March
Before I wanted to preserve art, I wanted to make it.
From an early age, I enjoyed the sense of freedom contained within a blank sheet of paper.
Like lots of children, for birthdays and Christmases I was given flat, rectangular metal tins of colouring pencils and plastic briefcases filled with felt tips.
There were paints in white trays that arrived looking like hard-boiled sweets, and after they’d been stroked with a wet brush, glistened like they’d been sucked.
At home in Norfolk, on the long, flat beaches, sand was my medium.
Where it met the sea, I scooped it up, wet and runny, and dribbled it out between my fingers into towers.
The dry, soft grains closer to the dunes I sprinkled in neat lines across pebbles and along the length of my father’s hairy legs.
He would describe himself as creatively challenged, but my mother had an artistic streak.
Typically, it manifested itself in the garden, which despite teetering on wild-looking was carefully maintained.
In spring, it burst into life with frothy blue forget-me-nots, primroses in soft shades of pink and cream, and yellow and white narcissi.
In winter, in and among the sombre palette of the evergreen foliage were snowdrops, bright pansies, buttery honeysuckle, climbing clematis.
I think now that it was me and my sense of science that put a stopper in my dream of becoming an artist. When I look back at myself as a seventeen-year-old, I see a curiously neat and ordered girl with poised fingers and a thirst for knowledge.
I wanted to do more than create art ; I wanted to understand it, to take care of it.
Still, I continued to sketch. Pencils and charcoal replaced the rainbow of colours.
The subject matter had changed over time, too.
My father’s leather boots, the laces a tangle.
Half-filled glasses of water, some dashed with viscous whirls of oil.
Noah’s ears. Raindrops wriggling down windowpanes.
Tom with a full snow-white belly. Noah’s eyebrows.
Waves, churning. One thing that had remained a constant source of inspiration was my mother’s hands, her fingers growing crooked with time, the skin loosening its hold, crinkling like tissue paper.
When I look down at my own fingers now, I’m glad to see that a couple of mine curve towards one another.
Inheritance is about the body as well as possessions.
It had been one of the coldest winters on record.
So said the BBC’s new weather presenter, blowing hot air into his palms and rubbing them together, standing in front of a video of a snowy scene.
On my morning run, my own hands were toasty inside a pair of gloves whose finger pads, Noah had told me, rubbing his own palms together with excitement, would work on a touch screen.
He’d given them to me at Christmas, along with a dozen other small gifts, including a hand-tied bundle of pencils and a red diary.
Every year, we agreed, no stockings ; every year, we failed.
We did try, though. Noah’s most recent effort : presenting my presents to me in a plastic Tesco bag.
I had raised an eyebrow, and he had held his hands up and said, What, I don’t see a stocking?
Thankfully I too had been resourceful, and presented mine to him in Tom’s travel crate.
It had rained during the night, then the temperature had dropped.
That morning, as I ran, the towpath was icy, as slippery as an eel.
I ran on the narrow verge, the real grass crunching like fake grass beneath my feet.
My nose was running, and probably pink. Eyes leaking, cold air coaxing out tears with no need to spill.
I continued past King’s Cross to Camden ; at Kentish Town Road, not all that far from Anna and Caleb’s, I turned around.
When I reached the northern fringes of London Fields, I wasn’t quite ready to start my day, so I walked around the block, breathing deeply.
I was enjoying the feeling of beads of sweat trickling down my back when a couple with a pram walked by and the pram started wailing.
Back at the flat, I peeled off my running clothes. I was in the shower when Noah appeared from our bedroom with bird’s-nest hair and bleary eyes.
‘Good run?’ he asked, raising his voice so I could hear him over the chute of water.
‘Slippery run,’ I replied, scrunching my eyes shut as I tipped my head back.
‘God, Cathy, please don’t go disappearing into the canal.’
At least I think that’s what he said. Water and shampoo were muffling my ears.
I pictured a half-submerged bicycle wheel, empty crisp packets and floating plastic wrappers amid the duckweed, a rusty shopping trolley.
