by Ella Carey
“You didn’t hear me coming up here.”
Emma jumped at the sound of Patrick’s voice and the feel of his presence at her studio’s open door.
“I assumed you’d left. I don’t like being disturbed while I work,” she said. She stopped and gazed out at the sea. A couple of boats bobbed in the harbor.
“I told Oscar that I wanted to ask you something about art.”
She paused for a moment, her hand hovering over her work.
“Do you like sailing?” he asked, switching tack like one of the yachts out on the blue sea. Still standing at the entrance to her room.
“Not particularly. Unless the company is amusing,” she said.
“I’ve heard that about you.”
She put down her paintbrush. “If I have prejudices, then they are only against restraint.”
He laughed. “But I understand that.”
“I try to make things better in any small way I can.”
“Your art does that.”
She gazed at her painting. “I always hate what I paint! But, yes, I strive to improve each piece, to make it better than the last; otherwise there seems little point in pushing on. I suppose what I try to do is to express something indefinable, a feeling sometimes.”
She swiveled to face him, and he wandered into the room.
“Do you find it easier to live by your philosophies here in France?” he asked. “Or doesn’t it matter where you are as long as you can paint?”
“A little of both. Although perhaps I have not found my spiritual home yet . . .” She stood up, her shoulder brushing against his as she moved past him toward the window.
“I see France as freedom,” he murmured.
She looked down at the intense greens outside the window. “I’m afraid our lives can sometimes be reduced to gossip at home. And worse,” she said, turning to him.
“It’s constant. It never goes away at home for me,” he said.
“I can’t begin to imagine.” What sort of a topic was this, when her feelings were moving in countless nonsensical directions that wanted to ignore who he was, how he lived?
“See that little boat out there?” He came to stand next to her.
Emma looked where he pointed, turning her focus fast, as if clutching at something normal outside the turmoil of herself. He pulled a tiny pair of binoculars out of his pocket and held them gently against her face so that she could peer out at the deep, deep blue.
She leaned closer to him and took in a long breath.
“See the little one, with the yellow sail, with the red poppies painted on it?” he murmured, leaning close to her in turn and guiding the binoculars to the right spot.
“Oh,” she said, narrowing her eyes. Two red poppies flapped and floated on the canvas as if they were moving of their own accord. “Yes?”
Patrick took back the binoculars. He rested on the windowsill while she stood opposite him. He crossed his legs and smiled. “I designed the sail for the owners of the boat. Two women. They live together out here in France. They, too, find that things are more liberal here for them.”
Emma felt her face redden. She moved back to her easel and dipped her brush into her palette, taking some deep green and focusing with great determination on the soft, lush feel of the brush circling about in the wet paint.
He stayed quiet, and the silence hung between them, but he did not break it for a while.
“Come out with me tomorrow,” he said finally.
Emma held her paintbrush in midair.
“I want to show you something. I’d love your opinion if you’d be happy to do that. That’s what I really came up here to ask. And, Emma?”
She waited.
“There’s something else.” He moved away from the window and strode toward the middle of the vast room until he stopped, standing still on the parquet floor. He ran a hand over his chin and regarded her. “Would you mind very much if I painted you?” he asked, his eyes searching her face.
She looked down at her hands.
“You see, I don’t paint anyone I know, as a rule,” he went on, his voice low. “I always think that if I were to do that, I would be crossing some line. It’s too intimate. My most intimate form of expression. But I’d love, if you would let me, to paint you.”
London, 1980
Laura helped Emma up the stairs to her studio before making her way down to the kitchen, where Lydia was chopping vegetables with force.
“That telephone,” Lydia said.
Laura could see how these women survived the war together.
“Fourteen calls while you and Mrs. Emma were out. People who are not friends of Mrs. Emma’s. Several journalists. Humans are first and foremost gossips, you know, Laura. Sometimes I wonder if, in the end, that is all we are.”
Laura ran her hand over the older woman’s soft arm. Lydia’s ability to run Emma’s day-to-day affairs was legendary. Without Lydia’s steady support, it was doubtful that Emma would have been able to paint every day.
“Honestly. The questions I was asked! ‘Did Mrs. Temple suspect that the Adams portrait of her was a fraud all along, or is the news a complete shock?’” Lydia went on, her eyebrows raising to the roof. “‘Would she come on the radio for an interview about the exact nature of her lifelong friendship with the homosexual artist Patrick Adams?’ ‘How does she feel about the fact that the painting could be worthless now that it has been proven’—yes, proven, this reporter said—‘not to be the work of the artist to whom it has been attributed for decades?’ And finally, a woman from New York.”
“New York?”
“The New York Times.”
Laura leaned on the back of a chair.
Lydia paused with her chopping knife in midair.
“That’s it.” Laura glared at the phone. “Time to set the record straight.”
There was a silence.
“It’s taken off like a barrel down a hill.” Lydia sounded resigned now. “What are we going to do?”
Laura stood up a little taller. “I’m going to confront this ‘expert’ first. Then I will go to the bank and remind them that everyone knows and accepts that the painting is an original Patrick Adams.” Laura pushed aside the dark doubts that had threatened to brew into full-blown worries since her conversation with Emma in the square. If Emma didn’t witness Patrick painting the canvas, who did?
