This was an intriguing novel. There were times when I wanted
to skip to the last pages to find out what was going to finally happen
regarding the tortuous mystery of the painting that appears to lie at the heart
of the story- and yet, does it? Since I never skip to the end of a novel, I was
left wondering page after page till the end, yet a full revelation of the story
didn’t seem to be what transpired for me. Many aspects remain conjectural;
though I’m pretty sure a subsequent reading will provide me with a different
outcome. Different interpretations of the plot I feel are quite possible. The
time sequencing is an intricate and very thready web and it was only towards
the end I felt myself grasping some of the inner strands. There are still bits
of that stretchy web that I hope to make better connections with, and characters
that I really want to understand in terms of their purpose in the novel. These
may appear vague statements but I prefer not to write spoilers. I don’t
generally find time to re-read novels but may have to with Painting by Numbers!
I rated it with 4 stars on Goodreads and amazon.
Enjoy an extract...
I rated it with 4 stars on Goodreads and amazon.
Enjoy an extract...
He deposited his coat with the cloakroom
assistant and returned to the painting. The room was busy with wet bedraggled
souls in from the rain trying to warm up. He scanned the floor for the girl but
she wasn’t there. He sat down, adjusted his position and waited. Quite soon,
the triangle reappeared and lines criss-crossed over the candleholder. He
focused on the face reflected in the base. The hardened wax obscured a section
of the image, but there was enough for Jacob to make out the faint pink and
white of a cheek and the dark of an eye socket. This was clearly no optical
illusion as he had previously considered. From his pocket he removed a small
magnifying glass and held it up close to the detail. The image expanded inside
the glass. He twisted his wrist and the image followed the movement of the lens
as it turned. When he pulled back, the image blurred, and when he held it near,
the face seemed to focus and define itself again. The pupil was small and blue,
with a deep shadow under the lower lid. It was staring straight out of the
painting, directly at him. This was impossible. The candleholder was on the
floor. The angle of reflection was too flat. For anyone to get their head that
straight they’d have to twist their neck sideways. It had to be something
deliberately imposed upon the image, a calculated insertion.
He stopped abruptly, and turned. The girl was
standing in the entrance, staring at him. He was aware of how odd he must have
looked, hunched over, peering at the painting through a magnifying glass. He
sat down and pretended to write something in his notebook. She approached and
stood behind him. He could hear her breathing; the same click and wheeze as she
inhaled. The hairs on his neck started to rise. She walked around, slowly, her
body shifting sideways towards the bench. Now she was directly in front of him,
blocking his view. She inched closer, to within two feet. He looked up. She was
staring over his shoulder at the painting opposite. Closer still. He could
smell the rain on her clothes. He attempted to speak but his mouth was dry. He
tried again.
“Excuse me, miss, but I’m trying to...” He
pointed, narrowly missing her leg. She looked down at him and smiled.
“I’m sorry, am I in your way?”
“Well, eh... yes, sorry.” She stepped to one
side, but remained too close. “I’ve got a thing about this painting,” she said.
Jacob turned round.
“Oh, the Rubens. Yes, that one is beautiful.”
She sat down on the bench facing in the opposite
direction. “Wouldn’t it be great...” she paused.
“Sorry?”
“Wouldn’t it be fine just to hang in a moment
like that, to lock yourself into the frame?” He glanced at her and felt the
longing return. He looked away.
“And no one would ever know,” she suggested,
“never really know what you’d done before and what you were about to do?”
“Well I hadn’t—”
“You come in here a lot, don’t you? I see you,”
she interrupted.
“Yes, I suppose I do,” Jacob smiled. “But I
can’t remember seeing you in here before,” he lied.
“Oh, I’m here.” She wiped a droplet of water
from her cheek. “I”m always here, too, except you are there and I am here.” She
nodded at her own canvas and then turned to him. “Tell me, why do you like your
picture so much?”
“It’s difficult to say.”
“I’ll tell you why I like mine, if you like.”
She smiled.
“Yes well, if you want to, I mean, if you can.”
“Stillness,” she said, pausing as though to
demonstrate the meaning. “I like it when nothing moves, when everything is
suspended and held in one perfect, significant moment. Out here there’s too
much movement, not enough certainty. The painting helps me deal with that. I
don’t know if that makes any sense.”
“Oh yes.” He shifted his weight onto his left
side and twisted discreetly so that he could look at her more completely. Her
hand dropped onto her knee, the palm upturned and open. The pulse twitched in
her little finger, up and down in a slow relaxed rhythm. She breathed in and
continued.
