Read The Breaking Point for Free Online Page B

can’t make a decent living abroad. Besides, Edna wouldn’t stand it. Away from her friends and all she’s been accustomed to. Never heard of such a thing.’
    Well, he was dead, and a good thing too. He’d been a wedge between them from the start. Marcus Sims . . . Marcus Sims the painter was a very different chap. Surrealist. Modern. The old boy would turn in his grave.
    ‘It’s a quarter to seven,’ murmured the woman.
    ‘Damn . . .’ He sighed, and stepped back from the easel. ‘I resent stopping like this, now it’s so light in the evenings,’ he said. ‘I could go on for quite another hour, or more.’
    ‘Why don’t you?’ she asked.
    ‘Ah! Home ties,’ he said. ‘My poor old mother would have a fit.’
    He had invented an old mother during the past weeks. Bedridden. He had promised to be home every evening at a quarter to eight. If he did not arrive in time the doctors would not answer for the consequences. He was a very good son to her.
    ‘I wish you could bring her here to live,’ said his model. ‘It’s so lonely when you’ve gone back in the evenings. Do you know, there’s a rumour this house may not be pulled down after all. If it’s true, you could take the flat on the ground floor, and your mother would be welcome.’
    ‘She’d never move now,’ said Fenton. ‘She’s over eighty. Very set in her ways.’ He smiled to himself, thinking of Edna’s face if he said to her that it would be more comfortable to sell the house they had lived in for nearly twenty years and take up lodgings in No. 8, Boulting Street. Imagine the upheaval! Imagine the Alhusons coming to Sunday supper!
    ‘Besides,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘the whole point would be gone.’
    ‘What point, Mr Sims?’
    He looked from the shape of colour on the canvas that meant so much to him to the woman who sat there, posing with her lank hair and her dumb eyes, and he tried to remember what had decided him, those months ago, to walk up the steps of the drab villa and ask for a room. Some temporary phase of irritation, surely, with poor Edna, with the windy grey day on the Embankment, with the fact of the Alhusons coming to drinks. But the workings of his mind on that vanished Sunday were forgotten, and he knew only that his life had changed from then, that this small, confined basement room was his solace, and the personalities of the woman Anna Kaufman and the child Johnnie were somehow symbolic of anonymity, of peace. All she ever did was to make him tea and clean his brushes. She was part of the background, like the cat, which purred at his approach and crouched on the windowsill, and to which he had not as yet given a single crumb.
    ‘Never mind, Madame Kaufman,’ he said. ‘One of these days we’ll hold an exhibition, and your face, and Johnnie’s, will be the talk of the town.’
    ‘This year . . . next year . . . sometime . . . never. Isn’t that what you say to cherry stones?’ she said.
    ‘You’ve got no faith,’ he told her. ‘I’ll prove it. Just wait and see.’
    She began once more the long, tedious story about the man she had fled from in Austria, and the husband who had deserted her in London - he knew it all so well by now that he could prompt her - but it did not bother him. It was part of the background, part of the blessed anonymity. Let her blab away, he said to himself, it kept her quiet, it did not matter. He could concentrate on making the orange she was sucking, doling out quarters to Johnnie on her lap, larger than life, more colourful than life, rounder, bigger, brighter.
    And as he walked home along the Embankment in the evening - because the walk was no longer suggestive of the old Sunday but was merged with the new life as well - he would throw his charcoal sketches and rough drawings into the river. They were now transfigured into paint and did not matter. With them went the used tubes of colour, pieces of rag, and brushes too clogged with oil. He threw them from Albert Bridge