The Very Picture of You

We stay there for a while and I ask her some questions, which she answers. Then I ask her the same questions all over again. Then we go downstairs and I fetch Chloë in from the garden and we all sit in front of the TV and exclaim over Sarah Ferguson’s billowing silk dress with its seventeen-foot, bee-embroidered train. And the next day I take my box down to the kitchen and lift out the pictures. Then I thrust them all deep into the bin.

ONE

‘Sorry about this,’ the radio reporter, Clare, said to me early this evening as she fiddled with her small audio recorder. She tucked a hank of Titian red hair behind one ear. ‘I just need to check that the machine’s recorded everything… there seems to be a gremlin…’

‘Don’t worry…’ I stole an anxious glance at the clock. I’d need to leave soon.

‘I really appreciate your time.’ Clare lifted out the tiny batteries with perfectly manicured fingers. I glanced at my stained ones. ‘But with radio you need to record quite a lot.’

‘Of course.’ How old was she? I’d been unsure to start with, as she was very made up. Thirty-five I now decided – my age. ‘I’m glad to be included,’ I added as she slotted the batteries back in and snapped the machine shut.

‘Well, I’d already heard of you, and then I read that piece about you in The Times last month…’ I felt my stomach clench. ‘And I thought you’d be perfect for my programme – if I can just get this damn thing to work…’ Even through the foundation I could see Clare’s cheeks flush as she stabbed at the buttons. And when did you first realise that you were going to be a painter? ‘Phew…’ She clapped her hand to her chest. ‘It’s still there.’ I knew I wanted to be a painter from eight or nine… She smiled. ‘I was worried that I’d erased it.’ I simply drew and painted all the time … Now, as she pressed ‘fast forward’, my voice became a Minnie Mouse squeak then slowed again to normal. Painting’s always been, in a way, my… solace. ‘Great,’ she said as I scratched a blob of dried Prussian blue off my paint-stiffened apron. ‘We can carry on.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Can you spare another twenty minutes?’

My heart sank. She’d already been here for an hour and a half – most of which had been spent in idle chatter or in sorting out her tape recorder. But being in a Radio 4 documentary might lead to another commission, so I quelled my frustration. ‘That’s fine.’

She picked up her microphone then glanced around the studio. ‘This must be a nice place to work.’

‘It is… That’s why I bought the house, because of this big attic. Plus the light’s perfect – it faces north-east.’

‘And you have a glorious view!’ Clare laughed. Through the two large dormer windows loomed the massive rust-coloured rotunda of Fulham’s Imperial Gas Works. ‘Actually, I like industrial architecture,’ she added quickly, as if worried that she might have offended me.

‘So do I – I think gas containers have a kind of grandeur; and on the other side I’ve got the old Lots Road Power Station. So, no, it’s not exactly green and pleasant, but I like the area and there are lots of artists and designers around here, so I feel at home.’

‘It’s a bit of a no-man’s land, though,’ Clare observed. ‘You have to trail all the way down the King’s Road to get here.’

‘True… but Fulham Broadway’s not far. In any case, I usually cycle everywhere.’

‘That’s brave of you. Anyway…’ She riffled through the sheaf of notes on the low glass table. ‘Where were we?’ I slid the pot of hyacinths aside to give her more room. ‘We started with your background,’ she said. ‘The Saturdays you spent as a teenager in the National Gallery copying old masters, the foundation course you did at the Slade; we talked about the painters you most admire – Rembrandt, Velázquez and Lucian Freud… I adore Lucian Freud.’ She gave a little shiver of appreciation. ‘So lovely and… fleshy.’

‘Very fleshy,’ I agreed.

‘Then we got to your big break with the BP Portrait Award four years ago—’

‘I didn’t win it,’ I interrupted. ‘I was a runner-up. But they used my painting on the poster for the competition, which led to several new commissions, which meant that I could give up teaching and start painting full time. So yes, that was a big step forward.’

‘And now the Duchess of Cornwall has put you right on the map!’

‘I… guess she has. I was thrilled when the National Portrait Gallery asked me to paint her.’

‘And that’s brought you some nice exposure.’ I flinched. ‘So have you had many famous sitters?’