“I come in here and hope that one day it will
happen. If I look at the picture long enough, if I focus my mind on the whole
and on the detail, I’ll find it, you know, the stillness.” She looked at him. “Sorry,
that might sound a bit weird.”
“No no, quite the contrary.”
“For me,” she continued, “it’s a bit like your
glass on the edge of the table.”
Jacob turned back to his painting.
“We don’t know why it’s there or who put it
there or what’s in it. We can only guess. And we also know that sooner or later
someone or something will knock it over and it’ll smash into pieces on the
floor. There’s a kind of inevitability about it. That’s its destiny. But inside
that moment up there, we know the glass can never fall. It will always remain,
locked inside its own space. And yet we continue to watch and wait. Maybe it
will, maybe it won’t. We don’t really know.” She turned her hand over and
gripped her knee. ”Out here in the real world, the glass would probably fall
and we would feel some initial relief, some deep felt satisfaction hearing it
shatter. We would nod our heads and say, ‘Told you so. That’s fate.’ But our
conceit always turns to feelings of failure, even resentment that the girl let
it fall because we let it fall.” She paused and breathed in again. Jacob
watched the whites of her knuckles pulse as she tightened her grip. “And in the
end, all that is left is movement and the chaos of a shattered glass. Our
belief in fate is just an excuse to avoid the sheer terror of chaos and our
inability to control it.”
“But if you believe in fate,” Jacob said, “then
surely there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”
“Who said I believed in fate?”
“Well, I
thought—”
“Oh no, that’s the beauty of it,” she
interrupted. “You don’t have to believe in it. It just happens. Belief is
irrelevant. We intervene and it’s fate, we do nothing and it’s fate, too. Fate
makes us think that our options are limited while at the same time providing us
with infinite possibility. You see, the stillness up there removes fate. It
removes the chaos of possibility and all of those things we believe govern our
lives.” She paused again and looked at her painting.
“But
isn’t that the exciting thing about life?” Jacob said. “You never know where
you are going or what will happen next? Surely free will is by definition
chaotic. It gives us the freedom to choose our own pathways and our own
infinite possibilities.”
“You think so? You think that you have free
will?”
“Yes, I do.”
“That you can control chaos?”
“I’m a scientist, I suppose I hope that I will
be able to explain it and understand it at least.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “Free will is just an
illusion, a con trick, cooked up by fate.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fate dangles free will in front of our faces
like a carrot that we pursue but never quite reach. It’s like when you go to
the supermarket and you stare at the shelves stocked with endless varieties of
breakfast cereals. We sweat over which one to choose, which one is the
tastiest, the healthiest, the best. But in the end it doesn’t really matter
because they all taste and look and cost the same. Yet every week we pace up
and down the aisles searching for something different, something special to
brighten up our mornings, change our lives, expand our healthy lifestyle
options. You see the great possibility of fate leaves us restless, neurotic and
exhausted, it lets us believe that we have the free will to choose. But what is
the point of free will when there is no alternative? In the end our lives are
desperately unfulfilled because of it.”
“But wasn’t it the same great possibility that
drove these artists to create these beautiful paintings?”
“No, I think they were trying to retreat or
escape from the relentless assault of chaos.” Her palm started rubbing on the
fabric of her jeans. “Fate is a bully. It feeds on the fear of what might be.
It is always in our blood and psyche, waiting, preparing and perpetually
fulfilling its own meaningless obsession.”
She paused, her hand stopped moving. Then she
smiled at Jacob. “And that’s why I like this painting. Because fate has been
sealed inside the frame forever. The future is locked up and safe; dried out
and stretched across the canvas. I find it comforting to know that there is at
least one thing in life I can cling to as a complete certainty, a moment
perfectly frozen and impervious to the abusive nature of fate.”
She wiped the tip of her nose with her finger.
Jacob reached into his pocket and produced a packet of handkerchiefs.
“Thanks.” She blew hard and the sound
reverberated around the room. She offered it back to him.
“Keep them.”
“Sorry I went on. Once I start I find it
difficult to stop.”
“I noticed.”
She giggled and blew her nose again. “I suppose
I’ve got a bit of a thing about fate.”
“I could have told you that.” They smiled and
their eyes met for the first time. There was something very sad and deeply
troubled about her. He wanted to wrap his arms around her shoulders and make
her feel better about herself and the world.
“Would you like to go for a drink?” The words
spluttered out of his mouth and were airborne before he could stop them.
She hesitated for a moment. “OK, I’m Jude, by
the way.”
“Hi Jude, I’m Jacob. Good to meet you.” They
shook hands awkwardly and stood up to go.
