Talland House

by Maggie Humm

  “Pardon me, Miss Briscoe. I didn’t know of your request,” Mr. Ramsay said as if falsely remembering his manners. “I’m sure my wife made you very welcome. Mrs. Ramsay loves attending to visitors. I often feel much neglected.”

  Lily breathed in his hopeless self-centredness. She wouldn’t reply, otherwise the radiant hours with Mrs. Ramsay would become incidental in her mind to the scene he’d created.

  “My dear,” Mrs. Ramsay said, in a conciliatory tone, “Mrs. Olsson is promised a visit from me tomorrow. I’ll take one of the children. You know how she loves to treat them.”

  Tucking her arm in his, she wrapped her shawl tight around her shoulders and smiled again at Lily. “It’s been a delight talking with you, Miss Briscoe, more than I can say.”

  Her first name probably couldn’t be spoken in front of Mr. Ramsay, but Mrs. Ramsay was safe from his anger. The voices of the couple softened in the air as they walked back into the house, with Mrs. Ramsay listening intently to the man at her side. They’d be watching the children play cricket late into the evening. Lily was alone, but she felt taller, more solid in some way, as if all the different feelings in her flowed smoothly together, as if nothing had happened before she met Mrs. Ramsay because Mrs. Ramsay had taken her from a toy box and given her life.

  III

  —

  1919

  THE ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON

  THE FRESH AIR OUTSIDE THE ACADEMY’S GALLERIES restored Lily a little, but she felt frail and distraught by the news of Mrs. Ramsay’s death, and the more she tried to suppress her unease, the stronger it grew. For reassurance she glanced at Louis and Hilary walking alongside Eliza, but the sudden bright sunlight turned them into silhouettes.

  “There’s a tea area with tables and chairs,” Louis said, “to your left under the awning.”

  Lily remembered delivering her paintings to the door also at the left. Twice she’d submitted a work for the summer exhibition, and as August aged into September, she’d collected the rejected scene; she’d used the same frame each year so at least new ones weren’t an extra expense. Now waitresses in smart black skirts and white starched blouses were carrying out trays of tea and scones from the selfsame door.

  “May I order tea for you both?” Louis murmured.

  The two women nodded, forcing half-smiles.

  “And water please, glasses of water,” Eliza said, dabbing her forehead.

  Lily glanced at the other tables full of young people but not at Louis and Hilary in case their dreadful news was somehow in their eyes. She wanted, for a moment, to be an excited eighteen-year-old girl again attending the Academy schools, dazzled by the architecture. The quadrangle wasn’t as grand as the square in front of the Louvre but richer in its baroque decorations, dotted with statues in niches.

  She looked away. Her muscles felt rigid and her hands clammy. Lily shivered; the sun hadn’t yet found its way onto the cobbles, and she pulled her shawl close around her shoulders, feeling her features settling into a deadened expression as if there were too many conflicting emotions to fit into her one face. The two men shifted awkwardly on their seats.

  Louis spoke first. “We’re so deeply sorry for our abruptness,” he whispered, after looking around, but they were all alone together in a corner. “We should have asked first when you’d last heard from Mrs. Ramsay, and not burdened you with so much information.”

  Instantly, Louis broke off, as a waitress stood in front of them. She placed a tea tray down on the table and, picking up the silver teapot, poured without asking. The ordinary gesture seemed so incongruous. Lily placed her hands around her cup for a moment, the steam moistening her lips, as if the warmth could take away the chill. Until the war, her friends were all artists who shared her values. One thing had built on another thing, and after the armistice she’d imagined returning to her old life, but now she no longer knew what life would be.

  “Tell me what you know,” she said, staring at Hilary, unable to say Mrs. Ramsay’s name aloud. “I need to know everything.”

  Eliza nodded in agreement. “Don’t be worried about upsetting us further.”

  Hilary’s eyes flickered between them. “Mrs. Ramsay’s death must be as terrible a loss for you as the horrors we’ve all lived through during the war.”

