TW // Threat, death
The painter’s hands wrung audibly. Eyes down, darkened, he ground the calloused masses, his face taut, waiting.
“Oh, Peter, do stop.” Claudia moaned and squeezed the bridge of her nose, her sleeves billowing with the gust of melodrama.
“I am ‘stopped’, Mother.” Peter snapped through gritted teeth. “I’m stopped right here, desperate for this to be over.” He had his back to her; such was their placement by the painter: two rows of familial churning; temporarily bundled into a scrum and expected to behave.
“It will be soon, my dear.” Her voice rang brightly, an attempt to at least make noises that suggested at all being well, all being civil.
Thomas - the father - grunted, sighed, rolled his eyes: “how long do we need, Gustav?”
“Oh, half a day, sir.” The painter blinked his dry eyes and rolled his tongue over his teeth before lifting a thin brush and dampening the end with a brief suck.
“Half a day?” Elspeth groaned, “Father, I have to tend the ponies.”
“You have to tend for nothing, such is the benefit our family’s standing has afforded. Your staff will tend the ponies.” He spoke over the top of her head, his words and his eyes directed at Gustav, who dabbed and wetted and paced out an acceptable perspective.
“Ellie has no trust in her staff, father.” Peter cast a sideways smirk, “she is the only one the ponies trust; they have a fondness reserved for those that are accustomed to laying in shit.” A yelp left his lips as Elspeth’s fist dug into his arm.
“Children, please.” Claudia said with a tone that was still able to command silence at a moment’s notice. “Now, where’s mother?”
“She might be held up somewhere,” Thomas said, “critiquing the kitchen staff, or walking the woodlands. Or maybe she’s cornered the pot-wash again for a quick game of…”
“...finish the thought, I dare you.” Claudia said, turning fully around to face her blushing husband.
The door creaked open after a short knock. The grandmother sat in her rusty old wheelchair with a white veil over her face.
Peter cocked his head and stage-whispered: “saved by the devil, father.” To which his mother slapped the side of his head.
“Mother. Come.” Claudia said as the woman was already being wheeled in by an austere, well-worn member of her staff. The painter and the family watched as the wheelchair’s wheels squeaked the woman into the room and inserted her between the two children in the front row. “I trust she has had her medicine?” The driver turned, nodded quickly and then scurried away. “How has your day been, Mother?” No response was forthcoming. Sir Thomas rolled his eyes and Peter bit his tongue.
The brave painter entered the fray: “would Mother remove the veil?” Further silence leeched into the room, filling the dark corners that evaded the candle-light and perfuming the attendees’ clothes. He shook his head and muttered something inaudible under his breath as the door opened again.
“Am I late?” A thin voice slipped through the gap and a young woman’s face followed, her long hair tumbling into the room with aplomb.
“Not at all, dear.” Claudia called back.
“Lydia?” Peter said, shocked.
“She will be family soon, Peter. This painting will outlive us all.”
“But, we’re not even...”
“...I know, but you will be, won’t you?”
“But that means…” Peter turned to face his mother, and then back to the door in almost a full turn of bafflement. “Yes, of course. Lydia, how lovely you made it.” He pivoted from incredulity to joy in the time it took Gustav to shave a sharpened point onto his pencil with a knife. The girl was sheepish in her approach, and she squeezed in beside Peter as Elspeth tutted.
“Now,” Gustav waved his hands and raised his eyebrows in excited anticipation, “may we begin?”
“Please.”
“Please, indeed.”
“Just get on with it.” Came the varied, muttered responses.
So, the Bulgarian cracked his knuckles, licked a brush, sharpened a pencil, and then widened his stance an uncomfortable distance before jabbing the propped canvas before him with quick and expansive strokes. For several minutes, only the sounds of his grunted decision-making and the volatile strokes against the unwhitening sheet could be heard.
“So, Peter,” Elspeth whispered out of the side of her mouth closest to her brother, “when are you proposing?”
“Oh, do shut up.” Peter snapped through gritted teeth.
“Me, sir?” Gustav stopped and pointed at his chest with a wet brush, crestfallen.
“No, Gustav.” Claudia said, her voice a whip of admonishment, “the children are being dreadful.”
“Just be sensible, for once.” Thomas barked, heavily.
“I have this under control, Thomas.” Claudia said without moving her lips.
“I know, I was just offering support.”
