Keeping the World Away (34 page)

The sessions, mercifully, were not quite a full hour. She knew he was uncomfortable, of course. When she selected the damned chair she had told him just to say if he found it too uncomfortable and she’d find another, but he was too proud to admit that he found sitting bolt upright too difficult. So he was stuck with the chair, and with the pose. ‘Sit how you want,’ she’d told him, ‘but be sure you can hold whatever position you choose.’ First he’d put his hands on his knees, and then he’d folded them. First he’d had his legs slightly apart, then imagined how this would look, and brought them together, only to settle on crossing them at the ankle. He’d been told to wear what he liked himself in best – an invitation to vanity if ever he’d heard one, and he wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt.

He wondered about the artist. She was not young, about forty, perhaps. He didn’t find her attractive, though he supposed some men might like her feline looks. She had good skin, pretty hair and her eyes were arresting not just because of their size and shape but their colour, more green than grey, the irises flecked with some other colour which he couldn’t quite decide on – gold? Every other woman in London was wearing a short skirt but Lucasta Jenkinson – an absurdly incongruous mixture of names – had on a long skirt, down to her ankles and tied at the waist with a bow to one side. It was made of some sort of floaty
blue
material and the top she was wearing matched the shade. Her figure was good, she was slim but her breasts were well rounded and were emphasised by her thin sweater. What struck him most was her extreme neatness and freshness – there was nothing of the messy artist about her. She cared about her appearance, he thought, and her clothes, took time and trouble over both. But for her own benefit, he decided. Certainly not for his.

Was there someone else? If so, all evidence was well hidden. No one lived with her, he was pretty sure. He’d tried, at the beginning, to chat her up, since she was clearly not going to chat him up. She appeared not to hear him. Twice, he’d asked the same question, twice there was neither acknowledgement nor reply. But then he remembered she had told him, on his arrival, that if she were silent during the sitting he must forgive her, it was how she worked. But it made him uneasy to spend nearly an hour without any communication, and being stared at. He was sure his discomfort would show in the finished portrait, and he’d hate it. She wouldn’t let him see the work in progress. About that she had been very definite, and he’d accepted that it would perhaps be a kind of unwelcome interference. But he was a curious man and found containing his curiosity frustrating – he wanted a quick glance, no more. But at the end of each sitting, she stood up and thanked him and then waited until he had left the room. She didn’t even see him to the door but remained beside her easel, bidding him goodbye, and thanking him, from a distance. He longed for some distraction to take her from the room – a phone call, a parcel being delivered – but though there was one afternoon when the door-bell rang, she ignored it. ‘Feel free to answer the door,’ he said, trying to hide his eagerness, ‘I don’t mind.’ She said nothing, and then when the bell sounded even more insistently and he fidgeted with anxiety, she said, ‘Please keep still, Mr Mortimer. I never interrupt a sitting. The caller will call again,’ and he felt reprimanded.

On his way out of the house that day, he found a parcel sitting outside the door at the bottom of her staircase. It was tucked behind a tub of geraniums on the step, safe from all except the
most
prying eyes, and the postman, or delivery man, had put a note through the letter-box, saying where it was and what time he’d called. Paul hesitated a moment and then picked up the parcel – quite light, quite small, though just too big to go through the letter-box – and went back up the stairs. He climbed them as quietly as he could, hoping to surprise Lucasta Jenkinson, simply to see how she would react when caught unawares. But he didn’t catch her unawares. She was waiting for him outside the front door of her flat. ‘How kind,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Hope it’s something interesting,’ he said, feeling slightly foolish, because she must have seen him coming up almost on tiptoe. ‘The stamps look interesting, anyway,’ he added, just for something to say. She smiled, said goodbye again, and went into her flat, closing the door gently. He left thinking how much he disliked aloof, remote, self-contained women who couldn’t even bring themselves to engage in pleasantries never mind any more meaningful social contact.

There were six sittings before she said anything to him other than good morning, good afternoon, please make yourself comfortable, goodbye, thank you. By then he was playing her at her own game, entering with a nod of greeting – that trumped her good morning – and settling down quickly on the damned chair. On the seventh, and penultimate occasion, she did not at once take up her own position. Instead, she stood in front of him, quite close, and said, ‘I’m having trouble with your tie.’

