1
“Tolstoy was an idiot.”
This is how he always begins. Then, when somebody responds, laughing or demurring, Ray will say: “All that crap about happy families. It’s the unhappy families who’re alike. Uptight, cold … ugh.” He’ll gesture merrily at the havoc: books everywhere, wizened tangerines and cold coffee, heating on full. “Poor bloke had never met us lot. We’re famously happy, aren’t we. Aren’t we? And totally unique.”
“I’m not actually sure he m—”
“And no, before you ask, I haven’t read whatever the book is, Crime and Bloody Punishment.”
This weekend is his chance to prove that, despite recent troubles, the Hanrahans are still enviable; with Ray Hanrahan, like a fiery prophet, above them all. Tomorrow will be the private view for Ray’s first solo show since the mid-nineties; a miracle, given his pain and suffering, the medication-induced fog, and, whisper it, the recent critical attention for Lucia, his wife. They’re having a celebratory dinner tonight; the usual relaxed surfeit but even his brothers, even his tricky younger daughter Jess, who abandoned him, will be there. On Saturday morning, Ray and his other, devotedly loyal daughter, Leah, will finish the preparations and then, in the evening, the show will finally open. If his guests have any sense, paintings will be bought, Ray’s unfairly occluded career will resume, and the Hanrahans’ glory days will begin.
* * *
Please, she is thinking. Let it be bad news.
Lucia Hanrahan, the artist’s wife, is lying on the concrete floor of her own studio, listening to the telephone ring. Her strong forearms are terracotta-red; stone-chips and clay-clots press into her back. She is trying to be calm, to ready herself for an entire weekend of alert self-containment, of giving nothing away: two nights, almost two full days, of solid dishonesty. But faking it, she has recently discovered, is easier than one might think. She’s a much better liar than anybody guesses; she’s been doing it for decades.
With appalling timing, Lucia has come back to life. The thought of why makes her throat swell, her knuckles ache. Heartache is coming, it is already here. She is beside herself, whatever that means.
She needs to focus on keeping tonight’s plans straight, not obsess about whether a tiny meeting, even ten minutes, could be crowbarred in.
When will the ringing stop? It’s the landline, which can only mean Marie-Claude at the gallery. No one else uses it. It should be exciting.
Lucia is not without ambition; this used to be her only secret. Protecting Ray from this, keeping him confident, unfurious, has been her life’s work; he’s not above estimating how successful her day has been from the plaster-dust under her nails. A phone call from the gallery will only bring upset, because she’ll have to tell him all about it. He too was represented by a gallery, once.
He tends his grudge like a sacred lamp. He’d been spotted by Dolly Chastin at art school; was, for a time, one of Chastin’s stars. He claims that the postcard sales from his big success at the RA Summer Show, Screw (1971), funded their St. John’s Wood renovations.
Ray thinks he introduced Lucia to Dolly Chastin. In fact, Dolly’s wooing of Lucia herself began earlier than he knows, in 1977 after she’d won the Hooper Prize. Dolly took her to a bar. Lucia was living largely on dry cereal and Dolly didn’t buy her dinner; Lucia got drunk quickly, kept slipping off her stool. She explained about her name, that her mother, Carmel Brophy, three years married, deliverer already of over a hundred other women’s babies, had gone to the Vatican to pray for fertility and a lovely nun called Lucia, “but with a ‘ch,’” had shared a bag of apricots on the steps. Soon, lo! Carmel was with child.
“She called me Lu-seea, though. Never explained why.” Dolly didn’t praise her work, not once, but she pronounced her name correctly. Then she sent a note: I’m fucked if I’m going to let anyone else take you on.
Lucia did not respond. How could she have? She had already found her calling: Ray, her teacher and Dolly’s client, needed her. She was devotedly dealing with all his letters, cleaning his brushes and mixing his colors, filling his sparky brain with ideas, reassuring and encouraging: the perfect assistant, honored to be elected to serve the genius. He was, amazingly, torn with self-doubt and suffering, needing constantly to be buoyed up. He hated dealing with collectors, so she wooed them for him; making him great was their joint project. Whenever the reverberation of a new idea, the tuning-fork thrill, began in her chest, she’d squash it, loyally. His career came first. Everyone fancied him, and he had his pick; he was posher, cleverer, better, and he allowed her, Lucia Brophy, to choose his blues and browns. Of course she was wildly in love. And she had Patrick already, pee-soaked, delicious, fatherless; soon her other two babies. Somebody had to take care of them, and she wanted to, sort of, and every moment she could snatch when they weren’t staggering into washing-up tubs of acrylic, or wailing about biscuits, was required by Ray.
