All Dora Judd ever told anyone about that night three weeks before Christmas was that she won the painting in a raffle.
She remembered being out in the back garden, as lights from the Cowley car plant spilt across the darkening sky, smoking her last cigarette, thinking there must be more to life.
Back inside, her husband said, Bloody move it, will you, and she said, Give it a rest, Len, and she began to undo her housedress as she made her way upstairs. In the bedroom, she looked at herself sideways in the mirror, her hands feeling for the progression of her pregnancy, this new life she knew was a son.
She sat down at her dressing table and rested her chin on her hands. She thought her eyes looked tired, her skin dry. She painted her lips red and the colour instantly lifted her face. It did little for her mood, however.
The moment she walked through the door of the Community Centre, she knew it had been a mistake to come. The room was smoky and festive drinkers jostled as they tried to get to the bar. She followed her husband through the crowds and the intermittent wafts of perfume and hair oil, bodies and beer.
She wasn’t up for socialising with him any more, not the way he behaved with his friends, making a point of looking at every pretty thing that passed, making sure she was watching. She stood off to the side holding a glass of warm orange juice that was beginning to make her feel sick. Thank God Mrs Powys made a beeline for her, clutching a book of raffle tickets.
Top prize was a bottle of Scotch whisky, said Mrs Powys, as she took Dora over to the table where the prizes were laid out. Then we have a radio, a voucher for a haircut and set at Audrey’s Coiffure, a tin of Quality Street, a pewter hip flask, and lastly – and she leant forward for this confidence – a mid-size oil painting of very little worth. Albeit a fine copy of a European work of art, she added with a wink.
Dora had seen the original on a school trip to London at the National Gallery’s Pimlico site. Fifteen years old she’d been, full of the contradictions of that age. But when she had entered the gallery room, the storm shutters around her heart flew open and she knew immediately that this was the life she wanted: Freedom. Possibility. Beauty.
There were other paintings in the room, too, she remembered – Van Gogh’s Chair and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières – but it was as if she had fallen under this particular painting’s spell, and whatever had transfixed her then, and drawn her into the inescapable confines of its frame, was exactly what was pleading with her now.
Mrs Judd? said Mrs Powys.
Mrs Judd? repeated Mrs Powys. Can I tempt you to a ticket, then?
What?
A raffle ticket?
Oh, yes. Of course.
The lights flickered on and off and a man tapped a spoon against a glass. The room quietened as Mrs Powys made a great show of reaching into the cardboard box and pulling out the first winning ticket. Number seventeen, she said, grandly.
Dora was too distracted by the feelings of nausea to hear Mrs Powys, and it was only when the woman next to her nudged her and said, It’s you! that Dora realised she had won. She held up her ticket and said, I’m seventeen! and Mrs Powys shouted, It’s Mrs Judd! Mrs Judd is our first winner! and led her over to the table to take her pick of the prizes.
Leonard shouted out for her to choose the whisky.
Mrs Judd? said Mrs Powys, quietly.
But Dora said nothing, she stared at the table.
Get the whisky, Leonard shouted again. The whisky!
And slowly, in unison, the men’s voices chanted, Whisky! Whisky! Whisky!
Mrs Judd? said Mrs Powys. Will it be the whisky?
And Dora turned and faced her husband and said, No, I don’t like whisky. I choose the painting instead.
It was her first ever act of defiance. Like cutting off an ear. And she made it in public.
She and Len left shortly after. They sat separately on the bus journey home, her up, him down. When they got off, he stormed ahead of her, and she fell back into the peace of her star-aligned night.
The front door was ajar when she arrived and the house was dark, no noise from upstairs. She went quietly into the back room and turned on the light. It was a drab room, furnished by one pay packet, his. Two armchairs were set by the hearth and a large dining table that had witnessed little conversation over the years blocked the way to the kitchen. There was nothing on those brown walls except a mirror, and Dora knew she should hang the painting in the shadow of the dresser away from his sight, but she couldn’t help herself, not that night. And she knew if she didn’t do it then, she never would. She went to the kitchen and opened his toolbox. She took out a hammer and a nail and came back to the wall. A few gentle taps and the nail moved softly and easily into the plaster.
She stood back. The painting was as conspicuous as a newly installed window, but one that looked out on to a life of colour and imagination, far away from the grey factory dawn and in stark contrast to the brown curtains and brown carpet, both chosen by a man to hide the dirt.
It would be as if the sun itself rose every morning on that wall, showering the silence of their mealtimes with the shifting emotion of light.
The door exploded and nearly came off its hinges. Leonard Judd made a lunge for the painting, and as quickly as she had ever moved in her life, Dora stood in front of it, raised the hammer, and said, Do it and I’ll kill you. If not now, then when you sleep. This painting is me. You don’t touch it, you respect it. Tonight I’ll move into the spare room. And tomorrow you’ll buy yourself another hammer.
All for a painting of sunflowers.