All the Perverse Angels

by Sarah K. Marr

  Wednesday, 29th February, 1888

  Diana is mine again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I was still resisting the urge to run ever onwards with the diaries. I limited myself to a few entries each day, as though each small group were hidden behind the cardboard shutters of an Advent calendar. Besides, there was no need to read ahead to see that there was soon to be an end to the story. The last twenty or so pages of the current diary were blank, and I estimated that I had only a few weeks’ worth of Penny’s life before emptiness prevailed. I could not understand why she had given me so much—given me the painting and receipt, the diaries, the mirror and guidebooks, the building blocks of a biography—only to leave the whole edifice incomplete. But I read on, slowly.

  There was nothing more than, “Diana is mine again,” to explain Lady Diana’s return to Penny. Perhaps she was too tired to write more, exhausted from the constant reporting of arguments, separations and rapprochements. Or perhaps she felt that a single sentence said all that needed to be said.

  Penny was surprised when Taylor invited her to another sitting, asking that she bring Diana with her. I was not. It was in Taylor’s best interests to finish the painting and, however hard he might have wished it were not the case, he did not have the talent to work from either memory or pure imagination.

  Mediocrity of execution is no bar to the greatness of a painting. Mediocrity can be transcended by subject or composition, by a new perspective—literally or figuratively—or a new technique, by the story of the painting’s creation or tales of its subsequent owners. Taylor’s painting found transcendence in none of these. It was too late to the party, and too humdrum to make a splash when it arrived. Only for me, and for Penny and Diana, did it hold any great value. For Taylor it must have tantalized with the hope of success, with the recognition for which he yearned but which was never to come to him. Not that I could tell him, tell him not to waste his time, tell him that he was doomed to be lost to posterity, another name on a stone, writ in water. So, he went on, ignoring his better judgment and refusing to accept the dying of his pride.

  Penny saw no such explanation for Taylor’s perseverance. She leapt at Diana’s suggestion that Taylor had some personal motive to finish the painting, deciding that he regretted his recent distance and was eager to rekindle their affair. She did not mention the specifics of her interpretation to Diana. Nor did she mention the inner conflict between her delight at Taylor’s continuing interest and her horror at the choices it forced upon her.

  The sittings continued. Taylor was withdrawn and abrupt. Penny started to arrive on time and with Diana, rather than early and alone. Taylor’s wife interfered as much and as often as she could, but never dared to stop the sittings or even mention them, not whilst the Fitzpatricks’ generosity might be jeopardized. Fridays remained the days on which Penny “had arranged to meet Diana.” All other days, however, were shared with Mrs Taylor and, as a result, Penny’s routine was increasingly centred on her academic activities. If anything, she welcomed the improvement in her standing within the college, but she wrote about her arguments with Diana, as Diana felt increasingly unable to see enough of her. The sittings became a focus for their relationship. The diary entries for Fridays often trailed off, saying only that she had spent time with Diana. Those details which she shared through her pen divulged only conversation and context, but always with a sense of well-exercised discretion, rather than an absence of intimacy.

  There was another argument about the painting, but it was delivered in an envelope addressed to Emily. The letter was from the owners of the cottage, a Mr and Mrs Laycomb. They had been trying to contact her, but without luck. I had not been answering the telephone since I returned to London, except to Alison, to whom I had made a promise that I would take a call if she rang once, hung up and rang immediately again. Every other call was reduced to an echoing knell, a brief interruption to the stifling peacefulness of the flat. Emily would not have answered, anyway. Mondrian did not have a telephone in his house, for a while at least. I envied him.

