half remembered from the brilliance and unbearable energies of her childhood in America. And when her mind dipped, deep, backwards, she would think, England is not like that, England is like this, making an implicit comparison; it was as if the scene she was painting held down some other scene and covered it.
On the pair of canvases by the back window, Gwen was doing something else, equally temperate, more mysterious: a pond in the woods, cloaked in mist, at dawn. And beside it, the same pond later in the day as the mist burned off so that the pond shone among the close-growing trees like phosphorescence. She liked to work on the first of these canvases very early in the morning, when the light from the window still reached long and low into its dank grey-green washes.
She would fetch the big wooden palette which she left tilted against the wall overnight to keep dust from clinging to the wet paint, and she would prod the little turds of colour with a small brush, with a knife, and with another, bigger, once white-haired brush, feeling how the colours had ever so slightly begun to seal themselves over in their sleep, like chrysalises around caterpillars. They would spread their wings, flatten out on to the palette as she waked them. She would snatch a brush into her mouth, clamp it there with wiry lips, tasting the white spirits she had cleaned it with, select another brush and another, until several bristled from her left fist as she narrowed her eyes again at where she had left off. She had hundreds of brushes in the studio, almost as many knives, stuffed upright into jars, flowerpots, pitchers, tin cans, all sizes, all shapes, each brush looking bleached and waterlogged as if it had rolled around the bottom of the sea, been abraded by sand, by surf, drifted ashore in harsh sun.
The sable hairs of her smallest brush would nip and sway at the soft mounds of Davy’s grey, Payne’s grey, burnt umber, terre verte, cadmium green, indigo, yellow ochre, probing the caches of colour. She would poke at the palette as if at a baby’s meal, mix and blend the tiny portions in dabs, deliver them with the delicate fingertips and the anxious poise of a mother’s hand towards an upturned mouth, then wait to see the effect before she offered more. On a clear day, the shafts of light reached closer and closer to the canvas as the morning wore on, and until Gwen herself moved on to the second canvas, where the mist was rising to reveal glimpses of brown and even purple reflected in the surface of the pond and ballasting the trees, bright yellow at their tops where the mist thinned to mere wisps, lifted in threads. The pond itself looked eerily on the move, as if through time, as if emerging from the past.
While she worked on these bucolic scenes, Gwen was mesmerised by their completeness, and she would think only from time to time of Will or of Lawrence – an instantaneous drift of face before her mind’s eye, amounting to a serene recognition: They, too, exist, separately, safely. But lately, more and more continually, she thought of Hilary. Hilary didn’t seem to be a discrete, settled fact; she not only existed but also suffered. Hilary was in turmoil, in trajectory, in a state of need. She was not constant; she was changing. Gwen saw Hilary clearly – wrinkles of fretfulness striking harsh verticals through the thick, pale flesh at the top of Hilary’s long nose, between her forthright blue eyes.
One lunchtime not long after the dinner party, Gwen put down her brushes, flexed her shoulders, filled the kettle with water for coffee. The light was already hardening into the yellow-grey scowl of a smoggy London afternoon. She stared into the stained enamel sink, iridescent with wear like an old tooth, blue-black around the paint-clogged drain. She would fight it, she resolved, the premature onset of twilight. Will had piano after school and Hilary had offered to pick him up. Still time for the meadow. And what else?
She leaned back against the chipped edge of the Formica counter, the kettle roaring and spitting behind her. Around the sides of the room stood canvas upon canvas, a few with their pale wood stretchers and blank backs showing titles scrawled in black across them, others facing forward, one or two in trial frames, offering glimpses of a season, a time of day, a mood of nature. Her sketchbooks, warped and fattened with changes of atmosphere – raindrops, sun, the baking edge of the Aga at the cottage – lay here and there on the spattered workbench, the fridge, the disused cooker; one or two were propped open like tents so she could glance at them as they stood up with their wire bindings across the top. They served to remind her of what she had wanted to capture about a particular time in a particular place, like a diary of her intentions towards the paint.
A rickety panelled screen zigzagged halfway along the bed. On the floor one of Hilary’s big black suitcases lay open, her linen skirt limp over one edge, her Lycra running tights over another. Abandoned like that, the clothes seemed to Gwen poignant, vulnerable. They had pressed so near Hilary’s skin that they might have been part of Hilary herself, her chosen outline, not her assigned one. But she isn’t fully conscious of making an outline, Gwen thought. Not of how she looks or chooses to make herself look. And here they lay, her garments, with white flecks of Hilary’s sloughed-off skin invisibly clinging to them, her odour and her sweat swelling each thread of the fabric ever so slightly, making it more airy, lighter than if the clothes had been newly laundered, dried, pressed. From all the way across the room, Gwen could see how intimately the fabric portrayed Hilary’s person. Hilary who was always so unconcerned about such things. If her knickers, her bra, had lain on top of the pile of her clothes, even in a locker room, a public changing booth, she wouldn’t have noticed, wouldn’t have paused to fold them inside and conceal them, wouldn’t even have turned them right side out if they were wrong side out. Was this really a woman? How like a boy, thought Gwen, a young boy. She noticed that among the pungent smells of the studio – white spirits, oil paint, linseed, sawdust – she couldn’t, in fact, smell Hilary.
Next to the suitcase, Hilary’s black nylon briefcase leaned against the bed, the pockets all unzipped, a laptop half in, half out. Plastic sleeves holding typed sheets and photographs spilled from one side. Doro’s collection, Gwen thought, crossing the room, bending down to flip through the files, slithery in her hands.
Amphorae, kraters, statues, friezes, the likes of which she herself had once pored over with painful concentration. It gave her a start, their familiarity and their strangeness. How we both loved all this, she thought. Hilary still does; this is where she really lives, where she is at home. Is this something she should have to sacrifice? Slow-footed processionals and naked ceremonials, wars and games and crafts, kissing, killing, dancing, marrying, offering, giving thanks. There were human figures, animals, ritual fires, wreaths, gods, heroes, centaurs, satyrs, once known by name to Gwen, all poised in their long-ago occupations and obligations. Ideal bodies idealised – orderly, savage, in draperies, in helmets, in wings, in chariots, their white-ringed eyes sightless. The statues stood free and trance-like in their three dimensions, inky bronze, white marble, battered grey stone; the painted figures were silhouetted against red backgrounds, like the earth they came and went from, or, on the later vases, against black backgrounds, like the eternity of night into which, as they told, time carries everything.
Try something like this under electric light, thought Gwen. It can’t change, so the light won’t matter. It’s not as if I ever experienced any of it as a natural world to begin with.
She decided on a tall, slender, two-handled black vase with red-gold figures, and she laid the sleeve with its typed notes on the counter while she measured coffee grounds into her little cafetière, poured in the boiling water, stirred it. Then, leaving the coffee to draw on the ridged steel draining board next to the sink, she slipped the photograph from the sleeve to see the figures on the vase more closely: a wedding procession, mostly women, their hair bound with leaves, with linen, their golden earrings dangling, their gowns crisply pleated, their maidenly eyes downcast, their noses and their backs long and straight as they trod, following a man and leading a bullock, towards the longed-for state of marriage. How chaste a scene, Gwen thought, remote, inviolable.
One woman, the most maidenly, the most downcast, was carrying a vase exactly like this vase on which she was portrayed.
‘Loutrophoros,’ Gwen muttered to herself.
For there was the name of the vase
