by Tanith Lee
‘While I was punished for my wickedness, willing and casting his life away when I might have been happy elsewhere, and he left in peace.’
‘Each the other’s sentence and downfall,’ said the raven. ‘As perhaps each knew it must be.’
‘And you,’ she said, ‘are an angel of chastising God. Or the Devil.’
‘Neither,’ said the raven. ‘Should we not chastise ourselves, that we learn?’ He flew to the embrasure of the window. Beyond the tower, the trees were dark as always, the tops of the other dreary towers pushed up. But the sky was blushed with blue. Over the wall it would be spring.
‘Despite all sins and stupidities,’ said the raven. ‘I love you yet and yet have waited for you, gentle, fair Blanche. And you, whether you wished it or no, waited for me in your bone tower, and at the last as at the first, you were kind.’
The white queen wept. Her tears were like pearls.
‘Let us,’ said the raven, ‘be together a little while, in freedom and innocence.’
‘Oh, how can you speak?’ she cried.
‘Oh, how can you understand what I say?’
Then the white queen left her chair. She left her body and bones and old pale blood, for she was white now inside and out. She flew up into the window embrasure. From the prison towers only the souls of dreamers or the wings of birds could get out. Up like arrows flew two ravens, one black as pitch, one white as snow, and away together over the trees, the wall, the road, the world, into the sky of spring.
SWEET GRAPES
Someone who was something of a romancer told me this tale, in a rather different form, claiming it to be true. Maybe it’s one of the new urban myths, of which most of us know a version.
Otherwise, dismantled buildings have always appealed to me, those stage-set shells, without backs, like elf-maidens. With everything revealed, what can they be hiding?
They’re pulling the house down. Of course, what does it matter? The rest of the street has gone already. A long line of brickwork structures, every one with its roofs, chimneys, windows, doors and steps, and lapped in trees. One by one they fell in a steady progression, as if a bomber had been at work in the night. Every morning another cavity, the crashed bricks giving up strange new colours, and little beetles hurrying across the road from the scene of the disaster. Twenty years ago, each structure had a life. Not only beetles but human things went in and out. Children played in the gardens and sleek pet cats sunned themselves. Behind locked doors the men and women rowed and planned and dreamed and grieved and made love. Crash, there goes another one. Who slept there, I wonder?
The problem with the last house, though. I was coming to that.
Somes the painter lived there. You won’t have heard of Somes, or do you think you have? It’s possible you may have seen a canvas or two, or some of the water-colours. But he exhibited very seldom. He was part of what they are inclined to call a School of Painting. That is, he knew, and was apparently influenced by an artist who very quickly achieved great renown, and who I’ll refer to, I think, as G. G. would indeed be known to you, to the peripheries of culture his name rings out. I would even go so far as to say if you mentioned G. to a taxi-driver who had no interest at all in what has come to be called Art, still he’d say, Oh, yes, G. He’d heard of G. all right. Somes had heard of G. all right too. They’d been students together, and at one phase even went to America together and travelled about in an ancient car, getting drunk and generally carrying on the way young artists are supposed to. Then G. came back here, and in a couple of ticks he was rich and famous. But Somes, I think, was in France then, and later, when he did come back, everybody who knew looked at his work and said, Ah, yes. One of the school of G.
Now to be honest with you, I never went all that much for G. Technically of course, he’s brilliant, and I do recognise that he is an innovator, someone who brings something new and maybe unique to what he does. That’s very good, I’m sure. In fact it’s essential to any movement — that it has to move. But one doesn’t always have to like it. It seemed to me there was a hard crust over G.’s best work, like the sort of stuff you can’t clean out of an egg pan. It was something in his way of seeing, or in his way of transposing what he saw. It wasn’t that he was being ‘clever’. It wasn’t so simple as that. It was more as if he had made some kind of final judgement, on life, the world, people, God, himself — everything. And there it was, hard and immovable — stuck. And stale. Yes, that’s the word I want. Stale even though it was completely fresh and bright and new. And it was only when I saw some of the little things, where he was fumbling a bit perhaps, that this awful element seemed to me to have got left out.
