Chapter One Hundred
After several requests, Genevra instituted a little painting class in the patio. With the sympathetic whitewash of snow as backdrop, the students filed in, stood each before an easel, facing the windows, and took up brushes in cloddish hands.
“A very kind porter found these easels,” began the master, who paced back and forth in splattered smock. “Apparently there were such classes long ago, in the hotel’s early years. There was even a stash of paints, as you can see. Now, I thought we would start with a still life. I asked at the kitchen for fruit, but that’s all gone, it would appear. There are no sculptures to speak of, so we’ll have to make do with this rather ordinary-looking lamp. But, of course, what we’re focussing on isn’t any quality present or lacking in the object, but in the vision of the one beholding it. The lamp might be commonplace and replicable, but your approach to it is not.”
The students nodded. Arthur Drig looked at the lamp, and tried to picture it in a new, even revolutionary, way. And yet, try as he might, it remained, he feared, merely a lamp.
“You might not know anything about painting. You might not know anything about art. That’s quite all right. Because you’ve all lived in this world, you’ve all seen things, felt things, and secretly wondered if you were a little bit crazy, since nobody else saw what you saw, or maybe, even, for that brief snatch of time, it was just you and the thing you saw which were together the only two objects in the universe.”
Arthur considered this. He was sure he had never felt any such thing.
“So, pick up your brush, dip it in a colour—it really doesn’t matter at this point which one—and move it around on the canvas until you feel you’ve made the initial offering to the genie in this lamp. Go on. I’ll come round and see how you’re getting on.”
Marcel Lapin-Défunt frowned at the lamp, scratched himself through the napkin strung around his neck and over his front, and slashed a bold line down the canvas. Deirdre, next to him, looked over at what he’d done, and nodded. She loaded her brush with black and dabbed limply at her own canvas, hinting at the form of the lamp. Looking at what she’d done, he wanted to weep, though he couldn’t have said why.
“Remember,” quoth the instructor, “there’s no such thing as a mistake. Unless, that is, you’re untrue to yourself.”
Arthur didn’t know what that meant, but was far too bashful to say so.
Seamus O’Herlihy, an effeminate, curly-headed young man with a working-class Irish accent and an air of secret amusement in his relations with the world, stood next to Arthur, rendering the parts of the lamp into exaggeratedly phallic shapes. Arthur watched him, and suddenly, this whole art thing seemed like it was finally starting to make some sense.
Voot stared at the lamp, unproductively, while at the same time taking in, from the corner of his left eye, Mifkin, who had somehow ended up at the next easel over. Mifkin, from his vantage point, cocked his right eye over to peripherally check out Voot. A triangulated observer from in front of them might have wondered at the strange magnetic attraction of these two eye-pupils. For every line of Voot’s, Mifkin would retaliate with one of his own; every time Mifkin’s line wobbled, Voot would snigger, and every time paint splashed from the palette onto Voot’s moustache, Mifkin would chortle.
Enid deprecated her own attempts with knowing jollity, and mocked Rosella’s insistent praise. Rosella, on the other hand, infused her lamp with feeling via a minimum of dextrous strokes, delighting Enid thoroughly. In fact, she hadn’t painted the lamp at all; it was as if she’d painted the world around it, a world consisting entirely of a substance known as “not-lamp”, leaving, in the vacuum at its centre, an absence that could only, by default, become a “lamp”.
Rounding out the group was the duchess, painting in, absurdly, a fine white gown, seeking to dredge up from the turbid memories of her girlhood education the painting skills with which she’d once so proudly amused her governess. But she couldn’t call them back; that had been another time, and she, another person, and as such, she could not know this lamp, wasn’t meant to know a thing about it, and as a consequence, had no right to paint it.
Lapin-Défunt’s lamp was impossible, ludicrous, and he knew it. But he did not care: he felt his bumbling travesty of a painting contained within its execution a thousand times more meaning than had his entire diplomatic career, and so promised himself, then and there, that when he returned to the outside, he would swear off politics, resign from his post, and become an artist, starving or otherwise, with Deirdre as his muse. He whispered this ambition to her, while she jabbed gashes in her canvas, leading her to shrug and suggest that, romantic as it might sound, it would never measure up to, say, a good old-fashioned suicide.