The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  I’ve been in the office a while, and it’s just occurred to me that I’ve been examining this view for too long, or with too fixed an attention, so I jerk my head round to the aircraft carrier deck that comprises the loathsome man’s desk. It’s then I notice the date, which I can see printed out on the day’s schedule in front of him. I can read upside down with exceptional speed, and I’ve observed that next to the name “D. Nunn” and the time of the appointment, 4:15 p.m., it says “15 minutes.” It’s underlined and in bold. This doesn’t bode well. Better be quick.

  Not an enormously long time to plead my case, I’m thinking, especially as at least five minutes have already been used up in fake bonhomie and loathsome yelps of “Where have you been hiding yourself, Dan?” and “Seriously great to see you” and so on. Another two—I’m having problems tracking time—wasted themselves on the astonishing fact that the man I’ve come to see is wearing one of his signature bow ties, and it’s a lime green one. Which gives me, by my unreliable estimate, about another eight in which to make my pitch. No problem. No hay problema. I’m the pitch king, and famous for it. I used to clinch it inside two.

  I approach the desk, put down my briefcase, and sit. I think: Engage turbodrive. I’m about to accelerate away when I realize the loathsome one is holding something. He’s holding a magazine, one of those newspaper color supplements, and he wants me to look at it. I deduce this with Sherlockian speed, because he’s waving it under my nose and jabbing a finger at the front cover. He says, “You’ve been out of the loop, but you’ve seen this, I expect?”

  It’s The Sisters Mortland. It’s an article about Lucas’s retrospective. And no, I haven’t seen it. That is quite an achievement; that took dedication and skill on my part, because there’s been a deluge of publicity. Now I can’t avoid it. There it is, famous Lucas’s most famous portrait. It’s the Abbey, it’s the last summer at the Abbey. It’s Julia and Finn and poor broken Maisie. It’s my twenty-three years ago and my yesterday. It’s everything I see in the dark when I can’t sleep at night.

  There’s more to come. A hand is flicking the pages, a voice is saying, “Hang on a nanosecond, I know I saw it somewhere.… Ah, here we are. Now, Danny boy—is that you, or is that you, or is that you? Only joking, no offense.”

  Truly Wildean: And what’s more, Oscar actually remembers how much I detest that sobriquet. I follow his pudgy finger, stare, and there I am, in triplicate. Trinity Daniel. I’m chalk and pencil. I’m in my rooms at Whewell’s Court, Trinity College; it’s the day after the last part II finals exam. The sun’s shining, the sky’s cloudless: All is right with the world. I’m twenty-two, ambitious, careless, insecure, and talented. Sometimes I’m confident, and sometimes I’m obnoxious, but if others have noticed that, I haven’t—as yet. Give me time.

  Yes, I’m at Whewell’s, next to the rooms Wittgenstein once had, and in a few months, once the long summer vac is over, I’m going to start revolutionizing world cinema—watch out, Truffaut; watch out, Godard. I plan to get into movies via advertising. One week I direct a commercial, next week Hollywood’s at my feet.… That’s roughly the scheme, and, aged twenty-two, I can’t see any flaws in it. Meanwhile I’m sprawling on a rug surrounded by lecture notes, and as soon as Lucas finishes scratching away at his sketchbook, we’re going to meet Finn. The three of us—inseparable, the Unholy Trinity, Varsity has nicknamed us—are going to punt upriver. We’re going to get drunk, sublimely post-exam drunk. And once Lucas, sketchbook in hand, has wandered off, I’m going to hold Finn in my arms. We’ll lie there by the Cam in the cool green shade of the willow trees, and…

  And the page is being turned. I look away fast, but not before I’ve glimpsed one of the other drawings they’ve reproduced: Summer Maisie, 1967. That drawing was to have been one of four. Now there’ll never be an Autumn Maisie, or a winter one. Now I’ll never direct a movie. Time moves on.

  “Sad,” remarks the man I’ve come to see, tossing aside the magazine. He knows the story, of course. Everyone knows the story, up to a point, because Lucas is now internationally celebrated and The Sisters Mortland is a painting people get obsessed with. It’s the one you see reproduced everywhere, the one students buy prints of and pin up on their walls. “The Meltdown Sisters,” the man opposite continues, and laughs. “Wasn’t that their nickname at Cambridge? One can see why. Julia still has that effect. But it’s the middle sister that intrigues me. Something about her face—I never met her, more’s the pity, just point me in the right direction, woof, woof. The one with the weird name, what was her name?”

