Talland House

by Maggie Humm

  “Probably an overcooked egg,” Eliza said. “Poor soul. She carries the weight of Mr. Ramsay’s explosions. It’s draining her. You must have seen how drawn and pallid her face has become since we first arrived at Talland House. Sometimes her head resembles a skull, her eyes are so deep-set.”

  “When I saw her one day on the landing outside her bedroom,” Lily replied, “she couldn’t focus, unable to see me. I was looking at a phantom.”

  “What can we do to help?” Eliza asked.

  Ahead the dahlias stood in their own shadows. Lily felt the same unbearable sadness that always overcame her thinking about her mother’s death, but something had to be done, and she looked up at the cloudless blue sky.

  “I know,” Eliza said, “we’ll visit her in London, rescue her with expeditions to art galleries, to exhibitions. She was a famous beauty, an artists’ model in her youth, she’d enjoy them.”

  Lily nodded, smiling. Eliza wanted to continue their friendship in London; she would have a close friend, a companion to share her passion for art and her love for Mrs. Ramsay. As they turned back to the house, Hilary was walking into the garden carrying his bags. There was barely time to say his goodbyes to any children who could be persuaded to stand stationary long enough to receive them.

  “Mama’s asked me to accompany you to the station,” Andrew said.

  “Then you may wear my sailing cap until we part,” Hilary said with a smile, setting it on Andrew’s head.

  Lily strode out of the garden gate together with Hilary, followed by Andrew and Eliza.

  “Have a safe journey,” Mrs. Ramsay called from her bedroom window. “I’ll send you Prue’s prints of the photographs she took, as mementos of our summer.”

  Had Lily been in any of the Ramsays’ photographs? She hadn’t posed, except for the first photograph with Eliza, but there were so many cameras coming and going, three owned by the family, and visitors arrived with their own black boxes. She might have been snapped unknowingly.

  Looking through the family’s photo album with Mrs. Ramsay one day, she’d noticed how underneath every photograph, Mrs. Ramsay had written the initials of each individual, including herself. Was she frightened of forgetting her own family members, or did she want to keep them fixed in time forever? It was hard to decide. In one photograph, the children, standing in the rear, were like naughty grinning schoolchildren lined up for inspection, but, sitting in front, Mrs. Ramsay wasn’t smiling; a large feathered hat threw a shadow onto her deep-set eyes. She was wrapped in scarves as if protecting herself from being fully seen. What had happened to the young beauty who wore Indian muslin without stays and posed happily for painters made famous for their portraits of her?

  Lily glanced back at Talland House, but the bedroom window was empty, and she walked down the hill in step with Hilary.

  “I was pictured by a famous photographer while on holiday in Switzerland,” Mrs. Ramsay had told Lily one day. Another time she’d told her how Mr. Ramsay’s Alpine climbing had impressed her; when they’d first met at a dinner party, she’d felt he was so manly after the bohemian friends of her youth.

  Surprised by the intimate disclosures, Lily had been disarmed and delighted by her frankness. Perhaps it was Mrs. Ramsay’s way of charming people, of staying young. When she’d told the tale about her marriage, the hollows of her cheeks had been the sole signs of her ageing, and Mr. Ramsay became the handsome man he must once have been.

  Hoping she’d be invited to return to Talland House next summer like Hilary, even if it meant more photographs, Lily strode briskly at his side trying to match his pace. The shimmering cobbled streets were the perfect antidote to the troubled breakfast scene. She glanced at his sturdy frame. He looked even taller next to her with her Oxford shoes. They kept to a pair between townspeople and around the carts in the high street, with Eliza and Andrew following close behind. Would Hilary ask to meet her in London? She pictured them sitting side by side in the British Museum Greek galleries, though the naked statues might embarrass and inhibit intimate discussions. The National Gallery was far safer. Its famous battle scenes would enable him to display his historical knowledge. She felt a contradictory pressure to talk as cleverly as she could and to say absolutely nothing at all.

