Poppyland (11 page)

So now I've learned that it is important that I have a routine, even though it exists not to be adhered to. It begins with the walk to the studio, calling in on the Spanish bakery for a croissant half a block away. I really like the wink the proprietor Jaime unfailingly
throws my way, no matter how crowded his shop is, or how loud the hiss of the milk steamer is. It's a moment of connection that I create in my day. Why is that such a big deal? It is paradoxical that the pleasure of being alone to think and do the thing I want and need to do more than anything else is also the part of my work that I find most difficult. No one talks much about loneliness in New York. Or their feelings, unless they have worked them into something malleable and acceptable with the help of an Upper East Side shrink.

Three years ago, my sister Lucy talked about the clanging sense of loneliness she experienced when Mac went back to work after their first baby was born.

‘It was terrifying, Grace. When Mac left every morning, I heard the door shut, then looked at my house with everything I had longed and hoped for in it. I looked at my lovely baby, and then, suddenly, life was terrifying. In seconds I was climbing the walls. Actually, I started painting them. I needed an activity to stop the rising panic.'

Lucy had laughed, making a funny story, but there was fear in her eyes. We both remembered Mum's unhappiness, the way she crawled into our room when we were tiny, the way she cried when Dad left, and then the darkness that the drink brought when she met Adrian. What did she need? I don't know if she even knew herself.

‘It is not our littleness we fear, it is our greatness.'
These words are engraved on Mum's headstone. At first I did
not understand them and felt angry that they had been chosen without anyone consulting me. Adrian had suggested them, and Lucy had agreed, and I did nothing when the fax came to me in New York asking if I could think of anything else. I couldn't. I was frozen. Even so, I felt a stinging sense of exclusion. The headstone was erected six months after Mum died, so I didn't see it until another eighteen months had passed, when I came back to England to see Lucy's baby. Lucy was different, she was pinkly triumphant and seduced by motherhood to a more sensual and gentle version of herself. I held tiny Bella in my arms, and when I kissed her head, the skin was softer than a peach.

‘Look what you've made, Luce, she's beautiful.' I had never imagined that a baby could be so moving, or that Lucy, my sister, could create another being. And here she was, revealing new levels of competence, being a mother. Everything about her was radiant as she fed the baby; her voice was a soft coo, her gestures were all encompassing and flowing. Mac made us supper, and we ate in the kitchen with the baby in a basket at the end of the table.

‘It's risotto,' he said cheerfully, adding, ‘it's the only thing I can cook apart from bacon sandwiches. My Italian grandmother taught me, so Lucy's getting used to it on a daily basis. Aren't you, babe?'

He kissed the top of her head, but I was glad for her. It was way out of my league. The house was full of flowers and their scent combined with the sunlit smell of baby talcum powder, and an ambrosial loveliness emanated. It was delicious to be near to, and it
felt as though it belonged to Lucy and she had earned it with all her sense and carefulness as a child.

Is happiness earned? It's definitely hard won. I saw Lucy with Mac and their baby, and I could see that I had nowhere near experienced the level of happiness she had. The birth of Bella was the moment I decided that I could have it too, and that I would.

Some things might have to change, though. At this point I was twenty-nine, and living in New York with Jerome. We didn't eat risotto, we barely ate a single carbohydrate, in fact. I don't know if I liked my life then, I just lived it. We went to a lot of parties. I got into my role as the artist girlfriend when they were Jerome's work parties. It was a relief not to be me, just to be a cipher. The artist girlfriend is a good mask, easily worn. With my friends, of course, it was different, and no one expected anything of me, but in the art world I felt the weight of expectation and I was convinced I could not live up to it. There is such an element of the Emperor's New Clothes in making a reputation and it has nothing to do with the work or the person. If Stephan from the rubber dress days hadn't turned up working for my gallery, I would have sunk without trace. Instead, I had collectors and an agent and a permanent feeling of fraudulence. How could anyone take me seriously?

