32. Stoke on Trent, December
STOKE ON TRENT, DECEMBER
THREE MONTHS LATER
Not long after the trial ended, I read an article about those migrating starlings.
It was in an old copy of the National Geographic that I found in the waiting room of my doctors’ surgery.
This summer, for some reason, large numbers of them had started falling out of the sky.
Residents were sweeping up great heaps of dead birds in the Porta Pia neighborhood, an ancient gateway to the city.
At first, they thought the heat was to blame.
But when the experts tested their bodies, they found the starlings to be in good health.
What they had suffered were broken bones, the physical trauma you would associate with collisions.
“We don’t understand what would cause the creatures to suddenly collide with each other, when before they flew in such perfectly choreographed harmony,” a scientist was quoted saying.
“Something has caused panic in the murmuration. It could be an electromagnetic force, it could be another creature, a predator.”
The journalist called it a “complete riddle.”
A resident of Porta Pia described it as a “bloodbath, like something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie.”
When I read the piece, I thought first of Jean and Lawrence, and then myself, too. Predators, the three of us, disturbing the harmony of things.
After my evidence, I returned to Stoke and tried to reestablish some semblance of normal life.
The judgment is to be announced in a matter of weeks, so all I can do is wait.
In the day, work helps to quell the anxiety, but, at night, my mind plays endless reruns of that moment with Jean in the park.
I wonder if I will be forever living through that decision, wavering between the reasons why I withheld that criminalizing recorded evidence, and in whose interests.
It was all for Mary, that’s what I try to remind myself.
I agreed to tell the truth in court, admitting to my part in everything, on the condition Jean left her and the baby in peace.
But I have no idea if Jean has aborted their sessions yet, and it terrifies me that she is still working with Decca and Bea, as well as others.
Ruining more lives, as she did mine. Then, as I acknowledge this, another creeping thought lingers: Was I reluctant to see Jean legally condemned?
Despite everything that has happened, was I still too attached to let her lose?
The idea of Jean, I correct myself. Not the reality. My projection.
Earlier this week, I was working late when an email arrived from Thea. Where in the world was I? How were things? She was curating an exhibition in Rome. Would I consider contributing a piece for her?
My heart soared: the first good news in a very long time.
I rushed to accept, sending photographs of my current project.
When she replied encouragingly, saying that she couldn’t wait to have me back in Rome, I felt like bursting into tears.
Thea never called me blocked , as Jean had.
Accepting me on my own terms, she was the first person who had given me permission—and you do always need permission—to think of myself as an artist. I had ignored her emails at the end of my residency and failed to make anything new for my end-of-term show, so fixated was I with Mary and Jean.
Now here was Thea, giving me a second chance.
That evening, I began searching for places to stay when I visited.
2br apartment in elegant, art-filled palazzo: Centro Storico
Halfway down the listings, there it was: Jean’s old apartment.
My mouth turned dry as I followed the link, navigating straight to images, hypnotized by the most anonymous, inconsequential features of a holiday let that had once meant everything to me.
The posters on the wall were all reprints, the pink bathroom a little moldy now, and the spare bed was tightly made up as if I’d never slept in it.
Back then, it seemed a sanctuary, but now it was just an eerie blank canvas, a rented stage for Jean to strut about on.
Her life, like all her ideas, and the girls who followed, were borrowed from someone else.
Months after I ceased contact, I take comfort in the fact that my ideas are my own now; that I am free to use the ugly things that have happened to me as inspiration.
The project I’ll submit to Thea’s show is a departure from my other stuff, and reflects the coercion I lived under.
The idea came from an old photograph Jean took of me in Rome.
In the image, I am standing at the Porta Portese flea market, carefully holding an old vase.
Something about the tender way I carried that ceramic piece moved me to re-create it in my work.
Experimenting at first, I began to take plaster casts of my hands, blending them carefully onto vases and pots, or other pieces I had thrown.
The results were thrilling. I loved how affectionately my sculpted hands held on to my ceramics.
It felt vital, too, that Jean had taken the original photograph, as if I was somehow shedding her influence.
Winding these casts of my hands around my own work made me feel as if I was giving myself a layer of protection that Jean had never provided.
The certainty that what I loved would be held safely, and not broken.
These pieces are nearing completion when, one freezing afternoon, my studio swings open. Instead of a person, there is a big parcel: rectangular, wrapped in brown paper. A large canvas.
A postcard falls out onto the floor. As I pick it up, my legs weaken.
Printed on the front is an image of an adult woman and a tiny baby: Mary and her new daughter, standing next to a grubby canal boat in a patch of weak sunlight.
She still wears her knitted hairband, but she is grinning with joy.
I almost choke at the hopelessly small size of the infant.
A knot of envy rises as I wonder who took the photograph.
The card reads:
Gussie in the North Light.
You should have had this years ago, I’m sorry.
Merry Christmas, from the two of us!
Tears spring to my eyes. I am seized by excitement at the message, but also fear. That apology, the sense of hope and freedom conveyed by the exclamation mark. I read the card again and again until the words blur and float away because my eyes, and then my whole face, are wet.
I slowly make a cup of tea, as if the canvas is a living entity that I must exert power over.
Finally, I take a breath and unwrap it from the protective sheathing, laying the canvas flat on the surface of my workbench.
Immediately, my vision swims. My only impression is of the background, that dense lilac gray: the color of a summer thundercloud.
I prop the painting on the shelf opposite my windows to see it better. There is a lamp nearby, which I turn on and position toward the canvas. Then I pause. I take a step backward. Then another. I hear myself gasp. My hand moves instinctively to my throat, as if Mary is still painting me.
There is a half-Gothic intensity to the portrait now.
Either Mary has worked it up, or I hadn’t seen it clearly at the time.
Before, I had despised that dubious figure seated in the middle of the canvas, all its milky, pastel tones.
Today, there is something different: an aliveness.
The shy expression that I had found embarrassingly passive when I first saw it at the school actually had an ageless presence.
The dark space between my upper and lower lip is wider than I remember it, as though I am halfway through a word, or even laughing.
My eyes are flecked green gems, almost photographic in likeness.
They follow me as I move to view the painting at different angles, giving the portrait, for all its superficial shyness, an uncanny, unassailable reality.
I sit down at my workbench and rest there with my chin in my hands as I continue to take it in.
What had set me so firmly against Mary’s canvas when I’d first seen it at the school?
Was it all because of Lawrence? Had Mary improved the painting, or was I only just learning to see it?
I’d been furious at the portrayal, but it would always have been wrong; nothing could have reflected the chaos on the other side of my appearance.
When I think of everything that happened, I realize that none of us were seeing each other properly.
All we perceived were outlines from which we derived stories, competing narratives: contradictory, overlapping, very few of them objectively true.
Anna had argued for a perfectly happy daughter in Mary, while Jean summoned a vulnerable victim of her mother’s fame.
I saw my soulmate in Mary, my sexual other, my socialite savior. She only saw me as a friend.
I wonder if Mary’s card means we can go back to that.
After the judgment is released—sometime after Christmas, they think—I can approach her, gently, and see if she wants to talk.
Perhaps I can meet the baby, even help Mary out with her.
I imagine this with a smile as I go over to my studio window.
Outside, you can see the moorlands, which span northeast from here; bright-green ground that stretches up towards the fringes of the Pennines.
I rest my head against the glass; press my nose against my reflection.
Then I reach up to the window, pull it open, and let the cool air enter.
I turn my face towards the gray, flat light—north light—and try to breathe it all in.