  Looking around her, she could see the August visitors had left St Ives; the town was calm after the regatta celebrations. Heavy overnight rain had cleansed the streets; its morning freshness combatted fishy smells from the squat cottages, and the sea air was bracing. The town was preparing for the winter. Men repaired shutters on some shops and washed down house fronts; newly painted black doors shone rainbow oily lights onto the street below. Summer was over. She pushed her hands deep into her pockets.

  Andrew was close on her heels, and now she could clearly hear him speaking to Eliza.

  “Mama dislikes Miss Briscoe’s portrait of her, such as it is,” he said in a brusque tone. “One day I found Mama standing in silence before the painting, unable to say more to me than ‘Oh, dear!’—the consternation was clear on her face.” His voice sounded like a second-hand version of his father’s.

  “The portrait is far from complete,” Eliza replied instantly. “Your mother has been very happy to sit for Lily.”

  Lily couldn’t hear Andrew’s mumbled response. As the shock of what he’d said sank in, her shoulders bent forwards, protecting her heart from his harsh words, and she swayed a little trying to stay upright, breathing in deeply to hide her emotions. She wouldn’t be able to speak to Eliza until after Hilary had left, and her eyes darted towards him, trying to swallow her sadness, but his face was unchanged. He mustn’t have heard, lost in thoughts about the train journey, and she breathed out slowly. When they reached the station, Hilary turned to her, made a low bow, and took her hand.

  “This is not goodbye, Miss Briscoe,” he said. “We’ll meet again in London, I hope, when you return? And you, too, Miss Stillman. We could all rendezvous next month in the centre of town?”

  Eliza agreed, smiling. The closeness of “next month” was eager, but Lily was too stunned by Andrew’s story to reply. The most she could do was to nod with a half-smile, biting her lip to keep back the tears. Andrew handed over Hilary’s cap, although he looked reluctant to return it to its owner. The clock above the station entrance stood nearly on the hour, and she could see the connecting train to London was already steaming at the far side of the tracks with cases piled up by the porter ready for boarding. After a last long glance at her, Hilary was gone.

  “I must return immediately to Talland House,” Andrew said. “Father wishes me to study all day for my scholarship examination. Please excuse me, ladies.”

  Clutching Eliza’s hand, Lily tensed, waiting for him to stride away into the distance, tears welling up in her eyes. How unreal her friendship with Mrs. Ramsay must have been without her knowing. In this month, painting her portrait, she’d been able to convince herself she’d become a different person, someone confident, certain of her art, freer and cheerful. But now she wasn’t sure any more, and, in the bitter confusion, she felt adrift, unnerved to think she’d have to carry this distressing news, unwillingly, for as long as she remembered Talland House. Already in the thought of that, she felt incontestably alone, as if her life had been fractured.

  “I’ve so admired Mrs. Ramsay,” she said, “depended utterly on her interest in my work.” Her voice was breaking. “I tried so hard to recreate her beauty in paint, and I can’t continue with her portrait if she dislikes my work. I can’t paint any longer!”

  “Andrew knows absolutely nothing about art,” Eliza whispered, hugging Lily.

  Lily knew she’d been painting her mother as much as Mrs. Ramsay. She’d heard, while painting, the tones of her mother’s voice, and she’d been certain as long as she could complete the portrait, she’d have a sense of her mother—and the happiness of the memory meant everything. Tucking her head into Eliza’s shoulder, she held onto her friend and sobbed.

  V

 
; —

  1914–1918

  LONDON

  LILY NOTICED THE WOMAN AS SOON AS SHE ENTERED the National Gallery. It was pleasing to see a visitor gazing at a painting so carefully. Few fully examined works of art, and no one seemed to move in and out to assess perspective as this woman did, her shadow almost covering the entire frame. Lily had studied The Rokeby Venus so often, she could almost feel the velvet cloth underneath the reclining figure, smooth against her own skin, as soft as her muff.

