by Susan Green
‘Neil. Those paintings of his. He’s always telling us what they’re about, what we’re meant to think, what we’re meant to see. Shouldn’t we just be able to look for ourselves? Why should we need a guidebook or a manual?’
‘It’s absurd, Bliss, your anti-intellectualism, your refusal to think. Thinking wouldn’t hurt you, you know.’
‘Gerald,’ I said, stopping and unlinking my arm from his. ‘I do think. I just don’t think about the things you think about. So, I don’t know a lot about your precious theories; does that make me stupid?’
‘I never said you were.’ Then, in a gentler voice, ‘You don’t need theories, darling. Yours is an instinctual approach; it’s a gift. You draw and paint like a bird sings, when you’re happy, like an enchanting child. That’s why you’ll never be an artist – by which I mean a professional artist. A professional doesn’t wait on mood or inspiration. They do what they do.’ He kissed me again. ‘I love your little pots of flowers,’ he said. ‘The bird’s nest and the pears. I could never do something like that, so happy, so natural.’
Happy, natural . . . He spoke so lovingly, so convincingly. I pictured myself in his words and since I was barely formed as a person, I was flattered. Swayed. Who wouldn’t like to be an enchanting child?
Judith, that’s who. On her plinth, with sword in hand and eagle’s wings and an eagle’s steady gaze. But I was not Judith. I melted in my husband’s arms. He kissed me, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if a nightingale had sung in the moonlit square.
‘Darling,’ I said, looking up at him and beginning to laugh. ‘You do know how to get your way, don’t you? You switch me off and on like – oh, Gerald!’
The kiss went on and on, and Neil Offren shrank into a tiny misshapen shadow.
Or so I thought. I was wrong. You wouldn’t think, would you, that a beautiful young wife could be eclipsed by an ugly man with a twisted mouth, an insatiable appetite for discord and a profound dislike of women? Oh, that’s not to say he didn’t desire women. It was his tragedy, I suppose. He wanted them and he hated them; perhaps he hated because he wanted. Perhaps it hurt him to watch his friends with their wives or girlfriends, to see how their bodies curved together, how even in public, at a party or in a bar, a man’s arm could drape casually around a smooth shoulder, or his hand linger on the nape of a neck, at the waist, on a hip.
I imagine he thought I was very stupid. At any rate, he didn’t bother talking to me. Judith, now, was more of a challenge, and though he was always outwardly polite, he liked to bait her. One evening he was uncharacteristically keen on a woman painter whose exhibition we’d all viewed earlier.
‘She’s really very good,’ he said. ‘Very talented.’
‘That’s a rare admission from you,’ said Judith.
‘Oh, women can have talent,’ he said. ‘But not genius. It’s nature. Let’s face it, women are made for motherhood, not art. It’s not fair, but it’s what it is.’
‘Can’t you do any better, Neil?’ Judith replied. ‘I have to turn out tripe like that for My Journal all the time. Trying to persuade women that all they really want is to be dear little housewives, so the men can take their jobs back. Next you’ll be telling me that I’ll go mad if I read a book.’
He backed down a little but it was all double negatives. ‘Look, I’m not saying there aren’t some very successful women artists.’
Gerald joined him. ‘They’re very good at portraiture, mothers and children, that sort of thing. Or still life. Eggs, fruit, flowers. Like Liza’s aunt. But then Liza’s aunt is –’ he laughed, and I knew what he was going to say – ‘well, she’s a loopy old lesbian.’
Aunt Emu was the third woman to win the National Gallery Travelling Scholarship. That was in 1910, when she was thirty-eight years old. Miss Minnie went with her to Paris, where she studied at Académie Delecluse, Académie Colarossi, Académie Julian. She won silver medals for her portraits and exhibited at the Salon, after which conventional success she was even – dear Aunt Emu, portly and slightly absurd with her furs and toques and corsages – for a few daring years somewhat cubist. Back in Melbourne she had to moderate her style if she was going to get any commissions because, as she put it, ‘You’d have thought, dearest, I’d gone on the game.’ Her paintings were in all the major Australian collections. She was respected, famous, still working in her breezy upstairs studio in a gathered grey smock. And I didn’t stand up for her. I let them laugh at her. Aunt Emu, a loopy old lesbian.
