I did not even show, Penelope. Once again I had nothing to share with my peers, or the wider world. It is not that I have nothing to say, it is that I have not the language with which to say it. It seems I contend with quite the opposite problem to Millais.
So where does that leave us, and our Warber? I believe we ought to continue, Penelope, but let us not title it, else title it in such a manner as to leave interpretation to those who will look upon it. The painting—that is, the heart of the thing—should transcend the inspiration and exist as an object of intrinsic value. And it must be shown where it can best fulfil its raison d’être. The Academy is a dusty place. The Grosvenor is favoured by Burne-Jones and others, but I hear that it is full of internecine strife and may not last much longer. There will be somewhere new, I am sure. There is always somewhere new.
Do I convey my thoughts with any degree of cogency? I am tired. Can you see why I must delay our meeting until I am quite ready to return to the piece? I do hope so. I believe by the commencement of next term I shall have had the time I need. Is that awful of me, to ask that of you, that you wait? Please understand that my struggle is with my art alone.
With fondest regards, your friend,
Matthew
I was unable to get a message to Diana before she arrived at the studio. On finding the door locked she came to college and found me waiting. She said it was “a damned good job” that she had not sent the carriage away before trying the door, but her annoyance soon dissolved when she saw that I was upset. I allowed her to read the letter. She said that Matthew seemed genuinely distressed, but she could not, or would not, say whether she believed his explanation to be truthful, or a design to hide a deeper truth, one which undoubtedly involves his wife.
We sat in my room and talked for a while. Together, we drafted a reply to Matthew. I suggested that we write something short, but not brusque, but Diana was of the opinion that my cause would be better served if we were to craft a longer letter, engaging with Matthew’s themes, lest I be perceived as dismissive of them in my brevity.
My Dear Mr. Taylor,
Thank you for taking the time to write and explain so thoroughly and completely the reasons for your being unable to attend our sitting yesterday. I hope you will not mind, but I took the liberty of showing the later pages of your letter to Lady Diana as I felt them to be of such a nature as to be personal but not entirely private. I remain aware that it is she, not I, who has the greater experience with the world of art. Just as you wished to demonstrate your desire to protect me, so I wish to show you that I am genuinely concerned for your happiness.
My father has of late been inspecting a forthcoming edition of the poet Keats’s letters, and I have been permitted to read a little of the manuscript, from which I took down several extracts. I believe that two passages are of particular interest. In the spring of 1819, Keats wrote to his brother George and George’s wife, asking, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” I believe that he was right to see our struggles as the tutors of our deeper understanding, elevating us above the mere beasts. So, my dear Matthew, I ask that you, too, might reflect upon your current worries and see within them an opportunity for improvement.
There is another letter worthy of mention. Two years earlier, Keats wrote to George and his other surviving brother, Thomas:
“It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
I showed this quote to Lady Diana and we are both agreed that it may hold the key to your disenchantment, or some part of it. You rail against a painting which reproduces some episode from history or a well-loved tale, or “becomes the embodiment of myth” as Lady Diana has it. It seems that you are troubled because these works are robbed of Negative Capability—robbed of their ability to entertain “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts”—because they are stamped with narrative by their titles and descriptions and left only as a photograph in oils.
It could be, too, that you see some paintings as too insipid to stir the imagination—Millais’s recent efforts, for example—and that the possibility of the exercise of Negative Capability is removed not by some degree of pre-determination, but by a lack of visual stimulation. I should venture a third category to which you would assign failure, being those pictures which take to themselves a subject so familiar to all that, even without title or explanation, it cannot be open to interpretation and thus leaves its audience in want of opportunity.