  The exhibition was proof of the enormity of war. The illustrated catalogue fell open on her lap. In one image, bled across the spine, a line of soldiers, eyes bandaged, one arm clutching another’s shoulder in front, were stomping over dead and wounded bodies, while a sulphurous yellow sky poured down. Turning the pages without thinking, she stared at images of bombed churches, whole towns destroyed, buildings turned into piles of spillikin sticks, a children’s game gone wrong, horribly wrong.

  “Oh, my dear,” Louis murmured.

  Her eyes were moist, but she felt herself slip away into the absurd hope they could all return to the blissful morning before Hilary had spoken, wanting desperately to believe Mrs. Ramsay wasn’t dead.

  “My portrait of Mrs. Ramsay will never be finished,” Lily whispered, staring at a napkin. It was selfish, self-centred, but it felt for a moment as if the future were behind a door without a handle. Slowly she raised her head.

  “How did she die?” she asked, looking directly at Louis.

  He leaned in close, speaking in a low voice. “According to the servants, Mrs. Ramsay died unexpectedly late one evening. The Ramsay family doctor, Dr. Seton, wasn’t called until 6:00 p.m. He agreed with Mr. Ramsay to inject her with the usual stimulant to regulate her heart, but the procedure failed, and then Seton signed a death certificate. Hilary, as you know, was close to the family and had befriended the cook, Sophie, while staying at Talland House. It was Sophie who gave Hilary more details when he visited the next week to offer condolences to Ramsay and the family.”

  The four glanced up simultaneously as a couple sat down at the next table. Scraping his chair closer, Hilary took up the story.

  “When I called at the house in Hyde Park Gate,” he said, “Sophie opened the door, explaining she was standing in for the parlour maid, and asked me to come to her kitchen. She called me Master Hunt, she always seemed to forget I’d grown,” he explained, glancing at Lily. “Sophie told me Mr. Ramsay let no one touch her. None of the servants washed her or dressed her for her funeral. He did it all. He removed things from her room including clothing and her handbag, and none of it was ever seen again.”

  Lily stared, trying hard to understand. “Why would he clear her room,” she asked, “and not the servants?”

  “Yes, Miss Briscoe,” Hunt replied. “Why? Mr. Ramsay attended the funeral in Highgate Cemetery alone. She was buried scarcely two days after her death.”

  He glanced at Louis, who was frowning. “My main concern,” he said, “was to reassure Sophie she was entirely right to tell me her story.”

  He looked miserable. “Before I left the kitchen, Sophie gave me the same gingerbread nuts she used to put into my coat pockets as a treat in Talland House, saying ‘Master Hunt, please take these biscuits with you to Mr. Ramsay.’ So I took them to him. Ramsay was his usual brusque self when we spoke.” Hilary added, “I couldn’t press him.”

  Images from the past scrolled in front of her. Hilary’s account of Mr. Ramsay chimed with moments she remembered from St Ives—his rudeness to his wife in public, his abruptness in every social situation. The precision of her memories obscured everything else for a trice, and she was uncertain what to think. He was hot-tempered and completely self-centered, and it was Mrs. Ramsay floating ghostlike through these scenes who had kept all the family content, her husband so often a dark cloud.

  She felt the weight of the galleries displaying the darkness that had destroyed reason for the past four years, with the paintings’ war horrors seemingly leaking into the courtyard as if their evil-smelling benzene spirit wafted over her. Paintings weren’t real lives lived, though. She was aware of how hard it was to speak and wiped her brow, although she wanted to ask for furt
her facts: about friends of the Ramsays, what others thought.

  “There’s no more to tell,” Hilary said, “except Mr. Ramsay withdrew from society later in the year. Perhaps I might prevail on you, Miss Briscoe, Miss Stillman, to look back at our time together in St Ives,” Hilary added, knitting his brows. “If incidents do arise in your mind, you might note these. Many friends with a particular interest and love for Mrs. Ramsay are concerned, wishing for a firm conclusion to the strange affair.”

  Eliza was trembling, and Lily placed an arm around her friend’s shoulders, hugging her. The sunlight was fading as if time had sifted through the afternoon like a tall hourglass. A lady and a gentleman at the nearest table caught her attention. They were taking tea and laughing as they talked, the ample brim of the woman’s hat almost touching her wide mouth. She was stealing furtive glances at her companion, seeming to share the certainty of something, and Lily envied her frivolity, although she wasn’t sure quite why.

