“So are you going to indict me for something? Some crime? James? Is that how your regime works?” This is going rather too far, Hannah knows; anger has gotten the best of her. “Or are you all spewing these impressions at me simply to try to humiliate me and my husband?”
George’s face is pained—a raw, murky blend of crimson and burnt umber. “Hannah, you are the one who is humiliating me. Don’t you see? You are humiliating all of us with this mad behaviour.”
“Mad behaviour?” She wipes her hands over her face. “I’m an artist. And I am painting.”
“Painting whores,” says Hazel.
“Yes!” At least I’m not screwing them, she wants to say, like our husbands do.
“Why can’t you just stop?” demands the colonel. “I’ve asked you to stop. And yet you go further.”
“No, George, you’ve never asked me to stop. You’ve never asked me about art, about painting, about anything that matters to me. In fact, you’ve never asked me anything! Not even to marry you—it was my father who obliged me to do that.”
Myrtle gasps.
“What you do, George, is make threats and arrange ambushes.”
“Let’s go,” he replies, rubbing at his sternum.
But James is closest in the room to Hannah, and he draws even closer to her until his presence eclipses the others, until she registers the longing in his eyes. “This,” he gestures, “may have been a little much, Hannah, bringing everyone together here. But…do you see why we are concerned, my dear? Why your husband is concerned?”
“Of course,” she replies, letting her chin fall toward her chest.
“Well?”
“Well, he shouldn’t be concerned.”
James recoils as if she’d slapped him.
“Good Lord!” Lucy exclaims. “We’re your friends.”
“Do you not care about your reputation?” warbles Myrtle.
Hannah grits her teeth. “I do care. Somewhat. But it’s not—I—look, I don’t expect you to understand this, any of you. But painting is like breathing to me. Like being able to breathe.”
Edgar is wrinkling his nose at her like she’s a hunk of stale cheese.
“Of course, none of us would understand,” Lucy says softly.
“Enough of this theatre,” barks the colonel, on his feet. “Let’s go.”
Hannah is out of the room before him and doesn’t wait for him to catch up. Outside, the air has cooled to a chill. Carts wheel and turn in all directions over the expansive front lawn and guests wave at each other as they totter away from the party. Hannah dodges them, cutting across the adjoining lawn toward their home. Pain clots her throat and she concentrates on trying to dissolve it.
Mounting the veranda steps and daring at last to look behind her, she sees the colonel chugging nearer with a sour look on his face.
He looks down as he moves past her into the house. And upstairs, he turns away as she undresses. Maneuvering out of her gown, petticoat, corset, stockings, she tosses each layer aside until all there is left is silence.
“Hannah?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
She pulls her nightgown over her head. In bed, the colonel is snoring, as if to prove his carelessness, even before Hannah has finished brushing her hair. Drained as she feels, her mind is active and works its way backwards to visit the people they have left behind at the Residency. The women, she imagines, have moved to different seats in the drawing room, conferring with each other. Eating second helpings of cake. She’s so unreceptive! What can be done, James? James Finch, fatigued with the topic, makes a remark to that effect before retiring to bed. She’s more trouble than she’s worth, somebody else says.
Hannah wipes her face. What if she had calmly explained to them all why she was painting the locals? It was not just the dock girls but the coconut man and flower seller at the market, the customs official at the pier. Children playing in mud puddles. Would it have made any difference? And if she could have calmly described the jungle painting, how marvelous it is to discover and amplify the hidden vibrating love that is all around them. What if she had shared Sergeant Singh’s exciting and unusual news: there is something called a parasol flower, a most astonishing wild creation. Would it be deemed an appropriate object of emotion?
In her mind, she takes Lucy and Hazel (with Myrtle struggling along behind them) on an imaginary walk through the public gardens. Shows them the camellia she is painting. The petals look burnt, she tells them; here, where the edges are decaying and dried, isn’t that endearing? It’s remarkable how life, even scorched or clipped or damaged life, struggles on in whatever manner it is able. She points out Sergeant Singh in the distance, consulting his little notebook. Wouldn’t you have been curious enough to want to intercept him? Now Beatrice Watts is looking at her over the carapace and Hannah waves her down to the shore. I want this embarrassed girl to look up at all of us from my canvas, she tells Beatrice. I want her to catch us staring at her swollen feet.
Other thoughts and memories come as she lies in bed. Lucy and Hazel, pouring her tea. As Hannah sips, she compliments them on their homes. This is genuine; they are impressive women. Pioneers, friends who tell her stories of their children and sisters and mothers, their plans to build a hospital in Kuala Kangsa. In the first and earliest meetings, they shared important information about flying ants and scorpions and the greenfly season, how to withstand homesickness. In turn, they asked her questions and listened as she described the academy and the Paris cafes, the Salon exhibitions, the Louvre, Monsieur Godot’s little gallery and the “Impressionists” who came and went. They appeared impressed, though perhaps in the way that people are interested by frivolous oddities. “You don’t say!” They asked about her teachers and about the other female students. “And your family? Were they happy for you?” Suddenly the whole room is shaking with her silent sobbing. Hannah slips out of bed and, through the blurry darkness, finds her way downstairs.
