After You Left(7)

We begin walking, and I slide up my big red umbrella. When we get to the Monument Metro Station, we stop, and she gazes at me with eyes full of sympathy. Then she says, ‘You know, it might not count for much, but John never cared for him.’

I watch her lips with the hint of pinkish neutral gloss, and frown. ‘What do you mean?’ Our umbrellas are touching. My red one is casting a warm glow over us. Yet the dampness suddenly gives me a shiver – the kind that locks your spine, and won’t dissipate.

‘I just think he finds him a little . . . unknowable.’

Unknowable. The word rebounds. I try to think, What does this even mean, and why are you telling me this? ‘And you agree with that?’ I ask.

‘Oh, Alice, my God . . .’ She glances around her, avoiding looking at me. People part around us. They disappear into the subway immediately behind, and an odd, draining sensation comes over me, as though part of me is detaching and disappearing into the ground, too.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ she says. ‘Not at this moment. But he’s a Scorpio, isn’t he? You know what they’re like? They’re driven, successful, have great sway over people, but rarely display their true feelings, and are filled with inherent contradiction.’

‘I better get off,’ I tell her. Sally is self-employed, so time might not be much of a concern to her, but I am already fifteen minutes over my lunch break.

‘Call me if you hear anything,’ she shouts after me.

I nod. I trot away. I don’t look in her eyes and give her the usual, genial goodbye gaze. I sense her staring at my back, for a beat or two.

Scorpio! It’s so stupid. Sally always puts such great stock in superstition and that sort of thing; that’s one way we’re very different. But I play over that brief description. Admittedly, some of it does sound like Justin.





THREE


When I see the name in my email inbox, I almost forget who it is; that’s how far removed I now feel from anything to do with my wedding. Aimee – the photographer – is sending me a link to the photographs. I’m supposed to go through them and tell her which ones I want and in what format. I stare at the link, but can’t bring myself to open it. Not here. Instead, I pick up a folder containing applications to our summer internship programme; my assistant said she’d flagged up the best ones, but she wanted my quick input. I get halfway down the first one, then have to put my head in my hands.

This is hopeless, so I wander into the gallery instead.

Art can play havoc with my mood. Landscapes suit me best. My mind and airwaves seem to open up in their presence. I am revitalised to face new challenges. Portraits bother me most. I am never fully at ease with them. Something to do with the fixed nature of light, shadow and perspective that gives the eyes their uncanny ability to follow you. I understand it from a technical standpoint, but the illusion of reciprocity bothers me on a more vital level. Here are real human beings trapped forever on canvas, on the wings of time. They have no say in the way they are being scrutinised. You can very often tell they’re displeased. And I feel so bad for them. I can never hold their eyes for too long. Perhaps because I sense they see things about me, too, that I wish to keep private. It’s an unnerving two-way street.

Today, though, as my feet echo on the wooden floor, I am entering a hallowed place of melancholy silence, a temple of human solitude that’s both eerily familiar and pleasantly disquieting. I look first at Hopper’s Morning Sun, on loan from the Columbus Museum of Art, in Ohio. A woman sitting alone on a bed in an austere, cell-like room, with sunlight streaming in from an open window that overlooks an uninspiring building. She is dwelling in her solitude, and the morning. But you don’t know if she’s happy or sad, if she has lost something, or someone, or if she has found an enviable contentment away from the drill of everyday life. Nighthawks, all the way from the Art Institute of Chicago. Three unspeaking strangers who are drawn to an American diner in the middle of the night, perhaps self-medicating their inability to face going home to nobody. Office in a Small City: the ordinariness of a man as he sits alone, daydreaming out of a window in a tall building.

I can’t help but think about the concept of loneliness, of having no one – how tangible melancholy is. If the artist were to paint me, I’d be a young woman standing alone in a room full of paintings about lonely people. A faceless figure captured from behind; her loss, palpable. Perhaps someone would speculate she is entirely on her own for the very first time – without a mother, a stepfather, a blood father; without a husband. They might sense all she has is questions, endless questions, and never any answers. And they would be right.

I’m so flooded with the naked reality of this, that at first I don’t notice that someone else is here.

She’s standing in front of Christina’s World. A slim, well-dressed little thing, perhaps in her early seventies, with the effortless carriage of a ballerina. She’s so passive and subdued that she could be a painting herself.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I cross the room and stand beside her, leaving a respectful distance between us, and I look at the painting.

At first, she doesn’t seem to hear. Then she says, ‘Yes. It’s haunting. Christina is haunting.’ She glances at me now, and she has the loveliest green and almond-shaped eyes. I notice that she studies me for a beat or two longer than usually happens with strangers.