Is this the very café table where we sat? Yes, I think it is. In fact, I'm sure it is. It's as if time has stood still. The café is just as it was nearly thirty years ago—or at least I don't remember anything as different. It's hard to believe that as much as London has changed over the last twenty years, Norwich might not have changed at all. Or so it seems. And so I want it to be. I don't want to have been wrong; I don't want Norwich to have outdistanced me. I left Norwich for London precisely because nothing had been changing in my life. I was in a rut; one of poverty and of unfulfilling dreams. I made sacrifices and compromises—tremendous ones—to change my life.
Do I regret it? Is the possibility of that why I've avoided returning here?
I don't have an opportunity to pursue that train of thought, as the waiter is at my elbow asking if everything is to my satisfaction.
"Yes, thank you. Yes, I'll take another coffee, thank you."
I don't know whether the waiter had recognized me or if it was the cut and material of my suit or the manicured appearance of the body I work hard and spend mightily to keep trim. Or whether it is the patrician demeanor I acquired during the decades in London that is according me such close attention from the wait staff, but it is clear that I am getting more attention than anyone else in the café. It's true that I'm recognized occasionally on the streets of London now—especially after my most recent series of exhibitions and the media coverage of that—but I'd hardly be remembered in Norwich, I shouldn't think.
But, of course they may receive the same magazines here that are sold on the streets of London.
Twenty-six years. It has been that long since I've been in Norwich. I was a struggling art student at the time, bypassing university not only because my family couldn't afford it, but also because I was just busting with the need to create—and determined not to work in the textile factory my whole life. I would have done anything at the time to be given the time and support needed to get on with the painting.
I, in fact, did what was required to get that done.
* * * *
Martin Ashen had been all the rage in Norwich. He had been to London and even to the continent with his art exhibits—not just his painting of seascapes and ships but also with his bronze sculptures. And now he was back in Norwich, mentoring at the Norfolk Art Institute.
He wasn't lecturing or teaching. When he wasn't rendering works of art for his series of life in the textile mills of the city, he was roaming the studios of the institute, giving advice to the students, and picking one or two out for, as he called it, mentoring. Producing art on such a mundane subject as the working-class textile workers in nineteenth century mills was just catching on in England. Surely Master Ashen was at the forefront of this movement, I thought—although I was later to learn that he actually was late to that medium and had come to Norwich to catch up with some of his contemporaries who were riding a social awareness wave and had already overworked more industrial subjects in the country.
"The line is good, but the perspective is off," the rich, melodic voice cut into my concentration from over my shoulder. "Here, I think it can be readily fixed."
I trembled as Master Ashen took the brush out of my hand and, leaning into me close, applied four deft strokes to the canvas I was working on. I could readily see how, with just that, he'd brought the painting under a control I had known was absent but had no idea how to fix.
I was mortified, and that must not have been hidden from him. Putting the brush down in the trough of the easel rather than handing it back to me, he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently.
"All in good time," he said. "I can see the talent is there. It just needs more practice—and perhaps a little closer observation of the work of others."
"I'm . . . sorry," I stammered. "I don't think I can—"
"Never say 'I can't,' young man"—he almost thundered that, causing nearby artists to look around, either startled or with self-satisfied looks that I was being upbraided. This, to my consternation, included Howard, an artist a few years my senior who had taken an interest in my work—and in whom, I must admit, I was taking a more personal interest. "I said the talent was there," Ashen continued—and I think his thought that I was discounting that was more the source of his flash of anger than what I had said—"it is patience and a bit more attention to detail you now need to apply."
He moved on right after that, but my frustration and disappointment in myself lingered. I couldn't concentrate on the landscape I was working on further that afternoon, so I put my tools away and left early. I took my sketch pad with me, though, and walked swiftly to Chapelfield Gardens, a recently opened park near the city center, which was the setting of the painting I was working on. The master painter had criticized my observation skills, so I wanted to take in the perspective of my subject matter again. I wanted to see better what I may have missed in my earlier trips.
My sighting was from just inside the tree line of a stand of trees overlooking a small, circular Roman temple on a hillock with a pond and a line of trees beyond it.
That wasn't the only reason I went to the park, though. I wanted to know if Howard would follow me here. We had met here earlier when we both were sketching the scene. I believed my sketches were better than Howard's, but of course I would not tell him that. He had been working at the art college three years longer than I had.
But it wasn't only sketching we'd done here. He read me poetry too and we discussed our lives and our ambitions. And we increasingly were becoming more intimate with each visit here. I had given little thought to relations between one man and another—but Howard was opening my eyes to so many possibilities I had not given thought to before. We had not reached the stage of ultimate intimacy—or what Howard had described as a luxury of life that would bring pleasure beyond measure—although I had tasted his lips and seen the glimmer of an opening to the pleasures he spoke of. And his hands had awakened me even more to the opportunities we seemed to be moving to—when and as I overcame my inhibitions to the unknown and the fear of what Howard's world entailed.
I settled under a tree and turned an intense gaze on the Roman temple. Surprisingly details came to me that I hadn't noticed before. Eager at this unexpected confirmation of what Martin Ashen had told me I needed to do, I plucked a pencil from the box I had brought, turned the sketch pad to a new page, and instead of looking at and trying to sketch the whole sweep of the view before me, I concentrated on separate sketches of just a detail here and a detail there of what I was seeing anew.
So intent was I on sketching that I didn't hear Howard approach until he was nearly upon me, and when he spoke to me, it caused my pencil to slide across the page and ruin my drawing of the detail of the cornice work on one of the temple columns.
But I didn't care. Howard was here.
"He can't believe your age."
