by Rosie Thomas
Clio jumped when someone touched her shoulder. She looked up to see Julius, handsome in his evening clothes. Blanche had invited him to join the party. She had not extended the invitation to Jake, knowing that he would not come.
‘I was just thinking about Pappy,’ Clio said.
‘Wagner.’ Julius smiled. They were fond of their aunt and uncle, particularly of Blanche, but they made their quiet affirmation to each other that they were Hirshes, not Strettons.
Julius shook hands with Anthony and then sat down in the sixth red-brocaded chair just behind Clio’s shoulder. Clio resumed her inspection of the crowd beneath.
‘Look,’ Grace said, and pointed with her gloved finger.
There was a disturbance in the centre of the stalls. A quartet of people had come noisily in and were threading their way to their seats. Heads turned to look at them and craned in their wake. There was an impression of odd clothes and raised voices.
‘Pilgrim.’
It was Pilgrim in an immense rusty-black opera cape, and John with his curling beard spread over a crimson velvet coat and his brass earrings glinting in the lights. Their companions were Jeannie, in some outlandish collection of purple drapes, and a young girl. The girl had bizarrely cropped silvery-gilt hair and she was wearing what looked like a man’s frock coat. Clio and Grace recognized simultaneously that she was extremely beautiful. They had no objection to Jeannie, she was part of the retinue, always present, but as soon as they saw the stranger they were jealous. Pilgrim was theirs. He did not belong in the stalls at the opera with somebody else. They did not look at each other. They leant forward, on either side of Blanche, for a better view.
John Leominster raised his opera glasses. ‘That’s your painter? Good God. What an extraordinary-looking fellow.’
Pilgrim had been examining the occupants of the boxes ranged above him. He saw the Strettons now, and his companions followed his gaze. The painters bowed extravagantly in the confined space of the stalls, making a swirl of capes and hair and setting up new ripples of interest all around them. Blanche gave a stiff nod in return.
Jeannie had caught sight of Julius. She lifted both her hands to her lips, kissed them, and blew. Her purple robes and raised arms made her look like the high priestess of some religious cult.
Grace was laughing. She admired the careless spectacle that Pilgrim made and she was happy to receive his public tribute. She was also happy to be sitting up in her father’s box, the focus of attention of all the stalls and the boxes opposite. She waved back at Pilgrim, an elegant flutter of her gloved hand.
Clio ducked her head. She didn’t smile because she was mortified to be exposed in the gilt and plush box. She felt the stiff arrangement of their family party, all of them in a row on their red and gold chairs, pinned in their places like butterflies in a case. It was as if they were specimens of their class and position, pleased with their niche and happy to have it spotlit for the audience. They were frozen in their time and place, unchangeable, chloroformed by convention. She longed to be able to creep out of the little door behind her and vanish, but she couldn’t move, any more than a dead butterfly could. She could almost feel the jab of the pin through her thorax.
Anthony leant towards Julius. ‘Who is the astonishing redhead, Hirsh?’
Julius looked uncomfortable. ‘I hardly know her. She has digs in the same house as me, just across the landing.’
‘And the silvery one? Is she one of your girls too?’
Grace was giggling.
Julius said, ‘I’ve never seen her before. And Jeannie isn’t one of my girls.’
John turned round, rigid with disapproval. ‘What a vile-looking crew of people they are. Can’t you find any decent friends among your own kind? I thought you were a violinist, Julius.’
‘I am a violinist.’
Grace and Clio did exchange glances then. Their jealousy of the new girl divided rather than united them, with their rivalrous claims on Pilgrim and his world. But they felt the same response to Lord Leominster’s blinkered condemnation. Pilgrim and his friends were not vile at all. They were rebellious and anarchic and everything that was attractive. At that moment Grace and Clio would willingly have changed places with Jeannie and the silver girl, if only they could.