But with Somes — well, with Somes there was a kind of almost-pleading in his work. He was never sure, even when he was certain. Always a question, always something half dissolving away. And while it cushioned the impact, holding him back like a sort of visual stammer, yet the openness was fluid and truthful. He seemed to be saying, I don’t know, but I’m looking; look with me. Maybe we’ll see it together. To my mind that made him more of an artist, if not so much of a genius. You could stare into his canvases an hour at a time — that’s the nature of search. With G., he told you in two seconds flat, so that was as long as you needed to look. And sometimes, too, Somes would produce a piece of work where the questioning itself became marvellous, the entire canvas like a singing cry in music.
When I read about the adventuring the two of them made, G. and Somes, I used to imagine them meeting some wise old sage in a desert who offered them both a seed of knowledge. And G. swallowed his straight down, and he saw God, and he knew he had the tablets of stone and all he need do was belt down the mountain and hit humanity over the head with them. But Somes sucked his knowledge-seed slowly, like a fruit pastille, and when he saw God, God said, Neither you nor I, Mr Somes, know anything. That is the secret of the universe. But after all, we are here to learn.
So you see, I liked Somes’s work, and in fact I own a few of the drawings and one tiny little oil, and when he exhibited, I’d go chasing all over the country if I could, so as not to miss the show. Then, as he got older, he produced less and less. I heard less and less of him. One day someone told me he had died.
Then, about a year after that, I met him.
It was in a very silly way, I might add.
You know how many streets, roads and squares there are around various parts of London with the same name. I was supposed to be doing an article, never mind on what, to tell you the truth I forget, and I had an address which I duly muttered as I jumped into the taxi. Either I added the wrong codicil, or the man misheard me, or that mindless psychic prankster an acquaintance of mine used to call the Cosmic Guffaw was now at work. The cab arrived, I paid and got out, and walking over to the proper number, the last house in the street, I looked for a bell. There was none, nor any names set out. Glancing up, I saw some of the windows were boarded. It didn’t bode particularly well, but anyway I knocked loudly.
Presently I heard someone coming to the door. Then it was opened and there stood Somes. I knew him instantly from the pictures I’d seen of him over the years, small and bony, with a large forehead and great eyes. His shabby clothing was augmented by the same red scarf I had seen in a self-portrait. I gaped at him and he looked sadly and patiently up at me. Finally I said, ‘Mr Somes?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Well I was — looking for some people — but I think I must have come to the wrong address …’ Then I put all this irrelevance aside and added firmly, ‘But you are David Somes, you are the painter David Somes?’
He smiled faintly. ‘Yes.’
‘May I talk to you, Mr Somes?’ I said. I gave him my credentials in a garble. Then, when he stood before me still, still smiling faintly, the jaws of the dark dusty hall behind him ready to swallow him back down, I amended, ‘If it isn’t convenient, I can come back any time, that is.’
It wasn’t that he was hesitating exactly. H
e looked more like a man who had been asleep for a long while, all morning, or all winter. Did he hibernate like a squirrel? Should I return later in the spring? But then he seemed to catch up with me, and he said, ‘Quite convenient,’ and stood aside to let me in.
I entered the hall flustered and excited, wondering what I was going to say to him. I only knew it wasn’t an opportunity I was about to pass up. And somehow, too, I felt he’d understand all that. The need to accost the moment, the unsureness of what to do with it. Wasn’t that a part of his own experience?
Having shut the door, he led me down the hall. He wore slippers, and shuffled. A green light lay on everything, and on the room into which he took me at the back of the house, from the high grass and bushes that were claiming the windows. I’d seen what had happened to the staircase. It would appear Somes was the last of the residents.
