by Ali Smith
And in truth, it wasn’t him, it was me who was too old for him. I couldn’t see a life with him. Too little in common. Not even remotely possible. I knew quite soon, very practical things meant it wouldn’t be possible. Though even in that short time he taught me a great deal, he knew a great deal about all sorts of things, about art –
About your son? the girl said.
Pictures, paintings, Sophia said. I mean, I knew about Monet and Renoir, well, everybody who knew anything did. I didn’t know much about the sculptor who’d lived here, I know a bit more about her now. In fact I know a lovely story I keep wishing I could tell him, about her, I read it in a paper last year, it’s a story he’d have loved.
And he’s dead now, the girl said.
He must be, she said. I’m old now and he was old then.
And this was Godfrey Gable, the girl said. The cut-out in the barn. But you already know he’s no longer alive.
Oh dear God, no, Sophia said. I’m not talking about Godfrey.
She laughed.
Sleep with Ray! I’d never have slept with Ray. I can see him killing himself laughing in heaven at the very thought. Oh dear no. We weren’t, it wasn’t, like that.
So, the girl said. And you’re telling me this because?
At the point at which I met Ray, Godfrey Gable is the name under which Ray worked, Sophia said, I was about to become a single mother. I wanted to keep working. He was a man who needed a family. His support protected us both and left us both free. It was a very good arrangement. I’ll be forever grateful to Ray. And to Godfrey.
But, the girl said. I think this is a secret thing you’re telling me.
It is sometimes easier to talk to a stranger, Sophia said.
A true cliché if ever there was one, the girl said.
It is also important in life to keep some things to yourself, Sophia said. And Arthur was my business. Nobody else’s.
Like the things you buy and sell? the girl said.
Not that kind of business, Sophia said.
So now I know something intimate about your son, the girl said, about his father, which your son, I think, doesn’t himself know.
Yes, Sophia said.
So. What would you like me to do with this knowledge? the girl said. Do you want me to tell him?
I don’t know why I’ve told you, Sophia said. Perhaps because of what you told me about wounds, and about families. But no. I don’t want you to tell anyone.
Then I won’t, the girl said.
For one thing, the love of my life had a history to which I could never have reconciled my own family, Sophia said. For another, I didn’t want his history to be my son’s inheritance.
But it’s your son’s history whether you want it to be or not, the girl said.
My son knows nothing about it, Sophia said. Therefore he has inherited none of it.
The girl shook her head.
Wrong, she said.
It is you who are wrong about this, Sophia said. You’re young.
And what about the love? the girl said. You gave it up. The love of your life.
That was easy, Sophia said. The love of my life made my life like, like, I don’t know. Like a double decker bus whose steering has gone wrong.
You couldn’t keep control of it, the girl said.
You turn the wheel one way and the vehicle goes quite another, Sophia said.
The girl laughed.
You took back control of your bus routes, she said.
Then the girl put a side dish of bread with some slices of cheese on it next to Sophia.
Tell me the story instead, she said.
What story? Sophia said. There’s no more story. That’s it over. The end.
No, I mean the story you want to tell Art’s real father but can’t, the girl said.
Oh, Sophia said. That story. Oh yes. He’d have loved it. The serendipity of it. But no. I won’t, if you don’t mind. That story’s private.
She picked up a piece of bread and put some cheese on it.
She ate it.
She picked up another.
(Here’s that story anyway that Sophia’d have liked to be able to tell the man she believed was probably now long dead, her son’s father, the love of her life:
When the twentieth century artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth was a young girl, her family, who lived in an industrial town in the north of England, used to go every year for their summer holidays to stay in a coastal village in Yorkshire. Hepworth loved it there. The people who write about her life say it’s one of the reasons she felt so at home in Cornwall later in her life, that she liked this coast so much.
She loved being between land and sea. She loved being on the edge. She loved being so close to the elements and she loved the elements being so unpredictable and wild. She was quite a wild and willed girl herself, apparently, the kind of girl who’d made a point of refusing to wave her hat in the air like everybody else did to celebrate the declaration of the end of the First World War, because of all the war dead layered deep under any celebration.
She was already determined to be an artist, had made this clear to her parents, and would be going to art college in Leeds at the age of sixteen then off to London soon after. So she was very at home in a place in which a lot of artists summered, a place of striking light.
One of the summer artists, a painter in her middle years who took a house there herself every summer, was unusually famous and established for an artist who happened to be a woman, in fact she was a painter of landscapes and portraits so renowned that there’s practically no municipal collection in the United Kingdom that doesn’t (or didn’t, given that so many collections are now sold off) have something by her in it.
Her name was Ethel Walker.
Nobody much remembers now who Ethel Walker was except the specialist art historians, and not very many of them know that much about her either.
Anyway, nearly a hundred years later, an art collector in America was surfing on eBay and he saw a quite good painting called something like Portrait of a Young Lady. It wasn’t very expensive so he bought it.
When it arrived at his home and he unpacked it, it was a fetching picture of a girl in a blue dress. She looked intelligent. Even her hands looked intelligent.