  The Laycombs were wondering if we had had cause to go into the attic for some reason. They were careful not to suggest any particular reason and their phrasing held an implicit condemnation of my ascension, for how could there be any justification for such a breach of trust? I knew that even if I told them I had been Jacob they would be unsatisfied with the explanation. They had noticed that some of their possessions had been displaced and, although they could not be certain, it seemed that one item might have been removed entirely. What it was, precisely, they would not like to say, but Mrs Laycomb did have a strong recollection of their having bought a painting at an auction some years ago, which was nowhere to be seen. They hoped we had enjoyed our stay, and so on. The letter was signed by Mrs Laycomb, but her husband, clearly finding his wife’s tone unnecessarily conciliatory, had added a postscript: “We have checked the house and find the painting is most definitely missing. Please contact us to explain as I am sure we would all prefer to avoid any escalation. Henry Laycomb.”

  I put the letter with the others on the table, where it camouflaged itself into insignificance. The doorbell rang. I looked out into the darkening afternoon, down to the pavement below. Alison stepped back from the door and waved up at me, then poked her index finger against her opposite wrist and gestured down the street with her head. It was time to go out. I had an appointment. It had been a while. Alison gestured again, and mouthed, “Come on,” at me with slow, exaggerated movements of her jaw.

  When I was young there was a quality to waiting rooms which made me feel deserving of treatment. They were unlike anywhere else. Libraries were just as quiet, and filled with the same shuffling and coughing, but their demands for silence seemed justified by the need for study. Waiting rooms were quiet because of a shared belief that waiting rooms ought to be quiet. There were no decorations on the wall, unless one counted posters about the dangers of smoking or the need for immunization. I always thought it strange that the women—it was always women—who worked behind the reception desk did not think their lives, and the lives of the patients, would be better for a little relief from stark, white walls and red-brown furnishings. It was as though some committee had decided, in the distant past, that a line was to be drawn between areas for the healthy and areas for the sick; a project best served by a puritanical aversion to comfort. Or maybe it was the smell: not quite antiseptic, with just the right blend of scents to let one know that there were people present, whom one did not know, with ailments one could not perceive, except in cases of hacking coughs, bandaged faces, scraped knees. It was all for the best. I could sit and wait without any worry that I might be a malingerer. Who would subject herself to that environment if not genuinely ill?

  Lucy’s waiting room was from a newer school, all soft furnishings and copies of Monet’s paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny. They represented a fraction of the hundreds of lily paintings which he produced. Several years earlier I had written a short piece on their creation as part of a pitch for a never-made television documentary. There are giant water lilies at Kew Gardens: a single leaf of Victoria amazonica can support the weight of a small child. I had seen photographs of children sitting on those lilies, and I thought about them as I sat waiting with Alison. But in that place, subjected to a manufactured tranquillity and washed over by almost-subliminal pan-pipe music, I found Monet’s presence to be oppressive. I was drowning in shades of blue, and no number of blurry, green lilies were going to keep me afloat. I hated arriving early. Lucy always opened her door on the hour, and ended our sessions precisely fifty minutes later. There was no point in drowning for any longer than necessary. When I came on my own I always waited elsewhere, usually a café or bookshop, and had no need to sit with Monet holding my head under. But Alison did not want to be late, so I was sinking, sinking a little deeper with each ticking minute counted by the wall clock. Lucy appeared.

  On that day, as in all my therapy ses
sions, Lucy did not start the discussion. For a while—six months, maybe a little less—I had been unable to bear the vacuum, and sought to fill it with anything which came into my head, monologue or soliloquy. However irrelevant my mutterings, Lucy would say hardly a word, nodding occasionally to show that she understood, a privilege I rarely shared. Sometimes I became frustrated with the sound of my own voice. I would fight, remaining wordless to see if Lucy broke first. She never did.

  There was no need for another battle. I was in a talkative mood. I told Lucy about my being discovered by Emily, the trip to hospital, the time there, the nurses, the food. I told her about the cottage and the painting. I even told her about Penny and Diana, but grew too tired of hearing myself to include Taylor and the other cast of characters. And through it all she nodded, and the clock ticked on the wall, and water lilies drifted above us both. She asked me if I wanted to talk about Emily. When I shook my head she did something she had never done before: she told me that I needed to talk. The second hand swept round, caught up with the minute hand, the hour hand, the minute hand, the hour hand, and on and on and I floated, and cried, slowly, with control, and took the tissues she offered and did nothing with them.

