Talland House

by Maggie Humm

  Slipping out of the building without a sound, she breathed in the sea air, leaning for a moment against the doorframe. Then she stepped slowly down the stairs as at the end of a normal day, but she felt made up of different pieces badly fitted together. She couldn’t face another bad critique, her Parisian techniques ignored; being laughed at by men who called attention to themselves with outdated work; trying to be someone she didn’t yet fully understand, afraid the distress of rejection would haunt her nights. It was all impossible. She had an odd sense of having asked too much from life, of needing to get away, to go home to Father, but the last London train must have left the connection at St Erth.

  The sky was darkening and seagulls screeched, sweeping close to her head, and she watched the waves crashing onto the rocks, the ocean folding over and over as she walked to the telegraph office by the station. The telegram said she was travelling home tomorrow; she couldn’t tell him why right now. It wasn’t running from one bad critique. She was stronger than that. St Ives was meant to be the culmination of her student life. Now she’d be a student forever.

  Reaching her lodgings at last, with a surge of self-pity, she felt the room was out of focus, changed from daytime into a strange blurred gloom with a confused sadness, and the furniture seemed misshapen, in shadow as she packed her trunk.

  “I’m going to be away for a few days to see Father in London,” she told Mrs. Trevelyan, too upset to give a full explanation. “I’d be grateful if you would take this letter to Miss Emily Carr.”

  In bed, Lily was tired by the weight of everything she didn’t understand and pulled the bedclothes tight up to her chin.

  The next morning, sitting in the ladies’ waiting room at the station, she stared at the door’s beveled glass with the station’s initials in fanciful letters, thinking of her painting and Olsson’s question: “Why are you in my studio?” It seemed impossible to answer. Her eyes welled while sadness clung—an invisible, chilly slip—close to her skin. The course had promised so much: women and men studying everything together, even the naked human body, not like in some London schools, and students listed as arriving from America as well as Europe suggested a heady mixture of styles, but all she’d had was Olsson’s criticism.

  Should she have run away? Sighing, she tenderly stroked her mother’s ruby bracelet on her wrist as if it were part of her mother. It always made Lily feel warm inside, but not today. Feeling so abandoned the day her mother died, she’d long mourned her thirteen-year-old self and life alone with Father. Bereft after Mother’s death, words had stuck between her tongue and lips—hard seeds she could neither spit out nor chew. It was seven years ago but still impossibly vivid, and sometimes the pain of it swept up inside her as if it were yesterday. The waiting room door creaked, and she bent over for her bag. The train must be leaving soon.

  “Oh, my dear girl.”

  Louis stood in the doorway with a smile as broad as the first time she’d seen him. Tucking his hat under his arm, he walked over and clasped her free hand. Hoping that Emily might come once she got the letter, she’d never imagined Louis might care, and the strength of his hands flooded her with happiness.

  “My dear, don’t pay any heed to Olsson’s brusqueness. He does want all the students to succeed. Sometimes he expects far too much. We can’t all be miniature Olssons! I thought you’d painted the tips of the waves rather well.”

  Smiling back at Louis’s wide beam, thinking even a miniature Olsson would be much taller than she, Lily was hugely relieved her painting hadn’t gone unnoticed. Wondering if she should return, feeling embarrassed by her reaction to the crit, she had to speak, perhaps apologize for running away.

  “I’ve been a bit hasty,” she said, fighting back the tears, trying to accept things might never be the same as she’d hoped or thought they might. Even if she’d never paint as well as Cézanne, Paris wasn’t the centre of the whole world. Louis liked her waves, and she suddenly felt something good was about to happen. How did he know she was at the station?

  “Emily told me about your letter, and I rushed here. Allow me to escort you back to your lodgings. You can rest before coming to my soirée. The first week is difficult for everybody. You must stay in St Ives at least to Studio Day. I insist. I promise to rein in our Lord and Master.”

