“I always knew. Sometimes I just like hearing you talk,” she said. “Go on.”
“Right. Okay. Well, if you look here,” I pointed at the top of the painting, “you’ll see that these two corners are bare. The artist knew there were going to be spandrels. They’re the arched bits at the top corners of the inner frame. They covered the canvas here, so he didn’t bother to continue the painting beneath them. There are some patches of colour where he was testing his pigment and varnish mixes—”
“It’s definitely a male painter?”
“No, I suppose not. Statistically though… There are a few pencil scribbles, too. Ophelia has the same thing: little daubs of paint where the spandrels hide the canvas. Splashes of colour, pencil sketches of birds, some sort of rat-like thing. They’re all there, hiding in the corners above Ophelia, Lizzie Siddal, in Millais’s bathtub beneath a willow growing aslant. Before her husband stole his poems from her.”
Emily put her hand on my arm and I paused, regaining a tenuous sense of pace and focus.
“Anyway,” I continued, “you can see that the ground, the layer on which the painting itself is made, is exceptionally white. Probably zinc white and lead white over the original commercial preparation of the canvas. It’s part of what makes the colours look as vibrant, as glassy, as they do. The oil paint is made from pigment, little particles of colour suspended in a liquid medium. I think the medium might be copal and nut oil, or something like it. Maybe Roberson’s Medium. That was popular at the time. See, around the edges the painting is slightly darker?”
Emily nodded. I could tell that I was testing the limits of her interest.
“That happens when copal mediums are kept away from light. Anyway, the refractive index of the medium, the amount it bends light, is close to that of the pigment it holds, so light passes through the paint without much scattering. A bit like when you drop a diamond in water. The diamond seems to disappear because it bends light almost exactly as much as the water around it does. So, the light goes through the paint—”
“The paint is the pigment and medium mixed together, right?”
“Right. The light goes through the paint and bounces back off the white layer beneath. It gives a kind of translucent appearance. Then you try to keep colours pure. One pigment in an area, not a mixture. You combine small areas of pure colour, so it doesn’t start to look muddy. But from a distance you get a range of colours.”
Emily took a mouthful of tea.
“Want me to go on?” I asked.
“I need to eat something. What about the artist?”
“Not much, but I have a plan to find out more. I’ll tell you about that after dinner. All I can tell you now is that it was painted later in the 1800s. At least, I think so. Something about it makes me imagine someone painting based on other Pre-Raphaelites. Not imitating, exactly, but not innovating either. The artist is all right, but he’s not astonishing.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. If you look closely you can see some of the sketching beneath the paint. Particularly where he used fugitive pigments.”
Emily looked genuinely puzzled.
“Areas where the colour has faded. There are a lot of pencil lines, a really detailed sketch straight onto the white background layer, probably whilst it was still a little wet.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, not bad as such. It was the way they worked. Sketching straight onto the painting, rather than creating preparatory drawings and transferring them when they were complete. But…”
“But?”
“But, look at a painting by someone as talented as Millais. The sketching underneath is sparse and fluid. He doesn’t need much to allow him to paint, doesn’t make many mistakes with what he does need. Here there’s a lot of detail. The painter needs his hand held when he starts applying paint.”
“So we’re looking for a second-rate, late Pre-Raphaelite with a penchant for Shakespearean themes?”
“Well, ‘second-rate’ seems a little harsh. Just not first-rate. And I’m still not convinced by the Shakespearean theme. I do agree with you about the ambiguity of the gender of the front figure, but it’s a calculated ambiguity. I think it’s probably deliberate and part of the story. With all that sketching I’m sure the artist would have fixed it if it had been a mistake, even if he’s second-rate. Could be a woman dressed as a man. Could be a man who looks feminine. Maybe something else. Maybe Shakespeare. Maybe not.”
Emily said we should eat.
Nicolas Poussin, painter of shepherds, once wrote a letter in which he linked the nature of his paintings to the modes of Greek music. It may be that he had a complex system of composition, a system which created ratios of size and position between the elements on the canvas, enhancing the emotions within a painting. Then again, he was writing to a disgruntled client who thought the painting he had received was inferior to another of Poussin’s. So, Nicolas may have been trying to get the guy off his back with whatever vague art-speak sounded like it might work.
Dinner was in Poussin’s Dorian mode, held with an air both grave and severe. As he constructed painting through music, so we constructed meaning through the act of dining. Our representations lay in the scrape of knife on plate, the slurp of tea and orange juice, and the page-rustle of a newspaper. Finally, as I stood to clear the table, I said:
“I know how we can find out more about the painting, Ems.”
Emily looked away from her newsprint and smiled a transparent smile.
“Oh? How?”
The removal of the frame had given me something, but not enough, not without returning to my gallery, discussing the piece with colleagues who specialized in the late-Victorian period, or with someone who did not know the period well, but knew people who did. Alison, who knew me, and cared when I needed her to care. Alison, who cared anyway. But the painting was shy and not ready for wider introductions. So I went back to the source, clicking open the small, black latch and being Jacob again, ascending, with the hum and the light above and the mice who would not scare me, I told myself, even as I was afraid that they would scare me.
