“OH, SERENA,” THEY SAID. “Serena! Serena was quite mad, you know. She would have made the finest surrealist painter of the twentieth century, only she ended up in a dustbin.”
And the little circle of ex-art students filled up their glasses and rolled a smidgen more dope and stared exhausted and melancholy into their mutual past. They wore sandals although it was cold outside.
“You mean,” said Philly, “her paintings ended up in a dustbin?”
“Oh no,” they said, whichever one of them it was, Harold or Perse or Don or Steve—Philly found them hard to tell apart, so information about Basil’s past seemed to come from some communal centre—“Serena ended up in the dustbin. She left Basil when she found him upstairs in the studio in bed with Ruthy Franklyn, and shacked up with some frame-maker she met in a hostel, who then committed suicide. She must have gone completely bonkers after that because she broke into Basil’s studio upstairs: burned all her own paintings in the stove—five years’ work gone in five hours—and had begun on Basil’s when luckily Ruthy came by and stopped her.
“So poor Basil changed the locks and Serena went and lived in the alley at the back of the house for a week or so, shouting and screaming, selling herself to passers-by, and then OD’d on heroin. She fell headfirst into a dustbin from whence she was carted off to the booby hatch, where she died. That was four years ago.”
“Poor Basil,” they chorused.
Philly envisaged Serena’s thin, white legs waving out of a big, black, plastic bin: a rag doll thrown away. “He’d married her to calm her down and help her paint, but it didn’t work,” said Harold, Perse, Don or Steve. “Serena was always completely mad, perhaps even because she was so talented. More talented even than Basil.”
“Completely mad,” agreed the Jean, Holly, Ryan and Olive who went with the men. Way, way over the top. OTT. Poor Basil. Better luck next time!”
They were all thirtyish: Basil was fortyish: Philly was twenty-one. In her family people only got married once. What did she know?
They were in Basil’s house, which had been left him by his grandmother. It had been designed in the thirties, and was made of functional and brutalist concrete: a long, low, expensive building with portholes where other people would have had windows. Philly had moved in a week ago. She was pregnant with Basil’s baby. The house was cold because the gas bill had not been paid. No one seemed to mind. Philly could see she’d be the one who’d have to attend to such matters.
Basil came down from the studio to join his friends, to join Philly. He had worn out his talent for the day. Now they could all party.
He had a gentle manner, a sweet smile, and a reputation as a major painter. His father had been a Royal Academician; his grandmother had slept with Augustus John. Dark green foliage surged up against the portholes, as if the house was under water. A sudden wind must have got up outside. The place was crowded in by trees. Philly would have risen to turn on the lights, but there was no electricity. Those bills had not been paid either.
So many things about the house, Philly could see, glamorous though it was, more exciting than anything she had ever known, which needed seeing to, organising, fixing, changing, cheering up. Then it could be a home. But not yet, not yet: better to offer no judgements. Philly knew the friends accepted her, or why would they talk about Serena? But perhaps to Basil she was just another item of changing human scenery. Wait and see. She sat quiet in the half-dark.
“Let’s not talk about Serena,” Basil said, “ever again. This is Philly’s home now. A new life starts for her and me. Let’s forget Serena.”
So everyone forgot Serena, including Philly.
That was in September. Philly set about making the house her own.
The kitchen door was stuck. It had not been opened for years. But since the back garden had at some time been sold off to keep creditors at bay, and the door led almost directly into the loading bays and alleys which backed a shopping complex, who would want to open it anyway? Better, Basil said, to use the front door, walk up the garden path and go round to the shops. Philly did. How did you unstick a door, anyway? It seemed better closed. The back of the complex was sunless by day, poorly lit by night. It always seemed deserted, but if ever you opened the windows at the back you could smell stale urine and hear a scuttling sound—rats or cockroaches, no doubt startled by the noise. So Philly kept the back windows closed: she let fresh air blow in from the front. Hardly windows, anyway: hinged portholes. And you had to force foliage back in order to get them open.
