The Fire Portrait

by Barbara Mutch

  The Fire Portrait

  BARBARA MUTCH

  For E, R and Z

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By Barbara Mutch

  Copyright

  Prologue

  This may be my last entry.

  It is curious the way one’s mind turns back to the beginning.

  Mother said spring came early the year I was born.

  Pale daffodils burst from the ground and opened their trumpets to the rising sun, swung their faces west to miss nothing of its afternoon passage, and then drooped for the night.

  You couldn’t get enough of them, even as a baby, Mother used to muse.

  You’d struggle out of your father’s arms and run into their midst.

  I’ve left the daffodils behind.

  Now, I race to capture the diverse colours of Africa.

  The orange of Namaqualand daisies, the blue-rose of dawn, the gritty ochre of desert.

  The fleeting jewel of a kingfisher’s wing.

  Sometimes I get it right, sometimes my colours wander across the paper like a random smear. Father says it’s about the soul, my teacher says it’s about technique and my husband says it’s all in the eye of the beholder anyway, and I should not agonise so much. But I do, because I am the beholder, and if my work cannot speak to me then I have failed.

  How strange that I should find fame outside the area where I practised for so long.

  And in a single work.

  The portrait of a human face.

  Chapter One

  Embury St David’s, England, 1921

  When I was a sober ten-year-old, I fell head first out of an oak tree and nearly died.

  Nothing was ever the same again. Not me, and not the world I crashed into. I should, various relatives complained, have realised there’d been enough dying and shown more sense.

  My father’s prized binoculars, slung around my neck, flipped over my head and smashed to the ground. I remember the calamitous sound of breaking glass but nothing at all from my own collision with the earth. It wasn’t my fault, I cried to my parents when I later came to, it was because I was distracted by a woodpecker on a nearby branch and failed to watch my feet as I descended.

  ‘Call an ambulance!’ Gerald Whittington had shouted while he loosened his daughter’s collar.

  Emily Whittington knelt on the ground and mopped at the blood with her lace handkerchief and tried to clear the vicinity of lens glass. The clang-clang of the approaching ambulance brought out a crowd from the terraced houses. The Ferguson toddlers, attracted by the noise, had to be hauled out of the vehicle’s anticipated path by their mother; the Atkinses’ hosepipe, left running, flooded their tiny garden and ruined Mrs A’s prize phlox while the Hodgson family – mother, father, three teenagers, visiting grandparents – rushed to form a circle around the inert body. Emily Whittington appeared to be praying over her daughter, which was only to be expected of a mother, especially one who’d lost so much already.

  The ambulance ground to a halt, scattering the onlookers and silencing a pair of barking dogs.

  A bottle was waved beneath Frances’s nose and her eyelids began to flutter.

  Why do male birds have different feathers from females? For courtship? Maybe to avoid mix-ups …

  ‘She’s alive!’ yelled Mr Atkins. He’d arrived on the scene after he heard the thud.

  ‘She’s alive!’ repeated the crowd.

  Confused, lovesick birds fluttered across my brain. And something else …

  A gust of wind shook the oak from where Frances had fallen. Folk exchanged glances. Frances was known to spend a lot of time up trees, more than the most adventurous neighbourhood boys. Maybe the oak had got tired of being climbed and tipped the invader out. Even Mrs Whittington had once confessed to Mrs Ferguson that she found her daughter’s behaviour … unusual. It was the Great War, replied Mrs Ferguson. And then the Spanish Flu. Nothing would ever be the same again. Even girls.

  The ambulancemen lifted Frances onto a stretcher, slid her into their vehicle and lurched off. Her parents followed more slowly in the family motor car, bought only a year ago and the first one on the street. Gerald Whittington was a coming man. ‘Make soup,’ Mr Atkins instructed his wife before shooing the neighbours away. ‘They’ll want something warm when they get back.’

  By the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital, I’d regained consciousness and it seemed I wouldn’t die from my moment of distraction. The binoculars, however, were ruined and that was the worst outcome. They were my extra eyes, the windows to a world I was sure no one else noticed. How would I see the way feathers layered along a bird’s wing and caught the light?

  ‘No more climbing for a while,’ said Dr Evans, the emergency doctor, after he’d examined my skull and made me watch a moving pencil without shifting my head. ‘Next time you may not be so lucky. Bed rest for five days. Lots of fluids.’ He unrolled a bandage and wound it around my head.

  ‘Her hands, Doctor?’ Mother looked in horror at my scratched palms. Mother was particular; the sight of abraded skin was an insult to her careful management of the household. And she wasn’t wearing a hat. Mother rarely left the house without a hat.

  ‘They’ll heal up soon enough. Nurse will clean them and put on dressings.’

