Rory didn't pause. ‘Then make sure he's got decent brushes at yours. The school ones are rubbish.’
‘Right,’ Neil said. Notepad closed. ‘Enough for a proposal.’
‘Hang on.’ Rory crossed to his desk and pulled out a larger sketch, the central trunk detail. Where most of the text would go.
He laid it flat. Close-up: bark rendered in fine charcoal crosshatching, with spaces left open where words would sit. Organic gaps, not captions, in the surface, as though the tree had grown around the language.
‘I want the words to look like they've always been there,’ Rory said. ‘Like the tree grew them.’
Neil stared at the sketch. His thumb found the edge of the paper. From somewhere outside, the caretaker's radio. A door banging in a far corridor. The heating pipes behind the wall ticked twice.
‘The layering technique in the trunk studies. Is that what you used in the Whitmore series? The scrape-back method?’
Silence.
When he looked up, Rory had gone still. The half-smile was gone, the easy charm, the aren't-we-having-fun-colleague routine, all of it stripped away. Recalculating.
‘You know the Whitmore series.’
Neil's mouth dried. The sentence had escaped.
‘I read a review. Months ago, in a supplement. The technique stuck.’
‘The technique.’
‘The layered surface. Paint built up and scraped back to reveal what's underneath. It gives the canvases a kind of...’ He groped for the right word. Something exact. His own word. ‘Honesty. You can see the process. The history of the painting's on the surface.’
Rory stared at him. A radiator clanked.
‘Most people look at those paintings and say intense,’ Rory said. His voice was lower now, stripped of the banter. ‘Or dark. Or confrontational. Nobody says honest.’
Neil looked at his hands. ‘Well. Maybe they should.’
‘Maybe.’ He held the look for a beat. Two. His eyes on Neil had changed. Open. He'd expected a locked door. Found it ajar. ‘You dropped Art History at A-level, didn't you.’
‘How did you…’
‘Because you talk about art as someone does who loved it once and stopped.’ The tilt of his head. ‘What happened?’
‘My father happened.’ Sharp. Out before he could stop it. Already loaded.
Rory didn't press. A short nod, I understand, that didn't require Neil to explain what Malcolm Ashworth had said, or how it had felt at seventeen to close a sketchbook and put it in a drawer.
‘We should talk about this properly,’ Rory said. He wasn't smiling. The words carried weight. ‘Come for a coffee. At mine. I mean it. I want to show you some pieces I'm working on.’
Broad enough to be collegial. Specific enough to be personal.
Every alarm in Neil's body fired.
‘I don't think that's appropriate, Cavanaugh.’
Too fast. The brittleness audible even to him.
Rory held his eyes. Held steady.
He'd heard the word. Not I'm not interested. The word appropriate. A small smile. He understood.
‘Your call, Mr Ashworth.’ He picked up a charcoal sketch. ‘But if you ever fancy a bit of art. And chaos. You know where I am.’
