The Novel is starting to flow now!
My St Iveian novel is really starting to flow now and the National Novel Writing Month is helping to push this along. I think I now have most of the plot worked out and I have written the final short chapter.
My morning walks in this beautiful town have been an inspiration and they help me focus on what will get written during the day. I am probably adding about 2,000 words a day and the novel is just passing the 20,000 words mark. I think it will finish up as about 65,000 words.
Here is a picture I took the other morning on one of my walks.
This is a short, rough, so there will be some typos except from the novel.
Roy drifted into life as much from the cold as the fulfilment of sleep. He pulled the duvet a little tighter and tried to return to sleep. He knew sleep could not come now. Tea was always the first part of his day. The little house was freezing as usual at this time of year. No central heating. He haltingly added layer on layer of clothing. Today he felt the desire to work and working in the cold studio meant, firstly, avoiding hypothermia. The hot tea made with two teabags, the same two bags he would use all day, laid down a layer of warmth. The bread in the bin was mouldy; that didn’t really matter so he put a single slice into the toaster. Unbuttered toast in mouth and bucket sized mug of tea in the hand, he opened the door to his rear room. The little house had belonged to Alfred Wallis fifty or more years ago but he had been left the house by his father. It was called a house but it might as well have been a shed for the house was so small that it was hard to imagine a family living here. There were two rooms at the bottom and two rooms at the top. the toilet and primitive bath was in the cellar. The small brown front door led onto the sitting room and kitchen, this room being about ten feet by ten feet. A flight of stairs led to two more rooms ten feet by ten feet. the rearmost of these Roy used as a bedroom. The front upstairs room was a storeroom of sorts containing paints, canvases, paper, frames, ropes, lines and paraphernalia who use he had long forgotten. Some of the things he had inherited with the house and never knew what they were let alone what they were used for. The house was dark and messy the light from the windows filtered through twenty years of dirt, maybe fifty.
As Roy opened the door to the rear ground floor room, that morning in December, the light was like a 100 photographers flashes. As dark as the front room was so the rear room was bright. It was illuminated by floor to roof glass windows. Some ingenious previous owner had arranged for the last section of roof to be made of glass sections so that almost the whole room had one glass side and ceiling. This glass was cleaned once per week by a contractor, at some considerable cost. The windows faced to the North an ideal orientation for art. Roy observed that yesterday’s canvas was lying on the floor. Roy was an abstract artist and worked with the canvas directly on the floor. This allowed him to work directly over the canvas. He dominated it. Over the years he had developed long brushes so that he could paint, at least some of the canvas, standing up. At other times he worked kneeling on the floor beside the canvas and for the larger canvases the discerning eye could determine knee sized impressions and stretch marks in the canvas, despite the use of a kneeling pad. Roy was no different to many artists in St Ives who you see walking about the town on daily errands covered in paint. The distinguishing mark for Roy Blum was that his knees were coated in old dry paint. He seldom changed his outer working clothes they consisted of an old blue smock of a think canvas material and a think pair of blue cord trousers. His working studio was also his showroom. There was a small door in the left-hand wall that opened onto Harry’s Court a small court yard with access to the main road. It was far too dangerous to open the small brown front door that led directly to the main back road.
He kept an old Chesterfield chair that had once, no doubt, resided in a grand house of Cornwall. It’s role now was far more practical but proletariatian. It supported alternately, Roy’s bottom, Roy’s palette or paint pot, Roy’s part finished work and most importantly Roy’s mug of tea when he was working on his knees. He rested his bottom on the arm of the Chesterfield and then slid into the seat. Lifting his eyes to the outside world he gazed upon Portmeor beach. Eight Hundred yards of fine grained golden sand, with a delicate glistening pattern impressed into it from the retreating sea. Roy had worked in this room for over twenty years and, he thought, had never seen the same scene from this window twice. it was as if the pulse of the retreating and advancing sea, like some perpetual engine, powered his work. And what of his work I hear you say! Abstract painting from the heart; Roy would say directly from his emotional bond with this place. For somehow, some unrevealed mechanism, drove this little colony of artists at the extreme end of this English protuberance. St Ives, Cornwall made better artists of everyone who sort out this remote colony.