  “Finisterre,” I reply.

  And I want to add so much, I can feel it welling up, a great spillage of detail. That she was called that because when Stella was pregnant with her second child, she was staying in Scotland, near yet another of the sanatoriums that were attempting to cure her husband. Her waters broke one evening when she was alone and listening to the shipping forecast. That Stella, being Stella, saw nothing outlandish in this name, because “Finisterre” was a wild, beautiful place, so what the word signified was immaterial. That no one ever spelled the abbreviation correctly; that no one called Finn by her full name anyway—except me. I used to use it, stroking her hair, lying together in yesteryear’s fields. Ou sont les neiges d’antan, Danny boy? Long melted. Long gone.

  The man opposite is still yakking; the word retrospective is being used. When he starts saying how he must catch it, it has only two more days to run, I reenter the atmosphere and understand. He glances at his watch, frowns, and then—he looks at me, actually looks, for the first time since I slid into his office. And what’s happening behind that bland face with its modish spectacles? Well, there’s a wee tussle going on. On the one hand, my stock may have risen—it’s something to be Lucas’s friend, there are definitely a few Brownie points in having been drawn by him, especially when the drawing concerned is now in a, Jesus-wept, “must see” retrospective. On the other hand, he’ll have heard the rumors; there are enough of them eddying around.

  I wonder distantly which stories he’s heard—the ones put about by my enemies or the ones whose source is my friends? Not that they differ much, and not that I have many friends left in the advertising industry. So which is it—the gifted but insecure+bereavement+ overwork+breakdown+all very sad version? Or the arrogant prick+ substance abuse+total burnout+always had it coming to him variation? Almost certainly the second—which is the one I prefer, anyway. I wonder if he’s factoring in past favors—in a moment of myopic mania, I gave this man his first job.… Always be nice to people on the way up, because sure as hell you’ll meet them on the way down.

  Was I nice to him? It’s hard to recall, but I think I might have fired him, in which case the prospects of my getting the Wunderbar campaign aren’t looking too good. It’s only up for grabs because, at the last minute, the creative who was handling it suffered some mishap, some unforeseen mishap. Like flu or shingles or terrorist attack or ME or PMT or TATT or death by firing squad or… I stop myself. It took half my diminishing stash of coke, two tabs of amphetamine, four Anadin, a couple of Peptos, half a bottle of cough mixture, a gargle of vodka, and four espressos to get me to this office, and the effect on my brain isn’t quite what I’d hoped—instead of sharpening my wits, it appears to be juicing them: They’re deliquescing. I’m experiencing slippage. Now that I look at the Widmerpool opposite, I’m none too sure it is the Wunderbar campaign that I’m here to discuss. It could be something completely different. I search the smooth face for clues: Skoda? Life insurance? The Labour Party? Tampax? That new fizzy orange drink?

  No, right first time, it’s Wunderbar. Crap chocolate, crap ads. But Widmerpool doesn’t see it that way, it seems. His instinct is, the product needs repositioning… and the person to do that repositioning, he begins to explain, is not me, despite my track record, my undoubted talents, my numerous industry awards, despite the undying respect and the undiminished admiration this man feels for me.… Translation: This bastard has dragged
me all the way down here to kiss me off. Will he admit that? He will not.

  He has, it seems, gone out on a limb. He’s discussed it in-house. He’s twisted arms, pushed the envelope, called in favors, bent over backward, and done his damnedest to make the Wunderbar boys see things his way—but they won’t. I know what they’re like, he tells me: They’re born-again conservative, narrow-minded, tightfisted, and allergic to risk. And, Dan, he says, dropping his voice an octave, let’s face facts—at this moment in time, you are a risk. Would you bring it in on budget? Would you make waves? Would you even turn up? Hand on heart, Dan—and it hurts me to say this—I can’t truthfully be sure you would. Frankly, Danny, you’ve always been a bit of a prima donna, and when you were delivering, that was fair enough. But now? You might go on a week’s bender. You might shove a kilo of coke up your snout. You might freak out totally, the way I hear you did in Tokyo. You might get the next plane to Honolulu two days into the shoot. Frankly, from what I hear, you’re capable of anything these days, and…

  A kilo of coke? I wish. Shall I tell him these scenarios aren’t too likely because I haven’t worked in a year and, frankly, I’m broke? Shall I tell him that if I weren’t broke, broken, chewed up, and spat out, I wouldn’t be here now, talking to him, let alone talking about the crappy Wunderbar account? Shall I tell him that, okay, I’ve been slow, but now I understand: This is his revenge, he never intended to consider me for this job, and he lured me here for the sole purpose of shafting me? Shall I show him how desperate I am? Break down or offer to crawl? I can see that’s what he’s waiting for. I can see that would make his month.

