by Vicky Adin
Megan knew exactly what she was talking about.
“I think now might be a good time to let you all into some secrets, don’t you?”
Sarah beamed. Megan couldn’t describe it any other way. “Just give me a minute to set Bella up with some colouring-in and a DVD to watch.”
Before long, with four sets of enquiring eyes trained on her, Megan began her story.
“The first year after your Dad went, I know I hid from life.” She shuddered and flapped her hands as she remembered the dark emotions of those lost days. “The second year threw me into the unknown. Thankfully, I met a lot of wonderful people who helped me and taught me much about life. Now I want to give something back.”
She reminded them how quickly time had passed since she’d left to trace her great-grandmother. “It’s close to a year to the day, and I’ve learnt a lot along the way, and I know I’ve changed. I found so much of it startling and frightening: startling because of its unexpectedness, and frightening because I felt a great sense of responsibility and didn’t know how to fulfil it. But now I have some ideas.
“Firstly, I want to give you both a sum of money. No strings attached.”
Passing envelopes to her children, she held up her hand to stop the comments as the first ‘buts’ came spluttering forth.
“Let me finish, and no arguments. Please – it’s my gift to you, so let me do this. I’ve got more than enough,” and she told them about the trust she’d established, which would cover her grandchildren’s future education.
“Thank you, Mum,” said Sarah, looking at the cheque. “That’s more than generous, and I won’t say no. It will be a lifesaver for us at the moment.”
“I hope it helps.”
Sarah hugged her mother.
“Yes. Thanks from us too, of course,” agreed Jason, casting a jubilant look between Trina and his mother. “I told you I was willing to help you spend it.”
“Jason, don’t be so mercenary,” Sarah scolded but Megan just laughed.
“And now,” continued Megan, “to the reason I bought that apartment you two are staying in. I want to create an ‘Artists in Residence’ programme for women portrait artists.”
“The fine details still need to be worked out with the art gallery. That’ll be up to the administrators. I won’t get involved. But I think it will satisfy my pledge to Constance.”
“Wow, that’s wonderful, Megan,” cried Trina. “What an amazingly generous thing to do.”
“It’s a great idea,” agreed Sarah. “I wish I’d known what you were planning, Mum, then I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time. I should have trusted you.”
A message of reconciliation passed between them.
“Not so fast, you two,” said Jason. “This needs thinking through. What are you doing, Mum? You mustn’t give all your money away.”
Not him, too? Megan sighed. Can’t I do a simple thing without someone telling me I’m wrong?
“Not my money, Jason. Constance’s.”
“What’s the difference? It’s all yours anyway.”
“My money is mine: what I have from the sale of the house, from your father’s insurance, from years of working. Mine to spend on my new home, holidays and other personal things. Constance’s money, I believe, has to be used for the good of others.”
“Why? You said it was family money. Why not use what you want and invest the rest? You could live another twenty or thirty years. You’ll need money.”
“I appreciate you sentiments, Jason, but I have more than enough. I have to do this for my own conscience. Constance was a feminist – when they were a rare and strange breed – so this programme will continue to fulfil those ideals. I still have to satisfy the rest of her wishes and honour Isabel in some way – when I find her.”
Chapter 35
In her new home, Megan’s search for Isabel continued. Summer arrived early and pohutukawa trees blossomed through the warm, sunny days as November evolved into December. Their distinctive red stamens looked striking against that startling blue sky all Kiwis know and love.
Megan regularly walked the beach and revelled in the sounds and smells of the ocean – the susurration of waves at her feet, birds cawing and squawking overhead. She loved the way the seaweed gracefully danced in the waves but didn’t turn her nose up as it curled and dried on the beach. Every day she would pick up another shell to add to her collection of joy markers, as she called them. Days when life now had purpose, when she knew what she wanted to do and was doing it.
In the months since Paul left, she had followed every link and possible lead she could from the papers he had left with her and, like the pohutukawa, an alluring picture of Isabel was emerging. A contact of Paul’s had given Megan her most meaningful insight into her great-grandmother’s life.
“You believe she was a professional artist’s model?” quizzed Megan, agape.
“Yes, I do,” said Dr Clare Turner, the Auckland-based art historian.
Until that moment, the thought that these images of Isabel they kept stumbling across meant she was a life model had never crossed Megan’s mind. In Florence, she had assumed Luigi had simply suffered from puppy love and drew Isabel from memory or when they met in the street – but maybe not. She had once thought Luigi might have been Isabel’s lover after all, but now it seemed more likely she modelled for him. There was much to learn about dear great-grandmama.
“Strange as it might seem to us today,” said Clare, “artists back then valued their models and treated them with great respect, regardless of the general view that women should be pure and decorous and women who were not were somehow lesser citizens.”
“These girls,” she explained, “were often without any other means of support, thrown out by their families because of poverty or in disgrace. They found modelling a honourable way to earn a living. It was certainly better than begging and often better than being a servant, especially for single mothers. Even if any of them had pretended to be a widow, without means of support they would have been little better off. At least modelling was honest and open, and sometimes the girls would become the lovers or wives of their patrons.”
