Unfinished Portrait

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  The lesson ended with Celia in tears. Barré was kind.

  ‘There, there – it is not your song. No, I see it is not your song. You shall sing the “Jerusalem” of Gounod. The “Alléluia” from the Cid. Some day we will return to Carmen.’

  Music occupied the time of most of the girls. There was an hour’s French every morning, that was all. Celia, who could speak much more fluent and idiomatic French than any of the others, was always horribly humiliated at French. In dictation, while the other girls had two, three, or at most five faults, she would have twenty-five or thirty. In spite of reading innumerable French books, she had no idea of the spelling. Also she wrote much slower than the others. Dictation was a nightmare to her.

  Madame would say:

  ‘But it is impossible – impossible – that you should have so many faults, Celia! Do you not even know what a past participle is?’

  Alas, that was exactly what Celia did not know.

  Twice a week she and Sybil went to their painting lesson. Celia grudged the time taken from the piano. She hated drawing, and painting even worse. Flower painting was what the two girls were learning.

  Oh, miserable bunch of violets in a glass of water!

  ‘The shadows, Celia, put in the shadows first.’

  But Celia could never see the shadows. Her best hope was surreptitiously to look at Sybil’s painting and try to make hers look like it.

  ‘You seem to see where these beastly shadows are, Sybil. I don’t – I never do. It’s just a blob of lovely purple.’

  Sybil was not particularly talented, but certainly at painting it was Celia who was ‘the Moron’.

  Something deep down in her hated this copying business – this tearing the secrets out of flowers and scratching and blobbing it down on paper. Violets should be left to grow in gardens or arranged droopingly in glasses. This making something out of something else – it went against her.

  ‘I don’t see why you’ve got to draw things,’ she said to Sybil one day. ‘They’re there already.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know quite how to say it, but why make things that are like other things? It’s such a waste. If one could draw a flower that didn’t exist – imagine one – then it might be worth while.’

  ‘You mean make up a flower out of your head?’

  ‘Yes, but even then it wouldn’t be right. I mean it would still be a flower, and you wouldn’t have made a flower – you’d have made a thing on paper.’

  ‘But, Celia, pictures, real pictures, art – they’re very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, of course – at least –’ She stopped. ‘Are they?’

  ‘Celia!’ cried Sybil, aghast at such heresy.

  Had they not been taken to the Louvre to look at old masters only yesterday?

  Celia felt she had been too heretical. Everybody spoke reverently of Art.

  ‘I expect I’d had too much chocolate to drink,’ she said. ‘That’s why I thought them stuffy. All those saints looking exactly alike. Of course, I don’t mean it,’ she added. ‘They’re wonderful, really.’

  But her voice sounded a little unconvinced.

  ‘You must be fond of art, Celia, you’re so fond of music.’

  ‘Music’s different. Music’s itself. It’s not copy cat. You take an instrument – the violin, or the piano, or the ’cello, and you make sounds – lovely sounds all woven together. You haven’t got to get it like anything else. It’s just itself.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sybil, ‘I think music is just a lot of nasty noises. And very often when I’m playing the wrong notes it sounds to me better than when I play the right ones.’

  Celia gazed despairingly at her friend.

  ‘You can’t be able to hear at all.’

  ‘Well, from the way you were painting those violets this morning nobody would think you were able to see.’

  Celia stopped dead – thereby blocking the path of the little femme de chambre who accompanied them and who chattered angrily.

  ‘Do you know, Sybil,’ said Celia, ‘I believe you’re right. I don’t think I do see things – not see them. That’s why I can’t spell. And that’s why I don’t really know what anything is like.’

  ‘You always walk straight through puddles,’ said Sybil. Celia was reflecting.

  ‘I don’t see that it matters – not really – except spelling, I suppose. I mean, it’s the feeling a thing gives you that matters – not just its shape and how it happens to be made.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, take a rose.’ Celia nodded towards a flower-seller they were passing. ‘What does it matter how many petals it has and exactly what the shape of them is – it’s just the oh, sort of whole thing that matters – the velvetyness and the smell.’

  ‘You couldn’t draw a rose without knowing its shape.’

  ‘Sybil, you great ass, haven’t I told you I don’t want to draw? I don’t like roses on paper. I like them real.’

  She stopped in front of the flower woman and for a few sous bought a bunch of drooping dark-red roses.

  ‘Smell,’ she said, thrusting them in front of Sybil’s nose. ‘Now, doesn’t that give you a heavenly sort of pain just here?’

  ‘You’ve been eating too many apples again.’

  ‘I haven’t. Oh, Sybil, don’t be so literal. Isn’t it a heavenly smell?’

  ‘Yes, it is. But it doesn’t give me a pain. I don’t see why one should want it to.’

  ‘Mummy and I tried to do botany once,’ said Celia. ‘But we threw the book away, I hated it so. Knowing all the different kinds of flowers and classifying them – and pistils and stamens – horrid, like undressing the poor things. I think it’s disgusting. It’s – it’s indelicate.’

