On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  There they are, living the briefest of walks away from each other past long fields of barley and of rye. Chapel and Hogsthorpe are so close that modern houses, strung along the road, more or less connect them so that the proximity now feels shattering. Surely this could only have made things more agonising after the adoption. Every time Hilda went to the beach she was brushing close to her child. If she went to Stow’s Stores, she could have bought stamps from Betty Elston. If she visited the Vine, in the summer season, she could have been served by her own daughter. Except that Hilda Blanchard was no longer there.

  A year after Veda’s death in 1967, when it could cause no more pain, my mother wrote again to the solicitor in Spilsby enquiring about her birth mother. He had no answers himself, but applied to Katherine Moore, niece of the Chapel dressmaker, passenger on that fateful bus, witness for Veda at the signing of the adoption agreement – Miss Moore, who was still alive.

  ‘I telephoned Miss Moore,’ he reported to my mother, ‘as, although she is long retired, she still lives locally and she did live for many years in Chapel. She remembered the case clearly and told me that Mr Elston was both your adoptive father and your natural father. She also said that your mother, Hilda Blanchard, came from Hogsthorpe and that her family were millers and bakers. Miss Moore did not know whether there were any family still living in Hogsthorpe. But she recalled that Hilda Blanchard left Lincolnshire soon after the adoption was agreed. She does not remember where.’

  12

  Family Portrait

  What is wrong with this picture? Or perhaps the question should be what is wrong with these people, a family of four making an appearance in an elegant apartment and yet at such strange odds as to undermine all semblance of unity? The scene is set for a conventional nineteenth-century portrait: mother, father and two daughters in spotless pinafores, comfortable, well-nourished, at leisure in their blue-and-gold salon, the clock serenely ticking, daylight polishing the gilded frame of the mirror. But the painting is as complex and divided as the group it portrays. The female figures on the left occupy most of the space (and perhaps the rest of the apartment) while the father on the right has withdrawn, or been sent, to his corner of the room. He turns his back, a brown study of detachment, barricaded in an armchair, a man on the edge of the family as well as the painting.

  The wife is a model of rectitude, rising above whatever injurious conditions her husband has imposed. Her hand, braced on the table, is as tense as her face. Somehow she has managed to keep up appearances in spite of his behaviour, or so the evidence implies: the smart furnishings, the girls’ brushed hair and immaculate frocks, her own trim black dress, in comparison to his slack jacket – all are her accomplishments. She keeps firm hold of the fair-haired child, a picture of innocence who seems to be aware of nothing except the instruction to be polite and stand straight. Her sister’s hands are tensed at her waist, as if she were ready to leap from the chair and be off (like the dog). The father’s hand forms a fist.

  Degas’s masterpiece is very nearly the size of life, and fully as profound. It hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a riddling confrontation that continues to polarise its audience, putting each of us on the spot. One child stares directly at us, tacit acknowledgement that this is the kind of formal portrait we are used to, where the subject looks back from an image made and meant for public viewing. But everyone else turns away. The adults are deliberately ignoring each other, as well as their own offspring. The mother looks resolutely into the distance; the father gives her – and us – the cold shoulder. In no other period portrait does a sitter turn his back on the viewer in this way. To pose for a portrait is to appear in public, which this man sullenly refuses. The child in the middle may be torn between them, inviting the question: whose side are you on?

  The black-clad matriarch is Degas’s aunt Laura, the girls his cousins Giulia and Giovanna and the man his Italian uncle, Count Gennaro Bellelli. The scene takes place in their Florentine apartment around 1858. Although Laura is actually pregnant in this portrait, she and her husband lived in perpetual schism, not helped by the recent death of her father whose portrait, also by Degas, hangs on the wall beside her head. The Bellellis’ terrible relationship was well known to other family members. Some loathed Gennaro as dishonourable and lazy; others thought Laura, forever dissatisfied, was partly to blame. She was quite open about the misery of their marriage, confiding to her nephew that the Count’s ‘horrible nature’ would one day be the death of her.

  This is what Degas sees and depicts. He did not paint this family portrait, as he called it, in the usual way. Many separate drawings were made of each person; Laura and her daughters on their own, then together, the Count in his velvet chair. The final composition was probably painted in Paris over several years for the annual Salon. Although it received no attention from the press, it is by general consent the crowning achievement of Degas’s youth, all its individual narratives drawn together in a psychological masterpiece: a novel in paint.

  Paintings, unlike books, don’t divide between fiction and non-fiction. But this one tells a story that invites interpretation. Perhaps Laura is justly aggrieved, a dignified woman stoically enduring a terrible marriage, an unwanted pregnancy and the loss of her father. She is doing everything, looking after the house and the children and even having to stand, in her condition, while Bellelli slouches in idle indifference. Or perhaps the Count is understandably in retreat from her martyred accusations, from all the disappointments she holds against him, and those girls are complicit. The blameless family dog is just trying to edge out of the scene. Of all the many things that could be said about this picture of oppression and suppression, of knowledge and innocence, not the least is this unique interplay between public and private. These people are posing for a portrait, a public record of themselves, of what they looked like separately and together in the family line-up, and yet the pull is inward. Inner and outer are dislocated, two different things; a performance of unity betrayed by aversion.