‘My tie?’

‘Yes. It looks wrong. There’s something about it.’

‘You mean the pattern, the stripe?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t fit. I wonder, could you remove it?’

‘You mean, not wear a tie?’

‘Yes. Or not that one.’

His hands felt oddly sweaty as he fumbled to take off his tie, letting it drop to the floor.

‘Now undo the button,’ she said. ‘Your top shirt button. Thank you. Much better,’ and she went back to her easel.

What was she playing at? All those sittings, and she had said
nothing
about ties or shirt buttons. Had she only just noticed he was wearing a tie that didn’t ‘fit’? He would look absurd, a formal suit and white shirt without a tie. If he was to be protrayed in an open-necked shirt he wanted it to be a casual shirt, worn with casual trousers. He should have said so, made his objections clear, but he’d meekly obeyed. It felt better, though, not to be wearing a tie and to have the neck of his shirt open. Was she looking at his throat, or at the gap where his chest hair showed, the beginnings of it, at least a hint? Her move had almost been like a sexual advance and yet she was so unsexual, or did he mean asexual, it couldn’t have been that. The words kept repeating themselves in his head – ‘I wonder, could you remove it? … Now undo the button’ – but he was sure that there was no trace of innuendo.

At the end of that particular hour – which felt like an eternity – she actually smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘that was much better, getting rid of the tie. It changed things.’

‘You should have said earlier.’

‘I didn’t know earlier. It just occurred to me what a tie was doing to you.’

‘I always wear a tie at work. I’m used to ties. They don’t
do
anything to me.’ He was irritated by her silly assumptions. But she didn’t defend herself, merely raised her eyebrows and looked amused and he was shocked to realise he would have liked to slap her.

‘One more session, I think?’ he said, calmly enough.

She nodded. ‘Good, thank you, next Tuesday, then. Would you mind if I took a photograph before you go?’

‘Now?’

‘No. At the end, before we finish. It might be useful, before I deliver the portrait, to get details right, an
aide-mémoire
.’

‘Certainly.’

‘Thank you.’

He left her flat in a fury.

*

From the beginning Lucasta had found it hard to conceal her attraction to Paul Mortimer – it had been a shock, to feel what
she
did the moment he walked into her studio. There had been no preparation for the physical sensations he aroused so immediately, the faint tingling in her limbs, the sudden palpitations, the heat spreading through her body. And yet he was not conventionally handsome, no chiselled features or noble brow or lustrous hair. He had about him something of Sam when he came back from the war, a toughness, a hard look, and a weariness in the lines of his face. He had great confidence, too, striding into her flat, arm outstretched, towering over her and meeting her stare with a measured one of his own. His hand, when she took it, was strong, the skin rough, and he gripped her own a little longer than necessary. It had taken all her self-possession to remain cool and polite, and she had hurried to begin the work. Once she had done so, she felt more in control, and able to explain her reaction as the result of having expected a quite different sort of man.

He was a company director, that was all she’d known. The name of the company had meant nothing to her and she hadn’t been curious enough to ask questions. The portrait had been commissioned by his wife, though Lucasta had never met her, for his fiftieth birthday. It had all been fixed up through Charlotte, whose gallery Mrs Mortimer had been taken to by a friend, to look at Lucasta’s work. The money was significant and Lucasta accepted the commission without first meeting the sitter or his wife, though she was surprised this had not been insisted upon. She was asked to ‘capture the essence of the man’, which somehow sounded affected, but she was not so prosperous that she could afford to let this put her off. Once Paul Mortimer came to sit, she saw that she would have no trouble catching his ‘essence’. The suit was boring and she decided quite quickly to ignore it. She’d paint him from the shoulders up, concentrating on his face. But she didn’t tell him this. On the contrary, she encouraged him to believe that his whole posture was important, right down to the way he positioned his feet, and enjoyed watching him try to make himself comfortable on the upright chair. He failed, but his discomfort translated into a determination to endure which gave him the most aggressive expression. This was what they must have
meant
about catching his ‘essence’ – his ‘I will not be beaten’ attitude. Every time she lifted her eyes from the canvas to study him she was overwhelmed by the power blazing out of him – he could hardly contain himself, he might at any moment spring up and shout at her. For a moment her brush trembled in her hand. She found herself clearing her throat repeatedly with the effort of composing herself.

