After She Left

by Penelope Hanley

  ‘Yeah. But he refused to tell me anything about why Deirdre sent it.’

  Maureen and Jim exchanged puzzled glances and moved close together.

  She’s up to something,’ Jim said. ‘Where was it postmarked from?’

  ‘Devon.’

  They all stared at the picture.

  ‘Weird,’ said Keira’s brother Michael.

  ‘Some of the fish have human faces,’ said Jim. ‘It’s like a dream.’

  ‘Those poor children will drown,’ said Keira’s youngest brother, Sean.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Maureen. ‘It has a strange power.’ She peered closer. ‘Oh! The children are – she must have done it from a photo I sent her – they’re little portraits of you!’

  Michael and Sean and Keira looked closer. ‘You think?’ asked Keira.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ said Maureen. ‘Don’t you think, Jim? Look at it closely – it’s pictures of the children!’

  Keira’s father took a long time to answer.

  ‘Not bad.’

  *

  The wafting fragrance of peppermint tea in their mugs should have smelt soothing but it only inflamed Keira’s anxiety.

  Heide was relaxing against a bright red cushion. ‘You could call your essay A Lost Woman. Her reputation was lost, her works scattered, and she herself drifting to various countries and not answering letters. A working title helps focus your energies. Now, what other aspects will you write about?’

  Keira perched forward, frowning and fiddling with her biro. Her notepad was sliding off her lap and she grabbed it. Her interviews were not yielding enough useful information. The bequest was fantastic at first but now just added to the mystery. Her parents remained hostile to the project. She had spent hours, weeks and months on research, but was still at a loss.

  In the large black and white poster on the wall opposite, the famous American dancer Martha Graham was bending her lean, sheathed torso forward. Her right arm was bent sharply at the elbow and her left straight back, flinging her long dark skirt in a dramatic arc like a backwards ‘C’ behind her. Her tragic and beseeching expression directed right at Keira was a warning. It was clear she was moaning, ‘Don’t do it! It’s too hard!’

  Keira said to Heide, ‘It’s a photographic essay – but I have almost no photographs. And there are too many gaps in the biography part. Too many people missing. You don’t know Olivia Kettlewell, do you?’

  Heide shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘She’s not in the phonebook under that name or under her married name, Dathcett. People tell me she and Deirdre were close and that she was a photographer, but everyone has lost track of her. And can you remind me again: what’s the connection between my subject and photography? I don’t know what I thought I was doing with this topic. It’s not working. Photography is what I’m studying but I can’t integrate it with my subject …’

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ Heide said, patting Keira’s upper arm and giving her a bright, reassuring smile. ‘There were so few women surrealists, even in Europe and the States. And there are many connections between surrealism and photography. Man Ray and Lee Miller and that crowd. Dora Maar. Cartier-Bresson.’

  She leapt up and reached to the highest row on her bookshelf, flicking past spines with her index finger, stopping at a thin volume. ‘I’m sure it’s in here!’ She took down the book and flipped it open to the first page. ‘Yes! Cartier-Bresson says: “I owe an allegiance to Surrealism, because it taught me to let the photographic lens look into the rubble of the unconscious and of chance.” Marvellous. Borrow this for your essay. It’s a good springboard.’ She grinned again, looking like a Colgate ad.

  Rubble. Chance. Keira sighed.

  ‘Thanks, Heide.’ She put her mug on the floor and took the book. ‘I know receiving that bequest out of the blue was good – weird, but good. But it’s still hard. I don’t know enough. I’m going too slowly. Geoffrey Pettifer was sort of helpful. Madge Burnside was an old battleaxe who wouldn’t even let me take her photograph.’

  Heide interrupted. ‘These people you’re interviewing are important. Deirdre Wild lived and worked within a cultural and economic network of relationships. The Romantic idea of the artist as a lone creative genius is a myth.’ Her dark blue eyes looked into Keira’s paler eyes. ‘Deirdre didn’t work alone, no one does. These people you’re interviewing are more than sources of information about your subject; they are your subject, too. And don’t forget about the sexism of her time. That should be coming up in your interviews with the women.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got much on it – nothing concrete.’

