by Maggie Humm
A rumble of traffic far below, with no distinct sounds, filtered through the open window. Imagining the rush of cars was the sea roaring in St Ives, she remembered sitting in her attic at Mrs. Trevelyan’s and gazing up at Talland House at the top of her tiny window. Lily stood, for several long minutes, watching the starry sky, dreaming, before the idea came into her mind. If she couldn’t finish Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait without her, then she’d paint a canvas full of Mrs. Ramsay’s favourite dahlias and submit it to the Royal Academy. The sounds and scents of St Ives were all around her as she pressed her hot forehead against the cold window frame, picked up her brushes, and began.
The next day she needed to buy more painting materials. Although the journey from the hospital to the artists’ supplier would take her the best part of a morning there and back, she would stick to the certainty of her pre-war rituals and buy paints in the same shop she’d always visited with her mother.
“Winsor & Newton is so close to the British Museum, Lily,” Mother had said, “over Tottenham Court Road. We can revel in a whole day visiting both.”
The hours spent contemplating statues could be appreciated without guilt if the day ended purposefully by buying paints. What she loved about visiting Winsor & Newton was not Rathbone Place itself, a street without its own identity, a corridor from Oxford Street to the Charlotte Street restaurants. It was the excitement of striding along the street to Fitzrovia, a neighbourhood which always seemed to her complete and unlike anywhere else. It was the home of artists. Applying Winsor & Newton’s paints to her canvas somehow created a passage to a painting’s emotions, and walking up Rathbone Place opened up the inexhaustible diversity of her favourite neighbourhood. Terrace houses were divided vertically and horizontally into every kind of activity—her frame maker, picture liner, and canvas dealer all lived amongst milliners and cobblers, other craftspeople whose work she prized.
Sitting in a bubble of silence, gazing along the river at the Whitehall huts marring the Embankment, she noticed there were even more now. How many buildings did the war need? The War Office had taken over most museums and galleries—why ruin her view of the Thames? During the past year she’d noticed a difference in London’s air, a kind of continual desperation filling the city, a feeling of despair she could almost smell in the breeze, and it made her despondent. There had been anti-German riots after Gotha bombers replaced the Zeppelins, shops with German-sounding names had been attacked, and people were going hungry, even fishing in the Thames. She’d never felt depressed before in the way events made her now, and she tried to push the scenes away because they threatened to make her miserable again. It was the growing uncertainty about life after the war which added to the confusion, people wondering if this was the last year, if all hostilities would end. The other day she’d heard a newspaper boy call out, “Turkey has surrendered!” People had never bought so many newspapers.
She stroked her eyelids with her kid gloves, feeling the tight, soft leather smooth away the tears, thinking at least she felt peaceful painting alongside Eliza in the hospital attic. She was her friend, and her friendship gave Lily a feeling of solidity. It was Eliza’s presence, of course, but also the restfulness of working silently beside her, the relief of not having to explain anything, like she did with Father. None of what a painting meant, or what she was trying to say, mattered, purely technique and style.
Outside the art shop she peered into the window, delighted to see the unchanged display of miniature easels with dusty little boards announcing prices, and those tiny articulated wooden figures squatted helplessly in the foreground. Counting the coins and notes in her purse, she wanted to spend as much as she could, to savour a full palette of colours, not minding sovereigns disappearing with metal requisitioning, even if the new one-pound notes were a flimsy substitute and her lighter purse made her feel poorer. Butter was now the most precious thing in the world; perhaps it could even replace money.
Inside, shelves ran from floor to ceiling, crowded with short tubes displaying their bright colours on each tin, with exotic names like viridian and cobalt. Her mother had shown her how to make different colours by mixing each with blue or yellow, and how to vary shades by first painting canvases white or grey, but then Mother had put away her thicker brushes and hadn’t painted oils any more, merely quick sketches and watercolours. It was probably due to Father. His demands for a well-organized household certainly took up all of her time, but her mother never complained. Perhaps that was why, after her death, he’d paid for the training at Heatherley’s and in Paris and St Ives—to assuage his guilt at limiting his wife’s horizons.
A couple more tubes and she could finish the painting; she’d submit Dahlias to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The decision to paint it had triggered more memories of St Ives. It was precisely these small gestures, the squeezing of paint onto a palette or stroking a sable-tipped brush, which reminded her of Louis. His insignificant movements in the studio, his day-to-day actions as she watched him paint were what she missed most. Dahlias was good, though. She’d redone the thick textures of the petals again and again before she was satisfied, and the flowers looked more alive than those in Talland House garden, so vibrant, and much, much brighter. It was a fine painting and she knew it, knew it with a confidence she’d never felt before. Something had moved forward, something else had fallen into place, giving her the feeling she’d be successful this year. Lily closed the shop door with its tinkling bell she’d loved as a child, like the smile of an old friend.
“These are exactly the tints I wanted!” Eliza exclaimed after opening her parcel that evening. “I do so love the squashy feel of new paint tubes, don’t you?”
“Sorry there wasn’t any butter, but at least we can paint for a few hours now in the attic,” Lily said. “I’m determined to finish my painting by Christmas.”