Occasionally I would see folk in waders fishing things out during maintenance jobs.
Mud-stained scraps of clothing and chunks of outdated technology.
When I opened my eyes, Noah was stepping into the shower to join me. I reached out my arms and wrapped them around his waist, pulling him towards me.
He’d received a decent advance for his last book – on new perspectives in diplomacy – and we’d celebrated, the adults that we were, by renovating the bathroom.
Or excavating the bathroom : the search for the wooden floorboards we were sure we’d find beneath our milky-tea-coloured carpet wasn’t entirely successful ; we’d settled for white tiles.
Still, here we were. Squared-off sink, walls painted – sceptically, at least on my part – a very pale pink.
Now we had a rain shower big enough for both of us to stand under.
Our morning ritual used to be less sexy, more squeeze.
‘Maybe you should give the towpath a break for the time being.’ Right on cue, he twisted the dial to add more hot water.
I could feel my already red face getting redder.
‘Run around Victoria Park instead?’ he suggested.
‘You’re honestly worried I’m going to slip and fall in?’
‘Well, it would be a shame, wouldn’t it?’ He shook his head at my offering of the shower gel and started massaging my shoulders, one at a time, firmly. ‘I mean, who would I wash with?’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’d find someone.’ I tipped my head back again to rinse my conditioner.
He stopped massaging and slipped his hands down my front and between my legs.
‘You do know I’m going to be late for work?’ I asked, trying not to smile.
‘Well then, what’s a little later.’
I half-heartedly resisted, and then I didn’t.
When we started dating, Noah often referred to my work as ‘restoration’ rather than ‘conservation’.
I would patiently correct him and explain that it wasn’t my job to return an artwork to its exact original state or a particular moment in time – pre-damage, say – but simply to put the brakes on its ageing process.
He would smile and say he’d lucked out, that I could wave my magic wand at him whenever I was ready.
I would smile back and say that, sadly, the deterioration of both artworks and boyfriends is inevitable.
Once, sitting on the sofa, he asked me what kind of interventions I would carry out on him.
I turned towards him and, like a plastic surgeon, traced the features of his face.
Thick, dark eyebrows ; oval eyes with big, brown pupils.
Gently, I brushed the tip of my finger through his eyelashes, naturally curled and fuller than mine.
I ran that same finger across the bridge of his nose and along his lips, pressed together in what I’d come to recognise as his more mischievous smile, then parted as he nipped at me with his teeth.
Next, I held out each of his hands, always a little rough, in need of moisturiser, and traversed the creases running like rivulets along the fronts and backs.
When I was done, I sank back into the sofa. He inspected his hands, then stood up and looked in the mirror. He poked and prodded at his face and told me he didn’t see a difference – he wanted his money back. If I refused, he would write a nasty review on Amazon.
I laughed.
Tripadvisor?
The thing is, I said, if my efforts are invisible, it means I’m doing something right.
He looked unconvinced.
There is one other thing, I said.
What’s that?
I wouldn’t change a thing.
It was time to remove the old and overzealous layer of varnish on the seascape.
I’d already completed the initial clean, eliminating any dirt from the paint film using small cotton swabs dipped in deionised water.
The colours hadn’t changed, but the surface had a fresh sheen to it.
Now that I was beginning to apply the solvents, it was like peeling back a layer of hazy film.
‘Wow, would you look at that?’
Frank had stopped by on his lunch break to check on my progress.
We’d be collaborating for the next five or six months, as long as it took, with my work pausing now and then for him to run scientific tests.
He’d mentioned that he and Douglas were going out the night before, so I searched his face for the tell-tale signs of a hangover. As usual with Frank, there were none.
I’d started with a patch in the lower-left corner of the canvas, where the type of wooden fence erected to stop dunes from ‘walking’ bordered a grassy verge.
I’d followed the fence a little way along, then moved upwards, towards the straggling group of people peering down at the beach from high up on the dunes.
Who knew what they were peering at – a far-off ship, maybe, swelling clouds, empty air?