‘The Professor’ taught his pupils in three wooden studios. All three huts were full with easels and standing students, and Florence Carter-Wood was often the first to arrive there, with rainbows of dew on her feet as she came down Paul Hill. She was also amongst the last to leave.
She walked briskly along the cobbled streets, with every corner a picture, up steep narrow cuttings that led to the studios, with their commanding views of the wide and busy bay beneath. As she walked up there early in the morning heads turned. Old men took their pipes out of their mouths and followed her footsteps with their pale blue watery eyes. They didn’t see many like her, not in Newlyn. Not with a walk like that. Not with hair like that.
Inside the crowded studio, however tight the squeeze, Florence established her stillness and space, a circle of concentration, a moat of silence. Arriving mid-morning, the Professor, now in his fifties, soon found himself standing behind her. One word from Stanhope Forbes could, she knew, raise her to the skies. Equally, one word could crush her. Often he said nothing, unsettling her with his restless activity and tuneless humming. On Saturdays, for those who were bold enough to face it, he delivered his ‘Crit’.
The first hut he set aside for beginners, drawing from plaster casts. Some went no further than this, and unless he pulled his worsted stockings up, this fate could well face Joey. In the second hut, where Florence was, were the living models (clothed) who took the opportunity to sit out of doors when the weather allowed. ‘Out of doors, outside, come on,’ the Professor urged, sometimes invoking the name of Bastien-Lepage. ‘What does a bit of dust in your eye matter when destiny calls?’
As for the nudes they were in the third of his studios. The pretty local girls were too shy to pose so most of the nudes came down from London. Only the most talented and most assiduous students reached this third studio. After a few weeks of moving back and forth behind his new pupil, of admiring her work (and the nape of her neck and the colour of her hair), the Professor had no doubts that Miss Carter-Wood was sufficiently talented and assiduous. Aware that he might, however, be more than usually susceptible, he asked his wife Elizabeth for a second opinion on the work of Miss Carter-Wood. It was quickly agreed: Florence had passed The Crit with flying colours.
At the moment the Professor told her of her promotion to the third studio Florence felt very honoured but also very anxious. Except for her own in the mirror she had never seen a naked body.
Bloodshot Eyes
Alfred looked at the picture and tried to reanimate the feelings he had felt not five minutes before. Five minutes ago he was Constable working on a masterpiece, he was John Sell Cotman, he was God. But the music had gone from his fingers. Now he was a sullen bull. It was difficult, so difficult, to recover the mood, to move back inside his painting. How could she swan off like that, his star turn, with her gloves and her airs and graces? How dare she! Anger leapt up inside him. No, anger grabbed him. He would hack the blasted picture into thousands of pieces. He picked up his sharpest knife. He moved. He hesitated. He threw down the knife and punched himself. He ran at the dog to kick it, but again the dog was just too quick for him, so he kicked the earth instead.
It was impossible to go on.
He put his head in his hands.
No, it was not impossible. Only weak people gave up. You’re only beaten for a day, never for ever. He strode up and down the clearing, his eyes glaring into the green, trying to throw off his anger. He wanted his paintings to be heard all over the world, didn’t he, like poems, like Poe, like Herrick, like Hiawatha, the songs to be sung in every gallery, and for that to happen he had to be strong, he had to be insatiable.
So stop piddling about.
After a quarter of an hour he picked up his brush and worked on the muscle and bone of the background trees. She might not be there but the trees were, these English trees, and they always would be.
Taffy lay, happy and safe, at his master’s feet.
Alfred had his reward. It was a fine Tuesday and, as agreed, Florence and Joey turned up on time at his studio. Fat chance she’ll bother, he’d been saying to himself only moments before their voices came along the clearing. He leapt up and ran down the outside wooden steps, arms open wide in greeting.
The brother and sister were bright-faced and healthy from their walk. Joey had on his haversack, while she (Alfred was delighted to note) was wearing the same coat and the same hat, which showed she wasn’t just another stupid woman, she could think as well as sit on a horse. Even her hair was set up in the same style. Oh, yes, she’d thought about it all right.
