My first real paint box was the size of a tea tray. It was a thing of total wonder, from the picture on its lid – two rosy children chasing a dog – to the slim squirrel-hair brush and the forty-eight little bricks lined up inside, enchanting me with their names.
They laid spells on me. Vermilion, magenta, ultramarine, cerulean blue. Learning to paint with these was easier than learning to read. Like a voracious reader, I painted anything and everything: my family, our sullen cat, our B and B in Ambleside, the cluttered house we moved to in Penrith, my father’s ramshackle garage and his strange collection in the shed. I painted his flywheels and oilcans. I painted bins and Marmite pots and gym shoes and bowls of cat food.
I couldn’t understand why my classmates could not do the same: why their houses all had four windows and a chimney, and their people had big feet pointing out at right angles and no shoulders. I painted literally. It didn’t occur to me for years that I had no imagination.
“Look at Eden’s drawing,” said Miss Wilkinson, holding up my picture for Year Three to admire. “Eden has looked properly. She has drawn her daffodil the way it really is, not the way she thinks it ought to be. She has seen it like an artist.” At that instant, my career took shape ahead of me: a straight, wide, easy road.
Later on, in High School, I acquired a label, an aura. Eden can draw. It defined me. Whatever else I couldn’t do, I could always draw. My skill held a kind of magic for classmates who still drew an aeroplane the way they had in infant school.
Back then, I drew a lot of portraits, to order: a caricature of the Head, or a long-limbed fashion sketch, or Mr Travis (History) with no clothes on. I drew my friends, to please them, although the results dissatisfied me. I couldn’t capture character: I couldn’t get inside people. My friends didn’t see it, for the likeness was good enough, but I knew my portraits were dead in the water. I was discovering by then that my competency lay elsewhere.
I could lay a wash and turn it to a landscape with a line. I could paint colours and reflections: hills and skies and water. I filled books with my experiments. My money went not on make-up but on tubes of watercolour – so much more luscious than the blocks – and sable brushes.
I rejected vermilion and magenta. My favourite colours were raw sienna, cobalt violet, terre verte. And as an early eighteenth birthday present, I begged and cajoled my parents for a week’s watercolour course at Raven How Artists’ Centre.
Raven How was a bunkhouse whose spartan rooms Ruby had done her best to disguise with tie-dyed drapes and throws. The walls were lit by Russell’s paintings – semi-abstract landscapes full of broad, confident brush-sweeps and translucent colours, as bright and urgent as stained glass.
Russell himself was tall, lean, shaggy and decisive. He had a constant one-week growth of beard: too restless to shave. I thought him leonine, prowling between his twelve timid pupils with a growled comment here, an approving toss of his mane there. We did our painting out in the field or, on the days it rained, in the big conservatory, pausing only to eat Ruby’s weird, if well-cooked, meals. I tried chick-peas for the first time, determined to like them because Russell did.
There was a daughter. Delilah was then three, and not Russell’s, Ruby was at pains to tell us, for they had an open marriage – a glamorous expression I had met but not been able to apply to anyone I knew: yet they gave the impression of being a long-settled couple. The courses had been running for several years. Over-subscribed, said Russell with satisfaction. You are the fortunate few.
I already knew that. I thought I knew it all. I went there in the anticipation of showing off. That week amongst dabbling amateurs three times my age only strengthened my opinion of my own talent. I knew I was better than any of them except Russell. That week confirmed my choice: I was going to be an artist.
The age gap should have warned me; but I was blind with love. It didn’t register that the form of art I had chosen to marry myself to was middle-aged, middle-class and middle-brow. Imagine: a stringy, gauche seventeen year old, into grungy leather, vampire movies, vodka with anything, drum’n’bass – and watercolours. I didn’t foresee the ridicule my passion would provoke. That unwelcome revelation was yet to come, at university.
Now, nine years later, as I climbed off my scooter in Keswick, I had to admit that my painting had taken me in directions I could never have foreseen so long ago. I had certainly never foreseen Freddie’s Bookshop as the main showcase for my talent, although God knows how I could have imagined anything grander was remotely possible.