I shook my head. ‘Most are “ordinary” people who simply like the idea of having themselves, or someone they love, painted; the rest are either in public life in one way or another, or have had a distinguished career which the portrait is intended to commemorate.’

‘So we’re talking about the great and the good then.’

I shrugged. ‘You could call them that – professors and politicians, captains of industry, singers, conductors… a few actors.’

Clare nodded at a small unframed painting hanging by the door. ‘I love that one of David Walliams – the way his face looms out of the darkness.’

‘That’s not the finished portrait,’ I explained. ‘He has that, of course. This is just the model I did to make sure that the close-up composition was going to work.’

‘It reminds me of Caravaggio,’ she mused. I wished she’d get on with it. ‘He looks a bit like Young Bacchus…’

‘I’m sorry, Clare,’ I interjected. ‘But can we…?’ I nodded at the tape recorder.

‘Oh – I keep chatting, don’t I! Let’s crack on.’ She lifted her headphones on to her coppery bob then held the microphone towards me. ‘So…’ She started the machine. ‘Why do you paint portraits, Ella, rather than, say, landscapes?’

‘Well… landscape painting’s very solitary,’ I replied. ‘It’s just you and the view. But with portraits you’re with another human being and that’s what’s always fascinated me.’ Clare nodded and smiled for me to expand. ‘I feel excited when I look at a person for the very first time. When they sit in front of me I drink in everything I can about them. I study the colour and shape of their eyes, the line of their nose, the shade and texture of the skin, the outline of the mouth. I’m also registering how they are, physically.’

‘You mean their body language?’

‘Yes. I’m looking at the way they tilt their head, and the way they smile; whether they look me in the eye, or keep glancing away; I’m looking at the way they fold their arms or cross their legs, or if they don’t sit on the chair properly but perch forward on it or slouch down into it – because all that will tell me what I need to know about that person to be able to paint them truthfully.’

‘But—’ a motorbike was roaring down the street. Clare waited for the noise to fade. ‘What does “truthfully” mean – that the portrait looks like the person?’

‘It ought to look like them.’ I rubbed a smear of chrome green off the palm of my hand. ‘But a good portrait should also reveal aspects of the sitter’s character. It should capture both an outer and an inner likeness.’

‘You mean body and soul?’

‘Yes… It should show the person, body and soul.’

Clare glanced at her notes again. ‘Do you work from photographs?’

‘No. I need to have the living person in front of me. I want to be able to look at them from every angle and to see the relationship between each part of their face. Above all, I need to see the way the light bounces off their features, because that’s what will give me the form and the proportions. Painting is all about seeing the light. So I work only from life, and I ask for six two-hour sittings.’

Clare’s green eyes widened. ‘That’s a big commitment – for you both.’

‘It is. But then a portrait is a significant undertaking, in which the painter and sitter are working together – there’s a complicity.’

She held the microphone a little closer. ‘And do your sitters open up to you?’ I didn’t reply. ‘I mean, there you are, on your own with them, for hours at a time. Do they confide in you?’

‘Well…’ I didn’t like to say that my sitters confide the most extraordinary things. ‘They do sometimes talk about their marriages or their relationships,’ I answered carefully. ‘They’ll even tell me about their tragedies, and their regrets. But I regard what happens during the sittings as not just confidential, but almost sacrosanct.’

‘It’s a bit like a confessional then?’ Clare suggested teasingly.

‘In a way it is. A portrait sitting is a very special space. It has an… intimacy: painting another human being is an act of intimacy.’

‘So… have you ever fallen in love with any of your sitters?’

I smiled. ‘Well, I did once fall in love with a dachshund that someone wanted in the picture, but I’ve never fallen for a human sitter, no.’ I didn’t add that as most of my male subjects were married they were, in any case, off-limits. I thought of the mess that Chloë had got herself into…

‘Is there any kind of person you particularly enjoy painting?’ Clare asked.

I was silent for a moment while I considered the question. ‘I suppose I’m drawn to people who are a little bit dark – who haven’t had happy-ever-after sort of lives. I like painting people who I feel are… complex.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘I… find it more interesting – to see that fight going on in the face between the conflicting parts of someone’s personality.’ I glanced at the clock. It was half past six. I had to go. ‘But… do you have enough material now?’