He led them up the steps.
‘Come in, come in, let me take your coat, for a moment, just for a moment, Joey, excuse the mess … you know what I’m like, find a seat, move those.’
Joey moved some drawings from the chair, noticing that Alfred had carefully combed his hair forward and had polished his boots. Not only that: he was in his most expansive mood, offering food and drink, ginger beer, wine, everything. Indeed he almost force-fed them. Fortunately, being blown about on the cliff path had made them both hungry.
‘Has Gilbert been away?’ Joey asked. ‘I haven’t seen him recently.’
‘Busy man, our Gilbert,’ Alfred said. ‘And I’m off soon myself.’
‘To London, for your exhibition, so I’ve heard,’ Joey said. ‘How wonderful!’
‘No, before that, the next fortnight. On the road. On my own.’
Florence now spoke for the first time.
‘You go off on your own? To paint?’
He looked directly at her. She noticed his eyes were bloodshot. He noticed she was annoyed.
‘All the time,’ he said. ‘I have to.’
‘Oh.’
‘Always have done. Well, not on my own exactly. With Tick and Taffy, you never feel alone with them, they’re all I need. And my paints. And some sunshine.’
‘But not Merrilegs?’ she asked, sipping her ginger beer.
‘No. Not even Merrilegs,’ he said, with a laugh.
‘Where do you stay?’ Joey mumbled, his mouth half full with cake.
‘Anywhere … in a pub. In a barn, if need be. My bed’s the least of my worries.’
‘So you’re bored already with Lamorna?’
‘Blote! Really!’ Joey gave her a disapproving glance.
‘No, fair question. Yes, I’m often bored, but who’s got half a brain and doesn’t get bored? Some days I retch with boredom, don’t you? Come on, be honest!’
Florence turned her glass in her hands. There was a small silence in which Joey stood up and crossed to the window, his walking shoes clipping the wooden floor. Below all was ready: Merrilegs was tethered and the paint-smeared easel was placed, waiting for the canvas. There was a pail of water by the easel.
The painting itself rested inside, against the studio wall. Looking at it again, from where she sat, gave Florence a shock. There was something wrong. Surely she was already fully painted, yet here she was no more than an outline. Last week her hat and coat were perfectly realised. Yet now she could see no hat or coat at all, merely the line of her shoulders. She had all but disappeared.
A.J. saw her start.
‘Yes, I changed it all. Wasn’t good enough, not up to the mark, worked all night on it, well, yes, all right, not all night, but most of it, until five and that does not mean I am exaggerating, it means I went to bed at five!’
He ended his sentence sounding angry.
‘Beautiful sky though,’ he went on, ‘and that was something, the sky, that was my windfall, my extra payment you might say. The sky.’
Florence went closer to the picture, still amazed at the ruthless and irreversible decisions he had taken. As well as her missing self, some densely worked areas of the background trees were now blank.
‘Can you work on a painting, then, without the model?’
‘Once I have it all in my mind, yes, once I’ve done enough drawings, but I have to do plenty.’
He pointed. With a second, deeper s
hock, she saw eight or ten drawings of herself, drawings of her face from every angle, her walk, her stance, her neck and shoulders as they turned.
‘But I couldn’t do it for ages. That took years, that skill, but I don’t have to tell you, you’re an artist yourself.’
‘So I’m not needed today?’ Florence asked with a balanced smile.
A.J. blurted out of a dry throat:
‘Of course you’re needed, my dear girl.’
‘But you’ve clearly committed me to memory?’
He jumped up.
‘Look, I hate talking about art!’ He stamped around. ‘Anyone can talk about art, Rogering Fry’s always talking about art, let’s cut the cackle and get on with it or, God help us, we’ll all end up critics!’
