Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

There are almost as many of their pictures about the place as his these days. Susan’s photographs. A few of her early studies, which she tried to throw out but he ‘rescued’ from the bin. Danny’s benders — those weird snares of junk he’s concocted with a welder between one of his many bases, which will find a place on a chest or table, or be strung up from the curtain rails on fishing line by his ma, so the bright blades rotate like a turbine after an apocalypse.

Lydia will have taken a bath, her hair piled up on top of her head in that mad-dame coiffure. He always finds a reason to go into the bathroom while she’s in there. ‘Oh, I’m just looking for that thing I left, love…Oh, I just need a whizz…’ The transparency. The lovesick folly. She’s aged, through motherhood, northern weather, the menopause. Her hair has begun to lose a little of its chestnut gleam, her waist’s a little thicker, and there are little blue knots on her outer thighs, which she points out to him occasionally, with a frown. He doesn’t mind, doesn’t see gun-flaws in her the way he does in canvas. Parts of her still find their way into his compositions. Maybe a rock in a sea pool will be modelled on that beautiful bottom. She is Lydia, the woman who can balance the whole sky on her nose. She is the calm, the anti-cyclone, the eye of his storm. Where would he be without her?

He’ll catch her watching the twins sometimes, when they’re bickering or play-fighting (in their twenties now, but the same games and provocations still apply), prodding each other with the little mackerel bones from the pie and yelling, ‘Wilse, tell him,’ ‘Wilse, tell her.’ A soft, intrigued look on her face. He wonders what she’s thinking, what her take on these two pod-dwellers is. She’s so good at being internal, his wife. She will not often issue judgement, nor will she declaim. Not like him; Mr Big-Mouth, Mr Well-Here’s-What-I-Bloody-Think!

What she likes about his work he’s gleaned from the paintings she has chosen to hang in the cottage, and her few light observations about clarity and prophecy, landscapes stripped of former inhabitants, the next Mesolithic age. She likes his human figures frilled and sutured, like ammonites. She hung the paintings the day they moved into the ramshackle Border cottage, while the roof gaped open at one end, and the crows dropped cobs of mud in like a dirty hex upon the new occupants.

There are none of the severe mountain ridges in the house, though. Those are the ones that have fetched big money in America and Canada, that have complicated tax years for them, while enabling the underpinning of the house at its north-west corner. Those are the paintings that have provided funds to travel, to visit collections in the national galleries of the world and spend six months in Italy, finally. That was a good trip — they pulled the kids out of school, much to the disapproval of Headmaster Pokerarse-and spent the time visiting museums like Victorian gentry. Rome: shabby and vandalised, but extraordinary, busted seat of the colossal empire. Green-lipped Venice. Florence, where they couldn’t turn around without tripping over a masterpiece. Perseus with the head of the Medusa. The church in Umbria, hung with a thousand tiles depicting a thousand local tragedies. He made those little pilgrimages he had wanted to make for years. Picked up some great souvenirs (and one particularly meaningful ‘find’, undeclared at customs, naturally). They made a fuss of him at the British Academy; he was on the radar by then, beginning to command respect, beginning to sell expensively.

Now wealthy climbers collect his mountains faithfully-the Rolex-Gore-tex brigade, Lydia calls them. They’ll travel upcountry when over on business, not only to scale famous peaks in the Lakeland, but to locate his little hub of industry and tell him under his front-door lintel that if it weren’t for the detail on the side of such and such a composition, grandly positioned in their study, office or corporate lobby, they never would have found a new route up the crags to the summit. ‘Super, I can charge you double for cartography then,’ he’ll say.

Never mind that fish pie; he could murder a toke. That would take the edge off all this madness. That would give him some reprieve from the existential mind-fuck. Except the pouch is in the bloody car. Why is it never to hand when he needs it? Why does he always have to go and fetch it from the glove box, the kitchen table, the bottom of the laundry hamper? Senility, probably. Welcome to your dotty dotage, laddo. If he could just have a smoke he could clear the cobwebs from his brain and he’d be able to sort this mess out. Come up with a plan to save the perishing foot, and get home, or to the hospital. Instead he’s sitting here under the rain clouds, dreaming of a tobacco miracle. He’s exhausting himself with nihilism, and expending his energy on imaginary rodents.

What time is it now? Must be late. After midnight. After heart attacks and cancers. After love and lost lovers, after he’s been born. Neville Caldicutt will be getting up in a few hours, throwing leaves into the tin teapot, squeaking his bedsprings. ‘Mind you keep reading books, Petie. Mind you work hard. There’s a whole world out there.’ There is a world. But he is tired. He is spent. And the dark is as dark as it is behind his eyes, when he closes them, just for a second.

In four years Annette has learned many things. She has learned that customers are more likely to buy flowers on a day of clear skies and moderate wind, rather than of fog or thunderstorms. She has learned to navigate the invisible pathways of the town, and to trust her noisy, vigorous brothers. She has learned to listen with her head cocked, like an owl, and to predict her body’s cycles. She has learned that the items of the world have various definitions, and if one is hidden, others will manifest with greater strength. A fire is its warmth on her skin and its spitting, clapping dance. The birds are their different songs in the morning in the courtyard. She has learned that people in the market give the correct change whenever they can, that Elemme is kind and lonely, even though she is married. All people smell differently, like the cardamoms, and nutmegs, and Spanish chillies in the spice jars at the market. Tommaso smells of burnt milk and hyacinths. Maurizio like candle wax, chicken skin, and sometimes cologne from the pharmacy where he has flirted with the girl behind the counter. Her mother’s voice always has an undercurrent of dark blue, like the night sky of the Nativity.

She has learned how to find the juiciest fruits in the market’s woven punnets. She has memorised the sufferings of the saints — the agonies and banishments and poverty. And, if someone is looking at her, her head will automatically turn towards the gaze like the magnetic needle of a compass. She has learned to live carefully inside the rooms of Castrabecco, in the alleys of the summer theatre and between the hot panes of the greenhouses; to walk carefully along the streets to the church of San Lorenzo and up the steps to the cimitero di campagna. She knows not to dress and undress at certain areas of her bedroom with the shutters open, or to invite trouble from boys and demons. She knows there are rules. But she knows also that life is more complicated, that the dimensions of her mind are endless.

On Sundays she continues to tell her papa the small domestic news of Castrabecco and recounts the affairs of the town. This week, Mauri has learned to do one hundred and fifty keep-ups with the football; she counted them for him, listening to his left foot twisting on the ground as he hopped round and the leather slapped against his thigh. At one hundred and eight he went skittering across the courtyard and skilfully recovered the wildly spinning ball. Afterwards, he told her what the shepherds used to do to their goats in the building in which they live, before it was a house, and that night she had a terrible dream in which the men of her family were lined up, in front of the castration blades. Tommaso has been training for the bike races, wearing a rubber swimming-cap, donated to him by his teacher, and with Vaseline on his legs and chest. He is as slippery as a fish and cannot be caught by their mother when it is time to eat. Uncle Marcello has found him a little odometer for the bicycle spokes so that he can know the distances pedalled. For two days the training has been suspended due to a head-cold. Uncle Marcello has prepared a mallow infusion for his sore throat. Another contagion brought from the South on the treno del sole, her mother declared when Tommaso began to sniff and cough.