Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  In her own room, Gwen had rolled the carpet up and pushed it under the window, leaving the floorboards bare. She liked the feel of them on her feet. There was space for her easel, and she could pretend this was her studio and not her bedroom. But this had a curious result. By placing her easel and her paints, and all that went with them, so prominently, she did something to the room which made her uneasy. The bed was still there, the other pieces of furniture were still prominent, and she felt threatened by them, she wanted to be rid of them. They had no place in an artist’s room; they did not fit.

  Winifred was admired by the art students who came to Fitzroy Street but she made no attachments. Gwen watched her being watched, and wondered at her lack of response. It was not, she thought, the same kind of withholding which she employed herself. Winifred was not suppressing passion. She was simply not interested in any of the students. Rather they mystified her with their flamboyance and noise, their apparent lack of seriousness. She was mistaken, of course. Gwen knew how deadly serious they all were about art if not life, but her sister could not discern their strength of purpose. She saw only the drinking, the smoking, the laughter and fooling about and the disregard for convention. It puzzled her that Gwen belonged to this crowd, that she did not spurn it but appeared as involved as Gus in all its activities. She wished sometimes that she could see them all at work in their precious Slade School of Art. It was like a secret society to which they all belonged. Gwen, she decided, was a reluctant member, and not as happy as Winifred had expected to find her.

  There were sudden storms of tears which were bewildering. Winifred would come back in the evening to Fitzroy Street and find Gwen prostrate on her bed, fists clenched, body rigid in some kind of sustained grief too awful to speak of. Once, the name Ambrose McEvoy was mentioned when Winifred asked what was the matter, but no explanation followed the muffled reference to him. It was all rather frightening.

  *

  Climbing the steps of the National Gallery made Gwen feel important. She was not a tourist, she was not an ignoramus, she had not come merely to gape. This was her work. Tonks had had no need to urge her to make this gallery her second home, to visit it often and learn from all it held. The very stones of the building felt sacred to her and when she was settled in front of a painting that she had come to study, she lost herself completely for hours. She sat on her folding stool perfectly composed, staring, seeking the internal structure of one picture before her. She looked for the muscles beneath the sleeves, the bones beneath the skin and the sinews of the neck, the veins in the eye. Then she opened her sketchbook and copied the line, leaving aside all colour and texture.

  She had finished with Gabriel Metsu’s A Woman Seated at a Table and a Man Tuning a Violin. Today she had come to look at Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, aged thirty-four. Young, but fourteen years older than she herself was now. She had fourteen years to reach Rembrandt’s standard, a thought which made her shiver. She wished he had looked straight at himself but his gaze was slightly off-centre. Why? How? Where was his mirror? And was he left-handed? If not, why was his right hand folded across his body? He was leaning on something, a banister perhaps, or a shelf. The clothes, the hat, were striking, but she was more interested in the face, especially the chin and the sparse growth of hair around it. Her own chin made her despair. Gus hid his chin, which like hers receded slightly, with his beard, and she almost wished that she could do the same. Always, she drew herself full-face, and then the chin did not bother her as much. Full-face and, increasingly, one hand on her hip. She liked the feeling this gave her, of defiance, even arrogance. She hoped it suggested that she was in control and able to face herself without shame. It was a lie, but she wanted it to be a successful lie, one that would not be questioned.

