by Ann Bridge
So meditating, Nicholas had wandered out into the cloister, where his eye was presently caught by the two stones. It occurred to him that she would be sure to want drawings of these for Nigel, and a combined impulse of remorse, admiration and affection caused him to pull out his sketchbook and spend the rest of that damp and chilly afternoon sitting on the cloister parapet, muttering to himself about the extreme probability of his getting piles, and making two very beautiful drawings. They were brutes to draw! But she would be sure to want them, and to be pleased with him for having done them; she would say ‘Oh thank you, Nicholas,’ with her soft emphasis. She made the name Nicholas, which he loathed, sound rather nice. Turning up the collar of his mackintosh, the owner of that name worked with unremitting diligence.
NINE
‘Yes, but I still don’t quite like it, Nicholas. All that foreground is too flat; it’s too much the same quality as the wall and the tower. You want to make more difference between flowers and stone. Why don’t you use another brush for that part? And I think you’d do better with a little green in the paint for that – there’s always a green tone about the white of flowers. I don’t like that shadow from the column, either.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘You’ve got it too like the tower shadow – don’t you see? It’s nearer – well then, bring it forward.’ She waved her hand at it. ‘And I should get some red into the picture, here, and here – that will help to pull the whole thing together, and warm it up. If you can get all that better I think it will really be rather good.’
‘You’re a hard taskmistress, Lady K.! I was rather pleased with it.’
‘No, I don’t feel you’ve quite got it, my dear child. It wants pulling together. I know it’s difficult, all that white on white – but you did choose it!’
‘And you did think I couldn’t do it, didn’t you?’ said Nicholas, screwing himself round on the camp stool to grin up at Lady Kilmichael, as she stood behind him, studying the canvas on the easel. ‘And you’re quite surprised that Little Nicky has done it even as well as he has!’
‘Yes – but it’s not the least use for Little Nicky’ – the warmth of an imperceptible smile came into her voice on the two words – ‘to half-paint things. You must see a subject properly, the essentials of it; and then get them into a picture. It’s no good painting shapeless unselected masses of objects.’
They were on the broad fondamento at Traü, outside the Porta Marina, over which the Lion of S. Mark, in his little penthouse, presides with such a singularly coy and lamb-like expression. Immediately to the right a projecting piece of the city wall cuts off the view abruptly – to the left the sea, the hills and shores beyond showed blue and pearl-like as a milky opal, faintly traced with the masts of ships moored below the quayside; the long vista was closed at the further end by the creamy polygonal mass of the Camerlengo tower, part of the old Venetian fortifications, its heavy crenellated battlements crumbling here and there – in the foreground that white column whose shadow was bothering Nicholas rose, abrupt and solitary, from the pavement. That view up the fondamento is at all times one of the loveliest aspects of the lovely little island town, but in the month of May a strange enchantment is added. The inhabitants of Traü then cut, in their mainland fields, the harvest of the starry white flowers of Chrysanthemum cinerariaefolium, from which insect powder is made, and spread them out on mats to dry in the sun all along the fondamento, so that the whole of that immense space is floored, not with cobbles or flagstones, but with flowers. There was something incredibly lovely about that pale pavement of blossom, spreading up to the foot of the white column, and stretching away towards the creamy mass of the tower beyond, under the tender blue of the North Adriatic sky – a strange blue, washed with silver, as if it had taken its tone from the silvery white of the limestone hills, the pale rocks of that arid coast. And it was this aspect of Traü which Nicholas had elected to paint.
It was his second picture, and he had already spent a couple of days on it. He had begun with a brilliant little painting of three women in the pottery market outside the former Porta Aenea at Spalato, which he had finished in a day – a painting so good that Grace was astonished. It seemed that he really could make a picture as well as a sketch; make a whole out of his subject, with the solidity of the actual somehow welded and fused into the significance of a design. This, for her, was the essential thing, and it looked as if Nicholas had got it. Technical accomplishment of course he still lacked, except for his draughtsmanship, which was already astonishing; his sense of colour seemed to her weak too. But that he was worth helping she felt sure. After that first picture she insisted on going to Traü, to get fresh material for her own sketches for the American contract. She found plenty. The little mediaeval town, filling its island to the brim like one of those toy cities in ivory with painted roofs, set in a border of looking glass, was so full of delicious things to draw that she hardly knew where to begin. And there Nicholas had fixed on the view along the fondamento, with the flowers, the column and the tower, as the thing he would and must paint next. Grace had thought it overambitious, and said so; lovely in itself, all those different planes and tones of creamy white, in the soft clear light, might be difficult to make anything of, she considered. But Nicholas had persisted, and had tackled it with a measure of success that surprised her. It gave, indeed, just the measure of his success that she was now become so critical – was forcing him towards such a high degree of excellence, of completeness. If he had failed, as she expected, she would have encouraged him and left him alone.
