All the Days And Nights

All the Days And Nights
Niven Govinden

From the author of ‘Black Bread White Beer’.The East Coast of America, 1980.Anna Brown, a dying artist, works on her final portrait. Obsessive and secretive, it is a righting of her past failures; her final statement.John Brown, her husband and life-long muse, has left; walked out of their home one morning to travel cross-country in search of the paintings he has sat for.As their stories unfold – independently, for the first time in many years – a passionate unconventional relationship is revealed, between two people living through the most tumultuous decades of modern history.All the Days and Nights is the story of an art hunt during a twilight period of painting. It lays bare two relationships that are ever changing and incomparable: of the artist and the muse, and of lovers. It is an exploration of what it means to create, what it means to inspire, what it means to live.

NIVEN GOVINDEN

All the Days and Nights

Copyright (#ulink_43048ce9-9201-5f78-aa4a-d0a5c2b0ef2d)

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

Hammersmith, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © Niven Govinden 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Niven Govinden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007580491

Ebook Edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007580507

Version: 2015-10-13

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

Frida Kahlo

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

Walt Whitman

Table of Contents

Cover (#ue3048bff-d78a-5e80-9ca1-b1ac1729f0be)

Title Page (#u75f456ec-fc9c-59e3-8d05-808d763cc5ed)

Copyright (#u78977f75-4b86-5d07-8bc2-bf42089a6913)

Epigraph (#u63bc0d3a-202b-5d21-aa32-174b7a819a48)

All the Days and Nights (#ucb62337c-8f71-5fec-af88-1f6cd7c87f96)

Also by Niven Govinden (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

WHERE WERE YOU when the sky collapsed; rain falling in pinched sheets, but constant, and the mist descending as if gravity was its master, until it settled on the front step and the path? Was the sky in collusion? Had you conspired with the elements to stay hidden from me; not satisfied with withholding so much of yourself, now your physical body had to be hidden too? Your intentions have brought the mist. You have unsettled nature. The swallows nesting above the window fret over what is to come. They scratch the roofing felt with urgency and speak their fear with a caw that rises from the pull of their guts. How instinctive their talk is, how deeply felt. The cassette spool from the answering machine in the hall hums and burrs more audibly than before, making me think of a hornets’ nest under the bed; each creature whirled into a fury and ready to break out. Everything is angry. But what signal is ours? What cry or call will reach you, muffled by cloud, lost in the mist? The dank has whitewashed the landscape, reducing you to a wisp, a dot in the meadow. Is this where I have driven you: into the chill of first light, to be soaked to the skin, slipping on the edge of the path as gravel gives way to mud as you walk toward town and the store that is not yet open, but the rail station that is, and the incoming train that will take you away from me, if you have decided that this is the day? There will be nothing in your pockets bar the silver-edged comb that belonged to your father and your frayed notebook, wedged in the back and struggling to be held. There will be no metallic clink as you walk, keys left behind and no money to speak of, but if you have decided, woken from the bed on the other side of this wall and filled with the determination you’ve previously threatened, you will find a way to be on that train, through charm, or theft, or an attempt at forced entry. Reviving the same hobo spirit that brought you here. If this is the day.

But it isn’t, is it? I know you too well to be crippled by surprise. You forget how I hear your footsteps as you creep down the stairs. Even in your stealth I can read you; the difference between the tiptoe to the doorway of the outbuilding where you punch your frustrations into the hay bales stored there; the steps that lead to the liquor cupboard in the middle of the night, when you believe that I am asleep, and not numbed enough to follow. A man, seventy years old, with the furtive steps of a teenager. Then those that take you to the bottom of the path, where you stand in your shirt and jeans, the same as when you arrived, hesitating at the gate before turning back. Innumerable times I’ve seen you at the gate, a shadow filling the cleft in your chin, the rising motion as your face twists southward to take in the house, deciding whether you have had enough of it. When you no longer lift your head, when there is no pause, fingers not drumming on the latch, where the echo of flesh pounding metal falls flat against the window and culls the ringing in my ears, I’ll know. Until then, we’ll carry on as before, in our spurts of comfort and unease. You will continue to sit and I will continue to paint you, because that, John, is why you are here.