Lady Diana told me the story of an uncle of hers—of whom you may have heard, but whose name I shall omit to spare his embarrassment—who writes novels of reasonable merit, which one might, if charitable, term “literary”. Apparently he is in the habit of explaining these novels, in the course of drinks or dinner, to all who will listen, and in doing so is at great pains to ensure that they become ever-more attired in depth and meaning. Lady Diana says it has become quite the running joke in her family, and that “to act the Uncle D_____” has become a synonym for painting the lily; particularly so when the unadorned lily is not of an overly beauteous nature. This uncle, it seems to me, is guilty of committing the same acts against literature as you would accuse artists of committing against art: namely, an inability to produce work which derives its merits from within itself, speaking with its own voice, coloured by the experience and mores of its viewer.
I look forward to continuing our sittings in the new year.
With fondest regards, your friend,
Penelope
In truth, Diana was far less charitable in her assessment of Matthew than my letter suggests. If Matthew wanted to let the observers of his work construct their own narratives, she wondered aloud, then why did he not submit a blank canvas to the Academy, leaving them free to call upon limitless whimsy? I do like Diana—I like her a great deal—but she occasionally tends towards the insufferable.
She has invited me to spend the New Year with her on the family estate. I shall ask Father if I may, as soon as I arrive home.
Friday, 16th December, 1887
I have just withdrawn to my room after the college’s Christmas dinner. It was a curiously cheerless affair. I suppose that all the girls, and Miss Callow’s cohort, too, are keen to return to their families and distracted by thoughts of old friends and familiar faces. Diana did not attend, but she sent her apologies yesterday and was not expected. I felt lonely without her. I sat at a table with Elizabeth, with whom I remain on good terms, but who has taken advantage of opportunities to make new friends amongst the students, and whose company I no longer find as—how shall I put it?—“engaging” as once I did. Still, I made the best of my lot and talked with the other women, and laughed as required at the various bon-mots of the evening.
Mrs. Taylor was present, of course. She sat beside Miss Callow and, much to my relief, with her back to me. On the one occasion when she caught my eye—or I hers, I forget which—she gave a wan smile which amounted to a social politeness and nothing more. We did not speak, for which I am grateful. She left the dinner directly after Miss Callow’s closing speech, whilst the rest of us remained behind for drinks and the singing of carols.
Saturday, 17th December, 1887
A day of packing, carriages and trains. Finally I am back home and in my own room. I find it less welcoming, and more suited to a child, than I remember.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On Thursday I stayed in the cottage, watching the rain hammer down and run to the waiting gutter as if it were late for an appointment. I spent my time with the diaries, reading a little then turning to some magazine or book for a while. Or I dozed by the window, waking to the sight of the painting on the table, where it remained, condemning Emily to meals eaten from plates balanced on her lap. If it troubled her she had been kind enough, or wary enough, not to say anything to me. I drank tea, ate toa
st and cake, eschewed anything of nutritional value. If someone had peered through the window they would have witnessed a scene from an advertisement for cat food: a woman curled up in jeans and an oversize sweater, thick socks on her feet and a mug held up to her lips, looking out of the window at nothing in particular. All that was missing was the cat.
I recalled a television commercial for instant coffee. In the darkness just before dawn an old, white Volkswagen Beetle pulls up to the top of a cliff, overlooking the sea. Cut to an interior shot of a young woman, her arms crossed over the curve of the steering wheel, her chin resting on them as she looks out into the lightening sky. She is clearly unhappy, even crying a little. She reaches over and fumbles in the glove box, looking for a heating element which is just the right size for the mug she keeps on the passenger seat. When she finds it she plugs it into the cigarette lighter and makes herself a cup of instant coffee. Then an exterior shot: the woman gets out of the car and stands. Her hands are cupped around the warming mug. She sips her drink. She allows the first glimmers of resolve and happiness to play across her face, washed with the gold of the rising sun. The soundtrack assures us that the coming day is going to be bathed in bright, bright, sunshine. I had always taken the whole thing at face value.
