The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  “I did check,” I say now in the somnolence of the gallery. At least, I think I say the words aloud, but maybe I don’t, because Nick doesn’t react, and neither does the elderly custodian who’s sitting at the entrance to this room—there’s no one else here; it’s close to closing time.

  And check I finally did, when I was fifteen and at the grammar school. I went to the archives of the local newspaper and sat in a sweat over ancient, browning musty volumes. Result: confirmation of all my suspicions. There was an incident with a Messerschmitt, and it did unloose a hail of bullets at the Abbey. No one knows why. There was speculation it had been heading for the bomber base at Deepden and peppered the Abbey out of pure devilry. Not too likely, I’d have said. Maybe this German, separated from his squadron, was in extremis, in which case, he has my sympathy. He did die, and horribly, when his plane plowed into Acre Field—but this all happened four years before V-E Day, two years before my parents married, and forty-eight months before I hit the lionskin.

  “I want the truth,” I said to Bella when I got home from the archive. Bella gave me one of her Ocean looks—ancient Roma wisdom, eyes fixed on the far beyond, etc. I wasn’t having it. “Come on, Gran, what happened?” I said. And I got chapter and verse: Yes, it was all true, location, sudden onset of labor, window, Cotter’s Giants, lionskin. The only embellishment was the Messerschmitt: Gran had added that in when I was small, when I would pester her with questions, and—in a way—it could have been true, because when my mother was standing at that window in the Lady Chapel, she saw something.

  As to what she saw, Gran could not, in the circumstances, be certain. It might have been the fatal plane, doing a spooky repeat flypast four years later. It might have been something else, but whatever it was, Dorrie, who had never manifested the Gift before, had seen something uncanny, something to which even gifted Gran was blind and something that was terrifying. So terrifying that she went straight into labor.

  I stand up. The gallery’s gone very quiet. Nick isn’t breathing. I’m not breathing. I’m thinking about my past, I’m thinking about my culpability. I had difficulties with the story of my birth as a child; later, I grew a skin. I found you could make those background shames and their attendant pain disappear if you emphasized them. So, at Cambridge (where there was the odd snob, just the odd thousand), I dined out on Roma ancestry, on Ocean and Bella and a plowman for a father. Okay, I was a pikey, but I wasn’t stupid: I knew there was no point in trying to pass, and it was the sixties, when to be a working-class exotic was not necessarily a disadvantage. Handled right, it was the strongest of trump cards.

  Once started, I couldn’t stop. I glorified and embellished, and by the summer at the Abbey, when Lucas painted this portrait, I had the bloody story of my birth really well honed. I regaled people with it—and one of the people I regaled, one twilight evening, was Maisie. It was a few days before the annual visit to Elde; we were all in the library. I took Maisie across to the window and showed her the marks where Dorrie’s lifeblood, and my birth, stained the parquet.

  “She saw something terrible?” Maisie said, frowning. “Was it the nuns? Or those three dead babies?” Because, yes, so help me, I’d told her about them, too.

  “Terrifying,” I corrected. I’d had too much wine. “She saw something terrifying.”

  “You’re sure it was the middle window?”

  “Definitely. The middle window.”

  “It’s the window I saw you in,” she said in that odd fixed way of hers. “I was the first of my family to see you. It was the day of Daddy’s funeral, though it wasn’t a funeral as such, of course. That is why we are friends.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right.” And I drifted away to join Nick, Finn, and Julia.

  Three weeks later, Maisie went up to the library when no one was there, opened that same window, stood on the sill, and jumped. Thirty feet down, onto the cloister flagstones. There’s a school of thought (it’s Stella’s) that she didn’t jump, that she stood in the window and then slipped.

  I don’t hold with it.

  I found her.

  I can’t stand thinking about it.

  “Back in two seconds,” I say to Nick, moving off fast. “I just have to… I won’t be a…” Speedy. I’m out of that room, I’m three miles down the corridors before he can speak.

  “Help,” I say to the first uniform I encounter. It wouldn’t surprise me if he took me into custody, but no, he’s a kindly soul, this cicerone of the gallery. He takes my arm, indicates some stairs, and—sure enough—when I’ve circled the inferno a few more times, I find the right door. There I am, blessedly alone, my reflections and me, Daniel in triplicate in the gentlemen’s lavatory.