“Don’t wish time away,” Eliza said. “It’s the beginning of November, although we seemed to have missed any bright autumn weather.”
Lily didn’t need any more wishes. Absorbed in painting, she had a sense of being on the brink of something certain.
The Thames was placid the next morning as Lily walked to work, although dark clouds above threatened rain later in the day. A heavy autumnal fog was drifting upriver making everything damp and drained of colour. She glanced across the water. Timber was in short supply, she’d heard. It was a miracle the skimpy trees on the other bank hadn’t been cut down to feed the war, joining the torn-out iron railings. They were blackened from last year’s heavy bombing, their charcoaled bark split in sections like a patient’s badly burned skin. At least there was somewhere for the birds to nest when they returned in the spring.
A month or so ago she’d walked upriver with Eliza, as far as they could manage in the few free hours from the hospital. Reaching Fulham Park, they’d stopped for a coffee from a stall by the riverbank before striding back, and she’d stood motionless in wonder, hearing an immense trilling coming from the trees alongside the Thames. Swirling in and out of the branches had been hundreds and hundreds of starlings, all calling out to each other and chirping loudly, greeting old friends at some giant bird reunion.
“The birds try out patterns in the sky,” the coffee seller had said, handing over their mugs, “then they fly south to the Sahara. I see them every year at this time without fail. It takes council workmen days to clean the benches. Messy buggers, pardon my French, ladies.”
The two women had smiled at each other.
“If only you knew,” Lily had said, touched by his awkward civility, “what language we have to listen to every day in the hospital!”
They watched the birds wheeling and crisscrossing the bright sky, becoming trails of brown paint flung across a white canvas, an abstract painting eclipsing newspaper photographs of khaki uniforms marching in tight formations every day at Victoria as they returned to the front. The birds flew in a kind of elation, the whole group pushing itself away from the earth, glittering and alive. It was
as if the war weren’t happening, as if it hadn’t changed London, and the caws of such sweet, tiny starlings filled the day.
“Men die,” she’d said, “but starlings will gather again and again at this very spot, perhaps for decades to come. They will fly away but always return.”
“You try to make things seem so significant, but you’re right this time,” Eliza had said. “How good life will be when the war’s over.”
Running in from the Embankment, Lily went through the day’s tasks in her mind. She’d offered to help Eliza count supplies in her nurses’ station because Mrs. Beckwith had mentioned yesterday it’d be useful to have an idea of requisites in advance of prescriptions being thrust through the dispensary window.
“Always best to plan ahead,” Mrs. Beckwith had said, “to anticipate demands.”
In the ward Lily sat writing at a low table and felt for a moment the familiar sense of being outside and indifferent to everything around her, until Eliza appeared with tea, a tiny reward for Lily’s painstaking lists. Thanking Eliza, her voice was silenced by the sound of cannons firing. The booms were joined by sirens hooting on river barges, and through the open windows, Lily could hear people running along the streets, blowing whistles and shouting, “Peace, it’s peace at last!” with dogs barking in the Peabody buildings behind the hospital. A senior consultant rushed into the ward, a wide smile right across his face. She’d never seen him wear anything other than a stern frown and his white coat.
“Gentlemen and ladies,” he announced, “the war has ended, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Peace in our time.”
Patients began banging their iron bedframes with empty bedpans, shouting, “Good Old Blighty!” in unison. Lily continued to stir her tea, feeling numb as maroons crashed with an incredible din across the river. She’d stopped thinking the war would ever end. The number of wounded men hadn’t diminished, and newspaper editorials, even if she’d had time to read them, had seemed too dramatic to be true.
“Nurse Briscoe, Nurse Stillman, you may leave the hospital for an hour if you wish to see the sights,” the doctor said. “The patients will be too happy to need much attention this morning.”
Throwing capes around their shoulders as protection from the rain, they joined nurses from other wards standing at the Embankment. Londoners crowded over bridges, walking in opposite directions at the same time as if uncertain where to go or what to see to signify the end of a war.
“There were huge displays of flags when the Boer War finished,” Eliza said, “but where will we find enough for the whole hospital?”
“Let’s not be too patriotic,” Lily said, pulling a long face. “Celebrate the moment.” She felt like giving a great shout, but no one would hear in the din. The noise was tumultuous, with automobiles hooting and clocks striking incessantly, draining fresh air from the day. People stared at each other as if stunned by the news, and by the clamour. Beer bottles were raised and shared all along Vauxhall Bridge, and wounded soldiers were being kissed by tipsy women. Eliza looked tearful, and Lily put her arm around her friend’s shoulders.
“We could walk to Buckingham Palace tonight,” Eliza suggested, wiping her eyes and hugging Lily in turn. “The King and Queen will be sure to be waving on the balcony.”
Some men on the opposite bank cheered the gaggle of nurses in their uniforms, giving thumbs-up signs across the swollen river, and a soldier next to Lily, clad in four different flags, winked at her, offering his pale ale. Stretching out her hand, she was tempted, but knowing Matron’s likely reaction to beery breath, she shook his free hand, not minding the warm stickiness of his palm, and smiled into his eyes.
