Howard Carter’s funeral was held in Putney in south London, four days after his death. Until the last moment, I still could not decide whether to attend: one of the numerous side-effects of my marriage and its dissolution was the indecision it induced. I was unravelling, I felt; my stitches had dropped off the needles, I couldn’t find a way to cast them on again, I must learn to reknit myself. In a weak moment, I’d telephoned Rose and asked her if she’d accompany me, but she refused. Rose had neither liked nor admired Carter very much, and I was not in her good books either: she disapproved of the planned divorce; she said marriage was for keeps, and I should go back to Eddie . . . No, she couldn’t come to the funeral with me, she said sniffily; she and her fiancé had another engagement.
‘Eve will be there, of course,’ she went on, thawing a little. ‘She’s terribly cut up. It was Hodgkin’s disease, you know – Carter’s last years weren’t easy. Eve wants him to have a good send-off, but the numbers are looking thin, so she’s ringing around, trying to drum up attendance. She’s not getting much luck. Too many people opting to send wreaths – the coward’s way out. They think that gets them off the hook. You should go. You owe it to him.’
The coward’s route tempted me at once: perhaps a wreath would suffice? Knowing it would not, feeling shabby in mind and body, I set off for the smartest florist’s I knew, the one Eddie always used when trying to propitiate the many hostesses he offended – the hostesses who always forgave him and asked him back. In heavy rain, I walked the length of the King’s Road, from World’s End to the smart Cadogan Estate area of Chelsea. I avoided the marital nest down a side-street. I examined the designs on offer – and miserable ugly things they were, those crosses and weighty circlets of laurel. I told the young woman serving me that I didn’t want anything like that. I knew papyrus was out of the question – I had some residue of sense – but might olive leaves be feasible? Interwoven with berries, with something fresh, like cornflowers.
‘Olive leaves, Mrs Vyne-Chance?’ said the assistant, who was pert. She raised her plucked brows and pursed her painted lips. ‘Cornflowers? It’s March. Regardless of season, we find we have no call for things like that.’
She looked me up and down: I was not looking my best. I was looking – well, let’s just say, bedraggled and a trifle unhinged. She registered that fact with a small tight smile. Wasn’t much to write home about in the first place. Now she’s let herself go and no wonder, said her expression. Could she have heard the gossip about my marriage and its unravellings? Almost certainly. Eddie came here at least once a week, and anyway he was famous in Chelsea. Everyone took a keen interest in his exploits, even the shopkeepers – especially the shopkeepers, since he owed money to most of them.
I lost it a bit then, then – looking back, I can see that. I asked the girl what, in that case, she did have a call for. I said the wreaths on offer were ugly, unimaginative, and hopelessly vieux jeu; this last was Eddie’s favourite term for anything he wished to disparage, whether it was another poet’s work, or the style of someone’s drawing room. In extremis.
‘Via what, madam?’
‘Vieux jeu. Old-fashioned. Out of date. Old hat. Unoriginal. Bloody frightful. Wouldn’t put it on a cat’s grave. Or a dog’s. An insult to the dead. Is that clearer?’
That kind of reaction, that kind of talk, was another symptom of my unravelling, my malaise: I’m turning into Madame Maladie, I thought. I was saved by the owner of the shop who, hearing this altercation, which continued some while, emerged from a rear room, sent the assistant packing, and listened gravely while I explained what I needed and why. He was gay, as we’d say now, queer as we said then; he was camp and astute. He certainly knew about Eddie’s exploits, I thought, as I apologised.
‘Too marvellously exciting, Mrs Vyne-Chance,’ he said, throwing up his hands. ‘Something different at long last. Egyptian . . . they used beads, you say? Madly original – we shall start a new fashion. How if we were to use this – if I interwove it with that? I have a book on Tut somewhere, I shall consult it for inspiration. Leave it entirely in my safe little hands, my dear Mrs VC . . . Oh, and when you next see that naughty husband of yours, remind him he owes me five quid for the last lot of lilies. Penitence comes so expensive.’ He winked.
He was as good as his word, and creative too; the circlet he made was not authentic, how could it be? But it was close in spirit.
My offering looked strange next to the other conventional funeral flowers, I felt, when I finally reached the chapel at Putney Vale Cemetery where Carter’s funeral was to be held. I had steeled myself to go – as I knew I should, as I knew Frances would have wished. I am here for me and Frances, I told myself.
