by Jody Shields
Chapter Twelve
THE VOICES THAT CARRIED from outside faded and the unwieldy circle of the straw hat in Catherine’s hand was forgotten as she stared at the man in the chair. He sat sideways, his fair hair transformed into a ragged halo by the light directed into the studio from overhead.
“I have what I need. I’m finished for now. Thank you.”
Released from his pose by Anna’s words, he languidly stretched his arms then turned around, slightly constrained by the bandage obscuring half his face. He was the man Catherine had seen in the pool.
His resemblance to her husband surfaced, slightly distorted, like a familiar object behind flawed glass. A scar curved near his right eye, which was wavering, deep blue, and there was little distinction between the pupil and the surrounding iris, as if its intense color compensated for the impaired vision of his bandaged eye.
“Julian is the first patient to sit for his portrait.” Anna’s face floated behind her easel.
Catherine stiffly pulled on a smock, rolled up the sleeves, and plunged her arms into wet clay, barely able to register its deep odor of decay and earth as its warmth slipped over her bare skin. She knew Julian had been called to her just as a bullet, a deadly projectile, the heat of an explosion, had been called to her husband. Countless hands had worked to heal this man, soothe his skin, hold a glass to his lips, a needle to his arm; he had been passed over water and land to meet her. There were no coincidences during a war.
McCleary stooped under the door’s low arch. In his severe white hospital uniform, he seemed to be out of place, an actor in costume as he solemnly held up a handsome wicker hamper from Harrods. “Ladies and my lone gentleman, I have brought a feast.” The hamper had been donated by a patient whose family refused to acknowledge he was unable to eat solid food.
Delighted by the doctor’s offering, Anna motioned Julian to bring chairs to the table.
McCleary smiled at Julian. “Hard at work, I see?”
“You’ve caught me out.” Julian grinned, his hands made a sweeping gesture, but there was the slightest hesitation, as he no longer possessed the confident carelessness of the able-bodied.
“Careful. Your balance may be affected.” McCleary gently relieved him of the chair, although his own hands were still tender from surgery.
Julian irritably shrugged him off. “Even if I fell flat on my face, I couldn’t be further damaged.”
“A cruel judgment,” objected Anna.
“I’m a disabled man. I’m not sentimental about ruins.”
“Nevertheless, you’re a fine model despite your modesty.” Anna hunted down clean paint jars to use as drinking glasses.
“Here I am, the apple of an artist’s eye, but my likeness isn’t fit to be seen by anyone but a surgeon.”
“Julian, the sketches of your face will help others. They are a reference, a guide for me,” McCleary said carefully.
“So I’m repaying the debt of my care?”
“No accounting could ever compensate for your injury.”
Unaccustomed to commonplace chores, Catherine awkwardly spread a clean canvas over a worktable, hoping no one noticed her shaking hands. Julian’s straightforwardness was shocking. She had expected he would be more apologetic, withdrawn. As Catherine’s mother’s vision had dimmed, she continued to receive guests at home, presided over dinners, teas, her favorite game of epigrams, but she had isolated herself from her family when she became totally blind.
At the table, McCleary sat next to Julian, discreetly sliding dishes within his reach, compensating for his patient’s uneven eyesight. This courtesy was unnecessary, but he was accustomed to giving aid even in a social setting.
The tin of foie gras was opened, and they savored its spicy gaminess, complex and heavy after the hospital cook’s bland offerings. The doctor knew someone, a hunter with a large park who was on the venison committee, and promised to inquire about a donation of wild game for the hospital kitchen.
Catherine had no appetite and remained silent during the meal, then finally found her voice. “I’ve never seen a table like this.” She gestured at the rough plates, the single bent spoon, the flowers sprawled in a bucket, the pencils that had rolled against the opened tins of food. A palette knife had been used to slice the cheese and potted meat.
“Why, this can hardly be an exotic feast for you.”
“It’s very bohemian. I’ve never sat down to a meal without a proper tablecloth,” Catherine said self-consciously. “Only at a shooting party, but it was very formal. Everything—the blankets, china, and silver—was sent to the field in hampers.”
