all the beloved ghosts
Page 17
‘Many of you will know that Angelica Garnett, in addition to being a talented painter, is also a gifted museum.’ Above the microphone, her host blushes deeply. ‘A gifted musician, I should say.’
She smiles devilishly, and the audience laugh. Poor chap, she thinks, he got it right the first time. She is only too aware that she is an old lady with red-rimmed eyes. Her long painter’s hands are a mountain range of veins. Her hair is a silver bob. In spite of the warmth of the day, she wears an oversized pullover, a dark woollen skirt, brown loafers and bright blue socks.
She is enjoying herself now. She is not uninteresting. How many people, after all, can say they married their father’s lover?
Only two glasses of water and a low table separate her from her interviewer. He has a high dome of a head, and his reading glasses dangle casually, confidently, from one hand. She understands he is a biographer. Much of the time, she doesn’t know the answers these people want.
They will never know, for example, about the elegy unfolding within her for the moorhens of her childhood and their beautiful red bills; for the gleaming beetles and the hairy green gooseberries; for the Roorkhee chairs on the terrace where the adults would sit at twilight; for the day that Roger’s hat was lost, and everyone, even Duncan’s new model, was enlisted by Vanessa to search – the model with only a small towel around his waist.
These moments cannot be panned like gold from the past, or if they can, they cannot be held.
Q: Can you hear me, Angelica?
A: Speak a little louder, if you would.
Q: We’re here at Charleston, your childhood home and the home of your parents, the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Would you say a little about what it was that attracted Vanessa to Duncan as a painter?
A: His wit. His gaiety, I suppose. (Pause.) They painted together, often the same subject, though something quite different would come out with each.
Q: Did they offer each other criticism?
A: I suppose so, but their criticism was very practical.
Q: Practical in what sort of way?
A: ‘You should use that blue.’
Q: I see.
A: ‘That line should go there.’ (The audience laugh. She has deflated his well-informed question.)
Q: Was Vanessa dependent on Duncan as a painter?
A: One hears she was.
Q: Perhaps he ‘freed up’ her style?
A: I’m afraid you’d have to ask her (there at her easel, in the orchard even as we speak).
Q: Virginia and Leonard were of course frequent visitors. What was Virginia’s relationship with Duncan?
A: Rather friendly, I think. Not very, very close. Well, because he was a painter and she was a writer.
Q: And Leonard and Duncan?
A: I think Leonard was slightly irritated by Duncan – not that it showed. Everyone would have pretended whatever the case.
Q: It was in the Garden Room that Vanessa, your mother, told you that Duncan Grant, not Clive Bell, was actually your biological father. Is that right?
A: Is that what they call it now? Yes, I was seventeen, I believe. Seventeen or eighteen. I suppose you could tell me. I’m afraid Vanessa made the wrong decision when I was born and then, I daresay, couldn’t get out of it . . .
Q: In spite of the general agreement not to tell you the truth for many years, was Duncan a ‘father figure’ as you grew up?
A: No. He was generous and kind, certainly, but he had no authority. It wasn’t in his nature. Leonard was a father figure of sorts. Not Duncan.
Q: Do you find it odd that we seem to be acquainted with your relatives on a first-name basis?
A: Yes, I suppose I do.
The minutes pass. The words come out of her, like a script she knows rather too well. Rain begins to tap on the canvas overhead and somewhere a lapwing cries.
Q: Did you have animals here as a child?
A: Yes, I had a cocker spaniel. And, before you ask, I had a reasonably good relationship with it! (More audience laughter.) It was given me by Vita Sackville-West, who bred them. Blotto or Botto . . .
Her attention is directed to the audience. She straightens herself in her chair. A tall, masculine sort of woman stands and adjusts the scarf on her shoulder before reaching for the mic.
Q: May I ask, did you see the film The Hours, and if so what did you think of Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia?
A: A film, you say? I’m afraid I don’t get to the pictures much. (She is feeling impish now.) Was I in it?
A long-faced man in specs and a waistcoat takes the mic.
Q: It seems to me that Maynard Keynes was one of the truly great minds of the last century. As a child, what were your impressions of him?
A: Maynard was charming. He wasn’t particularly interested in me but I remember that when I was small, he used to come into the bath and shower me in bath salts!
The long-faced man chews his lip and takes his seat. The mic travels to a woman in a red cardigan.
Q: Angelica, I wonder, do you ever dream of Charleston?
The woman has a beautiful voice, as soothing as a Beethoven sonata.
A: Do I ever dream of Charleston?
Q: Yes . . .
And for no reason at all, she feels her thoughts eddy; her hands tighten on the arms of her chair, as if she might slip into herself and not surface again.
