17 Alma Road
The fourteenth section...
XIV
Having just finished packing in readiness for his return to London, Owen had been standing at the top of the stairs looking down. Getting ready to leave was always a short and somewhat dissatisfying ritual, although he could never really establish why. With work being unusually challenging, taking an extra day to make a long weekend away had proved an inspired decision. If Maddie’s fleeting presence had been an unexpected bonus, he was nonetheless convinced that in terms of unwinding from everyday stresses he had managed to use the time in Alma Road more successfully than his sister. Her voice — and that of Florence — floated up from the hall towards him, an incursion of sufficient interest to arrest his progress with his re-packed case and leave him leaning against the balustrade at the top of the stairs. From his vantage point he could make out a vertical slice of Maddie, one foot on the bottom step, her body turned to face the kitchen door where he was sure his aunt was standing.
“I do admire your resilience,” Florence was saying.
“Is that what you think it is?” Maddie replied. “Not stupidity or bloodymindedness?”
Florence laughed a little.
“Well, perhaps with a touch of those mixed in too.” When the slightest of pauses looked likely to trigger Maddie’s resumption of her stair climb, Florence pushed on. “It must be difficult,” she suggested.
“What?”
“To put disappointment behind you and move on — and with apparent ease — as if it didn’t matter.”
“Ah.” Maddie turned her body sufficiently to allow her to sit on the third step, her head still inclined towards the kitchen. “Well, in the first instance it does matter, and in the second it isn’t easy — even if you think I strive to make it seem so. It’s always hard being told that your work isn’t good enough. But it goes with the territory; you have to take it on the chin. After a while — after all this time — in theory it gets easier, but it never gets ‘easy’.” Maddie paused to consider the second part of Florence’s statement. “And as for moving on, what else are you supposed to do? If you didn’t, you’d only paint one picture in your entire life because when it was turned down you couldn’t possibly paint another.” She laughed, though without conviction. “I confess I have felt like that on more than one occasion. Giving up, I mean.”
From his perch high above them Owen could tell Maddie was only partly joking. They had spoken often enough about her difficulties in placing and selling work for him to know that whatever brave face she had chosen to put on, the process ground her down from time to time. Perhaps increasingly so. He didn’t think he had ever seen her as fragile as he had that weekend.
“Of course, you do have one advantage over everyone else,” Florence offered in response.
“What’s that?”
“Your brilliance.”
Maddie laughed at the semi-joke, throwing back her head a little as she did so. For a split second Owen was worried that he might be discovered eavesdropping.
“You’re right,” Maddie said, making the effort to stand up again. “I always have that to fall back on; the knowledge that one day some curator or gallery owner will recognise my true worth and then suddenly everything will be different. People will look back at all my earlier work and say ‘how did we miss her?’ It’s only a matter of time.”
A final unheard word from Florence brought the exchange to an end. Owen pushed himself back from the banister towards his door and then, just as Maddie reached the half-landing, made out he was emerging from his room.
“Alright, Sis?”
“Never better.”
And she breezed past him and into her room.