Poppyland Read Free

well for you.’
    â€˜Thank you.’ Once I began crying about my mother, it was hard to stop; all the regret I felt for not having seen her, and not having liked her much got muddled with the relief that she was not alive to drink herself to death now. Hans Stettjen’s kindness and his interest and his capability all reminded me of what wasimpossible between me and my mother. It’s funny how much easier it is to express a whole range of emotions on a canvas than it is to sit face to face in a family and talk. Somewhere along the way I got scared of saying anything to my mother because I knew she was fragile and it might be too much for her. The small phrases people use can echo in a child’s head and I didn’t dare ask her what she meant when she shook me, aged five, after I had spilled ink across the whole of the sitting-room sofa, and said fiercely, ‘The trouble with you is that you can’t keep still. You even got out of your cot on the wrong side and everything since then has been a struggle.’ She had then stalked off and the door of her room had closed with a crisp click. I had told Lucy, my older sister, and she had looked very frightened. ‘Which is the wrong side?’ she whispered.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I wept in reply. ‘Mummy didn’t say.’
    The next telephone conversation I had with Hans Stettjens was more businesslike: ‘Let’s talk about how you would like them hung,’ he said. ‘The nudes are very arresting; I see them as a triptych, no?’
    â€˜No,’ I almost yelled. ‘They don’t go together at all. Well, not close together. They need space. Everyone needs space, Hans.’
    For me, hanging an exhibition with my pictures in it is an act as intimate as the removal of my clothes. I had never imagined that I wouldn’t do it myself, oreven be there for the final adjusting and changing of light and space between the work. And I hardly have the vocabulary for talking about them and how they should be. I can be articulate on paper or canvas, but not in conversation. I don’t actually even know my right and left, which baffled Hans when he was hanging my pictures with me on the phone guiding him.
    â€˜Yes, do it there! Do you see? I mean up a bit from the green one on the same side as her hair and the tree.’
    â€˜The left, you mean?’
    â€˜Do I?’ I was waving my arms in front of me with the phone under my chin, mouthing at my sister Lucy to tell me which was left and which was right.
    Hans Stettjens was unfailingly polite. ‘Yes, very good indeed, left it is,’ he said as though I had performed a rabbit-from-hat miracle. I must say, it felt a bit of a miracle. I have never shown my work before without seeing the gallery space and the pictures hanging in it. And now I am about to arrive and they will all be there, ready and waiting for me. I was trying to explain to Lucy why it was weird, and the only comparison I could find was a bit random.
    â€˜Well, Lucy, imagine if you had a baby and it wasn’t with you one day and you went to a party and the baby was there all dressed and ready with someone else.’
    I knew exactly what I meant and how I would feel; I could imagine a baby all dressed in a red satin outfit looking all wrong, but Lucy raised her eyebrows and nodded in a special ‘You are bonkers’ way and said,‘Mmm. Maybe, but I haven’t got a baby, so it’s hard to imagine any of it, Grace, and it’s a lot of fuss to make when we’ve got to deal with all this business of Mum, you know.’
    I groaned, then bit my lip. She wasn’t going to understand and it didn’t matter that she couldn’t. Lucy has always been very down to earth, and she couldn’t understand the battles I had with Mum.
    â€˜Oh well, just believe me when I tell you that I need to hang my own show, it’s very personal, I always do it myself.’
    Lucy