“We must cultivate your spontaneity,” Julian said, not unkindly.
“Once on a dare, our host at Hatfield House rode his horse into the dining room. We all held our breath, afraid to frighten the horse as he jumped over the table. The crystal rattled, but nothing was broken. I stood very close to the horse.”
She had sought Julian’s attention, but realized her anecdote had made a poor impression. Embarrassed, she studied Julian’s hand next to hers on the table, his fingernails, wristbone, a blunt blue vein softly looped over his knuckles. She surreptitiously glanced at his face, strikingly divided in profile, as his right side appeared perfect, and the left side was white, gauze-covered, stiffly mute.
McCleary poured champagne into the paint jars.
“I have a tale of champagne,” Julian announced. Anecdotes from the front had not dulled for Anna and the doctor. Catherine was dismayed, preferring that Julian remain a cipher with a hidden face and history, so that his personal information wouldn’t affect her imagination.
“Our battalion had been in no-man’s-land, unrelieved for weeks. I hadn’t changed my clothing in twenty days. Our section commander brought out a bottle of champagne. He’d saved it from his wedding, as he’d married just before coming over. I’ll never forget the taste of that champagne, its effervescence after water that always tasted of petrol. I was drunk on a mouthful, quicker than morphine.”
Anna began to rearrange the flowers in the bucket, breaking the solemn mood. McCleary watched without comment, reminded of the nurses who were never still, constantly greedy for the sensation of usefulness, basking in the spotlight of attention they brought to each patient.
Julian tapped his glass with a spoon. “Let us drink to risk.”
“To brave souls who risk repairing the world,” said McCleary. “Vivem. I shall live.”
“Better said, sir. Vivem.”
Catherine felt the warmth of Julian’s arm radiating through his thin shirt next to her. Had he deliberately moved closer? Did he glance at her a moment longer than necessary?
“How does the time pass for you here?” It was the first time she had dared to address him.
Julian shifted his body into a diagonal and he looked directly at her. “Since I was wounded, I do nothing but wait.”
She turned his words over as if they were a box she examined. So he was a prisoner too.
CAN YOU MOVE this way?”
Julian sat under the skylight, his body concealed by a loose, ill-fitting hospital uniform.
Anna studied the whole, undamaged areas of his cheek, jaw, and neck offered to her blunt chalk. His bandage was ungainly, and she imagined that in the dark, private fastness beneath it, his face was fragmented, monstrous, his skin a bitter red.
“How long will I need to pose?”
“An unanswerable question. Cézanne needed five hundred sessions for a single portrait.”
“So I have my orders. May I speak while you work?”
“Certainly. But I may not always answer.”
Anna didn’t mind occasional conversation; it provided relief from the concentration of work. She had found that the relationship with her subjects could be as intense as that between lovers, or even a doctor and patient. A portrait was a continuous intimate struggle between observation and secrecy, and there was no protection from the artist’s gaze.
ACCORDING TO KAZANJIAN, t
he muscles of the face were intricate and tough as lace, so delicately melded with the undersurface of the skin that accurate dissection was nearly impossible. Remove the skin, and the underlying muscles were distorted. The face differed slightly from the rest of the body in this respect.
Hour after hour, as Anna’s eye focused on the few square inches of Julian’s face, she remembered this tense, ordered web under the skin. His bandage had lost its troubling significance, neutralized by familiarity, and she depicted it as a white, unfinished area. She imagined that the power of her observation would magically wear away his bandage until his bare skin was revealed, whole and healed.
She had learned to work quickly at the base hospital, blocking the heat, her anxiety, unconsciously absorbing the rhythm of the activity around her. Anna had carefully surrounded herself with familiar things, and blank white paper, coarse charcoal, the thick colors waiting on a palette, formed a barrier, secure as barbed wire against disturbing intrusions. But even in the studio, she was afraid that an odor, a noise, a certain slant of light, would bring back troubling memories.
