“And Torquil didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t want it; in fact, he told me, he felt a sort of revulsion about the very thought of having it in his house. He couldn’t ask his mother – she was in poor health and quite devastated by the loss of her husband; he didn’t want to take any risks by even reminding her in any way of the existence of Helen Ralston. He’d considered leaving it in the envelope and slipping it into one of the boxes destined for the library – it would be safe enough in a university collection, he thought, and yet the idea of students looking at it and writing about it in their theses made him feel queasy, just as did the thought of it going into a public auction, to be numbered and listed and described in a catalogue.”
Alistair paused and took a deep breath. Then he went on. “I offered to take care of it for him. I promised there’d be no publicity. In fact, I said, if the price was right, I’d be happy to buy it for myself, not to sell on. Torq knew, because we’d talked about it, just how important Willy Logan’s books had been to me. Especially as a young man. That mystical strand of his, the idea that the old gods are still alive in the land and can be brought back to life through us, in us – I can’t quite explain how deeply that affected me, but the idea of owning something that had belonged to him, which had been so deeply, personally meaningful, was irresistible.
“And Torquil said I could have it. In fact, he said he would like to give it to me. He didn’t want payment; it didn’t seem right to sell it. I protested, but he wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, he mailed it to me that same day, by ordinary post, in a padded envelope, but otherwise unprotected – when I think how easily it could have been lost or damaged . . .”
We all stared at the thing in my lap. Unable to bear it any longer, I lifted the framed painting like a tray and held it out to Alistair. When he didn’t respond, I glared at him, but still he made no move to take it away.
“I could never sell it,” he said quietly. “I’ve respected Torquil’s feelings about that. And yet, I’ve never felt right about owning it. It came to me by chance.” He paused. His tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth and ran quickly around his lips. “I’d like you to have it.”
“Me!” I felt the same unexpectedly sexual shock I’d had on first recognizing the hidden meaning of the picture I now held. “Oh, no, I couldn’t. It’s not right.”
“Selwyn tells me you’re writing a biography of Helen Ralston. I’ve felt for some time that the painting should go back to her, but I didn’t know how to approach her. It seemed too difficult, and potentially too disturbing. How would she feel to learn that a male stranger had this very personal thing? Yet she might want it back. And it is hers, by rights, since Willy’s death. It might come more easily from another woman, and, as her biographer, you’ll be in on lots of intimate secrets; she’ll have to accept that . . .”
“I don’t know that she’ll even accept me as her biographer. I can’t. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” I couldn’t seem to stop shaking my head.
“Of course she will. Of course she is. And if she doesn’t want it, or you can’t find her, and you don’t feel you can keep it yourself, well, you could always mail it back to me in a plain brown envelope. Please.”
And although I really didn’t want to do it, in the end I found it impossible not to agree.
I’d booked a room for the night at Jury’s hotel, which was located just behind the train station. I’d planned, when I’d booked, to take myself out for a nice dinner and to see a movie, but by the time I’d parted from Selwyn, very late in the afternoon, the only thing I wanted was to find out more about Helen Ralston.
I hit another bookshop, where I determined that In Troy was definitely out of print, and so was that old-fashioned children’s classic Hermine in Cloud-Land. “But you can find loads of secondhand copies on the Internet,” a helpful clerk assured me.
“Thanks, I’ll do that when I get home,” I said, and paid for a copy of Touched by the Goddess. I bought a selection of interesting-looking gourmet salads from Marks and Spencer – ah, the luxuries of city life! – and settled into my hotel room to read everything in the big fat biography of Willy Logan that had anything to do with Helen Ralston.
IV
She was the girl from faraway, the girl from another land, and she swept into the dreich damp grey streets of Glasgow like a warm wind, smelling of exotic spices and a hint of dangerous mystery. She claimed to be half-Greek and half-Irish, with a mother who told fortunes and a father possessed of the second sight. She herself, according to at least one bewildered classmate, was subject to “fits” when she would go rigid and begin to prophesy in a voice manifestly not her own – afterwards, she appeared exhausted and claimed to remember nothing.