He’d tried to begin a conversation but, from every point of view, she could not afford to have one, and was telling the truth when she said she had to work in silence. But the deeper reason, in this case, was that she might have given too much away. He would attempt to charm her, she could tell, without being overtly charming. Over and over again, throughout the weeks, she reminded herself that she knew nothing about this man, except that he was an immensely successful company director and that he was married, with children. Her attraction to him was purely physical, chemical almost, or that was how she described it to herself – it was a matter of hormones, leaving her mind disengaged. She neither liked nor disliked him, she did not even know him, but was drawn to him in the most superficial of ways. It was always the same for her. The few affairs she had had were due to sexual attraction, and when that was satisfied there was nothing left. Sometimes she thought she ought to get to know a man properly before indulging her own frank desire for him. But it would mean a level of disturbance she could hardly tolerate. And she did not want people to ‘get to know’ her, either. Intimacy, true intimacy, involving minds and hearts and emotions, was abhorrent to her. This, she acknowledged, was so abnormal it was better not to mention it. It hurt people, and she had no wish to offend or pain anyone. It was better to pretend that she was busy, or ill – anything to get out of prolonging such encounters.

Paul Mortimer was only one of several men to whom she had been attracted in the same straightforward way, but he was different. Usually, she could tell at once that the object of her attraction was also attracted to her – all she had to do was give a signal. But in his case she warned herself against it. She also warned
herself
against something else: thinking that
he
was attracted to her. She had spent hours studying him, and saw that he was not. On the contrary, he seemed to regard her with something like disdain, if not actual contempt.

After Paul Mortimer had returned to give her Sam’s parcel (a jade necklace, for her birthday) she had difficulty settling down. She stood at her window, watching him march vigorously along the road, then she turned to examine his portrait: it was good, striking, perhaps the best thing she had ever done, though whether he, or his wife, would like it was another matter. If they didn’t, she would keep it, and refuse to accept a fee. Hours later, as the light faded outside, she prowled through her rooms, unable to sit down, feeling tense and jumpy, and her cat complained loudly, wanting to curl up on her lap. She never went out at this time of evening, never, but suddenly she grabbed her coat and rushed down the stairs and into the road, cutting across to the Heath and almost running towards the ponds. She kept up the pace all the way down the hill, slowing down only when she reached the path between the ponds, pausing to look at the reflections of the houses in the darkening water. More in control, she continued up the hill ahead until she stood on the top, with all London spread out before her, a mass of lights beginning to appear like a rash across all the buildings. Thousands and thousands of people there, behind those lights, within the walls from which they beamed out, and herself alone, outside all of them, and looking down upon them.

What was wrong with her? She felt irritated with herself, angry that she was behaving like a woman with no dignity. Breathing deeply, she tied her scarf tighter round her neck and began the walk home. She met no one. It was almost dark now, though not pitch black, the way nights like this had been when she was a child in Cornwall. Then if there was no moon and the stars were hidden by clouds, the dark had been frighteningly dense. There were cars on East Heath Road providing yet more light, a constant bathing of the trees with the brightness. She felt exhausted, though with what she could not decide. Everything inside her felt disturbed,
agitated
. Once back in her flat, she was calmer, as she always felt whenever she returned. Then, glass of wine in hand, she sat in front of the fire and ate her supper, the cat quiet at her feet. There was hardly enough light to see the attic painting in all its sweetness but tonight it did not soothe her, as it had done so many times when she’d been agitated, but on the contrary, it saddened her. She remembered that as a girl, when first she’d noticed her mother’s picture, it had seemed a peaceful image, the pretty corner of an attic, but also insipid, unexciting, even soporific. But over the years she had come to see it as triumphant, catching a mood of something gained after great effort, and she had found it uplifting. Now she changed her mind again. It was surely a picture of sadness, a gentle wistfulness, the reflection of an aching heart. She couldn’t bear its poignancy. Taking it down, she went and found a piece of clean cloth and wrapped it up. It was ultimately too full of heartbreak and she did not want her heart broken by a painting.