The Portrait Hung Backwards

The portrait faced the wall when Juno arrived, and its label faced the room.

WINDOW SEAT. CAL RENN.

Underneath, in smaller type: painted this year.

Gwen stood beside it with a cup of tea she had forgotten to drink. She managed the Bellweather Gallery, which occupied three rooms above a hardware shop. In two hours, the doors would open for the annual new-work exhibition. A modest studio grant would go to one of the painters. Juno had come to straighten labels and check the catalogue, not decide whose career deserved a beginning.

"I've turned it round," Gwen said.

"I can see that."

"A question has been raised. Until we have an answer, nobody sees the picture with the wrong information beside it."

She handed Juno a note signed Mara Renn. No anonymous threat, no demand for money. Just a telephone number and one sentence: My mother painted this in 1996.

Juno had seen the portrait the previous afternoon. A woman in a rust-coloured cardigan sat beside a window, holding a white cup with a broken handle. Beyond her was a narrow garden. A yellow ladder leaned against a wall, and one foot rested in a blue bucket. The woman looked neither pleased nor patient. She looked as though somebody had asked a question and was still waiting for the answer.

Cal Renn had brought it himself. He said his sitter was an old family friend, the room his mother's former studio. The application called it a new painting from life. He had laughed about using an old frame.

"If Mara is mistaken, we'll turn it back," Gwen said. "If Cal is mistaken, we'll change more than the direction."

"Are they related?"

"Brother and sister. He says she wants the family paintings sold. She says this isn't about selling anything."

From the pavement below came the hardware shop's delivery bell. Juno looked at the back of the frame, then at the certainty of the printed name.

"Let's start with the room," she said.

Mara lived two streets away, above a closed travel agency. She came carrying a paper shopping bag and no painting.

"I thought you might bring proof," Gwen said.

"I brought what I have. You'll have to decide what it proves."

Inside the bag were family photographs, a thin exhibition leaflet and a woollen scarf. Mara took the scarf out first because it had caught around the album. She folded it carefully before opening anything else.

Her mother was Aline Renn. She had painted at the back of their old house, in a room that the family called the sewing room even after the sewing machine stopped working. Mara was fourteen in 1996; Cal was ten. Aline died in 2018. Their father's name was Peter, and he had liked saying that creativity ran in the family, usually when he was showing somebody his own drawings.

"Did Cal paint there this year?" Juno asked.

"He visited the house before it was sold. He has worked there before. I can't tell you everything he did."

It was an inconvenient answer, and Juno trusted it more than a sweeping denial.

Mara showed them a photograph of the garden taken during the move. The narrow window was still there. The wall outside had been rebuilt, and the ground beyond it was paving, not the little border in the portrait.

"An artist can paint something that isn't there," Gwen said.

"Yes," Mara answered. "That's why I didn't bring only this."

The exhibition leaflet was dated 1996. Aline's name appeared among six local painters. One title was Window Seat. There was no reproduction of the painting, only a description of a seated figure with a cup.

The title was suggestive. The description was suggestive. Neither was an image of the object facing the gallery wall.

Juno asked who the woman was.

"Evi Marsh. She used to mend our clothes. She's still here. Cal knows that."

"May we speak to her?"

Mara nodded. "Ask her what she remembers. Don't tell her what you want her to remember."

Evi Marsh arrived in a waterproof coat with one button replaced by a red one. She looked at the reversed portrait and laughed once.

"Aline would have enjoyed that. People staring at the back and talking about the front."

Gwen explained the question before showing her the painting. Evi agreed to look. They turned it carefully together; nobody removed the picture from its frame or tried to examine its paint with a tool.

Evi stood a long way back at first. Then she moved closer.

"That's my cup."

"The one in the picture?" Juno asked.

"I broke the handle on the kitchen step. Aline said it looked more interesting without one. I said it was less useful. We disagreed about useful things."

She looked at the woman in the cardigan, then at her own hands.

"I was thirty-five. I remember because my sister had given me that cardigan for my birthday."

"Did you sit for Cal recently?" Gwen asked.

