My wife is amazing at a lot of things: spotting a typo from 10 paces, retaining obscure facts about medieval English food customs and, as seems almost obligatory these days, making sourdough bread. The one thing she is absolutely awful at, however, is art. Back in the 80s, her art teacher wrote in her end-of-year report: “Claire has a tendency to be highly experimental – which I would praise, were it not for the fact that her examination pieces were experiments which appeared to have gone very badly wrong.”
I tell you this not in order to publicly shame her – how could I, as the owner of a D-grade German O-level? – but to highlight how wonderful it was when, in 1996, on our first wedding anniversary, AKA our “paper” anniversary, she presented me with a papier-mache heart that she had sculpted with her own fair hands.
There is something undeniably romantic about gestures that involve artistic creation. It’s the willingness to lay it all on the line, the readiness to make oneself vulnerable, that I admire. All the more so when you have been told that, at best, you are a “trier”, while, at worst, you are in danger of negatively skewing your school’s exam results.
When, with no small degree of meekness, my wife handed me a large box wrapped in gift paper on the morning of our anniversary, I eagerly tore it open, fully expecting to find a copy of Independence Day on VHS (I had been dropping hints like crazy) or a box of cherry liqueurs (my favourite of all the confections). Instead, lying on a bed of tissue paper in an old shoe box was the aforementioned papier-mache heart. I loved it immediately.
The idea had come to her, she told me, after trawling the aisles of HMV for gift inspiration. Finding none, it dawned on her that she should instead make something – something made from paper.
Several weeks later, having gathered all the materials together – wallpaper paste, a couple of small cereal boxes, old newspapers and paint – she began her first art project since leaving school. Whenever I was out of the house, she would add a couple of layers of gluey paper to the boxes, which she had sandwiched together to make a basic frame for the heart. Day by day, layer by layer, she sculpted and moulded her work until it resembled the organ classically perceived as the seat of the emotions. Finally, after a week of drying it out in the airing cupboard (a place I never ventured, clearly), she added the first of several coats of paint.
The time and effort my wife put into her creative endeavour was an obvious, but nonetheless utterly gorgeous, metaphor for her love for me. Had she given me a copy of the classic Will Smith movie or a customary box of chocolates, I would undoubtedly have been pleased. But I can also guarantee that the video would have long since been dispatched to Oxfam, the liqueurs regretted as soon as I stepped on the bathroom scales.
A quarter of a century later, however, the heart still has pride of place on a shelf in our living room. Its bright-red paint might be chipped and faded, its paper-and-glue surface more than a little fragile, but it’s there watching over us nonetheless, having become a regular talking point with our kids and houseguests. It’s an exquisite reminder of our love – and why you shouldn’t always listen to your art teacher.
Mike Gayle is the author of Museum of Ordinary People and A Song of Me and You, which will be published in July (Hodder & Stoughton)
