She was overcome with sleep sometimes, while she sat poring over her texts. And sometimes she lay down on her bed in the middle of the afternoon, guiltily but deliciously, relinquishing responsibility. Then she woke up to the green light of the room in a strange mood, exempted from all the solid pressures of her usual nature and her obligations. Sometimes on these lost afternoons she drew, and while she was drawing she turned the face of her alarm clock away so that she couldn’t see how time was passing. She had done well in art classes at school, she had a gift for catching the likeness of things, but no one had ever suggested she should continue with her art, it had never seriously occurred to her. She and her brothers had all aimed at university; art school could only have been seen as a compensation for failing to get in anywhere worthwhile. Her family put a high value on the visual arts, and went to all the exhibitions, but would have found it presumptuous to dream of being an actual artist. New art was too raw. Who knew, until posterity’s confidence had silted up around it, what was any good? They preferred their subjects cooked. Nobody would have minded if she’d studied art history.

Christine only thought of this drawing at first as doodling, passing the time while she focused her thought on particular poems, wondering what to write about them. In an art shop, ashamed of wasting money on a childish whim, she bought scraperboards. And while she bent over them, alone in the house, digging out the black ink coating and leaving the white lines in relief, she seemed to be gouging out some new terrain, which came out of her self and yet was unknown to her. There was something savage and exuberant in it, and high-risk. The first picture she completed showed a section cut through a turf in a graveyard, its grass wet with drops from a shower of rain, and an odd back-end view of a blackbird with its tail feathers in a fan, all very close up to the viewer’s eye and cramped. A body was buried in the loamy earth, along with stones and worms: though not decomposing, rather as if it were alive – and not the whole body, but just a shoulder and neck and hair seen from behind and pressed up close against the picture frame. She knew once the picture was finished that it was horribly clumsy and faux-Victorian, and she didn’t show it to anyone, hid it away under some papers in a drawer in her desk.