Chapter 7
DISCOVERY
Two weeks later, on a Friday in mid-November, they didn't have sex at all.
Neil hadn't planned it. Neither had Rory.
When Neil arrived at eight, the front door was on the latch.
He let himself in. Rory was in the studio, working on a canvas, not the Neil canvas but a commission piece, and said ‘Give me fifteen minutes’ over his shoulder.
Neil said ‘Fine’ and poured himself wine and sat on the small sofa Rory had recently put in his studio and picked up a book from the nearest tower.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Penguin edition, cracked spine. He opened it at random and started reading.
Fifteen minutes became forty. Rory worked in the studio, the scrape of the palette knife reaching through, the occasional tap of a brush dropped into a jar. Neil read. The flat was warm. Rain steady on the windows. No drama. Just days of it.
And this silence was different. Easier than the corridor kind. Just quiet. Two people in the same space, doing different things, who didn't need to fill the gap between them with speech or touch.
Neil read about Vincent's money. Letters to Theo that were half art theory and half begging. The desperation didn't diminish the work. It was the soil.
He thought about Rory at twenty-two. Batch-cooking bolognese, painting on whatever he could find because canvases cost money and stretchers cost more.
The early work on the website, rough, struggling figures pressed into whatever surface was available.
A man making art from nothing because making art was what his hands did when everything else was falling apart.
At nine, Rory emerged. Late. Cadmium orange on his jaw and a streak of prussian blue across his forehead where he'd pushed his hair back. He dropped onto the other end of the sofa, picked up the wine, drank directly from the bottle.
‘What're you reading?’
‘Van Gogh's letters. To Theo.’
‘Any good?’
‘Desperate. But brilliant. He writes about colour like it's a physical force.’
‘It is a physical force.’ Rory pulled one leg up, arm along the sofa back. ‘Light hits a surface, the surface reflects wavelengths, the wavelengths enter your eye, your brain translates them into experience. Colour is the world touching your nervous system.’
‘You sound like a physics teacher.’
‘I sound like a painter who paid attention in one lecture.’ He took another sip from the bottle. ‘Which letters? The Arles ones?’
‘Earlier. Nuenen. He's still learning. Still failing.’
‘The potato paintings.’
‘The potato paintings are remarkable.’
‘The potato paintings are ugly. Deliberately, brilliantly ugly.
He was painting darkness because darkness was what he knew.
The light came later. When he went south and the sun hit him and he couldn't mix yellows fast enough.’ Rory's head tilted.
A strand of hair had escaped the tie and lay against his cheek, dark against the smear on his cheekbone.
‘I was the same. My early stuff is all bruise.
Blues and blacks. I didn't have warm colours until...’ He stopped.
‘Until?’
‘Until recently.’
A beat. Rain on the windows. The flat close around them.
Neil held his wine and didn't look away. The not-looking-away was new.
They talked for two more hours, sharing the wine bottle.
‘Go on then. Your lot. Keats. Byron. The big romantics. Did suffering make them better?’
‘Keats had tuberculosis. He wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ while coughing blood into a handkerchief. So you could argue the proximity to death sharpened his attention.’
‘Or you could argue that the man was brilliant and the tuberculosis was irrelevant and he’d have written something extraordinary regardless.’
‘You could. But you’d be wrong.’
Rory’s eyebrow went up. ‘I’d be wrong.’
‘The nightingale poem isn’t about a bird. It’s about wanting to dissolve into something beautiful because your body is failing. Take away the failing body and you lose the urgency. The poem needs the cough.’
‘That’s a horrifying position for an English teacher.’
‘It’s an accurate position for an English teacher.’
‘Bollocks,’ Rory said. ‘I paint better when I’m eating and sleeping properly. The starving artist thing is propaganda invented by people who don’t want to pay artists. Caravaggio was a genius and also a murderer, and I don’t see anyone arguing that the murder improved his brushwork.’
‘Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro is directly informed by the moral darkness of his...’
‘Neil. He stabbed a man over a tennis match. That’s not moral darkness. That’s poor sportsmanship.’
Neil laughed. The sound surprised him. He didn’t laugh often, and the register of it caught him off guard, too loud for the flat, too unguarded for him.
Rory noticed. He smiled into his wine and didn’t say anything, which was worse.
The commission came up. A client who wanted ‘something cheerful.’
‘I tried. Mixed yellows. The canvas looked like a dentist’s waiting room.’
‘You can’t force warmth into paint.’