It was a cold, grey day, threatening rain. The cemetery, faintly municipal, lines of graves punctuated by yews, was enormous. As I arrived – late; lost in Putney – the other mourners were just filing in. I joined the huddle of latecomers bringing up the rear, crept in behind them and sat down alone behind a pillar in a pew at the back. When the coffin processed in, it was a bright shiny mahogany, with ornate silvery handles. Once the mutes had put down their burden and withdrawn, I counted the meagre congregation, but the huddled figures and the women’s hats confused me – nineteen, fewer? There were two hymns, which I mouthed. The first was ‘Fight the Good Fight’, which Carter would surely have appreciated.
The address was awkward and ineloquent; I think the priest officiating had never met Carter, but someone must have primed him, and he did his best. He spoke of Carter’s work at length, consulting copious notes. I heard ‘great Egyptologist’ and ‘one of the most exciting episodes in the annals of archaeology’ and ‘find of the century’. After that, I gazed at the stained-glass windows, trying to conjure the Valley as I’d known it in childhood, and Howard Carter, the unreadable man, as I remembered him.
The memories flickered, came close, but eluded my grasp; they disappeared into the billowing white dust of Carter’s excavations. I came to only when I realised that the coffin was being carried out – and that many of the congregation were looking at their watches and murmuring. We filed out behind it, heads bent. Once outside, several of the mourners left, making for their cars in the way people do when they wish to disguise unseemly haste. I joined the black straggle of those who’d remained loyal and were escorting the coffin to the graveside for burial. I attached myself to the tail of this procession, and then hung back. I edged behind a yew; that gave some shelter. It had begun to rain and umbrellas were being raised. I had no umbrella.
Why Putney? Why here? I’d heard via Rose, who had it from Eve, that in later years Carter had owned a series of flats in central London; the last had been in Kensington, near the Albert Hall. Putney was a long way from there, the other side of the Thames. This cemetery felt wrong – but then where in England would feel right for such a man’s final resting place?
Perhaps Carter’s family had made the choice: some of the mourners were family, I thought. There was an elderly man, stooped and obviously unwell, who bore a passing resemblance to him and might perhaps be one of his brothers; there was a young woman, who also seemed to be related; she was neatly dressed, wearing what looked like a new hat, and was crying quietly into a handkerchief. As was Eve, I saw, recognising her after all these years as she stood, head bowed, by the graveside.
I stayed listening to the quiet and beautiful words of the Committal. I stayed until the end. It began to rain more heavily. Dust and ashes, sure and certain hope. Scatterings of earth on the coffin lid. People were turning to leave. I hesitated, then approached and spoke briefly to Eve, who clasped my hands and said: ‘Gracious, Lucy, is it you? But of course I remember you. Howard would be so glad you came . . . Isn’t this terrible? He was such a great man – you remember that. He had the world at his feet once, and now . . . Oh my dear, don’t – we mustn’t cry. Doesn’t this bring back memories of the Valley? Do you remember the time when you and Frances—’ She broke off, gave me a sad ghost of her former dimpling smile, turned up the collar of her fur and sighed. ‘Certain people conspicuous by their absence, Lucy. Isn’t it hateful?’
Someone claimed her attention and with a Bless you, dear, and a kiss to my cheek, a press of her black kid-gloved hand, a brush of her fur coat, she turned away. A queue had formed by the young woman who had wept and, as I waited to shake hands with her, I heard her speaking, with simple dignity, to a small bent old woman. ‘Poor Uncle Howard. He was so brave. Yes, Hodgkin’s – and he was in dreadful pain for years. He never spoke of it. None of the treatments really worked. But he soldiered on, and it was only in the last year that he became . . . Well, no. It wasn’t swift. I wouldn’t say swift. But a quiet end. Mercifully quiet. The nurse and I were with him. He just slipped away from us, between one breath and the next . . . Thank you. That’s very kind. Yes, we had hoped for a few more people, but his friends – many of them don’t live in London, you see, and I think the journey was . . . Yes, aren’t the flowers lovely?’
I waited my turn, shook the young woman’s hand and said the usual formal things. I was agitated, and I could tell that the words were not coming out as they should. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of you to say that.’ I turned away and began to thread my way between the gravestones. The grass was wet and it was beginning to rain very heavily. Reaching the main path, I faced the cemetery gates and began to trudge towards them. I’d walk back to World’s End, I decided. I missed the kind of walking I was accustomed to when working on books, but any walk, even through busy streets, cleared the mind and led to places that were often unexpected – led to calm, for instance, a calm that was not always a mirage.