  Last night, they had all gone to the Café Royal, she and Gus, and Ida and Ambrose and Grilda. (She would rather have been with Ursula, but Ursula had gone home to her father’s vicarage in Essex.) They had eaten sandwiches and drunk lager, and watched what was going on around them though none of them sketched. Winifred would not go with them; she had said she would be out of place and feel uncomfortable, and this had made Gwen realise that she herself felt perfectly at ease. To be part of a group, a gang, was not a situation she had either wanted or anticipated – surely, she was a solitary being, more solitary than her sister. It was Gus who needed people around him and liked to be at the centre of activity, not she. And yet there she had been, as she now often was, sitting with friends, drinking and eating and talking, quite comfortable. She had caught sight of herself in a huge mirror fixed along the wall opposite and she could not credit it was herself. Ida on one side, Ambrose on the other, squashed up together on the banquette, smoke wreathing their heads and the light from candles casting their faces into shadow. She looked so small and demure beside Ida who was dressed in crimson and wore a flower Gus had given her in her hair. Nondescript, that was the word that had come to her as she looked at herself. Dark dress, plain hairstyle, pale unpainted face. Only her necklace sparkled, her mother’s diamonds brilliant against her black velvet dress. She hadn’t known whether she should wear them or not: they looked out of place on her and might draw attention in a way she did not want. But wear them she did.

  It was the beer, she supposed, but towards the end of last evening she had become convinced that Ambrose was singling her out for meaningful attention. So often he evaded her eyes but then suddenly he looked into them and his expression changed. It was exhilarating and yet tantalising. She wanted him to take her hand, or put his arm round her, as Gus had his round Ida. And then she could lay her head on his shoulder and close her eyes and feel him embrace her … But he went no further than a look and it made her want to cry. What did she have to do? Ida needed to do nothing, Gus did it all. And Ambrose had not come back to Fitzroy Street with them afterwards, as he usually did. They had parted in the street. He and Grilda walked in one direction, she and Gus and Ida in the other. She had felt bereft and cold, and once home had flung herself onto her bed and bitten her pillow in fury.

  It was all gone now, the anger, the frustration. So long as she was here, in the gallery, in front of Rembrandt she was safe from unseemly emotion. It was people, people who were alive, who caused disturbance in her. What she must do was cut herself off from them, and yet to do so would be perverse. She loved her group, all women artist friends. They had taken her to their hearts and enriched her life immeasurably – what folly to discard them. Men, then. They were the disturbance, even Gus – especially Gus. Look at Edna, only nineteen and about to be married and already her dedication was wavering. Was it, then, to be a choice? Was Ida going to make this choice?

  Gwen stared at Rembrandt. She would paint herself and try to bring into her portrait all this seething beneath the surface and with it the determination to save herself.

  *

  The summer vacation came and her money did not stretch to staying on in London, so she was obliged to go to Tenby, though she no longer thought of it as home. Agony to take the train back to Tenby, knowing that Ida and another Gwen, Gwen Salmond, were going to Paris where she had never been and longed to go. They were to try to study at the Académie Julien, where Bonnard and Vuillard had studied, and were in a state of excitement so extreme that it came off them like heat. It was quite unbearable. Is this jealousy, raw and ugly? Gwen asked herself, and the answer came quickly enough – yes, she was jealous to the point of angry tears.

  Her father had no patience with tears. She knew that. They only irritated him. But tears trickled down her pale cheeks every time she confronted him in his cold, dull house and she could not seem to stop them. ‘Please,’ she said. She would do anything, she would go without anything. For long enough she had existed merely on bread and nuts and a little fruit and could exist on bread and water entirely if only he would finance a brief trip to Paris. Her begging – and she had held her hands out, like a beggar – maddened him. Why, he asked, was she not content? Once, London, the Slade School
, had been all she craved. He had given it to her, and now – he was reading Oliver Twist again – she wanted more.

  So for three days, Gwen ate nothing. She drank water and weak tea but closed her lips firmly against food. She sat at the table with her father and Winifred and refused all sustenance. On the fourth day, she fainted. It was no ploy. She rose from the table as her father rose, at the end of the meal, and she could not get to the door. Silently, gracefully, she slid to the floor, her skirt crumpling around her, rustling as it settled. Winifred told her how alarmed their father had been, how he had rushed to Gwen’s side and anxiously felt her pulse and – Winifred vowed it was true – kissed her forehead. But she knew nothing of that. When she came to, her father was not in the room. Winifred was kneeling beside her, pressing a damp cloth to her face. ‘You must eat,’ her sister said. ‘You must eat, or you will not be strong enough to travel to Paris.’

