CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The remaining diary entries were all short. They were mostly reports of dull days with parents, interspersed with occasional visits from old school friends. Miss Ashdown spent a weekend at Penny’s house, despite Penny’s damning of her after their afternoon at the Galleries. Nothing about her stay inspired Penny to regain the fastidiousness of her diary-keeping.
I had thought that Penny would follow Diana’s example, but she returned to Oxford for the final term of her first year. She must surely have suffered through a vituperative internal dialogue in reaching her decision, but she did not take the time to write it down. The final entry was unremarkable: “Back at college. It will not be the same without her. Mrs. Taylor has already called on me in my room. I shall write more after dinner.”
Blank page after blank page. Penny watched over me from her frame on the wall. It was as though I had entered into one of Friedrich’s paintings and overtaken the figure dwarfed by the landscape: the monk by the sea, the lame boy staring at the crucifix, the pall-bearer at the head of the snow-bound procession. I had overtaken them all and turned to see their expressions, to see their reactions to the sublime, to beauty, to terror, to the knowledge that their sight was unshared and misunderstood. They stood behind me, doomed to loneliness, not for want of company but through the unavoidable magnitude of the world and the intractable uncertainty of their place within it. There was nothing in Penny’s eyes. Whatever I thought was there I had put there myself, put there in my broken perspective. She was David’s missing assassin and Baudry’s heroine, Rokeby Venus and Borghese Hermaphrodite. She was everything I wanted her to be and nothing of herself.
By Friday afternoon I had a new list of questions for Gerald and by evening I had thrown them away, remembering our first meeting: he would tell me all he chose to tell and no more. Asking questions would only fluster him as he served his tea and cake and revelled in having company. If the conversation kept to main roads then all would be well, but if it strayed onto lanes and tracks there would be no map to help.
I packed everything back into the boxes. Gerald would put them into storage and forget them, and when he died they would be passed to the next generation, assuming there was a next generation. And the cycle would continue—Penny’s testament hidden away—or be broken forever thereafter, the boxes thrown into a skip with unwanted crockery and saucepans and shoes and clothes. All of Thursday morning, and most of the afternoon, I had been standing in front of the photocopier at the local library, duplicating every page of the diaries, guidebooks and notebook. I had taken a break for lunch and another for a trip to the bank, to get more coins to feed into the machine. If I closed my eyes I could still see the bright, blue-white light scanning across my retinas. The piles of copy-paper sat on the couch, carefully gathered and sorted into individual documents.
A little after noon on Saturday I heard the beep-beep of a car horn rising from the street and looked down to see Alison sticking her head out of her battered old Ford. She waved up at me and mouthed something. I cupped my hand to my ear so she would repeat it but it still made no sense. I lifted the sash window and stuck my head out into the cold air.
“What?” I mouthed.
“Roadtrip!” she shouted back at me. “Roadtrip! Roadtrip! Roadtrip!” Each exclamation was louder and more drawn out than the last. Across the road a couple of faces appeared at windows as Alison retreated back into the car, leaving me shaking my head and laughing. Five minutes later we were on our way to the coast, with Gerald’s boxes on the back seat.
In suburban Whitstable “The Sands”, “Tide Cottage” and “Oyster Shell House” were still standing, and Gerald’s lace curtains still twitched at the slightest sound. He opened the door before Alison had finished parking the car.
“I’m afraid I didn’t bring you a cake this time,” I said.
“Oh, no, no. No matter, no matter at all. Think nothing of it. I have cake.” He ushered us through the hall and into the lounge. He did indeed have cake, and biscuits, all laid out on the table, and from the kitchen the last, timorous whistle of a just-boiled kettle promised tea.
“It’s lovely to see you again. Anna I know, of course. And you must be?” Gerald looked at Alison and then back to me, clearly seeking a formal introduction.
“This is Alison,” I said. “She’s an old friend of mine. She knows all about the painting and the diaries.”
Gerald and Alison helloed their hellos and she and I sat down, next to each other, as Gerald disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with a tray on which rested a teapot, three cups, three saucers, three teaspoons, a sugar bowl with a pair of silver tongs half-buried amongst the cubes, a milk jug and a tea strainer. It must have been sitting ready for us, just needing the addition of water to the pot.
