Ulysses turned to her. Said, Oh yeah? Turned back to watch the kids.
I think it’s serious.
He nodded.
I’m taking it slow. Just wanted you to hear it from me.
Thanks, Peg.
She stood up. She studied him. Always him. They needed to stop having sex. She told him so. Not fair on Ted. Ted’s your bloke, is he? And she nodded. OK, he said, but he knew they wouldn’t.
Can I take Alys to the gallery tomorrow? he said.
Course you can.
Morning all right?
All day if you want.
He laughed but he knew she was serious.
You’re a good mum, Peg.
No I’m not but it’s good of you to say. Your mum was a good mum, Temps. That’s what a good mum is. Mine was competition.
The next day, the Whitechapel Gallery felt cool out of the sun. Alys ran on ahead and scanned the paintings because she knew what she was looking for. She settled, eventually, on an area of floor where she’d be left undisturbed. She opened her sketchbook and took the pencil sharpener out of her sock. Ulysses knelt down. He collected the shavings in his hand and put them in his pocket because that was his job. And for an hour and a half, out of the corner of his eye, he watched the kid produce her own version of a painting by Joan Eardley: children sitting on a pavement reading a comic. A world she understood.
She was five. Would she remember that moment as completely as he saw it?
Probably not. But she would remember the day because years later, she would tell people about it. The cool of the floor on her bare legs, the lines she’d made on the page. She would remember how a morning became an afternoon, how people stared at the paintings on the wall and talked about them in serious tones. How the gentle murmur became white noise and calmed her. How Ulysses’ gaze made her think she was something, or something enough. How she was glad to be away from her mother. How she saw a woman dressed as a man and thought how interesting life could be, might be. The type of day that showed her where she ended, and the world began.
Ulysses left the kid drawing. He wandered through the hall of paintings. Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurter. Dorothy Cunningham.
Since his conversation with Evelyn during that long dark drive back to the albergo, he’d thought about the gallery a lot. How Evelyn had laughed at the snobbery of art, said that the responsibility of privilege must always be to raise others up. Standing there now, he equated that conversation with the space around him. Paintings by local schoolchildren were exhibited on the wall opposite, and he thought maybe this was what she’d been talking about. Nearby, an artist began talking about her work.
From the back the woman could have been a man with her short hair, rolled-up shirtsleeves and high-waisted slacks, but her voice was unmistakeably feminine. She was referred to as Miss Cunningham – Dorothy Cunningham, he presumed. He was drawn to the rounded explanation of her craft, her brow intelligent and open to the questions fired at her from the front. From considered to acute spontaneity was how she described her new work. He let those words roll about his tongue.
Ulysses looked over to the kid. Still in her quiet world, sucking a pencil.
The catch of conversation from a passing couple and a brief reference to Spain propelled him back to 1938 – a year after his parents had died, and the year Picasso’s Guernica came to the gallery. It had travelled the world by then, raising funds for the rebels fighting Franco. That’s why Ulysses had gone to see it – his first ever exhibition – lured by a romantic and fallacious idea of war. The gallery had been a campaign headquarters of sorts and price of admission, for those who couldn’t afford the entrance fee, had been set at a pair of boots. He’d gone back the next day and left a pair of his father’s just inside the doorway. On the leather tongue he’d written, Good luck.
The voice of Dorothy Cunningham drew him towards the confluence of same thought same time. Yes, she said, I did see the Guernica.
A surge of electricity spluttered up his spine.
I agree, she said. We learnt the hard way. That there must always be a moral argument against the march of Fascism.
Ulysses wondered what his response to the painting might be if he were to see it now.
Not at all, said Dorothy Cunningham. There was no heroism in Picasso’s depiction of war. No victory, only horror.
The deliberate bombing of civilians on market day, said Ulysses.
Dorothy Cunningham turned towards him.
We weren’t immune, he said. It wasn’t just them who did stuff. We did whatever it took, too.
Everyone looking at him. The kid looking at him.
And it was this she would remember: his voice resonant in the stillness. People listening to him, not laughing. She stood up, marched over to him and held his hand. Her exquisite moment of ownership. The day when he became hers.