Clare’s explanation rang true with Megan. She didn’t like to think of Isabel as unacceptable to society, given the world she came from. Such isolation would have been hard to take, surely?
“Unfortunately, the names of many of the girls of the time you are asking after were never recorded. It is only by their faces can we be certain how popular they were, or whether they belonged to any particular studio or school.”
Clare had unearthed numerous documents and several books on the history of artists’ models and explained how artists would use the body of one model and the face of another. Their drawings were not always a complete image of one person.
“Your friend, Professor Rosse, told me about the sketch of a young woman and child he had discovered in Cornwall. I’ve since contacted the gallery and seen a digital copy, and I think I have something to show you.”
“I didn’t realise it was online.” Why hadn’t Paul told her? Was he hiding something again?
Clare put one of the large books in front of Megan and opened it to a pre-marked page. In keeping with all things Trevallyan, Megan was stunned. The double-page spread of black and white photos of charcoal drawings were all of Isabel. Just like in Luigi’s book: part of the face, an eye, a turn of the head, one scenting a rose, but, undoubtedly her.
“Is that your Isabel?”
“Yes. Yes, it is. But how did you find her?”
“By chance. A student doing research on the usage of charcoal and pencil in preparatory sketches brought the book to me to ask about these very images. Until then I knew nothing about her, but after my discussion with Professor Rosse, and when I saw the digital image, I wondered if this could be her. I investigated further then wrote to tell him what I’d discovered. Hence your visit today, I believe.”
“Yes, Paul emailed me. Tell me what you know ... please!
”
“Very little, unfortunately, except her name.”
At last! Megan edged forward in her seat and bit her lower lip.
“She was known as La Bella Rosa Bianchi. And seems to have been a popular model.”
“It means ‘my beautiful white rose’. I believe she was nicknamed Bella.”
Megan, overcome, could hardly believe her ears.
* * * * *
“You’ll never guess what I’ve found!” Megan exclaimed to Sarah later that month when the certificates she’d ordered finally arrived.
“Is this about Isabel?”
“Who else? I just had to come round and show you. I’ve sent emails off to James and Jessica in Truro, and to Paul telling them all about it. I’ve found her. I’ve really found her.”
“Whoa, slow down. What is it you’ve found this time?”
Sarah had already seen the images of Isabel from the book Clare Turner had shown Megan. She had also read every snippet of information her mother had gleaned from every newspaper clipping and archives record.
Megan had tracked down many articles about exhibitions, descriptions of paintings and stories about the artists and their models. It seemed their bohemian lifestyle appealed to the reporters, who believed such stories gave readers a frisson of excitement in their mundane lives. Some of the most famous models were named but mostly the reports described the paintings in terms of ‘a girl seated on a chair with her hair flowing and a sheer veil slipping from one shoulder’ – any one of whom could have been Isabel.
“After I found out her modelling nom de plume I went searching for records under any variation of the name I could think of.” She waved a piece of paper in front of Sarah. “Look what I’ve got here: a death certificate for a Rose White.”
Sarah took the form to read while Megan explained. “Whoever completed the form didn’t know much about her, which is really strange. They left all the information about where she was born and her family blank. The doctor estimated her age at late sixties and stated the cause of death as heart disease.”
Megan pointed to the name of the person who gave the information, which meant nothing.
“And you’re sure this Rose White is Isabel?”
“Not entirely, but it’s highly possible. I need to find burial records and the headstone. They might tell me more. What I don’t understand is where Grandma Julia was when her mother died.”
“Are you thinking your Grandma Julia and Isabel were alienated?” Sarah handed back the form.
“Looks likely. Isabel seems to have had two lives: Bella the artist’s model and Lady Isabel the piano teacher. Any sign she was also a mother is missing.”
Megan futilely searched electoral rolls to find Isabel’s address, but nothing. Nor had she been able to find out what Isabel did in her later years, which, she assumed, would not have been modelling – but she did find Julia Trevallyan.
Julia was sent to boarding school in Epsom, presumably to allow her mother free rein or else to shield her from her mother’s notoriety. Either way, they didn’t live together.
“But do you notice something else about this certificate?” asked Megan. Sarah shook her head.
“Check the year.”
“1959?”
“The same year my mother and grandfather died, Grandma Julia also lost her mother. She lost everyone who ever mattered to her. No wonder she shut herself away from everything and there was only ever the two of us. But I’m curious now about how close those two were. I had assumed very close, since Grandma Julia and I were, but the records show me another possibility I hadn’t thought of.”
Images of Grandma Julia flickered in Megan’s memory. The times when she had sat quietly staring into the garden as if in another world meant something more significant now. The times when Megan found her staring at a photograph, or when she would change the subject if Megan asked questions, and times when her eyes were red and, as a child, Megan had not thought it important. Old people always looked different, their skin and eyes wrinkled, reddened and sagging – nothing like young skin. Except at forty-seven Julia wasn’t old. The realisation that the young are indifferent, carefree creatures, who do not see what is in front of them until they too have suffered, is something only understood in hindsight, thought Megan.
