Читать книгу Unlikely Paradise - Alan D. Butcher - Страница 9

PROLOGUE

THE WOMAN STANDS IN THE doorway of her squalid shack. Already she thinks of it as hers though she took possession only the week before. She will remember that day forever: January 21, 1957.

In front of her, across the patch of overgrown ground, is the three-storey bulk of the Studio Building, built in Toronto more than forty years before by the wealthy painter Lawren Harris for his artist friends, many of whom would later form the famous Group of Seven. The shack had been a tool shed used by the workers during the construction of the building.

Now, standing in the doorway, looking north as the late afternoon shadows creep up the wall of the Studio Building, she shivers. The cold January wind reminds her that February is yet to come, and the shack will grow even colder. The small stove will fight the plain wooden uninsulated walls — and lose. Today it had already taken six hours to coax from it a tenuous Scrooge-like heat that allowed her to remove just one of the many layers of clothing she wore.

But the previous evening, despite the fact that she could see her breath in the arctic air of the shack, she had curled up beside the stove and read a book with deep pleasure. The light from the single bulb had illuminated the paintings of the Group of Seven that hung on the walls, looking down upon her, and she had been happy.

But now, casting her eyes back to the interior of the shack and seeing there the meagre signs of a sculptor’s studio, she feels a pang of something deeper than mere concern, rather a real fear of … what? Disaster? No, not yet. Still … on the work table there is the model of the small owl. Pretty little thing; it’ll be lovely when cast. Yes … the pang of concern again. When cast. And where, she thought, do I get the money for that casting? It’s cast or eat. Okay, not quite as bad as that — yet. She sighs, a sigh that carries an edge of exasperation. There must be thousands, well, hundreds of people in Toronto, in Canada, who would benefit from my work, my talent. I’ve learned the skills given me by some of the finest sculptors in the world, and my own talents are there, right there in these hands. Isn’t that enough? Is it? Have all those years of study been for nothing? The years here in the Ontario College of Art? The years studying in New York, in Paris? All those years? My whole life?

She turns and goes inside, her mind tormented by the shadows of an uncertain future, and the shades of an often unsatisfying past.