I was perhaps halfway down that drive, yes, I think halfway down it, when I realised someone was behind me, hastening to catch up. I could hear a man’s footsteps on the gravel. I increased my pace. I did not look round. I wanted to speak to no one – and, apart from Eve, surely no one here knew me? The man behind me also increased his pace. He caught up with me in three strides. He put a restraining hand on my wet coat sleeve and said, ‘Lulu?’
I swung around: a tall man, wearing a dark overcoat with the collar turned up against the rain; broad shoulders, his hair wet from the rain, and darker than it had been in his childhood. No trace now of the injury he’d sustained in the civil war in Spain. When I’d last seen him, his arm, fractured by a bullet, had been in a sling. I wasn’t sure when that brief encounter had taken place: a year ago? Now he was in the RAF and had been posted somewhere for training; I found I couldn’t remember where. I had to tilt my hat back and look up to meet his eyes – his eyes I’d have recognised anywhere: inky blue, like those of the mother from whom he’d inherited them, but their expression very different. We stared at one another in silence. I saw him take in the details of my appearance. Perhaps they shocked him.
He said, ‘Lucy? Are you ill? What’s happened to you?’
And at the same moment I said, ‘Peter? Where did you spring from? Why on earth are you here?’
‘To see you. Rose said you’d be here. I was looking for you in the chapel, but you must have been hiding somewhere. I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind, that you hadn’t come after all. I did glimpse you talking to Eve, but I thought – no, that can’t be her.’ He paused in a grave, considering way. ‘I didn’t recognise you, Lucy . . . I expect your hat confused me.’
‘All right, it’s a hideous hat. I do know that.’
‘It is pretty bad. And the rain hasn’t improved it.’
‘I know it’s not just the hat. I know how I look. Did Rose send you?’
‘No. Rose did not send me. I came of my own accord. At the first opportunity.’
‘I don’t believe you. Rose arranged this. Well, you can tell her from me, I don’t need her assistance or yours. I’m perfectly fine. Fit as a fiddle, never felt better, pick your superlative. I’ve been to the funeral, I’ve done my duty, I’ve paid my final respects and now I’m walking home—’
‘The perfect day for a stroll. In that case, I’ll walk with you.’
He glanced up at the sky; the rain was now torrential. Taking my arm, he tucked it inside his own. I resisted and then stopped resisting. Looking down, he examined my hand – my bare and very cold hand. Madame Maladie had forgotten to bring her gloves as well as her umbrella.
‘You’ve removed your wedding ring, I see.’ He drew me along beside him at a fast pace, pausing only when we reached the cemetery gates. Leading me into the street, into the noise, the sudden clamour beyond, he came to a halt.
‘So – which way? Where are we going, Lucy?’
I can’t remember what reply I gave . . . The other side of the river, World’s End? Whatever I said, it’s immaterial. We both knew exactly where we were going: that knowledge had flashed between us the second we turned to face one another. It is always swift. No point in pretending otherwise.
We began walking northwards and, after various detours and on reaching a bridge, paused to look down at the Thames, sullen, dark, an incoming tide coursing through a transformed city. Peter leaned over the parapet to examine the water, and I did too. The rain was beginning to abate, but we were both drenched by then. My mind felt marvellously clear, rinsed of all impediments.
‘I’m glad you’ve told me all that,’ he said, after an interval.
‘I haven’t said very much.’
‘Then your silences must speak, Lucy.’
That was that. He took my hand and we continued walking. The route we took that day was no doubt erratic; it was a long wind through the city, and afterwards neither of us could recall its details. ‘I think we walked along that street,’ he’d say, ‘but why were we there?’ I couldn’t remember either – I don’t think there was any reason behind our route beyond the surprise and joy of being on it.
‘When did you know?’ Peter asked me, as we walked.
‘At the cemetery gates,’ I replied. I don’t think he believed me.
‘I always knew,’ he said. ‘I finally decided to stop waiting.’
We walked on. I can remember certain places where we paused, where we lingered, and I know where we were when he took me in his arms for the first time. Outside a museum – one of the many in Kensington. Outside a bastion of learning – in a courtyard, soundless traffic, invisible passers-by, a spring day suddenly, and the clouds racing.