I’m ashamed of that now, although I don’t blame myself unduly. I was young, and I didn’t have the nerve, the resolve, the confidence to go up against my husband. I wasn’t exactly scared of Gerald, I simply knew that when I disagreed with him, he would wear me down – hector me, lecture me – until I took the path of least resistance. Was it, apart from my youth, a kind of laziness, a disinclination to exert myself? Or did I think to do otherwise was unbecoming, unfeminine? I can’t easily place myself back in that state. It took a few years – indeed, it took the children – before the iron entered my soul. Now, of course, I would simply tell a Neil Offren or a Gerald to fuck off.
‘Whether she’s a lesbian or a dear little housewife is irrelevant,’ said Rob. He was gathering dishes from the table and piling them on the draining board as he spoke. ‘Bliss’s aunt is a distinguished artist. Leonardo and Michelangelo were both homosexual, but we don’t refer to them as a pair of pansies. Too much is made of a person’s sexual self. Aren’t our souls without gender?’
Neil made a wet, ugly sound with his blubbery lips. ‘Our souls? Come on, Rob. It’s science. It’s biology. And it’s a fact that a woman’s nature –’
Judith, clearly, was sick of the whole discussion. ‘We shall never really understand a woman’s nature as long as it’s men who are talking and writing about it. Jane Austen said something to that effect, if you remember.’ She gestured towards Rob at the sink. ‘But tell me anyway, Neil; why am I more fitted by nature than you are to do the dishes?’
‘You say this now, but what will happen when you and Rob start to have children?’ said Neil. ‘Will you say that when the baby’s crying? Wet? Needs a feed?’
Judith stood up, walked into the kitchen and got out margarine, sugar and powdered egg. Rob followed her and silently produced the mixing bowl and the marmalade.
‘Well?’ said Neil.
I was struck by the way she stood, back straight and head held high, with the bowl held against her body and the wooden spoon in her hand. She seemed defiant and yet vulnerable. Which was silly, really. Judith was the least vulnerable person I knew.
‘Rob will help, won’t you, Rob?’ I cried.
‘Yes, Bliss,’ he said. He put his arm around his wife’s waist, and for a few seconds she leaned against him. ‘Yes, I will.’
When I told Gerald I was pregnant, he was aghast. I wasn’t exactly ecstatic myself – it was so unexpected – but surely, in such a case, the husband ought to be pleased? Or at least say he is.
‘Are you sure?’ His tone was accusatory.
‘Certain. I went to the doctor.’
‘Oh, God, Liza, it’s too soon. Surely you could have waited? This is going to . . . well, how am I going to paint with a baby in the house? There’s no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’
‘Sombre enemy? What?’
‘I’m quoting. Cyril Connolly.’
Cyril – whoever he was – could go jump. ‘You seem to think it’s all my fault, but you did have something to do with it.’
‘Yes, but surely . . . weren’t you . . .’
We stared at each other. It was gone, suddenly, the happy future we’d imagined for ourselves, the working and travelling, with Gerald having exhibitions and becoming famous and me being his wife, all because we’d never talked about this possibility. We’d never – what was the phrase? – ‘taken precautions’. I didn’t really know what those precautions were.
‘You seem to think I’ve done this on purpose.
How do you think I feel?’ I stretched out my hands to him but Gerald was now slumped at the kitchen table in an attitude of despair.
‘Gerald?’
He didn’t answer, so I threw my teacup at him, grabbed my bag and coat and ran out of the door.
‘Really, Bliss, what did you expect?’ asked Judith.
‘We were in love,’ I said. ‘The topic . . . well, it just didn’t come up. He seems to think I should have been taking care of things and, well, I just didn’t think about it.’
‘Oh my Lord,’ she said. ‘I feel like smacking you both. Talk about babes in the wood!’