The conductor emerged from the wings. With more flourishes and gestures the painters subsided into their seats amidst the applause. The lights dimmed, as if all the theatre had only been waiting for them to settle themselves. Under cover of the blackness, Clio found that she could smile.
As soon as the lights came up again for the first interval all four of them left their places. They swept out and they didn’t come back again. Clio’s eyes kept coming back to the empty seats.
‘And so, my little Clio, what shall we talk about this afternoon?’
The gas fire was popping companionably. Pilgrim stood in his painting clothes, peering at her over the top of his canvas.
‘I am a shade taller than Grace, as it happens,’ Clio said coolly. Pilgrim only laughed at her.
‘Your height is quite irrelevant. You all looked remarkably fine at the opera.’
‘I was embarrassed. I felt like an exhibit.’ If Pilgrim realized that he had made the Strettons’ box the focus of attention, he seemed quite unashamed of it. Clio bit the corner of her lip. ‘I would rather have been sitting with you and Jeannie and John.’
‘Yes,’ Pilgrim agreed. ‘You would have found it livelier.’
‘Why didn’t you come back after the interval?’
He shrugged. ‘The sets looked as if they had been painted in some village hall by a committee of farmhands. The costumes as if they had been improvized for charades at your uncle’s country seat.’
‘They don’t play charades at Stretton. Didn’t you enjoy the music?’
‘How could I listen to the music, with such eyesores confronting me?’ He looked at her again, and then stared for a long time at his canvas. Clio waited, concentrating on holding her pose. She loved Pilgrim’s rambling disquisitions on art and music and literature.
‘What did you think of the pictures?’ he demanded at length. Under Pilgrim’s offhand guidance, Clio had ventured into a dusty gallery in Fitzroy Street to examine the ranks of canvases stacked haphazardly against the walls. She had even bought a picture for herself, nervously parting with eight pounds of the money that Nathaniel had given her ‘for handkerchiefs or stockings, whatever it is young women need’.
It was a small canvas by Harold Gilman, titled The Bedsitter. It showed a cold blue-painted room with a half-dressed girl lying on an unmade bed. Her exposed thigh made a gleam of stark white in the surrounding dimness.
Clio took her purchase home and propped it on the mahogany tallboy in her bedroom at Belgrave Square. The picture seemed to sum up all the romantic, spartan life of the Slade students and the poets she met with Pilgrim. It looked highly incongruous in the overstuffed Victorian setting of Leominster House, and Clio liked it all the more for that.
‘I thought some of them were wonderful,’ Clio said carefully. ‘I bought one.’
‘Gilman?’ Pilgrim scoffed when she told him. ‘I expect you admire Sickert as well, don’t you?’
‘Who should I admire, then?’ Clio asked.
‘Van Gogh.’
He worked in silence for another minute, and then he put the brush down. He stood back from the easel. ‘So. I suppose you had better tell me what you think of this.’
Clio thought she might have misheard. But he was waiting, with his black eyebrows raised. He was offering her the first glimpse of his painting.
She stood up and stretched out her hand for the dingy wrap he had given her to wear while she was resting. She put it around her shoulders and fastened it at the waist. Then she walked slowly across the studio to the easel. Pilgrim stood aside, to allow her a clear sight.
Clio looked.
She had thought that she was prepared for anything. But when she saw the portrait she gasped.
/> The figures seemed to swell to fill the big canvas. They were massive, half-clad Amazons, with profiles framed by geometric ripples of dark hair. Their shoulders were great slabs and their breasts looked as round and hard as apples. But it was not the sheer size, or the uncompromising style of the painting that was surprising. She had seen enough of Pilgrim’s work, and that of the other painters in his circle.
It was the interpretation of the pose, and the expressions in the two faces, that shocked her.
Pilgrim had painted them facing away from each other, seeming to strain in opposite directions, and the tension was almost unbearably heightened by their twin torsos appearing to sprout like flowers from the same bud of flesh. He had joined them at the hips. They were two women struggling to wrench themselves apart from a single root.