“Lydia, surely you were in France that summer when Patrick painted her. What did you see? Can you verify that Patrick painted the portrait?”
Lydia placed her knife down and pressed her fingers into the bench. “I was just a girl. It was my first summer with Mrs. Emma, and I oversaw the management of the house in France. I looked after young Calum, but there was a local cleaner to see to all the bedrooms and so forth. I didn’t venture into Mr. Patrick’s or Mr. Jerome’s rooms that summer. As for what struck me, it was that Mrs. Emma and Mr. Patrick had this secret, joking sort of way of communicating between themselves. They tolerated each other’s whims and nonsense. It was as if they were their own little circle that no one else could break. There was this quiet excitement between them about the portrait, but to my knowledge, Mrs. Emma let him work on it while she quietly got on with her own art. I do think, with all due respect . . .” Lydia paused a moment.
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s just that I do think that the idea of Mr. Patrick painting Mrs. Emma helped temper her worries about Mr. Patrick’s relationship with that Jerome. To me, the nature of his portrait of her was just as their relationship was—an unspoken agreement, something of beauty that was between them since they first met. That’s how I would describe it. They both knew how they felt about each other all their lives, and they both knew that his painting her, given he never painted anyone else he knew well, was a testament to the depth of their shared love.”
“I can’t stand this so-called expert already,” Laura whispered. “Hate him. I’m going to war.” Her words seemed to hover in the quiet kitchen.
&
nbsp; “Ewan Buchanan?” Lydia said. “I will join you. I can’t stand the man.”
CHAPTER THREE
London, 1909
Steady southern light bathed the life drawing room at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly in a canopy of autumn gold. Emma glanced at the clock, savoring the last five minutes that she could spend here before she was compelled to go home. At half past three, Cinderella-like, she had to disappear. Risking her father’s wrath was not worth it. She had to be home to pour tea.
Emma contemplated her work, leaning forward a little in her seat so that the soft blue smock she wore billowed around her slender frame. Her teacher, John Singer Sargent, had started today by demonstrating his method; his head thrown back, he had executed something marvelous from a few strokes of charcoal.
While he was a brilliant technician, Sargent also seemed to Emma a glorious representation of everything she admired about the new ways in art. Light dazzled and flickered in Sargent’s work, glinting on skeins of silk, shining on pearls. He eschewed the elaborate skill and unnecessary detail that the other artists who taught at the academy advocated. Sargent believed in getting to the heart of things and argued that was all that was important in art.
This fresh approach to painting, which Emma had studied first in the small book on the French Impressionists given to her by her mercurial father, was beginning to emerge as a new force in her artistic conscience. There was no doubt that she was irresistibly attracted to this idea of bold use of color. She’d always been drawn to the allure of it, and bright tones seemed entirely relevant in the emerging modern world, far more so than the old, muted colors that British artists still favored.
Emma gathered her things, painfully aware of the contrast between the possibility of freedom that seemed so real here and being forced to serve cinnamon buns to her father’s daily visitors by four o’clock. She would sit through the conversations with the few matrons and gentlemen who still came to see her father, the now elderly biographer and literary critic who lived and worked in an otherwise solitary and temperamental state at the top of the family’s Kensington House.
Emma drew on her cape and pushed her bike out into Piccadilly, hoisting herself up on the leather seat, pedaling in a firm, consistent pattern in spite of the swelling drops of rain that pelted her back. The wind whipped up her hair, causing it to fly around her face and obscuring her view beyond a few feet ahead. She cycled on, past the park, where the trees had become shimmering, glistening versions of themselves, and along to Kensington Road, until finally, soaked to the skin, her chest hot and heaving, she turned into the dead-end street where she lived.
Ten minutes later, having unceremoniously thrown off her sodden dress and changed everything from her soaked-through undergarments to her water-stained cape, she made her calm way downstairs, past her family’s collection of oddities and the vast array of Victorian knickknacks that cluttered every surface.
Her eyes darted to the grandfather clock outside the sitting room as she smoothed down her wet hair, her fingers alighting on her still-damp cheeks, flushed from the violent effort she’d made to be here on time.
She was fifteen minutes late.
The sound of her father’s loud voice boomed out into the hallway.
“Don’t know where Emma’s got to,” he proclaimed. “Darned art school. Teaching women to paint. I’ve always maintained that it’s important to educate them, though. Complete waste of their lives if we don’t. But that doesn’t mean we allow standards to slip!”
A general chuckle sounded from the room.
Emma held her head up as she walked into the overheated parlor. She’d learned to stay silent during her father’s irrational bouts. Were she to question him, he’d take her out of the academy altogether. So she kept her mouth shut.
The deep green walls seemed to close in on her as she nodded, smiling silently at her father’s assembled guests, barely visible in the dark, hazy atmosphere. Two elderly, old-school Oxford dons acknowledged her with the briefest of nods; the wife of one of them and two neighbors looked at her as if she had landed from some distasteful moon. But they were all part of the coterie of friends that Emma’s departed mother had kept like a security blanket around her while she devoted the majority of her time to good, charitable works.
