That Summer: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  If Julia imagined the hair up, instead of down, traded the gown of sapphire silk for a white collar and cuffs …

  It was the woman in the drawing room.

  No. It had to be a mistake. Respectable Victorian matrons didn’t just pose for paintings, at least not paintings that weren’t portraits, and the woman in the drawing room was very respectable indeed, buttoned up to the chin and down to the wrists. Julia was imagining things, that was all. Too many hours of peering at minuscule thumbnails of Pre-Raphaelite paintings on the Internet.

  But it couldn’t hurt to check. Just to take a look.

  Carefully, Julia swathed the painting in its linen wrappings and maneuvered the clumsy bundle down the stairs, taking extra care not to bash the edges into the walls. It was gloomy in the drawing room, even in the middle of the afternoon. The shrubbery had grown too wild to admit much light through the grimed old windows. Julia made a mental note to buy hedge clippers and clicked on the electric light.

  It wasn’t much of an improvement, but it was enough to see by. She set down her bundle on an old card table and gently peeled away the wrappings. Over the mantelpiece, the lady with the Princess Leia hairdo and the buttoned basque looked away into space, as though disclaiming any responsibility.

  Same cheekbones. Same chin. Same nose. Hairstyles changed, but basic features didn’t, at least not in those days, before plastic surgery and discreet little doctors on Park and 73rd.

  Julia looked from the portrait to the painting. Prim respectability. Wild abandon. One of these things was not like the others. But which? Which was the real story and which was the aberration?

  There was something so prim and stuffy about that parlor, about the white woodwork and the careful swags of the draperies, as prim and stuffy as the white lace collar and cuffs of the lady in the portrait, the carefully modest hairstyle that obscured even her ears. It was impossible to imagine an artist’s model living here—unless, of course, she had been an artist’s model before her marriage and then married into a stuffy bourgeois family.

  The more Julia thought about the theory, the more she liked it.

  “That would explain why you were in the closet,” she said to the painting.

  Painting: still not talking.

  Julia began to wonder if being alone for such extended periods of time was quite good for her. If she kept this up, she’d have to get a dog. Talking to dogs was generally considered more socially acceptable than talking to paintings and avoided the stigma of “crazy cat lady.”

  There was one person she could talk to.…

  Julia’s hand hovered over her cell phone. It was a very off chance. He probably wouldn’t know anything. All the same …

  She turned the phone back on and waited impatiently as it warmed up.

  No new messages. Surprise, surprise.

  The display on her phone read: 4:13, which meant that it was just a little past eleven in the morning at home in New York.

  She started, automatically, to type in her father’s number at Mount Sinai, then hastily hit the End Call button. It was late July. Her father and Helen would be at the Hamptons house. The idea of her father taking a full two weeks away from the hospital was mind-boggling—when she was little, a weekend felt like a boon—but, somehow, Helen had managed it. Every summer, they went out to East Hampton for the last two weeks of July, while the boys were away at camp.

  From what Julia gathered, while out there they pretty much replicated exactly what they would have done at the apartment on a Sunday at home: Helen read mystery novels, Julia’s father read medical journals, and they drank fresh-ground coffee out of blindingly white mugs.

  They had invited her up, again and again, but she had always found an excuse to stay away. She had told herself it was because the idea of her father in swimming trunks was too horrible to contemplate.

  Taking a deep breath, Julia punched in the Hamptons number. It was Helen who answered. She professed herself delighted to hear from Julia. That was one of the nice things about Helen: she always did sound genuinely pleased. There were times when Julia felt a bit guilty for not having been more of the daughter Helen so obviously wanted and would have been happy for her to be.

  Easy to see that now, at thirty-one; it had been less easy at sixteen.

  They covered the usual social niceties—the weather here, the weather there, the boys’ bulletins from camp—before Julia asked, “Is Himself around?”

  “I’ll just get your father for you.” Julia’s sense of humor sometimes left Helen a little flustered.

