Ivory (6 page)

The boy’s face
became mockingly serious and he gave an exaggerated shake of his
head. The smirk returned and he yanked Hadleigh’s jeans open and
lunged forward.

“
You are right, Hadleigh. You shouldn’t,” Martin stated with a
stentorian voice.

The younger
boy jumped up and stumbled over some of the equipment surrounding
them. Martin watched with a merciless grin as Hadleigh doubled up
to fasten his jeans. He smiled at his perfect timing. “Canvases are
expensive enough without having them dashed with your Greek
love.”

The two boys
bundled through the door. Hadleigh tried to recover himself, whilst
dragging the boy after him, who after the initial scare didn’t seem
worried at being discovered. “I’m sorry you didn’t win last night,”
he stated. He paused in the doorway his face a deep red and pained
by his own words. “I mean – I thought your piece was very
good…”

The peroxide
boy sniggered at Hadleigh’s fuel on the fire apology and earned a
flash of genuine anger from Hadleigh as he shrugged him off.

Martin smiled
as genuinely as he could against the dead feeling he had when he
looked upon Richard. “Thank you. I should never have entered it. It
wasn’t a contender. A wasted opportunity.”

Richard tucked
strands of his jaw length hair behind his ear, straightened his
back and puffed out his broad chest as he began to recover himself
after his embarrassment. “It was a contender.”

Martin nodded
curtly. “Congratulations on your achievement.” He smiled in an
attempt to relieve the tension of the moment, but he felt it twist
into something cruel that altered the intended lightness of his
tone. “Now will you kindly take the love that dare not speak its
name from my art rooms and find a more appropriate venue.”

Hadleigh
looked awkward then frustrated and then disappeared through the
door. Martin heard Hadleigh’s angry tone but not the words that
Hadleigh used to chastise his boy.

Martin
experienced a confusion of emotions; satisfaction at having seen
Hadleigh embarrassed, the resurfacing of anger toward him for
changing his medium, guilt at having such feelings for someone he
had admired and liked for such a long time, and mournful for the
breakdown of their relationship. The feelings pulled him in too
many directions so he ignored them and returned to his sketch pad.
He sat back down took up his pencil and closed his eyes once
again.

It was no use.
He felt dirty inside his body and his mind was busy. He slouched
over his belly and stared at the white page and the single charcoal
grey line he had managed to produce before he had been interrupted.
The line was around seven or eight inches long, started and ended
with a distinct curve and wavered in between. It was the side of a
face and the curve of a forehead, the depression of an eye socket,
the swell of a cheek bone, the gradual decent of a jaw into the
curl of a chin.

Martin blocked
the image in his mind and worked the pencil across the page, with a
few fluid lines the face was framed by a fall of long hair, a
couple of quick flicks of his pencil and he had the suggestion of a
mouth and a nose, and with some careful touches the face was given
eyes. He applied shading to the face and gave her flesh and
texture. He pressed harder as he began to detail the eyes, and that
was when he recognised who he was channelling. It was Ivory.

He expanded
the dark of the pupils and the sketch began to look increasingly
unnatural. The eyes played such an important role in any portrait,
the compliment of light and detail had to be right, and their gaze
had to have the appropriate character. If there were too much
detail the eyes would dominate, while too little attention would
cause the face to change and the focus for the portrait would be
lost. Likenesses were made with the eyes and if there were any
detail missing a portrait would lose something of it’s identity and
it would become a doppelganger staring back with an unnerving tell
of it’s deception.

He filled one
whole eye with graphite, relieving his pressure on the pencil when
he required a softer shade of grey to suggest the change of light
on the curve of the eye, leaving spots of paper completely to
create glittering dapples of white light. It didn’t look right.

Martin flipped
the sheet to the back of the pad and started again. Almost
immediately his pencil took the wrong path and he was unable to
capture the contour of the face that he had created earlier. After
several false starts he decided to work on the eyes alone, being
able to create solid black eyes that looked natural was a unique
challenge. He had hoped that by recreating her eyes they might lead
him into recreating the rest of her face, but no matter how much
reflected light he put in them they always left his attempts at her
face looking like hollow masks. Creating eyeless beauties or vamps
that might best dominate the cover of a pulp horror novel. The more
he worked the pencil the further she seemed to fade from his memory
and became more difficult to capture on the page.

After an hour
and eight pages of abandoned sketches he had something reminiscent
of the face he could picture in his mind. It was one face among
many others that had ended up being strangers. He tore the quarter
of the page from the pad and pinned it to the corner of the large
easel set in the cupboard.

He turned the
pencil on the canvas and began to create an enlarged version of her
face. A sense of proportion and scale for copying enlarging and
reducing images came naturally to him, but was strangely evading
him in this task and actually became something he had to work at.
After what felt like a frustrating return to being a student
learning his art again he had managed to reproduce a sketch of the
face on his canvas. It still wasn’t an entirely convincing likeness
of the face that haunted him from his memory. He hoped that the
fluidity and forgiving nature of paint might make it easier for him
to recreate Ivory’s face.

He pulled out a tub of acrylic paints from the bottom of the
cupboard. Oils would take too long to dry and would impede the
frenetic channelling of creativity that would be taking place as he
tried to conjure her into being. He added a retarder agent to some
water to slow down the drying process of the acrylics so that he
could continually mix, layer and sculpt the paint
alla primer
on the
canvas
.

He lined up
tubes of Golden paints, a variety of colours that he was sure he
would need and selected a range of Kolinsky sable-hair brushes to
be close at hand. He closed his eyes. Slowed his breathing and
remembered. He remembered the glittering rain. The chalk and
charcoal sketch of the road drawn from the darkness by his car’s
headlights. The only visual memory of hitting Ivory was one smeary
frame of her, overexposed in his lights with her arms raised in
defence, blurred into angel wings with the motion. His hand
trembled with the memory of the accident but his desire to see that
face again steadied him. His brush went to work and he quickly
layered a dark brown background around the crudely sketched face,
automatically bringing her stark contrast with the world into
being.

