Eighteen

Barnaby Munk and I arranged to meet in a pub called The White Dog. I’d never been to Oxford and was surprised to find it entirely under construction, my preconception being that it was an unchanging and ancient place. The roads, the bridges, the old stone buildings of the university—everything, it seemed, was framed with scaffolding and hazard tape. I walked in circles under a cool March sun, enjoying the icy boughs of the weeping willows and the yellowed church spires, priming myself for the relief of a cozy pub. (I’d located said pub upon arrival. Out front, the sidewalk was being re-leveled and two enormous pylons marked a potentially hazardous bump.) I entered at one p.m. sharp, and as I stood looking around me, rubbing my cold hands together, an elderly gentleman rose in one corner, his eyes locking on mine.

“Nancy?”

When I nodded, he beamed like the Cheshire cat. The professor emeritus wore a pink cardigan over his rounded shoulders and sported a frizzle of grey hair. He extended a hand to shake mine, but in the process of moving out from behind his little table knocked against it. Over went his pint. The glass crashed to the floor, ale sloshing dramatically. Barnaby apologized to the servers who came running, to me, to the other nearby customers.

“I drop things,” he told me, when we had settled down together at another table. (The staff needed to mop the floor.) He looked over his shoulder at them. “Oh dear, I do drop things.”

“I do, too,” I confessed. “Sometimes I drop myself. I sit down and find there is no chair under me.” I told him about the most recent occasion, at Richelieu. And the librarian who’d walked the length of the open floor to shush me like a five-year-old.

Barnaby laughed. “Ah, les francophones. So,” he said, looking conspiratorial, “have you read The Descent of Woman?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I held his gaze for a moment. I’d contacted him about Hannah Inglis and her art, and he kept rerouting me to the Peterboroughs’ book. It was true that Hannah’s art appeared there. Did he feel the book provided us with some sort of common ground?

“It’s an interesting book,” I prevaricated.

“In what way?”

“I suppose it’s a sort of systematic hodgepodge, isn’t it? As if they felt they had to include everything they’d ever studied. One of those Theories of Everything books.”

He nodded cautiously.

“Or,” and this had just occurred to me, “perhaps the two Peterboroughs couldn’t agree on what to include? There’s something of a mixture of styles, maybe? Something odd. I can’t put my finger on it. Something patchwork about it.”

Of course, I remembered the comment in Barnaby’s email concerning the “nasty business.” I’d learned that Charles Peterborough had performed studies of the natives in the Malay and Indonesian archipelagos as well as Australia. Physiological tests, the “evidence” of which informed the most contentious section of The Descent, two chapters concerning the sexual traits of human beings. Whereas Alfred Wallace had collected everything from crayfish to orangutans, which he’d brought back to England pickled in barrels, apparently Charles and Eva Peterborough felt that to fully understand humans they had to study humans. Whether that study represented Barnaby’s “nasty business,” I wasn’t so sure. In any case, I wasn’t prepared to do what he wanted: namely to prove, by mentioning the “nasty business” reference, how closely and keenly I’d been hanging on his every emailed word.

I said, “Is The Descent considered to be their magnum opus, so to speak?”

“It’s the only book-length volume she wrote. He wrote several others.”

“She wrote? I thought it was a—”

“Oh, it was published under both of their names.”

We broke off to receive menus and order drinks. Were we eating? the server wondered. Yes, we were eating a proper lunch, he informed her. I wanted to ask Barnaby if he’d found out; did his family have any more of Hannah’s paintings? This seemed so direct as to be impolite, however. I inhaled and smiled as my companion addressed his menu with as much gusto as he’d welcomed me.

“The operative question,” he said, folding his menu at last, “is what to consider that document. Do we address it as a contribution to truth? As a historical artifact? Literary work? Triptych to a global adventure tour? Is it a book of theory, a sort of philosophy of sexuality, or is it a scientific treatise?”

“Uh. What do you consider The Descent of Man?” I countered. “Isn’t the Peterboroughs’ book some kind of response to Darwin?”

