17 Alma Road
The twelfth section...
XII
It seems darker at the top of the stairs, so Owen pauses to allow himself a moment to adjust to the slightly lower level of light. Or is that no more than an excuse? Off the landing are the four doors leading to the bedrooms — Florence and George’s, Maddie’s, his — plus one door for the bathroom, and one for the airing cupboard. He glances up to ensure that the loft hatch remains where it has always been.
“Not sure where to start?” Maddie asks, her voice already beyond the top of the stairs.
“Does it matter?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether you’re intending to go into all of them — the bedrooms I mean — in order to stir the dust.”
“Or none of them,” he suggests.
Maddie laughs.
“You never were a very good liar, Glen.”
Owen shrugs his shoulders. Again he tells himself that he never intended to go in any of the rooms, let alone venture upstairs and across more personal thresholds. Yet he feels committed now; there is an undeniable sense that he should see this reacquaintance through to its logical conclusion, and in completing the itinerary perhaps resolve that undefined something which remains vague and just out of reach. Maddie’s ‘next’ perhaps.
Immediately to his right are the doors to the bathroom and airing cupboard. Ahead of him, the main three bedrooms. “Well then,” he says to himself.
“‘Well then’ what?” his shadow asks.
“Does the order matter?”
Rhetorical, Owen’s question not only seems to ask whether significance can be attached to where he chooses to start, but whether any of it matters at all. Unsure, he waits for Maddie’s intervention. None is forthcoming.
Perhaps illogically he decides to start in the middle.
He remembers Maddie’s room as exceptionally bright and vibrant, and is surprised to find it little different to the rest of the house; there is nothing outrageous in the paintwork, nothing dramatic in the wallpaper. Of the two, it is the latter which unsettles him the most, less the mundanity of it rather than the fact that there is wallpaper there at all. Even though the built-in wardrobe is where he remembered it (George’s early handiwork), he glances toward the window as if doing so will affirm he is exactly where he thinks he is. He notices a small chip in the window frame. Definitely her room then.
“You look confused,” she observes, her voice wrapped around him as if she is inhabiting all the freshly disturbed dust.
“I expected more colour.” Somehow it is a weak observation.
“You’re not wrong. Don’t you remember? You could hardly see the walls because of all my stuff — especially the year before I went to university.”
Owen senses her reacquainting herself with the place too.
“There was a free-standing bookcase in the other alcove” — he turns as if being directed by a version of Maddie transformed into an estate agent — “and over by the window there were always at least two easels up at any one time. They would have had paintings on them in some state or other. I was being very colourful then.” There is an upbeat lilt in her voice which seems to take years off her — as well as reminding him how much she is missed. “Then a little table covered in stuff: brushes, paints, jars of linseed oil. And the walls were filled with all my rubbish.” She laughs. “You could hardly see the wallpaper, so it’s no surprise if you’ve forgotten it.”
He tries to recreate the image she has drawn for him and is only partially successful.
“Was that how you were at university?” he asks, shifting his ground. “I never did see you in your first-year halls, or that allegedly awful house you lived in for the two years after that.”
Even though there is little that is amusing about the latter, Maddie laughs again.
“I was in the beginning. I tried to cram all of this into a room about half the size. The result was catastrophic. I used to get paint on my clothes, on my essays; important things would get buried under unimportant things… It was a joke really. So I decided to become a minimalist.” She seems to wait for a comment but Owen makes none. “Pared everything back — even my art. In the first term I was a wild Fauvist, and in my second totally monochrome and small scale.”
Instinctively with a preference the second, Owen cannot help but ask “Which was better?”
“Better? Neither. Nothing’s ‘better’.” She dismisses the notion. “They’re just different modes of expression, good for doing different things.” Another pause. “I became all sorts of people over those three years, trying them on for size. Some fads lasted a few weeks, some a few months.”
Owen is struck by her use of the word ‘became’, as if her art defined her. Which in a way it did, of course.
“And?”
“What do you mean, ‘and’?”
“Did you find what you were looking for? Your ‘style’ — if that’s what you call it?”