  Wondering how long she’d been there, Lily turned to study the paintings on the opposite wall. She felt a familiar kind of enjoyable tightness in scanning and reacting to something fine, something so expert: an intake of breath, a nodule of absorption right in the middle of her chest. In a moment, loud cracks sounded through the room like new ice breaking underfoot, and she spun round to see shards of glass crashing, scattering in a shower over the polished, wooden floor. The woman’s face was without expression as she hacked at the scrutinized painting with a chopper, making slashes in the canvas through the smashed glass. The sweeping curve of the varnished naked body had several parallel gashes, deep in its creamy skin. The event seemed unreal, unrolling in slow motion like a film. Rooted to the spot, Lily couldn’t see any guards and didn’t know what to do, unable to cry out, to say anything. She’d always been in awe of the luscious skin in the Velázquez, but now, in front of her eyes, the painting was being turned into a horrific scene.

  Catching her breath, she managed to step nearer. The woman didn’t seem to hear, and Lily grabbed her arm shouting, “Stop! Stop!” but she slipped on the polished floor. Then she heard a whistle, and a guard and a police constable rushed in together, pinning the woman’s arms on either side.

  Breathing deeply, Lily stood up as the guard glanced at her.

  “Are you alright, Miss?” he asked, and she nodded, checking her clothes for pieces of broken glass, already hearing herself describing the event to another person—“It was like the raised sword of Damocles,” she’d tell Eliza later.

  The woman stood undaunted between her captors. She was young, perhaps not more than thirty, with a thin nose peeking out from under a soft hat decorated with an incongruous paper rose. The neatly buttoned-up purple coat and long green scarf and gloves showed her to be respectable. The colours were so striking, like wearing a political label right across her body. Lily could overhear the woman talking to the constable.

  “I’ve destroyed the picture of the most beautiful woman in history as a protest against the government’s destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst.”

  Feeling her cheeks flush and appalled by the attack, Lily stared as the constable pulled the woman away, but she wished she hadn’t had to be the one helping the arrest. A shorter, older constable entered and began to take Lily’s details. As she glanced over his shoulder, she gave the suffragette an understanding look as if to say she shared her politics, but the look didn’t quite match what she felt in her mind. The woman was frog-marched out of the room, and Lily followed, feeling confused.

  Visitors were being ushered out of the Gallery by a phalanx of uniformed attendants slowly stepping forward in unison, sweeping them towards the exit, and Lily searched inside her purse for the cloakroom ticket to collect her muff and sketch bag.

  “The gallery is shut for the rest of the day, Miss,” the cloakroom attendant said. “I heard the other London galleries are closing today, too, in case of more attacks.”

  Last year she’d persuaded Eliza to attend a suffragette meeting with the promise of an exciting evening, and certainly enthusiasm for the cause had flowed through the audience. They’d sat near the back, unsure about joining a large group of such serious women, worried about being asked any questions. The platform was gaily decorated with woven purple, green, and white banners. “Women claim equal justice with men” flashed in shining silk, hung behind the speakers, brightening the gloom. Each wearing a wide purple sash, the women presented their arguments with care and passion, and Lily thought them formidable, knowing some were artists too. She felt their confidence radiate through the room and through her. The open faces of the women sitting alongside them, the murmurs of agreement, the clapping at the end of every call for action—it was all genuinely moving. She could see it wasn’t a performance, a theatrical spectacle on the platform. They were a stirring group of activists sweeping the audience up into a gloriously equal future soon belonging, they’d said, to them all, to everyone in Britain.

  Inspired by the speeches, she’d volunteered in the Fulham Road suffrage atelier, printing posters and prison certificates to be given to women much braver than her when they walked free at last out of the high gates of Holloway Prison. She’d been glad to contribute to suffrage art, even sacrificing her own work for hours at a time. And it was a relief, she’d admitted to Eliza, not to be worrying about her paintings for a while.

  Behind her, the attendant locked the cloakroom door, and Lily stood for a moment, watching the other visitors leaving through the turnstiles. A young man smiled at her, touching the peak of his tweed cap, and she remembered the warm summer day in the atelier.

  Edith, the shop assistant she’d been instructing in inking printing plates, had invited Lily to share lunchtime sandwiches out on the fire escape in the fresh air. Her brother Tom joined her as often as he could, keeping up her spirits with tunes on his harmonica. The two women had climbed awkwardly from a sash window onto the broad, black iron steps, hot in the sun, watching Tom climb up from the street below, and she’d sat, leaning tentatively against a metal strut to face him.

