An Inch of Ashes (37 page)

‘I’ve finished.’

He looked up distractedly. ‘Finished?’

She laughed. ‘The portrait, Ben. I’ve finished it.’

‘Ah...’ He stood up, stretching, then looked across at her again. ‘That was quick.’

‘Hardly quick. You’ve been sitting for me the best part of three hours.’

‘Three hours?’ He laughed strangely. ‘I’m sorry. I was miles away.’

‘Miles?’

He smiled. ‘It’s nothing. Just an old word, that’s all...’

She moved aside, letting him stand before the canvas, anxious to know what he thought of it. For a moment she looked at it anew, trying to see it for the first time, as he was seeing it. Then she looked back at him.

He was frowning.

‘What is it?’ she asked, feeling a pulse start in her throat.

He put one hand out vaguely, indicating the canvas. ‘Where am I?’

She gave a small laugh. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This...’ He lifted the picture from its mechanical easel and threw it down. ‘It’s shit, Catherine. Lifeless shit!’

She stood there a moment, too shocked to say anything, unable to believe that he could act so badly, so...
boorishly
. She glared at him, furious at what he’d done, then bent down and picked the painting up. Where he had thrown it down the frame had snapped, damaging the bottom of the picture. It would be impossible to repair.

She clutched the painting to her, her deep sense of hurt fuelling the anger she felt towards him.

‘Get out!’ she screamed at him. ‘Go on, get out of here, right now!’

He turned away, seemingly unaffected by her outburst, then leaned over the bed, picking up the folder he had brought with him. She watched him, expecting him to leave, to go without a further word, but he turned back, facing her, offering the folder.

‘Here,’ he said, meeting her eyes calmly. ‘This is what I mean. This is the kind of thing you should be doing, not that crap you mistake for art.’

She gave a laugh of astonishment. He was unbelievable.

‘You arrogant bastard.’

She felt like slapping his face. Like smashing the canvas over his smug, self-complacent head.

‘Take it,’ he said, suddenly more forceful, his voice assuming an air of command. Then, strangely, he relented, his voice softening. ‘Just look. That’s all. And afterwards, if you can’t see what I mean, I’ll go. It’s just that I thought you were different from the rest. I thought...’

He shrugged, then looked down at the folder again. It was a simple art folder – the kind you carried holo flats in – its jet-black cover unmarked.

She hesitated, her eyes searching his face, looking for some further insult, but if anything he seemed subdued, disappointed in her. She frowned, then set the painting down.

‘Here,’ she said, taking the folder from him angrily. ‘You’ve got nerve, I’ll give you that.’

He said nothing. He was watching her now, expectantly, those dark eyes of his seeming to catch and hold every last atom of her being, their gaze disconcerting her.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, the folder in her lap, looking up at him through half-lidded eyes.

‘What is this?’

‘Open it and see.’

For a long time she was silent, her head down, her fingers tracing the shapes and forms that stared up at her from the sheaf of papers that had been inside the folder. Then she looked up at him, wide-eyed, all anger gone from her.

‘Who painted these?’

He sat down beside her, taking the folder and flicking through to the first of the reproductions.

‘This here is by Caravaggio. His
Supper At Emmaus
, painted more than six hundred years ago. And this... this is Vermeer, painted almost sixty years later. He called it
The Artist’s Studio
. And this is by Rembrandt, his
Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer
, painted ten years earlier. And this is
Laocoon
by El Greco...’

She put her hand on his, stopping him from turning the print over, staring at the stretched white forms that lay there on the page.

‘I’ve... I’ve never seen anything like these. They’re...’

She shivered, then looked up at him, suddenly afraid.

‘Why have I never seen them? I mean, they’re beautiful. They’re
real
somehow...’

She stopped, suddenly embarrassed, realizing now what he had meant. She had painted him in the traditional way – the only way she knew – but he had known something better.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked, her fingers tracing the pale, elongated forms. ‘Who are they?’

He gave a small laugh, then shook his head. ‘The old man lying down in the centre, he’s Laocoon. He was the priest who warned the Trojans not to allow the wooden horse into Troy.’

