LITMIR.BIZ

       2

      Lucy listened to the wind howling through the eaves and was extremely grateful that she had avoided an uncomfortable commute to work through torrential rain, unlike poor Adam. Converting the loft into an art studio had been her husband’s idea and had been undertaken shortly after Lucy had moved into the house in West Kirby a year ago. She could have continued to rent studio space in Liverpool but Adam knew how she hated driving through the Kingsway tunnel and it was a journey she was happy to surrender. She liked that she could set to work whenever inspiration struck, although her artistic flare seemed to be misfiring of late.

      Wrapping her hands around a mug of peppermint tea that was too hot to drink, Lucy inhaled the scented steam to ease her mind. It was late morning and she had yet to pick up a paintbrush, while Adam had probably fixed whatever system bug had caused him to rise at five thirty.

      He had left for work hours before Lucy had crawled out of bed, and she had lounged in her PJs, eating porridge and watching morning TV for far longer than she intended. When she had dressed, she had forgone her usual uniform of paint-splattered crop pants and T-shirt for an oversized shirt to make room for the swell of her belly that grew by the day.

      Setting down her drink on the workbench, Lucy tied back her hair with an old bandana and lifted the dust sheet covering her current work in progress. Her easel had been set up close to the Juliet balcony window to catch the natural light, but the storm had stolen the day and she wasted the next few minutes repositioning her work beneath one of the spotlights.

      Taking a step back, she took time to consider her latest commission. It was a portrait of a dog called Ralph, or at least that was the plan. Since leaving college, Lucy had made a decent living painting portraits and most of her work came from either personal recommendation or online requests. She painted people as well as pets, but preferred animal fur to flesh because it suited her style. The last time she had painted a cocker spaniel, it had been one of her best ever portraits and she had been excited by the prospect of doing another.

      What Lucy hadn’t realized from the initial enquiry was that Ralph was completely black except for the flash of white on his chest. The first photo her client had sent was impossible to work from, and even though Lucy now had a series of images pinned to the top of her easel, there was a chance that the end product would be no more than a silhouette set off by the spaniel’s sparkling – and admittedly adorable – eyes. The only aspect of the composition she was confident about tackling was the background. Her trademark was the inclusion of symbolic references, which in Ralph’s case was the window where he awaited his master’s return. There would also be a slipper caught beneath his paw with the toe torn to shreds.

      Having sketched an outline and blocked out the basic contours of the dog’s head and body the day before, Lucy’s task for today was to add some much-needed texture. She picked up her palette and began adding her oil colours. She squeezed out a generous amount of titanium white, a dab of Prussian blue and, as an afterthought, some French ultramarine. There would be no black on the canvas until she was happy with the curve of the dog’s snout and the ripples of fur on his silken ears.

      Picking up an unlabelled glass bottle, Lucy twisted the cap and squeezed the dropper to draw up the clear liquid that would thin the paints. She dribbled a few drops across her palette before selecting a wide flat brush and, as she mixed her colours, she couldn’t help but notice the smell of her paints had changed. She wondered if it might be the steam rising from her tea, or perhaps the metallic scent of the storm in the air – or was it simply that her perceptions were changing along with her body?

      Adam had a point about her becoming a newer version of herself but, in the software industry, that implied an improvement to the old. In some ways, Lucy was changing for the better. She had clung on to her student days a little too long and it was time to accept that she was a proper grown-up with a husband and a baby on the way.

      Taking a deep breath, Lucy began to add paint to the stretched canvas. She used curved brushstrokes to add texture, but the oils worked against her and after half an hour of trying and failing to add some depth to her painting, she put down her palette. With her brow furrowed, she picked up the bottle she had used to thin the paint and raised it to eye level. She made up her own thinner mixture from equal parts of linseed oil and turpentine but one sniff confirmed her suspicions. If there was any oil present at all, it was the remnants from a previous mix.

      The rain was beating down on the roof hard enough to make the tiles quake and as the noise intensified, so did Lucy’s frustration. She poured the contents of the bottle on to a rag and used it to wipe clean her palette. She could have rescued the paints she had been using, but she would feel better starting over. She was almost tempted to cast aside the canvas too, but it was salvageable, assuming she did everything right next time.

      Lucy took extra care as she half-filled the offending bottle with turpentine before adding the linseed oil. Such a simple task would normally be undertaken while she was planning her work, or thinking about what to have for lunch. It shouldn’t need her undivided attention and Lucy’s ineptitude annoyed her. And then it worried her. What if she made similar mistakes when the baby was born? Mixing incorrect ratios of thinner and oil was one thing, but what if she were making up formula milk? What if something went terribly wrong because of her carelessness?

      The thought of being a mother terrified Lucy more than she had ever anticipated. She hoped her daughter would be blessed with health and happiness – nothing short of a perfect life – but for that, she would need the perfect mother. How could life be so perverse that part of preparing a woman’s body for motherhood should involve giving her an overdose of hormones to screw up her mind?

      Shaking the bottle, Lucy attempted to release some of her tension. She was being overdramatic. It was a simple slip-up.

      ‘Bloody hormones,’ Lucy muttered.

      Picking up her peppermint tea, Lucy studied the canvas. It wasn’t that bad and she wondered if she had been too quick to jump to conclusions about the thinner mix. With renewed determination, she picked up her paintbrush and this time used gentle strokes to transform her previous dabs of paint into a smooth wash that gave some sense of light and shadow to Ralph’s features. She felt calmer, and Adam chose the perfect time to call.

      ‘Hello,’ she said with a soft smile.

      ‘I can hardly hear you,’ Adam shouted. ‘Are you in your studio? Am I disturbing you?’

      Lucy took another look at the canvas. ‘No, I’ll go downstairs,’ she yelled back as she dropped her brush in a jar of thinner so it wouldn’t dry out.

      With her phone cradled against her shoulder, Lucy held her mug in one hand and used the other to grasp the handrail as she made her way down the staircase to the door on the first-floor landing. The entrance to her studio fitted seamlessly in with the rest of the house and Lucy reminded herself that she had reason to be proud of her accomplishments.

      It had been hard graft, project-managing the building work and the wedding at the same time, but she had done it without so much as a mishap. Of the two, the wedding had

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