  “Thank you,” she said, turning back to Hilary. “I’m glad to know all this.”

  “I’m very grateful too,” Eliza added, as Hunt made a slight bow.

  The quadrangle was almost empty. The short guard in his oversized cap sitting in the gatehouse would soon be asking visitors to make the final rounds of the galleries.

  “Forgive me,” Lily said, impatient to escape and longing to be alone. “I must return to my painting before the galleries close today.”

  The tea had restored a little of her strength. It was too soon to open a door into the past. The present moment—having her picture accepted and hung on the line—must be fixed and varnished first. She glanced up at Louis for reassurance, and his eyes held hers.

  “I’ve many happy memories of St Ives,” he said, “your paintings, the Saturday evenings when I played the piano, our songs together.”

  She was in his thoughts. The idea made her content for a moment.

  “I’ll be working in the town in the next months,” he continued. “Perhaps you both might visit at some point. I believe there’s a free studio loft next to mine. As you said, Miss Briscoe, you never did complete your painting of Mrs. Ramsay. I would think working on the picture again so close to Talland House would be a marvelous solace. I’d be happy to make arrangements.”

  His words were what she’d wanted to hear for a long time. As a student in St Ives, she’d craved Louis’s approval. When he’d chosen her watercolour for Studio Day, her first thought was he’d revealed his innermost feelings—he cherished her, or at least was interested in her. In those months it had felt like nothing mattered until she heard his praise. Since then, during the years she’d been alone with Father, those memories had never dimmed. Now she didn’t know what she thought about him, and this made her cautious, unsure what to say. Did she still love him? All she did know was she had to return to St Ives.

  IV

  —

  1909

  ST IVES

  HAD IT REALLY BEEN NINE YEARS SINCE THE ARTISTS’ Eleven cricket match, nine years since Lily had sat, teacup in hand in Talland House, overwhelmed when Mrs. Ramsay agreed to be painted? Now she was back, here again in St Ives. In the long drawn-out days she could become friends again with Mrs. Ramsay while painting the portrait. Although there was no reason, no excuse to keep in touch, apart from the one brief agreement to have her portrait painted, they’d continued to write. Every few months a letter from Mrs. Ramsay, full of the children’s activities and Mr. Ramsay’s endless editing of the Dictionary of National Biography, lay on the hall table for Lily to snatch up and read in the privacy of her little studio.

  The replies sometimes took her longer to write than completing a new painting, having to cautiously skirt around Mrs. Ramsay never mentioning her portrait, but that must have been her husband’s decision. It was an arrangement made without Mr. Ramsay’s knowledge, and he probably didn’t approve of an obscure artist. Mrs. Ramsay wouldn’t forget something so significant, so important to Lily. She could hear Mrs. Ramsay’s voice while reading the letters, but then she’d never stopped hearing her. Walking up Charing Cross Road to the National Gallery, running a conversation with Mrs. Ramsay through her mind, noticing a passerby staring, not being sure if she’d spoken aloud—Mrs. Ramsay filtered through everything. She’d continued to think about her—sometimes, it struck her guiltily, more often than her own mother.

  Father had aged and was less steady on his feet now, but she felt stronger, buoyed by selling watercolours and exhibiting, even if they were merely group exhibitions. A mention in the Studio, her name in bold, had given her a real sense of herself as an artist.

  Then a few weeks ago a special letter had arrived, and the dark Victorian gloom of Father’s little mews home became a faint shadow. The handwriting was rounded and neat on specially designed paper with decorated edges. The one kind of special notepaper Father had ordered was Mother’s funeral stationery with their address, in an ugly typeface, between the black borders. The invitation was for a month to paint the portrait. Mrs. Ramsay was apologetic, explaining Talland House was too full of children, and of visitors who had already indicated they would stay, for a separate bedroom for Lily. The lodgings were much more comfortable she understood, and particularly suitable for a single young woman. She wouldn’t be with Mrs. Trevelyan in Fore Street as before, but conveniently nearer Talland House, Mrs. Ramsay wrote, and another visitor, a Mr. Bankes, would also stay in the lodgings. Whoever Mr. Bankes was, he must be moneyed, for Mrs. Ramsay had to arrange an additional room for his valet.