By November the trees on windy days were bare and the portholes easier to open, although branches scratched up against the glass, and there was never silence. Philly’s father came to visit her. Philly’s mother had died that same month only a year ago, and left her daughter eleven thousand pounds. Perhaps Philly had got pregnant to forget the grief, sorrow and shock, to lose herself in a new life: the thought hung between father and daughter. “I’d have those trees cut down,” said Philly’s father. “They make the house dark and damp. Personally, I’d rather live in a bungalow. Shall I come over and get rid of a few branches for you?”
But Basil liked trees. The worst offender, when it came to opening the studio window, was an elm which had escaped Dutch elm disease, and was apparently as rare as it was beautiful. Basil was shocked at the notion that there could be a leaf, a twig less of the tree than nature suggested. But what did Philly know? To Philly, according to Basil, one leaf was much like another. She was a barbarian: but hadn’t they always known that: Harold, Perse, Don and Steve, Jean, Holly, Ryan and Olive, too? Philly was the new blank canvas on which Basil could imprint his taste, his knowledge, his guidance.
“But don’t you need as much light as possible to paint?” asked Philly.
“This house is perfectly light and cheerful,” Basil said, and discouraged her father from visiting thereafter, on the grounds that he made Philly gloomy.
Philly was six months pregnant and didn’t like to argue with Basil, since she only got upset and never won. The fact was that it was a dark, cold house, no matter how much was spent on gas and electricity, how much wine was drunk by the friends. Basil encouraged her to put in new radiators: she’d turn them up full but the concrete walls seemed to swallow warmth and give none back. She put in wall lights to supplement the stark central bulbs; she washed the concrete walls with white: she brought halogen uplighters, but even by night, light seemed not to be doing its proper job of banishing gloom. A stubborn month. Well, November is never the brightest of months: just grey, grey.
Basil didn’t like spending money on the house: she used her own, and was happy to. He was pleased with what she did.
“It’s your home,” he’d say. “Have it the way you want it.” That encouraged her. She did what she could. She called in a carpenter to plane down the back door, and he freed it, but damp must have swelled the wood again, because within a week it was stuck once more. She had an electrician in to fix the oven; which had always either burned or cut out at the worst possible time, but its thermostat stayed unreliable. It was only five years old. Basil balked at the cost of a new one. Philly couldn’t make the floors “come up,” to use her mother’s phrase. Over and over she’d washed wide stretches of dark green floor tiles, and polished them too, but some of the tiles must have been unusually porous: the result was always patchy. Unsightly lines of what seemed like white salt kept rising up to spoil the finish. The whole floor should by rights have gleamed and shone; perhaps it was something about the pattern of light from the porthole windows which managed to give it a ridged effect. Philly would scrub and polish on her hands and knees. It was comfortable so to do. When she was upright, pressure on her sciatic nerve gave her a continual pain. It was not an easy pregnancy.
When Philly was seven months pregnant, in December, Basil suggested they get married. Twelfth Night, he said, would be the right kind of day: a special day: one you wouldn’t forget when it came to anniversaries.
January, and Philly was Basil’s second wife. Harold and Perse, Don and Steve came to the party after the wedding, in the house, along with Jean, Holly, Ryan and Olive. One of them observed, “Serena’s birthday was Twelfth Night,” and Philly said, “Who’s Serena?” a moment before she remembered. A rather strange thing happened. A box of indoor fireworks somehow caught fire inside its wrapping: blackish ash erupted from the box, swelled and burst the plastic: a series of tiny explosions then sent the ash flying and whirling through the air, so all the surfaces in the room were soon covered with a soft film of grey. It was not unpretty; and the event had not even been dangerous, just extraordinary, watching the box jump up and down as if of its own volition, puffing out ash. But when someone else said, “Philly, you forgot to take down the Christmas decorations: that’s unlucky,” she worried at once. She feared for her baby. Dear God, let me be lucky, prayed Philly. Babies got born with all kinds of things wrong with them. She vacuumed carefully every day, into every corner, and felt better. Cleaning was a kind of talisman. Amazing how Christmas tree needles hung around and got everywhere, no matter how sure you were you’d finally got rid of the last of them. But you could clean and clean in this house and it just never looked as if you’d done a thing. She couldn’t understand it.