They had fallen into a sort of routine of work, quickly and almost without noticing it. The buses from Spalato to Traü were slow, and at awkward times; the hire of a car and chauffeur was exorbitant. Nicholas, suddenly displaying a quite unexpected resourcefulness, had thereupon routed out, through the agency of one of his sitters in the pottery market, a rather dilapidated Peugeot car which he managed to hire without a driver for quite a reasonable sum. Every day, in this, they drove over to Traü, where he parked it on the small piazza by the bridge; they worked all the morning, took a long luncheon interval at the little restaurant on the quay, sitting under the shade of the awning, and then, if they had the energy, filled up their sketchbooks for an hour or so in the afternoon. At four or thereabouts they knocked off, and armed with Grace’s tea basket drove somewhere for a picnic and a little sightseeing, only returning at dark to Spalato, to dine at the restaurant in the Piazza, and then to sit outside it, drinking coffee or beer, watching the shadows flung by the street lamps repeating the grace of the colonnades in black along the white pavement, and the octagonal lantern of Diocletian’s mausoleum grey against the stars.
Grace loved these expeditions. The landscape of Dalmatia, as they gradually revealed it to her, was a perpetually renewed enchantment. She could not get over the fact that the prevailing colour of that coast should be white. Shades, gradations of tone of course there were, but the impression was of a white landscape; and the summits of the mountains, above the last traces of vegetation, were really white, like paper or cream. And in what subtle ways these white hills took their colour from the light and atmosphere about them! On lowering days they showed a sullen grey, featureless and dull; at noon, in sunshine, they had the warmth of ivory; there was a moment at evening when, most strange of all, as the light left the sky all the solidity of rock and stone deserted them, and they melted into the sky, became invisible, lost in one incredible tender tone, like a shadowy pearl. She was charmed too with the near-at-hand details of the landscape – the grace of olive trees, the patches of bright flowers, goats browsing among ruins, the dark flame-like shapes of cypresses round some monastery – and for a background, always, that delicate opalescent blue of the sea and the shores of bays and islands.
Whether working or sightseeing, of course she and Nicholas talked. It is surprising the amount of talk that two people will get through during a week of solid tête-à-tête. Now in modern life it is a
n extreme rarity, outside marriage, to get a week of uninterrupted companionship with any human being. Nicholas was too inexperienced to realise this, and Lady Kilmichael too interested in other things to think about it one way or the other. She was absorbed in her sketches, in seeking out the various bits of entwined ornament-motives to which Dr Rajitch had directed her, and above all in Nicholas’s painting. These interests, half separate and half in common, made their companionship a delightfully rational and natural thing. But there was little that Grace did not now know about the General, his wife and Celia; and Nicholas for his part had gained a very lively impression of Nigel, Teddy and Linnet, from the little remarks, half deprecating, half complacent, which Lady Kilmichael let fall about her children from time to time.
But such external details, though illuminating, were not the most important fruits of these days spent together by this very oddly assorted couple. They were getting to know not only the details of each other’s lives, but getting to know one another – a different thing. The process of getting to know anyone is not merely a matter of listening, watching and understanding. M. Maurois has pointed out how, in any new relationship, we feel an unconscious need to create, as it were, a new picture, a new edition of ourselves to present to the fresh person who claims our interest; for them, we in a strange sense wish to, and do, start life anew. Grace Kilmichael was not analytical enough to recognise either this wish or this process in herself, but she was unconsciously doing it. All she realised was that she was finding this new friendship strangely interesting. It is a fact, not always recognised, that married women of her generation are apt to have singularly few independent relationships. They are probably on terms of intimacy with a few women, friends of their youth with whom they have ‘kept up,’ as Grace had kept up with Lady Roseneath; but outside their own families with few other people, and with men hardly at all. This lack of experience in human relationships is one of the factors which most handicaps them in their dealings with the young, now that the old-fashioned stereotyped relation between parents and children has broken down. Today each family creates a new relationship for itself, on a fresh and individual pattern and on its own merits. And many women, unused to this delightful task, and utterly at sea without the formal landmarks of family behaviour which guided their own youth in relation to their mothers, flounder, helpless and distressed. Married women so often become more an institution than a person – to their own families a wife or a mother, to other people the wife or the mother of somebody else. Apart from her painting, Grace Kilmichael had been an institution for years. She didn’t mind it; she hadn’t really noticed it; but when Nicholas Humphries started treating her as a person, being interested in her as herself, ‘Lady K.’, and not as Nigel’s or Teddy’s or Linnet’s mother, or as the brilliant Sir Walter Kilmichael’s nice wife, she did notice it. She found it something quite new and rather delightful. And entirely without conscious intention, without being aware of it, the presentation of herself which she was making to Nicholas was, in some subtle way, more personal and less ‘institutional’ than it would have been if she had met him in her London house, as a friend of Linnet’s or Nigel’s.
