Fiona Smith's Blog › Jean: Still Life…

Jean: Still Life - Shortbread's Light Bite

Published 10 months ago

Today's Light Bite is a tale of love, life and vanity.

Jean: Still Life by Heather Reid

As she said to the surgeon, when he unwrapped the bandages, it had been birds to start with, nothing dodgy, just birds - robins and the like - that’s what he was doing when she’d met him.

It was Donna who’d seen him first, spied him from the back of the salon where she was shampooing the scant remains of Mrs Redfern’s hair. He’d appeared to be fishing - hunched over in his green hooded Parka while the canal slid by like a line of grey sludge – and he’d looked cold and sad, like something discarded. When it began to rain, huge gobbets of it bouncing on the water, Donna had said, ‘Go and take him a cup of tea, Jean, the poor bugger’ll catch his death sittin’ out there. God knows there’s not much else to catch, unless it’s shopping trolleys he’s after!’ And Jean had wandered down with a mug of Tetley’s and a packet of Jaffa Cakes.

Up close he was a stunner – dark haired, brooding – but it was his hands that caught her eye, big, like a polar bears, with fingers thick as sausages. He was sketching, not fishing, using those hands to draw the ducks that were paddling to and fro on the canal.

His name was Owen and he was grateful for the tea. He let her watch a while and showed her how he used the charcoal to add light and shade to his work, how it was possible to make a drawing seem alive. ‘He’s a natural,’ she’d said to Donna, later, ‘never had any training either. It’s like he’s just been born with a special arty gene. Like it’s a gift.’

‘Shut up, Jean,’ Donna had replied, peeved.

They saw Owen a lot after that, sitting by the canal, and he drank a lot of their tea, and, when they married the following spring, he joked at the wedding that- thanks to Jean - he’d enough drawings of ducks to rival Peter Scott!

It was tough at first, Owen didn’t work and Jean had to take extra hours at the salon in order to meet the bills. Some nights she returned home to find him shivering beside his easel and would rub his hands between her own to restore the circulation. She helped in other ways, too, bringing home plants for him to sketch and unusual fruits which she picked up from the market in town. When he had finished she would cut them into pieces and feed him, in bed, where it was warm, their bodies made sticky with juice.

Sometimes he found birds that had been hit by cars or had flown too hard into windows, and brought them home, tucked inside his Parka. On one occasion a neighbour called with a bird her cat had killed, a pretty coloured thing of a type Jean had never seen before. Owen recognised it right away. ‘A waxwing,’ he’d said and showed her the shiny dots of colour, like wax, at the end of its feathers. He’d loved that bird, spent hours blending paints to perfect its peachy colour. He’d kept it in the tiny freezer compartment above their refrigerator, in order to keep it fresh, nestled it in amongst the peas and oven chips. Jean confessed to Donna that she found it rather creepy, but Owen had told her not to be so squeamish, ‘you wouldn’t bat an eyelid if it was a chicken,’ he’d said, ‘and a bird is a bird at the end of the day.’ And so Jean had tried her hardest to ignore it.

In those early days, she would have put up with anything to please him: birds in the freezer, otters in the bathtub, bats in the wardrobe. His happiness meant everything to Jean and yet increasingly she found him staring bleakly at the canvas, manacled by the heavy grey chains of depression. As time went by, Jean herself began to understand that talent means nothing when your work isn’t selling, and the sad truth was that wildlife art just wasn’t what the punters seemed to want.

Later – after he’d handed her the mirror and she was able to trace the smooth lines of her skin beneath eyelids bruised the colour of a summer storm - she’d confided in the surgeon that, since London, she’d blamed Freud – not Sigmund or Clement (of course), but Lucian, the painter.

After ten years of marriage they’d decided to celebrate their anniversary with a weekend trip to the capital. Not that they could afford it; Jean’s mother met the cost having recognised that things were growing difficult between them; that point in a childless marriage when each partner begins to dwell upon the purpose of the union. Owen was in artist’s heaven. They did them all: The National, The Royal Academy, The Portrait, but it was Tate Britain that really hit the spot, particularly the Freud. Jean confided in Donna, on her return to the salon, that she could now say with confidence that nudes weren’t really her scene. ‘I’d rather see a landscape than the human form displayed in all its detail,’ she’d said. But she’d feigned enthusiasm and tried to concentrate upon the skill of the portrayal.

It was when they came upon the painting of Freud’s daughter, Emma, that Jean let slip her prudish inclinations. ‘Fancy that,’ she’d whispered urgently to Owen, ‘painting your own daughter in the buff and then letting folk display it in a gallery for the entire world to see. It doesn’t seem right to me.’

But Owen viewed it differently, called the work remarkable and pure, artistically and emotionally liberating. And so, when they returned home to Leeds and he’d said ‘Jean?’ in that peculiar, wheedling tone, usually the preserve of tired and whiny children, she’d guessed where it was leading.