In appearance, she made a most unlikely femme fatale. She was small and skinny, with sharp features, including a prominent nose, and her eyes, although large and lustrous, were disturbingly deep-set. Logan’s portrait glamorized her; the few photographs taken of Helen Ralston in the late 1920s reveal an odd shrunken figure who appeared prematurely old.
Helen Elizabeth Ralston was a new student on the rolls of The Glasgow School of Art in September 1927; prior to that she had studied at Syracuse University, New York. Her reasons for departing NewYork for Glasgow are unknown. She had no Scottish connections whatsoever, and was far from wealthy. Although her tuition fees were paid in advance, she clearly found it a struggle to pay for supplies and other necessities of life. A fellow student, Mabel Scott Smith, who recalls buying her dinner more than once, made it a practice to bring along an extra bun for Helen at tea time: “She would pretend she’d forgotten, or that she wasn’t hungry, but the truth was, she didn’t have a penny to spare. Everybody knew she was broke, even though you thought Americans must all be rich. She went around with a portfolio of drawings, trying to sell to the papers, but she never had a hope. She was good, but so were plenty others, and times were hard. It was even worse in Glasgow than in other places; you couldn’t make money from pretty pictures there, not then.”
The budding friendship between Mabel and Helen came to an abrupt end when the American student moved out of her shared lodgings and into a West End flat paid for by W. E. Logan. Mabel Smith: “It wasn’t the sex – we art school girls had quite a liberal attitude towards that! – but that she would let herself be kept and by a married man! I lost my respect for Mr Logan, too.”
Logan noticed the “young-old” quality of Helen Ralston’s face during his first class with her, and invited her to sit for him on Saturday afternoon. He singled out several students like this every year; there was nothing unusual, or improper, in his attentions. But from her first sitting it was clear that Helen would be different. Fixing her large, hypnotic eyes upon him, she began to speak and immediately held him spell-bound by her stories.
These were probably mostly a retelling of myths and legends from many different cultures, Russian fairy-tales mingled with Greek myths, and Celtic motifs interwoven with material stolen from the Arabian Nights. To Logan they were pure magic, igniting in him the passion for myth that would dominate his life.
In his autobiography Logan writes of certain “magical” moments in his early childhood. Apart from that, however, there is no evidence that he experienced any significant mystical or spiritual leanings before meeting Helen Ralston.
Despite the stories she told him about her background, Helen Elizabeth Ralston had neither Greek nor Irish blood. Her parents, Ben and Sadie Rudinski, were Polish Jews who arrived in New York around 1890. By the time their last child, Helen, was born in Brooklyn in 1907, the family fortunes were thriving. Helen’s artistic ambitions were encouraged, and she was both educated and indulged. As America prepared to go to war in 1917, the Rudinskis changed their name to Ralston – around this time, Helen adopted Elizabeth as a middle name and began signing her drawings with the initials HER.
Helen did well at school and was accepted into the undergraduate liberal arts program at Syracuse University. Her grades from her freshman ye
ar were good, and she participated in the drama society (painting sets and making costumes rather than acting) and contributed to the student newspaper and seemed in general to have settled. But instead of returning as expected for a second year, Helen Elizabeth Ralston applied to the Glasgow School of Art, and embarked on a new life in Great Britain.
Logan wrote later that she made this great change in her life on the prompting of a dream. He also believed that her parents were dead, that she was an only child, and that she had been self-supporting since the age of thirteen. It is impossible to know for certain when the relationship between them altered and they became lovers, as Logan is uncharacteristically reticent about this in his memoirs. But by January 1928 he had begun to paint “Circe”, and by March she was living in the flat for which he paid the rent, and to which he was a frequent visitor.