What if she had arrived earlier, with no dawn to greet her? Or suppose she had left the heating element at home? Or the coffee? Suppose Thomas Chatterton lay on the bed in his garret, tearing his writing paper into confetti, preparing for death, when a friend knocked on the door. They started talking about the past few weeks, how they stood at the finish line by Shoreditch Church gates and watched a costermonger run the first four-minute mile. His name was James Parrott and they had chatted to him when he had recovered his breath. And then life did not seem so bad to Chatterton, and he thought he should just go out for a walk. It was going to be a bright, bright day. One small shift and everything changes. A young woman drives off a cliff. A young poet finds his own voice and writes again.
What if Matthew Taylor had not been there, that first evening at college? Or had been preoccupied with his wife, or the possibility of a commission from Lady Diana? No sittings, no relationship, no painting. It seemed wrong that these events might not have happened: they had been validated by history, removing the potential for things to be otherwise even before they had occurred. Chatterton had to die, so his story would end with tragedy, so his death could be romanticized, so Wallis could paint him. Penelope had to kiss Taylor, had to give herself to him—or have him give himself to her—and then sit for him, weave Diana into their arrangement, even if she never saw the future before it happened, even if Diana always did.
Those first few weeks of sittings must have been awkward. Penelope arrived early, before Diana, on every occasion. She must have been breathless, tousled when her friend joined her, but the diaries never mentioned the two women having any conversation about Penny’s physicality. Taylor showed nothing of her dishevelment in the painting.
I had my Penelope in the green dress, who looked out at me like Erinna in her garden, wanting answers. She was Olivia, and Diana was her Thomas, unless that was a trivial reading of the painting, too driven by the imposed narrative from which Taylor longed to escape. So, Penelope and Diana were on a bed, telling whatever story I wanted them to tell, or telling me something I was supposed to understand but could not, or asking me to write their history with them. Charlotte Corday was a heroine to some, a traitor to others, and that decision is forced by the paintings of her. There was no decision in Taylor’s painting, no definitive tale. I wondered if reading the diaries would close off the possibilities of history even further, and if I had the right to do that.
Penelope had thought Diana insufferable for commenting that a blank canvas would provide limitless freedom, but it seemed a fair point in the light of twentieth-century art. I saw Yves Klein’s IKB 79 whilst at college. It is one of Klein’s monochrome paintings, a single-colour canvas, titled for the blue of its paint: International Klein Blue, synthetic resin and ultramarine, lapis lazuli flowing with leaves under a bridge in Venice, Klein’s vision of the infinite. I was with Alison, the same Alison who worked at the gallery with me, the Alison whom I would not trust with my painting. She took me to the Tate, and as I stood before the Klein, as I stood amongst visitors and speech and laughter and footsteps, she reached into her bag and handed me a cassette player, slipped the headphones over my ears. When I looked at her with questions she just nodded towards the painting and I let it fill my vision, pressed play, and everything was bathed in the hiss of a blank tape, unchanging, remorseless, the perfect shelter. Klein gave us his IKB, his blue, and Alison gave me the chance of a blue of my own, a blue which began still wrapped in its own construction, in pigment and canvas, wall and hanging, in the movement around me and the mechanics of amplification. Then I drowned and there was only colour and static, and the meaning of colour itself was lost in its constancy and the noise became silence. Sometimes I believed I had fallen asleep and was dreaming, and I blinked, hard and long, and the deliberate blackness brought back the blue and with it the sound and the there-and-then and I breathed again—gulps of air—and let myself float. Sometimes I told myself stories, sometimes memories, sometimes nothing at all. I think I cried. When the tape clicked to a halt I had been standing for half an hour and as the water seeped away, back into the surroundings, the image on the canvas was lost.
By the time Emily arrived home Penelope and I had shared Christmas dinner and I was lying asleep on the couch. She woke me with a gentle shake of my shoulder.
“Hey,” she whispered. “Another hard day?”
“They’re all hard days,” I mumbled back, unwilling to open my eyes for an exchange which started with her beatification by work-ethic. She sat down in front of my hips and placed her hand on my head.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just had a hell of a time at the office.”
