Nightshade by Annalena McAfee

Author:Annalena McAfee [McAfee, Annalena]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

14

It’s started to rain again. She ducks into a doorway in Frith Street—a boutique hotel which two hundred years ago, in its former life as a Soho boarding house, accommodated itinerant painter and maverick writer William Hazlitt, one of Florian’s heroes. Roused to a fury by some slight, or imagined slight, Florian used to quote Hazlitt on the pleasures of hating: “we throw aside the flimsy veil of humanity…the greatest possible good of each individual consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbour.”

In hatred, as in love and portraiture, Florian was a master, and his most potent store of contempt was reserved for those who had been closest to him: erstwhile friends like Lucian Freud (too successful for Florian’s liking); Florian’s former dealer (who committed the crime of insisting on his full commission); and Eve herself, the lover who got away.

She searches in her bag for her umbrella as two tourists—Americans, husband and wife, presumably—emerge from the hotel in waterproofs to hail a cab.

“London rain, eh?” says the man to Eve, jovially.

“Yes!” Eve replies with a smile strained by a sense of her own bad faith.

If she had the energy she would have pointed out that no, actually, London has lower precipitation than Paris or New York or even Rome. But reputation is a tricky commodity, another flimsy veil, one that conceals the wearer then consumes her. Let them indulge their comforting cliché of rainy London.

Keen to avoid the crowds, she finds herself in Manette Street, behind the site of the old Foyles bookshop, where some of her more radical art college contemporaries used to go on book-stealing expeditions. This was shoplifting as a political act, they would say. Eve would smile and nod—more bad faith—and make her excuses. As a young student, she was intent on shaking off her suburban roots but couldn’t make the leap into larceny and, once more, she hated herself for her bourgeois timidity.

Where were they now, the dashing champions of the revolution? Mara kept in touch with some of them—the most high-profile survivors were gearing up for retirement from senior posts in television, journalism, local government and the law, and, no doubt, they’d ceased to view shoplifting as a brave blow against the iniquities of monopoly capitalism.

Eve always had difficulty reading people and was bewildered by the gulf between expressed intention and action. Kristof was more clear-sighted. Even virtuous Mara could sniff out cant from a hundred paces. And Luka? He’d scanned and parsed Eve in an instant. For her, though, plants have always been a better bet. Plants and paints.

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