not up to you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t call myself.’
He put up his hands in surrender. ‘All right. I just – you must keep writing, you know.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘You sound like Cynthia. You sound like Quick. Everyone wants me to write, but they never try it themselves. If they tried it themselves they might shut up.’
He shrugged. ‘Quick did you an enormous favour. And I bet if she knew you were dragging your heels—’
The last few hours finally caught up with me. ‘I’m not dragging – don’t use her – she dead, Lawrie. She dead. I don’t – I can’t – we don’t all have paintings we can sell, you know. I have to do other work.’
‘You’re right. Of course. But sometimes I do think you need reminding how good you are.’
We stood in silence for a few minutes. I knew it was true that I had stalled again on my writing. For once, I was too caught up with actually living my life to stop and turn it into words. People like Lawrie – who never wrote a single line of prose, as far as I knew – seemed to want those who did to walk around with a pad and pencil hanging round their neck, jotting down the whole thing, turning it into a book for their own pleasure.
As if he knew he’d trod on tender ground, Lawrie changed the subject. ‘It looks like there’s a couple of people interested in buying Rufina,’ he said.
‘That’s good.’ I saw his rueful grin. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Grass greener for Rufina. Told you I was a poet. Thing is, now there’s a chance I’m not going to have it any more, I’m rather reluctant.’
‘Well, it’s not any old painting.’
Lawrie looked across the gallery, where the colours of Rufina and the Lion glowed, the people crossing back and forth, intermittently obscuring our view. ‘It certainly isn’t. But what am I going to do with it, Dell? I don’t have any money and it isn’t going to feed me.’
As we looked at the painting, vanishing and reappearing again and again behind people’s heads, I knew that Lawrie and I were looking at different things. In its uniqueness, I read multiple stories. Through its technical brushstrokes, I experienced metaphysical sensations. It was a one-off I should do my utmost to protect and keep in public view. I could guess at the impulses behind the artist’s decisions, I could meditate on how the painting made me feel, but I understood that I would never know its truth.
But Lawrie saw something else. The new frame Reede had commissioned was a window, and the painting within was a curtain he was pushing aside. He claimed he was reluctant to sell it, but he hadn’t seen the cheque yet. He didn’t really want to keep hold of Rufina – although it was his mother’s, he seemed unbound by the memories it clearly had evoked for her. And why else had he come to the Skelton in the first place? He said it was to find me, but maybe I was a bonus. For him, the painting was a thing for sale, a transitional object that would take him places. He saw in it opportunity, a chance to start again.
Reede tapped his wine glass and began to address the crowd. He stood in front of Rufina and the Lion, starting by taking us through the skeleton story of Isaac Robles; his importance in the early journey of art in the twentieth century, his gift cut short. He thanked the Guggenheim foundation in Venice, and built on the particular mystery of the discovery, pointing out Lawrie in the crowd, who blushed and raised his glass to appreciative applause at his good fortune for having such a painting concealed in his house, and his generosity in deciding to show it.
When Reede spoke of how Robles’ work was a meditation on adversity, the people in the Skelton gallery probably thought he was talking about war and dictatorship, and the struggles many of them were old enough to have lived through and remember on a visceral level. But I just thought what Quick had said about it: It’s the subject that overwhelms. As if there’s an extra layer to the painting we’re not privy to, that you just can’t get at.
Rufina and the Lion moved me that night in a transcendental way; it was the conduit through which I channelled my sense of loss, of accepting I might never