All the Perverse Angels

by Sarah K. Marr

  As we walked home Diana and I spoke of the studio but, each aware of some tacit agreement, we both ensured that the conversation centred on the artistic and narrative aspects of our time with Mr. Taylor. I told her of my wish to have hair as fair as hers. She assured me that she thinks my chestnut locks perfect for the role: they give me an air of “purposeful fragility”. Then, as we came within sight of the college house, she said:

  “The thing about lay figures, about using them, using full-sized dolls, instead of real people… The thing is, they are not hard to come by, and they are not inappropriate for princesses. They are, however, expensive.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I awoke to an empty cottage and Venus. I had thought that I would rise early, keen to get to the boxes from Gerald, but yellow kept me down. I threw on a dressing gown that must have been Emily’s, because it certainly was not mine, unless I had forgotten about it, and maybe I had, maybe it was from my mother.

  The bathroom mirror was filled with well-known strangers. The student of Johannes Vermeer’s Music Lesson looked off to the right, towards an instructor I could not see but could sense beside me, standing in black with a sash from shoulder to hip and his hand resting on a cane. And the student’s face, framed by ringlets and bows, but only in the mirror, because she was painted from behind with dress and shoulders and no face but the one in the mirror: the mirror behind the virginal at which she sits, the mirror on the bathroom wall, the mirror on the wall in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. They arrived behind me then, the two figures in Van Eyck’s reflected doorway, distorted by their mirror’s convex surface, small and insignificant compared to the couple who are the main subject of the Arnolfini canvas, who were not showing their faces today. And maybe, just maybe, one of these small figures was Van Eyck himself, come to join me. I stared ahead, because they were not in the room itself, and nor was Ford Madox Brown—perhaps it was Ford Madox Brown—ready to receive a child I did not have to give but, then, he could not see me, I supposed. Brown only saw the woman in his own painting, Take Your Son, Sir!, the woman who held out her baby to him as she stood before the halo of a circular mirror: wife or kept woman, moment of joy or morality tale, or both. Who was I to judge? My Brown looked sadder than his reflection in the painting. My Brown was older, knew his son would die as an infant before the painting was finished, knew the painting would never be finished. All these joined me as I brushed my teeth, and all these left with the arrival of Venus, another reflection, another delicate resonance.

  Diego Velázquez painted The Rokeby Venus in the mid-1600s. He was lucky to get away with it, given the Inquisition’s displeasure at seeing naked women on Spanish walls. Venus faces away from the viewer, lounging on a day-bed, resting her head upon her crooked right arm, looking into a mirror held by her son, Cupid. I saw, in my mirror, the face of Venus just as I saw her face in the mirror of the painting, even though it ought not to be there at all, her face, because the angles are wrong, because light does not work that way. And she would know. Velázquez’s goddess gave her name to the Venus Effect, the weird behaviour of mirrors in paintings, which reveal the reflection of their subjects to the viewer even as it is revealed to the subjects themselves. Somehow, impossibly, she admires her own image even as we admire it, as I admired it in my mirror, but mirrors do not do that: either she gets to look at herself or we do, but not both, not in the real world, at least.

  My Venus, Velázquez’s Venus, was slim but not thin, curvy but not Rubenesque, and maybe Velázquez used a live model and maybe he did not. In either case he painted her in a variation of the pose of the Borghese Hermaphrodite, an ancient marble which he saw in Rome, before it went to the Louvre but after it was placed on a marble mattress carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. If I shifted my head I could see that mattress, a perfect creation of feathers and warmth, but hard and cold to the touch, if I could have touched it.

  I could touch the mirror, though, and did, moved the cabinet door on which it was fixed—opened, closed—and my reflection moved with it, cold, out of sight and back, with no Venus Effect and, besides, nobody to see it but me, and nobody sees the front of the Venus so nobody knows what lies between her legs. She was cut, once, with a meat chopper, by a Suffragette called Mary who came from Canada and was arrested nine times, force-fed, joined Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted Fascists, left them, died. Venus was repaired and the cuts are almost invisible, like old scars on her skin, painful memories on her neck and back and hips.

