The Fire Portrait

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘How much are you exposed?’

  A light blue for the sky, arcing overhead. Filaments of cloud.

  ‘I warned you, gentlemen, but no one heeded me.’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you!’

  ‘Surely not, Gerald—’

  I glanced from the real cathedral to the copy and back again. Swiftly drawn lines, a bold cross-hatching of straight and diagonal, and the paper version had sprung to life! Yet within an hour the cloudy filaments might thicken into rain, veiling the sharp corners, smudging the bold lines—

  ‘Fran?’ Father peered in. His face was unusually flushed. ‘We’re going home, my dear.’

  ‘So soon? A little longer, please Father?’ I clipped up a fresh sheet. ‘I must do one more!’

  He shook his head. ‘Another time. Gather your pencils, please.’

  One of the men who may have been shouting earlier hurried by, ignoring Father as he stood in the doorway. Another came past more slowly and put a hand on Father’s shoulder.

  I stared at Father but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I folded my easel and packed my pencils into their tin.

  Miss Fisk bent over her typewriter and didn’t look up as we left.

  ‘Read all about it,’ shouted a paperboy on the corner as we motored home in silence. ‘Big Crash!’

  ‘Millions lost! Read all about it!’

  Cloud dived over the hills and swallowed the cathedral.

  ‘Splendid!’ enthused Mr Cadwaller, when I showed him my sketch. ‘Now try it with watercolours from the same vantage point – if your Father will allow you?’

  ‘Have you heard?’ Brian asked idly over tea, when the first whispers of collapsing shares began to circulate, ‘there’s been an issue on the New York Stock Exchange.’ He shrugged, and took my hand and kissed it while my parents were speaking to Mr Jacobs in the garden. ‘I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Our family never took a big position in American stocks. What name,’ he squeezed my fingers, ‘shall we give our new filly? She’s a beauty, and I have naming rights. I rather fancy Chestnut Delight.’

  ‘I think my father may have some American shares,’ I said, slowly, watching Father with Jacobs.

  ‘Well, I hope he’s covered against a loss. How about Fran’s Fancy?’

  The word blowing from New York to London to Winchester to Embury was that no one could have seen the Crash coming. Certainly, those besuited men striding jauntily down Wall Street between the skyscrapers one morning, and then slinking home with the contents of their desks in cardboard boxes in the afternoon, hadn’t seen it coming: the ticker tape chattering madly, stock prices tumbling, fortunes dissipating like smoke in the unforgiving air. The newspapers with their shouted headlines were wise after the event, but there’d been no warnings in the paper that thudded into our postbox every day. And no warning from Father that such misfortune might cross an ocean.

  ‘How much have we lost, Father?’

  Mother was at church. Would our village Jesus see the Crash as born of usury? Or simply bad luck—

  ‘How much, Father?’

  He met my eyes reluctantly. ‘A great deal, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But we must have some money left!’ I stared around the study: the walnut desk, the brass paperweight, the evidence of a successful life that surely couldn’t vanish and leave behind no crumbs. Father was, after all, no longer a coming man. He’d arrived.

  ‘Not enough, my dear.’

  ‘Did you put it all in one basket?’ I tried not to shout. ‘That’s what you warned me about! You said it was foolish to put all your assets in one place!’

  Spread the risk, he’d insisted. That way you’ll never be caught, or lose the power to shape your future.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fran. More than I can say.’

  ‘The railway shares? That paid for this house? For my art lessons?’

  ‘Largely worthless, I’m afraid.’

  Choof, choof! I’d shouted as a child, about the magic power of those shares.

  ‘What will we do, Father?’

  ‘We’ll economise further. Cut our cloth more simply. Move to a smaller property.’

  I grabbed the curtains that framed the window. While I might secretly long to go further afield, or ignore the young man who was the best catch, this place was my inheritance. Look, Father had proclaimed from the oak, one day it’ll be yours.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’ He took his watch from his waistcoat pocket, put it back without looking at its face, then took it out again. ‘We’ll have to sell.’