On the back it said: Portrait of Miss Barbara Hepworth.
He wondered if she was by chance anything to do with Hepworth, or the gallery called the Hepworth Wakefield in the north of England.
He wrote to them to ask them and to ask if they’d like to see the painting.
Then he gave them the painting.
It’s now at the Hepworth Wakefield.
And that’s life and time for you.)
—
I’m staying with people here for the Christmas holidays, Sophia says.
Me too, the man says. Over there, the farmhouse. I came out to get some air.
Mine live up the path, Sophia says.
The man shines his torch on the sign at the roadside.
Chei Bres, the man says.
I also needed some air, Sophia says.
What does it mean? the man says.
I haven’t a clue, Sophia says.
The people I’m staying with have children called Cornwall and Devon, the man says. And believe me, I’ve had enough of Cornwall and Devon. Not that I don’t like Cornwall and Devon, I do, very much, and their parents, but it’s been Christmas Day all day and I need a break from what we’ll politely call the richness of Christmas tradition. Because anyway, I’m sad. Chaplin just died, did you know? And the people I’m staying with are not appreciators of Chaplin.
The old silent film star? Sophia says.
You know his films? the man said.
No, not really, Sophia says. I thought he was funny when I was little.
The film star, the man says. The tramp. The wanderer. The first modern hero. The outcast who got people all over the world to laugh out loud together at the same things at the same time. I thought I’d go fo
r a walk, down to the village. Away from the Micronauts and the new Yamaha Electone E-70. Don’t get me wrong. I like music. Songs are my life. But Somewhere My Love performed by an eight year old for the 51st time means it’s time for me to go for a walk.
They’ve been showing Elvis’s films on TV this year now that he’s dead, Sophia says. Maybe Charlie Chaplin’ll be next year’s Christmas film season.
Sweet Elvis in his leathers, the man says.
It is not the kind of thing a man usually says.
A blue blue Christmas without him, he says. He had some very fine songs. And dead. Young as a circus parade.
Well, in his forties, Sophia says.
The man laughs a little.
It’s a line from a song, he says, the circus parade thing. From Roustabout, the film about the fairground. The world’s a clown with its nose painted red. Wonderful World. That’s the name of the song.
I’m staying with people who’re intent on saving the world, Sophia says. But our mother, I mean my mother, she died this year, she’s dead. I’m finding it hard to care about the wonderful world per se.
Ah, the man says. I’m very sorry. For your loss.
Thank you, Sophia says.
Him saying it makes her cry. He won’t see that she is crying; it is dark here. She steadies her voice.
And our father has gone abroad, Christmas with our relatives, New Zealand, she says. I have work and couldn’t go. Which is why I’m here at all. But I’ll know to spend next Christmas by myself.
Remind me next Christmas to do the same, the man says. Meanwhile. Let’s get through this Christmas. Would you like to walk with me to the village? It’s not far.
He has a nice voice in the dark. She says yes.
He looks nice too, when they get to streetlight.
He is not her usual type. He is older, maybe closer to her father’s age. He is wearing very nice clothes, well cut. His shirt looks expensive. He must have money.
There’s nobody about. It’s not cold, though it’s quite windy. They step over a little fence and cross a green in the middle of the village. There’s a wooden bench constructed in a circle round a tree whose trunk is so thick, the man says, that he thinks it must be at least Elizabethan.
He dries the bench for her with his handkerchief. They sit back against the trunk of the tree. The tree is so wide that they’re completely out of the wind.
She can feel the ridges in its bark through her coat.
Are you warm enough? he says.
Too mild down here for winter, he says. I keep wishing snow would fall in its little icy chips off that old ice block in the sky.
The thing which most preoccupies me these days is, he says. How can men and women lead creative lives?
He tells her about Charlie Chaplin’s father singing songs about pretty girls in the music halls and dying young and a drunkard, and Chaplin’s mother singing songs in the halls too and growing madder and madder till she was too far out of her mind to work, and how Chaplin went on stage instead of his mother one night though he was still a very small child, because he knew the words of the song his mother’d been singing and his mother, there on the same stage, was staring into space as if she’d forgotten them or forgotten where and who she was, so the child Chaplin sang the song and did a dance and the crowd who’d been booing his mother showered him with pennies and applause.
He hated Christmas, he says. No wonder he died at Christmas. When he was a child and was in a home for orphans, when his mother was in the asylum, the man in charge gave all the boys an apple for their Christmas except him, and this man said to him, you can’t have one, Charlie, because you keep the boys awake telling them your stories. After that, he was always looking for it, always knowing he’d be denied it. He called it the red apple of happiness.
What a sad thing to know, she says. To have to know.
He apologizes for passing on a sadness.
He blames his own sadnesses.
He tells her how the boy Chaplin also played a cat in a pantomime at the Hippodrome in London, when the Hippodrome was a new theatre and had a pit which could fill with water, and all the dancing girls, dressed in armour like knights of old, would dance into the water till they disappeared under its surface, and how there was a clown who’d come out after they did and sit on the edge of the pool of water with a fishing rod using diamond necklaces for bait to try to catch a chorus girl.