I heard the rustle of a plastic bag, and the smell of vinegar and deep-fried food filled the room.
“Fish and chips. I thought we deserved a treat.”
I opened my eyes. Emily kissed me on the cheek as I sat up. I think she expected me to turn and reciprocate but I just rubbed my eyes and assumed an air of confusion.
“What time is it?” I asked. “Shall I get plates?”
“It’s half past eight, and yes. And bring some salt and tomato ketchup. I’m going to move the painting onto a chair.”
“It has to stay flat, Ems.”
“Then I’ll put two of the chairs facing each other and lay it across them. Carefully.”
I told her I would do it whilst she went to the kitchen. I was usually drawn in by Penelope, but as I lifted the canvas it was Diana who gained my attention. I knew Penelope from her diaries, knew more than just the facts of her name and age and address. But Diana remained somehow aloof, as though she had meticulously crafted both the person she was and the person she allowed the world to see. There, in the painting, she was disguised, dressed as a man, half her face hidden from view. In the Galleries she had chosen to be Melpomene, and by her hip the mask of Tragedy, the symbol of the Muse. And to me the mask seemed to gain a reality and Diana took her part in Allori’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes. Diana as Judith, holding a severed head, set against her gold-yellow robes, cut off to save her besieged people from an Assyrian attack, cut off after she had seduced the general and filled him with wine. And the face at her thigh is that of Cristofano Allori himself, and Judith is his lover, and the ever-present maid her mother, perhaps, if biographers are to be believed. Of all the copies of the painting, Diana was the Judith of the Palatina Gallery in Florence, because of the eyes, the eyes of one who has seen horror, and whose lids speak of both resignation and defiance. But then, Judith is triumphant and Diana held only Tragedy by her hip, so perhaps there was only resignation in her eyes.
When Emily returned I still had the painting in my arms, lost in it. It fell to her to arrange the chairs. She brought pills wi
th the ketchup.
Over dinner I told Emily that she had been right about the picture’s being of two women, and told her about Penelope and Diana, and Taylor and Taylor’s wife. She asked what happened at the end of the story and I told her again that I had not reached the end and that she was a lawyer. Our focus shifted to the food in front of us and the cottage sat quietly but for the ringing taps of knives on plates and the creak of chairs. Soon the plates were empty compositions of white, silver and red: Piet Mondrian rendering colour blocks in condiments. We began to talk again, with details of the day’s activities and weather reports.
“Tomorrow I’m going to Barbroke,” I said, gathering up the plates.
“Barbroke?”
I answered as I headed towards the kitchen.
“Diana’s home. It’s near here. There’s a bus.”
Emily followed me and leaned against the wall as I ran water into the bowl and added a squirt of washing-up liquid. We continued over scraping and suds.
“But why go there?” she asked.
“Well, Diana, Lady Diana, is a bit of a mystery to me. I don’t know who she is, really.”
“Do you need to know?”
“Yes. Yes, I think so. Penelope’s about to spend the New Year with her, at Barbroke, and I want to be there, too, to read what happens. Don’t you think that’s exciting?”
“I suppose. Wouldn’t you rather wait until the weekend? I’ll go with you. We can take the car. It’s much easier.”
I was prepared for Emily’s suggestion. She was always sure that if mistakes were to be made then I was the one to make them. Her adopted role was she-who-picked-up-the-pieces, so she sought to pre-empt any opportunity for misfortune. She watched my hands moving in the cloudy water and I knew she was thinking about the sink at home and the tap running, the red spirals like raspberry-swirls in porcelain ice cream, pointillist poppy-heads at the margins. She never ran the film backwards, to before those frames, to causes, accusations, arguments. For her, the bathroom scene made us both victims of me, all previous sins forgotten. So I kept saying I was sorry and she kept telling me there was no need to apologize, all the while beseeching an apology.
All the Perverse Angels Page 15