Page 11 of The Edge of Always

It’s on the first floor, where there’s an enormous picture of Earl on the wall. He’s younger than I ever knew him, but wearing the same top hat he always wore. Earl Josef Spencer, it says underneath the picture. ‘Une Vie en Couleur’.

My hands are shaking slightly as I take my sunglasses off my head and put them in my bag, as I reach the long bright corridor. It’s jarring, since it’s so different from how Earl lived, all this grandeur and space. It’s overwhelming.

There’s a small crowd of people clustered at the end of the exhibition, looking at a single painting on the wall. That must be it – the Edge of Always. I make myself walk slowly, recognising the other pieces on the walls, how the colours jump out at you. I can chart the final years of my childhood through these paintings, and it’s both miraculous and unbearably hard seeing them again. I had so much hope then. Losing that hope hurts more than almost anything else I’ve lost.

I can’t dwell on that now, though. Not when the paintings are right here, dragging me back to The Time Before. Reminding me, against my will, how colourful the past was. It’s like coming home, seeing them again:

The Weight of Light

Longing for Human Connection

Montmartre in Motion

The Juxtaposition of Life and Death

The Rubicon

If I had more time, I could go there, to the places he painted. They’re all in Paris. But there isn’t enough time. There’s never enough time.

I wait at the back of the small crowd, stepping forward only when someone else moves.

It’s there, and it takes my breath away.

The Edge of Always.

Oh, Earl.

It is, it’s different from his other work.

Gone are the bright, vivid colours that he favoured. Instead, this piece is almost pastel. There are greens and blues, thick brush strokes that sweep across the bottom of the canvas, blurring the distinction between land and water. I’m certain that it’s Northumberland, the way the coast juts over the sea, all broken lines, like a jigsaw; the sea and land coming together as one. The greens and blues give way to lighter colours, pastel pinks and pale yellows, white clouds that draw the eye up.

And there I am, right in the centre, my hair blown out in all directions by some invisible wind, red and vivid against the background. My eyes are sad. I thought they were neutral, but here up close, I think I’m sad. It’s clear that it’s me. My eyes, my hair, the shape of my face. But it’s also the fact that I’m in Northumberland, and that’s the place that I’m meant to be. I’ve often felt that I couldn’t exist in any other place. There’s some symmetry between the land and me.

There’s a shadow too, a patch of green only just darker than the rest. You have to look closely to see it.

Great art isn’t what you see; it’s how much you feel when you look at it. And I feel so many things when I look at this painting that it’s impossible to untangle all of the threads.

I’m immortal in this painting, and I can’t look away. I stumble backwards and sit on a concrete bench. People don’t block my view, so I sit some more, trying to commit every stroke to memory. It’s almost whimsical and so beautiful.

There’s a line of writing in the bottom corner under Earl’s signature. I squint at it.

The answer is always in the art.

I tilt my head to the side, wondering what Earl meant, and catch a couple of people looking at me and then the painting. I ignore them, consider putting my sunglasses on. I’d do it except for the fact that they’d dull my view.

It wasn’t exactly true, what I said to the Deathers about Earl’s art not incorporating death. Earl might not have painted death overtly, but his work was often inspired by it. He’d said this once when the local newspaper had run an article on him, and they’d asked him what his favourite thing to paint was.

‘The moment before death,’ he answered simply. ‘I imagine that there’s an explosion of colour, in the seconds before we die. A last hurrah, if you will, before eternal darkness.’ The reporter from the Bamburgh Echo hadn’t really known what to make of him after that. But Earl had just chuckled at his startled expression and carried on. ‘Whatever question you ask, my friend, death is always the answer.’

After that, the other kids on the caravan park had avoided him for a few months. They’d dared each other to knock on his door, until Mae had punched one of them on the nose.

But this isn’t a painting of death.

The answer is always in the art.

What answer? I wonder. What question?

I’m absorbed in it. I’m trying to imagine where and when Earl painted the piece, wondering how he could have kept this work secret. No one had any secrets on the caravan park; everyone lived too close together for that. Gregor had managed to sell some of his work during Earl’s lifetime, but once he’d been ‘discovered’ in the years after his death, they’d all reappeared, owned mostly by the same collector in London. How can it be that there was a whole painting just out there somewhere?