‘But perhaps not so … argumentatively?’ Mother folded her gloves and placed them beside her hat.
‘I won’t say anything, any more.’ I scowled at my open textbook, Cross, Castle and Compass: Their Role in History. ‘I’ll be completely quiet.’
‘No, Frances,’ Mother sighed, ‘we don’t want you to be completely silent. But you should think before you speak. Questioning the conduct of the Great War is not appropriate for a youngster.’
For Mother, it was less about education and more about bad manners, especially in a girl. Like wearing plain shoes to Southampton instead of patent leather.
‘Art,’ said Mr Cadwaller a few weeks later, wagging a stained finger at me, ‘is a journey. It requires planning. You cannot simply trust to instinct or hope for fair weather. Eighty per cent is acquired technique, twenty per cent is talent. If you wish to progress, Frances, you must hone your technique.’
He spread out the sketches I’d brought in.
A pale pink rose, a lavender-hulled liner with a funnel in black and red, a fragile dandelion. If my pictures were no good, Mr Cadwaller would say so – unlike dear Father who said everything I drew was beautiful and showed a pleasing sense of soul.
‘I see you’re not over-detailing,’ he arched an eyebrow, ‘at the expense of the overall effect.’
‘When should I start to use paint, sir?’
‘Not just yet. This rose is well done.’
‘Mr Cadwaller,’ I felt a frisson of excitement, ‘do you think I could be an artist?’
‘Anyone can be an artist! Anyone!’ He spread his arms wide as if to embrace the entire village, perhaps even the entire country, as if the gift were universal and simply needed to be uncovered. ‘Are you asking me whether you could make a living from it?’
‘Yes, sir.’ I hesitated and then plunged. ‘I’d like to make it my career.’
None of my friends talked of careers. They only wanted to find boys to marry. ‘What else is there?’ asked Phyllis, teasing a kiss curl over her forehead. ‘You’d be an old maid, otherwise.’
‘Frances?’
Wasn’t settling on a husband like putting all your assets into one basket, as Father had advised against?
I blushed. A truly heretical thought.
‘Are you prepared to devote yourself, Frances? To fail, and try again?’
‘I know Van Gogh went mad, sir. And Vermeer died poor. So did some of the great music composers.’
‘Now, now!’ Mr Cadwaller puffed out a breath. ‘Self-sacrifice is not required.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘You could become an educated admirer of other people’s work, like the Masters you’ve just mentioned. There’s no shame in that.’ His lips twitched. Now he was goading me. ‘You could ask your parents to take you to London to view the National Gallery.’
‘I don’t want to study art, sir, I want to make it myself.’
Are there pencil strokes that can capture the thrill of a vantage point? I asked my diary later. The risk of being up a mountain or a tree, precariously, looking down on the world? Father was in his study when I got home. I rapped on the door.
‘Come in!’
He looked up from his desk as I closed the door behind me.
‘Father, can I interrupt? Mr Cadwaller says I might be good enough to be an artist if I work hard!’
‘Does he now,’ Father leant back and regarded me. ‘You mean instead of an ornithologist, my dear? After all, you can list every bird in the garden by name and family.’
‘Don’t tease, Father. Could you pay for me to take private lessons?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ He winked. ‘Our shares are doing well!’
When I’d first asked where the money came from to buy our home, he’d said from the railways in America and I’d shouted ‘choof, choof!’ and it became our private joke.
I went around the desk to hug him. ‘It’s because I broke the binoculars. I learnt I could see well enough on my own to draw a picture - but I need to get better.’
He nodded and I saw his hand shake for a moment. Father didn’t like to be reminded of my fall. It brought back memories of the war across the Channel and the soldiers who fell beside him.
‘You promised to tell me one day about this man,’ I pointed to a small, framed poster tucked away on a side wall, of a man in military uniform pointing a finger at his audience. Mother disapproved, as did relatives who came at Christmas, and particularly one visitor from overseas. ‘After the internment camps, Gerald! The scorched earth! How can you bear to have him on your wall?’
