Talland House

by Maggie Humm

  Turning to Emily, she said, “The lady always sits on the righthand side of the gentleman, who takes her into dinner unless she is the hostess,” but she couldn’t stop staring at Mrs. Ramsay. Her large eyes were so evenly balanced, her mouth the full red of a Rossetti heroine, her neck a slim white column. Her face was too thin perhaps, even allowing for middle age, her cheekbones too prominent, and she sat very quietly glancing at her husband from time to time as the guests dragged their chairs across the floor to sit.

  Cold dishes were spread out all along the table: hors d’oeuvres crowded up against entrées and desserts: oysters, game pie, fish pies, vol-au-vents, sandwiches, prawns in aspic, salmon mayonnaise, galantine of turkey, Russian salad, meringue-iced puddings, oranges in jelly, and a pedal-footed dish with a gleaming pyramid of fruit.

  “I’ll need to remember every single item for my next letter to Father,” she murmured to Louis, easing her way into a conversation.

  “It certainly outdoes the Last Supper,” he quipped, “yet there’s no Cornish Stargazy pie?”

  “Or Mrs. Trevelyan’s Cornish pasties,” Lily said. “What luxury these people have, they can eat without fear of tomorrow, unlike the fishermen.”

  “At least we can drink without worrying about tomorrow,” Louis said, clinking his glass against hers. “No crits. It’s a Saturday!” he said, and smiled into her eyes.

  She smelled his lemony gentleman’s cologne as she watched him knock back his drink with a startling flourish, and she drank delicately to cover her glances, feeling a little dizzy. There was a sense of ease between them, a sort of understanding, but she wasn’t sure of what, and she slid into a kind of tingling dream with a feeling, as the wine diminished in her glass, the evening would work and Louis would care for her. A waiter, resplendent in a butler’s regulation dress suit and white tie, passed dishes back and forth across the table. Golden lights flickered from the candles, mirrored in finger bowls with two or three flowers floating in each bowl—unscented anemones that wouldn’t overpower the food—and little lace doilies under each glass. As Lily took in the scene, the still life seemed to overflow its frame.

  “May I give you more wine?” Louis asked roguishly.

  Holding up her half-full glass, Lily shook her head but smiled at his inviting expression. It was impossible not to.

  As she picked up her napkin, the folded “boats” pattern opened, dropping a dinner roll into her lap she managed to catch, and she felt her cheeks flush. Glancing up at Mrs. Ramsay across the table, Lily saw her carefully remove the dinner roll from her husband’s napkin and place it discreetly by his plate without him noticing, mouthing thanks at her. Exhilarated, Lily sat more erect, mirroring the older woman’s posture.

  “Miss Briscoe,” Louis leaned towards her, “is our grand dinner entertaining?”

  “It’s wonderful,” Lily giggled. “I feel I’m floating.”

  Louis beamed and, touching her glass again, looked around as if searching for a waiter.

  She stared ahead, trying to focus on the Ramsays. A vase’s foliage, with autumnal tints of beach and oak, drooped dramatically without interfering with her line of vision, but Louis and Emily had started chatting about the food, and it was hard to concentrate. The champagne must have gone to her head. She watched Mr. Ramsay talk irritably with a gentleman at his left and shake his head from side to side, like a boy flicking away flies while fishing, whenever his wife offered him another dish. Gradually Mrs. Ramsay seemed to be gazing inwards at something unknown.

  There was a purple velvet purse lying open on the table, and Mrs. Ramsay’s fingers slid out a little vial into the palm of her hand. When Mr. Ramsay turned again to the gentleman, she dripped a few drops of liquid into a water glass before restoring the bottle to her purse. Her dinner plate was untouched. It was a strange spectacle—something Lily couldn’t explain. Was it neuralgia? Father often secluded himself in his study with “headaches” if her friends gossiped too loudly and, in his opinion, overstayed their welcome.

  In a moment, Mr. Ramsay stood up, ringing a cook’s bell to hush the chatter.

  “The annual gongs,” Louis whispered.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s now time for the award of medals,” Mr. Ramsay proclaimed. “I was privileged to chair the selection panel. And thirty artists from St Ives had paintings accepted for the Royal Academy this year. I congratulate you all.”

