The Things We Don’t Say by Ella Carey

Author:Ella Carey [Carey, Ella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503902183
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2018-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

London 1923

Emma and Patrick returned to London as a couple. With Lawrence’s considerable support their careers flourished, but it was Patrick’s flamboyant genius that was becoming famous, while Emma continued with her daily practice by his side. He’d had three shows in the capital entirely devoted to his work, and his name was beginning to be starred in catalogs when he contributed to other exhibitions. His collaborative, decorative work carried out with Emma and sold through Lawrence’s workshop became wildly fashionable; Vogue picked up their screens and lampshades, and their modernist style was so popular that at one showing, all their pieces sold out in a great crush in one hour, with the profits going to Lawrence’s cooperative and the thirty artists all sharing in a little of the margins. Meanwhile, Emma remained of the acute opinion that Patrick’s talent was far superior to her own. And she kept on producing her quiet, reflective pieces that were picked up by the occasional collector. She was content to work for her work’s sake and because there was nothing she would rather do.

She saw Patrick as more inventive and more imaginative than she would ever be, and she remained fascinated with his love of conceits in both art and life—by the way he made her laugh and was always the center of attention at any party. Mostly, she was in constant admiration of the way he could draw up a miracle directly with his brush.

When Lawrence told her one afternoon in Gordon Square that he felt her work had deeper feeling and integrity to it than Patrick’s did, that her art held a steadiness that was missing in the frivolity of Patrick’s work, Emma turned away and shook her head.

But Lawrence was insistent. “Underneath that calm luminescent surface we all see, I worry that you are not happy,” he said. “Your depth of feeling and the sadness I can see in you shows in your work. I worry that it’s become part of you. Something you’re living with. Something you’ve accepted as your lot.”

Emma glanced across at him—the man she’d found comfort with, briefly, when her marriage was falling apart. But Patrick had so eclipsed him since then in her head that she’d not given Lawrence a second thought romantically. Now he was working for both her and Patrick, tirelessly organizing exhibitions, promoting their decorative work, while his other career as a London art exhibition reviewer went from strength to strength.

He remained close in the inner Circle, but he was out of the circle that was Emma and Patrick’s tight-knit orb by a mile. She created a bubble, and she saw this as her core and her reason for living. While she and Patrick were sometimes lovers, she would never be everything to him. To love him was to accept him as he was. It was beautiful, heartbreaking, and a means of complete contentment all at the same time.

It was, in a word, life.

But why her circles always had to sharpen into triangles was the constant rub.

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