“Does anyone?” she asks, not expecting him to respond. “There are few people who succeed in finding a fruitful niche — and often these are the ones who end up being commercially successful. For the rest of us the journey is almost always more important than the arriving, I think.” Owen notes the change of tone. “You can’t expect to find yourself without discovering who you’re not… Take Picasso. Realist when he was young, then Blue Period, Rose Period, Cubism. Always searching, trying things out, reinventing himself. How can you pin him down?”
It is a fair point, but Owen knows the comparison is disingenuous.
“But he was a genius. He could have stopped at any of those points and still have been Picasso.” Expecting an interruption, he gives her a chance to do so, yet it is one she does not take. “And you: Fauvism, Minimalism… I suppose there were lots of other ‘isms’ too. Which one was really you?”
He walks to the window and looks out, down onto the overgrown front garden, the half-camouflaged path, the rusting gate. Did Maddie ever stand here and paint what she saw through the window? He is convinced that she must have, and feels it a betrayal that he cannot remember for certain.
“All of them and none of them, I suppose.” Her response is clearly a considered one. “I was always trying to find my ‘style’ if you want to call it that; not just at university, but always, and right to the end.”
Owen wonders if she was tempted to say that she was trying to find herself rather than her ‘style’ — and if so whether that wouldn’t have been a more accurate assessment. The Maddie he remembers seemed to have flipped a little each time he saw her: colourful versus monotone, vivacious or reserved, happy then sad. In the end there had been far too much sad. Was that — in part at least — a reflection on the state of her art, or did it work the other way round?
“Both,” she says.
He finds her mind-reading disconcerting — even though that’s exactly what it isn’t.
“Explain.”
She sighs.
“I would create an image for myself — mainly in terms of what kind of an artist I wanted to be, what kind of things I wanted to paint and how I wanted to paint them — and then shape my life to align with that. Does that make sense? If my painting was Bohemian then I felt I needed to live a Bohemian kind of life in order to have any chance of capturing the spirit of what I was after. And before you say anything, I’ll admit that it sounds a little artificial. It was a little artificial. I suppose I was forcing it to a degree; trying to shoehorn myself into various shapes that might ‘fit’, rather than wait and see what happened. I didn’t have the patience to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because, unlike you, I guess I wasn’t made that way.”
It is a theory Owen finds difficult to accept. In most respects both he and Maddie had been brought up in an identical fashion: to be self-aware, rational, considered. That’s how Florence and George had lived their lives after all. If his sister was trying to ‘force things’, surely that went against the grain; perhaps in doing so Maddie was always destined to fail.
If she has read those thoughts too, she lets them go.
“I always wondered if there was a part of me that was like our parents — especially after Florence described them to us that day. You remember? More suited to me than you. Florence’s description of them touched a nerve, struck a chord. You choose the phrase. And when it came to my work, some of how she said they had been — some elements of them — seemed more natural when I considered what I thought ‘an artist’ should be. I accept that some of the things I did were” — she pauses to find a word, knowing in doing so that she will disclose that she has been reading his mind all along — “manufactured. But they had to be. I had to find out, discover, explore. You were lucky. You had a plan, could set your life out like some grand ‘to do’ list and work your way through that. Which was fine. But I could never do that. Had I been made that way I would probably have become a draughtsman or an architect.”
“Or a town planner,” Owen suggests.
She laughs.
“God forbid.”
“Was all that experimentation really necessary?” It is a question he has always wanted to ask her; one of those you continually put off because you believe there will always be a better moment to pose it. Or because you lacked the moral courage to give it voice in the first place.
“From the outside, what did you see it as? Or how do you think of it now?”
Owen glances back down into the garden as if doing so might help him find a suitable word. In George’s day it had been neat and ordered, everything in its place, under control; his kind of garden too, he supposed. And his kind of life. But now? Now it was less a manifestation of his life and more as Maddie’s had been.
“Turmoil,” he suggests, immediately wondering if the sound of of the word he settled on was triggered by his vague consideration of ‘soil’.
“That’s how it seemed looking in?”
“Sometimes, yes.” A stranger passes the gate. Having no connection to make them look his way, their gaze does not stray from the direction in which they are walking. And what would they see if they happened to turn their head, glance up to the window of the vacant house? “Mainly when it came to your friends, I suppose.”