And Father had replied, ‘As a warning, dear chap. A warning.’
He stood up and took my hand and led me to the picture. ‘That is Lord Kitchener, a famous British soldier. He was the hero or the scourge of the Boer War, depending which side you were on. Ten years later, he was exhorting the same young men to follow him and sign up for the Great War.’
‘So why do you keep him here, Father?’
He hesitated.
‘As a reminder and an omen. That a person can be an enemy one moment, and an ally the next. And that powerful men must be held to account, Fran. Whether they’re Kitchener or the Kaiser.’
‘I thought the Great War started because the Archduke was shot.’
‘Yes it did, and one thing led to another. It became a matter of honouring alliances. We were obliged to uphold previous treaties and stop the Kaiser’s ambitions in Europe.’
‘Before he gathered too much power for himself?
He smiled. ‘Indeed. Talking of power, shall we tell Mother you plan to be the greatest female artist in England?’
‘Father?’ I stopped him at the door. ‘Mr Jacobs says you and Mother are sad.’
He put an arm about my shoulder. ‘Poor Jacobs also thinks plants have feelings, my dear. A sweet notion. Don’t listen to his nonsense.’
Chapter Six
The year of my fifteenth birthday was a stormy one. Winds from the Atlantic delivered gusts strong enough to bring down several branches from the oak and forced me to climb a more perilous route to my vantage point. Rainwater sluiced along our roads, filling the River Itchen with a muddy torrent that emptied itself into the Solent as a brown stain I fancied I could see in the distance. I tried to draw the bubbling streams but they were too fast, too unpredictable. Roses let you copy each delicate stage from bud to bloom but water tears past you before you can catch it.
Is love, I asked my diary after I clambered down the tree, like water? Life-giving but erratic? Too changeable to be pinned down?
I don’t want to give my love too easily in case it runs away from me.
‘How,’ I asked Mr Cadwaller, ‘do you draw something that is never still?’
‘You choose one moment, Frances, you capture it as you see it,’ he clapped his hands together, as if imprisoning the image between his palms, ‘and fix it upon your mind! Then draw it just so.’
I walked on Embury Common with my sketchbook and my folding stool and an umbrella, and drew whatever was fleetingly in front of me. Shifting skies, windblown daisies, flitting sparrows. ‘Rather come with us,’ Sue and Julie would urge on their way to the bus stop, skirts swinging. ‘Don’t waste an afternoon in the damp! We’re going to the pictures!’ When I hear their bus depart, I close my eyes and conjure up foreign blooms and darting birds with coloured feathers that I copy from my imagination. Mother says it’s unseemly to lust after what one can’t have. Yet nature, whether real or imagined, is surely God’s artwork? Even Mr Darwin might be prepared to agree.
‘Excellent, Frances! Such diligence to record specimens in the rough. These sketches,’ Mr Cadwaller flourished one to the class, ‘show the challenge of working outdoors. Beware, young ladies! Rain will surely fall, sparrows will surely fly away! You will rarely have the luxury of time!’
‘Now, Frances,’ said Mr Cadwaller to me privately, ‘shall we consider watercolours?’
I painted a line of cobalt blue at the top
of the page and then lifted the paper vertically. Blue colour bled downwards like shards of rain. Or tears. I placed the paper flat, dipped my brush in the water and stroked it over the colour, lightening it, fading it. Too much water, though, and the effect became insipid; too little and the sky possessed a garishness that nature would never recognise. This wash of soft shades and meandering lines is the opposite of my precise flower drawings. The effect they create is like a dream, the blurry chase of a child in the garden.
Perhaps, one day, I’ll be able to paint what I can’t quite see.
‘Mother?’
She looked up from her knitting.
‘Did I have a brother? I see him in my dreams—’
Her face paled as readily as if I’d performed the same watercolour fade on her skin.
‘It was a long time ago. I’d prefer not to talk about it, my dear.’