I parked up by the supermarket and strolled around for a bit to recover from the trauma of driving over Dunmail Raise. Though I’d had the second-hand scooter for three months now, I’d not yet accustomed myself to the capricious, whiny ride: it buzzed and bumped along the Lake District’s roads like a bad-tempered mosquito, only not as fast. With a top speed of thirty, it wasn’t the pleasantest way to travel; nor the most popular, with the other traffic at least.
So I was glad to enjoy the sedate bustle of Keswick market and admire the bric-a-brac and home-made pies. I liked Keswick, with its business-like air and the stately tower of the Moot Hall, which always looked to me like something built by an enthusiastic ten-year-old giant with a ton of grey and white Lego.
Freddie’s was just around the corner from the market place. It was a long, thin shop that tunnelled into the gloomy depths of the building and sprawled tentacles of piled books up the rickety stairs. Freddie sold second-hand and antiquarian books, maps, charts, prints, greetings cards and minor original water-colours, unframed, any major ones generally being displayed on the more dignified walls of Latrigg Galleries down the road.
Freddie was sitting on a cushion on the floor surrounded by books, regardless of any customers who would have to pick their way around him. Not that there were any customers.
“My dear Eden,” he said, his ready smile turning equally readily to anxiety, “I wasn’t expecting you. We don’t need to restock your cards just yet. It’s the weather, you know. A chilly spring so far.” He stared up at me with his genial, apologetic gaze. Freddie’s once-handsome, chubby face was heading dramatically south, with drooping jowls and heavy bags under his eyes. Too much smoking and drinking. He resembled one of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits; that air of puffy resignation.
“It’s all right,” I said, embarrassed. “I was coming up to Keswick anyway so I thought I’d just drop in on the off-chance, and beg a brew.”
“Well, that’s easy, my love. Any time,” he said, scrambling laboriously to his feet. “I’ll get the coffee on. Matt? Coffee?” he called.
Matt appeared from behind a bookcase. “Hallo there, Eden.” Matt was tall, dark, and while not exactly handsome, had an attractive, alert face, his amused green eyes as wide-set as a cat’s beneath his carefully spiked hair. His movements held a supple catlike grace as well, with a gym-honed tautness that I might have surreptitiously admired had there been any point. He wore a new leather jacket, with a badge declaring Rarely pure and never simple.
“Oscar Wilde?” I asked.
“Of course.” Matt was organised and clever and, I thought, quietly devoted to Freddie. Freddie was certainly devoted to him. I assumed that they were partners in more than business. At any rate, when Matt touched Freddie lightly on the shoulder I saw how Freddie looked at him: like the old dog with Isaac.
“You sit down,” said Matt. “I’ll make the coffee. Chocolate biscuits?”
“Bring the lemon cake,” said Freddie. They always had a full cake tin. Visiting them was like dropping in on a couple of uncles – although Matt, the younger by a good ten years, was barely thirty; but their easy acceptance made me more comfortable than I was with my own family.
I’d known Freddie and his shop since I was a little girl in pigtails hunting comic books. However, it was Matt, new to me when I turned up with my painted samples at New Year, who had proved my first ally.
I’d already been turned down by several shops, all saying No, dear, it’s an over-
crowded market – and I could see Freddie was about to say the same, when Matt spoke up for me. I think these have something, he’d announced. Not the usual run of the mill. You’re a professional artist, right? Eden Shirer… He eyed me with a speculative gaze, cogs turning in his head. Now where have I heard that name?
He had probably read it in the papers. I had to spill out my jailbird credentials – something my probation officer insisted on – which left Freddie totally in shock but which Matt, after an initial recoil, put to one side.
Irrelevant, he’d quietly said to Freddie; everybody makes mistakes. Forgive and Forget. And Freddie had agreed, though clearly for the love of Matt, not me: and Matt had brought me a piece of parkin.
Now the three of us sat on the big, cracked leather sofa by the window, with plates of sticky lemon cake, and exchanged Keswick gossip with Ambleside’s, such as it was. A hotel closed: a café opened. Freddie’s motorboat was up for sale, but no buyers. Was Freddie short of money then? I couldn’t work out how to ask, and anyway Matt was rattling on amusingly about a local newsagent who had run off with the week’s takings and one of the paper-girls.