“It is not well received now.”
“Quite.”
“How long will this take?” Lydia asked.
“Half a day.” The others said in unison, in varying degrees of irritation.
Silence crept back into the room - but for the scratched immortalising - and the air hummed with the familial angst. Five minutes passed and then a rough wheezing sound forced its way into their attentions. The wheezing was wet, desperate, and emitting from the white veil. Lydia left the formation and spun to the old lady’s side. The rest of the family remained in place. Gustav paused and stood erect, pensive.
“She can’t breathe!” Lydia shouted from the wheelchair’s side, staring up at the family, eyes flitting from one static person to the next. She frowned and looked urgently, urgingly at Peter. “Peter, we must do something! Why are you not moving?” Peter met her gaze for a sliver of a moment and then sent it searching around the room. He gritted his teeth and choked back a response.
“Leave her, child.” Claudia said without dropping her eyes, without relaxing a taut, posed muscle. “This is simply the way.”
“What on Earth does that mean?” Lydia said through tears that clogged in her eyes before tumbling, bereft, down her porcelain cheeks.
Claudia’s composure slipped: “watch your tone, prospective daughter.” Peter’s gulp was a gunshot. “You will do as I say, you will leave my mother to die.”
“I don’t understand.” Lydia rose to her feet and squashed her face under her hands. “This is a madness.”
“You don’t know how lucky you are.” Elspeth’s voice was clear as a bell, and it sang over the viscous undertones of audible death. “Just be silent for the painting. This is all for you, do you not realise?”
“What does that mean?”
“Smart as a whip this one, Pete.” Elspeth let out a laugh that made Lydia flinch as if it were a slap.
“Enough, Elspeth.” Claudia rebuked and then nobody spoke for a minute. Gustav chewed the base of his paintbrush, Peter stared at his shoes, Thomas teased a sliver of pork from between his teeth with his tongue, and the old lady in the wheelchair noisily - and with little haste - died.
“For me?” A ragged silence had replaced the laboured breathing and Lydia shattered it with two syllables, her chin wobbling with the sadness her proximity to death necessitated: that and not a little fear at the incongruous ambivalence shown by the others.
“For you, child.” Claudia said, her voice now soft and maternal. “This is the Mothering Ceremony. It has been repeated for centuries. As one mother departs, another is brought into the family. And so the cycle goes.”
“I am no mother.” Lydia said flatly, barely above a whisper.
“Not yet, but you will soon be. This portrait sets into motion the path ahead and closes that which has come before. My time will come in the not-so-distant future, and it will be your speech to another - as yet unborn, perhaps - that will seal my closing.”
“I don’t understand.” Lydia covered her face and began to audibly weep. Peter swayed from foot to foot, his eyes admiring the walls’ ornate, emotionless coving. “Wait.” She stopped, sniffed and wiped her dripping nose with her sleeve as she collected together the presented fragments in a sensible order. “You killed her.” Nothing but silence followed. Gustav bit the end off of a fingernail. “How can you kill your mother?”
“Oh, child. Don’t be so sanctimonious.” Claudia spat, her anger dissipating the composure of before. “This is the way it has always been, just in the way that she will have killed her mother, and she hers, etcetera and so on since this family lived in a farmyard shack. We’ve made a bargain, see? Gustav’s ancestors promised us riches and comfort and everything we would ever desire, in exchange for us turning the circle, maintaining the flow in and out. And so that is how we mean to go on.” Lydia looked from Gustav to Claudia, aghast and fearful. “You have been chosen my dear - pencilled in at least by now I should suspect.” Gustav nodded. “The circle is moving, and you are within its power. Come, stand. This will be over before you know it.”
“Quite.” Gustav winked and his moustache trembled with the suggestion of a smile.
“Come, darling.” Peter found his voice and shepherded his apparent fiancé into formation beside him, sending an awkward half-glance at his now silent grandmother. Lydia sobbed pathetically, softly now; resigned.
“Gustav,” Thomas said after clearing his throat, an air of finality and control in his voice, “let’s get this over with, shall we? Before the beast comes for all of our souls. Or that old witch wakes up.” He gasped as Claudia’s elbow found his ribs and Elspeth sniggered.
“Certainly, sir.” Gustav licked his paintbrush and held it up in his eye-line, as though preparing to fire a kill-shot from a rifle, “all smiles then, please.”