  ‘Something concrete is the Archibald Prize: it started in nineteen twenty-one. For seventeen years the winners were all men. The judges were all men too, of course. Then in nineteen thirty-eight Nora Heysen won it. Listen to what Max Meldrum, a very influential man – who had submitted two entries into the same competition, by the way – had to say.’ Heide grabbed a book from her desk. ‘This was a letter he wrote to the newspaper: “If I were a woman I would certainly prefer raising a family to a career in art. To expect women to do some things as well as men is sheer lunacy. A great artist needs all the manly qualities, courage and endurance …” and he goes on.’

  Keira groaned.

  Heide nodded. ‘That was a common attitude. That was what Deirdre Wild and her contemporaries were up against. And we’ve still got a way to go, today!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Keira thoughtfully. ‘I should be asking questions about that. I’ve got the address book Geoffrey Pettifer gave me, but the addresses are ancient. And when women married they changed their name. And many of the people are dead. I’ve been working hard for ages but I still know so little about Deirdre.’

  ‘All the more exciting. You’re a detective, gathering evidence. You can find out more from the galleries who represented her and there must be more family information you can uncover.’

  ‘But my mother still won’t talk about her. I told you, they’re out of touch and Mum won’t say why. It’s weird.’

  Heide nodded slowly, her hands around her mug. ‘If they’re estranged it’s probably painful for her. But once you start digging deeply into your research and sharing it with her, she might start talking. People change …’

  ‘Not my mother. She could never change.’

  *

  Keira did more research on the sexist angle. Nora Heysen’s triumph didn’t lead to change, she discovered. A woman winning the Archibald Prize for the first time in seventeen years did not make much difference. It was twenty-two years until the next time a woman won it. In 1960 Judy Cassab was awarded the prize for her portrait of fellow artist Stanislau Rapotec and then seven years later for the one of Margo Lewers.

  And in all the decades it had been going, those were still the only women who had won it. Three women in fifty-three years! Were the trustees and judges all still men? Max Meldrum, author of the letter telling women that they wanted to be raising a family and not having a career in art because they had no courage or endurance, had won it in the two succeeding years after Nora Heysen had. It was common for the same men’s names to crop up as winners, year after year.

  *

  Keira had been spending so much time studying that she had forgotten her birthday was coming up until her mother’s card arrived in the mail one day before it.

  She would visit her parents on the weekend and Maureen would bake Keira’s favourite: chocolate-orange cake.

  On the birthday night, Alan took her to L’Ironique in Darling Street, just down the road from his place.

  He gave her a book called Handmade Houses. They sipped claret and pored over the book’s intriguing photographs of romantic-looking, idiosyncratic wooden houses. Alan said maybe they could build a house like some of those. Keira shuddered at the image of living on a building site.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘in the future.’ Was he picturing her as a barefoot earth mother, baking bread for him in his ha
ndmade wooden home?

  ‘I could do something really creative,’ he was saying, ‘something curved and expressive like the Opera House!’ He laughed. ‘Not that I’ve got delusions of grandeur, but Utzon’s proved that we can break out of the functionalist straitjacket of the past. Too bad our corrupt state government got rid of him and tried to cheapen everything – and of course their philistine manipulation misfired into massive problems with Utzon gone. But seeing it opened, even without the genius behind it – that’ll be something to tell our grandchildren about!’

  Keira shifted uncomfortably. They ordered dessert.

  ‘Crème caramel?’ she said, frowning at his order. ‘A blobby little thing that you chase around the plate and when you finally catch it on your spoon, it’s gone in two bites!’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Alan, smiling. ‘Tell me what’s so great about crêpes suzette.’

  ‘Intense orange flavour from three sources – fruit, the juice and Cointreau – plus it appeals to the pyromaniac in me.’