  No way, frankly. He is—and always was—a poisonous pompous power-crazed prat. Let’s be clear: He’s unforgivably thick. He’s a lazy subliterate snot rag, a reactionary and an arse licker, a tuft-hunting, vindictive, talent-bypassed, five-star pain up the butt. He’s a Thatcherite, a sneak, and a shit stirrer, he’s a twit and a twat. He’s an Olympic gold medal asshole. He’s an epiphyte, a pudding puller, and a zit. He’s the human equivalent of a bum boil; he’s a vasectomy, a weasel, a wank merchant, an intolerable whoreson zed. He’s one fucking unnecessary letter.… And he wouldn’t know a good ad from a fart in the face.

  Which was precisely why I fired him, I now recall. That and the bow ties. I stand up.

  For one swooping second I experience the joy, the ecstasy, the Joycean epiphany, there would be in telling him this. The lovely words are there on my lips. But I never speak them. I never speak them, because I’ve glanced down at that expensive expanse of desk, and the magazine cover has arrested me. I’ve looked at The Sisters Mortland, and they’ve looked back at me, and suddenly I’ve understood: I don’t need to be here. I need to be back there, at the Abbey, in the eternal summers at the Abbey, and I need to be there at once.

  I’m out of there in a blink. Hoist the briefcase and run. Down in the express lift. Out onto the pavement, into a taxi. I direct the driver to Piccadilly. Once I get to the gallery, once I’m in front of that painting, my whole life is going to make sense. I close my eyes. The traffic is snarled. Winter in London. It’s already dark on the streets.

  These amphetamines do the weirdest things to one’s heartbeat. First fast, then slow, a buzzy percussive effect. Finisterre, Finisterre, Finisterre. It’s a pretty fine mantra. All the way to the academy, I repeat it under my breath.

  [ eleven ]

  Squint

  Outside the gallery, something strange happens. I’m standing there on the pavement opposite, all revved up—and suddenly, no warning, I’m irresolute. A Hamlet moment. A bipolar moment. I blame the cough cure: God knows what’s in that.

  Shall I negotiate the pedestrian crossings or just throw myself under the next bus? Should I return home, where I could end things less messily? The temptation to end things has been strengthening recently. I’ve been stockpiling old-fashioned razors—now extraordinarily hard to obtain; I’ve had to trek round umpteen shops. But I can’t decide: throat—fast and fatal, but requiring a certain dexterity; or wrists—slow and stoic, the noble Roman touch? I have several useful lengths of stout Manila rope, strong enough to take my weight. I’ve cornered the market in sleeping pills, and have a stash of pretty major painkillers, so if I’m feeling squeamish, there’s always the coward’s way out. Admittedly, I’ve been too cowardly to take even this route so far, though late at night the temptation is sometimes great. So concentrate, Daniel: To cross or not to cross?

  Over the road, huge banners advertising the retrospective bulge and flutter in the back draft of a bus. Lucas’s familiar hawky features ripple, then coalesce. It’s starting to rain; people are putting up umbrellas; all around me there’s that late afternoon, ending-of-the-office-day mania and crush. My eyes are on the opposite pavement, where a thousand strangers parade, pass, pause, and push. I’m watching them with the dreamy, glassy detachment that now afflicts me, which may be a by-product of my exiled, jobless state, or the Peptos, or just life, when suddenly one of the figures detaches and becomes recognizable. It’s Nicholas Marlow. It’s my oldest friend, the man I promised to contact six weeks ago, the man I’ve almost telephoned a hundred times but never have.

  He’s wearing a dark overcoat and walking at speed. He seems oblivious to the rain, the traffic, and the crush. Will he turn in to the gallery? Surely he can’t be going there, too? He is. I watch him go under the archway, mount the steps. He doesn’t hesitate or look at the placards; he makes straight for the entrance. And that’s it: The black prince is cured of irresolution at once. The red don’t cross man is showing, a cab screeches to a halt; I heft my briefcase under my arm, duck and weave between the cars, under the dark arch, up the steps, marble underfoot, parquet underfoot. I know which gallery I’ll find Nick in—and sure enough, after a few hundred anterooms, a few thousand passageways, there he is. He’s sitting on a bench in front of The Sisters Mortland. He has his black-coated back to me. He doesn’t look around; he’s completely absorbed—and even in my jittery state I wonder: What does he see here? Does he see what I see—or something else? How does he read these figures, these colors, these codes, these women, these shapes?