After January, although she did not formally withdraw from the School, Helen attended fewer and fewer classes, until, by March, the other students scarcely saw her at all, unless she was in Logan’s company. Their relationship was certainly gossiped about, but Logan’s reputation was such that some thought him above suspicion. He was a respectable family man, with several children and a beautiful, gentle wife from a well-to-do Edinburgh background. The American student was such an odd creature it was hard to credit that the great W. E. Logan was seriously attracted to her.
He had often taken a paternal interest in his students, male and female, and had even been known to make small financial contributions to help support those who were talented but poor. Helen Ralston clearly fell into that category. Brian Ross, Logan’s biographer, suggested that Logan’s natural innocence combined with generosity and good intentions might have got him into trouble. He thought that Helen had fallen in love with the great man, who had been interested in her only as a model. When “Circe” was finished, and it became clear that he would no longer be spending so much time alone in the studio with her, she had thrown herself out of the window in despair, and only then had he become aware of her true feelings for him.
I shut Ross’s book in disgust. In the whole history of human relationships, how many men had ever rented an expensive flat for an unrelated female without expecting sexual favours in return? If she’d been one-sidedly in love with him, her suicide attempt would have been his signal to run like hell, not to abandon wife and children to nurse her back to health. Logan’s sacrifice only made sense if he was deeply in love with her, and her leap had shocked him into recognizing his responsibilities.
I was willing to believe that it had been one-sided – on his part. She might have stopped going to art school to avoid him, even though her poverty had forced her into accepting his financial support, and she might have hoped that, once he no longer needed her to model for “Circe” she would have nothing more to do with him. Only he wouldn’t let her go – maybe he’d turned up that August day not to say goodbye, but to tell her he was going to leave his wife and children to live with her. I imagined her backing away from him, evading his hands, his lips, his unwanted declarations of undying devotion until, in a last, desperate squirm out of his arms, she’d fallen out of the window.
I frowned as I considered this. What sort of window was it? How did a conscious, healthy adult fall out of a window? I found it hard to visualize from Ross’s description – he said she was “sitting on the window ledge.” Sideways, or with her back to the air? It was August, and hot, so naturally enough the windows were open. Did she lean too far back and lose her balance, or did she deliberately swivel around and jump?
I picked up Touched by the Goddess and paged through it looking for references to Hermine, which was his name for Helen. There was no index. One reference leaped out at me:
Truth then flying out the window, Hermine went after it. She caught it, although she nearly died in the attempt, and so restored me to the way of truth, and life.
Well, that was a lot of help. Logan was concerned with myth, as he saw it, a deeper truth than mere facts could provide.
I turned back to Ross again. It seemed that, however briefly, a n attempted murder charge had been considered, on the grounds of Logan’s distraught “confession” to a policeman at the hospital to which Helen had been taken. Undoubtedly, he’d been filled with feelings of guilt, but was it the guilt of a violent seducer, or that of a man who felt torn between two women, or simply what anyone close to an attempted suicide might feel? Even his actual words at the time were unclear. And, as Ross pointed out, suicide was a crime, so Logan might have been trying to save Helen from prosecution and/or deportation for attempted self-murder by suggesting it was really his fault.
More than one story could be told about what had happened in that room in Glasgow, a room with an open window, four storeys up, on a warm August day in 1928. There had been only two witnesses, who were also the protagonists, or the protagonist and the antagonist, the two people in the room, Willy Logan and Helen Ralston.
Ross wrote far more clearly and simply than Logan in his attempt to establish the truth, but, as far as I could see, he was no less biased, and no more reliable, because there was only one story he wanted to tell, and that was Willy Logan’s. Helen’s experience, her interpretation, her story, was nowhere in his book.
I went back to the beginning and made my way carefully through the acknowledgments. This ran to over two pages of names of all the people who had helped him in some way, and Helen Ralston’s name was not included. If she was dead, I thought, he might have quoted from one of her books or letters – surely she had written about her relationship with Logan at some point, to someone? Some of the passages from In Troy could well have been pertinent. His restraint made me think he must have been refused permission to quote, with possibly the threat of legal action if he said anything about her that could be deemed offensive . . . the libel laws in Britain were pretty fierce, and if the old lady had a taste for litigation that would have tied his hands.
