I am still wearing last night’s evening dress which is ruined from wine and other substances. I feel as slippery and as manhandled as a piece of leather. It is a new feeling, having been rolled about as if my body is made of modelling clay, my lip bitten as if it were food, my hands squeezed until the skin wrapped around them is white. I lie back on the vast and endless four-poster bed near the long tall windows of the hotel room and it is just like looking out of the porthole on a boat. I think of the tremendous things I am ready to do. My empty stomach contains a feeling of urgency, a pressure: London! Begin! How, though, to begin? And begin what? Piers is making a business of dragging furniture across the thick carpet and something in my chest lowers.
‘This is where the donkey will look best, Prue. Closer to the window. You need light to work.’
What he calls the donkey is a narrow wooden bench with a sloped edge for life-drawing students to lean on. It was stolen by Piers and his friends from one of the St John’s Wood life-drawing classes that many of the Slade students attend. I am not enrolled at the Slade, I am too young at eighteen, but Piers smuggles me in to lectures and twice I have been asked to sit for the professor they call Tonks but both times I said no. Keep it up, Piers said. Being aloof increases your mystery.
I close my eyes. I was asleep but he woke me up. He is tapping the table impatiently, wanting me to rise, to start. He has laid out thin blue hotel letter paper and put a box of sharpened pencils on the floor. He wants to prepare the perfect surroundings for me, he says, the exactly correct conditions. He sets me tasks, little exercises designed to open up a room in my head and produce the contents, on a plate, for him. It started as a game, before we were married. Draw with your left hand, write before you wake up properly, don’t think about it, and just see what comes out. Art, Dear Prue, Art. But now when he arranges the room he does it without looking at me. He focuses fully on what he is doing, scraping the large heavy curtains back so it is lighter. He gets a twitch below his right eye when he is like this.
My name is Prudence Ashton. No it is not.
My name is Prudence Miller.
The only way to bring him back to a good mood is to look inviting on the bed. I shift so that I am a roll of up-and-down curve and look over at him. I think that he is going to join me and slide his hand behind my neck, but instead he jumps quickly on top of me before I can move, each of his knees pushing into the side of my chest. He does not have much hair on his body. He is smoking a Spanish cigarette.
He is drunk, I see now. The buildings outside the window are London-grey, a dream colour, the same as the inside of a Whitstable oyster. Last night we went to a lecture by the sculptor Gill and I listened to his long and mesmerising explanation of working the chisel directly on the stone. No pointwork, and if you work with heavy granite, he said, you feel heavy in thought, emotion. If you work in lighter stone, you feel lighter. In the corner of my vision I can see the glow of the cigarette end, a red coal, a snake’s eye. It sparkles as air is sucked through it. It comes closer.
I have been taken up – that is the way they phrase it – by Piers’s set. My unknowing ways entertain them. I understand the codes of international colonial living – the servants, the driver, the cook, the gardener, the natives, the rulers – but in London I have no idea how things go and they mistake my endless faux pas for subversive deeds and find me a hoot.
I wriggle under Piers’s knees, push my nails into his skin. I’ve had enough of this game. There is something unwise and destructive about his face, and yet beautiful, with his sloppy contemplations which suddenly transform into an intense concentration, an insistence on everyone in his orbit doing exactly as he wants, a despotic domineering quality.
‘Get off me. You’re drunk.’
He says nothing but squeezes his knees tighter against my ribcage. There is this new look again, he is staring at me but doesn’t really see me. Or what is it that he sees? A physical entity, like a doll you might pull around, tug legs off, discard.
‘Move, Piers, come on, I can’t breathe now.’ I hit his knees. He is shaking his head, lips loose and wet. I am not laughing.
‘You didn’t do the drawings yesterday. You didn’t give me any more work.’ He takes one long inhalation of his cigarette, moves his face towards mine.
‘I couldn’t come up with anything.’ The more I squirm beneath him the heavier his weight. The glowing end of the cigarette dips between us. Ash falls on to my lip.