Isabel had abandoned her traditional upbringing, her parents and everything she knew to become the lover of an artist and remained an outsider to the conventional world her entire life. It even seemed likely she had isolated her own daughter to maintain that life. Only now, after losing Tony, did Megan begin to appreciate the price Julia had to pay for Isabel’s choices but as her grandmother had shown, life goes on. There is life after tragedy and it can be rewarding.
Making up her mind on the next course of action, Megan picked up her bag and headed for the door. “I’m off to find the headstone for this Rose White.”
* * * * *
Megan knelt beside the broken concrete on the side of the hill and stared at the moss-covered chiselled words on the headstone: name, date of death and an inscription.
Art as a motif for life
Is an evolving Continuum of Form
Here lieth a Goodwife
Whose Life art Transformed.
RIP La Bella Rosa
A lone tear rolled down Megan’s cheek. She had reached her journey’s end. A little over a year ago she had set out to follow her great-grandmother’s footsteps around the world and now she had found her here, buried under the trees in an old section of the Purewa Cemetery, close to a century after she had arrived in New Zealand.
Neglected since it had been erected, by the look of it, the headstone confirmed her findings. Her great-grandmother had arrived in New Zealand in 1913 as Isabel Trevallyan in Della Rossa and died as La Bella Rosa Bianchi and was buried as Rose White in 1959. Engraved in the concrete beside her name was a Celtic knot, the last motif to link this woman with her roots.
In the shade of a large pohutukawa, Megan sat down more comfortably to think about all she had learnt in her search for her great-grandmother: the history, the hurts and the mysteries.
Isabel had written ‘he’ used to call her Bella. She assumed the ‘he’ was Luciano but maybe not, and whether the translation was a derivative of her name or because she was beautiful to him, Megan couldn’t decide. Either way, where did the Bianchi come into it? The burial record had told Megan little. The person who had given the information only knew the woman by her professional name. Quite how or when her name changed was a total mystery. Unless, and Megan thought she really was clutching at straws with this idea, her skin was so white or her hair by then, maybe. Oh dear! She must be desperate.
She would have liked to know much more about her avant-garde great-grandmother. Grandma Julia had certainly not been of her mother’s mould. Nor had she been there when her mother died. Why, Megan had not discovered, and it seemed unlikely she ever would. Isabel virtually vanished, secluded or protected by someone, but whoever she was, she was resilient.
If Megan’s fruitless searches were anything to go by, Isabel, young and alone with a baby, had survived the deprivations of World War One, avoided the flu epidemic of 1918, got through the great depression of the early 1930s, bypassed any work that required registration during World War Two and lived into the boom years of the 1950s without appearing in any newspaper, on any lists (despite compulsory voter registration) or receiving government support of any kind. It seemed incredible someone so visible in the free-spirited world of art could be so invisible in the everyday world.
By using the title Lady Isabel she would have given herself an air of sophistication, which would have been good leverage for a piano teacher, but how she managed to keep her two identities separate in the relatively small city was still a mystery. Given what Megan knew of her forebear’s character, Isabel would have been in her element during the 1920s, a boom time for everything new. She would have adored being part of the set who enjoyed the latest in music on the radio, danced
to records from around the world and went to the cinema, as well as experimenting with the new styles in art, clothes, hair and makeup.
Suddenly, Megan realised Isabel and her friends would have known some of the breakaway group who turned their back on the more conservative art schools and established the Canterbury Society of Arts. Where did she sit? Were they pleased? In the end, those answers didn’t matter. Other answers were far more important.
Did Isabel ever give Luciano, her former lover, any thought after he’d abandoned her?
Did she take a new lover, as Paul had hinted?
Who was that lover?
Who fathered Grandma Julia?
And why was she estranged from her mother?
Unfortunately, whatever questions she had, answers there were none.
Relieved to have tracked Isabel down at last and finding her life linked with the art world added piquancy to Megan’s discovery. But even more important, the best news was that Isabel had friends, real friends – people who treasured her, and that, despite everything, she valued family ties – obvious through her letters to Constance over the years. Megan decided she rather liked this Isabel and her unconventional ways – a strong woman who knew how to adapt while she was still learning.
She stood up, wiped away the last of her tears and said a silent farewell, promising to return.
Chapter 36
The whole idea had come to her as she wandered around her apartment trying to decide where to hang her painting of Isabel and Constance. She was still debating whether she should gift it to a gallery, to be properly cared for, or keep it. Part of her worried it was too valuable to be on private display and another part said she wanted to look at it all the time.
Rather than give it to a gallery, what about establishing a new art gallery for Isabel? Thoughts spiralled in her head. That would certainly honour Isabel’s love of art – and the artists. She chuckled. Or buy an existing one, if such a thing was for sale?