As Clio stared she saw that the features were just recognizably their own. They were Grace and Clio, but with their wide staring eyes and their lips drawn back from their teeth they were also savages, or feral creatures. The sense of wildness trapped within such ramparts of solid flesh gave the violent picture an odd poignancy.
Clio breathed out, a long ragged breath.
‘So what do you say?’ he asked.
The picture unnerved her. She went on staring at it, at her own bared teeth and straining muscles.
Pilgrim came to stand beside her. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her against him. The embrace was comforting.
At length Clio said, ‘Is that how we look, Grace and I?’
‘It is how I chose to paint you. It is called The Janus Face. Do you know who Janus is?’
‘Of course. The Roman god. His head faces both ways, so he looks into the past and the future. He gave his name to January, between the old year and the new one.’
‘Yes. I like the idea of beginnings and endings, don’t you? And I like polarity, too. Similarity and dissimilarity, repelling and attracting, never in stasis.’
Clio shivered. She felt the touch of cold premonition, and she tried to shake it off with humour. ‘The Janus Face is a livelier title than Lady Grace Stretton and Miss Clio Hirsh at Their Début.’
‘You haven’t told me what you think of it.’
Clio said quietly, ‘I think it is magnificent.’ She couldn’t deny that it was. It was oppressive and alarming, but it had unmistakable power. ‘I also think that it will cause a lot of trouble. When the Leominsters see it.’
Pilgrim put his head back and roared with laughter. Clio could see his tongue and his strong teeth and the springy growth of long thick hair over his ears. She could sense the mischief in him like a charge of electricity.
‘Of course it will. That is part of the fun of it. Did you think I was painting a simpering toffee-tin lid like one of Sargent’s?’ He was in an excellent humour now. He began wiping his brushes and thrusting them back into bristling jars. He was looking forward to a drink, to taking this thoughtful half of his Janus to the pub, where she would listen attentively to whatever he had to say.
‘I didn’t want to paint you and your cousin. I accepted the commission for the money. But there’s something between the two of you, and as I worked I got interested. It’s a fine picture, I’m pleased with it. I don’t give a fuck what your aunt and uncle make of it. Or rather, their disapprobation will only add to my pleasure.’
Clio couldn’t help but laugh. ‘I hope I’m here when you unveil it for them.’
‘You shall be. Put your clothes on now, we’re going to the pub. And don’t tell me that you are forbidden to go to the pub.’
‘I’ve never been to one in my life. And no one has thought it worth forbidding it for when the opportunity should arise.’
Pilgrim wound a long, erratically knitted scarf around his throat. ‘My poor little English rose. Come out and I will educate you.’
The invitation was irresistible. Clio knew that she was more than a little in love with Pilgrim. They went to the pub together, and Clio listened while he talked.
To her disappointment, their tête-à-tête was short lived. A group of Pilgrim’s friends came to claim him, clustering around him at the bar, jostling and spilling pools of beer, hailing further acquaintances with invitations to join them and wedging themselves up against the brass foot-rail with the clear intention of staying all night.
Pilgrim began to tell one of his stories but a woman shouted him down, claiming that her own version was better. A heated argument broke out. A soft-lipped boy with curly hair began drunkenly to declaim his own poetry. Clio sipped her half-pint of bitter beer in wide-eyed silence.
‘I’m Max Erdmann,’ a voice next to her announced. ‘Who might you be?’
She saw a small, slope-shouldered person in a corduroy coat.
‘I’m Clio Hirsh.’
The man held out a packet of cigarettes. Clio took one and he lit it for her with the last match from a battered box. He grinned his approval to her through the flame, revealing small brownish teeth with gaps between them.
‘I’m a friend of Pilgrim’s,’ Clio added, feeling the need to explain herself.
‘Isn’t everyone? Me, I’ve known Pilgrim since he was Quintus Prynne, penny odd-jobber and bicycle thief.’ Max sniffed, unimpressed by Pilgrim’s celebrity.
‘Are you a painter too?’