‘You’re not to tell Rose,’ I said. ‘I don’t want us to tell anyone.’
Peter agreed: neither of us wanted this discussed, gossiped over, analysed, muddied.
‘I’m still not divorced.’
‘Unimportant.’
‘I’m older than you are.’
‘In certain respects. Not in others. You’re catching up fast. Come over here . . . You see? No age gap. No gaps of any kind between us. And never will be.’
We met in secret whenever Peter could get leave, sometimes in London and, when summer came, the last summer before the war, we’d go to Hampshire, to Nuthanger, which was empty of tenants and which Rose’s trustees were trying to sell: not many takers in 1939.
‘I expect they’ll requisition it when the war comes,’ Peter said. ‘Meanwhile, we will.’
We were careful to leave no traces of these visits. I never spoke of them to anyone and I will not write of them now. But I knew they could not continue for long, that even our meetings in London might cease, certainly become briefer and more snatched, once the war came. So it proved: Peter was posted to Yorkshire for further training that November. His squadron moved and was briefly based in East Anglia, then it regrouped and was posted to Sussex in the spring of 1940. We went to Nuthanger for the last time that May, just a month or so before the Battle of Britain began. Two days’ leave, the poignancy of stolen time, owls calling from the beech hangers, larks singing above the hayfields, the drone of planes at night. Our valley – and our house, which I always thought of as Peter had drawn it in childhood, protected eternally by a scribbled rainbow, by a red sun, a blue moon, two gold-foil stars: weLcOm lUcY.
Bare feet on old elm floorboards; a room striped with moonlight. I knew what would happen, and it did; how inward that experience makes you, how unstable and yet serene – I waited until I was sure. I told him, but apart from that, old habits die hard, I told no one.
I hugged the knowledge to me and took it back to London. I’d left the room in World’s End by then, and we’d taken the cheap tail-end of a lease on a small flat in Marylebone – fifth floor, a view over the doctor-land of Harley Street and its environs, roofs, chimneys, church steeples – and from late August, when the nightly German bombing raids began, a view of the fires at the docks and in the East End; fires they said you could see from ten miles away, the whole skyline red, London burning. When he had leave, Peter would join me there. When he did not have leave, we wrote letters. His commanding officer had my telephone number, in case of – emergencies.
It was a short walk from Marylebone to Nicola and Clair’s flat. I visited them often, hiding my fears, which were acute, and concealing the joy that possessed me. I’d walk to their apartment and try to get back before blackout. I’d look up at the silver barrage balloons, flying high over Regent’s Park. I’d walk past Warren Street tube, where mothers and children carrying cardboard suitcases and gas masks would emerge in the mornings, pale from sleepless nights underground. I’d pass them in the afternoons, as they began to queue again for another night’s shelter. I was superstitious – well, everyone was. I’d avoid cracks on the pavement, touch my shabti figure before I left the flat and on my return. I counted the barrage balloons and if their number altered, it was a bad omen; if it remained the same, a good one.
The timing of my visits to Bloomsbury was difficult: sometimes I’d be at Nicola’s flat, and the first wave of Luftwaffe bombers would come in earlier than expected. The sirens would begin wailing, and I’d be forced to remain there. Sometimes Clair would succeed in persuading Nicola to take refuge in the house cellars; sometimes Nicola – who hated being underground – would refuse and would pace her drawing room, listening to the crunch of bombs in the distance. As the days passed and the Blitz intensified, the crunch of bombs came closer, then closer still: proximity to railway stations, to King’s Cross, to Euston, to St Pancras was no advantage now; mainline stations were targets.
Once the ‘All Clear’ sounded, Nicola would cease her restless pacing and sink down in a chair, and sooner or later she and Clair would resume the bickering of the pre-war period. That was their routine, their preferred habit. Once the iniquities of war and food rationing had been exhausted as subjects, they’d return to the ever-dependable topic, the one that never failed them: my divorce – and my lamentable failure to secure it. I took no part in those conversations; Eddie had sailed for America the week before war was declared. He was not answering any letters, especially those from solicitors – and I no longer cared. In my mind and heart, I was not married to him, never had been; the formalities could wait. I had other, more pressing priorities.