  At ten minutes to the hour I dried my face and lifted my gaze from the carpet. Lucy ought to have been leaning forward in her seat, hands together, preparing for goodbyes. Instead, she sat exactly as she had throughout the session, and so I was the one who said the next-times and rose, ready to swim away. Lucy said she wanted me to stay, that she had kept her afternoon clear, and I began to panic a little, and she saw and understood and pointed towards the chair and poured a glass of water from the jug on the little table by the window, and held it out to me, but it was just more water and I waved it away. I sat down, though, and said something about Alison, waiting for me outside. Lucy’s “It’s all right” let me know that they had spoken before I had even come through the door to the waiting room. So the clock ticked on and I changed the subject, to Oxford, to Barbroke, to Bernini, Bruegel, Friedrich, Monet, Venice, Emily.

  Emily. The police had come to the cottage the morning after Barbroke, early. I was still in bed: yellows and sleep. She was gone. She had driven too fast and too carelessly and there was too much snow. She had gone out in the snow because of me. She had gone to find him. She had probably always gone to find him. He was at the funeral when I went with Alison and so we did not stay long, and left early, without farewells.

  Lucy spoke gently and slowly, but she could not change anything, nor tell me anything new. I sniffed and listened, and nodded when I thought I should, and even, once or twice, when I agreed with her. There were the usual platitudes in her words, the reassurances of a future to be lived, but she made no real effort to console me. She gave me, as she had always given me, an unvoiced permission to experience my emotions, raw and unlimited, and I took it, for what it was worth. I had the facts, but I had always had them. There were few emotions, and that did not change, despite a concerted campaign of tea and sympathy. What did change was my increasing awareness of the gulf between how I was expected to feel and how I did feel. Alison and Lucy were of the opinion, as they both took pains to tell me, that I was either torn apart but unable to express it, or numb. I was not torn apart or, if I were, it was only to avoid the guilt I would otherwise feel. Nor was I numb, which I took to imply my going through everyday activities as though on a stage, reading lines and following directions: the play was the thing wherein they would catch my conscience.

  I was Anna without Emily, but that was nothing new, and if its finality was novel it was not entirely unwelcome. I had Alison to help me. And Penny. Or she had me, or we had each other, but whatever the case she was there as much as Alison and she would notice if I fell from the sky, even if the shepherd did not and the ships drifted on in the bay. Lucy interrupted my chain of thought.

  “Did you go back to say your goodbye?”

  “No,” I said. “I thought about going back to the church. There was no point. Everything was over. She wasn’t there any more. I mean, she wasn’t really ever there, was she?”

  “Sometimes ‘goodbye’ is important, Anna. Especially if there was never a chance before…” She trailed off.

  “I wonder if Penny said goodbye to Diana, before. Maybe afterwards. Maybe she went to Barbroke and took the mirror away with her. Met Taylor again, or never left him. So he ended up with it. Before it came to me. Do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Anna. Perhaps. Perhaps we’ll never know. Even if we do, Anna, do you think knowing will help you?”

  She kept repeating my name and I was growing tired of it, and growing tired of the tick of the clock.

  “I think I should go, Lucy,” I said. “I have things to do. Alison is waiting. She must be hungry. Thank you.”

  Lucy took out her appointment book, but I told her that I would call to make arrangements. Through the glass of the waiting room door I could see Alison. She was reading a magazine with a cover which suggested that last summer’s fashions were going to involve orange and pink. She looked up as I entered and was already at reception, paying for the session, by the time I had walked over to her.

  We stepped out into the chill of early evening.

  “Did you talk?” she asked.

  “About Emily?”

  “About anything?”

