by Jo Mazelis
The two little girls who had been singing ran past her, drawn inexplicably to the one who was spouting so much blood. When they reached her one produced a hankie, while the other tipped the girl’s head back and pinched the bridge of her nose. They did not seem to mind the blood.
Julia’s mother hurried back inside the house locking the French doors behind her, then she sat on the loveseat and thought again about how the sky at dawn had been streaked with red and how the foal, within minutes of being born, would struggle to rise on brand new legs, and its hair, once dried in the sun, would look like velvet.
THE GREEN HOUR
She thought of the sea as her beating heart and so its violence on certain wild nights frightened her. On other days it seemed to have shrugged on a green cloak that rippled with shifting mysterious shadows. Despite this she was glad to leave the provincial Welsh town and join her brother in London. Later she’d gone to Toulouse with Dorelia McNeill and painted her standing by a table with a book in her hand, her lips the colour of coral, her hair like the black sea on a moonless night. They had meant to walk to Rome, but Gwen ended up in Paris, alone.
Auguste Rodin hired her as a model and to celebrate took her to the café for absinthe. ‘L’heure verte, Marie,’ he said. He could not quite manage the, to him, alien name of Gwen so this is what she became. She watched as he let the water trickle, drop by slow drop through the cube of sugar and into the green spirit where a pale swirling cloud began to appear like a wraith.
She could not tell him that she’d had nothing to eat that day and nothing since breakfast the day before. The drink warmed her and then seemed to flood her body with energy. She had a second glass and stared intently at the brilliant green, thinking first of emeralds and jade, then cats’ eyes.
He reminded her of her father. Except that her father’s gaze came with a disapproving silence. When she was a girl it seemed that only the sea washing beyond the windows had broken the silence of the house in Tenby. That and the loud tick, tick, tick of the grandfather clock. She would escape to the sea and draw the wild urchin children; some, in the heat of summer, quite naked in the shallow lapping waves.
‘The green hour,’ she said in English, then smiled at his puzzled expression.
A third glass of absinthe. As the water entered the clear green liquid she thought about an old cat she’d once seen, its blind eyes clouded over, their colour muted.
‘You have an athlete’s body,’ he said later when she stepped from behind the screen in the studio and slipped the robe from her shoulders. He approved of her slim hips, her slender legs, her small breasts; she would do very well for the sculpture he had in mind. He also had a seduction planned … but then so did she.
He was 64. His beard was a great wiry nest, nearly white. She was reminded of the stuffed doves under the glass dome in the drawing room in Tenby. Gentle plump birds made still and silent by death.
She posed for him, taking up attitudes that exposed to him the most intimate parts of her body. This she gave for art first and secondly for love.
For love and against silence.
No, it was not his beard that reminded her of the stuffed doves, not really. It was his manhood. They had made love on the floor of the studio and he had rolled off her and lay back exhausted, spent, his eyes closed and an arm flung over his face. She let her gaze fall on his member where it seemed to nestle in a pale curve against his thigh and it was that which reminded her of the doves under the glass dome.
Time dripped by, water dissolving a sugar cube, sweetening the bitter wormwood and distorting the senses. He tired of her and abandoned her for another woman. Then further abandoned her by dying. She had a sense of belonging nowhere and to no one.
Except to God.
A sharp pain rippled through her belly. Was it the spot where a sword had been thrust into the body of Christ? She painted wet daubs of Rouge Phoenician on the palms of each hand. Stigmata. No saint, she. Then wiped them away on a turpentine-soaked rag.
What she lacked was the religion of ritual and confession. How bare and without passion was the church of her youth; the puritan sparsity, the chill incantations, the Sunday best clothes, the eyes of the congregation slipping sideways to see what coins a neighbour had placed on the collection plate.
She mixed ground barley with milk and drank it slowly over the course of half an hour. She was not sure if it worsened the pain, which seemed a constant, but it was all she could manage.