Ivory had been
in his mind for much of the day, not surprising considering the
shock of the car accident, but despite her distinction the exact
details of her face were frustratingly out of reach to him. He had
caught the bus to university that morning, but had broken his
journey with a visit to the garage to inspect the damage to his
car. It was a write-off. It was an old banger of a runabout so he
hadn’t taken out full comprehensive insurance. Now they would
either have to dip into their savings or have to get by with the
one car for a while. More stress.

In the clarity of daylight the damage was frightening. The
thick metal of the bonnet was creased like tin-foil around the
impact point. The whole front of the car was an inverted curve as
if he had slammed into a wide pillar of granite and not the fragile
frame of a girl. The damage puzzled Martin. Ivory should have been
a contorted bloody mess of twisted shattered limbs, not a sleeping
beauty tipped from a glass case. He frowned dismissively at
himself, but could feel the tension of his uncertainty affecting
the ease of his movement and the grace of his brush.

His
brush paused.

He thought of
their parting moment at the hospital and that smile, and tried to
conjure her face from the shades of memory that seemed to dissolve
under the light of his concentration. In his memory she emerged
from the cubicle with Ebony and the purpled blotches and the thin
cut were gone. His memory was losing detail or he was being
impatient and skipping details to get to the smile that would
follow. Yet with this moment replayed he was sure her healed
appearance was a fact he was only now realising.

Martin shook
his head dismissively and countered the momentary doubt with
confident strokes of his brush. Yesterday had been a long and tough
day: a full day of lecturing, organising the department for the
scrutiny of the campus during the open evening and the stress of
the awards party. Then the accident. It was hardly surprising that
his memory was playing tricks on him.

Martin walked
up the path to his home with his head cowed against the fall of the
rain, and keyed open the front door. He shed the rain from his
green wax jacket with a few shrugs of his shoulders and shakes of
his arms and deadlocked the door behind him. He placed his keys
upon the balustrade, took off his coat and kicked off his shoes
wearily. He had walked more today with his public transport commute
than he had done in some time. His aching feet took comfort in his
cushioned slippers as he weaved his way through the boy’s school
bags, gym packs and lunchboxes that had been cast off on their way
through to the family room. He stopped in at the kitchen and leaned
in. Jenny had her back to him doing some hand-washing at the sink
with the dishwasher burbling away and the tumble dryer rumbling in
the background.

“
Hello,” she called with little commitment beyond her
chore.

He beamed
enthusiastically at her even though she had yet to look up. “I’ve
done a painting. I want you to see it.”

She glanced
over her shoulder blankly, returned to her chore for a moment then
dried her hands to follow him through to the family room.

Martin headed
over to the grey metal PC station set in the alcove between the
French doors and the fireplace. He ruffled Oscar and Fins mops of
hair. “Off you get boys.” He waved away the ‘oh dad’ protests. “You
can pretend to do your homework on it later.”

“
Oh dad, I have something to show you…” Oscar raced as he
jumped down from the swivel chair that he had been sharing with his
younger brother.

“
Later.” He began to close windows down on the desktop. One of
them was the homepage of Arsenal Football Club. The grounds were in
the area and a few of the boy’s friends supported the team, but
Martin detested football and didn’t understand what the two boy’s
saw in it. It made them a little alien to him.

“
Aw dad, I want to show you now,” he whined.

“
Later!” Oscar stalked, sulking to the door. “And then you
have a treat! This morning you had my acceptance speech in
gratitude of the awards you bestowed upon me last night, but
tonight we celebrate with takeaway Pizza.” Oscar broke from his
mood and joined Finn in cheering. Kids were easy to
please.

Jenny shot him
a disapproving look. “But I have meat out of the freezer…”

He waved his
hand at Jenny also. “Then it can go in the bin. You have had months
of my melancholy, a night off of cooking is the least you
deserve.”

“
You don’t have to do things like that. We’re
married.”

“
Marriage isn’t an excuse to be bad company.” With a couple of
clicks of the mouse he replaced the gaudy website the children had
been looking at with his Photographic software. He connected his
camera phone to the PC and opened the file he had created earlier.
With a couple of clicks the image of the painting he had completed
that afternoon filled the screen. “Right then,
my-wife-the-art-critic, what do you think?” That was his pet name
for Jenny as she had been critiquing a show of paintings for
the
Art Monthly
magazine and they had met over one of his
paintings.

“
Who is she?” Jenny asked with a fleeting frown.

“
Does it matter,” he dismissed incredulously. “Do you like
it?” he enthused.

She hunched
over the screen and took control of the mouse and zoomed in close
to the photograph. He watched her exploring the flow of visible
brush strokes, studying where they crossed and converged, where
colours merged built and faded. It was her attention to the details
of a painting that had attracted him to her. He aspired to achieve
perfection and she aspired to find it. He remembered asking her
when they had first met, what it was in a painting that attracted
her; “I prefer work where the brushwork; the prods, the whips, the
sweeps, the curves, the stroke and the caress of paint, can all be
recognised when the work is studied closely. It’s not just the
image created through paint, but by recognising the brush strokes
it’s almost as if I can feel the movement of the artist’s brush,
the grace of the hand that masters it. I love paintings where the
artist is inviting you into his art in that way, showing you his
secrets. Sharing an art only a few that might see it could
replicate and for those that can’t then the artist is sharing
something like magic.” It was her passion for art that he had
fallen in love with.