I made what would be my last visit to Nicola’s flat that October. I know that the Blitz lasted from August 1940 to the following May, with fifty-seven consecutive nights of heavy bombing, but at the time it seemed much longer than that, a nightly bombardment that left me dazed and deafened in daylight, lost in areas once known well that had become, overnight, an unrecognisable wasteland. Where were the landmarks? I calculate that it must have been day forty-five of the Blitz when I made that visit to Nicola’s flat. I sat there hugging my secrets to me, shivering by a miserable fire – their coal supply was running out. It was still only four o’clock when I arrived, but the blackout blinds were already drawn. Only one table lamp had been switched on: money was tight, Clair and Nicola were economising.
I was sitting next to a table piled with Nicola’s current reading – light novels, borrowed from a lending library. The flat was looking neglected. Behind the books, relegated to a dusty corner, scarcely given space, was the blue shabti figure I’d given Nicola in Paris, all those years before. For Nicola, with love, the real thing! I wondered when she had last held the little figure, or looked at him.
I was hoping for tea, but as usual Clair produced some foul vinegary red wine – it was all they could get their hands on, she said. Nicola fretted; there had been bomb damage to Mecklenburgh Square the other night, and that, she said, was too close for comfort. Clair dismissed this; the damage there was not that extensive, Mecklenburgh was much closer to main-line stations than their square was and therefore more vulnerable. Their part of London was still safe, and if it wasn’t, too bad . . . Nicola said the bombing frightened her: they should move out to the country.
‘We can’t. Do shut up about that, Nicola,’ Clair said. ‘We can’t afford it. You’ve burned your boats. We’re stuck in this mausoleum you insisted on buying. Who’s going to take on the lease now? Who’d even rent it?’
They continued this bickering as if I were not there, as they usually did. I was five months’ pregnant by then. My baby had begun to move in the fourth month, punctually, on schedule, as the books I’d anxiously consulted had assured me would happen. I’d felt stirrings, shiftings, a surreptitious assertion – new life, within me. Now, my baby, my he-or-she would often give me a fierce little kick, or perform some gymnastic manoeuvre in the womb, a gentle roll, a flexing, a somersault.
The alteration in my figure, not that evident anyway, had gone unremarked. Neither Nicola nor Clair noticed my hands laced across my stomach; no one noticed my dreaminess or abstraction, though I think they must have been very evident. The wine, which I shouldn’t have touched, was making me feel sick. I pushed the glass aside. I was nauseous much of the time, and it was worst in the afternoons and evenings. I had cravings too, which would come upon me without warning – at that moment, sitting there by the reluctant fire, I had a fierce desire for salt and sweetness. Sardines. Peaches.
I had been given a new ration book now, the special blue one that all pregnant women received. It entitled me to one pint of milk a day and first choice of the fruit at the greengrocer’s. I dreamed of peaches, the unobtainable tang of oranges, lemons, pineapples: first choice made little difference, since all they had on offer was apples . . . I closed my eyes. As my baby turned in the womb, lazily stretched, gave me a small punch, I slipped into a greedy reverie of salted almonds, of maple syrup and bacon, Egyptian honey cakes and the salted popcorn Frances and I had once shared in some movie- theatre long ago. Sardines. Peaches. No, sardines and peaches. Together.
Clair rose to put a record on the gramophone: Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro – and the last act of that opera. She had the volume turned down low, and as the sequence of intrigues and hidden identities of the opera’s final scenes began to play themselves out with sweet, sharp melancholy, I gazed dreamily around the room. I saw it had grown shabby, its fine cornice yellowed: the abode of two women who spent much of their life indoors, one of whom smoked heavily. The walls were stained with pale rectangles where Clair’s paintings had formerly hung; they’d been removed to her studio, where she was preparing them for a new exhibition at a small gallery. It was owned by a friend, who was giving her this show as a favour.
‘A complete waste of time,’ Nicola had said snappishly. ‘Who’s going to buy paintings in wartime? No one understands Clair’s work anyway.’
‘Give it a rest,’ Clair had replied. ‘One painting will buy two cases of this foul wine we’re drinking. That’s better than nothing. I’m giving them away. It breaks my bloody heart. Five guineas a canvas. A steal.’
Reaching across Nicola’s library books, as they talked on and the music wound its delicate phrases, I picked up the little shabti figure and brushed the dust from his head. I replaced him where he was visible, where the lamp shone its light on him.