Matt was easy company. Like me, he’d been brought up in the Lakes before the city beckoned: and, like me, had returned home out of exile when things hadn’t worked out. I felt a fellowship with him on that account. Matt loved a gossip, with just a hint of sharpness showing through his carefully kind manner. Freddie was less forthcoming. I didn’t mention my dip in the lake with Selena just yet; I was saving it up, and at the same time wondering how much I should say.
Meanwhile a single browser appeared and tiptoed round the shop, refusing offers of help. Time of year, Freddie said again.
“I think I’ll just hibernate next winter,” he added gloomily, “and save myself the trouble.”
“You won’t need any more cards for a while then?”
Freddie was already shaking his head when Matt put in, “Oh, if you’ve brought them, Eden, we’ll take them. They don’t need much space, after all.”
“What about my bigger paintings, Freddie? Are you ready to restock yet?” I asked without much hope.
“Not just yet,” he said. “I always think it’s better not to display too many all at once.” I knew Freddie’s theories on rarity value.
“I bumped into somebody the other day I haven’t seen for years,” I said. “You might know her. Ruby: wife of Russell. They run the painting courses at Raven How.”
“Oh, yes! I know them quite well.” The crease deepened between Freddie’s brows.
“Apparently he sells some work through you. I never realised.” I hadn’t spotted any in the shop, although I would have expected to instantly recognise Russell’s strong lines and colours. But maybe it was only minor bits and pieces that he bothered to sell here.
Freddie locked his fingers together. “We’ve had a few pieces of Russell’s. I don’t think he’s as productive as he used to be.”
“I suppose he doesn’t have much time, with all those courses.”
“They don’t run so many of those nowadays,” said Matt, offering me a second slice of cake.
“Don’t they? I wonder why. When Ruby asked me what I was doing these days I hardly knew what to say. I mean, I couldn’t tell her I’d been done for forgery,” I said glumly. “I don’t think that would go down well.”
“It matters less than you suppose,” said Freddie, patting my knee.
“It still matters, though.”
“But how much?” Matt sat forward to study me intently with his measuring cat’s stare. “Who exactly did you hurt?”
I smiled without humour. “Nobody, except myself.”
“And do you feel you’ve paid for what you did?”
“More than enough,” I said.
“Indeed. Unfortunately not everybody would agree.” Matt leaned back again, his tone sardonic. “Ruby, for one. She’s conventional beneath the tie-dye.”
“No, no! Ruby’s big-hearted,” objected Freddie. “She wouldn’t care about it.”
I was doubtful. “Please don’t tell her anyway, will you? Or Russell, if you should happen to mention me at all. Not that he’ll remember me. But he’d think I’d wasted my talent, such as it was.”
“You wouldn’t be alone in that,” said Freddie ruefully. “Where did you bump into Ruby?”
“Oh, she came over to the farmhouse next to Raven How, while I was… er, visiting.” I still hadn’t decided how much of Selena’s story I was at liberty to tell.
“You were at the Staithwaite place?” said Matt, suddenly alert.
“Yes. Do you know it?”
Freddie shook his head, but Matt said, “I used to know Luke. The man who died.” Freddie took an inward breath and looked up and away at the bookshelves, tapping his fingers on the flaking leather of the sofa arm.
“The farmer who killed himself?” he said distantly.
“Supposedly.” Matt sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I hardly like to think it, but yes, I suppose he must have. Poor old Luke.”
“How well did you know him?” I asked.
“Very well, as a boy. We met at High School when we were both eleven. We stayed friendly right through school and for a few years after, until I moved down south.”
“I didn’t know it was that long,” said Freddie, with a petulant edge to his voice.
“Oh, yes. Everyone liked Luke. He was very popular, especially with the girls. He was always falling for some pretty girl or other. Not many of them turned him down. He was good-looking, with that brown hair flopping over his eyes; and always ready to please. Thoughtful. Sometimes moody but appealingly so. The moods grew darker, though, as he grew older.” Matt winced slightly in remembered pity or pain.
“But you moved away,” said Freddie. “You dropped him.”