"No. He visited in the spring. Asked to borrow the cardigan, if I still had it. I didn't. I thought he was looking at his mother's old pictures."

Evi's recollection mattered, but it did not settle whether Cal had made a new version of an old subject. Juno explained that question, and Evi listened without taking offence.

"Then you'll need something better than my face," she said.

She pointed to the yellow ladder.

"Peter was painting the outside wall. He put the foot in a bucket because one leg was shorter. I told him the whole thing was foolish. Aline left it in the picture because she'd had the same argument."

Gwen studied the ladder in the picture as if it had finally settled an old argument.

"Do you have any photographs from that time?" Juno asked.

"Mara might. I have a postcard Aline sent me. A little picture on the front. She said I looked fierce enough to frighten a bill collector."

Evi smiled at the painted woman.

"She wasn't wrong."

Cal came up the stairs carrying an umbrella that had failed to keep one shoulder dry. He saw the portrait facing into the room and stopped.

"You've decided already."

"We've decided to ask you," Gwen said.

Mara moved away from the table. Evi stayed beside the picture. For a moment the four of them arranged themselves around Cal as though a family photograph were being taken, leaving Juno in the place where the photographer should stand.

He greeted Evi warmly. She returned the greeting without answering his smile.

"You haven't painted me this year," she said.

"I used photographs. I meant from life in a broader sense."

Gwen put his application on the table. It did not ask whether the subject had once been alive. It asked whether the submitted painting was made by the entrant during the current year. He had answered yes.

"A new painting based on an old photograph might meet the rules," Gwen said. "But we need an accurate account of this one."

Cal looked at Mara's album.

"She doesn't like what I've done with the house."

"We're not deciding about the house," Juno said.

"Everything with Mara is about the house."

Mara put her scarf in the bag. "You can make me difficult if it helps. It won't make you the painter."

Cal said he had worked on the picture. He had cleaned the frame and replaced its backing paper. He had prepared it for display. His words stayed close to things a pair of hands could do, without reaching the thing the form required.

Juno asked whether he had made a new version of Aline's composition.

"It's a family picture," he said.

"That's where it came from. It doesn't tell us who painted it."

He asked to speak to Gwen alone. She agreed. Evi went downstairs to buy a new button from the hardware shop, where buttons were kept in an unexpected drawer beside the keys. Mara and Juno remained by the window.

"I didn't want this," Mara said.

Juno looked at the signed note.

"I wanted him to change the name before anybody else had to ask."

Evi returned with two buttons and a postcard her neighbour had brought from her house. She had telephoned him from downstairs. It was an ordinary favour, not a retrieval from a locked archive.

The card was bent at one corner. On the front was the portrait: Evi, the cup, the yellow ladder, the foot in the blue bucket. On the back, Aline had written about the little exhibition and asked whether Evi wanted another sitting when the weather improved. The postmark was from September 1996.

Mara opened the album again. A photograph showed Aline in the sewing room with the portrait beside her. Mara remembered taking it, though the album's handwritten year was not an independent dating test.

Juno placed the postcard beside the photograph without laying either on the painting.

"This composition existed then," she said. "The card makes that plain. It still leaves Cal's claim of a new version to answer."

Gwen came back from the office alone.

"He now says his mother gave him the painting."

"She did," Mara said. "On his eighteenth birthday. He was always better at receiving a gift than letting somebody know he'd received it."

She regretted the sentence as soon as she said it. Juno could see that. Mara took the postcard from the table and turned it over.

"I'm being cruel. He carried her shopping. He sat with her when she was tired. He wasn't only one thing."

"Nor was she," Evi said.

Cal stood in the office doorway. He had heard enough to look wounded, though Juno could not tell which part had hurt him.

"You didn't put your name on her work," he said to Mara.

"I didn't put anyone's name on it."

"You let Dad call it his room. His painting room. She had to ask him to move a chair in her own studio. Why didn't you say anything?"

Mara folded her hands around the postcard, careful of the bent corner.

"I was fourteen," she said.

For the first time that morning, Cal had nothing ready to say.