‘But—’
She set aside her knitting, stood up and walked away to her bedroom. I flung down my brush, jumped up, ready to put my arms around her, but she closed the door behind her. I waited for a moment. I should have opened it, broken through her reserve. When I knocked an hour later she said she had a headache. I went outside and climbed the oak tree to the highest, most dangerous perch and looked towards the sea. Did anyone else know, apart from Mr Jacobs and our neighbours and extended family now keeping silent? Those neighbours, seeing me fall, must have feared that history might be about to repeat itself.
Mother will not allow me in, I wrote later.
She won’t allow me to comfort her in her loss.
She doesn’t realise that, in some strange way, I’ve lost someone, too.
I want to know the boy’s name, and how he died. I would like to draw him. But I could ask nothing further because Mother emerged the following morning with her face powdered and her hair immaculate and her lips closed. I could almost understand if her withdrawal were a way to protect herself. How much, after all, could a mother weep before her heart ran dry?
I don’t want to give away my love too easily either.
Mother and I may be more alike than I realise.
I began to paint pictures for the brother I never knew. Did he like bright colours? Roses in shades of yellow with a sweep of viridian green for their leaves; bougainvillea blossoms in indigo and rose madder. A navy swallow with a rufous throat and sleek wings made for thousands of miles of flight.
‘My,’ said Father, ‘how bold, my dear. Mr Cadwaller will surely be impressed.’
Chapter Seven
I’m not regarded as a tree-climbing monkey any more. Perhaps the outspokenness Mother tried to curb and Father likes to applaud is refreshing for boys brought up with girls who mostly giggle and agree with what they say.
Or maybe it’s because I read the papers more than my friends. I know about Aboriginal tribes in Australia and buildings in New York that are so tall they are called skyscrapers.
I don’t think the young men are interested in what I know. Or in my painting.
I like to be with them. They’re not as silly as girls, Susan excepted.
When I turned seventeen I was invited to my first formal dance by Brian Harris. Julie said he was a catch and if I ever tired of him to let her know first. Brian was a tall boy with blond hair that flopped over his forehead in an engaging way. Phyllis said he’d inherit a tidy fortune from his solicitor father who, in his spare time, bred horses that had won at Cheltenham.
‘Lucky you!’ chortled Sue as we pored over the invitation in the privacy of my bedroom. ‘Will you wear pink? They say it’s the colour of the season. With fringing on the hem, flapper style. A headband?’
‘White or, at most, cream,’ countered Mother over dinner. ‘Demureness for your first outing, Frances! A plain slide in your hair. You don’t want to appear worldly.’
Mother and I have said no more about my brother. Instead, she’s taken up in my new-found popularity.
‘I say,’ exclaimed Brian when he fetched me in his father’s motor car, ‘the prettiest girl in town!’
‘Only in town?’
He coloured, shot me a glance and then grinned. ‘Alright then, prettiest in the world!’
‘That’s better,’ I said, taking his arm and swinging my hips just a little, so that the tiny fringe Mother and I had compromised on could swish against my knees.
‘No speeding, young man,’ ordered Father, following us out to the motor car. He removed his watch from his waistcoat and tapped it. ‘Back by ten-thirty, please.’
The hall was decked with paper flower garlands, the band played the latest American jazz, candles flickered on the tables and I danced all evening. Mostly with Brian, occasionally with other boys who cut in. Maybe it was the flapper dress? Whatever the reason, a string of admirers soon beat a path to our door. Mother insisted I should agree to their invitations in strict rotation.
‘So you don’t favour one over another. Not yet, at least.’
Mother believed a daughter who attracted widespread attention was an asset to be carefully managed.
‘Who do you fancy?’ whispered Susan, eyeing the crush. ‘They’re all crazy for you!’
The wooing accelerated when Brian invited me to watch the arrival of the next mail ship along with his parents. Mother advised pink-and-cream stripes, and a cloche hat. I was on parade, as were all the ladies on the quay, some waiting for a loved one’s return, others perhaps hoping to catch the eye of a foreign diamond magnate.
