All the Perverse Angels

by Sarah K. Marr

  Dearest Penny,

  Knowing you as I do, I am quite sure that you are, at this minute, pondering how you might return this gift which you feel cannot be mine to offer, nor yours to accept. Please, put such thoughts out of your head. The box will never be missed and I am of the firm opinion that books belong with those to whom they offer the most pleasure. I have my Swinburne. You must have your Warber. Besides, my darling P., I know that you were eager to spend more time with the volume at Barbroke and found yourself unable to do so. Now you can take a closer look and see what you learn. At least I can be sure that your possession of the book itself, and the Tyburn pamphlet, will save you the trouble of writing copious notes. Will you share their secrets with me when we are together in Oxford?

  Papa and Mama find you to be a delight. Peter keeps himself to himself, but he is not one to swallow his criticisms and his silence tells me that he, too, enjoyed the pleasure of your company. I, of course, have thought of little else since your departure and am deeply saddened that my shortness of temper spoiled our time together at Barbroke. I hope you can understand that I was not angry with you, but with the situation in which we find ourselves, a situation run through with difficulties.

  Do you think what we share is improper? I have never been able to form a satisfactory division of life into proper and improper: both categories seem arbitrary in so many ways and change without any clear reason, so that what the Romans loved we abhor, and what we love they hated. Does that withstand argument, or am I trying in vain to excuse something within myself ? I do hope I am not, for I truly do not feel that I have anything to excuse.

  Please forgive my behaviour. I was a petulant child to become so emotional over the book. It reminded me so clearly that when we return to college we shall begin sitting again for Mr. Taylor, with all the complications which that entails. I want you to know that I now see how it may play to our advantage in giving us a chance to spend time together. Besides, I suppose we are not even sure that Mr. Taylor will wish to continue, after his last letter to you: the painting may remain ever unfinished as he pursues his dreams of abstraction.

  Do you like him very much, Penny? I remember when we spoke on that night in college, the first time you saw him, and I watched you as your gaze followed him into the garden. He was with his wife then, of course. It must be hard for you, knowing that he is married, and not only married, but married to our own Constance Taylor. Please do not forget that I am your friend, someone with whom to share your concerns, someone to ease your distress.

  It has been decided that the memorial service will be on Friday, 20th January, by which time all building works will have been completed. It will doubtless be an unspeakably sad occasion but it is best for all the family that Albert is finally laid to rest. Papa has always hidden his feelings from me, but I sense them—just the smallest amount—from time to time, when he seems preoccupied with thoughts which he cannot annunciate if queried on the matter. Mama has adopted all the social conventions of mourning, yet I have the unsettling notion that it is through the performance of what is expected that she avoids the need to face any real loss. Peter has always been quiet but, if pressed, I should say that he has been even more so since dear Albert’s sleep. He chooses to remain within his own world not because it is a place he wishes to inhabit but because ours is a world he wishes to escape. If that all sounds a little melodramatic then I apologize, as I apologize for my own melancholia, which was so obvious during our time at the Galleries, I know. If I have an excuse it is that I am able to be open with you as with no other, and that hiding emotion from you is alike to betrayal, in my mind.

  I shall not be coming up again until the following Monday, a couple of days after the start of full term. You must not think me lost to Barbroke. I should hate to imagine you at Oxford, worrying that I shall not return at all or, worse, that I have returned but failed to call on you.

  Until then, I hope that Warber will keep you company.

  Ever your affectionate,

  Diana

  After the signature she has quoted the final lines of “Love and Sleep”, which I still hear in her voice from the temple.

  And all her face was honey to my mouth,

  And all her body pasture to mine eyes;

  The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,

  The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,

  The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs

  And glittering eyelids of my soul’s desire.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Diana’s letter was folded neatly between the pages of the diary. I read it on the bus as it meandered back to the cottage. There were only eight passengers but the melting snow on our coats was enough to steam all the windows to a milky translucence. A faded, grinning face was visible beside me, just two dots and a curve, so low on the window that it must have been drawn by a child, in other mists, sometime within the past few days. I rubbed my arm down and over it in an arc, then back again, clearing enough of the pane to see out to the world. There were no towns of any real size between Barbroke and our village, but the cars passing by, the telephone boxes and the bus stops were enough to rip away the layers of history. At Barbroke I had been part of Penny’s world, and Diana’s, and I had left something of them behind. I felt the distance between us increasing with each mile I travelled until, by the time I stepped off the bus, I felt unspeakably alone.