Basil laughed when she complained.
“It looks just fine to me,” he said. “But thank God you have proper domestic ambition. You are the right wife for me, Philly.”
Philly’s father hadn’t been invited to the wedding. He’d written to ask if Philly would hand back the eleven thousand pounds from her mother for his safekeeping. He’d invest it for her, to her advantage. Basil had understandably taken offence. Philly felt her loyalties were to her husband, not her father, and Harold, Perse, Don and Steve, Jean, Holly, Ryan and Mattie agreed. “The thing to do with Basil,” all agreed, “is not make waves. He can be ruthless if you do. Poor Olive!”
Olive had been taken on at the same gallery as Basil. She had had a one-person show and, instead of being a failure, was now a success. She was no longer in the group of friends. Steve had taken on Mattie instead: it was that, or be out of the circle too. Mattie was a pleasant, daft girl, good at the Benefit Game, and no one spoke much about Olive any more, and within weeks she, too, was forgotten.
February, and there were only four thousand pounds left of Philly’s legacy. Basil needed better frames for his paintings than his gallery was prepared to provide: anything looks better, sells better, if surrounded by real gold leaf: that had been Olive’s one trick, Basil had said, unfairly used. Nothing to do with talent. Then the roof had to be re-tiled. Rain had leaked down from the ceilings, corrugating the studio walls with lines of damp. The studio was where Basil and Philly slept, in the large brass bed which was there when Philly moved in. They slept surrounded by canvas, rags, easels, paints, brushes: his hand companionable on her thigh. The famous hand: how she loved it! Completed paintings were stacked against the walls. These days Basil painted, to the despair of his gallery, only swirls of grey and black: gold leaf helped, but not enough. Philly could get quite depressed, looking at the swirls. The smell of paint and turps lingered in the studio all night through, although tubes and jars were closed, sealed; she once tried wrapping them in plastic to stop the fumes, but it didn’t help. Sometimes they made her feel quite sick. It was as if morning sickness, which she had not suffered from in early pregnancy, had stored itself up till now, when she had just a few weeks to go.
Basil’s baby! Oh, she was lucky. So was he; he said so, lucky second time round. He’d always wanted a baby: someone to inherit the family’s genes. A pity he had to be away so often now, in Edinburgh, commissioned to paint a mural on a town hall wall. But times were hard: an artist did what he could. If he had to be a man of the people, so he would be. Philly would be okay, polishing and scouring away. When he called on the phone, its ring sounded oddly echoey: his voice would babble, as if he were under water.
Eight and a half months pregnant and who should turn up for tea one day, while Basil was away, but someone who announced herself as Ruthy Franklyn, an old friend of Basil’s. Ruthy just stood on the doorstep, a total stranger, and asked herself in for tea. She was fortyish, smart, small, thin and lively and made Philly feel bulky, stupid and slow. Ruthy wore a silk turban in green and had a yellowy chiffon scarf at her wiry neck. Ruthy owned a small gallery. She’d come to collect an early painting of Basil’s for a show she was mounting. She looked a little death’s headish to Philly, as if the Reaper had come calling. Ruthy drank Earl Grey and took lemon: always a problem to provide. You had to use a teapot, not teabags, and slice the lemon thinly, and serve the whole thing properly.
“Nice rock cakes,” said Ruthy, “if on the crispy side.”
“It’s one of those ovens,” said Philly, “you can never quite get to understand. Always leaping out of control.”
“Serena never had any trouble with it,” said Ruthy. Philly had not quite realised the oven had once been Serena’s. Presumably Serena had slept in the brass bed with Basil. Philly cooked in Serena’s kitchen: slept in Serena’s bed: Philly replaced Serena. Ruthy had slept in the brass bed with Basil too, by all accounts.