Often she thought of the sea. Once she had watched a child being lifted from the waves at Tenby’s North Beach. Half drowned he’d been, the son of a blind piano tuner on holiday from Bristol, and when he recovered she saw him leading his father up the steps and towards the town. Her brother Augustus had nearly destroyed himself diving into the sea and dashing his head on the rocks when he was 18 or 19. People said he was different after that, especially with women.
One day in the Louvre she was crossing a gallery in search of paintings of Christ’s wounds, when someone caught her eye. He was reflected in a glass cabinet. She stopped walking immediately, mesmerised. It was him, her master, Rodin, standing quite still and gazing over his shoulder as if he were as arrested by the sight of her as she was by him. For a moment she forgot the pain in her stomach, she forgot the painting she was trying to complete, everything in the world melted away. There he was again, her lover back from the dead after 22 years, come to claim her.
Then her senses caught up with her and she saw that this was no living, breathing man, but a statue. A sharp cramping pain ripped through her like a lightning bolt, almost taking her breath away, but she bore it bravely and made her way towards the cruelly deceptive sculpture.
Neptune, god of the sea. An ache sprang up in her heart, worse by far than the physical one in her stomach and it was followed by an impulse; she must go now, go back to the sea.
She caught the train to Dieppe. All the way in the cramped railway carriage, pain like the arrows that pierced the flesh of St Sebastian. Nothing to eat – only a cup of tepid water to wet her lips. Pain like a lance thrust into Christ. This is my blood, this, my body… Exquisite pain, as if to herald another world war.
In a quiet street not far from the station her knees buckled and she had to rest, clinging to a railing for support. A black Tomcat came strutting out of the dusty undergrowth, its tail raised high, quivering with pleasure. One of her own it must have been, come back to her as a ghost. Eyes so sharp, so green, so pure she could never replicate them; though her mind from habit seemed to trace a paintbrush over her palette from Cobalt to Terre Verte to Viridian; so many greens … and the sea now so near she could almost smell it.
STORM DOGS
Pen y Cae, October 1949
Dorothy met him in the Ancient Briton not far from the small village where each of them had ancestors. She had deferred her place at Wellesley College for a year in order to see Europe and her maternal grandmother had given her fifty dollars and a camera; a black and silver Leica in a tan leather case. Then she had extracted a promise; Dodo must go to Wales, must take photos of the old farm, the mountain, the church, the gravestones of the Thomases, the Craddocks, the Vaughans and Dandos.
Everyone stared at her when she entered the pub; she had the sense that she had barged into someone’s private living room, though the door had ‘Public Bar’ engraved on its glass. She stood out amongst the local women in her crisp sky-blue slacks, crew-necked sweater and saddle shoes. They seemed mired in the mud and heather, the tree bark and tea stains judging by the colours of their clothes, all of them in skirts and worn-looking winter coats and stout-looking dress shoes. Not that there were any women in the pub at midday.
He had approached her at once, handsome and smiling, making her feel welcome. He bought her a glass of warm beer. Then he had sung a haunting song in the language of his (and her) people. Everything had stopped in that moment, no one moved, no one touched their drink or spoke or lit the cigarette that dangled from their lips. All eyes were o
n the black-haired young man as he leaned almost jauntily on his stick and lifted his head and voice to heaven.
When she said it was time for her to go, he walked her outside and asked if he could kiss her. She understood that he had been in the war, that his leg had been damaged by shrapnel or gunshot or mine. She said yes because she was ashamed to say no.
‘Marry me!’ he said and she laughed and skipped away out of reach.
An hour later she was on the mountain, faithfully taking the photos her grandmother had asked for, when she fainted. A sheepdog and his master found her; otherwise she would surely have died. She was carried down the mountain on an old enamelled sign that advertised Buckley’s beer and woke in an itchy flannel nightgown that stank of old sweat. The farmer’s wife was smearing some rancid, foul-smelling, grease on her chest and throat. She was in a fever for six days remembering little except for a dreamlike procession of different visitors, a doctor, a nurse, a few small children, the farmer’s wife, the farmer himself and his dog, and the young wounded man with the pure singing voice. On the seventh day he came to see her and brought his mother and three sisters. They congratulated her and held her hand and kissed her. He spoke of their engagement and lifted her left hand to show off the gold and diamond ring she now wore. He had got the ring in France but failed to mention who he had bought it off or the dead hand it had been taken from.