  She’d wondered then, as he chatted, whether she was attractive to men. In St Ives, Louis had talked about returning to Australia. Hilary had grimaced about being the younger son who’d be banished to the colonies, probably why he’d never arranged a meeting, so returning to London she’d spent more and more time on her “vocation,” as she’d termed it to Father. Distant from St Ives, she’d tried to paint an abstract in dramatic colours, since she couldn’t finish Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait without seeing her again. Art was the one life to never let her down, and she’d worked in her little studio with a doggedness and resolve amusing Eliza. She’d spent hours copying paintings in the National Gallery, been as stunned as ordinary Londoners by the Post-Impressionist exhibition, and she’d attended faithfully every subsequent show. There was an impersonal firmness in all of this which had given her a sense of an identity, if not one she owned quite yet, although when teaching younger women, she’d begun to feel the power of it—but men, it struck her, had not been present then. The wallowing of pleasure in printing was almost the sole sensual feeling she’d allowed herself for many months, but here, in front of her, finishing a sandwich, was a good-looking man.

  “Edith’s told me you play the harmonica, Tom,” Lily had said, smiling. “I’d love to hear a tune.”

  “Happy to oblige, Miss,” Tom had said with a wink, cleaning his hands on his trousers. “I’m never without my harp.”

  After eating she’d sat smoking on the fire escape with Edith, listening to Tom playing Irish airs, and she’d found herself staring at him as if scanning a painted portrait, looking for the telling gesture, the crucial detail of a cap or a waistcoat, to reveal the inner person, like knowing a painter from his choice of brush. He was a wide-shouldered man with an open face, the peak of his tweed cap partly obscuring his bright blue eyes. Yet she’d seemed able to see him merely in paint, by removing her emotions, and she’d observed herself doing this as if she were looking at a fine racehorse. There was a disassociation she’d never felt with Louis, and it seemed not to matter her memories of Louis were brighter than the eyes of the young man facing her.

  At that moment she’d felt somewhere within she must contact her St Ives friends, especially Louis and Mrs. Ramsay, and Hilary at his family home, write letters to them all, with that part of her life impossibly vivid. For a moment she’d felt the possibility of something with Tom, an encounter to be had, but it passed. As she’d thoug
ht of reaching out for it, it had disappeared, and she didn’t want it to return. She’d tossed her cigarette stub over the stairs, shaken hands with Tom, thanking him for his tunes, and returned to the printing.

  The atelier was last year. She’d lost touch with Edith. Painting was the sole thing she thought about now.

  When she came out of the National Gallery into Charing Cross Road it was raining; the air was heavy with the musty smell of damp leaves, but the sky was clear of the morning’s clouds. Gripping her artist’s satchel, Lily searched for the tube sign. The new red circle was ahead, and it reminded her of a pattern in Mrs. Ramsay’s skirt. Somewhere inside her, whether she was walking up Charing Cross Road or supervising the cook, the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, its shapes and colours, was always floating behind her eyes. Somehow, she had to finish it. The sense of exaltation she felt while painting wasn’t the same as the abounding recklessness of these suffragettes, but art never failed to speak to her, to catch her in its intensity. Reaching the tube, she took the Hampstead line to Eliza’s, thinking friends were a kind of scarf to tuck around you when the wind was chill.

  “Goodness gracious,” Eliza exclaimed, “you look so serious tonight. Your face is quite pale.”

  “It’s been a shocking day,” Lily replied. “I haven’t been able to think properly or sketch at all since this morning.” She was glad Eliza had suggested sitting in the cosy kitchen, tucked away from her mother’s grand studio.

  “Have a smoke and tell me everything.”

  Lily took a ready rolled cigarette from Eliza’s case and, lighting it with a spill from the grate, told her about the morning’s attack, experiencing it all again through Eliza’s wide eyes.

  “I wish I hadn’t had to help the police,” she said.