  ‘Do you know, Celia, that if you go to a convent, the nuns make you have your bath with a chemise on. My cousin told me.’

  ‘Do they? Why?’

  ‘They don’t think it’s nice to look at your own body.’

  ‘Oh.’ Celia thought a minute. ‘How do you manage with the soap? You wouldn’t get awfully clean if you soaped yourself through a chemise.’

  2

  The girls at the Pensionnat were taken to the opera, and to the Comédie Francaise, and to skate at the Palais de Glace in winter. Celia enjoyed it all, but it was the music that really filled her life. She wrote to her mother that she wanted to take up the piano professionally.

  At the end of the term Miss Schofield gave a party, at which the more advanced of the girls played and sang. Celia was to do both. The singing went off quite all right, but over playing she broke down and stumbled badly through the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonate Pathétique.

  Miriam came over to Paris to fetch her daughter, and at Celia’s wish she asked M. Kochter to tea. She was not at all anxious for Celia to take up music professionally, but she thought she might as well hear what M. Kochter had to say on the matter. Celia was not in the room when she asked him about it.

  ‘I will tell you the truth, madame. She has the ability – the technique – the feeling. She is the most promising pupil I have. But I do not think she has the temperament.’

  ‘You mean she has not the temperament to play in public?’

  ‘That is exactly what I do mean, madame. To be an artist one must be able to shut out the world – if you feel it there listening to you, then you must feel it as a stimulus. But Mademoiselle Celia, she will give of her best to an audience of one – of two people – and she will play best of all to herself with the door closed.’

  ‘Will you tell her what you have told me, M. Kochter?’

  ‘If you wish, madame.’

  Celia was bitterly disappointed. She fell back on the idea of singing.

  ‘Though it won’t be the same thing.’

  ‘You don’t love singing as you love your piano?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why you’re not nervous when you sing?’

  ‘Perhaps it is. A v
oice seems somehow something apart from one’s self – I mean, it isn’t you doing it – like it is with your fingers on the piano. Do you understand, Mummy?’

  They had a serious discussion with M. Barré.

  ‘She has the ability and the voice, yes. Also the temperament. She has as yet very little expression in her singing – it is the voice of a boy, not a woman. That’– he smiled – ‘will come. But the voice is charming – pure – steady – and her breathing is good. She can be a singer, yes. A singer for the concert stage – her voice is not strong enough for opera.’

  When they were back in England, Celia said:

  ‘I’ve thought about it, Mummy. If I can’t sing in opera, I don’t want to sing at all. I mean, not professionally.’

  Then she laughed.

  ‘You didn’t want me to, did you, Mummy?’

  ‘No, I certainly didn’t want you to become a professional singer.’

  ‘But you’d have let me? Would you let me do anything I wanted to if I wanted it enough?’

  ‘Not anything,’ said Miriam with spirit.

  ‘But nearly anything?’

  Her mother smiled at her.

  ‘I want you to be happy, my pet.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall always be happy,’ said Celia with great confidence.

  3

  Celia wrote to her mother that autumn that she wanted to be a hospital nurse. Bessie was going to be one, and she wanted to be one too. Her letters had been very full of Bessie lately.

  Miriam did not reply directly, but towards the end of the term she wrote and told Celia that the doctor had said it would be a good thing for her to winter abroad. She was going to Egypt, and Celia was coming with her.

  Celia arrived back from Paris to find her mother staying with Grannie and in the full bustle of departure. Grannie was not at all pleased at the Egyptian idea. Celia heard her talking about it to Cousin Lottie, who had come in to lunch.

  ‘I can’t understand Miriam. Left as badly off as she is. The idea of rushing off to Egypt – Egypt – about the most expensive place she could go to! That’s Miriam all over – no idea of money. And Egypt was one of the last places she went to with poor John. It seems most unfeeling.’

  Celia thought her mother looked both defiant and excited. She took Celia to shop and bought her three evening dresses.

  ‘The child’s not out. You’re absurd, Miriam,’ said Grannie.

  ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea for her to come out there. It’s not as though she could have a London season – we can’t afford it.’

  ‘She’s only sixteen.’

  ‘Nearly seventeen. My mother was married before she was seventeen.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you want Celia to marry before she’s seventeen.’

  ‘No, I don’t, but I want her to have her young girl’s time.’

  The evening dresses were very exciting – though they emphasized the one crumpled roseleaf in Celia’s life. Alas, the figure that Celia had never ceased to look forward to so eagerly had never materialized. No swelling mounds for Celia to encase in a striped shirt. Her disappointment was bitter and acute. She had wanted ‘a chest’ so badly. Poor Celia – had she only been born twenty years later – how admired her shape would have been! No slimming exercises necessary for that slender yet well-covered frame.

  As it was, ‘plumpers’ were introduced into the bodices of Celia’s evening dresses – delicate ruchings of net.

  Celia longed for a black evening dress, but Miriam said No, not until she was older. She bought her a white taffeta gown, a dress of pale green net with lots of little ribbons running across it and a pale pink satin with rosebuds on the shoulder.