VISHNI BURNS THE COFFEE. She is distracted by the thickness of the rain and the absence of you. Usually she would wake to find the fire in the kitchen lit, the stove light on, possibly some voices in heated argument on the radio; whether Carter can hold his own against Reagan; new anger for a new decade; one of the few things from the outside world that interests you. She expects these things and today they are not there, disturbing her in a way she had not anticipated. She stands in the darkness of a barely broken morning for several minutes, wondering if there was a note mentioning a business trip she had forgotten, or whether she had paid scant attention to the clock before leaving her room. She wrings the excess bathwater that has soaked her plaited hair into the sink before re-coiling it into a bun, all the time, thinking. An epoch of wondering passes until I hear the rip of the light cord as the rise and fall is pulled. You never sleep late, nor leave the house without some kind of welcome for her. She is undecided whether to march or creep up the stairs and so manages a little of both. The door of your bedroom is opened in the same confused manner and then closed again within seconds, the final crack of the handle pulled hard against the door frame and ringing through the hall. This is Vishni all over: covert but ultimately clumsy. Bureau drawers not entirely closed and overdue bills stuffed roughly back into envelopes are typical of her handiwork. There is nothing to see there: the bed will be made, the curtains drawn. If I had the voice I could save her the futility. At our ages, we think of economy in all things. She is breathless with exertion, her heavy lungs punishing her for this impulsiveness. As she stands outside my room, more hesitant than before, her wheezy rasp seeps through the gap under the door. She knows it is unlikely that you will be here but wishes to be thorough. The door handle rattles with her uncertainty, to wake me with a knock or ease the door open to spy on someone who despises being watched, who has made a career of being invisible.

– What is it?

– I was looking for John, Anna.

– I sent him to the store. We ran out of one of the oils last night. Had to finish early because of it.

Lightness appears in Vishni’s voice – relief – betraying that she too shared the same thoughts.

– Let me get the fire going. I’ll have breakfast ready for when he returns.

She is only here for you; enjoys your company and pandering to your needs. Coffee is served how you like it, breakfast and other meals to your whims. It’s why we often eat like children: franks and beans, macaroni with everything. On those mornings when your presence at the table is shortened because of the need for firewood or household repair, the tone is quite different. The radio is mostly switched off. She will not sit and watch me eat. No teasing passes between us. The offer of second helpings when the plate is clean is only made the once, both of us understanding that mothering cannot be applied here. We are left as two women thinking about their respective work, aware of the other’s presence, but still in our separate spheres.

When you first moved here, I warned you of my need for silence and space. You warned me of your need to eat something that was not raw or burnt. Vishni has been here almost as long as you, following barely a month after your arrival. See how quickly I acted for you back then! Your every intelligent suggestion was my command. I wonder if you even remember the nights I spent away from my work to call people I knew in the town asking for recommendations; people who were alarmed at hearing my voice at the end of the receiver, having been aware of my long-standing reticence toward the telephone, and believing that I would only be calling in a case of dire emergency. But then they remembered that you had arrived and their panic, if not irritation, softened to indulgence and finally warmth. If I pressed you on this now I am certain you would not even recall it, so taken were you with the meadow and the scattering of macadamia trees that flanked the drive. Out of New York for the first time in your life, you were full of wonder and mischief; running back and forth the length of the meadow with one of the yard dogs from the neighboring farm, each trying to exhaust the other, pulling yourself up the first trees you had ever climbed that were not in Central Park and swimming the river that divided the house from the village, not minding the rain or mud, nor the stones on the river bank and bed that bruised and cut your feet.

– I’m looking for work. Anything you have.

– Can you build a fence? Knock down a wall?

– I’ve little experience, but I can try. I’m strong and can work hard. Been asking at the other farms, but they’re having the same problems as those I left behind in the city. All of us, scrabbling around like mice.

The bulk of my work, what they will remember, sprang from those words. You; sitting on the veranda steps while I fetched you some water, returning to see how the light treated your face; how everything changed during that minute I was in the house.

On those first afternoons I sketched you, you were restless, wanting to be anywhere but indoors. Instructed to keep your eyes forward, you constantly deviated, looking past the window to the garden table where Vishni had promised you that she would serve all meals. Those twin pulls have never changed: someone to put home-cooked food in your belly and the need to feel your feet in the grass. This is why I know you can never leave, not entirely. Something will always bring you back. Inside and out, you have made roots here; from pushing your fingers deep into the earth when you thought no one was looking, as if the feel of soil between your hands and under your nails made it real; and from your face being in the paintings. Whether you are aware of this or not, you have created invisible roots capable of dragging back the unwilling. Once they are unfurled they will recoil. In the meantime I have my work to keep me occupied and the smell of Vishni’s coffee burning on the hot plate to jolt me when my attention slips.

WE ARE HUSBAND and wife. Some run a shop or diner together. This is ours.

You once said that the darkness of the studio was my comforter, having watched my first minutes or so there each morning, when I seem wrapped up in its closeness before rolling back the shutters from the skylight.

– It’s like the dark is some kind of magnet. Pulling away all the shit that’s amassed since you were last here. Everything about you is different. Another person.