  The clouds parted, and a weak sun broke through.

  The oak stood tall and impassive, soon to belong to someone else.

  ‘If other people have been equally affected, Father, then we won’t get the price we deserve.’

  Father didn’t reply but came over and put his arm around me. We stared at the garden.

  ‘I had a brother,’ I whispered. ‘Here. In this house. We’ll lose him, too.’

  Father lifted a thin hand to cover his eyes. ‘Not now, please, Frances. And never with your mother.’

  Briefly, to my diary.

  Father, so careful not to trust powerful men blindly, or take chances …

  I once believed he was as wise in real life as he was in his advice about it.

  I was wrong. He never followed his own teaching.

  And not only for ourselves: Aunt Rosemary, from Exeter, refuses to forgive him for losing part of her fortune. She’s withdrawn her remaining savings from her account, keeps the notes under her mattress and has ignored Father’s telephone calls for weeks.

  Mother is devastated on my behalf. She berates herself that she didn’t hurry my romance. Have I lost my chance? Surely Brian will not back away.

  But is this crisis pushing me in a direction I never wanted to go? Is money and a settled status enough – without love and partnership?

  The Crash, it turned out, was another kind of fall. A fresh sharpening.

  It came about not from my own distraction – or a sneaking desire for danger – but from a crisis over which I had no control. Our house was put up for sale and bought at a knock-down price by a man wanting to move from his terrace row. We could have waited for a higher price but Father wasn’t sure we’d have done any better given the number of properties newly on the market.

  ‘Sometimes it’s best to take a loss and move on,’ he said to me, out of earshot of Mother, ‘rather than advertise your situation by hanging on for a buyer who may not come.’

  Rather accept an offer now, than wait for one that will not come.

  But I was no longer in demand. A talent for conversation, titian hair and a slim ankle beneath a flapper frock were not, it appeared, enough to compensate for a lack of fortune or a reasonable standing in the community. My eighteenth birthday came and went without public celebration or a trip to Winchester Cathedral with Brian and the expected proposal. He stopped calling altogether. Susan said it proved he wasn’t worth it, but then she hugged her own beau, Peter, and fingered her engagement ring. I was even delicately shunned in my art classes, which I’d cut from daily to weekly to save Father the expense. ‘Shame,’ I overheard Susan Currie say without regret, ‘she won’t get any further, now.’

  The newspapers began to show hard, industrial images.

  ‘Don’t look away, Frances!’ Mr Cadwaller urged. ‘Express yourself in art!’

  I copied the pictures in grey pencil: families queueing at soup kitchens or outside silent mills; men and women scrambling over mine waste dumps for stray pieces of coal to heat their homes. Yet my fingers misbehaved. Lines wavered or became unaccountably jagged, sketches lost their accuracy and I tore up more than I kept. Mother saw my struggle and said nothing. She didn’t embrace me or murmur that she was sorry my romance had died, that life dealt blows that were not always fair. Instead she looked away from my latest failed picture, quietly left the room and closed the door behind her as she’d done before. Perhaps
that was the only way she knew.

  I took to coming downstairs early every morning to see Father before he left the house.

  ‘Where is it today?’ I asked on one occasion as he set off in the grey dawn wearing his best tweed suit.

  ‘To the bus station, Frances.’ He forced a smile. ‘For Southampton. The mail ship.’

  He kissed me and let himself out quietly. Our motor car had been sold so it had to be the bus – in fact, several buses. I willed the new arrivals to notice Father’s smile and raised hat, and accept his offer of accounting services, assistance with housing, tax representation …

  If we’d lived in a big city our plight might have been less visible but in a small village like Embury, any reduction in circumstances stood out. Father was no longer considered as having arrived and we, his family, retreated with him. While the neighbours watched – the Atkinses, the Fergusons, the Hodgsons – we moved to a terraced house with no outlook, no roses for Mr Jacobs to prune – even if we could have managed to keep him on. For Mother, it was the worst outcome. Our home had been her version of the oak tree, her vantage point over village society.