And he did encourage her enormously; she must not forget that, she thinks now, tense for the phone to ring again. It’s getting dark; he’ll be upset that she isn’t home, all systems go for the dinner. But she doesn’t move homeward.
“But why don’t you paint a bit when you can?” he’d say. “My golden girl, you should.” In the long years before all three children were reliably in school, Leah already Ray’s little twin, Jess a roaring toddler, Patrick still holding her knees, it was beyond her. The work, in her head, was much too big to squeeze between forgotten chapter books, opticians, chicken pox, three meals for five people, scrubbing the bath; not a little scribble at the kitchen table but huge creaking joists and tautness and howling space. She’d feast on the smooth curves of her children’s cheeks and temples, the minuscule quivering of a lower lip, wondering: am I awake but unconscious, or conscious but not awake? Like a good mother, she’d stroke and inhale them, whispering: “You are entirely beautiful. I love you so much. I will stare at you all night.”
But her thoughts would drift: to art, to her dream studio, a big plywood mess far from anywhere, to child problems and the current Ray crisis. He hadn’t yet decided he wanted yet another baby; once that happened, there was upset every time a buggy passed.
So she gave up completely, not even a sketch for months. Then Ray made an announcement: when the storeroom beside his studio at the Angharad Bevin Community Center became free, he’d persuaded the landlord to let it to Lucia, to store her stuff.
She’d press against the cold whitewashed wall between them, breathing cottage-pie steam from the Pensioners’ Club, the dampness from the cemetery trees close by, in, out, and try to sense how his own painting was going. She’d think: I’m so lucky. Now I have a room, I could work in here forever.
No one could say that Ray didn’t help her, wasn’t loving and supportive at the start. He’d explain, kindly, that she had much to learn about the World of Art. It was just that by the time he began to regret it, it was too late.
His conviction grew that no couple can succeed in the same world; one—Lucia, obviously—must step back. He insists that, had she been more grateful, more respectful of his seniority, they could both have stayed at Chastin’s. The truth is that Dolly tolerated his delays, the increasing opacity and repetitiveness of his work (“why should I have to explain it?”), stood by him. Then, at the private viewing for the Hayward’s Unbound, Ray was so pissed, ranting about sidelining and neophilia that, despite Lucia’s increasingly desperate explanations of the power of his vision, Chastin’s quietly dropped him.
Lucia had a small piece in that show: Bloody Perseus. “I had to tell her who Perseus was!” he says. “Didn’t have a clue!” She can’t think of it without sweating; his shouting, her pride derailed.
Then Dolly died, launching both Lucia and Ray into the backwaters. Eighteen years later, the unheard-of Marie-Claude rocked up. Obviously, Lucia has tried to persuade her to take Ray on too.
Lucia used to visualize a future point when everything would be easy. Ray says she’s a shark, a ligger, a user, yet she loves him, has loved him so entirely. She always expects him to say he’s met someone else.
If Marie-Claude did take on Ray, Lucia would surrender, if necessary. Oh, even that word: surrender.
Is this what it’s like to be a man?
2
The phone has stopped. Lucia, still on her back, breathes through her nostrils: linseed, cold clay, solder. She keeps her head still, moves only her eyes in the frame of her skull to see the mess that used to excite her: wire everywhere, curled on hooks, thick with beeswax. There are nails, the rustier the better, in coffee and mustard tins lined up against the narrow window, so cluttered with cannibalized maquettes that it barely sheds light, when daylight—where it strikes, what it changes—is the point. Balsa and hazel poking out of a pub fire-bucket; bamboos in a Laphroaig canister; deconstructed beach mats and Venetian blinds continually crashing to the ground; matchboxes by the score. Lined pebbles and sea urchin fossils, for holding up to see their angles in sunlight; knuckly plane-tree twigs, bones and cones. Cheap teabags, caustic soda, pans full of solidified wax, crunchy lung-destroying nubs of florists’ foam, as much plywood as she can fit in; the single hotplate, stolen in 1974 when she was young and ferocious and so, so hungry.