  Given that the people of two villages knew their secret, I wonder how the Elstons presented themselves to the outer world. Did they appear as a family, were they seen together in public? George avoided both Chapel and Hogsthorpe, and the scene of what some may have regarded as his crime, by leaving Lincolnshire every Monday. He could lead a double life between two worlds that never overlapped. Veda stayed at home, without the use of a telephone, ignorant of his wanderings and whereabouts. She attended church every Sunday with Betty; but George never joined them, and had nothing to do with the church committee, the servicemen’s canteen or the tea meetings she ran for charity. Veda braved the eyes of the villagers as George rarely did, alone, protected only by their compassion or pity.

  In a family of three there will generally be two sitters and one photographer. So it is with the Elstons, and George is invariably in charge of the camera. In the family album, the word Snapshots casually embossed on its black leather cover, he brings his wife and daughter together. Here are Veda and Betty in conversation, posing in the garden, or even – in one precious shot – standing with their arms around each other. George and Betty are a far rarer proposition, only appearing together when she is little. Indeed most of the photographs in the album show Betty alone. She rides a birthday bicycle in the back garden, sits on the notorious swing holding up the Happy Days annual, stands next to the little aviary. The photographs of her stop, tellingly, around the age of thirteen and there is just that one before the age of three, the puzzling shot of George and Grace at the beach in the back. The images begin and end at exactly the same time as the closeness between father and daughter.

  There is only one photograph of George and Veda alone together as a couple. Could it be the only one ever taken? Perhaps George did not trust anyone else with control of his camera. At any rate, Betty is behind the lens today, Veda sweetly smiling back at her daughter, the soft hair, now white, in a crown around that gentle face. George stands behind, hand on hip, staring away to t
he side. He does not smile at his child or put an arm around his wife. This is not an accidental pose but a deliberate response to the occasion. What is wrong with this picture, it seems, is that George is a reluctant performer – there, but averted.

  I have stood where he stands, in that high-hedged garden with the scent of leaves in the air, trying to imagine myself into that scene. It is 1948. My mother is briefly home from art college and George is wearing a three-piece suit for the event. In the evening, he will leave the two of them behind and walk across the fields for a drink, smoking hard as he goes. Nothing in the landscape has changed, barely a hedge; there is the worn path, the church bell sounding out as always over the early-autumn brambles, and yet I cannot think we are in the same country. The past diminishes into half-tones. George and Veda Elston cast their actual living shadows into the future through this photograph, seventy years ago, and yet because they are not in colour it is easy to see them as ghosts already, moving around in half-darkness. George in particular is always dark: dark-faced, dark-eyed, an oblique character edging out of the scene. Look closely at family albums and these revelations emerge across time, in the way people hold or withhold themselves, heading for the shadows, appearing or disappearing from the pages. There is a truth in the fact that there are no images of Betty after she leaves school, as if she had no further life. And in the fact that George only appears happy in rare shots with men. He never smiles in the company of Veda or Betty.

  Black-and-white photographs seal people into a colourless world, as if they saw life that way too. The mind knows this is false, but the optic nerve is fooled into finding these figures less real, immediate, vital. Monochrome turns the present into the past; makes the past look even more distant. I look at Veda in that shot, and though I know that Edwardian stoicism wouldn’t have staunched the agony of George’s betrayal any more than it would now, the photograph puts her emotions ever further beyond my reach. All that boot-blacking and mangling and cake baking, was it enough of a comfort, did it soothe the piercing wound of Grace’s birth? Twenty years of marriage without a child, and then the arrival of George’s baby with another woman. Hilda in Veda’s head all the time, so close they might accidentally meet. Imagine living by the beach where Betty was kidnapped; no wonder she never went there. My mother remembers the day they all forgot Veda’s birthday; it passes just as keenly to me. George, who always managed to buy her daffodils – from where? – in January, simply produced nothing and only at the very end of the day did Veda mention, quietly, that this had been her birthday. I can only assume she felt the sharpness of it, as did my mother, as do I now. To commemorate Veda’s life, Elizabeth planted thousands of daffodil bulbs in the grounds of Chapel school for the pupils to pick on Mother’s Day each year, so that no future mother would ever be forgotten.

  How did Veda carry herself, how did she feel inside, in the long years since that early photograph with George and her sister in the Yorkshire countryside? There were upheavals; from one county to another, from one home to another. But her husband was never out of work and they somehow got by. I don’t suppose there was ever a sudden terrible outburst of shattering news. Perhaps Veda even suspected her husband’s infidelity. She managed to carry off the harvest festivals and charity whist drives, the parish meetings and years of running the soldiers’ canteen, ever practical, constant, enduring. But did she have any rights in George’s eyes, did she have any say in which direction to take, this gentle Mrs Which-Way? Perhaps she loved George enough to forgive him, or thought it her Christian duty, or, like so many other husbands and wives, simply had no choice.