He describes a picture to her by the poet William Blake, where two lovers in Dante’s writing, which she has not yet read but will now, are meeting in heaven, and how there’s a woman in the scene whose pigtails are like braids made of happy infant souls, how the angels in the picture have wings covered in open eyes, and how a woman who’s meant to be hope personified stands off to the side, she’s wearing a green dress, she’s smiling and throwing her hands up skywards.
He flings his own arms in the air under the tree to show her hope.
She laughs out loud.
Beautiful happy hope, he says.
They shelter in the wooden hut at the village bus stop. He holds up the holly wreath he stole off the door again. He looks at her through it. He is like no man she has ever spent time with. He seems not in the least interested in the things the older men who want to talk to you are interested in.
But I’m old now, he says. You’re young. You probably think I’m senile. And it’s true, I tend to let fair things pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
You tend to what? she says.
He laughs. He tells her it’s Keats, not him, talking.
Then tell Keats not to be so stupid, she says.
Some people walk past the green. Merry Christmas! the people shout. Merry Christmas! they both shout back. The face of the church clock says half past two. I’d better get back to my west countries, he says. They’ll have locked the door on me.
They return the holly wreath to its rightful door. This is the kind of man he is. He walks her home in the wind to the start of the path off the road, Chei Bres. When they get there he insists. He walks her all the way to the house up the dark tree-rooted path.
Big house, he says when they get there. My goodness.
The lights are still on. People are up, of course they are. They sleep in the daytime here like vampires.
It won’t be locked, she says. They’re not the door-locking type.
How hospitable, he says.
One day, she says. I’ll own this house. I’m going to buy it one day.
You will, he says. You are.
He kisses her on the mouth.
If they’ve locked up at your place, come back here, she says. You can sleep here.
Thank you, he says. It’s most kind.
He wishes her a happy Christmas.
When she can’t hear his going away any more she opens the door and goes in. She stands at the bottom of the stairs, considers going straight up to bed. But she changes her mind. He might come back. She’ll wait up, half an hour. She goes through to the kitchen. It’s full of dope smoke and dopey people, someone strumming a guitar, one of the girls doing dishes, quarter past three in the morning.
Nobody asks her where she’s been.
Probably nobody noticed she’d even gone out.
She puts the kettle on to make a hot water bottle.
I met a man, she tells Iris.
Sing hallelujah, Iris says.
He’s here in this part of the world because he really likes the artist who made the stones with the holes in them and lived over in St Ives, is St Ives near here? she says. He was sad. Charlie Chaplin’s died today. I mean yesterday. Christmas Day.
Chaplin’s died?
The news goes round the table.
Aw.
Shafted by America.
Good comrade.
Great Dictator, Iris says. Great film.
Iris starts talking about the new dictatorship of the media and the new feudal system the tabloids are milking, the readers the slaves of their propaganda.
> Sophia yawns.
One of the men, a man whose shirt collar is filthy, whose hair is long and stringy and whose baldspot makes him look a bit like a medieval monk, tells her Hepworth is the name of the artist who lived near here and that she was anti nuclear. Sophia rolls her eyes to herself. I bet they say that about everyone, she thinks. Especially the dead. I bet they enlist all the great and good to their side as soon as they can’t speak for themselves about what it is they believe.
I honestly doubt it since anybody with any powers of logic and understanding knows we need nuclear weapons, she says out loud.
The whole room turns towards her like in that unnatural way owls can move their heads right round without moving the rest of their bodies.
It’s obvious, she says. We need them to stop the other countries with nuclear weapons attacking us with their nuclear weapons. Simple maths, comrades.
She feels brave and witty for the first time in months. Calling them comrades to their faces.
And I don’t know how you’d prove, anyway, she says, that this artist who’s now dead and can’t speak for herself was anti nuclear while she was alive.
No one can argue otherwise with her. All they can say is, you’re wrong about that. She just was, they say. You can see it in her work, they say.
They bring up other important people. One woman even brings up Lord Mountbatten. As if Lord Mountbatten, a military man himself, would be anti nuclear. A military royal would never be so stupid and short sighted and blind.
She’ll learn, Iris says. Give her time.
Sophia purses her just-kissed lips.
She fills her bottle. She puts the kettle back on the hob. One of the queue of people waiting for a warm drink shakes that kettle so everyone can hear how little water’s left in it.
She doesn’t care.
She has unexpectedly had one of the best Christmases ever.
She has met a man who knows about Dante, Blake and Keats, who can speak like words are themselves magic things, and who apologized to her, who sensed that she has feelings and who bowed to them, who has looked at her through holly leaves and described all sorts of things to her, described art, poems, theatre, described the green dress of hope.
She has been sitting with her back against an Elizabethan tree. Her head is full of girls in suits of armour dancing down into water till it’s over their heads, girls under the surface waiting for the flash of light on the fisherman’s hook.