  The village was quiet. It was too early for the evening traffic of returning commuters, too cold for tourists, too dark for me. Night seemed to arrive so quickly in winter that I could never shake the sense of its scheming behind my back, waiting for me to look away before it descended to oppress and confine. Sodium yellow, glancing off snowflakes, pooled on the ground beneath each streetlight as though huddled for warmth. The colour lost meaning in the absence of contrast, yellow to white and all else was shading. I watched my breath ascend and disperse, shifted my bag on my shoulder, sank my hands into my pockets and started for home. The snow was building again, coming down fast enough to defeat any lingering slush in the gutters. I wanted shelter and warmth of a sort which I knew the cottage, and Emily, could not provide; and Penny and Diana would not yet have returned to the painting after their time at Barbroke.

  Through the lychgate, away from the road, the graveyard faded quickly into an indecipherable Totentanz of greys and blacks, a smeared woodcut of the scene itself: fallen snow, falling snow, suspended snow, thick boughs which cut the scene in ink, branches juddering life into the cold; and beneath it all, always, the stones, worn but upright, patiently waiting. No pills today, not yet, left at home, forgotten in my hurry to leave and not missed in their absence. I sat beneath the roof of the gate and peered out, out to the waiting space, defining its individual elements without trouble, but unable to piece them together into a coherent whole. Caspar David Friedrich. Lines of monks, outside my grasp, always outside my grasp: walking towards them would ruin the print, stop the music, so I sat and watched, my own Klosterfriedhof im Schnee, a Monastery Graveyard in Snow. Friedrich painted it towards the end of the 1820s. In its middle distance stands the tumbled wall of a monastic church. Perpendicular windows—ruined, glassless—claw at the sky, high above an altar. The trees in Friedrich’s foreground, winter-dead and stark, became the supports of the roof above my head, and the monks within the clearing, the monks processing to an empty doorway in a broken entrance, scattered before me to take their places throughout the cemetery. There was no colour, as there is no colour in the forest-break of Friedrich, stolen by the destruction of the painting during a bombing raid on Berlin. All that remains is an old, black-and-white photograph.

  A coffin rests on the shoulders of the monks at the head of their column, already past one, two, three sets of steps and through the stone arch of the ruined entrance. Its time before the altar will be short, because in the foreground, by the dead trees, an open grave is prepared: a pair of spades for a headstone, stuck into the ground, eager to rain soil ont
o the coffin lid. The grave prepared and Diana waiting. I was cold, and drained by the company of cloisterers. The Klosterfriedhof belonged with things lost.

  The cottage was warm, and the light switch brought colour rushing back. I kicked off my boots and hung my coat on its peg in the porch. Ten minutes later I was sitting on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate clutched in both hands, sipping it as I looked at Penny and Diana, back on their bed, in front of me. I was seeing Diana before she became the cold marble of Saint Cecilia’s; but if Taylor followed Pre-Raphaelite practices, as he had claimed to do, then the faces were painted last, after the background and bodies were complete, so my Diana was painted after the kiss. Penny, too, must have finished the sittings looking out over the Diana of the temple at Barbroke, not the Diana of the University Galleries. I examined the expressions of the two women, wanting desperately to see something more of their story come through the varnish, but there was nothing new. Penny, as Olivia, still stared back at me with an air of expectancy. As Thomas, Diana’s profile remained strong and protective, yet something in the turn of her mouth revealed a disquiet at her imminent unmasking. Or perhaps neither woman portrayed any such emotions. Perhaps I was reading into the painting what Penelope had told me in the diaries. Perhaps everything I saw was the product of Taylor’s brushwork and imagination, just layers of pigment and copal, mixed and applied to a bright canvas. I sat back again and gave myself permission to imagine anything I desired. I imagined Penny glancing at Diana, trying to keep the corners of her mouth from turning upwards. But then, what if Penny just gazed at Taylor, seeing him, not Diana, as the one true constant in her life, even then, even after those days of unspoken promises? I pulled the diary from my bag.