‘Yoo-hoo.’ There is a banging on the door. It is Marguerite, coming in without waiting to be invited, which is her way, and Piers leaps off me, stag-like and supple, and I see that before he turns around his face has a sarcastic smile. He puts his cigarette out on the rim of a vase full of dead Christmas chrysanthemums. I tug the sheet up around me.
Marguerite, wearing brightly coloured stockings and a dress that looks Grecian in its flow, loosely belted, and covered with a bright blue gypsy shawl, brings outside smells into the room. I have been in here for days. Weeks. Centuries. Food comes. Weather outside changes. It is not fresh air that she has brought in, just a different version of stale air. Marguerite looks at me and then quickly away.
‘Please don’t just walk in,’ Piers shouts in mock-horror, taking his time to clamber across the floor towards his dressing room. I sit up, exposed in the bed, trying to remember how badly ripped or stained the dress I am wearing is. Piers moves slowly; he has a long thin, perfect streak of a body and he likes eyes on his skin. Marguerite watches Piers. She lets her hand, with its own cigarette, drop. Her mouth open slightly, she brazenly looks at him and the question rises up in me: have they slept together? And I know: of course they have.
‘What do you want exactly, La Margarita?’ Piers calls over his shoulder. Marguerite stands at the mantelpiece, quite still, as if half with us in the room but half elsewhere. She told me one night as we drank schnapps together that Piers had had a particularly terrible time during the war and that it had done something awful to his mind; burnt out a hole in it, she had said. Like a cigarette burn. She had caught my hand, that night, and rubbed it with her thumb and told me not to let him tell me what to do. I was not interested: in her rub-rubbing the skin on my hand and looking at me oddly. At her warning, which I took to be interference.
‘It was really just to say that Herbert Read has invited us all to dinner. He is keen to meet la petite fille.’
Piers, trousers on now, doing up his button, spins around and seems to snap out of his half-cut morose fug.
‘Really? Margarita. That is rather brilliant of you, how did you pull it off?’ Now he is all warmth towards her and gestures towards the fireplace where, with his thrifty nature despite his comfortable circumstances, he has installed a tea-making rig on the hearth and, so far, the maids and the room-service waiters have turned a blind eye.
‘The inestimable Herbert Read,’ he says, clapping his hands lightly. ‘Only the most powerful man in the art world. Will you have tea, dear? We rather lost track of time and I am guessing it is elevenish?’ He looks around the room as if for confirmation. He has forgotten that he smashed all the clocks up in here when we first moved in.
‘I don’t think so to tea, do you?’ She laughs, a brittle yelping laugh, and puts her hand to a silver charm that hangs around her neck. I can’t see what it is, just the glint of it. ‘He’s taking us to the Savoy. Nine on Friday.’
She looks over at me, suspended in bed, and there is my old doll, Lulu, at the end of it, making me feel even more as though I am their child. Looks between parents that mean something but I am not sure what. I don’t know why that doll is there. I haven’t seen it for a long time. Piers must have moved it from my trunk. When Piers first introduced me to his friends he led me through a crowded room one evening in a flat in Chelsea to a corner where we could speak privately.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said, and opened his book. In it were drawings, or doodles rather, all very similar: heads stretched, eyeballs, layers of faces, and twiste
d bodies. They were dolls, I realised. Some with extended heads, or twisted necks. They had a similar face, eyes wide, far apart.
‘They look like me.’
‘I drew them five years ago.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It means I imagined you before you came. Or it means we were meant to meet.’
That was it then, the perceptible shift. A change in the way they all treated me; less like open game, less like a stray foal in the oddest dress, with the women wondering: did she actually mean to put that hat on her head in such a manner? They began to talk to me as if I were fragile, difficult, vulnerable, as if I had come back from a long voyage on a steamship with an incurable disease that had no clear symptoms. Mostly, they saw me as Piers’s property. He laid down his claims and without discussing it, just by default, I moved to his bed and as it was his father, Earl something or other, who was paying for everything, he asked everyone to leave apart from me. He cleared them out. GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT I’VE HAD IT WITH YOU PAUPERS AND SCROUNGERS AND ARTISTS DISPLACED LEAVE US IN PEACE. Shortly afterwards, very drunk, we were married by an easily bribed official in Hackney who had never seen as much money in his life as the bundle of notes that Piers forced into his palm, and Marguerite was always there, shimmering, moving as if ice skating. She picks up the doll and examines it. Puts it back down on the bed, gives me another look, training her eyes on me as a dog does, lowering the head, telling me to stay, telling me to run. I half-expect her to bare her teeth.