  [ twelve ]

  Look Closely

  I’d like to be clear : I blame everything that’s happened subsequently—everything—on the two minutes and twenty seconds I then spent in that cool, quiet, white-tiled space. Opening the door, closing it behind me, glimpsing the ghastly spectacle of myself mirrored back at me, I’m clear what I have to do. I have to sober up, get clean and stay clean. I have to junk the dwindling stash of stuff I told Nick I’d junked six weeks ago.

  I have to get a grip. I have to reform. I must start now. At once.

  If I’ve made mistakes in the past, I won’t waste my energy on them. What’s done cannot be undone, so there is no point in castigating, or cracking up, or rushing around hardware shops and chemists, stocking up on Stanley knives and acetaminophen and geriatric Gillette razor blades. Who does that help? It doesn’t help anyone, and it certainly doesn’t help me. So I will not think of Finn, or Maisie, or lost loves, or past guilts, or failed careers, or wasted talents, or betrayed fathers. It’s all too damn biblical: I will leave such melodrama behind me. I will, magisterially, move on. I’ll do what every sensible person does: I’ll settle for second best, good works, and nonentity.

  How do I see myself in, say, five years? The word burgher springs to mind. Yes, a good burgher of Islington, a paterfamilias, perhaps, unless they’re extinct. I can see it now: the modest London house, the modest country cottage, The Guardian on the breakfast table, the eco-aware car, and the compost heap. The donations to Oxfam, the 2.4 children, the sensible wife, the pension plan; the brisk walking weekends, the three-weeks-in-a-charming-gîte holidays; the odor of sanctity, the consolations of principle, the sure and certain hope of the resurrection… Oh, the blamelessness of it: I can’t wait.

  I approach the washbasins. My mind is resolved—I’m so damn resolved, I’m positively godly. And then…

  And then, something goes wrong. The tap won’t turn on, and when it does finally turn on, it won’t fucking well turn off. One minute it’s a dribble, the next we’re talking Niagara. The lights become excessively bright, then excessively dim, and before I can do a thing it’s back, the wastage of years is back, filling the room, reverberating around the room, howling in my ears, thumbing its nose at me.

  So I do what I suppose I knew I’d do all along. It’s the joylessness I can’t stand. The diurnal joylessness: No one warned me about that. In the acres of print I’ve read this past year on such hitherto unexplored and derided subjects as male midlife crisis, bereavement guilt, and depression, not one guru, medic, crank, or charlatan has mentioned joylessness. They didn’t describe its serpentine approach—the decades it takes to slither up on you, so you never even notice it’s there until too late, until it’s got you in its anaconda grip, and it’s crushing the life out of you. And they didn’t suggest a cure, either—but that doesn’t matter, because right here in my pockets I have one.

  I have several, in fact. And just to be on the safe side, I select three. It’s ignominious, it’s undignified, and my hands are twitching so much that I nearly spill half the cure down the Niagara Falls, but I get there in the end. I cut a precious penultimate line of best Bolivian and Hoover it up an eager nostril. I crunch two amphetamine tabs, then gulp them down. I light a Marlboro and blow gusts of hot heretic smoke at the ce
iling sensor systems. I wait for a response: red lights, alarms, sprinkler activations, uniformed intervention at the very least, and—what do you know?—nothing happens. Nothing at all. The errant tap continues to gush. The world turns. My reflections splinter and refract. And then there’s the rush of relief, the return of conviction, the sure and certain hope only chemicals can give you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. With one bound I’m free, I’m out of there—and I’m back in the gallery.

  Nick hasn’t moved. He doesn’t seem to react when I return—which is odd considering the light-years that have passed, the galaxies I’ve been visiting. Never mind, there’s a lot to look at in here, there’s a lot to learn in here, and—thanks to my enhanced chemistry, my rebooted synapses—I can see it with new eyes. I start prowling about. I prowl busily, first this wall of portraits, then that one.