During her voyage across the channel, the scent of turpentine in a station had instantly conjured up the memory of scrubbing a man’s naked back and shoulders, gray with dirt, using a turpentine-soaked rag in the triage tent. Wounded soldiers were cleansed with harsh turpentine, since soap and water weren’t strong enough. Or there was no soap.
Julian was jarred by the slightest noise, which Anna fairly tolerated as a condition of his experience. He broke his pose at the clatter of a pencil on the floor, an unexpected footstep, the clank of a distant engine. When this happened, the twitching of her pencil or chalk betrayed her impatience.
“Silence is my battle cure,” he explained. “I was overwhelmed by noise at the front. Sometimes the guns roared like rolling drums, an orchestra. Brassy. Majestic. Sometimes a sharp staccato or hiss. Machine guns clacked. There were thousands and thousands of continuous echoes, from every gully, shell hole, ditch, hollow under a fallen tree. Only the flies were louder. The noise was so relentless that dreams couldn’t be distinguished from waking life. And yet, every morning the birds sang. Nightingales.”
She let him talk, her smooth chalk lines tenderly following the outline of his head.
“It was so disorienting that everyone asked themselves the same question, Where am I?”
Anna murmured sympathetically, continuing to sketch.
He continued in a softer voice, “I swear the experience sharpened my perceptions. I can identify the progress of your drawing even though I cannot see it. Short strokes for shading. A confident, drawn-out scrape is a longer line, the slope of a nose, the arc of a silhouette.”
The chalk’s contact with the paper, a delicate shush shush, seeped into the shells on the walls. Anna completed two additional sketches and paused to tidy her hair, fingers dulled with chalk. Julian was already fatigued, his torso compressed, shoulders curved forward. She ended the session for the day.
GRADUALLY, JULIAN WAS able to model unselfconsciously and tolerated lengthier poses without discomfort. He seldom betrayed any distress about his appearance, never looking at Anna’s work, and it was understood that without visual proof he could continue under the illusion that his face was undamaged.
Anna rarely questioned Julian about his family or studies, and silence was held comfortably between them as she documented his face. During his breaks, Julian would wander over and inspect her supplies, and Anna would recite the labels of the pastel chalks, as he loved the poetry of the names: Aucuba Green, Burgundy, Burnt Rose, Murillo, Nankeen Yellow. He would smudge a chalk on his arm, fascinated by the contrast of color with his skin, still slightly tanned from the time lived outdoors.
One day Julian abruptly put color to his experiences.
“Everything on the battlefield was gray or brown, as if all the life had been bled from the landscape. Any bit of color was precious as a jewel.” Julian recalled the huge crimson cross on the hospital tent, the green stripe on the ship that had conveyed him across the channel, the sapphire of a stained glass window in a country church that remained miraculously intact as combat had flowed around it and the area was taken, lost, and retaken.
When Anna studied a sketch or was distracted, searching for a misplaced brush or pencil—her attention focused elsewhere—Julian belonged to Catherine. With brief and secret glances, she memorized the line of his head and neck, the patient set of his mouth, the slope of his cheek and uncovered single eyebrow. His resemblance to Charles was elusive, shifting with the angle of his face, the light, and Catherine’s mood. Or was it a trick of memory? How long would the true image of a loved one persist?
Catherine swore that Julian constantly sought her face, was sensitive to every breath, and followed her by ear, since he was unable to move his head while posing. She dropped an earring, and he instantly looked in her direction. Another time, his cool hand had found her arm at the sudden drone of an aeroplane, understanding that the sound disturbed her.
IN THE PINK Drawing Room, Anna caught herself jealously watching Kazanjian as he spoke to Dr. McCleary; the two men appeared almost spellbound, so complete was their attention to each other. Kazanjian had never shown her such intensity. She didn’t interrupt, but continued to stare at Kazanjian, and just as a pattern can be discerned in a fountain’s spray of water, she recognized that he would be lost to her. Everything that rewarded Kazanjian—the hospital routine, the approval of his colleagues, the challenge and gratitude of his patients—excluded her.