  They drank their wine and Alan said, ‘To get back to Utzon, did you know that the Opera House is one of the most difficult engineering feats ever attempted?’

  ‘I did not know that.’

  ‘It took eight years to build the shell. My head of department met him in years past and said he set out to build it as you might build a ship. Utzon’s dad was a naval architect.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, those sails – you can see that they were inspired by yacht sails.’

  ‘No! That’s the interesting thing – he was inspired by segments of an orange!’

  ‘Oh, really? And right on cue, here’s my orange dessert.’

  25

  DEIRDRE

  March 1973

  Spring in Devon – it was going to be beautiful. Deirdre was excited about the idea and was dying to share it with Owen.

  London, with the constant excitement of its arts and entertainment scene, had not suited either of them. A writer and an artist need quietness and a serene psychic space. It had not suited them to be too stimulated. The crowds and the noise disagreed with them. They found it hard to sleep.

  It seemed unbelievable to Deirdre that she and Owen had been together more than twenty-five years since his release from the prison in Madrid.

  Most of their time had been spent in Spain, but in 1967 and 1968 they had studied yoga and meditation in India. They’d lived in Majorca for many happy years, then moved to Torremolinos in the south. They lived in Cadiz for a year and then in San Sebastian.

  Only twelve miles from the French border, San Sebastian was conveniently close to the picturesque fishing village of Collioure, beloved by Matisse and Derain, and they went on holiday there. They lived in Brittany for a couple of years.

  They chose places that were cheap to live and there they lived simply. Owen wrote for English language newspapers and sometimes for The Tribune back home. Deirdre painted and made collages, exhibiting in galleries and selling enough to make a meagre living. Sometimes there was enough money for Deirdre and Owen to visit her family in Ireland, and once Deirdre visited Maureen and the grandchildren in Sydney.

  With all the geography they’d covered they’d also been travelling along on their interior journeys all that time, each growing and changing in their different ways. It was time to settle for a while in a small, quiet village and take stock.

  Deirdre ferreted about for a bowl and arranged the fruit she’d bought from Covent Garden markets that morning.

  Where was that devil of a man?

  A pity their house-minding stint in Battersea had not coincided with Janet’s and Paul’s house-minding in London, thought Deirdre as she turned her attention to the wood-framed mirror, using a chopstick to put her hair up in a top-knot. That would be a few months hence. Janet had written to her with the address. Perhaps they could travel up from Devon and visit sometimes.

  Deirdre was captivated by thoughts of the warmer climate and the beauty of Devon: away from the bustle of London, a new environment in which to paint and write, and extremely cheap. She had seen the advertisement for the cottage in the Manchester Guardian classifieds.

  Once Owen managed to make some personal contacts with some London newspaper editors and they had absorbed an abundance of the works in galleries they would be more than ready for some peace and quiet.

  Owen burst in to the house, flew up the hallway and grabbed Deirdre around the waist.

  ‘Ah, my sea witch!’

  ‘My political prisoner!’

  Deirdre drew Owen’s attention to the advert and gave her commentary, and he sat down and agreed that the picturesque stone cottage in North Tawton would be perfect. He would write. She would paint.

  ‘And we’ll do the yoga and meditation workshops there over the spring and summer,’ said Deirdre.

  Owen picked up an apple and threw it to her, and she took a big, satisfying bite out of it.

  26

  MAUREEN

  July 1973

  ‘Mrs Bolt?’

  ‘Yes, who’s speaking please?’

  ‘I’m Greg Marsh, your son Jimmy’s boss. He’s not turned up for a week and we were wondering if anything might have happened to him.’

  ‘Well, that is concerning. Nothing as far as I know, but I haven’t heard from him. Let me call around. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve heard anything. I’m so sorry. I’m sure there must be a reasonable explanation.’

  Maureen rang Keira and Rowan, she asked Michael – no one knew where Jimmy was.

  When Jim came home Maureen served dinner as usual and kept her intense worrying to herself.