  On the wall behind Nick are some of Lucas’s later works. His notorious later works. I don’t like them. The light is remorseless, and so is his eye. Two of the wives, several of the mistresses. All his subjects look bleached or drained, as if Transylvanian Lucas applied his mouth to their jugular, sucked out all their blood, and then—when there was just a faint heartbeat still remaining—picked up his brush and painted their last agonies.

  They’re pitifully calm. You can tell that death has just interrupted them. There they were, reading a book, cradling a child, drinking a glass of wine, making love, smoking a ciggie—and suddenly there was a soft tap at the door. All aboard, a voice said to them, and the journey they’re about to make is there in their eyes, their pale zombie eyes, which are filled with living-dead resignation. There’s a glitter to their eyes, too, a certain gloating malevolence, as if they’d like us, their watchers, to know that we’ll be joining the same train, that we’ll be packed in the very same boxcars. What’s more—and this I particularly dislike—there’s a clear intimation that this journey’s going to be brief. Hades, only one stop: We’re all disembarking at the very next station.

  Well, thanks, Lucas, but I think I’ll skip this ride. I don’t want to look at these stripped, naked women—Lucas nearly always paints women. I don’t want to look at those drawings of Maisie, either: the drawings on the next wall, the drawings that make Maisie look deformed and desperate. I look at the early drawings of Finn instead. Orchard Finn, a lovely girl, book in hand, sprawled beneath a tree, abundant apples scattered in the grass beside her. Finn at Black Ditch, a nymph-girl standing next to a dark stripe, a Styx of ominous water. Finn by Nun Wood, The Dormition of Finn (her eyes are closed), Dreaming Finn (her eyes are open). Finn, again and again Finn—there must be ten, twelve, fifteen drawings here, I realize, more drawings than I’ve ever seen before, more than I knew Lucas made, more—far more—than he’s ever shown me.

  A multiplicity of black-and-white Finns—and they’re starting to dazzle me. I think, When did he do these drawings? How did he have time, that summer, to do so many drawings? Where was I when he worked on them, when she posed for them? Surely I was with her almost every hour of every day that summer?

  But, of course, I wasn’t. That was the summer Finn slipped away from me, the summer I lost her. I think: He’s my friend, try explaining that, Finn. And it seems to be a sentence I might once have said, but I can’t remember if I merely thought it or actually articulated it and, if so, where or under what circumstances—except that I was jealous, obviously, just as I’m jealous again now, jealous and bereft, standing here watching a multiplicity of Finns I never knew, Finns I never suspected, dancing down some tunnel of the past and—as ever—eluding me.

  In the last of the drawings, a tight close-up of her face—it’s called Final Finn—she is screening her eyes with her hands, and she’s wearing a wedding ring. Lucas’s wedding ring—since Finn was, disastrously, the first of Lucas’s several wives. The drawing’s undated; it’s another I’ve never seen. I stare at it hard, too hard, until its sense starts crumbling, until it’s a mess of lines and scrawls and smudges, until it’s random and means nothing. When did Lucas draw that? When the brief marriage came to its unlovely end or afterward? Or on their wedding day, perhaps? Half an hour after they left the register office in Cambridge—that would be my guess. Final Finn: Yes, I can imagine that. It might interest Lucas to combine hail and farewell. But then Lucas is a gifted artist, very possibly a great one, and great artists are odd. The havoc Lucas causes is the lifeblood of his paintings, but Lucas never notices the havoc—he’s blind in that respect.

  He discarded Finn; he’s discarded Julia—several times, if you can believe the gossip; but their affairs are always brief, or so people say, occurring and recurring only at times when they’ll cause maximum damage. So: Two out of three of the sisters Mortland is Lucas’s score, and no doubt, if circumstances had been different, he’d have moved on to Maisie eventually. Given a few more years, he’d have gone for the hat trick. And for once might have met his match, I think, turning round to face the portrait and remembering the Maisie I knew, the Maisie who can’t be explained by “freakiness,” or a form of autism, or by being “touched,” as they used to say in the village, but the Maisie who was like a land mine, some lethal discard on a battlefield, antique mechanism in full working order: the Maisie I thought was innocent and dangerous.

  A child’s inscrutable blue gaze meets mine. We stare at each other, across the gallery, across the decades. And at that point, precisely at that point (Nick will later claim it’s when the dope really kicks in), I understand that this small, lost child is trying to escape from the frame in which Lucas has imprisoned her, and she wants to tell me something.