‘Ah, how beautiful he is, such an enigmatic smile,’ Nicola had cried, when I’d given him to her on my arrival in Paris from Egypt. When I’d confessed his dubious history, she’d laughed in delight. ‘So he’s stolen goods? Who cares – who will know? He can be our secret,’ she’d said – and then, catching me by the hand, she’d rushed me outside: the moment had come to show me, for the first time, the beauty of Paris.
One fine day a million years ago. Weeks of fine, fine days: the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Right Bank, the Left Bank, the Seine sparkling; the Comédie Française, where I heard the true power of Racine’s alexandrines, understood for the first time how cold and remorseless was the advance of Corneille’s tragedies. Nicola took me to the Tuileries, out to Versailles, out to the wooded walks of the Bois de Vincennes and then back to the Jardin du Luxembourg – we’d stopped for a café noir here, a vin rouge there; shopped for a length of silk in the Rue Saint-Honoré one morning when she felt extravagant, and for little rustic cooking dishes in the Rue Mouffetard one morning when she felt poor. To that day, I could not revisit those places without remembering them as Nicola Dunsire showed them to me.
Afterwards, I had wondered if these explorations were an attempt to rid me of Egypt and replace my fascination for that country with a new one. Were they a deliberate assault on those old loyalties? It was possible. Nicola could be jealous of interests she did not share; she could regard them as a challenge to her hegemony. So perhaps that stay in Paris was a campaign of attack, a series of persuasions. Perhaps it was designed to cement our confederacy. French was her mother tongue, she’d remind me, laughing, as she introduced me to further proofs of French civilisation, to the refinements of French hedonism.
‘Now do you understand?’ she’d said once – when, after a day of such dazzlements, we’d returned to the apartment by the Seine that she’d persuaded my father to rent. He was elsewhere. ‘Now do you see, Lucy?’ she said, her eyes meeting mine across the glimmering river reflections of its salon, as the room’s many looking glasses reflected us back upon ourselves, as the traffic outside fell suddenly silent. A long, level, appraising look. She waited for my answer before she moved towards me . . . And I did see, could Nicola not understand that? I could speak this silver tongue of hers. I’d abandoned resistance our first day here; the windings of the Seine had seduced me.
My baby stirred. I opened my eyes and found myself back in a room in Bloomsbury, a room that felt suddenly unsteady, freighted with the weight of the past, as unreliable as the deck of a ship in a storm. The Mozart had ceased and the gramophone needle was scratching back and forth, stuck in the black grooves at the end of the record. ‘What’s the matter with you, Lucy?’ Clair was saying. ‘You haven’t touched your wine. You’re white as a ghost.’
‘Is she going to faint? What’s wrong? Clair, quickly – fetch her some water.’
‘No, no. I’m fine.’ I stood up. ‘But I think I should go now.’
‘Oh, don’t go yet.’ Nicola rose and crossed to my side. ‘Sit down again – you don’t look well, truly. You’re safe for another half-hour at least. Stay a little, dear. Are you hungry? Let me find something for you to eat – eggs – Clair, do we have any eggs left? It’s only five o’clock, Lucy. Please don’t go. The planes never come over before six . . . ’
‘Even so.’
I managed to extricate myself. At the door to the flat, Nicola gently embraced me. Clair escorted me downstairs. I ducked out into the square’s gathering dark and walked home past blacked-out buildings. As I reached my own street, the wails of the sirens started up; shortly after, the planes began to come over. Wave after wave of them: one of the worst of the raids of the war, eight unbroken hours of bombs falling. I never saw Nicola or Clair again. Their Bloomsbury house received its direct hit during that raid, at around three that morning.
I went there as soon as I heard the news on the wireless. I found the remainder of their Bloomsbury terrace almost unscathed, but the house in which Nicola and Clair had lived had gone. I stood behind the barriers the wardens had erected, and there was nothing: no trace of lives lived, only singed air, lingering smoke, dying fires, smouldering rubble. The building had become vacancy. At attic height, a fireplace was still attached to a party wall; on the floor that had been hers, shreds of wallpaper remained, clinging obstinately; where the basement and cellars had been, there was a black hole, already filled with water from a burst main. I was standing in a litter of sharp glass, in pools of water from the firemen’s hoses.
Clair Lennox’s studio, in that mews building at the far end of the house’s long rear garden, escaped the blast. I was allowed to inspect it eventually; after prolonged frantic argument, the ARP warden in charge agreed to escort me there. I think I had some unreasonable hope that, after I’d left them, Clair and Nicola might have gone to the studio, and that I would find them there.