  Some people she couldn’t perceive, and at first Louis had been an outline, but now she could see all the colours, the flush on his cheeks from running to the station, his eyes more dark hazel than brown. Blissful, she was afraid to say more, reluctant to break the intimacy of the moment. She looked down at her hand in his, without moving her fingers in case any gesture might end his touch. It was in Louis’s cushioned grasp when they reached Mrs. Trevelyan’s. Had he noticed?

  By the time Emily and Lily arrived, Louis’s studio, already thick with tobacco smoke, was full of students sharing chipped cups and mismatched glasses. Two men wearing wigs and dresses ballooning out in layers like eighteenth-century courtesans were putting rouge on their cheeks, and Lily wished she’d known it was a fancy-dress party. Smoothing down her skirt, she thought the crushed red silk flowers seemed less Parisian, wishing she had some pieces of cloth to hang about her to change into a character. She remembered her favourite childhood game of dressing up, trying to turn into the famous people in the leather-bound history books in Father’s study, usually pretending to be Queen Elizabeth I or Boudicca.

  Hearing a high tenor and a chorus coming from the other side of the room, she searched for Louis, peering through the smoke and the crowd. He was sitting at a piano, students clustered around him, a black velvet evening cape hanging low down his back, playing a music hall song and singing louder than anyone else. Focused on the music sheets, he hadn’t seen her arrive. The oil lamps gave out a soft light reflected on the singers’ bodies as they moved from side to side in syncopation with Louis, stamping hard on the pedals. He barely seemed to notice the piano keys, one of those people whose expertise seemed easy, facile, a gift. He possessed that uncanny skill of making people like him without, seemingly, having done anything at all. In a pool of shimmering whiteness, he encouraged more raucous singing. With “Yes, You Are,” students were slapping their hands on the piano top during each chorus. Gazing at the bright group, she wanted to join in, but her last singing was with her mother, and could she remember all the words?

  Louis sung as powerfully as he spoke, but she couldn’t say anything positive about him to Emily. While walking together to the soirée, she’d told Emily about Louis’s kindness in collecting her from the station and protecting her from Olsson, and Emily had snorted, saying Louis had a reputation and drank heavily, even adding all he wanted were her fees with fewer students arriving now in early autumn. But Emily had a tendency to be sharp and upset other students. Lily wouldn’t tell Emily Louis had held her hand all along Fore Street to Mrs. Trevelyan’s, or that the warmth of his fingers lingered.

  “What are you thinking about?” Emily asked.

  “Just how wonderful the music is,” Lily said. She was thinking, of course, about Louis, imagining him asking her to dance, feeling his arms around her, treasuring his touch.

  “I don’t care for the songs,” Emily said.

  Emily mustn’t have gone to theatre in Canada, Lily imagined. “Well, Walter Sickert performed music hall songs in St Ives’s theatre, when he was painting in the town,” Lily said, “so perhaps low life isn’t so low after all?”

  Emily sat calm and self-possessed, and Lily stared around the studio. In a corner the German student who’d laughed at her crit was gazing down a stereoscope with two men, flushed and crowding over his shoulder.

  Emily caught her glance and frowned. “He’s a confirmed bachelor,” she said. “It’s probably an erotic scene. He must have been abroad and brought back some stereo cards.”

  Emily was older, Lily decided, not just in years but in understanding life. Her sturdy mass of dark curly hair, freed from its day cap, was tamed tonight with several slides. She seemed e
qually certain about morality and men, although it was refreshing in a way, and Lily clicked her glass against Emily’s and gazed at the singers now disbanded, clutching teacups of whisky. The scene resembled an Academy “problem” picture—the decadence of modern youth—yet the music was intoxicating, and the soft light shone on Louis.

  Across the studio he bowed to them, and, not knowing what to do, she smiled her awareness, a feeling of contentment secure in her body. Their looks met as if sealed safe behind glass from the murmur of the students and the tinkling of piano keys. Everything seemed to clarify for Lily, then, as she felt herself swept up in the warmth that she might be falling in love. She thought him the handsomest man she’d ever seen, but she worried Emily might somehow see all this in her face, and the studio was more beautiful even than a Parisian bar.