She could see that I had only the loosest of grips on the whole business, so she gave me a short lecture on Dutch caps and French letters. To which I paid little or no attention. It was shutting the stable door after the horse had well and truly bolted, and she must have realised, for she stopped and took my hand in hers.
‘Bliss, it’s a surprise – well, more of a shock, right now – but, my dear, life’s thrown you this particular line; grab it with both hands. Don’t regret what you’re losing. This is the next thing, the next step, when you love each other: you make a new life, you make a family . . .’
She had tears in her eyes, which was most unlike her, and I became teary again myself. She took me in her arms and hugged me, hard – which, again, was unusual – and over her shoulder, through the open door of their bedroom, I saw on the wall the little Cretan icon they had bought recently for five pounds at an auction. It was a serious, horse-faced Madonna, cheek to cheek with her equally serious child. Rob had explained to me that in Greek iconography this was a Virgin glykophilousa, the One of the Sweet Kiss. Mother and child had hands entwined, and I thought suddenly of my mother’s hand. I thought of Gerald being brought up by relatives, and a radiant new idea took hold.
And at that precise moment Gerald raced up the stairs into the room, swept me into his arms and, kissing my cheeks, my neck, my eyelids, told me he was sorry, it was wonderful news, he loved me, he loved me, he loved me . . .
Rob, coming in a moment later, shut the door and leaned against it, arms crossed. The expression on his face was unreadable.
‘Everybody happy?’ he said.
UNRAVELLING
Gerald was very considerate. Before he left for work, he’d tiptoe into the bedroom with weak tea and dry biscuits. On weekends, he took me for gentle outings and tucked me up in bed for afternoon naps. We made lists of names – Dora, Poppy, Madeleine – for she was, I knew, a girl.
We made plans. With the money we’d already saved, and the money that was coming from Mother’s estate, we would go to live on one of the Greek islands (cheaper even than Italy, we were informed) when the baby was born. Gerald could paint full-time and help me with the baby and I would bathe in the sea, eat figs and breastfeed. Gerald even started trying to teach himself Greek from a book. We were happy.
After I got over the nausea, I felt energetic and wonderfully inspired. I continued with the illustrations for My Journal and I started drawing again. For myself, I mean. I sketched people in the park, in the square, in the library. That was all right. Sketchbooks are small. They can be shoved under piles of newspapers, under carpets, under beds. Canvases are another matter. One day I took Gerald’s painting off the easel and put a canvas of my own in its place. When I met him at the door wearing a paint-smeared smock, he shook his head.
‘I thought you were over all that.’
‘Well, I’m not.’ I knew I was being childish, but I couldn’t help it. ‘Why can’t I paint? I want to paint. I came to England so I could paint.’
‘Yes, I know. But, Liza, look at all those women painters who go to the Slade, who win the Prix de Rome, who study in Paris. Who’s ever heard of them? They do pictures for Medici cards or nice portraits of their children or their flower gardens.’
‘I might be different.’
‘With a baby to look after? Really, why bother?’
After the miscarriage, I often woke crying in the night. I didn’t want to eat or get dressed or do my hair. I didn’t want to go to the pictures or look in the shops. All I wanted was what I couldn’t have. Gerald bought me horrible tonics and pick-me-ups – Vimaltol, Wincarnis, Sanatogen – but I stayed limp, pale and weepy.
‘It’s not the end of the world,’ he told me. ‘We can have another.’
But when we started making love again, he used French letters or pulled out.
‘We want you to get really well,’ he said, ‘before we try again.’
I suppose he became frustrated. His lovemaking grew rough and I felt as if he was slamming himself into me, on and on, with his face like a stranger’s and his eyes unreachable. Once, when I was sitting on a chair in my knickers and vest, darning a stocking, he ripped off my underclothes and pinned me against the wall. I said no. I said it again. Afterwards, we never talked about it.