‘Writer. And editor.’ After a moment’s rummaging he produced a dog-eared card. Under Max’s name Clio read the words ‘Editor-in-Chief. Fathom.’ Max took the card back again.
‘What is Fathom?’
‘Don’t you know? It is a magazine. A monthly forum for all that is best in modern writing and criticism. A mouthpiece for the avant-garde.’
‘That sounds very interesting,’ Clio said politely.
‘It is. And what are you? Art student?’
‘No. I’ve been sitting for Pilgrim. With my cousin.’
Max’s lips curved knowingly. ‘Ah yes. I’ve heard about that.’
Clio knew about gossip and Charlotte Street. ‘I shall be a student next year,’ she offered. ‘Modern languages, at Oxford. One of the first women to be admitted as full members of the University, actually.’
Max studied her face. ‘Pity,’ he said. ‘I was going to ask you if you wanted a job. We need someone to help out on Fathom.’
‘I don’t think I could take a job,’ Clio said, with some regret.
The boy poet had begun to weep. Glassy tears rolled out of his eyes and down his round cheeks.
‘Give him another bloody drink, for God’s sake,’ somebody shouted.
Across the bar, Clio saw the silver-haired girl from the opera stalls. She had her arm round a man’s shoulder. She looked very young, younger than Clio herself.
‘Who’s she?’ Clio asked Max.
‘Her? That’s Isolde,’ he told her. ‘Would you like to meet her?’
Clio felt envious of the girl’s acceptance here, and shy. ‘No. Another time perhaps.’
The Earl and Countess of Leominster climbed the stairs to the Charlotte Street studio. Clio led the way and Grace followed behind them. The stairs were steep, and as they ascended Grace’s eyes were on a level with the beaded hem of her mother’s jacket. Nathaniel came last. They were filing upwards in silence, and Grace could hear her uncle puffing slightly through the mat of his beard.
When they reached the confined space of the top landing they crowded together, and then the studio door was flung open and Pilgrim confronted them. He was wearing one of his unpressed suits and a collarless shirt. His hair looked even longer than usual.
‘Please, won’t you come in? My lord? Your ladyship?’
Clio and Grace did not look at each other. Clio had warned Grace that the unveiling of the portrait was likely to cause a disturbance, and even the warning had created difficulty. Grace had not been invited to look at it in advance, and her resentment had flowered into anger. The girls had quarrelled, their submerged rivalry breaking the calm surface of their summer’s truce.
The studio was littered and smelly. M
ingled with the usual painterly odours there was a strong element of fried bacon and a suggestion of stale beer. John Leominster wrinkled his nose as he strode across the room to the shrouded easel. He was wearing country tweeds, the pepper-and-salt colour exactly the same shade as his gloomy moustache. He was on the point of leaving for Stretton, where he would disagree with the decisions that Hugo had made regarding the estate’s management, and from Stretton he would progress to Melton for a few days’ hunting. He was impatient to be on his way, and Blanche’s insistence on the tiresome chore of viewing the portrait had made him irritable. He stood in silence, fingering his watch chain.
Nathaniel looked around him. The portrait was finished, and Clio no longer had any reason to stay in London. He had come to escort her back to Oxford, and while he would not normally have been any more than mildly interested in a portrait of the two girls commissioned by John and Blanche, something in Clio’s wary manner when it was discussed had sparked his curiosity. He was thinking that this studio was defiantly squalid, and that Pilgrim himself looked a rogue, but an attractive rogue. It would be interesting to see what representation he had made of Clio and Grace in their white dance dresses. There were dozens of other canvases in the studio, but every one of them was turned to face the wall.
Pilgrim was smiling. John slipped his gold hunter out of his pocket and snapped it open.
‘May we see this picture now, Mr Pilgrim?’ he asked in his wintry manner. ‘I have a long drive ahead of me.’
Pilgrim’s smile broadened. ‘By all means, Lord Leominster. That is what you are all here for.’