  “Yes. I talked about Emily. Take me home.”

  We rode in a taxi, without another word, until we reached the flat and Alison paid the driver and I let us in and made tea. I expected her to continue talking about Emily. Instead, she said:

  “You have to give it back.”

  I wondered what she meant, and then I knew what she meant and began to wonder how she knew.

  “Give what back?” I asked.

  “Anna, you know. You have to give the painting back. It’s not yours. I saw the letter.”

  “What the hell are you doing reading my post?”

  I stood up. Alison put down her cup and gave me a look half pity, half exasperation. She reminded me of the ticket seller at Barbroke, horrified at the idea that I might not want to visit her precious gardens.

  “It was on top of the pile, Anna. I didn’t rifle through anything. I’m worried about you and I’m trying to keep an eye on you. I noticed and I couldn’t just leave it. Sit down. Please.”

  I sat down.

  “It is mine,” I said. “They’re lying. Ems and I found it in an auction over in Reading. It was cheap and she wanted to cheer me up. I don’t know what they’re going on about. I didn’t take anything from the attic. Maybe Ems did, before she left.”

  “Emily wouldn’t do that.”

  “There were lots of things Ems wouldn’t do, but she did them. She might have gone in the attic before I even arrived.”

  Alison grabbed a digestive biscuit and munched on it whilst she stared out of the window. There was not much to see. The sky was a uniform yellow-grey, the closest London ever came to darkness, above ground at least. Most of the curtains were drawn in the row of Victorian houses across the road. When Penny was alive they must have been single houses for a rising middle class. Most had long-since been converted to flats: one at street level, another one or two above, and finally the basement, which always seemed to be called the ‘garden flat’ by estate agents, even when the garden was a tiny, concrete yard at the bottom of six-foot, concrete walls. I wondered how much longer I could stay, and where I would go next, and if it would be as colourless. I suddenly thought of Gerald, alone in his house in Whitstable. We had promised to return his boxes. They were not mine, either.

  “At the cottage you said you bought it near the coast,” said Alison.

  “No. I said we bought it in Reading. We went to the coast because Gerald lives there.”

  “I don’t know who that is. Who is he?”

  “I told you. Gerald is related to Taylor, the painter, and we got his details from the auction house, well, Ems got the details and I waited in the car and talked to the man o
utside, and then we went to see Gerald because he wanted us to, because he lives alone, and he gave us the boxes with the diaries and the other bits and pieces.”

  “I didn’t know that, Anna. You said the other stuff came with the painting. It’s not yours, is it?”

  “Come with me to see Gerald again. He might have some more clues. Then I’d know how it ends.”

  “If I come, will you give the painting back?”

  “Just say yes, Alison.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll come with you. Get me another biscuit.”

  That night I dreamed of dragons in the snow, amongst the boundless, fabulous mountains, but I awoke to fog and rain, a red-brick Venice, and Stanley Spencer in the churchyard by the park. Gerald answered the telephone on the first ring, and was, predictably, delighted to hear from me. He had been planning to call me soon, he said. He asked after Emily, and sounded a little disappointed when I told him that she was away, and that I intended to bring a friend along with me in her place, if that was all right. It was, of course. Alison had told me that she could shift her weekend schedules around, so I arranged for us to meet on Saturday afternoon. Gerald promised cake.

  I sat on the couch, turning the mirror back and forth in my hands. Anna, lilacs, lilacs, Anna. Had the owners of the cottage missed it? They had only mentioned the loss of one item—the painting—and the mirror had been left on the bookcase, surely forgotten. Even if they checked, they no longer had the auction receipt and I doubted that they would trust their memories enough to accuse me of its theft. Then there were the diaries and guidebooks, and the detritus of Gerald’s life, in boxes in the bedroom. He had not mentioned them, but it was reasonable for him to assume that I would return his belongings. I was not ready to do that, any more than I was ready to lose Penny and Diana.