‘Not yet.’
‘I’ve seen every painting you’ve made in the last six months.’
‘Not this one.’
‘What’s different about this one?’
Rory looked at him. The half-smile absent. Nerves, maybe. Or concentration. Someone working on a canvas that mattered and couldn’t articulate why without showing it.
‘You’ll see it when it’s ready,’ he said. ‘Never before.’
The opening. The Whitmore, the same gallery where Rory’s earlier work had been reviewed, where a magazine in a waiting room somewhere had used the words dark, physical, urgentand Neil had read them without attention and remembered the name.
The gallery had offered Rory a solo show. Six weeks. Twenty-four canvases. The invitation had arrived in April and Rory had said yes and then spent three months painting with an intensity that made his normal intensity look recreational. Neil had watched from the sofa. Had heard the sounds through the studio door; brush on canvas, the tap of brushes dropped in jars, the occasional oath when something went wrong. Had brought coffee to the threshold and left it outside because the threshold was as far as the padlock permitted.
‘It’s called Bare,’ Rory said one evening. Wine. Sofa. His feet in Neil’s lap.
‘The show?’
‘The show and the painting. Same title.’
‘Bare as in…’
‘Bare as in uncovered. Bare as in nothing between the surface and what’s underneath. Bare as in the opposite of what I’ve always painted.’
He looked at the ceiling.
‘I used to paint people turning away. Shoulders. Backs. The face hidden. Because showing the face was too much. Too exposed.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I’ve painted a face.’
Neil’s hand stilled on Rory’s ankle.
The smile arrived. Small. Unsure. ‘I need to show you something.’
The studio door opened. The room received them, oil and turpentine and the deeper, mineral residue of paint worked and reworked over months.
The canvas stood on the easel. Six feet by five. The largest Neil had ever seen from Rory.
The figure was facing forward. No turning, no hiding behind a shoulder or a posture or the comfortable anonymity of a back. Full face. Eyes open. The face looked out of the canvas with an expression that was terrified and brave and honest, all three simultaneously, held in a look that refused to leave him.
The face was Neil’s.
No photograph. The features softened, the jawline suggested rather than drawn, the eyes rendered in a brown so deep it was nearly black. But the likeness was undisguised. Set of the brow. Line of the mouth. The three-millimetre beard kept precise for four years. The set of the mouth that Neil carried and couldn’t see on himself but that Rory had been studying and kissing away for months and knew better than its owner.
Neil stood in the studio wine going flat, breathing stopped.
‘Neil,’ Rory said. Behind him. ‘If you don’t want it in the show, it doesn’t go in the show.’
The offer hung in the air, made without reservation, the best painting of his career and he’d pull it from the exhibition. For Neil. Without argument.
‘People will know it’s me,’ Neil said.
‘Some will. The art lot won’t care. Someone we know might recognise the jaw. Your... ex-wife definitely will. But nobody’s going to ring the school and announce it.’
‘The programme notes.’