I drove alone to Norfolk to visit Mum's grave the day before I flew back to New York. I would have liked to go with Lucy, but there was no way she could move
with her newborn and, in a way, to go alone was better. March mist and rain clouds gathered as I approached the coast and the sea was a mess, blurred and hissing with churning waves, blue-grey like the gulls that wheeled above it. The wind spat raindrops in my face when I got out of the car and I leaned into it, hair whipping my face, my coat flailing as I inched through the grassy mounds and marble-edged squares of gravel to the windswept corner where Mum was buried. It was the only new grave in this part of the churchyard, where the tombs were mossy and the writing on headstones hard to make out, and it looked as though it had been brought in as a prop. No flowers lay on any of the graves save hers, just a few empty containers lolling like the remnants of a forgotten picnic in the long grass.

Hands deep in my pockets, I glared at the words on Mum's headstone. I had no idea what would be right, only that this was wrong. A part of me could stand back and know that in the bigger scheme of things it didn't matter a bit, but that thought only whipped the impotence into a bigger rage. What would have been right? What I knew, with aching clarity, was that nothing could be right when your mother dies of drink before she is sixty. I stared at the gold lettering in the flecked marble, my arms folded in front of me, rigid with pointless disapproval. The stone itself looked like a slice through a tin of jellied dog food, gleaming salami pink among the wrecked older stones at sea on the misshapen graves. Who ordered it? I had not known I had so many views on tombstone decor, or
that it could matter to me so much. I had not really known that anything to do with Mum could matter to me any more. In a way I was glad. Not feeling anything had been so much worse. I sat on the grass and cried for Mum and the tears felt cleansing and good. There was nothing left to do now but learn to accept, and suddenly it felt possible. Back in the car, changing gear with gusto to speed my departure, I turned up the radio as piano music tumbled out, and I cried for all the losses and even more for the need to move on from them.

Poor Mum, I could suddenly see her greatness, it tumbled into my consciousness like sunbeams from a storm cloud. She kept a roof over our heads, although admittedly there was the time when it almost caved in thanks to that tree, but we survived. She loved us even though she hid behind Adrian and alcohol until we could hardly see her at all any more. But in the distance between us and Mum, Lucy and I became so very close and stayed that way. It is poignant now to think of her, living alone, though Adrian was never far away, and separated from her daughters. In her silent sadness, she missed out on seeing the greatness in herself or the joy in having us.

Returning to Lucy's small house in London I felt my spirits lift as I approached and it was painful to think that in the morning I spent with Lucy and baby Bella, more love and happiness flowed through her house than Mum had in all the life I remember with her. If I could slip through a shaft in time to talk to Mum, she has been dead for five years, I could tell her
I love her now. But it still isn't easy. My adrenaline is pulsing, with memories and the feelings they bring up, so the prospect of a holiday in Norfolk, returning to the place at the heart of my childhood, even with Lucy and Mac, isn't instantly appealing. I don't want to think about it now, I want to lose myself in work instead. I stand back from the canvas. Sometimes this is not the ordeal I imagine it will be. Sometimes it is a pleasant surprise to find that the painting is more coherent than I am. At best, a painting can illuminate a diaphanous thought, revealing it to be more lapidary than it seems, with roots into the past and wings to take it into the world and the future. Sometimes the thought is a new idea, or a belief, and sometimes it is just a fake, a mock-up that will not withstand illumination.

I often feel uneasy approaching something I have made. I never know what to make of it, and sometimes the work emanates a sense of having always been here, and it freaks me out that it is so permanent when I am not. Not every piece evokes this. More often than not there is a frustrating distance between my perception of what I am doing and what comes off the canvas in two-dimensional colour. Sometimes, though, if I keep going, allowing myself to observe whatever it is that is coming next, transformation can occur. The trepidation with which I come up against my work for the first time every day is not so much based on experience as the damping down of expectation – it would be too disappointing to come to it hoping to change the world every day. Better to
believe anything might happen, and in that find a small glimmer of possibility or at least a dab of paint.