As soon as she is gone Piers points towards the donkey. ‘Now, draw. Get up,’ he bangs his fist on the bed, ‘get up, get up.’
I ignore him, turn over. London. Piers. It is the one place my father, with all his Englishness and his rearranging of cities all over the world, has never lived or known. Piers is sitting on my back, his hand on my hair pulling it up so that my mouth opens involuntarily. I let out one gasp, thinking this will be sexual, but before I can respond he has pushed my face deep into the pillow. There are bright lights crossing on the inside of my eyelids, and I heave my spine, push against him, but he doesn’t move his hand.
His voice has gone sickly sweet. ‘I want to see what comes out of that beautiful little mind, that’s all. Draw, or write then.’
When he lets go the air comes back at me in a rush, and I push him off, furious. I jump from the bed and go to the window, rubbing a tear from my eye so that it is not crying, just part of skin. His words follow me around the room like a snake. I understand Herbert Read is a literary as well as artistically minded fellow. In the mirror I am a wreck; I look like a broken bride. I peel off the evening gown and change quickly into a simple green dress, my skin tense, not looking at him or listening to him, but it is pointless. My attempt to punish him falls flat as he is unaware. I lean against the donkey and take a pencil.
Dear Father
Father
Dearest Father
Father
Piers comes behind me, making me jump, and whips the page from me, screws it up.
‘Good Lord, not that.’ He gives me another sheet of paper. ‘Tell me.’ He needs these stories, as much – maybe more – than he needs drink. He has a knife and he weasels out parts of my mind. If I tell him a dream he writes it down. If I doodle on a writing pad, staring into space, he whisks it from me. He returns, hours or days later, and shows me his own working of a drawing or painting and it is always based on something I have done. He takes my notebooks and turns them into his own. I refuse to look at him, but I draw: a snake creature with feathered edges, a curling tendril swirl, I do what he wants, let it come automatic and unthinking, the loops and the edges, the words and the scratches, and as I do, he disappears, the city disappears, the sea and the boats and the sky disappear, I am at a still-point inside myself, the unsafe feeling calms, fades, I am balanced.
He takes, and he takes them all, as if they feed some hole in the centre of him.
The only painting he has done recently which does not originate from something I created was still a portrait of me, although not completely realist. I am standing next to a bicycle on a Bloomsbury square, wearing a long blue dress, looking down at the ground. Perhaps the expression is furtive, distrustful, as if any morals I might have had have been laid out to be picked over by birds. There is a figure behind me, leaning against the railings of the gardens, a person in a black coat, who is obviously intended to have a menacing presence, a threat. A crouching, creeping, following person and I assume it is him, Piers, putting himself into the picture.
I move over towards the fireplace and put both hands on the mantelpiece. At first, being the intense object of his focus, his attention, was wonderful. I felt bathed, wrapped up, as if I had been tucked into bed with my shoulders covered and my toes warmed, then examined, understood, observed. Now, I am getting rather tired of being told what to do. I look up at the large, alcove-arched ceilings and remember how, as a child in Jerusalem, I wanted more than anything to go up in an aeroplane and fly above buildings that were empty. To see what the world must look like from above. It seemed to me that a person who can look down on the world is free.
‘Here is what we are going to do.’ Piers, fully dressed now, is walking around the hotel room with the rigid neck of a sergeant-major. Sometimes, I can clearly see the soldier rather than the artist he purports to be. ‘I am going to my studio and you are going to work.’
The word work has become a threat from him. For days he has been telling me about his new studio on a ground floor with four tall windows that open out on to a garden where rabbits hop. ‘You would like it,’ he keeps saying, but he doesn’t invite me there.
‘I am going to the studio,’ he says again, as if he is offering me a gift.
‘Surely I could come and work alongside you?’