  I looked away and caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror opposite the hospital bed. Was that really me? Pale face, green eyes with a fleck of ginger, wild, titian hair scraped away from a large head bandage; a tear in my cotton blouse through which poked bruised skin.

  ‘Frances? Are you listening?’ Wind rattled a
gainst the ward windows and brought a speckle of raindrops to the glass. ‘You need to tell your parents if your headache persists in the coming days.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I will.’

  ‘What if it does, Doctor?’ This, nervously, from Mother as she plucked at my crumpled cardigan.

  Mother was always well ironed, in contrast to Father’s gangly untidiness. Maybe the combination of order and disarray was the correct mix where marriage was concerned.

  ‘Then we’ll investigate further. But I’m confident your daughter’s injuries will heal swiftly.’

  The woodpecker I’d spotted, the one that caused my fall, did he see me and wonder if I’d live? Do birds have brains that notice life and death in species other than their own?

  ‘When can I go home, Doctor?’

  ‘As soon as your cuts have been dressed. And, young lady,’ he wagged a finger, ‘no more outdoor adventures, rather take up reading or embroidery.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Father hurriedly, and shot me a warning glance. Embroidery!

  ‘Why,’ Mother asked later, after she’d helped me into the motor car, ‘must you climb? Why won’t you play on the ground like other girls? Like your friend Susan?’

  ‘Emily,’ murmured Father, putting a hand on her arm, ‘Fran’s had enough of a fright.’

  He glanced at me in the rear-view mirror and closed one eye in a slow wink.

  Father understood.

  In a way, he was also to blame.

  He’d first taken me up the oak as a child. Father said vantage points were the only way to gain a proper view of the world. Mother protested that climbing was an unrefined pastime for girls, but he said if Frances wanted to do so then why shouldn’t she? He’d shown me how to use the glasses to trace the winding road that led to Eastleigh, and notice how the land fell into folds as if liquid turned to solid. To match him, I’d learnt the names of the birds that played about the oak and some that didn’t, and I’d recite them until Father covered his ears: cardinal woodpeckers, raucous magpies, friendly robins, scarlet macaws from the Amazon, unmistakably …

  But for Father, the view was about more than pretty scenery and a sense of proportion. It was about money. Borrowed landscape opened up a crowded island and a buyer’s pocket. ‘Look,’ he’d murmur, waving at the vista, ‘it’s ours, little one. We paid for it fair and square and it will surely appreciate with time. One day it’ll be yours.’ He must have known, even then, that I’d be an only child. And Embury, like Father, was known to be a place on the up: close enough to the cathedral cities of Salisbury and Winchester to provide business opportunities and religious solace, and also to Southampton from where the Empire was in reach for the making of a fortune. Father bought our house after the Anglo-Boer War. ‘Mark my words,’ he used to say, ‘there’ll be another set-to out there. Nothing was truly settled.’ Queen Victoria died towards the end and some said it was only her passing that encouraged the two sides to look up from battle and make reluctant peace. The fact that Father’s sister, Mary, lived at the Cape of Good Hope meant he took an interest in that part of the world.

  My mind is unbound, darting from oaks to houses to distant wars …

  We crept along the road towards our home, Father driving the motor car extra slowly to avoid jarring my bandaged head. Mother did not initially share Father’s view about Embury. She would’ve preferred Winchester, even if it meant a cramped semi rather than a detached house. But Father persisted and Mother conceded. After all, she was lucky to have a husband, let alone a house. Many of her friends had only framed photographs of men in uniform and bunches of letters tied with ribbons; unsatisfactory lives eked out alongside elderly parents.

  Light broke from behind the Atkinses’ curtains. Someone was watching for our return. A cat scuttled away, its eyes reflecting in Father’s headlamps as he parked. The terraced houses shifted closer, looming overhead. I felt a tremor and touched a hand to the bandage. Maybe the injury was playing with my eyes. And somewhere out there, beneath the oak, were the splinters of Father’s binoculars.

  Do trees have a kind of consciousness? Do they know who climbs them? Who falls out of them?

  And what kind of birds live in oak trees in Africa?

  ‘Mind her sore hands, Gerald,’ Mother said as Father opened my door.

  Even with his helping hand around my shoulder, it took an age to reach my bedroom. Mother had wanted me to have dark curtains but I wanted voile so I could see outside at night. Father had said I could have any kind I fancied. Mother wondered how I’d manage to sleep with moonlight streaming in but eventually agreed and ordered them from France as a special treat. No one else on the street had foreign curtains.

  ‘I’m sorry I fell,’ I said later, when she kissed me goodnight.

  ‘I wish you’d be sensible,’ she murmured. ‘You ruined your green cardigan. And your father didn’t show it but you gave him a tremendous shock. He thought he’d lost you.’