That was not so. The studio was unlocked and empty – or so I thought at first. Its windows had been taped, but had shattered. There were two shiny, well-oiled bolts on the inside of its door. I inspected a sink, a gas-ring, a wind-up gramophone, orderly brushes and stacked tubes of oil paint. The air smelled of turpentine and smoke. Broken glass was scattered everywhere, but the small building was otherwise undamaged. So too were Clair Lennox’s paintings. There they were, some packed, some unpacked, awaiting her new exhibition. I stared at one of them: Nicola Dunsire, in a white dress, standing next to a rose arch in a Newnham garden. Across the space between us her painted stare met mine and held it.
‘No, wait – one more minute,’ I said, when the warden tried to persuade me to leave. I went on staring at the past, at Nicola as seen by Clair Lennox, she whose vision differed from mine, whose artist’s vision was no doubt more acute than mine. I could not read that painted stare of Nicola’s, couldn’t decide whether Clair had made it searching or lost, challenging or defeated.
The warden finally took my arm and led me outside. ‘You’re in shock, miss,’ he said, closing the studio door firmly behind us. ‘I see it every day.’ He sighed in resignation. He was not young, and I could see how exhausted he was. Hanging on by a thread.
‘Far to go, love?’ he said. ‘Forgive me asking, but – are you expecting? I’m a family man myself. Three nippers, and one more on the way. You don’t want to be taking any risks – not in your condition. Nothing you can do here. On your way now.’
Some months later, in December, Clair’s gallery friend invited me to the exhibition planned before her death. Her paintings had been left to Nicola, with this gallery as backstop. It was a small place, behind the British Museum, and the show of Lennox’s work had been on view for several weeks before I went there. None of the paintings had sold; not one had a welcome red sticker.
‘Hopeless,’ said her friend. She lit a cigarette. ‘Look at them – marvels. No one’s interested. It’s this bloody war, of course, but it’s not just that. People can’t see it. Poor Clair. I’m glad she’s not around to witness it – knew her well, did you?’
‘No, not well,’ I replied – and that was true: inspecting her grouped paintings had made me understand that. I bought that portrait of Nicola, and in my will I’ve left it to the Tate Modern. The curators are delighted; they will hang it next to the three other Lennoxes now in their possession, they tell me, and they plan a major Lennox retrospective. Times change, of course, and what we value – the way we value, alters. How do we decide this is worthless, and that is a treasure? Unless the object concerned is of gold, of course, whose value never declines, whose glitter can never be resisted.
Clair’s painting has travelled with me down the years, down the decades, from house to house, from youth to age, until it finally came to rest here on the north wall of my sitting room in Highgate. I look at it often, must have looked at it a million times. I’ve been looking at it every day this winter, and still I can’t decide – is that painted stare resigned or rebellious? What are you thinking? I ask it sometimes, in those moments when I permit or cannot evade such weaknesses. What are you saying, Nicola?
And then I turn away from it. I examine Sargent’s version of my mother Marianne, or turn to the Degas ballet dancer who, fleetingly, from certain angles and depending on the light, resembles Frances. And I think of those who were never portrayed: I think of Peter, whose plane was shot down over the Channel that winter, and whose body was never recovered. I think of our daughter, born a month afterwards. The delivery went well, and the two midwives assisting me marvelled at the lucky speed with which I, a first-time mother, gave birth. But I knew there was something wrong almost immediately: I heard my daughter’s first cry – but from the midwives, silence.
A problem with the valves to her heart, they said. They operated. And I did hold her; I nursed her, for a week or so. I named her. Then, one evening, my child gave a small sigh, and her tiny face puckered in brief distress. Her eyes opened with that wide unfocused gaze of babies; she made a snuffling sound and waved her tiny starfish hand. The next second, between one breath and the next, she slipped away from me. I still think of her. I still think of her father – though many years lost, their sharp presence, and their terrible absence, remain with me.
For some reason – and I think I know exactly what that reason is – this concatenation of absence and presence has been particularly testing this past winter in Highgate. There have been days and nights when it came close to breaking me. I hadn’t expected or foreseen that. I’d believed that passing years, age and resignation had put a barrier between me and grieving. How wrong. Grief’s talons are never sheathed, and its patient capacity to wound is unremitting – but then, it has been a long harsh winter and so, by extension, solitary.