Sixteen
She wakes on the chaise longue in the conservatory. The colonel is standing over her with a steaming mug in each fist. His brow is split, his face puffy and pale.
“George. Are you all right?” she asks, sitting up.
He sets one beaker down on the floor beside her, casting a glance at the nearby work-in-progress on the easel. “Brought you coffee.”
“Thank you.” She groans. “What a horrible night.”
He looks away. “What is this?” He nods at the painting on the easel.
“A papaya.”
The colonel drags a wooden chair over to the chaise longue, first removing a pile of rags from the seat. Looking through his eyes, she sees the chaos. The room is a mess. And for what? Once seated, he sips before saying, “I didn’t sleep well. It was—it was perhaps a mistake to confront you in such a way.”
She lets these words swell in the air between them.
“However, I…uh…” he shakes his head. “I felt I had no alternative.”
“George, is it really so terrible to want to paint? People have been doing it for centuries. Women, for decades. Longer. I’m not claiming I’m a great artist like Rembrandt or Delacroix, but…”
“It’s not the painting, per se,” he grumbles. “No, it’s these, these situations that you…”
“Goodness, do you honestly think I am romantically ‘pursuing’ Sergeant Singh?”
He examines the rim of his beaker before replacing it in his lap. “That’s how it looks, Hannah.”
“Well, that is not how it is. Myrtle’s stupidity,” she mutters, “elevated to testimony by Lucy Meddlesome Finch.”
The colonel chews his upper lip. How vulnerable he is when it comes to her. It has been so from the beginning, she realizes, whether on account of her younger age or for some other reason. Despite the fact she’s traveled halfway around the glo
be for him!
“I feel, George, I mean I wonder, whether the others haven’t rather a prejudiced notion of the life of an artist?” she ventures, careful to diffuse any blame. “I was up most of the night as well. Ruminating. I didn’t conduct myself very well with…with everybody at the party. I think perhaps if I have a chance to properly explain what I am trying to do with my artwork… If I were to, for instance, show them my portfolio. Or this studio!” She throws open her arms. “Tidied up a little, of course. Perhaps it’s a case of the unknown being off-putting, you see? Do you think so? I…I confess I don’t fully understand why they would be objecting. I don’t go around objecting to the way they deal with the natives.”
He looks around him uncertainly. “Studio?”
“George, I don’t think I’ve ever properly shown you my botanical studies. From my jungle treks.”
He looks puzzled, as if she were speaking Dutch.
After a pause, she tries again. “Or I could perhaps do a portrait of James. Esteemed Resident of Perak. Or, for instance, one of the Swinburne’s dog. Or of you, George, if you like. Make myself useful, as it were.”
His eyes narrow. “So you’re not stopping.”
“Stopping?”
“What you’re suggesting is that you make more art, and talk more about painting. You’ll try to bring me and the others onside so that you can keep doing what you are doing in the village and in the forest.”
She is sitting on her hands. Her left index finger smarts at the tip where she’s bitten it too deeply. “I’m trying to help people see.”
“Rubbish. Who are you to help them see?” His neck flushes its characteristic puce, rose madder deepened with ochre. “What about our home? This room is a conservatory.”
She gets to her feet just as he does. “What about our home?”
“I don’t think you were hearing us yesterday. There’s something wrong with you, Hannah, that this…mess should matter so much to you.” He gestures at the cluttered table, the easel, the stacks of stretchers upon which her various canvases lie drying. “Good God, you slept in here last night.”
“You humiliated me, George! You arranged for my friends to humiliate me! Do you blame me that I couldn’t bear to be near you?”
He strides to the doorway, head bowed. “Clean it up, please. All of it.” Turning, his eyes scan the room. “I want this room returned to a proper conservatory.”
After he’s gone, she picks up her full beaker and pitches the coffee onto the potted lemon tree. “God damn this!”
In the kitchen, she is pleased to find there is a mug-full of brew left in the biggin. Hannah pours herself a fresh cup and stands drinking it, recalling the early morning of the tiger attack. The dewy hem of her daygown against her ankles. The tiger prowling through her mind. Suria, tottering into the kitchen, as she may do even now. She was screamin’, mem. Poor thing. The smell of rotting flesh, so strong she thought it might corrode the canvas or curdle the paint as she worked.
There is something wrong with her. Look at the trouble they have all gone to, in their sincere conviction to help. And they know nothing about the morning she spent hunkered over a fragment of bloodied bone.
It isn’t until she’s penned not one but two letters to Monsieur Godot—and walked to town and back to post them—that Hannah can bear to return to her studio. She enters only briefly to fetch Songs of Innocence and Experience. On the veranda, the hibiscus bushes have grown high enough to conceal her with their branches and leaves and no one comes to find her except Roddy. The little gibbon sleeps next to her chair as she reads, balancing his lithe body along the railing.
Oh rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Hannah begins by boxing up her old palette knives. Cuvier, the first shop where she purchased art supplies on her own. It was last on the list provided by the academy—the cheapest option, and the furthest from Monmartre. The shopkeeper looks through his pince nez at her, wondering why she’s bothering to remember him. Then, in a blink, she is standing at Monsieur Bougereau’s desk with several other girls, listening to Bougie’s opinions on the use of palette knives “beyond mixing,” as he puts it.