A.J. picked up the canvas and as much clobber as he could and went outside. Joey, pulling his haversack back on, picked up the rest, then watched as the open-air scene was carefully reset. He watched him help her, with great courtesy, on to Merrilegs. He saw him give the horse a sweet then settle the fall of Florence’s coat exactly as he wished it. He watched Munnings very attentively reach up and tilt her hat a touch, then tell her to look at exactly the same branch of exactly the same tree. Only when he was perfectly satisfied with every particular did Munnings take up his stance, the fencer, sizing her up, flexing his elbow … and begin to work.
‘I’ll be off then,’ Joey said.
Neither his sister nor the painter acknowledged his remark or his departure. The only move Florence made was to wave away some flies. A crow settled on a fence to watch.
Feeling dissatisfied with himself and with all this, Joey left, rather at a loose end, hoping he would find Gilbert in his office.
Joey walked slowly along, pausing to watch the ducks on the mill pond. Some children, let loose from school, ran past him. He loitered, smoking his pipe. What was it exactly that niggled him about his sister, the sister he loved so much and so longed to join him down here? Could the difference in her behaviour, a difference he found it difficult to put his finger on, be simply that she was, for the first time, away from home, far away from Papa’s scrutiny and the constraints of family life, and suddenly in the company of some pretty rum characters, for example A.J. up there in the clearing?
It was tempting to see it as no more than that. Tempting to say they were both adjusting and settling into a new stage of their lives – tempting but to be resisted. He could not, for example, forget the way she described the accident on the railway line. Of course, on one level, one could do absolutely nothing in the face of such an appalling event, that was true, and he certainly did not want little doses of sentiment from her, but the way she responded to such an accident, the manner and the words with which one addressed or spoke of such horror, surely suggested something about one’s view of life?
And what did she say? He tried to recover the extreme silentness of her face and her exact words.
‘But how terrible for you,’ he had said.
‘Not really,’ she replied, ‘I just waited for the train to move on.’
That sentence came to Joey when he was half asleep. It came to him as he watched the ducks. It disturbed him. It missed the point. He flicked a match into the pond and watched the match move, a trembling longboat, as the ducks slipped away.
Again, when he was wild about A.J.’s feat in reciting ‘The Raven’ that first night, Blote quietly asked if he thought such a strange poem worth making ‘all that effort’ to commit to memory. All right, A.J. was a bit of a backslapping windbag and sometimes he tried the patience of Job, but he had a heart like a bucket and this kind of comment wasn’t worthy of the Blote he knew and loved.
Joey moved on down to the cove. Sensing a thunderstorm was working its way around the Lizard, he put his haversack on the sea wall and watched the swell.
To make it all the more odd, on the way over to meet A.J. just now, she had never been more animated. With more than a touch of pride she told him about her move to the third studio, which had temporarily softened her annoyance with his own lack of progress, and yet as soon as she was back in A.J.’s company she changed. Was it affectation? Or was it something she could not help? He asked an incoming wave, could she not help herself?
Was that it?
‘Jo-ey! Jo-ey!’
It was Gilbert Evans riding down the hill, riding too fast too, and waving a warm greeting. If he wasn’t careful his front tyre would hit the small open drain at the bottom and throw him over the handlebars. Roused in a second, Joey leapt down from the wall.
‘Gil-bert! Hullo! Stead-y!’
The coat was now right. The hat was right. The horse was right, with good lighting on the back, loins and mane. He had to admit, he really was very pleased with the horse. The slim tree trunk, the line of her glance, Merrilegs’ pricked ears, the dash of sunlight on her hindquarters, all these ‘worked’ too, as did the alternating light and shade of the tree-flecked planes. ‘Whoever said there are no short cuts,’ Alfred said to himself, ‘never said a truer word.’ The tension between the gentle touch and the dense solidity of texture was as he had conceived it just before dawn; the interlacing branches and foliage gave the picture the spontaneous feel which he loved.
Cotman, Crome, Constable, and … Munnings.
He was fit to stand with them.