  I sat on the side of the bath and finished brushing my teeth, trying to clear my head and prepare myself to attack the contents of Gerald’s boxes. I had seen a copy of the Borghese Hermaphrodite in Florence, in the Uffizi Gallery, and Turner—Turner who painted Whitstable and decorated a biscuit-tin lid—Turner sketched it, about a year after completing his watercolour of the Rivers Greta and Tees at their confluence. Ruskin used the watercolour in the Oxford Teaching Collection and must have guided his students to the background, between the trees, to the front aspect of Rokeby Park, once home to The Rokeby Venus. I stood and spat and rinsed and went downstairs to look for biscuits.

  The boxes were stacked neatly by the side of the fireplace. I took the uppermost and placed it on the table beside the painting. It contained a mess of receipts, a tyre-pressure gauge, a mid-seventies Oxford telephone book, a collection of loose paperwork and policy documents which must have come from Mr Carter’s time in insurance, and a plastic doll from the 1960s, judging by its torn, op art dress. I looked through the papers one final time, in case I had missed anything, but no, there was nothing there to help me. The second box turned out to be the one which Gerald had opened in Whitstable, but instead of examining the contents in detail I put it aside and opened the third. It matched the first: a mess of random papers weighed down by an old, digital alarm clock in a fake walnut case, missing two of its four buttons. Gerald must have opened one box and then assumed everything around it contained the same sort of materials. There was a certain pleasure in knowing that the detective work had been left to me.

  I set the one interesting box on the table and began to sort its contents. In the hours after the Whitstable visit I had imagined that I would read the books as I removed them, read through their pages in a frenzy, look for the identity of my friends and the story they wanted to tell me. Instead, I found myself working methodically and calmly, bringing order, Klee’s geometry, cool marble, gentle rivers. After about ten minutes I had arranged the Oyster Bed pilgrims into five congregations, neatly arranged on the table. The first was a set of three notebooks, each about six inches wide by eight inches tall, bound in marbled boards, with leather reinforcing the spine and corners. On the front of one of them a crumbling paper label hung by the last of its glue, identifying its owner and author as a Miss Penelope Swift. The other two covers each possessed a lighter area of similar size, where their labels had evidently rested, before the paste had finally withered with age. All three were diaries, their entries varying in length from several pages to little more than a date and a sentence fragment. Folded letters and ticket stubs peeked out from between a few of the pages.

  The second gathering was also made up of notebooks, filled with the same, neat hand as the first, greater in number—there were eight of them—but with fewer pages. All but one of these were of a slightly larger page size than the diaries and contained notes in English, Latin and Greek. The odd one out was a smaller book containing both notes and sketches. Next came a small pile of envelopes, mostly empty, some with stamps, others delivered by hand, all addressed to Miss Swift. The fourth group contained a couple of old guidebooks, and the fifth was a jumble of personal effects including a silver mechanical pencil, more ticket stubs and an old pair of bootlaces.

  When everything had been removed from the box, I found tucked into one corner a lock of reddish-brown hair, tied round with a light-green bow. I took it over to the painting and held it against the head of the nearest figure. It was far too dark. Held against the other figure i
t seemed to match, not perfectly, but I could believe it belonged to her, if I allowed for some artistic licence on the part of the painter. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled deeply. In its scent there was nothing left of the woman to whom it belonged, nothing to echo the sensations of her protector, who held her with those locks only a breath away. Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux. And I wanted more but had only the smell of dust and mildew to shake memories into the air. I tucked it between the pages of one of the guidebooks for safekeeping.

  There was some part of me that did not want to sit down and begin to read. I was afraid that the stories I could construct, built on a loose scaffold of connections, would always be better than the truth. Yet I opened the uppermost diary and checked the first entry.