No wonder she can’t start anything new. She needs to earn, not stare out of the window imagining what, if she could coax a person here, silently, breathing quickly, they could do to each other.
Rain bursts against the window. Fool. You should be working.
Usually fear is the poke she needs. She is fifty-four, almost dead, and has wasted her life faffing, fretting, obsessively wondering what, say, a huge commission could do for her. What it would do to her marriage. Her current piece, another group but more birdy, more arrowy, which she wants to call And Then They Came but Ray will say she’s straining for profundity, remains soggy and unrecoverable. She can only think of him, her husband; how much he’ll hate it, if it’s good.
So instead she dreams of filthy acts against blond-oak cupboards, in an office above Westminster Tube station. She can’t leave her phone alone. Her mind has gone beyond the reach of caffeine. And, like a spider, flinging silken threads over the chasm of debt, she’s also trying to think of something big, buyable, but ideally mediocre, to keep them all afloat. Her kiln failed again this morning: its lying thermostat and dodgy door humiliating, at this stage in her career. Tina Erzinger keeps banging on about her magnificent new Sorensen Deluxe CZ200, but Tina can work as she wants: no children, no husband, only pure dedication to her art.
Artists need wives; everyone tells Ray this, or no ties at all. She thinks of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, selfishly rootless, or that gorgeous bastard Modigliani, sleeping in his studio, mallet beside his humble cot so he could work upon waking. Other artist heroes—Lee, Isa—knew that women with children cannot do this. Long grainy nights of colic and nappies after the bedlam of art school, sinking stunned onto the floor bundled in blankets, sleep broken by nightmares, wet sheets or, when Patrick became free range, her own terror. It wasn’t drugs; he was even scared of Calpol. He’d say he was out with his mates, her silent boy: really? And, when he would talk, or at least endure her chat, her carefully light arm, there was always Ray, furious that she was claiming him for her own.
She should stop worrying about Patrick and hurry home before the phone rings again.
But Lucia’s children are in trouble. She has to bribe her adult son with all-day breakfasts to assess his mental state, as if coaxing a deer. Her elder daughter, Leah, who hates her, barely leaves the house; the younger, Jess, barely comes home. The fluffy heads she used to press her mouth to on the bus, who’d trot around galleries while they played “Art or Fart?,” are lost. Yet she still can’t leave them for long, or whatever careful tranquility has built up will start to crack. And the worry, the ache, follows her here.
She thinks of peers, competitors, their children launched, leaving them to months of solitude and focus. She’s twenty years behind, has wasted so much time, lost so many ideas.
The phone has fallen quiet. She watches her chest rise, and her mind drifts away from perpetual worry to other skin, other breath. Instant, raging desire: her hands burn with it, her heart stings. She’d never before realized that lust makes one’s body hurt.
Stop it, she thinks. Not that.
But by now she is lost in the second night they kissed, absurdly recent, when they’d been saying goodbye by the Tube and she’d whispered: “What happens if we fall in love?”
“Then we fall in love.”
And so she’d walked into disaster.
3
Jess is cutting it fine.
She’s told her family again and again she’ll be on the first possible train south after Friday lessons, yet everyone’s still outraged. Her elder sister, Leah, refuses to believe she can’t leave earlier; her father takes it personally, particularly because Martyn, her boyfriend, asked the Head for the afternoon off, so he could be on the twelve o’clock sharp.
Martyn’s been pressing her to take the same train: five and a half solid hours of chat about their shared colleagues, their life.
“You know it’s History Club,” she said. “I can’t let them down.”
“What about Ray, though? He’ll be so delighted, why not spend more time with him?”
She stared at Martyn: his amazing unawareness. “I’ll be on the four o’clock, I’ll race there from the station. It’s fine.”
“You don’t even seem excited.”
“I … I’m just nervous,” she said. “It’s complicated. Don’t forget Dad hasn’t done this, shown his work, for most of my life.”
“So?”
Copyright © 2022 by Charlotte Mendelson