She gave a little shake of her head, then laughed. ‘Troy? Where was Troy? And what do you mean by wooden horse...?’

He laughed, once again that openness, that strange naturalness of his surfacing unexpectedly. ‘It was an ancient tale. About a war that happened three thousand years ago between two small nation-states. A war that was fought over a woman.’

‘A woman?’

‘Yes...’ He looked away, a faint smile on his lips.

‘How strange. To fight a war over a woman.’ She turned the page. ‘And this?’

Ben was silent for a time, simply staring at the painting, then he looked up at her again. ‘What do you make of it?’

She gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t know. It’s different from the others. They’re all so... so dark and intense and brooding. But this... there’s such serenity there, such knowledge in those eyes.’

‘Yes...’ He laughed softly, surprised by her. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The painter was a man called Modigliani, and it was painted some three hundred years after those others. It’s called
Last Love
. The girl was his lover, a woman called Jeanne Hebuterne. When he died she threw herself from a fifth-floor window.’

She looked up at him sharply, then looked back down at the painting. ‘Poor woman. I ...’ She hesitated, then turned, facing him. ‘But why, Ben? Why haven’t I heard of any of these painters? Why don’t they teach them in college?’

He looked back at her. ‘Because they don’t exist. Not officially.’

‘What do you mean?’

He paused, then shook his head. ‘No. It’s dangerous. I shouldn’t have shown you. Even to know about these...’

He made to close the folder but she stopped him, flicking through the remaining paintings until she came to one near the end.

‘This,’ she said. ‘Why have I never seen this before?’

Ben hesitated, staring at the print she was holding out to him. He had no need to look at it, it was imprinted so firmly in his memory, but he looked at it anyway, trying to see it fresh – free of its context – as she was seeing it.

‘That’s Da Vinci,’ he said softly. ‘Leonardo Da Vinci. It’s called
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist
and it was painted exactly seven hundred and eight years ago.’

She was silent a moment, studying the print, then she looked up at him again, her eyes pained now, demanding.

‘Yes, Ben, but why? And what do you mean, they don’t exist? These paintings exist, don’t they? And the men who painted them – they existed, didn’t they? Or is this all some kind of joke?’

He shook his head, suddenly weary of it all. Was he to blame that these things had gone from the world? Was it his fault that the truth was kept from them? No. And yet he felt a dreadful burden of guilt, just knowing this. Or was it guilt? Wasn’t it something to do with the feeling he’d had ever since he’d come here, into the City? That feeling that only
he
was real? That awful feeling of distance from everything and everyone – as if, when he reached out to touch it all, it would dissolve, leaving him there in the midst of nothingness, falling back towards the earth.

He heard the old man’s voice echo in his head.
Ghosts? Why there’s nothing here but ghosts!
and shivered.

Was that why he had shown her these? To make some kind of connection? To reassure himself that he wasn’t the only living, breathing creature in this vast mirage – this house of cards?

Maybe. But now he realized what he had done. He had committed her. Seduced her with these glimpses of another world. So what now? Should he back off and tell her to forget all that she’d seen, or should he take her one step further?

He looked at her again, taking her hand, for that one brief moment balanced between the two courses that lay open to him. Then he smiled and squeezed her hand.

‘Have you ever read
Wuthering Heights
?’

She hesitated, then nodded.

‘Good. Then I want you to read it again. But this time in the original version. As it was first written, three hundred and sixty years ago.’

‘But that’s...’ She laughed then looked down, disturbed by all of this. ‘What are you doing, Ben? Why are you showing me these things?’

‘To wake you up. To make you see all of this as I see it.’ He looked away from her, his eyes moving back to the broken painting on the easel.