  Slowly, reluctantly, I raise my eyes to the portrait. I know it so well, yet every time I look at it, it morphs. It will not remain stable; it retains a nasty capacity to alarm, puzzle, perturb, delight, arouse, blind, and illuminate. It’s very large; the figures are almost life-size. Three sisters, two still living, one long lost. The gas-jet blue gaze of three young girls meets mine, and it’s—fearsome. I close my eyes to shut it out. Some afterburn of their stare scorches my retina. Finisterre, I say to myself under my breath, and when the buzzy panic in the hushed room subsides, I cross to my friend and touch his arm. “Nick,” I say. “It’s me. I’m back.”

  He swings round, and for a moment I catch on his face an expression I’ve never seen before. I don’t know where he is—in some Timbuktu of the mind—but it’s a place that’s left him solitary and bereft. It takes an effort for him to escape that region, wherever it is; then he rises, his countenance relaxes, his eyes warm, and he grasps my hand. It’s so long since anyone’s been remotely pleased to see me that I can’t deal with it—kindness and friendliness undo me in a way antagonism never would. The air blurs; the room tilts.

  Nick puts his arm around my shoulder. He draws me down on the bench beside him. “Let’s just sit here for a while,” he says eventually. No doubt he’s made some quick and immediate medical assessment—I think it’s pretty evident I’m not in too good a state. But then—to judge from the expression I glimpsed on his face—neither is he. And that’s strange, because Nick has it all: honorable profession, well-merited esteem, home, children, and wife. Whereas I have—what? No job, no parents, no children, no wife, negative equity, a reputation that’s shot—and all too few compensating factors. These days, even sex is… well, let’s not get started on that.

  Those differences fall away as I sit beside him. None of them matters, not one jot. Nick has always posse
ssed this gift. He quietens clamor; his friendship is so sure that he gives me back myself, and the fragmentation, while I’m with him, blessedly stops. We sit there side by side in a silence that starts to feel companionable. I turn my eyes back to Lucas’s painting. I look at the three sisters: one I disliked, one I liked, and one I loved. Lucas has given them a stillness that’s charged—as if they’re about to step out of the canvas and speak. I look at Valkyrie Julia, at Finn, and at Maisie. In the portrait, she is tiny, dwarfed by her elder sisters—but then she was small for her age, a thin, grave, disconcerting child. My grandmother told her fortune once. “What did you see in the crystal, Maisie?” I asked her. I knew she’d seen something—the crystal had smashed.

  “That is a secret I will never divulge,” she replied—she talked in that stilted way, like a small ticking time bomb of an automaton. And she was true to her word. She never told anyone—not even Finn, and I know that because I asked, after the accident.

  What was your secret, Maisie? I think, looking at Lucas’s painted child. She’s holding a tiny pair of scissors in her hand—I’ve never noticed that detail before. A minute pair of scissors and, behind her, light, from an unidentifiable source. In this spilled eerie light, I can see a shape—some creature, perhaps. Lucas’s shapes are infinitely suggestible, fluid, and ambiguous. But I reckon it’s a bird. I’m almost certain it’s a swallow. Scissors, and a maybe-swallow, in a maybe-English, maybe-stormy, maybe-sky behind Maisie’s head.

  When did I last see a swallow? I think. And, thanks to the quiet of the gallery, or the reassurance of Nick’s proximity, or the unpredictable pills, or the unnerving blue burn of three pairs of eyes, I’m released. I’m not even aware it’s happening, the swoop is so fast. One minute I’m most definitely there, on the bench. The next I’m in my English childhood’s infinite space. I’m sitting by Black Ditch with Nick; I’m building a den with him, in Nun Wood; I’m watching my father plow a field, and Bella is saying, That’s artistry, that is. Then Bella has grasped my hand, and she’s leading me through the Abbey, on and on, through a maze of passageways, until we open a door—it looks like a cupboard door, but it isn’t—and there the stepladder is, in readiness. Up you go, Bella whispers. Didn’t I promise I’d show you? And she helps me up the steps, and there, right in front of my eyes, is a small, square aperture. It’s a marvel, Bella says.