  Feeling a flutter of excitement, Lily hoped she’d have a painting chosen sometime for the RA Summer Exhibition, but Emily stared directly at Louis. “I want to win a medal before I leave,” she said, as if he could manufacture one for her immediately.

  “You’re both becoming first-rate artists,” Louis replied. “I expect the highest awards will be yours in good time,” he said, and tilted his head backwards for the last dregs of wine, holding the glass out to the waiter.

  As Lily glanced up, she noticed Mrs. Ramsay pushing back her chair.

  “Do we women withdraw?” Emily asked, also watching. “I’ve read in novels about these strange English behaviours at dinner,” she said, but no one else moved. Alone, Mrs. Ramsay swept behind the seated guests, and Lily’s eyes followed to see her place an arm around Andrew’s shoulders and hold her son tight, as he ferociously cut at a piece of cake with his own penknife. Mrs. Ramsay whispered into his ear, and he wiped the blade on a napkin, closing the horn handle with a flourish. All at once the air was still. In the midst of the babble, she had pacified her son and prevented any embarrassment her husband might have had with his dinner roll. Yet somehow, Lily felt unsettled by what she’d witnessed, as if there were too many pieces to hold together, and she couldn’t complete the jigsaw because Mrs. Ramsay’s image had missing parts.

  Later that week, painting fisherfolk with Emily on the beach, Lily couldn’t settle on the scene. The last memory of Mrs. Ramsay was too vivid, and what she’d seen at the Arts Club wouldn’t fit into a painting with a precise title. She hadn’t talked about it to Emily because it was difficult to marry her image of Mrs. Ramsay as a mother to someone hiding things from her husband, and Lily couldn’t find the right words.

  Emily had paid the fisherwoman and her children to pose. “Some of the other students hired professional models from London,” she said. “The sixpence for the fisherwoman is cheap by comparison.”

  “Here’s my half,” Lily replied, handing over a three-penny piece. The northeast to northwest aspect meant the sun shone over the water and the sea was sparkling, the mudflats glowing with translucent light. “I’m going to paint figures without faces,” she added. “I think I can capture their feelings better if I outline their gestures.”

  Emily nodded and bent over her canvas.

  Lily began to paint the children as silhouettes against the white sand to give a scale to the scene and to suggest a fine day. There wasn’t any reason to paint false stories of picturesque fisherfolk. She tried to sketch in the mass of the hill above the beach, but the lines were too thin, and she stood back, not wanting to start and then have to cover it up with style. Perhaps the square beach tents all in a row would be a better pattern contrasted with the round tops of umbrellas and the women’s wide-brimmed summer hats? Her face flushed with effort as she painted directly onto the canvas rather than mixing paints on her palette, but the outlines wouldn’t fix. The black wasn’t strong enough, and her head ached. She had to stop.

  Lily rinsed her brushes and gazed out to sea, watching the tide coming in. The children were leaning against each other and moving out of the poses Emily had requested. While the fisherwoman went on mechanically repairing the nets, the two boys held each other’s hands, and sang out:

  “Can you keep a secret? I don’t believe you can. You mustn’t laugh, you mustn’t smile, while the tickle’s in your hand,” and the tickled boy guffawed with pleasure.

  Lily joined in the laughter, and Emily pointed her brush at the boys.

  “You’re impossible!” she exclaimed, smiling and turning to Lily. “Our day’s
work is done, I fear.”

  Swimmers clambered up the steps of bathing machines into seclusion as the tide lapped rapidly up the beach. Wiping her hands clean on a piece of towelling, Lily packed brushes into her satchel.

  “I’m hungry enough for a pasty, and we both need a cup of tea,” she said. “Let’s go up into the town.”

  The two women stood for a moment on the quayside, staring upwards at the deep green of the island’s trees, where, in the distance, several figures weaved between the trunks, running up to the top of the hill, waving white bags, and crying:

  “Hevva, hevva!”

  “It’s the pilchards, Miss, the pilchards!” the two boys shouted, rushing past with their mother along the quayside, clutching their nets.