At first she didn’t mind. It was just a bit of fun, she thought, no harm done, and it seemed to make him happy. The paintings were impressive, too. Jean was the first to admit that she was no Kate Winslet, but Owen was kind with his brush and enhanced the parts that age had treated harshly, smoothing lines and boosting sagging skin. His confidence brought benefits in other areas too, he was happy again, skittish almost, slapping her rump playfully when he’d finished cleaning his brushes, and chasing her to the bedroom.

They might have carried on that way, quite happily, if it hadn’t been for Donna and her mouth.

‘Oogh, Jean!’ she’d said, one morning as she made them both a coffee, ‘aren’t you the dark horse?’ Her face was sly and something in her tone made Jean feel cheap.

‘What are you on about?’ she’d replied, thankful that the salon was still empty.

‘You, in the art shop window, naked! That man of yours has done a cracking job, though. How much would he charge to do me?’

That evening Jean had confronted Owen, fuming at the depth of his betrayal. ‘How could you?’ she’d hissed, ‘Do you think I want the entire bleeding town to see me naked?’

But Owen didn’t get it. ‘We’ve had some interest,’ is all he said. ‘This could be the start of something big.’

And in many ways it was, although the end of some things too. As his paintings started to sell, Owen began to mix with certain ‘types’- arty folk who influenced his thinking – and to feel that nudes weren’t really quite enough, he needed something more to catch the eye. Jean slipped from wife to model, demotion of a kind, and he didn’t like her working anymore, claimed her absence stemmed the flow of his creative juices. Ever keen to please, Jean hung up her scissors and remained at home, watching as each day she was applied, in shades of skin, onto his canvas.

On her final visit to the surgeon, after she had admired the results of his work, and marvelled at the changes he had made, Jean explained the reasons for her decision. ‘I know I’m not the first,’ she’d said, ‘look at Titian, look at roman statues, go right back to man’s first use of art and there’ll be some poor cow portrayed without her clothes. But it just didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t who I was.’

It had ended, as most things do, with a mild dissatisfaction, a hunger to succeed, a kind of greed. Owen’s work was selling, but he didn’t really stand out from the crowd. Nudes weren’t new, particularly draped across a sofa, and he wanted something special that would set his work apart, a style to call his own. He tried portraying Jean amongst fresh flowers and even tried a new slant on the fruit, but, in the end he chose to make the best of their resources and painted Jean beside the kitchen sink, or cutting up the onions for a stew or even – weather permitting – pegging out the washing in the yard. He called it realism, gained compliments for being brave enough to show life as it was – mundane and pedestrian. Sadly though, he went too far, painting now exactly what he saw: Jean aged forty-two, Jean with sagging breasts and mottled flesh, Jean with the early signs of jowls and a look of disappointment on her face. Finally he painted her beside the kitchen table with all their weekly shopping piled upon it. That was the last time.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Jean when she bumped into Donna one wet afternoon, at the supermarket ‘I’m not ungrateful for what I’ve got today, but let’s just say that on that Friday, as I sat beside the beans and flour, the bacon and the Bisto, the last few shreds of romance curled and withered from our marriage. He’d hit the market right though, even made The Tate in later years – best tits in the gallery, one critic said! And I came out okay. Well, who could deny, when it came to divvying the assets, that our wealth wasn’t more than partly due to me. And money brings its own rewards. I got myself a surgeon,’ she whispered, ‘and between you and me, he made a cut or two.’

‘He’s done quite a job, Jean,’ said Donna, managing to sound simultaneously spiteful and awed. ‘How much for him to do me?’

And so the story ends like this: once a year Jean performs, what she likes to call, her pilgrimage, takes herself to London and checks-in to one of the better hotels, treating herself to a show at night and a good meal somewhere pricey. Owen lives in London now, but it isn’t him she sees, instead she makes her way along the Thames to The Tate and there, amongst the Picassos and the Bacons, she finds the painting, ‘Jean amidst the Shopping.’

The woman in the painting’s not best pleased. Her body’s slightly hunched and her hands are limp and huddled in her lap. The artist’s got the eyes right though, staring and dull. Looking at it you’d want to offer her your coat or a cup of something warm, you’d want to take her from the gallery and prop her by the fire, show her that there’s more to life than this.

‘Poor thing,’ says Jean to an elderly man who is viewing the painting beside her.

He rocks back on his heels as if to take in the entirety of her misery, ‘she doesn’t look too happy, does she?’

Jean doesn’t answer, she’s focussing on something in the painting, something which softens her features and blurs the hazel colour of her eyes. It’ s hanging on the wall behind the model, a painting within a painting, barely discernable amongst the rubble of the shopping but somehow key to everything that’s there, a miniature charcoal sketch of ducks on a canal.

If you have enjoyed this story, please let the author know!

Share This Blog Post

Recommend this blog post to other social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.