Tea finish he threw open the side door and placed this little swinging sign outside in the alley. Wallis Studio Open! Not many customers stepped into the studio in December and purchasing customers were rare birds in deed. So it was that at a little after ten o’clock in the morning a smart lady wearing a black pencil skirt above the knee and 2″ purple kitten heels teamed with a purple jumper and a black Macintosh, unbuttoned, stepped over the threshold and ask, ‘Is it OK to look around?’
‘On Yes, do come in and browse,’ Roy said.
Carrying on working once he had had a glance at the newcomer. But he couldn’t ignore the woman for long.
‘It is a rare treat to find such a fair and beautiful maiden in these parts so close to Michaelmas.’
She tossed him, nonchalantly, a sexist pig look.
Not chastened he continued.
‘It is a pleasure to be stopped in my work by real beauty.’
He raised himself from kneeling to admire the woman some more. Looking at her, not with his artists eye but with his lecherous eye, he was stirred by her prim attention to her appearance. The expertly carved dark brown bob suggested money and a traveller from London. ‘If you would like to remove your clothes I’ll be ready to paint you in a moment.’
‘But you are an abstract painter I think. You have no need of models.’
‘True, true but for you I would make an exception.’
He recoiled, with hurt pride, into his chair.
‘Is there anything in particular that your were after?’
‘I need some big abstract canvases for the hotel I run. They need to have blues and seaside colours.’
‘Oh my dear. Blue is not a seaside colour for seaside you need reds and purples not blues.’
‘Do you have any large blue canvases, or should I go somewhere else.’
‘As you can see I am all out of large blue.’
‘Is your artist principle so strong that you couldn’t paint some with blue.’
‘My artist principle drives me I do not drive it,’
‘Oh for goodness sake do you want to take my money or not?’
‘I have little need for much money. If I had some blue canvases you could have them for the price of a pint of ale and an hour in my bed.’
‘God! You ridiculous man. Do you have any more work on show that I can see. I do like the emotion of what you have here.’
‘Luckily I do have some other work on show at the moment. Pop out of here and go to the right you will find another gallery 80 yards on your left. I have a small showing of material entitled Passions of the Sea,’
She stepped out as quickly as she stepped in. Roy thought maybe out quicker than she stepped in. He chuckled to himself – paintings for sex it was just like the old days. The smile was eye to eye. Painting for food and drink in the old days, but now the only currency the Sloop took was Queens coinage. Shame, he thought. He mixed a large aquamarine blue, she’d made him think, and a new mug of tea. He’d hardly finished the mug of tea when the women was back again.
‘Did you see anything you liked? He said.’
‘The Tate doesn’t sell paintings from the exhibition they said. They sent me round to see you.’
‘I want to sleep with you now and I will have the whole exhibition when it closes in March.’
‘While I am very taken with you, you seem like my sort of woman, you’d have to sleep with me twice a day for ten years for my agent to be happy with that bargain.’
They both started to laugh, a small chuckle at first, and then both fell about laughing that filled the studio with a warm resonance.
‘If you have a hour you can buy me a pint and a pie, in that order, and we can talk about a commission.’
He closed up the studio placing the sign ‘Working in the Sloop’ on the door. They chatted about all things on the way to the Sloop and on arrival were surprised to find it closed. For the mourners of David May only!.
‘Come on, she said I am staying at the Porthminster, ‘we can get a decent drink there.’
On arrival at the grand Porthminster hotel they looked a strange couple. To the doorman they looked like a business women and a tramp. His quizzical look was soon quelled by a rather ferocious one from Madeline Albright. They sat in the main lounge looking down onto the town and the beach and she ordered, which Roy thought rare confidence for a woman, ‘a pint of HSD for my friend here and a large Sauvignon Blanc for me. Two further drinks followed and then Madeline Albright said, ‘you will need to shower if you are going to sleep with me!’
Rosie