  *

  She had only enough money to travel third class but this suited her perfectly. It was September and sunny, and being out on deck was exhilarating. No one noticed her, and she was able to lean on the rail and watch the white cliffs fade. Only the thought of arriving in Calais, and having to get herself on the train to Paris, made her apprehensive. No one seemed to understand her French and the speed with which the French themselves spoke meant that she understood little of what they said. But, though she felt nervous, she was also aware of a kind of relief to be so isolated. The hubbub was great, and in the midst of it she was speechless and deaf and turned in on herself, which thrilled her. There was a sense of containment that she had never experienced before, and when, at the Gare du Nord, she was met by Ida she was almost sorry. Ida laughed and talked and hugged her, and that sense of being remote, untouchable, disappeared.

  The apartment thrilled her. Three large rooms, empty. Wooden floors, long windows, dazzling light. They did not need beds. Mattresses would do, and cushions were preferable to chairs and stools. Gwen felt giddy with excitement. In no time the three of them had been to the market and bought the very minimum they needed, and then Ida and the other Gwen went off to Boulogne for the weekend leaving her alone. When the door closed, Gwen let out one of her loud exclamations. ‘Oh!’ she cried with delight. Round and round the rooms she paraded, arms flung wide, dancing in the space. At one and the same time she never wanted to leave the apartment but longed to explore Montparnasse. Out she went in the end, not caring if she got lost, and wandered the streets, the boulevards, feeling carefree and eager. When she returned to her room, she began painting immediately, her easel set up near the window so that she could see the scene below.

  But street scenes were not what she wanted. The only reason she wanted Ida and Gwen Salmond to return was so that they could pose for her, so that she could attempt an interior with figures in it. They were obliging when they arrived, understanding her feverish impatience. The other Gwen donned a white muslin dress and Ida a flounced skirt with a pink shawl draped round her upper body, and she posed them standing together, Gwen reading a book, Ida peering at it over her shoulder. Though it was not the figures she had difficulty with – the composition was simple – but the room around them. She struggled to capture the spirit of the room but felt it slipping from her. The eye was drawn to the window in the background but tripped up on its way there by the fireplace and a picture framed on the wall above it. And the plaster rose in the ceiling. There was something not right. She needed a teacher. The teacher she wanted was Whistler, but his fees, for lessons in his Académie Carmen, were double those of other schools. What was to be done?

  She borrowed money. It was against everything her father had preached – neither a borrower nor a lender be – and he would be furious if he found out. But his allowance would not pay for lessons at the Académie Carmen and so she took the money Gwen Salmond offered. The moment she stepped into Whistler’s presence, she was happy. He was small and neat, with curly grey hair; she noted his bright inquisitive eyes and his exquisite hands, which were rarely still. There was a passion about him which appealed to her immediately. He was different from Henry Tonks and his ideals not those of the Slade. Art, he believed, was about poetry, about bringing forth the spirit of things and expressing beauty of every sort – line, form, but most important of all, emotion. Art was about speaking from the soul.

  She did not want to return to London and the Slade. Paris was right for her, she decided, it was where she must stay. So she wrote to her father, an impassioned letter, trying to make him understand the vital importance to her of Paris and Whistler and the Académie Carmen. Never had she anticipated that he would come to inspect where she was living – ‘Oh!’ she cried out as she read his letter. The others could not understand her dismay. Her father, they said, could not fail to see how happy she was and how her work had improved. But they did not know him. He was not interested in happiness, only in obedience and decorum. He would find fault even with her appearance. The girls said they would help. If she designed a new dress, they would make it up for her. So she tried to make herself look pretty and girlish, abandoning her usual dark colours and choosing a lustrous blue taffeta material and a style she copied from a painting by Manet, a dress with a full skirt and billowing sleeves and a neck with lace round it that showed some bosom.