As she lay there alone and exhausted she felt everything was drifting away from her; the water glass with its beaded linen cover, the walls of the room, the train that should have carried her to London, the boat to Calais, the Eiffel tower, Venice with its canals and gondolas, the Coliseum in Rome, the Parthenon, the Aegean sea, the olive groves, the brightly painted fishing boats, the dusty narrow streets that led to open squares with sparkling fountains. All were picture postcards blown out of her hands before she had a chance to send them.
Her marriage to a young Welsh war hero delighted everyone. She was back where she belonged. After the war it was the happy ending they had longed for. To go back on her word, to break her engagement was out of the question.
She married him, hoping for the best, but came to suffer him just as a soldier must suffer his wounds long after the battle had ended. Long after the wound was inflicted.
Dorothy’s Journal
The Loire Valley, August 1958
Crossing the bridge our eyes were filled by the imposing presence of the chateau. Its towers and spires circled and chased by a murder of crows that swooped and cawed. I stopped to take a photograph while Thomas walked on, slowing his pace in deference to my dawdling ways. The weather which had promised fair when we drove towards the town now seemed on the brink of change. While one half of the sky was still blue and filled with high white clouds like those a child would draw, behind the chateau, a great mass seemed to gather and brew, deep lilac grey and gun-metal blue. Heavy and ominous.
Perfect for a moody shot of the thirteenth-century edifice, with the black pen strokes of the winged birds adding drama and interest to the scene.
I took several shots and adjusted the metering to be sure of a good exposure. Thomas was now twenty paces ahead of me and had walked into the shot. He wore his black gabardine coat and dark moleskin trousers and leaned, as he always did, to the right, his cane taking the weight of his body as he limped slowly forward. With his dark head turned towards the chateau only his bony wrist and strong hand showed white. I took another shot, this one including him in the composition, but this was no cheery familial snapshot such as a wife should take of her husband, him smiling at the camera with some tourist destination serving as backdrop and proof of their trip, but one which rendered him an ominous stranger, a black-clad cripple; priest, sinner or necromancer. Perfecting the graphic composition as artfully as if it had been sketched by Beardsley or Dore or Peake.
I had loaded the camera with a roll of 36 exposures and the dial showed 14 frames remained, but when I advanced the film it jammed. I increased the pressure with my thumb, but it did not give way. I knew I dare not force it as the film might snap.
‘Come on, Dodo! It’s going to rain,’ Thomas called and as he did I felt the first few drops of rain. One splashed on my hand. Warmish rain that my skin was almost insensible to. I closed the camera’s leather case and keeping the strap around my neck tucked it under my raincoat, then holding it securely between my hand and my body began to run after Thomas.
By the time I caught up with him the rain was torrential, Thomas’s hair was plastered to his head, and his glasses were washed by a moving film of water. We were still a good distance from the entrance to the chateau and the winding road that led steeply up to it was lined with small houses of differing age, but there was no shop or cafe where we might seek shelter.
‘Damn it!’ Thomas shouted, but I barely heard him so loud, so all-consuming was the relentless pounding of the rain. The cobbled street had become a river and we seemed to wade through it as if for the sport of it. In this state, our shoes sodden and waterlogged, our clothes and hair drenched, everything wet through, there would be no chateau visit, no pleasant lunch on the square, nothing but a miserable retracing of our steps, a return to the small hotel and an afternoon amongst our dripping, steaming clothes and towels.