  ‘How was your day, dear?’ she asked. No need to put him off his meal. She would tell him after dinner.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘No, fine isn’t an answer. I want to know how your day was.’

  ‘Not this again, Mo? I don’t know what you want me to tell you. It was nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Right. No traffic accidents, no indecent propositions.’

  ‘I’m a married man. I’m only indecent with you.’

  ‘Oh dear. And we can’t even talk about politics anymore.’

  They chewed in silence until it was time to clear the plates. Before Maureen could broach the subject of Jimmy, there was a knock at the door and Jim got up to answer it. When he came back with two police officers Maureen nearly fainted with alarm.

  But it was relatively good news. Jimmy was alive. He was in Grafton Gaol for possession of marijuana but it turned out they had twenty-two summonses against him. He had given the Beach Lane address because they refused to send his summonses to the Glebe pub where he was temporarily living. While the police had him they were taking the opportunity to serve the summonses to his parents.

  They asked Jim to sign the twenty-two summonses for unpaid fines relating to dangerous riding of a motorbike without wearing a helmet, for riding with no licence, and for riding an unregistered vehicle, as well as for speeding and similar misdemeanours.

  After the police left, Maureen turned to Jim.

  ‘I got such a shock seeing you with the police. Thank God Jimmy is alive.’

  Jim looked like thunder and didn’t answer.

  *

  When Jimmy turned up at Beach Lane the following day, Jim looked askance at him. Maureen pushed past Jim and hugged her son. She breathed in his young smell of leather and tobacco.

  ‘You look quite healthy, at least,’ she said with relief.

  The two sat down and produced cigarettes from their respective packets.

  Jim stood over them and glowered at Jimmy. ‘You’re a juvenile delinquent,’ he said, adding in a low, sarcastic tone, ‘If you’d got your timing better, I could have had two of my sons in jail at the same time!’

  ‘Jim, please – this is not helping,’ said Maureen.

  Jim ignored her. ‘And you can change your surname,’ he said to his son. ‘I can’t hold my head up in the community with the same name as a prisoner.’

  Maur
een and Jimmy looked at each other, not knowing whether he was joking or not.

  Jimmy laughed in disbelief. He said, ‘What to?’

  ‘That’s not my concern,’ said Jim, and walked out of the room.

  Maureen wanted Jimmy to stay, at least for lunch, but he had found himself a spare room in his mate Pete’s group house in Glebe and that was where he was going.

  Maureen gave him the phone number of Stephen Field and said she would make an appointment for him herself if he liked.

  ‘Thanks, Mum – I’ll do it. I’ll give him a call.’

  27

  KEIRA

  June 1973

  Alfred Foote’s voice sounded posh, for a gravedigger. Keira had finally got through to him on the phone and the next day she caught the 326 to town where they had agreed to meet at the Café Continental.

  Alfred stood up as Keira entered, and looked directly at her through rimless glasses. An orange cravat contrasted with the shabby black suit he wore. His shoulder-length white hair was cut crookedly. His skin was like crumpled white tissue paper and as Keira drew near him she smelled mothballs.

  ‘You look very like her, except for your blue eyes,’ he said, in his cultivated English-sounding voice.

  They ordered two cappuccinos. ‘And some of those spicy biscuits, please,’ he said to the waitress.

  ‘You said you wanted more information about Deirdre. I know nothing about art but I know something about her past.’ He talked quickly, gazing unseeingly out the window next to them, concentrating on the past.

  ‘Once, Deirdre told me about something that happened to her father when she was young. The islanders used to row in big wooden boats from the Blaskets to Dingle on the mainland with their fish and wool to sell. With the money they got, they would buy what they couldn’t grow or get from the sea. The men tied up their two big boats as usual.’

  Their coffees came. ‘Thank you, dear,’ he said to the waitress.

  ‘They sold their goods and then spent the night in town. But when they went next day to their boats, there were strangers in charge of them. The police.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘They’d had their orders from the rent collectors – the boats were impounded in lieu of unpaid rent.’