Читать книгу Bleak Water - Danuta Reah - Страница 14

Eliza’s eighteen months in Madrid slipped past her like a dream. Once Daniel Flynn had arrived, time seemed to kick into overdrive in a whirl of excitement, of art and books and travel and sex and wine.

It was a month since they’d first met. Their relationship had taken off with a giddy speed that still made her uncertain about its status and durability. In her experience, a swift tumble into intimacy was usually followed by an equally – but less pleasant – tumble into indifference or enmity. His arrival in Madrid originally had been a random zag in an unplanned drift around Europe. But he’d prolonged his stay in Madrid, taking a summer rental. Ivan Bakst, the man he’d been travelling with had moved on, but Daniel had stayed. He’d started spending a lot of time at the Prado, his status as a rising young artist making him a welcome visitor, gaining him entry when the museum was closed, and giving him access to off-limits areas, such as the workshops where Eliza was now.

She picked up her magnifying glass. The portrait on the easel in front of her was illuminated by a raking light, showing the brush strokes that a living artist had placed on the canvas almost five hundred years before. Portrait of Sophia. She moved the glass across the surface, studying the paint. The picture had been damaged at the bottom left. She could see the multi-layered structure of the red paint of the woman’s cuff. She made a note.

Daniel would be upstairs in the Flemish rooms, studying the Brueghel. He was beginning to share her obsession. He was searching, he’d told her. He knew what he wanted his next work to be about, but he couldn’t decide on its form. He was an eclectic artist, prepared to use any materials that came to hand and seemingly competent in most traditional and non-traditional media. He found Eliza’s interest in Renaissance art hard to understand. ‘It’s gone, it’s past,’ he’d said once when they’d discussed it. But he was spending more and more time in front of The Triumph of Death, more and more time listening to her ideas about it.

Later that morning, they met for coffee in one of the pavement cafés that abounded in the city. They sat in the sun as the waiter came over to fill their cups and take an order for churros, the sweet batter sticks that Eliza had developed an addiction for.

His exhibition was starting to come together in his head, he told her. He wanted to focus on The Triumph of Death. ‘I want to put it in a current setting,’ he said. ‘A cityscape, industrial ruins. I want to show people a modern triumph of death.’ He had a small reproduction of the Brueghel, and he wanted to pick her brains about its background, the nature of its composition. The waiter put a plate down in front of her and he helped himself.

‘It’s heavily symbolic,’ Eliza said. She dipped her churros into her coffee, and let the crisp sweetness melt on her tongue as she thought about it. ‘It’s a series of tableaux that people would have recognized. You’d need some modern equivalents. Look here, for example –’ She pointed out the fallen woman about to be crushed under the wheels of the death cart. ‘She’s holding a spindle, and the scissors in her other hand are about to cut the thread. That’s Fate. When the thread of your life is cut, you die. I don’t know what that image would mean to a modern audience. Or here, the lovers.’ They were singing to each other, absorbed, close, doomed, as Death added his counterpoint to their duet.