  There was no letter from Penny in reply to Diana’s gift, at least not folded into the diary itself. I had glanced through the loose letters, too, and knew there was not one which fell early in the new year. It seemed unthinkable that there would be no note of thanks and, sure enough, on 12th January, Penelope mentioned a walk to the post office. She wrote at some length about her decision to keep the Warber, with the air of one who was justifying a decision after it has been taken, rather than weighing the pros and cons in order to reach it. I cannot say that I blamed her. I was sitting with the painting, surrounded by her diaries and letters, and I could entirely understand her desire to keep something she loved.

  The handle-click and swing of the front door brought me back to the cottage. Emily entered amidst a swirl of freezing air. She stamped her feet and swore under her crystallizing breath. I hurried over to her, the diary still in one hand.

  “They kissed!” I told her, then stood perfectly still, my face close to hers.

  “What? Who kissed? Let me get in at least. It’s taken forever to get home. The trains are just…” Emily trailed off and headed past me to the couch. “Make me a cup of tea?”

  I made her a cup of tea.

  “But it’s only six. You’re home early.”

  “I left at three. There was a general consensus that if we waited any longer we’d be spending the night in the office.”

  “You weren’t tempted?” I did not ask it out loud, but the pause was enough.

  “Anyway, I’m home,” she continued. “Want to tell me about your day?”

  I told her about my day. Except in reality I told her about Penny and Diana, with nothing of my own experience of Barbroke but the weather, the mechanics of transportation, and the implication that I had been standing in front of the objects which I described. I ended with Diana’s letter. There was no place for the Klosterfriedhof in the story Emily wanted to hear.

  “And there’s no reply?” she asked.

  “No, just a mention of a trip to the post office. She kept the book. She copied out a dedication scribbled on the final page.”

  “May I have a look?”

  I hesitated.

  “Or you could read it to me,” she said.

  “Of course. It doesn’t say much. ‘Hannah, mine owne Thomasin,’ and Warber’s initials, ‘S.W.’ Maybe Hannah was his girlfriend or wife.”

  “Or husband.”

  “Oh, you mean because of Thomasin. Do you think so? I suppose.”

  “I was being facetious. I’m sorry. Anna, do you think you’re getting a bit too wrapped up in all this?”

  “What else would I be doing?”

  The conversation dragged on, and everything was my fault, my mistakes, my reactions, and blue and black and white and red. She was just tired, she said, and I am sure that she was, but I was angry, again, and wanted to turn it outwards into the room, into the cold. So I said his name. Once. No context, no adjectives, just a proper noun in our own deadened space. Then another name, Anactoria, and she frowned and asked what I meant and before I answered she told me not everything was about paintings, not everything was someone else’s story. I said it was Swinburne, a poem, a pleading to a lost love, a pleading from one woman to another, a resentment, a search for consolation. The Venetian shadows returned. Then she was gone, over the frozen waters, into the cold and the snow. The lights of the car passed out of sight beyond the Klosterfriedhof, where the monks of the cortège, intent on their delivery, did not turn.

  In the window Jo Hopper looked back at me. Even when she vanished in reflections of table and chairs, fireplace and couch, I remained motionless, deliberately seeing through myself so everything was painted in blurred patches of light and shade.

