Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
Beau was standing just inside his father’s studio, holding tight to the door handle to keep himself upright.
Grief had just done that sucker-punch thing to him again. As much as the impact of seeing everything inside, just as his dad had left it, there was the unmistakable smell: a combination of oil paint and turps and paper and spray glue, with a hint of coffee and even the powerfully spicy aftershave Matt had worn. Or was he imagining that?
As he looked around the space, he could see why his mother wanted to put off packing it up. She’d been uncharacteristically short with him when he’d suggested they should get on with it. There was just so much of it. Plus she’d said Matt’s gallerist and Goldsmiths wanted to curate it all. But he thought the overwhelming sense of Matt’s presence must be part of it too. It would be too much for her.
His poor mum. It was horrible seeing her so stressed. She was normally the rock of the family, calm and organised, keeping everything going, but Beau could see how she was struggling. He did his best, and Rey was a great friend, but there was only so much they could do. At least Jack had come home for a couple of weeks to help her unpack in the new house.
Two of his uncles were there too, which was great. He fished his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through to find some pics Jack had sent him of them all eating fish and chips and drinking wine on the beach in the early evening. There she was, sitting between Thomas and Sebastian, each of them with a protective arm around her, looking caring. She was smiling, but he could still see it in her eyes. That haunted look.
He couldn’t bear it. And that was exactly why he was in his father’s studio, to have a look around in case there was anything lurking there that could hurt her even more.
Beau sighed deeply and walked into the middle of the space, taking it all in. He hadn’t actually been there very often. Although Matt always had multiple projects on the go that everyone had to know about, he’d been very private about this work space. He’d never had assistants and didn’t really like anyone going there, except for the models he sometimes used.
Beau’s eye fell on the chaise longue on the far side of the room, stuffing coming out of the seat, random paint splodges on the velvet. It had always been there, but now it took on a new and unwelcome significance. Was that why Matt had always been so cagey about his precious studio? He’d made claims for it as a holy shrine of creativity, a fragile ecosystem conducive to his work – but was it really his secret knocking shop?
Beau shuddered at the thought, because it reminded him what he was there for. To snoop. He didn’t have anything to go on apart from what his father had told him that last time at the Red Lion, the woman at the wake wearing Matt’s jacket – and the weird thing she’d said to Rey. But as much as Beau kept telling himself he was probably imagining the whole thing, he couldn’t unhear those words: ‘I’ve met someone.’ That had been presented as a fact.
So he needed to find out what it was all about.
After tilting his neck from side to side a couple of times to ease the tension, he went over to the desk area, which was scattered with pieces of paper. There was a coffee cup on it, dregs still inside it. Beau closed his eyes and touched it lightly with his fingers, looking for connection. There was nothing. He felt stupid for even hoping and that gave him a push to keep going.
He sifted through the papers, finding pages torn from magazines, a council tax bill and a bank statement, which he didn’t look at. He might be secretly poking around in his late father’s stuff, in a space he wasn’t supposed to be in, but he wasn’t that low.
The desk was made out of an old door resting on two metal filing cabinets. Beau pulled open a drawer and was surprised to find it carefully organised with labelled folders arranged alphabetically: America ; Angels ; Artists ; Brass Bands ; Bullets ; Cakes ; Corduroy ; Dogs . He pulled out the Dogs folder and it was full of torn-out pages from magazines with photographs of dogs on them. Eagles , Eggs , Eccentrics were the same deal.
So Matt had built up his own visual reference library, with physical pictures, not the Google searches Beau used when he wanted some inspiration. When they did clear the space out, he would ask his mum if he could keep this archive. It was the best of his dad, this kind of thing.
He tried L for Lover , M for Mistress and W for Woman , but there was nothing. He opened the other three drawers and it was all the same: carefully filed pictures. What an obsessive man his father had been.
With that area exhausted of possibilities, Beau looked round the space and headed over to the shelves that lined the far wall. There were lots of art books and magazines and the kind of random objects Matt liked to have around. A troll doll with bright green hair. A real Campbell’s tomato soup tin, like the one immortalised by Andy Warhol. An amateur-looking ship in an old milk bottle, the masts made from cocktail sticks. A pottery pig that Beau had made at junior school.
He flicked through the canvases stacked against the walls, so many of them, at different stages, all interesting, but nothing that helped his search. Would these all go to some kind of hideous auction now?
He was beginning to think he couldn’t stand to be in there much longer and it was probably all a big waste of time anyway, when he noticed that the bottom shelves of the bookcases were stacked with black hardback sketchbooks of various sizes. There were loads of them, which wasn’t surprising, because Matt always had one on him.
Pulling out a few and flicking through the pages, Beau could see there wasn’t any system of use with the sketchbooks. All the drawings were dated and they could skip years from page to page within one book. It seemed like his father must have just picked up whichever one took his fancy on a particular day.
Another classic Matt-ism , thought Beau. What a great way to torture anyone who might want to do a study of his work, which they probably would.
He pulled out one of the smaller books, turning the pages and stopping suddenly when he saw a sketch that was clearly of him. Blowing out birthday candles on a cake. Six of them.
My Beau, my own boy was written next to it in Matt’s unmistakable spiky handwriting.
Beau slumped onto the floor. He remembered the party and the cake, a pirate ship, which Sophie had made, of course. He had no memory of Matt sketching; he’d been too excited about having his friends there, the games, the presents, the food. And all the time his father had been drawing him, with love.
He let the book drop. What was he doing poking around in his father’s private stuff? Matt might be dead and gone, but he still had to allow him some respect. Yes, he’d said something very disturbing when they’d last spent time together, but was that justification for Beau to go ferreting around like some kind of amateur detective?
Any hanky-panky Matt might have been up to had been abruptly interrupted by his death, so why go looking for it? Sophie had suffered a terrible loss – but been spared another. He should just leave it all well alone.
Beau stood up. It was time to go. This had been a mistake.
But when he picked up the sketchbook again to put it back on the shelf, it fell open on the last page. There was a beautiful pen-and-ink drawing of a naked woman who seemed to be asleep. She was pregnant.
His first thought was it must be his mother, but it came after drawings of him and Jack, so it wasn’t her pregnant with them – and the face just wasn’t Sophie’s. Matt had drawn her so many times, it had almost become a signature the way he perfectly captured her face in just a few lines.
Although this was very loosely sketched, it was clearly a different woman. She was pregnant and naked, lying among tangled sheets. It didn’t look like a drawing of an artist’s model – there was a deep intimacy in the composition.
There were words on the sketch too. My girl cooking .
It didn’t make any sense at first, but then Beau suddenly felt slightly sick. Was this so-called ‘girl’, in the context, ‘cooking’ a baby?
Did he have a half-brother or -sister somewhere?