Self-Portrait by Celia Paul

Author:Celia Paul [Paul, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473569812
Publisher: Random House

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Lucian was a regular and frequent gambler. Often when he was on the phone, placing more and more extortionate bets on a horse, he would clutch me to him as I sat on his knee and I would hear his heart pounding wildly with excitement. We watched the races, after he had placed his bets, on a little television in a narrow room between his kitchen and his bedroom. The smell of rotting fruit and vegetable skins, mixed with old meat bones and cheese rinds from the rubbish bags that he kept in this room, added to the sense of the ‘sin’ of the gambling itself. As he held me tightly on his knee, Lucian knew that he was playing truant and that he should really be in his studio, working. Once he won an enormous amount of money and he joked that he would buy me a diamond brooch, which he would fasten ‘just here’ – and he demonstrated with his fingers a place underneath the waistband of my skirt, where no-one could possibly see it. He more often lost, and on a vast scale. Then he was philosophical about it and said that he felt ‘purged’. He would resume his work in a quieter frame of mind, until the next frenzied passion for betting overtook him again.

I wrote in my notebook, after one trip from Hull to London to see Lucian:

Lucian asked me to go down to see him on Sunday night at 1 a.m. I, like a sheepish fool, agreed. No hesitations.

His bell wasn’t working so he said he’d linger around outside for me. When I met him he was far from welcoming, in a salty-white shirt, partly because some creepish man from the betting office had been hanging around him trying to extort money from him. So we went for a walk round the block trying to shake him off. We walked up through the dinky little mews (which I so often stare out at from his bedroom window) and finally reached his flat and the selfsame bedroom.

In the morning I went out to buy him some peaches and I found a buzzard’s feather for him in the gutter. He had three samples of material to cover his sofa: a deep chestnut brown, a liver-grey and a smokier pinkish-grey. He had liked the liver-grey best until I said I like the smoke-pink-grey one and he decided I was definitely right on that score. That pleased me.

When I left I was weighed down by melancholy and even Constable’s Leaping Horse couldn’t part the clouds for me. He does not love me.

I caught the train home. I was so lost in depressive thoughts that I was completely unaware of any other passengers and was startled when a schoolma’amly voice said ‘Are you ill?’

I started a painting of the ransacked whale of a tree in the garden in the pouring rain when I got home.

And now I must go to sleep.

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