The Diplomat by Chris Womersley

Author:Chris Womersley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2022-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

It was morning in Dalston again. I was woken by the sound of the hair dryer. Night rarely lasted long enough. This life was relentless; it always seemed to be dawn.

I staggered out of bed and ventured into the sunny lounge, where Gertrude was fiddling about with our latest Josef Soroko painting. I lingered in the doorway. She didn’t notice me. The rectangular piece of board on which she was painting we’d fished out of a skip a few weeks ago, outside a demolished house in Islington. This work – about A2 in size – was propped on a kitchen chair. With an unlit cigarette in one hand, she was idly drying the corner she’d been working on most recently.

I watched her waving the hair dryer back and forth, occasionally pausing to inspect her work or pick at the surface here and there with a fingernail. When she had finished, she switched off the dryer and turned to face me. Of course, she’d known all along that I was there.

‘Morning,’ she said.

‘How’s it coming along?’

‘Pretty good, I think. The actual painting is finished. Only need to finesse it. Age it a bit.’

‘It looks great, Gertrude.’

It was true. It did look great. It was an incredible painting, so bold and arresting. I was very pleased with the colours I’d managed to mix, but the art lay in Gertrude’s technique. It was possibly the best thing we’d produced. She truly did have a gift. The real crime was that it might only be used surreptitiously, that she might only be smuggled into the art world under someone else’s name – even if she reckoned she preferred it that way.

My admiration was, however, twinned with jealousy. I thought – and not for the first time – that if I had been blessed with her talents, I would have abandoned an amateur like me years ago and made my way elsewhere. This was an appalling idea and I was ashamed of myself for thinking it. But why on earth did she stay with me?

Gertrude shrugged, unmoved by my flattery. ‘It’s not exactly a masterpiece, but what the hell. It should pay some bills. And it’ll satisfy Walter’s mysterious Russian.’

This wasn’t false modesty; those who were genuinely talented were never sure of the quality of their work. The mediocre, on the other hand, were invariably convinced of it.

The flat smelled wonderful, of freshly brewed tea, turpentine and oil paint. At this time of the morning, the room looked quite lovely. Soft dawn light, an empty bottle of red wine on the floor, dark curtains, a few art books stacked on the sideboard, an artfully drooping lily in its pot, discarded cigarette packets, brushes in jars, half-squeezed paint tubes, paint-stiffened rags: the very picture of romantic, boho squalor.

And, most importantly, early morning was the time before we started to hang out too seriously for more smack, that brief hiatus before need stripped away any outer covering to reveal our lives for what they truly were. But, right now, if I squinted, I could persuade myself of almost anything.

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