  “Hello?” Julia’s father picked up the phone with that brusque bark that pretty much typified his bedside manner. It was, she had always thought, a good thing he was a surgeon, not a GP. He’d scare his patients right out of the office. On the other hand, he was brilliant with people out cold on an operating table.

  Julia got straight to the point. If she was going to ask a silly question, she might as well ask it fast.

  “Dad … what do you know about my mother’s side of the family?”

  Herne Hill, 1849

  When Gavin arrived at the house on Herne Hill, a portable easel uncomfortably bundled on one shoulder, a maid directed him to the garden.

  He would find Mrs. Grantham in the summerhouse, the maid said. When Gavin asked after Mr. Grantham, he was informed that the master was not at home but had left instructions for Mr. Thorne to be served tea, alfresco. Or, as the maid pronounced it, all fresho.

  He could tell that the maid didn’t quite know what to make of him. As a journeyman painter, he wasn’t quite a gentleman, he wasn’t to have his hat reverently taken from him and be received in the drawing room, but he wasn’t one of the lower orders, either, to be received in the kitchen and offered a slice of bread and dripping. So the maid afforded him his “mister” but left him to make his own way into the gardens.

  Gavin felt as though he had slipped into a little bit of Eden. The ground sloped steeply down behind the house, so it seemed that there was nothing ahead of him but trees and flowers and birdsong, stretching down as far as the eye could see, lazy bees drowsing in flowers and tree branches frothy with white blossoms that released their own heady scent into the drowsy spring air. It was the sort of day in May that justified poets’ pay, the sun gilding the grass, the breeze enough to cool but not to chill, and the first buds of flowers opening their cautious petals to the sun.

  Who would have imagined that such loveliness existed, tucked away, within walking distance of London? It was a world away from the squalor of Cleveland Street, the squawk of the hawkers’ cries, the stench of human and animal offal rotting in the gutter, trod down into the spaces between the cobbles. Unbidden, the image of the cellar where he’d spent his youth rose into his mind, the effluvia of the gutter sinking through the stones and fouling the floor, the damp that marred the walls even on the sunniest of days. He’d sketched to escape it, drawing pictures with a stick in the dirt, imagining landscapes such as this.

  The summerhouse was a small, white building, the roof pointed, the sides open to the sun. Rosebushes, not yet in bloom, grew in profusion around the base, all buds and thorns, like Sleeping Beauty’s briars. In the middle of it sat the princess in her tower, her wide skirts billowing around her, a book in her hand.

  Gavin stood for a moment, like a pilgrim at a shrine, caught by the play of light and shade, the curve of pale fingers against the red morocco cover of a book, the tilt of her head, the elegant angle of her neck. The sunlight picked out hidden veins of red in her dark hair. In his imagination, the summerhouse became a stone tower, the blue gown a flowing robe of sapphire samite. There would be a gold circlet around her brow.…

  “Mr. Thorne.” Mrs. Grantham shut her book with a snap, setting it aside, and the spell was broken. It was just a simple whitewashed building, and he was a disheveled and slightly dusty painter, overly warm from his six-mile walk and a cravat that wilted loosely around his neck.

  “Mrs. Grantham.” Gavin bowed, stiff
ly, encumbered by his parcels. Was there a protocol to such meetings? Was he meant to ask her, formally, to sit for him? With models, one simply told them where to go and what to do, but this wasn’t a model; he was the employee in this relationship, not the employer. He ought to have asked Augustus. Augustus would have laughed and looked down his nose, but he would have been more than glad to air his own expertise.

  Gavin’s own inexperience irked him, and it didn’t make it any easier that Mrs. Grantham was looking at him as though he were a bug who had landed on her tea cake. The devil of it was, he couldn’t afford to offend her. She could glower all she liked, but he was the one, at the end of the day, who needed to be paid.

  “My husband suggested you paint me here, in the garden.” If Mrs. Grantham had any opinion as to her husband’s choice, she gave no sign of it. Her expression and voice were as bland as her dark blue dress. “The weather appears inclined to cooperate.”

  Gavin deeply hoped that Grantham realized that a portrait wasn’t painted in a day. “I had meant to take some sketches today. Before we begin in earnest.”

