouting missions’, as he liked to call them. But I soon grew tired of hunting around in ditches and thickets, and began to suspect that Jim would prefer to do his scouting alone. One morning, as we were heading back to the cottage through the neighbouring firs, he said to me, ‘You really don’t have to come with me any more — I can tell you hate it.’

‘It’s nature,’ I said. ‘I don’t hate it.’

‘But you could do without the pissing rain and cold.’

I shrugged. ‘You might run off on me again.’

‘I’ve got a shilling to my name. It’d get me into Balloch, but then I reckon I’d be stuck. I’m too old to be scrubbing pots again for bus fare.’

Every second day, he started a new painting. His process was fixed but unusual: first, he coated all of his boards with a black primer then underpainted thickly with Cremnitz White, a very stiff material that he could spread across the board like stucco. ‘My only extravagance,’ he told me. ‘You can use it if you want, but sparingly — I find it helps to think of it as diamond paste.’ He would then add definition to the background in regular tube-oils. Next, he would dip a fat round brush into a batch of his homemade pigment (it was thin like syrup) and, holding it firmly in his left hand, he would thump his right fist hard against the base of the brush, spiking beads of paint against the board to form the Judas blossoms. They would hold there fuzzily on the surface, pink and dazzling, and he would spend the next few hours fine-detailing them with a very slim sable.