The room was fairly chaotic, what you’d expect from an elderly man living on his own, and one also who, long ago, dismissed the niceties as superfluous. There were a great many books everywhere, no art books that I saw. Of course, you can probably imagine, the moment I got into the room my eyes were everywhere, looking to see if anything was going on, any painting. But there wasn’t a single thing. And on the walls only the peeling paper and the patterns of the damp.
Somes boiled a kettle on a gas ring and prepared tea. It made me rather uncomfortable. I’d come on him out of thin air, and here he was grovelling by the fireplace, he, Somes the artist, with a tea-caddy and two chipped cups. I think we constructed some small talk, or I did. I explained what had happened with the mistaken address. Then I tried to tell him why it was imperative for me to see him now, how I had followed his seasons — all that without employing the dreadful clichés. Often nothing is so threatening to the artist as to be told how one admires his work (as if that gains one some rights of social rape), or so horrific for him as to have to describe, for the umpteenth time, his methods and procedures, his feelings and motives, all of which should anyway be apparent in — or extraneous to — the objects themselves, and which always are. Those aren’t the questions I ever want to ask. Sometimes it’s simply enough to be in the same room with them, these beings, to look at them and know they’re there. At last I said, ‘I don’t know where to begin. Is there anything you could tell me?’ And to this idiotic sally he responded. He raised his great tired eyes, and smiled again, and said, ‘Shall I be paid?’
Far from being shocked at his need — it was obvious enough — I was delighted at the excuse to give him something. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. I quoted a sum, went so far as to count it out before him, and promised more if the article should be published. I then managed to tell him I had pursued his work for years, that I owned a painting, and informed him which.
He said suddenly, ‘And do you have anything of G.’s?’
I didn’t want to fall into the trap either of admitting that G.’s ventures were beyond my means or that I disliked G.’s ventures in any case.
‘No,’ I said. And with what I hoped was the right emphasis, ‘Just your own.’
‘I have always,’ he said, ‘bowed in the shadow of G.’
The impulse was very strong in me to argue violently that if so, with no cause, and the art world was an ass, etc.: I kept it down somehow.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘there is always one plant that grows bigger by sucking the life out of all the others.’
Then I was glad I’d said nothing. He saw he had embarrassed me, and went on quietly, ‘I’m used to it. But no one can suppose I like it. When I was a young man, finding I had talent, I expected the doors of the sky to open for me. And later, when no doors at all were opened, I felt it very much. For many years I was jealous of G. I would have liked to kill him, or to have him assassinated. It seemed to me, if his shadow was gone, I should be seen. But it was too late. He was the master, and the rest of us had been classed as disciples. Crucifying him would only have made it worse.’
Then he talked for a while, rationally, sometimes smoking the cheaper brands of cigarettes — always refusing mine — about his life, and the journeys with G., and how he, Somes, had begun to paint, and what ideas had obsessed him, and what images remained. And I took my notes. He was telling me all the things I didn’t want to hear. What did I want from him? The atmosphere in the room was close and green and musty, and the gas fire stupefied me. I stifled a succession of yawns. I was bored.
In the end, he stopped talking and I stopped taking notes. I thanked him, and tried not to do so too profusely. He too looked exhausted and worn, bored far worse than I by what he was. Of course, he was of no account. It was the thing he could do which mattered. And nowhere, nowhere — not even a tacked-up pencil sketch on the wall.
‘But now,’ I said, ‘do you — are you working on anything at all — ’
A sudden sharp gleam came into his eyes.
‘Do I look as if I am?’
A moment before I would have said he looked incapable of any such thing. Now I wasn’t so sure.
‘Are you?’
‘Well,’ he said. Suddenly he reached across and took one of my cigarettes with a gentle ‘May I?’ A surge hit me. If he took the cigarette he felt he was going to repay it. Where was the painting — where? My eyes shot round the room again, the thrown-together bed, the heaps of books and clothes. Out of a drawer? From a cupboard? He rose and said, ‘We must go upstairs. Do you object to that? The staircase is not very good.’
