[7] We are not doomed to stay

All right, then. This is the first time since Johnny’s Big Day that I’ve tried this thirty metres across the garden. My first walk. My first time outside since they carried me up here after the new year (how?). The maid has taken Johnny to him, and when she returns and sees me standing at the garden door, she lifts my berber cloak over my shoulders for me to tie from inside. Now I’m working up strength and nerve, wanting a normal thing to start for us both again, staring at the ice that his bootmarks have packed into the snow. How will I dodge those? I’m holding a candle lantern and breathing the winter air to see if I can. I don’t want to enter his studio looking as if the pain dogs have bitten me.

The sun has almost set. Through the window, in the silence of the outer night, I see him on a stool in the room’s centre, by a coal oil lantern on the oak plank floor that throws his shadow at the ceiling, Johnny in his arms trailing a striped blanket and batting at his face with two walnut fists. He has five canvases in works here (six more in his quay studio), surrounding him wherever he looks like fist holes in the world, blinding white. You’d have to step close day after day to notice the spider’s lines on them, the plastic shapes his mental forms are taking. This is why he needs so much light – he draws so faintly on his canvases, colours so pale (until the very end), that he couldn’t see them if he didn’t blast his studio with sunlight from all sides. He has never minded most people in here while he’s working on canvas, but I know that he does the hardest when he’s alone with nothing in his hands except a graphite and tablet.

With me to fuss with and worry about, and being away from where his most familiar tools are, he’s haunted by the thought of having to rush himself in March and April. (It does him good to work more quickly. It also does him good to be distracted for an hour or two. He knows it. I see him getting frustrated with himself some nights, and the next day or two he makes himself work faster and then he reads a book in the evening, original Balzac or Zola, instead of staring at me or his hands.) Days and days with his graphites and charcoals, days after that mixing and testing paints and varnishes, then the colour work. That goes quickly, but he has to start at the right time, when he at last knows and before he can start to forget. He doesn’t churn anything out. He doesn’t plod or grind much either, except sometimes with a background or when it’s graphite on canvas. The way he works, most of the strain on him is up front. Every problem he sets himself has an answer or he wouldn’t have seen it first in his mind, and once it’s there, he knows the solution will be somewhere. The work is never hopeless as long as his choice to do it was honest. If you asked him, ‘Why did you do it that way?,’ he wouldn’t want to tell you, but if he had to tell you (which I don’t ever demand him to do), he would know how to explain. He’s too gifted not to know, when he has to know. If he didn’t know, it would all be an accident.

When I clatter the door, he’s staring at the nearest canvas, slack-faced under parchment skin, so tired it hurts, looking for the moment ten years older than thirty, with Johnny in his vision and nothing else. Then he looks up and smiles at me – the first time I’ve made this trip since Johnny – while I totter to his supply cabinet, middle shelf, to find the brandy and its chalice. He watches me raise the crystal to eye level and pour three fingers and hand it to him so that our fingers just touch. I watch him nod thanks to me over the rim and drain it in one slow pull, then sigh himself awake to me. When I come to him in the evenings it’s always been to release him from the solitude he needed so much that moment when the sun appeared. He’s never had to say the words for how much he needs me for this moment, to unlock the next ones. It used to be a bottle of red or a few lines of Duclos or a long wet hug that he knew he’d come back to, and now it’s Johnny.

[[ Chapter 8 on 24 January ]]