  Then Grannie unearthed from one of the bottom mahogany drawers a piece of brilliant turquoise blue taffeta with suggestions that Poor Miss Bennett should try her hand at it. Miriam managed to suggest tactfully that perhaps Poor Miss Bennett would find a fashionable evening dress a little beyond her. The blue taffeta was made up elsewhere. Then Celia was taken to a hairdresser and given a few lessons in the art of putting up her own hair – a somewhat elaborate process, since it was trained over a ‘hair frame’ in front and arranged in masses of curls behind. Not an easy style for anyone who had, like Celia, long thick hair falling far below her waist.

  It was all very exciting, and it never occurred to Celia that her mother seemed rather better than worse in health than usual.

  It did not escape Grannie.

  ‘But there,’ she said, ‘Miriam’s got a bee in her bonnet over this business.’

  It was many years later that Celia realized exactly what her mother’s feelings were at the time. She had had a dull girlhood herself – she was passionately eager that her darling should have all the gaieties and excitements that a young girl’s life could hold. And it was going to be difficult for Celia to have a ‘good time’ living buried in the country with few young people of her own age around.

  Hence, Egypt – where Miriam had many friends from the time when she and her husband had been there together. To obtain the necessary funds she did not hesitate to sell out some of the few stocks and shares she possessed. Celia was not to be envious of other girls having ‘good times’ which she had never had.

  Also, so she confided some years later to Celia, she had been afraid of her friendship for Bessie West.

  ‘I’ve seen so many girls get interested in another girl and refuse to go out or take any interest in men. It’s unnatural – and not right.’

  ‘Bessie? But I was never very fond of Bessie.’

  ‘I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. I was afraid. And all that hospital nurse nonsense. I wanted you to have a good time and pretty clothes and enjoy yourself in a young, natural way.’

  ‘Well,’ said Celia, ‘I did.’

  7 Grown Up

  1

  Celia enjoyed herself, it is true, but she also went through a lot of agony through being handicapped by the shyness that she had had ever since she was a baby. It made her tongue-tied and awkward, and utterly unable to show when she was enjoying herself.

  Celia seldom thought about her appearance. She took it for granted that she was pretty – and she was pretty – tall, slender and graceful, with very fair flaxen hair and Scandinavian fairness and delicacy of colouring. She had an exquisite complexion, though she went pale through nervousness. In the days when to ‘make up’ was shameful, Miriam put a touch of rouge on her daughter’s cheeks every evening. She wanted her to look her best.

  It was not her appearance that worried Celia. What weighed her down was the consciousness of her stupidity. She was not clever. It was awful not to be clever. She never could think of anything to say to the people she danced with. She was solemn and rather heavy.

  Miriam ceaselessly urged her daughter to talk.

  ‘Say something, darling. Anything. It doesn’t matter what silly thing it is. But it’s such uphill work for a man to talk to a girl who says nothing but yes and no. Don’t let the ball drop.’

  Nobody appreciated Celia’s difficulties more than her mother who had been hampered herself by shyness all her life.

  Nobody ever realized that Celia was shy. They thought she was haughty and conceited. Nobody realized how humble this pretty girl was feeling – how bitterly conscious of her social defects.

  Because of her beauty Celia had a good time. Also, she danced well. At the end of the winter she had been to fifty-six dances and had at last acquired a certain amount of the art of small talk. She was less gauche now, more self-assured, and was at last beginning to be able to enjoy herself without being tortured by constantly recurring shyness.

  Life was rather a haze – a haze of dancing and golden light, and polo and tennis and young men. Young men who held her hand, flirted with her, asked if they might kiss her, and were baffled by her aloofness. To Celia only one person was real, the dark bronzed colonel of a Scottish regiment, who seldom danced and who never bothered to talk to young girls.

  She liked jo
lly little red-haired Captain Gale who always danced three times with her every evening. (Three was the largest number of dances permissible with one person.) It was his joke that she didn’t need teaching to dance, but did need teaching to talk.

  Nevertheless, she was surprised when Miriam said on the way home:

  ‘Did you know that Captain Gale wanted to marry you?’

  ‘Me?’ Celia was very surprised.

  ‘Yes, he talked to me about it. He wanted to know whether I thought he had any chance.’

  ‘Why didn’t he ask me?’ Celia felt a little resentful about it.

  ‘I don’t quite know. I think he found it difficult.’ Miriam smiled. ‘But you don’t want to marry him, do you, Celia?’

  ‘Oh, no – but I think I ought to have been asked.’

  That was Celia’s first proposal. Not, she thought, a very satisfactory one.

  Not that it mattered. She would never want to marry anyone except Colonel Moncrieff, and he would never ask her. She would remain an old maid all her life, loving him secretly.

  Alas for the dark, bronzed Colonel Moncrieff! In six months he had gone the way of Auguste, of Sybil, of the Bishop of London and Mr Gerald du Maurier.

  2

  Grown-up life was difficult. It was exciting but tiring. You always seemed to be in agonies about something or other. The way your hair was done, or your lack of figure, or your stupidity in talking, and people, especially men, made you feel uncomfortable.