  And you, Mother?

  I caught the words before they left my lips.

  So often I see detachment on Mother’s face. Perhaps it was the Great War? Mother had lost her brother and nearly her husband but for a lucky avoidance of the Somme. Maybe emotion was a weakness that, like a creased blouse, should never be displayed.

  Even so …

  If I was the only child she’d ever have, surely she’d want to hold me closer, love me more openly?

  ‘It’s been a long day.’ Father appeared at Mother’s shoulder. ‘Let’s get you to sleep.’ He leant down and kissed me, his beard tickling my cheek, his watch chain glinting in the lamplight. Father might be a little untidy but he valued quality. A good watch. A tweed suit. Expensive binoculars …

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. About the glasses. I’ll save my pocket money—’

  ‘Hush.’ He put his finger to his lips before leading Mother away.

  Father was never detached. He’d laugh ruefully after he’d revealed something it would’ve been better to conceal – like his opinion of the King, who was nothing like the late Victoria in terms of decorum or ending wars – and say he couldn’t lie to a child’s trusting face. He also said it was foolish to store all your assets in one place, whether it was money or influence. I didn’t understand him at the time but he said it didn’t matter as long as I remembered the words when I was older.

  Risk, whatever that was, must be spread.

  I stared out of the window. It felt as if my voile curtains were being torn aside to expose the world in all its rawness. With each tug I saw more clearly, understood more sharply. Mother’s indifference might reach to the bedroom she shared with Father. I wasn’t clear how babies came about but I sensed you needed both parents to take part. That was why – not a medical reason, as I’d believed – there was no brother or sister. Mother didn’t want another child. One was enough. Or maybe, at times, too much.

  Through the open window came a trilling, bubbling song.

  A nightingale, I registered, as my eyes closed.

  A secretive bird, not often seen. Perhaps I’d missed it in the oak.

  Chapter Two

  The tremor in my head disappeared but the new sharpness didn’t leave me the next day, or the next. I couldn’t work out whether this fresh awareness sprang from outside of me or from within.

  Had the world changed in my moment of collision with the earth, or was it only me?

  ‘Is the sun too strong?’ Mother fussed with the thin curtains. ‘Are you chilly?’

  Mother’s detachment now veered into constant surveillance. She wouldn’t let me draw or read in case such exertion placed too great a burden on my scrambled brain. She patrolled regularly to prevent me sneaking out of bed and falling prey to a delayed seizure.

  ‘It’s too soon, Frances. We must be careful.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts, my dear. Remember what the doctor said.’

  Mrs Atkins delivered soup and a fruit cake – I heard the door knocker – of which I was allowed to ea
t small portions, and Susan’s mother called to say that Sue would love to visit and promised not to make me laugh if doing so might hurt my head. Aunt Rosemary from Exeter offered to come up by train to child-sit. Mrs Ferguson sent over a copy of Crafts for Girls.

  Mother repelled them all. In my solitude I began to speculate about Jesus. I only knew Him from Sundays, where He resided on a cross at the centre of St David’s Church, ready to forgive us for what we had done to Him, provided we sinned no more. Did He choose to cushion my fall instead of letting me die … and then cruelly decree that boredom should be my punishment? But I don’t believe He noticed my moment of distraction in the midst of all the other upheavals that vied for His attention that day. Jesus couldn’t possibly save every mouse from the fangs of a snake, or every sober child from an unfortunate slip. It was luck that spared me, not Divine Intervention. I realised these were probably heretical thoughts and should not be shared.

  ‘How are you feeling, Frances?’ Mother, again. ‘Have you drunk your beef tea?’

  ‘I hate beef tea.’

  Mother was wearing a pink twinset and a navy skirt, and her hair was carefully set. I’ve never seen Mother un-set. Even in bed, she wears a hairnet to tamp down the possibility of stray curls.

  ‘You will drink it, Frances. You need building up. And then you must rest.’

  Susan says her mother winds her hair on pins every night. Isn’t that sinful? Putting outward appearance above a holy heart? I’ve read about tribes who pierce their noses with skewers but that is for their Lord’s benefit not for their husband’s or random visitors—

  ‘Frances?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. I’ll drink it.’

  The only distraction – and I was shamefully aware that distraction had brought me to this low point – was when Father returned from work and peered lankily round my door.

  ‘Please, Father.’ I wriggled to the edge of the bed. ‘Take me outside! Please? A drive to the sea?’

  ‘Next week. For the moment,’ he fixed me with a mock stern glance, ‘we will escape via the exercise of our brains, most particularly what may be left of yours. Let me see.’ He cast his eyes upwards. ‘If one caterpillar takes half a day to eat three leaves, how many leaves will four caterpillars eat in a week?’