  Mrs. Grantham inclined her head. The white line of her parting looked strangely vulnerable. “You are the expert, Mr. Thorne. Where would you like me?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind moving just a little to your right, where the light falls better … Yes, there.” He added awkwardly, “Thank you.”

  Mrs. Grantham smiled stiffly. “Nonsense, Mr. Thorne. You must be frank with me and tell me what I must do. I shouldn’t wish to impede your task.”

  Clumsily, Gavin set up his easel. In his studio, his hands were swift and sure. Here, they fumbled on the slats of the frame. The wood made a hideous scraping noise against the plank floor of the summerhouse. Mrs. Grantham looked away, her expression polite, detached. Had his journey been difficult? Wasn’t the weather lovely? Gavin made the requisite replies, fumbling his chalks from his satchel, until even that poor excuse for conversation trailed into awkwardness.

  “If you would just turn your head a little to the left…” Somewhere, a bird squawked, strident. Gavin’s chalk scraped clumsily against the page.

  If Mrs. Grantham noticed, she made no sign; she sat perfectly still, her spine straight, her expression blank.

  The lines of her face were easy enough, but the character eluded him. Gavin threw back a precious page and started again, but his skill, what small skill he might have, was blunted by her reserve and his discomfort. If they carried on like this, her portrait would look more like a death mask than a living, breathing woman.

  “You’ve a pleasing prospect here,” Gavin ventured, trying to elicit some response, any response.

  Mrs. Grantham inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment. That was all. Not even a one-syllable response. As if he weren’t even there.

  For a penny he’d have packed up his paints and left. But he couldn’t, and it galled him. It galled him to be dependent on the whims of wealthy matrons, singing for his supper, fighting for the handful of coins that separated him from the fate of his father, his family. He looked at her pale, protected profile and thought of his sister, as he’d last seen her, her features mottled and disfigured, her poor, work-worn hands lying slack in death. Gavin’s fingers tightened on his chalk.

  “I’m sorry this seems so painful for you,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice that made Mrs. Grantham turn and look at him, really look at him, for the first time. The glint of surprise in her eyes was the first flicker of emotion he had seen since he arrived.

  She settled herself on the bench, like a bird smoothing its plumage. “I am quite comfortable,” she said coolly.

  “That’s not what I meant.” No point in beating about the bush. Gavin cleared his throat and took the situation by the horns. “If I’m to be frank with you, Mrs. Grantham,” he said, and the accents of his youth roughened his voice, made it come out too load and coarse, “you must be frank with me. I’ve offended you and I’m not sure why.”

  “Not at all.” Mrs. Grantham’s words were as stiff as her limbs.

  “At the Exhibition—” Gavin persevered; Once he had gone this far, it made no sense to pull back in polite retreat—“my painting displeased you.”

  He had struck home there. Mrs. Grantham’s lips pressed tightly together. “I was simply taken aback to see my—my husband’s possessions hanging on the wall at the Royal Academy. It was as though one’s laundry were hanging in a public field.”

  The homely simile surprised Gavin into a bark of laughter. “The Academy frowns on airing the washing.” He’d like to see Sir Martin’s reaction to that.

  Mrs. Grantham wasn’t smiling. “But my sewing box was perfectly acceptable. With my book in it.”

  She was quite serious, and, in the face of it, Gavin felt his own amusement fading.

  “I’d no notion there was anything private there. Mr. Grantham told us to sketch what we liked.” Medieval artifacts from the collection of a collector. And most of what Gavin had sketched had been. But the sewing box had been there, too, the perfect, homely touch to ground Mariana’s mythical past in some sort of reality. He had seen it and he had sketched it, as he had the chalice and the Book of Hours, because he had needed one for the picture and because it was there. He hadn’t thought of the sewing box as belonging to anyone in particular. The book sticking out of one side, that was simply a nice touch.

