by Lucy Foley
‘Thank you.’ Even in his vainer moments, he had not anticipated this. He feels hope bloom.
By the end of the afternoon, all the pieces have been turned around – even those Tom vowed he would never show to another soul. The room is ablaze with colour now, in defiance of the miserable weather without. Alice has studied each work in turn, minutely. When she reaches his study of Winnard Cove, constructed from memories still vivid through the telescope of the years, she turns to him and her eyes are wet with tears.
‘Tom,’ she says, fiercely, ‘this is what you must do. I’m certain of it. I know I haven’t any expertise whatsoever, but you don’t have to have it to be moved by something, to understand … to feel how good it is, how unique.’ Alice thinks. ‘You should meet my aunt Margaret. She isn’t an artist, but she is an expert of sorts.’ She is speaking rapidly, excited, and she reels off a series of names – artists whom her aunt has apparently advised – a list that includes several of Tom’s personal heroes. He sits forward in his seat, tense with excitement.
‘I’d love to meet her.’
Alice nods. ‘You’d like her. She’s Pa’s sister. She’s similar to him, in many ways. Pa was famous for his bravery, but Aunt M. has been just as adventurous, just as courageous, in her own way. She was a Suffragist in her youth, you know. She walks with a cane, now, and it’s because of that. They caught her scaling the fence at Westminster. One of the policemen hit her knuckles and she fell and crushed her hip. My grandparents were mortified by the disgrace; they were terribly traditional. Funny that their children turned out the way they did.’
‘She sounds fascinating.’
‘She is. Her marriage caused a fuss, too. Her husband was years older than her, an Italian – and Jewish – which did not go down well with my grandparents. He was also enormously rich – though money’s never been important to Aunt M, or rather only in so much as it allows her independence.
‘Ma has always been fond of making remarks of the “he was the only one who would have her” sort. But I know it’s not true. She could have taken her pick. Aunt M. might not be beautiful, like Ma, but she’s got such energy. She makes me – I can’t explain it exactly … she makes me want to be something more than what is expected of me.’
Tom nods, understanding.
*
Lady Margaret’s London residence is a Bloomsbury apartment: an exquisite arrangement of rooms and a pair of large French windows leading out on to a delicate roof garden with a view to the buildings on the other side of the square. Tom is surprised that someone of her prodigious wealth lives in a space of such modest size, even if it is a smart address. The apartment is not much larger than the ground floor of his parents’ house. Alice explains that this is one of many of her aunt’s homes, in the city in which she spends the least time. Three of the others are abroad: in Rome, in Venice and Marrakech.
The red-brick exterior of the building is identical to all of the others in the square. Once inside, Tom finds it easy to forget that he is in England at all. If one chose not to look through those glass doors on to a scene so unmistakably British it could not be anywhere else, one could imagine that this was a Moroccan riad. The air, even, seems different to the air outside, where the smell of wet pavements pervades. He can smell fig, amber and the weighty, exotic scent of frankincense.
Tom first meets Margaret’s likeness in an early-Cubist nude that hangs on the opposite wall as they come in. It is done in the naïf style, with a fecund circle for a belly and further, smaller circles to represent the breasts. For all the crudity of the shapes and simplicity of the colour palette, it is replete with the personality of the sitter. The style is at once reverential and playful: the woman’s gaze challenges her onlooker, but the smiling feline mouth implies amusement. What talent the artist must have, Tom thinks, to convey all of this. How brilliantly he has distilled the essence of the subject into the work.
There are works of art everywhere, from every modern school he knows of – and many that are unknown to him, shocking in their newness and flouting of convention. The very doorknobs here are made from porcelain painted in an earthy pattern of primary colours that seems to him distinctly Bloomsburian. And there is a gorgeous oil of seated women, the colours almost pungent in their vividness. In the style of Gauguin, perhaps Gauguin himself. Anything seems possible here.