  When he was thirteen Caspar David Friedrich watched his brother Johann fall through the ice on a frozen lake and drown. Knowing that, and knowing that he lost his mother at seven, and sisters, too, had changed how I looked at his paintings. Nothing could escape that history, his personal pathetic fallacy, or mine, ours, written over every landscape; his winters melancholic, his summers mocking. Most of his Monk by the Sea, about four-fifths of it, is sky. Moving down the canvas, dark green-blues lighten to a band of cloud with highlights hinting at an obscured sun. Then down into darkness again, to a sea in which Dylan Thomas would find Bibles. The bottom fifth is land, gently undulating in shades of sand and beachgrass. Nothing frames the image, nothing leads the eye as the trees lead to the Klosterfriedhof, the monks to the coffin, the gate to the church. A critic, Heinrich von Kleist, wrote that “when viewing it, it is as if one’s eyelids have been cut away.” Only the monk, the contemplative Rückenfigur—the figure with his back to us—steals the gaze. I stood before the painting, years ago, and thought I saw a vision of an existential sublime: a remorseless, endless beauty in the coming storm, defined in its breadth by the solitary man against whom it was set. But then, why is he there? Surely he is more than a slave to scale and composition, standing where he ought to be, on the golden section of the horizon, a tiny figure holding everything together even as he divides it into left and right, to please the lidless eye.

  There are flecks of foam on his sea, bright as the brightest clouds. They are trapped between ground and sky, except where the sea disappears behind the body of the monk, who rises a little way above the edge of the land. Here the flecks transmute, become small birds, each just a few touches of white paint on the canvas, wheeling, flying upwards, some part of a soul, the closest of them low by the monk’s feet, the farthest high in the clouds, lost in pale blue-greys. And, for me, the monk became more than just the immediacy of the figure he presented: he was my perspective, the one who stood by me as I entered the immensity of the painting, who started my journey, came with me and showed me that the others were wrong, that I could blink and return complete.

  That was Emily, had been Emily: a companion by my side since our first meeting in a Soho bar. We stayed late, long after closing time, when the lights upstairs were off and downstairs was left to the two of us and our friends washing glasses and tidying tables. We would have found each other sooner but I had been in Glasgow for the second year of my doctoral studies and had returned to London only a week earlier. Emily had arrived in the capital just as I left, to start the first year of her
master’s in international law and human rights. Still, we were both regulars at the bar and our meeting was inevitable, even if its outcome was not. The rest of the story was pedestrian, if not to us, its protagonists, then to its audience, to our shared friends, to Alison. Emily received her master’s after a further year and began to work with a large firm of London solicitors. I finished my doctorate and took a junior position at a gallery on Bond Street. We moved in together, had a cat for a while, until London traffic got the better of him. There were ups and downs but we managed, for a few years at least.

  Then, one day, I blinked and there was no way to return. I was Caspar David Friedrich, thirteen years old and standing by a frozen lake. Brother Johann was gone and all I could do was watch the birds ascend.

  I let my eyes focus. An artificial, Mondrian oblong became the open doorway to the kitchen. I fought myself in a gentle battle between hunger and exhaustion. Exhaustion won. Tea and purples, sloeblacks, yellows, sleep. Blue lights and wakefulness once more, for a few hours at least.

  On Wednesday I awoke with a thought, a memory of something that had gained importance over the past days, something I had already found without realizing it. Jacob, the ladder, and the golden light from above, but silver, too, more star than night sky, among the ascending angels. I clicked the black latch and followed the choir, who sang with the hum of the light. If the mice were scratching then they stopped before I heard them, and I was alone with a forgotten past that had been appraised as worthless. The bookcase still rested against the wall, revelling in its exposure, offering me tiles and china, paperbacks and precious metals, dusty bric-a-brackery at prices too good to miss.

  I heard a noise and turned, expecting the mice to have overcome their shyness, but the sound was carrying up the stairs from below, and I suddenly imagined that Emily was opening the door. Precious metals. I reached out and grabbed the silver mirror, pulling it to me in a cloud of dust. A roughly modelled swan, hollow between the wings, fell to the floor and broke into three pieces, never to hold toothpicks again. I hurried down the stairs, along the landing and down again, but there was no Emily. I peered out of the front window, but all that greeted me was a soil-shaded garden, damp and unwelcoming, set against the glass like a warder to keep me indoors. In the porch I found a menu for a local Italian restaurant, splayed on the tiles where it had fallen from the letterbox. I raised the mirror to my face and a green cloakroom ticket fluttered to the floor: 735. I started to rub at my blurred reflection with the cuff of my nightshirt, but found myself too hungry to wait for a genie. Penny looked out over Diana, watching me put the mirror on the table and head to the kitchen to forage.