“I lost contact,” said Matt carefully. “When I came back up to Cumbria , I got in touch again, but it seemed to me he wasn’t the same man. His mother was very ill by then. I think Luke was already suffering from full-blown depression, and his mother’s death was the last straw.”
“But he met Selena just after his mother died,” I said, startled into an unintended show of knowledge.
“That’s true. I suspect he married her on the rebound from her death. Not that Selena wasn’t good for him – I’m sure marriage helped him for a while, but in the end the depression took over. There was nothing she could do about it.”
“How do you know all this? I thought you hardly ever saw him,” complained Freddie.
“Hardly ever isn’t never,” Matt answered levelly. “We bumped into each other from time to time. And Ruby gave me updates. I couldn’t help but take an interest. I’d grown up with him, after all.”
Freddie half-glanced at him and looked away again as if it hurt, although Matt showed the same composed face as always.
“You’ve met Selena, then?” Matt asked me.
“Yes. As a matter of fact–” I stopped. Hunter might not approve, even though Selena’s dip in the lake had hardly been private. “I met her in Ambleside, and we got talking, and I went back to the farm,” I said lamely. I was a bad liar. Matt’s eyes narrowed in sceptical amusement.
“You got talking? What about? Where was that?”
“About painting. I was painting at the time, down by Waterhead, and she was there too.”
“You talked with Selena about painting?” Matt sounded incredulous.
“Sure. Why not? I’ve promised to do her portrait. But that’s just an excuse. Once I saw where she lived, I couldn’t resist. I’ve got to paint that farm,” I said. “It’s such an amazing setting.”
“It’s quite a place,” agreed Matt. “Luke never appreciated it. You should go there some time, Freddie.”
“What for?” Freddie grumbled.
“Next time we go for dinner at Ruby and Russell’s, I’ll take you over.”
“Not necessary,” said Freddie shortly. He heaved himself off the sofa and began to shuffle the d
isplay books around the table. I was taken aback. Here they were talking with familiarity about dining with Russell, when I’d carefully treasured his legend in my heart for all those years.
“What sort of thing does Russell paint these days?” I asked.
“You want to see? Come down here. I’ll show you.” Turning his back on Matt, Freddie led me down the book-strewn tunnel to the depths of the shop, as murky as a pond, the feeble lights barely penetrating its brown gloom.
I spotted my cards on a rack, half in shadow and hemmed in by garish cartoons of sheep holding umbrellas. I bit my lip and said nothing. I had few enough outlets as it was.
At least one of my larger paintings was decently displayed on the wall. Just a shame it wasn’t sold. The stuff around it probably put people off: it was fairly grim.
“There,” said Freddie. “Those are Russell’s.” He pointed at the pictures I’d just been mentally condemning to the dustbin.
“What? Those?” I was stunned. Where were the flowing lines, the vibrancy of colour? These were dry, muddy scratches in the dirt, barely recognisable as landscapes: their trees looked dead and their earth poisoned. I peered for the signature, disbelieving: there it was, sure enough.
“He’s changed,” I said. “I mean, that’s quite a change in style.” Could I have been mistaken about Russell all those years ago? But even at seventeen I surely knew what was good and what wasn’t. This wasn’t.
“So I believe. We haven’t been stocking him for long. A year, maybe. He used to sell his work elsewhere. Latrigg Galleries and a few others. He had a name,” said Freddie.
“Does he sell well?”
Freddie put his head on one side and smiled at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked.” Name or not, I couldn’t see people falling over themselves to buy these. I hated them. To cover my shock, I said, “You don’t really need any more of my cards, do you?”
“No,” said Freddie. “I’m about to sort out that lot, you know, to show them off better. Matt’s been on at me about updating the display racks. I’m afraid I just don’t seem to get round to it. The view of Derwentwater from Cat Bells is our best seller.”
“I’ll knock out some more of those, then,” I said. “In different weathers.” I wouldn’t need to go up Cat Bells again to do it. I had the photos and the sketches. Just add mist or sunshine, or my favourite, thunderous rainclouds with a pale sunbeam glinting through. I was good at clouds, thanks largely to Russell. I took another disbelieving glance at the muddy scrapings on the wall before retreating.