Later, at Jerome's apartment, I peel prawns for supper and try to suppress resentment. It's not aimed at Jerome especially, and yet it is. He is not the love of my life, but that is not a reason to be angry with him. He is giving me a home and he loves me. My part of the deal is not hard, I just have to keep things on an even keel. So why do I feel suffocated? His key in the door makes me jump. Here he is, right in the middle of my thoughts, and I haven't got them in order yet. Jerome is big and quiet like a panther when he lets himself into the apartment and puts his briefcase down in the living room, shedding his coat, letting it fall on to the sofa, walking around it, taking his tie off all without turning on the lights. Coming towards me in the small brightly lit kitchen his focus is scorching, his eyes intent on my face. My cheeks burn where I am caught by his gaze. We look at one another and there is welling excitement; the resentment inside me flares into something else, and I no longer feel invaded. Instead, I catch my breath with the thrill of being pursued. Neither of us speaks but the music has a bass line beating like my heart. I wipe my hands on my thighs and turn away from him. Pulling undone the strings of the apron I have tied over my jeans, I move towards the window to hang it on the back of a chair. Jerome blocks my way. Pinning me against the worktop he stands with one arm either side of me. It's a game I can either resist or surrender to and my body is already playing with his, so resisting is only another
part of it. My back arches, and to stay standing upright with him this close to me I wrap my arms around his neck. He looks at me, his eyes flicking back and forth from my mouth to the buttons of my shirt. He doesn't say anything, I can hear blood drumming in my head, my breath a gasp in the silent kitchen, a song on a radio somewhere else. Still not touching me with his hands, Jerome bends his head and kisses me. I want to be turned on by him too, and I kiss him back. His tongue in my mouth is hot, he pushes one leg between mine, I am all up against him now, he presses against me right the way up my stomach and, through his shirt, I can feel his heart beating against me and the heat of his skin and the rise and fall of his breath. He pulls his body away and his fingers pull the ribbon fastening my top and it falls open. He unbuttons my jeans, pushing down the zip as he slides his hand down my stomach under my knickers. Still in silence, burning more and more electric, he strokes me between my legs. I feel liquid and my back arches more. He stops kissing my mouth and runs his tongue down my neck to my breast. He groans, or maybe it's me, as he undoes the hook of my bra, stroking me softly though the thin fabric of my shirt. All my nerve endings flare and yearn, I lean on to Jerome from the counter top, sitting astride his thigh with his fingers deep inside me, his tongue circling my nipple, and I am melting. Melting. My fingers yank his belt buckle undone and I am so intent on him pushing down his clothes fast and urgent and he turns me around to lean over the table. He whispers, his mouth against my ear.

‘I've been thinking about fucking you. About touching your skin, your scent in your hair, your mouth, all of you. I wanted you all the time you were away.'

And he tugs my head back, pulling on my hair and my breath comes faster, harder and I gasp and swallow and in my body a pulse hits the base of my spine and radiates through me and another and another. And we move apart so I can turn around and I am lying on the table, my legs are wrapped around him and he is in me so deep and it's hot from the middle of me, intense wave following wave because he keeps moving and everything is electric, building up as we fuck, and the waves come together and we are both panting and breathless on the kitchen table. I open my eyes, smiling.

Jerome pulls his clothes back on immediately, not even looking at me, and getting out his wallet he flicks a photograph across to me. It's a coffee maker cut out of a magazine.

‘What's this for?'

‘I couldn't give up on you and your ancient
bouillardière
, so I ordered you an espresso machine and it'll be delivered tomorrow. Look on it as a love token for Valentine's Day if you can.'

‘Enchanting,' I snap and I am angry. All the loveliness of sex has rushed away like sand in an egg timer and, disliking myself enough to scream, I do the only other thing I can and grab a sharp knife. Instead of acting like a crazy woman, which is incredibly tempting, I begin slicing mushrooms in a fast rhythm, my
back turned to him, deliberately not doing up my top or putting on any other clothes over my knickers. It is all completely wasted on Jerome, because he has gone through to find his jacket in the next room, following the shrill command of his telephone.