happen to me without Jean – he was there to cushion all the blows. What was I going to do about work? Thank God my dad had drilled it into my head about being careful with money in an attempt to prepare me for ‘the days of the flooding'. Most of what I had earned was put aside. He was right: life was all about trying to make yourself as secure as possible so nobody could come along with any surprises. After hours of sitting there and thinking, I decided to drag myself to the Tate.
For a Monday morning it was busy, with people flocking to see the wardrobe stuffed with worldly possessions. Thankfully there was a Matisse exhibition on. I always liked Matisse. He also studied law and his father was furious when he said he wanted to give it up to paint. He was a great painter and didn’t begin to paint until after recovering from an illness. They say it was providence that sent him that illness to set him on a different path, that only looking back do we know exactly why things have happened.
It had been almost ten years since I’d picked up a paintbrush. I could have continued to paint as a ‘hobby’ after I began my law degree but it was always all or nothing with me. Even when I was angry or sad and had a desperate urge to splatter the emotion across a blank canvas, I resisted and picked up my books and studied instead. Studied and did what everyone else wanted me to do, and became who others wanted me to be.
The rooms where Matisse’s pictures were displayed were not as busy as downstairs. But as soon as I walked in I could feel the warmth. His pictures gave me energy, their raw emotions expressed with an explosion of pure, intense colours. There was no option but to stare at the paintings, to feel them: violets to stir feelings placed next to sunny, optimistic yellows, vibrant oranges against laconic blues and sober greens floating among a sea of passionate cerulean red. When I stared into Matisse’s colours I could see other colours that weren’t really there; realities that were invented; somewhere I could escape.
Matisse’s paintings carried me into his world without me even realising, making me forget who or where I was. He painted windows that let you fly in and out; bold strips of colour like the green that ran along his wife’s nose and made you feel you could balance on it, look at her every feature and see what he saw; hues of reality next to splashes of imagination. I wandered around for hours, drawn into his world, lost in the depths of his colour, soaking up every ray, searching for the shadows that he had skilfully eliminated. In every painting, I found peace.
I went to have lunch in the cafeteria and found that my thoughts had become calmer, and because I didn’t want to think any more deeply I concentrated on the noise that the cutlery and crockery were making, watching the tourists, many of whom had pulled out their guidebooks to see which exhibitions they would visit next.
Before leaving the Tate I visited the shop and picked up a book on Matisse. I randomly flicked through the pages and stopped at one of his quotes:
‘In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.’
I put the book back. It wasn’t a sign – dead people were unable to speak.
With a few more hours to kill before going back home, I decided to take a walk in Green Park. Jean Michel didn’t live too far from there and sometimes we had gone walking together. It was an effort to drag him out as he really didn’t like walking. He didn’t really enjoy staying in and watching videos, either, as I did. He liked finding new restaurants and eating out; he would drive halfway across the country to find a good restaurant. He loved going to the casino and betting all his money on one number. I was intrigued by his boldness, but looking back I should have known then that I would never have been enough – life with me was probably boring, with my constant refusal to go away with him and rushing off home to my parents instead. But he said we were good together, that I brought calmness to his life; but then he said many things, most of which probably weren’t even true.
I switched my phone back on and the message box was full. All of them were from him, frantic messages, every one saying how much he loved me. I so desperately wanted to believe him, to speak to him and have him put his arms around me and tell me that there had been some terrible mistake, that he could explain it all, but instead I made myself delete the messages one by one. Time, that was what I needed, time to sort out my head. I bought a coffee, sat on the park bench and thought more about the quote before setting off for home.
No sooner had I turned the key, my mum was waiting anxiously, rolling pin in one hand, telling me that Raj would be calling at seven-thirty.
‘You already told me that before I left,’ I said.
‘Good day?’ my dad asked, turning back to watch the television before I had replied.
What was I supposed to say? That Henri Matisse had given me some much-needed peace.
‘Yes, good day.’
I went upstairs, quickly had a shower, and bang on time the phone rang. No unpredictability there, then.
‘Hi Nina, it’s Raj.’
‘Hello.’
There was a moment’s hesitation and then he took control.
‘I hear you’re a lawyer and working in the city?’
‘Yes, and you?’ I asked in a half-hearted attempt to deflect the conversation away from myself.
‘No, I’m not a lawyer,’ he laughed. Well, it was more of a grunting sound. And why did he laugh? I mean, if the man thought that was humour we might as well put the phone down now.
‘No,’ he said, gathering himself together, ‘I work for a consultancy firm as an accountant.’
There wasn’t much to say to that.
‘So what do you like doing?’ he began again.
There was no stopping this man; he careered straight past the silences and kept on going.
Be kind to him, Nina, talk. It’s not his fault, none of it is his fault. What did I like doing? Suddenly I felt a sense of panic. It was the realisation that my life up until that moment had revolved solely around Jean and work. I had to say something, and so, like an eight-year-old, reeled off a list of hobbies. ‘Reading, cinema, watching TV, painting.’
‘Oh, painting? What do you paint with?’
‘A paintbrush,’ I replied.
He laughed again. ‘Very good, that’s very good, I see you too have got a sense of humour. I’ve dabbled in watercolours but I’m not very good,’ he added.
Then there was another silence.
‘Seen any good films?’ he asked.
I said the first thing that came into my head. ‘The Matrix.’
‘I saw that on the plane to Japan.’
For the first time he had my attention. Japan? What was he doing in Japan?
‘Japan?’ I enquired.
‘Yes, I have to travel for work and so I extend my stay wherever possible. I love to find out about other cultures. It’s important to expand the mind.’
‘Where else have you been?’
He listed practically half the countries in the atlas but not in a pretentious way. I stopped him at Chile and asked what it was like, and for the first time I sensed he was being himself.
‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ I said, and to my surprise he did not come out with a cheesy line like, ‘I’ll take you’ or ‘Maybe you’ll go there soon.’ Instead, he said it was beautiful.
There was a pause but now it wasn’t awkward.
‘Perhaps you’d like to meet up?’ he asked.
I had images of my mother, a protagonist in an Indian film, wailing and beating her chest in despair at the thought of me saying no, so I said ‘Yes'. It would be just one meeting and