Today's Reading
She put on her overall, a white coat just like the doctors wore, but smeared with paint and charcoal dust. The alcoholics were arriving in a pack as they always did, to avoid confronting art alone. They were quite talentless with pencil or paint and had originally signed up, Helen suspected, in the hope of nudes. The still life with milk jug and eggs had been a disappointment, but better than falling back on the imagination, which was treacherous terrain indeed. The chief attraction of the class was as a respite from the hours of group therapy which, along with disulfiram, formed the body of their treatment. In the art room there was no requirement to reflect on their addiction or talk about the misfortunes that had brought them low. Instead, they cheerfully mocked each other's and their own efforts and were generous in their praise of anything more or less resembling its subject.
Helen's purpose, as had been made clear at her interview, was to provide them with materials and space and to encourage free expression, but not to teach or diagnose or psychoanalyse or trespass in any way on the work of the medically trained professionals, like Gil. Today, she was distracted from performing even this modest service by thoughts of the weekend ahead. She had failed to share with Gil the complication that was now casting a considerable shadow over their plans.
Three weeks ago, she had accepted an invitation to a family dinner on Saturday night from her brother, Clive, and his wife. The event was to celebrate their daughter's sixteenth birthday and had been in her diary and on her mind as something to look forward to. She was fond of her niece, Lorraine, who was gawky and lacking in confidence, and of Clive, too, up to a point. His wife, June, she just tolerated. Clive had even taken the unusual and thoughtful step of phoning her earlier in the week to ask if she would like their parents to pick her up on their way. She had refused the lift—her father was an erratic driver with a furious temper behind the wheel, and away from it—but confirmed her attendance. Now, she would have to pull out. It was always the way: Gil's availability could never be counted on until the very last minute; hers was simply assumed. Only sickness would suffice as an excuse at such late notice and it would have to be something significant to justify cancellation.
In contemplating the deception that would soon be necessary, Helen started to feel the intestinal cramping and queasiness that often accompanied the contemplation of her moral failings. By the time she came to make the fateful call, it might very well not be a lie at all. The other possibility, that she should honour her original commitment and forgo the weekend with Gil, did not even occur to her.
Roland, one of the more diligent members of the group, beckoned her over, rousing her from her brooding. He had started his sketch without considering the layout of the page. Although the vase, jug, and bowl were arranged in a cluster on the table, on paper the same elements were spread out in a straight line, evenly spaced and untethered to any background. The eggs—tiny, flattened pebbles—floated freely above the two-dimensional bowl. It was like the work of a six-year-old, and yet this was a man who could operate a metal lathe in a workshop, fix every kind of motorcar engine, and bang out the chords of any tune you could sing on a pub piano.
"It doesn't look anything like it," he said, shaking his head. "What am I doing wrong?"
"You're not doing anything wrong," Helen said. "There's no right or wrong about it."
"But I want to get better or what's the point?"
For a moment she wondered whether he was talking about his drawing or his addiction. If only he could be cured of the latter it hardly mattered whether he could draw tulips or milk jugs.
"If it's the composition that you find difficult, perhaps you could focus on just one item."
"Can I start again?"
"Of course," said Helen, retrieving the sketch before he could crumple it into a ball. "Don't destroy this one. We'll put it in your folder."
She was scrupulous and superstitious about preserving her patients' work, keeping it long after they had been discharged. It was both respectful of their efforts and provided evidence of the value of the therapy. Her mentor at the hospital where she worked previously as a volunteer had been emphatic on this point. "You are not here to teach art and your patients are not here to produce art. They are here to get well. It is the process of painting or drawing or sculpting that can help with that. But you must still treat the outcome of that process with respect."
It was an argument on this theme that had first brought her to Gil's attention soon after her arrival at Westbury Park three years previously. Full of enthusiasm for her new role, she had begun by working long after her prescribed hours, cleaning brushes and palettes, sharpening pencils, wiping tables, decorating the studio in readiness for the next day. One evening, returning a rinsed coffee mug to the small room in a distant wing of the hospital where staff could go to make hot drinks or play cards on their break, she walked in on three orderlies sitting together weaving a rug.
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