That drive from Brixton to Hampstead had taken a long time. Elise admired the deftness with which Connie switched gears and never hesitated to zoom through an amber light. ‘This city’s wonderful,’ she said to Connie. ‘Can you imagine what the Blitz was like? The Great Fire?’
‘I’d rather have the wanker bankers,’ said Connie laughing, lifting her hand off the steering wheel to put it on top of Elise’s. She had dry, strong fingers. And she was such a confident driver! They sat at the traffic lights, touching hands, and Elise kept looking out until the lights turned green and Connie left her hand alone, shooting them up the Euston Road, past St Pancras, past the women standing in the street on York Way, then further north, to Hampstead.
*
After the Kahlo exhibition, Elise and Connie stood next to each other outside, watching the traffic go up and down the street. They walked towards Whitechapel Station in silence, not holding hands. ‘She really ran the gamut,’ Connie said eventually, as if talking of a friend. It was April, and breezy, and Connie’s pale red curls were blowing all over the place.
‘Gamut?’ Elise repeated. She had no idea what a gamut was. It sounded vaguely Yiddish. She was still reeling from the intimacy of the paintings. She wanted to be like Kahlo, to know every smashed moment of herself and accept it anyway. She looked at Connie and wanted to touch her, but you never knew who was looking. Soon, everything they had together was going to change. Soon, Wax Heart was going to be turned into a Hollywood movie called Heartlands. They were going to Los Angeles to see it happen. Suddenly, Elise wanted to kneel on the East End pavement and hold it close against her palms. This was her city, wasn’t it?
‘Well, you know,’ said Connie. ‘The childhood illness. Then the accident – the operations. How much she wanted children. The miscarriages. That marriage.’
Elise shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Only forty-seven when she died,’ said Connie. ‘What a waste to die so young!’
‘Not always,’ Elise said. ‘And forty-seven isn’t young.’
Looking disconcerted, Connie carried on. ‘It’s hard to put my finger on why I feel so sorry for her.’
‘I don’t feel sorry for Frida Kahlo,’ said Elise. ‘I don’t think Frida Kahlo wants your pity. She was angry, looking at some of those paintings. She was quite determined to show you what she wanted to show you.’
Connie laughed. Elise hated it when she did this, like a glass of water dousing a burning candle. She couldn’t help it if she felt strongly about these things. Art wasn’t truth, it was a lie told to tell the truth. That’s what the drawing master said at the RCA where she modelled. And truth held different qualities to a fact. It was a question of angle, where you were standing and what view you needed to see. Art was being always on the hunt for something to which you could cling.
‘Frida Kahlo,’ Elise went on, fishing for her Tube ticket in her purse, thinking of herself as the drawing master – ‘she worked on everyone she knew, by the looks of it. She did it to herself. But she used everyone else, too. She put everyone in the soup.’
*
The Tube pulled alongside the platform at Whitechapel and they got on, sitting side by side on the District Line to Monument. Connie looked tired. She rested the side of her head against the carriage window. Elise rolled and unrolled the exhibition programme as the carriage swayed them, the lights of the tunnels flashing past. Since meeting Connie, she had felt her heart maturing at speed like a peach in a heated laboratory. It had swelled out, gathered heft, pushing away from the stone that had lived inside her always. Even as Elise got to the door of Connie’s Citroën on the day she moved in, she felt older than she had five minutes previously, and did not realize this could only be a symptom of being so young.
Connie had said: I want you to flourish. Why did Connie want this for her? Elise wondered, as they hurtled their way back into the city on the Tube. What did Connie ever want from her? I just want to love you, she would say. It is the greatest privilege to love you. Now, why don’t you write that play?
Elise no longer ached daily for Connie, as she crossed the city to her various jobs. Her face was still as a pond, her cunt a warm coal. But the love she felt was still growing, pressing her down; it was pushing roots into the ground. She knew she hadn’t done much since being with Connie. She was twenty-two years old now and everything was still inside her. Dippy moorhen, that’s what Connie had made her. Ripples in the water; small-headed bird, desire reducing her to black and white. She felt so powerless, and so happy.
6
Elise stood on the threshold of Connie’s study, silently watching. She never went in. Connie was so deep in concentration that she did not notice, her head bent slightly over the desk, her arm moving across the notepaper. Ripley lifted his head from the carpet and laid it back down. He rolled over and stared. Connie was a witch with her familiar, writing up her spells, Elise thought. When she was near Connie, she felt just like Ripley, luxuriating in the warmth and safety of Connie’s presence. She wanted to be the one curled up on the carpet at Connie’s feet. Connie had been working longer and longer days, looking occasionally pained at the end of them, distracted at breakfast, lunch and dinner, but also emanating a kind of elation which Elise found exciting to be near.
‘Con?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Biscuit?’
‘No.’
Elise continued to hover. Connie’s cleaner, Mary O’Reilly, was downstairs. Elise didn’t like it when Mary was there. The first time she’d met Mary, early on in their relationship, Connie was working upstairs and Elise was reading the paper in the kitchen. Elise had heard the door unlock, and tensed as whoever it was came in – own key! Then footsteps, a woman’s back, woolly hat, placing her rucksack easily on a kitchen chair, walking to the cleaning products under the sink. Only then did Mary turn and see Elise sitting at the table. Mary, in her fifties, slender, a bored and solemn mandarin who understood her cabinet minister’s secrets. ‘Hello,’ Mary had said, clutching her hat by the tips of her fingers. ‘So. You’re the one who’s stopping by.’
‘I am,’ said Elise. ‘I’m stopping by.’
*
‘What are you writing?’ Elise said. Connie’s back stiffened. She stopped writing, but didn’t turn round.
‘Something.’
‘Something?’ said Elise.
Connie placed her pen down, but still did not turn round. ‘El.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Connie was writing; that was all anybody would ever know. Elise knew she should not ask these questions, that they were juvenile and invasive, but she felt annoyed that day. Los Angeles was less than two weeks away – she’d handed in her notice at the cafe, she’d done her last shift at the National. She told the art school she was going to America for a while, so she wouldn’t be able to pose for life class. She made it sound like she had plans over there, and then she’d sat for the last time in the draughty workshop, listening to the pencil scratches. Elise was closing down everything she’d made here and thought she might like to keep, except for Connie – because they were going to Los Angeles, because there was no way they were going to be apart. And now Connie would not turn round.