But what she was very clearly aware of was the extraordinary interest of all she was learning from Nicholas about those mysterious and baffling creatures, the young. His accounts of his family, his day-to-day attitude to people, books, and things, all threw a flood of light for her on the new generation. And whenever she got what Teddy would have called a ‘slant’ on such matters, she thought of Linnet, and of herself and Linnet. This very morning, while she sketched the fish market at Traü, she had been thinking again of what Nicholas had said on the way to the Museum about Mrs Humphries’ spoiling of her children being really a form of self-indulgence. She had always meant to talk to him again about it, but somehow she never had – there had been so many other things to talk about. Was there so much self-indulgence in doing things for one’s children? When they were small, anyhow, what one did for them was often arduous and exhausting, and at the time, and to the doer, felt much more like self-sacrifice! But that was all over – now was the point. And as her pencil sped and her eye travelled from her paper to her subject and back, her mind ran over various recent episodes with Linnet, which had roused that young person’s reprobation, seeing them in the light of Celia and her mother. With considerably more detachment than ever before, Lady Kilmichael examined her motives as well as her actions – detachment was a habit she was catching from Nicholas. Yes, she did often remind Linnet to write her Collinses; she knew she would do them in the end, but she wanted her to do them promptly; it was more polite, it was obviously better to write them at once. But when she enquired within herself why she wanted Linnet to be polite, she was forced to admit the existence of a self-regarding motive – she wanted Linnet, her daughter, in a sense her own creation, to be thought polite; to do her credit, and not discredit. So there was that to it! Of course when she or the boys did come and ask to have this or that done for them – ‘you’re rather a hand at that, Miss Stanway’ – it was the dearest pleasure, the tenderest flattery. Well, she told herself, with stubborn instinctive common sense, that was natural and quite all right. But trains and things – Nicholas had spoken of them; Linnet was always missing trains or engagements through sheer fecklessness, and sometimes the things she missed were important. Was one then never to say – if you don’t start now you’ll be late? Must one stand by and see them do things really badly, for lack of a word?
It was at this point in her discussion with herself that Nicholas’s voice had summoned her – ‘Lady K. Could you spare a second to come and look?’ Now, standing behind him, making her comments, the thought came into her mind – in painting anyhow one couldn’t let people do things badly – one had to try to make them see what was wrong, indicate the right way. She was doing that now, vigorously, far more vigorously than she usually remonstrated with Linnet, and Nicholas didn’t mind a bit! Of course painting was different, somehow. But why was it different?
Before she could answer that question, Nicholas replied to her last criticism.
‘No, I know – but I think I have got the main points of this taped now, if I only get this pernicious floral effect right, don’t you? – and the shadow?’
‘Yes, I do.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Nicholas, how long do you think you’ll be? You know we’re going to Clissa, and it’s a good long way. Are you likely to get it finished before lunch, do you think?’
‘I daresay, if lunch can be two-ish – but it doesn’t matter if I haven’t – I can go on with it tomorrow.’
‘I thought we might want to spend the day at Clissa tomorrow, if we like it,’ said Grace.
‘We can spend the day after there just as well, can’t we?’ returned Nicholas, working the recommended green into a white mass on his – or rather Lady Kilmichael’s – palette.
Grace didn’t answer at once. Actually apart from Clissa, the hill fortress commanding the pass into the interior, up beyond Salona, she felt that she had seen most of Spalato and its environs, and rather wanted to move on to Ragusa. Oh well, there was really no hurry – one day was as good as another; time hardly counted on this magic shore. They could talk about that later.
‘We’ll see,’ she said easily. And leaving Nicholas to his painting she went off to the Duomo to draw the little business-like cherubs, with faces like immature but immensely determined stockbrokers, who thrust their flambeaux so menacingly through the false doors in the panelling in the Capella Orsini. She thought about the picture she had just been criticising. It was good. She herself would have tackled it differently: concentrated on all those related masses of white, put the emphasis there, made everything else subsidiary. Nicholas hadn’t – he had stressed the architectural quality, shoved the architectural detail at you in a way that she felt was out of proportion; and like most draughtsmen he tended to paint in lines. The picture had precision, too much precision – and too little atmosphere; he had rather miss
ed the quality of warmth and light which to her eye was so much there. It was a young person’s picture; it gave him away – that over-precision was a reflection of the artificial rigidity of someone not sure of himself, a person afraid to surrender to warmth and light – a young person, in fact! But then he was insensitive to colour; that was his weak spot; there he most needed to develop both his perception and his technique. But one must let that come, gradually; one couldn’t interfere too much. She could help him – a little – to paint what he saw; she couldn’t dictate to him about what he was to see. Moru had been so skilful about that – she wished the child could have worked with Moru. ‘Mais demandez cela à vos propres yeux!’ he used to say, in answer to requests for advice; though he taught so much, he always respected a person’s individual vision.