“If we treat it as a contribution in the service of scientific truth,” said Barnaby, “if we do so…then we can discount The Descent of Woman thoroughly.”

“Can we?”

He shrugged, making an it’s-always-debatable expression. “Well, I can tell you the dominant view is decidedly not that sexual differences arose from sexual selection mechanisms. Nobody followed Darwin in that direction.”

“And is the dominant view correct?” This was as an innocent question on my part. It set Barnaby off, and he seemed pleased for the opportunity to put me straight. In the process, he told me about his own research in the field of lepidoptery, which centered on moth migration and various accomplishments associated with moth migration. In the midst of his monologue we ordered our food. By the time it arrived, Barnaby had exhausted himself.

“Now tell me about your own research.” He unrolled his knife and fork from their napkin. “You’re looking for this Inglis woman.”

“I am, yes. Her artwork.”

“Quite. She herself would long be mouldering, wouldn’t she?”

Irrationally, I felt a pang of sadness. Surely I hadn’t been expecting to meet the woman? I reviewed for Barnaby what I’d seen at Fulgham House, as well as Alvin’s unveiling of Strangler Fig for me at Kew Gardens. I worked in how difficult it was proving to be to find any more of Hannah’s art, and I expressed hope that his family might have some pieces in their collection.

Soberly, Barnaby said, “I did speak to Celia.” He wiped his hands, fished in his shirt pocket, and produced a heavily creased piece of paper. Squinting for a moment at it, he turned it over to me.

It was a typewritten list. A very long one. Some line items had been crossed out with a blue fountain pen; others involved additional penciled-in information. I scanned the numbered entries until I found what I was looking for.

16. H. Inglis, Murdo and Jane (2 pieces, companion; oil)

17. H. Inglis, Still Life of Cut Flowers (oil)

18. H. Inglis, The Cabin (sketch, charc. on paper)

19. H. Inglis, untitled of Sikh servant and fruiting tree (oil)

20. H. Inglis, Nude House Girl (oil)

21. H. Inglis, The Parasol Flower (oil)

My hands shook a little as I moved my beer aside and my bowl of curry. Beside the entries for 20 and 21, someone had written: give to Tommy.

“Do you, do you have these works?” I asked.

“No, unfortunately not,” he said, forking off a chunk of battered cod. “Well, as you know, Murdo and Jane are at Fulgham House.” He took the sheet back and, pulling a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his cardigan, reviewed the list with great care. “I believe the Trust also took the still life, and this one called The Cabin.”

An annoying confusion. Miranda had told me the Fulgham House collection had no other Inglis works at all. “And the others?” I pressed on. “Does ‘Tommy’ have those?”

He laughed. “Presumably. Celia and I do not.”

“Does Celia perhaps know where I can find Tommy? Or how to contact him?”

Barnaby sucked his bottom lip for a moment before shaking his head. “We’re not sure who he is. The list was probably drawn up by Charlotte. She was my grandmother, Charlotte Peterborough Munk. Or, you know, somebody working for her. But the list itself is sixty years old or more.”

I hid my frustration with showier mock-frustration. “Oh, no! And so no idea who this ‘Tommy’ is? Do you think it was Charlotte who wrote that in?”

“Well, it could be Thomas Ealing—he was a second cousin of Charlotte’s, apparently. Celia went through all this with me. You see, I’m afraid I’ve never taken much interest in these old dead buggers. Tory toffs, the lot of them.” He cleared his throat and gave me a rueful look. “Or it’s possible ‘Tommy’ was no relation at all. One of the estate staff, perhaps. An art dealer. A friend of Charlotte’s?”

“Quite a close friend, to give him two oil paintings,” I observed.

He looked frankly miserable. For a moment, I thought he was going to reach for my hand to squeeze it. “Charlotte may not have valued the pieces as much as you do, my dear.”