His sketchbook is heavy beneath his arm. Why on earth did he allow himself to be persuaded to bring it? He knows the answer: he was swept up in Alice’s enthusiasm – intoxicated by it, even, and through her he saw himself as a real artist, worthy of Lady Margaret’s attention. Next to these brave, brilliant works, however, his own attempts seem jejune: humiliating in both their hesitance and their pretension.
He is thrown out of his funk by the arrival of Lady Margaret into her sitting room. Alice’s aunt is, in a word, astonishing. She wears loose pantaloons in a vivid green silk, far more shocking than the most revealing flapper’s skirt. These are topped by what appears to be a man’s dress shirt, several sizes too large for her thin frame and tucked in so that it billows extravagantly at the waist. A jewel of the same hue as the trousers flashes at her collarbone. Her limp is prominent, though she carries it well, and she walks with a silver-topped cane of polished ebony. Her hair is wet, smoothed back over the crown of her head, and Tom can see that it is short and very red.
‘Alice, my darling.’ Her voice, as low as his own, has a gentle roughness to it that speaks of cigarettes and a life well lived. She enfolds Alice in her arms. Then her heavy-lidded gaze moves in his direction, and Tom, too, is clasped in her fragrant and rather bony embrace.
‘You must be Tom.’ She takes a step back, but keeps a hold of his upper arms, so that she can look at him. ‘Delighted,’ she murmurs, and he echoes the word to her rather stupidly.
She draws away and surveys them both. ‘Have you been waiting for me a terribly long time?’
‘No,’ begins Tom, but Alice says, playfully, ‘Yes, Aunt. Tom’s practically grown a beard since we arrived. Luckily, you have all this art about, so we had something to entertain us.’
‘I am a scoundrel,’ Lady Margaret says, confessionally. ‘I told you so specifically four o’clock, but I’ve developed a fondness for long baths, especially in the afternoon. Once you’re in, it’s like entering a different world – one tends to lose any sense of time. It rejuvenates one splendidly for the evening … particularly important for we elderly.’
Tom cannot imagine anyone less befitting the label ‘elderly’ and laughs, despite himself.
Lady Margaret turns to smile at him. Then her gaze falls to the sketchbook beneath his arm. He feels his every muscle tense, his hand gripping the spine of the book involuntarily. Margaret’s eyes run over him, and she seems to make a quick calculation. ‘First, I think, tea is in order. One cannot discuss art on an empty stomach.’
Tea (mint leaves, stewed in the pot) and cake (spiced, almond-studded pastries specially imported from Turkey) are brought in by the enigmatic Beatrice, Margaret’s young housekeeper, who smiles at them dreamily, but doesn’t say a single word. Margaret explains that this is because she only speaks Italian, and a Venetian dialect at that. She looks, thinks Tom, like a Modigliani model, with large, rather vague grey eyes in a perfectly oval face and a slender white neck that is bent forward like the stem of a bloom grown too heavy for its support.
Lady Margaret bids Tom pass her his sketchbook. It is as though the strange, delicious tea and the deep purr of her voice have had a soporific effect upon him, for Tom realizes that he no longer feels any anxiety about doing so. He hands the book over.
Lady Margaret pores over it in silence, while Tom and Alice make rather strained small talk, Tom keeping half an eye on his sketchbook. He can’t help noticing that Margaret spends far longer on certain pages, and flicks through some as though there were nothing there: clearly their contents are considered beneath her notice. It is a humbling experience.
After an apparent eternity of t
ime Lady Margaret’s head snaps up.
‘I think you have some way to go,’ she says. ‘There is something here, but you need to work at it, draw it out.’
Tom nods. ‘Yes. I need much more experience before I can produce anything—’
‘It is not necessarily a matter of experience, though,’ Lady Margaret cuts him off. ‘It is a matter of confidence. Tell me, if it isn’t art, what is it to be?’
‘You mean, what shall I do?’ She nods. ‘Well, law, most likely. My father was – is – a lawyer … I know that’s what my parents would like to see me doing.’ He thinks of boyhood visits to his father’s office – the smell of aged paper, the dusty, wasting hours – and feels the familiar panic rise within his chest.