I read swiftly through the pages that dealt with Logan’s desertion of his family, his devoted vigils beside Helen’s hospital bed, the loss of his job scarcely registering on him, her surgery, the creation of little Hermine and her adventures, then Helen’s convalescence in the West End flat, now their home, until, in the spring of 1929, although she still had to walk with a cane, Helen was deemed well enough to travel, and Logan took her on a sailing holiday up the west coast. In the fresh air away from the city they would rest and sketch and grow strong, Willy wrote in a letter to his son Torquil, adding:
I hope you know how much I love you, darling boy, and that I don’t stay away out of crossness or dislike or any wrong reason, but only because Helen needs me so much more than the rest of you do. She has been very ill, you know, but finally is getting better. I hope soon she will be well enough to meet you. I have written and drawn a funny little story for her which I think you will like, too. It is to be published as a book in September, and I have told the publishers to be sure to send you your very own copy . . .
On their first day out, they spotted a small island. In Logan’s description, Helen went “rigid”, her face paled, and her large, shiny eyes seemed to become even larger, a trio of symptoms which had always heralded her prophesying fits. This time all she said was, “I’ve seen my death. My death is there.”
Logan never explained why, in that case, he didn’t just sail as far away from the island as he could. To him, it was self-evidently necessary to go where Helen had foreseen her own death. In his novel In Circe’s Snare (1948) Logan has Odysseus declare, “Every man must seek his own death.”
“And every woman, too,” Circe chimed in quickly. “If, that is, she wishes to be more than just a woman.”
On the charts the island bears the name of Eilean nan Achlan. At the time, this probably meant nothing to Logan, but later, when he began his study of Gaelic, he would have found that it bears the meaning “the isle of lamentation”.
Modern archaeologists believe that Achlan was an important funerary site in pre-Christia
n Scotland. Not only the name points to this conclusion, but the many cairns, including one large chambered tomb, still awaiting serious excavation today, believed to have been in use for a period of several hundred years. There was a tradition for a long time on the west coast of interring the dead on uninhabited islands reserved for that purpose. More often these islands were located in lakes or inland lochs, but Achlan’s position in the straits of Jura, relatively near to the mainland shore, would have made it equally accessible and therefore suitable for this purpose.
Because it was late in the day, they did not attempt to land just then, but dropped anchor and spent the night on board in view of the little island. While the light was good they both made watercolour sketches of it. What Logan thought of his own painting – the last he would ever produce – or what became of it is not recorded. But, as Logan recalled in Touched by the Goddess, Helen’s swiftly rendered landscape was “technically remarkably assured, and quite surprising; the most remarkable piece of work I ever saw her produce.” He expressed his belief that already “The Goddess was working through her.” On the back of the little sketch she wrote the title “My Death,” the date – April 14 1929 – and a dedication to her lover.
Reading this, I was quite certain that Brian Ross had never set eyes on the painting he seemed to describe. The passage was footnoted; I looked it up and read, “The current whereabouts of this painting is unknown. Personal correspondence with Torquil Logan.”
I looked across the room where the painting now lay in a plain brown envelope. Alistair would have been happy to give me the frame, but I thought it would be too much to cart around. After all, I didn’t intend to hang it, but just return it to the woman who had painted it.
The morning of April 15 1929 dawned calm and fine. The sun was shining, the air warm for April, and quite still: perfect weather for exploring the island. Helen stripped off her clothes, wrapped them in a Sou’wester to make a waterproof bundle she could carry on top of her head, and slipped over the side of the boat while Willy was still blinking sleep from his eyes. She gave a sudden sharp hiss as the salt water hit her scarred back and legs: the sight of those raw, red wounds against her pale flesh seemed to reproach Willy, and although the water was not very deep he felt obliged to follow her lead and strip completely rather than just removing shoes and trousers as he would have preferred.
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