It was as she pondered her palette, trying to imagine the colour combination that would perfectly capture the way the light seemed to be coming from beneath the water, that not for the first time she got the uneasy feeling she was being watched. Quickly turning her head to the left and right, she held her breath, more than a little unnerved. Finally she narrowed her eyes across the water, figuring her dad was right, that it was most probably someone in one of the flats or offices opposite, just as in love with their stretch of the river as she was. Maybe they, too, were drawn to the tiny cresting jewels being pushed up to the surface, no doubt by a river nymph, or maybe that leviathan whose head they’d once spotted, trying to show the world that he was in fact a nice guy.
‘What are you painting?’ A man’s voice made her jump, so lost was she in her imaginings.
This was not an unusual question. There seemed to be a certain fascination for anyone passing the moment they spied her, brush in hand.
‘Oh.’ Lilly looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the midday sun with her hand.
With his back to the light his face was in shadow, but his shoulder-length hair, curls – dark curls – were part hat, part halo. This made her smile, thinking that if you swapped the shadow for an apple, he was a walking Magritte. She didn’t like anyone looking at her work when it was underway, not really, didn’t liketalkingto anyone about her art mid-progress. Especially strangers, who typically didn’t really want to know about her style, materials, inspiration or perspective but rather wanted to use her work as a vehicle to talk about their own technique; what they liked or didn’t like, how they hadn’t painted since school, or once went to an exhibition, yada ... yada ... yada ... Everyone was a critic.
‘Just the river, the water.’
She kept it vague, doing her best to sound polite, responsive but with just the right amount of dismissal to her tone that might encourage him to shut up and go away. There was something about sitting at an easel that was akin to opening her diary and inviting the world to come and take a look. Trouble was, she hadn’t yet figured out how to paint in this, her favoured spot on the towpath, without such interruptions.
‘Mind if I sit?’
Yes! Yes, I do! I mind very much! Please just leave me alone! washer mental response; ‘erm’ the rather pointless word that actually left her mouth.
The man seemed to take her lack of decisiveness as consent and perched on the wall by her side, but said nothing. It was a silence that was odd. The kind of quiet that might occur when you were well acquainted with someone but not when you were total strangers. It made the whole encounter most peculiar, if alittle energised. Not that she was a stranger to peculiar or odd, having been called both, and recognising both within herself.
Bertie had said not to think of herself as odd, but rather unique! This was the mantra she repeated when her confidence was flagging, and it helped, a little. Glenda had roared her laughter when she’d shared this trick with her.
‘Unique? Sweet Jesus, we’re all unique, Lil, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Some of us are unique and bat-shit crazy, some of us unique and absolutely miserable! I’d settle for being bloody average. Not too many highs, very few lows, but bloody average, that’d do me.’
It struck her as the oddest of ambitions, that and wanting to get married quickly so she could start collecting Pyrex.
‘How long have you been an artist?’ His question was most endearing, suggesting she was an actual artist, recognising her as such, in contrast with the feeble, almost apologetic explanation she would offer when asked if she painted:Oh, I kind of dabble, you know, and work in a gallery and other stuff, but yeah, I paint a bit ...as if she had no right to such a lofty ambition or an artsy leaning. Not a girl like her from the banks of the river, who, despite winning a place at art college, had practically grown up motherless and couldn’t afford a ticket to Paris.
His words were empowering and lovely.
‘I guess the corny answer is that I was born an artist!’ She spoke the last three words with faux pomposity, which made him laugh. Not a raucous giggle but rather a slow, considered body laugh where his shoulders came in, his head shook and his face bore a wide grin. A handsome face, she now noticed. His eyes were so dark she couldn’t see his pupils. His beard was thick and his fringe long over his forehead, which gave him the habit of having to shake it out of his eyes. He was wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the triangle and prism ofThe Dark Side of the Moonon it.
‘Lucky you. I was born a mathematician.’
It was her turn to laugh.
‘I guess, in the career stakes, your skills might rate a little higher, so ...’
He seemed to study her, as if taking in all the details, which was thrilling and terrifying all at once.
‘I think Picasso died very rich,’ he pointed out, the artist having shuffled off his mortal coil only a few months previously.
‘Yet Van Gogh died poor,’ she countered.
‘Hmmm ... true. I think a mathematician is more likely to die contentedly, as life, like anything else, is just a mathematical puzzle, and death kind of solves it, doesn’t it? The final piece of the jigsaw, whereas artists, phew’ – he exhaled, arms splayed – ‘do they ever figure it out?’
‘Figure what out?’ She was curious, conscious she had stopped painting and that the light was changing.
‘Life! Love! Loss! The greatest mysteries of them all!’
‘This is a most extraordinary conversation. I have known you for all of five minutes and we are already on the meaning of life. I don’t even know your name,’ she fished, quite obviously taking the risk in the way that Bertie had tried to coach her.
No one remembers the meek, Bob! Be bold! Be open!
‘Do you want to know my name?’ he teased her.
‘Oh God, last time I played this it turned out his name was Rumpelstiltskin and he got so mad that I guessed it, he tore himself in half!’
There it was again, that confident laugh of his that spoke of much more than frivolity, as if they were building a connection. Yes, exactly like that.