‘Do you think of yourself as an artist … or a lawyer?’
‘I’d certainly like to consider myself a painter one day.’
‘No!’ Lady Margaret shakes her head emphatically. ‘That is not the way to go about it. I have always felt that to be an artist, of the true sort, and therefore the only sort that matters, you must believe in your vocation absolutely. To hope is not enough. You cannot go about as a boy with a hobby on the side and produce work of the highest calibre.’ She points behind her at the Cubist nude. ‘What do you see?’
‘It’s a fantastic piece,’ Tom begins. ‘The artist must be extremely talented, the—’
‘That is not what I mean,’ she admonishes. ‘What I find in it is bravery. Courage to go beyond convention, beyond engrained ideas of style and form. You need practice, yes: you must hone your eye, certainly, but that is not what is holding you back. Technically excellent though these may be’ – she gestures to the sketchbook – ‘there is something almost … apologetic about them. To truly create, to innovate, you cannot care about the sensibilities you may offend. You cannot mind that some people – your own mother, perhaps – will violently dislike your work. Do you understand?’ Tom nods, and Alice gives him a secret smile of encouragement.
‘What I see here’ – Lady Margaret taps the open page of the sketchbook with a long finger – ‘is potential, but undeveloped. You are handicapped by a lack of self-belief. And that’ – she looks up at him – ‘is my diagnosis.’
13
It was Alice who gave me confidence and Lady Margaret who pushed me towards new heights. I was rather terrified of her, and a little under her spell, probably. She wasn’t beautiful, at least not in the conventional way, as Alice’s mother was, but there was in her an innate confidence and strength that was more attractive than any heart-shaped face or mane of golden hair could have been. It was the same strength that was in Alice.
Lady M. was a true maverick. She was modern, too. I couldn’t believe what I saw, when she went to turn the page of my sketchbook. Her sleeve was pulled back slightly by the movement and I glimpsed a tattoo on the inside of her wrist. It was small but extremely dark against the pale skin. Alice explained that it was of a serpent. Her aunt had been bitten by a rattlesnake on a trip to Nicaragua, and nearly died. After she had recovered she had the tattoo done. It was a talisman, a symbol of the force of will that had brought her through it. Such a thing is, even now, a sign of rebellion, of non-conformism, but back then, nobody had tattoos, and especially no one of Lady Margaret’s class.
She criticized my work ruthlessly, but when she told me that it had promise, I felt again that hope I’d had when Alice had come to the studio. Only this time there was, perhaps, more foundation to it: Lady Margaret knew art.
Some of the pieces she dismissed outright. I had gone through a Picasso phase, as so many artists of my generation did, in which I didn’t so much work under his influence but lifted elements wholesale: a cross-hatching technique here, a colour-blocking effect there. In one sketch I had literally copied the jug from Picasso’s Pitcher and Lemon, and was embarrassed when Lady M. called me out on it. ‘It is a talent of sorts,’ she told me, ‘to imitate another’s work, but it is not the sort that you should pursue. There are dozens of Frenchmen in Montmartre doing precisely that, and much better, for they have had years to hone their skill. Find your own style – and you must be brave, because it takes courage to strike out alone. You must not be afraid of ridicule; indeed, you may want to court it. To be able to illicit a strong reaction of any sort is a powerful thing. God forbid that people should tolerate your work.’
You felt that if she believed in you, harnessed you to her, it was impossible that you should fail, and absolutely possible that you might do anything. And while she had been fairly damning about my work in one sense, she was supportive in the way that mattered the most: she urged me to continue. She thought that, even if I hadn’t got there yet, I would.
She told me to return, in a year’s time, when I had sought out my own style, and had a new portfolio of works to show her. I went back to the studio and tore up half of my work, burned it in the brazier I kept there. Afterwards I felt that I had undergone a form of catharsis. I cannot remember a single one of those paintings, but I have no doubt that, if I could do so, I would not regret that action for an instant. The collectors might feel differently … sometimes a painter’s first terrible daubs are worth more than his mature work. Presumably they derive excitement from seeing the artist’s style in its embryonic state. For me, those works were the artistic equivalent of a teenage diary: full of overblown sentiment and melodrama.