“Did you use Serena’s recipe?” asked Ruthy, yellowy teeth scraping away at the hard little cake, which seemed the best Philly could contrive. “She was hopeless at housework but always a wonderful cook. Just generally creative, I suppose.”
“I’m not a very creative person,” said Philly. “But I wish I could make the house look better.”
“It looks perfect to me,” said Ruthy Franklyn, surprised. “You must make Basil very happy. All this and pregnant too! The famous genes will survive. Serena only ever miscarried. Four times in five years. Basil thought she somehow did it on purpose to annoy, but he would, wouldn’t he? Basil likes a woman to be a woman: simple and sweet and fertile; up to her elbows in soap suds. That’s why he likes you so much, no doubt.” And Ruthy laughed. Why does she dislike me so much? wondered Philly. What went on? Ruthy in Basil’s bed while Serena, out in the rain, banged and pummelled at the back door, stuck forever, swelled in the damp.
White snow hit against the portholes and turned bitter black. It was a storm at sea: foam and black water. How could you tell earth from sea, plant from person? Even the baby seemed to be tossing inside her.
“Do you see much of Basil?” asked Philly. “I know you did in the past, but now?”
“From time to time,” said Ruthy. “But only when he wants something. Right now he wants me to sell an early painting, and his current gallery not to know. Don’t take any of it seriously. I don’t any more. It’s you and the baby he wants,” and Ruthy Franklyn laughed. She went up to the studio, and took the painting she wanted. It was a nude: one of Basil’s very early works: face to the wall for years, its plain wooden frame blackened by smoke. “Since he started swirling the greys and the blacks,” said Ruthy as she left, “he’s hardly sold a thing. Sometimes I think it’s Serena’s curse. I get myself checked over pretty carefully for cancer, I can tell you that. Serena might have been mad but she had a strong personality. She loved Basil. A pity he didn’t love her. But then, he probably can’t love anybody. Not really.” And she looked at Philly with the drop-dead look women sometimes do give pregnant women. You have what I don’t. Die, then!
Ruthy left before the blizzard got worse. Philly felt, and was, alone in the world, and the washing machine, on its fast spin, tipped itself forward on to a loose tile which vibrated and made an echoing sound, worse than the phone, worse than anything she’d ever known, right inside Philly’s head. She thought she’d go deaf. Presently it faded and she could think again. She called Basil at his hotel in Edinburgh but they said there was no guest checked in under that name, and she didn’t have the strength or the will to argue. The walls of the room closed in to encircle her, ridged and streaked; ash filled her nostrils. It was an old tin dustbin she was in, she realised, not the black plastic one she’d somehow envisaged: she was head down in a bin half-filled with water, and what Serena saw, Philly saw, and always would. What Serena heard, clang, clang, so would Philly, forever. As for the first wife, so for her successors.
Philly took a couple of packets of firelighters up to the studio, placed them under the brass bed and fired them. The white valance caught; the mattress smouldered and flared; the turpentine went up satisfactorily: so did the paints. The wooden stretchers of a hundred canvases flickered merrily: the canvas itself puckered, blackened, shrivelled to nothing. Gold leaf, Philly discovered, burns in a series of little spurting explosions. When there seemed no possibility of bed or paintings surviving, Philly went downstairs; the fire came with her. Concrete would not burn; the house itself would survive. Philly watched while streaks of fire raced over the tiled floor, feeding themselves on layer after layer of polish: generations’ worth, as woman after woman had tried to erase the gritty, salty patches of grief and anger that past and future met to create.
“Okay, Serena?” she said, leaving by the kitchen door, the one which led out into the alley, and which today opened perfectly easily: the alley where the old tin dustbins stood and the homeless lingered, and the lager louts peed, and Serena had howled and screamed, day after day, night after night, while Basil and Ruthy waited for her to just go away. “Okay now?” she asked.