‘You work better alone. I work better alone. You know that. I need you to not be there, it’s too distracting. I will be . . . two days. I have put all the food over there.’ He points to the bureau which is really a disguise for a liberally stocked drinks cabinet. There are three netted bags and I can see oranges and cake and sour bread and jam. He went out and shopped for all of this early this morning while I was asleep, bringing it back himself rather than having the packages delivered.
Then he takes me to bed. As if sealing something in his mind, but the sex is different. It’s too tender and careful, less calamitous than usual. Normally we fall out of bed. Bump noses. Sneeze in faces and fall asleep halfway through when drunk. He wants to gaze into my eyes, wrap his fingers around mine. It makes me queasy and when he’s done I turn on my side, eroded by the empty feeling after sex that did not quite meet in the middle. He tiptoes around the room, as if I am a child having an afternoon nap, thinking I am asleep. The door clicks. One, two of his footsteps outside the corridor and then nothing.
I immediately sit up. A pigeon flutters on to the balcony, its grey scraggly wings dragging in a pool of rainwater that has collected there. It has a gammy, revolting wound at the end of one leg in place of a foot and it hops and balances awkwardly as it bows to drink from the puddle. I hear another door slam and click locked further along the corridor. Something propels me to the window, I open the balcony door. That at least is not locked, and I look down at the street. Piers, pretending to be a socialist, eschewed his family’s insistence of a personal valet, but somehow within the web of political reconfigurations – confused and contradictory at the best of times – agreed to retain a driver called Barnes and his Buick. Barnes is standing with the door open and Piers is striding across the street towards the vehicle. I put my hand on the balcony railing and watch them. Piers leans close to Barnes talking about something and then he turns and waves. It is Marguerite, walking quickly, muff in her hand. She must have been waiting. They slide on to the back seat together.
I come back inside the hotel room. The door to the corridor is locked, although I could of course shout. Bang on the door. Someone would come. I sit on the floor with my back resting on the bottom pa
ne of the balcony door. I press my palms into the fluff of the red carpet. Stretch my toes so they are flat. There is something not quite right with my breathing. I lie down, head on the carpet, and I stay there.
Piers told me that he first saw me in the bookshop on Charing Cross Road. My face flushed, peeling off my goatskin gloves and looking very queer, but I didn’t notice him at all. I was watching the bookseller, with his neat beard and his little puffs on his pipe. My skin felt as if it was on fire, I wanted to be entirely stripped of all clothing, as if the feeling of silk or cotton on my body was torture. This desire to release myself from hats and gloves and scarves and coats kept overtaking me. In the bookshop, my cheeks were blazing. I knew I must move and I made my way to the door but another woman was coming in. Roughly, rudely, I barged past her, out into the despicable London rain, though I welcomed it because its coldness cooled my skin.
I crossed Charing Cross Road and later, Piers said, he and his friend Marcus ran to keep up with me and I was almost hit by a fast omnibus that I had barely noticed. I ducked under the Hercules arch into Greek Street. Walked, fast, to Old Compton Street where I paid a penny to a hand in a slot and descended steep steps which smelled of urine. A penny cinema.
The film was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. On the screen, a man with a black hat and a bandanna around his mouth arrives at a London door. The landlady opens it; behind her a staircase winds upwards, perhaps leading to heaven. I remember that my body was hot, my skin still on fire, and with my eyes on the screen I undid the top button of my blouse and then quickly, in a flurry, undid the rest. I leant down and unfastened my shoe buckle. The sensation was similar to a small sip of brandy: peace, for a second, and then an immediate need for more. As I rolled my left stocking down, I was aware that two men had sat close to me; one on the row of seats behind me, the other two seats along on my row. I did not particularly care. I removed my right stocking. I was not afraid of anything. I glanced at them. They were quite handsome – at the good age, twenty-eight or similar – with sharp straight noses and arrogant eyes and mannered collars and I knew their type: the men who want to impress one another, who live for the posturing and the flippancy. I had their complete attention. I wouldn’t quite say that their mouths were open, but it was close: a hypnotism, a transfixed extended moment of time controlled by me. I turned to the man sitting closest to me.
The Photographer's Wife Page 14