The drawing that Kate had brought me, though, that was different. It was one of the works I’m proudest of. I’m not sure that I would have been capable of ever drawing anything quite like it – and not only because of the way in which my style evolved. There was something in the essence of that sketch which, like my innocence at that age, had to be lost to time. A certain unselfconsciousness … a lack of the cynicism that comes with experience, perhaps. And it was the record of a memory, too, of what I still think of as the happiest day of my life.
Kate
It seemed Stafford was tired of talking, for the next couple of hours passed in relative silence, the only sound the scratching of pencil upon paper. The warm air stilled as the day reached its midday peak and the sea beyond the windows was one uniform expanse of blue, seemingly unruffled by wind or tide. It looked as though it could have been painted on to the glass. I felt my eyelids beginning to droop.
‘Time for lunch,’ said Stafford suddenly, as if he had guessed that I was tiring.
I shook myself out of my stupor. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Excellent. I shall call for Marie.’
I spent the afternoon down in the cove, half reading my book, but mainly thinking about all that Stafford told me. At times the past he was describing now felt more real to me than my life back in London, which now seemed insubstantial, far away. I only wished that I could have shared this new discovery. I was sure Mum would have been fascinated by it all, in spite of herself.
The sand was coarse-grained, whitish, and hot to the touch. The beach was a mere few metres across: a brief gap in the rock that extended along the coast on either side. I waded into the shallows at one point, and discovered that if I stood there long enough, letting my feet sink into the sand, tiny brown fish would dart about my ankles. Until, that is, I wiggled a toe – whereupon they would disappear from sight in the blink of an eye.
Afterwards I lay back on the warm sand, and must have fallen asleep for a while, because I awoke with a start on hearing my name called. I looked about me, bleary-eyed, and saw to my dismay that it was Oliver, standing a few feet away with his hands in his pockets. Instantly I was on my guard, but the hostility that I prepared myself for did not come.
‘Marie has put out tea,’ he said, and his voice sounded different: not friendly, exactly, but approaching civil. ‘I thought I’d come and see if you were hungry.’
‘Oh.’ I sat up, confused. My first reaction, irrational though it might have been, was: this must be a trick. ‘Yes,’ I said, carefully, ‘I am – thank you.’
He turned and disappeared from sight. I waited for a few m
oments, letting my head clear of sleep – I wanted to be alert for whatever confrontation was to follow – and then followed him up the steps. I realized that it might simply be that Stafford had asked him to fetch me – though that wouldn’t quite explain the new, courteous way he’d spoken to me – but when I reached the terrace the artist was nowhere to be seen.
‘Grand-père’s taking his nap,’ Oliver said, catching me looking about for him.
‘Ah.’
We sat down at the table together, which had been set with an elegant china pot, two cups with matching saucers, and a large Victoria sponge. There was something quite pleasingly surreal about the sight of it all sitting there, as the distinctly un-British sun beat down on us, and the cicadas chattered in the vegetation all around.
‘It’s Grand-père’s favourite,’ Oliver told me, indicating the cake. ‘Grand-mère used to make it for us. Marie carried on baking it, after she died.’
I looked at him, curiously. He had spoken quickly, even nervily.
He cut and plated two generous slices, passing one to me. I took it, feeling tense, as though I were readying myself for an interview, still trying to guess what his purpose might be. Maybe, I thought, he was about to give me my marching orders, while his grandfather was conveniently out of sight.
I lifted a small forkful of cake to my mouth. The delicious morsel momentarily distracted me: the lemony airiness of the sponge, the unctuousness of the cream and the tartness of the raspberry jam. I looked up and found that Oliver was watching me.
‘It’s very good,’ I told him, because he seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
There followed a long, tense pause, during which I tentatively ate another bite of cake. Then Oliver shifted, leaning forward in his seat. ‘Well …’ He stopped, looking uncomfortable. ‘I’m not quite sure how to say this …’