Over by the window the light still stole through the dirt, but darker today, with clouds playing games in the sky, hiding Poussin’s blue above them. The dust-sheet lay where I had left it, a small drift of snow and pale begonias warped by the crumpling of cotton. In my fear of mice—which I did not have, I reminded myself—I kicked it with my foot and stepped back. Nothing moved. I glanced at the doll’s house. It lay sleeping, my handprints in the dust on its roof. The motes floated around me, filling my lungs with each breath.
Propped against the wall, visible without the painting for protection, an old bookcase held shoeboxes and papers, china animals, a stack of bathroom tiles, a tarnished silver mirror. A few brown-tinted paperbacks, tumbling from the bottom shelf and onto the floor, gave it some of the dignity of its purpose, but not enough to bring it back to life. It huddled, dead, buried under the detritus with poems to be reclaimed.
I picked up the nearest pile of papers and glanced through playbills and postcards, found the secrets of a washing machine from 1973 and a tape-deck from 1982, learned the notes to “Greensleeves”. So went the rest of the loose sheafs, and each one made me less hopeful and more expectant, as if I were searching the places I thought least likely first, because stories should have a quest and the painting should demand that of me, that I struggle a little.
The first shoebox was full of jigsaw pieces, large and small, wood and cardboard, edge pieces that were straight, edge pieces that were curved, fractured pieces of stories, snatches of tunes, broken modes. A child’s face, red-cheeked, missing an eye, had become trapped in a castle wall. Ducks rode a train into a tunnel of something purple, too blurry to make out, a little interlocking detail, robbed of context. Tabs and blanks and squares mixed with whimsies from a map of Britain, shaped like tourist attractions: Big Ben, Stonehenge, a jaundiced smudge which was probably the White Cliffs of Dover.
&nbs
p; The second box was on the bottom shelf. One of the front corners had been replaced by a ragged-edged hole. I reached out and flicked the lid off, toppling a pile of paperbacks, trying to catch them, causing even more to tumble to the floor, and even as they fell something moved to my left and I wanted to leave, but I stayed because the story needed a heroine. Everything settled to dust and heartbeats. Nothing moved inside the box, nothing lived amongst the receipts, and fragments of paper, and mouse droppings. I could have looked through the contents in the attic, where they belonged, but the light was poor, I said, and the dust was bad for me, I said. I remembered that Jacob did not ascend the ladder himself, but slept and watched the angels, and I was no angel so I did not belong, I said. I left the dirt and books, the mice and their house-on-a-racket-press, and took the box down to safety.
The details were not for Emily.
“I found the receipt in the attic,” I told her, pulling the folded, yellowing paper out of the pocket of my jeans. “We can use it to find out more.”
She took the receipt from me and read it, or made the pretence of reading it, then placed it on the table and sipped her tea with an air of deliberation.
“Anna,” she began, and the way in which she said my name caused me to stiffen, ready to defend myself before she uttered another word. “I don’t see what we can do with this. I’m not going to ask the owners about their private belongings. We shouldn’t even be in the attic. Right now you have their painting in pieces.” She gestured to the other half of the table. “And now you want me to talk to them about some paperwork you found hidden up there?”
“Oh. Oh, no. We can’t bother the owner. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” I sat back down and drank my juice, looking at her over the rim of the glass. “I thought we’d go to the auction house.”
“The auction house?”
“Yes. We can find out who sold the painting. No need to bother the owners.”
“Are you serious? Why would they even tell us? Even if they would tell us, why don’t you just ring them? I’m not going all the way to—” She looked at the receipt. “Reading?” She paused and checked the address. “You want to go to Reading?”
“I do,” I said, and wrapped both hands around my cool glass and looked down at the light bulb turned to sunlight by the orange liquid. “They might not tell us anything but I want to try. And I don’t want to call because it’ll be harder to persuade them if we call. And you said it wouldn’t hurt, a little research wouldn’t hurt.”
“I did say that, but…”
“I want to go to Reading, please.”
Emily examined the receipt yet again, but the address refused to change.
“And if we go, you’ll be satisfied?”
She blurred in front of me, in salt water with the same refractive index as diamond. I nodded.
“Fine. We’ll go at the weekend. At least call them and make sure they’re going to be open.”
“I did. They’re open tomorrow. We can go tomorrow.”
Emily rearranged her cup and spoon and the sugar bowl. Geometry, gentle modes of tension, Klee and Poussin. She looked straight at me.
“Anna, I have to work. I’ve missed enough already. I can’t keep asking my colleagues to cover for me. We’re a person short on the team. I can’t ask them.”
She ought to have been sorry. She had shown me the maggoty corpse in my own Arcadia, and if the truth was hard it was hard because it was her truth, and she had allowed me to ignore it, ignore even the possibility of it, until she showed me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I understand. We’ll go on Saturday.”
Emily handed the receipt back to me.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m still not sure what good it will do.”
I finished my juice.