‘You’re fulfilling your talent, Frances,’ Mr Cadwaller said, viewing my latest work: skeletal beech trees against a winter sky. ‘Watercolours have added a new dimension.’
I stared out of the studio window. Brian Harris didn’t see me as a true partner. If I was brave enough to wait, I might find someone who did, and if money happened to come in the same package, and the young man appreciated art …
‘Frances?’
I was, I realised with a flash of guilt, making a calculation.
Mother had made it and it might suit me, too, but on my own terms.
‘If I marry well, Mr Cadwaller, I’ll have the freedom to continue with my art.’
‘How so?’
‘I’d have the means to ensure my family were well looked after – while I—’
He threw back his head and let out a giant guffaw. ‘While you headed off and travelled the world and painted it? Come, come, Frances! I admire your strategy, but that will be a stretch! And if you don’t find the paragon you’re seeking? What then?’
‘Then I shall stay single, sir. And I’ll need my art to support me.’
‘And your father? How would he feel if he were to know your plans?’
‘I suspect he wouldn’t be surprised, sir. Disconcerted, perhaps, not surprised.’
But Father was recently too distracted to consider my burgeoning social life and was happy to leave the matter to Mother until a clear favourite emerged. I blamed Joseph Currie and Anthony Darby, who came to our house regularly, holding fat briefcases over their heads to shield themselves from the winter downpours as they ran from their motor cars to our front door.
‘Won’t you stay for drinks, gentlemen?’ Mother would say when they emerged from the study after another lengthy conference.
‘Thank you, no,’ they would reply, and make the excuse of another engagement.
Mother was told that economies would have to be made in the running of the house.
‘Just for a while,’ Father said, affecting a nonchalant air. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
I finished school top of my class and Mother proposed secretarial training if I insisted on an occupation before the leap into marriage. But rather than either of those, I joined Mr Cadwaller’s evening classes: still-life drawing, watercolours, pencil sketches. ‘Wise decision, Frances! Practise! Practise! That way lies mastery of technique!’ If I made sufficient progress, he’d promised me an introduction to the Royal Botanic Garden’s illustration section.
On the perimeter, a posse of you
ng men vetted by Mother circled. I smiled and flirted and no one guessed my hesitation. Julie and Phyllis and Sue paired off with local boys and began planning summer weddings. All agreed that I, Frances, had bagged the best fellow. It was just a matter of the proposal and setting the date. Brian’s family would buy us a house in Eastleigh and I would be taken up with producing a family and supporting my husband and occasionally drawing.
What more could Frances want, they asked themselves.
As my eighteenth birthday approached, the future was as clear as the colours in my paintbox.
The only clouds in my sky were ones I chose to conjure up myself.
Chapter Eight
‘Good morning, Mr Whittington.’ The secretary looked up. ‘The partners are in the meeting room.’
‘Thank you, Miss Fisk. Will you show my daughter to the spare office? It has a good view.’
‘Of course, sir.’
I unpacked my small easel and set it up on the desk. The cathedral rose up, elbowing aside the smaller buildings around it. Brian was planning to take me up to its highest point for my birthday, chaperoned – only at a distance, hopefully – by his parents. I was certain he intended to propose and I still didn’t know how I would respond.
That first critical glance, I told myself, remembering Mr Cadwaller’s words.
I sharpened my coloured pencils.
A door further away opened and closed.
Draw what you see, Frances.
I picked up the grey pencil and began to sketch.
First the outline, the angles, then the great west façade emerging like a ship out of fog. The flying buttresses, just seen, the stained glass of the West Window, hinted at …
A door opened and voices swept out, talking over each other, some shouting.
‘There’s no choice! We have to liquidate!’
Tiny jewel colours for the window segments, although I couldn’t be sure without binoculars. Greyish-cream for the stone.
The Fire Portrait Page 3