  Louis was playing “What the Curate Saw,” the risqué humour perfect for the theatricals. One of the men wore a reversed collar and mimed to his lady friend, with Louis conducting with one hand, amplifying the rowdiness.

  “Bicycle Built for Two!” someone called out from the back of the room.

  There was laughter and clapping, but the possibility of speeding accurately through all the syllables, after so much drinking, was beyond them. Next to Louis stood the redheaded woman whose seascape Olsson had approved, wearing a tight-fitting satin black bodice and skirt and looking radiant now without the usual overall. Lily leaned forward, trying hard to overhear their subdued conversation. She could tell from his little laughs Louis was delighted. Dragging a long bench towards the piano, he kicked the stool away with one foot, and the woman curtsied, laughing, too, and sat close beside him on the bench. Was this the usual Saturday entertainment? The woman’s fingers were slim and long with jewelled rings, three on each hand, and his hands zigzagged above hers as the couple took different parts without looking at the music sheets on the piano, their heads nodding together as if they were in tune with hidden feelings, as well as the music.

  Lily bit her lip and stopped tapping her foot, uncertain what to do with herself or where to look. The woman was gazing up at Louis, and the sight was too disturbing to watch any more. Lily couldn’t sit still, so she swiftly drank down the rest of her wine and stepped to the open door, where Emily stood, leaning against the doorframe in the fresh air.

  “My head aches a little,” Emily said. “I can breathe more easily here. If you care to stay, I can always return alone to my lodging.”

  “I’m tired too,” Lily said, feeling unaccountably angry.

  “Tomorrow promises an end to these windy, wet days,” Emily added. “I often take walks along the clifftops on Sundays with my paints and sketchbook. My landlady makes sandwiches for me, and I’m sure Mrs. Trevelyan would, too, for a small sum. Will you join me?”

  “Yes, I will,” Lily said, thinking a long walk might be the perfect antidote to all this confusion.

  The next day, sunlight flooded the streets. Emily was striding along, her satchel strapped across her chest, and Lily strode to keep up, thinking about Louis, imagining him asleep after the late soirée, hoping he’d be alone. Their laced-up leather boots snapped on the cobbles as they made their way in step along the quayside and up to the top of the hill, past its disused chapel, in the north of the town. An empty church meant there couldn’t be any angry worshippers to disturb their sketching. “Don’t work on Sundays,” Olsson had said. Gazing ahead, she was impatient to paint.

  At last Emily stopped at a bench near the cliff edge. As Lily sat with her sketchbook open, the sea was in clear bands of blue and green from this height, the air shimmering above the waves like fine gauze.

  “I’m glad I brought watercolours,” Lily said, bringing out a tiny white box. “They’re perfect for today’s hazy light.”

  “I agree. In my dream last night,” Emily said, “I saw a wooded hillside—no particular pattern or design to catch an artist’s eye. The hillside turned livid, burning green in every leaf. Only watercolours can capture the colour.”

  Emily was so extreme sometimes. In the studio Lily had seen her refuse to join in casual banter. Emily said women mirror back to men an image of themselves at twice their size, boosting their vanity, but Lily did appreciate hearing her strange ideas. The hill above the sea was viridian in her sketchbook. As the sun climbed higher, the day became summery.

  “The midday sunlight is making everything appear too flat and even,” Lily said, wiping her brow. “Let’s stop and walk on a little.”

  Washing their brushes in a clear brook, they stepped carefully along a narrow strip of coastal path between dense gorse shrubs scratching at their long skirts. Lily felt part of an immense world, with all the sea and land, and seagulls and cormorants dipping in and out of the waves for fish. It cut her away from her bewilderment about Louis. At least she could say the image of him and the young woman had faded today into shadowy silhouettes, and nothing mattered but the sun, the glittering waves, and the yellow gorse.