“Men friends, you mean?”
“I understand what you say about being a Bohemian, using that as an example — or at least I think I do. But did all of that ‘experimentation’ need to extend to men as well?”
He turns back into the room expecting a rebuke of some kind, but none is forthcoming. Not only that, but he has a sudden sense she is no longer there, as if she has abandoned him. He focuses his eyes on the dust that refuses to settle; wonders if in its whorls and patterns there is something tell-tale to suggest her movement rather than his.
Walking to the door, resigned to have his question remain unanswered, her voice stops him. It seems a smaller voice, confined to the far corner of the room where she’d had her bed. Owen looks back over his shoulder half expecting to see his sister sitting pressed against the wall, arms around her knees; it was her tell-tale defensive posture.
“It didn’t need to, no. And it wasn’t always the case that I chased unsuitable partners based on how I happened to see myself at any one particular time. As an artist, I mean. Most often my ‘turmoil’ arose from simply being crap at picking out the good guys. It was an affliction — and sadly a lifelong one.”
“You needed someone like me,” Owen suggests, only half playfully. Maddie laughs, responding to the lighter half.
“I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with someone like you. Or vice versa. All that control, knowing what you were doing, things being mapped out to the nth degree. I don’t think I ever got that desperate.”
Determined not to be offended, he smiles then continues to edge toward the door. His hand is on the door frame when she speaks next.
“That sounded awful, Glen. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“I know, I know. And if it’s any comfort, I couldn’t possibly have lived with anyone like you either.”
She laughs.
“You never know; you might have surprised yourself. In fact, perhaps you could have tried a little harder.”
“To do what?”
“Find more” — again a break, this time for dramatic effect —“variety.”
All three of his major relationships had been with similar women, each ending in failure; Owen knew he had never experienced what Maddie might have categorised as ‘variety’. Thinking about it now, he is unsure of the nature of the logic which — having failed once — drove him to seek out more of the same. He had been beaten into submission for the final time the year Florence died.
He says nothing, hoping he doesn’t need to. Maddie’s defensive instincts allow her to rescue him again.
“And you know, occasionally these disastrous ‘entanglements’ of mine paid dividends. There were some very fertile periods as far as my work was concerned, periods when I actually sold things. Think of that.”
“And who were these paragons of virtue who helped unlock your inner Picasso?”
“That’s a low blow.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
Although he is now outside on the landing and trying to decided whether to go next into his old room or his aunt and uncle’s, when Maddie’s voice comes to him again it is still rooted in her own space.
“I sold a lot when I was with Dylan, so that was good; a few pieces that were Ricky-related. And I landed one really big commission when I was in Camden with Alan for that short period, remember? Alan — for all his faults — might just have worked out. He might even have passed your criteria.”
“My criteria? I didn’t know I had any ‘criteria’.”
“Of course you do. We all do. Florence and George had criteria in spades — but they were brilliant at camouflaging them under the veil of being wonderful people.”
“Am I not a wonderful person?” Owen asks. It is an unfair question.
“What a ridiculous thing to ask your sister. Of course you’re not wonderful…” He laughs, then the timbre of her voice changes. “Now it’s your turn.”
“My turn?”
“Your room.”
He takes a pace towards his bedroom door and then stops.
“But tell me,” he tilts his head back slightly as if he is addressing his question not to her but to the light fitting, the cornice, the picture rails; as if the house may know the answer to all his questions, “was it all worthwhile? In the end, I mean. All that chopping and changing; the never-ending difficulty with the inferior sex; what that did — or did not do — for your work; those hard times when you were down to your last few quid; the weeks of sofa-surfing… Or is that just a stupid question, considering?”
If he is hoping to be gifted a definitive answer on Maddie’s behalf, neither the light fitting nor the picture rail show any sign they are about to cooperate. Nothing in the fabric of the place changes. Even though it is one of the biggest questions to which he has wanted an answer — certainly for the past five years — Alma Road remains unmoved, for now holding on to its secrets. As does Maddie who merely reiterates “your turn”, her voice leading Owen through the next door.