  Saturday, 1st January, 1887

  A new diary for the start of a new year. Our guests left this afternoon and I believe that Mother and Father share my relief at the end of the annual descent of family and friends upon our home. I have given the rest of the day to reading the copy of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which I received from Father.

  The second diary started earlier, in mid-May of 1886, and the final one later, in the last days of August of 1887, when Vincent was in Paris, painting sunflowers and tangling balls of dyed yarn as he explored colour theory. Outside the cottage the sky was bright and the sun was teasing the night’s frost into a facsimile of morning dew. Inside was a god-awful dull affair to me, a girl with mousy hair. No daddy to tell me to go, but I went, taking the earliest diary, wrapped in a plastic bag recently relieved of the bread and butter and eggs with which it arrived.

  The village was clear. In the black tarmac the receding waters had left looking-glasses full of warm stone. Where fields showed through between buildings and walls, gates and fences, they lay fallow and still glazed with eddying mist. The village was Brigadoon, back for a day after another lost century, or seemed so until I reached the main road and a Ford Escort broke any spell cast over the place. A door sign told the world that the bookshop was shut, and would remain so until half-past twelve. There was no reason to suppose that the sign could be trusted on a mid-week day when the world was not around to rely on its accuracy. Next to the bookshop was a small café, with a blackboard outside promising the unseasonal availability of ices. Above a few rows of tiles—some white, some green, and white chips on the green ones—a large window made of small panes revealed tables and chairs. Several of the panes used bull’s-eye glass, thick and distorted, twisting the tables into smears of light pine. The other glass was clear and even, showing the bull’s-eyes for what they were, an affectation designed to give the place a false sense of age. I could see an elderly couple sitting as far from the door as possible, each nursing a cup of something steaming. They looked back at me without any sign of interest.

  A bell tinkled as I entered and a short, round lady appeared from a door in the rear wall. She wore tweed as though it were a military uniform.

  “Hello,” she said. “Anywhere you like. I’ll get a menu.” She vanished back through the door and reappeared just as I sat down at a table by the window.

  “I’ll give you a minute to decide,” she said and started her retreat to the safety of her kitchen redoubt.

  “Oh, I’d just like a pot of tea, please.”

  The little round lady turned and took the menu off the table with a countenance which hinted at pleasant delight in having my custom but shouted ill-disguised contempt: all I wanted was a cup of tea, and even then I had not ordered until she had fetched the menu, and what was the point of that then? It started to drizzle again, little circles in the puddles, breaking the upturned houses and trees, sending clouds scampering outwards. I unwrapped my plastic parcel and placed the diary on the table. Tea arrived, served with shortbread biscuits and mild disdain.

  Many of the early entries were short, one or two words, a single sentence: “Margaret has a new cat”, “Weekend with the Bankses”, and so on. July began with a longer entry:

  Thursday, 1st July, 1886

  Yesterday, Royal Holloway College was officially opened by Queen Victoria. It is a college for women only, and when I mentioned it to Father and Mother they approved. I told them that I felt it might be of benefit to continue my own education and they did not appear averse to the idea. Father, in particular, promised to give the matter some consideration over the next few months, although he expressed his wish that my academic performance continue to be such as to encourage him to look favourably upon my attending college.

  There was little mention of art in the diary. Penelope’s schooling was designed to impart the more ladylike pursuits required of a good wife. She spoke of literature and history quite often, but almost always in the context of her mother or father. Her mother did not seem to work but Penelope wrote of overhearing her discussing politics and the social upheavals of the day with her father: riots in Belfast, talk of a Women’s Liberal Federation, a general election in July, not a year after the last. Her father, as far as I could tell, was something in publishing: on a few occasions Penelope described hearing her parents argue “about the new business” or “over the demands of the new bookshop.” She and her father were close, judging by the regularity with which she mentioned him: sometimes no more than, “Spent an hour or two with Father,” other times with more substance. One entry in particular caught my attention:

  Saturday, 4th September, 1886

  This morning I found myself alone in the house, but for Cook, who was busy in the kitchen preparing for this evening’s dinner party. I decided to read but lacked anything of interest in my own room except for those favourites which are already much read. I went downstairs to Father’s office, to search amongst the new books. I still do not know what possessed me, what caused me to behave so abominably, but I became caught up in my curiosity and opened several of the cupboards in the base of the large, glazed bookcase. It seems so ill-conceived now, as I write of it, but at the time I did not stop to consider my actions.