  The stare he gave her … was chilling. Disgust was in it, and horror. He told her that she looked like a prostitute. She was tempted to ask how he knew but instead snatched a cloak off a peg and swathed herself in it. ‘Is that better?’ she challenged. He turned and walked out of the apartment and she did not follow him. Watching him from the window she saw him march back to his hotel, upright, swinging his cane, not caring that he had insulted her, confident that she would have to come crawling to him for money. But she would not. She would never ask him again for money.

  Rather than plead for money from her father she would readily have become what he had accused her of being. To stay in Paris it would be worth becoming a prostitute – if necessary.

  *

  How long had it been? On the train, she counted the months – only five, and yet they had stretched and stretched to fill her life. To be leaving Paris now was pitiful, but loans from the other Gwen, and income from modelling, was not enough. She would have to return and learn to paint by herself without expensive lessons. Ida’s company helped, but not enough. Ida was going home to Wigmore Street, but where would she herself go? She did not know. Perhaps Gus would help, not with money – he was as poor as she was – but to find a room.

  In fact she found one herself, in Howland Street, round the corner from their old apartment in Fitzroy Street. A basement, dank and ugly, but which suited her mood. The steps down to it were made of iron and her boots clattered upon them unpleasantly. No light, of course. The window looked out onto a wall streaming with damp, its bricks all mossy. She did not bother to take the net curtain down, it would make no difference. She did not bother to unpack either, leaving most things in her two bags and hanging up only her best red blouse. Then she sat, bolt upright, on the bed and tried to think. How was she to return to Paris? It seemed impossible. Gus was to have an exhibition of his paintings at the Carfax Gallery and hoped to sell them, which he probably would. Could she earn money to get back to Paris, by doing the same? The idea was absurd. She had nothing to exhibit. She knew no gallery owners.

  In Tenby, before she went to Paris, she had worked on a self-portrait in oils that she thought might have a future. It was, for her, quite a large canvas, twenty-four inches by fourteen, oblong in shape, and she had laboured over it, staring so fixedly into the wardrobe mirror between brushstrokes that she had felt disembodied – the woman staring arrogantly back was not she but some other demanding taskmaster of whom she was a little afraid. She had left this unfinished painting in her father’s house, and did not wish to go there to complete it and bring it to London. What, after all, would she do with it? Show it to Gus, see if he had any ideas? He always showed interest in her work and had already expresse
d dismay that in this basement she could not paint. He’d told her she must get away, into the air, into the light. He himself would go mad confined to such a dungeon.

  In the spring, he took her away himself. Arriving one afternoon to find her crouched beside her grimy window sketching a stray cat which had perched on the sill, he said she must come with him to Dorset and walk among the primroses and swim in the sea and restore her spirits. The invitation to stay in a boarding house in Swanage had come from their old landlady, Mrs Everett. So she went, wishing only that one of her women friends could go with her (though not voicing this to Gus). It was, as he’d promised, a lovely, wild place and she revelled in the freedom to walk and swim and be outside all the time but the odd thing was that, though she relished the solitude and appreciated the beauty of the landscape, it did not make her want to paint. She did no work while Gus sketched madly. Instead, thoughts of people and rooms, and people in rooms, haunted her. It was as though the wide open skies of Dorset and the vast stretch of the sea inhibited instead of releasing her – she wanted to draw herself in, concentrate on the essence of someone or something containable. She became restless and jumpy, and Gus became irritated.

  But he was kind to her. It was his friend who, back in London, let them have his house in Kensington, a whole cottage to herself. She left her basement and once in the cottage began to work again, getting Winifred to bring her self-portrait from Tenby. It was the hand she had to work on, the way it rested on her hip in that deliberate way, the hand and the belt, cinching her waist tightly. It was finished before Gus’s friend returned, and she moved again, this time to Gower Street, on her own, but not for long. Gus was going to France and asked if she would go with him, and because she could not resist the lure of France, anywhere in France, she agreed. There was another factor that lured her. Ambrose was to join them at Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne where they were to stay with another friend, Michel Salaman. Surely something would happen between them? Her yearning had gone on so long now and nothing had come of it.