“You’re getting the attention now,” Eliza whispered, nudging her with an elbow.
Lily couldn’t say whether it was the friendliness of the soldier or the general sense of merriment, but in this instant, she felt more joyful than she could have thought possible. A rich, protective cloak of peace spread out all around her, and she was becoming wrapped up in it as if she were floating, supported, into a new space, into a life without regulations and dead people in it. This was the beginning of her future, even though she didn’t know what she would do there when it fully arrived. Street lamps and bus lights were switched on at the same moment, shining through the rainy November gloom. What would 1919 and its brilliantly lit new year bring? Maybe, now the war was done, she would see Louis. Startled by the cacophony, starlings wheeled overhead.
VI
—
1919
THE ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON
THE COURTYARD WAS GROWING CHILLY. LILY COULDN’T fathom how Mrs. Ramsay had died so suddenly. Stunned, unable to think clearly, she glanced up at the Academy’s indifferent façade towering over her, at the statues of celebrated artists, each in their own niche. It was easy to imagine she was in an earlier time, with the architecture untouched by the war. She wasn’t sure she recognized all the figures in spite of months studying in the Royal Academy schools. None were women, of course. One should be Joshua Reynolds, and the tiny head to the left was Christopher Wren; alongside him might be Michelangelo. She remembered Mrs. Ramsay’s Michelangelo print in Talland House, and the figure of Mrs. Ramsay was here, as if standing beside her again.
“Mr. Ramsay told me,” Hilary had said, “his wife caught a chill sitting by an open window without the protection of a shawl. How could she die from a chill, even if it did turn to rheumatic fever?”
Lily couldn’t envisage Mrs. Ramsay lying in bed for any length of time. She was always too concerned for others, was such an excellent nurse herself, and she knew exactly how illnesses should be treated.
“Death came in one day,” Hilary had added.
It didn’t seem real. Father had protected her from seeing her mother at the last, had sent her away to family friends in the country on the day of the funeral. “It’s for the best, my dearest,” he’d told her. She never saw him cry. For many months, years it seemed, part of her believed her mother was alive somewhere in London. Sometimes, on the street, the sight of a hat resembling hers, or the posture of a woman walking along the pavement, or a woman calling out something sounding like her name, would startle Lily, make her heart beat faster. She was always with her.
Lily had seen dead bodies in the hospital, watched their grey faces collapse into smaller versions of themselves, but death in the hospital wasn’t like her mother’s and Mrs. Ramsay’s. Patients whom she’d come to know had died, but hospital rituals contained a dead person ready for a coffin. Curtains were rapidly pulled around the bed to shield other patients. After the obligatory nod of nurses’ heads, bodies were cleaned and fumigated. Orderlies came with stretchers, and white-sheeted lumps were seen leaving each ward. It was remarkable how speedily all personal items, the detritus of a once-living being, were removed.
Lily pushed her hat firmly on her head, glad she’d left Hilary and the others at the tea table. It was kind of Hilary to offer to escort Eliza to the tube, although she didn’t look as if she wanted his company. All he’d accomplished since leaving St Ives, according to the Times, was a short book about Burmese timber and wood’s strength and elasticity, written during his work on a rubber plantation. It was a damning review. She wouldn’t judge, but he seemed a different person since St Ives, a brusque businessman whose callousness about Mrs. Ramsay’s death was harsh, even cruel. She’d do what he asked and write down all the details she could remember about the household in Talland House, but for Mrs. Ramsay’s sake. She decided to make a factual list, without elaboration, describing Mr. Ramsay’s outbursts, Andrew’s love of knives, and Mrs. Ramsay’s actions. Should she include her memories of what Mrs. Ramsay drank and ate—or more usually, didn’t eat? Surely there couldn’t be clues to anything malevolent? Hilary was trying to create a drama, and she disliked being a spectator, or a character in a novel already written.
Straightening her jacket in a window’s reflection, and restored by the tea, she felt well enough to walk thr
ough the galleries. The cost of the entrance fee and catalogue—two shillings in all—meant she wanted to see as much as possible before the Academy closed. The next visit would be to collect her painting after August Bank Holiday when everything was taken down; she was certain no one would buy Dahlias. At least the visit would be through the main doors since her painting had been exhibited, she thought, remembering collecting her rejected works year after year in the gloomy basement corridor, but it didn’t matter—Dahlias was a kind of substitute for Mrs. Ramsay’s unfinished portrait, making her feel more confident.
Opening the catalogue to select a few things to see before the day faded, she felt a wave of irritation. Why were the names of academicians in such large black block capitals? The font made every other painter seem minor, minuscule in comparison, and academicians’ paintings were always hung on the line, never near the ceiling. Every tiny thing, since she’d heard about Mrs. Ramsay, had become a pain inside her, like collections of stones to be carried in her pockets. She had to contain her feelings, had to get through the afternoon; her glasses steamed up a little in the warm crush of spectators, and she peered down. The page listing her painting and name must be kept pristine, so Father could be proud. He’d embraced her when she’d shown him the embossed acceptance card, topped with the Academy’s crest, and she couldn’t remember the last time he’d hugged her.