He was certainly right about the staircase. I crept up it, twice putting my feet part-way through the rotten wood. He moved as lightly as a ghost, presumably used to the trek. How we should get down again I didn’t know, I had visions of everything collapsing in our wake. At the same time, excited by the prospect of this secret collation in some studio above, what did I care if the stair fell in rubble?
On the first landing he turned to the left and opened a door. It seemed low in the house for a studio, but the rest of the floors were probably unnegotiable. Even before I stepped inside after him, a huge and powerful smell of paint, raw and acid as adrenalin itself, came soaking out at me. Even so, I wasn’t prepared.
I got into the room, saw him standing like a tiny doll in the middle of its complete bareness, had a second of fright that there was nothing here. Then, I saw the wall. The light of the dirty window fell across it in a radiant stripe. Colour and form burned out and faded down as the sun went in from the sky beyond the house. Without a thought of electrocution, I hit the switch by the door, and a cluster of bare bulbs came on in the ceiling. Then I walked into the middle of the floor, where he was, and stood staring up at the painting.
It covered almost the entire wall, and like the frescoes of Renaissance Italy, it must have required scaffolding, candles, alternating brushes of extraordinary thinness and mass. But that was by the way, irrelevant, because this act of creation, like all such acts, was magic. In a hesitant voice, I asked him what treatment he’d given the plaster, and he told me — it was the right one, for the time being. He would know, but how — how had he done it, this fragile old man? No, who cared how. How had he painted something so beautiful and absolute? That was the real mystery of this shrine.
I saw at once it was the best of him. It was something he had never managed before. The subject, which, too, was almost unimportant, was a favourite of his, often tackled, a landscape, with hills, and heaven beyond. But the soul of the painting was infinite. Even the colossal size, which could have made it ludicrous, seemed only to have refined it further. It had all the melting, ambient, questing quality of everything Somes had ever done, yet now it rested in a perfect wholeness. It was not that he had stopped seeking, pleading, asking, it was that he had finally learned how to frame the question. It was the question which was seen now to be so beautiful. It ennobled not only the painter, but the observer also. As ever, he took you with him, you were one with him. You understood, looking at this floating dream of lights and shades, hues and textures, forms and un-forms, that to dare to a
sk the question was not a stammering shame, but a sweetness, a glory.
I couldn’t say anything to him. I knew he’d comprehend that. I knew that if he’d thought for one moment I would dash about the room barking with ecstasy and leaping to put my paws on his shoulders, he would never have let me look.
In the end, I sighed. Then he said, ‘Would you care to see the others?’
I just stood there, dumbfounded. But he took me anyway.
There were seven more, one in every amenable room of the house. He explained mildly that some of the walls were in such bad condition by the time the tenants had moved out, it had been impossible to do anything with them. Where the treatment would take, he applied it, and then moved in for the weeks, the months, which were needed. When it was finished, the last painting, he burned the brushes and the palettes, and everything else that was left over. He said, regretfully, he had made such a mess of them that they weren’t re-usable, or he would have sold what he could. The ladders and trestles, of course, but that was another business.
There were several subjects, nothing he hadn’t attempted previously, though never in this way. A giant’s still-life of flowers and fruits, three more landscapes, a seascape caught in an outflung arm of shore, a winter village, girls with birds. I couldn’t describe them. They were all the same, all the perfection of the question. All perfect.
I don’t remember coming down the dangerous stair. All I remember is that, in the lower hallway, I caught his arm as I hadn’t meant to do, and began to blurt in a kind of terror that somehow everything must be seen to. The damage to the house was so great, something must be done at once, or the paintings would be ruined in less than a year.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. He lowered his eyes.
I asked his permission to return with photographers. We would have to get some record, before anyone could be expected to help. The mains electricity must be unreliable. A van with a generator then, and huge lights. He listened with the old patience. He neither agreed nor quarrelled. In the end I ran away from him in my haste to get back, only thinking enough to leave my cigarettes behind.