Chapter 17
BARE
Rory hadn’t let him see the painting.
Three weeks of the studio door closed. Always closed.
‘You’re serious,’ Neil said, standing in the hallway.
‘I’m serious.’
‘You’re just not going to let me in.’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ve seen every painting you’ve made in the last six months.’
‘Not this one.’
‘What’s different about this one?’
Rory looked at him. The half-smile absent. Nerves, maybe. Or concentration. Someone working on a canvas that mattered and couldn’t articulate why without showing it.
‘You’ll see it when it’s ready,’ he said. ‘Never before.’
The opening. The Whitmore, the same gallery where Rory’s earlier work had been reviewed, where a magazine in a waiting room somewhere had used the words dark, physical, urgent and Neil had read them without attention and remembered the name.
The gallery had offered Rory a solo show.
Six weeks. Twenty-four canvases. The invitation had arrived in April and Rory had said yes and then spent three months painting with an intensity that made his normal intensity look recreational.
Neil had watched from the sofa. Had heard the sounds through the studio door; brush on canvas, the tap of brushes dropped in jars, the occasional oath when something went wrong.
Had brought coffee to the threshold and left it outside because the threshold was as far as the padlock permitted.
‘It’s called Bare,’ Rory said one evening. Wine. Sofa. His feet in Neil’s lap.
‘The show?’
‘The show and the painting. Same title.’
‘Bare as in…’
‘Bare as in uncovered. Bare as in nothing between the surface and what’s underneath. Bare as in the opposite of what I’ve always painted.’
He looked at the ceiling.
‘I used to paint people turning away. Shoulders. Backs. The face hidden. Because showing the face was too much. Too exposed.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I’ve painted a face.’
Neil’s hand stilled on Rory’s ankle.
The smile arrived. Small. Unsure. ‘I need to show you something.’
The studio door opened. The room received them, oil and turpentine and the deeper, mineral residue of paint worked and reworked over months.
The canvas stood on the easel. Six feet by five. The largest Neil had ever seen from Rory.
The figure was facing forward. No turning, no hiding behind a shoulder or a posture or the comfortable anonymity of a back.
Full face. Eyes open. The face looked out of the canvas with an expression that was terrified and brave and honest, all three simultaneously, held in a look that refused to leave him.
The face was Neil’s.
No photograph. The features softened, the jawline suggested rather than drawn, the eyes rendered in a brown so deep it was nearly black.
But the likeness was undisguised. Set of the brow.
Line of the mouth. The three-millimetre beard kept precise for four years.
The set of the mouth that Neil carried and couldn’t see on himself but that Rory had been studying and kissing away for months and knew better than its owner.
Neil stood in the studio wine going flat, breathing stopped.
‘Neil,’ Rory said. Behind him. ‘If you don’t want it in the show, it doesn’t go in the show.’
The offer hung in the air, made without reservation, the best painting of his career and he’d pull it from the exhibition. For Neil. Without argument.
‘People will know it’s me,’ Neil said.
‘Some will. The art lot won’t care. Someone we know might recognise the jaw. Your... ex-wife definitely will. But nobody’s going to ring the school and announce it.’
‘The programme notes.’
‘Bare. That’s all. I won’t put your name anywhere.’
Neil looked at the painting. The painting looked back.
His own face, seen by someone who loved it. The fear in the eyes was real, Rory hadn’t softened it, hadn’t painted courage without cost. He’d painted a man in the act of arriving. Still frightened. But getting there.
‘Put it in the show,’ Neil said.
‘You’re sure.’
‘I’m sure.’
He meant it. In the studio, wine in hand, Rory behind him.
The opening was a Friday in late April. Seven o’clock. The gallery occupied a converted warehouse south of the river; high ceilings, concrete floors, the industrial architecture that made art look serious and artists look small. Track lighting that turned every surface into a stage.
The same man who dressed in ten minutes on a school morning had spent sixty minutes standing in front of a mirror, changing shirts, changing back, discovering that his good trousers had a paint mark on the left thigh, Rory’s paint, orange, from the studio floor, and deciding to keep it.
Neil wore the dark jumper. The aftershave Gemma had given him. He’d shaved clean. His hair was pushed back. The face in the mirror looked decided.