  She’d wanted so much to see this event. Mrs. Trevelyan sometimes told her tales of old St Ives and Cornwall over their evening dish of hot chocolate: how Mr. Lanham, the art shop owner, chose his wife from a catalogue, and Sir Humphry Davy, with his lamp, sauntered into the stories as often as lodgers arriving at the cottage. She was playing a role as a local bard, Lily dismissively thought at first, before the vivid stories began to take hold of her. “Thousands of pilchards arrive in St Ives once a year,” Mrs. Trevelyan had said, “and men on the hill wave sticks, with bushes tied at the top, to direct the boats.” Lily had imagined a Cornish version of Birnam Wood coming to kill Macbeth, but all tales change in the retelling. Probably several young women over the years had sat listening and half believing Mrs. Trevelyan. Now here it all was.

  Townspeople were running up the hill, and others holding onto hawsers launched dipper boats down to the sea over wooden planks flat on the sand. Some men sat high up on tree branches gesticulating with sticks each tied at the end to a white cloth bag and, for a moment, the white squares against the vivid green leaves became an Impressionist painting in her mind.

  “Quick, quick,” Emily said, grasping her hand. “We must climb up the hill path too—to see the fish.”

  There were constant cries—“hevva, hevva!”—as the men pointed their sticks with the bag flags out towards shining heaps of fish jumping into the air. The two women climbed higher, and Lily turned to see thrashing waves divided into triangles by the larger sailing boats, moving thick seine nets towards tiny dipper boats in the centre, all painted in haphazard colours. The scene became a twelve-foot canvas in her mind, the kind of history painting she’d always scorned, but now was a real-life drama. Loud calls from the hill were matched by the grating of wooden fish barrels rolling down the town; their metal bands clanged a harsh rhythm on the cobblestones, and the noise redoubled when men brought horses clip-clopping down the echoing streets to the quayside to help the haulers bring up the boats.

  The fisherwoman they’d been painting the hour before was already gutting and salting the first catch, throwing fish into piles in wooden troughs. The drizzle turned to a steady rain, which all the frantic folk on the hill and quayside and in the fishing boats ignored.

  “We should return to our lodgings. We have to prepare for tomorrow’s crit,” Emily reminded her, practical as always, and wet and tired, they rushed into town. Lily could have stayed all night, mesmerized.

  The next day, the rain had ceased. The studio windows were all open, hung on iron hooks so as not to shatter in sudden gusts of wind. Lily stood tense in a corner, waiting for the crit, although Mrs. Ramsay’s praise when she’d bought her painting had made her feel complete, strong enough to face down anyone. Sometimes she felt at peace in the room, working steadily on her canvases—life becoming a flat ocean—gradually washing her into the horizon, but the first crit, when Olsson was so brutal, often repeated in her mind like a cracked phonograph record. She gazed at the other students. The men had bold expressions; Emily was standing unmoving and sturdy as always. Feeling nervous, hoping Louis, not Olsson, would assess her work, Lily clasped her hands tightly together and tried to breathe calmly. She wanted to be seen as an accomplished independent artist and forced herself to stand tall, holding her head up ready to defy Olsson.

  When had she first felt a moment of independence? It was in Liberty’s, as a child, watching her mother hold up fabrics to the light, comparing textures and colours. Bored, she’d wandered off into a side room. A mirror at the end pulled her towards the tiny image of herself smelling the new leather bags and trunks piled at each side. She’d wanted to sit and play with the teddy bear in her hand, its leg trailing on the floor, and, turning to ask her mother if she might, she found she was quite alone. There was no Mother and no shop assistants. Surprisingly calm, she’d walked through the connecting rooms, floorboards smooth with polish, until reaching a wide desk with a brass ruler along one side, where a young statuesque lady in a long black dress and pretty white lace collar was looking at her over a pile of cloth.

  “I’ve lost my mother,” Lily had said.

  An hour later, she was safe in her mother’s arms. “I never felt frightened, Mama,” she’d said. “Well, not very frightened.”

  Lily could smell the sweet scent of her mother’s evening rouge, the feel of her cheek, but if she went on remembering moments with her mother, she would cry. Her face stiffened, and she looked up to see Louis smiling at her. She could have danced in relief it wasn’t Olsson.