  I watched her face as we left, the mechanical smile above the carefully ironed blouse, and caught her final rearwards glance from the taxi. It would have been easier if we’d made a complete break, to a place where no one knew our background. But I suspect Mother didn’t want to go far away.

  I know why.

  I’ve not dreamt of my brother since we moved.

  He’s gone and I’m oddly lost without him. For Mother, it must be close to a betrayal, an abandonment of her son, the grass he ran over, the sound of his voice on the stairs.

  My parents sit in our cramped lounge in the evening and say little. Father’s forays to Southampton and his tireless local trawling have produced nothing in return. He won’t be able to support me if I don’t marry. And no one wants me.

  Even though I’m struggling to draw, I sometimes feel I’m the only one thinking clearly.

  Capture the moment …

  ‘Father? I have an idea.’

  Chapter Nine

  Have you ever seized a dream? I asked my diary, in the hope it might answer back, one friend to another, and give me guidance.

  And is it wrong – unseemly – to turn a crisis into an opportunity?

  Because I see one and I want to grasp it.

  Fresh colours on my palette, new scents on my nose …

  ‘You can’t go all that way on your own, Frances! Tell her, Gerald! It’s out of the question!’ Mother swept a hand across her un-coiffed hair.

  From outside came the clatter of bins. Our too-close neighbours clattered bins night and day with no regard to the disturbance. And they showed no particular respect towards Mother.

  ‘It’s an option,’ said Father, with an appraising rub of his beard. I’ve noticed that Father is careful not to contradict Mother outright. He’s failed her and therefore has no right to assume his views should be trusted or take precedence. I’m starting to appreciate that marriage is a tricky two-step. You must yield to the music and your partner – but also to the history between you.

  ‘You’ve always said Aunt Mary needed a companion, Father,’ I went on. ‘I can be that person.’

  Once a year we received a picture postcard of the Cape, showing rearing mountains or strange flowers – I copied one – and a peremptory message asking why, with Gerald’s means, he’d yet to bring his family to visit. Hurry up, tardy brother! None of us is getting any younger.

  ‘The only question,’ I leant forward, ‘is whether we can afford the fare. I’d go third class.’

  ‘Third class!’ Mother gasped. ‘You will not! And nothing has been decided yet!’

  ‘Emily,’ Father murmured, reaching out a hand to her. ‘Please. It is worth discussing.’

  I waited in the chair opposite. The second sofa had been sold. We could only host two visitors at a time.

  ‘What will we do, Gerald, without Frances?’

  The words burst out of Mother as if they’d been held, mutely, for too long. I felt a chill around my heart. There were matters here that touched me but were not mine to resolve.

  Is there so little left between them that I am the necessary glue? I wrote later in my diary.

  I jumped up and went over to Mother and wrapped my arms around her. ‘You have Father,’ I murmured against her hair, ‘and your friends. And the church. Mother,’ I disengaged gently, ‘please look at me.’

  Her eyes were dry but red-rimmed.

  ‘This is my chance. Don’t you see, Mother? If you wish me to marry, my prospects are better there than here. No one will know my circumstances. It’ll be a fresh start.’

  Her grey eyes roamed over my face, like the way she’d looked at me while fingering my bloody cardigan after the fall, as if she couldn’t believe I was her child and had done something so unlike her.

  ‘I will always be your daughter, Mother. You will always have me.’

  As with the sale of the house, events moved fast. Father wrote to his sister and received a telegrammed reply.

  Delighted have Frances Stop Send Harrods tea Stop Mary

  Mother held her head up around the village and made out that the opportunity for Frances had come out of the blue and was in no way an act of rescue or desperation.

  ‘Fancy that,’ said Mrs Atkins with a quick glance at Mother’s deportment. ‘A benefactor!’

  Mrs Ferguson said the colonies were exciting but surely ungodly places for a susceptible girl. It was as well that Gerald had respectable family abroad to protect her from temptation.

