Talland House

by Maggie Humm

  “Miss Briscoe, may I tell you a little secret?” he murmured, close to her ear.

  Her chest swelled with the relief of avoiding Olsson and feeling Louis’s breath on her cheek.

  “My sunset is not by chance or my whimsy,” he said. “The skies glisten from Redruth to St Ives because the Cornish atmosphere is full of tiny particles of opalescent glass from miners roasting arsenic. The heavens simply look golden when lit from behind by the sun. Art should always draw on what life provides.”

  Pausing, he scrutinized her painting for several minutes and then smiled at Lily. “I suggest your watercolour The Island should hang next to my piece on Studio Day. Your green is vivid, and the washes work well together.”

  Being alongside Louis would get her work noticed, and better still, show she was judged a good enough artist to be chosen by him. She was conscious of a buzz in the room and glanced round to find the young woman who’d played piano with him at the Saturday soirée was staring at them with a perplexed expression. It was glorious. The moment hung luminous in the air. Louis’s interest was a shield to repulse any attacking arrows, making her feel equal to anything.

  All afternoon the students’ work was switched around again and again as Louis and Olsson walked back and forth eyeing juxtapositions and matching subjects. At last the selection was complete.

  “I’ll design the short catalogue myself,” Olsson said, and no one looked surprised. It must be the usual end to the day’s proceedings.

  “Are they for visitors?” she asked Emily in a whisper. “It would make Father so proud to see my name in print.”

  Emily, bold as ever, asked Olsson if each student could have a copy. “Not as a memento. I travel straight to Paris from St Ives. I want to add the catalogue to my portfolio. The covers are always so contemporary.”

  She never dissembled, and Olsson’s face for once managed a smile.

  “By all means,” he said. “We each will have one.”

  On Saturday the gallery doors were wide open, carrying a poster, an enlarged copy of the catalogue cover. The poster’s line of descending steps, each aligned with either the name of the day, or the year, seemed almost modern. Lily smiled at Emily standing next to her and made herself look at everything, remember every item, worried the day might fade away without all the detail being gathered in her mind.

  The room tingled with excitement. The folds of the women’s silk skirts caught the electric light which would stay on throughout the day with great extravagance. What an immense crowd of people had come to see their paintings! Military folk, women in their best bonnets, men in new serge suits, even clergy, all jostled together, holding up lorgnettes, watching the drama, with students standing alongside their paintings, as the actors. She was in the deep thick of it all, and Louis was walking towards them. The possibility came to her that somewhere here, somehow, some amazing moment would soon arrive to make her joyful, and she simply had to wait.

  “Did you know the railway company runs special trains from Paddington to St Ives for visitors to come for Studio Day?” he whispered, watching her delighted face. “Let’s stand next to our paintings,” he suggested, and they pushed through the crowd.

  A tall gentleman and lady were already in front of her watercolour, together with a child flicking a pocketknife open and closed. Lily recognized the boy and man immediately from the clifftop walk. The woman was pale but looked a Renaissance beauty, with large lightly lidded eyes in perfect symmetry and an aquiline nose. Her face was familiar. Louis bowed, ushering them towards the family.

  “May I present Miss Briscoe and Miss Carr, two of our most accomplished students, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay.”

  Lily made a slight bow and looked directly at the man’s clothes and bushy beard reaching almost to his eyes. He was more smartly dressed than earlier, in a black frock coat and waistcoat.

  Mr. Ramsay doffed his hat, nodding in return. “We’ve already met under unfortunate circumstances,” he said to his wife, describing the event on the cliff path.

  “It was a moment, sir,” Lily said, “although somewhat disturbing.”

  “I omitted to present Andrew,” Louis interrupted. “It is Andrew, I think?”

  “Oh, don’t bother with him. We have too many ragamice for people to remember all their names!” Mr. Ramsay said.

  With a concerned expression, his wife moved close to their son, putting her arm around his thin shoulders, giving him a hug, and she grasped Lily’s hand.

  “Your painting has moved me more than I can say,” she said, beaming. “We’ve a special place in our garden which the children call ‘the Lookout place’ because they can see the railway station and the town from there. But I prefer the view of St Ives you’ve captured. May we buy the painting?”