I was a few paces ahead of him and running blindly with my head bent forward, when a door to my left was abruptly pulled open and a beckoning arm urgently drew me in. I all but fell into the doorway and seconds later Thomas plunged in behind me, bumping against me and making me stagger forward into the room. I heard the door slam shut and then the noise of the storm was muted. It still lashed angrily against the window panes and roof, but it was powerless, a watery demon disarmed.
I sighed with relief and wiped my hand over my face and back over my hair, stemming the tide of liquid that ran down my forehead, into my eyes and poured off my nose and chin. It was only then that I took in the kind stranger who had opened her home to us. She was a tiny, ancient woman with fine white hair scraped back over a bony skull. Her back was hunched and her once ample bosom had sunk to a broad fleshy mound. She wore a shapeless frock that, because of her diminutive size, almost covered her ankles. Her surprising large feet had been pushed into a pair of worn sabots and grey lisle stockings drooped in rolls around her lower legs.
‘Merci Madame! Merci!’ Thomas said rapidly and with great warmth. She did not reply but nodded and gestured towards the old-fashioned black stove that dominated the room. She opened the iron door and poked at the coals, rousing them into fierce life, then turned her attention to me and partly by gesturing and partly tugging at one sleeve she encouraged me to take off my coat. There was a wooden airing rack over the stove and she unwound a rope to lower this, then draped my coat and Thomas’s over it. Next she pointed at our shoes and from a copper box produced sheets of newspaper which she pushed into our shoes before lining them up on the hearth.
I took my camera from my neck and finding that it was still dry I put it on the large table by the side of the fire.
Our socks and stockings were taken and wrung out over the hearth to sizzle and steam, then they too were draped over the airing rack.
Thomas let out a steady stream of thanks and elaborately formal expressions of flattery and gratitude in perfect though badly accented French. He was in the middle of such a speech when our host began to shoo him away from the fire and towards a very narrow and steep flight of wooden stairs. Up he limped, his naked feet almost soundless on the steps, while his walking stick played a slow tattoo, one, then one, then one. She followed and I heard the floorboards creak overhead, then a door bang shut and the shuffle and slap of shoes as the old woman descended to turn her attentions to me. I was likewise shooed into another room. I understood at once that this was the old woman’s bedchamber as there was a metal bedstead painted white and beside it a sturdy three-legged stool by which means she must have climbed in and out, for the bed was very high and she was remarkably small. Shrunk by old age and bent by osteoporosis, she
was the size of a child of nine or ten. Once more she tugged at my clothes encouraging me to remove them. She was right of course; they were soaked quite through even down to my underwear. While I peeled off my cardigan and blouse, she searched in a tall chiffonier until she found garments she deemed suitable for me and draped these over the bed. As I stood there naked except for my brassiere and pants, her parting shot was to press a threadbare towel into my hands, then to mime, quite unnecessarily, the vigorous rubbing and tousling movements I should make to dry myself.
I suppose I might have found her manner overbearing, for she did not smile, nor show any expression of warmth, but gratitude and her great age combined with her almost doll-like size quite disarmed me. It was as if Thomas and I were two orphans of the storm she had chosen to take under her wing. Or two stray dogs, one of them lame and almost blind, that she had found cowering and half-starved in the street.
I wriggled out of my underwear, then rubbed myself dry and wrapped the towel around my head in a turban. I looked at the clothes she’d laid out for me, eggshell blue cami-knickers and a matching suspender belt made from silk with a trim of white lace, seamed stockings and black satin shoes with an ankle strap. Finally there was a lavender-grey dress of crepe de chine that fell from the shoulders to the waistband in soft folds, while the skirt, as it had been cut on the bias, skimmed over the hips and fell in flowing airy flutes to just above the knee.
They were none of them garments I would have chosen to put on, being given more to practical skirts or slacks, to cotton blouses and aertex shirts, but once I had them on I could not help but examine my reflection in the looking glass. My skin, it seemed, had done well by its dowsing with rain water and looked soft and translucent. The dress was a very good fit, indeed it might have been made for me.