The Mistressclass
Page 20
Some of the paintings were so large you had to hold them from behind, by their cross-bars. The flat surfaces went sliding along, walked by a pair of feet sticking out underneath. They came alive, because they were such large, simplified, bright images, and because they were moving against the backdrop of lush greenery. Like a slide show going sideways, scarlet and crimson and flesh-colour flashing strobe-like in this May garden of green speckled with white.
Their perspective was unsettling. Two and three dimensions both at once. Drew you in then rebuffed you. You felt you had your nose flattened against someone’s skin, and yet the treatment of the surface, chilly and flat, meant you were pushed away, kept distant; at the same time. Some of the reds, in the nude studies, made you think of wounds, of a body that’s been stabbed.
This first group of pictures was all about flesh. Seen one by one they represented a dismemberment. A hand. A foot. A cunt. An eye. Put together they made one reassembled body. Flesh admired and longed for, caressed and gratified; flesh that forbade, repulsed and punished; that was bruised and scratched; pitied.
The second group was strongly narrative. These paintings employed props and costumes, as in some nineteenth-century allegorical drama. At first glance the pictures were so pastiched as to be hopelessly old-fashioned. Then you saw that the handling of the paint did make the work modern.
Robert had repeatedly painted a figure with Catherine’s face, in imaginary landscapes of jungles and forests; in imaginary roles, as a goddess, a madonna, a bride. She was veiled in gauze; crowned with poppies; carried wreaths of lilies. She was unsmiling; evoked the harsh beauty of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait.
He had represented Vinny in a short, tight skirt, posed in urban settings of junkyards and derelict factories, dwarfed by huge bleak skies. Hands on hips, feet apart. Legs braced in high heels. Gangster’s moll; tart; cigarette in her mouth. This one couldn’t feel anything; carapace of muscles and makeup; she was like an alien. Her hard gaze attacked you: how much?
—Thanks a lot, Robert, Vinny said.
—Not exactly cutting edge, are they? Charlie said: that nude portrait in London of your sister’s the best of the lot.
—You know it’s Catherine? Vinny asked: did she tell you?
—Never said a word, Charlie said: but the minute I saw it I knew. It’s obvious, if you’ve got eyes in your head.
—So what about the show? Vinny asked.
—We’ll see, Charlie said: these will sell, for sure. If that’s what you’re asking.
Vinny helped Charlie load the paintings into the van. Then they built a bonfire and burned the rubbish from the pile outside the shed. Ancient newspapers, worm-eaten picture-frames, old boxes and broken furniture formed a substantial pyre. They set aside the sacks of old porn mags, old sex manuals they found at the back of the paintings-store: someone might make something of them one day. They stood around the flames, poking them with pitchforks. Vinny cremated Robert anew. She collected up all his dismembered parts, all his worn-out, cut-up bits, fed them into these flames. Alchemy. To release him and say farewell. So that mourning could be properly done, and end, and his imaginary gold body could arise.
She was tired out. She sat down on the grass and yawned.
—D’you want to eat something? Charlie asked: I bought some food on the way here. I’ll make us supper if you like.
Jeanne and Lucien arrived from shutting up their poultry. Wrapped in coats against the chill of the May night the four of them sat by the heaped red embers. Waiting for the lamb chops to grill they opened one of the bottles of claret Charlie had brought with him and clinked glasses. The moon rose, salmon-pink in the indigo sky, Venus at its heel. The stars came out.
PART 17
Arthur says I was ill for a long time, cher Monsieur; that my mind wandered sadly. I don’t call it illness; rather, an adventure. My mind wandered to France and back. My mind wandered to Brussels and still does. But this is the last time I shall write to you, my dear master. From henceforth I shall keep my stories, my parcels of words, for myself. No more giving everything away: letters squandered to the flames. I shall keep my writing and not burn it and see, instead, what I can make of it.
I’ll write no more to you, dear friend. But I’ll write another novel; and perhaps you will read it in translation someday.
Do you remember how bitterly I complained before that I had nowhere to write? Now that I’ve returned, I’ve made myself a study. I’ve found myself a retreat for writing in. Outside.
In front of the house, cher Monsieur, we tend what you’d call the jardin d’ornement: a strip of grass edged with flower-beds. Behind the house, the garden slopes up to a hawthorn hedge. This marks the boundary of the cultivated part: beyond, the hill rears up towards the moor. The back garden is laid out on three narrow terraces, stepped steeply one above the other. The first is merely a grassy path where we hang the washing out to dry on a line between two apple trees, so that it can’t be seen from the churchyard or the church. To witness the vicar’s long woollen underpants, however clean, however neatly mended, flapping in the breeze, would offend the parishioners’ sensibilities, apparently; distract them from their prayers. The second garden-step, or terrace, is set with fruit bushes and rows of vegetables, and a line of pear trees; and the third, and highest, is planted with apple trees, shrubs and flowers to make a kind of alley. Much too narrow for someone as tall and big as Arthur to pace along in comfort. But I like slipping in here between the glossy green leaves of the bay, the orange-blossom, the crab-apple.
If you sit here and wait quietly you see hedgehogs, dormice and voles going about their business. Thrushes, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches and sparrows dart to and fro. When it rains, the slugs and snails come out. None of them minds me. I’m just another animal; on two legs.
Here I have pitched my camp. I brought up two old sheets from the house, so patched and darned they are fit only for making rags, and tied them to the branches of a lilac bush on one side and then round to the hawthorn hedge. I weighted them on the ground with stones. Two sides of a pavilion to screen the parsonage below from my view. I’ve laid down a piece of old blue carpet for floor. Silky on my bare soles once I peel my stockings off. It marks out my space on the dry earth. Also I’ve carried up the wicker table and armchair from the outhouse, two cushions, my little desk, a basket of books, a bottle of water, a tin cup.
Soft walls of white construct my temporary house, billow in the warm wind, enclose me like wings. Overhead there’s a green canopy studded with small apples as red as enamel beads, and to my left a screen of tall ferns with the sunlight dappling through them. Far above me are the moors, and the blue hills.
No-one can see me from the parsonage. Anyone climbing the crags and looking down might remark two sheets blowing in the wind and think nothing of it. So what? The vicar’s laundry. But these aren’t the sheets off our bed. They’re the ones from childhood, that Emily and I slept in until they wore out, and then wore out again from being mended so much. Now, the light pierces them; they’re like very old paper, almost transparent, and the waving shadows of the ferns dance over them like writing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Gillon Aitken and all at Gillon Aitken Associates. Thanks to all at Little, Brown and Virago and, in particular, to my editor Lennie Goodings. Special thanks to Sarah LeFanu and Jenny Newman.
ALSO BY MICHÈLE ROBERTS
Daughters of the House
Impossible Saints
Fair Exchange
The Looking Glass
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve novels, including Fair Exchange, Daughters of the House, which won the WH Smith Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Looking Glass. Half English and half French, Roberts divides her time between London and Mayenne, France.
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Copyright © 2003 by Michèle Roberts
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Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by Little, Brown and Company, London.
First American Edition 2003
eISBN 9781466866461
First eBook edition: February 2014