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FFM Day 5 - Integrity

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From the outside, the house looked just the same, the flowers were bright with colour and sweet scent, their leaves bushy and proud; the grass was still lush, but only due to the recent thunder storm. The house itself was pristine, no chips in the paint work, no shoddy guttering and no weeds in the driveway, though as soon as the key turned in the lock and the door creaked open, the interior of the house made it’s state known. The staleness of the air was almost overpowering and the murky, life-less light that struggled to push its way through the blinds told a very different story to that of the front garden.

She always had been a woman of contrasts.

On the outside, everything was pristine, faultless and of a very particular kind of prescribed beauty; the inside of her mind, her house and her art were the exact opposite: messy with passion and the desire to follow only the whims of the moment. Her duality was vast, a gulf between them, but her age had long garnered experience and wisdom kept everything she had no desire for others to know expertly hidden.

When I first met her, she was an old, wrinkly seventy-four year old, her face set to a passive smile - you know the classic one pretty much everyone expects to see on their idealistic perfect-grandparent-type. I’d lived next door to her for almost three years before I really saw her character. She was often out of the house, dressed sharply and offering a warm ‘hello’ to all who passed her and long winding stories of decades past to any particularly rowdy children.

On a cold, but bright winter’s Saturday, I happened to be out in my garden and I over heard her shouting, I ran quickly to her aid to find her on the floor, apparently having fallen. She was in a spare bedroom, encircled in a chaotic mess of paint palettes, brushed, glasses of murky water and hundreds of paintings. Before I could scoop her up and take her to the hospital, one in particular caught my eye: it was a figure portrait of a young woman in photographic detail at the epicentre of a mess of angry reds and soulful blues, cut by shards of dazzling white.

That image stayed with me: for as long as her short stay in hospital (luckily, she’d suffered no more than a bit of a shock) and for weeks after until I found the courage to ask about it.

Sat in her prim living room over a floral tea set, she smiled cannily at me.

“It seems you have seen through me, young man,” Her voice held the smoothness of a cornered criminal with one more trick up her sleeve.

“Have I? You seem like more of a mystery than ever you had before,”

“Hmm, we all have our secrets, but only some of us are any good as treating those riddles with any respect,” Her hummed laughter formed and dissipated in her throat without ever crossing her lips. “I think you’d better come with me,” She rose to her feet and led me through the house, that I now saw offered tantalising clues that pointed, only to the keen observer, of the tornado that Eloise was so good at hiding.

Her studio hadn’t changed, the same portrait sat against the wall with the low chair in front and surrounding by side tables. The hundreds of other paintings - some landscape, some abstract and many more portraits all looked on, apparently content enough to bask in the glow of the centrepiece.

“Who is she?” I ask, my mouth suddenly dry,

“Someone I wish I’d known,”

“So it isn’t you?”

“Not for all the wishes in my life,”

“So…” I suddenly felt very stupid and very young. She merely smiled, patiently, and placed a gentle hand on my tricep,

“My dear, we all have the great desires for our own lives, but rarely can we catch up to them for our insecurities have strong legs and weak hearts and we, just the opposite,” She hummed again and looked back at her masterpiece, “I come back to this painting everyday but I just can’t get it right, she’s so taciturn… I’m ashamed to admit it in front of them, but all the other paintings were a distraction from her.”

It’s hard to believe she’d dead. The final three years I spent with Eloise were a magic highlighted with a cold regret, on my part. I half wished I’d been born forty years earlier, closer to her age, so that I could, perhaps have been given the illusion of having a more equal association with her.

(It still dries my mouth to contemplate how many other people I have walked passed because they had the courage to hold their secrets with integrity.)