  In one moment, Lily felt so much happier than she’d been since her mother died, overcome with relief she was on her way to professionalism if Mrs. Ramsay thought she was a good artist. The sense she sometimes had, that she wasn’t sure who Lily Briscoe actually was, began to dim. She glanced at Louis uncertain what to reply, but he was his usual charming self.

  “You’ve chosen the perfect image of St Ives,” he said, bowing to the Ramsays. “We can arrange to have the work brought up to Talland House this very evening if you wish.”

  Anxious Emily’s vivid country scene had been ignored, Lily turned to Emily and tried to gauge her expression, but her friend’s face was blank.

  “You are both such clever young women,” Mrs. Ramsay said, directly to Emily. “I wish we had more money with us today. Perhaps later we may buy your painting, Miss Carr? How wonderful to be gifted so young. My own artistic moment is sadly long past.”

  For once Emily looked content. Mrs. Ramsay handed the fee to Louis, her hands covered in delicate white lace half gloves, in a graceful gesture matching the kindness of her speech. The praise of the two paintings together was so real, with no flourishes or falsity. Lily felt radiant, and it was due to Mrs. Ramsay. The words tumbled out.

  “Thank you, thank you so much, Mrs. Ramsay,” she said. “How wonderful … you’ve made me so happy. It’s simply wonderful.”

  She stopped speaking and watched the mother and son, wanting to be in his place, with Mrs. Ramsay’s arm around her shoulders and relishing a motherly cuddle. When she glanced up, Olsson was staring from across the room, and she couldn’t resist a smile as the gallery chatter burst into her bubble. The little group of the Ramsays, themselves, and Louis had been in a thick bell jar of suspended life. Now all the fashionable London visitors came alive again, but nothing mattered more than seeing Mrs. Ramsay, as the family weaved away through the crowd, and she wanted to remember this sight for as long as possible.

  “She was painted by Burne-Jones himself, you know,” Louis said. “The delicate figure facing the angel in The Annunciation is Mrs. Ramsay.”

  So, she was always beautiful, always desired by artists, and now she was married to the irritable Mr. Ramsay with his big bushy beard and Alpine socks.

  The two women walked back slowly to Emily’s room above a curio shop. When Lily first saw the lodging, she’d wondered if the curios dotted around Louis’s studio were signs of his frequent visits to the shop, and perhaps an interest in Emily. Louis had said he’d love to have a companion one day, but then her jealousy disappeared when she noticed Emily’s usual breeches and stout walking boots. Today, Emily’s brightly sprigged dress must have been carefully chosen for the exhibition.

  “Thank you for being generous about my watercolour,” Lily said, pleased her friend’s air of unsmiling intimacy was the same as always.

  “Oh, I am so glad for you,” Emily replied, and continued almost breathlessly. “In any case, I’ve been doing my best work this week. I even tried Monsieur Pissarro’s brushstrokes! I think one’s art is a growth inside one, but I can’t say this in front of the men, so I depend on your interest.”

  Touched by the confession, Lily smiled. She always felt everyone she’d ever met knew so more about t
he world than her, but it was true of Emily: she’d been born in North America; travelled the geographies of distant landscapes; seen animal lairs, vast forests, icy tundra; and encountered Indians. Yet Emily tramped the Cornish coastal paths and cobbled streets with Lily as if these narrow spaces and the textures of St Ives’s beach meant as much to her. Hugging her friend goodbye, Lily’s face creased into a broad smile when she reached her lodgings.

  The next weekend, after their usual Sunday walk, Lily and Emily rushed back down into the evening stillness of St Ives. They took a different descent into the town than the road they’d climbed, following a path around the back of the grand houses resembling an extended mews behind fancy Knightsbridge mansions. It was on days like this—the air fresh on her cheeks, the sky a bright ultramarine—she’d found herself succumbing to a sort of wonderment, a state of bliss, as the landscape unrolled into a grand vista.

  “Tregenna wood—and haunting, ivy-draped solemn Tregenna Castle!” Emily had excitedly exclaimed when they’d first climbed the hill.