There is a curled photograph in the box. The image was taken just before an anatomy class, she remembers, by a young woman from America who was on holiday and persuaded her family to let her stay on in Paris and attend the school. Diana. What ever became of Diana? They all so look young and determined. She smiles at the one or two women who have had a fringe cut into their hair, the new fashion. Hannah herself is seated on a high stool toward the back of the group, tipping forward a little; she’d had trouble getting in place, it was so crowded. The cautious look on her face to mask the exuberance she always felt in the studio. It was a space of absolutes… Absolute freedom? Devotion? Yes, they were all such slaves, such sponges, so utterly willing to prostrate themselves to the making of art.
There were openly exuberant girls at the academy, and she envied the ease with which they spoke. And there were others, not necessarily so loud, who could hold their own with anyone, female or male; these, Hannah admired and loved on principle, even if they were sometimes disagreeable people. She’d felt rebellious, but the truth was she was quiet and ever-acquiescent. For her, to rebel was to vow. To grow quieter still and take firm hold of her convictions. And then, of course, to paint.
In those days she was closest with Jane Hemming, for no particular reason except that Jane had sat down next to her on the first day. And there is Jane, standing next to her in the image, a slight smirk on her squarish face. Jane proved to have a delicious, dark sense of humour, which she applied in good measure. At Julian, teachers encouraged the pupils to speak, especially about art, but just as often about any topic of the day. It was a point of pride for them all to exist in friendly conflict. They were meant to be as far as possible from the stuffy, disciplined corridors of the Academie des Beaux-Arts.
Tucked into an anatomy textbook she finds a lavender-scented note from the directress congratulating her on her marriage and wishing her well in Malaya. Madame l’Espagne! “Ah, you have a wonderful model today, ladies!” Madame would announce, strolling into the room as she always did during the life drawing portion of the afternoon. They were all wonderful models to Madame Julian, whether old or young, fat or thin, female or male. “Formidable!” she would say in her accented French, rolling the r. And just as predictably, the three Japanese ladies would titter.
She folds the note and replaces it, boxes up the textbooks and manuals, collapses her two easels and her drying racks. The round hatbox is filled with letters from her mother that she cannot open. Her mother must have already been dying that year. Hannah’s first at Julian.
Her satchel, however, she empties onto the floor. Nothing in this collection is superfluous. Each pencil she has need of, and each curled tube of pigment. No, she doesn’t need any of it, she reminds herself. That is the point. She tucks it all back inside the bag and draws the strings tight.
Her notebooks are treasures. Godot’s portraiture class in the first semester! In the margins she has sketched his face. She has no memory of drawing this, and yet there he is, winking and pointing comically to his nest of hair.
“Do you understand him?” Jane asked her on the day Monsieur Godot first spoke to them at any length.
“My French,” Hannah replied, wincing, “is not so bad as it was.”
“No, I mean, do you feel you understand him?”
That their learning was a spiritual matter. That making art was a way of living. Not something extra, a hobby, that one tacked on. Yes, she felt she understood him deeply.
She and Jane smil
ing smugly at each other across a café table. Little fools! Probably they’d had too much sugar in their hot cocoa. A new way of being in the world had taken root that year inside her and inside Jane, and they were vain enough to think they had a measure on it.
Flipping pages, Hannah’s eye falls on:
The Great Difficulty: to decide between own natural impressions
vs// beliefs about what should be perceived
how do you know diff??→instincts, heart, experiences… cultivate these for genuine art
In retrospect, how easy it had all been. The triangulation assignment. On backgrounds. Choosing a palette that suits your subject. Depth perspective. Was she in love with Monsieur Godot? Does she still believe what he told them?
What is art? trace
footprints that show I have walked bravely and in great happiness
The word happiness makes her break down. She clutches the notebook to her chest. If only he would write back to her! Why doesn’t he write anymore?
Hannah makes several trips to the third story, hauling her boxed supplies and books to her writing garret, where she piles them against the wall and, sitting down at last, slumps over her desk.
Later, in the new conservatory, she and Suria pull the furniture back into the center of the room. Hannah had cleared a space to spread her studies over the floor. A space where, at other times, she would pace or pirouette, shaking inspiration into her arms and hands.
“More help, mem?” asks Suria, when they are done with the furniture. The old woman looks puzzled at the changes but, uncharacteristically, has not shot off any questions.
“No, thank you, Suria, I’ll do the rest.”
With a duster, broom and mop, Hannah works at cleaning away her traces.
Seventeen
Another supper to arrange; it’s practically obscene how they keep coming. Hannah stands in the pantry, examining the mostly bare shelves. Rice. Reliable rice. Half a dozen boxes of stale biscuits.
Three weeks ago she took fifty Straits dollars, over half of the amount he’d given her and, exchanging them for English pounds, completed her Schlauerbach’s order. Hoping for what, exactly? That the colonel would change his mind?
The Parasol Flower Page 11