  Would it perturb him if his shaving kit were to appear in one of Rossetti’s pictures? Probably not. He’d been painted in as a reveler in Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella and cast as a slightly cranky Roman soldier in Hunt’s Rienzi. But Gavin was used to the notion that anything—and anyone—was a potential model for the painting of the moment. Mrs. Grantham wasn’t.

  “I will confess,” Gavin said honestly, feeling more than a little abashed, “I’d not been thinking of those objects as someone’s personal property.”

  Mrs. Grantham raised her dark brows. “Radical notions, Mr. Thorne?”

  He was digging himself in deeper by the moment.

  “I was wrong to use your sewing box. But as for the artifacts…” Gavin set down his chalk, trying to sort his feelings into words. “What I ought to have said was I’d not been thinking of them as belonging to this time. To me, they were the possessions of the people who had them in the time when they were made. Putting them into the scene felt like … well, like returning them to the time in which they belonged.”

  “Displayed like animals in a menagerie,” said Mrs. Grantham in a low voice, “hung on the wall for all to see.”

  “No,” said Gavin emphatically, and his chalk scraped against the page with the force of his emotion. “It’s quite the contrary. I’ve put them back where they’re meant to be. None of those objects were intended to be displayed as curiosities, set on a table against a velvet backdrop. Once they were practical, useful—even that Book of Hours was the object of someone’s private devotions once. We look at those illustrations and think only of the artistry, but someone used that once, to real purpose.”

  It was a longer speech than he was accustomed to making, and he felt a bit sheepish, all the more so because it was true and not something he would otherwise have thought to share. Rossetti might go about baring his feelings to all and sundry, but Gavin preferred to put his emotions into paint and paint alone.

  But it had been the right thing to say. He had her attention now. “A lady,” said Mrs. Grantham softly, “kneeling at a prie-dieu, her book in her hand.”

  Gavin sketched furiously, trying to catch that elusive hint of emotion. Stay like that, he wanted to say. Don’t fade away again into pale reserve.

  “When I lift that chalice,” he said rapidly, trying to catch her before she could slip away again, “I wonder whose hands have held it, whose lips have sipped from it. Did they drink in celebration? In despair? It’s not just an object, to be put on a pedestal and admired for the quality of the craftsmanship. It’s the embodiment of the thoughts and feelings of the people who used it.” />
  “One doesn’t see it with a cup of course,” Mrs. Grantham said, her hands folded tightly in her lap, as though she were afraid of giving too much away, “but in the manuscripts there are so often bits of writing in the margins, little windows into the souls of the people who held and read them. In one book, at the very beginning, someone—oh, centuries ago!—crossed out the former owner’s name and wrote below it: Non est eius liber, est meus liber.”

  “Non est—?”

  “It’s not his book, it’s my book,” Mrs. Grantham translated.

  Gavin looked up from his work in surprise. “You read Latin, then?”

  The question was a mistake. Mrs. Grantham’s features rearranged themselves into stiff, social lines.

  “My father was a vicar.” The answer was a polite evasion. He had accidentally trodden on forbidden territory.

  “I envy you that,” Gavin said, keeping his voice carefully matter-of-fact. “My education didn’t stretch to the classics.” Both true and less than the truth. His education hadn’t stretched to much of anything at all. “I should have liked to have learned.”

  “It’s not too late,” Mrs. Grantham said, and, for a moment, Gavin thought he was seeing the real person beneath, before she added, her face a study in indifference, “I imagine you haven’t the time for it now, though.”

  Gavin made a droll face. “It’s more that I’m afraid I would prove a poor pupil. I’m too big to be caned.” Gavin felt as though he were coaxing a wary bird out of its nest. “Your father’s parish. Was it near here?”

  Mrs. Grantham looked out over the glossy vines twining along the slats of the summerhouse, the neat boxwood hedges, and the ranks of almond and apple trees below, and an expression of inestimable sadness crossed her face. “Farther than you can imagine.”

  Gavin had the impression that she was speaking of more than a physical distance.

  Briskly she added, “It was in Cornwall. At the outer edges of the earth. I doubt you would have heard of it.” She straightened in her seat, saying, with evident relief, “Evie! Did you need me?”