I was Josephine Hopper for the rest of the week, sitting by a window, looking out and waiting for something. She sits at eleven in the morning, if the title of the painting—her husband Edward’s painting, another work of confinement and loneliness—if the title tells the truth. Eleven A.M. She sits, Jo sits, but not Jo if we are not told. She sits staring out of her window at a missing view. There is only her body, almost naked, naked but for flat-soled shoes, naked on her chair, and outside only the stones of her building, and the windows of another, in shade, and the slightest hint of sunlight breaking through between them. It was grey outside my window, but at least I had a garden.
The painting, my painting, not mine, but yes mine, sat beside me. But Jo has only a table-lamp and an impossible chest of drawers, set between chair and wall, where no space exists to be filled, and the drawers are just fronts with handles, and their opening is defied by the chair which blocks their path. Everything enclosed. A curtain on the wall, a curtain which should be a door, a curtain which seems to hide… what? It must be another room, with another window, because the sun hits its back wall and how could the sun slip in without an invitation? Maybe it is a guest room, waiting for Gauguin, but far too late. And it is too flat, too flat to be a way out. No room. As flat as the garden outside the cottage. Rose bushes all empty sticks, and all and ever entwined, with their perspective stolen and no shadows for depth. Jo has shadows at least. They shade a wooden chair, partly visible and nobody on it.
My wooden chair had the painting on it. I had company, even if I did not know their names. Even if one stared away from me, the other looked out and wanted to hear something from me. And all I said was, “Soon.” Aloud. Allowed to say that, as Emily was not there to hear.
Jo sits in Edward’s Automat, too, one glove on, the other off—because one should not wear a glove to lift a coffee cup—waiting, or tired of waiting, or no longer waiting. Alone, with another empty chair. But there is depth in the window behind her, plate glass and the lights on the ceiling reflected into a darkness which is cheated of the mirror of her, of tables and chairs, because they might give comfort. Red lips, red apples behind her in a glass bowl, amongst oranges and bananas. Red roses outside my window, but not then, because they might have given comfort.
Emily brought the newspaper home each night and I read down the columns. On Thursday I wandered to the little bookshop, floating on the lagoon which had returned with the morning rain. Outside, the cheap paperbacks were sheltering beneath plastic sheeting. The pooling raindrops magnified Penguins and Puffins. I bought a battered copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with an acid-trip rainbow cover and the silhouette of a piper in the corner. The rain was falling again, bouncing off the streets, by the time I had walked back as far as the church. The cottage was within sight, but I was not ready for my own confinement, so I sought refuge under the roof of the lychgate and began to read the words I had read so many times before. There were no new plot twists, no new jokes, just old friends in familiar situations, and I welcomed them all. I began to feel the chill of the day but the cottage did not offer warmth and I took the path between the graves, into the church. I sat at the end of a pew, the end by a window, reading pages faintly dappled by the colours of the staining between the lead. Nobody came, nobody left. Wooden chairs with nobody on them and the only paintings were paintings of Christ and the stories of Christ, with no interest in me but for our mutual distrust. The light faded over the lost hours until I could no longer see the shapes of letters against darkening paper. I slipped the book beneath my coat and left, afraid that someone would come and switch on the lights.
Inside the cottage I could switch on my own lights. I hung up my coat and dropped the book onto the table just as Emily arrived. The sound of the front door made me jump.
“You’re home early.”
I tried to say it matter-of-factly but I could not remove an accusatory edge. Emily replied whilst facing the coat rack.
“I can leave again if you’d like.”
“No. I’m glad to see you. I’m sorry. I bought a book.”
Emily looked over and saw the book beside me.
“Surely you’ve read that before?”
She didn’t wait for an answer so I could never say that she knew I had, and we had spoken about it, and it was one of my favourites but the radio series was better.
“Will you make a drink?” she asked. “I want to change and collapse on the couch. Let’s get Chinese or something.”
We got Chinese.
On Friday I was Jo Hopper and on Saturday we left for Reading.
CHAPTER SIX
Wednesday, 26th October, 1887
Mr. Taylor has responded quickly and effusively to my brief outline of Warber’s story. Whilst expressing his sincere wish not to be the pedlar of an improper invitation, he inquires if I might like to call on him tomorrow at his studio, which is a short walk from college, and where he will be working all day. I, not being as much of a naïf as others have cast me, discussed his offer with Elizabeth. I have only known her for a fortnight but I am usually a fine judge of character. She is one of those rare individuals who manage to apply sound reasoning to affairs of the heart—is this, then, already an affair of the heart?—without the accompanying harshness of tone so often found in those called upon for advice. In truth, she was a little short with me when we spoke, but I attribute that to her being distracted by her studies. We are all aware that we “bonnets” must achieve with a greatness exceeding that to which we might aspire were we amongst the men of the University. Nevertheless, her advice, given generously, is that I ought to ask myself whether I should agree to such an assignation were it certain to become public knowledge. Beyond that, she would not—she “did not feel it was her place to”—advise me, but she has kindly offered to be my chaperone should I decide to accept Mr. Taylor’s invitation. She ended our conversation by picking up a Latin dictionary and examining its contents with a studied exaggeration.
All the Perverse Angels Page 6