  While I packed up my paints and pencils, Mother threw herself into preparations for my modest wardrobe: light dresses plus a wrap to protect me from the sea breezes; two hats of varying brim size to be worn in response to the ferocity of the elements; two pairs of silk stockings to be reserved for dinner at the captain’s table – should I be so fortunate as to be chosen – or for the horse races in Cape Town, should I be invited. Father bought an outbound second-class ticket, a brass-cornered trunk, and, pressed by Mother, found a Scottish missionary and his wife to be chaperones.

  ‘But I might find a millionaire, Mother, returning to his gold mines!’

  ‘Don’t be flippant, Frances. Reverend Campbell will take his responsibilities seriously.’

  The attitude of my friends began to change. I was now the object of casual curiosity and even a measure of grudging envy, though Phyllis made sure to mention how savage I would find my destination. ‘Those Boer farmers,’ she observed, ‘are hardly civilised.’

  ‘But how do you know? You’ve never been there!’

  She added that Africa would ruin my complexion and dry out my hair if I forgot to wear a hat and veil.

  ‘Africa!’ Sue whispered. ‘When will I see you again?’

  Mr Cadwaller viewed my emigration as a career move.

  ‘Frances,’ he leant towards me, ‘I insist you send me new work! I have connections at Kew, as you know.’

  ‘I will. And thank you, sir. This is for you.’

  I laid in front of him a watercolour painting.

  An oak. Dark-boughed, green-leaved, reaching into a pale sky. And clinging to the trunk – if you looked closely – a woodpecker.

  ‘Thirteen thousand tons!’ shouted Father at the Union-Castle Royal Mail Steamer, Edinburgh Castle.

  Mother clung to my arm. My leaving has unleashed the fugitive warmth she’s kept in check all my life.

  ‘You’ll be able to draw, Frances,’ she murmured, ‘wherever you go—’

  ‘All aboard! All aboard, I say!’ Smartly dressed officers chivvied the crowds.

  I embraced my parents, kept a firm grip on my case – the brass-cornered trunk was already on board – and stepped onto the gangplank.

  ‘Wave your scarf!’ Father called. ‘We’ll see you!’

  I found my small cabin – to be shared, it turned out, with a quiet nun who prayed nightly for us both – deposite
d my case, hurried on deck and elbowed my way to a space at the rail. A tapestry of coloured streamers drifted down to the quayside. Hands reached up and grabbed for them. I flung mine over the side and watched it unfurl. Somewhere, a band was playing and snatches of a march, eddied through the shouts of fellow passengers. The ship’s horn sounded, long and deep. Smoke curled from the funnel and the deck thrummed beneath my feet as the ship began to ease away from the quay. The streamers stretched, went taut, then snapped, their ends fluttering into the sea, the link between ship and shore severed. Another boom from the horn. I waved again, for the joy of it.

  ‘Frances!’ Reverend Campbell fought his way to my side, excusing himself to left and right. ‘Do not be sad, my dear. A great adventure is in store.’

  ‘I’m not sad, Reverend! I can’t wait!’

  He lifted a conservative Scottish eyebrow. ‘We are always available for spiritual guidance.’

  It seemed a young woman going abroad was forever deemed to be at risk of falling into sinful ways. Our vicar had been of a similar mind. ‘Let Jesus,’ he pointed to the Cross, ‘be your compass, Frances, in an alien land. Do not be tempted by false prophets. Or unseemly materialism.’

  The rhythm of the ship changed.

  I craned over the side to see a wave curving against the graceful hull. The reverend lifted his hat and went to find his wife. The crowd drifted away. I leant on the rail and laughed out loud at the expanse of sky and wheeling seagulls, the qualms of the clergy … and the irony of a young woman setting out on a journey she would never have undertaken if her father had retained his fortune.

  Southampton faded to a smudge.

  A coal barge chugged past in the opposite direction under a balloon of smoke.

  A crewman waved.

  I waved back.

  The air blew cool against my cheek, and I fancied I smelt the first heady scent of freedom.