  Emily’s painting was chosen first. Her short calligraphic brush marks had expertly captured the fisherwoman and her nets against a cerulean sea. The delicately placed figure pulled a spectator’s eye to the centre of the picture plane. Her technique couldn’t be faulted. Lily felt ashamed at her envy and stood closer to her own painting, watching Louis’s finger tracing over her square beach huts, and the mother and children, the beach she’d drawn from different points of view. At a glance, it was clear the mother figure was too dominating, as always.

  “How glorious it is to be young, independent, and able to splash paint on canvas,” he laughed, turning to the room.

  She hoped his smile wasn’t facetious, and relaxed, overjoyed at the generous comment and glad not to be criticised. She wanted always to paint as she’d dimly known she could paint, not imitating others but becoming herself or whatever self would serve as a painter. Louis was staring at her work.

  “Why do all your figures have their backs to us, Miss Briscoe?” he murmured. “Your geometry, your surface schemes are without question modern. I might even say ‘comme Gauguin’ if the phrase wouldn’t embarrass you. But the figures seem melancholic without faces.”

  It was true and not meant unkindly. He spoke more meaningfully than he realised. She wanted him to know about her memories of losing her mother, but the students weren’t allowed to talk about their lives in relation to their work; whatever was inside the frame had to be the entire story, and she chose a straightforward answer.

  “It’s because I haven’t yet seen anyone on the beach I want to paint from the front.”

  Of course, that wasn’t it. Louis would think her explanation odd, but his question had clarified something about her work—art could recreate presence where there was absence. Painting kept her mother alive; she understood now. She could own whatever she’d put into her paintings. It was strangely liberating. Mother always said, “Never let the sun go down on your anger,” but anger wasn’t memory. The sun never went down on her memories; she simply couldn’t forget.

  At the end of the week it was the last cricket match of the year, and they’d been released from the studio for the day, but Emily didn’t seem interested.

  “I’ve never played cricket nor seen a match,” she said, “and I’m not sure I want to.”

  Emily’s strong body, her sunburnt skin, spoke of the outdoors, of physical activity, and surely much of Canada was cultivated by English immigrants. Perhaps they’d left behind their bats together with other childhood objects when they’d sailed away to the new land.

  “I loved horse riding for hours alone in the woods,” Emily had said when Lily asked her what she used to do for outdoor leisure.

  Lily looked up. S
urrounded by the male art students, Louis strode along, his hat sitting at an even jauntier angle than normal, his cricket bat swinging from side to side. Yesterday’s teaching had been displaced by talk of batting and bowling and game plans.

  “The men all seem to know what to do, well-trained at expensive schools, no doubt,” Emily had whispered.

  “They’re taught to think cricket is the measure of a man. To English men, cricket is a substitute for religion,” Lily had replied, and they’d smiled.

  The Australians had shared the discussion, secure in their knowledge of the absurd technical terms—“silly mid-off ” and “silly mid-on”—inherited from an earlier generation’s memory of England. The “St Ives Artists’ Eleven” sounded grand, and they were sure they’d beat “The Town.”

  “Important to bat first if we win the toss,” Louis had said.

  Ahead, his cape swung with each long stride. It was one of those late summer days when the air was so clear, the sun overhead bleaching the sky, she could almost taste the heat on her lips. An ancient yew tree stood at the entrance, shielding the whitewashed cricket pavilion as they’d stood in churchyards safeguarding English churches for hundreds of years, and here, high above St Ives, everything smelled fresh, like sweet milk mixed with sea salt. Cricket matches tediously lasted several hours, Lily remembered, and she glanced back at the sea. The waves’ silver streams, which the pilchard boats had turned into froth last week, were wide, tranquil channels. From this height, the expanse reached to Godrevy Lighthouse, its flashing beam motionless in the heat. The women walked on towards the pavilion with its benches, and Lily watched Louis greeting a Town player.

  “Hilary Hunt, I believe?” Louis said. “Louis Grier, at your service. We met in your father’s studio, and again at the Academy Hanging Day later the same year.”