Now that the Snapshot League had been dissolved, Christabel was wondering what to do with her time. As with her sisters, the years of strenuous activity during the war had given her a taste for doing something useful and creative, and she could not envisage herself sitting at home in the drawing room, embroidering and making conversation until the right man turned up. Accordingly she devoted much time to looking in the Situations Vacant pages of newspapers and magazines. It was in one of these magazines that she found that there was an exhibition of war paintings being put on at a small gallery in Dulwich, not far from the school. It was well reviewed, but, since she could not persuade anyone else to accompany her, she went to see it on her own.
There were ten paintings occupying the whole of one wall, and they were very striking indeed. One was of two soldiers, one German and the other British, each with a cigarette in his mouth and a bandage about his forehead, sitting side by side and arm in arm against a low wall at a casualty clearing station. They were grinning and waving as if it were a holiday snap. Another picture showed an expanse of glutinous mud with a few broken trees and a smashed limber. Christabel was convinced that the artist had pounded real mud into the oil paint. Another showed a French officer standing smartly to attention in his red-and-blue uniform. His head, however, was a skull, depicted in the most extraordinary detail. Christabel shuddered. There was another, very like the famous Singer Sargent painting, that showed soldiers with bandages about their eyes, temporarily blinded by gas, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front. These soldiers were of all nations, however. There was a very lovely painting of a rifle, propped casually in the corner of a room, and another of a nurse at a table improvised out of ammunition boxes, slumped in exhaustion over a half-drunk cup of tea.
Christabel became aware of someone standing next to her, looking at the same pictures. ‘What do you think?’ asked the stranger. Her voice was low and melodious, with a hint of an aristocratic drawl.
‘These are the best pictures in the whole exhibition,’ said Christabel. ‘They’ve got so much…’
‘Pathos?’
‘Well, I was thinking personality rather than pathos. Of course the pathos is very obvious. You’d have to be an idiot not to see that, but what I like is, well, they’re not at all conventional.’
‘The work of a truly individual artist?’
‘Absolutely. And technically they’re quite brilliant. Do you have any idea who it is?’ She leaned forward to read the signature. ‘Gaskell.’
‘I can introduce you if you like.’
‘Oh, would you? Is he here?’
The woman laughed, turned to face Christabel, and held out her hand. ‘Gaskell,’ she said.
Christabel looked at her in astonishment. She was extremely tall, with short black hair slicked back with pomade, and was dressed as a man in a tweed suit and brown brogues. In her left hand she carried a long holder with an unlit cigarette in it, and a monocle dangled on a cord from the buttonhole of her jacket.
‘Your eyes!’ exclaimed Christabel, and Gaskell laughed.
‘My best feature,’ she said, with an air of proud satisfaction. Her eyes were a rich and bright emerald green, and fixed on Christabel with a beautiful, sincere and humorous intensity. ‘Let’s go out and have a cup of tea and a piece of cake,’ she said.
They sat and chatted, and then went for a walk, getting on so well that they decided to go to the West End and see a play. In the interval Christabel found a telephone box and phoned home. It was answered by Rosie. ‘Where are you? We’ve been worried sick!’
‘Actually, I’m in the West End, and I’m going to stay in Kensington tonight.’
‘Kensington?’
‘I’ve made a new friend. She’s marvellous. You’ll really adore her. Anyway, I’m going to stay with her tonight. She says that her flat is frightfully bohemian, and –’ She was interrupted by the bleeping of expiring time, and the last Rosie heard was ‘Gaskell, have you got another penny?’ before the telephone was cut off.
Gaskell’s rooms were really a fully functioning studio, with canvases propped up against chairs and walls, pots of paint lined up, and brushes decongealing in jars of turpentine. The smell was intoxicating. Gaskell had been using the walls to try out colours, and you would have had to look up to see that they had once been white. There was a marvellously vigorous multicoloured patch where she had been cleaning the excess oil from her brushes, with strong diagonal strokes that had built up into thick contours. There was a large new canvas, still at the charcoal stage, which was going to be of a dead horse.
The two women drank sherry out of teacups, ate anchovy-paste sandwiches straight off the table, and talked about photography. ‘I always take lots of photographs before I do a painting,’ said Gaskell. ‘Otherwise it’s terribly difficult to sketch things quickly enough, or get anyone to pose for long enough.’
‘The dead horse would have been easy,’ pointed out Christabel.
‘Very true, but that particular one has been dead for two years, and by now it would be quite a different thing to paint. I took lots of pictures of it. Of course, I had to make notes about the colours.’
‘Will you teach me how to take photographs artistically?’ asked Christabel. ‘I think it might be my vocation, but I have such a long way to go technically.’
‘Why don’t we do joint exhibitions?’ suggested Gaskell. ‘Photographs and paintings together would double the potential, I would think.’
‘I think you’d better wait and see if I’m any good,’ said Christabel.
They killed the bottle of sherry between them, and Gaskell fetched Christabel a glass of water, saying, ‘Better drink this, or you’ll have a head in the morning.’
That night Christabel lay wide awake in Gaskell’s bed, her head swimming with alcohol, and Gaskell tried to accommodate her long frame on a sofa, covered only by a rug. It seemed that they could not stop talking, no matter how they tried to get to sleep. They had forgotten to stack up the grate, and it grew very cold. At two o’clock in the morning, Christabel said, ‘Aren’t you absolutely freezing?’
‘I wouldn’t say I’m toasting,’ replied Gaskell.
‘Come and get in with me and we’ll keep each other warm,’ said Christabel.
‘I’m not sure…well…I mean…’
‘Oh, come on, it’ll be like being at school again. And I often cuddle up to my sisters when it’s cold.
‘Isn’t this nice?’ said Christabel happily, as they matched contours, and began to warm up deliciously.
‘You smell just like a puppy,’ said Gaskell, putting her arm over Christabel, and tucking up.