Saying goodbyes to Matt and Freddie, I left with my rucksack still full of cards. I wandered the gently undemanding Keswick streets for a while, collecting postcards for reference and checking out coats on the market and in the charity shops, because my lemon puffa jacket was growing more disgusting by the day.
But finally I couldn’t put it off any longer. Gathering my courage, I walked into Latrigg Galleries.
I pretended to myself that I was just browsing – a hiker hoping to get warm. I strolled across the polished floor, laying a trail of echoes, and surveyed the works on the spacious white walls. This room held the modern stuff: big, bold, sophisticated. Real art. There were none of Russell’s. I went into the next room, where they kept the older paintings, and stopped dead in shock.
I recognised it straight away. It was an Anthony MacLeish, a late one, that I clearly remembered painting towards the end of my short career before I diverged into the Holbecks that were to prove my downfall. “Rae Bridge,” it was called. I’d used a photo off a calendar.
The first shock was just seeing it there. The second shock was how good it was. I mean, it was good. I didn’t quite believe I’d done it. It looked alive. You could almost hear the water laughing.
The third shock was the price. Which was well into four figures.
Almost twenty times what Lionel had paid me for it originally. I stood and stared, until the assistant – or possibly owner – finally felt it worth his while to ask if he could help me. Sharp suit, southern accent, bored air. He wanted to be in Soho, not Keswick.
I couldn’t help it. I said, “How come this is so expensive?”
“This is a particularly fine example of MacLeish’s work. He’s been undervalued for a long time. He’s on the up. A good investment for the right person.” He spoke flatly, eyeing my naff yellow jacket and scuffed boots. I was clearly not that person. He didn’t like it when I asked,
“What’s the provenance?”
“It’s being sold by a private collector who purchased it some years ago.” Three years at most. I never knew any of the buyer’s names: Lionel saw to all that.
“But it’s authenticated?” I insisted.
“Validated by the auction house,” he said sniffily. “Are you considering buying?” Just daring me to say yes.
So I invented an interest. “Anthony MacLeish was friends with my grandfather.”
“Really?” I could see his ears perk up. “Are there any of his works in the family?”
“I believe there used to be a couple. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Well, if you ever come across them and the family wishes to sell, I’d be very interested to take a look.”
“Okay,” I said, edging towards the door. “I’ll bear it in mind.” He didn’t want to let me go now.
“Were they good friends, MacLeish and your grandfather?”
“Um… I believe they fell out.”
He nodded. “Yes, well, MacLeish had a habit of doing that, I understand.”
“Do you have any of his other work?”
“Not at present. But we’re always on the lookout. Do let us know if you hear of anything.” He had gone from sniffy to courteous: greedily so. I reached the door at last with him nosing after me like a well-dressed piranha.
“I’ll remember that,” I said, as I slid out.
I had to pause outside in the street for a while, pretending to contemplate jam tarts through a shop window while my heart was pounding and my mind racing. Who would have thought it? MacLeish was in demand. Could I still do it?
I closed the thought firmly away and locked the door. No, I couldn’t. Even if I could come up with a provenance – something Lionel had always arranged – I still couldn’t do it. I’d been in enough trouble. I could never get away with presenting the gallery with a new Anthony MacLeish. A pity: I felt a pang, because I’d enjoyed them, had been confident in the role of that quarrelsome, obsessive, long-dead Scotsman. And he had never let me down.
The court case had been based on my Holbecks. By the time I was charged, the MacLeishes had slipped through the net and gone, all except the last two they found in Lionel’s workshop.
We made out they were the first two, not the last. We never let on that there had been more: that there was a sizeable shoal of fake Anthony MacLeishes out there, swimming around the muddy unregarded shallows of the art market. The two they found were never brought in evidence against me, since they had not been sold. The Holbecks were enough.
At least there was nothing to link me now to this MacLeish, apart from Greta. No matter what her doubts, she wouldn’t act on them and risk more notoriety for the family. There was no reason for anyone else to wonder. It was a good painting: it ought to make some buyer very happy. I’d hang it on my wall any day, I thought, if I ever owned a wall to hang it on.
My work, for sale in Latrigg Galleries. I was proud.
Chapter Five