‘I met someone yesterday. A
Lu Nan Jen
. You know, what they call an oven man. He painted, too. Not like you. He didn’t have your skill with a brush, your eye for classical composition. But he did have something you haven’t – something the whole of Han art hasn’t – and that’s vision. He could see clear through the forms of things. Through to the bone. He understood what made it all tick and set it down – clearly, powerfully. For himself. So that he could understand it all. When you came up to me in the Café Burgundy I had been sitting there thinking about him – thinking about what he’d done; how he’d spent his life trying to set down that vision, that
dream
of his. And I wondered suddenly what it would be like to wake that in someone. To make it blossom in the soul of someone who had the talent to set it down as it really ought to be set down. And then... there you were, and I thought...’

She was watching him closely now, her head pushed forward, her lips parted in expectation.

‘You thought what?’

He turned back, looking at her. ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

She sat back, disappointed. ‘Nothing. Why?’

‘Would you like to come with me somewhere? Somewhere you’ve never been before?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Where?’

‘Somewhere no one ever goes. Beneath here. Into the Clay.’

Ben had hired a man to walk ten paces in front of them, his arc lamp held high, its fierce white light revealing the facades of old greystone buildings, their stark shapes edged in deepest shadow.

Ben held a second, smaller lamp: a lightweight affair on a long, slender handle. Its light was gentler, casting a small, pearled pool of brightness about the walking couple.

Catherine held his hand tightly, fascinated and afraid. She hadn’t known. She had thought it all destroyed. But here it was, preserved, deserted, left to the darkness; isolated from the savage wilderness surrounding it.

As they walked, Ben’s voice filled the hollow darkness, speaking from memory, telling her the history of the place.

‘Unlike all previous architects, the man who designed City Earth made no accommodation for the old. The new was everything to him. Even that most simple of concessions – the destruction of the old – was, as far as possible, bypassed. The tallest buildings were destroyed, of course, but the rest was simply built over, as if they really had no further use for the past.’ He turned, looking back at her. ‘What we have now is not so much a new form of architecture as a new geological age. With City Earth we entered the Technozoic. All else was left behind us, in the Clay.’

He paused, pointing across at a rounded dome the guide’s lamp had revealed. ‘Have you ever noticed how there are no domes in our City, even in the mansions of First Level? No. There are copies of Han architecture, of course, but of the old West there’s nothing. All that elegance of line has been replaced by harder shapes – hexagons, octagons, an interlacing of complex crystalline structures, as if the world had frozen over.’

‘But that...’ She pointed up at the curved roof of the dome. ‘That’s beautiful.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘But why?’

‘The desire for conformity, I guess. Things like that dome induce a sense of individuality in us. And they didn’t want that.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

Ben looked about him. The circle of light extended only so far. Beyond, it was as if the great stone buildings faded into uncreated nothingness. As if they had no existence other than that which the light gave them in its passage through their realm. Ben smiled at the thought, realizing that this was a clue to what he himself was doing. For he – as artist – was the light, creating that tiny circle of mock-reality about him as he passed.

He turned back, looking at the girl, answering her.

‘When it all fell apart, shortly before City Earth was built, there was an age of great excess – of individual expression unmatched in the history of our species. The architects of City Earth – Tsao Ch’un, his Ministers and their servants – identified the symptom as the cause. They saw the excesses and the extravagance, the beauty and the expression as cultural viruses and sought to destroy them. But there was too much to destroy. They would have found it easier to destroy the species. It was too deeply ingrained. So, instead, they tried to mask it – to bury it beneath new forms. City Earth was to be a place where no one wanted for anything. Where everything the physical self could need would be provided for. It was to be Utopia – the world beyond Peach-Blossom River.’

She frowned at him, not recognizing the term, but he seemed almost unaware of her now. Slowly he led her on through the labyrinth of streets, the doubled lights, like sun and moon, reflected in the ceiling high above.

‘But the City was a cage. It catered only for the grounded, physical being. It did not cater for the higher soul – the winged soul that wants to fly.’

She laughed, surprised by him. But of course one caged birds. Who had ever heard of a bird flying free?

The walls closed about them on either side. They were walking now through a narrow back alley, the guide only paces in front of them, his lamp filling the darkness with its strong white light. For a moment they could almost have been walking in the City.