  “But no one we know could afford to stay there,” Lily had said. “I heard Mr. Henry James visits.”

  The sweep of the land behind the inn had been dense with trees, with smoke from cottages filtering through the foliage, and she’d felt outside of herself somehow, part of it all. Looking back at the town, with its chimneys’ black fingers reaching up into the sky, she’d noticed the Sloop Inn by the harbour overburdened with chimneys, all irregular round columns, each with a curved lip resembling a drinking cup, and she’d sighed. Was this why Louis felt at home there, and was he truly charming or charming when he drank, and would she ever know the difference? At least she could paint, and painting had become for her a way of suggesting, for all the doubts and insecurities of life, there was one thing she could handle well, that would always say what she couldn’t say in words. Lost in a design, she’d been startled Emily had invited her to come to Paris as a companion, never having visited the city.

  What would the artists in the Bateau-Lavoir make of Emily with her strange expressions, her intensity? Although Lily had to admit, sharing art with Emily would be the perfect antidote to months with Olsson. There’d be fewer distractions on a second visit to Paris, and she’d be free to walk the streets late at night safe with another woman, but she’d refused. Father, retired and alone with the servants, needed her, and she had to sell more paintings. She’d make the best of things, knowing her mother would have approved, and hugged her friend, feeling older for a moment, catching up with Emily’s extra years, and promising to write every week until Emily returned with tales of her French lovers. Their laughter had hung in the air until they reached the grand houses.

  A heavy hawthorn scent of hedges now surrounded them, and a delicate, almost sugary aroma came from a tall escallonia protecting the grounds of a white house. The screams and laughter of children playing out of doors filtered into the lane, and Lily peeked through a gap in the leaves. The gardens, as many as she could see one-eyed between the stalks, seemed numerous, and on a lawn with a fountain, two boys and three girls surrounded a grey terrier gripping onto a rat. The girls were excited, dancing on tiptoes; the boys held onto the dog, trying to retrieve the rat, making the youngest girl scream.

  “Shag, Shag, drop the rat!” It was Mrs. Ramsay calling, high above the children on steps leading down from the house.

  She clapped her hands at the dog, gave precise directions to the boys, and asked the girls to return indoors. Majestic, her hair glinted auburn above a white shawl tied around her shoulders. Even in the twilight, she glowed in a tableau of her own competence, and Lily couldn’t stop gazing. The family was here in St Ives, not yet returned to London, and Talland House must be in the terrace visible at the top of her attic window each night. Her painting The Island could be hanging in the drawing room and seen by all their visitors. She struggled for self-possession, her voice rising.

  “Talland House I believe, Emily. We must have walked a good deal further around the town than we intended.”

  “We can’t stay any longer,” Emily cautioned. “They might hear us and wonder why we’re secretly staring.”

  Lily wanted to be inside sharing the evening. Oil lamps would be lit; servants would carry trays of delicious food into the dining room. She could take pleasure in Mrs. Ramsay’s friendship, sitting in a window space watching all their ragamice playing, becoming so much more than someone who thought the tiny amount of knowledge she carried around was enough. Nodding at Emily, she moved away from the hedge, knowing, since meeting Mrs. Ramsay, with each day, each hour in St Ives, she’d felt parts of herself come alive, and one day the sad memories of her mother would begin to fade and disappear.

  The next day there was an envelope for her on the hallstand. Lily withdrew the stiff card.

  The President of the St Ives Arts Club and his wife have the pleasure of inviting Miss Lily Briscoe to the Arts Club President’s Night at eight o’clock this Saturday. Evening dress. Carriages at 11 p.m.

  She took a quick breath. Louis would be certain to be invited, and dressing up for a grand dinner was a chance to reveal a different version of herself, someone perhaps more adult, less intense, and certainly less anxious.

  Later in the studio the students crowded around Olsson, waving their invitations. Those from Australia and America were anxious about what to wear for a formal event, the English students asked about the appropriate mores of possibly dining with different classes. Emily turned to Lily with a puzzled expression.

  “May we sit together,” she asked, “so you can tell me what to do? I’ve never been to a banquet in England.”