“We brought your boxes back,” I said. “We’ll get them from the car before we leave.”
“Ah. Oh. Thank you. Yes. Did you find anything interesting?” Gerald asked.
I told him no more than I felt necessary to encourage his reciprocation, skipping details as I desired, reserving them for myself. I was close enough to see each stroke on the canvas, close enough to lose sight of the scene which they created, if I were not careful. Gerald, however, was forced to stand behind the red rope of the gallery, to peer at the image from across the polished floor. I had Penny and Diana, and Taylor, and Constance, and all the tangled mess of their relationships. He had only the names and the painting. I had the college and the Galleries and the studio and Barbroke. He had only Oxford. But most of all, I had Penny.
Gerald listened with what appeared to be unfeigned interest, stopping me between biscuits to ask about trivialities. I thought he was just trying to engage with the story. Gradually, however, I began to realize that he showed no curiosity about the story itself: his questions added an occasional brushstroke but did not open up the vista beneath his gaze. It was only when I came to the end of the much-abbreviated account, and Gerald had muttered, “Fascinating,” that I thought to ask him a question:
“Have you read the diaries?”
“Hmmm?” he replied, then crunched on his fifth or sixth biscuit. Alison put down her cup and directed a frown towards me.
“The diaries, and the rest. Did you read them before you gave them to me?”
Gerald brushed a crumb from his lip.
“My dear girl,” he said, “but of course. It’s fascinating stuff, isn’t it? New Year at Barbroke. That poor Mrs Taylor, Constance. I liked your telling of it. Much faster paced. Much more enjoyable.”
I was not sure how to react. The stupid man had stolen from me and he sat there and talked about it as if his theft were nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “And why give me all those other things? Why give me the receipts and other rubbish, if you’d already been through everything? Why do that?”
Gerald shifted in his seat. He looked first to me, then to Alison, where his gaze lingered, as though he hoped she would come to his rescue. In the end, evidently sensing that there was nowhere to hide, he spoke.
“She told me to.”
“Alison?”
I asked without pausing to think, but before he replied I had caught up and knew exactly what he was about to say. I found Alison’s hand on top of mine, gently squeezing my fingers together.
“No, no. The other girl. Emily.”
Gerald started to speak more quickly and all I could do was listen to him, and my breathing, and the clink of his cup and saucer. Alison was moving closer and holding my hand tighter as though she wanted to get my attention, to take it from Gerald and make it hers, so she could control me somehow, as Emily had done.
“She called me to arrange our first meeting. She said you were interested in the painting and asked if I knew anything about it. Well, I said I knew all about it and I’d be happy to tell you both. It’s always nice to meet new people. But she said that perhaps I could help her, you know, with your condition.”
; Alison reacted on my behalf.
“Her condition?” she said.
“Well, you know.” Gerald was clearly flustered. He continued, talking to Alison. “No offence meant. Anyway, she asked if I had any papers that might relate to it, something to give to Anna so she could continue with her own investigations. Something to make it all a little more interesting for her.”
“You collected up the papers and put them in a box to give to her?” asked Alison.
“Oh, they were already in the box, so that was easy enough. I added a few other items. Red herrings. To make the chase more challenging. I hope I haven’t said the wrong thing. I’m sure Emily can explain it all far better.”
I was not there any more. I was staring at a wall of creams and browns, greys and blacks, a wall whitewashed and forgotten. I was Velázquez’s Venus, robbed of mirror, torn from Cupid, left to lie on grubby sheets. I was the Borghese Hermaphrodite, because who was to say otherwise when I faced away towards the wall, and hid my face from sight on a mattress that even Bernini could not redeem. I was Helga Testorf, Andrew Wyeth’s model, painted by him, again and again, over more than a decade. I was Helga stripped of identity, no longer the Helga of the other paintings: the Helga with braids, the Helga with flowers in her hair, the Helga naked on a stool by an open window. I was the Helga of a single canvas, lying naked, face to the wall, hidden. I lay in the dim light with old plaster for company, a reclining nude, and felt nothing and shifted and saw the rusted metal hooks in the roof above me, above Helga, which looked so sinister and yet held only a line for drying, or perhaps a curtain. And then back to the wall, and the sounds of the room fading into the greys, and the squeezing of my hand getting harder, becoming the only feeling I had. I longed for Mary, Suffragette Mary, to come and slash at my neck and back and hips, to save me from the nothing. Someone was shaking my shoulder and I started to wake and move, as though I had been asleep and motionless, but I was not telling anyone where I had been, only that I was back, back to Alison saying, “Hey,” and Gerald gone.
