My Tango With Barbara Strozzi Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘
Please forgive me
.’
    ‘
It’s OK
,’ I mouthed back. ‘
I
’
m sorry I hurt you
.’ I was, too.
    At the hospital they examined him in A & E and sent him up to surgery to have the eye removed. When he was out of surgery I sat by his bed and waited for him to come out of the anaesthetic. After a while he put his hand up to the bandages and felt around, then he opened his one eye. ‘I’m glad I’ve still got one eye to see you with,’ he said.
    I said, ‘I’m glad you’re glad.’ I didn’t know what else to say. He seemed humbled by what had happened. I took his hand and said, ‘When you’re ready to go back to work I’ll pose for you again if you want me to.’
    ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Looking at you made me want to paint in a new way. I don’t want to do ugly any more.’ He closed his eye and went to sleep then and I got a minicab back to his place for my bike. It was dark by then. His wife came to the door when she heard the car. She didn’t say anything, just stood there with the light behind her. Then she closed the door and I rode homewith Marianne Faithfull and ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ in my head again.
    Brian was back at work in a week with his eye still bandaged and he said his wife had left him and taken the kids. He didn’t seem to be exactly broken up about it; he told me this was the second wife who’d left him. He had visitation rights for the daughter of the first marriage, now a teenager, and he expected the same for the little son and daughter of the second. I had the feeling that he wasn’t up for a lot of quality time with his kids.
    He wanted me to pose again so I did. When I came out from behind the screen I dropped the kimono and we stood looking at each other.
    ‘What?’ he said.
    ‘Here I am,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’ I didn’t know I was going to say that. Then again, I think I did. And that was how I became Brian Adderley’s mistress. He turned out to be not such a bad guy, or maybe I turned out to be not such a good girl. His new paintings were a whole lot better than the old ones, they were less about him and more about what he was looking at. Which was me most of the time. We drank a lot of cognac and beer and we ate a lot of pizza, Chinese, Thai and Indian take-aways. I put on a few pounds which quite pleased Brian. ‘The more of you, the better,’ he said. His new paintings were better – more sensitive than the earlier ones. I couldn’t help being proud of that.
    When they removed Brian’s eye in hospital the surgeon inserted an implant made of coral compoundwhich was attached to the eye muscles so that it could move naturally. It took four weeks for this to heal, then we went to London and stayed at the Regent Palace Hotel for the two days it took to make the artificial eye.
    The ocularists were two brothers, Karl and Georg (pronounced Gayorg) Lichtheim, who had a studio in Berwick Street. Both of them were tall and thin with grey hair. Karl did all the steps up to the painting, then Georg painted the eye and put in the little red threads for the veins.
    The room where they worked was big and bright and looked something like a dentist’s surgery. Equipment everywhere. Charts on the walls and diplomas from Germany. First they took an impression of the eye socket and made a mould. Then from the mould they made a wax shell which was carved and fitted. The iris button was inserted in this and the position checked for accuracy when the eye moved. From this they cast the plastic shape which would be the finished eye. This was ground down and a temporary plastic shell made. Then the eye was painted and clear plastic was processed over the paint.
    So there we were then. We went back to Humberside and it was business and pleasure as usual. Brian still had an eye for the girls but I was the only one that ever was invited to the studio. Even if he’d had others I wouldn’t have minded – it was an OK arrangement while I finished the course but I