  “All I remember is wine travels from the right and then, after the meal is over, port from the left for the gentlemen,” Lily replied, laughing, “but I’d be delighted to sit with you.”

  The rituals of grand dinners, of who should sit where, had little place in their world; in the studio, men dressed in their shirtsleeves, and outside on the quayside, women painted without gloves. Art mattered, but the formality of men bowing and ladies curtsying mattered not at all, and conservative South Kensington seemed far away. It occurred to her the dinner wouldn’t be as important as the changes she felt inside—not simply gaining a new knowledge of painting techniques but the unexpected feelings brought by the colours of the sea, of trying to capture the gold-lit sky, of finding herself inside her painting in a way completely novel. At first, she’d envied Olsson’s certainty. His gaze and brush moved in tandem, fixing a line exactly where he wanted it, but she was glad now to paint out of doors, and she could focus harder and longer, loving the way the sun burnt through the early morning mists. She thought of yesterday, rushing down the hill with Emily, seeing Talland House, Mrs. Ramsay pale and commanding, and wanting to capture all of it in paint.

  “We’ll go together.” Lily smiled at her best friend. “I’m sure you’ll appreciate the event.”

  Saturday evening arrived before she’d had time to start the usual worries. The tiny washstand mirror merely reflected her face, not her clothes, but she hurried into the silk evening dress, a memento from Paris Father had kindly posted when she wrote about the president’s grand dinner, and it overflowed the glass as she swished in and out of its frame. Her hands were hot and sticky trying to tie the pleated sash tight around her waist. Was the fabric too fashionable for St Ives? Lily smiled. It did enhance her slim figure. The lily was already less white than an hour before in the flower shop, but pinned above her bust the bloom seemed to shine light upwards to her face.

  The knocker clanged. For once Emily wore a new blouse and colourful bows, with two velvet ribbons pinned to her hair, although it was drawn straight back from her face.

  “We can carry our evening shoes in my sponge bag,” Emily said, “to keep them clean for the dinner.”

  Lily nodded, glad Emily was always so practical. Boots were more appropriate anyway for the autumn gloom, especially over cobbled streets, and she took off her black patent pumps, hand
ing them to her friend. Glancing up when they reached the Arts Club, she thought to herself it resembled a fairy-tale castle, with its windows of light dotted in irregular places, and a wide beam streamed over them from a large skylight at the top of the Dutch roof gable.

  “We have to climb up to the club room on a back staircase,” Emily said. “We should take our boots off now under the building’s porch before anyone sees us.”

  As they entered the club, Lily’s eyes swept around looking for Louis. The candlelit upper room displayed two carved alabaster vases with electric bulbs inside, throwing soft hues onto the long table, and she was amazed at the transformation of the whole space. Lights flickered over pale distempered walls, and the polished surfaces of the furniture reflected the pictures, magnifying their shapes. Holding her hands behind her back, she smiled when Louis stepped towards them, sweeping his velvet evening cape back over his shoulders. He came so close to her she felt she could see right into him, and wiping her hot palms delicately on the back of her dress, she shook his outstretched hand.

  “Mr. Ramsay was elected president this year,” he said as he slowly relinquished her grasp, still gazing at her face. “He’ll be making the speeches. Allow me to escort you both to the table. I’m sure we can all sit together. I doubt there are named place cards. The custom is to have the menu on one side of the card together with the medal winners on the reverse, rather than people’s names.”

  As she followed him to the tables, she felt a fresh kind of beauty in her body as if the evening’s exquisiteness had already distilled into a rare food she’d eaten. Two students stared as she passed, giving her a palpable sense of delight. Overjoyed to be sitting next to Louis amid the company, she noticed Mr. Ramsay already seated opposite, at the centre of the dining table, frowning at the guests, with his wife at his right hand. Lily picked up her glass thinking she shouldn’t drink too fast, but there was something perfect about the scene. Was it selfish to be as blissful as she felt now, for a moment like this, in a world of such poverty? Was it wrong to want to give herself over to golden lights and champagne? Sucked into the evening’s glow, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Louis beckon to the waiter, and their glasses were refilled.