  In the second cupboard I found an old book—MDCCXLV, London—which seems to be written, for the most part, in English from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The short preface, however, describes its having been authored and published only some eighty years previously. That edition, it says, was banned and destroyed by order of the Crown. The story is entitled Ye Straunge Hystory of Thomysin & Oliuia. I had not even proceeded past the title page before Father entered at such a brisk pace that he was some distance into the room before he espied me at his desk. He stopped short and said, “Penelope?”

  Sip of tea. Purple pill. I read on.

  I braced myself for his anger. I had behaved in a way that caused me to feel guilty. How then could Father’s reaction not hold a mirror to that guilt? Yet he showed no sign that he wished to punish me: sitting on the window seat, he patted his hand on the cushion beside him. When I rose he nodded towards the book on the desk. I picked it up and went over to join him. He took it from me, turning it in his hands, reading the spine, even though I am sure he already knew which volume I had selected. He asked me what I thought of it.

  I told him that I had not had a chance to read any of the story itself, but that I found the title most intriguing. At this he handed the book to me, and told me to read it over the course of the next few days. I am not, however, to show it to Mother: she, according to Father, is not impressed by any fascination with literature which does not pertain to the modern woman. I have always thought it odd to keep secrets from either of one’s parents, but, for a situation in which the distress or incredulity of that parent is an inevitable consequence of one’s honesty, I am willing to accept such secrecy.

  Then he kissed me gently on my forehead and sent me off to my room.

  The rain had gathered pace, and its rapping on the window distracted me from my reading, even as Penelope took me into her confidence. I nibbled on a biscuit, staring out as Venice returned to the village and, with it, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He
was there, too, in Venice, before Monet, creating etchings for a commission. Diamond panes either side of a doorway, and a girl there, looking at her reflection. The woman behind—it looks like a woman, but so does Venus—holds her face to her hand and leans against the open door in encroaching shadow, beneath the chairs hanging above. And then the eye runs back, back over the steps, to lesser figures in a caner’s workroom. Through my window the reflections shattered, running from figurative to abstract, just as Whistler’s Venetian girl lost her twin to the finger-smudges of ink on the printing plate, a different smudge for each impression. The biscuit mixed with tea. Tweed returned.

  “If there’s nothing else, I’ll just leave this here,” she said.

  Clearly, the option of there being anything else was entirely illusory. She put the bill on the table. It was slipped inside the tab of a black, leather holder. The paper aligned perfectly with the edges of the flap in which it rested. The pot was still warm, however, and not yet empty. I poured myself another cup and splashed in the last of the milk. The diary lay open but I held a new secret and was not ready to continue the story. My face blurred against the darkening skies as I focused out, out and down the gentle slope of the road to the bridge over the stream, where swirling stars hid beneath the dripping foliage of the bank.

  Penelope Swift, daughter of a publisher, and an Oxford student, judging by the college address on the letters. Was she the woman in the green dress, looking at me from the picture? The lock of hair suggested that she was, but as evidence it was far from conclusive. Or was Emily right? Then the androgynous figure in the tunic was a woman, too, possibly Penelope, resting in profile, holding her lover to her breast. I wanted her to be the green dress, not the tunic. I wanted to share a look with her, to have her be imploring me, somehow, to give her answers. I wanted someone to rely on me, and there, in the green dress, was someone I could never let down, someone who could never let me down. Swirling leaves rushing under a bridge and then the waiting on the other side, waiting until she came home from work, waiting until she collected me from the hospital, waiting, and all a blur in the rain.