The drive was short. He parked a street away. Sat in the car for two minutes, grip white on the steering wheel. Different from the first drive to Rory’s flat, the shaking, the circling the block. This was the stillness before a thing he wanted. The pause before something worth marking.
Out of the car. April evening, mild, the first since October, blossom on the pavement, the city scented with river and exhaust and the green vegetable snap of spring.
The gallery entrance was a loading dock converted into a doorway; industrial roller shutter raised, the interior visible from the street.
Light spilling out. People inside, moving, holding glasses.
The hum of conversation that happens when a hundred people gather around something and pretend they’re not looking at each other.
He walked in.
The space was already filling. Art people in studied carelessness.
Tess and Patrick by the bar, Tess in a dress that said I left the pub for this and the champagne had better be worth it, Patrick in a clean shirt that said this is the maximum I will concede to the occasion.
Kieran in a blazer that didn’t quite fit, his girlfriend Carol beside him, both overwhelmed by a room that contained no screens and no food.
The canvases were arranged in sequence around the perimeter. Twenty-four pieces. Large-format, five by four, six by five, the biggest Neil had seen from Rory.
The palette had shifted since the earlier work. Still the bruised blues. The near-blacks he was known for. But warmer. Ochres and ambers bleeding through the dark surfaces. The scrape-back technique revealing layers beneath layers, each surface an archaeology. Neil walked the sequence.
His feet moved without instruction. A set of canvases. There was a pattern he hadn’t seen before. The warmth bleeding through the scrape-back layers was what Rory had taught Year 7 to paint into the mural roots, the colour that lived underneath, revealed by attention.
Here, it was plain.
The first canvas: a figure turned completely away. All shoulder. All back. Posture closed, defended. Paint surface dense and dark, almost black, the gold tones barely visible. The old Rory. The Rory of the Whitmore review: dark, urgent.
Further along: three-quarter profile. Half a face. One eye visible, dark, wary. The palette shifted. Ambers and raw siennas mixing with the blues, the scrape-back revealing golds underneath. The surface thinner, the paint less armoured.
As the figure turned, the layers came away.
At the end, the final canvas. It occupied the far wall alone. Lit from above. Track lights pulling it into a pool of white. The rest of the gallery fell away.
He’d seen it in the studio. Said yes. Prepared himself.
He was not prepared.
In the studio, the painting had been private. Two men and a canvas and the familiar studio air. Here it was public. Lit. Institutional. The face, his face, hung six feet tall on a white wall while fifty strangers moved around the room holding wine and opinions.
The expression Rory had captured, terrified and brave, the eyes open, was not a painting anymore. It was a confession pinned to a wall under lights.
A woman in a red scarf stood in front of it. She studied the canvas, then turned and scanned the room. Her eyes found Neil. Back to the painting. To Neil. The comparison was clinical, unhurried. She tilted her head. Tilted her head. Her face softened into something worse than curiosity. Moved on.
A man with a notebook, the arts supplement, the same one that had reviewed Rory’s earlier work, looked up from the canvas.
His gaze found Neil, held for a beat, then returned to the painting.
He wrote something. Unhurried. His colleague leaned over and read the note.
Glanced at the painting, then at Neil, then back.
Neil stood still. The gallery was performing its function: people were looking at art.
This was the contract. He’d signed it. In the studio, with wine, with Rory behind him, the signature had felt brave.
Here, under track lighting, with strangers cataloguing the distance between the painting’s face and his own, the signature was exposure.
His breath went shallow. His fingers found his shirt cuffs and held.
His body knew before his brain caught up. The hands went first.
‘Neil.’ Rory’s voice. Close. His hand came to the small of Neil’s back, light, the habitual touch of eight months. Neil shifted. Half a centimetre. Away from the hand.
He didn’t decide to do it. Subcortical; the body’s oldest programme, the one that predated Rory, predated the studio, predated the card, went back to Malcolm’s living room and the channel change and the word disgraceful dropped into a weeknight dinner.
The programme that said: when people are watching, close.
Rory’s hand withdrew.
The half-centimetre was the loudest thing in the room.
Rory heard it.
‘The whole sequence. Really impressive work,’ Neil said. He heard his own voice. Level. Controlled. The voice he used at parents’ evenings when a mother asked if her son was gifted and the son had spelled definitely wrong six times in three pages. Polite and empty.