She has to reach for her glass of water and clear her throat. Her questioner doesn’t know whether to remain standing or to take her seat, and the audience wait, anxious on an elderly woman’s behalf. In the front row, her niece’s eyes (and simultaneously her aunt’s) widen.
Do you ever dream of Charleston?
She dabs her eyes with the cuff of her pullover, and as she does so, she notices Sophie. Yes, it is Sophie. That’s where she’s got to. She is standing at the back of the tent, directly within her line of sight, and she is nodding to her, her face as benign as a Madonna’s. Dear Sophie and her dear Madonna face.
Angelica lifts her chin and speaks to Sophie.
‘I do. I do dream of Charleston. For many years, it was the same dream. The house was on fire and everyone was rushing around like ants. There was such confusion, such . . . chaos. But lately it’s different. We’re all gone. I can see deep rooms. The bricks are freshly whitewashed. The windows are open. The floorboards are bare and striped with sunlight. Each room is empty – of furniture, books, paintings – and dust is streaming, everywhere there’s dust, but – how can I explain it? – it’s golden. Endless. And we’re gone: me, you, all the beloved ghosts, all of us.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the wonderful team at Bloomsbury UK and USA, and especially Nigel Newton, Alexandra Pringle, Angelique Tran Van Sang and Anton Mueller. I’m very grateful, too, to Nicole Winstanley at Hamish Hamilton Canada. I’m fortunate to have world-class talent at work in support of this book.
I’d also like to thank my ever impressive agent, David Godwin, and everyone at DGA, including Heather Godwin, Kirsty McLachlin, Philippa Sitters and Lisette Verhagen.
My warmest thanks are also due to writer friends Karen Stevens and Hugh Dunkerley. Their sharp eyes have helped these stories come to life. Equally, I’d like to thank my friend, Professor Denis Noble, who was incredibly generous in our collaboration as I wrote ‘The Heart of Denis Noble’.
I am grateful, too, to the late Angelica Garnett. I was moved to write the story ‘all the beloved ghosts’ after hearing her speak, twice, at the special place that is the Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. Her art was one inspiration for the story, as was her memoir, Deceived with Kindness. I feel privileged that she took the time to read the story in 2010 and to allow publication.
Regarding my ‘Chekhov trio’, I am, like most story writers, indebted to the inspiration of Chekhov, his life and his fiction. I’d also like to acknowledge and thank Chekhov biographers Donald Rayfield and Rosamund Bartlett, and editor/translator of the Chekhov–Knipper letters, Jean
Benedetti.
In the story ‘In Praise of Radical Fish’, the extract cited by Hamid is taken from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward Fitzgerald).
I’d like to thank the following editors, producers and publishers for their generous support and for first publication/broadcast of versions of many of the stories collected here: editor Kate Pullinger and Bloomsbury UK for ‘The Thaw’ in Waving at the Gardener (Bloomsbury); producer Jeremy Osborne of Sweet Talk Productions for ‘Solo, A Cappella’, first broadcast in shorter form on BBC Radio 4; publisher Ra Page of Comma Press who commissioned ‘The Heart of Denis Noble’ for Litmus: Short Stories from Modern Science; editor A. J. Ashworth who commissioned ‘Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld’ for Matter Magazine; Editor-of-Readings at the BBC Di Speirs and producer Elizabeth Allard who commissioned ‘There are precious things’ for BBC Radio 3; editor Peter Wild who commissioned ‘Oscillate Wildly’ for Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction Inspired by the Smiths (Serpent’s Tail); editor Barbara Marshall who published a very early version of ‘Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames’ in Reading Prose (Hodder & Stoughton); Sweet Talk Productions and Jeremy Osborne for commissioning ‘In Praise of Radical Fish’ for BBC Radio 4; Tom Vowler and Anthony Caleshu, editors of the journal Short Fiction, who first published a version of ‘all the beloved ghosts’; and finally, once again, producer Jeremy Osborne of Sweet Talk and Commissioning Editor Caroline Raphael at BBC Radio 4 for the commission of my ‘Imagining Chekhov’ trio of stories.
Funding from both the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Society of Authors’ Authors’ Foundation helped to provide the vital time for me to complete this book. I am enormously grateful to both organisations.
Alison MacLeod
May 2016
A Note on the Author
Alison MacLeod was born in Canada and has lived in the UK since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013, and a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Alison MacLeod is the joint winner of the 2016 Eccles British Library Writer’s Award. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and lives in Brighton.
alison-macleod.com
First published in Great Britain 2017
This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Alison MacLeod, 2017
Alison MacLeod has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Photographs are from the author’s personal collection.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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