“Where’s Gerald?” I asked.
“He’s making a fresh pot of tea,” said Alison. “I told him it was what you needed after a long day of travel.”
“Did you tell him about… Did you tell him why she can’t be here?”
“No. There was no need. He saw you were upset and stopped talking. I think he’s more embarrassed than anything, to be honest. He probably thinks he’s betrayed a confidence.”
“Why would they conspire like that? Why would she have told him to keep secrets from me? After all the secrets she’d already kept. I thought she’d changed.” The grey wall was coming back, but Alison’s hand on my shoulder kept me facing her.
“I don’t know if she changed. But I think she was trying to keep you healthy.”
“Healthy is a fine thing,” said Gerald, stepping out of the kitchen. “I brewed another pot. I’m sorry if I said anything to upset you. It wasn’t my intention. Shall we get back to our girls?”
“Our girls?” I asked.
“Penny. Diana. I might be able to tell you more.”
“Our girls?” I asked again.
Gerald started to speak to Alison, as though she were my keeper, as though in any minute he would ask her if I took sugar in my tea, or if I needed to use the bathroom.
“I only meant, well, you know. We both know the girls, through the diary. So, in that sense… You can see that, can’t you?”
He asked the question with a sense of desperation. I took my hand away from Alison’s and began to lean forward in my seat, but Alison took control of the situation before I had time to bring order to the script in my head.
“I think we’d best be going,” she said. “We have quite a drive back. That’s probably enough for today.” She stood up. “Yes, I’d say enough.”
I still had no structure to my words. Whenever they aligned I reached out to grab them and, in my anger, sent them flying, never pulling them near enough to speak. I stood up. The iron hooks in the ceiling were closer, more intimidating than ever. I lowered my head a little, followed Alison’s feet to the door, listened to her goodbye to Gerald, heard her explain that everything was fine and I was just a little tired, and he understood, of course, but still apologized. Then I left them behind, by the door, and shivered by the car and could no longer hear what they said and did not look up at all. Alison joined me. She unlocked the car and started the engine, and I waited inside, listening to the laboured breathing of the heater, as she and Gerald unloaded the boxes. I did not listen to them. When the work was done Alison sat in the driver’s seat, put her hand on my knee and asked how I was feeling.
“I want to go home. I don’t like that man any more. I want to go home and forget all about him,” I said.
We drove home. The daylight had hidden itself almost before we left Whitstable. Alison took the side-roads back to London. I think she wanted to give me time to find safety before we were amongst the memories of the flat. When we passed through woodlands the bare trees blocked the lights of villages so that each individual street-lamp and window blinked in and out of life and the woods sparkled. The dashboard glowed red and green. The warmth from the heater started at our toes and rose up inside the car. Red and green, and the will-o’-the-wisp yellows, and the hum of the engine mixed with the tick-tock of the indicators. Night-time swirls and a night sky above an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Alison did not wake me until she had parked the car outside the flat. I stayed awake only long enough for more yellow with hot chocolate.
On Sunday I woke up to find that Emily had already left for church. I pottered around the flat, turned on the radio to let it burble to itself as I crunched my way through a helping of bland breakfast cereal. I was halfway through rinsing the bowl before I remembered that Emily had not gone to church.