He was now very tired. His eyes throbbed and his back ached. His gout was the worst he had known it. Perhaps the jumping-powder breakfast he’d given himself of champagne and game pie had not helped and to have gout so young was certainly a private shame but, for the moment, he was elated at a job well done. Moving slowly back from the easel he half missed his footing and reeled. He just steadied himself. Florence was sure, watching him scrutinise the picture yet again, that he had been drinking. He took another half-step back and looked again; then a small step to the left and a step to the right. He tilted his head one way, then half inclined it the other.
So.
Now, Alfred—
Now for the nasty question, the nastiest question of them all. What wasn’t right with the picture? What would the critic in him say? Perhaps the bottom left-hand corner needed a little more detail. It was a touch muddy. Perhaps her right hand was not exactly caught. Well, those could easily be corrected.
‘Easily, my arse!’ he snorted aloud.
Nothing was easy, and nothing’s easier than botching a good job with a final bit of overfussiness. But the main point was: the total effect was there, a beau-ti-ful woman riding on a beautiful horse in a beautiful setting. And that was what art was meant to be, wasn’t it, real life captured on canvas and captured beautifully. And he’d got the title. Morning Ride. Yes, that was the title!
‘Could have been made for each other,’ he said without looking at her.
Did he mean the painter and the sitter, or the sitter and the horse?
She would not ask.
‘I’m so glad … it pleases you.’
‘You’re perfect together.’
Ah, so that was it. The sitter and the horse. Mild irritation touched her voice.
‘If it’s finished, may I dismount?’
‘Dis-mount? Yes yes, you may, you may.’
He helped her down, placing his hands round her waist and landing her lightly on her feet. How easy that was, the first touch. And she felt so light. She stroked out her coat. He smelt her scent. With her back to him she rearranged her hair. Sensing the game would end in his favour, he stood behind her. She could hear his breathing. Standing there, he sounded and felt different from Stanhope Forbes humming away behind her. Very different. When he spoke next it was with a self-mocking, defensive tone.
‘Bravely done, is it not?’
For a while she did not reply. Her eyes stayed on the painting, though her spine felt his presence. She was looking at herself, only at herself; and she knew she was being looked at looking at herself. When she turned to face him and his bloodshot eyes, her lips had a bluish tint.
‘Yes, I like it very
much.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not, you don’t look well, do go inside and sit down. Please.’
‘In a moment. If you don’t mind I would like to look at it a little longer. I can learn so much from you. Unless you mind?’
‘Mind? Mind? Why should I? It’s all over now. Now it’s up to the critics.’
Clumsily, his eyes smarting and feeling his collar tighten, he gathered up his brushes. He patted Merrilegs, good girl, he patted Taffy, good boy, good girl, good boy.
By the time Florence joined him upstairs he was stretched right out in his low chair, legs wide apart, eyes closed. He was fast asleep. She tiptoed to the spare seat, barely making a rustle. He moved uneasily in his chair, his head tilted back at an awkward angle, his face turned to the ceiling. She looked at his sharp Adam’s apple and the patches of unshaven stubble on his neck. She looked at his boots and his tight trousers and his long slim legs spread wide. She tried not to look at the bulge but it seemed the focal point of his position. She had never seen Papa or Joey, even at their most relaxed, sit quite like that, not once, not quite so … openly. Still, soon she must learn to face and to study the nude figure. It would be worse even than this!
She felt a tumble of emotions in her stomach. She glanced from her hands to his bulge, then back to his paintings and drawings which lined the floor and walls.
‘Not asleep,’ he said, causing her to jump a little, ‘just resting my eyes.’
‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’
‘No one could sleep in your company.’
‘I’m sorry if I did wake you.’
‘No – no … So, here we are …’ His eyes were still closed. ‘At the end of the day.’
‘Yes, here we are.’
‘Two painters and one critic.’
From where she was sitting she could see seven studies of herself, a sequence on the floorboards, seven faces of Florence.
‘I wouldn’t say I was a critic.’
‘So you like it? The picture, I mean? The portrait of … Blote on Merrilegs. The Morning Ride passes the test?’
Summer in February Page 11