  The consideration, the care for every detail was so generous. When Lily had last visited, grey skies had arrived too often above the sea’s horizon, bathing everything with a dull light. Now the invitation for a mid-September visit promised golden evenings and softer tones. Warm hazes would spread their varnish over the landscape. Today had begun brightly, with no clouds in the sky. Surely something she didn’t know about yet but might become important in her life was waiting for her in Talland House.

  As she stood by her easel on the lawn, painting Mrs. Ramsay sitting near the drawing room window, it was like holding up a mirror to her own past. Life seemed to be going backwards, from an unknown future. Lily tried hard to concentrate, but Mr. Carmichael was close by asking about her inspiration, about her motivations.

  “When I was a child, my mother would sit me on the floor and give me pieces of string, cardboard, or fabric,” she said, “and I’d make little things. I suppose I start my paintings thinking of shapes in the same way.” These tiny constructions had calmed her, and everything she couldn’t tell Mother or Father, everything she couldn’t control about her life, could, it seemed, be sorted out by creating shapes.

  She needn’t have spoken. Mr. Carmichael hadn’t waited for an answer and was already asleep in a high-backed beehive basket chair near her easel. He was a poet, Mrs. Ramsay had said yesterday, but he didn’t look intelligent. His yellow cat’s eyes matched a stain on his moustache, and his hands lay loose in his lap, barely covering his ample paunch. Lily turned back to her painting. To design something from nearly nothing, to create meaning through forms, was what the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay would do.

  Lily glanced up at the house. Over the years, Talland House had come to mean more and more to her, a kind of home, a place where she’d always wanted to return, and she’d missed it with the sadness of missing an old friend, a real person. There was a special spot—the steps from the drawing room into the garden where Mrs. Ramsay liked to sit—at a specific moment of the day—early evening when the low sunlight caught the bright escallonia hedge—and it looked magnificent. Anxious the house would seem insubstantial, insignificant since the last visit, like a childhood place shrunk through an adult lens, she’d found it unchanged, treasured.

  Standing closer to the easel, she felt the grand thrill of being en plein air and trying to capture the translucent light with intense colour. Conscious of nothing but the edge of the drawing room window becoming a black frame surrounding M
rs. Ramsay and her son James playing on the floor, she measured the scale with the length of a paintbrush. Mrs. Ramsay’s face seemed unaccountably both habitual and more handsome than she’d remembered, and, as Lily examined her shape on the canvas, the surface came alive with emotions, some shapes seeming sharp, and others soft. The heat of the day drove her gestures, and she focused again on the window, using the brush tip for a line, but Mrs. Ramsay bent down, and the frame was empty. The moment was lost.

  As Lily waited for her to sit upright again, she thought about Louis. For a few months after she’d returned to London, she’d wondered what Louis would be doing at any hour of the day, even though Emily had said he’d sailed back to Australia. Closing her eyes, she’d try to see him in his studio, surrounded by students. She’d been a naive girl then, too deferential to him and Olsson, but during the past few years, she wasn’t ashamed to admit, she’d become an artist, if not a particularly successful one, and she visualized him impressed by her work and looking at her with brighter eyes.

  Imagining what Louis would think of a novelty like the telephone Father had installed in the hall, she pictured him picking up a receiver and, hearing her speaking at the other end, his face breaking into a smile, and she’d hear his voice, its light tenor clear and real. Was that all it took—a telephone—to set her mind racing back to Louis? Other days she’d puzzled about what Louis might make of all the new cinemas opening in London and whether he’d watch westerns or romances; she’d decided he’d like historical films with their landscapes and strange settings, images he could paint, but there probably weren’t many cinemas yet in Australia. Even so, his presence stayed with her during those days. Now she was here again in St Ives and could visit his studio, find out if he’d returned, and watch him twirling his hat on one finger.