‘You can, actually. Cadmium yellow over a burnt sienna ground. Physically warm. But the painting was still dead.’ He swirled his wine. ‘Because cheerful isn’t a colour. It’s a lie. Joy is a colour. Joy’s got weight. Joy costs something.’
‘What does it cost?’
‘Admitting you’ve got something worth losing.’ He said it to the wine bottle.
Neil recited Heaney from memory. Four lines, quietly, looking at the bookshelf rather than at Rory because looking up would have turned it into a confession.
Rory sat up straighter. ‘Say that again.’
Neil said it again.
‘Christ.’ Rory stared at him. ‘How is writing that good?’
‘Because he meant every word and he chose every word and those are not the same thing.’
‘Meaning and choosing.’
‘Two different skills. Most people can mean. Most people can choose. Doing both. That's the trick. In writing. In painting. In anything worth doing.’
‘You sound like you've thought about this.’
‘I'm an English teacher. Thinking about this is my entire profession.’
‘It's more than that. You care about it. About words. About whether they're right.’ Rory turned to face him, one knee drawn up, elbow on the sofa back. ‘Most people use words like they use cutlery. Pick them up, use them, put them down. You use them like tools. Specific tools for specific jobs.’
‘Everyone should.’
‘Everyone doesn't. That's why most of what's written is rubbish.’
Neil laughed again. Short, startled out of him by the accuracy of the observation and the grin and the wine and the rain and the late hour and he was sitting on a paint-splattered sofa in his socks arguing about art and poetry with Rory. Paint on his face. Bare feet.
He had become it anyway the most important person in his life after Freddie and Gemma.
The laugh changed the air. When Rory heard it, his face changed, the grin softening. Quieter. More private.
At midnight, Rory walked him to the door. They stood in the hallway. The usual moment arrived, the moment where one of them would reach.
Neither reached.
Rory kissed him at the door. Brief. The press of his mouth, the ring clicking against Neil's lower lip. A full stop, not a prelude.
‘See you, Neil.’
‘See you.’
He drove home. The Van Gogh quote in his head. The shape of the evening around him.
The pattern held through November. Fridays. Freddie at Gemma's. Neil at Rory's. The evenings had acquired their own rhythm, sometimes sex, sometimes not. The not-sex evenings grew longer, deeper.
‘I’m making risotto,’ Rory announced.
‘You can’t cook.’
‘I’ve watched a video. The Italian woman said it was simple.’ He produced a bag of rice, mushrooms, an onion, and a block of parmesan with the confidence of a man about to perform surgery he’d learned from YouTube. ‘You do the vegetables. You’re good with detail work.’
Neil diced them with the same precision he applied to lesson plans, every cube uniform, every cut careful. Rory watched him do it.
‘You dice an onion like you alphabetise your bookshelf.’
‘I do alphabetise my bookshelf.’
‘It’s terrifying and attractive in equal measure.’
The rice went in. Rory stirred it with a wooden spoon, phone propped against the backsplash, the Italian woman’s voice coming through the speaker in bursts.
‘She says you have to keep stirring. Constantly. The starch releases.’
‘Are you stirring?’
‘I’m stirring.’
‘You stopped stirring to check your phone.’
‘I stopped stirring for two seconds to verify the ratio.’
Neil leaned over. The rice was already sticking. ‘You need more stock.’
‘I haven’t added the stock yet.’
‘Then it’s burning.’
‘It’s toasting. Toasting is different from burning. The video said...’
‘The video didn’t account for you leaving the spoon in the pan for forty-five seconds while reading about starch.’
Rory scraped the bottom of the pan. A thin brown layer came up. He held it on the spoon and studied it with the focused attention he gave his canvases.
‘That’s not burnt. That’s fond.’
‘You learned the word fond from a cooking video twenty minutes ago and you’re using it against me.’
‘I’m using it accurately. Fond is the caramelised residue that forms...’
‘I know what fond is. Give me the spoon.’
Neil took the spoon. Added the first ladle of stock. The pan hissed. He stirred, slow and even, and the rice loosened and began to move, and the kitchen smelled of onion and white wine and a meal coming back.
Rory leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching Neil stir like he’d engineered this outcome from the beginning.
‘You planned this,’ Neil said. ‘You made risotto knowing you’d abandon it halfway through and I’d finish it.’
‘I made risotto because I wanted to see what your face does when someone makes a mess in front of you. It does a lot, by the way. Your jaw alone performed a three-act play.’
‘My jaw did nothing.’
‘Your jaw clenched when I stopped stirring, relaxed when you took the spoon, and is currently set at what I’d describe as reluctant satisfaction. You’re enjoying yourself and you don’t want to admit it.’