Even if she were to become intimately involved with Kazanjian, secrets could not survive in this place ruled by men. There would be talk, and they would transfer their harshest judgment to her work. Kazanjian would be unable to defend her. Her concern didn’t extend to her husband. She had nothing to fear from him.
She was certain she had decoded her relationship with Kazanjian, just as she knew the amount of white added to red paint that made pink, the degree of green that would surface in the otherwise dissolving power of black.
Anna belittled herself for seeking Kazanjian’s approval and relying on him for comfort. She hardened her heart against him, against the certainty of his future betrayal. In wartime, everyone shaped his or her own exile.
Breaking the line of her attachment to Kazanjian seemed to heighten Anna’s iron power of observation, so everyone around her appeared transformed, their desires intelligible.
ANNA, CATHERINE, and Julian sat beneath a chestnut tree, taking luncheon in the field near the studio. Catherine handed Julian a cup of water, and their fingers touched. Anna observed their familiarity, the closeness of their bodies. She saw the angle of Catherine’s head as she listened to Julian, the length of time she held his gaze. Catherine laughed at one of Julian’s remarks, which Anna thought had been meant for her alone. Each of these exchanges had weight, like the swing of a heavy gate, a dropping coin. Anna was coldly furious. Julian was her subject, bound by the lines Anna drew, her vision of him. To document was to possess. From that moment, she determined to watch them, her eye a chink, a keyhole in a door, an open window that they would pass unaware. A thousand snares would be set.
They returned to the studio, and Anna noticed the synchronizing of the couple’s steps as they walked together. Later, standing by her easel, Anna observed that Catherine and Julian seldom spoke to each other. This held the power of evidence for those who could read it, like the white space in a work of art. Her instructor at the academy had claimed that white had a presence equal to black and ordered Anna to reexamine her drawings. She had been skeptical but found that the shapes had mysteriously reversed and the white space became stronger than black.
ONE AFTERNOON, ANNA straightened up, stepped back from her easel, and released Julian from his pose.
He grinned and swung around on the narrow modeling stool. “I’d broken my pose long ago. You didn’t notice.” He stretched his arms over his head, a luxurious, fluid gesture, and caught Catherine staring at him. She
quickly withdrew her eyes, her face suffused with burning color. A brush slipped from her fingers into a bowl, and the brilliant red paint saturating its bristles dissolved into the water, swift and curved as flame.
Anna had followed this from across the room. It was impossible to hide from another woman. The attempt at deceit was like a cracked glass, its sharp edge hidden inside.
She expected their desire would swell and fill the space around them like a living thing, a seaweed expanding in water. This pressure diluted her abilities, made her hand hesitate, interfered with the calculation of her eye, was evident in the faltering progress of Julian’s portrait, labored and imperfect.
The couple’s tense impatience to be alone together was thick and exclusionary. Anna had become an intruder, an obstacle, a rock, an unwelcome witness. An outsider in her own studio.
IT HAD BECOME Anna’s routine to walk through the rose garden between the ornamental lawns and the Italian garden. The original outlines of the flowerbeds had been lost, but the roses continued blooming, wildly overgrown, scarcely affected by neglect.
She took scissors from her pocket and began to prune the thinnest stems of the roses, holding her skirt away from the thorny branches. The path of the sun was interrupted, and Anna squinted up at a silhouette standing with the light behind him, recognizable after a heartbeat as Kazanjian. Weeks had passed since they’d had an opportunity to exchange more than a quick greeting.
“You were watching me.”
“Only in admiration.”
She flushed. “Please don’t.” She tucked a wisp of hair under her straw hat.
“Beg pardon. I didn’t mean to distress you.”
He insisted they seek the shade of trees, as the midday sun was much too hot for a lady. He slowed his steps to hers, but she hardly looked at him as they walked around the flower beds, her skirt rhythmically brushing against the roses, petals falling in a frenzy of motion as if obeying a different pull of gravity.
In the orchard, the trunks of the trees were blacker and their leaves a denser green veil than they had appeared from a distance. Over decades, the apple trees had eased into unpruned irregularity, along with the climbing roses trained over their lowest branches.