“Ah, here’s the girl in question,” he announced. “You’re late!”
Emma raised a brow at the deceptive benevolence in her father’s tone. Later this evening, she knew, she would be subject to the full force of his wrath. The evening accounting rituals upset him. He was always telling her they were falling into debt, while expecting her to manage all the family’s expenditures since her mother had died. Emma knew that his agitation over the accounts was a mask for the real grief he felt over the loss of her mother. She tried to focus her thoughts on this rather than reacting to him and risking his temper any further.
Emma poured tea while one don droned on and on, only to be interrupted by short, insistent barbs from her father. Emma retreated mentally, her thoughts drifting to Sargent’s suggestion that his students travel to see the light in France and Italy. She kept half an ear on the conversation so that she could comment when spoken to.
Sargent’s encouragement for her to be bold, to embrace the new emerging world and modernity, seemed almost hopeless in the face of her life at home. In spite of that, she was starting to glimpse freedom of expression in both life and art as an ideal.
If only her painting and her life could merge. How exciting things could become. Emma glanced at her father as he wiped a smear of cinnamon-speckled icing off his chin. His hand shook as he placed his teacup back down on the small table in front of him, beside a silver-framed photo of her mother and a porcelain vase decorated with elaborate gold leaf.
“You’re off to do the rounds with Arthur this evening, I trust, Emma?” he boomed. His voice still intonated throughout the room, even though his body, racked with the illness they’d discovered only a few months earlier, was rendering him almost a cripple these days.
Emma laid her own teacup back down in its saucer, but her hand shook in turn as she did so.
“I did promise Arthur I would accompany him tonight.” To a ghastly party in Mayfair, then to another in Belgravia. Emma’s older brother required her support in society as he determinedly sought a wife, while he saw it as his duty to the family to find a suitable husband for Emma. In short, they wanted to marry her off. She couldn’t count the number of times Arthur had told her some sporting chap was keen on her, prodding her to get on with things and be thankful for his attentions.
Two hours later, having endured her father’s inevitable tantrum about the household finances, Emma stepped into the family carriage with Arthur.
“I’ve bought you a horse,” her older brother announced, bringing his snuffbox up to his nose and sniffing it as if he were a connoisseur of fine wines. “You can ride out on Rotten Row in the mornings every day. A woman on a horse is always an attractive sight. And something tells me that you would be more alluring astride a mare than most women.”
In silence, Emma gazed out the window at the dripping blackness. Carriages swept by on Kensington Road, and Hyde Park looked like a deep mystery in the dark, rather than the wonderland that she had escaped to as a child.
The fan that she held and the long white gloves she had to wear, even the glint of her mother’s jewels at her neck and the Malmaison carnation that Arthur had pinned to her dress, seemed like gloomy entrapments ahead of another dull evening.
She’d learned to put men off by seeming distant. She preferred, by far, to be thought cold and aloof than to get caught in any way, having to spend the rest of her life stuck as the wife in a repressive Victorian-style household. At least tonight it was just two parties, and not a house party that lasted an entire excruciating weekend. Having to spend three full days with no space to herself was the worst of all and only caused her to retreat even further into her own interior world.
And yet, when
she was at a house party, it was ironic that she yearned for home and the tall house filled with her father’s books. At least there was scope for intellectual life there. When her dearest brother Frederick was down from Cambridge, he involved her in wonderful conversations about philosophy, art, economics, and science, all possibilities that seemed almost magical to Emma in their scope. During their childhood, her mother’s absence and busyness in charities had given Emma and her younger sister, Freya, the time to read to their hearts’ content and, for Emma’s part, to draw, and for Freya’s, to write.
After they were welcomed into Lady Frances Ottway’s charmingly appointed house in Mayfair, Emma occupied herself by sitting in a corner and playing a game of contrast between the sight in front of her and the other thrilling possibility that was emerging in her life right now besides Sargent’s lessons—the exciting discussions that happened when Frederick and his burgeoning group of freethinking friends came down to London from Cambridge.
Fiercely intellectual young men, Frederick’s crowd was drawn passionately to the philosophies of G. E. Moore, radical writings from 1903 that espoused living a life that valued personal affection and aesthetic enjoyment above all else, a life that contained nothing evil or indifferent, free from materialist philosophy. Such ideas excited Emma to the depths of her soul. It was almost as if someone had put on paper the feelings that bloomed quietly in her mind.
What was more, Frederick’s friends represented the pinnacle of Cambridge talent. Their erudite conversations lit upon pacifism as the only ethical and respectful way of life; they would talk of tolerance toward all people, regardless of gender, sexuality, or race. They rejected the structures that dictated social life in Victorian England and saw, instead, personal freedom as the only way forward in the new century.
Emma had come to relish the opportunity to get out of the house with Frederick and the other young men, sneaking away with them to coffee shops in Knightsbridge, where the brilliant young Oscar Temple, Lawrence Irvin, Ambrose Carlisle, and her adored younger brother, Frederick, would open her and Freya’s minds and help their thoughts to soar.