We began to argue, and it was always over trivial things – burnt toast, the milk left out, an unironed shirt. Though we made up, there remained a distance between us that increased incrementally and Gerald began to stay up late, painting or reading or learning Greek, coming to bed when I was already asleep. He spent more time with Neil. He painted building sites and cranes and piles of rubble, not me. On weekends he was so moody and disagreeable that I walked on eggshells. I could forgive him his roughness, his lack of understanding over our lost baby; he was a man, after all. What I really wanted was for us to be in love again. Because – and I could scarcely allow myself to think this – if I wasn’t in love with Gerald, I didn’t really like him very much.
It was also after my miscarriage that Gerald began to draw away from Rob in earnest. It wasn’t just that Neil had inserted himself between them. Something had changed; the group at Rob and Judith’s had splintered. Now Gerald preferred to go to Neil’s house in Notting Hill, and so of course I went too. It was an all-male enclave – he shared with another Australian painter and a young Scottish textiles designer – and not particularly accommodating to women. I don’t mean it was squalid. It was just that the three of them had no concept of comfort. Deliberately? I wonder now if there was no milk for tea on purpose, and if the stale bread and nasty marge, the scratchy loo paper and hard chairs were all carefully chosen. We often ended up at the local, the Duke of Windsor.
Rob turned up occasionally, without Judith – she didn’t care for pubs – and then he stopped coming, too. There’d been a string of unpleasant little scenes and this was the last of them.
Gerald led off with a neutral remark. ‘That group show at the Lefevre – Liza tells me you and she went to see it during the week.’
Rob and I – both freelancing as illustrators, both working from home – often met midweek for lunch and a gallery. They were happy, chattering, high-spirited expeditions. Both of us, I realise now, had spouses who were fundamentally serious and even somewhat dark. Away from them, together, we could let off steam, laugh, play. Once, after passing a street musician, Rob waltzed me in broad daylight down Cromwell Road towards the V&A.
‘You liked it, didn’t you, Liza?’
I nodded. ‘Very much.’
‘I dropped in to have a look, too. With Neil.’
‘And what did you think?’ asked Rob.
‘I thought it displayed everything that’s wrong with that kind of art. It’s camp, stagey, literary . . .’
Neil joined in. ‘Not just literary. You can’t get away from the fact that it’s mere illustration.’
‘Mere illustration?’ Rob raised an eyebrow. For months now, Gerald’s sneering implication had been that the quality of Rob’s painting was fatally compromised by his commercial work, but he was not yet unsettled. ‘Until the eighteenth century, you could say that most European painting was illustration. It was Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, the lives of the saints . . .’
‘Yes, but you have to admit, Freeman, that these artists – urban romantics, neo-pastoralists, lyric realists, whatever they are – all worship at th
e same altar. It’s so bloody English, and in the worst sense; looking backwards to some Golden Age before the Industrial Revolution. It’s the tired old crew: Samuel Palmer, William Calvert . . .’
‘William Blake,’ added Gerald.
Rob was nettled. ‘Blake was a visionary,’ he said. ‘A mystic, a genius.’
‘Hero worship, Rob? I suppose I’d say that’s what’s wrong with the work at the Lefevre. I can admit it’s got an awful lot of surface charm, but ultimately it’s imitation, without conviction or real creativity.’
‘I don’t know that you’d call it hero worship. It’s simply an attitude I admire. To be open and alive to the world, to never lose your sense of wonder.’
Neil gave a snort of laughter. ‘We don’t live in that world any more, man. The old vocabulary – truth, beauty, wonder, delight – no longer suits the needs of the day. Mankind is a futile species; we’re playing out the game of life dependent not on God or some half-arsed spirituality, but on chance.’
‘So hope is out, doom is in?’
‘If you want to put it that way, yes.’
‘Pessimism.’
‘I’d say realism. So, come on, Freeman, give us your manifesto.’
‘I think . . . I think an artist must paint the things he or she knows and loves.’ He was less coherent now, less measured than his tormentors. ‘So, yes, love – for everything you know, desire, even what you fear – your whole life – the living moment made of objects, shapes, forms, moods, atmosphere . . . It’s love.’
‘It’s love that makes the world go round? Isn’t that a bit trite?’
‘I don’t think so, Gerry.’
‘So you wear your art on your sleeve, eh, Rob?’ Neil sniggered at his own joke.