  I have her cookery book, blue-lined with a desiccated cloth binding, over a hundred years old, containing recipes for tea meetings, which generate new recipes in turn. Granny Crawford’s daisy scones; seed cake with half an ounce of peel from Mrs Richardson (mother of Pat); coconut biscuits from Mrs Paterson (wife of the doctor who delivered Grace). The book is a testament to frugality – no money, food or pages ever wasted. Even the inside cover holds recipes for furniture polish made with turpentine, and camphorated chloroform for toothache. It begins in the newly-wed Bradford days with more exotic fare – cup puddings served with gin sauce, Bolton pudding steamed in a basin lined with damsons – and runs all the way to instructions for plain scones given by a nurse at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where Veda is still making herself useful hemming bandages half a century later. The slowness of life is echoed in her patient copperplate; the old seasonal certainties written into the calendar. Make marmalade in the first week of March. Buy pickled hams on 1 November; they will take twenty-eight days to salt. Social history passes through these pages. For rheumatism there is oil of amber, now banned; laudanum mixed with camphor for sprains. The Second World War comes and goes – a toffee recipe gives the exorbitant cost in ration stamps for condensed milk – and Christmas recurs with fractional improvements to the pudding as ingredients come back into circulation. Betty’s ten-year-old handwriting momentarily appears and, out of the blue, Hilda Green’s rules for crab and cucumber sandwiches. Unlike all the others, this entry remains unticked.

  I search for Veda’s voice in occasional turns of phrase. ‘To make cheesecake, boil butter and lemon until they are as honey in a jar.’ I find her in the condition of the book itself, pristine despite half a century in a working kitchen. The humblest of objects characterise their owners. Veda’s Vicks jar was empty of everything except its scent, and yet she kept it for my pleasure.

  It comes to me suddenly that the couple in Betty’s photograph are my grandparents, that I am of them. Yet I cannot feel it for George, whose bloodline I extend. Veda is the only person to whom I am bound. Of course this is because I knew her, and can reconstitute the old photographs, turning her back into full colour; but also because she is so far the injured party that I am taking sides. And how easy this is, since Veda shows no signs of Laura Bellelli’s rigid resentment, in life or in photographs. In fairy tales she would have treated Betty cruelly; in reality she seems to have been entirely accepting.

  Whatever she feels towards George in that picture, Veda looks out with love to her daughter. The daughter who has stitched the clothes Veda is wearing. The daughter who has become her friend and dispelled the monotony. At the very least there is another story to hear when Betty comes to live with the Elstons, another unfurling narrative and telling of daily news, of feelings and experiences beyond her own. Perhaps it was not George but Betty she loved enough to forgive him.

  As for George, his public face is with other men – fellow-travellers, factory managers, locals in the Vine. There is a photograph of him on a jaunt with two local farmers and Dr Paterson. He was a Freemason, joining a lodge in Liverpool that was about as far from home as he could get, but gave it up when my mother was born, possibly out of conscience or because he could no longer afford the dinners. When my mother turned twenty-one and the duties laid out in the adoption agreement were over he became a Freemason once more. He was sixty-seven by now, and retired. What he did then, other than the usual round of walking the beach, collecting the newspaper and buying a drink, I have no idea. Barely a single sample of his handwriting survives beyond signatures and occasional phrases. He would be almost a blank if it weren’t for his war records, Freemason’s certificate and an account of his funeral in the Skegness Times, pointedly reporting my mother’s absence. I can’t even discover who he worked for, though his lodge was near Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight. Veda and George leave no correspondence, whereas I have literally thousands of letters from my mother, beginning the moment I left home for university and continuing ever since. She has not lived the day until it is recorded; she has not loved without putting it in words. She is in my story, and I in hers, so deeply that I can scarcely believe she came from a household of such detachment and silence.

  George is opaque. He lost Hilda Blanchard, if he ever had her; but who knows whether he felt anguish, fury, indifference, relief. Maybe he longed to know what became of her, felt increasing
bitterness, or just gratitude that he and his wife were spared the horror of running into her in public, on the beach, in a lane, at Stow’s Stores. George and Veda recover themselves. All continues. And they must keep up appearances, for everyone around them knows.

  Granny Crawford had to know, for into her old age arrived a small child of three. The Greens knew; as did their daughter Rebe, although she never breathed a word. Lizzie Cornell, keeper of an entire village’s secrets, obviously knew and so did Dr Paterson, having brought Grace into the world. Bert Parrish, cycling around, fag in mouth, presumably communicated the knowledge to his daughters, which is why the two girls were suddenly barred from the door. Mr and Mrs Stow knew, and the Simpsons, and the Robinsons. But they all kept silent.

  And this continued when we returned to Chapel in 1985 in the hope of discovering something more about Veda, George and Hilda, and how my mother could have been passed between them. Every door was opened to us and then politely closed. We sat over tea, walked in people’s gardens, paid our respects to everyone still living and known to my mother, including some of these very neighbours, but nobody told us a thing.