  At a stile ahead, the two women clambered over it and jumped down together giggling. A lanky man with a bristling beard almost to his eyes and a Windsor cap crammed over his equally wiry hair walked towards them. The knickerbockers and thick socks pulled up to his knees, combined with his knotted Alpine walking stick swishing between the encroaching bushes, suggested a serious walker. He towered over a boy taking two strides to every one of his, so as not to lag behind. As they came alongside, the boy opened a large clasp knife and began slashing at the delicate yellow flowers, waving the knife back and forth, stabbing in the air, moving closer and closer to them.

  “Sir!” Emily called out, taking a step backwards and reaching for Lily’s hand.

  As the man looked up, he yelled at the boy. “Andrew, stop!” He didn’t seem too worried about the boy’s actions, though, and turned abruptly. “Mr. Ramsay, at your service.”

  Lily didn’t speak. Both father and son shared an intimidating air, a masculine forcefulness that made her uncomfortable. Mr. Ramsay raised his cap and swept the peak in front of the boy, keeping him away from the gorse and the women. The boy looked grumpy for being corrected, and Mr. Ramsay took the knife.

  “It’s a Swiss knife, which I gave my son from one of my climbing expeditions up Mont Blanc,” Mr. Ramsay said, holding the knife even closer. “It’s used by their soldiers,” he added as he took out further blades.

  The boy was silent, staring down at his dirty boots.

  “I abhor violence of any kind, sir,” Emily said, not mentioning their names in return.

  Lily nodded. There was a kind of contained energy in Mr. Ramsay’s movements that seemed at any moment in danger of pouring out.

  “We shouldn’t attack flowers, Andrew,” Mr. Ramsay said, turning back to his son, as if oblivious to their concern. He was waving the knife around. “Plants have much to teach us. I think this is common gorse rather than dwarf because common gorse flowers more profusely in autumn.”

  Mr. Ramsay didn’t seem to know what was right to say. The knife’s blades caught the sun as he at last pushed them into the handle. Was he trying to placate them with his little parcel of expertise?

  “Good day, sir,” Emily said, pulling at Lily’s hand, and the two women stalked off down the coastal path with the echoes of Mr. Ramsay’s “Swiss knife” hanging in the sea fret blowing against their backs.

  “Did you find him alarming?” Lily asked.

  “Some men are like that,” Emily said. “Nature will make us feel better,” she added, and pointed to petrels floating near the shore. The sight of all the birds bobbing their heads under the waves made Lily smile, but she felt confused—somehow between two worlds, not entirely free to criticise like Emily, but neither wanting to give gentlemen false sympathy. Mr. Ramsay had the superiority men carry with them, too proud to leave their self-created bubbles.

  “Have you read Emerson’s Self-Reliance?” Emily asked.

  “It’s all there. Exactly how we should behave to each other. Emerson’s writings are what we n
eed to follow a good life, as well as Whitman’s, of course. I don’t go to church any more. I was glad to leave the New Testament behind in Canada. Leaves of Grass is my bible now.”

  Emily’s readings seemed more than an ocean away from the Studio and the Woman’s Signal she sometimes read when Father was out of the house. Bewildered by Mr. Ramsay’s intimidating look and his son’s violence, Lily sighed, but she was filled with the relief of having an interesting friend. In step together again, they ran back down into St Ives as Godrevy Lighthouse was switching on its evening beam.

  It was nearly the end of another week already. “Your paintings must be ready to display on Saturday’s Studio Day,” Olsson said in his customary loud voice. “Each will be framed, given titles, and little information cards placed alongside.”

  Lily flinched from the booming echo, anxious about what he’d say to her. Would he think her work worthy of a card or even selection? Her new watercolour was different, though, with its contemporary colours. Her stomach tightened, and she distracted herself with Louis’s painting on the opposite wall. His was so clever with hues multiplying across the canvas, doubling the intensity, and distant sailboats outlined as dark silhouettes, with the sky a bright, golden sunset. The glow flooded into her, and she ran her fingers over the cold frame of her work, feeling her eyes smarting and the faults in her little painting immediately visible. As she looked down at her feet waiting for Olsson’s inevitable sarcasm, it was Louis magically at her side.