  I start moving toward the picture fast, dimly aware that somewhere to my right Nick is rising to his feet and suggesting something—that we leave, probably. But I can’t pause to listen to him, or even glance at him, or at the custodian, who was seated at the entrance, who is also rising to his feet. No, I have to concentrate exclusively on Maisie, on what she is saying and trying to show me. Look closely, says a small, familiar voice—and no, I’m not imagining it, I’m not having some kind of trip; this bears no resemblance to those moments I’ve experienced recently, when alcohol, dope, and misery make me see the invisible. Look closely, says the voice, look closely.

  And I do. I look at Maisie in her blue dress, holding her pair of tiny, half-hidden scissors. She, in the center, is the source of the painting’s charge: You can feel the high-voltage flow between her and her sisters. Finn is gripping her hand, Julia clasps her shoulder; the sky behind them is irradiated. All three, linked by some unseen galvanic force, send out a current that sparks off the canvas. It’s fluorescent—I can feel it light me up. It’s disturbing; it’s modern and ancient. I can try to distance myself from this; I can make myself note the painterly references all the academics hymn, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, The Opening of the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse. Yes, looking with their critical eyes, I can see those echoes and mockeries; I can see that the sisters’ pose is like, and unlike, that of Botticelli’s Graces—but that tells me nothing. Three Graces, three fates, three sibyls, three witches: I look at the strange way in which all three sisters’ faces seem turned toward the spectator yet are discernibly tilted, as if they’re looking up at something unseen. I look at the disconcerting perspective this gives the painting—so its effect is El Greco vertiginous. I look at the background—insofar as there is one—which could, I suppose, be a room, but which I’ve always assumed to be a postmodern nowhere-everywhere, a terrifying distillation of that wasteland, the twentieth century.

  I see an abstract of floaty jagged misaligned shapes that resist interpretation, but I can’t see beyond them. All I can see, all I can really see, is the riddling danger of Lucas’s creation. I try to decode this weird perspective, this unnatural realism, this last-days’ iridescence. Something huge is about to happen here—it screams out of the paint—but I can’t tell whether it’s joyful or appalling. What are these three sisters looking at? Are they watching a resurrection or some final catastrophe?

>   Look closely, says that small voice one final time, and although I can sense movement and stir behind me, I do. I get right up close, so close that I can see veins beneath the painted skin and the air’s very brushstrokes. And when I do, there’s—revelation. Those floaty misaligned shapes suddenly cease to be random or imagined: They become recognizable. That dark leonine smudge of color in the left foreground, for instance—isn’t that familiar? That threatening snaky shape, which uncoils in the shadows behind Finn, that serpentine thing that has so puzzled critics—don’t I know that? And above the sisters’ heads, those three indistinct spheres that seem to float in the indeterminacy of the background, spheres that some commentators have claimed are moons, a little constellation held in the sisters’ galaxy, forever fixed by their triple-force gravity—why, they’re not moons at all, they’re nothing so fanciful. What I’m looking at is a place—one I could recognize blindfolded. That leonine smudge is a lionskin. That snaky thing is a vulgar table, brought back from a Calcutta bazaar by one of many colonialist Mortland uncles. Those three moons are the ivory spheres that used to fascinate me so, the ones I lusted after, in my childhood.

  Look closely, and we’re in the library at the Abbey. We’re in the Lady Chapel. Or, to be more precise, we’re looking down at that space from the vantage point of Bella’s marvel, the irreligious Squint, that medieval aperture set at man-height in a building occupied exclusively by women.

  By holy women. Which is surprising. It may explain why the sisters’ faces appear to look up and why the painting induces this celebrated sense of imbalance or vertigo or, as others have suggested, voyeurism—yet as far as I know, Lucas never knew of the Squint’s existence. He rarely spent any time inside the Abbey itself. He had no interest whatsoever in its history or its architecture. I cannot remember him ever sketching there—he always worked outdoors or in the refectory. And when we finally trooped down to the refectory, on the memorable day when he unveiled the picture, no mention was made of library, Lady Chapel, or Squint—I’m absolutely certain of that. Am I certain of that?