How delicately put, I thought. I must look a fool to him. People like Charlotte Peterborough, people who lived in places like Fulgham House, had so much art they had to list it to remember it. They treated it like a commodity—bought, sold, dispensed with. I had no inkling of this kind of life. Barnaby was at least familiar with it.

“Forgive me for being blunt, Ms. Roach, but I must ask you: why is this woman’s art noteworthy? Is it indeed noteworthy?”

“I believe so,” I managed to say.

“But art is subjective, isn’t it?” He shrugged. “Art is a subjective matter.”

“Not merely subjective,” I protested softly. “There are elements—line, balance, composition, color—elements that can be judged on the basis of known standards and known strategies. Anyway, you can’t go discounting everything with a subjective element to it. Intersubjective,” I drawled the word. “How else could there be art criticism. Art appreciation. Art history.”

“And yet Hannah Inglis has not been part of that history or that criticism, has she?”

My fingers began tapping the table of their own accord. “I don’t know that that matters for considering the quality of the art itself.”

“But you’ve just said it does.”

“The question is why, then? Why has she been excluded?”

I took a swift pull of my pint, a beer that he’d recommended, which smelled and tasted to me of meadows. Excusing myself for the toilet, I locked myself in a dimly lit stall to try to get some purchase on my motives.

Hannah’s paintings had moved me. Because they were a contribution, I vowed, a true contribution. Not because they hadn’t been appreciated, she hadn’t been appreciated. I couldn’t deny that her gender and the lack of reception were factors of interest for me. Of course they were. I, more than Barnaby, surely, knew how very alone she must have felt as she was making these works…. But how exactly did Hannah’s story matter to an appreciation of her art?

Perhaps her art had been forgotten for good reason, and I had simply become obsessed with it in the way people became obsessed with stock car racing or comic book heroes or their local football team. I stared at my face in the tiny mirror over the sink, habitually going over as I did now, the pouches under my eyes and the blurring line of my jaw.

Did I have a right to be angry with Barnaby? Yes, I decided. Not because he was clueless about his family history. He could have saved me a trip to Oxford. He could have just written back to me and said he’d checked into it, sorry, there was no art, he had no clue where else to look. Instead, I’d come all the way here and walked in circles for two hours; it had all been one great big tease. “He’d better be paying for this meal,” I told my reflection.

When I returned to the table I found that he’d done just that and was chatting with the server. The two of them were discussing the sidewalk construction—some in’s and out’s with the city council. I thought I might ask Barnaby to introduce me to Celia. I considered how to accomplish this request without making it seem that I distrusted him, while also subtly pointing out that he’d wasted my time.

“Did you like the unfiltered beer?” he asked when the server bowed out of the picture.

“Yes,” I said decidedly. “Very much.” There was an inch left in my glass, and I set about finishing it.

He played with his paper coaster and smoothed his dress shirt with a knobbled hand, shooting me furtive looks. A crusty old codger, that was the bottom line. Which is not to say I didn’t like him. On the contrary.

He leaned toward me. “I have letters in my possession.”

“Oh. Uh. Letters? You mean…”

“Letters written by your Hannah Inglis.” He paused to enjoy the moment, a sly look on his face.

“More letters?” I said, deliberately deadpan.

He looked a little deflated, which pleased me. “More? I—well, I don’t know about that,” he said stiffly. “At any rate. You’re welcome to have a look at them.”

I told him I’d love to have a look at the letters in his possession. I told him about what I’d found at the Academie Julian: namely, the Coles book. That Hannah had attended the academy in one of the first classes of female students and she’d left for Malaysia, possibly even before she’d graduated, but that she’d kept in touch with one of her instructors. Presumably the letters in Barnaby’s possession were more mundane, though perhaps more personal, if she’d been writing to one of the Peterboroughs.

“She kept up quite a correspondence with this famous artist.” I smiled at him. “Mind you, I’ve only seen a few of her letters as they have been reprinted. Appendix A. Not the originals. A Frenchman named—”

“Henri Godot.”

We frowned at one another.