There was a parcel on the couch. I had noticed it earlier and then elided it as an unwanted intrusion into the morning routine. The routine was all that kept the memories away, but they had returned and there was nothing to lose in tearing off the shiny, red wrapping paper. There was a little gift tag: “Not sure if you’ll still want this. Hope you do. I’ll see you later. A.” I sat at the table and set the gift down in front of me. It was an old book, Oxford: History and Traditions. The dust jacket showed the view across the quad of some college, towards the great, oak doors of a tall, crenellated gatehouse. It was a stylistic representation in black ink, printed with rough blocks of pale umber for the walls, green for grass, grey for shadow. The jacket was wrapped in a protective plastic cover: Alison had probably bought it from one of the shops on the Charing Cross Road.
The book offered a chance to know more about the place where Penny—my Penny—and Diana had met. It would fill in the details of the college, even the Galleries and the Parks. But maybe Keats had it right.
I had been to Oxford in the past, just for an afternoon, to meet Kathy, a school friend who had gone up the previous term. The world I had constructed for Penny and Diana gained its ink from the diaries, and its blocks of colour from that afternoon with Kathy. Early in the year, with the sun low in the sky, diluted by clouds, the colleges lost their glow. Greys ran into yellows and whites, walls became monumental as their stones merged with each other, bled of the contrast they needed for an identity. The Parks kept their green but hedged it round with black branches, cut it through with the stroke of a slumbering river. And then on, to North Oxford, its red brick always red whatever the weather: a Victorian stamp on the city, and even it could not resist the mellowing of the place in its ivies and gardens, those delicate refinements glossed on a brash upstart. I had not seen Taylor’s old studio. Kathy and I had walked close to it, or whatever had replaced it, but there was nothing of it left to me. Nor would the book describe it, I was sure, if I were to open the covers and read.
I could have gone back, made a pilgrimage to the sites of the diary as I had at Barbroke, but what would I have gained? Barbroke was different. It had the luxury of existi
ng in its own cabinet, a frozen curiosity. Oxford, for all its outward languor, layered its history, hid the old beneath new sediments: not the grand things, but the smaller ones, the people and places which strove for grandeur but were lost when they did not achieve it. Students and painters departed; studios shut their doors. Newer colleges grew and evolved, moved to better locations, built their own traditions and stories, left their past to books and photographs. Barbroke could not hide its timelessness in its solitude, and ticket office and gift shop. Oxford, though, could bury its history deep and conceal the truth of it beneath a patina of age and tradition.
I had already lost part of my story yesterday, when Gerald claimed his share of Penny and Diana. It was true he had seen them first, but we were not participating in some stupid teenage competition and his claim was not a reason to suppose he had rightful ownership. I looked at the painting on the wall. It was home, with me, where it belonged.
The mirror lay flat on the mantelpiece. Diana had grasped it, combed her hair, thought of Penny. I remembered a painting I had seen, somewhere, in one of the books which filled the shelves on either side of the chimney breast. It was a memory of a memory, because the connection had come to me before, in the church at Barbroke, and then flown as quickly as it had arrived. The morning brightened outside the window. The painting was in an old book, badly printed. Something large. A present from Emily, a reminder of her, given to me before all I had were reminders. I began to scan the books to the right of the fireplace. The upper shelves were small, full of paperbacks. The bottom shelf, at waist height, was actually the top of a cupboard below, and held larger hardbacks. On the far left was what I wanted: a set of German magazines bound into two volumes of some five hundred pages each, with Jugend 1917 I on the spine of one and Jugend 1917 II on the other. I retrieved them both and left them on the table whilst I disappeared into the kitchen.
With a cup of coffee to hand I began the process of leafing through the pages, waiting for an image to trigger some recollection. The first volume yielded nothing. A little over halfway through the second I found it: Die Korallen-Kette—The Coral Chain—by “Wilhelm Gallhof, München”. A low-quality print of the painting covered the whole of the right-hand page and spilled over onto the left, leaving room for a single column of text which had, as far as my German allowed me to make out, no link to the image at all. At the bottom of the column was a piece entitled “Zum Frühstück”—“For Breakfast”—by Karl Ettlinger, which my poor translation suggested was a group of pithy observations on tolerance, pride and criticism. The last of these—“Lerne das Konversationslexikon auswendig und Du weißt—garnichts.”—seemed to be a shadow of Keats: “Learn the lexicon of conversation by heart and you will know—nothing at all.”
All the Perverse Angels Page 27